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For this week’s Peace of History:
On May 29, 1968, the Poor People’s Campaign began in Washington, D.C., a month and a half after Dr. King had been assassinated. Dr. King had started organizing the campaign months before, convinced that the issue of socioeconomics was the next front in the struggle against racial injustice. However, when he learned of a majority-Black strike of municipal sanitation workers in Tennessee, he took a break from the national campaign to make his final return South. On February 1, 1968, Memphis sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker were crushed to death by a malfunctioning garbage collection truck. In 1964, two other sanitation workers had been killed in a similar manner. In the following years, the city of Memphis refused to replace the defective machines or even remove them from service; refused to provide safety equipment, uniforms, or restrooms; kept wages so low that many sanitation workers relied on welfare and food stamps; forced late-night shifts with no overtime pay; and provided no procedures for filing grievances. Strikes were attempted -- first in 1963, which failed for lack of proper organization; and the second in 1966, which the city beat to the punch with strikebreakers and threats of jailing the strike leaders. The second strike had been led by worker-turned-organizer T.O. Jones of Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a union the city of Memphis refused to recognize. On February 11, ten days after the deaths of Cole and Walker, over 700 members of the AFSCME unanimously voted to strike. After a week and a half, city police deployed mace, tear gas, and clubs on nonviolent demonstrators marching on City Hall. With this kind of brutality running rampant in Memphis, 150 local ministers under the leadership of Rev. James Lawson met on February 24 to form the Community on the Move for Equality (COME). Their plan was to nonviolently bring national attention to the strike and put public pressure on the Mayor Loeb, who continued to resist the strikers even against the wishes of the City Council. Initially kept apprised by phone, national civil rights leaders such as Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, and later Dr. King would arrive in Memphis to support the strikers. On March 28, Dr. King led his last march: one that led to a splinter group throwing sticks and bricks into store windows, and the police responding with teargas and indiscriminate violence. Looting broke out, police shot dead a 16 year old boy, and by nightfall, nearly 4000 National Guard troops with tanks had been called in to enforce a state of emergency. Later, King learned that the Black community in Memphis had a militant “Black Power” wing called the Invaders. Some in Memphis at the time thought of the Invaders as quite separate from the rest of the nonviolent demonstrators -- young, reckless, extreme. Others tried to group all of the nonviolent protesters in with the rioters to discredit the sanitation workers’ grievances. Indeed, Blackness in America is far from a single monolithic culture -- but the nonviolent civil rights leaders of the 1960s also understood that all African-Americans do suffer under the same racist superstructure, which includes the interconnected systems of policing, poverty, and labor exploitation, among more. When Dr. King addressed the issue of rioting and property damage, he notably did not criticize their lack of civility, nor did he address the ethics of looting. Instead, he criticized the fact that the rioting distracted the media from the real issues: “Secondly, let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. Now we've got to keep attention on that. That's always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window breaking. I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that 1,300 sanitation workers are on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn't get around to that.” A year earlier, Dr. King made his position on riots clear in his speech “The Other America”: “…I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.” It wasn’t just about the deaths of Echol Cole and Robert Walker. The reaction to their deaths was explosive in part because the other municipal workers knew that it could have been any of them. In the final speech of his life, King continued on to argue for Black solidarity and working class solidarity. He called for boycotts, an old tried-and-true tactic of the civil rights movement, but notably also included some nonviolent tactics in line with “Black Power” strategies of Black separatism, such as the bank-in: “Now not only that, we've got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank. We want a "bank-in" movement in Memphis. Go by the savings and loan association. I'm not asking you something that we don't do ourselves in SCLC. Judge Hooks and others will tell you that we have an account here in the savings and loan association from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. We are telling you to follow what we're doing, put your money there. You have six or seven black insurance companies here in the city of Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an "insurance-in." Now these are some practical things that we can do. We begin the process of building a greater economic base, and at the same time, we are putting pressure where it really hurts. And I ask you to follow through here.” Many Americans today are not accustomed to thinking about the connections between racism, police violence, poverty, labor exploitation, war, ecological devastation, and climate change. Even Dr. King, at the