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Birmingham pub bombings. Tragic on all fronts. Six men jailed for being Irish in the wrong place and at the wrong time. 21 innocent people dead, hundreds injured. The anti Irish hatred that this act manifested went on for years in Brum so much that even family events such as the St Patrick's Parade were not viable.

Birmingham pub bombings 46th anniversary marked with 100-car convoy through city Birmingham pub bombings 46th anniversary marked with 100-car convoy through city
 
80 years ago today the Bristol Blitz began. Before it ended:

919 tons of high-explosive bombs plus many thousands of incendiary bombs dropped in clusters
1,299 people killed, 1,303 seriously injured and 697 rescued from the debris of bombed buildings
89,080 buildings damaged including 81,830 houses completely destroyed and over 3,000 rendered unusable and later demolished


Most of the old town centre was destroyed, hence the current sometimes odd look of places near the new centre.

Collection of oral histories.
 
80 years ago today the Bristol Blitz began. Before it ended:

919 tons of high-explosive bombs plus many thousands of incendiary bombs dropped in clusters
1,299 people killed, 1,303 seriously injured and 697 rescued from the debris of bombed buildings
89,080 buildings damaged including 81,830 houses completely destroyed and over 3,000 rendered unusable and later demolished


Most of the old town centre was destroyed, hence the current sometimes odd look of places near the new centre.

Collection of oral histories.

Why didn’t we rebuild like the Germans did in Dresden?
 
Eighty years ago tonight my dad on his way by train along with many other members of his squadron spent the night in the Victoria Railway Station in Sheffield during the Blitz on Sheffield. They were on their way from his previous base in Lincolnshire to Hull for disembarkation to Iceland.
Fortunately none were injured, unlike many residents of Sheffield.


Sheffield Blitz firefighter remembered on raid anniversary Sheffield Blitz firefighter remembered on raid anniversary
 
Nice one Sprocket, my grandfather was a regular at this boozer but was working that night.
Truly horrific night, many times when walking down the subway alongside the rebuilt Marples I shuddered thinking of all those buried people alongside where I was walking.
As an apprentice in Sheffield in the seventies I worked with many craftsmen who had been working at Firth Brown and Vickers who had close calls to talk about.
 
I’ll have to chat with my mum but I’m sure he worked at Hadfields which is now the site of Meadowhall. He died in 1980 when I was 13 but he did a good job, his six kids hated and the four that are still around despise the Tories.
 
Irma Grese and Josef Kramer were sent on their way to hell, very much living up to the adage hanging’s too good for ‘em.
 
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On this day, 20th February 1895, Black abolitionist and advocate for women's rights who escaped slavery, Frederick Douglass, died in Washington DC aged 77. Douglass wrote his first autobiography in 1845, in which he named his former enslaver, and so he headed to the UK and Ireland, in part to avoid his former enslaver trying to reclaim his "property". There he spent two years raising the international profile of the movement to abolish slavery. He then returned to the US and set up a newspaper, The North Star, and after the civil war fought for the rights of the poor, women, Black people, Native Americans and Asian migrant workers.

On the latter, during a wave of anti-Asian racism sweeping the US, Douglass argued to people of European descent that they did not exclusively own the country: “It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here.” The right to migrate, he said, is the “great right that I assert for the Chinese and Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go to the side of humanity.”

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On this day, 21 February 1965, el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz, better known as Malcolm X, instrumental speaker and activist of the US civil rights and Black power movements, was assassinated while preparing to address a crowd of supporters in New York.

Formerly a member of the Nation of Islam (NoI), Malcolm X publicly split with the organisation due to issues such as NoI leader Elijah Mohammed failing to approve action to respond to police attacks on Black Muslims in Los Angeles. Instead he founded his own mosque, as well as the secular Organization of Afro-American Unity. Already a target of both the police and FBI, NoI activist Louis Farrakhan also declared Malcolm to be "worthy of death".

On February 21, Malcolm stepped up to speak at the Audubon ballroom when he was shot. Mujahid Abdul Halim, a NoI member from New Jersey was apprehended fleeing the scene with a clip from one of the murder weapons, and admitted his participation in the killing. However, two other Black Muslims from the Harlem mosque were subsequently arrested and convicted of the crime: Khalil Islam and Muhamad Abdul Abdulaziz. This was despite a lack of evidence and the fact that they, and Halim, protested their innocence. In an effort to win the freedom for Islam and Aziz, Halim even filed affidavits naming his four co-conspirators – all from the New Jersey mosque. But prosecutors repeatedly refused to reopen the case.

A posthumous letter attributed to a former undercover New York police officer has just been released by his family, claiming that, at the direction of his bosses, he provoked two of Malcolm X's security guards into committing crimes shortly before the assassination so that they could be arrested and would be unavailable to protect him at the Audubon.

After the case gained new attention following the 2020 release of a Netflix documentary series on the murder, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr agreed to review the case, which is currently ongoing.

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Today is Japanese American Internment Remembrance Day. On this day in 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 which authorized the federal government to incarcerate thousands of Japanese Americans. More than 110,000 American citizens and immigrants of Japanese ancestry were forced to leave behind their homes, businesses, and ways of life. Today let's remember internment survivors and all the communities that continue to have their civil liberties violated today.

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On this day, 24 February 1909, Ethel MacDonald was born in Motherwell, Scotland. She later moved to Glasgow, worked in retail, and became an anarchist. When the Spanish civil war began in 1936 she travelled to revolutionary Barcelona and wrote for Scottish newspapers. She described how factories and villages were collectivised and how churches were turned into hospitals, libraries, and schools.

Her writings also contain interesting details that help us to picture life at the time: British volunteers tended to get drunk upon arriving in Spain “perhaps… because they are unaccustomed to wine”; men and women soldiers were indistinguishable in dress, except that “all the girls had beautifully permed hair and were strikingly made up.” She also achieved fame as the English language voice of the CNT union radio station. Her reports were listened to around the world and her Scottish accent proved especially popular in the US.

In May 1937 the Communist Party began to purge the anti-fascist movement of revolutionaries who didn’t agree with the Moscow line. In Barcelona, Ethel helped anarchists defend the barricades against CP troops, and later she smuggled food and letters to imprisoned comrades. She helped foreign anti-fascists escape Spain and the UK press dubbed her the “Scots Scarlet Pimpernel.” Soon she too was imprisoned by the CP, and upon her release she went into hiding, moving from house to house as she sheltered among Barcelona’s anarchists until she managed to get to France, and from there back to Glasgow.

After the outbreak of WWII she received call up papers for Women’s National Service. She returned them with the words “Get Lost.” When she received further papers, she wrote back, “Come and get me.” Authorities decided against chasing the Scots’ Scarlet Pimpernel. She remained active in the radical movement until her death.

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