This Day in History: 2017-04-16
In the Year 1807 “Freed Muslim Remains in America” – Yarrow Marmout, an African slave of the Muslim faith, was set free in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood, where he lived for the
rest of his life. Marmout was an early shareholder in the Columbia
bank, which is the second chartered bank in the U.S. Today portraits
of Marmout hang in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the
Georgetown Public Library. In 1927, nearly 175 years after his arrival
to the U.S. as a slave, a descendant of his daughter-in-law’s family,
Robert Turner Ford, graduated from Harvard University.
November 23, 2002 - "First Native American Travels to Space"
John Herrington, a registered member of the Chickasaw Nation, was the first Native American to travel into space as the mission specialist for STS-113, the 16th mission to the International Space Station. During his mission, Herrington performed three spacewalks that totaled 19 hours and 55 minutes. The length of his mission was 13 days, 18 hours and 47 minutes. Herrington was inducted to the Chickasaw Hall of Fame the same year he went into space. William Pogue, a crewman aboard Skylab 4 in 1973-1974, had Choctaw ancestry, but was not an enrolled member of the Choctaw.