GM – FBF – Today’s American Champion was an American businessman, lawyer, politician, and civil rights leader from Nashville, Tennessee, who served as Register of the Treasury from 1911 to 1913.He is one of only five African Americans to have their signatures on American currency. He was one of four African-American politicians appointed to high position under President William Howard Taft, and they were known as his “Black Cabinet.” He was instrumental in founding civic institutions in Nashville to benefit the African-American business community and residents, including an emphasis on education.Today in our History – June 9, 1845 – James Carroll Napier (June 9, 1845 – April 21, 1940) was born.African American businessman and leader James C. Napier was born to free parents on June 9, 1845, in Nashville. His father, William Carroll, was a free hack driver and a sometime overseer. James attended the free blacks’ school on Line and High Street (now Sixth Avenue) with some sixty other black children until white vigilantes forced the school to close in 1856. He later attended school in Ohio after a December 1856 race riot ended black education in Nashville until the Union occupation in February 1862.Upon returning to the Union-held city of Nashville, Napier became involved in Republican Party politics. John Mercer Langston, an Ohio free black who became a powerful Republican politician and congressman, was a friend of Napier’s father. On December 30, 1864, Langston visited Nashville to speak to ten thousand black Union troops who had taken part in the recent and victorious battle of Nashville and to address the second Emancipation Day Celebration. He later invited Napier to attend the newly opened law school at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he was a founding dean. After receiving his law degree in 1872, Napier returned to practice in Nashville. In 1873 he married Dean Langston’s youngest daughter, Nettie. This wedding was the biggest social event in nineteenth-century black Washington.Between 1872 and 1913 Napier became Nashville’s most powerful and influential African American citizen. Between 1878 and 1886 he served on the Nashville City Council and was the first black to preside over the council. He was instrumental in the hiring of black teachers for the “colored” public schools during the 1870s, the hiring of black “detectives,” and the organization of the black fire-engine company during the 1880s. His greatest political accomplishment was his service as President William H. Taft’s Register of the United States Treasury from 1911 to 1913.Napier also was a successful businessman and a personal friend of Booker T. Washington, whose wife Margaret was a personal friend of Nettie Langston Napier and often spent two or more weeks each summer at the Napier’s Nolensville Road summer home.Washington visited the city several times a year until his death in 1915. Napier was elected president of the National Negro Business League, which Washington had founded. The league held several of its annual meetings in Nashville, and Napier organized a local chapter of the league in 1905. He was a founder and cashier (manager) of the One Cent (now Citizens) Savings Bank organized in 1904, and he gave the new bank temporary quarters rent-free in his Napier Court office building at 411 North Cherry Street (now Fourth Avenue). He helped organize the 1905 Negro streetcar strike and the black Union Transportation Company’s streetcar lines. He presided over the powerful Nashville Negro Board of Trade and was on the boards of Fisk and Howard universities. Upon his death on April 21, 1940, Napier was interred in Greenwood Cemetery near members of his family and members of the Langston family. Research more about this great American Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today’s American Champion was an American professional baseball pitcher who played in Negro league baseball and Major League Baseball (MLB). His career spanned five decades and culminated with his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.A right-handed pitcher, he first played for the semi-professional Mobile Tigers from 1924 to 1926. He began his professional baseball career in 1926 with the Chattanooga Black Lookouts of the Negro Southern League and became one of the most famous and successful players from the Negro leagues. On town tours across the United States, he would sometimes have his infielders sit down behind him and then routinely strike out the side.At age 42 in 1948, he made his major league debut for the Cleveland Indians. he was the first black pitcher to play in the American League and was the seventh black player to play in Major League Baseball. Also in 1948, he became the first player who had played in the Negro leagues to pitch in the World Series; the Indians won the Series that year. He played with the St. Louis Browns from 1951 to 1953, representing the team in the All-Star Game in 1952 and 1953. He played his last professional game on June 21, 1966, for the Peninsula Grays of the Carolina League. In 1971, he became the first electee of the Negro League Committee to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Today in our History – June 8, 1982 – Leroy Robert “Satchel” Paige (July 7, 1906 – June 8, 1982) dies.Leroy Robert Paige (better known as Satchel Paige) was an American baseball player who played for the Negro Leagues as well as MLB (Major League Baseball) teams. He was born on July 7, 1906 in Alabama, the 7th of 12 children in his family. His actual date of birth has been a point of contention but was officially determined from his birth certificate to be so. As a child, Paige used to work as a porter at the train station, earning a dime for carrying a bag. According to Paige, he used to tie a pole and rope around his shoulders to allow him to carry more luggage at once, due to which other kids would call him “satchel tree” thus earning him his nickname. According to another version of events, however, Paige got the nickname when he was caught trying to steal a bag.At the age of 13, Paige was caught trying to shoplift, which had been the third such incident to date. He was then sent to a state reform school, Industrial School for Negro Children in Mount Meigs, Alabama, where he stayed till the age of 18. During his 5 years there, his coach Edward Byrd taught him to pitch and polished his skills until he was released in December 1923. As African Americans were barred from the Major Leagues back then, Paige began his career with the Negro Southern League in 1926. He was drafted into the Chattanooga White Sox on a contract of $250 per month, where he had an impressive record. He was then traded to the Birmingham Black Barons of the major Negro National League (NNL). He played for several other leagues, both within the U.S. as well as in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Mexico.Satchel Paige also played a lot of exhibition matches and barnstorming tours for extra money, sometimes against stars from the major leagues such as Joe DiMaggio and Dizzy Dean, who commented on his exceptional capabilities as a pitcher. Unfortunately, however, there are very few official