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Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los Angeles

1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium March 8 (women holding crosses)

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4. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium March: Protestors in the rain
6. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium March: Las Adelitas de Aztlán join protest “After leaving the Brown Berets, Arellanes — along with Jensen and her sister, Grace; Andrea and Esther Sánchez; Lorraine Escalante; Yolanda Solis; and Arlene Sánchez — founded Las Adelitas de Aztlán. The name referred to the soldaderas who fought alongside the men during the Mexican Revolution. They invited members of the community to join them and on Feb. 28, 1970, they made their public debut at the second anti-war moratorium in East Los Angeles.” Members of Las Adelitas de Aztlán at the second Chicano Moratorium protest against the Vietnam War on Feb. 28, 1970. At right is Hilda Reyes. They marched in the rain under a banner made by Gloria Arellanes and other members of the group. Las Adelitas dissolved later that year.
17. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium 11 (Ruben Salazar)
18. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium 12 (Raul Ruiz and the corpse of Gustav Montag) Raul Ruiz lays a Mexican flag atop the corpse of Gustav Montag, during a 1971 protest in East Los Angeles. Three people died on Aug. 29, 1970 Moratorium. They included: LA Times journalist and KMEX (Ch. 34) news director Rubén Salazar, Gilberto Diaz (Angel Gilbert Diaz) and Lyn Ward. During a 1971 protest, Gustav Montag was murdered by police. Identified as Jewish, Montag was the fourth casualty in East LA of the organized moratoriums. This moratorium was held on February 2, 1971.
19. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium 13 (after moratorium demostration) Chicano Moratorium Committee anti-war demonstrators gather in East L.A. "The biggest, bloodiest disturbance in Los Angeles since Watts five years earlier lasted several hours. When it was over, Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar was dead and two others mortally wounded, about 200 people were under arrest, 75 law enforcement officers and untold numbers of demonstrators were injured, 95 county vehicles were destroyed or damaged, 44 buildings were pillaged and eight major fires had been set.” “After the Chicano Moratorium, I said no way am I going to put myself in jeopardy ever again,” Jensen says. “Because that’s how scared I was.” Jensen stopped organizing
20. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium 2 (group of protestors moving down Whittier Blvd.) “The National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War in East Los Angeles would become the biggest gathering of Mexican American demonstrators in U.S. history to that point, with about 20,000 people parading down Whittier Boulevard to what was then called Laguna Park — before widespread violence erupted when sheriff’s deputies stormed the park and skirmishes followed. Patrol cars and buildings were set on fire.”
22. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium 5 (Rosalio Munoz speaks) Smoke above Whittier Boulevard from multiple fires points to the chaotic aftermath of the Chicano Moratorium march. On Aug. 29, 1970, more than 20,000 demonstrators marched through East Los Angeles for the National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War. But the protest for peace devolved into conflict between demonstrators and sheriff’s deputies. By day’s end, hundreds were arrested and trailblazing Latino journalist Ruben Salazar was dead. Ultimately 3 died in the protests. What started as a peaceful demonstration, and what some folks felt was going to be a celebratory moment demanding peace, turned into violence & chaos.
23. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium 6 (Consuelo Flores) Consuelo Flores Remembers, age 9 in 1970. She remembered smoke — tear gas, shot into the crowds. Untold numbers of protesters were injured by deputies or while fleeing. ‘I’m 9 years old, and I’m seeing the cop who’s supposed to protect me, whacking” a young man, she recalled. ‘My [red] shoes just fall off, and I just keep running, I’m running with my bare feet, so now my feet are burning too, and ... I’m just trying to get home.’
24. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium 7 (Policeman with shotgun)
26. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium 9 (injured policeman being dragged)
27. 1970 The Death of Ruben Salazar The Silver Dollar Café is remembered most significantly for its role in the Chicano Moratorium, a protest against the Vietnam War that occurred on August 29, 1970. Nearly 30,000 people participated in the peaceful march through East Los Angeles, which passed by the café and culminated in a rally at nearby Laguna Park (later renamed Ruben Salazar Park). An unrelated incident adjacent to the park purportedly led to a violent clash between law enforcement and the protestors. Ruben Salazar, a writer for the Los Angeles Times and News Director of KMEX, was fatally wounded inside the Silver Dollar when a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy fired a Flite-Rite tear gas missile into the café. His death, along with the deaths of two protestors that day, marked a turning point in the Chicano Civil Rights Movement.
28. 1971 ASCO Stations of the Cross Stations of the Cross was a walking “ritual of resistance” against what the performance group Asco considered the “useless deaths” taking place in Vietnam. The male members of the group (which originally comprised Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez) paraded down Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, with Herrón as a Christ/death figure bearing a large cardboard cross. The quasi-Passion Play ended with the trioblocking a U.S. Marines recruiting office with the cross, symbolically halting military recruitment from their Mexican American neighborhood. One year earlier, Whittier Boulevard had been the site of the National Chicano Moratorium March – the largest war protest organized by a minority group, and one that called out the disproportionate burden borne by Americans of color on the front lines.
29. 1974 ASCO First Supper After a Major Riot The riot referenced in the title occurred nearby in 1971, when the Chicano Moratorium held a peaceful demonstration that degenerated into police brutality. Harry Gamboa Jr.: LA County sheriffs open fired on innocent students and protestors, and wounded and killed many people who were protesting against the war in Vietnam, and were also protesting against police violence, which was followed by a two to three-and-a-half year crackdown on young people gathering on the streets of East Los Angeles. At the time that we shot [First Supper After a Major Riot], we felt that it had been long enough. It was time for it to be extinguished. And so, we declared it to be a celebration. Willie Herrón: At the time of the Moratorium, I was in high school. I remember the procession originating at Belvedere Park, protesting the Vietnam War and all the Chicanos that lost their lives. The police brutality was incredible. It affected me quite a bit and I think it affected all of us. So that's why Whittier Boulevard became such an important street, and a place for us to conduct our performances and connect them to our community and the way society viewed us at the time. Gronk: We decided that it was time that we would take action and actually use the streets once again. We would take over a street or a neighborhood and activate it in some way. Pattsi Valdez: These performances usually happened really quickly. An idea would be sparked and then we'd gather all our stuff and Harry would pick us all up, and we'd put everything in the car, and then we'd zoom off into the city and find the location.I think it was a combination of performance art and protest. For me, it was very important to try to get noticed because I had things to say. I felt like I had to do it in a big way, so that the viewer would pay attention. The look, the make-up: I needed for you to pay attention, because I had a message. Gronk: During the performance, people either honked their horns or cheered us on. But also in the back of our minds…at the time a phone call was ten cents, so we all had ten cents in our pocket just in case we had to make that phone call from jail.
31. Remembering Ruben Salazar's Life, Not Just His Death David Sandoval Papers, Special Collections, John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, California Sate University, LA - Sheriff's deputies outside the Silver Dollar, August 29, 1970. Salazar was born in Juarez, Mexico but emigrated to the U.S. with his family when he was an infant. As an immigrant living in Texas during the Great Depression, he had much to overcome. He would later recall that it was common to see signs that read "No Dogs, Negroes, and Mexicans" on public establishments. Still, he enlisted in the Armed Forces and went to college on the GI Bill. He become the managing editor of his college newspaper and used his regular column to speak out against racism and McCarthyism. An accomplished journalist, Salazar earned his credentials reporting from the trenches. He used his bilingual skill and knowledge of the barrio to do in depth reporting in El Paso, Texas, and later in California where he was hired by the Los Angeles Times, where he covered political, social and other news, with a special focus on major developments in the Mexican American community. As The Times' first Mexican American foreign correspondent, Salazar would report on the Vietnam War, Central America and the Olympics in Mexico City. In 1969 The Times brought him back to Los Angeles, where he would cover the growing Chicano movement, fast becoming national news. Salazar would go on to write about the changing attitudes, lives and activities of people living in Los Angeles' barrios during those turbulent times. In 1970, as a Times columnist and Spanish language news editor, he advocated on behalf of the community and welcomed the Chicano movement. To Salazar, journalism was more than just a career; it was a vehicle for democracy. He saw journalism as a way to influence public opinion and create change. On the flipside, however, it meant he would constantly be under the critical eye of those interested in maintaining the status quo, and would have to learn how to subtly and gradually break down stereotypes in order to push the social justice movement forward. He covered a wide variety of events and topics, which enabled him to find ways to get barrio realities recognized as news. That in turn helped the Mexican American community see itself as newsmakers, and history makers. Ruben Salazar was becoming an activist journalist when his life was cut short, killed by a sheriff's tear gas canister while covering the Chicano Moratorium on August 29, 1970. According to the coroner's report he was wearing the demonstrations' green, white and red button: "CHICANO MORATORIUM 8,000 Dead ¡YA BASTA! L.A. Aug. 29." He was just 42 years old. This article was originally published on EGPNews.com.
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1. 1959 Cooper Do-nuts Protest Predating the Stonewall Riots by ten years, Cooper Do-nuts was the site of a 1959 protest against the LAPD's harrassment of the gay and transgender clientele frequenting the shop. Due to Cooper Do-nuts' proximity to several gay and lesbian establishments, a case of resisting arrest evolved into a full-scale riot that is remembered as the first open act of LGBTQ resistance toward police abuse in the United States.
3. The Rev. James Lawson's nonviolent teachings led to his expulsion from Vanderbilt 60 years ago
4. Jim Lawson Nonviolent Civil Rights Workshops Simulating Violent Reactions im Lawson, pioneering expert on nonviolence and teacher to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lewis, led civil rights workshops simulating violent reactions of white people at lunch counters. This was to train the nonviolent resisters not to react with violence. Lawson also discusses the importance of discipline in nonviolent movements: "You cannot go on a demonstration with 25 people doing whatever they want to do. They have to have a common discipline… The difficulty with nonviolent people and efforts is that they don’t recognize the necessity of fierce discipline and training, and strategizing, and planning, and recruiting, and doing the kind of things you do to have a movement. That can’t happen spontaneously. It has to be done systematically." Lawson is the voice in the video, the facilitator of the workshop, and the person interviewed at the end. This clip taken from "A Force More Powerful", an excellent documentary on the history of nonviolent movements, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpBoH.... We reproduce to highlight this important part in the U.S. civil rights movement, and Lawson's crucial thoughts on nonviolent noncooperation.
5. 1960 Sit-in movement sparks social change Ronald Martin, Robert Patterson and Mark Martin sit at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, on February 2, 1960. A day earlier, four African-American college students made history when they sat at the same Woolsworth's counter. Service never came for the "Greensboro Four," as they came to be known, and their peaceful demonstration drew national attention and sparked more sit-ins in Southern cities. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images People protest outside a Woolsworth's in Pittsburgh. Charles 'Teenie' Harris/Carnegie Museum of Art/Getty Images Dion Diamond is harassed during a sit-in at the Cherrydale Drug Fair in Arlington, Virginia. He was part of a small group called the Non-Violent Action Group. Some people threw lit cigarettes at group members, while others kicked them. The two-week protests in June 1960 led to the integration of restaurants in Arlington. Restaurants soon followed in nearby Alexandria and Fairfax. Gus Chinn/Courtesy of the DC Public Library Washington Star Collection/Washington Post Activists would often undergo tolerance training to prepare themselves for what they might encounter during a sit-in. Here, NAACP student adviser David Gunter, left, and Leroy Hill blow smoke into the face of Virginius Thornton. Howard Sochurek/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images Trainers in Petersburg, Virginia, use newspapers to swat volunteers in the head and prepare them for harassment they might encounter during a sit-in. Howard Sochurek/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images Students wait in vain at a Greensboro Woolsworth's in April 1960. Greensboro News & Record/AP Woolworth's temporarily closed a store in Atlanta after Harold Sprayberry sprayed insect repellant above the heads of nearly 100 sit-in protesters in October 1960. He was arrested, and the store reopened about an hour later. Horace Cort/AP People poured sugar, ketchup and mustard over the heads of Tougaloo College students who were conducting a sit-in at a Woolsworth's in Jackson, Mississippi, in May 1963. Sitting at the counter, from left, are Tougaloo professor John Salter and students Joan Trumpauer and Anne Moody. Fred Blackwell/Jackson Daily News/AP A police officer in Birmingham, Alabama, frisks a demonstrator after an attempted sit-in on April 15, 1963. AP Protesters fill a jail cell in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1963. A year later, the Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination in public places and facilities and banned discrimination based on race, gender, religion or national origin. The News & Observer
11. 1962 LAPD attack a Black Muslim Temple, killing Ronald Stokes April 27: An altercation leads to police entering the Los Angeles Temple and killing its unarmed secretary, Ronald Stokes. "They're going to pay for it," Malcolm declares, and goes to Los Angeles to eulogize Stokes at a funeral attended by 2,000 people. He says the police shot "innocent unarmed Black men in cold blood" and urges action. But Elijah Muhammad resists calls for an aggressive response. An all-white coroner's jury deliberates about Stokes' killing for 23 minutes and terms it "justifiable homicide." By contrast, 14 Nation of Islam members are indicted for assault in the incident and 11 are found guilty. Later this year, Malcolm confirms that Elijah Muhammad has engaged in repeated adultery and had children with at least three of his young secretaries. "I felt almost out of my mind," Malcolm says. Herbert Muhammad asks Muhammad Speaks to minimize coverage of Malcolm X.
13. 1950 -66 Warden of the Ghetto (Police and Carceral Regime) William H. Parker, who headed the LAPD from 1950 to 1966, is considered the originator of the warrior cop policing style.(Los Angeles Times) The LAPD’s racial animus during this time is often attributed to the bigotry of its chief. Parker was a cartoonish racist who likened Black people to monkeys and thought Latinos inherently criminal due to their descent from what he called the “wild tribes” of Mexico. He once complained during a television news interview that an influx of African Americans moving to L.A. to escape the Jim Crow South had “flooded a community that wasn’t prepared to meet them. We didn’t ask these people to come here.” According to Kramer, Parker was a punch-below-the-belt politician who maintained his authority in part by spying on his adversaries and threatened them with the dirt he uncovered. Yet he wasn’t some rogue white supremacist who slipped through the cracks into his position. Parker enjoyed strong support from L.A.’s white business leaders and homeowners. Even after the brutality of his department drew national scrutiny in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots, Parker’s white base of support rallied around him. It took death, not outrage, to finally remove him from his position in 1966, after which city leaders changed the name of LAPD headquarters to honor him — and kept it there until 2009. Parker’s LAPD, much like other problematic police departments across California, was possible only because of the support of the white power structure. And that power structure wanted residential segregation. L.A.’s powerful real estate industry, as detailed in Andrea Gibson’s “City of Segregation,” did everything it could to enforce and profit from segregation. According to Gibson, the industry furthered the myth that Black and Latino integration was bad for property values, thus ensuring a premium on homes in white communities, while simultaneously imposing artificial scarcity in segregated ones, driving up prices for jam-packed residents of color who were prevented from living elsewhere.
16. 1961- Freedom Riders - Attack in Anniston On Sunday, May 14, 1961—Mother's Day—scores of angry white people blocked a Greyhound bus carrying black and white passengers through rural Alabama. The attackers pelted the vehicle with rocks and bricks, slashed tires, smashed windows with pipes and axes and lobbed a firebomb through a broken window. As smoke and flames filled the bus, the mob barricaded the door. "Burn them alive," somebody cried out. "Fry the goddamn niggers." An exploding fuel tank and warning shots from arriving state troopers forced the rabble back and allowed the riders to escape the inferno. Even then some were pummeled with baseball bats as they fled. A few hours later, black and white passengers on a Trailways bus were beaten bloody after they entered whites-only waiting rooms and restaurants at bus terminals in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama.
18. 1963 Congress passed the Equal Pay Act - the Equal Pay Act was signed by President Kennedy with the intention of ending gender-based pay discrimination.
20. 1963 Congress passed the Equal Pay Act - the Equal Pay Act was signed by President Kennedy with the intention of ending gender-based pay discrimination.
21. 1963 Anne Moody, who later wrote Coming of Age in Mississippi, participated in a Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in. On May 28, 1963, Anne Moody was among the students from historically black Tougaloo College who staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Jackson, Miss. A white mob attacked the integrated group of peaceful students, dousing them with ketchup, mustard and sugar and beating one of the men. A photograph from the sit-in shows Moody sitting stoically at the five-and-dime counter with food on her head. Moody’s eyes are downcast as a man pours more food on one of her fellow students, Joan Trumpauer. Moody wrote in her 1968 memoir that “all hell broke loose” after she and two other black students, Memphis Norman and Pearlena Lewis, prayed at the lunch counter.
22. 1964 - 1965 Free Speech Movement “The Free Speech Movement was the first revolt of the 1960s to bring to a college campus the mass civil disobedience tactics pioneered in the civil rights movement. Those tactics, most notably the sit-in, would give students unprecedented leverage to make demands on university administrators, setting the stage for mass student protests against the Vietnam War.” – Robert Cohen, author of Freedom’s Orator
23. January 23, 1964: Poll Taxes Banned
24. 1965 The Watts Riots On Wednesday, 11 August 1965, Marquette Frye, a 21-year-old black man, was arrested for drunk driving on the edge of Los Angeles’ Watts neighborhood. The ensuing struggle during his arrest sparked off 6 days of rioting, resulting in 34 deaths, over 1,000 injuries, nearly 4,000 arrests, and the destruction of property valued at $40 million. On 17 August 1965, Martin Luther King arrived in Los Angeles in the aftermath of the riots. His experiences over the next several days reinforced his growing conviction that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) should move north and lead a movement to address the growing problems facing black people in the nation’s urban areas. Frye had been drinking and was driving with his brother, Ronald, in the car, when the two were pulled over two blocks from their home. While Marquette was being arrested, Ronald retrieved their mother from her house. When Mrs. Frye saw her son being forcibly arrested, she fought with the arresting officers, tearing one officer’s shirt. An officer then struck Marquette’s head with his nightstick, and all three of the Fryes were arrested.
