April


April 1, 1841

Brook Farm, perhaps history's most well-known utopian community, was founded by George and Sophia Ripley near West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Its primary appeal was to young Bostonians who were uncomfortable with the materialism of American life, and the community was a refuge for dozens of transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

more about Brook Farm


April 1, 1918
Following four days of demonstrations in Quebec City against the Military Services Act that devolved into rioting, Prime Minister Robert Borden called in troops from Ontario to stop the violence. Orders from the soldiers were read in English only to the mostly Francophone demonstrators, and when the they didn’t disperse, the troops fired, killing four and wounding 70. [see March 28]

April 1, 1932
500 schoolchildren paraded through Chicago's downtown section to the Board of Education offices, demanding that the school system provide them with food.

April 1, 1918

Following four days of demonstrations against the Military Services Act that devolved into rioting, Prime Minister Robert Borden called in troops
from Ontario to stop the violence.
Orders from the soldiers were read in English only, and when the demonstrators didn’t disperse, the troops fired, killing four and wounding 70.
[see March 28, 1918]


memorial monument

April 1, 1932
500 schoolchildren paraded through Chicago's downtown section to the Board of Education offices, demanding that the school system provide them with food.

April 1, 1955
The African National Congress had called on parents to withdraw their children by this day from South African schools in resistance to the Bantu Education Act. That 1953 law transferred education of the Bantu (blacks) from religious missions to state-controlled schools. Mission education, argued the then minister of Bantu Education, Dr. H.F. Verwoerd, not only tended to create “false expectations” amongst the natives, but was also in direct conflict with South Africa’s apartheid policies.

April 1, 1970

 

Following decades of struggle and ending a five-year national boycott, the United Farm Workers signed its first contract for table-grape workers with two of California's largest grape growers.

read about the boycott


April 1, 1983

Protesters in the United Kingdom formed a human chain 22.5 kilometers (14 miles) long to express their opposition to the presence of nuclear missiles. The chain started at the American airbase at Greenham Common, passed the Aldermaston nuclear research center, and ended at the ordnance factory in Burghfield.
At the same time 15,000 people took part in the first of a series of anti-nuclear marches in West Germany. They are protesting against the siting of American cruise missiles on West German territory.


April 1, 1985

The Environmental Protection Agency ordered an end to the dumping of sludge off the New Jersey coast into the Atlantic Ocean.

April 2, 1966

One hundred thousand Vietnamese demonstrated in Da Nang against both the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments. Civil unrest spread also to Hue and Saigon.

April 2, 1970

Massachusetts, in the midst of the Vietnam war, enacted a law which ex-empted its citizens from having to fight in an undeclared war.



April 3, 1958

10,000 British joined a rally in advance of a three-day, fifty-mile peace march from Trafalgar Square, London, to Aldermaston, Berkshire. Berkshire was the site of the AWRE (Atomic Weapons Research Establishment). This march marked the beginning of many protests against Britain's devel-opment of nuclear weaponry. Thousands made the march along the same route for many years.


Some 10,000 people joined the 1958 rally.

David and Renee Gill at the first Altermaston march 1958 (left)
and at the April 2004 march (right)

...still protesting for

nuclear disarmament.

read the story


April 3, 1963

Martin Luther King, Jr., launched a voter registration drive in Birmingham, Alabama. Police Chief "Bull" Connor responded with fire hoses & attack dogs.

April 3, 1968

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I've been to the mountaintop" speech in Memphis, Tennessee. King was there to support sanita-tion workers striking to protest low wages and poor working conditions.“. . . I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!And so I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
King was assassinated the next day.

read the speech ...or listen


April 4, 1958

Four thousand began the first of eleven consecutive annual Easter protest marches. It took three days on foot from London to the Aldermaston AWRE (Atomic Weapons Research Establishment) base in England.

watch one of the marches

Aldermaston March, 1st Day, 1958.

April 4, 1967

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in a speech to Clergy and Laity Concerned at the Riverside Church in New York City, called for common cause between the civil rights and peace movements. The Nobel Peace Prize-winner proposed the United States stop all bombing of North and South Vietnam; declare a unilateral truce in the hope that it would lead to peace talks; set a date for with-drawal of all troops from Vietnam; and give the National Liberation Front a role in negotiations.

"...this war is a blasphemy against all that America stands for...."

