Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. criticizes US involvement in the Vietnam War during a speech at the University of Minnesota's St. Paul campus.

KSTP-TV makes the first commercial television broadcast in Minnesota, showing the Minneapolis Millers' baseball game from Nicollet Park for the approximately 2,500 owners of television sets in the Twin Cities. Station owner Stanley E. Hubbard had experimented with television since the 1930s.

The Minnesota Asian American Project (MAAP), an organization that promotes civil rights, affirmative action, and legal services for the Asian community, is officially incorporated by Dennis Tachiki, Gloria Kumagai, and Daniel Matsumoto.

John Jacob Astor forms the American Fur Company, headquartered in New York City. It operates fur-trading posts on the Rainy River, at Grand Portage, and at Grand Marais, as well as on Moose, Basswood, Vermillion, and Little Vermillion Lakes. The company would exist until 1842.

Newspaper editor James M. Goodhue is born in Hebron, New Hampshire. In 1849 he would establish the territory's first newspaper, the Minnesota Pioneer, which promoted the territory both within its borders and beyond. Goodhue died in 1852, but in 1858 Jane Grey Swisshelm would use his press after hers was destroyed (see March 24).

Former governor Harold LeVander dies at age eighty-two. Born in Swede Home, Nebraska, LeVander served as governor from 1967 to 1971. During that time he led in the establishment of Minnesota's first state human rights department, a pollution control agency, and the Metropolitan Council for the Twin Cities area. LeVander also opposed establishing a state sales tax, but his veto was twice overridden.

Prominent Minneapolis industrialist Lewis S. Gillette dies at his winter home near Natchez, Mississippi.

A tornado strikes Austin, killing five.

A tornado with 110-mile-per-hour winds blows down St. Paul's High Bridge and kills fourteen in the Twin Cities and Stillwater.

On St. Paul's East Side, a five-story building collapses into Swede Hollow. The structure, home to twelve stores and twenty-five families, had been built on a landfill. Luckily, the tenants manage to evacuate the building before its slide into the hollow.