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Yippie! Party Video from 1968 | Video Worth Watching

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It’s roughly the 50 year anniversary of the Chicago Democratic convention and the police attack on the counterculture protesters. As a response to the event, the Yippie! party secured free air time through campaign “Equal Time” legislation. They made some of the time available to the ACLU, some to an anti-war group and used about 15 minutes for this gem of a protest parody campaign video. It features appearances by Alan Ginsburg, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and music by Phil Ochs. It also memorializes Mayor Daley’s Yogi Berra-like remark that “the policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”

The quality is marginal, but it’s worth a watch. This version has about ten seconds of audio deleted around the 1:40 minute mark right where Ginsburg appears. I’m guessing someone was concerned about a DMCA take down since there’s another version on YouTube that does have the audio and Ginsburg begins to chant “AUM” and a chorus morphs it into “dreaming of a white Christmas”! Gotta love that sense of humor!
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Richard Nixon resigns – August 8, 1974 | Video Worth Watching

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On this day in 1974, Richard M. Nixon delivered his resignation speech. How times have changed. For some insightful reflection on how and why, check out Will Bunch’s column in The Inquirer. Well, we can dream (and still fight back!) (h/t to AGD)   [Read more…]

Jose ‘Pepe’ Villarino: A Giver, Not a Taker | Latinos in San Diego

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Jose “Pepe” Villarino is an icon in San Diego’s Latino community, where he has been known for over four decades as an educator, activist and musician.

Pepe was born in Winslow, Arizona, on March 19, 1930. He is the second youngest son born to Rosa Rios and Leocidio Layva. When Pepe was seven years old, just a few days after Rosa gave birth to his sister Rachael, his mother died.

After the Mexican Revolution, Leocidio came to Winslow to work for the railroad. Pepe says his father was light skinned and he believes this trait was crucial for being selected for a better job. Because of this job, the family lived in a house with indoor plumbing. Leocidio paid ten dollars a month for their two-bedroom house.   [Read more…]

Voices from Stonewall, the Riot that Sparked the Gay Rights Movement | Video Worth Watching

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In order to make a movie more palatable to the public, Hollywood often glosses over or contradicts key historical elements. In this short video The Real Queens and Kings of Stonewall, Matt Baume provides a reality check regarding the commercially released Hollywood version of the riots: Stonewall.

And here are some more voices of actual participants in the groundbreaking historic Stonewall riot: Stonewall Veterans Talk About the Night That Changed The World – Stonewall: Profiles of Pride.   [Read more…]

What to the Working Class is the Fourth of July?

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On this day when we celebrate the Declaration of Independence, it’s important to remember Jefferson himself believed that each new generation needed to make the American creed their own. And everyone from slaves to women to working people did just that as we see in Frederick Douglass’s great speech “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?”, the early feminist manifesto “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Seneca Falls,” and the much lesser known “Working Men’s Declaration of Independence.”

This last is centrally important to remember because while Americans are largely aware that the battle for inclusion involved long and heroic abolition, civil rights, and women’s movements, struggles around issues of class have all-too-frequently been relinquished to the dustbin of history. Such is the case with the early Working Men’s Party that was railing about what Bernie Sanders calls “the billionaire class” well before the time when many historians mark the beginning rustlings of the American labor movement.

Indeed, what the early Working Men’s Party history shows is class rebellion is as American as apple pie and was seen as a fulfillment of the Jeffersonian project. How so?   [Read more…]

History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools

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Susan DuFresne, a pre-school and special education specialist from Seattle, Washi., just published the book History of Institutional Racism in U.S. Public Schools. Dufresne is also a self-taught artist with a heart that screams for justice. She began her project with three 15-feet-long 4-feet-high pieces of canvas and painted images of racial injustice and its effect on schools from the 16th century until today. These illustrations are supported by the notes Susan developed about each issue depicted and hand wrote in the margins.

I met Susan at a march in 2014 at Seattle’s iconic Westgate Park, home of political expression and protest for five decades. For me, it brought back childhood memories of a 1962 trip with my parents and a sister to the Seattle World’s Fair. At Westgate Park, my family boarded the mono-rail for the fairgrounds now called the Seattle Center, still home of the Space Needle and today, home to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

That 2014 teacher’s march was the first public event organized by the Washington State Bats. We were protesting the Gates Foundation. Two motorcycle police went ahead of us closing streets to cross traffic and we happily marched toward the Seattle Center to enthusiastic cheers from locals along the route.

Last year, I met Susan again at the National Public Education (NPE) annual conference in Oakland, California. She displayed her amazing art work in the main conference room. The room was large enough to accommodate more than 1,000 people seated at round tables. Her illustrations covered most of the north wall.

I would be very surprised if Susan could pick me out of a line   [Read more…]

Behind the Criminal Immigration Law: Eugenics and White Supremacy

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The history of the statute that can make it a felony to illegally enter the country involves some dark corners of U.S. history.

