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

2017 Why communities fighting for fair policing also demand environmental justice

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3. 2020 - Downfall of the Two Party System The Gazette - So how did the United States settle into a two-party system in contrast to multiparty democracies such as France, Germany and Canada? Historians say the pattern was set in motion two centuries ago with the embrace of winner-take-all elections nationally and locally - that means that coming in second or third place in most elections is worthless. As two major parties emerged and grew in power, third parties found it harder to attract public notice and get their candidates invited to debates or listed on ballots. In addition, voters who supported these candidates but never saw them win eventually drifted away, and third parties found it harder to create enthusiasm, given their likelihood of losing. And that brings us to our current national election. On the Republican side, Donald Trump is seeking a second four-year term as president. The Democrats have Joe Biden, a former vice president, atop their ticket.
4. 2020 Is America's 2-Party System Fracturing?
8. Angela Davis - UCLA hired her to teach in the philosophy department in 1969. After the four-hour LAPD attack on the Black Panther headquarters in South Central (1969), Angela Davis led a protest march to LA city hall and spoke from the front steps.
9. 2021 Assembly Bill 32, a law that took effect last year, mandated that the state could no longer enter or renew contracts with private, for-profit prisons and detention facilities, with some exceptions, by 2028. California tries again to close down privately operated prisons and immigrant detention facilities - CAP Radio by Janelle Salanga: California’s first-of-its-kind ban of privately operated prisons could be back on the table. Assembly Bill 32, a law that took effect last year, mandated that the state could no longer enter or renew contracts with private, for-profit prisons and detention facilities, with some exceptions, by 2028. But last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that the law couldn’t be enforced because it would likely interfere with the federal government’s detention of immigrants facing deportation or legal proceedings. Judge Kenneth Lee wrote in his decision that Congress granted the Department of Homeland Security “broad discretion over immigrant detention,” so the law could not stand because it conflicted with that power. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who authored the bill as an Assembly member, filed a petition Wednesday asking the Ninth Circuit to reconsider its 2-1 ruling. “The record is clear: For-profit, private prisons and detention facilities that treat people like commodities pose an unacceptable risk to the health and welfare of Californians,” Bonta said in a statement. GEO Group was the company that filed the suit striking down A.B. 32. CapRadio reached out to GEO Group via email to discuss Bonta’s petition. The attorney general’s office has been tasked with tracking conditions in privately operated detention facilities, as mandated by Assembly Bill 103 passed in 2017. In January, the California Department of Justice released its second report, finding that private facilities now account for 97% of the total beds for immigrant detainees in California, compared to 77% in February 2019. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency still has direct contracts with three groups — MTC, CoreCivic and GEO Group — that are valid for at least five years. Then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra wrote that the Department of Justice saw “deficient conditions of confinement” and insufficient mental health care in the three facilities. “Extremely restrictive conditions for detainees in protective custody and placement of vulnerable detainees with mental health conditions in restrictive housing to the detriment of their mental health … were evident at the three facilities, with female detainees facing especially harsh conditions,” he wrote. In 2019, the Department of Homeland Security released a report that found detainees lived in dangerous, overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in ICE and U.S. Border Patrol detention facilities in southern Texas’ Rio Grande Valley. President Joe Biden signed an executive order into law this January that ordered the attorney general to let existing contracts between the Department of Justice and privately operated detention facilities expire. But the executive order doesn’t affect private facilities contracted with ICE. NorCal Resist, a grassroots organization offering legal support for detainees and other services for immigrants, said in a statement that it was pleased to see Bonta defending the ban and called all ICE prisons “inherently inhumane and unsafe.” “Taking the profit motive out of the immigration system in California is a good step in the right direction,” it read. California’s petition for a new hearing asserts that the current ruling doesn’t account for states’ traditionally held power to regulate private entities that affect residents’ health and welfare. Bonta’s petition, which would require the case to be presented before a full bench of judges, is a request seldom granted. The court will not order a rehearing without giving GEO Group an opportunity to express whether it believes one is appropriate.
