Tag: Justice

Peace & Justice History for 9/20:

September 20, 1830
The National Negro Convention, a group of 38 free black Americans from eight states, met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with the express purpose of abolishing slavery and improving the social status of African Americans. They elected Richard Allen president and agreed to boycott slave-produced goods and encourage free-produce organizations. One of the most active would be the Colored Female Free Produce Society, which urged the boycott of all slave-produced goods.
Read more
 Richard Allen
 
National Negro Convention leaders 1879
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September 20, 1850
The District of Columbia abolished the slave trade though slavery itself was not outlawed. Washington had been home to the largest slave market in the country. This was an element of the Compromise of 1850.
The Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act 
================
September 20, 1906
Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” a realist novel, was published, exposing the dangerous conditions and deplorable sanitation in Chicago’s meat-packing plants. Reaction from readers was intense, including President Theodore Roosevelt who coined the term “muckrakers” to describe Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and other writers who exposed corruption in government and business [what we’d now call investigative reporting].

“The men with the muck-rakes are often indispensable to the well-being of society …
if they gradually grow to feel that the whole world is nothing
but muck, their power of usefulness is gone.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
More on the muckrakers 
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September 20, 1932
Rabindranath Tagore urges resistance to practice of “untouchability,” British India.
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September 20, 1946
The first Cannes Film Festival began in that French Riviera resort town. It had originally been planned for 1939 but Hitler’s invasion of Poland that year, and later France, delayed plans until after the war.
The first Grand Prix and the International Peace Prize were awarded to “The Last Chance” by Leopold Lindtberg of Switzerland, a movie (shot on location) about how three Allied soldiers, including two escaped prisoners of war, lead a group of Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied northern Italy across the Alps to safety in nominally neutral Switzerland. Cannes festival history 
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September 20, 1997
3,000 protesters helped to rip up the railroad tracks leading from Krummel nuclear power station to the main Hamburg-Berlin line. The previous year two doctors had sued for closure of the plant due to the increased incidence of leukemia among the population around the plant.
In January, a train carrying nuclear waste derailed near the reactor at Krummel.
At the time, Germany’s 19 nuclear reactors generated 34 per cent of the country’s electricity; in 2005 it was down to 26 percent.
================
September 20, 1999
A multinational peacekeeping force landed in East Timor in an attempt to restore law and order to the territory. Indonesian militias had killed thousands following the overwhelming vote by the East Timorese for independence from Jakarta on September 4.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september20

Peace & Justice History for 9/18:

September 18, 1850

Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, allowing slave owners to reclaim slaves who escaped into another state, and levying harsh penalties on those who would interfere with the apprehension of runaway slaves.

As part of the Compromise of 1850, it offered federal officers a fee for each captured slave and denied the slaves the right to a jury trial.
about the Fugitive Slave Act 
The Compromise of 1850 
September 18, 1895
African-American educator (founder of the Tuskegee Institute) and leader (born a slave) Booker T. Washington spoke before a predominantly white audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. Although the organizers of the exposition worried that “public sentiment was not prepared for such an advanced step,” they decided that inviting a black speaker would impress Northern visitors with the evidence of racial progress in the South. Washington, in his “Atlanta Compromise” address, soothed his listeners’ concerns about “uppity” blacks by claiming that his race would content itself with living “by the productions of our hands.”
Text of the speech 
September 18, 1961
Earl Bertrand Russell and Lady Edith Russell were released from prison after serving one week of their two-month sentences.
They had been part of a Hiroshima Day vigil in Hyde Park, and were accused of inciting civil disobedience.

