CARLATA BRADLEY

Carol Elizabeth Moseley Braun (Moseley-Braun)

Lawrence Douglas Wilder will be 89 on January 17.           

Douglas Wilder, the first African American to be elected
governor of an American state, took office as Governor
of Virginia on January 13, 1990.He broke a number of
color barriers in Virginia politics and remains an enduring
and controversial figure in the state’s political scene.

Born in 1931 in Church Hill, a poor and segregated
neighborhood of Richmond, Wilder is the grandson of
slaves and is named for Frederick Douglass. He grew
up in the Jim Crow era, graduating from Richmond’s
Virginia Union University in 1951. Wilder fought in the
Korean War, earning the Bronze Star, before studying
law at Howard University and returning to Richmond to
practice.

Wilder entered politics by way of a special election to the
State Senate in 1969, becoming the state’s first African
American state senator since Reconstruction.

  
Under federal troop escort, the Little Rock Nine were escorted back
into Central High School for their first full day of classes. 
 

Under escort from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, nine black
students entered an all-white High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Three
weeks earlier, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had surrounded the
school with National Guard troops to prevent its federal court-ordered
racial integration. After a tense standoff, President Dwight Eisenhower
federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 army troops
to Little Rock to enforce the court order.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivering a special broadcast on
the Little Rock situation.

CARLATA BRADLEY

On this day in 1972, the last U.S. combat troops depart Vietnam.