JOHN F.KENNEDY

by Alicia W. Stewart

(CNN) -- Fifty years ago, Alabama Gov. George Wallace defiantly stood in front of the University of Alabama's Foster Auditorium to prevent Black students from enrolling.

The then newly elected governor had famously declared "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" in his inauguration speech. His "stand in the schoolhouse door" brought him national attention.

It took the National Guard, federal marshals and an attorney general to persuade the governor to allow Vivian Malone Jones and James Hood to enter.

It was not the first time Americans saw the drama of the civil rights movement unfold before their eyes. Earlier that spring, images of police attacking peaceful civil rights demonstrators with dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama, flashed across the evening news. The previous year, riots were quelled with federal troops after the admission of James Meredith, the first black student at the University of Mississippi.

Wallace later rescinded his views, but the incidents of the time prompted President John F. Kennedy to address the nation in a historic televised address about civil rights.

"Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise," President Kennedy said in that address. 'The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them."

He told the nation that evening:

MEDGAR EVERS

For the week of June 12-18
June 12
1840—The world’s first anti-slavery convention took place in London, England. The aim of the gathering was to unite abolitionists worldwide. However, the effectiveness of the convention was harmed by a decision to exclude female delegates.
1886—The Georgia Supreme Court upholds the will of former slave owner David Dickson who had left over $300,000 to a child he fathered by raping a 12-year-old Black girl. The ruling made Amanda America Eubanks the wealthiest Black person in America. She would later marry one of her White first cousins.
1963—Medgar Evers, Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP, was assassinated in front of his home by White supremacist Byron de la Beckwith. All-White juries twice refused to find De la Beckwith guilty although the evidence was overwhelming. Finally, in 1995, Beckwith was convicted of killing the civil rights activist. Beckwith died in prison in 2001.

Rev. Fred Luter Jr. points upward after being re-elected as the Southern Baptist Convention's president during the 2013 Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting at the George R. Brown Convention Center Tuesday, June 11, 2013, in Houston. Luter was the SBC's first Black president. (AP Photo/Houston Chronicle, Johnny 

Hanson)

HOUSTON (AP) — The Southern Baptist Convention re-elected its first Black president, the Rev. Fred Luter Jr., at its annual meeting Tuesday.

Luter was first elected in 2012. His presidency comes at a time when the nation's largest Protestant denomination is trying to move beyond its traditional White Southern base.

The Nashville-based Southern Baptist Convention claims 16 million members, but recently announced that membership declined in 2012 for the sixth straight year.

Vincent George Sr., right, and Vincent George Jr. listen to closing arguments in a courtroom in New York, June 6, 2013. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

by Colleen Long
Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — The evidence of sex trafficking was tattooed on the bodies of the prostitutes: Their pimps' names branded onto skin, scrolled across chests and inked onto pelvises, prosecutors said.

They were women so traumatized by their horrible circumstances that they lied on the witness stand to protect their abusers in a criminal trial in Manhattan, prosecutors said during closing arguments Thursday in the case. Three women testified that they begged the father and son team for the tattoos, eager to show their love for the men.

They said they were one big happy family, living a suburban life as "wife-in-laws" in Allentown, Pa., commuting by night about 100 miles to work the Manhattan streets.