1
10
47
-
Article/Essay
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<p>The 1960s were a period of social unrest in American history. Student movements that helped shape larger struggles for social and political equality emerged from street politics and mass protests. In 1968, people witnessed student demonstrations in France, Mexico and the United States. Over 10,000 students followed suit in March of that year walking out of mostly Chicano schools in East Los Angeles to protest the inferior quality of their education. This event, which came to be known as the East Los Angeles School Walkouts, was part of a Chicano/Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. They were also a part of a longer history by Mexican Americans to improve their educational opportunities and include their culture and history into their educational experience.</p>
<p>During the 1960s, East Los Angeles schools had a “drop out/push out†rate of almost fifty percent. Mexican American students were categorized as mentally retarded and emotionally disturbed. School buildings were in decay. Teachers were largely insensitive to the needs of working class Mexican Americans. Students attempted in various forms to communicate their needs to teachers and administrators but were ignored. Rather than giving up or remaining silent, students directed their anger and discontent into an organized protest. This week-long protest, grew larger by the day, impacting schools, students, teachers, and parents. Everyone was reminded of the importance of equal educational opportunity in their community.</p>
<p>Another significant characterisitc of this youth-led movement is that by 1960, nearly eight-five percent of the Mexican American community were citizens by birth. They had been informed an aware by shifting terraine of politics in the Mexican and Mexican American community. From the 1930s until the 1960s, politics were defined through “bread and butter†issues (wages, work conditions) and had much to do with union involvement. In the post World War 2 period, politics shifted as middle class leadership engaged with civil rights. Laregly middle class, centrist if not conservative, groups sought to pursue politics, challenge Jim Crow, emphasize learning English, and naturalization. Their end goal was greater participation in electoral politics.</p>
<p>The civil rights movement transformed youth. There were several political flashpoints that reverberated through Mexican American commmunities and brought attention to the nation’s second largest minority group. Here are a few:</p>
<ul><li>
<p>1962—Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta founded UFW—United Farm Workers Union—crusade against corporate agriculture and the1968 grape boycott</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>1968-East LA walkouts—“blowoutsâ€</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>1969 First National Chicano Youth Conference—El Plan de Aztlán</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>1969-La Raza Unida party is founded</p>
</li>
</ul><p>These events represented the multi-faceted goals of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement: political representation, economic and educational equality, and cultural pride. The enclosed chapter, “The Fight for Educational Reform†details one these seminal moments in civil rights history. </p>
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Background Essay on the 1968 Latino Student Walkouts
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American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
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This short essay describes the social, political, and educational climate that resulted in the 1968 Los Angeles walkouts.
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Sources: Vicki Ruiz, <em>From Out of the Shadows: From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America</em> (Oxford, 1999); George Sanchez, <em>Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945</em> (Oxford, 1995); and F. Arturo Rosales, <em>Chicano! The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement</em> (Arte Publico Press, 1997).
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Copyright American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning
<div><a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License</a>.</div>
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2008
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Postwar America (1946-1975)
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Social Movements
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<p>Thirty-five years ago, as a college student activist in March of 1968, I joined more than 1,000 Mexican-American students who walked out of Abraham Lincoln High School in East Los Angeles.</p>
