In Montgomery, Alabama on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was
jailed for refusing to give up her seat on a public bus to a white
man, a violation of the city’s racial segregation laws.

The successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized by a young
Baptist minister named Martin Luther King Jr., followed Park’s
historic act of civil disobedience.

“The mother of the civil rights movement,” as Rosa Parks is
known, was born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1913.

She worked as a seamstress and in 1943 joined the Montgomery
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – April 4)

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks  (1913 –  2005)

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)       
      
                                                                                                                                      

On February 12, 1909, the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, 
a group that included African American leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois 
and Ida B. Wells-Barnett announced the formation of a new organization 
Called the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
it would have a profound effect on the struggle for civil rights and the
course of 20th Century American history. The conference that led to
the NAACP’s founding had been called in response to a race riot in
Illinois.

A silent march in New York to protest the police treatment of blacks during riots in East St. Louis in 1917. They marched down Fifth
Avenue on that summer Saturday without saying a word. 

MIKE GRACIA

(February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865)

Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer and politician. He served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in
April 1865. Lincoln led the nation through the Civil War, its bloodiest
war and its greatest moral, constitutional, and political crisis. He preserved the Union, abolished slavery, strengthened the government, 
and modernized the economy.

On this day in 1999, the U.S. Senate voted on whether to remove President Bill Clinton from office following an impeachment trial
which lasted five-weeks. Clinton was acquitted on both articles
of impeachment. On the first charge of perjury, 45 Democrats
and 10 Republicans voted “not guilty”and on the charge of
obstruction of justice the Senate was split 50-50.
.  

After the trial concluded, President Clinton said he was “profoundly sorry” for the burden his behavior imposed on Congress and the American people.

President Clinton heads back to the Oval Office after making his statement to the press.

MIKE GRACIA

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865)

1999