25. 1965 Watts Renaissance
26. 1965 Sister Mary Corita (Sister Mary Corita in 1965, courtesy of the Corita Art Center.) Worked from a studio at Immaculate Heart College. "LA's most famous artist in the 1960s, her prints became increasingly political, which led L.A.'s famously right wing cardinal, Francis McIntyre, to order her either to confine herself to traditional religious duties or to renounce her vows. She left the order in 1968, followed by most of the rest of the sisters at the college. " - Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties
27. 1965 Sister Mary Corita (Sister Mary Corita in 1965, courtesy of the Corita Art Center.) Worked from a studio at Immaculate Heart College. "LA's most famous artist in the 1960s, her prints became increasingly political, which led L.A.'s famously right wing cardinal, Francis McIntyre, to order her either to confine herself to traditional religious duties or to renounce her vows. She left the order in 1968, followed by most of the rest of the sisters at the college. " - Set the Night on Fire: LA in the Sixties
29. 1966 Riots on the Sunset Strip
31. 1966 Ron Karenga sitting with Hakim Jamal, Los Angeles, 1966 Photographed by Harry Adams (from CSUN digital archives).Ron Karenga (left), also known as Maulana Ndabezith Karenga or Roland McKinley Everett, sits next to Hakim Jamal. Karenga is known for creating the first Pan-African holiday, Kwanzaa, in 1966. Hakim Jamal was cousin of Malcolm X and co-founder of the organization "US," a group promoting African-American cultural unity. https://digital-collections.csun.edu/digital/collection/Bradley/id/3554
33. 1966 March from Delano to the state capital Striking workers are subjected to physical and verbal attacks throughout their peaceful demonstrations, and on March 16, the Senate Sub-Committee on Migratory Labor held hearings in Delano. March 17, the morning following the hearings, Cesar Chavez sets out with 100 farm workers to begin his pilgrimage to the San Joaquin Valley. After 25 days, their numbers swell from hundreds, to an army of thousands.
34. 1966 Stokely Carmichael defines "black power" at the University of California's Greek Theatre in Berkeley
35. 1966 Riots on the Sunset Strip
36. 1966 Stokely Carmichael defines "black power" at the University of California's Greek Theatre in Berkeley
37. 1966 March from Delano to the state capital Striking workers are subjected to physical and verbal attacks throughout their peaceful demonstrations, and on March 16, the Senate Sub-Committee on Migratory Labor held hearings in Delano. March 17, the morning following the hearings, Cesar Chavez sets out with 100 farm workers to begin his pilgrimage to the San Joaquin Valley. After 25 days, their numbers swell from hundreds, to an army of thousands.
38. 1967 - Newark, New Jersey Riot
41. 1968 MLK Assassination Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968, an event that sent shock waves reverberating around the world. A Baptist minister and founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), King had led the civil rights movement since the mid-1950s, using a combination of impassioned speeches and nonviolent protests to fight segregation and achieve significant civil rights advances for African Americans. His assassination led to an outpouring of anger among Black Americans, as well as a period of national mourning that helped speed the way for an equal housing bill that would be the last significant legislative achievement of the civil rights era.
44. 1968 Terry vs. Ohio Stop-And- Frisk Policing
45. 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike
46. Soul Force and the Nonviolent Movement of America, 1953 - 1973
53. 1961 President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order establishing the President's Commission on the Status of Women
56. 1963 Congress passed the Equal Pay Act - the Equal Pay Act was signed by President Kennedy with the intention of ending gender-based pay discrimination.
58. 1963 The Feminine Mystique Published
59. 1963 Protesters fill a jail cell in Raleigh, North Carolina
61. 1963 Marchers with signs at the March on Washington The Voting Rights Act, adopted initially in 1965 and extended in 1970, 1975, and 1982, is generally considered the most successful piece of civil rights legislation ever adopted by the United States Congress. The Act codifies and effectuates the 15th Amendment’s permanent guarantee that, throughout the nation, no person shall be denied the right to vote on account of race or color. In addition, the Act contains several special provisions that impose even more stringent requirements in certain jurisdictions throughout the country.
64. 1963 ‘They cut my face with sharp brass knuckles; someone cut the back of my head with the jagged edge of a broken sugar container. There was a good deal of blood’
65. 1963 Welfare Mother's Movement The welfare mothers movement in Los Angeles can be traced to 1963 and the founding of the ANC Mothers Anonymous of Watts. Initially it had little connection with the larger women's movement, and its members did not view themselves as part of that movement. Later, after the formation of the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), and especially after Johnnie Tillmon took the helm of the national organization, this changed. The turning point might well have been the publication of her 1972 Ms Magazine article, "Welfare is a Woman's Issue." By 1979 and the International Women's Conference in Houston, women of color and poor women had become a visible presence in the larger women's movement (which ranged from reformist groups like NOW to radical feminists) and were making their voices heard and their issues public. At the present time, there is only one interview included in the "Welfare Mothers" series: the oral history of Johnnie Tillmon, one of the founders and leaders of the ANC Mothers Anonymous of Watts. Hopefully, an oral history of Ardelphia Hickey, another key person in the ANC mothers group, might be conducted eventually. It should also be noted that Alicia Escalante, the founder of the ELA Welfare Rights group (later named Chicana Welfare Rights Organization) was interviewed for a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
66. 1964 Bertha Gilbert taken by police at lunch counter in Nashville - Extracted from Op-Ed: Learning from the Nashville model of social change - LA times Article by Reverend Lawson
67. 1964 The Civil Rights Act The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended segregation in public places and banned employment discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, is considered one of the crowning legislative achievements of the civil rights movement. First proposed by President John F. Kennedy, it survived strong opposition from southern members of Congress and was then signed into law by Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. In subsequent years, Congress expanded the act and passed additional civil rights legislation such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Lead-up to the Civil Rights Act
68. 1964 War on Poverty President Lyndon B. Johnson declares the 'War on Poverty' and proposes the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which lays the ground for projects through the Office of Economic Opportunity. In his State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson introduced his “war on poverty,” when the national poverty rate was 19 percent. His project created Medicare, Medicaid, a permanent food stamp program, Head Start, Volunteers in Service to America and the Job Corps.
69. 1964 The Yakima Valley Council for Community Action(YVCCA) is organized to coordinate the War on Poverty efforts in the Valley. Late Nov.-Dec. 1965: The United Farm Workers Organizing Committee initiates a national table grape boycott. In Washington’s Yakima Valley, justice for farm workers would be aided by federal “war on poverty” programs. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed off on the “Economic Opportunity Act of 1964,” effectively initiating the “war on poverty,” as well as the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), with the aim of alleviating the harsh conditions encountered by many populations that had been previously institutionally neglected.3 The role of the war on poverty’s Yakima Valley administrative entity, the Yakima Valley Council for Community (YVCCA), was to train a group of Chicana/o leaders that would organize independently of the YVCCA. The YVCCA thus ushered in the organizational framework of el Movimiento by training its leaders. Prior to war on poverty efforts, the Catholic Cursillo Movement in the Valley trained individuals to take leadership positions within the community.4 The Cursillo movement began in the U.S. in 1957 as a Catholic ministry designed to train members in community leadership and engagement via weekend retreats. One organizer, Ricardo Garcia, noted that Cursillo activity existed around 1964-65, while others contend that Cursillismo didn’t necessarily have an impact until 1967. The movement stressed unity and action to better the lives of others. At the peak of Cursillo and YVCCA action, organizers helped establish centers throughout the valley to aid many of those in need, especially farm workers.
70. January 23, 1964: Poll Taxes Banned
71. ANC-MA (Aid to Needy Children-Mothers Anonymous ) In 1963, Johnnie Tillmon—a black single mother on welfare—decided to get in touch with fellow welfare recipients in Los Angeles. She was tired of enduring the stigma that came with being on welfare—and she did not want to endure it alone. She envisioned a group of welfare recipients that would support one another, exchange advice, and even pressure the California government for policy changes. In putting this group together, the first step was to find out who else was on welfare, or Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). “That was a hard job”, said Tillmon, “because that kind of information was not made public. We were in the housing project manager’s office one day when he was called to the phone. Instead of taking the call in his office, he took it from outside. While he was out, we started looking through the papers on his desk.” Among those papers was a list of neighborhood welfare recipients, and Tillmon “copied the names”. Soon after, she went door-to-door, spoke with neighbors in her housing project, and a group of welfare recipients began to form. This group came to be called Aid to Needy Children-Mothers Anonymous ([1], p. 18), or ANC-MA: one of many local welfare-rights groups across the country. California is indispensible to the welfare-rights story for a number of reasons. It was home to over 50 local welfare-rights groups [2]; more importantly, California can be understood as a testing ground for the policies and ideologies that then-Governor Ronald Reagan would later propagate as US president. Humanities 2017, 6, 14; doi:10.3390/h6020014 www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities Humanities 2017, 6, 14 2 of 12 Finally, California activists lent momentum and leadership to the broader, nationwide movement for welfare rights. In 1966—three years after ANC-MA’s founding—welfare recipients built a national group: the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). The NWRO used lobbying and direct action to pursue a three-pronged agenda: a “guaranteed annual income”, an increase in “availability of welfare benefits and services”, and improved “access to consumer credit ([3], p. 301).” Johnnie Tillmon was selected to serve as the NWRO’s chair, bringing with her the knowledge and experience she had gained in California.
72. Malcolm X and Ronald Stokes 1963 - After an altercation where a cop was shot, LAPD officers attacked the Black Muslim temple, a block away, where unarmed members were leaving after evening prayers. The final tally: one Muslim man dead, seven others seriously wounded, fourteen arraigned on felonies, and the temple ransacked. Malcolm, at the funeral, praised LA Black organizations for protesting the attack: "Our unity shocked them and we should continue to shock the white man by working together." (Set the Night on Fire L.A. n the Sixties, Mike Davis and Jon Wiener)
73. 1964 - 1965 Free Speech Movement “The Free Speech Movement was the first revolt of the 1960s to bring to a college campus the mass civil disobedience tactics pioneered in the civil rights movement. Those tactics, most notably the sit-in, would give students unprecedented leverage to make demands on university administrators, setting the stage for mass student protests against the Vietnam War.” – Robert Cohen, author of Freedom’s Orator
74. 1964 Forced sterilization policies in the US targeted minorities and those with disabilities – and lasted into the 21st century In August 1964, the North Carolina Eugenics Board met to decide if a 20-year-old Black woman should be sterilized. Because her name was redacted from the records, we call her Bertha. She was a single mother with one child who lived at the segregated O'Berry Center for African American adults with intellectual disabilities in Goldsboro. According to the North Carolina Eugenics Board, Bertha had an IQ of 62 and exhibited “aggressive behavior and sexual promiscuity.” She had been orphaned as a child and had a limited education. Likely because of her “low IQ score,” the board determined she was not capable of rehabilitation. Instead the board recommended the “protection of sterilization” for Bertha, because she was “feebleminded” and deemed unable to “assume responsibility for herself” or her child. Without her input, Bertha’s guardian signed the sterilization form.
75. 1965 El Teatro Campesino Founded Since its inception, El Teatro Campesino and its founder and artistic director, Luis Valdez, have set the standard for Latino theatrical production in the United States. Founded in 1965 on the Delano Grape Strike picket lines of Cesar Chavez’s United Farmworkers Union, the company created and performed “actos” or short skits on flatbed trucks and in union halls. Taking the “actos” on tour to dramatize the plight and cause of the farmworkers, El Teatro Campesino was honored in 1969 with an Obie Award for “demonstrating the politics of survival” and with the Los Angeles Drama Critics Award in 1969 and 1972.
76. 1965 Pauli Murray and Mary Eastwood published "Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII" in the George Washington Law Review. “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII” was written by Pauli Murray and Mary Eastwood in 1965. It was published by the George Washington University Law Review in response to the Civil Rights Act, which had been passed the year before in 1964, and it questions the extent to which the Constitution protects against gender discrimination, and the “interpretation of the sex discrimination provisions of the equal employment opportunity title of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg later read the article at the American Civil Liberties Union to convince the Supreme Court that the Equal Protection Clause does indeed apply to women.
78. 1966 First public same-sex marriage (by the Metropolitan Community Churches’s Rev. Troy Perry, 1968) LA's gay history is everywhere, from the endangered former nightclub The Factory to Griffith Park. But in honor of today's landmark Supreme Court decision on marriage equality, why not go and take a look at a particularly special site—this modest Huntington Park house, described by TIME magazine as the house where the first public gay marriage ceremony took place back in 1968. At the time, the house was the location of the Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles; the religious organization, founded in October of that year by Reverend Troy D. Perry, was open to LGBT members, as explained on MCC's website. The first MCC service had 12 attendees. In December 1968, the reverend performed the ceremony for two men (it was, of course, not legally binding then). More marriages followed. In March 1969, the reverend oversaw the marriage of two women; their wedding would go on, says an MCC historian, to be "the basis for the world's first lawsuit seeking recognition of same-gender marriage." (Some sources cite this union as the first same-sex marriage, but agree that whichever couple was first, it was Rev. Perry who officiated.)
79. 1966 Organizational efforts to unionize farm workers in Central Washington Thirty-five years ago in April, Yakima Valley farmworkers took to the streets to address low wages and other concerns. The workers, who marched from Granger to Yakima over the course of two days, were led by Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers union. One organizer of the march said its legacy was instilling confidence in area farmworkers and giving them a voice that has been heard in Olympia. “They became emboldened,” recalled Ricardo Garcia, one of the organizers of the 1986 march and one of the founders of Radio KDNA, a Granger-based Spanish-language radio station. The farmworkers movement traces its roots to the Mexican Farm Worker Program — also known as the Bracero program — that brought Mexican nationals to the United States to keep farms working as the military and war industries created a labor shortage. While the program required that farmworkers be treated fairly, they were subjected to brutal working conditions — workers were required to use short-handled hoes — and cheated out of a portion of their wages by the Mexican government, which was supposed to hold a tenth of their paychecks in trust for them. The National Farm Workers Union was organized to combat the abuses that farmworkers faced. Chavez emerged as a leader in the farm labor movement, founding the National Farm Workers Association in 1962 in California with Dolores Huerta, forging alliances with other unions, churches and community groups to push for the end of the Bracero program in 1964. While the program ended, wages remained low. Chavez’s NFWA merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to form United Farm Workers. Tomas Villanueva and Guadalupe Gamboa, sons of Yakima Valley farmworkers, met with Chavez in 1966, and came back to formed the United Farm Workers Cooperative in Toppenish, pushing for better wages, sick pay and help applying for food stamps and other assistance. In the 1980s, following Chavez’s calls for boycotting California grapes until workers receive better wages, labor organizers in Yakima sought Chavez’s help securing better wages in the Valley and promoting organized labor. “We invited him to inspire, motivate people for the farmworker movement,” Garcia said.
80. 1966 The National Organization for Women, known as NOW, was founded. On October 29, 1966, the Nation Organization for Women officially adopted their Statement of Purpose. The statement, written by Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray, expressed the organization’s main goals in addressing and fighting the unequal treatment of women in society. This 1966 document is a seminal part of the modern women’s rights movement and played an important role in inspiring more Americans to fight for gender equality. Although their Statement of Purpose was adopted in October, the feminist organization was officially founded on June 30, 1966. The statement described NOW’s purpose as “To take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.” NOW was created when its founders recognized that women needed a pressure group to combat gender discrimination, as the government agencies and recent laws to address this problem had proven ineffective. A prime example of this was the failure of the Equality Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Title VII is a federal law that prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion.) Employers were still discriminating against women in hiring practices and there was unequal pay for women. Secondly, NOW was also influenced by the failure of John F. Kennedy’s 1961 President’s Commission on the Status of Women, headed by Eleanor Roosevelt, to end discrimination against females in education, the workforce and Social Security. The movement was also inspired by Friedan’s 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique,” where she famously expresses her stultifying experiences as a housewife lacking other options in society beyond that domestic role. The founders of NOW hoped that their organization would help women combat discrimination in all aspects of society by lobbying and holding rallies, marches and conferences. NOW broke with previous trends for women’s organizations by including the concerns of black women in their mission. NOW has advocated for many issues they see as necessary for ensuring equality for women, including maternity leave rights in employment, child day care centers, equal job training opportunities, reproductive rights, and the prohibition of sex discrimination in the workplace.
83. 1966 The National Organization for Women, known as NOW, was founded. On October 29, 1966, the Nation Organization for Women officially adopted their Statement of Purpose. The statement, written by Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray, expressed the organization’s main goals in addressing and fighting the unequal treatment of women in society. This 1966 document is a seminal part of the modern women’s rights movement and played an important role in inspiring more Americans to fight for gender equality. Although their Statement of Purpose was adopted in October, the feminist organization was officially founded on June 30, 1966. The statement described NOW’s purpose as “To take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.” NOW was created when its founders recognized that women needed a pressure group to combat gender discrimination, as the government agencies and recent laws to address this problem had proven ineffective. A prime example of this was the failure of the Equality Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Title VII is a federal law that prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion.) Employers were still discriminating against women in hiring practices and there was unequal pay for women. Secondly, NOW was also influenced by the failure of John F. Kennedy’s 1961 President’s Commission on the Status of Women, headed by Eleanor Roosevelt, to end discrimination against females in education, the workforce and Social Security. The movement was also inspired by Friedan’s 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique,” where she famously expresses her stultifying experiences as a housewife lacking other options in society beyond that domestic role. The founders of NOW hoped that their organization would help women combat discrimination in all aspects of society by lobbying and holding rallies, marches and conferences. NOW broke with previous trends for women’s organizations by including the concerns of black women in their mission. NOW has advocated for many issues they see as necessary for ensuring equality for women, including maternity leave rights in employment, child day care centers, equal job training opportunities, reproductive rights, and the prohibition of sex discrimination in the workplace.
