Tag: Peace

Peace & Justice History for 4/11

April 11, 1916

Annie Besant, founder of the India Home Rule League and publisher of New India.
Annie Besant, a Briton and active suffragist who moved to India, established the Home Rule League with autonomy for India from British colonial rule as its goal. Head of the Theosophical Society of India, she was also the publisher of the newspaper, New India, and CommonWeal.
More on Annie Besant 
April 11, 1961
The trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann began in Israel. The man accused of leading Hitler’s effort to exterminate the Jewish people and others faced 15 charges, including crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, and war crimes, all of which took more than an hour to enumerate.

Adolf Eichmann
The charges against Eichmann 
April 11, 1968
The Civil Rights Act of 1968 was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson just one week after the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Known as the Fair Housing Act, it first outlawed discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing and now bans it for reasons of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, or handicap.
The struggle for Fair Housing 

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Peace & Justice History for 4/10

April 10, 1516
In what was the first ghetto, Jews in Venice, Italy, were forced to live in a specific, restricted area of the city known as Campo del Ghetto Nuovo. The word “ghetto” comes from the Venetian word “geto,” meaning foundry. Prior to becoming an exclusively Jewish neighborhood, the Venice ghetto was the site of a foundry.
After its establishment the city’s Jews, who were allowed to attend to their business during the day (though required to wear a yellow badge or scarf indicating their religion), were forced to return to the ghetto where gates were locked to keep them inside overnight.
Venice also restricted the living quarters of Germans and Turks, all to satisfy the demands of the Roman Catholic Church.

The site of the Ghetto Nouvo today
April 10, 1971
Ninety-year-old Jeannette Rankin, the first female member of Congress (R-Montana), and the only one to vote against U.S. entry into both World Wars, led 8000 in protest of the Vietnam War in a women’s peace march on the Pentagon.
 
April 10, 1972

Charlie Chaplin received an honorary Oscar for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century.” The British native’s political views had previously been criticized, as had been his failure to apply for U.S. citizenship.
Pressed for back taxes and accused of supporting subversive causes during the McCarthy era, Chaplin left the United States in 1952.Informed that he would not be welcomed back, he retorted, “I wouldn’t go back there if Jesus Christ were president.” He returned briefly from exile, however, to accept this award and received the longest standing ovation in Academy Award history, lasting a full five minutes.
Charlie Chaplin, one of PBS’s American Masters 
April 10, 1981
The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (also known as the Inhumane Weapons Convention) started gathering signatures of nations willing to abide by its limitations.
Currently, 109 countries have agreed to ban or limit munitions that cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants, or affect civilians indiscriminately. So far the restrictions cover mines, booby traps, incendiary weapons (such as Napalm) and blinding laser weapons.
This Life photograph of a naked child running down a street in Vietnam screaming in agony captures the effects of Napalm. Nick Ut’s photograph of Kim Phuk, taken in 1972, won the Pulitzer Prize ( Associated Press).

Not all country signatories have agreed to all its provisions
How militaries think about incendiary weapons
April 10, 1994
France, Belgium, the U.S., among other countries airlifted their nationals out of Rwanda as the wholesale slaughter of Tutsis at the hands of the Hutu majority proceeded. Rwandan employees of Western governments were left behind.
The International Red Cross was already estimating the death toll in the tens of thousands.
April 10, 1998
The Northern Ireland peace talks ended with an historic accord—called the Good Friday Agreement—reached after nearly two years of talks and 30 years of conflict. Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine) was chair of the talks which established a Northern Irish Assembly for both the Irish Catholic republicans and the British Anglican unionists.

Senator George Mitchell

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Peace & Justice History for 4/9

April 9, 1898
Ida Wells-Barnett, a journalist, speaker and advocate for suffrage, wrote to President William McKinley requesting federal action against those who lynched the U.S. Postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina.

