March 28
Martin Luther King, Jr., leads a march of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tenn.. Violence during the march persuades him to return the following week to Memphis, where he was assassinated. – 1968.
At 4 a.m. the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island in Dauphin County, Pa. fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat. – 1979.
March 29
Two months after the signing of the Vietnam peace agreement, the last U.S. combat troops leave South Vietnam and Hanoi, the controlling operation headquarters of North Vietnam, frees the remaining American prisoners of war held in North Vietnam. America’s direct eight-year intervention in the Vietnam War was at an end. In Saigon, some 7,000 U.S. Department of Defense civilian employees remained behind to aid South Vietnam in conducting what looked to be a fierce and ongoing war with communist North Vietnam. – 1973.
March 30
President Ronald Reagan is shot in the chest and injured outside a Washington, D.C., hotel by a deranged drifter. – 1981.
March 31
The Eiffel Tower is dedicated in Paris in a ceremony presided over by Gustave Eiffel, the tower’s designer, and attended by Pierre Tirard, French prime minister, a handful of other dignitaries, and 200 construction workers. – 1889.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs legislation to establish the Civilian Conservation Corps, to help alleviate suffering during the Depression. By the time the program ended after the start of World War II it had provided jobs for more than six Million persons. – 1933.
April 1
English pranksters begin popularizing the annual tradition of April Fools’ Day by playing practical jokes on each other. – 1700.
Eleven-day strike by 34,000 New York City transit workers begins, and halts bus and subway service in all five boroughs before strikers return to work with a 17% raise over two years plus a cost-of-living adjustment. – 1980.
April 2
The U.S. Supreme Court declares unconstitutional a 1918 Washington, D.C. law establishing a minimum wage for women. – 1923.
The world’s first anthrax epidemic begins in Ekaterinburg, Russia, now Sverdlosk. By the time it ended six weeks later, 62 individuals were dead. Another 32 survived serious illness. The farmers in Ekaterinburg, which the town was known in Soviet times, suffered livestock losses from the epidemic. – 1979.
Major League Baseball players end a 232-day strike, which began August 12, 1994 and led to the cancellation of the 1994 postseason, including the World Series. – 1995.
April 3
The first Pony Express mail, traveling by horse and rider relay teams, simultaneously leaves St. Joseph, Mo., and Sacramento, Calif.. Ten days later, April 13, the westbound rider and mail packet completed the approximately 1,800-mile journey and arrives in Sacramento to beat the eastbound packet’s arrival in St. Joseph by two days to set a new standard for speedy mail delivery. – 1860.
President Harry S Truman signs off on legislation to establish the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948, more popularly known as the Marshall Plan. The act eventually provided more than $12 Billion, approximately $114 Billion in today’s dollars, of assistance to aid in the economic recovery of Western Europe. -1948.
Over 16 hours, 148 tornadoes hit the United States heartland. By the time the deadly storm ended, 330 persons died. It was the largest grouping of tornadoes recorded in its time, and affected 11 states, including Illinois, and Ontario, Canada. At any one moment during the storm, there were as many as 15 tornadoes touching the ground. – 1974.
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.