The following events occurred in May 1959:
May 1, 1959 (Friday) W. E. B. Du Bois was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize during his visit to Moscow. Ghana's President Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea's President Sekou Toure announced the merger of their two nations into the Union of African States, which later grew to include Mali in 1961. The Union was dissolved in 1963 after the creation of the Organization of African Unity. Jean Hoerni filed a patent application (No. 3,064,167) for the planar process under the name "method of protecting exposed p-n junctions at the surface of silicon transistors by oxide masking technique". The process, which protected the transistor from contamination, made mass production of the transistors feasible, and has been called "after the invention of the junction transistor, the most important invention of microelectronics". The NASA spaceflight center in Greenbelt, Maryland, was named for Robert H. Goddard. A Little Joe Project Coordination Meeting, attended by personnel from Space Task Group, McDonnell, and Wallops Island, was held for the first time. The purpose of the meeting was to determine the status of various developmental phases and whether or not proper coordination was being effected with other related projects in the Mercury program (Big Joe, Mercury-Atlas, Mercury-Redstone, and Mercury-Jupiter). The important factor with regard to the latter item was whether or not a reasonable launch schedule could be established and maintained.
May 2, 1959 (Saturday) Four white men in Tallahassee, Florida, kidnapped and raped a black woman, Betty Jean Owens, near the campus of Florida A & M University, beginning a case that attracted nationwide attention. Ultimately, an all-white jury convicted the four men, and on June 22, Judge W. May Walker sentenced them to life in prison. Jerry Unser Jr. was fatally injured while practicing for the Indianapolis 500. Unser's car struck a retaining wall at and burst into flame, and he died 15 days later from his burns. As a result, Indy racing officials required all drivers to wear fire-resistant suits in practice and in competition.
May 3, 1959 (Sunday) A body was found in the shallow waters of a slough (wetland) of the Columbia River near Camas, Washington, and soon confirmed to be that of 10-year-old Susan Martin, one of five members of a Portland, Oregon, family that had vanished almost five months earlier. On December 7, 1958, Ken and Barbara Martin, and their three daughters, had left home to buy a Christmas tree, and never returned. The mystery garnered national attention. The next day, the body of 12-year-old Virginia Martin was found at the Bonneville Dam. No trace of the other three victims was ever located, nor was their car, a red and white station wagon. After more than sixty years, the mystery of what happened to the Martin family would remain unsolved.
May 4, 1959 (Monday) The first Grammy Awards were bestowed by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, in simultaneous ceremonies held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, and the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York City. The Music from Peter Gunn, by Henry Mancini, was album of the year, and Domenico Modugno's Volare (officially Nel blu, dipinto di blu) was song of the year.The Champs' Tequila won the award for best rhythm & blues performance. "Grammy" is an abbreviation for the Gramophone Award. On a day in which a white man was exonerated from charges of rape of a black woman, and a black man convicted of rape of a white woman, Robert Williams of the NAACP declared in Monroe, North Carolina, "We must meet violence with violence". In a rare appearance before Congress, former U.S. President Harry S. Truman testified in favor of a repeal of the two-terms amendment. "You don't have to be very smart to know that an officeholder who is not eligible for re-election loses a lot of influence."
May 5, 1959 (Tuesday) Potter Stewart was confirmed as a justice of the United States Supreme Court by a vote of 70–17. On the same day, Roland Ritchie was appointed to the Supreme Court of Canada. Both served on their nation's highest courts for more than 20 years. Stewart retired in 1981 and Ritchie in 1984. The United States signed an agreement with West Germany to share classified information about American nuclear weapons and to train German personnel in the operation of those weapons. After three of the six members of the school board of Little Rock, Arkansas, walked out, the remaining three, all segregationists, ordered the firing of 44 teachers who had supported integration, and reassigned School Superintendent Terrell E. Powell to a school principal's job. Born: Peter Molyneux, British game programmer, in Guildford, England Brian Williams, anchorman for NBC Nightly News, in Elmira, New York Died: Carlos Saavedra Lamas, 80, Argentine politician, 1936 Nobel Peace Prize laureate
May 6, 1959 (Wednesday) South Vietnam's President Ngô Đình Diệm promulgated "Law 10/59" to combat opposition by the communist Viet Cong. Under Article I, the death penalty could be invoked for murder and for other crimes, including theft of farm implements, and under Article III, a person found guilty of belonging to "an organization designed to help to prepare or perpetrate" such crimes could be executed. Death was by beheading, and traveling military tribunals brought guillotines along to carry out sentences. The Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, which oversaw the American nuclear arsenal, was reorganized as DASA, the Defense Atomic Support Agency. Later renamed the Defense Nuclear Agency (1971) and then the Defense Special Weapons Agency (1996), the former DASA is now part of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. Pigs were eliminated as Little Joe flight test subjects when studies disclosed that they could not survive long periods of time on their backs. However, McDonnell did use a pig, "Gentle Bess," to test the impact crushable support, and the test was successful.