By Ian MacDougall / ProPublica

Amid a bipartisan backlash, President Trump has tried repeatedly to shift blame to Democrats for his own administration’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, which has resulted in more than 2,300 migrant children being taken from their families along the U.S.–Mexico border. “The Democrats have to change their law — that’s their law,” Trump told reporters on Friday.

The president didn’t specify which law he was talking about. But the statute at the center of his administration’s policy is the work of Republicans — with origins dating back all the way to World War I — albeit with substantial Democratic support along the way. Known originally as the “Undesirable Aliens Act,” the statute would not exist without support from, respectively, a eugenicist and a white supremacist.

The law in question was the foundation of a memo Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued in early April that laid out the administration’s new, zero-tolerance policy. In the memo, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors in the southwestern United States to file criminal charges against any adults caught entering the country illegally. His order stripped officials of discretion over whether to place migrant families seeking asylum into civil proceedings, which allow families to stay together. (Court rulings limit how long the government can detain migrants in civil proceedings. There’s also no guarantee they’ll return for future hearing dates once they’re let out, a phenomenon that has prompted the president’s complaints about “catch and release.”)

On Monday, ProPublica published audio recorded at a U.S. Customs and Border Protection detention facility in which a Border Patrol agent mocks the   [Read more…]

Dazed and Confused in Ocean Beach | 1968

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1968 wasn’t a good year to be a transfer student at Point Loma High School.

A San Diego Police Department bust in early December 1967 (where a tiny amount of marijuana was seized with a street value of two million dollars) prompted lots of paranoia throughout the student body.

The Christian Science Church across from the school provided a great vantage point for the Evening Tribune photographer to document the dopers, and select students made the paper’s front page with black tape covering their eyes.

I wasn’t one of those students, but it didn’t matter. Depending on the point of view of the long-time students, outsiders were either narcs or dangerous drug dealers.   [Read more…]

The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius | 1968

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Key words : Dawning, the beginning of a new day. Age : 2000 years. Aquarius : in astrology, the water bearer.

Carrying water has always been the women’s task. From the stream, the river, the well, to the house, for cooking , washing, cleaning. And still it is today in many countries around the world.

The point being, “the dawning” takes some time,and in the scope of 2000 years, a dawning may take many generations. And our planet , and our lives, is all about water.   [Read more…]

The More Things Change: Tulsa’s Race Massacre History Books Turned Into A Race “Riot”

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By Abby Zimet / Common Dreams

Lessons from the past: Last week marked the 97th anniversary of Tulsa, Oklahoma’s 1921 Race Massacre, wherein mobs of white vigilantes, abetted by complicit government and law enforcement officials, looted, burned, bombed from the air and virtually destroyed the black, thriving, middle-class Greenwood community widely known as Negro Wall Street, in the process killing at least 300 of its 10,000 black residents, and likely many more.

Then perhaps America’s most preeminent, albeit segregated, black community, Greenwood was created by post-World-War-One blacks fleeing the Deep South; divided by railroad tracks from white Tulsa, they built scores of black-owned businesses, hotels, restaurants and law offices, as well as a library and hospital even as racial hostilities, lynchings and the ranks of Klan members grew — in Tulsa, to over 3,200.   [Read more…]

Moxie Theatre’s ’The Madres’: The Women’s “Performance” during the Dirty War

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The Moxie Theatre production (National New Play Network, Rolling World Premiere) of The Madres, written by Stephanie Alison Walker and co-directed by Maria Patrice Amon and Jennifer Eve Thorn, presents a “slice of life” of those affected by the Dirty War (1976-1983)—a seven-year campaign by the Argentine government which led to the kidnapping and murder of over 30,000 people under the direction of General Jorge Rafael Videla.

During the Dirty War demonstrations began on April 30, 1977 in Buenos Aires when fourteen mothers assembled in the Plaza de Mayo (a square built to celebrate the beginning of the Argentine republic on 25 May 1810) to petition for information on the fate of their “disappeared” children. These demonstrations—which some historians call political “performance”—grew during the Videla regime and drew international attention.

All of the demonstrators wore white shawls embroidered with the names of the disappeared. Their demonstration became more choreographed over time as the participants increased in number. Today the Mothers continue marching in the Plaza de Mayo every Thursday.   [Read more…]

Dial Telephones: “How to Use the Dial Phone” 1927 AT&T | Video Worth Watching

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Today, May 29th, marks the 91st anniversary of dial telephone service in the Fresno area. To prepare the public for this new technology the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Co. and the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. (AT&T) produced a “training” film demonstrating how to use these new-fangled instruments. The original, now in the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, was silent, but this YouTube version has been provided with (somewhat random) background music. You may want to just mute the sound and listen to something that works for you. (h/t to AGD)   [Read more…]

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