statistics about his career, especially because he switched teams frequently and travelled quite often. According to some of Paige’s own statistics, as well as those compiled by others, he has pitched in more than 2,500 games, won more than 2,000 and played for over 250 teams which vouch for his exceptional career.In 1948, Paige was inducted into Major League Baseball. Jackie Robinson had been drafted by the Minor Leagues earlier but this was still a huge accomplishment, as Paige was 42 years old at the time and the first black player in the Major Leagues. He joined the Cleveland Indians, and his first season, helped them to win the World Series. He stayed with the team for one more season before moving to the St. Louis Browns, with whom he spent three seasons. His MLB record is just as impressive as his Negro League record, and Paige continued to play well into his fifties, becoming the oldest player in Major League history.Satchel Paige was a true baseball legend and his life has been documented in his autobiographies. He died of a heart attack at the age of 75 on June 8, 1982. He is widely claimed to be one of the best pitchers in the history of the game by numerous sports writers, critics and fans alike and several books, movies and documentaries have been made about his life and accomplishments. Research more about this great American Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF- Today’s American Champion was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.Throughout her prolific writing career, she received many more honors. A lifelong resident of Chicago, she was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968, a position she held until her death 32 years later. She was also named the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for the 1985–86 term. In 1976, she became the first African-American woman inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Today in our History – June 7, 1917 – Gwendolyn Brooks is born.Although she was born on 7 June 1917 in Topeka, Kansas–the first child of David and Keziah Brooks–Gwendolyn Brooks is “a Chicagoan.” The family moved to Chicago shortly after her birth, and despite her extensive travels and periods in some of the major universities of the country, she has remained associated with the city’s South Side.What her strong family unit lacked in material wealth was made bearable by the wealth of human capital that resulted from warm interpersonal relationships. When she writes about families that–despite their daily adversities–are not dysfunctional, Gwendolyn Brooks writes from an intimate knowledge reinforced by her own life.Brooks attended Hyde Park High School, the leading white high school in the city, but transferred to the all-black Wendell Phillips, then to the integrated Englewood High School. In 1936 she graduated from Wilson Junior College. These four schools gave her a perspective on racial dynamics in the city that continues to influence her work.Her profound interest in poetry informed much of her early life. “Eventide,” her first poem, was published in American Childhood Magazine in 1930. A few years later she met James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes, who urged her to read modern poetry–especially the work of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and e. c. cummings–and who emphasized the need to write as much and as frequently as she possibly could. By 1934 Brooks had become an adjunct member of the staff of the Chicago Defender and had published almost one hundred of her poems in a weekly poetry column.In 1938 she married Henry Blakely and moved to a kitchenette apartment on Chicago’s South Side. Between the birth of her first child, Henry, Jr., in 1940 and the birth of Nora in 1951, she became associated with the group of writers involved in Harriet Monroe’s still-extant Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. From this group she received further encouragement, and by 1943 she had won the Midwestern Writers Conference Poetry Award.In 1945 her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (published by Harper and Row), brought her instant critical acclaim. She was selected one of Mademoiselle magazine’s “Ten Young Women of the Year,” she won her first Guggenheim Fellowship, and she became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her second book of poems, Annie Allen (1949), won Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize. In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. From that time to the present, she has seen the recipient of a number of awards, fellowships, and honorary degrees usually designated as Doctor of Humane Letters.President John Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry festival in 1962. In 1985 she was appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Just as receiving a Pulitzer Prize for poetry marked a milestone in her career, so also did her selection by the National Endowment for the Humanities as the 1994 Jefferson Lecturer, the highest award in the humanities given by the federal government.Her first teaching job was a poetry workshop at Columbia College (Chicago) in 1963. She went on to teach creative writing at a number of institutions including Northeastern Illinois University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Clay College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin.A turning point in her career came in 1967 when she attended the Fisk University Second Black Writers’ Conference and decided to become more involved in the Black Arts movement. She became one of the most visible articulators of “the black aesthetic.” Her “awakening” led to a shift away from a major publishing house to smaller black ones. While some critics found an angrier tone in her work, elements of protest had always been present in her writing and her awareness of social issues did not result in diatribes at the expense of her clear commitment to aesthetic principles. Consequently, becoming the leader of one phase of the Black Arts movement in Chicago did not drastically alter her poetry, but there were some subtle changes that become more noticeable when one examines her total canon to date.The ambiguity of her role as a black poet can be illustrated by her participation in two events in Chicago. In 1967 Brooks, who wrote the commemorative ode for the “Chicago Picasso,” attended the unveiling ceremony along with social and business dignitaries. The poem was well received even though such lines as “Art hurts. Art urges voyages . . .” made some uncomfortable. Less than two weeks later there was the dedication of the mural known as “The Wall of Respect” at 43rd and Langley streets, in the heart of the black neighborhood. The social and business elites of Chicago were not present, but for this event Gwendolyn Brooks wrote “The Wall.” In a measure these two poems illustrate the dichotomy of a divided city, but they also exemplify Brooks’s ability both to bridge those divisions and to utilize nonstrident protest.Gwendolyn Brooks has been a prolific writer. In addition to individual poems, essays, and reviews that have appeared in numerous publications, she has issued a number of books