10. 2021 California plans to be abortion sanctuary if Roe vs. Wade is overturned SACRAMENTO — With more than two dozen states poised to ban abortion if the U.S. Supreme Court gives them the OK next year, California clinics and their allies in the state Legislature on Wednesday revealed a plan to make the state a “sanctuary” for those seeking reproductive care, including possibly paying for travel, lodging and procedures for people from other states. The California Future of Abortion Council, made up of more than 40 abortion providers and advocacy groups, released a list of 45 recommendations for the state to consider if the high court overturns Roe vs. Wade — the 48-year-old decision that forbids states from outlawing abortion. The recommendations are more than wild ideas. Some of the state’s most important policymakers helped write them, including Toni Atkins, the San Diego Democrat who leads the state Senate and attended multiple meetings. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom started the group himself, and in an interview last week with the Associated Press said some of the report’s details will be included in his budget proposal in January.
11. Restrictive Voting Rights is the New Jim Crow 2021 Protesters gather outside of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta to protest HB 531, which would place tougher restrictions on voting in Georgia, March 1, 2021. The new law has mostly gained attention for its measures to strengthen absentee ballot identification requirements, curtail ballot drop box use and penalize members of the public who offer food and water to voters in line. Months after former Republican President Donald Trump falsely claimed voter fraud in the 2020 elections, Republican backers say Georgia's law is needed to restore confidence in election integrity. Civil rights groups have filed three lawsuits asserting the law illegally restricts voting rights, particularly for minority voters.
12. What Jim Crow looks like in 2021 Protesters gather outside of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta to protest HB 531, which would place tougher restrictions on voting in Georgia, U.S. March 1, 2021. Protesters gather outside of the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta to protest HB 531, which would place tougher restrictions on voting in Georgia, U.S. March 1, 2021. Dustin Chamber/Reuters “It’s a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” That’s how Stacey Abrams, who spearheaded efforts to organize Black voters in Georgia for the 2020 election, recently described the deluge of new voter restriction laws proposed by Republicans in the Georgia state legislature in the wake of their defeat. Cliff Albright of the Black Voters Matter Fund echoed Abrams, saying the new restrictions, which include new ID requirements and limits on drop boxes, are just “putting a little makeup and cologne on Jim Crow.” Nicole Hemmer Nicole Hemmer The idea that these new voting restrictions are a more sanitized version of Jim Crow says a lot about popular understanding of that era of racism and discrimination (something Abrams and Albright clearly know, and are speaking to). Next to images of White protesters snarling at civil rights activists at sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960 or police officers siccing German Shepherds on Black schoolchildren in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1963, the image of legislators calmly enacting a series of discriminatory restrictions seems far more civilized. Yet, even at its violent peak, Jim Crow had another side, one that always wore a suit and tie, especially when it came to voter disenfranchisement. Required to navigate around the 15th Amendment, which explicitly prohibited barring Black men from voting, White Southern legislators innovated a kind of colorblind racism that would go on to become the right’s preferred tool for opposing civil rights advances in the post-Jim Crow era. Looked at through that lens, the current rush to restrict voting rights is less proof of the resuscitation of Jim Crow than evidence that it never really went away.
13. 2021 After John Lewis dies Democrats renew push for Voting Rights Law
15. 2021 COVID-19 job losses will worsen L.A. homelessness by 2023, new report says
16. 2021 The John Lewis Voting Rights Act
17. 2021 Stop Asian Hate Feng Shen holds up a sign stating “Asians Are not Viruses Racism Is!” in front of candles left out for the eight victims of the Atlanta Mass shooting during the candlelight vigil held in Thousand Oaks, CA. on March 20. 2021. Photo credit: Ryan Bough https://moorparkreporter.com/4016775/news/there-is-no-vaccine-for-racism-ventura-county-asian-american-and-pacific-islander-community-holds-candlelight-vigil-for-atlanta-murder-victims/
18. 2022 Three Strikes
19. 2022 Inglewood Shooting- The Guardian- "Killings in LA spotlight a crisis" ‘Black women are being murdered and no one is paying attention’ - Three recent killings in the Los Angeles area have put the spotlight on the disparate impact of American gun violence on Black women and the lack of attention their stories receive, as the country reckons with some of the most intense spates of gun violence in years. girl holding a sign which reads 'stop gun violence' California city requires gun owners to carry liability insurance in first measure of its kind Read more Both killings took place on weekends, a mere two weeks apart. On 8 January, California officials found the body of Tioni Theus, a 16-year-old girl who was found shot at a busy onramp of the 110 freeway. On 23 January, sisters Breahna Stines and Marneysha Hamilton were among four people shot dead during a mass shooting at a birthday party in Inglewood. Neither incident received much coverage outside of local news, raising questions about which stories are elevated in the national spotlight and which mass shootings grasp the country’s attention. While discrepancies between the attention for white victims of violence and Black victims of violence is nothing new, community organizers and researchers worry about the message this phenomenon continues to send to young Black girls about their worth and potential. “This image of a young Black girl on the side of a highway with cars driving by speaks to the invisibility of Black life,” said Nikki Jones, a professor of African American studies at UC Berkeley. “Black girls are contending with the messages that their life is disposable, and that’s an extremely dangerous message.”