time of his death, was continuing to broaden his understanding of these connections. While some aspects of society have demonstrably improved for the historically oppressed, other unjust conditions have changed little in the ensuing years. Here lies danger: focusing on the improvements of one aspect of society can hide the rot of another. Jim Crow is over and most municipal garbage disposal in the United States is now semi-automated and much safer -- but the unlivable wage the Memphis sanitation workers were protesting was equivalent to between $12.06 - $14.32 in 2019 dollars (today, the US federal minimum wage is $7.25, and sanitation workers in Memphis make about $12/hour). What is different, 52 years later, is that now more people than ever see passed the distractions and recognize the interwoven patterns of injustice. Let us remember, when tragedy strikes and innocent people die, when responsible parties escape consequences and it seems that evil is winning -- we are not alone, our allies are diverse and many, and our numbers are only growing. Sources: “"I've Been to the Mountaintop," Address Delivered at Bishop Charles Mason Temple.” https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/ive-been-mountaintop-address-delivered-bishop-charles-mason-temple “Memphis Sanitation Workers' Strike.” https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/memphis-sanitation-workers-strike “The Other America.” https://www.crmvet.org/docs/otheram.htm For this week’s Peace of History:
With economic insecurity currently on many people’s minds, let us look at the unique activities and principles of the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA). Founded in 1929 as primarily a research, educational, and central coordinating organization for the progressive labor movement, the group also provided relief, ran public awareness campaigns, and generally sought to build an expansive “labor culture” among working-class Americans. Under A.J. Muste’s leadership, the CPLA tactics were grounded in experience and more flexible than those of many other more ideological leftist groups at the time. Muste was heavily influenced by his colleague David Saposs, who believed that “an effective labor movement is only possible when it is based upon a labor culture; that is, a mode of feeling, thinking and acting in terms of the problems and aspirations of labor.” Saposs, like many labor progressives of the time, viewed the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as “business unionism, which deliberately discouraged all working class organizational activity except unions, and which led the workers to immerse themselves in the capitalistic culture” (118). As a healthier and more fulfilling alternative to the dominant capitalist culture, some early CPLA projects focused on organizing recreational activities like picnics, dances, and singing clubs. They taught union songs and labor history, and generally attempted to educate working class people by framing the labor struggle as the next step in the expansion of American liberty. The ultimate goal was to develop a radical bloc within the conservative AFL to force the broader group to accept progressive measures. From the start, the CPLA focused its attention on many of the “neglected” groups of the working class. Taking the opposite tact of the Communist Party, which was at once too reliant on long-winded theory and also too opportunistic with regards to strikes, the CPLA always started with the specific concerns of the workers to build sustainable, community-led movements. One of the first groups the CPLA started with was African-American laborers. Indeed, among the pamphlets published by the CPLA in its first year was “Negro Labor.” With both Black nationalism and Black capitalism becoming popular ideologies for many African-Americans in the early 20th century, the CPLA offered a third alternative to Black workers: working class solidarity with special attention to the unique challenges and implications of anti-Black racism. The theory was that barriers like racial prejudice and ideological differences would dissipate through the organic education of collective action and shared struggle. Although this proved to be an imperfect strategy, it was often the reason why the CPLA was successful when similar leftist and labor groups had failed. The CPLA also regarded the concerns of woman-laborers to require special attention, similarly to those of African-American workers. Despite this wisdom, however, the CPLA was only somewhat more progressive with regards to views of women than many other leftist organizations of the time: the CPLA’s typical “labor feminism” sought to cultivate female leadership and female worker organization, but also presumed natural differences in ability between men and women, and continued to envision the prototypical “Worker” as a masculine force. Moreover, the CPLA recruited young people of all genders from the League for Industrial Democracy (youth wing of the Socialist Party especially active on college campuses), and from the YWCA’s industrial department (with which Muste was well-acquainted from past collaborative projects). Against the established leftist theory of the time, Muste also recruited intellectuals and “professional” wage-earners of “new capitalism” into the network, envisioning this new class of wage-earners as brothers to labor. Perhaps the CPLA found some of its most dramatic successes in organizing jobless people -- first in Seattle, then spreading across the country (Ohio and Pennsylvania would ultimately organize the most, with approximately 100,000 and 50,000 people, respectively). With these numbers, the CPLA coordinated