Bertrand and Edith Russell after being released from prison.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september18

Peace & Justice History for 9/17:

September 17, 1924
Mohandas Gandhi began a purifying 21-day fast for Hindu-Muslim tolerance and unity following communal riots in Kohat on India’s northwest border in what is now Pakistan. A Hindu, Gandhi spent his fast at the home of Mahomed Ali.
September 17, 1961
Bertrand Russell at anti nuclear weapons March, 1961
1,314 anti-nuclear protesters were arrested during a sit-down in London’s Trafalgar Square by 12,000 (authorities had denied a permit). Philosopher and peace activist Bertrand Russell, aged 89, and 32 others were already in jail, having been arrested the previous month during a demonstration on Hiroshima Day in Hyde Park.
Russell’s Committee of 100 had organized the sit-down and other actions to resist nuclear weapons, challenging the authorities to ‘fill the jails’, with the intention of causing prison overload and large-scale disorder. On arrest members would go limp so as to create maximum disruption without conflict.
History gallery: The Committee of 100 
September 17, 1988
Haiti’s military government was overthrown by a group of non-commissioned officers who installed Lieutenant General Prosper Avril as the new head of state. The leaders of the coup were outraged by the attack the previous Sunday on St. Jean Bosco Church during which 13 parishioners were killed and nearly 80 injured. Fr. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a persistent critic of the military regime, had been celebrating mass when the attack occurred.
From the report of the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, issued on September 7, 1988:

“ The Commission has come to the conclusion that the current military government in Haiti has perpetuated itself in power as a result of violence instigated by elements of the Haitian Armed forces resulting in the massacre of Haitian voters on November 29, 1987, the manipulation of the elections held on January 17, 1988, and the ouster of President Leslie Manigat on June 20, 1988.”

The full report 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september17

Peace & Justice History for 9/16

September 16, 1837
William Whipper, a wealthy negro from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, published “An Address on Non-Resistance to Offensive Aggression” in the The Colored American, outlining his commitment to a strictly non-violent response to the evils of slavery. This landmark essay predated Thoreau’s on “Civil Disobedience” by 12 years.

“ …fatal error arises from the belief that the only method of maintaining peace, is always to be ready for war.”
William Whipper
Whipper edited a newspaper, The National Reformer, a publication of the National Moral Reform Society, and furnished food and transportation assistance to fugitive slaves who reached Pennsylvania.
A biography of William Whipper 
September 16, 1939
August Dickmann, a German and a Jehovah’s Witness, became the first conscientious objector (CO) to be executed by the Nazis during World War II. The execution by firing squad took place in Sachsenhausen concentration camp before all prisoners, including 400 Jehovah’s Witness inmates.

NY Times, Sept 16, 1939
Though threatened by Commandant Hermann Baranowsky with the same fate, none of the remaining 400 Witnesses renounced their CO position. Later, the Nazis commonly executed Witnesses by guillotine or hanging, not wanting to spend bullets on COs. German military courts sentenced and executed 270 Jehovah’s Witnesses, the largest number of COs executed from any victim group during World War II.

August Dickmann
He Died for a Principle
September 16, 1974
A federal judge dismissed all charges against American Indian Movement (AIM) leaders Dennis Banks and Russell Means stemming from the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

.Dennis BanksRussell Means

On February 27, 1973, AIM and supporters seized control of Wounded Knee to draw attention to corruption and conditions on the Pine Ridge (Lakota Sioux) reservation.
Wounded Knee was the site where, on December 29, 1890, over 200 Sioux men, women and children were mercilessly gunned down by U.S. cavalry.
We Shall Remain  The Legacy of Wounded Knee 
September 16, 1974
President Gerald Ford announced a conditional amnesty program for Vietnam War deserters and draft-evaders, provided they swear allegiance to the country and agree to work two years in the branch of the military they had abandoned. He did this one month following his pardon of resigned former President Richard Nixon.
September 16, 1991
The Philippine Senate rejected a treaty allowing continued operation of U.S. military bases in the Philippines. The Americans had occupied the Philippines since 1898 (except after surrendering control to the Japanese in 1942 until the end of World War II), though on a “temporary” basis. More than two dozen U.S. military installations were established in the country, even after independence in 1945, notably Clark Air Base and the naval station at Subic Bay, the largest U.S. military installations in Asia.
September 16, 2003
New York Stock Exchange Chair Dick Grasso resigned amid a furor over his compensation package that would reach $139.5 million in one year.

