Supreme Court rules in Hernandez v. Texas, broadening civil rights laws

Year
1954
Month Day
May 03

The Supreme Court issues a momentous ruling that clarified the way that the American legal system handled charges of discrimination. In Hernandez v. Texas, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to all racial and ethnic groups facing discrimination, effectively broadening civil rights laws to include Hispanics and all other non-whites.

The defendant, Peter Hernandez, was a Mexican American agricultural laborer, part of the influx of such workers that had come to Texas during and after World War II. Hernandez was convicted of killing a man in cold blood in Jackson County, Texas, but his legal team, which was drawn mostly from one of the oldest Latino civil rights groups in the nation, the League of United Latin American Citizens, appealed. They pored through the records of jury selections in Jackson County, an area with a substantial Hispanic population, and found that not one of the roughly 6,000 jurors selected over the previous 25 years had a Hispanic last name. Citing the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been passed in 1868 and guaranteed equal protection under the law to all African Americans, Hernandez’s lawyers claimed he had been deprived of equal protection because discrimination prevented him from being tried by a jury of his peers.

A Texas appeals court upheld Hernandez’s conviction, but the case went to the Supreme Court. Lawyers for the State of Texas did not deny the charge of discrimination. Instead, they argued that such discrimination was not prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment, stating that it applied only to African Americans. Writing on behalf of himself and the other eight justices, Chief Justice Earl Warren dismissed this notion, saying, “The Fourteenth Amendment is not directed solely against discrimination due to a ‘two-class theory’—that is, based upon differences between ‘white’ and Negro.”

The decision that the Fourteenth Amendment applied to all racial minorities, not just the one its authors had had in mind, has had immense consequences for the Hispanic community and every other minority group that has sought equal protection in the face of racial discrimination. As the Civil Rights Movement progressed, Hernandez v. Texas ensured that every moment of legal progress for one minority was a victory for all.

READ MORE: The Mexican American Family Who Fought School Segregation 8 Years Before Brown v. Board of Ed

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Three-year-old Madeleine McCann goes missing in Portugal

Year
2007
Month Day
May 03

On May 3, 2007, less than two weeks before her fourth birthday, Madeleine McCann of Rothley, England, vanishes during a family vacation at a resort in southern Portugal. McCann’s disappearance prompted an international search; however, she has never been found.

In May 2007, the McCann family—parents Gerry and Kate McCann, Madeleine and her 2-year-old twin siblings Sean and Amelie—were vacationing with a group of friends at the Ocean Club resort in Praia da Luz (“Beach of Light”), a tourist village along Portugal’s Algarve coast. On the evening of May 3, Gerry and Kate McCann went with friends to the Ocean Club’s tapas bar, leaving a sleeping Madeleine and her brother and sister in the family’s ground-floor apartment, located near the tapas bar. The McCanns and their friends agreed to check on the children every half hour. At around 10 p.m., Kate McCann went to the apartment and discovered Madeleine was missing.

Portuguese police initially believed the little girl had wandered off and would be quickly found. As a result, they failed to promptly distribute a description of the missing child or search cars crossing the Portugal-Spain border, less than two hours from Praia da Luz.

McCann’s disappearance generated widespread media coverage in Europe and beyond. English soccer star David Beckham made a televised plea for her safe return, and “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling reportedly donated millions to help find the little girl. Gerry and Kate McCann, observant Catholics, also had an audience in Rome with Pope Benedict, who blessed a photo of Madeleine.

On September 7, 2007, Portuguese officials named Gerry and Kate McCann, both of whom are physicians, as suspects in their daughter’s disappearance. Soon after, authorities leaked word that Madeleine’s DNA had been discovered in the trunk of the car her parents rented in Portugal almost a month after she vanished. There was speculation that the McCanns, in order to enjoy an evening out, had given their children sedatives and that Madeleine had a fatal reaction to the dosage she received. Afterward, the McCanns faked her abduction and hid her body for weeks before transferring it to the trunk of their rental car. Gerry and Kate McCann labeled this theory ridiculous, particularly given the fact that they were under intense media scrutiny and constantly followed by reporters. The local Portuguese police chief later admitted that the DNA tests were inconclusive.

