This path was created by Gina Leon.

This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los Angeles Main Menu Research of the Decades Research 1960s Illustration Development Illustration Development Playlists of the Decades Playlists Great Wall Institute - Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC)

2013 The Black Lives Matter Movement

This page has paths:

2010s Gina Leon
Contents of this path:
1. 2010 SB1070 Anti-Immigration Bill in Arizona
2. 2010 Repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”
3. 2011 Obama officially Declares an End to the War on Iraq and that the US is to pull out.
4. 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.
5. 2012 The fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin An unarmed black teenager, in Florida by an armed neighborhood-watch volunteer prompts Obama to say: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” The man who shot Martin is found not guilty of second-degree murder and acquitted of manslaughter, a lesser charge. But some protesters claim Martin was only stopped because of racial profiling. After Martin’s parents raised concerns about the police investigation into the death of their son, who had no criminal record, the case gained national attention. Protest rallies were held in cities nationwide, including New York City, where on March 21 hundreds of people gathered for the Million Hoodie March and demanded justice for Martin, who many believed Zimmerman had profiled as suspicious and threatening simply because the teen was Black. Two days later, President Barack Obama said of the shooting: “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” In addition to raising a national debate about race relations, the shooting drew attention to Florida’s controversial Stand Your Ground law, which allows people to use lethal force if they fear for their safety and does not require them to retreat from a dangerous situation, even when it’s possible to do so. On April 11, 2012, following weeks of demonstrations, a special prosecutor appointed by Florida’s governor charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder. He pleaded not guilty and the case went to trial in June 2013. In court, the prosecution portrayed Zimmerman as a wannabe cop who had profiled Martin as a criminal, chased him down and fought him. Prosecutors also tried to poke holes in Zimmerman’s self-defense claim by pointing to inconsistencies in his statements to the police. Defense attorneys for Zimmerman, who did not take the stand, contended he only shot Martin after the teen attacked him. On July 13, after deliberating for 16 hours over two days, a jury of six women found Zimmerman not guilty. (https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/florida-teen-trayvon-martin-is-shot-and-killed)
6. June 25, 2013: Voting Rights Act Walked Back In Shelby County v. Holder, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, rules that Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, holding that the constraints placed on certain states and federal review of states' voting procedures, known as preclearance, are outdated. Seen as a blow to civil rights activists, since the ruling, which affected nine states and several counties and townships, a federal commission found at least 23 states had enacted "newly restrictive statewide voter laws." These include polling place closures, voter ID laws, limiting early voting and more. Not Released (NR) **Agency/Wires: This photo was licensed from an agency and any use must be consistent with the terms of the agreement for that agency. Unless otherwise noted, we have the right to use the photo for one-time use in connection with a particular story. We may not re-use, sublicense or distribute this photo, except via our API/RSS in conjunction with the story for which the photo was licensed, but you may re-license the photo for subsequent use by going back to the agency.** The Voting Rights Act is often called the crown jewel of the civil rights movement, yet many Americans do not know why or how it was passed. Pictured, NAACP Field Director Charles White speaks on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, June 25, 2013, after the court limited use of a major part of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, in effect invalidating a key enforcement provision. Here are some key moments and characters in the voting rights saga. Mark Wilson/Getty Images Three young civil rights workers were murdered in 1964 in Mississippi while trying to register black voters. The infamous murders showed that segregationists were willing to kill to keep African-Americans from voting. MPI/Getty Images John Lewis, a young activist who later became a congressman of Georgia, heads to a fateful encounter on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama during a 1965 march. Lewis was brutally assaulted by state troopers during the "Bloody Sunday" march that made voting rights a national issue. Birmingham News /Landov Marchers during the 1965 voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama gather for a rally on March 26, 1965, a few weeks after "Bloody Sunday." Black residents were beaten, fired from their jobs and imprisoned trying to vote. Stringer/AFP/Getty Images Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife, was murdered while participating in the voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Her