(Sources: Peace Buttons, War Resisters League, and the Peace Center.)
June 26
1894
Mohandas Gandhi, a young lawyer from Mumbai (formerly Bombay), urged the Natal (a province in South Africa) to run a campaign of education and peaceful noncooperation to assert and protect their rights in South Africa. Though he was a British subject and South Africa was subject to British rule, within days of his arrival in South Africa the previous year, he had been thrown off a train, assaulted by a white coachman, denied hotel rooms and pushed off a sidewalk because his skin color defined his status and limited his rights.
Gandhi as a young lawyer
More about Gandhi in South Africa
“We must never lose sight of the fact that the Gandhian philosophy may be a key to human survival in the twenty-first century.”
– Nelson Mandela, in his speech opening the Gandhi Hall in Lenasia, September 1992
The National Firearms Act, the first federal gun law, was signed into law.
1918
“And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose — especially their lives.”
Eugene Debs
1945
On the stage of San Fransisco’s Veterans Auditorium (in the center of the War Memorial Veterans Building and now known as the Herbst Theatre), delegates from 50 nations signed the United Nations Charter, establishing the world body as a means of saving “succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” The Germans had just surrendered to the Allied forces in April, and the war in the Pacific still raged.
1963
President Kennedy addresses 120,000 West Berliners and concludes his speech, “All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’.”
Deanna Dee-Dee Taylor 