TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT 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.

ALSO ON THIS DATE 1634

English colonists sent by Lord Baltimore arrived in presentday Maryland.

1894

Jacob S. Coxey began leading an “army” of unemployed from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington, D.C., to demand help from the federal government.

1911

146people, mostly young female immigrants, were killed when fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in New York.

1915

The U.S. Navy lost its first commissioned submarine as the USS F-4sank off Hawaii, claiming the lives of all 21 crew members.

1947

A coal-dust explosion inside the Centralia Coal Co. Mine No. 5in Washington County, Illinois, claimed 111 lives; 31 men survived.

1960

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled that the D.H. Lawrence novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” was not obscene and could be sent through the mails. Ray Charles recorded “Georgia on My Mind” as part of his “The Genius Hits the Road” album in New York.

1963

Private pilot Ralph Flores and his 21-year-old passenger, Helen Klaben, were rescued after being stranded for seven weeks in brutally cold conditions in the Yukon after their plane crashed.

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.

1985

“Amadeus” won eight Academy Awards, including best picture, best director for Milos Forman and best actor for F. Murray Abraham.

1988

In New York City’s so-called “Preppie Killer” case, Robert Chambers Jr. pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the death of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin.

1990

87 people, most of them Honduran and Dominican immigrants, were killed when fire raced through an illegal social club in New York City.

2010

Osama bin Laden threatened in a new message to kill any Americans al-Qaida captured if the U.S. executed Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the selfprofessed mastermind of the Sept. 11attacks, or other alQaida suspects. Defense Secretary Robert Gates approved new rules easing enforcement of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gays serving openly in the military.