July

July 1, 1917

8000 anti-war marchers demonstrated in Boston. Their banners read:

“IS THIS A POPULAR WAR, WHY CONSCRIPTION?
WHO STOLE PANAMA? WHO CRUSHED HAITI?
WE DEMAND PEACE.”

The parade was attacked by soldiers and sailors, on orders from their officers.

July 1, 1944

A massive general strike in Guatemala led to the resignation of dictator Dictator Jorge Ubico who had harshly ruled Guatemala for over a decade.

Jorge Ubico

On March 15 of the next year, Dr. Juan Jose Arevalo Bermejo took office as the first popularly elected President of Guatemala and promptly called for democratic reforms establishing the nation’s social security and health systems, land reform (redistribution of farmland not under cultivation to the landless with compensation to the owners), and a government bureau to look after Mayan concerns.

Juan José Arévalo Bermejo

July 1, 1968

Sixty-one nations, including the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union, signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) which set up systems to monitor use of nuclear technology and prevent more nations from acquiring nuclear weapons. 190 countries are now signatories; Israel, India and Pakistan remain outside the Treaty. North Korea joined the NPT in 1985, but in January 2003 announced its intention to withdraw from the Treaty.

July 1, 2000

Vermont's civil unions law went into effect, granting gay couples most of the rights, benefits, protections and responsibilities of marriage under state law. In the first five years, 1,142 Vermont couples, and 6,424 from elsewhere, had chosen a Vermont civil union.

July 2, 1809

Alarmed by the growing encroachment of whites squatting on Native American lands, the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh called on all Indians to unite and resist. By 1810, he had organized the Ohio Valley Confederacy, which united Indians from the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Winnebago, Menominee, Ottawa, and Wyandotte nations.

For several years, Tecumseh's Indian Confederacy successfully delayed further white settlement in the region.

Chief Tecumseh

July 2, 1839

Slave ship

Early in the morning, Africans on the Cuban slave ship Amistad, led by Joseph Cinquè (a Mende from what is now Sierra Leone), mutinied against their captors, killing the captain and the cook, and seized control of the schooner. Jose Ruiz, a Spaniard and planter from Puerto Principe, Cuba, had bought the 49 adult males on the ship, paying $450 each, as slaves for his sugar plantation.

July 2, 1964

Massive demonstrations a year earlier had helped ensure passage of the Act.

U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, thus barring discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and voting. The law had survived an 83-day filibuster in the U.S. Senate by southern members.

July 3, 1835

July 3, 1966

At least 31 people were arrested in London after their protest against the Vietnam War turned violent. Police moved in after scuffles broke out at the demonstration outside the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square.

read more

Actress Vanessa Redgrave joins 25,000 two years later at Anti-Vietnam war protest, Grosvenor Square.

July 4, 1776

The U.S. Declaration of Independence from England began the first successful anti-imperial revolution in world history. Signed in Philadelphia by 56 British subjects who lived and owned property in thirteen of the American colonies, the document asserted the right of a people to create its own form of government. The signers were members of the 2nd Continental Congress which had voted two days earlier for independence from the monarchy and King George III.

On July 4, 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence.

July 4, 1966

July 4, 1969

"Give Peace a Chance" by the Plastic Ono Band was released in the United Kingdom.

Some facts about "Give Peace a Chance"
This song was recorded May 31, 1969 during a "Bed-In" John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged at the Queen Elizabeth's Hotel in Montreal. John and Yoko stayed in bed for 8 days, beginning May 26, in an effort to promote world peace.
Some of the people in the hotel room who sang on this were Tommy Smothers,Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, and Petula Clark. Smothers also played guitar.This event promoting peace received a great deal of media attention

A national anti-war conference in Cleveland, Ohio, mapped out activities against the Vietnam War and resulted in the founding of New Mobe (mobilization).

