In December 1994, the city of Baltimore passed a city ordinance mandating that employees of companies receiving city contracts be paid a living wage (defined as a wage that keeps a family of four above the federally determined poverty level adjusted yearly for cost of living increases and inflation).
In 1955, just one year after the Supreme Court issued its pivotal Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the country was again shaken by the Montgomery Bus Boycotts (see “African Americans boycott buses for integration in Montgomery, Alabama, U.S., 1955-1956”). The campaign, which targeted the city’s practice of segregation on public transportation, brought leaders such as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., into the national spotlight.
The yearlong boycott of Montgomery, Alabama’s city buses by between 40,000 and 50,000 African American residents was in the works for years before it began in December 1955. At that time in Montgomery, as well as in many cities across the southern United States, laws required African Americans to sit at the back of buses and yield their seats to white passengers if no other seats were available.
The strike against the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) by approximately 1,500 train conductors, attendants, engineers, and signalmen, which lasted from March 15 to July 3, 1983, had been in the works for some months. On January 1, 1983, SEPTA, the region's largest public transit provider, assumed ownership of twelve suburban commuter rail lines from Conrail, a federal entity. These twelve lines served four counties surrounding Philadelphia and carried between 40,000 and 50,000 commuters to and from the city each weekday.
A union presence among the 17,000 wool and silk factory workers in and around Passaic, NJ in late 1925 and early 1926 was almost nonexistent. The United Textile Workers (UTW), an affiliate of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), had tried to organize the workers in the past but had had no success. The management of the mills used the fact that the workers were largely immigrants from many different countries to their advantage and suppressed union support.
Approximately 700 male prisoners held in solitary confinement in the Security Housing Unit (SHU) at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California, and approximately 300 male prisoners held in similar conditions at the Corcoran State Prison in Corcoran, California staged a hunger strike in the first two weeks of July, 2001 to protest their living conditions.
In the late 70s and 80s, American colleges and universities were engulfed in a heated debate over the ethical implications of financial investments. Educational institutions had invested billions of dollars in financial institutions and corporations with holdings in South Africa. Since the mid 1900s, the South African Nationalist government had implemented apartheid – a form of institutionalized racial segregation that had forced over a million South Africans to move out of urban spaces to designated rural areas. Many saw U.S.
In 1978, Ward Transformer Company of Raleigh, North Carolina commissioned a few workers to dispose of 31,000 gallons of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), a known carcinogen. They deposited the waste on state land, giving the state responsibility to relocate the waste. Subsequently, the state bought private land in Warren County, a 90% impoverished and 66% African American community, to develop into a landfill for the PCB. Because this was a private transaction, Warren County residents did not realize the development until the U.S.
The 1980s saw a new consciousness of environmental awareness, particularly around the Earth’s rain forests. Scientists had discovered that, aside from their enormous biodiversity, rainforests also helped to keep carbon from being released into the atmosphere.
Industrial forces, however, saw the rainforests as a means for profit. While environmental groups in Europe and Australia had been actively fighting deforestation on a grassroots level, the U.S. environmental movements had failed to evoke widespread activism on the subject.
The problem of illegal mahogany logging was focused in the Brazilian state of Pará, especially in what is termed the “Middle Land”, a plot of Federal public land composed in large part of undisturbed rainforest. Known as “green gold”, mahogany is the most valuable natural resource in this region of the Brazilian Amazon. While there have always been legal avenues by which to utilize this resource, the Brazilian government estimated that as of 2001, 80% of all exported mahogany was being logged illegally.
In 1987, the HIV/AIDS epidemic was still localized to urban centers, most notably gay men in New York City (NYC). Despite thousands of sufferers within NYC, little city public health or housing funding was devoted to the population. Nonprofits that served sufferers attempted to provide palliative care, but did little in terms of advocacy or lobbying.
There are several noted origins of the South Africa divestment movement in the United States. Students and activists protested the 1948-implemented system of apartheid in South Africa throughout the 1960’s and early 70’s, but the movement failed to gain much momentum. In 1962, the United Nations issued Resolution 1761 which called for economic and other sanctions on South Africa, but it received very little support from Western governments.
