Today’s Highlight in History<br>
On June 12, 2016, a gunman opened fire at the Pulse nightclub, a gay establishment in Orlando, Florida, leaving 49 people dead and 53 wounded; Omar Mateen pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group during a three-hour standoff before being killed in a shootout with police.
On this date:
In 1630, Englishman John Winthrop, leading a fleet carrying Puritan refugees, arrived at the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he became its governor.
In 1776, Virginia’s colonial legislature adopted a Declaration of Rights.
In 1942, Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a diary for her 13th birthday, less than a month before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis.
In 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 2001.)
In 1964, South African Black nationalist Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison along with seven other people, including Walter Sisulu, for committing sabotage against the apartheid regime (all were eventually released, Mandela in 1990).
In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, unanimously struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages.
In 1978, David Berkowitz was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for each of the six “Son of Sam” .44-caliber killings that terrified New Yorkers.
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan, during a visit to the divided German city of Berlin, exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
In 1991, Russians went to the polls to elect Boris N. Yeltsin president of their republic.
In 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were slashed to death outside her Los Angeles home. (O.J. Simpson was later acquitted of the killings in a criminal trial but was eventually held liable in a civil action.)
In 2004, former President Ronald Reagan’s body was sealed inside a tomb at his presidential library in Simi Valley, California, following a week of mourning and remembrance by world leaders and regular Americans.
In 2012, Democrat Ron Barber, who almost lost his life in the Arizona shooting rampage that seriously wounded former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, won a special election to succeed her. Former mobster Henry Hill, the subject of the movie “Goodfellas,” died in Los Angeles a day after his 69th birthday.
In 2017, tens of thousands of protesters held anti-corruption rallies across Russia; more than a thousand were arrested, including opposition leader and protest organizer Alexei Navalny. The Golden State Warriors brought home the NBA championship, defeating the Cleveland Cavaliers 129-120 in Game 5.
In 2020, Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, was shot and killed by one of the two white officers who responded after he was found asleep in his car in the drive-thru lane of a Wendy’s restaurant in Atlanta; police body camera video showed Brooks struggling with the officers and grabbing a Taser from one of them, firing it as he fled. (An autopsy found that Brooks had been shot twice in the back. Officer Garrett Rolfe faces charges including murder.)
In 2021, a federal judge threw out a lawsuit filed by employees of a Houston hospital system over its requirement that all of its staff be vaccinated against COVID-19; the Houston Methodist Hospital system had suspended 178 employees without pay over their refusal to get vaccinated. (More than 150 employees who refused to get the vaccine would resign or be fired after the suit was dismissed.) Saudi Arabia announced that the next hajj pilgrimage would be limited to no more than 60,000 people, all of them from within the kingdom, due to the pandemic.
In 2022, Senate bargainers announced a bipartisan framework responding to a series of mass shootings, a modest breakthrough offering measured gun curbs and bolstered efforts to improve school safety and mental health programs. The proposal fell far short of tougher steps sought by President Joe Biden. Members of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot said they had uncovered enough evidence for the Justice Department to consider a criminal indictment against former President Donald Trump for seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election. J. Joseph “Joe” Grandmaison, a larger-than-life Democratic operative who ran numerous campaigns and served as an appointee under three presidents, died at age 79.