Founding of the Liberty League, the first organization of the “New Negro Movement,” founded by Hubert Harrison, a black intellectual and labor leader who immigrated to the US from the US Virgin Islands.
The Marquis de Sade is moved from the Bastille prison to Charenton, days before French revolutionaries storm it and set fire to his writings there. “No act of possession can ever be perpetrated on a free being; it is as unjust to own a wife monogamously as it is to own slaves.”
US president Grant issues the National Eight Hour Law Proclamation, an early but symbolic victory for the struggle over the working day in the US. “Think carefully of the operative and the mechanic leaving his work at half-past seven (after dark, the most of the year), and that of the more leisurely walk home at half-past four p.m., or three hours earlier.”