#civil rights
Three generations of women standing with their city for #ReproductiveRights and #bodilyautonomy.
#NSFW for written adult language
My rule, when I started these rants, was, “no politics."Today, I’m breaking that rule. And I’m not going to apologize for it.
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“Nay.” -Ron Paul’s vote on H.R. 5461, designating the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. a legal public holiday.
“What an infamy Ronald Reagan approved [the MLK holiday]! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.” -Ron Paul’s newsletter, 1990.
“In the early 1990s, [Paul’s] newsletters attacked the ‘X-Rated Martin Luther King’ as a 'world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours,’ 'seduced underage girls and boys,’ and 'made a pass at’ fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy.” -The New Republic
“What [Ed and Elaine Brown are] doing is standing up for the law, because the law is the Constitution…I compare them to people like Gandhi…Martin Luther King…” -2007 video
“We are fed up with the Zionist Illuminati,” Ed Brown in 2007 on why he refused to pay his taxes.
“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government unprecedented power over the hiring, employee relations, and customer service practices of every business in the country. The result was a massive violation of the rights of private property and contract, which are the bedrocks of free society.” -Ron Paul in 2004, dissenting the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act in Congress.
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Protesting segregation at the State Theater in Farmville, Virginia, 1963
A police photographer records the actions of student protesters attempting to purchase tickets to King Kong vs. Godzilla at the whites-only State Theater. Some students hid their faces to thwart the evidence gathering, while others, like Darwyn White, smiled a challenge.
State Theater Protest photographs from the VCU Libraries’ Freedom Now Project.
On May 17, 1954 the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education: “in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” Change would come too slowly, but the decision was a landmark for the nation.
VCU Libraries Freedom Now Project gives you the opportunity to explore photographs from one Virginia county’s response to Brown v. Board of Education.
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“Past Is Prologue” - @bkcollage
I am in awe of those who stare into the face of greed and power and corruption and humanity’s incredible capacity for violence and dream of a world where the most vulnerable of us are treated with dignity.
The resisters we have come to know as heroes — the abolitionists, the suffragists, the leaders of the Civil Rights movement — were always dehumanized and abused by the dominant culture of their time.
Our past is violent oppression and our present is blind complacency.
Fight for the future.
Every time a cis man says something that anyone who saw the inside of a high school would know, I just respond, “We already know that, Chad. Why would you write an essay-long statement to tell us something obvious?”
You gotta shut that shit down.
George Washington Carver. Scientist. Inventor.
Elizabeth Keckley was born enslaved and lived in Dinwiddie County and Petersburg as a young girl. She purchased her freedom working as a seamstress after moving to Missouri. With her freedom, she became the most sought after dress maker in Washington D.C. Her talents as a seamstress, both before and during the Civil War, led to her being chosen as the personal dressmaker of Mary Todd Lincoln. Over the years, both women became good friends and Mrs. Lincoln looked on Elizabeth as one of her closest confidantes during the White House years.
“Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows. Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the slaves. Perhaps the child’s own mother is among those hated ones. She listens to violent outbreaks of jealous passion, and cannot help understanding what is the cause. She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn to tremble when she hears her master’s footfall. She will be compelled to realize that she is no longer a child. If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.
I know that some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but many slaves feel it most acutely, and shrink from the memory of it. I cannot tell how much I suffered in the presence of these wrongs, now how I am still pained by the retrospect. My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air, after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings. The other slaves in my master’s house noticed the change. Many of them pitied me; but none dared to ask the cause. They had no need to inquire. They knew too well the guilty practices under that roof; and they were aware that to speak of them was an offence that never went unpunished.”
