Felecia Young remembered the day she walked into the Forrest County Courthouse in Hattiesburg, Miss. with her 11-year-old son, 9-year-old daughter, and mother on August 17, 1998.

The streets were barricaded. Buildings and streets showed the faces of police officers who were on site in case of a riot. An Aryan organization had threatened to demonstrate. But Young was determined to bear witness.

She and her children found seats in the balcony of the humid, packed courthouse.

“We sat in the balcony area, way up high,” Young said. “I don’t think I’d ever seen that area open, but they had to open it because there were so many people coming that there wasn’t any where to sit downstairs.”

Young is a black woman, born and raised in Hattiesburg. She attended high school there and graduated from the local college, the University of Southern Mississippi.

After serving six years in the Air Force, during which she visited or lived in 13 countries and earned the rank of captain before her commitment was fulfilled, she returned home, where she and her husband decided to raise their family. It was there where she became familiar with the Ku Klux Klan and its acts of violence. And the charismatic leader of the Klan’s Mississippi White Knights, Sam Bowers, was perhaps the most hateful person of them all.

At the courthouse, Young felt anxious, anticipatory, and inquisitive at beginnings of Bowers’ trial – his fifth trial, in fact, for the murder of Vernon Dahmer Sr. 22 years earlier. She wanted to take in the moment. Most of all, she wanted her children to see Bowers and to remember people like him are real. They exist.

“I wanted (my children) to have that historical perspective,” Young said. “A lot of people have sacrificed their lives so that you could have a better life than they had had.”

Bowers’ hate of all colors and creeds not his own was well known in the South.

“Sam Bowers lived a life consumed with hate for African Americans,” Vernon Dahmer Jr. told the New York Times in 2006. “He caused a lot of pain, suffering and death for many individuals and families in my race. During his life, he never apologized or asked for forgiveness for his actions.”

For Young, the Klan was not an urban legend but very real, frightful terrorist organization. She recalled the terrifying moment when it became real to her as a child.

“At some point, we had some people come by, some white people drive by our house,” she said. “My grandfather was sitting on the front porch with his walking cane in his lap. And they stopped. They slowed down and stopped like they were going to do something. We think they thought he had a shotgun or some kind of gun in his lap, and they drove off real fast.”

Dahmer was a grocery store owner and a known civil rights activist, allowing blacks to pay their poll tax in his grocery store, paying for the right to vote. Bower had threatened to punish the elder Dahmer if he didn’t put a stop to his efforts. Like others in Hattiesburg, Dahmer refused. Others like Peggy Jean Connor.

Connor is Young’s mother. She also allowed Hattiesburg’s black citizens to pay their poll tax at her business, Jean’s Beauty Shop at 510 Mobile Street, and knew of Dahmer’s work in the community.

Connor, who turns 80 years old in October, became a licensed beautician at 14. She began another career after her salon went out of business, as a nurse technician at Forrest General Hospital, and held it down for 27 years.

She was secretary treasurer for the Council of Federated Organization in 1963, while teaching citizenship classes for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at True Light Baptist Church in Hattiesburg. She was executive secretary of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and was arrested for picketing in front of the Forrest County Courthouse in 1964. She sued the governor of Mississippi – and, on May 31, 1977, she won. Two years later, she received the Carter G. Woodson Award for Courage in Civil Rights.

And, at the time of Bower’s threats, she paid the poll tax.

(l-r) Marie Blalock, Peggy Jean Connor and Vassie Patton. Courtesy of RJ Young

“During that time, you had to pay poll tax to register to vote before you could vote,” Connor said; the tax had to be paid for two consecutive years in order to qualify for registration. “So we were trying to collect poll tax from people who were afraid to go to the courthouse to pay their poll tax.”

And people did. They trusted people like Connor and Dahmer to go in their stead to the courthouse to pay their poll tax for them. But the Klan didn’t choose to come after Connor and her family; it chose to go after Dahmer and his.

The poll tax was deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1937. Mississippi was one of five states, including Alabama, Arkansas, Texas and Virginia, that upheld the poll tax. The twenty-fourth amendment, which sought to outlaw the poll tax, was submitted to the states for ratification on Sept. 24, 1962. The amendment’s ratification came on Jan. 23, 1964, outlawing the poll tax in federal elections.

Of the 50 states, Mississippi is the only one to reject the twenty-fourth amendment. The Supreme Court ruled the poll tax unconstitutional in all state elections with a 6-3 vote in 1966, but that decision came a few months too late for Dahmer.

On Jan. 10 of that year, two cars full of white men in white hoods spilled 12 gallons of gasoline on his home under the cover of night. His wife, Ellie, and two small children awoke to the sound of gunfire and the sight of black smoke. Inhaling smoke and badly burned, Dahmer defended his family against the hooded attackers and did his best to extinguish the flames, but there was too much damage. Both his home and his store burned to the ground.

The next morning, Connor said, she went to see the remains.

“It was still smoking,” she said. “I went to the hospital to visit him and he and his daughter were in the room together. He was in one bed and she was in another. And he was talking. I was just shocked when I heard that he had died. It hadn’t been an hour when I left the hospital and heard that he was dead. I couldn’t believe that.”

Dahmer died the next. He was 57. President Lyndon B. Johnson later sent a telegram to his wife, Ellie, expressing “deep concern and shock” over the attack.

“His work was in the best tradition of a democracy,” the President wrote. “His family can be justly proud as his work was a fine example of good citizenship.”

Young heard about the crime from her grandfather, John Henry Gould. She was eight years old.

“I was really small,” she said. “But I was really aware of the Civil Rights Movement and what my mama and my granddaddy where trying to accomplish. I remember somebody coming by to tell my grandfather that Vernon Dahmer had been killed and burnt out.”

Bowers was convicted of murder by a jury that consisted of six minority jurors and sentenced to life in prison, 32 years after his crime. He died in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at 82.

In the wake of Dahmer’s death, the Civil Rights Movement came into its own and permanently adjusted the lens through which race and class are viewed. It has ushered in much needed legislation and forced elected officials to become more transparent and vigilant while in office.

Hattiesburg elected its first black mayor, Johnny DuPree, in 2001. After achieving reelection twice, he is still in office. Last year, DuPree became the first black person to win a major party nomination to run for governor of Mississippi since Reconstruction, and he, like Connor, has urged young people to vote. But Connor is worried that the right to vote has become so impressed upon young people that they have become numb to it.

“It worries me that right here in Hattiesburg (young people) don’t think it’s necessary for them to do that,” she said. “You have to just plead with them to go and register. And then after registering, you have to beg them to go and vote.  A lot of people don’t think it was as bad as it was back in the Fifties and Sixties.”

But perhaps there is hope for this generation:  Circle, the center for information and research on civic learning and engagement, reported 23 million Americans under the age of 30 turned out to vote in 2008. The Times reported young black voters led all ethnic groups in voter turnout for the first time ever.

The socioeconomic results of the Civil Rights Movement could be best depicted in the lives of Connor’s two grandchildren. Both attended a predominantly white elementary school, Presbyterian Christian School, in that same Hattiesburg.

The 11-year-old son, this writer, has graduated from the University of Tulsa and is beginning his last semester of coursework in route to his master’s degree at the University of Oklahoma. The 9-year-old daughter is now majoring in biosystems and agricultural engineering at Oklahoma State University.

Neither child has ever been convicted of a crime. Both are registered voters. Both exercise that right.

On Thursday, Racialicious joined the many websites around the world in shutting down for most of the day to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which threatens to undermine the same creative freedom it was allegedly designed to protect.

SOPA supporters say the bill, introduced in the House of Representatives in October 2011, would protect copyright holders against online piracy. SOPA’s counterpart in the Senate, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), is scheduled for a Jan. 24 vote.

The idea is, the two bills would give authorities more ways to starve  “rogue sites,” as Politico’s Mike Zapler and Kim Hart explain:

Here’s how it would work: If the Justice Department or a copyright holder believed a site was directing users to pirated content, they would go to court. Depending on who’s complaining, different remedies would come into play: In some instances a judge could order an Internet service provider like Verizon to cut off access to a site. In others, a search engine like Google could be directed to delete links to an infringing site. The idea is to starve the offending sites of the web traffic that keeps them in business.

Originally delivered Aug. 16, 1967, at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. Transcript courtesy of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute

Dr. Abernathy, our distinguished vice president, fellow delegates to this, the tenth annual session of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, my brothers and sisters from not only all over the South, but from all over the United States of America: ten years ago during the piercing chill of a January day and on the heels of the year-long Montgomery bus boycott, a group of approximately one hundred Negro leaders from across the South assembled in this church and agreed on the need for an organization to be formed that could serve as a channel through which local protest organizations in the South could coordinate their protest activities. It was this meeting that gave birth to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

And when our organization was formed ten years ago, racial segregation was still a structured part of the architecture of southern society. Negroes with the pangs of hunger and the anguish of thirst were denied access to the average lunch counter. The downtown restaurants were still off-limits for the black man. Negroes, burdened with the fatigue of travel, were still barred from the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. Negro boys and girls in dire need of recreational activities were not allowed to inhale the fresh air of the big city parks. Negroes in desperate need of allowing their mental buckets to sink deep into the wells of knowledge were confronted with a firm “no” when they sought to use the city libraries. Ten years ago, legislative halls of the South were still ringing loud with such words as “interposition” and “nullification.” All types of conniving methods were still being used to keep the Negro from becoming a registered voter. A decade ago, not a single Negro entered the legislative chambers of the South except as a porter or a chauffeur. Ten years ago, all too many Negroes were still harried by day and haunted by night by a corroding sense of fear and a nagging sense of nobody-ness.

But things are different now. In assault after assault, we caused the sagging walls of segregation to come tumbling down. During this era the entire edifice of segregation was profoundly shaken. This is an accomplishment whose consequences are deeply felt by every southern Negro in his daily life. It is no longer possible to count the number of public establishments that are open to Negroes. Ten years ago, Negroes seemed almost invisible to the larger society, and the facts of their harsh lives were unknown to the majority of the nation. But today, civil rights is a dominating issue in every state, crowding the pages of the press and the daily conversation of white Americans. In this decade of change, the Negro stood up and confronted his oppressor. He faced the bullies and the guns, and the dogs and the tear gas. He put himself squarely before the vicious mobs and moved with strength and dignity toward them and decisively defeated them.  And the courage with which he confronted enraged mobs dissolved the stereotype of the grinning, submissive Uncle Tom.  He came out of his struggle integrated only slightly in the external society, but powerfully integrated within. This was a victory that had to precede all other gains.

In short, over the last ten years the Negro decided to straighten his back up, realizing that a man cannot ride your back unless it is bent. We made our government write new laws to alter some of the cruelest injustices that affected us. We made an indifferent and unconcerned nation rise from lethargy and subpoenaed its conscience to appear before the judgment seat of morality on the whole question of civil rights. We gained manhood in the nation that had always called us “boy.” It would be hypocritical indeed if I allowed modesty to forbid my saying that SCLC stood at the forefront of all of the watershed movements that brought these monumental changes in the South. For this, we can feel a legitimate pride. But in spite of a decade of significant progress, the problem is far from solved. The deep rumbling of discontent in our cities is indicative of the fact that the plant of freedom has grown only a bud and not yet a flower.

And before discussing the awesome responsibilities that we face in the days ahead, let us take an inventory of our programmatic action and activities over the past year. Last year as we met in Jackson, Mississippi, we were painfully aware of the struggle of our brothers in Grenada, Mississippi. After living for a hundred or more years under the yoke of total segregation, the Negro citizens of this northern Delta hamlet banded together in nonviolent warfare against racial discrimination under the leadership of our affiliate chapter and organization there. The fact of this non-destructive rebellion was as spectacular as were its results. In a few short weeks the Grenada County Movement challenged every aspect of the society’s exploitative life. Stores which denied employment were boycotted; voter registration increased by thousands. We can never forget the courageous action of the people of Grenada who moved our nation and its federal courts to powerful action in behalf of school integration, giving Grenada one of the most integrated school systems in America. The battle is far from over, but the black people of Grenada have achieved forty of fifty-three demands through their persistent nonviolent efforts.

Slowly but surely, our southern affiliates continued their building and organizing. Seventy-nine counties conducted voter registration drives, while double that number carried on political education and get-out-the-vote efforts. In spite of press opinions, our staff is still overwhelmingly a southern-based staff. One hundred and five persons have worked across the South under the direction of Hosea Williams. What used to be primarily a voter registration staff is actually a multifaceted program dealing with the total life of the community, from farm cooperatives, business development, tutorials, credit unions, etcetera. Especially to be commended are those ninety-nine communities and their staffs which maintain regular mass meetings throughout the year.

Our Citizenship Education Program continues to lay the solid foundation of adult education and community organization upon which all social change must ultimately rest. This year, five hundred local leaders received training at Dorchester and ten community centers through our Citizenship Education Program. They were trained in literacy, consumer education, planned parenthood, and many other things. And this program, so ably directed by Mrs. Dorothy Cotton, Mrs. Septima Clark, and their staff of eight persons, continues to cover ten southern states. Our auxiliary feature of C.E.P. is the aid which they have given to poor communities, poor counties in receiving and establishing O.E.O. projects. With the competent professional guidance of our marvelous staff member, Miss Mew Soong-Li, Lowndes and Wilcox counties in Alabama have pioneered in developing outstanding poverty programs totally controlled and operated by residents of the area.

