September

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September 1, 1939

Nazi Germany invaded Poland, overwhelming the Polish Army with 58 German divisions and air cover from the German air force, the Luftwaffe. This action started the second world war, prompting England and France to declare war on Germany two days later.


September 1, 1945


The Emperor of Japan surrendered unconditionally to the U.S. and its allies in a ceremony on the deck of the battleship U.S.S. Missouri, ending the second world war.



September 1, 1986

Angelo (Charlie) Liteky & George Mizo, both Vietnam veterans, began an open-ended Fast For Life on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. They were calling attention to their opposition to U.S. support of the Nicaraguan contras and repressive regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala.


“our expression of a deeply felt desire to do everything and anything we can . . . to stop the war with Nicaragua.”

Charles Liteky George Mizo
Liteky was a Catholic chaplain in the Vietnam War and had received the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Charles Liteky and his subsequent peace efforts



September 1, 1987

During a nonviolent protest at the Concord (California) Naval Weapons Station, a Navy munitions train ran over Brian Willson.
An Air Force and Vietnam veteran, Willson and the other protesters were attempting to stop shipment of weapons to Nicaragua and
El Salvador.

Brian Willson bird-watching California, 1997.

They considered U.S. policy in Central America a violation of the Nuremberg Principles. (Here is a link to those principles)
Willson lost both legs and suffered other injuries but has remained an active and articulate leader in the anti-military movement.



Ron Kovic (author 'Born on the Fourth of July')
and Brian Willson (also born on the Fourth of July)

Willson’s testimony before the U.S. House Armed Services Subcommittee on Investigations


September 1, 1989

White House staffers decided to purchase some crack cocaine so President George H.W. Bush could hold the illegal drug in his hands during a national address. On the first attempt, the drug dealer didn't show up. On the second try, an undercover drug agent's body microphone didn't work. Trying for the third time, Bush's team managed to purchase the crack, but the camera operator videotaping the deal missed the action as a homeless person assaulted him.



September 1, 1997

Kurdish and British activists blockaded an arms trade exhibition outside London. 89 members of Campaign Against the Arms Trade (CAAT)were arrested for protesting the presence of Turkish, Chinese and Indonesian government representatives in Britain to purchase weapons. The Labour government had pledged “[We will] not permit the sale of arms to regimes that could use them for internal repression or external aggression . . . .” Great Britain is the world’s second largest arms manufacturer (by dollar volume) after the U.S.

Campaign Against the Arms Trade home


September 1 - International Day of War Tax Resistance.

“Refusing to pay taxes for war is probably as old as the first taxes levied for warfare...”

War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee



September 2, 1885

A mob of white coal miners, led by the Knights of Labor, violently attacked their Chinese co-workers in Rock Springs, Wyoming, killing 28 and burning the homes of 75 Chinese families. The white miners wanted the Chinese barred from working in the mine. The mine owners and operators had brought in the Chinese ten years earlier to keep labor costs down and to suppress strikes.

Chinese fleeing Rock Springs
The unfortunate story and illustrations of the scene (scroll down)


September 2, 1945


Revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam a republic and independent from France (National Day). Half a million people gathered in the capital of Hanoi to hear him read the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, which was modeled on the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

note:Ho Chi Minh translates to 'He Who Enlightens'

Read about how it was influenced by the U.S. Declaration



September 2, 1966

On what was supposed to be the first day of school in Grenada, Mississippi—and the first day in an integrated school for 450 Negro children—the school board postponed opening of school for 10 days because of “paperwork.” Nevertheless, the high school played its first football game that night. Some of the Negro kids who had registered for that school tried to attend the game but were beaten and their car windows smashed.


September 2, 1969

Vietnamese revolutionary and national leader Nguyen Tat Thanh (aka Ho Chi Minh), 79, died of natural causes in Hanoi.   Uncle Ho
 
Ho Chi Minh

Ho and his struggle for Vietnamese independence



September 3, 1783

The Paris Peace Treaty between the U.S. and Great Britain — formally ending the American War for Independence — was signed by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin and John Jay.
In addition to giving formal recognition to the U.S., the treaty established U.S. boundaries, specified certain fishing rights, allowed creditors of each country to be paid by citizens of the other, restored the rights and property of Loyalists, opened up the Mississippi River to citizens of both nations, and provided for evacuation of all British forces.

The Treaty of Paris



September 3, 1838

Frederick Douglass made his escape from slavery in Baltimore and went on in life to become an abolitionist, journalist, author, and human rights advocate.

