Good morning, POU Family. This week’s threads will highlight little known facts about Black history. At POU we celebrate black history 365 days a year.
Fact 1: Allensworth is the first all-Black Californian township, founded and financed by African Americans. Created by Lieutenant Colonel Allen Allensworth in 1908, they built the town intending to establish a self-sufficient city where African Americans could live their lives free of racial prejudice.
Fact 2: Louis Armstrong learned how to play the cornet while living at the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys.
Fact 3: After a long career as an actress and singer, Pearl Bailey earned a bachelor’s degree in theology from Georgetown University in 1985.
Fact 4: Before he was a renowned artist, Romare Bearden was also a talented baseball player. The Philadelphia Athletics recruited him on the pretext that he would pass as white. He turned down the offer, instead choosing to work on his art.
Fact 5: Record sales from musician and singer Nat King Cole contributed so greatly to Capitol Records’ success during the 1950s that its headquarters became known as “the house that Nat built.”
Fact 6: Shortly before his mysterious disappearance in 1934, Wallace D. Fard founded the Nation of Islam.
Fact 7: The father of renowned scribe Langston Hughes discouraged his son from writing, wanting him to take up a more “practical” vocation.
Fact 8: In 1967, chemist and scholar Robert H. Lawrence Jr. became the first Black man to be trained as an astronaut. Sadly, Lawrence died in a jet crash during flight training and never made it into space.
Fact 9: George Monroe and William Robinson are thought to be two of the first African Americans to work as Pony Express riders.
Fact 10: A serious student, Condoleezza Rice entered the University of Denver at 15 and earned her Ph.D. by age 26.
**All information obtained from Biography.com**