Pope John elevated Bishop Laurian Rugambwa of Tanganyika to College of Cardinals, the first Black cardinal in the modern era.

Air Force Captain Edward J. Dwight Jr. named to fourth class of aerospace research pilots at Edwards Air Base and became the first Black astronaut candidate. He was dropped from the program in 1965.

Miss District of Columbia Shauntay Hinton is crowned Miss USA.

Civil Rights Bill enacted by Congress. Bill gave Blacks the right to equal treatment in inns, public conveyances, theaters and other places of public amusement. It will be overturned by the Supreme Court in 1883.

Alabama State Board of Education expelled nine Alabama State students for participating in sit-in demonstrations.

Defense Department limited electronic surveilance after disclosure of civil disturbance information collection plan which directed the gathering of information on civil rights groups.

Actor Sherman Hemsley (All in The Family, Jeffersons, Amen) is born in Philadelphia.

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March 1, 1842, Decided

OPINION: Mr. Justice STORY delivered the opinion of the Court.

This is a writ of error to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, brought under the 25th section of the judiciary act of 1789, ch. 20, for the purpose of revising the judgment of that Court, in a case involving the construction of the Constitution and laws of the United States.

The facts are briefly these: The plaintiff in error was indicted in the Court of Oyer and Terminer for York county, for having, with force and violence, taken and carried away from that county to the state of Maryland, a certain negro woman, named Margaret Morgan, with a design and intention of selling and disposing of, and keeping her as a slave or servant for life, contrary to a statute of Pennsylvania, passed on the 26th of March, 1826. That statute in the first section, in substance, provides, that if any person or persons shall from and after the passing of the act, by force and violence take and carry away, or cause to be taken and carried away, and shall by fraud or false pretence, seduce, or cause to be seduced, or shall attempt to take, carry away, or seduce any negro or mulatto from any part of that commonwealth, with a design and intention of selling and disposing of, or causing to be sold, or of keeping and detaining, or of causing to be kept and detained, such negro or mulatto as a slave or servant

Harold (Harry) George Belafonte was born on this day.

The British are forced to sign a peace treaty with Maroons, escaped slave societies, in Jamaica.

Associated Press reported that more than one thousand Blacks had been arrested in sit-in demonstrations.

Joe Louis retired as heavyweight boxing after holding the title for a record eleven years and eight months.

The pastry fork was invented by

a black woman, Ms. Anna M. Mangin.

Don Carlton Lemon is a prominent, award-winning black television anchor in the United States. In 2011, he publicly came out as a gay man. In so doing, he became the most prominent African American journalist to announce his sexual orientation and was immediately considered a major role model for other gay men of color.

Lemon was born on March 1, 1966 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana to a single working mother. His father, known only as Mr. Richardson, played a positive role in Lemon’s young life. He and his sisters, Yma and Leisa, grew up in west Baton Rouge and Port Allen. They lived there with their mother and grandmother until 1976 when his mother married Lemon’s step-father. As an adult, Lemon reported that at the age of five he was sexually abused by a teenage male neighbor.

Lemon enrolled at Louisiana State University in 1984 but did not complete his studies. He moved to New York City in 1990 and entered the broadcasting field. His first job there was as a reporter for the Fox Affiliate, WNYW. Lemon graduated from Brooklyn College in Broadcast Journalism in 1996. He then moved to Birmingham, Alabama to anchor the news at Fox’s WBRC. St. Louis, Missouri was his next stop where he anchored and reported for KTVI.

In the late 1990s, he started his NBC affiliation at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s WCAU. Lemon then stepped up to network news as correspondent for NBC’s Today and NBC Nightly News. At this time, he also guest anchored the Today show and was seen on MSNBC on weekends. Lemon earned the Edward R. Murrow Award for his 2002 reporting on the Washington D.C. snipers.

Lemon moved to Chicago in 2003 to co-anchor the 5 p.m. newscast at WMAQ. His investigative report on the Chicago real estate market garnered him an Emmy.  He financed his own fact-finding trip to Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, and Tanzania in 2005. Reporting on the African AIDS pandemic, he connected the international situation to the home context. He won another Emmy for this special coverage as well as one for his reporting on Hurricane Katrina.

CNN hired

March 1, 1880, Decided; OCTOBER, 1879 Term

MR. JUSTICE STRONG delivered the opinion of the court.

The plaintiff in error, a colored man, was indicted for murder in the Circuit Court of Ohio County, in West Virginia, on the 20th of October, 1874, and upon trial was convicted and sentenced. The record was then removed to the Supreme Court of the State, and there the judgment of the Circuit Court was affirmed. The present case is a writ of error to that court, and it is now, in substance, averred that at the trial in the State court the defendant (now plaintiff in error) was denied rights to which he was entitled under the Constitution and laws of the United States.

In the Circuit Court of the State, before the trial of the indictment was commenced, the defendant presented his petition, verified by his oath, praying for a removal of the cause into the Circuit Court of the United States, assigning, as ground for the removal, that by virtue of the laws of the State of West Virginia no colored man was eligible to be a member of the grand jury or to serve on a petit jury in the State; that white men are so eligible, and that by reason of his being a colored man and having been a slave, he had reason to believe, and did believe, he could not have the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings in the State of West Virginia for the security of his person as is enjoyed by white citizens, and that he had less chance of enforcing in the courts of the State his rights on the prosecution, as a citizen of the United States, and that the probabilities of a denial of them to him as such citizen on every trial which might take place on the indictment in the courts of the State were much more enhanced than if he was a white man. This petition was denied by the State court, and the cause was forced to trial.

