August 5 Illinois History Minute

It’s August 5th. And on this day in 1966, Dr. Martin Luther King Junior attempted to lead 700 marchers through the all-white neighborhoods of Marquette Park and Gage Park in Chicago, as part of a campaign for fair housing practices. But the march was met by thousands of white counter-protesters, who attacked with bricks, bottles and cherry bombs and hit King in the head with a rock.

Actor Jesse Williams was born in Chicago on this day in 1981. He’s best known for playing the ambitious, competitive Dr. Jackson Avery in the TV medical drama Grey’s Anatomy and its spinoffs.

The comic strip Little Orphan Annie began a test run on this day in 1924 in the New York Daily News, and appeared a few months later in its sister paper, the Chicago Tribune, and in syndication. Kankakee native Harold Grey wrote and drew Annie’s adventures until his death in 1968.