peace history january

January

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January 1, 1831

William Lloyd Garrison first published The Liberator (four hundred copies printed in the middle of the night using borrowed type), which became the leading abolitionist paper in the United States. He labeled slave-holding a crime and called for immediate abolition.
From the first issue: “I will be harsh as truth, and uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation.”

William Lloyd Garrison

“ Assenting to the ‘self-evident truth’ maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, ‘that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights—among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,’ I shall strenuously contend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population.”

see January 6, 1832

January 1, 1847

Michigan became the first state – the first government in the English-speaking world – to abolish capital punishment (for all crimes except treason).

This was done by a vote of the legislature, and not a part of the state’s constitution until 1964.

How it happened:

January 1, 1959

32-year-old lawyer Fidel Castro led Cuban revolutionaries to victory over the corrupt government of Fulgencio Batista who had fled the island the day before. Batista, a former army sergeant, had seized power in a coup, canceling an election, in 1952.

More on the Chiapas conflict

January 2, 1905

The Conference of Industrial Unionists in Chicago formed the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), known as The Wobblies. The IWW mission was to form “One Big Union” among industrial workers.

IWW home

January 2, 1920

U.S. Attorney General Alexander Palmer, in what were called the Palmer or Red raids, ordered the arrest and detention without trial of 6,000 Americans, including suspected anarchists, communists, unionists and others considered radicals, including many members of the IWW.

This followed a mass arrest of thousands two months earlier based on Palmer’s belief that Communist agents from Russia were planning to overthrow the American government.
A suicide bomber had blown off the front of the newly appointed Palmer the previous June, one in a series of coordinated attacks that day on judges, politicians, law enforcement officials, and others in eight cities nationwide. Palmer put a young lawyer, J. Edgar Hoover, in charge of investigating the bombings, collecting information on potentially violent anarchists, and coordinating the mass arrests.

Attorney General Alexander Palmer

FBI perspective

January 2, 1975

A U.S. Court ruled that John Lennon and his lawyers be given access to Department of Immigration and Naturalization files regarding his deportation case, to determine if the government case was based on his 1968 British drug conviction, or his anti-establishment comments during the years of the Nixon administration.
On October 5, 1975, the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the order to deport Lennon, and he was granted permanent residency status.

See the trailer for the documentary, “The U.S. v. John Lennon”

January 2, 1996

An estimated 100,000 Bangladeshi women traveled from the countryside to attend a rally in Dacca, the capital, to protest Islamist clerics' attacks on women's education and employment. Khaleda Zia, the country’s first female prime minister, had introduced compulsory free primary education, free education for girls up to class ten, a stipend for the girl students, and food for the education program.

Khaleda Zia

January 3, 1961

A nuclear reactor exploded at the National Reactor Testing Station in Idaho Falls, Idaho, killing three military technicians, and released radioactivity which, in the words of John A. McCone, Director of the Atomic Energy Commission, was "largely confined" to the reactor building. One technician was blown to the ceiling of the containment dome and impaled on a control rod. His body remained there until it was taken down six days later. The men were so heavily exposed to radiation that their hands and heads had to be buried separately with other radioactive waste.

January 3, 1967

Carl Wilson of the the Beach Boys was indicted for draft evasion.

Claiming conscientious objector status, he eventually won his battle against these charges.

Carl Wilso

January 3, 1971

On her first day as a member of Congress, Bella Abzug (D-New York) introduced a resolution calling for the withdrawal of troops from Southeast Asia. Born in the Bronx in 1920, one month after the passage of the U.S. Constitution’s 19th amendment granting women’s right to vote, she was the first Jewish woman elected to Congress. After attending Columbia University Law School, she practiced civil rights and labor law for twenty-three years. Throughout her career, she was known as one of the most vocal proponents of civil rights for women, as well as for gays and lesbians.

Bella Abzug

January 3, 1993

The United States of America and the Russian Federation agreed to cut the number of their nuclear warheads to between 3,000 and 3,500 (nearly half).

U.S. President George H.W. Bush, just before leaving office, and his Russian counterpart, Boris Yeltsin, signed the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – Start II – in Moscow. Start II marked the biggest reduction in nuclear arms ever agreed, eliminating land-based multiple warhead missiles, and putting limits on submarine-based missiles.

