This Week in National Press Club History: Obama, Clooney, appear at Press Club

This week in National Press Club History:

April 27, 2006: Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, participates with actor George Clooney and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, in a discussion of genocide in Darfur, Sudan, at a Press Club Newsmakers press conference attended by a record number of journalists.

April 29, 1993: His Holiness the Dalai Lama, exiled leader of Tibet, calls for political independence for Tibet, now recognized by the United States as a province of China, at a Club Luncheon.

April 30, 2010: Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus tells an NPC Luncheon that women will soon be assigned to serve on submarines. “The Navy has 20 years of experience with women aboard surface ships,” Mabus says, and this move “will make us a better Navy. We could not run the Navy without women.”

May 1, 1950: The debut issue of The Record, the Club’s first regularly-published newsletter, is released. It becomes a weekly in February 1966 and survives almost 60 years before electronic-news, and the Wire, takes over.

May 2, 2002: Rev. Al Sharpton, civil rights activist, announces at a Club Luncheon that his advocacy organization, the National Action Network, is beginning a campaign, more than two years before the November 2004 general elections, to register at least one million women to vote.

May 3, 2011: The NPC hosts the awards ceremony for the Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize in observance of UNESCO”s annual World Press Freedom Day. Thirteen courageous journalist from 13 countries receive the award in recognition of their unflinching dedication to press freedom.

This Week In National Press Club History is brought to you by the NPC History & Heritage Committee, which preserves and revitalizes the century-plus history of the Club with lobby displays, events, panel discussions and an extensive, on-going oral history project. For further information about the Committee or to join it, contact Chair Gilbert Klein at [email protected].