Pam

Remembering Taylor

September 24, 2016 By Pam

I’ve been absent from this blog for nearly a year, during which I underwent some surgery and then moved out of the 3rd-floor walk-up where I’d lived for 37 years to a garden apartment in another part of Brooklyn. I’m finally recovered and settled, more or less, and ready to write again. It’s good to be back!

It seems fitting that I resume my blog with a tribute to a dear friend who died this summer, but who will live in my heart forever. His name was Norman Walsh Taylor. I knew him only as Taylor. (I’ll tell you why in a minute.)

In my imagination Taylor could have been a storybook character, like one who lives deep in the woods conjuring magic, talking with the animals, dancing in the moonlight, showing up in the village disguised as a streetlamp or a cat or Jesus, the holy stranger who suddenly appears to bless the good-hearted and console those who mourn.

People on the fringe of society were drawn to him — poets and dreamers and those trapped in nightmares. Was it the tilt of his head? the lilt in his step? sparkling eyes? contagious laugh? the way he said “Hello Luv!”

GANDHI, KAI, TAYLOR, AND ME

Taylor and I first met in Philadelphia in the early 1980s at a nonviolence workshop run by Movement for a New Society (MNS). We sat cross-legged on the floor, and, when we introduced ourselves around the circle, something clicked. From that moment, time and space held little significance in our friendship except for the occasional lament, “Oh, I wish you lived just around the corner so we could talk over tea.”

Taylor was a genuine free spirit, bon vivant with a heart aching for the whole hurting world, courageous activist, determined to do whatever he could to make a difference on our fragile planet. He was, from day one, supportive of my writing and passions, ready with a listening ear and words of encouragement.

Taylor had not always been Taylor. Approaching middle age, he had decided to drop his birth name — Norman Walsh — and adopt a mononym. In a consciously bold, feminist, anti-patriarchal move, he’d chosen to be known by his mother’s maiden name: Taylor. Later, he would reclaim the name Norman, but he was always Taylor to me.

Gandhi visiting Lancashire, UK in 1931

Not only had his mother been a seamstress (tailor), but his parents had been textile workers in Lancashire, UK, in 1931 when Gandhi visited, mid-boycott of English cotton goods, (part of his Indian self-sufficiency movement) and pleaded for worker solidarity. Even those who’d already lost their jobs in England greeted Gandhi as an anti-imperialist hero, including Taylor’s parents, who packed up and moved to Canada in search of new work.

When we met, Taylor was suffering deep emotional turmoil. His beloved friend Kai Yutah Clouds, a literacy activist working in Guatemala at the invitation of the Mayas, had been kidnapped at gunpoint by security officers in October, 1980, in front of 100 witnesses. His body was found the next day many miles away in Antigua. Kai, who’d been researching the genocide of Native peoples in Central America, had been tortured to death by Guatemalan government forces as a warning to other activists. In memory of Kai, Taylor created a slide bank to empower grassroots social change groups to make their own slide shows and documentaries on everything from consumerism to animal rights, pollution to racism, peace activism to Native Peoples’ struggles, patriarchy to mercury poisoning.

Over the years, the crazy quilt of Taylor’s unconventional, counter-cultural life was slowly revealed to me — including his childhood vaudeville act in Canada. He had been billed as the “youngest ventriloquist in the British Empire” and a Gracie Fields impersonator. He had done his doctoral work at Yale and, writing as Norman Walsh, had won a prestigious Canadian Playwriting Contest. I have the first edition, illustrated hardcover copy inscribed to me, and an anthology, The Best Short Plays: 1955-56, which includes his award-winning work beside plays of Tennessee Williams and Archibald MacLeish.

LISTENER-ACTIVIST EXTRAORDINAIRE

As impressive and far-out as his accomplishments were, I already knew they were not the important things to Taylor. What mattered was his engagement with this harsh and hurtful world as a deep listener, gentle soul, often terrified but determined nonviolent activist fighting against the oppression of sentient creatures, human and other.

During the Civil Rights Movement, he went to Mississippi. Once, he was asked by fellow activists to calm a tense standoff with the Ku Klux Klan. He was successful that day, but the experience scared and scarred him.

He became a skilled nonviolence trainer, deeply involved in Movement for a New Society, and led Group Process workshops across Canada. He served for a time as the National Coordinator for the Canadian Friends (Quakers) Service Committee.

Gays and Lesbians Aging, Toronto

Taylor fought for LGBTQ rights and was a lover of men. In an elegant coffee table book published by the City of Toronto and often presented to visiting dignitaries, there’s a color photo of Taylor, laughing in front of a banner proclaiming “Gays and Lesbians Aging.” One of the greatest blessings of his life was to fall in love with Leo. They got married in the summer of 2014.

A skilled deep-listener, Taylor was a magnet for remarkable adventures. Once, by invitation, he walked gingerly across a frozen lake to reach a designated meeting ground to help two divisions within a First People’s tribe break a century’s old impasse. He earned their deep thanks, but, on the trek home, as the ice began to crack under his feet, Taylor, shivering with cold and terror, had a heart attack. Another time, he was chosen by a Native Canadian tribal council to help resolve a dispute between them and the Canadian government.

Taylor, Dee, and me

Always, at his apartment or mine, there were cats to cuddle and cherish, and dogs, like Dee. Aging went hard on this beloved canine who had a fierce hold on life. As the dog lost sight, hearing, and mobility, Taylor pulled him through the streets of Toronto in a little red wagon.

A devoted animal rights activist, he volunteered at Fauna Foundation, Canada’s only chimpanzee sanctuary, for 14 years to his last days and served on their Board of Directors. He was beloved of the chimps. Many of them had survived years of torture in biomedical research or neglect after outliving their usefulness in the entertainment industry. Taylor knew their names, their fears, and what calmed them. He listened, and they communicated with him.

Taylor felt a special connection with Pepper, a chimp severely traumatized by 27 years of the most horrendous medical experiments. Pepper touched many lives after she came to the sanctuary and learned to trust a few humans, Taylor being one. He emailed me in July 2012:

Last week I dashed to Montreal to say goodbye to my chimp friend Pepper who was in kidney failure. But when she saw me, and even though she was in enormous distress, she thrust her hand toward me and stroked my palm a half dozen times before collapsing again.

Taylor devoted several years to researching inter-species relationships — cats and crows, kittens and apes, deer and dogs.

OUR DANCE OF LIFE AND DEATH

Taylor was magical, remarkable, quirky, campy, kind. I reach into a grab bag to pull out a list of partial identities to hint at the whole. He was scholar prince, holy fool, and fairy godmother, crusader, confidante, Quaker, author of travel books, Broadway show tune belter-outer (with me as his delighted accompanist) …

I loved visiting Taylor. The first time, I stayed in a rustic cabin behind his upstate New York home in Oneonta near the college where he was a professor, teaching drama and literature. He called it Blake House for his favorite poet (oh “Tyger, tyger burning bright”).

Later, when he moved back to Toronto, my favorite apartment was the one he called his Tree House. A branch of a city tree had grown through his open window and stretched over his bed! It was fabulous.

