Southern Cultural Cleansing

12 May 1996  

On this date in 1996...

Arsonists set fire to the apartment building where Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind for the second time in two years.  The motive for the arson was thought to be an attempt to prevent the opening of her home as a tourist attraction in conjunction with the Atlanta Summer Olympic Games

Other Years:

• 1780 - British troops occupied Charleston, South Carolina during the American War for Independence.
• 1858 - Comanche Chief Iron Jacket was killed in a fight with Texas Rangers on the Canadian River.
• 1862 - The Georgia Railroad Bridge Guard began duty under command of Captain E.M. Gault.
• 1862 - Federal troops occupied Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
• 1864 - Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart died from wounds received at the Battle of Yellow Tavern, Virginia.
• 1865 - Brigadier General W.T. Wofford surrendered Confederate forces in North Georgia at Kingston, Georgia.
• 1865 - The two-day Battle of Palmitto Ranch, Texas began. (Often called the last battle of the War of Northern Aggression.)
• 1890 - Louisiana legalized prize fighting.
• 1942 - A German U-Boat sank an American cargo ship at mouth of the Mississippi River.
• 1957 - Texas race car driver A.J. Foyt won his first pro victory. 
• 1963 - Blacks shut down the city of Birmingham, Alabama with racially motivated rioting.
• 1970 - Police killed five black rioters and another was killed by a citizen in racially motivated riots at Augusta, Georgia.
• 2003 - Fifty-nine Democrat lawmakers brought the Texas Legislature to a standstill by going into hiding over a dispute with a Republican congressional redistricting plan.

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