(Photo By Flickr User Tim Evanson)

“What we’re gonna do right here is go back, way back, back into time………”

All month long, we here at WVEL & Cumulus Media, will be celebrating the history of famous African-Americans past and present.

Alright family, are you ready to take a journey back together and see what happened on this day in Black History? Make sure that you’re buckled up, ready, here we go!!!!

Black History Today for February 1st (courtesy of blackfacts.com):

1997- BET Holdings and Encore Media Corp. launch BET Movie/Starz the first 24 hour Black Movie channel.

1990- In Greensboro, NC, Joseph McNeil, Jibreel Khazan (Ezell Blair), Franklin McCain, and David Richmond repeated the original sit-in of 30 years prior, by having breakfast at the Greensboro Woolworth store.

1978- The first stamp of the U.S. Postal Service’s Black Heritage USA series honors Harriet Tubman, famed abolitionist and “conductor” on the Underground Railroad.

1965- Ruby Dee was the first African-American actress to play a major role at the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, CT.

1937- Actor/Comedian Garrett Morris, formerly of Saturday Night Live, born in New Orleans, LA.

1902- One of the most famous poets, Langston Hughes was born in the year 1902. Hughes came from the Harlem Renaissance, the early stages of the Black Arts Movement. Hughes was well known in the streets of Harlem, making him one of the greatest poets of all time. Before his death in 1967, he wrote fifteen collections of poetry, two autobiographies, and seven collections of short stories, as well as other juvenile books and translations.

1887- J. Robinson patents food carrier (Dinner Pail) on this day.

1870- Jonathan Jasper Wright is elected to the South Carolina Supreme Court; He is the first African-American to hold a major judicial position.