South African president Nelson Mandela dies at 95

On December 5, 2013, Nelson Mandela, the former activist who overcame a nearly three-decade prison stint to become president of South Africa, passes away after years of struggling with health issues. He was 95.

“Our nation has lost its greatest son. Our people have lost a father,” South African President Jacob Zuma said. “What made Nelson Mandela great was precisely what made him human. We saw in him what we seek in ourselves.”

Mandela was known as a freedom fighter, prisoner, civil rights leader, political leader and symbol of integrity and reconciliation not only for South Africa, but for the world.

His lifelong mission to end apartheid started when he left school early to join the the African National Congress (ANC). He rose quickly in the organization, and was elected president of the organization in 1950. It was in 1960 that Mandela’s efforts turned more militant, sparked when police opened fire on a group of unarmed protestors in the Sharpeville township, killing 69 people.

READ MORE: Key Steps That Led to the End of Apartheid 

Soon after, the ANC was outlawed, but that didn’t stop Mandela. After the ban, he went underground to form a new, armed wing of the organization named “Spear of the Nation.” Through this group, which was also known as the MK, Mandela helped plan attacks on government institutions, like the post office.

The violent turn was not one he took lightly. “It would be wrong and unrealistic for African leaders to continue preaching peace and nonviolence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force,” he said about starting the more militant branch. “It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle.”

In 1962, Mandela secretly left South Africa, traveling around Africa and England to gain support. He also trained in Morocco and Ethiopia. When he returned, he was arrested and charged with illegal exit of the country and incitement to strike. He was then sentenced to life in prison for sabotage and conspiracy to overthrow the government.

Instead of a testimony, he gave a four hours long speech, ending it by saying: “I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

While he was in prison, a “Free Nelson Mandela” campaign fueled the outcry against the regime.

In 1990, newly elected president F. W. de Klerk made a shocking move that broke from the conservatives of his party, lifting the ban on the ANC—and all other formerly banned political parties—and calling for a non-racist South Africa. That February, de Klerk unconditionally released Mandela. The then 71-year-old walked out of prison, fist held above his head. He had served 27 years in prison.

After his release, Mandela resumed his leadership of the ANC in its negotiations for an end to apartheid. Incredibly, just four years after his release, on May 10, 1994, he was inaugurated as South Africa’s first democratically elected President.

As president, Mandela introduced social and economic programs and presided over the enactment of a new constitution that established a strong central government and prohibited discrimination. He also discouraged black South Africans from seeking revenge for the apartheid period, preaching kindness and forgiveness instead. Mandela only served one term in order to set an example for future leaders, but he remained in the nation’s consciousness until his death.

Dozens of officials world leaders expressed their grief over Mandela’s passing. The funeral and burial cap took place over 10 days of national mourning. On December 15, tribal leaders clad in animal skins stood alongside officials in dark suits as Mandela’s coffin, which was draped with the South African flag, was buried in his childhood village of Qunu. 

READ MORE: Nelson Mandela: His Written Legacy

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21st amendment is ratified; Prohibition ends

The 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, repealing the 18th Amendment and bringing an end to the era of national prohibition of alcohol in America. At 5:32 p.m. EST, Utah became the 36th state to ratify the amendment, achieving the requisite three-fourths majority of states’ approval. Pennsylvania and Ohio had ratified it earlier in the day.

The movement for the prohibition of alcohol began in the early 19th century, when Americans concerned about the adverse effects of drinking began forming temperance societies. By the late 19th century, these groups had become a powerful political force, campaigning on the state level and calling for national liquor abstinence. Several states outlawed the manufacture or sale of alcohol within their own borders. In December 1917, the 18th Amendment, prohibiting the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes,” was passed by Congress and sent to the states for ratification. On January 16, 1919, the 18th Amendment was ratified by the states. Prohibition went into effect the next year, on January 17, 1920.

READ MORE: The Night Prohibition Ended

In the meantime, Congress passed the Volstead Act on October 28, 1919, over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto. The Volstead Act provided for the enforcement of Prohibition, including the creation of a special Prohibition unit of the Treasury Department. In its first six months, the unit destroyed thousands of illicit stills run by bootleggers. However, federal agents and police did little more than slow the flow of booze, and organized crime flourished in America. Large-scale bootleggers like Al Capone of Chicago built criminal empires out of illegal distribution efforts, and federal and state governments lost billions in tax revenue. In most urban areas, the individual consumption of alcohol was largely tolerated and drinkers gathered at “speakeasies,” the Prohibition-era term for saloons.

Prohibition, failing fully to enforce sobriety and costing billions, rapidly lost popular support in the early 1930s. In 1933, the 21st Amendment to the Constitution was passed and ratified, ending national Prohibition. After the repeal of the 18th Amendment, some states continued Prohibition by maintaining statewide temperance laws. Mississippi, the last dry state in the Union, ended Prohibition in 1966.

