CRM VETS on The HELP

"Our Thoughts" (http://www.crmvet.org/comm/commhome.htm)

       "No thanks Kathryn Stockett, I don't want to be "The Help,"
       Joyce Ladner
       http://www.crmvet.org/comm/ladnerj.htm

       "The Help the Movie," Casey Hayden
       http://www.crmvet.org/comm/haydenc.htm

       "The Help — Thoughts of Ruby Sales"
       http://www.crmvet.org/comm/salesr.htm

       "The Help — Thoughts of Theresa El-Amin"
       http://www.crmvet.org/comm/theresa.htm

Lecture and Photo Exhibit re Civil Rights Movement

Civil Rights Under Three Hats: Photographs by Matt Herron: Opening Reception

Lecture | September 16 | 7-8:30 p.m. | North Gate Hall, Room 105

Sponsor: Journalism, Graduate School of

Photojournalist, Social Documentarian, Movement Propagandist: The Photography of Matt Herron.

When Matt Herron moved to Mississippi with his family in 1963, he thought of himself as wearing three hats. As a photojournalist, he was beginning to see his career take off, and he hoped to win assignments from editors he knew in New York by submitting picture story ideas from the heart of the Civil Rights struggle. And influenced by several formative meetings with the well-known documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, Herron also hoped to document the process of social change that was beginning to disrupt deeply ingrained patterns of life in both black and white communities of the Deep South. To this end, he organized a team of photographers in the Spring of 1964 to follow this process through one of the most tumultuous summers in Civil Rights history. Finally, as a pacifist and political radical, Herron was personally drawn to the cause of racial justice and eagerly committed his cameras to the organizing work of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississipp and other venues of the South.

How well did these three hats fit one head? That is the subject of a new photography exhibition at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

The exhibit will be available for viewing at North Gate Hall, Monday-Friday, from August 29- December 1, 2011

Event Contact: juliehirano@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3394

Dealing with the Contradictions and Infrastructure Building: Racial division within the Suffrage Movment

A Daily Kos post provides some insight into the racial divisions within the women's suffrage movement (and a variety of suggested resources).  From the point of view of how this contributed to building a social movement, one can see the importance of dealing with the contradictions within the movement.  For example,Stanton and Anthony allying with racist Democrats in the hopes of recruiting white southern women to their suffrage movement.  Where did this put William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells and the thousands and thousands upon thousands of other suffragists who believed that black women should stand shoulder to shoulder with white women in the fight for the vote for women?  Creating alternative organizations like sororities at black female colleges and the National Association of Colored Women's Clubs is mentioned is this blog post. 

Nancy Robertson has written a brilliant book that illustrates how the YWCA dealt with these contradictions in a manner that led that organization being a crucial part of the fundamental infrastructure that supported not only the Southern Freedom Movement but the modern women's movement as well. READ  Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906-46 (can be borrowed from the SFFS library)

Key Components of a successful social movement:

• identifying the problem
• doing your homework (research)
• personal relationship and community building,
• building an infrastructure,
• development of local leadership,
• creating coalitions,
• strategic use of the arts,
• strategic use of nonviolent direct resistance,
• learning how to deal with the contradictions within the movement,
• and being in the right historical moment.