Indefinite Divisibility by Yves Tanguy, 1942, oil on canvas.
Monthly Archives: April 2008
FROM THE ARCHIVES: TODAY, APRIL 16, IS EMANCIPATION DAY
(I originally posted this essay on April 16, 2007. I have provided more updated links for reference, and a link to this year’s Washington, D.C. 2008 celebrations of Emancipation Day.)
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United States
The municipality of Washington, D.C., celebrates April 16 as Emancipation Day. On that day in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act for the release of certain persons held to service or labor in the District of Columbia. The Act freed about 3,100 enslaved persons in the District of Columbia nine months before President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation which presaged the eventual end of slavery to the rest of the nation. The District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act represents the only example of compensation by the federal government to slaveholders who owned enslaved black people:
HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WASHINGTON – On April 16, 1862, President Lincoln signed into law “An Act for the Release of Certain Persons held to Service or Labor in the District of Columbia.” The Act decreed “that all persons held to service or labor within the District of Columbia by reason of African descent are hereby discharged and freed of and from all claim to such service or labor; and from and after the passage of this act neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall hereafter exist in said District.”Under this law, which uses neither the word “slave” nor “emancipation”, the enslaved residents of Washington, and the city itself, became the first freed from the burden of slavery by the U.S. government. The act also provides the sole instance of compensated emancipation in U.S. history.
Under the Act, Benjamin T. Thorn was paid $569.40 in compensation for the release of John H. Hawkins. For release of a “male infant”, Margaret Loughborough received $21.90. “Henry Hatton, colored” received $1,839.60 in compensation for the emancipation of Martha, Henry, and George Hatton. George Washington Young received $17,771.85 upon the release of 69 of his slaves. Sarah Davis received nothing at all for the release of Hannah West, who was deemed to be of “no value.”
On January 4, 2005, Mayor Anthony Williams signed legislation making Emancipation Day an official public holiday in the District. Each year, a series of activities will be held during the public holiday including the traditional Emancipation Day parade celebrating the freedom of enslaved persons in the District of Columbia. The Emancipation Day celebration was held yearly from 1866 to 1901, and was resumed as a tradition and historic celebration in 2002 as a direct result of years of research, lobbying and leadership done by Ms. Loretta Carter-Hanes.
In 2007, the observance of this holiday in Washington DC had the effect of nationally extending the 2006 income tax filing deadline from the 16th to the 17th of April, a delay that will recur in April of 2012. This 2007 date change was not discovered until after many forms went to print.
In Texas, Emancipation Day is celebrated on June 19. It commemorates the announcement in Texas of the abolition of slavery made on that day in 1865. It is commonly known as Juneteenth.
THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA EMANCIPATION ACT
On April 16, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia. Passage of this law came 8 1/2 months before President Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation. The act brought to a conclusion decades of agitation aimed at ending what antislavery advocates called “the national shame” of slavery in the nation’s capital. It provided for immediate emancipation, compensation to former owners who were loyal to the Union of up to $300 for each freed slave, voluntary colonization of former slaves to locations outside the United States, and payments of up to $100 for each person choosing emigration. Over the next 9 months, the Board of Commissioners appointed to administer the act approved 930 petitions, completely or in part, from former owners for the freedom of 2,989 former slaves.
Although its combination of emancipation, compensation to owners, and colonization did not serve as a model for the future, the District of Columbia Emancipation Act was an early signal of slavery’s death. In the District itself, black Americans greeted emancipation with great jubilation. For many years afterward, they celebrated Emancipation Day on April 16 with parades and festivals.
AN ACT FOR THE RELEASE OF CERTAIN PERSONS HELD TO SERVICE OR LABOR IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all persons held to service or labor within the District of Columbia by reason of African descent are hereby discharged and freed of and from all claim to such service or labor; and from and after the passage of this act neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except for crime, whereof the party shall be duly convicted, shall hereafter exist in said District.
Sec. 2. And be it further enacted, That all persons loyal to the United States, holding claims to service or labor against persons discharged therefrom by this act, may, within ninety days from the passage thereof, but not thereafter, present to the commissioners hereinafter mentioned their respective statements or petitions in writing, verified by oath or affirmation, setting forth the names, ages, and personal description of such persons, the manner in which said petitioners acquired such claim, and any facts touching the value thereof, and declaring his allegiance to the Government of the United States, and that he has not borne arms against the United States during the present rebellion, nor in any way given aid or comfort thereto: Provided, That the oath of the party to the petition shall not be evidence of the facts therein stated.
Sec. 3. And be it further enacted, That the President of the United States, with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint three commissioners, residents of the District of Columbia, any two of whom shall have power to act, who shall receive the petitions above mentioned, and who shall investigate and determine the validity and value of the claims therein presented, as aforesaid, and appraise and apportion, under the proviso hereto annexed, the value in money of the several claims by them found to be valid: Provided, however, That the entire sum so appraised and apportioned shall not exceed in the aggregate an amount equal to three hundred dollars for each person shown to have been so held by lawful claim: And provided, further, That no claim shall be allowed for any slave or slaves brought into said District after the passage of this act, nor for any slave claimed by any person who has borne arms against the Government of the United States in the present rebellion, or in any way given aid or comfort thereto, or which originates in or by virtue of any transfer heretofore made, or which shall hereafter be made by any person who has in any manner aided or sustained the rebellion against the Government of the United States.
Sec. 4. And be it further enacted, That said commissioners shall, within nine months from the passage of this act, make a full and final report of their proceedings, findings, and appraisement, and shall deliver the same to the Secretary of the Treasury, which report shall be deemed and taken to be conclusive in all respects, except as hereinafter provided; and the Secretary of the Treasury shall, with like exception, cause the amounts so apportioned to said claims to be paid from the Treasury of the United States to the parties found by said report to be entitled thereto as aforesaid, and the same shall be received in full and complete compensation: Provided, That in cases where petitions may be filed presenting conflicting claims, or setting up liens, said commissioners shall so specify in said report, and payment shall not be made according to the award of said commissioners until a period of sixty days shall have elapsed, during which time any petitioner claiming an interest in the particular amount may file a bill in equity in the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, making all other claimants defendants thereto, setting forth the proceedings in such case before said commissioners and their actions therein, and praying that the party to whom payment has been awarded may be enjoined form receiving the same; and if said court shall grant such provisional order, a copy thereof may, on motion of said complainant, be served upon the Secretary of the Treasury, who shall thereupon cause the said amount of money to be paid into said court, subject to its orders and final decree, which payment shall be in full and complete compensation, as in other cases.
Sec. 5. And be it further enacted, That said commissioners shall hold their sessions in the city of Washington, at such place and times as the President of the United States may direct, of which they shall give due and public notice. They shall have power to subpoena and compel the attendance of witnesses, and to receive testimony and enforce its production, as in civil cases before courts of justice, without the exclusion of any witness on account of color; and they may summon before them the persons making claim to service or labor, and examine them under oath; and they may also, for purposes of identification and appraisement, call before them the persons so claimed. Said commissioners shall appoint a clerk, who shall keep files and [a] complete record of all proceedings before them, who shall have power to administer oaths and affirmations in said proceedings, and who shall issue all lawful process by them ordered. The Marshal of the District of Columbia shall personally, or by deputy, attend upon the sessions of said commissioners, and shall execute the process issued by said clerk.
