162. Sit-in

In January 2010, it became clear that the Jamaican government sought to sell Air Jamaica to a foreign company.  The government and the owners of Air Jamaica saw the company as losing a lot of money and, due to heavy subsidizing, the government had a great deal of power over the future of the airline.  Some reports suggest that Air Jamaica was losing more than USD $90 million per year and was already USD $900 million in debt.  However, Air Jamaica employed over 1,600 Jamaicans.  Fearing for the loss of their jobs and the potential damage that could be done to the country

In 2000, Liberia’s second civil war broke out.  Liberian President Charles Taylor and his military forces, who had taken over Liberia in 1989 during the first civil war, experienced attacks from the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD).  LURD consisted of various anti-Taylor militant groups led by warlords who were not given a role in Taylor's government.

On March 10, 2008, the Tibetan Uprising Day, a protest against China's occupation of Tibet took place in Lhasa, Tibet’s administrative capital. Worried about the worsening human rights situation inside Tibet, participants intended to use the Olympics’ spotlight to attract international support for the Tibetan cause and to pressure the Chinese government to end its occupation of Tibet, to put a stop to its abuses against Tibetan citizens and supporters, and to ultimately respect Tibet’s sovereignty.

In 2008, former President of Costa Rica, Oscar Arias authorized the removal of over 600 acres of yellow almond trees in order to build a gold mine in Las Crucitas, a small town in Northern Costa Rica.  Costa Rican law prohibits the cutting down of these trees, as they are the main source of food for the endangered green macaw.  However, Arias went ahead with his authorization, making an agreement with Industrias Infinitos, a subsidiary of Infinito Gold Ltd., a Canadian mining company to mine an estimated $1 billion worth of gold.  

In July 1975, the Dahe Dam on the Dahe River in Shanyang Township, southern China, was completed.  The environmental toll of the project accumulated within months.  Upstream of the dam, rising waters swamped homes and farmland, while downstream, water coming from the spillways scoured away riverbank, causing widespread erosion and loss of fertile land.  The government anticipated a certain amount of upstream flooding, and accordingly compensated the affected population and relocated them when necessary.  In the haste to complete the project, however, the engineers had ne

In June 1988, the Arlington Richmond Company (ARCO) acquired rights to explore and exploit petroleum resources in an area of Pastaza province, Ecuador, known as Block 10.  Located in the Amazon rainforest in eastern Ecuador (“El Oriente”), Pastaza was barely developed at the time.  No roads reached Block 10—the small villages in the area were only accessible via helicopter, small airplane, or a multi-day jungle trek.  To the Organization of Indigenous Peoples of Pastaza (OPIP), which represented 15,000 locals, mostly of the Quichua nation, ARCO’s acquisition seemed like a dan

The world voiced its opposition to the National Party’s apartheid government ruling in South Africa in a new way in 1964. International sports tours and matches had become a focal point of cultural identity for whites in South Africa. Victories, to them, demonstrated a kind of symbolic power of white South Africa. White elite South Africa was considered “sports mad.” Once this became apparent to other countries in objection to the political state of South Africa, they found a way to use the situation to send a message.

Since 1938, the United States Navy has occupied a significant portion of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, a fifty-two square-mile island eight miles east of the mainland of Puerto Rico.  By the end of the twentieth century, the U.S. Navy controlled over 70% of the island.  Thousands of the island's 10,000 inhabitants had been forcibly removed from their homes and relocated to the center portion of the island, surrounded by training grounds, weapons depots, and bomb sites on both sides.  According to the U.S.

On November 3, 2008, Chen Yunlin arrived from China on a visit to Taiwan to meet with President Ma Ying Jiao. His visit was met with protests led by the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party), which resulted in violent clashes with the police. In reaction to the protests, police closed major highways, forbade citizens from publicly waving the national flag or saying “Taiwan does not belong to China,” hindered citizens filming around the hotel where Chen was staying, shut down a nearby music store, and executed a number of other repressive actions.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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 late 1950s, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) was nearly two decades old, and had grown to successfully organize a national network of interracial, nonviolent direct-action cells working towards integration and civil rights for African Americans.  CORE’s interracial approach stemmed from their assertion that the race problem is a human, social problem applicable to all people.  Their incredible growth between 1957 and 1959 stemmed not only from the added support of Dr.

Agitation in Iran was visible by May 1977 in predominantly intellectual circles. A group of lawyers—upset by the government’s interference in the judiciary—drafted a strongly worded manifesto chronicling the legal abuses that had occurred under the Shah’s regime. Poets formed a Writers’ Association to call for an end to censorship and the activity of SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police. A National Organization of University Teachers began fighting for academic freedom while university and seminary students called for academic freedom in the schools.

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

A Read’s Drug Store was built at the corner of Howard and Lexington Streets in 1934, when it was first praised as a local landmark and the modern flagship store for the chain. The store was located at the center of the downtown shopping district and the business grew as Read’s drug store expanded throughout downtown Baltimore and surrounding regions.

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.