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History from the grass roots . . .
This
Week in History is a collection designed to help us
a ppreciate 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.
To
the real peace advocates - YOU! |
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Publisher, Carl
Bunin • Editor, Al
Frank • Detroit, Michigan
view in web browser |
Monday
May 13
•Brazil ends slavery
•Nixon Stoned
•Chicano Students Organize
•Workers Back Students
•Movement for a New Congress |
Tuesday
May 14
•COs report for duty
•"Yankee"
nuke test
•Jackson State erupts and
2 dead |
Wednesday
May 15
•Mother's Day
•Workers' rights under law
•Teach-in
•Washington picketing
•People's Park melee
•COs get their day |
Thursday
May 16
•No slavery in Denmark
•Sedition Act
•Self-immolation
•Jubilee 2000 |
Friday
May 17
•Women form peace group
•Brown v. Board
•Catonsville 9
•Seattle die-in
•Watergate hearings
•Marriage in Massachusetts
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Saturday
May 18
•Happy birthday, Sir Russell
•Gray Panthers
•Indian A-bomb
•Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee |
Sunday
May 19
•'30s anti-war march
•Hellman won't name names |
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Monday
Brazil, which had imported more African slaves than any other
country (nearly 40% of the 11 million Africans shipped
to the western hemisphere), abolished slavery. |
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During
a goodwill trip through Latin America, Vice President
Richard Nixon's limousine was attacked with rocks and
bottles by an angry crowd and nearly overturned while
traveling through Caracas, Venezuela. The crowd was angered
by U.S. Cold War policies and their effect on Latin America.
Five days earlier in the trip, the Vice President had
been shoved, stoned, booed, and spat upon by protesters
in Peru. |
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Caracas demonstrators
surround Nixon's limousine
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"We are the power"
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Workers
joined Paris students’ protest in a one-day general
strike calling for the fall of the government and protesting
police brutality. The protest by French students included
occupation of The Sorbonne; by the end of the month over
10,000,000 French citizens had been involved in school
and workplace occupations.
View
and read about the great poster art from Paris ‘68 
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Readers comment
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"Buttons arrived in Monteverde, Costa Rica! Just in time, too, to distribute tomr at the Christmas Meeting. Will try to take some photos as well. Thanks so much, and have a happy and peaceful holiday."
- Bill |
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| The
Movement for a New Congress—to elect peace candidates—was
founded at Princeton University. |
May
1968, month of intense protest and political organizing
around the country |
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Check it Out!
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Tuesday
The
first groups of WWII conscientious objectors (COs) were
ordered to report
to camp at Patapsco, Maryland. They and others formed
the Civilian Public Service (CPS) during the war. They performed
various duties, among others being trained as smoke jumpers
dealing with forest fires |
 World
War II COs |
Conscientious objection
in America |
More
on the CPS |
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| In
the “Yankee” nuclear weapons test in the atmosphere
above the South Pacific, a single detonation, expected to yield
9.5 megatons of force, actually yielded 13.5 megatons (equivalent
to thirteen and a half million tons of TNT), the second largest
ever by the U.S. The resultant mushroom cloud extended 25 miles
up and spread 100 miles across. |
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| "Yankee" |
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 Phillip
Lafayette Gibbs
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Two
African-American students were shot to death and 30 others
wounded by local police and state troopers and national
guardsmen at primarily black Jackson State University
in Mississippi. The two were watching demonstrators protesting
the invasion of Cambodia and racial discrimination from
a nearby dormitory tower. This happened shortly after
the shooting of students at Kent State University
in Ohio. Two days of riots ensued in Jackson resulting
in curfews and sealing off of the city. |
 James Earl Green
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more |
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Readers comment |
"I just placed an order for 100 "occupy" buttons and 50 "Nonviolence/occupy" buttons . . .
I always try to steer people to your site to buy buttons, telling them, "They don't sell Republican buttons like Cafe Press and others do!" Keep up the good work."
Linda, Henderson NV
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Wednesday
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 Julia Ward Howe
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Julia
Ward Howe, suffragist, abolitionist and author of the “Battle
Hymn of the Republic,” proposed Mother's Day as
a peace holiday.
