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

1976 - The Great Wall of Los Angeles

The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony. SPARC’s first public art project and its true signature piece, the Great Wall is a landmark pictorial representation of the history of ethnic peoples of California from prehistoric times to the 1950’s, conceived by SPARC’s artistic director and founder Judith F. Baca. Begun in 1974 and completed over six summers, the Great Wall employed over 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members.

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1. 1974 The Great Wall of Los Angeles 1974 The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony. SPARC’s first public art project and its true signature piece, the Great Wall is a landmark pictorial representation of the history of ethnic peoples of California from prehistoric times to the 1950’s, conceived by SPARC’S artistic director and founder Judy Baca. Begun in 1974 and completed over five summers, the Great Wall employed over 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members.
2. 1976 - The Great Wall of Los Angeles The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony. SPARC’s first public art project and its true signature piece, the Great Wall is a landmark pictorial representation of the history of ethnic peoples of California from prehistoric times to the 1950’s, conceived by SPARC’s artistic director and founder Judith F. Baca. Begun in 1974 and completed over six summers, the Great Wall employed over 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members.
3. 1977 Self Help Graphics Día de los Muertos 1 Day of the Dead ’77 Procession, Self-Help Graphics, November 1977. The first Día de los Muertos was a small gathering in the parking lot behind Self-Help Graphics in 1972. In 1973, a procession of people and floats went down the street from Evergreen Cemetery to the organization’s headquarters. A Catholic mass and indigenous ceremonies were celebrated at the cemetery, along with participation from the Asco art collective.
4. 1977 Self Help Graphics Día de los Muertos 2 Day of the Dead ’77, Self-Help Graphics, November 1977. Beginning in 1973, the trio of founders and affiliated artists partnered to redeploy the Mexican Día de Muertos for their neighborhoods in East Los Angeles. A Catholic and Indigenous Mexican celebration of the dead, Día de Muertos is traditionally celebrated on November 2, although preparations begin the week before when celebrants prepare and gather decorations, mementos, specific foods, and flowers, and construct altars of remembrance at the cemetery or in their homes.
5. 1973 Self Help Graphics 1 “Self Help Graphics & Art emerged out of the inspiration and energies of a group of artists/printmakers working from an East Los Angeles garage. Known as Art, Inc. when they began working together in 1970, printmakers Sister Karen Boccalero, Carlos Bueno, Antonio Ibáñez, Frank Hernández, and others held their first exhibition at the El Mercado shopping center in 1971. Soon after, they relocated to Boyle Heights with a gift from the Order of the Sisters of St. Francis and by 1973, the organization was reestablished as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and changed its name to Self Help Graphics & Art (SHG).”
6. 1973 Self Help Graphics 2 The evolution SHG’s focus on printmaking as its core discipline grew throughout the 1970s and by 1979 the programs became increasingly experimental, in the printmaking studio and in other media, including music and performance art. During the 1980s, SHG earned its reputation as a locus for the emerging Chicano and Latino artists and cultural movements. Sister Karen passed away in 1997 and facilities and financial management continued to impart the organization’s health during the twenty-first century. A significant revival has been in process since 2007, including a major relocation from the former headquarters on Cesar Chavez Avenue to a new location in Boyle Heights, adjacent to downtown Los Angeles.
7. 1973 Self Help Graphics 3 Established in the wake of the 1970 Chicano Moratorium, Self Help Graphics & Art (1973–present), quickly became an invaluable community art center and site for the production and promotion of Chicanx and Latinx art. Founded by Sister Karen Boccalero, a Franciscan nun and student of Sister Corita Kent, along with artists Carlos Bueno, Antonio Ibáñez, and Frank Hernández in an East LA garage, Self Help Graphics understood art production as a social practice, and sought to fortify the local community through arts education and art-making that celebrated Chicanx identities and experiences.
8. 1973 Self Help Graphics 4
Contents of this path:
1. 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.”
2. 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.
3. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Coast Gaurd ward off supporters in boats as they circle Alcatraz Islamd
4. 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
5. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Occupiers moments after being removed from Alcatraz Island
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Leaders of the American Indian Movement hold a press conference
10. Native American girl paints a sign that reads "Indian American Land" on a wall of Alcataz Island in San Francisco Bay
11. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: LaNada with her son
12. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Group by playground
13. Native American activist LaNada Means addresses a press conference alongside an artist's impression of a proposed cultural center LaNada proposes 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. (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
14. 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
15. 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.”
16. 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.)
17. 1968 LGBTQ-inclusive Metropolitan Community Church founded by Reverend Troy Perry
18. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: John Trudell on Alcatraz
19. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: 12 Alcatraz protestors voluntarily surrender
21. 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.
