Black History Month
Events in African American History, 2000+
1600 - 1699 | 1700 - 1799 | 1800 - 1849 | 1850 - 1899 | 1900 - 1949 | 1950 - 1999 | 2000+
2000
January. Basketball star Michael Jordan announces his new position as partner and president of basketball operations of the Washington Wizards.
January 17. More than 46,000 protesters rally in a march on the state capitol at Columbia, South Carolina, to protest the Confederate battle flag flying atop the statehouse dome. NAACP chair Kweisi Mfume, the main speaker at the event, called it the greatest civil rights rally since the 1960s.
February 25. Louis Farrakhan announces an end to the 25-year-long rift between the Nation of Islam and the Moslem American Society headed by Wallace Deen Mohammed. The groups split in 1975 following the death of Elijah Muhammad.
May 2. South Carolina governor Jim Hodges signs a bill to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday an official state holiday. South Carolina is the last state to recognize the day as a holiday.
July. At Wimbledon, tennis player Venus Williams beats her sister Serena Williams in semifinals and becomes the first black woman to win the women's title since Althea Gibson did it in 1957-58.
December. President-Elect George W. Bush announces the appointment of several African-Americans to his cabinet. Colin L. Powell will serve as Secretary of State, Condolezza Rice as foreign policy adviser, and Dr. Roderick Paige as Secretary of Education.
2001
January. Representative John Conyers of Michigan reintroduces legislation to create a commission to study the issue of slavery reparations.
May 12. Eight of the original "Freedom Riders" reenact their 1961 bus ride. In 1961, the civil rights protesters rode from Atlanta to Montgomery, stopping in facilities designated "white only," in order to test the Supreme Court ruling banning racial segregation in public facilities.
2002
March 24. Halle Berry becomes the first African-American woman to receive an Academy Award for best actress and Denzel Washington becomes only the second African-American man to win in the best actor category.
July 9. President George W. Bush awards comedian and actor Bill Cosby and baseball player Hank Aaron the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
2003
January 14. The Cincinnati Bengals hire defensive coordinator Marvin Lewis as the football team's new head coach. Lewis along with Tony Dungy and Herman Edwards are the only African-American coaches in the NFL.
January. The Montgomery bus on which Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in 1955 is restored and put on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.
June 23. The Supreme Court issues decisions in two cases, Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger, which challenged the use of race in admissions policy at the University of Michigan's Law School and the undergraduate College of Literature, Science and the Arts. The court upholds the concept of race as one of many factors in university admission, but rejects approaches that fail to examine each student's record on an individual basis.
September 22. Carol Mosely Braun, the nation's first African-American woman senator, announces her candidacy for United States President. However, she drops out of the race on January 14, 2004.