Frederick Douglass didn’t know what day he was born — having been born a slave — so he picked a day, February 14. Timothy Sandefur at Freespace notes a new book on the way about Douglass, and a few other details.
Douglass is to me the very model of an ideological reformer. He lived his beliefs 100 percent (even marrying a white woman in 1884; can you imagine?) and he, in his own words, agitated, agitated, agitated. But he was respectful, decorous, dignified, rebellious, and intelligent. He was eloquent and smart, but he knew the necessity of violence in some circumstances. And although he understood the need for occasional compromise, he compromised in the right way, never letting go of the ultimate vision and never letting his enemies forget that he knew why they were wrong, and that he would not rest until they were set right. Even then, his focus was not on defeating his opponents, but at getting to the right result. “The man who has thoroughly embraced the principles of justice, love and liberty,” he wrote, “like the true preacher of Christianity, is less anxious to reproach the world of its sins, than to win it to repentance. His great work on earth is to exemplify, and to illustrate, and to engraft those principles on the living and practical understandings of all men within the reach of his influence…. It is to snatch from the bosom of nature the latent facts of each individual man’s experience and with a steady hand to hold them up fresh and glowing, enforcing with all his power their acknowledgment and practical adoption.” That accurately describes Douglass’s own conduct in his life. He was a man of principles and a man of action.
Gotta note that for the calendar next year.
Years ago, the first significant piece I ever read on Douglass claimed that he was in the White House often enough to know his way around, and on more than one occasion was mistaken for President Lincoln by visitors unfamiliar with either man. It’s difficult to know how accurate such a claim could be, and I’ve not found it noted anywhere in the last decade or so. For my U.S. history class skeptics, however, I got a lucite cube that allowed two photos to be displayed, and displayed Douglass on one side and Lincoln on the other. Looking quickly, students often mistook which one was on display. I suppose such identity confusion is possible.
Douglass’s story is great inspiration, and a testament to the value of education. Every school kid should know it.
SMU has about an hour of tape of a speech Dr. King delivered at SMU in 1966. While the speech is not particularly noteworthy, it’s a good example of King’s rhetoric of the time. You can put it on your iPod.
It’s a real period piece — King in a southern, formerly segregated town, so soon after the Voting Rights Act. Real history, real people. Very interesting.
SMU has activities running all week long. Things change in 40 years.
(Check out the socks and ties of the men on stage — and where are the women?)
Photos from SMU, from the archives of the campus newspaper, The SMU Campus.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Tony Campolo is an evangelical Christian, a sociology professor and preacher who for the past 15 years or so has been a thorn in the side of political conservatives and other evangelicals, for taking generally more liberal stands, against poverty, for tolerance in culture and politics, and so on. His trademark sermon is an upbeat call to action and one of the more plagiarized works in Christendom, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s Coming” (listen to it here).
Rev. Tony Campolo; photo from Berean Research.
Since he’s so close to the mainstream of American political thought, Campolo is marginalized by many of the more conservative evangelists in the U.S. Campolo is not a frequent guest on the Trinity Broadcast Network, on Pat Robertson’s “700 Club,” nor on the white, nominally-Christian, low-budget knock-off of “Sabado Gigante!,” “Praise the Lord” (with purple hair and everything).
Campolo came closest to real national fame when he counseled President Bill Clinton on moral and spiritual issues during the Lewinsky scandal.
His opposite-editorial piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday, “The real danger in Darwin is not evolution, but racism,” is out of character for Campolo as a non-conservative evangelistic thinker — far from what most Christians expect from Campolo either from the pulpit or in the college classroom. The piece looks as though it was lifted wholesale from Jerry Falwell or D. James Kennedy, showing little familiarity with the science or history of evolution, and repeating canards that careful Christians shouldn’t repeat.
Campolo’s piece is inaccurate in several places, and grossly misleading where it’s not just wrong. He pulls out several old creationist hoaxes, cites junk science as if it were golden, and generally gets the issue exactly wrong.
Evolution science is a block to racism. It has always stood against racism, in the science that undergirds the theory and in its applications by those scientists and policy makers who were not racists prior to their discovery of evolution theory. Darwin himself was anti-racist. One of the chief reasons the theory has been so despised throughout the American south is its scientific basis for saying whites and blacks are so closely related. This history should not be ignored, or distorted.
