Check out This Day in History for Nov. 21, in MainStream’s daily look at significant progressive, intersectional historical events.
1620: In what some historians call America’s “foundation of liberty based on law and order,” the Mayflower Compact is signed. The agreement meant that 41 non-Pilgrim Mayflower passengers, known as the “strangers,” agreed to abide by new laws established by a new government, after initially defying authority. Future U.S. President Calvin Coolidge called the Mayflower Compact “the first real constitution of modern times.”
1654: The earliest-known freed slave landowner, Anthony Johnson, receives 100 acres in return for importing his son and another slave into North America. Johnson earned his freedom by completing several years of indentured service; it wasn’t until 1661 that the British government changed that law and declared slaves were slaves for life.
Above from top left: Young Thomas Edison, the Freedom of Information Act logo, George Latimer, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Coretta Scott King, Rosalyn Carter, Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson at the National Women’s Conference in 1977.
1842: George Latimer inspires a nationwide abolitionist movement to protect fugitives from slavery, when he is freed by a Boston judge. Latimer and his wife Rebecca had escaped slavery in Virginia by hiding on a steamboat ship to Boston, but their “owner” caught word and seized them in Boston. The judge’s order followed an uprising of support for Latimer that included support from Boston city officials and from hundreds of Black men throughout Massachusetts.
1905: Albert Enstein publishes what becomes known as the Theory of Relativity., to explain the relationship between space, time, mass, energy and gravity. It’s included in a series of papers he completed while a 26-year-old patent office clerk. His paper is titled, “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon its Energy Content?”
1922: The first woman to be seated in the United States Senate, Ruth Felton, is sworn in to represent the state of Georgia. But she’s more known for something else: Felton advocated for decades on behalf of women’s rights – and in support of lynching, as as means to protect white women from “rape.” “Although she was very progressive in many ways, her racist views advanced white supremacy and provided justification for heinous acts of racial violence,” writes the New Georgia Encyclopedia. Felton’s appointment was a ploy by another politician to foil a likely opponent for Felton’s seat, whose previous holder died unexpectedly. She served for only 24 hours.
1974: Congress succeeds in strengthening the Freedom of Information Act, overriding a veto by U.S. President Gerald Ford. Changes to the FOI Act included “judicial review of agency decisions, narrowing of some exemptions, restrictions on fees agencies could charge, and a new 10-day time limit for agencies to comply with a request.”
1977: An increased focus on women of color, and on accepting visible lesbians, are the results of the bipartisan National Women’s Conference that ends in Houston, Tex., after a three-day gathering of 20,000 women. First Ladies Rosalynn Carter, Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson spoke along with Coretta Scott King and Dr. Gloria Dean Randle Scott, the first-ever Black national president of the Girl Scouts of the USA.
1980: The National Black Independent Political Party forms when 1,500 Black activists from “the Black Power Movement and other related progressive groups” gather in Philadelphia. Called “the most prominent example of Blacks breaking with the major two-party system of Democrats and Republicans,” the NBIPP breaks up after six years.ology for unwelcome sexual advances.
2019: Benjamin Netanyahu becomes the first-ever sitting prime minister in Israel to be charged with a crime he is indicted on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust for accepting “hundreds of thousands of pounds in luxury gifts from billionaire friends and for trading valuable favours with Israeli media and telecoms moguls for positive news coverage.” The trial on those charges, which began in 2020, is currently delayed
Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Christine Hawes contributed to this report.