in rapid succession, including Maud Martha (1953), Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), and In the Mecca (1968). Her poetry moves from traditional forms including ballads, sonnets, variations of the Chaucerian and Spenserian stanzas as well as the rhythm of the blues to the most unrestricted free verse. In short, the popular forms of English poetry appear in her work; yet there is a strong sense of experimentation as she juxtaposes lyric, narrative, and dramatic poetic forms. In her lyrics there is an affirmation of life that rises above the stench of urban kitchenette buildings. In her narrative poetry the stories are simple but usually transcend the restrictions of place; in her dramatic poetry, the characters are often memorable not because of any heroism on their part but merely because they are trying to survive from day to day.Brooks’s poetry is marked by some unforgettable characters who are drawn from the underclass of the nation’s black neighborhoods. Like many urban writers, Brooks has recorded the impact of city life. But unlike the most committed naturalists, she does not hold the city completely responsible for what happens to people. The city is simply an existing force with which people must cope.While they are generally insignificant in the great urban universe, her characters gain importance–at least to themselves–in their tiny worlds, whether it be Annie Allen trying on a hat in a milliner’s shop or DeWitt Williams “on his way to Lincoln Cemetery” or Satin-Legs Smith trying to decide what outlandish outfit to wear on Sundays. Just as there is not a strong naturalistic sense of victimization, neither are there great plans for an unpromised future nor is there some great divine spirit that will rescue them. Brooks is content to describe a moment in the lives of very ordinary people whose only goal is to exist from day to day and perhaps have a nice funeral when they die. Sometimes these ordinary people seem to have a control that is out of keeping with their own insignificance.Although her poetic voice is objective, there is a strong sense that she–as an observer–is never far from her action. On one level, of course, Brooks is a protest poet; yet her protest evolves through suggestion rather than through a bludgeon. She sets forth the facts without embellishment or interpretation, but the simplicity of the facts makes it impossible for readers to come away unconvinced–despite whatever discomfort they may feel–whether she is writing about suburban ladies who go into the ghetto to give occasional aid or a black mother who has had an abortion.Trying to determine clear lines of influence from the work of earlier writers to later ones is always a risky business; however, knowing some identifiable poetic traditions can aid in understanding the work of Gwendolyn Brooks. On one level there is the English metaphysical tradition perhaps best exemplified by John Donne. From nineteenth-century American poetry one can detect elements of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Paul Laurence Dunbar. From twentieth-century American poetry there are many strains, most notably the compact style of T S. Eliot, the frequent use of the lower-case for titles in the manner of e. e. cummings, and the racial consciousness of the Harlem Renaissance, especially as found in the work of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes; but, of perhaps greater importance, she seems to be a direct descendant of the urban commitment and attitude of the “Chicago School’ of writing. For Brooks, setting goes beyond the Midwest with a focus on Chicago and concentrates on a small neglected comer of the city. Consequently, in the final analysis, she is not a carbon copy of any of the Chicago writers.She was appointed poet laureate of Illinois in 1968 and has been perhaps more active than many laureates. She has done much to bring poetry to the people through accessibility and public readings. In fact, she is one of our most visible American poets. Not only is she extremely active in the poetry workshop movement, but her classes and contests for young people are attempts to help inner-city children see “the poetry” in their lives. She has taught audiences that poetry is not some formal activity closed to all but the most perceptive.Rather, it is an art form within the reach and understanding of everybody–including the lowliest among us. Research more about this great American champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today’s American Champion is an American activist for children’s rights. She has been an advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional life. She is founder and president emerita of the Children’s Defense Fund. She influenced leaders such at Martin Luther King Jr. and Hillary Clinton.Today in our History – June 6, 1939- Children’s civil rights activist Marian Wright Edelman was born. She was the founder and president of the Children’s Defense Fund.Edelman attended Spelman College in Atlanta (B.A., 1960) and Yale University Law School (LL.B., 1963). After work registering African American voters in Mississippi, she moved to New York City as a staff attorney for the Legal Defense and Educational Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).In 1964 Edelman returned to the South and became the first African American woman to pass the bar in Mississippi. In private practice, she took on civil rights cases and fought for funding of one of the largest Head Start programs in the country.She served as director of the Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Jackson, Mississippi (1964–68), and then moved to Washington, D.C., to start the Washington Research Project of the Southern Center for Public Policy, a public interest law firm.From 1971 to 1973 Edelman was the director of Harvard University’s Center for Law and Education, and in 1973 she founded and became president of the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) in Washington, D.C. Under her leadership, the CDF became a highly effective organization in advocating children’s rights; in 2018 Edelman stepped down as president and became president emerita in the office of the founder. In 1996 she founded a similar organization, Stand for Children.Edelman’s publications included Children Out of School in America: A Report (1974), Portrait of Inequality: Black and White Children in America (1980), Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change (1987), The Measure of Our Success: A Letter to My Children and Yours (1992), and Guide My Feet: Meditations and Prayers on Loving and Working for Children (1995).Her honours include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (1985) and several humanitarian awards. In 2000 Edelman received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian award, and the Robert F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award for her writings.In 2002 she published I’m Your Child, God: Prayers for Children and Teenagers. That same year, Edelman received the National Mental Health Association Tipper Gore Remember the Children Volunteer Award. In 2005 she published I Can Make a Difference: A Treasury to Inspire Our Children, and in 2008 she published The Sea Is So Wide and My Boat Is So Small: Charting a Course for the Next Generation. Research more about this great American Champion and share it with your babies and make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today’s American Champion was an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher, and lawyer. She was the first black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada. Shadd Cary edited The Provincial Freeman, established in 1853. Published weekly in southern Ontario, it advocated equality, integration and self-education for black people in Canada and the United States.Shadd Cary’s family was involved in the Underground Railroad assisting those fleeing slavery. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, her family relocated to Canada. She returned to the United States during the American Civil War where she recruited soldiers for the Union. She taught, went to Howard University Law School, and continued advocacy for civil rights for African Americans and women for the rest of her life.Today in our History – June 5, 1893 – Mary Ann Shadd Cary (October 9, 1823 – June 5, 1893) died.Mary Ann Shadd was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on October 9, 1823, the eldest of 13 children to Abraham Doras Shadd (1801–1882) and Harriet Burton Parnell, who were free African-Americans. Abraham D. Shadd was a grandson of Hans Schad, alias John Shadd, a native of Hesse-Cassel who had entered the United States serving as a Hessian soldier with the British Army during the French and Indian War. Hans Schad was wounded and left in the care of two African-American women, mother and daughter, both named Elizabeth Jackson. The Hessian soldier and the daughter were married in January 1756 and their first son was born six months later.A. D. Shadd was a son of Jeremiah Shadd, John’s younger son, who was a Wilmington butcher. Abraham Shadd was trained as a shoemaker and had a shop in Wilmington and later in the nearby town of West Chester, Pennsylvania. In both places he was active as a conductor on the Underground Railroad and in other civil rights activities, being an active member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and, in 1833, named President of the National Convention for the Improvement of Free People of Colour in Philadelphia.Growing up, her family’s home frequently served as a refuge for fugitive slaves; however, when it became illegal to educate African-American children in the state of Delaware, the Shadd family moved to Pennsylvania, where Mary attended a Quaker Boarding School. In 1840, after being away at school, Mary Ann returned to East Chester and established a school for black children. She also later taught in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and New York City.Three years after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, A. D. Shadd moved his family to the United Canadas (Canada West), settling in North Buxton, Ontario. In 1858, he became one of the first black men to be elected to political office in Canada, when he was elected to the position of Counsellor of Raleigh Township, Ontario.In 1848, Frederick Douglass asked readers in his newspaper, The North Star, to offer their suggestions on what could be done to improve life for African-Americans. Mary Ann Shadd, then only 25 years of age, wrote to him to say, “We should do more and talk less.” She expressed her frustration with the many conventions that had been held to that date, such as those attended by her father, where speeches were made and resolutions passed about the evils of slavery and the need for justice for African-Americans. Yet little tangible improvement had resulted. Douglass published her letter in his paper.When the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 in the United States threatened to return free northern blacks and escaped slaves into bondage, Mary Ann Shadd and her brother Isaac Shadd moved to Canada, and settled in Windsor, Ontario, across the border from Detroit, where Mary Ann’s efforts to create free black settlements in Canada first began.While in Windsor, she founded a racially integrated school with the support of the American Missionary Association. Public education in Ontario was not open to black students at the time. Mary Ann offered daytime classes for children and youth, and evening classes for adults.An advocate for emigration, in 1852, Mary Ann Shadd published a pamphlet entitled A Plea for Emigration; or Notes of Canada West, in Its Moral, Social and Political Aspect: with Suggestions respecting Mexico, West Indies and Vancouver’s Island for the Information of Colored Emigrants. The pamphlet discussed the benefits of emigration, as well as the opportunities for blacks in the area.In 1853, Mary Ann Shadd founded an anti-slavery paper, called The Provincial Freeman. The paper’s slogan was “Devoted to antislavery, temperance and general literature.” It was published weekly, and the first issue was published in Toronto, Ontario, on March 24, 1853. It ran for four years, before financial challenges forced the paper to fold.Mary Ann was aware that her name would affect the number of people reading it, because of the gender expectations of the 19th century society. So, she persuaded Samuel Ringgold Ward, a black abolitionist who published several abolitionist newspapers, including Impartial Citizen, to help her publish it. She also enlisted the help of Rev. Alexander McArthur, a white clergyman. Their names were featured on the masthead, but Mary Ann was involved in all aspects of the paper.Isaac Shadd, Mary Ann’s brother, managed the daily business affairs of the newspaper. Isaac was a committed abolitionist, and would later host gatherings to plan the raid on Harper’s Ferry at his home.Mary Ann traveled widely in Canada and the United States to increase subscription to the paper, and to publicly solicit aid for runaway slaves. Because of the Fugitive Slave Act, these trips included significant risk to Mary Ann’s personal well-being; free blacks could be captured by bounty hunters seeking escaped slaves.As was typical in the black press, The Provincial Freeman played an important role by giving voice to the opinions of black Canadian anti-slavery activists.The impact of African-American newspapers from 1850–1860 was significant in the abolitionist movement. However, it was challenging to sustain publication. Publishers like Shadd undertook their work because of a commitment to education and advocacy, and used their newspapers as a means to influence opinion. They had to overcome financial, political and social challenges to keep their papers afloat.Carol B. Conaway writes in “Racial Uplift: The Nineteenth Century Thought of Black Newspaper Publisher Mary Ann Shadd Cary” that these newspapers shifted the focus from whites to blacks in an empowering way. She writes that whites read these newspapers to monitor the dissatisfaction level of the treatment of African Americans and to measure their tolerance for continued slavery in America.Black newspapers often modeled their newspapers on mainstream white publications. According to research conducted by William