In July 2008, Gerry and Kate McCann were formally cleared by Portuguese officials of any involvement in their daughter’s disappearance. A third person who had been considered the case’s only other formal suspect, a British man living in Portugal, was cleared as well. Additionally, Portugal’s attorney general said there was insufficient evidence for police to continue their investigation.

The McCanns hired private detectives to keep looking for their daughter and have made publicity tours throughout Europe and the U.S. to raise awareness about her plight. 

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Japanese war crimes trial begins

Year
1946
Month Day
May 03

In Tokyo, Japan, the International Military Tribunals for the Far East begins hearing the case against 28 Japanese military and government officials accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during World War II.

On November 4, 1948, the trial ended with 25 of 28 Japanese defendants being found guilty. Of the three other defendants, two had died during the lengthy trial, and one was declared insane. On November 12, the war crimes tribunal passed death sentences on seven of the men, including General Hideki Tojo, who served as Japanese premier during the war, and other principals, such as Iwane Matsui, who organized the Rape of Nanking, and Heitaro Kimura, who brutalized Allied prisoners of war. Sixteen others were sentenced to life imprisonment, and two were sentenced to lesser terms in prison. On December 23, 1948, Tojo and the six others were executed in Tokyo.

Unlike the Nuremberg trial of Nazi war criminals, where there were four chief prosecutors, to represent Great Britain, France, the United States, and the USSR, the Tokyo trial featured only one chief prosecutor–American Joseph B. Keenan, a former assistant to the U.S. attorney general. However, other nations, especially China, contributed to the proceedings, and Australian judge William Flood Webb presided. In addition to the central Tokyo trial, various tribunals sitting outside Japan judged some 5,000 Japanese guilty of war crimes, of whom more than 900 were executed. Some observers thought that Emperor Hirohito should have been tried for his tacit approval of Japanese policy during the war, but he was protected by U.S. authorities who saw him as a symbol of Japanese unity and conservatism, both favorable traits in the postwar U.S. view.

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New Japanese constitution goes into effect

Year
1947
Month Day
May 03

On May 3, 1947, Japan’s postwar constitution goes into effect. The progressive constitution granted universal suffrage, stripped Emperor Hirohito of all but symbolic power, stipulated a bill of rights, abolished peerage, and outlawed Japan’s right to make war. The document was largely the work of Supreme Allied Commander Douglas MacArthur and his occupation staff, who had prepared the draft in February 1946 after a Japanese attempt was deemed unacceptable.

As the defender of the Philippines from 1941 to 1942, and commander of Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific theater from 1942 to 1945, Douglas MacArthur was the most acclaimed American general in the war against Japan. On September 2, 1945, aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, he presided over the official surrender of Japan. According to the terms of surrender, Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese government were subject to the authority of the Supreme Commander for Allied Powers in occupied Japan, a post filled by General MacArthur.

On September 8, Supreme Commander MacArthur made his way by automobile through the ruins of Tokyo to the American embassy, which would be his home for the next five and a half years. The occupation was to be a nominally Allied enterprise, but increasing Cold War division left Japan firmly in the American sphere of influence. From his General Headquarters, which overlooked the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo, MacArthur presided over an extremely productive reconstruction of Japanese government, industry, and society along American models. MacArthur was a gifted administrator, and his progressive reforms were for the most part welcomed by the Japanese people.

The most important reform carried out by the American occupation was the establishment of a new constitution to replace the 1889 Meiji Constitution. In early 1946, the Japanese government submitted a draft for a new constitution to the General Headquarters, but it was rejected for being too conservative. MacArthur ordered his young staff to draft their own version in one week. The document, submitted to the Japanese government on February 13, 1946, protected the civil liberties MacArthur had introduced and preserved the emperor, though he was stripped of power. Article 9 forbade the Japanese ever to wage war again.

