March


March 1, 1943

A huge rally in New York City’s Madison Square called on the U.S. government to reconsider its refusal to offer sanctuary to Jewish refugees of Nazi Germany.

March 1, 1954

Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Day, or Bikini Day, marks the anniversary of the explosion of the largest-ever U.S. nuclear weapon which contaminated major parts of the Marshall Islands [see February 28, 1954]. The land and people of the south Pacific have been exposed to numerous nuclear bomb tests and the radioactive aftermath.
In addition to the 67 U.S. tests at Bikini and Enewetak Atolls, France tested 193 weapons in French Polynesia, 46 in the atmosphere. The U.K. exploded 34 devices on Malden and Christmas Islands.

The day is also intended to call attention to the potential danger of the increasing trans-oceanic shipment of hazardous nuclear materials, and the need of nuclear and shipping nations to consider the rights and health of the indigenous peoples of the region.
Indigenous People and Nuclear Weapons

The proposed South Pacific Nuclear-Free Zone Treaty


March 1, 1961

 

 

President John F. Kennedy issued Executive Order 10924 establishing the Peace Corps as a new agency within the Department of State. The same day, he sent a message to Congress asking for permanent funding for the agency, which would send trained American men and women to foreign nations to assist in development efforts. The Peace Corps captured the imagination of the U.S. public, and during the week following its creation, thousands of letters poured into Washington from young Americans hoping to volunteer.

read more


March 1, 1956

The University of Alabama permanently expelled Autherine Lucy, the first African-American person ever admitted to the University (following a federal court’s ordering her admission).

She was met with rioting by thousands of students (none of whom were disciplined) and others. She charged in court that University officials had been complicit in allowing the disorder, as a means of avoiding compliance with the court order. The trustees expelled her for making such “ baseless, outrageous and unfounded charges of misconduct on the part of the university officials.”


Burning desegregation litgerature at the University of Alabama. Students, adults and even groups from outside of Alabama shouted racial epithets, threw eggs, sticks and rocks, and generally attempted to block her way.

March 1, 1974

Former top Nixon White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, and former Attorney General John Mitchell, were indicted on obstruction of justice charges related to the Watergate break-in.


March 1, 1981

Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands began a hunger strike at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland; he died 65 days later.

He had dedicated his life to freeing Northern Ireland
from British rule.

read more


March 2, 1807

The U.S. Congress sought to end international slave trade by passing an act to make it unlawful “to import or bring into the United States or the territories thereof from any foreign kingdom, place, or country, any negro, mulatto, or person of colour, with intent to hold, sell, or dispose of such negro, mulatto, or person of colour, as a slave, or to be held to service or labour." Domestic traffic in slaves, however, was still legal and unregulated.
The first shipload of African captives to North America had arrived at Jamestown, Virginia, in August 1619, and the first American slave ship, named Desire, sailed from Marblehead, Massachusetts, in 1637. In total, nearly 15 million Africans were transported as slaves to the Americas. The African continent, meanwhile, lost approximately 50 million human beings to slavery and related deaths. Despite the federal prohibition and because the slave trade was so profitable, an additional 250,000 slaves would be imported illegally by the time the Civil War began in 1861.

African slave trade timeline


March 2, 1955 

 

Nine months before Rosa Parks made headlines, teenager Claudette Colvin was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person.

 

Claudette Colvin later in life


March 3, 1863

In the midst of the Civil War, Pres. Abraham Lincoln signed a conscription act that created the first draft lottery of American citizens. The act called for registration of all males between the ages of 20 and 35, and unmarried men up to 45, including aliens with the intention of becoming citizens, by April 1. Exemptions from the draft could be bought for $300 or by finding a substitute draftee, raising the objection, "rich man's war, but poor man's fight." Black Americans were also not eligible because they weren’t considered citizens.

Bounties for New York military "volunteers" during the Civil War

March 3, 1913 

The day before Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration as president, 8000 from the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), representing every state, marched in Washington, D.C. to call for a constitutional amendment granting women the right to vote.
Organized by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who had been inspired by the parades, pickets and speeches of the British suffragists, the march drew hundreds of thousands of spectators. Though some of the marchers were attacked by onlookers, the march focused attention on the suffrage issue.
Short video about Alice Paul

March 3, 1961 

The village council in the Inupiat Eskimo town of Point Hope, Alaska, formally protested, in a letter to President Kennedy, the chain explosion of three atomic bombs in the nearby above-ground "Project Chariot" tests. The project entailed using atomic explosions to create a harbor near Point Hope in northwest Alaska. The excavation never happened due to public opposition and inspired native peoples in Alaska to assert their rights and legitimate land claims.

