Selections from People Get Ready: The Struggle For Human Rights

 

 

Cairo, Egypt — February 8, 2011

Yuri Kozyrev / NOOR for Time

"Beyond the revolutions in Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen and Libya, I also traveled to cover the protests in Moscow, Greece and Tunis. I came to the conclusion that each revolution must be assessed in its own context, because each had a distinctive impact. The drama of each revolution unfolded separately. Each had its own heroes, its own crises. Each, therefore, demands its own narrative. In the end, the differences between them may turn out to be more important than their similarities, however.  And the common thing about all these protests is the number of young people who really want to bring changes to their country. That’s what’s most incredible. We have a new generation of people who are sick and tired of what’s going on. Call it the Jasmine Revolution, the Arab Spring or the Facebook Revolution, there’s a powerful Sirocco blowing across the world, and young people realize there’s another life and they want to live differently." --Yuri Kozyrev

Previous Selections

People Get Ready: The Struggle For Human Rights exhibition continues through September 23, 2012

August 26, 1970: The Women's Strike for Equality

Women in Parade Down 5th Avenue on the 50th Anniversary of the Passage of the 19th Amendment, New York, 1970 -Photograph by John Olsen


The Women’s Strike for Equality was a strike which took place in the United States on August 26, 1970. It celebrated the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, which effectively gave American women the right to vote. The rally was sponsored by the National Organization for Women (NOW). More than 20,000 women gathered for the protest in New York City and throughout the country

 At the march for Women’s Strike for Equality, the three preconditions for emancipation included child care, legal abortion and equal pay.

The Guardian: From the archive, 27 August 1970: US women find some advertising offensive, insulting and degrading

 

Ken Regan: Gloria Steinhem, Women's Liberation March,

New York, August 26,1970

 

 

 

 

 

Ken Regan: Bella Abzug, Women's Liberation March, New York, August 26, 1970

 

 

 

 Ken Regan: Women's Liberation March, New York, August 26, 1970

 

 

 

 

Ken Regan: Women's Liberation March, New York, August 26, 1970



Related: People Get Ready: The Struggle For Human Rights

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"in an age of information overload, now, more than ever, seeing is believing"

Seeing is believing: Human rights content in the age of social media

Via Storyful.blog


"Remember this famous image of a naked Vietnamese girl running in agony after being hit with napalm? Or how the plight of Kosovo refugees was documented in this image in 1999? These photographs were both captured by professional journalists, at times when media professionals played an integral role in documenting human rights abuses and bringing about change for those who weren’t being listened to. But with tightening budgets and technological changes altering the way news is being reported, nowadays it’s often largely up to the citizens themselves to let the world know what’s happening to them. Because in an age of information overload, now, more than ever, seeing is believing."


Full post here. (with video)


"For many reasons, there will always be a need for journalists on the ground, but the burden of human rights promotion rests now more than ever on the shoulders of the people who it most affects. Citizen journalists, working often in harrowing circumstances, can only do so much, however, and NGOs and news agencies must play their part in helping to transmit their message. They collate these citizen videos, verify sources and publicize the human rights violations they document using their established networks. Curation tools, outreach and collaboration play a vital part. The tools made available on and through social media are proving invaluable in the fight for human rights: it’s hard to deny atrocities when they are being documented and shared across a global community. Seeing is believing: what action we take once we witness the result is up to us."


Related: People Get Ready: The Struggle for Human Rights

Guest Blog: "To see, one has to look"

Selections from People Get Ready: The Struggle for Human Rights

Grey Villet: Sam Mali at gravesites, South Africa, 1985

South Africa, 1985, during the darkest days of apartheid. Nelson Mandela still languished in a cell on Robben Island. The burning issue to Americans was “disinvestment” – were American companies propping up the racist regime by doing business there? And how to tell that story in pictures? We flailed about – and then discovered a 38-year-old black man who seemed to embody many of the contradictions at work in South Africa. By day Sam Mali had an enviable job as foreman of a General Motors plant in Port Elizabeth, supervising a crew that included whites; by night he was a kaffir, required to carry an ID card, banned from areas marked ‘whites only’. He was forced to live with other blacks in a squalid township without power or running water.

 Sam Mali was profoundly torn - between his livelihood, and “the struggle.” He felt compelled to attend the funerals of activists killed by the police – but risked his job and his life by doing so. It was an act of courage or madness to allow himself to be photographed for the entire world to see. Grey Villet's essay on Sam Mali was duly published. When I returned to South Africa a few months later, I was abruptly summoned to the state capitol in Pretoria. There I was confronted by the furious deputy foreign minister of the ruling racist government. Redfaced, he brandished a copy of LIFE – waving it in the air. “These are lies,” he shouted, “and you know they are!”--Chris Whipple



Related: American Nazi Party Demonstration, District of Columbia Stadium,

Washington, DC, October 1, 1961

Alabama bus boycott organizer, professor dies at 96

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) -- Thelma McWilliams Glass, a longtime professor and civil rights pioneer who helped organize the Montgomery bus boycott, died on Wednesday. She was 96.

A statement from Alabama State University, where Glass was a professor of geography, said she died but did not give a cause.

"The ASU family lost one of its crown jewels today," said President William H. Harris. "Mrs. Glass was the consummate educator, whose life was a shining example of service, courage and commitment. She will be truly missed."

Glass was one of a group of women who helped put together the bus boycott in Montgomery in 1955. The effort came together after Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white person.

The boycott by blacks in the city crippled the bus service and helped bring an end to segregation of public transportation in the South a year later. Glass was secretary of the Women's Political Council, a group that spread the word through the black community in Montgomery about the boycott.