–Harriet Jacobs, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
“The every-day life of a slave on one of our southern plantations, however frequently it may have been described, is generally little known at the North. The principal food of those upon my master’s plantation consisted of corn meal, and salt herrings; to which was added in summer a little buttermilk, and the few vegetables which each might raise for himself and his family, on the little piece of ground which was assigned to him for the purpose, called a truck patch. The meals were two, daily. The first, or breakfast was taken at 12 o’clock, after laboring from daylight; and the other when the work of the remainder of the day was over. The only dress was of tow cloth, which for the young, and often even for those who had passed the period of childhood, consisted of a single garment, something like a shirt, but longer, reaching to the ankles; and for the older, a pair of pantaloons, or a gown, according to the sex, while some kind of round jacket, or overcoat, might be added in winter, a wool hat once in two or three years, for the males, and a pair of coarse shoes once a year. Our lodging was in log huts, of a single small room, with no other floor than the trodden earth, in which ten or a dozen person-men, women, and children-might sleep, but which could not protect them from dampness and cold, nor permit the existence of the common decencies of life. There were neither beds, nor furniture of any description-a blanket being the only addition to the dress of the day for protection from chillness of the air or the earth. In these hovels were we penned at night, and fed by day; here were the children born, and the sick-neglected. Such were the provisions for the daily toll of the slave.”
–Josiah Henson, “The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave. Narrated by himself. 1849
“Slavery has existed in this country too long and has stamped its character too deeply and indelibly, to be blotted out in a day or a year, or even in a generation. The slave will yet remain in some sense a slave, long after the chains are taken from his limbs, and the master will yet retain much of the pride, the arrogance, imperiousness and conscious superiority, and love of power, acquired by his former relation of master. Time, necessity, education, will be required to bring all classes into harmonious and natural relations…
Law and the sword can and will, in the end abolish slavery. But law and the sword cannot abolish the malignant slaveholding sentiment which has kept the slave system alive in this country during two centuries. Pride of race, prejudice against color, will raise this hateful clamor for oppression of the negro as heretofore. The slave having ceased to be the abject slave of a single master, his enemies will endeavor to make him the slave of society at large.”
-Frederick Douglass, December 28, 1862, Rochester, New York, Speech at the Spring Street AME Zion Church
“My Guilt”
My guilt is “slavery’s chains,” too long
the clang of iron falls down the years.
This brother’s sold, this sister’s gone,
is bitter wax, lining my ears.
My guilt made music with the tears.
My crime is “heroes, dead and gone,”
dead Vesey, Turner, Gabriel,
dead Malcolm, Marcus, Martin King,
They fought too hard, they loved too well.
My crime is I’m alive to tell.
My sin is “hanging from a tree,”
I do not scream, it makes me proud.
I take to dying like a man.
I do it to impress the crowd.
My sin lies in not screaming loud.
-Maya Angelou
Howard Cruse: Stuck Rubber Baby (1995)
Today, more human beings suffer enslavement than during the three and a half centuries of the transatlantic slave trade.
The International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency focused on labor rights, recently—and some would say conservatively—raised its worldwide estimate of the number of slaves from 12 million to nearly 21 million human beings, individuals unable to escape conditions of forced labor, bonded labor, slavery, and trafficking. Africa and the Asia-Pacific region together account for the largest number, close to 15 million people, but slavery is epidemic around the world and increasing.
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Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!
Top photo: Dr. King speaks at Duke University’s Page Auditorium on November 13, 1964.
Bottom photos: The audience filled the auditorium and overflowed into the wooded area behind the building. Note the speakers visible in the middle photograph.
To hear clips of Dr. King speaking at Duke, visit http://mlk.duke.edu/king-at-duke/
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Just Mercy ⚖️
Also Vintage
“If I fall, I will fall five-feet four-inches forward in the fight for freedom.” Civil Rights icon Fannie Lou Hamer died on this day in 1977
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Alice Walker sees the world differently, and not just because a childhood accident left her blind in one eye. This civil rights firebrand and talented novelist is famous for penning “The Color Purple”, but she’s also focused on pushing over the status quo, one prejudice at a time. Read her work, and you’ll get true Push Girl inspiration.
Tell your friend she’s got a little Alice Walker in her. Share now to give her a little push.
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Rosa Parks proved that sitting down can be a stand-up statement. While history may depict her famous refusal to get up from her bus seat as a spontaneous protest, this incredible woman had activist credentials that stretched well beyond. But, it was her famous 1955 act of civil disobedience that became a watershed event in civil rights activism and forever changed America for the better. It is for this uncompromising spirit in the face of repression that Rosa Parks takes her rightful seat in the Push Girl Hall of Fame.
