Buckroe Beach is one of the oldest recreational regions in Virginia. In 1619, the “Buck Roe” plantation was designated for public use for the newly arrived English settlers sent by the Virginia Company of London. By 1637, however, the plantation was converted into a commercial tobacco farm.  After the Civil War, Buckroe became a fishing camp used by both black and white fishermen. In 1890 a group of Hampton Institute administrators purchased eight acres of beachfront on Chesapeake Bay to provide a place for student exercise and the location of a hotel which could host out-of-town guests.  Led by Frank D. Banks, the administrators pooled their funds to build a four-room cottage they ambitiously named the Bay Shore Hotel.

As word spread, this rare Atlantic coast resort open to African Americans soon drew visitors from as far away as New York and Georgia on summer weekends.  By 1925 this summer vacation destination grew to include the now seventy-room Bay Shore Hotel, a pavilion, amusement park, and boardwalk along its 275-foot waterfront.  By 1930, Bay Shore Beach and Resort, as it was now called, rivaled all-white Buckroe Beach Amusement Park and in fact the two facilities sat side by side with a fence separating the properties that extended across the beach and into the Chesapeake Bay.

Just before World War II one local transportation company extended its tracks and trolleys to Phoebus, the community that included Bay Shore Beach and Resort, to encourage more white and black visitors from nearby Hampton, Newport News, and other Tidewater cities to come to the beach area.  With a growing number of visitors including servicemen and their families during World War II, the beach area was increasingly built up and eventually annexed to Hampton in 1952.

Like other black east coast beaches, Bay Shore Beach was on the circuit for locally and nationally prominent black musicians from Cab Calloway to James Brown, who played before illegally integrated audiences (as white fans climbed over the fence to see their favorite

Willie Mays scores his 1,950th run

First Black student, Vivian Malone, graduated from the University of Alabama.

Gale Sayers, youngest player ever to be elected to the Football Hall of Fame, born

Gale Sayers was born on May 30, 1943, in Kansas to a family whose only bread winner was an auto mechanic. In 1951, Sayers and his family moved to Omaha where he grew up to an athletic child and showed natural ability in a number of sports, especially American football.

Playing middle linebacker for Omaha’s Central High School’s varsity team, Sayers became a part of the All-Mid-western and All-American high school teams in his senior year. Sayers also stood out in track and field and set a state record of long jump. However, football continued to be his first preference and he returned to Kansas.

Joining the University of Kansas, Gale Sayers performed poorly in his academics but continued to shine on the field. Rushing for 1,125 yards in his sophomore year with an average of 7.2 yards per carry, followed by 941 and 678 yards in his junior and senior years respectively, Sayers earned himself the All-American honours in two consecutive seasons. For his magnificent performance and contribution to the game, Sayers was given the nick name of the ‘Kansas Comet’.

Focusing entirely on his career as a football player, Sayer failed his Bachelor’s degree and juggled between offers from NFL and the American Football League. Choosing the Chicago Bears over the Kansas City Chiefs, Sayers became a part of Pro Football and played running back for the team.

Kicking off his debut with a total of 867 yards and 22 touchdowns during his rookie season, Sayers earned himself NFL’s scoring title for the year along with the honor of Rookie of the Year. Scoring 6 touchdowns, 316 yards and 36 points, Sayers single-handedly won the game for the Chicago Bears against San Francisco in 1965, earning himself a trip to the Pro Bowl.

To prove his consistency after the rookie season, Sayers returned to the league in 1966 with a total score of 1,231 yards and an average of 5.4 yards. Hence, he was selected to play in the Pro Bowl once again. The following year, he managed to earn All-Pro honours for a second time with a score of 880 yards.

Sayers’

Bus boycott began in Tallahassee, Florida.

Clifton R. Wharton, one of the first African-Americans to hold a professional position in the U.S. State Department, was born in 1899 in Baltimore, Maryland. Described as a “scholastic marvel,” Wharton attended English High School in Boston, Massachusetts, skipped college and was accepted to Boston University Law School where he received a Bachelor’s degree in Law in 1920 and Master’s degree in Law in 1923. After practicing for two years in Boston he moved to Washington, D.C. in 1924 where he took a position as an examiner with the Veterans Bureau.  He later worked as a law clerk in State Departments legal section. While there, he took an aptitude test for the position of foreign service officer, scoring in the top 15 percent.

Mr. Whartons 40-year career with the State Department spanned an era of profound change in U.S. foreign policy and in the bureaucracy which managed that policy.  Initially, Whartons career opportunities were limited to relatively insignificant posts traditionally assigned to African-American diplomats. For 25 years, he worked in Liberia, the Canary Islands, Madagascar, and the Azores in a rotation of small tropical countries known as the “Negro Circuit.”

