Rustin (2023) - 5 of 5 Dreams
I quite enjoyed the movie. As I told my wife, this is the sort of movie that leaves me emotionally drained. I'm sad that Bayard Rustin isn't a name I recalled hearing earlier in my life. I will definitely be looking up a biography or another historical book about him and his story.
This film reminds me how I want a series of documentaries, working title, "Just off Screen" - which highlights people like Rustin, who are important players in notable historic movements or moments, but who tend to fall just out of the focus of history's cameras.
I enjoyed this article about the film by Tanisha Ford, a professor at CUNY. It lauds the highlighting of Rustin and also notes some of the overlooked aspects in service to the narrative. Here are that article's two closing paragraphs:
Rustin does not offer any altogether new revelations about the significance of the March on Washington. In fact, it reifies the widely accepted narrative of the march as a triumphant moment for the movement and a transformative moment in US history. It does not zoom out beyond the groups assembled in its two rooms to show the degree to which the march was hotly contested by the more radical, grassroots arm of the movement. For example, Malcolm X referred to the march as the "Farce on Washington." He was critical of the White House's heavy involvement in the planning of the march and the big dollar donations that "Big Six" civil rights leaders such as Wilkins, King, and Whitney Young received from philanthropic foundations to underwrite it.
But the film is triumphant in that it proves that centering the most marginalized, like Bayard Rustin, brings other underappreciated, undercelebrated activists into the national conversation. In the film's closing scene, Bayard Rustin is collecting trash from the National Mall lawn. King has given his now classic "I have a Dream" speech, to rousing applause. Wilkins and the Big Six have brokered an Oval Office meeting with President Kennedy to make him commit to civil rights legislation. And yet Rustin—somewhat by his own choice—does not enter that room. As this scene conveys, his work is, literally, at the grassroots. Thus, by focusing on grassroots organizers, Rustin pays tribute to people such as Anna Arnold Hedgeman, Ella Baker, Joyce and Dorie Ladner, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Cortland Cox, Rachelle Horowitz—many of whom are still alive to receive their flowers.
|
"Do you have a moral duty to watch the police beating of Tyre Nichols?"
A friend asked a similar question on Facebook yesterday.
Is watching it ghoulish voyeurism?
Or is not watching it tacit complicity in the status quo?
How do you feel about the answer, and why? I can't figure out where I stand.
This was my response:
I turn away from watching the video itself, but I read the responses and editorials about it. I have always shied away from watching death. As [name removed, another person in the thread] said, and I fully acknowledge, this is my cowardly privilege. I don't watch horror movies, I avoid almost all suspense, because it gets into my head and torments me for a long while after.
I already know how I feel about this, and the awfulness on display here. My feelings here are pegged already in the anger and sadness and frustration, and watching it won't do anything to drive those further in me.
The editorial on WaPo shows others are asking the same question. I especially appreciated this excerpt:
Allissa V. Richardson, a University of Southern California journalism professor who researches Black Americans' use of social media as journalism, said people should not feel a moral obligation to view violent records of important events.
Richardson said there is both power and risk in the ways that smartphones and social media regularly broadcast so much evidence of brutality to us.
"People should be very careful about consuming these videos casually through social media," Richardson said in an email. "For many Black Americans especially, it can be retraumatizing to see someone who looks like you or a loved one be brutalized this way."
Richardson also said that when violent moments grab our attention, we may conflate passive watching with action.
"Pressing play is not the same as pressing for tangible changes. Social media can make us forget that sometimes," she said.
|
A reminder about the true Dr. King
The King we are being presented is the corporate King, the creature of the white government who used this pacifist myth to beat down the Black freedom movement of the 1960's with blood, and of which he was one of the major casualties, along with Malcolm X, the other major leader of that period. We are fed this garbage every year at this time, which totally circumvents logic and perverts history about Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement itself.