David Sloan in his various historical textbooks, the first newspapers were about four pages and had one blank page to provide a place for people to write their own information before passing it along to friends and relatives. He goes even farther to discuss how the newspapers during these early days were the center of information for society and culture.In 1854, Mary Ann Shadd changed the masthead to feature her own name, rather than McArthur and Ward. She also hired her sister to help edit the paper. There was intense criticism of the change, and Mary Ann was forced to resign the following year.Between 1855 and 1856, Shadd traveled in the United States as an anti-slavery speaker, advocating for full racial integration through education and self-reliance. In her speeches, she advised all blacks to insist on fair treatment and if all else failed, to take legal action.She sought to participate in the 1855 Philadelphia Colored Convention, but women had never been permitted to attend, and the assembly had to debate whether to let her sit as a delegate. Her advocacy of emigration made her a controversial figure and she was only admitted by a slim margin of 15 votes. According to Frederick Douglass’s Paper, although she gave a speech at the Convention advocating for emigration, she was so well-received that the delegates voted to give her ten more minutes to speak. However, her presence at the Convention was largely elided from the minutes, likely because she was a woman.In 1856, she married Thomas F. Cary, a Toronto barber who was also involved with the Provincial Freeman. She had a daughter named Sarah and a son named Linton.After her husband died in 1860, Shadd Cary and her children returned to the United States. During the Civil War, at the behest of the abolitionist Martin Delany, she served as a recruiting officer to enlist black volunteers for the Union Army in the state of Indiana.After the Civil War, she taught in black schools in Wilmington. She then returned to Washington, D.C., with her daughter, and taught for fifteen years in the public schools. She then attended Howard University School of Law and graduated at the age of 60 in 1883, becoming only the second black woman in the United States to earn a law degree.She wrote for the newspapers National Era and The People’s Advocate and in 1880, organized the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise.Shadd Cary joined the National Woman Suffrage Association, working alongside Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for women’s suffrage, testifying before the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, and becoming the first African-American woman to vote in a national election.She died in Washington, D.C., on June 5, 1893, from stomach cancer. She was interred at Columbian Harmony Cemetery.In the United States, Shadd Cary’s former residence in the U Street Corridor of Washington, DC, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976. In 1987 she was designated a Women’s History Month Honoree by the National Women’s History Project. In 1998, Shadd Cary was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.In Canada, she was designated a Person of National Historic Significance, with a plaque from the national Historic Sites and Monuments Board placed in Chatham, Ontario. There, Ontario provincial plaques also honor her and her newspaper, The Provincial Freeman. In Toronto, a Heritage Toronto plaque marks where she published the Provincial Freeman while living in the city from 1854 to 1855.Shadd Cary is featured in Canada’s citizenship test study guide, released in 2009.In 1985 Mary Shadd Public School was opened in Scarborough Ontario Canada, in the town of Malvern, and was later enlarged in 1992. The school motto “Free to be…the best of me” and school anthem “We’re on the right track…Mary Shadd” are tributes to Mary Ann Shadd, after whom the school was named.In 2018 the New York Times published a belated obituary for her.Shadd’s 197th birthday was observed with a Google Doodle on October 9, 2020, appearing across Canada, the United States, Latvia, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, and South Africa.The Mary Ann Shadd Cary Post Office, named that in 2021, is at 500 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1, in Wilmington, Delaware. Research more about this great American Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today’s American Champion was a United States Navy officer. He was the first African American in the U.S. Navy to serve aboard a fighting ship as an officer, the first to command a Navy ship, the first fleet commander, and the first to become a flag officer, retiring as a vice admiral.Today in our History – June 4, 1922 – Samuel L. Gravely is born.Gravely was born on June 4, 1922 in Richmond, Virginia, the oldest of five children of Mary George Gravely and postal worker Samuel L. Gravely Sr. He attended Virginia Union University but left before graduating to join the Naval Reserve in 1942. He had attempted to enlist in the U.S. Army in 1940 but was turned away due to a supposed heart murmur. After receiving basic training at Naval Station Great Lakes, Illinois, Gravely entered the V-12 Navy College Training Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. Upon graduating from UCLA, he completed Midshipmen’s School at Columbia University and was commissioned an ensign on November 14, 1944. His commission came only eight months after the “Golden Thirteen” became the first African-American officers in the U.S. Navy. Gravely began his seagoing career as the only black officer aboard the submarine chaser USS PC-1264, which was one of two U.S. Navy ships (the other being USS Mason (DE-529)) with a predominantly black enlisted crew. Before June 1, 1942, African Americans could only enlist in the Navy as messmen; PC-1264 and Mason were intended to test the ability of African Americans to perform general Navy service. For the remainder of World War II, PC-1264 conducted patrols and escort missions along the east coast of the U.S. and south to the Caribbean. In 1946, Gravely was released from active duty, remaining in the Naval Reserve. He married schoolteacher Alma Bernice Clark later that year; the couple went on to raise three children, Robert, David, and Tracey. He returned to his hometown of Richmond and re-enrolled at Virginia Union University, graduating in 1948 with a degree in history and then working as a railway postal clerk. Gravely was recalled to active duty in 1949 and worked as a recruiter in Washington, D.C. before holding both shore and sea assignments during the Korean War. During that time he served on the USS Iowa as a communications officer. He transferred from the Reserve to the regular Navy in 1955 and began to specialize in naval communications. Many of Gravely’s later career achievements represented “firsts” for African Americans. From 15 February 1961 to 21 October 1961, he served as the first African-American officer to command a U.S. Navy ship, the USS Theodore E. Chandler (DD-717) (Robert Smalls had briefly commanded a Navy ship in the American Civil War, although he was a civilian, not a Navy officer). He also commanded of