July 24 Peace Love Art Activism

Black History

July 24, 1937, ”SCOTTSBORO BOYS”

• Charlie Weems convicted and sentenced to 105 years
• Ozie Powell pled guilty to assaulting Sheriff Edgar Blalock and is sentenced to 20 years.
• All charges against Roy Wright and Eugene Williams were dropped, on account of their young age at the time of the crime, and the number of years already served.

The charges against Olen Montgomery and Willie Roberson dropped on the grounds that the state no longer believes the men to be guilty. (see Scottsboro for expanded story)

Albany Movement

July 24, 1962: Chief Judge Elbert P Tuttle of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned the ban on demonstrations, stating, “The trial court had no jurisdiction to enter this order at all.” Later that day, the Albany police dispersed a crowd of 2,000 protestors. (see Albany for expanded story)

Civil Rights Act

July 24, 1964: the FBI made its first arrests under the public accommodations sections of the Civil Rights Act.  Agents charged three Greenwood white men with a conspiracy designed to keep Silas McGhee from going to the movie theater. The FBI charged the three with “unlawfully conspiring to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate” Silas McGhee, 21, of Greenwood, “in the free exercise of his right to full and equal enjoyment of a motion picture picture house, the Leflore Theatre.” (NYT article) (see July 29)

137 Shots

July 24, 2015: Cuyahoga Common Pleas Judge John P. O’Donnell dismissed dereliction-of-duty charges against five Cleveland police supervisors involved in a 2012 police chase and shooting that ended in the deaths of two unarmed people. O’Donnell’s ruling will likely result in the supervisors being tried in East Cleveland Municipal Court, where identical charges were filed on July 2.

“The fact that duplicative charges are pending in East Cleveland amounts to good cause to dismiss the indictment here,” O’Donnell wrote, but officials are waiting for a decision from the 8th Ohio District Court of Appeals regarding whether the suburban court has jurisdiction in the case.

Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty wants the trial in East Cleveland and asked O’Donnell to dismiss the Common Pleas Court charges. Prosecutors have argued that since the supervisors face misdemeanor charges, they should be tried in municipal court, where misdemeanor cases are generally heard. (see 137 for expanded story)

July 24 Peace Love Art Activism

Cold War

A-Bomb

July 24, 1945: President Harry S. Truman informed Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin that the United States had nuclear weapons. (Nuclear Files dot org article) RS, see Aug 2; NC, see Aug 6)

Nixon v Khrushchev

July 24, 1959:  During the grand opening ceremony of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev engaged in a heated debate about capitalism and communism in the middle of a model kitchen set up for the fair. The so-called “kitchen debate” became one of the most famous episodes of the Cold War.

In late 1958, the Soviet Union and the US agreed to set up national exhibitions in each other’s nation as part of their new emphasis on cultural exchanges. The Soviet exhibition opened in New York City in June 1959. The day before the U.S. exhibition opened in Sokolniki Park in Moscow Vice President Nixon served as a host for a visit by Soviet leader Khrushchev. As Nixon led Khrushchev through the American exhibition, the Soviet leader’s famous temper began to flare.

When Nixon demonstrated some new American color television sets, Khrushchev launched into an attack on the so-called “Captive Nations Resolution” passed by the U.S. Congress just days before. The resolution condemned the Soviet control of the “captive” peoples of Eastern Europe and asked all Americans to pray for their deliverance. After denouncing the resolution, Khrushchev then sneered at the U.S. technology on display, proclaiming that the Soviet Union would have the same sort of gadgets and appliances within a few years. Nixon, never one to shy away from a debate, goaded Khrushchev by stating that the Russian leader should “not be afraid of ideas. After all, you don’t know everything.” The Soviet leader snapped at Nixon, “You don’t know anything about communism–except fear of it.” (see Khrushchev for expanded story)

July 24 Peace Love Art Activism

Space Race

Cape Canaveral

July 24, 1950: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) officially began operations with the launch of a Bumper rocket (the Bumper 8 was a low-angle atmospheric flight over 320 km (200 mi) range). (NASA article) (see October 4, 1957)

Apollo 11

July 24, 1969: Apollo 11 returned safely. [NASA article] (see Nov 14 – 24)

July 24 Peace Love Art Activism

July 24 Music et al

Carnival!

July 24 – 30, 1961, the original Broadway cast album for Carnival! is the Billboard #1.

Beatles/Cannabis

July 24, 1967: The Beatles and Brian Epstein all signed their names to a full page advertisement in The Times (of London) declaring “the law against marijuana is immoral in principal and unworkable in practice.” The list of names also included a variety of authors, painters, and politicians. (next Beatles, see Aug 19; see Beatles Cannabis for expanded story)

Road to Bethel

July 24, 1969: Bethel Supervisor reported that he’d received about twenty phone calls from residents opposed to festival, but no legal threats. (see Chronology for expanded story)

July 24 Peace Love Art Activism

Vietnam

July 24, 1965: the first surface-to-air missile (SAM) fired by North Vietnam brought down a U.S. F-4C Phantom jet. The SAM site that fired the missile was one of five ringing Hanoi at a distance of about 20 miles. (Air&Space Smithsonian article) (see July 28)

July 24 Peace Love Art Activism

Watergate

July 24. 1974: the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Nixon must turn over the tape recordings of 64 White House conversations, rejecting the president’s claims of executive privilege. (see Watergate for expanded story)

July 24 Peace Love Art Activism

Immigration History

Detention

July 24, 2015: Judge Dolly M. Gee of Federal District Court for the Central District of California ruled that the Obama administration’s detention of children and their mothers who were caught crossing the border illegally was a serious violation of a longstanding court settlement, and that the families should be released as quickly as possible.

