This Week in History

North Carolina History

Basketball Superstar Michael Jordan Born. On February 17, 1963, American basketball superstar Michael Jeffrey Jordan was born in Brooklyn, New York. Before his first birthday, Jordan’s parents moved to Wilmington, where he played three sports at Laney High School and was named to the McDonald’s All-American team.

As a UNC-Chapel Hill freshman, Jordan scored the winning basket in the 1982 NCAA title game. In 1984, he was named College Player of the Year and won the first of two Olympic gold medals (the other was in 1992) with the U.S. men’s basketball team. After his junior year at Carolina, Jordan entered the NBA draft and was picked by the Chicago Bulls.

His high-scoring, high-flying antics quickly made “Air Jordan” an international sports celebrity and marketing marvel. After leading the Bulls to three consecutive NBA championships, Jordan unexpectedly retired in 1993 to pursue a career in baseball. He rejoined the Bulls in 1995 and led them to three more NBA titles before retiring again in 1999. After a two-year hiatus, Jordan returned to basketball, playing with the Washington Wizards. He retired for the final time in 2003.

Poole Bill and Anti-Evolution Fervor. On Feb. 19, 1925, the North Carolina House defeated the Poole anti-evolution resolution. The resolution, introduced by D. Scott Poole of Hoke County, proposed that it was harmful to the welfare of the citizens for “Darwinism or any other evolutionary hypotheses” to be taught in the schools sought to keep all such lessons out of the state’s classrooms. William Louis Poteat, a former biology professor, president of Wake Forest College and a devout Baptist, believed that evolution demonstrated the “divine method of creation.” He became one of the outspoken advocates for keeping it in the curriculum.

Although the House appeared to be quite divided on the issue, when it was put to a vote, the resolution was defeated by the comfortable margin of 67 to 46. The evolution debate received national attention just a few months later during the Tennessee case that has come to be known as the Scopes “Monkey Trial.” The case was in response to a Tennessee law that was similar to the one that was defeated in North Carolina.

A great overview of the evolution debate in the 1920s in North Carolina from UNC Libraries.

Princeville, Founded by African Americans, Incorporated 1885. On Feb. 20, 1885, 22 years after Emancipation, freedmen in Edgecombe County incorporated Princeville, the state’s first town founded by African Americans.

Its claim to first in the nation is rivaled only by Eatonville, Florida. Along with James City in Craven County and Roanoke Island in Dare County, the community was among the state’s three resettlement colonies for former slaves.

At the close of the Civil War, Union troops occupied the Tarboro area. Formerly enslaved people from surrounding counties left their plantations and flocked to the Federal encampment seeking freedom and protection. The future faced by the mostly illiterate, unskilled and penniless freedmen was uncertain and bleak.

Adopting the name Freedom Hill from a nearby knoll from which Northern soldiers addressed the refugees, the community’s first families camped alongside the river and erected crude shanties. White landowners made no effort to evict them from the land, it being so swampy as to be otherwise useless. In the 1870s the land did change hands and residents began acquiring lots. One of the buyers was Turner Prince, a carpenter for whom the community was renamed upon its incorporation.

National attention was drawn to Princeville in September 1999 when flooding associated with Hurricane Floyd devastated the area.

“High Priestess of Soul” Nina Simone Born. On Feb. 21, 1933, Nina Simone, often called the “high priestess of soul,” was born in the small town of Tryon in Polk County.

Determined to become one of the first highly-successful African-American concert pianists, Simone spent a summer at the famed Julliard School after graduating high school in Asheville in 1950. Denied admission to music school in Philadelphia, Simone took menial jobs there.

While on a trip to Atlantic City, N.J. in the summer of 1954, Simone began to experiment with popular music. Word of her talent spread, and she became in high demand at nightclubs all along the Mid-Atlantic coast. After releasing her first album, Little Girl Blue, in 1958, her work began to reflect her increasing involvement in the civil rights movement and her close associations with leading African-American intellectuals like Lorraine Hansberry and Langston Hughes.

After releasing 13 albums during the 1960s, Simone hit a rough patch in the 1970s, struggling with a divorce and mental illness. She toured extensively in Europe during the 1980s and her career began to wind down in the early 1990s. She died in France in 2003.

Nation and World History

On Feb. 17, 1801, the U.S. House of Representatives broke an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, electing Jefferson president; Burr became vice president.

On Feb. 17, 1863, the International Red Cross was founded in Geneva.

On Feb. 17, 1864, during the Civil War, the Union ship USS Housatonic was rammed and sunk in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, by the Confederate hand-cranked submarine HL Hunley in the first naval attack of its kind; the Hunley also sank.

On Feb. 17, 2013: Danica Patrick won the Daytona 500 pole, becoming the first woman to secure the top spot for any Sprint Cup race. (Patrick covered the 2½-mile Superspeedway in 45.817 seconds, averaging 196.434 mph. A week later, Jimmie Johnson won the race, while Patrick finished eighth.) The Western Conference beat the East 143-138 in the NBA All-Star game played in Houston. Mindy McCready, 37, who’d hit the top of U.S. country music charts before personal problems sidetracked her career, died by her own hand in Heber Springs, Arkansas.

On Feb. 18, 2001, auto racing star Dale Earnhardt Sr. died in a crash at the Daytona 500; he was 49.

On Feb. 18, 1994, at the Winter Olympic Games in Norway, U.S. speedskater Dan Jansen finally won a gold medal, breaking the world record in the 1,000 meters.

On Feb. 18, 2018: “Black Panther,” the Marvel superhero film from the Walt Disney Co., blew past expectations to take in $192 million during its debut weekend in U.S. and Canadian theaters. LeBron James scored 29 points and won his third NBA All-Star Game MVP award as his team beat the rival squad headed by Stephen Curry, 148-to-145.

On Feb. 19, 1942, during World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which paved the way for the relocation and internment of people of Japanese ancestry, including U.S.-born citizens.

On Feb. 20, 1962, astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth as he flew aboard Project Mercury’s Friendship 7 spacecraft, which circled the globe three times in a flight lasting 4 hours, 55 minutes and 23 seconds before splashing down safely in the Atlantic Ocean 800 miles southeast of Bermuda.

On Feb. 22, 2021, the number of U.S. deaths from COVID-19 topped 500,000, according to Johns Hopkins University.

On Feb. 22, 1732, the first president of the United States, George Washington, was born in Westmoreland County in the Virginia Colony.

On Feb. 22, 1980, the “Miracle on Ice” took place in Lake Placid, New York, as the United States Olympic hockey team upset the Soviets, 4-3. (The U.S. team went on to win the gold medal.)

On Feb. 22, 2016, the City Council of Charlotte, North Carolina, voted 7-4 to pass a new law allowing transgender people to choose public bathrooms that corresponded to their gender identity.

On Feb. 23, 1954, the first mass inoculation of schoolchildren against polio using the Salk vaccine began in Pittsburgh as some 5,000 students were vaccinated.

On Feb. 23, 1836, the siege of the Alamo began in San Antonio, Texas.

On Feb. 23, 2007, a Mississippi grand jury refused to bring any new charges in the 1955 slaying of Emmett Till, the Black teenager who was beaten and shot after being accused of whistling at a white woman, declining to indict the woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, for manslaughter.

This Week In History is compiled by Executive Editor David Kennard from Robesonian archives, the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources and the Associated Press.