At the time of this writing, it appears the site for the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center has been hacked — an illustration of the need for citizens to stand up for civil rights and human decency, still.
LYNDON JOHNSON: It’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.
BILL MOYERS: As he finished, Congress stood and thunderous applause shook the chamber. Johnson would soon sign into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and black people were no longer second class citizens. Martin Luther King had marched and preached and witnessed for this day. Countless ordinary people had put their bodies on the line for it, been berated, bullied and beaten, only to rise, organize and struggle on, against the dogs and guns, the bias and burning crosses. Take nothing from them; their courage is their legacy. But take nothing from the president who once had seen the light but dimly, as through a dark glass — and now did the right thing. Lyndon Johnson threw the full weight of his office on the side of justice. Of course the movement had come first, watered by the blood of so many, championed bravely now by the preacher turned prophet who would himself soon be martyred. But there is no inevitability to history, someone has to seize and turn it. With these words at the right moment — “we shall overcome” — Lyndon Johnson transcended race and color, and history, too — reminding us that a president matters, and so do we.
December 15th is Bill of Rights Day, a tradition since Franklin Roosevelt first declared it in 1941.
It falls on Saturday this year — which means teachers can choose whether to commemorate it Friday, or next Monday, or on both days. It marks the date of the approval of the Bill of Rights, in 1790.
Texas requires social studies teachers to spend a day on the Constitution. The law isn’t well enforced, but Bill of Rights Day might be a good time to fill the legal duty in your classrooms.
More material here, and the National Archives material can be reached here.
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* The ides is merely the middle of the month. Of course you thought of Shakespeare’s witch warning Julius Caesar to “beware the ides of March.” In this case, we can celebrate the ides of December — Hanukkah mostly gone, Christmas, Eid and KWANZAA on the way. Read the rest of this entry »
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
The Bill of Rights Institute invites you to celebrate Bill of Rights Day on December 15, 2007 by taking advantage of the resources on the Constitution and Bill of Rights we are offering educatorsFREE of charge. These activities will engage your students and demonstrate the importance of the Bill of Rights in their lives. Utilize the lessons on December 14th as part of a Bill of Rights Day celebration for your students or save the lessons for use throughout the school year.
Access our website and find:
Founders Online includes audio clips, biographical essays, classroom activities
videos on our nation’s Founding Fathers
Readings for your students on the Bill of Rights
Free, complete lesson plans for middle and high school students
Background information from Princeton University professor Dr. Ken Kerch
on First Amendment freedoms
On the evening of December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, an African American, was arrested for disobeying an Alabama law requiring black passengers to relinquish seats to white passengers when the bus was full. Blacks were also required to sit at the back of the bus. Her arrest sparked a 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system and led to a 1956 Supreme Court decision banning segregation on public transportation.
Rosa Parks made a nearly perfect subject for a protest on racism. College-educated, trained in peaceful protest at the famous Highlander Folk School, Parks was known as a peaceful and respected person. The sight of such a proper woman being arrested and jailed would provide a schocking image to most Americans. Americans jolted awake.
Often lost in the retelling of the story are the threads that tie together the events of the civil rights movement through the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. As noted, Parks was a trained civil rights activist. Such training in peaceful and nonviolent protest provided a moral power to the movement probably unattainable any other way. Parks’ arrest was not planned, however. Parks wrote that as she sat on the bus, she was thinking of the tragedy of Emmet Till, the young African American man from Chicago, brutally murdered in Mississippi early in 1955. She was thinking that someone had to take a stand for civil rights, at about the time the bus driver told her to move to allow a white man to take her seat. To take a stand, she remained seated. [More below the fold] Read the rest of this entry »
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Mayfield is the Oregon lawyer who was accused of being a participant in the al Quaeda-connected bombings of commuter trains in Madrid, Spain. The accusation appears to have been based mostly on Mr. Mayfield’s religious affiliation, and not on any evidence. Mayfield was arrested, charged and held in jail, until the charges were dismissed.
Mayfield’s suit points out that the government acted illegally against him, in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which bans searches without a valid warrant. It appears that Mr. Mayfield’s religion was the chief basis for the search warrants obtained.
In what other nation, in a time considered to be a time of war, could such a suit protecting a citizen against his own government be entertained? In what other nation could one judge declare such a major action of its government to be illegal, with any expectation that the government would obey such a ruling?