20. 2022 Column: They never thought they’d see a Black president, or another assault on voting rights
21. 2022 The Emmett Till Antilynching Act is Passed. United States federal legislation that would make lynching a federal hate crime Beulah Melton, widow of Clinton Melton, talks with civil rights activist Medgar Evers. Everett Collection Historical / Alamy Stock Earlier this month, the Senate unanimously passed legislation that would make lynching a federal hate crime. It was a historic moment. Congress has tried and failed to pass anti-lynching legislation more than 200 times over the course of more than a century. According to the NAACP, more than 4700 people were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968. The new Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act – as it’s called – is named for the 14-year-old boy whose murder, 67 years ago, shocked the nation. In 1955, Emmett Till had traveled from Chicago to the Mississippi Delta to visit family when he was kidnapped, beaten, and killed by white men after allegedly flirting with a white woman. His body was later found in the Tallahatchie River. Emmett Til’s death became a media sensation, partly because of a widely distributed photograph of his disfigured face. Today, his murder is considered the spark that ignited the Civil Rights Movement. But for every Emmett Till, there are many others whose names are lost in time. One of them was a Black gas station attendant who lived just a few miles from where Till was killed.
22. 2022 Woman cries while kneeling in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. Woman cries while kneeling in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on May 2, 2022. The Supreme Court is poised to strike down the right to abortion in the country, according to a leaked draft of a majority opinion that would shred nearly 50 years of constitutional protections. Credit: Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/overturning-roe-v-wade-could-have-devastating-health-and-financial-impacts-landmark-study-showed/
23. 2022 Roe vs. Wade falls
24. 2022 An abortion rights activist outside the Supreme Court in D.C The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion that was guaranteed nearly 50 years ago by the decision in Roe v. Wade. The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization was released Friday morning. The justices, voting 6-3 along ideological lines, sided with the Mississippi abortion law that was in question. Reactions were mixed across the country, with anti-abortion-rights supporters celebrating what they view as a victory, and abortion-rights activists expressing their frustration over the decision. Here are some of the scenes from D.C., and across the country. Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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1. 2010 SB1070 Anti-Immigration Bill in Arizona
2. 2010 Repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”
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
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.
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
16. 2017 #MeToo Movement and Exposing Sexual Violence in Hollywood
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)
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

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4. 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.
5. 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. 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.
15. 1967 The Bloody March - America at War with Itself
17. 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.
18. 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.
21. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Rosalio Munoz speaks at Laguna Park
22. 1970 After Chicano Moratoriums: After moratorium demonstration Chicano Moratorium Committee anti-war demonstrators gather in East L.A. "The biggest, bloodiest disturbance in Los Angeles since Watts five years earlier lasted several hours. When it was over, Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar was dead and two others mortally wounded, about 200 people were under arrest, 75 law enforcement officers and untold numbers of demonstrators were injured, 95 county vehicles were destroyed or damaged, 44 buildings were pillaged and eight major fires had been set.” “After the Chicano Moratorium, I said no way am I going to put myself in jeopardy ever again,” Jensen says. “Because that’s how scared I was.” Jensen stopped organizing
23. 1966 Youth being searched by police during crackdown on the Sunset Strip
24. 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.
25. 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.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. 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.
30. 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.
31. 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
32. 1969 1st Chicano Moratorium: Outside recruiting center
33. 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)
34. 1971 Student and barrio youth lead protest march in Belvedere Park.
36. 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]
38. 1992 Chinese Student Protection Act
39. 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.
41. 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.
43. 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.
44. 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. …
45. 1968 Walkouts at Venice High School
46. 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.
