Learn about progressive happenings throughout history on October 19, in This Day in History.
1818: The Chickasaw nation cedes land that now comprises the state of Tennessee, through a treaty that gives them payment from the United Staes for the next 20 years. This agreement, the Chickasaw Treaty, starts an ongoing process of removal that would lead to the Chickasaw nation being relocated altogether to Oklahoma.
1870: For the first time history, African-Americans are elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, 89 years after the body was first formed. They are all from South Carolina: Joseph H. Rainey, a businessman who had been born a slave and had also been forced to work for the Confederacy; Robert C. Delarge, the son of a Black slaveholder; and Robert B. Elliott, a native of England who jumped ship during the Tea party and ran a newspaper.
1994: CenterLink, a nationwide coalition of LGBT community centers, creates National LGBT Center Awareness Day to be celebrated every Oct. 19. It’s a day to raise awareness of the centers and the role they fill in LGBTQ+ communities.Â
2005: The Iraqi trial of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, captured two years earlier, begins. He is tried for crimes against humanity for killings of civilians in the early 1980s, and for gassing Kurdish Iraqis in the late 1980s. Hussein will be sentenced to death and hung in late 2006.
2009: Attorney General Eric Holder announces the federal government will no longer prosecute medical marijuana patients who are complying with state laws.
2016: “”If you are durably suppressed, meaning you have had a repetitive viral load test at or below detection, the chance of transmitting HIV to your partner, assuming you’re staying adherent, is zero, I’ll say it again: the chance of transmitting if you are virally durably suppressed is zero.” This announcement, by Dr. Carl Dieffenbach, was the government’s first public communication of the “undetectable=untransmittable” or U=U campaign.
Historical references today include On This Day and Zinn Education. Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons
