This
Week in History is a collection designed to help us
appreciate the fact that we are part of a rich history
advocating peace and social justice. While the entries
often focus on large and dramatic events there are
so many smaller things done everyday to promote peace
and justice.
Saturday July 4
•Independence declared
•Dangers to the Nation
•First reminder picket
•Peace given a chance
•Anti-war women mobilized
•Amahoro Amani (Peace Peace)
Sunday July 5
•Freed people parade up Broadway
•Pullman strike
Dock strike turns violent
•NLRB established
•White House official sentenced
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The South African parliament passed a bill excluding black, coloured (mixed race) and Indian people from all skilled or semi-skilled jobs.
June
29, 1963
A mass “walk-on” (trespass) was organized at a chemical and biological warfare facility in Porton Down, England. These weaponized agents had been researched and produced there since 1916; it’s now known as the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory.
Unconscionable activities at Porton Down
June
30, 1966
The first GIs—known as the Fort Hood Three, U.S. Army Privates James Johnson, Dennis Mora and David Samas—refused to be sent to Vietnam. All were members of the 142nd Signal Battalion, 2nd Armored Division stationed at Fort Hood, Texas. The three were from working-class families, and had denounced the war as “immoral, illegal and unjust.” They were arrested, court-martialed and imprisoned. The Pentagon reported 503,926 “incidents of desertion” between 1966 and 1971.
What the Fort Hood Three had to say
The full story of the Fort Hood Three
Ballad
of The Fort Hood Three Pete
Seeger
June
30, 1971
The 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, lowering the minimum voting age to 18 in all elections, was ratified after ¾ of the 50 state legislatures had agreed to it, a mere 100 days after its passage by Congress.
June
30, 1974
The Selective Service law, authorizing the draft, expired, marking the official end of conscription in the U.S. and the beginning of the all-volunteer armed forces.
June
30, 2005
Spain legalized same-sex marriage by a vote of 187-147 in parliament. Such couples were also granted the right to adopt and receive inheritances. Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero spoke in support of the bill, “We are expanding the opportunities for happiness of our neighbors, our colleagues, our friends and our relatives. At the same time, we are building a more decent society.
read more
July
1, 1946
The United States exploded a 20-kiloton atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.he
United States exploded a 20-kiloton atomic bomb near Bikini
Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.
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.
Text
of the Treaty
July
1, 1972
Publication of the first monthly issue of Ms. Magazine, founded by Gloria Steinem (“The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off”), Letty Cottin Pogrebin (“Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else”), and others.
The
first issue
Ms. Magazine today
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, 1776
New Jersey became the first British colony in America to grant partial women's suffrage. The new constitution (temporary if there were a reconciliation with Great Britain) granted the vote to all those “of full age, who are worth fifty pounds proclamation money,” including non-whites and widows; married women were not able to own property under common lawhites and widows; married women were not able to own property under common law.
July
2, 1777
Vermont became the first of the United States to abolish slavery.
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.
Tecumseh’s efforts
Chief
Tecumseh
July
2, 1964
Jobs
and Freedom march April 28, 1963
Washington DC
U.S. Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, thus barring discrimination in public accommodations (restaurants, stores, theatres, etc.), employment, and voting. The law had survived an 83-day filibuster in the U.S. Senate by 21 members from southern states.
"We have lost the South for a generation," said Pres. Johnson to an
aide, immediately after signing the Act, referring to an expected shift in white
southern voting from the Democratic to the Republican party in response to the
law.
Massive demonstrations a year earlier had helped ensure passage of the Act.
July
3, 1835
Children employed in the silk mills at Paterson, New Jersey, went on strike for an eleven-hour workday and a six-day workweek rather than 12-14 hour days. With the help of adults, they won a compromise settlement of a 69-hour week.
More on the Baby Strikers
July
3, 1966
4000 Britons chanting, “Hands off Vietnam,” demonstrated in London against escalation of the Vietnam War. U.S. warplanes had recently bombed the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi as well as the port city of Haiphong. Police moved in after scuffles broke out at the demonstration outside the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square; 31 were arrested.
read
more
Actress
Vanessa Redgrave joins 25,000 two years later at Anti-Vietnam
war protest, Grosvenor Square.
July
3, 1974
At the Moscow Summit talks between Pres. Richard Nixon and Pres. Leonid Brezhnev, the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to hold bilateral talks on the prohibition of chemical weapons.
July
4, 1776
The United States declared its independence from King George III and Great Britain, thus beginning 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 of the Declaration of Independence were members of the 2nd Continental Congress which had voted two days earlier to separate from the British crown.
