Better Together: The John R. Lewis Advocacy & Action Ministry

Key Historical Dates in February

Feb. 1st

• Birth of Langston Hughes (1902 in Joplin, MO)
• Black History Month inaugurated as part of bicentennial of the United States (1976)
• 1st stamp in the US Black Heritage Series of Harriet Tubman released (1978)
• Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and mor than 200 arrested and jailed after a voting rights march in Selma, AL (1965)

Feb. 2nd

• World Day for Consecrated Life
• Sculptor, William E. Artis born (1914 in Washington, DC)
• Pittsburgh police arrest more than 200 Black men on charges of "vagrancy" and sentence them to forced labor at the city workhouse (1909)

Feb. 3rd 

• Death of Mother Mary Lange (1882)
• US Congress Ratified the 15th Amendment, which bars race as a qualification for voting (1870)
• Rosa Lee Ingram and her two teenaged sons are sentenced to death in Georgia for killing an armed white man who assaulted them

Feb. 4th 

• Birth of Rosa Parks (1913 in Tuskegee, AL)
• Death of Ossie Davis (2005)
• Tony Dungy became the 1st African American head coach to win the Super Bowl (2007)
• Alabama launches convict leasing by leasing Wetumpka State Penitentiary and its inmates to a private company (1846)

Feb. 5th 

• Barack Obama became the 1st African American president of the Harvard Law Review (1990)
• Congress passes the Immigration Act of 1917 to bar entry of Asians, Mexican, and Mediterranean people, poor people, those with mental/physical disabilities, or criminal records (1917)