Steamfunkateers

by Balogun Ojetade

  1862Educator Mary Jane Patterson is generally recognized as the first Black woman to receive a B.A. degree when she graduated from Oberlin College in 1862. Lucy Stanton Day Sessions graduated from Oberlin twelve years earlier but was not in a program that awarded official bachelor’s degrees.

  1863Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation takes effect on January 1, legally freeing slaves in areas of the South still in rebellion against the United States.

  1863The New York City draft riots erupt on July 13 and continue for four days, during which at least 100 of the city’s residents are killed. This remains the highest death toll in any urban conflict in the 19th or 20th Centuries.

  1863On July 18, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteers, the first officially recognized all-Black military unit in the Union army, assaults Fort Wagner in Charleston, South Carolina in an unsuccessful effort to take the fortification. Sergeant William H. Carney becomes the first Black to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery under fire.

  1863Robert Smalls of Charleston, South Carolina, is the first and only Black to be commissioned a captain in the U.S. Navy during the Civil War.

  1863Susie King Taylor of Savannah is the first Black Army nurse in U.S. history.

  1864The Fort Pillow Massacre takes place in West Tennessee on April 12. Approximately 300 of the 585 soldiers of the Union garrison at Fort Pillow are killed including many after the Union forces surrender. Only 14 Confederate soldiers die in the battle.

  1864In June Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler of Boston is the first Black woman to earn a medical degree when she graduates from the New England Female Medical College in Boston.

  1864On June 15, Congress passed a bill authorizing equal pay, equipment, arms, and health care for Black troops in the Union Army.

  1864On October 4, La Tribune de la Nouvelle Orleans (the New Orleans Tribune) begins publication. The Tribune is the first Black-owned daily newspaper.

  1865On February 1, 1865, Abraham Lincoln signs the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution outlawing slavery throughout the United States.

  1865On March 3, Congress established the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide health care, education, and technical assistance to emancipated slaves. Congress also charters the Freedman’s Bank to promote savings and thrift among the ex-slaves.

  1865Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders to Union General Ulysses S. Grant on April 9 at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, effectively ending the Civil War.

  1865On April 15, President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated by John Wilkes Booth in Washington, D.C.

  1865 John Wilkes Booth escapes capture by American troops after killing President Abraham Lincoln. The army believes he was Brushed or enhanced by dark magic, which allowed him to pass by others unnoticed. They begin a search for not only Booth but his conspirators as well.

  1865On June 19, enslaved Blacks in Texas finally receive news of their emancipation. From that point they commemorate that day as Juneteenth.

  1865Between September and November, a number of ex-Confederate states pass so called Black Codes.

  1865The Ku Klux Klan is formed on December 24th in Pulaski, Tennessee by six educated, middle class former Confederate veterans. The Klan soon adopts terror tactics to thwart the aspirations of the formerly enslaved and their supporters.

  1865Twenty thousand Black troops are among the 32,000 U.S. soldiers sent to the Rio Grande as a show of force against Emperor Maximilian’s French troops occupying Mexico. Some discharged Black soldiers join the forces of Mexican resistance leader Benito Juarez.

  1865John S. Rock is the first Black to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

  1865Martin R. Delany’s appointment as Major by President Abraham Lincoln makes him the highest ranking Black officer during the Civil War.

  1865On January 16, General William T. Sherman issues Special Field Order No. 15 which gives 400,000 acres of abandoned coastal land in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida to formerly enslaved people. This order becomes the basis for subsequent “40 acres and a mule” demands by former slaves and their supporters.

  1865With the approval of the Georgia Legislature on December 6, the 13th Amendment took effect and outlawed slavery throughout the United States and its possessions.

  1866Fisk University is founded in Nashville, Tennessee on January 9.

  1866On April 9, Congress overrides President Andrew Johnson’s veto to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The act confers citizenship upon Black Americans and guarantees equal rights with whites.

