On this day, July 22 …

2009: President Barack Obama tells a prime-time press conference that Cambridge, Mass., police acted "stupidly" in the arrest of prominent Black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., and that despite racial progress, Blacks and Hispanics are still singled out unfairly for arrest.

Also on this day:

  • 1862: President Abraham Lincoln presents to his Cabinet a preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.
  • 1934:  Bank robber John Dillinger is shot to death by federal agents outside Chicago's Biograph Theater, where he had just seen the Clark Gable movie "Manhattan Melodrama."
  • 1937: The U.S. Senate rejects President Franklin D. Roosevelt's proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court.
  • 1942: The Nazis begin transporting Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka concentration camp.
  • 1942: Gasoline rationing involving the use of coupons begin along the Atlantic seaboard.
  • 1975: The House of Representatives joins the Senate in voting to restore the American citizenship of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
  • 1991: Police in Milwaukee arrest Jeffrey Dahmer, who would later confess to murdering 17 men and boys.
  • 1992: Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar escapes from his luxury prison near Medellin.
  • 2005: A labor agreement ends an NHL lockout that canceled the previous hockey season.