1942 – Anne Frank receives a diary for her thirteenth birthday.
In 1963
civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37,
was shot and killed
outside his home
in Jackson, Mississippi,
by a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1964,
South African black freedom fighter
Nelson Mandela was sentenced
to life in prison
for ‘committing sabotage’
against the racist white regime.
They let him out early
twenty-six years later.
In 1967,
The United States Supreme Court
in Loving v. Virginia
declares all U.S. state laws
which prohibit interracial marriage
to be unconstitutional.
In 1987,
President Ronald Reagan visited
the divided city of Berlin
and exhorted the Soviets’ leader
Mikhail Gorbachev to
“tear down this wall.”
In 2016,
an American Muslim
opened fire
in Pulse,
a gay bar in Orlando, Florida.
He wounded fifty-three people
and killed forty-nine.
Before being shot dead
by police.