This Week in Black History

July 25
1912 Comoros proclaimed French colonies
1847 Liberia, where the American Colonization Society established the first settlement, Monrovia, in 1822 on land 'granted' by local rulers, becomes an independent republic with a constitution based on that of the US. Unfortunately the ex-slave colonists applied the US template too well, and set about enslaving Africans from the interior and neighbouring countries.
1936 Shamefully, Germany recognizes the Italian conquest of Abyssinia
1943 Did you know that a warship was named for a Black person? the SS Leonard Roy
Harmon, was launched in Quincy, Massachusetts
1971 Dr Christiaan Neethling Barnard carries out the first combined heart and lung transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town.
Dr Barnard had carried out the first heart transplant back on 3 December 1967.
1972 US health officials concede blacks were used as guinea pigs in
40 year syphillis experiment. Read about Tuskeegee Experiments www.thetalkingdrum.com/tus.html
July 26
1865 Patrick Francis Healy is first Black American awarded PhD
1953 Cuban Revolution begins with the Movimiento de 26 de Julio. Moncada Barracks attacks, 100 poorly armed insurgents against a garrison of 2,000 soldiers. Repelled and arrested, sentenced to 15 years. “La historia me absolvera.” 1955 Fulgencio Batista released all political prisoners and Castro et al exiled to Mexico. Returned to Cuba in Granma November
July 27
1962 Martin Luther King Jr jailed in Albany Georgia
1968 Race Riot in Gary Indiana
July 28

189- Ascendancy of St Victor I, 14th pope (189-199). The First of three known Black popes

1868 The 14th Amendment, making Blacks American citizens, adopted
1915 10,000 blacks march on 5th Ave (NYC) protesting lynchings
1915 US forces invade Haiti, stays until 1924. The US controlled government, finance and virtually treat it as a colony.
1966 Major-General Johnson Thomas Umurakwe Aguiyi-Ironsi, head of the Nigerian National Military Government is ousted when his own troops mutiny. He is replaced as leader by Yakubu Gowon.
1967 Eight days of racially motivated disturbances end in Detroit, Michigan. The uprising, one of the worst of its kind in the 20th century, kills 43 people, injures 2,000, and results in over 5,000 arrests and over 1,400 fires
1975 Exactly nine years after he took power Gowon is deposed in a bloodless military coup and replaced by Murtala Ramat Mohammed.
July 29

1985 South African President PW Botha threatens military and economic reprisals against neighbouring black controlled countries if the United States does not relax sanctions.
1990 Abu Baker-led Jamaat Al Muslimeen, attempt an overthrow of the Trinidad and Tobago Government, shooting President ANR Robinson in the process.
July 30

1839 Slave rebels, led by Joseph Cinque, kill the captain and take over the slave ship Amistad in the most celebrated
of American slave mutinies. The rebels were captured off
Long Island on August 26. This epic was made into the movie Amistad

1863 - President Lincoln gave an order to shoot a Confederate
prisoner for every African American prisoner that was shot;
it became known as the "eye-for-eye" order. A rebel
prisoner would also be condemned to life in prison doing
hard labor, for every African American prisoner sold into
slavery. The order had restraining influence on the
Confederate government, though individual commanders and
soldiers continued to murder captured African American
soldiers.

1866 - White Democrats, led by police, attack a convention of
African American and white Republicans in New Orleans,
Louisiana. More than 40 persons are killed, and at least
150 persons are wounded. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, Military
commander of the state, says "It was not riot; it was an
absolute massacre...which the mayor and the police of the
city perpetrated without the shadow of a necessity."
July 31

1874 - Patrick Francis Healy, a Jesuit priest, is inaugurated as
president of Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
Healy is the first African American to head a
predominantly white university and is credited with the
modernization of the university's curriculum and the
expansion of its campus.