peace history february

February

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February 1, 1960

Four black college students sat in at Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they'd been refused service, to protest segregation. Similar protests subsequently took place all over the South and in some northern communities. By September 1961, more than 70,000 students, whites and blacks, had participated, and many were arrested, during sit-ins.

February 1, 1961

On the first anniversary of the Greensboro sit-in, there were demonstrations all across the south, including a Nashville movie theater desegregation campaign (which sparked similar tactics in 10 other cities). Nine students were arrested at a lunch counter in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and chose to take 30 days hard labor on a road gang. The next week, four other students repeated the sit-in, also choose jail.

February 1, 1968

Saigon police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan summarily executed Nguyen Van Lem, suspected leader of a Viet Cong assassination platoon, with a pistol shot to the head on the street. AP photojournalist Eddie Adams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of the incident became one of the most famous, ubiguitous and lasting images of the war in Vietnam, affecting international and American public opinion regarding the war.

General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes Nguyen Van Lem a NLF officer.

February 2, 1779

Anthony Benezet refused to pay taxes to support the American Revolutionary War.

read more about Anthony Benezet

February 2, 1848

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in the city of the same name ending the Mexican War. In 1845 Congress had voted to annex Texas, and sent troops to patrol the border newly defined by the Rio Grande. General Winfield Scott and troops eventually seized Mexico City.
The treaty’s provisions called for Mexico to cede 55% of its territory (present-day Arizona, California, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, Nevada and Utah) in exchange for fifteen million dollars in compensation for war-related damage to Mexican property.

February 2, 1931

The first of well over 400,000 Mexican-Americans from across the country, many U.S. citizens living here as long as 40 years, were "repatriated" as Los Angeles Chicanos were deported to Mexico.

February 2, 1932

Conference on the Reduction and Limitation of Arms, the world’s first disarmament convention opened in Geneva, Switzerland. Sponsored by the League of Nations, and attended by delegates from 60 nations, no agreement was reached. The U.S. delegation called for the abolition of all offensive weapons as the basis for the negotiations but found little support.

February 2, 1966

The first burning of Australian military conscription papers as a protest against the Vietnam War occurred in Sydney, Australia.

February 2, 1970

Bertrand Russell, philosopher of peace, died in Penryndeudreaeth, Merioneth, at age 97.

February 2, 1980

Reports surfaced that the FBI had conducted a sting operation targeting members of Congress using phony Arab businessmen in what became known as ''Abscam,'' a code name protested by Arab-Americans.

February 2, 1989

Soviet participation in the war in Afghanistan ended as Red Army troops withdrew from the capital city of Kabul. They left behind many of their arms for use by Afghan government forces.

February 2, 1990

South African President F.W. De Klerk unbanned (lifted the ban on) opposition parties: the African National Congress (ANC), the Pan-Africanist Congress and the South African Communist party were now legal. He also announced the lifting of restrictions on the UDF, COSATU and thirty-three other anti-apartheid organizations, as well as the release of all political prisoners and the suspension of the death penalty.

February 3, 1893

Abigail Ashbrook of Willingboro, New Jersey refused to pay taxes because she was denied the right to vote.

February 3, 1964

In New York City, more than 450,000 students, mostly black and Puerto Rican and nearly half the citywide enrollment, boycotted the New York City schools to protest segregation.

February 3, 1988

The U.S. House of Representatives rejected President Ronald Reagan's request for at least $36.25 million in aid to the Nicaraguan Contras, a rebel group trying violently to overthrow the elected Sandinista government.

February 4, 1822

The American Colonization Society founded the African state of Liberia in West Africa as a home for freed U.S. slaves.

American Colonization Society ship leaving New York City bound for Liberia.

February 4, 1990

The Colombian government recognized native rights to half of its 69,000 square miles of forest in the Amazon River basin, home to 55,000 indigenous tribal people.

read more about indigenous U’wa people in Columbia

February 4, 2004

The Massachusetts Supreme Court declared that gays were entitled to nothing less than marriage, and that Vermont-style civil unions would not suffice.

