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Nazi Town, USA | Full Documentary | AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | PBS

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The Tenement Museum celebrates the enduring stories that define and strengthen what it means to be American.
A hidden gem of New York City, our two historic tenement buildings offer visitors a chance to explore the historically recreated homes of immigrant, migrant, and refugee families who lived in city tenements between the 1860s and the 1980s through interactive guided building tours, as well as walking tours of the iconic Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan.

Check out what's happening at the Tenement Museum! Join us for this season's holiday virtual tours and events.

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Our new family story explores the lives of Joseph and Rachel Moore, a young Black couple starting anew in a post-Civil War New York City.

Launching Christmas week.

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Get to know the city by visiting historical sites and learning about the people and neighborhoods of the Lower East Side through our walking tours. Tours are available for both individual ticket holders or private groups.

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Host a private in-person or virtual experience with us! Your guests will be guided by expert educators through the recreated spaces of our historic tenement buildings and the lives of the families who lived there.

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Immigration Museum NYC | Tenement Museum

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The Tenement Museum shares stories of the immigrant and migrant experience through guided tours of two historic tenement buildings in NYC.

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‘The camera is my weapon of choice’: Gordon Parks’ era-defining shots of segregation – and those who defied it

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The visionary photographer captured the ugliness of racism in America, as well as the strength and dignity of those who opposed it – from cleaners in the corridors of power to Martin Luther King Jr proclaiming his dream

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The WW1 Christmas Truce: ‘The war, for that moment, came to a standstill’

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In 1914, in a poignant moment of shared humanity, British and German troops entered into a spontaneous ceasefire over the Christmas period.

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#342 Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny w/ Jeff Bieber

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We shall satirise him on the beaches… Churchill through the eyes of cartoonists – in pictures

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Depictions of the British leader are celebrated in a new show at the Imperial War Museum in London

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How ‘plucky’ heroines of 1914-18 conflict seized chance to advance women’s freedoms

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In this episode Dan Snow is joined by Chris Wilson, Director of Experience Design at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Chris specialises in the Civil Rights Movement and has written about the intersection of non-violence with the self defence mentality of that time.

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‎Dan Snow's History Hit: The Civil Rights Movement su Apple Podcasts

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In this episode Dan Snow is joined by Chris Wilson, Director of Experience Design at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Chris specialises in the Civil Rights Movement and has written about the intersection of non-violence with the self defence mentality of that time. Subscribe...

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The 10 Key Causes of the Second World War

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4th world conference on women, 1995 Beijing 

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Co-Chair Indigenous Womens Network, Program Director of the Environmental Program at the Seventh Generation Fund, at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, Beijing, China, August 31 1995.

I am from the Mississippi Band of Anishinabeg of the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, one of approximately 250,00 Anishinabeg people who inhabit the great lakes region of the North American continent. Aniin indinawaymugnitok. Me gweich Chi-iwewag, Megwetch Ogitchi taikwewag. Nindizhinikaz, Beenaysayikwe, Makwa nin dodaem. Megwetch indinawaymugunitok.

I am greeting you in my language and thanking you, my sisters for the honor of speaking with you today about the challenges facing women as we approach the 21st century.

A primary and central challenge impacting women as we approach the 21st century will be the distance we collectively as women and societies have artificially placed ourselves from our Mother the Earth, and the inherent environmental, social, health and psychological consequences of colonialism, and subsequently rapid industrialization on our bodies, and our nations. As a centerpiece of this problem is the increasing lack of control we have over ourselves, and our long term security. This situation must be rectified through the laws of international institutions, such as the United Nations, but as well, the policies, laws and practices of our nations, our communities, our states, and ourselves.

The situation of Indigenous women, as a part of Indigenous peoples, we believe is a magnified version of the critical juncture we find ourselves in as peoples, an the problems facing all women and our future generations as we struggle for a better world. Security, militarism, the globalization of the economy, the further marginalization of women, increasing intolerance and the forced commodification and homogenization of culture through the media.

The Earth is our Mother. From her we get our life, and our life, and our ability to live. It is our responsibility to care for our mother, and in caring for our Mother, we care for ourselves. Women, all females, are the manifestation of Mother Earth in human form. We are her daughters and in my cultural instructions: Minobimaatisiiwin. We are to care for her. I am taught to live in respect for Mother Earth. In Indigenous societies, we are told that Natural Law is the highest law, higher than the law made by nations, states, municipalities and the World Bank. That one would do well to live in accordance with Natural Law. With those of our Mother. And in respect for our Mother Earth of our relations -- indinawaymuguni took.

One hundred years ago, one of our Great Leaders -- Chief Seattle stated, "What befalls the Earth, befalls the People of the Earth." And that is the reality of today, and the situation of the status of women, and the status of Indigenous women and Indigenous peoples.

While I am from one nation of Indigenous peoples, there are millions of Indigenous people worldwide. An estimated 500 million people are in the world today. We are in the Cordillera, the Maori of New Zealand, we are in East Timor, we are the Wara Wara of Australia, the Lakota, the Tibetans, the peoples of Hawai'i, New Caledonia and many other nations of Indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples. We are not populations, not minority groups, we are peoples. We are nations of peoples. Under international law we meet the criteria of nation states, having a common economic system, language, territory, history, culture and governing institutions. Despite this fact, Indigenous Nations are not allowed to participate at the United Nations.

Nations of Indigenous people are not, by and large, represented at the United Nations. Most decisions today are made by the 180 or so member states to the United Nations. Those states, by and large, have been in existence for only 200 years or less, while most Nations of Indigenous peoples, with few exceptions, have been in existence for thousands of years. Ironically, there would likely be little argument in this room, that most decisions made in the world today are actually made by some of the 47 transnational corporations and their international financiers whose annual income is larger than the gross national product for many countries of the world.

This is a centerpiece of the problem. Decision-making is not made by those who are affected by those decisions, people who live on the land, but corporations, with an interest which is entirely different than that of the land, and the people, or the women of the land. This brings forth a fundamental question: What gives these corporations like CONOCO, SHELL, EXXON, DIASHAWA, ITT, RIO TINTO ZINC,and the WORLD BANK, a right which supersedes or is superior to my human right to live on my land, or that of my family, my community, my nation, our nations, and to us as women? What law gives that right to them? Not any law of the Creator, or of Mother Earth. Is that right contained within their wealth? Is that right contained within their wealth, that which is historically acquired immorally, unethically, through colonialism, imperialism, and paid for with the lives of millions of people, or species of plants and entire ecosystems? They should have no such right, that right of self-determination, and to determine our destiny, and that of our future generations.

The origins of this problem lie with the predator-prey relationship industrial society has developed with the Earth, and subsequently, the people of the Earth. This same relationship exists vis a vis women. We, collectively find that we are often in the role of the prey, to a predator society, whether for sexual discrimination, exploitation, sterilization, absence of control over our bodies, or being the subjects of repressive laws and legislation in which we have no voice. This occurs not only on an individual level, but, equally, and more significantly on a societal level. It is also critical to point out at this time that most matrilineal societies, societies in which governance and decision-making are largely controlled by women, have been obliterated from the face of the Earth by colonialism, and subsequently industrialism. The only matrilineal societies which exist in the world today are those of Indigenous nations. We are the remaining matriliineal societies. Yet we also face obliteration.

On a worldwide scale and in North America, Indigenous societies historically, and today, remain in a predator-prey relationship with industrial society, and prior to that colonialism and imperialism. We are the peoples with the land -- land and natural resources required for someone else's development program and the amassing of wealth. The wealth of the United States, that nation which today determines much of world policy, easily expropriated from our lands. Similarly the wealth of Indigenous peoples of South Africa, Central, South American countries, and Asia was taken for the industrial development of Europe, and later for settler states which came to occupy those lands. That relationship between development and underdevelopment adversely affected the status of our Indigenous societies, and the status of Indigenous women.

Eduardo Galeano, the Latin American writer and scholar has said.

In the colonial to neocolonial alchemy, gold changes to scrap metal and food to poison, we have become painfully aware of the mortality of wealth which nature bestows and imperialism appropriates.

Today, on a worldwide scale, we remain in the same situation as one hundred years ago, only with less land, and fewer people. Today, on a worldwide scale, 50 million indigenous peoples live in the world's rainforests, a million indigenous peoples are slated for relocated for dam projects in the next decade (thanks to the World Bank, from the Narmada Project in India, to the Three Gorges Dam Project, here in China, to the Jasmes Bay Hydro Electric Project in northern Canada).

Almost all atomic weapons which have been detonated in the world are also detonated on the lands or waters of Indigenous people. This situation is mimicked in the North American context. Today, over 50% of our remaining lands are forested, and both Canada and the United States continue aggressive clearcutting policies on our land. Over two thirds of the uranium resources in the United States, and similar figures for Canada are on Indigenous lands, as is one third of all low-sulphur coal resources. We have huge oil reserves on our reservations, and we have the dubious honor of being the most highly bombed nation in the world, in this case, the Western Shoshone Nation, on which over 650 atomic weapons have been detonated. We also have two separate accelerated proposals to dump nuclear waste in our reservation lands, and similarly over 100 separate proposals to dump toxic waste on our reservation lands.

We understand clearly the relationship between development for someone else, and our own underdevelopment. We also understand clearly the relationship between the environmental impacts of types of development on our lands, and the environmental and subsequent health impacts of in our bodies as women. That is the cause of the problems.

We also understand clearly, that the analysis of North versus South is an erroneous analysis. There is, from our perspective not a problem of the North dictating the economic policies of the South, and subsequently consuming the South. Instead, there is a problem of the Middle Consuming Both the North and the South. That is our situation. Let me explain.

The rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, is one acre every nine seconds. Incidentally, the rate of extinction of Indigenous peoples in the Amazon is one nation of Indigenous peoples per year. The rate of deforestation of the boreal forest of Canada is One Acre Every Twelve Seconds. Siberia, thanks to American corporations like Weyerhauser, is not far behind, In all cases, indigenous peoples are endangered. There is frankly no difference between the impact in the North and the South. Uranium mining has devastated a number of Indigenous communities in North America.

Uranium mining in northern Canada has left over 120 million tons of radioactive waste. This amount represents enough material to cover the Trans-Canada Highway two meters deep across the Country. Present production of uranium waste from Saskatchewan alone occurs at the rate of over one million tons annually. Since 1975, hospitalization for cancer, birth defects and circulatory illnesses in that area have increased dramatically -- between 123 and 600 percent in that region. In other areas impacted by uranium mining, cancers and birth defects have increased to, in some cases, eight times the national average. The subsequent increases in radiation exposure to both the local and to the larger north American population are also evidenced in broader incidences of cancer, such as breast cancer in North American women, which is significantly in the rise. There is no a distinction in this problem caused by radiation, whether is is in the Dine of northern Canada, the Laguna Pueblo people of New Mexico, or the people of Namibia.

The rapid increase in dioxin, organichlorides, and PCBs (polychlorinated byphenots) chemicals in the world, as a result of industrialization, has a devastating impact on Indigenous peoples, Indigenous women, and other women. Each year, the world's paper industry discharges from 600 to 3200 grams of dioxin equivalents into water, sludge and paper products according to United States Environmental Protection agency statistics. This quantity is equal to the amount which would cause 58,000 to 294,000 cases of cancer every year, based on the Environmental Protection Agency's estimate of dioxin's carcinogenicity. According to a number of recent studies, this has significantly increased the risk of breast cancer in women. Similarly, heavy metals and PCBs contamination of Inuit women of the Hudson Bay region of the Arctic indicates that they have the highest levels of breast milk contamination in the world. In a 1988 study, Inuit women were found to have contamination levels up to 28 times higher than the average of women in Quebec, and ten times higher than that considered "safe" by the government.

It is also of great concern to our women, and our peoples, that polar bears in that region of the Arctic have such a high level of contamination from PCBs That they may be facing total sterility, and forced into extinction by early in the next century. As peoples who consider the Bears to be our relatives, we are concerned also, significantly about ability to reproduce, as a consequence of this level of bio-accumulation of toxins. We find that or communities, like those of our relatives, the Bears, are in fact, in danger of extinction.

Consequently, it is clear to us that the problems also found in the south, like the export of chemicals and bio-accumulation of toxins, are also very much our problems, and the problems clearly manifested in our women. These are problems which emanates from industrial societies mis-treatment and disrespect for our Mother Earth, and subsequently are reflected in the devastation of the collective health and well-being of women.

In summary, I have presented these arguments for a purpose. To illustrate that that these are very common issues for women, not only for Indigenous women, but for all women. What befalls our mother Earth, befalls her daughter -- the women who are the mothers of our nations. Simply stated, if we can no longer nurse our children, if we can no longer bear children, and if our bodies, themselves are wracked with poisons, we will have accomplished little in the way of determining our destiny, or improving our conditions. And, these problems, reflected in our health and well being, are also inherently resulting in a decline of the status of women, and are the result of a long set of historical processes. Processes, which we as women, will need to challenge if we will ultimately be in charge of our own destinies, our own self-determination, and the future of our Earth our Mother.

The reality is that all of these conditions -- those emanating from the military and industrial devastation of our Mother the Earth, and subsequently, our own bodies, and the land on which we live -- are mimicked in social and development policies which affect women. It is our belief, at Indigenous Womens Network, the following:

1. Women should not have to trade their ecosystem for running water, basic housing, health care, and basic human rights.

2. Development projects, whether in the north or in the south, whether financed by the World Bank, or by the coffers of Rio Tinto Zinc and Exxon, often replicate patriarchy and sexism, and by and large cause the destruction of matrilineal governance structure, land tenure, and cause a decline in the status of women. By denying us the basic land on which we live, and the clean food and streams from which to eat, and instead offering us a wage economy, in which privilege is often dictated by class, sex and race, indigenous women are frequently moved from a central role in their societies to the margins and to refugee status in industrial society.

3. The intellectual knowledge systems today often negate or deny the existence and inherent property rights of Indigenous people to our cultural and intellectual knowledge by supplanting our knowledge systems. Industrial knowledge system call us "primitive" while our medical knowledge, plants, and even genetic material are stolen (as in the Human Genome Project) by transnational corporations and international agencies. This situation affects Indigenous women, as a part of our communities. But on a larger scale it has affected most women.

4. Subsequently, our women find that the basic rights to control our bodies are impacted by all of the above through development policies aimed at non-consensual or forced sterilization, medical testing, invasive genetic sampling, and absence of basic facilities and services which would guarantee us the right and ability to control the size of our families safely and willingly. These same development policies often are based on tourism which commodifies our bodies and cultures (the Pacific and Native America are prime examples), and causes the same with women internationally.

Collectively, we must challenge this paradigm. In this international arena, I call on you to support the struggle of Indigenous peoples of the world for recognition, and to recognize that until all peoples have self-determination, no one will truly be free. Free of the predator and free to control our destiny. I ask you to look into the United Nations' International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, PART 1, Article 1, which provides that "All peoples have right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they may freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development."

All peoples, should be constructed to mean, Indigenous peoples have that right to self-determination. And, by virtue of that right, they may freely determine their political status and freely pursue, their economic, social and political development. Accord us the same rights as all other nations of peoples. And through that process, allow us to protect our ecosystems, their inherent biodiversity, human cultural diversity, and those matriarchal governments which remain in the world.

And with the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization (UNPO), we reaffirm that definition of self-determination provided in Article 1 of the International Covenant on Social Economic and Cultural Rights, further recognizing that the right to self-determination belongs equally to women and to men. We believe that the right of all peoples to self-determination cannot be realized while women continue to be marginalized and prevented from becoming full participants in their respective societies. The human rights of women, like the human rights of Indigenous peoples, and our inherent rights to self-determination, are not issues exclusively within the domestic jurisdiction of states. For further discussion of these, please see the international agreements and accords struck by hundreds of Indigenous nations, such as the Karioka document and the Matatua document.

Finally, while we may, here in the commonness of this forum, speak of the common rights of all women, and those fundamental human rights of self-determination, it is incumbent upon me to point out the fundamental inequalities of this situation. So long as the predator continues, so long as the middle -- the temperate countries of the world -- continues to drive an increasing level of consumption, and, frankly continue to export both the technologies and drive for this level of consumption to other countries of the world, there will be no safety for the human rights of women, rights of Indigenous peoples, and to basic protection for the Earth, from which we get our life. Consumption causes the commodification of the sacred, the natural world, cultures, and the commodification of children, and women.

From the United States position, consider the following. The US is the largest energy market in the world. The average American consumes seven times as many wood products per capita as anywhere else in the industrialized world. And overall that country consumes one third of the world's natural resources. By comparison Canada's per capita energy consumption is the highest in the world. Levels of consumption in the industrial world drive destruction of the world's rainforests and the world's boreal forests, drive production of nuclear wastes, production of pcbs, dioxin and other lethal chemicals, which devastate the body of our Mother earth, and our own bodies. Unless we speak and take meaningful action to address the levels of consumption, and subsequently, the exports of these technologies, and levels of consumption to other countries (like the international market for nuclear reactors), we will never have any security for our individual human rights as Indigenous women, and for our security as women.

If we are to seek and struggle for common ground of all women, it is essential to struggle on this issue. It is not that the women of the dominant society in so-called first world countries should have equal pay and equal status, if that pay and status continues to be based on a consumption model which is not only unsustainable, but causes constant violation of the human rights of women and nations elsewhere in the world. It essential to collectively struggle to recover our status as Daughters of the Earth. In that is our strength and the security; not in the predator, but in the security of our Mother, for our future generations. In that we can ensure our security as the Mothers of our Nations.

United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women
Beijing, China
August 31 1995

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The Indigenous Women’s Network, Our Future, Our Responsibility, Winona LaDuke, 8/31/95

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Co-Chair Indigenous Womens Network, Program Director of the Environmental
Program at the Seventh Generation Fund, at the United Nations Fourth World
Conference on Women, Beijing, China, August 31 1995.

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Archbishop Desmond Tutu: tributes paid to ‘a moral giant’ after anti-apartheid hero dies – latest updates

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Archbishop Desmond Tutu: Dalai Lama joins tributes to 'true humanitarian' after anti-apartheid hero dies - as it happened

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Desmond Tutu, the cleric and social activist who was a giant of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, has died aged 90

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Provocative art exhibition opens in Italy amid Chinese embassy protests

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Written by Oscar Holland, CNN Ben Wedeman, CNN Brescia, Italy

At a museum in Brescia, northern Italy, Shanghai-born artist Badiucao is making final adjustments to an exhibition that has enraged Chinese officials.

Images of President Xi Jinping and Winnie the Pooh -- a tongue-in-cheek comparison now widely censored on Chinese social media -- hang alongside a tribute to Wuhan whistleblower Li Wenliang and a depiction of riot police pursuing a protestor. Mock posters for the forthcoming Winter Olympics show a snowboarder sliding across a CCTV camera and a biathlete pointing a rifle towards a blindfolded Uighur prisoner.

Badiucao's provocative new works will be unveiled to the public on Saturday, despite protests from Chinese diplomats. In a letter to Brescia's mayor, the country's embassy in Rome said the artworks are "full of anti-Chinese lies," and that they "distort the facts, spread false information, mislead the understanding of the Italian people and seriously injure the feelings of the Chinese people," according to local newspaper Giornale di Brescia.

For the dissident artist, who has lived in self-imposed exile in Australia since 2009, the spat comes as little surprise.

"It's almost impossible (to) avoid offending the Chinese government these days," he says, showing CNN around the exhibition ahead of its opening. "Anything could be sensitive; anything could be problematic."

Since the embassy lodged its complaint last month, museum officials and local politicians have framed the show -- titled "La Cina (non) è Vicina," or "China is (not) near" -- as a symbol of free speech.

"I have to say, I had to read the letter twice because it surprised me," Brescia's deputy mayor, Laura Castelletti, recounts, calling it "an intrusion on a city's artistic, cultural decision." The request to cancel the show, she adds, has only "attracted more attention."

The Brescia Museum Foundation's president, Francesca Bazoli, meanwhile says that going ahead with the exhibition "was a matter of freedom of artistic expression."

The Chinese embassy in Rome has not responded to CNN's repeated requests for comment.

Ongoing censorship

A thorn in the Chinese Communist Party's side for more than a decade, Badiucao has established a reputation for poking fun at politicians and prodding at sensitive topics, from the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre to the treatment of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo.

Last month, outspoken basketball star Enes Kanter -- who has called out the Chinese government for alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet -- was pictured wearing several pairs of custom sneakers designed by the artist. The shoes, controversially worn on court during various NBA games, carried messages including "Free Tibet" and "Made with Slave Labor."

The once-anonymous Badiucao came to prominence in 2011, when he began posting cartoons about China's handling of Wenzhou high-speed train crash to the microblogging site Sina Weibo. The images were repeatedly censored, and even though he is now an Australian citizen, the country's authorities have clamped down on his work ever since.

In 2018, a planned exhibition of his art in Hong Kong was canceled due to "safety concerns." Organizers attributed the decision to "threats made by the Chinese authorities," and the artist later revealed that members of his family in China had been contacted by officials ahead of the show. Admitting that his cover "had been compromised," he unveiled his identity in 2019 after years of anonymity,

Badiucao says he is regularly harassed -- and occasionally threatened -- online, where he posts a regular stream of searing cartoons to Twitter and Instagram. "It's like a battleground and that's how you can use visual language and internet memes and that's how you can dissolve the authority of censorship," he says.

Given the political and commercial pressures facing his collaborators, the decision to proceed with the show makes Brescia "a role model for the rest of the world," he adds.

"As an artist I have experienced censorship so many times, for so many years and in so many places -- not just in China or Hong Kong, but also in Australia and in many other countries," he says. "I rarely have an opportunity like this, to show (my work at an exhibition), because all the galleries, curators and museums worry that if they showcase my art ... then they're jeopardizing their Chinese market.

"China is very good at using its capital and money to control, manipulate and silence people's criticism -- and this is how it's reflected in our world, the art market."

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badiucao art exhibition opens in brescia

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italy amid chinese embassy protests - cnn

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Provocative art exhibition opens in Italy amid Chinese embassy protests

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Written by Oscar Holland, CNN Ben Wedeman, CNN Brescia, Italy At a museum in Brescia, northern Italy, Shanghai-born artist Badiucao is making final adjustments to an exhibition that has enraged Chinese officials.

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New Zealand’s children will all soon study the country’s brutal history – it’s not before time

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New Zealand’s children will all soon study the country’s brutal history – it’s not before time | Vincent O’Malley

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A more truthful understanding of history is largely dependent on education. A lot is riding on the success of this new curriculum

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Avabai Wadia: The lawyer who became India’s family planning pioneer

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In 1933, a sari-clad teenager made international headlines.

Avabai Wadia, 19, became the first woman from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to pass the bar exam in the United Kingdom. Her success encouraged the Ceylonese government to allow women to study law in the country.

This was not the only time Wadia spurred government policies on women's rights. By the time she died in 2005, she had become a globally respected figure in the family planning movement, combining a lawyer's acumen with a dedication to socially uplifting women.

Wadia was born in 1913 in a progressive Parsi family in Colombo. After qualifying as a lawyer, she worked in both London and Colombo despite omnipresent "masculine prejudice".

She moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) during World War Two and immersed herself in social work, but found her true calling in family planning.

"It seems my life work presented itself to me rather than my consciously searching for it," she wrote in her autobiography, The Light is Ours. "I did not feel it a waste not to carry on with a legal career, for law was a fortifying element in all that I undertook."

When she began working in the field in the late 1940s, family planning was a taboo topic across much of the world.

Aside from stoking opposition from religious conservatives, it also had ugly links with racism and eugenics.

"The first time I heard the words 'birth control', I was revolted," Wadia noted. But she was profoundly affected by a female doctor in Bombay who said that Indian women "oscillated between gestation and lactation until death wound up the sorry tale".

Despite the threat of social ostracism, Wadia plunged into the cause.

In 1949, she helped establish the Family Planning Association of India (FPAI), an organisation she would head for 34 years.

FPAI's work ranged from promoting contraceptive methods to providing fertility services - the latter gave Wadia "a real sense of satisfaction" since she had suffered miscarriages and had no children. It was in large part due to Wadia's efforts that the Indian government became the first in the world to officially promote family planning policies in 1951-52.

Under Wadia, FPAI adopted a decentralised, community-based approach, working with the urban poor and villagers from some of the most impoverished regions of India.

This meant that, quite often, the FPAI did "anything but family planning" - it undertook projects ranging from reforestation to road-building.

Linking family planning with a holistic agenda of education, skill development and health, Wadia and her team employed creative communication techniques such as singing bhajans (devotional songs) with social messaging and organising a family planning exhibition which zipped across the country by train.

FPAI's innovative style of work fostered public confidence and led to marked improvements in development indicators.

For instance, a project which began in the 1970s in Malur in Karnataka, resulted in reduced infant mortality, a significant increase in the average age of marriage, and the doubling of literacy rates. The project evoked such popular support that villagers took over its management after FPAI exited the scene.

Perhaps due to her international upbringing, Wadia brought a global perspective to Indian family planning.

Inspired by the success of South Korean mothers' clubs, which bolstered widespread acceptance of family planning in rural areas, she organised close-knit groups where women could discuss pressing social issues ranging from dowry to female under-representation in politics. At the same time, she became a leading figure in the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), spotlighting the unique challenges faced by India in controlling its ballooning demographics.

Politics further complicated these challenges.

During the Emergency, which was imposed from 1975 to 1977, the Indian government adopted draconian population control measures including forced sterilisation. Wadia condemned this, warning against coercion in family planning programmes and declaring that participation had to be strictly voluntary. Family planning was beginning to show good results but, she lamented, the Emergency "brought the whole programme into disrepute."

In the early 1980s, Wadia faced another formidable challenge as president of the IPPF. She locked horns with the administration of US president Ronald Reagan, which cut funding from the country to any organisation which provided or endorsed abortion services.

Although the IPPF did not officially promote abortion, some of its affiliates provided abortion services in countries where it was legal.

The IPPF refused to cave into US pressure to change this arrangement, resulting in a loss of $17m in funding to its programmes.

Wadia ridiculed the Reaganite notion that free market economics would combat population growth. Anyone who believed that, she averred, "has never been anywhere in the developing word - there are too many of the absolute poor, and you just can't leave it to laissez-faire".

In many ways, Wadia's career is of pressing relevance to contemporary dilemmas in family planning.

In the United States, conservatives have argued that the reversal of abortion rights in Roe v Wade should be followed by reconsideration of rulings on contraceptive access.

Wadia - who was involved in conceptualising India's own abortion law - worried about how abortion could be weaponised in a larger movement against birth control. "Those who try to confuse the public by equating abortion with family planning," she argued, "are trying to destroy human and individual rights."

Today in India, political debates abound about employing disincentives and coercive elements to restrict the sizes of families. Wadia cautioned against such approaches.

"We cannot support disincentives which do not uphold basic human rights," she said in 2000, when Maharashtra state - in a bid to enforce a two-child norm - considered stripping any third-born child of food rations and free primary education. "In practice, anyway, we have found that disincentives don't work."

These events have demonstrated that family planning is intrinsically linked to law and politics. Perhaps it was fortuitous, therefore, that India had a pioneering female lawyer as one of the principal architects of its family planning movement.

Above all, Wadia's career is a reminder that family planning cannot be divorced from overall socioeconomic development.

A few years before Wadia's death, MS Swaminathan - the scientist who led India's Green Revolution, which helped the country achieve food security - paid tribute to this fact.

"More than anybody else," he said, Wadia "knew that if our population policies go wrong, nothing else will have a chance to go right".

Parinaz Madan is a lawyer and Dinyar Patel is a historian.

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Avabai Wadia: The lawyer who became India's family planning pioneer

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In 1933, a sari-clad teenager made international headlines. Avabai Wadia, 19, became the first woman from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to pass the bar exam in the United Kingdom. Her success encouraged the Ceylonese government to allow women to study law in the country.

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Mahatma Gandhi – dying for freedom | DW Documentary

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video: unearthed tapes reveal holocaust architect boast of final solution - cnn video

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Video: Unearthed tapes reveal Holocaust architect boast of Final Solution - CNN Video

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CNN's Hadas Gold reports on recently unearthed recordings of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann, who is heard boasting about the Final Solution, the Nazi program to exterminate European Jews.

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Cancel culture: Have any two words become more weaponised?

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A US president is banned from social media. A long-time national science reporter resigns in disgrace after repeating a racial slur. A school district drops the names of famous Americans from its buildings. A congresswoman is punished for spreading conspiracy theories.

Each one of these episodes has been cited as evidence of "cancel culture" - the idea that zealous activists, mostly on the left, are seeking to suppress disfavoured free expression by permanently shaming and ostracising individuals who have been deemed to have transgressed.

Just last week, Donald Trump's legal team derided his impeachment trial as "constitutional cancel culture". Disney severed ties with actress Gina Carano, who portrays a popular character in its Star Wars series The Mandalorian, reportedly because of inflammatory social media posts on mask-wearing and the US election.

The national media seems to have a steady supply of new sources of righteous outrage for both sides of the cancel culture debate.

The consequences of being "cancelled" include the loss of friends and social connections, the termination of employment or business opportunities, the denial of a platform from which to share their provocative views.

