This week in Black history

Barbara C. Harris, an ordained priest of the Philadelphia Church of the Advocate, was elected a bishop in the Episcopal Church on this day. She is the first woman of any ethnicity to be elected a bishop in the history of the 70 million-member worldwide Anglican Communion. Harris was elected a suffragan, or assistant bishop, on the eighth ballot at a convention of the diocese in Boston, the largest in the United States. Bishop Barbara C. Harris is set to retire in November.

September 25, 1957--

Nine Black teenagers, The Little Rock Nine, were escorted by troops of the Army 101st Airborne Division to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, AR, on this day. President Dwight Eisenhower ordered the troops when Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus used National Guardsmen to deny the students' entrance. Faubus was in defiance of the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, KS, which banned segregation in public schools. During that time, the Little Rock Nine's members Thelma Mothershed, Elizabeth Eckford, Gloria Ray, Jefferson Thomas, Melba Pattilo, Ernest Green, Carlotta Walls, Minnie Brown and Terrance Roberts were led by Daisy Bates, who then headed the Arkansas conference of NAACP branches. Forty-two years later in 1999, the group members were awarded Congressional Gold Medals, the top civilian award bestowed by Congress.