Perhaps the area of greatest concentration of my efforts has been in the cities of Chicago and Cleveland. Chicago has been a wonderful proving ground for our work in the North. There have been no earth-shaking victories, but neither has there been failure. Our open housing marches, which finally brought about an agreement which actually calls the power structure of Chicago to capitulate to the civil rights movement, these marches and the agreement have finally begun to pay off. After the season of delay around election periods, the Leadership Conference, organized to meet our demands for an open city, has finally begun to implement the programs agreed to last summer.

But this is not the most important aspect of our work. As a result of our tenant union organizing, we have begun a four million dollar rehabilitation project, which will renovate deteriorating buildings and allow their tenants the opportunity to own their own homes. This pilot project was the inspiration for the new home ownership bill, which Senator Percy introduced in Congress only recently.

The most dramatic success in Chicago has been Operation Breadbasket. Through Operation Breadbasket we have now achieved for the Negro community of Chicago more than twenty-two hundred new jobs with an income of approximately eighteen million dollars a year, new income to the Negro community. But not only have we gotten jobs through Operation Breadbasket in Chicago; there was another area through this economic program, and that was the development of financial institutions which were controlled by Negroes and which were sensitive to problems of economic deprivation of the Negro community. The two banks in Chicago that were interested in helping Negro businessmen were largely unable to loan much because of limited assets. Hi-Lo, one of the chain stores in Chicago, agreed to maintain substantial accounts in the two banks, thus increasing their ability to serve the needs of the Negro community. And I can say to you today that as a result of Operation Breadbasket in Chicago, both of these Negro-operated banks have now more than double their assets, and this has been done in less than a year by the work of Operation Breadbasket.

In addition, the ministers learned that Negro scavengers had been deprived of significant accounts in the ghetto. Whites controlled even the garbage of Negroes. Consequently, the chain stores agreed to contract with Negro scavengers to service at least the stores in Negro areas. Negro insect and rodent exterminators, as well as janitorial services, were likewise excluded from major contracts with chain stores. The chain stores also agreed to utilize these services. It also became apparent that chain stores advertised only rarely in Negro-owned community newspapers. This area of neglect was also negotiated, giving community newspapers regular, substantial accounts. And finally, the ministers found that Negro contractors, from painters to masons, from electricians to excavators, had also been forced to remain small by the monopolies of white contractors. Breadbasket negotiated agreements on new construction and rehabilitation work for the chain stores. These several interrelated aspects of economic development, all based on the power of organized consumers, hold great possibilities for dealing with the problems of Negroes in other northern cities. The kinds of requests made by Breadbasket in Chicago can be made not only of chain stores, but of almost any major industry in any city in the country.

And so Operation Breadbasket has a very simple program, but a powerful one. It simply says, “If you respect my dollar, you must respect my person.” It simply says that we will no longer spend our money where we can not get substantial jobs.

In Cleveland, Ohio, a group of ministers have formed an Operation Breadbasket through our program there and have moved against a major dairy company. Their requests include jobs, advertising in Negro newspapers, and depositing funds in Negro financial institutions. This effort resulted in something marvelous. I went to Cleveland just last week to sign the agreement with Sealtest. We went to get the facts about their employment; we discovered that they had 442 employees and only forty-three were Negroes, yet the Negro population of Cleveland is thirty-five percent of the total population. They refused to give us all of the information that we requested, and we said in substance, “Mr. Sealtest, we’re sorry. We aren’t going to burn your store down. We aren’t going to throw any bricks in the window. But we are going to put picket signs around and we are going to put leaflets out and we are going to our pulpits and tell them not to sell Sealtest products, and not to purchase Sealtest products.”

We did that. We went through the churches. Reverend Dr. Hoover, who pastors the largest church in Cleveland, who’s here today, and all of the ministers got together and got behind this program. We went to every store in the ghetto and said, “You must take Sealtest products off of your counters. If not, we’re going to boycott your whole store.” A&P refused. We put picket lines around A&P; they have a hundred and some stores in Cleveland, and we picketed A&P and closed down eighteen of them in one day. Nobody went in A&P. The next day Mr. A&P was calling on us, and Bob Brown, who is here on our board and who is a public relations man representing a number of firms, came in. They called him in because he worked for A&P, also; and they didn’t know he worked for us, too. Bob Brown sat down with A&P, and he said, they said, “Now, Mr. Brown, what would you advise us to do.” He said, “I would advise you to take Sealtest products off of all of your counters.” A&P agreed next day not only to take Sealtest products off of the counters in the ghetto, but off of the counters of every A&P store in Cleveland, and they said to Sealtest, “If you don’t reach an agreement with SCLC and Operation Breadbasket, we will take Sealtest products off of every A&P store in the state of Ohio.”

The next day, the next day the Sealtest people were talking nice, they were very humble. And I am proud to say that I went to Cleveland just last Tuesday, and I sat down with the Sealtest people and some seventy ministers from Cleveland, and we signed the agreement. This effort resulted in a number of jobs, which will bring almost five hundred thousand dollars of new income to the Negro community a year. We also said to Sealtest, “The problem that we face is that the ghetto is a domestic colony that’s constantly drained without being replenished. And you are always telling us to lift ourselves by our own bootstraps, and yet we are being robbed every day. Put something back in the ghetto.” So along with our demand for jobs, we said, “We also demand that you put money in the Negro savings and loan association and that you take ads, advertise, in the Cleveland Call & Post, the Negro newspaper.” So along with the new jobs, Sealtest has now deposited thousands of dollars in the Negro bank of Cleveland and has already started taking ads in the Negro newspaper in that city. This is the power of Operation Breadbasket.

Now, for fear that you may feel that it’s limited to Chicago and Cleveland, let me say to you that we’ve gotten even more than that. In Atlanta, Georgia, Breadbasket has been equally successful in the South. Here the emphasis has been divided between governmental employment and private industry. And while I do not have time to go into the details, I want to commend the men who have been working with it here: the Reverend Bennett, the Reverend Joe Boone, the Reverend J. C. Ward, Reverend Dorsey, Reverend Greer, and I could go on down the line, and they have stood up along with all of the other ministers. But here is the story that’s not printed in the newspapers in Atlanta: as a result of Operation Breadbasket, over the last three years, we have added about twenty-five million dollars of new income to the Negro community every year.

Now as you know, Operation Breadbasket has now gone national in the sense that we had a national conference in Chicago and agreed to launch a nationwide program, which you will hear more about.

Finally, SCLC has entered the field of housing. Under the leadership of attorney James Robinson, we have already contracted to build 152 units of low-income housing with apartments for the elderly on a choice downtown Atlanta site under the sponsorship of Ebenezer Baptist Church. This is the first project [applause], this is the first project of a proposed southwide Housing Development Corporation which we hope to develop in conjunction with SCLC, and through this corporation we hope to build housing from Mississippi to North Carolina using Negro workmen, Negro architects, Negro attorneys, and Negro financial institutions throughout. And it is our feeling that in the next two or three years, we can build right here in the South forty million dollars worth of new housing for Negroes, and with millions and millions of dollars in income coming to the Negro community.

Now there are many other things that I could tell you, but time is passing. This, in short, is an account of SCLC’s work over the last year. It is a record of which we can all be proud.

With all the struggle and all the achievements, we must face the fact, however, that the Negro still lives in the basement of the Great Society. He is still at the bottom, despite the few who have penetrated to slightly higher levels. Even where the door has been forced partially open, mobility for the Negro is still sharply restricted. There is often no bottom at which to start, and when there is there’s almost no room at the top. In consequence, Negroes are still impoverished aliens in an affluent society. They are too poor even to rise with the society, too impoverished by the ages to be able to ascend by using their own resources. And the Negro did not do this himself; it was done to him. For more than half of his American history, he was enslaved. Yet, he built the spanning bridges and the grand mansions, the sturdy docks and stout factories of the South. His unpaid labor made cotton “King” and established America as a significant nation in international commerce. Even after his release from chattel slavery, the nation grew over him, submerging him. It became the richest, most powerful society in the history of man, but it left the Negro far behind.

And so we still have a long, long way to go before we reach the promised land of freedom. Yes, we have left the dusty soils of Egypt, and we have crossed a Red Sea that had for years been hardened by a long and piercing winter of massive resistance, but before we reach the majestic shores of the promised land, there will still be gigantic mountains of opposition ahead and prodigious hilltops of injustice. We still need some Paul Revere of conscience to alert every hamlet and every village of America that revolution is still at hand. Yes, we need a chart; we need a compass; indeed, we need some North Star to guide us into a future shrouded with impenetrable uncertainties.

Now, in order to answer the question, “Where do we go from here?” which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was sixty percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is fifty percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those of whites. Thus, half of all Negroes live in substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites. When we turn to the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share: There are twice as many unemployed; the rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites; and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population.

In other spheres, the figures are equally alarming. In elementary schools, Negroes lag one to three years behind whites, and their segregated schools receive substantially less money per student than the white schools. One-twentieth as many Negroes as whites attend college. Of employed Negroes, seventy-five percent hold menial jobs. This is where we are.

Where do we go from here? First, we must massively assert our dignity and worth. We must stand up amid a system that still oppresses us and develop an unassailable and majestic sense of values. We must no longer be ashamed of being black. The job of arousing manhood within a people that have been taught for so many centuries that they are nobody is not easy.

Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In Roget’s Thesaurus there are some 120 synonyms for blackness and at least sixty of them are offensive, such words as blot, soot, grim, devil, and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity, and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is the “black sheep.” Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child sixty ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority. [applause] The tendency to ignore the Negro’s contribution to American life and strip him of his personhood is as old as the earliest history books and as contemporary as the morning’s newspaper.

To offset this cultural homicide, the Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian manhood. Any movement for the Negro’s freedom that overlooks this necessity is only waiting to be buried. As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery. No Lincolnian Emancipation Proclamation, no Johnsonian civil rights bill can totally bring this kind of freedom. The Negro will only be free when he reaches down to the inner depths of his own being and signs with the pen and ink of assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation. And with a spirit straining toward true self-esteem, the Negro must boldly throw off the manacles of self-abnegation and say to himself and to the world, “I am somebody. I am a person. I am a man with dignity and honor. I have a rich and noble history, however painful and exploited that history has been. Yes, I was a slave through my foreparents, and now I’m not ashamed of that. I’m ashamed of the people who were so sinful to make me a slave.” Yes, yes, we must stand up and say, “I’m black , but I’m black and beautiful.” This, this self-affirmation is the black man’s need, made compelling by the white man’s crimes against him.

Now another basic challenge is to discover how to organize our strength in to economic and political power. Now no one can deny that the Negro is in dire need of this kind of legitimate power. Indeed, one of the great problems that the Negro confronts is his lack of power. From the old plantations of the South to the newer ghettos of the North, the Negro has been confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness. Stripped of the right to make decisions concerning his life and destiny he has been subject to the authoritarian and sometimes whimsical decisions of the white power structure. The plantation and the ghetto were created by those who had power, both to confine those who had no power and to perpetuate their powerlessness. Now the problem of transforming the ghetto, therefore, is a problem of power, a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to the preserving of the status quo. Now, power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change. Walter Reuther defined power one day. He said, “Power is the ability of a labor union like UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say, ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That’s power.”

Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often we have problems with power. But there is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly.

You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused the philosopher Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love.

Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best, power at its best is love, implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.

Now what has happened is that we’ve had it wrong and mixed up in our country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power, and white Americans to seek their goals through power devoid of love and conscience. It is leading a few extremists today to advocate for Negroes the same destructive and conscienceless power that they have justly abhorred in whites. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our times.

Now we must develop progress, or rather, a program— and I can’t stay on this long— that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. Now, early in the century this proposal would have been greeted with ridicule and denunciation as destructive of initiative and responsibility. At that time economic status was considered the measure of the individual’s abilities and talents. And in the thinking of that day, the absence of worldly goods indicated a want of industrious habits and moral fiber. We’ve come a long way in our understanding of human motivation and of the blind operation of our economic system. Now we realize that dislocations in the market operation of our economy and the prevalence of discrimination thrust people into idleness and bind them in constant or frequent unemployment against their will. The poor are less often dismissed, I hope, from our conscience today by being branded as inferior and incompetent. We also know that no matter how dynamically the economy develops and expands, it does not eliminate all poverty.

The problem indicates that our emphasis must be twofold: We must create full employment, or we must create incomes. People must be made consumers by one method or the other. Once they are placed in this position, we need to be concerned that the potential of the individual is not wasted. New forms of work that enhance the social good will have to be devised for those for whom traditional jobs are not available. In 1879 Henry George anticipated this state of affairs when he wrote in Progress and Poverty:

The fact is that the work which improves the condition of mankind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and enriches literature and elevates thought, is not done to secure a living. It is not the work of slaves driven to their tasks either by the, that of a taskmaster or by animal necessities. It is the work of men who somehow find a form of work that brings a security for its own sake and a state of society where want is abolished.