February 5, 1830

The first daily labor newspaper, "New York Daily Sentinel," began publication.

February 5, 1991

49 German troops conscientiously objected to serving in Turkey during the Gulf War. The German peace movement actively supported U.S. soldiers stationed there by helping them file for conscientious objector status.

February 6, 1943

The U.S. government required the 110,000 disposessed Japanese-Americans forcibly held in concentration (internment) camps to answer loyalty surveys.

February 6, 1956

Autherine Lucy was excluded from attending classes just three days after becoming the first black person to attend the University of Alabama.
Her suspension "for her own safety" followed three days of riots over her Supreme Court-ordered enrollment. Crows of sudents, townspeople and members of the Ku Klux Klan shouted “Kill her!” among other things. It is unclear why the University did not suspend the students who were among the rioters.

Autherine J. Lucy and her attorney Thurgood Marshall

Historical note: Lucy had originally applied for graduate study in library science in 1952, and had been accepted until the University realized her race, and claimed state law prevented her admission. A graduate of traditionally black Miles College, she was only admitted with the help of the NAACP and lawyers Thurgood Marshall (later a Supreme Court justice) Constance Baker Motley (future federal judge) and Arthur Shores (elected to Birmingham City Council).

February 6, 1959

The United States successfully test-fired its first intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), known as Titan, from Cape Canaveral. It was a two-stage missile also capable of boosting payloads into space.

February 6, 1961

The civil rights jail-in movement began when students in Rock Hill, South Carolina, were arrested and demanded jail time rather than paying fines.

February 6, 1985

The Molesworth Common Peace Camp, just outside the Royal Air Force Base there, was evicted by the British Army. The 300 inhabitants and their many supporters were nonviolently protesting the siting of U.S. cruise missiles at the base. Peace camps were established at several locations in Europe in the early 1980s to protest the destabilizing nuclear weapons buildup.

Molesworth Common peace camp

February 7, 1926

"Negro History Week" was observed for the first time, conceived by Dr. Carter G. Woodson, an an opportunity to study the history and accomplishments of African-Americans.
Dr. Woodson was the founder, in Chicago in 1915, of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and first published the Journal of Negro History — a publication still in existence.

Top L-R: Frederick Douglass, former slave and abolitionist leader; Muhammad Ali, poet, World Champion, the greatest; Ruby Dee, actor, author, activist; Malcolm X, strong and clear-eyed brother seeking freedom and honor and dignity ; Harriet Tubman, liberator and conductor on the Underground Railroad. Below: Jimi Hendrix, prolific guitar genius, rock ‘n’ roll writer; Nat “King” Cole, jazz composer, pianist and singer; Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., pastor, scholar and author, leader of a people, inspiration to peacemakers.	Woodson was a graduate of the University of Chicago, the Sorbonne in France, and was the second black man to receive his doctorate from Harvard. He chose February because it is the birth month of both Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass; now it is considered Black History Month.
		read more about Dr. Carter G. Woodson

February 7, 1971

Women in Switzerland were given the right to vote in national elections and to stand for parliament for the first time in their nation's history.

February 7, 1986

Haitian self-appointed President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier fled his country after being ousted by the military, ending 28 years of authoritarian family rule. Policies begun by his father, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, had forced many to flee Haiti (the western portion of the island of Hispaniola), leaving it the poorest and most illiterate nation in the hemisphere.
Jean-Claude `Baby Doc' Duvalier with his father Francois `Papa Doc' Duvalier.

February 7, 1991

The Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was sworn in as Haiti's president after winning the country’s first-ever democratic election. Haiti had achieved its independence from France in 1804 but had a long succession on unstable governments, as well as significant U.S. control in the first half of the 20th century, including military occupation from 1915 to 1934.

February 8, 1962

More than 20,000 attended a demonstration in Paris against the Secret Army Organization (Organisation de l'Armée Secrète or OAS), a group of European Algerians using terrorist methods to keep Algeria a French colony.

