038. Marches

In 1960, Orangeburg, South Carolina was a town of 13,852 people.  Although the African-American population numbered only around 5,000 and declining, racial tension in the town was high due to a series of protests and boycotts in 1955-56.  Two all-black colleges, South Carolina State College (SCSC) and Claflin College, were home to plenty of potential activists.  When students in Greensboro sat-in for racial integration on February 1, students in Orangeburg eagerly followed suit.  They formed the Orangeburg Student Movement Association (OSMA) to coordinate actions between

United States Midwest farmers fought for agricultural policy reform that would ensure economic stability and sustainable financial support for small-scale farms. A number of rural grassroots organizations, including the Iowa Farm Unity Coalition (IFUC), Citizens Organizing Acting Together (COACT), and the United States Farmers’ Association (USFA) led the family farm crisis movement of the 1980s that demanded federal policy reforms to prevent unfair foreclosures and to secure economic stability for Midwest non-corporate farmers.

The Marsden Power Station B was originally built on Marsden Point, Ruakākā, Northland, New Zealand in the 1970s as an oil-fired power station, but when construction concluded in the 1980s, oil prices had risen substantially, resulting in the plant not being commissioned. In October 2004, Mighty River Power, a New Zealand-based electric company, applied to the Northland Regional Council, which manages air, land, freshwater, and coastal resources in the Northland region, for resource consent to operate Marsden B power station using coal.

In 2019 in Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island territory of the United States, tensions were rising between the citizens and their governor Ricardo Rosselló Nevares. When news outlets leaked hundreds of pages of profane online chat messages between Rosselló and eleven of his close advisors, Puerto Rican citizens began protesting for his resignation by the hundreds of thousands. After two weeks of protests, Rosselló agreed to step down, and Secretary Wanda Vázquez assumed the role of Governor of Puerto Rico. 

In 2003, the National Women’s Conference (ENM), a yearly feminist conference based in Argentina, held a workshop called “Strategies for Abortion Rights” in the nation’s province of Rosario. This workshop inspired the idea for launching a national campaign focused on the right to choose. In May of the following year, feminist groups organized another conference at the University of Buenos Aires to implement proposals from the 2003 ENM.

Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, has spent the last several centuries under the control of alternating powers. In 1942, Britain began its occupation of Hong Kong, following the First Opium War and the Treaty of Nanking. Japan occupied the island from 1941-1946, and then Britain gained control again after the Allied Powers won World War II. 

After long negotiations, twelve countries from around the Pacific Rim came together to endorse the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The partnership would have been the largest regional trade accord in history, including countries that make up 40% of the global gross domestic product. The United States, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Peru, and Chile were involved in this trade negotiation, which was seen as a collective defense against China’s economic, political and legal influence in the Pacific Rim.

Alberto Patishtán Gomez was an indigenous Tzotzil teacher of basic education from the town of El Bosque in the Chiapas state of Mexico. The Mexican federal police arrested Patishtán in 2000 for murders that he did not commit. He spent the next thirteen years in the Mexican justice system as he campaigned for the release of himself and other indigenous political prisoners being wrongfully held by the Mexican government.

Kurdistan is a geographic region that encompasses portions of Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Türkiye (Turkey). This mountainous land is home to the Middle East’s fourth largest ethnic group – the Kurds. When the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1922, the victorious Allied powers drafted the Treaty of Sevres, partitioning what used to be the Ottoman Empire into new divisions . Signatories promised a referendum to determine what would become of Kurdish aspirations for an autonomous state.

Arizona, a southwestern U.S. state known for its diverse geography and iconic landmarks, had approximately 48,510 teachers in its public schools in 2018. For three decades, under state budget and education fund cuts, teachers' salaries were between $8,000 and $9,000 lower than teachers' salaries had been in 1990. According to the state's auditor general, Arizona teachers' wages averaged $48,372 per year in 2018, ranked among some of the lowest in the nation.

From 30 March 2018 to 26 December 2019, Gazans protested at the Israeli border every Friday for the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and land that they had been displaced from since 1948. This series of demonstrations is known now as the “Great March of Return.”

The citizens of the Dominican Republic first elected Danilo Medina President of the Dominican Republic (DR) in May 2012. Despite the Constitution prohibiting second terms, consistently high polling during Medina’s first term compelled Congress to pass an amendment in 2015 allowing for his 2016 re-election. As the 2020 elections approached, it became clear that Medina hoped to stay in office for yet another four years.

Hunger strikes have a long history in Ireland dating back to the medieval periods when Cealachan, a method of gaining justice for some perceived offense through starvation, was codified in the civil code called the Senchus Mor. This starvation tactic, whereby the victim fasted on the doorstep of their wrongdoer, could be used to settle or recover a debt, or address an injustice – the threat lay in that if the complainant was allowed to die on the defendant’s doorstep, that person would be held responsible for the death and the victim’s family.

