*Chuck Davis, an African American dancer and choreographer who brought traditional African dance to America, was born in Raleigh, North Carolina.
January 5
*The Black Native Party of Uruguay was recognized by the Electoral Court.
*Shirley Bassey, a singer best known for singing the theme song for the James Bond film Goldfinger, was born in Tiger Bay, Cardiff, Wales.
*Italy banned interracial marriage in its African colonies.
*The French Colonial Ministry confirmed reports that it was studying plans to offer land on Madagascar and other French colonies for settlement by Jews.
*The melodrama film Black Legion starring Humphrey Bogart premiered in New York City.
January 25
*Ange-Felix Patasse, a politician who became the President of the Central African Republic, was born in Paoua, Ubangi-Shari.
February 1
*Garrett Morris, comedian and actor, in New Orleans, Louisiana.
February 2
February 7
*Juan Pizarro, a baseball player who played for 18 seasons in Major League Baseball, was born in Santurce, Puerto Rico.
*Roberta Flack, a Grammy winning singer, was born in Black Mountain, North Carolina.
February 12
*Charles Dumas, an Olympic champion high jumper who was the first to clear seven feet, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
February 13
*Rupiah Banda, the President of Zambia from 2008 to 2011, was born in Gwanda, Southern Rhodesia,
February 14
*Magic Sam, a blues musician, was born in Grenada, Mississippi.
February 19
*Ethiopians attempted to assassinate Italian Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani in a grenade attack. Graziani and several of his staff were wounded. In retaliation, the Italians would massacre 30,000 Ethiopians in reprisal killings over the next three days.
*Robert Walker, a blues musician, was born near Clarksdale, Mississippi.
February 20
February 21
*The Italians captured the leader of the Ethiopian resistance, Desta Damtew.
*Mussolini decreed that any native chieftain or officer who opposed Italian colonial troops, even in territory as yet unoccupied, would be put to death.
February 23
*Italy protested to Britain for inviting Haile Selassie to send an envoy to the king's coronation ceremony.
February 24
*Desta Damtew, a leader of the Ethiopian resistance, was executed.
March
*Olusegun Obasanjo, the President of Nigeria from 1999 to 2007, was born in Abeokuta, Colonial Nigeria.
March 8
*Juvenal Habyarimana, the third President of Rwanda, was born in Ruanda-Urundi.
*Raynoma Singleton, one of the founders of Motown and the second wife of Berry Gordy, was born in Detroit, Michigan.
The encyclical Mit brennender Sorge ("With burning concern") of Pope Pius XI was published in Germany in the German language. Largely the work of Cardinals von Faulhaber and Pacelli, it condemned breaches of the 1933 Reichskonkordat agreement signed between the Nazi government and the Catholic Church, and criticized Nazism's views on race and other matters incompatible with Catholicism.
March 21
*The Ponce massacre occurred in Ponce, Puerto Rico when police opened fire on a peaceful civilian march. Twenty-one were killed and more than 200 wounded.
March 25
*Italy and Yugoslavia signed a five-year non-aggression and neutrality pact. Yugoslavia recognized Ethiopia as Italian territory while Italy made trade concessions and granted language and school rights for its Yugoslav minority.
March 26
*Wayne Embry, a basketball player and executive, was born in Springfield, Ohio.
*Johnny Copeland, a blues musician, was born in Haynesville, Louisiana.
March 28
April 5
May 21
May 24
*In Italy, the Ministry of Popular Culture ordered all foreign words and names to be Italianized. Louis Armstrong, for example, was to be known as Luigi Fortebraccio.
*Toni Harper, a child singer known for the hit "Candy Store Blues", was born in Los Angeles, California.
June 13
*Switzerland recognized the Italian conquest of Ethiopia.
Jnne 17
*Cuban band Orquesta de la Playa recorded "Bruca manigua", Arsenio Rodriguez's first hit.
June 22
*Paul Robeson made an important speech on the Spanish Civil War at the Royal Albert Hall in London during a benefit to raise funds for Basque refugee children. "There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights. There are no impartial observers", Robeson said. "The liberation of Spain from the oppression of fascist reactionaries is not a private matter of the Spaniards, but the common cause of all advanced and progressive humanity."
*Liechtenstein added a crown to its national flag so it would no longer be identical to the flag of Haiti.
July 2
* Michael Sata, the fifth President of Zambia, was born in Mpika, Northern Rhodesia.
July 10
July 24
*Alabama dropped rape charges against the so-called Scottsboro Boys.
August 3
*Roland Burris, the first African American elected to statewide office in Illinois, was born in Centralia, Illinois.
August 7
*Magic Slim, a blues singer and guitarist, was born in Torrance, Mississippi.