 

read the speechor listen


April 4, 1968


Martin Luther King, Jr., 39, was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had come to help with a strike by sanitation workers. Riots in reaction to the assassination broke out in over a hundred cities across the U.S., lasting u p to a week; cities included Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Cincinnati, Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Toledo, Pittsburgh, and Seattle. The government deployed 75,000 National Guard troops. 39 people died and 2,500 were injured.

Revs. Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, and King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel shortly before he was shot.

The building now houses the National Civil Rights Museum.
visit the museum

James Earl Ray confessed to the slaying, was sentenced to 99 years in prison, but later recanted. Numerous people originally involved in investi-gating him have raised serious doubts about his involvement; after Ray's death, a 1999 civil jury trial in Memphis concluded that Ray did not act alone.


April 4, 1969


CBS-TV censored anti-Vietnam War commentary on its network through its cancellation of "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour," despite the show’s commercial success.

read more


April 4, 1984

The women of the main peace camp at Greenham Common in Berkshire, England, were evicted by British authorities. They had been encamped for over two years to oppose the presence of nucleararmed cruise missiles at the military base there. They said it would not end their protest.
read more

April 5, 1972

The Harrisburg Seven case ended in mistrial after 11 weeks. The Seven were charged with plotting to kidnap Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, among other alleged crimes. The defense attorney, recent former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, Asked by the presiding judge to call his first witness said, "Your Honor, the defendants shall always seek peace. They continue to proclaim their innocence. The defense rests." Only Phil Berrigan and Sister Elizabeth McAllister were declared guilty of smuggling letters in and out of prison.
They later married, co-founding Baltimore's Jonah House.

visit Jonah House


April 5, 1982
Dublin, Ireland, declared itself a nuclear-free zone by vote of its City Council.

April 5, 1985
Columbia University students occupied Hamilton Hall to demand divest-ment by the university of its assets invested in companies doing business with South Africa. The dis-investment was to pressure the racially separatist government to eliminate its racially separatist policy of apartheid.

April 5, 1989


Solidarity (Solidarnosc in Polish) became the first independent labor union given legal status in Poland. It started out as a strike committee among shipyard workers advocating democratic reforms during the summer of 1980 in Gdansk (FKA Danzig). A very high percentage of the Polish work-ers, a broad representation of the political and social opposition to the communist military regime, became members despite the union’s having been declared illegal in October of 1982.


April 5, 1992
A march and rally in support of women's reproductive rights and equality drew several hundred thousand people to Washington, D.C. One of the largest protests ever in the nation's capital, the pro-choice rally occurred as the U.S. Supreme Court was about to consider the constitutionality of a Pennsylvania law that limited access to abortions. Many abortion-rights advocates feared that the high court, with its conservative majority, might find the Pennsylvania law unconstitutional, or even overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that made abortion legal.

read more


April 5, 1996

54 were arrested in a Good Friday protest at Livermore Nuclear Weapons Laboratory in California.


April 6, 1712

The first major slave rebellion in the North American British colonies took place in New York.

read about the rebellion
Original documents

April 6, 1930

Mohandas Gandhi and his followers made salt by boiling seawater, an act of civil disobedience that violated the law. Following the Indian declaration of independence in January, Gandhi had sought a nonviolent means of resisting the Raj, as the British colonial control of India was known.
Gandhi chose salt, a dietary necessity in the hot climate of India. The British not only exercised monopoly control over its production and sale, but taxed it as well.
He wrote to the Viceroy, “I regard this to be the most iniquitous of all from the poor man’s standpoint.”Gandhi and 78 of his supporters who practiced satyagraha (prohibition of both physical and psychological violence, active caring toward the oppo-nent, and the intention to convert; unconditional commitment to nonvio-lence based both on principle and on practical/humanitarian considera-tions) began a 390-km (240-mile) march in Ahmedabad, drawing crowds in every village as they went. They arrived at the seaside in Dandi 23 days later, with thousands who had joined them along the way.He was imprisoned as were nearly 60,000 others for their defiance of the Salt Laws, and millions more risked arrest. Though independence was not achieved until 1947, this was the turning point in popular understanding of a peaceful path toward a political goal.
Gandhi making salt
The Salt March to Dandi

April 6, 1968

Dozens of major cities in the United States were rocked by an escalation in the race riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King two days before. By this time, at least 19 people had died in the arson, looting and shootings. Several hundred had also been injured and about 3,000 arrested — most of those in Washington, D.C.
read more

April 6, 1968

Oakland police raided Black Panther Party headquarters, killing Bobby Hutton and wounding three others, including Eldridge Cleaver. Police opened fire on a car of Black Panthers returning from a meeting. The Panthers escaped their vehicle and ran into a house. Police attacked the house with tear gas and gunfire. After the building was on fire, the Panthers tried to surrender. Seventeen-year-old Bobby Hutton came out of the house with his hands in the air. But a police officer shouted, "He's got a gun." This prompted further police gunfire that left Hutton dead. Police later admitted he was unarmed.
Bobby Hutton

April 6, 1983


Interior Secretary James Watt banned the Beach Boys from the Fourth of July celebration on the Washington Mall, saying rock 'n' roll bands attracted the ''wrong element."