22. Occupants on Alcatraz Island, gather in front of the main cell block with the island's water tower in the background
24. 1969 - 1974 Nixon Era
29. 1970 East L.A. picketing to protest conditions at the school
32. 1970s LGBT Movement Featuring Harvey Milk Harvey Milk, a native of Long Island, New York, served in the U.S. Navy before working at a Wall Street investment firm. Keeping his homosexuality a secret at first, Milk became more openly gay through his exposure to New York City’s bohemian theater scene. After moving to San Francisco in the early 1970s, Milk established himself as a leading political activist for the gay community. Winning a seat on the city’s Board of Supervisors, he emerged as one of the country’s preeminent openly gay elected officials, spearheading an important anti-discrimination measure. Milk was murdered in November 1978 by a former colleague, Dan White. - history.coom
34. 1971- The Beginning of Consumer Technology
37. 1971 Student and barrio youth lead protest march in Belvedere Park.
38. July 1, 1971: 18 and Up Can Vote
39. A Trail of Broken Treaties 1972 With desks, chairs and file cabinets, hundreds of Native Americans barricaded the entrances to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in downtown Washington, just six blocks from the White House. It was the week before the 1972 presidential election between President Richard Nixon and Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.), and the group of men, women, children, activists and elders had come to the nation’s capital in a caravan of vans, trucks and cars to demand a meeting with Nixon and top officials. They wanted to describe the poor housing, underfunded schools and health crises they faced — a result, they said, of the U.S. government’s failure to honor treaties with their tribal governments. They called their effort “The Trail of Broken Treaties,” a nod to the forcible removal in the 1830s of thousands of Native Americans from their homelands during the “Trail of Tears.”
41. 1973 Wounded Knee: Activist Gladys Bissonette Gladys Bissonette during the 1970s. Thunder Hawk,of the Oohenumpa band of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, said there wasn’t a conscious effort to make women part of Wounded Knee – they were just there. It was instinctive to be part of the movement. She said tribal leadership back then was predominantly male because of a colonized way of thinking, but having a strong matriarchal presence was simply tradition and culture. “Anything that happens in community all revolves around the strong families and the matriarchs,” said Thunder Hawk, now 83. “That's the way it is.”
43. 1973 Wounded Knee: An armed Native American in a trench takes cover between sandbags An armed Native American in a trench takes cover between sandbags, the Sacred Heart Church in the background, during the Wounded Knee Occupation (also known as Second Wounded Knee) at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota, 7th March 1973. On 27th February 1973, approximately 200 members of the 'American Indian Movement' (AIM) took the reservation hamlet of Wounded Knee by force, declaring it the 'Independent Oglala Sioux Nation,' the hamlet was immediately surrounded by federal marshals, and a siege began, which ended on 8th May 1973.
44. 1973 Wounded Knee: Dick Wilson with GOONs 2 Tribal president Dick Wilson with his GOONs during the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee. February 27, 1973, AIM Organization accepted the responsibility of providing all necessary strength and protection needed by the Oglala Sioux in the efforts to rid themselves of corrupt tribal president, Dick Wilson. Because this degenerated human being is financed and wholly supported by the FBI, CIA, BIA, U.S. Justice Dept., and the U.S. Marshals, it is virtually impossible for any Oglala to voice any kind of opinion which may run contrary to this puppet government without being arrested or beaten...a policy that cannot go unchallenged or unanswered.
45. 1973 Wounded Knee: An armed Native American in a trench looks over sandbags
46. 1973 Wounded Knee: Armed AIM Members in a dugout Armed Native Americans, with the Sacred Heart Church in the background, during the Wounded Knee Occupation on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota. March 7, 1973. Then, in early 1973, AIM prepared for its dramatic occupation of Wounded Knee. In addition to its historical significance, Wounded Knee was one of the poorest communities in the United States and shared with the other Pine Ridge settlements some of the country’s lowest rates of life expectancy.
49. 1973 Wounded Knee: Armed federal agents search a car
50. 1973 Wounded Knee: Clyde Bellecourt with rifle Native American activist Clyde Bellecourt holding his fist clenched while holding his rifle high, in front of Sacred Heart Church, during the Wounded Knee Occupation at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, 13th April 1973. AIM was founded in 1968 by Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and other Native leaders as a militant political and civil rights organization. From November 1969 to June 1971, AIM members occupied Alcatraz Island off San Francisco, saying they had the right to it under a treaty provision granting them unused federal land. In November 1972, AIM members briefly occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., to protest programs controlling reservation development.
51. 1973 Wounded Knee: Four federal troops stand blocking the road to Wounded Knee Four federal troops stand blocking the road to Wounded Knee during the standoff between 200 members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the government, South Dakota, 1973. The AIM is demanding an increase in financial aid from the government for the town of Wounded Knee, the site of the last armed conflict between the United States government and the Great Sioux Nation, which resulted in the massacre of hundreds of Lakota Sioux Indians.
52. 1973 Wounded Knee: Dick Wilson with U.S. Marshall Chief Wayne Colburn, chief of U.S. Marshalls talks with Dick Wilson at the Oglala Sioux roadblock leading into occupied Wounded Knee, March 27th, 1973. Violent conflict on the reservation continued after the resolution of the Wounded Knee incident. In the three years that followed, more than 50 opponents of Wilson allegedly died violently. One was Pedro Bissonette, head of the civil rights organization, who had originally invited AIM activists to Pine Ridge. He died in a reported altercation with a BIA policeman. Residents accused GOONs of arson and frequent assault. Wilson was alleged to have personally directed an assault on six AIM lawyers in February 1975, but no charges were filed.