Work of this sort could be enormously increased, and we are likely to find that the problem of housing, education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor, transformed into purchasers, will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.

Beyond these advantages, a host of positive psychological changes inevitably will result from widespread economic security. The dignity of the individual will flourish when the decisions concerning his life are in his own hands, when he has the assurance that his income is stable and certain, and when he knows that he has the means to seek self-improvement. Personal conflicts between husband, wife, and children will diminish when the unjust measurement of human worth on a scale of dollars is eliminated.

Now, our country can do this. John Kenneth Galbraith said that a guaranteed annual income could be done for about twenty billion dollars a year. And I say to you today, that if our nation can spend thirty-five billion dollars a year to fight an unjust, evil war in Vietnam, and twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet right here on earth.

Now, let me rush on to say we must reaffirm our commitment to nonviolence. And I want to stress this. The futility of violence in the struggle for racial justice has been tragically etched in all the recent Negro riots. Now, yesterday, I tried to analyze the riots and deal with the causes for them. Today I want to give the other side. There is something painfully sad about a riot. One sees screaming youngsters and angry adults fighting hopelessly and aimlessly against impossible odds. And deep down within them, you perceive a desire for self-destruction, a kind of suicidal longing.

Occasionally, Negroes contend that the 1965 Watts riot and the other riots in various cities represented effective civil rights action. But those who express this view always end up with stumbling words when asked what concrete gains have been won as a result. At best, the riots have produced a little additional anti-poverty money allotted by frightened government officials and a few water sprinklers to cool the children of the ghettos. It is something like improving the food in the prison while the people remain securely incarcerated behind bars. Nowhere have the riots won any concrete improvement such as have the organized protest demonstrations.

And when one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments and they talk about guerrilla warfare. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces. Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States. In a violent racial situation, the power structure has the local police, the state troopers, the National Guard, and finally, the army to call on, all of which are predominantly white. Furthermore, few, if any, violent revolutions have been successful unless the violent minority had the sympathy and support of the non-resisting majority. Castro may have had only a few Cubans actually fighting with him and up in the hills, but he would have never overthrown the Batista regime unless he had had the sympathy of the vast majority of Cuban people. It is perfectly clear that a violent revolution on the part of American blacks would find no sympathy and support from the white population and very little from the majority of the Negroes themselves.

This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom. This is a time for action. What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible. So far, this has only been offered by the nonviolent movement. Without recognizing this we will end up with solutions that don’t solve, answers that don’t answer, and explanations that don’t explain.

And so I say to you today that I still stand by nonviolence. And I am still convinced, and I’m still convinced that it is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for justice in this country.

And the other thing is, I’m concerned about a better world. I’m concerned about justice; I’m concerned about brotherhood; I’m concerned about truth. And when one is concerned about that, he can never advocate violence. For through violence you may murder a murderer, but you can’t murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. Through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.

And I say to you, I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. For I have seen too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate, myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities, and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love. And the beautiful thing is that we aren’t moving wrong when we do it, because John was right, God is love. He who hates does not know God, but he who loves has the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.

And so I say to you today, my friends, that you may be able to speak with the tongues of men and angels; you may have the eloquence of articulate speech; but if you have not love, it means nothing. Yes, you may have the gift of prophecy; you may have the gift of scientific prediction and understand the behavior of molecules; you may break into the storehouse of nature and bring forth many new insights; yes, you may ascend to the heights of academic achievement so that you have all knowledge; and you may boast of your great institutions of learning and the boundless extent of your degrees; but if you have not love, all of these mean absolutely nothing. You may even give your goods to feed the poor; you may bestow great gifts to charity; and you may tower high in philanthropy; but if you have not love, your charity means nothing. You may even give your body to be burned and die the death of a martyr, and your spilt blood may be a symbol of honor for generations yet unborn, and thousands may praise you as one of history’s greatest heroes; but if you have not love, your blood was spilt in vain. What I’m trying to get you to see this morning is that a man may be self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice. His generosity may feed his ego, and his piety may feed his pride. So without love, benevolence becomes egotism, and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.

I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about “Where do we go from here?” that we must honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here, and one day we must ask the question, “Why are there forty million poor people in America?” And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising a question about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life’s marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. And you see, my friends, when you deal with this you begin to ask the question, “Who owns the oil?” You begin to ask the question, “Who owns the iron ore?” You begin to ask the question, “Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that’s two-thirds water?” These are words that must be said.

Now, don’t think you have me in a bind today. I’m not talking about communism. What I’m talking about is far beyond communism. My inspiration didn’t come from Karl Marx; my inspiration didn’t come from Engels; my inspiration didn’t come from Trotsky; my inspiration didn’t come from Lenin. Yes, I read Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital a long time ago, and I saw that maybe Marx didn’t follow Hegel enough. He took his dialectics, but he left out his idealism and his spiritualism. And he went over to a German philosopher by the name of Feuerbach, and took his materialism and made it into a system that he called “dialectical materialism.” I have to reject that.

What I’m saying to you this morning is communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social.  And the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism, but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say questioning the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

And if you will let me be a preacher just a little bit.  One day, one night, a juror came to Jesus and he wanted to know what he could do to be saved. Jesus didn’t get bogged down on the kind of isolated approach of what you shouldn’t do. Jesus didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop lying.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, now you must not commit adultery.” He didn’t say, “Now Nicodemus, you must stop cheating if you are doing that.” He didn’t say, “Nicodemus, you must stop drinking liquor if you are doing that excessively.” He said something altogether different, because Jesus realized something basic: that if a man will lie, he will steal. And if a man will steal, he will kill. So instead of just getting bogged down on one thing, Jesus looked at him and said, “Nicodemus, you must be born again.”

In other words, “Your whole structure must be changed.” A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them and make them things. And therefore, they will exploit them and poor people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.

What I’m saying today is that we must go from this convention and say, “America, you must be born again!”

And so, I conclude by saying today that we have a task, and let us go out with a divine dissatisfaction.

Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.

Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.

Let us be dissatisfied until those who live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security.

Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home.

Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be transformed into bright tomorrows of quality integrated education.

Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.

Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character, not on the basis of the color of their skin. Let us be dissatisfied.

Let us be dissatisfied until every state capitol will be housed by a governor who will do justly, who will love mercy, and who will walk humbly with his God.

Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Let us be dissatisfied until that day when the lion and the lamb shall lie down together, and every man will sit under his own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid.

Let us be dissatisfied, and men will recognize that out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth.

Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout, “White Power!” when nobody will shout, “Black Power!” but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.

And I must confess, my friends, that the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. And there will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again, with tear-drenched eyes, have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. But difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future. And as we continue our charted course, we may gain consolation from the words so nobly left by that great black bard, who was also a great freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chastening rod
Felt in the days
When hope unborn had died.
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place
For which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way
That with tears has been watered.
We have come treading our paths
Through the blood of the slaughtered.
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the bright gleam
Of our bright star is cast.

Let this affirmation be our ringing cry. It will give us the courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows.

Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: “Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.” Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right: “Be not deceived. God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” This is our hope for the future, and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow, with a cosmic past tense, “We have overcome! We have overcome! Deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome.”

Martin Luther King – Where Do We Go From Here? (Conclusion) from MLK Speeches on Vimeo.

By Arturo R. García

Over the past month, this video, “It Did Not Start With Stonewall,” has been picking up steam online – we first saw it on Elixher – which is curious, given that it was originally uploaded in 2007. In the clip, a group of black women offers perspectives on life in the LGBT community in New York City in the era surrounding the seminal Stonewall Rebellion of 1969.

But it cuts off just after the three-minute mark, leaving people wondering where it came from – and whether there are more interviews like these out there. Racialicious contacted the person who uploaded the video Wednesday night, so we hope to have an update soon. In the meantime, the transcript to the video is under the cut.

We paid an awful lot of dues so that the younger people of today can feel the freedom to walk along holding hands. It did not start with Stonewall.

They used to have something in Harlem called Funmaker’s Ball, and they would do that every Thanksgiving. And we would go to the Funmaker’s Ball, and that’s really when the cops would be nasty,’cause the gay guys would come and dress up like women, and people would come in and enjoy themselves, and they’d stand outside and get the guys as they came out,
and the women sometimes, and arrest them.

When we were younger, uh, because we did not have any role models, uh, roles were defined, people were into playing roles,
and people dressed and acted out whatever role that they, found, that they were suited for. And it was a law at that time
that you had to wear 3 pieces of female clothing, or else they would uh take you to jail for impersonation.

During this time of Stonewall, I was not living in New York at the time. And, so I missed that. But I had been involved in many raids and harassment by the police in my own community. We had a very viable black lesbian and gay community
in different, not only in Harlem, but in Brooklyn, and in The Bronx, and I can’t say too much for Queens and Staten Island
because they’re a foreign country.

And what happened was, that the bars downtown weren’t making money. And someone discovered that there was a lot of money being spent in Harlem. And in other black communities. And they systematically either burnt them down, closed them down or they started having a lot of problems with police, for different violations and stuff and things like that.
And as bar after bar and club after club closed down, clubs in The Village that years prior did not welcome the citizens of these neighborhoods – Bed-Stuy, and South Bronx, and Jamaica and Harlem – they let you in and took your money, but they still did not treat you any better. Until the current lesbian and gay community acknowledges that there were contributions made by other lesbians and gay men of all colors, to the freedom of lesbians and gays prior to Stonewall, there will always be some…[cuts off]

Here’s what should have happened in the 17 years since then: Cape Town, the country’s oldest city with its reputation for being cosmopolitan, ought to have led the way in racial unity. It didn’t happen. Far away from verkrampte Pretoria and even more conservative Bloemfontein, Cape Town failed us. Her people withdrew into their racial enclaves and passed each other warily on the street.

I spent two and a half years in Cape Town before I fled for Johannesburg, like so many other black professionals (ahem). It wasn’t just the stories you’d hear about people of colour being turned away from nightclubs, or how the only other black people in your work place were generally the cleaners. It wasn’t even the near complete absence of racial integration.

What drove me slowly mad was how racism was an elephant in the room that you could not talk about. How white Capetonians would cringe and turn away when the topic came up, or look at you in blank confusion and ask why you were so obsessed with race. It was how, yes, there is racism everywhere in South Africa but in Cape Town it is not possible to even discuss it. And how Cape Town, with its pristine beaches, its lofty Parliament buildings and history of activism, was somehow supposed to be better than that.

And in our haste to one-up each other in the Being Right game, South Africans have singularly failed to stop and listen to each other. It’s the black professionals like myself who fled the city, generally for Johannesburg, and didn’t consider what the glib statement “Cape Town is racist” really meant, and how a generalisation like that was itself prejudiced.
- From “The black professional is not dead,” in The Mail & Guardian.

This is just an idea that’s been kicking around my head for a few days, but I’d like to get everyone’s early take on it. Let me begin by listing reasons a POC-centric geek gathering should happen:

• Because we’ve already seen Geek Girl Con and and Bent-Con step up for communities typically marginalized or exploited by genre-related industries.

• Because Christina Xu’s GGC wrap-up raises questions that still need to be addressed:

in an age when superstar rapper Nicki Minaj name-checks Street Fighter characters and streetwear brands team up with comic-book companies like Marvel and DC, who exactly is the geek referred to in GeekGirlCon? To be a geek, do you have to prefer filk over bounce? Is it a self-identification?

I ask these questions because I’m legitimately curious; if fandom is the uniting factor, then the increasingly diverse audiences for all of our favorite geek media (video games, sci-fi, comics, etc.) should be offered a place at conventions like GGC. If, in fact, geekdom here is actually defined by a set of social norms and practices (or the lack thereof) that just happens to coincide with fandom, then geek communities need to have some serious internal conversations and own up to that.

• Because, while San Diego Comic-Con and other conventions featured race-positive programming this year, that still doesn’t make them safe spaces.

• Because you can still say the same about any number of fandoms.

• Because in spite of this fact, there’s still members of fandom – consumers, creators and executives alike – who still won’t own up to the fact that there’s geeks out there who react with hostility whenever somebody points out a problematic portrayal of race.

• Because not only are there POC writers, artists and editors doing good work, there’s cosplayers, bloggers, cartoonists, and filmmakers on the scene

• Because there’s got to be creators and aspiring creators of color out there who need a place in which to meet and network outside of the “general population.”

• Because executives still think diversity is “contrived.”

• Because, while it was great to read about DC Comics getting called out on the carpet at SDCC with regards to gender issues, I shouldn’t have to doubt that raising the same questions about race would get half as much discussion outside of sites like this one or Racebending.

• Because the Akira adaptation is still happening, proving Hollywood didn’t get the message about The Last Airbender.

• Because this might be the best way left to get those same industry forces to listen to our concerns, in a place where we can set the terms of discussion.

Again, this is just a kernel of a concept right now, but … what do you think, Racializens? Would you be up for a full-scale gathering?

By Guest Contributor Debbie Reese, cross-posted from American Indians in Children’s Literature

In October of 2011, ABC broadcast “Children of the Plains” on its 20/20 news program. Watching the promos for it, I shook my head. Diane Sawyer gave her viewers a very narrow program that did little to portray Native youth in the fullness of their existence.

