Peace and Justice History – December 24
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Today in Peace and Justice History
| Dec. 24, 1865 |
| Months after the fall of the Confederacy and the “end” of slavery, several veterans of the Confederate Army formed a private social club in Pulaski, Tennessee, called the Ku Klux Klan. The group’s first priority, declared in its creed, was “to protect the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless from the indignities, wrongs, and outrages of the lawless, the violent, and the brutal.” In fact, it was the Klan that was lawless, violent, and brutal, as the group terrorized and killed formerly enslaved Black and mixed people, sympathetic white people, and immigrants.
The building where it happened still stands with a bronze plaque reading, “Ku Klux Klan organized in this, the law office of Judge Thomas M. Jones, Dec. 24, 1865.” When the building was purchased in 1990, the new owner, Don Massey, instead of removing the plaque, simply reversed it, showing the smooth back side. |
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More on the Klan
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| Dec. 24, 1924 |
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Costa Rica indicated its intention to withdraw from The League of Nations to protest the lack of progress on regional issues, particularly U.S. dominance of the hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine, declared by President James Monroe in 1823, established the U.S. sphere of influence encompassed the entirety of North and South America, as well as the Caribbean island nations. |
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| Dec. 24, 1947 |
| President Truman pardoned 1,523 of the 15,805 World War II draft resisters who had been convicted and served time in prison for what society considered an offense. Five years later on the same day, shortly before leaving office, Truman granted full pardon and restoration of civil and political rights to former convicts who had served in the peacetime army or who had not been covered by his earlier pardon, as well as all convicted peacetime deserters. |
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| Dec. 24, 1991 |
| Bosnian, Croatian, and Macedonian parents of reservists from Grocka protested at army headquarters in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, worried their sons would be caught up in the war threatened by Serbian nationalist expansionism. |
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| Dec, 24, 1992 |
| President George H.W. Bush pardoned six Reagan administration appointees in the Iran-Contra case, among them former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, and Robert McFarlane, the President’s former national security advisor. | |
| He did so with less than one month to go in his presidency, and one week before Weinberger’s trial on four felony charges was to begin. These people and others were responsible for selling arms to the revolutionary government of Iran in the hope of the release of hostages held in Lebanon, despite then-President Ronald Reagan’s repeated pledge not to negotiate with hostage-takers.
The money raised through the arms sales was used to fund the Contra insurgents in Nicaragua, who were violently trying to overthrow the government. This support was in violation of an explicit legal ban on such activities under the Boland Amendment [see Dec. 21, 1982]. |
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Text of Bush’s Grant of Executive Clemency
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U.S. presidential pardon history
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More about presidential pardons
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