53. 1973 Wounded Knee: Federal troops walk on a road near Wounded Knee Federal troops walk on a road near Wounded Knee during the siege of the town on March 20, 1973, as about 200 American Indians occupe the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, for the rights of indigenous people. The town of Wounded Knee, the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, was seized on February 27, 1973, by followers of the American Indian Movement (AIM), who staged a 71-day occupation of the area. Two Indians were killed and a US Marshall was seriously wounded.
54. 1973 Wounded Knee: Occupiers escort negotiator Harlington Wood
57. 1973 Wounded Knee: Native American activist Webster Poor Bear has bullet wound treated
58. 1973 Wounded Knee: Dick Wilson Pine Ridge, S.D.: Richard Wilson, president of the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council, revels a previously unreleased list given to him and later authenticated by a U.S. Justice Dept. official, showing names of American Indian Movement (AIM) militants occupying Wounded Knee, S.D., and the counts the Justice Dept. has against them. It was the first time such a list has shown there are definite charges against the AIM leaders and others in Wounded Knee. The prosecution was unprepared when Wilson said he was ready to go to trial, and the proceedings closed without completing the impeachment trial. Several hundred Lakota people marched in protest, demanding the removal of Wilson from office. US Marshals were assigned to protect Wilson and his family. AIM and Lakota supporters occupied the town of Wounded Knee, and a 71-day armed siege resulted, known as the Wounded Knee Occupation.
59. 1973 Wounded Knee: Native American activist Webster Poor Bear has bullet wound treated 2
62. 1973 Wounded Knee: An armed man stands guard at a Checkpoint
63. 1973 Wounded Knee: Dick Wilson with GOONs Tribal president Dick Wilson (center) and members of his paramilitary unit the GOONs (Guardians of the Oglala Nation). This photo is taken during the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee, where the GOONs worked with police and military to repress the resistance. Richard A. Wilson (April 29, 1934 – January 31, 1990) was elected chairman of the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where he served from 1972–1976, following re-election in 1974. Following complaints about his favoring friends and family in award of jobs and suppressing political opponents with his private militia, Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs), members of the tribal council brought impeachment charges against him in February 1973.
64. 1973 Wounded Knee: AIM members gather around an old pick up truck The Pine Ridge reservation, where Wounded Knee was located, had been in turmoil for years. To many in the area the siege was no surprise. The Oglala Lakota who lived on the reservation faced racism beyond its boundaries and a poorly managed tribal government within them. In particular, they sought the removal of tribal chairman Dick Wilson, whom many Oglala living on the reservation thought corrupt. Wilson seemed to favor mixed-race, assimilated Lakota like himself -- and especially his own family members -- over reservation residents with more traditional lifestyles. Efforts to remove Wilson by impeaching him had failed, and so Oglala Lakota tribal leaders turned to AIM for help in removing him by force. Their answer was to occupy Wounded Knee.
67. 1973 Roe v Wade was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court
68. 1973 Wounded Knee: AIM activist Oscar Bear Runner stands guard with a rifle AIM Member Oscar Bear Runner stands guard with a rifle during the Wounded Knee Occupation at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota, March, 2nd 1973. The Wounded Knee occupation lasted for a total of 71 days, during which time two Sioux men were shot to death by federal agents and several more were wounded. On May 8, the AIM leaders and their supporters surrendered after officials promised to investigate their complaints. Russell Means and Dennis Banks were arrested, but on September 16, 1973, the charges against them were dismissed by a federal judge because of the U.S. government’s unlawful handling of witnesses and evidence.
69. 1973 Wounded Knee: AIM activists preparing for a purification ceremony
71. "No Compre Vino Gallo" by Willie Heron (Restored 1990) 1974 Original by Willie Heron - ARTIST: Willie Herron III grew up in East Los Angeles, and has been long active in the Chicano art movement. He rose to prominence in the early 1970s with the “blood and guts and fists” style he uses to portray the barrio where he was raised and began drawing and painting. He had the ability to cope in a community where he sometimes had to “dodge bullets between brushstrokes”. “I began painting murals in Los Angeles with a conscious attempt at representing contemporary issues that confront the people of those communities in which my murals are located” –Willie F. Herron SUBJECT: For the 1990-91 Neighborhood Pride Program, as a tribute to Carlos Almaraz and to the historic struggle of the United Farm workers’ Union, Herron recreated No Compren Vino Gallo, one of the most artistically significant Chicano murals. The artist includes elements of Siqueiros’s mural imagery, and portrays the UFW boycott of Gallo wine; a company that uses grapes picked by workers who suffered horrible working conditions. The mural commemorates the UFW’s struggle for social justice and against dehumanizing agribusiness and corporate greed. The mural was exhibited at the Latino Lab at the former Los Angeles Theater Center (LATC) in 1991 until it was moved because the LATC closure.©SPARC
72. 1973 Wounded Knee: AIM members defend a blockade during the occupation of Wounded Knee The day after the Wounded Knee occupation began, AIM members traded gunfire with the federal marshals surrounding the settlement and fired on automobiles and low-flying planes that dared come within rifle range. Russell Means began negotiations for the release of the hostages, demanding that the U.S. Senate launch an investigation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and all Sioux reservations in South Dakota, and that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hold hearings on the scores of Indian treaties broken by the U.S. government.
