TODAY IN HISTORY
On Sept. 12, 1962, in a speech at Rice University in Houston, President John F. Kennedy reaffirmed his support for the manned space program, declaring: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
Also on this date In 1958,
the U.S. Supreme Court, in Cooper v. Aaron, unanimously ruled that Arkansas officials who were resisting public school desegregation orders could not disregard the high court’s rulings.
In 1977,
South African Black student leader and anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, 30, died while in police custody, triggering an international outcry.
In 1987,
reports surfaced that Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Biden had borrowed, without attribution, passages of a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock for one of his own speeches. (The report, along with other revelations, prompted Biden to drop his White House bid.)
In 1994,
a stolen, single-engine Cessna crashed into the South Lawn of the White House, coming to rest against the executive mansion; the pilot, Frank Corder, was killed.
In 2001,
rescue workers continued to search for bodies in the World Trade Center’s smoking rubble a day after a terrorist attack that shut down the financial capital, badly damaged the Pentagon and left thousands dead.
In 2008,
a Metrolink commuter train struck a freight train head-on in Los Angeles, killing 25 people. (Federal investigators said the Metrolink engineer, Robert Sanchez, who was among those who died, had been text-messaging on his cellphone and ran a red light shortly before the crash.)
In 2012,
The U.S. dispatched an elite group of Marines to Tripoli, Libya, after the mob attack in Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans.
The United States won its first world basketball championship since 1994, beating Turkey 81-64 in Istanbul.
Jeremy Corbyn won a landslide victory to lead Britain’s opposition Labor Party in one of the country’s biggest political shake-ups in decades.
The Trump administration revoked a regulation from the Obama era that shielded many U.S. wetlands and streams from pollution; the regulation was opposed by developers and farmers who said it hurt economic development and infringed on property rights.
Associated Press