*The United States Senate confirmed Hugo Black for the United States Supreme Court by a 63-16 vote despite his controversial past involvement with the Ku Klux Klan.
*Diego Segui, a baseball player who played for both of Seattle's Major League Baseball teams, was born in Holguin, Cuba.
August 18
*Jean Alingue Bawoyeu, politician and former Prime Minister was born in Fort-Lamy, French Equatorial Africa.
August 27
*Alice Coltrane, a jazz musician, was born in Detroit, Michigan.
August 30
August 31
*Bobby Parker, a blues-rock guitarist best known for his song "Watch Your Step", was born in Lafayette, Louisiana.
September 16
*The NAACP sent a telegram to President Roosevelt urging that he call upon Hugo Black to resign from the Supreme Court or "take other appropriate action in the absence of repudiation and disproof of the charges by Senator Black to relieve himself and the nation of the embarrassment of having upon the highest court a man pledged to uphold principles inimical to true Americanism."
*Jesse J. McCrary, Jr., a lawyer and civil rights activist who became the first African American in the Florida State Cabinet, was born in Blitchton, Florida.
September 17
*Orlando Cepeda, a Hall of Fame baseball player, was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico.
Orlando Cepeda, Baseball Star Known as the Baby Bull, Dies at 86
Only the second Puerto Rican native elected to the Hall of Fame, he hit 379 home runs but later served time in prison on a drug-smuggling charge.
Orlando Cepeda, the second Puerto Rican-born player to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and one of the leading sluggers of his time, from the late 1950s to the early ’70s, died on Friday. He was 86.
His death was announced by the San Francisco Giants. The organization did not say where he died.
Playing for 17 seasons in the major leagues, mostly at first base but also in the outfield and, at the end of his career, as a designated hitter, Cepeda hit 379 home runs, had 2,351 hits, drove in 1,365 runs and finished his career with a batting average of .297.
He was a unanimous selection as the National League’s rookie of the year with the Giants in 1958, their first season in San Francisco. He was also a unanimous choice as the league’s most valuable player in 1967, the year he helped lead the St. Louis Cardinals to a World Series championship. He hit at least .300 in nine seasons and played in nine All-Star Games.
Cepeda’s father, Pedro, known as the Bull for his strength, was a professional baseball player, primarily a shortstop, who was often called the Babe Ruth of Puerto Rico. Orlando Cepeda, a muscular 6-foot-2, 210-pound right-handed power hitter, became known as the Baby Bull.
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While pitching in the Giants’ farm system, Juan Marichal, the future Hall of Famer from the Dominican Republic, was inspired by Cepeda and his fellow Latino players on the Giants.
“I would see Orlando Cepeda, Felipe Alou and Ruben Gomez on television,” Marichal once told The Associated Press. “I started learning what the major leagues were all about, and I hoped that one day I could be one of them.”
Marichal, who joined the Giants in 1960, said that Cepeda “was the type of player who had no fear, the type of player you wanted playing behind you.”
But Cepeda’s reputation was tarnished a year after his playing days ended.
He was arrested in San Juan in December 1975 for his role in smuggling marijuana from Colombia and spent 10 months in federal prison.
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The Baseball Writers Association of America, presumably taking his prison term into account, rejected him for the Hall of Fame in 15 years of balloting. It was not until 1999, and a vote by the Veterans Committee, that Cepeda made it to Cooperstown.
Cepeda had been revered in Puerto Rico nearly as much as Roberto Clemente, the Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder and the commonwealth’s first Hall of Famer, who died in a plane crash in 1972 while he was delivering earthquake relief supplies to Nicaragua.
Cepeda’s drug conviction stood in contrast with Clemente’s altruism and turned him into something of an outcast at home after his release from prison.
“When you play baseball you have a name and money and you feel like you’re bulletproof,” Cepeda told Sports Illustrated when he was about to enter the Hall of Fame. “You forget who you are. Especially in a Latin country, they make you feel like you are God. I learned that one mistake, in two seconds, can make a disaster that seems to last forever.”
Orlando Cepeda was born in Ponce, P.R., on Sept. 17, 1937. His father, though a baseball hero in Puerto Rico and elsewhere in the Caribbean, was a victim of the major leagues’ color barrier. He died in 1955, just before his son played his first game in the Giants’ farm system.
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Cepeda was named rookie of the year after hitting .312 with 25 home runs for the 1958 Giants. Three years later, he led the league in home runs, with 46, and runs batted in, with 142, as part of a slugging lineup that also included Willie Mays, Willie McCovey and Felipe Alou.
Cepeda helped propel the Giants to their first pennant in San Francisco in 1962, but they were beaten by the Yankees in the World Series.
