Happy May Day

That we never forget.

On May 1, 1886, Lucy Parsons helped launch the world’s first May Day and the demand for the eight-hour work day. Along with her husband, anarchist and activist Albert Parsons, and their two children, they led 80,000 working people down the Chicago streets, while more than 100,000 marched in other U.S. cities. A new international holiday was born. Parsons went on to help found the Industrial Workers of the World, continued to give speeches, and worked tirelessly for equality throughout the rest of her life until her death in 1942. Read more about Lucy Parsons in this profile by William Loren Katz at the Zinn Education Project website: http://bit.ly/1cSoMvm and at the Lucy Parsons Center website: http://bit.ly/1fTZ3Tb Here are free role plays and writing activities on labor history from the book The Power In Our Hands (download for free on the Zinn Education Projectwebsite): http://bit.ly/RU5oFp Learn about the history of May Day and the Haymarket affair from an interview with James Green on Democracy Now!: http://bit.ly/1ububmN

Congratulations, America, On Your Very Dubious 15 Year Anniversary

Today is the 15th anniversary of the U.S-led invasion of Afghanistan.

Think about that.

15 years of sending mostly young American soldiers---men and women--to a foreign country to fight and die--for....?

How is this not like the Vietnam War?  How is this not a "quagmire"?

#perpetualwar

Link:  U.S.-led attack on Afghanistan begins - Oct 07, 2001

Fifteen years on, the Afghanistan war still rumbles

Afghanistan Needs a Settlement, Not Another Troop-Withdrawal Deadline

Ending the Afghan War

Hoist By Their Own Words

Leslie H. Gelb says the U.S. military has lost its way in Afghanistan.

Forging a Four-Sided Afghan Deal

 Fifteen Years of Lessons Not Learned

With No End After 15 Years, Thoughts Turn to Who Will Inherit Afghan War

The US, "Corrections", Prisons, Racism and Gross Injustice

From the Zinn Education Project  today.

Kalief Browder was arrested at the age of 16 for allegedly stealing a backpack weeks before in the Bronx. Despite no evidence, never being convicted of a crime, nor a trial, Browder was held at Rikers Island for almost three years. For most of that time, he was held in solitary confinement. He was beaten and starved. He maintained his innocence, requested a trial, but was only offered plea deals while the trial was repeatedly delayed. On principle, he refused to plead guilty.

Eventually he was released from prison, but not from the trauma he had suffered. On Saturday, he committed suicide. We mourn his loss and commit to redouble our efforts to teach about and challenge the "new Jim Crow."

There's so much of this story that needs to be retold. I'll cut to the end. This from NPR  today:

The Los Angeles Times spoke to Browder's lawyer on Sunday. Paul V. Prestia said that all those years in jail took an unbearable toll on Browder.

The Times reports:

" 'I think what caused the suicide was his incarceration and those hundreds and hundreds of nights in solitary confinement, where there were mice crawling up his sheets in that little cell,' Prestia said in a phone interview Sunday evening. 'Being starved, and not being taken to the shower for two weeks at a time ... those were direct contributing factors. ... That was the pain and sadness that he had to deal with every day, and I think it was too much for him.'

Learn more on Democracy Now! here: http://bit.ly/1IqM1sx 

More links:  Three Years on Rikers Without Trial - The New Yorker

Kalief Browder, Held at Rikers Island for 3 Years Without Trial, Commits Suicide

Kalief Browder, 1993–2015 - The New Yorker

An American History Anniversary (guest post)

The American history we don't know.

The American history we're not taught.

The American history we don't want to know.

BLACK WALL STREET - Today is the 94th anniversary of the Race Riot and Bombing of Black Wall Street in Tulsa Oklahoma, May 31st, 1921.Read The Article: You do know that Black Wall Street was rebuilt by the Black residents after the bombing took place in 1921. They rebuilt it with their own money and got no government support.

