January 5 · This Day in America
He was born enslaved in Missouri near the end of the Civil War, traded as an infant for a horse, and turned away from a college the day it learned he was Black. He kept going. He became the first Black student at Iowa State, then gave forty-seven years to Tuskegee, where he taught the sons and grandsons of the enslaved how to pull a living from worn-out cotton land — rotate the crops, plant peanuts and sweet potatoes, let the dirt heal. He found hundreds of uses for the humble peanut and refused to patent most of them, saying God had not charged him for them and neither would he. On this day, at seventy-eight, he dies in Alabama. That summer Congress makes his birthplace a national monument — the first federal site dedicated to a Black American. He had asked only to be useful. He was, beyond measure.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1925
Nellie Tayloe Ross takes the oath in Wyoming — the first woman to govern a U.S. state. She had won a special election months after her husband, the sitting governor, died in office. Wyoming, the same state that first gave women the vote, now hands one the executive chair. She would later run the U.S. Mint for twenty years. Fifteen days after her, Texas inaugurated its own woman governor. The door, once open, did not swing shut.
Source: www.wyohistory.org