Sec.6. And be it further enacted, That said commissioners shall receive in compensation for their services the sum of two thousand dollars each, to be paid upon the filing of their report; that said clerk shall receive for his services the sum of two hundred dollars per month; that said marshal shall receive such fees as are allowed by law for similar services performed by him in the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia; that the Secretary of the Treasury shall cause all other reasonable expenses of said commission to be audited and allowed, and that said compensation, fees, and expenses shall be paid from the Treasury of the United States.
Sec. 7. And be it further enacted, That for the purpose of carrying this act into effect there is hereby appropriated, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, a sum not exceeding one million of dollars.
Sec. 8. And be it further enacted, That any person or persons who shall kidnap, or in any manner transport or procure to be taken out of said District, any person or persons discharged and freed by the provisions of this act, or any free person or persons with intent to re-enslave or sell such person or person into slavery, or shall re-enslave any of said freed persons, the person of persons so offending shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and on conviction thereof in any court of competent jurisdiction in said District, shall be imprisoned in the penitentiary not less than five nor more that twenty years.
Sec. 9. And be it further enacted, That within twenty days, or within such further time as the commissioners herein provided for shall limit, after the passage of this act, a statement in writing or schedule shall be filed with the clerk of the Circuit court for the District of Columbia, by the several owners or claimants to the services of the persons made free or manumitted by this act, setting forth the names, ages, sex, and particular description of such persons, severally; and the said clerk shall receive and record, in a book by him to be provided and kept for that purpose, the said statements or schedules on receiving fifty cents each therefor, and no claim shall be allowed to any claimant or owner who shall neglect this requirement.
Sec. 10. And be it further enacted, That the said clerk and his successors in office shall, from time to time, on demand, and on receiving twenty-five cents therefor, prepare, sign, and deliver to each person made free or manumitted by this act, a certificate under the seal of said court, setting out the name, age, and description of such person, and stating that such person was duly manumitted and set free by this act.
Sec. 11. And be it further enacted, That the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, out of any money in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, is hereby appropriated, to be expended under the direction of the President of the United States, to aid in the colonization and settlement of such free persons of African descent now residing in said District, including those to be liberated by this act, as may desire to emigrate to the Republics of Hayti or Liberia, or such other country beyond the limits of the United States as the President may determine: Provided, The expenditure for this purpose shall not exceed one hundred dollars for each emigrant.
Sec. 12. And be it further enacted, That all acts of Congress and all laws of the State of Maryland in force in said District, and all ordinances of the cities of Washington and Georgetown, inconsistent with the provisions of this act, are hereby repealed.
Approved, April 16, 1862.
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SUPPLEMENTAL ACT OF JULY 12, 1862
On July 12, 1862, Congress passed a supplemental bill to the original DC Emancipation Act which covered another type of claim, allowing slaves whose masters had not filed for compensation to do so.
An important factor in deciding claims under this Act was that the testimony of both blacks and whites was accepted. Now, if an owner challenged a slave who petitioned for freedom, the testimony from both was given equal weight, a sharp departure from the previous legal practice in which enslaved or freed black people could not testify against whites.
LINKS: http://mac110.assumption.edu/aas/Reports/emancprocdc.html
U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS: http://www.archives.gov/global-pages/larger-image.html?i=/historical-docs/doc-content/images/dc-emanc-supplemental-act-l.jpg&c=/historical-docs/doc-content/images/dc-emanc-supplemental-act.caption.html
Filed under Uncategorized
FROM THE ARCHIVES: PBS INTERVIEW WITH ANGELA DAVIS (1998)
MARXIST HISTORY: USA: BLACK PANTHER PARTY
Interviewer: Your mentor, Herbert Marcuse once back in ’58, as I recall, said that one of the things that would happen as blacks made gains in the civil rights movement was that there would be the creation of a black bourgeoisie and that’s certainly been one of the things that’s happened as we look back from the vantage point of 1997. How do you see the role of the black bourgeoisie in the continuing struggle?
Davis: Actually we’ve had a black bourgeoisie or the makings of a black bourgeoisie for many more decades…. if we look at one of our great leaders, W.E.B. Du Bois, he was associated with a very minuscule black bourgeoisie in the 19th century so this is not something that is substantively new although the numbers of black people who now count themselves among the black bourgeoisie certainly does make an enormous difference.
In a sense the quest for the emancipation of black people in the US has always been a quest for economic liberation which means to a certain extent that the rise of black middle class would be inevitable. What I think is different today is the lack of political connection between the black middle class and the increasing numbers of black people who are more impoverished than ever before.
Interviewer: Isn’t that inevitable though? Hasn’t every immigrant group, as it becomes part of the American mainstream, left behind its roots in a certain way?
Davis: That’s true but I think the contemporary problem that we are facing increasing numbers of black people and other people of color being thrown into a status that involves work in alternative economies and increasing numbers of people who are incarcerated. This is new. This is not the typical path toward freedom that immigrants have traditionally discovered in the US.
And I guess what I would say is that we can’t think narrowly about movements for black liberation and we can’t necessarily see this class division as simply a product or a certain strategy that black movements have developed for liberation. But rather we have to look at the structural changes that have also accompanied the gains of the civil rights movement. We have to look at for example the increasing globalization of capital, the whole system of transitional capitalism now which has had an impact on black populations — that has for example eradicated large numbers of jobs that black people traditionally have been able to count upon and created communities where the tax base is lost now as a result of corporations moving to the third world in order to discover cheap labor. I would suggest is that in the latter 1990s it is extremely important to look at the predicament of black people within the context of the globalization of capital.
Interviewer: One of the things that struck me as I’ve gone back and revisited this history —is that Martin Luther King starts this movement for economic justice just before he’s assassinated. The Black Panther party is just getting off the ground here in California and in a way there seems like there was a march towards merging these issues of class and race in the late 60s that somehow got derailed.
Davis: Yes, I think it’s really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement. It’s I think quite significant that he was in Memphis to participate in a demonstration by sanitation workers who had gone out on strike. Now, if we look at the way in which the labor movement itself has evolved over the last couple of decades, we see increasing numbers of black people who are in the leadership of the labor movement and this is true today.
Interviewer: We also see an increasingly weaker labor movement.
Davis: Well, we see an increasingly weaker labor movement as a result of the overall assault on the labor movement and as a result of the globalization of capital. So yeah, you’re absolutely right, but I’m thinking about some developments say in the 80s when the anti-apartheid movement began to claim more support and strength within the US. Black trade unionists played a really important role in developing this US anti-apartheid movement. For example, right here in the Bay Area one of the first major activist moments was the refusal on the part of the longshoremen’s union to unload ships that were coming in from South Africa and the ILWU then took the leadership here in the Bay Area, particularly as a result of the black caucus within the ILWU, they took the leadership in creating an anti-apartheid movement that spread to all of the campuses, UC Berkeley, Stanford.