47. 1969 UCLA philosophy department hired Angela Davis
48. 1968 Female student being arrested at Venice High School Walkout LOS ANGELES, CA - MARCH 12: Image originally published on March 13, 1968--Police struggle to arrest a female student at Venice High School during a clash with 1,000 students. She was accused of using obscene and abusive language. Eight people were arrested. March 1, 1968: Over 15,000 Chicanos, students, faculty, and community members, walk out of seven East L.A. high schools. Those schools included: Garfield, Roosevelt, Lincoln, Belmont, Wilson, Venice, and Jefferson High School. Some students from East L.A. junior high schools join the protests, as well
49. 1966 Riots on the Sunset Strip
50. 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.
51. 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.
52. 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.
53. 1960s/1970s GIDRA sisters
55. 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.
56. 1970 East L.A. picketing to protest conditions at the school
61. 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.
62. 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
65. 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
67. 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.
69. 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.
70. 1970 Official Resignation of all women in the Brown Berets LA chapter
71. 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
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1. 1979 Whispering Pines - Bean v Southwestern Waste Management Corp. and the Formation of NECAG. In Houston, Texas, a group of African American homeowners began a bitter fight to keep the Whispering Pines Sanitary Landfill from being placed within 1500 feet of a local public school (and within two miles of 6 schools). Residents formed the Northeast Community Action Group (NECAG). NECAG and their attorney Linda McKeever Bullard filed a class action lawsuit to block the landfill from being built. Their lawsuit, Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc., was the first of its kind in the United States that charged environmental discrimination in waste facility siting under civil rights laws. While the lawsuit ultimately failed to prevent the construction of the landfill, it sent a clear message for environmental justice cases across the country. Robert Bullard is the father of environmental justice. A distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University, Bullard first began exploring the relationship between the environment, place, and race back in the ’70s. At that time, the term “environmental justice” didn’t yet exist. Racist practices by people in power, however, did. Through a civil rights lens, Bullard began studying a landfill proposal near a predominantly Black middle-class neighborhood in Houston. Today, this field of research Bullard founded continues to show that low-income communities and people of color live closest to hazardous waste sites and polluters. Before climate disaster even strikes, these vulnerable communities face a disproportionate burden from industry—often from the one most at fault for this crisis in the first place: fossil fuels. More than 70 percent of the world’s emissions can be attributed to 100 companies, according to a 2017 report from CDP, which measures companies’ climate risks. The fossil fuel sector is responsible for this mess. It’s also responsible for the air pollution and health disparities that communities in the Gulf Coast or California’s Central Valley face daily. Climate change devastates vulnerable communities from beginning to end. Welcome to The Frontline, where we get real about the climate crisis—and whom it affects most. I’m Yessenia Funes, the climate editor at Atmos. Today, I’m here to break down the history of environmental justice and how it relates to the heating of our planet. The environmental justice movement is a direct result of the civil rights movement. It didn’t come from nature or conservation groups. Nope, civil rights leaders made it happen. That’s how Bullard got his start on this research. “The environmental justice movement and environmental justice were framed out of a civil rights equity movement,” Bullard tells me over the phone. “Environmental justice, for me, embraces the principle that all communities and all people are entitled to equal protection of environmental laws and regulation, housing laws, education, land use, employment, and health.” All communities should be entitled to this, but we know that’s not the reality. In 1978, the Houston neighborhood of Northwood Manor was confronted with a proposal for a toxic landfill. Bullard and his students relied on archival records and reports to map where landfills in the city sat. They were trying to uncover whether the locations of these city-owned landfills were, in fact, discriminatory toward Black residents. Surprise, surprise: They were. Every single landfill and 75 percent of the incinerators were in Black neighborhoods. This was despite the fact that Houston was only about 27 percent Black.
