Today in History, August 28: Martin Luther King Jr gave 'I Have a Dream' speech

Let us take a look at some of the significant events that took place on 28th August:

• Emmett Till, a Black boy from Chicago, was kidnapped from his uncle's house in Money, Mississippi, on August 28, 1955, by two white men who claimed he had whistled at one of them. Emmett Till was discovered brutally murdered three days later.

• The Second Battle of Bull Run, commonly referred to as Second Manassas, started in Prince William County, Virginia, in 1862, and the Confederates won.


• The first-ever radio ad was played on station WEAF in New York City in 1922; it was a ten-minute promotion for the Queensboro Realty Co., for which a price of $100 had been paid.

• In 1941, Kichisaburo Nomura, the Japanese ambassador to the United States, gave President Franklin D. Roosevelt a letter from Prince Fumimaro Konoye, the prime minister of Japan, requesting better ties.

• The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech right in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to an audience of more than 200,000 people in 1963.

• As Hubert H. Humphrey was named the Democratic nominee for president in 1968, police and anti-war protesters battled in the streets of Chicago.

• At an air show at the American Air Base in Ramstein, West Germany, in 1988, three Italian stunt planes collided, killing 70 spectators.

• The turbulent 15-year union between Britain's Prince Charles and Princess Diana came to an end in 1996 when a divorce judgement was issued.

• Mayor Ray Nagin of New Orleans (NAY'-gin) issued an evacuation order for the whole city in 2005 as Hurricane Katrina swelled into a superstorm.

• Maj. Nidal Hasan was given the death penalty by a military jury in 2013 for the 13-person shooting rampage at Fort Hood in 2009. President Barack Obama stood on the exact same steps as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his "I Have a Dream" address at the Lincoln Memorial and urged the next generation to take up the fight for racial equality.

• Six scientists spent a year simulating Mars in Hawaii in 2016, emerging after spending the year inside a dome almost alone on the Mauna Loa mountain.

• A black 15-year-old boy named Jordan Edwards was fatally shot by a white former police officer named Roy Oliver in suburban Dallas in 2018. Oliver was found guilty of murder and given a 15-year jail sentence the following day.

• Shinzo Abe, the longest-serving prime minister of Japan, announced his resignation in 2020, citing a recurrence of a severe illness.