Today in History: May 2, Nelson Mandela claims election victory

Today is Saturday, May 2, the 122nd day of 2026. There are 243 days left in the year.

Today in history:

On May 2, 1994, Nelson Mandela claimed victory for the African National Congress after South Africa’s first democratic elections.

Also on this date:

In 1863, during the Civil War, Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was accidentally wounded by his own men at Chancellorsville, Virginia; he died eight days later.

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell, upheld 8-1 a Virginia law allowing the forced sterilization of people in order to promote the “health of the patient and the welfare of society.”

In 1972, a fire at the Sunshine silver mine in Kellogg, Idaho, claimed the lives of 91 miners who succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning.

In 1997, Tony Blair, whose Labour Party crushed John Major’s long-reigning Conservatives in a national election, became Britain’s youngest prime minister in 185 years, at age 43.

In 2011, al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, who had been killed hours earlier in a raid by American forces at his Pakistan compound, was buried at sea.

In 2017, Michael Slager, a white former police officer whose killing of Walter Scott, an unarmed Black man running from a traffic stop, was captured on cellphone video, pleaded guilty to federal civil rights charges in Charleston, South Carolina. (Slager would be sentenced to 20 years in prison.)

In 2022, a draft was leaked of a Supreme Court ruling throwing out the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling that had stood for a half-century. The court cautioned that the draft was not final. (The decision would be released in essentially the same form the following month.)

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