May 4 in History

A pipe bomb arced through the evening air and detonated among a line of police officers advancing on a labor rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square. Officer Mathias Degan was killed instantly. Police opened fire into the crowd, and the crowd fired back. When the shooting stopped on May 4, 1886, seven police officers and at least four civilians lay dead, with dozens more wounded on both sides. The rally had been called to protest the police killing of several striking workers at the McCormick Reaper Works the previous day. Chicago was the epicenter of the national movement for an eight-hour workday, and tensions between labor organizers and industrialists had been escalating for weeks. On May 1, some 80,000 workers had marched down Michigan Avenue in the largest labor demonstration in American history to that date. The Haymarket rally was peaceful and sparsely attended by the time police arrived. Mayor Carter Harrison had stopped by earlier and told the police commander the crowd was calm. But after Harrison left, Inspector John Bonfield ordered 176 officers to disperse the remaining few hundred people. The bomb was thrown as the police column approached the speakers' wagon. The bomber's identity has never been conclusively established. Eight anarchist labor organizers were arrested, tried, and convicted, though prosecutors never proved any of them threw the bomb. The evidence centered on their published writings and speeches advocating revolutionary violence. Four were hanged on November 11, 1887. One committed suicide in his cell. The remaining three were pardoned by Governor John Peter Altgeld in 1893, who concluded the trial had been fundamentally unfair. Haymarket devastated the American labor movement in the short term, associating unions with anarchist violence in the public mind. But the martyrdom of the executed men galvanized international labor solidarity. In 1889, the Second International designated May 1 as International Workers' Day in their honor, a holiday now observed in over 80 countries.

Federal prosecutors could not convict Al Capone for the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, the dozens of murders attributed to his organization, or the bootlegging empire that made him the most powerful gangster in America. They got him on his taxes. On May 4, 1932, Capone began serving an eleven-year federal prison sentence for income tax evasion, a conviction that demonstrated the government's willingness to use any available statute to dismantle organized crime. The IRS investigation began in 1927, when the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Sullivan that illegally earned income was subject to federal taxation. Special Agent Frank Wilson spent years tracing Capone's spending patterns, connecting lavish expenditures on homes, cars, jewelry, and clothing to income that had never appeared on a tax return. Capone had not filed returns for several years, and the few he did file dramatically understated his earnings. Capone's trial in October 1931 lasted two weeks. His defense team initially negotiated a plea bargain, but Judge James Wilkerson rejected it and impaneled a fresh jury after learning that Capone's associates had been bribing the original jurors. The jury convicted Capone on five of twenty-two counts, and Wilkerson sentenced him to eleven years, the harshest tax evasion sentence ever imposed at that time. Capone served his first two years at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary before being transferred to the newly opened Alcatraz in August 1934. His health deteriorated rapidly. Syphilis, contracted years earlier and left untreated, attacked his nervous system. By the late 1930s, other inmates reported that Capone was confused, childlike, and unable to follow conversations. He was released in November 1939 and spent his remaining years at his Florida estate, mentally incapacitated. The Capone prosecution became the template for federal organized crime strategy. The IRS's approach of following the money rather than prosecuting violent acts directly influenced the development of RICO statutes decades later and remains a cornerstone of white-collar criminal investigation.

Yitzhak Rabin paused before signing. The Israeli Prime Minister sat at the ceremony table in Cairo on May 4, 1994, pen in hand, and hesitated over a map appendix that defined the boundaries of Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and Jericho. Yasser Arafat had to be called back to initial the corrections before the signing could proceed, an awkward moment broadcast live to a global audience already skeptical that the agreement would hold. The Cairo Agreement, formally the Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area, implemented the framework established by the Oslo Accords signed on the White House lawn seven months earlier. Oslo had been a declaration of principles; Cairo provided the operational details. Palestinian police would assume security responsibility in Gaza and Jericho. A Palestinian Authority would govern civil affairs. Israeli military forces would withdraw from populated areas while maintaining control of settlements, borders, and external security. The agreement represented an extraordinary reversal for both leaders. Rabin had built his military reputation fighting Arabs, and Arafat had spent decades directing armed resistance against Israel. The handshake that produced Oslo began with secret back-channel negotiations in Norway, conducted without the knowledge of most officials in either government. Palestinian self-rule began in Jericho on May 13 and in Gaza on May 18, when Israeli forces withdrew from population centers. Arafat crossed into Gaza on July 1, returning to Palestinian territory for the first time in 27 years. He established the Palestinian Authority's headquarters in Gaza City, surrounded by the trappings of statehood but lacking sovereignty over borders, airspace, or water resources. The optimism proved short-lived. Israeli settlement expansion continued, Palestinian militant groups opposed to the accords launched attacks, and the promised final-status negotiations stalled repeatedly. Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli extremist in November 1995. The Gaza-Jericho Agreement remains a historical artifact of the closest the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came to resolution.

