Tag: Conscientious Objection To War

Enten Eller, & John Lennon in Peace & Justice History for 8/17

August 17, 1966
Beatle John Lennon, while in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, expressed his admiration for American draft dodgers who resisted enlistment in the U.S. armed forces because of the Vietnam War.

An interview with the Beatles 8/17/1966 
August 17, 1982

Enten Eller
The first draft resister since the Vietnam era, Enten Eller, was convicted. A member of the Mennonite Church of the Brethren Resistance, he received three years’ probation in Bridgewater, Virginia, for refusing to register for the draft. Support demonstrations occurred all over the U.S.
The history of Mennonite resistance to conscription

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august17

Peace & Justice History for 11/2:

November 2, 1920

Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs received nearly one million votes for President though he was serving a prison sentence at the time for his criticism of World War I and his encouraging resistance to the draft.
More on Debs  
November 2, 1982
Voters in nine general elections passed statewide referenda supporting a freeze on testing of nuclear weapons. Only Arizona turned it down.

Dr. Randall Forsberg, a key person behind the Freeze movement
Dr. Randall Forsberg
November 2, 1983

A bill designating a federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (to be observed on the third Monday of January) was signed by President Ronald Reagan.
King was born in Atlanta in 1929, the son of a Baptist minister. He received a doctorate degree in theology and in 1955 organized the first major protest of the civil rights movement: the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. Influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, he advocated nonviolent civil disobedience of the laws that enforced racial segregation. 
The history of Martin Luther King Day   (pdf)

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november2

Peace & Justice history for 8/10

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august10

August 10, 1883
Adrian “Cap” Anson refused to field his visiting Chicago White Stockings team in an exhibition baseball game if the Toledo Mud Hens included star catcher Moses Fleetwood Walker in their lineup. Chicago’s Captain Anson, who grew up in slaveholding Iowa, said he wouldn’t share the diamond with a non-white player. After more than an hour’s delay, Charlie Morton, the Toledo manager, insisted that if Chicago forfeited the game, it would also lose its share of the gate receipts; Anson relented.
Moses Fleetwood Walker
Morton had not planned to have Walker catch due to injury, but insisted on putting him in at centerfield, despite Cap Anson’s objections.

August 10, 1948

Gay rights activist Harry Hay organized what later became the Mattachine Society (originally ~ Foundation), a groundbreaking 1950s gay rights organization. The group was named after the Mattachines, a medieval troupe of men who went village-to-village advocating social justice.
Mattachine: Radical Roots of Gay Liberation: https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Mattachine:_Radical_Roots_of_the_Gay_Movement

August 10, 1984
Two Plowshares activists, Barb Katt and John LaForge, damaged a guidance system for a Trident submarine with hammers at a Sperry plant in Minnesota. In sentencing them to six months’ probation, U.S. District Judge Miles W. Lord commented, “Why do we condemn and hang individual killers, while extolling the virtues of warmongers?“
“ Barb Katt
More plowshares actions: https://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/issue42/articles/a_history_of_direct_disarmament.htm

August 10, 1988
President George H.W. Bush signed legislation apologizing and compensating for the World War II internment of Japanese Americans.
President Franklin Roosevelt had authorized the round-up of hundreds of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry, some of whom were American citizens, as security risks. Most lost all their property and were moved to relocation camps for the duration of the war (though not in Hawaii, then not yet a state, where public opposition would not allow it).


August 10, 1993
Ruth Bader Ginsburg is sworn in as the second woman and 107th Justice to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. 

August 10, 2005
Mehmet Tarhan was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment on two charges of “insubordination before command” and “insubordination before command for trying to escape from military service” because he refused to serve in the Turkish Army.
He would not sign any paper, put on a uniform, nor allow his hair and beard to be cut. He went on two extended hunger strikes to protest his arrest and abuse while in Sivas Military Prison. War Resisters International has supported his efforts throughout his ordeal. He was released unexpectedly from prison after one year.
Read more: https://wri-irg.org/en/story/2005/turkey-conscientious-objector-mehmet-tarhan-hunger-strike-more-32-days

Things happened on this date in history:

July 19, 1848 
The first Women’s Rights Convention in the U.S. was held at Seneca Falls, New York. Its “Declaration of Sentiments” launched the movement of women to be included in the constitution.The Declaration used as a model the U.S. Declaration of Independence, demanding that the rights of women as individuals be acknowledged and respected by society. It was signed by sixty-eight women
and thirty-two men.
The impetus came from Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, both of whom had been excluded, along with all the other female American delegates, from the World Anti-Slavery Convention (London, 1840) because of their sex.
Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist leader attended the convention and supported the resolution for women’s suffrage.When suffrage finally became a reality in 1920, seventy-two years after this first organized demand in 1848, only one signer of the Seneca Falls Declaration, Charlotte Woodward, then a young worker in a glove manufactory, had lived long enough to cast her first ballot.The Seneca Falls Convention and the Early Suffrage Movement https://www.gilderlehrman.org/ap-us-history/period-4?modal=/history-resources/essays/seneca-falls-convention-setting-national-stage-womens-suffrage

July 19, 1958
Several black teenagers, members of the local NAACP chapter (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), entered downtown Wichita’s Dockum Drug Store (then the largest drugstore chain in Kansas) and sat down at the lunch counter.Wichita sit-in sculptureThe store refused to serve them because of their race. They returned at least twice a week for the next several weeks. They sat quietly all afternoon, creating no disturbance, but refused to leave without being served. Though the police once chased them away, they were breaking no law, only asking to make a purchase, a violation of store policy.This was the first instance of a sit-in to protest segregationist policies. Less than a month later, a white man around 40 walked in and looked
at those sitting in for several minutes. Then he looked at the store manager, and said, “Serve them. I’m losing too much money.”
That man was the owner of the Dockum drug store chain.
That day the lawyer for the local NAACP branch called the store’s state offices, and was toldby the chain’s vice president that “he had instructed all of his managers, clerks, etc. (statewide), to serve all people without regard to race, creed or color.”

July 19, 1974 
Martha Tranquill of Sacramento, California, was sentenced to nine months’ prison time for refusing to pay her federal taxes as a protest against the Vietnam War.

July 19, 1993
President Bill Clinton announced regulations to implement his “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy regarding gays in the military, saying that the armed services should put an end to “witch hunts.” The policy was developed by General Colin Powell, then Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and eventually summarized as “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue, don’t harass.”

July 19, 2000
A federal administrative law judge ordered white supremacist Ryan Wilson to pay $1.1 million in damages to fair housing advocate Bonnie Jouhari and her daughter, Dani. The decision stemmed from threats made against Jouhari by Wilson and his Philadelphia neo-Nazi group, ALPA HQ.

Bonnie and Dani Jouhari

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjuly.htm#july191848