Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior (1985)

Wed Jul 10, 1985

Image: The Rainbow Warrior in Marsden Wharf in Auckland Harbour after the bombing by French secret service agents. © Greenpeace / John Miller [greenpeace.org]

On this day in 1985, the French government, in an act of state-sponsored terror, bombed the Greenpeace-operated boat Rainbow Warrior, which was en route to protest a nuclear weapons test planned by the French state. The bombing, later found to be personally ordered by French President François Mitterrand, killed a freelance photographer on board named Fernando Pereira.

France had been testing nuclear weapons on the Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia since 1966. In 1985 eight South Pacific countries, including New Zealand and Australia, signed a treaty declaring the region a nuclear-free zone.

Since being acquired by Greenpeace in 1977, Rainbow Warrior was active in supporting a number of anti-nuclear testing campaigns during the late 1970s and early 1980s, including relocating 300 Marshall Islanders from Rongelap Atoll, which had been polluted by radioactive fallout by past American nuclear tests.

For the 1985 tests, Greenpeace intended to monitor the impact of nuclear tests and place protesters on the island to observe the blasts. Three undercover French agents were on board, however, and they attached two limpet mines to Rainbow Warrior and detonated them ten minutes apart, sinking the ship.

France initially denied responsibility, but two of the French agents were captured by New Zealand Police and charged with arson, conspiracy to commit arson, willful damage, and murder.

The resulting scandal led to the resignation of the French Defence Minister Charles Hernu, while the two agents pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to ten years in prison. They spent a little over two years confined to the French island of Hao before being freed by the French government.

In 1987, after international pressure, France paid $8.16m to Greenpeace in damages, which helped finance another ship. It also paid compensation to the Pereira family, making reparation payments of 650,000 francs to Pereira's wife, 1.5 million francs to his two children, and 75,000 francs to each of his parents.

• Date: 1985-07-10
• Learn More: www.greenpeace.org, en.wikipedia.org, www.zinnedproject.org.
• Tags: #Terrorism, #Protests.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Wagner Act (1935)

Sat Jul 06, 1935

The National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act) is a U.S. labor law that became effective on this day in 1935, guaranteeing the right of private sector employees to organize trade unions, engage in collective bargaining, and strike.

The Act also set up a permanent three-member National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with the power to hear and resolve labor disputes through quasi-judicial proceedings and banned employers from refusing to negotiate with any union ratified by this board.

The Act does not apply to certain workers, including agricultural employees, domestic workers, government employees, and independent contractors. Despite demands by the NAACP and National Urban League, the Act was written without the inclusion of an anti-discrimination clause, allowing both employers and racist labor unions such as the AFL and CIO to maintain white supremacist labor practices.

Corporate interest was heavily against the NLRA, and, when it was challenged in court, the U.S. Supreme Court was compelled to uphold (5-4) the constitutionality of the Wagner Act in "National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp".

The Wagner Act would later be partially repealed and amended with the strongly anti-union Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, granting states the power to pass so-called "right-to-work" laws.

• Date: 1935-07-06
• Learn More: www.nlrb.gov, en.wikipedia.org.
• Tags: #Labor.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954)

Sat Jul 06, 1907

Frida Kahlo, born on this day in 1907, was a Mexican artist and revolutionary communist known for her folk-art inspired style paintings, touching on themes on gender, race, class, self-perception, indigenous culture, and chronic pain.

Although she had always sketched as a hobby, she did not consider visual art as a career until a severe bus accident at the age of eighteen left her bedridden for three months and with a lifetime of chronic pain. Confined to her bed, Kahlo's mother provided her with a specially-made easel, which enabled her to paint while lying down.

With a mirror placed such so that she could see herself, Kahlo began to paint self-portraits, stating "I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best".

Inspired by Mexico's popular culture, she employed an accessible, folk art style. In 1943, Kahlo accepted a teaching position at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado, the "La Esmeralda." She encouraged her students to treat her in an informal and non-hierarchical way and taught them to appreciate Mexican popular culture and folk art, and to derive their subjects from the street.

Frida Kahlo was a member of the Mexican Communist Party and committed to radical anti-capitalism throughout her entire adult life. In 1951, she stated:

"I have a great restlessness about my paintings. Mainly because I want to make it useful to the revolutionary communist movement...until now I have managed simply an honest expression of my own self...I must struggle with all my strength to ensure that the little positive my health allows me to do also benefits the Revolution, the only real reason to live."

• Date: 1907-07-06
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, www.fridakahlo.org.
• Tags: #Communism, #Birthdays.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Black Panther Party Founded (1966)

Sat Oct 15, 1966

Image: 1969 photograph of Black Panther Party members outside a courthouse in New York City

On this day in 1966, in the wake of spontaneous riots against police brutality, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California.

In an interview recorded for the 1990 documentary "Eyes on the Prize II", Seale described the founding of the BPP in his own words:

"Black Panther Party, 1966, when Huey and I founded that organization, that particular year, numerous acts of police brutality had sparked a lot of spontaneous riots, something that Huey and I were against, the spontaneous riots.

Even a year earlier, in 1965, in Watts, you know, sixty-five people were killed, 200 wounded, 5,000 arrested. And Huey and I began to try to figure out how could we organize 5,000 youthful Black folks into some kind of political-electorial power movement.

Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture] was on the scene with Black Power. We were questioning, Huey and I, about the need for a functional definition of power and we came up with this, that 'power is the ability to define phenomena then in turn make it act in a desired manner.'

With the phenomena of racism structured in the city council at that time, Huey and I working with the North Oakland Neighborhood Service Center, the advisory board, we got 5,000 signatures for them to go to the city council, to get the city council to try to set up a police review board to deal with complaints of police brutality. Well, the city council ignored them.

So, that phenomena was that the city council was just a racist structure which could care less about the forty-eight percent Black and Chicano people who lived in the city of Oakland. So, there we are trying to figure out what to do. We finally concluded through those months that we had to start a new organization.

And we sit down and began to write out this Ten-Point Platform and Program in the North Oakland Neighborhood Service Center in North Oakland, California, in the community where Huey and I lived. And we wrote out this program.

'We want power to determine our own destiny in our own Black community', alluding to the needs to be organized-political electoral power. Full employment, decent housing, decent education that taught us about our true selves, not to have to fight in Vietnam, immediate end to police brutality and murder of back people was point number seven.

The right to have juries of our peers in the courts, what have you. We summed it up. We wanted land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace. And, in the tail end, we stuck in two famous paragraphs: 'When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to separate themself from the political bondage' - that was the emphasis, the political bondage - 'which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the Earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God entitled them.'

I mean, this was the kind of summarization we gave to our meaning. And we summarized that Ten-Point Platform Program, flipped a coin to see who would be chairman. I won chairman and we created the Black Panther Party."

• Date: 1966-10-15
• Learn More: repository.wustl.edu, www.youtube.com, www.britannica.com, www.jacobinmag.com.
• Tags: #Riots.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Danziger Bridge Shootings (2005)

Sun Sep 04, 2005

Image: Danziger Bridge, New Orleans, in April 2012 [Wikipedia]

The Danziger Bridge Shootings were murders that took place on this day in 2005 at the Danziger Bridge in New Orleans, six days after Hurricane Katrina struck the city.

The killings happened when members of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD), allegedly responding to a call of an officer under fire, shot and killed two civilians - 17-year-old James Brissette and 40-year-old Ronald Madison. Four other civilians were also wounded. All of the victims were black and unarmed, and one, Ronald Madison, was mentally handicapped and shot in the back five times.

The NOPD attempted to cover-up the murders, falsely reporting that seven police officers responded to a police dispatch reporting an officer down, and that at least four suspects were firing weapons at the officers upon their arrival.

An attorney for the Justice Department described the case as "the most significant police misconduct prosecution [in the U.S.] since the Rodney King beating case". On April 20th, 2016, the five former officers pleaded guilty to various charges related to the shooting, and in return received reduced sentences ranging from three to twelve years. Three of the officers are white and two are black.

• Date: 2005-09-04
• Learn More: www.nola.com, en.wikipedia.org, www.npr.org.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Theresa Garnett (1888 - 1966)

Thu May 17, 1888

Theresa Garnett, born on this day in 1888, was a militant British suffragette whose acts of feminist rebellion included assaulting Winston Churchill with a whip, shouting "Take that in the name of the insulted women of England!"

Garnett was born in Leeds on May 17th, 1888. In 1907, she joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) after being inspired by a speech given by the feminist and later co-founder of the Australian Communist Party Adela Pankhurst.

The WSPU fought for women's suffrage in the United Kingdom and was noted for its use of direct action. Its members heckled politicians, held demonstrations and marches, broke the law to force arrests, broke windows in prominent buildings, set fire to post boxes, committed night-time arson of unoccupied houses and churches, and, when imprisoned, went on hunger strike and endured physically traumatizing force-feeding.

Garnett participated in several of these actions as a young adult, chaining herself in 1909, along with four other activists, to a statue in Parliament in protest of a law meant to prohibit disorderly conduct while Parliament was in session.

On November 14th, 1909, Garnett assaulted Winston Churchill, who instituted policies of force feeding suffragettes in prison, with a whip, striking him several times while shouting "Take that in the name of the insulted women of England!"

• Date: 1888-05-17
• Learn More: en.wikipedia.org, spartacus-educational.com.
• Tags: #Labor, #Feminism, #Birthdays, #Protests.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org

Gestapo Executes Ehrenfeld Anti-Fascists (1944)

Fri Nov 10, 1944

On this day in 1944, the Gestapo publicly hanged 13 members of the anti-Nazi Ehrenfeld Group without trial, near Cologne, Germany.

The Ehrenfeld Group consisted of over one hundred people, some of whom also participated in the local Edelweiss Pirates organization, was led by Hans Steinbrück, an escaped concentration camp prisoner. They engaged in many acts of rebellion against the Nazi regime, including petty theft, escaping prisoners, and stealing and hiding weapons.

After a botched attempt at stealing explosives, on October 8th, 1944, the Gestapo began arresting members of the group, eventually capturing 63 people, including Steinbrück himself. Of those, thirteen Germans, including several teenagers, were executed without trial in a public hanging next to the Ehrenfeld train station on November 10th, 1944.

• Date: 1944-11-10
• Learn More: www.executedtoday.com, en.wikipedia.org.
• Tags: #Fascism.
• Source: www.apeoplescalendar.org