SFFS at SFSU

Business Building (facing the Quad behind HSS and between Science and Admin)

Room 138 --  6:10 to 9:50  -- Discussion then Movies are usually at 8 pm

 DROP INS WELCOME!

Textbook: Lessons from Freedom Summer

Wednesday August 31: Building the Foundations of the Movement

                        Movie:  10,000 Men Named George (or Miles of Smiles)

Readings:

o      Lessons From Freedom Summer – Chapters One and Two; including links to the 1964 Freedom School Curriculum cited within the chapter.

o      Black Resistance to Racist Violence

Wednesday September 7: Building the Foundations of the Movement

    Movie: With All Deliberate Speed

Readings: Lessons from Freedom Summer -  Chapter Three (CORE); including links to the 1964 Freedom School Curriculum cited within the chapter

Wednesday September 14:  Role of Education in Movement Building

                        Movie: You Got to Move

Readings: Lessons from Freedom Summer – Chapter Four (SCLC); including links to the 1964 Freedom School Curriculum cited within the chapter

Wednesday September 21: The Montgomery Bus Boycott   

GUEST SPEAKER:  BRUCE HARTFORD

                        Movie: Boycott

ONLINE Readings:  
Miscellaneous readings
from CRMvet.org   
Stanford's King Center Encyclopedia
SFFS supplemental readings (scribd)
Key Components of a Social Movement Wrksht

Wednesday September 28: ----  Sit Ins and the formation of SNCC   

GUEST SPEAKER:  PHIL HUTCHINGS FROM 7 PM TO 8 PM (OR LATER)

                        Movie FROM 6:30 TO 7 PM When We Were Warriors

Readings: Lessons from Freedom Summer -  Chapter Five (SNCC); including links to the 1964 Freedom School Curriculum cited within the chapter

Wednesday October 5:  Freedom Rides   

GUEST SPEAKER:  MIMI FEINGOLD REAL

                        Movie: excerpts from Eyes on the Prize

Readings: TBD

Wednesday October 12: The White Power Structure in Mississippi   

GUEST SPEAKER: WAZIR PEACOCK

                        Movie: Freedom Song

                        Readings: Lessons from Freedom Summer -  Chapter Six and Seven (The Challenge of Mississippi; including links to the 1964 Freedom School Curriculum cited within the chapter

                       

Wednesday October 19:  Freedom Summer – Mississippi 1960-63   

                        Movie: Freedom on My Mind

Readings: Lessons from Freedom Summer -  Chapters Eight and Nine; including links to the 1964 Freedom School Curriculum cited within the chapter

Wednesday October 26: Freedom Summer – Formation of the MFDP
GUEST SPEAKER:  CHUDE ALLEN and MIRIAM GLICKMAN 
                          Movie: Freedom on my Mind

Readings: Lessons from Freedom Summer -  Chapter Ten and Eleven; including links to the 1964 Freedom School Curriculum cited within the chapter

                         

Wednesday November 9: Selma to Montgomery   

GUEST SPEAKER:  JIMMY ROGERS

                        Movie: from Eyes on the Prize

Readings:

Wednesday November 16:  From Civil Rights to Black Power 

GUEST SPEAKER: TBD

                        Movie: Orangeburg Massacre

                        Readings: download selections from the Ilearn page

Wednesday November 23 – NO CLASS – Thanksgiving break

Wednesday November 30: From Civil Rights to Black Power   

Readings: download selections from the Ilearn page                                                           

Wednesday December 7: Reflections on Projects and the Course.

More HELP from CRMvets and Alice Walker

Bruce Hartford has added a 4th comment to The Help discussion by Penny Patch at http://www.crmvet.org/comm/helphome.htm.

Also, since Ruby Sales mentions Alice Walker's comments.........

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett.  Langston Hughes who befriended me when I was very young, just beginning to write, exhibited a quality I also have: I deeply prefer to say nothing about another’s work if I dislike it.  In fact, decades ago I wrote a short review of another writer’s work that hurt her feelings.  Realizing this, I gave up writing reviews.

I put off listening to The Help thinking I wouldn’t like it; that the story would awaken pain (especially from my years as an activist living in Jackson, Mississippi, the novel’s setting) from which perhaps I had not sufficiently recovered.  My own mother and father and grandparents before them were “the help” to generations of racist white southerners.  My mother especially took on a job as maid and caretaker of a white woman’s house and children from seven in the morning to seven at night, every day but Sunday.  Leaving her own home and family bereft of her light-filled presence, attention and love.  A robbery of guidance and grace,  a theft of security.