 

 

Edward Teller "Father of the hydrogen bomb" arrives to promote plans for Project Chariot
read more

March 3, 2003

In the first-ever worldwide theatrical act of dissent, there were at least 1,029 stagings of Lysistrata, the 2400-year-old anti-war comedy by Greek playwright Aristophanes. Conceived and organized in just two months by Kathryn Blume and Sharron Bower, the performances occurred on the same day to express opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Staged in 59 countries (including Iraq), the bawdy play tells of Athenian and Spartan women who unite to deny their lovers sex in order to stop the 22-year-long Peloponnesian War between the two city-states. Desperate for intimacy, the men finally agree to lay down their swords and see their way to achieving peace through diplomacy.

 

About the organizer
More about how it happened

March 4, 1917

 

Montana elected Republican Jeanette Rankin as the first woman to sit in the U.S. House of Representatives. Rankin voted against American entry into both world wars, and later led marches against the Vietnam war.

 

more about Jeanette Rankin

 


March 4, 1933

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sworn in as president in the midst of the Great Depression. From his inaugural address:
“ This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure, as it has endured, will revive and will prosper.
So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.”
Audio and video of the speech

March 4, 1969

the UCS today

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) was founded.

From its founding document: “Misuse of scientific and technical knowledge presents a major threat to the existence of mankind. Through its actions in Vietnam our government has shaken our confidence in its ability to make wise and humane decisions. There is also disquieting evidence of an intention to enlarge further our immense destructive capability...”

Continued at...


March 4, 1978

40,000 demonstrated against a uranium enrichment plant in Almelo, Netherlands.

March 5, 1970

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty went into effect after ratification by 43 nations.

The agreement sought to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament, as well as general and complete disarmament. It has since been joined by 189 countries, and is enforced through the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency.


Read about the non-proliferation treaty


March 5, 1994

Ukraine, having voluntarily agreed to give up its nuclear weapons following the collapse of the Soviet Union, began transfer of its nuclear stockpile to Russia. Ukraine, which had the world’s third largest weapons stockpile, rid itself of all 1300 warheads within about two years.

 

 read more

Schoolchildren preparing to turn the keys to destroy the last missile silo in the Ukraine. October 30, 2001                    



March 6, 1857

The U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision (Sanford v. Dred Scott) which declared that an escaped slave, Scott, could not sue for his freedom in federal court because those of African descent could never be considered citizens but “as a subordinate and inferior class of beings.”

Dred Scott

Chief Justice Roger Taney stated in his opinion that the "unhappy Black Race . . . had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it."



Chief Justice Roger Taney

read more read the decision

March 6, 1884
Susan B. Anthony and more than 100 delegates from the National Woman Suffrage Association met with Pres. Chester Alan Arthur concerning women's right to vote. Anthony asked him, "Ought not women have full equality and political rights?" He responded, "We should probably differ on the details of that question."
Susan B. Anthony
Pres. Chester Alan Arthur

March 6, 1957 

Ghana became the first black African country to become independent from colonial rule.
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah became independent Ghana's first leader.

read more



Ghana's flag


Dr. Kwame Nkrumah

March 6, 1967 

Muhammad Ali was ordered by the Selective Service to be inducted into military service. He refused, citing his religious beliefs that precluded him from killing others.

 

"I ain't got no quarrel with those Vietcong." 

 

 

< Top Black athletes gather to hear Muhammad Ali (formerly Cassius Clay) give his reasons for rejecting the draft, United States, June 4, 1967.


March 6, 1982

The United Nations University for Peace near San Jose, Costa Rica, was founded. The University had been chartered by the General Assembly for research and the dissemination of knowledge specifically aimed at training and education for peace.

visit the University for Peace

 

The monument on campus sculpted by Cuban artist Thelvia Marín in 1987, is the world's largest peace monument.


