on this day


0455 – Rome was sacked by the Vandal army.

1487 – The War of the Roses ended with the Battle of Stoke.

1567 – Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned in Lochleven Castle in Scotland.

1815 – Napoleon defeated the Prussians at the Battle of Ligny, Netherlands.

1858 – In a speech in Springfield, IL, U.S. Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln said the slavery issue had to be resolved. He declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

1884 – At Coney Island, in Brooklyn, NY, the first roller coaster in America opened.

1883 – The New York Giants baseball team admitted all ladies for free to the ballpark. It was the first Ladies Day.

1897 – The U.S. government signed a treaty of annexation with Hawaii.

1903 – Ford Motor Company was incorporated.

1904 – The novel “Ulysses” by James Joyce took place. The main character of the book was Leopold Bloom.

1907 – The Russian czar dissolved the Duma in St. Petersburg.

1909 – Glenn Hammond Curtiss sold his first airplane, the “Gold Bug” to the New York Aeronautical Society for $5,000.

1922 – Henry Berliner accomplished the first helicopter flight at College Park, MD.

1925 – France accepted a German proposal for a security pact.

1932 – The ban on Nazi storm troopers was lifted by the von Papen government in Germany.

1940 – Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain became the prime minister of the Vichy government of occupied France.

1941 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the closure of all German consulates in the United States. The deadline was set as July 10.

1952 – “Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl” was published in the United States.

1955 – The U.S. House of Representatives voted to extend Selective Service until 1959.

1955 – Pope Pius XII excommunicated Argentine President Juan Peron. The ban was lifted eight years later.

1955 – Argentine naval officers launched an attack on President Juan Peron’s headquarters. The revolt was suppressed by the army.

1961 – Rudolf Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union while in Paris, traveling with the Leningrad Kirov Ballet.

1963 – 26-year-old Valentina Tereshkova went into orbit aboard the Vostok 6 spacecraft for three days. She was the first female space traveler.

1972 – Ulrike Meinhof was captured by West German police in Hanover. She was co-founder of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group and the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion).

1975 – The Simonstown agreement on naval cooperation between Britain and South Africa ended. The agreement was formally ended by mutual agreement after 169 years.

1976 – In Soweto, thousands of school children revolted against the South African government’s plan to enforce Afrikaans as the language for instruction in black schools.

1977 – Leonid Brezhnev was named the first Soviet president of the USSR. He was the first person to hold the post of president and Communist Party General Secretary. He replaced Nikolai Podgorny.

1978 – U.S. President Carter and Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos ratified the Panama Canal treaties.

1978 – The film adaptation of “Grease” premiered in New York City.

1980 – The movie “The Blues Brothers” opened in Chicago, IL.

1981 – The “Chicago Tribune” purchased the Chicago Cubs baseball team from the P.K. Wrigley Chewing Gum Company for $20.5 million.

1983 – Yuri Andropov was elected chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. The position was the equivalent of president.

1984 – Wilson Ferreira Aldunate was arrested upon his return from an eleven year exile. Aldunate had been a popular Uruguayan opposition leader.

1985 – Willie Banks broke the world record for the triple jump with a leap of 58 feet, 11-1/2 inches in the U.S.A. championships in Indianapolis, IN.

1992 – U.S. President George H.W. Bush welcomed Russian President Boris Yeltsin to a meeting in Washington, DC. The two agreed in principle to reduce strategic weapon arsenals by about two-thirds by the year 2003.

1993 – The U.S. Postal Service released a set of seven stamps that featured Bill Haley, Buddy Holly, Clyde McPhatter, Otis Redding, Ritchie Valens, Dinah Washington and Elvis Presley.

1996 – Russian voters had their first independent presidential election. Boris Yeltsin was the winner after a run-off.

1999 – The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that a 1992 federal music piracy law does not prohibit a palm-sized device that can download high-quality digital music files from the Internet and play them at home.

2000 – U.S. federal regulators approved the merger of Bell Atlantic and GTE Corp. The merger created the nation’s largest local phone company.

2000 – U.S. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson reported that an employee at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico had discovered that two computer hard drives were missing.

2008 – California began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

1917 – U.S. Congress passes Espionage Act


On June 15, 1917, some two months after America’s formal entrance into World War I against Germany, the United States Congress passes the Espionage Act.

Enforced largely by A. Mitchell Palmer, the United States attorney general under President Woodrow Wilson, the Espionage Act essentially made it a crime for any person to convey information intended to interfere with the U.S. armed forces prosecution of the war effort or to promote the success of the country’s enemies. Anyone found guilty of such acts would be subject to a fine of $10,000 and a prison sentence of 20 years.