Ida Wells-Barnett
Though the federal government had previously refused to involve itself with the thousands of lynchings, leaving them to be dealt with at the state level, Ms. Wells-Barnett insisted that a postmaster’s murder was a federal matter.
“We most earnestly desire that national legislation be enacted for the suppression of the national crime of lynching . . . .
Her open letter to President McKinley 
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April 9, 1947

The first freedom ride, the “Journey of Reconciliation,” left Washington, D.C. to travel through four states of the upper South.In response to a Supreme Court decision (Morgan v. Virginia) outlawing segregation on interstate busses, the group of both black and white Americans rode together despite “Jim Crow” state laws making it illegal.
Together on the bus, and arrested several times for being so, were George Houser, Bayard Rustin, James Peck, Igal Roodenko, Nathan Wright, Conrad Lynn, Wallace Nelson, Andrew Johnson, Eugene Stanley, Dennis Banks, William Worthy, Louis Adams, Joseph Felmet, Worth Randle and Homer Jack.
Two African-American members of the group, Rustin and Johnson, served on a chain gang for 30 days after their conviction in North Carolina. The integrated bus tour was sponsored by CORE (Congress for Racial Equality) and FOR (Fellowship of Reconciliation)
Read more about the freedom rides
============================================== 
April 9, 1981
Members of the Bigstone Cree band of indigenous people ended a 250-mile march to the capital, Edmonton, to highlight their economic plight in northern Alberta, Canada.

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April 9, 1995
Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara first publicly acknowledged error in prosecution of the war in Vietnam. “Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”
Robert McNamara, Fog of War
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April 9, 2000
Jubilee 2000 National Mobilization Day in Washington, D.C. brought together individuals and groups demanding cancellation of third world debt.
“Every child in Africa is born with a financial burden which a lifetime’s work cannot repay. The debt is a new form of slavery as vicious as the slave trade.”
Jubilee USA Network 

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Peace & Justice History for 4/7

April 7, 1979
Thousands protested against the nuclear industry in Sydney, Australia. The country is by far the world’s largest exporter of uranium (and thorium ores and concentrates), the radioactive heavy metal necessary for the power generation and weapons industries.
The marchers were from groups concerned about many related issues: the link between the uranium industry and weapons proliferation; the environmental destructiveness of nuclear power; the impact of uranium mining on Aborigines and workers in the industry; weapons testing in the Pacific, and the secret history of the British nuclear weapons tests in the region; and the Cold War nuclear arms spiral and Australia’s contribution to it through the hosting of U.S. military bases, allowing nuclear warships to use Australian ports through the ANZUS alliance (among Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.); weapons testing in the Pacific, and the secret history of the British nuclear weapons tests in the region.

Sydney anti-uranium protest, Photo: Paul Keig
Today’s Australian Nuclear Free Alliance 
April 7, 1994
Genocide in Rwanda began. Over the following 90 days at least a half million people were killed by their countrymen, principally Hutus killing Tutsis.
This day is commemorated annually with prayer vigils in Rwanda.
Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, head of the U.N. Peacekeeping Force in Rwanda, a tiny African nation formerly a Belgian colony, had warned of impending slaughter, but was ordered not to attempt to intervene.

PBS interview with General Dallaire, what he knew and what he watched happen
  

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In Today’s GoComics,

Doonesbury

By Garry Trudeau

Peace & Justice History for 4/6

April 6, 1712
The first major slave rebellion in the North American British colonies took place in New York City. One out of every five New Yorkers was enslaved at the time. Twenty-three black slaves set fire to buildings, killed six white British subjects and wounded six others.
More on the rebellion and its aftermath 
Slavery in New York 
April 6, 1909
Robert Peary, his negro servant, Matthew Henson, and four Eskimos reached the geographic North Pole for the first time.

Matthew Peary at the White House, 1954
 
Stamp issued 2005
Though Henson was alongside Peary, widely hailed as a courageous explorer, during that and subsequent Arctic expeditions, Henson achieved little notice until much later in life.
Article about the unsung hero of the polar expedition 
April 6, 1968
Dozens of major cities in the United States experienced an escalation of rioting in reaction to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. two days before. At least 19 people had already died in the arson, looting and shootings. Several hundred had also been injured and about 3,000 arrested—most of those in Washington, D.C.
April 6, 1968
Bobby Hutton, the 17-year-old first member of the Black Panther Party was gunned down by officers of the Oakland Police Department. Police opened fire on a car of Black Panthers returning from a meeting. The Panthers escaped their vehicle and ran into a house. Police attacked the house with tear gas and gunfire. After the building was on fire, the Panthers tried to surrender. Hutton came out of the house with his hands in the air.