Interviewer: At least from my vantage point, back then it seemed we were attacking structures and institutions and after a certain point it began to feel like it wasn’t possible. Our leaders were assassinated, one of the things I was reading today was — 28 Panthers were killed by the police but 300 Black Panthers were killed by other Panthers just within — internecine warfare. It just began to seem like we were in an impossible task given what we were facing. How do we reawaken that sense that one person can really make that difference again now? And kids these days are kind of going back to Tupac and Snoop Doggy Dogg as examples of people that stand for something.
Davis: It’s true that it’s within the realm of cultural politics that young people tend to work through political issues, which I think is good, although it’s not going to solve the problems. I guess I would say first of all that we tend to go back to the 60s and we tend to see these struggles and these goals in a relatively static way. The fact is important gains were made and those gains are still visible today. For example, the number of African-American studies programs that are on college campuses today. Those institutional changes are inconceivable outside of that development within — related to the Black Panther party and other organizations. Young people began to take those struggles onto the campuses
Interviewer: The last line in the essay Skip Gates has in The Future of the Race is— “only sometimes do I feel guilty that I was one of the lucky ones. Only sometimes do I ask myself why.” I wonder whether you ever feel guilty for having been one of those who have survived?
Davis: Well, I think about it. But I don’t know whether I feel guilty. I think that has to do with my awareness that in a sense we all have a certain measure of responsibility to those who have made it possible for us to take advantage of the opportunities. The door is opened only so far. If some of us can squeeze through the crack of that door, then we owe it to those who have made those demands that the door be opened to use the knowledge or the skills that we acquire not only for ourselves but in the service of the community as well. This is something that I guess I decided a long time ago.
Interviewer: But still there were those who were arrested around the same time you are were still in prison? You got out — you got off in some ways because you had become such a cause celebre that there were others who didn’t have.
Davis: I mean that’s true but I am actually addressing your question about guilt, and I’m trying to suggest that maybe there are other ways to deal with it than with guilt. So rather than feeling guilty is what I have done is to continue the work. As soon as I got out of jail, as soon as my trial was over, first of all, during the time I was in jail, there was an organization called the National United Committee to Free Angela Davis, and I insisted that it be called National United Committee to Free Angela Davis and All Political Prisoners.
As soon as my trial was over, we tried to use the energy that had developed around my case to create another organization, which we called the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression. And, what? in June it will have been 25 years since my trial was over. I’m still working for the freedom of political prisoners, Mumia Abu Jamal, the Puerto Rican political prisoners, such as Dinci Pargan, for example, Leonard Pelletier. I’m involved in the work around prison rights in general. I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement. Then I don’t think it’s necessary to feel guilty. Because I know that I’m still doing the work that is going to help more sisters and brothers to challenge the whole criminal justice system, and I’m trying to use whatever knowledge I was able to acquire to continue to do the work in our communities that will move us forward.
Interviewer: One of the problems, as we came into the 70s is it seemed as though we were fighting institutions and structures that were so big that there just seemed to be nothing that one person could do about them… How do we recapture that sense of a kind of power of being bold enough to take on those structures again?
Davis: I don’t know whether the movement crashed as a result of the overwhelming character of the institutions we set out to change. I think repression had a lot to do with the dismantling of the movement and also the winning of certain victories had something to do with the inability of the movement to take those victories as the launching point for new goals and developing new strategies.
But I do think it’s extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement. I don’t think we do that enough.. Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.
Interviewer: Such as?
Davis: I’m thinking about the desegregation of the south, for example, and the fact that some black women decided to boycott the bus system and this was actually done and eventually those laws were transformed or changed.
Interviewer: The other thing that happened of course is that the struggle isn’t so much taking place on college campuses any more, it’s taking place in corporate board rooms or within the corporate structure and those of us who are there are both — it’s a weird thing happening. On one hand we’re more reticent about taking on the racist things that we see happening within that environment, but the other thing that’s happening is we’re becoming more Afrocentric at the same time. It’s almost like, we kind of feel like if we show up wearing our kente cloth that that’s it, we’ve done our struggle. What is that about? Where does that come from?
Davis: I think it arises out of a tendency often to conflate cultural blackness with anti-racism. I think this is another case where there are lessons to be learned during the period of the 60s when organizations like the Black Panther Party were coming into being, there were other cultural nationalist organizations such as US Organization, such as the organization that Amiri Baraka developed and of course Amiri OK, there was the black arts movement which was extremely important, but there was also Baraka’s political organization in Newark that took a cultural nationalist position that assumed that if we were able to connect with the culture of our African ancestors that somehow or another these vast problems surrounding us, racism in education, in the school, racism in the economy, in health care, etc would disappear. They were very interesting conflicts and debates between groups like the Black Panther party and the cultural nationalist groups in the 60s.
Interviewer: What were those debates? What was the nature of that debate between the Black Panther and say a group like US?
Davis: The debate often focused on what young black people wanting to associate themselves with a movement for liberation should do, whether they should become active in campaigns against police violence, for example, or whether they should focus their energy on wearing African clothes and changing their name and developing rituals. One of the names members of the Black Panther Party used to call those who focused on Africa and African rituals was sort of pork chop nationalists. There were some of us who argued that yes, we need to develop a cultural consciousness of our connection with Africa particularly since racist structures had relied upon the sort of cultural genocide going back to the period of slavery so that many of us were arguing that we could affirm our connection with our African ancestors in political ways as well, following for example Dr. Du Bois’ vision of pan-Africanism which was an anti-imperialist notion of pan-Africanism rather than the pan-Africanism that projected a very idealized, romantic image of Africa, a fictional notion of Africa and assumed that all we needed to do was to become African, so to speak, rather than become involved in organized anti-imperialist struggles. So I think that the debate around pan-Africanism at the beginning, in the aftermath of world war I, for example, that Dr. Du Bois participated in, took on a different character but recapitulated some of the very same kinds of concepts and issues in the 1960s.
Interviewer: So what does it say to you that here we are in 1997 and the pan-Africanist/cultural nationalist agenda is the one that the commercial side, that Wall Street has fastened onto—that side seems to have been triumphant and that the anti-imperialist movement is, not in retreat, but certainly not being heard from as much.
Davis: It doesn’t surprise me that aspect of the black nationalist movement, the cultural side, has triumphed because that is the aspect of the movement that was most commodifiable and when we look at the commodification of blackness we’re looking at a phenomenon that’s very profitable and it’s connection with the rise of a black middle class I think is very obvious. As far as the tradition of struggle and tradition of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist struggle I think that is one that has to be fought for and recrafted continuously. It’s not going to happen on its own, it’s not going to be taken up by the capitalist corporations and presented as something that is both profitable and something that is pleasurable to masses of people.
Interviewer: In a way I find it interesting that Kwanzaa — you know Karenga’s ideas which apparently seem to have been financed by the FBI, at least in part, are the ones that now most black folks would say they would hold to and not the ideals of the Panther Party which were about survival, at least in some part an economic survival.