April 6, 1996

Eleven were arrested at the main post office near Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., for attempting to mail medical supplies to Iraq in defiance of the U.S.-led embargo.

a chronology by Voices in the Wilderness and the struggle against sanctions


April 7, 1979

Thousands protested against the nuclear industry in Sydney, Australia. The country was a major source of uranium, the radioactive heavy metal necessary for the power generation and weapons industries.
The marchers were from many allied groups concerned about many related issues: the link between the uranium industry and weapons proliferation; the environmental destructiveness of nuclear power; the impact of uranium mining on Aborigines and workers in the industry; the Cold War nuclear arms spiral and Australia's contribution to it through the hosting of US bases, allowing US nuclear warships to use Australian ports and the ANZUS alliance; weapons testing in the Pacific, and the secret history of the British nuclear weapons tests in the region.

Sydney anti-uranium protest
Photo: Paul Keig

April 7, 1994

Genocide in Rwanda began. Over the following 90 days at least a half million people were killed by their countrymen, principally Hutus killing Tutsis. This day is commemorated annually with prayer vigils in Rwanda.
Canadian Gen. Romeo Dallaire, head of the U.N. Peacekeeping Force in Rwanda, a tiny African nation formerly a Belgian colony, had warned of impending slaughter, but was ordered not to attempt to intervene.

 

Interview with Gen. Dallaire
 
From the background to the aftermath of the genocide

from the Peace Pledge Union


April 8, 1952

President Harry S. Truman attempted to nationalize the steel industry in order to avert a nationwide strike. He was concerned about a shortage of steel needed for the war effort in Korea.

April 8, 1993

Women in Black of Lund, Sweden, demonstrated in solidarity with their Serbian sisters suffering amidst the conflicts resulting from the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. “We dressed in black. We knew that despair and pain needed to be transformed into political action. Our choice of black meant that we did not agree with everything that the Serbian regime was doing. We refused their language which promotes hate and death. We repeated: "DO NOT SPEAK FOR US, WE WILL SPEAK FOR OURSELVES "

more about Women in Black


April 9, 1898

Ida Wells-Barnett, a journalist, speaker and advocate for suffrage, wrote to Pres. William McKinley for federal action against those who lynched the U.S. Postmaster of Lake City, South Carolina.
Though the federal government had previously refused to involve itself with the thousands of lynchings, leaving them to be dealt with at the state level, Ms. Wells-Barnett insisted that a postmaster’s murder was a federal matter.“ We most earnestly desire that national legislation be enacted for the suppression of the national crime of lynching . . . .
“ Nowhere in the civilized world save the United States of America do men, possessing all civil and political power, go out in bands of 50 and 5,000 to hunt down, shoot, hang or burn to death a single individual, unarmed and absolutely powerless . . . We refuse to believe this country, so powerful to defend its citizens abroad, is unable to protect its citizens at home.”
Ida Wells-Barnett

April 9, 1947

The first freedom ride, the "Journey of Reconciliation," left Washington, D.C. to travel through four states of the upper South.


In response to a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated seating in interstate travel, the group of both black and white Americans rode together despite “Jim Crow” state laws making it illegal. Some members of the group served on a chain gang after their arrest in North Carolina. The integrated bus tour was sponsored by CORE (Congress for Racial Equality) and FOR (Fellowship of Reconciliation).

read more about the freedom rides


April 9, 1981


Members of the Bigstone Cree band of indigenous people ended a 250-mile march to the capital, Edmonton, to highlight their economic plight in northern Alberta, Canada.


April 9, 1995

Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara first publicly acknowledged error in prosecution of the war in Vietnam.
“ Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."

