Showing posts with label protests. Show all posts
Showing posts with label protests. Show all posts

September 15 - Leesburg Stockade Girls Released!

Posted on September 15, 2020

Have you ever heard of the Leesburg Stockade Girls?

Or maybe the Stolen Girls?


In Americus, Georgia, in 1963, a group of African American civil rights protesters marched from a church to a movie theater. They were peacefully protesting segregation - protesting the fact that some places of business did not allow black people to enter, buy, eat, etc. In this case, the movie theater did not allow black people to buy tickets and watch a movie.

In 1963! This is not exactly ancient history. Kennedy was president, I was almost nine years old, and the Beatles were about to "invade" America.

Marching along with the rest of the protesters, a group of 15 to 33 African American girls extended their peaceful protest by trying to buy movie tickets.

And they were arrested!

The girls, who ranged in age from 12 to 15 years old, were not kept in juvenile detention, nor even in a jail there in Americus. No, they were hauled off to a different town, more than 26 miles away, and then to yet another town about 18 miles away - that would be Leesburg, Georgia. There they were imprisoned in the Lee County Public Works building, which was called the Leesburg Stockade.

And there they were kept - without charges! - for 45 days.

We are talking 45 days with just one toilet - a toilet that wasn't working!

And 45 days with just concrete floors to sleep on.

We're talking 45 days with the only water source being drips from the shower! And really yuck food.


Days and days of being threatened with murder. At one point, a rattlesnake was thrown into their makeshift prison!

Taking a view at what it was like from the girls' families point of view: 45 days of not being able to help their children! About 30 days of not even knowing where their daughters were being kept (let alone how badly they were being kept!).

Finally, a janitor somehow got the word out of where the arrested-but-not-charged girls were being held - and a Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee photographer crept up to the stockade was able to snap their photo. The photo was published in the SNCC newspaper, and then African American newspapers across the country picked up the story of the unlawful arrests and squalid conditions.

Apparently pressure from outsiders finally caused the Georgia law enforcement officers to release the girls, on this date in 1963. The girls never faced charges for "illegally" trying to buy movie tickets, but the people who did the illegal imprisonment and neglectful mistreatment of innocent children ALSO never faced charges. And, - get this! - the "Leesburg Stockade Girls" were actually charged a fee for "use" of the Stockade facilities!

W.O.W.!




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November 17 – International Students' Day

Posted on November 17, 2017


Today is the super sad anniversary of a violent response by German forces to an anti-Nazi protest by University of Prague students, in what is now Czechia. It happened in 1939.

But it is also the anniversary of the start of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. On the fiftieth anniversary of the anti-Nazi protest, university students organized a mass demonstration in Prague. Some 15,000 gathered and chanted anti-Communist slogans.

Unfortunately, although it sounds like the students were non-violent, the riot police sent to break up the demonstration were not, and some students were badly beaten.

Nobody died, thank goodness!

However, as all the protestors left, one man was lying in the street. 

Here's where the story is tricky:

The man lying in street wasn't a student, he was an undercover police officer.

He wasn't physically hurt.

He certainly wasn't dead - and he wasn't even pretending to be dead.

I read that he was overcome with emotion.

Police officers carried the motionless man to an ambulance - and some of the students who saw this, students who WERE hurt and waiting for treatment, thought he was a dead student.

Rumors of the dead student got started, and soon all kinds of things happened:

Students and theater performers agreed to go on strike.

The demonstration of November 17 was dwarfed by 250,000 students gathering in protest a few days later, and by November 20, about 500,000 people were in the streets of Prague, protesting.


On November 24, the entire top leadership of the Communist Party resigned.

On November 27, there was a 2-hour general strike, demanding the end to a one-party state.

And on November 29, Communist rule in Czechoslovakia ended!

What we can learn from all of this is that student protests can be dangerous and violent, but they can also be non-violent, and they can also be successful! The Velvet Revolution is called "velvet" because it was largely non-violent. Even though the very first bit of the non-violent revolution was met with police brutality (riot police beating up students), the end of Communism in Czechoslovakia was mostly bloodless.

How do people celebrate International Students' Day now? In some places, students gather for demonstrations demanding free education, equal access to education, and safe campuses. In some places, students remember the Nazi repression of 1939 and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. In some places, universities have special activities honoring international students or celebrating cultural diversity.

In 2014, students from more than 40 countries coordinated demonstrations.

International Students' Day in Rome, 2016




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February 15 – Anniversary of the Largest Protest Event Ever

Posted on February 15, 2017

Rome
On this date in 2003, three MILLION people in Rome, Italy, protested the upcoming Iraq War. The Guinness Book of World Records lists this as the
largest anti-war rally anywhere, ever in history.

But the Roman rally was just one rally that took place on this date in 2003. On the same day, there were 1.5 million protestors in Madrid, Spain, and maybe a million in London, United Kingdom. And there were thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of protestors in New York City and Los Angeles, and in other big cities everywhere -- from Europe to North America, from Asia to Africa to Australia.
Amsterdam 

San Francisco

Tel Aviv, Israel

All in all, estimates range from 6 to 11 million participants in the February 15 protests. Like the single rally in Rome, the February 15 anti-war protests in more than 600 cities have set the record as the largest protest event ever in human history!

(In case you are wondering, the January 2017 "Women's March" on every continent and almost every country in the world - protesting Donald Trump and / or promoting women's rights, reproductive rights, minority and immigration rights - probably involved around 4.5 to 5.6 protestors worldwide -- certainly one of the largest ever, but not as large as the 2003 protest of the Iraq War.)

London
Remember, this protest was about a war that had not yet started. Officials in the United States, including then-President George W. Bush, had been speaking about and discussing the possibility of starting a war with Saddam Hussein's government mostly over fears that Hussein had violated U.N. resolutions and had developed weapons of mass destruction.

Other protests occurred in the lead-up to the war, starting in January of 2003, with about 36 million participants spread out over several months' worth of rallies and marches. The actual war began in late March, 2003.

You might already know that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were never found.


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