His first break from this pattern occurred in 1949 when he was assigned to a diplomatic post in Lisbon, Portugal. The following year, he was  named consul general in Lisbon and three years later he was appointed consul general in Marseille, France. He remained there until 1957.

Whartons international activities were impacted by events in the United States.  In the 1950s, U.S. diplomats were often faced with international condemnation for the nations treatment of African-American citizens. The incident in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957, for example, where nine young black students entering school were confronted by a mob of bigots, was a major propaganda disaster for the United States.

In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Wharton as Minister to Romania, which was another major breakthrough.  Wharton at that time was the

Born in 1903 in New York City, Countee Cullen was raised in a Methodist

parsonage. He attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York and began

writing poetry at the age of fourteen. In 1922, Cullen entered New York

University. His poems were published in The Crisis, under the leadership of

W. E. B. Du Bois, and Opportunity, a magazine of the National Urban League.

He was soon after published in Harpers, the Century Magazine, and Poetry.

He won several awards for his poem, Ballad of the Brown Girl, and

graduated from New York University in 1923. That same year, Harper published

his first volume of verse, Color, and he was admitted to Harvard University

where he completed a masters degree.

His second volume of poetry, Copper Sun (1927), met with controversy in the

black community because Cullen did not give the subject of race the same

attention he had given it in Color. He was raised and educated in a

primarily white community, and he differed from other poets of the Harlem

Renaissance like Langston Hughes in that he lacked the background to comment

from personal experience on the lives of other blacks or use popular black

themes in his writing. An imaginative lyric poet, he wrote in the tradition

of Keats and Shelley and was resistant to the new poetic techniques of the

Modernists. He died in 1946.

Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed Missouri Compromise and opened Northern territory to slavery.

Odumegwu Ojukwu , in full Chief Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu (born November 4, 1933, Zungeru, Nigeria—died November 26, 2011, London, England), Nigerian military leader and politician, who was head of the secessionist state of Biafra during the Nigerian civil war.

Ojukwu was the son of a successful Igbo businessman. After graduating from the University of Oxford in 1955, he returned to Nigeria to serve as an administrative officer. After two years, however, he joined the army and was rapidly promoted thereafter. In January 1966 a group of largely Igbo junior army officers overthrew Nigeria’s civilian government but then were forced to hand power to the highest-ranking military officer, Major General T.U. Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi (also an Igbo); he appointed Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu as military governor of the mostly Igbo Eastern region. However, Hausa and Yoruba army officers from the Northern and Western regions feared a government dominated by the Igbo, and in July 1966 northern officers staged a successful countercoup in which Lieutenant Colonel (later General) Yakubu Gowon was installed as the new head of state. Under Gowon’s rule, Ojukwu retained his command of the Eastern region. Meanwhile, the rising tide of feeling against the Igbo in the Northern region led to large-scale massacres of Igbos by northerners in May–September 1966.

The Eastern region felt increasingly alienated from the federal military government under Gowon. Ojukwu’s main proposal to end the ethnic strife was a significant devolution of power to the regions. The federal government initially agreed to this solution at a conference in January 1967 but then rejected it soon afterward. Ojukwu responded in March–April 1967 by separating the Eastern regional government’s administration and revenues from those of the federal government. Mounting secessionist pressures from his fellow Igbo finally compelled Ojukwu on May 30, 1967, to declare the Eastern region an independent sovereign state as the Republic of Biafra. Federal troops soon

On Oct. 1, 1960, Nigeria gained independence, becoming a member of the Commonwealth of Nations and joining the United Nations. Organized as a loose federation of self-governing states, the independent nation faced the overwhelming task of unifying a country with 250 ethnic and linguistic groups.

Rioting broke out in 1966, and military leaders, primarily of Ibo ethnicity, seized control. In July, a second military coup put Col. Yakubu Gowon in power, a choice unacceptable to the Ibos. Also in that year, the Muslim Hausas in the north massacred the predominantly Christian Ibos in the east, many of whom had been driven from the north. Thousands of Ibos took refuge in the eastern region, which declared its independence as the Republic of Biafra on May 30, 1967. Civil war broke out. In Jan. 1970, after 31 months of civil war, Biafra surrendered to the federal government.

House slave betrayed Denmark Vesey conspiracy. Vesey conspiracy, one of the most elaborate slave plots on record, involved thousands of Blacks in Charleston, S.C., and vicinity. Thirty-seven Blacks were hanged.

Countee Cullen , in full Countee Porter Cullen (born May 30, 1903, Louisville, Kentucky?