Today (December 13, 2011) I’m sharing a rebuttal to Sawyer.

Please watch More Than That, and share it with as many people as you can. Those of you who work with children’s literature in some way, keep this video in mind when you’re reviewing books. We need literature that reflects the entirety of who we are rather than an outsiders romantic or derogatory misconception.

Update: 6:15 AM, Wednesday, December 14, 2011

After posting the video yesterday, I watched some of the other videos the students have on Youtube. They do a video news broadcast at their school. That’s what the first part of the video below shows, but the second half is a series of outtakes. While More Than That… blew me away, 12-12-11 (below) made me smile. These students are terrific! Right now, the school features More Than That… on their homepage.

Graphic courtesy of Sepia Mutiny

The citizenship rate of foreign-born Asian Americans has also increased, from 50% in 2000 to 57% now. India has one of the greatest number of legal permanent residents eligible to become citizens and 57% of foreign-born Pakistanis have been naturalized. Yet, there are still language and cost barriers associated with citizenship and this remains a hurdle to full civic engagement.

These results and more can be found in the report. But as an electoral advocate, these findings are the most fascinating in how they pertain to civic engagement. As part of the federal Voting Rights Act, Section 203 requires bilingual voting assistance to be required to particular populations, based on Census data. 2002 was the last time an assessment was determined. Due to the results of the 2010 Census, Section 203 now covers Asian American populations located in 22 counties, boroughs, census areas or cities, including 17 new population areas. For the first time South Asian languages are included as a mandatory language for particular counties. The South Asian jurisdictions covered by Section 203 now include:

• Los Angeles County, California – Asian-Indian
• Cook County, Illinois (Chicago) – Asian-Indian
• Queens County, New York – Asian-Indian
• Hamtramck City, Michigan – Bangladeshi

As can be inferred from the above charts, the increase in South Asian populations as well as the higher proportion of naturalized South Asians means that more South Asian Americans are eligible to vote. Providing bilingual assistance will allow the South Asian community to get fully engaged in a process which they wouldn’t have otherwise.
- From “It’s Confirmed – Desis Are Growing,” by Taz

Illustration by Gary Bedard

By Guest Contributor Chris Fan, cross-posted from Hyphen Magazine

Last Monday, Oakland’s mayor Jean Quan ordered the forcible eviction of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s Oakland encampment, which had been situated directly outside of her office at City Hall off and on for the past two months.

Wakened in the early morning by an army of police outfitted in riot gear, demonstrators remained peaceful as more than 100 tents were destroyed, and dozens of arrests were made. The action precipitated the resignation of two of Quan’s top staffers, bringing the total resignations in response to her handling of Occupy Oakland to three. It also deepened this writer’s disappointment and embarrassment over the actions of someone who, not too long ago, could have been described as embodying the best of the Asian American movement of the ’60s and ’70s.

As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, Quan was intensely involved with the Third World Liberation Front’s (TWLF) radical efforts to create ethnic studies programs, ultimately spearheading the establishment of the Asian American Studies program there. After graduating, she continued her activism in New York’s Chinatown, and, much later, joined Oakland School Board, and City Council, where she fought for a variety of progressive causes. Last summer, when large-scale demonstrations broke out in protest of a lenient verdict handed down to BART police officer Johannes Mehserle — who was on trial for shooting Oscar Grant while the latter was face-down and restrained — it was hardly a surprise when Jean Quan joined in a human chain to protect demonstrators from riot police. She was just dusting off an old skill set.

So, when Quan won the mayor’s seat last November, I and so many others were overjoyed not only that she had become Oakland’s first Asian American and first female mayor, but that Jean Quan the progressive activist had become mayor.

Why she decided to step onto the other side of the riot shield is a question that cannot be adequately answered now.

My disappointment and embarrassment for her aside, it would be unfair to characterize Quan as a tyrant, or unequivocally beholden to business and police interests. In fact, it’s been precisely her ambivalence over Occupy Oakland that has provoked resignations and her alienation from city agencies — especially the Oakland police. She has explicitly expressed support for the movement (as, to be sure, have so many mayors who also justified their endorsement of excessive force in the same gesture), and her husband (Floyd Huen, also a TWLF alum) and daughter have been considerably less ambivalent in their support of it. We might even take the divisions within the Quan family as a kind of parable of the American left.

Monday’s eviction was, of course, not the first. Quan’s first attempt at permanently dismantling the camp came early in the morning of October 25, when she authorized hundreds of police officers to evict its residents with a “shock and awe” strategy. In just a few hours, they cleared and destroyed over 150 tents, as well as an elaborate system of services that had maintained the encampment for more than two weeks: including a fully operational kitchen, medic tent, library and children’s area.

Later that afternoon, Occupiers marched from the steps of the city’s Main Library (which librarians, in solidarity, refused to close, in defiance of police orders) back to the encampment site with the intention of re-occupying it. This resulted in large-scale confrontations with police, in which the latter employed an excessive amount of force that resulted in serious injuries, including the critical wounding of Iraq war veteran Scott Olsen. Widely circulated videos depict a police officer tossing an exploding tear gas canister directly at Olsen’s head, after he had already been rendered unconscious by a projectile fired by police moments beforehand.

In a painful example of precisely the kind of tragic irony that the Occupy movement is trying to highlight, that same night, just a few miles from the thick of the demonstrations, Oakland’s school board voted to close five elementary schools in an attempt to save $2 million. The cost of the police actions for that day alone ran well over $1 million.

Along with the cost of last week’s actions, the total cost of police services rose to over $1.5 million. Considering how Occupy Oakland has made every attempt at cooperating with health and safety standards, and how its demonstrations have been largely peaceful, the costs seem not only unjustified, but somehow idiotic. I say “idiotic,” because it reminds me of that paradigmatic scene of idiocy from Steve Martin’s film The Jerk, when a barrage of gunshots fired at the main character miss him, hitting piles of cans instead, and which we can paraphrase like this: “They hate the tents! Stay away from the tents!”

Quan’s involvement in the decisions of October 25 prompted international condemation, as well as ridicule by the likes of Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann. But perhaps the most damning criticism came from a group of Asian American Oakland residents who were just as excited about her election as I was. A few days after the eviction, they circulated an open letter in which they wrote: “It is a sad day. We once believed you to be an ally to low-income, communities of color; to progressive politics; to real democracy. What happened?”

What happened?

I’ve been following Occupy Oakland since it pitched its first tent on October 10. Unfortunately, with an infant son vigorously engaged in his own protest against sleep, it was impossible to join the encampment, and difficult to spend a significant amount of time at Frank Ogawa Plaza (renamed Oscar Grant Plaza by the Occupiers). Nonetheless, my wife and I donated what we could, and I stayed involved via Twitter — something that, prior to this Spring, would have sounded ridiculous.

Even with my meager involvement in virtual and meat-space, I have never in my lifetime seen the American Left so invigorated, so hopeful — or so unified. The movement certainly has its problems, not least of which being its demographics (although as our own Tammy Kim reports, Zuccotti Park is an exception). And with the onset of winter — and the Bay Area’s own rainy version of that mythical season — the question of demands, thus far strategically deferred, is becoming all the more pressing. If there’s anything we’ve learned, however, it’s that the movement’s astonishing resilience is generated more by its form than its content. And it’s not like Occupiers aren’t unaware of their contradictions; they’re working through them slowly and earnestly.

Occupy Oakland shuts down the Port of Oakland during the Nov. 2 general strike

As encouraging as the past two months have been, the tragedy of Mayor Quan stands as a sobering reminder of what a movement like Occupy risks becoming as time wears on. She is precisely the kind of future the movement resists when it militates against co-optation.

In a way, Quan also signals the incoherence of “Asian American” as a radical coalition. No other public figure dramatizes more powerfully just how distant those heady days of action and idealism have become.

This may seem like an odd claim to make, with Asian Americans so much on the rise just across the Bay in San Francisco. Two weeks ago, Edwin Lee became the first elected Asian American mayor of that city, making him the latest instance of an ascendant and formidable wave of Asian American political influence there. But that influence flows from a largely Chinatown-centered voting bloc that is either more closely associated with the Chinese-language press and China’s international political dynamics, or would more readily identify as Chinese and American than Asian American.

Also consider the example of Occupy Oakland’s renaming of Frank Ogawa Plaza to Oscar Grant Plaza, a deliberate displacement of Asian American politics for a narrative of white-on-black state violence.

Ogawa, a gardener by trade, was Oakland’s first Japanese American and longest-standing city council member, as well as an internee at Topaz Camp. He was known for his moderation and record of breaking racial barriers. It’s possible that his conservative politics would have clashed with the Occupy movement’s values — but that doesn’t seem like a strong enough reason. What’s more telling is the startling lack of commentary on this issue (with very few exceptions).

The fact that this move could be passed over in silence is perhaps the most poignant epitaph to a coalition that once I so lovingly knew.

But, alas, Quan herself is the best evidence of what I want to call, polemically, “the Death of Asian America.” The idea of the “Asian American” was born in the ’60s with Quan and her Third Worldist comrades. If it still had any life in it, it died this fall, along with her political career. To use a clunky sociological term, Quan has become a symbol of Asian America’s broader “embourgeoisiement” over the past forty years.

Rather than despair, I believe that, at this moment, we should gauge our optimism against the endurance of the Occupy movement itself. We need to risk it.

Help them through the winter.

What hope is left for us is to be found in solutions that haven’t been formulated yet. We need new coalitions. We don’t yet know what they are, which is why we need the space — indeed, the interruption — to think these things through clearly and honestly. It’s precisely that space and time that the Occupiers are putting their bodies and selves on the line to create and defend.

Those chains of students linking arms and getting pepper sprayed by the officer John Pikes of the world aren’t defending tents, or the spaces they occupy. It’s ridiculous to think so. They’re defending our time to think.

Floating signifiers. A scene from Occupy Cal. Photo by Aaron Bady.

Update, 11/22/11

 It’s been brought to my attention that there has, indeed, been lively discussion on the Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant renaming issue.

The best commentary on it is from the artist Kenji Liu, who designed two posters — one with Ogawa’s image, and the other with Grant’s — emblazoned with the caption “Memory is Solidarity.” These were widely distributed during the Occupy demonstrations and general strike at the beginning of November. Liu writes:

We can have a more complex and nuanced movement for economic and racial justice by honoring both Ogawa and Grant, not as equivalents but in solidarity. This is not just about inclusion, but about having a complex analysis from which to act together. As Audre Lorde has written, “difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark.” We can recognize the different ways capitalism has attacked each of our communities. We can bring this imagination to our aspirations for our places, our movements and our society.

For me, this is the crucial point: that solidarity and a “complex analysis” of capitalism are more fundamental than the identity politics at the heart of the renaming issue. That doesn’t of course make Asian American-specific or black-specific politics disappear; it forces them to incorporate a broader analysis than identity politics can accomodate.

In the case of Oscar Grant, the discourse has evolved from outrage over a long history of white-on-black violence, to a critique of police force, to a critique of the police state, and then to a critique of the police state’s inextricabile link to capitalism. This evolution, for me, is what I hope will be one of the most enduring legacies of the OWS movement. And what I believe we need to do is risk accepting that broader critique, even if that means letting go of some aspects of those old identity-based coalitions.

Last week, The Root featured this video by Obatala Mawusi focusing on some black participants at Occupy Wall Street. Shot in early October, Mawusi asked them what brought them to the burgeoning movement. It’s just over four and a half minutes long, and the language is mildly NSFW, so it’s worth checking out.

By Guest Contributor Jorge Antonio Vallejos, cross-posted from Black Coffee Poet

I’ve got Scandalous by Psycho Realm playing as I write.

It’s a Brown thing.

Brown Pride more like it.

That’s what this is about.  It’s also a fitting song since I’ve been referred to as scandalous, angry, mean, and I love this one — reverse racist.

Being Brown in a place that doesn’t have many Brown faces with colonial Spanish names in the media has you starving sometimes.  Similarly, I remember my Anishinaabe friend Deb Daynard saying she never saw a Brown face (Native American) on T.V while growing in Winnipeg, Canada.  For me it was never having a Brown writer with a name like mine to follow as a kid.

I grew up reading Gordon Korman and Judy Blume.  Both were funny and had me entertained for years but I couldn’t relate to their characters.

What the f-ck did I have in common with white boys attending private school?

My teen years saw me reading books on the Columbian cartel with dreams of being the next Pablo Escobar.  Maybe if I had some Brown writers to follow I wouldn’t have been looking up to a notoriously violent drug lord.

A few years ago I discovered writers like Jimmy Santiago Bacca, Ana Castillo, Luis J. Rodriguez, Gloria Anzaldua, Sherman Alexie.  I’ve also had the privilege and pleasure of studying with Indigenous greats such as Simon Ortiz, Marilyn Dumont, and Lee Maracle, and a soon to be great Daniel Heath Justice.

I remember jumping up a couple of years ago while reading Ernesto Quinonez’s Bodega Dreams.  There’s a scene where the main character goes to the fridge to grab a bottle of malt to accompany his rice and beans.

