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 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, German Chancellor 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 ruled that recitation of the Lord’s Prayer and readings from the Bible in public schools violated the establishment clause of the first amendment to the U.S. constitution.

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

June 1, 1967

The Vietnam Veterans Against War (VVAW) was founded in New York City after six Vietnam vets marched together in a peace demonstration.

	It was organized to voice the growing opposition among returning servicemen and women to the still-raging war in Indochina. VVAW, through open discussion of soldiers’ first-hand experiences, revealed the truth about U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia.
	VVAW demonstrating against Iraq war 2004
	the VVAW today

June 2, 1863

Abolitionist and former slave James Montgomery led 300 African-American troops of the Union Army'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.
More on General Tubman
Harriet Tubman

June 2, 1936

General Anastasio Somoza, head of the U.S. Marine-trained National Guard, forced the resignation of Nicaragua’s elected President, Juan Bautista Sacasa. This followed a seven-year U.S. occupation of the country and was followed by Somoza family control of the country for the next four decades.

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.

The decision in perspective

June 3, 1900

The International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), a consolidation of seven smaller east coast unions, was founded.

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Herman Grossman, ILGWU president

June 3, 1946

In Irene Morgan v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregation in interstate travel was unconstitutional as “an undue burden on commerce.” The southern states refused to enforce it, however, and Jim Crow (the laws, local and state, that enforced segregation) continued as the way of life in the South. Eleven years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a young woman named Irene Morgan rejected that same demand on an interstate bus headed to Maryland from Gloucester, Virginia.
Recovering from surgery and already sitting far in the back, she defied the driver’s order to surrender her seat to a white couple. Like Parks, Morgan was arrested and jailed. But her action caught the attention of lawyers from the NAACP, led by Thurgood Marshall, and two years later her case reached the Supreme Court.
Headlines when Irene Morgan won out over Jim Crow (JC) segregation laws

Hear Bayard Rustin, labor and civil right leader, sing “You Don’t have to Ride Jim Crow”

June 3, 1957

Thousands of scientists, led by Barry Commoner and Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, issued a call for banning nuclear weapons testing: “As scientists we have knowledge of the dangers involved and therefore a special responsibility to make those dangers known.”

“ ...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

Read “An Appeal by American Scientists to the Governments and People of the World.”

June 3, 1964

Conscientious objection, the refusal to bear arms in time of war on the grounds of moral or religious principles, became legally recognized in Belgium.

a history of European conscientious objection

June 4, 1939

During what became known as the "Voyage of the Damned," the SS St. Louis, carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees from Germany to the U.S., was turned away from the Florida coast. The ship, also denied permission to dock in Cuba, eventually returned to Europe; many of the refugees later died in Nazi concentration camps.
read more	read about the movie

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.

Angela Davis wearing a peace button from peacebuttons.info
speaking at The Grays Harbor Institute
Hoquiam, Washington April, 2007

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 of 1987 (which ratified 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
•   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, 1851

Uncle Tom's Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly began to appear in serial form in the Washington National Era, an abolitionist weekly. The novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a tear-jerking tale of the hardships of slavery, became a central reference point in the national debate over the issue.
read more

June 5, 1972

Jane Briggs Hart, the wife of Senator Philip A. Hart (D-Michigan), informed the Internal Revenue Service that she wouldn’t pay some of her taxes; instead, she deposited her quarterly estimated tax of $6,200 in a special bank account. "I cannot contribute one more dollar toward the purchase of more bombs and bullets," she wrote.
Jane Briggs Hart

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 Program (UNEP) was established as a result of the conference.
	read more

UNEP’s 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 2008 the theme of World Environment Day:
Kick the Habit! Towards a Low Carbon Economy

June 5, 1989

Just a few days before the first fission reaction was to be allowed at New Hampshire’s Seabrook Station nuclear power plant, hundreds breached the security fence, leading to 627 arrests.
They carried signs reading “In Mourning for the Late, Great State of New Hampshire,” and ”Remember Chernobyl.” Led by the Clamshell Alliance, their concern was for the safety of local residents in the event of a nuclear accident, as well as environmental pollution and the unsolved problem of safe disposal of nuclear waste generated by the reactor. There were also concerns for increased electricity rates to cover the costs of the project. Repeated significant protests occurred as early as 1976 at the beginning of construction when sometimes more than a thousand would be arrested.
Ron Sher, a Seabrook spokesman, termed the demonstrators “very vocal but a small minority.” “They don't represent the millions of people in New England that recognize that nuclear energy is a viable energy option.” The plant was projected to produce up to 1.15 gigawatts, enough for one million homes.

