Popular singer and radio and television personality Dinah Shore wins her first Emmy as host of her TV variety show. During her long career, she is exceptional in her ability to connect with her audiences.
Opera singer Beverly Sills joins the New York City Opera. During her long singing career, she records eighteen full-length operas. After she retires, she devotes herself to charity work for the prevention of birth defects.
Edith Green begins a two-decade-long career in Congress as a representative from Oregon. She works on women's rights and plays a significant role in securing the passage of Title IX, the first comprehensive federal law to prohibit sex discrimination against students and employees of educational institutions. Title IX benefits both males and females but is widely recognized as helping to develop parity for women in athletics.
Shirley MacLaine appears in her first film, the Alfred Hitchcock classic The Trouble with Harry. Over the course of her career she appears in more than fifty films and many TV specials and stage shows, and writes numerous books about her spiritual beliefs.
The arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man sparks the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott. Black women, the system's main users, support the boycott for more than a year. Parks's courageous action is seen as an underpinning of the civil rights movement. In 1996 she is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 1999 she receives the Congressional Gold Medal. Of the events of the fateful day, she said: “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”