This Week in People’s History, May 13–19, 2026
Uncle Sam’s ‘Disgraceful, Cruel, and Iniquitous War’ (1846)
MAY 13 IS THE 180TH ANNIVERSARY of the U.S. declaration of war at the beginning of what is known in the U.S. as the Mexican-American War. South of the border the war is known, more accurately, as Intervención americana en México.
The U.S. has been involved in many wars, but only five of them have been declared by Congress. Of the five declared wars, two were started by the U.S. with the explicit objective of acquiring territory by force of arms. One of the two was the “Mexican-American War,” which was as successful, from the land-grabbers point of view, as a war could be.
After the war ended with the signing of two treaties, the U.S. had acquired a huge chunk of territory, including all of California, Nevada and Utah, plus most of New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming for a total of about 530,000 square miles.
Total U.S. acreage increased by more than 22 percent. Mexico lost 41 percent of its territory. Of course, Mexico lost much more than real estate. During the 21-month war, U.S. troops killed at least nine thousand Mexicans, including at least four thousand civilians, compared to about 1,750 U.S. fatalities. No wonder Frederick Douglass called for the “speedy termination of the present disgraceful, cruel, and iniquitous war with our sister republic. Mexico seems a doomed victim to Anglo Saxon cupidity and love of dominion.” For a lot more information, please follow this link: https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/congress-approves-declaration-of-war-against-mexico/
When the Klan Attacks, the Cops Are AWOL (1961)
MAY 14 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY of two buses carrying Freedom Riders crossing into Alabama, where the civil rights activists were badly beaten when each bus and its passengers were viciously assaulted. The attackers were members of the National States' Rights Party and Alabama Ku Klux Klan, with the overt participation of police and sheriff’s deputies. The attacks took place at two locations, in Birmingham and in Anniston, 60 miles away.
The Freedom Rides were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) with the cooperation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in order to challenge the enforcement of Jim Crow segregation of interstate public transportation despite a 5-month-old Supreme Court ruling that outlawed the practice.
The civil rights activists had boarded New Orleans-bound buses in Washington, D.C., and had encountered some interference as they proceeded south through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, but nothing like their experience in Alabama.
A detailed description of multiple attacks on the Freedom Riders on May 14 can be accessed by following the link at the end of this paragraph. Suffice to say that one bus was destroyed when it was firebombed by the Klan, that many of the Freedom Riders were seriously injured, some to the extent of becoming permanently disabled, that law enforcement officials (including the FBI) were purposefully absent for many minutes at the beginning of each attack, and when police arrived they allowed the attacks to continue and made no arrests. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis61.htm#1961frbegin
Thousands Picket the White House (1966)
MAY 15 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of a demonstration against the war in Vietnam sponsored by the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, Women Strike for Peace and American Friends Service Committee during which about 10,000 protesters surrounded the White House for two hours in a vast picket line.
Then they gathered around the foot of the nearby Washington Monument for a rally that was addressed by Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee spokesperson Julian Bond, Rev. William Sloane Coffin, journalist David Frost, Dissent Magazine editor Irving Howe, Dr. Benjamin Spock, journalist I.F. Stone and Norman Thomas. https://www.peaceaction.org/who-we-are/our-mission/timeline/#1960s
Deadly Violence Against the Left (1966)
MAY 16 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of a terrorist attack on a Socialist Workers Party office in Detroit that killed Leo Bernard, an SWP member who was also the treasurer of the Detroit Committee to End the War in Vietnam. Using an automatic pistol, the attacker killed Barnard and seriously wounded two college students who were in the office at the time.
The Detroit shooting came soon after a spate of violent assaults on radical activists, including bombings that targeted the Vietnam Day Committee headquarters in Berkeley, the main office of the Communist Party in Manhattan, and the office of the W.E.B. DuBois Club in San Francisco.
