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Sojourner Truth (a name she believed God had given her as a symbolic
representation of her mission in life) set out from New York
on a journey across America, preaching about the evils of slavery
and promoting women's rights.
read
more about Sojourner Truth 
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Gay
rights organizer Henry Gerber published an article in
Modern Thinker magazine attacking the view that homosexuality
is a neurosis.
In
1924, Henry Gerber, a postal worker in Chicago, started the
Society for Human Rights, America's
first known gay rights
organization. "The Society for Human Rights is formed
to promote and protect the interests of people who are abused
and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness which is guaranteed
them by the Declaration of Independence, and to combat the
public prejudices against them."
After having created and distributed a newsletter called "Friends
and Freedom,” Gerber was arrested and held for 3 days
without a warrant or being charged with any infractions. Upon
release he lost his job for "conduct unbecoming a postal
worker.”
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On this day in 1942, on the advice of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph
Goebbels, German Chancellor Adolf Hitler ordered all Jews in
occupied Paris to wear an identifying yellow star on the left
side of their coats.
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more
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Senator
Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine), the only woman in the
Senate, and only the second in history, denounced Sen.
Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) and his "red-baiting" tactics
on the floor of the U.S. Senate, in a speech called "A
Declaration of Conscience.”
read
the declaration
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The
U.S. Supreme Court ruled that recitation of the Lord’s
Prayer and readings from the Bible in public schools
violated the establishment clause of the first amendment
to the U.S. constitution.
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[School
Dist. Of Abington Township v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963);
Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962)]
The decision |
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| The
Vietnam Veterans Against War (VVAW) was founded in New
York City after six Vietnam vets marched together in a
peace demonstration. |
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It
was organized to voice the growing opposition among returning
servicemen and women to the still-raging war in Indochina.
VVAW, through open discussion of soldiers’ first-hand experiences, revealed
the truth about U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia.
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VVAW demonstrating against Iraq war 2004
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the
VVAW today |
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Abolitionist and former
slave James Montgomery led 300 African-American troops
of the Union's 2nd South Carolina Volunteers on a raid
of plantations along the Combahee River. Meanwhile, backed
by three gunboats, Harriet Tubman's forces set fire to
the plantations and freed 750 slaves.
read
more
Harriet
Tubman
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General
Anastasio Somoza, head of the U.S. Marine-trained National
Guard, forced the resignation of Nicaragua’s
elected President, Juan Bautista Sacasa. This followed
a seven-year U.S. occupation of the country and was followed
by Somoza family control of the country for the next four
decades.
read
more
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The
U.S. Supreme court ruled illegal President Truman's order
two months earlier for the Army to seize the nation's
steel mills in order to avert a strike.
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The
International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU),
a consolidation of seven smaller east coast unions, was founded.
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read
more
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Herman Grossman, ILGWU president
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Thousands
of scientists, led by Barry Commoner and Nobel laureate
Linus Pauling, issued a call for banning nuclear weapons
testing: “As scientists we have knowledge of the
dangers involved and therefore a special responsibility
to make those dangers known.”
“ ...Then
on May 15, 1957, with the help of some of the
scientists in Washington University, St. Louis,
I wrote the Scientists' Bomb Test Appeal, which
within two weeks was signed by over two thousand
American scientists and within a few months by
11,021 scientists, of forty-nine countries....”
Linus
Pauling's Nobel Peace Prize speech 1962
Linus Paulng at a disarmament demonstration
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Conscientious
objection, the refusal to bear arms on the grounds of
moral or religious principles, became legally recognized
in Belgium.
a
history of European conscientious objection
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| Angela
Y. Davis, a former philosophy professor at the University
of California, militant black leader and self-proclaimed
communist, was acquitted on charges of conspiracy, murder,
and kidnapping by an all-white jury in San Jose, California. |
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read
more |
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Angela Davis wearing a peace button from peacebuttons.info
speaking at The Grays Harbor Institute
Hoquiam, Washington April, 2007
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New
Zealand passed legislation declaring itself nuclear-free.