<p>We were later joined by several thousand more students who walked out of three other predominantly Mexican-American high schools. By the end of the week, more than 10,000 had participated in the walkouts.<br /><br />Our purpose was to peacefully protest the racism and educational inequality Mexican-American youth faced in public schools.<br /><br />Students marched through the streets of Los Angeles for a week and a half and used civil disobedience to disrupt the nation's largest public-school system. We were delighted when students from the predominantly African-American Thomas Jefferson High School in South Central Los Angeles also walked out in solidarity with us.<br /><br />We did not know it at the time, but in terms of numbers, the walkouts were the first major dramatic protest against racism ever staged by Mexican Americans in the history of the United States. It was carried out in the nonviolent protest tradition of the southern Civil Rights Movement. Its historical significance was similar to the 1960 black student sit-ins in Greensboro, N.C.<br /><br />Whereas the Greensboro student protest fueled the flames of the civil rights struggle in the south, the Los Angeles walkouts signaled the beginnings of the Mexican-American civil rights movement — which came to be known as the Chicano movement — throughout the southwestern United States.</p>
<p><strong>Thirteen arrested, long ordeal</strong></p>
<p>Three months after the high-school walkouts, 13 organizers were indicted for conspiracy to "willfully disturb the peace and quiet" of the city of Los Angeles.</p>
<p>I was a first-year graduate student and the president of my campus chapter of the United Mexican American Students. I was arrested in the early morning hours while hard at work on a term paper due for one of my graduate seminars. I have never forgotten the trauma my family and I were forced to endure that day.<br /><br />The imprisonment I experienced after my arrest was equally traumatic. When I was in jail, my attorney told me each of us faced 66 years in prison if convicted of the conspiracy charges.</p>
<p>It took two years for our conspiracy case to be decided by the California State Appellate Court. The court finally ruled that the 13 of us were innocent of the conspiracy charges by virtue of the First Amendment.<br /><br />I remain eternally grateful that we have an amendment granting us the right of freedom of speech. If that amendment did not exist, I could still be in prison today instead of teaching at the University of California, Berkeley.</p>
<p><strong>Gains not realized</strong></p>
<p>The Chicano movement opened doors for equal opportunity in higher education to youth previously systematically excluded from those institutions.<br /><br />Chicano Studies, for example, produced a generation of activist intellectuals and professionals deeply committed to playing a role in the struggle against racism in our society.</p>
<p>But the walkouts — and the Chicano movement they ignited — did not eliminate Latino educational inequality.<br /><br />According to the 2000 Census, 30% of Latino youth drop out of high school — compared to 8% of white students and 12% of blacks. In some inner-city school districts, the dropout rates for Latinos are even higher. And the majority of Latino students who do graduate from high school are not eligible for college admission because they have been academically ill equipped.<br /><br />In California, Gov. Gray Davis has cut the education budget by millions of dollars. His priority has been to build more prisons instead of more and better schools.<br /><br />At the national level, President Bush remains out of touch with the needs of Latino youth in the public schools in spite of proclaiming himself the "Education President" during his presidential campaign.<br /><br />Federal funding for public schools is grossly inadequate to meet needs. Bush has yet to allocate funding for the development of a multicultural curriculum that can make the Latino experience — and that of other people of color — an integral component of public schooling. His priority is war.<br /><br />The time has come for another round of student strikes against educational inequality. This time, however, Latino and other students of color must place the issue in the context of a struggle not only against racism but also against militarism and the prison-industrial complex.</p>
<p><em>Carlos Muñoz Jr. is the author of "Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement" (Verso Press, 1989), which won the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for scholarship on a subject of human rights in the Americas. He also is professor emeritus in the department of ethnic studies at U.C. Berkeley. He can be reached at pmproj@progressive.org.</em></p>
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"Latino Student Walkouts: In 35 Years, What Has Changed?"
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English
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<p>Professor and author Carlos Muñoz, Jr. describes his participation in the 1968 Los Angeles walkouts and the aftermath. He then explores the current inequalities in education and calls for a new wave of student activism and protest.</p>
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Carlos Muñoz
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Carlos Muñoz Jr., "Latino Student Walkouts: In 35 Years, What Has Changed?" 1 April 2003, from <em>Teaching Tolerance</em>, www.tolerance.org.