death outraged the nation and helped spur passage of the Voting Rights Act. AP President Lyndon Johnson, pictured here discussing the act with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965, went on national television to call for passage of the Voting Rights Act. He ended his speech by saying, "And we shall overcome." Hulton Archive/Getty Images Rep. John Lewis speaks after bipartisan House and Senate officials met to voice support for reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act for an additional 25 years on May 2, 2006. From left, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, House Speaker Dennis Hastert, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and other officials listen during the media conference. Mark Wilson/Getty Images President George W. Bush signs reauthorization of the act on July 27, 2006. From left, Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisconsin, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and Sen. Bill Frist, R-Tennessee, look on. G. Fabiano-Pool/Getty Images President Barack Obama marches with civil right veterans during a commemoration march in 2007. Scott Olson/Getty Images A conservative judge called the Voting Rights Act a racial entitlement but supporters of the act say it is the crowning victory of the civil rights movement. Pictured, people gather for a post-march rally after crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the "Bloody Sunday" anniversary, March 4, 2012. Birmingham News/Tamika Moore /Landov Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Executive Director Barbara Arnwine speaks during a news conference to voice opposition to state photo ID voter laws with the Rev. Jesse Jackson and members of Congress at the U.S. Capitol July 13, 2011. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images A supporter of the Voting Rights Act rallies in the South Carolina State House in Columbia on February 26, 2013, the day before oral hearings at the Supreme Court. Richard Ellis/Getty Images The Rev. Jesse Jackson, at the microphone, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, left, deliver remarks during a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court on February 27, 2013, as the court prepared to hear oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder, the legal challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Supporters of the Voting Rights Act listen to speakers discussing the rulings outside the U.S. Supreme Court building on Tuesday, June 25, 2013. Win McNamee/Getty Images
7. 2013 The Black Lives Matter Movement
8. 2014 Beginning of Water Crisis in Flint, MI
9. 2014 YES on Prop 47 - When California reversed tough-on-crime policies earlier this month many cheered, saying the state blazed a trail for a more enlightened approach to crime and punishment across the United States. (The Guardian) Prop. 47, the Safe Neighborhood and Schools Act, will be on the ballot this November. It would change the lowest-level, nonviolent crimes such as simple drug possession and petty theft from felonies to misdemeanors. The savings would go toward preventing crime. If it passes, California will lead the nation in ending felony sentencing for the lowest level, non-violent crimes, permanently reduce incarceration and shift $1 billion in the next five years alone from the state corrections department to K-12 school programs and mental health and drug treatment. This reform maintains the current law for anyone with prior convictions for rape, murder or child molestation. At the same time, Prop. 47 reduces the barriers that many people with a low-level, non-violent felony conviction face to becoming stable and productive citizens, such as a lack of employment, housing and access to assistance programs and professional trades. Yes on Prop. 47 is supported by law enforcement leaders, crime victims, teachers, rehabilitation experts, business leaders, faith-based leaders and civil rights organizations, as well as the ACLU of California. This reform will focus our law enforcement resources on violent and serious crime, and use the savings in prison spending to prevent crime.
10. 2015-2016- SPARC's CITY WIDE MURAL PROGRAM
11. 2015 Changes to California Equal Pay Act - 50 years on, women still fighting for equal pay in 2015, Governor Brown signed the California Fair Pay Act, which strengthened the Equal Pay Act in a number of ways and signaled California’s commitment to achieving real gender pay equity. 2. What were the most significant changes to the Equal Pay Act? Requiring equal pay for employees who perform “substantially similar work,” when viewed as a composite of skill, effort, and responsibility. Eliminating the requirement that the employees being compared work at the “same establishment.” Making it more difficult for employers to justify inequities in pay through the “bona fide factor other than sex” defense. Ensuring that any legitimate factors relied upon by the employer for pay inequities are applied reasonably and account for the entire pay difference. Explicitly stating that retaliation against employees who seek to enforce the law is illegal, and making it illegal for employers to prohibit employees from discussing or inquiring about their co-workers’ wages. Extending the number of years that employers must maintain wage and other employment-related records from two years to three years.
