Republic Day in Sierra Leone.

Black and white Minutemen fought British Soilders at Lexington and Concord.

Although racially restricted housing covenants had been banned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1948, various forms of de facto housing segregation kept African Americans relatively isolated spatially in urban areas, including the city of Seattle.  Many white homeowners in the years following the Court’s decision were apprehensive about letting black families into their communities for fear that it would lead to the deterioration of the neighborhood.  In 1960, King County Superior Judge James W. Hodson ruled that private property owners had the right to choose who to sell to, effectively granting permission to realtors and homeowners to discriminate based on race.

Local civil rights leaders created the open housing movement in Seattle to challenge the type of thinking that was behind the 1960 county court decision.  They advocated open housing which argued that people with resources should be able to purchase a home in any section of the city.  They called for legislation which would make it illegal for individuals to discriminate against someone when selling property.  Proponents of open housing were opposed to the isolation of black families in the Central District (the city’s African American area) where higher poverty rates and poor schools plagued the community.  Local civil rights groups used various tactics to promote open housing, including a fair housing program known as Operation Equity, a program that would encourage black home purchases throughout the city and in its suburbs.

In 1967, the Seattle Urban League received a $138,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to expand Operation Equity.  The program helped arrange the sale of property in white neighborhoods to black families.  With help from the grant, Operation Equity was able to place an average of ten families per month in formerly all-white neighborhoods.  

Despite some opposition from the black power movement and from conservative white home owners, open housing was eventually welcomed by blacks and whites in Seattle.  On April 19, 1968, after two

Militia Integrated in the War of Independence: The first integrated army in American history was the colonial militia that fought the early battles of the War of Independence. African American minutemen fought on the front lines in the first battles against British authority: African Americans assembled at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, to defend Boston against a threatened attack by His Majestys regiments. One of the first to see combat was Prince Easterbrooks, a Lexington slave, who was a member of Captain John Parkers company and who was wounded at the battle of Concord. He survived, however, to fight in many other companies throughout the Revolutionary War. Another was Barzillai Lew, who joined the 27th Massachusetts Regiment, fought at Bunker Hill, and served in the army for seven years. Although the Continental Army tried to exclude African Americans at one time during the conflict, and some states raised all-Black units, free African Americans and slave militiamen served alongside of white militiamen in many battles from Bunker Hill to Yorktown.

Percy Julian , in full Percy Lavon Julian (born April 11, 1899, Montgomery, Alabama, U.S.—died April 19, 1975, Waukegan, Illinois), American chemist, synthesist of cortisone, hormones, and other products from soybeans.

Percy Julian attended De Pauw University (A.B., 1920) and Harvard University (M.A., 1923) and studied under Ernst Späth, who synthesized nicotine and ephedrine, at the University of Vienna (Ph.D., 1931). Julian also taught chemistry at Fisk University, West Virginia State College for Negroes, and Howard and De Pauw universities before, in 1936, directing research into soybeans at the Glidden Company in Chicago. He became director of chemicals development there before leaving in 1953 to found his own companies.

In his researches Julian isolated simple compounds in natural products, then investigated how those compounds were naturally altered into chemicals essential to life, including vitamins and hormones; he then attempted to create the compounds artificially. Early in his career Julian attracted attention for synthesizing the drug physostigmine, used to treat glaucoma. He refined a soya protein that became the basis of Aero-Foam, a foam fire extinguisher used by the U.S. Navy in World War II. He led research that resulted in quantity production of the hormones progesterone (female) and testosterone (male) and of cortisone drugs.

In 1950 Julian, an African American, was named Chicago’s Man of the Year in a Chicago Sun-Times poll, but his home was bombed and burned when he moved to the all-white suburb of Oak Park. He was active as a fund-raiser for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for their project to sue to enforce civil rights legislation.

The National Urban League was formed in New York City. The league was born out of a merger of the National League for the Protection of Colored Women, National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes and the Niagra Movement.

National Education Association study revealed that Blacks had lost thirty thousand teaching jobs since 1954 in seventeen Southern and Border states because of discrimination and desegregation.

Cheyney University is founded in Cheyney, PA

Maj. Gen. Frederic E. Davidson assumed command of the Eighth Infantry Division in Germany and became the first Black to lead an army division.

Jackie Robinson becomes the first African American major league baseball player

On April 19, 2011, Cuba made the most significant change to its leadership in over 50 years, by appointing José Ramón Machado to fill the second-highest position in the Communist Party. It was the first time since the 1959 revolution that someone other than the Castro brothers has been named to the position. The appointment was made at the partys first congress in 14 years and coincides with several changes being made to allow for more private enterprise in Cuba.

