Check out This Day in History for Sept. 29, MainStream’s daily look at significant progressive, intersectional historical events.
1910: A group that would eventually become the National Urban League, a respected civil rights advocacy group, is founded by suffragist Ruth Standish Baldwin and social worker George Edmund Haynes. It’s called the Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes.
1941: The Babi Yar massacre takes place, with Nazi German soldiers marching more than 30,000 Ukrainian Jews to a ravine north of Kiev where they were ordered to strip, and were then murdered. It’s considered one of the deadliest incidents of the entire Holocaust.
Above left: Voting rights advocate Willie Velasquez. Right, activist and writer Louise Thompson Patterson.
1951: The Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a group of prominent Black female activists and writers, forms and releases “A Call to Negro Women.” The writing beckoned more than 130 women to Washington, D.C., to protest both racism and sexism, in one of history’s first illustrations of intersectional activism. Founders of the group included workers ‘right activist Louise Thompson Patterson and author/actress Eslanda Robeson.
1975: The first Black-owned television station in the United States, WGPR-TV in Detroit, begins broadcasting. It’s eventually sold to CBS 20 years later.
1995: Willie Velasquez, a voting rights advocate credited with increasing Latino and Hisipanic voter engagement in the early 1970s through the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project which, receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously from President Bill Clinton.
2012: California becomes the first state to ban conversion therapy, the use of psychological tactics to change someone’s sexual orientation, when then Gov. Jerry Brown signs SB 1172. The law would face legal challenges for the next two years before finally taking effect in 2014.
2020: Timothy Ray Brown, the first person to be cured of HIV dies of cancer. Brown went into permanent remission from AIDS in 2008 after receiving two stem cell transplants.
2023: President Joe Biden signs an Executive Order extending the Presidential Advisory Committee on HIV/AIDS (PACHA) , originally founded by Bill Clinton in 1995, until September 30, 2025. Though President Donald Trump has threatened to remove all of its members, the committee remains intact.
References for today’s history nuggets include history.com, On This day, and HIV.gov. Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
