Apologies about the late posting especially for missing these two important events…

• (non-Detroit-Michigan-related) Nina Simone (RIP) was born on February 21, 1933
• (Detroit-born) Malcolm X (RIP) was designated persona non grata by The Nation of Islam and then later assassinated February 21, 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom in NYC

February 23, 1868—Dr. W.E.B. DuBois is born William Edward Burghardt DuBois in Great Barrington, Mass. DuBois can easily qualify as Black America’s lead­ing scholar and intellectual of the late 1800s and early 1900s. He was also an educator and social activist fight­ing tirelessly against racial injustice and U.S. imperialism.

February 24, 1868—The U.S. House of Represen­tatives voted 126 to 47 to impeach President Andrew Johnson.

Thanks to Johnson, who was acquitted by one vote in the Senate, the promise of Forty Acres and A Mule was never kept. If he had been expelled, who knows in what kind of America we would all be living in today? I’m sure that Rosa Parks would have sat on the bus wherever she damn pleased her entire life, Rev King would mostly likely have been “just another” Baptist minister, we wouldn’t have had to wait until 2009 for our country’s first Black president and our next quoted item would have never been realized…

February 26, 1920—Dr. Carter G. Woodson (1875-1950) founds the first nation­ally organized celebration of Black American history (then called Negro History Week), which was first cele­brated on this day in 1926. Woodson scheduled the week to coincide with the birthdays of Civil War President Abraham Lincoln and Black aboli­tionist Frederick Douglass. However, in 1976, Negro History Week was expanded into the current day Black History Month.