December 3
1982- Thomas “Hit Man” Hearns won the WBC Junior Middleweight title. He was the first Black boxer to win titles in five different weight classes.
December 4
1969- Ebony Magazine’s Moneta Sleet Jr. won a Pulitzer Prize for photography for his picture “Deep Sorrow”. Sleet captured the image of Coretta Scott King and her daughter at the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King.
December 5
1955- Historic bus boycott began in Montgomery, Alabama, at a mass meeting in the Holt Street Baptist Church. It all started when Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat to a White man, initiating the boycott that lasted over a year.
December 6
1997- Lee Brown became Houston’s first Black mayor.
December 7
1981- John Jacobs was named the president of the National Urban League.
December 8
1936- The NAACP wins the landmark case, Gibbs v. Board of Education, against the state of Maryland, ensuring that white and Black teachers are paid equally.
December 9
1971- Bill Pickett became the first African American elected to the National Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame.
