Today in history

April 1
April Fool’s Day

1621
The Pilgrim-Wampanoag Peace Treaty is signed.
1649
Diggers occupy Saint George’s Hill, seizing land to hold in common & to plant.

1841
Brook Farm, perhaps history’s most famous utopian community, was founded by George and Sophia Ripley near West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Its primary appeal was to young Bostonians who shrank from the materialism of American life, and the community was a refuge for dozens of transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathanial Hawthorne.

1847
Michigan becomes first state to abolish the death penalty.
1866
US Congress overrides President Andrew Johnson’s veto of Civil Rights Bill, gives equal rights to all men born in the US except Indians.
1930
Gandhi ends salt march by illegally collecting salt from the sea.
1932
500 school children, most with haggard faces & in tattered clothes, paraded through Chicago’s downtown section to the Board of Education offices to demand that the school system provide them with food.
1955
South Africa: boycott of segregated schools begins. (1955)

1970
Following decades of struggle and ending a five-year national boycott, the United Farm Workers signed its first table-grape contract with two of California’s largest grape growers. By 1974, the union was threatened not only by the growers but by more powerful unions. The then-mob-controlled International Brotherhood of Teamsters signed sweetheart contracts with growers who hadn’t signed with the Farm Workers union.

The Great Grape Boycott

1983
Protesters in the United Kingdom formed a human chain 22.5 kilometres (14 miles) long to express their opposition to the presence of nuclear missiles. The chain started at the American airbase at Greenham Common, passed the Aldermaston nuclear research center and ended at the ordnance factory in Burghfield.
At the same time 15,000 people take part in the first of a series of anti-nuclear marches in West Germany. They are protesting against the siting of American missiles on West German territory.