Posts tagged Civil rights
مہرین کسانه
Some Al Qaeda text up there.
Since the 18th century, the idea of economic freedom has been joined at the hip with the need for a police state; government is perceived as incompetent with regard to economic regulation, but fully legitimate and competent at policing and punishing. Not surprisingly, the periods of strongest belief in the free market (the “Market Revolution” in the 1820s and the recent period of neoliberalism since the 1970s) have coincided with the starkest periods of penal expansion – with the birth of the penitentiary in the first half of the 19th century and the exponential rise in prison populations since 1973.
Laissez-faire with strip-searches - America’s two-faced liberalism: Recent supreme court hearings sum up the US polity’s central contradiction: liberty is sacrosanct for the Market, not the Citizen. (via Guardian Comment is Free)
The rise of neoliberal thought since the 1970s has left us with a frightening union, one in which there is both free-market ideology (which militates against universal healthcare) and mass incarceration (with the attendant excesses like generalized strip-searches). This is what many of us have come to call “neoliberal penality”. Justice Kennedy’s Janus-faced liberalism is just the most recent, and troubling instance, where the socio-economic domain (healthcare reform) is governed by skepticism of the state and the need to protect the freedom of the individual, while the penal sphere is governed by a police-state logic that gives the state security apparatus carte blanche to eradicate even the smallest security risks (with a sledge hammer, if necessary). No delegation is permitted to social security experts in the economic realm, lest we fundamentally alter the relationship of the government to the individual; but we give free rein to the domestic security experts in policing and punishing – even when the magnitude of the potential harm is minimal.
Extremely relevant and important. Read this. It’s essential (and scary) to know.
This picture gave me chills
and
…look which side is so filled with cowardice that every single one of their faces are covered.
Because I couldn’t resist doing some snooping, apparently this picture is from a 1938 stand-off between the Klan and Black residents/locals of Lakeland, Florida. I found it in a special exhibition archive at the Lakeland city website, here. And here’s an article recounting historical and current racial tensions in Polk County and Lakeland in specific.
The article gives this chilling context for the image (which appears to be from Life magazine and shot by a local photographer named Dan Sanborn):
The rally on Aug. 30, 1938, wasn’t the first rally and cross-burning in Polk County, and it certainly wasn’t the last. According to news reports, more than 200 KKK members from Polk, Hillsborough and Pinellas counties descended on Lakeland and paraded through the northern section of town.
“The white robed and hooded marchers frequently herded groups of Negroes together and voiced a warning against further outbreaks,” the Polk County Record reported. “The parade climaxed with the burning of a wooden cross.”
And how many folks have grandparents that were young around this time????
One of the most powerful images I’ve ever seen.
(Source: scumbagcrew, via tsotchke)
![thesmithian:
“Hoover saw the civil rights movement from the 1950s onward and the anti-war movement from the 1960s onward, as presenting the greatest threats to the stability of the American government since the Civil War,” says [the author] in particular Martin Luther King [Jr.] was an enemy…” Hoover was intent on planting bugs around civil rights leaders—including King—because he thought communists had infiltrated the civil rights movement…Hoover had his intelligence chief bug King’s bedroom, and then sent the civil rights leader a copy of the sex recordings his intelligence chief had taken of King—along with an anonymous letter from the FBI.
more.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzm5juTTfJ1qcwnv4o1_400.jpg)
“Hoover saw the civil rights movement from the 1950s onward and the anti-war movement from the 1960s onward, as presenting the greatest threats to the stability of the American government since the Civil War,” says [the author] in particular Martin Luther King [Jr.] was an enemy…” Hoover was intent on planting bugs around civil rights leaders—including King—because he thought communists had infiltrated the civil rights movement…Hoover had his intelligence chief bug King’s bedroom, and then sent the civil rights leader a copy of the sex recordings his intelligence chief had taken of King—along with an anonymous letter from the FBI.
more.
(Source: thesmithian, via soupsoup)
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967
Oh, America.
(via androphilia)
June 1964. Black Children integrate the swimming pool of the Monson Motel. To force them out, the owner pours acid into the water.
(Source: blck-grrl)
The civil rights movement was complex and vast and included white heroes as well as black ones. And obviously, if you portray all whites as villains and racists, then you’re not presenting a full or accurate picture.
But if you make a movie about Jim Crow that is all about white people saving black people, and that movie has a happy ending, then you are being reductive, and you are downplaying the idea that African-Americans had any agency in their own destinies. You are, as was the case with the creators of the movie version of The Help, co-opting the black experience.
(via pantslessprogressive)
