CARLATA BRADLEY

Chief Justice Earl Warren swore in Thurgood Marshall, the first
Black justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. As chief counsel for
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People in the 1940s and ’50s.

Marshall was the architect and executor of the legal strategy
that ended the era of official racial segregation.

Thoroughgood "Thurgood" Marshall
(July 2, 1908 – January 24, 1993)

U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Guion S. Bluford became
the first African American to travel into space when the space
shuttle Challenger lifted off on its third mission.

It was the first night launch of a space shuttle, and many people
stayed up late to watch the spacecraft roar up from Cape
Canaveral, Florida, at 2:32 a.m.

The Challenger spent six days in space, during which time
Bluford and his crew members launched a communications
satellite for the government of India, made contact with an
errant communications satellite, conducted various scientific experiments, and tested the shuttle’s robotic arm.

Guion Stewart Bluford Jr. (82)

On or about August 20, 1619, “20 and odd” Angolans, kidnapped
by the Portuguese, arrived in the British colony of Virginia and 
were then bought by English colonists.

The exact date is not definitively known (a letter from the time
identified the ship’s arrival coming in "the latter part of August"),
but this date has been chosen by many to mark the arrival of the enslaved Africans in the New World—beginning two and a half
centuries of slavery in North America.

On August 19, 1791, the accomplished American mathematician
and astronomer Benjamin Banneker wrote a letter to then-
Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson corresponded prolifically with luminaries from around
the world, but Banneker is unique among them: the son of a free
Black American woman and a formerly enslaved African man from Guinea, Banneker criticizes Jefferson’s hypocritical stance on
slavery in respectful but unambiguous terms, using Jefferson’s
own words to make his case for the abolition of slavery.

Banneker himself was born free in what is now Ellicott City,
Maryland, and was encouraged in his studies of astronomy
and mathematics by the Ellicotts, a Quaker family who owned
a mill and much of the land in the area.