This Week in People’s History, Oct 2–8
‘We’re the Black Survivors’
45 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 2, 1979, Bob Marley and the Wailers released Survival.
None of its great tracks, including "Africa Unite," "So Much Trouble In the World," "Top Rankin'," and "Zimbabwe" became hit singles, but they nevertheless filled the air for the following months, and years.
Marley’s musical plea for Black liberation struck a political chord. When “Zimbabwe” was recorded, the nation of that name did not officially exist. It was not until April 1980 that the anthem Marley had written could be triumphantly performed at the celebration of the new nation’s independence. You can listen to it here: https://youtu.be/yxmsZXYhQCg?si=bVmaT0jgK9mCGOTR
A Martyr’s Birthday
135 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 3, 1889, Carl Ossietsky was born in Hamburg, Germany. He grew up to be an energetic, brave, and Nobel Peace Prize-winning investigative journalist and editor, whose exposes of Nazi lawlessness made him a target for arrest.
Hitler threw him in prison in 1933, where he died five years later. But not before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935, at an award ceremony he could not attend.
The Nazis hated and feared Ossietzky because he made a career of writing powerful and detailed exposés of the illegal rise of militarism and fascism in Weimar Germany. He was arrested as soon as the Nazis came to power because Hitler considered him to be "an enemy of the state."
Ironically, many of Ossietzky's anti-fascist colleagues avoided arrest because they fled Germany in the months before the Nazis came to power. Ossietsky knew he would be in danger under Nazi rule, but he thought that he would have time to leave because he would not be arrested immediately. He was brave, but wrong, and he paid for his mistake with his life when he was only 48. https://forward.com/opinion/351453/the-nobel-peace-prize-winner-who-infuriated-hitler/
Canada Takes a Big Step Toward Bilingualism
55 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 7, 1969, all non-supervisory police officers in Montreal, Canada, went on strike in support of a much-deserved pay increase. The vast majority of the city’s firefighters struck in sympathy. The sudden and unexpected absence of police unleashed a violent reaction that helped to bring about a permanent sea-change in Canadian society.
In 1969, many members of the large French-speaking minority of Canada’s population referred to themselves as the “Nègres blancs d'Amérique” (the white niggers of America) as they were characterized in the title of a best-selling book by Montreal-born Front de libération du Québec militant Pierres Vallières, who was in jail at the time on charges related to his nationalist activities. By every social measure, Canadian French-speakers were grossly disadvantaged in relation to the members of the country’s English-speaking majority.
Shortly before the Montreal police went on strike, Montreal’s government had ruled that a single company – Murray Hill Limousine Service – had the exclusive right to provide bus and taxi service to Montreal’s airport. The company was owned by Anglophone Canadians, but the vast majority of Montreal taxi drivers were French-speakers. With all police off-duty, what had been a peaceful picket-line of taxi drivers outside the Murray Hill garage quickly turned violent; several buses and limousines were set on fire (and burned to cinders). The violence spread quickly to the Anglophone-owned businesses (and even some Francophone businesses) downtown, where scores of stores were looted and hundreds of display windows were smashed. Seven Montreal banks were robbed the next day.
By the following day the police were back at work with the support of many provincial police and army troops (none of whom had been in Montreal when the strike began). The concentrated outburst of violence was over, but one could hardly say that Montreal was really peaceful, and the speed with which law and order had disappeared when the police struck caused considerable astonishment and concern among people who had previously regarded bigotry and discrimination against Canada’s French-speaking population as the natural order of things.
The process of substantially reducing the myriad ways in which Canada’s linguistic majority disadvantaged the minority happened to begin on the same day as the police strike, when Canada’s Official Languages Act went into effect. For the first time Canada’s federal government was officially bilingual, and discrimination based on a Canadian’s first language was outlawed. When the law went into effect, 25 percent of Canada’s population was Francophone, which was true of only 9 percent of Canada’s federal workforce. Half a century later the linguistic makeup of the population and the federal workforce are the same. Language-based discrimination is far from dead in Canada, but it has lost much of its power to relegate a quarter of the country’s population to second-class status. https://portside.org/2017-05-18/major-decisions-face-quebec-solidaire-its-forthcoming-congress
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