Today in Black History - May 17th

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In 1875, Oliver Lewis became the first jockey to win the Kentucky Derby, America's longest continuous sporting event. Lewis was born in 1856 in Fayette Country, Kentucky, to his parents Goodson and Eleanor Lewis. Lewis was born free, but there is little known about his parents or family.

Lewis was only 19 years old when he entered the first Kentucky Derby. The race was held at what was then the Louisville Jockey Club on May 17, 1875, but is now known as Churchill Downs. Ten thousand spectators watched this first race. Lewis rode a horse named Aristide, which was one of two colts entered by their owner, H. Price McGrath of Jessamine, Kentucky. The other horse, Chesapeake, was ridden by William Henry. Although the same owner entered both horses, Chesapeake was favored to win the $2,850 purse, and Lewis was told that his job was to lead most of the race to tire out the other horses. Out of the fifteen jockeys in the field, at this first Kentucky Derby, thirteen of them were African American. Aristide's trainer, Ansel Williamson, was also an African American.

Oliver Lewis followed his instructions and was pushing most of the field while trailing a horse named Volcano for most of the race. However, in the last stretch, Chesapeake was unexpectedly far back in the pack while Aristide and Volcano were running neck and neck for first place. Lewis and Aristide pulled away near the finish line and won the race by two lengths. With that victory Lewis became the first jockey to win the Kentucky Derby. Later that season, Lewis came in second in the Belmont Stakes in New York and won three more races at the Louisville Jockey Club, riding Aristide in all of them. He would never ride in the Kentucky Derby again, however, and would retire after that racing season for unknown reasons.

After retiring, Lewis worked for a short time as a day laborer, but then began providing handicapping tables and racing forms to bookies. He later became a bookie himself which was legal in Kentucky at that time.

Lewis married although his wife's name is unknown. The couple had six children including James who inherited his lucrative bookmaking business. Oliver Lewis died in Lexington, Kentucky in 1924 at the age of 68.



Sources:
Edward Hotaling, The Great Black Jockeys: The Lives and Times of the Men Who Dominated America’s First National Sport (California: Three Rivers Press, 1999);
http://biography.jrank.org/pages/2969/Lewis-Oliver.html

- See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/aah/lewis-oliver-1856-1924#sthash.yCD9uBTQ.dpuf

 

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1864 - birth of John William "Blind" Boone


Rachel Boone was a slave of the decendents of the Daniel Boone family who escaped to an army camp near Miami, MO. She gave birth to a son & moved to Warrensburg, MO. Her son became "Blind" Boone, famous classical pianist known all over the U.S., Canada & Mexico who also reportedly played in Europe. He became known as the "pioneer of ragtime" because he brought in ragtime music to the concert stage as an encore or when the audience became restless, saying "Let's put the cookies on the bottom shelf where everybody can reach them.". His motto was "Merit, not sympathy, wins."

 

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Brown v. Board of Education (1954)

Brown v. Board of Education (1954), now acknowledged as one of the greatest Supreme Court decisions of the 20th century, unanimously held that the racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which held that segregated public facilities were constitutional so long as the black and white facilities were equal to each other. However, by the mid-twentieth century, civil rights groups set up legal and political, challenges to racial segregation. In the early 1950s, NAACP lawyers brought class action lawsuits on behalf of black schoolchildren and their families in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware, seeking court orders to compel school districts to let black students attend white public schools.

One of these class actions, Brown v. Board of Education was filed against the Topeka, Kansas school board by representative-plaintiff Oliver Brown, parent of one of the children denied access to Topeka's white schools. Brown claimed that Topeka's racial segregation violated the Constitution's Equal Protection Clause because the city's black and white schools were not equal to each other and never could be. The federal district court dismissed his claim, ruling that the segregated public schools were "substantially" equal enough to be constitutional under the Plessy doctrine. Brown appealed to the Supreme Court, which consolidated and then reviewed all the school segregation actions together.Thurgood Marshall, who would in 1967 be appointed the first black justice of the Court, was chief counsel for the plaintiffs.

Thanks to the astute leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court spoke in a unanimous decision written by Warren himself. The decision held that racial segregation of children in public schools violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which states that "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The Court noted that Congress, when drafting the Fourteenth Amendment in the 1860s, did not expressly intend to require integration of public schools. On the other hand, that Amendment did not prohibit integration. In any case, the Court asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees equal education today. Public education in the 20th century, said the Court, had become an essential component of a citizen's public life, forming the basis of democratic citizenship, normal socialization, and professional training. In this context, any child denied a good education would be unlikely to succeed in life. Where a state, therefore, has undertaken to provide universal education, such education becomes a right that must be afforded equally to both blacks and whites.

Were the black and white schools "substantially" equal to each other, as the lower courts had found? After reviewing psychological studies showing black girls in segregated schools had low racial self-esteem, the Court concluded that separating children on the basis of race creates dangerous inferiority complexes that may adversely affect black children's ability to learn. The Court concluded that, even if the tangible facilities were equal between the black and white schools, racial segregation in schools is "inherently unequal" and is thus always unconstitutional. At least in the context of public schools, Plessy v. Ferguson was overruled. In the Brown II case a decided year later, the Court ordered the states to integrate their schools "with all deliberate speed."

Opposition to Brown I and II reached an apex in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), when the Court ruled that states were constitutionally required to implement the Supreme Court's integration orders. Widespread racial integration of the South was achieved by the late 1960s and 1970s. In the meantime, the equal protection ruling in Brown spilled over into other areas of the law and into the political arena as well. Scholars now point out that Brown v. Board was not the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, but there is no doubt that it constituted a watershed moment in the struggle for racial equality in America.

 

[Mello Mello]

1864 - birth of John William "Blind" Boone


Rachel Boone was a slave of the decendents of the Daniel Boone family who escaped to an army camp near Miami, MO. She gave birth to a son & moved to Warrensburg, MO. Her son became "Blind" Boone, famous classical pianist known all over the U.S., Canada & Mexico who also reportedly played in Europe. He became known as the "pioneer of ragtime" because he brought in ragtime music to the concert stage as an encore or when the audience became restless, saying "Let's put the cookies on the bottom shelf where everybody can reach them.". His motto was "Merit, not sympathy, wins."

I never knew that but I suspected a black person was behind ragtime. Whenever I hear ragtime you only see white people.