WHAT ALL HAPPENED MARCH TO DECEMBER 1963
Find out what all happened March to December 1963

Beeching Axe: Dr. Richard Beeching issues a report calling for huge cuts to the United Kingdom's rail network. (27. March 1963)

The Pro Football Hall of Fame opens in Canton, Ohio with 17 charter members. (7. September 1963)

Great Train Robbery: in England, a gang of 15 train robbers steal £2.6 million in bank notes. (8. August 1963)

North Borneo (now Sabah) achieve a self governance. (31. August 1963)

CBS Evening News becomes U.S. network television's first half-hour weeknight news broadcast, when the show is lengthened from 15 to 30 minutes. (2. September 1963)

Syncom 2, the world's first geosynchronous satellite, is launched from Cape Canaveral on a Delta B booster. (26. July 1963)

The Convention on the Unification of Certain Points of Substantive Law on Patents for Invention is signed at Strasbourg. (27. November 1963)

The New York Post Sunday Magazine publishes Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, drafted shortly after his arrest on April 12th during the Birmingham Campaign advocating for civil rights and an end to segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. The letter was in response to "A Call for Unity": a statement made by eight white Alabama clergymen against King and his methods, following his arrest, and became one of the most-anthologized statements of the civil rights movement. (19. May 1963)

American Civil Rights Movement: Alabama Governor George Wallace stands at the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in an attempt to block two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from attending that school. Later in the day, accompanied by federalized National Guard troops, they are able to register. (11. June 1963)

Pan Am Flight 214, a Boeing 707, is struck by lightning and crashes near Elkton, Maryland, killing all 81 people on board. (8. December 1963)

Instant replay makes its debut during an American Army–Navy football game. (7. December 1963)

Swissair Flight 306 crashes near Dürrenäsch, Switzerland, killing all 80 people on board. (4. September 1963)

Pope John XXIII issues Pacem in Terris, the first encyclical addressed to all instead of to Catholics alone. (11. April 1963)

American civil rights movement: James Meredith becomes the first black person to graduate from the University of Mississippi. (18. August 1963)

In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the Organisation of African Unity is established. (25. May 1963)

The 1963 South Vietnamese coup begins (1. November 1963)

A day after South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem announced the Joint Communique to end the Buddhist crisis, a riot involving around 2,000 people breaks out. One person is killed. (17. June 1963)

In the first live, televised murder, Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, is murdered two days after the assassination, by Jack Ruby in the basement of Dallas police department headquarters. (24. November 1963)

Zanzibar gains independence from the United Kingdom as a constitutional monarchy, under Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah. (10. December 1963)

The United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union sign a nuclear test ban treaty. (5. August 1963)