It is done to really remove him from his people, and put him in the hands of the White political establishment, and in that respect that is what has been done. They also want to give us a man they claim who was a sheer pacifist, and could not support the liberation movements which existed all during the revolutionary 1960's. That also was false since we know that Dr. King was opposed to the Vietnam war and reached a pointed where he began to criticize the political institutions of the capitalist government and economy itself. That is why they killed him.
|
"America’s First Black Physician Sought to Heal a Nation’s Persistent Illness"
James McCune Smith was not just any physician. He was the first African American to earn a medical degree, educated at the University of Glasgow in the 1830s, when no American university would admit him. For this groundbreaking achievement alone, Smith warrants greater appreciation.
But Smith was also one of the nation’s leading abolitionists. In 1859, Frederick Douglass declared, "No man in this country more thoroughly understands the whole struggle between freedom and slavery than does Dr. Smith, and his heart is as broad as his understanding." A prolific writer, Smith was not only the first African American to publish peer-reviewed articles in medical journals; he also wrote essays and gave lectures refuting pseudoscientific claims of black inferiority and forecast the transformational impact African Americans were destined to make on world culture.
|
Mary Mcleod Bethune becomes first black American in National Statuary Hall
I am ashamed to admit that I had to go look her up. Her name was familiar as someone I learned about in school, and I believed she was taught as part of Black History and the Civil Rights, but I couldn't be more specific. Here's looking to celebrate as that hall is filled with more and more non-White Americans.
Here is a great biography on the Bethune-Cookman University website:
Bethune-Cookman University’s founder, Mary McLeod Bethune, is one of America’s most inspirational daughters. Educator. National civil rights pioneer and activist. Champion of African American women’s rights and advancement. Advisor to Presidents of the United States. The first in her family not to be born into slavery, she became one of the most influential women of her generation.
Dr. Bethune famously started the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training Institute for Negro Girls on October 3, 1904 with $1.50, vision, an entrepreneurial mindset, resilience and faith in God. She created “pencils” from charred wood, ink from elderberries, and mattresses from moss-stuffed corn sacks. Her first students were five little girls and her five-year-old son, Albert Jr. In less than two years, the school grew to 250 students. Recognizing the health disparities and lack of medical treatment available to African Americans in Daytona Beach, she also founded the Mary McLeod Hospital and Training School for Nurses, which at the time was the only school of its kind that served African American women on the east coast.
|
Martin Luther King Day
Over ten years ago, closer to twelve now, Katie and I took a trip to D.C. I was attending a Drupal conference there for work (back when I was a full-time web developer) and we decided to take extra time and see the museums and landmarks.
I will forever remember what Katie wanted on this trip. She wanted a recording of King's "I Have a Dream" speech on her iPod, so she could sit on the steps of the Lincoln memorial and experience and imagine it. I can still see her clearly sitting on the steps in her coat, headphones on, listening to the words of the Reverend and tears silently falling down her cheeks.
The injustice that someone as great as him was murdered and not allowed to continue his work in driving social reform is a terrible tragedy. And it is crucial that people today not gloss over what today is meant to be - a day of remembering and honoring him for his work.
Two years ago, while visiting family in Memphis we went to the Civil Rights Museum which has been built in the motel and surrounding buildings of where he was murdered. It was eye opening for me, and educated me on a lot about the civil rights movement that I had no idea. Things that history class had glossed over or ignored completely.
It's important to understand the magnitude of effort it took to, essentially, turn the dial one or two notches on social injustice. They moved the needle. They changed things. But not completely, leaving more still to be done. It is a fight which requires more figures to stand up and speak out and fight back. Things we are seeing around us, from last year's protests and the riot at the capitol unveiling how many members of law enforcement side with a personality rather than the Constitution.
From the 'I Have a Dream' speech:
We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.
Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
|
Rep. John Lewis on the first time he met MLK Jr.
Rep. John Lewis speaks on MLK's death:
[{embed}]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80jUWTBSOVs\[{/embed}]
|