South Africa’s system of apartheid became law following the elections in 1948. Similar to the Jim Crow laws in the United States, the system of apartheid was a form of legalized racial segregation. Consequently, South African apartheid became a very important political issue in the United States; this was especially true once the Jim Crows laws were outlawed. Americans of different racial and economic backgrounds opposed South African apartheid.
The 1941 March on Washington campaign, precursor of the 1963 March on Washington, was an important moment in the struggle for civil rights in the United States. The proposal for a nationwide mass demonstration for a greater black share in the defense effort had been put forth in January 1941, but it wasn’t until the spring of 1941 that A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP), called for a march on Washington, D. C., to challenge the discrimination that African Americans were faced with in the national defense industry.
On February 12, 1968, sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, began a labor strike to protest unfair wages, unsafe working conditions, and the city’s refusal to recognize their sanitation workers union.
Race relations in the United States had been tense for decades before the 1950s. The tension was especially obvious in the political, economic, and social realm where African-Americans were unable to vote in many states, had previously been considered property by white Americans, and were frequently segregated in restaurants, libraries, movie theatres, or almost any place where African-Americans might interact with whites.
Prior to the Tallahassee student sit-ins of 1960, the Tallahassee Bus Boycott took place in 1956, patterned after the Montgomery Bus Boycott that started with the refusal of Rosa Parks to surrender her bus seat to a white person. Tallahassee was sometimes called the “little Mississippi” where segregation was prominent.
On May 27, 1956, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, two female students at all-black Florida A+M University in Tallahassee, Florida, paid their ten-cent fares and boarded a segregated city bus. They sat in seats normally occupied by white people, because the back of the bus, where black patrons were expected to sit, was very crowded. When the driver asked them to move, they refused, citing the standing-room only conditions of the back of the bus, and their own fatigue. They offered to leave if their fares were refunded.
In 1960, Orangeburg, South Carolina was a town of 13,852 people. Although the African-American population numbered only around 5,000 and declining, racial tension in the town was high due to a series of protests and boycotts in 1955-56. Two all-black colleges, South Carolina State College (SCSC) and Claflin College, were home to plenty of potential activists. When students in Greensboro sat-in for racial integration on February 1, students in Orangeburg eagerly followed suit. They formed the Orangeburg Student Movement Association (OSMA) to coordinate actions between
Before the grape strike in 1965, the average annual income
of a California farmworker was less than $1,400. In addition, variations in
weather or market patterns could lessen this amount. Working conditions were
also poor, as many workers did not have access to a sufficient amount of food
or sanitary facilities.
In the early 1980s, it was no secret that United States president Ronald Reagan would use any means necessary to end or prevent the influence of Communism and the Soviet Union around the globe. The two countries had been engaged in a bitter ideological struggle since the end of World War II, and each sought to expand their influence to other, mostly developing nations. From Central America to Sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East, the U.S.
When Alice Paul emerged into the somewhat stagnant scene of the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association’s (NAWSA) campaign for the right to vote in 1912, the energy and momentum of the movement surged. Having just come from Britain where women were fighting a similar battle in which they were imprisoned, partaking in hunger strikes and smashing windows, NAWSA’s polite pleading over a cup of tea with political leaders and legislators was not only ineffective in the eyes of Paul and other emerging women leaders, it was a blow to the dignity of women to request basic human rights.
Pakistan was splitting apart. Its eastern part, Bengali, declared independence and held a free election. West Pakistan declared war to end the secession, with U.S. support. President Nixon denied that the U.S. was sending weapons to Pakistani dictator Yaya Khan, but insiders knew otherwise.
In Philadelphia a group of activists decided in June to make it difficult for Pakistani freighters to load weapons at U.S. ports, by launching nonviolent fleets of small boats that would get between the freighters and the dock, a first in U.S. history.
Around the turn of the 20th century, employment agencies, or, as they were known to many workers, “job sharks” had a monopoly on casual laborer in the American West. Industries such as mining and agriculture would contract labor out to an agency, which would “buy out” job applicants and take a sizable cut of what would otherwise have been workers’ wages.
Similar to action taken on college and university campuses throughout the 1960s in the United States, students at the College of the Holy Cross also took a stand against the Vietnam War. Students first organized to protest the presence of recruiters for Dow Chemical Company (a manufacturer of napalm) in O’Kane Hall on campus in January 1968.