It seems right that Halloween became central to our early friendship, with its dance of life and death. Is this what drew us together — our shared awareness of temporality and the willingness to risk engaging in the drama of it all?

Pack of cards shuffling at NYC’s Village Halloween Parade

We established a decade-long tradition of celebrating Halloween together in Greenwich Village, joining other revelers who wove through the tight streets. In those early years, the parade passed the Jefferson Market Library, where a huge, hairy spider climbed up and down the tower.

The marchers we most enjoyed were those who came as a coordinated creative act:
~ the pack of cards which ran amok when one card called out the command, “Shuffle!!”
~ the bull and bear who talked into toy phones, frantically shouting “Buy!” “Sell!”
~ the giant puppet heads and impressive stilt walkers from Vermont’s Bread and Puppet Theatre
~ the mustachioed “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence” who wore nuns’ habits and Groucho glasses. They’d glide by silently with hands folded, arranged in descending order from tallest to shortest.

TIME TO GO

The last time I saw Taylor, he was in a hospital in Toronto. It was serious, but he would live more than another year. We both knew it was unlikely we’d see each other again.

When it was time to part, he propped his red-slippered feet on his walker, waved “like the Queen of England,” and sang, “Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye, Cheerio, here I go on my way,” a WWII song sung by Gracie Fields in the movie Shipyard Sally.

Over the past year, Taylor said goodbye to me in various ways, as though he were slowly fading from the world, waving goodbye through his emails and letters. He died peacefully at home, with Leo by his side, on Sunday, August 7, 2016. The landscape of my life has changed with his passing.

In my mind’s eye, I can see Taylor. He’s giving me the royal wave, like the queen would do, straight-faced, but with a sparkle in his eye. How blessed I’ve been by his example and his friendship and all that laughter and all those tears.

Oh, Taylor, it went by so fast. Cheerio, my remarkable friend. I’m so grateful for all the serendipity.

TO GO DEEPER

Obituary: Norman Walsh Taylor

Fauna Foundation website for Canada’s only Chimpanzee Sanctuary: Taylor asked that donations in his memory be made to this foundation (Fauna Foundation, 3802 Chemin Bellerive, Carignan, Quebec J3L-3P9)

Book: Oppose and Propose: Lessons from Movement for a New Society by Andrew Cornell, AK Press, 2011.

History of NYC’s Village Halloween Parade

Gandhi’s Visit to England (Lancashire, 1931)

Videos

The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary

Gracie Fields singing “Wish Me Luck As you Wave Me

LIFE AMONG THE TREE-CREATURES: From Personal to Political

October 18, 2015 By Pam

I have a lifelong soul-deep connection with trees. It began in rural America where I grew up, and deepened in New York City, my chosen home.

COUNTRY TREES

The green paradise behind my childhood house on the Ridge Road

At dusk one evening when I was about six, I was certain I saw a kindly oval face glowing from the very top of the tall pine tree near our sagging barn. Trembling, I stood my ground, mouth open in amazement, as it gazed down at me. From that moment, I understood that the tree held the Holy, that the Sacred flowed through it and knew me.

Our family was surrounded by apple and cherry orchards owned by farmers on all sides, but we had personal relationships with the trees on our few acres.

My big sister climbed trees. My little sister and I named them. We called one the “Four-en Tree” because it was shaped like a 4. Behind the outhouse was a skinny, bent tree we called “Grandpa.” The saddest tree was the “Witness Tree” out by the highway where it witnessed car accidents.

Standing in front of Marion with Henrietta in my arms

Dad built a safe and sturdy treehouse — which we never used. Instead, we girls snuck out behind the well to the “Hideaway Tree,” a sanctuary of leaves so dense we could stay dry in a rainstorm. My big sister had managed to carry a weathered board up to the top, which she precariously balanced across two thick branches. It became a hiding place. In those branches, I read The Secret Garden aloud to the tree, which seemed to peer over my shoulder.

“Marion” was my favorite tree. She was a maple, tall and strong. I spent long delicious hours in her shade, dug a hole almost to China, played with Henrietta, and pumped the air on a rope swing. Now and then, I’d stop what I was doing, throw my arms around the tree, and proclaim, “Marion, I love you.” My sisters teased me, making kissing sounds and moaning “Marion, Marion.”

My parents sometimes roused my sisters and me in the middle of the night, wrapped us in blankets and led us to the back yard to shine a flashlight into Marion’s branches, where a moon-eyed owl hooted at us.

Me with my whimsical mom, one autumn day long ago

Once, an historic occasion, we looked up through her branches at Sputnik blinking across the starry sky.

When I was 11, we moved into the little village ten miles up the road. The trees on Highland Avenue turned golden in the fall. We were a playful family. We raked the leaves, then jumped in them.

Even when I went off to college, I found favorite trees around campus and studied under them.

Leaves press against my 3rd-floor window

CITY TREES

After college, I left rural America for life in the Big City. My father used to joke, “How’s that tree that grows in Brooklyn?” but, truly, some of the most amazing tree-creatures live here.

The front windows of my 3rd- floor apartment frame the densest part of the trees that line my street. Once, seeing leaves dance so near my windows, a young piano student declared, “Pam, you live in a tree house!” I wish.

Autumn leaves in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park

In nearby Prospect Park, people hearing me mutter probably assume I’m speaking into an ultra-light wireless headset. I’m not. I’m chanting, “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” to the trees. I feel them breathing with me.

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a poem, “City Trees,” sympathetic to the slender, vulnerable trees that grow beside sidewalks, surrounded by the cacophony of urban sounds, contrasting them with hearty trees in country lanes. It’s one of my favorites:

The trees along this city street,
Save for the traffic and the trains,
Would make a sound as thin and sweet
As trees in country lanes.

And people standing in their shade
Out of a shower, undoubtedly
Would hear such music as is made
Upon a country tree.

Storytelling beneath a tree in Prospect Park

Oh, little leaves that are so dumb
Against the shrieking city air,
I watch you when the wind has come,—
I know what sound is there.

My younger sister brakes for animals, birds, bugs. If I were a driver, I think I’d brake for trees, too, not of necessity, but because time and again they take my breath away. Cedar, Dogwood, Ginko, Birch, Elm, Maple, Willow, Oak. How blessed we are that such amazing creatures populate our world! Thank you, thank you, thank you.

INDIA’S CHIPKO (tree-hugging) MOVEMENT

Twig sculpture honoring Chipko women, by Klub Gaja, (Polish environmentalist group), 2008

In 1730, Amrita Devi watched men with axes enter her village in India with an order from the Maharajah — to cut down trees needed to build his new palace. The trees were the villagers’ source of life, the only green in an otherwise barren landscape, sacred. Amrita Devi tried to reason with the men, but they had their orders. When she stretched her thin arms around a tree, the Maharajah’s men beheaded her. It is said that 363 villagers were killed that day, trying to save the sacred trees that were essential to their lives.