2. 1982 Sit-in Against Warren County, NC PCB Landfill September 1982: The second time African Americans mobilized a national, broad-based group was a nonviolent sit-in protest against a polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) landfill in Warren County, North Carolina. Over 500 environmentalists and civil rights activists were arrested and the protest was unsuccessful in halting construction. This event is widely understood to be the catalyst for the Environmental Justice Movement. North Carolina State Troopers pick up protestors on the road to the Warren County Landfill on September 17, 1982. The protestors, who sat on the road with their arms locked, were upset over the dumping of PCB-laden dirt in the landfill.AP Photo/Steve Helber
3. 1983 Publication of Solid Waste Sites and the Houston Black Community Dr. Robert Bullard (husband to Linda McKeever Bullard, the attorney for the plaintiffs in Bean v. Southwestern Waste Management, Inc.), conducted a first-of-its-kind study documenting the location of municipal waste disposal facilities in Houston. Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community was the first comprehensive account of environmental racism in the United States. Bullard and his researchers found that African American neighborhoods in Houston were often chosen for toxic waste sites. All five city-owned garbage dumps, 80 percent of city-owned garbage incinerators, and 75 percent of privately owned landfills were sited in black neighborhoods, although African Americans made up only 25 percent of the city's population. (Original Caption) 10/21/1982-Afton, NC- Resembling civil rights demonstrators of the 1960's, blacks and whites march together in protest against a dump for toxic wastes. Many in this rural community contend Warren County was chosen as the site because most of its citizens are black and poor. Officials deny the question of race played any part in the selection. Front center is Reverend Joseph Lowery of Atlanta, who heads the Southern Christian Leadership Conference founded by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Environmental advocates lost that battle—North Carolina ultimately buried the PCBs in Warren County—but the controversy crystallized the idea that the nation's environmental problems disproportionately burden its low-income people of color. Other communities of color had organized to oppose environmental threats before Warren County. In the early 1960s, Latino farm workers led by Cesar Chavez fought for workplace rights, including protection from harmful pesticides in the farm fields of California's San Joaquin Valley. In 1967, African-American students took to the streets of Houston to oppose a city garbage dump in their community that had claimed the life of a child. In 1968, residents of West Harlem, in New York City, fought unsuccessfully against a sewage treatment plant in their community. But the Warren County protests marked the first instance of an environmental protest by people of color garnering widespread national attention. The environmental justice movement's power only multiplied when the data began to roll in. At the behest of Congressman Walter Fauntroy, the Washington, D.C., delegate arrested during the North Carolina protests, the General Accounting Office in 1983 confirmed that hazardous waste sites in three southeastern states were disproportionately located near black communities. Four years later, the United Church of Christ produced a landmark report showing that three out of five Latino and black Americans lived near a toxic waste site.
5. 1990 Dumping in Dixie: Race Class and Environmental Quality, the nation's first environmental justice book
6. 1987 Toxic Waste in the United States The United Church of Christ Commission on Racial Justice (UCC) released Toxic Waste in the United States (PDF). In this document, the UCC examined the statistical relationship between the location of a hazardous waste site and the racial/socioeconomic composition of host communities nationwide. The study found that over 15 million African Americans, 8 million Hispanics, and half of all Asian/Pacific Islanders and Native Americans resided in communities with at least one abandoned or uncontrolled toxic waste site. The UCC study was the first of its kind to address the issues of race, class, and the environment on a national level. The study noted that although the socioeconomic status of residents appeared to play an important role in the location of hazardous waste sites, the residents' race was the most significant factor among the variables analyzed.
7. 1971 Bolinas Oil Spill - one of the worst environmental disasters to occur in San Francisco Bay Volunteers clean oil from a beach in Bolinas, Calif., on Jan. 23, 1971, following the collision of two Standard Oil tankers. (Ilka Hartmann/Associated Press) In the early morning of Jan. 18, 1971, two Standard Oil tankers collided in dense fog several hundred yards outside the Golden Gate and spilled more than 800,000 gallons of thick bunker fuel oil. Hours later, oil began to wash up on San Francisco and Marin County beaches and smothered more than 7,000 birds in the toxic fuel. All but a few hundred birds died despite extensive efforts to save them over the next several weeks. Tens of thousands of volunteers — from local residents to farmers to hippies and doctors — flocked to beaches to attempt to protect cherished habitats such as Bolinas Lagoon and to save as much of the wildlife as possible.
8. April 1990 Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice (SNEEJ) was formed in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the People of Color Regional Activist Dialogue on Environmental Justice. SNEEJ is a regional organization composed of African American, Latino, Native American, and Asian/Pacific Islanders. SNEEJ exists to strengthen the work of local organizations and empower communities and workers to impact local, state, regional, national, and international policy on environmental and economic justice issues.
