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

1979 Chol Soo Lee - Korean immigrant facing the death penalty for Prison fight

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1. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: A young brave from New Mexico at a Thanksgiving feast on Alcatraz Island A young brave from Nogales, New Mexico, at a Thanksgiving feast on Alcatraz Island on November 27, 1969. For Native American students at San Francisco State University and other schools around the Bay Area, the protests and strikes at University of California, Berkeley during the 1960s, were a glimpse into how political activism could begin to address the injustices Native people had long suffered. In meetings at San Francisco’s American Indian Center and Warren’s, a bar in the Mission District’s “Little Res,” a plan was hatched to take over Alcatraz Island, whose world-famous prison had recently been decommissioned and its land declared “surplus.” The siege of Alcatraz officially began on November 20, 1969, with two major goals — to agitate for Native American self-determination and sovereignty and to establish a Native American cultural center, museum and college on the island. In the 1960s, War Jack says, “just to identify yourself as a Native person would bring immediate discrimination and racism. [Alcatraz] helped us re-establish our self-identification as Native people. People developed pride.”
2. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Kids on bikes with lighthouse in background This is a photograph of Native American children playing on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. On November 20, 1969, 79 Native Americans, including six children, set out to occupy Alcatraz Island. The intention of the occupation was to gain Indian control over the island for the purpose of building a center for Native American Studies, an American Indian spiritual center, an ecology center, and an American Indian Museum.
3. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Coast Gaurd ward off supporters in boats as they circle Alcatraz Islamd
4. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Hoka Hay!! Poster stating that the U.S. government has forcibly taken back—“ripped off”—Alcatraz Island. “Hoka Hay!!” translates roughly as “It is Over.” The poster appeared in Berkeley, California on June 12, 1971, the morning after the removal of remaining occupiers from the island. A group of 78 Indians calling themselves Indians of All Tribes lands on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and begins to occupy it in a demonstration for the rights of American Indians. Indians of All Tribes draws on powerful historic precedents of Native peoples taking a stand for the return of illegally taken lands, and they also usher in a new activist movement that draws attention with its mix of radicalism and American Indian traditionalism. “We moved onto Alcatraz Island because we feel that Indian people need a cultural center of their own. For several decades, Indian people have not had enough control of training their young people. And without a cultural center of their own, we are afraid that the old Indian ways may be lost. We believe that the only way to keep them alive is for Indian people to do it themselves.” —Letter from Indians of All Tribes, December 16, 1969
5. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Occupiers moments after being removed from Alcatraz Island
6. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: LaNada Means poses with a proposed cultural center Native American activist LaNada Means poses with an architect's model of a proposed cultural center on the first anniversary of their occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, California, 20th November 1970. The occupation was a 19-month long protest when 89 Native Americans and their supporters occupied Alcatraz Island from 20th November 1969 to 11th June 1971 when the United States Government forcibly ended the protest.
7. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Occupiers standing on the dock at Alcatraz On November 20, 1969, a group of Native students landed on an uninhabited Alcatraz and reclaimed it as Indian Land, beginning nineteen months of occupation. Leaders included Richard Oakes, an Akwesasne Mohawk and Chair of the Native American student group from San Francisco State College and LaNada War Jack, a member of the Shoshone Bannock Tribes and Chair of the Native American students from UC Berkeley. Thousands of Native people from across the country joined the original group of 80 occupiers. The Indians of All Tribes demanded that the federal government recognize treaties with Indian tribes, they demanded a Native American cultural center, and they demanded that land be returned. As the Occupiers discussed their plans, they wrote messages of peace and freedom around the island as well as submitting formal proposals and architectural plans. You can see several of their messages and symbols recently restored here at the dock.
8. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Leaders of the American Indian Movement hold a press conference
10. Native American girl paints a sign that reads "Indian American Land" on a wall of Alcataz Island in San Francisco Bay
11. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: LaNada with her son
12. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Group by playground
13. Native American activist LaNada Means addresses a press conference alongside an artist's impression of a proposed cultural center LaNada proposes cultural center on the first anniversary of their occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, California, 20th November 1970. The occupation was a 19-month long protest when 89 Native Americans and their supporters occupied Alcatraz Island from 20th November 1969 to 11th June 1971 when the United States Government forcibly ended the protest. (Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
14. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Belvia Cottier, Sioux, and a young friend on Alcatraz A group of 78 Indians calling themselves Indians of All Tribes lands on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay and begins to occupy it in a demonstration for the rights of American Indians. Indians of All Tribes draws on powerful historic precedents of Native peoples taking a stand for the return of illegally taken lands, and they also usher in a new activist movement that draws attention with its mix of radicalism and American Indian traditionalism. “We moved onto Alcatraz Island because we feel that Indian people need a cultural center of their own. For several decades, Indian people have not had enough control of training their young people. And without a cultural center of their own, we are afraid that the old Indian ways may be lost. We believe that the only way to keep them alive is for Indian people to do it themselves.” —Letter from Indians of All Tribes, December 16, 1969
15. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Native and Indigenous elders from throughout the country joined the young occupiers of Alcatraz Island for a meeting Native and Indigenous elders from throughout the country joined the young occupiers of Alcatraz Island for a meeting they said was the most important since the ‘Ghost Dance’ days of the 1880s. When, in 1956, the Bureau of Indian Affairs launched yet another assimilationist policy, the Indian Relocation Act, the intention was to further undermine Native communities by moving youth from Indian Reservations to urban centers throughout the West. Instead, the opposite occurred. Native people began, for the first time, to find support across tribal lines among the more than 100,000 relocated Indigenous people who shared similar histories of Indigenous identity and cultural survival… For Native American students at San Francisco State University and other schools around the Bay Area, the protests and strikes at University of California, Berkeley during the 1960s, were a glimpse into how political activism could begin to address the injustices Native people had long suffered. In meetings at San Francisco’s American Indian Center and Warren’s, a bar in the Mission District’s “Little Res,” a plan was hatched to take over Alcatraz Island, whose world-famous prison had recently been decommissioned and its land declared “surplus.” The siege of Alcatraz officially began on November 20, 1969, with two major goals — to agitate for Native American self-determination and sovereignty and to establish a Native American cultural center, museum and college on the island. In the 1960s, War Jack says, “just to identify yourself as a Native person would bring immediate discrimination and racism. [Alcatraz] helped us re-establish our self-identification as Native people. People developed pride.”