Tell your friend she’s got a little Rosa Parks in her. Reblog now to give her a little push.
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Josephine Baker was a singer, dancer, spy, activist, paragon of beauty, and member of social circles that included luminaries like Langston Hughes, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway. Not bad, eh? She wowed audiences in her adopted France, worked for the resistance in the WWII, and returned back to the States to integrate concert halls and fight in the civil rights movement. If you think she sounds like a busy lady, wait until you hear about her 12 kids! This Push Girl was simply amazing.
Tell your friend she’s got a little Josephine Baker in her. Reblog now to give her a little push.
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Some push girls rise from the bottom, and some lead the way from the top. Born into privilege, never saw her station in life as anything but a platform to help others. Completely redefining the role of First Lady, she pushed for civil and
Tell your friend she’s got a little Eleanor Roosevelt in her. Reblog now to give her a little push.
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“We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, (…) tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his last Christmas sermon 50 years ago.
Remembering and honoring #RosaParks on her 109th birthday.
“I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free… so other people would be also free.”
Rosa Parks with Steven Spielberg at film premiere of his film ‘Amistad’, 4/12/1997.
Black History Month
God Bless America.
I’m extremely disappointed in the values this country and its citizens have chosen to embody today, for the next four years and in the pages of history. I feel betrayed, I feel fearful, and I feel a little paranoid, if I’m honest. I’ve loved this country. I’ve loved this city. And I’ve always thought that this country and all it’s glory loved me back. That it would protect me, and stand with and for me. I would have given my life for these great United States of America, and its citizens. It seems though, the feeling isn’t mutual. Where I would give my life to protect others, they would not do the same for me. There’s a certain blindness that comes with patriotism, a naive blindness. It is a disgustingly amazing and debilitating thing to see that the love and respect I hold for this Great Nation means nothing. That the land I love had a thirst so great for change that they lined up behind the embodiment of hate, fear, xenophobia, misogyny, and a bad haircut. History really does repeat itself. It is amazing to me that the greatest nation on Planet Earth felt the need to choose someone who bragged about and touted their ability to sexually and physically assault women. It is amazing to me, that the states which hold the institution of marriage so dear voted for a man who has had 2 divorces. It is amazing to me that demonizing a race or religion resonated with the citizens of this great nation. God Bless America. Never in my scariest nightmares would I have seen a man who would ban immigrants and build a wall become president. Never would I have seen an American president be elected to the highest office in the land on the platform and promise of special IDs or a database for Muslims; where have we seen that before? I’ve lost a huge piece of my identity today. I’ve lost something I held very near and dear to my heart. -W.
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In Santiago, Chile, a student is hit by a water cannon during a march called by the Confederation of Chilean Students (Confech) to reject the changes announced by the government to an education bill. (Sebastian Silva / EPA)
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Free Britney Spears from her controlling conservatorship!!
Rally again January 22, 2020!
She should have control over money, travel, assets - #equal person!!
Also, I love this video. It’s really helpful and helped me before! It should - because it normal to have emotions. I also love the multicolor, and cheerfulness!
#FreeBritney #HumanRights
On this date, July 20, in 1967, the first national Black Power conference opened in Newark, New Jersey.
More than a thousand people from a wide array of community organizations and other groups convened in Newark on July 20, 1967, to discuss the most pressing issues of the day facing African-Americans at the first national Black Power Conference.
It was one of the largest such gatherings of Black leaders, with representatives of nearly 300 organizations and institutions from 126 cities in 26 states, Bermuda and Nigeria. The conference held workshops, presented papers for specific programs and developed more than 80 resolutions calling for emphasis of Black power in political, economic and cultural affairs. [Continue reading.]
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“WE SERVE THE PEOPLE”
New York City chapter of the Black Panther Party’s Harlem office, circa 1970 with racks of free clothes for the community in front.
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I won’t even caption this one cause it’s self-explanatory. Not even animals should ever be treated like this.
Credits to: Anarchist People of Color
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