July 11, 1905. Thirty-three African-American militants -- including W.E.B. DuBois, William Monroe Trotter, Fredrick McGhee and Charles Edwin Bentley -- gather near Niagara Falls to form a new organization that will challenge the accommodationist program advocated by Booker T. Washington and the National Afro-American Council. The new organization's founders reject Washington's toleration of racial segregation and the denial of voting and other civil rights for most African-Americans in the U.S. They call the new organization the Niagara Movement, for the "mighty current" of change they advocate. The Niagara Movement did not meet with enormous success and lasted only five years. Perhaps its most significant legacy was that when the NAACP was founded in 1910, most members of the Niagara Movement joined, many of them in leadership positions. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/niagara-movement-190…
July 12, 1957. U.S. Surgeon-General Leroy Burney publishes a short but detailed document stating "it is clear . . . that excessive cigarette smoking is one of the causative factors in lung cancer." Never before has a federal official said that smoking is not only associated with lung cancer, but causes it. On the same day the tobacco industries Scientific Advisory Board declares that the Surgeon-General's conclusion is not accurate. Most U.S. media give the two statements equal treatment. And so it went for too many years. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/
July 13, 1973 (50 years ago). The 13-month-old Watergate scandal takes unexpected and dramatic turn when White House staff member Alexander Butterfield tells a Senate investigator that there is a voice-activated system that automatically records everything said in Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, and Nixon's private office. Up until then, the existence of the White House tapes had been a very closely held secret. After the White House loses a long legal fight about disclosing the tapes, wide dissemination of Nixon's own words leave him no choice but to resign. https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/secret-white-house-tapes/smokin…
July 14, 1975. The ongoing litany of official misbehavior that is part of the fall-out of the Watergate scandal gets a bit longer when the Director of the FBI tells a press conference that the FBI had been in the practice of committing "surreptitious entries" to collect "information relative to the security of the nation." He says "I do not note in these activities any gross abuse of authority. I do not feel that it was a corruption of the trust that was placed in us." https://sites.google.com/site/cointelprodocs/warrantless-surreptitious-…
July 15, 1977. The CIA informs the U.S. Senate that the CIA's illegal program of conducting drug-related medical experiments on people who were not aware they were being used as guinea pigs was even bigger than the CIA had admitted during Senate hearings in 1975. The CIA claims to have discovered a large cache of forgotten records that include more information. Among the previously undisclosed records are some eye-opening items, such as the CIA's 14-year search for ways to "control human behavior," using chemical, biological and radiological material. And the CIA's experiments on prison inmates to find a drug that would cause the "loss of speech in man," "loss of sensitivity to pain -- loss of memory, loss of will power." And the search for a drug that would kill but "leave no characteristic pathological findings." http://www.vabioethics.com/content/2022/1/18/ykdo2xmmsk0lqe8glzs6z8nmw7…
July 16, 1917. Fewer than 60 years after the end of the Civil War, which killed 620,000 soldiers and at least 50,000 civilians, the U.S. Army's Chief of Staff signs a memo directing that all the many new Army bases located in the states of the former Confederacy will be named for Confederate commanders. Sixteen were so named --
Fort Lee in Virginia, named for Confederate General Robert E. Lee
Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia, named for Confederate General A. P. Hill
Fort Hood in Texas, named for Confederate General John Bell Hood
Fort Polk in Louisiana, named for Confederate General Leonidas Polk
Fort Pickett in Virginia, named for Confederate General George Pickett
Camp Maxey in Texas, named for Confederate General Samuel Maxey
Fort Benning in Georgia, named for Confederate General Henry Benning
Fort Rucker in Alabama, named for Confederate Colonel Edmund Rucker
Camp Wheeler in Georgia, named for Confederate General Joseph Wheeler
Fort Bragg in North Carolina, named for Confederate General Braxton Bragg
Fort Gordon in Georgia, named for Confederate General John Brown Gordon
Camp Van Dorn in Mississippi, named for Confederate General Earl Van Dorn
Camp Pendleton in Virginia, named for Confederate General William N. Pendleton
Camp Breckinridge in Kentucky, named for Confederate General John Breckinridge
Camp Forrest in Tennessee, named for Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest
Camp Beauregard in Louisiana, named for Confederate General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard
Quite an honor for people who helped to spill so much of their fellow citizens' blood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naming_Commission
July 17, 1962. After years of growing controversy about the hazard to public health and other environmental dangers caused by testing nuclear weapons, the U.S. government sets off an atomic bomb above the Nevada desert. The bomb test is the last atmospheric detonation of a nuclear weapon by the U.S. On July 15, 1963 (60 years ago), the U.S. and the Soviet Union informally agreed to permanently refrain from testing nuclear weapons about ground. On October 10, 1963, the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty went into effect. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)0120…
