Vietnam love-ins, Martin Luther King Jr’s bus boycott, Ghandi’s salt march…all trace back to Peterloo. 

‘Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number,

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you –

Ye are many – they are few.’ Shelley 1819

Manchester, England 1819: 0% of women and only 11% of adult males had the right to vote. Two years earlier a petition with over three quarters of a million signatures was presented to parliament in support of universal male suffrage. It was completely rejected without debate. On 16 August 1819 tens of thousands of men, women and children “armed with no other weapon but that of a self-approving conscience” gathered to demand election reform. Many wore their Sunday best. Hours later at least 11 people were dead and hundreds injured when armed cavalry charged the peaceful crowd.

Shortly after the massacre Percy Shelley wrote “The Mask of Anarchy,” one of the first modern statements of non-violent resistance. Too radical for publication at the time, it has since become a rallying cry worldwide. Gandhi frequently quoted it. Women on the picket line after the New York City Triangle Shirtwaist fire read it aloud. Passages have been chanted in protests from Tiananmen Square to Tahrir Square to Wall Street. 

From Masks of Anarchy by Michael Demson

St Peter’s Square + Waterloo = Peterloo 

Details of the Manchester massacre were suppressed, and the event was barely acknowledged for years. A blue plaque on site described the massacre as a “dispersal” by the military. It wasn’t until its 200 year anniversary in 2019 that a monument listing victims and other non-violent resistance movements was installed.

Nearby in St. Peter’s Square outside the Manchester City library is a mosaic floor where red circles remember the names of those who lost their lives in the massacre.

Also nearby is the Briton’s Protection pub, a traditional Regency pub dating back to 1806/11, where it’s rumored that some of the injured from the massacre were brought for treatment. Murals inside depict the event.

Extra: Manchester was also home to the decidedly NOT non-violent wing of the women’s suffrage movement. It was here in the sitting room of Emeline Pankhurst’s home that the first meeting of the Women’s Social and Political Union took place. “Deeds Not Words” was the rallying cry of their militant wing of the suffragettes that utilized bombings, arson, letter bombs, and physical assaults to force the government into granting women the right to vote.