Read
the Declaration
July
4, 1829
Speaking at Boston’s Park Street Church, newspaper editor and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison gave a seminal speech on “Dangers to the Nation.” Though Massachusetts had banned slavery in 1781 and there was strong anti-slavery sentiment, most understood that a national ban of slavery would threaten the union of the states. Compensation to slaveholders and return of the enslaved to Africa was considered the best solution.
Garrison, on the other hand, called attention to the hypocrisy of celebrating the the day the document was signed declaring, “All men are created equal” while two million were in bondage. He proposed four propositions that day to guide the abolitionist movement:
1. Above all others, slaves in America deserve “the prayers, and sympathies, and charities of the American people.”
2. Non-slave-holding states are “constitutionally involved in the guilt of slavery,” and are obligated “to assist in its overthrow.”
3. There is no valid legal or religious justification for the preservation of slavery.
4. The “colored population” of America should be freed, given an education, and accepted as equal citizens with whites.
William Lloyd Garrison
July
4, 1965
The first of an annual picket in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall was held by gay and Lesbian Americans. Jack Nichols and Frank Kameny and members of the New York and Washington Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis had earlier demonstrated in Washington, and wished to change the general perception that homosexuals were perverted or sick.
Barabara Gittings at the Philadelphia picket
“By those protesters coming out publicly, and placing themselves very strategically in front of the building that evoked the Declaration of Independence and the idea that all men are created equal, it suggested it [gay rights] was no longer a moral or national security or psychiatric issue ... it was a civil-rights issues,” David K. Johnson wrote in The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government.
July
4, 1969
“Give Peace a Chance” by the Plastic Ono Band was released in the United Kingdom.
The song was recorded May 31, 1969, during the “Bed-In” John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged at the Queen Elizabeth's Hotel in Montreal as part of their honeymoon. 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.
Watch footage
from the hotel room recording session
July
4, 1983
The Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice began an eight week stay on a farm just outside the Seneca Army Depot near Romulus, New York. The purpose of the gathering was for the women to learn about and together protest the escalation of militarism and the weapons build-up being led at the time by the Reagan administration.
The flyer for the event
July
4, 2007
The first of several Peace Caravans (Caravanes de Paix) set out from South Kivu and traveled across Africa’s Great Lakes region, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and Rwanda. The Scout Associations of the countries in the violence-ridden area trained hundreds of young people in conflict resolution through their focus on education for peace. The classes and the caravans included hundreds of young people in Scouts and Girl Guides from many ethnic groups (often with a history of mutual hostility) who act as community mediators.
Members of the Caravan for Peace in Burundi
Learn how they put education for peace into action
July
5, 1827
The newly freed African-American population of New York, led by men on horseback, marched in an Emancipation Day Parade from the Battery at the
foot of Manhattan to City Hall.
Follow the route of the
parade
July
5, 1894
Buildings erected for the 1892 Columbian Exposition in Chicago's Jackson Park were set ablaze, seven reduced to ashes. The fire was part of the chaos in reaction to Pres. Grover Cleveland’s calling out federal troops to end the Pullman Strike.
The Pullman Palace Car Company produced the sleeping cars used by most of the railroads. The contingent of federal, state and local forces equalled the number of striking workers.
The Pullman employees, who lived in company-owned housing in Pullman, Illinois, had suffered massive layoffs and pay cuts averaging 25%. The company refused to cut the rent on the housing its employees were required to occupy, nor would it bargain with workers’ representatives.
The Pullman workers’ cause had been taken up by Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the American Railway Union, who helped organize a nationwide boycott of any train that included a Pullman car.
Federal troops guarding the Arcade Building
in Pullman, Illinois
The Pullman Strikers’ Statement
More on the Great Pullman Strike
July
5, 1934
On “Bloody Thursday,” police armed with machine guns opened fire against striking longshoremen and their supporters, killing two, wounding 32 more by gunfire, and injuring 75 others at Rincon Hill in San Francisco.
Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, near Rincon Hill.
July
5, 1935
The National Labor Relations or Wagner Act (named for New York’s Sen. Robert Wagner) became law, recognizing workers' rights to organize and bargain collectively. It was signed into law by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt.
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. The scandal was a secret arrangement directed from the Reagan White House that provided funds to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels (despite 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 would never negotiate with hostage-takers.
North’s conviction was later overturned because evidence revealed in the congressional Iran-Contra hearings had compromised his right to a fair trial.
The
real details on
Ollie North’s activities
There's a lot more peace and justice history to see.
For
a more complete listing for this week or to see another
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Actress
Vanessa Redgrave joins 25,000 two years later at Anti-Vietnam
war protest, Grosvenor Square.
