This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
On June 3, 2017, NSA contractor Reality Leigh Winner was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act for providing a media organization with a single five-page top-secret document that analyzed information about alleged Russian online intrusions into U.S. election systems.
Reality, who has been jailed without bail since her arrest, has now been sentenced to five years in prison. This is by far the longest sentence ever given in federal court for leaking information to the media. Today, she is being transferred from a small Georgia jail to a yet-unknown federal prison.
Several months before her arrest, the FBI’s then-Director James Comey told President Trump that he was (in the words of a subsequent Comey memo) “eager to find leakers and would like to nail one to the door as a message.” Meanwhile, politically connected and high-level government officials continue to leak without consequence, or selectively declassify material to advance their own interests.
Join Courage to Resist and a dozen other organizations in calling on President Trump, who has acknowledged Winner’s treatment as “so unfair,” to pardon Reality Winner or to commute her sentence to time served.
Feds holding last public hearing on draft registration Los Angeles, California Thursday, September 20 At California State University Los Angeles More info
50th anniversary events of the Presidio 27 mutiny San Francisco, California Panel discussion on Saturday, October 13 Commemoration on Sunday, October 14 At the former Presidio Army Base More info
“And The Choir Kept Singing
Of Freedom”- Birmingham Sunday-1963-A Reflection After Viewing "Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project"Photograph
Display At The National Gallery Of Art
Richard Farina's Birmingham Sunday
Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project
September 12, 2018 – March 24, 2019
West Building, Ground Floor
Dawoud Bey, Mary Parker and Caela Cowan, 2012, 2 inkjet prints mounted to dibond, overall: 101.6 x 162.56 cm (40 x 64 in.), National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee and the Alfred H. Moses and Fern M. Schad Fund
For more than 40 years photographer Dawoud Bey (b. 1953) has portrayed American youth and those from marginalized communities with sensitivity and complexity.Dawoud Bey: The Birmingham Project marks the National Gallery of Art's recent acquisition of four large-scale photographs and one video from Bey's series, The Birmingham Project, a tribute to the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama. Coinciding with the 55th anniversary of this tragedy, the exhibition focuses on how Bey visualizes the past through the lens of the present, pushing the boundaries of portraiture and engaging ongoing national issues of racism, violence against African Americans, and terrorism in churches.
On September 15, 1963, four girls were killed in the dynamiting of the church, and two teenaged boys were murdered in racially motivated violence. Each of Bey’s diptychs combines one portrait of a young person the same age as one of the victims, and another of an adult 50 years older—the child's age had she or he survived. Alongside these photographs, the exhibition features Bey's video 9.15.63. This split-screen projection juxtaposes a re-creation of the drive to the 16th Street Baptist Church, taken from the vantage point of a young child in the backseat, with slow pans that move through everyday spaces (beauty parlor, barbershop, lunch counter, and schoolroom) as they might have appeared that Sunday morning. Devoid of people, these views poeticize the innocent lives ripped apart by violence.
This exhibition is curated by Kara Fiedorek, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the department of photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
By Seth Garth
Sometimes things, events,
ideas, and such lead into one another. Recently I had written a short piece
based on hearing a segment on NPR’s Morning
Edition where the reporter was ruminating about the effect that folk-singer/songwriter
Bob Dylan’s “anthem” The Times They Are
A-Changin’ had on her and the Generation of ‘68 when it first hit the
airwaves in 1963. That reportage got my attention since I have spent plenty of
cyber-ink throughout my journalistic career highlighting various aspects of the
tremendous push on my generation, that Generation of ’68 or the best part of it,
of events in the early 1960s which were harbingers of what we expected to have
occur that would change the world, would turn the world upside down. I thus
need not go into detail here about my notion that Bob Dylan’s song set him up
as the “voice” of a generation whether he wanted to be that or not. Nor about
what effect that song, and songs like his had on us, gave us our marching
orders.
As part of her presentation
the reporter mentioned that some events, some events down South around the
black civil rights movement against one Mister James Crow like the beatings,
the water-hosing and the unleashing of the vicious dogs by the police on
innocent protestors had on her growing political consciousness, her desire to
work for social change. Although she did not specifically mention Birmingham
Sunday, the bombing of a black church killing four innocent children and
wounding others that event triggered the activism button of many young people,
including myself.
I have detailed elsewhere some
of the events like the black civil rights struggle down South, the fight for
nuclear bomb disarmament, the emerging struggle against the escalating Vietnam
War as acting as catalysts to action. Also tried to convey a more general sense
of the mood of the times among young people that the world, a world then on the
brink, on as one song had it on the “eve of destruction” was not responding to
their needs, was not changing in ways that we could understand. Most of all
that we had no say, had not been asked about what had been created in our
names. And nobody in power seemed to think that they needed to consult us.
All of this came to mind as
well by a recent visit to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. where
on the ground floor there was a small photographic exhibit centered on that
Birmingham Sunday bombing. A kind of what if, or rather what would those who
were killed or maimed look like today if they had been permitted to live out
their precious lives. That got me to thinking the thoughts I expressed in that
“voice of a generation” commentary and about the changes in people who did
survive, who now have aged, gracefully or not, and who are thinking about, are
summing up their lives and what they did, or did not do. Powerful stuff
although when one realizes what is what in the world today one has to be very
circumspect about the little changes we have made. Not profound but something
to think about whatever generation designation.
Alejandra Rodriguez (participant in last summer's Radical Roots Delegation to El Salvador) "Struggle to achieve Mons Romero's vision in the current day"
Jose Aleman (invited--former Consul General of El Salvador for New England)--"Mons Romero's meaning for Salvadorans and people worldwide"
Just now, the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival began its second live hearing to ensure that our voices, concerns, and demands cannot be ignored.
Testifiers like Mary Jane Shanklin will tell their elected reps and others about life in rural Kansas—where there’s no fresh water, supermarket, or newspaper—but a urologist has opened shop next door because the incidence of kidney and bladder cancer from water pollution is so high.
Or Roberta Hickman, whose husband survived a war but couldn’t survive the Agent Orange welts on his legs, which many vets can’t afford to treat.
Mary Jane and Roberta are joined by other testifiers in Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Wisconsin and more, who will speak to voter suppression, unjust immigration policies, and poverty.
In many heavily poor and rural states, politicians have been sticking their fingers in their ears and whistling pretty loudly to avoid us.
But as loudly as the politicians and others try to whistle us away, we’ll be louder. Folks like Mary Jane and Roberta are at a breaking point, and feigning ignorance won’t work anymore.
Forward together, not one step back, The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival
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