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<p>An Interview with Antonio Gonzalez, President of the Southwest Voter Education Project</p>
<p>June 2004</p>
<p>Â </p>
<p><strong>What's the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project and the William C. Velasquez Institute?</strong></p>
<p>Â </p>
<p>Gonzalez: Southwest Voter Registration Education Project is a nonprofit, nonpartisan that is dedicated to increasing political participation among minorities, particularly Latinos, throughout the United States.</p>
<p>The William C. Velasquez Institute is another nonpartisan, nonprofit, organization that is dedicated to policy and research towards supporting effective governance by Latino voters and Latino-elected officials and leaders-- sort of a spinoff of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project.</p>
<p>Â </p>
<p><strong>Tell us about Willie Velasquez.</strong></p>
<p>Â </p>
<p>Gonzalez: Willie Velasquez was a radical youth from San Antonio of working-class origin who was a student at St. Mary's University, which was a hotbed of political activism at that time. The Chicanos were influenced by the black Civil Rights Movement, by Martin Luther King, particularly by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, by Malcolm X, and by their own homegrown heroes in Mexican American politics, which had a history, particularly in Texas and New Mexico, that antedated the Civil Rights Movement.</p>
<p>Willie was one of the founders of La Raza Unida, an independent Latino-Chicano third political party that was successful in many places in South Texas. He left Raza Unida [around 1970] to create Southwest Voter. It was finally founded in 1974. It was a tough row to hoe, getting it funded.</p>
<p>Latinos' numbers were declining in political participation until around the time Southwest Voter was founded. The numbers since have gone up consistently and dramatically. Hispanics have been the fastest-growing group in registration in voting in America since 1980, measured by every presidential election, without exception. Willie's contribution was to crete the vehicle for that and to believe that we could stimulate this.</p>
<p>Â </p>
<p><strong>What was the initial impact of SVREP?</strong></p>
<p>Gonzalez: Southwest Voter Registration Education Project and Willie Velasquez are key elements in the transition of the condition of the U.S. Latino community from utter and complete powerlessness to where we are today, which is having some power, but not enough. Clearly, we have changed our condition from being outside the power. Willie Velasquez's context was the era of powerlessness. That's why people were militant and protesting, organizing third parties. They were utterly excluded by policies, practices, barriers, laws, and institutions. Velasquez led the charge. He opened those doors.</p>
<p>Willie died in 1988. He had just begun to reinterpret Latino politics. I remember Willie beginning to agitate that we had to equip ourselves to govern because we were winning. When Southwest Voter started, there were about 1,300 Latino-elected officals in the country and about 2.3 million Latino voters. Ten years later, we nearly doubled the number of Latino-elected officials to about 2,500 and nearly 4 million Latinos were registered to vote.</p>
<p>Willie's whole team was a group of intellectuals, so they would think about these things. Willie agitated to create the capacity to train candidates and train elected officials and come up with new policy strategies, do opinion surveys, the sort of things that 20 years later we all do. Willie saw the Latino community governing. Henry Cisneros was mayor of San Antonio and on Mondale's short list for vice president. the Hispanic caucus of Texas was very powerful. Tony Anaya was governor of New Mexico.</p>
<p>Â </p>
<p><strong>How did the Institute come about?</strong></p>
<p>Gonzalez: Whillie was wrong [to think] that we had broken through and were in a condition of exercising power. It certainly wasn't true across the country, though it was true in Texas and New Mexico. That's why he created the institute, which was called the Southwest Voter Research Institute. We renamed it after Willie died to honor him. The institute started polling and doing international work to take delegations of Latino-elected officials and leaders to Central America. Willie went to Nicaragua and El Salvador. He was interested in revolutions. Willie was a global thinker.  </p>
<p>Â </p>
<p><strong>That was the later stage of Willie's career and lifework, pondering "how do we govern?"</strong></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:normal;">Willie saw the immigration reform in 1986, but he didn't get to see the big wave. None of us predicted the impact it was going to have in speeding up our political empowerment.</span></p>
<p>Â </p>
<p><strong>Was his death a surprise?</strong></p>
<p>Gonzalez: Totally. He was only 44. He got sick and a month later he died. I was a member of his staff. I'd been there for four years. I came in 1984, and I was involved with the '84 presidential campaign. Then I worked on special projects-- an immigration bill, the '87 Texas Legislature, and an international project called the Latin America Project.</p>
<p>Â </p>
<p><strong>How did you deal with the sudden loss of your charismatic leader?</strong></p>
<p><span style="font-weight:normal;">Gonzalez: I'm from California. When Willie died, I was sent back to California to help [keep] us from collapsing. We were on the verge of bankruptcy. We had the test of fire.</span></p>
<p>"There's a debate being argued... They say voting rights is a black-oriented program and Latinos are not excluded like African Americans are."</p>
<p>Willie had a number two named Andy Hernandez, who had been with Southwest Voter from the beginning. Fortunately, he was there and was able to step in. He had 14 years of experience with the organization, so he became the president when Willie passed away. We weathered everything that happens when you lose your charismatic superstar. We had to retool the fundraising and reassure the leadership. People thought we were going to disappear. We had a tough couple years.</p>