March 7, 1932

The Ford Hunger March began on Detroit’s East Side and proceeded 10 miles seeking relief during the Great Depression. Facing hunger and evictions, workers had formed neighborhood Unemployed Councils. Along the route, the marchers were given good wishes from Detroit Mayor Frank Murphy as well as two motorcycle escorts, and thousands joined the marchers along the route.
At the Detroit city limit, the marchers were met by Dearborn police and doused by fire hoses. Despite the cold weather, they continued to the Employment Office of the Ford River Rouge plant, from which there had been massive layoffs. Five workers were killed and nineteen wounded by police and company “security” armed with pistols, rifles and a machine gun.
According to Dave Moore, one of the marchers, “That blood was black blood and white blood. One of the photos that was published in the Detroit Times, but never seen since, shows a black woman, Mattie Woodson, wiping the blood off the head of Joe DiBlasio, a white man who lay there dying . . . It’s been 75 years, but when you drive down Miller Road today, your car tires will be moistened with the blood that those five shed.” Grave markers with the words “His Life for the Union” pay tribute to them in Woodmere Cemetery on Detroit’s West Side.
Dave Moore, one of the leaders of the Ford Hunger March.

March 7, 1965

525 civil rights advocates began a 54-mile march on a Sunday morning from Selma, Alabama, to the capital of Montgomery, to promote voting rights for blacks. Just after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the outskirts of Selma, the marchers were attacked in what became known as Bloody Sunday.

 

Enforcing an order by Gov. George Wallace, the group was broken up by state troopers and volunteer officers of the Dallas County sheriff who used tear gas, nightsticks, bullwhips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. John Lewis, then head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a leader of the march (and now a congressman), suffered a fractured skull.

 read more

ABC television interrupted a Nazi war crimes documentary, “Judgment at Nuremberg,” to show footage of the violence in Selma, confusing some viewers about who was beating whom.

Injured in Selma

March 7, 1988

A Federal Court ruled in Atlanta, Georgia, that a peace group must have the same access to students at high school career days as military recruiters.

 

the anti-recruitment movement today:

LEAVE MY CHILD ALONE!



March 8, 1908

Thousands of workers in the New York needle trades (primarily women) demonstrated and began a strike for higher wages, a shorter workday and
an end to child labor.

 

This event became the basis for International Women's Day celebrated all over the world since March 8, 1945.

read more


March 8, 1965

About 3,500 U. S. Marines became the first American combat troops in Vietnam, landing near the coastal city of Da Nang. The USS Henrico, Union, and Vancouver, carrying the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade under Brig. Gen. Frederick J. Karch, took up stations 4,000 yards off Red Beach Two, north of Da Nang.


March 8, 1983

40,000 in Tel Aviv, Israel, organized by Peace Now, rallied against the war in Lebanon.


March 8, 1995

Women in Black demonstrated in the center of Belgrade, Serbia, on International Women's Day, expressing solidarity with Kosovar women: "The Albanian women from Kosovo are our sisters." The women were both spit at and kicked, but didn't give up, and stood there to the end of the usual hour. 
Kosovo, whose population is overwhelmingly (90%) ethnically Albanian, is considered the national and religious birthplace of Serbians. Both Kosovo and Serbia had been part of the former Yugoslavia, which had granted partial autonomy to Kosovo in 1974. Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic (later tried for war crimes) in 1989 withdrew that autonomy and revoked the official status of the Albanian language.


March 9, 1839

The U.S. Supreme Court, with only one dissent, freed the slaves who had seized the Spanish slave ship Amistad, ruling that they had been illegally forced into slavery, and thus were free under American law.

 

Slave ship

They had mutinied and taken control of the ship off the shore of Cuba (then a colony of Spain) and demanded to be taken back to Africa but wound up in U.S. waters off the coast of Long Island, New York.

read more

The slaves’ leader, Joseph Cinque, returned to Africa to become a slaver himself.

March 9, 1965

Two days after Bloody Sunday [see March 7, 1965] Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. led 1500 outraged people from around the country back to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. Confronted once again by state troopers blocking passage to the bridge, King knealt in prayer, then led his followers back, avoiding further violence.
Later that evening three white ministers were attacked by locals as they left a soul food restaurant in Selma. Rev. James Reeb was struck on the head with a club and died two days later.

March 9, 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

Video of Joan Baez performing with the Smothers Brothers

March 10, 1969

James Earl Ray was jailed for 99 years by a court in Memphis, Tennessee, after admitting he murdered American civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King, who preached and practiced nonviolence, was shot dead by a sniper in Memphis as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
The building now houses the National Civil Rights Museum.