Sometimes the focus of the outrage is a public figure; other times a private citizen whose actions have been captured and disseminated on social media is in the cross-hairs. In either case, the response can be similarly ferocious. "Cancel culture" frequently makes no distinction.

"Those who embrace the idea (if not the precise language) of cancelling seek more than pat apologies and retractions, although it's not always clear whether the goal is to right a specific wrong and redress a larger imbalance of power."

Let's take a closer look at those examples.

Donald Trump's Twitter exile

A survey of the landscape has to start at the top, however, with one of the most powerful people in the world being held to task.

On 9 January, just three days after Donald Trump gave a rally speech to supporters who just hours later stormed the US Capitol, social media company Twitter permanently banned his account from the site.

"Having to take these actions fragment the public conversation," he wrote in a series of tweets. "They divide us. They limit the potential for clarification, redemption and learning. And sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation."

The response from Trump's supporters was quick and furious, however. Trump adviser Jason Miller said that "big tech" was trying to cancel the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020.

If the president of the United States can be cancelled - his backers were saying, both explicitly and implicitly - then what chance do you have of navigating the treacherous waters of modern society?

Although some conservatives characterise the "cancel" movement as an attempt by liberal media to damage high-profile Republicans like Trump, its targets aren't always political figures - or conservatives.

New York Times reporter Donald McNeil had been with the paper for 44 years and taken on a particularly prominent role in 2020 as an expert on the catastrophic global spread of Covid-19. Last Saturday, he announced he was resigning because of what he called his "extraordinarily bad judgement".

During a 2019 trip with teenage students to Peru, he said, he had repeated a racial slur as part of a conversation about whether a 12-year-old should have been suspended from school for using the word.

"Originally, I thought the context in which I used this ugly word could be defended," he wrote. "I now realise that it cannot. It is deeply offensive and hurtful."

Times executive editor Dean Baquet had at first only internally disciplined McNeil for the incident.

But after a pressure from parents of the students on the trip - who alleged McNeil made other comments denigrating black teens - and a letter from other Times staffers calling for McNeil's termination, he said he welcomed the resignation and that the paper does not tolerate racist language "regardless of intent".

"The overarching rule of liberal media circles and liberal politics is that you are free to accuse anyone who deviates from liberal orthodoxy of any kind of bigotry that casually crosses your mind," he wrote. "Just smear them as a racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, etc without the slightest need for evidence - and it will be regarded as completely acceptable."

As is often the case with headline-grabbing controversies like this, there's often more to the story than first reported. It's not black-and-white, and real humans - with all their complex mix of real faults and virtues - are involved. At some point, the details of the controversy become secondary to the debate that emerges from it.

For Greenwald, for instance, the Times episode is simply a new piece of evidence that there are two sets of standards at play - one for people who make controversial speech and those who make accusations.

Earlier this year, a member of Congress was the one whose controversial speech came in the form of accusations. Marjorie Taylor Greene stood charged with trafficking in conspiracy theories - about Democrats, about religious minorities and about events like school shootings and forest fires.

Shortly before Democrats and 11 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to remove Greene from her congressional committee assignments for her past controversial statements, Congressman Jim Jordan took to the airwaves to issue a warning.

"No one is condoning the remarks she has made," Jordan said of Greene's seeming endorsement of violence directed at Democratic leaders and suggestion that high-profile school shootings were staged by anti-gun activists. "That is not the issue. The issue is once this starts, tell me where it ends. Who is next?"

Jordan offered a similar defence during Trump's impeachment vote in January - that the left's attempt to punish conservative politicians for their speech would, inevitably, lead to an environment where average Americans are also at risk.

"The cancel culture doesn't just go after conservatives and Republicans," he said. "It won't just stop there. It'll come for us all. That's what's frightening."

"Is there literally no limit to what a politician can say without consequence?" he asks. "And if the answer is that some limits exist, the question then becomes even more straightforward: why are Jordan and his far-right cohorts convinced that Greene's radicalism didn't go too far?"

At the centre of the debate over "cancel culture" is one of action and consequence. When do words merit punishment? And what form - and permanence - does that punishment take?

The push for accountability - or cancelling - isn't limited to recent words or even to people who lived in the past century. In January, the San Francisco Board of Education voted 6-to-1 to rename 44 of its public schools as a way to "dismantle racism and white-supremacy culture", in the words of board president Gabriela Lopez.

Buildings named after historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Paul Revere, as well as modern ones, like California Senator Diane Feinstein, are designated for rebranding.

"Lincoln isn't going away, but our school district is taking this opportunity to highlight someone else, highlight someone who normally isn't acknowledged but has contributed to the progress of people of colour, or the progress of the community that we're serving in San Francisco," she said.

That hasn't stopped the board's action from generating a firestorm of controversy. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, a Democrat, called the vote ill-timed, given the challenges schools are facing during the coronavirus pandemic

"The possibility that judging past figures by the standards of the present is both untenable and ethically suspect did not, apparently, occur to the committee," he wrote. "Nor did the committee decide that the towering achievements of Lincoln or Washington or Jefferson might just outweigh their shortcomings."

One of the warnings lobbed by those who rail against "cancel culture" is that it will eventually know no boundaries. The living and the dead will all be subject to judgement by the contemporary standards of the day - standards that can change according to political whim.

Free speech and accountability

"The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation," signatories like JK Rowling, Malcolm Gladwell and Noam Chomsky write in the letter. "The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away."

Conservatives have been quick to latch onto the term as a political cudgel to use against liberals whenever they face political adversity.

"This is the left looking to cancel everyone they don't approve of," said Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who cited "cancel culture" as a reason publisher Simon & Schuster terminated his book deal after he supported challenges to Joe Biden's presidential victory. "I will fight this cancel culture with everything I have."

The response from the left, however, has been that there's a difference between cancelling someone and holding them accountable for their actions; that free speech is protected from government interference but its abuse has consequences within society.

Parker Malloy of the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America says that many of the conservative arguments against "cancel culture" are abandoned when the sides are switched and it is liberal words or actions that are found objectionable. She notes Hawley, for instance, celebrated a push to have credit-card companies stop doing business with adult website Pornhub.

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Cancel culture: Have any two words become more weaponised?

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A US president is banned from social media. A long-time national science reporter resigns in disgrace after repeating a racial slur. A school district drops the names of famous Americans from its buildings. A congresswoman is punished for spreading conspiracy theories.

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Why we can’t stop fighting about cancel culture

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Is cancel culture a mob mentality, or a long overdue way of speaking truth to power?

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Badenoch’s empire comments speak to the enduring mentality of colonialism

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n every single country that was ever under British rule, you will find a significant number of people who praise colonialism or claim they would willingly welcome back the British. It's a sort of meme - half joke, half genuine frustration over political or economic instability.

Sometimes these laments are wistful longings for things that never really happened, such as the trains running on time, or lost status from a period when "people knew their place". But they are almost always issued by those who have internalised the logic of empire itself - which is that it was, overall, an improving mission, albeit with a small number of unsavoury excesses.

In messages leaked last week, Conservative MP and equalities minister Kemi Badenoch made these points, familiar to anyone who comes from a former colony. " I don't care about colonialism," she wrote. "They came in and just made a different bunch of winners and losers. There was never any concept of 'rights', so [the] people who lost out were old elites not everyday people."

Idle nostalgia about empire, or indifference to it, can rarely be separated from the sort of worldview that established the empire itself: that there is some inherent natural order to the process of colonisation; might is right. If the British had the more evolved means - both in terms of technology and finance - to dominate a people and commandeer their natural resources, then they also had the right to do so.

The propaganda that then sustained empire, which imbued the "might" with the "right", was the lie that empire was in fact really a civilising mission - a burden on the white man who brought not only Christianity to the heathen but also the order and hierarchy of his more sophisticated society. All the fraught discussions about empire still basically revolve around that coding - one embedded deeply not only in the British psyche but in that of much of the rest of the world, forged as it was in the furnace of colonialism and its monopoly on power for so long.

Empire has not only shaped British attitudes towards the rest of the world; it has shaped, to a large degree, the attitudes of those who have come to this country from the ex-colonies. In west Africa, in particular, the centralisation of power in the Christian church and the colonial administration, away from traditional structures and religions, vested both moral and political power in the coloniser. To become part of the local elite required learning English, adopting Christian values, aligning oneself more and more closely with Britain, maybe even being educated there. In creating this hierarchy, Britain created a centre of gravity, both cultural and political, that still has a powerful draw.

In my native Sudan, colonialism was a relatively gentle and short-lived experience (Sudan's resources were not easily extractable and most of its lands inaccessible). The British underinvested in the country's agriculture and overinvested in creating an army of local soldiers to support its military missions, first in Egypt and later during the second world war. By the time the British left, an entire generation of farmers had left their lands to become underemployed and overpaid soldiers. The result was the creation of a new set of values that fetishised the the anglicised elite and gave urban life a higher social status.

Britain's current culture wars instantly marshal accounts of colonial and postcolonial life into supporting material for either "pro-" or "anti-" empire stances. But what is closer to the truth is that British minorities' views on empire, race and immigration are very much the product of colonialism itself, creating a class of winners and losers (Badenoch wasn't wrong there): the winners being those closest to the source of power and the political establishment.

When combined with the precariousness of the migrant experience, these competitive pressures can sometimes lead to an emphasis on social mobility and status, rather than group solidarity, and produce a sort of dog-eat-dog assimilation into the new society. Older, first-generation British minorities were more likely to vote for Brexit than those born here, and reported feeling anxious about the ease with which eastern European migrants were allowed into the UK.

Any criticism of Badenoch will no doubt be used by the right to show that non-"woke" black people aren't "allowed" to have positive thoughts on empire. But black people both in former colonies and in the UK have long held these views. When we disagree with them, we know we are not arguing against facts, but against the loud echo of empire in a world where the power to define the colonial experience still resides with the colonising force.

Like most other non-democratic regimes, empire thrived through coercion and complicity. This isn't complicated stuff. But so integral is empire to British identity that any attempt to come to grips with it is degraded into a matter of loyalty: whether one is patriotic, "proud" of one's history, or a migrant who doesn't appreciate the freedoms bequeathed by past colonial leaders. In this climate, challenging Badenoch's account of empire becomes an act of treachery.

The rise of a particular type of prominent ethnic-minority Conservative politician has made it even harder to have these conversations. Ministers such as Priti Patel, Sajid Javid and Badenoch all simultaneously decry identity politics while leveraging their own identity to delegitimise others' accounts of Britain's racism.

With such powerful and prominent figures refusing to engage with the reality of the country and its history, we remain stuck: unable to move on from the logic of British rule as anything other than benign and above reproach; unable to understand how it still impacts on our politics, foreign policy and race relations. Badenoch is free not to care about colonialism. But I am not sure she, or any of us, can afford not to.

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Badenoch's empire comments speak to the enduring mentality of colonialism | Nesrine Malik

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n every single country that was ever under British rule, you will find a significant number of people who praise colonialism or claim they would willingly welcome back the British. It's a sort of meme - half joke, half genuine frustration over political or economic instability.

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UNHCR’s seven decades of work with refugees – in pictures

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UNHCR's seven decades of work with refugees - in pictures

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As refugees in the UK mark the 70th anniversary of the signing of the UN refugee convention, we look at the work of the UNHCR around the world since the 1950s

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I Changed Astronomy Forever. He Won the Nobel Prize for It. | 'Almost Famous' by Op-Docs

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‘I was one of the few people able to document it’: shooting the Black Panthers – in pictures

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From bustling Free Huey rallies to private moments smoking with Angela Davis, Stephen Shames’s photographs tell the revolutionary organisation’s incredible story

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Baldwin-Buckley race debate still resonates 55 years on

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from NatGeo

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American women had been fighting for the vote for nearly 70 years when Woodrow Wilson won the presidential election in November 1916. It would be Wilson's second term, and suffragists were disappointed. Wilson first took office in 1913, and one day prior to his Inauguration, they had staged a huge woman suffrage parade of more than 5,000 people marching up Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.

Almost four years had passed, and U.S. women still did not have the vote. Wilson's reelection felt like a major setback, but the suffragists, led by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, decided to turn their grief into action. They met on January 9, 1917, at the new headquarters of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, Cameron House, located just steps from the White House. There they would hear a plan, by Harriot Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Blatch told them: "We have got to bring to the President, day by day, week in, week out, the idea that great numbers of women want to be free, will be free, and want to know what he is going to do about it. We need to have a silent vigil in front of the White House until his inauguration in March."

They listened as Blatch offered a new form of protest. In America pickets had become a common union tactic, and Blatch had used pickets in her Votes for Women campaign with the New York Legislature in 1912, so when she delivered her final plea to the women of Cameron House, they stirred. "Will you not," she asked, "be a 'silent sentinel' of liberty and self-government?"

The first vigils

On January 10, 1917, a dozen or so suffragists bundled themselves into wool coats, hats, and gloves and draped purple, white, and gold sashes across their chests. As they braced for the bitter January chill, they were fortified with Paul's advice: Don't be provoked into a physical or verbal confrontation, don't make eye contact with angry bystanders, stay quiet, and keep your backs to the gate for safety and to make sure the public can read the signs.

The group marched to the White House in single file while Paul stayed behind to manage the protest from headquarters. They arrived outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and took their positions, standing silently and holding their signs, which begged for answers to tired questions: "MR. PRESIDENT, WHAT WILL YOU DO FOR WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE?" and "HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY?" (For Black women, the fight to vote would continue even after the 19th Amendment.)

The sentinels had been in position for only 40 minutes when Woodrow Wilson's car returned to the White House. Smiling broadly but ignoring them, he zipped through the gates. Nonetheless, the president must have been shocked; never before in the history of America had anything like this happened in front of the White House.

Officials were unsure how to handle the situation. Major Raymond W. Pullman, the super-intendent of police, knew the suffragists did not need a permit if they were not advertising anything and that, as of now, there was no violation of the law. The sentinels stood there, peacefully, until early afternoon and would stay until dark. Back at headquarters, Paul informed the press that the pickets would continue this silent protest from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily, except for Sundays until the president's Inauguration. But, she said, the protest was designed to continue until the Susan B. Anthony amendment passed.

The news of this ongoing protest had an immediate effect, overwhelmingly negative, even among suffragists. Carrie Chapman Catt told the Washington Times, "I think the Congressional Union is beginning at the wrong end when it seeks to embarrass the President." The National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage called the picketing "a menace to the life of the president-a silent invitation to the assassin," and said "it is impossible to follow the mental processes of the women who devised the picket idea. As an argument it ranks with the small boy's thrusting out his tongue. As a demonstration of fitness for the vote it is idiotic."

Even close allies were upset by the brazenness of it all. Paul's own mother, familiar with her daughter's single-minded focus and stubbornness, wanted her to call it off. One organizer told Paul to "use your own splendid talents for something besides circus tricks!" Even as a slew of women quit the Congressional Union, Paul refused to adapt or apologize; she was unremitting, responding to her critics with copies of The Suffragist, so they could "learn what we are attempting to do."

Well beyond that first day, the Silent Sentinels persevered. If it was raining, sleeting, or snowing, the protesters adhered to a rotation of two-hour shifts. Their commitment amplified their notoriety while softening the opposition. Even the most hardened anti-suffrage forces felt sorry for these shivering, dripping women. One congressman told a picket that there was "something religious" about the Silent Sentinels. "To me," he said, "it has already become a part of the modern religion of this country." For the Inauguration, the rainy weather in early March matched Wilson's mood as he left the White House for his swearing-in at the Capitol. Nearly a thousand suffragists with raincoats and boots assembled into formation behind a banner bearing these words: "MR. PRESIDENT, HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY?" Behind it, an American flag waved to show that those protesting during the president's Inauguration were patriots, too. (Black men and women were fundamental to the suffrage movement, arguing, "We are all bound up together.")

The rest of the line, making its way to surround 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on Wilson's first official day of his second term-was organized alphabetically with each state represented. As they made their way toward the White House, 5,000 people, most of them Inaugural visitors and many lured by posters advertising the protest, cheered them. The protesters circled the White House four times, each lap representing a year that they had pressed for a federal amendment.

Declarations of war

The suffragists' rapport with the police and the public had grown in the nearly three months of picketing. Having made it through the harshest season, their colorful presence was as welcome as the matching spring landscape. This cordial relationship would change in April 1917 after the United States entered World War I. Many assumed the protesters would do their patriotic duty and hang up their sashes in deference to the war, spending their volunteer time working for the war effort. (Wilson asks Americans to "Do their bit" in National Geographic's April 1917 )

The idea of women being pressed into service, even if it was as a volunteer and carrying other burdens of war, did generate sympathy for suffrage. Within weeks, Michigan, Rhode Island, and Nebraska granted equal voting rights to women. This war, one that Wilson had framed around the intangible ideals of democracy, encouraged Americans to be accountable to these principles as well. If young men were willing to die for liberty on the other side of the ocean, the least Americans could do was grant all of their citizens suffrage.

Things took a turn after a Russian delegation's visit to the White House in June 1917. Lucy Burns and other suffragettes assembled in front of the White House shortly before the meeting with the Russians. They unfurled a 10-foot, hand-stenciled cloth sign, stretched between two wooden posts, addressed to the Russian envoys, telling them that "America is not a democracy. Twenty million American Women are denied the right to vote." To attack the president so directly in front of diplomatic guests was an unprecedented outrage. The situation quickly grew tense.

"Take down that banner or I'm through with woman suffrage for life," one man screamed at Burns. "You are a friend to the enemy, and a disgrace to your country," one woman sneered at the protesters. Men in the crowd ignored police directions to disperse, and destroyed the sign, pushed Burns, and left the women stunned but standing. From across the street, suffragists watched in horror as the men closed around their colleagues. All they could see was the top of the poles and people in straw hats surging this way and then that way. They held their breath as the guards approached to break up the scene. Despite the scuffle, there would be no arrests that day.

Americans were outraged that the women were not hauled off to jail. They told the press and wrote letters to Wilson declaiming what they thought was a double standard: If the pickets had been men, they would have been cuffed for provoking a riot. D.C. police superintendent Pullman conferred with the president and his administration. Going forward, Pullman agreed to find some excuse, however flimsy, to arrest the suffragists "if the thing was attempted again."

The threat of arrests did not scare Paul. She told the press that she planned to repeat the Russian protest the next day. "We have ordered another banner with the same wording and we intend to show it in the same place," she said. Sure enough, within 24 hours, the Silent Sentinels were back at their posts.

Behind bars

Planning her next steps, Alice Paul publicly committed to continue despite outbreaks of violence. On June 21, 1917, Lucy Burns and Katharine Morey carried a banner to the White House gate, but a group of boys grabbed their sign and tore it apart. The police did nothing. More sentinels emerged with banners, and the conflict escalated. Police called for backup and did their best to prevent a riot from breaking out.

Inside the White House, the administration wanted to end the protests without giving the women more publicity. They tried to negotiate with Paul, but she was unmoved. The protests would continue. Superintendent Pullman knew he had no choice: He told Paul, "If anybody goes out again on the picket line, it will be our duty to arrest them."

On June 22 outside the White House, three suffragists held up a sign containing Wilson's own words from his war message to Congress on April 2: "WE SHALL FIGHT FOR THE THINGS WHICH WE HAVE ALWAYS CARRIED NEAREST OUR HEARTS-FOR DEMOCRACY, FOR THE RIGHT OF THOSE WHO SUBMIT TO AUTHORITY TO HAVE A VOICE IN THEIR GOVERNMENT."

The officers arrested the women, who were charged with blocking traffic and unlawful assemblage. Rather than send the women to prison and risk turning them into martyrs, Pullman released them on personal recognizance. Despite the arrests, Paul announced that they would never stop picketing and more arrests followed. (The 1918 Spanish flu nearly derailed the women's suffrage movement.)

Following a series of protests in early July. Judge Alexander Mullowney decided to switch tactics: "I hate to do it, but under the law there is nothing else for me to do. I can fine you $25 but that's nothing. I know it's not going to make you quit marching in front of the White House." He offered fines or a three-day sentence in jail. The sentinels chose jail, and the protests continued.

Sixteen more women were later arrested for protesting and booked for "unlawful assembly." The defendants included Alison Hopkins, whose husband, John, had helped finance Wilson's campaign. On Monday, Judge Mullowney issued a new ruling: "Sixty days in the [Occoquan] Workhouse in default of a $25 fine," the judge said. Again, the women chose jail.

The sentinels' sentence would be served in a Virginia workhouse an hour away from Washington, D.C. Harsh living conditions, inedible food, and limited contact with the outside world awaited them there. After John Hopkins visited his wife Alice at the workhouse, he grew angry and confronted the president.

Hopkins had worked with Woodrow Wilson for years, joined in the common cause of progressive politics. The two were now at loggerheads. "In view of the seriousness of the present situation," Hopkins said, "the only solution lay in the immediate passage of the Susan B. Anthony Amendment." He told the president there were enough votes in both chambers for it to pass. Wilson, turning defensive, said he would take his own poll to find out if that was true.

Hopkins was not the only one objecting to the suffragists' prison term. Telegrams poured into the White House as well as the National Woman's Party (the successor to the Congressional Union) headquarters from those upset by the harsh punishment these women had received. Wilson struggled over what to do and decided a pardon was the best course of action. When the sentinels at Occoquan learned of the pardon, they refused to accept it. They had committed no crime, so there was no reason for a pardon.

Their attorney, Dudley Field Malone (who had resigned from Wilson's administration for its failure to support woman suffrage), explained that while they could not be forced to accept the pardon, the attorney general would kick them out of the workhouse anyway and the public would interpret the outcome as if they had taken the president's offer. That's exactly what happened.

After the women's release, the press was eager for a statement. John Hopkins put his conversation with the president on the public record, saying Wilson predicted Congress would pass the Susan B. Anthony amendment in the current session if they had the chance to vote on it. Paul told reporters that the picketing would continue as "picketing has accomplished just exactly what we wanted it to accomplish, and picketing is going to end in forcing the issue."

Days and nights of terror

The Silent Sentinels continued protesting into August, creating more and more inflammatory signs. As the protests continued, the women were struck, knocked down, and dragged by rioters. Similar scenes played out day after day with more pickets, more attacks, and finally, more arrests. On August 17, six women were sentenced to month-long confinements at the workhouse.

Events throughout September led to a new intensity in the campaign. By the end of September, two dozen suffragists were confined to Occoquan Workhouse. Alice Paul was frank with potential protesters: Be prepared to go to prison for up to six months. On October 20, 1917, Paul herself was arrested with several others in front of the White House and later sentenced to seven months in the district jail. As Paul was led out of the courtroom, she told reporters: "I am being imprisoned . . . because I pointed out to President Wilson the fact that he was obstructing the cause of democracy and justice at home, while Americans fight for it abroad." She said she expected to be treated a sa political prisoner. (Not just the United States: Women around the world have had to fight to vote.)

In early November Paul began a hunger strike. Three days in, prison physicians examined Paul and tried to change her mind, but she remained steadfast. The doctors decided to force-feed her. Paul was taken to the psychiatric ward and strapped down. A tube was stuck up her nose and milk and raw eggs were funneled down her throat. The ghastly ritual occurred three times that day.

Although news reports said Paul took the nourishment without protest, she smuggled out her own account. On November 10, 41 women protested her treatment outside the White House; 31 were arrested, including Lucy Burns, who had been released from prison only a few days before. The pickets were sentenced to varying terms at Occoquan Workhouse; Burns received the harshest penalty: six months.

Malone, with so many legal issues swirling, made Paul his top priority. He was granted a court order to see her. When he arrived, he barked at the staff to take her out of the psychiatric ward. Paul, faint and feeble, was carried on a stretcher to the hospital section. There, the forced feedings continued for the next two weeks.

The pickets most recently arrested, including Burns, arrived at Occoquan on November 15. The suffragists demanded to be treated as political prisoners but were seized and tossed into a cell. One, 55-year-old Dora Lewis, hit her head on the wall and crumpled to the floor, motionless. Lewis regained consciousness. Burns, described as "worth her weight in wild cats," fought two guards the whole way to the cell.

When Burns began calling the roll to see if everyone was okay, the guards ordered silence and threatened to put them in straitjackets. Burns continued to speak, so they handcuffed her wrists above her head to the cell door and threatened to put a gag buckle over her mouth. Cellmate Alice Cosu had a heart attack and vomited throughout the night. Another woman from their group was locked up with the male prisoners, who were told that they could do whatever they wanted with her. The next day, 16 of these women went on a hunger strike. The superintendent, targeting the ringleaders, ordered the force-feeding of Burns and Lewis first.

Matthew O'Brien, a lawyer working with Malone, got a court order allowing him into the workhouse to check on his clients. There he found Burns in her dark cell, wrapped in a blanket as her clothes had been violently stripped from her. It was all he needed to argue that the suffragists were being subjected to cruel and unusual punishment. At a hearing a week later in U.S. district court, with Burns and Lewis in the room but too weak to testify, Judge Edmund Waddill ordered all suffragists transferred from Occoquan to the district jail, where Paul had been moved.

Wilson's political reputation was taking a big hit, according to the torrent of letters and telegrams flowing toward the White House. Some writers made plain to Wilson that Democrats would lose the next election over the maltreatment issue. A week after the Waddill hearing, all the women were granted release. By November 28, Paul, Burns, and 20 other protesters were freed. Now it was Wilson who was handcuffed in a difficult position.

On January 9, 1918, Woodrow Wilson announced his support for the Susan B. Anthony amendment as the House stood poised to vote on it. Wilson said that his personal position had not changed-leaving the states to decide would be the "proper and orderly way of dealing with the question." But, he said, America, and the world, had changed. There was growing public sentiment in favor of votes for women, and the nation's stature as a beacon of democracy had grown.

When they heard the news, the suffragists were elated. Paul, mostly recovered from her last hunger strike, was also upbeat. In a statement to the press, she said, "It is difficult to express our gratification at the President's stand. For four years we have striven to secure his support for the national amendment, for we knew that this, and perhaps it alone, would ensure us success." ( Now nearly a century old, will the Equal Rights Amendment ever be ratified?)

The Susan B. Anthony amendment would not pass in Congress until 1919. Suffragists would spend much of the following year focusing their efforts on ratification in the states. The determination and persistence of the Silent Sentinels turned President Wilson from foe to ally, and would bring the final push for woman suffrage across the finish line in August 1920, when the 19th Amendment became the law of the land in the United States.

Journalist Tina Cassidy writes about women and culture and is the author ofBirth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born; andJackie After O.

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Arrested and tortured, the Silent Sentinels suffered for suffrage

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American women had been fighting for the vote for nearly 70 years when Woodrow Wilson won the presidential election in November 1916. It would be Wilson's second term, and suffragists were disappointed. Wilson first took office in 1913, and one day prior to his Inauguration, they had staged a huge woman suffrage parade of more than 5,000 people marching up Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C.

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The US suffragette movement tried to leave out Black women. They showed up anyway

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Published in collaboration with PBS for the documentary The American Experience: The Vote which explores the arduous battle that finally led to the passage of the 19th amendment.
In late winter 1913, suffragette Alice Paul and her committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) were at work planning a women's parade that aimed to upstage Woodrow Wilson's inauguration with a many-thousand-strong phalanx of women protesting for the right to vote. Paul was poised to pull off an unparalleled act of political theater on the nation's biggest stage, Washington DC's Pennsylvania Avenue. Her vision was clouded, however, as Paul contemplated what it would mean to have Black women among the marchers.

By 1913, racism was tightly stitched into the fabric of the movement for women's votes. As far back as the 1860s, suffrage leaders had traded in anti-Black thinking. They had even linked arms with openly racist allies who, for example, in 1867 Kansas looked to trade the defeat of Black enfranchisement for the elevation of white women to the polls. The movement continued into the 20th century by way of a southern strategy that aimed to win support for a women's suffrage amendment by remaining hands-off when it came to Jim Crow, assenting to the ongoing disenfranchisement of Black women in the south. Paul built her radical wing of the movement on this troubled foundation.

Initially, Paul had reached out to invite Black women in Washington DC - especially the members of Howard University's Delta Sigma Theta sorority - to take part in the parade. Facing criticism and the threat that white southern women might pull out, Paul recalculated, and drew a line: the parade was to be "a purely suffrage demonstration entirely uncomplicated by any other problems such as racial ones". Paul imagined she knew best: "Our winning suffrage will be the thing that will most raise the state of Negro women."

Had she asked, Black suffragists would have advised Paul that there was nowhere for her committee to hide. Racism and sexism were bound together in the fight for women's votes. When it came to suffrage politics, there was nothing pure about them.

On the morning of 3 March 1913, Black women rose early and joined the throng that assembled for the parade. Ida B Wells, the Chicago-based anti-lynching and women's suffrage activist, was at the center of a true dust-up when on the eve of the parade she was advised to march with other Black women rather than with her Illinois state delegation. It was a painful rebuke, but Wells refused defeat and ultimately marched with her state's representatives, flanked by white women allied with Chicago's Alpha Suffrage Club.

Mary Church Terrell was a former head of the National Association of Colored Women and a Washington DC powerbroker who traveled home from New York to march. Terrell had always kept one foot in suffrage association politics and knew its shortcomings well. Neither Wells nor Terrell frequented Paul's circles but they appeared on that day to make plain that Black women would never cede the question of their voting rights to others.