The Maharajah was appalled when he heard about the massacre and declared a permanent injunction against felling the trees or killing the wildlife in the area. Today, the Bishnoi villages of Jodhpur are a tourist attraction, green and beautiful, filled with animals and birds, in an otherwise desolate region. Amrita Devi is honored as one of the world’s first eco-warriors, a heroine of the Chipko (“tree-hugging”) movement in India.

India’s Chipko women, protecting a tree

But history repeats itself. Modern developers descended on the forests of the Himalayas seeking short-term profit. Deforestation led to environmental disasters. In monsoon season, landslides and floods devastated the regions where trees once secured the land.

One day in March, 1974, when the men of Reni were away, laborers with axes and guns showed up with government permits to fell the trees. Women of the village marched to the forest and confronted the men. Their leader, Gaura Devi (1925-1991), said, “Brothers, this forest is like our mother. You will have to shoot me before you can cut it down.” The men laughed.

Dodging obscenities and threats, the women stood between the men and the trees. Eventually, frustrated and exhausted, the workers backed down.

It took months of vigilance and protest, but, using Gandhian nonviolence, the people, with women in the lead, saved their trees.

GREEN BELT MOVEMENT, BORN IN KENYA

Wangari Maathai launched the Green Belt Movement

When Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) saw that women in Kenya had to walk farther each day for water and wood, she realized that the cause was a policy of rapid deforestation which had left big swaths of the nation bare and dusty. The authorities didn’t seem to care.

On World Environment Day, 1977, Dr. Maathai planted seven seedlings in honor of seven female environmentalists of Africa and, with that, launched the Green Belt Movement.

At first the authorities laughed. They stopped laughing when Dr. Maathai got women thinking about how much better it would be for their families if they helped promote sustainable agriculture, food-security, and environmentally appropriate crops benefiting the many in place of export commodities profiting the few.

By the time Wangari Maathai died in 2011, 900,000 women had helped plant 45 million trees which provided a lush canopy of green over their heads, a canopy of hope. And it all began with Wangari’s seven little seedlings.

SWOON’S TREE

Swoon’s fabric tree at the Brooklyn Museum, 2014

Caledonia “Callie” Curry is a 30-something street artist/ social justice activist who goes by the tag Swoon. For years, her powerful portraits could be found illegally wheat-pasted on the sides of neglected buildings in gritty Brooklyn’s back alleys. Currently, she’s leading art-therapy for recovering addicts as part of Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program.

For much of 2014, the Brooklyn Museum devoted its 5th-floor rotunda to Swoon’s Hurricane Sandy-inspired installation, “Submerged Motherlands.” I was lucky enough to see this fantastical landscape.

From the clutter representing our fragile, dislocated lives with their alarming cycles of growth and decay, rose a magnificent fabric tree, akin to the sacred but endangered Mapou in Haiti. It drew our gaze, repeatedly, to the rotunda skylight, as if we might find relief from our environmental anxieties up there with the delicate cut paper foliage.

Swoon believes “we can create little cracks in the façade of impossibility and inevitability.”

Standing at the foot of that tree, I, too, believed.

TO GO DEEPER

“The Original Tree Huggers: Let Us Not Forget Their Sacrifice on Earth Day” by Rucha Chitnis, April 22, 2013, from Women’s Earth Alliance (An excellent article, with information from Amrita Devi’s day to current history)

“Wangari Maathai’s Canopy of Hope: remembering a warrior woman for the planet and role model for us all” by Jennifer Browdy at Transition Times, Sept. 26, 2011

Wangari’s Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa by Jeanette Winter, 2008 (children’s book)

“Life of Wonderment: Swoon Blurs the Line Between Art and Activism” by Melena Ryzik, The New York Times, August 6, 2014,

Video Clips

A Day in History, Chipko Movement (of 1974) 2 mins.

“Wangari Maathai ‘The Tree Lady’ by Will Levitt” — Excellent overview of Maathai’s life, success, challenges, the power of the nonviolent grassroots Green Belt Movement and the empowerment of women. (10 mins)

“The Hummingbird and the Forest Fire” — Wangari Maathai narrates the 2 minute, animated story about doing the best we can, no mater how small, for the environment, from Dirt! The Movie.

Swoon: “Submerged Motherlands” environmental art at the Brooklyn Museum, 2014 (3 minutes)

Women and Kids Form a “Living Petition” for Free Speech

September 22, 2015 By Pam

1917 poster depicting Ralph Chaplin behind bars

1917 poster of Ralph Chaplin behind bars

After Woodrow Wilson signed the Espionage Act in June 1917, it became illegal for U.S. citizens to express “disloyalty” when the nation was at war.

WITCH-HUNT FOR WAR RESISTERS

In its vagueness and ambiguity, this Act became a tool used to imprison anyone who spoke or wrote against the war, especially labor leaders and socialists, who opposed the war as “capitalist folly.” They argued that workers were sent to the slaughter while the ruling class, bragging of “patriotism,” grew rich from war profits.

In September 1917, government agents raided union meeting halls, seizing literature and arresting union leaders for antiwar conspiracy. Over 100 union leaders were found guilty of disloyalty and jailed, some with sentences of up to twenty years, including luminaries such as union leader Eugene V. Debs and Ralph Chaplin, author of the workers’ anthem “Solidarity Forever.”

O’HARE’S PLEAS FOR PEACE & FREE SPEECH

Kate Richards O’Hare spoke for workers’ rights, peace, suffrage, free speech

Kate Richards O’Hare drew crowds, advocating for workers’ rights, peace, suffrage, and free speech

Kate Richards O’Hare (1876-1948), a socialist, advocate for working women, and mother of four, was arrested for giving an antiwar speech in North Dakota. It was the same speech she had delivered in at least 70 other towns and cities. She was sentenced to five years and sent to prison.

In prison, O’Hare wrote two books and befriended fellow inmate Emma Goldman. Because her imprisonment stirred nationwide outrage, she won an early release from Woodrow Wilson.

As soon as “Red Kate” was freed, she set out on a “Welcome Home” tour, agitating for amnesty for the other political prisoners.

By the spring of 1922, Warren G. Harding was president. O’Hare decided it was time to send him a “living petition.”

CRUSADE OF STORYTELLING WOMEN

Sheet music for the hit tune of the antiwar movement

Thirty-five women and their children began a truth-speaking tour. It was a journey of storytellers, poor and working-class, from midwestern cornfields and New England factories.

On their way to the White House, the Living Petition stopped in towns and cities to educate anyone who’d listen about the 113 men imprisoned for the crime of political dissent in the “land of the free.”

Media-conscious organizers called it the “Children’s Crusade for Amnesty,” hoping that the mention of children would catch the headlines they needed and the sympathy, too.

Their stories were about workers — tenant farmers, factory workers, lumberjacks, miners — union men, most of them “Wobblies,” the nickname given members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

It took courage to defend the right to express antiwar sentiments during a time of patriotic fervor, but speak they did, in city after city.

