On this day in 1954, Ellis Island, the gateway to America, shuts it doors after processing more than 12 million immigrants since opening in 1892. Today, an estimated 40% of all Americans can trace their roots through Ellis Island, located in New York Harbor off the New Jersey coast and named… read more »
At exactly noon on this day, American and Canadian railroads begin using four continental time zones to end the confusion of dealing with thousands of local times. The bold move was emblematic of the power shared by the railroad companies. The need for continental time zones …read more
They sent their babies into a mob.
That’s what’s so impressive — and bewildering — about the parents of Ruby Bridges, Gail Etienne, Pam Foreman, Yolanda Gabrielle, Tessie Prevost and Leona Tate. Fifty years ago this week, they sent their babies — five first-graders and a kindergartner — to William Frantz Elementary and McDonogh No. 19 through a gauntlet of spewing and sputtering segregationists so committed to their backwardness that they assembled to yell obscenities at small children.
If the natural instinct of most parents is to protect their children from harm, how remarkable it is that the parents of Gail, Leona, Pam, Ruby, Tessie and Yolanda deliberately sent them into harm’s way. The girls were sometimes escorted through the hostile crowds by badge-wearing U.S. marshals, which put the protesters on notice that physical violence wouldn’t be tolerated. But those stony-faced federal officers couldn’t protect the girls from the insults being hurled at them. We can take some solace, though, that some of the language was too complex for the intended targets to understand.
Ruby Bridges, for example, taught one of her playmates a new chant she’d heard, and the girls jumped rope to it: “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to integrate.”
Nobody would have blamed the girls’ parents if they’d decided to protect their children from such hate-filled madness. Good people would have understood if the parents succumbed to a loving impulse to cover the girls’ eyes and ears and remove them from a campus where so many bigots had gathered to yell at them. Nobody would have blamed them. Which makes their decisions all the more worthy of praise. They didn’t have to buck against the status quo. They didn’t have to offer their children up for the integration experiment. But they did.
That goes for the black parents who sent their children to Frantz and McDonogh No. 19 and the parents of the two white girls who refused to succumb to mob-rule and enroll their children elsewhere. Pam’s father was a preacher and a war veteran who, according to the writer John Updike, “wasn’t going to let a mob of women tell him what to do.” Yolanda’s mother was initially afraid for the girl’s safety but kept her at Frantz because, she said, “It was the principle of the thing.”
“When there is to be a lynching the people hitch up and come miles to see it, bringing their wives and children. Really to see it? No — they come only because they are afraid to stay at home, lest it be noticed and offensively commented upon.”
New Orleans students are loaded onto buses to be transported to St. Bernard Parish, November 28, 1960, after McDonogh 19 school was integrated in September.
Children seemed to always be on the front lines in our country’s often bloody battle for civil rights. Not all of them wanted to be. The 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Miss., shocked the national conscience, and months later, Rosa Parks was refusing to budge from her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus. In September 1963, four little girls in Sunday School at Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church died when the Ku Klux Klan attacked their church with dynamite. The next year President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act.
And in 1960, six little girls in New Orleans — four black, two white — were sent by their parents into a hate-filled mob. What a heart-wrenching decision that must have been.
What a sad place this would be if they hadn’t made it. (source: The Times-Picayune)
1776 – British troops captured Fort Washington during the American Revolution.
1885 – Canadian rebel Louis Riel was executed for high treason.
1907 – Oklahoma was admitted as the 46th state.
1915 – Coca-Cola had its prototype for a countoured bottle patented. The bottle made its commercial debut the next year.
1933 – The United States and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations for the first time.
1952 – In the Peanuts comic strip, Lucy first held a football for Charlie Brown.
1957 – Jim Brown (Cleveland Browns) set an NFL season rushing record of 1163 yards after only eight games.
1966 – Dr. Samuel H. Sheppard was acquitted in his second trial of charges he had murdered his pregnant wife, Marilyn, in 1954.
1969 – The U.S. Army announced that several had been charged with massacre and the subsequent cover-up in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam on March 16, 1968.
1973 – Skylab 3 carrying a crew of three astronauts, was launched from Cape Canaveral, FL, on an 84-day mission.
1973 – U.S. President Nixon signed the Alaska Pipeline measure into law.
1981 – A vaccine for hepatitis B was approved. The vaccine had been developed at Merck Institute for Therapeutic Research.
1982 – An agreement was announced on the 57th day of a strike by National Football League (NFL) players.
1985 – Colonel Oliver North was put in charge of the shipment of HAWK anti-aircraft missiles to Iran.
1988 – Estonia’s parliament declared that the Baltic republic “sovereign,” but stopped short of complete independence.
1994 – Major League Soccer announced that it would start its inaugural season in 1996.
1997 – China released Wei Jingsheng, a pro-democracy dissident from jail for medical reasons. He had been incarcerated for almost 18 years.
1998 – In Burlington, WIsconsin, five high school students, aged 15 to 16, were arrested in an alleged plot to kill a carefully selected group of teachers and students.
1998 – The U.S. Supreme Court said that union members could file discrimination lawsuits against employers even when labor contracts require arbitration.
1999 – Chrica Adams, the pregnant girlfriend of Rae Carruth, was shot four times in her car. She died a month later from her wounds. The baby survived. Carruth was sentenced to a minimum of 18 years and 11 months in prison for his role in the murder.
2000 – Bill Clinton became the first serving U.S. president to visit Communist Vietnam.
2001 – The movie “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” opened in the U.S. and U.K.
2004 – A NASA unmanned “scramjet” (X-43A) reached a speed of nearly 10 times the speed of sound above the Pacific Ocean.
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