This week in KU History...

This Week In KU History

April 2, 1946: Danforth Chapel is officially dedicated.
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April 4, 1988: Danny Manning leads the Jayhawk basketball team to its first NCAA championship in 36 years.
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April 8, 1970: Hippie activist Abbie Hoffman speaks at KU's Allen Field House.
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April 11, 1890: The Board of Regents elects natural science professor Francis Huntington Snow the University's fifth chancellor.
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April 12, 1935: In a demonstration of 1930s-era pacifism, 700 KU students gather in front of Fowler for a Student Strike Against War Committee protest gathering, a nationwide event taking place on campuses across the country.
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April 15, 1948: The KU chapter of the Committee on Racial Equality (CORE) stages a sit-in at Brick's Café in an attempt to force the owner to serve African-Americans.
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April 17, 1907: To combat the green bug wheat pest that is damaging the state's wheat fields, KU's entomology department begins distributing parasitic bees to Kansas farmers to help them fight the plague.

April 19, 1910: Electric trolleys from the Lawrence city system initiate 23 years of streetcar service to the KU campus.
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April 20, 1940: Glenn Cunningham, arguably KU's greatest track star, competes in his final race at the Kansas Relays.
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April 20, 1970: An unidentified arsonist sets fire to the Kansas Union by exploding what was apparently an incendiary device in a sixth-floor women's rest room, causing an estimated $1 million in damages. Read the full story.

April 21, 1923: First running of the Kansas Relays occurs at Memorial Stadium.
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April 21, 1984: The University inducts Olympic gold medalist Billy Mills into its Athletics Hall of Fame.
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April 22, 1967: KU students hold a "Human Be-In" at Potter Lake.

April 23, 1966: KU freshman track star Jim Ryun knocks nearly eight seconds off the Kansas Relays record for the mile run in a race that launches perhaps the greatest three-month stretch of his remarkable career.
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April 25, 1908: The editor of the Lawrence Journal allows KU journalism students to assume charge of the day's newspaper, resulting in a scoop about the liquor trade in supposedly dry Lawrence.
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April 27, 1973: In the first of two stunts that would enter into campus legend, KU art student Dan Wessell, who preferred to be known as Lorenzo Wesselini: The Human Cannonball, attempts to fly his homemade glider over Memorial Stadium by rolling down the 32-foot ramp north of the Campanile.
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April 28, 1919: Four thousand KU students and Lawrence residents watch a US Army tank destroy the walls of the East Wing of abandoned Old North College, the University's original building, as part of a demonstration of firepower in behalf of the Fifth Liberty Loan drive.

Photos courtesy University Archives

Compiled by H.J. Fortunato
Department of History
University of Kansas

This Week In KU History is a project of the KU Memorial Unions.
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