McNamara in the movie, Fog of War


(resources include comprehensive lesson plans)
Robert McNamara & the Iraq War


April 9, 2000

Jubilee 2000 National Mobilization Day in Washington, D.C. brought together individuals and groups demanding cancellation of third world debt.
"Every child in Africa is born with a financial burden which a lifetime's work cannot repay. The debt is a new form of slavery as vicious as the slave trade."
More on Jubilee 2000

April 10, 1516

In what was the first ghetto, Jews in Venice, Italy, were forced to live in a specific, restricted area of the city known as ghetto nuovo. The word "ghetto" comes from the Venetian word "geto," meaning foundry. Prior to becoming an exclusively Jewish neighborhood, the Venice ghetto was the site of two foundries.

After its establishment the city’s Jews, who were allowed to attend to their business during the day (though required to wear a yellow badge or scarf indicating their religion), were forced to return to the ghetto where gates were locked to keep them inside overnight.

 


April 10, 1972

Charlie Chaplin received an honorary Oscar for "the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century.” The British native’s political views had been criticized, as had been his failure to apply for U.S. citizenship. Pressed for back taxes and accused of supporting subversive causes during the McCarthy era, Chaplin left the United States in 1952. Informed that he would not be welcomed back, he retorted, "I wouldn't go back there if Jesus Christ were president." He returned briefly from exile, however, to accept this award and received the longest standing ovation in Academy Award history, lasting a full five minutes.


April 10, 1981

The United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (also known as the Inhumane Weapons Convention) started gathering signatures of nations willing to abide by its limitations.

Currently, 105 countries have agreed to ban or limit munitions that cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants, or affect civilians indiscriminately. So far the restrictions cover mines, booby traps, incendiary weapons (such as Napalm) and blinding laser weapons.

This Life photograph of a naked child running down a street in Vietnam screaming in agony captures the effects of Napalm. Nick Ut's photograph of Kim Phuk, taken in 1972, won the Pulitzer Prize ( Associated Press).

more on the treaty
more on incendiary weapons

April 10, 1998

The Northern Ireland peace talks ended with an historic accord – called the Good Friday Agreement – reached after nearly two years of talks and 30 years of conflict. Former U.S. Senator George Mitchell (D-Maine) was chair of the talks established a Northern Irish Assembly for both the Irish Catholic republicans and the British Anglican unionists.
read more

April 11, 1916

Mrs. Annie Besant, a Briton and head of the Theosophical Society of India, established the Home Rule League with autonomy for India from British colonial rule as its goal.

April 11, 1961


The trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann began in Israel. The man accused of leading Hitler’s effort to exterminate the Jewish people and others faced 15 charges, including crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people, and war crimes.

 

read the charges


Adolf Eichmann

April 11, 1968

Civil Rights Act of 1968 was signed into law by Pres. Lyndon Johnson just one week after the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The law bars racial discrimination in the sale, rental or financing of housing and other areas.

April 12, 1937

60,000 students across the U.S. took part in the first nationwide student strike. The protest was against participation in any war.

Posters from the anti-war movement of the 1930's


April 12, 1971

 

Ninety-year-old Jeanette Rankin, the first female member of Congress, and the only one to vote against U.S. entry into both World Wars, led 8,000 in protest of the Vietnam War in the Women's peace march on the Pentagon.


April 12, 1971


The first European demonstration against nuclear power brought together 1500 to oppose construction of a nuclear power plant in Fessenheim, France.

 


Protest at Fessenheim


April 13, 1919


 

Socialist, pacifist, and labor leader Eugene V. Debs was imprisoned for opposing U.S. entry into World War I.

While in prison, he received nearly one million votes for President in 1920 (as he had in 1912).

learn more about Eugene Debs


April 13, 1919

In Amritsar, holiest city of the Sikh religion (in India’s Punjab province), British and Gurkha troops fired without warning and killed at least 379 and wounded 1200 Sikhs meeting in a park known as Jallianwala Bagh to celebrate their new year’s festival of Baisakhi Mela. In the previous three days, two key Sikh leaders had been deported, Mohandas Ghandi had been barred from entering the Punjab, and a general strike and demonstration had been met with deadly fire from British troops, sparking violent reaction.

read the background of the Amritsar massacre


April 13, 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."
Silent Spring and its impact

April 14, 1968

A massive student rally in West Berlin blocked the city's main thoroughfare, the Kurfurstendamm. It ended in violent clashes between police and the marchers. The students were protesting the shooting a week earlier of one of their leaders, Rudi Dutschke, outside the offices of the German Socialist Students Federation (SDS).

read more


April 14, 1988


The Soviet Union signed an agreement pledging to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan after ten years. The pact, drawn up in negotiations between the United States, the USSR, Pakistan and Afghanistan, was signed at a United Nations ceremony in the Swiss capital of Geneva.


