Also Within This Year in History:
1921
As Europe struggled to recover from WWI, two major figures of the next war ascended. In Germany, Adolph Hitler became leader of the Nazi Party, while Benito Mussolini was elected to Italy’s parliament, soon becoming prime minister and then, dictator. In America, the Tulsa Race Massacre took hundreds of Black lives, an atrocity largely covered up for decades. Meanwhile, Black culture began flourishing in the Harlem Renaissance, and Pittsburgh’s KDKA broadcast the first live sporting event on radio: a boxing match.
On April 11, 1921, KDKA in Pittsburgh broadcasts the first live sporting event on the radio, a boxing match between Johnny Ray and Johnny Dundee. Pittsburgh Daily Post sports editor Florent…
On May 5, 1921, a date of symbolic importance to its iconic creator, the perfume Chanel No. 5 officially debuts in Coco Chanel’s boutique on the Rue Cambon in Paris.…
Deeply in debt and relegated to a shabby theater, the musical Shuffle Along debuts at the Sixty‑Third Street Music Hall on May 23, 1921. The odds are stacked against the…
Beginning on the night of May 31, 1921, thousands of white citizens in Tulsa, Oklahoma descended on the city’s predominantly Black Greenwood District, burning homes and businesses to the ground…
A paymaster and a security guard are killed during a mid‑afternoon armed robbery of a shoe company in South Braintree, Massachusetts. Out of this rather unremarkable crime comes one of…
After Judge Hugo Friend denies a motion to quash the indictments against the major league baseball players accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, a trial begins with jury selection.…
On July 29, 1921, Adolf Hitler becomes the leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ (Nazi) Party. Under Hitler, the Nazi Party grew into a mass movement and ruled Germany…
On September 10, 1921, Fatty Arbuckle, a silent‑film era performer at the height of his fame, is arrested in San Francisco for the rape and murder of aspiring actress Virginia…
On October 24, 1921, in the French town of Chalons‑sur‑Marne, an American sergeant selects the body of the first “Unknown Soldier” to be honored among the approximately 77,000 United States…
On October 26, 1921, President Warren G. Harding delivers a speech in Birmingham, Alabama in which he condemns lynchings—extrajudicial murders (usually hangings) committed primarily by white supremacists against Black Americans…
Exactly three years after the end of World War I, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is dedicated at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia during an Armistice Day ceremony presided over…
The Irish Free State, comprising four‑fifths of Ireland, is declared, ending a five‑year Irish struggle for independence from Britain. Like other autonomous nations of the former British Empire, Ireland was…
