From The Intelligent Optimist
Winter 2017
Tiananmen Square
After the death of pro-democracy leader Hu Yaobang in mid-1989, students began gathering in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to mourn his passing. It was the beginning of large demonstration for greater freedom that lasted seven weeks. The Chinese government send tanks into the square to stop the growing demonstration. The tanks randomly shot into the crowds, killing more than 200 people. One lone demonstrator walked onto the road and stood directly in front of the tanks to block them. The man’s identity remains a mystery. Some say he was killed; others believe him to be hiding in Taiwan.
Photograph: rawtools.Org
The summer of love
During the 1967 Summer of Love the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations began gathering steam. This image is from a demonstration in front of the Pentagon on October 21, 1967 and it encapsulates the flower power of the hippies pushing for change with nothing more than a few petals.
Photograph: Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Photo
The Montgomery bus boycott
In 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, the law was that blacks had to give up their seats for whites—despite the fact that African Americans constituted on average 70 percent of the bus passengers. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Her subsequent arrest incited the Montgomery Bus Boycott. A year later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregated seating unconstitutional. Rosa Parks became know as “the mother of the civil-rights movement”.
Photograph: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo
The suffrage parade
On March 3, 1930, lawyer Inez Milholland Boissevain led a procession of more than 5,000 people down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. Seven years later women in the U.S. were granted the right to vote.
Photograph: Everett Collection Inc / Alamy Stock Photo
The honeymoon of John Lennon and Yoko Ono
John Lennon married his second wife, Yoko Ono, in March 1969. In lieu of a traditional honeymoon, the couple held a weeklong “Bed-In for Peace” in the Hilton Hotel in Amsterdam to demonstrate against the Vietnam War. The couple repeated the same in protest a few months later in Montreal where Lennon recorded “Give Peace a Chance”.
Photograph: Keystone Pictures USA / Alamy Stock Photo
Willy Brandt in Warsaw
In World War II the Nazi’s deported hundreds of thousands of Jews from Warsaw. Most of them were killed in death camps. On December 7, 1970, then chancellor Willy Brandt was the first German leader to visit Warsaw after the war. When he visited the monument commemorating the Nazi crimes he fell to his knees, in a display of confessing guilt and begging for forgiveness. Brandt later described the event: “I have been often asked what the gesture was all about. Was it planned? No, it wasn’t. As I stood on the edge of the Germany’s historical abyss, feeling the burden of millions of murders, I did what people do when words fail.”
Photograph: dpa picture alliance / Alamy Stock Photo
Anwar Sadat in the Knesset
On November 20, 1977, then-Egyptian president Anwar Sadat flew from Egypt to Israel to give a historic speech. The visit had been arranged less than one week earlier and would set in motion a series of events and negotiations that led to the first peace treaty signed between Israel and an Arab state. Addressing the 120 Knesset members, the Egyptian president declared: “Today I tell you, and declare it to the whole world, that we accept to live with you in permanent peace based on justice.” Sixteen months later, Sadat and Israeli prime-minister Menachem Begin signed a peace treaty, brokered by U.S. president Jimmy Carter.
The march on Washington
More than 200,000 people followed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Washington on August 28, 1963 to demand equal rights for African American. In the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech and led a nation to action.
