Dalai Lama of Tibet escapes to India. Tibet embraced Buddhism in the 7th century under head of state and spiritual leader Dalai Lama. The present and 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was identified at the age of two as a reincarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama. From an early age, he tried to deal with the tensions between his country and China. But China, feeling its power threatened, invaded Tibet in 1950, asserting its sovereignty over the centuries-old region. Tibetan anger grew until an...

Native women’s group loses discrimination case. In 1991, when the federal government was trying to change the constitution, it gave $10 million to four aboriginal groups to secure their input throughout an extensive consultative process. Unfortunately, the government overlooked the Native Women’s Association of Canada (NWAC), whose members felt they should have been at what they considered a male-dominated table. Belatedly trying to correct matters, the government gave NWAC $560,000, but it...

Catherine Callbeck becomes Canada’s first woman elected premier of a province. Catherine Callbeck spent her life alternating between her love of business and her penchant for politics. Born July 25, 1939 in Central Bedeque, Prince Edward Island, she earned bachelors of commerce and education and did post-graduate work in business administration before teaching business in New Brunswick and Ontario. She then returned to PEI to join the family business until her interest in politics landed her...

Arab countries propose peace plan to Israelis. Even before Israel became an independent country, its citizens and neighboring Arabs were prone to battle. Every peace plan put forward evaporated in the heat of violence. Arabs refused to recognize Israel, and Israelis refused to return any land won during the 1967 Six-Day War: West Bank, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. And yet, March 28, 2002 marked a day of hope, when all Arab countries managed to agree on a peace plan process, one that...

Elsie MacGill was a woman of unusual capability and resilience. Born in Vancouver on March 27, 1905, she was the first woman to graduate with an electrical engineering degree from the University of Toronto, then the first woman to receive her masters in aeronautical engineering from the University of Michigan. Although she contracted polio the same year, the determined young engineer defied the odds and taught herself to walk with two metal canes. She went on to become the first woman to...

Bora Laskin dies while Chief Justice of Canada’s Supreme Court. Born in Fort William (Thunder Bay), Ontario on October 5, 1912, Bora Laskin pursued education in a big way: He earned his bachelor of arts, masters of arts, and bachelor of laws degrees from the University of Toronto and his masters of laws from Harvard Law School. Shortly after being called to the bar, Laskin taught at the University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall Law School, also publishing and editing notable legal texts and...

Can’t fire HIV-positive naval seamen, federal Court of Canada warns. After enlisting with the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) in 1980, Simon Thwaites spent six years progressing to the rank of master seaman, where he spent most of his time on naval vessels. The same year, the Canadian Red Cross informed him he was HIV positive. He voluntarily told the CAF, but when staff there learned he was homosexual, they downgraded his security clearance to a level that made it impossible to do his job....

The Provincial Freeman first published by Mary Ann Shad. Mary Ann Shadd was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the oldest of 13 children to Harriet and Abraham Shadd. Both her parents were leaders in the Underground Railroad, which helped black slaves reach freedom in Canada. Her parents sent her to a Quaker school, and her love of learning led her to open a school for black children, then to continue teaching for years. When the U.S. Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, forcing...

Germany grants Adolph Hitler dictatorial powers.
 How did Adolph Hitler rise to power? For various and strange reasons, Hitler was sworn in as chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, and his cabinet’s few Nazis were assigned key positions, including control of the police. Weeks later, the Nazis burned down the German Parliament building (the Reichstag) and blamed it on the communists. Hitler used the event as an excuse to con President Hindenburg and the cabinet into passing emergency laws...

Canada’s first women radio broadcaster, Jane Gray, dies. Only a few years after landing her first radio broadcasting job in London, Ontario on CJGC at the age of 28, Jane beat out 90 other applicants to host a cooking program on Toronto’s CFRB radio. Many Torontonians remember Gray’s public appearances, where she dressed in native costume and played Indian princess Mus-Kee-Kee to answer questions from the station’s listeners. A savvy broadcaster who even dabbled in buying and selling radio...

Commemoration date to eliminate racial discrimination. For decades, black South Africans had to carry identification papers known as “passbooks” anywhere they went. Passbooks formed a central part of the country’s racist apartheid system by placing severe restrictions on their holders. For blacks, needless to say, passbooks were a constant source of anger and resentment. On March 21, 1960, a large crowd gathered in Sharpeville, South Africa to peacefully protest the laws requiring...

Libby Riddles makes history for women in winning Iditarod Trail dogsled race. In 1925, a diphtheria epidemic required medical supplies to be rushed to Nome, Alaska. Traditional methods of transport could get no goods further than within 674 miles of the site. Teams of dogsleds rushed the precious medicine the rest of the way. In 1973, Alaskan officials decided to memorialize this traipse by turning the 1,150-mile Iditarod Trail between Anchorage and Nome into an official race. Soon, hardy...

