February 3 · This Day in America
With the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the Constitution declares that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. It is the last of the three Reconstruction Amendments, the closing line of a sentence begun by emancipation: men who had been property five years earlier are now, on paper, voters. The country celebrates in churches and streets. The work would not hold. Within a generation, poll taxes and terror would strip the promise back down to almost nothing, and it would take another century and the Voting Rights Act to make these words mean what they say. But the words went into the Constitution on this day, and words in the Constitution are a debt the nation owes itself.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1959
Just after midnight, a small chartered plane lifts off from Mason City, Iowa, into light snow and rising wind. Minutes later it goes down in a frozen field. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, and pilot Roger Peterson are killed. Holly was 22. The youngest of rock and roll's first geniuses were gone in an instant, and Don McLean would later give the moment its name: the day the music died.
Source: www.britannica.com