1950 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

Johannesburg has riots January 29 as blacks begin violent protests against the apartheid program that went into effect last year (see 1951).

Civil-rights leader Charles Hamilton Houston dies of heart disease at his native Washington, D.C., April 22 at age 54, having laid the legal ground for overturning the Supreme Court's 1896 "separate but equal" decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. The U.S. Supreme Court June 5 overturns a Texas court's ruling that upheld the exclusion of a black applicant to the University of Texas Law School at Austin (Sweatt v. Painter). Postal worker Heman Sweatt applied for admission in 1946, the governor set up a separate law school for blacks at Houston, Sweatt obtained help from the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) to sue the state (see Brown decision, 1954).

The Mattachine Society founded at Los Angeles by English-born U.S. Communist Party member and pioneer gay-rights activist Harry Hay (originally Henry Hay Jr.), 38, and a few others is a secret group whose existence defies a California law making it illegal for homosexuals to assemble in public (other states have similar laws, and the American Psychiatric Association defines homosexuality as a mental illness). The group takes its name from a medieval French term for male dancers who wear only masks as they perform in public, sometimes satirizing social customs (see 1969).

India grants women the right to vote on the same basis as men under terms of its new constitution (see Pakistan, 1947).

North and South Koreans commit atrocities, as do UN forces, and subject prisoners of war to unspeakable cruelty. Both sides execute suspected collaborators and dissidents without trial.