Former National Basketball Association star Charles Barkley is the luncheon keynote speaker at the Defining the Future Leadership Conference Oct. 5 in Montgomery. The conference, which is hosted by the Alabama Community Leadership Network and the Alabama Communities of Excellence, is at the Renaissance Hotel and Spa at the Convention Center Oct. 5-6.

Barkley established himself as one of the National Basketball Association's most dominating power forwards. He was selected to the All-NBA First Team five times, the All-NBA Second Team five times and once to the All-NBA Third Team. He earned 11 NBA All-NBA appearances and was named the All-Star Most Valuable Player in 1991.

September 24, 1864: Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest takes more than 1,400 Union soldiers prisoner when he tricks Col. Wallace Campbell into surrendering a fort on Coleman Hill near Athens. Forrest convinced Campbell that his force was three times its actual size and that resisting or waiting on reinforcements was pointless. Most of the Union troops were from the 110th U.S. Colored Infantry, which was made up of former slaves from northern Alabama and southern Tennessee.

Information Source: Alabama Department of Archives and History

September 19, 1953: More than thirty years after it became law, the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which gave women the right to vote, is ratified by the Alabama legislature. Although Alabama complied with the provisions of the amendment as soon as it went into effect in 1920, the 1953 legislature wanted "to record its approval of extending the right of suffrage to women."

Information Source: Alabama Department of Archives and History