Wells and Terrell were not alone. Most of the two dozen or so Black women marchers were local residents of Washington, including the sculptor May Howard Jackson; the director of the Washington Conservatory of Music, Harriet Gibbs Marshall; pharmacists and drugstore owners Dr Amanda Gray and Dr Eva Ross; and a contingent of so-called college women that included Oberlin College graduate and advocate for early childhood education Anna Evans Murray, M Street school French instructor Georgia Simpson and Smith College graduate Harriet Shadd. Howard University students joined the procession decked out in caps and gowns.

What had been Black women's experience of the parade? Carrie Clifford, the poet and activist, boasted to readers of the NAACP's magazine, the Crisis, that Black women should be "congratulated" for "taking part" and demonstrating the "courage of their convictions". They had not been encouraged to participate but once there they received "courteous treatment on the part of the marshals" and "no worse treatment from bystanders than was accorded white women".

In the same issue, editor WEB DuBois detailed the strife that had surrounded Black women's attempts to join the parade as equals and, like Clifford, he concluded that ultimately they had marched "according to their state and occupation without let or hindrance". Editors at the Chicago Defender were not so understanding and insisted that Paul and her committee owed Black women marchers a "public apology" for "drawing the color line".

Perhaps the best measure of how the 1913 parade mattered was what Black women did next. In the months that followed, they did not look to collaborate with Paul's NAWSA. Nor did they pursue their grievances. Instead, Black women returned to their ongoing work, commingling their commitment to the vote with concerns about racial justice. Carrie Clifford not only wrote for the Crisis, she raised funds to support the magazine, chairing a benefit along with suffragists Addie Hunton and Terrell. Terrell returned to the lecture circuit in Brooklyn, where she urged audiences to support anti-lynching legislation. Wells headed home to Chicago, where she continued to build the influence of the Alpha Suffrage Club.

They were busy that spring, women's suffrage was on the agenda in Illinois's capital. But so was a cluster of Jim Crow laws that proposed to segregate transportation, demote Black train workers, and bar interracial marriage. Whatever disappointments Black women felt after the March 1913 parade, they quickly receded. There was too much work to do.

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The US suffragette movement tried to leave out Black women. They showed up anyway

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Published in collaboration with PBS for the documentary The American Experience: The Vote which explores the arduous battle that finally led to the passage of the 19th amendment. In late winter 1913, suffragette Alice Paul and her committee of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) were at work planning a women's parade that aimed to upstage Woodrow Wilson's inauguration with a many-thousand-strong phalanx of women protesting for the right to vote.

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Wright Morris was known for his novels, yet the pictures he took while travelling through the midwest capture a vanishing way of life in Depression-era America

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FW de Klerk and the South African row over apartheid and crimes against humanity

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FW de Klerk, the last white man to lead South Africa, has apologised for "quibbling" over whether or not apartheid was a "crime against humanity", but the row has revealed old wounds, writes the BBC's Africa correspondent Andrew Harding.

The past is still raw in South Africa.

Mr de Klerk's apology was an attempt to calm a fortnight of increasingly furious debate after he made comments that many interpreted as an attempt to rewrite history and play down the seriousness of apartheid.

In a statement issued through the De Klerk Foundation, the 83-year-old expressed regret for "the confusion, anger, and hurt" his remarks might have caused.

Two weeks ago, in an interview with the national broadcaster, SABC, the former president said he was "not fully agreeing" with the presenter who asked him to confirm that apartheid, the legalised discrimination against non-white people, was a crime against humanity.

Mr de Klerk went on to acknowledge that it was a crime, and to apologise profusely for his role in it, but he insisted that apartheid was responsible for relatively few deaths and that it should not be put in the same category of "genocide" or "crimes against humanity".

At first, South Africa seemed to shrug.

Mr de Klerk, who shared the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Nelson Mandela after helping to negotiate an end to apartheid, is a peripheral figure in the country these days, and his potentially polarising comments seem to pass unnoticed.

But that changed last Thursday when, as a former head of state, he attended parliament for President Cyril Ramaphosa's annual State of the Nation Address.

Members of the opposition Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party interrupted the president and demanded that Mr de Klerk be removed from the chamber.

"We have a murderer in the House," said EFF leader Julius Malema. He said that Mr de Klerk was an "apartheid apologist... with blood on his hands".

An hour-and-a-half later, President Ramaphosa was finally able to begin his speech, and the EFF's aggressive delaying tactics were widely condemned - by the governing ANC and other opposition parties - as an outrageous, shameful stunt.
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Once again, it seemed as if Mr de Klerk's own comments had been more or less sidelined.

But not for long.

In the days that followed, the backlash against Mr de Klerk gathered a furious momentum across the country, opening wounds and provoking deep anger. That anger was fuelled - in part - by social media, and by rival political agendas, but also by Mr de Klerk's blunt attempts to defend his views.

His own charitable foundation initially issued a defiant statement explaining why it believed Mr de Klerk was right to insist that apartheid was not a crime against humanity.

It argued that describing it as such was simply "an agitprop project initiated by the Soviet Union", and that it was "simplistic" to portray South Africa's painful history in a "black/white, good/evil framework".

Mr de Klerk, his foundation insisted, was an innocent victim of the EFF's "bully boy tactics... who whip up race hatred and call their leaders 'Führer, or Duce'".

In a BBC interview last Friday, Mr de Klerk said his comment about crimes against humanity was "in line with the (UN) Security Council at that time".

This was a reference to the fact that, although the UN General Assembly declared that apartheid was a crime against humanity, the US and the UK (both permanent members of the Security Council) voted against approving this description.

But this cannot obscure the UN's repeated condemnation of apartheid and imposition of wide-ranging sanctions against South Africa. Apartheid was also included as a "crime against humanity" in the Rome Statute that set up the International Criminal Court.

'Shock' at de Klerk's ignorance

"It is unarguable and hopeless to claim today that apartheid is not, and has never been, a 'crime against humanity,'" said Philippe Sands, QC, a professor and expert on international law.

To push home that same point, another former South African President, Thabo Mbeki, announced that he would send Mr de Klerk a copy of the relevant UN convention, having been shocked to learn from the man himself that his predecessor "actually did not know" about its existence.

Some voices - particularly, but not exclusively, those of white South Africans - responded to Mr de Klerk's comments by calling for people to "move on" and to focus on more urgent priorities like fighting corruption, tackling poverty, and reviving a stagnant economy.

Those same voices suggested that the furore was being deliberately, cynically, exploited by the ANC and others, in order to deflect attention from its own failings, and to shift blame to the white minority.

There is no doubt that in recent years, under former President Jacob Zuma, and spurred on by the EFF, the political rhetoric in South Africa has become increasingly racialised. White farmers and "white monopoly capital" have frequently been blamed for the country's slow pace of economic transformation.

The former leader of the opposition Democratic Alliance, Helen Zille, has regularly bemoaned the growth of racial nationalism, and of "identity politics" which has also caused friction within her own party.

But to many others here - perhaps even to the majority - Mr de Klerk's comments appeared to reinforce a wider perception that many white people have never been obliged to confront, properly, the evils of the past. This is in part, perhaps, because apartheid ended through negotiation rather than a military victory.

"Far too many white South Africans... continue to deny the full horror of apartheid," wrote constitutional expert Pierre de Vos. "[They] refuse to admit that they or their parents actively, or tacitly, propped up the system and still reap the benefits bestowed on them by that system."

'De Klerk should repent'

"Sadly, FW de Klerk, his foundation, and the behaviour of some of our white compatriots of even trying... to justify the systemic destruction of black lives for generations, has opened old wounds at the time when many are questioning the very democracy and its liberation dividends," wrote political commentator Somadoda Fikeni on Twitter.

"De Klerk soaked up the glory and the money on the speaking circuit when he should have repented every single day," tweeted prominent journalist Carol Paton.

The ANC issued its own statement, condemning Mr de Klerk's argument as "a blatant whitewash [which]... flies in the face of our commitments to reconciliation and nation building".

It is incumbent on former leaders of the white community... to demonstrate the courage... necessary to contribute to societal healing"

Soon afterwards, Archbishop Desmond Tutu's foundation called on the De Klerk Foundation to "withdraw its statement".

It angrily chided the former president: "It is incumbent on leaders and former leaders of the white community, in particular, to demonstrate the courage, magnanimity and compassion necessary to contribute to societal healing."

This row has surfaced at a particularly difficult time. As Desmond Tutu himself put it in his foundation's statement, South Africa "is on an economic precipice. It is beset by radical poverty and inequity. Those who suffered most under apartheid continue to suffer most today."

Some black South Africans have taken to arguing that Mr Mandela himself was a sell-out, and that the painful and hard-won compromises that led to the emergence of a democratic "rainbow" nation, now need to be re-examined.

In his second statement, withdrawing his first, Mr de Klerk acknowledged that his comments about apartheid had been "totally unacceptable".

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How do you define a crime like apartheid?

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FW de Klerk, the last white man to lead South Africa, has apologised for "quibbling" over whether or not apartheid was a "crime against humanity", but the row has revealed old wounds, writes the BBC's Africa correspondent Andrew Harding. The past is still raw in South Africa.

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100 year anniversary for women's right to vote: BBC News Review

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Bloody Sunday -Articles from The Guardian

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Bloody Sunday -Articles from The Guardian

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Irish taoiseach Micheál Martin and other party leaders lay wreaths at Bloody Sunday memorial as part of series of commemorative events

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Life In Auschwitz: The Extraordinary Stories Of Six Survivors | Swimming in Auschwitz | Timeline

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Freedom and the revolution / Hannah Arendt. : Free Borrow & Streaming : Internet Archive

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German-born political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906 - 1975) delivers a talk about the concepts of freedom and revolution. Venue unknown. Recording starts...

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How Ireland Became Bitterly Divided | Irish War of Independence

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How Ireland Became Bitterly Divided | Irish War of Independence

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What you can learn from the most persuasive adverts

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Whether we are presenting a business pitch, selling our own home, or nudging our friends to go to our favourite bar or restaurant, there are many situations in which we need to argue our case in the most convincing way possible. Experience tells us that simply stating the facts won't always work: it's the way you tell them that matters. So why not take a cue from the people who are paid to persuade for a living?

We are exposed to hundreds of marketing messages every day - on the Tube and the Metro, through the TV, at the start of each YouTube video, and in a halo around almost every webpage. That's not to mention the rhetorical addresses of politicians hoping to sway our votes, or health awareness campaigners attempting to bring about a change in behaviour.

The majority of these messages fail to make a lasting impact, but a few stick in our minds for days, weeks or even years afterwards - and psychological experiments are now helping to identify what makes those messages so powerful. The same strategies can help us all master the art of persuasion.
Repeat, then surprise
Let's start in a surprising place: the folk tale Three Little Pigs. A pig builds a straw house, only for the Big Bad Wolf to blow it down. Next up is a house made of wood - the wolf blows that down too, and gobbles up the pig inside. Finally, the wolf comes to a house full of bricks - but the wolf now fails to blow it down, despite all his huffing and puffing. So he tries to climb down the chimney, straight into a steaming cauldron. Now it's the pig that has the tasty dinner.

What you might not realise is that this familiar childhood story uses a powerful persuasive tool: the "repeat-break" plot structure. There is a basic idea - the wolf blowing the house down - which is repeated once to create an expectation, and which is then violated, producing a sense of surprise.

The "repeat-break" plot structure can greatly increase the impact of advertisements and spark people's interest in a particular pitch or argument (Credit: Getty Images)

Jeffrey Loewenstein at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US has found that the repeat-break plot structure is highly prevalent in folk tales across the world (from Germany to Russia, Tibet to Afghanistan). "We couldn't find a book of folklore where you didn't see this pattern being really, really prevalent," he says. His research has found that it's also the basis for many of the most popular jokes. All of which suggests there is apparently a universal psychological tendency to enjoy something that sets up an expectation and then pulls the rug from under our feet, Loewenstein says.

Loewenstein's later studies found that the same plot structure vastly increases the impact of adverts, with immediate effects on people's opinions on brands or social movements. (They're also more likely to gain more views on YouTube, and to win industry awards for advertising, such as the Clios.) One particularly noteworthy example, he says, was a campaign against gun violence, which showed a bullet passing through objects like an egg, an apple, and a watermelon - before a child appears on screen. The bullet, of course, never reaches the child, but the expectation has been established, adding a strong emotional punch to the campaign's message.

In everyday life, Loewenstein thinks that the repeat-break structure could be especially useful for sparking interest in your argument. "If you are trying to present a new perspective on something, or if you're trying to go into new idea territory and help people to 'get' the new idea - that's when I think it's valuable."
Extend your metaphors
As much as 20% of our conversation and writing is framed as a metaphor, often without us really paying attention to the comparisons we're making. And cognitive scientists have shown that they profoundly affect our most basic linguistic processing.

In a typical experiment on the processing of metaphor, participants are asked to read sentences and to signal - with the press of a button - when they have comprehended each line. Phrases such as: "I was fuming... I had to take a moment to let off steam, otherwise my boiler would burst," take less time to comprehend than "I was fuming... I had to take a moment to let off steam, otherwise my claws would come out."

The basic conceptual meaning is the same, but the first example extends a single metaphor and leads the brain on a seamless path. Whereas the second combines two metaphors, taking you on a diversion. The extended metaphor was also easier to process than an anecdote that ended literally, such as "I was fuming. I had to take a moment to relax."

Although these small differences in processing may only be registered unconsciously, they can change people's gut feelings about your message. One experiment on anti-depressants showed that we would prefer a (fictional) drug called "Liftix" if we were told that depression is a persistent "low" mood, but "Illuminix" if the illness were described as a kind of darkness. Another study looked at the ways government policies are described to the public, and showed that the tactical use of extended metaphors hugely increases a message's persuasive power. If crime was called a "virus", for instance, the participants were much more likely to endorse reforms that were described as "treatments" (such as educational policies and creating afterschool programmes). If crime was described as a "beast", however, they preferred reforms that would "attack" the problem - such as increasing street patrols - while the "treatments" fell flat.

Research by Jeffery Mio at California State Polytechnic University suggests you should also aim for that linguistic consistency during spoken debates or arguments. If someone uses a metaphor, and you riff on the same image in response, your answer will end up looking more persuasive than if you switch to different imagery.
Embrace errors
If you were looking for a product endorsement, you might hope to find someone known for their impeccable judgement - rather than someone who openly admits to having been duped previously. Yet Taly Reich at Yale School for Management and Sam Maglio at the University of Toronto have shown that endorsements carry more weight when they describe a previous error of judgement.

Consider someone reviewing a mobile phone. They might just rave about its long battery life. Or they might describe how they'd first bought a competitor that ran down three times as quickly, before settling on the current product that proved to be far more reliable.

In a series of experiments, Reich and Maglio found that the latter kind of endorsement tends to be far more persuasive to consumers. The important point, Maglio says, is to demonstrate some kind of learning experience from the error. "It helps a lot for the audience to trust in that review, because [the reviewer] seems to have a high degree of expertise," he says.

Danish beer brand Carlsberg has used ambiguous marketing techniques, which research suggests can be more persuasive than overt advertising (Credit: Getty Images)

Marketing materials rarely ever include that information, though. "Marketing managers' intuitions are pretty consistently against anything negative - it's all positivity, all day long when you're promoting your product," Maglio says. The belief was that any bad qualities would accidentally become associated with the product they were trying to sell. "But if mistakes are used in the right way, they can be quite compelling."

You could try the same whenever you are attempting to make a strong case. Rather than ignoring the blind alleys that eventually led you to your current decision, actively flaunt those missteps. If you were trying to persuade your friends to go to a particular restaurant, say, you could try to contrast it with a previous trip to a disappointing venue. Similarly, in conversations with your boss at work, you might be a bit readier to explain how your previous errors had led to a current decision. The fact that you have learnt from a mistake will make your argument more persuasive.
Create a brain teaser
During the 2016 European Football Championships, spectators saw the word "Probably" branded around the stadiums. There were no further explanations, but fans might have noted that the font resembled the logo of a famous Danish beer brand. The strategy allowed the Championship sponsors to circumvent French laws about advertising alcohol around sports events.

While vague or enigmatic messages may seem off-putting, psychological research suggests that ambiguous marketing of this kind can be more persuasive than overt advertising.

Antonia Kraus at the University of Augsburg in Germany recently tested various adverts of well-known brands. All the adverts had some clue to the product, such as the iconic shape of a bottle for a popular drink or a familiar slogan, but the names and logos were either partly or completely obscured. Sure enough, she found that the more ambiguous adverts were better remembered than the complete adverts, with the full names and the logos. Afterwards, they also rated the product more highly.

It seems that the participants treated the adverts as a kind of puzzle. The extra mental effort required to resolve the clues improved their recall, while the sense of pleasure at having deduced the answer translated to a greater appreciation of the product. In other words, the beer ads at Euro 2016 may have worked because, and not in spite of, the ban on overt marketing.

Whatever your particular message, it can pay for your audience to think for themselves. In a work presentation, for example, you might underline one part of your argument by presenting a problem and asking the audience to guess the solution for themselves.

Researchers at the University of Amsterdam recently ambushed restaurant diners and gave them a customer satisfaction questionnaire. As part of the questionnaire, some of the participants were asked to give two reasons why the waitress deserved a tip. Their subsequent contributions were more than twice as a big as people who did not answer the questionnaire, or those who were given some text outlining the importance of the service charge. Thanks to the subtle prompt, the diners had persuaded themselves to dish out more cash.
Add a decoy
If you are trying to persuade someone to make a decision, it can often help to add a similar, but slightly undesirable option to the mix - a decoy that will make your preferred choice seem even more attractive.

Companies already use this trick all the time. In coffee shops, for instance, you might notice that the "medium" size drink is almost as big as the large option. That's deliberately designed to make you feel like you might as well pay the difference and opt for the bigger cup. (You can read many more examples of the decoy effect here.)

These strategies can only work if the facts you present are already compelling; they can't turn a leaden message into gold. But if you have an appealing argument that you then polish with these five principles of powerful persuasion, you will be well on the way to changing your audiences' hearts and minds.
David Robson is the author of The Intelligence Trap, which examines our most common thinking errors and the best ways to escape them. He is d_a_robson on Twitter.

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What you can learn from the most persuasive adverts

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Whether we are presenting a business pitch, selling our own home, or nudging our friends to go to our favourite bar or restaurant, there are many situations in which we need to argue our case in the most convincing way possible.

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The Zulu Nation's Rise and Fall (In Our Time)

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Dancing in the streets: VE Day celebrations in 1945 - in pictures

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Dancing in the streets: VE Day celebrations in 1945 - in pictures

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A selection of archive photographs to mark the 75th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day

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White handkerchief and a Derry play tell Bloody Sunday story

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White handkerchief and a Derry play tell Bloody Sunday story

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Untold stories of Jewish resistance revealed in London Holocaust exhibition

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From quiet acts of bravery, to overt acts of rebellion, Jewish resistance to the Holocaust took many forms, yet research shows they remain largely unacknowledged in traditional UK teachings about the genocide.

A new exhibition, drawing on thousands of previously unseen documents and manuscripts, is placing some of the little-known personal stories of heroism, active armed resistance, and rescue networks in the extermination camps and ghettos at the forefront.

Opening at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London, it highlights the extraordinary endeavours of Tosia Altman, a courier who as a member of the socialist Zionist youth movement Hashomer Hatzair, smuggled herself into Poland's ghettos on false "Aryanised" papers, organising groups, spreading information and moving weapons, before being captured and dying of her injuries, aged 24, after the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943.

"Her story is quite amazing. And she was typical of a lot of the resisters in camps and ghettos. She was quite young, and managed to obtain papers indicating she was just Polish rather than Jewish Polish, allowing her to move around occupied Poland," said Dr Barbara Warnock, the senior curator.

The extensive diaries of Philipp Manes, who was incarcerated with his wife Gertrud in the Theresienstadt ghetto, in German-occupied Bohemia and Moravia, also features, and contain poems, letters, and drawings from other prisoners, providing a vivid contemporaneous account of the efforts to keep their culture - and humanity - alive in such extreme circumstances.

Manes was key to the cultural life in the ghetto, documenting his experiences in great detail. His final notebook breaks off mid-sentence. On 28 October 1944, he and his wife were sent to Auschwitz, on one of the last transports to leave Theresienstadt, where they were murdered.

"Research by the Centre for Holocaust Education at UCL shows that schools and students in this country aren't very aware of Jewish resistance. It isn't taught that much," said Warnock.

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A group of Jewish partisan fighters in Soviet territory in about 1942-44. Photograph: Wiener Holocaust Library

"Sometimes the view that people have is that the Jews didn't really resist, and people have commented on why wasn't there more resistance. But in these incredibly extreme circumstances there are just so many examples of resistance, even in the most desperate situations. So the idea there wasn't resistance is false," she added.

The exhibition, which runs from 6 August to 30 November, reveals stories of endurance and bravery drawn from the library's unique archival collection, including witness accounts gathered by its staff in the 1950s.

These includes the story of the the Baum Group. Formed by Herbert Baum, his wife and friends, it was part of an anti-Nazi resistance group in Berlin in the 1930s. Almost all of its members were Jewish. Initially motivated by their communist beliefs, from 1936 they also increasingly resisted because of their opposition to the Nazis' persecution of Jews.

In 1940, after Baum was forced to work at a Siemens factory, he recruited other mainly young Jewish forced labourers to the group, which expanded to about 100 members.

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A report by Richard and Charlotte Holzer, surviving members of the Baum Group, from 1957. The Baum Group were a Jewish communist resistance network who carried out arson attacks on Nazi sites. Photograph: Wiener Holocaust library

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union the following year, they became active in distributing leaflets publicising the the atrocities carried out during the invasion. On 18 May 1942, they carried out an arson attack on the anti-communist and antisemitic Nazi exhibition called Soviet Paradise.

Most of those involved in the bombing were arrested and executed. Herbert Baum himself was probably murdered in Moabit prison in Berlin on 11 June 1942. A few survived, managing to escape from captivity, and able to give first-hand accounts to the Wiener Holocaust Library.

"People often when they think about resistance might think of underground groups in France, for example, which they may not be aware contained many Jews," said Warnock.

"In camps and ghettos, the Nazis' aim was to destroy Jewish community and lives. People tried to subvert it by continuing with education, social services, religious practices, and by keeping their own diaries even though they weren't supposed to, so maintaining a sense of their own humanity," she added.

"There is all sort of resistance, from the armed partisan groups in Berlin, and Paris, but also in Soviet territories where about 30,000 Jews are thought to have joined armed partisan groups, to people writing diaries trying to maintain a sense of themselves.

"There is just a huge variety of different ways Jews responded."
Topics

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Untold stories of Jewish resistance revealed in London Holocaust exhibition

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From quiet acts of bravery, to overt acts of rebellion, Jewish resistance to the Holocaust took many forms, yet research shows they remain largely unacknowledged in traditional UK teachings about the genocide.

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Winston Churchill Addresses The Nation After the German Blitz (1941) | War Archives

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Incredible Footage of the Battle of Dunkirk (1940) | War Archives

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Dunkirk (2017) - The First Bombing Scene (2/10) | Movieclips

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Second world war through the lenses of German soldiers – in pictures

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In 1939, thousands of German soldiers, many of them conscripts, were dispatched across Europe. They went armed not only with weapons but with cameras - the famous German Leica and Rolleiflex - in their bags and orders to capture what they saw.

As Britain, France and the Allied countries mark the 77th anniversary of the Normandy landings on D-day this weekend, a recently released book All at War: Photography by German Soldiers 1939-45, is a compilation of these photographs taken from a vast collection held by the Archive of Modern Conflict in London. Here are some of the photographs from the book

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Second world war through the lenses of German soldiers - in pictures

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In 1939, thousands of German soldiers, many of them conscripts, were dispatched across Europe. They went armed not only with weapons but with cameras - the famous German Leica and Rolleiflex - in their bags and orders to capture what they saw.

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Join Ellen for a discussion on life in Nazi Germany for your GCSE History exam. In this episode, she will explore whether the Nazis rules through consent or coercion, the forms of propaganda they used, censorship of information, the party's social policies and the instruments of terror used.

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‎Revise - A Level and GCSE Revision: GCSE History Revision - Nazi Germany su Apple Podcasts

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‎Join Ellen for a discussion on life in Nazi Germany for your GCSE History exam. In this episode, she will explore whether the Nazis rules through consent or coercion, the forms of propaganda they used, censorship of information, the party's social policies and the instruments of terror used.

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Aboriginal Australians: Victoria to hold inquiry into impact of colonisation

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Called the Yoo-rrook [Truth] Justice Commission, the inquiry will be modelled on one established by Nelson Mandela in post-apartheid South Africa, and others that have taken place in Canada and New Zealand, local media reported.

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Aboriginal Australians: Victoria to hold inquiry into impact of colonisation

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Called the Yoo-rrook [Truth] Justice Commission, the inquiry will be modelled on one established by Nelson Mandela in post-apartheid South Africa, and others that have taken place in Canada and New Zealand, local media reported.

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The Rosenbergs were executed for spying in 1953. Can their sons reveal the truth?

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During their trial, Ethel in particular was vilified for prioritising communism over her children, and the prosecution insisted she had been the dominant half of the couple, purely because she was three years older. "She was the mastermind of this whole conspiracy," assistant prosecutor Roy Cohn told the judge. But questions about whether she was guilty at all have been growing louder in recent years, and a new biography presents her in a different light. "Ethel was killed for being a wife. She was guilty of supporting her husband," Anne Sebba, author of Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy, tells me. And for that, the 37-year-old mother of two young children had five massive jolts of electricity pumped through her body. Her death was so brutal that eyewitnesses reported that smoke rose out of her head.

The killing of the Rosenbergs was so shocking at the time and is so resonant of a specific period in American history that it has become part of popular culture. In Tony Kushner's play Angels In America, Ethel haunts Cohn. In Woody Allen's Crimes And Misdemeanours, Clifford (played by Allen) says sarcastically that he loves another character "like a brother - David Greenglass", referencing Ethel's brother, who testified against her and Julius to save himself and his wife. The most moving cultural response to the Rosenbergs' deaths was EL Doctorow's 1971 novel, The Book Of Daniel, which imagines the painful life afterwards of the Rosenbergs' oldest child, whom he renames Daniel. In reality, the older Rosenberg child is called Michael, and his younger brother is Robert.

t is a bitter, rainy spring day when I interview the Rosenbergs' sons. Only three and seven when their parents were arrested, six and 10 when they were killed, they are now grandfathers with grey beards and known as Michael and Robert Meeropol, having long ago taken the surname of the couple who adopted them after the US government orphaned them. When their parents were arrested, Michael, always a challenging child ("That's putting it kindly," he says), acted out even more, whereas Robert withdrew into himself. This dynamic still holds true: "Robert is more reserved and I tend to fly off the handle," says Michael, 78, a retired economics professor, whose eyes spark with fire when he recalls old battles. Patient, methodical Robert, 74, a former lawyer, considers every word carefully. We are all talking by video chat, and when I ask where Robert is, he replies that he's at home in Massachusetts, in a town "90 miles west of Boston and 150 miles north-east of New York City. To be more specific... " Michael is in his home in New York state, in a town he describes as "just south of Pete Seeger 's home", referring to the folksinger and leftwing hero.

The differences between the brothers are obvious, but so is their closeness: Michael calls Robert "Chando", a childhood nickname, and since Michael's wife, Ann, died two years ago, his younger brother has called him every day.

"Rob and I are unusual siblings in so many ways. We have dealt with so many struggles, so we are very enmeshed," says Michael. I ask how it would have been if he had gone through it all on his own. He recoils, poleaxed by the thought. "I think it would have been very, very hard," he says eventually. Perhaps just as importantly, they have been there for one another as adults, as more evidence about their parents' case has trickled out, and they've had to keep reframing their own past. "Throughout the 70s and 80s, we believed our parents were just communists who were framed. Do you want to add anything, Chando?" says Michael. "Yes, I would add: you can frame guilty people," says Robert.

The brothers' struggles began on 17 July 1950 when their father, Julius, was arrested in the family's home on New York's Lower East Side on suspicion of espionage. Michael had been listening to The Lone Ranger on the radio, an episode in which the Lone Ranger was framed, and now the show seemed to be happening in front of him. The previous month, Ethel's younger brother, David Greenglass, had been arrested for the same crime. Equally significantly, the Korean war had just begun, which was seen by the US as a fight to stop communism destroying the American way of life. Senator Joseph McCarthy was warning Americans about "homegrown commies". By the time Julius was arrested, America was in a red panic. A month later, Ethel was seized by the FBI and charged. She called Michael at home and told him that she, like his father, had been arrested.

"So you can't come home?" he asked.

"No," she replied.

The seven-year-old screamed.

The Rosenbergs are almost invariably discussed as a duo, but as her sons have slowly realised, and as Sebba shows in her book, their stories were very different. While Julius had a close relationship with his mother, Sophie, Ethel and her mother, Tessie, had a difficult one. Tessie favoured David, the baby of the family, and for Ethel, communism was a means of educating herself and separating herself from her mother.