massive public awareness campaigns, educating the public of the invisible plight of unemployment as well as measures like government assistance that could mitigate them. And yet, perhaps it could also be said that FDR’s federal response to the Great Depression helped end that era of progressive labor organizing. To Muste, the foundations of a movement, an organization, or a policy must be aligned with a diverse, anti-capitalist labor culture in order to win and maintain workers’ rights. He was unshakeable in his belief in the primacy of the common people’s will, even when FDR implemented some of the progressive policies while maintaining the dominant capitalist power structures. It is a problem that continues, as contemporary leftists still contend with reactionaries and moderate liberals -- but perhaps the solution is to simply continue the work of building the culture of labor as a more attractive alternative to the individualistic, capitalist society in which we live. Culture, after all, is cumulative -- and history is not over. For this week’s Peace of History:
We continue to celebrate Labor History Month with the famous story of the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike, commonly known as the “Bread and Roses” Strike. Last Sunday was Mother’s Day, a holiday formed in part to bring attention to and celebrate the many underappreciated labors and responsibilities of women. Perhaps less known is the role of women in the American labor movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, both as organizers and as workers. After a new state law shortened the maximum work week for woman and child mill workers from 56 to 54 hours, and after mill owners responded by cutting wages, the strike began with a group of Polish woman textile workers discovering the wage cut and walking out. Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer Joseph Ettor and Socialist Party of America member Arturo Giovannitti had already been attempting to organize the textile workers of the city. The two quickly became leaders of the strike and formed a committee of 56 people: four representatives of fourteen nationalities. Like the strike that would hit Lawrence 7 years later, the 1912 strike organized efficient solutions to the extensive communication issues between the strikers. Strike meetings, decisions, and demands were ultimately translated into 25 different languages, and the ethnic representative system allowed for the rapid communication of pertinent information from the strike leadership to the workers. The United Textile Workers (UTW), an AFL-affiliated union, attempted to speak for the strikers early on to work out agreements with individual mills, but with the leadership clearly centered around Ettor and Giovannitti as well as the ethnic representatives, the mill owners ignored these attempts to undercut Ettor and Giovannitti. The reaction to the strike, however, was swift and extreme. The city’s alarm bells were rung for the first time in its history. Police militias began patrolling streets. Bouts of violence between picketters, mill owners, and police broke out. Someone paid by the president of the American Woolen Company tried to frame the strikers by planting dynamite in various places across the city. Later, authorities fallaciously charged the strike leadership as accomplices to murder for the death of Anna LoPizzo, a striker likely shot by police. Ettor and Giovannitti were jailed, 22 more militia companies began patrolling the streets, and the city was put under martial law. To replace the lost strike leadership, the IWW sent “Big” Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, along with several other organizers to Lawrence. Together, they raised funds from other New England mills; established relief committees, soup kitchens, and food distribution stations; and coordinated volunteer doctors to provide medical care. They also organized for the children of strikers to be sent out of Lawrence temporarily to the homes of supporters, mostly in New York City, for their own safety and to reduce the strain on the strike fund. When police attempted to stop them, beating strikers and supporters including women and children, the press witnessed and reported on the brutality. The story got the attention of Congress, which brought the strikers’ plight to national consciousness and made the mill owners’ position morally indefensible. The owners caved. At the end of the strike, the workers had won most of their demands. The children sent away to New York City returned home. Without a permanent union or other organization to protect the gains, however, mill owners were able to reverse every improvement over the next few years, leading to the 1919 strike described last week. In both strikes, the ability to organize an incredibly diverse and multilingual industry of workers proved to be essential. Next week: we will continue exploring the intersection of labor and peace with more stories from the movements. Sources: “Lawrence, MA factory workers strike ‘for Bread and Roses,’ U.S. 1912.” https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/lawrence-ma-factory-workers-strike-bread-and-roses-us-1912 “The Lawrence textile strike, 1912 - Sam Lowry.” https://libcom.org/history/articles/lawrence-textile-strike-1912 “The Strike that Shook America.” https://www.history.com/news/the-strike-that-shook-america For this week’s Peace of History:
