‘No Kings’ Has a Long Pedigree (1795)
OCTOBER 29 IS THE 230TH ANNIVERSARY of an ancient precedent for last week’s No Kings Day.
On that day in 1795 King George III’s horse-drawn carriage was set upon by a crowd of stone-throwing radicals. George was not hurt, but one of the carriage windows was shattered.
The King was extremely unpopular at the time. The ongoing French Revolution and the war Great Britain had been fighting against the radical French regime for more than two years had helped to inspire a wave of anti-monarchist sentiment throughout England. The war had driven food prices so high that many workers with jobs could not afford enough to eat. Bread riots were frequent.
The founding of the radical London Corresponding Society had given rise to scores of local corresponding societies, with thousands of members throughout Britain. Gigantic open-air political meetings had become a regular occurrence. One such meeting – where speaker after speaker denounced the war, high prices, famine, corruption, and political repression – took place in London three days before the attack on the King’s carriage.
Then on the 29th, a crowd of men and women, many of them carrying pamphlets with titles including “King Killing,” “The Reign of the English Robespierre,” and “The Happy Reign of George the Last,” besieged the King’s carriage while calling for “peace” and “bread” and “Down with George! No King!.”
The drawing above by cartoonist James Gillray, which was published just days after the event, is worth a close inspection. Rather than siding with the King, as it might appear at first glance, at bottom right it shows the figure of Britannia being trampled by the horses. The man holding the horses’ reins is none other than William Pitt, the King’s Prime Minister, who is driving recklessly, without regard for the damage he is causing. Britannia is the victim of hit-and-run, and it is the government’s fault. https://pasttense.co.uk/2018/10/29/today-in-london-riotous-history-1795-king-george-iii-attacked-by-angry-crowds/
Struggling to Throw Jim Crow Off the Trolley (1870)
OCTOBER 30 IS THE 155TH ANNIVERSARY of the beginning of a very long and successful struggle by Louisville, Kentucky’s, Black community to prevent the segregation of the city’s public transportation system.
The struggle began on this day in 1870, five years after the end of the Civil War, when representatives of the city’s large population of Black citizens staged a non-violent sit-in on one of Louisville’s horse-drawn streetcars.
The sit-in, and the streetcar company’s resistance to the demand for an end to Jim Crow transportation, led to protracted litigation and negotiation, at the end of which the protesters won the right for anyone with the price of the fare to use the city’s public transportation network.
For a detailed account of the long and militant struggle to integrate public transportation in Kentucky’s largest city, visit https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/freedoms-main-line
World’s Largest Halloween Parade (1985)
OCTOBER 31 IS THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY of the annual Greenwich Village Halloween Parade’s big break.
When the first parade had taken place eleven years previously, in 1974, it was very much a neighborhood affair; about 200 people, almost all of them friends and acquaintances, held a festive, noisy, costumed procession on the sidewalks (not the streets) of Manhattan’s artistic mecca, Greenwich Village.
With each passing year, the parade grew larger as a result of word-of-mouth and other free publicity, until in 1985 it was too well-attended to be restricted to the neighborhood’s narrow side streets. Its organizers received permits for the parade to fill a long stretch of one of Manhattan’s major north-south thoroughfares, causing headaches for hundreds of uninformed motorists, but joy for everyone who wants to join the world’s largest Halloween parade. Ten of thousands of marchers and some two million spectators are expected to take part this year. https://www.timeout.com/newyork/2022-village-halloween-parade-artists
Subversion of the Right to Vote (1890)
NOVEMBER 1 IS THE 135TH ANNIVERSARY of Mississippi adopting a Jim Crow constitution that disfranchised almost every Black citizen of the state by requiring poll taxes, residency tests, and impossible-to-pass “literacy” tests.
Mississippi’s 1890 Constitution is described this way by a 1964 pamphlet published by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee: “Before 1890 the Constitution and laws of Mississippi provided that all male citizens could register to vote [if they were 21 and] over, and had lived in the state six months and in the county one month. The exceptions were those who were insane or had committed crimes which disqualified them.
“In 1890 there were many more Negro citizens than white citizens who were eligible to become qualified electors in Mississippi. Therefore, in that year a Mississippi Constitutional Convention was held to adopt a new state Constitution. Section 244 of the new Constitution required a new registration of voters starting January 1, 1892. This section also established and new requirement for qualification as a registered voter: a person had to be able to read any section of the Mississippi Constitution, or understand any section when read to him, or give a reasonable interpretation of any section.” Visit https://www.crmvet.org/docs/msrv64.pdf to see the entire 20-page illustrated pamphlet titled “Mississippi: Subversion of the Right to Vote”
Hope for Everything, Expect Nothing (1920)
NOVEMBER 2 IS THE 105TH ANNIVERSARY of the Election Day on which nearly a million U.S. voters cast their votes for a federal prison inmate, Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs, to become President of the United States.
Debs was in prison because he had been convicted of violating the Espionage Act, the infamous law that defined espionage as including giving a public speech in opposition to U.S. participation in World War 1. Visit the Zinn Education Project website for more information and to see Mark Ruffalo’s recitation of the speech that resulted in Debs going to jail. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/debs-received-million-votes/
When Communists Filled Madison Square Garden (1940)
NOVEMBER 3 IS THE 85TH ANNIVERSARY OF the final rally of Communist Party’s 1940 presidential campaign, during which a standing-room-only crowd of some 22 thousand filled Madison Square Garden, where they heard their candidate, CPUSA General Secretary Earl Browder, tell them “the road to life, to prosperity, to peace, to the future, is the road to socialism. And this road is charted only by the Communist Party.” For the full text of another 1940 campaign speech by Earl Browder, visit https://www.marxists.org/archive/browder/peculiar-campaign.pdf
Racism Has Its Admirers (1890)
NOVEMBER 4 IS THE 135TH ANNIVERSARY of the 1890 Election Day when South Carolina voters elected a new governor, Benjamin Tillman, who had started his political “career” by participating in the premeditated 1876 massacre of at least six Black men in Hamburg, South Carolina.
Tillman had created his political identity based on white supremacy, a deep commitment to blocking educational opportunity for Black people, and advocating violence against Black voters. Concerning the education of Black people, Tillman argued, “when you educate a Negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.” For more information about Tillman’s career, visit https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/nov/04
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