Canadian women take gold at first Women’s Ice Hockey World Championships. Given the popularity of women’s ice hockey today, it’s hard to believe that prior to 1990, it had a very low profile. Not until March 19, 1990 did the International Ice Hockey Association open a World Championship to women. On that date, Ottawa played host for three days to nine teams from Canada, the United States, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, West Germany and Japan. Canada clinched gold, the U.S. took silver,...

White South Africans vote to end apartheid. International pressure against South Africa’s ongoing white-minority rule and apartheid system had by the 1980s brought boycotts against South African products and sports teams. The result was a deteriorating economy. Clearly, something had to change. When F.W. de Klerk became president of South Africa in 1989, he worked swiftly to shift more power to the black majority. In 1990, he lifted the four-year-old state of emergency that still existed in...

Future behind-the-scenes civil rights activist Bayard Rustin is born. Bayard Rustin was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania on March 17, 1912 and raised by a Quaker grandmother. A bright student and accomplished athlete, he formed an early understanding about racism. His involvement in the Young Communist League between 1936 and 1941 would later be used against this great civil rights leader, but it was probably his homosexuality that robbed him of the prominence he deserved. Rustin was...

RCMP Sikhs allowed to wear turbans. Baltej Singh Dhillon was born in Malaysia in 1966 and immigrated to Canada at the age of 16. He trained to be an officer with the RCMP, but as a baptized Sikh, was required to wear a turban as a tenet of his religion. This precluded him from wearing the hat that formed part of the RCMP’s ceremonial uniform. In this he shared a dilemma with many Canadian Sikhs who felt under pressure to comply with regulations against their beards and turbans. Dhillon chose...

U.S. soldiers massacre 500 civilians at My Lai, Vietnam. While serving in Vietnam in late 1967, a U.S. Army regiment named Charlie Company suffered one casualty and several injuries from a Viet Cong booby trap in Quang Ngai province. Captain Ernest Medina, set on revenge, gave the men a pep talk and plotted the destruction of the village known as My Lai 4. At 7:22 a.m. on March 16, 1968, U.S. Army helicopters stormed the village of 700. Their mission was to root out the Viet Cong, and...

Future suffragist, journalist and judge Emily Murphy is born. Emily Ferguson was born into a wealthy and influential Canadian family on March 14, 1868 in Cookstown, Ontario. Years later, she and her Anglican minister husband, Arthur Murphy, moved to Alberta, where she took up the cause of women’s equality. Her constant pressure led the Alberta government to pass the Dower Act in 1911, ensuring the right of a wife to one-third of her husband’s property. When Alberta’s attorney general made...

British Columbia passes the Chinese Restriction Act. In the late 1800s, Chinese people wishing to immigrate to Canada were welcomed into the country because they offered cheap (and in some cases, disposable) labour for building Canada’s Canadian Pacific Railroad (CPR). Once the railroad was completed, however, CPR reneged on its pledge to pay their passage back to China. Incidents of discrimination and resentment quickly escalated. On March 13, 1885, British Columbia passed the Chinese...

Florence Bird Memorial Library opens at Status of Women Canada office. Florence Rhein was born in 1908 in Philadelphia and brought up in a privileged family that believed in gender equality. After marrying journalist John Bird, she moved with him to Montreal, then Winnipeg. While her husband worked for the Winnipeg Tribune, Bird wrote articles under the pen name Anne Francis and took up radio broadcasting. Shortly after World War II, when the couple moved to Ottawa, she became a women’s...

African American Dr. Reginald Weir competes in U.S. Indoor Lawn Tennis Championship. When a New Yorker named Dr. Reginald Weir signed up to play indoor lawn tennis at a national tournament scheduled for March 11, 1948, it raised no eyebrows. The organizers failed to block him for the simple reason that it never occurred to them that a black man might have the title of a physician. Thus, red-faced officials ended up letting him play, even though blacks at the time were banned from U.S....

Anti-abortion extremist murders Florida doctor. Despite daily pickets, protests and death threats from anti-abortionists, Dr. David Gunn provided abortion services to women in Alabama, Georgia and Florida. He paid for his courage and defiance with his life on March 10, 1993. That’s the day anti-abortion extremist Michael Griffin responded to what he called “a sign from God” by murdering Gunn outside the Pensacola Florida Women’s Medical Services abortion clinic. The crime fuelled the debate...

Zimbabwe’s rigged election proves a turning point. When the practice of a white minority ruling over a black majority ended in 1980 in Africa’s Rhodesia, the country was renamed Zimbabwe. Initially, the nation’s new president, Robert Mugabe, and his Zanu-PF Party pushed through reforms instrumental in achieving greater fairness across the population. But Mugabe soon turned more tyrant than democratic leader. He oppressed opposition, violated basic human rights and obliterated the freedom of...

Artist Carl Beam receives Governor General’s Award for art. Carl Beam was born the eldest of nine children on the West Bay First Nations (later to be renamed M'chigeeng) reserve on Manitoulin Island, Ontario on May 24, 1943. Although his white father was killed during World War II, his Ojibway maternal grandfather took a significant interest in his upbringing. In his late 20s, Beam followed in his artist mother’s footsteps by studying at the Kootenay School of Art before further studies at...