1968 propelled history in dramatic fashion, much of it tragic. History teachers might await the 40th anniversary stories of 1968’s events, knowing that the newspapers and television specials will provide much richer material than any textbook could hope for.
Was 1967 less momentous? Perhaps. But an anniversary this week only serves to highlight how the entire decade was a series of turning points for the United States. This week marks the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s issuing the decision inLoving v. Virginia. The Lovings had been arrested, convicted and exiled from the state of Virginia for the crime of — brace yourself — getting married.
Photo of Richard and Mildred Loving from Bettman-Corbis Archive.
You see, Virginia in those days prohibited marriage between a black person and a white person. So did 15 other states. In language that is quaint and archaic to all but Biblical literalist creationists, the trial judge said:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
The Department leaders, Klein, Seidman and Alonso, lawyers all (perhapsShakespeare was correct), are rigid ideologues who have alienated their work force as well as the parents of their constituents
Did you catch that? Especially the link to the Shakespeare line, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers?”
This is not exactly history we’re fisking here — it’s drama, I suppose. Still, it falls neatly into the category of debunkings, not too unlike the debunking of the story of Millard Fillmore’s bathtub.
The line from Shakespeare is accurate. It’s from Henry VI, Part II. But it’s not so much a diatribe against lawyers as it is a part of a satirical indictment of those who would overthrow government, and oppress the masses for personal gain.
It is Dick the Butcher who says the line. Jack Cade has just expressed his warped view that he should be king, after having attempted a coup d’etat and taken power, at least temporarily. Cade starts in with his big plans to reform the economy — that is, to let his friends eat cheap or free.
Dick chimes in to suggest that in the new regime, the lawyers ought to be the first to go — they protect rights of people and property rights, and such rights won’t exist in Cade’s imagined reign. Cade agrees. The purpose of killing the lawyers, then, is to perpetuate their rather lawless regime.
At that moment others in Cade’s conspiracy enter, having captured the town Clerk of Chatham. The man is put on trial for his life, accused of being able to read and keep accounts. Worse, he’s been caught instructing young boys to read.Read the rest of this entry »
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Congress this week approved a renewal of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Senate voting yesterday, 98-0. The Act was a watershed in civil rights legislation, a law whose effects are clearly visible in the diversity of people who populate government in municipal, state and federal government now.
This photo by Doug Mills of the New York Times is worth several thousand words. Its caption: Representative John Lewis, left, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy in the room where President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.
As the Senate voted, Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, who was beaten in the 1965 voting rights march on Montgomery, Ala., came to the floor, and other lawmakers provided their memories of the era as they spoke in support of the legislation.
“I recall watching President Lyndon Baines Johnson sign the 1965 act just off the chamber of the Senate,” said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and one of three current senators serving when the law was originally passed. “We knew that day we had changed the country forever, and indeed we had.”
This event is a good lynch-pin for history lessons on the civil rights movement. Teachers may want to clip the story and photos from today’s papers to save for lesson plans through the year.
(West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd is one of the other three senators who were there in 1965. Who is the third?)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Or, until that account is unsuspended by the forces supporting Donald Trump: Follow @FillmoreWhite, the account of the Millard Fillmore White House Library
We've been soaking in the Bathtub for several months, long enough that some of the links we've used have gone to the Great Internet in the Sky.
If you find a dead link, please leave a comment to that post, and tell us what link has expired.
Thanks!
Retired teacher of law, economics, history, AP government, psychology and science. Former speechwriter, press guy and legislative aide in U.S. Senate. Former Department of Education. Former airline real estate, telecom towers, Big 6 (that old!) consultant. Lab and field research in air pollution control.
My blog, Millard Fillmore's Bathtub, is a continuing experiment to test how to use blogs to improve and speed up learning processes for students, perhaps by making some of the courses actually interesting. It is a blog for teachers, to see if we can use blogs. It is for people interested in social studies and social studies education, to see if we can learn to get it right. It's a blog for science fans, to promote good science and good science policy. It's a blog for people interested in good government and how to achieve it.
BS in Mass Communication, University of Utah
Graduate study in Rhetoric and Speech Communication, University of Arizona
JD from the National Law Center, George Washington University
Posted by Ed Darrell 
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 