March 21 in History

A federal judge had cleared the way, and this time, the marchers would not be stopped. Two weeks after state troopers beat 600 peaceful demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in what became known as Bloody Sunday, Martin Luther King Jr. led 3,200 people out of Selma, Alabama on March 21, 1965, beginning the third and final attempt to march to the state capital in Montgomery. The first march on March 7 had ended in minutes. Alabama state troopers under Colonel Al Lingo, backed by Sheriff Jim Clark's mounted posse, attacked marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Television cameras broadcast the assault into living rooms across America, and the footage galvanized national outrage. A second attempt on March 9, led by King, turned back at the bridge after a brief prayer. President Lyndon Johnson addressed Congress on March 15, declaring "We shall overcome" and demanding passage of voting rights legislation. Federal Judge Frank Johnson ruled that the marchers had a First Amendment right to march, and the president federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect them. Over five days, the column swelled to 25,000 as it covered 54 miles along U.S. Route 80, sleeping in fields and enduring rain and cold. The march delivered its message directly to Governor George Wallace's doorstep. Within five months, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which dismantled the literacy tests and poll taxes that had disenfranchised Black voters across the South for nearly a century. Selma to Montgomery remains the march that turned moral outrage into federal law.

Emperor Heraclius walked barefoot through the gates of Jerusalem, carrying the relic that Christendom believed was the cross on which Jesus had been crucified. The date was March 21, 630, and the True Cross was coming home after 15 years in Persian hands. Its return marked the climax of a war that had nearly destroyed the Byzantine Empire. The Sassanid Persians had captured Jerusalem in 614, massacring tens of thousands of Christians and seizing the True Cross from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The relic's loss was a spiritual catastrophe for Byzantine Christians, equivalent to losing the Ark of the Covenant. Emperor Heraclius spent the next decade rebuilding his shattered military, borrowing gold from the Church itself to finance what became a religious crusade centuries before the word existed. Heraclius launched his counter-offensive in 622, leading armies deep into Persian territory in a campaign that military historians consider one of the most remarkable comebacks in ancient warfare. He defeated the Persian army at the Battle of Nineveh in 627, and the Sassanid Empire collapsed into civil war. The Persian general Shahrbaraz negotiated the return of the True Cross as part of the peace settlement. The triumph was short-lived. Within a decade, Arab Muslim armies swept out of the Arabian Peninsula and conquered both Jerusalem and the entire Persian Empire. Heraclius, who had staked everything on restoring Christian control of the Holy Land, watched helplessly as a new power reshaped the map of the Middle East permanently. His victory, so hard-won, lasted barely seven years.

Thomas Cranmer thrust the hand that had signed his recantation into the flames first. "This hand hath offended," the Archbishop of Canterbury declared as fire engulfed him on March 21, 1556, rejecting at the last moment the six statements he had written renouncing his Protestant faith. The architect of the English Reformation chose to die rather than let his enemies claim his conscience. Cranmer had spent two decades reshaping English Christianity. As Archbishop under Henry VIII, he annulled the king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon and helped establish royal supremacy over the Church. Under Edward VI, he authored the Book of Common Prayer, the foundational text of Anglican worship, and drafted the Forty-Two Articles that defined Protestant doctrine in England. His prose style shaped English-language worship for centuries. When the Catholic Mary I took the throne in 1553, Cranmer's position became impossible. He was arrested, tried for heresy, and imprisoned in Oxford. Under intense psychological pressure, he signed multiple recantations of his Protestant beliefs. Mary's government published these recantations widely, hoping to discredit the Reformation. But on the day of his execution, Cranmer reversed course, renouncing his recantations and declaring the Pope to be Christ's enemy. His execution did the opposite of what Mary intended. Rather than demonstrating Catholic authority, Cranmer's defiant death became a Protestant martyrdom that strengthened the very movement Mary was trying to destroy. His Book of Common Prayer survived to become one of the most influential texts in the English language, and his final gesture remains one of the most dramatic acts of conscience in English history.

