Not Your Century
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2020: Not Your Century Goes on Hiatus
With the San Francisco Chronicle focusing its editorial resources on the coronavirus pandemic and its effects, Not Your Century is going on hiatus. Listen to Fifth & Mission and become a member at SFChronicle.com to stay up to date on the crisis.
1959: The Dalai Lama Escapes
The 23-year-old religious and spiritual leader of Tibet gets an invitation from the occupying Chinese to come to a dance performance. Without bodyguards. Sensing a trap, he flees on foot over the Himalayas to India, where he remains in exile.
1922: Fatty Arbuckle's Third Trial
He's a giant of silent comedies, in more ways than one. Hollywood's first million-dollar star is a baby-faced man-mountain with the grace of a dancer. But a sensational rape and manslaughter case has derailed his life and career.
1918: The Flu Pandemic
A century before the COVID-19 coronavirus, the United States, like all combatants in the Great War, wants to keep the exploding flu crisis quiet to protect morale and prevent the enemy from seeing weakness. Sound familiar? | (Correction: An earlier versi
1964: The Palace Hotel Protest Leader
As an 18-year-old, Tracy Sims was the leader of civil rights protests that forced San Francisco hotels to end hiring discrimination. Now Tamam Tracy Moncur, the retired schoolteacher remembers a time when "the whole country was on fire for civil rights."
1981: Walter Cronkite Signs Off
"That's the way it is," says the Most Trusted Man in America for the last time, as he retires from anchoring the CBS Evening News. It's like a presidential changeover.
1946: Churchill's Iron Curtain Speech
In a college gym in small-town Missouri, former Prime Minister Winston Churchill tries to shake Americans out of their postwar bliss by saying their old ally "Uncle Joe" Stalin has dropped an "Iron Curtain" across Europe.
1991: The Rodney King Beating
When a commotion outside his apartment woke George Holliday up at 1 a.m., the plumber grabbed his new camcorder and went out to his balcony. He saw a police beating, and within a few days, everyone would see it.
1991: Murder in Porn's First Family
The Mitchell Brothers, Jim and "Party Artie," revolutionized the adult entertainment business, first with their O'Farrell Theatre in San Francisco, then with movies like "Behind the Green Door." They were close. Then Jim killed Artie. Why?
1965: Malcolm X Suspect Arrested
In the wake of the Fusion and Netflix series "Who Killed Malcolm X?" the New York D.A. has reopened the case of Muhammad Abdul Aziz, then known as Norman 3X Butler, who served 20 years for the murder despite multiple alibi witnesses.