March 22, 1959 (Sunday)
- In a televised address, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro announced that, effective immediately, he was outlawing all racial discrimination. Previously segregated clubs, parks and beaches were opened to Cuba's black residents by law.
- The Constitutional Assembly of Mauritania approved a democratic constitution for the African state, which would become independent of France in 1960. Provisions for a multiparty parliamentary system would last only five years, after which Governor Moktar Ould Daddah's Mauritanian People's Party became the only legal party.
- Born: Matthew Modine, American film actor, in Loma Linda, California
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Famous quotes containing the word march:
“On a late-winter evening in 1983, while driving through fog along the Maine coast, recollections of old campfires began to drift into the March mist, and I thought of the Abnaki Indians of the Algonquin tribe who dwelt near Bangor a thousand years ago.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)