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| Physicist and peace activist Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany. The Nobel Prize winner opposed militarism and became a champion of nuclear disarmament. Though he supported the development of the atomic bomb in fear that Germany would develop it first, he warned in a 1944 letter to the Manhattan Project's Niels Bohr: "When the war is over, then there will be in all countries a pursuit of secret war preparations with technological means which will lead inevitably to preventative wars and to destruction even
more terrible than the present destruction of life." |
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| | During a second attempt by Native American activists to claim Fort Lawton (about 50 miles south of Seattle, Washington), 78 were arrested for entering the site. United Indians for All Tribes was demanding the city give the unused facility to Native Americans for use as a cultural center. One week earlier about the same number had been arrested for occupying what had been declared federal surplus property. The Daybreak Star Cultural Center is now operating on the site. | Indians demonstrating at Fort Lawton | |
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| Sixteen disability-rights activists were arrested at the U.S. Capitol demanding passage of what would become the Americans With Disabilities Act.
disability rights demonstration
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Opposition Socialists scored an upset win in Spain's general election three days following the Madrid train bombings. The conservative government had joined the U.S.-led coalition that invaded Iraq the previous year though Spanish public opinion was overwhelmingly opposed to it. José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his party, Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), had opposed the Iraq War and Spain's involvement.
The coordinated bombings, which left 191 dead and 1600 injured, were the worst terrorist attack in Europe aside from the downing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. | | | |
| Over 1300 Norwegian teachers were arrested by the German Nazi-installed government run by Vidkun Quisling after 12,000 of 14,000 nationwide had refused to join the new teachers' association and resisted nazification of the curriculum. Half were held in a concentration camp outside the capital of Oslo. The rest were shipped to the Arctic for forced labor alongside Russian prisoners of war. | | The loss of the arrested teachers forced a school shutdown for several weeks. Each day the imprisoned teachers were marched to their job of unloading supply ships, citizens stood respectfully by as they passed. When the teachers returned home later in the year, they were treated as heroes.
Following Germany's defeat, Quisling was tried for treason, convicted and sentenced to death. Quisling is now considered a synonym for traitor.
| Hitler and Quisling | | |
| Students from South Carolina State and Claflin College organized to integrate the lunch counter at Kresge 5&10 in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Though their efforts were disciplined and peaceful, 400 were attacked by police then herded behind fences in the largest mass arrest of the civil rights movement. Convicted of "Breach of the Peace," the U.S. Supreme Court later overturned those convictions because those arrested were petitioning for redress of grievances within the protection of the 1st Amendment. |
 | | More than a 1000 students marched peacefully to intergrate lunch counters in Orangeburg, South Carolina. | | |
| Less than a week after the Bloody Sunday police attacks on peaceful marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, President Lyndon Johnson addressed the American people before a televised Joint Session of Congress. He said, "There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights . . . We have already waited a hundred years and more, and the time for waiting is gone . . . ." | | | |
| The United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador concluded that most of the murder and human rights abuses during its civil war had been committed by the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government through its various military, security and allied paramilitary organizations. | |
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| The first newspaper owned and edited by and for African-Americans, Freedom's Journal, was published in New York City. It appeared the same year slavery was abolished in New York state. | | |
| The War Resisters International was founded with sections set up in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Austria. By 1939 there were 54 WRI Sections in 24 countries, including the U.S.. | 
WRI No More War demonstration in Berlin 1922 |  |
Their symbol: a broken gun.
Their slogan: "The right to refuse to kill." | | |
| Reference librarian Zoia Horn refused to testify against the Harrisburg Seven who were on trial for an alleged conspiracy to kidnap then-National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger. Five of the seven were current or former Catholic priests or nuns. |  | Horn had been implicated by an ex-convict informer placed in the Bucknell University library by the FBI. Though given immunity from self-incrimination, Zoia objected to the idea that libraries could become places of infiltration and spying. Charged with contempt of court, she was sent to jail for 20 days until a mistrial was declared.
Judith Krug, longtime director of the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom, said that Horn was "the first librarian who spent time in jail for a value of our profession." | | Reference librarian Zoia Horn | | |
| Rachel Corrie, an American college student in Gaza to protest Israeli military and security operations, was killed when run over by a bulldozer while trying to stop Israeli troops from demolishing a Palestinian home. |  | The 23-year-old from Olympia, Washington, was a member of International Solidarity Movement and was the first nonviolent western protester to die in the occupied territories. | | |
Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association left Delano for Sacramento, the capital of California, a 340-mile march which would take three weeks. They were calling public attention to the plight of farm workers and for their struggle for the right to organize a union.