In October 2011, buying and selling cars became legal. Also, Raul Castro started allowing Cubans to go into business for themselves in a variety of approved jobs, from accounting to food vendors. The following month, the government began allowing real estate to be bought and sold for the first time since the days immediately following the revolution. A new law, applying only to permanent residents, went into effect on November 10. The law, an effort to prevent massive real estate holdings, limits Cubans to owning one home in the city and one in the country. The new law also requires that all new real estate transactions be made through Cuban bank accounts for regulation purposes.

In December 2011, the government pardoned more than 2,900 prisoners. Of those pardoned, 86 were foreigners; however, Alan Gross was not one of them. Gross, an American contractor, has served a 15-year sentence since 2009 for distributing satellite telephone equipment in Cuba. His case has dampened President Obamas efforts to improve relations between the United States and Cuba.

Walter Fauntroy takes office as the first elected Congressional representative from the District of Columbia since Reconstruction.

Republic Day in Sierra Leone.

Pierre Caliste Landry, a former slave turned educator and minister, is noted as the first African American to be elected mayor of a town in the Unites States. Landry was born into slavery on April 19, 1841 on a sugar cane plantation in Ascension Parish, Louisiana. He was given the name Caliste at birth by his mother, Marcelite, an enslaved cook on the plantation, and his father, Roseman Landry, a white laborer. Caliste was sent to live with Pierre Bouissiac and his wife Zaides, a family of free African Americans and was educated at a local school for free children. However, despite his owners wishes that he be freed, Laundry, at the age of 13 was sold for $1,665 to the Houmas Plantation, whose owner was Marius St. Colombe Bringer.

The Bringer Family owned over 35,000 acres of land on various plantations. Landry was allowed to continue his education in the plantation schools and live inside the family mansion. After working various positions, Landry was appointed superintendent of the yard and allowed to form a business partnership with the head butler on the plantation. They operated a plantation store, selling candies and goodies Landry made.

In 1866, Landry, now freed by the 13th Amendment, changed his first name to Pierre and moved to the African American community in Donaldsonville, the former capital of Louisiana between 1829 to 1831. Within a year, he started two day schools and a night school for the children, built the first home owned by a former slave, and opened a small store.

Two years later Landry had become one of the town’s most prominent citizens and that year (1868), he was unanimously elected as Mayor of Donaldsonville, making him the first African American to be elected as mayor of a town in the United States. He served for one term, and additionally served as a Justice of the Peace, member of the Ascension Parish School Board, and Superintendent of Schools. In 1870 he was elected President of the Police Jury and an appointed Tax Collector for his town.  Two years later Landry was

Home of Z. Alexander Looby, counsel for 153 students arrested in sit-in demonstrations, destroyed by dynamite bomb. More than eighty-three demonstrators indicted in Atlanta, Georgia, on charges stemming from the sit-in demonstrations at Atlanta restaurants. Two thousand students marched on the Nashville City Hall in protest. One hundred Black students, carrying rifles and shotguns, seized the Student Building at Cornell University to protest University racism.

Alex Haley receives a special Pulitzer Prize for Roots.

Max Robinson is the first African American to anchor

network news. The network is ABC.

Lucien-Leon Guillaume Lambert was a pianist, composer, arranger, and music teacher. Born in 1858 in Vernouillet, France, a then-small village near Paris, he was the son of Charles Lucien Lambert, an American, and an unknown French mother. Guillaume Lambert was one of several renowned musicians in his family: his father Charles Lucien Lambert, his paternal uncle Sidney Lambert, and his paternal grandfather Charles-Richard Lambert, were all esteemed musicians, famous in the United States and Europe. Lucien-Leon Guillaume Lambert is often designated as Lambert fils or Lambert Jr. and his father as Lambert père or Lambert Sr. Lucien-Leon Guillaume Lambert and some other members of his family are part of what has been termed a “Creole Romantic” musical dynasty composed of musicians with ties to New Orleans (Louisiana), France, Portugal, the Antilles Islands in the West Indies, and Latin America.

Charles Lucien Lambert moved his family, including young Lucien-Leon Guillaume Lambert, to Brazil in the 1860s.  Young Lambert returned to Paris in the mid-1870s to study music. Having shown early promise in music, he was taught by his father for much of his youth and later studied at the Conservatoire de Paris. Lambert was greatly influenced by musicians Théodore Dubois and Jules Massenet. One of his earliest triumphs was winning, along with Georges Matthias, the Rossini Concours Prize for the composition Prométhée enchaîné (Prometheus Bound). Lambert and Matthias each wrote upon the same theme of Prometheus, but, as critics of the time noted, the styles of the two winners were greatly dissimilar. Written when he was still undertaking musical studies, Lambert’s Prométhée enchaîné demonstrated in its earliest sections a Wagnerian mode, and was said to have been characterized by grandeur, melodic sentiment and charm. The prize was awarded in 1882 and the composition was performed April 19, 1885 by the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire in Paris.

Lambert’s compositions employ a broad variety of musical forms and