April 4
Only 31 days after assuming office, William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States, dies of pneumonia at the White House. – 1841.
Just after 6 p.m. April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn.. The civil rights leader was in Memphis to support a sanitation workers’ strike and was on his way to dinner when a bullet struck him in the jaw and severed his spinal cord. King was pronounced dead after his arrival at a Memphis hospital. He was 39 years old. – 1968.
April 5
Two small towns in Mississippi and Georgia are devastated by tornadoes which kill 200 residents in one of the deadliest spates of tornadoes in United States history. A total of 466 persons were killed over four days of nearly continuous twisters. Another 3,500 were injured. – 1936
April 6
The Olympic Games, a long-lost tradition of ancient Greece, are reborn in Athens 1,500 years after being banned by Roman Emperor Theodosius I. At the opening of the Athens Games, King Georgios I of Greece and a crowd of 60,000 spectators welcomed athletes from 13 nations to the international competition. – 1896.
Two days after the U.S. Senate voted 82 to 6 to declare war against Germany, the U.S. House of Representatives endorses the declaration by a vote of 373 to 50, and America formally enters World War I. When World War I erupted in 1914, president Woodrow Wilson pledged neutrality for the United States, a position that the vast majority of Americans favored. When Germany declared unrestricted warfare in war-zone waters it destroyed several civilian ships with Americans aboard. With that America took action. When the war finally ended, November 11, 1918, more than two Million American soldiers had served on the battlefields of Western Europe, and some 50,000 of them had lost their lives. – 1917.
April 7
Rwandan armed forces kill 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers in a successful effort to discourage international intervention in the genocide that had begun only hours earlier. In approximately three months, the Hutu extremists who controlled Rwanda brutally murdered an estimated 500,000 to one Million innocent civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus in the worst episode of ethnic genocide since World War II. – 1994.
April 8
The Works Progress Administration (WPA) is approved by the U.S. Congress. President Franklin Roosevelt proposed the WPA during the Great Depression of the 1930s when 25% of Americans were unemployed. It created low-paying federal jobs providing immediate relief and put 8.5 Million jobless to work on projects ranging from construction of bridges, highways, and public buildings to arts programs such as Federal Writers’ Project. – 1935.
President Harry S Truman orders the U.S. Army to seize the Nation’s steel mills to avert a strike. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the act illegal three weeks later. – 1952.
In Major League Baseball, Hank Aaron of the Atlanta Braves hits his 715th career home run and breaks Babe Ruth’s legendary record of 714 homers. However, because Aaron was an African American who had received death threats and racist hate mail during his pursuit of one of baseball’s most distinguished records, the achievement was bittersweet. – 1974.
April 9
At Appomattox, Va., Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders his 28,000 troops to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, effectively ending the American Civil War. Forced to abandon the Confederate capital of Richmond, Va., blocked from joining the surviving Confederate force in North Carolina, and harassed constantly by Union cavalry, Lee had no other option. – 1865.
April 10
U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt establishes the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), an innovative federally-funded organization that put thousands of Americans to work during the Great Depression on projects with environmental benefits. – 1933.
Sources: History.com, Toil and Trouble, by Thomas R. Brooks; American Labor Struggles, by Samuel Yellen; IWW calendar, Solidarity Forever; Historical Encyclopedia of American Labor, edited by Robert E. Weir and James P. Hanlan; Southwest Labor History Archives/George Meany Center; Geov Parrish’s Radical History; workday Minnesota; Andy Richards and Adam Wright, AFL-CIO Washington DC Metro Council.