9. 1971 Marin County, Bolinas California OIL SPILL
10. 1990 Congressional Black Caucus Meets with EPA Officials
11. 1979 Whispering Pines Robert Bullard is the father of environmental justice. A distinguished professor of urban planning and environmental policy at Texas Southern University, Bullard first began exploring the relationship between the environment, place, and race back in the ’70s. At that time, the term “environmental justice” didn’t yet exist. Racist practices by people in power, however, did. Through a civil rights lens, Bullard began studying a landfill proposal near a predominantly Black middle-class neighborhood in Houston. Today, this field of research Bullard founded continues to show that low-income communities and people of color live closest to hazardous waste sites and polluters. Before climate disaster even strikes, these vulnerable communities face a disproportionate burden from industry—often from the one most at fault for this crisis in the first place: fossil fuels. More than 70 percent of the world’s emissions can be attributed to 100 companies, according to a 2017 report from CDP, which measures companies’ climate risks. The fossil fuel sector is responsible for this mess. It’s also responsible for the air pollution and health disparities that communities in the Gulf Coast or California’s Central Valley face daily. Climate change devastates vulnerable communities from beginning to end. Welcome to The Frontline, where we get real about the climate crisis—and whom it affects most. I’m Yessenia Funes, the climate editor at Atmos. Today, I’m here to break down the history of environmental justice and how it relates to the heating of our planet. The environmental justice movement is a direct result of the civil rights movement. It didn’t come from nature or conservation groups. Nope, civil rights leaders made it happen. That’s how Bullard got his start on this research. “The environmental justice movement and environmental justice were framed out of a civil rights equity movement,” Bullard tells me over the phone. “Environmental justice, for me, embraces the principle that all communities and all people are entitled to equal protection of environmental laws and regulation, housing laws, education, land use, employment, and health.” All communities should be entitled to this, but we know that’s not the reality. In 1978, the Houston neighborhood of Northwood Manor was confronted with a proposal for a toxic landfill. Bullard and his students relied on archival records and reports to map where landfills in the city sat. They were trying to uncover whether the locations of these city-owned landfills were, in fact, discriminatory toward Black residents. Surprise, surprise: They were. Every single landfill and 75 percent of the incinerators were in Black neighborhoods. This was despite the fact that Houston was only about 27 percent Black.
12. First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit On October 24, 1991, nearly 300 Black, Native, Latino, Pacific Islander, Asian American, and other minority activists gathered in Washington, D.C. to discuss, for the first time in history, the environmental injustices their communities were experiencing. During the four-day event, delegates told stories of Black communities forced to relocate due to dangerously high pollution levels, farmworkers forced to live in homes built on abandoned chemical dump sites, Indigenous groups fighting against mining and nuclear testing on their reservations, and Asian immigrants developing respiratory problems after working for years in factories. There was excitement, remembers sociologist Robert Bullard, an environmental justice advocate who served on the summit’s planning committee, but also anxiety. Conversations got heated. “We had to unpack, and throw off that baggage of mistrust that’s kept African Americans from knowing that much about Latinos, Latinos from Asian and Pacific Islanders and Indigenous people,” said Bullard. “Those first few days were very intense.” “That was the moment that we came together — not knowing much about each other — but we learned during those first few days,” he added. Thirty years later, the 17 principles of environmental justice laid out during the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit are as relevant as ever. The intersection between race and environmental injustices has been recognized by the federal and state governments, and a growing number of people understand certain groups are more vulnerable to the devastating effects of environmental degradation and climate change due to historical injustices. On the 30th anniversary of the summit, we talked to four of its key figures to understand the legacies of the watershed moment, and what challenges still lie ahead for environmental justice.
13. 1992 Deep South Center for Environmental Justice founded at Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation's first EJ center Dr. Beverly Wright founds the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in collaboration with community environmental groups and universities across the southern region. The center was the first EJ center affiliated with an HBCU (the center has recently been restructured to be a fully independent, nonprofit entity). Since its founding, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice has become an influential resource for environmental justice research, education, and job training.
14. 1983 General Accounting Office Conducts Study (Environmental Justice) Prompted by the 1982 Warren County sit-in, the United States General Accounting Office (GAO) conducted the study: Siting of Hazardous Waste Landfills and Their Correlation with Racial and Economic Status of Surrounding Communities (PDF). This study is said to have "galvanized the environmental justice movement and provided empirical support for the claims for environmental racism." GAO found that three out of four hazardous waste landfills examined were located in communities where African Americans made up at least twenty-six percent of the population, and whose family incomes were below the poverty level. This study used 1980 Census data.