READ MORE: How the Prohibition Era Spurred Organized Crime 

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Aircraft squadron disappears in the Bermuda Triangle

At 2:10 p.m., five U.S. Navy Avenger torpedo-bombers comprising Flight 19 take off from the Ft. Lauderdale Naval Air Station in Florida on a routine three-hour training mission. Flight 19 was scheduled to take them due east for 120 miles, north for 73 miles, and then back over a final 120-mile leg that would return them to the naval base. They never returned.

Two hours after the flight began, the leader of the squadron, who had been flying in the area for more than six months, reported that his compass and back-up compass had failed and that his position was unknown. The other planes experienced similar instrument malfunctions. Radio facilities on land were contacted to find the location of the lost squadron, but none were successful. After two more hours of confused messages from the fliers, a distorted radio transmission from the squadron leader was heard at 6:20 p.m., apparently calling for his men to prepare to ditch their aircraft simultaneously because of lack of fuel.

READ MORE: Bermuda Triangle Mystery: What Happened to the USS Cyclops?

By this time, several land radar stations finally determined that Flight 19 was somewhere north of the Bahamas and east of the Florida coast, and at 7:27 p.m. a search and rescue Mariner aircraft took off with a 13-man crew. Three minutes later, the Mariner aircraft radioed to its home base that its mission was underway. The Mariner was never heard from again. Later, there was a report from a tanker cruising off the coast of Florida of a visible explosion seen at 7:50 p.m.

The disappearance of the 14 men of Flight 19 and the 13 men of the Mariner led to one of the largest air and seas searches to that date, and hundreds of ships and aircraft combed thousands of square miles of the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, and remote locations within the interior of Florida. No trace of the bodies or aircraft was ever found.

Although naval officials maintained that the remains of the six aircraft and 27 men were not found because stormy weather destroyed the evidence, the story of the “Lost Squadron” helped cement the legend of the Bermuda Triangle, an area of the Atlantic Ocean where ships and aircraft are said to disappear without a trace. The Bermuda Triangle is said to stretch from the southern U.S. coast across to Bermuda and down to the Atlantic coast of Cuba and Santo Domingo.

READ MORE: What is the Bermuda Triangle?

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The Mary Celeste, a ship whose crew mysteriously disappeared, is spotted at sea

The Dei Gratia, a small British brig under Captain David Morehouse, spots the Mary Celeste, an American vessel, sailing erratically but at full sail near the Azores Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. The ship was seaworthy, its stores and supplies were untouched, but not a soul was onboard.

On November 7, the brigantine Mary Celeste sailed from New York harbor for Genoa, Italy, carrying Captain Benjamin S. Briggs, his wife and two-year-old daughter, a crew of eight, and a cargo of some 1,700 barrels of crude alcohol. After the Dei Gratia sighted the vessel on December 4, Captain Morehouse and his men boarded the ship to find it abandoned, with its sails slightly damaged, several feet of water in the hold, and the lifeboat and navigational instruments missing. However, the ship was in good order, the cargo intact, and reserves of food and water remained on board.

The last entry in the captain’s log shows that the Mary Celeste had been nine days and 500 miles away from where the ship was found by the Dei Gratia. Apparently, the Mary Celeste had been drifting toward Genoa on her intended course for 11 days with no one at the wheel to guide her. Captain Briggs, his family, and the crew of the vessel were never found, and the reason for the abandonment of the Mary Celeste has never been determined.

READ MORE: What Happened to the Mary Celeste? 

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Army Captain awarded first Medal of Honor for action in Vietnam

The first Medal of Honor awarded to a U.S. serviceman for action in Vietnam is presented to Capt. Roger Donlon of Saugerties, New York, for his heroic action earlier in the year.

Captain Donlon and his Special Forces team were manning Camp Nam Dong, a mountain outpost near the borders of Laos and North Vietnam. Just before two o’clock in the morning on July 6, 1964, hordes of Viet Cong attacked the camp. He was shot in the stomach, but Donlon stuffed a handkerchief into the wound, cinched up his belt, and kept fighting. He was wounded three more times, but he continued fighting–manning a mortar, throwing grenades at the enemy, and refusing medical attention.

The battle ended in early morning; 154 Viet Cong were killed during the battle. Two Americans died and seven were wounded. Over 50 South Vietnamese soldiers and Nung mercenaries were also killed during the action. Once the battle was over, Donlon allowed himself to be evacuated to a hospital in Saigon. He spent over a month there before rejoining the surviving members of his Special Forces team; they completed their six-month tour in Vietnam in November and flew home together. In a White House ceremony, with Donlon’s nine surviving team members watching, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented him with the Medal of Honor for “conspicuous gallantry, extraordinary heroism and intrepidity at the risk of his own life above and beyond the call of duty.” Donlon, justifiably proud of his team, told the president, “The medal belongs to them, too.”