73. 1973 Wounded Knee: AIM activist with rifle stands in the snow
74. 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act - Credit Cards for Women Until the mid-1970s, banks and other financial institutions denied married women in the U.S. credit cards or loans in their own name, and single women also had trouble getting credit. Enter the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, which “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, or age in credit transactions.” This means if you apply for a credit card or loan, you can only be considered based on factors directly related to your creditworthiness. That seems obvious today, but it was not 50 years ago. A body of jurisprudence favorable to equal rights — much of it stemming from legal work directed by Ginsburg when she was an attorney — began accumulating in the early 1970s and adding momentum to the fight for equality. That credit card act, signed into law by President Gerald Ford on October 28, 1974, was in some ways the culmination of that work. Without it, women would not have been able to access one of the basic tools of financial independence. Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1993, but had long been a major figure in the legal battle for women’s rights, before joining the federal bench in 1980. By then she had already helped argue for equality in front of the Court, with great success. Forty years ago, any woman applying for a credit card could be asked a barrage of questions: Was she married? Did she plan to have children? Many banks required single, divorced or widowed women to bring a man along with them to cosign for a credit card, and some discounted the wages of women by as much as 50 percent when calculating their credit card limits. As women and minorities pushed for equal civil rights in various arenas, credit cards became the focus of a series of hearings in which women documented the discrimination they faced. And, finally, in 1974—forty years ago this year—the Senate passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which made it illegal to discriminate against someone based on their gender, race, religion and national origin. A year later, in 1975, the first women’s bank was opened by Judy H. Mello, as Eric Pace reported in the New York Times obituary for Mello: The bank, a creation of the feminist movement, was established in April 1975. It was the first bank in the United States to be operated by women and for women, at a time when its founders said that women were given short shrift by other banks. But despite the law, a report from 2012 found that women still pay more for credit cards. According to a study by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, women pay a half a point higher interest rate than men. Today, there are two kinds of ways today’s credit card ads handle women, as Lisa Wade at The Society Pages points out. Either they’re shopaholics who are madly in love with their credits cards, or their shopaholics madly in love with their husband’s credit cards. Of course, both are winning situations for the credit card company.
75. "Uprising of the Mujeres" by Judith F. Baca (1979) Created in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1979 at El Taller Siquerios, a workshop for training muralists established by one of the great Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siquerios. Uprising of the Mujeres is a statement of political struggle led by women. udy Baca placed an indigenous woman at the forefront of political struggle against the prioritization of military spending, the formation of a police state at the expense of social welfare and the exploitation of workers to further capitalism.
76. 1974 The Great Wall of Los Angeles 1974 The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony. SPARC’s first public art project and its true signature piece, the Great Wall is a landmark pictorial representation of the history of ethnic peoples of California from prehistoric times to the 1950’s, conceived by SPARC’S artistic director and founder Judy Baca. Begun in 1974 and completed over five summers, the Great Wall employed over 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members.
77. 1976 - The Great Wall of Los Angeles The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony. SPARC’s first public art project and its true signature piece, the Great Wall is a landmark pictorial representation of the history of ethnic peoples of California from prehistoric times to the 1950’s, conceived by SPARC’s artistic director and founder Judith F. Baca. Begun in 1974 and completed over six summers, the Great Wall employed over 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members.
78. 1978 California Proposition 6: Briggs Initiative
79. 1978 The Bakke Decision In Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Supreme Court ruled that a university's use of racial "quotas". Bakke decision, formally Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, ruling in which, on June 28, 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court declared affirmative action constitutional but invalidated the use of racial quotas. The medical school at the University of California, Davis, as part of the university’s affirmative action program, had reserved 16 percent of its admission places for minority applicants. Allan Bakke, a white California man who had twice unsuccessfully applied for admission to the medical school, filed suit against the university. Citing evidence that his grades and test scores surpassed those of many minority students who had been accepted for admission, Bakke charged that he had suffered unfair “reverse discrimination” on the basis of race, which he argued was contrary to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court, in a highly fractured ruling (six separate opinions were issued), agreed that the university’s use of strict racial quotas was unconstitutional and ordered that the medical school admit Bakke, but it also contended that race could be used as one criterion in the admissions decisions of institutions of higher education. Although the ruling legalized the use of affirmative action, in subsequent decisions during the next several decades the court limited the scope of such programs, and several U.S. states prohibited affirmative action programs based on race. in its admissions process was unconstitutional, but a school's use of "affirmative action" to accept more minority applicants was constitutional in some circumstances. The case involved the admissions practices of the Medical School of the University of California at Davis. The medical school reserved 16 out of 100 seats in its entering class for minorities, including "Blacks," "Chicanos," "Asians," and "American Indians." The rigid admissions quota was administered by a special school committee. Allan Bakke, a white applicant, was twice denied admission to the medical school even though his MCAT scores, GPA, and benchmark scores were "significantly higher" than those of some minority applicants recently admitted. Bakke sued the University of California in a state court, alleging that the medical school's admission policy violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The California Supreme Court agreed, finding that the quota system explicitly discriminated against racial groups and holding that "no applicant may be rejected because of his race, in favor of another who is less qualified, as measured by standards applied without regard to race." The medical school, ordered to shut down its quota system, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reviewed the case in 1978.