Witnesses pointing toward the source of the shot that killed King
National Civil Rights Museum

March 10, 2006

Turkish conscientious objector (CO) Mehmet Tarhan was released unexpectedly from a military prison for having refused service in the army.

A court decided that he had already been held longer (23 months) than any possible sentence for the crime.
Mehmet Tarhan

Mehmet Tarhan's supporters

He was ordered, however, to present himself again for military service and thus be subject to re-arrest for the same offense.

War Resisters' International(WRI) led an international support campaign for him along with CO activists in Turkey.

More on Mehmet Tarhan and other Turkish COs


March 11, 1968

Cesar Chavez ended a 23-day fast for U.S. farm workers in a Delano, California, public park with 4000 supporters at his side, including Senator Robert Kennedy (D-New York). Cesar Chavez led the effort to organize farm workers into a union for better working conditions.

The story of Cesar Chavez


March 11, 1988

10 days of protest and direct action demanded an end to nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site. The site, larger than the state of Rhode Island, is an outdoor laboratory and national experimental center for testing nuclear weapons. The actions resulted in over 2,200 arrests, the largest number of arrests at a political protest outside Washington, D.C. in U.S. history.


March 12, 295

Maximilian was beheaded by Romans for refusing military service due to his Christian beliefs in Thevesta, North Africa.


March 12, 1912

Worker led by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) won the Lawrence, Massachusetts, "Bread & Roses" textile strike after 32,000 workers (mostly young female immigrants who spoke 25 different languages) stayed out for nine weeks. They were striking for a wage increase, double time for overtime and safer working conditions: the equipment was dangerous and the air quality caused lung disease in nearly one-third of the workers before the age of twenty-five.

read more

 

“Bread and Roses” became the strikers slogan and inspired a poem by by the same name.

read  the poem

<IWW organizer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn addresses a strike rally

Bread & Roses victory parade

Hear Judy Collins sing “Bread and Roses” from her album of the same title

(free Rhapsody software installation required)


March 12, 1930

Gandhi's Salt March began from Ahmadabad with 76 followers to protest the salt tax. Britain's Salt Acts prohibited Indians from collecting or selling salt, a staple in the Indian diet.
Citizens were forced to buy it from the British, who, in addition to exercising a monopoly over the manufacture and sale of salt, also exerted a heavy salt tax. Defying the Salt Acts, Gandhi reasoned, would be a simple way for many Indians to break a British law nonviolently, increasing the pressure for independence.
By the time Gandhi had covered the 241 miles to the coastal city of Dandi on the Arabian Sea, the number of marchers had grown into the thousands.
Gandhi leading the Salt March
More on the Salt March

March 12, 1978

150,000 demonstrated against construction of a nuclear power plant in Lemoniz, Spain, part of the Basque region. No fewer than a dozen plants were planned in a relatively small, densely populated area, Lemoniz being only 5 miles (12 km) from Bilbao, a city of a million. The opposition was concerned about the possibility of accidents.


March 13, 1830

The term “rat” first appeared in print referring to a worker who betrays the interests of fellow workers. The New York Daily Sentinel, reporting on replacement workers who had agreed to work for two-thirds of the going rate.
“ . . . [many printers are out of work, others are being paid about 2/3 the regular pay; they should join in cooperative associations, ‘as we have done’]
“ [While] the master printers [fill] their offices with boys and two-thirds men, alias ‘rats,’ it will be difficult to find a remedy.”

March 13, 1864

The first contingent of 14,030 Navajo reached Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Men, women and children had been forced to march almost 400 miles from northeastern Arizona and northwestern New Mexico to Bosque Redondo, a desolate tract on the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico. Traveling in harsh winter conditions for almost two months, about 200 Navajo died of cold and starvation.  More died after they arrived at the barren reservation.  The forced march, led by Kit Carson, became known by the Navajos as the "Long Walk." 

A grueling 400-mile march to imprisonment in a sterile land.

Resources on The Long Walk


March 13, 1945

Pax Christi, an international Catholic peace organization was founded in France. From their website: “Pax Christi is a ground up organization – it began with a few committed people who spoke out, prayed and worked for reconciliation at the end of the second world war, and is now active in more than 60 countries and five continents, with more than 60,000 members worldwide.”