January 3, 2003

Brazil’s new leftist president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, suspended purchase of 12 new fighter planes, saying money could be better used to relieve hunger.

about Lula da Silva

January 4, 1961

The longest recorded labor strike ended after 33 years: Danish barbers' assistants began their strike in 1938 in Copenhagen.

January 4, 1965

The Free Speech Movement held its first legal rally in Sproul Plaza of the University of California at Berkeley.

January 4, 1974

President Richard Nixon refused to release tape recordings of Oval Office discussions and other documents subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee investigating illegal activities of the president’s re-election committee.

the Watergate tapes online

January 5, 1916

With the Great War (World War I) entering its third year, British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith introduced the first military conscription bill in British history to the House of Commons. It was passed into law as the Military Service Act later that month, and went into effect on February 10.

World War I Conscientious Objectors, Dyce Camp, UK

About 16,000 conscientious objectors refused to fight. Most believed that even during wartime it was wrong to kill another human being. About 7,000 agreed to perform non-combat service; more than 1,500 refused all compulsory service. They were usually drafted into military units and, upon refusing to obey orders, were court-martialed.

January 5, 1968

"Prague Spring," a mass movement advocating political and economic reforms, including increased freedom of speech and an end to state censorship, began in Czechoslovakia when Alexander Dubcek came to power. "We shall have to remove everything that strangles artistic and scientific creativeness."

Alexander Dubcek

”Socialism with a human face”

Soviet tanks enter Prague, August 1968

January 6, 1832

William Lloyd Garrison, along with 15 others, founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society at the African Meeting House in Boston. By 1833, Garrison helped establish the American Anti-Slavery Society with fellow abolitionists Arthur Tappan, Lewis Tappan, and Theodore Dwight Weld. This organization sent lecturers across the North to convince whites of slavery's brutality.

read about the Anti-Slavery Society today

about William Lloyd Garrison

William Lloyd Garrison

January 6, 1941

President Roosevelt introduced idea of the "Four Freedoms": freedom of speech and expression; freedom of every person to worship God in his own way; freedom from want; and freedom from fear.

The full text (pdf)

January 7, 1953

President Harry S. Truman announced in his State of the Union address that the United States had developed a hydrogen (fusion) bomb.

January 7, 1971

The U.S. District Court of Appeals ordered William Ruckelshaus, the Environmental Protection Agency's first administrator, to begin the de-registration procedure for DDT so that it could no longer be used.

DDT being sprayed next to livestock

It was a widely used pesticide in agriculture (principally cotton). This happened nine years after the publication of Rachel Carson's “Silent Spring,” a book which cautioned about the dangers of excessive use of pesticides and other industrial chemicals to plants and animals, and humans.

read more about Gandhi

Gandhi, 1906

January 10, 1920

The League of Nations formally came into being when its Covenant (part of the Treaty of Versailles), ratified by 42 nations in 1919, took effect.
In 1914, a political assassination in Sarajevo set off a chain of events that led to the outbreak of the most costly war ever fought to that date. As more and more young men were sent down into the trenches, influential voices in the United States and Britain began calling for the establishment of a permanent international body to to promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security.
Though strongly supported by Pres. Woodrow Wilson (who served as Chairman of the Committee that developed the Covenant), the U.S. never joined.

The archives of the League of Nations:

January 10, 1930

In December 1928, Gandhi attended a session of the Indian National Congress Party in Calcutta where it called for complete Indian independence from Great Britain. This was to be achieved through peaceful means, specifically complete noncooperation with the governmental apparatus of colonial British rule, known as the Raj.
On this day, Gandhi drafted the declaration, which stated, in part:
"The British government in India has not only deprived the Indian people of their freedom but has based itself on the exploitation of the masses, and has ruined India economically, politically, culturally and spiritually. . . . Therefore . . . India must sever the British connection and attain Purna Swaraj, or complete independence."

January 10, 1940

Members of the Brethren, Mennonites and Friends religious groups sent a message to Pres. Franklin Roosevelt requesting alternative service in the event of war.

The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 proclaimed that all persons who “by reason of religious training and belief were conscientiously opposed to all forms of military service, should, if conscripted for service, be assigned to work of national importance under civilian direction.”

