TODAY IN HISTORY
TODAY IS WEDNESDAY, APRIL 7, the 97th day of 2021. There are 268 days left in the year. TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT IN HISTORY: On this date in 1915, jazz singer-songwriter Billie Holiday, also known as “Lady Day,” was born in Philadelphia. In 1862, Union forces led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee. In 1922, the Teapot Dome scandal had its beginnings as Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall signed a secret deal to lease U.S. Navy petroleum reserves in Wyoming and California to his friends, oilmen Harry F. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny, in exchange for cash gifts. In 1927, the image and voice of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover were transmitted live from Washington to New York in the first successful longdistance demonstration of television. In 1945, during World War II, American planes intercepted and effectively destroyed a Japanese fleet, which included the battleship Yamato, that was headed to Okinawa on a suicide mission. In 1966, the U.S. Navy recovered a hydrogen bomb that the U.S. Air Force had lost in the Mediterranean Sea off Spain following a B-52 crash. In 1984, the Census Bureau reported Los Angeles had overtaken Chicago as the nation’s “second city” in terms of population. In 1994, civil war erupted in Rwanda, a day after a mysterious plane crash claimed the lives of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi. (In the following months, Hutu extremists slaughtered hundreds of thousands of minority Tutsi and Hutu moderates.) In 2010, North Korea said it had convicted and sentenced an American man to eight years in a labor prison for entering the country illegally and unspecified hostile acts. (Aijalon Mahli Gomes was freed in August 2010 after former U.S. President Jimmy Carter secured his release.) In 2015, Michael Thomas Slager, a white South Carolina police officer, was charged with murder in the shooting death of Black motorist Walter Lamer Scott after law enforcement officials saw a cellphone video taken by a bystander. (Slager pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges and was sentenced to 20 years in prison; prosecutors agreed to drop state murder charges that remained after a jury couldn’t agree whether he had committed a crime.) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS: Country singer Bobby Bare is 86. R&B singer Charlie Thomas (The Drifters) is 84. Former California Gov. Jerry Brown is 83. Movie director Francis Ford Coppola is 82. Singer Janis Ian and country musician John Dittrich are 70. Actor Jackie Chan, and College and Pro Football Hall-ofFamer Tony Dorsett are 67. Actor Russell Crowe and Christian/jazz singer Mark Kibble (Take 6) are 57. Actor Bill Bellamy and rock musician Dave “Yorkie” Palmer (Space) are 56. Rock musician Charlie Hall (The War on Drugs) is 47. Former football player-turned-analyst Tiki Barber, actor Heather Burns and Christian rock singer-musician John Cooper (Skillet) are 46. Actor Kevin Alejandro is 45.