Today in history

Posted on July 2, 2006 | Leave a comment

(Sources: Peace Buttons, War Resisters League, and the Peace Center.)

July 2

1776
New Jersey becomes the first Colony to grant women’s suffrage.

1777
Vermont becomes first American colony to abolish slavery

1809

Alarmed by the growing encroachment of whites squatting on Native American lands, the Shawnee Chief Tecumseh called on all Indians to unite and resist. By 1810, he had organized the Ohio Valley Confederacy, which united Indians from the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Winnebago, Menominee, Ottawa, and Wyandotte nations.

For several years, Tecumseh’s Indian Confederacy successfully delayed further white settlement in the region.

Chief Tecumseh

1839

Early in the morning, Africans on the Cuban slave ship Amistad, led by Joseph Cinquè (a Mende from what is now Sierra Leone), mutinied against their captors, killing the captain and the cook, and seized control of the schooner. Jose Ruiz, a Spaniard and planter from Puerto Principe, Cuba, had bought the 49 adult males on the ship, paying $450 each, as slaves for his sugar plantation.

Slave ship

Joseph Cinquè

1964

Massive demonstrations a year earlier had helped ensure passage of the Act.

U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, thus barring discrimination in public accommodations, employment, and voting. The law had survived an 83-day filibuster in the U.S. Senate by southern members.

“We have lost the South for a generation,” said Pres. Johnson to an aide, immediately after signing the Act.


1976

The Supreme Court rules that Capital Punishment does not constitute “cruel and unusual punishment”.

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