Bobby Hutton
But a police officer shouted, “He’s got a gun.” This prompted further police gunfire that left Hutton dead and Panthers co-founder Eldridge Cleaver wounded. Police later admitted that Hutton was unarmed.
More about Bobby Hutton 
April 6, 1983
President Ronald Reagan’s interior secretary, James Watt, banned all rock ‘n’ roll groups from the Fourth of July celebration on the Washington Mall.The bands scheduled to play included the Beach Boys, generally considered very wholesome. But Watt said such acts attracted the “wrong element.” ”We’re not going to encourage drug abuse and alcoholism as was done in the past.” The president’s wife, a fan, complained directly to Secretary Watt, but he claimed never to have heard of the band.
April 6, 1996
Eleven were arrested at the main post office near Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., for attempting to mail medical supplies to Iraq in defiance of the U.S.-led embargo. Between 1990 and 1995 with the first Gulf War and the sanctions regime imposed by the U.S., its coalition and the U.N., infant and under-5 mortality rates in Iraq had more than doubled.
More about Voices in the Wilderness 

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Peace & Justice History for 4/5

Hands Off Day!

April 5, 1910
Emil Seidel was elected mayor of Milwaukee and became the first socialist mayor of a major city in the United States. During his administration the first public works department was established, the first fire and police commissions were organized, and a city park system came into being.
In 1912, the Socialist Party nominated Emil Seidel as their vice presidential candidate to run with Eugene Debs.

Emil Seidel
Read more about Emil Seidel 
Milwaukee’s Socialist Era 
April 5, 1930
Mohandas Gandhi and his followers reached the end of their 400 km (240 mile) march to the Indian Ocean coast at Dandi. He had left his ashram with 78 satyagrahis (“soldiers” of peaceful resistance), but the procession grew over the 23 days of traveling on foot until it stretched more than 3 km (2 miles).
When they arrived at the seaside, Gandhi made salt by allowing seawater to evaporate. This simple task was an act of civil disobedience because the British Raj, the governing colonial authority, had made salt-making a monopoly and a crime for others; additionally, there was a tax on salt, a necessary element of the Indian diet.

Gandhi picking up salt.
Gandhi had chosen this issue to demonstrate how British control affected all Indians, regardless of ethnicity, religion or caste. The nature of this “crime” allowed him to resist that power without violence. And the British were faced with potentially arresting millions who might now be willing to flout the Salt Laws.
He had written to Lord Irwin, the Viceroy of India, a month earlier:
“Dear Friend, I cannot intentionally hurt anything that lives, much less fellow human beings, even though they may do the greatest wrong to me and mine. Whilst, therefore, I hold the British rule to be a curse, I do not intend to harm to a single Englishman or to any legitimate interest he may have in India . . . .”
Read Gandhi’s letter 
April 5, 1972
The Harrisburg Seven case ended in mistrial after 11 weeks.The Seven were charged with plotting to kidnap Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, among other alleged crimes. The defense attorney, recent former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, asked by the presiding judge to call his first witness said, “Your Honor, the defendants shall always seek peace. They continue to proclaim their innocence.

Elizabeth McAllister and Philip Berrigan, two of the Harrisburg Seven
The defense rests.” Only Philip Berrigan and Sister Elizabeth McAllister were declared guilty—of smuggling letters in and out of prison. They later married, co-founding Baltimore’s Jonah House.
Visit Jonah House 
April 5, 1977
Demonstrations and sit-ins began at regional offices of the U.S. Department of Health, Education & Welfare (HEW, now Department of Health & Human Services) urging HEW Secretary Joseph Califano to implement an extension of civil rights that included the disabled. Since non-discrimination protection had been part of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the department had failed to agree to regulations (under Section 504) that would give the law practical effect in the lives of those it intended to protect. Discrimination on the basis of disability was to be illegal in any program which received federal funds.
At all the offices the demonstrators left at the end of the working day, except two: Washington, DC and the San Francisco regional headquarters.
Though negotiations were continuing between the Carter administration and the American Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities, those in San Francisco, led by Judith Heumann, held their ground until Califano signed the Sec. 504 regulations on April 28. It had been the longest sit-in of a federal office in history.
Judith Heumann, Advisor for Disability and Development.

