On this day in 1955, Rosa Parks broke the law by refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, resulting in her arrest. At the time, she said that she was just too tired to stand that day, but she later admitted that she’d challenged the law on purpose because she thought it was wrong. She recalled, “When that white driver stepped back toward us, when he waved his hand and ordered us up and out of our seats, I felt a determination cover my body like a quilt on a winter night.” She refused to give up her seat. “When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up, and I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ And he said, ‘Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested.’ I said, ‘You may do that.’”

Parks’s arrest was the catalyst that the newly formed Montgomery Improvement Association needed to organize a boycott of the city’s buses on December 5. A 26-year-old pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as the protest’s leader; on the first night of the boycott he came forward and said, “The great glory of the American democracy is the right to protest for right.”

The boycott of the buses in Montgomery continued for over a year and eventually helped lead to the end of segregation.

1982 – Michael Jackson's sixth solo studio album, Thriller, is released worldwide, ultimately to become the best-selling record album in history.

1963 – "I Want to Hold Your Hand", recorded on October 17, 1963, is released by the Beatles in the United Kingdom.

1971 – During a severe thunderstorm over Washington state, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper (aka D. B. Cooper) parachutes from a Northwest Orient Airlines plane with $200,000 in ransom money. He has never been found.

1859 – Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species.

1992 – The first smartphone, the IBM Simon, is introduced at COMDEX in Las Vegas, Nevada.

1963 – The BBC broadcasts An Unearthly Child (starring William Hartnell), the first episode of the first story from the first series of Doctor Who, which is now the world's longest running science fiction drama.

1924 – Edwin Hubble's discovery, that the Andromeda "nebula" is actually another island galaxy far outside of our own Milky Way, is first published in The New York Times.

1905 – Albert Einstein's paper that leads to the mass–energy equivalence formula, E = mc², is published in the journal Annalen der Physik.

1877 – Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.

1978 – In Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones led his Peoples Temple to a mass murder–suicide that claimed 918 lives in all, 909 of them in Jonestown itself, including over 270 children. Congressman Leo Ryan is murdered by members of the Peoples Temple hours earlier.

1983 – Bill Gates introduces Windows 1.0.

1979 – Cold War: Nuclear false alarm: The NORAD computers and the Alternate National Military Command Center in Fort Ritchie, Maryland detected purported massive Soviet nuclear strike. After reviewing the raw data from satellites and checking the early-warning radars, the alert is cancelled.

1940 – Franklin D. Roosevelt is the first and only President of the United States to be elected to a third term.

1872 – Women's suffrage in the United States: In defiance of the law, suffragist Susan B. Anthony votes for the first time, and is later fined $100.

1605 - The Gunpowder Plot (Links One, Two)

 Red_Dragon wrote:
 
Ain't easy being green...

1979 – Greensboro massacre: Five members of the Communist Workers Party are shot dead and seven are wounded by a group of Klansmen and neo-Nazis during a "Death to the Klan" rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, United States.

 Red_Dragon wrote: 

his statue in muzeon park was torn down two months ago by red lives matter and protifa

oh well

1962 – By refusing to agree to the firing of a nuclear torpedo at a US warship, Vasily Arkhipov averts nuclear war.