Before Japan’s defeat, Emperor Hirohito was officially regarded as Japan’s absolute ruler and a quasi-divine figure. Although his authority was sharply limited in practice, he was consulted with by the Japanese government and approved of its expansionist policies from 1931 through World War II. Hirohito feared, with good reason, that he might be indicted as a war criminal and the Japanese imperial house abolished. MacArthur’s constitution at least preserved the emperor as the “symbol of the state and of the unity of the people,” so Hirohito offered his support. Many conservatives in the government were less enthusiastic, but on April 10, 1946, the new constitution was endorsed in popular elections that allowed Japanese women to vote for the first time. The final draft, slightly revised by the Japanese government, was made public one week later. On November 3, it was promulgated by the Diet–the Japanese parliament–and on May 3, 1947, it came into force.

In 1948, Yoshida Shigeru’s election as prime minister ushered in the Yoshida era, marked by political stability and rapid economic growth in Japan. In 1949, MacArthur gave up much of his authority to the Japanese government, and in September 1951 the United States and 48 other nations signed a formal peace treaty with Japan. On April 28, 1952, the treaty went into effect, and Japan assumed full sovereignty as the Allied occupation came to an end.

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Joseph Fletcher lands first aircraft on the North Pole

Year
1952
Month Day
May 03

A ski-modified U.S. Air Force C-47 piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher of Oklahoma and Lieutenant Colonel William P. Benedict of California becomes the first aircraft to land on the North Pole. A moment later, Fletcher climbed out of the plane and walked to the exact geographic North Pole, probably the first person in history to do so.

In the early 20th century, American explorers Robert Peary and Dr. Frederick Cook, both claiming to have separately reached the North Pole by land, publicly disputed each other’s claims. In 1911, Congress formally recognized Peary’s claim. In recent years, further studies of the conflicting claims suggest that neither expedition reached the exact North Pole, but that Peary came far closer, falling perhaps 30 miles short. In 1952, Lieutenant Colonel Fletcher was the first person to undisputedly stand on the North Pole. Standing alongside Fletcher on the top of the world was Dr. Albert P. Crary, a scientist who in 1961 traveled to the South Pole by motorized vehicle, becoming the first person in history to have stood on both poles.

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Italian philosopher and writer Niccolo Machiavelli born

Year
1469
Month Day
May 03

On May 3, 1469, the Italian philosopher and writer Niccolo Machiavelli is born. A lifelong patriot and diehard proponent of a unified Italy, Machiavelli became one of the fathers of modern political theory.

Machiavelli entered the political service of his native Florence by the time he was 29. As defense secretary, he distinguished himself by executing policies that strengthened Florence politically. He soon found himself assigned diplomatic missions for his principality, through which he met such luminaries as Louis XII of France, Pope Julius II, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, and perhaps most importantly for Machiavelli, a prince of the Papal States named Cesare Borgia. The shrewd and cunning Borgia later inspired the title character in Machiavelli’s famous and influential political treatise The Prince (1532).

Machiavelli’s political life took a downward turn after 1512, when he fell out of favor with the powerful Medici family. He was accused of conspiracy, imprisoned, tortured and temporarily exiled. It was an attempt to regain a political post and the Medici family’s good favor that Machiavelli penned The Prince, which was to become his most well-known work.

Though released in book form posthumously in 1532, The Prince was first published as a pamphlet in 1513. In it, Machiavelli outlined his vision of an ideal leader: an amoral, calculating tyrant for whom the end justifies the means. The Prince not only failed to win the Medici family’s favor, it also alienated him from the Florentine people. 

Machiavelli was never truly welcomed back into politics, and when the Florentine Republic was reestablished in 1527, Machiavelli was an object of great suspicion. He died later that year, embittered and shut out from the Florentine society to which he had devoted his life.

