On This Day: September 8

On This Day, for September 8th, by Britannica.

I’m Kurt Heintz. In today’s program we talk about:

• a schoolyard as battleground,
• a politician who is considered both “establishment” and “anti-establishment,”
• and television, the final frontier.

If you’re a frequent listener of On This Day, you’ll know we love to celebrate birthdays on our show. Today is no exception. Ruby Bridges was born on this date in 1952.

At just six years old, Ruby Bridges became an icon for the American civil rights movement. She was the youngest of the African American children who first integrated formerly all-white schools in the American South.

Two years after Bridges’ family moved to New Orleans, a test was given to the city’s African American schoolchildren to determine who would be eligible to enter all-white schools. Bridges passed and was the only child out of six who were accepted at William Frantz Elementary School to actually enroll. Four federal marshals escorted her into the building on her first day, which she spent entirely in the principal’s office, sheltered from the many white parents marching into the school to remove their children. On her second day, Bridges and a teacher began lessons alone. The protests from white parents were so frequent, and so threatening, that Bridges was educated in an otherwise-empty classroom for the entire year. The marshals also continued escorting her to school, a necessary barrier to protect her from the angry mob of white parents and community members who gathered every day to frighten and threaten her.
Bridges’s memoir, Through My Eyes, was released in 1999—the same year she established the Ruby Bridges Foundation, which used educational initiatives to combat racism in schools. In 2009 she published the children’s book Ruby Bridges Goes to School: My True Story to bring her not-that-long-ago history to today’s schoolchildren.

More On This Day is coming after the break: another birthday, a groundbreaking comedian, groundbreaking television, and of course Fast Facts.

We’re back with more On This Day.

A controversial politician is celebrating his birthday today, too. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was born on this day in 1941 in Brooklyn, New York.

Though Sanders is perhaps best known for his two attempts at the Democratic presidential nominations, for 2016 and 2020, his political career has taken many different forms, from his service as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, to his eight terms as U.S. representative, to his seat as one of Vermont’s U.S. senators.

Even before he was an elected official, Sanders was involved in national politics from a citizen’s perspective. He participated in the March on Washington in 1963 and was active in the anti-Vietnam War movement throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. As a senator and a presidential candidate, he is known for pushing the conversation to the left. He advocated for universal health care, for increased taxes on the wealthy, and for student debt cancellation.
I’m Emily Goldstein. And now, some Fast Facts for September 8th.

German and Finnish forces began a siege on Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, on this day in 1941. The siege lasted 872 days which the city endured, ultimately being freed by Soviet forces.
After resigning the presidency a month prior, Richard Nixon was pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, on this day in 1974. For more about Nixon’s impeachment hearings, you can check out the May 9th episode of On This Day.

Paris was attacked by Joan of Arc (and her army, of course) on this day in 1429. Believing she was acting under divine influence, Joan intended to oust the duke of Burgundy and take Paris for the newly crowned King Charles VII.

Batter up! On this day in 1998, Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals broke the record for most home runs in a regular professional baseball season, which had belonged to Roger Maris since 1961. McGwire broke the record with 62 home runs and finished the season with a whopping 70.

And finally, The Oprah Winfrey Show was broadcast nationally for the first time on this day in 1986. The long-running talk show sparked Oprah’s career as one of the most famous and beloved women in the United States. We certainly can’t live up to Oprah’s legacy—and we may not be giving away cars on our show today—but we hope you stick around for our final story anyway.
British actor Peter Sellers was born on this date in 1925. Can you guess what movie role he’s best known for? Of course—the charming-yet-bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau. Sellers performed in all six films in the Pink Panther series, beginning with the 1963 film in which he played Clouseau in pursuit of a jewel thief he thinks would steal a diamond called the Pink Panther.

Sellers, of course, had a lot more screen time than just the Pink Panther movies. But his on-screen opportunities in life were not instant. As a young man, Sellers toured British military bases during World War II to entertain the troops. He had to travel light and be flexible and ready to “transform” into any number of comedic characters on short notice. His duties gave him a live audience for trying out his comic stage personalities. The skills Sellers developed would amply prove their worth in years to come.

By the 1950s, he connected with the BBC and was a performer/writer for The Goon Show, a famous English sketch comedy program. The Goon Show has been considered the grandparent to television series Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Kids in the Hall, and Saturday Night Live.

The 1960s, of course, brought the first Pink Panther movies but also put Sellers in touch with darker comedies. Consider the satirical movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. … Yes, that’s the full title. This “bomb,” of course, is the hydrogen bomb. The story was set at the height of the Cold War. Sellers had three different roles in the movie, including the namesake Dr. Strangelove: a nuclear weapons expert who may be better described as a weapons fanatic and a thinly closeted ex-Nazi. This insane role earned Sellers an Academy Award nomination.

Sellers rounded out his film career with the 1979 film Being There, a warm yet melancholy satire of class. The story by Jerzy Kosinski follows Sellers’s character as a sheltered and privileged but intellectually challenged gardener who, through his fate of literally “being there” at the right time, becomes admired by wealthy people as a kind of sage.
Sellers passed away at the young age of 54, in 1980.

It’s time to “boldly go where no man has gone before”—to our last story, that is. The first episode of Star Trek premiered on this day in 1966, introducing Kirk, Spock, and the USS Enterprise to the world for the first time. Though the show ran for only three seasons, it became one of the most popular entertainment brands of all time, spawning TV reboots, movies, fan conventions, and video games. Even if you’ve never seen the original Star Trek TV show, there’s a good chance you’ve seen at least one of its iterations—or even just remember seeing a kid in school with a Star Trek lunch box or comic book.

Here’s another fun fact about the original Star Trek: it was purposefully multicultural in a world that wasn’t actually the 23rd century, of course. In the 1960s, when the original series was produced, many Americans considered civil rights to be a controversial issue, and many others dismissed the idea of racial equality entirely. The casting of Black actress Nichelle Nichols as chief communications officer Uhura—a main character and occasional love interest for the white Captain Kirk—caused some Southern stations to threaten to pull Star Trek from their programming. To those threats, Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry said (and I quote): “Go to hell!”

Now Uhura became an iconic figure in American pop culture—so much so that Nichelle Nichols later worked for NASA’s space program recruiting women and minority applicants. In a Smithsonian Channel series called Building Star Trek, Dr. Aprille Ericcson, who became an aerospace engineer for NASA, spoke for many when she said, “Seeing someone like Uhura on that stage, you know, right behind the captain’s shoulder, was a big thing. I felt I could probably do that too.”

That’s it for today’s episode of On This Day. If you’re still curious about Ruby Bridges, “Feeling the Bern,” or Star Trek, take a look at Britannica.com. We have the balanced and researched stories.

Thanks for listening. Our program was written by Meg Matthias and edited by yours truly. For Britannica, I’m Kurt Heintz. And I’m Emily Goldstein.

This program is copyrighted by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.