YEARS AGO

years ago

Today is Tuesday, June 7, the 159th day of 2016. There are 207 days left in the year.

Associated Press

On this date in:

1769: Frontiersman Daniel Boone first begins to explore present-day Kentucky.

1776: Richard Henry Lee of Virginia offers a resolution to the Continental Congress stating “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”

1892: Homer Plessy, a “Creole of color,” is fined for refusing to leave a whites-only car of the East Louisiana Railroad. (Ruling on his case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld “separate but equal” racial segregation, a concept it renounced in 1954.)

1929: The sovereign state of Vatican City comes into existence as copies of the Lateran Treaty are exchanged in Rome.

1939: King George VI and his wife, Queen Elizabeth, arrive at Niagara Falls, N.Y., from Canada on the first visit to the United States by a reigning British monarch.

1942: The World War II Battle of Midway ends in a decisive victory for American forces over the Imperial Japanese.

1958: The late singer-songwriter Prince is born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis.

1972: The musical “Grease” opens on Broadway.

1981: Israeli military planes destroy a nuclear power plant in Iraq.

1998: James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old black man, is hooked by a chain to a pickup truck and dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas. (Two white men were later sentenced to death).

2011: Moammar Gadhafi stands defiant in the face of the heaviest and most punishing NATO airstrikes to date, declaring in an audio address carried on Libyan state television, “We will not kneel!”

VINDICATOR FILES

1991: Only five months into the year, Youngstown registers its 30th homicide, breaking the record of 29 set for the entire year in 1981.

Columbiana County deputies and federal agents raid 95 locations in the county and northern West Virginia in a crackdown on illegal gambling and money laundering.

Pennsylvania State Police arrest two Greenville men accused of stealing nearly 500 bronze and aluminum flag holders from the graves of veterans in seven cemeteries and selling them for scrap at a fraction of their value.

1976: Former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter tells a cheering crowd of 5,000 in Youngstown’s Federal Plaza that 1976 offers a special chance to elect another Democrat president of the United States.

U.S. Sen. Frank Church of Iowa, campaigning in the Democratic presidential race, tells members of Local 171, Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, at the Mahoning Country Club that strong labor unions are vital to the economic strength of America.

Police disperse a crowd of nearly 1,000 Ohio University students who took over a two-block area of downtown Athens in what became a violent end-of-year celebration. Twenty-one people were arrested.

1966: The Youngstown Board of Control awards a contract for detailed design work on a proposed remodeling of Central Square.

Ground-breaking ceremonies are held for Copeland Oaks, a new retirement center in Sebring to be constructed for the Methodist Church.

An extra session has been added for the Youngstown Rotary Club’s 23rd annual Horse Show, which will run for four days at the Canfield Fairgrounds.

1941: The W.T. Grant store in downtown Youngstown plans a two-story addition to its building at 201-201 W. Federal Street.

Joe Newman, a former Rayen School athlete, graduates from the University of Pittsburgh, winding up four years of consistent scoring on the track team.

The CIO opens a drive to organize 7,000 laborers working at the Ravenna Arsenal.