the radar picket destroyer escort USS Falgout (DE-324) from January 1962 to June 1963. During the Vietnam War he commanded the destroyer USS Taussig (DD-746) as it performed plane guard duty and gunfire support off the coast of Vietnam in 1966, making him the first African American to lead a ship into combat. In 1967 he became the first African American to reach the rank of captain, and in 1971 the first to reach rear admiral. At the time of his promotion to rear admiral, he was in command of the guided missile frigate USS Jouett (DLG-29). Gravely commanded Cruiser-Destroyer Group 2. He was later named the Director of Naval Communications. From 1976 to 1978, he commanded the Third Fleet based in Hawaii, then transferred to Virginia to direct the Defense Communications Agency until his retirement in 1980. Gravely’s military decorations include the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star Medal, Meritorious Service Medal and Navy Commendation Medal. He was also awarded the World War II Victory Medal, the Korean Service Medal with two service stars, the United Nations Korea Medal, and the Republic of Korea Presidential Unit Citation. Following his military retirement, Gravely settled in rural Haymarket, Virginia, and worked as a consultant. After suffering a stroke, Gravely died at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, on October 22, 2004. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.In Richmond, the street on which Gravely grew up was renamed “Admiral Gravely Boulevard” in 1977. Samuel L. Gravely, Jr. Elementary School in Haymarket, Virginia was named after him in 2008. The destroyer USS Gravely (DDG-107), commissioned in 2010, was named in his honor. Vice Admiral Gravely is honored annually in San Pedro, California, aboard Battleship Iowa, at the Gravely Celebration Experience. Each year the organization honors trailblazers exemplifying VADM Gravely’s leadership and service with the Leadership & Service Award. An essay competition for U.S. History high school students that explores VADM Gravely’s motto: Education, Motivation, Perseverance is affiliated with the annual event. Research more about this great America Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today’s American Champion was was an American Roman Catholic priest and the second bishop of Portland, Maine. He was the first Black Catholic priest and bishop in the United States (though he passed for White).Born in Georgia to a mixed-race slave mother and Irish immigrant father, he was ordained in 1854 and consecrated in 1875; knowledge of his African ancestry was largely restricted to his mentors in the Church. (Augustus Tolton, a former slave who was publicly known to be African-American when ordained in 1886, is for that reason sometimes credited as the first African-American Catholic priest rather than Healy.)Healy was one of nine mixed-race siblings of the Catholic Healy family of Georgia who survived to adulthood and achieved many “firsts” in United States history; his brothers Patrick and Alexander also became Catholic priests.James is credited with greatly expanding the Catholic church in Maine at a time of increased Irish immigration, and he also served Abenaki people and many parishioners of French Canadian descent who were traditionally Catholic. He spoke both English and French.Today in our History – June 2, 1975- James A. Healy became the first Roman Catholic bishop and consecrated at a cathedral in Portland, Maine.Healy was one of 10 children born on a Georgia cotton plantation to an Irish immigrant and his common-law wife, a mixed-race slave. Because Healy and his siblings were legally considered illegitimate and slaves, they were barred from attending school in the state, and their parents were forced to send the boys to schools in the North. After encountering racial prejudice at their first school in Long Island, New York,Healy and his brothers completed their education in Massachusetts. In 1849 Healy was the valedictorian of the first graduating class of Holy Cross College. His brother Patrick, who also attended Holy Cross, became the first African American to earn a Ph.D.; he was later president of Georgetown University.After college Healy attended seminary in Montreal and in Paris and was ordained a priest in 1854 (see Researcher’s Note). He did mission work in Boston, where he opposed state anti-Catholic laws. He then served as chancellor of the diocese and, during the Civil War, as secretary to the bishop. He was made pastor of St. James Church in Boston in 1866 and was appointed bishop of Portland by Pope Pius IX in 1875.As bishop (1875–1900), he faced anti-Catholic sentiment but doubled the Catholic population of his diocese, which included Maine and New Hampshire, and increased the number of priests significantly; this growth led to the division of the diocese in two in 1885. During his reign, Healy established numerous churches, schools, convents, and welfare institutions. A tireless advocate for Civil War widows and orphans, he purchased part of an island near Portland to use as a vacation site for children.He was a leader of the American bishops who proposed three decrees that were approved in 1884 by the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, which was empowered to legislate for all ecclesiastical provinces in the country. In recognition of his support for Native Americans, Healy was made a consultant to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. On his 25th anniversary as bishop, he was named assistant to the papal throne, a position only one step below cardinal in the church hierarchy. Although an advocate for the less fortunate, Healy never took up specifically African American issues, and he even turned down invitations to speak to African American Catholic groups. Research more about this great American Vhampion and share it with you babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today’s American Champion is an American actor whose emotional depth, subtle humor, and versatility made him one of the most-respected performers of his generation. Over a career that included numerous memorable performances on stage, screen, and television, Freeman was one of the few African American actors who consistently received roles that were not specifically written for Black actors.Today in our History – June 1 – Morgan Freeman was born.As a young man, Freeman had aspirations of being a fighter pilot; however, a stint in the air force (1955–59) proved disappointing, and he turned his attention to acting. He made his Broadway debut in an all-Black production of Hello Dolly! in 1967. In the 1970s he continued to work on the stage and also appeared on the educational children’s television show The Electric Company as the character Easy Reader. Freeman’s performance in the film Brubaker (1980) and on the soap opera Another World (1982–84), along with several enthusiastic reviews for his theatrical work in the early 1980s, led to more challenging film roles.His portrayal of a dangerous hustler in Street Smart (1987) earned Freeman his first Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor. He was later nominated for a best-actor Oscar for his