September 15, 1915
In a letter, Turkish Minister of the Interior Mehmet Talaat Pasha explained that the real intention of sending the Armenians to the Der-el-Zor (Deir el-Zor) Desert (now in Syria) was to annihilate them. Talaat had primary responsibility for planning and implementing the Armenian Genocide.
The day before, The New York Times reported that the murder of 350,000 Armenians in Turkey had already occurred.
1915, orphaned Armenian children in the open, many covering their heads from the desert sun. Location: Ottoman empire, region Syria.
The Turkish Adolf Eichmann |
September 15, 1935
The “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor” and the “Reich Citizenship Law” were adopted by the Nazi (National Socialist German Workers’) Party Rally in Nuremberg, depriving German Jews of their citizenship. |
September 15, 1963
During Sunday School, 15 sticks of dynamite blew apart the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four children in the basement changing room, and injuring 23 others. Prime suspects were the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) and Nacirema (both white supremacist organizations; Nacirema is “American” spelled backwards).
A week before the bombing Governor George C. Wallace had told The New York Times that to stop integration, Alabama needed a “few first-class funerals.”
The four girls lost in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing,
the ruins of the church and grieving parents
This event set off racial rioting and other violence in which two African-American boys were shot to death, and became a turning point in generating broad American sympathy for the civil rights movement.
A member of the church, studying on a scholarship in Paris at the time, was Birmingham High School student Angela Davis.
Lives cut short…
   
Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Caole Robertson (14), Denise McNair (11)
Read more |
September 15, 1970
Vice President Spiro Agnew said the youth of America were being “brainwashed into a drug culture” by rock music, movies, books, and underground newspapers.
Agnew Assails Songs and Films That Promote a ‘Drug Culture’
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September 15, 1981
A blockade started at a nuclear power plant construction site in Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo, California. Nearly 10,000 people tried to prevent fuel rods from being loaded into the two reactor cores. Over two weeks, 1,901 are arrested in the largest occupation of a nuclear power site in U.S. history.
Their immediate major concern was over the region being seismically active and the plant’s location near the Hosgri fault. In 2004 a 6.5 (on the Richter Scale) earthquake was centered less than 40 miles from the plant. Four other faults nearby have since been identified.
Additionally, 9.5 billion liters (2.5 billion gallons) of water needed to cool the reactors each day are discharged directly into the Pacific 11°C (20°F) warmer than the surrounding ocean water, affecting marine plant and animal life there. Diablo canyon
As with all nuclear plants, the problem remains with storage of spent nuclear fuel that remains dangerously radioactive for more than 10,000 years. Diablo Canyon generates 110 spent fuel rod assemblies each year. There is still no satisfactory solution to this long-term storage problem.
Diablo Canyon timeline |
September 15, 1986
Veterans Duncan Murphy (World War II) and Brian Willson (Vietnam) joined Charles Liteky & George Mizo in the Fast For Life, opposing U.S. support for the terrorist contra war against Nicaragua. The contras were insurgent guerillas using violence against civilians in the countryside to bring down the newly formed Sandanista government.
The contras were supported in contravention of the Boland Amendment which prohibited U.S. agencies from providing military equipment, training or support to anyone “for the purpose of overthrowing the Government of Nicaragua.”   
Duncan Murphy, Brian Willson, Charles Liteky, George Mizo
The Fast for Life from Brian Willson’s perspective |
September 15, 1996
6,000 rallied and 1,033 were arrested near the Headwaters Grove in rural Carlotta, California, in protest against cutting one of the last large unlogged stands of redwood trees in the world.
Redwoods are coniferous trees (sequoia sempervivens: the genus is named for Sequoya, or George Guess, an American Indian scholar; sempervivens is ever alive in Latin) that can reach over 90m (300 ft.) over a life as long as 2000 years. |
September 15, 1997
Sinn Fein, the political party closely allied with the goals of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), entered Northern Ireland’s peace talks for the first time. |
September 15, 2001
Four days after 9/11, Representative Barbara Lee
(D-California) cast the only congressional vote against authorizing President Bush to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against anyone associated with the terrorist attacks of September 11. “I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States.”
Barbara Lee – Alone on the Hill |
William Whipper
Dennis Banks
Russell Means