<p>Â </p>
<p><strong>How did you keep on going?</strong></p>
<p>Gonzalez: We had a hard-core group of staff who basically dedicated themselves to Willie's memory and said, "Not on our watch. We're not going to be recorded in history as the group that couldn't make it after Willie died."</p>
<p>It took a lot of hard work. The hardest part was figuring out how to raise money without the superstar doing it. [Before,] Willie would pick up a phone and we'd get money. We had to reestablish relationships with foundations, start raising money from corporations and unions who used to give us nothing, zippo.</p>
<p>Willie enjoyed the largesse. He was the darling of the New York liberals. When he went away, they went away. We had to go to our base. For at least a couple of years there was goodwill meaning, "We'll do this for Willie. We'll help Southwest for Willie." By the 1990s, we were able to get into "the self-interest cycle," meaning people have a self-interest in seeing the Hispanic vote grow. Once we got past the '92 election, people saw Southwest Voter was going to make it. So they came back.</p>
<p>Â </p>
<p><span style="font-weight:normal;"><strong>Andy Hernandez stepped down as SVREP president in 1994. What happened after that? </strong></span></p>
<p>Gonzalez: I was surprised when he stepped down. You know, I don't think Andy ever reconciled himself to being Willie's successor and being the head of Southwest Voter without Willie because they were like brothers. [Willie's death] was a personal tragedy for him. I was sort of in position because I was [Andy's] number two, although more focused on the Velasquez Institute, which had grown quite a bit and had a big international program. Andy sort of pooped it on me. I didn't really have a choice. he said, "I'm leaving, you're in." The board said, "Yeah, that's right." Been there ever since.</p>
<p>Â </p>
<p><strong>How did you lead the organization out from under Willie's shadow, when SVREP had been so much about him?</strong></p>
<p>Gonzalez: I will tell you, it's the reverse. Southwest Voter now is much bigger than Willie ever was. This year we'll quintuple the budget of Willie's biggest year. We do work in many more states. We're in 16 states, with partnerships that get us into 26 states. When Willie was alive and the institute and Southwest were together, they raised $1 million. When they were separate under Andy, he raised about $2 million. We'll do $5 million, maybe $6 million, between the two organizations this year.</p>
<p>We're clearly the preeminent Latino vote organization, bar none, registering and turning out people. We're going to hit 10 million [registered voters] this year. We were tow-and-a-half million when Willie started. We're at eight-and-a-half million now, and we'll hit 10 million [by the fall 2004 elections] maybe nine-and-a-half, 9.3-- it depends.</p>
<p>"You can't ask for a better situation. Both parties say they have to have your vote to win."</p>
<p>Our challenge is to keep Willie's memory alive. We're going to pay a lot of attention to that this year. It's our 30th anniversary. There's a book coming out about Willie in April: <em>The Life and Times of Willie Velasquez</em> (Arte Publico Press) by Juan Sepulveda.</p>
<p>We're going to push to create a Willie Velasquez archive. We're preparing to start the process to build a building, maybe a statue, in his honor on the West Side here in San Antonio. There's a Velasquez education building at St. Mary's University and Velasquez mural. There's a Velasquez [Walk]. There's Velasquez schools. We're going to do more because Willie is not known to the younger generation.</p>
<p>Â </p>
<p><strong>What are top priorities for the project?</strong></p>
<p>Gonzalez: We're setting up voter registration campaigns. We have active projects right now in Little Havana, Kendall, Hollywood, Tampa and Plant City in Florida; in Hobbs and Las Cruces, New Mexico; four different offices in Maricopa County [Phoenix], Arizona-- it's a big county-- and setting up in Tucson and Casa Grande. Seattle, Yakima Valley, the Tri-City are of Washington state, and about 20 more on the drawing board. We've still got to get into Albuguergue, got to get into Santa Fe.</p>
<p>We're shaking and baking. We've got offices of people moving all around. We're setting up the coalitions, contracting organizers. There's training going on in Albuquerque next weekend, and then two weeks after that, trainings in Miami-Dade and in Tucson. We have to set up 300 of these. Our partners are setting up another 150. </p>
<p>The Valasquez Institute is on a separate but complementary track, getting into the field in April with a national opinion survey. Through our leadership program, we're sending a religious delegation to Cuba. Through our community development program, we're conducting a solar retrofitting initiative with Hispanic businesses in urban Southern California as a policy response to the energy crisis. Energy's very expensive. Through our International program, we do Cuba, Central America. We have a drug policy reform initiative. We're co-sponsoring a national conference in Houston. We have a major research project going in anticipation of the Voting Rights Act [of 1965] reauthorization fight. It's a longitudinal study looking at 30 years of census data. We're seeking to measure the level of social, economic, and political inclusion of native-born Latinos.</p>
<p>There's a debate being argued from these neoconservative academics and Latino academics. They say voting rights is a black-oriented program and Latinos are not excluded like African American are. Therefore, the Voting Rights Act should not apply to Latinos, because Latinos are inevitably on a path of social, political and economic inclusion. It's just a matter of time and overcoming our own cultural barriers; that there are really no substantive barriers to inclusions.</p>
