ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY:1776 : Washington begins march to New YorkAfter the successful siege of Boston, General George Washington begins marching his unpaid soldiers from their headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, toward New York in anticipation of a British invasion, on this day in 1776.
1884 : Yamamoto Isoroku, Japan's mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack, is bornYamamoto Isoroku, perhaps Japan's greatest strategist and the officer who would contrive the surprise air attack on U.S. naval forces at Pearl Harbor, is born on this day in 1884.1933 : Dirigible crash kills 73
On this day in 1933, a dirigible crashes in New Jersey, killing 73 people in one of the first air disasters in history. The Akron was the largest airship built in the United States when it took its first flight in August 1931. In its short life of less than two years, it was involved in two fatal accidents.
1928 : Maya Angelou is bornPoet and novelist Maya Angelou-born Marguerite Johnson-is born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her parents divorced when she was three, and she and her brother went to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. When she was eight, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend. When she revealed what happened, her uncles kicked the culprit to death. Frightened by the power of her own tongue, Angelou chose not to speak for the next five years.
1949 : NATO pact signedThe United States and 11 other nations establish the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a mutual defense pact aimed at containing possible Soviet aggression against Western Europe. NATO stood as the main U.S.-led military alliance against the Soviet Union throughout the duration of the Cold War.
1968 : Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinatedMartin Luther King Jr. is shot to death at a hotel in Memphis, Tennessee. A single shot fired by James Earl Ray from over 200 feet away at a nearby motel struck King in the neck. He died an hour later at St. Joseph's Hospital. The death of America's leading civil rights advocate sparked a wave of rioting in the black communities of several cities around the country.

4/04, Civil Rights Movement leader not found.