This Day in History: September 11th

September 11, 1589: Appela Huebmeyer, Barbara Huebmeyer, and Anna Schnelling were burned as “witches” in Waldsee, Germany.

September 11, 1857: Approximately 100 Mormon militia members in Utah massacred at least 120 members of a wagon train. The perpetrators, inflamed by the story that a Mormon had been persecuted and killed in Arkansas by some of the members of a wagon train then heading through Utah, and ordered by the Mormon leadership to exact vengeance as an act of faith, disarmed the wagon train under a flag of truce and massacred everyone except the youngest of the children. The perpetrators either included some members of the Pauite tribe, or (more likely, according to historian Sally Denton) disguised themselves as Pauite; the Mormon leadership later blamed the tribe for the crime. See American Massacre (Knopf 2003), by Sally Denton.

September 11, 1905: Vinoba Bhave, Indian land reform activist, considered by many to be one of Mohandas Gandhi’s primary successors, was born. Bhave participated in the Quit India movement and was chosen by Gandhi in 1940 to be the first Individual Satyagrahi, or individual civil resister, in the revived campaign against British rule. Bhave initiated the Bhoodhan (land gift) movement, in which he walked the breadth of India asking people to consider him a son and give him land, which he redistributed to landless peasants.

September 11, 1906: Gandhi began a nonviolent resistance campaign to secure civil and political rights for Indians in South Africa. Between that time and the campaign’s victory in 1914, Gandhi and his cohorts were repeatedly beaten and imprisoned, but they maintained the discipline of nonviolent action. The campaign helped initiate a wave of mass nonviolent struggle around the world. However, during the campaign, Gandhi used the racist argument that the laws unjustly reduced the status of the Indian immigrants to that of the native Africans. (Please see Gandhi’s 1906 speech on page 9, and a critique on page 25).

September 11, 1941: Underground Norwegian trade union newspapers arranged for the writing of thousands of letters rejecting Nazification to the government. According the website of England’s Peace Pledge Union, “When all radios were confiscated, over 300 ‘underground’ newspapers sprang up, carrying news obtained from concealed radios and urging non-cooperation with the Nazi authorities. One person would type out several copies (say 20) of each edition, and pass them on for the next 20 readers to type more copies, and so on until there were enough to go around.”

September 11, 1941: Construction commenced on the Pentagon building. See James Carroll’s book, House of War: the Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power (Houghton-Mifflin, 2006).

September 9-13, 1971: Approximately 1,300 inmates took control of New York State’s Attica prison to protest inhumane treatment. Prisoners held 39 guards hostage. Negotiations lasted until the 13th when Governor Nelson Rockefeller sent in state troopers and correctional officers. In the attack, gunshots killed 10 hostages and 29 inmates, and wounded 4 hostages and 85 inmates. The official version claimed that the inmates killed hostages during the attack; however, only the forces sent in by the government had guns. After the longest-running court case in New York State history, New York settled a wrongful death lawsuit with families of the killed inmates in 1998, and compensated the families of the murdered prison employees in 2004.

September 11, 1973: Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president of Chile was murdered in a CIA-backed coup. Augusto Pinochet seized control of Chile and, during his 17-year dictatorial reign, supervised the murder of at least 3,000 Chileans and the torture of thousands more (see article, p. 20).

September 11-12, 1977: Steve Biko, South African anti-apartheid activist, was assassinated in prison by prison guards. One of the preeminent voices of the anti-apartheid struggle, Steve Biko, leader of the South African Black Consciousness Movement stressing black pride and self-determination, was beaten unconscious on September 11 and shackled, naked, in the back of a van. Instead of taking him to a hospital, the van was driven 700 miles from Port Elizabeth to Pretoria. Biko, who had been arrested three weeks earlier, died from multiple injuries on September 12.

September 11, 1988: The Innu Nation launched direct action protests against low-level supersonic jet training flights over their traditional hunting grounds around Goose Bay in Labrador. The Innu claimed that the training flights and attendant sonic booms adversely affected wildlife and seriously compromised their traditional way of life.

September 11, 2002: According to peacebuttons.info, “Women In Black (Baltimore) started the first Peace Path as a response to the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attacks. The nonviolent action presents images of peace as opposed to war and militarism. Now in its fourth year, the Path — a line of supporters along city streets in Baltimore — extends for 12 miles. Others are beginning to create September 11th Peace Paths in their own communities.”

For more analyses of and reflections about the events and immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, please see our October 2001 issue [8], and our September 2002 special commemorative issue [9].