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Today in History: June 7, James Byrd Jr. killed in hate crime
In 1892, Homer Plessy, a Creole of color, was arrested for refusing to leave a whites-only car of the East Louisiana Railroad. (Ruling on his case, Plessy v. Ferguson, the US Supreme Court upheld 'separate but equal' racial segregation, a concept it renounced in 1954.)
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In 1929, the sovereign state of Vatican City formally came into existence as the Italian Parliament ratified the Lateran Treaty in Rome.
In 1942, the Battle of Midway ended in a decisive victory for American naval forces over Imperial Japan, marking a turning point in the Pacific War.
In 1965, the US Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, struck down, 7-2, a Connecticut law used to prosecute a Planned Parenthood clinic in New Haven for providing contraceptives to married couples.
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In 1976, New York magazine published an article by journalist Nik Cohn entitled 'The Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,' which inspired the film 'Saturday Night Fever,' which in turn sparked a nationwide disco craze. (Cohn admitted in 1997 that the article was actually a work of fiction.)
In 1979, Texas became the first state to recognize Juneteenth as an official state holiday. (Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021.)
In 1982, Graceland, Elvis Presley's Memphis mansion, was opened to the public as a tourist destination, five years after Presley's death.
In 1998, in a crime that shocked the nation and led to stronger state and federal hate crime laws, James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old Black man, was hooked by a chain to a pickup truck and dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas. (Two white men were later sentenced to death and executed for the crime; a third was sentenced to life in prison.)
In 2006, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, was killed by a US airstrike on his safe house.
In 2021, Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and her son Paul Murdaugh, 22, from a prominent South Carolina legal family, were found shot and killed on their family's property. (Alex Murdaugh, Maggie's husband and Paul's father, would be found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison.)
