On this date in ...

1919: Monk Eastman, a powerful New York City gangster who operated his illegal activities for six years out of Albany after being released from Sing Sing, walked down Fifth Avenue in New York carrying a gun and a smile, but received only cheers and applause from onlookers. He was now a member of the Army National Guard’s 27th Infantry Division in the 106th Machine Gun Battalion, and he and his fellow returning soldiers were part of a military parade. Due to his honorable service. Gov. Al Smith soon restored his U.S. citizenship taken away when he went to prison. Before long, however, he went back to a life of crime and by December 1920 he was dead from multiple gunshot wounds delivered by his partner, a corrupt Prohibition agent. 1969: In a memorandum circulated on campus, the 20-member Black Students Alliance at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy demanded that administrators of the science-oriented school recruit more black students, name a winner of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. scholarship and have a separate dormitory for black students with a black counselor. The group also demanded the right to have a say over students recruited from the inner city and the right to remove those already in school on a scholarship program. The memorandum said an upper class undergraduate program should be set up to compensate Alliance members for the time and effort they had wasted in fighting for “black brothers” on campus. RPI had a total enrollment of about 4,500.

1994: Whether they were retirees volunteering at senior centers, temporary workers in storefront offices or accountants in pinstripes, the Capital Region’s tax preparers were in the throes of their annual frenzy. And despite early guesses that bad weather and anxiety over tax increases would delay filings, accountants and the Internal Revenue Service reported that Capital Region taxpayers were sending in their returns ahead of last year’s pace. Fifty-eight percent of the 1.15 million taxpayers in the IRS Albany region, which stretched from Dutchess to Essex counties, had filed their 1993 returns by March 18, said spokeswoman Christine Hogankilburn.