16. 1966 First public same-sex marriage (by the Metropolitan Community Churches’s Rev. Troy Perry, 1968) LA's gay history is everywhere, from the endangered former nightclub The Factory to Griffith Park. But in honor of today's landmark Supreme Court decision on marriage equality, why not go and take a look at a particularly special site—this modest Huntington Park house, described by TIME magazine as the house where the first public gay marriage ceremony took place back in 1968. At the time, the house was the location of the Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles; the religious organization, founded in October of that year by Reverend Troy D. Perry, was open to LGBT members, as explained on MCC's website. The first MCC service had 12 attendees. In December 1968, the reverend performed the ceremony for two men (it was, of course, not legally binding then). More marriages followed. In March 1969, the reverend oversaw the marriage of two women; their wedding would go on, says an MCC historian, to be "the basis for the world's first lawsuit seeking recognition of same-gender marriage." (Some sources cite this union as the first same-sex marriage, but agree that whichever couple was first, it was Rev. Perry who officiated.)
17. 1968 LGBTQ-inclusive Metropolitan Community Church founded by Reverend Troy Perry
18. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: John Trudell on Alcatraz
19. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: 12 Alcatraz protestors voluntarily surrender
21. 1969-1971 Occupation of Alcatraz: Atha Rider Whitemankiller, stands before the press after the removal of the last occupiers from Alcatraz Overcoming exhaustion and disillusionment, Atha Rider Whitemankiller, Cherokee, stands before the press at the Senator Hotel in San Francisco after the removal of the last Indian occupiers from Alcatraz on June 11, 1971. His eloquent words about the purpose of the occupation of Alcatraz Island—to publicize his people’s plight and establish a land base for the Indians of the Bay Area—were the most quoted of the day.
22. Occupants on Alcatraz Island, gather in front of the main cell block with the island's water tower in the background
24. 1969 - 1974 Nixon Era
29. 1970 East L.A. picketing to protest conditions at the school
32. 1970s LGBT Movement Featuring Harvey Milk Harvey Milk, a native of Long Island, New York, served in the U.S. Navy before working at a Wall Street investment firm. Keeping his homosexuality a secret at first, Milk became more openly gay through his exposure to New York City’s bohemian theater scene. After moving to San Francisco in the early 1970s, Milk established himself as a leading political activist for the gay community. Winning a seat on the city’s Board of Supervisors, he emerged as one of the country’s preeminent openly gay elected officials, spearheading an important anti-discrimination measure. Milk was murdered in November 1978 by a former colleague, Dan White. - history.coom
34. 1971- The Beginning of Consumer Technology
37. 1971 Student and barrio youth lead protest march in Belvedere Park.
38. July 1, 1971: 18 and Up Can Vote
39. A Trail of Broken Treaties 1972 With desks, chairs and file cabinets, hundreds of Native Americans barricaded the entrances to the Bureau of Indian Affairs in downtown Washington, just six blocks from the White House. It was the week before the 1972 presidential election between President Richard Nixon and Sen. George McGovern (D-S.D.), and the group of men, women, children, activists and elders had come to the nation’s capital in a caravan of vans, trucks and cars to demand a meeting with Nixon and top officials. They wanted to describe the poor housing, underfunded schools and health crises they faced — a result, they said, of the U.S. government’s failure to honor treaties with their tribal governments. They called their effort “The Trail of Broken Treaties,” a nod to the forcible removal in the 1830s of thousands of Native Americans from their homelands during the “Trail of Tears.”
41. 1973 Wounded Knee: Activist Gladys Bissonette Gladys Bissonette during the 1970s. Thunder Hawk,of the Oohenumpa band of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, said there wasn’t a conscious effort to make women part of Wounded Knee – they were just there. It was instinctive to be part of the movement. She said tribal leadership back then was predominantly male because of a colonized way of thinking, but having a strong matriarchal presence was simply tradition and culture. “Anything that happens in community all revolves around the strong families and the matriarchs,” said Thunder Hawk, now 83. “That's the way it is.”
43. 1973 Wounded Knee: An armed Native American in a trench takes cover between sandbags An armed Native American in a trench takes cover between sandbags, the Sacred Heart Church in the background, during the Wounded Knee Occupation (also known as Second Wounded Knee) at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota, 7th March 1973. On 27th February 1973, approximately 200 members of the 'American Indian Movement' (AIM) took the reservation hamlet of Wounded Knee by force, declaring it the 'Independent Oglala Sioux Nation,' the hamlet was immediately surrounded by federal marshals, and a siege began, which ended on 8th May 1973.
44. 1973 Wounded Knee: Dick Wilson with GOONs 2 Tribal president Dick Wilson with his GOONs during the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee. February 27, 1973, AIM Organization accepted the responsibility of providing all necessary strength and protection needed by the Oglala Sioux in the efforts to rid themselves of corrupt tribal president, Dick Wilson. Because this degenerated human being is financed and wholly supported by the FBI, CIA, BIA, U.S. Justice Dept., and the U.S. Marshals, it is virtually impossible for any Oglala to voice any kind of opinion which may run contrary to this puppet government without being arrested or beaten...a policy that cannot go unchallenged or unanswered.
45. 1973 Wounded Knee: An armed Native American in a trench looks over sandbags
46. 1973 Wounded Knee: Armed AIM Members in a dugout Armed Native Americans, with the Sacred Heart Church in the background, during the Wounded Knee Occupation on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota. March 7, 1973. Then, in early 1973, AIM prepared for its dramatic occupation of Wounded Knee. In addition to its historical significance, Wounded Knee was one of the poorest communities in the United States and shared with the other Pine Ridge settlements some of the country’s lowest rates of life expectancy.
49. 1973 Wounded Knee: Armed federal agents search a car
50. 1973 Wounded Knee: Clyde Bellecourt with rifle Native American activist Clyde Bellecourt holding his fist clenched while holding his rifle high, in front of Sacred Heart Church, during the Wounded Knee Occupation at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, 13th April 1973. AIM was founded in 1968 by Russell Means, Dennis Banks, and other Native leaders as a militant political and civil rights organization. From November 1969 to June 1971, AIM members occupied Alcatraz Island off San Francisco, saying they had the right to it under a treaty provision granting them unused federal land. In November 1972, AIM members briefly occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington, D.C., to protest programs controlling reservation development.
51. 1973 Wounded Knee: Four federal troops stand blocking the road to Wounded Knee Four federal troops stand blocking the road to Wounded Knee during the standoff between 200 members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the government, South Dakota, 1973. The AIM is demanding an increase in financial aid from the government for the town of Wounded Knee, the site of the last armed conflict between the United States government and the Great Sioux Nation, which resulted in the massacre of hundreds of Lakota Sioux Indians.