Pax Christi history


March 13, 1968

Clouds of nerve gas drifted outside the Army's Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, poisoning 6,400 sheep in nearby Skull Valley.

read more about Dugway - the home of Amerian WMD

Sign near Dugway: Warning Hazardous Area: This area may contain Chemical, Biological and Radiological contaminated material and explosives . . . .

March 14, 1879

Physicist and peace activist Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany. The Nobel Prize winner opposed militarism and became a champion of nuclear disarmament. Though he supported the development of the atomic bomb in fear that Germany would develop it first, he warned in a 1944 letter to the Manhattan Project’s Niels Bohr: "When the war is over, then there will be in all countries a pursuit of secret war preparations with technological means which will lead inevitably to preventative wars and to destruction even more terrible than the present destruction of life."

 read more


March 14, 1934

The National Civil Liberties Council was founded in England, principally to monitor the policing of protests. Renamed Liberty in 1989, it has campaigned to protect and promote rights and freedoms for over 70 years. 

More background
The organization today

March 14, 1990

 

Sixteen disability-rights activists were arrested at the U.S. Capitol demanding passage of what would become the Americans With Disabilities Act.

read more

 

disability rights demonstration


March 14, 2004

Opposition Socialists scored an upset win in Spain's general election three days following the Madrid train bombings. The conservative government had joined the U.S.-led coalition that invaded Iraq the previous year. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his party, Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE) had opposed the Iraq War and Spain’s involvement.


March 15, 1869

The first proposed amendment to the constitution guaranteeing women’s suffrage was introduced in the U.S. Congress.

March 15, 1942

Over 1300 Norwegian teachers were arrested by the Nazi-installed government run by Vidkun Quisling after 12,000 of 14,000 nationwide had refused to join the new teachers’ association and resisted nazification of the curriculum. Half were held in a concentration camp outside the capital of Oslo. The rest were shipped to the Arctic for forced labor alongside Russian prisoners of war. Quisling is now considered a synonym for traitor.
Vidkun Quisling (left) rides with SS head Heinrich Himmler

March 15, 1965

Less than a week after the Bloody Sunday police attacks on peaceful marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon Johnson addressed the American people before a televised Joint Session of Congress. He said, "There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights . . . We have already waited a hundred years and more, and the time for waiting is gone . . . ."
Watch video or read the text of his speech

March 15, 1970

During a second attempt by Native American activists to occupy Seattle’s Fort Lawton, 78 protesters were arrested. They were demanding the city give the unused facility back to Native Americans.

read more

 

Indians demonstrating at Fort Lawton


March 15, 1993

The United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador concluded that most of the murder and human rights abuses during its civil war had been committed by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government through its various military, security and allied paramilitary organizations.

The complete report, “From Madness to Hope: The 12-Year War in El Salvador“



March 16, 1190
The entire Jewish community of York, England, perished while observing  Shabbat ha-Gadol, the last sabbath before Passover. Gathered together inside Clifford’s Tower for protection from the violent mob outside, many of the Jews took their own lives; others died in the flames they had lit, and those who finally surrendered were massacred and murdered.


Clifford's Tower

This occurred just after the beginning of the Third Crusade. "Before attempting to revenge ourselves upon the Moslem unbelievers, let us first revenge ourselves upon the 'killers of Christ' living in our midst!"

March 16, 1827
The first newspaper owned and edited by and for African-Americans, Freedom's Journal, was published in New York City. It appeared the same year slavery was abolished in New York state.
 


two of the early founders
of
Freedom's
Journal


March 16, 1921

The War Resisters International was founded with sections set up in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. By 1939 there were 54 WRI Sections in 24 countries, including America.

WRI No More War demonstration in Berlin 1922

Their symbol: a broken gun.

Their slogan: "The right to refuse to kill."

read more


March 16, 1968

U.S. troops in South Vietnam killed an estimated 350 unarmed men, women and children in My Lai, a cluster of hamlets in the coastal lowlands of Quang Ngai Province. Lt. William L. Calley, Jr. commanded the men of Charlie Company, First Battalion, Americal Division, and was the only one tried out of 80 involved in what is called the My Lai Massacre. The Army, including a young Major Colin Powell, at first tried to cover it up and the media resisted reporting it.