Black History Month and Some Unforgettable Milestones

By helping more than 40,000 to 100,000 slaves obtain freedom and being lead by Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad gained real momentum in 1831.

Lending a sense of urgency to the Niagara Movement and its followers, the NAACP was founded in 1909.

A Jamaican born male, Marcus Garvey, brought his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNA) to the United States in 1916.

Coast to coast, the Harlem Renaissance was were the great migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North sparked an African-American cultural renaissance that took its name from the New York City neighborhood of Harlem but became a widespread movement in cities in 1920.

Keen on winning the war in 1941, more than 3 million blacks registered for service during WWII, with about 500,000 battling a war for America.

Having Jackie Robinson, a sharecropper's son from Georgia, join the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League in 1945, after serving in the U.S. Army, where he earned an honorable discharge after facing a court-martial for refusing to move to the back of a segregated bus in 1947 was history in the making.

Infamous Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama and was arrested for violating the city's racial segregation ordinances, which mandated that blacks sit in the back of public buses and give up their seats for white riders if the front seats in 1955.

Sadly, 14-year-old Emmett Till from Chicago, who allegedly whistled and flirted with a white woman in Mississippi and then, three days later, was killed by two white men, who threw his in the Tallahatchie River in 1955.

Taking hatred to a new level, four, young African- American girls were killed when white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church during Sunday services in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963.

On a day considered to be the largest demonstration in history of the nation's capital, the March on Washington, had about 250,000 people, black and white, showing the most significant display of the civil rights movement's growing strength in 1963.

Remember, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law using 75 pens, where he presented one of them to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who counted it among his most prized possessions in 1964.

Yearning to make a statement during a speaking engagement in Harlem, three members of the NOI rushed the stage and shot Malcolm X at least15 times at close range in 1965.

Moving a step closer to freedom, the Voting Rights Act was one of the most expansive pieces of civil rights legislation in American history, which reduced the disparity between black and white voters in the U.S in 1965.

On another subject, when high school sweethearts Mildred (half black, half white) and Richard (white) Loving returned to their hometown, Virginia, unaware this state was one of 16 in the U.S, with laws prohibiting interracial marriage, they faced non-stop harassment from their fellow man. The Court evidently ruled unanimously that long-standing state laws against miscegenation, the last segregation laws on the books, were in violation of the Constitution in 1967.

Noteworthy, the Fair Housing Act marked the last great legislative achievement of the civil rights era in 1968.

The balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee made history when civil rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed, as he tried to support a sanitation workers' strike in 1968.

Hence, Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York became a national symbol of both movements as the first major party African-American candidate and the first female candidate for president of the United States, where Shirley Chisholm run for President in 1972.

YES WE CAN...

Yes, the US Supreme Court ruled on the Bakke decision and on affirmative action in 1978.

Enter, Jesse Jackson, who ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 1984.

Sealing her fate in history, Oprah Winfrey launched her own nationally syndicated talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show in 1986.

When a jury of 11 whites and one Hispanic found the officers not guilty of beating Rodney King in 1991, rage over the verdict sparked four days of riots, beginning in the mostly black South Central neighborhood. In the end, about 55 people were dead, more than 2,300 injured, and more than 1,000 buildings were burned in 1992.

Entering into Washington, D.C. for the Million Man March, black mean gathered together for one of the largest demonstrations of its kind in the capital's history. This march was organized by Minister Louis Farrakhan in 1995.

Colin Powell was appointed by George W. Busch as secretary of state and was the first African-American to serve as America's top diplomat in 2001.

And the Oscar goes to...Halle Berry (Monster's Ball), took home the Oscar in the Best Actress category (the first black actress to do so), while Denzel Washington (a winner in the Best Supporting Actor category for 1989's Civil War drama Glory, became the first black actor since Poitier to win an Oscar for Best Actor (Training Day) in 2002.

Nationwide wide and aboard, millions of people flocked to the TV and to Washington, D.C. to see former Chicago Senator, Barrack Obama, become the nation's 44^th President of the United States in 2009.