Today is Tuesday, July 2, the 184th day of 2024.
There are 182 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law a sweeping civil rights bill passed by Congress prohibiting discrimination and segregation based on race, color, sex, religion or national origin.
Also on this date:
In 1776, the Continental Congress passed a resolution saying that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.”
In 1881, President James A. Garfield was shot by Charles J. Guiteau (gee-TOH’) at the Washington railroad station; Garfield died the following September. (Guiteau was hanged in June 1882.)
In 1917, rioting erupted in East St. Louis, Illinois, as white mobs attacked Black residents; at least 50 and as many as 200 people, most of them Black, are believed to have died in the violence.
In 1937, aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to make the first round-the-world flight along the equator.
In 1962, the first Walmart store opened in Rogers, Arkansas.
In 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Gregg v. Georgia, ruled 7-2 that the death penalty was not inherently cruel or unusual.
In 1979, the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin was released to the public.
In 1986, ruling in a pair of cases, the Supreme Court upheld affirmative action as a remedy for past job discrimination.
In 1990, more than 1,400 Muslim pilgrims were killed in a stampede inside a pedestrian tunnel near Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
In 2002, Steve Fossett became the first person to complete a solo circumnavigation of the world nonstop in a balloon.
In 2018, rescue divers in Thailand found alive 12 boys and their soccer coach, who had been trapped by flooding as they explored a cave more than a week earlier.
In 2020, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested in New Hampshire on charges that she had helped lure at least three girls – one as young as 14 – to be sexually abused by the late financier Jeffrey Epstein. (Maxwell would be convicted on five of six counts.)
In 2022, the police chief for the Uvalde, Texas, school district stepped down from his City Council seat amid criticism of his response to the mass shooting that left 19 students and two teachers dead.