52. 1973 Wounded Knee: Dick Wilson with U.S. Marshall Chief Wayne Colburn, chief of U.S. Marshalls talks with Dick Wilson at the Oglala Sioux roadblock leading into occupied Wounded Knee, March 27th, 1973. Violent conflict on the reservation continued after the resolution of the Wounded Knee incident. In the three years that followed, more than 50 opponents of Wilson allegedly died violently. One was Pedro Bissonette, head of the civil rights organization, who had originally invited AIM activists to Pine Ridge. He died in a reported altercation with a BIA policeman. Residents accused GOONs of arson and frequent assault. Wilson was alleged to have personally directed an assault on six AIM lawyers in February 1975, but no charges were filed.
53. 1973 Wounded Knee: Federal troops walk on a road near Wounded Knee Federal troops walk on a road near Wounded Knee during the siege of the town on March 20, 1973, as about 200 American Indians occupe the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, for the rights of indigenous people. The town of Wounded Knee, the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre, was seized on February 27, 1973, by followers of the American Indian Movement (AIM), who staged a 71-day occupation of the area. Two Indians were killed and a US Marshall was seriously wounded.
54. 1973 Wounded Knee: Occupiers escort negotiator Harlington Wood
57. 1973 Wounded Knee: Native American activist Webster Poor Bear has bullet wound treated
58. 1973 Wounded Knee: Dick Wilson Pine Ridge, S.D.: Richard Wilson, president of the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council, revels a previously unreleased list given to him and later authenticated by a U.S. Justice Dept. official, showing names of American Indian Movement (AIM) militants occupying Wounded Knee, S.D., and the counts the Justice Dept. has against them. It was the first time such a list has shown there are definite charges against the AIM leaders and others in Wounded Knee. The prosecution was unprepared when Wilson said he was ready to go to trial, and the proceedings closed without completing the impeachment trial. Several hundred Lakota people marched in protest, demanding the removal of Wilson from office. US Marshals were assigned to protect Wilson and his family. AIM and Lakota supporters occupied the town of Wounded Knee, and a 71-day armed siege resulted, known as the Wounded Knee Occupation.
59. 1973 Wounded Knee: Native American activist Webster Poor Bear has bullet wound treated 2
62. 1973 Wounded Knee: An armed man stands guard at a Checkpoint
63. 1973 Wounded Knee: Dick Wilson with GOONs Tribal president Dick Wilson (center) and members of his paramilitary unit the GOONs (Guardians of the Oglala Nation). This photo is taken during the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee, where the GOONs worked with police and military to repress the resistance. Richard A. Wilson (April 29, 1934 – January 31, 1990) was elected chairman of the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, where he served from 1972–1976, following re-election in 1974. Following complaints about his favoring friends and family in award of jobs and suppressing political opponents with his private militia, Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs), members of the tribal council brought impeachment charges against him in February 1973.
64. 1973 Wounded Knee: AIM members gather around an old pick up truck The Pine Ridge reservation, where Wounded Knee was located, had been in turmoil for years. To many in the area the siege was no surprise. The Oglala Lakota who lived on the reservation faced racism beyond its boundaries and a poorly managed tribal government within them. In particular, they sought the removal of tribal chairman Dick Wilson, whom many Oglala living on the reservation thought corrupt. Wilson seemed to favor mixed-race, assimilated Lakota like himself -- and especially his own family members -- over reservation residents with more traditional lifestyles. Efforts to remove Wilson by impeaching him had failed, and so Oglala Lakota tribal leaders turned to AIM for help in removing him by force. Their answer was to occupy Wounded Knee.
67. 1973 Roe v Wade was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court
68. 1973 Wounded Knee: AIM activist Oscar Bear Runner stands guard with a rifle AIM Member Oscar Bear Runner stands guard with a rifle during the Wounded Knee Occupation at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, South Dakota, March, 2nd 1973. The Wounded Knee occupation lasted for a total of 71 days, during which time two Sioux men were shot to death by federal agents and several more were wounded. On May 8, the AIM leaders and their supporters surrendered after officials promised to investigate their complaints. Russell Means and Dennis Banks were arrested, but on September 16, 1973, the charges against them were dismissed by a federal judge because of the U.S. government’s unlawful handling of witnesses and evidence.
69. 1973 Wounded Knee: AIM activists preparing for a purification ceremony
71. "No Compre Vino Gallo" by Willie Heron (Restored 1990) 1974 Original by Willie Heron - ARTIST: Willie Herron III grew up in East Los Angeles, and has been long active in the Chicano art movement. He rose to prominence in the early 1970s with the “blood and guts and fists” style he uses to portray the barrio where he was raised and began drawing and painting. He had the ability to cope in a community where he sometimes had to “dodge bullets between brushstrokes”. “I began painting murals in Los Angeles with a conscious attempt at representing contemporary issues that confront the people of those communities in which my murals are located” –Willie F. Herron SUBJECT: For the 1990-91 Neighborhood Pride Program, as a tribute to Carlos Almaraz and to the historic struggle of the United Farm workers’ Union, Herron recreated No Compren Vino Gallo, one of the most artistically significant Chicano murals. The artist includes elements of Siqueiros’s mural imagery, and portrays the UFW boycott of Gallo wine; a company that uses grapes picked by workers who suffered horrible working conditions. The mural commemorates the UFW’s struggle for social justice and against dehumanizing agribusiness and corporate greed. The mural was exhibited at the Latino Lab at the former Los Angeles Theater Center (LATC) in 1991 until it was moved because the LATC closure.©SPARC
72. 1973 Wounded Knee: AIM members defend a blockade during the occupation of Wounded Knee The day after the Wounded Knee occupation began, AIM members traded gunfire with the federal marshals surrounding the settlement and fired on automobiles and low-flying planes that dared come within rifle range. Russell Means began negotiations for the release of the hostages, demanding that the U.S. Senate launch an investigation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and all Sioux reservations in South Dakota, and that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hold hearings on the scores of Indian treaties broken by the U.S. government.