Davis: To a certain extent I think both traditions have survived. The cultural nationalist tradition has been commodified and therefore it has been worked into the whole institution of capitalism in a way that the traditions of struggling against police violence have not, but those traditions are still very much alive. As a matter of fact I think that the response to the OJ Simpson trial was based on a kind of sensibility that emerged out of the many campaigns to defend black communities against police violence. It just so happened that a figure like OJ Simpson was the one who benefited from those sensibilities, but I think it’s important to affirm the fact that sensibility continues to exist and a kind of desire for black movements continues to exist even, I think, among middle class black people.
This accounts, I think, for the success of the Million Man March because black people tend to think of themselves as a people in struggle. This has been our history within this country and there’s a kind of nostalgia for those moments where the struggle becomes dramatic and visible and powerful, although the Million Man March wasn’t such a moment, I would argue, because there were no political demands that addressed the major problems that black communities are confronting yet there were the images of struggle, there were the images of masses of people that I think affected and brought pleasure to and moved so many black people. Now perhaps we can use that. Perhaps we can rely on that as we try to build movements that will address the impoverishment of masses of black people, the prison/industrial complex. I have to maintain some hope that that’s possible. But at the same time I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March.
Interviewer: You were critical of the Million Man March before? What was the substance of your criticism?
Davis: We developed this criticism on a number of accounts. First of all, the failure to integrate gender into the vision of what the black community needed, the exclusion of women from the march itself although finally I think someone said it’s OK for black women to come, they don’t have to stay at home with the babies as they were urged to before. But my criticism was also based on the conservative politics of the Million Man March, the conservative politics, the tendency to rely on voluntarism, the way in which the politics of the march coexisted quite harmoniously with the politics of a Newt Gingrich, for example the focus on family values that again linked the march to some of the most conservative developments in US society today, the assault on women’s reproductive rights, etc. If this march of a million black men had raised issues such as the assault on the welfare system, the assault on women’s reproductive rights, if there had been a sense of how to address this vast issue of violence against women, rather than assuming that a patriarchal family structure in which black men would —
Interviewer: Atone.
Davis: Atone but also assume their role as the patriarchs in the family, cause that’s what the atonement was all about. The black men were not really being the fathers that they needed to be, not really taking on the burden of the family in the way they needed to do it. I found that extremely problematic because I think it’s important for us to recognize that although historically black communities have been very progressive with respect to issues of race and with respect to struggles for racial equality, that does not necessarily translate into progressive positions on gender issues, progressive positions on issues of sexuality and in the latter 1990s we have to recognize the intersectionality, the interconnectedness of all of these institutions and attitudes.
Interviewer: Now that the Million Man March is over, do you still feel it was not a correct thing to have done?
Davis: Those of us who criticized the Million Man March — were not arguing that it shouldn’t happen. We were arguing that debates around the issues taken up by the march needed to be allowed particularly within black communities. I guess what I would criticize today is the tendency to conflate that dramatic moment with a movement.
The nostalgia within black communities for this mass movement which involves vast numbers of black people coming together is something that can often lead us in unproductive directions. Because in the past the demonstrations that we think about — the 1963 march on Washington, for example, that march wasn’t this moment that was organized against the backdrop of nothing else. It was a demonstrating of the organizing that had been going on for years and years and to assume that one can call a march on Washington and have that be a movement in the 1990s is I think a tremendous mistake. I would say perhaps the importance of the Million Man March was that it stimulated a great deal of discussion. Perhaps it brought to people’s attention the fact that we need to begin to regenerate an approach towards grassroots organizing that will help us in the direction of a mass movement.
There was a tendency of the middle class men who I think participated in that march to passionately identify with the brother on the street without taking up the kinds of political issues that are required to move black people who are in poverty in a progressive direction.
Interviewer: Of course the brothers on the street are identifying with the gangster rappers or at least the younger brothers on the street are, which is a whole other level of symbolic identity.
Davis: And not only the brothers on the street but the middle class brothers are also identifying with the gangster rappers because of the extent to which this music circulates. It becomes possible for the — not only the young middle class men, but it becomes possible for young middle class white men and young men of other racial communities to identify with the misogyny of gangster rap.
Interviewer: Well, it’s not just misogyny. Now it’s kind of moved just a straight crass materialism. The latest ones are just — they just name off name brands. That’s the progression of it. How have we reached a point where in 1997 that the ethic of being black means that you don’t go to school to learn. That learning is equated with whiteness and that somehow that is bad?
Davis: Well, whether it’s the approach that all young black kids are encouraged to take or decide to take. Because you do have this rising middle class and you do have the young brothers and sisters who are moving toward the corporate arena and who are encouraged to do this arena from the time that they are very young. I think this is one of those moments where we also have to talk about the deterioration of the institutions.
I can’t really blame a lot of young sisters and brothers who believe that education has anything to offer them. Because as a matter of fact, it has nothing to offer them. Suppose they do get a high school diploma that is meaningful. What kind of job is awaiting them. The jobs that used to be available to working class people are not there as a result of the de-industrialization of this economy.
Therefore, often young black people are looking towards the alternative economies. They are looking towards the drug economy…. the economies that are going to — that apparently will produce some kind of material gain for them. You can’t criticize people for wanting to have a decent life or wanting to live decently. While I think that it is true that there is a great deal to be done with respect to the ideas that circulate among young people within arenas such as hip hop. At the same time, we can’t forget about the deterioration of the institutions and the structural influence on young people.
Interviewer: Bring us back to globalization of capital. How do you mobilize around an issue like globalization of capital?
Davis: Well, you mobilize around globalization of capital in local ways. Obviously there are some organizations that go out on the street and say we want an end to the capitalist system. But obviously that is not going to happen as a result of just assuming that stance. I think in black communities today we need to encourage a lot more cross racial organizing. For example, we look at the assault on immigrants. Both legal immigrants and undocumented immigrants. Where does the black community stand with respect to that issue?
I think it is important to recognize that there is a connection between the predicament of poor black people and the predicament of immigrants who come to this country in search of a better life. The de industrialization of the US. economy based on the migration of corporations into third world areas where labor is very cheap and thus more profitable for these companies creates on the one hand conditions in those countries that encourage people to emigrate to the US. in search of a better life. On the other hand, it creates conditions here that send more black people into the alternative economies, the drug economies, women into economies in sexual services, and sends them into the prison industrial complex.
So we have to figure out how to formulate issues that are going to bring those of us together who are affected in one way or another by the globalization of capital…When we consider how much a young black person wants to, or is willing to pay for a pair of Nike’s, right? — and then think about the conditions under which those shoes are made in Indonesia or wherever, at the same time that young sister or brother will be treated on the labor market here as indispensible and perhaps as someone to be cast away into the prison system. So there are reasons for coming together if we can figure out some specific kinds of strategies and tactics that will allow it. I think this is the real challenge for this era, which means we have to get away from a narrow conception of blackness. We can’t talk about the black community. It’s no longer a homogeneous community; it was never a homogeneous community. At one point, it did make sense to talk about the black community because we were struggling against the profound impact of racism on people’s lives in various ways. We still have to struggle against the impact of racism, but it doesn’t happen in the same way. I think it is much more complicated today than it ever was.
