Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on April 17, 1823, Mifflin Wistar Gibbs apprenticed as a carpenter. By his early 20s he was an activist in the abolition movement, sharing platforms with Frederick Douglass and helping in the Underground Railroad. Black intellectual ferment of the era gave him a superb education outside the classroom, and he became a powerful writer. In 1850 he migrated to San Francisco, California; starting as a bootblack, he was soon a successful merchant, the founder of a black newspaper, Mirror of the Times, and a leading member of the city’s black community.

In 1858 Gibbs moved to Victoria in what is now British Columbia, part of a mass migration of black men and women seeking equality under the British flag. Again he prospered, first as a merchant, then as a property developer, contractor, and elected politician.  In 1866 Gibbs was elected to the Victoria (BC) City Council becoming the second black elected official in Canada and only the third elected anywhere on the North American continent.

Gibbs briefly returned to the US in 1859 to court and marry Maria Alexander, who had studied at Oberlin College. In developing a coal mine in the Queen Charlotte Islands in 1869-70, he built British Columbia’s first railroad. A tireless advocate for the black community, he helped to organize the colony’s first militia, an all-black unit known as the African Rifles. As an elected delegate to the Yale Convention, he also helped to frame the terms by which British Columbia entered the Canadian confederation.

Mifflin and Maria Gibbs separated in the late 1860s. Returning to the United States in 1870, Gibbs studied law in Oberlin, Ohio (where his wife Maria had settled, and where four of their five children graduated from Oberlin College). He toured the Reconstruction South and settled in Little Rock, Arkansas, soon becoming the first black elected municipal judge in the United States. His long and sometimes dangerous efforts on behalf of the Republican Party earned him an ambiguous reward: at the age

Francis Williams, first U.S. Black college graduate, publishes a poem book in Latin.

It’s no secret that white households in the United States take in significantly more income than black and Latino households do, fueling racial inequality. What’s to blame for this discrepancy? It’s not just that whites work in higher paying jobs than their minority counterparts do. Even when whites and minorities both work in the same field—management, for instance—these income gaps don’t disappear.

Women and people of color continue to bring home less than white men do because of the pervasiveness of income inequality. A vast amount of research indicates that minority workers are literally being shortchanged in their paychecks.

The Great Recession of 2007 had an adverse effect on all American workers. For African American and Hispanic laborers in particular, the recession proved devastating. The racial wealth gap that existed before the economic downturn only widened. In a study called “State of Communities of Color in the U.S. Economy,” the Center for American Progress (CAP) pinpointed just how much minority employees suffered during the recession. The study found that blacks and Latinos brought in on average $674 and $549, respectively, per week. Meanwhile, whites earned $744 per week, and Asians earned $866 per week during the fourth quarter of 2011.

Contributing to this pay gap is that higher numbers of African Americans and Hispanics than whites and Asians worked in jobs that paid minimum wage or less. The amount of black minimum wage workers rose by 16.6 percent from 2009 to 2011, and the number of Latino minimum wage workers rose by 15.8 percent, CAP found.

On the other hand, the number of white minimum wage workers rose by just 5.2 percent. The amount of Asian minimum wage workers actually dropped by 15.4 percent.

In February 2011, the Economic Policy Institute released a paper about racial disparities in income called “Whiter Jobs, Higher Wages.” The paper suggests that occupational segregation contributes to racial gaps in the pay scale. EPI found that “in occupations where black men are

Wiliam Monroe Trotter, crusader for full equality, publisher of The Boston Guardian, co-founder of the Niagra Movement and close friend of W.E.B. Dubois, was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Trotter led a protest against the showing of the racist film Birth of a Nation and was in opposition to Booker T. Washington.

Ralph David Abernathy , (born March 11, 1926, Linden, Ala., U.S.—died April 17, 1990, Atlanta, Ga.), black American pastor and civil rights leader who was Martin Luther King’s chief aide and closest associate during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

The son of a successful farmer, Abernathy was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1948 and graduated with a B.S. degree from Alabama State University in 1950. His interest then shifted from mathematics to sociology, and he earned an M.A. degree in the latter from Atlanta University in 1951. That same year he became pastor of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., and he met King a few years later when the latter became pastor of another Baptist church in the same city. In 1955–56 the two men organized a boycott by black citizens of the Montgomery bus system that forced the system’s racial desegregation in 1956. This nonviolent boycott marked the beginning of the civil rights movement that was to desegregate American society during the following two decades.