15. 1992 University of Michigan's Environmental Justice Program n 2020 SEAS hosted the Michigan Environmental Justice Summit, celebrating 30 years of Environmental justice. Panelsist included moderator & SEAS Alumna Michelle Martinez (MS '08), Coordinator, Michigan Environmental Justice Coalition, Detroit-based EJ activist, speaker, writer and mother; Dr. Robert Bullard,  known as the “Father of Environmental Justice,” named one of 13 Environmental Leaders of the Century (Newsweek, 2008); Charles Lee, Senior Policy Advisor, EPA, EJ pioneer and principal author of the landmark report, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States; Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Policy Director, New Consensus, an architect of the Green New Deal; Regina Strong, Environmental Justice Public Advocate, Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy; and Dr. Beverly Wright, Founder and Executive Director of the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice
16. 1994 Executive Order 12898 President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12898, Federal Actions to Address Environmental Justice in Minority Populations and Low-Income Populations., This action was made to focus federal attention on the environmental and human health conditions of minority and low-income populations with the goal of achieving environmental protection for all communities. The Order established an Interagency Working Group on Environmental Justice Additionally, it directed federal agencies to develop strategies on how to identify and address the disproportionately adverse human health and environmental effects of programs, policies, and activities on minority and low-income populations.
17. 1983 A Movement Is Born: Environmental Justice and the UCC The Rev. Ben Chavis during a 1983 protest against the dumping of toxic waste. Photo by Ricky Stilley Through the leadership of Dollie Burwell, the Rev. Leon White, the Rev. Benjamin Chavis, Jr., and the UCC’s Commission for Racial Justice, the United Church of Christ served as the leading organizational force in the birth of the environmental justice movement. The story of how this movement arose begins in the late 1970s when a group of residents formed the Warren County Citizens Concerned (WCCC) and began to protest the state of North Carolina’s designation of a landfill in their county for the disposal of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a toxic chemical substance whose production was banned by congress in 1979. With a population that was roughly 62% black, no other county in the state had a higher percentage of black residents, and only a few of the state’s one hundred counties could claim higher poverty rates. The placement of the landfill became to be regarded as an instance “environmental racism,” a phrase coined by Chavis. Photo Ricky Stilley While Chavis would ultimately take the helm of the UCC’s Commission for Racial Justice, it was White who served as the commission’s Executive Director when the WCCC first involved the group in its efforts. Both White and Chavis ultimately played leading roles in what became the watershed event in the launching of the movement. In September of 1982, the first trucks carrying PCB contaminated soil drove into Warren County but were met by hundreds of protestors who laid down on the highway to prevent their arrival. On the first day of action, 55 protestors were arrested. The protests lasted six weeks and were covered by the national media. By the end, 523 arrests were made. The attention garnered by the demonstrations in Warren County laid the foundation for more activism and consciousness-raising. In an article that appeared in the New Yorker, Chavis later recalled, “Warren County made headlines. And because it made headlines in the media, we began to get calls from other communities. But you know that in the eighties you couldn’t just say there was discrimination. You had to prove it.” Under the leadership of Chavis, the UCC’s Commission for Racial Justice issued its landmark 1987 report Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States. The study found that race rose to the top among variables associated with the location of a toxic waste facility. Three out of five Black and Hispanic Americans lived in a community that housed what the EPA called an “uncontrolled toxic waste site,” a closed or abandoned site that posed a threat to human health and the environment.