read more about the mobes

During a strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company for having laid off about a quarter of its employees and drastically reduced wages, the 1892 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago's Jackson Park was set ablaze, and seven buildings were reduced to ashes. The Pullman workers’ cause had been taken up by Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the American Railway Union helped organize a nationwide boycott of any train that included a Pullman car.

read the Pullman Strikers’ Statement read more

July 5, 1935

The National Labor Relations Act became law, recognizing workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively. The bill was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on this day.

read more about the act

July 5, 1989   

Former National Security Council aide Oliver North received a $150,000 fine and a suspended prison term for his part in the Iran-Contra scandal. That was a secret arrangement directed from the Reagan White House that provided funds to the Nicaraguan contra rebels (in contravention of specific congressional prohibition) from profits gained by selling arms to Iran (at war with Iraq at the time) in hopes of their releasing hostages, despite Pres. Reagan’s claim that he wouldn’t trade arms for hostages.
The convictions were later overturned because evidence revealed in the congressional Iran-Contra hearings had compromised his right to a fair trial.

more on "Ollie"

In one of the worst cases of violent union-busting, a fierce battle broke out between the striking employees of Andrew Carnegie’s steel company, and a Pinkerton Detective Agency private army brought on barges down the Monongahela River in the dead of night. Twelve were killed. Henry C. Frick, general manager of the plant in Homestead, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, had been given free reign by Carnegie to quash the strike. At Frick's request, Pennsylvania Governor Robert E. Pattison then sent 8,500 troops to Homestead to intervene on behalf of the company.

read more

July 6, 1942

In Nazi-occupied Holland, thirteen-year-old Jewish diarist Anne Frank and her family were forced to take refuge in a secret sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse under threat of arrest and deportation to concentration camp by the Einsatzgruppen (Task Force), a part of the German Gestapo.

read more

July 6, 1944

Irene Morgan, a 28-year-old black woman, refused to move to the back of the bus eleven years before Rosa Parks. Her appeal, after her conviction for breaking a Virginia law forbidding integrated seating, resulted in a 7-1 Supreme Court decision barring segregation in interstate commerce.

read more

July 7, 1903

July 7, 1903
Labor organizer Mary Harris ("Mother") Jones led the "March of the Mill Children" over 100 miles from Philadelphia to President Theodore Roosevelt's summer home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York to publicize the harsh conditions of child labor and to demand a 55-hour work week. It is during this march, on about the 24th, she delivered her famed "The Wail of the Children" speech. Roosevelt refused to see them.

the March of the Mill Children

“Fifty years ago there was a cry against slavery and men gave up their lives to stop the selling of black children on the block. Today the white child is sold for two dollars a week to the manufacturers.”
from Mother Jones’s autobiography

read more about Mother Jones

July 7, 1957

Scientists held their first peace conference in the village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada. The mission of the Pugwash conference was to “... bring scientific insight and reason to bear on threats to human security arising from science and technology in general, and above all from the catastrophic threat posed to humanity by nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction....”

Pugwash home

July 7, 1977

a neutron bomb explosion at a test site

July 7, 1979

2,000 American Indian activists and anti-nuclear demonstrators marched through the Black Hills of western South Dakota to protest the development of uranium mines on native sacred lands.

July 8, 1917

The Women's Peace Crusade organized a Sunday mass demonstration in Glasgow; from two sides of the city processions wound their way toward Glasgow Green accompanied by bands and banners. They merged into one massive colorful demonstration of some 14,000 people protesting World War I.

read more

July 8, 1959

Vietnamese guerillas ambushed two U.S. "advisers," making them the first U.S. casualties since 1946 in Vietnam.

July 8, 1965

Roy Wilkins became the executive director of NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He had edited the organization’s magazine, Crisis, for fifteen years, and was one of the most articulate of civil rights leaders.

