This Week in Black History

On this day, Patrick Francis Healy became the first Black president of a predominantly White university. He was inaugurated as president of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the oldest Catholic university in America. Healy, who studied at Louvain in Belgium, was also the first Black person to receive a Ph.D. decree in 1865.

July 31, 1921

Whitney Moore Young, Jr., civil rights leader, was born on this day in Lincoln Ridge, KY. Executive director of the National Urban League from 1961 to 1971, Young helped thousands of Black people to find jobs by establishing on-the-job training and tutoring centers and instituting the Head Start education program. A 1941 graduate of Kentucky State College, now Kentucky State University, he earned an M.A. degree in social work from the University of Minnesota in 1947 and went to work immediately for the Urban League in St. Paul and Omaha. From 1954 to 1961, Young served as dean of the Atlanta University School of Social Work. In his final year as dean, he was a visiting scholar at Harvard University. A noted lecturer and author, Young received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969. He died February 11, 1971, in a swimming accident in Lagos, Nigeria, at the age of 49.

July 31, 1981

Chicago attorney Arnette R. Hubbard was installed as the 39th president of the National Bar Association, the largest national group of Black attorneys, legal scholars, and jurists, on this day. She was the first woman to preside over the organization which now has 17,000 members. Hubbard is a graduate of John Marshall Law School in Chicago and past president of the Cook County Bar Association. In 1992, she became the first Black commissioner elected president of the Association of Election Commissioners of Illinois.