In 1986, New Zealand had banned the entry of U.S. Navy
ships from their ports in the belief that they were carrying
nuclear weapons or were nuclear-powered. U.S. government
protests of the policy led to breakup of the ANZUS (Australia-New
Zealand-United States) defense alliance. |
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The
New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control
Act of 1987 (which ratified the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty)
prohibits the:
•
manufacture, acquisition, possession, control of
any nuclear explosive device
•
aiding, abetting or procuring any person to manufacture,
acquire, possess, or have control over any nuclear explosive
device
•
transport, stockpiling, storage, installation,
or deployment of any nuclear explosive device. |
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Hundreds
of civilians were shot dead by China’s People’s
Liberation Army during a bloody military operation in Beijing’s
Tiananmen Square. Students and workers had became part
of a growing pro-democracy movement, gathering there continuously
for weeks. The Chinese government still officially denies
any deaths occurred; thousands arrested "disappeared" and
remain unaccounted for.
"... deaths from the military
assault on Tiananmen Square range from 180 to 500; thousands
more have been injured . . . thousands of civilians stood
their ground or swarmed around military vehicles. APCs [armored
personnel carriers] were set on fire, and demonstrators besieged
troops with rocks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails."*
watch
*From
a comprehensive overview prepared by the National Security
Archive based on formerly classified U.S. Government documents
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Uncle Tom's Cabin
or, Life Among the Lowly began to appear in serial form in
the Washington National Era, an abolitionist weekly. The novel
by Harriet Beecher Stowe,
a tear-jerking tale of the hardships
of slavery, became a central reference point in the national
debate over the issue. |
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read more |
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| Jane
Briggs Hart, the wife of Senator Philip A. Hart (D-Michigan),
informed the Internal Revenue Service that she wouldn’t
pay some of her taxes; instead, she deposited her quarterly
estimated tax of $6,200 in a special bank account. "I
cannot contribute one more dollar toward the purchase of
more bombs and bullets," she wrote. |
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Jane
Briggs Hart
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World
Environment Day was established by the U.N. General Assembly
to commemorate the opening of the Stockholm Conference
on the Human Environment in Sweden. The United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) was established as a result
of the conference.
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UNEP
Mission: To provide leadership and encourage partnership
in caring for the environment by inspiring, informing,
and enabling nations and peoples to improve their quality
of life without compromising that of future generations.
read
more
past
milestones of World Environment Day
|
Each
year World Environment Day adopts a theme.
For
2007 the theme of World Environment Day is MELTING ICE – A
HOT TOPIC?
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| Thousands
marched in Germany to protest neo-Nazi violence against
foreigners, especially Turks. |
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First
issue of Peace News published in England.
read
more
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James
H. Meredith, the first African American ever to attend
the University of Mississippi,
was shot by a sniper in the back and legs while on a lone "March
Against Fear."
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He
was walking the 220 miles from Memphis, Tennessee,
to Jackson, Mississippi, to encourage others to stand
up for their rights and self-respect, and to register
to vote. Law enforcement officers and reporters following
him witnessed the attack, and the shooter was arrested.
read
more
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Comedian Dick Gregory began a hunger strike in the Olympia, Washington,
jail after his arrest with others at a fish-in, an act of civil
disobedience in support of the fishing rights of the Nisqually
Indian Tribe.
visit
Dick Greogy.com read
more about Dick Gregory
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| 40 members of
the American Indian Movement camped in the sacred Black Hills,
or Paha Sapa, atop Mount Rushmore; 20 were arrested.
They were demanding the U.S. honor the terms of the 1868
treaty with the Sioux Nation granting them the Black Hills
territory. |
read more |
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| The Pennsylvania Assembly banned
the importation of slaves into the colony. |
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Homer
Plessy, a Creole of European and African descent, was arrested
and jailed in 1892 for sitting in a Louisiana railroad
car designated for white people only.
Plessy had violated
the 1890 state law that called for racially segregated
facilities. He then went to court, claiming the law violated
the 13th and 14th amendments, but Judge John Howard Ferguson
found him guilty anyhow. |
|
The
U.S. Supreme Court, also found Plessy guilty by an 8-1
majority. The resulting doctrine of "separate but
equal" [separate
facilities for white and black people] institutionalized segregation
in the United States until overturned in 1954 by the case of
Brown v. Board of Education. |
more
about Homer Plessy |
Read
his petition to the Court |
|
|
 a
young Ghandi
|
In his first act of civil
disobedience, Mohandas Gandhi refused to comply with
racial segregation rules on a South African train and
was forcibly ejected at Pietermaritzburg.
read "Pietermaritzburg:
The Beginning of Gandhi's Odyssey"
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Seven
activists are arrested for distributing copies of the
Bill of Rights outside the Bradbury Science Museum, part
of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the
primary nuclear research facility in the U.S.
