[The Heart of Darkness (in 1903), Racism on the Bench (1893),
Terror in Lancaster, Pa. (1763), Physician, Heal Thyself (1973), No
Taxation Without Representation (1773), Will Sex Work Ever Be Made
Safe? (2003), Cleveland Sinks in Red Ink (1978)]
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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, DEC 12–18
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_ The Heart of Darkness (in 1903), Racism on the Bench (1893), Terror
in Lancaster, Pa. (1763), Physician, Heal Thyself (1973), No Taxation
Without Representation (1773), Will Sex Work Ever Be Made Safe?
(2003), Cleveland Sinks in Red Ink (1978) _
By Linley Sambourne in Punch, Nov. 28, 1906.,
_THE HEART OF DARKNESS_
120 YEARS AGO, on December 12, 1903, British diplomat Roger Casement
completed a long, detailed report to the UK government describing what
he had seen during a 2-month inspection tour of the Belgian Congo. The
Casement Report was secret at first, but when its horrifying details
about the genocidal methods that the King of Belgium was using to
force the Congo's indigenous population to collect rubber, the
reaction was tremendous.
As Casement reported, the King's agents were using murderous terror to
enslave the Congolese people and force them to harvest wild-growing
rubber. As Casement put it, the local population "endured such
ill-treatment at the hands of the Government officials and soldiers
that nothing had remained but to be killed for failure to bring in
rubber or to die in their attempts to satisfy the demands.”
Not long after producing his official report, Casement helped to
organize the Congo Reform Association, which advocated an end to the
regime of terror in the Congo. As a result of the Association's work
and the outcry it helped to produce, in 1908 the Belgian King (who
until then had owned the Congo as a personal possession) was forced to
sell the huge territory to the Belgian government, which quickly
halted some of the most brutal aspects of the region's administration.
Of course, the Congolese people continued to be victimized by
imperialist exploitation until winning independence in 1960. (For
Bertrand Russell's insightful reflection on Belgian imperialism in the
Congo, visit
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and scroll down to the middle of page 450)
_RACISM ON THE BENCH_
130 YEARS AGO, on December 13, 1893, in an effort to eliminate
interracial relationships by terrorizing interracial couples with
extreme punishment, a judge in Knoxville, Tennessee, sent all six
members of a family to jail, pending trial, for felony miscegenation.
All six spent more than a month in custody awaiting their date in
court. At trial, two of the adults were convicted of lewdness and
sentenced to 11 months in jail. The rest of the family was released.
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_TERROR IN LANCASTER, PA._
260 YEARS AGO, on December 14, 1763, in southeastern Pennsylvania
where white settlers were steadily encroaching on Native American
settlements, a group of vigilantes known as the Paxton Boys attacked a
Susquehannock settlement known as Conestoga Town near Lancaster,
killing all six Susquehannock they found and burning the town down. In
the following days, when no one had been arrested for the killings,
the surviving Susquehannock sought protection of Lancaster officials,
who gave them refuge in the solidly built county jail. But on December
27, a mob of Paxton Boys overwhelmed the jailors and killed all 14
Susquehannocks refugees, including women and children. Even though all
20 killings in what is called the Conestoga Massacre were clearly
murder and the assailants were well-known, no one was ever charged
with a crime.
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_PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF_
50 YEARS AGO, on December 15, 1973, in a victory for LBGTQ activists,
the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its
list of mental disorders, a change that was soon reflected in the
revised edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual.
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_NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION_
250 YEARS AGO, on December 16, 1773, more than a hundred Sons of
Liberty activists boarded three cargo ships in Boston Harbor and
dumped hundreds of chests of tea into the water. The Boston Tea Party,
which was a dramatic protest against taxation without representation,
helped to intensify and accelerate support for the American
Revolution.
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_WILL SEX WORK EVER BE MADE SAFE?_
20 YEARS AGO, on December 17, 2003, the International Day to End
Violence Against Sex Workers was first observed in Seattle,
Washington, to commemorate the victims of a serial killer who had
murdered more than 40 young women before he was arrested in 2001.
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_CLEVELAND SINKS IN RED INK_
45 YEARS AGO, on December 18, 1978, in Cleveland, Ohio, a crisis that
was both fiscal and political came to a head when liberal mayor Dennis
Kuchinich and the conservative majority of the city council could not
agree on a plan to prevent the city's budgetary collapse. Kuchinich,
on his own authority, then announced the lay-off of two thousand
municipal workers -- including 45 percent of the police force,
on-third of its firefighters, one-sixth of its sanitation workers and
the entire recreation department staff -- in order to save $3 million
a month. Despite Kuchinich's efforts, Cleveland became the first
major U.S. city to go into default since the depression of the 1930s.
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* U.S. history
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* imperialism
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* Jim Crow race laws
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* Native Americans
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* psychiatry
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* sex workers
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* Cleveland
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