The escape from “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave”

A Frederick Douglass biography


Frederick Douglass pin
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September 3, 1957

Elizabeth Eckford was blocked from becoming the first black student at Little Rock’s Central High School in Arkansas.


September 3, 1970

Representatives from 27 African nations, the Caribbean nations, four South American countries, Australia, and the U.S. met in Atlanta, Georgia, for the first Congress of African People.
Read more about CAP in historical context


September 3, 1997

The Musa Anter, or Kurdish Peace Train (named after an assassinated Kurdish writer) was organized by peace activists to call attention to the oppression of the Kurdish people in Turkey by their own government. At the time, the Turkish words for Kurd, Kurdish, guerilla and torture were banned, and it was illegal to speak the Kurdish language.

The Peace Train was to leave London and travel through Europe to Diyarbakir in eastern Turkey to celebrate International Anti-War Day there. Germany disallowed passage of the Train through its territory (the Germans and Turks have strong military ties). The group then flew to Istanbul, intending to take a fleet of busses to the Kurdish region. Turkish troops stopped them from reaching Diyarbakir, forcing them back to the capital.

On this day they tried to hold a press conference to discuss the Kurdish issue. The police arrested or beat all present, including foreign diplomats.
The story of the Musa Anter Peace Train


September 4, 1949

Paul Robeson, scholar, athlete, musician and leader, defying a racist and red-baiting mob, sang to 15,000 at a Labor Day gathering in Peekskill, New York.
 
Paul Robeson (at microphone) singing to the Labor Day gathering in Peekskill, New York

The story and photographs of what happened

Film from that day narrated by Sidney Poitier

Paul Robeson pin
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Union printed - made in Detroit.


September 4, 1954

The Peace Pledge Union (PPU) organized a demonstration against the H-Bomb in London’s Trafalgar Square.
The PPU dates back to October 1934.

The PPU today
History of the Peace Pledge Union
Young Peace Pledge Union members today.


September 4, 1957

Elizabeth Eckford and eight other young Negroes were blocked from becoming the first black student at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Governor Orval Faubus had called out the National Guard to prevent the court-ordered integration of the public schools in the state’s capital.
President Dwight Eisenhower eventually sent in federal troops to guarantee the law was enforced.
Elizabeth Eckford Read more Elizabeth Eckford followed and taunted by mob, 1957.

A very interesting related story:



September 4, 1970

Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) began Operation RAW (Rapid American Withdrawal). Over the following three days more than 200 veterans, assisted by the Philadelphia Guerilla Theater, staged a march from Morristown, New Jersey, to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, reenacting the invasion of small rural hamlets along the way.

Operation Rapid American Withdrawal 1970-2005: An Exhibition:



September 4, 1978
Simultaneous demonstrations in Moscow’s Red Square and in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. were organized by the War Resisters League, calling for nuclear disarmament.


September 5, 1882
Well over 10,000 workers demanding the 8-hour day marched to protest working conditions in the first-ever U.S. Labor Day parade, held in New York City. About a quarter million New Yorkers turned out to watch.

The idea was that of Peter J. McGuire, a union carpenter and cofounder of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, a precursor of the American Federation of Labor.

< Peter J. McGuire, the carpenter and labor leader who conceived of Labor Day
1st Labor Parade in Union Square, NYC 1882
He wanted to honor the American worker and create a holiday break between the 4th of July and Thanksgiving, proposing a “festive parade through the streets of the city.”
Originally the second Tuesday of the month, it is now the first Monday, and recognized as a national holiday. 
More on the history and practice of Labor Day


September 5, 1917

In 48 coordinated raids across the country, later known as the Palmer Raids, federal agents seized records, destroyed equipment and books, and arrested hundreds of activists involved with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known fondly as the Wobblies.

Attorney General Mitchell Palmer

 

 Big Bill Haywood

Among the arrested was William D. “Big Bill” Haywood, a leader of the IWW, for the “crimes of labor" and “obstructing World War I.”
An Italian anarchist’s bomb blew himself up on the porch of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer’s residence in Washington shortly after the discovery of 38 bombs mailed to leading politicians.
More on Attorney General Palmer


September 5, 1981

The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp was established outside Greenham Air Base in England, as “Women For Life On Earth.”



 

Greenham Peace Camp

April, 1983.

More on Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp



September 6, 1941


All Jews over the age of six in German-occupied territories were ordered by the Nazi regime to wear a yellow Star of David on their clothing.

