A lawmaker introduces the pun “May the Fourth be with you” on the floor of U.K. Parliament

On May 4, 1994, in a groan-inducing moment on the floor of U.K. Parliament, a lawmaker uses a pun that will spawn its own holiday far, far away from the halls of government.

The first recorded appearance of “May the Fourth Be With You” occurred on May 4, 1979, when the UK Conservative Party placed a congratulatory advertisement in the London Evening News after Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. The ad read:

“May the Fourth Be With You, Maggie. Congratulations!”

This is the earliest documented instance of the pun being used in print.

In 1954, the Supreme Court issued a momentous ruling that clarified how the American legal system handled charges of discrimination. In Hernandez v. Texas, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to all racial and ethnic groups facing discrimination, effectively broadening civil rights laws to include Hispanics and all other non-whites.

The defendant, Peter Hernandez, was a Mexican American agricultural laborer, part of the influx of such workers that had come to Texas during and after World War II. Hernandez was convicted of killing a man in cold blood in Jackson County, Texas, but his legal team, which was drawn mostly from one of the oldest Latino civil rights groups in the nation, the League of United Latin American Citizens, appealed. They pored through the records of jury selections in Jackson County, an area with a substantial Hispanic population, and found that not one of the roughly 6,000 jurors selected over the previous 25 years had a Hispanic last name. Citing the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been passed in 1868 and guaranteed equal protection under the law to all African Americans, Hernandez’s lawyers claimed he had been deprived of equal protection because discrimination prevented him from being tried by a jury of his peers.

Source: history.com for the complete

The 1971 May Day Protests were a series of large-scale civil disobedience actions in Washington, D.C., in protest against the Vietnam War.

These began on Monday morning, May 3rd, and ended on May 5th. More than 12,000 people were arrested, the largest mass arrest in U.S. history.

Members of the Nixon administration would come to view the events as damaging, because the government’s response was perceived as violating citizens’ civil rights.

wiki

The 1992 Los Angeles riots, sometimes called the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, were a series of riots and civil disturbances that occurred in Los Angeles County in April and May 1992. 

Unrest began in South Central Los Angeles on April 29, after a trial jury acquitted four officers of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) for usage of excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King, which had been videotaped and widely viewed in TV broadcasts. The rioting took place in several areas in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, as thousands of people rioted over six days after the verdict’s announcement.

Widespread looting, assault, and arson occurred during the riots, which local police forces had difficulty controlling due to lack of personnel and resources. The situation in the Los Angeles area was only resolved after the California National Guard, the United States military, and several federal law enforcement agencies were deployed to assist in ending the violence and unrest.

By the time the riots ended, 63 people had been killed, 2,383 had been injured, more than 12,000 had been arrested, and estimates of property damage were over $1 billion, much of which disproportionately affected Koreatown, where the bulk of rioting occurred. LAPD Chief of Police Daryl Gates, who had already announced his resignation by the time of the riots, was attributed with much of the blame for failure to de-escalate the situation and overall mismanagement.

wiki