12. 2016 Standing Rock Protest Against Oil Pipeline
13. 2016 Promise Zone Designation in South LA
14. 2017 Why communities fighting for fair policing also demand environmental justice
15. La Bestia - One side from " Paletas de la Frontera" by Judith F. Baca (2021)
16. 2017 #MeToo Movement and Exposing Sexual Violence in Hollywood
17. 2018 From separation to detention
18. Border Wall
19. Family Separation MCALLEN, TX - JUNE 12: Central American asylum seekers wait as U.S. Border Patrol agents take groups of them into custody on June 12, 2018 near McAllen, Texas. The families were then sent to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) processing center for possible separation. U.S. border authorities are executing the Trump administration's zero tolerance policy towards undocumented immigrants. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also said that domestic and gang violence in immigrants' country of origin would no longer qualify them for political-asylum status. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
20. Children in Cages
21. Children in Cages, Detention Center during the Trump Era
22. 2018 California Endowment: Central Valley Mural Project
23. "Immigrants Feed America" by Judith Baca (2018) In 2017 Central Valley Mural Project and SPARC began the installation of eight murals throughout the Central Valley on health, wellness and social justice in immigrant and agricultural communities. Sponsored by the California Endowment, the SPARC team will be completing murals in Bakersfield, Lamont, Merced, Fresno, Armona, Tulare, Modesto, and Stockton. Partners include the United Farm Workers, ACT for Women and Girls, the Dolores Huerta Foundation, El Centro Binacional para el Desarrollo Indígena Oaxaqueño, El Concilio, Community Medical Centers-Stockton, We’Ced, and the Kings County Cultural Center.
24. 2018 LA Legalizes Street Vending
25. Immigrant detention system has grown since 2017 - "THE DETENTION MACHINE HAS EXPLODED" The detention machine has exploded, resulting in billions of dollars in revenue for private operators. Since 2017, 40 new detention facilities have opened. Most are run by private operators. As of January 2020, 81 percent of detained people are in facilities owned and/or operated by private companies; that number jumps to 91 percent for people who are detained in facilities that opened after 2017. For Fiscal Year 2021, the Trump administration has requested that taxpayers fund ICE at $4.1 billion, with the intent to expand ICE’s daily detention capacity to 60,000 people on any given day.
26. 2018 Korematsu, Notorious Supreme Court Ruling on Japanese Internment, Is Finally Tossed Out A Japanese internment camp in Manzanar, Calif., in 1942. In upholding President Trump’s travel ban on Tuesday, the Supreme Court also overruled the case that had allowed the World War II internments as constitutional.Credit...Bettmann Archive. WASHINGTON — In the annals of Supreme Court history, a 1944 decision upholding the forcible internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II has long stood out as a stain that is almost universally recognized as a shameful mistake. Yet that notorious precedent, Korematsu v. United States, remained law because no case gave justices a good opportunity to overrule it. But on Tuesday, when the Supreme Court’s conservative majority upheld President Trump’s ban on travel into the United States by citizens of several predominantly Muslim countries, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. also seized the moment to finally overrule Korematsu. “The forcible relocation of U.S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of presidential authority,” he wrote. Citing language used by then-Justice Robert H. Jackson in a dissent to the 1944 ruling, Chief Justice Roberts added, “Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and — to be clear — ‘has no place in law under the Constitution.’” In a dissent of the travel ban ruling, Justice Sonia Sotomayor offered tepid applause. While the “formal repudiation of a shameful precedent is laudable and long overdue,” she said, it failed to make the court’s decision to uphold the travel ban acceptable or right. She accused the Justice Department and the court’s majority of adopting troubling parallels between the two cases. In both cases, she wrote, the court deferred to the Trump administration’s invocation of “an ill-defined national security threat to justify an exclusionary policy of sweeping proportion,” relying on stereotypes about a particular group amid “strong evidence that impermissible hostility and animus motivated the government’s policy.” The fallacies in Korematsu were echoed in the travel ban ruling, warned Hiroshi Motomura, a University of California, Los Angeles, law professor who has written extensively about immigration. “Overruling Korematsu the way the court did in this case reduces the overruling to symbolism that is so bare that it is deeply troubling, given the parts of the reasoning behind Korematsu that live on in today’s decision: a willingness to paint with a broad brush by nationality, race or religion by claiming national security grounds,” he said. He added, “If the majority really wanted to bury Korematsu, they would have struck down the travel ban.” The Korematsu ruling, an exceedingly rare modern example in which the court explicitly upheld government discrimination against an entire category of people based upon a trait like race or ethnicity, traced back to the early days after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States entered World War II.
