This Week in People’s History, July 24–30
A Lot Has Changed in 50 Years, and Not for the Better
50 YEARS AGO, on July 24, 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled by a vote of 8-0 that the President of the United States had the legal obligation to comply with a lawful subpoena and release tape recordings of the President’s conversations concerning the cover-up of the Watergate burglary. Richard Nixon had managed to hide those tapes – which included irrefutable evidence of Nixon helping to plan the coverup – for more than a year. The Supreme Court brought the cover-up to an end. Two weeks later the tapes were made public; four days after that, Nixon became the first and only U.S. President to resign from office. https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/secret-white-house-tapes/smokin…
‘All the News That Kills’
35 YEARS AGO, on July 25, 1989, some 150 supporters of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), picketed the house of the New York Times publisher while passing out leaflets reading "AIDS Crisis Escalates While N.Y. Times Sleeps." Then they marched to the Times office, where they continued to demonstrate.
They were protesting the Times' blatantly inadequate and misleading coverage of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a combination of the newspaper's failure to publish anything about many important developments in the years-old public-health catastrophe, and its failure to treat official and corporate pronouncements about HIV/AIDS with the slightest skepticism. In addition, the activists pointed out, the Times refused to give any consideration to the activists' very substantial and hard-won expertise.
Even though the Times and almost all other media did not report on the demonstration, many observers thought it had an impact on the Times’ reporting on HIV/AIDS. Certainly not an about-face, but a slight improvement in the quality and quantity of coverage and an occasional willingness to report seriously on the activists' insights. https://actupny.org/reports/NYTfires.html
Martial Law Isn’t Always Bad
90 YEARS AGO, on July 26, 1934, six days after “Bloody Friday,” when Minneapolis police opened fire on unarmed Teamster pickets, killing two and wounding 67, the governor of Minnesota declared martial law, largely to prevent another bloody confrontation between police and strikers. Less than a month later, the strike was settled on terms that met almost all of the strikers demands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minneapolis_general_strike_of_1934
‘Big Government’ in Action
75 YEARS AGO, on July 27, 1949, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a 16-year-old government agency created by the New Deal, passed a milestone in its program of transforming the standard of living of millions of residents of Tennessee and six neighboring states.
The TVA’s main responsibility was (and is) to generate and distribute electricity throughout a vast area of the country that was, in 1933, sorely lacking in electric service outside large population centers. On this day in 1949, TVA provided an electric hook-up for its millionth customer, a West Tennessee farm family near Humboldt. Today, TVA provides electricity to about 10 million people. https://archive.org/details/gov.fdr.353.3.3
The NYPD Prepares for the Worst In More Ways Than One
90 YEARS AGO, on July 28, 1934, in the worst days of the Great Depression, after authorities in San Francisco and Minneapolis had been confronted with the challenges of general strikes, the New York Police Department did what any self-respecting law-and-order operation would do, and created a 1200-member riot squad, twice the size of what it replaced. The new squad. armed with machine guns and rifles, was organized like a regular Army regiment with three battalions of three companies each. The new riot squad did not sit idle, but neither was it ever called on to operate at full strength. https://www.nyclu.org/podcast/s2-ep-9-inside-the-special-nypd-unit-that…
‘Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round’
60 YEARS AGO, on July 29, 1964, the leaders of the six largest civil rights organizations in the U.S. – Congress of Racial Equality, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Negro American Labor Council, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Urban League – held an emergency meeting in New York City.
During the summer of 1964, both civil rights militancy and racist resistance were coming to a crescendo in the U.S., from deep in the South, to the Black ghettos in the North, to the halls of Congress.
Black voters all over Mississippi were registering to vote for the first time with the support of two thousand civil rights workers who were encountering brutal resistance that included the kidnapping and murder of three of them by the Klan. In St. Augustine, Florida, scores of activists were being arrested on a daily basis for demonstrating to demand the integration of public accommodations. Many members of Congress, most of them from the deep South, were binding their political wounds after having lost a bruising fight over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was the biggest legislative setback to Jim Crow since the Civil War.
In the North, Harlem had just endured six bloody days and nights of rioting in reaction to the shooting death by police of a ninth-grader. In Rochester, New York, hundreds of people had been injured after militant opposition to police brutality led to the city’s occupation by a thousand National Guard troops.
It was by no means clear what the civil rights leadership could do. Their organizations were only slightly involved with the events in the North. They had played a major role in persuading Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act, but the action in Washington, D.C., was over for the time being. In the South, however, civil rights activists were targets for police and racist thugs. Would calling for a halt to demonstrations help to cool the nation’s temperature?
The majority of the organizations that met in Manhattan evidently thought so, because they issued a statement asking for a 3-month-long national “moratorium” on civil rights demonstrations, “a voluntary, temporary alteration in strategy and procedure” that was immediately headline news. But the two organizations chiefly responsible for Freedom Summer in Mississippi – the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – did not join in calling for a pause, with the result that very little changed as a result of the meeting.
The push against racism was hardly affected. Mississippi Freedom Summer continued, as did the violent reaction against it. Major violence broke out in the ghettos of Jersey City, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The country survived, but the reputations of the organizations that had called for a moratorium took a big hit. https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2014/05/1964-civil-rights-battles/100…
‘Prepare To Be Impeached, Mr. President’
50 YEARS AGO, on July 30, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee concluded many days of hearings about impeaching President Richard Nixon for his role in the Watergate break-in and in its cover-up. Six days earlier the Supreme Court had ordered Nixon to release the White House tapes, but he had not yet complied. See the July 24 item, above.
After having already voted to recommend that the whole House impeach Nixon for obstruction of justice and abuse of presidential power, on this, the final day of hearings, the committee voted in favor of impeaching Nixon for committing contempt of Congress by refusing to comply with Congressional subpoenas for White House tape recordings and other material. The final four days of the Judiciary Committee’s hearings, when the impeachment votes took place, were televised live, with an audience estimated to have been 35-40 million viewers. The whole House never had an opportunity to debate impeachment, because before they could do so, Nixon resigned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impeachment_process_against_Richard_Nixon