A “GRIEF PARADE”

1919 article about O’Hare, pictured with her children, imprisoned at the Missouri State Penitentiary, with an inset of the warden

One woman, known only as Mrs Hicks, was frail and sickly. She held a toddler named after the famous deaf-blind socialist, Helen Keller. She had a story to tell: In 1912, her husband, a pacifist and socialist, had written a letter to a friend in England about the possibility of war and the effect it might have on working people. Though it had been written before passage of the Espionage Act, he was sent to prison because of that letter.

With her husband in prison and seven little children to feed, Mrs. Hicks appealed to a county judge, pleading for help. Instead, the judge removed one of her children and threatened to take the others.

The storytelling women experienced a range of responses to their Crusade. In Indianapolis, the American Legion opposed their visit. City officials refused to let them march, speak, or distribute leaflets. In Cleveland, on the other hand, 2,000 turned out to greet the women and their weary children, and joined in calling for the release of all political prisoners.

In New York City, the women paraded from Grand Central Station up Madison Avenue with banners: “IS THE CONSTITUTION DEAD?” and “A HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN MEN JAILED FOR THEIR OPINIONS!” When she saw the procession, Mary Heaton Vorse, the great labor journalist and feminist, called it a “grief parade.”

That evening, the women told their stories at a mass meeting in Webster Hall. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the fiery labor organizer known as “the rebel girl,” was there that night. In her autobiography she wrote:

I remember most vividly Kate O’Hare, tall, gaunt, standing there speaking while she held Helen Keller Hicks asleep in her arms. There were no loudspeakers then, but Kate’s powerful ringing voice filled every part of the hall. “This,” she said of the sleeping child, “is a petition they cannot throw away!”

FROM “LIVING PETITION” TO PICKET LINE

Seeing kids on the picket line eventually touched Harding’s heart.

The crusaders reached Washington, D.C. on April 29, exhausted but determined to meet with President Harding. He, however, chose to meet with Lord and Lady Astor that day instead.

When the president was still busy the next day and the next, the women and their children formed a picket line in front of the White House. They had come too far and been through too much to turn back now.

The women, with children in tow, picketed the White House through weeks of an uncommonly hot Washington summer. At night, they bedded down in a house that had been rented for them.

On July 19, President Harding reportedly groaned, “I can’t stand seeing those kids out there any longer!”

When a delegation was finally allowed to meet with the president, they handed him a petition with a million signatures. Harding expressed his sympathy for the prisoners and their families. Although he refused to grant a general amnesty, he agreed that each case should be reviewed.

The women and their children returned home with honor, carrying bundles of gifts from well-wishers.

TO GO DEEPER

“Kansas: Remembering ‘Red Kate’” by P. S. Ruckman, Jr. on Pardon Power (blog)

BOOKS

Kate Richards O’Hare: Selected Writings and Speeches, edited by Philip S. Foner and Sally M. Miller, Louisiana State University Press, 1982

From Prairie to Prison: The Life of Social Activist Kate Richards O’Hare by Sally M. Miller, University of Missouri, 1993

The Rebel Girl: An Autobiography, My First Life 1906-26 by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, International Publishers, 1973

VIDEO CLIPS

“Women in the IWW” (1.25 mins.)

“I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier” The First Anti-War Hit Record (3 mins)

LEGACY OF LITTLE ROCK

September 4, 2015 By Pam

Painting by Charly Palmer

September 4, 1957 was supposed to be the first day of school for nine black students with good grades and superb coping skills, selected to help Arkansas comply with the 1954 Supreme Court ruling to integrate its public schools. The old “separate but equal” plan had failed. Black students in Little Rock had been kept separate, but their shoddy schools and tattered textbooks were anything but equal to what most white kids had.

Daisy Bates, president of the Arkansas NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), heard the news reports of a white mob assembling at Little Rock Central High School, attended by over 2,000 white students. She thought the young people would be safer going as a group and arranged for them to meet at her house to go together.

Everyone got the message to meet at the Bates’ home and travel together except the Eckford family. They didn’t have a telephone.

ELIZABETH ECKFORD WALKED ALONE

Elizabeth Eckford surrounded by mob

When Elizabeth Eckford stepped off the city bus that morning, she was engulfed by a crowd of frenzied white people who followed her, screaming the N-word all the way to Central High, two blocks away.

Will Counts, a young white photographer, snapped Elizabeth’s picture just as a student behind her, named Hazel, pinched up her face and hollered, “Go back to Africa!” mouth wide open, her face forever frozen in a mask of hate.

When Elizabeth finally reached the front doors of the school, it looked like a war zone. The Arkansas National Guard, ordered by Governor Faubus to defy the federal law, let white students in, but, when Elizabeth tried to squeeze past, they blocked her way with raised rifles.

After several attempts, Elizabeth decided to head back to the bus stop. Even then, the racists followed her, cursing and spitting. Boys made loud plans to get a rope, wrap it around her neck, and hang her.

As if from a great distance, she heard one white woman address the mob. “Shame on all of you. Why don’t you leave her alone? She’s scared. She’s only a girl.” It was a glimmer of sanity in a world gone mad. Several journalists, hesitant to get involved in “the story,” placed themselves between Elizabeth and the bigots. It took 35 minutes for the bus to come.

When she got home, Elizabeth changed her clothes. The new skirt she’d spent so much time sewing was covered in spit. She never wore it again.

EISENHOWER DISPATCHED FEDERAL TROOPS

For three weeks, the mayor, courts, school officials, and civil rights activists held a series of tense meetings. They eventually came to an agreement.

On September 23, the black students, including Elizabeth, met at Daisy Bates’ home to be escorted by the police. Again, a mob of several hundred white parents was waiting for them outside the school, hissing, crying, cursing. Reporters came from around the world; several black reporters were attacked. Halfway through the morning, the nine black teens were sent home. The school could not protect them.

President Eisenhower addressed the nation

That night, President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke on TV, outraged by the attack on black reporters and threats to the nine students. This display of ignorance and racism was a national embarrassment. He had given the state time to sort it out, but time was up. “Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts,” he said.

On September 25, the whole world watched as Elizabeth and the others walked up the stairs to the front entrance of the school, this time protected by federal troops.

HELL AT LITTLE ROCK CENTRAL HIGH

U.S. postage stamp, 2005. Art: “America Cares,” by George Hunt

From a distance it seemed like a new day in America — black and white students studying together in a place where, just a few weeks earlier, it had seemed impossible. If this were a fairytale, the story would end here with “And they all lived happily ever after.” But this was real life.

For a few weeks, some white students braved ridicule and dirty looks to befriend the black students, but after awhile, most gave up. It was easier to blend in and remain silent than to speak out.

“Testaments,” sculpted by John and Kathy Deering, located at the Arkansas State Capitol

The black students, now known as the “Little Rock Nine,” were separated and sent to different classrooms for the remainder of the year. The school made each of them agree not to join the glee club, band, or sports team; not to run for student council; not to attend any school dances or proms.

After the reporters and soldiers left, life at Central settled into one long obstacle course for the brave teens. Boys threw everything from spit balls to acid. Girls put broken glass near the black students’ gym lockers. Teachers refused to get involved. It was a year of hell for the nine.