  1866On May 1-3, white civilians and police in Memphis, Tennessee kill forty-six Blacks and injure many more, burning ninety houses, twelve schools, and four churches in what will be known as the Memphis Massacre.

  1866On June 13, Congress approves the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing due process and equal protection under the law to all citizens. The amendment also grants citizenship to Blacks.

  1866Congress authorizes the creation of four all-Black regiments in the United States Army. Two cavalry regiments, the 9th and 10th and two infantry regiments, the 24th and 25th will become the first and only units in which Black soldiers can serve until the Spanish American War. They will be known as Buffalo Soldiers.

  1866Police in New Orleans supporting the Democratic Mayor storm a Republican meeting of blacks and whites on July 30, killing 34 Black and 3 white Republicans. Over 150 people are injured in the attack.

  1867On January 8, overriding President Andrew Johnson’s veto, Congress grants the Black citizens of the District of Columbia the right to vote. Two days later it passes the Territorial Suffrage Act which allows Blacks in the western territories to vote.

  1867Morehouse College is founded in Atlanta on February 14.

  1867The Reconstruction Acts are passed by Congress on March 2. Congress divides ten of the eleven ex-Confederate states into military districts. These acts also reorganize post-war Southern governments, disfranchising former high ranking Confederates and enfranchising former slaves in the South.

  1867On March 2, Howard University is chartered by Congress in Washington, D.C. The institution is named after General Oliver O. Howard who heads the Freedman’s Bureau.

  1868On July 21, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, granting citizenship to any person born or naturalized in the United States.

  1868Opelousas, Louisiana is the site of the Opelousas Massacre on September 28, in which an estimated 200 to 300 Black Americans are killed by whites opposed to Reconstruction and Black voting.

  1868On November 3, Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant (Republican) is elected president.

  1868On November 3, John Willis Menard is elected to Congress from Louisiana’s Second Congressional District. Menard is the first Black elected to Congress. However, neither he nor his opponent will be seated due to disputed election results.

  1868Howard University Medical School opens on November 9. It is the first medical school in the United States established for the training of Black doctors.

  1868 The Shogun Kekei of Japan abdicates and the shogunate is abolished. The Meiji dynasty is restored and begins the modernization and Westernization of Japan.

  1869On February 26, Congress sends the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution to the states for approval. The amendment guarantees Black males the right to vote.

  1869On April 6, Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett is appointed minister to Haiti. He is the first Black American diplomat and presidential appointee.

  1869Isaac Myers organizes the Colored National Labor Union in Baltimore.

  1869George Lewis Ruffin is the first Black to receive a law degree from any institution when he graduates from Harvard Law School.

  1870Census of 1870, U.S. population: 39,818,449, Black population: 4,880,009 (12.7 percent).

  1870Hiram R. Revels (Republican) of Mississippi takes his seat in the U.S. Senate on February 25. He is the first Black United States senator, though he serves only one year, completing the unexp
ired term of Jefferson Davis.

  1870The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified on March 30.

  1870In June Richard T. Greener becomes the first Black undergraduate to graduate from Harvard University.

  1870The Preparatory High School for Colored Youth opens in Washington, D.C. It is the first public high school for Blacks in the nation. The institution is later named the M Street High School and finally Dunbar High School in honor of Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

  1870 The Standard Oil Company is founded by John D. Rockefeller.

  1870 Franco Prussian War breaks out. The war lasts six weeks and marks the end of Louis Napoleon as emperor of France and the end of the German Unification Wars. The French loose all cohesion and a provisional government is set up by the Prussians. By the end of 1870 the French proclaim the Third French Republic. Paris will succeed from France at the end of 1870 and proclaims the Paris Commune.

  1871In February Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1871 popularly known as the Ku Klux Klan Act.

  1871On October 6, Fisk University’s Jubilee Singers begin their first national tour. The Jubilee Singers become world-famous singers of Black spirituals, performing before the Queen of England and the Emperor of Japan. The money they earn finances the construction of Jubilee Hall on the Fisk University campus.

