March 7 Birthday
March 7, 1965: Six hundred civil rights marchers set out from Selma, Alabama, toward Montgomery to demand voting rights. They crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were met by state troopers and a posse deputized by the local sheriff. The troopers attacked with billy clubs, tear gas, and bullwhips. John Lewis, twenty-five, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was struck in the head and knocked unconscious. He thought he was going to die. Seventeen marchers were hospitalized. The attack was televised — ABC was showing Judgment at Nuremberg and broke in with footage from Selma. The images shocked the nation. Eight days later, President Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act in a joint session of Congress, using the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome." The bridge is named for Edmund Pettus, a Confederate general and Grand Dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. The name has not been changed. In 1936, Hitler ordered 22,000 troops into the Rhineland, the demilitarized zone between Germany and France established by the Treaty of Versailles. It was a gamble — the German army was not yet ready for war, and Hitler had ordered the troops to retreat if France resisted. France did not resist. Britain did not object. Hitler later said, "The forty-eight hours after the march into the Rhineland were the most nerve-racking in my life. If the French had then marched into the Rhineland, we would have had to withdraw with our tails between our legs." The failure to respond emboldened Hitler to absorb Austria in 1938 and Czechoslovakia in 1939. Appeasement was not a strategy; it was a miscalculation that made World War II inevitable. Bell patented the telephone on this day in 1876. The patent, number 174,465, was filed on February 14 and granted on March 7 — three days before his first successful transmission. Elisha Gray filed a caveat for a similar device on the same day Bell filed his patent. The patent examiner noted the conflict and delayed Gray's caveat until Bell's patent was processed. Whether Bell copied Gray's design has been debated for 150 years. The patent became the most valuable ever issued — it created the Bell System, which grew into AT&T, which was broken up in 1984 and reassembled and broken up again. Maurice Ravel, born this day in 1875, wrote Boléro in 1928 as an experiment in orchestration — a single melody repeated eighteen times with different instruments, gradually getting louder. He called it "a piece for orchestra without music." It is his most famous work. He died in 1937 after a botched brain surgery. The surgeon had tried to repair what he believed was a brain tumor but found nothing. People born on March 7 fall under the zodiac sign of Pisces. The birthstone is Aquamarine and the birth flower is Daffodil. Historical events on March 7 include 1876: Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone (US Patent 174,465), 1936: German army reoccupies the Rhineland in violation of Treaty of Versailles, 1965: Civil rights marchers attacked by state troopers at Selma (Bloody Sunday). Famous people born on March 7 include Maurice Ravel (1875), Luther Burbank (1849), Rachel Weisz (1970).