“The simple act of walking through a schoolhouse door that had been barred to me, and all people of my color, by the governor of this state - that simple act represented an end to legal segregation in the American South.”
#OnThisDay, 11 June 1963, Vivian Malone defies the Governor of Alabama to become the first Black female student at the University of Alabama.
#OnThisDay, 8 Jun 1953, Mary Terrell wins her Supreme Court case and desegregates Washington DC's restaurants. She's 93, and celebrates with lunch in the very restaurant that she'd taken to court.
#OnThisDay, 8 Jun 1944, Violette Szabo returns to occupied France by parachute for her second posting with the British Special Operations Executive.
She is captured two days later, after a gun battle. She's tortured and sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. She is killed in Jan 1945. Her daughter Tania received the George Cross on her behalf in 1947.
Violette Szabo's story was filmed as Carve Her Name With Pride (1958).
#OnThisDay, 4 Jun 1972, civil rights activist Angela Davis is acquitted in a trial over her alleged involvement in the 1970 Marin County Civic Centre attack.
Davis had been prosecuted for three capital felonies, including conspiracy to murder, after guns she owned were used in the attack. The all-white jury cleared her of all charges.
100 years ago #OnThisDay, 3 Jun 1924, Alfonsina Strada crosses the finish line of the Giro d'Italia. She remains the only woman to have officially ridden in a Grand Tour.
At one point she had been disqualified on time grounds but was allowed to continue without the option of prizes. She finished ahead of the lantern rouge (the last cyclist to finish).
#OnThisDay, 28 May 1944, Sonia Butt parachutes into occupied France as an explosives expert for the British Special Operations Executive. She had turned 20 two weeks earlier.
She trained the maquis and coordinated sabotage operations. She was never captured.
#OnThisDay, 8 May 1865, Dr Mary Harris Thompson founds the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children. At the time one of the city's two existing hospitals did not admit women patients.
Very early #OnThisDay, 6 May 1944, Marguerite 'Peggy' Knight parachutes into occupied France to be a courier for the Special Operations Executive. The British SOE supported the French resistance.
Knight fought her way out of an attempted capture, and returned to the UK in September 1944.
#OnThisDay, 1 May 1944, South African Phyllis Latour parachutes into occupied France to be a radio operator for the British Special Operations Executive.
Very early #OnThisDay, 30 April 1944, New Zealander Nancy Wake parachutes into occupied France to be a courier for the Special Operations Executive. The British SOE supported French Resistance to Nazi occupation.
Nick-named 'the white mouse' by the Gestapo, she is never captured. She died in 2011.
#OnThisDay, 20 Apr 1902, Marie and Pierre Curie refine radium chloride. The discovery leads to Marie being the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.
The Academy originally planned to award only Pierre and Henri Becquerel. Pierre insisted that Marie should also be included.
#OnThisDay, 19 Apr 1967, Katherine Switzer becomes the first woman to complete the Boston Marathon as a registered runner, despite the organiser physically trying to stop her.
#OnThisDay, 18 Apr 1905, Baroness Bertha von Suttner becomes the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism.
As well as writing an influential novel, Lay Down Your Arms (1889), she founded the German Peace Society in 1892. In 1907 she was the only woman to attend the Second Hague Peace Convention, and warned that Europe was heading for war once again.
#OnThisDay, 15 Apr 1960, Ella Baker convenes a conference of 126 independent student protest groups. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) forms as a result. SNCC coordinated and assisted direct-action challenges to segregation in the USA.
Baker was a civil rights activist for five decades, and advocated grassroots activism. She also criticised the misogyny she encountered within the movement.
Very early #OnThisDay, 12 Apr 1944, Odette Wilen parachutes into France to work as a wireless operator for the British Special Operations Executive. The SOE supports the French resistance.
Wireless operators were at the greatest risk of discovery, as their position could be triangulated whenever they were transmitting messages back to London.
Wilen evades capture by minutes and escapes over the Pyrenees. She lives until 2015.
#OnThisDay, 10 Apr 1864, army surgeon Dr Mary Edwards Walker is captured by the Confederates during the US Civil War. She later receives the Medal of Honor.
As well as serving in the Civil War, and being a dress reformer who preferred to wear trousers, she was also a suffragist who declined to take her husband’s name when they married.
Very early #OnThisDay, 6 Apr 1944, Lillian Rolfe and Violette Szabo separately arrive in occupied France to work for the British Special Operations Executive (SEO). Rolfe is a wireless operator, Szabo a courier.
Szabo returns to the UK at the end of April but goes back to France in June 1944 and is captured. Rolfe is captured in July 1944.
They are executed together, by shooting, in Ravensbrück concentration camp in Feb 1945.
Why is a bridge in Sarajevo named after two women?
#OnThisDay, 5 Apr 1992, Suada Dilberović, a Muslim, and Olga Sučić, a Catholic, are killed whilst protesting for peace in Sarajevo during the outbreak of the Bosnian war. They are the first civilian casualties in what became the Siege of Sarajevo. The siege lasted 1,425 days, and over 5,000 civilians were killed during it.
The bridge they died on has been renamed in their memory.