May 3 is the 123rd day of the year (124th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 242 days remain until the end of the year.
On May 3, 1979, Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher was chosen to become Britain’s first female prime minister.
In 1802, Washington, D.C., was incorporated as a city.
In 1937, Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel, “Gone with the Wind.”
In 1948, the Supreme Court, in Shelley v. Kraemer, ruled that covenants prohibiting the sale of real estate to Blacks or members of other racial groups were legally unenforceable.
In 1960, the Harvey Schmidt-Tom Jones musical “The Fantasticks” began a nearly 42-year run at New York’s Sullivan Street Playhouse.
In 1987, The Miami Herald said its reporters had observed a young woman spending “Friday night and most of Saturday” at a Washington townhouse belonging to Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart. The woman was later identified as Donna Rice; the resulting controversy torpedoed Hart’s presidential bid.
In 2006, a federal jury in Alexandria, Virginia, rejected the death penalty for al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, deciding he should spend life in prison for his role in 9/11; as he was led from the courtroom, Moussaoui taunted, “America, you lost.”
In 2009, Mexican President Felipe Calderon told state television a nationwide shutdown appeared to have helped curtail an outbreak of swine flu in Mexico.
In 2011, Chicago’s Derrick Rose became at age 22 the NBA’s youngest MVP.
In 2015, two gunmen were shot and killed by a police officer in Garland, Texas, after they opened fire outside a purposely provocative contest for cartoon depictions of the Prophet Muhammad.
In 2016, in a stunning triumph for a political outsider, Donald Trump all but clinched the Republican presidential nomination with a resounding victory in Indiana that knocked Ted Cruz out of the race.
In 2017, President Donald Trump met at the White House with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas promising “to do whatever is necessary” to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace.
In 2018, a federal grand jury in Detroit indicted former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn on charges stemming from the company’s diesel emissions cheating scandal.
In 2021, an elevated section of the Mexico City metro collapsed as subway cars were passing over it, killing 26 people; investigations found that the failure was caused by construction defects.