May 7, 1959 (Thursday) English scientist and novelist C. P. Snow delivered an influential Rede Lecture on The Two Cultures, concerning a perceived breakdown of communication between the sciences and humanities, in the Senate House, University of Cambridge (U.K.)Subsequently published as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. The largest crowd ever to attend a Major League Baseball game up that time —93,103—turned out for an exhibition between the NL Dodgers and the AL Yankees (who won 6–2), at Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, for Roy Campanella Night, to honor the Dodgers catcher who had been paralyzed in a car crash the year before.Mark Langill, Los Angeles Dodgers (Arcadia Publishing, 2004), p34 The record stood for nearly half a century, until March 29, 2008, in another exhibition game at the L.A. Coliseum, when 115,300 came out for a charity game between the Dodgers and the Red Sox (who won 7–4). "A Squeeze Play For L.A.", Los Angeles Times, March 30, 2008 In a game that did count, Stan Musial of the Cardinals hit his 400th home run in a 4–3 win over the visiting Cubs.Baseball Digest (April 2004), p17 Two burglars broke into the apartment of socialite Mary G. Roebling at the Hotel Hildebrecht in Trenton, New Jersey, loaded nearly one million dollars' worth of gems and furs into a cardboard box and rode down the hotel elevator for their getaway—where New York City police were waiting for them. The police had been following the pair and their driver since February 2, after being tipped off.
May 8, 1959 (Friday) The Egyptian tour boat Dandara sank in the Nile River near Qalyub, drowning 150 of the 300 people on board. The overloaded boat, ferrying agricultural engineers and their families to a picnic, was only from shore when a sudden leak caused it to founder in water deep, and then to capsize. Most of the victims were women and children, trapped below decks. The skipper of the ship was arrested for negligence. At the Cannes Film Festival, Hiroshima mon amour, directed by Alain Resnais, was excluded from the contest because of its pacifist message. The success of the Resnais movie and of Francois Truffaut’s The 400 blows (presented in competition May 4) marked the beginning of the French New Wave. The first Little Caesars pizza restaurant was opened. Mike Ilitch and his wife Marian began the chain with a store in Garden City, Michigan. An F-84 jet fighter crashed into a backyard at Northville, Michigan, injuring two children, after the pilot had ejected. The last 30 people were evicted from Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles under court order, and their homes were bulldozed to make way for Dodger Stadium. Matvei Zakharov was made a Marshal of the Soviet Union. Born: Kevin McCloud, British designer and television presenter for the show Grand Designs; in Bedfordshire Died: Donald A. Quarles, 64, the Deputy U.S. Secretary of Defense, died of a heart attack. Quarles had been expected to succeed Neil McElroy later in the year as Defense Secretary.
May 9, 1959 (Saturday) The legislature for Eritrea voted to become part of Ethiopia, with the President being redesignated as "Chief of the Eritrean Administration under Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia". Alfred H. Fuller, President of the Fuller Brush Company and the son of company founder Alfred C. Fuller, died, along with his wife, when a blown rear tire crashed their Mercedes-Benz near Hawthorne, Nevada.
May 10, 1959 (Sunday)
Lakewood Church, now the largest megachurch in the United States, with 43,500 worshipers per week in 2018 and more than 52,000 reported by 2026.Lakewood Church website, was founded as Lakewood Baptist Church by future televangelist John Osteen and his wife Dolores "Dodie" Osteen with a service in a tent, and would then move into a former feed store in northeast Houston in Texas. The Osteens changed the church in 1961 to a nondenominational Christian house of worship and build it into a megachurch with 700 seats in 1972 and 8,000 in 1988. After John's 1999 death, his youngest son, televangelist Joel Osteen would build the church congregation into more than 50,000 weekly attendees as of 2026 at regular services at the former Compaq Center pro basketball arena (with seats for 16,800 for each service), as well as reaching millions of people on television and online. Azef Youssef Atta was enthroned at Alexandria in Egypt, as Pope Pope Cyril VI of the Coptic Orthodox Church and its four million adherents in Egypt.. He would be the spiritual leader of the Coptic Christians until his death on March 9, 1971. Elections were held in Austria for all 185 seats of the Nationalrat, the lower house of the Austrian parliament. While no party won the 93 seats needed for a majority, the coalition of the Volkspartei (ÖVP) of Chancellor Julius Raab (79 seats) and the Sozialdemokratische (SPÖ) of Vice Chancellor Bruno Pittermann (78 seats) combined for 157 seats.
May 11, 1959 (Monday) Nine clubs from the Transvaal and three from Natal province formed the first professional soccer football league in South Africa. It was designated by its members as the National Football League. In accordance with the apartheid laws in effect at the time, the South African NFL was limited to white players only and would play its first matches on July 4. The original 12 members were Durban City and Durban United (Durban); Benoni United, Brakpan United, Germiston Callies (East Rand); Northern United, Rangers Johannesburg and Southern Park (Johannesburg); Maritzburg Celtic (Pietermaritzburg); Pretoria City and Arcadia Shepherds (Pretoria); and Randfontein (West Rand).Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation, John van Enckevort and Ian King In 1978, the all-white NFL would merge with the all-nonwhite National Professional Soccer League (NPSL) under the NPSL name. The foreign ministers of Britain, France, the Soviet Union and the United States met in Geneva for a 17-day conference on the reunification of Germany, without coming to an agreement.