They set off bombs in Metropolitan France and made multiple attempts on President DeGaulle’s life. DeGaulle had chosen a referendum among Algerians to decide their independence where Europeans were outnumbered 9:1 by the native Islamic population.
The demonstration was held in violation of a declared state of emergency (because of OAS actions) and, in the subsequent rioting, at least eight people were killed and 240 injured (half of them police officers).

February 8, 1968

The Orangeburg Masssacre

College students conducted a civil rights protest against a whites-only bowling alley in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Three black students were killed and 50 wounded in a confrontation with highway patrolmen.

February 8, 1980

President Jimmy Carter unveiled a plan to re-introduce draft registration.

February 9, 1780

Capt. Paul Cuffee and six other African-American residents of Massachusetts petitioned the state legislature for the right to vote. A few years earlier Cuffee and his brother had refused to pay local taxes, reasoning that there was a connection between an obligation to pay taxes to a government and the right to vote for that government.
Captain Paul Cuffee

February 9, 1950

United States Senator Joseph P. McCarthy (D-WI) accused more than 200 staff members in the State Department of being Communists, launching his anti-red crusade.

He made the allegation in a public speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, saying that State was infested with communists, and brandished a sheet of paper which purportedly contained the alleged traitors' names. "I have here in my hand," he said, "the names of 205 men that were known to the Secretary of State [Dean Acheson] as being members of the Communist party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department." Some years later, he confided the paper was actually just a laundry list.

The rebirth of McCarthyism

February 9, 1964

G.I. JOE action figure made its debut as an 11.5 inch "doll" for boys with 21 moving parts, named after the movie "The Story of G.I. JOE."

Puts you in the action!

February 9, 1965

President Lyndon Johnson ordered a U.S. Marine Corps Hawk air defense missile battalion deployed to Da Nang, South Vietnam, to provide protection for the key U.S. air base there. American military advisors had been in country since the retreat of the French in 1954 but this was the first commitment of combat troops to South Vietnam.
There was considerable reaction around the world to this new level of U.S. involvement. Both the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union threatened to intervene if the United States continued its military support of the South Vietnamese government. In Moscow, some 2,000 demonstrators, led by Vietnamese and Chinese students and clearly supported by the authorities, attacked the U.S. Embassy. Britain and Australia supported the U.S. action, but France called for negotiations.

February 9, 2002

Ten thousand, organized by Gush Shalom (the peace bloc in Hebrew), a coalition of Israeli peace groups, marched in Tel Aviv against the Ariel Sharon government's increasingly brutal attacks on Palestinian civilians during the continuing occupation of territory beyond Israel’s recognized 1967 borders.

February 9, 2003

Six weeks before the Iraq War began, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on ABC's This Week dismissed the need for U.N. weapons inspectors to continue searching Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.

He said the administration saw no further need for ''inspectors to play detectives or Inspector Clouseau running all over Iraq.'' Clouseau was the bumbling detective played by Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther films.
U.N. weapons inspectors, left, and Iraqi National Monitoring Directorate members visit a Baghdad storage facility in this photo taken Feb. 5, 2003, just hours before U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared at the U.N. Security Council to offer evidence of alleged Iraqi attempts to hide banned weapons.

February 10, 1961

The Voice of Nuclear Disarmament, a pirate radio station, began operation offshore of Great Britain.

Pirate radio ship

February 10, 1964

Bob Dylan's album ''The Times They Are A-Changin’'' was released. The title song captured the emerging, principally generational gap in American culture concerning war and racism.

read the lyrics

February 10, 2003

Iraq acceded to U-2 surveillance flights over its territory, meeting a key demand by U.N. inspectors searching for banned weapons of mass destruction (WMD) there. The 60 weapons inspectors were under the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), led by Hans Blix, and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The U.N. had destroyed all of Iraq’s banned weapons by 1994, as well as production and development facilities later. The embargo during the inter-war period prevented resumption of the weapons programs. CIA and other intelligence estimates, however, insisted upon the existence of WMDs in Iraq. None have ever been found.