The Espionage Act was reinforced by the Sedition Act of the following year, which imposed similarly harsh penalties on anyone found guilty of making false statements that interfered with the prosecution of the war; insulting or abusing the U.S. government, the flag, the Constitution or the military; agitating against the production of necessary war materials; or advocating, teaching or defending any of these acts. Both pieces of legislation were aimed at socialists, pacifists and other anti-war activists during World War I and were used to punishing effect in the years immediately following the war, during a period characterized by the fear of communist influence and communist infiltration into American society that became known as the first Red Scare (a second would occur later, during the 1940s and 1950s, associated largely with Senator Joseph McCarthy). Palmer–a former pacifist whose views on civil rights radically changed once he assumed the attorney general’s office during the Red Scare–and his right-hand man, J. Edgar Hoover, liberally employed the Espionage and Sedition Acts to persecute left-wing political figures.

for the complete article… history.com

June 12, 1963 – Civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi, by a rifle bullet from an ambush. – Black History


Evers HAD BEEN ACTIVE IN SEEKING INTEGRATION OF SCHOOLS AND VOTER REGISTRATION FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS IN THE SOUTH. WIDESPREAD PUBLIC OUTRAGE FOLLOWING HIS DEATH LED PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY TO PROPOSE A COMPREHENSIVE CIVIL RIGHTS LAW. EVERS WAS BURIED IN ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY.

June Awareness Month …


The featured picture is called “The Faces of My People” by Margaret Burroughs b.1917 and made of woodcut on paper.

Men’s Health Awareness Month

HHT Global Awareness Month Highlights COVID-19 Risk for Those With Rare Genetic Disease: As Many AS 90% Unaware They Have HHT

CPR & AED awareness month

World Elder Abuse Awareness Month

Alzheimer’s & Brain Awareness Month

PTSD awareness

 

2017 ~ Police in Washington D.C. wearing white power symbols over their uniforms –


This post is old, and the petition is possibly invalid now but a reminder

Law4BlackLives-DC just started a petition to

Kick Racist Cops Out Our Community! Tell MPD To Fire Officer Altiere!

We just started a petition titled “Kick Racist Cops Out Our Community! Tell MPD To Fire Officer Altiere!”There is no room for racist cops in Black neighborhoods

 

On June 2, 5, and 13, 2017, Officer Vincent Altiere, Badge #4440, of the Washington, DC Metropolitan Police Department, was seen in the DC community and at the DC Superior Court (where he was present to testify in a criminal case), wearing an offensive, racist, and threatening shirt. The shirt displays symbols of police harassment, hate, and death while prominently displaying the symbols and emblems of the Metropolitan Police Department. We’re asking that you join us, together we can voice our extreme concern about this offensive shirt and demand that Mayor Bowser’s administration, Metropolitan Police Department and the Office of Police Complaints take immediate disciplinary action against Officer Altiere and any other Officers who have worn this or similar shirts. Our effort is already having an effect, the Metropolitan Police Department has already stated that they’re taking Officer Altiere off the street for the time being. We are also demanding that officials take proactive measures to address a department culture that allowed this type of misconduct to go unchecked.

The Seventh District is a Black community being policed by an officer openly displaying white supremacist symbols!

The shirt displays a “sun cross,” replacing the letter “O” of “PowerShift” with a notorious white supremacist symbol adopted by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist hate groups. Immediately below is the image of the Grim Reaper, a personification of death in the form of a hooded skeleton, holding an assault rifle and a Metropolitan Police Department badge. Below, the shirt reads “Let me see that waistband jo,” referring to “jump outs” and the routine practice of demanding to see the waistbands of individuals, who are disproportionately young Black and Brown men, often for no legitimate reason.

Given the prominent placement of MPD logos and a badge number, the shirt does not appear to be attributed to Officer Altiere alone, but instead, appears to have been designed for a group of officers associated with the MPD Seventh District. Ninety-five percent of the residents in MPD’s Seventh District are black and too many Seventh District residents have experienced harassment and abuse at the hands of the police. It is time for the leadership of this city to acknowledge and address the systemic violation of rights, and threat of violence to Black people here in Washington D.C.

This shirt is offensive and indicates systemic bias in the policing of people of color. Join us to fight back.

White supremacy and insinuated threats of death should never be associated with or tolerated in police departments who are sworn to protect and serve. Such ideologies are dangerous and demonstrate a blatant disregard for Black and Brown life. They are at the root of rampant police abuse and result in the unconstitutional terrorizing of Black and Brown communities and the callous murder of Black and Brown men and women at the hands of the police, both in Washington, DC and across the country.

On behalf of a number of community organizations and community members, Law4BlackLives-DC has formally filed complaints with both the  Internal Affairs Division of the Metropolitan Police Department and the Office of Police Complaints regarding this shirt and the message it propagates. The shirt stands alone as an affront to the community. It also embraces ongoing patterns of constitutional violations and constitutes a blatant disregard of MPD’s own general orders, including MPD General Orders 110.11, 201.26, 304.10, and 304.15. We are also asking concerned community members to let Mayor Bowser know that she must step in to check this culture for the people of Washington D.C. 

Such Officers are a threat to public safety and erode public trust in the police. Inaction by the Metropolitan Police Department, Office of Police Complaints, and the Mayor’s office would be an endorsement of this shirt’s hateful message and an acceptance of a policing culture infected by racism and violence. We’re going to keep pushing until we win substantive change, we won’t rest until he is fired and everyone who has taken part in this disgraceful conduct is gone.

Will you pledge to join the fight against racist policing?

Thank you,

Law4BlackLives-DC