80. 1978 Proposition 13 Led by a tax fighter The so-called “taxpayer’s revolt” was led by Jarvis, a Utah native born in 1903. By the age of 30, he owned several small newspapers and was active in Republican politics. He moved to California in the 1930s and ran several times unsuccessfully for mayor of Los Angeles on an anti-tax platform. Jarvis gained a reputation as a harsh government critic. He worked for more than a decade to change the state’s property tax laws. Prop. 13, as Jarvis described it in a 1978 press conference, was a way to push back against “the moochers and loafers” in government. “They’re just destroying the country,” said Jarvis. “They’re just like a bunch of locusts going through a grain field and when they get through there, no grain is left.”
84. 1970s/1980s Location shoot in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park for Visual Communications The roots of Asian American studies and its flourishing as a field of study has borne fruit, evidenced by the accomplishments of its students, a growing diversity in the curriculum, and the strength of local Asian American community institutions. For the students, Asian American studies validated their identities as Asians in America. It allowed them to explore a common history and cause with fellow Asians. And it offered a space to develop solidarities within and across racial, ethnic, gender and other boundaries. Asian American studies was a hotbed where students could grow in their activism and leadership. On university campuses, Asian American studies institutionalized community-based learning and research that re-envisioned the role of the university. Finally, the Asian American community as a whole benefited, as students went on to apply their skills and experiences to establish needed community programs and services as well as local and national organizations. They also entered mainstream institutions and advocated on behalf of those whose voices were missing.
85. 1973-Los Angeles, California- Tom Bradley takes the oath of office of the the Mayor of Los Angeles
87. 1974 Clifford Glover - Protesters in Queens in 1974 urged that a white police officer be convicted of murdering Clifford Glover, a black 10-year-old.
90. 1969 UCLA philosophy department hired Angela Davis
92. 1970 First LA Pride Parade The first L.A. Pride Parade (originally Gay Pride Parade), organized by Rev. Bob Humphries (founder, United States Mission), Morris Kight (founder, Gay Liberation Front) and Rev. Troy Perry (founder, Metropolitan Community Church) and the Christopher Street West Association, was held on June 28, 1970 in Los Angeles. L.A.'s Gay Pride Parade permit did not come easily. No city had, until that time, ever experienced thousands of LGBTQ people marching openly and LAPD Chief Edward Davis did not hesitate to remind organizers that homosexuality was still illegal in California. Rev. Perry recounted that Davis declared to them, “As far as I’m concerned, granting a permit to a group of homosexuals to parade down Hollywood Boulevard would be the same as giving a permit to a group of thieves and robbers.” The Los Angeles Police Commission, for their part, claiming to fear violent homophobic counter-reactions, imposed excessive permit requirements, such as $1.5 million in fees. Parade organizers and the ACLU challenged the city in court, taking their fight all the way to the California Supreme Court. The court ended up ordering the city to issue a parade permit without discriminatory add-ons. L.A.’s Gay Pride Parade became the world’s first officially-permitted parade advocating for LGBTQ rights. The parade was moved from Hollywood in Los Angeles to West Hollywood in 1979.
