Social Movement Calendar 12

December 1st 1955: Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat to a white man in
Montgomery, Alabama. She was charged with disorderly conduct. Her action
precipitated one of the great United States civil rights campaigns, The Montgomery
Buss Boycott. During this action Martin Luther King came into prominence as a key
leader of the Civil Rights movement.

December 3rd 1980: Three Marynoll nuns and a lay missionary who have been working
on behalf of the poor and oppressed are murdered in El Salvador by government
sanctioned rightist thugs. This was part of the ongoing terrorist campaign by the army
supported by capitalist elites and elements of the USA government.

December 6th 1921: Political activist Agnes Macphail becomes the first female MP to be
elected to the Canadian Parliament. Interested in agricultural problems, she became a
member and active spokesperson for the United Farmers of Ontario. Her move into
politics stemmed from her desire to represent the farmers of her region

December 6th 1989: Fourteen women are gunned by a deranged gunman. Before
opening fire on the classroom of female engineering students he screamed, "I hate
feminists." Almost immediately, the Montreal Massacre became a galvanizing moment
in which mourning turned into outrage about male violence against women. As well,
later, students petitioned the government for more stringent gun control legislation.

December 6th 1921: The Anglo-Irish Treaty is signed in London. It was later ratified in
triplicate by Dáil Éireann in December 1921 which gave it legal legitimacy under the
governmental system of the new Irish Republic, called the Irish Free State (i.e., the
beginning of Ireland's independence).

December 10th 1948: Universal Declaration of Human Rights is adopted by the United
Nations General Assembly. It is not legally binding and there were therefore no
signatories. The declaration does not form part of international law, but it is,
theoretically, a powerful tool in applying diplomatic and moral pressure to
governments, and it is customary to follow it.

December 13th 1997: Supreme Court of Canada rules that oral history gives Aboriginal
bands constitutional claim in the absence of treaties. In a unanimous decision released
yesterday, a six-member panel of the Supreme Court overturned a ruling of a B.C. court
that dismissed claims from the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en First Nations to ownership of
a 58,000-square-kilometre swatch of land in northwest British Columbia.

December 21st 1956: Martin Luther King and his supporters board a Montgomery city
bus and are able to sit in any empty seat they choose after the U.S A Supreme Court (in
November) had ordered the city bus system in Montgomery to integrate racially.

December 21st 1967: Justice Minister and soon-to-be prime minister Pierre Trudeau
responds to a reporter's question about sweeping legislation on the criminal code of
Canada he had just introduced in the House of Commons utters the sentence, "There's
no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation." It has often been misstated as
"The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation"

December 22nd 2003: Brazilian Aboriginal people retake their land. "Armed" with bows
and arrows and with their faces painted as warriors 3000 Indigenous people
repossessed 9000 hectares in a tense two-month standoff with the farmers who were
ejected from the land in Japora County in the west state of Mato Grosso do Sul. One of
the leaders, Karai stated: "The documentation of this area as Indian land has been in
the hands of the authorities for more than four years," … If we don't protest, if we don't
organize, if we don't take our land nothing will happen".

December 24th 1914: Joyeux Noel. French, British and German troops down their guns
in a spontaneous celebration of Christmas and their common humanity during the early
months of WWI. While this event is particularly famous it apparently occurred in a
number of areas and though attempts were made to stamp it out (eventually
successfully) the action was repeated during Easter of 1915 and to some extent at
Christmas later that year.

December 29th 1890: 150 Sioux villagers at Wounded Knee are massacred by the U.S.A.
7th Cavalry in South Dakota. This was a short time after units of the 7th Cavalry were
totally wiped out by Sioux warriors at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

December 30th 1936: The American Auto Workers begin the Flint Michigan sit down
strike at the Fisher Body Plant Number One at General Motors plant. It was one of the
defining moments in American labour history. At the successful completion of the action
(Feb, 11, 1937) 20 plants had struck and other Sit-down strikes soon started across the
country

December 31st 1929, The Indian National Congress, led by Mohandis Gandhi and
Jawaharlal Nehru, unfurl the Indian flag of independence on the banks of Ravi at Lahore.
This was shortly followed (Jan. 26th) by the announcement of a program of non-violent
civil disobedience against the British Colonial occupation.