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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, OCT 2–8  
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_ ‘We’re the Black Survivors’ (1979), A Martyr’s Birthday
(1889), Canada Takes a Big Step Toward Bilingualism (1969) _

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_‘WE’RE THE BLACK SURVIVORS’_

45 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 2, 1979, Bob Marley and the Wailers released
Survival.

None of its great tracks, including "Africa Unite," "So Much Trouble
In the World," "Top Rankin'," and "Zimbabwe" became hit singles, but
they nevertheless filled the air for the following months, and years.

Marley’s musical plea for Black liberation struck a political chord.
When “Zimbabwe” was recorded, the nation of that name did not
officially exist. It was not until April 1980 that the anthem Marley
had written could be triumphantly performed at the celebration of the
new nation’s independence. You can listen to it here:
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_A MARTYR’S BIRTHDAY_

135 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 3, 1889, Carl Ossietsky was born in Hamburg,
Germany. He grew up to be an energetic, brave, and Nobel Peace
Prize-winning investigative journalist and editor, whose exposes of
Nazi lawlessness made him a target for arrest.

Hitler threw him in prison in 1933, where he died five years later.
But not before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935, at an
award ceremony he could not attend.

The Nazis hated and feared Ossietzky because he made a career of
writing powerful and detailed exposés of the illegal rise of
militarism and fascism in Weimar Germany. He was arrested as soon as
the Nazis came to power because Hitler considered him to be "an enemy
of the state."

Ironically, many of Ossietzky's anti-fascist colleagues avoided arrest
because they fled Germany in the months before the Nazis came to
power. Ossietsky knew he would be in danger under Nazi rule, but he
thought that he would have time to leave because he would not be
arrested immediately. He was brave, but wrong, and he paid for his
mistake with his life when he was only 48.
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_CANADA TAKES A BIG STEP TOWARD BILINGUALISM  _

55 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 7, 1969, all non-supervisory police officers in
Montreal, Canada, went on strike in support of a much-deserved pay
increase. The vast majority of the city’s firefighters struck in
sympathy. The sudden and unexpected absence of police unleashed a
violent reaction that helped to bring about a permanent sea-change in
Canadian society.

In 1969, many members of the large French-speaking minority of
Canada’s population referred to themselves as the “Nègres blancs
d'Amérique” (the white niggers of America) as they were
characterized in the title of a best-selling book by Montreal-born
Front de libération du Québec militant Pierres Vallières, who was
in jail at the time on charges related to his nationalist activities.
By every social measure, Canadian French-speakers were grossly
disadvantaged in relation to the members of the country’s
English-speaking majority. 

Shortly before the Montreal police went on strike, Montreal’s
government had ruled that a single company – Murray Hill Limousine
Service – had the exclusive right to provide bus and taxi service to
Montreal’s airport. The company was owned by Anglophone Canadians,
but the vast majority of Montreal taxi drivers were French-speakers.
With all police off-duty, what had been a peaceful picket-line of taxi
drivers outside the Murray Hill garage quickly turned violent; several
buses and limousines were set on fire (and burned to cinders). The
violence spread quickly to the Anglophone-owned businesses (and even
some Francophone businesses) downtown, where scores of stores were
looted and hundreds of display windows were smashed. Seven Montreal
banks were robbed the next day.

By the following day the police were back at work with the support of
many provincial police and army troops (none of whom had been in
Montreal when the strike began). The concentrated outburst of violence
was over, but one could hardly say that Montreal was really peaceful,
and the speed with which law and order had disappeared when the police
struck caused considerable astonishment and concern among people who
had previously regarded bigotry and discrimination against Canada’s
French-speaking population as the natural order of things.  

The process of substantially reducing the myriad ways in which
Canada’s linguistic majority disadvantaged the minority happened to
begin on the same day as the police strike, when Canada’s Official
Languages Act went into effect. For the first time Canada’s federal
government was officially bilingual, and discrimination based on a
Canadian’s first language was outlawed. When the law went into
effect, 25 percent of Canada’s population was Francophone, which was
true of only 9 percent of Canada’s federal workforce. Half a century
later the linguistic makeup of the population and the federal
workforce are the same. Language-based discrimination is far from dead
in Canada, but it has lost much of its power to relegate a quarter of
the country’s population to second-class status.
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For more People's History, go to 
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* Bob Marley
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* Carl Ossietsky
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* Canada bilingualism
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