Zangara Executed – Today In Southern History

20 March 1933

On this date in 1933…

Italian immigrant Giuseppe Zangara was executed in Florida’s electric chair for killing Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak and shooting four others in an attempt to assassinate President Franklin D. Roosevelt at an event in Miami.

Other Years:

• 1699 – While explorating up the Mississippi River, French explorer Lemoyne d’Iberville visited the village of the Houma Indians.

• 1775 - The Second Virginia Convention began in St. John’s church in Richmond.

• 1864 – Eight hundred Navajo, mostly women, children and old men began the 300 mile “Long Walk” to Fort Sumner and the Bosque Redondo Reservation, in New Mexico. More than a hundred died in a snow storm before reaching the reservation.

• 1865 – A plan by John Wilkes Booth to abduct U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was ruined when Lincoln changed his plans and did not appear at the Soldier’s Home near Washington, DC.

• 1868 – The James-Younger Gang was blamed for a bank robbery in Russelville, Kentucky that netted $14,000.

• 1965 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered 4,000 troops to protect the Selma-Montgomery civil rights marchers.

• 1989 – A Washington, DC district court judge blocked a curfew imposed by Mayor Barry and the City Council.

• 1997 – Liggett Group, the maker of Chesterfield cigarettes, settled 22 state lawsuits by admitting the industry marketed cigarettes to teenagers and agreed to warn on every pack that smoking is addictive.

• 2000 – Former Black Panther Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, once known as H. Rap Brown, was captured following a shootout that left a sherriff’s deputy dead.

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