From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [+]
The Watts Riots was a civil disturbance in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California from August 11 to August 15, 1965. The five-day riot resulted in 34 deaths, 1,032 injuries, 3,438 arrests and over $40 million in property damage. It was the most severe riot in the city's history until the Los Angeles riots of 1992. [...]
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Ştefan Gheorghiu (15 January 1879 — 19 March 1914), Romanian trade unionist, was born to a worker in Ploieşti. He entered the socialist movement and became a member of his native city's Club of Workers. After the leaders of the Romanian Social-Democratic Workers' Party entered the National Liberal Party in 1899, he struggled to reorganise the workers' movement. He played an important role in setting up trade unions and was one of the promoters of the General Conference of Trade Unions in 1906. During the 1907 Romanian Peasants' Revolt he was an outspoken defender of the peasants and was arrested as an instigator of opposition. Gheorghiu was a member and leader of the "Working Romania" Socialist Circles and one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party in 1910. He protested against Romania's participation in the Second Balkan War and published the manifesto War against War before dying, aged 35, of tuberculosis in Bucharest's Filaret Hospital.
The Ştefan Gheorghiu Academy was named in his honour in 1946. [...]
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Angela Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American political activist, scholar, and author. Davis emerged as a nationally prominent activist in the 1960s, when she was associated with the Communist Party USA, the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party. Prisoner rights have been among her continuing interests; she is the founder of "Critical Resistance", an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. She is a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is the former director of the university's Feminist Studies department.
Her membership in the Communist Party led to Ronald Reagan's request in 1969 to have her barred from teaching at any university in the State of California. She was tried and acquitted of suspected involvement in the Soledad brothers' August 1970 abduction and murder of Judge Harold Haley in Marin County, California.
She was twice a candidate for Vice President on the Communist Party USA ticket during the 1980s. [...]
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Hồ Chí Minh 胡志明 (Vietnamese pronunciation: [hô cǐ miɲ] ; 19 May 1890 – 2 September 1969), born Nguyễn Sinh Cung and also known as Nguyễn Ái Quốc, was a Vietnamese Marxist-Leninist revolutionary leader who was prime minister (1945–1955) and president (1945–1969) of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). He was a key figure in the foundation of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945, as well as the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the Viet Cong (NLF) during the Vietnam War.
He led the Việt Minh independence movement from 1941 onward, establishing the communist-governed Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945 and defeating the French Union in 1954 at Điện Biên Phủ. He officially stepped down from power in 1955 due to health problems, but remained a highly visible figurehead and inspiration for Vietnamese fighting for his cause — a united, independent Vietnam — until his death. Saigon, the capital of Republic of Vietnam, after the war, was renamed Hồ Chí Minh City in his honor. [...]
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Olga Bancic (born Golda Bancic), also known under her French nom de guerre Pierrette (May 10, 1912–May 10, 1944), was a Jewish Romanian communist, known for her role in the French Resistance during World War II. A member of the FTP-MOI and the Manouchian Group, she was captured by Nazi German forces in late 1943. She was tried with Missak Manouchian and 21 others in February 1944. While the others were executed immediately after the trial in France, she was transported to Stuttgart, Germany and beheaded in May. [...]
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Haneen Zoabi, also Hanin Zoubi, (, born 23 May 1969), is the first Palestinian woman to be elected to the Israeli legislative body on an Arab party's list. [...]
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Nadezhda Konstantinovna "Nadya" Krupskaya (, scientific transliteration Nadežda Konstantinovna Krupskaja) ( – February 27, 1939) was a Russian Bolshevik revolutionary and politician. She married the Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin in 1898. She was deputy minister (Comissar) of Education in 1929–1939, Doctor of Education. [...]
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Olga Benário Prestes (February 12, 1908 – April 23, 1942) was a German-Brazilian communist militant.
She was born in Munich as Olga Gutmann Benário, to a Jewish family. Her father, Leo Benário, was a Social-Democrat lawyer, and her mother, Eugenie (Gutmann), was a member of Bavarian high-society. In 1923, aged fifteen, she joined the Communist Youth International and in 1928 helped organize her lover and comrade Otto Braun's escape from Moabit prison. She went to Czechoslovakia and from there, reunited with Braun, to Moscow, where Benário attended the Lenin-School of the Comintern and then worked as an instructor of the Communist Youth International, in the Soviet Union and in France and Great Britain, where she participated in coordinating anti-fascist activities. She parted from Otto Braun in 1931.
After her stay in Britain, where she was briefly arrested, Olga attended a course in the Zhukovsky Military Academy, something that led her to be charged in rightist histories with being an agent of Soviet military intelligence. Be as it is, due to her military training, in 1934 she was tasked with helping the return to Brazil of Luís Carlos Prestes, to whom she was assigned as a bodyguard. In order to accomplish this mission, false papers were created stating that they were a Portuguese married couple. By the time they arrived at Rio de Janeiro in 1935, this cover had become a reality, as the couple had fallen in love. After a failed insurrection in November 1935, Benário and her husband went into hiding, and after barely escaping a police raid at their bunk in Ipanema, they were both eventually arrested in January 1936, during the harsh anti-communist campaign declared after Getúlio Vargas had proclaimed martial law and was already plotting the 1937 coup that would eventually lead to the institution of the fascist-like Estado Novo régime.
Pregnant and separated from Prestes, Benário clung to her alias, only to have her real identity disclosed by Brazilian diplomacy, working hand-in-hand with the Gestapo. Her lawyers' attempted at avoiding extradiction by means of an habeas corpus at the Brazilian Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal), based on her pregnancy, that would have left a newborn Brazilian national in the power of a foreign government. As Brazilian law forbids the extradiction of nationals, Olga's lawyers expected to win time until Olga gave birth on Brazilian soil to an ipso facto Brazilian citizen - irrespective of the child's paternity, which remained legally doubtful in the absence of evidence for Olga's and Prestes' actual wedding - something that would have rendered extradiction quite unlikely. The plea, however, was speedily quashed, the rapporteur-justice alleging that habeas corpus was superseded by martial law and that Olga's deportation was justified as "an alien noxious to public order". She was then, despite an international campaign, taken back to Germany in September 1936, the commander of the German liner that took her having cancelled scheduled stops in non-German European ports, therefore foiling communist attempts at rescuing her. On arrival, she was put in prison, where she gave birth to a daughter, Anita Leocádia. The child was subsequently released into the care of her grandmother, Leocádia Prestes.
Olga, however, was eventually sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp and from there to an experimental extermination camp set up at an old psychiatric hospital in Bernburg in 1942, where she was gassed (see: Action T4).
As Vargas joined the United Nations and Brazil entered World War II against the Axis, Luís Carlos Prestes, the father of Anita Leocádia and former partner of Olga Benário, eventually struck a political partnership with him according to Popular Front Communist policies of the time: Prestes argued that, by declaring himself against Vargas' immediate resignation, he wanted to take a stand against "the decrepit remains of reaction". [...]
