Milestones: Wednesday, June 28, 2023

June 28, 2023 Brooklyn Eagle Staff

Share this:

START OF A MOVEMENT — Police raiding the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village could never have dreamed that they would be sparking a new movement as they arrested patrons for what was then an illegal activity. At the time, same-gender solicitation and pickups were illegal, and a network of laws had been set up to criminalize cross-dressing (drag) as well. Early in the morning of Saturday, June 28, 1969, the Stonewall clientele began rioting in reaction to a police raid. Although raids had happened before, this one was with local residents joining in several days of demonstrations afterward. The protests and solidarity led to the start of the gay liberation movement.

The following year, the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee organized, and the first Gay Pride parade was held on the first anniversary of the uprising, June 28, 1970.

✰✰✰

PIONEER BLACK PROGRAM — “AMOS ‘N ANDY” made its TV premiere on June 28, 1951, based on a popular radio show from the 1920s-40s in which white dialecticians Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll played the part of two Black friends who went to Chicago to seek their fortune. The TV program was the first to have an all-Black cast, including Tim Moore, Spencer Williams, Alvin Childress, Ernestine Wade, Amanda Randolph, Johnny Lee, Nick O’Demus and Jester Hairston. The series enjoyed syndication until some civil rights groups complained that the show was actually stereotypical and prejudicial, even though others praised the show for being influential.

The criticism of Amos ‘n Andy actually predated the TV series by two decades. In 1931, the African American press petitioned the Federal Radio Commission to cancel the show on the grounds that it gave an unfair and inaccurate representation of African Americans, and that whites could exploit the programs to justify slavery and segregation.

✰✰✰

PART OF THE MANHATTAN PROJECT — MARIA GOEPPERT-MAYER, one of the scientists instrumental to the Manhattan Project, was born on June 28, 1906, in Kattowitz, Germany. She immigrated to the United States after meeting the man who would become her husband, a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, according to the Nobel Prize website. A participant in the Manhattan Project, Goeppert-Mayer worked on the separation of uranium isotopes for the atomic bomb. She became the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize, sharing the 1963 prize in physics with J. Hans Daniel Jensen and Eugene P. Wigner for their explanation of the atomic nucleus, known as the nuclear shell theory.

Participants in The Manhattan Project, which was shrouded in secrecy, often did not know each other’s identities and their involvement is not always made public. These scientists were racing to create an atom bomb — before the Germans did, according to the National Archives website. Their success had some unexpected consequences: President Truman had to use the bomb against Japan to force a surrender (twice, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

✰✰✰

LIGHTNING AS A KILLER — INTERNATIONAL LIGHTNING SAFETY DAY, observed annually on June 28 comes very timely on the heels of this week’s severe storms. The Centre for Science and Technology of the Non-Aligned and Other Developing Countries, an intergovernmental organization, developed the observance in 2015, after a disaster four years earlier, on June 28, 2011 in which 18 Ugandan schoolchildren were killed, and dozens injured, in a lightning strike. At the time, the children were taking shelter in their school.

The goal of International Lightning Safety Day is to promote awareness and injury-prevention campaigns.

✰✰✰

RESISTANCE OVER VETERANS DAY — The MONDAY HOLIDAY LAW, signed into law on June 28, 1968, marks its 55th anniversary. President Lyndon B. Johnson approved PL 90–363, which amended section 6103(a) of Title 5, United States Code, establishing Monday (long-weekend) observances of Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Labor Day, Columbus Day and Veterans Day. The new holiday law took effect Jan. 1, 1971. Although Veterans Day was originally moved to a Monday holiday, veterans in most of the states protested, refusing to observe the new October date and continuing to mark Nov. 11, which is timed to an historic event — the signing of the Armistice “on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month” of 1918. Congress, respecting the veterans groups’ resistance, amended the Monday Holiday Law in 1975 to restore November 11 as the official observance.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management establishes federal government closings, and also sets the holidays that fall on a non-workday — Saturday or Sunday — to fall on either the Friday before or the Monday after, respectively. This includes Christmas, but not Thanksgiving, which is always observed on the fourth Thursday in November.

