Garrett Augustus Morgan Sr.
(March 4, 1877 – July 27, 1963)

On November 20, 1923, the U.S. Patent Office grants Patent No.
1,475,074 to 46-year-old inventor and newspaperman Garrett
Morgan for his three-position traffic signal. Though Morgan’s
was not the first traffic signal (that one had been installed in
London in 1868), it was an important innovation nonetheless:

By having a third position besides just “Stop” and “Go,”
it regulated crossing vehicles more safely than earlier
signals had.

Morgan also invented a "safety hood smoke protection device"

Richard Roundtree is noted for his portrayal of private detective
John Shaft in the 1971 film Shaft, and its four sequels, released
between 1972 and 2019.

For his performance in the original film, Roundtree was nominated
for the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actor in
1972.

Roundtree died of pancreatic cancer at his Los Angeles home
on October 24, at the age of 81.

On September 2, 1967, 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 (NAACP) in the 1940s 
and ’50s, Marshall was the architect and executor of
legal strategy that ended the era of official racial
segregation 

                                       
                                          Thurgood Marshall (1908 – 1993)       
      
                                                                                                                                      

U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Guion S. Bluford became the
first African American to travel into space when the space shuttle Challenger lifts 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 four fellow crew members launched a communications
satellite for the government of India, made contact with an errant communications satellite, conducted scientific experiments, and
tested the shuttle’s robotic arm.

Guion Stewart Bluford Jr. will be 81  years old, November 22.

  
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
   
On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the
African American civil rights movement reached its high-water
mark when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream"
speech to about 250,000 people attending the March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963.      

The demonstrators—Black and white, poor and rich—came
together in the nation’s capital to demand voting rights and        
equal opportunity for African Americans and to appeal for 
an end to racial segregation and discrimination.