This Week in People’s History, Aug 20–26, 2025
Voting Rights Trial By Fire
AUGUST 20 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of the death of 26-year-old Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee volunteer Jonathan Daniels, who was killed by a shotgun blast fired by a Lowndes County Deputy Sheriff in Hayneville, Alabama.
Daniels, who was in Alabama in 1965 to work on SNCC’s voter-registration drive, was killed just two weeks after the Voting Rights Act went into effect. The law made it possible – for the first time since the 1880s – for millions of Afro-Americans in the southern U.S. to become registered voters. Daniels was the first person to be killed for helping put the Voting Rights Act into effect. He was not the last.
Under the new law the federal government installed Justice Department-operated voter registration offices in nine jurisdictions (counties or parishes) in Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana. The locations were chosen because each had large Black populations and no, or almost no, Black registered voters.
One of the jurisdictions chosen by the Justice Department was Lowndes County, Alabama. On August 10, 1965, Justice Department registrars opened a voter-registration office in Fort Deposit, the largest town in Lowndes County.
Four days later, more than two dozen SNCC activists, including Daniels, arrived in Fort Deposit to support the population’s effort to register in the face of constant white-supremacist harassment. Almost as soon as the SNCC volunteers started to work, they were arrested for “disturbing the peace.” They were transported to the county jail in Hayneville, where they were held in unsanitary, overcrowded conditions for six days.
In the afternoon on August 20 the imprisoned SNCC workers were suddenly released, forced out of the jail and off the jailhouse grounds. Four of those released, Daniels and Richard Morrisroe, who were both white, and two Black teenagers, Joyce Bailey and Ruby Sales, walked to a nearby store to buy soft drinks. Before they could enter the store, they were confronted by Deputy Sheriff Tom Coleman, holding a shotgun, who told them the store was closed.
Surprised, because the store was clearly open for business, the group paused near the front door. When Coleman aimed the shotgun at Ruby Sales, Daniels pushed Sales out of the way and caught a full blast of buckshot in the abdomen, which killed him instantly. When the SNCC volunteers turned to flee, Coleman shot Morrisroe in the back, critically injuring him.
It is widely believed (but not proven) that the SNCC activists’ eviction from the jail was a set-up, intended to end as it did in a fatal confrontation. Coleman, who was charged with manslaughter, claimed he had acted in self-defense because Daniels and Morrisroe were armed with knives. (No knives were ever found.) Coleman was acquitted by an all-white jury. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voting-rights-act-explained
The image is an outdoor mural by Chris Lovelady, which located at 25 Lamson St., in Keene, New Hampshire (Jonathan Daniels’ birthplace), courtesy of Jonathan Daniels Center for Social Responsibility
Take Your Racist Law and Shove It in 1850
AUGUST 21 IS THE 175TH ANNIVERSARY of the first session of a memorable 2-day Fugitive Slave Law convention in the upstate New York village of Cazenovia.
Chaired by Frederick Douglass and attended by some two thousand participants, including some about fifty self-emancipated (or “fugitive’) slaves, it was the largest meeting of its kind ever.
The meeting took place four weeks before the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 passed Congress and became law. The U.S. had had a Fugitive Slave Law ever since 1793, but the law’s 1850 re-write had the effect of making the law much easier to enforce and the penalties for violating it more draconian. The 1850 law’s passage was a foregone conclusion at the time of the meeting, so the meeting did not concern itself with attempting to prevent it from passing. Its focus was, instead, a discussion of the many important ways the new law could be resisted and sabotaged.
Visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Convention for a detailed article about the Cazenovia Fugitive Slave Convention.
Let Slip the Dogs of War!
AUGUST 22 IS THE 250TH ANNIVERSARY of George III’s “Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition,” which was issued in response to the news of the Battle of Bunker Hill at the beginning of the Revolutionary War.
The 1775 proclamation declared the North American colonies to be in a state of "open and avowed rebellion" and ordered officials of the British empire "to use their utmost endeavours to withstand and suppress such rebellion."
On December 6, 1775, the Continental Congress issued a response to the Proclamation of Rebellion saying that, while they had always been loyal to the King, Parliament never had legitimate claim to authority over them, because the colonies were not democratically represented in Parliament. Congress argued it had a duty to resist Parliament's violations of the British Constitution. You can view an image of the original Royal Proclamation here https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Kings_Proclamation_1775_08_23.png
Never Forget How We Got Here
AUGUST 23 IS the International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition, which was designated as such in 1998 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
The date is significant because, during the night of August 22-23, 1791, on the island of Saint Domingue (which is now known as Haiti), an uprising began that was a major factor in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. https://www.unesco.org/en/days/slave-trade-remembrance?hub=180536
Thirty Years Too Many
AUGUST 24 IS THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY of the first day of the top-secret program that the U.S. government designated by the code-name Project SHAMROCK.
Project SHAMROCK which continued from 1945 until 1975, was the U.S. government’s warrantless interception and copying of every telegraphic message that passed through the hands of every commercial telegraphic operation. It processed as many as 150,000 messages per month. Soon after its existence was exposed by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh in December 1974, Project SHAMROCK was terminated, even though the same information continued to be collected under other bureaucratic designations.
Until recently, the website of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Center for the Study of Intelligence included a detailed history of Project SHAMROCK, a program that was terminated in 1975. Unfortunately, that history is no longer accessible; here is what has replaced it: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art4.html
Born to Run, Indeed, in 1975
AUGUST 25 IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY of Columbia Records’ release of “Born to Run,” featuring Bruce Springsteen on vocals and guitar and the E Street Band (Clarence Clemons, saxophone, Danny Federici, organ, David Sancious, piano, Garry Tallent, bass, and Ernest Carter, drums).
The album has eight tracks: Thunder Road, Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out, Night, Backstreets, Born to Run, She's the One, Meeting Across the River and Jungleland. It was Springsteen’s third album, but his first commercial success, his breakthrough. You can listen to it here: https://youtu.be/W2X0Gf9jfz8?si=XR3UPzS-Dt3Rf5Ie
Nothing to Lose But Your Chains
AUGUST 26 ISTHE 55TH ANNIVERSARY of the Women’s Strike for Equality, which was organized by the National Organization for Women and spearheaded by Betty Friedan.
In 1970, some 50 thousand feminists and supporters paraded down 5th Avenue in Manhattan, behind an open car carrying several women who had been active in the campaign to pass the 19th Amendment 50 years earlier, which established the right of women to vote in U.S. elections.
Similar events took place the same day in many locations throughout the U.S. https://jacobin.com/2020/11/womens-strike-equality-liberation-betty-friedan
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