Remembrance, rights and justice — from Brazil's Black Consciousness Day and children's rights to the Nuremberg trials.
Next: Friday, November 20, 2026.
November 20 is the National Day of Zumbi and Black Consciousness (Dia Nacional de Zumbi e da Consciência Negra) in Brazil. It marks the death in 1695 of Zumbi, leader of the Quilombo dos Palmares, a large community of people who escaped slavery. Law 14.759 of December 21, 2023 made it a national public holiday, first observed nationwide in 2024; before that it was a holiday only in some states and cities.
November 20 is World Children's Day (Universal Children's Day), first established by the United Nations in 1954. The date marks the UN General Assembly's adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959 and of the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. The Convention is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history.
Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDoR), observed on November 20, honors transgender people who have been killed in acts of anti-transgender violence. Activist Gwendolyn Ann Smith started it in 1999 as a vigil for Rita Hester, a transgender woman killed in Allston, Massachusetts, in November 1998. Vigils and events are now held in many countries.
The International Military Tribunal, with judges from the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and France, opened its trial of leading Nazis in Nuremberg, Germany, on November 20, 1945. Twenty-four men were indicted; 22 were tried, one of them, Martin Bormann, in absentia. The tribunal's charter rejected "following orders" as a defense. When the verdicts came on October 1, 1946, 12 defendants were sentenced to death, seven to prison terms, and three were acquitted.
Russia launched Zarya, the first module of the International Space Station, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Two weeks later, Space Shuttle Endeavour carried up the U.S.-built Unity module, and astronauts joined the two in orbit. The station's partners include the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada, and it has been continuously occupied since November 2, 2000.
Robert Francis Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, the seventh of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. He served as U.S. Attorney General under his brother, President John F. Kennedy, and later as a U.S. Senator from New York. While campaigning for president, he was shot in Los Angeles just after midnight on June 5, 1968, after winning the California primary, and died the next day.