History

It was an epochal moment in American history.

On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a Report to the American People on Civil Rights and called upon Congress to enact sweeping civil rights legislation.  “I am asking the Congress to enact legislation giving all Americans the right to be served in facilities which are open to the public — hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments.” Civil Rights Announcement, 1963 (excerpt):

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.

The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated. If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he can not send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

One hundred years have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

An assassin’s bullet cut short  the life of President Kennedy in Dallas in November. He did not live to see his civil rights bill enacted by Congress.

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100 years ago today an assassin, Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist belonging to the Black Hand (Serbia), carried out the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir presumptive, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife on their visit to Sarajevo on 28th June, 1914. This event triggered the subsequent course of events that directly led to the outbreak of the Great War, World War I, but it was not the cause of it. 7 Events That Fueled World War I (h/t photo).

The History Channel recaps, Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassinated:

In an event that is widely acknowledged to have sparked the outbreak of World War I, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of Emperor Franz Josef and heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is shot to death along with his wife by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on this day in 1914.

The great Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, the man most responsible for the unification of Germany in 1871, was quoted as saying at the end of his life that “One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.” It went as he predicted.

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