Category: Today

On April 9, 1969, the “Chicago Eight,” indicted on federal charges of conspiracy to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, pled not guilty. The eight antiwar activists were David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee (NMC); Rennie Davis and Thomas Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party (“Yippies”); Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers; and two lesser known activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines. The defendants were ultimately found not guilty of conspiracy, but the jury convicted all but Froines and Weiner of intent to riot. Though the others were each sentenced to five years in prison and fined $5,000, none of the defendants served time because in 1972 a Court of Appeals overturned the criminal convictions.

On April 8, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized almost $5 million to implement work-relief programs, hoping to lift the nation out of the Great Depression, after Congress allowed the president to use the funds at his discretion. FDR created the Works Progress Administration from the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act, one of several New Deal programs he hoped would relieve massive unemployment. (Like recent efforts, it didn’t work.) After 1935, FDR lobbied Congress annually to continue funding the ERA Act. In total, the act allocated approximately $880 million in federal funds.

On April 8, 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt froze wages and prices, prohibited workers from changing jobs unless required by the war effort, and barred rate increases by common carriers and public utilities to check inflation.

On April 8, 1952, President Harry Truman called for the seizure of all domestic steel mills to prevent a nationwide strike.

On April 8, 1953, Mau Mau leader Jomo Kenyatta was convicted by Kenya’s British rulers and sentenced to seven years imprisonment with hard labor and indefinite restriction thereafter.

On April 7, 1931, Daniel Ellsberg, an American military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers and whose office was broken into by burglars hired by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), was born in Chicago. The break-in would lead to the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon

On April 7, 1969, the Internet was born with Steve Crocker’s invention of Request For Comments (RFC) documents to help record unofficial notes on the development of the ARPANET, the world’s first operational packet switching network and the core network that would become the global Internet. RFCs have since become the official record for Internet specifications, protocols, procedures, and events.

On April 7, 1994, civil war erupted in Rwanda with Hutu extremists attacking the minority Tutsis after President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. It is not known whether the attack was carried out by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi military organization, or by Hutu extremists trying to instigate the mass killing. But in roughly three months, the Hutu Interahamwe brutally murdered as many as a million innocent civilian Tutsis (and moderate Hutus) in the worst ethnic genocide since World War II.

On April 6, 1776, the Continental Congress opened all U.S. ports to international trade with any part of the world not under British rule. Under Britain’s mercantilist policies, all American imports and exports had to pass through Great Britain on their way to and from the colonies.

On April 6, 1862, the Battle of Shiloh began in Tennessee.

On April 6, 1929, Governor Huey P. Long was impeached by the Louisiana House of Representatives. But the Senate needed a two-thirds majority to convict and, when a number of state senators pledged not to vote against Long no matter the evidence, the drive to remove Long was suspended.

On April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was fatally shot on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. King was struck in the jaw by a bullet that severed his spinal cord. The 39-year-old civil rights leader was pronounced dead on his arrival at a Memphis hospital. Following the assassination, riots broke out in cities across the country, with National Guard troops called out to quell unrest in Memphis and Washington, D.C.

On April 4, 1975, Microsoft was founded Albuquerque, New Mexico, as a partnership between Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

On April 3, 1776, John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, signed the authorization for privateers to attack British vessels. Lacking sufficient funds for a strong navy, the Congress gave privateers permission to attack any and all British ships.

On April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King spoke at the Mason Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters) in Memphis, Tennessee, in what has come to be known as his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech. The following day, King was assassinated in the city outside his hotel room.

On Apr 2, 1917, Jeannette Rankin took her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as the first woman ever elected to Congress, representing Montana. Four days later, she would be one of only 50 representatives to vote against U.S. entry into the First World War. In 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Rankin would cast the only dissenting vote against the country’s entry into World War II.

On April 1, 1787, James Madison, father of the Constitution, removed the General Welfare clause from his draft of the U.S. Constitution, telling friends that, “I fear future big-government-loving politicians will undoubtedly abuse the clause’s vague concept to drown the people in federal overreach.”

On April 1, 1918, Woodrow Wilson became the first and only President of the United States to be impeached and removed from office for lying about munitions being aboard the Lusitania in an effort to whip up war fever against Germany and push the nation into World War I.

On April 1, 2002, the U.S. Congress refused to grant President George W. Bush’s request for a declaration of war against Iraq.

On March 31, 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry signed the Treaty of Kanagawa with Japan, opening the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American trade.

On March 31, 1959, the Dalai Lama fled the Chinese military suppression of the revolt in Tibet, crossing the border into India, where he was granted political asylum. Thirty years later, in 1989, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his nonviolent campaign to end the Chinese domination of Tibet.

On March 31, 1990, an anti-poll tax rally in London led to the city’s worst riots in a century, with 113 people injured, including 45 policemen, and 340 people arrested. The violence erupted after 70,000 people took to the streets in protest of the new government levy.