Thirteen people boarded two buses in Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961, and rode south into a level of violence that shocked the nation and forced the federal government to enforce its own laws. The Freedom Riders, seven Black and six white, organized by the Congress of Racial Equality, planned to travel through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi to New Orleans, testing whether Southern states were complying with Supreme Court rulings that banned segregation in interstate travel facilities. The legal basis was clear. The Supreme Court had ruled in Morgan v. Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960) that segregation on interstate buses and in terminal facilities was unconstitutional. Southern states ignored both rulings. Whites-only waiting rooms, lunch counters, and restrooms remained standard throughout the region, and local police enforced segregation customs with the full weight of law. The first days passed with only minor confrontations. The violence erupted in Alabama. On May 14, a mob firebombed the Greyhound bus outside Anniston, beating riders as they escaped the burning vehicle. In Birmingham, Klansmen attacked the Trailways bus riders with pipes and baseball bats at the terminal while police, under Commissioner Bull Connor's direction, stayed away for fifteen minutes to give the mob time. CORE's original riders were hospitalized and unable to continue. Students from the Nashville Student Movement, led by Diane Nash, organized replacement riders who were equally brutalized in Montgomery, where a mob beat John Lewis unconscious and attacked a group of bystanders, including the President's personal representative. Attorney General Robert Kennedy dispatched federal marshals after Alabama Governor John Patterson refused to guarantee the riders' safety. The Freedom Rides continued throughout the summer, with over 400 riders deliberately courting arrest in Jackson, Mississippi. In September 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued regulations enforcing desegregation of all interstate travel facilities, with an effective date of November 1. The riders had achieved through moral confrontation what court orders alone could not.

Ken Livingstone won London's first direct mayoral election on May 4, 2000, running as an independent after the Labour Party expelled him for defying its candidate selection process. The victory was both a democratic milestone for a city of seven million and a humiliating defeat for Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had created the office specifically to modernize London's governance and expected to control who filled it. London had not had a citywide executive since the Greater London Council was abolished by Margaret Thatcher in 1986. For fourteen years, the capital of the United Kingdom had no unified local government, with services divided among thirty-two borough councils and various quangos. Blair's government created the Greater London Authority and the mayoralty as part of its devolution agenda, alongside new assemblies for Scotland and Wales. Blair wanted his own candidate in the job. The Labour leadership backed Frank Dobson, the Health Secretary, and engineered a selection process designed to prevent Livingstone from winning the party nomination. When Livingstone ran anyway as an independent, he was automatically expelled from Labour. The maneuver backfired spectacularly. Livingstone won with 58 percent of the vote in the supplementary vote system, carrying every London borough. Livingstone had been the last leader of the Greater London Council before Thatcher abolished it, and Londoners remembered him as a colorful, combative figure who had trolled the Thatcher government by posting London's unemployment figures on a billboard visible from Parliament. His populist campaign focused on transport, promising to fix the Underground and oppose the government's preferred public-private partnership for Tube modernization. As mayor, Livingstone introduced the congestion charge for central London in 2003, one of the first large-scale urban road pricing schemes in the world. He was readmitted to Labour and won a second term in 2004 before losing to Boris Johnson in 2008. The office he inaugurated has since become one of the most powerful directly elected positions in European local government.