September 30 in History

Neville Chamberlain stepped off the plane at Heston Aerodrome waving a piece of paper and declared "peace for our time." The date was September 30, 1938, and the paper was the Munich Agreement, which handed Adolf Hitler the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia without a shot being fired. Within a year, the peace Chamberlain promised was shattered, and the agreement had become the most infamous act of appeasement in modern history. The crisis began in the spring of 1938, when Hitler demanded the annexation of the Sudetenland, a mountainous border region of Czechoslovakia inhabited by roughly three million ethnic Germans. The Sudeten Germans, organized by the Nazi-funded Sudeten German Party under Konrad Henlein, staged protests and provocations designed to create a pretext for German intervention. Czechoslovakia was prepared to fight. Its army was well-trained and equipped, its border fortifications were formidable, and it had military alliances with both France and the Soviet Union. But Britain and France, haunted by memories of the Great War, were desperate to avoid another conflict. Chamberlain flew to meet Hitler three times in September 1938, each time conceding more territory. At Munich on September 29, Chamberlain, French Premier Édouard Daladier, Hitler, and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini signed the agreement in the early hours of September 30. Czechoslovakia was not invited to the conference that dismembered it. The Czechs were informed afterward and given a choice between acceptance and fighting Germany alone. They accepted, and Czech President Edvard Beneš called it a betrayal. Germany occupied the Sudetenland on October 1. In March 1939, Hitler violated the agreement and seized the rest of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain, finally recognizing that appeasement had failed, extended security guarantees to Poland. When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Britain and France declared war. Winston Churchill's judgment, delivered in the House of Commons after Munich, proved prophetic: "You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour and you will have war." The Munich Agreement permanently discredited appeasement as a foreign policy strategy and became the reference point for every subsequent debate about whether to confront or accommodate aggressive dictators.

César Chávez had ten dollars in his pocket and a conviction that the most exploited workers in America deserved a union. On September 30, 1962, in an abandoned theater in Fresno, California, he founded the National Farm Workers Association, the organization that would become the United Farm Workers and launch the most successful labor movement of the late 20th century. Chávez grew up in the fields. Born to a Mexican American family in Yuma, Arizona, he became a migrant farm worker at age ten after his family lost their homestead during the Depression. He attended dozens of schools, never graduated from eighth grade, and spent his youth picking cotton, grapes, and vegetables across California's Central Valley. He understood from personal experience that farm workers lived in conditions most Americans associated with a previous century: no minimum wage, no overtime, no toilets in the fields, no clean drinking water, and constant exposure to pesticides. Chávez spent a decade as a community organizer with the Community Service Organization before concluding that farm workers needed their own union, not just civic programs. He moved to Delano, California, and spent months driving from labor camp to labor camp, talking to workers one family at a time. The Fresno convention drew over 150 delegates who adopted a union flag featuring a black Aztec eagle on a red and white background. The breakthrough came in 1965 when Filipino grape workers in Delano, led by Larry Itliong and the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, launched a strike against grape growers. Chávez's NFWA joined the strike, and the two organizations eventually merged into the United Farm Workers. Chávez expanded the conflict into a national consumer boycott of California table grapes that lasted five years and enlisted the support of Robert Kennedy, Walter Reuther, and millions of ordinary Americans who stopped buying grapes in solidarity. The first union contracts were signed in 1970, granting farm workers wage increases, health benefits, and protections against pesticide exposure. California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, the first law in the country granting farm workers collective bargaining rights. Chávez's methods, drawn from Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., included fasting, marches, and strict nonviolence. His 1968 fast in Delano lasted 25 days and brought national attention to the cause. He died in 1993 and was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

James Meredith walked into the Lyceum building at the University of Mississippi on September 30, 1962, to register for classes, and a riot erupted that required 30,000 federal troops to suppress. The integration of Ole Miss was the most violent confrontation of the civil rights movement until that point, leaving two people dead and hundreds injured. Meredith, a twenty-nine-year-old Air Force veteran, had applied to the university in January 1961 and been rejected solely because of his race. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund took his case, and after sixteen months of legal battles, the Supreme Court ordered his admission. Governor Ross Barnett, a segregationist Democrat, personally blocked Meredith's enrollment on three separate occasions, declaring on statewide television that Mississippi would never surrender to the forces of integration. President John F. Kennedy attempted to negotiate with Barnett by phone, offering political cover in exchange for compliance. Barnett, playing to his base while secretly assuring Kennedy he would eventually yield, kept moving the goalposts. On September 30, Kennedy federalized the Mississippi National Guard and dispatched 500 U.S. Marshals to escort Meredith onto campus. The riot began that evening when a mob of over 2,000 students, Klansmen, and segregationists from across the South attacked the marshals with bricks, bottles, guns, and Molotov cocktails. The marshals held their positions around the Lyceum using tear gas but were steadily beaten back. A French journalist, Paul Guihard, was shot in the back and killed. A local bystander, Ray Gunter, was also fatally shot. Over 200 marshals were wounded, 28 by gunfire. Kennedy ordered Army troops to Oxford early on October 1. By dawn, 20,000 soldiers occupied the campus and town. Meredith registered for classes that morning, attended his first lecture in American history, and completed the semester under constant military escort. Meredith graduated from Ole Miss in August 1963 with a degree in political science. The university that had required an army to admit him now has a civil rights monument on the campus and named a building in his honor. Meredith's solitary act of defiance forced the federal government to demonstrate, for the second time in five years after Little Rock, that it would use military force to enforce constitutional rights.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was dying, though he did not yet know it, when he conducted the premiere of The Magic Flute at the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna on September 30, 1791. The opera was a popular triumph, running for over a hundred consecutive performances, but Mozart had less than ten weeks to live. The Magic Flute was unlike anything Mozart had written before. His previous operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte, were Italian-language works composed for the court opera. The Magic Flute was a Singspiel, a German-language popular entertainment mixing spoken dialogue with musical numbers, written for a suburban theater that catered to middle-class audiences rather than aristocrats. The librettist was Emanuel Schikaneder, an actor, impresario, and fellow Freemason who also played the role of the bird-catcher Papageno. The plot, drawing on Masonic symbolism, Egyptian mythology, and fairy tale convention, follows Prince Tamino and Papageno on a quest to rescue the princess Pamina from the sorcerer Sarastro. Beneath the fairy-tale surface, the opera explores themes of enlightenment, moral testing, and the triumph of wisdom over superstition that resonated deeply with the Masonic values both Mozart and Schikaneder shared. The music ranges from the comic accessibility of Papageno's folk-like songs to the terrifying virtuosity of the Queen of the Night's arias, which demand some of the highest notes in the soprano repertoire. The chorale-like solemnity of Sarastro's bass arias provides a contrasting gravity. The orchestration is simultaneously simple enough for a popular audience and sophisticated enough to reward close musical analysis. The premiere was a success, though Mozart reportedly noted from the orchestra pit that parts of the audience did not fully understand the Masonic allegory. The opera's popularity grew rapidly; by the time of Mozart's death on December 5, 1791, it had been performed dozens of times to packed houses. The Magic Flute became the most frequently performed opera in the German-speaking world and remains among the most staged works in the international repertoire. Mozart's final theatrical work proved that the highest art could reach the widest audience.