September 21, 1963 The War Resisters League organized the first American anti-Vietnam War demonstration in New York City. The League, founded in 1923, was the first peace group to call for U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, and played a key role throughout the war, organizing rallies, the burning of draft cards, civil disobedience at induction centers, and assisting resisters. History of WRL WRL home ======================== September 21st (since 1982) The International Day of Peace was established by United Nations resolution in 1981 and first celebrated in 1982 (then as the 3rd tuesday of the month). Events are planned all over the world to promote peace and make it more visible. About Peace Day and plans around the world
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 ================ 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 ================ September 20, 1932 Rabindranath Tagore urges resistance to practice of “untouchability,” British India. ================ 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 ================ 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.
By HILLEL ITALIE – Associated Press Updated 1 hour ago
NEW YORK (AP) — Less than two weeks before his 100th birthday, former President Jimmy Carter is receiving a lifetime achievement award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation, which has set aside its longstanding rule that the winner accept the honor in person.
The Ohio-based foundation announced Thursday that Carter was this year’s winner of the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, named for the late diplomat. In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his human rights advocacy and for brokering such agreements as the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel.
Carter, who turns 100 on Oct. 1, is in hospice care in Plains, Georgia. His grandson, Jason Carter, will accept the prize on his behalf during a November ceremony that will honor the former president’s peace efforts and his authorship of more than 30 books — what the foundation calls “the power of the written word to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding.”
“For the past 17 years, one of the standing requirements to receive the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award was a guaranty that the recipient would appear in person in Dayton, OH for an on-stage interview and an awards ceremony,” Nicholas A. Raines, executive director of the Dayton foundation, said in a statement. “This year we have decided to waive that requirement and present the award in absentia, to President Jimmy Carter.”
Jason Carter said in a statement that two of his grandfather’s “most enduring interests have been a devotion to literature and a near-constant pursuit of a peaceful resolution to conflict.”
“It is gratifying to have the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation choose to honor my grandfather with the Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award for a lifetime of work melding two of his loves — literature and peace,” Jason Carter added.
On Thursday, the Foundation also announced that Paul Lynch’s “Prophet Song” won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction and Victor Luckerson’s “Built from the Fire” won for nonfiction.
Lynch and Luckerson each will receive $10,000. Fiction runner-up, “The Postcard” author Anne Berest, and nonfiction finalist, “Red Memory” author Tania Branigan, each get $5,000.
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.
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.”
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 RemainThe 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
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, 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
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.
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.
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.”
Richard Allen
Bertrand Russell at anti nuclear weapons March, 1961
William Whipper
Dennis Banks
Russell Means
Diablo canyon
dissidents held in the stadium
Victor Jara plays to young supporters
Victor Jara
Women in Black along the peace path in Baltimore, 2007
Senator George Mitchell
Barbara Gittings leading a picket in the ’60s
Scottie's Playtime 