History & Events

In January 1941 the War Department formed the all-black 99th Pursuit Squadron of the U.S. Army Air Corps (later the U.S. Army Air Forces), to be trained using single-engine planes at the segregated Tuskegee Army Air Field at Tuskegee, Alabama. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the black press, and others had been lobbying hard for the government to allow African Americans to become military pilots. However, neither the NAACP nor the most-involved black newspapers approved the solution of creating separate black units

Meredith was born in Kosciusko, Mississippi, on June 25th, 1933. From 1951 to 1960 he served in the American Air Force. After this, Meredith studied at Jackson State College for two years. Following this, he applied to start a course at the University of Mississippi. He was rejected twice. Meredith filed a complaint with the courts that he had been rejected by the university simply because he was black. His complaint was rejected by a district court, but on appeal, the Fifth Judicial Circuit Court supported him and ruled against the district court stating that the University of Mississippi was indeed maintaining a policy of segregation in its admissions policy.

The 21-year-old volunteer graduated from flight training on May 5, 1917 after spending more than 12 harrowing months fighting in the French army on the Western Front. One of nearly 300 U.S. citizens to serve in France’s burgeoning air corps prior to America’s entry into the war, Bullard was eventually assigned to the famous Lafayette Flying Corps.

Nineteenth Century African American soldiers who served in the Western United States have generally been known a “Buffalo Soldiers.”  In this article, however, military historian Frank N. Schubert, challenges modern popular perceptions of the soldiers, among them the significance of their name and the nature of their views of the native  people against whom they fought.   His argument appears below.

Carthage had been settled by Phoenicians as a city-state in North Africa near the current Tunis. In his 1961 work, French Historian Gabriel Audisio comments that he considered "Hannibal to be neither a Phoenician, nor a Carthaginian, nor a Punic, but a North African... The majority of the Punic populace seems to have had African, indeed Negroid, ancestry." Whether described as Carthaginians, Phoenicians, or Punics of North Africa, according to Audisio's research they were certainly a mix of aboriginal North Africans that included the native Berbers, Moors and other groups

According to Ivan Van Sertima. "It is generally assumed that the movement of Africans into Europe in significantly large numbers and into positions of real power, did not occur until the Muslim invasion of Spain in 711 A.D. In Al-Makkary's "History of the Mohammedan Dynasties in Spain", however, we learn of a great drought that afflicted Spain about three thousand years ago, a catastrophe that was followed not long afterwards by an invasion from Africa.