Friday, March 30, 2012

The Battle of Athens, Tennessee, 1946

I had no idea that this had ever occurred in America: The Battle of Athens, Tennessee.

On August 1-2, 1946, some Americans, brutalized by their county government, used armed force as a last resort to overturn it. These Americans wanted honest open elections. For years they had asked for state or federal election monitors to prevent vote fraud (forged ballots, secret ballot counts and intimidation by armed sheriff's deputies) by the local political boss. They got no help.



"The government, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."

Abraham Lincoln

(Shamelessly stolen from Ace of Spades.)

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