<p>We obviously disagree. And so we have to demonstrate that, based on the data on Latinos. We're looking specifically at native-borns because foreign-born do show increased inclusion because they became citizens. So it's a false positive when you look at immigrants.</p>
<p>"You had a golf tournament!"</p>
<p>Gonzalez: We do golf tournaments, we do annual banquets-- six of them: Miami, Houston, San Antonio, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area. We're doing a small-dollar endowment that we're launching this year where it's basically working folks. We're going to sign up ten thousand $1,000 donors from our network, where they give us $30 a month over three years, it's like dues, but it goes into an endowment.</p>
<p>You have to figure out something for each sector. What do we have? We have a lot of working folks. So that's that sector. And we have a professional sector; you have golf tournaments and fundraisers. Fundraisers include your corporate donors. We have a lot of people in anticipation of the money. Willie had to ask five people. It got harder. So you spend more time raising money, but we raise a lot more.</p>
<p>You can't ask for a better situation. Both parties say they have to have your vote to win. And when your vote is big enough to make a difference, and when you look like you're going to have the resources to mobilize the infrastructure to make a difference, issues that matter to our community are going to bubble up because we have these other things in place. This is the kind of context and scenario that I live for. And it's one that Willie lived for. He didn't get to see it, but a generation after his passing, it's here today.</p>
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"Our Challenge is to Keep Willie's Memory Alive"
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English
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American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
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William (Willie) Velásquez founded the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project (SVREP) in 1974. The son of a butcher from San Antonio, Texas, he spent his adult life as a community organizer and political activist. Inspired by the African-American civil rights movement, he sought to inform and empower Mexican Americans about the democratic process. In the interview below, Antonio Gonzalez, who took over as president of SVREP after Velásquez's death in 1988, spoke with a reporter about Velásquez's mission and legacy.
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Joe Nick Patoski
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Joe Nick Patoski, "Our Challenges Is to Keep Willie's Memory Alive," 2004 from <em>Voices of Civil Rights</em>, http://www.voicesofcivilrights.org/civil3_gonzalez.html.
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1
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2004
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Contemporary US (1976 to the present)
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Civil Rights and Citizenship
Social Movements
Social Movements
Voting
-
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<p>Brookline, Mass. 8th mo. 28th, 1837.</p>
<p>Dear Friend:</p>
<div>
<p>…I trust my sisters may always be permitted to petition for a redress of grievances. Why not? The right of petition is the only political right that women have: why not let them exercise it whenever they are aggrieved? Our fathers waged a bloody conflict with England, because they were taxed without being represented. This is just what unmarried women of property are now. They were not willing to be governed by laws which they had no voice in making; but this is the way in which women are governed in this Republic. If, then, we are taxed without being represented, and governed by laws we have no voice in framing, then, surely, we ought to be permitted at least to remonstrate against "every political measure that may tend to injure and oppress our sex in various parts of the nation, and under the various public measures that may hereafter be enforced."* Why not? Art thou afraid to trust the women of this country with discretionary power as to petitioning? Is there not sound principle and common sense enough among them, to regulate the exercise of this right? I believe they will always use it wisely. I am not afraid to trust my sisters—not I.</p>
</div>
<p>Thou sayest, "In this country, petitions to Congress, in reference to official duties of legislatures, seem, IN ALL CASES, to fall entirely without the sphere of female duty. Men are the proper persons to make appeals to the rulers whom they appoint," &c. Here I entirely dissent from thee. The fact that women are denied the right of voting for members of Congress, is but a poor reason why they should also be deprived of the right of petition. If their numbers are counted to swell the number of Representatives in our State and National Legislatures, the very least that can be done is to give them the right of petition in all cases whatsoever; and without any abridgement. If not, they are mere slaves, known only through their masters….</p>
<p>Thy Friend,</p>
<p>A. E. Grimké</p>
<p>* Grimké is addressing the words of Catherine E. Beecher.</p>
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Angelina Grimke Argues for Women's Political Rights
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American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
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In this letter Angelina Grimke, abolitionist and women's rights advocate, argues for the right of propertied women to participate in government through petitions despite their lack of enfranchisement. This letter was a part of a series of essays that Grimke publicly addressed to Catherine Beecher. Beecher strongly supported female education, but believed that women's proper place was in the home, as wives and mothers, rather than in the public sphere.