Though Machiavelli has long been associated with the practice of diabolical expediency in the realm of politics that was made famous in The Prince, his actual views were not so extreme. In fact, in such longer and more detailed writings as Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (1517) and History of Florence (1525), he shows himself to be a more principled political moralist. Still, even today, the term “Machiavellian” is used to describe an action undertaken for gain without regard for right or wrong.

HISTORY Vault

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173rd Airborne Brigade deploys to South Vietnam

Year
1965
Month Day
May 03

The lead element of the 173rd Airborne Brigade (“Sky Soldiers”), stationed in Okinawa, departs for South Vietnam. It was the first U.S. Army ground combat unit committed to the war. Combat elements of the 173rd Airborne Brigade included the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Battalions, 503rd Infantry; the 3rd Battalion, 319th Airborne Artillery; Company D, 16th Armor; Troop E, 17th Cavalry; and the 335th Aviation company.

Headquartered at Bien Hoa Air Base near Saigon, the Brigade conducted operations to keep communist forces away from the Saigon-Bien Hoa complex. In February 1967, the Brigade conducted a combat parachute jump into a major communist base area to the north of Saigon near the Cambodian border. In November 1967, the Brigade was ordered to the Central Highlands, where they fought a major battle at Dak To against an entrenched North Vietnamese Army regiment on Hill 875. In some of the most brutal fighting of the war, the paratroopers captured the hill on Thanksgiving Day, winning the Presidential Unit Citation for bravery in action.

After more than six years on the battlefield, the Brigade was withdrawn from Vietnam in August 1971. During combat service, they suffered 1,606 killed in action and 8,435 wounded in action. Twelve paratroopers of the 173rd were awarded the Medal of Honor for conspicuous bravery in battle.

READ MORE: Vietnam War Timeline

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Funk master, James Brown, is born

Year
1933
Month Day
May 03

“Soul Brother #1,”The Godfather of Soul,” “Mr. Dynamite,” “Sex Machine,” “The Minister of the New New Super Heavy Funk.” These are some of the names by which the world would eventually know James Joseph Brown, Jr., the revolutionary musical figure who was born on May 3, 1933. The story Brown himself would often tell is that he appeared stillborn when he first came into the world, but that an aunt attending his birth managed to breathe life into him.

Long before he changed the course of 20th-century popular music and crowned himself “The Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” little James Brown may well have been the hardest working boy in Augusta, Georgia, where he was sent to live with his Aunt Honey in Washington at the age of six. He’d spent the previous several years with his father, James, Sr., who scraped out a meager living selling pine tar to the local turpentine factory in the woods of Barnwell County, South Carolina, just down the Savannah River from Augusta. James’s mother had left with another man when James was only four, and while Aunt Honey would play something of a maternal role for James, the fact that she ran a brothel and sold moonshine for a living made for anything but a traditional upbringing.

While other famous musicians of his generation would get their musical training in the traditional context of the church, James Brown would get his on the streets, where between jobs as a cotton-picker, coal-scrounger and shoeshine boy, he also danced and sang to attract clients to his aunt’s place of business. He honed his talents further in prison, where he was sentenced to serve 8-to-16 years for stealing from parked cars at the age of 15. An experience that might have broken another man, however, instead inspired Brown to dedicate himself to music. He did his first gospel singing while in prison, where he earned the nickname “Music Box” and impressed his warden and the Georgia State Parole Board enough with his seriousness of purpose to win his release after only three years. At the age of 19, a highly motivated, worldly wise and ferociously talented James Brown walked out of prison and began his climb toward music greatness.

Born on this day in 1933, James Brown died on Christmas Day 2006.