U-2 spy plane

February 11, 1790

The Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery composed of Quakers and Mennonites petitioned Congress for the Emancipation of slaves. Benjamin Franklin had become vocal as an abolitionist and in 1787 began to serve as President of the Society which not only advocated the abolition of slavery, but made efforts to integrate freed slaves into American society.
The resolution was immediately denounced by pro-slavery congressmen and sparked a heated debate in both the House and the Senate.

more on early Abolitionist and Anti-Slavery Movements

February 11, 1777

Vermont became the first state to abolish slavery.

February 11, 1911

Emma Goldman was arrested for lecturing on birth control which violated the 1873 Comstock Law which prohibited the distribution of literature on birth control.

Goldman considered this essential to women's sexual and economic freedom; she had worked as a nurse and midwife among poor immigrant workers on the Lower East Side in the 1890s. She also organized for womens’ suffrage, opposed U.S. involvement in World War I and was imprisoned for obstructing military conscription.

Emma Goldman speaking on Birth Control -Union Square, New York City May 20, 1916

February 11, 1937

Forty-eight thousand General Motors workers won a 44-day sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan. On December 30 workers at Fischer Plants 1 & 2 sat down andrefused to leave, forcing workers around them to stop work and preventing the next shift from starting.

The sit-down strike ended when the company agreed to recognize the United Automobile Workers union as the representative bargaining agent for the hourly employees. Other automakers gradually accepted the legitimacy of the union. The success of the sit-down was an inspiration to workers in other industries to organize their own unions.

February 11, 1978

Native Americans began The Longest Walk, a march from Alcatraz Island in San Francisco to Washington, DC.		photo Ilka Hartmann click for larger image
	The walk was a reminder of the forced removal of American Indians from their homelands across the continent and drew attention to the continuing problems plaguing the Indian community.

February 11, 1979

Poet John Trudell, a former national chairman of the American Indian Movement (AIM), burned an upside-down flag on the steps of the FBI building in Washington, D.C. during a vigil for Leonard Peltier. Peltier, also a leader of AIM, was in prison (and still today after 27 years), and considered a political prisoner by Amnesty International.
Twelve hours later his wife Tine, her mother, and their three children died in an arsonist's attack on their home on the Duck Valley Reservation in Nevada. The FBI did not investigate even though the crime fell under its jurisdiction.

Learn about Leonard Peltier

February 11, 1990

Nelson Mandela was freed after 27 years in a South African prison following months of secret negotiations with South African President F.W. (Frederik Willem) de Klerk.In 1952, Mandela became deputy national president of the African National Congress (ANC), the oldest black political organization in South Africa, having joined as a young lawyer in 1944.
He advocated nonviolent resistance to apartheid – South Africa's institutionalized system of white supremacy, black disenfranchisement and rigid racial segregation.

However, after the massacre of peaceful black demonstrators at Sharpeville in 1960, Mandela helped organize a paramilitary branch of the ANC to engage in guerrilla warfare against the white minority government.
He and deKlerk were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1993 "for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime, and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa.”

February 12, 1909

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded by sixty blacks and whites in a call to safeguard civil, legal, economic, human, and political rights of black Americans partly in reaction to a race riot in 1908 in Springfield, Illinois, home of Abraham Lincoln. The call was principally written by Oswald Garrison Villard, president of the N. Y. Evening Post Company, and published on Lincoln’s Birthday.

Read the call to action and the signatories:

February 12, 1947

An estimated 400-500 veterans and conscientious objectors from World Wars I and II burned their draft cards during two demonstrations, in front of the White House and at New York City’s Labor Temple, in protest of a proposed universal conscription law. This was the first peacetime draft card-burning.

February 12, 1993

About 5,000 demonstrators marched on Atlanta's State Capitol to protest the Georgia state flag because its principal element was the Confederate battle flag(on left). That flag was adopted in 1956 by the state legislature in reaction to the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education ordering the racial integration of public schools. Several newspaper editorials opposed the flag as well as 18 local patriotic organizations, including the United Daughters of the Confederacy, stating the flag "would cause strife."

