(Sources: Peace Buttons, War Resisters League, and the Peace Center.)
June 19
1865
More than two years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, TX, with news that the war had ended and all slaves were now free. Still celebrated as Juneteenth.
1964
Two hundred college students left Western College for Women in Oxford, Ohio, to join hundreds of other civil rights volunteers in Mississippi as part of “Freedom Summer.”
Under the umbrella organization of COFO (Council of Federated Organizations) they worked on projects across the state. Led by SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) field secretaries, they helped Negroes try to register to vote, they taught in Freedom Schools, participated in community organizing, and endured the hostility toward civil rights work in the deep South. “If we can crack Mississippi,” the students said, “we can crack segregation anywhere.”
ROBERT MOSES, director of the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project and leader of the training program in Oxford, is shown here during a break in a session which he conducted in Jackson, Mississippi, to prepare African-Americans for politically effective action.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was approved after surviving an 83-day filibuster in the United States Senate. The new law, initiated and passed through the determination of Pres. Lyndon Johnson, guaranteed for the first time equal access to public accommodations “without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.”
Massive demonstrations a year earlier insured passage of the Acts
Read about the Civil Rights Acti (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965)
1964
One thousand landowners occupied key islands in protest against French nuclear tests at Kwajalein Atoll. Kwajalein Atoll is located in the western Pacific Ocean, about 2,100 miles southwest of Hawaii and 1,400 miles east of Guam. The island is now home to USAKA (United States Army Kwajalein Atoll), the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site, and about 2,000 support personnel and family members on Kwajalein and Roi-Namur islands.
Deanna Dee-Dee Taylor 