Men at a Civilian Public Service camp.

January 10, 1946

The first General Assembly of the United Nations convened at Westminster Central Hall in London, England, and included 51 nations.

On January 24, the General Assembly adopted its first resolution, a measure calling for the peaceful uses of atomic energy and the elimination of atomic and other weapons of mass destruction.

January 10, 1966

Vernon Dahmer, a wealthy businessman in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, offered to pay poll taxes for those who couldn’t afford the fee then required to vote. The night after a radio station broadcasted Dahmer’s offer, his home and store were firebombed. Dahmer died later from severe burns.
The man responsible for the arson attack, Ku Klux Klan Wizard Sam Bowers, was not tried and convicted until 32 years later.

former home of Vernon Dahmer

January 10, 1971

The Peoples' Peace Treaty between the peoples of U.S. and Vietnam was endorsed by 130 organizations. Several million North Americans later signed it.

The treaty had been signed in December by leaders from the South Vietnam National Student Union, South Vietnam Liberation Student Union, North Vietnam Student Union, and National Student Associations in Saigon, Hanoi and Paris. It was adopted this day by the New University Conference and Chicago Movement meeting.

Text of the treaty

Peoples' Peace Treaty organizers

January 10, 1994

Guatemalan government officials and leftist guerilla movement leaders agreed to negotiate to end 36 years of violent conflict.

January 11, 1952

The Peace Pledge Union organized "Operation Gandhi," which became the first British protest against nuclear weapons. Ten members staged a "sit down" on the War Office steps in London.

January 11, 1998

Twenty-five thousand occupied the site of one of 30 dams to be built on the Narmada River in India. They objected to a World Bank-funded project to build 30 large, 135 medium and 3000 small dams to harness the waters of the Narmada and its tributaries to provide electrical power and irrigation to Gujarat and Rajasthan.

	Local residents known as Narmada Bachao Andolan (Save the Narmada movement), organized as they became concerned about their livelihoods, the dams’ environmental impact and a host of other issues.
	read more

The largest proposed dam, Sardar Sarovar, would submerge 61 villages and displace more than 320,000 people.

January 11, 2002

The first of the detainees/enemy combatants arrived at Guantánamo Bay, the U.S. military base on the southeastern coast of Cuba.
Detainees on their way to Guantanamo

January 12, 1954

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced U.S. abandonment of President Truman's doctrine of "containing Communism" for a new policy: “Local defenses must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory [nuclear] power.”

January 12, 1957

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was founded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other black clergymen who wanted to press for civil rights long denied members of their community. Sixty black ministers from ten states went to Atlanta, Georgia, to set up the coordinating group. They elected King its first president, with the Rev. Ralph Abernathy as treasurer.

January 12, 1962

Federal workers were guaranteed the the right to join unions and bargain collectively after President Kennedy signed Executive Order 10988.

Executive Order 10988 being signed

January 12, 1971

Reverend Philip F. Berrigan, founder of the Catholic Peace Fellowship anti-Vietnam War organization, was indicted along with five others on charges of conspiring to kidnap National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, and to bomb the heating systems of federal buildings in Washington, D.C.

At the time, Berrigan was serving a six-year sentence at a federal prison in Connecticut with his brother, Daniel, for their destruction of military draft records in Maryland during 1967-68. Berrigan’s ethic of nonviolence towards others made the charges questionable, and eventually all six were acquitted of the conspiracy charges. Berrigan and Elizabeth McAllister (later to become his wife) were convicted of smuggling mail out of a federal penitentiary.

more about Philip Berrigan

January 12, 1971

" All in the Family" premiered on CBS TV. The sitcom focused on the major social and political issues of the day such as racism, war, homosexuality and the role of women.

January 12, 1987

Twenty West German judges were arrested for blockading the U.S. Air Force base at Mutlangen, West Germany where Pershing missiles were being deployed.

Judge Ulf Panzer stated:

"Fifty years ago, during the time of Nazi fascism, we judges and prosecutors allegedly

'did not know anything.' By closing our eyes and ears, our hearts and minds, we became a docile instrument of suppression, and many judges committed cruel crimes under the cloak of the law. We have been guilty of complicity. Today we are on the way to becoming guilty again, to being abused again.

