September 5, 1981 (Saturday)
- Pope Shenuda III, head of the Coptic Christian Church of Egypt, was deposed from his job by President Anwar Sadat, who charged that Muslim and Christian extremists were conspiring to overthrow the government. Three years after Sadat's assassination, Shenuda, who had been exiled to the monastery of Saint Bishoi, was allowed by President Hosni Mubarak to return to Cairo.
- John Barnes, who would become England's greatest black soccer football player, made his professional debut at age 17, playing for the last 15 minutes of Watford F.C.'s game against Oldham Athletic.
- In the largest jailbreak from a Communist nation, 154 inmates escaped from a jail in Bydgoszcz, Poland. The mass breakout happened after prisoners rioted after a 17-year old burglary suspect had been shot during an attempted escape.
Read more about this topic: September 1981
Famous quotes containing the word september:
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)