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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, OCT 23–29  
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_ Wrist-Slaps for Racist Terrorists (1964), Stop Global Warming!
(2009), An ‘October Surprise’ for the Ages (1924), Nothing New
About ‘Lock ‘em Up!’ (1994), Integrated Schools – ‘Just
Around the Corner’ (1969) _

McComb, Mississippi’s, Society Hill Missionary Baptist Church, site
of a Freedom Summer school until it was destroyed by a bomb on Sept.
20, 1964.,

 

_WRIST-SLAPS FOR RACIST TERRORISTS__ (1964)_

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, is the 60th anniversary of a shocking legal
decision in McComb, Mississippi (in 1964), that infuriated the
African-American community and civil rights activists while giving
comfort to the supporters of white supremacist terrorism.

McComb was one of the many Mississippi towns where staff and
volunteers for Mississippi Freedom Summer – a project was organized
by the Council of Federated Organizations, which was a coalition of
the Mississippi branches of Congress of Racial Equality, National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Southern Christian
Leadership Conference and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee
– were working.

 For more than three months McComb had been at the center of an
intense struggle between the education and voter-registration efforts
of Mississippi Freedom Summer organizers and the supporters and
McComb's white power structure, which included a mayor who was the
Pike County chair of the White Citizens' Council and a police chief
who led the local branch of Americans for the Preservation of the
White Race.

Over the summer, scores of civil rights volunteers had been arrested
in McComb on trumped-up charges including felonious criminal
syndicalism; there had been at least 17 bombings of the homes,
churches and businesses of African-Americans; four Black churches had
been destroyed by arson; white thugs had beaten African-Americans with
total impunity. Some long-time McComb residents, both Black and white,
who supported the Freedom Summer volunteers were harassed and
threatened to the point that they had to move away. 

After the federal government authorized a belated investigation of
unchecked racist violence in McComb as possible civil rights
violations, FBI investigators had quickly discovered an arms cache
containing 15 fully fabricated bombs and several thousand rounds of
.30-caliber ammunition. They also arrested nine white men who were
linked to the arsenal.

The nine men all faced bombing charges that could be punished by
death, but on Oct. 23, 1964, a local circuit court judge accepted a
guilty- or no-contest plea from each defendant and sentenced each to
probation, with no jail time, and a fine of $500 or less. 

During sentencing, the judge told defendants, "What you have done has
been, to some extent at least, provoked by outside influences. Their
[civil rights workers] presence here was unnerving and unwanted . .
.  some of them are people of low morality and unhygenic."
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_STOP GLOBAL WARMING!_

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24, is the 15th anniversary of the first
International Day of Climate Action, organized in 2009 by 350.org. The
day's more than five thousand coordinated actions in 181 countries
included marches, rallies, teach-ins, bike rides, and tree plantings.
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_AN ‘OCTOBER SURPRISE’ FOR THE AGES_

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25, is the 100th anniversary of a sensationally
effective October electoral Surprise (in 1924) – which was totally
effective even though it was later shown to be a forgery – but not
until 75 years after the damage had been done.

On this day, just four days before a British general election, the
right-wing Daily Mail published what it described as a letter to the
leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain from the head of
the Communist International in Moscow. 

A day later the so-called “Zinoviev letter” was front-page news in
every British daily, and in many newspapers around the world.

The letter, “signed” by Grigori Zinoviev, president of the
Communist International, called on British communists to "stir up the
masses of the British proletariat [and] unemployed proletarians [of
whom there were enormous numbers at the time, and] bring pressure to
bear . . .  in favour of the ratification of the Treaty." 

The crucial Treaty, as almost everyone in Britain would have known,
was an unprecedented but not-yet-ratified trade deal between the UK
and the Soviet Union, which would have included a large UK loan to the
Soviet Union. Such a loan would have brought an end to an
international trade embargo that had literally starved the Soviets
ever since the Russian Revolution seven years earlier. 

Not only was Zinoviev supposedly telling British communists to help
seal the trade deal, he urged them to improve their
"agitation-propaganda work in the army [and] the navy . . .  it would
be desirable to have ‘cells’ in all the units of the troops,
particularly among those quartered in the large centres of the
country, and also among factories working on munitions and at military
store depots. . . . with the aid of the latter and in contact with the
transport workers, it is possible to paralyse all the military
preparations of the bourgeoisie.” 

If the letter had been real, it would have represented “Russian
interference” of the highest order. Its publication had the desired
effect of persuading the voters to bring an end to the UK’s first
Labour government, and thereby bury the proposed trade deal.
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_NOTHING NEW ABOUT ‘LOCK ‘EM UP!’_

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, is the 30th anniversary of the 1994 announcement
by the U.S. Justice Department that the prison population topped one
million for the first time in U.S. history. 

The figure — 1,250,000 people in state and federal prisons — did
not even include local prisons, where an estimated 547,000 prisoners
were held. Mass incarceration in the U.S. has more than doubled since
then. Please follow this link for much more detail from the Zinn
Education Project, including a brief introduction to the “Justice In
America” podcast:
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_INTEGRATED SCHOOLS – ‘JUST AROUND THE CORNER’ _

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, is the 55th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme
Court’s 1969 decision finally putting some teeth behind the
court’s 1954 decision that supposedly banned racially segregated
public schools. 

The 1954 decision might have outlawed “separate-but-equal”
schools, but it lacked the essential element of an enforcement
deadline.  Rather, the court ruled that schools must be desegregated
“with all deliberate speed,” leaving what that meant up to the
same officials who believed that segregated schools were the only
“deliberate” solution to education in a racist society. 
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For more People's History, visit 
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* mississippi freedom summer
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* White Supremacist Movements
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* 350.org
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* Global warming
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* October Surprise
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* Mass Incarceration
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* Brown v Board of Education
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