History: Rock pioneer Chuck Berry born
October 16, 1901: President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute and the most prominent African American of his time, to a meeting in the White House. When the meeting went long, the President asked Washington to stay for dinner, the first African American to do so. The President’s act drew harsh criticism from some Southerners.
October 16, 1973: Maynard Jackson won the election in Atlanta, becoming the first African-American mayor of a major Southern city. He was elected twice more, and the city’s motto became “A City Too Busy to Hate.”
October 17, 1859: News that Abolitionist John Brown had taken over the U.S. arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, spread to Baltimore and beyond. Brown had led a group of 21 other men, five black and 16 white, there the day before. They had hoped to set off a slave revolt with the weapons they had planned to seize. Virtually all his compatriots were killed or captured by Col. Robert E. Lee’s troops; Brown was wounded, arrested, and hanged for treason. President Abraham Lincoln called him a “misguided fanatic,” but abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass said Brown was “as deeply interested in our cause as though his own soul had been pierced with the iron of slavery.”
October 18, 1926: Chuck Berry, sometimes called “The Father of Rock & Roll,” was born in St. Louis. His songs, which included “Johnny B. Goode,” “Roll Over Beethoven!” and “Rock and Roll Music" inspired the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and countless other bands. In 1986, he became the first inductee into the Rock & Rock Hall of Fame, and in 2000, the Kennedy Center honored him. Before the Voyager departed earth for deep space, NASA officials included recordings of music from around the world, including Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and “Johnny B. Goode.”
October 18, 1945: Paul Robeson received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal after becoming the first African American to play the lead role in Shakespeare’s Othello on Broadway. The actor, singer and activist was a two-time All-American football player at Rutgers University and attended Columbia Law School. He was best known for his singing and acting work in the theater and in films like Showboat and King Solomon’s Mines. His politics led to his blacklisting in Hollywood in the 1950s, and he died in 1976.
October 19, 1960: Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested along with students, eventually numbering 280, after conducting mass sit-ins at Rich’s Department Store and other Atlanta stores. The others were freed, but the judge sentenced King to four months in prison. Legal efforts secured King’s release after eight days. A boycott of the store followed, and by the fall of 1961, Rich’s began to desegregate.
October 19, 1965: The House Un-American Activities Committee opened hearings in Washington on the Ku Klux Klan’s activities.
October 20, 1967: A U.S. District Court jury in Meridian, Mississippi, convicted seven, including Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers and Deputy Cecil Price, on federal conspiracy charges in connection with the 1964 abduction and killings of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. The rest of the 18 men walked free, including Edgar Ray Killen and Sheriff Lawrence Rainey.
October 21, 1917: Legendary trumpeter John Birks “Dizzy” Gillespie was born in Cheraw, South Carolina. One of the pioneers of “bebop” jazz, he is considered one of the greatest trumpeters to ever play. His trademark trumpet, which was bent upward, initially resulted from an accident. Happy with the new tone, he had a new “bent” trumpet made. Before he died in 1993 of pancreatic cancer, he received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, the Kennedy Center Honors Award and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers Duke Ellington Award for a half-century of achievement as a composer, performer and bandleader.
October 22, 1955: John Earl Reese was in a Mayflower, Texas, café when white men fired nine shots through the window, killing him and injuring his cousins. The men were attempting to terrorize African Americans into giving up plans for a new school. Perry Dean Ross and Joseph Reagan Simpson were both convicted of the crime, but never spent a day behind bars because the judge suspended their five-year sentences. A historical marker in town now honors Reese.
October 22, 1963: About 200,000 students boycotted Chicago schools to protest de facto segregation. It was the first of two boycotts to demand desegregation of public schools.
Contact Jerry Mitchell at (601) 961-7064 or jmitchell@gannett.com. Follow him onFacebook andTwitter.