But when I began listening to The Help, I found myself seeing my mother’s sacrifice and love at an even greater depth than I had before.  By the time I finished the novel, late in the night, and after many tears and some laughter, I felt immensely comforted by the reminder  that our mothers and fathers who basically re-enslaved themselves to feed, clothe and educate their children, also did their best to love the children they were forced to tend, thus keeping themselves human in a situation in which the most self-destructive hatred might have developed. Destroying all our lives.

I used to wonder if any white child in the South who received the love of the great souls forced to tend them would ever develop enough soul of his or her own to  rise in their defense.  Or even to an understanding, however limited or imperfect, of their silenced, hidden sacrifice.  Kathryn Stockett has done so.

I appreciate The Help for its healing response to a lifetime (really lifetimes) of injustice and hurt. And for its teaching of solidarity with the intimately oppressed.

As a film, it too could move us forward into the necessary awareness humans must continue to develop: that it is our denial of ourselves as family, with one another, and with all of creation, that threatens our planetary existence.

The readers of this audio book are brilliant.  Their voices delightfully true.

Alice Walker

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

World War II Veterans

The New York Times/Bay Citizen reported (12/23) on the story of Carl E. Clark, a black WW II Veteran who is, today, being considered for a Medal of Honor for his heroic and successful act of putting out a fire on his ship in 1945.  The reporter noted that Clark "is one of an estimated one million black World War II veterans whose accomplishments were routinely ignored by the military."

This made me think of another area in which black WW II veterans are routinely ignored -- by historians and popular culture.   Danny Glover made a film, Freedom Song, which attempts to rectify our collective amnesia. [You can borrow this film, in its entirety or a 30 minute excerpted version from the Freedom school library]. This superb docu-drama illustrates the important role Southern World War II veterans played when they returned home.  After fighting to defend democracy against fascism abroad, especially in Europe, black veterans returned home with a renewed sense of purpose, confidence and abilities to fight for democracy at home. Amzie Moore was one of many....

When Moore returned to Mississippi [1945], he discovered a climate of increased repression. News photographs of German women sitting on the laps of African American soldiers had angered white Mississippians. “For at least six to eight months, at least one Negro each week was killed.” In 1950, Moore, Dr. T. R. M. Howard, and a group of black Mississippians founded the Regional Council of Negro Leadership in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi. The purpose of the council was to encourage “first-class citizenship” —voting, office holding, and property owning. The organization, whose rallies were attended by thousands, began a campaign which included encouraging boycotts of service stations where blacks couldn’t use the restrooms and political pressure on the state to equalize public facilities. After the Brown decision [1955] and the formation of the White Citizens Councils, Moore sensed a movement to drive blacks from the Delta, because the whites sensed that otherwise blacks “might dominate them politically, and . . . that,” according to Moore, “is really the beginning of our trouble.”

In l955, Moore was elected President of the Cleveland branch of the NAACP, a group of eighty-seven members. Moore, with the support of Medgar Evers, soon expanded the branch to include 564 members, but soon violence against blacks in the Delta escalated. The murders of Dr. George W. Lee and Emmett Till, followed by Dr. T.R.M. Howard’s decision to leave the state, thwarted efforts to enforce the political gains promised by Brown. Moore noted a “great exodus of leaders from the state due to the pressure that was being brought on by white organizations bent and bound on maintaining slavery.” In 1956, the fourteen blacks who attempted to vote in the East Cleveland precinct were greeted at the ballot box by a man armed with a .38 Smith and Wesson, who ordered them to place their ballots in a brown envelope. Moore went to the telephone to inform the Justice Department that the group had been prevented from voting. Moore continued to carry on his isolated battle to enfranchise blacks, printing up copies of the Constitution and opening citizenship schools. His ability to build connections outside of the state offered him not only personal friendships with activists like Ella Baker, but economic support from Baker’s organization In Friendship.

In l960, frustrated by the bureaucracy of the NAACP, Moore attended a meeting of SNCC in Atlanta, Georgia, and invited Bob Moses and the voter registration drive to Mississippi. Moses’ first impression of Moore is that he was a man “who lives like a brick wall in a brick house, dug into this country like a tree beside the water.” Moore often accompanied Moses on his early trips to encourage voter registration among rural blacks, sharing with Moses his connections throughout the state. Once the SNCC workers arrived in Mississippi, Moore’s home served as an improvised Freedom House. Moore recalled that he “used to have sleeping in my house six and eight and ten, twelve, who had come. I bought a lots of cheese, and always we’d eat cheese and peaches, and sometimes we would get spaghetti and ground chuck or ground beef and make a huge tub of meatballs and spaghetti to fill everybody up.”  Moore agreed with Bob Moses about the difficulties voter registration was facing.