Interviewer: Does the fact that black folks are now a heterogeneous community absolve us from the obligation to keep reaching back — everybody to reach back, each one — reach one?
Davis: I think we need to insist on a certain responsibility, which people have — particularly those who have made it into the ranks of the middle class because as Dr. King said many years ago in a sense they have climbed out of the masses on the shoulders of their sisters and brothers and therefore, they do have some responsibility.
But whether people would be willing to assume that responsibility or not is something that is up to them. We cannot assume that people by virtue of the fact that they are black are going to associate themselves with progressive political struggles. We need to divest ourselves the kinds of strategies that assume that black unity — black political unity is possible.
Interviewer: What’s the coalition?
Davis: Political coalition. Politically based coalitions. I think we have to really focus on the issues much more than we may have in the past. I think we have to, as I said before, seek to create coalitional strategies that go beyond racial lines. We need to bring black communities, Chicano communities, Puerto Rican communities, Asian American communities together.
Interview: Before February 10, 1998
Source: PBS: Frontline
Transcription/Markup: PBS/Brian Basgen
Online Version: PBS Online 1998; Marxist History Archive (marxists.org) 2001
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COLUMBIA MAPS THE BLACK AMERICAN PAST
March 4, 2008, 4:46 pm
The new African American history site started by Columbia.Columbia University is unveiling a new Web site — MAAP, for Mapping the African American Past — that will use video, audio and historic maps and images to showcase 52 historic sites and people in the city, ranging from the familiar (the African Burial Ground) to the rarely acknowledged.
One little-known example: A teeming restaurant called Downing’s Oyster House patronized by bankers, politicians and lawyers in the 19th century.
Even as the swells did their deals upstairs, the proprietor, Thomas Downing, a free black man, presided over a far different scene in his basement, a hiding place for escaping slaves. The establishment on 5 Broad Street, at Wall Street, was a stop on the Underground Railroad to Canada, and freedom.
Frank A. Moretti, a professor of communications at Teachers College and the Columbia University School of Journalism, said the site “gives students an opportunity for detailed study in a way that would never be possible in traditional textbooks.”
He described the new site as the most extensive Web-based examination of the city’s African-American history. The Web site — a portal to film and music clips, historical photographs and artwork — is searchable by location and year, back to 1632. Narratives will be available as audio podcasts.
Professor Moretti said the year-long project was conceived by Reginald L. Powe, a longtime developer of educational content for publishers and curriculum providers, whose Manhattan-based company, Creative Curriculum Initiatives, has produced boxed sets of 52 historical 3-and-a-half-inch-by-5-inch cards depicting historical locations under the rubric “The African Experience in New York.”
“As an African-American interested in history, I found it hard to understand why so much of the city’s African-American past was unknown to students,” Mr. Powe said. “People know little about slave revolts and people burned at the stake and about inspirational stories of those who advanced against impossible odds.”
A thousand sets of the cards will be made available for free to city schools, and the sets will also be offered for sale to the public for $24, “the price reputed to have been paid for Manhattan,” Mr. Powe said.
(Article courtesy of The new York Times: http://www.nytimes.com )
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BLACK BASEBALL PLAYERS DROP TO 8.2 PER CENT OF MAJOR LEAGUERS
Filed at 5:48 p.m. ET
NEW YORK (AP) — Major League Baseball received its best grade for racial diversity in hiring, even as the percentage of black players dropped again last year.
MLB received its first A- for race Tuesday from Richard Lapchick, director of the University of Central Florida’s Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports. Its grade was B+ in last year’s study.
Among major leaguers, though, just 8.2 percent were black players, down from 8.4 percent in 2006 and the lowest level in at least two decades.
”I’m very disappointed by that fact,” said Rachel Robinson, the widow of Jackie Robinson. ”Competition from other sports is certainly a big factor, but they’re many factors. We’ve got to work on it in terms of getting younger children playing, into the game, and getting communities behind the programs, like the RBI programs and the academies.”
Lapchick released the study on Jackie Robinson Day, the 61st anniversary of when Robinson broke the major league color barrier.
The percentage of black pitchers remained at 3 percent last year.
”Baseball has probably lost a whole generation here,” Lapchick said. ”African-Americans just aren’t playing it at this point. They’re going to have to increase their efforts.”
Although MLB has established its Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities program and urban youth academies, Lapchick said it will take many years for those efforts to pay off.
MLB received a C+ for gender hiring, up from a C last year. Its overall grade remained at B.
Lapchick said 28 percent of employees at baseball’s central offices were nonwhite, including 20 percent among senior executives. Women were 42 percent of employees, but 26 percent of the senior executives.
He suggested baseball commissioner Bud Selig pressure clubs more to consider minority candidates. He also said MLB should institute a rule that a woman be considered for all senior job openings, similar to the rule that minority candidates must be interviewed.
Lapchick would make an exception for general manager — there has never been a woman GM, and there are relatively few high-ranking women in baseball operations. Kim Ng of the Dodgers and Jean Afterman of the Yankees have been the exceptions.
”They would have token interviews until we have that one case that a woman is successful,” he said.
He gave baseball a B+ for race and a C for gender for its senior administration hiring, the same as last year. For team vice presidents, the grade was B for race — the same as last year — and D- for gender, up from an F.
General managers were given a C for 2007, and Lapchick noted the Los Angeles Angels promoted Tony Reagins to GM, where he joins Kenny Williams of the Chicago White Sox and Omar Minaya of the New York Mets as the only minorities.
Managers received an A, with six minority managers last year. The total increased to eight at the start of this season.
(Article courtesy of the Associated Press: http://ap.com )
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OUR FIRST ‘BLACK’ PRESIDENT?
Will Americans vote for a black president? If the notorious historian William Estabrook Chancellor was right, we already did. In the early 1920s, Chancellor helped assemble a controversial biographical portrait accusing President Warren Harding of covering up his family’s “colored” past. According to the family tree Chancellor created, Harding was actually the great-grandson of a black woman. Under the one-drop rule of American race relations, Chancellor claimed, the country had inadvertently elected its “first Negro president.”
In today’s presidential landscape, many Americans view the prospect of a black man in the Oval Office as a sign of progress — evidence of a “postracial” national consciousness. In the white-supremacist heyday of the 1920s (the Ku Klux Klan had a major revival during the Harding years), the taint of “Negro blood” was political death. The Harding forces hit back hard against Chancellor, driving him out of his job and destroying all but a handful of published copies of his book.
In the decades since, many biographers have dismissed the rumors of Harding’s mixed-race family as little more than a political scandal and Chancellor himself as a Democratic mudslinger and racist ideologue. But as with the long-denied and now all-but-proved allegations of Thomas Jefferson’s affair with his slave Sally Hemings, there is reason to question the denials. From the perspective of 2008, when interracial sex is seen as a historical fact of life instead of an abomination, the circumstantial case for Harding’s mixed-race ancestry is intriguing though not definitive.
