On This Day In Black History...

• 1892 ~ Homer Plessy was jailed for sitting in the "white" car of the East Louisiana Railroad Plessy was 1/8 Black and under Louisiana law, the infamous one drop rule, he was considered Black and therefore required to sit in the "colored" car initiating Plessy v Ferguson



• 1892 ~ G.J. Sampsons received a patent for the Clothes Dryer



• 1893 ~ Mahatma Gandhi refused to comply with racial segregation rules on a South African train and was forcibly ejected



• 1917 ~ Gwendolyn Brooks, Pulitzer Prize winning Poet, was born



• 1930 ~ New York Times agrees to respect Negro demands, that the "N" in the word "Negro" would be henceforth capitalized in its pages



• 1943 ~ Nikki Giovanni, Poet, Educator & Publisher was born



• 1953 ~ Mary Church Terrell, Political Activist, wins struggle to end segregation in Washington DC restaurants



• 1958 ~ His Purple Majesty & Premier Entertainer, Prince Rogers Nelson was born in Minneapolis, MN



• 1998 ~ James Byrd, Jr., a Black hitchiker, was beaten, chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged three miles to his death in Jasper, TX. The three cowardly "white supremacists" dumped his body in a Black cemetery. All were convicted. One is scheduled for execution on 09/21/2011 (keep hope alive!), death for another has not been scheduled and the remaining defendant received life imprisonment