73. 1973 Wounded Knee: AIM activist with rifle stands in the snow
74. 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act - Credit Cards for Women Until the mid-1970s, banks and other financial institutions denied married women in the U.S. credit cards or loans in their own name, and single women also had trouble getting credit. Enter the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, which “prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, marital status, or age in credit transactions.” This means if you apply for a credit card or loan, you can only be considered based on factors directly related to your creditworthiness. That seems obvious today, but it was not 50 years ago. A body of jurisprudence favorable to equal rights — much of it stemming from legal work directed by Ginsburg when she was an attorney — began accumulating in the early 1970s and adding momentum to the fight for equality. That credit card act, signed into law by President Gerald Ford on October 28, 1974, was in some ways the culmination of that work. Without it, women would not have been able to access one of the basic tools of financial independence. Ginsburg was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States in 1993, but had long been a major figure in the legal battle for women’s rights, before joining the federal bench in 1980. By then she had already helped argue for equality in front of the Court, with great success. Forty years ago, any woman applying for a credit card could be asked a barrage of questions: Was she married? Did she plan to have children? Many banks required single, divorced or widowed women to bring a man along with them to cosign for a credit card, and some discounted the wages of women by as much as 50 percent when calculating their credit card limits. As women and minorities pushed for equal civil rights in various arenas, credit cards became the focus of a series of hearings in which women documented the discrimination they faced. And, finally, in 1974—forty years ago this year—the Senate passed the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which made it illegal to discriminate against someone based on their gender, race, religion and national origin. A year later, in 1975, the first women’s bank was opened by Judy H. Mello, as Eric Pace reported in the New York Times obituary for Mello: The bank, a creation of the feminist movement, was established in April 1975. It was the first bank in the United States to be operated by women and for women, at a time when its founders said that women were given short shrift by other banks. But despite the law, a report from 2012 found that women still pay more for credit cards. According to a study by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, women pay a half a point higher interest rate than men. Today, there are two kinds of ways today’s credit card ads handle women, as Lisa Wade at The Society Pages points out. Either they’re shopaholics who are madly in love with their credits cards, or their shopaholics madly in love with their husband’s credit cards. Of course, both are winning situations for the credit card company.
75. "Uprising of the Mujeres" by Judith F. Baca (1979) Created in Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1979 at El Taller Siquerios, a workshop for training muralists established by one of the great Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siquerios. Uprising of the Mujeres is a statement of political struggle led by women. udy Baca placed an indigenous woman at the forefront of political struggle against the prioritization of military spending, the formation of a police state at the expense of social welfare and the exploitation of workers to further capitalism.
76. 1974 The Great Wall of Los Angeles 1974 The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony. SPARC’s first public art project and its true signature piece, the Great Wall is a landmark pictorial representation of the history of ethnic peoples of California from prehistoric times to the 1950’s, conceived by SPARC’S artistic director and founder Judy Baca. Begun in 1974 and completed over five summers, the Great Wall employed over 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members.
77. 1976 - The Great Wall of Los Angeles The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of Los Angeles’ true cultural landmarks and one of the country’s most respected and largest monuments to inter-racial harmony. SPARC’s first public art project and its true signature piece, the Great Wall is a landmark pictorial representation of the history of ethnic peoples of California from prehistoric times to the 1950’s, conceived by SPARC’s artistic director and founder Judith F. Baca. Begun in 1974 and completed over six summers, the Great Wall employed over 400 youth and their families from diverse social and economic backgrounds working with artists, oral historians, ethnologists, scholars, and hundreds of community members.
78. 1978 California Proposition 6: Briggs Initiative
79. 1978 The Bakke Decision In Regents of University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Supreme Court ruled that a university's use of racial "quotas". Bakke decision, formally Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, ruling in which, on June 28, 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court declared affirmative action constitutional but invalidated the use of racial quotas. The medical school at the University of California, Davis, as part of the university’s affirmative action program, had reserved 16 percent of its admission places for minority applicants. Allan Bakke, a white California man who had twice unsuccessfully applied for admission to the medical school, filed suit against the university. Citing evidence that his grades and test scores surpassed those of many minority students who had been accepted for admission, Bakke charged that he had suffered unfair “reverse discrimination” on the basis of race, which he argued was contrary to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court, in a highly fractured ruling (six separate opinions were issued), agreed that the university’s use of strict racial quotas was unconstitutional and ordered that the medical school admit Bakke, but it also contended that race could be used as one criterion in the admissions decisions of institutions of higher education. Although the ruling legalized the use of affirmative action, in subsequent decisions during the next several decades the court limited the scope of such programs, and several U.S. states prohibited affirmative action programs based on race. in its admissions process was unconstitutional, but a school's use of "affirmative action" to accept more minority applicants was constitutional in some circumstances. The case involved the admissions practices of the Medical School of the University of California at Davis. The medical school reserved 16 out of 100 seats in its entering class for minorities, including "Blacks," "Chicanos," "Asians," and "American Indians." The rigid admissions quota was administered by a special school committee. Allan Bakke, a white applicant, was twice denied admission to the medical school even though his MCAT scores, GPA, and benchmark scores were "significantly higher" than those of some minority applicants recently admitted. Bakke sued the University of California in a state court, alleging that the medical school's admission policy violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. The California Supreme Court agreed, finding that the quota system explicitly discriminated against racial groups and holding that "no applicant may be rejected because of his race, in favor of another who is less qualified, as measured by standards applied without regard to race." The medical school, ordered to shut down its quota system, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reviewed the case in 1978.
80. 1978 Proposition 13 Led by a tax fighter The so-called “taxpayer’s revolt” was led by Jarvis, a Utah native born in 1903. By the age of 30, he owned several small newspapers and was active in Republican politics. He moved to California in the 1930s and ran several times unsuccessfully for mayor of Los Angeles on an anti-tax platform. Jarvis gained a reputation as a harsh government critic. He worked for more than a decade to change the state’s property tax laws. Prop. 13, as Jarvis described it in a 1978 press conference, was a way to push back against “the moochers and loafers” in government. “They’re just destroying the country,” said Jarvis. “They’re just like a bunch of locusts going through a grain field and when they get through there, no grain is left.”
84. 1970s/1980s Location shoot in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park for Visual Communications The roots of Asian American studies and its flourishing as a field of study has borne fruit, evidenced by the accomplishments of its students, a growing diversity in the curriculum, and the strength of local Asian American community institutions. For the students, Asian American studies validated their identities as Asians in America. It allowed them to explore a common history and cause with fellow Asians. And it offered a space to develop solidarities within and across racial, ethnic, gender and other boundaries. Asian American studies was a hotbed where students could grow in their activism and leadership. On university campuses, Asian American studies institutionalized community-based learning and research that re-envisioned the role of the university. Finally, the Asian American community as a whole benefited, as students went on to apply their skills and experiences to establish needed community programs and services as well as local and national organizations. They also entered mainstream institutions and advocated on behalf of those whose voices were missing.
