Today marks one of the largest insurrections in the U.S. history. Black people rose up against racialized police violence, and the U.S. sent tanks and federal troops to crack down. 43 people were killed, 1,000 were injured, and more than 7,200 were arrested.
July 23rd 1967 Detroit Police raided an unlicensed bar and arrested 82 Black patrons. Scores of locals who were out to cool off during a heat wave witnessed this and protested the arrests. One threw a brick into a police car, beginning a riot that would last 5 days.
Days in, thousands of National Guard members and U.S. troops were deployed. Residents raided gun stores to arm themselves against the security forces. Detroit became a virtual war zone.
Though Detroit riots were violently quelled by U.S. forces, the moment became an important catalyst for the militant Black Power movement and a wave of urban uprisings that would follow.
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Palestinian children living under Israeli occupation have endured numerous offensives on Gaza. Each day they're subject to militarized checkpoints & violent expulsions from their homes. This is what it’s like for children living under the constant threat of Israeli aggression:
More than 3,000 Palestinian children have been killed by Israeli forces over the past two decades and tens of thousands have been injured. Currently, at least 1 million Palestinian children are in need of humanitarian assistance.
Over and above the deaths caused by Israeli airstrikes, numerous children are denied emergency medical care as a result of Israeli barriers and military checkpoints which significantly impede Palestinians’ freedom of movement.
Meet Willem Arondeus, the Dutch artist & author who started an underground resistance movement against the Nazis in WWII. He was executed in 1943 for bombing a public records office to protect Jews from Nazi persecution. Being openly gay his entire life, his final words were:
Arondeus was forced to leave home at the age of 17 as his parents could not accept his choice to live openly gay.
When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, Arondeus and his friend, lesbian cellist Frieda Belinfante, were among the first to join the Dutch anti-Nazi resistance movement.
On this day in history the Soweto Uprising took place, when more than 20,000 South African Black school children took to the streets of Soweto to protest. When police opened fire and killed hundreds, rioting escalated into a nationwide uprising against white apartheid rule.
The 1976 Uprising that began in Soweto was triggered by the introduction of Afrikaans as a language of instruction in schools, because it was seen by most Black South Africans as directly linked to apartheid and the violent, white state.
The protests began peacefully, but apartheid security forces quickly used violence against protesters. Police shot tear gas and sent dogs into the crowds. When that failed to disperse the gathering, the police shot with live bullets.
The man on the horse is Pedro Castillo, Peru’s Indigenous, radical and anti-imperialist teacher who won the presidential elections’ second round and proposes to build a socialist state in Peru. His opponent, far-right candidate Keiko Fujimori, is still refusing to concede.
51-year-old Castillo, a school teacher from the Cajamarca region, is known for leading the teachers’ strike of 2017, which fought for better working conditions. Back then, he was accused of having ties with the political arm of a former Maoist guerrilla group, which he has denied
Carrying an explicitly anti-neoliberal agenda, Castillo, a first-time presidential candidate, earned the highest number of votes among all presidential candidates in the first round, beating millionaires and entrenched establishment figures.
Black revolutionary, MOVE member and former political prisoner Delbert Africa passed away on this day one year ago. He died having only been released from prison for several months, where he spent 42 years suffering for a crime he said he didn’t commit.
Delbert Africa was one of nine MOVE members sent to prison on third-degree murder charges for the death of Philadelphia police officer James Ramp, shot during the 1978 standoff between MOVE and the Philadelphia police.
During the standoff, James Ramp was killed with a single bullet, but MOVE has always denied that any of its members were responsible and Delbert Africa maintained that he did not fire a gun that day.
Today we remember Walter Rodney, the revolutionary anti-imperialist, socialist and Pan-Africanist intellectual and activist who was assassinated on this day 41 years ago.
Widely known today for his influential book "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa", Rodney was one of the most renowned intellectuals of Pan-Africanism, looking to build unity among African and Afro-descendant peoples, while connecting their struggles to the working class struggle.
Rodney developed a Marxism in which Black Power was central, developing historical analyses of slavery and colonialism and convinced that only "under the banner of socialism and through the leadership of the working classes" Africans could break from imperialism and colonialism.