Today in history

April 15

War Tax Resistance Day

1947
Jackie Roosevelt Robinson became the first African-American to play in a major league baseball game. His stepping onto Ebbets field in a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform broke the “color line,” segregation dating back 78 years to the nineteenth century. The game, until a franchise moved to Atlanta in the mid-’60s, had been played entirely in northern cities.

“Jackie (Robinson), we’ve got no army. There’s virtually nobody on our side. No owners, no umpires, very few newspapermen. And I’m afraid that many fans will be hostile. We’ll be in a tough position. We can win only if we can convince the world that I’m doing this because you’re a great ballplayer, a fine gentleman.”…
“There was never a man in the game who could put mind and muscle together quicker and with better judgment than (Jackie) Robinson.”
Branch Rickey, the courageous but canny Dodgers’ manager who hired Robinson

1963
Mass rally after release of 2,000 arrested for trying to hold Marathon peace march, Acropolis, Athens.

1967
Amidst growing opposition to the war in Vietnam, large scale anti-war protests were held in New York, San Francisco and other cities. In New York, the protest began in Central Park, where over 150 draft cards were burned, and included a march to the United Nations led by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Read the Speech

Early draft card burning.

1968
Ninety-year-old Jeanette Rankin, the first female member of Congress, and the only one to vote against U.S. entry into both World Wars, led 8,000 in protest of the Vietnam War in the Women’s peace march on the Pentagon.