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 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 82 years old on
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 for Jobs
and Freedom.  

On August 21, 1950, officials of the United States Lawn
Tennis Association accepted Althea Gibson into their
annual championship at Forest Hills, New York, making
her the first African American player to compete in a U.S.
national tennis competition.

Althea Neale Gibson
(August 25, 1927 – September 28, 2003

Gibson survived a heart attack in 2003, but died on
September 28 that year from complications following
respiratory and bladder infections. Her body was
interred in the Rosedale Cemetery, Orange, New
Jersey, near her first husband, Will.

Statue of Gibson by Thomas Jay Warren in Newark, New
Jersey, near the courts (in background) on which she ran
clinics for young players in her later years.

On or about 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 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.

                             
CAMILLE
BOHANNON

Robert Redford at 10.

1962
    
   

Charles Robert Redford Jr. is a retired actor and filmmaker. He
has received numerous accolades such as an Academy Award,
a BAFTA Award, and two Golden Globe Awards, as well as the
Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1994, the Screen Actors Guild Life
Achievement Award in 1996, the Academy Honorary Award in
2002, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005, the Presidential
Medal of Freedom in 2016, and the Honorary César in 2019. He
was named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people
in the world in 2014 (below). He is 88 today.