More about The Yellow Star



September 6, 1963

Anti-nuclear marchers who began in Glasgow, Scotland, arrived in London and attempted to present a dummy missile to the British Imperial War Museum.



September 7, 1948

3,000 attended a rally to publicly launch the Peace Council in Melbourne, Australia.



September 7, 1957

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

 

Cover from their magazine "The Ladder", October,1968

Barabara Gittings leading a picket in the '60s


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."


September 8, 1756

Colonel John Armstrong and troops under his command destroyed the Indian village of Kittanning. The Corporation of the City of Philadelphia awarded a silver medal to Armstrong and his officers for their action.


September 8, 1941

In Norway, 2000 workers in the shipyards went on strike against diversion of milk, "depriving mothers and babies," to military use by the German soldiers in Finland. In retaliation, Oslo was placed under a 7 o'clock nightly curfew, after which transportation was stopped, public meetings prohibited, radios seized, dancing forbidden. Boy Scouts, Girl Guides and Salvation Army organizations were all dissolved.

More about the Milk strike



September 8, 1965

Table grape pickers, the mostly Filipino members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), led by Larry Itliong, went on strike for higher wages in Delano, California.

 
Larry Itliong

More about Larry Itliong



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.
Read about Heather Anne Thompson's recent book "Blood in the Water: . . ."


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 10, 1897

Nineteen unarmed striking coal miners were killed and 36 more wounded in Lattimer (near Hazleton), Pennsylvania, for refusing to disperse, by a posse organized by the Luzerne County sheriff. The strikers, most of whom were shot in the back, were originally brought in as strike-breakers, but later created their own union.

The background and details



September 10,
1963

Twenty black students entered public schools in Birmingham, Tuskegee and Mobile, Alabama. The Governor George C. Wallace had ordered Alabama state troopers to stop the federal court-ordered integration of Alabama’s elementary and high schools. President John Kennedy responded by calling out the Alabama National Guard to protect the students and to see the order enforced.
President Kennedy spoke that day at American University’s commencement, saying,
"Peace need not be impractical, war not inevitable . . . There is not peace in many of our cities because there is not freedom."



September 10, 1996

 

Sheryl Crow's second album was banned from Wal-Mart stores because the song she co-wrote with Tad Wadhams, "Love Is A Good Thing" opens with
“Watch out sister, watch out brother,
Watch our children while they kill each other
With a gun they bought at Wal-Mart discount stores....”

Read more about this event   and an update


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:
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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 12, 1977

Steve Biko, the leader of the black consciousness movement, and probably the most influential young black leader in South Africa, died while being held by security forces in Port Elizabeth; he was the forty-first person to die while in police custody in South Africa.

The Death of Stephen Biko

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September 12, 1998
A group later known as the Cuban Five was arrested after infiltrating groups which had previously executed terrorist attacks on Cuban soil.
They were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage against the U.S. Their conviction was overturned by a three-judge panel of the 11th Circuit Court, then reinstated by the full court; an appeal to the Supreme Court is planned.
The United Nations Commission on Arbitrary Detentions has characterized their imprisonment as arbitrary detentio
n.
Who are the Cuban 5?


September 12, 2002

President George W. Bush told skeptical world leaders at the United Nations to confront the ''grave and gathering danger'' of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or to stand aside as the United States acted.

 


September 13, 1858

A group of the citizens of Oberlin, Ohio, stopped Kentucky slavecatchers from kidnapping John Price, a black man. Shakespeare Boynton, son of a wealthy landowner had lured Price with the promise of work. Oberlinians, black and white, from town and from the local College, pursued the kidnappers to nearby Wellington at word of his abduction.
These were twenty of the thirty-seven citizens from Oberlin and Wellington who were charged with breaking the law by helping John Price escape from slave catchers in the fall of 1858.
The Oberlin-Wellington Rescue and subsequent trial caught the eye of the nation as escalating tensions over slavery raised the prospect of civil war
The group, led by Charles Langston, James M. Fitch, bookseller and superintendent of the Oberlin Sunday School, and John Watson, a grocer, wanted to proceed nonviolently, but when the Kentuckians refused to surrender Price, the response was "we will have him anyhow."
They rushed the door guards of the Inn and theology student Richard Winsor took Price to safety, hidden for a time in the home of Oberlin College President James Fairchild, later helped across the Canadian border to freedom.
The Oberlin-Wellington Rescue


September 13, 1961

Bertrand Russell, aged 89, and 32 others were arrested during a major demonstration against nuclear weapons in Trafalgar Square, London.


