Moments in Time – June 5, 2024

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• On June 17, 2015, 21-year-old Dylann Roof joined members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., for a Bible study session before drawing a gun, telling the others that African Americans were “taking over the country,” and killing nine people. Roof was arrested the following morning and eventually sentenced to death for the crime.
• On June 18, 1979, President Jimmy Carter and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the Salt II agreement dealing with limitations and guidelines for nuclear weapons. However, due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the following year, it never went into effect and Carter withdrew the U.S. from the agreement.
• On June 19, 1821, Jesuit missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet met with Sioux leader Sitting Bull in present-day Montana in an attempt to convince local Native Americans to make peace with the United States. While the chief refused to personally sign a peace treaty, he sent one of his lesser chiefs to Fort Laramie, WY, to sign a pact in which the Sioux would allow white travel and settlement in specified areas.
• On June 20, 1937, W2XBS (later WCBS-TV) televised the first TV operetta, “The Pirates of Penzance” by Gilbert and Sullivan. It became the pair’s most popular creation.
• On June 21, 2005, 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen, a former KKK organizer, was declared guilty on three counts of manslaughter in the deaths of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, MS, 41 years earlier, and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
• On June 22, 1783, after hearing arguments in the case of the slave ship Zong, the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench in London stated that a massacre of 142 captive Africans “was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard,” as the actual question before the court was whether the “cargo” was covered by insurance rather than who was responsible for their deaths. The trial would galvanize the burgeoning movement to abolish slavery.
• On June 23, 1940, Adolf Hitler surveyed notable sites in the then German-occupied French capital during his first and only visit to Paris, marking Napoleon’s tomb among the spots to see and calling the trip “the greatest and finest moment of my life.”

© 2024 King Features Synd., Inc.