Citizen Journalists, Video and the Internet - A NEW PROJECT

A new internet video project announced on the Global Voices Advocacy website:

In recent years, few major catastrophes have taken place without being captured through video, pictures, or tweets by ordinary citizens. Citizen journalists have reported on everything from the civil war in Syria, to natural disasters such as the 2011 tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, to incidents of police brutality at Occupy protests.

This kind of raw documentation brings new complexity to the information landscape. It has created new avenues for news dissemination, and as more mainstream media outlets include citizen media in their reporting, it has changed and enhanced their coverage. However, there still is a gap between the mainstream media, with their large audiences, and these citizen journalists that must be bridged.

The newly launched project Irrepressible Voices (IV) aims to fill this gap by creating a platform that will connect online activists, bloggers, and citizen journalists with the mainstream media as well as with policy and decision makers.

 This video is a one minute "call to action" by citizen journalists, asking people to upload videos of human rights abuses to their cite.


WATCH SAMPLE VIDEO HERE about the Philippines.

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.

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

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.

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

Charismatic Leaders

Sylvia and I went to hear Bernice Johnson Reagon speak at Stanford on Tuesday. She was fabulous. She gave a history of the civil rights movement from the point of view of song. One of the important things I learned from her talk/singing was that not all the civil rights songs were built upon hymms but some on the top 40. the youth in particular used top 40 songs, especially ray charles, substituting freedom lyrics but keeping the tune. there was a folk revival going on as well at the time. this really solved a dilemma I have been having about where is the music going to come from today? Music and Arts are so crucial to movement building -- its transformative, assuages fear, builds community. and I thought that the reason that the music worked in the sixties is because everyone went to church and knew the tunes. but the youth today don't go to church. how are freedom songs going to come out of hip hop today? Reagon's history made it clear that freedom songs could easily come out of hip hop today. the do-wop songs were never sung at mass meetings but on buses and picket lines that sncc workers filled.

She also pointed out with examples from her own history in the movemnt that those of us who are fighters will always be in the minority -- but we can bring the majority with us at certain moments. One person asked her about why she never signed with a major recording label. she said that she wanted to but wouldn't because there were too many strings attached to doing so -- they wanted to mess with their style. one company bemoaned the fact that sweet honey did fit into a category -- world music-- but that they were from the US so they couldn't market them as such -- reagon wondered tuesday night why the US doesn't consider itself part of the world!?


the next day, I met a woman who works with Bay Area Women in Black and I told her about seeing Reagon the night before. she agreed that reagon was awesome but that she was still a bit too much about herself -- "do you know the names of the other sweet honey singers?" She contrasted bernice's leadership style with that of Suzanne Phar who always brings everyone else along with her as she moves through organizing. This reminded me of Myles Horton's critique of King in chapter 10 "Charisma" of the Long Haul.

I quote from page 120: "While some of the goals of the civil rights movement were not realized, many were. But the civil rights movement as it was then cannot and should not be imitated. It was creative, and we must be creative. We must start where Martin Luther King Jr. was stopped, and move on to a more holistic world conception of the struggle for freedom and justice. The only problem I have with movements has to do with my reservations about charismatic leaders. There's something about having one that can keep democracy from working effectively. But we don't have movements without them. That's why I had no intellectual problem supporting King as a charismatic leader."

from page 126: "King....wasn't just a charismatic leader; he was many other things . . . one of the criticisms I made to him was "you are so much the powerful leader that it's hard for people who work with you to have a role they can grow into . . . from my perspective, it looked as if he and never developed anybody who could take his place after he was killed. . . . People would say, "well, what would martin have done?" and try to do the same thing. To me, this was a great weakness in the movement. . . he never did get around to really dong what he knew was needed. I think that's a very difficult thing for a charismatic leader to do. One of the things I especially like about social movements is that even though they throw up charismatic leaders, most of the people who are part of them can learn to be educators and organizers . . . there is another important thing that social movements do: they radicalize people. That is, people learn from the movement to go beyond the movement."

I love myles horton -- the long haul is an amazing book.

bernice reagon made the point last tuesday night that historians are mistaken when they don't attribute a particular policy or cultural change to a mass movement that took place many years before. movements transform people, then those people go on to make fundamental changes, the cause/effect relationship is not explicit enough for historians to pick up on.

anyway . . those are some of my thoughts