Today in History: June 7, James Byrd Jr. killed in hate crime

Today is Sunday, June 7, the 158th day of 2026. There are 207 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On June 7, 1998, in a crime that shocked the nation and led to stronger state and federal hate crime laws, James Byrd Jr., a 49-year-old Black man, was hooked by a chain to a pickup truck and dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas. (Two white men were later sentenced to death and executed for the crime; a third was sentenced to life in prison.)

Also on this date:

In 1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia offered a resolution to the Continental Congress stating "that these united colonies are and of right ought to be free and independent States."

In 1892, Homer Plessy, a Creole of color, was arrested for refusing to leave a whites-only car of the East Louisiana Railroad. (In an 1896 ruling on his case, Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld "separate but equal" racial segregation, a concept it renounced in 1954.)

In 1929, the sovereign state of Vatican City formally came into existence as the Italian Parliament ratified the Lateran Treaty in Rome.

In 1942, the Battle of Midway ended in a decisive victory for American naval forces over Imperial Japan, marking a turning point in the Pacific War.

In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, struck down by a 7-2 vote a Connecticut law used to prosecute a Planned Parenthood clinic in New Haven for providing contraceptives to married couples.

In 1976, New York magazine published an article by journalist Nik Cohn entitled "The Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night," that inspired the 1977 film "Saturday Night Fever" and sparked a nationwide disco craze. (Cohn admitted in 1997 that the article was actually a work of fiction.)

In 1979, Texas became the first state to recognize Juneteenth as an official state holiday. (Juneteenth became a federal holiday in 2021; the June 19 holiday marks the day in 1865 when Union soldiers arrived in Galveston at the end of the Civil War and brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Texas.)

In 1982, Graceland, Elvis Presley's Memphis mansion, was opened to the public as a tourist destination, five years after Presley's death.

In 2006, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, was killed by a U.S. airstrike on his safe house.

In 2021, Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and her son Paul Murdaugh, 22, from a prominent South Carolina legal family, were found shot and killed on their family's property. (In 2026 the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned the murder convictions of Alex Murdaugh, Maggie's husband and Paul's father.)

Today's Birthdays: Filmmaker James Ivory is 98. Singer Tom Jones is 86. Actor Liam Neeson is 74. Author Orhan Pamuk is 74. Author Louise Erdrich is 72. Music producer L.A. Reid is 70. Musician Juan Luis Guerra is 69. Former Vice President Mike Pence is 67. Rock musician-TV host Dave Navarro is 59. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, D-N.M., is 54. Actor Karl Urban is 54. TV personality Bear Grylls is 52. Basketball Hall of Famer Allen Iverson is 51. Actor-comedian Bill Hader is 48. Actor Michael Cera is 38. Rapper Iggy Azalea is 36. Actor-model Emily Ratajkowski is 35. NFL running back Christian McCaffrey is 30.