Explore progressive, intersectional events that happened on October 16, in MainStream’s This Day in History.
1793: Marie Antoinette is beheaded after being accused of treason, and after serving 18 years as Queen of France.
1847: “Jane Eyre,” the English novel that injected life into the Victorian era, is released by Charlotte Brontë under the pseudonym Currer Bell.
Above: Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, an excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s Peoria speech against slavery, Olympians give a Black Power salute from the podium; Yahya Sinwar just before his assassination; and the Million Man March.
1854: Abraham Lincoln gives his famous “Peoria speech” on the lawn of the Peoria County Courthouse in Illinois, extolling the evils of slavery six years before he becomes president, and 11 years before his assassination.
1916: America’s first-ever birth control clinic, what would eventually become Planned Parenthood, is founded by Margaret Sanger, her sister Ethel Byrne, and activist Fania Mindell in the lower east side of New York. Sanger and Byrne would be arrested 10 days later for “obscenity” and sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse.
1943: The largest-ever round-up of Italian Jews takes place in the Roma ghetto, when Gestapo troops arrest and deport more than 1,000 to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
1946: Ten prominent Nazis who had been convicted two weeks earlier of war crimes in the Nuremberg Trials are executed. They include the Nazis’ minister of foreign affairs, chief of the German air force, minister of the interior, and head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories.
1962: America and the Soviet Union come closer than ever before in history to a nuclear war, when the Cuban Missile Crisis begins. The 12-day stand-off started when President John F. Kennedy notified his attorney general and brother, Robert, that he believed the Soviets were directing missiles to Cuba.
1968: The raised fist of the Black Power salute appears on the medal stands of the Summer Olympics, courtesy of sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos. The Gold and Bronze metal winners also were shoeless to represent Black poverty; silver medalist Peter Norman, from Australia, joined them in wearing human rights badges.
1970: “Jesus Christ Superstar,” a satirical drama about the final part of Jesus’ life, is released and immediately banned in the United Kingdom for being “irreligious.” The soundtrack of the film by Andrew Lloyd Weber becomes the best-selling album of 1991 in the United States.
1973: Vice Mayor Maynard Jackson, 35, becomes the first Black mayor of a major Southern City when he’s elected to lead Atlanta, Ga.
1995: Somewhere between 400,000 and 1.9 million Black men gather in Washington for the Million Man March. Led by the Nation of Islam and dozens of civil rights organizations, the march on the National Mall was focused on encouraging community activism and voter registration.
2024: An Israeli drone and sniper assassinate Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the October 7 Attacks that claimed more than 1,200 Israeli lives in a day, and left 251 Israelis held hostage by Hamas.
(Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
