Tag: history

February 25th commemorates the victory of the People-Power Revolution in the Philippines, in which nonviolent civil resistance (people power) overthrew President Ferdinand Marcos. Marcos had been elected in 1965, and again in 1969. When barred from a third term campaign for re-election, he declared martial law, arrested his opposition leaders, and dissolved congress. His primary […]

  When times are bleak and darkness deepens, ancient yearnings of humanity stir in our hearts. We long for the simple things that our ancestors always sought: safety for our families, roofs over our heads, food in our bellies, rest for our weary bodies. In other words, we yearn for the basic human rights have […]

Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution in 1989 —  Campaigners sought to end the Soviet occupation of the country, as well as shifting from communist rule. They wanted to remove the laws of state-mandated censorship and demanded free elections. Just eighteen months before the November nonviolent revolution, Czechoslovakians organized their first public mass demonstration since 1969. Roman Catholic […]

[ Photo Credit: By Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine; Restored by Adam Cuerden – Public Domain[/caption] Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was born on October 6th, 1917, in Mississippi, and lived under the harsh reality of the Jim Crow South. Through years of courage and challenge, she became a legendary […]

Automation isn’t coming. It’s here. At the airport, the public library, the grocery store, and dozens of other places, touch screens are rapidly replacing human bodies, especially in basic service industry positions. In a time when service industry jobs represent 80 percent of all employment in the United States, and when a presidential report on […]

On August 23rd, 1989, two million people joined hands to form a human chain crossing the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, in protest against the Soviet Union, and in support of each nation’s independence. The Baltic Way, as the human chain was called, spanned 420 miles, engaging people of all ages in […]

On August 1st, 1976, the first nonviolent mass demonstration of the Clamshell Alliance took place at the proposed site of the Seabrook Nuclear Energy Facility in New Hampshire. The Clamshell Alliance was a group of anti-nuclear activists who worked to stop nuclear power plant construction at a time when President Nixon’s “Project Independence” had proposed […]

This week in nonviolent history commemorates a turning point in the long struggle to demand justice for the residents of Love Canal, a residential community in upstate New York that was situated on top of a leaking toxic waste dump. On August 2nd, 1978, State Health Commissioner Robert Whalen issued a state of emergency ordering […]

On August 20, 2013, Antoinette Tuff (right) nonviolently disarmed a school shooter, saving the lives of hundreds of school children. Antoinette was a bookkeeper. She wasn’t supposed to be at the school that day. She was just filling in as a front desk receptionist as a favor to a friend. That morning, during her prayer […]

Independence Day is commemorated with fireworks and flag-waving, gun salutes and military parades . . . however, one of our nation’s founding fathers, John Adams, wrote, “A history of military operations . . . is not a history of the American Revolution.” Often minimized in our history books, the tactics of nonviolent action played a […]

The name Helen Keller conjures up, for many people, a deaf-blind-mute girl learning to communicate via sign language. It is a scene straight out of “The Miracle Worker,” the biographical play recounting Anne Sullivan’s role in reaching young Helen Keller. However, the amazing part of Keller’s story is not that the way she learned to […]

On June 27, 1915, Grace Lee Boggs was born in Providence, Rhode Island, above her father’s restaurant.  Grace later said, “because I was born to Chinese immigrant parents and because I was born female, I learned very quickly that the world needed changing.” Over her 100 years of life, Grace would, indeed, change the world […]

On June 15th, 1955, Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day joined a group of pacifists in refusing to participate in the civilian defense drills scheduled on that day. These drills were to prepare the citizenry in the event of a nuclear attack, and involved evacuations of city centers, taking shelter in subway tunnels, and, for schoolchildren, […]

Every year in May, peace activists circulate Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Peace Proclamation. But, Howe did not commemorate Mother’s Day in May . . . for thirty years Americans celebrated Mother’s Day for Peace on June 2nd. It was Julia Ward Howe’s contemporary, Anna Jarvis, who established the May celebration of mothers, and even […]

This week in nonviolent history, we celebrate the effective and versatile tactic of the teach-in. One of the largest teach-ins during the Vietnam War, for example, was held on May 21st-23rd, 1965 at UC Berkeley with 10-30,000 students attending. The State Department was invited to send a representative, but declined. An empty chair was set […]

The successful conclusion of Kuwait’s Blue Revolution came on May 17th, 2005 when Kuwaiti women gained suffrage after more than 40 years of struggle. The women used a wide variety of approaches to achieve their goals, including lobbying, introducing repeated legislation, protests and demonstration, marches, rallies, and mock elections. Like many women’s suffrage movements around […]

By May 1961, federal law had already ruled that segregation on interstate, public buses was illegal. Southern states, however, maintained segregation in seating, and at bus station bathrooms, waiting rooms and drinking fountains. The Interstate Commerce Commission refused to take action to enforce federal law. To change this, the Civil Rights Movement (CORE, SNCC, NAACP) […]

The next time someone calls you a treehugger, say thank you . . . then proceed to tell them the origins of the treehuggers. In 1730, in India, local villagers of the Bishnoi sect, led by a woman named Amrita Devi, threw their arms around the trunks of a sacred forest, trying to protect the […]

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was born on Feb 6th, 1890 in the Peshawar Valley of British-controlled India. At the age of twenty, Ghaffar Khan founded a village mosque school, and began his revolutionary work against British colonial control with what his contemporary Mohandas K. Gandhi was calling “constructive programme”. He worked tirelessly for independence and […]

If you have a passel of teenage girls headed to your house for a slumber party, perhaps go out on a limb as being the weird parent, and screen Iron Jawed Angels as an act of resistance to violence as usual in the coming of age stories of young women. After all, we’ve been subjected […]

This week is the 104th anniversary of the Lawrence Textile Strike that later became known as the Bread and Roses strike. On Jan 11th and 12th, 1912 women working in the textile factories of Lawrence, Massachusetts walked out en masse and started a two month strike that would later become known as the Bread and […]

“Alice Paul had “a spirit like Joan of Arc, and it is useless to try to change it. She will die but she will never give up.” – Physician at Occoquan Workhouse where Alice Paul was imprisoned for nonviolent actions to win women’s suffrage in the United States. Alice Paul was born on Jan 11th, […]

This piece was written for Campaign Nonviolence‘s email series, This Nonviolent Life. Sign up to receive these “inspirations in your inbox” here.  Nonviolence is as old as the hills – well, at least as old as the Parthenon and older than some of the pyramids. It forms a lineage of human beings that stretches around […]

(This is a guest post from Sherri Mitchell, a member of the Penobscot Nation, Indigenous Rights Attorney, and my cohost on Love (and Revolution) Radio which premiers Jan 1, 2016.) Carly Fiorina’s lies directly resulted in the attack at Planned Parenthood. There is no denying this, since the shooter quoted her when he was apprehended. […]