The last 27 prisoners left Alcatraz on March 21, 1963, and the most feared penitentiary in America went quiet. Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered the closure not because the island fortress had failed at its mission but because the saltwater corrosion eating its concrete walls made keeping it open absurdly expensive. Maintaining the facility cost three times more per inmate than any other federal prison. Alcatraz became a federal penitentiary in 1934, designed to house the prisoners other facilities could not handle. Al Capone, George "Machine Gun" Kelly, and Robert Stroud (the "Birdman of Alcatraz," though he was never allowed birds there) all served time on the island in San Francisco Bay. The 1.25-mile swim through frigid, current-swept water made escape virtually impossible. Of the 36 men who attempted it over 29 years, none were confirmed to have survived, though five remain officially missing. The most famous escape attempt came in June 1962, when Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin crawled through ventilation ducts they had widened with sharpened spoons, left papier-mache decoy heads in their beds, and disappeared into the bay on a makeshift raft. The FBI concluded they drowned, but no bodies were ever found. Six years after closing, a group of Native American activists occupied the island for 19 months, claiming it under an 1868 Sioux treaty. Today Alcatraz draws more than 1.5 million visitors annually as a national park, generating far more revenue as a tourist destination than it ever consumed as a prison.

The new Pope's tiara was made of papier-mache because the real one had been seized by French revolutionaries. Pius VII was crowned on March 21, 1800, in Venice rather than Rome, wearing a makeshift crown because Napoleon's armies had looted the papal treasury and imprisoned his predecessor, Pius VI, who died in French captivity. The papacy had not looked this weak since the Avignon exile five centuries earlier. Barnaba Chiaramonti had been elected pope after a conclave that lasted three months, conducted in Venice because Rome was under French military occupation. The cardinals chose him partly because he was seen as moderate enough to negotiate with Napoleon, who had dissolved the Papal States and declared Rome a republic. The Venetian ceremony, held in the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, reflected a Church in crisis. Pius VII proved more politically shrewd than his enemies expected. He negotiated the Concordat of 1801 with Napoleon, restoring Catholicism as the majority religion of France while preserving the Republic's control over Church appointments. When Napoleon crowned himself Emperor in 1804, Pius attended the ceremony in Paris but was deliberately sidelined when Napoleon placed the crown on his own head. The relationship eventually collapsed. Napoleon annexed the Papal States in 1809 and imprisoned Pius VII for five years. But the Pope outlasted the Emperor. After Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo, Pius VII returned to Rome in triumph and the Congress of Vienna restored the Papal States. The man who had been crowned in papier-mache ended his pontificate having reasserted papal authority across Catholic Europe.

A child smashes a teapot, and the teapot sings back. Maurice Ravel's one-act fantasy opera L'enfant et les sortileges premiered at the Opera de Monte-Carlo on March 21, 1925, bringing to life a libretto by Colette in which a naughty boy is scolded by the furniture, animals, and objects he has mistreated. The opera took 20 years to complete, delayed by World War I and Ravel's meticulous obsession with every note. Colette had written the libretto in 1917 at the request of Jacques Rouche, director of the Paris Opera, who originally wanted a ballet-opera about fairy tales. She sent her text to Ravel, then waited years for a response. Ravel was serving as a military truck driver during the war, and afterward he worked on the score in agonizing increments, sometimes producing only a few measures per week. His orchestration demanded over 40 instrumental parts and incorporated jazz, ragtime, Chinese pentatonic scales, and Baroque pastiche within a single 45-minute work. The premiere divided audiences. Conservative critics called it trivial, while progressives recognized its technical brilliance. The cast included singers portraying a clock, a Chinese teacup, a dragonfly, and a chorus of frogs. Ravel's orchestration made the impossible seem natural: a duet between two cats consists entirely of the word "meow," yet it functions as legitimate operatic counterpoint. L'enfant et les sortileges has since become recognized as one of the 20th century's most imaginative operas, a work where Ravel compressed an entire encyclopedia of musical styles into a children's story about learning empathy through broken furniture.