November 28

Ruth Alice Lucas (November 28, 1920 – March 23, 2013) was the first African American woman in the Air Force to be promoted to the rank of colonel.

Charles H. Alston (November 28, 1907 - April 27, 1977) was the first African American supervisor for the WPA's Federal Art Project, with his main work being the murals at Harlem Hospital. While there he met his wife, Dr. Myra Logan, who was an intern at the hospital. He held a BA from Columbia University and an MA from Columbia Teacher's College, and taught at the Harlem Community Art Center, Art Students League, Museum of Modern Art, and City College of New York. One of his early students in Harlem was Jacob Lawrence, and he was also a mentor to Romare Bearden who became his cousin after Alston's father died and his mother married Bearden's uncle, Harry Bearden, when Alston was five years old. He also founded the Harlem Artists Guild and Spiral, another black arts collective, and served on the National Council of Culture and the Arts. In 1990 his bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. became the first image of an African American displayed at the White House.

Detail of Charles Alston's Modern Medicine (oil on canvas) in Harlem Hospital, a mural commissioned in 1936 by the WPA. Alston's future wife, Myra Logan, was a medical intern at the hospital then and served as a model for the mural; she appears as a nurse holding a baby.

Birthdays

William H. Lewis -- (November 28, 1868 – January 1, 1949) was an African American pioneer in athletics, politics and law. He was the first African American college football player, the first in the sport to be selected as an All-American, the first to be appointed as an Assistant United States Attorney, the first to become a member of the American Bar Association, and the first to serve as United States Assistant Attorney General.

Colonel Ruth Alice Lucas (November 28, 1920 – March 23, 2013) graduated from Tuskegee Institute in 1942 and enlisted in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC), transferring to the newly formed U.S. Air Force in 1947. She received a master's degree in educational psychology from Columbia University in 1957 and moved to the Washington, D.C. area in the early 1960s, where she worked at the Pentagon creating, organizing, and implementing special literacy programs aimed to increase the education levels of service personnel. In 1968 she became the first African American woman in the Air Force to be promoted to the rank of colonel. After her retirement from the military she worked in outreach for the University of the District of Columbia.

Gert Schramm (November 28, 1928 -April 18, 2016) was a survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp, where he was the only black prisoner. He was the son of a German woman and an African American father and was arrested in violation of Nazi racial purity laws at the age of 15. After being the camp was liberated he worked as a mechanic and was on the prisoners' advisory board of the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation.

Berry Gordy Jr. (born November 28, 1929) is a songwriter, producer and founder of Motown Corporation. His gift for identifying musical talent made Motown a major national and then international success. He he signed such artists as The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Stevie Wonder, Martha & the Vandellas, and The Jackson 5. He produced Lady Sings the Blues, starring Diana Ross and her second movie Mahogany. He has written or co-written 240 songs for Motown’s music catalog.

American pacifist James Zwerg (born November 28, 1939) participated in a one-semester student exchange program in January 1961 between Wisconsin's Beliot College and Fisk University where he met John Lewis, then an organizer with SNCC. He participated in the Freedom Rides along with Lewis, and was severely beaten in Montgomery. He was unconscious for two days and pictures of him after the beating were widely published across the country, as was an interview that later became part of the "Eyes on the Prize" documentary, in which a battered Zwerg told the American public that the Freedom Rides would go on. "We will continue our journey, one way or another. We are prepared to die."

Events

On November 28, 1961, Ernie Davis won the Heisman Trophy, becoming the first African American winner. He was the first pick in the NFL draft by the Washington Redskins, but Redskins owner, George Preston Marshall, was a notorious racist and traded him to the Cleveland Browns. He and Jim Brown were expected to form the most dominant backfield in NFL history, but Davis was diagnosed with leukemia soon afterward and passed away in May of 1963.




Photo Gallery

Josephine Baker During The Rothschild Gala In Monaco City, Monaco On November 28, 1973. Credit: Daniel SIMON 

Legendary Top Model Jennifer Brice walks the runway at Le Grand Divertissement à Versailles aka “The Battle of Versailles” on November 28, 1973.

Backstage beauty from “Le 1973 Grand Divertissement à Versailles” Fashion Show, on 28 November 1973.

The legendary Herbie Hancock presents Smithsonian Magazine’s first annual American Ingenuity Award for performing arts to Esperanza Spalding. November 28, 2012. (Photo by Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images for Smithsonian Magazine)

The First Daughters at the Capital Area Food Bank in DC, Wednesday, November 28, 2013.

A demonstrator protesting the shooting death of Michael Brown holds a sign near the entrance to a local Walmart store on Black Friday, November 28, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri.

Publications

Ella Fitzgerald on the cover of Down Beat magazine, November 28, 1956. 

Carol J. Crawford is First Black Miss World - Jet Magazine November 28, 1963

Dreams and Nightmares: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and the Struggle for Black Equality in America (New Perspectives on the History of the South) by Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson. $10.35. 208 pages. Publisher: University Press of Florida (November 28, 2011). 

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November 21

On November 21, 1784, James Armistead was cited by French General Lafayette for his valuable service to the American forces in the Revolutionary War.

