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The Mercury Theater Presents
Orson Welles "War of the Worlds"
Tuesday, October 21, 2014
Radio Drama: The War of the Worlds
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Colorado Student Protests
Civil Disobedience is alive and well in 2014.
School board members say they want to make sure the history course, accused of having an anti-American bias by some conservatives, is balanced.
Student participants said their demonstration was organized by word of mouth and social media. Many waved American flags and carried signs, including messages that read "There is nothing more patriotic than protest."
Local Coverage
Democracy Now excerpt
The school board met Thursday, October 2nd and voted on the proposal. Students, parents and teachers attended the meeting, as well as protested before it started.
Reaction Paragraph
What do you think about the protests that happened in Colorado? Do you agree or disagree with the School Board's desire to make the curriculum more patriotic? How do you feel about the student's decision to protest the proposed changes? Do you think civil disobedience is an important idea to learn in school? Explain your position.
Monday, September 29, 2014
Civil Liberties Defense Center
Assert Your Rights, We Got Your Back
CLDC Make-Up Assignment
If you were absent the day we had our speakers from the Civil Liberties Defense Center here's what you need to do to earn a grade. Go to their website: cldc.org and view the "Know Your Rights Training" video and then complete the CLDC presentation worksheet (found in class files).
If you were absent the day we had our speakers from the Civil Liberties Defense Center here's what you need to do to earn a grade. Go to their website: cldc.org and view the "Know Your Rights Training" video and then complete the CLDC presentation worksheet (found in class files).
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
A3 Peace Week March & Student Rally
Thought you all might enjoy the video that David Hazen (ryhymes with raisin) sent me. Thanks to everyone for helping make Peace Week a reality. Keep practicing peace.
A3 GIVING PEACE A CHANCE
Sunday, September 21, 2014
The Women's Movement
Women's Rights Movement in the U.S.
The women's suffrage movement actually began in 1848, when the first
women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York. For the
next 50 years, woman suffrage supporters worked to educate the public
about the validity of woman suffrage. Under the leadership of Susan B.
Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other women’s rights pioneers,
suffragists circulated petitions and lobbied Congress to pass a
Constitutional Amendment to enfranchise women.
1848
The first women's rights convention is held in Seneca, Falls, New York. After two days of discussion and debate, 68 women and 32 men sign a Declaration of Sentiments, which outlines grievances and sets the agenda for the women's rights movement. A set of 12 resolutions is adopted calling for equal treatment of women and men under the law and voting rights for women.
The first women's rights convention is held in Seneca, Falls, New York. After two days of discussion and debate, 68 women and 32 men sign a Declaration of Sentiments, which outlines grievances and sets the agenda for the women's rights movement. A set of 12 resolutions is adopted calling for equal treatment of women and men under the law and voting rights for women.
1869
The primary goal of the
organization is to achieve voting rights for women by means of a
Colorado is the first state to adopt an amendment granting women the right to vote. Utah and Idaho follow suit in 1896, Washington State in 1910, California in 1911, Oregon, Kansas and Arizona 1912. Alaska and Illinois in 1913, Montana and Nevada in 1914, New York in 1917; Michigan, South Dakota, and Oklahoma in 1918.
In the 20th century leadership of the suffrage movement split into two
organizations. The first, the National American Woman Suffrage
Association (NAWSA), under the leadership of Carrie Chapman Catt, was a
moderate organization.
The NAWSA undertook campaigns to enfranchise women in individual states, and simultaneously lobbied President Wilson and Congress to pass a woman suffrage Constitutional Amendment. In the 1910s, NAWSA’s membership numbered in the millions.
The NAWSA undertook campaigns to enfranchise women in individual states, and simultaneously lobbied President Wilson and Congress to pass a woman suffrage Constitutional Amendment. In the 1910s, NAWSA’s membership numbered in the millions.
National Women's Party
The origins of the National Woman's Party (NWP) date from December 1912, when Alice Paul (1885-1977) and Lucy Burns (1879-1966) were appointed to the National American Woman Suffrage Association’s (NAWSA) Congressional Committee.