After the Indo-Chinese border conflict ended in 1963, access to the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, a region encompassing eight different districts in the Himalayas, was greatly expanded.  The money for this expansion, including highway building, generally came from logging companies that wanted access to the vast timber forests in this area of the country.  Poor forest management led to increased erosion, depleted water resources, lower agricultural yields and greater flooding.

Nagorno-Karabakh was an autonomous region in Azerbaijan that USSR’s leader Joseph Stalin took from Armenia during the Sovietization of Transcaucasia in the early 1920s, in an attempt to placate Turkey.  The citizens of the region predominantly identified as Armenian (approximately 76%) and this also corresponded to a religious identification where Armenians are predominantly Christian while Azeris are predominantly Muslim.

 
Uganda in East Africa has a large rainforest area, the Mabira Forest, that has been protected since 1932. In 2007 Ugandan President Yoweli Kaguta Museveni announced a plan to hand over one-third of the Mabira rainforest to the Sugar Corporation of Uganda Limited (SCOUL).  The plan was to turn the forest into land for growing sugarcane.

On December 1, 1960, just after a rally in San Francisco, ten members of the Committee for Non-Violent Action marched out of the city, intent on marching across the country, all the way to Moscow in the Soviet Union. Their chances for success were slim. Despite the backing of the (admittedly small) CNVA, marching most of the way around the world is a monumental task. Even if the distance were not an issue, the Soviet Union was notoriously unsympathetic to peace groups or protest action in general. Breaching the Iron Curtain would not be easy.

In 1984, South Africa was ruled by an increasingly brutal and repressive regime under Prime Minister Pieter Botha, a strong supporter of apartheid, a system of legal racial segregation enforced by the National Party government under which the rights of the majority black inhabitants of South Africa were curtailed and minority rule by whites was maintained. In response to increased anti-apartheid protest in 1984, the Botha regime repressed political dissent with increasing brutality. In November of that year, Ronald Reagan had been reelected as President of the United States.

In 2002 the provincial government of Chubut granted a gold mining concession to Meridian Gold, a Canadian mining company based out of Reno, Nevada, for a large open-pit gold mine just 7 kilometers from Esquel, Argentina. The local population was strongly opposed to this, due to the environmental impact that the mine would have, and decided to protest the action.

Argentina and Uruguay have a history of friendly diplomatic relations, with their countries sharing similar heritages, mutual alliances and significant cultural and political ties. However, following the 2005 announcement of the construction of two paper mills on the Uruguayan side of the Uruguay River (which serves as a boundary between the two countries), Argentina and Uruguay experienced their first significant diplomatic tensions since the 1970s.

In the early 1960’s, student-led sit-ins were a prominent scene in the United States Civil Rights Movement. The success of a sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina (see “Greensboro, NC, students sit-in for U.S. Civil Rights, 1960”) began a wave of action in college campuses throughout the South. One of the many areas inspired by the Greensboro sit-ins was Atlanta, Georgia.

The anti-sweatshop movement was the largest student activism movement in the United States since the South African divestment movement over ten years before. Students all around the country pressured college and university administrators to adopt strict labor codes that guaranteed that merchandise bearing the college’s logo was not made by people working under unacceptable, “sweatshop-like” conditions.

In 1913, sixteen to eighteen percent of all women over fourteen in and around Barcelona worked in textile factories and related industries. Spinning and weaving workshops usually employed fewer than 40 women and these women worked eleven to twelve hour days. In contrast, male workers usually worked only ten-hour days. Male wages varied between 3 and 3.75 pesetas while female wages were between 1.75 and 2.50 pesetas, with few women earning over 2. Some women worked from the home, manufacturing corsets, paper boxes, shoes, and garments for employers who provided them with piecework.

Throughout most of the U.S. civil rights campaigns of the 1950s, Baton Rouge, Louisiana remained quiet. The city of “broad avenues and tree-lined streets” (Sinclair 1998) remained fully segregated despite movements towards desegregation in neighboring states. However, at the beginning of 1960, when university students staged sit-ins at lunch counters across the south, students at Baton Rouge’s Southern University took notice. Southern University, a black university on the edge of the city, became home to the main civil rights campaign in Baton Rouge.

The mass demonstrations of 1963 in Durham were the culmination of a local black freedom movement that had slowly gained momentum over the preceding years. Durham had been the site of a thwarted sit-in at the Royal Ice Cream Parlor in 1957, limited desegregation of schools, and the long-standing lunch-counter sit-ins in 1960 (see “Durham students sit-in for U.S. Civil Rights, 1960”). Throughout the next few years, civil rights activists continued to attack segregation in theaters, schools, motels, and restaurants as well as demand increased employment opportunities for blacks.