Source: blackfacts.com
1865 – Mississippi passed the so-called “Black Codes” that barred blacks from jury service, testifying against whites in trials, bearing arms and attending white schools.
1866 – Rust College in Mississippi was founded on this date in 1866.
1868 – Scott Joplin, the King of Ragtime, was born on this day in 1868 in Texarkana, Texas. A skilled pianist and composer, Joplin started a 20-year ragtime craze with the release of his composition “Maple Leaf Rag” in 1897, during the Gay Nineties. Ragtime-scored piano music-at the time was considered Negro tavern and brothel music. Its tinny sound was the source of the name Tin Pan Alley, the center of ragtime in New York City. The lack of recognition of ragtime as a serious African-American musical art form plagued Joplin throughout his life. He died in an asylum in New York City on April 1, 1917, at the age of 49.
1870 – Robert Sengstacke Abbott, founder of the Chicago Defender, the city’s first Black newspaper, was born at Frederica, St. Simon’s Island, GA, on this date in 1870.
1880 – More than 150 delegates from Baptist Churches in eleven states organized the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention of the United States at a meeting in Montgomery, Alabama. Rev. William H. McAlphine was elected president. W. W. Colley was its first Corresponding Secretary. The group was anti-liquor and anti-tobacco and supported African missions abroad.
1880 – Southern University established.
1883 – Edwin Bancroft Herson, the “Father of Black Sports,” was born in Washington, DC, on this date in 1883. Herson was the founder of the Colored Inter-Collegiate Athletic Association and the Negro Athletic Association.
1892 – The first Black college football game was played between Biddle University (Johnson C. Smith) and Livingstone College on this date, Thanksgiving Day, in 1892.
1943 – Dorie Miller, a messman on the USS Arizona who manned a machine-gun and shot down four planes during the Pearl Harbor attack, died on this date in 1943. Miller was on the carrier Liscone Bay as it sank after being hit by a torpedo.
