page_title: June 1966
section_title: June 26, 1966 (Sunday)
hierarchical_section_title: June 1966 / June 26, 1966 (Sunday)
caption_attribution_description: English: Chicago Cubs third baseman en:Ron Santo in a 1961 issue of Baseball Digest.
context_page_description: The following events occurred in June 1966:
context_section_description: The Communist Party USA (CPUSA) ended its first national convention since 1959, meeting at New York City's Lower East Side, at Webster Hall. Gus Hall, who had been identifying himself as a "party spokesman" for more than five years in order to avoid criminal prosecution as an agent of the Soviet Union, was elected as the CPUSA General Secretary, and Harry Winston was voted the honorary title of National Chairman.  Both had served federal prison terms during the 1950s for conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government.
  Major League Baseball player Ron Santo of the Chicago Cubs was hospitalized after being struck in the face by a pitched ball hurled by the New York Mets' Jack Fisher sustaining the accident that would ultimately lead to the mandatory requirement of the "earflap helmet" in the major leagues.  Starting with his return to action on July 4, Santo, who had sustained a broken cheekbone, wore the modified helmet for the rest of his career, and the idea gradually caught on, becoming mandatory in 1983.
  The "March Against Fear", started by one man, James H. Meredith, on June 6, came to a dramatic climax as more than 16,000 African-Americans (and a few hundred white supporters) arrived at the Mississippi State Capitol in Jackson.  Although the Capitol building itself was separated from the crowd by police and National Guardsmen who had been ordered to the area, the group packed the grounds and adjacent areas to hear the speakers.  Meredith himself, who had been shot and hospitalized the day after he began his quest, addressed the assembly from a platform on a flatbed truck.  "It's true that we got some mean white folks in Mississippi," Meredith told listeners, "but these people can be decent.  There is only one thing that is holding them back.  And that thing is the system of white supremacy."  He noted that he had been shot, "but as you can see here, that didn't end a thing."
caption: Santo
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