This Week in People’s History, July 31-Aug 6
Freedom Summer Digs In
60 YEARS AGO, on July 31, 1964, ten days after the beginning of Mississippi Freedom Summer, the terrorist effort to preserve Jim Crow was at its worst. During those ten days at least 15 Black Mississippi churches had been destroyed or badly damaged by arsonists. The three Congress of Racial Equality volunteers who had been kidnapped were still missing and their fate was unknown to all except their killers. The Mississippi state legislature had started a so-called investigation into “the influences of the Communist Party and other subversive and un-American organizations in the activities in Mississippi of civil rights organizations.”
But the backlash wasn’t stopping the two thousand Council of Federated Organizations volunteers who were operating in every corner of the state. They were making good use of the legal leverage they had gained from the brand-new Civil Rights Act to help emboldened Black voters to register. In addition, a new organization, the Jackson Movement for Freedom and Human Dignity was hard at work organizing a boycott of businesses in Jackson that refused to comply with the Civil Rights Act’s new prohibitions on the segregation of public accommodations. A constant struggle was ahead, but the tide was beginning to turn against the Klan and White Citizens’ Councils. https://snccdigital.org/events/freedom-summer/
The Warsaw Uprising Begins
80 YEARS AGO, on August 1, 1944, one of the most memorable of World War 2’s many chilling events began to unfold. As the Soviet Union’s troops pushed the retreating Nazi armies west across Poland and began to approach Warsaw, the Polish Home Army, a surprisingly large and well organized military resistance operation, went on the offensive against the German occupiers.
The Home Army started its new offensive on this day because it knew the Germans’ ability to fight back was badly compromised by their need to devote more and more resources to fighting the approaching Soviets. The Home Army’s leadership believed that if they could defeat the Germans in Warsaw before the Soviets entered the city, it would put them in a position to establish a regime of Polish nationalists that could have a legitimate claim on sharing power with the advancing Soviets.
Apparently, the Soviets understood the Home Army’s plans, and, in order to avoid the need to establish a power-sharing arrangement, delayed their occupation of Warsaw for two months, just enough time for the Germans to come close to totally destroying the Home Army. https://web.archive.org/web/20090213154502/http://www.poloniatoday.com/…
Jim Crow, Meet Lieutenant Robinson
80 YEARS AGO, on August 2, 1944, an Army court martial acquitted 2nd Lieut. Jackie Robinson of the potentially very serious charge that he had refused to obey a lawful command from a superior officer. Robinson’s case and its outcome received extensive coverage from Black newspapers all over the U.S., both because it had arisen from Robinson’s having refused to be consigned to the rear of a bus and because Robinson was already a minor celebrity, as a former star UCLA running back. Less than a year and a half later, after his brush with military justice, Robinson started his career as the first African-American to break Major League Baseball’s color line. https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2008/spring/robinson.html
There’s More Than One Way to Pledge Allegiance
95 YEARS AGO, August 3, 1929, was a bad day for civil liberties, thanks to the San Bernardino County Sheriff. But later, in 1931, thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court, what had been a bad day turned into a good one.
In 1929, 19-year-old Yetta Stromberg and four other young people, all of whom were working at the Pioneer Summer Camp in the San Bernardino Mountains, were arrested for violating a California law that made it illegal to display a red flag “as a sign, symbol, or emblem of opposition to organized government.” During the trial in state court, the prosecution showed that Stromberg had presided over a daily flag-raising during which the campers pledged allegiance to "the workers' red flag, and to the cause for which it stands, one aim throughout our lives, freedom for the working class."
Stromberg and her co-defendants were convicted, but, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, they took their case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the case known as Stromberg v. California, the Supreme Court ruled (for the first time) that the First Amendment prevented any state from outlawing political speech or the display of political symbols. https://www.aclu.org/documents/speech-campus
Beach Days for the Masses
95 YEARS AGO, on August 4, 1929, New York State Governor Franklin Roosevelt, along with former Governor Al Smith, presided over the opening ceremony of the 10,000-acre Jones Beach State Park on the south shore of Long Island. At the time, the development of Jones Beach was regarded as the leading edge of a controversial social experiment, creating a public park in an area that was dominated by wealthy landowners who were fighting to preserve their privacy. During the opening ceremony, Roosevelt referred to the ongoing opposition to the construction of public recreational facilities in the midst of private estates. Mentioning that the effort was criticized as being “socialistic,” Roosevelt said, “Well, Governor Smith and I are pretty good Socialists.” https://parks.ny.gov/parks/10/details.aspx
‘We Seek No Wider War’
60 YEARS AGO, on August 5, 1964, a significant escalation of the war against Vietnam took place when, for the first time, the United States bombed targets in North Vietnam. Attacking U.S., Navy jets destroyed or damaged more than two dozen Vietnamese gunboats and did severe damage to a fuel storage facility. The attacks on North Vietnam were announced on television just before midnight by President Lyndon Johnson, who said they were “limited retaliation” for attacks on U.S. Navy ships off Vietnam’s coast, and that “we seek no wider war.”
The bombing on this day was the start of the longest and heaviest aerial bombardment in history, during which the U.S. dropped 7,662,000 tons of bombs on Southeast Asia, compared with the 2,150,000 tons the U.S. dropped during World War II. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_incident
Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
60 YEARS AGO, on August 6, 1964, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party held its first statewide convention, attended by 2500 people, in Jackson, the state capital. The meeting chose 68 delegates to send to the national Democratic Party’s upcoming convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They planned to challenge the legitimacy of the regular Democratic delegation on the ground that only the Freedom Democrats had complied with the national Democratic Party’s policies in choosing its delegates. Their challenge to the regular Democrats did not succeed, but it put the party on notice that a major shift was beginning to make itself felt in Mississippi and beyond. https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/alliances-relationships/mfdp/
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