27. The Normalizing of Mass Shootings

Contents of this path:

2013 The Black Lives Matter Movement

This page has tags:

Black Liberation Gina Leon
Contents of this tag:
1. 1965 - The Watts Uprising
2. 1963 - March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
3. Watts Renaissance (1965-67)
4. 1960s Subculture of Black Solidarity at San Quentin - NOI - Nation of Islam
5. 1961 Members of CORE Raise Funds in Pacoima, Los Angeles for Freedom Riders CORE members pass out pamphlets in Pacoima protesting the jailing of Freedom Riders. From left, Michael Haimovitz, 19, Stevie Lipney, 17, and Ernie Dillard, 23. Mike Davis and John Weiner: "Members of CORE raise funds in Pacoima for jailed Freedom Riders, July 24, 1961. LA CORE sent five integrated groups of Freedom Riders to challenge segregation in Southern train and bus terminals. Most of them were jailed at Mississippi's Parchman Farm, perhaps the scariest prison in North America. "
6. Birth of SNCC (The Black Freedom Struggle)
7. 1960s Black Liberation Powerpoint
8. Ronald Martin, Robert Patterson and Mark Martin sit at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro
9. James Lawson - Training for Nonviolent Resistance ICNC - International Center on Nonviolent Conflict -"The Worst thing that happens is bombing... a boy or girl would wrap a stone or marble... and throw them... and it really hurt.... she walked into her english class and a bomb went whizzing by her ear... missed her and hit the wall. She was trembling and thought what can I do. She picked up the bomb and went back to the room and she smiled at the boy who threw it as she placed it on his desk. He turned a number of colors. She smiled at him. Students laughed nervously. The next english class, that boy greeted her at the door and said Good Morning Melba. He never again was found harassing her."
10. 1962 The Black Muslims / Malcolm X
11. 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.
12. 1961 Burning Greyhound bus pictured here carried Freedom Riders into Anniston on May 14, 1961 Photo courtesy of the Birmingham Public Library Archives: The burning Greyhound bus pictured here carried Freedom Riders into Anniston on May 14, 1961, as part of an effort to test a newly enacted integration law regarding bus stations in the South. After the riders were attacked at the station in Anniston, the bus was firebombed after breaking down several miles outside the city. Many of the riders were beaten, with several being severely injured, by a white mob as they departed the bus.
13. The Black Power Movement
14. 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....
15. 1965 Watts Writers Workshop
16. 1965 First Watts Festival, boys climbing a tall chainlink fence First Watts Festival - After the revolt, Central Los Angeles, California, 1965. A black-and-white photograph of approximately twenty boys climbing or attempting to climb a tall chainlink fence. Joe Schwartz, Folk Photography: Poems I've Never Written (2000), 39.3. The Watts Summer Festival was founded by community activist Tommy Chaquette, whose shrewd organizational skills helped make this event a success (https://www.marquette.edu/haggerty-museum/documents/watts_catalogue.pdf).