July 8, 1996

July 9, 1917

During World War I, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, leaders of the No-Conscription League, spoke out against the war and the draft. Both were found guilty in New York City of conspiracy against the draft, fined $10,000 each and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with the possibility of deportation at the end of their terms.

more about Emma and Alex

July 9, 1955

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell and seven other scientists warned that the development of weapons of mass destruction had created a choice between war and survival of the human species. The Russell-Einstein Manifesto was published in London .

read the manifesto

Bertrand Russell

“We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves ...

what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of

which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?”

July 17, 1927

In the first-ever aerial military bombing of a civilian population, a U.S. Marine squadron of seven airplanes killed 300 at Ocatal, Nicaragua.

The opening ceremony of the 21st Olympic games in Montreal is marked by the withdrawal of 25 African countries and some 300 participants, protesting the presence of the South African team which had been banned from the Olympics since 1964 for its refusal to end their racially separatist policy of apartheid.

July 17, 1979

Fighters of the Sandinista National Liberation Front overthrew the U.S.-supported dictatorial regime of Anastasio Somoza in the Central American republic of Nicaragua and forced him to flee the country. The notorious U.S.-trained National Guard crumbled and its surviving commanders negotiated a surrender, despite their superiority in armaments.

read more

July 18, 1918

Nelson Mandela was born. He was one of the leaders in the fight against apartheid in South Africa and became its first black president. In 1993 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

  read more about Nelson Mandel

July 19, 1848 

The first Women's Rights Convention in the U.S. was held at Seneca Falls, New York. Its "Declaration of Sentiments" launched the women's rights movement. The Declaration used the model of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, demanding that the rights of women as individuals be acknowledged and respected by society. It was signed by sixty-eight women and thirty-two men.

read about the convention               read the declaration

July 19, 1974 

A federal administrative law judge ordered white supremacist Ryan Wilson to pay $1.1 million in damages to fair housing advocate Bonnie Jouhari and her daughter, Dani. The decision stemmed from threats made against Jouhari by Wilson and his Philadelphia neo-Nazi group, ALPA HQ.

Bonnie and Dani Jouhari

July 20, 1967

The first Black Power conference was held in Newark, New Jersey, calling on black people in the U.S. "to unite, to recognize their heritage and to build a sense of community."

read more

July 20, 1971

The first labor contract in the history of the federal government was signed by postal worker unions and the newly re-organized U.S. Postal Service through the collective bargaining process.

read about the history of the

APWU (American Postal Workers Union)

Publication of "Eight Hours," written by Rev. Jesse H. Jones (music) IG Blanchard (lyrics), the most popular labor song until "Solidarity Forever" was published by the IWW in 1915.

“Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest;
Eight hours for what we will.”

all the lyrics

The so-called "Monkey Trial" ended in Dayton, Tennessee, with high school teacher John T. Scopes convicted of violating state law for teaching Darwin's theory of evolution. Referred to as “the trial of the century” even before it started, it was the first trial ever broadcast (on radio). The conviction was later overturned.

The Verdict: Thou Shall Not Think

July 21, 1954

Major world powers, meeting in Geneva Switzerland, reached agreement on the terms for a ceasefire in Indochina, ending nearly eight years of war. The war began in 1946 between nationalist forces of the Communist Viet Minh, under leader Ho Chi Minh, and France, the occupying colonial power.
The Geneva conference included France, Britain, the USA, the USSR, China, and other countries of Indochina. It ended with a peace treaty that called for independence for Vietnam a 1956 election to unify the country. However, only France and Ho Chi Minh's DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) signed the document.
The United States did not approve of the agreement. Instead, they backed the Diem government in South Vietnam and refused to allow the elections knowing, in President Eisenhower’s words, that “Ho Chi Minh will win.” The result was the Second Indochina War, more commonly known as the Vietnam War.   

read more

July 22, 1756

The Friendly Association for Peace was founded in Philadelphia. It was comprised primarily of Quakers who wished to pursue peaceful coexistence between American Indians and people of the Pennsylvania region.