STEPS TOWARD RECONCILIATION

In 1992, Central High School was declared a National Historic Landmark. A Visitors Center was later added nearby, on Daisy Bates Drive.

Will Counts’ photo of Elizabeth and Hazel was named one of the top 100 photographs of the 20th century by the Associated Press, and Counts was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1997, Counts brought Elizabeth and Hazel together, so that Hazel could apologize for the way she’d behaved as a teen. The two middle-aged women posed in front of Central High. Photos from 1957 and 1997 were put on a poster titled “Reconciliation.” It was intended as a sign of hope that people can change and that, someday, racism will be a thing of the past in America.

Two years later, President Bill Clinton awarded the Little Rock Nine the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest non-military honor in the United States. It was approved with a vote by members of both houses of Congress.

Inauguration of President Barack Obama

In 2007, while running for president, Barack Obama said, “Fifty years ago, nine young men and women showed the world that in the face of impossible odds, ordinary people could do extraordinary things.”

The next year, the Little Rock Nine were invited to attend the inauguration of America’s first black president.

TO GO DEEPER

Books:

A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School, by Carlotta Walls Lanier with Lisa Frazier Page, Foreword by Bill Clinton, Ballantine, 2009

Warriors Don’t Cry: A Searing Memoir of the Battle to Integrate Little Rock’s Central High by Melba Pattilo Beals, Washington Square Press, 1995

Little Rock Girl 1957: How a Photograph Changed the Fight for Integration by Shelley Tougas, Compass Point Books, 2011

Article:
“Through a Lens, Darkly” by David Margolick, Vanity Fair, September 2007

Video Clips:

Little Rock 9, Arkansas 1957 (10 mins)

Women in Pretoria Shout “You Have Struck a Rock!”

August 26, 2015 By Pam

In Pretoria, on August 9, 1956, 20,000 women stood for a full thirty minutes in silence. It is said that even the babies on their mothers’ backs did not cry.

Called by the Federation of South African Women to fight apartheid (a system of official racial separation), they stood beneath a pale winter sun:

— black women in the green, black, and gold colors of the African National Congress

— Indian women in brightly colored saris

— Xhosa women wearing elaborate headscarves and ocher robes

— white women in quiet colors, beige and blue.

A LEGACY OF RESISTANCE

The women had come from across South Africa to see the prime minister, deliver a petition, and protest, once again, the extension of the pass laws to women.

Passes were identity booklets used by the government to control and track each carrier’s movements. They were essential to the smooth functioning of the South African police state and the rule of the white minority, but caused untold suffering to masses of people. It meant imprisonment, broken homes, unemployment, poverty.

The women had seen the men of their communities subjected to harassment and pass raids. They knew what they were up against.

Their mothers had resisted pass laws in 1913, and they were bound by honor to bestow the legacy of resistance upon their daughters and granddaughters.

Four women led the way: Rahima Moosa, Lilian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Sophie Williams. In their arms they carried the precious petitions with over 100,000 women’s signatures, each signature signifying courage.

FROM SILENCE TO SONG

Because the apartheid regime had officially banned all processions in Pretoria for the day, the women arranged themselves in careful groupings of two or three and walked slowly up the wide avenue to an amphitheater which was ringed with gardens and government buildings.

Silence grew as the assembly waited, while the four leaders, representing South Africa’s racial divisions (African, Asian, Colored, and White), delivered an anti-pass petition to the prime minister, who remained in hiding all day.

The women’s silence took on a life of its own — pulsing between them, solid beneath their feet, alive in their breathing together, raging through their veins.

Suddenly, the women began singing freedom songs, harmonizing with the familiar African anthems, “Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika” and “Morena Boloka,” and another song with the words of an African proverb: “When you have touched the women, you have struck a rock.”

When the women dispersed, they kept singing for a long time, and their voices echoed over Pretoria.

Ever since that day, August 9 has been celebrated as South African Women’s Day in honor of the demonstration which was both a culmination of years of resistance to apartheid and a renewal of the women’s commitment to further struggle.

TO GO DEEPER

Article:

“Black History Month: Lilian Masediba Ngoyi (1911-1980), October, 2010 on Women’s History Network Blog

Video clip:

“South African Women’s Day” (3 mins.)

Hiroshima’s Children Remember Sadako

August 6, 2015 By Pam

On the clear, sunny morning of August 6, 1945, a United States airplane, the Enola Gay, suddenly appeared in the sky over Japan and dropped a bomb on the city of Hiroshima.

Children on their way to school melted into the sidewalks. People walking down the street turned into shadows and ash. Whole city blocks vanished.

WHAT SADAKO DIDN’T REMEMBER

Mushroom cloud over Hiroshima

Two-year-old Sadako Sasaki was eating breakfast with her mother, brother, and grandmother when the bomb fell one mile away.

Throughout the city, those who turned their heads and looked up never saw another thing. Ten seconds later, a rush of air rolled across the demolished city, then reversed course and sucked everything in toward the center.

Sadako was too little to remember being carried to the river, or how her grandmother went back to the house to get something and was never seen again.

She would not remember the wave of heat that roared down the street where houses, trees, gardens, and stores burst into flame or the charred bodies of the dead, the screams of the living.

Jovial crew of the Enola Gay

She would not remember the mushroom cloud that rose into the sky like a giant demon, carrying the ashes of eighty thousand people, their animal-companions, beds, books.

There wasn’t a scratch on her, but Sadako’s blood and bones had a secret: they held the memory of deadly radiation.

THE A-BOMB DISEASE

Ten years later, red canna lilies grew everywhere in Hiroshima, even in the rubble, giving everyone hope for new life.

Sadako Sasaki

By then, Sadako was an athletic sixth grader. On Fall Sports Day, 1954, her class went on a field trip to Mount Misen. Sadako and a few other girls raced ahead, past the Eternal Fire that had burned for over a thousand years. Later, everyone remembered Sadako, still full of energy after reaching the top, leaping around like the Rabbit in the Moon.

But just a few weeks later, something was wrong. Sadako was listless. Lumps bubbled under her chin.

In January, 1955, purple spots appeared on Sadako’s legs. Her parents took her to the Red Cross Hospital and learned that Sadako had leukemia, known then as the” A-bomb disease.”

Her classmates visited her in the hospital and presented Sadako with a Kokeshi doll made of wood, its big round head painted with a pretty face.

SADAKO’S ORIGAMI CRANES

One day, Sadako was given a square piece of golden paper and taught to fold it into a crane. She was reminded that, according to an ancient Japanese legend, the crane is the bird of happiness and youth. It is said, that anyone who folds 1,000 paper cranes would be granted a wish.

After that, Sadako folded paper cranes in her hospital room every day when she wasn’t busy doing her homework from school or sleeping from her illness. Her school friends collected little squares of colored paper for her. Her father found bits of paper in his barber shop and her mother, sister, and brothers scoured the neighborhood, finding pretty papers for Sadako’s cranes.

