Milestones: March 7, 2024

March 7, 2024 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

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‘BLOODY SUNDAY’ — A 600-PERSON-STRONG CIVIL RIGHTS DEMONSTRATION ENDED IN VIOLENCE ON MARCH 7, 1965 as the group crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma, Alabama. Leading the march, were civil rights activists John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The group was commemorating and protesting the recent fatal shooting of a church deacon named Jimmie Lee Jackson at the hands of a state trooper. The marchers had planned to walk 54 miles from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery, but were pushed back at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and ordered to disperse. Police then attacked marchers with tear gas, whips and billy clubs. As the violence was broadcast on TV, additional demonstrations broke out across the U.S., and Martin Luther King Jr. two days later, led more than two thousand marchers across the same Edmund Pettus Bridge. President Lyndon B. Johnson then responded by articulating the need for voter reform.

John Lewis, 25 at the time, survived his injuries, and later served for 33 years as a Democrat Congressoweaib from Georgia, from 1987 until his death in 2020 at the age of 80.

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VIOLATED TREATIES — GERMANY ALREADY DISDAINED THE TREATY OF VERSAILLES, SIGNED IN 1919 AFTER WORLD WAR I, which punished the Axis power by mandating stiff war reparations. Some 17 years later, Nazi Leader Adolf Hitler violated both the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact of December 1925, in which Germany, as well as France, Belgium, Great Britain and Italy agreed to keep peace in western Europe. Germany’s anger at being forced into the Treaty of Versailles was so pronounced that its delegate broke the ceremonial pen used in the signing. As part of the treaty, the Rhine was to be demilitarized. When Hitler rose to power in the 1930s, the Nazi Party promised vengeance on the Allied nations. Hitler voided the Versailles Treaty’s clauses regarding militarization and denounced the Locarno Pact.

The Nazis then expanded beyond its boundaries, absorbing Austria and Czechoslovakia, invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, and then France in June 1940.

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PATENT FOR TELEPHONE— ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL, ON MARCH 7, 1876, RECEIVED A PATENT for his revolutionary new invention: the telephone. The 29-year-old Scottish-born inventor had worked with his father, Melville Bell, on the development of Visible Speech, a written system used to teach speaking to the deaf. As part of his work at Pemberton Avenue School for the Deaf, Bell grew impassioned with the potential of transmitting speech over wires, and sought to adapt Samuel F.B. Morse’s 1843 telegraph invention for this purpose. Because the telegraph was limited in the need for handwritten transcriptions of the coded messages, Bell sought to design a “harmonic” telegraph that combined the capabilities of the telegraph with a record player using a system of manual diaphragms both on the sending and receiving instruments.

Just three days after filing his patent, Bell’s new telephone transmitted its first message, directed at his assistant: “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you.”

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FAITHFUL CORRESPONDENTS — FIVE LETTERS WERE DELIVERED IN ONE DAY, MARCH 7, 1777, TO CONTINENTAL CONGRESSPERSON AND FOUNDING FATHER JOHN ADAMS IN PHILADELPHIA, BY HIS WIFE, ABIGAIL, who was managing their farm in Braintree, Massachusetts. The long absences for this couple became transformed into a rich trove of correspondence, a total of more than 1,100 letters, dealing with topics from politics, military strategy to household matters and their health. Throughout these letters, John and Abigail’s mutual respect and love were evident.

Abigail’s letters to John bemoaned the challenges of being able to correspond reliably during wartime, as well as New Englanders’ military apathy. The correspondence was highlighted in the play and film version of 1776, starring William Daniels and Virginia Vestoff as John and Abigail.

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BEST DIRECTOR ALSO WINS ‘BEST PICTURE’ — ON THIS DATE, KATHRYN BIGELOW ON MARCH 7, 2010, BECAME THE FIRST WOMAN TO WIN AN ACADEMY AWARD FOR BEST DIRECTOR, for her movie “The Hurt Locker,” about an American bomb squad that disables explosives in Iraq in 2004. “The Hurt Locker,” starring Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty, also won Oscars for Best Picture, Film Editing, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Original Screenplay. Bigelow made her feature film debut with 1982’s “The Loveless,” starring Willem Dafoe which she cowrote and codirected.

Before Bigelow, only three women had been nominated for a best director Oscar: Lina Wertmueller for 1975’s “Seven Beauties,” Jane Campion for 1993’s “The Piano” and Sofia Coppola for 2003’s “Lost in Translation.”

See previous milestones, here.