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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, DEC 10–16  
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_ Free Speech for Students! (1965), A Message from a Great American
(1935), The Pandemic Meets Its Match (2020), The Death of an Unarmed
Prisoner (1890), It’s Bigger than Baseball (2020) _

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_FREE SPEECH FOR STUDENTS!_

DECEMBER 10 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of the day that 13-year-old
junior high student Mary Beth Tinker and some of her schoolmates in
Des Moines, Iowa, decided to show their opposition to the constantly
escalating U.S. war against Vietnam. They decided to protest by
wearing black armbands to school.

Several days later, more than two dozen armband-wearing students
showed up at several Des Moines schools. None carried signs or made
speeches or caused any disruption, but school administrators declared
that silently wearing a black armband as a means of expression was a
violation of discipline. They singled out five students, including
Tinker, and suspended them. 

That was the beginning of a 4-year legal struggle over the First
Amendment rights of public school students. With the help of the
American Civil Liberties Union, the Des Moines Five took their case
all the way to the Supreme Court, where they established the precedent
that, as the high court put it, neither "students or teachers shed
their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the
schoolhouse gate."

Today, more than 55 years later, the Supreme Court’s decision that
“In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of
totalitarianism,” remains the law of the land. Of course, the
Supreme Court has recently made a regular practice of throwing
precedents out, but one can always hope. For much more information
about the case that established students’ rights, visit 
[link removed]

 

_A MESSAGE FROM A GREAT AMERICAN_

DECEMBER 11 IS THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY of New York City Parks
Commissioner Robert Moses’ decision to remind the thousands of Parks
Department workers and the additional thousands of federal Works
Project Administration workers on the city payroll that their
continued employment depended on the continued good-will of their
boss.

Commissioner Moses arranged to have hundreds of copies of large
placards printed and posted at every Parks Department work site
bearing a handsome portrait of Abraham Lincoln over this headline: "A
Message to Park Workers from a Great American”. 

Under the headline appeared this text: “The habits of our whole
species fall into three great classes, useful labor, useless labor and
idleness. Of these, the first only is meritorious and to it all the
products of labor rightfully belong; but the two latter, while they
exist, are heavy pensioners upon the first, robbing it of a large
portion of its just rights. The only remedy for this is to, so far as
possible, drive useless labor and idleness out of
existence." [link removed]

 

_A PANDEMIC MEETS ITS MATCH_

DECEMBER 14 IS THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of the first non-experimental
use a Covid-19 vaccine in the U.S. The first U.S. vaccine recipient
was Sandra Lindsay, an African-American nurse who was head of
critical-care nursing at a large hospital in Queens, New York. The
choice of Lindsay was fitting, because critical-care health-care
workers were one of the pandemics’ worst-hit occupational groups, as
were African-Americans in general.

By the time Lindsay got her jab, more than 15 million people in the
U.S. had been sickened by Covid-19 and at least three hundred thousand
had died. Of course, at first the vaccine could only retard the rate
of increase in Covid-19 cases and deaths. It was estimated that during
the first 26 months of the vaccine’s availability, its use prevented
120 million infections, 18.5 million hospitalizations and 3.2 million
deaths in the
U.S. [link removed] 

 

_THE DEATH OF AN UNARMED PRISONER_

DECEMBER 15 IS THE 135TH ANNIVERSARY of the death of Hunkpapa Lakota
leader Sitting Bull, who was killed by a federal law enforcement
official who was attempting to take Sitting Bull, who was unarmed, 
into custody. 

Sitting Bull was one of the most successful defenders of the rights of
Native Americans both by military means and otherwise. He had been one
of the leaders of the most successful (for the Native Americans)
extended period of open warfare between Native Americans and an
experienced, fully-manned, well-equipped, U.S. Army occupation force
in the Great Plains. 

That period, which U.S. forces called Red Cloud’s War, ended when
the U.S. government sued for peace after nearly two years of
intermittent heavy fighting. The Army’s suing for peace was, for
practical purposes, the Army’s admission of defeat. The treaty that
ended “Red Cloud’s War” was a capitulation to the demands the
Native Americans had been fighting for; it is said to have been the
worst defeat ever for the U.S. Army fighting in North America, with
the exception of Confederate victories during the Civil War.

The 1890 incident during which Sitting Bull was shot to death, was, at
best, according to the U.S. government’s own testimony, a case of
manslaughter committed by a U.S.official, and could reasonably be
described as a case of premeditated murder that went awry. What
occurred, according to U.S. officials, was that a large party of
federal lawmen arrived, unannounced, to arrest Sitting Bull at his
cabin in Grand River, South Dakota, but lacking an essential piece of
equipment: a wheeled vehicle to carry Sitting Bull to police
headquarters. The arrest party that neglected to bring a wagon with
them knew that the only way they could transfer Sitting Bull to jail
would be to force an uncooperative Sitting Bull onto the back of a
horse.

During the noisy effort to force Sitting Bull to mount a horse, a
crowd of his Sioux neighbors gathered to demand the release of their
leader. Eventually a member of the crowd fired a shot at the leader of
the arresting party. As soon as the shot hit the arresting officer, he
turned, aimed at the unarmed Sitting Bull, and fired the shot that
killed him. The arresting officer never explained why he shot Sitting
Bull, but it clearly could not have been in self-defense. 

Two weeks after Sitting Bull was killed during a bizarrely botched
arrest effort, U.S. forces killed more than 300 Sioux in the Massacre
at Wounded Knee, South
Dakota. [link removed]

 

_IT’S BIGGER THAN BASEBALL_

DECEMBER 16 IS THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of Major League Baseball’s
announcement that it would henceforth consider the Negro Leagues to
have been Major Leagues just like the American and National Leagues,
and would meld statistics of Negro League players into Major League
statistics.

Three-and-a-half years later, when the statistics had been combined,
many new names had been added to the record books, including Josh
Gibson, Oscar Charleston, Satchel Paige and Charlie “Chino” Smith.
Slugger Gibson, who died before the first Black player joined the
National League in 1947, not only received official recognition, but
he had the highest career batting average (.372), the highest career
slugging percentage (.718) and the highest career
on-base-plus-slugging percentage (1.177). 
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For more People's History,
visithttps://www.facebook.com/jonathan.bennett.7771/

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