93. FBI Wanted Poster Angela Davis, Black Panther Party, American, 1966 - 1982
94. Remembering Busing And School Desegregation In Los Angeles 1972-79 It was 1972 and the Los Angeles Unified School District had been found guilty of intentionally segregating city schools. White families, fearful of having their children bused, had begun fleeing the district and transferring to private schools. The new busing program, called Permits With Transportation, or PWT, was partly seen as a way to fill empty classroom seats. It was a prelude to the much larger mandatory desegregation program the district would begin in 1978. It helped integrate Valley campuses and extend the bounty of predominantly white suburban schools to a small group of black children from poor neighborhoods. Pittman’s parents had grown up in Watts. His mother graduated from Fremont, his father from Jordan High. Most of what his family knew about white people, they had learned from radio and TV. “We expected the white boys to be all ‘Alice Cooper,’ doing acid, tripping out,” Pittman said.- A handful of court decisions in the 1970s paved the way for busing as a way to integrate public schools in the Los Angeles Unified School Districts. The practice bussed African American students from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods to wealthier and white-dominated schools and areas -- and vice versa. Mandatory busing came to an end in 1979, with the passage of a state constitutional amendment. Proponents say that busing, although not perfect, is an effective way to ensure racial and resource parity in LAUSD. One of the consequences of busing, like opponents had warned, was a “white flight” from LAUSD neighborhoods, and white parents taking their kids out of public schools to attend private schools. https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2012-feb-11-la-me-banks-20120211-story.html
95. In the 1970s, Davis was a fugitive on the FBI's most-wanted list. Once caught, she faced the death penalty in California but was later acquitted on all charges. Angela Davis raises her fist to give her power salute as she sits in the courtroom at Marin Civic Center in San Rafael, Ca., on March 16, 1971. Davis, who is accused of supplying some of the weapons used in a shoot-out during an attempted escape of prisoners at the Marin County Courthouse, is waiting for her court hearing to start after it was postponed because of bomb threats. In the fall of 1970, she was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. (AP Photo)
96. 1978 California Prop 6: John Briggs and Harvey Milk meet John Briggs and Harvey Milk meet, 1978. A coalition of activists mobilized under the slogan "Come out! Come out! Wherever you are!" to defeat the initiative. In what became the No On 6 campaign, gay men and lesbians went door to door in their cities and towns across the state to talk about the harm the initiative would cause. Gay men and lesbians came out to their families and their neighbors and their co-workers, spoke in their churches and community centers, sent letters to their local editors, and otherwise revealed to the general population that gay people really were "everywhere" and included people they already knew and cared about
97. 1973 Reverend Troy Perry stands in his burned-down church The church has also endured its share of troubles. MCC has faced anti-LGBTQ violence, particularly during what Perry terms a period of persecution in the 1970s when they lost five churches to arson—including a New Orleans gay bar called the Upstairs Lounge where MCC members were holding a meeting; it was the worst mass murder of LGBTQ persons in the U.S. until the Pulse night club massacre in 2016. According to the MCC History Project, their churches began to experience the full brunt of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s; the Rev. Elder Don Eastman wrote that by the time effective HIV treatments became available in 1996, MCC had lost one-third of its congregants. “I don’t believe that any disease, I don’t care what it is, is a gift from God to a class of people,” Perry said to the Rev. Jerry Falwell in 1983 during a televised debate. “We don’t want political games played with this issue. We want to make sure that people don’t die.”
98. 1972 - Reverend Troy Perry - Same-sex marriage was one of his fights from the beginning, long before it was a major political issue: Same-sex marriage was one of his fights from the beginning, long before it was a major political issue: In December 1968, just two months after MCC’s first meeting in his living room, Perry performed what Time magazine declared the first public same-sex wedding in the U.S. “I always believed in marriage. I was one of those strange gay men who talked about marriage,” Perry told me through laughter. “And marriage was just very, very important to me, and so all my life, I fought for that.” Marriage was just one theater of operations for Perry and MCC. “I used to say, years ago,” Perry said, “the one thing I had to fight for, if I was not going to fight for anything else—of course, I fought for everything—was the rights of my members to have a job. People have to work, and that includes my community, too.” That fight took different forms: picketing in 1969 in front of States Steamship Co. offices when it fired a man for coming out, and in 1977, when Perry told reporters from the steps of downtown LA’s Federal Building that he intended to fast there publicly “until death if necessary,” in order to raise $100,000 to fight the Briggs Initiative, a proposed amendment to the state’s education code that would ban gay and lesbian California teachers from working in the state’s public schools.
99. 1977 Harvey Milk - The Gay Rights Movement
100. 1978 California Proposition 6: Briggs Initiative
101. 1975 Black April Helicopter pilot O.B. Harnage reaches out to help Vietnamese evacuees escape Saigon on April 29, 1975. VIPs and other Vietnamese had been gathering at the location in hopes of a rescue. Wooden stairs had been built to the top of the roof’s elevator shaft to aid the evacuation. Harnage made three pickups, packing 20 people onto each flight. To make room for them all, he rode outside the bird, standing on the skid while gripping a machine gun. The station chief had ordered him to concentrate on the VIPs, but Harnage decided to board on a first-come, first-serve basis. Some parents handed him their children with heartbreaking notes pinned to the kids’ clothes, such as, “My son wants to be a doctor” and “My daughter is very musical.”
103. 1970s Spike in Mexican Migration Mexican immigrants boarding a plane in Los Angeles California as they are being deported back to their native Mexico, July 27, 1976. AP Photo -n the 1960s Mexican officials discouraged emigration, but by the 1970s, those same officials encouraged the departures of working-class men as a solution to high unemployment and population growth in the country. Simultaneously, the U.S. government attempted to address these problems by fortifying the border and conducting raids in Latina/o communities. Migrants described their diminished capacity to belong in local and national spaces by characterizing themselves as being “neither from here nor from there” – ni de aquí ni de allá. When they resided in their hometowns in Mexico, their families and friends pressured them to head north to make money. Conversely, when they moved to new cities and towns in the U.S., their communities in Mexico insisted that they return home. Migrants unwittingly resisted the idea that they were superfluous in Mexico by becoming indispensable economic agents in their hometowns through the money they sent from abroad. They countered their illegality north of the border by establishing that undocumented migrants deserved constitutional rights and creating new meanings of community life. These actions provided them with partial inclusion in the multiple locales they lived, but only as migrants who lived, at least some of their time, in the United States. For their part, elderly Mexican men, along with women and queer men, commonly responded to dominant gender and sexual ideologies by remaining in Mexico and depending on foreign remittances to survive.