In 2001 the Georgia state flag was redesigned, shown on bottom.

February 12, 1997

	In "Prince of Peace Plowshares," six activists poured blood and symbolically disarmed the U.S.S. The Sullivans, a nuclear-capable Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, at the Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine. All were eventually convicted of destruction of government property and conspiracy.
	read more

February 13, 1960

France became the world’s fourth nuclear power, conducting its first plutonium bomb at the Reggane base in the Sahara Desert in what was then French Algeria. It was detonated from a 330-foot tower and had a yield of 60-70 kilotons.

February 13, 1967

Carrying huge photos of Vietnamese children who had been victims of Napalm (a flammable defoliant), 2,500 members of the group Women Strike for Peace stormed the Pentagon, demanding to see "the generals who send our sons to Vietnam." When Pentagon guards locked the main entrance doors, the women took off their shoes and banged on the doors with their heels. They were eventually allowed inside, but Defense Secretary Robert McNamara would not meet with them.

They were eventually allowed inside, but Defense Secretary Robert McNamara would not meet with them.

Sen. Jacob Javits (R-NY) agreed to meet a few hundred of the women, but he was booed by the women when he denied the U.S. was using toxic gas in Vietnam.

February 13, 1968

Five soldiers were arrested at a pray-in for peace in Vietnam at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

February 13, 1971

Two precision-guided missiles destroyed the Amirayah subterranean bunker in Baghdad being used as an air-raid shelter by 408 Iraqi civilians during the first Gulf War.
The deaths of all made it the single most lethal incident for non-combatants in modern air warfare. 3% of the the 250,00 bombs and missiles fired during that conflict were considered such “smart bombs.”

The U.S. had detected signals coming from the bunker and considered it a military command and control center. There was an antenna atop the bunker but it was connected by cable to the actual command center 300 yards away, which was not hit by the 2000 lb. bombs which landed precisely on their intended target, penetrating ten feet of hardened concrete.

February 14, 1957

The organization that would shortly be called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) chose its leadership at a meeting in New Orleans. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rev. Ralph David Abernathy led the group which sought to coordinate civil rights protests throughout the South.

Organizers of bus boycotts inspired by Montgomery, Alabama’s, had met in Atlanta a month earlier. During that meeting Dr. Abernathy’s home and church were bombed.

February 14, 1971

President Richard Nixon ordered a secret taping system in his offices in the White House.

Government Exhibit 133: Chapstick Tubes

with Hidden Microphones, ca. 1972

February 14, 1989

At a meeting of the presidents of Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and El Salvador, the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua agreed to release a number of political prisoners and hold free elections within a year. In return, Honduras promised to close bases being used by the anti-Sandinista Contra rebels. Within a year, elections in Nicaragua resulted in the defeat of the Sandinistas, removing what President Ronald Reagan’s administration referred to as a "beachhead of communism" in the Western Hemisphere.

February 15, 2002

President George W. Bush approved Nevada's Yucca Mountain as the site for long-term disposal of 77,000 tons of highly radioactive nuclear power plant waste. 12 years and $6.8 billion worth of study and construction had gone into the site 90 miles from Las Vegas.

2000 additional tons of such waste are generated by U.S. nuclear power plants each year.

February 15, 2003

The world said NO to war...

In the single largest day of protest in world history, millions on 6 continents demonstrated against the U.S./U.K. plans to invade Iraq. Reported totals included 1 to 2 million in London and Rome; 1.3 million in Barcelona, Spain (a city of 1.5 million); 500,000 each in Berlin, Paris, Madrid, and New York.
Smaller demonstrations were held in over 600 cities and towns across the US, including tens of thousands in several cities,
and 150,000 the following day in San Francisco.
Totals estimated 25 million in more than 100 countries.

February 16, 1959

Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro was sworn in as Cuba’s youngest prime minister after leading a years-long guerrilla campaign that forced right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista into exile. Castro, who had become commander-in-chief of Cuba's armed forces after Batista was ousted on January 1, replaced the more moderate Jose Miro Cardona as head of the country's new provisional government.

