On June 12, 1939, the Baseball Hall of Fame was dedicated in Cooperstown, New York.

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, where he died in 2001.)

In 1964, eight South African anti-apartheid activists, including Nelson Mandela, were sentenced to life in prison for committing acts of sabotage against South Africa’s apartheid government.

In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, unanimously struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages, ruling that such laws violated the Fourteenth Amendment.

In 1991, Russians voted their first presidential election, which resulted in victory for Boris Yeltsin.