David worked as a machinist for 18 months at the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory. He was arrested when he was identified as part of a chain that passed on secrets about the technology to the Soviets. David quickly admitted his guilt, and his lawyer advised him that the best thing he could do for himself, and to give his wife immunity, would be to turn in someone else. Then the Rosenbergs were arrested. The FBI believed that Julius was a kingpin who recruited Americans to spy against their own country, and that he had used David to pass on secrets of the atomic bomb to the Russians. The initial allegations against Ethel were that she "had a discussion with Julius Rosenberg and others in November 1944", and "had a discussion with Julius Rosenberg, David Greenglass and others in January 1945"- in other words, that she talked to her husband and brother. It was feeble stuff, as the FBI knew, yet Myles Lane, the chief assistant attorney for the Southern District of New York, told the press: "If the crime with which she, Ethel, is charged had not occurred perhaps we would not have the present situation in Korea."

Michael played hangman with his father on prison visits, although he didn't realise the irony until he was an adult

Initially, David testified that his sister had not been involved in any espionage. However, his wife, Ruth, said that Ethel had typed up the information David had given Julius to pass on to the Soviets. David quickly changed his story the week before the trial to corroborate his wife's version, probably under pressure from Roy Cohn, the ambitious chief assistant prosecutor. This was the key evidence against Ethel, and the chief prosecutor, Irving Saypol, conjured up an image for the jury of Ethel at the typewriter, pounding the keys, striking "blow by blow, against her own country in the interest of the Soviets". But even with that, Myles Lane, who had publicly laid the blame for the Korean war at Ethel's feet, admitted privately in a closed-door meeting of the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy: "The case is not strong against Mrs Rosenberg. But for the purpose of acting as a deterrent, I think it is very important that she be convicted, too, and given a stiff sentence." FBI director J Edgar Hoover agreed, writing "proceeding against the wife will serve as a lever" to make her husband talk.

At the trial, under Cohn's questioning, David testified that in September 1945 he gave Julius a sketch and description of the atomic bomb, and that Ethel was deeply involved in the discussions between them. Because he had given names, David was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and ended up serving nine. Ruth was free to stay home and look after their children. The Rosenbergs, who insisted they were innocent, were found guilty. Judge Irving Kaufman carefully considered their sentence. Hoover, aware of the tenuousness of the case against Ethel, and how it would look if America executed a young mother, urged against the death sentence for her, but Cohn argued for it and won.

ichael and Robert never saw the Greenglasses again after the trial, and all Michael remembers of them is: "David looked like a nondescript schlub and Ruth was a cold fish. But is that true, or just a nephew who wants to expose the people who lied about my parents?" he asks. They constantly question their own memories of the past. Robert says that when he thinks of his family before his parents were arrested he has, "this feeling of a golden age, of a wonderful loving family before it was ripped apart. But is that just fantasy?"

Ethel has long been portrayed as a cold woman, one who, as Kaufman said in his sentencing, loved communism more than her children. In reality, as Sebba reveals in her book, she was a particularly devoted mother, with a progressive interest in child psychology. Before her arrest, she regularly saw a child therapist, Elizabeth Phillips, for help with Michael and to learn how to be a better mother. During her three years in prison, she faithfully kept up her subscription to Parents magazine. But when she was arrested, all the aspirations she had harboured for giving her boys the kind of happy childhood that had been denied to her imploded spectacularly. At first the boys lived with her mother, Tessie, who made no secret of her resentment of the situation. Things got even worse when they were put in a children's home. Eventually, Julius's mother, Sophie, took them in, but two little boys were too much for their frail grandmotherto handle. None of their many aunts or uncles would take them, either because they sided with David and Ruth, or they were scared. So they were shipped around to various families. All Ethel could do was write letters to her lawyer, Manny Bloch, desperately laying out her parenting theories in the hope they would somehow be followed ("One cannot behave inconsistently with children... ") For the sake of the boys, she always maintained a happy front when they visited.

"We always had a good time on the prison visits: singing, talking, enjoying ourselves," says Michael. He even used to play hangman with his father, although he didn't realise the irony until he was an adult.

The US government said that if Julius gave them names of other spies, and he and Ethel admitted their guilt, their lives would be spared. The Rosenbergs issued a public statement: "By asking us to repudiate the truth of our innocence, the government admits its own doubts concerning our guilt... we will not be coerced, even under pain of death, to bear false witness." On 16 June 1953, the children were brought to Sing Sing prison in New York State to say goodbye to their parents. Ethel kept up her usual brave appearance, but on this occasion Michael - who was 10 and understood what was happening - was upset by her outward calm. Afterwards, Ethel wrote a letter to her children: "Maybe you thought that I didn't feel like crying when we were hugging and kissing goodbye huh... Darlings, that would have been so easy, far too easy on myself... because I love you more than I love myself and because I knew you needed that love far more than I needed the relief of crying." On 19 June, Ethel and Julius wrote their last letter to their children: "We wish we might have had the tremendous joy and gratification of living our lives out with you... Always remember that we were innocent and could not wrong our conscience. We press you close and kiss you with all our strength. Lovingly, Daddy and Mommy." Just after 8pm that day, the Rosenbergs were executed. They were buried on Long Island, in one of the few Jewish cemeteries that would accept their bodies.

ith their extended family still unwilling to look after them ("People later said to me, 'A Jewish family and no family members took in the kids?!'" says Michael wryly), the boys were eventually adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol, an older leftwing couple. They could finally grow up in anonymity among loving people who told them their parents had been brave and admirable. Abel Meeropol was a songwriter whose biggest hit was Strange Fruit, so the boys were raised on the royalties from the most famous song of the civil rights era. "I never thought about our aunts and uncles not taking us in, because living with Abel and Anne, it felt like we won the lottery," says Michael. But memories of their parents were always there. Robert developed a strong physical resemblance to Ethel. "It made me want to hug and kiss him all the time," says Michael.

The boys enjoyed a happy, academic, leftwing upbringing as Meeropols. They told almost no one their real surname, and Robert, who was a toddler when his parents were imprisoned, never considered reverting to it. It was more complicated for Michael, who could remember playing ball games with his father in their apartment ("If it went in Robby's playpen, it was a home run.") Eventually, he decided as an adult that reverting to Rosenberg would be "artificial". It soon didn't matter, because in 1973 the local media unmasked them, ignoring their pleas to retain their anonymity. They decided to put the exposure to good use by campaigning for their parents. They wrote a memoir, We Are Your Sons, and sued the FBI and CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, obtaining more than 300,000 once secret documents which they believed proved their parents' innocence. But the story had only started to unfold.

"At first, I hated that transcript, because it made Julius look guilty of something," says Robert. "But then I realised this was as close to a smoking gun we would ever get, because it said that Julius and Ethel didn't do the thing they were killed for. Ethel didn't work and Julius wasn't an atomic spy, he was a military-industrial spy," he says, meaning that although Julius passed on details of weapons, he wasn't passing on details about the atomic bomb.

When our father got involved with the Soviets, our mother stayed out of it so that if he got arrested, she could take care of us

Michael was more sceptical of the Venona papers and wondered if they were "CIA disinformation". But in 2008 he finally accepted them when Morton Sobell - who had been convicted for espionage along with the Rosenbergs and served 18 years in Alcatraz - gave an interview to the New York Times. He said that he and Julius had been spies together, and confirmed that Julius had not helped the Russians build the bomb. "What he gave them was junk," Sobell said of Julius, probably because he didn't know anything about the bomb. Of Ethel, Sobell said, "She knew what he was doing, but what was she guilty of? Of being Julius's wife." This corroborated what Aleksandr Feklisov, a retired KGB agent, said in 1997 when he admitted that he had been Julius's handler. Feklisov agreed that Julius had passed on military secrets but, "he didn't understand anything about the atomic bomb, and he couldn't help us". Ethel, he said, "had nothing to do with this, she was completely innocent. I think she knew [what her husband was doing], but for that you don't kill people."

Michael has made peace with the revelation that his father was a spy. "As Robby's daughter Jenny said to me, there is a positive to not thinking of our family as hapless victims. We want to be people who take charge of our lives," he says.But he and Robert repeatedly emphasise that their uncle David's claim that he gave Julius atomic information in September 1945 is extremely dubious. Recent research corroborates their argument: Soviet sources state that Julius stopped working for them in February 1945. "[The government] took a small-fry spy and framed him to be an atomic spy," is Michael's take on his father. Ethel, however, was a very different story.

In 1996, David Greenglass gave an interview in which he finally admitted he lied about his sister: "I told them the story and left her out of it, right? But my wife put her in it. So what am I gonna do, call my wife a liar? My wife is my wife. I mean, I don't sleep with my sister, you know." He added, "I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don't remember." It is possible that Ethel helped to recruit Ruth and David, but they needed little encouragement. Many Jews of their milieu were communists and the Greenglasses' letters show they were even more enthusiastic about communism than the Rosenbergs. Ruth died in 2008, David in 2014.

Robert launched the campaign for Ethel's exoneration in 2015 - not for a pardon, because that would suggest she had done something wrong, but a full exoneration. He is, he says, "more focused" on his mother than his father. "Perhaps my willingness to separate Ethel from Julius is a sign I don't feel the same way about my parents," he says.

I ask what he means.

"I wonder if there's a little voice in the back of my head that's saying, 'You know, Julius, you really shouldn't have done it, because you had kids,'" he says with some effort. I ask how he feels when he looks back at his father's letters from prison, in which he insisted he was innocent. "I think he was spinning: he wasn't an atomic spy, like they said, but he was a spy, so it wasn't the whole truth. And I think he thought if he confessed to anything they would kill him, so denying everything was the best option. But yes, I have some ambivalences."

Michael, who has clearer memories of his parents, sees his father's behaviour differently: "Should a man not have children if he goes off to war? In those days, that wasn't the thought process. For a Jew and a communist, this was about survival."

Ethel's innocence raises more questions than it settles. First, given that she was a true believer in communism, why didn't she join her husband, brother and sister-in-law in spying?

"Robby and I think that when our father got involved in helping the Soviets, our mother stayed out of it so that if he got arrested, she could take care of us," says Michael.

This sounds to me like a son hoping that their parents at least tried to protect their sons. But Julius and Ethel seemed to have little understanding of the danger they were putting the family in. After all, Greenglass was arrested a month before Julius, so they had plenty of time to flee the country, but didn't. Sebba's theory strikes me as more likely: "I think she just had other concerns: she was looking after her children and trying to be present for them. She gave up activism when her children were born. Her main identity was as a wife and a mother, and that's what mattered to her," she says.

So why didn't Julius save Ethel? The FBI was right: he had recruited spies, so he could easily have given names and probably saved her life, and very possibly his own, too.

"Dad's unwillingness to rat out his fellows wasn't about him wanting to be a soldier of Stalin," says Michael. "It was more personal. These were his friends! My father was not going to cooperate with the government, and that's why they arrested my mother. So now he's going to turn around and say, 'OK, I'm going to save my wife by ratting out my friends?' No! He had a naive belief that the American justice system was going to work because half the case against him was a pack of lies, so he thought he could deny everything and save them both." Almost until the end, Julius believed that they wouldn't go to the chair. The government and FBI hoped that, too. They never wanted to kill this young mother and father - they wanted names. After Ethel was killed, the then deputy attorney general William Rogers said, "She called our bluff."

Then there's the question that baffled officials at the time, and has become the defining mystery about her: why did Ethel choose to stay silent and die with Julius, over staying with her children? We know she was deeply in love with her husband, and her letters to him during their imprisonment are filled with her longing to "lift my willing lips to yours". But they are also full of her anxiety about the boys. Yet she said nothing.

"Ethel absolutely did not want to be separated from Julius, and her letters show that she thought she was the one who had done him wrong by introducing him to her ghastly family," says Sebba. "I believe that Ethel thought her life without Julius would have been valueless because her sons would never have respected her, because she would have had to make some kind of confession and name names."

If Ethel did think this, she might have been right.

"As a child, it might have been easier if Julius had cooperated" says Robert. "He'd have been in prison and Ethel would have been released to take care of us - that's the deal the government made with the Greenglasses. But as an adult I would much rather be the child of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg than the child of David and Ruth Greenglass."

The campaign to exonerate Ethel is starting again, and the Meeropols are "optimistic" that President Biden will look at it favourably. They know their argument defies the confines of bite-size headlines, and so is a difficult one to sell to the public: Julius was guilty, although the extent of his guilt was exaggerated in an attempt to scare him into naming names; Ethel was possibly complicit, but not culpable. "There's a very binary idea of the political world, in which people are guilty or innocent, right or wrong. But understanding nuance is essential to understanding how politics work and how society works," says Robert.

I ask why it matters so much to them what people understand. Their parents' lives were destroyed by this case; instead of spending so much of their lives reliving it, why not leave it in the past? "It's personal as well as political," says Robert, emphasising both words. "That the US government invented evidence to obtain a conviction and an execution is a threat to every person in this country, and to not expose that is to become complicit in it. The personal stuff is obvious, but the political stuff is equally powerful."

The biggest question about Ethel for me relates to her sons. After our initial interview, I end up speaking to them, together and separately, several times over the course of a month, mainly because I have so many questions, but also because they are so delightful to talk to: wildly intelligent, always interesting, completely admirable. How on earth did they triumph over such a traumatic childhood? Sebba tells me that she asked the same thing of Elizabeth Phillips, the child therapist Ethel used to consult, whom she interviewed before her death.

"She told me it was down to three things," Sebba says. "She said, 'One, they have an extraordinarily high level of intelligence. Second, they had amazing adoptive parents. But we now know how important those early years of life are, and Ethel must have given those two boys so much in those years that it lasted all their lives. Ethel must have been an extremely good mother.'"

Ethel Rosenberg by Anne Sebba is published by Orion at £20. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

This article was amended on 22 June 2021 to describe the Los Alamos laboratory's focus as atomic weapons rather than atomic power.

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The Rosenbergs were executed for spying in 1953. Can their sons reveal the truth?

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During their trial, Ethel in particular was vilified for prioritising communism over her children, and the prosecution insisted she had been the dominant half of the couple, purely because she was three years older. "She was the mastermind of this whole conspiracy," assistant prosecutor Roy Cohn told the judge.

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The Long Shadow: Europe After World War One (WW1 Documentary) | Timeline

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Revealed: how UK spies incited mass murder of Indonesia’s communists

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A propaganda campaign orchestrated by Britain played a crucial part in one of the most brutal massacres of the postwar 20th century, shocking new evidence reveals.

British officials secretly deployed black propaganda in the 1960s to urge prominent Indonesians to "cut out" the "communist cancer".

It is estimated that at least 500,000 people - some estimates go to three million - linked to the Indonesia Communist party (PKI) were eliminated between 1965 and 1966.

Recently declassified Foreign Office documents show that British propagandists secretly incited anti-communists, including army generals, to eliminate the PKI. The campaign of apparently spontaneous mass murder, now known to have been orchestrated by the Indonesian army, was later described by the CIA as one of the worst mass murders of the century.

As the massacres started in October 1965 British officials called for "the PKI and all communist organisations" to "be eliminated". The nation, they warned, would be in danger "as long as the communist leaders are at large and their rank and file are allowed to go unpunished".

Britain launched its propaganda offensive against Indonesia in response to President Sukarno's hostility to the formation of its former colonies into the Malayan federation which from 1963 resulted in a low-level conflict and armed incursions by the Indonesian army across the border. In 1965 specialist propagandists from the Foreign Office's information research department (IRD) were sent to Singapore to produce black propaganda to undermine Sukarno's regime. The PKI was a strong supporter of both the president and the Confrontation movement.

President Sukarno of Indonesia with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, 1960. Photograph: Harvey Lippman/AP

A small team produced a newsletter purporting to be produced by Indonesian émigrés and targeted at prominent and influential individuals, including army generals. It also supplied a black radio station broadcasting into Indonesia run by the Malaysians.

By mid-1965 the operation was in full swing, but an attempted coup by leftwing army officers and, secretly, by agents of the PKI, in which seven generals were murdered, provided the chance to have a real impact on events.

The coup was swiftly crushed by Indonesia's future president General Suharto, who then set about a gradual seizure of power from Sukarno and the elimination of the PKI, then the biggest communist party in the non-communist world.

The propagandists called for "the PKI and all it stands for" to be "eliminated for all time" advising its influential readers that "procrastination and half-hearted measures can only lead to... our ultimate and complete destruction". Over the following weeks massacres of alleged PKI members, few if any with any involvement in the attempted coup, and other leftists spread across the archipelago.

There can be little doubt that British diplomats became aware of what was happening. Not only could GCHQ intercept and read Indonesian government communications, but its Chai Keng monitoring station in Singapore enabled the British to trace the progress of army units involved in suppressing the PKI.

According to Dr Duncan Campbell, an investigative journalist and expert on GCHQ, they had technology enabling listeners to "locate the positions of Indonesian military commanders and units who were sending, relaying and receiving orders for the roundup and murder of those supposedly linked to the PKI".

A letter to the British ambassador in Djakarta from the "coordinator of political warfare", a Foreign Office propaganda specialist called Norman Reddaway, who arrived in Singapore in the aftermath of the attempted coup, reveals the policy was "to conceal the fact that the butcheries have taken place with the encouragement of the generals", in the hope that the generals "will do us better than the old gang".

Tari Lang, then a teenager in Indonesia whose father and mother, the late human rights activist Carmel Budiardjo, were imprisoned by the army, says the documents are "horrendous" and the British government bears some responsibility for what happened. "I am angry that my government, the British government, did this. The British did nothing to stop the violence once it had started."

Reddaway considered the downfall of Sukarno to be one of Britain's greatest propaganda victories. In a letter written years later he said "the discrediting of Sukarno was quickly successful. His Confrontasi was costing us about £250,000,000 a year. It was countered and abolished at minimal cost by IRD research and techniques in six months."

According to Professor Scott Lucas, the declassified documents "show how central IRD and black propaganda continued to be" in postwar British foreign policy and in its overseas operations. "This was a relatively inexpensive way for Britain to project influence even if that influence can't be openly admitted."

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Revealed: how UK spies incited mass murder of Indonesia's communists

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A propaganda campaign orchestrated by Britain played a crucial part in one of the most brutal massacres of the postwar 20th century, shocking new evidence reveals. British officials secretly deployed black propaganda in the 1960s to urge prominent Indonesians to "cut out" the "communist cancer".

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March 27

The thirty thousand people who at one point or another took part in this week's march from the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma, Alabama, to the statehouse in Montgomery were giving highly dramatic expression to a principle that could be articulated only in the vaguest terms. They were a varied lot: local Negroes, Northern clergymen, members of labor unions, delegates from state and city governments, entertainers, mothers pushing baby carriages, members of civil-rights groups more or less at odds with one another, isolated, shaggy marchers with an air of simple vagrancy, doctors, lawyers, teachers, children, college students, and a preponderance of what one marcher described as "ordinary, garden- variety civilians from just about everywhere." They were insulated in front by soldiers and television camera crews, overhead and underfoot by helicopters and Army demolition teams, at the sides and rear by more members of the press and military, and over all by agents of the F.B.I. Most of them were aware that protection along a route of more than fifty miles of hostile country could not be absolute (on the night before the march, a student who had come here from Boston University was slashed across the cheek with a razor blade), yet few of the thirty-two hundred marchers who set out on Sunday morning seemed to have a strong consciousness of risk. They did not have a sharply defined sense of purpose, either. President Johnson's speech about voting rights and Judge Johnson's granting of permission for the march to take place had made the march itself ceremonial-almost redundant. The immediate aims of the abortive earlier marches had been realized: the national conscience had been aroused and federal intervention had been secured. In a sense, the government of Alabama was now in rebellion, and the marchers, with the sanction and protection of the federal government, were demonstrating against a rebellious state. It was unclear what such a demonstration could hope to achieve. Few segregationists could be converted by it, the national commitment to civil rights would hardly be increased by it, there was certainly an element of danger in it, and for the local citizenry it might have a long and ugly aftermath. The marchers, who had five days and four nights in which to talk, tended for the most part to avoid discussions of principle, apparently in the hope that their good will, their sense of solidarity, and the sheer pageantry of the occasion would resolve matters at some symbolic level and yield a clear statement of practical purpose before the march came to an end.

From this point of view, the first few hours of Sunday morning in Selma were far from satisfying. Broad Street, the town's main thoroughfare, was deserted and indifferent. At the Negro First Baptist Church, on the corner of Sylvan Street and Jefferson Davis Avenue, denim-clad veterans of earlier marches stood wearily aloof from recruits, who ate watery scrambled eggs, drank watery coffee, and simply milled about. On Sylvan Street itself, an unpaved red sand road dividing identical rows of brick houses known as the George Washington Carver Development, crowds were gathering, some facing the entrance to the Brown Chapel Church, others on the steps of the church facing out. Inside the church, more people were milling, while a few tried to sleep on benches or on the floor. For several hours, nothing happened. The church service that was to begin the march was scheduled to take place at ten o'clock, but veterans advised newcomers-in the first of several bitter, self-mocking jokes that became current on the Selma-Montgomery road-that this was C.P.T., Colored People Time, and the service actually began more than an hour behind schedule. In a field behind the housing development, the Reverend Andrew Young, executive director of Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (S.C.L.C., referred to by some of the marchers as Slick), which sponsored the march, was giving marshals and night security guards last-minute instructions in the tactics of non-violence. "Keep women and children in the middle," he said. "If there's a shot, stand up and make the others kneel down. Don't be lagging around, or you're going to get hurt. Don't rely on the troopers, either. If you're beaten on, crouch and put your hands over the back of your head. Don't put up your arm to ward off a blow. If you fall, fall right down and look dead. Get to know the people in your unit, so you can tell if somebody's missing or if there's somebody there who shouldn't be there. And listen! If you can't be non-violent, let me know now." A young man in the standard denim overalls of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (S.N.C.C., otherwise known as Snick) murmured, "Man, you've got it all so structured. There seems to be a certain anxiety here about structure." Everyone laughed, a bit nervously, and the marshals went to the front of the church.

The crowd there was growing, still arrayed in two lines, one facing in, the other facing out. There were National Guardsmen and local policemen, on foot and in jeeps and cars, along the sides of Sylvan Street and around its corners, at Jefferson Davis and Alabama Avenues. The marchers themselves appeared to have dressed for all kinds of weather and occasions-in denims, cassocks, tweed coats, ponchos, boots, sneakers, Shetland sweaters, silk dresses, college sweatshirts, sports shirts, khaki slacks, fur-collared coats, pea jackets, and trenchcoats. As they waited, they sang innumerable, increasingly dispirited choruses of "We Shall Overcome," "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me 'Round," and other songs of the movement. There was a moment of excitement when Dr. King and other speakers assembled on the steps, but a succession of long, rhetorical, and, to a certain extent (when press helicopters buzzed too low or when the microphone went dead), inaudible speeches put a damper on that. An enthusiastic lady, of a sort that often afflicts banquets and church suppers, sang several hymns of many stanzas, with little melody and much vibrato. Exhaust fumes from a television truck parked to the right of the steps began to choke some of the marchers, and they walked away, coughing. Speakers praised one another extravagantly in monotonous political-convention cadences ("the man who . . ."). An irreverent, irritated voice with a Bronx accent shouted, "Would you mind please talking a little louder!" Several members of the crowd sat down in the street, and the march assumed the first of its many moods-that of tedium.

Then Dr. King began to speak, and suddenly, for no apparent reason, several Army jeeps drove straight through the center of the crowd. ("Didn't realize we were interrupting," said one of the drivers, smiling. He had a D.D., for Dixie Division, emblem on his uniform.) The startled crowd, divided in half for a moment, became aware of its size. Dr. King's speech came to an end, and there was last, unified, and loud rendition of "We Shall Overcome." Then the marshals quickly arranged the crowd in columns, six abreast-women and children in the middle-and the procession set out down Sylvan Street. It was about one o'clock. On Alabama Avenue, the marchers turned right, passing lines of silent white citizens on the sidewalks. On Broad Street, which is also U.S. Route 80 to Montgomery, they turned left, and as segregationist loudspeakers along the way blared "Bye, Bye, Blackbird" and the white onlookers began to jeer, the marchers approached and crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And the march entered another mood-jubilation.

The day was sunny and cool. The flat road, an amalgam of asphalt and the local sand, looked pink. The people in the line linked arms, and the procession was long enough to permit the marchers to sing five different civil-rights songs simultaneously without confusion; the vanguard could not hear what the rear guard was singing. Occasionally, various leaders of the movement broke out of the line to join interviewers from the television networks, which took turns using a camera truck that preceded the line of march. For the first few miles, the highway was flanked by billboards ("Keep Selma Beautiful, Cover It with Dodge"), smaller signs (Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions, Citizens Council), diners, and gas stations. Little clusters of white onlookers appeared at various points along the road, some shouting threats and insults, others silently waving Confederate flags, and still others taking pictures of the marchers, presumably as a warning that their faces would not be forgotten when the march was over. The procession filled the two left lanes of the four-lane highway, but in the two right lanes traffic was proceeding almost normally. A black Volkswagen passed the marchers several times; on its doors and fenders were signs, lettered in whitewash: " martin luther kink," " walk, coon," " coonesville, u.s.a.," and " rent your priest suit here." Several small children at the roadside waved toy rifles and popguns and chanted "Nigger lover!," "White nigger!," "Half-breed!," and other epithets. A man in front of a roadside diner thumbed his nose for the entire twenty minutes it took the procession to pass him, and a well-dressed matron briefly stopped her Chrysler, got out, stuck out her tongue, climbed in again, slammed the door, and drove off.

Several times, the march came to an abrupt halt, and in the middle ranks and the rear guard there were murmurs of alarm. Then it became clear that these were only rest stops, and the marchers relaxed and resumed their singing. Rented trucks, driven by ministers of the San Francisco Theological Seminary, carried portable toilets up and down the line. When press photographers attempted to take pictures of civil-right leaders entering the men's rooms, the Reverend Mr. Young shouted, "Can't a man even go to the john in peace?" The photographers moved away. Three tired marchers rode a short distance on the water truck, and James Forman, the executive secretary of S.N.C.C., who was being interviewed in French for Canadian television, broke off his interview to mutter as the truck passed, "Hey, man, you cats could walk." The marchers got down from the truck at once. Forman resumed his interview. "I think he's having trouble with his French," said one of the marchers. 'He just said that no Negro in America is allowed to vote." "His French is all right," said another. "But he may be less concerned with the immediate truth than with stirring up the kind of chaos that makes things change."

By sunset of the first day, the caravan was more than seven miles from Selma, and most of the marchers returned by a special train to town, where some of them left for their home communities and others were put up for the night in the Negro development on Sylvan Street. Two hundred and eighty Negroes, representing Alabama counties (a hundred and forty-eight from Dallas County, eighty-nine from Perry, twenty-three from Marengo, and twenty from Wilcox), and twenty whites, from all over the country, who had been chosen to make the entire journey to Montgomery (the court permitted no more than three hundred marchers on the twenty-mile stretch of Route 80 midway between Selma and Montgomery, where it is only a two-lane highway) turned off Route 80 onto a tarred road leading to the David Hall farm-their campsite for the night. Four large tents had already been pitched in a field. As the marchers lined up for supper (three tons of spaghetti), which was served to them on paper plates, from brand-new garbage pails, night fell. Groups of National Guardsmen who surrounded the farm lighted campfires. "It looks like Camelot," said one of the younger whites.

Camelot soon became very cold and damp. By nine o'clock, most of the marchers had retired to the tents, but within an hour they had to be roused and sorted out. One tent was for men, another for women, the third for the marchers' own night security patrol, and the fourth for the press. When everyone had been assigned to his or her proper tent, it developed that there was a shortage of blankets, winter clothes, and sleeping bags. A shivering group huddled around an incinerator, the campsite's only source of heat. A few marchers made their way to the loft of a barn beside the Hall farmhouse, to profit from the heat given off by the animals in the stalls below. Five guinea hens perched in a tree outside the barn. The march's security patrol wandered about with walkie-talkies; they had labelled their outposts Abel, Baker, Charlie, and Dog, using the Army's old system, to set them apart from Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, and Delta, the outposts of the National Guard along the perimeter of the field. The night grew colder, damper, and darker, and the group around the incinerator fire grew uneasy.

There was talk of the march ahead through Lowndes County, where swamps and the woods behind them might easily shelter a sniper in a tree or a canoe. Several marchers claimed to have spotted members of the American Nazi Party along the line of march. Someone mentioned the Ku Klux Klan "counter-demonstration" that had taken place in Montgomery that afternoon.

"And the snakes," a man said.

"What snakes?" said a Northern voice.

"Copperheads and cottonmouth. It takes the heat to bring them out, but a trooper told me somebody's caught five baskets full and is letting them go where we camp tomorrow night."

"How'd the trooper hear about it?"

"Spies."

"Well, I suppose there might be spies right here in camp."

"There might. And bombs and mines. They cleared a few this afternoon. Man, this isn't any Boy Scout jamboree. It's something else."

By the time dawn came, the campers were a thoroughly chilled and bleary-eyed group. The oatmeal served at breakfast gave rise to a certain amount of mirth ("Tastes like fermented library paste," said one of the clergymen), and the news that the National Guardsmen had burned thirteen fence posts, two shovel handles, and an outhouse belonging to a neighboring church in order to keep warm during the night cheered everyone considerably. At a press conference held by Jack Rosenthal, the young Director of Public Information of the Justice Department, the rumors about snakes, bombs, and mines were checked out, and it was learned that none of them were true. A reporter waved several racist leaflets that had been dropped from an airplane and asked whether anything was being done to prevent such planes from dropping bombs. "What do you want us to do?" Rosenthal replied. "Use anti-aircraft guns?"

