Politics
Following increased pressure from Southern politicians, Congress passed a revised Fugitive Slave Act in 1850.
Part of Henry Clay’s famed Compromise of 1850—a group of bills that helped quiet early calls for Southern secession—this new law forcibly compelled citizens to assist in the capture of runaways. It also denied enslaved people the right to a jury trial and increased the penalty for interfering with the rendition process to $1,000 and six months in jail.
In order to ensure the statute was enforced, the 1850 law also placed control of individual cases in the hands of federal commissioners. These agents were paid more for returning a suspected runaway than for freeing them, leading many to argue the law was biased in favor of Southern slaveholders.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was met with even more impassioned criticism and resistance than the earlier measure. States like Vermont and Wisconsin passed new measures intended to bypass and even nullify the law, and abolitionists redoubled their efforts to assist runaways.
The Underground Railroad reached its peak in the 1850s, with many enslaved people fleeing to Canada to escape U.S. jurisdiction.
Resistance also occasionally boiled over into riots and revolts. In 1851 a mob of antislavery activists rushed a Boston courthouse and forcibly liberated an escapee named Shadrach Minkins from federal custody. Similar rescues were later made in New York, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Events
The first National Negro Convention began in Philadelphia, 1830, where they agreed to boycott slave-produced goods.
In the early months of 1830, a young freed man from Baltimore named Hezekiah Grice was not satisfied with life in the North because of the “hopelessness of contending against oppression in the United States.”
Grice wrote to a number of Black American leaders asking if freedmen should emigrate to Canada and, if a convention could be held to discuss the issue.
By September 15, 1830 the first National Negro Convention was held in Philadelphia.
Education
On April 29, 1854, Lincoln University becomes the nation’s first historically Black degree-granting institution of higher education.
Located in Pennsylvania and originally founded as the Ashmun Institute, the university was renamed in 1866 in honor of President Abraham Lincoln, revered among African Americans for his 1863 decree to emancipate the nation’s millions of enslaved people. Founder John Miller Dickey, who was white, had long been involved in the ministry, and with the help of his wife Sarah Emlen Cressen, provided philanthropic services to African Americans in the community. Dickey made efforts to enroll a freedman, James Amos, into other schools to prepare him for ministry, but when no one would admit him due to his race, Dickey trained Amos himself.
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Events
The Poor People’s Campaign, or Poor People’s March on Washington, was a 1968 effort to gain economic justice for poor people in the United States. It was organized by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of King’s assassination in April 1968.
The campaign demanded economic and human rights for poor Americans of diverse backgrounds. After presenting an organized set of demands to Congress and executive agencies, participants set up a 3,000-person protest camp on the Washington Mall, where they stayed for six weeks in the spring of 1968.
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Firsts
First black Pro Basketball team “The Renaissance” organized February 13, 1923.
The Renaissance, commonly called the Rens, become one of the dominant teams of the 1920s and 1930s.
The team’s founder was Robert L. Douglas, whose primary objective was to give New York City’s male, Black athletes opportunities to better themselves. In February 1923, Douglas struck an agreement with William Roach, a Harlem-based real estate developer who owned the New Renaissance Ballroom and Casino, and the Rens were born.
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