  1871George Washington, an early Black settler in Washington Territory becomes the first Black to found a predominately white town when he establishes Centerville, later Centralia, Washington.

  1872Lt. Governor Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback of Louisiana serves as governor of the state for one month from December 1872 to January 1873. He is the first Black to hold that position.

  1872Charlotte Ray of Washington, D.C. is the first Black woman and only the third woman admitted to the bar to practice law in the U.S.

  1873The 43rd Congress has seven Black members.

  1873On April 14, the U.S Supreme Court in the Slaughterhouse Cases rules that the due process clause of the 14th Amendment protects national, not state, citizenship.

  1873Bishop Patrick Healy serves as President of Georgetown University from 1873 to 1881. He is the first Black to preside over a predominately white university.

  1873On Easter Sunday more than 100 Blacks were killed in northwest Louisiana while defending Republicans in local office against white militia. The incident became known as the Colfax Massacre. Later that year in what would be known as the Coushatta Massacre 30 people including white and Black Republican officeholders and their supporters were killed by white militia.

  1874The Freedman’s Bank closes after Black depositors and investors lose more than one million dollars.

  1875Federal troops are sent to Vicksburg, Mississippi in January to protect Blacks attempting to vote and to allow the safe return of the Black sheriff who had been forced to flee the city.

  1875On February 23rd Jim Crow laws are enacted in Tennessee. Similar statutes had existed in the North before the Civil War.

  1875Congress enacts the Civil Rights Act of 1875 on March 1, guaranteeing equal rights to Black Americans in public accommodations and jury duty.

  1875Blanche Kelso Bruce (Republican) of Mississippi becomes the first Black to serve a full six year term as senator when he takes his seat in the United States Senate on March 3.

  1875The 44th Congress has eight Black members.

  1875Jockey Oliver Lewis wins the first Kentucky Derby race. Over the next 27 years fourteen Black jockeys would ride the wining horse at the Derby.

  1875 Guangxu is crowned Emperor of China at the age of four. His adopted mother Empress Dowager Cixi acts as regent until 1889.

  1876Lewis H. Latimer, while working for the Boston patent attorney office of Crosby and Gould, assists Alexander Graham Bell in obtaining a patent for the telephone on March 7.

  1876In May, Edward Alexander Bouchet receives a Ph.D. from Yale University. He is the first Black to receive a Ph.D. from an American university and only the sixth American to earn a Ph.D. in physics.

  1876Race riots and other forms of terrorism against Black voters in South Carolina over the summer including the infamous Hamburg Massacre where blacks are killed while celebrating the Fourth of July, prompt President Grant to sent federal troops to restore order.

  1876On October 13 Meharry Medical College is founded in Nashville by the Freedman’s Aid Society of the Methodist Church.

  1876The presidential election of 1876, pitting Samuel Tilden (Democrat) against Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican), is inconclusive when the votes in the Electoral College are disputed.

  1876 Dr. Kellogg opens the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. People flock from all around to come for cleansing, exercise, and a radical change in diet.

  1876 Alexander Graham Bell is awarded a patent for his new invention, the telephone.

  1876 Johns Hopkins University is founded in Baltimore, Maryland, as a research university. The university is named after Johns Hopkins, who left $7 million dollars when he died in 1873 to start a university and a hospital.

  1876 General George Armstrong Custer, leading a detachment of the Seventh Cavalry, attacks a combined Sioux and Cheyenne encampment—Little Bighorn. The 260 soldiers are slaughtered to a man.

  1877The Compromise of 1877 (also known as the Wormley House Compromise because the meeting takes place in a Black-owned hotel in Washington, D.C.) is an arrangement worked out in January of that year which effectively ends Reconstruction. Although Democratic Presidential candidate Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, Southern Democratic leaders agree to support Rutherford Hayes’s efforts to obtain the disputed electoral votes of Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina in exchange for the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South and the end of federal efforts to protect the civil rights of Blacks.

  1877The 45th Congress has three Black members.

  1877On June 15, Henry O. Flipper became the first Black to graduate from West Point.

