October 5, 1998
MUTAWINTJI, Australia — In the culmination of a 15-year fight, more than 500 Aborigines and their supporters from around eastern Australia gathered at newly renamed Mutawintji National Park Sept. 5 for a day of celebration to mark the return of its 76,000 hectares (188,000 acres) to the traditional owners. It is the first of five parks in the state to be returned to Aboriginal people by the state government.
Mark Sutton, of the Mutawintji Local Aboriginal Land Council and chair of the event, explained, “In 1983 Paakantji community members from Broken Hill, Wilcannia and Menindee came out and blockaded the main entrance to the park” to protest the lack of involvement of Aboriginal people in how it was run.
The 1983 blockade was part of the new wave of land rights struggles around the country that had risen again beginning in the 1960s.
October 5, 1973
NEW YORK — As Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made his first speech to the United Nations, nearly 1,000 demonstrators marched to the U.N. to denounce the role of U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico.
The action was the culmination of a series of meetings and forums. Events celebrated were the anniversary of the birth of Pedro Albizu Campos, the central leader of the Puerto Rican independence movement in the 1930s and 1940s, and El Grito de Lares, the 1868 rebellion for independence from Spain. Thousands rallied in Puerto Rico Sept. 23 to mark the anniversary.
Since the early 1950s, when Albizu Campos tried to get a hearing before the U.N., that body had refused to hear the case. Only in the last year, due to the efforts of Cuban delegate Ricardo Alarcon and protests by Puerto Ricans, has the U.N. Decolonization Committee taken up Puerto Rico.
October 4, 1948
The following speech was broadcast to the workers of Canton, Ohio, by Farrell Dobbs, SWP presidential candidate, on Friday, Sept. 24. [Excerpt]
Thirty years ago, during the First World War, Eugene V. Debs told the truth about capitalist wars in a historic speech here in Canton. Debs told the workers, “Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder.” President Woodrow Wilson ordered immediate prosecution of Debs. He was convicted and locked up.
I have come here to reaffirm the socialist anti-war program of Debs. We denounced the conspiracy of American monopoly capitalism to drag the country into the Second World War.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered prosecution of the Socialist Workers Party for our anti-war stand. In 1941, eighteen leaders of the party were convicted under the Smith “Gag” Act and sentenced to prison.