Today in History: September 12, Steve Biko dies in custody

Today in History Today is Monday, Sept. 12, the 255th day of 2022. There are 110 days left in the year. Today’s Highlight in History: On Sept. 12, 1977, South African Black student leader and anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko (BEE’-koh), 30, died while in police custody, triggering an international outcry. On this date: In 1913, Olympic legend Jesse Owens was born in Oakville, Alabama. In 1914, during World War I, the First Battle of the Marne ended in an Allied victory against Germany. In 1958, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Cooper v. Aaron, unanimously ruled that Arkansas officials who were resisting public school desegregation orders could not disregard the high court’s rulings. In 1959, the Soviet Union launched its Luna 2 space probe, which made a crash landing on the moon. The TV Western series ‘œBonanza’� premiered on NBC. In 1962, in a speech at Rice University in Houston, President John F. Kennedy reaffirmed his support for the manned space program, declaring: ‘œWe choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’� In 1987, reports surfaced that Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Biden had borrowed, without attribution, passages of a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock (KIHN’-ik) for one of his own campaign speeches. (The Kinnock report, along with other damaging revelations, prompted Biden to drop his White House bid.) In 1995, the Belarusian military shot down a hydrogen balloon during an international race, killing its two American pilots, John Stuart-Jervis and Alan Fraenckel. In 2001, stunned rescue workers continued to search for bodies in the World Trade Center’s smoking rubble a day after a terrorist attack that shut down the financial capital, badly damaged the Pentagon and left thousands dead. President George W. Bush, branding the attacks in New York and Washington ‘œacts of war,’� spoke of ‘œa monumental struggle of good versus evil’� and said that ‘œgood will prevail.’� In 2003, in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, U.S. forces mistakenly opened fire on vehicles carrying police, killing eight of them. In 2005, Federal Emergency Management Agency director Mike Brown resigned, three days after losing his onsite command of the Hurricane Katrina relief effort. In 2008, a Metrolink commuter train struck a freight train head-on in Los Angeles, killing 25 people. (Federal investigators said the Metrolink engineer, Robert Sanchez, who was among those who died, had been text-messaging on his cell phone and ran a red light shortly before the crash.) In 2011, Novak Djokovic beat defending champion Rafael Nadal 6-2, 6-4, 6-7 (3), 6-1 to win his first U.S. Open championship. Ten years ago: The U.S. dispatched an elite group of Marines to Tripoli, Libya, after the mob attack in Benghazi that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. President Barack Obama strongly condemned the violence, and vowed to bring the killers to justice; Republican challenger Mitt Romney accused the administration of showing weakness in the face of tumultuous events in the Middle East. Five years ago: Crews worked to repair the lone highway connecting the Florida Keys, where 25 percent of the homes were feared to have been destroyed by Hurricane Irma; more than 9 million Floridians, or nearly half the state’s population, were still without power in the late-summer heat. Seattle Mayor Ed Murray announced that he was resigning amid sex abuse allegations. Gay rights pioneer Edith Windsor, whose landmark Supreme Court case struck down parts of a federal anti-gay-marriage law, died in New York at the age of 88.