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Showing 10 posts tagged activism
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Late last year, a movement named Idle No More sprung up in Canada and quickly spread across the continent in response to attacks to indigenous rights and damage to the environment. Environmentalist Bill McKibben recently encouraged his readers to think of INM as the Occupy movement, “but with deep, deep roots.” Allison Kilkenny reports on the movement’s global protests for indigenous rights.
“A year later, the déjà vu is palpable, complete with much the same precariousness, naïveté and uncertainty. Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is.”
Some 800 people gathered in Charlotte’s Frazier Park and marched to Uptown, where the Democratic National Convention kicks off on Tuesday. Environmental justice, immigration, labor, education, anti-war, and Occupy activists spent nearly four hours in the streets despite an overwhelming amount of police and other security forces.
The march marked the first major protest for Undocubus riders. The bus made its way from Phoenix, Arizona, picking up riders along the way from various states in the South in the past month. The activists are calling for the immigration reform that President Obama promised when he first ran for office. Watch the full video to learn more about Undocubus and visit NoPapersNoFear.org to get involved.
“Guizar, 19, was arrested after his high school graduation—he had some drinks at a party and was charged with public intoxication. Despite the fact that the charge was dropped, he still faces deportation proceedings. As he addressed the packed church, he explained why he decided to risk arrest the previous day, when he and three others blocked the bridge that leads to Sheriff Jones’s office. Because he was the only one participating in the civil disobedience without identification, he was, indeed, arrested—but mounting pressure from UnodcuBus and the social media network they’ve created secured Guizar’s release, just six hours after his arrest.”
Several thousand people marched down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue on June 17 to demand an end to the NYPD’s controversial Stop-and-Frisk tactic. The silent march, organized by the NAACP and a coalition of nearly 300 other groups, sought to draw attention to the damage the massive spike in street interrogations is causing to communities of color.
“The fast and furious online action that eventually led to Komen’s turnaround was possible only because a younger generation of feminists made it so. While the media was saying feminism was dead and our foremothers were complaining that young women were politically apathetic, we were preparing for these very fights.”
Thousands have turned out to protest at the BoA shareholders meeting today, following demonstrations in New York yesterday outside BoA’s Manhattan offices. Many protesters explain that they’ve been personally impacted by the bank’s practices:
My house was foreclosed by Bank of America after I lost my job… It’s not a joke to live without a job. My family depends on me. We don’t deserve to be put on the street. I’ve tried to modify my mortgage five times with Bank of America, but they’d rather put it in a short sale.
Latest updates and photos from the demonstrations here.
The Occupy movement has been an extremely exciting development. Unprecedented, in fact. There’s never been anything like it that I can think of. If the bonds and associations it has established can be sustained through a long, dark period ahead—because victory won’t come quickly—it could prove a significant moment in American history.
Read the rest here.
Elsie Richardson, left, with Shirley Chisholm. Courtesy: Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration
If you’re not familiar with Elsie Richardson, do yourself a favor.
Elsie Richardson, who died in Brooklyn on March 15 at the age of 90, was a school secretary and community organizer whose activism in the realms of civil-rights, housing, and community development spanned six decades. Her signature moment occurred on a frigid February day in 1966, when she led Sen. Robert F. Kennedy on a lengthy tour of the impoverished, majority-black Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Kennedy at the time was plotting a new front in the War on Poverty, which had been declared two years earlier by President Lyndon Johnson but had yet to score significant victories. Richardson, meanwhile, hoped to rally political support for a set of ideas she and her fellow Brooklyn activists had been developing—ideas about how to stem capital flight, create jobs, and revitalize crumbling housing stock. Their meeting resulted in the founding of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, the first federally-funded Community Development Corporation and a model for the grassroots rebuilding efforts that would unfold in cities around the country in decades to come.
Read the rest here.
“If we look closely enough, we’ll have to conclude that poverty is not, after all, a cultural aberration or a character flaw. Poverty is a shortage of money.”
Barbara Ehrenreich on “The Culture of Poverty”
Read her full piece for this week’s issue of The Nation here.