Dick Grasso
The details of the plan and the reaction

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september16

Peace & Justice History for 9/15:

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’
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 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september15

Peace & Justice History for 9/11:

September 11, 1906
Mohandas Gandhi, a young Indian lawyer, began a nonviolent resistance campaign in Johannesburg, South Africa, demanding rights and respect for those of Asian descent. It was the birth of his concept of political progress through nonviolent resistance known as Satyagraha, or truth-force.
He led a meeting of 3000 of the town’s Indians, protesting the Transvaal Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance. That law required all Asians to obey three rules: those of eight years or older had to carry passes for which they had to give their fingerprints; they would be segregated as to where they could live and work; new Asian immigration into the Transvaal would be disallowed, even for those who had left the town when the South African War broke out in 1899, and were returning.


Gandhi, London, 1906
The meeting produced the Fourth Resolution, in which all Indians resolved to go to prison rather than submit to the ordinance.
In Gandhi’s own words:
September 11, 1973
Chile’s armed forces staged a coup d’etat against the government of President Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected socialist head of state in Latin America. Some three thousand were held in Santiago’s national stadium where guards singled out folksinger Victor Jara as he continued to sing protest songs. Jara was viciously beaten, and his mutilated body machine-gunned in front of the other prisoners.
 dissidents held in the stadium
Read more on Victor Jara
 Victor Jara plays to young supporters
 Victor Jara
The U.S. government, through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had worked for three years to foment the coup against Allende. Striking Chilean labor unions, instrumental in destabilizing the Allende government, were secretly bankrolled by the CIA.
During the brutal and repressive 17-year rule of General Augusto Pinochet that followed, more than 3,000 political opponents were assassinated or “disappeared.” The U.S.-backed military dictatorship banned Jara’s music, image, name and, for a time, even outlawed the public performance of the folk-guitar.
More about the coup 
September 11, 2001

Suicidal Islamist terrorists, members of Al Qaeda and most of them Saudis, hijacked four commercial airliners in the eastern U.S., and managed successfully to turn three of the jet-fuel-loaded planes into missiles: two flew into New York City’s World Trade Center towers, destroying them, and a third into the west side of the Pentagon. On the fourth, passengers heroically seized back control but crashed it into an empty field in western Pennsylvania. The hijackers killed nearly 3000 that day: passengers and crew, workers in the twin towers and the Pentagon. A 911 chronology 
September 11, 2002
Women In Black (WIB) Baltimore started the first Peace Path as a response to 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. The nonviolent action presented images of peace rather than war and militarism as a response to problems.
Now in its seventh year, the path will extend for 12 miles through Baltimore. Others are beginning to create 9/11 peace paths in their own communities.Women in Black along the peace path in Baltimore, 2007
Participants in WIB vigils wear black as a sign of mourning for all that is lost through war and violence. The group seeks to bring together people of all races, faiths, nationalities, and genders who support positions of nonviolence and who seek peace through mutual understanding and constructive dialogue.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september101996

Peace & Justice History for 9/9:

September 9, 1862
Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey declared that “The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state.”
The previous month the Dakota, or Santee, Sioux, long burdened by treaty violations and late or unfair payments from Indian agents, killed four settlers and decided to attack settlers throughout the Minnesota River valley. The number killed was estimated between 300 and 800, until 9/11 the largest civilian death toll in the U.S. The number of Indian deaths was not recorded.
September 9, 1944
Religious conscientious objector Corbett Bishop was arrested after walking out of a Civilian Public Service Camp. During subsequent trials and imprisonments, he refused any type of cooperation with the government until he was released 193 days later.
 
“I’m not going to cooperate in any way, shape or form.
I was carried in here.If you hold me, you’ll have to carry me out.War is wrong. I don’t want any part of it.” – Corbett Bishop, 1906-1961
September 9, 1963
Students at Chu Van An boys’ high school in Saigon tore down the government flag and raised a Buddhist flag to protest the corrupt Diem regime in South Vietnam; 1,000 were arrested.
September 9, 1971
The Attica (New York) State Penitentiary revolt began. The interracial revolt was led by blacks but featured cooperation between prisoners of different racial and ethnic backgrounds.

It was finally brutally suppressed by the state five days later, upon orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller who refused to become directly involved. 29 prisoners and 10 guards were shot and killed by attacking state troopers in the bloodiest prison confrontation in U.S. history.

