Joe Louis defeated James J. Braddock for the heavyweight boxing championship.

Richard Nixon signed a bill extending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to 1975.

Joseph Haynes Rainey, the first African-American representative in the US House of Representatives, was born.

Marcus Garvey is sentenced to five year in prison on political charges.

By Nura Sediqe
President Obama’s words in his June 4 address in Cairo, Egypt have brought a refreshing change in the rhetoric that is commonly utilized when discussing women and Islam. They were only a few simple lines in a long and extensive speech addressing a variety of pressing policy issues, but for Muslim women like myself, there was a pause….while we were all thinking, “Did he really just say that?”

By Eisa Ulen
Yesterday, as I walked with my husband and son to the park, I heard a sister from across the busy Brooklyn street. “Come on!” she yelled and flipped her ponytail. “Sh**!” Two things I knew before even looking her way: 1) This sister was a sister. 2) She was cursing her own child. I looked her way, and in one glance confirmed both assumptions were correct.

By Pamela Newkirk
No name is too big for the theater that in 1934 abolished its white-only policy and made way for 16-year-old Ella Fitzgerald, so it was fitting at a June 8 fundraiser that Bill Cosby, Quincy Jones, Prince, Mariah Carey, Jamie Foxx, the O’Jays and Patti LaBelle graced the stage that had launched the careers of Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Stevie Wonder, James Brown and Michael Jackson.

By Lee A. Daniels
The lives of John Hope Franklin, long acclaimed as one of America’s greatest historians, and his wife and most important supporter, Aurelia, were celebrated June 11 in a ceremony at Duke University that seemed to match their character: elegant but unpretentious, spare of words but full of substantive implication, buoyed by humanizing humor, and simultaneously majestic and intimate.

By The Editors
On June 11th, 2009, the California Supreme Court decided not to review a case challenging the student assignment plan in Berkeley, California, which means that the California Appellate Court’s March 17, 2009 decision upholding the plan stands.

By Chinyere Osuala
Overcoming Discrimination, a documentary produced by 11th and 12th graders, explored the topics of racism and heterosexism both in the media and among their peers.