On THIS date in Black History...

March 3

1820 - In an attempt to resolve the conflict between pro and antislavery forces, the Missouri Compromise becomes law. In the final law, Missouri joins the Union as a slave state while Maine joins as a free one.  The measure prohibits slavery to the north of the southern boundary of Missouri.

1821 - Thomas L. Jennings receives a patent for an invention to "dry scour" (dry clean) clothes. It is the earliest known patent granted to an African American.

1865 - Congress established the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, commonly known as the Freedman's Bureau, to provide health and education to newly freed slaves displaced by the Civil War.

1865 - Congress chartered Freedmen's Savings and Trust Bank with business confined to African Americans.

1869 - The University of South Carolina is opened to all races.  Two African Americans, B.A. Boseman and Francis L. Cardozo were elected to a seven-man board of trustees.

1896 - The South Carolina legislature passed a measure creating the Colored Normal Industrial, Agricultural and Mechanical College (later South Carolina State) in Orangeburg.

1931 - Cab Calloway recorded the classic "Minnie The Moocher," a song that would be forever linked to him.  The song combined scat-singing with nonsense syllables and lyrics of drug use, recounting how Minnie and her cocaine-using lover, Smokey Joe, went to Chinatown, where "he showed her how to kick the gong around" - slang for opium smoking.

1962 - Jacqueline Joyner (later Kersee) was born in East Saint Louis, Illinois. She became an Olympic champion, winning two  medals (silver in 1984 and gold in 1988) in the heptathlon and another gold medal in the long jump at the 1988 Games in Seoul, South Korea.

1967 - Grenada gains partial independence from Great Britain.

1988 - Juanita Kidd Stout becomes the first African American woman to serve on a state supreme court when she is sworn in as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

1991 - Motorist Rodney King was severely beaten by four Los Angeles police officers after a high-speed chase in a scene captured on home video by George Holliday. We know how this ended.

     

1998 - Larry Doby, the second African American to play major league baseball and the first African American to play in the American League (Cleveland Indians), was selected for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.