| April 30, 1917 The American Friends Service Committee was founded to provide young Quakers and other conscientious objectors the opportunity to serve those in need as an alternative to military service in what was later known as World War I. They worked with British Friends assisting refugees from that conflict. American Friends Service Committee-Quaker values in action AFSC history AFSC today |
| April 30, 1967 Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a sermon entitled, “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam” at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. “The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism.” Read the speech |
| April 30, 1973 President Richard Nixon took responsibility for the Watergate scandal, though denying any personal involvement, as he accepted the resignations of his two closest advisors (H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, John Ehrlichman) and Attorney General John Mitchell, who had been in charge of his presidential re-election campaign. He also fired his White House counsel, John Dean. Nixon said later that evening, “I’m never going to discuss the . . . Watergate thing again—never, never, never, never.” |
| April 30, 1975 The U.S. presence in Vietnam ended as U.S. Marines and Air Force helicopters, flying from aircraft carriers offshore, began a massive airlift, Operation Frequent Wind. In all, 682 flights went out — 360 at night. 5,000 people were evacuated by helicopter from the military compound near Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport; about 2500 from the U.S. Embassy (1000 Americans total, the rest Vietnamese). That morning, two U.S. Marines, Darwin Judge and Charles McMahon Jr., Marine security guards, were killed in a rocket attack at the airport. They were the last Americans to die in the Vietnam War (the final total was 58,193). At dawn, the last Marines guarding the U.S. embassy lifted off.  A helicopter lifts off from inside the U.S. Embassy grounds. The war in Vietnam ended as the government in Saigon (then the southern capital, now Ho Chi Minh City) announced its unconditional surrender to the North Vietnamese Army (NVA). Vietnam was reunited after 21 years of U.S. domination and 100 years of French colonial rule. In 15 years, nearly a million NVA and Vietcong troops and a quarter of a million South Vietnamese soldiers had died. Hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed. |
| April 30, 1977 A group of 14 mothers who had met in the waiting rooms of police stations while trying to discover the whereabouts of their children, organized the first of a continuing series of demonstrations in front of the Presidential Palace on the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Their children were among the “disappeared” (los desaparecidos), victims of the Argentina’s “dirty war” against its own people.  Each Thursday afternoon they gathered at the Plaza to demand that the fate of the victims be made known. Some of the mothers, including Azucena de Villaflor, their first president, themselves disappeared. In spite of this, the group soon counted some 150 members and eventually grew to several thousand in 1982-83. The mothers created a formidable national network and obtained the support of Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Argentina’s Dirty War |
| April 30, 1977 Following a 24-hour occupation at the site of two proposed nuclear power plants in Seabrook, New Hampshire, 1,414 people were arrested.  The non-violent civil disobedience, organized by the Clamshell Alliance, became a model for anti-nuclear direct actions across the country. National and international news coverage brought the issue of nuclear power into public focus and no nuclear reactors were ordered after that time. Those plants already approved eventually went online, including Seabrook Unit I, but Unit II was never built. There is still no permanent method for long-term safe storage of highly redioactive nuclear waste generated by such plants. Most of the radioisotopes in high-level waste have extremely long half-lives (some longer than 100,000 years). Currently, it is stored on-site at nuclear plants around the country. Seabrook 1977  From 1975 and reissued by peacebuttons.info click to purchasesee the history of the symbol > read has been translated into 44 languages > watch |
April 30, 1996 Sister Dianna Ortiz About 120 activists were arrested over the following eight days in Washington, D.C., in support of a fast by Sister Dianna Ortiz. The Ursuline nun had been kidnapped, tortured, and raped by U.S.-trained and supported Guatemalan Army officers in 1989; she was fasting to demand that the U.S. government release information on her assailants. Video or audio of Sr. Dianna |
April 30, 1997 ABC-TV aired the ”coming out” episode of the sitcom ”Ellen,” in which the title character, played by Ellen DeGeneres, acknowledged she was a lesbian. |
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