2018—Hoping not to get shot like so many of their late peers, a million American students walk out of school to demand gun control that works.
1977—RIP Fannie Lou Hamer, organizer of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, who said, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”
1970—Richard Nixon plays piano at the Gridiron Dinner. His standards are drowned out by Spiro Agnew singing “Dixie” in “Black dialect.”
1965—“Except for Vietnam,” the AP reports Richard Nixon saying, “U.S. foreign policy is in a shambles.”
1964—We still don’t know who killed JFK, but on this day a jury decided Jack Ruby killed Lee Harvey Oswald.
1961—A B-52 with two nukes on board, its cabin overheated and its crew overamped on bennies, runs out of fuel over Yuba City, Calif. No big boom, though; all survive the crash.
1927—Edward Abbey, writer and anarchist, is born in…Pennsylvania?
1912—Strikers in Lawrence, Mass. win more bread—and a few roses, too.
1891—A mob of 20,000 in New Orleans lynches 11 Italian immigrants recently acquitted of murder.
1888—Kentucky’s State Treasurer, James “Honest Dick” Tate, vanishes with $247,000 in state funds.
1883—Ex-journalist Karl Marx dies in London, impoverished, of course.
1757—For not “doing his utmost” in battle at Minorca, the Royal Navy has Admiral John Byng shot.