84. 1966: Miranda v. Arizona In a 5-4 Supreme Court decision Miranda v. Arizona (1966) ruled that an arrested individual is entitled to rights against self-discrimination and to an attorney under the 5th and 6th Amendments of the United States Constitution. Miranda v. Arizona (1966) culminated in the famed “Miranda rights” requirement during arrests. On March 13, 1963, police arrested Ernesto Miranda on charges of rape and kidnapping after a witness identified him in Phoenix, Arizona. During his two-hour interrogation, police did not advise Miranda on his constitutional rights to an attorney nor against self-incrimination. Nonetheless, he signed a written confession affirming knowledge of these rights and admitting to crimes. This confession led to a June 27, 1963 conviction of rape and kidnapping as well as a robbery pending on Miranda’s record. Judge McFate sentenced Miranda to a maximum fifty-five years in prison. Miranda’s lawyer, Alvin Moore, appealed the case to the Arizona Supreme Court, which reaffirmed the lower court’s decision, arguing that police had not violated Miranda’s constitutional rights in procuring a confession without the presence of a lawyer. The Supreme Court ruled differently on June 13, 1966. It held that presenting Miranda’s confession as evidence violated his constitutional rights under the 5th and 6th Amendments. The 5th Amendment protects from self-incrimination and requires the police to inform the detainee about his or her rights while the 6th guarantees criminal suspects rights to a personal or state issued attorney. Chief Justice Earl Warren articulated that the court permitted confessions or self-incriminating statements in criminal trials only when suspects issued them deliberately after police inform of their rights. Miranda v. Arizona (1966) included four dissenters and three separate dissenting opinions. After Arizona’s ruling was overturned, the state court retried the case without presenting Miranda’s confession. They convicted him of the same charges, and sentenced him to a maximum 30 years in prison. Four years after his release on parole, a killer, who did receive his Miranda rights, stabbed Miranda to death.
85. Lot 91 of : Cesar Chavez 1966 Inscribed photograph with Robert Kennedy at the Delano Grape Strike Candid Photograph of Cesar Chavez and Robert Kennedy at the Delano Grape Strike. ca. March 16, 1966. 8 x 9.5", pasted to stiff cardboard. Inscribed by Chavez in faded ink in lower margin: "Para Andy y Margarita, Buena Suerte, Cesar E. Chavez" Handwritten note on verso: Delano Grape Strike C. 1966 / Cesar Chavez, Robert Kennedy. As a US Senator, Kennedy visited Chavez (now sometimes called the Latino Martin Luther King Jr.) in the second year of the five-year Delano agricultural workers strike against grape growers in California's central valley. He met with Chavez again in 1968, when he was a presidential candidate, three months before his untimely death.
86. 1967 Century City Antiwar Demonstration June 23, 1967: Protestors fill Motor Ave. as they start marching toward Century Plaza Hotel for an anti-Vietnam War protest. Ten thousand protesters turned out during speech by President Lyndon Johnson.(Ray Graham / Los Angeles Times) . Ten thousand marchers, by most estimates, were assembling across the street from the Century City hotel. Hundreds of nightstick-wielding police — using a parade permit and court order that restricted the marchers from stopping to demonstrate — forcibly dispersed them. The bloody, panicked clash that ensued left an indelible mark on politics, protests and police relations. It marked a turning point for Los Angeles, a city not known for drawing demonstrators to marches in sizable numbers. The significance of the evening lay not simply in the 51 people who were arrested and the scores injured when 500 of the 1,300 police on the scene pushed the demonstrators into, and then beyond, a vacant lot that is now the site of the ABC Entertainment Center. Far more powerfully, the Century Plaza confrontation foreshadowed the explosive growth of the national antiwar movement and its inevitable confrontations with police. It shaped the movement’s rising militancy, particularly among the sizable number of middle-class protesters who expected to do nothing more than chant against Johnson outside the $1,000-a-plate Democratic Party fundraising dinner and were outraged by the LAPD’s hard-line tactics. Johnson rarely campaigned in public again, except for appearances at safe places like military bases. Within nine months, opposition to the war grew so strong that he shelved his reelection campaign. White liberals in Los Angeles, meanwhile, began to complain about excessive force by the LAPD, a subject traditionally raised only by black and Latino residents. By the next summer, when Chicago police beat demonstrators in the street outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the country was at war with itself. In retrospect, the Century Plaza demonstration was one of the earliest battlegrounds. …
87. 1967 President Johnson amended Executive Order 11246, which dealt with affirmative action, to include sex discrimination on the list of prohibited employment discrimination. The Origin of Affirmative Action Programs Former U.S. President John F. Kennedy used the phrase “affirmative action” in 1961. In an executive order, President Kennedy required federal contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed…without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson issued an order that used the same language to call for nondiscrimination in government employment. FEATURED VIDEO Hate Your Job? 5 Problems That Are in Every Workplace It was not until 1967 that President Johnson addressed sex discrimination. He issued another executive order on October 13, 1967. It expanded his previous order and required the government’s equal opportunity programs to “expressly embrace discrimination on account of sex” as they worked toward equality. The Need for Affirmative Action The legislation of the 1960s was part of a larger climate of seeking equality and justice for all members of society. Segregation had been legal for decades after the end of enslavement. President Johnson argued for affirmative action: if two men were running a race, he said, but one had his legs bound together in shackles, they could not achieve a fair result by simply removing the shackles. Instead, the man who had been in chains should be allowed to make up the missing yards from the time he was bound. If striking down segregation laws could not instantly solve the problem, then positive steps of affirmative action could be used to achieve what President Johnson called “equality of result.” Some opponents of affirmative action saw it as a “quota” system that unfairly demanded a certain number of minority candidates be hired no matter how qualified the competing White male candidate was. Affirmative action brought up different issues concerning women in the workplace. There was little protest of women in traditional “women’s jobs”—secretaries, nurses, elementary school teachers, etc. As more women began to work in jobs that had not been traditional women’s jobs, there was an outcry that giving a job to a woman over a qualified male candidate would be “taking” the job from the man. The men needed the job, was the argument, but the women did not need to work. In her 1979 essay “The Importance of Work,” Gloria Steinem rejected the notion that women should not work if they do not “have to." She pointed out the double standard that employers never ask men with children at home if they need the job for which they are applying. She also argued that many women do, in fact, “need” their jobs. Work is a human right, not a male right, she wrote, and she criticized the false argument that independence for women is a luxury.
88. 1968 LGBTQ-inclusive Metropolitan Community Church founded by Reverend Troy Perry
90. 1970 - Marching for peace-rally through through the streets of Little Tokyo For many young Asian Americans in the 1960s, the War in Vietnam was a brutal and urgent politicization. Watching the war unfold on the nightly news, a common sentiment was that America “killing people who looked like us.” Unlike the mainstream anti-war movement, many Asian Americans saw the Vietnam War as genocidal, or at least imperialist. They placed the war within the larger history of anti-Asian racism in America and imperialist expansion into the Third World. In 1969, Asians Americans for Peace was founded in Los Angeles. Groups like the Thai Binh and Van Troi Brigades (named after Vietnamese freedom fighters) formed to mobilize youth. Meanwhile, Asian Movement for Military Outreach
91. 1969 Roots and Resources Roots and Resources Founded in 1969 out of a campaign by student activist and faculty allies, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center quickly became a center for resources-gathering and scholarship for the Asian American movement. Asian American student organizations at CSULA, Occidental, USC, and other colleges soon followed. It was a vital hub and training ground for young activists, a place they could earn a salary while doing community work. Roots, the publication which inspired this exhibition’s title, was a course reader published by the UCLA Asian American Studies department in 1971. The editors, many of them young organizers themselves, defined the stakes and reasons for publishing such a volume in the preface: “the lack of appropriate materials in readily accessible form is one of the greatest immediate problems”
92. 1972 JoAnne/Nobuko Miyamoto and Chris Iijima perform at the Third World Storefront organization Art and Communication The Movement marked the first time Asian people collectively owned and created their own images in this country. Culture—musical, visual, written, performed—was a way to exorcise and subvert dominant American narratives. Young artists had to cut against the stereotypes and caricatures they had been fed since youth. Art was “for the people”: and there was little differentiation between it and activism, and it infused the new identity of Asian America with anti-imperialist and multiethnic critiques. Los Angeles became home to the first Asian American films ever made. Community-based and politically-charged, they showed Asian struggles, families, and histories in a way Hollywood never imagined. A plethora of newspapers got out the word. From personal essays to reports on U.S. militarism and Asian communities, the concerns and goals of the Movement took shape in those worn and circulated pages.
93. 1973 three young activists in New York City recorded A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America The Movement marked the first time Asian people collectively owned and created their own images in this country. It was no small feat: young artists had to cut against the stereotypes and caricatures they had been fed since youth. These lines from “We Are the Children” on the seminal album A Grain of Sand capture this tension: Foster children of the Pepsi generation Cowboys and Indians ride, red man, ride! Watching war movies with the next-door neighbor Secretly rooting for the other side Culture—musical, visual, written, performed—was a way to exorcise and subvert dominant American narratives. It infused the new identity of Asian America with anti-imperialist and multiethnic critiques. The verse above both names a dominant paradigm then re-appropriates the image of the heroic cowboy and soldier by actually identifying with the ‘villain’—in this case, the indigenous and Asian combatants.
94. 1960s/1970s Asian American protest Community and Place Mao told his followers to “serve the people,” and Movement activists took the call to heart. In the context of Los Angeles, they found their calling in historic Japanese, Filipino and Chinese American communities. Often neglected by government agencies and limited by language access and social stigma, these neighborhoods needed jobs, health services, and education access. As these younger, college-educated, radicalized Asian Americans worked in the community, they built intergenerational bridges and emphasized the importance of place. Their battles against eviction and redevelopment took on a double urgency: both protecting historical communities and the new Movement centers that shared spaces with them.
95. 1968/1980s Activists in Little Tokyo protest against neighborhood redevelopment and the displacement of residents. It is one of the items on display in the new Chinese American Museum exhibit Roots: Asian American Movements in Los Angeles “Hell no, we won’t go!” In the early 1970s, Little Tokyo was marked as a blighted area by the L.A. Master Plan, and the landmark Sun Building was to be torn down and replaced with a luxury hotel. The Sun Building housed the Japanese American Community Services, Asian Involvement Office (or JACS-AI, a more youth- and movement-focused wing of the older service organization), elderly Latino residents, Japanese cultural spaces, and small businesses. In 1973, the Little Tokyo Anti-Eviction Task Force formed to combat the evictions. It disbanded a couple years later, and was replaced by the Little Tokyo People’s Rights Organization (LTPRO). The LTPRO waged a multi-year battle of fundraising, demonstrations, community outreach, and Nisei Week outreach. They demanded the construction of a Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC), jobs for Japanese workers, and senior housing. In 1976, residents of the Sun Building were finally evicted. In a pyrrhic victory, the LTPRO and organizing was able to secure the Little Tokyo Service Center, founded in 1979, and funding for the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, which opened its doors in 1980. Many of those activists also went on to found the National Coalition for Redress/Reparations, which called upon the U.S. government to recognize the legacy of internment.
96. 1960s/1970s Health Fair at Castelar Elementary The Movement suffered from misogyny and homophobia. Though perhaps less so than other Third World left groups (e.g. there were fewer instances of physical abuse and assault), women and queer-identified people fought for presence, voice, and their issues. At the same time, the analysis of a “triple oppression” of class, race, and gender for women, and the creation of a multiracial LGBT identity, opened a profound reworking of patriarchal and heterosexual norms. These movements within the Movement are crucial not only to appraising the Asian American Movement, but offer vital case studies for our intersectional present.
97. 1971“Liberation,” January 1971 issue of Gidra Though Gidra included women on its staff and women’s issues in its pages, a series of “rap sessions” led to a special women’s issue in 1971 with the word “Liberation” and a large Venus symbol on the cover. The issue linked international questions to those at home, from war brides and G.I.s to struggles of women within the Asian American Movement. The focus on the global and the local was also present in the popular International Women’s Day celebrations. Beginning in 1974, the festival united many of the different Movement groups in a common recognition of women’s struggles.
98. 1960s/1970s GIDRA sisters
99. 1960s/1970s GIDRA Staff photo Murase, who completed his undergraduate degree in 1970, said he had few opportunities to learn about Asian Americans in the classroom. In response, he and five other UCLA students established Gidra in 1969, a monthly newspaper that highlighted and commented on Asian American issues while also enabling local artists and writers to share their work. Gidra was initially established at Campbell Hall as an Asian American student publication, Murase said. As Gidra’s influence began to extend beyond UCLA following its early publications, Murase said he and his peers moved their operations to a rented office on Jefferson Boulevard – about five and a half miles from UCLA – and accepted submissions from the larger community, including those who lived outside of Los Angeles or were not of Asian descent. Through the work of its volunteer staff and contributors, Gidra produced a total of 60 issues before its closure in 1974, Murase added. Coming of age in the 1960s, Asian American students at universities developed a new, distinct consciousness as Asian Americans shaped by the racial and international context of the time. By 1968, when the Asian American population numbered about 1.3 million, 80 percent of Japanese Americans and about 50 percent of Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans, respectively, were born in the United States. Asian Americans had come to reach the same educational attainment as whites, but still earned substantially less because of racial discrimination. For example, in 1960 Filipinos earned only 61 percent of the income of whites with comparable educations. Japanese and Chinese also earned less than their white counterparts, making 77 percent and 87 percent, respectively. Among the 107,366 Asian American college students on university campuses in 1970, Chinese and Japanese made up the vast majority, with over eight out of ten Asian American students being of either Japanese or Chinese American descent.
100. 1971 Asian Americans not only called for peace in order to bring troops home, but also protested U.S. intervention and imperialism in Vietnam As a newly-formed group identity, Asian American consciousness was rooted in the communities from which they came. Actively seeking to reclaim their histories and to find their own voices, they sought out narratives from their ancestors and elders. They became engaged with their home neighborhoods, creating local programs to “serve the people” and to rally the masses. They also sought to forge solidarities across ethnicity, race, and national boundaries as they identified with other “Third World” peoples. This term recognized the exploitative relations in the global hierarchy where the least developed nations faced oppressive histories and conditions similar to historically marginalized communities in the U.S. Through the practice of supporting one another’s movements and struggles, Asian American students built a collective identity and common cause to address racial injustices. Additionally, Asian American students were deeply influenced by major international developments of the 1960s. The anti-war movement against U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia reached its apex on campuses in early 1968; the success of North Vietnam’s Tet offensive demonstrated that despite the onslaught of U.S. military might, the war could not be easily won. Asian American war protestors realized their paradoxical position. On one hand, they knew they were Americans, but they were being sent to fight an enemy that not only looked like them, but were in a subordinate position in the world order like they found themselves to be within boundaries of their own country
101. 1970s Flier for "The Struggle for National Democracy in the Philippines" This flier advertises an event titled "The Struggle for National Democracy in the Philippines" which was sponsored by the Union of Democratic Filipinos and Liberation Books. A sideshow, songs and discussion are advertised. In this movement, Asian Americans, who had individually become involved with the causes of the times, drew together to address their own racial status and identity. They confronted enduring stereotypes of the unassimilable heathen, the Yellow Peril, and the perpetual foreigner. This generation of students faced the model minority myth, that Asian American students were expected to be hard-working, studious, and quiet even in the face of discrimination. While many sought to assimilate to mainstream Anglo-American cultural norms, they soon recognized that they could not assimilate fully into the white mainstream. The other racial model for Asian Americans was the Black Power movement, which rejected American racism and promoted Black autonomy, racial pride, and community control. For those African American activists, the ideologies of self-determination and cultural nationalism became realized through militant organizations, a flowering of Black arts and expression, and a reclamation of indigenous and ethnic histories. Some of the subsequent Asian American organizations, such as the Red Guard, modeled themselves partially after the Black Panthers, while others were more connected to diasporic movements, such as the Union of Democratic Filipinos, which was also involved in opposing martial law in the Philippines.
102. 1960s/1970s International Hotel in San Francisco
103. 1960s Sacramento Assembly Center, which held nearly 5,000 Japanese Americans from the Sacramento area in 1942 prior to their transfer to Tule Lake concentration camp in northern California. World War II exposed the blatant hypocrisy of American democracy and its institutional racism when the U.S. government incarcerated over 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry in concentration camps. Over six in ten internees were U.S.-born citizens, who were incarcerated for about four years under the suspicion of espionage and fear of their disloyalty. Not until 1988, after Japanese Americans lobbied for redress and reparations, did the U.S. government apologize for unjustly incarcerating its own citizens. In the decade after World War II, Asian Americans remained scarred by the internment and by the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era. Consequently, the U.S.-born generations of Asians, who grew up attending American public schools, generally felt pressure to integrate into American society by acculturating and assimilating.
104. 1968 SFSU Mass Strike Called THE CALL FOR ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES ON WEST COAST CAMPUSES, As students became involved with both international and local issues, they began to call for a relevant education that could address these concerns. However, as Irene Dea expressed, they found a system of higher education that largely excluded students of color from admission and whose courses showed little reflection of their histories and experiences
105. 1960s/1970s Student protesting for Asian Studies classes Students had to keep fighting for Asian American and ethnic studies courses to be offered every year in the early period of the ethnic studies centers.After the TWLF strikes at SF State and UC Berkeley and the creation of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, the struggle to establish Asian American studies continued as students sought to develop the curriculum that was relevant to their communities
106. 1960 Kennedy v. Nixon Latin opinion piece
107. 1960 “Democratic Representative Adam Clayton Powell introducing Democratic Party presidential candidate JFK in front of the Hotel Theresa in Harlem during campaign
108. 1965 Delano Grape Strike, Filipino farm workers
109. 1965 Larry Itliong leads Filipino Farm Workers Larry Itliong & other Filipino leaders of Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) approached NFWA to participate in strike against major grape growers of the Central Valley. Filipino farmwohe Delano Grape Strike. Born in the Philippines, Itliong immigrated to the U.S in 1929, hoping to become a lawyer. Instead, he ended up working in the Alaskan fish canneries and along the West Coast as a farm laborer. During that time, he experienced how badly laborers were treated and saw the power they could gain by working together. He became an activist and organizer. Following his service in the U.S. Army during World War II, Itliong became a U.S citizen and in 1954 moved to Stockton’s Little Manila, where he organized for the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC). He was so good at recruiting new members that union leaders asked him to move to Delano to organize Filipino grape workers. It was there that he helped change the history of farm labor. On Sept. 8, 1965, he led AWOC members in walking off the grape vineyards to demand wages equal to federal minimum wage and better working conditions. But Itliong knew that for the strike to succeed, they needed members of the National Farm Workers Association to join. He approached NFWA’s leader, César Chávez, with the proposal. On Sept. 16, the AWOC and NFWA joined forces beginning the Delano Grape Strike and Boycott. It lasted five years and was one of the most important social justice and labor movements in American history, ending with victory for the farmworkers. In the meantime, the AWOC and NFWA merged in 1966 to become the United Farm Workers (UFW), with Chávez as director and Itliong as assistant director. In 1971, Itliong left the UFW but continued to work for Filipino Americans until his death in 1977 at age 63. One of his major successes was securing funding for the construction of the Paulo Agbayani Retirement Village in Delano, which has provided housing and support for retired Filipino farmworkers since 1974.