✰✰✰

CONTROVERSIAL CLAUSE — The TREATY OF VERSAILLES was signed on June 28, 1919, exactly five years to the day of the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which had sparked World War I. It took almost eight months from the signing of the Armistice in November 1918 for Allied leaders to negotiate and formulate a treaty, at the Paris Peace Conference, and disagreements rose in particular over a clause that required Germany to take full responsibility and pay reparations of 20 billion gold marks. Germany was not allowed to take part in the treaty negotiations. Some Allied leaders believed the terms were too harsh on Germany. However, France’s French Marshal Ferdinand Foch asserted that the treaty was instead too lenient.

The disagreement over these terms was never fully resolved and the United States Senate rejected the treaty — which also established the short-lived League of Nations — even though President Woodrow Wilson was its primary architect.

✰✰✰

STANDING AT ARAFAT — June 28 is observed this year, according to the Islamic lunar calendar as Dhu al-Hijjah 9, which in the 15th century, Common Era when pilgrims on the Hajj assembled for The Standing. This observance, which took place at the plain of Arafat at Mina, Saudi Arabia, near Mecca, is marked as a gathering and a foreshadowing of the Day of Judgment.

Muslim groups utilize different methods for “anticipating” the visibility of the new moon crescent; since the prophet Muhammad’s time in the 7th century, the moon’s visibility to the naked eye has been required.

✰✰✰

CELEBRATING MEL BROOKS — Born on a tenement kitchen table as Melvin Kaminsky on June 28, 1926 in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood, Brooks grew up in Williamsburg. Brooks met then-18-year-old Sid Caesar at Borscht Belt hotel (in the Catskills) and his career of antics and comedy took off (Brooks during his teens changed his surname from Kaminsky to avoid confusion with a trumpeter). Buddy Rich (also from Williamsburg) taught Brooks how to play the drums. After scoring highly on an Army General Classification Test, a Stanford–Binet-type IQ test, Brooks was recruited and drafted. Following his training, he boarded SS Sea Owl at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in early 1945. At one point he was married to the actress Anne Bancroft.

Brooks, known for “Blazing Saddles,” “The Producers” and “Spaceballs,” is in a special class of entertainers who have won an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony, and a Grammy Award.

✰✰✰

STARTED AS CHILD ACTRESS — Danielle Anne Brisebois, born in Brooklyn on June 28, 1969 is of French-Canadian and Italian descent. Starting as a child actress, she played the fictional Stephanie Mills (not to be confused with real-life singer-songwriter The Wiz star), the niece to Archie and Edith Bunker on “All in the Family,” and its spinoff, “Archie Bunker’s Place” (for which Brisebois was a Golden Globe nominee.) Brisebois also played Molly in the original Broadway production of “Annie.”

Now an actor and producer, Brisebois also joined the New Radicals band, who had the hit single “You Get What You Give”, and the million-selling album “Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too.”

✰✰✰

LOVEABLE COMIC — Kathy Bates, born 75 years ago, on June 28, 1948, makes the quintessential Jewish grandmother, even though the actress herself has Irish ancestry. Most recently, she played the beloved Grandma to the title role character, rising 6th-grader Margaret Simon, in “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret,” which debuted in theaters in April 2023. Bates has racked up awards, including an Academy Award (“Misery”), which launched her Hollywood career, two Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and two Screen Actors Guild Awards as well as nominations for a Tony Award and two BAFTA Awards. Many filmgoers love Bates’ character, Evelyn Couch, in “Fried Green Tomatoes,” Molly Brown in the 1997 blockbuster, “Titanic,” and even as Bitsy the Cow in the 2006 animated film, “Charlotte’s Web.”

Kathy Bates is also a cancer survivor (ovarian and breast) and has served as spokesperson and chairperson for the Lymphatic Education & Research Network’s (LE&RN) honorary board.

See previous milestones, here.