1946 | Human Rights, Social Justice
Human Rights, Social Justice
Japan's Buraku Liberation League (Buraku Kaihō Domei) has its beginnings in the militant All-Japan Committee for Baraku Liberation (Buraku Kaihō Zenkoku Iinkai) (see 1922). It will rename itself in 1955 but have only limited success (see 1960).
Bombay (Mumbai) removes social disabilities of the city's untouchables, but prejudice against the harijans continues (see 1947; Gandhi, 1932).
Japanese women vote for the first time April 10 (see 1945); 83 women stand for election to the Diet, 39 win seats. The new Japanese constitution adopted November 3 contains provisions (written by 22-year-old U.S. lawyer Beate Sirota Gordon) that expand women's rights, following the lead of some other national constitutions but not that of the United States, which contains no such provisions (see Equal Rights Amendment, 1947).
Italian women vote on the same basis as men for the first time as the nation ends its monarchy and becomes a republic.
Women in Palestine, Kenya, Liberia, and Vietnam gain the right to vote on the same basis as men.
Mexican women gain the right to vote in municipal elections (see 1935; 1953).
Japanese women form an organization to protect women from occupation-force authorities, who pick up women in the street and subject them to examination for sexually transmitted diseases.
France's "Loi Marthe Richard" closes Paris brothels. Assemblywoman Richard, 58, has campaigned against the enslavement of women in houses of prostitution. She became the sixth woman in the world to fly an airplane 34 years ago, served as a spy in World War I and stole the German plan for U-boat attacks on U.S. troopship convoys from the bedroom of naval attaché Hans von Krohn in Spain. Her legislation does not outlaw prostitution, but bordellos are no longer licensed, medical examinations are dropped, and demimondaines are obliged to solicit in the streets.
Latvian-born Illinois Institute of Technology psychologist David P. (Pablo) Boder, 59, accepts an invitation from Gen. Eisenhower to interview survivors of Nazi death camps. Using a newly-invented wire recorder, Broder speaks through interpreters to 109 people and introduces the word Holocaust that will come into wide use for the annihilation of some 6 million Jews since the 1930s.
Holocaust orchestrator Adolf Eichmann escapes from a U.S. internment camp and makes his way under an alias to Argentina (see 1942; 1961).
Switzerland agrees May 25 to repay $58 million in gold that was stolen from Jews by the Nazis and deposited in Swiss accounts during the war. The Swiss agree also to try to locate assets of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust and return them to survivors, but they will drag their feet about making good on the promises (see 1962).
A Polish pogrom at Kielce July 4 kills dozens of Jews who have survived the Holocaust that took the lives of 20,000 in the city's ghetto. As many as 3,000 will be killed in the next few months, and most of Poland's remaining 300,000 Jews (out of 3 million before the war) will emigrate.
Congress establishes an Indian Claims Commission to settle once and for all the disputes that have been smoldering for nearly a century over lands taken by the white man.
The U.S. Supreme Court rules June 3 that Virginia's Jim Crow law requiring segregation of passengers on interstate buses is unconstitutional. Baltimore-born NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall, now 38, has helped Richmond lawyer Spottswood Robinson, 29, represent Irene Morgan (see 1944), the court's 6-to-1 decision in Morgan v. Virginia theoretically outlaws racial segregation on interstate buses, Greyhound Bus Co. orders its drivers to avoid forcing segregation, but some Southern states defy the ruling, and the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) organizes the first challenges to Jim Crow laws, with blacks and whites traveling in the fall through four Southern states and singing, "You Don't Have to Ride Jim Crow" (see Rosa Parks, 1955).
A Georgia racial murder makes national headlines: about 15 Walton County whites drag four blacks out of their car near Monroe July 15 and shoot them to death with rifles and shotguns, firing more than 60 shots. Pacific War veteran George W. Dorsey, 28; his pregnant wife, Mae, 28; his pregnant sister Dorothy, 20; and Dorothy's farm worker husband, Roger Malcolm, 24, are buried in unmarked graves. The F.B.I. receives no help from the sheriff or local police, its agents conduct a 6-month investigation, a federal grand jury of 21 whites and two blacks will hear 100 witnesses, but no indictments will be handed up and no perpetrators brought to justice; observers suggest that the Ku Klux Klan acted in retaliation against Malcolm, who stabbed his white boss's son because the man was having sex with Dorothy.
Southern white supremacists use intimidation and violence to prevent blacks from voting in the November elections. Blacks active in voter registration find miniature coffins left on their doorsteps or receive bullets in the mail, there are killings at registrar offices and polling places, and Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo (D. Miss.) boasts that he has used the word nigger 77 times in one speech; some blacks who do manage to vote are subsequently lynched, and the racism outrages President Truman. He issues an executive order December 5 establishing a Civil Rights Commission headed by General Electric CEO Charles E. Wilson with subpoena powers to investigate charges of civil rights violations, an issue that Congress has refused to address because Southern Democrats control the ways and means committees that determine what the House and Senate may consider. The commission will issue a 178-page report (see Truman speech, 1947).
Consumers' League of New York cofounder and former suffragist Maud Nathan dies at her native New York December 15 at age 84.