Sadako’s medicine came wrapped in red paper squares. She saved these and turned them into magic cranes. Other patients in the hospital heard about Sadako’s cranes and came by the room to see the girl and her magic birds.

Origami became meditation. Folding the paper became a prayer not only for her own health, but for world peace, a recognition that peace is in our hands.

Accounts vary, but some say that, after Sadako’s death at age 12 on October 25, 1955, her classmates folded 346 cranes to complete the 1,000 for their friend. Sadako’s parents buried their daughter, surrounded by colorful paper cranes and the Kokeshi doll her friends had given her months earlier.

CHILDREN LEAD THE WAY

Something had happened to Sadako’s classmates as they folded the cranes. They wanted to do more.

They decided that what the world needed was a statue, a monument to all the children killed by the atomic bomb. Sadako’s friends met in downtown Hiroshima to collect money for a statue. The idea for the statue spread. Children in over three thousand schools in Japan started raising money. Then, children in other countries began to collect money too.

The children’s monument in Hiroshima’s Peace Park

The children’s monument in Hiroshima’s Peace Park was unveiled on May 5, 1958, Children’s Day in Japan. On the top of a huge, hollowed-out atom bomb was the figure of a girl like Sadako, her arms stretched to the sky. In her hands was a golden crane. The children’s message was, “THIS IS OUR CRY, THIS IS OUR PRAYER, PEACE IN THE WORLD.”

News of the statue spread, and children everywhere began folding paper cranes and sending them to the Children’s Peace Monument — children in the United States, Russia, Brazil, India, Iran, Spain, Sweden, France; children in Poland, South Africa, Israel, Thailand, Australia. Still, every year, children send thousands of paper cranes to be placed in glass cases near the monument — each crane is a prayer for peace.

Sadako has become a symbol of children’s desire for peace. Hundreds of books have been written about her. Movies and YouTube cartoons tell her story. There are Sadako statues and peace gardens. Plays have been written about Sadako. Music has been composed in her memory. Countless artists have painted pictures showing Sadako and her thousand paper cranes.

TO GO DEEPER

Article:
“Hiroshima Remembers Atomic Bomb: ‘Abolish the Evil of Nuclear Weapons’” by Justin McCurry, The Guardian, August 5, 2015

Video Clips:

“How To Make a Crane / Origami” (7 mins)

“Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (5 mins)

Mother Jones Makes a Hot July Hotter

July 9, 2015 By Pam

Mary Harris Jones lost everything. Everything!

When the Civil War ended, she was eager to raise her family in peace, but just two years later her husband and all four children died of yellow fever in Memphis. Imagine!

Devastated and alone, she moved to Chicago and became a seamstress, fashioning beautiful dresses for elegant ladies. As if trapped in a Job-esque nightmare, she lost her home and sewing shop in the Great Fire of 1871. Everything she owned went up in flames.

THAT’S WHEN MARY BECAME “MOTHER JONES”

For awhile, she slept in a church and spent her days listening to speeches in the Knights of Labor building. The speakers believed in an eight-hour work day, fair pay, and decent working conditions. They also thought children belonged in school, not in factories or mines. It made sense to Mary.

Her own children buried, she decided to become “Mother” to all poor and suffering kids. Her own home in ashes, she became a traveling “hell-raiser” for the rights of working people. She said, “My address is like my shoes. It travels with me. I abide where there is a fight against wrong.”

THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE OF 1903

No one thought seventy-five thousand workers in Pennsylvania would go on strike, but they did. At least 10,000 of those strikers were children.

Mother Jones went to Philadelphia to support the strikers. Once there, she realized the American people needed a dramatic story to wake them up about the brutal reality of child labor.

She proclaimed a Children’s Crusade — a march of young textile workers from Kensington, PA to Oyster Bay, NY, where President Teddy Roosevelt was vacationing in style with his children.

On July 7, 1903, though newspaper headlines warned: HEAT WAVE! Mother Jones set out with a ragtag group of factory kids and their parents for a march to challenge American indifference to child labor.

That evening, stopping on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Mother Jones stirred up the sweaty crowd with a speech. She called millionaires “hobos and bums” and scolded lawmakers and factory owners for hiring boys and girls to do grownup work.

In town after town, the Children’s Crusade drew crowds and grabbed headlines. In Princeton, Mother Jones shocked a crowd of professors and students. She pointed to one of her crusaders. “Here’s a textbook on economics! This little chap is only ten years old, but he’s stooped over like an old man from carrying bundles of yarn that weigh seventy-five pounds. For all his work, he only gets three dollars a week. He works in a carpet factory eleven hours a day, while the children of the rich are getting their higher education!”

MOTHER JONES IN MANHATTAN

The crusaders reached Jersey City on July 22nd. The next day, they piled into a ferryboat to cross the Hudson, then paraded through the streets of Manhattan waving their banners.

Thousands of people turned out to hear Mother Jones’ headline-grabbing oratory. She didn’t disappoint. Pointing to a young marcher, she hollered: “That’s little Gussie Rangnew. She’s just a little girl, but all the childhood has gone out of her. Gussie works in a factory eleven hours a day. She packs stockings into boxes. At the end of the day she is given a few cents.”

The children were invited to spend a day at the Coney Island amusement park. For Mother Jones, it was another opportunity to make news for the strikers.

She found some empty cages and asked a few children to crawl inside. Then, she started to talk as a crowd gathered. She said that the children were imprisoned in their terrible factory jobs like animals imprisoned in cages and told the crowd about their plan to see the president. “These children weave the carpets he walks upon and the lace curtains in his windows. They make his clothes. We want him to hear the wail of the children who never have a chance to go to school.”

The children never got to see the president. Warned about possible arrest and probable disappointment, Mother Jones only took three boys with her all the way to the president’s summer mansion, but Teddy Roosevelt refused to see them. Back in Philadelphia, the strikers were too hungry to hold out any longer. The strike was over.

Despite the disappointing results, the Children’s Crusade made a difference. People around the country talked about Mother Jones and the factory children long after the march was over. They wrote to lawmakers and demanded that the laws be changed.

Two years after the hot summer of 1903, the child labor laws in Pennsylvania were changed. Slowly, other states changes their laws. In 1938, a federal law was passed so that all American children, rich and poor, would have the right to go to school.

TO GO DEEPER

“March of the Mill Children” except from The Autobiography of Mother Jones, 1925.

“Mary Harris ‘Mother Jones’” by Doris Weatherford, reprinted from American Women’s History (Prentice Hall, 1994) on National Women’s History Museum blog

“Jones, Mary Harris ‘Mother’” at Zinn Education Project — Teaching A People’s History

“The March of the Mill Children of 1903: Changing Public Perception of Child Labor” (10 mins.)

Ireland’s “Pill Train” X2

June 30, 2015 By Pam

In 1971, no one could have imagined that Ireland would have a pro-contraceptive female president (Mary Robinson) by 1990, or that she would be succeeded by another female president in 1997 (Mary McAleese).

