February 20
1895 Frederick Douglass dies
1900 J.F. Pickering patents the airship
1927 Sidney Poitier, first African-American to win Academy Award for best actor, is born
1934 Four Saints in Three Acts, by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, premieres as the first African-American opera on Broadway
February 21
1936 Congresswoman Barbara Jordan is born
1965 Malcolm X is assassinated
February 22
1989 Col. Frederick Gregory becomes the first African- American astronaut to command a space shuttle mission
February 23
1868 W.E.B. DuBois, scholar, activist and author of The Souls of Black Folk, is born
1972 Political activist Angela Davis is released from jail
February 24
1811 Daniel A. Payne, first African-American college president, is born
February 25
1853 The first African- American YMCA is organized in Washington, D.C.
1870 Hiram Revels of Mississippi is elected the first African-American in the U.S. Senate
February 26
1965 Civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson dies after being shot by state police in Marion, Alabama
February 27
1902 Opera singer Marian Anderson is born in Philadelphia
1942 Journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, first African American to attend the University of Georgia, is born
1987 Civil rights leader Wharlest Jackson is killed
February 28
1842 African-American abolitionist Charles Lenox Remond testifies before the Massachusetts House Committee
1984 Entertainer Michael Jackson wins eight Grammy Awards