Motions to quash the venire, because the law under which it was issued was unconstitutional, null, and void, and successive motions to challenge the array of the panel, for a new trial, and in arrest of judgment

Montgomery, Ala., police broke up protest demonstration on Alabama State campus and arrested thirty-five students, a teacher and her husband.

Born on this day. HARRY BELAFONTE is the son of Caribbean-born immigrants, he became one of the most popular vocalists of the postwar era.

Singer/Actor Harry Belafonte is born in New York.

Richard Rive , in full Richard Moore Rive (born March 1, 1931, Cape Town, S.Af.—died June 4/5, 1989, Cape Town), South African writer, literary critic, and teacher whose short stories, which were dominated by the ironies and oppression of apartheid and by the degradation of slum life, have been extensively anthologized and translated into more than a dozen languages. He was considered to be one of South Africa’s most important short-story writers.

Rive grew up in Cape Town and with scholarship help attended high school and the University of Cape Town (graduated 1949). He taught at Hewat Training College and at a large Cape Town high school, where he was also athletic coach (he was himself a hurdling champion). In 1962 he traveled widely in Africa and Europe, teaching and lecturing and absorbing recent trends in African literature in English.

Quartet: New Voices from South Africa (1963; a selection of 16 short stories by four writers including Rive), African Songs (1963; Rive’s own short stories), Modern African Prose (1964; an anthology edited by Rive and designed for use by students), and Emergency (1964; a novel about the events of the Sharpeville massacre and state of emergency in 1960) were published soon after his return to South Africa. Rive received an M.A. (1966) from Columbia University in New York City and a D.Phil. from Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1974. Selected Writings, a collection of essays, short stories, and plays, was published in 1977. In 1981 he published Writing Black: An Author’s Notebook. Rive’s short stories are characterized by great imaginative and technical power, a skillful use of leitmotifs, and realistic dialogue.

3/1/1933: On this day Merlie Evers-Williams , who will become a civil rights

activist and the first woman to head the NAACP, is born.

1914: Ralph

Waldo Ellison,

author of

The Invisible

Man, is born

Pennsylvania becomes the first state to abolish slavery.

Blanche Kelso Bruce, first Black to serve a full term in the United States Senate was born a slave in Prince Edward County, Virginia.

Police used tear gas to break up student protest demonstration at Tallahassee, Florida.

Through the 30th, One thousand Alabama State students marched on state capitol and held protest meeting.

Harry Belafonte is an eminent African-American figure in the American entertainment industry. He is a notable singer, lyricist, actor and social activist. Belafonte came to international stardom as “King of Calypso” for his popular Caribbean musical style. He is famous for his composition “The Banana Boat Song”.

Born on March 1, 1927 as Harold George Bellanfanti, Jr., in Harlem, New York, Belafonte’s mother, Melvine, was a housekeeper of Jamaican descent and father, Bellafanti Senior was a Martiniquan chef. He spent his early years in Jamaica with his grandmother. Upon his return to New York City, he received his formal education from George Washington High School. After graduation, he went on to join American Navy so as to serve in the Second World War. During 1940s he was serving a job as a janitor’s assistant in NYC, when he received two tickets for the American Negro Theater from his tenant as gratuity. The experience led to his increasing interest in the art form and his meeting with Sidney Poitier. Being financially unstable the two friends fulfilled their love of art by attending the theatre on a single ticket.

Subsequently, Belafonte went on to attend the Dramatic Workshop of The New School. He took the acting classes alongside with Sidney, the influential German director Erwin Piscator, Bea Arthur and Tony Curtis. Afterwards, he performed with the American Negro Theatre and later garnered a Tony Award for his exquisite work in the Broadway revue, John Murray Anderson’s Almanac. In order to afford his drama class tuition fees, Belafonte took the first step toward his music career as a club singer in New York. At his first performance he was supported by musicians like Miles Davis, Max Roach and Charlie Parker.

Belafonte’s professional music career began as a pop-singer when he recorded for Roost record label in 1949. However, later he became enthusiastic about learning folk music which he accessed through the Library of Congress in the American folk songs archives. He made his debut at a renowned jazz

New York Times comments on findings of archaeologist Bruce Williams finds at Qutsul. Evidence leads many to believe that Ta-Seti (most ancient Nubia) developed the worlds first divine kingship, monarchy, which then travelled up the Nile to Egypt.

Rebecca Lee graduates from the New England Female Medical College. She along with Rebecca Cole and Susan Mc Kinney is one of the first African American female physicians.

J. Milton Turner named minister to Liberia and became the first Black diplomat accredited to an African county. James W. Mason was named minister in March, 1870, but never traveled to his post.

Pinn was born free to William and Zilphia Broxton-Pinn, in Stark County, Ohio on March 1, 1843.

U.S. House of Representatives expelled Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. by a vote of 307 to 116. Civil rights leaders said Powell was ousted because of his race.

On this day, Survey Graphic published a special issue titled Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro. By the end of the year, editor Alain Locke had reprinted and expanded upon the writings from this issue, producing a full-length anthology of African-American writing called The New Negro. This anthology, known as the Manifesto of the Harlem Renaissance, included works by established figures such as James Weldon Johnson, William Stanley Braithwaite, W.E.B. DuBoise, and Claude McKay, and introduced rising stars like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Four national chain stores announced on October 17 that counters in about 150 stores in 112 cities in North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Texas, Tennessee, Missouri, Maryland, Florida and Oklahoma had been integrated.

Carl T. Rowan named ambassador of Finland.

Through the 30th, Emancipation Centennial protest began with voter registration campaign in Greenwood, Mississippi.

San Antonio, Texas, became first major Southern city to integrate lunch counters.