On June 12, 1942, Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a diary for her 13th birthday, less than a month before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis.
In 1963, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 2001.)
In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, unanimously struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages.
In 1987, President Ronald Reagan, during a visit to Berlin, exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”
In 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were slashed to death outside her home. (O.J. Simpson was later acquitted of the killings in a criminal trial but was held liable in a civil action.)