Black History Month allows for an extra dose of history on African Americans that have paved the way in civil rights, inventions, music and made American history. 

(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
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1868 - Republican conservatives used help from the U.S. Military forces to establish control over convention hall and take over the Reconstruction process in Florida.

The Republicans would then draft a new constitution to not only political power in hands of a governor, but also to disenfranchise black voter and limit the impact of their vote.

1907 - Civil rights activist and politician Grace Towns Hamilton was born on this day in Atlanta, Georgia.

Hamilton served as executive director of the Atlanta Urban League from 1943-1960, and also sat on the board of the Southern Regional Council as well as the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women, as well as many other voluntary positions.

However her biggest claim to fame was becoming the first African-American woman elected to the Georgia General Assembly in 1965.   There she made her mark and served in Georgia House of Representatives til 1984. Today, she has her own several hundred admirers including a chair name in her honor in the Emory University political science department.  In 2006, Hamilton was inducted into Georgia Women of Achievement.

1927 - Leontyne Price was born

 

1940 - Roberta Flack was born

 

1946 - Jackie Robinson goes to the Minor Leagues

 

1964 - 1964 Civil Rights Act is passed

1966- Andrew F. Brimmer becomes the first African American governor of the Federal Reserve Board
The son of a Louisiana sharecropper Andrew F. Brimmer was the first black member of the Federal Reserve Board.  He is responsible for leading efforts to reverse the country’s balance-of-payments deficit.

Dr. Brimmer was the assistant secretary of commerce for economic affairs and it was President Lyndon B. Johnson who named him to the Fed board in 1966.  Johnson said at Brimmer’s swearing-in ceremony, he did not expect Dr. Brimmer to be “an easy money man or a tight money man.  I expect him to be a right money man.”

Dr. Brimmer served a little more than eight years of his 14-year term, and retired from the board in 1974.  He would join the faculty of the Harvard Business School and start a consulting firm, Brimmer & Company.

1992 - Renowned author, biographer, scriptwriter Alex Hailey died.

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