On this day, April 16
1945 A Soviet submarine in the Baltic Sea torpedoed and sank the ship the MV Goya, which Germany was using to transport civilian refugees and wounded soldiers; it’s estimated that up to 7,000 people died.
1947 The cargo ship Grandcamp, carrying ammonium nitrate, blew up in the harbor in Texas City, Texas; a nearby ship, the High Flyer, which was carrying ammonium nitrate and sulfur, caught fire and exploded the following day; the blasts and fires killed nearly 600 people.
1963 Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which the civil rights activist responded to a group of local clergymen who had criticized him for leading street protests; King defended his tactics, writing, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
1972 Apollo 16 blasted off on a voyage to the moon with astronauts John W. Young, Charles M. Duke Jr. and Ken Mattingly on board. 1977 Alex Haley, author of the best-seller “Roots,” visited the Gambian village of Juffure, where, he believed, his ancestor Kunte Kinte was captured as a slave in 1767.
2003 Michael Jordan played his last NBA game with the Washington Wizards, who lost to the Philadelphia 76ers, 107-87.
2007 In one of America’s worst school attacks, a college senior killed 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech before taking his own life.
2010 The U.S government accused Wall Street’s most powerful firm of fraud, saying Goldman Sachs & Co. had sold mortgage investments without telling buyers the securities were crafted with input from a client who was betting on them to fail. (In July 2010, Goldman agreed to pay $550 million in a settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but did not admit wrongdoing.)
2018 The New York Times and The New Yorker won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for breaking the Harvey Weinstein scandal with reporting that galvanized the #MeToo movement.
2020 The Trump administration gutted an Obama-era rule that compelled the country’s coal plants to cut back emissions of mercury and other human health hazards.
2021 Jon Ryan Schaffer, a member of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group and a heavy metal guitarist, became the first defendant to plead guilty to federal charges in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Today’s birthdays: Singer and Canonsburg native Bobby Vinton, 89. Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II, 84. Basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, 77. Former Massachusetts first lady Ann Romney, 75. NFL coach Bill Belichick, 72. Actor Ellen Barkin, 70. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, 62. Singer Jimmy Osmond, 61. Actor-comedian Martin Lawrence, 59. Actor Jon Cryer, 59.