Paul and Burns were young, well-educated Americans who worked with Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst in the militant wing of the British suffrage movement.
Radicalized by their experiences in England–which included violent confrontations with authorities, jail sentences, hunger strikes, and force-feedings–they sought to inject a renewed militancy into the American campaign.
They also endeavored to shift NAWSA’s attention away from winning voting rights for women at the state and local levels to securing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to enfranchise women nationally.
This parade was modeled on the elaborate suffrage pageants held in Britain.
The March 3, 1913, parade coincided with President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration and put the president-elect and Congress on notice that NAWSA would hold the Democratic Party responsible if it failed to pass a women’s suffrage amendment.
Bands, floats, and more than 8,000 marchers participated, representing nearly every state and most occupations.
Despite assurances of police protection, crowds of men mobbed the parade route–some of them threatening or injuring the marching women. The police declined to intervene, and the public outcry was intense.
Even NAWSA officials, leery of Paul’s affiliation with British suffragettes, conceded afterwards that the parade and ensuing police debacle had “. . . done more for suffrage, to establish firmly those who were wavering, and to bring to our ranks thousands of others who would never have taken any interest in it.
Despite the publicity that such events generated, the NAWSA leadership remained skeptical.
They feared that militant tactics would endanger state victories, antagonize Congress, and make it difficult to gain widespread support for ratifying women’s voting rights if a federal amendment were passed by Congress.
Increasingly at odds with NAWSA leadership, Paul and Burns founded the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage (CU) in April 1913.
From 1914 to 1917, the CU, instilled in the flagging American suffrage campaign an energy and militancy reminiscent of the early radicalism of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton Susan B Anthony
All of its tactics were designed to generate interest and publicity, attract new supporters, and pressure public officials.
In early June 1916, the CU sponsored a convention in Chicago for women in the West who had achieved voting rights in their states.
The goal of the world’s “first women’s political party” was to remain independent of the existing political parties and to campaign on a platform consisting of one plank–immediate passage of the Susan B. Anthony federal suffrage amendment.
From June to November 1916, both the NWP and CU concentrated on the upcoming elections. They picketed the national conventions, met with presidential and congressional candidates, and sent organizers into the enfranchised states to lobby for the federal suffrage amendment and oppose all Democratic Party candidates.
On January 10, 1917, the NWP instituted the practice of picketing the White House, the first political activists to do so. Every day for the next two months, regardless of weather, women marched to the White House, where they took up their stations as “silent sentinels.”
President Wilson initially tolerated the pickets, waving to them as his car pulled through the gates. However, when the United States entered World War I four months later, the political climate changed, and criticism of the government became less acceptable.
Unlike other suffragists, including longtime pacifists who stopped campaigning for the vote and devoted themselves to the war work, the NWP neither publicly supported the war nor halted agitating for women's voting rights.
The NWP highlighted the government's hypocrisy of supporting democracy abroad while denying its women citizens the right to vote at home.
The NWP highlighted the government's hypocrisy of supporting democracy abroad while denying its women citizens the right to vote at home.
NWP criticism of the government was viewed as unpatriotic by many and even seditious and subversive by some, especially the soldiers and sailors who were among the most visible instigators of mob violence against the pickets.
On June 22, 1917, suffrage pickets began to be arrested on the technical charge of obstructing traffic.
As the summer progressed, more arrests followed and longer prison sentences were handed down.
The women were imprisoned– usually in unsanitary conditions, sometimes beaten (most notably during the November 15 “Night of Terror” at Occoquan Workhouse), and often brutally force-fed when they went on hunger strikes to protest being denied political prisoner status.
Alice Paul in jail
National Women's Movement - Make Alice Proud
Government officials found it increasingly difficult to refuse the vote to women who were contributing so much to the war effort. Anti-suffragist arguments about women’s mental and physical inferiority were difficult to sustain as women took over jobs vacated by men drafted into military service.
In addition, the NWP’s militant tactics and the public support its members garnered from their imprisonment eventually forced President Wilson to endorse the 19th Amendment on January 9, 1918. The next day, it passed in the House of Representatives.