We celebrate the first week of Labor History Month with the story of the 1919 Lawrence Textile Workers’ Strike: an episode that proved the power of nonviolent resistance in the American context decades before Dr. King, that bridged the gap between pacifism and trade unionism, and that sent A.J. Muste on the path to later co-found the influential Committee for Nonviolent Action. A.J. Muste (for whom the VPT conference center is named) was a Dutch-born American pastor and activist known for his lifelong work in the labor, peace, and civil rights movements. Shortly after the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) was founded in 1916, A.J. Muste became an active member of the pacifist organization. By the end of the next year, with the United States’ entry into the First World War already several months in, Muste’s wildly unpopular pacifism led to the resignation of his pastorate in Newtonville, MA. Shortly thereafter, Muste moved to Boston and joined up with two other pacifist ministers involved in FOR, Cedric Long and Harold Rotzel, as well as three women of some social renown: Anna N. Davis, Ethel Paine, and Elizabeth Glendower Evans. Together, they formed the Comradeship: a group dedicated to investigating “the question of how to organize our lives so that they would truly express the teachings and spirit of Jesus.” In 1919, when FOR asked Long, Rotzel, and Muste to assist in the arbitration of the strike at Lawrence, MA, the Comradeship had their chance to put their philosophy to the test. There were many challenges to resolving the strike from the start. The more than 30,000 striking workers came from over twenty different ethnic groups with different languages, spoke little English, and faced an ascendant and violent nationalism hostile to their foreignness. The workers had organized themselves into smaller ethnic groups, with a spokesperson for each group, but factory bosses had devised a divide-and-conquer strategy of rewarding “old” immigrants and exploiting “new” immigrants, further stoking ethnic tensions among the workers. And the brutality of police attacks on the workers began on the very first day of the strike, with police clubbing not just workers on picket lines and outside the mills, but also entering the homes of workers to attack women and other members of working families. Many pacifists of the time, including some in FOR, believed that in irreconcilable situations, it might actually be better to cede victory to evil rather than to violate fundamental pacifist principles. Unlike mainstream pacifism of the time, however, when push came to shove, the Comradeship could not stand neutral. Moreover, while many American pacifists viewed labor strikes as inherently violent, the Comradeship realized almost immediately upon entering the situation in Lawrence that law enforcement was the “creator of violence” in the strike. Muste would argue later that, although worker activism might appear to disturb the “social peace,” the language of “peace” could often be used to maintain an unjust status quo -- one of the many important lessons he would learn from the 1919 strike. In helping to organize the strikers into a more sustainable force, the Comradeship helped to form the Amalgamated Textile Workers of America (ATWA), a new union of skilled and unskilled laborers. Muste was immediately elected to the office of Executive Secretary. His immigrant and working-class credentials helped him win the trust of the workers, but it was largely his strategic flexibility paired with a rigid commitment to justice that maintained that trust. One early episode in particular demonstrated both of these qualities especially well. Of course, the Comradeship discouraged the strikers from retaliatory violence against the police and scab workers, but sensing that some dramatic action was required to take its place, Long, Rotzel, and Muste took the risk of suffering police brutality to lead the picket line. On the first day of leading the line, Muste and Long were separated from the rest of the strikers, beaten until they could not stand, and then arrested. The Comradeship, however, turned the beating into a victory -- preceding the strategies that Dr. King would champion decades later, the brutalization of the clearly nonviolent pastors by the city police turned the city’s opinion of the situation overnight. More money began coming in for the strike fund. The tone of the press became more sympathetic. And the workers now had a living example of the power of nonviolent resistance. So when police mounted machine guns in key locations of strike zones, and when “radicals” (who later turned out to be agents provocateur) called for the commandeering of the machine guns, the strike committee decided to continue the nonviolence strategy. To their great frustration, the police were unable to instigate any more significant bouts of violence from the strikers. Mill employers attempted to frame Muste for murder, but that plan was not carried through, in part because such an accusation would strain credulity. At the end of 16-weeks, with both sides exhausted and preparing to give up, Muste was finally called in by the head of the American Woolen Company in Lawrence. They settled: 15% increase in wages and no discrimation against strikers. It was an important victory for the labor movement, a critical chapter of the early peace movement, and an essential learning experience for A.J. Muste -- the beginning of much of his decades-long work. Next week: we will compare the 1919 Lawrence strike with the much more famous, and decidedly more violent, 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike -- so-called the “Bread and Roses” strike organized by the Industrial Workers of the World. Sources: Danielson, Leilah. American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the Twentieth Century, 2014. “Lawrence Mill Workers strike against wage cuts, 1919.” https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/lawrence-mill-workers-strike-against-wage-cuts-1919 “This Day in Resistance History: Hope College graduate A.J. Muste and the 1919 Lawrence textile workers strike.” https://griid.org/2013/02/03/this-day-in-resistance-history-hope-college-graduate-a-j-muste-and-the-1919-lawrence-textile-workers-strike/ "Sorrow Song"; “The First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining”; "Question and Answer"5/3/2020
