TODAY IN HISTORY

1649

England’s King Charles I was executed for high treason.

1911

James White, an intellectually disabled Black young man who’d been convicted of rape for having sex with a 14-year-old white girl when he was 16, was publicly hanged in Bell County, Ky.

1945

During World War II, a Soviet submarine torpedoed the German ship MV Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic Sea with the loss of more than 9,000lives, most of them war refugees; roughly 1,000 people survived.

1948

Indian political and spiritual leader Mohandas K. Gandhi, 78, was shot and killed in New Delhi by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu extremist. (Godse and a co-conspirator were later executed.)

1969

The Beatles staged an impromptu concert atop Apple headquarters in London; it was the group’s last public performance.

2013

In a dramatic appeal before the Senate Judiciary Committee, wounded former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords urged Congress to enact tougher curbs on guns, saying, “too many children are dying” without them.