  1877In July, 30 Black settlers establish the town of Nicodemus in western Kansas. About a third of the settlers are Brushed, including town leaders, John D. Konkeroo and Bud Billiken. Harriet Tubman and Robert Charles are frequent visitors/semi-residents and John Henry eventually settles there as the town’s blacksmith/weaponsmith. Nicodemus is the first of hundreds of all or mostly Black towns created in the West.

  1877George Washington Henderson of the University of Vermont is the first Black person elected to Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest humanities honor society in the U.S.

  1877 U.S. Grant leaves the Presidency of the United States and Rutherford B. Hayes is sworn in as the 19th President of the United States.

  1877President Rutherford B. Hayes appoints Frederick Douglass as the first Black U.S. Marshal. His jurisdiction is the District of Columbia.

  1877 Thomas Alva Edison invents the phonograph, recording voices on wax cylinders.

  1877 The first public telephones are made available in New York City.

  1877 Queen Victoria is proclaimed the Empress of India.

  1878Marie Selika Williams becomes the first Black woman entertainer to perform at the White House when she presents a musical program to President Rutherford B. Hayes and assembled guests.

  1878 The Christian Revival Association, founded in 1865, inexplicably changes its name to the Salvation Army. It is rumored the Salvation Army is secretly a private army of the Protestant churches that enforces the Ten Commandments and Christian interests through violence and intimidation.

  1878 Electrical street lighting is introduced in London.

  1878 Pope Pius IX dies (assassinated?) and is succeeded by Pope Leo XIII.

  1878 Cleopatra’s Needle is taken out of Alexandra, Egypt, and erected in London, Paris and New York City.

  1879Mary Eliza Mahoney becomes the first Black professional nurse, graduating from the New England Hospital for Women and Children in Boston.

  1879 The Zulu War. Zulus massacre invading British soldiers at Isandhlwana. The son of Napoleon III, the Fre
nch Prince Imperial, is killed during one of the battles of the Zulu War.

  1879-1880 Approximately six thousand Blacks leave Louisiana and Mississippi counties along the Mississippi River for Kansas in what will be known as the Exodus. Henry Adams and Benjamin “Pap” Singleton were two of the major leaders of the Exodus.

  1880Census of 1880, U.S. population: 50,155,783, Black population: 6,580,793 (13.1 percent).

  1880On May 14, Sgt. George Jordan of the Ninth Cavalry, commanding a detachment of Buffalo Soldiers, leads a successful defense of Tularosa, New Mexico Territory, against Apache Indians.

  1880The U.S. Supreme Court in Strauder v. West Virginia rules that Blacks cannot be excluded from juries solely on the basis of race.

  1880 Thomas Edison and J.W. Swan independently invent the first practical electric lights.

  1880 The first electric lights in New York City are installed.

  1881In January the Tennessee State Legislature votes to segregate railroad passenger cars. Tennessee’s action is followed by Florida (1887), Mississippi (1888), Texas (1889), Louisiana (1890), Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Georgia (1891), South Carolina (1898), North Carolina (1899), Virginia (1900), Maryland (1904), and Oklahoma (1907).

  1881Spelman College, the first college for Black women in the U.S., is founded on April 11 by Sophia B. Packard and Harriet E. Giles.

  1881On the Fourth of July 25-year-old Booker T. Washington opens Tuskegee Institute in central Alabama.

  1881 President James Garfield is assassinated. Vice-President Chester A. Arthur succeeds him.

  1881 Wyatt Earp, Morgan Earp, Virgil Earp, and Doc Holliday fight Frank McLaury, Tom McLaury, Billy Claiborne, Ike Clanton, and Billy Clanton in the infamous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The fight, which takes place in a vacant lot behind the corral, lasts about 30 seconds. During that time about 30 shots are fired. Frank McLaury, Tom McLaury, and Billy Clanton are killed. Morgan Earp, Virgil Earp, and Doc Holliday are wounded.

  1882The Virginia State Assembly established the first state mental hospital for Blacks and locates it near Petersburg.