038. Marches

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.

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.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century Norway was marginal in Europe, a part of the Swedish kingdom, with a scarcity of resources, little industrial development, and massive poverty.  Although the country had parliamentary forms, it was ruled by the owning class; the Norwegian army was used to suppress strikes. 

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.

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.

On February 14, 2005, a massive car-bomb explosion rocked Beirut, Lebanon, which killed twenty-two people, including former prime minister and leader of the opposition parties Rafiq Hariri. Suspicions were high that Syria, which had occupied Lebanon with troops and intelligence agents for three decades, was behind the attack. Parliamentary elections were approaching and the anti-Syria opposition was widely expected to win. Rafiq Hariri was a charismatic billionaire businessman who had become the most popular opposition politician in Lebanon.

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.

Iraqi women and men waged a nonviolent pro-democracy campaign from 2003 to 2005. Led by the moderate Shiite religious leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani (a respected Iraqi theologian within the “Quietest Branch”), Iraqis used public protest, strikes, walkouts, sit-ins and boycotts to push for democracy.

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.

By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union had invaded and taken over much of Czechoslovakia.  The Communist Party officially came to power in February 1948, and under its rule dissidents faced persecution by secret police, censorship was enforced, Marxist-Leninist ideology was proclaimed mandatory in schools, and all schools, media, and businesses became the possessions of the state.  

Social protest has played an important role in Bolivia's recent political history. Ever since the national revolution of 1952, civil society has found success in turning to forms of mass participatory direct action for meaningful social change, largely responsible for the removal of unpopular Presidential administrations from office.

Following a coup that ousted then-acting President Isabel Perón from power, Argentina’s armed forces established a military government in 1976, a year that marked the beginning of Argentina’s “Dirty War” period.  Headed by General Jorge Videla, the new military junta dissolved Argentina’s Supreme Court, congress, and provincial governments, and implemented a government program known as the “National Reorganization Process.”  This program sought to rid Argentinean society of perceived government subversives, and effectively institutionalized state-sponsored terror.  Through th

On September 11, 1973, a military coup forced the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende out of power.  After the coup Augusto Pinochet established himself as the leader of Chile and set up a military dictatorship with the heavy involvement of his army.  During this regime, Pinochet used repressive measures to suppress opposition to his rule, and supported politics that divided any opposition groups.  Pinochet moved the country’s economic system away from socialist policies towards a market economy, gaining the support of the pro-capitalist portions of the

By the year 1988, political, social and economic life in Burma was under the repressive military rule of the Burma Socialist Program Party (BSPP), headed by General Ne Win.  Since the military coup in 1962, the Burmese had been subjected to extreme socioeconomic isolation and heavy state control that extended from the media and universities to social events and monasteries. Although citizens, and in particular students, protested throughout the 60’s, violent repression was enough to cease all opposition until 1987 when unrest began to stir once again within the Burmese population.

The Salt Satyagraha campaign that began in 1930 sought to continue previous efforts that had attempted to undermine British colonial rule in India and establish Purna Swaraj (complete self-rule).  The previous nationwide nonviolent campaign for independence (1919-22) had been called off by Gandhi because it broke into disarray and violence, even though it had been preceded by local campaigns: a campaign in Champaran (Indian peasants in Champaran campaign for rights, 1917) and a textile workers strike in Ahmedabad in 1918.

The October 31, 2004, presidential elections in Ukraine pitted popular opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko against Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych.  The incumbent president, Leonid Kuchma, had personally chosen Yanukovych as his successor, but their political party was losing popular support.  Yushchenko, supported by a united opposition, was expected to win the election.  However, the October 31 election yielded no winner, with each candidate receiving about 40% of the votes.  At this point most opposition groups, such as the student group Pora, already suspected fr

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.

Despite passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, several outrageous incidents over the following two years demonstrated the double standard of justice for blacks and whites. Blacks were brutally attacked, murdered, and targeted in an attempted church burning, all of which resulted either in no prosecution or acquittal by an all-white jury. In 1967, the Florida Parishes of Louisiana still remained an active stronghold for the Ku Klux Klan.

Black activists, determined to carry on with their struggle for equality, decided to march straight through Klan territory.

In the late 1950s, Louisville, Kentucky, became known as a regional leader in race relations due to the passage of peaceful school integration laws in 1956. Although laws targeting segregation had been passed, Louisville’s public accommodations continued to be segregated. This persistence of inequality between the African Americans and the European Americans spurred much protest in the black community, especially among youth.

After the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, groups of whites advocating for continued segregation formed across the southern United States.  The strongest and most notable were white citizens councils (WCCs), which began in Mississippi and erupted shortly thereafter in every southern state. 

In 1965 Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO) president John J. Tuomy announced the intent to open a nuclear power plant in East Shoreham on Long Island New York at LILCO’s annual shareholders' meeting.  Construction on the site commenced in 1973.

In 1976 local residents held their first protest against the construction of the Shoreham Plant, but details of this action are difficult to ascertain. About this time however, Nora Bredes and other local mothers began voicing specific concerns about the community’s health at local county meetings.

The state of New York was required by federal law to have a nuclear waste dump by January 1, 1993. In 1988, a special siting committee formed to determine where to put the dump. The siting commission considered five sites in rural Allegany County, New York, as potential spots to put the nuclear dump. The people of Allegany County linked arms in several acts of civil disobedience to prevent the construction of a nuclear waste facility in their backyard.

In 1954, Congress approved the Atomic Energy Act in an attempt to jumpstart nuclear energy in the United States.  The Atomic Energy Commission was charged with creating a positive image of the peaceful applications of nuclear power as well as with regulating safety measures.

At 4:00 a.m. on Wednesday, 28 March 1979 began the worst accident in the history of United States commercial nuclear power, when the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station experienced a failure that would ultimately lead to the release of “approximately 2.5 million curies of radioactive noble gases” into the surrounding areas.  This mishap, in turn, sparked the largest string of anti-nuclear protests in the country’s history. That weekend, activists held rallies across the country.

Since the 1920s, phosphorite mining has polluted the air and water of Estonia. The former Soviet Union republic is rich in phosphorite deposits, which can be used to make phosphorus fertilizers. In the 1960s, the Soviet Union began exploiting Estonia’s deposits with large-scale mining operations. The ensuing problems were caused not by the phosphorite, but by the layers of oil shale that were removed in the process of extraction. The excess shale was typically dumped close to the mine, where it would continually catch fire and pollute the groundwater.