For this week’s Peace of History:
We conclude National Poetry month by sharing two poems that each meditate on the sense of absurdity, loss of meaning, and disorientation during times of crisis. The first immediately brings to mind the unspeakably inhumane horrors that people of color, and especially children, have suffered in recent centuries due to colonialism and war. In a simple litany of places and ethnicities, some of the worst scenes of human brutality are evoked like a highlight reel. And yet, the poem is not about the brutality itself (the atrocities are only mentioned, not described), but about the banal sources of that brutality, and the children who witness them. The second poem is the inverse to the first: it is a contemporary poem that has recently gone viral on Twitter. Composed of email snippets, the poem shows the strange dissonance of heartfelt well-wishes and attempts to connect alongside naked capitalistic opportunism -- especially during a deadly global pandemic. In the age of COVID-19, everything is heightened. Each stanza clings to a sense of normalcy, but the things that mattered before the quarantines seem strange now, and new normals are being formed before our eyes. Finally, we also share a third poem to remind us of the reasons to struggle for justice. Despite how long we have struggled, how hard we have already fought for a better world, how many we have lost in our striving -- faith in the possibility of a better world sustains many of us. This has always been true, but in this most historic of moments, the inherent injustices of our society have been exposed by the pandemic, and we can all feel what seems like the foundations of the whole earth shift and heave below our feet. The old systems are in crisis, and never have the possibilities for the reshaping of the world seemed more real. “Sorrow Song” for the eyes of the children, the last to melt, the last to vaporize, for the lingering eyes of the children, staring, the eyes of the children of buchenwald, of viet nam and johannesburg, for the eyes of the children of nagasaki, for the eyes of the children of the middle passage, for the cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes, russian eyes, american eyes, for all that remains of the children, their eyes, staring at us, amazed to see the extraordinary evil in ordinary men. Lucille Clifton (1936-2010) -- “The First Lines of Emails I’ve Received While Quarantining” In these uncertain times as we navigate the new normal, are you willing to share your ideas and solutions? As you know, many people are struggling. I know you are up against it: the digital landscape. We share your concerns. As you know, many people are struggling. We hope this note finds you and your family safe. We’ve never seen anything like this before. Here are 25 Distance Learning Tips! As you know, many people are struggling. Feeling Fiesta today? Happy Taco Tuesday! Calories don’t count during a pandemic. Grocers report flour shortages as more people are baking than ever! As you know, many people are struggling. Count your blessings. Share your blessings. Get Free Curb-side pick up or ship to your house! Chicken! Lemon! Artichokes! As you know, many people are struggling. How are you inspiring greatness today? We have a cure for your cabin fever. Pandemic dial-in town hall TONIGHT! As you know, many people are struggling. Mother’s Day looks a little different this year. You’re invited to shop all jeans for 50% off! Yes, buy 1, get 1 free! As you know, many people are struggling. Call us to discuss a loan extension without penalty. ACT NOW: Tell Congress Charters should Not Line their Pockets During the COVID crisis. Now shipping facemasks as recommended by the CDC. As you know, many people are struggling. This is not normal. Jessica Salfia (2020) https://twitter.com/jessica_salfia/status/1249000027198033922 -- “Question and Answer” Durban, Birmingham, Cape Town, Alabama, Johannesburg, Watts, The earth around Struggling, fighting, Dying--for what? A world to gain. Groping, hoping, Waiting--for what? A world to gain. Dreams kicked asunder, Why not go under? There's a world to gain. But suppose I don't want it, Why take it? To remake it. Langston Hughes (1902-1967) For this week’s Peace of History:
We continue our celebration of National Poetry Month with two more poems. Yesterday was the 50th annual Earth Day -- the most unique in the half-century history of the holiday due to covid-19. So in acknowledgment of the holiday, as well as the extraordinary circumstances in which we celebrated our home planet, our poems this week offer differing perspectives on our relationship with Earth. In the first poem, by Dunya Mikhail, the narrator describes a utopian planet in contrast to Earth: the other planet is safe, comfortable, beautiful, peaceful. But what is the value of such a life if there is no one else with whom to share it? On the other hand, the narrator of the second poem, by Robert Frost, is content with Earth except that he must share it with others. The poem is also reminiscent of the covid-19 quarantine “loud birds” phenomenon, in which people around the world have noticed the high volume of bird sounds as the sounds of human activity