August 23
1826—This is generally recognized as the day that the first Black person in America graduated from college. His name was Edward Jones and he received his BA degree from Amherst College in Massachusetts. Despite the general recognition, however, there is some evidence that the honor actually belongs to Alexander Lucius Twilight who appears to have graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1823. Nevertheless, Jones would eventually leave America and help establish the African nation of Sierra Leone.
August 24
1854—Dr. John V. DeGrasse, perhaps the most prominent Black person in New England during the pre-Civil War period, is admitted to the Massachusetts Medical Society. DeGrasse was born in New York City in 1825 and graduated from Bowdoin College in Maine.
1950—Chicago attorney Edith Spurlock Sampson is named by President Harry S. Truman as the first African-American representative in the U.S. delegation to the United Nations. Sampson was also the first Black female elected judge in the United States. She was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., around 1901 and died in 1979.
August 25
1862—After a disastrous loss to the South during a battle known as the Peninsular Campaign, U.S. Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton orders the arming of 5,000 Black soldiers in a bid to turn the tide against the pro-slavery forces. The Blacks (both freedmen and former slaves) fought with distinction winning 15 Congressional Medals of Honor. In fact, the Black soldiers were so effective, near the end of the Civil War the Confederacy, in a desperation move, actually attempted to recruit Black soldiers to the pro-slavery side.
1908—The National Association of Colored Nurses is founded by Martha Minerva Franklin. At the time Black nurses were not welcomed in the all-White American Nurses Association.
1925—Six men, led by A. Phillip Randolph, organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—a union composed of porters and attendants on the nation’s railroad passenger cars. The effort was the most successful Black labor organizing campaign in American history. The Brotherhood would go on to become the largest and most powerful Black controlled union in America including over 15,000 members by 1959. Randolph would also become a major (often behind the scenes) figure in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. He played a key role in Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous 1963 March on Washington. Randolph would often boast that his union was a success not because people loved it, but because it knew how to “push people out of the way.”
1927—The first Black person to win the Wimbledon Singles Tennis Championship, Althea Gibson, is born on this day in Silver, S.C. Gibson won Wimbledon on July 6, 1957. The all-around athlete died on Sept. 23, 2003.
August 26
1943—In a primarily token gesture Black Chicago Congressman William L. Dawson is recommended to be the Democratic Party’s vice presidential candidate. For several years, Dawson was the only African-American in the United States Congress. He would later be joined by New York’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Dawson served in Congress for 27 years, from January 1943 to the time he died in November 1970.
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