Celebrations Today – May 18
Holidays and observances
- Christian feast day:
- Victoria Day (Canada) (Earliest possible date of the last Monday preceding May 25)
- Baltic Fleet Day (Russia)
- Battle of Las Piedras Day (Uruguay)
- Day of Remembrance of Crimean Tatar genocide (Ukraine)
- Flag and Universities Day (Haiti)
- Independence Day (Somaliland) (unrecognized)
- International Museum Day
- Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day (Sri Lankan Tamils)
- Revival, Unity, and Poetry of Magtymguly Day (Turkmenistan)
- Teacher’s Day (Syria)
- Victory Day (Sri Lanka)
- World AIDS Vaccine Day
Celebrations Today – USA: May 18
National Cheese Souffle Day
National HIV Vaccine Awareness Day
National No Dirty Dishes Day
National Visit Your Relatives Day
National Accounting Day
National I Love Reese’s Day
International Museum Day
National Mother Whistler Day
National Cheese Soufflé Day
National Send an Electronic Greeting Card Day
World AIDS Vaccine Day
Today in US History: May 18
Plessy v. Ferguson
Drinking at “Colored” Water Cooler in Streetcar Terminal, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma,
Russell Lee, photographer, July 1939.
Negro Going in Colored Entrance of Movie House, Belzoni, Mississippi Delta, Mississippi,
Marion Post Wolcott, photographer, circa October 1939.
On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court ruled separate-but-equal facilities constitutional on intrastate railroads. For some fifty years, the Plessy v. Ferguson decision upheld the principle of racial segregation. Across the country, laws mandated separate accommodations on buses and trains, and in hotels, theaters, and schools.
The Court’s majority opinion denied that legalized segregation connoted inferiority. However, in a dissenting opinion, Justice John Marshall Harlan argued that segregation in public facilities smacked of servitude and abridged the principle of equality under the law.
In a speech delivered in the Ohio House of Representatives in 1886 and later published as The Black Laws, legislator Benjamin W. Arnett described life in segregated Ohio:
I have traveled in this free country for twenty hours without anything to eat; not because I had no money to pay for it, but because I was colored. Other passengers of a lighter hue had breakfast, dinner and supper. In traveling we are thrown in “jim crow” cars, denied the privilege of buying a berth in the sleeping coach.
This foe of my race stands at the school house door and separates the children, by reason of ‘color,’ and denies to those who have a visible admixture of African blood in them the blessings of a graded school and equal privileges… We call upon all friends of ‘Equal Rights’ to assist in this struggle to secure the blessings of untrammeled liberty for ourselves and posterity.B. W. Arnett, The Black Laws, March 10, 1886.
African American Perspectives, 1818-1907
By the 1930s, the practice of racial segregation was widespread and vigorously maintained. When devastating floods hit Arkansas in 1937, for example, white refugees and black refugees were cared for in separate relief facilities. A series of Farm Security Administration photographs documenting the flood demonstrates the pervasive nature of segregation.
After hearing arguments by NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court overruled the Plessy decision on May 17, 1954. In Brown v. the Board of Education, a unanimous Court adopted Justice Harlan’s position that segregation violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
A Sign at the Greyhound Bus Station, Rome, Georgia
Esther Bubley, photographer, September 1943.
Photographs of Signs Enforcing Racial Discrimination
Prints and Photographs Division
- Search African American Perspectives, 1818-1907 on segregation to locate primary source material pertaining to segregation. The Time Line of African American History lists significant dates in African-American history.
- Search on keywords such as fugitive or names such as Wendell Phillips in Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 to read more about the experiences of African and African-American slaves in the American colonies and the United States. Read, for example, Dred Scott vs. John F. A. Sandford.
- Search the collection a America from the Great Depression to World War II: Black-and-White Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-1945 on the terms colored, white, black or negro to find additional photographs documenting the era of segregation.
- Tour the Library of Congress online exhibitions African-American Mosaic: African-American Culture and History, African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, and With an Even Hand: Brown v. Board at Fifty. See also other online digital collections Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938 and Voices from the Days of Slavery: Former Slaves Tell Their Stories.
- The Supreme Court Opinions for both the Plessy (1896) and Brown (1954) cases are available online at FindLaw.
For more information on African Americans with regard to segregation, black laws, and the Jim Crow era, the following online research tools may provide further guidance:
- African American History Month
- Sources for Images on African American History
- African American Sites in the Digital Collections
- American Memory: African American History collections
Mary McLeod Bethune
We live in a world which respects power above all things. Power, intelligently directed, can lead to more freedom.”My Last Will and Testament,”
originally published in Ebony (August 1955).
Mary McLeod Bethune, April 6, 1949.
Creative Americans: Portraits by Van Vechten, 1932-1964
Educator and political leader Mary McLeod Bethune died at the age of eighty on May 18, 1955, in Daytona Beach, Florida. Born in Mayesville, South Carolina, in 1875, Bethune was one of the last of Samuel and Patsy McLeod’s seventeen children. Former slaves, her parents were leaders of Mayesville’s African-American community.
Bethune grasped the importance of education early on. Despite poverty, her family managed to send her to the local mission school. With help from a patron, she attended Scotia Seminary in North Carolina and Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. After nearly a decade of teaching, she opened her own school, the Daytona Educational and Industrial School for Negro Girls in Daytona Beach, Florida (now Bethune-Cookman College).
With an initial investment of just $1.50, Bethune created an educational institution that served students and community. As president of the college from 1904-42, her efforts on behalf of the school garnered national attention. As a result, she served as vice president of the National Urban League, president of the National Association of Colored Women and as an advisor on minority issues to presidents Coolidge and Hoover.
In 1936, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made Bethune director of the Division of Negro Affairs, National Youth Administration, then the highest government position ever held by an African-American woman. Simultaneously, she served the Roosevelt administration as a special advisor on minority affairs. She was also appointed a special assistant to the secretary of war to oversee for the selection of candidates for the Women’s Army Corps, one of many influential positions she held during the 1940s. Bethune spent her final years writing and traveling.
- The Mary McLeod Bethune Council House in Washington, D.C. is the site of Bethune’s last residence in the District and the first headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women, which she founded in 1935.
- Search African American Perspectives, 1818-1907 on National Association of Colored Women to learn more this organization.
- African-American Experience in Ohio, 1850-1920 contains many newspaper articles about African Americans and the issues affecting them. See, for example, this 1918 article from the Cleveland Advocate, headlined “Vice President Dedicates Mrs. Bethune’s School.” A search on the word school reveals many additional items concerning this important topic.
- To learn more about historically black colleges, see the Today in History features on Howard University and Fisk University.
- Search on Bethune or Bethune-Cookman College in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog for photographs including Dr. Bethune, students, and campus life.
For more information on African Americans and education browse the following online research tools:
- African American History Month
- Sources for Images on African American History
- African American Sites in the Digital Collections
- American Memory: African American History collections
Today in History – May 18-External Links
Today’s Weather in History
Today in Earthquake History
This Day in Naval History
Today’s Document from the National Archives
Today’s Events, Births & Deaths –Wikipedia
Today in History by AP
On this Day -1950 to 2005 – Today’s Story–BBC
On This Day: The New York Times
This Day in History –History.com
Today in Canadian History – Canada Channel
History of Britain that took place On This Day
Russia in History –Russiapedia