The procession set out promptly at 8 a.m. The distance to the next campsite-Rosa Steele's farm-was seventeen miles. Again the day was sunny, and as the air grew warmer some of the more sunburned members of the group donned berets or Stetsons or tied scarves or handkerchiefs around their heads. To the white onlookers who clustered beside the road, the three hundred marchers must have seemed a faintly piratical band. At the head of the line were Dr. and Mrs. King, wearing green caps with earmuffs and reading newspapers as they walked. Not far behind them was a pale-green wagon (known to the marchers as the Green Dragon) with Mississippi license plates, in which rode doctors wearing armbands of the M.C.H.R. (the Medical Committee for Human Rights). Farther back were some of the younger civil-rights leaders: Hosea Williams, S.C.L.C. director of the march and veteran of the bitter struggle for public accommodations in Savannah, Georgia; the Reverend James Bevel, formerly of S.N.C.C., now S.C.L.C. project director for Alabama (Mr. Bevel was wearing the many-colored yarmulke that has become almost his trademark-"a link," he says, "to our Old Testament heritage"); John Lewis, chairman of S.N.C.C.; and the Reverend Andrew Young. Behind the leaders, some of the main personae of the march had begun to emerge, among them Joe Young, a blind greenhouse worker from Atlanta, Georgia, and Jim Letherer, a one-legged settlement-house worker from Saginaw, Michigan. ("Left! Left! Left! " the segregationist onlookers chanted as Mr. Letherer moved along on crutches.) Chuck Fager, a young worker for S.C.L.C., wearing denims and a black yarmulke, was waving and shouting, "Come march with us! Why don't you come along and march with us?" ("It sets up a dialogue," he explained. "The last time I was in jail, a sheriff pulled me aside and asked me where the hell I was from. Any sort of talk like that sets up a dialogue.") Sister Mary Leoline, a nun from Christ the King parish in Kansas City, Kansas, was talking to John Bart Gerald, a young novelist from New York. "This is a great time to be alive," she said. A few members of the night security guard had somehow acquired cameras, and they were now photographing bystanders who were photographing marchers; it appeared that a sort of reciprocal Most Wanted list was being compiled. From time to time, the marchers were still singing ("Oh-h-h, Wallace, segregation's bound to fall"), and the chief of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, Assistant Attorney General John Doar, tall, tanned, and coatless, was striding back and forth along the line of march to see that all was going well.

Around two o'clock, as the middle ranks of marchers passed an intersection just outside Lowndes County, a female bystander apparently could stand it no longer. "They're carrying the flag upside down!" she screamed to the nearest trooper. "Isn't there a law against that? Can't you arrest them? Look at them so-called white men with church collars that they bought for fifty cents! And them devirginated nuns! I'm a Catholic myself, but it turns my stomach to see them. They said there was thousands yesterday, but there wasn't near a thousand. Them niggers and them girls! I've watched the whole thing three times, and there isn't a intelligent-looking one in the bunch. I feel sorry for the black folks. If they want to vote, why don't they just go out and register? Oh, honey, look! There goes a big one. Go home, scum! Go home, scum!" The procession began to sing a not very hearty version of "A Great Camp Meeting in the Promised Land."

Not all the bystanders along the road were white. At the boundary of Lowndes County (with a population of fifteen thousand, eighty per cent of them Negroes, not one of whom had been registered to vote by March 1, 1965), John Maxwell, a Negro worker in a Lowndes County cotton-gin mill (at a salary of six dollars for a twelve-hour day), appeared at an intersection.

"Why don't you register to vote?" a reporter from the Harvard Crimson asked Mr. Maxwell.

"They'd put us off the place if I tried," Mr. Maxwell said.

In the town of Trickem, at the Nolan Elementary School-a small white shack on brick stilts, which had asbestos shingles, a corrugated-iron roof, six broken windows, and a broken wood floor patched with automobile license plates-a group of old people and barefoot children rushed out to embrace Dr. King. They had been waiting four hours.

"Will you march with us?" Dr. King asked an old man with a cane.

"I'll walk one step, anyway," said the man. "Because I know for every one step I'll take you'll take two."

The marchers broke into a chant. " What do you want?" they shouted encouragingly to the Negroes at the roadside. The Negroes smiled, but they did not give the expected response-" Freedom!" The marchers had to supply that themselves.

Late in the afternoon, as Route 80 passed through the swamps of Lowndes County, the marchers looked anxiously at the woods, covered with Spanish moss, which began a few yards back from the road. They reached Rosa Steele's farm at sunset. Many of them seemed dismayed to find that the campsite lay right beside the highway. Fresh rumors began to circulate: a man had been seen putting a bomb under a roadside bridge; twenty white men, with pistols and shotguns, had been seen prowling through a neighboring field; testing security, a representative of the Pentagon had managed to penetrate the security lines without being asked to show his pass. Mr. Rosenthal again put these fears to rest. "The field has been combed by Army demolition teams," he said. "If anyone from the Pentagon had made it through unchecked, you can bet there would have been one hell of a fuss. And as for the man under the bridge, it was a little boy who got off his bicycle to relieve himself. The troopers found out these things. It's nice to know that they are this aware."

As darkness fell, Dr. King held a press conference. A Negro woman lifted up her three-year-old son so that he might catch a glimpse of Dr. King. She soon grew tired and had to put him down. "I'll take him," said a white man standing beside her, and he lifted the boy onto his shoulders. The boy did not glance at Dr. King; he was too busy gazing down at the white man's blond hair.

Again the night was cold and damp. At the entrance to the field, there was so much mud that boards and reeds had been scattered to provide traction for cars. Most of the marchers went to sleep in their four tents soon after supper, but at Steele's Service Station, across the highway, a crowd of Negroes from the neighborhood had gathered. Some of them were dancing to music from a jukebox, and a few of the more energetic marchers, white and black, joined them.

"This is getting to be too much like a holiday," said a veteran of one if the earlier marches. "It doesn't tell the truth of what happened."

At about ten o'clock, the last of the marchers crossed the highway back to camp. Shortly afterward, a fleet of cars drove up to the service station and a group of white boys got out. Two of the boys were from Georgia, two were from Texas, one was from Tennessee, one was from Oklahoma, one was from Monroeville, Alabama, and one was from Selma. The Reverend Arthur E. Matott, a white minister from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, who was a member of the night patrol, saw them and walked across the highway to where they were standing. "Can I help you fellows?" Mr. Matott asked.

"We're just curious," the boy from Monroeville said. "Came out to see what it was like."

"How long are you planning to stay?" said Mr. Matott.

"Until we get ready to leave," the boy said.

A Negro member of the night patrol quietly joined Mr. Matott.

"I cut classes," said the boy from Tennessee. "Sort of impulsive. You hear all these stories. I wondered why you were marching."

"Well, you might say we're marching to get to know each other and to ease a little of the hate around here," Mr. Matott said.

"You don't need to march for that," said one of the boys from Texas. "You're making it worse. The hate was being lessened and lessened by itself throughout the years."

"Was it?" asked the Negro member of the guard.

"It was," the Texas boy said.

"We never had much trouble in Nashville." said the boy from Tennessee. "Where you have no conflict, it's hard to conceive . . . "

"Why don't you-all go and liberate the Indian reservations, or something?" said the boy from Monroeville. "The Negroes around here are happy."

"I don't think they are," said Mr. Matott.

"I've lived in the South all my life, and I know that they are," the boy from Georgia said.

"I'm not happy," said the Negro guard.

"Well, just wait awhile," said the boy from Monroeville.

An attractive blond girl in a black turtleneck sweater, denim pants, and boots now crossed the highway from the camp. "Do you know where I can get a ride to Jackson?" she asked the Negro guard.

"This is Casey Hayden, from S.N.C.C. She's the granddaughter of a Texas sheriff," said the minister, introducing her to the group.

A battered car drove up, and three more white boys emerged.

"I don't mean to bug you," the Negro whispered to the girl, "but did you realize we're surrounded?"

"You fellows from Selma?" Miss Hayden asked, turning to the three most recent arrivals.

"Yeah," said one, who was wearing a green zippered jacket, a black shirt, and black pants, and had a crew cut.

"What do you want?" Miss Hayden asked.

"I don't know," the boy answered.

"That's an honest answer," Miss Hayden said.

"It is," the boy said.

"What do you do?" Miss Hayden asked.

"Well, Miss, I actually work for a living, and I can tell you it's going to be hard on all of them when this is over," the boy said. "A lot of people in town are letting their maids go."

"Well, I don't suppose I'd want to have a maid anyway," Miss Hayden said amiably. "I guess I can do most things myself."

"That's not all, though," said another boy. "It's awfully bad down the road. Nothing's happened so far, but you can't ever tell. Selma's a peace-loving place, but that Lowndes County is something else,"

"I guess some of these people feel they haven't got that much to lose," Miss Hayden said.

"I know," said the boy.

"Do you understand what they're marching about?" Miss Hayden asked.

"Yeah-fighting for freedom, something like that. That's the idea, along that line. It don't mean nothing," the boy said.

"And to make money," the third young man said. "The men are getting fifteen dollars a day for marching, and the girls are really making it big."

"Is that so?" said Miss Hayden.

"Yeah. Girl came into the Selma hospital this morning, fifteen hundred dollars in her wallet. She'd slept with forty-one."

"Forty-one what?" Miss Hayden asked.

"Niggers," the young man said.

"And what did she go to the hospital for?" Miss Hayden asked.

"Well, actually, Ma'am, she bled to death," the young man said.

"Where did you hear that?" Miss Hayden asked.

"In town," the young man said. 'There's not much you can do, more than keep track of everything. It's a big mess."

"Well," Miss Hayden said, "I think it's going to get better."

"Hard to say," said one of the boys as they drifted back to their cars.

At midnight in the camp, Charles Mauldin, aged seventeen, the head of the Dallas County Student Union and a student at Selma's Hudson High School, which is Negro, was awakened in the security tent by several guards, who ushered in a rather frightened-looking Negro boy.

"What's going on?" asked Charles.

The boy replied that he was trying to found a Negro student movement in Lowndes County.

"That's fine," said Charles.

"The principal's dead set against it," the boy said.

"Then stay underground until you've got everybody organized," Charles said. "Then if he throws one out he'll have to throw you all out."

"You with Snick or S.C.L.C., or what?" the boy asked.

"I'm not with anything," Charles said. "I'm with them all. I used to just go to dances in Selma on Saturday nights and not belong to anything. Then I met John Love, who was Snick project director down here, and I felt how he just sees himself in every Negro. Then I joined the movement."

"What about your folk?" the boy asked.

"My father's a truck driver, and at first they were against it, but now they don't push me and they don't hold me back," Charles said.

"Who've you had personal run-ins with?" the boy asked.

"I haven't had personal run-ins with anybody," Charles said. "I've been in jail three times, but never more than a few hours. They needed room to put other people in. Last week, I got let out, so I just had to march and get beaten on. In January, we had a march of little kids-we called it the Tots March-but we were afraid they might get frightened, so we joined them, and some of us got put in jail Nothing personal about it."

"Some of us think that for the march we might be better off staying in school," the boy wid.

"Well, I think if you stay in school you're saying that you're satisfied," Charles said. "We had a hundred of our teachers marching partway with us. At first, I was against the march, but then I realized that although we're probably going to get the voting bill, we still don't have a lot of other things. It's dramatic, and it's an experience, so I came. I thought of a lot of terrible things that could happen, because we're committed to non-violence, and I'm responsible for the kids from the Selma school. But then I thought, If they killed everyone on this march, it would be nothing compared to the number of people they've killed in the last three hundred years."

"You really believe in non-violence?" the boy asked Charles.

"I do," Charles said. "I used to think of it as just a tactic, but now I believe in it all the way. Now I'd just like to be tested."

"Weren't you tested enough when you were beaten on?" the boy asked.

"No, I mean an individual test, by myself," Charles said. "It's easy to talk about non-violence, but in a lot of cases you've got to be tested, and re-inspire yourself.'

By 2 a.m., hardly anyone in the camp was awake except the late-shift night security patrol and a group of radio operators in a trader truck, which served as a base for the walkie-talkies around the campsite and in the church back in Selma. The operators kept in constant touch with Selma, where prospective marchers were still arriving by the busload. Inside the trailer were Norman Talbot, a middle-aged Negro from Selma who had borrowed the trailer from his uncle and was serving as its driver ("I used to work in a junk yard, until they fired me for joining the movement. I've got a five-year-old daughter, but after that I made it my business to come out in a big way'); Pete Muilenberg, a nineteen-year-old white student on leave of absence from Dartmouth to work for C.O.F.O., the Congress of Federated Organizations, in Mississippi; and Mike Kenny, a twenty-nine-year-old white student who had quit graduate school at Iowa State to work for S.N.C.C.

"Snick isn't officially involved in this march," Mr. Kenny said to a marcher who visited him in the trailer early that morning. "Although individual Snick workers can take part if they like. They say Martin Luther King and Snick struck a bargain: Snick wouldn't boycott this march if S.C.L.C. would take part in a demonstration in Washington to challenge the Mississippi members of Congress. We didn't want to bring in all these outsiders, and we wanted to keep marching on that Tuesday when King turned back. Man, there are cats in Selma now from up North saying, 'Which demonstration are you going to? Which one is the best? As though it were a college prom, or something. I tell them they ought to have sense enough to be scared. 'What do you think you're down here for? For publicity, to show how many of you there are, and to get a few heads bashed in. Nobody needs you to lead them. S.C.L.C. has got plenty of leaders.' People need Snick, though, for the technicians. Some of us took a two-day course in short-wave-radio repair from one of our guys, Marty Schiff, so we could set up their radios for them. Then, a lot of Snick cats have come over here from Mississippi, where the romance has worn off a bit and it's time for our experts to take over-running schools, pairing off communities with communities up North, filing legal depositions against the Mississippi congressmen and against the worst of the police. We're called agitators from out of state. Well, take away the connotations and agitation is what we do, but we're not outsiders. Nobody who crosses a state line is an outsider. It's the same with racial lines. I don't give a damn about the Negro race, but I don't give a damn about the white race, either. I'm interested in breaking the fetters of thought. What this march is going to do is help the Alabama Negro to break his patterns of thought. It's also going to change the marchers when they go hack home. The students who went back from the Mississippi project became dynamos. It's easier to join the movement than to get out. You have this commitment. There will be Snick workers staying behind to keep things going in Selma. We were here, working, a year and a half before S.C.L.C, came in. Man, there's a cartoon in our Jackson office showing the Snick power structure, and it's just one big snarl. Some of us are in favor of more central organization, but most of us believe in the mystique of the local people. We're not running the C.O.F.O. project in Mississippi next summer, because of the black-white tensions in Snick. Some of the white cats feel they're being forced out, because of the racism. But I can understand it. The white invasion put the Negro cats in a predicament. Not even their movement was their own anymore. I'm staying with it, though. Every Snick meeting is a traumatic experience for all of us, but even the turmoil is too real, too important, for me to get out now. It's what you might call the dramatic-results mentality. Some of the leaders may be evolving some pretty far-out political philosophy, but it's the workers who get things done-black-white tensions, left-right tensions, and all."

Later that morning, Tuesday, it began to rain, and the rain continued through most of the day. When the first drops fell, whites at the roadside cheered (a Southern adage states that "a nigger won't stay out in the rain"), but it soon became apparent that, even over hilly country, the procession was going at a more spirited pace than ever. Jim Letherer, on his crutches, appeared to be flagging. John Doar walked beside him for a while, joking and imperceptibly slowing his pace. Then Mr. Doar said, "Jim, come to the car a minute. I want to show you something back down the road." Jim disappeared from the march. In twenty minutes, he was walking again.

Back in Selma, thousands of out-of-towners had arrived and had been quietly absorbed into the Negro ghetto. On the outskirts of town, a sign had appeared showing a photograph of Martin Luther King at the Highlander Folk School and captioned "Martin Luther King at Communist School." Lying soggily upon the sidewalks were leaflets reading "An unemployed agitator ceases to agitate. Operation Ban. Selective hiring, firing, buying, selling." The Selma Avenue Church of Christ, whose congregation is white, displayed a sign reading "When You Pray, Be Not As Hypocrites Are, Standing in the Street. Matt: 6:5," and the Brown Chapel Church displayed a sign reading "Forward Ever, Backward Never. Visitors Welcome." Inside the church and its parsonage, things were bustling. There were notes tacked everywhere: "If you don't have official business here, please leave," "All those who wish to take hot baths, contact Mrs. Lilly," "Don't sleep here anymore. This is an office," "Please, the person who is trying to find me to return my suit coat and trenchcoat, not having left it in my Rambler . . . "

"Everyone here in town is getting antsy," Melody Heap, a white girl who had come in from Chicago, said to a reporter. "We're not allowed to march until Thursday, and there's nothing to do. On the other hand, we're giving the Selma Negroes a chance to take it easy. They know what they're doing, and we don't, so they can order us around a little."

"You know what just happened?" aid a white clergyman from Ontario. "Some of those white segs splashed mud all over us. It was so funny and childish we just howled."

A little later, two clergymen picked their luggage and left the church for the home of Mrs. Georgia Roberts, where, they had been told, they were to spend the night.

"I guess I can put you up," Mrs. Roberts said when they arrived. "Last night, I put up fourteen. I worked as a cook at the Selma Country Club for thirteen years, before they fired me for joining the movement. I've been friendly to all the other guests, so I guess you'll find me friendly, too. I never thought I'd see the day when we'd dare to march against the white government in the Black Belt of Alabama."

At the Tuesday-night campsite, a farm owned by the A. G. Gastons, a Birmingham Negro family who had become millionaires in various businesses, the ground was so wet that the marchers could walk through the clay-like mud only by moving their feet as though they were skating. A Negro family living in the middle of the property had received several intimidating phone calls during the day, and as a consequence they barred their house to marchers. They held a party in their little front garden to watch the goings on.

The marchers had by then been joined by Mrs. Ann Cheatham, an English housewife from Ealing, who had flown across the Atlantic just to take part in the last two days of marching. "It seems to me an outrage," she said. "I saw it on the telly-people being battered on the head. I came to show that the English are in sympathy. I can see there are a lot of odd bods on this march, but there were a lot in the marches on Aldermaston and Washington. This appalling business of barring white facilities to Negro children! People say it's not my business, but I would deny that. It's everybody's business."

In the early evening, a clergyman became violently ill, and doctors blamed the marchers' water supply. The marchers had all along complained that the water tasted of kerosene, and upon investigation, it turned out that the water was in fact polluted, having come from a truck that was ordinarily used for draining septic tanks. (Fortunately, no other marchers seemed to suffer from the contamination.) Later, the singer Odetta appeared at the campsite, and found all the marchers, including another singer, Pete Seeger, fast asleep.

Wednesday, the fourth and last full day of marching, was sunny again, and the marchers set out in good spirits. In the morning, a minister who had rashly dropped out at a gas station to make a telephone call was punched by the owner, and a freelance newspaper photographer was struck on the ear by a passerby. (Although he required three stitches, he was heartened by the fact that a Montgomery policeman had come, with a flying tackle, to his rescue.) There seemed, however, to be fewer segregationists by the side of the road than usual-perhaps because the Montgomery Advertiser had been running a two-page advertisement, prepared by the City Commissioner's Committee on Community Affairs. imploring citizens to be moderate and ignore the march. The coverage of the march in the Southern press had consistently amused the marchers. "Civil Righters Led by Communists" had been the headline in the Birmingham weekly Independent; the Selma Times-Journal, whose coverage of the march was relatively accurate, had editorialized about President Johnson, under the heading "A Modern Mussolini Speaks, 'We Shall Overcome,' " "No man in any generation . . . has ever held so much power in the palm of his hand, and that includes Caesar, Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Franklin D. Roosevelt"; and the Wednesday Advertiser's sole front-page item concerning the march was a one-column, twenty-one-line account, lower right, of the Alabama legislature's resolution condemning the demonstrators for being "sexually promiscuous." ("It is well known that the white Southern segregationist is obsessed with fornication," said John Lewis, chairman of S.N.C.C. "And that is why there are so many shades of Negro.") At 9 a.m., Ray Robin announced over radio station WHHY, in Montgomery, that "there is now evidence that women are returning to their homes from the march as expectant unwed mothers." Several marchers commented, ironically, on the advanced state of medical science in Alabama.

By noon, most of the marchers were sunburned or just plain weatherburned. Two Negroes scrawled the word "Vote" in sunburn cream on their foreheads and were photographed planting an American flag, Iwo Jima fashion, by the side of the road. Flags of all sorts, including state flags and church flags, had materialized in the hands of marchers. One of the few segregationists watching the procession stopped his jeering for a moment when he saw the American flag, and raised his hand in a salute. The singing had abated somewhat, and the marchers had become conversational.

"This area's a study in social psychopathology," said Henry Schwarzschild, executive secretary of L.C.D.C. (the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee). "In a way, they're asking for a show of force like this, to make them face reality."

"And there's the ignorance," said another civil-rights lawyer. "A relatively friendly sheriff in Sunflower County, Mississippi, warned me, confidentially, that my client was a 'blue-gum nigger.' 'Their mouths are filled with poison,' he said. 'Don't let him bite you.' "

"And what did you say?" asked a college student marching beside him.

"What could I say?" the lawyer replied. "I said I'd try to be careful."

"The way I see this march," said a young man from S.N.C.C., "is as a march from the religious to the secular-from the chapel to the statehouse. For too long now, the Southern Negro's only refuge has been the church. That's why he prefers these S.C.L.C. ministers to the Snick cats. But we're going to change all that."

"I'm worried, though, about the Maoists," said the student.

"What do you mean by that, exactly?" asked another marcher,

"A Maoist. You know. From the Mau Mau."

In the early afternoon, Dr. King and his wife, who had dropped out for a day in order for him to go to Cleveland to receive an award, rejoined the procession. The singing began again. Marching behind Dr. King was his friend the Reverend Morris H. Tynes, of Chicago, who teased Dr. King continuously. "Moses, can you let your people rest for a minute?" Mr. Tynes said. "Can you just let the homiletic smoke from your cigarette drift out of your mouth and engulf the multitude and let them rest?" Dr. King smiled. Some of the other marchers, who had tended to speak of Dr. King half in joking and half in reverent tones (most of them referred to him conversationally as "De Lawd") laughed out loud.

A Volkswagen bus full of marchers from Chicago ran out of gas just short of the procession. "Now, we all believe in non-violence," one of the passengers said to the driver, "but if you don't get this thing moving pretty soon . . ."

"Are you members of some sort of group?" asked a reporter, looking inside the bus.

"No," said the driver. "We're just individuals."

At last, on the outskirts of Montgomery, the marchers reached their fourth campsite-the Catholic City of St. Jude, consisting of a church, a hospital, and a school built in a style that might be called Contemporary Romanesque. The four tents were pitched by the time they arrived, and they marched onto the grounds singing "We Have Overcome." They also added two new verses to the song-"All the way from Selma" and "Our feet are soaked." Inside the gates of St. Jude's, they were greeted by a crowd of Montgomery Negroes singing the national anthem.

" What do you want?" the marchers chanted.

This time, the response from the onlookers was immediate and loud: " Freedom!"

"When do you want it? "
"Now!"
"How much of it?"

"All of it!"

On its fourth night, the march began to look first like a football rally, then like a carnival and a hootenanny, and finally like something dangerously close to a hysterical mob. Perhaps because of a new feeling of confidence, the security check at the main gate had been practically abandoned. Thousands of marchers poured in from Selma and Montgomery, some of them carrying luggage, and no one had time to examine its contents. The campsite was cold and almost completely dark, and a bomb or a rifle shot would have left everyone helpless. Word got out that the doctors on the march had treated several cases of strep throat, two of pneumonia, one of advanced pulmonary tuberculosis, and one of epilepsy, and because of the number and variety of sick and handicapped who had made the march a macabre new joke began to go the rounds: "What has five hundred and ninety-nine legs, five hundred and ninety-eight eyes, an indeterminate number of germs, and walks singing? The march from Selma."

An entertainment had been scheduled for nine o'clock that night, but it was several hours late started, and in the meantime the crowd of thousands churned about in the mud and chanted. A number of people climbed into trees near the platform where the entertainment was to take place. On the outskirts of St. Jude's, in a section normally set aside as a playground, a few children spun the hand-powered carousel, or climbed over the jungle gym in the dark. In the wires of the telephone poles around the field, the skeletons of old kites were just visible in the dim lights from the windows of St. Jude's Hospital.

A minister, who had been seeking for several hours to clear the platform, wept with chagrin. "Betcha old Sheriff Clark and his troopers could clear it!" someone shouted. In the darkness, there were repeated cries for doctors, and a soldier stood on top of the radio trailer and beamed a flashlight into the crowd, trying to find the sources of the cries. Thousands crowded around the platform, and several of them were pressed against it and fell. Several others, mostly members of the special group of three hundred marchers, fainted from exhaustion. A number of entertainers, each of whom had been given a dime to use for a phone call in case of an emergency, and all of whom had been instructed to stand in groups of not fewer than six, appeared on the platform. Among them were Shelley Winters, Sammy Davis, Jr., Tony Perkins, Tony Bennett, and Nina Simone. A number of girls in the crowd collapsed and, because there was no other lighted space, had to be carried onstage, where Miss Winters did her best to minister to them. Before long, twenty people, none of them seriously ill or seriously injured, were carried off to the hospital on stretchers. A large group started an agitated march within the campsite.

"I'm tired," said a white college student. "If only I could walk someplace and get a cab!"

"Man, that's not cool," said a Negro. "There are a lot of hostile people outside that gate."

"Inside it, too, for all I know," said the student. "See any white sheets?"

Finally, the entertainment got under way, and the situation improved. Tony Perkins and a few others spoke with well-considered brevity. The crowd clapped along with the singers as they sang folk songs and songs of the movement, and it laughed at the comedians, including Dick Gregory, Nipsey Russell, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May. ("I can't afford to call up the National Guard," said Mike Nichols, impersonating Governor Wallace. "Why not?" said Elaine May, impersonating a telegraph operator. "It only costs a dime.")

At 2 A.M., the entertainment and speeches were over, and the performers left for a Montgomery hotel, which was surrounded for the remainder of the night by shouting segregationists. Most of the crowd drifted off the field and headed for Montgomery, and the tents were left at last to the marchers. Suddenly security tightened up. At one point, the Reverend Andrew Young himself was asked for his credentials. The hours before dawn passed without incident.

On Thursday morning, the march expanded, pulled itself together, and turned at once serious and gay. It finally seemed that the whole nation was marching to Montgomery. Signs from every conceivable place and representing every conceivable religious denomination, philosophical viewpoint, labor union, and walk of life assembled at St. Jude's and lined up in orderly fashion. A Magic Marker pen passed from hand to hand, and new signs went up: "The Peace Corps Knows Integration Works," "So Does Canada," "American Indians" (carried by Fran Poafpybitty, a Comanche from Indiahoma, Oklahoma), "Freedom" in Greek letters (carried by a Negro girl), "Out of Vietnam into Selma" in Korean (carried by a white girl), "The Awe and Wonder of Human Dignity We Want to Maintain" (on a sandwich board worn by a succession of people), and, on two sticks tied together, with a blue silk scarf above it, a sign reading simply "Boston." A young white man in a gray flannel suit hurried back and forth among the platoons of marchers; on his attaché case was written "D. J. Bittner, Night Security."

Near the tents, Ivanhoe Donaldson and Frank Surocco (the first a Negro project director for S.N.C.C. in Atlanta, the second a white boy, also from S.N.C.C.) were distributing orange plastic jackets to the original three hundred marchers. The jackets, of the sort worn by construction workers, had been bought for eighty-nine cents apiece in Atlanta, and jackets just like them had been worn throughout the march by the marshals, but for the marchers the orange jacket had become a singular status symbol. There was some dispute about who was entitled to wear one. There was also a dispute about the order of march. Some thought that the entertainers should go first, some that the leaders should. Roy Wilkins, of the N.A.A.C.P.,: demurred on behalf of the leaders. Odetta said, "Man, don't let the morale crumble. The original three hundred deserve to be first." The Reverend Andrew Young was served with a summons in an action by the City of Selma and the Selma Bus Lines protesting the operation of buses in competition with the Selma company. Finally, after another session of virtually inaudible speeches, the parade was ready to go. "Make way for the originals!" the marshals shouted, forming a cordon to hold back the other marchers and the press. Behind the three hundred came Martin Luther King, Ralph Bunche, A. Philip Randolph, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth, Charles G. Gomillion, the Reverend F. D. Reese, and other civil-rights leaders; behind them came the grandfather of Jimmie Lee Jackson, the Negro boy who had been shot in nearby Perry County, and the Reverend Orloff Miller, a friend of the Reverend James Reeb's, who had been beaten with Reeb on the night of Reeb's murder; and behind them came a crowd of what turned out to be more than thirty thousand people. "We're not just down here for show," said Mr. Miller. "A lot of our people are staying here to help. But the show itself is important. When civil rights drops out of the headlines, the country forgets."

