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Sidney Poitier, consummate actor, film director, and diplomat, was born on this day in 1927 in Miami, Florida. He is the first Black man to win the Academy Award as best actor for his role in the movie, Lilies of the Field, in 1964.

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Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, popularly known as Frederick Douglass, diplomat, abolitionist, orator, writer, statesman, formerly enslaved, died from a heart attack on this day in 1895 at his Anacostia home in Washington, DC. He had addressed a meeting of the National Council of Women earlier that day.