This Day in Peace History
September 11, 1906
Mohandas Gandhi began a nonviolent resistance campaign in Johannesburg, South Africa, demanding rights and respect for those of Asian descent. It was the birth of his idea of Satyagraha, or passive resistance. He led a meeting of 3000 of the town’s Indians, protesting the Transvaal Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance. That ordinance required all Asians to obey three rules: those of eight years or older had to carry passes for which they had to give their fingerprints; they would be segregated as to where they could live and work; new Asian immigration into the Transvaal would be disallowed, even for those who had left the town when the South African War broke out in 1899, and were returning.
The meeting produced the Fourth Resolution, in which all Indians resolved to go to prison rather than submit to the ordinance.
Ghandi, London, 1906—->
September 11, 1973
Chile’s armed forces staged a coup d’etat against the government of President Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected socialist head of state in Latin America. Some three thousand were held in Santiago’s national stadium where guards singled out folksinger Victor Jara as he 
continued to sing protest songs. Jara was viciously beaten, and his mutilated body machine-gunned in front of the other prisoners.
dissidents held in the stadium
The U.S. government, through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), had worked for three years to foment the coup against Allende. Striking Chilean labor unions, instrumental in destabilizing the Allende government, were secretly bankrolled by the CIA. During the brutal and repressive 17-year rule of General Augusto Pinochet that followed, more than 3,000 political opponents were assassinated or “disappeared.” The U.S. backed military dictatorship banned Jara’s music, image, name, and, for a time, even outlawed the public performance of the folk-guitar.
September 11, 2001
Suicidal Islamist terrorists, most of them Saudis, hijacked four commercial airliners in the eastern U.S., and managed successfully to turn three of them into missiles: two flying into New York City’s World Trade Center towers, destroying them, and a third into the west side of the Pentagon. On the fourth, passengers heroically seized back control but crashed it into an empty field in Western Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 were killed: passengers and crew, workers in the twin towers and the Pentagon; democracy and the American sense of invulnerability were badly wounded.
Note: this date in peace history is adapted from This Week in History, a publication of www.peacebuttons.info