TODAY IN HISTORY
On June 23, 1888, abolitionist Frederick Douglass received one vote from the Kentucky delegation at the Republican convention in Chicago, making him the first Black candidate to have his name placed in nomination for U.S. president. (The nomination went to Benjamin Harrison.)
Also on this date
In 1931, aviators Wiley Post and Harold Gatty took off from New York on a round-the-world flight that lasted eight days and 15 hours.
In 1947, the Senate joined the House in overriding President Harry S. Truman’s veto of the Taft-Hartley Act, designed to limit the power of organized labor.
In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed Title IX barring discrimination on the basis of sex for “any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”
In 1972, President Nixon and White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman discussed using the CIA to obstruct the FBI’s Watergate investigation. (Revelation of the tape recording of this conversation sparked Nixon’s resignation in 1974.)
In 2016, Britain voted to leave the European Union after a bitterly divisive referendum campaign, toppling Prime Minister David Cameron, who had led the campaign to keep Britain in the EU.
In 2020, the Louisville, Kentucky, police department fired an officer involved in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor more than three months earlier, saying Brett Hankison had shown “extreme indifference to the value of human life” when he fired 10 rounds into Taylor’s apartment. (A second officer was also fired; Hankison was found not guilty on charges that he endangered neighbors.)
Ten years ago: Syria and Turkey sought to ease tensions following an incident in which Syria shot down a Turkish reconnaissance plane, saying the plane had entered its airspace.
Five years ago: President Donald Trump signed a bill making it easier for the Department of Veterans Affairs to fire employees, part of a push to overhaul the struggling agency.
One year ago: A 49-year-old Indiana grandmother became the first person to be sentenced in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol; Anna Morgan Lloyd was sentenced to probation and community service and had to pay $500 in restitution after pleading guilty to a single misdemeanor charge. A member of the Oath Keepers extremist group, Graydon Young, pleaded guilty in a conspiracy case stemming from the Jan. 6 attack, and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.