Plagued by knee injuries, Cepeda was traded to the Cardinals early in the 1966 season for the pitcher Ray Sadecki. The next year, he hit a career-high .325 and led the National League in runs batted in, with 111, in capturing M.V.P. honors. The Cardinals went on to defeat the Boston Red Sox in the World Series.
Cepeda played on the Cardinals’ pennant-winning 1968 team, and later with the Atlanta Braves, the Oakland Athletics and the Red Sox. He retired in 1974, after a single season with the Kansas City Royals.
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After moving to Southern California in the mid-1980s, he embraced Buddhism while seeking a return to the baseball world. “From the moment I stepped into the temple, it changed my life,” he told The A.P. in 1993. “It taught me to accept responsibility for my actions, not to blame others.”
Cepeda returned to the San Francisco area in 1987. He scouted for the Giants in 1988 and then became a member of their community relations department, speaking to young people through the years about drug and alcohol abuse.
But trouble arrived again in May 2007, when Cepeda was stopped for speeding in Solano County, north of San Francisco. The police reported finding cocaine, marijuana and hypodermic syringes in his car. But he was allowed to plead no contest to a charge of possessing less than one ounce of marijuana, and was fined $100.
The county district attorney, David Paulson, fired the prosecutor handling the case hours before the prosecutor was scheduled to resign, saying the decision to drop felony cocaine charges suggested that Cepeda had received favorable treatment because of his celebrity status.
Cepeda, who lived in Concord, Calif., held the title of community ambassador in the Giant organization at his death. His survivors include five sons, Hector, Orlando Jr., Carl, Malcolm and Ali.
For all the years he was shunned in Puerto Rico, Cepeda won redemption when he was elected to the Hall of Fame. The Puerto Rican government brought him back for a parade in his honor. It began at the San Juan airport, where he had been arrested 24 years earlier, and passed through Old San Juan along streets lined by crowds.
The Giants retired Cepeda’s No. 30 two weeks before his induction into the Hall of Fame. In September 2008, they honored him with a bronze statue outside their stadium, AT&T Park (now Oracle Park). It stands alongside statues paying tribute to Mays, McCovey, Marichal and the pitcher Gaylord Perry.
After all his travails, Cepeda was extremely gratified.
“When things like this happen to you,” he told The San Francisco Chronicle at the unveiling of his statue, “that’s when I say to myself, ‘Orlando, you’re a very lucky person.’”
*Abner Haynes, an American Football League running back, was born in Denton, Texas.
*United States Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black gave a radio address admitting that he had once been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, but had resigned and never rejoined. Black repudiated the Klan and pointed out that his voting record in the Senate demonstrated that he was "of that group of liberal senators who have consistently fought for the civil, economic and religious rights of all Americans, without regard to race or creed."
October 2
*The Parsley Massacre began in Hispaniola when Dominican President Rafael Trujillo made an inflammatory speech against Haitans.
*Johnnie Cochran, a lawyer best know for his defense of O. J. Simpson, was born in Shreveport, Louisiana.
*Juan Marichal, a Hall of Fame baseball player, was born in Monte Cristi, Dominican Republic.
October 28
*Lenny Wilkens, a Hall of Fame basketball player and coach, in Brooklyn, New York.
October 29
*Henry Armstrong knocked out Petey Sarron in the sixth round at Madison Square Garden to win the World Featherweight Championship of boxing.
November 1
November 2
*Earl Carroll, the lead vocalist for the doo-wop singing group, The Cadillacs, was born.
November 3
*Ethiopian Crown Prince Asfaw Wossen petitioned the Coptic Church Council in Egypt for a divorce from Wolete Israel Seyoum, declaring that he could not live with the daughter of a man who surrendered to the Italian invaders.
November 12
*The memoir Out of Africa by Karen Blixen was published.
November 15
*Little Willie John, an R&B singer who is best known for his song "Fever", was born Cullendale, Arkansas.
November 28
*Elijah Malok Aleng, a South Sudanese public servant, general and politician, was born in Bor, Sudan.
*Everett Farmer, the last person to be executed in Nova Scotia, was hanged from the gallows in Shelburne, Nova Scotia.
December 4
*The General Assembly of the Black Native Party of Uruguay was organized.
December 12
*Willie Stokes, a reputed Chicago mobster, was born in Chicago, Illinois.
December 18
*A local committee of the Black Native Party of Uruguay was set up in the town of Melo.
*DeLawrence Beard, the first African American superior court judge in Montgomery County, Maryland, was born in Okalona, Arkansas.
December 30
*James Marshall, a National Football League (NFL) player who held the career record for most consecutive starts, was born in Wilsonville, in Boyle County, Kentucky.
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