A Brief History On February 25, 1870, history was made when Hiram Rhodes Revels, an African American man from Mississippi, was sworn in as a US Senator, the first African American member of the US Congress. Digging Deeper Despite being born in North Carolina in 1827, Revels was not born a slave, and later lived in Indiana and Ohio. The son of a Baptist minister, Revels was educated in Quaker seminaries and at Knox College, in Illinois, later being ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Revels served in the US Army during the American Civil War as a chaplain,…
Browsing: Religion
A Brief History On February 21, 1965, former Nation of Islam officer and African American nationalist, Malcom X, was gunned down prior to making a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. Digging Deeper Malcom had a falling out with the NOI and had received threats and warnings of imminent assassination. While one assailant blasted Malcom with a shotgun to the chest, 2 more gunmen fired multiple shots from semi-automatic handguns, hitting him with 21 bullets and 10 shotgun pellets. Malcom X was killed, and one of his murderers was beaten and captured by the audience, while the…
A Brief History On February 17, 1600, Italian polymath and philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the Papal States of Rome for the crime of heresy. Digging Deeper Bruno had the nerve to believe in the Heliocentric model of the solar system as taught by Polish astronomer Copernicus, and that the stars in the sky were really distant suns that had their own planets. Further, Bruno opined that unlike the Catholic belief, not only was our Sun not the center of the universe, the universe is infinite and therefore could have no center. As he was led…
A Brief History On February 4, 1555, English clergyman John Rogers became the first martyr burned at the stake under the rule of Queen Mary I of England, known better as Bloody Mary. Digging Deeper Rogers was a Protestant cleric in an England that had turned away from the Catholic Church under King Henry VIII, but when Henry’s daughter, Mary, a Catholic, assumed the throne in 1553, she did all she could to reinstall the supremacy of the Catholic Church and reverse the Reformation in England. During Mary’s 5 year reign, at least 280 religious dissenters were burned at the…
A Brief History On January 29, 2002, US President George W. Bush coined a new phrase in his State of the Union Address to Congress, labeling Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as the “Axis of Evil.” Digging Deeper Bush accused these states of being “regimes that sponsor terror,” a highly charged topic in the US after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Bush apparently liked the sound of his new designation and used the phrase often in his remaining years in office. The allusion in the phrase to “Axis” would harken back to the “Axis Powers” of World War…
