On this day in Washington on 2nd July 1964, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the historic Civil Rights Act.

The poem today is from African American Poetry of the 1800s

‘The Ebon Venus’

By Lewis Howard Latimer-The New York Age, September 27, 1890

Lewis Howard Latimer

Let others boast of maidens fair,

Of eyes of blue and golden hair;

My heart like a needle ever true

Turns to the maid of ebon hue.

I love her form of matchless grace,

The dark brown beauty of her face,

Her lips that speak of love’s delight,

Her eyes that gleam as stars at night.

O’er marble Venus let them rage

Who set the fashions of the age;

Each to his taste; but as for me,

My Venus shall be ebony.

Lewis Howard Latimer   Engineer, Inventor(c. 1848–c. 1928)