February 15
1848 — Sarah Roberts is barred from white school in Boston. Her father, Benjamin Roberts, filed the first school integration suit on her behalf.
1851 — Black abolitionists invade a Boston courtroom and rescue a fugitive slave.
1968 — Henry Lewis becomes the first Black conductor to lead a symphony orchestra in the United States.
February 16
1857 — Frederick Douglass is elected president of Freedman Bank and Trust.
1923 — Bessie Smith makes her first recording, “Down Hearted Blues,” which sells 800,000 copies for Columbia Records.
1951 — New York City Council passes a bill prohibiting racial discrimination in city-assisted housing developments.
February 17
1870 — Congress passes a resolution readmitting Mississippi on condition that it would never change its constitution to disenfranchise Black people.
1963 — Michael Jeffrey Jordan, famed basketball player and former minor league baseball player, is born in New York, N.Y.
1997 — Virginia House of Delegates votes unanimously to retire the state song, “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia,” a tune that glorifies slavery.
February 18
1688 — First formal protest against slavery by organized a white group in English America made by Germantown Quakers at monthly meeting.
1865 — Rebels abandon Charleston. First Union troops to enter the city included 21st U.S.C.T., followed by two companies of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteers.
1931 — Toni Morrison (born Chloe Anthony Wofford), who will win the Pulitzer Prize for her novel “Beloved,” was born on this day in Lorain, Ohio.
February 19:
1919 — Pan-African Congress, organized by W.E.B. Du Bois, met at the Grand Hotel, Paris. There were 57 delegates — 16 from the United States and 14 from Africa as well as others from 16 countries and colonies.
February 20
1895 – Death of Frederick Douglass, the leading Black spokesman for almost 50 years. He was a major abolitionist, lecturer and editor.
February 21
1895 — North Carolina Legislature, dominated by Black Republicans and white Populists, adjourned for the day to mark the death of Frederick Douglass.
