June 12 is Red Rose Day
National Peanut Butter Cookie Day
International Cachaça Day (a Brazilian distilled spirit made from sugarcane juice.)
National Jerky Day
American Revolution: British general Thomas Gage declared martial law in Massachusetts on June 12, 1775. The British offer a pardon to all colonists who lay down their arms. There would be only two exceptions to the amnesty: Samuel Adams and John Hancock, if captured, were to be hanged.
Birthday of George H W Bush (June 12, 1924), forty-first President of the United States, father of George W Bush, forty-third President of the United States.
On June 12, 1939, the Baseball Hall of Fame opened in Cooperstown, New York.
Civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered in front of his home in Jackson, Mississippi by Ku Klux Klan member Byron De La Beckwith on June 12, 1963. According to Wikipedia:
In the early morning of June 12, 1963, just hours after President John F. Kennedy’s nationally televised Civil Rights Address, Evers pulled into his driveway after returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. Emerging from his car and carrying NAACP T-shirts that read “Jim Crow Must Go”, Evers was struck in the back with a bullet fired from an Enfield 1917 rifle; the bullet ripped through his heart. He staggered 30 feet (9.1 meters) before collapsing. He was taken to the local hospital in Jackson, Mississippi where he was initially refused entry because of his race. His family explained who he was and he was admitted; he died in the hospital 50 minutes later.
The state twice prosecuted De La Beckwith for murder in 1964, but both trials ended with hung juries. He was eventually convicted of the crime in 1994, almost 30 years after the murder. He died in prison on January 21, 2001.
In 1967, The United States Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia declared all U.S. state laws which prohibit interracial marriage (miscegenation) to be unconstitutional.
1987 – Cold War: At the Brandenburg Gate U.S. President Ronald Reagan publicly challenges Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this (the Berlin) Wall.
In 1991, Russians elected Boris Yeltsin as the president of the republic.
June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were murdered outside her home in Los Angeles, California. O.J. Simpson was later acquitted of the killings, but is held liable in wrongful death civil suit.