The Socialist Workers Party charged that the killing was “a product of the witchhunt atmosphere that has been stirred up and intensified by the dirty war in Vietnam,” a “piece of terrorism bred by the atmosphere in which we live” that was “acting out the logic” of the Vietnam war’s ideological underpinning that “glorifies the murder of communists as a heroic task.” https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/two-days-in-october-student-antiwar-protests-and-backlash/
‘A Burning Shame to Our Country’ (1860)
MAY 17 IS THE 166TH ANNIVERSARY of the recently formed Republican Party’s adoption of a presidential campaign platform including these words: "the African slave trade . . . [is] a crime against humanity and a burning shame to our country and age; and we call upon Congress to take prompt and efficient measures for the total and final suppression of that execrable traffic."
It was one of the first times the phrase "crime against humanity" was used in a public document. Abraham Lincoln won the election against three other major party candidates. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/republican-party-platform-1860
High-Mindedness Doesn’t Sell Many Newspapers (1936)
MAY 18 IS THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY of the annual convention of the Southern Newspaper Publishers’ Association. One of the speakers at the 1936 meeting, which was being held in West Virginia, was sharply critical of the way southern newspapers covered the domestic terrorism that targeted African-Americans almost exclusively, that is, lynching.
The invited speaker was anti-lynching activist Jessie Daniel Ames, who had led the creation of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (ASWPL) in 1930.
The Atlanta-based ASWPL declared that “lynching is an indefensible crime,” but the organization, all of whose members were White women, was far from being radical. Its members did not demonstrate or boycott or make any use of civil disobedience; rather they lobbied politicians, all of whom were White, and used public education campaigns to persuade voters (almost all of whom were White) “that the crime of lynching is a logical result in every community that pursues the policy of humiliation and degradation of a part of its citizenship because of accident of birth.”
Jessie Ames’ presentation to the publishers could be headed “Southern Newspapers Need to Harmonize their High-Minded Editorial Stance Against Lynching with their Pandering News Coverage of Lynchings.”
Here is an excerpt from Ames’ remarks. At the bottom is a link to the whole speech. I hope that anyone who is intrigued by my excerpts will read the whole thing.
“[Southern] editors do condemn lynchings. . . . Their handling of such crimes is dignified and logical. On no other subject have editorials and editors risen to greater heights of eloquence in stronger language. But the very nature of the editorial, its dignity and its balanced phrases, restricts its effect on public opinion and its influence on human conduct.”
“The editorial writer competes in a losing battle with his news stories. . . . [that the] public reads on [the] front page—in language that fairly bristles with expressions calculated to awaken the ever-present fear and hate in the less-privileged members of the white race—a dramatic and inflammatory account of some violation of the white man’s code by a ‘giant Negro.’”
“Front page space [alone] is not enough. Lest some might fail to see or read the story [about a lynching, then banner] headlines, of an inch or more in height, catch the eye of any careless loiterer. Whatever the editor may say after this is like the silent fall of dew after a terrific hail storm.”
At the time Ames spoke, southern lynch mobs were killing an average of two African-Americans every month, so the page-1 stories about vigilante justice were hard to miss. For all the coverage newspapers gave to lynchings, the violence hardly ever resulted in anyone being so much as arrested, let alone convicted, an almost unheard of outcome.
It was hard for anyone to argue with Ames’ criticism of the editors and publishers, the way they filled their front pages with banner headlines over graphic, breathless, descriptions of lynchings (and boosted newspaper sales in the process), while saving their eloquent condemnation of lynch mobs for the editorial page, which hardly anyone read. To read Jessie Daniel Ames’ complete 1936 address, click here: https://speakingwhilefemale.co/journalism-ames1/
Blaming the Victim (1961)
MAY 19 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY of an outrageous, but hardly surprising, display of the workings of southern justice.
In the aftermath of the events of May 14 described above, at the request of the Attorney General of Alabama, an Alabama judge issued an injunction prohibiting the Congress of Racial Equality and its followers from "engaging in the so-called 'freedom ride' and other acts or conduct calculated to provoke breaches of the peace."
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