Today in history, June 12

June 12

Today in history

Today is June 12. On this date in:

1939: The Baseball Hall of Fame opened with its first induction ceremony in Cooperstown, New York. The inaugural class, elected in 1936, included Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner. By the time it opened in 1939, 20 more members were inducted. Lou Gehrig was added later that year due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) ending his career.

1942: Anne Frank received a diary as a present for her 13th birthday. The Jewish German girl used it later that year to record her Holocaust experiences hiding in a secret Amsterdam apartment from Nazis seeking to deport them. Frank and her family hid for two years before they were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Anne and her sister Margot were rerouted to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where they died in 1945.

1963: Civil rights activist Medgar Evers, 37, the NAACP’s field secretary in Mississippi, was assassinated by segregationist and white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. Two mistrials were declared after all-White juries were deadlocked, but in 1994, a multiracial jury convicted Beckwith of murder at age 73 and sentenced him to life in prison.

1964: South African anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela was among eight defendants sentenced to life in prison for sabotage, a broader, easier crime for the all-White government to prove than treason, which he and other activists had previously been charged with before a four-year trial ended with the case dropped. Mandela, who served 27 years in prison, became South Africa’s first Black president in the 1990s after the nation had its first multiracial election.

1987: President Ronald Reagan spoke to a crowd in West Berlin, aiming to ease Cold War nuclear tensions between the U.S. and the USSR. With the Berlin Wall behind him, Reagan urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” The wall that had divided Germans since 1961 was demolished in 1989.

1990: Russia’s parliament adopted a declaration of national sovereignty at a time of great hope for democracy in the former Soviet Union. June 12 has been a national holiday since, though many continue to seek freedom from Kremlin oppression.

1991: After the collapse of the USSR, Boris Yeltsin was elected president of Russia in the country’s first democratic election. Yeltsin, who served two terms filled with challenges and hard-line opposition, named Vladimir Putin as president upon stepping down. Putin then gave Yeltsin immunity from arrest, searches, interrogation and prosecution.

2014: Islamic State forces killed up to an estimated 1,700 Shiite Muslim Iraqi cadets in Tikrit, Iraq, a massacre that was at the time the world’s second deadliest terrorist act, with only 9/11 having a higher death toll. ISIS hit Tikrit Air Academy, which was known as Camp Speicher until the U.S. returned the air base to Iraqi control in 2011.

2016: Pulse nightclub in Orlando became the site of the nation’s then-deadliest mass shooting when 29-year-old gunman Omar Mateen killed 49 people and wounded 53 others before being killed by police in a shootout.

2018: At the Singapore Summit, President Donald Trump became the first U.S. leader to meet with a North Korean leader when he and Kim Jong-un had peace talks. Trump made security guarantees to Kim, who reaffirmed his pledge to fully denuclearize the Korean peninsula.

– USA TODAY Network