17. 2013 The Black Lives Matter Movement
18. Oral History Interview with James Lawson Nonviolence Workshops & Lunch Counter Sit-ins Organizing 1957-1969: Lawson is involved with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), 8 a pacifist organization founded in Europe at the outbreak of WWI and the oldest pacifist organization in the U.S. 9 He serves as a southern director of FOR and begins organizing workshops on nonviolence for community members & students at Vanderbilt and the city’s four black colleges (Tennessee State University, Fisk University, Meharry College, and American Baptist College). 10 He then enrolls at Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville. As of 2011, Lawson identified himself as a member of FOR. From Jan.-May in 1958 Lawson held nonviolence workshops in Little Rock, a year after the Little Rock Nine had begun desegregation of the local high schools. In 1959, Lawson alongside Diane Nash, Marion Barry, John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, & James Bevel plan nonviolent From Jan.-May in 1958 Lawson held nonviolence workshops in Little Rock, a year after the Little Rock Nine had begun desegregation of the local high schools. In 1959, Lawson alongside Diane Nash, Marion Barry, John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, & James Bevel plan nonviolent demonstrations in Nashville & conduct test sit-ins. These organizers are met with resistance and considered “radical” in Nashville as the belief was that Nashville was a “moderate” city with “the best working relationships with Black people and that in fact the sit-in was not the way to do it.” In 1958, Lawson attended his first meeting with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) where he met with King and led his first workshop on nonviolence. Following the Greensboro lunch counter sit-ins in 1960, Lawson and other activists launched similar protests in downtown Nashville. More than 150 students were arrested before the city began desegregating lunch counters. First sit-in in Nashville on February 13th 1960. The city of Nashville officially desegregated its downtown lunch counters in May of 1960. In 1960, Lawson was expelled from Vanderbilt due to involvement with the desegregation movement.
19. 1963 Birmingham "Demonstration: Dogs and Hoses Repulse Negroes at Birmingham" Civil Rights Movement: Firemen turn hoses on demonstrators, Birmingham, Alabama - IRMINGHAM, Ala., May 3 -- Fire hoses and police dogs were used here today to disperse Negro students protesting racial segregation. Three students were reported to have been bitten and to have required hospital treatment. Two firemen and a news photographer were injured by bricks and broken bottles thrown from the top of a Negro office building near the major encounter, at 17th Street and Fifth Avenue North. [In Washington, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy warned that ``increasing turmoil'' would be made inevitable by a refusal to grant equal rights to Negroes, United Press International reported. But he questioned the timing of the demonstrations.] Marchers Are Dispersed This was the second day of major demonstrations by the students here. Yesterday, more than 900 students were sent out from the Negro section in groups of 10 to 50. Some succeeded in reaching City Hall and several downtown corners. More than 700 were arrested. Today, with the dogs and fire hoses, the police were largely successful in dispersing the student marchers before they left the Negro section. Fewer than 500 were able to leave the 16th Street Baptist Church before the police sealed its doors. Only two groups won their way through the police lines. One group of 20 reached City Hall, where they were arrested. Another group of 10 got as far as the bus depot on 19th Street, where they also were taken into custody. In all, more than 250 persons were reported arrested today. The demonstrators today appeared to be older than those who marched yesterday. They appeared to be mostly high school and college students. All the demonstrations were held between 1 and 3 P.M. They followed by less than three hours a declaration by the two principal leaders of the month-old direct action campaign against segregation here. The leaders said that the demonstrations would continue with increasing intensity until there were both ``promise and action'' from the city authorities and white merchants to start to end segregation. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Atlanta, Ga., and the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, head of the local affiliate, the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights, made the announcement. They told the news conference that they had no intention of relaxing the pressure without such action. ``We are ready to negotiate,'' Dr. King said. ``But we intend to negotiate from strength. If the white power structure of this city will meet some of our minimum demands, then we will consider calling off the demonstrations, but we want promises, plus action.'' Both said there was no lack of recruits from among the Negro community of 140,000 persons here. If there ever was any division within it over the timing of the campaign, it now has disappeared, they declared.