She had seen firsthand some of the worst effects of war during
the American Civil War—the death and disease which killed
and maimed, and the widows and orphans left behind on both
sides of the Civil War—and realized that the effects
of the war go beyond the killing of soldiers in battle. Mother’s
Day did not become a national holiday until declared by President
Woodrow Wilson in 1914. |
Read
her Mother’s Day Proclamation |
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This button originally issued in Detroit for Cindy Sheehan's September 2004 Bring Them Home Tour from Camp Casey outside of Bush's Texas ranch to the White House.
click to buy
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The National Labor Relations Act
was passed, recognizing workers' rights to organize unions
and bargain collectively with their employers.
Read
more
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| A National teach-in to oppose the Vietnam
War was held in Washington, D.C. |
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"A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall
never sit in."
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The American Friends Service
Committee, SANE (The Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy),
and Women March for Peace, along with four other organizations,
sponsored a 10,000+ person anti-war picket at the White House
and a 60,000+ rally at the Washington Monument to oppose
the Vietnam War.
. . . elsewhere the same day . . .
Buddhist altars were placed in streets to impede troops arresting
dissidents in South Vietnam.
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Peace quote
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"The only thing that's been a worse flop than the organization of non-violence has been the organization of violence"
- Joan Baez
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Governor Ronald Reagan sent in the National
Guard to reclaim People's Park from 6,000 protesters in Berkeley,
California, who had occupied the space and created the park.
Police gunfire killed a bystander, James Rector, blinded
another, and injured dozens. |
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People's Park March, Friday May 30, 1969, at
the intersection of Haste Street and Telegraph Avenue, in Berkeley |
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May
15 (since the 1980's) |
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International
Conscientious Objectors Day, established to honor those
who leave or refuse to enter their country’s armed
forces for reasons of principle. |
Read
the stories of 4 Conscientious Objectors
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Thursday
| Denmark became the first country
to outlaw the slave trade. |
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"No matter how deeply buried it is, the truth will always come to surface."
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The
U.S. Congress passed the Sedition Act, legislation designed
to protect America’s participation in World War I.
Along with the Espionage Act of the previous year, the
Sedition Act was orchestrated largely by A. Mitchell Palmer,
the United States attorney general under President Woodrow
Wilson. The Espionage Act, passed shortly after the U.S.
entrance into the war in early April 1917, made it a crime
for any person to convey information intended to interfere
with the U.S. armed forces’ prosecution of the war
effort or to promote the success of the country’s
enemies.
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Peace quote
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“While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free”
- Eugene V. Debs
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Nhat
Chi Mai immolates herself in Saigon, the capital of South
Vietnam, to protest the war.
"I
offer my body as a torch / to dissipate the dark / to waken
love among men / to give peace to Vietnam."
Read
more |
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| The
flower known as Nhat Chi Mai. |
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| Tens of thousands of Britons supporting
Jubilee 2000 formed a human chain around the meeting place
of the G7 Summit (an annual meeting of the leaders of the largest
industrial countries) in Birmingham, England. Jubilee 2000
urged the major international lending countries to relieve
terms of and forgive the massive indebtedness of poor countries
around the world. |
| Speech by Ann Pettifor, Co-founder of Jubilee 2000-UK |
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Friday
| The Women's International League
for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) was formally established in Zurich,
Switzerland. |
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In
a major civil rights victory, the U.S. Supreme Court handed
down a unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education,
ruling "separate but equal" public education to
be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, which guaranteed
equal treatment under the law. The historic decision, bringing
an end to federal tolerance of racial segregation, specifically
dealt with Linda Brown, a young African American girl denied
admission to her local elementary school in Topeka, Kansas,
because of the color of her skin.
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| Read
more |
and
more |
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Peace quote
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"Today's Constitution is a realistic document of freedom only because of several corrective amendments. Those amendments speak to a sense of decency and fairness that I and other Blacks cherish."
- Justice Thurgood Marshall
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A
group of anti-war activists who came to be known as the "Catonsville
Nine," including Philip and Daniel Berrigan, broke
into the Catonsville, Maryland, draft board center and
burned over 600 draft files.
The
Catonsville Nine in a picture taken in the police station
minutes after the action.
