peace history june

June

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June 1, 1845

Sojourner Truth (a name she believed God had given her as a symbolic representation of her mission in life) set out from New York on a historic journey across America, preaching about the evils of slavery and promoting women's rights.

read more about Sojourner Truth

June 1, 1932

Gay rights organizer Henry Gerber published an article in Modern Thinker magazine attacking the view that homosexuality is a neurosis.

In 1924, Henry Gerber, a postal worker in Chicago, started the Society for Human Rights, America's first known gay rights organization. "The Society for Human Rights is formed to promote and protect the interests of people who are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness which is guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence, and to combat the public prejudices against them."
After having created and distributed a newsletter called "Friends and Freedom,” Gerber was arrested and held for 3 days without a warrant or being charged with any infractions. Upon release he lost his job for "conduct unbecoming a postal worker.”

June 1, 1942

On this day in 1942, on the advice of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler ordered all Jews in occupied Paris to wear an identifying yellow star on the left side of their coats.

June 1, 1950

Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine), the only woman in the Senate, and only the second in history, denounced Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) and his "red-baiting" tactics on the floor of the U.S. Senate, in a speech called "A Declaration of Conscience.”

read the declaration

June 1, 1963

The U.S. Supreme Court banned formal prayers and religious exercises from public schools.

[School Dist. Of Abington Township v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963); Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962)]

June 1, 1967

The Vietnam Veterans Against War (VVAW) was formed.

the VVAW today

June 2, 1863

Abolitionist and former slave James Montgomery led 300 African-American troops of the Union's 2nd South Carolina Volunteers on a raid of plantations along the Combahee River. Meanwhile, backed by three gunboats, Harriet Tubman's forces set fire to the plantations and freed 750 slaves.

Harriet Tubman

June 2, 1936

General Anastasio Somoza took over as dictator of Nicaragua.

June 2, 1952

The U.S. Supreme court ruled illegal President Truman's order two months earlier for the Army to seize the nation's steel mills in order to avert a strike.

June 3, 1900

The International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) was founded.

June 3, 1957

Linus Pauling and thousands of other scientists joined in a call for banning nuclear weapons testing. President Eisenhower rejected their plea.

“...Then on May 15, 1957, with the help of some of the scientists in Washington University, St. Louis, I wrote the Scientists' Bomb Test Appeal, which within two weeks was signed by over two thousand American scientists and within a few months by 11,021 scientists, of forty-nine countries....”

Linus Pauling's Nobel Peace Prize speech 1962

Linus Paulng at a disarmament demonstration

June 3, 1964

Conscientious objection became legally recognized in Belgium.

a history of European conscientious objection

June 4, 1972

Angela Y. Davis, a former philosophy professor at the University of California, militant black leader and self-proclaimed communist, was acquitted on charges of conspiracy, murder, and kidnapping by an all-white jury in San Jose, California.

June 4, 1987

New Zealand passed legislation declaring itself nuclear-free. In 1986, New Zealand had banned the entry of U.S. Navy ships from their ports in the belief that they were carrying nuclear weapons or were nuclear-powered. U.S. government protests of the policy led to breakup of the ANZUS (Australia-New Zealand-United States) defense alliance.

The New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament and Arms Control Act 1987 (which implemented the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) prohibits the:
-   manufacture, acquisition, possession, control of any nuclear explosive device,
-   aiding, abetting or procuring any person to manufacture, acquire, possess, or have control over any nuclear explosive device, and
-   transport ,stockpiling, storage, installation, or deployment of any nuclear explosive device.

June 4, 1989

Hundreds of civilians were shot dead by China’s People’s Liberation Army during a bloody military operation in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Students and workers had became part of a growing pro-democracy movement, gathering there continuously for weeks. The Chinese government still officially denies any deaths occurred; thousands arrested "disappeared" and remain unaccounted for.

"deaths from the military assault on Tiananmen Square range from 180 to 500; thousands more have been injured . . . thousands of civilians stood their ground or swarmed around military vehicles. APCs [armored personnel carriers] were set on fire, and demonstrators besieged troops with rocks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails."*

watch

*From a comprehensive overview prepared by the National Security Archive based on formerly classified U.S. Government documents

June 5, [since] 1972

World Environment Day was established by the U.N. General Assembly to commemorate the opening of the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in Sweden. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was established as a result of the conference.

UNEP Mission: To provide leadership and encourage partnership in caring for the environment by inspiring, informing, and enabling nations and peoples to improve their quality of life without compromising that of future generations.

past milestones of World Environment Day

Each year World Environment Day adopts a theme.

For 2006 the theme of World Environment

Day is Deserts and Desertification Don't Desert Drylands!

June 6, 1936

First issue of Peace News published in England.

