On This Day
Wed 5 Apr 2006
Posted by Geov Parrish, This Day in Radical History:
April 5 1956:
Columnist Victor Riesel, a crusader against labor racketeers, blinded in New York City when a hired assailant threw sulfuric acid in his face.
Tue 4 Apr 2006
April 4, 1668: Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated.
“Martin Luther King, Jr., was “murdered by an intricate plot that included government agencies,” according to a December 1999 jury in Memphis Tennessee, ruling in a civil wrongful death suit. On March 15, 2000, The Christian Century Magazine (p. 308-313) published an article by James W. Douglass summarizing the evidence on which this startling verdict was made. The chronology which appears below is primarily based on the evidence presented in this article.” [Link]
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Thu 23 Mar 2006
Mir (Мир, which can mean both world and peace in Russian) was a highly successful Soviet (and later Russian) space station. It was humanity’s first consistently inhabited long-term research station in space. Through a number of collaborations, it was made internationally accessible to cosmonauts and astronauts of many different countries. Mir was assembled in orbit by successively connecting several modules, each launched separately from February 19, 1986 to 1996. The station existed until March 23, 2001, at which point it was deliberately de-orbited and broke apart during atmospheric re-entry. Link.
Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr[1] von Braun (March 23, 1912 – June 16, 1977) was one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in Germany and the United States. Originally a German scientist who led Germany’s rocket development program before and during World War II, he entered the United States at the end of the war through the then-secret Operation Paperclip. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen and worked on the American ICBM program before joining NASA, where he served as Director. He is generally regarded as the father of the United States space program. Link.
Tue 21 Mar 2006
1960: Sharpeville Massacre: South African police kill 89 protesters in Sharpeville and other towns during protests of apartheid pass laws. In Sharpeville itself, 69 were killed and 176 wounded when police opened fire on an unarmed crowd, 63 of them shot in the back. Overall, 13,000 were jailed.
1985: South Africa: During funeral march for three killed in a Sharpeville memorial demo, South African police kill 19 more.
1995: South Africa: On the anniversary of the Sharpeville Massacre, newly elected democratic government establishes today as Human Rights Day. Link.
Wed 15 Mar 2006
Phil Lesh, bassist for the Grateful Dead (1940)
Ry Cooder, guitarist, singer, and composer (1947)
Any other musicians born March 15 …?
Tue 14 Mar 2006
On March 14, 1896, 
seven thousand people gathered at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach to celebrate the official opening of the Sutro Baths, an extravagant public bathhouse envisioned and developed by the eccentric one-time mayor of San Francisco, Adolph Sutro. An early immigrant to the city, the Prussian-born Sutro was a mining engineer, construction expert, and real estate investor who once owned an estimated one-twelfth of San Francisco real estate.
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