January 2, 2019 Today in Black History

January 2, 1965 Martin Luther King Jr.,and SCLC joined SNCC, the Dallas County Voters League, and other local African American activists in a voting rights campaign in Selma where, in spite of repeated registration attempts by local blacks, only two percent were on the voting rolls. SCLC had chosen to focus its efforts in Selma because they anticipated that the notorious brutality of local law enforcement under Sheriff Jim Clark would attract national attention and pressure President Lyndon B. Johnson and Congress to enact new national voting rights legislation.

On 25 March 1965, Martin Luther King led thousands of nonviolent demonstrators to the steps of the capitol in Montgomery, Alabama, after a 5-day, 54-mile march from Selma, Alabama, where local African Americans, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had been campaigning for voting rights. King told the assembled crowd: “There never was a moment in American history more honorable and more inspiring than the pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma to face danger at the side of its embattled Negroes” (King, Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March , 121).

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Up until that date, the Towns of Hempstead, North Hempstead and Oyster Bay were part of Queens County -- but when Queens became a part of New York City in 1898, leaders from those three towns met and decided to break away to form a new county. Mineola, once the county seat for Queens but a part of North Hempstead, was voted to serve the same role for Nassau -- and it was on July 13, 1900, when then-New York Gov. (and Oyster Bay local) Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone for the first Nassau County Courthouse at the corner of Old Country Road and Franklin Avenue.