YEARS AGO FOR JUNE 7

Today is Friday, June 7, the 158th day of 2019. There are 207 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1712: Pennsylvania’s colonial assembly votes to ban the further importation of slaves.

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 arrested 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.)

1958: Singer-songwriter Prince is born Prince Rogers Nelson in Minneapolis.

1965: The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down, 7-2, a Connecticut law used to prosecute a Planned Parenthood clinic for providing contraceptives to married couples.

1981: Israeli military planes destroy a nuclear power plant in Iraq, a facility the Israelis charge could have been used to make nuclear weapons.

1998: In a crime that shocks the nation, 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.

VINDICATOR FILES

1994: Joseph Pavlov of Struthers plays taps during a D-Day commemoration at the Mahoning County Courthouse.

D.J. Porter Construction of Youngstown is building a performing arts pavilion in Mill Creek Park. The first performance will be Aug. 8.

The Night Court Tavern in Lisbon faces either a $500 fine or a five-day license suspension for violating state liquor law with the performance of a male dance group that involved lewd dancing.

1979: Susan Ezzo, an eighth-grader at St. Patrick School in Youngstown, finishes eighth among 109 spellers in the 52nd National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. She fell in the tenth round, misspelling “piton,” a tool used in mountain climbing, with a “y” instead of an “i.”

Trumbull County Common Pleas Judge David M. Griffith disqualifies himself from presiding over the murder trial of Robert D. Parks and Dorothy DiBlasio after defense attorneys Eugene Fox and Gary VanBrocklin filed a claim that Griffith was prejudiced because he presided over an immunity hearing for a co-conspirator, Beatrice Sharp.

William Cossler is elected president of the Youngstown Playhouse board of directors, succeeding Dr. Robert Shreve.

1969: The 1969 graduating class of South High School dedicates a new illuminated sign in front of the school, a gift from the class.

The Most Rev. James W. Malone, bishop of Youngstown, announces the reassignment of 51 diocesan priests, including that of Msgr. Robert Fannon to the new post of episcopal vicar for the religious. The Rev. Thomas J. McCarthy is named assistant superintendent of diocesan schools, and the Rev. David Rhodes is named director of vocations and assistant chancellor.

A 26-year-old South Side woman who crashed into a porch on Willis Avenue told police she really intended to run down her husband, but missed. She was charged with reckless driving and driving without a license.

1944: Sgt. Edmund J. Rudnicki, 23, a graduate of South High School whose Army Air Corps bomber did not return from an April 1 mission, is reported a German prisoner of war.

A Youngstown man and an East Cleveland man are arrested and two other men are being sought on charges of possession and transfer of gas-rationing coupons that were part of a group stolen from a deposit vault in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Pvt. Homer D. Wood, 17, of Youngstown was pictured in a recently published photo standing next to Admiral Chester Nimitz in Hawaii as the naval chieftain was playing horseshoes.