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.

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

The arrival of the enslaved Africans in the New World marked
the beginning of two and a half centuries of slavery in North
America.

The 1967 Detroit Riots were among the bloodiest in American
history. The strife occurred during a period of Detroit’s history
when the once-affluent city was struggling economically, and
race relations nationwide were at an all-time low.

On July 6, 1957, Althea Gibson claimed the women’s singles tennis
title at Wimbledon and becomes the first African American to win a championship at London’s All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet
Club.

Gibson was born on August 25, 1927, in Silver, South Carolina,
and raised in the Harlem section of New York City. She began
playing tennis as a teenager and went on to win the national
Black women’s championship twice.

Althea Neale Gibson  (1927 – 2003)