1961 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

Psychologist David P. Boder dies at Chicago January 1 at age 74, having introduced the word Holocaust after interviewing 109 death-camp survivors in 1946. Former Nazi concentration camp director Adolf Eichmann goes on trial beginning April 11 at a Jerusalem cultural center (see 1946). Now 55, he had been living in Argentina under the name Ricardo Klement when he was captured in May of last year after a 15-year manhunt; Israeli agent Peter Z. Malkin grabbed him as he stepped off a bus in a Buenos Aires suburb and spirited him away to a safe house by taxi. Even most Israelis have known very little about the horrors of the death camps, a bullet-proof glass enclosure protects Eichmann in the courtroom, his 4-month trial brings the facts of the Holocaust to world attention, and although he tries to persuade the court that he was merely acting on orders, it sentences Eichmann to be hanged (see 1962).

The Jewish Documentation Center opens at Vienna under the direction of Simon Wiesenthal, now 52, whose files were shipped to Israel in 1954 (see 1947). Encouraged by the arrest of Adolf Eichmann, Wiesenthal will enlist the cooperation of Israeli, West German, and other governments to track down more than 1,000 former Gestapo agents, SS officers, and other Nazi war criminals and bring them to trial, mostly in West Germany.

The UN General Assembly condemns South Africa's apartheid policies April 13 (see Sharpeville massacre, 1960). A South African court acquits apartheid foe Helen Joseph of treason after a marathon trial (see 1956), but as a banned person she will not be permitted for the next 10 years to receive visitors on weekends or at nights or to socialize with more than one person at a time (see 1978). Nelson R. Mandela, Walter Sisulu, and other African National Congress leaders conclude that the white government will respond only to violence and set up a militant wing under the name Umkhonto we Size (MK), or "Spear of the Nation," whose leadership begins a campaign of sabotage December 16 with the announcement, "The time comes in the life of any nation when there remains only two choices: submit or fight . . . We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means within our power in defense of our people, our future, and our freedom" (see 1962).

California-born Georgia judge Elbert P. (Parr) Tuttle, 64, New Orleans-born judge John Minor Wisdom, 56, Texas judge John R. Brown, and Alabama judge Richard T. Rives of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit at New Orleans strike down a Louisiana school-closing law after the St. Helen Parish has voted overwhelmingly to close its public schools rather than submit to desegregation in accordance with the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (all but Rives are Republicans). The court's jurisdiction includes Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas as well as Louisiana (see Meredith, 1962).

"Freedom Riders" begin a civil-rights demonstration at Birmingham, Ala., May 4 in a move organized by the biracial Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to overturn segregation practices in the Deep South (see 1960). Blacks sit in the front of the Greyhound bus, whites in the rear, and when they reach a bus station the whites go into the black rest room and vice versa; all have been trained in nonviolent ways to behave and protect themselves. A white mob attacks the Freedom Riders May 20 at Montgomery, Ala., local police permit the mob to beat the riders with iron pipes, U.S. marshals sent in by Attorney General Kennedy restore order and maintain safe passage for travelers in interstate commerce (National Guard general Henry V. Graham, 45, tells the Freedom Riders, "This may be a hazardous journey. We have taken every precaution to protect you. And I sincerely wish you all a safe journey"). Similar demonstrations occur in Louisiana and other states (see Supreme Court, 1962).

Atlanta students Charlayne Hunter, 19, and Hamilton "Hamp" Holmes, 20, defy racist epithets as they enter the University of Georgia at Athens, ending segregation at the school pursuant to a federal court order issued January 6 by Chief Justice Elbert P. Tuttle of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Daughter of a U.S. Army chaplain, Hunter has transferred from Wayne State University in Detroit. She hopes for a career in journalism and, she will later write, has "studied the comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook" (see communications, 1940; Nonfiction [Hunter-Gault book], 1992).

Septima Clark joins the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as director of education and teaching (see 1956). Now 63, the "grand lady of civil rights" will defy Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens' Council intimidation as she works to increase literacy and citizenship training.

Rwanda grants women the right to vote on the same basis as men.

Amnesty International has its beginnings in a front-page article published May 28 in the Observer by English barrister and civil-liberties activist Peter Benenson, 38, whose piece entitled "The Forgotten Prisoner" is reprinted in papers worldwide. Benenson has read about two Portuguese students who were imprisoned for raising their glasses in a toast to freedom at a Lisbon restaurant, his article will lead to the establishment of Amnesty International chapters in more than 60 countries, and they will be instrumental in securing the release of political prisoners.

Social reformer-economist Emily Greene Balch dies at Cambridge, Mass., January 9 at age 94; suffragist Frederick W. Pethick-Lawrence, Baron Pethick-Lawrence, at London September 10 at age 89.

The U.S. Supreme Court rules unanimously November 20 to uphold a Florida law exempting women from jury duty unless they volunteer. The right to an impartially selected jury "does not entitle one accused of crime to a jury tailored to the circumstances of the particular case, whether relating to the sex or other condition of the defendant, or the nature of the charges to be tried," says the Court. Mrs. Gwendolyn Hoyt was convicted by an all-male jury in 1958 of murdering her husband with a baseball bat, and the Court upholds her conviction. Three states (Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina) do not permit women to serve on juries, and 18 allow women to be excused from jury duty on the basis of their gender (but see 1975).