TODAY IN HISTORY

A.D. 632: The prophet Muhammad died in Medina.

1864: Abraham Lincoln was nominated for another term as president during the National Union (Republican) Party’s convention in Baltimore.

1867: Modern American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wis.

1953: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that restaurants in the District of Columbia could not refuse to serve Black people. Eight tornadoes struck Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, killing 126 people.

1966: A merger was announced between the National and American football leagues, to take effect in 1970.

1967: During the six-day Middle East war, 34 American servicemen were killed when Israel attacked the USS Liberty, a Navy intelligence-gathering ship in the Mediterranean Sea. (Israel later said the Liberty had been mistaken for an Egyptian vessel.)

1968: Authorities announced the capture in London of James Earl Ray, the suspected assassin of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 1978: A jury in Clark County, Nev., ruled that the so-called “Mormon will,” purportedly written by the late billionaire Howard Hughes, was a forgery.

1995: U.S. Marines rescued Capt. Scott O’Grady, whose F-16C fighter jet had been shot down by Bosnian Serbs on June 2. Mickey Mantle received a liver transplant at a Dallas hospital; however, the baseball great died two months later.

2008: The average price of regular gas crept up to $4 a gallon.

2009: North Korea’s highest court sentenced American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee to 12 years’ hard labor for trespassing and “hostile acts.” (The women were pardoned in early August 2009 after a trip to Pyongyang by former President Bill Clinton.)

2015: Siding with the White House in a foreign policy power struggle with Congress, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Americans born in the disputed city of Jerusalem could not list Israel as their birthplace on passports.

2020: Thousands of mourners gathered at a church in Houston for a service for George Floyd, as his death during an arrest in Minneapolis continued to stoke protests in America and beyond over racial injustice.