This Week 100 Years Ago: Headlines from 5 19, 2025

Looking Back: The World on 19 May 1925

A century may feel like an eternity, yet leafing through old front pages shows how quickly today becomes history. This week we rewind to 19 May 1925, when two very different milestones were unfolding—one in a quiet Mid-western household, the other on the boulevards of Paris. Each, in its own way, still echoes loudly in 2025.

1. Omaha, Nebraska — A Child Called Malcolm Little Enters the World

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At 10 p.m. on a warm Tuesday night, Louise Little delivered her fourth child in a modest two-storey home at 3448 Pinkney Street. The boy was named Malcolm Little—known to future generations as Malcolm X.

• Parents: Louise, a Grenadian-born activist, and Earl Little, a Baptist minister and outspoken Garveyite, were raising their children on a steady diet of Black self-reliance.
• Atmosphere in 1925: The Ku Klux Klan was surging; racial terror lynchings numbered in the hundreds each year. In Omaha, the Littles had already felt the burn of cross-wielding night riders.
• Why it matters: By the early 1960s, that infant would stand at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom challenging America to reckon with its racial sins, influencing global liberation movements from Johannesburg to Jakarta.

2025 Perspective: In an era of biometric passports and virtual town halls, the fight for racial equity has evolved into data-driven activism—yet Malcolm’s insistence on dignity and self-determination still guides hashtags and policy briefs alike. His birth story reminds us that social revolutions often begin in the most ordinary of rooms.

2. Paris, France — The Art Deco Exposition Turns the City Into Tomorrow

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By mid-May 1925, the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes—open since 28 April—was the talk of Europe. Crowds queued for hours along the Seine to glimpse pavilions that glittered in lacquer, chrome, and neon.

• What visitors saw: The cubist facade of Pierre Chareau’s glass house; René Lalique’s fountains lit from beneath; Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston at night-club galas.
• The big idea: Modernity could be glamorous. Designers threw out overwrought Victorian curls for bold geometry, birthing the style we now call Art Deco.
• Global impact: By December, skyscraper lobbies in New York, cinemas in Bombay, and rail stations in São Paulo were borrowing the Exposition’s zigzags and sunbursts.

2025 Perspective: A hundred years on, we’re debating VR architecture and 3-D-printed neighborhoods, yet the Exposition’s message endures—design shapes how we feel about progress. The sustainable-materials pavilions of today trace a direct lineage to those chrome-and-glass showstoppers on the Quai d’Orsay.

Closing Thoughts

From the first cries of a future civil-rights icon to the neon glow of Parisian modernism, 19 May 1925 crackled with beginnings. One shifted the moral compass of a nation; the other reframed global aesthetics. Both prove that history’s big bangs often start as soft footfalls—a baby’s breath, a designer’s sketch.