Deanna Dee-Dee Taylor

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

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

Gandhiji was a South African and his memory deserves to be cherished now and in post-apartheid South Africa. The Gandhian philosophy of peace, tolerance and non-violence began in South Africa as a powerful instrument of social change…. This weapon was effectively used by India to liberate her people. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., used it to combat racism in the United States of America….

“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

1934
The National Firearms Act, the first federal gun law, was signed into law.

1918
Pacifist and socialist organizer Eugene Debs was arrested for giving an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, 10 days earlier. He was charged with “uttering words intended to cause insubordination and disloyalty within the American forces of the United States, to incite resistance to the war, and to promote the cause of Germany” despite his repeated and vehement criticism in the speech of Germany and the Junkers, its landed aristocracy.

 

“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’.”

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

June 25

1938
The Fair Labor Standards Act sets the minimum wage at 25 cents per hour and prohibits child labor.

1955
The South African Freedom Charter was adopted at the Congress of the People in Johannesburg.

“We, the People of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know that South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people….”

1978

In response to passage of an anti-gay ordinance in Miami, 240,000 people marched in San Francisco, the first large-scale version of that city’s annual Gay Freedom Day Parade.

read more about the Gay Parades of the Seventies

(pictures and stories)

1987

Conscientious objector Michaelis Maraggakis jailed four years for refusing compulsory military service, Thessaloniki, Greece.

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

June 24

1929
Mrs. Herbert Hoover invited Mrs. DePriest, wife of the first African-American congressman from a northern state, to tea at the White House, creating a stir in Southern society.

1948

President Truman signed the Selective Service Act, creating a system for registering all men ages 18-25, and drafting them into the armed forces as the nation’s military needs required.