*               Today in Black History - April 9              *

1816 - The African Methodist Episcopal Church is organized at a 
	general convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

1865 - Nine African American regiments of Gen. John Hawkins's 
	division help to smash the Confederate defenses at Fort 
	Blakely, Alabama. Capture of the fort will lead to the 
	fall of Mobile. The 68th U.S. Colored Troops will have 
	the highest number of casualties in the engagement.

1865 - Robert E. Lee surrenders Army of Northern Virginia to 
	Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, ending the 
	Civil War. 
	AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE CONFEDERACY: The Confederacy is 
	the first to recognize that African Americans are major 
	factors in the war. The South impresses slaves to work 
	in mines, repair railroads and build fortifications, 
	thereby releasing a disproportionately large percentage 
	of able-bodied whites for direct war service. A handful 
	of African Americans enlisted in the rebel army, but few, 
	if any, fired guns in anger. A regiment of fourteen 
	hundred free African Americans received official 
	recognition in New Orleans, but was not called into 
	service. It later became, by a strange mutation of 
	history, the first African American regiment officially 
	recognized by the Union army.
	AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE UNION NAVY: One out of every 
	four Union sailors was an African American.  Of the 
	118,044 sailors in the Union Navy, 29,511 were African 
	Americans. At least four African American sailors won 
	Congressional Medals of Honor.
	AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE UNION ARMY: The 185,000 Black 
	soldiers in the Union army were organized into 166 all 
	Black regiments (145 infantry, 7 cavalry, 12 heavy 
	artillery, 1 light artillery, 1 engineer). The largest 
	number of African American soldiers came from Louisiana 
	(24,052), followed by Kentucky (23,703) and Tennessee 
	(20,133). Pennsylvania contributed more African 
	American soldiers than any other Northern state (8,612). 
	African	American soldiers participated in 449 battles, 
	39 of them major engagements. Sixteen Black soldiers 
	received Congressional Medals of Honor for gallantry in 
	action. Some 37,638 African American soldiers lost 
	their lives during the war. African American soldiers 
	generally received poor equipment and were forced to do 
	a large amount of fatigue duty. Until 1864, African 
	American soldiers (from private to chaplain) received 
	seven dollars a month whereas white soldiers received 
	from thirteen to one hundred dollars a month. In 1863 
	African American units, with four exceptions (Fifth 
	Massachusetts Cavalry, Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth 
	Massachusetts Volunteers and Twenty-ninth Connecticut
	Volunteers), were officially designated United States 
	Colored Troops (USCT). Since the War Department 
	discouraged applications from African Americans, there 
	were few commissioned officers. The highest ranking of 
	the seventy-five to one hundred African American 
	officers was Lt. Col. Alexander T. Augustana, a surgeon.  
	Some 200,000 African American civilians were employed 
	by the Union army as laborers, cooks, teamsters and 
	servants.

1866 - The Civil Rights Bill of 1866 is passed over president 
	Andrew Johnson's veto. The bill will confer citizenship 
	on African Americans and give them "the same right, in 
	every State and Territory... as is enjoyed by white 
	citizens."

1870 - The American Anti-Slavery Society is dissolved.

1898 - Paul Leroy Robeson is born in Princeton, New Jersey. The 
	son of an ex-slave turned Methodist minister, Robeson 
	will attend Rutgers University on a full scholarship, 
	where he will excel and obtain 12 letters in four sports, 
	be named to the All-American football team twice, be a 
	member of the debate team, and earn a Phi Beta Kappa key.  
	He will study law at Columbia University in New York and 
	receive his degree in 1923. There he will meet and marry 
	Eslanda Cardozo Goode, who will be the first African 
	American woman to head a pathology laboratory. He will 
	work as a law clerk in New York, but once again will 
	face discrimination and leave the practice when a white 
	secretary refuses to take dictation from him. He will 
	later become one of America's foremost actors and singers.
  	He will make 14 films including "The Emperor Jones," 
	"King Solomon's Mines," and "Showboat." During the 1940's 
	he will continue to have success on the stage, in film, 
	and in concert halls, but will remain face to face with 
	prejudice and racism. After finding the Soviet Union 
	to be a tolerant and friendly nation, he will begin to 
	protest the growing Cold War hostilities between the 
	United States and the USSR. He will question why 
	African Americans should support a government that did 
	not treat them as equals. At a time when dissent was 
	hardly tolerated, Robeson will be looked upon as an 
	enemy by his government. In 1947, he will be named by 
	the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and the 
	State Department will deny him a passport until 1958.  
	Events such as these, along with a negative public 
	response, will lead to the demise of his public career. 
	He will be an inspiration to millions around the world.  
	His courageous stance against oppression and inequality 
	in part will lead to the civil rights movement of the 
	1960s. He will join the ancestors on January 23, 1976, 
	in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania after living in seclusion 
	for ten years.

1929 - Valenza Pauline Burke is born in Brooklyn, New York to 
	parents who had immigrated to the United States from 
	Barbados. She will become a novelist known as Paule 
	Marshall. She will author "Browngirl, Brownstones," 
	"Praisesong for the Widow," "The Chosen Place, The 
	Timeless People," "Soul Clap Hands and Sing," and 
	Daughters." She will also write a collection of short 
	stories, "Reena and Other Stories." She will teach at
	Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of 
	California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and 
	Yale University, before holding the Helen Gould Sheppard 
	Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University.
	In 1993, she will receive an honorary L.H.D. from Bates 
	College. She will be a MacArthur Fellow and a winner of 
	the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. She will be 
	designated as a Literary Lion by the New York Public 
	Library in 1994. She will be inducted into the Celebrity 
	Path at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 2001. Her memoir, 
	"Triangular Road," will be published in 2009. In 2010, 
	she will win a Lifetime Achievement Award from the 
	Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. She will join the ancestors
	on August 12, 2019 in Richmond, Virginia.

1939 - When she is refused admission to the Daughters of the 
	American Revolution's Constitution Hall to give a 
	planned concert, Marian Anderson performs for 75,000 on 
	the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Two months later, she 
	will be honored with the NAACP's Spingarn Medal for her 
	talents as "one of the greatest singers of our time"
	and for "her magnificent dignity as a human being."

1950 - Juanita Hall becomes the first African American to win a 
	Tony award for her role as Bloody Mary in the musical 
	"South Pacific."

1968 - Martin Luther King Jr. is buried after funeral services 
	at Ebenezer Baptist Church and memorial services at 
	Morehouse College, in Atlanta, Georgia. More than 
	300,000 persons march behind the coffin of the slain 
	leader which is carried through the streets of Atlanta 
	on a farm wagon pulled by two Georgia mules. Scores of 
	national dignitaries, including Vice-President Hubert 
	Humphrey, attend the funeral. CORE and the Fellowship of
	Reconciliation will send twenty-three dignitaries. Ralph 
	David Abernathy is elected to succeed King as head of 
	the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

1993 - The Reverend Benjamin Chavis is chosen to head the NAACP, 
	succeeding Benjamin Hooks.

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