peace history january

January

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January 1, 1831

William Lloyd Garrison first published The Liberator, which became the leading abolitionist paper in the United States. He labeled slave-holding a crime and called for immediate abolition.

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.

read more about Gandhi

Gandhi, 1906

January 10, 1920

The League of Nations formally came into being when the Covenant of the League of Nations (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 co-operation 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, 1940

Members of the Brethren, Mennonites and Friends religious groups, sent a message to President 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 required to vote. The night after a radio station broadcasted Dahmer’s offer, his home was firebombed.

Dahmer died later from severe burns.

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. The treaty was adopted by New University Conference and Chicago Movement meeting.

read 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 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 Rjasthan.

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

read about IRN (International Rivers Network)

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

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 and other Black clergymen who wanted to press for civil rights. Sixty black ministers from ten states came 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 and war.

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 unemployed parades 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, 1962

One hundred fifty members of the Committee of 100 (an anti-nuclear group) launched 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 from Cherbourg, France.

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 forbid 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.

January 14, 1784

The United States Congress ratified a peace treaty known as 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."

signing the Treaty of Paris

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."

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.

January 14, 1963

George Wallace was sworn in as Governor of Alabama. In his inaugural address, he called for "segregation now; segregation tomorrow; segregation forever!"

George C. Wallace, left, blocked the University of Alabama doorway to prevent desegregation later in 1963. U.S. Marshal Peyton Norville, center, and U.S. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas deB. Katzenbach listened. (File/AP)

January 14, 1966

A march in Atlanta was held to protest the ouster of Julian Bond, an African American, from Georgia House of Representatives, after his endorsement of statement critical of U.S. involvement in Vietnam issued by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

January 14, 1994

An agreement was signed for Russia and the U.S. to assist newly independent Ukraine in ridding itself of nuclear weapons. Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s leader Leonid Kravchuk found his country with the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, including multiple-warhead long-range missiles and bombers, and 3000 tactical nuclear weapons.

former Ukranian missle silo

January 14, 1996

Sixteen protesters were arrested in a winter blockade of the rural Wisconsin site (in the Chequamegon National Forest) of the U.S. Navy's ELF (extremely low frequency) transmitter, which communicated (one-way) with deeply submerged U.S. submarines.

A total of nearly 400 arrests occurred in 24 actions between 1991-96.

January 15, 1968

The Jeanette Rankin Brigade, led by 87-year-old Rankin, the first U.S. Congresswoman and the only member of Congress to vote against U.S. entry to both World Wars, marches on Washington to protest the war in Vietnam.

January 16, 2006

Happy Martin Luther King Day!

Since 1986, the first Monday of January has been designated a federal holiday honoring civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
In 1955 Dr. King organized the first major protest of the civil rights movement: the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. Influenced by Mohandas Gandhi, he advocated nonviolent civil disobedience to end racial segregation. The peaceful protests he led throughout the American South were often met with violence, but King and his followers persisted and the movement gained momentum.

MLK Day timeline
April 4, 1968 Dr. King was assassinated.

U.S. Representative John Conyers of Michigan introduced

legislation to create a federal holiday to commemorate Dr. King.
1973 Illinois became the first state to adopt MLK Day as a state holiday.
1985 U.S. officially observes Martin Luther King Day for the first time.
January 20, 1986 The United States observed the first federal MLK Day.
January 18, 1993 Martin Luther King Day holiday was observed

in all 50 states for the first time.

more about Martin Luther King

January 16, 1966

Folk singer Joan Baez is jailed for 10 days for participating in a protest which blocked the entrance to the Armed Forces Induction Center in Oakland, California to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

more on the Chicago 7

Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Country Joe McDonald, Phil Ochs, and Pete Seeger

January 24, 1970

John Lennon & Yoko Ono cropped their hair short for the first time in years, declaring 1970 "Year One for Peace" and helped organize a Toronto Peace Festival.

John & Yoko

January 25, 1930

Mahatma Gandhi issued the Declaration of Independence of India. To achieve this goal Gandhi adopted the non-violent tactic of challenging the British monopoly on salt - it was illegal for anyone other than the British government in India to manufacture or sell salt. Gathering supporters as he walked 241 miles in 24 days to the sea where he made salt. Salt was sold, illegally, all over the seacoast of India and the British government incarcerated over sixty thousand people. This march was a key turning point in India’s struggle for independence from British colonial rule.

The Dandi March:

A simple act of making salt shakes the British Empire.

January 25, 2002

Israeli refuseniks

A group of Israeli army reservists issued a landmark declaration saying they will not serve in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

By April 2002, 69 refuseniks are jailed.

refusnik support rally

January 26, 1784

Benjamin Franklin, noting the bald eagle was "a bird of bad moral character" who lived "by sharping and robbing," expressed regret it had been selected to be the U.S. national symbol. Franklin proposed the turkey, "a much more respectable Bird and a true original Native of America."

bald eagle eastern wild turkey

January 26, 1962

Bishop Joseph A. Burke of the Buffalo, New York Catholic Diocese banned the Twist.

It can't be danced, sung about, or listened to in any Catholic school, parish, or youth event. Later in the year, the Twist was banned from community center dances in Tampa, Florida as well. The religious right claimed the Twist was actually a pagan fertility dance.

January 27, 1951

The first atomic test was conducted at the Nevada Proving Ground as an Air Force plane dropped a one-kiloton bomb on Frenchman Flats.
The Proving Ground was created by President Harry Truman on January 11, 1951.
The final nuclear test, Divider, was conducted on September 23, 1992.
There were 99 above ground tests and over 800 below ground tests there.

