Tag: Women in Black

Julia Ward Howe, Women in Black, & More, in Peace & Justice History for 6/9

June 9, 1872
Julia Ward Howe, an abolitionist and the composer of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” tried to establish the Mothers’ Peace Day Observance on the second Sunday in June. In 1872 the first such celebration was held and the meetings continued for several years. Her idea was widely accepted, but she was never able to get the day recognized as an official holiday. Mothers’ Peace Day was the predecessor of the Mothers’ Day holiday in the United States now celebrated on the third Sunday of May.

Julia Ward Howe ca.1898
Her proclamation read in part:
“As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace….”
June 9, 1954
Special Counsel for the U.S. Army Joseph N. Welch confronted Senator Joseph P. McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) during hearings into alleged communist infiltration of the Army Signal Corps.McCarthy had attacked a member of Welch’s law firm, Frederick G. Fischer, among many others, as a communist. This was alleged due to Fischer’s prior membership in the National Lawyers Guild.
The Guild was the nation’s first racially integrated bar association.
Army counsel Joseph N. Welch (l) confronts Senator Joseph McCarthy (r)
Welch was outraged by the attempt to destroy the reputation and career of someone of whose integrity he had no doubt: “Until this moment, senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness . . . . Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
The entire hearings and this encounter were seen live on television, the first congressional committee hearings ever to be broadcast. McCarthy’s ability to make such accusations was soon greatly diminished.
Watch the confrontation 
National Lawyers Guild, since 1937 and today 
June 9, 1984
150,000 marched in London, England, for nuclear disarmament, protesting the presence of U.S. cruise missiles on British soil.
June 9, 1993
Police banned a vigil by Women in Black (Zene u Crnom) in Belgrade, Serbia. 
Who are the Women in Black?
 
Women in Black demonstrations combine art & politics

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryjune.htm#june9

Peace & Justice History for 4/8

April 8, 1952
President Harry S. Truman attempted to nationalize the steel industry in order to avert a nationwide strike. He was concerned about a shortage of steel needed for the war effort in Korea.
Read more from the Truman library
April 8, 1993
Women in Black of Lund, Sweden, demonstrated in solidarity with their Serbian sisters suffering amidst the conflicts resulting from the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. “We dressed in black. We knew that despair and pain needed to be transformed into political action. Our choice of black meant that we did not agree with everything that the Serbian regime was doing. We refused their language which promotes hate and death.” We repeated: “DO NOT SPEAK FOR US, WE WILL SPEAK FOR OURSELVES”
Who are Women in Black? 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryapril.htm#april8

Peace & Justice History for 12/26

December 26, 1862
38 members of the Santee Sioux tribe were hanged in a public mass execution in Minnesota. 300 members of the band had been convicted of participating the the Minnesota Uprising and ordered to hang. However, all sentences except the 38 had been commuted by President Abraham Lincoln.
For decades white settlers had been encroaching on Santee Sioux territory, and they had been victimized by corrupt federal Indian agents on the reservations.In July agents and contractors had withheld food when their demands for kickbacks had been refused. The Indians eventually struck back, killing Anglo settlers and taking some hostages. In two battles with the U.S. Army, they killed or wounded dozens of soldiers, but ultimately lost and were put on trial.

America’s only legal mass execution
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December 26, 1966
The first Kwanzaa was celebrated in Los Angeles, California. It was conceived and organized in the wake of the Watts riots by Dr. Maulana (Ron) Karenga, a professor and chairman of Black Studies at California State University at Long Beach. Kwanzaa is a non-religious African-American holiday focusing on family, community, and culture.The name Kwanzaa is derived from the phrase “matunda ya kwanza,” which means “first fruits” in Swahili. The celebrations are expressed through song, dance, drumming, storytelling, poetry and the lighting of candles in a Kinara, all followed by a large traditional meal. The holiday is observed for seven days, each representing a different principle:

a Kwanzaa Kinara
• Umoja (oo-MO-jah) Unity
• Kujichagulia (koo-gee-cha-goo-LEE-yah) Self-Determination
• Ujima (oo-GEE-mah) Collective Work and Responsibility
• Ujamaa (oo-JAH-mah) Cooperative economics
• Nia (NEE-yah) Purpose
• Kuumba (koo-OOM-bah) Creativity
• Imani (ee-MAH-nee) Faith

Ron Karenga lighting the Kinara
History, Principles, and Symbols of Kwanzaa 
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December 26, 1971

Two dozen members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War “liberated” the Statue of Liberty with a sit-in to protest resumed U.S. aerial bombings in Vietnam. They flew an inverted U.S. flag from the crown as a signal of distress.
more on this action 
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December 26, 1992

photo: Simran Sachdev Belgrade, 7.2009
Women In Black began campaign against rape during war, Belgrade, Serbia.
WIB website 
Women in Black is a world-wide network of women committed to peace with justice and actively opposed to injustice, war, militarism and
other forms of violence.
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December 26, 1999
Alfonso Portillo Cabrera scored a resounding victory (nearly 70% of the vote in the second round) in Guatemala’s first peacetime presidential elections following a 36-year civil war.

Alfonso Portillo Cabrera after his election
Some perspective 

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorydecember.htm#december26

Peace & Justice History for 10/9:

October 9, 1919
The International Fellowship of Reconciliation was founded in Bilthoven, the Netherlands. Its members have since been active in promoting programs and activities for reconciliation, peace-building, active nonviolence, and conflict resolution. 

More about FOR history 
October 9, 1990
The U.S. began making reparations payments to survivors and families of Japanese-Americans taken from their homes put into internment (or concentration) camps during World War II.The payments were a result of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 signed by President Reagan. Popularly known as the Japanese American Redress Bill, this act acknowledged that “a grave injustice was done” and mandated Congress to pay each victim of internment $20,000 in reparations.

Some of the housing in the concentration camps was in former horse stalls.

The first nine redress payments were made at a Washington, D.C. ceremony. 107-year-old Reverend Mamoru Eto of Los Angeles was the first to receive his check.
A chronology of internment during WWII 
Note: In the entire course of the war, 10 people were convicted of spying for Japan, all of whom were Caucasian.
October 9, 1991
Women In Black in Belgrade (Zene u Crnom) began regular weekly silent vigils in Republic Square. They stood to protest the nationalist violence that had erupted in the disintegration of Yugoslavia. They encouraged men who refused to serve in the military, and engaged in many educational efforts.
They were initially encouraged by “Women Visiting Difficult Places,” a group of Italian women who encouraged women on both “sides” in conflict-ridden countries to communicate. They in turn were inspired by Israeli Jewish women who organized in 1988 during the first intifada to protest their country’s occupation of Palestinian territories, and held vigils in as many as forty locations, later joined by Israeli Palestinians.
Women In Black • New York City
October 9, 2007
The Imagine Peace Tower, a work conceived by Yoko Ono and dedicated to John Lennon’s memory, was dedicated on the island of Videy, within sight of Reykjavik, Iceland. The LennonOno Grant for Peace will be awarded there each year.
Iceland was chosen because Iceland has no standing army and it is a world leader on the environment.
The installation bears the inscription, Imagine Peace, in 24 languages.

more photos
The Tower is lit the first week of Spring, on October 9 and December 8 (the dates of Lennon’s birth and death) and on New Year’s Eve. The electricity comes solely from the Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Plant.

The Imagine Peace Tower   live feed

Note: A few peace buttons from peacebuttons.info were buried in a time capsule at the base of the Imagine Peace Tower. < get some for yourself and friends

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistoryoctober.htm#october9

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