work in Driving Miss Daisy (1989), in which he re-created the role of Hoke after first performing it onstage. He evinced a disciplinarian principal in Lean on Me (1989), a hard-hearted Civil War soldier in Glory (1989), and an aging gunslinger in Unforgiven (1992). He made his directorial debut with the antiapartheid film Bopha! (1993).A third Oscar nomination came for his soulful turn as a convict in The Shawshank Redemption (1994). Reserach more about this great American Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today’s American Champion event was The Tulsa race massacre (known alternatively as the Tulsa race riot, the Greenwood Massacre, the Black Wall Street Massacre, the Tulsa pogrom, or the Tulsa Massacre) took place on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents, many of them deputized and given weapons by city officials, attacked black residents and businesses of the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It has been called “the single worst incident of racial violence in American history.” The attack, carried out on the ground and from private aircraft, destroyed more than 35 square blocks of the district—at that time the wealthiest black community in the United States, known as “Black Wall Street.”More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 black residents were interned in large facilities, many of them for several days. The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead. A 2001 state commission examination of events was able to confirm 39 dead, 26 black and 13 white, based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates and other records. The commission gave several estimates ranging from 75 to 300 dead.The massacre began during the Memorial Day weekend after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black shoeshiner, was accused of assaulting Sarah Page, the 17-year-old white elevator operator of the nearby Drexel Building. He was taken into custody. After the arrest, rumors spread through the city that Rowland was to be lynched. Upon hearing reports that a mob of hundreds of white men had gathered around the jail where Rowland was being kept, a group of 75 black men, some of whom were armed, arrived at the jail to ensure that Rowland would not be lynched. The sheriff persuaded the group to leave the jail, assuring them that he had the situation under control. As the group was leaving the premises, complying with the sheriff’s request, a member of the mob of white men allegedly attempted to disarm one of the black men. A shot was fired, and then according to the reports of the sheriff, “all hell broke loose.” At the end of the firefight, 12 people were killed: 10 white and 2 black. As news of these deaths spread throughout the city, mob violence exploded. White rioters rampaged through the black neighborhood that night and morning killing men and burning and looting stores and homes. Around noon on June 1, the Oklahoma National Guard imposed martial law, effectively ending the massacre.About 10,000 black people were left homeless, and property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property (equivalent to $32.25 million in 2019). Many survivors left Tulsa, while black and white residents who stayed in the city kept silent about the terror, violence, and resulting losses for decades. The massacre was largely omitted from local, state, and national histories.In 1996, 75 years after the massacre, a bipartisan group in the state legislature authorized formation of the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. The commission’s final report, published in 2001, states that the city had conspired with the mob of white citizens against black citizens; it recommended a program of reparations to survivors and their descendants. The state passed legislation to establish scholarships for descendants of survivors, encourage economic development of Greenwood, and develop a memorial park to the massacre victims in Tulsa. The park was dedicated in 2010. In 2020, the massacre became a part of the Oklahoma school curriculum. The last male survivor of the Tulsa race massacre, R&B and jazz saxophonist Hal Singer, died on August 18, 2020, at age 100.Today in our History May 31, 1921 – The Tulsa, OK race riots.On May 30, 1921, Dick Rowland, a young African American shoe shiner, was accused of assaulting a white elevator operator named Sarah Page in the elevator of a building in downtown Tulsa. The next day, the Tulsa Tribune printed a story saying that Rowland had tried to rape Page, with an accompanying editorial stating that a lynching was planned for that night. That evening mobs of both African Americans and whites descended on the courthouse where Rowland was being held. When a confrontation between an armed African American man, there to protect Rowland, and a white protestor resulted in the death of the latter, the white mob was incensed, and the Tulsa massacre was thus ignited.Over the next two days, mobs of white people looted and set fire to African American businesses and homes throughout the city. Many of the mob members were recently returned World War I veterans trained in the use of firearms and are said to have shot African Americans on sight. Some survivors even claimed that people in airplanes dropped incendiary bombs.When the massacre ended on June 1, the official death toll was recorded at 10 whites and 26 African Americans, though many experts now believe at least 300 people were killed. Shortly after the massacre there was a brief official inquiry, but documents related to the massacre disappeared soon afterward. The event never received widespread attention and was long noticeably absent from the history books used to teach Oklahoma schoolchildren.In 1997 a Tulsa Race Riot Commission was formed by the state of Oklahoma to investigate the massacre and formally document the incident. Members of the commission gathered accounts of survivors who were still alive, documents from individuals who witnessed the massacre but had since died, and other historical evidence. Scholars used the accounts of witnesses and ground-piercing radar to locate a potential mass grave just outside Tulsa’s Oaklawn Cemetery, suggesting the death toll may be much higher than the original records indicate. In its preliminary recommendations, the commission suggested that the state of Oklahoma pay $33 million in restitution, some of it to the 121 surviving victims who had been located. However, no legislative action was ever taken on the recommendation, and the commission had no power to force legislation. In April 2002 a private religious charity, the Tulsa Metropolitan Ministry, paid a total of $28,000 to the survivors, a little more than $200 each, using funds raised from private donations. Research more about this great American Tragedy and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!

