Tag Archives: peace history

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

1683
A treaty is signed between William Penn and the chiefs of the Lenni Lenape tribe in Shakamaxon, Pennsylvania.

1972
Education Amendments of 1972 becomes law. Prohibits any discrimination at Educational institutions based on sex

1972
Life magazine published photos of South Vietnamese children running from Napalm, an incendiary weapon used widely by U.S. forces to burn down the jungle and eliminate cover for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops. Napalm, a sticky mixture of gasoline, polystyrene and benzene that burns at very high temperature, had been used in WWII and Korea.

Read about this picture.

1973
The International Court of Justice granted an injunction, requested by Australia and New Zealand governments, against French nuclear weapons testing in the South Pacific.

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

1843
The First General Peace Convention opened in London, England of “persons from different nations … to deliberate upon the best means, under the Divine blessing, to show the world the evil and inexpediency of the spirit and to promote permanent and universal peace.”

1987
At least 8,000 peace protesters formed a 10-mile human chain around the U.S. air base on Okinawa, Japan.

People in Okinawa demostrate against a new U.S. base every day.

2002 No Base chain at Okinawa.

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

June 21
Summer Solstice

1877

Four members of the “Molly Maguires” were hung in what was then Mauch Chunk, and in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, charged with murder. The Molly Maguires were a secret and violent Irish-Catholic organization of coal miners formed to combat the oppressive working and living conditions in the anthracite region of the state.

The Molly Maguires                               the movie

1908

A Women’s Sunday Suffrage rally, supporting the right of women to vote, drew several hundred thousand to London’s Hyde Park from all over the country.
    Women were encouraged to wear “the colours” – white (for purity), green (hope) and purple (dignity) – and in “as fetching, charming and ladylike a manner as possible.” As the Yorkshire Daily Post put it: “At least one half of the crowd was composed of the sort of people you would expect to see at a suburban garden party.”

the women’s suffrage movement

1964
James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three young Freedom Summer workers, disappeared in Philadelphia, Mississippi, while registering Blacks to vote. Their bodies were found six weeks later, having been shot and buried in an earthen dam.
   
Eight members of the Ku Klux Klan eventually went to prison on federal conspiracy charges related to the disappearance; none served more than six years.
Schwerner and Goodman, both white New Yorkers, had traveled to heavily segregated Mississippi to help organize civil rights efforts on behalf of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Chaney was a local African American man who had joined CORE in 1963.

James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner

the movie

1997

100,000 marched in solidarity with striking newspaper workers in Detroit after nearly two years on the picket line.

support rally march 1, 1997    photo: Paul Felton

Voices of the Strike: With portraits of Detroit newspaper workers by George Waldman

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

June 20

1960

Nobel laureate for Chemistry Linus Pauling defied Congress by refusing to name circulators of petitions calling for total halt of nuclear weapons testing. Pauling later won a second Nobel, a Peace Prize for his work championing nuclear disarmament.

Linus Pauling

1967

Muhammad Ali convicted of refusing to be drafted

1982

2,500 were arrested during a two-day blockade of Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in California, the principal American nuclear weapons research site.

1995
Shell Oil gave in to international pressure and abandoned its plans to dump the Brent Spar oil-drilling platform in the North Atlantic. The environmental group Greenpeace spearheaded the effort to prevent Shell from sinking the rig, its members boarding and occupying it as a tactic to stop the deep sea disposal.
Shell’s plan would have dumped toxic and radioactive sludge into the ocean just west of the British Isles. A month later, at the Oslo and Paris Commission (OSPARCOM) meeting, 11 out of 13 countries agreed on a moratorium on the dumping of offshore installations, pending agreement on a outright ban.

Greenpeace climbers on Brent Spar platform
		read more about Greenpeace and Brent Spar                             Shell ships use water cannons against Greenpeace activists on board the rig.

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

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.”

Student protestors are photographed by a policeman on Freedom Day in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1964.

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.

More photos

1964
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.

Read more on nuclear testing in the Pacific

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

June 17

1838
The Cherokee Nation began the 1,200-mile forced march known as the Trail of Tears. Their removal from their ancestral land had been ordered by Pres. Andrew Jackson as the result of a treaty signed by a small minority of the tribe, and approved in the Senate by a one-vote margin. Ordered to move on the Cherokee, General John Wool resigned his command in protest; Gen. Winfield Scott and 7000 troops moved in to enforce the treaty.

“The Trail Where They Cried” (“Nunna daul Tsuny” in the Cherokee language) led from northern Georgia to Oklahoma during which an estimated 4,000 died from hunger, exposure and disease. 

1963

The Supreme Court struck down rules requiring the Lord’s Prayer or Bible verses in public schools

1972

In the early morning five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. to install bugging devices. They had been hired and financed by President Richard Nixon’s re-election committee. The abuse of power involved in the cover-up of this crime eventually led to the resignation of the President.

left to right: James McCord, Jr., Roman Gonzalez, Frank Sturgis, Eugenio Martinez, and Bernard Baker.

The Historical and Political Context of Watergate
a Watergate chronology

1991
The Supreme Court rules that prison conditions such as overcrowding, poor sanitation, and exposure to violence do not violate th 8th Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

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

June 15

1215
King John signs the Magna Carta at Runnymede, limiting the power of the English monarchy

1907
44 nations meet in 2nd Hague Peace Conference

1943

CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) was founded in Chicago.

June 14

1816

The Society for the Promotion of Universal and Permanent Peace, often known as the London Peace Society, was founded. Nearly all of the members of the Society came from Protestant denominations, and Quaker influence was strong.

International Peace Society

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

June 13

1966
In Miranda v. Arizona, the Supreme Court rules that a suspect must be read his rights by police before interrogation.

1967

Thurgood Marshall was nominated for justice of the Supreme Court by President Lyndon Johnson. Marshall was the Solicitor General of the United States and had been the lead attorney in the Brown v. Board of Education case that ended legal segregation. He would be the first African American on the Court.

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

June 12

In the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death by a white supremacist. His murderer was not convicted until 1994.

 
Medgar Evers