85. 1973-Los Angeles, California- Tom Bradley takes the oath of office of the the Mayor of Los Angeles
87. 1974 Clifford Glover - Protesters in Queens in 1974 urged that a white police officer be convicted of murdering Clifford Glover, a black 10-year-old.
90. 1969 UCLA philosophy department hired Angela Davis
92. 1970 First LA Pride Parade The first L.A. Pride Parade (originally Gay Pride Parade), organized by Rev. Bob Humphries (founder, United States Mission), Morris Kight (founder, Gay Liberation Front) and Rev. Troy Perry (founder, Metropolitan Community Church) and the Christopher Street West Association, was held on June 28, 1970 in Los Angeles. L.A.'s Gay Pride Parade permit did not come easily. No city had, until that time, ever experienced thousands of LGBTQ people marching openly and LAPD Chief Edward Davis did not hesitate to remind organizers that homosexuality was still illegal in California. Rev. Perry recounted that Davis declared to them, “As far as I’m concerned, granting a permit to a group of homosexuals to parade down Hollywood Boulevard would be the same as giving a permit to a group of thieves and robbers.” The Los Angeles Police Commission, for their part, claiming to fear violent homophobic counter-reactions, imposed excessive permit requirements, such as $1.5 million in fees. Parade organizers and the ACLU challenged the city in court, taking their fight all the way to the California Supreme Court. The court ended up ordering the city to issue a parade permit without discriminatory add-ons. L.A.’s Gay Pride Parade became the world’s first officially-permitted parade advocating for LGBTQ rights. The parade was moved from Hollywood in Los Angeles to West Hollywood in 1979.
93. FBI Wanted Poster Angela Davis, Black Panther Party, American, 1966 - 1982
94. Remembering Busing And School Desegregation In Los Angeles 1972-79 It was 1972 and the Los Angeles Unified School District had been found guilty of intentionally segregating city schools. White families, fearful of having their children bused, had begun fleeing the district and transferring to private schools. The new busing program, called Permits With Transportation, or PWT, was partly seen as a way to fill empty classroom seats. It was a prelude to the much larger mandatory desegregation program the district would begin in 1978. It helped integrate Valley campuses and extend the bounty of predominantly white suburban schools to a small group of black children from poor neighborhoods. Pittman’s parents had grown up in Watts. His mother graduated from Fremont, his father from Jordan High. Most of what his family knew about white people, they had learned from radio and TV. “We expected the white boys to be all ‘Alice Cooper,’ doing acid, tripping out,” Pittman said.- A handful of court decisions in the 1970s paved the way for busing as a way to integrate public schools in the Los Angeles Unified School Districts. The practice bussed African American students from economically disadvantaged neighborhoods to wealthier and white-dominated schools and areas -- and vice versa. Mandatory busing came to an end in 1979, with the passage of a state constitutional amendment. Proponents say that busing, although not perfect, is an effective way to ensure racial and resource parity in LAUSD. One of the consequences of busing, like opponents had warned, was a “white flight” from LAUSD neighborhoods, and white parents taking their kids out of public schools to attend private schools. https://www.latimes.com/local/la-xpm-2012-feb-11-la-me-banks-20120211-story.html
95. In the 1970s, Davis was a fugitive on the FBI's most-wanted list. Once caught, she faced the death penalty in California but was later acquitted on all charges. Angela Davis raises her fist to give her power salute as she sits in the courtroom at Marin Civic Center in San Rafael, Ca., on March 16, 1971. Davis, who is accused of supplying some of the weapons used in a shoot-out during an attempted escape of prisoners at the Marin County Courthouse, is waiting for her court hearing to start after it was postponed because of bomb threats. In the fall of 1970, she was on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. (AP Photo)
96. 1978 California Prop 6: John Briggs and Harvey Milk meet John Briggs and Harvey Milk meet, 1978. A coalition of activists mobilized under the slogan "Come out! Come out! Wherever you are!" to defeat the initiative. In what became the No On 6 campaign, gay men and lesbians went door to door in their cities and towns across the state to talk about the harm the initiative would cause. Gay men and lesbians came out to their families and their neighbors and their co-workers, spoke in their churches and community centers, sent letters to their local editors, and otherwise revealed to the general population that gay people really were "everywhere" and included people they already knew and cared about
97. 1973 Reverend Troy Perry stands in his burned-down church The church has also endured its share of troubles. MCC has faced anti-LGBTQ violence, particularly during what Perry terms a period of persecution in the 1970s when they lost five churches to arson—including a New Orleans gay bar called the Upstairs Lounge where MCC members were holding a meeting; it was the worst mass murder of LGBTQ persons in the U.S. until the Pulse night club massacre in 2016. According to the MCC History Project, their churches began to experience the full brunt of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s; the Rev. Elder Don Eastman wrote that by the time effective HIV treatments became available in 1996, MCC had lost one-third of its congregants. “I don’t believe that any disease, I don’t care what it is, is a gift from God to a class of people,” Perry said to the Rev. Jerry Falwell in 1983 during a televised debate. “We don’t want political games played with this issue. We want to make sure that people don’t die.”
98. 1972 - Reverend Troy Perry - Same-sex marriage was one of his fights from the beginning, long before it was a major political issue: Same-sex marriage was one of his fights from the beginning, long before it was a major political issue: In December 1968, just two months after MCC’s first meeting in his living room, Perry performed what Time magazine declared the first public same-sex wedding in the U.S. “I always believed in marriage. I was one of those strange gay men who talked about marriage,” Perry told me through laughter. “And marriage was just very, very important to me, and so all my life, I fought for that.” Marriage was just one theater of operations for Perry and MCC. “I used to say, years ago,” Perry said, “the one thing I had to fight for, if I was not going to fight for anything else—of course, I fought for everything—was the rights of my members to have a job. People have to work, and that includes my community, too.” That fight took different forms: picketing in 1969 in front of States Steamship Co. offices when it fired a man for coming out, and in 1977, when Perry told reporters from the steps of downtown LA’s Federal Building that he intended to fast there publicly “until death if necessary,” in order to raise $100,000 to fight the Briggs Initiative, a proposed amendment to the state’s education code that would ban gay and lesbian California teachers from working in the state’s public schools.
