Today in history

June 1

1660
Mary Dyer hanged for nonviolent resistance to suppression of Quakers, Boston

1845
Sojourner Truth (a name she believed God had given her as a symbolic representation of her mission in life) set out from New York on a historic journey across America, preaching about the evils of slavery and promoting women’s rights.

1932
Gay rights organizer Henry Gerber published an article in Modern Thinker magazine attacking the view that homosexuality is a neurosis.
In 1924, Henry Gerber, a postal worker in Chicago, started the Society for Human Rights, America’s first known gay rights organization. “The Society for Human Rights is formed to promote and protect the interests of people who are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness which is guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence, and to combat the public prejudices against them.”
After having created and distributed a newsletter called “Friends and Freedom,” Gerber was arrested and held for 3 days without a warrant or being charged with any infractions. Upon release he lost his job for “conduct unbecoming a postal worker.”

1942
On this day in 1942, on the advice of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler ordered all Jews in occupied Paris to wear an identifying yellow star on the left side of their coats.

1942
A Warsaw underground newspaper, the Liberty Brigade, makes public the news of the gassing of tens of thousands of Jews at Chelmno, a death camp in Poland-almost seven months after extermination of prisoners began.

1950
Senator Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine), the only woman in the Senate, and only the second in history, denounced Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) and his “red-baiting” tactics on the floor of the U.S. Senate, in a speech called “A Declaration of Conscience.”

1958
700 protest at White House against nuclear testing.

1963
The U.S. Supreme Court banned formal prayers and religious exercises from public schools.
[School Dist. Of Abington Township v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963); Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962)]

1963

First Buddhist monk, Quang Duc (73) immolates self in Vietnam.

1967
The Vietnam Veterans Against War (VVAW) was formed.

US and USSR signed an agreement to stop producing chemical weapons (1990)