Fulgencio Batista

February 16, 1962

First of two days on which Boston SANE (Organization for a Sane Nuclear Policy) and the newly formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held an anti-nuclear march on Washington; 4,000-8,000 participated.

February 16, 1996

Seven activists were arrested for blocking the road to the ceremony commissioning the nuclear warship U.S.S. Greeneville at the Norfolk (Virginia) Naval Base.

February 16, 2005

The Kyoto Protocol went into effect after countries representing 55% of the world’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions had ratified the treaty, after Russia signed on. The agreement’s purpose is to reduce such gases to 12% below their levels in 1990 by 2012 and, thus, slow global warming.

180 countries had agreed (except for the United States and Australia) to rules for implementing the Kyoto Protocol on July 29, 2001, in Bonn, Germany. Pres. G.W. Bush withdrew the U.S. from the process shortly after he took office. The U.S. is responsible for 25% of the earth’s GHG, and has increased its emissions (13.4 percent higher in 2004).

February 17, 1958

The first meeting of Britain's Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was held.

the CND today

original CND logo

February 17, 1975

Several hundred residents of Wyhl, Germany, occupied the construction site of a nuclear power plant with the intent of halting construction. Police responded with water cannon and arrests. By the following week, 28,000 had joined the occupation. This is believed to have been the first such plant occupation in the world.

February 18, 1688

Pennsylvania Quakers made first formal protest against slavery.
From their proclamation "...we shall doe [sic] to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are."

February 18, 1961

In London, Bertrand Russell, 88, led a march of 20,000 and sit-down of 5,000 in an anti-nuke rally outside U.K. Defense Ministry and was jailed for seven days. It was the first public demonstration organized by the Committee of 100, the direct action wing of the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament.

the CND today

<Bertand Russell addresses demonstration

early CND demonstator>

February 18, 1970

Five of the "Chicago Seven" (Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin) were found guilty of crossing state lines to incite a riot at the 1968 Democratic convention.

John Froines and Lee Weiner had both been charged withy making incendiary devices (stink bombs) but were found not guilty as well. None of the seven were found guilty of conspiracy. Attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass were sentenced for contempt of court. All appealed.

The Chicago Seven

February 19, 1919

The first Pan-African Congress was organized by W.E.B. DuBois in Paris, France to coincide with the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I.
The Congress’s aim was to bring to the attention of those laying the plans for a League of Nations the grievances of oppressed minorities.

DuBois was a moving spirit behind the growing struggle for self-determination among Africans, both on the continent and in the diaspora, and the Pan-African Congresses helped to bring the issues of this struggle to world attention. The Pan-African Congress was re-convened in 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945.

more on Malcolm X

Malcolm & Martin: “In 1964, after his break with Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, and following his trips to Africa and to Mecca, Malcolm was seriously questioning black nationalism. He was also beginning to recognize that MLK’s non-violent methods, far from being passive, were actually creating more change than the separatism of the Nation of Islam.
In this same period MLK was beginning to recognize that Malcolm was advocating self-defense, not violence.
In March Malcolm and Martin encountered one another by chance at a news conference in Washington, D.C. Subsequently Malcolm spoke at several rallies in support of the civil rights movement, and in February 1965, two weeks before his assassination, he went to Selma to meet with King." –Grace Lee Boggs

"You can’t separate peace from freedom because no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom."

--"Prospects for Freedom in 1965," speech, January 7 1965.

February 21, 1972

The trial began for Father Philip Berrigan and six other activists (the "Harrisburg Seven") in Pennsylvania. They were charged with conspiring in an alleged plot to kidnap Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Proceedings later ended in a mistrial.

more about Fr. Philip Berrigan

February 21, 1975

Former Attorney General John N. Mitchell and former White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman were sentenced to 2 1⁄2 to 8 years in prison for their roles in the Watergate cover-up.