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TV producer Roone Arledge dies

On December 5, 2002, the legendary television producer and executive Roone Arledge dies in New York City, at the age of 71. Born in Forest Hills, Queens, Arledge won his first producing job from New York’s Channel 4, where he worked behind the scenes on a puppet show starring Shari Lewis. After unsuccessfully pitching a pilot called For Men Only to NBC, he was noticed by ABC executive Ed Sherick, and began working at ABC’s fledgling sports division in 1960.

From the start of his tenure at ABC, Arledge aimed to “add show business to sports,” as he put it. He pioneered a number of new techniques in college football programming, including hand-held cameras, aerial footage and improved sound. With Sherick, he introduced ABC’s Wide World of Sports, a weekly roundup of sporting events–featuring many less mainstream sports from around the world–hosted by Jim McKay. The groundbreaking show became a hit, and by 1964 Arledge was a network vice president; he became president of ABC Sports four years later.

More than anyone else, Arledge brought sports programming out of its limited weekend niche and into prime time, beginning with the broadcast of the Olympic Games in 1968. In 1970, Arledge solidified his impact with the premiere of Monday Night Football with Howard Cosell, Frank Gifford and Don Meredith, which opened the floodgates for all major sports to move into prime time. Arledge’s enormously influential style–including “up close and personal” stories about athletes’ lives and technological innovations such as instant and slow-motion replays, split-screen views and isolated cameras–aimed to thrill audiences and get them emotionally involved in the broadcast. His philosophy continues to define sports programming today.

Notoriously detail-oriented, Arledge truly showed his mettle during the 1972 Olympics in Munich, when Arab terrorists took 11 Israeli athletes hostage. As the U.S. broadcaster of the Games, ABC had exclusive access, and under Arledge’s guidance, the network covered the unfolding crisis continuously for the next 17 hours, up to and including the announcement that the hostages had been killed. ABC, Jim McKay- and Arledge won a historic total of 29 Emmys for the Munich coverage.

Arledge took over ABC’s struggling news division in 1977, retaining control of ABC Sports as well. Renaming the nightly newscast World News Tonight, he nurtured the careers of top newscasters such as Peter Jennings and oversaw the coverage of such momentous topics as apartheid in South Africa and the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80, Arledge produced a nightly special on the crisis, a first in network news. The show later became Nightline, hosted by Ted Koppel. Arledge put another network star, Barbara Walters, at the head of the first news magazine show, 20/20. By 1990, ABC News was turning a yearly profit of some $70 million, another first for a network news division.

In the mid-1990s, Arledge began to relinquish day-to-day control at ABC; the Walt Disney Company’s acquisition of the network in 1996 accelerated this process. Three months before his death on December 5, 2002, Arledge was awarded the first-ever lifetime achievement Emmy–his 37th Emmy Award overall.

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Eddie Murphy stars in “Beverly Hills Cop”

Eddie Murphy stars as the wisecracking Detective Axel Foley in the action-comedy Beverly Hills Cop, released in theaters on December 5, 1984. The movie marked the first major starring role for Murphy, who went on to become one of the top-grossing actors in Hollywood.

Murphy was born on April 3, 1961, in Brooklyn, New York, and rose to fame in the early 1980s on the TV sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live. As a regular cast member of the show from 1980 to 1984, Murphy became known for such memorable characters as Buckwheat, Gumby and an inner-city Mr. Rogers, as well as for his impersonations of celebrities, including Stevie Wonder. In 1982, Murphy made his big-screen debut in the hit action-comedy 48 Hrs., co-starring Nick Nolte, which was followed by another popular comedy, Trading Places (1983), featuring fellow SNLer Dan Aykroyd, Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche.

It was the huge box-office success of 1984’s Beverly Hills Cop, however, that propelled Murphy to worldwide fame. In the film, Murphy played a police detective from Detroit who winds up in Beverly Hills, where he tracks a man believed responsible for the death of his friend. Beverly Hills Cop earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and featured a soundtrack with such chart-toppers as “New Attitude” by Patti LaBelle and “The Heat is On” by Glenn Frey. The film spawned the hit sequels Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) and Beverly Hills Cop III (1994).

