Tag: nonviolent struggle

In the neighborhood of Pilson, Chicago, there’s a small elementary school called Whittier Elementary School. The residents and children are mostly Mexican immigrants, and the chronically under-funded school needed repairs, a functional cafeteria, and a library. In the corner of the soccer field was an old run-down field house affectionately called “La Casita”, where parents […]

This story appeared as part of Pace e Bene/Campaign Nonviolence‘s inspirational email service: This Nonviolent Life. Sign up here. On August 10th, 1976, Anne Maguire took her children out to go shopping in Northern Ireland. Anne was pushing a pram with her six-week-old newborn. Her son walked ahead; her daughter rode her bicycle beside her, […]

On August 23rd, 1989, two million people joined hands to form a human chain crossing the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, in protest against the Soviet Union, and in support of each nation’s independence. The Baltic Way, as the human chain was called, spanned 420 miles, engaging people of all ages in […]

On August 1st, 1976, the first nonviolent mass demonstration of the Clamshell Alliance took place at the proposed site of the Seabrook Nuclear Energy Facility in New Hampshire. The Clamshell Alliance was a group of anti-nuclear activists who worked to stop nuclear power plant construction at a time when President Nixon’s “Project Independence” had proposed […]

This week in nonviolent history commemorates a turning point in the long struggle to demand justice for the residents of Love Canal, a residential community in upstate New York that was situated on top of a leaking toxic waste dump. On August 2nd, 1978, State Health Commissioner Robert Whalen issued a state of emergency ordering […]

Independence Day is commemorated with fireworks and flag-waving, gun salutes and military parades . . . however, one of our nation’s founding fathers, John Adams, wrote, “A history of military operations . . . is not a history of the American Revolution.” Often minimized in our history books, the tactics of nonviolent action played a […]

Civil disobedience is an art … and there’s more to it than simply “getting arrested.” The term comes from an essay by Henry David Thoreau, whose classic, “On Civil Disobedience” was written in relation to slavery and the Mexican-American war. Thoreau felt it was the duty of citizens to resist through noncooperation and disobedience the […]

The name Helen Keller conjures up, for many people, a deaf-blind-mute girl learning to communicate via sign language. It is a scene straight out of “The Miracle Worker,” the biographical play recounting Anne Sullivan’s role in reaching young Helen Keller. However, the amazing part of Keller’s story is not that the way she learned to […]

On June 27th, 1915, Grace Lee Boogs was born in Providence, Rhode Island, above her father’s restaurant.  Grace later said, “because I was born to Chinese immigrant parents and because I was born female, I learned very quickly that the world needed changing.” Over her 100 years of life, she would, indeed, change the world […]

Every year in May, peace activists circulate Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Peace Proclamation. But, Howe did not commemorate Mother’s Day in May . . . for thirty years Americans celebrated Mother’s Day for Peace on June 2nd. It was Julia Ward Howe’s contemporary, Anna Jarvis, who established the May celebration of mothers, and even […]

The successful conclusion of Kuwait’s Blue Revolution came on May 17th, 2005 when Kuwaiti women gained suffrage after more than 40 years of struggle. The women used a wide variety of approaches to achieve their goals, including lobbying, introducing repeated legislation, protests and demonstration, marches, rallies, and mock elections. Like many women’s suffrage movements around […]

By May 1961, federal law had already ruled that segregation on interstate, public buses was illegal. Southern states, however, maintained segregation in seating, and at bus station bathrooms, waiting rooms and drinking fountains. The Interstate Commerce Commission refused to take action to enforce federal law. To change this, the Civil Rights Movement (CORE, SNCC, NAACP) […]

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was born on Feb 6th, 1890 in the Peshawar Valley of British-controlled India. At the age of twenty, Ghaffar Khan founded a village mosque school, and began his revolutionary work against British colonial control with what his contemporary Mohandas K. Gandhi was calling “constructive programme”. He worked tirelessly for independence and […]

The name Helen Keller conjures up, for most people, a deaf-blind-mute girl learning to communicate via sign language. It’s a scene straight out of The Miracle Worker, the biographical play recounting Anne Sullivan’s role in reaching young Helen Keller. But the miraculous part of Keller’s story is not that the way she learned to fingerspell […]

By the time the historic Selma March occurred on March 21st, 1965, more than 3,000 protesters in Selma, Alabama had already been arrested, and demonstrators had twice begun the fated march, once to be turned back by heavy repression in an event known as “Bloody Sunday”. On March 7th, 1965, a group of marchers organized […]

Nonviolent struggle is on the rise globally. Neither passive, nor inaction, this powerful way of working for change is proving Gandhi’s audacious claim that “nonviolence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind” to be correct. Here are ten things you should know about nonviolent struggle and how it works. 1. Nonviolent action is […]

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was born on Feb 6th, 1890 in the Peshawar Valley of British-controlled India. At the age of twenty, Ghaffar Khan founded a village mosque school, and began his revolutionary work against British colonial control with what his contemporary Mohandas K. Gandhi was calling “constructive programme”. He worked tirelessly for independence and […]

In April 1940, the Nazis invaded Norway and occupied the country. In 1942, as part of an attempt to implement a fascist curriculum in the schools, Minister-President Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian collaborator, disbanded the existing teachers’ union and required all teachers to register with the new Norwegian Teachers’ Union by February 5th. Between 8,000-10,000 of […]

In 1943, Joseph Goebbels promised Adolf Hitler that Berlin would be Judenfrei – Jew free – in time for Hitler’s birthday. On February 27th, without warning, Jews were snatched off the streets and from workplaces, and held in buildings temporarily before being loaded onto trains to be sent to their deaths in the concentration camps. […]

“We are tired of war. We are tired of running. We are tired of begging for bulgur wheat. We are tired of our children being raped. We are now taking this stand, to secure the future of our children. Because we believe, as custodians of society, tomorrow our children will ask us, “Mama, what was […]

This week is the 104th anniversary of the Lawrence Textile Strike that later became known as the Bread and Roses strike. On Jan 11th and 12th, 1912 women working in the textile factories of Lawrence, Massachusetts walked out en masse and started a two month strike that would later become known as the Bread and […]

“Alice Paul had “a spirit like Joan of Arc, and it is useless to try to change it. She will die but she will never give up.” – Physician at Occoquan Workhouse where Alice Paul was imprisoned for nonviolent actions to win women’s suffrage in the United States. Alice Paul was born on Jan 11th, […]

On this day in nonviolent history, the Silent Sentinels began their two and a half years long protest in front of the White House demanding Women’s Suffrage. They were organized by Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and the National Woman’s Party. The women began on Jan 10th, 1917 and protested for six days a week until […]

This piece was written for Campaign Nonviolence‘s email series, This Nonviolent Life. Sign up to receive these “inspirations in your inbox” here.  Nonviolence is as old as the hills – well, at least as old as the Parthenon and older than some of the pyramids. It forms a lineage of human beings that stretches around […]