Today is June 12. On this date in:
1665
England installed a municipal government in New York, formerly the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, and appointed its first mayor, Thomas Willett.
1925
William DeHart Hubbard of Avondale, the first African-American to win an Olympic gold medal, set the long jump record at 25' 10 3/4".
1939
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was dedicated in Cooperstown, New York.
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.
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 murder and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 2001.)
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).
1967
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages.
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.
1981
Major league baseball players began a 49-day strike over the issue of free-agent compensation. (The season did not resume until Aug. 10.)
1981
“Raiders of the Lost Ark,” the first Indiana Jones film directed by Steven Spielberg, produced by George Lucas and starring Harrison Ford, premiered.
1987
President Ronald Reagan stood at the Berlin Wall dividing East and West Berlin in Germany, and told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
1994
Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were slashed to death outside her Los Angeles home. (O.J. Simpson was acquitted of the killings in a criminal trial, but was held liable in a civil action.)
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