Stationed, like an advance man, hundreds of yards out in front of the procession as it made its way through the Negro section of Montgomery and, ultimately, past a hundred and four intersections was Charles Mauldin, dressed in his Hudson High sweatshirt and blue jeans and an orange jacket, and waving a little American flag and a megaphone. One pocket of his denims was split, and the fatigue in his gentle, intelligent face made him seem considerably younger than his seventeen years. "Come and march with us!" he shouted to Negro bystanders. "You can't make your witness standing on the corner. Come and march with us. We're going downtown. There's nothing to be afraid of. Come and march with us!"

"Tell 'em, baby," said Frank Surocco, who was a few yards back of Charles.

"Is everything safe up ahead?" asked the voice of Ivanhoe Donaldson through a walkie-talkie.

"We watching 'em, baby," said Surocco.

"Come and march with us!" said Charles Mauldin, to black and white bystanders alike.

In midtown Montgomery, at the Jefferson Davis Hotel, colored maids were looking out of the windows and the white clientele was standing on the hotel marquee. Farther along, at the Whitley Hotel, colored porters were looking out of windows on one side of the building and white customers were looking out of windows on the other. Troopers watched from the roof of the Brown Printing Company. The windows of the Montgomery Citizens Council were empty. Outside the Citizens Council building, a man stood waving a Confederate flag.

"What's your name?" a reporter asked.

"None of your goddam business," said the man.

At the intersection of Montgomery Street and Dexter Avenue (the avenue leading to the capitol), Charles Mauldin turned and looked around. "They're still coming out of St. Jude's," a reporter told him. And when the vanguard of the march reached the capitol steps, they were still coming out of St. Jude's. "You're only likely to see three great parades in a lifetime," said John Doar to a student who walked beside him, "and this is one of them." A brown dog had joined the crowd for the march up Dexter Avenue. On the sidewalk in front of the capitol, reporters stood on the press tables to look back. Charles and the rest of the orange-jacketed three hundred stood below. Behind them, the procession was gradually drawing together and to a halt. Ahead, a few green-clad, helmeted officers of the Alabama Game and Fish Service and some state officials blocked the capitol steps, at the top of which, covering the bronze star that marks the spot where Jefferson Davis was inaugurated President of the Confederacy, was a plywood shield constructed at the order of Governor Wallace-"to keep that s.o.b. King from desecrating the Cradle of the Confederacy," according to a spokesman for the Governor. Martin Luther King had managed to draw a larger crowd than the leader of the Confederacy a hundred years before.

Onto a raised platform-erected by the marchers for the occasion-in a plaza between the crowd and the steps climbed a group of entertainers that included, at one point or another, Joan Baez; the Chad Mitchell Trio; Peter, Paul, and Mary; and Harry Belafonte. As Alabamians peered from the statehouse windows, Negro and white performers put their arms around each other's shoulders and began to sing. Although the songs were familiar and the front rank of the three hundred mouthed a few of the words, none of the crowd really sang along. Everybody simply cheered and applauded at the end of each number. Then Len Chandler, a young Negro folk singer who had marched most of the way, appeared on the platform. He was dressed peculiarly, as he had been on the road-in a yellow helmet, a flaglike blue cape with white stars on it, and denims-and the crowd at once joined him in singing:

"You've got to move when the spirit say move,
Move when the spirit say move.
When the spirit say move, you've got to move, oh, Lord,
You got to move when the spirit say move."

In the subsequent verses, Mr. Chandler changed "move" to "walk," march," "vote," "picket," "cool it," and "love," and the crowd kept singing. Joan Baez, wearing a purple velvet dress and a large bronze crucifix, even broke into a rather reverent Frug.

After an invocation by a rabbi and speeches by the Reverend Andrew Young and the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the crowd turned away from the Confederate and Alabama State flags flying from the capitol, faced its own American flags, and sang the national anthem. At its close, the Reverend Theodore Gill, president of the San Francisco Theological Seminary, looked before and behind him and said a simple prayer: "Forgive us our trespasses." One marcher applauded, and was immediately hushed. Then there was the succession of speeches, most of them eloquent, some of them pacific ("Friends of freedom," said Whitney Young, of the Urban League), others militant ("Fellow Freedom Fighters," said John Lewis, of S.N.C.C.), and nearly all of them filled with taunts of Governor Wallace as the list of grievances, intimidations, and brutalities committed by the state piled up.

"This march has become a rescue operation," Charles Mauldin said quietly to a friend as the speeches continued. "Most of those Negroes along the way have joined us, and although this Wallace-baiting sounds like a little boy whose big brother has come home and who is standing outside a bully's window just to jeer, these Negroes are never going to be quite so afraid of the bully again. When the bill goes through, they're going to vote, and the white men down here are going to think twice before they try to stop them. Big brothers have come down from the North and everywhere, and they've shown that they're ready and willing to come down again. I don't think they're going to have to."

"It's good that even a few of the civil-rights talkers have joined us," said another marcher. "When those people feel they have to climb on the bandwagon, you know you're on the way to victory."

As one speaker followed another, as Ralph Bunche, who had marched for two full days, and A. Philip Randolph spoke, the civil-rights leaders saluted one another and gave signs of patching up their differences. (Mr. Abernathy, second-in-command of S.C.L.C., slipped once and said, "Now here's James Peck, for James Farmer, to tell us whether core is with us." Peck ignored the implications of the "whether" and spoke as eloquently as the rest.) Throughout, the crowd applauded politely but gave no sign of real enthusiasm. S.C.L.C. and S.N.C.C. leaders seemed to be equally popular, but the N.A.A.C.P. and the Urban League, more active in other states than in Alabama, seemed to require a little help from Mr. Abernathy ("Now let's give a big hand to . . . ") to get their applause. Some of the marchers crawled forward under the press tables and went to sleep. A Japanese reporter, who had been taking notes in his own language, seized one of the marchers as he crawled under a table. "What do you think of all this?" the reporter asked. "I think it's good," the marcher said. Some fell asleep in their places on Dexter Avenue. (Perhaps remembering the mob scenes of the night before, the crowd left its members ample breathing space in front of the capitol.) A scuffle broke out between marchers and white bystanders in front of Klein's Jewelry Store, but no one was hurt seriously. It rained a little, and Charles Mauldin said, "Wallace is seeding the clouds."

Albert Turner, of Marion, where Jimmie Lee Jackson was murdered, said from the platform, "I look worse than anybody else on this stage. That's because I marched fifty miles." Then he read the Negro voting statistics from Perry County. When he said, "We are not satisfied," the crowd gave him a rousing cheer. He looked down at his orange jacket and smiled. Mrs. Amelia Boynton spoke; during the previous demonstrations, she had been kicked and beaten, and jailed, for what some members of the press have come to call "resisting assault." She read the petition, mentioning the "psychotic climate" of the State of Alabama, that a delegation of marchers was seeking to' present to Governor Wallace, and she was roundly applauded. Near the end of the ceremony, Rosa Parks, the "Mother of the Movement," who had set off Dr. King's first demonstration when she was jailed for refusing to yield her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, received the most enthusiastic cheers of all. "Tell it! Tell! Tell!" some of the marchers shouted. "Speak! Speak!" Finally, after an extravagant introduction by Mr. Abernathy, who referred to Dr. King as "conceived by God" ("This personality cult is getting out of hand," said a college student, and, to judge by the apathetic reception of Mr. Abernathy's words, the crowd agreed), Dr. King himself spoke. There were some enthusiastic yells of "Speak! Speak!" and "Yessir! Yessir!" from the older members of the audience when Dr. King's speech began, but at first the younger members were subdued. Gradually, the whole crowd began to be stirred. By the time he reached his refrains-"Let us march on the ballot boxes. . . . We're on the move now. . . . How long? Not long"-and the final, ringing "Glory, glory, hallelujah!," the crowd was with him all the way.

The director of the march, Hosea Williams, of S.C.L.C., said some concluding words, remarking that there should be no lingering in Montgomery that night and exhorting the crowd to leave quietly and with dignity. There was a last rendition of "We Shall Overcome." Within ten minutes. Dexter Avenue was cleared of all but the press and the troopers.

A few hours later, the delegation and its petition were turned away by Governor Wallace. At the airport, where there had been some difficulty during the preceding days (an uncanny number of suitcases belonging to marchers were mislaid by the airlines), new flights had been scheduled to get the marchers out of Montgomery. Still, many marchers had to wait at the airport all night long. They rested on the floor, and on the lawn outside, and as often as the police cleared then away they reappeared and fell asleep again. Word came that Mrs. Viola Liuzzo had been shot. Some of the marchers went back to Selma at once. Others boarded planes for home. At the Montgomery airport exit was a permanent official sign reading "Glad You Could Come. Hurry Back." ♦

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The thirty thousand people who at one point or another took part in this week's march from the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma, Alabama, to the statehouse in Montgomery were giving highly dramatic expression to a principle that could be articulated only in the vaguest terms. They

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I Have a Dream speech by Martin Luther King .Jr HD (subtitled)

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‘People shunned me like hot lava’: the runner who raised his fist and risked his life

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ommie Smith still gets chills when he hears the opening bars of The Star Spangled Banner. It takes him right back to that night in October 1968 when he stood on the Olympic podium in Mexico City, wearing his gold medal, and made the raised-fist salute that has defined his life. "It's kind of a push, when I hear 'dum, da-dum'," he says, singing the opening notes of the United States national anthem. "Because that's the first three notes I heard in Mexico, then my head went down, and I saw no more of it until the last note."

While the anthem played, all that was going through Smith's head, he says, was "prayer and pain". Pain because he had picked up a thigh injury that day on the way to winning the 200m final (he still set a world record). And prayer because Smith was not just putting his career on the line - he was risking his life. There was a real possibility that somebody in the stadium might try to shoot him or his team-mate John Carlos, who was making the salute beside him after winning bronze. In the months leading up to the Olympics, he had been receiving death threats. Two weeks before, Mexican police had fired into a crowd of student protesters, killing as many as 300 people. Martin Luther King had been assassinated just six months earlier. So Smith fully expected that the last thing he would hear, halfway through The Star Spangled Banner, would be a gunshot. "So when I hear that 'dum, da-dum', I get chills," he says. "I got chills then when I sang it," he laughs, holding out his arms to show the hairs standing on end.

In 1968, Smith seemed like a reluctant spokesman - resolute but nervous in interviews, unaccustomed to being in the spotlight for anything except his running. Today, aged 77, he is relaxed and forthcoming - perhaps as a result of all the public speaking he has done since. The tidy afro has been replaced by a shiny bald head and a grey beard, but Smith looks the picture of health as he speaks from his home outside Las Vegas (he has another home in Atlanta, Georgia). As well as speaking engagements, he works with a leadership academy and has various business interests. "I might be 77, but I'm more active now than I was when I was 50," he says.

Sports and politics are once more in the eye of the storm, but Smith's life shows how inseparable the two have always been, especially for a Black man who grew up in the US after the second world war. For Smith, the two were fused together permanently one weekend in March 1965. At an athletics meet on a Saturday, Smith broke his first world records - for the 200m and 220 yards (simultaneously as the track had two finish lines). He then went to join, part-way along, his first civil rights march, a 45-mile walk from San Jose to San Francisco calling for equal educational opportunities. It was a pivotal moment for him. "We were one of the first student marches for a good cause in the history of the United States," he says. "We were booed by the cars passing. Things were thrown at us. The women and children had to be moved to the middle of the pack, so they wouldn't be injured." They arrived in San Francisco, Smith having walked 30 miles, on Sunday evening.

His feet must have been killing him, I say. "You know, back in those days I was used to working because I'm a farm boy," he replies. "I was kind of tough - physically tough. So it didn't bother me. I came back, slept overnight four or five hours in my dorm, worked out and went to classes the next day and worked out that evening, and life kept going."

Smith is no longer a reluctant spokesman. Photograph: Rita Harper/The Guardian

Smith credits his hard childhood for his athletic ability. In effect, his training began as soon as he could walk, and work. He was the seventh of 14 siblings, two of whom died, in a poor family in rural Texas. As with most Black families in the area, they were sharecroppers - working land owned by white people, who took most of the profits. In the Jim Crow south, Smith barely ever saw any white people, he says, or any other people at all; the nearest neighbours were several miles away. The whole family worked in the cotton fields and lived in a leaky wooden house. When people ask who his favourite athlete is, Smith says his mother. "She had 14 kids and she did the same work as we did in the fields."

The family moved to California when Smith was six, to better conditions but essentially the same social position. "We were put in a labour camp, to do labour work," he says. "You could almost call it indentured servitude." Smith had to work 12-hour shifts every day. "I worked at night, because I went to school during the day," he says. "We irrigated fields from canals that ran through the San Joaquin valley. So I had to work all night, many times by myself, to make sure the water was going in the right places." When did he sleep? "You had to sleep when you could. It was very difficult. Easy to get yourself drowned if you fall asleep in the path of water that's running that fast."

At high school, Smith's sporting potential shone through - and in American football and basketball as well as track and field. That earned him a scholarship to San Jose State University, where he studied sociology. As one of the few Black students on campus (almost all of whom were male and athletes), he continued to experience discrimination. "The names I was being called, the way I was looked at, the way I was turned down from renting apartments on college campus and off, and so forth. A lot of so forth."

In his studies, though, Smith was learning African American history, even as the civil rights movement was writing a new chapter of it. This was the era of the March on Washington; Martin Luther King's Birmingham protests; the Alabama church bombings, in which four 14-year-old Black girls were killed by the Ku Klux Klan; the assassination of Malcolm X. African Americans were standing up, and being beaten down. Smith felt he needed to act. "I read sociology, but I didn't do sociology," he says. "I realised that reading was not good enough. You got to lay that book down and apply to the system what you learned in the book that the system wrote. And a lot of time it wasn't Black folks that wrote it; it was other cultures that wrote it."

At the same time, Smith was going from strength to strength on the track: the Usain Bolt of his day. Tall (6ft 4in/1.9 metres), rangy and well trained, he dominated men's sprinting. In 1968, he held 11 world records concurrently, across 200m and 400m and their imperial counterparts. His 100m time was pretty respectable, too. There was little question he would be on the US Olympics team for Mexico 1968.

The year before, African American athletes had discussed boycotting the Olympics. In October 1967, the activist and academic Harry Edwards formed what became the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), along with Smith, Carlos and the 400m runner Lee Evans (all four were at San Jose State). Soon the hate mail and death threats began.

The goal was human rights, Smith stresses, not Black power. The OPHR had a set of demands: that apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia be excluded; that Muhammad Ali's world heavyweight boxing title, removed as punishment for his stance against the Vietnam war, be reinstated; that more African American coaches be hired; and that Avery Brundage, chairman of the International Olympic Committee, be removed.

Smith, setting a world record time of 19.83 sec to win the 200m race; Carlos is to his left. Photograph: NCAA Photos/Getty Images

Brundage was steadfastly opposed to politics in sports. He had supported the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, and was doing everything he could to prevent an embarrassing boycott in Mexico. He even sent over Jesse Owens, hero of the 1936 Olympics, to try to talk the Black athletes out of it. Eventually they decided by a democratic vote that each athlete would do as they saw fit. Smith and Carlos were decided on their plan - although, as Smith reminds me, that depended on them actually winning medals. "We were not a group of kids running around and hoping that we win gold medals. We were running around having to win medals to do what we had to do."

On the podium, the pair's clothes carried important symbolism. They only had one pair of gloves between them; Smith's right hand signified "the power within Black America", he told reporters at the time, while Carlos's left hand stood for "Black unity". The black scarf around Smith's neck stood for Black pride. They wore black socks without shoes to symbolise "Black poverty in racist America". Carlos's bead necklace was for the lynchings of Black Americans. In addition, Smith, Carlos and the silver medallist, the Australian Peter Norman, all wore OPHR badges.

Nobody tried to assassinate Smith and Carlos that night, but they still paid a heavy price. Brundage and the US Olympic Committee (USOC) tried to make an example of them. They were expelled from the Olympic village and sent home. When they arrived in San Jose with their wives, nobody met them at the airport except the press. A Black reporter had to give them a lift home.

Most of (white) America regarded them as traitors. "When I came back to California, people shunned me like I was hot lava," Smith says. "I had a young son and a wife and I had to work, but the only jobs I could find were, like, washing cars. Had I been a white guy who held 11 world records, I believe no matter what I would have done in Mexico City or in the Olympic Games, I would have had some backing." He was 24 years old, theoretically at the peak of his career, but the USOC banned him from national and international competition. His career was over. During the next two years Smith's marriage broke up and his mother died - both of which he attributes to the after-effects of Mexico City.

During the 70s, Smith went under the radar. He finished his final year of college, then played football for the Cincinnati Bengals for a couple of seasons, before moving into teaching and athletics coaching, first at Oberlin College, near Cleveland, then in Santa Monica. He did a master's degree and taught sociology. Over the decades, his moral stand came to be recognised and celebrated. He and Carlos have been inducted into various halls of fame and received numerous awards. The image of Smith and Carlos on the podium is now part of civil rights history - reproduced on T-shirts and posters, recreated in music videos, commemorated in statues and murals, chronicled in documentaries. Smith's tracksuit and shoes are now on display in the National Museum of African American History in Washington DC.

Carlos (left) and Smith in front of a statue of their protest at San Jose State University. Photograph: Tony Avelar/AP

In 2016, by way of a belated apology, they were invited to be Olympic ambassadors for the US team in Rio. After the games, President Obama honoured them at the White House. "Their powerful silent protest in the 1968 Games was controversial, but it woke folks up and created greater opportunity for those that followed," he said.

Perhaps Smith's greatest vindication is that he set a powerful example for other sportspeople to use their platforms. The obvious parallel is Colin Kaepernick, whose decision to kneel during the national anthem in 2016 to highlight police racism caused similar controversy, and fed into the momentous Black Lives Matter movement. Other leading sportspeople have followed suit: Serena Williams, Lewis Hamilton, LeBron James and Naomi Osaka, not to mention England's national football team.

Smith has not followed England's Euros saga but has had some contact with Kaepernick, through letters and texts. "We know what happened to us," he says. "We both used the same platform to do what we felt necessary. He was strong enough to put his feelings on the line by that sacrifice, and doing what he thought he could do." Like Smith, Kaepernick paid a heavy price in terms of his career, though he has at least received sponsorship and public recognition (a Netflix series based on Kaepernick's life is coming soon).

As with Brundage in 1968, there are still critics arguing that politics has no place in sport. Rule 50 of the International Olympic Committee's charter bans any form of "political, religious or racial propaganda". Priti Patel tried to dismiss the England team's knee-taking as "gesture politics", just as Donald Trump and many others characterised Kaepernick's knee-taking as "unpatriotic" and "disrespecting the flag".

Photograph: Rita Harper/The Guardian

Unsurprisingly, Smith has little time for that argument. "They thought the flag was more important than the people who worked for it to fly in the first place," he says. "I have a lot of respect for that flag. Black folks have lost their lives for that flag, just as white folks have. But that was my platform. That's where the world was looking. I chose the victory stand for my silent gesture. How you viewed it is how you viewed it, because it wasn't about the flag. I love that flag because it represents my people as well.

"Sports and politics, in my terminology of moving forward and the truth, have always been a part of each other," Smith continues. "I didn't wear red, white and blue because they're my favourite colours. You don't sing the national anthem because it has a cool beat." Ultimately, though, Smith was forced to choose between the two. In making one of the world's most powerful political gestures, Smith sacrificed his sporting career. He wasn't thinking about his career at the time, though, he says. "I did it because it was for me to do. Whenever God gives you something to do, you don't question why. You just do it, because the heart says it must be done."

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'People shunned me like hot lava': the runner who raised his fist and risked his life

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ommie Smith still gets chills when he hears the opening bars of The Star Spangled Banner. It takes him right back to that night in October 1968 when he stood on the Olympic podium in Mexico City, wearing his gold medal, and made the raised-fist salute that has defined his life.

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Angela Davis: ‘We knew that the role of the police was to protect white supremacy’

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It is 1972, and Angela Davis is answering a question about whether she approves of the use of violence by the Black Panthers. She is sitting against a backdrop of powder-blue breeze blocks, the walls of a California state prison cell. Dressed in a red turtleneck, with her signature afro and a lit cigarette, she stares at the Swedish interviewer - almost straight through him - as she delivers her reply: "You ask me whether I approve of violence? That just doesn't make any sense at all. Whether I approve of guns? I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. Some very, very good friends of mine were killed by bombs - bombs that were planted by racists. I remember, from the time I was very small, the sound of bombs exploding across the street and the house shaking ... That's why, when someone asks me about violence, I find it incredible because it means the person asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through and experienced in this country from the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa."

Watching the short clip explains Davis the icon in an instant: the image, the intent, the intellect. She was immortalised in the 2011 documentary The Black Power Mixtape, and clips of the interview have been shared on social media as the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer has triggered global protests against police violence. Her 1981 book, Women, Race and Class, is being shared widely as essential reading for anyone wanting to learn about being actively anti-racist, alongside James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time and the autobiography of Frederick Douglass.

Now 76, she speaks over Zoom from her office in California. Does she feel now that, after so many years, meaningful change is possible? "Well, of course, it could be different," says Davis. "But that's not guaranteed." It's an understandably cautious tone from Davis, who has seen everything from the Watts riots and Vietnam to Ferguson and Iraq. "After many moments of dramatic awareness and possibilities of change, the kinds of reforms instituted in the aftermath have prevented the radical potential from being realised."

She is, on the whole, buoyed up by the vast protests triggered by Floyd's death. Although there have been large-scale protests as recently as 2014 - after the death of Michael Brown, and others including Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and Eric Garner - Davis thinks that this time, something has changed. This time, white people are beginning to understand.

"We've never witnessed sustained demonstrations of this size that are so diverse," says Davis. "So I think that is what is giving people a great deal of hope. Many people previously, in response to the slogan Black Lives Matter, asked: 'But shouldn't we really be saying all lives matter?' They're now finally getting it. That as long as black people continue to be treated in this way, as long as the violence of racism remains what it is, then no one is safe."

If anyone is qualified to make an assessment on the current situation, it is Davis. She has spent five decades as an intellectual campaigning for racial justice, yet the causes she has pursued - prison reform, defunding the police, restructuring the bail system - had, until recently, been considered too radical for mainstream political thinking. There was a feeling that she was frozen in time; that she belonged to a 60s brand of so-called radical chic and that her ideas were outmoded. In a profile written in 2016, a Wall Street Journal interviewer asked colleagues if they knew who Davis was. No one under 35 did.

Davis may have become a pinup for social justice 50 years after she rose to prominence, but she insists she gets just as much out of the new generation of protesters and political thinkers. "I see these young people who are so intelligent, who have learned from the past and who have developed new ideas," she says. "I find myself learning a great deal from people who are 50 years younger than me. And to me, that's exciting. That keeps me wanting to remain in the struggle."

"I think it's really important to point out that, while the immensity of this response is new, the struggles are not new," she says. Davis doesn't want the impact of community organising, educational workshops and food banks - the grassroots work pioneered by the Black Panthers in the 60s - to be ignored now. "The struggles have been unfolding for a long time," she adds. "What we are seeing now bears witness to the work that people have been doing that has not necessarily received media attention."

Davis cites the militarisation of the US police after Vietnam, and the potential for prison reform after the Attica prison uprising in 1971, which did not materialise, at least not in the way she imagined. Prison populations in the US exploded from around 200,000 at the time of Attica to over a million prisoners by the mid-90s. "Looking back at that period, we realised that the reforms actually helped to consolidate the institution itself and to make it more permanent," she says. "And that is the fear right now."

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Davis in 1974, with her signature look. Photograph: Everett Collection/REX/Everett Collection/Rex

So what advice would she give the Black Lives Matter movement? "The most important thing from where I stand is to begin to give expression to ideas about what we can do next," she says.

This is, of course, a big question, and a harder one to answer in the heat of growing protests around the world. One thing Davis is clear on is that moments such as the burning of a police precinct in Minneapolis or the removal of the Edward Colston statue in Bristol aren't the ultimate answer. "Regardless of what people think about it, it's really not going to bring about change," she says of the statue's removal. "It's organising. It's the work. And if people continue to do that work, and continue to organise against racism and provide new ways of thinking about how to transform our respective societies, that is what will make the difference."

Angela Yvonne Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944. At the time, Alabama was controlled by the notorious white supremacist politician Bull Connor. Davis was friends with some of those who died in the 16th Street Baptist church bombing in 1963 - a Ku Klux Klan act of terrorism that lead to the death of four girls, and for which no prosecutions were brought until 1977. "We knew that the role of the police was to protect white supremacy," says Davis.

She moved to New York at 15 to attend high school there, went to West Germany to study philosophy and Marxism under Herbert Marcuse at the Frankfurt school, and, back in the US by the end of the 60s, was active in the Black Panthers and a member of the Communist party. Her links to communism meant that the then California governor, Ronald Reagan, had her sacked from herposition as acting assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA.

Then, in 1970, things shifted gears. A shotgun Davis legally bought was used in an attempted courthouse escape. A judge who was taken hostage was killed, as was Jonathan Jackson - the student who attempted the breakout - and the two defendants. Davis was charged with "aggravated kidnapping and first degree murder" because she had purchased the gun. She went underground and was arrested in New York. Aretha Franklin helped publicise her case by offering to pay her bail, the Rolling Stones and John Lennon wrote songs about her, she became a cause celebre around the world and was cleared of the charges after spending 18 months in prison. It turned Davis from a radical academic and community leader into an international figurehead for political activism of all stripes. "I'm really thankful that I'm still alive," says Davis. "Because I feel like I'm witnessing this for all of those who didn't make it this far."

Davis knows how close she came to not surviving. When the 1972 interview took place, she was still being held on a charge of murder and could - in theory - have been executed. Many of Davis's fellow Panthers did meet violent deaths at the hands of the state: Fred Hampton was killed in a police raid in Chicago, while Bobby Hutton was shot while surrendering in Oakland (Marlon Brando delivered his eulogy). Many more are still in prison (Mumia Abu-Jamal) or exile (Assata Shakur). "I know that I could have been one of those ... several didn't make it," says Davis. "I could be in prison, I could have been sentenced to spend the rest of my life behind bars. And it was only because of the organising that unfolded all over the world that my life was saved. So, in a sense, my continued work is based on the awareness that I would not be here had enough people not done the same kind of work for me. And I'll continue to do this until the day I die."

One of the key tenets of Davis's post-prison life has been ensuring women's contribution to the civil-rights struggle is not ignored. That's something she sees echoed today, as people fight for female victims of police violence - people such as Breonna Taylor, who was shot and killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky, after they used a battering ram to enter her apartment - to be given the same coverage as their male counterparts. "This masculinisation of history goes back many decades and centuries," says Davis. "Discussions about lynching, for example, often fail to acknowledge not only that many of the lynching victims were black women, but also that those who struggled against lynching were black women, such as Ida B Wells."

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Campaigning against the Vietnam war with Jane Fonda. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images

"I think it's important to understand why this tendency towards masculine representations of struggle happen, and why we fail to recognise that women have forever been at the centre of these struggles, whether as victims or organisers."

It's not just Davis's ideas on police reform and social justice that are taking hold; her ideas on how that change comes about are proving equally influential. For decades, she has promoted feminist thinking that pushes back against hypermasculine political leadership and forms of resistance. She thinks the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements, which have not put an emphasis on or - in some cases - even formed recognisable leadership groups, are breaking new ground.

My mother told us that things would change. And that we could be a part of that change

"There are those here in this country who are asking: 'Where is the contemporary Martin Luther King?', 'Where is the new Malcolm X?', 'Where is the next Marcus Garvey?'" says Davis. "And, of course, when they think about leaders, they think about black male charismatic leaders. But the more recent radical organising among young people, which has been a feminist kind of organising, has emphasised collective leadership."

But isn't there a tension between Davis's ideals of collectivity and her own status? "I can't take myself too seriously," she says. "I say that over and over again. Because none of this would have happened if it were only up to me as an individual. It was the movement and the impact of the movement."

Davis has tried to pull that movement into the mainstream before. She ran for office herself in 1980, as the vice-presidential candidate for the US Communist party. In a lecture in 2006, she despaired at the George W Bush administration, and now she can't even bring herself to say Trump's name, instead opting for "the current resident of the White House". Does she think US democracy at present has room for radical ideas about social change? "I don't think it can happen," says Davis. "Not with the leadership of the current political formations - not the Democrats, and certainly not the Republican party."

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Speaking at the Women's March in Washington in 2017. Photograph: Noam Galai/WireImage

But what about the Democrats taking a knee and wearing kente cloth in solidarity? Nancy Pelosi and other prominent Democrats wore the Ghanaian fabric, which was given to them by the Congressional Black Caucus, to show "solidarity" with African Americans, a crucial voter base that their presidential candidate, Joe Biden, is struggling to connect with."That was because they want to be on the right side of history," Davis says, dismissively. "Not necessarily because they're going to do the right thing."

Davis sometimes tells a story at her lectures about how, as a young child in Birmingham, she asked her mother why she couldn't go to the segregated amusement park or libraries. Her mother, who was an activist before her, explained how segregation worked, but didn't leave it there. "She continually told us that things would change," says Davis. "And that they would change, and that we could be a part of that change. So I learned as a child to live under racial segregation, but at the same time simultaneously, to live in an imagined new world and to recognise that things would not always be as they were."