April 14, 1988

The Danish parliament, the Folketing, insisted that foreign warships affirmatively state whether or not they carry nuclear weapons before being allowed to enter their ports. Previously, the well-known Danish non-nuclear policy had not been enforced and such weapons were routinely carried on nuclear-capable NATO ships visiting Denmark. U.S. and other allies abided by a policy known as "neither confirming nor denying" (NCND).

The policy and its consequences

April 15, 1947

Jackie Roosevelt Robinson became the first African American to play in a major league baseball game for more than fifty years. His stepping onto Ebbets field in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform broke the "color line," the segregation of professional teams.
The International League in 1887 began a wave of League-wide black exclusion, and it had been complete since 1899, when Bill Galloway became the last African-American player (Woodstock, Ontario) in white organized ball.
Though hitless in three at-bats, Robinson started at first base, and the Dodgers beat the Boston Braves that day,
5-3.

"Jackie, we've got no army. There's virtually nobody on our side. No owners, no umpires, very few newspapermen. And I'm afraid that many fans will be hostile. We'll be in a tough position. We can win only if we can convince the world that I'm doing this because you're a great ballplayer, a fine gentleman."

" There was never a man in the game who could put mind and muscle together quicker and with better judgment than (Jackie) Robinson."

-Branch Rickey
Jackie Robinson signing his contract with Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers
Jackie Robinson and his work on civil rights from the National Archives

April 15, 1967

 

Amidst growing opposition to the war in Vietnam, large-scale anti-war protests were held in New York, San Francisco and other cities. In New York, the protest began in Central Park, where over 150 draft cards were burned, and included a march to the United Nations led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.


King and Dr. Benjamin Spock lead an anti-war march to the United Nations, 15 April 1967

April 16, 1971


Members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) threw medals they had earned in Vietnam on the U.S. Capitol steps in protest of the Vietnam War.

 

read more about the VVAW


April, 16, 1971

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) estimated over 2,000 people openly refused to pay part or all of their income tax in protest over the war in Vietnam.

“If a thousand [people] were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them and enable the state to commit violence and shed innocent blood.”
Henry David Thoreau on the Mexican War

National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee

April 16, 2000

Between 10,000 and 20,000 activists blockaded meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. Sitting down in intersections and locking arms to form human chains, the protestors were opposed to Bank policies that increased third-world indebtedness and did little to directly benefit the poor in those countries.
" The World Bank is subjugating our economic and social independence,"Vineeta Gupta, a doctor from the Punjab in India, said in a letter he delivered to World Bank President James Wolfensohn at his home. "It is time that we shut the bank down, and this boycott is a great start."


April 17, 1959

22 were arrested in New York City for refusing to take shelter during
a civil defense drill.

April 17, 1960

Inspired by the Greensboro sit-in by four black college students at an all-white lunch counter, nearly 150 black students from nine states formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, with Ella Baker, James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr., the founders set SNCC’s initial goals as overturning segregation in the South and giving young blacks a stronger voice in the civil rights movement. By that time, in mid-April 1960, 50,000 or more students had participated in sit-ins over just the previous three months.
At the Raleigh conference Guy Carawan sang a new version of “We Shall Overcome,” an adaptation of an old labor song. This song would become the national anthem of the civil rights movement. People joined hands and gently swayed in time singing “black and white together,” repeating over and over, “Deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome some day.”

History of SNCC

SNCC website


April 17, 1961

An army of 1,500 anti-Castro Cuban exiles, mercenaries equipped and trained at a secret Guatemala base by the CIA, landed at Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) in an attempt to "liberate" Cuba from Communist rule. Within three days, the invasion proved disastrous with nearly 1,200 members of Brigade 2506 taken prisoner.
Known as Operation Zapata, it was conceived by Vice President Nixon, planned and approved by the Eisenhower administration, and executed by Pres. John Kennedy.
Cuban leader Fidel Castro during the Bay of Pigs invasion
What actually happened
Read formerly classified critique of the operation:

April 17, 1965


The first national demonstration against the Vietnam War took place. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the organizers, had expected about 2000 marchers; the actual count was about 25,000. This was the largest anti-war protest ever to have been held in Washington, D.C. up to that time. The number of marchers approximately equaled the number of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. Several hundred students in the protest broke away from the main march and conducted a brief sit-in at the U.S. Capitol’s door.

read more

April 17, 1986