January 15 · This Day in America
In an upstairs bedroom of a tidy house at 501 Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, a boy is born to a Baptist preacher and a preacher's daughter. They name him Michael, and later Martin. The street outside is one of the most prosperous Black neighborhoods in America, and still the world beyond it is a closed door he will spend his life trying to open with words instead of fists. He is thirty-nine years when it ends. In between, he will stand on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and tell a quarter-million people about a dream, win a Nobel Prize, march at Selma, go to jail and write from it, and bend the country, against its weight, toward its own founding promise. All of it is still ahead. Today there is only a baby crying in a house on Auburn Avenue, and a family that does not yet know.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 2009
Ninety seconds out of LaGuardia, a flock of Canada geese kills both engines of US Airways Flight 1549. Captain Chesley Sullenberger has no power, no altitude, and no airport in reach. He keys the radio: "We're gonna be in the Hudson." Three and a half minutes after the birds, he sets an Airbus full of people down on a river without a scratch on it. Ferries converge within minutes. All 155 aboard live. The whole event lasted the length of a song.
Source: www.ntsb.gov
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”Martin Luther King Jr., 1963