"My mother always said to us: 'This is not the way things are supposed to be, this is not the way the world is supposed to be.'"
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Angela Davis: 'We knew the role of the police was to protect white supremacy'

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It is 1972, and Angela Davis is answering a question about whether she approves of the use of violence by the Black Panthers. She is sitting against a backdrop of powder-blue breeze blocks, the walls of a California state prison cell.

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Minneapolis on trial: how the year of George Floyd changed me and my city

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At 9.52pm on 8 March 2020, my university sent out an email telling students that we would start our spring break a week early because of a potential Covid-19 case on campus.

What they couldn't tell us right then is that over the course of the two weeks, I'd fly home to Minnesota, fly back to campus in New York to move out and fly back home to finish classes in my family home.

There was no way of knowing that a mere two months later I'd be living through the largest civil rights uprising since the 60s - rippling out across the country from Minneapolis and St Paul, sometimes known as the Twin Cities, after the police killed George Floyd.

That was on top of the fast-unfolding global pandemic that was forcing me to study from my childhood room.

It's an almost dissociative sensation watching downtown Minneapolis, the city you've grown up in for 20 years, burn when you live only a few minutes' drive away from the flames, in St Paul's Como neighborhood.

No apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic movie could prepare me for the things I saw.

After the initial riots there was an eerie atmosphere during the day, as police vehicles and national guard tanks casually patrolled the streets. As soon as the sun set, the scene turned into what felt like a war zone as protesters prepped with medical remedies clashed with armed police dressed in riot gear.

I didn't protest the first two days after George Floyd's killing because my mother was worried that I would be arrested or killed.

Flames rise from the cleaners shop near the Third Police Precinct in Minneapolis on 28 May 2020. Photograph: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images

The protest flyers and events on social media pleaded with me to take action. On day three, I decided that I couldn't let others fight our battle alone so I took to the streets.

One protest turned into two, days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months of protesting - as much as my body and mental capacity could handle.

I went from party-hopping at my university pre-pandemic to protest-hopping in my home state. It became normal to leave home at 10am to protest and not return until night had fallen - due to curfew order - after attending two or three different demonstrations.

Lake Street, a few miles from where George Floyd died and the battleground for night one of the riots, was a dystopian sight.

The Wells Fargo bank whose free lollipops I craved as a child was completely charred from cars that were set ablaze in the drive-thru.

The outside was lined with the few desks and office supplies that survived the fire. The ATMs had been pried open and left empty. Shattered glass crunched under my feet.

Black smoke still rose from the heaps of ashes that were once buildings, for miles. It's surreal watching streets that hold so many memories be reduced to practically nothing.

The vast majority of the protests remained peaceful even when violence was acted out against demonstrators.

Large-scale global protests showed the world that " good trouble " for change is possible.

I think it's important to make clear that protesters and rioters are not synonymous. Most of the riots were started by instigators who crossed state lines or came from outside the city to intentionally cause destruction and undermine the movement.

People march in the street during a demonstration on 25 June 2020 in Minneapolis. Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

In the same breath, some riots are expressions of extreme frustration and rage that boil over. I didn't think the level of frustration and anger mixed with motivation and dedication I possessed in those months was possible.

For weeks I had a throbbing headache near my nape. I would sleep but never rest because of paranoia that I could be harmed by the police or white supremacists who had come to counter the civil rights protesters.

I woke up to paragraphs from people explaining why the death of George Floyd and other Black bodies were justified.

I woke up to other messages from close friends and acquaintances asking if I was safe and encouraging me to continue fighting.

From the ashes and rubble, a revolution formed. A revolution that mirrors those my grandmother was born into in Arkansas during the 60s.

In her youth she vividly remembers the traumatic experiences of white people refusing to serve her family on a road trip to Mississippi and her white third-grade teacher calling Black students the N-word.

Segregation showed itself through Black people living on one side of the railroads while white people lived on the other side and Black people sitting upstairs at the movie theaters.

She eventually moved to Minnesota where she thought there would be far less racism - she now knows that she was wrong.

"The south was more in-your-face. In Minnesota they try to hide it more but the same things are going on here," she said.

A man stands under shelter from the rain on 18 June 2020 in Minneapolis. Photograph: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Since my grandmother was a girl, the world has changed in so many ways, yet the fight for justice has been the same for centuries.

Now that the cameras are gone and protests are more sporadic, the world seems to have moved on from last summer.

The voices that once boomed across the downtown buildings have turned into a murmur. But Minnesota remembers. There is no going back to normal for us. As I drive on the icy streets I spent the summer marching on, I feel a sense of nostalgia and foreshadowing.

I'm certain that in the coming weeks, I will find myself marching on these streets again.

On 8 March 2021, exactly a year after I opened that email from my university, ex-officer and George Floyd's killer, Derek Chauvin, is set to go on trial in Minneapolis. So, in effect, does the police department, the city and the criminal justice system itself.

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Minneapolis on trial: how the year of George Floyd changed me and my city

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At 9.52pm on 8 March 2020, my university sent out an email telling students that we would start our spring break a week early because of a potential Covid-19 case on campus.

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‘A mural that celebrates Black joy’: Oakland home honors women of the Black Panther party

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Jilchristina Vest always wanted people to look up to Black women. Now, thanks to a two-story mural on the side of her Oakland home, they literally do.

The mural, dedicated to the women of the Black Panther party, was unveiled earlier this month. Vest's house sits at Center and 9th streets, in the heart of the West Oakland neighborhood where the Black Panther party began, once known as the Harlem of the west. The mural looks down on the corner where Huey Newton, one of the party's founders, was killed.

The work was commissioned by Vest and brought to life by Rachel Wolfe-Goldsmith, an Oakland-based muralist, while the former Black Panther Ericka Huggins served as mentor on the project.

Standing 30ft tall, the towering mural is already drawing regular crowds and sparking a dialogue in the neighborhood. "People park their cars, get out and stand on the sidewalk and look up at the Black women on the wall," says Vest. "They take pictures in front of their images. The mural starts conversations on the sidewalk. Strangers introduce themselves to one another. They ask questions."

Rachel Wolfe-Goldsmith, a muralist based in Oakland, paints a mural dedicated to the women of the Black Panther party on Jilchristina Vest's home in Oakland, California, as a crowd gathers to watch. Jane Tyska/East Bay Times/Getty Images
Rachel Wolfe-Goldsmith, a muralist based in Oakland, paints a mural dedicated to the women of the Black Panther party on Jilchristina Vest's home in Oakland, California, as a crowd gathers to watch. Jane Tyska/East Bay Times/Getty Images

Vest explains the mural is based on an archival photograph taken by Stephen Shames, and that the women in the photograph were originally unidentified. But since the mural unveiling, observers have helped name the figures as Delores Henderson, Angie Johnson, and Lauren Williams and her child. The striking "Panther" blue artwork already contains the names of 260 women, and the plan is for it to eventually stretch around Vests's entire house, covering 2,000 sq ft, and that names of more women will continue to be added.

The towering work is the first public installation honoring the women of the party who Huggins, the longest serving female Black Panther, says have long been overlooked by the media and historians. She recalls how Black teenagers from all over the country were drawn to California to join the party; two-thirds were women who worked side-by-side with the men.

"This is something people do not know," she says. "The history books do not carry us."

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A quote from former Black Panther party member Ericka Huggins is part of the mural. Photograph: Ayodele Nzinga/The Guardian

Huggins, who spent 14 years in the party, says that Newton was a lover of art and literature; they even co-authored poetry together. She describes how the Black Panthers operated community programs in the historically redlined West Oakland neighborhood - providing food, medical care and educational programming - that went on to be replicated nationally and internationally.

"We were not a mainstream organization, nor did we aspire to be," she recalls. "We called ourselves revolutionaries. We didn't expect mainstream media to carry us. We were talking about uplifting not only Black and Brown people but all oppressed people."

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Ericka Huggins, former Black Panther party member, served as a mentor on the mural dedicated to the women of the Black Panther party. Photograph: Courtesy Ericka Huggins

The mural memorializes the party's creed, "Serve the People, Body and Soul", as well as a quote from Huggins: "Love is an expression of power. We can use it to transform our world." Its unveiling included a Black Panther-style community food giveaway in collaboration with the East Oakland Collective.

Vest, 54, is originally from Chicago, and was born the same year the Black Panthers formed. She moved to California at 19, and purchased her home on Ninth Street 20 years ago. While the mural was in process, she spearheaded a movement to rename three blocks of 9th Street Dr Huey P Newton Way.

Murals are an enormous undertaking, logistically and financially, but Vest says the most challenging part of the project was self-doubt. "As Black people and as Black women, we constantly have to negate what we are being told out in the world," she says. "It is difficult to talk it down."

The project helped Vest move through a dark period, brought about by the pandemic and the police killing of George Floyd and the lack of justice over the murder of Breonna Taylor.

"I was suffering. Everyone around me was suffering. I was crying daily and having panic attacks," she says. "So much of the mural is born out of the events of May-June of 2020."

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Rachel Wolfe-Goldsmith brings to life a mural dedicated to the women of the Black Panther party. Photograph: Jane Tyska/East Bay Times/Getty Images

Thousands of people protested across Oakland during the summer, and dozens of murals sprung up in the city's downtown, creating a kind of outdoor museum. Vest says she found them beautiful and cathartic, but noted that they came out of grief. The artwork inspired her to commission the mural - one that celebrated life, her ancestors, community, and people who looked like her.

And at a time when "black Bodies continue to be persecuted", she says, the mural is also a reminder that she is "not going anywhere".

"I do not have to ask permission to take up space," she says. "I can paint a mural on my home that celebrates Black joy, that reminds us we thrive, we are powerful, we are amazing, and we can use that to balance the grief."
Topics

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'A mural that celebrates Black joy': Oakland home honors women of the Black Panther party

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Jilchristina Vest always wanted people to look up to Black women. Now, thanks to a two-story mural on the side of her Oakland home, they literally do. The mural, dedicated to the women of the Black Panther party, was unveiled earlier this month.

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George Floyd: Why is the trial so important?

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Jury selection is about to start in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer accused of killing George Floyd.

Onlookers in the US city of Minneapolis recorded Chauvin - who's white - kneeling on the neck of Floyd, who was black. The incident sparked protests in the US and across the world against police brutality and racism.

What happened to George Floyd?

The 46-year-old bought a pack of cigarettes at a convenience store in South Minneapolis on the evening of 25 May 2020.

A shop assistant believed he used a counterfeit $20 bill and called the police after Mr Floyd refused to give the cigarettes back.

Officers arrived and handcuffed him, but when they tried to put him into the squad car he resisted, and a struggle ended with Mr Floyd face-down on the street.

That's when onlookers began filming.

Mr Chauvin, 44, placed his left knee between Mr Floyd's head and neck, and kept it there for seven minutes and 46 seconds, according to prosecutors. Two other officers helped pin him down, while another prevented witnesses from intervening.

More than 20 times Mr Floyd said he could not breathe. The video shows him go limp and get carried away by police.

He was pronounced dead in hospital an hour later.

When is the George Floyd trial?

The weeks-long process will begin on Monday 8 March with jury selection. Arguments are due to start on 29 March and are expected to take at least one month.

The contentious process will see lawyers for both sides question dozens - or possibly hundreds of candidates - and eventually choose 16 people.

Twelve jurors will be seated to decide the case, with four other alternates chosen as backups.

Potential jurors have already submitted questionnaires, describing their existing knowledge of the case, any previous contact with police and their media habits.

Each side can remove a potential juror from the panel, but if either side believes a juror has been relieved due to discrimination based on race, ethnicity or sex, opposing lawyers can issue a "Batson challenge".

The judge then decides whether the juror stays or goes.

How did the US react to Floyd's death?

The four police officers at the scene were fired the following day as crowds took to the streets of Minneapolis to protest. The station where they worked was set ablaze and protests quickly spread to other cities.

By the sixth night, there were protests in 75 cities across the US - some violent - and a national debate about police brutality against African-Americans was reignited.

An anti-racism movement created in 2013 after the killing of teenager Trayvon Martin, Black Lives Matter, was re-energised by the protests.

Even very white, small towns in rural parts of the US held protests to remember Mr Floyd and take a stand against racial injustice.

Reforms were introduced by lawmakers to change the way some police forces make arrests and detain suspects.

But the conversation soon widened from policing to issues such as workplace equality, unconscious bias and the legacy of slavery.

What happened outside the US?

Anti-racism protests were held in countries across the world in response to the death.

Many focused on their own victims of alleged police violence.

In Australia, the focus was on the indigenous community, while in the UK, a statue of a 17th Century slave trader was torn down and thrown into Bristol harbour.

Many corporate brands also expressed support for Black Lives Matter, while many athletes now "take the knee" in solidarity before events.

What is second-degree murder?

Mr Chauvin is charged with second-degree murder, which means causing death without intent. The maximum sentence is 40 years.

It is rare that police officers in the US are charged, let alone convicted, for use of lethal force. This is partly because they can often successfully argue that they feared for their lives.

Mr Chauvin is standing trial separately from the other three police officers, due to Covid restrictions on space.

The others are charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and will come before the courts in August.

What are the rules in court?

The entire trial will be streamed online - unusually for a US murder case.

The judge has ruled that only one member of the Chauvin and Floyd families can be in court at any one time.

Face masks with slogans are banned in the courtroom.

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George Floyd: Why is the trial so important?

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Jury selection is about to start in the trial of Derek Chauvin, the police officer accused of killing George Floyd. Onlookers in the US city of Minneapolis recorded Chauvin - who's white - kneeling on the neck of Floyd, who was black. The incident sparked protests in the US and across the world against police brutality and racism.

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Malcolm X - Interview At Berkeley (1963)

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Martin Luther King Jr  and the Civil Rights Movement

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International Women's Day: We are #GenerationEquality

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International Women's Day is celebrated annually on 8 March. Watch this video from UN Women to find out more about the fight for gender equality.

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‘They stood firm’: Poverty and police violence in 70s Northern Ireland – in pictures

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In 1978, Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins visited Northern Ireland to document the lives of Catholic communities from the inside: 'I was not neutral and was not interested in capturing it so'

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'They stood firm': Poverty and police violence in 70s Northern Ireland - in pictures

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In 1978, Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins visited Northern Ireland to document the lives of Catholic communities from the inside: 'I was not neutral and was not interested in capturing it so'

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Bloody Sunday: Rare actual footage of how it all unfolded (30 Jan. 1972, Derry, Northern Ireland)

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On Friday 21 July 1972, 19 Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombs exploded across Belfast in little over an hour on a warm afternoon.

Nine people were killed and 130 others were seriously injured in what became known as Bloody Friday, another horrific day in the Troubles.

What happened?

As the timed devices went off around the city starting shortly after 14:00 BST, flying glass and debris from the blasts caused extensive injuries to people caught in the open and fireballs caused horrific burns.

Security forces in the city were stretched to their limits with the subsequent chaos in the streets and hoax warnings about further bombs.

The scale of the attack was huge stretching from Botanic Avenue in the south of the city to Great Victoria Street in the city centre, the ferry terminus and Queen Elizabeth Bridge up to Salisbury Avenue in north Belfast,.

The nine people who were killed died in two of the 19 bombs.

A car was driven into the rear of the Oxford Street bus station in the city centre, killing six people.

An explosion in a hijacked vehicle at shops on the Cavehill Road killed another three people.

Of the nine people who died, seven were civilians and two were soldiers.

Among the injured were 77 women and girls, and 53 men and boys.

The victims came from both sides of the community.

The IRA had placed more bombs which were defused possibly saving more lives.

In the aftermath, the IRA attempted to blame security forces for failing to act on warnings.

Who were the victims?

Stephen Cooper (19), member of the British Army

William Crothers (15), civilian

John Gibson (45), civilian

William Irvine (18), civilian

Thomas Killops (39), civilian

Brigid Murray (65), civilian

Margaret O'Hare (34), civilian

Stephen Parker (14), civilian

Philip Price (27), member of the British Army

What happened next?

July 1972 is often called the bloodiest month, of the bloodiest year of the Troubles.

By the time the first bomb in Belfast exploded on Bloody Friday, 59 people had already been killed across Northern Ireland that month.

News headlines from across Northern Ireland on the day said the attack was the worst the city had seen since the Blitz in 1941, with widespread condemnation from both sides of the community.

The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland at the time, William Whitelaw, told the House of Commons the bombings were "a wanton attack on innocent men, women and children".

In the 10 days after Bloody Friday, 18 more people were killed in Belfast.

Then, at 04:00 on 31 July 1972 the Army launched Operation Motorman and moved in to clear "no go" areas set up by republican paramilitaries across Northern Ireland.

In Londonderry more than 1,000 soldiers in armoured vehicles moved into the Bogside and Creggan.

In Belfast, the Army set up watchtowers in Casement Park in the west of the city.

In all, about 4,000 extra troops were brought into Northern Ireland during the operation.

Two teenagers were shot and killed by the Army during the operation in Derry.

Nine people were also killed that day in an IRA bomb in Claudy, County Londonderry.

In later years, the IRA leader at the time, Sean MacStiofain, said the aim of the Bloody Friday attacks had been to cause financial damage - but he refused to accept responsibility.

Writing in 1996, Gerry Adams, the then Sinn Féin president, stated the IRA "made a mistake in putting out so many bombs".

He added that civilian fatalities were "a matter of deep regret".

In a statement in the republican newspaper An Phoblacht it said it offered "sincere apologies" to the families of those killed on Bloody Friday.

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Bloody Friday: What happened in Belfast on 21 July 1972?

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On Friday 21 July 1972, 19 Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombs exploded across Belfast in little over an hour on a warm afternoon. Nine people were killed and 130 others were seriously injured in what became known as Bloody Friday, another horrific day in the Troubles. What happened?

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Christopher Columbus Statue Controversy  | The Daily Social Distancing Show

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Bobby Sands: The hunger strike that changed the course of N Ireland's conflict

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The seeds of the hunger strike had been sown in 1976, when the Labour government of Harold Wilson abolished the "special category" status that IRA prisoners had previously been granted, allowing them, among other things, to wear their own clothes.

The question of clothing was important to them because they claimed they were "political" prisoners, fighting to achieve the IRA's historic goal of a united Ireland; prison uniforms criminalised them, they argued.

So many responded to the Wilson government's withdrawal of the right to wear their own clothes, by wearing nothing.

Gerard Hodgins, a Belfast Republican sentenced to 14 years for terrorist offences and IRA membership told me what happened when he arrived at the specially built H-blocks, at the Maze.

"I didn't identify myself as being a criminal. The prison officer was there saying, 'Right, you're here to do your time. You can do it the hard way or the easy way. If you take my advice, you'd get them uniforms on you now. If not, strip.' So you stripped there and then whilst you were being ridiculed and jeered at by the screws."

The so-called "blanket men", who covered themselves in the blankets left on their beds, made five demands: the right to wear their own clothes, not do prison work, to organise their own studies, receive parcels from home, and enjoy freedom to mix with their comrades. They were savvy enough to realise that the government would never grant political status in name.

But their protest excited little sympathy outside the walls of the prison. The Nationalist community remained largely uninterested and apathetic. The government stood its ground, sensing it was on the winning side.

So the prisoners then escalated the protest, refusing to "slop out" the chamber pots left in their cells, as there were no toilets. Instead they slopped their urine on the floor and daubed the solid waste on the walls. It became known as the "dirty" or "no-wash" protest.

"You become accustomed to it. You were waking up in the morning with maggots in the bed with you," said Gerard Hodgins, who lived like this for about three years. "It just gets to the stage where you brush them off again."

Cathal Crumley from Londonderry, who was sentenced to four years for IRA membership at the age of 18, told me he used to sweep the urine under the prison door.

"I remember for years sleeping on a piece of sponge that had been soaked by urine that was pushed back under the doors. It was uncomfortable, it was stomach-churning, but that was the battleground that had been created for us and we either survived or gave up."

By 1980, despite the horrific conditions, the "dirty protest" had still failed to galvanise much of the Nationalist community. Many simply believed the conditions were self-inflicted. With morale sinking, the prisoners decided to go for the nuclear option - the hunger strike.

They calculated that being ready to sacrifice their lives for their convictions would finally fire up their supporters and force the new Conservative prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, to compromise.

Seven prisoners refused food on 28 October 1980, and I remember having my doubts that they would go through with it. But they did. After 53 days they were staring death in the face when a compromise was agreed through a top-secret back-channel, facilitated by MI6 officer Michael Oatley.

Remarkably the compromise was sanctioned by Mrs Thatcher. I asked Oatley - codenamed The Mountain Climber by the IRA - if the formula allowed prisoners to wear their own clothes.

"I think it left that sort of question rather open," he replied. "It did suggest some concessions."

The prisoners certainly ended their hunger strike in the belief that they were getting their own clothes - families brought them into the prison in readiness - but the government had other plans.

I well remember a Northern Ireland Office official in Belfast opening his desk drawer and producing a shirt still crisp in its Marks and Spencer's wrapper. "Look," he said proudly, "we're going to give them, not their own clothes, but brand new clothes."

"But they'll never wear it," I said. And they didn't.

The compromise collapsed. The prisoners accused the perfidious "Brits" of betrayal. I asked Michael Oatley what had gone wrong.

"I think that at the end of the first hunger strike the prison regime was not altered sufficiently to meet the expectations of the prisoners," he said.

I think that was probably putting it mildly. Today Oatley describes the hunger strike as "a searing tragedy that could have been avoided".

Two months later, when I heard that the IRA's commanding officer in the Maze, Bobby Sands, was to lead a second hunger strike, starting on 1 March 1981 - the fifth anniversary of the abolition of special category status - I knew that this time, failing any compromise, it would be to the death. Nine volunteers followed Sands.

Mrs Thatcher never wavered.

"Crime is crime is crime," she declared. "It is not political. It is crime. There can be no question of political status."

Nor was there any compromise on the IRA side. It was destined to be an epic struggle between the Iron Lady and the iron-willed men.

Then came a totally unexpected event. A snap by-election was announced for the Westminster constituency of Fermanagh/South Tyrone, and Sinn Fein's Jim Gibney, sensing that outside support for Sands and the other hunger strikers was ebbing, suggested to Gerry Adams - then the party's vice-president - that Sands should stand as a candidate.

After much discussion, Adams assented and Sands agreed to run as an Anti-H-Block/Armagh Political Prisoner candidate. (Armagh was the women's prison.) Confounding the government's expectations, Sands narrowly won the election by 1,446 votes on a turnout of 87%.

The Unionist MP, Ken Maginnis, probably reflected the view of the vast majority of his Loyalist constituents when he said he was surprised and horrified.

"I couldn't believe that my Roman Catholic neighbour, whom I'd always treated with a great deal of respect, could then go out and vote for someone who was going to murder me or murder some of my friends and who was an enemy of this particular community. I just couldn't believe it."

It proved to be a critical turning point though, changing the course of the conflict.

"It was very, very difficult before Bobby Sands was elected, to argue internally that the way forward was through standing Sinn Fein in elections," Jim Gibney told me. "It was one of the high points in terms of convincing Republicans of the merits of electoral politics."

A month after his election, and after 66 days on hunger strike, Bobby Sands MP died.

Around 100,000 mourners came to his funeral, again confounding the expectations of the government, which believed the hunger strike had limited support. To those who marched behind his coffin, Sands was a martyr, Margaret Thatcher a murderer.

"Mr Sands was a convicted criminal," the prime minister said. "He chose to take his own life. It was a choice that his organisation did not allow to many of their victims."

Over the next three months, nine other hunger strikers were buried with full IRA honours. Most had gone without food for over 60 days.

Mrs Thatcher scented victory.

"Faced with the failure of their discredited cause, the men of violence have chosen in recent months to play what may well be their last card," she said.

But prisoners were still joining the hunger strike into the autumn. Gerard Hodgins refused food on 14 September. He knew exactly what he was doing.

"The hunger strike came to encapsulate the whole struggle for us. We believed if we lose out on this one, we've lost this war. Everything that we've sacrificed up to date would have been in vain."

He ended his strike on 3 October, along with the rest of his comrades, after it became clear that their families would authorise medical intervention to save the lives of their sons.

By now, Mrs Thatcher had sent James Prior to Belfast as Northern Ireland secretary, to try to resolve the hunger strike. Prior, an arch conciliator, intimated concessions - and, once the strike was over, modified prison rules.

Prisoners were allowed their own clothes, permitted to associate freely, granted more visits and excused prison work. On the face of it, the hunger strikers had won - but at a terrible cost.

A month after the end of the hunger strike, at Sinn Fein's annual conference, the party's director of publicity, Danny Morrison, first gave voice to the slogan, "The Armalite and Ballot Box" - the phrase reflecting the fusion of violence and politics that was to define IRA/Sinn Fein strategy for next 15 years.

The next year, Martin McGuinness, who had told an Irish court in 1973 he was proud to be a member of the Provisional IRA, was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly, and in 1983 Gerry Adams was elected to Westminster. That was the Ballot Box. The Armalite followed in 1984 when the IRA bombed the Grand Hotel, Brighton, where the Conservative Party was holding its annual conference. Five members of the party were killed. Mrs Thatcher narrowly survived. To the IRA leadership and rank and file, it was seen as revenge for the hunger strike.

Also by Peter Taylor:

The party's momentous political advance was finally crowned when Martin McGuinness, once arguably the most powerful IRA leader on the island of Ireland, became deputy first minister in the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly, sharing power with his once bitter enemy, Ian Paisley. Astonishingly, McGuinness then went on to dine in white tie and tails with the Queen at Windsor Castle. He did so, he told me, "to reach out the hand of friendship to the Unionist people of the North".

The hunger strikes were pivotal in Sinn Fein's remarkable journey, which leaves it now the largest political party on the island of Ireland, sharing power in Belfast and knocking on the door in Dublin.

It is a transformation I never dreamed I would see when I was covering the hunger strikes from their origin to their dramatic climax.

How did the Northern Ireland secretary, who finally brought the hunger strike to an end, view Sinn Fein's advance? I interviewed James - by then Lord - Prior two years before he died aged 89. I asked him if he thought the Armalite and Ballot Box strategy had worked. He was remarkably candid.

"I expect with the benefit of hindsight, one has to say yes it did. However unpleasant that sounds, I'm afraid it did work."

I put it to him that governments can never acknowledge that violence works, while they are in power.

"No," he said. "It takes many years afterwards, such as you're asking me now."

The island of Ireland is partitioned, and Northern Ireland established. Catholic minority in the North suffers discrimination in voting, housing and employment at hands of Protestant majority. Catholics are mostly Nationalist - favouring a united Ireland, governed from Dublin - while Protestants are mostly Unionist, preferring to remain within the UK.

Mainly Catholic Civil Rights movement takes to the streets to demand an end to discrimination. Forces of the state resist.

British troops intervene in Northern Ireland to stop sectarian rioting between Catholic and Protestant mobs. Provisional IRA formed with aim of using "armed struggle" to re-unify Ireland.

IRA suspects are interned without trial in the disused RAF camp at Long Kesh outside Belfast. Internees detained in RAF Nissen huts in wired compounds that look like a WW2 German Prisoner of War camp. Behind the wire, detainees live like POWs, allowed to wear their own clothes, mix freely with their comrades and run their own regime. Arms training practised with wooden guns. Lectures on guerrilla warfare by inmates. Detainees regard themselves as political prisoners because their political aim is to re-unify Ireland - by armed force.

The most violent year of the so-called "Troubles". Nearly 500 killed including over 250 civilians and 150 members of the security forces. The year opens with "Bloody Sunday" on 30 January when Paratroopers shoot dead 13 innocent Catholic civil rights marchers.

The Unionist-dominated Parliament at Stormont is abolished and direct rule imposed from Westminster, headed by a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland.

Prisoners in Belfast's Crumlin Road jail go on hunger strike demanding "political" status, with the same privileges enjoyed by their comrades detained in Long Kesh. A hunger strike led by IRA Belfast commander Billy McKee lasts for 35 days. By then 40 other prisoners have joined him. Fearing violence on the streets should McKee die, Northern Ireland Secretary William Whitelaw makes concessions including the right for prisoners to wear their own clothes. The government calls it "special category status", refusing to call it "political status".

Secret peace talks take place between the British Government and the IRA leadership including the young Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. The talks fail.

The government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson abolishes special category status and introduces a policy of "criminalisation" - using due process of law to arrest terrorist suspects and try them before special non-jury courts, presided over by a single judge. They're then to be sentenced to the new, specially built, high security H Blocks - so-named because of their shape. Long Kesh is renamed the Maze prison.

IRA prisoners refuse to put on prison uniform and wear prison blankets instead. They make five demands, including the right to wear their own clothes and privileges regarding work, education, visits, and free association outside cells. The government shows no sign of giving in.

Prisoners then escalate the protest, refusing to slop out the chamber pots in their cells - they daub excreta on the walls and pour urine under the cell doors. They live like this for three years.

Margaret Thatcher becomes prime minister.

The IRA assassinates Lord Louis Mountbatten at his holiday home in the Irish Republic and on the same day kills 18 soldiers in an ambush at Warrenpoint.

The prisoners press the nuclear button. The first hunger strike begins when seven prisoners refuse food. They call off the strike after 53 days just as one of their number is on the brink of dying. They are led to believe they are about to get their own clothes - the crunch issue in the confrontation. Families deliver them to the prison but they are never given to the prisoners.