September 13, 1971

President Richard Nixon, speaking to his Chief of Staff Robert Haldeman, was recorded on the White House’s taping system saying: "Now here's the point, Bob. Please get me the names of the Jews. You know, the big Jewish contributors to the Democrats. Could we please investigate some of the cocksuckers?"
Pres. Richard Nixon (L) with Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman, advisor John Ehrlichman (R) with Sec. of State (standing) Henry Kissinger

listen to The Smoking Gun:



September 13, 1982

 

The European Parliament voted to phase out promotion and advertising of war toys throughout the 25 countries of the European Union (formerly European Economic Community).



September 13, 1983

The first group from Peace Brigades International (PBI) arrived in Guatemala to provide unarmed and nonviolent witness protection for indigenous leaders. Following decades of severe repression of native ethnic groups by the unelected military government, the PBI team accompanied the Mutual Support Group (GAM in Spanish) of Families of the Disappeared, the first human rights group to emerge from the terror and survive.

PBI vision and mission



September 13, 1993

The Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, and the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat, shook hands before cheering crowds on the White House lawn in Washington after signing an accord establishing limited Palestinian autonomy.

Read more



September 14, 1918

Eugene V. Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for opposing U.S. entry into World War I. Debs had been an elected official in Indiana, a labor organizer, writer and editor, had founded the first industrial union in the U.S., the American Railway Union, and had run for President four times on the Socialist Party ticket.

He ran again for president from prison in 1920 with the slogan “From Atlanta Prison to the White House,” and received nearly one million.

Learn more about Eugene V. Debs

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September 14, 1940


Congress passed the Selective Service Act, providing for the first peacetime draft (though Japan had already invaded China in 1937 and Germany had invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1939) in U.S. history.




September 14, 1948

A groundbreaking ceremony took place in New York City at the site of the United Nations' world headquarters.

The 39-story building on 18 acres of Manhattan’s Turtle Bay neighborhood (donated by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.) on the East River. It is a major expression of the International Style with its simple geometric form and glass curtain wall, designed principally by Le Corbusier.

The UN building today

The site selected for the permanent
headquarters of the United Nations as it was in 1946.

Background and more examples of the minimalist, utilitarian International style



September 14, 1963

The ABC television network invited singer, songwriter, banjo player and activist Pete Seeger to appear on its Saturday night folk and acoustic music show, Hootenanny, despite the fact that he had been blacklisted.

But the invitation stood only if he'd sign an oath of loyalty to the U.S. He described his reaction: "This is ridiculous. I’d sign ’em, if you sign ’em, and everybody who's born will sign ’em, then we’d all be clean." 
In the 1940s Seeger traveled throughout the country with Woody Guthrie, performing at union meetings, strikes and demonstrations. After World War II, he and Lee Hays co-founded the Weavers, the legendary folk group that gained commercial success despite being blacklisted.

A Pete Seeger Biography

More about Hootenanny

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September 14, 1964

The Free Speech Movement began at the University of California-Berkeley when its Dean Katherine Towle (pronounced toll) announced that existing University regulations prohibiting advocacy of political causes or candidates, signing of members, and collection of funds by student organizations at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph, would henceforth be ''strictly enforced."

Read more



September 14, 1982

Wisconsin became the first to approve a statewide referendum calling for a freeze on all testing of nuclear weapons.


September 14, 1990

The Pentagon announced a $20 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (Saudi Arabia’s eastern neighbor) had invaded Kuwait six weeks earlier.

Saud royal family


September 14, 1991

The South African government, the African National Congress, the Inkatha Freedom Party, a total of forty organizations, signed the National Peace Accord. It led to the country’s first multi-racial elections and the end of South Africa's racially separatist apartheid (literally separateness in the Afrikaans language) political, economic and social system by 1994.
“ Bearing in mind the values which we hold, be these religious or humanitarian, we pledge ourselves with integrity of purpose to make this land a prosperous one where we can all live, work and play together in peace and harmony.”

Text of the National Peace Accord

Background of the conflict


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, 1970


Vice President Spiro Agnew said the youth of America were being "brainwashed into a drug culture" by rock music, movies, books, and underground newspapers.


Agnew Assails Songs and Films That Promote a 'Drug Culture'



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 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.

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.

NY Times, Sept 16, 1939

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 Banks

Russell 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 Remain The 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.


The details of the plan and the reaction
Dick Grasso


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.

A Gandhi chronology



September 17, 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.

Bertrand Russell at anti nuclear weapons March, 1961.

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.”

