This Day in Radical History- August 31st-ya damned Commies

August 31
Things that happened on this day that you never had to memorize in school

1378: The government of Florence massacres the Ciompi.

1521: Cortes and his Indian allies take Tenochtitlan.

1643: Antinomian Anne Hutchinson killed by natives, Long Island, New York.

1779: Runovea, an Iroquoian town in upstate New York, burned by Gen. Sullivan.

1811: Fort Okanogan established at confluence of Columbia and Okanogan Rivers; Indians meet Astorians with pledges of friendship and gifts of beaver.

1888: The body of Mary Ann Nichols, the first victim of London serial killer "Jack the Ripper" is found murdered and mutilated in Buck's Road. The East End of London sees five more victims of the murderer over the next three months; while a royal figure is suspected, no one is ever nailed. Today, in the U.S., such a spree would soon be forgotten.

1892: Inter-Parliamentary Union founded.

1895: First issue of Julius Wyland's Kansas-based socialist newspaper, An Appeal to Reason, is published.

1919: American Communist Party formed, Chicago.

1925: U.S. Marines end eleven-year occupation of Haiti. The dictatorship they leave in place continues to pillage and murder Haitians for another 60 years, rendering destitute what was once the wealthiest country in the Western Hemisphere.

1929: The Trade Union Unity League founded as 690 delegates from 18 states cut the cord with the conservative American Federation of Labor, which still organizes along craft lines. An arm of the Communist Party, the league pushed for unionizing workers along industrial lines, and led struggles of miners, textile workers and farm workers. At its peak, it had 125,000 members. In 1930 it led almost a million jobless workers in a dozen cities to demand relief and unemployment insurance. The TUUL dissolved before the great organizing drives of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the late 1930s.

1945: 2000 attend "World Unity or World Destruction" rally, London.

1954: U.S. government orders British novelist Graham Greene, visiting Puerto Rico, to leave. The reason: he briefly joined the Communist Party, as a prank, at the age of 19.

1962: Twenty thousand call for general strike in the event of civil war, Algeria.

1965: President Johnson signs into law a bill criminalizing destruction of draft cards.

1968: Grade school students, in a suburb of Montreal, Quebec, occupy their school, demanding reforms.

1970: Philadelphia police raid office of local Black Panthers Party. Among those arrested is a young teen, Wesley Cook, later known as Mumia Abu-Jamal. Abu-Jamal would be sentenced to death in a highly questionable trial in 1983, in part because of his teenage association with the Black Panthers.

1971: Stephen Bingham, 29, lawyer to revolutionary George Jackson, charged with smuggling weapons into prison.

1973: Gainesville 8 (veterans) acquitted.

1974: In federal court, John Lennon testifies the Nixon Administration tried to have him deported because of his involvement with the anti-war demonstrations at the 1972 Republican convention in Miami.

1976: Rooftop prison protest in Turin, Italy.

1980: "Solidarity" workers movement founded at Lenin Shipyards, Gdansk, Poland.

1983: Police use tear gas and water cannons on 10,000 Solidarity demonstrators, Nowa Huta, Poland.

1988: Five-day power blackout of downtown Seattle begins.

1994: Irish Republican Army declares truce in its decades-old struggle for independence for Northern Ireland. Truce dissolves in early 1996 after repeated recalcitrance by British government over terms of negotiation.

1994: After 50-years of military presence in Germany, troops of the former Soviet Union depart the former East Germany during a ceremony presided over by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Russian President Boris Yeltsin. Also leave Latvia and Estonia.

1997: Private citizen (and former princess) Diana Spencer is killed in the world's most celebrated case of murderous drunken driving, Paris. Millions weep for no apparent reason.
http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=17393#31

They found her Head and Shoulders under the dash.

Ouch

I remember waiting for my buddy to get done at the restauarant/bar he managed and his walking by me and asking "What is that on CNN?"

"Princess Di apparently died in a car crash"

there was a moment of silence between the two of us and then a collective groan

"Well I guess we know what we are going to hear about for the next FIVE YEARS OF OUR LIFE!!!"

We laughed.

Death by fame.