110. 1960s Photo of Philip Vera Cruz “He was one of the co-founders of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), a labor union that later joined the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) to become what is known today as the United Farm Workers (UFW). During his years with AWOC, Philip and the other leaders made the decision to start Delano Grape Strike which was one of the most significant and well known strikes in the history of farmworker struggle in California. This strike is what eventually made the UFW. Philip Vera Cruz was the long standing second Vice President of the UFW until he retired in in 1997.”
111. 1960s Photo of Philip Vera Cruz 2 “In the words of Philip Vera Cruz: ‘On September 8, 1965, at the Filipino Hall at 1457 Glenwood St. in Delano, the Filipino members of AWOC held a mass meeting to discuss and decide whether to strike or to accept the reduced wages proposed by the growers. The decision was "to strike" and it became one of the most significant and famous decisions ever made in the entire history of the farmworker struggles in California. It was like an incendiary bomb, exploding out the strike message to the workers in the vineyards, telling them to have sit-ins in the labor camps, and set up picket lines at every grower's ranch... It was this strike that eventually made the UFW, the farmworkers movement, and Cesar Chavez famous worldwide.’”
112. 1972 Filipino Farm Workers gather to plan the construction of Agbayani Village Filipino union members played key roles in the farmworker movement. Most of these men, respectfully known as Manongs, migrated to the United States in their teens and 20s. Racist laws in California at that time forbade them from marrying outside their race, so most remained single. Evicted from farm labor camps after joining the Delano Grape Strike in 1965, by the end of the strike in 1970 many Filipino men were without families, pensions, and places to live. In 1973 and 1974, the farm worker movement built the Paulo Agbayani Retirement Village. It provided some of Manongs with safe and comfortable housing, human dignity and respect in their final years. Hundreds of volunteer laborers constructed this complex. The village was named after a Filipino Manong who died of a heart attack on the picket line. The village provided residents with individual rooms, a community kitchen serving Filipino cuisine, a dining hall, living and recreation room, and garden. As the first affordable housing community built by what is now the Cesar Chavez Foundation, Agbayani Village served as a model for dozens of properties built across four states that continue providing affordable housing. The Chavez Foundation manages the property today, which still houses people.
113. 1995 SPARC Neighborhood Pride Mural Program Sponsored Mural located on 1660 Beverly Boulevard at Unidad Park, Sponsored by SPARC’s Neighborhood Pride Mural Program in 1995. On September 8th, 1965, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), a majority Filipino labor group, initiated a strike against Delano grape growers amidst cries of “welga!” (the Tagalog word for “strike”). The purpose of the strike was to get union contracts, higher pay, and improved working conditions.
115. 1965 Protesting apart of the Delano Grape strike “The Delano Grape Strike began on September 8, 1965, in protest to substandard wages being paid to predominantly Filipino farm workers of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. A week later, they were joined by the Mexican-American National Farmworkers Association, led by prominent labor leader Cesar Chavez, his elder brother Richard, and Dolores Huerta. Less than a year later, the two organizations merged to form the United Farm Workers – and more than 2,000 workers had joined the fight. Ultimately, the strike spread across North America and even Western Europe as consumers supported the workers by boycotting non-union grapes”
116. 1970 Pamphlet for Delano Grape Strike and Boycott
127. 1973 Side with the Farmworker: Boycott Gallo Untitled (Side with the Farmworker), ca. 1973, screenprint on computer tractor paper During the civil rights era, artists often used whatever materials they had at hand to craft public messages about pressing concerns. Here an unidentified artist emblazons a pro-labor message on recycled computer paper, calling for the boycott of Gallo Wines. Activists on college campuses were especially known for using this unconventional paper for their printmaking. The artist depicts a revolting rat, a symbol of nonunion workers who cross the picket line
130. 1968 Walkouts at Venice High School
132. 1968 Walkouts in Roosevelt High School Students protest during a walkout at Roosevelt High School, Devra Weber, 1968; from the La Raza Photograph Collection, courtesy of UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. That push for diversity and a better educational system is what led to the Chicano Blowouts in 1968, also known as the East L.A. Walkouts. It's estimated that 15,000 to 22,000 students participated in the walkouts. As a result of this massive protest, according to the Los Angeles Conservancy, the school district hired more Latinx educators, implemented bilingual classes and ethnic studies, and at UCLA, the Los Angeles Times reported, a year after the walkouts, Mexican-American student enrollment rose 1,800%.
134. 1968 Wilson High School student protester Peter Rodriguez at LAUSD Board of Education meeting Wilson High School student protester Peter Rodriguez at LAUSD Board of Education meeting. Photo by Los Angeles Public Library. In 1967, Mexican American students throughout the Southwest held a 60% high school dropout rate. If they did graduate, they averaged an 8th-grade reading level. Due to Anglo-centric internal school policies many Chicano students were fielded to vocational training or classes for the mentally disabled. Prejudice from teachers and administrators instigated stereotypes of Mexican Americans that discouraged the students from higher learning. These inequalities in education led to the 1968 East Los Angeles Walkouts, also known as the "Blowouts," which displayed the largest mobilization of Chicano youth leaders in Los Angeles history.
135. 1968 Female student being arrested at Venice High School Walkout LOS ANGELES, CA - MARCH 12: Image originally published on March 13, 1968--Police struggle to arrest a female student at Venice High School during a clash with 1,000 students. She was accused of using obscene and abusive language. Eight people were arrested. March 1, 1968: Over 15,000 Chicanos, students, faculty, and community members, walk out of seven East L.A. high schools. Those schools included: Garfield, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Belmont, Wilson, Venice, and Jefferson High School. Some students from East L.A. junior high schools join the protests, as well
136. 1960s Brown Berets members When he 15, Dr. Sanchez started the Young Chicanos for Community Action in Monterey Park, California. He later changed the name to the Brown Berets, because he had actually purchased one, by chance, and wore it often. From then on, the grassroots group met at various locations, including the Boy’s and Girl’s Club and coffee shops, because they didn’t want police to know their whereabouts. Dr. Sanchez, along with Carlos Montes, another organizer with the Brown Berets, began to take up causes such as police brutality, better education, and discrimination against the Latinx community. Their first protest was in 1967, when they picketed the sheriff's office in East L.A. to protest the killing of Latino men.
137. 1968 Brown Beret's El Barrio Free Clinic
138. 1968 Brown Berets provide security for Memorial Procession the day after RFK was killed “Gloria Arellanes (left, second row) marches in a Robert Kennedy Requiem Memorial Procession the day after he was killed, from Belvedere Park to East Los Angeles College Stadium for a Catholic Mass. Brown Berets were security. (George Rodriguez)”. “At its peak, the Brown Berets had as many as 55 chapters throughout the country, including the Southwest but also in states such as Kansas and Minnesota. By 1970, however, the founding chapter was tearing at the seams. As the group planned demonstrations against the Vietnam War, female members began to question why they were largely excluded from leadership positions and relegated to behind-the-scenes, menial work.”
143. 1960s Brown Beret member Gloria Arellenas and others Undated photo strips show Gloria Arellanes, at left, and at center, with fellow Brown Beret members including, from clockwise: Lorraine Escalante, Hilda Reyes and Arlene Sánchez. (Special Collections & Archives, John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, Cal State LA, Gloria Arellanes Papers) Arrellanes became the minister of Finance & Correspondence after being apoitned by David Sánchez, the group’s founder. She was the only woman on the leadership team.
145. 1969 Portrait of Brown Beret member Hilda Jensen Rodriguez took this portrait of a Chicana demonstrator in the neighborhood of Lincoln Heights in 1969 Hilda’s Jenson’s photos has graced the covers of books, films etc, but often the names of her and her fellow women organizers have often gone unrecognized. In 2003 she wrote to filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño who had included her image in his memoir to identify her by name and include her maiden name: Hilda Reyes.
146. 1970 Official Resignation of all women in the Brown Berets LA chapter
148. 1969 1st Chicano Moratorium: Outside recruiting center
149. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Protestors in the rain
151. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Las Adelitas de Aztlán join protest “After leaving the Brown Berets, Arellanes — along with Jensen and her sister, Grace; Andrea and Esther Sánchez; Lorraine Escalante; Yolanda Solis; and Arlene Sánchez — founded Las Adelitas de Aztlán. The name referred to the soldaderas who fought alongside the men during the Mexican Revolution. They invited members of the community to join them and on Feb. 28, 1970, they made their public debut at the second anti-war moratorium in East Los Angeles.” Members of Las Adelitas de Aztlán at the second Chicano Moratorium protest against the Vietnam War on Feb. 28, 1970. At right is Hilda Reyes. They marched in the rain under a banner made by Gloria Arellanes and other members of the group. Las Adelitas dissolved later that year.
162. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Group of protestors move down Whittier Blvd. “The National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War in East Los Angeles would become the biggest gathering of Mexican American demonstrators in U.S. history to that point, with about 20,000 people parading down Whittier Boulevard to what was then called Laguna Park — before widespread violence erupted when sheriff’s deputies stormed the park and skirmishes followed. Patrol cars and buildings were set on fire.”
164. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Rosalio Munoz speaks at Laguna Park
165. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Consuelo Flores recounts as violence broke out Consuelo Flores Remembers, age 9 in 1970. She remembered smoke — tear gas, shot into the crowds. Untold numbers of protesters were injured by deputies or while fleeing. ‘I’m 9 years old, and I’m seeing the cop who’s supposed to protect me, whacking” a young man, she recalled. ‘My [red] shoes just fall off, and I just keep running, I’m running with my bare feet, so now my feet are burning too, and ... I’m just trying to get home.’
166. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Policeman with shotgun
168. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Injured policeman dragged out of Laguna Park
169. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Ruben Salazar 2 “Anyone who has worked a police beat as a reporter, as I have, knows that policemen tend to have difference attitudes toward enforcing the law depending on the social, financial and racial makeup of the people they deal with.” -Ruben Salazar Journalist Rubén Salazar and camera operator Guillermo Restrepo trailed after police who were chasing people east down Whittier Blvd. They eventually stopped at the Silver Dollar Bar and Café. That was where Los Angeles County deputy sheriff Tom Wilson said he fired the tear gas canister that struck Salazar in the head. Rubén Salazar was both the news director at Spanish language TV station KMEX and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
170. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: Raul Ruiz and the corpse of Gustav Montag Raul Ruiz lays a Mexican flag atop the corpse of Gustav Montag, during a 1971 protest in East Los Angeles. Three people died on Aug. 29, 1970 Moratorium. They included: LA Times journalist and KMEX (Ch. 34) news director Rubén Salazar, Gilberto Diaz (Angel Gilbert Diaz) and Lyn Ward. During a 1971 protest, Gustav Montag was murdered by police. Identified as Jewish, Montag was the fourth casualty in East LA of the organized moratoriums. This moratorium was held on February 2, 1971.
171. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: After moratorium demonstration Chicano Moratorium Committee anti-war demonstrators gather in East L.A. "The biggest, bloodiest disturbance in Los Angeles since Watts five years earlier lasted several hours. When it was over, Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar was dead and two others mortally wounded, about 200 people were under arrest, 75 law enforcement officers and untold numbers of demonstrators were injured, 95 county vehicles were destroyed or damaged, 44 buildings were pillaged and eight major fires had been set.” “After the Chicano Moratorium, I said no way am I going to put myself in jeopardy ever again,” Jensen says. “Because that’s how scared I was.” Jensen stopped organizing
172. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: 1974 ASCO First Supper After a Major Riot Harry Gamboa Jr.: LA County sheriffs open fired on innocent students and protestors, and wounded and killed many people who were protesting against the war in Vietnam, and were also protesting against police violence, which was followed by a two to three-and-a-half year crackdown on young people gathering on the streets of East Los Angeles. At the time that we shot [First Supper After a Major Riot], we felt that it had been long enough. It was time for it to be extinguished. And so, we declared it to be a celebration. Willie Herrón: At the time of the Moratorium, I was in high school. I remember the procession originating at Belvedere Park, protesting the Vietnam War and all the Chicanos that lost their lives. The police brutality was incredible. It affected me quite a bit and I think it affected all of us. So that's why Whittier Boulevard became such an important street, and a place for us to conduct our performances and connect them to our community and the way society viewed us at the time.
173. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: 1971 ASCO Stations of the Cross Stations of the Cross was a walking “ritual of resistance” against what the performance group Asco considered the “useless deaths” taking place in Vietnam. The male members of the group (which originally comprised Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez) paraded down Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, with Herrón as a Christ/death figure bearing a large cardboard cross. The quasi-Passion Play ended with the trio blocking a U.S. Marines recruiting office with the cross, symbolically halting military recruitment from their Mexican American neighborhood.
174. 1960s-1970s A group of men reading a newspaper promoting Raul Ruiz
175. 1964 The Fish-in Movement
176. 1964 The Fish-in Movement Liberty Boat 1964: First Actions of the Survival of the American Indian Association On December 23rd, 1963, some of the soon-to-be founding members of the SAIA marched on the state capital in Olympia, carrying signs that read “No salmon – No santa.”The Governor invited them in, listened to their complaints, and sent them away with only a dismissive, “Nice to hear your problems. Come back again.” The Native Americans involved in this protest were among those most adversely affected by the active state enforcement of fishing regulations. Many had been arrested on multiple occasions by state officers, and their gear had been confiscated numerous times. After years of waiting, they were completely disillusioned with the tribal organizations’ slow and halting attempts to resolve the fishing rights dispute through negotiation and compromise with state authorities. They saw an immediate need for confrontation and direct action in order to force real changes. Read more
177. 1964 The Fish-in Movement Protests Native Americans and supporters stage fish-in to protest denial of treaty rights on March 2, 1964. On March 2, 1964, Native Americans protest the denial of treaty rights by fishing in defiance of state law. Inspired by sit-ins of the civil rights movement, Actor Marlon Brando (b. 1924), Episcopal clergyman John Yaryan from San Francisco, and Puyallup tribal leader Bob Satiacum (1929-1991) catch salmon in the Puyallup River without state permits. The action is called a fish-in and results in the arrest of Brando and the clergyman. Satiacum is not arrested. The Pierce County Prosecutor refuses to file charges and Brando and Yaryan are released. Whenever tribal members fished for salmon and steelhead trout off their tiny reservations, they were held subject to state law. State regulations prohibited the use of nets and traps even though these were traditional Native methods of taking fish from rivers and streams. Native Americans insisting on their rights guaranteed by Treaties signed by Territorial Governor Isaac Stevens (1818-1862), were subjected to arrest and prosecution. The right to fish became a unifying identity among the diverse tribes of Puget Sound, which traditionally were tied to natural resources rather than to real estate. The fish-in was staged by the National Indian Youth Council, a Native American civil rights organization formed in Gallup, New Mexico, in 1961. NIYC members participated in "freedom rides" and civil rights marches in Alabama and Mississippi, and applied their knowledge of activism and civil disobedience to tribal issues. Fish-ins were used throughout the 1960s to dramatize racial discrimination, pride in native heritage, and to assert treaty rights. In 1974, a Federal court ruled that the tribes were entitled to half the salmon in Western Washington.
178. 1964 The Fish-in Movement police response 1964: Police brutalize tribal fishermen in Washington State. Local police brutalize tribal fishermen on the Puyallup River at Frank’s Landing, near Tacoma, Washington. Hank Adams, spokesman for the Survival of American Indians Association, sends an open letter to incoming Washington governor Dan Evans, informing him that Frank’s Landing is being posted against trespassing and that an armed guard is being stationed to prevent opposition by police officers.
179. 1961 Alaska Native organizations unify; call for federal recognition of rights Three regional Alaska Native organizations—the Alaska Native Brotherhood, the Dena Nena Henash, and the Iñupiat Paitot—agree to affiliate. The new group expresses strong disagreement with the U.S. Secretary of Interior’s Alaska Task Force report on land claims and needs. “Citing the land recommendations as ‘inadequate,’ the Indian organization made a series of concise but far-reaching proposals of its own including changes in the current Native Allotment Act to allow securing several tracts of non-contiguous land, the need for leasing for native benefit reserved tribal lands and future withdrawals, and the need for Congress to define aboriginal land rights of the natives and to establish a forum in which their claims may be heard.” —Tundra Times, 1961
180. 1962 Apsáalooke (Crow) nurse recognized for lifetime of fighting abuses Susie Walking Bear Yellowtail, an Apsáalooke (Crow)/Lakota registered nurse, receives the President’s Award for Outstanding Nursing Health Care. In 1930, she began traveling to reservations across the U.S. to learn about the condition of Indian health and to advocate for political action. She witnessed the forced sterilization of Crow women. On the Navajo reservation, she found that gravely ill Navajo children were literally dying on the backs of their mothers, who walked 20 miles or more to reach the nearest hospital. These experiences inspired her to dedicate her life to fighting abuses in the Indian health care system.
