1947: Influential Black Americans Miriam Benjamin, Sheila Minor, Sylvia Rhue, Johnny Robinson, Stephen Shames & Sharon P. Wilkinson

Also, psychologist, writer, eugenicist and scientific racist, Linda Gottfredson & Afro-Puerto Rican poet, community activist, journalist, media personality, and politician, Felipe Luciano

Schoolteacher and inventor, Miriam Benjamin, dies.

In 1888, she obtained a patent for the Gong and Signal Chair for Hotels, becoming the second Black American woman to receive a patent.

In 1873, the Benjamin family moved to Boston, Massachusetts [the state in which I was born and raised to adulthood], where she attended the Girl's High School and graduated in 1881.

After graduating, she accepted the position to become the Second Assistant at the Stanton Institute, Jacksonville, Florida [the state that I raised my children in for two decades].

After the 1888 patent of the Gong and Signal chair, Benjamin continued to obtain patents.

When she returned to Boston in 1900, she referred to herself as a “solicitor of patents” and is listed as an attorney on her brother's 1893 patent application.

Under the pseudonym E. B. Miriam, Benjamin also composed musical pieces, including songs and marches for piano and band.

In 1895, the Boston-based magazine Women's Era reported “Miss Miriam Benjamin has composed a march which is now upon the market, the ‘Boston Elite Quickstep.’”

In 1903, it was reported she patented a pinking device for dressmaking.

On December 4, 1917, she received U.S. patent no. 1,249,000 for her Sole for Footwear.

This invention was intended to help with temperature regulation in the foot.  

In 1920, she returned to Boston, where she lived and worked with her brother, attorney Edgar P. Benjamin.

Her younger brother Edgar Pinkerton Benjamin (1869–1972) graduated from Boston University's law school and had a successful private practice in the city of Boston [I attended Boston University for my freshman year of college (1993-1994)].

Although best remembered for establishing the Resthaven Nursing Home (now the Benjamin Healthcare Center) in Roxbury, Massachusetts, he also received U.S. patent no. 475,749 for a “Trousers-Shield” or a bicycle clip, on May 31, 1892.

Miriam Benjamin never married.

For most of her life, she lived with her widowed mother Eliza Jane (Hopkins) Benjamin (1840–1934) in the Boston area.  

Psychologist, writer, eugenicist and scientific racist, Linda Gottfredson, born.

Gottfredson has been very critical of psychologist Robert Sternberg's work on the triarchic theory of intelligence, arguing that Sternberg has not demonstrated a distinction between practical intelligence and the analytical intelligence measured by IQ tests.

Gottfredson has received research grants worth $267,000 from the Pioneer Fund, an organization described as racist and white supremacist.

She has defended the work of J. Philippe Rushton, who served as president of the Pioneer Fund and whose research focused on a purported correlation between race and intelligence.

The University of Delaware unsuccessfully sought to block Gottfredson from receiving Pioneer Fund grants before reaching a legal settlement with her in 1992 [when I was a junior at Amherst Regional High School in Massachusetts].

Her views on the relationship between race and intelligence and her vocal opposition to policies such as affirmative action, hiring quotas, and “race-norming” on aptitude tests, as well as her funding by the Pioneer Fund, have led the Southern Poverty Law Center to describe her as a promoter of eugenics, scientific racism, and white nationalism.

Poet, community activist, journalist, media personality, and politician, Felipe Luciano, born.

He is of Afro-Puerto Rican heritage.

He is known for his significant involvement in both the Young Lords Party and The Last Poets, and more generally, as “an early and important participant in the awakening of the new consciousness-raising radicalism among Puerto Ricans in New York and across the country in the late 1960s and 1970s.”

Luciano later became a radio, television, and print journalist.

Former Biological Research Technician, Sheila Minor, born.

Her 35-year career included positions at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of the Interior, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Minor's story has drawn comparisons between her and the women in Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures.

Writer, filmmaker, producer, and LGBT activist, Sylvia Rhue, born

A young Black American teenager who, in 1963 at age 16, is shot and killed by a police officer in the unrest following the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, Johnny Robinson, born.

A Birmingham police officer, Jack Parker, who was riding in the back seat of a police car, shot and killed Robinson.

Parker was never indicted for the killing.

Photojournalist, Stephen Shames, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts [where I lived during early childhood].

For or over 50 years, he has used his photography to raise awareness of social issues, with a particular focus on child poverty, solutions to child poverty, and race.

He testified about child poverty to the United States Senate in 1986.

Shames was named a Purpose Prize Fellow in 2010 by Encore.org for his work helping AIDS orphans and former child soldiers in Africa.  

Kehrer Verlag is publishing his retrospective, Stephen Shames: a lifetime in photography.

In 2024, Shames has exhibits at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts.

Diplomat, Sharon P. Wilkinson, born.

She served as United States Ambassador to Burkina Faso from 1996 to 1999 and United States Ambassador to Mozambique.