1770 – Marie Antoinette, at age 14, married the future King Louis XVI of France, who was 15.

1866 – The U.S. Congress authorized the first 5-cent piece to be minted.

1868 – U.S. President Andrew Johnson was acquitted during the Senate impeachment, by one vote.

1879 – The Treaty of Gandamak between Russia and England set up the Afghan state.

1881 – In Germany, the first electric tram for the public started service.

1888 – The first demonstration of recording on a flat disc was demonstrated by Emile Berliner.

1888 – The capitol of Texas was dedicated in Austin.

1910 – The U.S. Bureau of Mines was authorized by the U.S. Congress.

1914 – The American Horseshoe Pitchers Association (AHPA) was formed in Kansas City, Kansas.

1920 – Joan of Arc was canonized in Rome.

1929 – The first Academy Awards were held in Hollywood.

1939 – The Philadelphia Athletics and the Cleveland Indians met at Shibe Park in Philadelphia for the first baseball game to be played under the lights in the American League.

1946 – “Annie Get Your Gun” opened on Broadway.

1946 – Jack Mullin showed the world the first magnetic tape recorder.

1948 – The body of CBS News correspondent George Polk was found in Solonika Bay in Greece. It had been a week after he’d disappeared.

1960 – A Big Four summit in Paris collapsed due to the American U-2 spy plane incident.

1960 – Theodore Maiman, at Hughes Research Laboratory in California, demonstrated the first working laser.

1963 – After 22 Earth orbits Gordon Cooper returned to Earth, ending Project Mercury.

1965 – Spaghetti-O’s were sold for the first time.

1969 – Venus 5, a Russian spacecraft, landed on the planet Venus.

1971 – U.S. postage for a one-ounce first class stamp was increased from 6 to 8 cents.

1975 – Japanese climber Junko Tabei became the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

1977 – Five people were killed when a New York Airways helicopter, idling on top of the Pan Am Building in Manhattan, toppled over, sending a huge rotor blade flying.

1985 – Michael Jordan was named Rookie of the Year in the NBA.

1987 – The Bobro 400 set sail from New York Harbor with 3,200 tons of garbage. The barge travelled 6,000 miles in search of a place to dump its load. It returned to New York Harbor after 8 weeks with the same load.

1988 – A report released by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop declared that nicotine was addictive in similar was as heroin and cocaine.

1988 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that police do not have to have a search warrant to search discarded garbage.

1991 – Queen Elizabeth II became the first British monarch to address the U.S. Congress.

1992 – The Endeavour space shuttle landed safely after its maiden voyage.

1996 – Admiral Jeremy “Mike” Boorda, the nation’s top Navy officer, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound after some of his military awards were called into question.

1997 – In Zaire, President Mobutu Sese Seko gave control of the country to rebel forces ending 32 years of autocratic rule.

2000 – U.S. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was nominated to run for U.S. Senator in New York. She was the first U.S.first lady to run for public office.

2005 – Sony Corp. unveiled three styles of its new PlayStation 3 video game machine.

Women’s History Month

So, as of June 2020, in the 40 states that have set a marriage age by statute, the lower minimum marriage age when all exceptions are taken into account, are:

• 2 states have a minimum age of 14: Alaska and North Carolina
• 3 states have a minimum age of 15.
• 21 states have a minimum age of 16.
• 10 states have a minimum age of 17.
• 4 states have a minimum age of 18.

The Koski/Heymann study found prevalence of child marriage varied from more than 10 per 1,000 in West Virginia, Hawaii and North Dakota to less than four per 1,000 in Maine, Rhode Island and Wyoming.^[29]

• In Texas from 2000 to 2014, almost 40,000 children were married.^[30][31]
• In Florida, 16,400 children, some as young as 13, were married from 2000–2017, which is the second highest incidence of child marriage after Texas.^[15]
• In Alabama there were over 8,600 child marriages from 2000 to 2015, the fourth highest amount of any state. However, child marriage in Alabama showed a large decline in that time. In 2000, almost 1,200 children married, but by 2014 it dropped to 190.^[31]
• In Virginia between 2004 and 2013, nearly 4,500 children were married according to the Tahirih Justice Center.^[32]
• In Ohio from 2000 to 2015 there were 4,443 girls married aged 17 and younger, including 43 aged 15 and under.^[33]
• In New York, more than 3,800 children were married between 2000 and 2010.^[34]

The Koski/Heymann also found that only 20% of married children were living with their spouses; the majority of the rest were living with their parents.^[29]

Source: wiki … yes please, definitely correct wiki if the information is foul

Lonnie Bunch, museum director, historian, lecturer, and author, is proud to present A Page from Our American Story, a regular on-line series for Museum supporters. It will showcase individuals and events in the African American experience, placing these stories in the context of a larger story — our American story.

