Little Richard (Richard Wayne Penniman)
(December 5, 1932 – May 9, 2020)  

Singer, pianist, and songwriter Little Richard was an influential
figure in popular music and culture for seven decades. He is 
described as the "Architect of Rock and Roll." 

Little Richard was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
as part of its first group of inductees in 1986.

After a two-month illness, Richard died at the age of 87 at his
home in Tullahoma, Tennessee, from a cause related to bone
cancer. 

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks
(February 4, 1913 – October 24, 2005)

(FOX NEWS) – Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old African American
seamstress and local activist, refused to give up her seat
to a White passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama, public
bus on this day in history, Dec. 1, 1955.

"The only tired I was, was tired of giving in," Parks said of
her decision to challenge local authority.

Black bus riders were required to sit in the back of the bus,
and to also give up those seats to White riders if the front
seats were filled, under local Montgomery ordinance.

Rosa Parks is fingerprinted by police Lt. D.H. Lackey in Montgomery, Ala. after her arrest for civil disobedience.

 


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)