Celebrate the Day!: September 25

Remembering the Little Rock 9, on September 25, 1997. It was the date of the 40th anniversary of the court-ordered entrance of the students into Central High School. Here Carlotta Walls Lanier, Melba Pattillo Beals, Dr. Terrence Roberts, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Thelma Mothershed Wair, Ernest Green, Elizabeth Eckford, Minnijean Brown Trickey, Jefferson Thomas, and Daisy L. Bates were honored for their bravery and courage in the midst of a difficult situation.

William Craft (September 25, 1824 - January 29, 1900) and his wife, Ellen, escaped from slavery in Macon, Georgia, with the light-skinned Mrs. Craft posing as a planter and Mr. Craft as her servant. The arrived in Philadelphia on Christmas Day, 1848, and appeared with prominent abolitionist throughout the north. After passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 they fled to England where they continued to lecture on the anti-slavery cause and also wrote the memoir Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; Or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (available at Project Gutenberg). In 1868 they returned to Georgia, settling near Savannah where they founded founded the Woodville Co-operative Farm School in 1873.

Ellen Craft disguised as a man to escape slavery. She had her right
arm in a sling to hide the fact that she was unable to write.

Birthdays

Abriea (Abbie) Cook (September 25, 1884 – March 16, 1960)sang the role of "Clara" in the premier production of George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess in 1935, and was also the first to record "Summertime" from that musical. She was married to composer Will Marion Cook whom she met while appearing in his musical comedy Clorindy; or, the Origin of the Cakewalk. Porgy and Bess was her last stage appearance as a singer. She later appeared in dramatic roles, coached singers and actors in New York City, and taught at Tuskegee Institute.

J. Mayo "Ink" Williams (September 25, 1896 - January 2, 1980) was an early recording executive for "race records" with Paramount and Decca, earning the nickname "Ink" for his ability to sign many talented artists of the day. He also had his own labels, Black Patti briefly in the 1920's and the longer-lasting Ebony Records from 1946 until his death. He prayed football and ran track at Brown, then played in the NFL for 5 years (where he was one of three African Americans along with Paul Robeson), and coached football at Morehouse during the Depression.

James P. Comer (born September 25, 1934) is currently the Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center and has been since 1976. He is also an associate dean at the Yale School of Medicine. As one of the world's leading child psychiatrists, he is best known for his efforts to improve the scholastic performance of children from lower-income and minority backgrounds which led to the founding of the Comer School Development Program in 1968. He has also served as a consultant to the Children's Television Workshop (Sesame Workshop) and is a co-founder and past president of the Black Psychiatrists of America.

bell hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins, September 25, 1952) is an writer, educator, and activist focusing on issues of race, class, and gender. She has written over 30 books, including Ain't I a Woman, Teaching to Transgress, Killing Rage, and Happy to Be Nappy (for children). After spending the majority of her career in California (earning a PhD in literature from UC Santa Cruz), she is currently affiliated with The New School in NYC and Berea College in her native Kentucky.

Scottie Maurice Pippen (born September 25, 1965) played twelve seasons at small forward with the Chicago Bulls, one with the Houston Rockets and four with the Portland Trail Blazers, making the postseason sixteen straight times and winning six championships with the Bulls. He was a part of the 1992 U.S. Olympic "Dream Team" as well as playing on the 1996 Olympic team, and is the only player to have won an NBA title and Olympic gold medal in the same year two times. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2010.

Willard Carroll (Will) Smith Jr. (born September 25, 1968) began his career as MC of the hip-hop duo DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, with his childhood friend Jeffrey "DJ Jazzy Jeff" Townes, winning the Grammy Award for rap music (1988). He became known to a wider audience in 1990 when cast in the popular sitcom Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which ran for six seasons. His film career began in 1993 with Six Degrees of Separation and he has gone on to star in some of the highest-grossing films of all time. As of 2014, his films have grossed $6.6 billion at the global box office. For his performances as boxer Muhammad Ali in Ali (2001) and stockbroker Chris Gardner in The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), Smith received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor.

Events

On September 25, 1861, Union Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles authorized the employment of escaped "contraband" slaves on board combatant vessels of the United States of America. There had always been free African Americans in the U.S. Navy serving in various roles, but Welles' action was notable in that it authorized the use of escaped slaves. This order made it legal for escaped slaves to take up arms against their former masters in the Confederate service.

On September 25, 1891, two sharecroppers were killed during a strike by the Colored Farmers’ National Alliance in Lee County, Arkansas. Strikers retaliated by killing a plantation manager and burning down a cotton gin before fleeing to nearby Cat Island in the Mississippi River. By the time a posse led by the local sheriff finished suppressing the strike four days later, it had killed fifteen African Americans and imprisoned another six.

On September 25, 1924 Langston Hughes wrote a letter to his friend Alain Locke while stranded in Europe when his money and passport were stolen. He had no more paper but wanted to share a new poem he had written. "I, Too, Sing America" was written on the back of the letter. Hughes eventually found passage back to the United States as a member of a ship's crew. The poem was published the next year and is possibly his most well-known.

On September 25, 1957, the nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock's Central High School were able to attend classes for the first time after the arrival of 1200 troops from the U. S. Army 101st Airborne Division, shown here escorting them to class. The soldiers would stay until November, when National Guardsmen continued to maintain order for the rest of the school year.

On September 25, 1961 Herbert Lee was shot to death in the parking lot of the Liberty, Mississippi, cotton gin by State Assemblyman E. H. Hurst. Lee had been working with Bob Moses on voter registration in Amite County and was an NAACP member. A quickly-convened coroner's jury ruled that Hurst acted in self-defense against the much-smaller Lee and no charges were filed. It was later found that several black witnesses, fearing for their own lives, lied about Lee threatening Hurst with a tire iron and one, Louis Allen, was killed himself on January 31, 1942, after testifying to the FBI about the attack.

September 25, 1991 the 1942 movie "Blood of Jesus" was among the third group of 25 films added to the Library of Congress's National Film Registry, the first film written, produced, and performed by African Americans to beso honored. It was produced in Texas by Spencer Williams on a budget of $5,000 and for years was considered a lost film until prints were discovered in the mid-1980s in a warehouse in Tyler, Texas. Time magazine counted it among its “25 Most Important Films on Race.” Historian Thomas Cripps, in his book Black Film as Genre, praised it for providing “a brief anatomy of Southern Baptist folk theology by presenting Christian myth in literal terms. From its opening voiceover, the film became an advocate for the most enduring traditions of Afro-American family life on Southern ground.”

Photo Gallery

Mr. and Mrs. Joe Louis Out for a Stroll September 25, 1935

On September 25, 1965 Satchel Paige pitched three innings for the Kansas City A's
against the Boston Red Sox at the age of 59. A's owner Charlie O. Fenley
had him rest in a rocking chair in the bullpen between innings, attended by a nurse.

Front window of a SNCC field office in the South, New York Times Magazine, September 25, 1966

U.S. President Barack Obama collects his thoughts before his address at the UN General
Assembly on September 25, 2012 in New York City. By John Moore/Getty Images