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| Feb 1 1902: Playwright, poet, author Langston Hughes born. 1960: Four North Carolina A&T students stage first sit-in protest. |
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| Feb 2 1807: Congress bans foreign slave trade. 1892: Carter Williams patents canopy frame (awning). |
Feb 3 1867: Entomologist Charles Henry Turner born. 1956: Autherine Lucy enrolls as the first African American student at the University of Alabama. |
Feb 4 1913: Rosa Parks, civil rights pioneer who sparked 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, born. |
Feb 5 1884: Willis Johnson patents eggbeater. 1934: Hank Aaron, major league home-run champion, born. |
Feb 6 1867: Robert Tanner Jackson becomes first African American to receive a degree in dentistry. |
Feb 7 1883: Ragtime pianist and composer Hubie Blake born. |
Feb 8 1968: Three South Carolina State students killed during segregation protest in Orangeburg, South Carolina. |
| Feb 9 1964: Arthur Ashe Jr. becomes first African American on U.S. Davis Cup team. |
Feb 10 1989: Ronald H. Brown elected chair, Democratic National Committee. 1992: Alex Haley, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, dies. |
Feb 11 1990: Nelson Mandela of South Africa is released from prison after 27 years. |
Feb 12 LINCOLN'S BIRTHDAY 1909: NAACP founded in New York City. |
Feb 13 1970: Joseph L. Searles becomes first black member of New York Stock Exchange. |
Feb 14 VALENTINE'S DAY 1879: B.K. Bruce of Mississippi becomes first African American to preside over U.S. Senate. |
Feb 15 1915: Biologist Ernest Just received Spingarn Medal for egg fertilization. 1961: U.N. sessions disrupted by U.S. and African nationalists over assassination of Congo Premier Patrice Lumumba. |
| Feb 16 1874: Frederick Douglass elected president of Freedman's Bank and Trust. |
Feb 17 PRESIDENT'S DAY 1902: Marian Anderson, internationally acclaimed opera star, born. |
Feb 18 1931: Toni Morrison, winner of 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, born. |
Feb 19 1923: In Moore v. Dempsey decision, Supreme Court guarantees due process of law to blacks in state courts. |
Feb 20 1934: Four Saints in Three Acts, by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, premieres as the first black-performed opera on Broadway. |
Feb 21 1965: Malcolm X assassinated in New York. 1943: Adah B. Thoms, crusader for equal opportunity for blacks in nursing, dies. |
Feb 22 WASHINGTON'S BIRTHDAY 1989: Col. Frederick Gregory becomes first African American to command a space shuttle mission. |
| Feb 23 1868: W.E.B. DuBois, scholar, activist and author of The Souls of Black Folk, born. |
Feb 24 1922: Home of Frederick Douglass made a national shrine. |
Feb 25 1853: First black YMCA organized in Washington, D.C. |
Feb 26 1965: Civil rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson dies after being shot by state police in Marion, Alabama. |
Feb 27 1988: Debi Thomas becomes first black to win an Olympic medal in figure skating. 1890: Mabel K. Staupers, black nurses' advocate, born. |
Feb 28 1984: Michael Jackson wins eight Grammy Awards. |