A Page From Our American Story

This month, as schoolchildren across the nation look forward to the beginning of summer vacation, the National Museum of African American History and Culture marks the anniversaries of two landmark United States Supreme Court decisions that profoundly impacted access to education – one that legally sanctioned an era of appalling discrimination, and the second that resulted in a major step toward equality and justice for African Americans.

The first case was the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which upheld the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities. It came about after the state of Louisiana passed the Separate Car Act in 1890, which mandated separate railway cars for blacks and whites. In response, a group of prominent black, white, and creole New Orleans residents formed the Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens) to fight for repeal of the law.

The Comité recruited Homer Plessy, a mixed-race man, to take part in a case challenging the law. On June 7, 1892, Plessy bought a first-class ticket on an East Louisiana Railroad train in New Orleans and took a seat in a “whites only” car. He was asked to move to the blacks-only car, arrested when he refused, and remanded for trial. He was convicted and ordered to pay a $25 fine. Upon appeal, the Supreme Court of Louisiana upheld the ruling, setting the stage for a challenge in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Oral arguments in Plessy v. Ferguson were held before the Supreme Court on April 13, 1896. Plessy’s attorneys built his case upon violation of his rights under the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equal rights and the protection of those rights to all U.S citizens.

In the seven-to-one decision handed down on May 18, 1896, the Court rejected Plessy’s arguments, holding that as long as the separate facilities for the separate races were equal, segregation did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote a scathing dissent in which he predicted the court’s decision would become as infamous as the notorious 1857Dred Scott ruling that no African American, free or slave, could claim U.S. citizenship or petition the court for their freedom.

The impacts of the “separate but equal” doctrine established by Plessy ruling were immediate and far-reaching – erasing legislative achievements of the Reconstruction Era, legitimizing state laws establishing racial segregation in the South (the Jim Crow system), and inspiring the spread of segregation laws and practices northward. These developments exacerbated already vast differences in funding for segregated school systems. As with other segregated facilities and institutions, schools for African Americans were consistently inferior to those for whites, contradicting the claims of “separate but equal” underlying the Plessy decision.

“Separate but equal” remained the standard doctrine in U.S. law until the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, in which the Court ruled that segregation in public education was unconstitutional. The case began in 1951 as a class action suit filed in the United States District Court for the District of Kansas that called on the city’s Board of Education to reverse its policy of racial segregation. It was initiated by the Topeka chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the plaintiffs were 13 African American parents on behalf of their children. The named plaintiff was Oliver L. Brown, a welder and an assistant pastor at his local church, whose daughter had to walk six blocks to her school bus stop to ride to her segregated black school one mile away, while a white school was located just seven blocks from her house.

Citing the precedent set in Plessy, the District Court ruled in favor of the Board of Education, leading the plaintiffs to mount a U.S. Supreme Court challenge. The Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education combined the Brown case and four similar cases from various states, and NAACP Chief Counsel Thurgood Marshall, later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, lead the team of attorneys that argued the case for the plaintiffs.

The Court heard the case in spring 1953 but was unable to decide the issue, and asked to rehear the case in fall 1953 at the urging of Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter, who wanted to build a consensus for an opinion outlawing segregation. After the September 1953 death of Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, who had been a major obstacle to securing such an opinion, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren as Chief Justice. Warren told the justices that the Court had to overrule Plessy unanimously to head off massive Southern resistance, eventually convincing the remaining holdouts on the Court. Warren himself drafted the basic opinion, circulating and revising it until all the justices endorsed it.

On May 17, 1954, the Court handed down its unanimous 9-0 decision overturning Plessy as it applied to public education, stating that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” As a result, racial segregation laws were declared in violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, paving the way for integration and winning a major victory for the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.

Many people today may not remember the details of these two landmark cases in the struggle for equality and justice. The National Museum of African American History and Culture was founded to ensure that this story and other important chapters in the African American experience are never forgotten. When the Museum opens its doors on September 24, 2016, we will bring major milestones like Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education to life through compelling interactive exhibitions and our unsurpassed permanent collection of African American historical artifacts, including an entire Jim Crow-era segregated railway car and the dining room that was used by Brown family and NAACP Legal Defense Fund during preparation for the Brown case.

All the best,

Lonnie G. Bunch III
Founding Director
P.S. We can only reach our $270 million goal with your help. I hope you will consider becoming a Charter Member today.

To read past Our American Stories, visit our archives.