104. 1975 - CAMBODIA-KHMER ROUGE-REFUGEES “In April 1975, refugees left Cambodia when the Communist Party of Kampuchea took control of the country. Frequently referred to as the Khmer Rouge, the regime had one goal: to create a communal utopia where everyone worked on farms. Production and distribution of goods were based on the Socialist principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” On April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge soldiers invaded the capital Phnom Penh and seized control. Soldiers forced residents out of their homes, hospital patients out of their beds, and made them walk to the countryside. Civil rights, politics and private property were abolished. Schools and colleges were closed and used as army bases. Medicine and hospitals were destroyed as part of erasing modern institutions. To accomplish their goal, the Khmer Rouge killed 90 percent of the country’s middle and upper class – doctors, lawyers, teachers, business owners and anyone with an education who might rebel. In less than four years, two-million people died from starvation, exhaustion, diseases or executions. PHNOM PENH - APRIL 17: A photo taken 17 April 1975 in Phnom Penh of Cambodian refugees moving, after the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and establish government of Democratic Kampuchea (DK). (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)
105. The Mothers Who Fought To Radically Reimagine Welfare At its height, the National Welfare Rights Organization had more than 25,000 dues-paying members. Some people have called it "the largest black feminist organization in American history." Jack Rottier Collection/George Mason University Libraries “I'm a black woman. I'm a poor woman. I'm a fat woman. I'm a middle-aged woman. And I'm on welfare. In this country, if you're any one of those things you count less as a human being. If you're all those things, you don't count at all.” - Johnnie Tillmon
106. 1970s NWRO Timeline 1970 NWRO fights Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP); Senator Eugene McCarthy introduces NWRO’s $5,500 Guaranteed Adequate Income Plan. 1971 Operation Nevada: NWRO fights massive recipient cut-offs; march along Las Vegas casino strip. March 25, 1972 Children’s March for Survival; 50,000 demonstrate in Washington, DC. July 1972 NWRO Adequate Income Proposals--$6,500 NOW—win almost 1,000 (of 1,500 needed for majority to adopt) at Democratic National Convention in Miami (where McGovern was nominated). December 1972 Dr. George Wiley announces his departure from NWRO to begin the Movement for Economic Justice; Mrs. Johnnie Tillmon, past chair-person of NWRO becomes its Executive Director. August 1973 George Wiley is killed in an alleged boating accident. 1974 NWRO forced to close Washington, DC national office due to lack of funds.
107. 1966 The National Welfare Rights Organization “I’m a woman. I’m a Black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare,” Tillmon writes in her landmark 1972 essay, “Welfare is a Women’s Issue,” published in Ms. magazine. “In this country, if you’re any of those things you count less as a human being. If you’re all of those things, you don’t count at all.” 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. Across California, welfare-rights activism grew organically: in living rooms and churches. It organized in direct opposition to the language and policies of Governor Ronald Reagan, the California legislature, bigoted social workers, and even middle-class black and feminist communities. It formed local organizations, including Tillmon’s ANC-MA, the California Welfare Rights Organization (CWRO), and many others. I
108. 1971 ANC Mothers Organize Healthcare Seminars
109. 1970 NWRO Protest Outside Welfare Office “A crowd of mostly women demonstrators stage a sit-in outside the Welfare office at 614 H Street NE May 8, 1970. The specifics of the protest are unknown, but recurrent issues involved unwarranted searches of homes by welfare case workers, greater levels of economic assistance and protesting the so-called “man in the house rule” that broke up families. The protest occurred in the days following President Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia that widened the Vietnam War. The National Welfare Rights Organization was pressing two demands at the time: a minimum $5,500 income for a family of four and an end to the Vietnam War and the subsequent diversion of military dollars into social welfare programs. The Nixon administration was proposing $1,200 for a family of four at the time. A few days after the demonstration at the District welfare office, the National Welfare Rights Organization staged a sit-in at the office of Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch where they pressed their two demands. Two dozen people were arrested when they refused to leave Finch’s office.”
110. 1971 Welfare Rights Workshop At Chicano Conference

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6. 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. 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)
14. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Rosalio Munoz speaks at Laguna Park
17. 1974 The Great Wall of Los Angeles 1974 The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony. SPARC’s first public art project and its true signature piece, the Great Wall is a landmark pictorial representation of the history of ethnic peoples of California from prehistoric times to the 1950’s, conceived by SPARC’S artistic director and founder Judy Baca. Begun in 1974 and completed over five summers, the Great Wall employed over 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members.