have diminished. The responses to the dramatic increase in “natural” sounds in our built environments have been varied, but Frost reminds us that if we are offended by the songs of Earth, perhaps it is we who adjust ourselves. “Another Planet” I have a special ticket to another planet beyond this Earth. A comfortable world, and beautiful: a world without much smoke, not too hot and not too cold. The creatures are gentler there, and the governments have no secrets. The police are nonexistent: there are no problems and no fights. And the schools don’t exhaust their students with too much work for history has yet to start and there’s no geography and no other languages. And even better: the war has left its “r” behind and turned into love, so the weapons sleep beneath the dust, and the planes pass by without shelling the cities, and the boats look like smiles on the water. All things are peaceful and kind on the other planet beyond this Earth. But still I hesitate to go alone. Dunya Mikhail. "Another Planet," The Iraqi Nights (2013). -- “A Minor Bird” I have wished a bird would fly away, And not sing by my house all day; Have clapped my hands at him from the door When it seemed as if I could bear no more. The fault must partly have been in me. The bird was not to blame for his key. And of course there must be something wrong In wanting to silence any song. Robert Frost. “A Minor Bird,” West-Running Brook (1928). For this Week’s Peace of History:
We share two more poems in celebration of National Poetry Month. This time, our first poem comes from Wendell Berry. “Let Us Pledge” concerns the awful truths of our society, the stories we tell ourselves to stay sane in an insane world, and how paper-thin those defenses can be. The narrator starts sentences with familiar phrases but ends them in extreme, unexpected ways; he gives voice to that which too often goes unsaid, revealing the contradictions between our values and our behaviors. As our governments debate the premature reopening of the economy and other deadly actions to take in this pandemic era, Berry reminds us of how important it is for us to articulate the horrible unspoken consequences and the logical conclusions. Our second poem is the very famous and popular Langston Hughes poem “Let America Be America Again.” In it, Hughes masterfully contrasts the national story of freedom, opportunity, and equality with the realities of living in the United States for anyone who is not a privileged white man. Hughes lays bare how the national narrative told through text books and federal holidays fools and manipulates us to accept injustice. So many prominent U.S. politicians today rely on vapid rhetoric and puerile pronouncements -- thoughtful policies (or lack thereof), voting histories, and personal indiscretions have not seemed to matter much at all in the past few years. And yet, Hughes reminds us that the purest version of that American Dream belongs to the most oppressed in this nation, for they have experienced it the least. Like Berry, Hughes’ poem is also about narratives and lived experiences, but while Berry’s poem ends with bitterness and perhaps even resignation, Hughes ends his poem defiantly, prophetically: certain of a brighter and more just future led by yesterday’s victims. “Let Us Pledge” Let us pledge allegiance to the flag and to the national sacrifice areas for which it stands, garbage dumps and empty holes, sold out for a higher spire on the rich church, the safety of voyagers in golf carts, the better mood of the stock market. Let us feast today, though tomorrow we starve. Let us gorge upon the body of the Lord, consuming the earth for our greater joy in Heaven, that fair Vacationland. Let us wander forever in the labyrinths of our self-esteem. Let us evolve forever toward the higher consciousness of the machine. The pool of our engine-driven fate unwinds, our history now outspeeding thought, and the heart is a beatable tool. Wendell Berry (1934-) -- “Let America Be America Again” Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free. (America never was America to me.) Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-- Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above. (It never was America to me.) O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe. (There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.") Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-- And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one's own greed! I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean-- Hungry yet today despite the dream. Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead, The poorest worker bartered through the years. Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings, Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That's made America the land it has become. O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas In search of what I meant to be my home-- For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore, And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea, And torn from Black Africa's strand I came To build a "homeland of the free." The free? Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For all the dreams we've dreamed And all the songs we've sung And all the hopes we've held And all the flags we've hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay-- Except the dream that's almost dead today. O, let America be America again-- The land that never has been yet-- And yet must be—the land where every man is free. The land that's mine—the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME-- Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again. Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-- The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, We must take back our land again, America! O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath-- America will be! Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain-- All, all the stretch of these great green states-- And make America again! Langston Hughes (1902-1967) For this week’s Peace of History:
