Leaders of the U.S.House of Representatives & the head of the United States Postal Service today unveiled the new stamp honoring late civil rights leader, Rep. John R. Lewis. The stamp design features a 2013 photograph of the Georgia Democrat taken by Marco Grob for Time magazine.
"Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”
He left his heart in San Francisco. Today, Tony Bennett left us at age 96, breaking ours. His first hit was in 1951 and topped the charts again more than 60 years later. He won 20 Grammy awards and performed for every POTUS, from DDE to Barack Obama. Bennett was devoted to civil rights. He campaigned for JFK & joined Dr. King in the march from Selma to Montgomery, AL. Gift article: https://wapo.st/3DsMs9e
April 4, 1968, #CivilRights leader Reverend #MartinLutherKing Jr., was shot & killed while standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in #Memphis, #Tennessee. Considered one of the greatest Americans to ever live, he was assassinated 56 years ago today.
Today in Labor History October 26, 1892: Ida B. Wells published “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” which led to threats against her life, and the burning down of her newspaper’s headquarters in Memphis. Wells, who was born into slavery, was a journalist, educator, feminist, and early Civil Rights leader who helped found the NAACP.
Nine months before Rosa Parks, when Claudette Colvin was just 15, she refused to give up her seat to a white person in Montgomery, Ala., and was arrested. However, Colvin's case wasn't taken up by the NAACP and her efforts were not publicized by Black leaders because she was young, dark complexioned, and pregnant, she believes. MSNBC tells the story of what happened, and how she and four other women sued the city of Montgomery, leading to its public transport segregation being declared unconstitutional. https://flip.it/OwOSMM
The Rev. Dr. Anna Pauline “Pauli” Murray lived one of the most remarkable lives of the 20th century. Their legal arguments & interpretation of the U.S. Constitution were winning strategies for desegregation, women’s rights, & LGBTQ+ rights based on Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Their personal exploration of gender identity & their struggle for gender-affirming medical care was ahead of their time.
#Albuquerque Is Throwing Out the Belongings of #Homeless People, Violating City Policy
The city has violated a court order and its own policies by discarding the personal property of thousands of homeless people, who have lost medications, birth certificates, IDs, treasured family photos and the ashes of loved ones.
Sam Griffiths, a father who runs his own business, was remanded in custody for 28 days and charged under new anti-protest laws for "interfering with key infrastructure" after marching against new oil and gas licenses.
He chose to face a crown court trial and refused to answer the question of whether he would continue to slow march.
This is what authoritarianism looks like.
Investigate the real criminals. #JustStopOil#UKPolitics#ClimateCatastrophe#CivilRights
Matthew McManus writes that those who imagine that there was a pre-Trump iteration of the US right in which the right was moderate are indulging in fantasy.
The right has long been driven by the radical determination to turn back the tide of equal rights for minority groups and legislate the notion that some people are superior to others.
When police took Jimmy into custody, they followed protocol for people charged with a crime: mug shot, fingerprints.
But Jimmy had not been charged with a crime. His father asked the county to bring Jimmy in for a mental evaluation & treatment after he'd threatened to hurt family members & himself.
On his booking form, under "offence," was a single word: “LUNACY," a charge that doesn't exist.
From The Intellectualist at the hellsite, here's Senator Mike Braun [R-IN] saying he's open to SCOTUS changing settled law and depriving people of equal protection in** mixed racial marriages.**
Thus allowing states to reimplement old miscegenation laws, or banning so-called mixed ethnic marriages, requiring SCOTUS overturn Loving v Virginia in 1967.
Current and former prisoners in Alabama filed a lawsuit in federal court Tuesday arguing that the state’s prison labor system amounts to a “modern-day form of slavery” that violates the U.S. and Alabama constitutions.
The complaint, brought with the support of labor unions, alleges that Alabama profits to the tune of more than $450 million a year through coerced work, and that fast food companies and other private corporations benefit from an unlawful “labor trafficking scheme.”
> [...] The general public is usually marginal to the policymaking process. In practice, that process is typically dominated by powerful industries and state institutions that exercise preponderant influence over both government and media. This asymmetry is especially well documented in the case of the United States but is also true, to varying extents, of all capitalist societies.
I LOVE that phrase: "preponderant influence". Well said.
I grew up in Memphis, TN. When my friends and I were old enough to drive, we loved exploring the decrepit, boarded-up stretch of South Main St. It was like a ghost town then, except for the still-in-use but severely neglected Amtrak train station and the vintage 1950s Arcade Restaurant.
About a block away, at 450 Mulberry St, stood the low-slung Lorraine Motel. The phrase "it had seen better days" was somehow both appropriate and inappropriate. We knew that was the place where the Rev. Martin Luther King had been assassinated.
That balcony. Everyone knew.
We would slow-roll past it and sometimes pause, to stare at that place, that balcony, and imagine the horror.
In 1991, a few years after I moved away, the Lorraine Motel transformed into the National Civil Rights Museum.
If you ever travel to Memphis, make sure to prioritize a visit to this museum. I experienced more emotion in that museum than any other. And I have visited museums throughout the US, Europe, and Southeast Asia, so that's saying something.
Some of the exhibits haunt me to this day. The dark, dog-house-sized replica of the space where a slave sat chained, unable to straighten their body, for months at sea. With the audio. Of the clanking chains and the screams of pain and suffering.
MLK's motel room, preserved in time, just as it was on that day.
The National Civil Rights Museum does it right. It fills you with horror, as it should. For me, that building always did.
Yael Khan, an elderly Jewish lady who lost her family in the Holocaust, was wearing a sign calling out Israeli war crimes and carrying a Palestinian flag in London yesterday and was arrested by the Met when she refused to take off the sign, on the grounds that "the sign could incite hate against a particular community".
WTF IS GOING ON IN THIS COUNTRY? #UKPolitics#CivilRights#CeasefireNow
Secrecy Shields Powerful Adults in Our Juvenile Justice Systems. #Kids Showed Me What’s Really Happening.
The three years I spent working on “The Kids of Rutherford County” #podcast taught me one thing: Tennessee’s punitive policies aren’t leaving #children in the legal system better off.