read more

July 22, 1877

A general strike, part of the railroad strike that had paralyzed the country, was called in St. Louis, where workers briefly seized control of the city.

read more about the 1877 general strike

July 23, 1846

Author Henry David Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay the poll tax as a protest against the Mexican war, which led to his writing "Civil Disobedience." This essay became a source of inspiration for Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

From Thoreau’s essay: “Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”
“Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

read the entire essay

Thomas Corwin of Ohio denounced the war as merely the latest example of American injustice to Mexico: "If I were a Mexican I would tell you, "Have you not room enough in your own country to bury your dead." Henry Clay declared, "This is no war of defense, but one of unnecessary and offensive aggression."

Out of Thoreau's jailing grew a legend: The great Ameriacan philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Thoreau in jail. Emerson asked, "Henry, why are you here?" Thoreau replied, "Why are you not here?"

read the whole story

July 24, 1974

The United States Supreme Court (U.S. v. Nixon) unanimously ordered President Nixon to surrender tape recordings of White House conversations about the Watergate affair. Speaking for the Supreme Court in front of a packed and hushed courtroom, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger rejected President Nixon's claims of executive privilege (virtually total confidentiality) because the need for fair administration of criminal justice must prevail.

The White House feared review of the recordings by a U.S. district judge would reveal, among other crimes, impeachable offenses.

Great resources (including for teaching) on this case:

July 24, 1983

Canadians and Americans crossed the international border at Thousand Islands Bridge, linking New York and Ontario, to protest nuclear weapons and border harassment of peace activists.

Thousand Islands Bridge

July 24, 1983

Women tagged a U.S. warplane with anti-nuclear graffiti at Greenham Common, an air base in England. The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp was started in 1981 to get U.S. Cruise missiles out of their country. Tactics included disrupting construction work at the base, blockading the base and cutting down parts of the fence.

read more about The Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp

July 25, 1898  

With 16,000 troops, the United States invaded Puerto Rico at Guánica and other towns, overthrowing the government, asserting that they were liberating the inhabitants from Spanish rule. The island, as well as Cuba and the Philippines, were spoils of the Spanish-American War which ended the following month.

N.Y. 17th Volunteer Regiment marching through Puerto Rico

July 25, 1946

The first underwater atomic device was detonated at Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. It was the second of two bombs, Able and Baker, that comprised Operation Crossroads; each weapon had a yield equivalent to 23,000 tons of TNT. The U.S. Navy conducted the tests to determine the effect of such weapons on ships at sea.

read more

More than 130 newspaper, magazine and radio correspondents from seven nations were present for the tests.

Gallery of U.S. Navy artwork from Operation Crossroads:

July 25, 1963 

Martin Luther King, Jr., joined protests against housing segregation in Chicago. SCLC (Southern Christian Conference) joined with the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), led by Al Raby, a Black schoolteacher, in the The Chicago Freedom Movement.

read more   more on the CCCO

Women throughout the U.S. won the right to vote when the Tennessee legislature approved the 19th amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Wyoming had granted suffrage in 1890 and several states followed. But the amendment had been introduced annually for 41 years and had gotten two-thirds of Congress to approve it just the year before.

read more

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law by Pres. George H.W. Bush. It prohibits discrimination based on disability in employment, in public accommodation (e.g., hotels, restaurants, retail stores, theaters, health care facilities, convention centers, parks), in transportation services, and in all activities of state and local governments.

July 27, 1953

After three years of bloody and frustrating war leading to stalemate, the United States, the People's Republic of China, North Korea, and South Korea agreed to a truce, bringing the Korean War - and America's first experiment with the Cold War concept of "limited war" - to an end. The armistice signed that day ended hostilities and created the 4000-meter-wide demilitarized zone (DMZ) as a buffer between North and South Korean forces, but was not a permanent peace treaty. North Korea still considers itself at war with the U.S.