To anyone who tracks it down today, Chancellor’s book comes across as a laughable partisan screed, an amalgam of bizarre racial theories, outlandish stereotypes and cheap political insults. But it also contains a remarkable trove of social knowledge — the kind of community gossip and oral tradition that rarely appears in official records but often provides clues to richer truths. When he toured Ohio in 1920, Chancellor claimed to find dozens of acquaintances and neighbors willing to swear that the Hardings had been considered black for generations. Among the persuaded, according to rumor, was Harding’s father-in-law, Amos Kling, one of the richest men in Harding’s adopted hometown of Marion. When Harding married his daughter, Florence, in 1891, Kling supposedly denounced her for polluting the family line.
There were rumors of other family scandals as well: the 1849 case in which “one David Butler killed Amos Smith” after Smith claimed that Butler’s wife, a Harding, was black; the suggestion that Harding’s father’s second wife divorced him because he was too much Negro “for her to endure.” In Chancellor’s book, such stories are relayed with a bitter, racist glee — ample reason not to accept them out of hand. But if none of this had any resemblance to the truth, how did all of these rumors get started?
In 1968, the Harding biographer Francis Russell offered an explanation: Harding’s great-great-grandfather Amos told his descendants that he once caught a man killing his neighbor’s apple trees and that the man started the rumor in retaliation — a rather weak story that Russell declined to endorse and that did not silence the mixed-blood rumors. Well into the 1930s, African-Americans claiming a family link continued to pop up in the press. (One decidedly dark-skinned Oliver Harding, supposedly the president’s great-uncle, appeared in Abbott’s Monthly, a black-owned Chicago magazine, in 1932.) As recently as 2005, a Michigan schoolteacher named Marsha Stewart issued her own claim to Harding ancestry. “While growing up,” she wrote, “we were never allowed to talk about the relationship to a U.S. president outside family gatherings because we were ‘colored’ and Warren was ‘passing.’ ”
Genetic testing and genealogical research may one day prove the truth or falsity of such claims. In the meantime, as the campaign season plunges us headlong into a “national conversation” about race, it’s worth thinking about why that truth has been so hard to come by for so long — about what makes it into our official history and what we choose to excise along the way.
Harding’s hometown, Marion, Ohio, provides a case in point. The town gained national fame in 1920 as the site of Harding’s “front-porch campaign”; for weeks, he delivered stump speeches from his well-tended home. Far less well known, as the historian Phillip Payne has noted, is what happened the year before, when a mob of armed white Marion residents drove more than 200 black families out of town, one of a wave of postwar race riots that served to segregate the industrialized north.
As he campaigns to become the nation’s first (openly) black president, Barack Obama likes to say that we’ve begun to put that divisive history behind us. The truth may be that we don’t yet know the half of it.
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MEXICO RECONQUERS CALIFORNIA? ABSOLUT DRINKS TO THAT!
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The latest advertising campaign in Mexico from Swedish vodka maker Absolut promises to push all the right buttons south of the U.S. border, but it could ruffle a few feathers in El Norte.
The billboard and press campaign, created by advertising agency Teran\TBWA and now running in Mexico, is a colorful map depicting what the Americas might look like in an “Absolut” — i.e., perfect — world. The U.S.-Mexico border lies where it was before the Mexican-American war of 1848 when California, as we now know it, was Mexican territory and known as Alta California. Following the war, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo saw the Mexican territories of Alta California and Santa Fé de Nuevo México ceded to the United States to become modern-day California, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Arizona. (Texas actually split from Mexico several years earlier to form a breakaway republic, and was voluntarily annexed by the United States in 1846.) The campaign taps into the national pride of Mexicans, according to Favio Ucedo, creative director of leading Latino advertising agency Grupo Gallegos in the U.S., which was not involved in the Absolut campaign. Ucedo, who is from Argentina, said: “Mexicans talk about how the Americans stole their land, so this is their way of reclaiming it. It’s very relevant and the Mexicans will love the idea.” But he said that were the campaign to run in the United States, it might fall flat. “Many people aren’t going to understand it here. Americans in the East and the North or in the center of the county — I don’t know if they know much about the history. “Probably Americans in Texas and California understand perfectly and I don’t know how they’d take it.” Meanwhile, the campaign has been circulating on the blogs and generating strong responses from people north of the border. “I find this ad deeply offensive, and needlessly divisive. I will now make a point of drinking other brands. And ‘vodka and tonic’ is my drink,” said one visitor, called New Yorker, on MexicoReporter.com. Reader Paul Green goes into a discussion on the blog Gateway Pundit of whether the U.S. territories ever belonged to Mexico in the first place, and the News12 Long island site invited people to boycott Absolut, with one user, called LivingSmall, writing: “If you drink Absolut vodka, you can voice your approval or disapproval of this advertising campaign with your purchases. I know I will be switching to Grey Goose or Stoli and will never have another bottle of Absolut in my house. “Hey Absolut … that’s my form of social commentary.” — Deborah Bonello and Reed Johnson in Mexico City |
Hmm.
I wonder how the rest of America would react to an “Asolut World” ad for Black Americans?
(SOURCE: LA PLAZA/L.A. TIMES: http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2008/04/mexico-reconque.html )
Hattip to: My DD: http://www.mydd.com/story/2008/4/15/103033/692 and Xicano Power: http://xicanopwr.com/2008/04/absolut-madness/ .
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PERFECTLY LEGAL IMMIGRANTS, UNTIL THEY APPLIED FOR CITIZENSHIP
Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
Dr. Pedro Servano and his wife, Salvacion, legal residents facing deportation, and two of their children, Phoebe and Steven.
SELINSGROVE, Pa. — Dr. Pedro Servano always believed that his journey from his native Philippines to the life of a community doctor in Pennsylvania would lead to American citizenship.
But the doctor, who has tended to patients here in the Susquehanna Valley for more than a decade, is instead battling a deportation order along with his wife.
The Servanos are among a growing group of legal immigrants who reach for the prize and permanence of citizenship, only to run afoul of highly technical immigration statutes that carry the severe penalty of expulsion from the country. For the Servanos, the problem has been a legal hitch involving their marital status when they came from the Philippines some 25 years ago.
Largely overlooked in the charged debate over illegal immigration, many of these are long-term legal immigrants in the United States who were confident of success when they applied for naturalization, and would have continued to live here legally had they not sought to become citizens.
As applications for naturalization have surged, overburdened federal examiners, under pressure to make quick decisions and also weed out any security risks, prefer to err on the side of rejection, immigration lawyers and independent researchers said. In 2007, 89,683 applications for naturalization were denied, about 12 percent of those presented.
In the last 12 years, denial rates have been consistently higher than at any time since the 1920s.
Though precise figures are not available, an increasing number of these denials involve immigrants who believed they were in good legal standing, according to lawyers and researchers. Under the law, a number of grounds for naturalization denial can lead to an order of deportation, and appeals are more limited than in criminal cases.
“It’s no wonder there are so many illegal immigrants,” said Brad Darnell, an electrical engineer from Canada living in California who applied for citizenship but is also now fighting deportation. “The legal method is so intolerant and confusing.”
