1922 | Human Rights, Social Justice
Human Rights, Social Justice
Mohandas K. Gandhi asks peasant farmers at Bardoli in India's Gujarat state to withhold land taxes but hears in February that some 60,000 "satyagrahis" have been imprisoned by the British for their activities in the campaign that Gandhi started in August 1920. When he learns that a mob of "satyagrahis" have massacred 22 Indian police in their station house at Chauri Chaura in the United Provinces, setting fire to the building and then blocking their escape, Gandhi announces that he has committed a "Himalayan blunder" by starting the satyagraha without proper soul-cleansing; he calls a halt to the campaign of non-cooperation, but he is found guilty of "promoting disaffection" and given a 6-year prison sentence (see 1930).
Japanese untouchables (burakumin) create an Organization of Levelers (Suiheisha) to withhold taxes, boycott schools, and stage protests against the discrimination to which they have been subject before and since the Emancipation Act of 1871. The Suiheisha will be disbanded in 1941 (see 1946).
The U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously February 27 that the Nineteenth Amendment granting suffrage to women is not unconstitutional, as some opponents have charged (see 1920). The Cable Act signed into law by President Harding September 22 grants independent citizenship to married women (a U.S. citizen who marries a foreigner does not lose her citizenship unless she chooses to renounce it).
Women in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island gain the right to vote in provincial elections (see 1919; Quebec, 1940).
Ida Wells Bennett travels to Arkansas to investigate reports of black prisoners being tortured with electric prongs. Whites from neighboring states came to Helena and broke up a meeting of black sharecroppers attempting to form a union, the black men were tried and convicted, 67 were given long prison terms, 12 sentenced to death. No one but a family member is permitted to go inside the prison to see the convicts, but Bennnet has been writing about the case in the Chicago Defender and gets in touch with family members of the prisoners; posing as a cousin of one man to get inside, she gathers details of what happened. The U.S. Supreme Court will rule within a year that the men did not get a fair trial and all will subsequently be set free.
Sen. Thomas E. Watson (D. Ga.) dies at Washington, D.C., September 26 at age 66, having fulminated to the end against blacks, Catholics, Jews, foreigners, socialists, and internationalists.
Chinese communist Xiang Jianyu establishes a Women's Department in the Party and serves as its first director (see 1916). Now 27, she participated in the 4th of May Movement in 1919, worked in a French textile mill the following year, studied the writings of Karl Marx, was married last year, and wrote a thesis on the emancipation and transformation of women (see politics, 1927).