20. Black Freedom Movements
21. Plantation Capitalism Article by Reverend Jim Conn: Lynd Ward, "Wild Pilgrimage" My friend, mentor and colleague, Rev. James Lawson, calls our economic system “plantation capitalism.” Lawson was the nonviolent strategist for Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement and the key figure in the desegregation of Nashville. His reference, of course, pulls forward the image of enslaved field workers in the Old South. The image chafes in my mind. Yes, slavery, but today’s workers are not slaves. They are not the landless peasants or sharecroppers that emancipated slaves were forced to be. They are not the low-level, below-the-standard-wage employees that Southern blacks became when they migrated to the steel cities of the North. They are not second-class citizens isolated into segregated neighborhoods and limited to menial jobs. Except, there is a growing body of evidence showing that this is exactly what a majority of workers of all colors is becoming. Between 1965 and 2011, while the top 10 percent gained an inflation-adjusted annual income increase of $116,000, the other 90 percent received a paltry $59. No wonder 75 percent of families report living paycheck to paycheck, and one in four Americans report using payday loans, pawn shops, auto-title loans and tax-refund loans to make ends meet. It’s why working people depend on check-cashing stores, purchase cars from “buy here/pay here” dealers and get re-treads from rent-a-tire shops. People who depend on such high-interest businesses to make it feel a lot of anxiety. Some 59 percent of Americans who think of themselves as middle class fear falling out of their class. Half of working-age Americans skipped necessary medical care in 2012 because it was too expensive. Even people with health insurance postponed care because of the cost of co-pays. Nearly a quarter of Americans report struggling to put food on the table. Meanwhile, women have moved into the breadwinner position. More than 40 percent of families say the woman is the sole earner. Yet a wage survey indicates that a mother is paid five percent less per child than her female counterpart without children, and women on the whole receive lower wages than their male colleagues. While moms in many states can now take an extended maternity leave without fearing losing their jobs, most do not. These patterns did not result from worker choices, but resulted from employer policies. Now they pile on more. Employers monitor employees in ways only technology could provide. Companies measure the keystrokes of data-entry workers. The phone message “this call may be monitored for quality assurance” is heard everywhere, all the time. Warehouse workers wear head phones that direct them to their next task and tell them how much time they have to finish it. The delivery guy sets a timer, then runs to leave the package and jogs back to his truck. Piece-work quotas are up, and managers even time bathroom breaks. As one worker put it, “I’m worn out. I get home and I can barely stand up.” With the constant threat of downsizing, layoffs and pay cuts – while a long line of the unemployed waits to take any available job – employees find themselves less and less willing to voice complaints or even talk among themselves about grievances. Since 92 percent of private-sector wage workers have no union or worker/peer means of redressing egregious circumstances on the job, people self-censor. They check their civil liberties at the door and take their bitterness home. A job, for most workers, means go to work, keep your head down, close your mouth, work to exhaustion, then go home and try to meet your family’s needs by going into debt. No wonder this generation of young people is not making long-term buying decisions on new cars and houses. They face the anxiety and stress of life-long financial insecurity. I think that is what my friend means by “plantation capitalism.”
22. 1965 Charcoal Alley - The Watts Riots
23. 1973 - Tom Bradley Elected L.A. Mayor 1st Black Mayor of a Major U.S. City
24. November 4, 2008 Barack Obama elected as America’s first Black president
25. 1965 Watts Renaissance
26. 1963 Birmingham Campaign
27. 1963 How The Civil Rights Movement Was Covered In Birmingham
28. MLK Reading Birmingham News of WATTS RIOTS
29. 1967-68 The Peace and Freedom Party (Eldridge Cleaver)
30. 1960 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Maurice Dawkins peacefully picket outside a Woolworth store Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rev. Maurice Dawkins peacefully picket outside a Woolworth store. Rev. Maurice Dawkins, chairman of the California Christian Leadership Conference, and the participants marched in support of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). SNCC and SCLC spearheaded the national “sit-in” movement at dime store lunch counters.
31. Plantation Capitalism - A slave is a commodity.
32. Mob attacks Freedom Riders Bus (Alabama)
33. 1966 Watts Summer Festival
34. 1964 The Civil Rights Act
35. 1963 A police officer in Birmingham, Alabama, frisks a demonstrator after an attempted sit-in
36. 1967 Miss Watts in Watts Festival Parade
37. 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.
38. 1966 Watts Summer Festival Goers Sitting on a Car