182. 1964 Formal training and salary for physicians’ aides
183. 1964-75 42,000 Native men and women serve in Vietnam On his last day of service in Vietnam in 1963, Harvey Pratt (Cheyenne and Arapaho) poses in Da Nang carrying his rappelling rope that he used to descend from helicopters to clear landing fields. Pratt is the designer of the National Native Americans Veterans Memorial. During the Vietnam War, more than 42,000 American Indians and Alaska Natives join the U.S. armed forces. Poor military record keeping may have undercounted the number. American Indians seek each other out and share dismay that stereotypes about Indians influence officers to send them out front during dangerous missions. The Vietnam Memorial lists 248 American Indians and Alaska Natives killed in action.
184. 1965-1971 Nuclear weapons tested in Aleutian Islands Map
187. 1966 Alaska Federation of Natives established to speak with one voice U.S. Secretary of Interior Walter J. Hickel, far left, meeting in Washington, D.C. with people involved in Native Alaska land claims disputes. From left to right: Tim Wallace, President Fairbanks Native Association; Charles Edwardsen, Executive Director Arctic Slope Native Association; Eben Hopson, Emil Notti; Attorney Barry Jackson (standing); State Senator William Hensley; and Alfred Ketzler. Farthest back on the right are State Senator Ray Christiansen and Frank Degnan. John Borbridge is seated in the foreground. A statewide conference of more than 400 Alaska Natives, representing several regional associations, establishes the Alaska Federation of Natives. Its purpose is to speak with a unified voice about land transfers, land claims, and resources development. The group pushes for a comprehensive settlement of all Alaska Native land claims, which comprise almost the state’s entire land mass.
188. 1968 Oil found in Prudhoe Bay; Alaska Native claims delay pipeline
189. 1968 Government trains midwives for remote villages, First Alaska community health aide class. Left to right: Herman Moonin, Mary Wassillie, Mary Nikolai, Dr. Carolyn Brown, Anne Jackson, and Jennie Erickson.
190. 1968 American Indian Movement advocates for urban Indian rights The founding board of the American Indian Movement meets in Minneapolis. Left to right: Harold Goodsky, Charles Deegan, Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt, Peggy Bellcourt, Mr. & Mrs. Barber, Rita Rogers (seated), George Mitchell, Mrs. Mellessy and daughter. A group of 200 Natives meet in Minneapolis to found the American Indian Movement, known as AIM. Growing out of the late 1960s civil rights era, its objective is to protect the rights of urban Indians. The U.S. government considers the group radical. “The American Indian Movement office was the place to stop by if you needed a ride, an emergency loan, leads on jobs, or a place to live. Social services and political action were integrated.”
191. 1968 President Johnson signs the Indian Civil Rights Act President Lyndon Johnson calls for “termination” to be replaced by Indian “self-determination.” Congress passes the Indian Civil Rights Act “to ensure that the American Indian is afforded the broad constitutional rights secured to other Americans … [in order to] protect individual Indians from arbitrary and unjust actions of tribal governments.” “The Act is a highly controversial law because it authorizes federal courts to intervene in intra-tribal disputes, a power they never had before. Many Indians bitterly resent this development. Essentially, it does two things: First, it confers certain rights on all persons who are subject to the jurisdiction of a tribal government. Second, it authorizes federal courts to enforce many of these rights.”
192. 1968 Aim members In the summer of 1968, Native American activists Dennis Banks, George Mitchell, and Clyde Bellecourt gathered hundreds of like-minded individuals in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Armed with ultimate goal of forcing the United States to recognize Native American sovereignty, the activists formed the American Indian Movement group, or the AIM. As stated on AIM's official website, the American Indian Movement’s goals were: the recognition of Indian treaties by the United States government, among other goals such as sovereignty and the protection of Native Americans and their liberties. AIM has sought to accomplish these goals over the past five decades by bringing a multitude of successful lawsuits against the federal government with n the hopes of changing U.S. policy. Key events for the American Indian movement include the group’s formation in Minnesota in 1968, as well as the initial occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969. The movement also organized the “Trail of Broken Treaties” March, where protesters marched on Washington, D.C. Following the 1973 occupation by AIM leader Russell Means and his supporters at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the AIM became an internationally known and recognized civil rights group. The New York Times even ran a story that reported on the vanishing number of Indians, as well as to their unfair treatment by the United States Federal government. In an Atlanta newspaper in 1973, Russel Means said that if the Indian voice isn’t heard among the U.S. government officials, “the situation…will evolve into a bigger and larger Wounded Knee.” It seems that Means was indeed correct, as an FBI officer was killed in a shootout with AIM at the Pine Ridge Reservation two years later.
193. 1970 Military medics recruited to reservations
194. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: 12 Alcatraz protestors voluntarily surrender
196. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: A young brave from New Mexico at a Thanksgiving feast on Alcatraz Island A young brave from Nogales, New Mexico, at a Thanksgiving feast on Alcatraz Island on November 27, 1969. For Native American students at San Francisco State University and other schools around the Bay Area, the protests and strikes at University of California, Berkeley during the 1960s, were a glimpse into how political activism could begin to address the injustices Native people had long suffered. In meetings at San Francisco’s American Indian Center and Warren’s, a bar in the Mission District’s “Little Res,” a plan was hatched to take over Alcatraz Island, whose world-famous prison had recently been decommissioned and its land declared “surplus.” The siege of Alcatraz officially began on November 20, 1969, with two major goals — to agitate for Native American self-determination and sovereignty and to establish a Native American cultural center, museum and college on the island. In the 1960s, War Jack says, “just to identify yourself as a Native person would bring immediate discrimination and racism. [Alcatraz] helped us re-establish our self-identification as Native people. People developed pride.”
197. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Atha Rider Whitemankiller, stands before the press after the removal of the last occupiers from Alcatraz Overcoming exhaustion and disillusionment, Atha Rider Whitemankiller, Cherokee, stands before the press at the Senator Hotel in San Francisco after the removal of the last Indian occupiers from Alcatraz on June 11, 1971. His eloquent words about the purpose of the occupation of Alcatraz Island—to publicize his people’s plight and establish a land base for the Indians of the Bay Area—were the most quoted of the day.
198. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Belvia Cottier, Sioux, and a young friend on Alcatraz A group of 78 Indians calling themselves Indians of All Tribes lands on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and begins to occupy it in a demonstration for the rights of American Indians. Indians of All Tribes draws on powerful historic precedents of Native peoples taking a stand for the return of illegally taken lands, and they also usher in a new activist movement that draws attention with its mix of radicalism and American Indian traditionalism. “We moved onto Alcatraz Island because we feel that Indian people need a cultural center of their own. For several decades, Indian people have not had enough control of training their young people. And without a cultural center of their own, we are afraid that the old Indian ways may be lost. We believe that the only way to keep them alive is for Indian people to do it themselves.” —Letter from Indians of All Tribes, December 16, 1969
199. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Celebration Occupants on Alcatraz Island, gather in front of the main cell block with the island's water tower in the background, during the occupation of Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay, California, 11th November 1970. The occupation was a 19-month long protest when 89 Native Americans and their supporters occupied Alcatraz Island from 20th November 1969 to 11th June 1971 when the United States Government forcibly ended the protest.
200. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Coast Gaurd ward off supporters in boats as they circle Alcatraz Islamd
201. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Group by playground
202. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Hoka Hay!! Poster stating that the U.S. government has forcibly taken back—“ripped off”—Alcatraz Island. “Hoka Hay!!” translates roughly as “It is Over.” The poster appeared in Berkeley, California on June 12, 1971, the morning after the removal of remaining occupiers from the island. A group of 78 Indians calling themselves Indians of All Tribes lands on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and begins to occupy it in a demonstration for the rights of American Indians. Indians of All Tribes draws on powerful historic precedents of Native peoples taking a stand for the return of illegally taken lands, and they also usher in a new activist movement that draws attention with its mix of radicalism and American Indian traditionalism. “We moved onto Alcatraz Island because we feel that Indian people need a cultural center of their own. For several decades, Indian people have not had enough control of training their young people. And without a cultural center of their own, we are afraid that the old Indian ways may be lost. We believe that the only way to keep them alive is for Indian people to do it themselves.” —Letter from Indians of All Tribes, December 16, 1969
203. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Indian American Land A Native American girl paints a sign that reads "Indian American Land" on a wall of Alcataz Island in San Francisco Bay. In 1969, dozens of Native activists took over the former federal prison site in protest of U.S. policies, claiming it as a cultural and spiritual center. In response, a growing movement of young Native Americans sought to reclaim their sovereignty through what they called the Red Power movement. Media savvy and galvanized by the protest movements of the 1960s, they staged high-profile protests to raise awareness of Native issues. (Native Americans are telling their own stories to counter stereotypes of Indigenous life.) One of the first was the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, home to a decommissioned prison where Hopi men and other Native Americans had once been held. In November 1969, a group calling itself “Indians of All Tribes” took over the island and proclaimed it a cultural and spiritual center in the name of all Native Americans. The occupation lasted until June 1971, when it disintegrated due to organizational issues, infighting, and worsening conditions as the U.S. government cut off power and water to the island.
204. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: John Trudell on Alcatraz
205. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Kids on bikes with lighthouse in background This is a photograph of Native American children playing on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. On November 20, 1969, 79 Native Americans, including six children, set out to occupy Alcatraz Island. The intention of the occupation was to gain Indian control over the island for the purpose of building a center for Native American Studies, an American Indian spiritual center, an ecology center, and an American Indian Museum.
206. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: LaNada Means poses with a proposed cultural center Native American activist LaNada Means poses with an architect's model of a proposed cultural center on the first anniversary of their occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, California, 20th November 1970. The occupation was a 19-month long protest when 89 Native Americans and their supporters occupied Alcatraz Island from 20th November 1969 to 11th June 1971 when the United States Government forcibly ended the protest.
207. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: LaNada Means presents a proposed cultural center
208. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: LaNada with her son
209. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Leaders of the American Indian Movement hold a press conference
210. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Native and Indigenous elders from throughout the country joined the young occupiers of Alcatraz Island for a meeting Native and Indigenous elders from throughout the country joined the young occupiers of Alcatraz Island for a meeting they said was the most important since the ‘Ghost Dance’ days of the 1880s. When, in 1956, the Bureau of Indian Affairs launched yet another assimilationist policy, the Indian Relocation Act, the intention was to further undermine Native communities by moving youth from Indian Reservations to urban centers throughout the West. Instead, the opposite occurred. Native people began, for the first time, to find support across tribal lines among the more than 100,000 relocated Indigenous people who shared similar histories of Indigenous identity and cultural survival… For Native American students at San Francisco State University and other schools around the Bay Area, the protests and strikes at University of California, Berkeley during the 1960s, were a glimpse into how political activism could begin to address the injustices Native people had long suffered. In meetings at San Francisco’s American Indian Center and Warren’s, a bar in the Mission District’s “Little Res,” a plan was hatched to take over Alcatraz Island, whose world-famous prison had recently been decommissioned and its land declared “surplus.” The siege of Alcatraz officially began on November 20, 1969, with two major goals — to agitate for Native American self-determination and sovereignty and to establish a Native American cultural center, museum and college on the island. In the 1960s, War Jack says, “just to identify yourself as a Native person would bring immediate discrimination and racism. [Alcatraz] helped us re-establish our self-identification as Native people. People developed pride.”
211. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Occupiers moments after being removed from Alcatraz Island
212. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Occupiers standing on the dock at Alcatraz On November 20, 1969, a group of Native students landed on an uninhabited Alcatraz and reclaimed it as Indian Land, beginning nineteen months of occupation. Leaders included Richard Oakes, an Akwesasne Mohawk and Chair of the Native American student group from San Francisco State College and LaNada War Jack, a member of the Shoshone Bannock Tribes and Chair of the Native American students from UC Berkeley. Thousands of Native people from across the country joined the original group of 80 occupiers. The Indians of All Tribes demanded that the federal government recognize treaties with Indian tribes, they demanded a Native American cultural center, and they demanded that land be returned. As the Occupiers discussed their plans, they wrote messages of peace and freedom around the island as well as submitting formal proposals and architectural plans. You can see several of their messages and symbols recently restored here at the dock.
214. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Playing basketball near main entrance
215. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Posed Photo
216. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Proclamation On Nov. 26, 1969, just before Thanksgiving Day Indians of All Tribes, issued the following press release indicating the seizure of Alcatraz Island. The 4-page press release reprinted by the Journal of American Indian Education in 1970 indicates that Alcatraz Island will be used for several Indian institutions including: 1. A Center for Native American Studies 2. An American Indian Spiritual Center 3. An Indian Center of Ecology 4. A Great Indian Training School 5. Creation of an American Indian Museum
218. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Sioux woman with a drink in cell
219. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Two activist walking through a cell block
220. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Three men and a dog inside the cell block of Alcatraz
221. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: View of the fire which burned most of the night on Alcatraz Island
222. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Woodcut print by Elvin Willie
225. 1965 Robert F. Kennedy and reporters with student as he works at Sherman Indian High School. In the fall of 1963 the ninth and tenth grades were revived. Sherman Indian High School re-opened enrollment to other tribes, including California Indian tribes. The school again moved in the direction of a high school program, adding a grade each year until the school began graduating classes in 1966. In 1967 eight buildings were deemed unable to withstand a major earthquake. One of the last buildings to be razed was the old school building in 1970. The old cornerstone from this building and its contents were saved and placed in Sherman Museum (old Administrative Building), the last of the original buildings. In 1971, Sherman was re-accredited as a high school, and became known as Sherman Indian High School. The museum houses records from the school’s early days to the present. Over 2,000 catalogued items or artifacts of American Indian origin are housed there. These items were acquired from friends of the school and museum. In 1974, the Sherman Indian Museum was designated as a Riverside Cultural Heritage Landmark. It was entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. At present day Sherman, the school hosts an average of 300 to 500 students who come from reservations spanning the United States. Any student who is a tribal member of a federally-recognized tribe with at least one-fourth blood quantum may apply to attend. The school is funded entirely by the United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Bureau of Indian Education. Attendance is free of charge. The reasoning behind leaving home to come to Sherman vary. Some students attend SIHS because they live too far away from school, back at home, to attend daily. Others attend SIHS because they had negative experiences attending non-Native schools, and more than a few attend SIHS simply due to it being a family tradition. Sherman enforced a Reduction In Force of employees in the spring of 2009, due to budget constraints. Approximately 34 employees were laid off. Despite this, Sherman faculty and staff still work to provide a safe, healthy and productive site for their Native American students.
226. 1965 Robert F. Kennedy and reporters with student in woodshop at Sherman Indian High School. Robert F. Kennedy and reporters with student in woodshop at Sherman Indian High School. In the fall of 1963 the ninth and tenth grades were revived. Sherman Indian High School re-opened enrollment to other tribes, including California Indian tribes. The school again moved in the direction of a high school program, adding a grade each year until the school began graduating classes in 1966. In 1967 eight buildings were deemed unable to withstand a major earthquake. One of the last buildings to be razed was the old school building in 1970. The old cornerstone from this building and its contents were saved and placed in Sherman Museum (old Administrative Building), the last of the original buildings. In 1971, Sherman was re-accredited as a high school, and became known as Sherman Indian High School. The museum houses records from the school’s early days to the present. Over 2,000 catalogued items or artifacts of American Indian origin are housed there. These items were acquired from friends of the school and museum. In 1974, the Sherman Indian Museum was designated as a Riverside Cultural Heritage Landmark. It was entered into the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. At present day Sherman, the school hosts an average of 300 to 500 students who come from reservations spanning the United States. Any student who is a tribal member of a federally-recognized tribe with at least one-fourth blood quantum may apply to attend. The school is funded entirely by the United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Bureau of Indian Education. Attendance is free of charge. The reasoning behind leaving home to come to Sherman vary. Some students attend SIHS because they live too far away from school, back at home, to attend daily. Others attend SIHS because they had negative experiences attending non-Native schools, and more than a few attend SIHS simply due to it being a family tradition. Sherman enforced a Reduction In Force of employees in the spring of 2009, due to budget constraints. Approximately 34 employees were laid off. Despite this, Sherman faculty and staff still work to provide a safe, healthy and productive site for their Native American students.
227. 1965 March to Montgomery
228. 1965 Civil rights activists march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge
229. 1960s Welfare Activism Activists marching under the NWRO banner in the Poor People’s Campaign, Washington, D.C., May–June 1968. 1960s/70s Welfare activists were mostly working-class black and some white mothers, and the majority of them were themselves welfare recipients. As welfare recipients, women of color, and working-class people, they faced a wave of policies and ideologies that stigmatized them, policed their behavior, and made receiving benefits increasingly difficult. These policies were but one element of a larger political crisis, wherein the California government stoked racialized and gendered fears in order to shrink the welfare state. Rather than simply acquiesce to this reality, welfare-rights groups in California refused to accept it. In 1963, Johnnie Tillmon—a black single mother on welfare—decided to get in touch with fellow welfare recipients in Los Angeles. She was tired of enduring the stigma that came with being on welfare—and she did not want to endure it alone. She envisioned a group of welfare recipients that would support one another, exchange advice, and even pressure the California government for policy changes. In putting this group together, the first step was to find out who else was on welfare, or Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). “That was a hard job”, said Tillmon, “because that kind of information was not made public. We were in the housing project manager’s office one day when he was called to the phone. Instead of taking the call in his office, he took it from outside. While he was out, we started looking through the papers on his desk.” Among those papers was a list of neighborhood welfare recipients, and Tillmon “copied the names”. Soon after, she went door-to-door, spoke with neighbors in her housing project, and a group of welfare recipients began to form. This group came to be called Aid to Needy Children-Mothers Anonymous ([1], p. 18), or ANC-MA: one of many local welfare-rights groups across the country.
