Oct. 6 history: The Jazz Singer

Oct. 6 in history:

In 1536, English theologian and scholar William Tyndale, who was the first to translate the Bible into Early Modern English, was executed for heresy.

In 1917, Fannie Lou Hamer was born on a Mississippi Delta plantation at Ruleville to a sharecropping family. She was youngest of 20 children. She became involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and after registering to vote, she was kicked off the plantation. A fearless civil rights leader, her singing became a source of inspiration and strength among civil rights workers. In 1964, she burst onto the national scene when she challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

In 1927, the era of talking pictures arrived with the opening of “The Jazz Singer” starring Al Jolson, a feature containing both silent and sound-synchronized sequences.

In 1928, Chiang Kai-shek became president of China.

In 1939, in a speech to the Reichstag, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler spoke of his plans to reorder the ethnic layout of Europe - a plan that would entail settling the “Jewish problem.”

In 1973, war erupted in the Middle East as Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel during the Yom Kippur holiday, starting a nearly e-week conflict that would become known as the Yom Kippur War. 

In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford, in his second presidential debate with Democrat Jimmy Carter, asserted that there was “no Soviet domination of eastern Europe.”

In 1979, Pope John Paul II, on a week-long U.S. tour, became the first pontiff to visit the White House, where he was received by President Jimmy Carter.

In 1981, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was shot to death by extremists while reviewing a military parade.

In 2003, American Paul Lauterbur and Briton Peter Mansfield won the Nobel Prize for medicine for discoveries that led to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

In 2014, the Supreme Court unexpectedly cleared the way for a dramatic expansion of gay marriage in the United States as it rejected appeals from five states seeking to preserve their bans, effectively making such marriages legal in 30 states.

In 2018, in the narrowest Senate confirmation of a Supreme Court justice in nearly 150 years, Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by a 50-48 vote; he was sworn in hours later.

In 2020, President Donald Trump, recovering from COVID-19, tweeted his eagerness to return to the campaign trail and still planned to attend a debate with Democrat Joe Biden in Miami. Biden said there should be no debate as long as Trump remained COVID positive. (The debate was canceled.).

(History.com 10/06/23)