Prisoners at Florida State Prison in Raiford, Florida, staged a sit-down strike to protest prison conditions. The 700 incarcerated protesters were met with gunfire by prison guards, leaving 63 prisoners injured.
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Over 1,100 sanitation workers strike and march for better wages, conditions, and safety with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee.
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The popular, educational Bell Laboratories Science series aired a new chapter in the series on prime-time television which warned that CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel use could warm the earth to a degree that melts the polar ice caps and creates a catastrophic rise in sea levels.
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Ellen Harris told the bus driver she would accept a refund and get off the bus, but the driver refused to accept her terms and had her arrested for breaking segregation law.
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The Casement Report was delivered before the British Houses of Parliament, providing firsthand accounts of the brutal violence inflicted upon the indigenous people and the land in the Congo Free State by settler colonialists acting on behalf of Belgium’s King Leopold II.
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“Lift Every Voice and Sing” was first publicly performed by 500 school children in Jacksonville, Florida. Later, the NAACP adopted the song as the Black National Anthem. The lyrics spoke out against racism and Jim Crow laws.
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Nelson Mandela was released from prison in South Africa after 27 years.
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Howard Zinn debated Fulton Lewis III, a journalist and member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, on the question of “Shall the House Committee on Un-American Activities Be Abolished?”
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Russian Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman was arrested for distributing materials about birth control in violation of the Comstock Act.
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Paul Cuffee and other free Blacks petitioned the Massachusetts government to give African and Native Americans the right to vote.
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Senator Joseph McCarthy delivered a speech at the McLure Hotel during which he claimed to hold a list of known communists in the U.S. State Department.
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In one of the more spectacular demonstrations for women's voting rights, the National Woman’s Party burned President Woodrow Wilson in effigy in front of the White House during the campaign for the 19th Amendment.
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Two years before the Kent State murders, 28 students were injured and three were killed in Orangeburg, South Carolina — most shot in the back by the state police while involved in a peaceful protest.
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Timothy Hood, a veteran of the U.S. Marines, was killed for removing a Jim Crow sign.
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An employee of the U.S. Senate, Kate Brown found political support from Sen. Charles Sumner and others in Congress when she was violently removed from the ladies' car, which was segregated illegally.
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Carter G. Woodson initiated the first celebration of Negro History Week which led to Black History Month.
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American Indian Movement (AIM) organizer Leonard Peltier was arrested in 1976 for a crime he says he did not commit. He remained imprisoned for nearly 50 years, despite international campaigns and calls for his release,
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The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) sent four volunteers to Rock Hill, South Carolina to sit-in.
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In 1951, the Commonwealth of Virginia executed seven Black men despite a national campaign in their defense.
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Two African American brothers — Charles and Alphonso Ferguson — were shot and killed by a white police officer in the segregated Freeport neighborhood of Long Island, New York.
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