January 27, 1969

In Detroit, African-American auto workers known as the Eldon Avenue Axle Plant Revolutionary Union Movement led a wildcat strike against racism and bad working conditions at Chrysler. Since the 1967 Detroit riots, African American workers had organized militant groups in several Detroit auto plants criticizing both the auto companies and the UAW leadership. These groups combined Black-Power nationalism and workplace militancy and shut auto plants in more than a dozen inner city plants. The most well known of these was the Dodge Revolutionary Union movement, or DRUM.
Most inner-city UAW locals soon became headed by African Americans, some of them veterans of this movement.

Detroit: I Do Mind Dying A Study in Urban Revolution

January 27, 1973

The United States and North Vietnam signed "An Agreement Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam" in Paris and all U.S. troops were to leave Vietnam within 90 days. The United States, South Vietnam, Viet Cong, and North Vietnam formally sign but because South Vietnam was unwilling to recognize the Viet Cong's Provisional Revolutionary Government, all references to it were confined to the document signed by North Vietnam and the United States. The same day, the United States announced an end to the military draft.

The Vietnam War resulted in between three and four million Vietnamese deaths with a countless number of Vietnamese casualties. It cost the United States 58,000 lives and 350,000 casualties. The financial cost to the United States came to something over $150 billion dollars.

Henry A. Kissinger and Le Duc Thos initial the agreement.

January 27, 1988

CISPIS demo

May, 1981 Wash DC

The Center for Constitutional Rights revealed that the FBI had spied on a number of organizations critical of the Reagan administration policies in Central America. The principal target was the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). 100 other groups were also investigated, including the Roman Catholic Maryknoll Sisters, the United Auto Workers, the United Steel Workers, and the National Education Association. FBI director William Sessions said the investigations were an outgrowth of the belief that CISPES was aiding a "terrorist organization."

CISPIS today

January 28, 1995

Soldiers' Mothers Committee members

Over 100 Soldiers' Mothers Committee members go to a Russian army training camp to reclaim their sons from the Army. Since it’s founding in 1989 the Soldiers' Mothers Committee has worked to expose human rights violations within the Russian military and has consistently supported a true alternative service option for conscientious objectors.

January 29, 1996

Four Ploughshares activists caused millions in damage and were arrested in Warton, England, for disarming a British Aerospace F-16 fighter jet destined to be sold to Indonesia for use in its illegal occupation and genocide of East Timor. The four were later acquitted of all charges on the grounds of preventing a greater crime.

Seeds of Hope/East Timor Ploughshares activists

January 30, 1948

Mohandas K. Gandhi was killed by as assassin's bullet in Delhi. The assassin was a Hindu who fired three shots from a pistol at a range of three feet.

January 30, 1956

As Martin Luther King, Jr. stood at the pulpit, leading a mass meeting during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, his home was bombed. By luck, King's wife and 10-week-old baby escaped unharmed. Later in the evening, as thousands of angry African Americans assembled on King's lawn, he appeared on his front porch, and told them: "If you have weapons, take them home...We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence...We must love our white brothers, no matter what they do to us."

Martin Luther King, Jr. and wife Coretta Scott, 1960

January 30, 1968

The Tet (the lunar new year) Offensive began as North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched surprise attacks against major cities, provincial and district capitals in South Vietnam.
The attack had been anticipated but, nonetheless, half of the ARVN troops (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) were on leave because of the holiday. There were attacks in Saigon (the South’s capital) on the Independence Palace (the residence of the president), the radio station, the ARVN's joint General Staff Compound, Tan Son Nhut airfield, and the United States embassy, causing considerable damage and throwing the city into turmoil.

January 30, 1972

In Londonderry (aka Derry), Northern Ireland, 13 unarmed civil rights demonstrators were shot dead by British Army paratroopers in an event that became known as "Bloody Sunday." The protesters, all Northern Catholics, had been marching in protest of the British policy of internment without trial of suspected Irish nationalists. British authorities had ordered the march banned, and sent troops to confront the demonstrators when it went ahead. The soldiers fired indiscriminately into the crowd of protesters, killing 13 and wounding seventeen. By the end of the year 323 civilians and 144 military and paramilitary personnel would be dead.

mural/Bloody Sunday martyrs

January 31, 1865

The U.S. House of Representatives passed the 13th constitutional amendment which abolished slavery, and sent it to the states for ratification (three-quarters had agreed by the end of the year). The Kentucky legislature didn’t vote to ratify until 1976; Mississippi has never done so.
The text: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

January 31, 1876

The U.S. government ordered that all Native Americans must move to reservations by this date or be declared hostile. Most Sioux did not even hear of the ultimatum until after the deadline.

Sitting Bull: One of several chiefs who refused to comply.

January 31, 1945

Private Eddie Slovik became the first American soldier since the Civil War to be executed for desertion, and the only one who suffered such a fate during World War II.

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered Slovik's execution be carried out, he said, to avoid further desertions in the late stages of the war.

Eddie Slovik

Eisenhower

January 31, 1950

U.S. President Harry S. Truman publicly announced his decision to support the development of the hydrogen bomb, a weapon theorized to be hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II.

January 31, 1971

The Winter Soldier Hearings began in a Howard Johnson's motel in Detroit. Sponsored by the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the hearings were an attempt by soldiers who had served in Vietnam to inform the public of U.S. conduct in the war. The veterans testified that the My Lai massacre was not an isolated incident, and that some American troops had committed atrocities.

More than 100 veterans testified to brutal acts. Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield later entered the transcript of the Winter Soldier hearings into the Congressional Record but, otherwise, the proceedings captured little attention.

Winter Soldier film

watch the trailer

(appox 4 minutes)

quicktime

January 31, 1993

300,000 Berliners rallied against attacks on immigrants, and against racism and Nazism on the 60th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's rise to power.

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