June 5, 1993

Thousands marched to protest neo-Nazi violence against foreigners, particularly ethnic Turks, living in Germany.

June 6, 1936

First issue of Peace News published in England.

the current issue

June 6, 1949

George Orwell's dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, was published. It described a world in which totalitarian government controls the behavior of all, including the way one thinks. This was summed up in the government’s slogans: War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength.
	more about George Orwell
	George Orwell

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 self-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 the 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 6, 1971

40 members of the American Indian Movement camped in the sacred Black Hills, or Paha Sapa, atop Mount Rushmore; 20 were arrested. They were demanding the U.S. honor the terms of the 1868 treaty with the Sioux Nation granting them the Black Hills territory.

June 6. 1989

The FBI and the Department of Energy, tipped off by plant workers, raided the Rocky Flats nuclear production facility. They found numerous violations of federal anti-pollution laws including massive contamination of water and soil. Rockwell International, the operator of the facility, was fined $18.5 million.

June 7, 1712

The Pennsylvania Assembly banned the importation of slaves into the colony.

June 7, 1892

Homer Plessy, a Creole of European and African descent, was arrested and jailed in 1892 for sitting in a Louisiana railroad car designated for white people only.
Plessy had violated an 1890 state law, the Louisiana Separate Car Act, that called for racially segregated rail facilities. He then went to court, claiming the law violated the 13th and 14th amendments, but Judge John Howard Ferguson found him guilty anyhow.

The U.S. Supreme Court allowed Plessy’s guilty verdict to stand by an 8-1 majority. The resulting doctrine of "separate but equal" [separate facilities for white and black people] institutionalized and legalized segregation in the United States public transportation until 1946 in Morgan v. Virginia [see June 3, 1946].
more about Homer Plessy	Read the decision

June 7, 1893

a young Gandhi

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 8, 2002

1500 Israeli and other peace activists demonstrated peacefully in front of the Prime Minister’s Jerusalem residence in opposition to 35 years of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. " The occupation is hurting us all," said advertising placed by the organizers, "draining billions of shekels from us, forcing cutbacks in social and educational programs."
	Coalition of Women for a Just Peace leading a demonstration against the continued Israeli occupation of Palestine.
They also claimed the occupation inculcates the belief that "violence is the only way to solve problems," and "allows militarism to run rampant in our lives." Buses with banners saying "End the Occupation" and "The Occupation is Hurting Us All" started out from four locations throughout Israel, arriving in Jerusalem together. A choir of Israeli and Palestinian children had been scheduled to close the action but their conductor feared government retribution; the demonstration ended in silence instead of with children’s voices.

June 9, 1872

Julia Ward Howe, an abolitionist and the composer of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” tried to establish the Mothers' Peace Day Observance on the second Sunday in June. In 1872 the first was held and the meetings continued for several years. Her idea was widely accepted, but she was never able to get the day recognized as an official holiday. The Mothers' Peace Day was the predecessor of the Mothers' Day holiday in the United States now celebrated in May.
Julia Ward Howe ca.1898
Her proclamation read in part: “ As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war, Let women now leave all that may be left of home For a great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead. Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means Whereby the great human family can live in peace....”

June 9, 1954

Special 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 had attacked a member of Welch's law firm, Frederick G. Fischer, among many others, as a communist. This was alleged due to Fischer’s prior membership in the National Lawyers Guild.

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

Welch was outraged by the attempt to destroy the reputation and career of someone of whose integrity he had no doubt: "Until this moment, senator, I think I never gauged your cruelty or recklessness . . . . Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
The entire hearings and this encounter were seen live on television, the first congressional committee hearings to be so broadcast. McCarthy’s ability to make such accusations was soon greatly diminished.

Watch the confrontation

National Lawyers Guild today

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, 1937

The mayor of Monroe, Michigan, organized a citizens’ posse of some 1400 vigilantes armed with batons and baseball bats to combat the union organizing drive at local Newton Steel. The mob threw a dozen of the picketers’ cars into the Raisin River.
The 120 picketing steelworkers and their supporters were working to form unions in the “Little Steel” companies which, unlike U.S. Steel, continued to resist unionization. Newton had just been purchased by Republic Steel [see Chicago’s Memorial Day Massacre May 30, 1937].

