Protests
Homestead Strike
In July 1892, a dispute between Carnegie Steel and the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers exploded into violence at a steel plant owned by Andrew Carnegie in Homestead, Pennsylvania. In what would be one of the deadliest labor-management conflicts in the nation’s ...read more
Who Was the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square?
After Chinese officials—alarmed at the June 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square—ordered soldiers and police to shoot and kill student protesters, one solitary man stood out from the crowd. Historian and journalist T.D. Allman, who witnessed the ...read more
How Columbia’s Student Uprising of 1968 Was Sparked by a Segregated Gym
If you walked across the campus of Columbia University in April 1968, you may have been handed a typewritten flyer inviting you to a campus protest. “The big steal is on,” it declared. Columbia was in the process of stealing land and resources from nearby Harlem, the flyer ...read more
Orangeburg Massacre
The Orangeburg Massacre occurred on the night of February 8, 1968, when a civil rights protest at South Carolina State University (SC State) turned deadly after highway patrolmen opened fire on about 200 unarmed black student protestors. Three young men were shot and killed, and ...read more
Why MLK Encouraged 225,000 Chicago Kids to Cut Class in 1963
Arydell Spinks had 12 children, but on October 22, 1963, seven of them missed school. “If they miss tests scheduled for that day and are marked ‘truant,’ that’s just too bad,” wrote the Chicago Defender in an article about Spinks’ plan to keep her kids home from school. Spinks’ ...read more
How Freedom Rider Diane Nash Risked Her Life to Desegregate the South
“Diane, you’ve gotten in with the wrong bunch.” Those were the words that civil rights activist Diane Nash heard when her grandmother found out she was involved in the civil rights movement in 1960. Imagine her grandmother’s surprise when she found out that Nash wasn’t just ...read more
History of Student Protests
In the wake of the February 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida—during which 17 people were killed and more than a dozen injured—students at that high school and across the United States have been galvanized into action. A number of ...read more
This Isn’t the First Time Conspiracy Theorists Have Accused Student Activists of Being ‘Paid Actors’
In the week after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida, conspiracy theorists started spreading lies about it. They said that some of the surviving students giving media interviews had not, in fact, been present at the shooting. Instead, ...read more
Arab Spring
The Arab Spring was a series of pro-democracy uprisings that enveloped several largely Muslim countries, including Tunisia, Morocco, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Bahrain. The events in these nations generally began in the spring of 2011, which led to the name. However, the political ...read more
Women’s March
On the first full day of Donald Trump’s presidency, hundreds of thousands of people crowd into the U.S. capital for the Women’s March on Washington, a massive protest in the nation’s capital aimed largely at the Trump administration and the threat it represented to reproductive, ...read more
2017 Events
From the inauguration of Donald Trump to the first total solar eclipse to traverse the Lower 48 in nearly a century, 2017 was a year for the history books. Here we review the biggest news in politics, culture and science this year. Politics Trump’s inauguration: After a ...read more
How Civil Rights Wade-Ins Desegregated Southern Beaches
The beach in Biloxi, Mississippi is much like any other: palm trees, piers, sparkling water, white sand. But in the 1950s, the beach wasn’t open to everyone—until a group of African Americans waded into the water to fight against segregation. On May 14, 1959, Gilbert Mason, Sr., ...read more
Florida teen Trayvon Martin is shot and killed
On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin, an African American teen walking home from a trip to a convenience store, is fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer patrolling the townhouse community of the Retreat at Twin Lakes in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman later ...read more
Kerner Commission Report released
The President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders—known as the Kerner Commission—releases its report, condemning racism as the primary cause of the recent surge of riots. Headed by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, the 11-member commission was appointed by President ...read more
Worker protests mount in France
In France, the May 1968 crisis escalates as a general strike spreads to factories and industries across the country, shutting down newspaper distribution, air transport and two major railroads. By the end of the month, millions of workers were on strike, and France seemed to be ...read more
Peasant army marches into London
During the Peasants’ Revolt, a large mob of English peasants led by Wat Tyler marches into London and begins burning and looting the city. Several government buildings were destroyed, prisoners were released, and a judge was beheaded along with several dozen other leading ...read more
Uprising at Attica prison begins
Prisoners seize control of the maximum-security Attica Correctional Facility near Buffalo, New York beginning on September 9, 1971. Later that day, state police retook most of the prison, but 1,281 convicts occupied an exercise field called D Yard, where they held 39 prison ...read more
Detroit Riots of 1967 begin
The 1967 Detroit Riots were among the bloodiest in American history. The strife occurred during a period of Detroit’s history when the once-affluent city was struggling economically, and race relations nationwide were at an all-time low. The Detroit Police Department’s vice ...read more
Massacre at Attica Prison
The four-day revolt at the maximum-security Attica Correctional Facility near Buffalo, New York, ends when hundreds of state police officers storm the complex in a hail of gunfire. Thirty-nine people were killed in the disastrous assault, including 29 prisoners and 10 prison ...read more
Watts Rebellion begins
In the predominantly Black Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, racial tension reaches a breaking point after two white policemen scuffle with a Black motorist suspected of drunken driving. A crowd of spectators gathered near the corner of Avalon Boulevard and 116th Street to watch ...read more
Warsaw Ghetto uprising ends
In Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising comes to an end as Nazi soldiers gain control of Warsaw’s Jewish ghetto, blowing up the last remaining synagogue and beginning the mass deportation of the ghetto’s remaining dwellers to the Treblinka extermination camp. Shortly after the ...read more
Violence erupts in Boston over desegregation busing
In Boston, Massachusetts, opposition to court-ordered school “busing” turns violent on the opening day of classes. School buses carrying African American children were pelted with eggs, bricks, and bottles, and police in combat gear fought to control angry white protesters ...read more
A bomb sinks the Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace’s flagship vessel
In Auckland harbor in New Zealand, Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior sinks after French agents in diving gear plant a bomb on the hull of the vessel. One person, Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira, was killed. The Rainbow Warrior, the flagship of international conservation group ...read more
Sacco and Vanzetti executed
Despite worldwide demonstrations in support of their innocence, Italian-born anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are executed for murder on August 23, 1927. On April 15, 1920, a paymaster for a shoe company in South Braintree, Massachusetts, was shot and killed along ...read more