History Quickies for April 15th

I’m really not trying to get back into the “History Business” but some events in our past demand attention. Today we have four of them.

1865 – At 7:22 a.m., Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, died from a bullet wound inflicted the night before by actor (and Confederate sympathizer) John Wilkes Booth.

1947 – Jackie Robinson, age 28, became the first African-American player in Major League Baseball when he stepped onto Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Robinson broke the color barrier in a sport that had been segregated for more than 50 years.
Exactly 50 years later, on April 15, 1997, Robinson’s groundbreaking career was honored and his uniform number, 42, was retired from Major League Baseball by Commissioner Bud Selig in a ceremony attended by over 50,000 fans at New York City’s Shea Stadium. Robinson’s was the first-ever number retired by all teams in the league.

1967 – Massive parades to protest Vietnam policy were held in New York and San Francisco. In New York, police estimated that 100,000 to 125,000 people listened to speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr., Floyd McKissick, Stokely Carmichael and Dr. Benjamin Spock.
Prior to the march, nearly 200 draft cards were burned by youths in Central Park. In San Francisco, black nationalists led a march, but most of the 20,000 marchers were white.

2013 – Two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three spectators and wounding more than 260 other people in attendance. Four days later, after an intense manhunt that shut down the Boston area, police captured one of the bombing suspects, 19-year-old Dzhohkar Tsarnaev. His older brother and fellow suspect, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died following a shootout with law enforcement earlier that same day.