Peace & Justice History for 6/21

June 21, 1877
 
The Molly Maguires
Four members of the Molly Maguires were hung for murder in what was then Mauch Chunk, and in Pottsville, towns in Pennsylvania’s Carbon County. The Molly Maguires was a secret and violent Irish-Catholic organization of coal miners formed to combat the oppressive working and living conditions in the anthracite coal region of the state.
Read more (2 links)
June 21, 1908
A Women’s Sunday Suffrage rally, supporting the right of women to vote, drew several hundred thousand to London’s Hyde Park from all over the country.

Women were encouraged to wear “the colours” – white (for purity), green (hope) and purple (dignity) – and in “as fetching, charming and ladylike a manner as possible.” As the Yorkshire Daily Post put it: “At least one half of the crowd was composed of the sort of people you would expect to see at a suburban garden party.”
The women’s suffrage movement 
June 21, 1964
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three young Freedom Summer workers, disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi, while registering negroes to vote. Their bodies were found six weeks later, having been shot and then buried in an earthen dam.

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner
Eight members of the Ku Klux Klan eventually went to prison on federal conspiracy charges related to the disappearance; none served more than six years.
Schwerner and Goodman, both white New Yorkers, had traveled to heavily segregated Mississippi to help organize civil rights efforts on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Chaney was a local African-American man who had joined CORE in 1963.

Read more and hear versions of Pete Seeger’s song,  “Those Three are On My Mind”

More on Chaney 
Read about the movie
June 21, 1997
100,000 marched in solidarity with striking newspaper workers in Detroit after nearly two years on the picket line.

support rally march 1, 1997  photo: Paul Felton
The Detroit Newspaper Agency (DNA) had refused to bargain in good faith (later confirmed by a ruling of the National Labor Relations Board), even after the union members had worked for months without a contract, and the DNA, which ran both the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News, had begun to impose the changes they had been insisting on at the bargaining table.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjune.htm#june21

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