Check out progressive happenings over time on This Day in History for October 21.
Above, Mohawk Catholic saint Kateri Tekakwitha, an anti-war sign at the March on the Pentagon in 1967, former President Warren Harding, and a rendition of the Medicine Lodge Treaty that displaced the Kiowa, Comanche, and Plains Apache tribes from the Great Plains
1921: Warren Harding becomes the first sitting president to condemn lynching, making his statement during a time when lynchings were claiming two Black lives every week, the NAACP stated.
1955: Forty years before Rosa Parks, an 18-year old named Mary Louise Smith refuses to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger and is arrested for “failure to obey segregation orders.” She is fined $12 (now about $145), and the following year will be part of a federal civil suit, Browder V. Gayle, that helps bolster the desegregation movement.
1967: The March on the Pentagon brings together 100,000 people to protest the Vietnam War. One of the first demonstrations against the war, the March involved clergy, students, hippies, and Black activists. A standoff in front of the Pentagon lasted for hours and left dozens wounded and 682 protestors arrested.
1989: Chicago businessmen Bertram Lee and Peter Bynoe become the first Black Americans with a “controlling interest” in an American sports team, with a $54 million purchase of the Denver Nuggets NBA franchise.
2012: Mohawk woman Kateri Tekakwitha becomes the first Native American Catholic Saint. She survived plagues and colonial attacks, but converted to Catholicism at age 19 after Jesuit missionaries entered her village. She Tekakwitha died in 1660 at age 24, and pilgrimages to her tomb have been credited with healing miracles. She leaves a divided legacy. Orenda Boucher, a Mohawk humanities professor, told AP News, “A lot of my friends who are traditionalists see Kateri as tied into the story of colonization,” while Mohawk historian Russell Roundpoint said “The Mohawk people are very proud of the fact that she has attained such a high level…”
2020: “Homosexual people have a right to be in a family,” Pope Francis says in Evgeny Afineevsky’s documentary Francesco, which shows him encouraging a gay couple with children to attend church. He also declares support for civil unions, but not marriage equality. Pope Francis had opposed civil unions and LGBT adoption as late as 2014.
Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