Korean War Memorial

photo: Heather Stanfield

July 27, 1954

The democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán was overthrown by CIA-paid and -trained mercenaries, making way for the U.S. to install a series of military dictatorships that waged a genocidal war against the indigenous Mayan Indians and against political opponents into the ‘90s. Nearly 200,000 citizens died over the nearly four decades of civil war.

“They have used the pretext of anti-communism. The truth is very different. The truth is to be found in the financial interests of the fruit company [United Fruit] and the other US monopolies which have invested great amounts of money in Latin America and fear that the example of Guatemala would be followed by other Latin countries ... I took over the presidency with great faith in the democratic system, in liberty and the possibility of achieving economic independence for Guatemala.”

read more

Jacobo Arbenz

Known as the "Weep and Disarm for Children Plowshares," four women were arrested for pouring their own blood on weaponry at the Naval Submarine Base at Groton, Connecticut, on the morning of the launch of the last new Trident submarine, the U.S.S. Louisiana.

read more about the Weep for Children Plowshares

Trident sub being loaded

Passed in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing due process, equal protection of the law, and citizenship to former slaves, went into effect.

read more

The text of the amendment:

July 28, 1932

Federal troops, under command of General Douglas MacArthur, forcibly dispersed the so-called ''Bonus Expeditionary Force,'' or Bonus Army. They were World War I veterans who had gathered in Washington, D.C., to demand money they weren't scheduled to receive until 1945. Most of the marchers were unemployed veterans in desperate financial straits during the Great Depression.

read more                  watch a video

July 28, 1965

President Lyndon Johnson ordered 50,000 troops to Vietnam to join the 75,000 already there. By the end of the year 180,000 U.S. troops will have been sent to Vietnam; in 1966 the figure doubled. By the summer of 1967, 80,000 Americans had been killed or wounded in the Vietnam War in addition to countless Vietnamese. President Johnson explained: "We intend to convince the communists that we cannot be defeated by force of arms or by superior power."

July 28, 1982

July 29, 1970

After a five-year strike, the United Farm Workers (UFW) signed a contract with the table grape growers in California, ending the first grape boycott.

read more

July 29, 1972

July 30, 1996

Four Ploughshares activists in Liverpool, England, were acquitted of all charges on the basis of preventing a greater crime, after having extensively damaged an Hawk fighter jet set to be sold to the Indonesian government for use in its genocidal occupation of East Timor.

read more

a chronology of plowshares disarmament actions

July 31, 1896

The National Association of Colored Women (NACW) was established in Washington. Its two leading members were Josephine Ruffin and Mary Church Terrell. Founders also included some of the most renowned African-American women educators, community leaders, and civil-rights activists in America, including: Harriet Tubman, Frances E.W. Harper, Margaret Murray Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

read more   

Mary Church Terrell

The original intention of the organization was "to furnish evidence of the moral, mental and material progress made by people of colour through the efforts of our women.” However, over the next ten years the NACW became involved in campaigns favoring women's suffrage and opposing lynching and Jim Crow laws. By the time the United States entered the First World War, membership had reached 300,000.

read more

July 31, 1986

25,000 people rallied in Namibia for freedom from South African colonial rule. In June 1971, the International Court of Justice had ruled that the South African presence in Namibia was illegal. Finally, open elections for a 72-member Constituent Assembly were held under UN supervision in November, 1989. Three months later Namibia gained its independence, and maintains it today.

read more Learn more about peacemakers in Africa:

Namibian flag

July 31, 1991

The United States and the Soviet Union, represented by Pres. George H.W. Bush and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, known as START I. It was the first agreement to actually reduce (25-35%) and verify both countries’ stockpiles at equal aggregate levels in strategic offensive arms.
The Soviet Union dissolved several months later, but Russia and the U.S. met their goal by December 2001. Three other former republics of the U.S.S.R., Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine, have eliminated these weapons from their territory altogether.

read more about Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I)

This Week In History compiled by peacebuttons.info from various sources
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