I saw myself.  I was at home in Quinonez’s novel.

Gracias Ernesto!

Still, I had no writer in my life who I could really relate to.

Before I go on you have to know my history and who I am, or what a white woman at a party last week asked, “What is your ethnicity?”

I’m mixed and proud.

My mom, born and raised in Peru, is Mestiza (Indigenous and Spanish), quarter Chinese, and has some Basque roots.  My biological sperm donor (I don’t say dad cause he’s didn’t raise me) is Arab.

“That’s some angry people!” said an acquaintance of colour when I told him my mix.

Anyway, last week I attended the International Festival of Authors in Toronto.  Really, it’s the festival of white authors with sprinkles of colour here and there.

I met someone important this week.  Important to me, not the higher ups.

One of my main goals for the week was to meet Ojibwa/French poet David A. Groulx.  I saw his face, a Brown face, in the festival guide and read that he was a poet.

“Perfect,” I thought.  “Someone I can meet and tape for blackcoffeepoet.com.”

It turned out to be way more than that.

I saw David across the room at a party.  It’s hard to miss a six-foot-something, 225 lb. Brown guy in a sea of white people.

“David Groulx,” I said with my hand out to shake his.  “I’m Jorge Antonio Vallejos. I run blackcoffeepoet.com.”

“Oh, you’re Black Coffee Poet!  I watch your site!” said David.

Music to my ears!

We chatted, laughed, met a couple of other rejects in the room (Brown South Asian poet Sheniz Janmohamed and her friend K Rock who the rest of the room would probably label as white trash), and parted ways.

The next day saw us talk on the phone and we made plans for the following night.

I attended his reading which also featured my writing mom Lee Maracle.

David’s poems told stories of uranium mines destroying Indigenous land, racism, cops killing Native men and getting away with it, appropriation of culture, and warnings to white folk.

I was home again.

It was again my Indigenous side, the Mestizo in me, jumping up.  You could argue it was my Basque roots too since they are Indigenous to the lands now called Spain and France.

There were no rice and beans and malt, nor a colonial Spanish name, but there was a mixed race Brown face reading good writing, challenging colonialism, and showing pride in who he was and where he came from.

Another party followed the reading that saw David, Lee, and I chilling in a corner as the white literati sipped wine and made connections.  A Brown guy from Trinidad walked up to us and said, “I thought I’d join the Brown corner.”  We welcomed him with open arms.

One more party happened, as did a dinner, but more importantly I got alone time with David.  We talked Fanon, Alexie, colonialism, peoples with white privilege who don’t come from white backgrounds, being Brown with long hair in a society that sees that as a threat, and our love—poetry.

I felt like I found an older brother.  Someone a little older, who I look like, and who not only has similar history but who has similar day to day experiences when walking the rough terrain that is this white run society.

People of the dominant class don’t understand that.

I was telling a white writer on the weekend how I was so happy to have met David.  I mentioned all the reasons listed above.  He looked at me like I was nuts.

On our last day together David gave me a copy of his first book, The Long Dance, and a three page bio.  I noticed that he was published in 191 different places!  I thought I was doing good.

This year alone David has had 3 collections of poems published.  He showed me his latest, hot off the press, at our last dinner together.  His big smile gobbled shrimp as he had his new book on the table.

While in bed that night I thought of David and how happy I was to meet him.  A Brown guy who was humble, kind, funny, had bang on politics, and who was published in almost 200 places, and who published three books in one year.  If he could do that so could I.

David signed his book for me:

To Jorge,

I’m really glad we met.

Your friend,

David A. Groulx 

Kind words to match a kind Brown face who some label scandalous.

David, I feel the same!

Source: @mrdaveyd

Compiled by Arturo R. García

Did a small group of activists manage in just 5 short days of organizing to bring about the first general strike in the United States in generations?

Not exactly. But while there was no broad, city-wide general strike of the sort last seen in this country in 1946, one shouldn’t judge the effort a failure. A day of scattered actions across the city culminated in a massive “occupation” that shut down the Port of Oakland, the fifth busiest container port in the country. When it was announced that operations had been suspended for the night, thousands of people partied around trucks halted in their tracks, celebrating a victory in their struggle with authorities that began with the violent eviction of Occupy Oakland last week. The Oakland police, and Mayor Jean Quan, stung by negative press stemming from the clashes, essentially gave the port to the movement.
- Joshua Holland, Alternet

Source: @reclaimuc

Oakland school officials say about 360 teachers didn’t show up for work, as thousands of people joined anti-Wall Street protests throughout the city.

Oakland Unified School District spokesman Troy Flint says roughly 18 percent of the district’s 2,000 teachers were absent. That’s compared to the 1-percent rate on a typical Wednesday.

Several teachers’ unions have expressed support for the Occupy Oakland movement.

Flint says the district got substitute teachers for most classrooms. Where that’s not possible, children were moved to other classrooms.

In addition to the school district absences, employees of city-run preschool programs for low-income children also took the day off in large numbers.

Officials say 15 of the city’s 17 Head Start centers had to close because of low staffing. Parents were notified in advance and made other arrangements.
- The Associated Press

Source: @ThinkProgress

Mayor Jean Quan of Oakland, a supporter of the movement who had nevertheless come under fire from the protesters after last week’s confrontations, had called for a minimal police presence on Wednesday. The police did keep a very low profile throughout the afternoon as the crowd grew and as splinter groups of hundreds of protesters broke off from the main body and pushed into surrounding streets.

“We support many of the demands, particularly the focus on foreclosures, fair lending practices and making capital available to low-income communities,” Ms. Quan said at a news conference.

Police officers needed to be on hand, she said, to protect everyone’s free-speech rights in balance with legitimate public safety concerns.
- Malia Woolan, The New York Times

Source: @garonsen

The demonstrations in Oakland were largely peaceful and police said there were no arrests.

Police estimated that a crowd of about 3,000 had gathered at the port at the height of the demonstration around dusk. Some had marched from the city’s downtown, while others had been bused to the port.

The crowd disrupted operations by overwhelming the area with people and blocking exits with chain-link fencing and illegally parked vehicles. The demonstrators also erected fences to block main streets to the port. No trucks were allowed into or out of the area.

Port spokesman Isaac Kos-Read said evening operations had been “effectively shut down.”

And later port officials released a statement saying that maritime activity would be cancelled indefinitely, but they hoped to resume the work day Thursday.

“Our hope is that the work day can resume tomorrow and that Port workers will be allowed to get to their jobs without incident,” the statement read. “Continued missed shifts represent economic hardship for maritime workers, truckers, and their families, as well as lost jobs and lost tax revenue for our region.”
- Terence Chea, Lisa Leff and Terry Collins, The Associated Press

Source: The Bay Citizen

Courtesy of @northoaklandnow

By Guest Contributor Jen Chau, cross-posted from The Time Is Always Right …

In the past couple of years, I have noticed a certain complacency that I never noticed before, in my eleven years of leading Swirl. The same passion and the same excitement around building multiracial communities had faded a bit. In the one year leading up to the Presidential election, we launched five new chapters (the norm had been a chapter every year or every other year). People were excited by the energy created by Obama’s campaign, and they were motivated and eager to be a part of creating supportive and inclusive multiracial communities.

And then once Obama was firmly placed in the White House, something happened. It got quiet.

My theory was that it was all related to the claims that we were now in some sort of post-racial wonderland. I think it very much had to do with the fact that Obama is of multiracial heritage. This fact resulted in a sort of sitting back. A sentiment that sounded like, “we’re good now.” The idea that Obama understood so many of us, and that he cared about diversity was something that gave people a reason to relax. Take a breath. Stop pushing so hard. I understood this and even felt a bit of it myself. The other reality is that in an individual’s development, one may feel a strong desire to connect to community at one point and not at another. Swirl has always understood and been supportive of this.

Organizations, academics, student leaders still continued their work, but it was clear that a lot of people – our members, our “audience” – were….gone. I heard the same from other groups – that membership started to lull. Student campus groups folded. It seemed that people didn’t need our mixed groups in the same way they had, previously. Before Obama. Before “check all that apply” on the U.S. Census.

But had things changed all that much? Yes, we are counted now. We know the numbers of multiracial people and interracial couples in this country. But do people start understanding one another and become supportive overnight just because we have a tally? Do things feel different for a multiracial person or a mixed family on a day to day basis?

Yes and no. I have heard from many people that things are better. That they are not questioned nearly as much. That people no longer stare in awe as they talk about the fact that their mom is black and dad is white. That they feel comfortable being all of who they are, at all times. It always makes me happy to hear that this is what people are experiencing. It means that progress is being made.

But others still experience the awkward questions. The demand by strangers to “prove” they are one thing or the other. Moms being asked how long they’ve been babysitting their own children. Stares, rude comments, family tensions and sometimes divisions. This is all still real and still happening.

And your experience, in part, is impacted by your context. Your circle, your larger environment. Where you live. In pockets, multiracial people and families are supported, recognized, understood. In others, far from it.

There are many ways that we have to fight racism and ignorance. It’s absolutely critical that things happen on the institutional level, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the corresponding changes automatically happen at the cultural or individual level. And vice versa. Just because a change occurs on one level doesn’t mean that the others follow neatly in line. We have the ability to “check all that apply” on the Census (which is huge), but that doesn’t mean that individuals immediately understand the complexity of multirace. Things don’t change overnight. We know this logically, but it seems that we sometimes want to pretend it isn’t the case (see “post-race”). I want to live in bliss too, believe me. But a real one, that we work hard to create for ourselves…not a superficial one that we wish into being.

This piece was prompted by a New York Times article on a mixed family. I hope that their story (and others) help to illustrate all that still needs to be understood.

I don’t feel safe in Seattle.

Specifically, I don’t feel safe in public.

I love this city. Its many neighborhoods, the “little” big city vibe with a more laid-back pace of life. The expansive mountain ranges and views of ocean waters. Housing so dense it is seemingly stacked on hill after hill of pavement and grass. The skyline at dusk and twilight, travelling both north and south on the I-5. It is unrushed and easy, yet there is some nameless vibrance to this place.

Of course, I’ve been here just shy of 8 weeks.

I’m still a rookie, but I am a maverick of emotion. I don’t feel safe here.

The dueling intersections of my social identities: race, class, gender & age have forged a path of extremely unpleasant, unwelcome events at a rate that I have never experienced in my entire life. Here are the facts, the need-to-know-to-get-it information:

I am black. I am a young woman in my early 20s, but I am frequently presumed to be younger. This is important. I am living below the poverty line.

That is a recipe for disaster.

In the past, I discussed my experiences regarding the language of race while living in Europe. I had just come home, a recent college graduate, and I wanted to enact social justice work on a larger scale: I applied for AmeriCorps. My AmeriCorps experience thus far has been amazing, but we are not paid well. In fact, our pay is not technically a salary; it is reported as a “living wage” because it is so low. So living in Seattle, I am poor. Looking for housing on a minuscule budget is difficult, thus I ended up in the deepest south neighborhood, Rainier Beach. Housing is significantly cheaper here and unsurprisingly, there is a very high concentration of black residents.

This is how the story begins.

My job is in the center of the city, an hour away by bus. The bus stop was a 10-minute walk from my house. Less than half a mile. I lived in Rainier Beach for 4 weeks. From the moment I stepped foot outside my door I became prey to the men, specifically black men, of the neighborhood. Whistles, shouts, catcalls, offers for rides twice [once while I was on the phone] occurred every single day. It was so mind-boggling that I started keeping a sexual harassment diary; it was cathartic to examine the harassment and muse on how it reflected larger cultural values of power relations and young black women marginalization. We are the 1%.

All those womanist musings I read about my objectification and debasement, suddenly I was egregiously living them week to week.

Being a black woman, my body is not my own, I am inviting attention by casual dress, I should be grateful for positive attention to my appearance, I am self-righteous [i.e., a bitch] to condemn “natural” male reaction to feminine wiles.

These things are true; they can be placed in a cultural context and analyzed every which way sociologically. It is difficult to be cerebral about experiences that are not abstract. And so I attempted to remedy the situation. I literally began policing my dress: the baggier pea coat instead of the funky, plaid, slim-fitting blue one, the loose-fitting cords instead of the slightly tighter business casual pants, the converse sneakers instead of the riding boots that “clicked” when I walked.

To no avail, it did not abate. I wryly noted that these men were especially verbal with their unwanted commentary: “you are looking gorgeous today, sweet thing!,” “when you know you are working it you know you are working it – I know you know!,” and my personal favorite, shouted out a frantically unrolled window: “you don’t have to walk in the rain!”

As soon as my hour-long ride ended and I entered the campus of the high school where I work, my role as open-invitation free-for-all do street wench ended. I was viewed through a different lens: for those who knew me, the idealistic young newcomer and for the majority unfamiliar staff, a student. Without makeup [and sometimes even with] I was mistaken for a student very frequently. I was asked for a hall pass or questioned why I was in the photocopy room.

This abrupt shift threw me for a mental loop: I am a young woman, a teen to many inside of the school, yet out there [public spaces] so many older black men view me as a sexual conquest. I work with young men and women of color and it sickens me to imagine what the girls are subjected to walking down the street – and similarly, what our boys are being taught.

