Milestones: April 29, 2024

April 29, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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NATION’S FIRST HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) — LINCOLN UNIVERSITY in Pennsylvania on April 29, 1854, became the nation’s first historically Black degree-granting institution of higher education. The school had originally been founded as the Ashmun Institute but was renamed in 1866 to honor the memory of the slain President Abraham Lincoln who had emancipated millions of enslaved people. Lincoln University was the brainchild of John Miller Dickey, a white man who had been a minister. Dickey and his wife became philanthropists to the community’s African Americans. One freedman in particular, James Amos, caught Dickey’s attention as being well-suited for the ministry. However, when the seminaries refused to admit a Black man, Dickey personally trained James, as well as his brother Thomas Amos. Dickey received approval in 1853 from the Presbytery of Newcastle, Pennsylvania to establish a university to train young Black men in classical, scientific and theological education. The school’s ties to Princeton University (historically Presbyterian) gained it the moniker “the Black Princeton.” But, in line with Dickey’s vision that the school accepts students regardless of skin color, white students were encouraged to enroll and two graduated in the first baccalaureate class of six men in 1868.

Lincoln University celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1953 by amending its charter to permit the granting of degrees to women.

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MEMORIAL BUILT AFTER VIETNAM’S — THE WORLD WAR II MEMORIAL opened in Washington, D.C. on April 29, 2004 — more than two decades after the Vietnam War Memorial debuted in 1982 — as a long overdue tribute to 16 million Americans who served in the war. The memorial, situated between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, consists of a granite and bronze monument with fountains spaced between the arches that symbolize the enmity among nations in both the European and Asian Pacific Theaters. A pool sits farther out and a curved wall of four thousand gold stars is seen beyond that. Each star represented 100 Americans. A stone at the memorial proclaims those “Americans who took up the struggle during the Second World War and made the sacrifices to perpetuate the gift our forefathers entrusted to us: A nation conceived in liberty and justice.”

An Ohio veteran named Roger Durbin, who served under Gen. George S. Patton asked his Congressmember, Rep. Marcy Kaptur in 1987, why no memorial existed to recognize the sacrifices of World War II troops and veterans. Kaptur, a Democrat who is still in Congress, quickly introduced legislation to get that rectified, but it took 17 years of complications for this to bear fruit.

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ICON OF YELLOW JOURNALISM — WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST, born April 29, 1863, built an empire of newspapers, including 28 dailies, and two radio stations. Among these publications were the San Francisco Examiner in 1887 and the New York Morning Journal in 1895. Hearst’s editorial style was confrontational, and sensational and found itself branded by his critics as “yellow journalism” for its hyperbole and melodrama. Two of Hearst’s newspapers were eventually merged: the New York American, a morning paper that was originally the New York Journal, (renamed in 1901 the New York Journal-American), and the New York Evening Journal, an afternoon paper. Hearst published both from 1895 to 1937.

The film classic “Citizen Kane,” released in 1941, was loosely based on Hearst’s life. His granddaughter, Patty Hearst, made news on Feb. 4, 1974, when she was kidnapped and later joined her captors’ group, the American left-wing bank heist gang, Symbionese Liberation Army.

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BRIEFLY CHIEF JUSTICE — OLIVER ELLSWORTH, who would later in his career serve four years as the third Chief Justice of the United States, was born in Windsor, Connecticut on April 29, 1745. A strong proponent of a centralized government, Ellsworth, during his time in the Senate, was the main author of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which established the federal court system’s structure and organization, as well as the position of attorney general. It was Ellsworth’s specification in Section 25 of Article III that granted the federal government its only effective authority over the state government. President George Washington appointed Ellsworth as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1796. During his tenure, he tried to get the Justices to collectively hand down per curiam opinions for the entire Court, instead of separate opinions by each individual justice.

Disillusioned perhaps, at not being able to make much of an imprint on the Supreme Court, Ellsworth resigned in 1800 and, during the remaining seven years of his life, he was elected and served as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1803.

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JAPAN’S LONGEST-RULING EMPEROR — HIROHITO MICHI-NO-MIYA, born April 29, 1901, would become Japan’s — and one of the world’s — longest-reigning emperors at 62 years old, (Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth would later surpass him). He became the 124th in a line of monarchs when he ascended to the Chrysanthemum Throne in 1926. Hirohito ruled over perhaps the most eventful and turbulent period in the 2,500 years of recorded Japanese history, including the attempted military conquest of Asia. He was emperor when Japanese forces bombed Pearl Harbor and brought the U.S. into World War II, and when President Truman’s use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought Japan to its knees. Hirohito was also emperor through Japan’s restoration and rise to an economic and political superpower.

One wonders what Hirohito might think of the current Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s state visit to and alliance with the United States.

See previous milestones, here.