The announcement on November 20, 1969 from 89 American Indians – mostly students from colleges and universities – that they were taking over Alcatraz Island, set in motion what would become the longest occupation of a federal facility by Native Americans to date. This report aired a year later on NBC News, in December 1970, six months before the occupation ended.
Sometimes known as the “Bread and Roses” strike, the Lawrence Textile Strike of 1912 was an early case of an ethnically diverse, largely female workforce protesting long hours and low wages.
When Leonard Peltier thinks of the massacre at Wounded Knee, he hears the screams of women and children. Although the vehicle for killing has changed, Peltier explains how American Indians are still being killed off in the modern day.
The German Reichstag passed the following version of Paragraph 175, which imposed harsher legal restrictions and penalties on sexual activity between men, in 1935. With this law came a dramatic increase in the number of individuals facing prosecution for homosexual activity.
When a wall is built between the Great North and the Great South, nothing can pass by it, not the clouds or the wind or even the monarch butterflies. When both sides begin to suffer, Papalotzin, Royal Butterfly, breaks down the Great Wall.
Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote the opinion for Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, a groundbreaking case that overturned the "separate but equal" standard set forth in Plessy v. Ferguson. The Supreme Court decided this case unanimously on May 17, 1954.
In this excerpt from his memoir, Rodriguez provides a stirring recollection from his adolescence: the first time he experienced racism as a result of being an immigrant in America. As he says, the experience "stays with [him] like a foul odor."