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Angelina Grimke
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Angelina Grimke, <em> Letters to Catherine E. Beecher in Reply to an Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism</em> (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838), 111-113; from Paul Lauter, ed. <em>Heath Anthology of American Literature</em>, vol. B, 5th ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 2089.
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1837
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Antebellum America (1816-1860)
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Civil Rights and Citizenship
Gender and Sexuality
Social Movements
Angelina Grimke
Social Movements
-
https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/files/original/anti-slaverymedallion_43aa89018d.png
f9841e33fcb2c29083d29a2ba346c87f
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833
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900
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8
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"Am I Not a Man and a Brother?"
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English
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This medallion was created by Josiah Wedgwood, a British ceramics maker and abolitionist, around 1787. The image of the kneeling slave in chains asking "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?" became an international symbol of the abolitionist movement. The image was widely reproduced during the late eighteenth century, appearing on crockery, snuffboxes, and jewelry, becoming a fashionable accessory among English abolitionists. Benjamin Franklin, who received a set of the medallions while serving as president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, wrote of the image's effectiveness that it was "equal to that of the best written Pamphlet, in procuring favour to those oppressed People."
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Josiah Wedgwood
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A related resource from which the described resource is derived
William Hackwood, <em>Medallion</em>, after 1786, tinted stoneware, 1 1/4 x 1 1/4 in. (3.2 x 3.2 cm), Brooklyn Museum, http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/2586.
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Used by permission of the Brooklyn Museum.
Primary
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1
Date
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1786 (Circa)
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Revolution and New Nation (1751-1815)
Subject
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Slavery and Abolition
Social Movements
Social Movements
-
Book (excerpt)
Text
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<p>The present century has been marked by a prodigious increase in wealth-producing power. The utilization of steam and electricity, the introduction of improved processes and labor-saving machinery, the greater subdivision and grander scale of production, the wonderful facility of exchanges, have multiplied enormously the effectiveness of labor.</p>
<p>At the beginning of this marvelous era it was natural to expect, and it was expected, that labor-saving inventions would lighten the toil and improve the condition of the laborer; that the enormous increase in the power of producing wealth would make real poverty a thing of the past. Could a man of the last century—a Franklin or a Priestley—have seen, in a vision of the future, the steamship taking the place of the sailing vessel, the railway train of the wagon, the reaping machine of the scythe, the threshing machine of the flail; could he have heard the throb of the engines that in obedience to human will, and for the satisfaction of human desire, exert a power greater than that of all the men and all the beasts of burden of the earth combined; could he have seen the. forest tree transformed into finished lumber—into doors, sashes, blinds, boxes or barrels, with hardly the touch of a human hand; the great workshops where boots and shoes are turned out by the case with less labor that the old-fashioned cobbler could have put on a sole; the factories where, under the eye of a girl, cotton becomes cloth faster than hundreds of stalwart weavers could have turned it out with their handlooms; could he have seen steam hammers shaping mammoth shafts and mighty anchors, and delicate machinery making tiny watches; the diamond drill cutting through the heart of the rocks, and coal oil sparing the whale; could he have realized the enormous saving of labor resulting from improved facilities of exchange and communication—sheep killed in Australia eaten fresh in England, and the order given by the London banker in the afternoon executed in San Francisco in the morning of the same day; could he have conceived of the hundred thousand improvements which these only suggest, what would he have inferred as to the social condition of mankind?….</p>
<p>Now however, we are coming into collision with facts which there can be no mistaking. From all parts of the civilized world come complaints of industrial depression; of labor condemned to involuntary idleness; of capital massed and wasting; of pecuniary distress among business men; of want and suffering and anxiety among the working classes. All the dull, deadening pain, all the keen, maddening anguish, that to great masses of men are involved in the words “hard times,†afflict the world to-day….</p>
<p>Unpleasant as it may be to admit it, it is the last becoming evident that the enormous increase in productive power which has marked the present century and is still going on with accelerating ratio, has no tendency to extirpate poverty or to lighten the burdens of those compelled to toil. It simply widens the gap between Dives and Lazarus, and makes the struggle for existence more intense. The march of invention has clothed mankind with powers of which a century ago the boldest imagination could not have dreamed. But in factories where labor-saving machinery has reached its most wonderful development, little children are at work; wherever the new forces are anything like fully utilized. Large classes are maintained by charity or live on the verge of recourse to it; amid the greatest accumulations of wealth, men die of starvation, and puny infants suckle dry breasts; while everywhere the greed of gain, the worship of wealth, shows the force of fear and want. The promised land flies before us like the mirage. The fruits of the tree of knowledge turn as we grasp them to apples of Sodom that crumble at the touch.</p>