And still, I feel unsafe. The incidents escalated today.

Walking the 10-minute trek to the bus stop, I hurriedly put in my iPod buds, often a welcome refuge to hearing the absurd and searing comments of men. Not soon enough. I heard a yell, and against my better judgment I looked up and saw there was a car stopped on the road across the street and the window was down: “do you need a ride, baby?” a young black man, perhaps around my own age, called.

I did what women have long been taught to do: I turned my head and ignored him.

And then I felt extremely unsafe. He abruptly swerved across the road, seemingly right toward me, changed directions, and drove off at top speed. My heart was beating out of my chest, every hair on end.

I felt so unsafe. I anxiously cowered in the bus stop shelter, waiting for my ride.

Fast forward to a few hours later, I am with a young white male friend leaving Target. We are casually chatting, laden down with our purchases. At the cross walk a bedraggled black man appears from nowhere and says, “Damn how is it that all the fine black women are with white boys?” We are both stunned. My friend says “What?” in a terse tone and I begin laughing – half out of nervousness and half because I want him to know that he will not incite my anger. “Yeah how is it that white boys are getting all our fine black women – and who are you? And you think it’s funny, huh?’

His eyes are so cold. His voice rings volumes of rage and genuine bewilderment. He is shaking his head.

Suddenly the white hand is flashing and we cross the street. Our harbinger is angrily walking the other direction, grumbling. My friend is shaken – race is rarely visible to him and perhaps on another level, he felt unsafe too.

We immediately begin rehashing and I stare across the street – the man is looking at me and waves – fuck you I murmur under my breath and gaily wave back, smiling.

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

As a black woman, it seems that my primary romantic responsibility is the preservation of black relationships. Never mind that the majority of black women do not date outside of their race, far fewer than black men. I am first and foremost to be evaluated on my appearance. I cannot break racial and gender mores by walking down the street with a white male friend.

Until now, I have seldom walked public spaces alone, so frequently. I have never ridden the bus so frequently. I have never lived on such little pay. I have never felt so unsafe.

Seattle has earned a reputation for being a progressive city, although the history of this city belies such a notion. In a 2005 nationwide study, Seattle was ranked the 17th most Liberal city in America. There is inexorable evidence of Seattle’s commitment to maintaining its liberal reputation: the most happening neighborhood in the city, Capitol Hill, is also the mecca of the gay community, it is majorly promoting an electric car initiative, and people wear flannel and those foot-shoes everywhere.

In actuality, Seattle is no more or less racially progressive than any other town I have lived in. Again, my social identities greatly impact my perspective. I grew up in a half-black half-white forgettable city in Michigan. It was very segregated by neighborhood and is currently undergoing gentrification. I went to college in Ann Arbor which hosts an annual event called Hash Bash, very liberal, and very college town-y. I received much less sexual harassment walking around campus but this may be because there were students literally everywhere, and not many seemingly feckless men sitting around, leering at young women.

Even if it is merited, do not mistake this article as an attack on [black] men who think it is okay to harass women, or young girls who looks like easy targets. I often wondered angrily “don’t they have something to do?” as I walked past Walgreens toward school, through the Central District. It is no longer the “ghetto” that locals claim it once was. It, like Rainier Beach, is undergoing extensive gentrification. Amidst the pastel-colored condominiums and new Quizno’s eateries, there are so many unemployed, almost 9 percent throughout the city. Since joblessness historically affects black males double the rate, probably around 18% of black men are without substantial employment. There is something demoralizing about the oppression of being without work when you have the motivation – I wonder how this transforms into demoralizing young women? I mean honestly, do they think that we enjoy it?

Even though they have terrified me, alienated me, marginalized me, I cannot hate them. To place it in context engenders empathy where resentment does not easily fester. Instead, I can acknowledge this pain without devaluing the pain of such pernicious attacks. This is an essay about a far too often ignored topic: street harassment.

This post is for the young, black women who have experienced far worse for far longer. This is the validation of an experience, sexual harassment, that is belittled and normalized to the point it is necessary to explain in great detail why and how it is so harmful [for my friend on the car ride home]. This post is not an attack on black men. It is important to place identities into context: the fact that I am a young black women being harassed by solely black men since my arrival, especially middle-aged black men, is significant. It is troubling, but necessary to acknowledge.

Since I have moved these incidents have reduced dramatically; my new neighborhood is predominantly upwardly mobile Asian families. The ride is 15 minutes. As of today, I am decidedly focused on new responses to sexual harassment – not simply ignoring it.

I want to invite young women of color to share their own stories of sexual harassment by strangers. My first memory of this is the 7th grade, I was 11 years old. He was a boy who ‘liked me’ and he touched my butt as I walked past him in the halls. There is no doubt that stories likes are rarely told: perhaps indignantly told to a friend, only to be dismissed or blame-shifted.

How does this affect your relationship to public spaces and what responses have you developed? Not necessarily in the moment either, but perhaps afterward. What is your coping mechanism?

There are initiatives designed to that uplift and redefine young’s ideas of masculinity, programs that decry harmful treatment of women. Still, we live our lives unprotected from sexual harassment every day. If Seattle is truly one of the “Best Cities for the Next Decade”, I’d like to feel safe standing next to a bus stop.

It is literally my job to empower and encourage black youth. At work, I feel positive and useful, I am making amazing emotional connections and learning from the kids I am meant to mentor. I feel strong. But the moment I step outside of the school, I feel unsafe. I have much to learn and a year-long contract. This is my first step toward security.

Had [Mayor Kasim] Reed gone forward with his threat to evict the protesters we might’ve seen a photo negative of the civil rights movement, one in which a black police force arrests white protesters who are demanding that the nation heed its own conscience — and doing so just two days after the Martin Luther King Memorial was dedicated on the National Mall.

That Bull Connor moment might still be in the offing, but Mayor Reed did issue a statement saying that civil disobedience was a crucial part of the city’s history. The activists got to put one in the win column.

Yet for all the symbolic importance of Occupy Atlanta remaining in the park, their victory managed to underscore the reasons for my basic distrust of the movement. Five years ago, the city enacted stringent laws directed at the homeless population — most of whom are black — downtown. Had any of the homeless who mingled among the activists on Troy Davis Park attempted to sleep on the grounds out of necessity, not political symbolism, they would have been quickly evicted or arrested.

Thus, there are a few ways to look at the (mostly white) Occupy Atlanta, but it can’t be overlooked that much of their success lies in who they are, not what they stand for. No big city mayor wants news cameras showing images of labor organizers or white college students being dragged into police cars. I suspect that a movement that is purportedly about chastening the over-privileged has itself banked on that very privilege.

- From Loop21, Oct. 19

In the past few weeks friends and family from around the country have asked me, with a deep urgency in their tone: “What is it like to be there? What does it feel like? How would you describe it?” These questions throw me because, like any project of describing life as it happens around you, when you are very much in it, it feels impossible sometimes. And so instead of describing what Occupy Wall Street feels like I say: “It is all happening so fast, it changes everyday, it is overwhelming, I am tired but I am also excited again, I’ve made new friends, new lovers and new enemies, I couldn’t have imagined my life would be like this a month ago.”

When I said this to my friend Amy last week she laughed and replied, half-jokingly: “That sounds like the start of the revolution.”

“Not yet,” I replied “but we’re trying.”

But my inability to answer this question has been nagging at me: Why is it so hard to describe what it feels like to be part of this movement that is not really a movement, this moment, this space? Maybe the fact that it is hard to describe is part of its strength?

Here is the thing: Occupy Wall Street has changed a lot over the past two weeks. It has grown tremendously, garnered more and more media attention and seems to be staying put for a while. While two weeks ago I walked away from Liberty Plaza thinking of how beautiful and inspiring it was, but also worried about how long it will be there, now the terrain of questions have shifted, it isn’t: When will the cops kick us out? but How will we grow? How do we sustain all the people that have come here? Should we occupy somewhere else too? That doesn’t mean that the cops getting rid of us isn’t still a major concern, but simply that now we feel like we are semi-established in some ways, or at least in enough ways that we can sustain something.

That said, on Friday I realized how much I have grown attached to the actual space of Zucotti Park when we were threatened with eviction by Brookfield Properties, the private real estate company who owns the park. That day I woke up at 3am and made my way over to the park, anxious and deeply sad that it might all be over. Arriving at the park I saw friends, old and new, and we hugged in the chilly pre-dawn air, “I don’t want to lose all of this” I kept saying over and over again. “We won’t” they replied, “and even if we do we’ll build it somewhere else.”

We didn’t lose on Friday morning, and the feeling of being surrounded by thousands of people willing to stay in the park, refusing to back down even if the cops threatened arrest was powerful beyond what I can express here. The moment made me realize that the way that I feel about all this, and the way I talk about it, has shifted. All of a sudden I am using personal pronouns– this is “our” movement, “we” are worried about the cops kicking us out. I don’t know when this happened but at some point I started feeling some sense of ownership over this movement. And I’ve started calling it a movement. I’ve started saying things I never thought I would , things like “in the movement….”

As I wrote in my last post, I still think OWS is more of a space than a movement, a space of radical possibility, but I also think it is becoming something else. It is a space, but it is also a moment: a moment in which radical critique of our political and economic systems and the harm they have caused, a critique that many of us have had for a while, feels possible to have on a larger scale. It is a moment in which people who never thought they would be out on the streets protesting are protesting. And this is revolutionary in itself.

So what does it feel like to be part of Occupy Wall Street, to be there everyday almost? In some ways it has become an addiction, I wake up some mornings telling myself that today I won’t go by, that today I will take the day off and go back to being a graduate student. But somehow I find myself there, either to go to a working group meeting, a working group sub-committee meeting, to attend a training, to go on a smaller march, to see a performance, to hear and be a part of what is being discussed in General Assembly that night, or just to hang out at the margins and observe what is happening for a few minutes. There is the celebrity watching aspect to being in that space, as all the leftist intellectuals and left-leaning pop culture icons make their stop-by (a conversation I had with a friend: “I saw Deepak Chopra last night” “well I saw Talib Kweli tonight” someone else chimes in: “Neutral Milk Hotel a week ago was my favorite”).

But this is not what is addictive about being there. What is addictive about being there is that this space, this moment, this movement, suddenly has me thinking about things in a new way. It suddenly has me hopeful again. And it has me excited to think about my own, and all of our, potentialities and possibilities. Everything feels possible again. I never thought I would feel this way.

And I’m not the only one- like I said above, I’ve made new friends, good friends, friends all of a sudden I can’t imagine my life without. And I’ve made the occasional new enemy, the kind of enemies that you see at smile and nod at but know that you share different theoretical views, different personal views, different perspectives. This enemies are necessary too for without them the space wouldn’t be what it is: a place of frustration sometimes but yet hope and expectation too.

But what does everyday life look like at OWS? This is hard to describe because it changes depending on what time of day you are there, what day of the week it is, what the weather is like, who is there, what is happening there. It can seem both incredibly chaotic yet incredibly organized. It can seem underwhelming yet overwhelming. Sometimes it seems like just a bunch of people standing around holding signs or sometimes it looks like groups of people milling about, sitting on the stairs, on the ground, sleeping on top of tarps. But look more closely: what these people are actually doing, what this space is actually doing, is shifting the terrain of our imaginations. These bodies in this space are inherently challenging.

More pragmatically though:

You can hear OWS before you see it now. If it is during the evening General Assembly, which can last for hours, you can hear the voice of hundreds of people talking in unison, amplifying one person’s words so that everyone can hear them- the General Assembly has grown so much in the past two weeks that now the “People’s Microphone” needs 2 and sometimes 3 waves through the crowd so that everyone knows what is going on. I get chills every time I see this process in action- something about the way it makes everyone listen, repeat and really take on what someone is saying. You can also hear the drum circle on the west side of the square that has hundreds of people playing in it, dancing around it, the rhythm they make bounces off the walls of the office towers around the square and reverberates throughout the square. And above all this you can hear the general din of hundreds of people in one space together: talking, debating, arguing, or just sitting with friends and being in that space together. Every time I bike towards Occupy Wall Street, dodging cars and buses and taxis on Broadway, my heart starts beating a little faster when I hear this din, I start biking faster and I can’t wait to just be there. To hear what is being discussed in that night’s General Assembly, to meet my friends, to attend a meeting or just to wander through and see what there is to see, make a new sign, or browse through a book in the library, eat something from the food station or just generally observe the beautifully overwhelming spectacle of it all.

A few nights ago I was there around 10pm when it was drizzling and everyone was getting under their tarps and sleeping bags and settling in for the night. I was with a friend from out of town who is trying to start up Occupy New Orleans (read about that here). She is also a street medic, so we made our way over to the medic’s station, someplace I have only wandered by but never stopped at. The medic’s station is impressive in that you can smell it before you see it: it smells of disinfectant and rubbing alcohol. And indeed while we were standing outside of it they were disinfecting and washing down their entire area, scrubbing the concrete and all the surfaces clean. The medic we spoke to was slow speaking and one of the calmest people I have ever met.

