Today in history

(Sources: Peace Buttons and War Resisters League Calendar)

Today is Aids Awareness Day and Prisoners for Peace Day

There does not appear to be anything in the headlines of either of Utah’s major newspapers about World Aids Day.

Stuart Merrill, a local (Salt Lake) gay activist. will appear on today’s KCPW’s Mid-Day Metro from 10:20-10:40. I will be discussing the challenges of living with HIV in Utah. (If you are out of the listening area you can get it on line.)
Stuart has on Op-Ed in this month’s Pillar, a Salt Lake GLBT magazine.
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December 1

1948
Following the civil war in 1948, Costa Rican president Pepe Figueres constitutionally abolished the army and the Constitution prohibits presidential re-election

Money not spent on a military allows for one of the highest literacy rates in the continent. Ninety-four percent of the population is literate.

1955
Rosa Parks Day

Rosa Parks, a black seamstress active in the local NAACP, is arrested by police in Montgomery, Alabama, after refusing to give up her seat on the bus to a white man. Mrs. Parks faced a fine for breaking the segregation laws which said black Americans must vacate their seats if there are white passengers left standing. The year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott, organized by a young Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., followed Parks’s historic act of civil disobedience. The boycott was successful and Mrs. Parks became known as the “mother of the civil rights movement.”

1966
Comedian Dick Gregory is convicted in Olympia, Washington for his participation in a Nisqually Native American fishing rights protest.