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40 years ago today, the Irish independence fighter and socialist Bobby Sands started his hunger strike, of which he would die 66 days later.

Sands was incarcerated for resisting British imperialism. The hunger strike Sands organized with fellow political prisoners was in protest against the conditions they faced in jail including torture as well as the stripping of their political prisoner status.

Sands joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army when he was 18 and shortly after was arrested for the possession of four handguns found in the house where he was staying. He was tortured in the Castlereagh interrogation center and sentenced to 14 years.

While in prison Bobby Sands was elected to the British Parliament, but a month later and 66 days into the hunger strike he was the first of ten hunger strikers allowed to die by the British government under the conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher denounced Sands as a "criminal" and "terrorist" on the day of his death.

Their fight won massive support in Ireland, North and South. Over 100,000 people attended his funeral in Belfast. The international impact of Bobby Sands’ death was also immense. In New York, dockers boycotted British ships, and there were protests outside British embassies across the world. In Iran, a group of young people changed the name of Winston Churchill Street in Tehran to Bobby Sands Street. In 2001, a memorial to Sands and the other hunger strikers was unveiled in Havana, Cuba.

He remains an icon of the struggle against imperialism to this day.

"I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto, but it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom. I shall not settle until I achieve liberation of my country, until Ireland becomes a sovereign, independent socialist republic."