• Because of “Hitlerism” tactics that are employed by whites in the Delta, it is extremely difficult to go into a community and start registering people.
• First, they must lose all the fear that now grips the hearts and minds of 99 percent of the Negro people.
• Secondly, they must regain their self-respect and self-reliance. This can be done by teaching them the philosophy of non-violence.
• Thirdly, they must be taught how to endure suffering because if there are any changes in the immediate future, there will undoubtedly be a lot of suffering among the people who attempt to exercise their constitutional rights.
• These things must be taught before a voter registration program in the Delta can be successful

Moses termed Amzie Moore his “father in the movement.” To Moses, Moore “was what I like to think an organizer should be—working behind the scenes, helping to set up things. . . . He didn’t have a formal education; he still had his common roots, which didn’t have that sort of institutional stamp a university can put on you. On the other hand, he had a very special analytical and well-read mind. So he could talk to the people and he could talk to the powerful.”

-------From Chapter Five in Lessons from Freedom Summer

Students! Apply now for 2011 Student Freedom Ride

2011 Student Freedom Ride
American Experience Invites College Students to “Get on the Bus.”  Be one of 40 college students to join original Freedom Ridersin retracing the 1961 Rides.
May 6-16, 2011: Washington, DC to Jackson, MS

Apply now!  Read the New York Times article.

JOIN students from across the country in retracing the route of the 1961 Freedom Rides. Accepted students will participate at no cost to them. All transportation, hotel and food expenses are covered by American Experience.

PARTICIPATE in an intergenerational conversation about civic engagement.  What does it mean today? What has changed since 1961?  What inspires young people to “get on the bus”?

SHARE the journey.  Through live blogging, Twitter, and Facebook, the students on the bus will be able to share their experiences and, in a sense, bring others along on their journey.

Application period is open!
Application deadline: January 17, 2011
Decisions announced: February 2011

Women and SNCC-- new book

Book Reading and Celebration of "Hands on the Freedom Plow"

Come Join the Bay Area Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement at USF on Saturday November 6th when they will host a coming-out book party for the long  awaited "Hands on the Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC."

Every aspect of SNCC's history is represented in this anthology of the  writings of 52 of the SNCC women who worked on the front lines of the  Southern Freedom Struggle. They are northern and southern, young and  old, urban and rural, black, white, and Latina; and their stories are  powerful testimonies to the intensity of the struggle for social change.

For more information about "Hands on the Freedom Plow"

Please pick up a copy of this book at your favorite independent  bookstore, and ask them to stock it. You will not be able to purchase it  at this event, but you will be able to have yours signed by the four  contributors who live in the Bay Area and by special guest Faith  Holsaert, one of the six editors, all SNCC women, who have labored for  15 years to get this book published.

Join us in celebration.

November 6, 2010

1pm to 5pm

University of San Francisco (USF)

Lone Mountain campus, Room: LM 100

For directions

Reflections on the student strike in Farmville, VA

On July 24th, we saw excerpts from With All Deliberate Speed. The movie describes the history of two of the five cases that were bundled together to form the 1954 BROWN decision, overturning the constitutionality of segregation of public schools. The movie also went into contemporary classrooms in Farmville, VA and Clarendon County (Briggs case) to see what effects these cases have had.

The excerpts watched Saturday morning at SFFS focused on the Farmville case. This case originated with a student strike organized by 16 year old Barbara Johns in 1951. Barbara and her classmates wanted a new school. The NAACP was persuaded by Johns to consider adopting their case as part of the five cases they were looking for to overturn Plessy v Ferguson.

Here are some reflections by SFFS participants after watching the film:

Barbara was really not very well known at school, she had a hidden fire--when the need for justice became unbearable, that fire had already been kindled in her heart and mind. She was ready to act.

Fear: touching the Bible
Ignorance: Imposed v. conditioned
Outcome: Better than desired goal
Perpetuating bad behavior: It only takes a few bad people to make things bad and only a few good people to make things right.

I didn't realize how unequal the schools were for black students. It was also striking how blatant the superintendent of schools was about not caring about the unequal facilities. It was amazing he told the black students he did not care if they received an education!

Is everybody prejudiced? Are there degrees of prejudice...depending on their access to power?
Barbara Johns put in strategic effort for her vision of having better schools.

The thoughtfulness of the students at Moton to do the strike as peers without the help of teachers and faculty shows insight into the resistance of their opponents. The youth inspire me to see how underutilized our youth are today.

In a social movement, there seems to be a tension between a desire for practical gains and a desire for idealistic gains among two groups of people:
1. practical gains = a better school environment with quality water, food, no cracked paint
2. Idealistic gain = integration of racial groups.
---Tension = does it hinder effective mobilization among groups; does it even exist; how do you resolve such a tension?
I see this tension playing out in communities today. Let's integrate the neighborhoods by mobilizing poor people (Ideal). However, poor people don't prioritize integration as much as they care about better living conditions.

It was mostly the girls.
They seem to have a strong sense of entitlement, to deserving a good education in a well equipped school. The parents apparently had agreed to risk being jailed for the kid's acts though that wasn't explicitly shown.

Emmett Till versus Oscar Grant

At the recent SF Freedom School session, we had a very involved and interesting discussion that revolved around comparing the events and organizing surrounding the murder of Emmett Till (1955 in MS) and Oscar Grant (2009 in Oakland). As with most discussions of events that are very emotional and complex, we were only beginning to scratch the surface when we had to stop.

I am hoping we can use the blog to keep the conversation going.... Face to face is superior to blogs, but blogs have their place too.

Here are the notes from the  easel pad....where do we go from here?

news media focus:

• ET = national/intl news on miscarriage of justice; local MS papers criticizing outside attention;
• OG = media focused on "violence" of protests

Picture is work a thousand words:

• ET = Jet Magazine (galvanizes black national community)
  
• OG = cell phone videos (undermines white denial of cops' culpability)
  

jury deliberation:

• ET = 67 minutes;
• OG = 9 hours

defense argument:

• ET = body was not Till's;
• OG = Did Mehserle intend to kill Grant?

role of federal govt:

• ET = refused to intervene;
• OG = plans to file civil suit after criminal verdict

goal of organizing around murder:

• ET = Bryant and Milam convicted of murder and kidnapping;
• OG = disband/disarm BART police, civilian oversight of police; jail all cops involved, media stop demonizing Grant, jobs and education for minority youth, free all political prisoners, drop charges against SF 8, end gang injunctions, revise police bill of rights, end 3 strikes, review hiring and training practices of police, money to oscar grant's family, drop charges against those arrested in protest, federal government intervene to protect the civil rights of Grant family and Oakland community

immediate result of trail:

• ET = Bryant and Milam acquitted, get paid to tell their story to LIFE magazine;
• O.G. = Mehserle convicted of manslaughter.

other effects or lack thereof:

• ET = In Friendship formed in response to Till's murder to raise money for civil rights activities, positioned to be able to support Montgomery Bus Boycott 100 days after murder; contributions to existing civil rights organizations (NAACP, FOR, CORE and local independents) rise dramatically; American Jewish Committee begins lobbying Congress to bolster existing Civil Rights legislation; black MS sharecroppers boycott Bryant's store and put him out of business; a generation of activists (e.g., John Lewis) are shaken out of their paralysis by the Till case to look for ways to make change, when they get to college, they discover workshops on nonviolent direct action being taught by employees of SCLC and FOR.
• O.G. = Pirone and Doemenici are fired; BART police lose Tasers until they are retrained; legislation is pending in CA House for civilian oversight of Oakland cops; nonprofits work with city officials to find ways for youth to vent their feelings in a nonviolent way; anarchists continue to exploit peaceful protests to provoke police violence; initial groups creating coalitions like CAPE unable to sustain their activity beyond a few months; direct action not coordinated and sustained over time; not part of a national movement against institutional racism (such as police brutality).

Lessons???? drawn re: organizing from comparing two events in their contexts?

• Make sure you share what's happened
• work is never over (e.g., protests forced arrest of Mehserle and firing of Pirone and Doemenici, but after verdict, more organizing to ensure that civilian oversight happens and it has teeth, actually effects police training and behavior)
  
• empowerment comes from being part of a group (need to get over our fears of speaking up today)
• don't count on the media to support your cause
• racism is institutional
• One cannot look to the legal system for "justice" (decisions can be used to organize for institutional and paradigm changes)
• To what degree are social justice organizations today working together?
• What role did JET magazine play in successfully getting the word out about what actually happened to Emmett Till? What are the counterparts to JET today, are they as successful in gaining support for organizing against police executions today as JET was as successful in helping people organize against institutional lynching and terrorism in 1955?