Black History Month is celebrated every February to honor the achievements of African Americans who have shaped American history. Historian Carter G. Woodson hoped to raise awareness of African American's contributions to civilization by establishing Negro History Week. The event was first celebrated during a week in February 1926 that included both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass' birthdays. The week was later expanded to a month in 1976 during the United States bicentennial.
PHOTO: On March 20, 1969, Black hospital workers at the Medical College of South Carolina in Charleston went on strike to protest the firing of twelve employees and to call for higher wages and union recognition.
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Enslaved Africans sang songs as they worked to help keep the pace of the task they were doing. A leader called out a verse or yell and others responded. This is the call-and-response singing tradition...
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European slave traders brought Africans to the New World on ships as early as the 1400s. These voyages across the Atlantic Ocean are called the Middle Passage. It was a terrible experience for the...
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Spirituals developed at the same time as work songs on the plantations. Although they were religious songs with a Christian message, spirituals were also heartfelt expressions of the slave experience...
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Smith singing at the 1988 Harborwalk Festival in Georgetown, SC. Aired on "Midday 5" program with WCSC-TV in Charleston, South Carolina
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Two men, Larry Doby and Bernard Baruch, are honored together in the form of bronze sculptures in downtown Camden, South Carolina. Both were Camden natives who went on to leave an indelible mark on the...
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Jazz king John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie was born in Cheraw in 1917. Dizzy was a founder of modern jazz, an innovative trumpeter known for his bent horn and bulging cheeks. The South Carolina Jazz...
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Andrew Young, politician, diplomat, activist, and friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., talks about the death of the American icon.
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The conclusion to the program. Dean Livingston, the former editor of the Orangeburg Times & Democrat, discusses the difficulty that he and Kent Krell of the Associated Press had in putting the story...
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A look at the events of Wednesday Feb. 7 and Thursday, Feb. 8, 1968 during the Tragedy at Orangeburg. On Wednesday morning, students sought to obtain a permit to march in protest. The City...
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A look at the timeline of the Orangeburg Massacre: Monday, February 5, 1968. Following a wave of campus protests over signs of racial inequity, students, frustrated by months of ineffective...