GM – FBF – Today’s American Champion was one of three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) field/social workers killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The others were Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City.Today in our History – May 30, 1943 – James Earl Chaney (May 30, 1943 – June 21, 1964) was born.James Chaney was born the eldest son of Fannie Lee and Ben Chaney, Sr. His brother Ben was nine years younger, born in 1952. He also had three sisters, Barbara, Janice, and Julia. His parents separated for a time when James was young. James attended Catholic school for the first nine grades, and was a member of St Joseph Catholic Church. At the age of 15 as a high school student, he and some of his classmates began wearing paper badges reading “NAACP”, to mark their support for the national civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, founded in 1910. They were suspended for a week from the segregated high school, because the principal feared the reaction of the all-white school board. After high school, Chaney started as a plasterer’s apprentice in a trade union. In 1962, Chaney participated in a Freedom Ride from Tennessee to Greenville, Mississippi, and in another from Greenville to Meridian. He and his younger brother participated in other non-violent demonstrations, as well. James Chaney started volunteering in late 1963, and joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Meridian. He organized voter education classes, introduced CORE workers to local church leaders, and helped CORE workers get around the counties.In 1964, he met with leaders of the Mt. Nebo Baptist Church to gain their support for letting Michael Schwerner, CORE’s local leader, come to address the church members, to encourage them to use the church for voter education and registration. Chaney also acted as a liaison with other CORE members. In June 1964, Chaney and fellow civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were killed near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi.They were investigating the burning of Mt. Zion Methodist Church, which had been a site for a CORE Freedom School. In the wake of Schwerner and Chaney’s voter registration rallies, parishioners had been beaten by whites. They accused the sheriff’s deputy, Cecil Price, of stopping their caravan and forcing the deacons to kneel in the headlights of their own cars, while white men beat them with rifle butts. The same whites who beat them were also identified as having burned the church.Price arrested Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner for an alleged traffic violation and took them to the Neshoba County jail. They were released that evening, without being allowed to telephone anyone. On the way back to Meridian, they were stopped by patrol lights and two carloads of Ku Kux Klan members on Highway 19, then taken in Price’s car to another remote rural road. The men approached then shot and killed Schwerner, then Goodman, both with one shot in the heart and finally Chaney with three shots, after severely beating him. They buried the young men in an earthen dam nearby.The men’s bodies remained undiscovered for 44 days. The FBI was brought into the case by John Doar, the Department of Justice representative in Mississippi monitoring the situation during Freedom Summer. The missing civil rights workers became a major national story, especially coming on top of other events as civil rights workers were active across Mississippi in a voter registration drive.Schwerner’s widow Rita, who also worked for CORE in Meridian, expressed indignation that the press had ignored previous murders and disappearances of blacks in the area, but had highlighted this case because two white men from New York had gone missing. She said she believed that if only Chaney were missing, the case would not have received nearly as much attention. After the funeral of their older son, the Chaneys left Mississippi because of death threats. Helped by the Goodman and Schwerner families, and other supporters, they moved to New York City, where Chaney’s younger brother Ben attended a private, majority-white high school.In 1969, Ben joined the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. In 1970, he went to Florida with two friends to buy guns; the two friends killed three white men in South Carolina and Florida, and Chaney was also convicted of murder in Florida. Chaney served 13 years and, after gaining parole, founded the James Earl Chaney Foundation in his brother’s honor. Since 1985, he has worked “as a legal clerk for the former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, the lawyer who secured his parole”.In 1967, the US government went to trial, charging ten men with conspiracy to deprive the three murdered men of their civil rights under the Enforcement Act of 1870, the only federal law then applying to the case. The jury convicted seven men, including Deputy Sheriff Price, and three were acquitted, including Edgar Ray Killen, the former Ku Klux Klan organizer who had planned and directed the murders.Over the years, activists had called for the state to prosecute the murderers. The journalist Jerry Mitchell, an award-winning investigative reporter for the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, had discovered new evidence and written extensively about the case for six years. Mitchell had earned renown for helping secure convictions in several other high-profile Civil Rights Era murder cases, including the assassination of Medgar Evers, the Birmingham church bombing, and the murder of Vernon Dahmer. He developed new evidence about the civil rights murders, found new witnesses, and pressured the State to prosecute. It began an investigation in the early years of the 2000s.In 2004, Barry Bradford, an Illinois high school teacher, and his three students, Allison Nichols, Sarah Siegel, and Brittany Saltiel, joined Mitchell’s efforts in a special project. They conducted additional research and created a documentary about their work. Their documentary, produced for the National History Day contest, presented important new evidence and compelling reasons for reopening the case. They obtained a taped interview with Edgar Ray Killen, who had been acquitted in the first trial. He had been an outspoken white supremacist nicknamed the “Preacher”. The interview helped convince the State to reopen an investigation into the murders.In 2005, the state charged Killen in the murders of the three activists; he was the only one of six living suspects to be charged.When the trial opened on January 7, 2005, Killen pleaded “Not guilty”. Evidence was presented that he had supervised the murders. Not sure that Killen intended in advance for the activists to be killed by the Klan, the jury found him guilty of three counts of manslaughter on June 20, 2005, and he was sentenced to 60 years in prison—20 years for each count, to be served consecutively.Believing there are other men involved in his brother’s death who should be charged as accomplices to murder, as Killen was, Ben Chaney has said: “I’m not as sad as I was. But I’m still angry”.In 1998, Ben Chaney established the James Earl Chaney Foundation in his older brother’s honor, to promote the work of civil rights and social justice. Chaney, along with Goodman and Schwerner, received a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2014. Research more about this tragic event and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!