This day in history
Today is Monday, March 25, the 85th day of 2024. There are 281 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Film critic Gene Shalit is 98. Former astronaut James Lovell is 96. Feminist activist and author Gloria Steinem is 90. Singer Anita Bryant is 84. Singer Elton John is 77. Actor Marcia Cross is 62. Author Kate DiCamillo is 60. Comedian-actor Alex Moffat (TV: “Saturday Night Live”) is 42. Former auto racer Danica Patrick is 42.Actorsinger Katharine McPhee is 40. Comedian-actor Chris Redd (TV: “Saturday Night Live”) is 39. Rapper Big Sean is 36. Rap DJproducer Ryan Lewis is 36. Actor-singer Aly (aka Alyson) Michalka is 35.
▶ In 1634, English colonists sent by Lord Baltimore arrived in present-day Maryland.
▶ In 1845, the Legislature passed a bill that would guarantee all Massachusetts children access to public education, giving Black plaintiffs such as those in Nantucket recourse in the courts for school integration.
▶ In 1911, 146 people, mostly young female immigrants, were killed when fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in New York.
▶ In 1915, the US Navy lost its first commissioned submarine as the USS F-4 sank off Hawaii, claiming the lives of all 21 crew members.
▶ In 1931, in the so-called “Scottsboro Boys” case, nine young Black men were taken off a train in Alabama, accused of raping two white women; after years of convictions, death sentences, and imprisonment, the nine were eventually vindicated.
▶ In 1947, a coal-dust explosion inside the Centralia Coal Co. Mine No. 5 in Washington County, Ill, claimed 111 lives; 31 men survived.
▶ In 1954, RCA announced it had begun producing color television sets at its plant in Bloomington, Ind.
▶ In 1960, Ray Charles recorded “Georgia on My Mind” as part of his “The Genius Hits the Road” album in New York.
▶ In 1965, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led 25,000 people to the Alabama state capitol in Montgomery after a five-day march from Selma to protest the denial of voting rights to Blacks. Later that day, civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo, a white Detroit homemaker, was shot and killed by Ku Klux Klansmen.
▶ In 1987, the Supreme Court, in Johnson v. Transportation Agency, ruled 6-3 that an employer could promote a woman over an arguably more-qualified man to help get women into higher-ranking jobs.
▶ In 1990, 87 people, most of them Honduran and Dominican immigrants, were killed when fire raced through an illegal social club in New York City. (An arsonist set the fire after being thrown out of the club following an argument with his girlfriend; Julio Gonzalez died in prison in 2016.)
▶ In 2018, Linda Brown, who, as a young girl in Kansas, became embroiled in a landmark 1954 Supreme Court case that challenged segregation in public schools, died at 75.
▶ Last year, powerful tornadoes tore through parts of the Deep South, killing 26 people in Mississippi and obliterating dozens of buildings.