The full report



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 release from prison.


September 19, 1893 

With the signing of the Electoral Bill by Governor Lord Glasgow, New Zealand became the first major country in the world to grant national electoral rights to women. The bill was the outcome of years of suffragist meetings in towns and cities across the country, with women often traveling considerable distances to hear lectures and speeches and pass resolutions.

Read more about New Zealand’s efforts

Organizer Kate Sheppard delivered to parliament a petition signed by a quarter or more of all the women in the country. New Zealand women, both the native Ma¯ori and Päkehä (Anglo-European or non-Maori), first went to the polls in the national elections in November of 1893.
The United States granted women voting rights in 1920, and Great Britain didn’t guarantee full voting rights
until 1928.

Kate Sheppard, a leader of the New Zealand suffragette movement                      

Kate Sheppard, a leader of the New Zealand suffragist movement
A timeline of Women’s Suffrage in the U.S.


September 19, 1952
The United States prevented Charlie Chaplin, the groundbreaking British director, actor and producer, from returning to his Hollywood home until he had been investigated by Immigration Services. He had lived and worked in the U.S. more than thirty years.

He had been on the FBI's Security Index since 1948, and was one of over 300 people blacklisted by Hollywood film studios. Chaplin was unable to work after refusing to cooperate during his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Informed that he would not necessarily be welcomed back, he retorted, "I wouldn't go back there if Jesus Christ were president," and surrendered his U.S. re-entry permit in Switzerland.

 Charlie Chaplin
Chaplin’s FBI files

Charlie Chaplin: "My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist.

Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them."

Charlie Chaplin pin
1" diameter - satin finish
Union printed - made in Detroit.


September 19, 1957


The United States conducted its first underground nuclear test, called Rainier, in the Nevada desert under the leadership of Edward Teller.


Tunnels at the Nevada Test Site were used to conduct contained underground nuclear tests, such as the RAINIER event in 1957.


September 19, 1966

After 300 members of Grenada, Mississippi’s white community called for “an end to violence,” hundreds of Negro schoolchildren were allowed to integrate the local public schools. The leaders of the vicious organized attack on the kids the previous week (including the town’s justice of the peace) had been arrested by the FBI, and the mobs were gone, but the children were all escorted to school by community members, or driven in cars for safety. Folksinger Joan Baez had been in Grenada the previous week lending support and running the same risks as Grenadans struggling against the segregationist way of life.

Grenada Mississippi in 1966

Marching strong and proud

in Grenada, Mississippi, 1966

On the front line at the March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, 1965.

James Baldwin, Joan Baez, and James Forman (left to right)



More than forty years later year Joan is still playing for peace and justice. She performed at Camp Casey in support of Cindy Sheehan and her protest against the war in Iraq in Crawford, Texas.

Joan Baez pin
1" diameter - satin finish
Union printed - made in Detroit.


September 19, 1966

A group of 22 eminent U.S. scientists, including seven Nobel laureates, urged President Lyndon Johnson to halt the use of anti-personnel and herbicidal chemical weapons in Vietnam. That same day in Congress, House Republicans issued a “white Paper" warning the United States was becoming "a full-fledged combatant" in a war that was becoming "bigger than the Korean War." The paper urged the President to end the war "more speedily and at a smaller cost, while safeguarding the independence and freedom of South Vietnam."



September 19, 1977

A lawsuit was filed which would become "University of California Regents v. Bakke," a groundbreaking claim of "reverse discrimination" by a white prospective student (Allan Bakke) passed over for admission to the UC-Davis Medical School allegedly due to the school’s affirmative action program.


September 19, 2001

Some 5,000 marched in a nighttime procession through Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, mourning the dead of September 11, and calling for a non-military response by the U.S.



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.



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 22, 1966

Eight hundred Puerto Rican men pledged in Lares to refuse U.S. Vietnam draft. They saw compliance as "part of the colonial subjugation of our country."



September 22, 1980

The Solidarity union under leadership of Lech Walesa was allowed to organize by the Communist-led Polish government. The previous month the group had occupied the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk and had inspired a national general strike.


September 22, 1985



The first Farm Aid concert, organized principally by Willie Nelson, was held with more than 50 musicians raising $9 million for debt-ridden U.S. farmers.

 


Farm Aid home



September 23, 1949

President Harry Truman announced that the Soviet Union had exploded its first atomic bomb, an implosive plutonium weapon, the previous month (it had happened on August 29). "We have evidence," the White House statement said, "that within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the U.S.S.R."


