May 4 Illinois History Minute

It’s May Fourth, the anniversary of the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. Police were breaking up a labor rally in support of an eight-hour workday when someone threw a bomb. The explosion and gunfire that followed killed at least four civilians and seven police officers. Eight people were convicted in connection with the riot, four of whom were executed.
 
George F. Will was born in Champaign on this day in 1941. Will won a Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper column promoting conservative and libertarian views.  But he left the Republican Party in 2016, due to his opposition to Donald Trump.

On this day in 1950, Illinois native Ray Bradbury published The Martian Chronicles --- a romanticized but tragic imagining of Earth’s colonization of Mars.