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270 walked out of graduation ceremonies at New York University (NYU)
to protest the presentation of an honorary degree to Robert McNamara,
then the Secretary of Defense and responsible for U.S. forces
waging war in Vietnam.
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| Two-thirds of the graduating
class of Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) turned
their backs on Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as he gave
the commencement address, silently expressing their opposition
to U.S. foreign policy and the war in Vietnam. |
|
Julia
Ward Howe, an abolitionist and composer of the “Battle
Hymn of the Republic,” tried to establish the Mothers'
Peace Day Observance on the second Sunday in June. In 1872
the first 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. The Mothers' Peace
Day was the beginning of the Mothers' Day holiday in the United
States now celebrated in May.
Her proclamation read in part:
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.... |
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Counsel for the
U.S. Army Joseph N. Welch confronted Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy
(R-Wisconsin) during hearings into alleged communist infiltration
of the Army Signal Corps. McCarthy attacked a member of Welch's
law firm, Frederick G. Fisher, as a communist for his prior
membership in the National Lawyers Guild.
|
Army
counsel Joseph N. Welch (left) confronts Sen Joseph McCarthy
(right)
|
Said
Welch: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long
last, have you left no sense of decency?" The entire
hearings and this encounter were broadcast live on television,
a first, and was the beginning of the end for McCarthy’s
power to spread fear.
read
more
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150,000 marched in London,
England, for nuclear disarmament, protesting the presence
of U.S. cruise missiles on British soil.
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Police banned a vigil by Women in Black in Belgrade, Serbia.
read
about Women in Black
Women
in Black demonstrations combine art & politics
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The Women's Peace Crusade
in Scotland launched a three-week campaign of street meetings
and demonstrations in dozens of towns to build support
for peace in the midst of World War I.
read
more
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| The "Equal
Pay Act of 1963" was passed and signed
into law; it guaranteed women equal pay for equal work. |
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Nelson
Mandela's first writings while imprisoned on South Africa’s
Robben Island were smuggled out and made public.
read
more about Nelson Mandela
Reflections
in Prison
Nelson
Mandela's cell on Robben Island
where
he spent 17 years
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Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS) held its founding convention
in Michigan and issued The Port Huron Statement, laying
out its principles and program.
“Making values explicit—an
initial task in establishing alternatives—is an activity
that has been devalued and corrupted. The conventional
moral terms of the age, the politician moralities—’free
world,’ ‘people's democracies’—reflect
realities poorly, if at all, and seem to function more
as ruling myths than as descriptive principles.”
read
The Port Huron Statement
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Thich
Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk from the Linh-Mu Pagoda in
Hue, Vietnam, burned himself to death (self-immolation)
in front of the U.S. embassy in downtown Saigon to protest
the the South Vietnamese regime they supported, and the
war.
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Daniel
Cohn-Bendit arrived in Britain, stirring up fears of
campus unrest. The 23-year-old
Paris law student had been given permission to remain in
the U.K. just 24 hours, but immediately threatened to defy
the authorities and out-stay his welcome [his visit was
later officially extended to 14 days]. Mr Cohn-Bendit—a
German citizen—had been expelled from France in May
for being an organizer of the French student and worker
demonstrations which almost brought that country to a standstill
the previous month.
read
more
|
"I
don't know how long I will stay.
I think it's a free
country"
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100,000
marched from United Nations headquarters in New York City
to Central Park during the 3rd U.N. Special Session on
Disarmament.
|
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In the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi,
civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death by a
white supremacist. His murderer was not convicted until
1994.
read
more
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Nelson
Mandela, a 46-year-old lawyer and a leader of the opposition
to South Africa’s racially separatist
apartheid system, was convicted of sabotage in the Rivonia
Trial and sentenced to life imprisonment.
From
Mandela’s statement to the court prior to sentencing:
“ I
have fought against white domination, and I have fought
against black domination. I have cherished the ideal
of a democratic and free society in which all persons
live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.
It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve.
