Civil rights group demonstrated at Harlem construction sites to Protest discrimination in building trades unions. Demonstrations and marches were held in metropolitan areas in June, July and August to dramatize discontent over housing, school and job discrimination.

The first known monument erected by African Americans to honor one of our heroes is dedicated to Richard Allen in Philadelphias Fairmont park.

U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Virginia law banning inter-racial marriage was unconstitutional.

Medgar Evers , in full Medgar Wiley Evers (born July 2, 1925, Decatur, Miss., U.S.—died June 12, 1963, Jackson, Miss.), American black civil-rights activist, whose murder received national attention and made him a martyr to the cause of the civil rights movement.

Evers served in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II. Afterward he and his elder brother, Charles Evers, both graduated from Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University, Lorman, Miss.) in 1950. They settled in Philadelphia, Miss., and engaged in various business pursuits—Medgar was an insurance salesman, and Charles operated a restaurant, a gas station, and other enterprises—and at the same time began organizing local affiliates of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). They worked quietly at first, slowly building a base of support; in 1954 Medgar moved to Jackson to become the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi. He traveled throughout the state recruiting members and organizing voter-registration drives and economic boycotts.

During the early 1960s the increased tempo of civil-rights activities in the South created high and constant tensions, and in Mississippi conditions were often at the breaking point. On June 12, 1963, a few hours after President John F. Kennedy had made an extraordinary broadcast to the nation on the subject of civil rights, Medgar Evers was shot and killed in an ambush in front of his home. The murder made Evers, until then a hardworking and effective but relatively obscure figure outside Mississippi, a nationally known figure. He was buried with full military honours in Arlington National Cemetery and awarded the 1963 Spingarn Medal of the NAACP.

Charles Evers immediately requested and was granted appointment by the NAACP to his brother’s position in Mississippi, and afterward he became a major political figure in the state. Evers’s widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams, was the first woman to head the NAACP (1995–98).

Byron de La Beckwith, a white

Religious leader Barbara Clementine Harris was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Walter and Beatrice (Price) Harris on June 12, 1930.

Michael Jordan lead Chicago Bulls in win over L.A.

Lakers in five games to capture his first NBA

Championship.

The Georgia State Supreme Court sustained the will of the late David Dickson, thus making Amanda Eubanks the wealthiest Negro in America. Dickson, a former slaveholder, willed more than half a million dollars to Eubanks. White relatives of Dickson, a bachelor, had contested the will on the grounds that it was illegal for a white man to leave property to his black illegitimate children.

When Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter decided to get married in June 1958, laws banning interracial marriage had been in effect for nearly three centuries.  The colonies of Maryland, Virginia, and Massachusetts had banned intermarriage in 1664, 1691, and 1705.  After the American Revolution, states passed similar laws.  During the Civil War, interracial marriage acquired a new name--miscegenation-and miscegenation laws became the foundation for the system of racial segregation in railroads, schools, parks, and cemeteries that prevailed into the 1960s.  When this regime was at its height, 30 states banned interracial marriage, many of them prohibiting whites from marrying Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as blacks.  Judges justified these laws by insisting that interracial marriage was somehow unnatural, a claim that became so pervasive that by 1958, 94 percent of Americans told pollsters they opposed interracial marriage.

Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter had grown up in Central Point, Virginia, a town so tiny that whites, blacks, and Indians had been mixing as far back as anyone could remember.  Richard was the son of a white truck driver who worked for a well-off Negro farmer.  Mildred, who said she was part negro and part Indian, fit into the catch-all category of colored.  The labels white and colored carried enough weight that Richard and Mildred attended different schools and churches.  Still, they knew each other even before they met at a local dance and started dating.  When Richard was 24 and Mildred was 18, they decided to get married.

Richard knew they had no hope of getting a license in Virginia, so the pair traveled to Washington, D.C. to get married, returning with a marriage certificate that they framed and placed on a wall of the home they shared with Mildreds parents.  Most of their Central Point neighbors paid little attention to the marriage, but someone told the Caroline County sheriff, who vowed to put a stop to it.  The newlyweds had lived

The National Black MBA Association is incorporated.

Dan Jacobson , (born March 7, 1929, Johannesburg, South Africa—died June 12, 2014, London, England), South African-born novelist and short-story writer who wrote with both humour and pathos of the troubled land of his birth and of his eastern European Jewish heritage, though in his later work he explored more-historical and biblical subjects.

After graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand (B.A., 1949), Jacobson lived in Israel, but he soon returned to South Africa, where he worked in public relations and in the family cattle-feed–milling business. He then settled (1954) in England and pursued an academic career at University College, London, as a lecturer (1974–79), reader (1979–86), and professor of English (1986–94; emeritus from 1994).

Jacobson’s first novels—The Trap (1955), A Dance in the Sun (1956), and The Price of Diamonds (1957)—form a complex mosaic that provides a peculiarly incisive view of racially divided South African society. Much of his best work was in his short stories, especially in the collections The Zulu and the Zeide (1959) and Beggar My Neighbour (1964).

With The Beginners (1966), a long generational novel paralleling his own family history, Jacobson began to shift away from writing about South Africa. The Rape of Tamar (1970) and Her Story (1987) are biblical novels, and The Confessions of Josef Baisz (1977) is set in a country only “something like” South Africa. His later books, notably The God-Fearer (1992) and All for Love (2005), continued to utilize both his political consciousness and his gift for irony. Jacobson also wrote several volumes of essays and memoirs.

The Worlds Anti-Slavery Convention convenes in London, England.

Race riot, Cincinnati, Ohio. Three hundred persons were arrested, and the National Guard was mobilized.

Gowons nine-year rule was ended in 1975 in a bloodless coup that made Army Brig. Muritala Rufai Mohammed the new chief of state. The return of civilian leadership was established with the election of Alhaji Shehu Shagari as president in 1979. An oil boom in the 1970s buoyed the economy and by the 1980s, Nigeria was considered an exemplar of African democracy and economic well-being.

The military again seized power in 1984, only to be followed by another military coup the following year. Maj. Gen. Ibrahim Babangida announced that the country would be returned to civilian rule, but after the presidential election of June 12, 1993, he voided the results. Nevertheless, Babangida did resign as president in August. In November the military, headed by defense minister Sani Abacha, seized power again.

Corruption and notorious governmental inefficiency as well as a harshly repressive military regime characterized Abachas reign over this oil-rich country, turning it into an international pariah. A UN fact-finding mission in 1996 reported that Nigerias “problems of human rights are terrible and the political problems are terrifying.” During the 1970s, Nigeria had the 33rd highest per capita income in the world, but by 1997 it had dropped to the 13th poorest. The hanging of writer Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995 because he protested against the government was condemned around the world.

Medgar W. Evers (37), NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, assassinated in front of his Jackson home by a segregationist.