TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

June 12, 1963

Civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Miss.

ALSO ON THIS DATE

1665

England installed a municipal government in New York, formerly the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, and appointed its first mayor, Thomas Willett.

1776

Virginia’s colonial legislature adopted a Declaration of Rights.

1939

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was dedicated in Cooperstown, N.Y.

1942

Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a diary for her 13th birthday, less than a month before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis.

1967

The U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, unanimously struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages.

1978

David Berkowitz was sentenced to 25years to life in prison for each of the six “Son of Sam” .44-caliber killings that terrified New Yorkers.

1987

President Ronald Reagan, during a visit to the divided German city of Berlin, exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

1994

2016

An American-born Muslim opened fire at the Pulse nightclub, a gay establishment in Orlando, Florida, leaving 49people dead and 53wounded before being shot dead by police. Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were slashed to death outside her Los Angeles home.