"After the riot, black Tulsans, who were living in tents and forced to wear green identification tags in order to work downtown, still managed to turn the tragedy into triumph. Without state help, they rebuilt Greenwood, and by 1942 the community had more than 240 black-owned businesses.

"If we did it once we can do it again.

http://www.theroot.com/…/greenwood_oklahoma_from_the_black_…

Sign up for The African History Network email newsletter by texting the word "Kemet" to 22828.

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If you want to learn more about African History and African-American History to counteract the negative images we see of ourselves on the TEL-LIE-VISION (TV), please visit www.AfricanHistoryNetwork.com. We have information to Educate, Empower and Inspire people of African Descent throughout the Diaspora and around the world.

Listen to “The African History Network Show” with host Michael Imhotep, every Thurs, 8pm-11pm EST and “The Per Ankh Hour Q & A Show” with Prof. Kaba Kamene (aka Booker T. Coleman) of “Hidden Colors 1 & 2” and Michael Imhotep of The African History Network every Wednesday 10:00pm-11:30pm EST athttp://www.blogtalkradio.com/theafricanhistorynetworkshow orwww.AfricanHistoryNetwork.com by phone, when we are LIVE at (914) 338-1375. Call in with your questions and comments. Archived episodes are available for you to listen and are also archived on www.Itunes.com.

And in our national history, it's not that isolated an incident, either, this Tulsa, Oklahoma killing and murder. Don't think for a moment that it is.

Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day? (Guest Post)

Because no one has said it better than Howard Zinn :

Whom Will We Honor Memorial Day?

Published on June 2, 1976 in the Boston Globe and republished in The Zinn Reader with the brief introduction below.

Memorial Day will be celebrated … by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments.

In 1974, I was invited by Tom Winship, the editor of the Boston Globe, who had been bold enough in 1971 to print part of the top secret Pentagon Papers on the history of the Vietnam War, to write a bi-weekly column for the op-ed page of the newspaper. I did that for about a year and a half. The column below appeared June 2, 1976, in connection with that year’s Memorial Day. After it appeared, my column was canceled.

* * * * *

Memorial Day will be celebrated as usual, by high-speed collisions of automobiles and bodies strewn on highways and the sound of ambulance sirens throughout the land.

It will also be celebrated by the display of flags, the sound of bugles and drums, by parades and speeches and unthinking applause.

It will be celebrated by giant corporations, which make guns, bombs, fighter planes, aircraft carriers and an endless assortment of military junk and which await the $100 billion in contracts to be approved soon by Congress and the President.

There was a young woman in New Hampshire who refused to allow her husband, killed in Vietnam, to be given a military burial. She rejected the hollow ceremony ordered by those who sent him and 50,000 others to their deaths. Her courage should be cherished on Memorial Day. There were the B52 pilots who refused to fly those last vicious raids of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s war. Have any of the great universities, so quick to give honorary degrees to God-knows-whom, thought to honor those men at this Commencement time, on this Memorial Day?

No politician who voted funds for war, no business contractor for the military, no general who ordered young men into battle, no FBI man who spied on anti-war activities, should be invited to public ceremonies on this sacred day. Let the dead of past wars he honored. Let those who live pledge themselves never to embark on mass slaughter again.

“The shell had his number on it. The blood ran into the ground…Where his chest ought to have been they pinned the Congressional Medal, the DSC, the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, The Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania. All the Washingtonians brought flowers .. Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.”

Those are the concluding lines of John Dos Passos angry novel 1919. Let us honor him on Memorial Day.

And also Thoreau, who went to jail to protest the Mexican War.

And Mark Twain, who denounced our war against the Filipinos at the turn of the century.

And I.F. Stone, who virtually alone among newspaper editors exposed the fraud and brutality of the Korean War.

Let us honor Martin Luther King, who refused the enticements of the White House, and the cautions of associates, and thundered against the war in Vietnam.

Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.

