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• Cheryl Adrienne Brown, Miss New York, became the first African American contestant in the Miss America pageant
• (August 7) Angela Davis, radical black activist and philosopher, was arrested as a suspected conspirator in the abortive attempt to free George Jackson from a courtroom in Marin County, California
• (January 11) Mary J. Blige born (singer)
• Beverly Johnson appears on the cover of Glamour, the first African American woman to be featured that way by a major fashion magazine
• Mahalia Jackson died (gospel singer)
• Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman candidate for President, with more than 150 delegate votes at the 1972 Democratic convention
• Barbara Jordan elected to Congress, the first African American woman from a former Confederate state to be elected to the House
• Yvonne Braithwaite Burke elected to Congress, the first black woman elected to the House from California
• Patricia Roberts Harris became chair of the Democratic National Convention; Yvonne Braithwaite Burke was co-chair of the convention
• Haitian boat people begin arriving in Florida
• Angela Davis acquitted in California by an all-white jury of charges from a 1970 shootout
• (January 27) Mahalia Jackson died (singer)
• (July 7) Lisa Leslie born (basketball player)
• Eleanor Holmes Norton and others found the National Black Feminist Organization.
• Marion Wright Edelson creates the Childrens Defense Fund.
• Cardiss Collins elected to Congress from a Chicago district, succeeding her husband
• Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman elected to Congress
• Alberta Williams King, Martin Luther King, Jr.s mother, and a deacon, were killed during services at Ebenezer Baptist Church
• Mary Bush Wilson becomes first African American woman board chair of the NAACP (the first chair, Mary White Ovington, was a white woman)
• Joanne Little acquitted of murder charges - she had stabbed a jailer with an ice pick to avoid sexual assault
• Leontyne Price awarded Italys Order of Merit
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