They established picket lines in front of the U.S. Capitol and the Senate Office Building in October 1918; started a watch fire campaign on January 1, 1919, in front of the White House to pressure President Wilson to lobby recalcitrant senators to pass the suffrage amendment; burned Wilson’s words and image in effigy; and sent suffrage prisoners on a cross-country speaking tour aboard a train named “Democracy Limited” in February and March 1919.
On May 21, 1919, the U.S. House of Representatives again passed the Susan B. Anthony federal suffrage amendment, and on June 4, the U.S. Senate followed suit.
The enactment of the amendment initiated a 14-month campaign for ratification by 36 states. Finally, on August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment. On August 26, the 19th Amendment was signed into law.
REACTION PARAGRAPH
How did the National Woman’s Party use civil disobedience in its campaign to secure women the vote? Do you think that their campaign was an effective strategy for gaining suffrage for women? Use examples from the class readings and blog to support your claims.
Monday, September 15, 2014
Plessy v. Ferguson
By the end of the nineteenth century, thirty years had passed without slavery. Life for African Americans however, had not improved significantly. Most lived in poverty in the rural South and even those that were able to rise above poverty did not advance very far. They all fell victim to the infamous Jim Crow laws in the South, which set aside separate facilities for blacks and whites in public places such as railroad cars, hospitals and schools.
While hardship was great, sympathy was little. Opportunities for education, jobs and the accumulation of wealth were too scarce to make any real difference. Jim Crow laws and "separate but equal" legislation helped maintain segregation. The "but equal" language was almost never enforced and in all areas of life, African Americans found themselves in inferior circumstances.
Here are some of the key pieces of legislation that led to this case.
Let's start in 1865. This is the year that the 13th Amendment abolished slavery. Three years later, the 14th Amendment defined United States citizenship and prohibited states or local officials from denying rights to its citizens. The adoption of these amendments helped advance African-American civil rights.
The Civil Rights Act of 1875 guaranteed African-Americans equal treatment in public accommodations, transportation, and prohibited exclusion from serving on a jury. This act represented another significant advancement of African-American civil rights.
These positive steps forward were tempered with the "Civil Rights Cases" Supreme Court Ruling of 1883. The court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional. They also ruled that the 14th Amendment prohibited discrimination by the state, but it did not give the government power to prohibit discrimination by individuals, organizations, or businesses. Finally, the court ruled that the 13th Amendment eliminated "the badge of slavery," but it did not prohibit discrimination in public accommodations.
Homer Plessy
One of the earliest challenges to the inequality
that resulted from segregation came in 1892 from Homer Plessy. Plessy was 7/8th
white of Creole descent and 1/8th African. He boarded a train in
Louisiana and took a seat in a car marked "for whites only." When he
refused to vacate the seat, he was charged with violating a Louisiana
statute that provided for separate but equal facilities in railway cars. Watch the following video clip to get an overview of Homer Plessy's act
of civil disobedience and the resulting Supreme Court case.
A Calculated Act
video clip is from the PBS series The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross
Reaction Paragraph
What do you think about civil disobedience as a tool for social change? Was Homer Plessy's act of civil disobedience effective even though it took over fifty years for segregation laws to change? The Plessy v. Ferguson decision introduced the "separate but equal" doctrine that legalized segregation. What do you think about Separate but Equal? Is it possible for two races to remain separated while striving for equality? Are separation and equality compatible? Why or why not?
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
Black Panther Party
The Black Panther Party
Above & Beyond Assignment
Directions: Read the tenth point from the Black Panther Party's Platform and answer the corresponding questions. Turn these in no later then Monday, September 15th.
Point Ten from the Black Panther Party Platform
We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace, and people’s community
control of modern technology.
When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown that mankind are most disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpation, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.
1) Why would the Panthers include this statement? In other words, what's the purpose?
2) How would it (Point 10) apply to the African-American community?
3) How might the inclusion of this portion of the Declaration of Independence influence readers'
perception of the Ten Point Program?
4) What connections to Thomas Jefferson and the so-called "Founding Fathers" are the Panthers
trying to make?
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