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12 Apr, 1988

Elected mayor

Runs for Office0 Comments

Bono is elected mayor of Palm Springs after a seven-way election with 4,842 votes. He celebrates his success among a crowd of 1,000 supporters at Maxim’s Suite Hotel as a live band plays the theme song from Rocky.

It’s a wonderful American thing that just happened.

4 Mar, 1980

Elected president

Wins Election0 Comments

_40878779_mugabe_238Zimbabwe elects Mugabe as the first black prime minister in a landslide victory. Mugabe:

If yesterday I fought you as an enemy, today you have become a friend and ally with the same national interest, loyalty, rights and duties as myself. If yesterday you hated me, today you cannot avoid the love that binds you to me and me to you…Is it not folly, therefore, that in these circumstances anybody should seek to revive the wounds and grievances of the past? The wrongs of the past must now stand forgiven and forgotten. If ever we look to the past, let us do so for the lesson the past has taught us, namely that oppression and racism are inequities that must never again find scope in our political and social system. It could never be a correct justification that, because whites oppressed us yesterday when they had power, the blacks must oppress them today because they have power.

30 Aug, 1967

Supreme Court nomination confirmed

Political Appointment0 Comments

The Senate confirms Marshall’s nomination as Supreme Court Justice. He is the first African American to sit on the high court. The roll-call vote is 69 to 11. Southerners try to delay Marshall’s appointment. The Southern opposition charges that Marshal was a “judicial activist” who looks to his personal philosophies rather than to the law for guidance. Senator Javits defends the appointment:

We should be thankful that there is [an African American] in the United States who deserves to be a justice of the Supreme Court.

28 Jul, 1868

Ratified

Law approved0 Comments

The United States ratifies the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” which includes former slaves who had just been freed after the Civil War. Known as the “Reconstruction Amendment,” it forbids any state to deny any person “life, liberty or property, without due process of law” or to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”