537 – The Goths began their siege on Rome.

1302 – The characters Romeo and Juliet were married this day according to William Shakespeare.

1649 – The peace of Rueil was signed between the Frondeurs (rebels) and the French government.

1665 – A new legal code was approved for the Dutch and English towns, guaranteeing religious observances unhindered.

1702 – The Daily Courant, the first regular English newspaper was published.

1791 – Samuel Mulliken became the first person to receive more than one patent from the U.S. Patent Office.

1810 – The Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was married by proxy to Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria.

1824 – The U.S. War Department created the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Seneca Indian Ely Parker became the first Indian to lead the Bureau.

1845 – Seven hundred Maoris led by their chief, Hone-Heke, burned the small town of Kororareka. The act was in protest to the settlement of Maoriland by Europeans, which was a breach of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.

1861 – A Confederate Convention was held in Montgomery, Alabama, where a new constitution was adopted.

1865 – Union General William Sherman and his forces occupied Fayetteville, NC.

1867 – In Hawaii, the volcano Great Mauna Loa erupted.

1882 – The Intercollegiate Lacrosse Association was formed in Princeton, NJ.

1888 – The “Blizzard of ’88” began along the U.S. Atlantic Seaboard shutting down communication and transportation lines. More than 400 people died.(March 11-14)

1900 – British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury rejected the peace overtures offered from the Boer leader Paul Kruger.

1901 – Britain rejected an amended treaty to the canal agreement with Nicaragua.

1901 – U.S. Steel was formed when industrialist J.P. Morgan purchased Carnegie Steep Corp. The event made Andrew Carnegie the world’s richest man.

1904 – After 30 years of drilling, the north tunnel under the Hudson River was holed through. The link was between Jersey City, NJ, and New York, NY.

1905 – The Parisian subway was officially inaugurated.

1907 – U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt induced California to revoke its anti-Japanese legislation.

1907 – In Bulgaria, Premier Nicolas Petkov was killed by an anarchist.

1909 – The first gold medal to a perfect-score bowler was awarded to A.C. Jellison by the American Bowling Congress.

1927 – Samuel Roxy Rothafel opened the famous Roxy Theatre in New York City.

1930 – Babe Ruth signed a two-year contract with the New York Yankees for the sum of $80,000.

1930 – U.S. President Howard Taft became the first U.S. president to be buried in the National Cemetery in Arlington, VA.

1935 – The German Air Force became an official department of the Reich.

1941 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the Lend-Lease Act, which authorized the act of providing war supplies to the Allies.

1946 – Communists and Nationalists began fighting as the Soviets pulled out of Mukden, Manchuria.

1946 – Pravda denounced Winston Churchill as anti-Soviet and a warmonger.

1947 – The DuMont network aired “Movies For Small Fry.” It was network television’s first successful children’s program.

1948 – Reginald Weir became the first black tennis player to participate in a U.S. Indoor Lawn Tennis Association tournament.

1959 – The Lorraine Hansberry drama A Raisin in the Sun opened at New York’s Ethel Barrymore Theater.

1964 – U.S. Senator Carl Hayden broke the record for continuous service in the U.S. Senate. He had worked 37 years and seven days.

1965 – The American navy began inspecting Vietnamese junks in an effort to end arms smuggling to the South.

1969 – Levi-Strauss started selling bell-bottomed jeans.

1978 – Bobby Hull (Winnipeg Jets) joined Gordie Howe by getting his 1,000th career goal.

1985 – Mikhail Gorbachev was named the new chairman of the Soviet Communist Party.

1986 – Popsicle announced its plan to end the traditional twin-stick frozen treat for a one-stick model.

1988 – A cease-fire was declared in the war between Iran and Iraq.

1990 – Lithuania declared its independence from the Soviet Union. It was the first Soviet republic to break away from Communist control.

1990 – In Chile, Patricio Aylwin was sworn in as the first democratically elected president since 1973.

1992 – Former U.S. President Nixon said that the Bush administration was not giving enough economic aid to Russia.

