Black History

Selma Freedom March

A march to protest at the intimidation which prevented blacks from voting in Dallas County, Alabama. Selma, a city of 29,000, had 15,000 blacks of voting age, of whom only 355 were registered to vote. Martin Luther king chose Selma as he thought whites would resist violently and that this (through television) would draw attention to his cause and force the government to act.

Sheriff Jim Clark, like â€˜Bullâ€™ Connor in the Birmingham demonstrations of 1963, was expected to overreact, which he did. King decided to lead a protest march from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery, 56 miles away, where the participants would petition Governor Wallace to protect blacks who wanted to register to vote. Continue reading →

Sheridan Broadcasting Corp.

In April 1976, the black-owned Sheridan Broadcasting Corporation purchased a 49 percent interest in the Mutual Black Network for a reported $850,000. Three years later, Sheridan bought the rest for $1 million and renamed it the Sheridan Broadcasting Network. When Mutual sold its interest, MBN had 89 affiliates, reaching 17 million black listeners daily – 70 percent of the U.S. black population.

Incidentally, the two black networks which started out as rivals in 1972 eventually became one: Sheridan merged with NBN in 1991 to form American Urban Radio Networks.

16th Street Baptist Church bombing

The 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL

The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed on Sunday, September 15, 1963 as an act of racially motivated terrorism. The explosion at the African-American church, which killed four girls, marked a turning point in the U.S. 1960s Civil Rights Movement and contributed to support for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Although city leaders had reached a settlement in May with demonstrators and started to integrate public places, not everyone agreed with ending segregation. Bombings and other acts of violence followed the settlement, and the church had become an inviting target. Continue reading →

National Negro Business League

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915), founder and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, organized the National Negro Business League in 1900 to promote “commercial, agricultural, educational, and industrial advancement … and the commercial and financial development of the Negro.” Washington believed that blacks should “leave political and civil rights alone” in order to “make a businessman of the Negro.”

Washington was hoping that the League would encourage blacks to start their own businesses, thus proving that they were as capable as whites of economic success. This in turn, Washington reasoned, would eventually lead whites to allow blacks — or at least certain blacks — their right to vote and due process of law. The League’s membership included a number of successful black businessmen (and women) and professionals and a large number of the black middle class “strivers” who hoped to start their own businesses.
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Kelly Miller – 1st Black Math Grad

Kelly Miller

Kelly Miller was the sixth of ten children born to Kelly Miller, a free Negro who served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, and Elizabeth (Roberts) Miller, a slave.

Miller received his early education in one of the local primary schools established during Reconstruction and, based on the recommendation of a missionary (Reverend Willard Richardson) who recognized Miller’s mathematical aptitude, Miller attended the Fairfield Institute in Winnsboro, South Carolina from 1878 to 1880.

Awarded a scholarship to Howard University, he completed the Preparatory Department’s three-year curriculum in Latin, Greek, and mathematics in two years (1880-1882), then attended the College Department at Howard from 1882 to 1886.

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