The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola begins armed struggle against Portugal.

Rosa Parks, who sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, is born in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Thurgood Marshall Academy for Learning & Social Change moves into the first new public school built in Harlem in 50 years.

Autherine Lucy enrolls as the first African American student at the University of Alabama.

Portraitist and painter Laura Wheeler Waring dies in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Percival Prattis, of Our World in New York City, becomes the first black news correspondent admitted to the House and Senate press galleries in Washington, D.C.

The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution ratified, grants voting rights regardless of race.

South Africa’s President F. W. de Klerk begins to dismantle apartheid by promising to free Nelson Mandela & legalizes African National Congress & 60 other political organizations.

Biologist Ernest E. .Just receives the Spingarn Medal for his pioneering research in fertilization and cell division.

Jefferson Long of Georgia is first black to make an official speech in House of Representatives (opposing leniency to former Confederates).