June 6, 1966

James H. Meredith, the first African American ever to attend the University of Mississippi, was shot by a sniper in the back and legs while on a lone "March Against Fear."

He was walking the 220 miles from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to encourage others to stand up for their rights and respect, and to register to vote. Law enforcement officers and reporters following him witnessed the attack, and the shooter was arrested.

June 6, 1968

Comedian Dick Gregory began a hunger strike in Olympia, Washington jail after his arrest with others at a fish-in, an act of civil disobedience in support of the fishing rights of the Nisqually Indian Tribe.

visit Dick Greogy.com read more about Dick Gregory

June 7, 1892

Homer Plessy was arrested when he refused to move from a seat reserved for whites on a train in New Orleans. The case led to the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ''separate but equal'' decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.

more about Homer Plessy Read his petition to the Court

June 7, 1893

a young Ghandi

In his first act of civil disobedience, Mohandas Gandhi refused to comply with racial segregation rules on a South African train and was forcibly ejected at Pietermaritzburg.

read "Pietermaritzburg: The Beginning of Gandhi's Odyssey"

June 7, 1997

Seven activists are arrested for distributing copies of the Bill of Rights outside the Bradbury Science Museum, part of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the primary nuclear research facility in the U.S.

June 8, 1966

270 walked out of graduation ceremonies at New York University (NYU) to protest the presentation of an honorary degree to Robert McNamara, then the Secretary of Defense and responsible for U.S. forces waging war in Vietnam.

June 8, 1969

Two-thirds of the graduating class of Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) turned their backs on Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as he gave the commencement address, silently expressing their opposition to U.S. foreign policy and the war in Vietnam.

June 9, 1954

Counsel for the U.S. Army Joseph N. Welch confronted Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) during hearings into alleged communist infiltration of the Army Signal Corps. McCarthy attacked a member of Welch's law firm, Frederick G. Fisher, as a communist
for his prior membership in the

National Lawyers Guild.

Army counsel Joseph N. Welch (left) confronts Sen Joseph McCarthy (right)

Said Welch: "Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" The entire hearings and this encounter were broadcast live on television, a first, and was the beginning of the end for McCarthy’s power to spread fear.

June 9, 1984

150,000 marched in London, England, for nuclear disarmament, protesting the presence of U.S. Cruise missiles on British soil.

June 9, 1993

Police banned a vigil by Women in Black in Belgrade, Serbia.

read about Women in Black

Women in Black demonstrations combine art & politics

June 10, 1917

The Women's Peace Crusade in Scotland launched a three-week campaign of street meetings and demonstrations in dozens of towns to build support for peace in the midst of World War I.

June 10, 1980

Nelson Mandela's first writings while imprisoned on South Africa’s Robben Island were smuggled out and made public.

read more about "Freedom Summer"

<Student protestors are photographed by a policeman on Freedom Day in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1964.

>ROBERT MOSES, director of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project and leader of the training program in Oxford, is shown here during a break in a session which he conducted in Jackson, Mississippi, to prepare African-Americans for politically effective action.

more photos

June 19, 1964

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was approved after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the United States Senate. The new law, initiated and passed through the determination of Pres. Lyndon Johnson, guaranteed for the first time equal access to public accommodations “without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.”

read about the Civil Rights (1964) and Voting Rights Acts (1965)

Massive demonstrations a year earlier insured passage of the Acts

June 19, 1982

One thousand landowners occupied key islands in protest against French nuclear tests at Kwajalein Atoll. Kwajalein Atoll is located in the western Pacific Ocean, about 2,100 miles southwest of Hawaii and 1,400 miles east of Guam. The island is now home to USAKA (United States Army Kwajalein Atoll), the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, and about 2,000 support personnel and family members on Kwajalein and Roi-Namur islands.

read more about nuclear testing in the Pacific

June 20, 1960

Nobel laureate for Chemistry Linus Pauling defied Congress by refusing to name circulators of petitions calling for total halt of nuclear weapons testing. Pauling later won a second Nobel, a Peace Prize for his work championing nuclear disarmament.

an interview with Linus Pauling on the peace movement, 1983

Linus Pauling

June 20, 1982

2,500 were arrested during a two-day blockade of Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in California, the principal American nuclear weapons research site.

June 20, 1995

Shell Oil gave in to international pressure and abandoned its plans to dump the Brent Spar oil-drilling platform in the North Atlantic. The environmental group Greenpeace spearheaded the effort to prevent Shell from sinking the rig, its members boarding and occupying it as a tactic to stop the deep sea disposal.
Shell’s plan would have dumped toxic and radioactive sludge into the ocean just west of the British Isles. A month later, at the Oslo and Paris Commission (OSPARCOM) meeting, 11 out of 13 countries agreed on a moratorium on the dumping of offshore installations, pending agreement on a outright ban.