The whole story

June 10, 1963

The "Equal Pay Act of 1963" was passed and signed into law; it guaranteed women equal pay for equal work.

June 10, 1980

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

Reflections in Prison

Nelson Mandela's cell on Robben Island

where he spent 17 years

June 11, 1962

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held its founding convention in Michigan and issued The Port Huron Statement, laying out its principles and program.

“Making values explicit—an initial task in establishing alternatives—is an activity that has been devalued and corrupted. The conventional moral terms of the age, the politician moralities—’free world,’ ‘people's democracies’—reflect realities poorly, if at all, and seem to function more as ruling myths than as descriptive principles.”

read The Port Huron Statement

June 11, 1963

Thich Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk from the Linh-Mu Pagoda in Hue, Vietnam, burned himself to death (self-immolation) in front of the U.S. embassy in downtown Saigon to protest the the South Vietnamese regime the U.S. supported, and the war the Americans were waging.

June 11, 1968

Daniel Cohn-Bendit arrived in Britain, stirring up fears of campus unrest. The 23-year-old Paris law student had been given permission to remain in the U.K. just 24 hours, but immediately threatened to defy the authorities and out-stay his welcome [his visit was later officially extended to 14 days]. Mr Cohn-Bendit—a German citizen—had been expelled from France in May for being an organizer of the French student and worker demonstrations which almost brought that country to a standstill the previous month.

"I don't know how long I will stay.
I think it's a free country"
-Daniel Cohn-Bendit

June 11, 1970

Rep. Martha Griffiths (D-Michigan) filed a discharge petition signed by a majority of all members of the U.S. House of Representatives, a seldom used parliamentary move, to bring the Equal Rights amendment to the House floor for consideration. She saw this as the only way to get the constitutional amendment out of the Judiciary Committee where it had been held by its chairman, Emmanuel Cellar (D-New York), who had refused to even hold hearings on the matter. Rep. Griffiths had introduced the amendment every year since 1948.

Rep. Martha Griffiths from Detroit's west side

June 11, 1988

100,000 marched from United Nations headquarters in New York City to Central Park during the 3rd U.N. Special Session on Disarmament.

June 12, 1963

In the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death by a white supremacist. His murderer was not convicted until 1994.

The whole sad story

June 12, 1964

Nelson Mandela, a 46-year-old lawyer and a leader of the opposition to South Africa’s racially separatist apartheid system, was convicted of sabotage in the Rivonia Trial and sentenced to life imprisonment.

From Mandela’s statement to the court prior to sentencing:
“ I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Nelson Mandela, 1963

June 12, 1967

Mildred and Richard Loving

The U.S. Supreme Court [Loving v. Virginia] struck down state miscegenation laws, those that prohibited interracial marriage, as violations of a person’s right to equal protection under the law, as guaranteed under the 14th amendment. In June of 1958, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter had married in Washington, D.C. Upon return to their home state of Virginia, the couple was arrested, convicted of a felony, and sentenced to a year in prison.
The appeal of their conviction led to the decision.

“ The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights
essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”
From Chief Justice Earl Warren’s majority opinion in Loving v. Virginia

Contemporary thoughts on the case

June 12, 1982

	In the largest-ever U.S. peace demonstration until the invasion of Iraq, one million rallied in New York City’s Central Park to support the newly formed Nuclear Freeze Campaign which called for a halt to all nuclear weapons testing worldwide.
	The biggest demonstration on earth (until the global anti-Iraq war march of Feb 15 2003) took place in New York on June 12, 1982, when one million people gathered in support of the second UN Special Session on Disarmament and to protest nuclear weapons.

read about the origin of the Nuclear Freeze Campaign

The demonstration

June 13, 1967

Thurgood Marshall was nominated for justice of the Supreme Court by President Lyndon Johnson. Marshall was the Solicitor General of the United States and had been the lead attorney in the Brown v. Board of Education case that ended legal segregation in the schools.
He would be the first African American on the Court.

more about Justice Thurgood Marshall

June 13, 1971

The New York Times began publishing the “Pentagon Papers,” a series of excerpts from the Defense Department’s classified history of the Vietnam War, giving details of U.S. involvement in Vietnam from the end of World War II to 1968. Publication was interrupted after the Nixon administration went to court to block it, asserting its power to exercise prior restraint over its public release. The Washington Post then began publishing the papers. On June 30 the Supreme Court, 6-3, allowed publication to resume.