18. 1967 The Bloody March - America at War with Itself
20. 1968 Oakland High School at funeral for Black Panther Bobby Hutton PHOTO BY NIKKI ARAI - Oakland High School students participated in the funeral for Black Panther Bobby Hutton, killed by Oakland Police in 1968. The Black Power movement, led by various groups including the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Nation of Islam, and the Black Panther Party, emerged in the latter half of the sixties. Coined by Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael, the Black Power movement inspired racial pride and advocated for local community control, self-determination and economic development. At the same time, other social movements challenged the existing social order. At UC Berkeley, students engaged in civil disobedience over a university ban on political activity and initiated the Free Speech movement. The women’s liberation movement emerged in the late ‘60s as organizations formed to confront society’s sexism and to promote women’s equality. Likewise, activists organized the environmental movement to protect the earth, stop pollution, and clean-up toxic environmental hazards in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Each of these movements, as well as their militancy, informed the Asian American movement.
21. 2012 California voters approved a ballot measure that would amend the state’s highly controversial Three Strikes law. https://blackyouthproject.com/ca-voters-approve-ballot-measure-reforming-three-strikes-law/ The revised law would require that the third offense be of a serious or violent nature–not something as minor as writing a bad check or, in a much-cited example, stealing a pair of socks. “Tonight’s vote on Proposition 36 sends a powerful message to policymakers in California and across the country that taxpayers are ready for a new direction in criminal justice,” Adam Gelb, director of the Pew Center on the States’ Public Safety Performance Project, told the San Jose Mercury News. “States that have already made some changes to their sentencing laws may be inspired to take a second look, and states that haven’t made significant changes yet may start.” In addition to altering the sentencing guidelines for future convicts, Prop 36 also creates a pathway for nearly 3,000 inmates currently serving life sentences under the Three Strikes Law to petition for a reduced term.
22. 1968 Los Angeles high school walkout protesters in their car: "Get Cops Out of Schools" This March 1968 photo provided by the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, protesters in a car drive by with a sign that reads "Get the Cops Out of the Schools Now!" during a walkout by students at Theodore Roosevelt High School in Los Angeles. Participants of a 1968 Los Angeles high school walkout over dropout rates, paddle beatings for speaking Spanish and other issues . (Devra Weber/La Raza Photograph collection/UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center via AP)
24. 1971 Student and barrio youth lead protest march in Belvedere Park.
25. 2007 Dream Act The Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, known as the DREAM Act, is a United States legislative proposal to grant temporary conditional residency, with the right to work, to undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as minors—and, if they later satisfy further qualifications, they would attain permanent residency. In April 2001, United States Senators Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) first introduced the bill in the Senate as S. 1291, but it did not pass. The proposal has since been reintroduced several times, but has not been approved by majorities in either house of the United States Congress.[1][2]
27. 1992 Chinese Student Protection Act
28. 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
29. 1966 Youth being searched by police during crackdown on the Sunset Strip
30. 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.
31. 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.
32. 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.
33. 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.
34. 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.
36. 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.
37. 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
38. 1969 1st Chicano Moratorium: Outside recruiting center
39. 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
41. 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.
43. 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.
44. 1970 Official Resignation of all women in the Brown Berets LA chapter
45. 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
47. 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.
49. 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.
51. 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.
52. 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. …
53. 1968 Walkouts at Venice High School
54. Free Huey Huey P. Newton, in full Huey Percy Newton, (born February 17, 1942, Monroe, Louisiana, U.S.—died August 22, 1989, Oakland, California), American political activist, cofounder (with Bobby Seale) of the Black Panther Party (originally called Black Panther Party for Self-Defense). An illiterate high-school graduate, Newton taught himself how to read before attending Merritt College in Oakland and the San Francisco School of Law. While at Merritt he met Seale. In Oakland in 1966 they formed the Black Panther group in response to incidents of alleged police brutality and racism and as an illustration of the need for Black self-reliance. At the height of its popularity during the late 1960s, the party had 2,000 members in chapters in several cities. In 1967 Newton was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the death of a police officer. His imprisonment sparked protests—and the popular rallying cry “Free Huey.” His conviction was overturned in 1970, and he was released from prison. In 1971 he announced that the party would adopt a nonviolent manifesto and dedicate itself to providing social services to the Black community, which included free meals for children and health clinics. In 1974 Newton was accused of another murder and fled to Cuba for three years before returning to face charges; two trials resulted in hung juries.
55. 1969 UCLA philosophy department hired Angela Davis
56. 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
57. 1966 Riots on the Sunset Strip
58. 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.
59. 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.
60. 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.
61. 1960s/1970s GIDRA sisters
63. 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.
64. 1970 East L.A. picketing to protest conditions at the school
69. 1976 - The Great Wall of Los Angeles The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony. SPARC’s first public art project and its true signature piece, the Great Wall is a landmark pictorial representation of the history of ethnic peoples of California from prehistoric times to the 1950’s, conceived by SPARC’s artistic director and founder Judith F. Baca. Begun in 1974 and completed over six summers, the Great Wall employed over 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members.
70. 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