From
left to right (standing) George Mische, Philip Berrigan,
Daniel Berrigan, Tom Lewis. From left to right (seated)
David Darst, Mary Moylan, John Hogan, Marjorie Melville,
Tom Melville. photo Jean
Walsh |
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Read
more about the Catonsville Nine |
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Peace quote
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"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."
-Howard Zinn
1922-2010 |
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100
protesters staged a silent "die-in" at Fifth Avenue and Pine Street
in downtown Seattle to protest shipment through
their city of Army nerve gas being transported from Okinawa,
Japan, to the Umatilla Army Depot in eastern Oregon.
Read
more |
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In Washington, D.C.,
the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities,
headed by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, began televised
hearings on the escalating Watergate affair. One week later,
Harvard Law Professor Archibald Cox was sworn in as Watergate
special prosecutor.
Flashback: On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested for breaking
into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the
Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. with the intent to set
up wiretaps. One of the suspects, James W. McCord, Jr., was
revealed to be the salaried security coordinator for President
Richard Nixon's reelection committee. |
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Marcia Kadish, 56, and Tanya McCloskey,
52, of Malden, Massachusetts, were married at Cambridge City
Hall in Massachusetts, becoming the first legally married same-sex
partners in the United States. Over the course of the day,
77 other such couples tied the knot across the state, and hundreds
more applied for marriage licenses. The day was characterized
by much celebration and only a few of the expected protests
materialized. |
Read
more |
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Saturday
Bertrand
Russell |
Birthday of Sir Bertrand Russell, British philosopher, logician, essayist, and social critic, a leading figure in his country’s anti-nuclear movement. In 1954 he delivered his “Man's Peril [from the Hydrogen Bomb]” broadcast on the BBC, condemning the Bikini H-bomb tests, and warning of the threat to humanity from the development of nuclear weapons: “. . . as a human being to other human beings: remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”
A year later, together with Albert Einstein nine other scientists, he released the Russell-Einstein Manifesto calling for the curtailment of nuclear weapons.
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| Text of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto |
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Peace quote
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“War does not determine who is right, only who is left."
- Bertrand Russell
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Margaret (Maggie) Kuhn founded the Gray Panthers (originally called the Consultation of Older and Younger Adults for Social Change) to consider the common problems faced by retirees — loss of income, loss of contact with associates, and loss of one of society's most distinguishing social roles, one's job. The members discovered a new kind of freedom in their retirement — the freedom to speak personally and passionately about what they believed in, such as their collective opposition to the Vietnam War. |
 Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers
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Gray
Panther history |
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Peace quote
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“Power should not be concentrated in the hands of so few, and powerlessness in the hands of so many.”
- Maggie Kuhn
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In the Rajasthan Desert in the state of Pokhran, India successfully detonated its first nuclear weapon, a fission bomb similar in explosive power to the U.S. atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
The test fell on the traditional anniversary of the Buddha's enlightenment, and Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi received the message "Buddha has smiled" from the exuberant test-site scientists after the detonation. The test, which made India the world's sixth nuclear power, broke the nuclear monopoly of the five members of the U.N. Security Council—the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, China, and France. |
| Detailed background on India’s nuclear weapons program and its first test |
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Peace quote
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"If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man's challenge to God. It's worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created.
If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is
4,600,000,000 years old. It could end in an afternoon."
- Arundhati Roy, 1998 |
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A jury in a federal court in Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee established a company’s responsibility for damage to the health of a worker in the nuclear industry. Karen Silkwood worked for the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation at their Cimmaron, Texas, plant where plutonium was manufactured. |
Silkwood had become the first female member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers bargaining committee, focusing on worker safety issues, but had suffered radiation exposure in a series of unexplained incidents. The jury in Judge Frank G. Theis’s court awarded her estate $505,000 in actual damages, and $10 million punitive damages.
She had died in a car accident on her way to a meeting with a The New York Times reporter five years earlier. |
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| Karen Silkwood's sisters and parents |
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Karen Silkwood remembered |
The Supreme Court upheld the decision and the award |
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Sunday
| 10,000
participated in a "No
More War" march in New York City. |
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Playwright and activist Lillian Hellman advised the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) that she refused to testify against friends and associates, saying, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.”
Learn
more about Lillian Hellman |
 Lillian Hellman |
Text of her letter to HUAC |
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