Coffee and an Doughnut, please.

Twelve million black Africans were shipped to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Of these, an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United States. The slave population in the United States had grown to four million by the 1860 Census.

Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1, 1863, freeing all slaves.

In a bid to stop black Americans from being equal, the southern states passed a series of laws known as Jim Crow laws which discriminated against blacks and made sure that they were segregated from whites.

David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil inspired student sit-ins and protests that spread across the South. Within days, sit-ins were occurring at Woolworth and Kress stores from New York to San Francisco.

February 1st, 1960, these four students from North Carolina sit down at a "whites-only" Woolworth's lunch counter and ask to be served. They are refused. They are ready to be arrested, but are not. They stay until the store closes. The next day they return, now joined by others. They sit from 11am to 3pm but again are not served. Instead they sit and study. The local media cover this second sit-in. The students form the Student Executive Committee for Justice and they receive NAACP endorsement.

The sit-ins, picket lines, and boycotts continue off and on as negotiations get under way, the lunch counters are closed and reopened. Woolworth and Kress stores in the North and West are boycotted and picketed in support of the sit-in movements that are now spreading across the upper and mid South. Dudley High students carry on the movement as the college students leave for the summer. In July, the national drugstore chains agree to serve all "properly dressed and well behaved people," regardless of race.

http://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis60.htm#1960greensboro

Nobel Peace Prize for Nasa People

The 110,000 Nasa people of Colombia, live in the north of Cauca. It is estimated that over 50 percent of children from Nasa families in northern Cauca suffer from malnutrition, and 24 percent of the population does not have land with which to sustain their families.

Landowners of the region have been involved in planning massacres of indigenous farmers, displacing the residents and opening up territory for resource extraction. The Nasa resistance to hold land to sustain their communities is as old as the Spanish conquest. European settlers have pushed the Nasa peoples from the fertile lowlands into the highlands. It’s estimated that two million people were displaced throughout the country, abandoning 350,000 small farms. The massive displacements in the mid-twentieth century served the large landowners in the area around Cauca with large sugar cane plantations taking up huge tracts of land. FARC is an ever present para-military group that continues to surround Cauca.

Despite the massive killings and terrorization of the communities, San José de Apartadó declared itself a peace community in 1997. The 1,300 Residents of the rural community pledged not to engage in war, either directly or indirectly, and to negotiate peaceful solutions to end the conflict. This declaration caused the armed groups to declare San José de Apartadó as aiding the “enemy.” Many sectors within Colombia have joined together in support of the Nasa people, contributing what they can to their peaceful struggle for justice, land and autonomy.

 AFSC, a Quaker humanitarian organization, nominated two Colombian groups for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their commitment to nonviolence during conflict. The Nasa have won Colombia's national peace prize twice for their commitment to non-violent social organizing and struggle.

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1452/61/

http://www.ww4report.com/node/3203

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/23/indigenous_colombians_begin_10_000_strong

Like a rock....

In a publication entitled Alcatraz Is Not An Island (1972), Native American anthropologist/historian Dr. Jack Forbes from UC Davis penned the following: "In the 1870's Natchez Winnemucca, respected chief of the Pyramid Lake Paiutes, was arrested and sent as a prisoner to Alcatraz. His crime: Attempting to resist and expose the corruption of the government's agents on his reservation. Natchez did not stay on "The Rock" very long, but other Indians, guilty of the "crime" of resisting white conquest, were frequent visitors to the prison. Now in 1969 modern-day Native Americans are attempting to claim Alcatraz Island in order to both obtain facilities for educational programs and to publicize the desperate circumstances under which Indian people live..... There is little question but that the Muwekma Indian people of San Francisco and the Hulueko [Coast Miwok people] of Marin County were, in the old days, frequent visitors to all of the islands in the San Francisco Bay. …"

It is said that the Native American oral history of Alcatraz Island has been largely lost because of colonization and deculturalization of the Native American populations of the area. However, from what I could gather the island was used for several purposes. Originally Indians believed the chunk of land in the middle of the San Francisco Bay fostered evil spirits. The over 10,000 indigenous people who, later to be called the Ohlone (a Miwok Indian word meaning "western people"), living in the coastal area between Point Sur and the San Francisco Bay, used the island as a place of isolation for tribal members who broke a tribal law, as a camping spot, an area for gathering foods, especially bird eggs and sea-life, and that Alcatraz was utilized also as a hiding place for many Indians attempting to escape from the California Mission system.