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| In London's Trafalgar Square, at the largest anti-Vietnam War protest in Britain to date, 25,000 people marched. They were demonstrating against American action in Vietnam and British support for the United States policy.
Some then attempted to storm the U.S. Embassy, resulting in 200 arrests and fifty taken to hospital, nearly half police officers. | 
| | Actress Vanessa Redgrave was allowed to enterthe embassy to deliver a protest | |
| The oil supertanker Amoco Cadiz ran aground and, in the worst oil spill ever, lost its entire cargo of 1,619,048 barrels (223,000 tons). A slick 18 miles wide and 80 miles long polluted approximately 200 miles of France's Brittany coastline. |  | | The Amoco Cadiz disaster was the first marine environmental catastrophe to be covered by the world's media in real time. | 
one of the victims | | | |
Mahatma Gandhi
| Gandhi's "Great Trial" for writing seditious articles opposing British colonial rule began in Ahmedabad, India. The accused, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aged 53, described himself as a farmer and weaver by profession, and spoke in his own defense, pleading guilty. "I hold it to be a virtue to be disaffected towards a government which, in its totality, has done more harm to India than any other system . . . .
" . . . I do not ask for mercy. I am to invite and cheerfully submit to the highest penalty that can be inflicted upon me for what in law is a deliberate crime and what appears to me to be the highest duty of the citizen." | |
| Algeria became a sovereign nation after 130 years of French colonial rule. The struggle for independence inspired "The Battle of Algiers," a movie by Gillo Pontecorvo. The film was shown extensively in the Pentagon to help understand the Iraqi insurgency. | 
French army confront demonstrators for Algerian independence in 1960 | | | | | | |
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| The first strike against the U.S. government and the first mass work stoppage in the 195-year history of the Postal Service began with a walkout of letter carriers in Brooklyn and Manhattan who were demanding better wages. Ultimately, 210,000 (in 30 cities) of the nation's 750,000 postal employees participated in the wildcat strike. With mail service virtually paralyzed in New York, Detroit, and Philadelphia, Pres. Nixon declared a state of national emergency and assigned military units to New York City post offices. The stand-off ended one week later.
Congress voted a six percent raise for the workers retroactive to December. | | |
Country Joe McDonald | Country Joe McDonald was convicted of obscenity and fined $500 for leading a crowd in his infamous Fish Cheer
("Gimme an F !") at a concert in Massachusetts.
It was the band's introduction to "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag," a Vietnam protest song. | | | | |
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| In a referendum, the last whites-only election held in South Africa, voters overwhelmingly gave the government authority to negotiate a new constitution with the African National Congress and other black political groups, and an end to the system of racial separation know as apartheid. | | | |
| The first International Women's Day was held in Germany, Austria, Denmark and some other European countries. This date was chosen by German women because, on that date in 1848, the Prussian king, faced with an armed uprising, had promised many reforms, including an unfulfilled one of votes for women. A million leaflets calling for action on the right to vote were distributed throughout Germany. | | |
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The blacklisting of Pete Seeger (and other members of The Weavers) from the folk music television show "Hootenanny" prompted a boycott by 50 folk artists (The Kingston Trio, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Peter, Paul & Mary, among others). Seeger had become a cultural hero through his outspoken and joyful commitment to the anti-war and civil rights movements, and helped popularize the anthemic "We Shall Overcome."
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| 50,000 marched in Amsterdam to protest U.S. deployment of the neutron bomb in Europe. The neutron bomb was a tactical (artillery shell) enhanced-radiation weapon. It killed people with a neutron flux that penetrated armor but was effective over a limited area, leaving little fallout or residual radiation. It did minimal damage to physical structures. | | |
| U.S. and coalition forces launched missiles and bombs at targets in Iraq including a "decapitation attack" aimed at Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and other top members of the country's leadership. | | 
Baghdad, Iraq under attack
| There were nearly 300,000 American, British and other troops at the border.
President George W. Bush warned Americans that the conflict "could be longer and more difficult than some predict." He assured the nation that "this will not be a campaign of half-measures, and we will accept no outcome except victory."
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| Switzerland was declared neutral by the great powers of Europe at the Vienna Congress following the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte. The confederation of 22 cantons (member states) had its current borders established with its neighbors France, Germany, Austria and Italy. | | | |
| Harriet Beecher Stowe's influential novel about slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, was first published in book form by J.P. Jewett of Boston. The text had previously been serialized in the anti-slavery newspaper, the National Era.
10,000 copies were sold in the first week, 300,000 within the first year. The many different editions published in Europe sold an aggregate of one million copies in the first year. It was the second best-selling book of the 19th century after the Bible. |  | | Uncle Tom's Cabin was soon published in dozens of language. | | |
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