On Memorial Day we should take note that, in the name of “defense,” our taxes have been used to spend a quarter of a billion dollars on a helicopter assault ship called “the biggest floating lemon,” which was accepted by the Navy although it had over 2,000 major defects at the time of its trial cruise.

Meanwhile, there is such a shortage of housing that millions live in dilapidated sections of our cities and millions more are forced to pay high rents or high interest rates on their mortgages. There’s 90 billion for the B1 bomber, but people don’t have money to pay hospital bills.

We must be practical, say those whose practicality has consisted of a war every generation. We mustn’t deplete our defenses. Say those who have depleted our youth, stolen our resources. In the end, it is living people, not corpses, creative energy, not destructive rage, which are our only real defense, not just against other governments trying to kill us, but against our own, also trying to kill us.

Let us not set out, this Memorial Day, on the same old drunken ride to death.

--Howard Zinn in the Memorial Day article that led the Boston Globe to cancel his column in 1976.

On This Day--National and Missouri State History

From the Zinn Education Project

On May 23, 1838--the forced removal of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw and other Native American nations officiallybegan--a land theft, massacre, and attempted genocide known as the Trail of Tears. A petition was signed by close to every member of the Cherokee nation (16,000) in protest of the planned removal. This resounding, democratic voice was ignored.  

See the film segment of We Shall Remain (http://bit.ly/13Mu8RG) and use the Cherokee/Seminole Removal Role Play from the Zinn Education Project (http://bit.ly/13Mt8wM) to introduce students to the history outside of the textbook about the organized efforts to resist relocation and the horror of the internment and subsequent death marches. 

Photo: Elizabeth "Betsy" Brown Stephens, a Cherokee woman who walked the Trail of Tears. [Wikimedia Commons]

Keeping in mind that this Trail of Tears also went through Missouri--which they don't teach in our schools. It went through Southern Missouri and straight through what is now Springfield, Missouri.

Links:   Trail of Tears

Discover A Hidden History- Cherokee Trail of Tears Encampment Waynesville, Missouri

Trail of Tears State Park | Missouri State Parks

Gain a better understanding of one of the saddest chapters in American history at Trail of Tears State Park, where nine of the 13 Cherokee Indian groups being relocated to Oklahoma crossed the Mississippi River during harsh winter conditions in 1838 and 1839.

On This Day in American History

On August 1, 1917, labor organizer Frank Little was taken forcibly from his boarding house in Butte, Montana and lynched from a railroad trestle.

In the summer of 1917, Frank had been helping to organize copper workers in a strike against the Anaconda Copper Company. He also took a stand against WWI, arguing that all working men should refuse to join the army and fight on behalf of their capitalist oppressors. As he said in the last speech before his death, "I stand for the solidarity of labor." 

Read more: http://bit.ly/1crvo0D 

More resources for teaching about labor history: http://bit.ly/1s6F4XA 

Image: By Nicole Schulman,http://www.nicoleschulman.com/

Links:   Frank Little

Frank Little - A True American Hero

Frank Little: A Murder in Butte

The Murder of Frank Little

More American history

And further, additional evidence of why we really do owe blacks and African-Americans reparations:

On July 29, 1910, citizens in the small, predominately African American town of Slocum, Texas were massacred. This was one of many towns, such as Rosewood and Tulsa, where a successful, self-sufficient African American community was the subject of a terrorist attack designed to maintain economic white supremacy. In each town, the incident that sparked the attack was relatively insignificant and often fabricated. The death toll was comparable if not higher than in the Rosewood massacre and the Tulsa race riot (massacre), but few have heard of Slocum. A new book, The 1910 Slocum Massacre: An Act of Genocide in East Texas is an invaluable resource on this history. 

Continue reading here:http://zinnedproject.org/2014/07/slocum-massacre/ 

Also read, "Convenient Amnesia in Texas—The Slocum Massacre": http://bit.ly/1o4oFQA 

A Texas school principal who is a descendant of the Slocum Massacre has asked the Zinn Education Project to help shine a light on this seldom told history. 

