Check out This Day in History for Oct. 22 in MainStream’s daily look at significant progressive, intersectional historical events.
1879: Building on the work of at least five other inventors, Thomas Edison makes the bulb commercially viable on this date with his breakthrough carbonized cotton filament light bulb. MysticStamp says Edison’s lightbulb burned for more than 13 hours on this day, “a brightness equivalent to 33 candles.”
1924: Former Bloomington, Ill., resident Ralph Smedley leads the first-ever gathering of what would become Toastmasters International in Santa Ana, Calif. Smedley, who first tried to start the group in 1904 while living in Bloomington, sought to create a group that helped people “become confident public speakers and leaders by practicing in a supportive group setting rather than a formal academic environment.” The nonprofit now includes day 270,000 members, in 14,000 clubs, throughout 150 countries.
Above, the Freedom Day protests at Chicago Public Schools, the logo for the October 22 Coalition to end police brutality, Toastmasters International logo, October 22 Coalition logo, Clarence S. Greene
1953: Clarence S. Greene, a former dentist, becomes the first board-certified Black neurosurgeon. A graduate of Howard University College of Medicine, Green performed the first-ever craniotomies at the university’s hospital, part of which will be named after him.
1963: More than 200,000 students and 10,000 parents and community members boycott the Chicago Public Schools to stand up for desegregation. Freedom Day, as it was known, objected to a districtwide rule that required students to attend schools that were within walking distance, resulting in segregated schools that were also overcrowded in Black neighborhoods. The board begins to slowly desegregate; the clash draws Martin Luther King Jr., to live in Chicago.
1986: “We are fighting a disease, not people,” says Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, in an official report about AIDS requested by U.S. President Ronald Reagan, that called out misinformation about AIDS. The Surgeon General’s Report on Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome offered frank information about the sexual transmission of HIV and was attacked by activists and conservatives alike.
1996: The National Day of Protest to End Police Brutality is founded by the October 22 Coalition to Stop Police Brutality, Repression and the Criminalization of a Generation.”U.S. police killed at least 1,365 people, the highest number on record. Further, Black Americans continue to be killed by police at nearly three times the rate of white Americans,” writes the Civil Liberties Defense Center.
2012: Cyclist Lance Armstrong is formallybanned for life from professional cycling and loses his seven Tour de France titles after the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), the world governing body for cycling, accuses him of doping. Armstrong would deny the charges for over a decade. “I view this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times,” Armstrong eventually tells Oprah Winfrey. He also receives a lifetime ban from the Olympics.
2023: For the first time since the October 7, when a Hamas-led incursion into Israel killed 1,200 and left 245 hostages,humanitarian aid trucks with foodcross into Gaza. Israel would bomb food convoys in coming years, and cut off food aid altogether in March 2025, before allowing it again in May yet also maintaining restrictions on food aid to Palestinians even today.
Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Zinn Education Project
