On January 14, 1973, the Miami Dolphins achieve something no NFL team has repeated: a perfect season. Despite a gaffe by kicker Garo Yepremian that has earned its own place in history, the Dolphins held on to beat Washington, 14-7, in Super Bowl VII, capping a 17-0 season.
Head Coach Don Shula being interviewed after the game.
Douglas Wilder, the first African American to be elected governor of an American state, took office as Governor of Virginia on this day in 1990. Wilder 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.
On January 12, 1926, the two-man comedy series “Sam ‘n’ Henry” debuted on Chicago radio station WGN. Two years later, after changing its name to “Amos ‘n’ Andy,” the show became one of the most popular radio programs in American history.
Though the creators and the stars of the new radio program, Freeman Gosden and Charles Carrell, were both white, the characters they played were two Black men from the Deep South who moved to Chicago to seek their fortunes.
By that time, white actors performing in dark stage makeup— or “blackface”—had been a significant tradition in American theater for over 100 years.
Gosden and Carrell, both vaudeville performers, were doing a Chicago comedy act in blackface when an employee at the Chicago Tribune suggested they create a radio show.