By our passivity, but also by applying laws, we legitimize terror: nuclear terror.

Today we do know...”

January 12, 1991

The United States Congress voted to authorize the use of military force against Iraq to end its occupation of Kuwait. House: 250-183; Senate: 52-47.

January 12, 2002

The "Refusenik" movement began when 53 Israeli soldiers signed an ad refusing to serve in the West Bank or Gaza Strip.

read their statement ... more

January 13, 1874

The depression of 1873-1877 left 3 million people unemployed. In the winter of 1873, 900 people starved to death, and 3,000 deserted their infants on doorsteps. A public meeting was called in New York City's Tompkins Square Park to lobby for public works projects.

The Tompkins Park Massacre

The night before, the city secretly voided the permit for the gathering. The next morning, mounted police charged into the crowd of 10,000, indiscriminately clubbing adults and children, leaving hundreds of casualties.

Police commissioner Abram Duryee commented, "It was the most glorious sight I have ever seen..."

The Tompkins Square event was part of a wave of parades of the unemployed and bread riots across the nation. In Chicago, 20,000 people marched. Even under police attack, workers in New York, Omaha, and Cincinnati refused to disperse.

January 13, 1958

Linus Pauling presented the “Scientists’ Test Ban Petition,” signed by over 11,000 scientists (including 36 Nobel laureates) from 49 countries, to the United Nations. It called for an end to nuclear weapons testing for, among other reasons, its health and ecological effects. In reaction to his efforts, Pauling was forced to resign as Chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Caltech after having served in that role for 22 years.

Linus Pauling

January 13, 1962

One hundred fifty members of the Scottish Committee of 100 (an anti-nuclear group) began a sit-down protest at the U.S. consulate in Glasgow, Scotland.

January 13, 1993

A vigil was held against arrival of ship bringing nearly two metric tons of plutonium for a pilot fuel reprocessing plant in Tokai, Japan. The specially constructed ship, the Akatsuki Maru, had carried it 25,000 km (15,500 miles) from Cherbourg, France.
Akatsuki Maru

Many objected to the maritime transport of the highly radioactive material due to risk of sinking, hijacking and the resultant risk of further nuclear proliferation. The original plan called for air transport over the United States.

The Voyage Of The Akatsuki Maru by Mario Uribe

January 14, 1601

Church authorities burned sacred Hebrew books in Rome during the papacy of Clement VIII who had forbidden Jews from reading the Talmud (a collection of centuries of interpretation of Jewish law). He had confirmed Pope Paul III’s assignment of Jews to a Roman ghetto, and their banning from papal states by Pope Pius V.
Other papal enemies of Jewish books included Innocent IV (1243-1254), Clement IV (1256-1268), John XXII (1316-1334), Paul IV (1555-1559), and Pius V (1566-1572)

January 14, 1784

The Confederation Congress, meeting in Annapolis, Maryland, ratified the Treaty of Paris with England ending the Revolutionary War. By its terms, "His Britannic Majesty" was bound to withdraw his armies without "carrying away any Negroes or other property of American inhabitants."
The treaty was negotiated by John Adams, John Jay and Benjamin Franklin for the colonies, and David Hartley representing the King of England.

Continental Congress meeting in Annapolis, Maryland

January 14, 1918

U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the selective service law, affirming all criminal charges arising from non-compliance with the draft. In Arver v. United States, the Court found that a draft does not violate the 13th Amendment’s prohibition of involuntary servitude.

January 14, 1941

A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (and widely considered de facto chief spokesperson for the African American working class) called for a march on Washington, demanding racial integration of the military and equal access to defense-industry jobs.
	" On to Washington, ten thousand black Americans!" Randolph urged. He said in the fight to "stop discrimination in National Defense...While conferences have merit, they won't get desired results by themselves."
	Asa Philip Randolph, Detail from painting by Betsy G. Reyneau

January 14, 1942

President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Presidential Proclamation No. 2537, which required aliens from World War II enemy countries – Italy, Germany and Japan – to register with the United States Department of Justice.
Registered persons received a “Certificate of Identification for Aliens of Enemy Nationality.”
This proclamation facilitated the beginning of full-scale internment of Japanese Americans the following month.