Eighteen- or nineteen-year-old student and revolutionary Võ Thị Sáu was shot by the French on this date in 1952.
A Viet Minh activist from childhood, Sáu (English Wikipedia entry | the more extensive Vietnamese) got her start in revolutionary praxis chucking a grenade at a group of French soldiers when she was 14.
She did three different turns in French custody over the very few years remaining her, the last of which was at Côn Đảo Prison* awaiting execution for murdering a French officer and a number of Vietnamese collaborators — “crimes” committed before she had attained majority. She poured invective upon the court that condemned her, correctly prophesying that Vietnamese resistance would defeat it.
Today Sáu is well-represented in monuments around Vietnam where she is of course honored as a patriotic hero; her tomb in Côn Đảo receives a steady tribute of offerings from admirers. She’s valorized in the 1994 film Daughter of the Red Earth:
* Later infamous as the location where the next imperial power kept its political prisoners in tiny “tiger cages”.
On this day..
- 1945: Angelo Chiappe
- 1874: Marshall Martin, "an innocent man compared to that woman"
- 1639: The auto de fe of Lima, Peru
- 1888: Danny Driscoll, Whyo
- 1751: Lobsang Trashi and the Lhasa Rebellion leaders
- 1348: The Duke of Durazzo, all in the family
- 1985: Vladimir Vetrov, Farewell
- 1892: Patrick Boyle, bindle bandit
- 1996: Richard Townes, Jr.
- 1685: Robert Pollack and Robert Millar, Covenanters
- 1903: Arthur Alfred Lynch condemned
- 1945: Nikolaus Gross, Catholic anti-Nazi labor activist