sign from the campaign
Short film about the sit-in (“Recalling an invigorating act of civil disobedience”)
How Section 504 became law and how its supporters prevailed
April 5, 1982
Dublin, Ireland, declared itself a nuclear-free zone by vote of its City Council.
April 5, 1985
Columbia University students occupied Hamilton Hall to demand divestment by the university of its assets invested in companies doing business with South Africa. The selling off was intended to pressure the racially separatist government to eliminate its racially separatist policy of apartheid.
April 5, 1989
Solidarity (Solidarnosc in Polish) became the first independent labor union given legal status in Poland.

It started out as a strike committee among shipyard workers advocating democratic reforms during the summer of 1980 in Gdansk (FKA Danzig). A very high percentage of the Polish workers, a broad representation of the political and social opposition to the communist military regime, became members despite the union’s having been declared illegal in October of 1982.
Solidarity’s legacy 
April 5, 1992
The March for Women’s Lives, in support of women’s reproductive rights and equality, drew several hundred thousand people to Washington, D.C. There were students representing 600 college campuses.

Part of the huge turnout taking part in the March for Women’s Lives

One of the largest protests ever in the nation’s capital, the pro-choice rally occurred as the U.S. Supreme Court was about to consider the constitutionality of a Pennsylvania law that limited access to abortions. Many abortion-rights advocates feared that the high court, with its conservative majority, might find the Pennsylvania law constitutional,
or even overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that made abortion legal. 
Read more about this march 
April 5, 1996
54 were arrested in a Good Friday protest at Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory in California.

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“Superlative Singer”

Veery

Peace & Justice History for 4/4

A goodly number of events have happened on April 4.

April 4, 1958

Aldermaston March, 1st Day, 1958.
Four thousand began the first of eleven consecutive annual Easter protest marches. It took three days on foot from London to Aldermaston AWRE (Atomic Weapons Research Establisment) base in England.
Watch one of the marches
Interviews with participants 
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April 4, 1967
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in a speech to Clergy and Laity Concerned at the Riverside Church in New York City, called for common cause between the civil rights and peace movements. The Nobel Peace Prize winner proposed the United States stop all bombing of North and South Vietnam;

MLK delivering the important speech
…declare a unilateral truce in the hope that it would lead to peace talks; set a date for withdrawal of all troops from Vietnam; and give the National Liberation Front a role in negotiations.” . . . this war is a blasphemy against all that America stands for . . . .”
Read the speech 
Or listen 
Impact of the speech 
———————————————————————————–
April 4, 1968
Martin Luther King, Jr., 39, was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to help with a strike by sanitation workers.
Reverends Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, and King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel shortly before he was shot.
Riots in reaction to the assassination broke out in over a hundred cities across the U.S., lasting up to a week; cities included Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Cincinnati, Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Toledo, Pittsburgh, and Seattle. The federal government deployed 75,000 National Guard troops. 39 people died and 2,500 were injured.
In Indianapolis, Indiana, Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-New York) was campaigning for president. Learning about the assassination just before speaking to a large rally, he said, “we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand, compassion and love.”
Indianapolis experienced no rioting that night.

Senator Robert Kennedy speaking to a large, mostly African-American rally
about the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Video and text of Kennedy’s speech 
The building now houses the National Civil Rights Museum; visit the museum 
James Earl Ray confessed to the slaying, was sentenced to 99 years in prison, but later recanted. Numerous people originally involved in investigating him have raised serious doubts about his involvement; after Ray’s death, a 1999 civil jury trial in Memphis concluded that Ray did not act alone.
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April 4, 1969
CBS cancelled “The Smothers Brothers’ Comedy Hour,” a television show which featured edgy political satire and such rock bands as the Beatles, the Who, Jefferson Airplane and the Doors.

