Today In History: John Hinckley Shot Reagan For Jodie Foster; LBJ Signs Fair Housing Act

April 11, 2017, is the 101st day of the year, with 264 days remaining. The moon is in a full moon phase, with illumination at 100 percent.

LBJ signs Fair Housing Act of 1968

America in the 1960s saw a number of civil rights milestones, from President Kennedy’s televised address on civil rights in 1963 to President Johnson’s call for the “earliest possible passage” of Kennedy’s civil rights bill — which, indeed, was signed into law in 1964 — following the JFK assassination. These watersheds culminated in the eventual enactment of the Civil Rights Act’s Title VII, also known as the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

From 1966 to 1967, Congress regularly considered the fair housing bill, but failed to garner a majority vote that was strong enough to allow the bill’s passage.

When Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Johnson utilized this tragedy to speed the bill toward Congressional approval. Dr. King’s name had been closely associated with fair housing legislation since the 1966 open housing marches that took place in Chicago.

Watch LBJ’s speech after signing the Fair Housing Act of 1968

Reagan returns to the White House

Twelve days after the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan’s life and one day after it was announced that the president would be leaving the hospital for the White House, speculations arose surrounding potential complications.

Reagan’s chest x-ray revealed “a tiny little pocket” of air, a half-inch in diameter, in the president’s left lung, which Dr. Dennis S. O’Leary — medical spokesman for George Washington University Hospital — said suggested the possibility of an abcess, or walled-off area of infection.

Dr. O’Leary further commented that Reagan would likely work half-days at his desk “depending upon how rapidly he [came] along” and that “common sense [would] prevail” on the question of how much physical activity in which the president would engage.

Reagan often wore a bulletproof vest for events — but on this day, he hadn’t. One might ask, what was perpetrator John Hinckley, Jr.’s motivation for the attack? Two words, one name:

Jodie. Foster.

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Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons via FBI