Cool Chicks from History

800 women strikers for peace on 47th St near the UN Building / World Telegram & Sun photo by Phil Stanziola, 1962.

Related: As it is the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK Presidential Library has a number of Cuban Missile Crisis posts this week.   

The Baltic Way Protest, Estonia

On August 23, 1989 over two million people joined hands and formed a human chain across Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.  This peaceful protest marked the 50th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which divided Eastern Europe between Nazi Germany and the USSR, forcing the Baltic states into the USSR.  (Related: Between Shades of Gray)

For 49 years, the Baltics had been under Soviet rule but the Iron Curtain was falling.  In less than a year, all three Baltic republics would declare independence and break away from the USSR.

Members and friends of Women Strike for Peace, wearing veils and carrying yellow roses, gathering at Pershing Square before march through downtown streets to protest Vietnam policy.

March 21, 1965

Margaret Vale Howe, niece of President Wilson, at New York Suffrage Parade in 1915.

The Alaska Territorial Legislature approved women’s right to vote as its first official act in 1913.

White female marcher being carried away by Montgomery police, March 1965

The Selma to Montgomery Marches were organized in March of 1965 by the Dallas County (Alabama) Voters League and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to protest discrimination against black voters.  At that time, less than 1% of voting age blacks in Dallas County were registered to vote because of intimidation and a literacy test.

It took three tries for the protesters to successfully make their way from Selma to Montgomery.  On March 7th (Bloody Sunday) protesters made it only six blocks before they were attacked by police with billy clubs and tear gas.  On March 9th, Martin Luther King, Jr. led a symbolic march to Edmund Pettus Bridge where they had been turned back two days early.  On March 16th, Federal District Court Judge Frank Johnson ruled in favor of the march and the state of Alabama was forced to allow the protest.

On March 21st, thousands assembled in Selma for the march to Montgomery.  Most were black, although white, Asian and Latino protesters also took part.  Walking 12 miles a day, they made it to Montgomery on March 25th and an enlarged protest of 25,000 people headed for the State Capitol Building.   

On March 15th, President Lyndon B. Johnson submitted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to Congress saying:

Even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too, because it is not just Negroes but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

Today Edmund Pettrus Bridge is part of the National Park Service’s Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement.

via brazilwonders

An anti-censorship protest in Brazil during the military dictatorship (1968-1985)

Marlene Taylor and her daughter Stacy protest in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment, Florida, 1973.

Margaret Vale Howe, niece of President Wilson, represents Oregon at a suffrage parade in DC, 1913

Eileen Anderson holding up a protest sign at an anti-war rally in Miami Beach during the 1972 GOP Convention.

via Union History

In 1976, there was an equal pay strike at the Trico-Folberth windscreen wipers factory at Brentford Middlesex. The women organised by the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, were out for 21 weeks before winning their demand to be paid the same basic rate as the men.

Margaret Vale Howe, niece of President Wilson, represents Oregon at a suffrage parade in DC, 1913

“Ida”, member of the Gay Liberation Front and Lavender Menace, 1970