Check out This Date in History for February 6, in MainStream’s daily look at significant progressive, intersectional historical events.
1820: Freed slaves from America travel to Sierra Leone, courtesy of the American government, in the first organized transport of the American Colonization Society. Congress had authorized $100,000 years earlier for this purpose, which was opposed and supported by abolitionists and freed slaves. A total of 15,000 freed slaves would be relocated from America to the African community over the next 40 years.
From left: Leonard Peltier, the Chicago Daily Defender logo, the International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM, George Peabody and former President Ronald Reagan.
1850: Unknown thousands of Lake Superior Ojibwe Tribe members are forced to relocate from what is now Wisconsin to Michigan, when U.S. President Zachary Taylor orders the violation of treaties reached with the tribe years earlier. His Removal Order of 1850 forced the tribe to relocate to Minnesota to receive payment from the U.S. government for their lands – but the payment didn’t arrive for almost a year, and 400 Ojibwe people died either at the Minnesota camp, from rotting food and disease, or during the foot march back to Wisconsin in late 1850.
1867: Massachusetts philanthropist George Peabody forms The Peabody Fund– considered “the first social fund to focus on one problem.” Its mission will be to support education for newly-freed Black slaves, and it will distribute $4 million throughout the South bo build schools and hire and train teachers.
1899: America receives Puerto Rico and Guam, and annexes Hawaii, when it signs the Paris Treaty with Spain to end the Spanish-American war. The agreement is also considered an end to Spain’s dominance of the western hemisphere.
1985: “Freedom is not the sole prerogative of a chosen few; it is the universal right of all God’s children.” These words from U.S. President Ronald Reagan will help solidify the Reagan Doctrine, a commitment to help democratic allies worldwide and “nourish and defend freedom and democracy.” Reagan made the comments during his State of hte Union speech, also proclaiming, “Support for freedom fighters is self-defense.”
1956: The Chicago Defender renames itself as The Daily Defender and builds itself into the world’s largest Black-focused newspaper. The Defender also helped popularize the term “African-American” in stead of “black” or “Negro.” It will eventually become a weekly and digital-only news product, and return to its original name.
1976: Leonard Peltier, a leader if the American Indian Movement who is accused along with two others of killing a sheriff’s deputy who had entered his tribe’s South Dakota reservation unannounced, is captured in Canada six months after the shooting. He’ll spend 50 years in jail, proclaiming his freedom and contending the whole time that he is a political prisoner. Over the decades, Nelson Mandela, Jesse Jackson, Demond Tutu and more will join the plea for his release. Peltier will finally be released at age 80, when U.S. President Joe Biden commutes his sentence in January 2025.
2003: The International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM (female genital mutilation) begins when Stella Obasanjo, the First Lady of Nigeria , makes the official declaration. An estimated 230 million women worldwide have experience FGM, often in unsanitary conditions.
2020: The first known death of an American from COVID-19 occurs when Patricia Dowd, a relatively healthy 57-year-old who exercised regularly, dies at home. Reserachers had originally though the virus first became deadly to Americans three weeks later, but samples from Dowd reveal she passed away from the virus before it had been identified. .dthe first covid related death occurs
2024: Jennifer Crumbley becomes the first American parent of a school shooter to be held liable for her child’s actions. She and her husband, who will go to trial a month later, will both be sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison for their 15-year-old son’s 2021 killing of four fellow students at Oxford High School in Michigan.
Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