We present two poems that speak to the complexity of our relationship with the rest of life on this planet. The first is from Judith Wright (1915-2000), a major Australian poet, critic, and early advocate of pacifist and conservationist causes. In her poem “Australia 1970,” Wright describes righteous fury refusing to go quietly into that good night -- except the fury belongs to a place, a habitat, an ecology. Fifty years ago, Wright pointed unequivocally to the source of the “natural” threats to us: not to the jungles or forests or “nature” itself, but to us. Now, many of the best ecologists have caught up to her. (To learn more about the relationship between covid-19 and ecological destruction, please visit the following link: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/18/tip-of-the-iceberg-is-our-destruction-of-nature-responsible-for-covid-19-aoe). The second poem is from Denise Levertov (1923-1997), a British-born American poet whose themes often involved peace and social justice. Somewhat less wrathful than Wright’s poem, Levertov’s piece “Kin and Kin” begins in despair and self-loathing at the violence and injustice “our species” has committed upon the earth. But then the narrator remembers that our destructiveness is not inevitable or even universal. After the bitterness of Wright’s poem, Levertov in “Kin and Kin” reminds us that human nature is diverse, mutable, both ancient and ever-evolving, and it seems that Levertov offers one possible solution to the salvation of “our species”: listen to indigenous leaders. (To learn more about indigenous peoples and covid-19, please visit the following link: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2020/03/24/news/covid-19-crisis-tells-world-what-indigenous-peoples-have-been-saying-thousands-years) Australia 1970 Die, wild country, like the eaglehawk, dangerous till the last breath’s gone, clawing and striking. Die cursing your captor through a raging eye. Die like the tigersnake that hisses such pure hatred from its pain as fills the killer’s dreams with fear like suicide’s invading stain. Suffer, wild country, like the ironwood that gaps the dozer-blade. I see your living soil ebb with the tree to naked poverty. Die like the soldier-ant mindless and faithful to your million years. Though we corrupt you with our torturing mind, stay obstinate; stay blind. For we are conquerors and self-poisoners more than scorpion or snake and dying of the venoms that we make even while you die of us. I praise the scoring drought, the flying dust, the drying creek, the furious animal, that they oppose us still; that we are ruined by the thing we kill. Judith Wright. Poems of Protest for the Year 2000. -- Kin and Kin Perhaps Jeffers was right, our species best unborn, and once born better soon gone, a criminal kind, the planet’s nightmare. Our going would leave no hauntings at all, unless to the last of those we’ve tamed or caged; after those, a world fierce in the hunt but free from malice and free from remembrance. Yet there have been the wise, the earthen elders humble before the grass. When from the torturers, picking their teeth after a full meal, relaxed after a full day of their routine job, we turn to regard such others remote as they are, yet kin-- as wheat and weed are kin, each having root, stem, seed--or when we hear some note of kindness innocent of its own courage amid the clamor of lies, it seems after all there might be open to us, even now, a chance to evolve, a swerve we could take, a destiny still held out (if we would look) in the Spirit’s palm. Denise Levertov. Poems of Protest for the Year 2000. For this week’s Peace of History:
For National Poetry Month, we will be sharing poems to reflect on our own current moment. Today we share a poem from the HIV/AIDS crisis. To those who are feeling helpless and anxious, to those who are worried about their own vulnerability to covid-19, or the vulnerability of a loved one, this is for you. And yet we must remember that Paul Monette, who wrote this poem about his own HIV+ partner, must have felt so much more alone than most of us do. With the near-universal spread of covid-19, most of us are going through the common experience of quarantining at home. In addition, we are able to connect with each other remotely through social media and other technology to extents impossible in the 1980s. Let us read Paul’s words and, for a moment, feel his anxiety and isolation as our own -- but then remember that we are not alone. We are all in this together. THE WORRYING ate me alive day and night these land mines all over like the toy bombs dropped on the Afghans little Bozo jack-in-the-boxes that blow your hands off 3 A.M. I’d go around the house with a rag of ammonia wiping wiping crazed as a housewife on Let’s Make a Deal the deal being PLEASE DON’T MAKE HIM SICK AGAIN faucets doorknobs the phone every lethal thing a person grips and leaves his prints on scrubbed my hands till my fingers cracked washed apples ten times ten no salad but iceberg and shuck the outer two thirds someone we knew was brain dead from sushi so stick to meatloaf creamed corn spuds whatever we could cook to death DON’T USE THE D WORD EVEN IN JEST when you started craving deli I heaved a sigh because salami was so de- germed with its