<p>It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share. I do not mean that the condition of the lowest class has nowhere nor in anything been improved; but that there is nowhere any improvement which can be credited to increase productive power. I mean that the tendency of what we call material progress is in nowise to improve the condition of the lowest class in the essentials of healthy, happy human life. Nay, more, that it is still further to depress the condition of the lowest class. The new forces, elevating in their nature though they be, do not act upon the social fabric from underneath, as was for a long time hoped and believed, but strike it at a point intermediate between top and bottom. It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down….</p>
<p>This association of poverty with progress is the great enigma of our times. It is the central fact from which spring industrial, social, and political difficulties that perplex the world, and with which statesmanship and philanthropy and education grapple in vain. From it come the clouds that overhand the future of the most progressive and self-reliant nations. It is the riddle that the Sphinx of Fate puts to our civilization, and which not to answer is to be destroyed. So long as all the increased wealth which modern progress brings goes but to build up great fortunes, to increase luxury and make sharper the contrast between the House of Have and the House of Want, progress is not real and cannot be permanent. The reaction must come. The tower leans from its foundations, and every new story but hastens the final catastrophe. To educate men who must be condemned to poverty, is but to make them restive; to base on a state of most glaring social inequality political institutions under which men are theoretically equal, is to stand a pyramid on its apex.</p>
Dublin Core
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Type
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Book
Title
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A Reformer Deplores the Poverty Caused by Industrial Progress
Language
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English
Publisher
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American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
Description
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Henry George was a reformer and utopian whose 1886 New York City mayoral campaign as the Workingman's Party candidate had the makings of a popular uprising. Although George finished second, behind Democrat Abram S. Hewitt and ahead of Republican Teddy Roosevelt, the campaign sent shockwaves around the established political and financial order, and electrified workers with its broad alliance of socialists, unions, Irish and German immigrants, and radical Catholics. In <em>Progress and Poverty</em>, his most famous work, George outlined the great disparities between wealth and want that defined his era and proposed a solution: a "Single Tax" on land that George believed would provide enough revenue to offset the social imbalances that produced poverty. Although George's solution has largely been forgotten, his legacy as one of the Gilded Age's most passionate reformers lives on.
Creator
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Henry George
Source
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Henry George, <em>Progress and Poverty</em> (San Francisco: W.M. Hinton & Co., 1879); from Leon Fink, ed., <em>Major Problems in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era</em> (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001): 20-22.
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1
Date
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1879
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Industrialization and Expansion (1877-1913)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Social Movements
Work
Social Movements
-
https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/files/original/freedomsdaughtersintro_3752772a6f.pdf
353bce7c006840587cc8a699a47957dc
Book (excerpt)
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Type
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Book
Title
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<em>Freedom's Daughters</em> (Excerpt)
Language
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English
Publisher
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American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
Description
An account of the resource
Lynne Olson's <em>Freedom's Daughters</em> shines light on the often-overlooked role that women played in the civil rights movement. In the preface to her book, Olson sketches some brief biographies of a few of the outstanding female civil rights leaders and activists, notes the intersection between the civil rights and women's movements, and sets out to rectify what she characterizes as the omission of women from most historical and journalistic accounts of the era.
Creator
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Lynne Olson
Source
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Lynne Olson, <em>Freedom's Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970</em> (New York: Scribner, 2002) 13-17.
Date
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2002
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Postwar America (1946-1975)
Subject
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Gender and Sexuality
Social Movements
Social Movements
-
https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/files/original/chicanoch10_4ee28cb70c.pdf
131c508db437355205903c6999269643
Book (excerpt)
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Book
Title
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"The Fight for Educational Reform": Chicano Youth Demand Change
Language
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English
Publisher
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American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
Description
An account of the resource
In this chapter from <em>Chicano!: The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement</em> F. Arturo Rosales explains the environment from which this Chicano youth movement developed and the tactics used by this student movement to bring about educational reform during the 1960s and early 1970s.