At the time, divorce was constitutionally prohibited. Husbands were the legal heads of their households. Ireland still outlawed contraception, not to mention abortion. In the fight for women’s rights, challenging the ban on birth control seemed a good place to begin.

The plan was for several women to cross the border to Northern Ireland, buy contraceptives in a pharmacy, and smuggle them back into Ireland. They hoped to grab headlines by allowing themselves to be caught, arrested with the contraband, and hauled off to jail.

On May 22, a small group took a train to Belfast and headed for the nearest drugstore. Born and raised Catholic, their understanding of birth control was sorely limited. When they boldly demanded coils, loops, and birth control pills, the pharmacist coolly explained that medical consultation was required for those forms of birth control. The women had to settle for condoms, creams, and jellies. They also bought lots of aspirin.

Back in Dublin, they were met by customs officials and cops. As onlookers gaped, the women waved tubes of contraceptive creams and jellies over their heads and read aloud from an article on birth control they’d clipped from a magazine. Then, for dramatic effect, they scattered what they hoped looked like birth control pills (the aspirin) on the floor. The condoms, however, they kept for themselves.

With national and international television reporters in tow, the women marched to a police station. The cops, however, played it cool and refused to arrest the women, thus minimizing headlines. Two days later, the Prime Minister assured members of parliament that the contraceptives had been confiscated and all was well.

SPARKING DEBATE, DISLODGING A BOULDER

Despite the lackluster response by authorities, the Pill Train action sparked debate, an essential tool of any nonviolent revolution.

Throughout the next decade, a number of bills concerning birth control were debated and voted on, allowing small concessions here and there. The Health Act, passed in 1985 and amended several times, went a long way toward making contraceptives available in Ireland. Censorship laws were reformed to allow mention of family planning.

The 8th Amendment to Ireland’s Constitution (1983), however, criminalized abortion, even when the pregnancy is forced by rape or incest and or when carrying the fetus to term is a threat to the woman’s mental or physical health. The only exception is for a risk (narrowly defined) to the actual life of the woman. Ireland ranks with Afghanistan, Chile, and Somalia when it comes to attitudes about a woman’s right to control her own body.

SAVITA’S DEATH

In October, 2012, Savita Halappanavar, a 31-year-old married dentist, began to miscarry due to a bacterial infection. At the University Hospital Galway, she begged for a medical abortion, but, since the fetus still had a heartbeat, she was denied one. According to one report, an assisting doctor, when asked why they couldn’t intervene, said, “You are not dying enough.”

By the time the fetal remains were removed from her body, Savita was in septic shock. She died a few days later with her husband by her side. News spread through social media outlets. Tens of thousands mourned and protested at rallies and vigils in Ireland, England, and India.

2014 “ABORTION PILL TRAIN”

Two years later, on October 28, 2014, while candlelight vigils were held across Ireland in Savita’s memory, a small group of pro-choice activists again boarded a train in Dublin and headed to Belfast.

They returned with “abortion pills” ordered through WoW (Women on Web), an online organization that assists women seeking safe abortions.

Participants from groups including Action for Choice and ROSA (Reproductive rights, against Oppression, Sexism & Austerity) rode the train and explained their actions to the media. In the train station, ten women swallowed some of the pills to demonstrate their safety, an act of civil disobedience. Once again, the police looked the other way.

✔ MARRIAGE, ✘ REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

On May 22, 2015, the Republic of Ireland became the first nation in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, not by an act of legislation, but by popular vote. It was celebrated as a remarkable shift in public opinion because homosexuality was only decriminalized in 1993.

Why are LGBTQ rights, especially those which expand and strengthen the institution of marriage, winning in Ireland (and the U.S.), while women’s reproductive rights are so severely lagging?

Feminist author Katha Pollitt has some ideas. Marriage, she says, is about love, commitment, and settling down. People of all genders, classes, and sexual identities are invested in it as a right.

Reproductive rights, on the other hand, have to do with sexual activity, sexual freedom, and women’s control of their own bodies. As Pollitt explains, it’s about replacing “the image of women as chaste, self-sacrificing mothers dependent on men with that of women as independent, sexual, and maybe not so self-sacrificing.” For some, the debate pits the pure potential of fetuses against the complicated lives of grown women. Fetuses are considered innocent; women are not.

The struggle continues.

TO GO DEEPER

Books:

This River of Courage: Generations of Women’s Resistance and Action by Pam McAllister, New Society Publishers, 1991

“IRELAND(S): Coping with the Womb and the Border,” by Nell McCafferty in Sisterhood Is Global: The International Women’s Movement Anthology, edited by Robin Morgan, Anchor Press/ Doubleday 1984.

Articles:

“Law, Disobedience, and ‘the Abortion Pill’” by Mairead Enright, Human Rights in Ireland, Nov. 1, 2014.

“International Women’s Day 2015: The Continued Struggle for Reproductive Rights in Ireland” by Irish Forum for Global Health, Global Health Writes, March 5, 2015

“Pregnant Woman’s Death Sparks Abortion Debate In Ireland” by Krishnadev Calamur, NPR.org, November 15, 2012

“The Future of Abortion Is Here — No Clinic Needed” (about Women on Web) by Allegra Kirkland, AlterNet, August 29, 2014.

“There’s a Reason Gay Marriage Is Winning, While Abortion Rights Are Losing” by Katha Pollitt, The Nation, April 22, 2015

Video Clip:

“Prochoice activists bring illegal Abortion Pills into Ireland, 28th October 2014” (2:05 mins)

Swimming Together

June 17, 2015 By Pam

By now we’ve all seen the video — a white cop goes Rambo on black teens at a pool party, curses them, wrestles one girl to the ground, draws his gun and waves it at the unarmed kids.

IT’S NOT ABOUT ONE COP: IT’S ABOUT US

This happened in McKinney, Texas on Friday, June 5, 2015. Once again, cellphone activism was used to alert the nation. The video went viral. By that Sunday, Officer Eric Casebolt was off the job. Some commentators said he was a “bad apple.” Others said was a good cop having a very bad day. Both miss the point. This is not about a lone officer’s failure to do the “right” thing or even the “helpful” thing. It’s about us.

It’s been hard to pin down exactly what sparked this confrontation. By some reports, a black teen who lives in the area and had a legit pass to the pool threw a party and invited friends, both black and white. Some friends with legit invitations brought other friends. At some point, two white women began hurling racist slurs and one yelled, “Go back to your section 8 housing.” As tensions escalated, several people called the police, including the mother of one of the black teens.

WE SINK OR SWIM TOGETHER

St. Augustine, FL wade-in confrontation, June 25, 1964

Since the clash in McKinney, much has been written about the U.S. experience of swimming together — or not. (See recommended articles below.) Here’s the gist:

Phase 1. In the North, municipal pools were built in the 1880s as places for unwashed immigrants and laborers of all races to swim for health and cleanliness. Women had access to pools on alternate days from men.

Phase 2. By the 1920s, women and men, working class and middle class, were swimming together for fun. As bathing outfits got skimpier, public pools and beaches became increasingly racially segregated, with blacks forcibly excluded, legally or extra-legally.