February 22, 1943

Sophie Scholl, a 22-year-old "White Rose" activist at Munich University, was executed after being convicted of urging students to rise up and overthrow the Nazi government.
There are many memorials in Bavaria and Germany to Sophie and her group, the White Rose, but little is known outside of Germany. They were medical students who organized nonviolent resistance to Hitler. They were arrested for printing and distributing anti-Nazi flyers. Sophie, her brother Hans, and Christof Probst, the three young people in the photo, were executed. Few White Rose members survived the war which is why the story is not well known.

read about the movie

In 2005 a newer film SOPHIE SCHOLL-THE FINAL DAYS was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

read more watch the trailer

February 22, 1967

Elected Indonesian President Sukarno surrendered all executive authority to military dictator General Suharto, remaining president in title only.

Suharto launched a purge of Indonesian communists that resulted in thousands of deaths. In 1967 he assumed full power, and in 1968 was elected president. He was also responsible for Indonesia's 1975 invasion of East Timor, which left an estimated 100,000 Timorese dead from famine, disease, and warfare.
General Suharto

February 22, 1974

Sam Lovejoy toppled the weather tower for a proposed nuclear power plant in Montague, Massachusetts. This was the first act of civil disobedience against nuclear power in the U.S.

Sam Lovejoy

February 22, 1997

Nearly 35,000 marched in Paris against a new anti-immigration bill. Many of the demonstrators chanted "First, second or third generation, we are all children of immigrants." Another 5,000 movie directors, writers, painters, actors, translators, journalists and teachers signed petitions pledging civil disobedience.

February 23, 1982

Wales declared itself a nuclear-free zone.

February 24, 1895

José Martí, a Cuban revolutionary, poet, journalist and teacher began the liberation struggle against Spanish control. He had been forced out of Cuba repeatedly (to Spain) for his opposition to colonial rule, and spent 15 years in the U.S. organizing the revolution just before returning home.
I Cultivate a White Rose By José Martí I cultivate a white rose In July as in January For the sincere friend Who gives me his hand frankly. And for the cruel person who tears out the heart with which I live, I cultivate neither nettles nor thorns: I cultivate a white rose.

read about Jose Marti

February 24, 1965

District 1199 of the health care workers’ union (Service Employees International Union) in New York City became the first U.S. labor union to officially oppose the war in Vietnam.

February 24, 1972

Daniel Berrigan (part of the "Catonsville 9") was released after 18 months of a three-year term. He went to Harrisburg, Pa., where his brother Phil Berrigan was on trial, also for anti-Vietnam War activities.

February 24, 1983

A congressional commission released a report condemning the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, calling it a "grave injustice."

February 25, 1941

A general strike was called in Amsterdam to protest Nazi persecution of Jews under the German Nazi occupation.

Truck drivers, dock and metal workers, civil servants and factory employees — Christians, Liberals, Social Democrats and Communists — answered the call and brought the city to a standstill. The work stoppages spread to Zaanstreek, Kennemerland and Utrecht.
Two days later the strike was called off: nine people were dead, 50 injured and another 200 arrested, some of whom were to die in the concentration camps.

(pdf)

February 25, 1968

Discussing the war capacity of North Vietnam, a country that had been fighting for 23 years and had just staged the massive, successful Tet Offensive, U.S. General William C. Westmoreland stated, "I do not believe Hanoi can hold up under a long war."

General Westmoreland

February 25, 1971

Legislation was introduced in both houses of Congress to forbid U.S. military support of any South Vietnamese invasion of North Vietnam without congressional approval. This bill was a result of the controversy that arose following the invasion of Laos by South Vietnamese forces. On February 8, South Vietnamese forces had launched a major cross-border operation into Laos to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail and destroy the North Vietnamese supply dumps in the area.

February 25, 1972

Paul McCartney	Paul McCartney's song, "Give Ireland Back to the Irish," was released and immediately banned from airplay by the BBC.
	read the lyrics

February 25, 1986

The new Philippines president Corazon Aquino was sworn in, bringing to an end years of dictatorship under Ferdinand Marcos. In the face of massive demonstrations against his rule, Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos and his entourage were airlifted from the presidential palace in Manila by U.S. helicopters.

