“Pages of history” features excerpts from The News Journal archives including the Wilmington Morning News and the Evening Journal.
Dec. 6, 1933, Wilmington Morning News
Delaware lacks liquor as dry era ends
A doubly purposed proclamation, putting an official end to Prohibition and calling on Americans to help restore respect for law and order was issued yesterday by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The proclamation was signed by the chief executive after Acting Secretary Phillips had certified that 36 states had approved the 21st Amendment, repealing the 18th Amendment….
The President enjoined all citizens and others in the United States to confine their purchases of alcoholic beverages solely to licensed dealers.
“The policy of the government will be to see to it that the social and political evils that have existed in the pre-prohibition era shall not be revived nor permitted again to exist,” he said. “We must remove forever from our midst the menace of the bootlegger and such others as would profit at the expense of good government and law and order.”
Delawareans went to bed dry last night because of the paradox of the sale of liquor being legal amid the absence of a legal supply to sell. During the night, however, trucks laden with approximately $20,000 worth of wines and liquors wheeled toward the state, and today shortly after 9 a.m., it is expected that the Blue Hen State will indulge in its first legal hard liquor after nearly 14 years of Prohibition….
Dec. 6, 1955, Wilmington Morning News
Thousands boycott Alabama city buses in protest against segregation
MONTGOMERY, Ala. – The arrest of a Negro who refused to move to the colored section of a city bus may bring a court test of segregated transportation in the cradle of the Confederacy.
While thousands of other blacks boycotted Montgomery City Lines in protest, Mrs. Rosa Parks was fined $14 in Police Court today for disregarding a driver’s order to move to the rear of a bus last Thursday.
Black passengers ride in the rear of buses here, white passengers in front, under a municipal segregation ordinance….
The boycott was organized after circulars were distributed in Black residential areas Saturday urging “economic reprisal” against the bus company.
Mrs. Parks appealed her $14 fine and was released under $100 bond signed by Black Attorney Fred Gray and a former state president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, E.D. Nixon.
Gray and Charles Langford, another Black lawyer representing the 42-year-old department store seamstress, refused to say whether they plan to attack the constitutionality of segregation laws affecting public transportation….
The U.S. Supreme Court already has before it a test cast against segregation on buses operating in Columbia, S.C. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., has ruled in this case that segregation must be ended. If the Supreme Court sustains the decision, the effect will be to outlaw segregation in all states and cities….
Catch up on history:The News Journal archives, week of Jan. 16
Dec. 8, 1941, Wilmington Morning News
U.S.-Japan war in Pacific; White House says Army, Navy losses heavy
Japan assaulted every main United States and British possession in the central and western Pacific and invaded Thailand today in a hasty but evidently shrewdly-planned prosecution of a war she began yesterday without warning.
Tokyo’s formal declaration of war against both the United States and Britain came two hours and 55 minutes after Japanese planes spread death and destruction in Honolulu and Pearl Harbor at 7:35 a.m. Hawaiian time Sunday….
An NBC broadcast said Japanese planes – estimated as high as 150 in the opening assault – struck at Ford Island in Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy’s mighty fortress of the Pacific, and dropped bombs on Honolulu….
There was a report from persons who came past Pearl Harbor that one ship was lying on its side and four others were on fire. According to United Press, the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor also caused heavy damage to 300 American airplanes….
The first U.S. official casualty report listed 104 dead and more than 300 injured in the Army at Hickam Field alone, near Honolulu. An NBC observer in Honolulu reported the death toll at Hickam was 300. There was heavy damage in Honolulu residential districts, and the death list among civilians was large but uncounted….
President Franklin D. Roosevelt will address a joint session of Congress at 12:30 p.m. today….
More:Elsmere WWII veteran, who earned Distinguished Flying Cross, turns 100
Dec. 9, 1980, The Morning News
Ex-Beatle Lennon shot dead
Former Beatle John Lennon, who catapulted to stardom with the long-haired British rock group in the 1960s, was shot to death late last night outside his luxury apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
Lennon, 40, was rushed in a police car to Roosevelt Hospital where he was pronounced dead shortly after arriving. Doctors said he suffered seven severe wounds in his chest, back and left arm, but they did not know how many bullets had hit him….
Police said they had taken a suspect into custody and described him as “a local screwball” with no apparent motive…
After word of the shooting spread, hundreds of people gathered outside the entrance to Lennon’s apartment building, many of them weeping….
Reach reporter Ben Mace at rmace@gannett.com.