Greenpeace climbers on Brent Spar platform

read more about Greenpeace and Brent Spar

Shell ships use water cannons against Greenpeace activists on board the rig.

June 21, 1877

The Molly Maguires

Four members of the "Molly Maguires" were hung in what was then Mauch Chunk, and in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, charged with murder. The Molly Maguires were a secret and violent Irish-Catholic organization of coal miners formed to combat the oppressive working and living conditions in the anthracite region of the state.

the movie

(see notes)

June 21, 1908

A Women's Sunday Suffrage rally, supporting the right of women to vote, drew several hundred thousand to London’s Hyde Park from all over the country.

Women were encouraged to wear "the colours" – white (for purity), green (hope) and purple (dignity) – and in "as fetching, charming and ladylike a manner as possible." As the Yorkshire Daily Post put it: "At least one half of the crowd was composed of the sort of people you would expect to see at a suburban garden party."

the women's suffrage movement

June 21, 1964

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three young Freedom Summer workers, disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi, while registering Blacks to vote. Their bodies were found six weeks later, having been shot and buried in an earthen dam.

Eight members of the Ku Klux Klan eventually went to prison on federal conspiracy charges related to the disappearance; none served more than six years.
Schwerner and Goodman, both white New Yorkers, had traveled to heavily segregated Mississippi to help organize civil rights efforts on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Chaney was a local African American man who had joined CORE in 1963.

read about the movie

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner

June 21, 1997

100,000 marched in solidarity with striking newspaper workers in Detroit after nearly two years on the picket line.

support rally march 1, 1997 photo: Paul Felton

The Detroit Newspaper Agency had refused to bargain in good faith, even after the union members had worked for months without a contract, and the DNA, which ran both the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News had begun to impose the changes they were insisting on at the bargaining table.

Voices of the Strike:

With portraits of Detroit newspaper workers

by George Waldman

June 22, 1843

The First General Peace Convention opened in London, England of "persons from different nations ... to deliberate upon the best means, under the Divine blessing, to show the world the evil and inexpediency of the spirit and to promote permanent and universal peace."

June 22, 1987

At least 8,000 peace protesters formed a 10-mile human chain around the U.S. air base on Okinawa, Japan.

2002 No Base chain at Okinawa.

People in Okinawa demostrate against a new U.S. base every day.

June 23, 1972

Life magazine published photos of South Vietnamese children running from Napalm, an incendiary weapon used widely by U.S. forces to burn down the jungle and eliminate cover for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. Napalm, a sticky mixture of gasoline, polystyrene and benzene that burns at very high temperature, had been used in WWII and Korea.

read about the photograph

June 23, 1973

The International Court of Justice granted an injunction, requested by Australia and New Zealand governments, against French nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific.

June 24, 1948

President Truman signed the Selective Service Act, creating a system for registering all men ages 18-25, and drafting them into the armed forces as the nation’s military needs required.

June 24, 1970

U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, passed in August, 1964 following a provocation by the U.S. destroyer Maddox, but portrayed as aggressive military action by North Vietnamese PT boats. The resolution, authorizing the president “to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States” was used by President Lyndon Johnson, absent a formal congressional, and constitutional, declaration of war, to justify open-ended pursuit of war in Vietnam.

June 24, 1980

A general strike was held in El Salvador against the Death Squads. These Death Squads were “private” groups supported by the government, its various “security” forces as a way to control civilian society.

a Salvadoran death squad at work

June 25, 1955

The South African Freedom Charter was adopted at the Congress of the People in Johannesburg.
“We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people....”

read the whole Charter

June 25, 1978

In response to passage of an anti-gay ordinance in Miami, 240,000 people marched in San Francisco, the first large-scale version of that city's annual Gay Freedom Day Parade.

read more about the Gay Parades of the Seventies

(pictures and stories)

June 25, 1987

Conscientious objector Michaelis Maraggakis jailed four years for refusing compulsory military service, Thessaloniki, Greece.

June 26, 1945

In the Herbst Theater auditorium in San Francisco, delegates from 50 nations sign the United Nations Charter, establishing the world body as a means of saving "succeeding generations from the scourge of war."

The U.S. Post Office issues a commemorative envelope.

June 26, 1955

The South African Freedom Charter is adopted at the Congress of the People in Johannesburg.

June 27, 1973

Former White House counsel John W. Dean tells the Senate Watergate Committee about an ''enemies list'' kept by the Nixon White House.

June 27, 1980

President Carter signs a measure that requires approximately 4 million U.S. men age 19 to 20 to register for the draft.

June 27, 1986

International Court of Justice ("World Court") decides 12-3 that United States violated international law as well of its Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Amity by its use of force against Nicaragua including the mining of harbors, bombing nearby airfields as well as furnishing financial, military and logistical support to the so-called Contra insurgents. The Contra's goal was to overthrow Nicaragua's popular left-wing government.