A legal immigrant since 1991, Mr. Darnell is married to an American and has two American-born sons. But after he presented his naturalization application last year, Mr. Darnell discovered that a 10-year-old conviction for domestic violence involving a former girlfriend, even though it had been reduced to a misdemeanor and erased from his public record, made him ineligible to become a citizen — or even to continue living in the United States.
Since 1996, when an immigration law overhaul first brought intensified scrutiny of citizenship applications, at least 85,000 naturalizations have been turned down each year.
The record year was 2000, when 399,670 applications were denied, one-third of those presented, according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization. More recent denial rates remain high, but have fallen from the peak because more immigrants have prepared with civics classes and immigrant advocates before applying to become citizens, researchers said.
In three recent cases in Florida, aspiring citizens thought their green cards entitled them to vote or register to vote before they were sworn in as Americans. When the immigrants reported their elections activities on their applications, not only were their naturalizations rejected, but they were also ordered to leave the country, according to their lawyer, Jeffrey Brauwerman.
In a current Florida case, a British-born businessman saw his naturalization derailed and was detained for deportation because he forgot to update his home address with the immigration agency, Mr. Brauwerman said. He was charged with ignoring a notice in which immigration examiners mistakenly accused him of a felony he had never committed.
In a case that drew Congressional attention this year in Illinois, Marin Turcinovic, an immigrant from Croatia, was twice denied citizenship because he did not show up at the immigration office to be fingerprinted. As his lawyer explained to no avail, Mr. Turcinovic was a quadriplegic, dependent on a ventilator and unable to leave his home.
Mr. Turcinovic died in April 2004 without becoming a citizen, creating an immigration crisis for his French widow, Corina, who had taken care of him. In January Representative Daniel Lipinski, Democrat of Illinois, presented a bill that halted her deportation.
Immigration officials say denials have increased in the last decade because naturalization applications are increasing. They note that approvals are rising as well. In 1996 naturalizations soared for the first time to more than one million, and they remained above 450,000 each year through 2007.
“Whenever we see a period when large numbers decide to apply, there tend to be larger numbers of people who are not ready or might not meet the requirements,” said Chris Rhatigan, a spokeswoman for Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Officials said the majority of denials went to applicants who failed a required civics and English language test or fell short of residency requirements. Those immigrants generally can try again.
But as the case of the Servano family illustrates, some denials come as a shock to both the applicants and the communities they call home.
Dr. Servano’s mother, five siblings and eight of his wife’s siblings became naturalized citizens, including one brother and two brothers-in-law who made careers in the Navy. His four children are Americans by virtue of being born here. He has been a legal immigrant in the United States for 25 years.
Following an outcry from neighbors, patients and local officials, Department of Homeland Security officials in December temporarily suspended the Servanos’ deportation. The Servanos and their supporters, including Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, are using the unusual reprieve to pursue new legal efforts to resolve the couple’s case.
For the federal government and for many Americans, naturalizations — the legal process by which legal immigrants become citizens — are a measure of immigrants’ willingness to join the society and embrace its civic values.
To become a citizen, a legal permanent resident must have lived in the United States more or less continuously for five years, or three years for the spouse of a citizen. The immigrant must demonstrate good moral character and allegiance to the Constitution, and pass a test of English ability and civics. Since 2002, citizenship applicants also undergo an extensive background check by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Applicants fail the moral character standard if they have been convicted of certain sex, drug or gambling charges or are “habitual drunkards.” They also can fail if they give “false testimony,” a term immigration lawyers say is subject to broad interpretation.
Dr. Servano and his wife, Salvacion, lived for years in the United States with no inkling they might have violated the law. They met in the Philippines when she was a nurse and he was a young traveling doctor. Her strict father insisted she marry, they said, but his family wanted him to wait.
In the early 1980s, their mothers came separately to the United States as legal immigrants and petitioned for residence visas, known as green cards, for Pedro and Salvacion under the category of unmarried children. But between the time the visas were requested and when they were issued in 1985, Pedro and Salvacion, hoping to escape conflicting parental demands, secretly married in the Philippines.
Unaware that their marriage could have violated the terms of their green cards, the Servanos settled in the United States. He completed a second medical residency here and began to practice in blue-collar towns where he made house calls and was known for attention to everyday ills. He and Salvacion married in New Jersey in 1987. They renewed their green cards punctually.
“My goal is to be fully functional and integrated into the society,” Dr. Servano said. They presented their 1991 naturalization applications without seeking a lawyer.
Immigration inspectors reviewing their applications discovered a record of their Philippine marriage. Accused of lying, they were ordered deported. In years of immigration court appeals, the Servanos had no opportunity to present broader evidence of their character, their lawyers said.
People in Selinsgrove and nearby Sunbury, Susquehanna Valley towns where Dr. Servano practices, were surprised to hear in October that the couple had received a final order with a November date for their deportation. Aside from his medical work, he and his wife had bought two blighted buildings on the square in Sunbury, refurbishing them with apartments and offices. Mrs. Servano opened a store, selling lottery tickets, homemade Filipino bread and DVDs in Tagalog, a Philippine language.
In November, more than 100 residents gathered in the Sunbury square for a candlelight vigil on behalf of the Servanos. Thousands of Filipinos in the United States have signed petitions supporting them.
“The fact that they want to displace and get rid of people we here feel are exceptionally good citizens quite frankly just doesn’t make any sense,” said Mayor Jesse C. Woodring of Sunbury.
The Servanos, huddled on the couch in their home in a Selinsgrove development, seemed numb at the prospect of returning to the Philippines.
“I live here, so I like America now,” Mrs. Servano said. “For 25 years we’ve been here; we didn’t even visit the Philippines. So it’s really hard.”
Their son, Peter, 16, an American, expressed his siblings’ anguish about being forced to separate either from their parents or from the only home they know.
“I want to stay here because all my friends are here, and I’ve grown up here, so it would be hard to leave,” Peter said. “But it would be hard not to go.”
Michael Gilhooly, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles deportations, said the Servanos’ removal had been suspended based on new information from Mr. Specter about their humanitarian role. Other immigration officials said the Servanos could recover their legal status by applying for new green cards as parents of citizen children.
(SOURCE: The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/12/us/12naturalize.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin# )
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FROME THE ARCHIVES: VICTIMS OF TRAFFICKING AND VIOLENCE PROTECTION ACT OF 2000: 2007 REPORT
“Trafficking in persons is a modern-day form of slavery, a new type of global slave trade. Perpetrators prey on the most weak among us, primarily women and children, for profit and gain. They lure victims into involuntary servitude and sexual slavery. Today we are again called by conscience to end the debasement of our fellow men and women. As in the 19th century, committed abolitionists around the world have come together in a global movement to confront this repulsive crime. President George W. Bush has committed the United States Government to lead in combating this serious 21st century challenge, and all nations that are resolved to end human trafficking have a strong partner in the United States.”
— Secretary Rice
The Report
In addition to the HTML-based files listed below, this report is available in PDF format as a single file [PDF: 22 MB
]. To view the PDF file, you will need to download, at no cost, the Adobe Acrobat Reader.
