Major League Baseball integrated in 1947, when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers and became the first black player in the league’s history.
It took the National Basketball Association three years longer to accept black players. But in 1950, three black players joined the NBA. One of them was Charles H. “Chuck” Cooper, who became the first black player drafted […]

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Last week, I posted an item on Hiram Revels, the nation’s first black member of Congress, who was sent to Washington by the Mississippi Legislature in 1870 to represent that state in the U.S. Senate.
This week, I’m featuring another historic first involving a black political leader, and there’s a Lancaster County connection. 
In 1939, Crystal Bird Fauset of […]

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On the day when our nation marks the historic election of its first black president, I thought it would be timely to call some attention to this recent Associated Press story about Hiram Revels, who was the country’s first black senator.
It was way back in 1870 when the Mississippi Legislature voted to send Revels to Washington to represent the […]

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