1993 – Janet Reno was unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate to become the first female attorney general.

1993 – North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty refusing to open sites for inspection.

1994 – In Chile, Eduardo Frei was sworn in as President. It was the first peaceful transfer of power in Chile since 1970.

1997 – An explosion at a nuclear waste reprocessing plant caused 35 workers to be exposed to low levels of radioactivity. The incident was the worst in Japan’s history.

1998 – The International Astronomical Union issued an alert that said that a mile-wide asteroid could come very close to, and possibly hit, Earth on Oct. 26, 2028. The next day NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that there was no chance the asteroid would hit Earth.

2002 – Two columns of light were pointed skyward from ground zero in New York as a temporary memorial to the victims of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

BY: PAT MCMANAMON

UPDATED: MAY 23, 2023 | ORIGINAL SEPTEMBER 2, 2021

Effa Manley, the only woman in the National Baseball Hall of Fame, was an advocate for Black athletes, a passionate supporter of baseball in the Negro leagues, a champion for civil rights and equality…and far ahead of her time.

In an era when few women were involved in sports management, Manley was the do-everything business manager for the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League. In the 1930s and ’40s, when she and her husband owned a Negro League team, she challenged fellow owners, who were all male. Later, she confronted Major League Baseball, pushing it to recognize Negro League players, who had been ignored by the Hall of Fame.

And her belief in herself was unwavering.  

Kim Ng, the only female general manager in Major League Baseball, draws inspiration from the largely unheralded figure from an era when people of color faced rampant discrimination and women dealt with overt sexism.

IN MEMORIAM

Mourning Paule Marshall, the Foremother Who Didn’t Always Love Me Back

Born April 9, 1929

Rosamond S. King on the Contradictions of Literary Gratitude

By Rosamond S. King

On August 12, Paule Marshall died. It was exactly one week after another black woman author passed away—that author had won the Nobel Prize, and a major documentary about her is or was probably playing in a theatre near you. I was sad about Toni Morrison’s death and posted images of and quotes from her interviews. But when I heard about Paule Marshall’s passing, I had a deeper and wider range of feeling that surprised me—sadness that there wouldn’t be another novel, anger that I never got to meet her, to interview her, or just to ask questions I never got answers to. I’m a queer Caribbean writer and critic, and Marshall is the literary foremother I love who didn’t always love me back.

In 1959, the year of the Cuban Revolution, when Richard Nixon was vice president, when most literature, and certainly most Caribbean literature, was published by men, Paule Marshall, a brown-skinned, Brooklyn-born daughter of working-class Barbadian (or Bajan) immigrants, published her first book, Brown Girl, Brownstones. By the time of her death on August 12, Marshall had written nine critically acclaimed books, won a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award and numerous other accolades. Her work became a staple in college classrooms of both African-American and Caribbean literature.

Just shy of 40 years later, I, the brown-skinned daughter of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, began reading Marshall’s work while at college in upstate New York. Her fiction, groundbreaking because of its frank portrayals of black, working class families, and because her protagonists clearly see the good, the bad, and the hypocrisy in the communities they belong to and love, still feels relevant and urgent. These black women she wrote about—sometimes young, often middle-aged—struggle to come to terms with their personal and cultural histories and with figuring out where they belong (and for the older women, what and whom to embrace in the second half of their lives).

Her description of Caribbean-American experiences in Brown Girl, Brownstones resonates with immigrants of many backgrounds in the midst of today’s vocal anti-immigrant sentiments. And her portrayal of everyday black women—those she called “kitchen table poets”—who seek lives of great joy and fulfillment, including both an intellectual life and sexual pleasure, provides a model for resisting seduction by the anger and despair that surrounds us.

Source: lithub.com

• Born: Apr 09, 1929 · New York City, United States
• Died: Aug 12, 2019 · Richmond, VA
• Awards: Guggenheim Fellowship (1) · Dos Passos Prize (1) · American Book Awards (1) · Other awards (2)
• Education: Hunter College · Brooklyn College · City University of New York
• Nominations: Neustadt International Prize for Literature (1988)