4th May, 1961: U.S Freedom Riders Start Bus Campaign
Civil rights activists, known as the U.S. Freedom Riders, started their campaign by riding buses into the segregated southern US to test the Supreme Court’s decision on Boynton vs. Virginia of the previous year. The very first freedom ride left Washington D.C. on this day, 1961, and was scheduled to arrive in New Orleans on May 17th.
Boynton vs. Virginia outlawed racial segregation in bus station restaurants and terminals, so the freedom fighters set out to test the integrity of the ruling by boarding various forms of transport and travelling across the southern US. The actions of these freedom riders ultimately bolstered the American Civil Rights movement, which was at its most influential between 1955 and 1968.
5th May, 1961 – Alan Shepard First American In Space Aboard Mercury-Redstone 3.
Mercury-Redstone 3 was a piloted space mission, part of the US’s ‘Mercury program’. The mission launched on May 5, 1961 from Cape Canaveral with the use of a Redstone rocket. The Mercury spacecraft was named Freedom 7 and was piloted by Alan B. Shepard, who became the first American in space. The flight was suborbital, lasting less than 16 minutes, and reached an altitude of just over 116 miles.
Earlier Russian Soviet Vostok 1 flights orbited the Earth, but the US mission was designed simply to test ballistic trajectory, meaning that Shepard simply went up and the down again! However, the simplicity of the mission meant that Shepard became the first astronaut to safely return to Earth inside his vehicle, after Russian, Yuri Gagarin, was forced to parachute prior to landing in the Vostok 1 mission.
6th May, 1961 – Tottenham Hotspur Win Double Title
On this day, 1961, Tottenham Hotspur became the first English team of the twentieth century (and only the third in history) to celebrate a double victory of the league title and the FA Cup, winning 2-0 against Leicester City in the final. The two goals were scored by Robert Smith and Terry Dyson, both of whom were top scorers for the club throughout their respective careers. The last team to achieve this double victory was Aston Villa in 1897, who beat Everton 3-2 at Crystal Palace.
8th May, 1961 – British Spy Found Guilty Of Being A Double-Agent
On this day, British spy, George Blake (christened George Behar) was sentenced to forty-two years in prison for being a double-agent in the pay of the Soviet Union. Blake escaped from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966 and fled to the USSR. Blake’s most notable work involved translating German documents during World War II, as well as interrogating captured Germans in France around the time of the D-Day landings.
He was recruited by MI6 in 1948 after a crash-course in Russian and posted to the Seoul British Embassy. Captured in Korea in 1950, Blake became a Marxist and after his release betrayed details of around 400 MI6 agents to the Soviet Union. He was exposed as a Soviet spy in 1961 by Polish defector, Michael Goleniewski. The maximum prison term for someone committing espionage was fourteen years, but Blake was convicted of three separate counts of spying, so his sentence was tripled to forty-two years of imprisonment. This would be the longest British court sentence ruled until Nezar Hindawi was imprisoned to forty-five years for attempting to bomb an El Al plane. In 2007, Blake was awarded the Order of Friendship by Vladimir Putin.
15th May, 1961 – Heinrich Matthaei: The Birth Of Modern Genetics
On this day, 1961, J Heinrich Matthaei performed the Poly-U-Experiment on his own, and was the first bio-chemist to understand and recognise the existence of the genetic code. Though Matthaei’s work is widely regarded as the main contributing factor to the birth of modern genetics, it was his fellow scientist, Marshall Warren Nirenberg that shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology.
Matthaei’s not being awarded the prize, as the person who actually deciphered the genetic code, remains one of the biggest Nobel Prize controversies.
28th May, 1961 – Founding Of Amnesty International
Jewish and son of an army officer father, Peter James Henry Solomon chose to keep his mother’s name in later life. At sixteen he helped establish an aid fund for children orphaned by the Spanish civil war. From 1941-1945, Benenson worked as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park, and afterwards became a barrister and joined the Labour Party.
In 1958 he became ill and moved to Italy, where he soon converted to the Roman Catholic Faith. In this year, 1961, Benenson was shocked to hear that two Portuguese students had been imprisoned for toasting to ‘freedom’ during the reign of António de Oliveira Salazar – the Estado Novo. This inspired him to write his paper, ‘The Forgotten Prisoners’, which appeared in The Observer on this day, May 28th 1961.
In the paper, Benenson encouraged people to write their own papers and letters to show support for the students. An organisation needed to be created to manage the letter-writing campaigns, and so Amnesty International was founded in Luxembourg.
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