September 23, 1979

200,000 attended an anti-nuclear rally in New York City’s Battery Park. It was the largest political protest
of the late '70s in the U.S., six months after the partial meltdown of the nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania. Two days earlier the 'No Nukes' concert, also known as the “Muse (Musicians United for Safe Energy) concert,” was held in Madison Square Garden, featuring Bruce Springsteen, Crosby Stills & Nash, Jackson Browne and others.

More about the concert, the record and the film



September 23,
1982

Dr. Jane Goodall created Roots & Shoots Day of Peace in 1982 in honor of U.N. International Day of Peace; each year, Roots & Shoots Day of Peace is observed in late September. Roots & Shoots groups around the world fly Giant Peace Dove puppets to celebrate Roots & Shoots Day of Peace for its symbolic meaning. They also plan and implement peace project initiatives to help make the world a better place for animals, the environment and the human community.

Hear Jane Goodall

on World Peace Day

(needs RealPlayer)

Dr. Goodall was appointed a Messenger of Peace in 2002 by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. People selected as Messengers of Peace are widely recognized for their achievements in music, literature, sports and the arts.

To commemorate her appointment, Roots & Shoots members at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point first conceived of and created the Giant Peace Dove puppets. Since then, Roots & Shoots groups have flown doves in over 40 countries around the world.


Students with their peace dove - Northern Light School, California



September 24, 1968

10,000 draft files were destroyed by fourteen anti-war activists with homemade napalm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Milwaukee 14 home

Watch a video of the event



September 24, 1969

The Chicago 8 trial opened in Chicago. It was the prosecution of eight anti-war activists charged with responsibility for the violent demonstrations at the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

The defendants included David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee (NMC); Rennie Davis and Thomas Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party ("Yippies"); Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party; and two lesser-known activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines.

The Chicago 8 minus Bobby Seale

Chicago 8 background

Bobby Seale, after repeatedly asserting his right to an attorney of his own choosing or to defend himself, was bound and gagged in the courtroom and his trial was severed from the rest on November 5th. The group then became know as the Chicago 7.


About Bobby Seale

Bobby Seale home


September 24, 1976

Ian Smith, leader of the whites-only government of Rhodesia, a former British colony, agreed to introduce black majority rule to the country within two years. He was under pressure from the United States through Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and from British Prime Minister James Callaghan.


September 25, 1789

The first U.S. Congress passed the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, and sent them on to the states for ratification.

See the actual document and learn more



September 25, 1957

Nine African-American children, protected by 300 members of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division, with fixed bayonets, entered the previously all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

The troops were there to escort the children past white segregationists and the Arkansas Militia (National Guard) thatArkansas Governor Orval Faubus had activated to prevent its federal court-approved racial integration plan.

 

After a tense standoff, President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent troops to Little Rock to enforce the court order. The order to de-segregate the Little Rock schools flowed from the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision.
The troops remained for the entire school term.

Watch a video about the Little Rock 9



September 25, 1961

Herbert Lee, a farmer who worked with civil rights leader Bob Moses to help register black voters, was killed by a state legislator, E. H. Hurst, in Liberty, Mississippi. Hurst claimed self-defense and was acquitted by a coroner's jury the same day as the killing. Lewis Allen, who witnessed the shooting, said otherwise, and was himself murdered two years later.
Herbert Lee

More about Herbert Lee



September 25, 2002

Rick DellaRatta and Jazz For Peace performed at the United Nations Headquarters in New York City. He led a band consisting of Israeli, Middle Eastern, European, Asian and American jazz musicians in concert for an international audience.
Jazz for Peace continues to perform concerts to raise money for non-profit organizations.

Rick DellaRatta


September 26, 1909


International Ladies' Garment Workers Union (ILGWU Local 25) began a strike against the Triangle Shirtwaist Company.
In November their strike would become part of the "Uprising of the 20,000," during which 339 of 352 firms would be struck and reach agreements with the union over the following five months but Triangle was not one of them. The strike ended after thirteen weeks that saw over 700 striking workers arrested.

More info Chronology


September 26, 1945

OSS (Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA) officer Lieutenant Colonel A. Peter Dewey became the first American to die in Vietnam. During unrest in Saigon, he was killed by Viet Minh guerrillas who mistook him for a French officer. Before his death, Dewey had filed a report on the deepening crisis in Vietnam, stating his opinion that the U.S. "ought to clear out of Southeast Asia."