230. 1968 National Welfare Rights Organization Marchers, 1968. This photograph and these pins highlight the welfare rights movement, which emerged in the 1960s at the intersection of the black freedom movement, women’s liberation, and anti-poverty activism. Many participants were single women of color, and they fought against punitive social policies that prioritized paid labor over caregiving responsibilities and tied the receipt of public benefits to increased surveillance of their families. Fighting for the means to provide for their families and juggling the demands of work, childcare, and activism, these women offered an expansive vision of citizenship that remains unfulfilled to this day. ( Jeanne Gardner Gutierrez, Curatorial Scholar in Women’s History )Jack Rottier Photograph Collection, Special Collections Research Center, George Mason University

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3. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Protestors in the rain
7. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Las Adelitas de Aztlán join protest “After leaving the Brown Berets, Arellanes — along with Jensen and her sister, Grace; Andrea and Esther Sánchez; Lorraine Escalante; Yolanda Solis; and Arlene Sánchez — founded Las Adelitas de Aztlán. The name referred to the soldaderas who fought alongside the men during the Mexican Revolution. They invited members of the community to join them and on Feb. 28, 1970, they made their public debut at the second anti-war moratorium in East Los Angeles.” Members of Las Adelitas de Aztlán at the second Chicano Moratorium protest against the Vietnam War on Feb. 28, 1970. At right is Hilda Reyes. They marched in the rain under a banner made by Gloria Arellanes and other members of the group. Las Adelitas dissolved later that year.
16. 1966 Breaking Bread Ending his 23-day fast in support of the Union’s strike against grape growers, United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez (R) breaks bread with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in this 1966 photo. Chavez said that Kennedy legitimized his union’s cause by lending his support. On 19th February, 1968, Cesar Chavez, the trade union leader, began a hunger strike in protest against the violence being used against his members in California. Robert F. Kennedy went to the San Joaquin Valley to give Chavez his support and told waiting reporters: “I am here out of respect for one of the heroic figures of our time – Cesar Chavez. I congratulate all of you who are locked with Cesar in the struggle for justice for the farm worker and in the struggle for justice for Spanish-speaking Americans.” On March 10 Robert F. Kennedy flew to California to help Chavez end a 25-day fast, offered as public penance for the violence that had resulted from his union's strike tactics. Chavez, who had lost 35 pounds in 25 days, was too weak to speak at the Mass of Thanksgiving in his honor. But someone read his speech, which included the following words: "It is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are... I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally
18. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Group of protestors move down Whittier Blvd. “The National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War in East Los Angeles would become the biggest gathering of Mexican American demonstrators in U.S. history to that point, with about 20,000 people parading down Whittier Boulevard to what was then called Laguna Park — before widespread violence erupted when sheriff’s deputies stormed the park and skirmishes followed. Patrol cars and buildings were set on fire.”
20. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Rosalio Munoz speaks at Laguna Park
22. 1970 Later Chicano Moratoriums: Raul Ruiz and the corpse of Gustav Montag Raul Ruiz lays a Mexican flag atop the corpse of Gustav Montag, during a 1971 protest in East Los Angeles. Three people died on Aug. 29, 1970 Moratorium. They included: LA Times journalist and KMEX (Ch. 34) news director Rubén Salazar, Gilberto Diaz (Angel Gilbert Diaz) and Lyn Ward. During a 1971 protest, Gustav Montag was murdered by police. Identified as Jewish, Montag was the fourth casualty in East LA of the organized moratoriums. This moratorium was held on February 2, 1971.
23. 1960s A group of men reading La Raza newspaper
27. 1960 JFK Campaign in San Jose Sen. John Kennedy gestures as he emphasizes a point during his address to more than 12,000 people in San Jose, California, November 2, 1960. Big signs greeted the Democratic standard bearer. “While Kennedy acknowledged that Mexican-American votes in Texas were critical to his win over Nixon, he largely neglected the promises made to Viva Kennedy campaigners—particularly Mexican Americans—once in the White House. Without the unifying force of the campaign and its celebrity candidate, the alliance of Latinos that Viva Kennedy represented collapsed. Nevertheless, the Kennedy campaign of 1960 established the broad outlines of Latino politics in the years to come. It encouraged leaders in various Latino communities to see the presidential election as the foundation of a nationwide Latino political community, even as it appealed to members of those communities in different ways.”
28. 1968 RFK and Cesar Chavez Ending his 23-day fast in support of the Union’s strike against grape growers, United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez (R) breaks bread with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in this 1966 photo. Chavez said that Kennedy legitimized his union’s cause by lending his support. On 19th February, 1968, Cesar Chavez, the trade union leader, began a hunger strike in protest against the violence being used against his members in California. Robert F. Kennedy went to the San Joaquin Valley to give Chavez his support and told waiting reporters: “I am here out of respect for one of the heroic figures of our time – Cesar Chavez. I congratulate all of you who are locked with Cesar in the struggle for justice for the farm worker and in the struggle for justice for Spanish-speaking Americans.” On March 10 Robert F. Kennedy flew to California to help Chavez end a 25-day fast, offered as public penance for the violence that had resulted from his union's strike tactics. Chavez, who had lost 35 pounds in 25 days, was too weak to speak at the Mass of Thanksgiving in his honor. But someone read his speech, which included the following words: "It is how we use our lives that determines what kind of men we are... I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us be men." Note: sources have conflicting start and ending dates of this either 25 or 27 day fast on water only. (UPI Photo/Files)
30. 1968 Walkouts in Roosevelt High School Students protest during a walkout at Roosevelt High School, Devra Weber, 1968; from the La Raza Photograph Collection, courtesy of UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. That push for diversity and a better educational system is what led to the Chicano Blowouts in 1968, also known as the East L.A. Walkouts. It's estimated that 15,000 to 22,000 students participated in the walkouts. As a result of this massive protest, according to the Los Angeles Conservancy, the school district hired more Latinx educators, implemented bilingual classes and ethnic studies, and at UCLA, the Los Angeles Times reported, a year after the walkouts, Mexican-American student enrollment rose 1,800%.
31. 1969 1st Chicano Moratorium: Outside recruiting center
32. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Consuelo Flores recounts as violence broke out Consuelo Flores Remembers, age 9 in 1970. She remembered smoke — tear gas, shot into the crowds. Untold numbers of protesters were injured by deputies or while fleeing. ‘I’m 9 years old, and I’m seeing the cop who’s supposed to protect me, whacking” a young man, she recalled. ‘My [red] shoes just fall off, and I just keep running, I’m running with my bare feet, so now my feet are burning too, and ... I’m just trying to get home.’
33. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Policeman with shotgun
34. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Injured policeman dragged out of Laguna Park
35. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Ruben Salazar 2 “Anyone who has worked a police beat as a reporter, as I have, knows that policemen tend to have difference attitudes toward enforcing the law depending on the social, financial and racial makeup of the people they deal with.” -Ruben Salazar Journalist Rubén Salazar and camera operator Guillermo Restrepo trailed after police who were chasing people east down Whittier Blvd. They eventually stopped at the Silver Dollar Bar and Café. That was where Los Angeles County deputy sheriff Tom Wilson said he fired the tear gas canister that struck Salazar in the head. Rubén Salazar was both the news director at Spanish language TV station KMEX and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
36. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: After moratorium demonstration Chicano Moratorium Committee anti-war demonstrators gather in East L.A. "The biggest, bloodiest disturbance in Los Angeles since Watts five years earlier lasted several hours. When it was over, Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar was dead and two others mortally wounded, about 200 people were under arrest, 75 law enforcement officers and untold numbers of demonstrators were injured, 95 county vehicles were destroyed or damaged, 44 buildings were pillaged and eight major fires had been set.” “After the Chicano Moratorium, I said no way am I going to put myself in jeopardy ever again,” Jensen says. “Because that’s how scared I was.” Jensen stopped organizing
37. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: 1974 ASCO First Supper After a Major Riot Harry Gamboa Jr.: LA County sheriffs open fired on innocent students and protestors, and wounded and killed many people who were protesting against the war in Vietnam, and were also protesting against police violence, which was followed by a two to three-and-a-half year crackdown on young people gathering on the streets of East Los Angeles. At the time that we shot [First Supper After a Major Riot], we felt that it had been long enough. It was time for it to be extinguished. And so, we declared it to be a celebration. Willie Herrón: At the time of the Moratorium, I was in high school. I remember the procession originating at Belvedere Park, protesting the Vietnam War and all the Chicanos that lost their lives. The police brutality was incredible. It affected me quite a bit and I think it affected all of us. So that's why Whittier Boulevard became such an important street, and a place for us to conduct our performances and connect them to our community and the way society viewed us at the time.
38. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: 1971 ASCO Stations of the Cross Stations of the Cross was a walking “ritual of resistance” against what the performance group Asco considered the “useless deaths” taking place in Vietnam. The male members of the group (which originally comprised Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez) paraded down Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, with Herrón as a Christ/death figure bearing a large cardboard cross. The quasi-Passion Play ended with the trio blocking a U.S. Marines recruiting office with the cross, symbolically halting military recruitment from their Mexican American neighborhood.
39. 1966 March from to Sacramento organized by the National Farmworkers Association (NFWA)
40. 1965 Delano Grape Strike/Boycott is started by Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOL)
41. 1960s Brown Berets members When he 15, Dr. Sanchez started the Young Chicanos for Community Action in Monterey Park, California. He later changed the name to the Brown Berets, because he had actually purchased one, by chance, and wore it often. From then on, the grassroots group met at various locations, including the Boy’s and Girl’s Club and coffee shops, because they didn’t want police to know their whereabouts. Dr. Sanchez, along with Carlos Montes, another organizer with the Brown Berets, began to take up causes such as police brutality, better education, and discrimination against the Latinx community. Their first protest was in 1967, when they picketed the sheriff's office in East L.A. to protest the killing of Latino men.
42. 1960s Brown Beret member Gloria Arellenas and others Undated photo strips show Gloria Arellanes, at left, and at center, with fellow Brown Beret members including, from clockwise: Lorraine Escalante, Hilda Reyes and Arlene Sánchez. (Special Collections & Archives, John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, Cal State LA, Gloria Arellanes Papers) Arrellanes became the minister of Finance & Correspondence after being apoitned by David Sánchez, the group’s founder. She was the only woman on the leadership team.
44. March 1968 Sal Castro with walkout students at Lincoln High School Image courtesy of LA Times Photographic Archive, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. Set the Night on Fire: "Castro, a high school teacher long active in liberal and Mexican-American causes, was a key force in organizing student walkouts to protest school conditions in East L.A. The "Blowouts", as they were soon called, were genesis events in the emergence of a new, militant "Chicano" identity.
45. 1962 United Farm Workers For more than a century farmworkers had been denied a decent life in the fields and communities of California’s agricultural valleys. Essential to the state’s biggest industry, but only so long as they remained exploited and submissive farmworkers had tried but failed so many times to organize the giant agribusiness farms that most observers considered it a hopeless task. And yet by the early 1960’s things were beginning to change beneath the surface. Within another fifteen years more than 50,000 farmworkers were protected by union contracts. The Bracero program, an informal arrangement between the United States and Mexican governments, became Public Law 78 in 1951. Started during World War II as a program to provide Mexican agricultural workers to growers, it continued after the war. Public Law 78 stated that no bracero-a temporary worker imported from Mexico-could replace a domestic worker. In reality this provision was rarely enforced. In fact the growers had wanted the Bracero program to continue after the war precisely in order to replace domestic workers. The small but energetic National Farm Labor Union, led by dynamic organizer Ernesto Galarza, found its efforts to create a lasting California farmworkers union in the 1940’s and 50’s stymied again and again by the growers’ manipulation of braceros. Over time, however, farmworkers, led by Cesar Chavez, were able to call upon allies in other unions, in churches and in community groups affiliated with the growing civil rights movement, to put enough pressure on politicians to end the Bracero Program by 1964
46. 1962 UFW (United Farm Workers) Formed In 1962, the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), a predecessor of the United Farm Workers (UFW), was founded in Delano, California. Cesar Chávez, alongside Dolores Huerta and other Chicano activists within this organization, defended the rights of farmworkers by employing nonviolent organizing tactics rooted in Catholic social teaching, Chicano identity, and civil rights rhetoric. Through a series of marches, national consumer boycotts, and fasts, the United Farm Workers union attracted national headlines, gained labor contracts with higher wages and improved working conditions, galvanizing the Chicano movement. California’s agribusiness depended on a corporatized system of farm production supported by political allies that hired low-wage workers from Asian, Native, and/or Mexican populations. Farmworkers worked in dire conditions, including exposure to deadly chemicals, inadequate food and shelter, and sexual harassment, while receiving meager wages. Those who protested were replaced by Mexican braceros under the Bracero Program. The Bracero Program’s termination in 1964 led to labor union mobilization among farmworkers. The United Farm Workers Organizing Committee (UFWOC) was formed in 1966 as a collaboration between the Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the National Farm Workers Association. The union built partnerships with religious organizations, student and civil rights activists, and politicians, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. From 1966 to 1970, the UFWOC carried out a successful international consumer boycott on grapes by picketing outside of grocery stores across the U.S. and Canada and spreading awareness about the movement in Europe. Subsequent boycotts and strikes against lettuce and strawberry growers occurred during the following years. Strikes often led to law enforcement intervention, where farmworkers were beaten, jailed, or replaced by non-citizen laborers. Dolores Huerta is credited with negotiating thousands of labor contracts providing farmworkers with improved wages and working conditions. In 1972, the UFWOC renamed itself the United Farm Workers. By then, communities of farmworkers had been established across the U.S. In California, the UFW’s newspaper El Malcriado (“The Unruly One”) informed the community and provided them with job openings, and Luis Valdes’ El Teatro Campesino (“The Farmer’s Theatre”) offered short comedic skits performed by farmworkers. The UFW also established a federal credit union and union centers with medical care, pension, and voter registration services to its union members. Although the UFW is still operating, internal union strife, short-term labor contracts, and lack of federal legislation concerning farmworker rights have affected the progress of the union.
47. 1968: The Young Lord's Organization/Party In 1968, José “Cha-Cha” Jiménez established the Young Lords Organization (YLO) at Lincoln Park, one of the most impoverished barrios of Chicago, Illinois. Modeled and inspired after the Black Panther Party (BPP), the YLO emerged from a Puerto Rican street gang to a community-based organization involved in advocating for minority access to healthcare, education, housing, and employment. The YLO was multiethnic and inclusive to African American, Latino/x, women, and LGBTQ membership, self-identified as “revolutionist nationalists” who rallied for Puerto Rico’s independence and power to the people, and adopted a 13 Point Program and Platform—a set of policies, responsibilities, and principles the organization lived by. The YLO expanded to other cities, including New York City, where a group of college students established a YLO chapter and renamed it the Young Lords Party (YLP). After World War II ended, thousands of Puerto Ricans migrated from the island to the U.S. mainland, particularly to New York and Chicago, where they established neighborhoods at Lincoln Park and East Harlem. Within these barrios, Puerto Ricans became vulnerable to discrimination, police brutality, lack of employment and education, and gentrification. Throughout the late 60s and early 70s, the Young Lords of Chicago rebranded from a street gang into a community-based organization. Similar to the BPP, the YLO’s structure of leadership consisted of various ministers who were responsible for specific committees, including education, health, and finance. The YLO of Chicago became more active after James Lamb, an off-duty officer, received no repercussions for killing Manuel Ramos, a YLO member, during a party. Under Jiménez, the YLO formed coalitions with other groups and expanded to New York’s East Harlem, where a group of first generation college students headed an independent chapter. The New York City chapter aroused national headlines during their Garbage Offensive. In retaliation to the city’s poor sanitation services, YLO members led a week-long neighborhood cleanup and burned a garbage pile in the middle of a street intersection, causing the arrival of the police and fire department at the scene. In New York and in Chicago, YLO members led a series of protests and building occupations, held free breakfast programs for children, which helped standardize the current federal children’s nutrition program, established free medical clinics, and created Puerto Rican cultural centers, celebrating the history and heritage of all Puertorriqueño/as. In addition, both chapters published a monthly newspaper to promote community services and events. By the late 1970s, the Young Lords Organization and Party retreated from their activities. In 1995, Cha-Cha Jiménez collaborated with DePaul University’s Center for Latino Research to create the Lincoln Park Project, which archives and documents the legacy of the YLO.
48. 1960 Kennedy v. Nixon Latin opinion piece
49. 1960 “Democratic Representative Adam Clayton Powell introducing Democratic Party presidential candidate JFK in front of the Hotel Theresa in Harlem during campaign
51. 1965 Protesting apart of the Delano Grape strike “The Delano Grape Strike began on September 8, 1965, in protest to substandard wages being paid to predominantly Filipino farm workers of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee. A week later, they were joined by the Mexican-American National Farmworkers Association, led by prominent labor leader Cesar Chavez, his elder brother Richard, and Dolores Huerta. Less than a year later, the two organizations merged to form the United Farm Workers – and more than 2,000 workers had joined the fight. Ultimately, the strike spread across North America and even Western Europe as consumers supported the workers by boycotting non-union grapes”
52. 1970 Pamphlet for Delano Grape Strike and Boycott
59. 2010 Judy Baca, “Seeing Through Others’ Eyes” Each petal represents one of the issues facing society that Robert F. Kennedy deemed most important: Environment, Intolerance, Poverty, Education, Health, and War. We see these things through different eyes; the eyes of a soldier, a woman and her ailing mother, a poverty stricken child. At the center of the blossom sit two enlightened men: Kennedy breaking bread with César Chávez after Chávez’s 26-Day Fast for Life. Juan Romero, the busboy who cradled Kennedy after he was shot, is depicted to the left of Kennedy. While one million people march in the background lead by Dolores Huertas, a legendary figure in the labor movement in this country. She co-founded the United Farmworkers of America, which plays a major role in organizing opposition to proposed immigration reform legislation.