“Oh yeah we’ve had to deal with some serious stuff,” he said, “but this is one of the best teams I’ve come across.” He went on to describe how they had doctors and nurses on call, a whole team of street medics at all times, as well as access to low-cost or free clinics in the neighborhood. He offered help to Occupy New Orleans in whatever way he could, and together they brainstormed supplies and ways that OWS might be able to help.

Thinking about this moment of solidarity and support while winding our way out of the park around all these tarps with people’s feet poking out at the bottom of them made my heart swell for a moment. When I got home I joked to my roommate: “If you get sick, go to OWS, they have better free healthcare there then anywhere.”

And in part this is the point: that OWS is such a challenge to the state because it is, in many ways, functioning by itself. It is governing itself, it is feeding itself, it is making art, making music, reading a book, sitting on the steps and talking to friends, it is taking care of itself. This is radically different than a march or a rally, which have ending points. I realized this last week when after the big Wednesday march (which my friend Sonny writes about here), I got drinks with some friends, and we all sat around and talked both about how amazing the march was but then we also asked the inevitable question of “What’s next?” And as this question was being asked, I realized that it was the wrong question for OWS. It is the wrong question for a few reasons: because when we are reproducing everyday life we don’t need to ask “What’s next?” because this question is already answered. But it is also the wrong question because in a movement without leaders and without demands, the question isn’t “What’s next?” but rather: “What do I want to do next?”

The next day on the subway coming home from another evening at OWS (7pm General Assembly and then an awesome dinner from the food station: beans and rice and pizza and apples and ice cream and salad and macaroni and cheese. While in the food line someone came and made everyone sanitize their hands and then passed out plates and I felt so well-taken care of for a moment), the people I was with asked each other exactly this question: what do we want to see happen here, in this movement, in this space? The answers were varied: Z. wanted there to be more occupations, C. wanted there to be walking tours of banks, A. wanted more dancing and singing, I wanted to re-write the declaration. This moment felt so different than the night before, and this difference matters because it is the difference between endings and beginnings.

Occupy Wall Street is not an ending, it is a beginning.

By Guest Contributor Minh-ha T. Pham, cross-posted from Threadbared

Alondra Nelson, author of the much-anticipated book Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination (University of Minnesota Press 2011) talks to me about The Black Panther Party’s Free Clothing Program, one of the organization’s many community programs. Nelson’s book, which Henry Louis Gates calls “a revelation” and Evelynn Hammonds describes as “indispensable” for understanding “how healthcare and citizenship have become so intertwined,” deftly recovers a lesser-known aspect of the BPP: its broader struggles for social justice through health activism.

On a more personal note, I’m utterly thrilled to be introducing Threadbared readers to Alondra Nelson! She’s an intellectual powerhouse of the first order whose research stands as far and away some of the most exciting and relevant stuff I’ve encountered in critical race and gender studies in some time. In addition to her intellectual capaciousness (follow her on Twitter to see what I mean!), she is unsparingly generous in her willingness to share knowledge, support, and tips for the best mascara a drugstore budget can buy. And she’s agreed to sign copies of her book which 3 (three!) lucky readers will win – keep reading to find out how!

MP: Alondra, as you know I’ve been dying to talk to you about  this photo of the Black Panther Party’s Free Clothing Program by Stephen Shames. It’s one of my favorite fashion photos because it captures so well what I can only describe as a state of sartorial joy – that happy feeling I get sometimes when I’m wearing a favorite outfit or trying on new clothes (even if only new to me). I mean, this kid is seriously feeling his look and himself – and I absolutely love it! What are your reactions to this photo?

Black Panther Party Free Clothing Program. A boy tries on a coat at a party office in Toledo, Ohio, 1971. Credit: Stephen Shames.

AN: This Shames photograph is striking and wonderful. There is definitely “sartorial joy” there. And, pure unadulterated happiness, too! The boy in the photo—his smile, his pose, his evident pride—conveys the thrill I think we’ve all felt during some especially successful shopping venture at a sample sale, thrift shop or department store. We unfortunately learn to dim our delight as we get older. This image is a welcome reminder to savor life’s little pleasures.

The photo also prompts a less cheery reading. The boy is wearing many layers of clothes and here he is adding yet another layer. He’s stocking up. Maybe he is in great need of clothing. Perhaps his enthusiasm is not the thrill of consumption, but the satisfaction of having this very basic need met.

The Black Panther Party’s 1966 founding manifesto stated “We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.” Helping disadvantaged communities to meet these needs was one of the activists’ main goals. To do this, the Party established a wide array of community service or “survival” initiatives, including the People’s Free Clothing Program depicted here.

Then there are the images within the picture; the images on the wall. There is the iconic poster of Huey Newton seated in a wicker chair brandishing both a sword and a rifle. There are several pieces of art that appear to be the work of Emory Douglas, the Party’s Minister of Culture. There’s also a familiar portrait of Eldridge Cleaver floating just above the boy’s head. This “gallery” links the boy’s sartorial joy and practical needs to the Black Panthers’ style and their politics.

MP: I love that. It really articulates my sense of the significance of the Black Panther Party’s health-based programs, which I think go beyond physical survival. That Eldridge Cleaver’s iconic image is part of this scene of sartorial joy really suggests to me that the BPP understood the political and psychic significance of clothing, that “health activism” for the BPP had much broader implications than physical health. Can you elaborate on this?

AN: Yes, that’s absolutely right. The Party appreciated that clothing could be both a basic need and a form of self-expression.

Also, the Black Panthers’ had a broad and politicized understanding of well-being that I describe as “social health.” Social health was their vision of the good society. The Party drew a connection between the physical health of individuals and social conditions in the U.S. They believed that achieving healthy bodies and communities required a just and equitable society.

The Black Panthers took a similarly holistic approach with their health activities. They provided basic health care services at their People’s Free Medical Clinics, for example. At these clinics one could also get free groceries or clothing, or advice on how to deal with a difficult landlord or help finding a job. For the Panthers, all of these issues were interconnected.

MP: Do you think it’d be fair to say that in the popular imaginary, it isn’t the group’s community programs for which they’re best remembered but their distinctive look? I’m thinking about the circulation and consumption of the BPP’s fashion practices and styles (e.g., Afros, berets, and military jackets) today in fashion magazines (under the sign of “radical chic”) and in the Internet (one blogger offers advice on how to “recreate the Panther look”). How important was the distinctive look of the BPP to its political mission and legacy then and now?

AN: The Black Panther Party emerged during a golden age of mass media: at a time when artists like John Lennon and Yoko Ono were pioneering some of the earliest music videos, when Marshall McLuhan was proclaiming the “medium” as “the message,” and when racially stereotypical television shows such as “Amos ‘n’ Andy” (which ran in syndication until the late 1960s) were giving way to integrated dramas like “The Mod Squad” and “Star Trek” (the latter of which was the setting for American TV’s first interracial kiss). Media mattered; image mattered.

Given this context, the fact that the Black Panthers were not only bold, but also beautiful, definitely contributed to their association with style in the popular imagination up to today. And, what the Shames photo of the boy captures so well is the fact that the Party’s image and its mission could overlap.

At the same time, we shouldn’t let our collective memory of the Party be so preoccupied with its imagery that we lose site of the activists’ urgent critique of racial and economic inequality and their efforts to imagine a better society. As Angela Davis stressed in her stirring 1994 article “Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia” (a MUST read!), we shouldn’t reduce a “politics of liberation to a politics of fashion.”

MP: Stephen Shames, the photographer responsible for the above photo, is also responsible for many of the photographs that serve as visual references for “radical chic”. Can you talk about his relationship to and role in the BPP?

AN: Because of his evocative photographs, Shames has been one of the most important historians of the BPP. Many familiar, iconic images of the Party reflect Shames’ unique vision and talents. He also photographed aspects of the BPP’s work and organizational culture that are less well-known, whether it was decpicting hundreds of bags of groceries spread out like a lawn in an Oakland park or capturing blood being drawn from a child’s finger during at one of the Panthers’ sickle cell anemia screening programs. I am honored that he allowed me to use one of his photographs for the cover of Body and Soul.

MP: Thanks, Alondra! I can’t wait to read the book!

Body and Soul will be available for purchase on November 1 but you can claim your FREE copy before then! Visit the original post at Threadbared and talk about your favorite book/film/image of the Black Panther Party to win one of the three autographed copies of Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination. The drawing will take place one week from today on Monday, October 24.

By Guest Contributor Harsha Walia

I wish I could start with the ritualistic “I love you” for the Occupy Movement. To be honest, it has been a space of turmoil for me. But also one of virulent optimism. What I outline below are not criticisms. I am inspired that the dynamic of the movement thus far has been organic, so that all those who choose to participate are collectively responsible for its evolution. To everyone – I offer my deepest respect.

I am writing today with Grace Lee Boggs in mind:

The coming struggle is a political struggle to take political power out of the hands of the few and put it into the hands of the many. But in order to get this power into the hands of the many, it will be necessary for the many not only to fight the powerful few but to fight and clash among themselves as well.

This may sound counter-productive, but I find it a poignant reminder that, in our state of elation, we cannot under-estimate the difficult terrain ahead. I look forward to the processes that will further these conversations.

Occupations on Occupied Land

One of the broad principles in a working statement of unity (yet to be formally adopted) of Occupy Vancouver thus far includes an acknowledgement of unceded Coast Salish territories. There has been opposition to this as being “divisive” and “focusing on First Nations issues”. I would argue that acknowledging Indigenous lands is a necessary and critical starting point for two primary reasons.

Firstly, the word Occupy has understandably ignited criticism from Indigenous people as having a deeply colonial implication. It erases the brutal history of genocide that settler societies have been built on. This is not simply a rhetorical or fringe point; it is a profound and indisputable matter of fact that this land is already occupied. The province of BC is largely still unceded land, which means that no treaties have been signed and the title holders of Vancouver are the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Tseilwau-tuth, and Musqueam. As my Sḵwx̱wú7mesh friend Dustin Rivers joked “Okay so the Premier and provincial government acknowledge and give thanks to the host territory, but Occupy Vancouver can’t?”

Supporting efforts towards decolonization is not only an Indigenous issue. It is also about us, as non-natives, learning the history of this land and locating ourselves and our responsibilities within the context of colonization. Occupation movements such as those in Boston and Denver and New York have taken similar steps in deepening an anti-colonial analysis.

Secondly, we must understand that the tentacles of corporate control have roots in the processes of colonization and enslavement. As written by the Owe Aku International Justice Project: “Corporate greed is the driving factor for the global oppression and suffering of Indigenous populations. It is the driving factor for the conquest and continued suffering for the Indigenous peoples on this continent. The effects of greed eventually spill over and negatively impact all peoples, everywhere.”

The Hudsons Bay Company in Canada and the East India Trading Company in India, for example, were some of the first corporate entities established on the stock market. Both companies were granted trading monopolies by the British Crown, and were able to extract resources and amass massive profits due to the subjugation of local communities through the use of the Empire’s military and police forces. The attendant processes of corporate expansion and colonization continues today, most evident in this country with the Alberta Tar Sands. In the midst of an economic crisis, corporations’ ability to accumulate wealth is dependent on discovering new frontiers from which to extract resources. This disproportionately impacts Indigenous peoples and destroys the land base required to sustain their communities, while creating an ecological crisis for the planet as a whole.

Systemic Oppression Connected to Economic Inequality

In creating a unified space of opposition to the 1% who hold a concentration of power and wealth, we must simultaneously foster critical education to learn about the systemic injustices that many of us in the 99% continue to face. This should not be pejoratively dismissed as “identity politics”, which for many re-enforces the patterns of marginalization. The connection between the nature and structure of the political economy and systemic injustice is clear: the growing economic inequality being experienced in this city and across this country is nothing new for low-income racialized communities, particularly single mothers, all of whom face the double brunt of scape-goating during periods of recession.

The very idea of the multitude forces a contestation of any one lived experience binding the 99%. Embracing this plurality and having an open heart to potentially uncomfortable truths about systemic oppression beyond the ‘evil corporations and greedy banks’ will strengthen this movement. Ignoring the hierarchies of power between us does not make them magically disappear. It actually does the opposite – it entrenches those inequalities. If we learn from social movements past, we observe that the struggle to genuinely address issues of race, class, gender, ability, sexuality, age, and nationality actually did more, rather than less, to facilitate broader participation.

In order to this we need to critically examine the idea of “catering to the mainstream”. I do not disagree with reaching out to as broad a base as possible; but we should ask ourselves: who constitutes the “mainstream”? If Indigenous communities, homeless people, immigrants, LGBTQs, seniors and others are all considered “special interest groups” (although we actually constitute an overwhelming demographic majority), then by default that suggests that, as Rinku Sen argues, straight white men are the sole standard of universalism. “Addressing other systems of oppression, and the people those systems affect, isn’t about elevating one group’s suffering over that of white men. It’s about understanding how the mechanisms of control actually operate. When we understand, we can craft solutions that truly help everybody. ” This should not be misunderstood as advocating for a pecking order of issues; it is about understanding that the 99% is not a homogenous group but a web of inter-related communities in struggle.