Charles Turner Torrey (November 21, 1813 - May 9, 1846) opposed William Lloyd Garrison's moderate abolitionist policies and in 1839 led a more activist group in breaking away from the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. They advocated a more political approached and formed the abolitionist Liberty Party. Torrey also worked to free slaves directly, and organized an Underground Railroad route from Washington D.C. to Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Albany. He used this to free over 400 people from the D.C. area, especially those who were the property of southern Congressmen and other politically prominent slaveholders. He was convicted of stealing slaves and sentenced to six years in prison, where he died of tuberculosis at the age of 36.

Laurence Clifton Jones (born November 21, 1884 – July 13, 1975) turned down a position at Tuskegee Institute after graduation from the University of Iowa in 1908 to teach at the Utica Institute in rural Hinds County, Mississippi. He was recruited by residents of nearby D'Lo to form a school in Rankin County where the illiteracy rate was 80%. He founded the Piney Woods Country Life School where he was president for over 60 years. The school was also home to the Mississippi School of the Blind for Negroes until it relocated to Jackson. The Piney Woods School is one of four remaining historically African American boarding schools in the United States.

Coleman Randolph Hawkins (November 21, 1904 – May 19, 1969), nicknamed Hawk and sometimes "Bean", was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. One of the first prominent jazz musicians on his instrument, as Joachim E. Berendt explained: "there were some tenor players before him, but the instrument was not an acknowledged jazz horn". While Hawkins is strongly associated with the swing music and big band era, he had a role in the development of bebop in the 1940s.

Samuel DuBois Cook (born November 21, 1928) entered Morehouse College along with his boyhood friend Martin Luther King at age 15 under an early admissions program the school had during World War II, While there he was student body president and founded the campus chapter of the NAACP. He earned a BA degree in history in 1948 and went on to earn an MA (1950) in political science and a Ph.D (1954) from Ohio State University. Dr. Cook taught political science at Southern, Atlanta University, and Duke where he was the first black faculty member at a PWI in the south. In 1975 he became president of Dillard, a post he held for 22 years.

Etta Zuber Falconer (November 21, 1933 – September 18, 2002) was one of the first African American women in the United States to obtain a Ph.D. in mathematics. She entered Fisk University at the age of 15 where she majored in mathematics and minored in chemistry, graduating summa cum laude in 1953. She received an MS in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1954 and a PhD in mathematics from Emory in 1969. She spent most of her career at Spelman College, retiring as chair of the mathematics department. She also started a computer science department at the college, and earned an MS in computer science from Emory University in 1982.

James DePreist (November 21, 1936 – February 8, 2013), was the Oregon Symphony's ground-breaking conductor (from 1980 to 2003), director emeritus of The Juilliard School's conducting program in New York (from 2004 - 2011) and most recently the permanent conductor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. He was the nephew of contralto Marian Anderson and studied composition with Vincent Persichetti at the Philadelphia Conservatory while earning a bachelor's degree at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a master's degree from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

Vernon Earl "Earl the Pearl" Monroe gained national recognition at Winston-Salem State University under Hall of Fame coach Clarence "Big House" Gaines, leading the school to a 1967 NCAA College Division Basketball Championship.and being named NCAA College Division player of the year. He played in the NBA for four years with the Baltimore Bullets before being traded to the New York Knicks where he played in the backcourt with Walt Frazier until his retirement in 1980.

Vincent W. Patton III (born November 21, 1954) became the first African American Master Chief Petty Officer of the U.S. Coast Guard in 1998. He earned an EdD from American University in 1984 and also holds degrees in counseling, social work, and communications. After retiring from the Coast Guard he earned a Master's Degree in theology and has taught at UC Berkeley and served as chaplain for the USO.





Events

On November 21, 1784, James Armistead was cited by French General Lafayette for his valuable service to the American forces in the Revolutionary War. Armistead, who was born into slavery 24 years earlier, had worked as a double agent for the Americans while supposedly employed as a servant of British General Lord Cornwallis. As a spy, he participated in the operation that surrounded Cornwallis and led to the British surrender.

On November 21, 1984, TransAfrica’s Randall Robinson, Washington, DC congressional delegate, Walter Fauntroy, National Council of Negro Women’s Dorothy Height, and U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner, Mary Frances Berry, among others, demonstrate and are arrested in a sit-in demonstration in front of the South African Embassy in Washington, DC on this date. They protested against apartheid, South Africa’s policy of racial discrimination

Photo Gallery

Ella Fitzgerald made her singing debut at 17 on November 21, 1934 at the Apollo Theater.

Michelle Obama introduces country music singers and songwriters Kris Kristofferson, Lyle Lovett and Darius Rucker during a student music event in the State Dining Room of the White House on November 21, 2011 in Washington D.C.

President Barack Obama hands out food for Thanksgiving at the Capitol Area Food Bank on November 21, 2012 in Washington, DC. Credits:  (Photo by Jim Lo Scalzo-Pool/Getty Images)

Publications

Era Bell Thompson and G Marshall Wilson Back From Being Detained in South Africa
 Jet Magazine, November 21, 1957

FBI Is Probing Mississippi Abduction of Jesse Harvey
 Jet Magazine, November 21, 1957

SOUL - November 21, 1977 - The Brothers Johnson

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