November 20 · This Day in America
Before dawn, boats slip across San Francisco Bay and eighty-nine Native American activists land on Alcatraz Island, the abandoned federal prison on the rock. They call themselves Indians of All Tribes, and they claim the island "by right of discovery," offering to buy it for twenty-four dollars in glass beads and red cloth — a deliberate echo of the price once paid for Manhattan. Their proclamation, addressed to "the Great White Father and All His People," notes with bitter precision that the island has no fresh water, no industry, no health care, no good soil: in other words, that it already resembles a reservation. The occupation lasts nineteen months. It does not win Alcatraz. But it puts Native self-determination on the national front page and helps end the federal policy of erasing tribes. "We hold the Rock," they wrote. The country finally had to listen.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1962
Weeks after the world held its breath, John F. Kennedy lifts the naval quarantine of Cuba. The Soviets have agreed to remove their nuclear-capable IL-28 bombers, the last offensive weapons on the island, and the confirmed dismantling of the missile sites lets the President stand down the blockade. The nearest the two superpowers ever came to nuclear war ends not with a bang but with ships turning for home.
Source: history.state.gov
“We feel this claim is just and proper, and that the land should rightfully be granted to us for as long as the rivers run and the sun shall shine. We hold the Rock!”Indians of All Tribes, Alcatraz Proclamation, 1969