June 3: An American Walks in Space, Riot in Los Angeles, London Bridge Attacked

June 3 carries the full range of what a date can hold — the exhilaration of a man stepping into open space a hundred miles above the Earth, the shame of a city that turned organized violence on its own young people for the crime of wearing the wrong clothes, and the grief of a summer evening in London when eight people died on a bridge and in a marketplace before anyone fully understood what was happening. These stories do not resolve into a lesson. They simply insist, as history always does, that human beings are capable of all of it simultaneously — of floating in the void and of burning down a neighborhood, of catastrophic cruelty and of the remarkable, ordinary courage of strangers who run toward a crisis rather than away from it.

23 Minutes

On June 3, 1965, astronaut Edward H. White II opened the hatch of the Gemini 4 spacecraft and floated out into the void, becoming the first American to perform a spacewalk — an extravehicular activity, in the technical language of NASA — and spending twenty-three minutes outside the capsule, one hundred miles above the surface of the Earth, moving through space at 17,500 miles per hour. White had a handheld oxygen jet-propulsion unit to maneuver with and a twenty-five-foot tether connecting him to the capsule. He described the experience as the most natural feeling he had ever had. When mission commander James McDivitt told him it was time to come back inside, White replied that it was the saddest moment of his life. He was thirty-four years old, a West Point graduate and Air Force test pilot, and he had just done something no American had ever done. The Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov had performed the first spacewalk three months earlier; the Gemini program had been partly designed to demonstrate that America could match and surpass Soviet milestones on the path to the Moon.

The photographs of White's spacewalk — particularly the image of him floating above the blue curve of the Earth in his white spacesuit, the tether spiraling away behind him — became some of the most iconic images in the history of space exploration. The moment captured something essential about the ambition of the space program: not just the technical achievement of keeping a human being alive in the most hostile environment imaginable, but the pure, almost childlike joy of what White described — the freedom of floating, the view, the sense of being outside everything that had ever contained him. He died less than two years later, on January 27, 1967, in the Apollo 1 launchpad fire that also killed astronauts Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee. He was thirty-six years old. The twenty-three minutes he spent outside Gemini 4 on June 3, 1965, remain the defining image of his life — a man suspended between the Earth and everything beyond it, in no hurry to come back in.

The Zoot Suit Riots

On the night of June 3, 1943, several hundred U.S. Navy sailors and Marines stationed in Los Angeles left their base and moved into the city's Mexican American neighborhoods, hunting for young men wearing zoot suits — the broad-shouldered, high-waisted, peg-legged suits with long key chains that had become the signature style of Mexican American, Black, and Filipino youth culture in wartime Los Angeles. The servicemen beat the young men they found, stripped their suits, cut their hair, and in some cases urinated on them, while Los Angeles police officers stood by or arrested the Mexican American victims rather than their attackers. The violence continued for five nights, spreading through neighborhoods and drawing in civilians alongside military personnel. The Los Angeles press covered the attacks with coverage that largely blamed the zoot-suit wearers; the Navy and Army did not discipline the servicemen involved; and the Los Angeles City Council subsequently voted to make wearing a zoot suit a misdemeanor.

The Zoot Suit Riots were not, despite their name, a riot in any conventional sense — the Mexican American community did not attack, it was attacked, and the violence was organized, sustained, and met with official indifference that amounted to complicity. The zoot suit itself was targeted partly because wartime rationing had restricted the amount of fabric that could be used in civilian clothing, making the suit's extravagant cut a symbol of unpatriotic excess — a framing that allowed the attacking servicemen to present their violence as an expression of wartime virtue. The actual dynamic was racial: Mexican American youth in Los Angeles occupied a precarious position, subject to discrimination in housing, employment, and policing, and the zoot suit was one of the few forms of visible self-assertion available to them. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, in a June 16 column, pointed out that the riots were the product of long-standing discrimination rather than wartime disloyalty. The reaction to her column was furious. The federal commission convened to investigate the riots concluded that racial prejudice was the primary cause. No serviceman was ever charged.

London Bridge

On the evening of June 3, 2017, at approximately 10:08 p.m., a rented van drove at speed into pedestrians on London Bridge, then three men exited the vehicle armed with knives and attacked people in the Borough Market area nearby. Eight people were killed and forty-eight were injured in the eight minutes between the start of the attack and the moment Metropolitan Police officers shot and killed all three attackers. The victims came from seven different countries — Canada, Australia, France, Spain, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom — a cross-section of the international community that gathers on a summer Saturday night in one of London's most popular neighborhoods. The attack came less than two weeks after the Manchester Arena bombing of May 22, 2017, and three months after the Westminster Bridge attack of March 22, making it the third major terrorist incident in Britain in less than a year.

What followed in the hours and days after June 3, 2017, was the response that London had developed through decades of living with the threat of political violence — from the IRA campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s through 7/7 in 2005 and every incident since. The police response was rapid and effective; the emergency services were at Borough Market within minutes. The community response was, by every account, remarkable: bystanders who dragged the injured to safety, bar staff who locked customers inside to protect them, a fishmonger who threw crates to create a barrier between attackers and the public. Mayor Sadiq Khan's statement that evening — acknowledging the horror of what had happened while refusing to let the attack define the city — captured the tone that London has learned, through painful experience, to find in these moments. The bridge that was attacked on June 3, 2017, was open again the following week. The name on the sign at its entrance had not changed.