King and Abernathy continued their close collaboration as the civil rights movement gathered momentum, and in 1957 they founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC; with King as president and Abernathy as secretary-treasurer) to organize the nonviolent struggle against segregation throughout the South. In 1961 Abernathy relocated his pastoral activities to Atlanta, and that year he was named vice president at large of the SCLC and King’s designated successor there. He continued as King’s chief aide and closest adviser until King’s assassination in 1968, at which time Abernathy succeeded him as president of the SCLC. He headed that organization until his resignation in 1977, after which he resumed his work as the pastor of a Baptist church in Atlanta. His autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, appeared in 1989.

Playwright August Wilson won his second Pulitzer Prize for drama with the play The Piano Lesson.

Arkansas jurist Mifflin Wistar Gibbs was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Gibbs became the nations first African American judge in 1873. From 1850-1858, he served as U.S. consul to Madagascar.

Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, keystone of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, died of heart failure.

Bessie Emery Head , (born July 6, 1937, Pietermaritzburg, S.Af.—died April 17, 1986, Serowe, Botswana), African writer who described the contradictions and shortcomings of pre- and postcolonial African society in morally didactic novels and stories.

Head was born of an illegal union between her white mother (who was placed in a mental asylum during her pregnancy) and black father (who then mysteriously disappeared). She suffered rejection and alienation at an early age. After moving from foster parents to an orphanage school to an early marriage, she abandoned her homeland, her teaching job, and her husband and took her small son to Botswana, seeking personal asylum and tranquility in simple village life.

Head’s novels evolved from an objective, affirmative narrative of an exile finding new meaning in his adopted village in When Rain Clouds Gather (1969) to a more introspective account of the acceptance won by a light-coloured San (Bushman) woman in a black-dominated African society in Maru (1971). A Question of Power (1973) is a frankly autobiographical account of disorientation and paranoia in which the heroine survives by sheer force of will. The Collector of Treasures (1977), a volume of short fiction, includes brief vignettes of traditional Botswanan village life, macabre tales of witchcraft, and passionate attacks on African male chauvinism.

Head said that literature must be a reflection of daily encounters with undistinguished people. Her works reveal empathy with children, with women treated as “dead things” in South Africa, and with idealistic planners who meet indifference and greed at the marketplace.

The white minority finally consented to hold multiracial elections in 1980, and Robert Mugabe won a landslide victory. The country achieved independence on April 17, 1980, under the name Zimbabwe. Mugabe eventually established a one-party socialist state, but by 1990 he had instituted multiparty elections and in 1991 deleted all references to Marxism-Leninism and scientific socialism from the constitution. Parliamentary elections in April 1995 gave Mugabes party a stunning victory with 63 of the 65 contested seats, and in 1996 Mugabe won another six-year term as president.

In 2000, veterans of Zimbabwes war for independence in the 1970s began squatting on land owned by white farmers in an effort to reclaim land taken under British colonization—one-third of Zimbabwes arable land was owned by 4,000 whites. In Aug. 2002, Mugabe ordered all white commercial farmers to leave their land without compensation. Mugabes support for the squatters and his repressive rule has led to foreign sanctions against Zimbabwe. Once heralded as a champion of the anticolonial movement, Mugabe is now viewed by much of the international community as an authoritarian ruler responsible for egregious human rights abuses and for running the economy of his country into the ground.

In 1961, a U.S.-backed group of Cuban exiles invaded Cuba. Planned during the Eisenhower administration, the invasion was given the go-ahead by President John Kennedy, although he refused to give U.S. air support. The landing at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, was a fiasco. The invaders did not receive popular Cuban support and were easily repulsed by the Cuban military.

Ralph David Abernathy died of cardiac arrest on April 17, 1990 in Atlanta, Georgia.