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Lord Byron swims across tumultuous Hellespont strait in Turkey

Year
1810
Month Day
May 03

George Gordon, Lord Byron, swims across the Hellespont, a tumultuous strait in Turkey now called the Dardanelles. Legendary Greek hero Leander supposedly swam the same four-mile stretch. Byron’s visits to Greece later made him a passionate supporter of Greek independence from Turkey.

The 22-year-old Byron was taking an extended tour of the European continent when he decided to take his famous swim. His travels inspired his first widely read poetic work, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. After the publication of the poem’s first canto in 1809, Byron became a major British celebrity. The world-weary tone of the poems, describing the travels of a young noble waiting to be knighted, caught the imagination of the public and established the cynical Byronic hero.

Byron, who was born with a clubfoot, had been raised in near-poverty in Scotland. At age 10, he inherited his title and wealth from a great uncle. He attended top schools, including Trinity College, Cambridge, where he racked up enormous debt and began to publish poetry. When his first volume, Hours of Idleness, was received unkindly by critics, he savaged the literary establishment in his second book, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809).

Byron married Annabella Milbanke in 1815, after several passionate affairs with other women. The couple had a child but separated in 1816. Byron’s reputation was shattered by rumors of an incestuous affair with his half-sister, August Leigh. Forced to flee England, he settled in Geneva near Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. He had an affair with Mary Shelley’s half-sister, who later bore his child. He traveled throughout Italy, engaged in countless amorous liaisons, and published the first two cantos of Don Juan in 1819. In Don Juan, he boasts of his swim across the Hellespont nine years earlier. In 1823, having lost close friends and family, Byron left Italy for Greece, where he trained revolutionary troops until he caught a fever and died in 1824. He became a national hero in Greece.

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U.S. Supreme Court decides Paramount antitrust case

Year
1948
Month Day
May 03

On May 3, 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court issues a decision in U.S. v. Paramount Pictures, et al., the government’s long-running antitrust lawsuit against Paramount Pictures and seven other major Hollywood movie studios.

The forerunner of the case was a 1928 antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission against the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (the forerunner to Paramount) and nine other major film studios. Declared guilty of violating antitrust law in 1930, the studios were nonetheless able to resume functioning as normal after concluding a controversial deal with the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression, under the auspices of the National Industrial Recovery Act. In July 1938, the government reversed its stance toward Hollywood and filed its lawsuit against seven major studios: Paramount, Universal, MGM, Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros., Columbia and RKO.

The government’s case accused the studios of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act in their total control over movie distribution and exhibition. At the time, the seven studios controlled almost all the country’s movie theaters, either through ownership of their own theater chains or through a process known as “block booking,” in which independent theater owners signed contracts with the studios that required them to show a given number (or “block”) of films. In their antitrust case, the government was demanding that the studios end block booking and get rid of either their distribution arms or theaters.

The case first went to trial in federal court in New York in June 1940, but was called off after two weeks when the government and studio attorneys worked out a compromise deal in which the studios would retain their movie theaters but limit block booking. Dissatisfaction with this so-called consent decree led to the formation of the Society of Independent Motion Picture Producers (SIMPP) by some of the leading independent movie producers of the day, including Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney, Samuel Goldwyn, David O. Selznick, Mary Pickford and Orson Welles. The efforts by independent producers helped get the government’s antitrust case back into court in the fall of 1945. After a New York District Court handed down a guilty ruling (the terms of which nonetheless failed to satisfy the government and the independent producers), both sides submitted appeals that would eventually take the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The trial proceeded quickly once it reached the Supreme Court in February 1948. On May 3, the court issued its ruling, which affirmed the earlier verdicts and declared the studios guilty of violating antitrust law. By the terms of the verdict, the studios were made to sign consent decrees that would end the practice of block booking by requiring that all films be sold on an individual basis. They were also required to divest themselves of their own theater chains. With this decision, independent producers could finally begin to compete with the major studios for audiences and actors, marking the beginning of the end for the Hollywood studio system.

READ MORE: How TV Killed Hollywood’s Golden Age 

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