› added 5 years ago

80

TIL Malcolm X said that white people could not join his black nationalist Organization of Afro-American Unity, but "if John Brown were still alive, we might accept him." Brown was a famous abolitionist convicted and hanged for treason after attempting to lead a slave rebellion in 1859.

Read more wikipedia.org

via reddit.com

ne697 TIL that in the 1940s, actress Joan Hickson appeared in an Agatha Christie play, following which the author sent her a note reading “I hope one day you will play my dear Miss Marple. 41 years later, Hickson was cast as Miss Marple in a BBC series of Marple adaptations.
wpjJ TIL that a 2 month-old baby boy named Ernest was raffled off at the 1909 World’s Fair in Seattle. No one claimed him with the winning ticket, and it’s unclear what happened to him.
R5kr8 TIL Almost 300 birds were shot at the 1900 Summer Olympics. This was the only Olympic Game to use live animals as targets.
M9pV TIL that the russian scientist Anatoli Bugorski got struck in the face by a proton beam in a particle accelerator, and survived. He described the sensation as seeing a light “brighter than a thousand suns”
PYj5O TIL the letter Y is not just "sometimes" a vowel. It is almost always a vowel. It is only a consonant around 2.5% of the time.