The prisoners had been demanding improvements in their living and working conditions at the increasingly overcrowded facility.
September 9, 1980
Eight activists from the Atlantic Life Community were arrested after hammering the nose cones of two missiles at the General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. 
Read about Plowshares 8
 
The Plowshares 8 (in alphabetical order):
Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Dean Hammer, Carl Kabat, Elmer Maas, Anne Montgomery, Molly Rush, and John Schuchardt.

This action would become the first of an international movement of dozens of “Plowshares” anti-nuclear direct actions.
 A chronology of Plowshares actions 
September 9, 1997
Sinn Fein (pronounced shin fayn), the Irish Republican Army’s allied political party, formally renounced violence by accepting the principles put forward by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell (D-Maine) who was mediating the talks between the Irish Republicans and the British Unionists on Northern Ireland’s future.
Senator George Mitchell
The Mitchell Principles:
• To democratic and exclusively peaceful means of resolving political issues;
• To the total disarmament of all paramilitary organisations;
• To agree that such disarmament must be verifiable to the satisfaction of an independent commission;
• To renounce for themselves, and to oppose any effort by others, to use force, or threaten to use force, to influence the course or the outcome of all-party negotiations;
• To agree to abide by the terms of any agreement reached in all-party negotiations and to resort to democratic and exclusively peaceful methods in trying to alter any aspect of that outcome with which they may disagree; and,
• To urge that “punishment” killings and beatings stop and to take effective steps to prevent such actions.

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september9

Peace & Justice History for 9/7:

(Really!)

September 7, 1948
3,000 attended a rally to publicly launch the Peace Council in Melbourne, Australia.
September 7, 1957
Barbara Gittings leading a picket in the ’60s
Barbara Gittings organized the first New York meeting held for the Daughters of Bilitis, a pioneer lesbian organization. The group was founded two years earlier in San Francisco.
Barbara Gittings: Mother of the Gay Rights Movement  (This link requires a sign-in on Medium, so I’m going to post it in another entry on its own.)

Cover from their magazine “The Ladder”, October,1968
September 7, 1990
Two British peace activists, Stephen Hancock and Mike Hutchinson known as the Upper Heyford Plowshares were sentenced to 15 months in prison for disabling an F-111 bomber in Oxford, England.
A brief History of Direct Disarmament Actions 
September 7, 1992
South African troops killed at least 24 people and injured 150 more at an African National Congress (ANC) rally on the border of Ciskei, in South Africa. 50,000 ANC supporters had turned out to demand Ciskei’s re-absorption into South Africa. Ciskei was one of ten black “homelands,” so designated to keep blacks from claiming citizenship in South Africa itself. They were a legal fiction, not recognized by any other country, that was part of the racially separatist apartheid regime.
News at the time BBC
September 7, 1996
Two women were arrested for trespass at the Norfolk (Virginia) Naval Base after walking into the base with a banner reading,
“Love Your Enemies.”

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september7

Peace & Justice History for 9/6:

August 6, 1890
At Auburn Prison in New York state, William Kemmler became the first person to be executed in the electric chair, developed by the Medico-Legal Society and Harold Brown, a colleague of Thomas Edison.William Kemmler received two applications of 1,300 volts of alternating current. The first lasted for only 17 seconds because a leather belt was about to fall off one of the second-hand Westinghouse generators. Kemmler was still alive. The second jolt lasted until the smell of burning flesh filled the room, about four minutes.


As soon as his charred body stopped smoldering, Kemmler was pronounced dead.
August 6th, 1945 – 8:15 AM
Anniversary of Hiroshima

The United States dropped the first atomic bomb used in warfare on Hiroshima, Japan.

