Faith And Fame With AV Observing Black History Month
Black History Month is underway, with this year marking the 100th anniversary of the celebration. The month was set aside to reflect on both the history and teachings of African Americans whose contributions to society were sometimes left out of the history books. That was back in 1976, but the real celebration of Black History began even earlier than that. Educator Carter G. Woodson is the man credited with bringing Black History Month to prominence. During the 1920s, Woodson launched Negro History Week in February to promote the diversity of Black achievement in America. Woodson chose the month of February because it included the birthdays of civil rights activist and educator Frederick Douglass and President Abraham Lincoln who signed the Emancipation Proclamation to free Blacks from slavery.
Today, Black History Month is celebrated in schools and communities around the country with special emphasis on the contributions of Black America to society as a whole.
In 1870, Hiram Rhodes Revels became the first African American elected to the US Senate.
Hiram Rhodes Revels was born in North Carolina in 1827. During his early adulthood, Revels was imprisoned in Missouri for preaching to other people of African American descent. Despite his previous imprisonment, Revels continued his passion for preaching and became the first Black pastor of the Madison Street Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland.
During the Civil War, Revels raised Maryland’s first two Black regiments for the U.S. Army, and fought at the battle of Vicksburg in Mississippi. In 1870, the Mississippi state legislature elected him to fill a vacant Senate seat. He used this opportunity to continue fighting against Reconstruction-era racial discrimination.