In 1989, Murphy made his directorial debut with Harlem Nights, which he also wrote and co-starred in, opposite Richard Pryor. The film was panned by critics and Murphy’s career slumped as he went on to appear in a series of box-office duds. Things rebounded for the actor in the mid-1990s, when he starred in such family-friendly box-office hits as The Nutty Professor (1996), in which he played multiple characters, and Dr. Doolittle (1998), in which he played the title role. Murphy scored yet another massive hit when he voiced the character of a donkey in 2001’s animated feature Shrek and its sequels, Shrek 2 (2004), Shrek the Third (2007) and Shrek Forever After (2010). He starred in Dolemite Is My Name in 2019, considered his “comeback” to film. 

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Hundreds die in Brooklyn theater fire

A fire at the Brooklyn Theater in New York kills nearly 300 people and injures hundreds more on December 5, 1876. Some victims perished from a combination of burns and smoke inhalation; others were trampled to death in the general panic that ensued.

The play The Two Orphans starring Harry S. Murdock and Kate Claxton was showing at the Brooklyn Theater on the night of December 5. The theater, built five years earlier at the corner of Johnson and Washington streets, was very popular at the time and all 900 seats were filled. Sometime near the start of the performance, a gas light ignited some extra scenery stored in the fly space behind the stage. It wasn’t until midway through the play that stagehands noticed the quickly spreading flames. Unfortunately, there were no fire hoses or water buckets at hand and the fire spread, unbeknownst to the cast and audience.

Finally, someone shouted “Fire!” and despite Murdock’s best attempt to calm the crowd, bedlam ensued, particularly in the balcony and rear of the theater. A narrow staircase was the only the exit from the balcony (there were no fire escapes) and panic resulted in a stampede in which many were crushed and others remained trapped. Meanwhile, the fire grew out of control. Witnesses saw Murdock return to the dressing room to change clothes; he then tried to wiggle out of a small window. He couldn’t get through, and died when the floor gave way and he fell to the basement.

By the time firefighters arrived it was too late for hundreds of people. The fire raged through the night and destroyed nearly the entire building. When would-be rescuers were finally able to get in, all they found were bodies melted together. Up to 100 of the victims were burned beyond recognition and could not be identified. A mass grave was set up at the Green-Wood Cemetery. In all, approximately 295 people died. A 30-foot-high granite memorial was later erected in their honor by the city of Brooklyn.

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The Boston Belfry Murderer kills his first victim

Bridget Landregan is found beaten and strangled to death in the Boston suburb of Dorchester. According to witnesses, a man in black clothes and a flowing cape attempted to sexually assault the dead girl before running away. In 1874, a man fitting the same description clubbed another young girl, Mary Sullivan, to death. His third victim, Mary Tynan, was bludgeoned in her bed in 1875. Although she survived for a year after the severe attack, she was never able to identify her attacker.

Residents of Boston were shocked to learn that the killer had been among them all along. Thomas Piper, the sexton at the Warren Avenue Baptist Church, was known for his flowing black cape, but because he was friendly with the parishioners, nobody suspected his involvement. But when five-year-old Mabel Young, who was last seen with the sexton, was found dead in the church’s belfry in the summer of 1876, Piper became the prime suspect. Young’s skull had been crushed with a wooden club.

Piper, who was dubbed “The Boston Belfry Murderer,” confessed to the four killings after his arrest. He was convicted and sentenced to die, and he was hanged in 1876.

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U.S.S.R. and Afghanistan sign “friendship treaty”

In an effort to prop up an unpopular pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union signs a “friendship treaty” with the Afghan government agreeing to provide economic and military assistance. The treaty moved the Russians another step closer to their disastrous involvement in the Afghan civil war between the Soviet-supported communist government and the Muslim rebels, the Mujahideen, which officially began in 1979.

The Soviet Union always considered the bordering nation of Afghanistan of interest to its national security. Since the 1950s, the Soviet Union worked diligently to establish close relations with its neighbor by providing economic aid and military assistance. In the 1970s matters took a dramatic turn in Afghanistan, and in April 1978, members of the Afghan Communist Party overthrew and murdered President Sardar Mohammed Daoud. Nur Mohammed Taraki, head of the Communist Party, took over and immediately declared one-party rule in Afghanistan. The regime was extremely unpopular with many Afghans so the Soviets sought to bolster it with the December 1978 treaty. The treaty established a 20-year period of “friendship and cooperation” between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. In addition to increased economic assistance, the Soviet Union promised continued cooperation in the military field. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev declared that the treaty marked a “qualitatively new character” of relations between the two nations.

The treaty, however, did not help Afghanistan. Taraki was overthrown and killed by members of the Afghan Communist Party who were dissatisfied with his rule in September 1979. In December, Soviet troops moved into Afghanistan and established a regime more amenable to Russian desires. Thus began what many pundits referred to as “Russia’s Vietnam,” as the Soviets poured endless amounts of money, weapons, and manpower into a seemingly endless civil war. Mikhail Gorbachev finally began the withdrawal of Russian troops nearly 10 years later.

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