September 26, 1957

Despite international protests, the United Kingdom began a series of atmospheric nuclear bomb tests beginning with Operation Buffalo on aboriginal land
at Maralinga, South Australia. The series of tests included dropping a bomb from a height of 30,000 feet. This was the first launching of a British atomic weapon from an aircraft.

The Buffalo Nuclear Test, Maralinga



September 26, 1983
Five members of Puget Sound Women's Peace Camp entered Boeing's cruise missile production plant in Seattle, Washington, to leaflet the workers and were arrested.
In November of 1980 and 1981 the Women's Pentagon Actions, where hundreds of women came together to challenge patriarchy and militarism, took place.

A movement grew that found ways to use direct action to put pressure on the military establishment and to show positive examples of life-affirming ways to live together. This movement spawned women's peace camps at military bases around the world from Greenham Common, England, to the Puget Sound Peace Camp, as well as camps in Japan and Italy, among others.



September 26, 1988

President Ronald Reagan urged the United Nations General Assembly to call a conference about the use of chemical weapons. Though the U.S. and other nations had signed the Geneva Protocol banning chemical (as well as bacteriological) arms, such weapons had been used repeatedly by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in its war against Iran.

Background on the treaty and the issue



September 27, 1962

Rachel Carson's book indicting the pesticide industry, Silent Spring, was published.

The scientist (17 years with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service) and writer demonstrated the connection between the excessive and ubiquitous use of DDT and its long-term effect on plants and animals.

Rachel Carson at work c. 1936

The impact of her book proved seminal to a new ecological awareness. But even 30 years later, Carson was denounced for “preservationist hysteria” and “bad science.” But she had said when the book was published: "We do not ask that all chemicals be abandoned. We ask moderation. We ask the use of other methods less harmful to our environment."
Rachel Carson, her Silent Spring and its impact

 



September 27, 1967

An advertisement headed "A Call To Resist Illegitimate Authority," signed by over 320 influential people (professors, writers, ministers, and other professional people), appeared in the New Republic and the New York Review of Books, asking for funds to help youths resist the draft.


September 27, 1990

The last U.S. Pershing II tactical nuclear missiles were removed from Germany, fewer than ten years after their installation provoked a massive anti-nuclear movement across Europe.

The range and accuracy of the Pershing II pushed the Soviet Union to negotiate the Treaty on Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) which completely eliminated all nuclear-armed ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers (about 300 to 3400 miles) and their infrastructure.

German Anti Pershing missile demonstration poster, 1983.

The INF Treaty was the first nuclear arms control agreement to actually reduce nuclear arms, and the signatories destroyed almost 2700 nuclear weapons (including 234 Pershing II) by May of 1991.



September 27, 1991

President George H.W. Bush announced a major unilateral withdrawal of U.S. tactical nuclear weapons:
"I am . . . directing that the United States eliminate its entire worldwide inventory of ground-launched short-range, that is, theater, nuclear weapons. We will bring home and destroy all of our nuclear artillery shells and short-range ballistic missile warheads. We will, of course, insure that we preserve an effective air-delivered nuclear capability in Europe.
"In turn, I have asked the Soviets . . . to destroy their entire inventory of ground-launched theater nuclear weapons . . . .
"Recognizing further the major changes in the international military landscape, the United States will withdraw all tactical nuclear weapons from its surface ships, attack submarines, as well as those nuclear weapons associated with our land-based naval aircraft. This means removing all nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles from U.S. ships and submarines, as well as nuclear bombs aboard aircraft carriers."


September 28, 1836

Cherokee Chief John Ross wrote a letter to both houses of the U.S. Congress stating that the Treaty of New Echota was not negotiated by any legitimate representatives of his nation.
Its terms required the Cherokees to relinquish all lands east of the Mississippi River for a payment of $5 million. Ross was the democratically chosen leader of a nation with its own language, its own newspaper, a bi-cameral legislature and a republican form of government.

Cherokee Chief John Ross
The Cherokee Nation celebrated its own arts and sports, and produced a wide variety of agricultural and commercial goods. I had twelve political units ranging from northern Alabama to western North Carolina.
Writing from north Georgia, Ross said: “The makers of it [the treaty] sustain no office nor appointment in our Nation, under the designation of Chiefs, Head men, or any other title, by which they hold, or could acquire, authority to assume the reins of Government, and to make bargain and sale of our rights, our possessions, and our common country . . . .
“ We are despoiled of our private possessions, the indefeasible property of individuals. We are stripped of every attribute of freedom and eligibility for legal self-defence. Our property may be plundered before our eyes; violence may be committed on our persons; even our lives may be taken away, and there is none to regard our complaints. We are denationalized; we are disfranchised. We are deprived of membership in the human family!”
Full text of the letter More on the Treaty and the Cherokee nation


September 28, 1917

166 people who were (or had been) active in the I.W.W. (Industrial Workers of the World, whose members were also known as Wobblies) were indicted for protesting World War I.