Teach about this practice in history with the lesson "Burned Out of Homes and History" by Rethinking Schools author Linda Christensen: http://bit.ly/1fDOUvG

Happy Flag Day

“What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor--inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing--permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children.” 

―-Howard Zinn, American historian, author, playwright, and social activist. from his book

A People's History of the United States: 1492 – Present

On this day...in nearby Oklahoma, 1921

From the  Zinn Education Project

In 1921, Greenwood (in Tulsa, Oklahoma) was one of the most prosperous African-American communities in the U.S. Serving over 8,000 residents, Greenwood’s commercial district was known nationally as the ‘Negro Wall Street’. The community boasted two newspapers, over a dozen churches, and hundreds of African-American-owned businesses. On the evening of May 31, 1921, Greenwood was ravaged by a white mob. By the conclusion of the riot at midday, June 1, virtually every building in a 42-square-block area of the community--homes, schools, churches, and businesses--was burned to the ground and thousands were left homeless. Over 1,200 homes were destroyed. Every church, school, and business in Greenwood was set on fire. Approximately 8,000 African-Americans were left homeless and penniless. (Continue reading here: http://bit.ly/1pGWfv5.)

(People) need to learn the hidden history of the 1921 Tulsa race riot (massacre) and how this links to racial wealth inequality today. Read "Burning Tulsa: The Legacy of Black Dispossession" by Linda Christensen of Rethinking Schools and see her classroom lesson: http://bit.ly/1fDOUvG


You can read and see more about that ugly, fateful day, here:

What happened to Black Wall Street on June 1, 1921?

Which brings up this article from this past week from The New Yorker:

What We Talk About When We Talk About Reparations

And it is based on this recent article from The Atlantic

The Case for Reparations

Most Americans likely don't know there were, in fact, some reparations paid for slavery just after the Civil War, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out.  Trouble is, they were paid to slave owners.  How's that for irony?  And hypocrisy.

Food for thought.

Enjoy your Sunday, everyone.

American history?

Link:  History: Get Me Rewrite!

MLK, Jr: History and background

"We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin ... the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” 
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Jan. 15, 1929 – Apr. 4, 1968) from speech at Riverside Church on Apr. 4, 1967 in opposition to the Vietnam War, one year before he was murdered. 
Read more here: http://bit.ly/1if2eGK 
More resources for learning about Dr. King: http://bit.ly/19u6a3e 
Resources on the Civil Rights Movement: http://bit.ly/1c12nLp 
Photo: Dr.King in a March 25, 1967 antiwar march in Chicago. (AP)

Quote of the day--our real problems

click on picture for easier reading

War is not, in fact, "human nature"

Quote of the day--on the "haves" and "have nots"

One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth.  The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another;  small property owners against the propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled.  These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country.  --Howard Zinn, "A People's History of the United States

Links:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People's_History_of_the_United_States;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn

For an education on Howard Zinn--and America

In case you see this movie being shown locally, you might want to go see it. Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0416825/

Another salute to Howard Zinn, historian

“Let’s talk about socialism. … I think it’s very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name. Socialism had a good name in this country. Socialism had Eugene Debs. It had Clarence Darrow. It had Mother Jones. It had Emma Goldman. It had several million people reading socialist newspapers around the country… Socialism basically said, hey, let’s have a kinder, gentler society. Let’s share things. Let’s have an economic system that produces things not because they’re profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism because you have to go beyond capitalism." --Howard Zinn (who died yesterday)

It frustrates the crap out of me that most Americans think Socialism is a) purely evil and b) right up there with the worst of Communism and anything and everything else bad they can throw in.

It's maddening.

Most Americans haven't the foggiest idea what it means in Europe and Scandinavia what the benefits are, for example.

Ignorant gits.

Now, go read up on Howard Zinn.

And while you're at it, get a copy of his book "A People's History of the United States".

***With specific and sincere thanks to Matt Payton and his Tumble-o-rama for pointing out this quote.