October 7, 1931

1931Cotton Fitzsimmons, American basketball player and coach (died 2004)^[†]

Lowell Gibbs "Cotton" Fitzsimmons was an American college and NBA basketball coach. A native of Bowling Green, Missouri, he attended and played basketball at Hannibal-LaGrange Junior College in Hannibal, Missouri and Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. He coached the Phoenix Suns three times, was named the NBA Coach of the Year twice, and is often credited as the architect of the Suns' success of the late 1980s and early to middle 1990s. Fitzsimmons won 1,089 games in his coaching career: 223 games at the junior college level, 34 at the Division I college level and 832 in the NBA.

1931Tommy Lewis, American football player and coach (died 2014)^[†]

Thomas Edison Lewis was an American gridiron football player. He played fullback for the Alabama Crimson Tide.

1931R. Sivagurunathan, Sri Lankan journalist, lawyer, and academic (died 2003)^[†]

Kalasuri Ratnadurai Sivagurunathan was a Sri Lankan journalist, lawyer, academic and editor of Thinakaran.

1931Desmond Tutu, South African archbishop and activist, Nobel Prize laureate (died 2021)^[†]

Desmond Mpilo Tutu was a South African Anglican bishop and theologian, known for his work as an anti-apartheid and human rights activist. He was Bishop of Johannesburg from 1985 to 1986 and then Archbishop of Cape Town from 1986 to 1996, in both cases being the first Black African to hold the position. Theologically, he sought to fuse ideas from Black theology with African theology.