Gee found that two detention centers in Texas that the administration opened last summer fail to meet minimum legal requirements of the 1997 settlement for facilities housing children.

Gee also found that migrant children had been held in “widespread deplorable conditions” in Border Patrol stations after they were first caught, and she said the authorities had “wholly failed” to provide the “safe and sanitary” conditions required for children even in temporary cells. (NYT article) (see Aug 21)

Deportation

July 24, 2017: U.S. District Judge Mark Goldsmith in Detroit indefinitely stopped the deportation of more than 1,400 Iraqis who feared physical harm if kicked out of the U.S.,  The injunction allowed the Iraqis, many of whom were Christian, to stay in the U.S. while they tried to persuade immigration courts to overturn the deportations based on risks back in their native country. (CBS News article) (see Aug 2)

Separation

July 24, 2018: the Trump administration told a federal court that more than 450 migrant parents whose children were separated from them were no longer in the United States, raising questions about whether the parents fully understood that they were being deported without their children.

The parents — nearly one-fifth of the 2,551 migrants whose children were taken from them after crossing the southwest border — were either swiftly deported or somehow left the country without their children, government lawyers said. [NYT article] (see July 26)

Asylum

July 24, 2019:  Judge Jon S. Tigar of the United States District Court in San Francisco ordered the Trump administration to continue accepting asylum claims from all eligible migrants arriving in the United States, temporarily thwarting the president’s latest attempt to stanch the flow of migrants crossing the southern border.

Tigar issued a preliminary injunction against a new rule that would have effectively banned asylum claims in the United States for most Central American migrants, who had been arriving in record numbers in 2019. It would have also affected many migrants from Africa, Asia and other regions.

The decision came on the same day that a federal judge in Washington, hearing a separate challenge, let the new rule stand, briefly delivering the administration a win. But Judge Tigar’s order prevents the rule from being carried out until the legal issues can be debated more fully. (see July 26)

July 24 Peace Love Art Activism

Cannabis

Sue for use

July 24, 2017: a collection of plaintiffs that range from a retired NFL player to a young epileptic girl filed a lawsuit that sought marijuana legalization nationwide through the courts.The suit argued that the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 was unconstitutional and asked that cannabis be removed from the schedule of controlled narcotics. (Marijuana, see Sept 16  or see CCC for expanded chronology; suit, see February 26, 2018)

NJ decriminalization

July 24, 2018: New Jersey attorney general Gurbir S. Grewal asked prosecutors in New Jersey to seek adjournments until September in “any matter involving a marijuana-related offense pending in municipal court.” (see July 29)

July 24 Peace Love Art Activism

Affordable Care Act

July 24, 2018: the Trump administration, in an abrupt reversal, said that it would restart a program that paid billions of dollars to insurers to stabilize health insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act.

The administration had suspended the program less than three weeks ago, saying it was compelled to do so by a federal court decision in New Mexico.

But the administration said that it would restore the program because otherwise health plans could become insolvent or withdraw from the market, causing chaos for consumers.

Payments would resume around Oct. 22, the Department of Health and Human Services said in the new rule. (see Dec 14)

FREE SPEECH

June 24, 2019:  in Iancu v. Brunetti, the US Supreme Court voted 6 – 3 and struck down a ban on trademarking words and symbols that are “immoral” or “scandalous.”

Clothing designer Erik Brunetti brought the case. He sought to trademark the phrase FUCT. The decision paved the way for him to get his brand trademarked.

The court struggled with how to deal with the word — in particular, its pronunciation. Justice Elena Kagan described it in her majority opinion: The clothing brand “is pronounced as             four letters, one after the other: F-U-C-T. … But you might read it differently and, if so, you would hardly be alone.”

She noted that it has been described “as ‘the equivalent of [the] past participle form of a well-known word of profanity.’ ”

The five justices who joined Kagan’s majority opinion: Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. (see July 23, 2020)

July 24 Peace Love Art Activism

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE

July 24, 2020: the Supreme Court rejected a request from a church in Nevada to block enforcement of state restrictions on attendance at religious services.

The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joining the court’s four more liberal members to form a majority.

The court’s brief order was unsigned and gave no reasons, which is typical when the justices act on emergency applications. The court’s four more conservative members filed three dissents, totaling 24 pages.

Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley in Dayton, Nev., argued that the state treated houses of worship less favorably than it did casinos, restaurants and amusement parks. Those businesses have been limited to 50 percent of their fire-code capacities, while houses of worship have been subject to a flat 50-person limit. [NYT article] (next Separation, see Oct 28)

July 24 Peace Love Art Activism