They were accused of trying to "cause insubordination, disloyalty, and refusal of duty in the military and naval forces" in violation of the Espionage Act. One hundred and one defendants were found guilty, and received prison sentences ranging from days to twenty years, with accompanying fines of $10,000-$20,000. This was part of a successful U.S. government campaign to cripple the radical union movement.

The I.W.W. - A Brief History (U.S.)

I.W.W. home
IWW pin IWW logo pin
1" diameter - satin finish
Union printed - made in Detroit.


September 28, 1943

In Denmark, underground anti-Nazi activists began systematic smuggling of Jews to Sweden. In just three weeks, all but 481 of Denmark's 8000 Jews had been moved to safety.


< Kim Malthe-Bruun, a 21-year-old
Danish resistance fighter.
Unfortunately one of the ones who did not make it.





A Danish Jewish family ready to go>

Read more about Kim



September 28, 2005

The lawyer who wrote the original legal complaint in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, Constance Baker Motley, died in New York City. She had led a remarkable career which began at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) where she was their first female attorney. The first black woman to argue before the Supreme Court, she was successful in nine of her ten cases. Motley went on to achieve three more firsts as an African American woman: being elected to the New York State Senate and shortly thereafter to the Manhattan Borough presidency. Finally, Pres. Lyndon Johnson appointed her to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1966 where she served until her passing.


September 29, 1923

Great Britain began to govern the formerly Turkish province of Palestine under a League of Nations mandate to create a Jewish national home.

The British Mandate For Palestine established at the San Remo Conference, 1920



September 29, 1943

Six conscientious objectors, imprisoned at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, for refusing to serve in World War II, began a hunger strike against censorship of mail and reading material by federal prison authorities.



September 29, 1983

The municipal council of Woensdrecht, a southern Dutch town, voted against cooperating in the possible siting of 48 U.S. nuclear-tipped cruise missiles at the nearby air base.
The council voted Tuesday by 9 to 4 not to cooperate with the national government, and to stop any activities that might lead to the missiles being sited at the base.


September 29, 2002



A London crowd - estimated between 200,000 and 500,000 - protested British and U.S. plans for a "preemptive" (that is, without provocation) invasion of Iraq.


September 30, 196
2

Hundreds of Ku Klux Klan members, white students and others, tried to keep a black student, James Meredith, 29, from attending classes at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. They were supported by the governor, Ross Barnett, who had explicitly resisted the order of the Federal Circuit Court.

In spite of the efforts to block his court-ordered registration, a deal to allow Meredith to register was reached between U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and Governor Barnett. Meredith was secretly escorted onto campus; deputy U.S. marshals, border patrolmen and federal prison guards were stationed on and around the campus to protect him. Those standing guard were assaulted throughout the night with guns, bricks, Molotov cocktails, and bottles.

James Meredith being escorted to his classes
by U.S.marshals and the military.

Tear gas was used to try and control the crowd. Federal troops arrived, bringing the total to 12,000 (President Kennedy had activated soldiers and national guardsmen totaling 30,000), and the mob finally retreated. In the end, two were dead, 160 U.S. Marshals were injured (28 shot), 200 others injured, and 300 arrested.

Integrating Ole Miss  JFK Library



September 30, 2003

The FBI began a criminal investigation into whether White House officials had illegally leaked the identity of an undercover CIA officer, Valerie Plame, wife of diplomat Joseph C. Wilson, IV. In early 2002 the CIA had sent Wilson to look into the claim that Saddam Hussein had sought to acquire yellow-cake uranium from the African country of Niger. Ambassador Wilson found nothing to support the claim, and some of the documents cited as evidence for the claim were clearly shown to be forgeries.
President Bush, nonetheless, repeated the claim in his January, 2003, State of the Union address as part of his argument for war in Iraq.
Wilson wrote a column in the New York Times in July, 2003, entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.”

 

 

Columnist Robert Novak a few days later published Plame’s identity following conversation with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. Plame, who previously had worked on counter-proliferation, was in charge of operations for the CIA’s Joint Task Force on Iraq, formed the summer before 9/11.



September 30, 2004

The U.S. Navy announce the shutdown of Project ELF. read more

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