Today in History: March 18, deadliest U.S. tornado strikes Midwest states
A March 21, 1925 photo of an overturned house that was carried more than 50 feet from its foundation by a tornado at Griffin, Indiana. (AP photo)
Today in history:
On March 18, 1925, nearly 700 people died when the Tri-State Tornado struck southeastern Missouri, southern Illinois and southwestern Indiana; it remains the deadliest single tornado in U.S. history.
Also on this date:
In 1922, Mohandas K. Gandhi was sentenced in India to six years’ imprisonment for civil disobedience. (He was released after serving two years.)
In 1937, in America’s worst school disaster, nearly 300 people—most of them children—were killed in a natural gas explosion at the New London Consolidated School in Rusk County, Texas.
In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the War Relocation Authority, which forced Japanese-Americans into internment camps during World War II.
In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Gideon v. Wainwright, ruled unanimously that state courts were required to provide legal counsel to criminal defendants who could not afford to hire an attorney on their own.
In 1965, the first spacewalk took place as Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov went outside his Voskhod 2 capsule, secured by a tether.
In 1990, two thieves posing as police officers subdued security guards at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of Art in Boston and stole 13 works of art valued at over $500 million in the biggest art heist in history.
In 2018, a self-driving Uber SUV struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona in the first death involving a fully autonomous test vehicle.