lovely nitrites to hell with cholesterol that’s for people way way over the hill or up the hill not us in the vale of borrowed time yet I was so far more gone than you nuts in fact ruinous as a supermom with a kid in a bubble who can’t play and ten years later can’t work can’t kiss can’t laugh but his room’s still clean every cough every bump would nothing ever be nothing again cramming you with zinc and Haagen-Dazs so wild to fatten you up I couldn’t keep track of what was medicine what was old wives’ but see THERE WAS NO MEDICINE only me and to circle the wagons and island the last of our magic spoon by spoon nap by nap till we healed you as April heals drinking the sun I was Prospero of the spell of day-by-day and all of this just the house worry peanuts to what’s out there and you with the dagger at your jugular struggling back to work jotting your calendar two months ahead penciling clients husbanding husbanding inching back and me agape with the day’s demises who was swollen who gone mad ringing you on the hour how are you compared to ten noon one come home and have blintzes petrified you’d step in an elevator with some hacking CPA the whole world ought to be masked please I can’t even speak of the hospital fear firsts bone white the first day of an assault huddled by your bed like an old crone empty- eyed in a Greek square black on black the waiting for tests the chamber of horrors in my head my rags and vitamins dumb as leeches how did the meningitis get in where did I slip up what didn’t I scour I’d have swathed the city in gauze to cushion you no man who hasn’t watched his cruelest worry come true in a room with no door can ever know what doesn’t die because they lie who say it’s over Rog it hasn’t stopped at all are you okay does it hurt what can I do still still I think if I worry enough I’ll keep you near the night before Thanksgiving I had this panic to buy the plot on either side of us so we won’t be cramped that yard of extra grass would let us breathe THIS IS CRAZY RIGHT but Thanksgiving morning I went the grave two over beside you was six feet deep ready for the next murdered dream so see the threat was real why not worry worry is like prayer is like God if you have none they all forget there’s the other side too twelve years and not once to fret WHO WILL EVER LOVE ME that was the heaven at the back of time but we had it here now black on black I wander frantic never done with worrying but it’s mine it’s a cure that’s not in the books are you easy my stolen pal what do you need is it sleep like sleep you want a pillow a cool drink oh my one safe place there must be something just say what it is and it’s yours Paul Monette. Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog. 1989. (click here to view the original post on Facebook)
For this week’s Peace of History: We share a brief history of ACT UP, the queer health advocacy group whose work helped save countless lives during the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. In early March, 1987, as the Reagan administration continued to cruelly neglect the rising body count of the new deadly disease, activists from the NYC queer community formed the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT UP). From its beginning, ACT UP was decentralized and leaderless, diverse in race and gender, followed nonviolent principles, and performed radical direct action and civil disobedience. This generation of activists was inspired by and trained by members of the civil rights, feminist, and peace movements of the previous decades. Jamie Bauer, a nonviolence trainer with the War Resisters League (WRL), encouraged ACT UP to put members through trainings to prepare for actions, to take care of each other, and to "use their bodies as a force for change." Jamie was one of many who learned their training skills from WRL. Almost exactly 33 years ago on March 24, 1987, ACT UP held their first protest on Wall Street, demanding greater access and affordability of experimental HIV/AIDS medicine from the pharmaceutical industry. Within the year, more chapters began forming in other cities across the country. In its heyday, the wholly grassroots organization took on the FDA’s excessive drug approval process for life-threatening conditions; the CDC for its narrow and inaccurate definition for AIDS; the NIH for its lack of urgency addressing the epidemic as well as its inaccurate reporting of cases; various presidents and other elected officials for their inaction, mismanagement, or divestment from life-saving programs; health insurance companies for discriminating against people with HIV/AIDS; the Catholic Church for its opposition to safe sex education in schools; and more. Even after ACT UP activity slowed elsewhere in the country, in 1996 ACT UP Philadelphia organized and applied enough pressure on Congress and the UN to force them to make HIV/AIDS medicine affordable worldwide as well. In this time of extreme uncertainty and federal ineptitude, let us take inspiration from the recent past: let us (virtually, or while practicing social distancing) join together, organize, give mutual aid, and demand justice from the powers that be in radical and creative ways. We are not powerless. To read the full story of ACT UP, please check out the two articles linked below. “ACT UP Was Unofficially Founded 33 Years Ago, Changing the Face of Queer Activism.” https://hornet.com/stories/act-up-history/ “Early AIDS Activism Was So Much More Diverse Than Media Depicts It.” https://www.out.com/…/early-aids-activism-was-so-much-more-… Source: “ACT UP ACCOMPLISHMENTS – 1987-2012.” https://actupny.com/actions/ |
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