TIM MAGUIRE

Under escort from the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, nine
Black students entered all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas on September 25, 1957. Three weeks earlier, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus had surrounded the school with National
Guard troops to prevent its federal court-ordered racial integration.

After a tense standoff, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized
the Arkansas National Guard and sent 1,000 army paratroopers to
Little Rock to enforce the court order.

Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower
(October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969)

On September 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln issued a
preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in the midst of the
Civil War , which set a date for the freedom of more than 3
million enslaved in the United States and would also recast
the Civil War as a fight against slavery.

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TIM MAGUIRE

Oliver Stone in Vietnam.

William Oliver Stone is a film director, producer, and screenwriter. He won an Academy Award for Best
Adapted Screenplay as writer of Midnight Express
(1978), and wrote the gangster film remake Scarface
(1983). Stone achieved prominence as writer and          
director  of the war drama Platoon (1986), which
won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best
Picture. Platoon was the first in a trilogy of films  
based on the Vietnam War, in which Stone served
as an infantry soldier. He continued the series with
Born on the Fourth of July (1989)—for which Stone
won his second Best Director Oscar. Stone is 76
years old today. 

ED DANAHUE

Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr.)
(January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968)