In honor of our 7th anniversary, each day this month we will post one of our favorite antifascist actions from around the world from the past year!
Today: June 19 2020 - On Juneteenth protesters in Washington DC tore down the statue of Confederate general Albert Pike and set it on fire, chanting “No justice, no peace, no racist police!”.
Donald Trump quickly tweeted about the toppling, calling out DC mayor Muriel Bowser and writing: “The DC police are not doing their job as they watched a statue be ripped down and burn. These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our country.”. Jubilant protesters read out Trump’s tweet over a bullhorn and cheered.
A study that dug into the history of the Amazon Rainforest has found that indigenous people lived there for millennia with “causing no detectable species losses or disturbances”.
Scientists working in Peru searched layers of soil for microscopic fossil evidence of human impact.
They found that forests were not “cleared, farmed, or otherwise significantly altered in prehistory”.
The research is published in the journal PNAS.
Stunning cave paintings discovered in Indonesia include what might be the oldest known depictions of animals on the planet, dating back at least 45,000 years.
The paintings of three pigs, alongside several hand stencils, were discovered in the limestone cave of Leang Tedongnge on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Even local people were unaware of the cave sites’ existence until their discovery in 2017 by Adam Brumm at Griffith University, Australia, and his team.
“I was struck dumb,” says Brumm. “It’s one of the most spectacular and well-preserved figurative animal paintings known from the whole region and it just immediately blew me away.”
Canada adds the Proud Boys, Atomwaffen Division, The Base, and five Daesh affiliates to its list of designated terror groups!
“Shaka King, the film’s director and co-writer, says focusing on Hampton and O’Neal was a way ‘to make The Departed inside the world of COINTELPRO,’ referring to the decades-long illegal FBI program to undermine Black and radical political organizations. ‘I just thought that that was a very clever vessel and intelligent way to Trojan-horse a Fred Hampton biopic.'”
Video by Its Okay to Be Smart: Why Is Our Skeleton On the Inside?:
Having bones is pretty cool. They make our blood, let us hear, and keep us from being just a squishy puddle on the floor. But for every species with bones, there’s at least 20 species on Earth with exoskeletons instead. And those exoskeleton animals are incredibly tough and strong. So why don’t WE have our skeletons on the outside? This is the story of bones!
On this day, 15 July 1954, the right-wing dictatorship of general Francisco Franco amended the 1933 vagrancy law to criminalise homosexuality. The amendment also authorised the detention of all those convicted under the law in labour and concentration camps (content note: sexual violence).
Over the next 25 years, around 5,000 LGBT+ people would be imprisoned – mostly gay and bisexual men and trans women. They were housed in specialist prisons in Huelva and Badajoz, and in a camp in Fuerteventura, Canary Islands, and many were subjected to brutal sexual violence, and medical abuse like electric shock treatment.
Most of those prosecuted for breaching the law were working class, and historian Pablo Fuentes told the Guardian that it was “not uncommon to hear homosexuals from the upper classes and the aristocracy speak about the Franco period as a great time.”
After Franco’s death in 1975 and the subsequent fall of the dictatorship, political prisoners were released, but LGBT+ prisoners were not.
The homophobic law was eventually overturned in 1979, although those imprisoned because of it were not recognised as victims of Francoism and awarded compensation until 2009.
We are currently working on a podcast episode about lives of LGBT+ people under Franco. To learn more about how Franco came to power, check out our latest podcast on the civil war: https://workingclasshistory.com/2020/06/17/e39-the-spanish-civil-war-an-introduction/
Pictured: Silvia Reyes, a trans woman who was imprisoned over 50 times. Image from lacuna.org.uk https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1475631362622009/?type=3
On this day, 31 May 1927, Fred Trump, the father of US president Donald Trump, was arrested at a rally of the Ku Klux Klan in Queens, New York.
He was initially arrested for “refusing to disperse” along with six other people after the rally descended into disorder. The Long Island Daily Press reported that all seven arrestees were wearing Klan robes.
After Donald Trump was endorsed by David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Trump was questioned about his father’s arrest. Donald claimed to journalist Jason Horowitz that “it never happened”, despite it being reported in several newspapers. When Horowitz asked Trump if the address reported for his father in the newspapers, 175-24 Devonshire Rd, was accurate, Donald dismissed it as “totally false”. However Fred Trump’s wedding announcement in the Daily Press listed his address at 175-24 Devonshire Rd.
Fred Trump was subjected to legal action by the Justice Department on multiple occasions for racist behaviour as a landlord, and one of his former tenants, folk singer Woody Guthrie once wrote in a song mentioning Trump: “I suppose / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much / Racial Hate / He stirred up”.
*
We have lots of other anniversaries today. For all of them each day, follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wrkclasshistory https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1439321772919635/?type=3
On this day, 31 May 1921, one of the worst single incidents of racial violence in US history took place: the Tulsa massacre, which left 300 dead after a false allegation of a Black man attacking a white woman.
The Tulsa Tribune newspaper included a front-page article titled “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator” and a back-page editorial titled “To Lynch Negro Tonight.”
Local whites were inflamed, and they attacked the Black community of Greenwood, at the time the most prosperous African American community in the US, commonly known as the Black Wall Street. Mobs were backed up by private planes that reportedly dropped incendiary devices and fired on Black residents. Hundreds were killed and the entire thirty-five-block area was razed to the ground, leaving up to ten thousand people homeless. At the time of writing (early 2020) there are still a few survivors awaiting justice and reparations. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1439535499564929/?type=3
An analysis of fossil eggshells may have settled a long-running debate about dinosaurs, suggesting that all species were warm-blooded.
This also means the ancestors of dinosaurs must have been warm-blooded too, says Robin Dawson at Yale University, who led the research.
It is now mostly agreed that the feathered dinosaurs called theropods that gave rise to birds were warm-blooded, but there is still a debate about whether other groups of dinosaurs were too. Until recently, we had only indirect methods of working out the body temperature of ancient animals, so there was no way to be sure.
If you plan on visiting WASP-76b, a planet orbiting another star roughly 600 light-years away, you’d better pack a hardy umbrella.
In a new study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists found that WASP-76b may produce rain. But this is no ordinary rain: it’s iron rain.
The international team of astronomers made the finding using the Echelle SPectrograph for Rocky Exoplanets and Stable Spectroscopic Observations (ESPRESSO) instrument at the Very Large Telescope in Atacama, Chile, which is made up of four individual telescopes.
This type of instrument allows scientists to determine not only the composition of a star — if it’s precise enough, it can detect the atmosphere of a distant exoplanet.
And ESPRESSO did this exceptionally well.
“We were not expecting to find this kind of signature [of iron] with this level of detail,” said David Ehrenreich, lead author of the paper, who is also an astronomer at the Observatoire astronomique de l'Université de Genève in Versoix, Switzerland.