Mar. 2. 1899: Congress allows railroad companies blanket approval for rights-of-way through Indian lands. 1955: Months before Rosa Parks, teenager Claudette Colvin is arrested in Montgomery, Ala., for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person. 1971: Oriental Student Union protesters occupy Seattle Central Community College. 1995: Last United Nations "peacekeepers" leave Somalia.

Mar. 3. 1875: Illegal act of Congress removes lands from Oregon Coast Reservation, despite opposition by Coos and other tribes. Alsea Reservation, Oregon, is returned to public domain. 1961: Village Council in Inuit town of Point Hope, in far northwestern Alaska, objects in letter to Pres. Kennedy to chain explosion of five atomic bombs in nearby above-ground "Project Chariot" tests. 1981: Navajo and Hopi religious leaders request halt in construction of ski resort in the San Francisco Peaks, northern Arizona.

Mar. 4. 1962: U.S. nuclear reactor begins operating, Antarctica. 1969: Union of Concerned Scientists founded. 1978: 40,000 demonstrate against uranium enrichment plant, Almelo, Netherlands.

Mar. 5. 1770: Free black Crispus Attucks becomes first American killed in revolution. 1871: Birth of Rosa Luxemburg, Jewish Polish leader in German Socialist and anti-war movements. 1927: U.S. Marines land in China. 1958: U.S. B-47 jettisons atomic bomb off Georgia coast after mid-air collision.

Mar. 6. 1836: Mexican troops defend their country's abolitionist constitution and defeat foreign slaveholders. San Antonio, Texas. Remember the Alamo. 1857: Dred Scott decision by U.S. Supreme Court opens federal territory to slavery and denies citizenship to blacks. 1933: Pres. Roosevelt closes all U.S. banks. 1965: Civil rights demonstrators begin a march from Selma to Montgomery to protest the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson and to demand voting rights for blacks. They are brutally beaten by police officers while crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Sixty-seven are injured. 1969: 9,000 march at Univ. of Washington to protest Vietnam War.

Mar. 7. 1972: Urban Indians form the National American Indians Council. Omaha, Nebraska. 1988: Activists sit in to protest refusal of the Albany (New York) City Council to pass legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Mar. 8. 1908: Strike by U.S. garment workers (all women) becomes the basis for International Women's Day. 1970: About 70 Native American activists briefly occupy Fort Lawton as the federal government negotiates with the city of Seattle over how to use the surplus military land. Thirteen arrested. Eventually activists win donation of some of land for Daybreak Star Cultural Center. 1971: Members of the "Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI" break into an FBI office in suburban Philadelphia, and later publish files revealing the existence of the FBI's COINTELPRO program of harassing domestic political dissidents.