Clayton Thomas-Muller, Tar Sands Campaign Organizer for the Indigenous Environmental Network, wrote to me: “Our own Indigenous Rights movements are gaining momentum which means that we all must continually be educating new folks getting politicized. We can all be working towards a larger convergence that is strongly rooted in an Anti colonial, Anti Racist, Anti Oppressive framework.” In a similar vein, Syed Hussan writes, “Understand that to truly be free, to truly include the entire 99 per cent, you have to say today, and say every day: We will leave no one behind.” Just as we challenge the idea of austerity put forward by governments and corporations, we should challenge the idea of scarcity of space in our movements and instead facilitate a more nuanced discourse about inequality.

Learning from History and Building on Successes

While it is clearly too early to comment on the future of the Occupy movement, I offer a few humble preliminary thoughts based on Occupy Wall Street and the nature of the Vancouver organizing. Those who us who have been activists rightfully do not have any particular authority in this movement and as many others have cautioned, more experienced activists should not claim moral righteousness over those who are just joining the struggle. But we also cannot claim ignorance either.

It must be re-stated that Occupy Together is brilliantly transitional. As has been repeatedly noted, it is has been a moral and strategic success to not have a pre-articulated laundry list of demands within which to confine a nascent movement. Peter Marcus writes “Occupy is seen by most of its participants and supporters not as a set of pressures for individual rights, but as a powerful claim for a better world… The whole essence of the movement is to reject the game’s rules as it is being played, to produce change that includes each of these demands but goes much further to question the structures that make those demands necessary.” Similarly Vijay Prashad says that we “must breathe in the many currents of dissatisfaction, and breathe out a new radical imagination.”

The creation of encampments is in itself an act of liberation. Decentralized gatherings with democratic decision-making processes and autonomous space for people to gather and dialogue based on their interests – such as through reading circles or art zones or guerrilla gardening – create a sense of purpose, connectedness, and emancipation in a society that otherwise breeds apathy, disenchantment, and isolation. This type of pre-figurative politics – a living symbol of refusal – is a ways to come together to create and live the alternatives to this system. I am reminded of the modest (Anti) Olympic Tent Village in our own city in the Downtown Eastside last year, which was deemed ‘paradise’ and a place where ‘real freedom lives’ by many.

One issue I would stress is building awareness about police violence and police infiltration. In some cities, Occupy organizers have actively collaborated with police. While many do this on the principle of ‘we have nothing to hide‘, the police cannot be trusted. This is not a comment on individual police officers who maybe “ordinary people”, but their job is to protect the 1%. The police have a long history of repression of social movements. Plus, people who are homeless, racialized, non-status, or queer routinely experience arbitrary police abuse. We must take these concerns seriously in order to promote participation from these communities. We must also learn to rely on ourselves to keep ourselves safe and to hold ground when police are ordered to clear us out. This seems insurmountable, but it has been done before and can be done again.

In the heels of the Olympics and G20, a recurring issue is diversity of tactics. Despite a history in community-based movement-building, based on a debate about diversity of tactics with an ally whom I respect, there has been unnecessary and misinformed fear-mongering that those who support a diversity of tactics “fundamentally reject peaceful assemblies”. For me, supporting a diversity of tactics has always implied respect for a range of strategies including non-violent assembly. As G20 defendant Alex Hundert, who has written extensively about diversity of tactics told me, “It is important to recognise that a belief in supporting a diversity of tactics means not ruling out intentionally peaceful means. These gatherings have been explicitly nonviolent from the start and in hundreds of cities across the continent. Obviously this is the right tactic for this moment.”

It is noteworthy that Occupy Wall Street has not actually dogmatically rejected a diversity of tactics. It appears that the movement there has understood what diversity of tactics actually means – which is not imposing one tactic in any and every context. The Occupy Wall Street Direct Action Working Group has adopted the basic tenet of “respect diversity of tactics, but be aware of how your actions will affect others.” In my opinion, this is an encouraging development as people work together to learn how to come keep each other safe within the encampment, while effectively escalating tactics in autonomous actions.

Finally, we may want to stop articulating that this is a leaderless movement; it might be more honest to suggest that We Are All Leaders. Denying that leadership exists deflects accountability, obscures potential hierarchies, and absolves us of actively creating structures within which to build collective leadership. Many of the models being used such as the General Assembly and Consensus are rooted in the practice of anti-authoritarians and community organizers. There are many other skills to share to empower and embolden this movement. As much as we wish we can radically transform unjust economic, political, and social systems overnight, but this is a long-term struggle. And there is always the danger of co-optation. Slavoj Zizek warned Occupy Wall Street that “Beware not only of the enemies. But also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process. In the same way you get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without fat, they will try to make this into a harmless moral protest.” Which means that we will need to find ways to do the pain-staking work of making this movement sustainable and rooting it within and alongside existing grassroots movements for social and environmental justice.

“We have begun to come out of the shadows; we have begun to break with routines and oppressive customs and to discard taboos; we have commenced to carry with pride the task of thawing hearts and changing consciousness. Women, let’s not let the danger of the journey and the vastness of the territory scare us — let’s look forward and open paths in these woods. Voyager, there are no bridges; one builds them as one walks.”
- Gloria Anzaldua

A version of this article originally appeared in rabble.ca

Civil rights activism lost two pioneers Wednesday night with the passing of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and legal scholar Derrick Bell.

The careers of Shuttlesworth – a founding member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy and Bayard Rustin – and Bell, who would become the first black tenured law professor and dean of Harvard Law School, seemed to dovetail at times.

In 1957, three years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, Shuttlesworth and his wife, Ruby, famously took their children to Phillips High School in Birmingham, Ala., to break the color barrier. The move came a year after Shuttleworth’s house was bombed by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Shuttlesworth escaped the bombing unharmed, but he would not be so fortunate at Phillips, as Ruby was stabbed and, as he recounted for the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in 2003, he was assaulted by a mob:

Each one was hitting and kicking, stomping. I began to realize that on this brilliant day that every time a chain or something would hit my head I would see instant gray. I knew I had to get back to the car.

I noticed that the guy that was sitting next to the car was going to get the last lick with his chain and I felt as if he had having been struck and stomped as much as I had, I probably wouldn’t have been able to get to the car. And I was trying to make up my mind I was just running to him, I don’t know what I was going to do. But anyway I was going to try to get to the car. Here again you must realize you have to figure God does things that you never even thought about. Suppose the door had closed.
Suppose some Klansman had closed the door or suppose as Rev. Woods said, “if it had been me, I would have driven off.” (Laughing) I would have died right there, or if this man had gotten a chance to hit me this one lick I would have been
right there.

But somehow or another as I was struggling being pulled at, tearing my clothes and kicking, the last thing I remember was one guy was standing in front as I was getting ready to go to the door where this man was getting ready to swing, somebody kicked me in the side. And somehow or another as I was falling down I think, another one struck me from in front. I didn’t see the guy with the chain. I wasn’t looking for him. I finally if you remember seeing the film, I fell up into the door with my hand and [a friend] reached over and pulled me into the car. And my feet were sticking out the door. The door was still open as we pulled off to go to the hospital.

That same year, Bell joined the Justice Department’s Civil Rights department, though he would resign in 1959 after being told his membership in the NAACP represented a conflict of interest. He would go on to lead more than 300 desegregation cases, including James Meredith’s attempt to enroll at the University of Mississippi.

“I learned a lot about evasiveness, and how racists could use a system to forestall equality,” Bell was quoted as saying. “I also learned a lot riding those dusty roads and walking into those sullen hostile courts in Jackson, Mississippi. It just seems that unless something’s pushed, unless you litigate, nothing happens.”

Neither Bell nor Shuttlesworth had a problem pushing back. The New York Times quoted an e-mail from Diane McWhorter, whose book Carry Me Home examined the civil rights movement in Birmingham, saying Shuttlesworth earned the nickname “the Wild Man from Birmingham.”

“Among the youthful ‘elders’ of the movement,” she added, “he was Martin Luther King’s most effective and insistent foil: blunt where King was soothing, driven where King was leisurely, and most important, confrontational where King was conciliatory — meaning, critically, that he was more upsetting than King in the eyes of the white public.”

Mr. Shuttlesworth was temperamental, even obstinate, and championed action and confrontation over words. He could antagonize segregationists and allies alike, quarreling with his allies behind closed doors.

For his part, after Bell moved into the academic world, he became a prolific author – his book Race, Racism and American Law is required reading at law schools across the country – and a leading scholar of Critical Race Theory. He was also a proponent of the Interest Convergence Dilemma: the idea that white people would only get behind black empowerment if they could get something out of it. As he wrote for the Harvard Law Review:

It follows that the availability of Fourteenth Amendment protection in racial cases may not actually be determined by the character of harm suffered by blacks or the quantum of liability proved against whites. Racial remedies may instead be the outward manifestations of unspoken and perhaps subconscious judicial conclusions that the remedies, if granted, will secure, advance, or at least not harm societal interests deemed important by middle‑ and upper‑class whites. Racial justice‑or its appearance‑may, from time to time, be counted among the interests deemed important by the courts and by society’s policymakers.

In assessing how this principle can accommodate both the Brown decision and the subsequent development of school desegregation law, it is necessary to remember that the issue of school segregation and the harm it inflicted on black children did not first come to the court’s attention in the Brown litigation: blacks had been attacking the validity of these policies for one hundred years.” Yet, prior to Brown, black claims that segregated public schools were inferior had been met by orders requiring merely that facilities be made equal.” What accounted, then, for the sudden shift in 1954 away from the separate but equal doctrine and toward a commitment to desegregation?

I contend that the decision in Brown to break with the court’s long‑held position on these issues cannot be understood without some consideration of the decision’s value to whites, not simply those concerned about the immorality of racial inequality, but also those whites in policymaking positions able to see the economic and political advances at home and abroad that would follow abandonment of segregation.

Both Shuttlesworth and Bell were active late into their lives: in 1988, Shuttlesworth started a housing foundation in Cincinatti to help families become homeowners. Ten years later, he was one of the first supporters of The Birmingham Pledge. According to the Times, Bell pushed for a more diverse faculty at both the University of Oregon (where he resigned after an Asian woman was denied tenure) and at Harvard, where he embarked on a two-year leave in protest of the school’s never having hired a black woman.

Bell is survived by his wife, Janet, three sons, two sisters and a brother. Shuttlesworth is survived by his second wife, Sephira Bailey Shuttlesworth, five children, 14 grandchildren, 20 great-grandchildren, a great-great grandchild, five sisters and two brothers.

By Arturo R. García

In 1957 she had a Billboard-charting single called “Love Is Strange,” a duet with ace guitarist Mickey Baker. The song has been used in movies from “Dirty Dancing” to “Mermaids” to “Casino.”

But after “Love Is Strange” the Harlem-born musician moved to New Jersey with her husband to raise their children. Sylvia and Joe Robinson were ambitious. They built a nightclub favored by boxers and Motown stars, and a recording studio where Robinson began writing songs for other artists. Al Green rejected one because he found it too sexy. So Robinson sang “Pillow Talk” herself.
- Neda Ulaby, NPR

However, it was in 1979 that Robinson began forging her indelible mark on an emerging art form that began taking shape at clubs and dance parties in New York. Inspired after listening to people rap over instrumental breaks, Robinson formed the Sugarhill Gang. Comprised Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright, Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien and Henry “Big Bank Hank” Jackson, the trio rapped over a rhythm track that sampled Chic’s 1979 R&B/pop hit “Good Times.” It was the first commercial hit for the burgeoning rap revolution and for Robinson and her husband’s post-All Platinum label Sugar Hill Records, named after Harlem, NY’s Sugar Hill neighborhood.

Robinson later signed seminal rap act Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five to Sugar Hill. The group struck top five (No. 4) status on the R&B charts with the socially conscious “The Message,” featuring Melle Mel and Duke Bootee in 1982. The group was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2007.

“‘Ms. Rob doin’ the job’ was a rhyme boast on recordings from Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five,” Public Enemy frontman Chuck D recalled to Billboard.biz. “Sylvia’s artistic talent and public notoriety have been mimicked without due credit for the past 30 years in the recorded art form she birthed. She was a black woman who pushed the button and turned the key to crank up a billion-dollar industry.”
- Gail Mitchell, Billboard Magazine

By 1979 Flash was approached by legendary record producer/store owner Bobby Robinson of Enjoy Reords, who wanted to Rrecord Flash and the Group. During this same period Cowboy, Melle Mel, Kid Creole and former Funky Four member Raheim had recorded a record for Brass Records called “We Rap More Mellow” under an assumed name, The Younger Generation.

Soon After, Flash and the Furious Five (with Raheim now a member) began recording for Robinson, with their first 12-inch single for the label being “Superappin’.” Disappointed with Robinson’s inability to get them on radio, the group soon signed with Sylvia Robinson’s Sugar Hill Records, on the strength of her promise to get them to perform on the backing track of a record that was a DJ favorite at the time, titled “Get Up and Dance,” by the group Freedom. Flash and the Furious Five’s first record for Sugar Hill was, in fact, titled “Freedom,” and was a hit with the Hip-Hop crowd. During that same year the group recorded the song “Birthday Party”
- Grandmaster Flash bio on Sing365.com