Swiss American Louis Chevrolet and his partner William Durant announced the incorporation of the new Chevrolet Motor Company. The com-pany planned to

establish its head-quarters in Detroit. Chevrolet, who had emigrated to the US from Switzerland only 11 years earlier, had already established

himself as an automotive giant by the time of the announcement of the new company was made.

In 1992, Democrat Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas was elected as 42nd President of the United States,

defeating President George Bush. This victory marked the end of a 12-year era of Republicans in the White House.

In 1924, Miriam Ferguson was elected governor of Texas. Ferguson, who was more commonly known

Shirley Chisholm became the first African American woman to serve in the US Congress when she was elected in 1968. She was a Democrat from Brooklyn,New York, and served in Congress until 1983.

as “Ma,” became the first woman in the United States to be elected to this office.

In 1946 Wing F. Ong became the first Chinese American elected to a state legislature. Ong was elected to the Arizona State Legislature.

Attorney General of the state of Massachusetts Edward Brooke became the first African American to be elected to the US Senate by popular vote in 1966.

Senator Brooke was a member of the Republican party.

The Vietnam Memorial was opened on this

day in 1982 in Washington, DC. The

memorial was designed by Maya Ying

Lin, a Vietnamese American architecture

student.

In 1917, 41 women from 15 states were arrested outside the White House in Washington, DC for suffragette demon-strations. The women did nothing more than picket the White House with

signs demanding voting rights. The arrested women drew sentences that ranged from six days to six months imprisonment.

student from Yale University. It was the first major tribute to US soldiers who fought in Vietnam.

William O. Douglas, associate justice of the US Supreme Court, announced his retirement from the court in 1975. Douglas served for 36

Carl Stokes was sworn in as mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, in 1967. Stokes became the first African American mayor of a major US city. Twenty years later, on this same date, Carrie Saxon Perry

was elected mayor of Hartford, Connecticut. Perry became the first African American woman to hold a mayoral seat in a major northeastern city.

At age 71, Rosa Parks was presented with the first Eleanor Roosevelt Woman of Courage Award from the Wonder Woman Foundation (1984). The award was given to Parks in recognition for her

defiance of a segrega-tionist law in Alabama that prohibited African Americans from sitting anywhere except in the back of buses.

In 1990, President Bush signed a bill that protected

the gravesites of Native Americans and required the

return of remains and artifacts from such sites to the Native American tribes to which they belonged.

Seventy-three-year-old former Klu Klux Klan mem-

ber Robert E. Chambliss was convicted of first-degree murder on this day in 1977. Chambliss was charged with

responsibility

for the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church resulting in the deaths of four African American girls in 1963.

Lincoln Borglum announced the completion of the

carvings of the busts of Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and

Theodore Roosevelt into Mount Rushmore in 1941.

His father, Gutzon, who died on March 6, 1941, spent 14 years carving the president’s heads into the mountain and,

when he died, his son pledged to finish his father’s work.

President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed by a sniper’s bullet as he rode in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas in 1963.He became the fourth

president to be assass-inated and the first in 62 years. Texas Govenor John Connally was also wounded. Several hours later, Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested and charged with the crime.

African American farmer and inventor Andrew Jackson Beard was awarded a patent for his “Jenny” coupler in 1899. The coupler allowed train cars to be joined

together simply by bumping them against one another. The device cut back on serious injuries, such as the loss of limbs, that occurred frequently using previous coupling methods.

Following the murder of President John F. Kennedy two days earlier, alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was shot and killed while being escorted from a Dallas

jail. Oswald was shot by Jack Ruby. The event, captured by the many television cameras waiting to photograph Oswald, became the first nationally televised murder. Ruby was

In 1973, Rose Mary Woods, personal secretary of Pre-sident Nixon, testified that she was responsible for the 18-minute gap on one of the tapes subpeonaed by the federal court investigating the Watergate break -in. The tape in question was

one contained a conversation between President Nixon and

H.R. Halderman three days following the

break-in at the Democratic National

Headquarters in 1972.

Mexican muralist Diego Rivera held a show of his latest works in his Mexico City gallery. The show included 150 paintings and drawings of people and places in Russia. During his

lifetime, Rivera had become known for his communist ideals. In the particular display, he was recognized as trying to emulate Soviet art.

In 1961, Ernie Davis, a record-setting halfback for Syracuse University, became the first African American college football player to win the Heisman Trophy.

This trophy is annually awarded to the “best” college football player in a given year.

In 1887, African American inventor Granville T. Woods,

was granted a patent for his

induction telegraph system.

The system permitted communication between moving trains, making train travel safer.

During this month in 1769, a school founded 20 years earlier by the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock for the purpose of education Native Americans

became Dartmouth College. At the new college’s inception, 10 of the 28 students attending the school were Native Americans.