--- Alfonso Ribeiro - September 21, 1971 American actor, director, and television personality. Happy Birthday!!! ---

--- Deborah Roberts - September 20, 1960 HAPPY BIRTHDAY Television Journalist for the ABC News division of the ABC broadcast television network. ---

--- Taral Hicks - September 21, 1974 HAPPY BIRTHDAY Actress. Hicks is best known for her acting in such films as 1993's American crime drama film A Bronx Tale ---

--- 1817— Alexander Lucius Twilight received his B.A. degree from Middlebury College and thus became the first African American college graduate. Twilight, born free in Vermont, would go on to become a Presbyterian minister and pastor at several churches....

--- 1965—Dorothy Dandridge, perhaps the most prominent African American actress of the 1940s and 1950s, commits suicide in Los Angeles, Calif. She had been suffering from a host of financial and emotional problems. In the early years of her career, she st...

--- 1957—Ghana becomes the first African country to break from White colonial rule and become an independent nation. The West African nation, once known as the Gold Coast, was led to independence by the dynamic Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah. He championed...

--- John Merrick, co-founder of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company was born on this day in 1859. He would help make the Durham, N.C., based firm the largest Black controlled insurance company in the nation. Merrick was born in Clinton, N.C....

--- Ruby Bridges - September 8, 1954 HAPPY BIRTHDAY At the tender age of six, Ruby Bridges advanced the cause of civil rights in November 1960 when she became the first African American student to integrate an elementary school in the South. Born on Sept...

--- Fred Hampton...August 30, 1948 – December 4, 1969 HAPPY BIRTHDAY...R.I.P. Activist ---