Video: 'The history of Charles Curtis, the first Vice President of color'

(Saturday, February 8, 1936, 10:25 a.m. EST) — Charles Curtis, the 31st vice president of the United States from 1929 to 1933 under President Herbert Hoover, died today of a heart attack in in Washington, D.C. He was 76.

An enrolled member of the Kaw Nation born in the Kansas Territory, Curtis was the first and only Native American and first multiracial person to serve as vice president.

In 1932, he became the first United States vice president to open the Olympic Games. However, when Curtis and Hoover ran together again later that year during the Great Depression, they lost when the public gave the Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Nance Garner a landslide victory.