But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared
to die.”
|
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Nelson
Mandela, 1963
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|
 Mildred
and Richard Loving
|
The
U.S. Supreme Court [Loving v. Virginia] struck down state
miscegenation
laws, those that prohibited interracial marriage, as violations
of a person’s right to equal protection under the law,
as guaranteed under the 14th amendment. In June of 1958,
Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter had married in Washington,
D.C. Upon return to their home state of Virginia, the couple
was arrested, convicted of a felony, and sentenced to a year
in prison. Their appeal of their conviction led to the decision.
|
Celebrating
the Freedom to marry on the
40th
anniversary of Loving v. Virginia
|
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From
Chief Justice Earl Warren’s majority opinion in
Loving v. Virginia
“ The
freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the
vital personal rights
essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free
men.”
|
The Gay and Non-Gay Partnership working to win marriage
equality nationwide
|
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In the largest U.S. peace demonstration to date, one million
rallied in Central Park to support the newly formed
Nuclear Freeze Campaign which called for a halt to
all nuclear weapons testing.
|
read
about the origin of the Nuclear Freeze Campaign
|
|
 |
Thurgood Marshall was nominated for justice of the
Supreme Court by President Lyndon Johnson. Marshall was
the Solicitor General of the United States and had been
the lead attorney in the Brown v. Board of Education case
that ended legal segregation.
He would be the first African
American on the Court.
more
about Justice Thurgood Marshall
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The
New York Times began publishing the “Pentagon Papers,” a
series of excerpts from the Defense Department’s
classified history of the Vietnam War, giving details of
U.S. involvement in Vietnam from the end of World War II
to 1968. Publication was interrupted after the Nixon administration
went to court to block it, asserting its power to exercise
prior restraint over its public release. The Washington
Post then began publishing the papers. On June 30 the Supreme
Court, 6-3, allowed publication to resume.
more
on the Pentagon Papers
|
|
“ But
out of the gobbledygook, comes a very clear thing: [unclear]
you can’t trust the government; you can’t believe
what they say; and you can’t rely on their judgment;
and the – the implicit infallibility of presidents,
which has been an accepted thing in America, is badly hurt
by this, because it shows that people do things the President
wants to do even though it’s wrong, and
the President can be wrong.”
-- H.R. Haldeman to President Nixon,
Monday, 14 June 1971, 3:09 p.m.
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Jeffrey Collins was awarded
a $5.3 million settlement from Shell Oil which had fired
him for being gay.
Collins had offered to settle out of court
for $50,000, but Shell refused. |
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The
Society for the Promotion of Universal and Permanent Peace,
often known as the London Peace Society, was founded. Nearly
all of the members of the Society came from Protestant
denominations, especially Quakers.
read
more
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The
U.S. Supreme Court decided a West Virginia case [Barnette
v. Board of Education] by upholding the constitutional right
of children in public schools to refuse to salute the American
flag when it is in conflict with their religious beliefs.
A group of Jehovah’s Witnesses had objected to the
mandatory salute as a violation of the Judeo-Christian third
commandment (Exodus 20:4) which prohibits worshipping a graven
image.
read
more
|
| School
children, in this undated Library of Congress photo, are
saluting the flag during the recitation of the Pledge of
Allegiance. This type of salute was changed to the “hand
over the heart” salute in the Flag Code of 1942. This
change came about because of the similarity of this salute
with the Nazi salute. |
|
| Members of Women Against
the Bomb called for complete nuclear disarmament during a
visit to Moscow, U.S.S.R. (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) |
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Dr.
Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician, author and peace activist,
was found guilty of aiding draft resisters during the Vietnam
War. A Federal District Court jury in Boston convicted Dr.
Spock and three others, including Yale University Chaplain
William Sloane Coffin, Jr., of conspiring to “aid,
abet, and counsel draft registrants to violate the Selective
Service Act.”
read
A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority co-authored by
Dr. Spock (1967)
|
|
60,000 marched to Central
Park demanding economic sanctions against
South Africa for
their apartheid regime because it enforced a
white supremacist
society that disenfranchised the vast majority of the population
categorized
as black or colored. |
|
The
Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was founded in Chicago
by a group of students including James Farmer and Bayard
Rustin. They found inspiration in Gandhi, and his non-violent
victory over British colonial rule of India, for their
struggle to achieve full rights for African Americans.
view
a history of CORE
|
 |
|
The
U.S. Supreme Court ruled (U. S. v. Sisson) that conscientious
objectors, those who refuse military service or to bear
arms, need not base their moral beliefs on the tenets of
an organized religion.
visit
the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors
|
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|
Following a meeting between
South Vietnamese envoy Nguyen Dinh Thuan and President
John F. Kennedy, the United States agreed to increase the
presence of American military advisors in Vietnam from
340 to 805, and to provide direct training and combat supervision
to South Vietnamese troops.