Hiroshima ruins
An estimated 140,000 died from the immediate effects of this bomb and tens of thousands more died in subsequent years from burns and other injuries, and radiation-related illnesses. President Harry Truman ordered the use of the weapon in hopes of avoiding an invasion of Japan to end the war, and the presumed casualties likely to be suffered by invading American troops.
The weapon, “Little Boy,” was delivered by a B-29 Superfortress nicknamed the Enola Gay, based on the island of Tinian, and piloted by Colonel Paul W. Tibbets. Voices of the Hibakusha, those injured in the bombings
  Hiroshima survivor 
Found watch stopped at the time of explosion

Documents related to the decision to drop the atomic bomb
On August 6, 1995, up to 50,000 people attended a memorial service commemorating Hiroshima Peace Day on the 50th anniversary of the first atomic bombing.
August 6, 1957
Eleven activists from the Committee for Nonviolent Action (CNVA) were arrested attempting to enter the atomic testing grounds at Camp Mercury, Nevada, the first of what eventually became many thousands of arrests at the Nevada test site.
August 6, 1965
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed by President Johnson, making illegal century-old practices aimed at preventing African Americans from exercising their constitutional right to vote.

It created federal oversight of election laws in six Southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia) and in many counties of North Carolina where black voter turnout was very low. Black voter registration rates were as low as 7% in Mississippi prior to passage of the law; today voter registration rates are comparable for both blacks and whites in these states.
The laws has been re-authorized by Congress four times.
Introduction to the Voting Rights Act 
August 6, 1990
George Galloway
The U.S. imposed trade sanctions on Iraq. As a result, the lack of much-needed medicines, water purification equipment and other items led to the death of many innocent Iraqis. According to British Member of Parliament George Galloway in his testimony to a committee of the U.S. Congress on May 17, 2005, these sanctions “ . . . killed one million Iraqis, most of them children, most of them died before they even knew that they were Iraqis, but they died for no other reason other than that they were Iraqis with the misfortune to be born at that time . . . .” When asked on U.S. television if she thought that the death of half a million Iraqi children (due to sanctions on Iraq) was a price worth paying, then U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright replied: “This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.” -60 Minutes (5/12/96)
Were Sanctions Worth the Price? by Christopher Hayes 
August 6, 1998
Nearly 50,000 people attended a memorial service commemorating Hiroshima Peace Day on the 50th anniversary of the first atomic bombing which killed nearly 200,000 Japanese with a single weapon.
The headlines when it happened 
August 6, 1998
Calling themselves the Minuteman III Plowshares, two peace activists, Daniel Sicken [pronounced seekin], 56, of Brattleboro, Vermont and Sachio Ko-Yin, 25, of Ridgewood, N.J entered silo N7 in Weld County [near Greeley] in Colorado operated by Warren AFB, Cheyenne, Wyoming. With hammers and their own blood, they symbolically disarmed structures on the launching pad of a Minuteman III nuclear missile silo.

Sachio Ko-Yin and Daniel Sicken
Read about the Minuteman III Plowshares action 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryaugust.htm#august6

Peace & Justice History for 9/4:

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryseptember.htm#september4

September 4, 1949
Paul Robeson, scholar, athlete, musician and leader, defying a racist and red-baiting mob, sang to 15,000 at a Labor Day gathering in Peekskill, New York.
 
Paul Robeson (at microphone) singing to the Labor Day gathering in Peekskill, New York
The story and photographs of what happened 
Film from that day narrated by Sidney Poitier 
September 4, 1954
The Peace Pledge Union (PPU) organized a demonstration against the H-Bomb in London’s Trafalgar Square.
The PPU dates back to October 1934.
Young Peace Pledge Union members today.
The PPU today
September 4, 1957
Elizabeth Eckford and eight other young Negroes were blocked from becoming the first black student at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Governor Orval Faubus had called out the National Guard to prevent the court-ordered integration of the public schools in the state’s capital.
President Dwight Eisenhower eventually sent in federal troops to guarantee the law was enforced.
Elizabeth Eckford
Read more Elizabeth Eckford followed and taunted by mob, 1957.
A very interesting related story: 
September 4, 1970
Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) began Operation RAW (Rapid American Withdrawal). Over the following three days more than 200 veterans, assisted by the Philadelphia Guerilla Theater, staged a march from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, reenacting the invasion of small rural hamlets along the way.

Operation Rapid American Withdrawal 1970-2005: An Exhibition: 
September 4, 1978
Simultaneous demonstrations in Moscow’s Red Square and in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. were organized by the War Resisters League, calling for nuclear disarmament.