other noteworthy events of the 14th of February:
1804 -- New Jersey is the last Northern state to abolish slavery.
1817 -- Black abolitionist, orator Frederick Douglass lives, born a slave, founder of the influential The North Star newspaper in Rochester, New York. Happy Birthday Freddy. John Brown forgives you.
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are people who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. That struggle might be a moral one; it might be a physical one; it might be both moral and physical, but it must be struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will. People might not get all that they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get."1957 -- Georgia Senate unanimously approves Senator Leon Butts' bill barring blacks from playing baseball with whites. Fitting name senator. Word has it that just the day before, white folks had reluctantly admitted that those negroes could play a little ball...
1989 -- Ayatollah Khomeini issues a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, orders Muslims to murder "Satanic Verses" novelist:
"I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of the Satanic Verses book which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death."Rushdie later thanks the Ayatollah for boosting sales of his shitty novel, which he himself describes as "just dull as hell. Mind-numbing really...frankly I'd kill myself before I'd read this boring fucking book." Ok, I made that up. Rushdie has written some good books, but the Satanic Verses wasn't one of them.