Smothers brothers
The brothers had refused to censor a comment made by Joan Baez. She wanted to dedicate a song to her husband, David, who was about to go to jail for objecting to the draft during the Vietnam War.

David Harris and Joan Baez
More about the show
Joan Baez and the Smothers Brothers sing Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released”
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April 4, 1984

The women of the main peace camp at Greenham Common in Berkshire, England, were evicted by British authorities. They had been encamped for over two years to oppose the presence of U.S. nuclear-armed cruise missiles at the military base there. They said their eviction would not end their protest.
Read more 

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Peace & Justice History for 4/2 (& 4/1)

When I went to Peace buttons Monday night, their site was down, or something, so no P&J 4/1 morning. However, keep scrolling; it’ll be after 4/2! -A

April 2, 1917

Jeannette Rankin, a Republican from Montana, took her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. The first woman ever elected to Congress, she became the only member to vote against U.S. entry into both world wars.
Rankin lost her seat in the next election but was re-elected twenty years later when she opposed entry into World War II. She again served just one term.
Though American women weren’t guaranteed the right to vote for three more years with passage of the 19th amendment, women in Montana, Wyoming, Utah and Washington had full voting rights even before statehood.
Rankin was instrumental in passing laws that made married women citizens in their own right.
Jeannette Rankin biography 
April 2, 1966
One hundred thousand Vietnamese demonstrated in DaNang against both the U.S. and their South Vietnamese governments. Civil unrest spread also to Hue and the capital, Saigon.
April 2, 1970
Massachusetts, in the midst of the Vietnam war, enacted a law which exempted its citizens from having to fight in an undeclared war.
The U.S. Congress had never formally declared war on North Vietnam as required by Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.

April 1, 1841

Brook Farm, perhaps history’s most well-known utopian community, was founded by George and Sophia Ripley near West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Its primary appeal was to young Bostonians who were uncomfortable with the materialism of American life, and the community was a refuge for dozens of transcendentalists, including authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Following four days of demonstrations against the Military Services Act that devolved into rioting in Quebec City, Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden sent in troops from Ontario to stop the violence. Orders from the soldiers were read only in English to the mostly Francophone demonstrators, and when the they didn’t disperse, the troops fired, killing four and wounding 70.
[see March 28, 1918]

A memorial in Quebec to those who died protesting conscription into World War I
More about Brook Farm 
April 1, 1932
500 schoolchildren, in the depth of the Depression, paraded through Chicago’s downtown section to the Board of Education offices, demanding that the school system provide them with food.
April 1, 1955
The African National Congress had called on parents to withdraw their children by this day from South African schools in resistance to the Bantu Education Act. That 1953 law transferred education of the Bantu (blacks) from religious missions to state-controlled schools. Mission education, argued then-Minister of Bantu Education Dr. H.F. Verwoerd, not only tended to create “false expectations” amongst the natives, but was also in direct conflict with South Africa’s racially separatist apartheid policies.
Whites, who were in complete control of government and society, comprised only 14% of South Africa’s population. Verwoerd presented to Parliament:
“When I have control of native education, I will reform it so that natives will be taught from childhood to realize that equality with Europeans is not for them. There is no place for him (the black child) in European society above the level of certain forms of labour…What is the use of teaching a Bantu child mathematics when it cannot use it in practice?”
April 1, 1983
Tens of thousands in the United Kingdom formed a “peace chain” 22.5 kilometers (14 miles) long to express their opposition to nuclear weapons. The chain started at the American airbase at Greenham Common, passed the Aldermaston nuclear research center, and ended at the ordnance factory in Burghfield.

At the same time 15,000 people took part in the first of a series of anti-nuclear marches in West Germany. They were protesting the siting of American cruise missiles on West German territory.
Contemporaneous coverage of the Peace Chain 
April 1, 1985
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered an end to the dumping of sludge off the New Jersey coast into the Atlantic Ocean.
21st century sludge 

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