Today’s snapshot of what is going on locally

Turn to the Community Page today and every day for upcoming area activities and a look at local history.

Today is Sunday, June 7, the 159th day of 2020. There are 207 days left in the year. Today’s Highlight in History: On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia offered a resolution to the Continental Congress stating “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”

On this date:

In 1654, King Louis XIV, age 15, was crowned in Rheims, 11 years after the start of his reign.

In 1712, Pennsylvania’s colonial assembly voted to ban the further importation of slaves.

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a “Creole of color,” was arrested for refusing to leave a whitesonly car of the East Louisiana Railroad. (Ruling on his case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld “separate but equal” racial segregation, a concept it renounced in 1954.)

In 1942, the Battle of Midway ended in a decisive victory for American naval forces over Imperial Japan, marking a turning point in the Pacific War.

In 1954, British mathematician, computer pioneer and code breaker Alan Turing died at age 41, an apparent suicide. ( Turing, convicted in 1952 of “gross indecency” for a homosexual relationship, was pardoned in 2013.

In 1958, singer- songwriter

Prince was born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis.

In 1965, the U. S. Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, struck down, 7-2, a Connecticut law used to prosecute a Planned Parenthood clinic in New Haven for providing contraceptives to married couples.

In 1977, Britons thronged London to celebrate the silver jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, who was marking the 25th year of her reign.

In 1981, Israeli military planes destroyed a nuclear power plant in Iraq, a facility the Israelis charged could have been used to make nuclear weapons.

In 1993, the U. S. Supreme Court ruled that religious groups could sometimes meet on school property after hours. Ground was broken for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

In 1998, in a crime that shocked the nation, James Byrd Jr., a 49-year- old black man, was hooked by a chain to a pickup truck and dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas. (Two white men were later sentenced to death; one of them, Lawrence Russell Brewer, was executed in 2011 and the other, John William King, was executed in April, 2019. A third defendant received life with the possibility of parole.)