August 30 · This Day in America
After six hours of debate, the Senate votes 69 to 11 to confirm Thurgood Marshall, and for the first time in its history the Supreme Court of the United States will have a Black justice. The man taking the seat is no stranger to that chamber's marble — he had argued before it dozens of times and won, most famously Brown v. Board of Education, the case that declared segregated schools unconstitutional. He had spent a career driving the South's back roads, defending men the law had already decided to lose, sometimes sleeping with a pistol because the Klan knew his car. Now the lawyer who had spent decades holding the Constitution to its word would help write its meaning from the inside. The grandson of a man born into slavery would sit, robed, among the nine. The promise of 1776 had not arrived. But it had moved.
Source: www.govtrack.us
Also on this day · 1983
At 2:32 a.m., the shuttle Challenger lights the Florida sky in NASA's first night launch, and aboard it Air Force officer Guion Bluford — a Vietnam combat pilot with a doctorate in aerospace engineering — becomes the first African American to fly into space. Over six days and ninety-eight orbits he deploys a satellite and runs experiments, doing the quiet, exacting work of an explorer. A barrier that had never made any sense was simply, finally, gone.
Source: www.nasa.gov