March: Bobby Sands, the leader of the IRA in the prison, goes on hunger strike, making clear he intends starve himself to death. Nine other Republican prisoners join him. Mrs Thatcher makes it clear there will be no compromise.

April: Sands is elected to Westminster, having stood as an H Block candidate in the Fermanagh South Tyrone by-election. I

May: Sands dies after 66 days on hunger strike. Around 100,000 mourners attend his funeral.

June: Two H Block prisoners are elected to the Irish Parliament in Dublin - one of them a hunger striker.

August: A 10th hunger striker dies. Sinn Fein's Owen Carron holds Bobby Sands' Westminster seat in the Fermanagh/South Tyrone by-election.

October: Families begin directing medical attention to save the lives of their sons still on hunger strike. James Prior becomes Northern Ireland Secretary. The strike ends and compromises are agreed. Prisoners get their own clothes and gradually the restoration of other privileges.

Martin McGuinness, the former IRA leader and now Sinn Fein politician, is elected to the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly.

Gerry Adams, Vice-President of Sinn Fein, is elected to Westminster. He becomes president of Sinn Fein later in the year.

IRA ceasefire, followed six weeks later by Loyalist paramilitary ceasefires.

Good Friday Agreement signed by all parties to the conflict.

Brexit - the UK leaves the European Union. Sinn Fein becomes the largest political party on the island of Ireland.

To avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland, a notional customs border is placed in the Irish Sea, setting a trade border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK.

Peter Taylor has been reporting on Northern Ireland since 1972

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Bobby Sands: The hunger strike that changed the course of N Ireland's conflict

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The seeds of the hunger strike had been sown in 1976, when the Labour government of Harold Wilson abolished the "special category" status that IRA prisoners had previously been granted, allowing them, among other things, to wear their own clothes.

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Ireland 1921: how republicans used their whiteness to win freedom

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Ireland 1921: how republicans used their whiteness to win freedom

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n February 1921, newspapers in London began to publish stories about how military lorries in Ireland were carrying prisoners as hostages in the hope of deterring attacks by the IRA, the guerrilla army fighting British rule since 1919. Within a year, negotiations would lead to Irish independence and the campaign would be hailed as the first successful revolt against the British empire. But in the spring of 1921 the war appeared to be intensifying. Martial law had been imposed across the southern half of Ireland; if troops or police were shot, houses in the vicinity of the attack were demolished in reprisal.

Dublin had become as dangerous as the provinces: army lorries were ambushed with bombs and revolvers; crowds scattered when Black and Tans - demobilised soldiers recruited to the Irish police force who had gained a reputation for brutality - opened fire indiscriminately in city centre streets.

The Daily News, a persistent critic of the conduct of the war, condemned the policy of "Oriental repression" in Ireland.

In the House of Commons, Capt William Wedgwood Benn introduced a motion declaring that the government's campaign to defeat the Irish independence movement had failed. Newspapers around the world were full of news from Ireland, he pointed out, in which the British were portrayed as the cruel persecutors of a people deserving of freedom.

As Benn spoke in the Commons, the prominent liberal journalist JL Hammond and his wife, Barbara, were travelling around Ireland to see for themselves. Barbara Hammond found conditions "simply appalling" while her husband was horrified that the attitude of the British government was to govern Ireland as if it were "Sierra Leone or Fiji". The best description he had heard of his own government's policy was from a French journalist, who told him that Britain was "trying to subdue a people as intelligent as any in Europe, by the means that European governments use for the correction of Berbers".

The comparisons between Ireland and other colonial possessions were not fanciful. To many British politicians, the situation in Ireland was on a par with the postwar nationalist revolts they faced in Egypt and India. Irish revolutionary leaders themselves supported self-determination as a universal principle. But the unspoken assumption of the French journalist who impressed Hammond was crucial: the Irish merited better treatment than the Berbers fighting French and Spanish colonialists in North Africa because they were white.

Although the Irish revolutionaries worked to forge links with anti-colonial movements across the world, they were increasingly aware that proclaiming their whiteness was a clever card to play. The Irish representative at the peace conference in Versailles in 1919, Seán T O'Kelly, had been bitterly disappointed at his failure to secure a meeting with President Woodrow Wilson. "It seems," he told an American journalist, "that the blacks and yellows, all colours and races, may be heard before the conference except the Irish."

Eamon de Valera, centre, at a rally in New York. Photograph: Keystone-France/Getty Images

By May 1919, Erskine Childers, the former English officer and bestselling spy novelist, who had become Sinn Féin's chief propagandist, was amplifying O'Kelly's theme. In Paris, Childers pointed out in a letter to the Times, Britain had set about fixing new frontiers of nations the prime minister, David Lloyd George, had scarcely heard of, while failing to deal with Ireland. Was Ireland, Childers asked, to be "the last unliberated white community on the face of the globe?"

And a year later O'Kelly was still emphasising the point in a letter seeking an audience with Pope Benedict XV: Sinn Féin's aim was "to obtain that independence which every other white race in the world has already won".

The Irish republican leader Éamon de Valera had also taken this theme to the US on a fundraising tour from June 1919 to December 1920. De Valera travelled around America during an upsurge in racial violence in response to new challenges to segregation in the south and the beginning of the great black migration northwards.

Amid a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, a new generation of radical black leaders celebrated the military achievements of black soldiers on European battlefields. The experience of fighting in Europe, black sociologist WEB Du Bois wrote, had revolutionised their attitudes to confronting discrimination in the US. "A new, radical Negro spirit has been born in France, which leave us older radicals far behind. Thousands of young black men have offered their lives for the Lilies of France and they return ready to offer them again for the Sun-flowers of Afro-America." The Harlem activist Hubert Harrison agreed that there was a growing awareness that "Negroes [were] awake" everywhere.

Black veterans were regularly attacked: several of the 78 black men lynched in the "red summer" of 1919 were wearing their army uniforms. Race riots erupted in 25 towns and cities, with more than 100 people killed. In Washington the streets were filled with soldiers. White rioters were led by marines in uniform; black men were beaten in the street on their way home from work and were took up arms to defend their homes from white mobs.

Another of the new black leaders, Marcus Garvey, had explicitly modelled his quest for black "self-determination" on Sinn Féin. In August 1920 he convened the first International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World in Madison Square Garden in New York and read out a telegram he had sent to De Valera before 25,000 delegates. "We believe Ireland should be free even as Africa shall be free for the Negroes of the world."

A crowd of men and armed National Guard stand in front of a cafe during race riots in Chicago in the 'red summer' of 1919. Photograph: Chicago History Museum/AP

But De Valera made no mention of Ireland's affinities with anti-colonial movements when he toured the American south in 1920. In Georgia, he shared a stage with veteran Confederate soldiers in their rebel uniforms; in Birmingham, Alabama, he wooed his audience by reminding them that Ireland "was the only white nation on earth still in the bonds of political slavery".

The violence in the US played into a popular discussion among commentators on both sides of the Atlantic about how the world might be on the brink of a race war. The Harvard historian Lothrop Stoddard published a bestselling book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, which raised the spectre of "a pan-Coloured alliance for the universal overthrow of the white hegemony at a single stroke, a nightmare of race-war beside which the late struggle in Europe would seem the veriest child's play". White southerners in the US were confident that the rest of the "civilised" world would adopt segregation to manage the race question.

President Wilson had taken his white supremacist attitudes with him to Paris, where he worked closely with the South African statesman Jan Smuts to devise the mandate system for running colonies under the new League of Nations. The big powers would become guardians of peoples who, in the view of Smuts, would need "much nursing" before they could be considered candidates for independence. Self-determination was no longer a universal aspiration: instead it was reformulated to accommodate what the historian Adom Getachew has described as a regime of "racialised exclusion".

Ireland's representative O'Kelly had been wrong: the peace conference did not signal an advance in racial equality that disadvantaged Ireland. In March 1921, Du Bois wrote in his magazine the Crisis that although he endorsed the League of Nations it was still controlled by "imperial dictators".

In the same issue he wrote that black Americans were uniquely placed to understand the news from Ireland. "The Irish resist... Their resistance is called crime... in retaliation not only the 'guilty' but the innocent among them are murdered and robbed and public property is burned by English guardians of the Peace!"

But Du Bois also noted how it must have caused the Irish some dismay to be treated in this way, given that they often sided with white supremacists in the US. "All this contains no word of argument against the ultimate freedom of Ireland - which God speedily grant! - but it does make us remember how in this world it is the Oppressed who have continually been used to cow and kill the Oppressed in the interest of the Universal Oppressor."
Maurice Walsh is the author of Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World 1918-1923 (Faber & Faber). He teaches history at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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Ireland 1921: how republicans used their whiteness to win freedom

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n February 1921, newspapers in London began to publish stories about how military lorries in Ireland were carrying prisoners as hostages in the hope of deterring attacks by the IRA, the guerrilla army fighting British rule since 1919. Within a year, negotiations would lead to Irish independence and the campaign would be hailed as the first successful revolt against the British empire.

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Slavery and Salvation - History Of Africa with Zeinab Badawi [Episode 17]

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Escape from Auschwitz: the most extraordinary Holocaust story you've never heard

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scape was lunacy, escape was death. To attempt it was suicide. That much had been taught to Walter Rosenberg early, within a week of his arrival in Auschwitz, aged just 17, at the start of July 1942. One afternoon, he and thousands of others had been forced to stand in silence and watch a public hanging, performed with full ceremony. The SS men had lined up with guns over their shoulders and marching drums strapped around their necks, while out in front stood two mobile gallows, wheeled into position, one for each condemned man.

The stars of the show were announced as two prisoners who had tried and failed to escape. Walter and the others had to watch as the men were brought out; a Kapo, one of the prisoners deployed by the SS to do the brute work of enforcement, tied their ankles and thighs with rope, then placed a noose around each of their necks. Afterwards, the inmates were kept there a full hour, forbidden even to look away. They had to stand, in silence, staring at the two dead bodies twirling in the wind. The corpses had notices pinned to their chests, written as if the words were spoken by the dead themselves: "Because we tried to escape ... "

Walter understood that the Nazis wanted him and every other prisoner to conclude that escape was futile, that any attempt was doomed. But Walter drew a very different lesson. The danger came not from trying to escape, but from trying and failing. From that day on, he was determined to try - and to succeed.

Before long, he had made himself a student of escapology, taking lessons from some of Auschwitz's most battle-hardened inmates - chief among them a grizzled captain in the Red Army - and forging ties with the camp's secret underground resistance, slowly acquiring the knowhow to attempt what no Jew had done before. This yearning to break out was rooted in more than a desire to save his own skin: his aim was much larger than that. For he had come to understand something essential about the death factory that was Auschwitz: that the crime unfolding before him rested on a great and devastating act of deception.

Most Jews were sent on arrival at Auschwitz to the gas chambers, but some, like Walter, were held instead as slave workers. For nearly two years, he remained a prisoner - kept alive by a series of random, accidental twists of fate - and in that time he saw almost every aspect of the Auschwitz slaughterhouse in action. He was never one of the Sonderkommando, those Jews compelled to do the most gruesome work of all - retrieving corpses from the gas chambers - but he witnessed every other stage of the process of industrialised murder.

For 10 months, he worked on the Judenrampe, the railway platform where incoming trains pulled in, delivering hundreds of Jews in cattle trucks from all across Europe, like so much livestock. His job was unloading each transport and, as he did it, he detected a pattern. The Nazis lied to their victims at every step of their journey towards destruction. The people falling out of those stinking cattle trucks had boarded them believing they were being taken to new lives in a new place: "resettlement in the east", the Nazis called it. The Jews on those trains had packed up their belongings and held on tight to them because they thought they were building a new home, one that would need pots and pans, clothes for their backs and toys for their children. They believed that because that was what the Nazis had told them, and it was what their own friends and families had told them, in the form of postcards home that they did not realise had been written at gunpoint.

The lying carried on the instant the SS men unlocked the wagons. If they were in a hurry, they would be brutal. But if there was time, if the weather was good, the SS men might lay on a different show. They would pretend that the dreadful journey the new arrivals had endured had been some kind of aberration, a mistake that was about to be rectified. "Good God," they might say, "in what state did those horrible Slovaks transport you? This is inhuman." Those transported from Paris or Amsterdam, people raised to expect the best of the civilised Germans, were primed to believe that anyway; to feel relief that, at long last, food and drink would be available, that their luggage would be looked after and that order was about to be restored.

If time permitted, the pretence would continue as the new arrivals climbed on to the trucks that would take them to the killing sites. SS men, their manners impeccable, might help the sick clamber aboard. For those heading to the death chambers on foot, there was more reassurance in the form of inquiries about the Jews' professional qualifications or trades back home. Why would they ask such things if they did not intend to make use of the deportees' skills?

If anyone asked where they were being taken, the answer came back: "For disinfection." Given how squalid the journey had been, that made sense. More reassurance came on that trek past the Birkenau section of the camp from the sight of an ambulance - a green military van bright with a red cross - driving slowly behind their ragtag column, occasionally picking up those who could not keep walking by themselves. The vehicle did carry a doctor. But his purpose was not healing the sick or saving lives. The medic inside was the SS doctor who would supervise the gassing, and the cargo on board consisted of cans of Zyklon B: poison gas. Walter knew all about that: one of his occasional jobs was to load the deadly canisters on to the vans.

These were the Jews' final minutes, but the Nazis lied to them, telling them to believe in a future they did not have

The scene of the crime itself was disguised. The doomed believed they had been brought to a secluded, bucolic spot, a farmhouse alongside two wooden huts for undressing. By crematoria IV and V, there were flower beds. Once there, the deception did not let up. These were the Jews' final minutes, but the Nazis encouraged them to believe in a future they did not have. "What is your trade? A shoemaker?" the officer would ask again. "We need them urgently, report to me immediately after!"

As the victims followed the order to strip off their clothes, the SS would tell them that they were about to bathe, that they should stay calm and that afterwards they would be given "coffee and something to eat". That was when a reminder would come to tie all shoes into pairs: "Afterwards you won't have to waste time finding the other shoe." In fact, the SS knew that the shoes of murdered children would only be of use for German families back home if they came in pairs.

When the Jews were finally pushed inside the gas chamber, the trickery did not end. The sign on the doors read, "To the baths". In crematorium II, the ceiling was dotted with fake showerheads. (Even the gas itself was part of the deception: the manufacturers of Zyklon B had altered their product, ridding it of the almond smell that, previously, had acted as a warning to anyone who got within inhalation distance.)

Walter soon understood that all this was not some cruel and elaborate joke. It had a clear and rational purpose. That much was plain from his own work on the ramp. He and his fellow slaves of the "clearing command" were under the strictest orders not to breathe a word to anybody getting off the trains. There was to be no contact whatsoever. Walter had seen what would happen if that rule were broken.

One night there came a transport from the concentration-camp-cum-ghetto of Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia. One of those disembarking was a well-dressed Czech mother, holding the hands of her two small children, and she was clearly relieved to have arrived at last. She said as much to a German officer: "Thank God we're here." She was one of those deportees who believed that the nation of Goethe and Kant would at last bring a measure of sanity to proceedings. That proved too much for one of Walter's young comrades who, as he ran past her, hissed words meant both to scold and warn: "You'll soon be dead."

The woman looked not so much scared as affronted by this intrusion from a ghoulish man in pyjama stripes, his breath foul, his head shaved, a prisoner who was surely therefore some kind of criminal. Instantly, she approached a German officer as if she were the aggrieved patron of a Prague department store, demanding to see the manager. "Officer, one of the gangsters has told me that I and my children are to be killed," she complained, in perfect German.

The SS man, gloved, his uniform creased in all the right places, gave her his most benign and trustworthy smile and said: "My dear lady, we are civilised people. Which gangster said this to you? If you would be so kind as to point him out." She did as she was asked, and the officer took out his notebook and quietly wrote down the number of the prisoner, visible on the man's tunic. Afterwards, when everything was finished and all the people had gone, the officer sought out that prisoner and had him taken behind the wagons and shot. Walter was among those who carried his corpse back to the camp. At around the same time, the woman who had complained was gassed, along with her two young children.

Running back and forth on the Judenrampe for those 10 long months, whether carrying corpses or suitcases, Walter gradually understood why the Nazis were so bent on keeping their victims ignorant of their fate, even to the last. They needed their killing machine to run smoothly and without disruption. Given the time pressure the SS were often under, with another transport coming down the track, there was no room for delay caused by panic or, worse, rebellion.

It was essential that the Jews coming off those trains did not know what fate awaited them. If they did, they might begin to cry out, they might start pushing and shoving, they might refuse to form columns, in neat rows of five, and instead rush for the barbed-wire fences or at their captors. True, they would be overwhelmed eventually: the SS carried submachine guns and their victims had nothing but their own bodies, weakened by hunger and thirst. But, still, there were sometimes a thousand or more people on that platform, outnumbering the Nazis by perhaps 10 to one. If the Jews knew what was coming, what sand might they be able to throw in the gears of the machine that was poised to devour them? They might not stop it, but they could slow it down.

They lay dead still, side by side in the hole. Two Germans approached the hiding place. Walter grabbed his knife

Walter saw it with new clarity. The difference between truth and lies was the difference between life and death. The factory of murder that the Nazis had constructed in this accursed place depended on one cardinal principle: that the people who came to Auschwitz did not know where they were going, or for what purpose. That was the premise on which the entire system was built. Auschwitz was an abattoir and Walter had seen enough of those in the countryside of his native Slovakia to know that it is much easier to slaughter lambs than it is to hunt deer. If you have to catch animals individually, hunting them down one by one, it is slow, awkward work. It is never as fast or efficient as driving thousands at a time, herded and neatly organised, towards their deaths. The Nazis had devised a method that would operate like a well-run slaughterhouse rather than a shooting party.

Walter understood it well because he was standing every day and every night on the threshold of the abattoir. The sight of it nearly broke him. In those 10 months, there were some fellow prisoners who feared Walter was about to crack. But just at the point when he might have come apart, he was filled instead with a hot and unstoppable urge: he had to act. Somebody had to escape and sound the alarm, issuing the warning that Auschwitz meant death. Around the time he turned 18, Walter concluded that person should be him.

n 7 April 1944, after days of delay, weeks of obsessive preparation, months of watching the failed attempts of others, and two years of seeing the depths to which human beings could sink, the moment had finally come. It was time to escape.

The two other prisoners were already there, at the designated spot. Wordlessly, they gave the nod: do it now. Walter and fellow inmate Fred Wetzler did not hesitate. They climbed on top of a woodpile, covering a hole that had been prepared by other would-be escapees, found the opening and dropped inside. A second later, their comrades moved the planks into place above their heads. One of them whispered: "Bon voyage." Then all was dark and silent.

Without delay, Walter set to work. He pulled out the machorka, the cheap, Soviet tobacco the Red Army captain had told him about, soaked in petrol and dried, exactly as instructed. Slowly, he began to wedge it into the cracks between the wooden boards, hoping against hope that the Soviet prisoner of war was right, that the scent would be repellent to dogs. If the captain's confidence was well founded, Walter and Fred should be able to crouch in this bunker beneath the woodpile, silent and undisturbed, for exactly as long as they needed: three days and three nights.

Walter stared at the phosphorescent hands of his watch. Time was crawling. He wanted to stand up, to stretch, but he could do no such thing. It was too risky to talk. At one point, Walter felt Fred, who at 25 was six years older than him - both of them from the same small Slovak town of Trnava - take his hand and squeeze it.

At 6pm that Friday night came the shriek of the siren. It was a howl to make the air vibrate and the blood freeze in your veins, a thousand wolf packs baying in unison. The noise was appalling, but every inmate welcomed it: it meant that at least one of their number had been found missing from the evening roll call, possibly escaped. That was their cue. Fred and Walter moved out of the main space under the woodpile, which had been built to hold four, and wriggled into a kind of passageway that could accommodate only two. It was intended to be an extra layer of protection: a hiding place within the hiding place. The pair crammed in and lay dead still, side by side.

They knew what the siren would bring. The pounding of close on 2,000 pairs of jackboots, tramping across the ground, the senior men alternately swearing and barking orders, their dogs slavering as they rooted out any sign of frail, quivering human life, 200 of them, trained and primed for this very purpose. The search had begun and it would not let up for three days.

Fred and Walter could be precise about that because the Nazis had a security protocol from which they never deviated. This outer part of the camp, where prisoners laboured as slaves, was guarded only during the daylight hours when the inmates were working. No need to watch over it at night, when every last prisoner was herded back inside the inner camp, with its double lines of electrified wire fences.

There was only one exception to that rule. If an inmate was missing, presumed to have attempted an escape, the SS kept up the outer ring of armed sentry posts for 72 hours as they searched. After that, they would conclude that the escapee, or escapees, had got away: from then on, it would be the responsibility of the Gestapo to scour the wider region and find them. If a prisoner could somehow hide in the outer area,during those three days and nights after the alarm had been sounded - as Walter and Fred were doing now - then he would emerge on the fourth night into an outer camp that was unguarded. He could escape.

Somehow the hours dragged their way through Saturday to reach Sunday. The SS kept up the search. Fred and Walter froze as they heard two men, Germans, a matter of yards away. It was in the early afternoon, and they could pick up every word. "They can't have got away," said one. "They must be still in the camp." The Germans began speculating about Fred and Walter's likely hiding places. "How about that pile of wood?"

Walter and Fred did not move. The two Germans climbed on top of the woodpile, which they proceeded to dismantle, board by board.

Walter grabbed his knife. Fred did the same. And then, not for the first time, Walter's life was saved by a random moment of good luck. Far off there was a sudden commotion, the voices distant but excited. Fred and Walter could hear the men just above them pause, their ears seemingly cocked to pick up what was happening. A second passed. Then another. Finally, one of the pair said: "They've got them! C'mon ... Hurry." And, down below, Fred and Walter heard their would-be discoverers scramble away.

Sunday night passed into Monday. The morning shift returned, bringing with it the same din, the same barking, both human and animal, for another 10 hours, each minute passing at the same agonising pace.

At 6.30pm, Walter and Fred finally heard the sound they had longed for. Announced loudly, it rang out: Postenkette abziehen! It was the order to take down the grosse Postenkette, the outer chain of sentry posts, shouted from one watchtower to the next and then the next, circling the entire perimeter. To Fred and Walter, those words, bellowed out by the men who had enslaved them and murdered hundreds of thousands of their people, sounded like the sweetest music. It was an admission of defeat by the SS, recognition that they had failed to recapture the two prisoners they had lost.

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For Walter, even inching out of the side cavity sent a sharp pain shooting through his arms, legs, trunk and neck. His muscles were stiff and cold, his first movements jerky and uncertain. Finally they were in the main pit. They hugged each other in the darkness.

Now they took a deep breath and pressed their palms against the roof, trying to give the bottom board a push. But it would not move. They tried another spot. Still it would not budge. Had they accidentally sealed themselves into their own tomb? They had assumed that, if you could pile a plank on, you could take it off. But lifting boards is easy from above. Not so from below, when the weight of the entire stack is pressing down.

Shoving in tandem, grunting with pain, they managed to lift one of the bottom planks no more than an inch. But it was enough to give them purchase. Now they could get hold of it, just enough to shove it sideways. Fred turned to Walter with a smile. "Thank God for those Germans who nearly found us," he whispered. "If they hadn't moved those planks, we'd have been trapped." They summoned their strength again, shifting and shoving the boards until they could, with excruciating effort, haul themselves up and out. At last, they had done it. They were out of that hole in the ground. Exhausted from the exertion and the three days' confinement, the two men paused to take in the night sky. It was clear; the moon was shining.

They needed to get going, but first they put the boards back in their original position. Part of it was a determination to be thorough, to leave no clue for those who would be here the next morning. But part of it was the hope that this concealed hole might serve as an escape hatch for someone else. Fred and Walter were on their way to becoming the first Jews to engineer their own escape from Auschwitz. They did not want to be the last.

Then they headed west, towards the little birch wood that gave Birkenau its name. They advanced not on foot, but on their stomachs, inching along, commando style. They did not get up until they had reached the trees, the same small forest that held the pits that had once burned corpses day and night.

The perimeter fence was not like the ones they had known from the inner camp. It did not have lights attached to each post; the wire was not electrified. Even so, the pair were taking no chances. They had fashioned in advance something that could function as a kind of clothes peg, protecting their hands as, working from the bottom, they lifted the wire above the ground. That made an opening big enough for them to crawl through.

Now they were on the other side of the fence. They would stay close to it, walking a near-complete circuit. Before long, they passed the inner camp, the lights that marked its perimeter warm and glowing. If you did not know better, the sight could almost look cosy, given the barren bleakness all around. Except they did know better. For they could also see the chimneys of the crematoria, pumping out their greenish-blue, oil-refinery flames and their thick smoke of death. The pair took a last look, as clear as they had ever been that they never wanted to see this place again.

They kept on, walking as stealthily as they could, their limbs still stiff, slowed down by the marshy terrain. At about 2am, crossing open moorland, they reached a signpost with a warning to those coming in the opposite direction: "Attention! This is Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Anyone found on these lands will be shot without warning!"
After escaping the camp, Walter and Fred went on the run, trekking across the mountains, marshlands and rivers of Nazi-occupied Poland, without a map or compass, to reach their native Slovakia. There, they wrote a 32-page report, the first detailed account of the mass slaughter under way in Auschwitz-Birkenau. It would eventually reach Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and the pope, and by a series of extraordinary moves sav e 200,000 Jewish lives. While in hiding, Walter adopted an alias - Rudolf Vrba - a name he would keep until his death in Vancouver in 2006, aged 81. His postwar life would take a series of unexpected turns - and include several more escapes - but he never stopped testifying to what he had seen, determined that the world should know the truth of Auschwitz.
It had taken them far too long, but they had at last reached the end of the vast "zone of interest" that enveloped the camp. For a moment at least, they could congratulate themselves. On 10 April 1944 they had each achieved what no Jew had done before: they had broken out of Auschwitz. And now they would embark on their true mission: to warn the world of the horrors within.

This is an edited extract from The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World by Jonathan Freedland (John Murray Press, £20). Order a copy for £17.40 from the Guardian Bookshop.

Jonathan Freedland talks to Hadley Freeman about the book in a Guardian Live event at 8pmon 21 June.

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Escape from Auschwitz: the most extraordinary Holocaust story you've never heard

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scape was lunacy, escape was death. To attempt it was suicide. That much had been taught to Walter Rosenberg early, within a week of his arrival in Auschwitz, aged just 17, at the start of July 1942. One afternoon, he and thousands of others had been forced to stand in silence and watch a public hanging, performed with full ceremony.

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Beyond Good Friday: the future of peace in Northern Ireland

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Northern Ireland - a legacy of division | FT Film

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WE LIVE IN THE INFOSPHERE [Prof. LUCIANO FLORIDI]

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WE LIVE IN THE INFOSPHERE [Prof. LUCIANO FLORIDI]

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Appeasement: The 10 Steps to World War Two

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The Blitz Raid That Almost Broke Britain During The War

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'Some people refused to leave their flats': Britain through the Thatcher years - in pictures

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Throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Mike Abrahams travelled the country photographing National Front marches, prison life and people's everyday struggles

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The Cold War and Vietnam - GCSE History - BBC Bitesize

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GCSE History The Cold War and Vietnam learning resources for adults, children, parents and teachers.

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With a sinister hierarchy of "grand wizards" and "dragons," hooded Klansmen concealed their identities as they unleashed a reign of terror on Black Americans and other minorities across America for almost a century.
Dan is joined by Professor Kristofer Allerfeldt from the University of Exeter to map out the rise and fall of the KKK founded in 1866 by Confederate veterans in Tennessee, as a vehicle for white Southerners to resist Reconstruction and the enfranchisement of Black Americans right through to the 21st century.
Produced by Mariana Des Forges, James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW - sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/.
We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at ds.hh@historyhit.com.
You can take part in our listener survey here.

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‎Dan Snow's History Hit: The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan su Apple Podcasts

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With a sinister hierarchy of "grand wizards" and "dragons," hooded Klansmen concealed their identities as they unleashed a reign of terror on Black Americans and other minorities across America for almost a century. Dan is joined by Professor Kristofer Allerfeldt from the University of Exeter to map...

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Adam and Sam look at the origins of the Cold War for your GCSE History exam. In this episode, they will discuss the impact the Potsdam conference had on relations between the USSR and USA and how this lead to the outbreak of war. Ideal for preparing your for GCSE History exam. For more info visit www.senecalearning.com/blog/gcse-history-revision-guide

Adam Bones is Deputy Head at Bolder Academy (@bolderlondon) and Sam Jones (@sojswest) is Head of History at Spingwest Academy.

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gcse cold war history - the origins of the cold war

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‎Revise - A Level and GCSE Revision: GCSE Cold War History - The Origins of the Cold War su Apple Podcasts

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‎Adam and Sam look at the origins of the Cold War for your GCSE History exam. In this episode, they will discuss the impact the Potsdam conference had on relations between the USSR and USA and how this lead to the outbreak of war. Ideal for preparing your for GCSE History exam.

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international relations and national security

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As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it's time to get rid of these three myths about slavery | CNN

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Though Juneteenth commemorates a moment when enslaved African Americans were freed, the US is still held captive by several myths about slavery.