Today in history

January 30

1948
Gandhi Assassinated, New Delhi.

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 & 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

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