2005—Veep Dick “Dick” Cheney explains to Larry King that the insurgency in Iraq is “in the last throes.”
1965—Navy Lts. Clinton B. Johnson and Charles Hartman, flying prop-driven Douglas A-1 Skyraiders, down a MiG jet fighter over Vietnam.
1963—The White House-Kremlin “Hot Line” is installed.
1953—Lt. Gen. John W. “Iron Mike” O’Daniel arrives in Saigon to confer with French General Henri Navarre on how to bring peace to Vietnam.
1947—Standing up for labor, President Harry S Truman vetoes the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act.
1943—A three-day race riot begins in Detroit; 34 die, 25 of them Black, 17 of whom are killed by white cops.
1942—Four prisoners in stolen Nazi uniforms drive out Auschwitz’s main gate in the commandant’s car.
1941—The sub U.S.S. 0-9 sinks east of the Isles of Shoals with 33 aboard.
1940—Elbert Williams is lynched for organizing the NAACP in Brownsville, Tenn.; cops can find no evidence.
1790—T. Jefferson, J. Madison, and A. Hamilton make a deal: a Potomac Capitol, assuming states’ debts.
1783—Independence Hall is beseiged by 400 disgruntled soldiers demanding their pay. Rather than cough up, Congress flees to Princeton, N.J.
1631—Pirates led by Murad—a Dutchman “gone Turk”—sack Baltimore, in County Cork; its inhabitants end up enslaved in North Africa.
Elbert Williams was the NAACP’s first voting rights martyr.
His murder in 1940 launched the voting rights bloodletting that reached its zenith in the 1960s. American justice failed. Williams killers were not prosecuted. If they had been lives might have been saved.
I am completing a book about the murder and its aftermath.