February 1 Birthday
On February 1, 1960, four Black college students — Ezell Blair Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain, and Joseph McNeil — sat down at the whites-only lunch counter at the F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and asked to be served. They were refused. They stayed until closing. They came back the next day, and the next, and the next. Within a week, the protest had spread to other cities. Within six months, the Greensboro Woolworth had desegregated its lunch counter. The sit-in was not the first — there had been earlier protests in the 1940s and 1950s — but the Greensboro Four ignited a wave. By the end of 1960, over 70,000 people had participated in sit-ins across the South. February 1, 2003: The Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry over Texas and Louisiana. All seven astronauts died. During launch, sixteen days earlier, a piece of foam insulation had broken from the external tank and struck the left wing's leading edge. Engineers identified the strike during the mission and requested satellite imagery to assess the damage. Management declined. The breach in the wing allowed superheated plasma to penetrate the structure during reentry, and the shuttle disintegrated at twelve thousand miles per hour. The investigation found the same organizational failures that had killed Challenger seventeen years earlier — the normalization of risk, the dismissal of engineer concerns, the pressure to maintain schedule. In 1790, the first session of the United States Supreme Court was held at the Royal Exchange Building in New York City. The Court consisted of Chief Justice John Jay and five associate justices. There were no cases to hear. The first decision was not issued until 1791. The Court was so inconsequential in its early years that justices resigned to take other positions — John Rutledge left to serve in a state court. The Court's power to strike down unconstitutional laws was not established until 1803, in Marbury v. Madison, and even that was an assertion rather than an enumerated power. Clark Gable, born this day in 1901, was known as "the King of Hollywood." He enlisted in the Army Air Forces after the death of his wife Carole Lombard in a plane crash in 1942, and flew combat missions as an aerial photographer. He was forty-one. His Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind defined the masculine archetype of his era. Boris Yeltsin, born this day in 1931, stood on a tank outside the Russian White House in August 1991 and faced down a coup attempt against Gorbachev. The image defined the end of the Soviet Union. He died in 2007. People born on February 1 fall under the zodiac sign of Aquarius. The birthstone is Amethyst and the birth flower is Violet. Historical events on February 1 include 1790: First US Supreme Court convenes in New York City, 1960: Greensboro sit-in begins at Woolworth's lunch counter, 2003: Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrates during reentry. Famous people born on February 1 include Clark Gable (1901), Boris Yeltsin (1931), Héctor Elizondo (1936).