99. 1977 Harvey Milk - The Gay Rights Movement
100. 1978 California Proposition 6: Briggs Initiative
101. 1975 Black April Helicopter pilot O.B. Harnage reaches out to help Vietnamese evacuees escape Saigon on April 29, 1975. VIPs and other Vietnamese had been gathering at the location in hopes of a rescue. Wooden stairs had been built to the top of the roof’s elevator shaft to aid the evacuation. Harnage made three pickups, packing 20 people onto each flight. To make room for them all, he rode outside the bird, standing on the skid while gripping a machine gun. The station chief had ordered him to concentrate on the VIPs, but Harnage decided to board on a first-come, first-serve basis. Some parents handed him their children with heartbreaking notes pinned to the kids’ clothes, such as, “My son wants to be a doctor” and “My daughter is very musical.”
103. 1970s Spike in Mexican Migration Mexican immigrants boarding a plane in Los Angeles California as they are being deported back to their native Mexico, July 27, 1976. AP Photo -n the 1960s Mexican officials discouraged emigration, but by the 1970s, those same officials encouraged the departures of working-class men as a solution to high unemployment and population growth in the country. Simultaneously, the U.S. government attempted to address these problems by fortifying the border and conducting raids in Latina/o communities. Migrants described their diminished capacity to belong in local and national spaces by characterizing themselves as being “neither from here nor from there” – ni de aquí ni de allá. When they resided in their hometowns in Mexico, their families and friends pressured them to head north to make money. Conversely, when they moved to new cities and towns in the U.S., their communities in Mexico insisted that they return home. Migrants unwittingly resisted the idea that they were superfluous in Mexico by becoming indispensable economic agents in their hometowns through the money they sent from abroad. They countered their illegality north of the border by establishing that undocumented migrants deserved constitutional rights and creating new meanings of community life. These actions provided them with partial inclusion in the multiple locales they lived, but only as migrants who lived, at least some of their time, in the United States. For their part, elderly Mexican men, along with women and queer men, commonly responded to dominant gender and sexual ideologies by remaining in Mexico and depending on foreign remittances to survive.
104. 1975 - CAMBODIA-KHMER ROUGE-REFUGEES “In April 1975, refugees left Cambodia when the Communist Party of Kampuchea took control of the country. Frequently referred to as the Khmer Rouge, the regime had one goal: to create a communal utopia where everyone worked on farms. Production and distribution of goods were based on the Socialist principle: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” On April 17, 1975, Khmer Rouge soldiers invaded the capital Phnom Penh and seized control. Soldiers forced residents out of their homes, hospital patients out of their beds, and made them walk to the countryside. Civil rights, politics and private property were abolished. Schools and colleges were closed and used as army bases. Medicine and hospitals were destroyed as part of erasing modern institutions. To accomplish their goal, the Khmer Rouge killed 90 percent of the country’s middle and upper class – doctors, lawyers, teachers, business owners and anyone with an education who might rebel. In less than four years, two-million people died from starvation, exhaustion, diseases or executions. PHNOM PENH - APRIL 17: A photo taken 17 April 1975 in Phnom Penh of Cambodian refugees moving, after the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh and establish government of Democratic Kampuchea (DK). (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)
105. The Mothers Who Fought To Radically Reimagine Welfare At its height, the National Welfare Rights Organization had more than 25,000 dues-paying members. Some people have called it "the largest black feminist organization in American history." Jack Rottier Collection/George Mason University Libraries “I'm a black woman. I'm a poor woman. I'm a fat woman. I'm a middle-aged woman. And I'm on welfare. In this country, if you're any one of those things you count less as a human being. If you're all those things, you don't count at all.” - Johnnie Tillmon
106. 1970s NWRO Timeline 1970 NWRO fights Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP); Senator Eugene McCarthy introduces NWRO’s $5,500 Guaranteed Adequate Income Plan. 1971 Operation Nevada: NWRO fights massive recipient cut-offs; march along Las Vegas casino strip. March 25, 1972 Children’s March for Survival; 50,000 demonstrate in Washington, DC. July 1972 NWRO Adequate Income Proposals--$6,500 NOW—win almost 1,000 (of 1,500 needed for majority to adopt) at Democratic National Convention in Miami (where McGovern was nominated). December 1972 Dr. George Wiley announces his departure from NWRO to begin the Movement for Economic Justice; Mrs. Johnnie Tillmon, past chair-person of NWRO becomes its Executive Director. August 1973 George Wiley is killed in an alleged boating accident. 1974 NWRO forced to close Washington, DC national office due to lack of funds.
107. 1966 The National Welfare Rights Organization “I’m a woman. I’m a Black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare,” Tillmon writes in her landmark 1972 essay, “Welfare is a Women’s Issue,” published in Ms. magazine. “In this country, if you’re any of those things you count less as a human being. If you’re all of those things, you don’t count at all.” In 1966—three years after ANC-MA’s founding—welfare recipients built a national group: the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). The NWRO used lobbying and direct action to pursue a three-pronged agenda: a “guaranteed annual income”, an increase in “availability of welfare benefits and services”, and improved “access to consumer credit ([3], p. 301).” Johnnie Tillmon was selected to serve as the NWRO’s chair, bringing with her the knowledge and experience she had gained in California. Across California, welfare-rights activism grew organically: in living rooms and churches. It organized in direct opposition to the language and policies of Governor Ronald Reagan, the California legislature, bigoted social workers, and even middle-class black and feminist communities. It formed local organizations, including Tillmon’s ANC-MA, the California Welfare Rights Organization (CWRO), and many others. I
108. 1971 ANC Mothers Organize Healthcare Seminars
109. 1970 NWRO Protest Outside Welfare Office “A crowd of mostly women demonstrators stage a sit-in outside the Welfare office at 614 H Street NE May 8, 1970. The specifics of the protest are unknown, but recurrent issues involved unwarranted searches of homes by welfare case workers, greater levels of economic assistance and protesting the so-called “man in the house rule” that broke up families. The protest occurred in the days following President Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia that widened the Vietnam War. The National Welfare Rights Organization was pressing two demands at the time: a minimum $5,500 income for a family of four and an end to the Vietnam War and the subsequent diversion of military dollars into social welfare programs. The Nixon administration was proposing $1,200 for a family of four at the time. A few days after the demonstration at the District welfare office, the National Welfare Rights Organization staged a sit-in at the office of Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Robert Finch where they pressed their two demands. Two dozen people were arrested when they refused to leave Finch’s office.”