18. 1988 West Harlem Environmental Action West Harlem Environmental Action (WE ACT) was founded. WE ACT was created to address ongoing West Harlem community struggles around the poor management of the North River Sewage Treatment Plant, the construction of the sixth bus depot across from an intermediate school, and a large housing development - a densely populated and heavily trafficked area. WE ACT evolved into an environmental justice organization committed to empowering the community to become a vocal, informed, and proactive force that determines and implements its vision of what its environment can and should be. WE ACT was New York's first environmental justice organization created to improve environmental and health quality in communities of color. WE ACT co-Founders Peggy Shepard and the late Chuck Sutton raising awareness about poor air quality in Northern Manhattan
19. 1990 Indigenous Environmental Network Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN) was formed by grassroots indigenous peoples and individuals to address environmental and economic justice issues by building economically sustainable communities. IEN's activities include building the capacity of indigenous communities and tribal governments to develop mechanisms to protect their sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, and health of both their people and all living things. Established in 1990 within the United States, IEN was formed by grassroots Indigenous peoples and individuals to address environmental and economic justice issues (EJ). IEN’s activities include building the capacity of Indigenous communities and tribal governments to develop mechanisms to protect our sacred sites, land, water, air, natural resources, health of both our people and all living things, and to build economically sustainable communities. IEN accomplishes this by maintaining an informational clearinghouse, organizing campaigns, direct actions and public awareness, building the capacity of community and tribes to address EJ issues, development of initiatives to impact policy, and building alliances among Indigenous communities, tribes, inter-tribal and Indigenous organizations, people-of-color/ethnic organizations, faith-based and women groups, youth, labor, environmental organizations and others. IEN convenes local, regional and national meetings on environmental and economic justice issues, and provides support, resources and referral to Indigenous communities and youth throughout primarily North America – and in recent years – globally.
20. 1978 LOVE Canal - President Jimmy Carter declared a state of emergency Aborted canal project branching off of the Niagara River - Dr. Jordan Kleiman Love Canal is an aborted canal project branching off of the Niagara River about four miles south of Niagara Falls. It is also the name of a fifteen-acre, working-class neighborhood of around 800 single-family homes built directly adjacent to the canal. From 1942 to 1953, the Hooker Chemical Company, with government sanction, began using the partially dug canal as a chemical waste dump. At the end of this period, the contents of the canal consisted of around 21,000 tons of toxic chemicals, including at least twelve that are known carcinogens (halogenated organics, chlorobenzenes, and dioxin among them). Hooker capped the 16-acre hazardous waste landfill in clay and sold the land to the Niagara Falls School Board, attempting to absolve itself of any future liability by including a warning in the property deed. Public awareness of the disaster unfolded in the late 1970s when investigative newspaper coverage and grassroots door-to-door health surveys began to reveal a series of inexplicable illnesses—epilepsy, asthma, migraines, and nephrosis—and abnormally high rates of birth defects and miscarriages in the Love Canal neighborhood. As it turns out, consecutive wet winters in the late 1970s raised the water table and caused the chemicals to leach (via underground swales and a sewer system that drained into nearby creeks) into the basements and yards of neighborhood residents, as well as into the playground of the elementary school built directly over the canal. After a series of frustrating encounters with apathetic NYS officials, who were slow to act but quick to dismiss the activists (most of whom were working-class women who lived in the neighborhood) as a collection of hysterical housewives, President Jimmy Carter declared a state of emergency in 1978 and had the federal government relocate 239 families. This left 700 families who federal officials viewed as being at insufficient risk to warrant relocation, even though tests conducted by the NYS Department of Health revealed that toxic substances were leaching into their homes. After another hard battle, activists forced Carter to declare a second state of emergency in 1981, during which the remaining families were relocated. The total cost for relocation of all the families was $17 million. Love Canal quickly came to symbolize the looming environmental disaster represented by untold numbers of toxic waste disposal sites scattered throughout America. Legislators and activists alike have tapped the momentum generated by Love Canal activism in their efforts to deal with this dangerous and costly problem. On the level of public policy, lawmakers used the national publicity generated by the Love Canal disaster to push for new legislation to hold polluters financially responsible for cleaning up their toxic waste sites. The result was the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act—better known as Superfund. A less well-known but equally important outcome of Love Canal was the emergence of a militant, grassroots “environmental justice” movement. This movement, which was fueled by mounting frustration with mainstream environmentalism’s failure to address the disproportionate impact of toxic pollution on working-class and minority communities, launched anti-toxics campaigns in hundreds of cities across the nation.
21. 1990 University of Michigan Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards Dr. Bunyan Bryant and Dr. Paul Mohai organized the Michigan Conference on Race and the Incidence of Environmental Hazards at the University of Michigan. This conference further propelled environmental justice as a legitimate academic field of study and resulted in Bryant and Mohai leading a team of academics and activists to advise the U.S. EPA on environmental justice policy. The EPA dubbed this group the "Michigan Coalition," which met with the EPA throughout the early 1990s.