This Day in Radical History

[Excerpted from the Working for Change feature by Geov Parrish, who will be speaking to the Tahoma Progressive Media Conference in October!]

August 23
Things that happened on this day that you never had to memorize in school

410: Visigoths sack Rome.

1500: Christopher Columbus, accused of mistreating the natives of Haiti, is arrested and sent back to Spain in chains.

1834: British National Trades Union founded.

1876: Canadian Assiniboine cede 121,000 square miles (twice the size of Washington state) in Treaty #6.

1900: Folk and protest singer Malvina Reynolds born, San Francisco, California. Was refused her diploma by Lowell High School because her parents were opposed to U.S. participation in World War I.

1903: Birth of Muhammad Yamin. Indonesian writer and politician, member of the leftist Murba Party. One of the pioneers of modern poetry in Indonesia.

1909: Battle between police and IWW strikers at the Pressed Steel Car Plant in McKees Rock, Pennsylvania, leaves 11 people dead. The strikers held solid and kept public opinion on their side, eventually forcing the company to concede.

1911: "Discovery" of Ishi, last member of the Yahi Yana, his Native American tribe in Northern California. He would surrender five days later. He had escaped from settlers who exterminated the rest of the Yahis, along with the elk they had hunted, only to spend his last years in captivity, studied by anthropoligists as a freakish curiosity.

1917: Riot occurs in Houston, Texas, when the 24th Infantry seeks revenge on the city's white police after the brutal beating of two of the regiment's soldiers. After two hours of violence, 15 whites, including four policemen, are killed, and 12 more injured. Four soldiers die. 118 soldiers are charged in connection with the riots and 19 executed, most in almost total secrecy, in one of the most infamous court-martials ever involving African-Americans.

1927: Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchist political prisoners, executed, Massachusetts.

1933: British rulers release Mohandas Gandhi from Indian jail after a one-week fast.

1933: Vigilantes assault 200 migrant workers in Yakima, Washington.

1939: Hitler and Stalin sign non-aggression pact, conspiring to carve up Poland between them.

1944: U.S. bomber crashes into an English school and explodes inflames. Seventy-one, 51 of them children, lost their lives.

1981: Five hundred attend naming of the Pacific Peacemaker, Sydney Opera House, Australia.

1983: Back-to-the-Earth advocate Scott Nearing dies, Maine.

1989: R.D. Laing, radical anti-psychiatrist, dies.

1989: Over one million join hands across three Baltic States in 400- mile-long chain of resistance to U.S.SR, on the 50th anniversary of the secret agreement which made them part of the Soviet Union.

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