110. 1971 Welfare Rights Workshop At Chicano Conference

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1. 1950 -66 Warden of the Ghetto (Police and Carceral Regime) William H. Parker, who headed the LAPD from 1950 to 1966, is considered the originator of the warrior cop policing style.(Los Angeles Times) The LAPD’s racial animus during this time is often attributed to the bigotry of its chief. Parker was a cartoonish racist who likened Black people to monkeys and thought Latinos inherently criminal due to their descent from what he called the “wild tribes” of Mexico. He once complained during a television news interview that an influx of African Americans moving to L.A. to escape the Jim Crow South had “flooded a community that wasn’t prepared to meet them. We didn’t ask these people to come here.” According to Kramer, Parker was a punch-below-the-belt politician who maintained his authority in part by spying on his adversaries and threatened them with the dirt he uncovered. Yet he wasn’t some rogue white supremacist who slipped through the cracks into his position. Parker enjoyed strong support from L.A.’s white business leaders and homeowners. Even after the brutality of his department drew national scrutiny in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots, Parker’s white base of support rallied around him. It took death, not outrage, to finally remove him from his position in 1966, after which city leaders changed the name of LAPD headquarters to honor him — and kept it there until 2009. Parker’s LAPD, much like other problematic police departments across California, was possible only because of the support of the white power structure. And that power structure wanted residential segregation. L.A.’s powerful real estate industry, as detailed in Andrea Gibson’s “City of Segregation,” did everything it could to enforce and profit from segregation. According to Gibson, the industry furthered the myth that Black and Latino integration was bad for property values, thus ensuring a premium on homes in white communities, while simultaneously imposing artificial scarcity in segregated ones, driving up prices for jam-packed residents of color who were prevented from living elsewhere.
2. 1994 Crime Bill that Fed Into the Mass Incarceration Crisis
3. 1962 LAPD attack a Black Muslim Temple, killing Ronald Stokes April 27: An altercation leads to police entering the Los Angeles Temple and killing its unarmed secretary, Ronald Stokes. "They're going to pay for it," Malcolm declares, and goes to Los Angeles to eulogize Stokes at a funeral attended by 2,000 people. He says the police shot "innocent unarmed Black men in cold blood" and urges action. But Elijah Muhammad resists calls for an aggressive response. An all-white coroner's jury deliberates about Stokes' killing for 23 minutes and terms it "justifiable homicide." By contrast, 14 Nation of Islam members are indicted for assault in the incident and 11 are found guilty. Later this year, Malcolm confirms that Elijah Muhammad has engaged in repeated adultery and had children with at least three of his young secretaries. "I felt almost out of my mind," Malcolm says. Herbert Muhammad asks Muhammad Speaks to minimize coverage of Malcolm X.
5. 1970 Later Chicano Moratoriums: Raul Ruiz and the corpse of Gustav Montag Raul Ruiz lays a Mexican flag atop the corpse of Gustav Montag, during a 1971 protest in East Los Angeles. Three people died on Aug. 29, 1970 Moratorium. They included: LA Times journalist and KMEX (Ch. 34) news director Rubén Salazar, Gilberto Diaz (Angel Gilbert Diaz) and Lyn Ward. During a 1971 protest, Gustav Montag was murdered by police. Identified as Jewish, Montag was the fourth casualty in East LA of the organized moratoriums. This moratorium was held on February 2, 1971.
7. 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.
9. 1969 Black Panther LA Headquarters SWAT Raid
10. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Policeman with shotgun
11. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Injured policeman dragged out of Laguna Park
12. 1970 3rd Chicano Moratorium: Ruben Salazar 2 “Anyone who has worked a police beat as a reporter, as I have, knows that policemen tend to have difference attitudes toward enforcing the law depending on the social, financial and racial makeup of the people they deal with.” -Ruben Salazar Journalist Rubén Salazar and camera operator Guillermo Restrepo trailed after police who were chasing people east down Whittier Blvd. They eventually stopped at the Silver Dollar Bar and Café. That was where Los Angeles County deputy sheriff Tom Wilson said he fired the tear gas canister that struck Salazar in the head. Rubén Salazar was both the news director at Spanish language TV station KMEX and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
13. 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
14. 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.
15. 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.
16. 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.
17. 1971 Attica Rebellion: Prisoners crawl on the ground after take-over Inmates of the Attica State Prison lie on the ground or are walked with their hands above their heads as authorities retake control of the facility, September 1971. Nelson: There was a scene of hundreds of dead and wounded lying on the ground, and the law enforcement had completely taken over the prison. But it didn't stop there. Then it just was a scene of various tortures. L.D. Barkley, who was one of the leaders, was sought out and murdered. The prisoners were made to crawl through the latrines that they had dug, through human waste. They were told that if they lifted their heads, they would be killed.
18. 1971 Attica Rebellion: Army helicopter over Attica An Army helicopter makes a low pass over the Attica Correctional Facility on September 13, 1971. Troops fired tear gas shells into the prison D Yard. Nelson: The helicopter kept broadcasting over and over again, "Surrender with your hands up. You will not be harmed. Surrender and you will not be harmed." But there was nowhere to surrender to. Again, they were up on the catwalks, just firing down. So no, there was no way to surrender, because there was nobody to surrender to.
19. 1971 Attica Rebellion: State troopers prepare to retake Attica 3 Armed officers walk by the entrance to the Attica Correctional Facility, in Attica, NY, in the aftermath of the riot at the prison, September 1971. It was really a law enforcement riot. Over 500 law enforcement agents, state troopers and ex-prison guards, whatever, stormed the prison with rifles, shotguns. And they were up on the catwalks and first tear gas was shot down on [the prisoners]. So it was all smoky and [law enforcement] really couldn't see anything. They were just firing down randomly at the prisoners. Again, I want to reiterate that they couldn't see what they were doing, so they just fired over and over again. There's one New York state surveillance tape of the riot, and it's unbelievable how long they were firing. It's about nine minutes of straight shooting down into the yard.
20. 1971 Attica Rebellion: Close-up of prisoners with raised fists Inmates of Attica state prison in upstate New York raise their fists to show solidarity in their demands during a negotiation session with state prisons Commissioner Russell Oswald, in this Sept. 10, 1971. Isolated in the far western corner of New York State (Attica is closer to Detroit than to New York City, where almost half of its prisoners come from), the prison in 1971 housed nearly 2,300 men who were permitted only one shower a week and provided a single roll of toilet paper each month (“one sheet per day,” went the saying). Men regularly went to bed hungry, as the state spent just 63 cents per prisoner per day for food.
21. 1971 Attica Rebellion: Prisoners negotiate Inmates of the Attica Correctional Facility negotiating with Russell G. Oswald, the state prisons commissioner, in September 1971. Puerto Rican prisoners suffered special discrimination; prisoner mail was censored, and since corrections officers couldn’t read Spanish, they simply tossed those letters in the trash. Black prisoners had it worst of all, as they were relegated to the lowest-paid jobs and racially harassed by the prison’s almost all-white staff.