Elected in 1966, Marcos had declared martial law in 1972 in response to leftist violence. In the next year, he assumed dictatorial powers. Backed by the United States, his regime was marked by misuse of foreign financial support, repression, and political murders. In 1986, Marcos defrauded the electorate in a presidential election, declaring himself the victor over Corazon Aquino, the wife of an assassinated rival. Aquino also declared herself the rightful winner, and the public rallied behind her.

Corazon Aquino

Ferdinand & Imelda Marcos

February 26, 1966

Julian Bond

Four thousand picketed outside New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel as President Lyndon Johnson received the National Freedom Award. As Johnson began his speech in defense of his Vietnam policies, James Peck of the War Resisters League jumped to his feet and shouted, "Mr. President, peace in Vietnam!" On the streets, meanwhile, activist A.J. Muste presented the crowd's own "Freedom Award" to Julian Bond, who had been denied his seat in the Georgia legislature for refusing to disavow his opposition to the war, and for his support of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

February 26, 1984

	The last of the peacekeeping troops President Ronald Reagan had sent to the Lebanese capital of Beirut were evacuated. The president withdrew almost all American troops following the deaths of 241 Marines and others in a suicide truck bombing carried out four months earlier by forces supported by Islamic Revolutionary Guards.
	read more

February 26, 1998

An international weapons inspection team, including Canadian Member of Parliament Libby Davies, was not allowed entry to determine the presence or absence of weapons of mass destruction at the Bangor, Washington, nuclear submarine base.

Libby Davies

February 27, 1939

Flint sit-down strikers, 1937	The Supreme Court outlawed sit-down strikes in its decision, NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp. Such strikes had become a very effective strategy employed by workers to organize unions. The 1937 Flint sit-down strike of autoworkers at General Motors forced GM to recognize and negotiate with the United Auto Workers as the union representing its hourly employees.
	More about the decision:

February 27, 1973

Hundreds of Oglala Sioux and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) occupied the village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Angered over a long history of violated treaties, mistreatment and discrimination, and in response to a recent campaign of harassment and violence by tribal and FBI officials, they chose the site of the 1890 massacre of Sioux men, women and children. The occupation lasted until May.

AIM leader Russell Means on Wounded Knee

February 28, 1919

Mohandas Gandhi launched his campaign of non-cooperation with Imperial British control of India. He called his overall method of non-violent action Satyagraha, formed from satya (truth) and Agraha, used to describe an effort or endeavor. This translates roughly as "Truth-force." A fuller rendering, though, would be "the force that is generated through adherence to Truth."

Gandhi, 1919

February 28, 1946

Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the newly formed Democratic Republic of Vietnam, facing reimposition of French colonial rule over his country, sent a telegram to Pres. Harry Truman: “...I most earnestly appeal to you personally and to the American people to interfere urgently in support of our independence and help making the negotiations more in keeping with the principles of the Atlantic and San Francisco charters [founding documents of the League of Nations and United Nations].”

February 28, 1958

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was founded in London by philosopher Bertrand Russell, then 86 years old, and the Rev. Canon (Lewis) John Collins.

The peace symbol was originally developed for CND.

history of the CND

the CND today

February 28, 1989

The Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement to Stop All Nuclear Testing was founded in the USSR. Oleg Suleimenov, a popular Kazakh poet, was chosen to lead this first anti-nuclear non-governmental organization on the territory of the former USSR. Nevada-Semipalatinsk ended nuclear arms tests at the Semipalatinsk Polygon. Organizers had been inspired by the large Nevada Test Site anti-nuclear demonstrations and encampments outside Las Vegas in the mid-to-late 1980s.

a Semipalatinsk test

demo at Semipalatinsk, 1990

February 29, 1968

The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission) warned that racism was causing America to move "toward two societies, one black, one white – separate but unequal."

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