October 16, 1916: Margaret Sanger opens the 1st birth control clinic in America, at 46 Amboy Street in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn. Planned Parenthood of America considers this its founding.
Brownsville has long been a ghetto, but, at the time, it was a Jewish one.
Sanger is arrested for obscenity, as printing and distributing literature about birth control involved mention of sexual organs and sexual behavior, and mentions of either were then illegal. She was convicted, and sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse.
In February 1917, she began publishing a magazine, Birth Control Review. It was, appropriately, published once a month. In 1918, the New York Court of Appeals issued a ruling that allowed doctors to prescribe contraception. Sanger died in 1966, 15 months after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, in Griswold v. Connecticut, that birth control was part of a person's right to privacy.
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October 16, 1916 was a Monday. The baseball season had ended 4 days earlier, when the Boston Red Sox beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in Game 5 to clinch the World Series. Football was in midweek. And it was too soon, in that era, for the basketball and hockey seasons to begin. So there were no scores on this historic day.