22. 1971 Attica Rebellion: Prisoners with makeshift amor in a hallway
23. 1971 Attica Rebellion: Prisoners stripped naked after state troopers stormed Attica Prisoners with their hands on their heads and stripped of all clothes are lined up after guards regained control following the Attica prison riot in Attica, New York, Sept. 1971. The most sadistic crimes took place after state officials had full control of the prison. Prisoners were forced to strip naked and run through a gantlet of 30 to 40 corrections officers who took turns beating them with batons. One National Guardsman described seeing a gravely injured black man being attacked by a corrections officer. “They forced him to his knees, and at that point, the correction sergeant backed up a short distance and then ran forward and kicked the man in the face…He immediately went limp and his head was hanging down, he was bleeding.” Another Guardsman recalled watching medical staff join in the abuse. He saw a doctor “speaking to the inmates and saying: ‘You say you’re hurt? You’re not hurt. We’ll see if you’re hurt.’ ” Instead of attending to their wounds, the doctor began kicking and hitting them.
24. 1971 Attica Rebellion: Vacant yard after state troopers stormed Attica The vacant prison yard strewn with debris at the Attica State Correctional Facility in Attica, New York, on September 14, 1971. What survivors hoped to see was insider information about the retaking of Attica. Finally getting to read volumes two and three of this report might mean, for example, that surviving hostage Michael Smith could finally find out who had riddled his lower abdomen with bullets, almost killing him and causing him years of agony. These volumes might also allow Traycee Barkley, the younger sister of slain 21-year-old prisoner L.D. Barkley to learn who had shot her brother to death and perhaps also to learn whether in fact, as various prisoners as well as respected state assemblyman observer Arthur Eve kept insisting back in 1971, he was shot to death after the retaking was complete. Or possibly the family of Attica prisoner Kenny Malloy might finally learn the name of the trooper who not only shot him to death, but also then proceeded to shoot out his eyes. Maybe the family of correction officer John Monteleone could finally learn how he ended up bleeding to death from a bullet wound to his chest.
27. 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)
28. 1991 Rodney King is seen leaving LA County Jail on March 7 On March 3, 1991, King's savage beating by Los Angeles police was caught on tape by a bystander watching from his balcony. LA had a long history of police brutality, but now we were all witnessing it first-hand on our TVs. Watching the beating was especially jarring for me because King and I had grown up in the same Pasadena-Altadena community. We'd gone to school together. We weren't close, but I knew him — who went by Glen, never Rodney — as a gentle, friendly kid. The four police — Sgt. Stacey Koon and officers Laurence Powell, Theodore Briseno, and Timothy Wind — went on trial the next year. Adding to public anger, the trial was moved from LA to Simi Valley, a predominantly white "cop town" northwest of the city.
29. 1967 - Newark, New Jersey Riot
30. 1966 Police Search Black Youth
31. 1960 LAPD Chief Parker Presents on Drug Cases
32. 1965 Volkswagon Stopped at Police Check Point in Watts
34. 1971 Attica Rebellion: Prison retaken, prisoners and corpses on the ground Inmates in Attica’s D yard shortly after state troopers regained control of the prison, September 13, 1971. The savagery that followed the decision to retake the prison was both predictable and avoidable. The prisoners had no guns themselves, yet the troopers — untrained, unsupervised and out for vengeance — began shooting wildly upon entering. Among the first to die were corrections officers held as hostages, as well as the prisoners who had been guarding them. Thirty-nine people — 29 prisoners and 10 hostages — would be killed.
35. 1968 Walkouts at Venice High School
36. 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
37. 1971 Attica Rebellion: Prisoners Raise Fists Attica prisoners raise fists in support of demands made during prison uprising, Sept. 10, 1971. “The most direct effect of the George Jackson murder was the rebellion at Attica prison — a rebellion that came from long, deep grievance, 54% of the inmates were black; 100% of the guards were white. Prisoners spent 14 to 16 hours a day in their cells, their mail was read, their reading material restricted, their visits from families conducted through a mesh screen, their medical care disgraceful, their parole system inequitable, racism everywhere.” - Howard Zinn.
38. 1971 Attica Rebellion: Prisoners raise fists during negotiations Rebellious inmates at the Attica Correctional Facility giving the black power salute during negotiations of the takeover. Manifesto of Demands: We, the men of Attica Prison, have been committed to the New York State Department of Corrections by the people of society for the purpose of correcting what has been deemed as social errors in behaviour. Errors which have classified us as socially unacceptable until reprogrammed with new values and more thorough understanding as to our values and responsibilities as members of the outside community. The Attica Prison program in its structure and conditions have been enslaved on the pages of this Manifesto of Demands with the blood, sweat, and tears of the inmates of this prison. The program which we are submitted to under the façade of rehabilitation are relative to the ancient stupidity of pouring water on a drowning man, inasmuch as we are treated for our hostilities by our program administrators with their hostility as medication. In our efforts to comprehend on a feeling level an existence contrary to violence, we are confronted by our captors with what is fair and just, we are victimized by the exploitation and the denial of the celebrated due process of law. In our peaceful efforts to assemble in dissent as provided under this nation’s U.S. Constitution, we are in turn murdered, brutalized, and framed on various criminal charges because we seek the rights and privileges of all American People.
39. 1971 Attica Rebellion: Prisoners meeting
40. 1971 Attica Rebellion: State troopers prepare to retake Attica State troopers prepare to retake Attica Prison, Attica, New York. September 1971 . Prison leaders quickly sought to negotiate with Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and other state officials, conditioning their surrender on the granting of 33 demands. These included better education, less mail censorship, more religious freedom, fairer disciplinary and parole processes and, most controversially, amnesty for crimes committed in the course of the riot itself.
41. 1971 Attica Rebellion: State troopers prepare to retake Attica 2 Armed officers walk by the entrance to the Attica Correctional Facility, in Attica, NY, in the aftermath of the riot at the prison, September 1971. Negotiations were led by a group of journalists, politicians and prison reformers, including the radical civil rights attorney William Kunstler and the New York Times columnist Tom Wicker. Shuttling between prisoners in the yard and state authorities gathered outside, the negotiators worked heroically toward a settlement. But Rockefeller was uncompromising, and after refusing to go to Attica to join the negotiations himself, he abandoned talks and ordered state troopers to “retake” the prison.