After colonization of the region, Alcatraz began a long history of imprisonment. Among the prisoners were many Native Americans, including the largest single group of Indian prisoners sentenced to confinement on Alcatraz, which occurred in January 1895 when the U.S. government arrested, tried and shipped nineteen Moqui Hopi to the island. Native Americans continued to be confined as prisoners in the barracks on the island through the 1800s and the early 1900s.

            In 1964, a year after the penitentiary closed, and again in 1969, Alcatraz was occupied by Indians of All Tribes. The occupation of 1969, headed by Richard Oakes, lasted 19 months. The occupation of Alcatraz was one of the most successful American Indian protest actions of the 20th century. The occupation also brought Indian rights issues to the attention of the federal government. 

The occupation succeeded in getting the federal government to adopt an official policy of Indian self-determination. From 1970 to 1971, Congress passed 52 legislative proposals on behalf of American Indians to support tribal self-rule. President Nixon increased the BIA budget by 225 percent, doubled funds for Indian health care and established the Office of Indian Water Rights. Also during Nixon's presidency, scholarship funds were increased by $848,000 for college students. The Office of Equal Opportunity provided more funds for economic development and drug and alcohol recovery programs and expanded housing, health care and other programs.

Every November since 1975, Native Americans have gathered on Alcatraz for what is called "Un-Thanksgiving Day" to honor the occupation and those who continue to fight for Native American rights today.

http://www.nps.gov/alca/historyculture/we-hold-the-rock.htm

http://www.nps.gov/archive/alcatraz/indian.html

http://www.nps.gov/alcatraz/

http://www.pbs.org/itvs/alcatrazisnotanisland/activism.html

This Land Is Your Land

When I was in elementary school, we learned about Washington State history. We learned the lyrics to Woody Guthrie's songs that protested class inequality in the United States. He wrote "This Land Is Your Land." Guthrie was also commissioned by the Bonneville Power Administration to write a song about the Grand Coulee Dam. "Roll along Columbia. You can ramble to the sea, But river while you're ramblin' you can do some work for me."

What Guthrie failed to represent in his powerhouse sponsored "protest" lyrics, was the voices of those being drowned by the dam. The Colville Nation lived off the lands of Central Washington before President Roosevelt ordered to cement their sacred place and flood and destroy fishing grounds. Perhaps while teaching local history, we can leave the "protest" lyrics to those who are still suffering the effects a Manifest Destiny motivated muscle flex by a narrow minded President. The Grand Coulee dam represents the irrational desire of white settlers to massively irrigate the plains. The Grand Coulee dam represents historical trauma for the Colville Nation.

Displacing native peoples in order to exploit the land for environmentally destructive energy is still happening all over the world. Rather than become violent or give up, many indigenous peoples are using ritual to communicate to the government and the media that the land is sacred and is home. The Winnemem Wintu natives from California have protested the proposed expansion of the Shasta Dam with traditional war dances. Over 1000 Indigenous Brazilians from the Xingu river also carried out pre-war ritual to challenge the government's desire to displace over 15,000 natives in order to construct a dam. Although these communities have not physically pursued warfare, these war rituals represents the determination to peacefully fight against state-sponsored efforts to dam sacred land.


Picture at top features the Colville chief with government engineers in 1941 during opening of the dam (credit: http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF1504/Harden/Harden.html)

See also... http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19930829&slug=1718180