Phase 3. Blacks and their white allies began to challenge segregated swimming areas in the 1950s, along with lunch counters, libraries, and other public arenas. One nonviolent tactic was the “wade-in.” When pools and beaches became racially integrated, many whites put pools in their backyards and abandoned public swimming areas.

RAINBOW BEACH WADE-IN

Velma Murphy Hill

There were no laws keeping the Chicago-area beaches racially segregated in 1960, but there might as well have been. Velma Murphy decided to challenge this by organizing a wade-in. She was the 21-year-old president of the Southside NAACP Youth Council.

On August 28, she led thirty activists, all but a quarter of them black, to Rainbow Beach where white families sunbathed, swam, and picnicked. She heard one man snarl, “You niggers are on the wrong beach,” but the activist group bravely laid out their beach towels, and tried to act nonchalant. They swam and waded in the water, dried off, tried to concentrate on games of checkers.

Two hours passed when they suddenly realized that all the white women and children had left the beach. A knot of young men surrounded them. When the white mob began hurling rocks, one hit Velma in the head. It required 17 stitches, causing temporary paralysis and a permanent limp. She was unable to attend the “wade-in” the following week, which was larger and had better police protection. The following summer, a number of groups joined the NAACP in trying to integrate the beach, including the Catholic Interracial Council and the Jewish Board of Rabbis.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” In 2011, Velma returned to Rainbow Beach with a coalition of civil rights and labor groups to dedicate a historic marker commemorating the “wade-ins.”

HOW DO YOU SEGREGATE AN OCEAN?

Acid attack on Civil Rights activists

Another early challenge came in Biloxi, MS with a series of “wade-ins” beginning in 1959. Two weeks after the assassination of Medgar Evers, in June, 1963, protesters planted black flags on the beach in his memory, but they were met with a violent white mob of over 2,000.

The U.S. Justice Department sued the city for denying black beach-goers access to public space and, after a long fight, won. By 1968, the beach was open to all.

Dramatic news photos documented a similar struggle on the whites-only beaches in St. Augustine, FL. Rev. King became involved and was arrested there. But it was what happened on June 18, 1964 that made history. When young activists jumped into the whites-only pool at the Monson Motor Lodge, the hotel manager poured acid in the water. No one was hurt, but the photo of his barbarity shocked the nation. The very next day, the Civil Rights Act was passed in the U.S. Senate, after an 83-day filibuster by the “Southern Bloc.”

TO GO DEEPER

Book:
Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America by Jeff Wiltse, The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Articles:
“Who Gets to Go to the Pool?” by Brit Bennett, The New York Times, June 10, 2015

Satirical comic by laloalcaraz

“McKinney, Texas, and the Racial History of American Swimming Pools” by Yoni Appelbaum, The Atlantic, June 8, 2015

“America’s Swimming Pools Have a Racist History” by Jeff Wiltse, Washington Post, June 10, 2015

“Our Segregated Summers: The Police Misconduct in McKinney, Texas, is part of America’s long, fraught history of race and swimming” by Jamelle Bouie, Slate, June 9, 2015

Audio:

“Swimming Pools and Racial Tension” on The Kojo Nnamdi Show, Monday, June 15, 2015, radio discussion with guests Jeff Wiltse, Jamelle Bouie, and Brit Bennett.

YouTube:

“Texas Community Questions Police Use of Force at Pool Party” PBS NewsHour, June 8, 2015 (5:58 mins.)

“The Daily Show: Jon Stewart Finds ‘Progress’ in McKinney: ‘Nobody Is Dead’” 6/8/15

Mary Dyer, Martyr for Religious Freedom

June 1, 2015 By Pam

On June 1, 1660, Boston’s Puritan patriarchs, minds snapped shut like oyster shells, executed Mary Dyer. They had come to the New World in search of the freedom to impose their own intolerant theocracy. Dyer had a wider vision, a New World of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience.

THIRD IN LINE AT THE HANGING ELM

Puritan fathers, lips stiff as church pews, arrived in the New World with worthy dreams. They would build a shining city on the hill, a New Jerusalem of parks, libraries, and schools, and tend lovingly to the poor and ill.

But along with new dreams, the Puritans brought Old World tools — hellfire and damnation, branding irons and prison cells. Before long, they claimed a tree in the center of their Eden as the Hanging Elm. By the mid-1650s, Quakers were outlawed in the Massachusetts colony, their books burned, their bodies whipped and branded, their tongues mutilated.

Repeatedly throughout 1659, Mary Dyer and other Quakers disobeyed the law by entering Boston, pitting their belief in the “Inner Light” against the Puritan’s “wrath of God.” For this act of civil disobedience, they were imprisoned. In mid-October, they were found guilty of breaking the laws of Quaker banishment and sentenced to hang from the tree at Boston Neck. Upon hearing this judgement, Mary cried out defiantly, “Yea, and joyfully I go!” as if it were her decision, her choice, her moral triumph over unjust laws.

On October 27, the three Quakers walked hand-in-hand to the Hanging Elm, Mary in the middle. They tried to address the crowd, but drummers had been ordered to maintain a steady beat and drown out their voices.

Dyer stood stoically, third in line. She watched one friend hanged, then the other. Then Mary herself was led to the tree, up a ladder, and a noose put around her neck. How furious the theocrats must have been that she acquiesced so calmly, as if she were waiting in line for strawberries at the market.

At the last minute, her execution was cancelled. The noose was removed from her neck, and she was sent back into exile, devastated, to her husband’s custody.

DYER’S DEATH, A TURNING POINT

Mary Dyer waited out the long winter on Shelter Island, no doubt grieving the friends she’d watched die before her. And then one day in May, she returned to Boston clothed, as it were, in disobedience, once again defying the law of “Quaker banishment.”

Some say she came back carrying her own shroud. Certainly this was true metaphorically, if not literally. Committed, body and soul, to upholding the right to freedom of conscience, she knew what she had to do. As she put it, “My life not availeth me in comparison to the liberty of the truth.”

The next morning, she was paraded through the streets once again, this time alone. At the tree, she was given a chance to repent and save herself, but she refused, believing that her death would heighten public awareness of the “unrighteous and unjust law of banishment.”

Mary Dyer statue in Boston, by Sylvia Shaw Judson

When her neck snapped, many wept. One of the officers, moved by the sight of Dyer’s slight body swaying in the breeze, became a Quaker convert.

Back in England, King Charles II was, finally, shocked into action and used his power to put an end to the execution of Quakers, although persecution (imprisonment and torture) by Puritans continued for more than a decade.

No one remembers the executioners who carried out the orders, but today in Boston, Philadelphia, and at Earlham College in Indiana there are statues of Mary Dyer, who is remembered for her courage in the fight for freedom of religion.

TO GO DEEPER

“Top 10 Things You May Not Know About Mary Dyer” by Christy K. Robinson (Excellent information and fun to read, written by a Mary Dyer scholar.)

This Day In History, June 1 (53 seconds)