62. 1973 Side with the Farmworker: Boycott Gallo Untitled (Side with the Farmworker), ca. 1973, screenprint on computer tractor paper During the civil rights era, artists often used whatever materials they had at hand to craft public messages about pressing concerns. Here an unidentified artist emblazons a pro-labor message on recycled computer paper, calling for the boycott of Gallo Wines. Activists on college campuses were especially known for using this unconventional paper for their printmaking. The artist depicts a revolting rat, a symbol of nonunion workers who cross the picket line
65. 1968 Wilson High School student protester Peter Rodriguez at LAUSD Board of Education meeting Wilson High School student protester Peter Rodriguez at LAUSD Board of Education meeting. Photo by Los Angeles Public Library. In 1967, Mexican American students throughout the Southwest held a 60% high school dropout rate. If they did graduate, they averaged an 8th-grade reading level. Due to Anglo-centric internal school policies many Chicano students were fielded to vocational training or classes for the mentally disabled. Prejudice from teachers and administrators instigated stereotypes of Mexican Americans that discouraged the students from higher learning. These inequalities in education led to the 1968 East Los Angeles Walkouts, also known as the "Blowouts," which displayed the largest mobilization of Chicano youth leaders in Los Angeles history.
68. 1968 Walkouts at Venice High School
69. 1968 Female student being arrested at Venice High School Walkout LOS ANGELES, CA - MARCH 12: Image originally published on March 13, 1968--Police struggle to arrest a female student at Venice High School during a clash with 1,000 students. She was accused of using obscene and abusive language. Eight people were arrested. March 1, 1968: Over 15,000 Chicanos, students, faculty, and community members, walk out of seven East L.A. high schools. Those schools included: Garfield, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Belmont, Wilson, Venice, and Jefferson High School. Some students from East L.A. junior high schools join the protests, as well
70. 1968 Brown Berets provide security for Memorial Procession the day after RFK was killed “Gloria Arellanes (left, second row) marches in a Robert Kennedy Requiem Memorial Procession the day after he was killed, from Belvedere Park to East Los Angeles College Stadium for a Catholic Mass. Brown Berets were security. (George Rodriguez)”. “At its peak, the Brown Berets had as many as 55 chapters throughout the country, including the Southwest but also in states such as Kansas and Minnesota. By 1970, however, the founding chapter was tearing at the seams. As the group planned demonstrations against the Vietnam War, female members began to question why they were largely excluded from leadership positions and relegated to behind-the-scenes, menial work.”
71. 1968 Brown Beret's El Barrio Free Clinic
76. 1969 Portrait of Brown Beret member Hilda Jensen Rodriguez took this portrait of a Chicana demonstrator in the neighborhood of Lincoln Heights in 1969 Hilda’s Jenson’s photos has graced the covers of books, films etc, but often the names of her and her fellow women organizers have often gone unrecognized. In 2003 she wrote to filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño who had included her image in his memoir to identify her by name and include her maiden name: Hilda Reyes.
77. 1970 Official Resignation of all women in the Brown Berets LA chapter
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1. 1960 - 1980 Women's Liberation Movement While some 1960s/1970s women's movements in Los Angeles were inextricably linked to ethnic or national communities and movements, many White Anglo women from different communities came together to participate in groups that, taken together, was often referred to as "the women's liberation movement." These groups ranged from chapters of a national organization like NOW - usually characterized as a liberal feminist group - to smaller radical groups of anarcha-feminists, lesbian feminists and radical feminists. In Los Angeles, many of these groups were spawned at the Crenshaw Women's Center (CWC), where NOW also participated initially. After the center closed in 1972, many of these groups operated out of the Westside Women's Center (WWC), where Sister monthly newspaper continued to be published. This series is by no means comprehensive or inclusive, but rather includes interviews with a few of the women who were key players in some of these Los Angeles feminist groups and/or institutions. Toni Carabillo was the force behind Los Angeles NOW during its infancy and later became a national leader in the organization as well. Joan Robins was one of the main forces behind the founding of the Crenshaw Women's Center, and Nancy (aka Dara) Robinson became active at the Center from the start. With Robins, Robinson began the Center Newsletter, which eventually became Sister newspaper. She was also instrumental in the formation of Lesbian Feminists. Originally active in the Lesbian Feminists at the Crenshaw Women's Center, Jeanne Cordova went on to start the monthly magazine, Lesbian Tide. Sherna Gluck, on the other hand, became active at the Westside Women's Center, where she also initiated the Feminist History Research Project. Carabillo, Gluck, Robins and Robinson were first interviewed in 1984 as part of a project initiated by Women Rising, a group to which the latter three belonged. Four years later, all of them except Robinson, were interviewed in conjunction with an Honors Thesis project of Michelle Moravec at UCLA. Cordova was also interviewed by her. In addition to these generally longer, life history interviews, this series includes both shorter interviews and other audio materials, including an interview with Lilyan Frank about her experience at the UN Conference in Mexico City; interviews with Bernadette Carmier, Consuelo Nieto, and Priscilla Oaks, taken at or shortly after the 1977 Houston IWY Conference; and a panel discussion by Los Angeles women who attended the conference. Although the audio quality of the 1983 Women's History Day speak-out organized by the Women Rising Collective is poor, it has also been incorporated into the series because it provides a glimpse of the range of activities of the Los Angeles women's movement dating back to the late 1960s/early 1970s.
5. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Las Adelitas de Aztlán join protest “After leaving the Brown Berets, Arellanes — along with Jensen and her sister, Grace; Andrea and Esther Sánchez; Lorraine Escalante; Yolanda Solis; and Arlene Sánchez — founded Las Adelitas de Aztlán. The name referred to the soldaderas who fought alongside the men during the Mexican Revolution. They invited members of the community to join them and on Feb. 28, 1970, they made their public debut at the second anti-war moratorium in East Los Angeles.” Members of Las Adelitas de Aztlán at the second Chicano Moratorium protest against the Vietnam War on Feb. 28, 1970. At right is Hilda Reyes. They marched in the rain under a banner made by Gloria Arellanes and other members of the group. Las Adelitas dissolved later that year.
7. November 5, 1968: Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman ever elected to Congress. Shirley Chisholm (born Shirley Anita St. Hill, November 30, 1924–January 1, 2005) was the first African-American woman ever elected to the U.S. Congress. She represented the 12th Congressional District of New York for seven terms (1968–1982) and quickly became known for her work on minority, women's, and peace issues. Getty Images: (Patsy Takemoto Mink – an Asian-American representative from Hawaii was the first woman of color elected to the House in 1964.) In 1972, Chisholm became the first Black woman to seek a major party nomination for president.
9. 1967 President Johnson amended Executive Order 11246, which dealt with affirmative action, to include sex discrimination on the list of prohibited employment discrimination. The Origin of Affirmative Action Programs Former U.S. President John F. Kennedy used the phrase “affirmative action” in 1961. In an executive order, President Kennedy required federal contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed…without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson issued an order that used the same language to call for nondiscrimination in government employment. FEATURED VIDEO Hate Your Job? 5 Problems That Are in Every Workplace It was not until 1967 that President Johnson addressed sex discrimination. He issued another executive order on October 13, 1967. It expanded his previous order and required the government’s equal opportunity programs to “expressly embrace discrimination on account of sex” as they worked toward equality. The Need for Affirmative Action The legislation of the 1960s was part of a larger climate of seeking equality and justice for all members of society. Segregation had been legal for decades after the end of enslavement. President Johnson argued for affirmative action: if two men were running a race, he said, but one had his legs bound together in shackles, they could not achieve a fair result by simply removing the shackles. Instead, the man who had been in chains should be allowed to make up the missing yards from the time he was bound. If striking down segregation laws could not instantly solve the problem, then positive steps of affirmative action could be used to achieve what President Johnson called “equality of result.” Some opponents of affirmative action saw it as a “quota” system that unfairly demanded a certain number of minority candidates be hired no matter how qualified the competing White male candidate was. Affirmative action brought up different issues concerning women in the workplace. There was little protest of women in traditional “women’s jobs”—secretaries, nurses, elementary school teachers, etc. As more women began to work in jobs that had not been traditional women’s jobs, there was an outcry that giving a job to a woman over a qualified male candidate would be “taking” the job from the man. The men needed the job, was the argument, but the women did not need to work. In her 1979 essay “The Importance of Work,” Gloria Steinem rejected the notion that women should not work if they do not “have to." She pointed out the double standard that employers never ask men with children at home if they need the job for which they are applying. She also argued that many women do, in fact, “need” their jobs. Work is a human right, not a male right, she wrote, and she criticized the false argument that independence for women is a luxury.
10. 1961 President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order establishing the President's Commission on the Status of Women
12. September 7, 1968: The "Miss America Protest" by New York Radical Women at the Miss America pageant brought widespread media attention to women's liberation. Fifty years ago—on September 7, 1968—more than 100 women launched a protest at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City. The action made national headlines, announcing the arrival of a militant and creative new wave of feminist organizing. More than merely denouncing a single televised event, the protesters connected the pageant with the systemic problems of consumerism, racism, and war—as well as with the routine abuses and humiliations of patriarchy, to which nearly every women in the country could say, “Me too.” “Every day in a woman’s life,” one organizer argued shortly after the protest, “is a walking Miss America contest.”
13. 1964 Civil Rights Act Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act establishes affirmative action programs, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender, creed, race, or ethnic background: "to achieve equality of employment opportunities and remove barriers that have operated in the past" (Title VII). The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is also established through Title VII to prevent job discrimination. The Bracero Program, the government program initially put in place during WWII, ends. It brought Mexican laborers into the country to replace the American men who were fighting overseas. When the war ended the program continued.
14. 1963 Congress passed the Equal Pay Act - the Equal Pay Act was signed by President Kennedy with the intention of ending gender-based pay discrimination.
16. 1970 Asian American Women's Movement Activists Although not widely known outside the Asian community or among feminist activists and scholars outside of the Los Angeles area, there was a thriving, militant Asian American women's movement in southern California starting in the late 1960s/early 1970s. Like other movements among feminists of color, it both grew out of and remained tied to the larger national/ethnic movement and the anti-war movement. Asian American consciousness and activism most often developed on college campuses and, ultimately, often led to the development of Asian American studies. The core women activists in the Los Angeles area, however, focused most of their political work and organizing in grass roots community programs, and looked to Chinese and Vietnamese women revolutionaries for their inspiration. Many of them were members of the Community Workers Collective, which engaged in studying political liberation movements in other countries as a basis for their community organizing. Based on their study and organizing experience, the Asian Women's Group developed one of the first multi-media interactive presentations on the Asian women's movement which was performed at venues along the West Coast. They also founded the first Asian Women's Center in the US, establishing principles of unity to guide their programs; and collectivized their salaries to generate more staff and programs. They collaborated in anti-Vietnam War activities, and used their resources to support other struggles such as Wounded Knee. Despite ongoing struggles with the men in the larger Asian American movement, these women activists remained committed to and involved in the broader movement and eschewed separatism. The Asian American activists included in this series include: May Ying Chen, Miya Iwataki and Evelyn Yoshimura. An additional interview with long-time Asian American male activist, Alan Nishio, sheds further light both on the activities of the women and on the relationship between them and the broader Asian American movement in Los Angeles.
17. Chicana Feminists Chicana feminists in Southern California engaged in a range of groups and activities, both on college campuses and in their communities - often both. Regardless of the specifics of their politics or focus, most were initially politicized in the Chicano movement of the late 1960s; and most developed their feminist consciousness as a result of their direct experience with sexism in that movement. The six individual narrators in this series reflect this common background. The four activists in Hijas de Cuauhtemoc (Anna NietoGomez, Corinne Sanchez, Leticia Hernandez and Sylvia Castillo) cut their political eye teeth in the Chicano student group, UMAS/MEChA, at CSULB. In fact, it was their experiences in MEChA that motivated them to form the Hijas group (which published a newspaper by the same name). They were also involved in community groups and continued this activism after they left college, particularly in the Chicana Service Action Center. Yolanda Nava , who was one of the founding members of Comision Femenil Mexicana (CFM) and later served a term as president, was also introduced to the Chicano movement through MEChA. Although more than a decade older than these activists, Consuelo Nieto had similar experiences with sexism. Her introduction to the Chicano movement came while she was teaching in the schools in ELA, where high school students had organized to demand better education. A word about language in this series: While the term Anglo came to be used later, during the heyday of the Chicana feminist movement - and particularly in the debate and conflict with those who excoriated the feminists - White was the term most often used. In their interviews, the women themselves used the term White. It should also be noted that Cuauhtemoc is sometimes spelled "Cuahtemoc." NOTE: The interviews with the founders and former members of Hijas de Cuauhtemoc were conducted by Maylei Blackwell for what became her larger research project. As a courtesy to her, the audio recordings of these interviews will not be available until 2006. Until then, they can be used on-site at CSULB with her permission. See also her essay, "Contested histories: las hijas de Cuauhtâemoc, Chicana feminisms, and print culture in the Chicano movement, 1968-1973" in Gabriela Arredondo et al., Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) and the response by Anna NietoGomez. See also the writings of Anna NietoGomez, and other femenista pioneers in Alma Garcia, ed., Chicana Feminist Thought: Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge, 1997.
18. Feminist Health Movement From its earliest days in the 1960s, the women's liberation movement focused on abortion and women's right to control their bodies. Some of the more radical groups engaged in underground abortion clinics, most notably in Chicago; others, like the Boston's Women's Health Collective began writing/publishing projects; and organizations like NOW formed Task Forces to work on the issue of reproductive rights. In fact, it was in NOW that leaders of the feminist health movement, Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman, first became active and initially demonstrated gynecological self-examination. And while Downer and Rothman went on to open the first Feminist Women's Health Center at the Crenshaw Women's Center, other women, like Vi Verreaux worked at and opened more conventionally structured, service-oriented clinics for women. This series is comprised of interviews with these three women. The long interviews with Downer and Rothman document the evolution and expansion of their work, and although the much shorter interview with Verreaux barely touches on her clinic work, it does provides a glimpse into a service-oriented, community-based clinic.
21. 1968 EEOC ruled that being female was not a bona fide occupational qualification of being a flight attendant. Exception to Discrimination Under Title VII, employers are not allowed to discriminate on the basis of sex, race, religion, or national origin. If religion, sex, or national origin can be shown to be necessary for the job, such as hiring Catholic professors to teach Catholic theology at a Catholic school, then a BFOQ exception can be made. The BFOQ exception does not permit discrimination on the basis of race. FEATURED VIDEO Simple Steps to Calculate Variance The employer must prove that the BFOQ is reasonably necessary to the normal operation of the business or whether the BFOQ is for a unique safety reason. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) extended this concept of BFOQ to discrimination based on age.
23. 1970 Official Resignation of all women in the Brown Berets LA chapter
24. 1969 Portrait of Brown Beret member Hilda Jensen Rodriguez took this portrait of a Chicana demonstrator in the neighborhood of Lincoln Heights in 1969 Hilda’s Jenson’s photos has graced the covers of books, films etc, but often the names of her and her fellow women organizers have often gone unrecognized. In 2003 she wrote to filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño who had included her image in his memoir to identify her by name and include her maiden name: Hilda Reyes.
25. 1971“Liberation,” January 1971 issue of Gidra Though Gidra included women on its staff and women’s issues in its pages, a series of “rap sessions” led to a special women’s issue in 1971 with the word “Liberation” and a large Venus symbol on the cover. The issue linked international questions to those at home, from war brides and G.I.s to struggles of women within the Asian American Movement. The focus on the global and the local was also present in the popular International Women’s Day celebrations. Beginning in 1974, the festival united many of the different Movement groups in a common recognition of women’s struggles.
26. 1966 The National Organization for Women, known as NOW, was founded. On October 29, 1966, the Nation Organization for Women officially adopted their Statement of Purpose. The statement, written by Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray, expressed the organization’s main goals in addressing and fighting the unequal treatment of women in society. This 1966 document is a seminal part of the modern women’s rights movement and played an important role in inspiring more Americans to fight for gender equality. Although their Statement of Purpose was adopted in October, the feminist organization was officially founded on June 30, 1966. The statement described NOW’s purpose as “To take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all privileges and responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men.” NOW was created when its founders recognized that women needed a pressure group to combat gender discrimination, as the government agencies and recent laws to address this problem had proven ineffective. A prime example of this was the failure of the Equality Employment Opportunity Commission to enforce Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Title VII is a federal law that prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion.) Employers were still discriminating against women in hiring practices and there was unequal pay for women. Secondly, NOW was also influenced by the failure of John F. Kennedy’s 1961 President’s Commission on the Status of Women, headed by Eleanor Roosevelt, to end discrimination against females in education, the workforce and Social Security. The movement was also inspired by Friedan’s 1963 book “The Feminine Mystique,” where she famously expresses her stultifying experiences as a housewife lacking other options in society beyond that domestic role. The founders of NOW hoped that their organization would help women combat discrimination in all aspects of society by lobbying and holding rallies, marches and conferences. NOW broke with previous trends for women’s organizations by including the concerns of black women in their mission. NOW has advocated for many issues they see as necessary for ensuring equality for women, including maternity leave rights in employment, child day care centers, equal job training opportunities, reproductive rights, and the prohibition of sex discrimination in the workplace.
27. 1965 Pauli Murray and Mary Eastwood published "Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII" in the George Washington Law Review. “Jane Crow and the Law: Sex Discrimination and Title VII” was written by Pauli Murray and Mary Eastwood in 1965. It was published by the George Washington University Law Review in response to the Civil Rights Act, which had been passed the year before in 1964, and it questions the extent to which the Constitution protects against gender discrimination, and the “interpretation of the sex discrimination provisions of the equal employment opportunity title of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg later read the article at the American Civil Liberties Union to convince the Supreme Court that the Equal Protection Clause does indeed apply to women.
29. 1963 Anne Moody, who later wrote Coming of Age in Mississippi, participated in a Woolworth's lunch counter sit-in. On May 28, 1963, Anne Moody was among the students from historically black Tougaloo College who staged a sit-in at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Jackson, Miss. A white mob attacked the integrated group of peaceful students, dousing them with ketchup, mustard and sugar and beating one of the men. A photograph from the sit-in shows Moody sitting stoically at the five-and-dime counter with food on her head. Moody’s eyes are downcast as a man pours more food on one of her fellow students, Joan Trumpauer. Moody wrote in her 1968 memoir that “all hell broke loose” after she and two other black students, Memphis Norman and Pearlena Lewis, prayed at the lunch counter.
