Happy New Year!

1835: The Cherokee Indian Treaty Party signs the Treaty of New Echota, ceding their lands east of the Mississippi River to the U.S. government. The Cherokees were to receive five million dollars and land in the western Indian Territory. Alabama created the new counties of Cherokee, DeKalb, and Marshall from the ceded land [...]

1857: Physician and co-founder of  Children’s Hospital, Thomas Duke Parke was born.

1950: Former U. S. Ambassador Margaret Tutwiler was born in Birmingham.

1956: Fred Shuttlesworth led hundreds of Blacks onto Birmingham buses in defiance of local law. 22 were arrested and Shuttlesworth filed a federal lawsuit against the police.

1945: Football player Kenny Stabler was born.
1956: The home of Birmingham minister and civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth is bombed. Although the structure is severely damaged, Shuttlesworth emerges uninjured, to the amazement of the gathering crowd. Undaunted, and interpreting his survival as a sign of God’s favor, Shuttlesworth and other local [...]

1923: David F. Friedman, film producer, was born in Birmingham.

1927: Musician, Jake Hess, was born in Limestone County.

Source: Bhamwiki

1813: In the midst of the Creek War, American forces defeat Creek warriors in the Battle of Holy Ground, a sacred town on the banks of the Alabama River believed by Creek prophets to be invincible. Although the Creeks suffered relatively few casualties, the defeat and the total destruction of the town dealt [...]

1956: The Supreme Court ruling banning segregated seating on Montgomery’s public transit vehicles goes into effect. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks were among the first people to board a fully integrated bus, ending the  year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott.

1976: Quenette Shehane was abducted and murdered. Her death lead to the start of the Victim’s Rights movement in Alabama.  Her mother Miriam Shehane would found Victims of Crime and Leniency and serve on state boards.

1871: The city of Birmingham is incorporated by the state legislature. The act called for the governor to appoint the first mayor and eight aldermen and allowed the mayor to require all male inhabitants ages 18-45 to work five days each year on the streets and roadways of the city.

1935: Actor, George Lindsey, was born in Fairfield.

1939: Musician, Eddie Kendricks, was born in Eutaw

1945: Musician, Sam Dees, was born in Birmingham.

1898: U.S. President William McKinley visits Tuskegee Institute at the invitation of Booker T. Washington, the school’s president. To Washington the visit signified that he had achieved his goal of “build[ing] up a school that would be of so much service to the country that the President of the United States would one [...]

1750: Creek leader, Alexander McGillvray, was born at Little Tallassee

1819: Alabama becomes a state. The Alabama Territory had been created in 1817 when Mississippi became a state. By November 1818 the population had grown sufficiently to apply for statehood. The Alabama constitutional convention met in July 1819 and William Bibb was elected governor. In December President James [...]

1868: Thirty-eight of Alabama’s sixty-seven counties were created or established during the month of December beginning with Madison County on December 13, 1808, and ending with Chilton County on December 30, 1868.

1949: Musician Randy Owen is born in Fort Payne, Alabama.

Source: Alabama Department of Archives and History