1861, After months of escalating tension, Major Robert Anderson refused to evacuate Fort Sumter at Charleston, South Carolina, which started the first major engagement of the American Civil War.
1963, Police used dogs and cattle prods on peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama.
1964, Arnold Palmer won his fourth Masters title and became the first golfer to earn career earnings of $506,496.00.
1964, Philadelphia singer Chubby Checker married former Miss World Catherina Lodders.
1966, Emmett Ashford became the first African-American major league umpire.
1981, The space shuttle Columbia blasted off from Cape Canaveral on its first test flight.
1983, Chicagoans went to the polls to elect Harold Washington the city’s first black mayor.
1984, Astronauts aboard the ill-fated Challenger made the first satellite repair in orbit by returning a healthy Solar Max satellite to space. The satellite had been circling the Earth for three years with all circuits dead before repairs were made.
1985, Senator Jake Garn of Utah became the first senator to fly into space as the shuttle Discovery lifted off.
1985, Federal inspectors declared that four animals of the Ringling Brothers And Barnum & Bailey Circus were not unicorns as the circus said, but goats with horns which had been surgically implanted.
1989, Radical activist Abbie Hoffman was found dead at his home in New Hope, Pennsylvania, at age 52.
1989, Former middleweight boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson died in Culver City, California, at age 67.
1989, In its first meeting, East Germany’s first democratically elected parliament acknowledged responsibility for the Nazi Holocaust, and asked the forgiveness of Jews and others who had suffered.
1992, Euro Disneyland opened in France.
1998, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams appealed to Irish Republican Army supporters to accept Northern Ireland’s compromise peace accord.
1999, A jury in Little Rock, Arkansas, acquitted Susan McDougal of obstructing Independent CounselKenneth Starr‘s Whitewater inquiry and deadlocked on two other charges, causing a mistrial.
1999, US District Judge Susan Webber Wright cited President Clinton for contempt of court, concluding that the president had lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky in a deposition in the Paula Jonescase.
2000, Attorney General Janet Reno met in Miami with the U.S. relatives of Elian Gonzalez, after which she ordered them to bring the six-year-old boy to an airport the next day so he could be taken to a reunion with his father in Washington. Elian was seized by federal agents 10 days after Reno’s order to turn him over.
2001, After urging from U.S. President George W. Bush, China agreed to release 24 crew members of a U.S. spy plane held by Beijing for 11 days.