31. 1963 The Feminine Mystique Published
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3. 1967 Century City Protestor removed by Police In retrospect, the Century Plaza demonstration was one of the earliest battlegrounds. The original idea was to stage a march from Rancho Park, up Pico Boulevard and past the hotel on Avenue of the Stars, then turn onto Santa Monica Boulevard and go home. But as the marchers reached the hotel, a vanguard of radicals ignored the terms of the police permit and sat down in the street. The march halted. Police said they issued a dispersal order several times on a powerful loudspeaker, but many demonstrators said that in all the noise and chants they failed to hear it. Then hundreds of officers moved in, their nightsticks held in front of them, pushing the demonstrators away. Some of the people fought back. Some photographs show police swinging their nightsticks at marchers who were not resisting. A particularly bitter clash took place under the Olympic Boulevard bridge. …June 23, 1967: A protester is removed from Century Plaza during a speech by President Lyndon Johnson.(Frank Q. Brown / Los Angeles Times Archive/UCLA)
5. 1970 2nd Chicano Moratorium: Las Adelitas de Aztlán join protest “After leaving the Brown Berets, Arellanes — along with Jensen and her sister, Grace; Andrea and Esther Sánchez; Lorraine Escalante; Yolanda Solis; and Arlene Sánchez — founded Las Adelitas de Aztlán. The name referred to the soldaderas who fought alongside the men during the Mexican Revolution. They invited members of the community to join them and on Feb. 28, 1970, they made their public debut at the second anti-war moratorium in East Los Angeles.” Members of Las Adelitas de Aztlán at the second Chicano Moratorium protest against the Vietnam War on Feb. 28, 1970. At right is Hilda Reyes. They marched in the rain under a banner made by Gloria Arellanes and other members of the group. Las Adelitas dissolved later that year.
12. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Rosalio Munoz speaks at Laguna Park
13. 1967 The Bloody March - America at War with Itself
15. 1968 Walkouts in Roosevelt High School Students protest during a walkout at Roosevelt High School, Devra Weber, 1968; from the La Raza Photograph Collection, courtesy of UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center. That push for diversity and a better educational system is what led to the Chicano Blowouts in 1968, also known as the East L.A. Walkouts. It's estimated that 15,000 to 22,000 students participated in the walkouts. As a result of this massive protest, according to the Los Angeles Conservancy, the school district hired more Latinx educators, implemented bilingual classes and ethnic studies, and at UCLA, the Los Angeles Times reported, a year after the walkouts, Mexican-American student enrollment rose 1,800%.
16. 1971 Asian Americans not only called for peace in order to bring troops home, but also protested U.S. intervention and imperialism in Vietnam As a newly-formed group identity, Asian American consciousness was rooted in the communities from which they came. Actively seeking to reclaim their histories and to find their own voices, they sought out narratives from their ancestors and elders. They became engaged with their home neighborhoods, creating local programs to “serve the people” and to rally the masses. They also sought to forge solidarities across ethnicity, race, and national boundaries as they identified with other “Third World” peoples. This term recognized the exploitative relations in the global hierarchy where the least developed nations faced oppressive histories and conditions similar to historically marginalized communities in the U.S. Through the practice of supporting one another’s movements and struggles, Asian American students built a collective identity and common cause to address racial injustices. Additionally, Asian American students were deeply influenced by major international developments of the 1960s. The anti-war movement against U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia reached its apex on campuses in early 1968; the success of North Vietnam’s Tet offensive demonstrated that despite the onslaught of U.S. military might, the war could not be easily won. Asian American war protestors realized their paradoxical position. On one hand, they knew they were Americans, but they were being sent to fight an enemy that not only looked like them, but were in a subordinate position in the world order like they found themselves to be within boundaries of their own country
17. 1960s/1970s GIDRA Staff photo Murase, who completed his undergraduate degree in 1970, said he had few opportunities to learn about Asian Americans in the classroom. In response, he and five other UCLA students established Gidra in 1969, a monthly newspaper that highlighted and commented on Asian American issues while also enabling local artists and writers to share their work. Gidra was initially established at Campbell Hall as an Asian American student publication, Murase said. As Gidra’s influence began to extend beyond UCLA following its early publications, Murase said he and his peers moved their operations to a rented office on Jefferson Boulevard – about five and a half miles from UCLA – and accepted submissions from the larger community, including those who lived outside of Los Angeles or were not of Asian descent. Through the work of its volunteer staff and contributors, Gidra produced a total of 60 issues before its closure in 1974, Murase added. Coming of age in the 1960s, Asian American students at universities developed a new, distinct consciousness as Asian Americans shaped by the racial and international context of the time. By 1968, when the Asian American population numbered about 1.3 million, 80 percent of Japanese Americans and about 50 percent of Chinese Americans and Filipino Americans, respectively, were born in the United States. Asian Americans had come to reach the same educational attainment as whites, but still earned substantially less because of racial discrimination. For example, in 1960 Filipinos earned only 61 percent of the income of whites with comparable educations. Japanese and Chinese also earned less than their white counterparts, making 77 percent and 87 percent, respectively. Among the 107,366 Asian American college students on university campuses in 1970, Chinese and Japanese made up the vast majority, with over eight out of ten Asian American students being of either Japanese or Chinese American descent.
18. 1960s/1970s Asian American protest Community and Place Mao told his followers to “serve the people,” and Movement activists took the call to heart. In the context of Los Angeles, they found their calling in historic Japanese, Filipino and Chinese American communities. Often neglected by government agencies and limited by language access and social stigma, these neighborhoods needed jobs, health services, and education access. As these younger, college-educated, radicalized Asian Americans worked in the community, they built intergenerational bridges and emphasized the importance of place. Their battles against eviction and redevelopment took on a double urgency: both protecting historical communities and the new Movement centers that shared spaces with them.
19. 1969 1st Chicano Moratorium: Outside recruiting center
20. 1966 Youth being searched by police during crackdown on the Sunset Strip
21. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: After moratorium demonstration Chicano Moratorium Committee anti-war demonstrators gather in East L.A. "The biggest, bloodiest disturbance in Los Angeles since Watts five years earlier lasted several hours. When it was over, Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar was dead and two others mortally wounded, about 200 people were under arrest, 75 law enforcement officers and untold numbers of demonstrators were injured, 95 county vehicles were destroyed or damaged, 44 buildings were pillaged and eight major fires had been set.” “After the Chicano Moratorium, I said no way am I going to put myself in jeopardy ever again,” Jensen says. “Because that’s how scared I was.” Jensen stopped organizing
23. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: 1974 ASCO First Supper After a Major Riot Harry Gamboa Jr.: LA County sheriffs open fired on innocent students and protestors, and wounded and killed many people who were protesting against the war in Vietnam, and were also protesting against police violence, which was followed by a two to three-and-a-half year crackdown on young people gathering on the streets of East Los Angeles. At the time that we shot [First Supper After a Major Riot], we felt that it had been long enough. It was time for it to be extinguished. And so, we declared it to be a celebration. Willie Herrón: At the time of the Moratorium, I was in high school. I remember the procession originating at Belvedere Park, protesting the Vietnam War and all the Chicanos that lost their lives. The police brutality was incredible. It affected me quite a bit and I think it affected all of us. So that's why Whittier Boulevard became such an important street, and a place for us to conduct our performances and connect them to our community and the way society viewed us at the time.
24. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: 1971 ASCO Stations of the Cross Stations of the Cross was a walking “ritual of resistance” against what the performance group Asco considered the “useless deaths” taking place in Vietnam. The male members of the group (which originally comprised Harry Gamboa Jr., Gronk, Willie Herrón III, and Patssi Valdez) paraded down Whittier Boulevard in East Los Angeles, with Herrón as a Christ/death figure bearing a large cardboard cross. The quasi-Passion Play ended with the trio blocking a U.S. Marines recruiting office with the cross, symbolically halting military recruitment from their Mexican American neighborhood.
25. 1960s Brown Berets members When he 15, Dr. Sanchez started the Young Chicanos for Community Action in Monterey Park, California. He later changed the name to the Brown Berets, because he had actually purchased one, by chance, and wore it often. From then on, the grassroots group met at various locations, including the Boy’s and Girl’s Club and coffee shops, because they didn’t want police to know their whereabouts. Dr. Sanchez, along with Carlos Montes, another organizer with the Brown Berets, began to take up causes such as police brutality, better education, and discrimination against the Latinx community. Their first protest was in 1967, when they picketed the sheriff's office in East L.A. to protest the killing of Latino men.
27. 1960s Brown Beret member Gloria Arellenas and others Undated photo strips show Gloria Arellanes, at left, and at center, with fellow Brown Beret members including, from clockwise: Lorraine Escalante, Hilda Reyes and Arlene Sánchez. (Special Collections & Archives, John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, Cal State LA, Gloria Arellanes Papers) Arrellanes became the minister of Finance & Correspondence after being apoitned by David Sánchez, the group’s founder. She was the only woman on the leadership team.
28. 1969 Portrait of Brown Beret member Hilda Jensen Rodriguez took this portrait of a Chicana demonstrator in the neighborhood of Lincoln Heights in 1969 Hilda’s Jenson’s photos has graced the covers of books, films etc, but often the names of her and her fellow women organizers have often gone unrecognized. In 2003 she wrote to filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño who had included her image in his memoir to identify her by name and include her maiden name: Hilda Reyes.
29. 1968 Wilson High School student protester Peter Rodriguez at LAUSD Board of Education meeting Wilson High School student protester Peter Rodriguez at LAUSD Board of Education meeting. Photo by Los Angeles Public Library. In 1967, Mexican American students throughout the Southwest held a 60% high school dropout rate. If they did graduate, they averaged an 8th-grade reading level. Due to Anglo-centric internal school policies many Chicano students were fielded to vocational training or classes for the mentally disabled. Prejudice from teachers and administrators instigated stereotypes of Mexican Americans that discouraged the students from higher learning. These inequalities in education led to the 1968 East Los Angeles Walkouts, also known as the "Blowouts," which displayed the largest mobilization of Chicano youth leaders in Los Angeles history.
30. March 1968 Sal Castro with walkout students at Lincoln High School Image courtesy of LA Times Photographic Archive, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. Set the Night on Fire: "Castro, a high school teacher long active in liberal and Mexican-American causes, was a key force in organizing student walkouts to protest school conditions in East L.A. The "Blowouts", as they were soon called, were genesis events in the emergence of a new, militant "Chicano" identity.
31. 1967 Century City Antiwar Protest Far more powerfully, the Century Plaza confrontation foreshadowed the explosive growth of the national antiwar movement and its inevitable confrontations with police. It shaped the movement’s rising militancy, particularly among the sizable number of middle-class protesters who expected to do nothing more than chant against Johnson outside the $1,000-a-plate Democratic Party fundraising dinner and were outraged by the LAPD’s hard-line tactics. Johnson rarely campaigned in public again, except for appearances at safe places like military bases. Within nine months, opposition to the war grew so strong that he shelved his reelection campaign. White liberals in Los Angeles, meanwhile, began to complain about excessive force by the LAPD, a subject traditionally raised only by black and Latino residents. By the next summer, when Chicago police beat demonstrators in the street outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the country was at war with itself. In retrospect, the Century Plaza demonstration was one of the earliest battlegrounds. …
36. 1967 Police Raid Silverlake's Black Cat "As the Rhythm Queens, a trio of black women, sang a rock version of "Auld Lang Syne," balloons fell from the ceiling and gay men exchanged the traditional midnight kiss. That was when uniformed police, who had been alerted by the undercover officers, rushed in and began to swing billy clubs, tear down leftover Christmas ornaments, break furnishings, and beat men brutally. Sixteen customers and employees were arrested and forced to lie face down on the sidewalk until squad cars came to take them away."- GAY L.A.
37. Chicana Feminists Chicana feminists in Southern California engaged in a range of groups and activities, both on college campuses and in their communities - often both. Regardless of the specifics of their politics or focus, most were initially politicized in the Chicano movement of the late 1960s; and most developed their feminist consciousness as a result of their direct experience with sexism in that movement. The six individual narrators in this series reflect this common background. The four activists in Hijas de Cuauhtemoc (Anna NietoGomez, Corinne Sanchez, Leticia Hernandez and Sylvia Castillo) cut their political eye teeth in the Chicano student group, UMAS/MEChA, at CSULB. In fact, it was their experiences in MEChA that motivated them to form the Hijas group (which published a newspaper by the same name). They were also involved in community groups and continued this activism after they left college, particularly in the Chicana Service Action Center. Yolanda Nava , who was one of the founding members of Comision Femenil Mexicana (CFM) and later served a term as president, was also introduced to the Chicano movement through MEChA. Although more than a decade older than these activists, Consuelo Nieto had similar experiences with sexism. Her introduction to the Chicano movement came while she was teaching in the schools in ELA, where high school students had organized to demand better education. A word about language in this series: While the term Anglo came to be used later, during the heyday of the Chicana feminist movement - and particularly in the debate and conflict with those who excoriated the feminists - White was the term most often used. In their interviews, the women themselves used the term White. It should also be noted that Cuauhtemoc is sometimes spelled "Cuahtemoc." NOTE: The interviews with the founders and former members of Hijas de Cuauhtemoc were conducted by Maylei Blackwell for what became her larger research project. As a courtesy to her, the audio recordings of these interviews will not be available until 2006. Until then, they can be used on-site at CSULB with her permission. See also her essay, "Contested histories: las hijas de Cuauhtâemoc, Chicana feminisms, and print culture in the Chicano movement, 1968-1973" in Gabriela Arredondo et al., Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) and the response by Anna NietoGomez. See also the writings of Anna NietoGomez, and other femenista pioneers in Alma Garcia, ed., Chicana Feminist Thought: Basic Historical Writings. New York: Routledge, 1997.
38. 1971 Anti-War demonstration on Wilshire Blvd Politicized by War For many young Asian Americans in the 1960s, the War in Vietnam was a brutal and urgent politicization. Watching the war unfold on the nightly news, a common sentiment was that America “killing people who looked like us.” Unlike the mainstream anti-war movement, many Asian Americans saw the Vietnam War as genocidal, or at least imperialist. They placed the war within the larger history of anti-Asian racism in America and imperialist expansion into the Third World.
39. 1970 - Marching for peace-rally through through the streets of Little Tokyo For many young Asian Americans in the 1960s, the War in Vietnam was a brutal and urgent politicization. Watching the war unfold on the nightly news, a common sentiment was that America “killing people who looked like us.” Unlike the mainstream anti-war movement, many Asian Americans saw the Vietnam War as genocidal, or at least imperialist. They placed the war within the larger history of anti-Asian racism in America and imperialist expansion into the Third World. In 1969, Asians Americans for Peace was founded in Los Angeles. Groups like the Thai Binh and Van Troi Brigades (named after Vietnamese freedom fighters) formed to mobilize youth. Meanwhile, Asian Movement for Military Outreach
40. 1972 JoAnne/Nobuko Miyamoto and Chris Iijima perform at the Third World Storefront organization Art and Communication The Movement marked the first time Asian people collectively owned and created their own images in this country. Culture—musical, visual, written, performed—was a way to exorcise and subvert dominant American narratives. Young artists had to cut against the stereotypes and caricatures they had been fed since youth. Art was “for the people”: and there was little differentiation between it and activism, and it infused the new identity of Asian America with anti-imperialist and multiethnic critiques. Los Angeles became home to the first Asian American films ever made. Community-based and politically-charged, they showed Asian struggles, families, and histories in a way Hollywood never imagined. A plethora of newspapers got out the word. From personal essays to reports on U.S. militarism and Asian communities, the concerns and goals of the Movement took shape in those worn and circulated pages.
41. 1973 three young activists in New York City recorded A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America The Movement marked the first time Asian people collectively owned and created their own images in this country. It was no small feat: young artists had to cut against the stereotypes and caricatures they had been fed since youth. These lines from “We Are the Children” on the seminal album A Grain of Sand capture this tension: Foster children of the Pepsi generation Cowboys and Indians ride, red man, ride! Watching war movies with the next-door neighbor Secretly rooting for the other side Culture—musical, visual, written, performed—was a way to exorcise and subvert dominant American narratives. It infused the new identity of Asian America with anti-imperialist and multiethnic critiques. The verse above both names a dominant paradigm then re-appropriates the image of the heroic cowboy and soldier by actually identifying with the ‘villain’—in this case, the indigenous and Asian combatants.
42. 1971 “Liberation,” January 1971 issue of Gidra Though Gidra included women on its staff and women’s issues in its pages, a series of “rap sessions” led to a special women’s issue in 1971 with the word “Liberation” and a large Venus symbol on the cover. The issue linked international questions to those at home, from war brides and G.I.s to struggles of women within the Asian American Movement. The focus on the global and the local was also present in the popular International Women’s Day celebrations. Beginning in 1974, the festival united many of the different Movement groups in a common recognition of women’s struggles.
43. 1960s/1970s GIDRA sisters
44. 1968 SFSU Mass Strike Called THE CALL FOR ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES ON WEST COAST CAMPUSES, As students became involved with both international and local issues, they began to call for a relevant education that could address these concerns. However, as Irene Dea expressed, they found a system of higher education that largely excluded students of color from admission and whose courses showed little reflection of their histories and experiences
47. 1968 Walkouts at Venice High School
48. 1968 Female student being arrested at Venice High School Walkout LOS ANGELES, CA - MARCH 12: Image originally published on March 13, 1968--Police struggle to arrest a female student at Venice High School during a clash with 1,000 students. She was accused of using obscene and abusive language. Eight people were arrested. March 1, 1968: Over 15,000 Chicanos, students, faculty, and community members, walk out of seven East L.A. high schools. Those schools included: Garfield, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Belmont, Wilson, Venice, and Jefferson High School. Some students from East L.A. junior high schools join the protests, as well
53. 1966 Riots on the Sunset Strip
54. 1970 Official Resignation of all women in the Brown Berets LA chapter