— Table of Contents (expanded)
— Letter from Secretary Condoleezza Rice
— Introduction
— Learning More: The Forms and Impact of Human Trafficking
— Policy Approaches to Trafficking in Persons
— Topics of Special Interest
— Global Law Enforcement Data
— Commendable International Efforts
— Heroes Acting To End Modern-Day Slavery
— Tier Placements
— U.S. Government Domestic Anti-Trafficking Efforts
— Country Narratives
— Special Cases
— Relevant International Conventions
— Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000
— Stopping Human Trafficking, Sexual Exploitation, and Abuse by International Peacekeepers
— Glossary of Acronyms
— A Closing Note From the Drafters of the Report
— PDF Version: Trafficking in Persons Report, June 2007 [
22110 Kb]
Related Material
Remarks by Secretary Rice at the Report Release
Remarks by Ambassador Lagon at the Report Release
SOURCE: http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2007/index.htm?lid=state_TIP&lpos=day:txt:TIP
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MEN COMBATTING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: TAKE THE PLEDGE
I came across this PDF article via the U.S. Department of Justice website ( http://www.ovw.usdoj.gov ). The study addresses what men can do to stop the violence of rape, domestic abuse, and other forms of abuse that harms and kills women and girls.
The article, “What They Grow Up To Be, Depends on What You Teach Them”, can be found at this link: http://www.ovw.usdoj.gov/doj_widershot_2.pdf
Men can raise their sons to treat women and girls with respect, humanity and deference. Men can pledge to never harm a woman or girl. Men can speak out against the violence of verbal abuse, physical abuse and psychological abuse that pervades the lives of women and girls. Men can work as allies with women in preventing rape and other forms of violence against women. Men can speak up when hearing men spout sexist, misogynistic epithets against women, both in their family, and out of their family, and in defense of women of other races, as well. Men can speak up and out against sexualized gendered racism that hurts and defames WOC. Men can work both nationally and locally to dismantle sexist belief systems, social structures, and institutional practices that oppress women and children and dehumanize men themselves. Women are not the only ones harmed by the devastation of male patriarchy—men suffer from its destructive effects as well with the lies that men must be aggressive and domineering in order to be considered a man.
Men must constantly and vigilantly work amongst themselves to help end the violence against women that takes the lives of so many mothers, wives, sisters, daughters, cousins, aunts and granddaughters.
Men must make a true committment to work for the abolition of violence against women.
Men must take the pledge to raise sons who are aware of the humanity of women and girls.
The lives of women you save may be the ones of your own family.
Here are the organizations that address the role that men have in fighting to end the sexual and domestic abuse against women and girls:
Adelphi University Sports Leadership Institute:
The mission of the Sports Leadership Institute (SLI) at Adelphi University is to reinforce the positive role of sports in teaching life lessons and to investigate and offer solutions to counter the negative effects of sports on our society. SLI Executive Director Don McPherson, a former NFL quarterback, worked with the Family Violence Prevention Fund to develop the Coaching Boys into Men program which works to actively engage men in efforts to curtail domestic violence.
http://www.sli.adelphi.edu/communityservices/sli/
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Emerge:
Founded in 1977, Emerge was the first abuser education program in the United States. Since its creation, Emerge has been a national leader in working to end violence in intimate relationships. In working towards its goal of eliminating domestic violence, Emerge seeks to educate individual abusers, prevent young people from learning to accept violence in their relationships, improve institutional responses to domestic violence, and increase public awareness about the causes and solutions to partner violence. With the development of parenting education groups for fathers, Emerge has expanded its mission to include a goal of helping men to become more responsible parents.
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Family Violence Prevention Fund: Coaching Boys into Men:
Coaching Boys into Men is a nationwide media campaign put forward by the Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF) which encourages men to teach boys that violence against women and girls is wrong. FVPF has partnered with the National High School Athletic Coaches Association to encourage coaches to become active partners in this effort.
http://endabuse.org/programs/display.php3?DocID=9916
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Family Violence Prevention Fund: Founding Fathers Campaign:
The Founding Fathers Campaign, also a campaign of the Family Violence Prevention Fund (FVPF), is made up of men from all walks of life committed to ending violence against women. Despite different ideologies, political persuasions, and lifestyles, they are united in their commitment to finding a solution to ending the violence. The Founding Fathers Campaign is striking a chord with men from across the country because it challenges them not with blame, but with hope and the opportunity to be part of the solution to end violence against women.
http://endabuse.org/programs/display.php3?DocID=9933
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Men Against Sexual Violence:
Men Against Sexual Violence (MASV), sponsored by the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Rape, is a forum designed to engage males in actively working together with women to eliminate sexual violence. MASV asks men to personally pledge to never commit, condone, or remain silent about sexual violence and to use their resources to support change.
http://www.menagainstsexualviolence.org/
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Men Can Stop Rape:
Men Can Stop Rape empowers male youth and the institutions that serve them to work as allies with women in preventing rape and other forms of violence against women. Through awareness-to-action education and community organization, Men Can Stop Rape promotes gender equality and builds men’s capacity to be strong without being violent.
http://www.mencanstoprape.org/
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Men Stopping Violence:
Men Stopping Violence (MSV) is a social change organization dedicated to ending violence against women. They work both nationally and locally to dismantle sexist belief systems, social structures, and institutional practices that oppress women and children and dehumanize men themselves. They also offer several different programs to hold men accountable for their violent behavior.
http://www.menstoppingviolence.org/index.php
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Mentors in Violence Prevention:
The mission of Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) is primarily to empower men who are not abusive towards women to confront those who are. MVP provides gender violence prevention training and materials to high schools, colleges, fraternities, athletic organizations, the U.S. military services, law enforcement agencies, community organizations, and corporations. MVP was founded by nationally known activist and lecturer Jackson Katz.
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One in Four, Inc.:
One in Four, Inc., previously known as NO MORE, is an organization dedicated to the preventing rape through the thoughtful application of theory and research to rape prevention programming. One in Four, Inc. provides presentations, training, and technical assistance to both men and women, with a focus on all-male programming targeted to colleges, high schools, the military, and local community organizations. One in Four, Inc. also serves as an umbrella organization for the all-male sexual assault peer educations groups, which constitute the “One in Four” chapters. One in Four, Inc. also sponsors the “One in Four” national tour, whereby professional educators travel nationwide to conduct rape prevention programs with boys and men.
White Ribbon Campaign:
The White Ribbon Campaign is one of the largest efforts worldwide of men working to end men’s violence against women. The White ribbon Campaign is an educational organization that encourages reflection and discussion that leads to personal and collective action among men. Wearing a white ribbon is a personal pledge never to commit, condone, nor remain silent about violence against women.
Men play an important role in our nation’s efforts to stop violence against women. All men have the opportunity to serve as role models for other men and boys in regards to the treatment of women and girls. Boys need to be taught at a young age that violence against women is wrong and will not be tolerated. Men are in a unique position to communicate this message in a strong, compassionate, and meaningful way. Working in partnership, men and women together can make enormous strides toward changing attitudes and perceptions around domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking.
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Ann