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F. Arturo Rosales
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F. Arturo Rosales, <em>Chicano: The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement</em> (Arte Publico Press, 1997), 174-195
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We do not have permission to display this item publicly.
Date
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1997
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Postwar America (1946-1975)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Social Movements
Social Movements
-
https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/files/original/bygeorge_d0519f9806.tif
00f33f02508c8f504d3c009cc301c23c
Omeka Image File
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Height
1125
Width
1141
Cartoon
Original Caption
<p>"With all its drawbacks, and horrors, and shortcomings, the great epoch of the French Revolution, now but a century gone, is about to repeat itself here." Extract from Speech by Henry George, at Nilsson Hall. N.Y. Sun, October 14.</p>
Dublin Core
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Type
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Cartoon
Title
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<em>Harper's Weekly</em> Mocks the Theories of Henry George
Language
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English
Publisher
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American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
Description
An account of the resource
In this political cartoon from <em>Harper's Weekly</em>, the theories of Henry George, the Workingman's Party candidate for Mayor of New York, are depicted as leading to mob violence and misrule. With a caption featuring a quote from George (taken out of context) that refers to the horrors of the French Revolution, the cartoonist suggests that the discrepancies between the "theory" and "practice" of reformers like George will likewise lead to violent excess on the part of the "undesirable elements" the poor and immigrant workers whose votes the George campaign sought.
Creator
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Unknown
Source
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"Reform-By George," <em>Harper's Weekly</em>, 23 October 1886; from <em>HarpWeek</em>, Cartoon of the Day, http://www.harpweek.com/09Cartoon/BrowseByDateCartoon.asp?Month=Octoberandamp;Date=23.
Primary
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1
Date
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1886
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Industrialization and Expansion (1877-1913)
Subject
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Social Movements
Social Movements
-
Diary/Letter
Text
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<p>Dear Sir:<br /><br />The Women’s Political Council is very grateful to you and the City Commissioners for the hearing you allowed our representative during the month of March, 1954, when the “city-bus-fare-increase case†was being reviewed. There were several things the Council asked for:<br /><br />1. A city law that would make it possible for Negroes to sit from back toward front, and whites from front toward back until all the seats are taken.<br /><br />2. That Negroes not be asked or forced to pay fare at front and go to the rear of the bus to enter.<br /><br />3. That busses stop at every corner in residential sections occupied by Negroes as they do in communities where whites reside.<br /><br />We are happy to report that busses have begun stopping at more corners now in some sections where Negroes live than previously. However, the same practices in seating and boarding the bus continue.<br /><br />Mayor Gayle, three-fourths of the riders of these public conveyances are Negroes. If Negroes did not patronize them, they could not possibly operate.<br /><br />More and more of our people are already arranging with neighbors and friends to ride to keep from being insulted and humiliated by bus drivers.<br /><br />There has been talk from twenty-five or more local organizations of planning a city-wide boycott of busses. We, sir, do not feel that forceful measures are necessary in bargaining for a convenience which is right for all bus passengers. . . . <br /><br />Please consider this plea, and if possible, act favorably upon it, for even now plans are being made to ride less, or not at all, on our busses. We do not want this.<br /><br />Respectfully yours,<br /><br />The Women’s Political Council<br />Jo Ann Robinson, President</p>
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Type
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Diary/Letter
Language
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English
Publisher
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American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning
Title
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African-American Women Threaten a Bus Boycott in Montgomery
Description
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This letter from the Women's Political Council to the Mayor of Montgomery, Alabama, threatens a bus boycott by the city's African Americans if demands for fair treatment are not met.
Creator
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Jo Ann Robinson
Source
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Clayborne Carson, et al, eds., <em>The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader</em> (New York: Penguin Books, 1991), 44-45; also from <em>Historical Thinking Matters</em>, http://historicalthinkingmatters.org/inquiry.php?sourceID=19&page=inquiry&moduleID=5&tab=resources.
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1
Relation
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1835, 1836
Date
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1954
Coverage
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Postwar America (1946-1975)
Subject
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Civil Rights and Citizenship
Social Movements
Boycotts
Social Movements