Today in History: May 15
The bullet-riddled windows of Alexander Hall, a women’s dormitory at Jackson State College in Jackson, Miss., are shown after two African-American students were killed and 12 injured when police opened fire on the building.
On May 15, 1970, less than two weeks after the shooting at Kent State University, two Black students at Jackson State College in Mississippi were killed and 12 were injured when police opened fire during student demonstrations.
In 1928, the Walt Disney cartoon character Mickey Mouse appeared for the first time in front of a public audience in a test screening of the short “Plane Crazy.” (Mickey made his formal screen debut with the release of “Steamboat Willie” six months later.)
In 1972, Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace was shot and left paralyzed while campaigning for president in Laurel, Maryland.
Richard and Maurice McDonald opened the first McDonald’s fast-food restaurant in San Bernardino, California in 1940.
Nylon stockings first went on sale to the public in 1940, and American stores sold out in days.
Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as United States Secretary of State, was born in 1937 in Prague, Czechoslovakia.
The first regular airmail route in the United States opened between New York City and Washington, D.C. in 1918.
American poet Emily Dickinson, who commanded a singular brilliance of style and integrity of vision, died in Amherst, Massachusetts in 1886.
Physical chemist Pierre Curie, cowinner (with his wife, Marie Curie) of the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics, was born in Paris in 1859.
On the Aventine Hill in Rome, the temple of the Roman god Mercury was dedicated in 495 B.C.