The number of U.S. personnel
rose to 3,200 by the end of 1962.
President
Ngo Dinh Diem and President Eisenhower in DC, five years
earlier
|
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South African police opened fire on black students
peacefully protesting the requirement to learn Afrikaans,
the language of the small white majority that enforced
the apartheid regime.
|
|
Over
150 South African children were killed and hundreds more
injured in the shooting -- what became known as the Soweto
Massacre.
read
more on Soweto
fact:
Soweto stands for
SOuth WEst TOwnships
|
 |
|
|
 President
Ronald Reagan with Caspar Weinberger, George Shultz, Ed
Meese, and Don Regan discussing the President's remarks
on the Iran-Contra affair.
|
Former
Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger was indicted on felony
charges in the Iran-Contra affair, charged with four
counts of lying to Congress and prosecutors. He had concealed
the secret arrangement to provide funds to the Nicaraguan
contra rebels with profits from selling arms to Iran.
The Reagan administration was circumventing the legal ban
on material support for the terrorist activities of the contras.
Iran had needed the weapons for its war with Iraq, and it
was hoped that Iran would respond by encouraging the release
of hostages being held by Islamist groups in Lebanon.
|
| Pres.
Reagan had repeatedly and publicly promised never to trade
arms for hostages, and had maintained the break in diplomatic
relations with the Iranian revolutionary government. |
Weinberger
and the five others charged were all pardoned by President
George H. W. Bush six months later, days before the trial
was to start, and shortly before Pres. Bush would be leaving
office.
more
on Iran-Contra pardons
|
|
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|
The
Cherokee Nation began the 1,200-mile forced march known
as the Trail
of Tears. Their removal from their ancestral land
had been ordered by Pres. Andrew Jackson as the result
of a treaty signed by a small minority of the tribe, and
approved in the Senate by a one-vote margin. Ordered to
move on the Cherokee, General John Wool resigned his command
in protest; Gen. Winfield Scott and 7000 troops moved in
to enforce the treaty.
|
|
"The
Trail Where They Cried" ("Nunna daul Tsuny" in
the Cherokee language) led from northern Georgia to Oklahoma
allong which an estimated 4,000 died from hunger, exposure
and disease.
a
Brief History of The Trail of Tears
|
|
Listen
to Sara Vowell’s contemporary take on this history: "History
repeats itself. The first time as tragedy. The second
time as farce. The third time as tourist trap."
|
|
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| The
Supreme Court struck down rules requiring the recitation
of the Lord's Prayer
or the reading of Bible verses in public
schools as a violation of the first amendment’s prohibition
on establishment of religion [Murray v. Curlett]. From Mr.
Justice Tom Clark’s opinion: “It is not the amount
of public funds expended; as this case illustrates, it is
the use to which public funds are put that is controlling.
For the First Amendment does not say that some forms of establishment
are allowed; it says that "no law respecting an establishment
of religion" shall be made. What may not be done directly
may not be done indirectly lest the Establishment Clause
become a mockery.” |
|
|
In
the early morning five men were arrested for breaking
into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at
the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. to install
bugging devices. They had been hired and financed by
President Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect
the President (CREEP). The abuse of power and obstruction
of justice involved in the cover-up of this crime eventually
led to the resignation of the President under threat
of impeachment.
|
left
to right: James McCord, Jr., Roman Gonzalez, Frank Sturgis,
Eugenio Martinez, and Bernard Baker.
|
|
|
Articles
of impeachment against Nixon
a
Watergate chronology
|
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|
The
Oberlin Non-Resistance Society was formed at the Ohio
university by students who believed “that the Gospel
of Jesus Christ inculcates the duty of peace and good-will.” They
were inspired by abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s
New England group of the same name. They rejected all
use of violence even in the name of duty to country. “we
must submit to the ‘powers that be,’ and ‘obey
magistrates,’ except when their requirements conflict
with God’s laws; when we are meekly to endure the
penalty of disobedience ‘threatening them not.’ ” [see
June 20, 1967 below]
Though denounced by the faculty and ignored by the student
newspaper, the group was just the first in a succession of
peace organizations at Oberlin.
|
read more |
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|
