This Day In History: March 30, 1981

Ebony Edwards-Ellis
3 min readMar 30, 2021

The 40th President of the United States was nearly felled by an assassin’s bullet forty years ago today.

On March 30, 1981, John Hinckley, Jr. attempted to assassinate President Ronald Reagan

On March 30, 1981, I was four years old. I was at my grandmother’s house with my mother and two younger brothers. We may have still been living with my grandparents at the time or maybe we were there visiting shortly after we’d moved into our own home. Anyway, my grandmother and mother were in my grandmother’s living room talking while the television droned in the background.

Suddenly, CBS broke away from its regularly scheduled programming for a Special Report. The newscaster announced that someone had shot at Ronald Reagan, the President of the United States.

Sometime later, CBS interrupted regularly scheduled programming to show footage of a beaming Ronald Reagan being roughly shoved into the presidential limo by white men in crisp business suits while a tumult of other white men in business suits dove for cover.

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Ebony Edwards-Ellis

Author of "Former First Lady" and "Memoir of a Royal Consort." Twitter provocateur, aspiring shut-in, and newly minted Roosevelt Islander.