"The men talked about it, you know, but we were ready to take action," Glass said during a recent interview with ASU Today Magazine.

Instead of riding buses, boycotters organized carpools to get to where they were going. Or they walked.

Glass also was an educator for 40 years, building a reputation for instilling in her students a desire to learn and become involved in the fight to end racial inequality.

Glass has an auditorium named after her in Trenholm Hall at Alabama State University - her alma mater. The university honored Glass with the Black and Gold Standard Award during the 2011 Founders' Day Convocation.

Glass was a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. She was also honored in 2011 by the National Alumni Association with the Harper Councill Trenholm Memorial Award.

Funeral arrangements for Glass have yet to be announced.

© 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved

Related: People Get Ready: The Struggle for Human Rights

"A raised arm, black power and Olympic trauma"

John Dominis: 1968 Olympics Black Power salute ©Time Inc

Via The Independant

By Geoffrey Macnab

Wednesday 11 July 2012

Tommie Smith's salute is recalled in a new film

The veteran sprinter is reminiscing about just what it feels like to go to the blocks in an Olympic final. He makes it sound like a dead man's walk.

It is certainly traumatic, it is certainly traumatic," the sprinter repeats the phrase. "You know, looking around, walking in a stadium is an experience that only those in the field can feel. You work all these years competing against some of the best people in the world and then you get to the final race. It goes beyond human imagination to the point where you forget where you are and you go back to your childhood, thinking 'how did I get here?' You look around at these world-class athletes and if you're not very careful, you can lose your race before you start by thinking everybody else is better than you are and what are you doing here?"

Whatever the state of his nerves, the sprinter in question ran an immaculate race. He whipped past the finishing line of the 200 metres final at the Mexico Olympics in 1968 in an astonishing time of 19.83 seconds.

Tommie Smith was 24 at the time, younger than Jamaican champion sprinter Usain Bolt is now. "Aged 24, my speed and Usain Bolt's speed were about the same," Smith says today. The assumption was that he would get even faster. However, when he and third-placed fellow African-American athlete John Carlos went to the podium, they raised their fists in a Black Power salute. The gesture caused outrage at the International Olympic Committee, which dubbed it a "violent breach" of the Olympic spirit. Smith and Carlos were vilified, as was the white Australian silver medallist Peter Norman (who supported their gesture.) The story of the friendship between the three men is told in the documentary Salute, shortly to be released in the UK.

"He [Norman] was a man of his word and a man of honesty." Smith pays tribute to the Australian sprinter. "He believed in rights for all men. He was a true friend and he went through some of the same things that Carlos and I did," Smith remembers of how all three men suffered because of their gesture in support of human rights. Norman didn't raise an arm but he wore an "Olympic Project For Human Rights Badge" –itself a defiant act – and he suggested that Carlos should wear Smith's left glove. As a result, he was ostracised by the Australian media and the country's Olympic selectors, who never picked him again.

After Mexico 1968, Smith's own Olympic career was over. If he is bitter about the way he was treated by the Olympic movement, he is not showing it. He relishes the friendships that the Olympics can help foster between athletes all over the world. However, he has no illusions about the machinations that go behind the scenes whenever the Games are staged.

"The politics of it is a different story. Those who contend that there are no politics in the Olympic Games are speaking with false tongues."

Ask him today if he has mixed feelings about that moment in 1968 when his salute effectively ended his athletics career and he replies: "I regret the fact that I had to do that to bring out the truth about a country that didn't honour the rights of its constitution."

No, he says today, he didn't know that making the Black Power salute was going to curtail his athletics career. "But had I known, it wouldn't have made any difference," he insists.

Would he have won more Olympic medals? He ponders the question. "I certainly would have run. I don't know if I would have been the fastest – but whoever was ahead of me would have been in trouble!"

'Salute' is released in cinemas on 13 July and DVD on 30 July

John Dominis's iconic photograph is featured in the current exhibition "People Get Raedy: The Struggle for Human Rights" through September 23, 2012

Jeff Widener

A lone man stops a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square, 1989 Beijing, China

Santa Fe Reporter Pick

People Get Ready

Exercise your freedom and come witness 55 powerful photographs from significant human rights struggles in history. Reception 5-7 pm Friday, July 6.

WORLD REFUGEE DAY 2012

Eddie Adams: Boat of no smiles, Vietnamese Refugees, Gulf of Siam, Thanksgiving Day,1977



Theme for 2012: Refugees have no choice. You do.

THE BOAT OF NO SMILES

 Here’s my story: in early 1977 I noticed a couple of paragraphs in the New York Times about people escaping from Vietnam. Associated Press had just signed me up with carte blanche to cover the whole world, and complete editorial control. (The first person before or since to get it–that was the deal I made with them.) And I went to the president and said, "Boat people. Here’s a story I want to do," and started making calls all through Southeast Asia to AP bureaus to find out more. No one, no country, was letting the refugees land. You couldn’t even find out about them. At first, I went back and said the story was impossible to cover. Then I had an idea and got in touch with the Thai Marine police (I knew Thailand very well) who had been shoving the boats right back offshore to certain death. I told them would like to go with them on patrol in the Gulf of Siam. They OK’d it, so we headed for the most likely point in northern Thailand, getting there at 4am when a refugee boat had just pulled in; the Thai authorities were getting ready to cast it off again. It was Thanksgiving Day in 1977. I suddenly asked the Vietnamese if I could go with them— I bought gas and rice – they had no fuel or food. There were forty-nine people aboard that fishing boat, including children— in the hold that same day a baby was born. The Thais towed us back out to sea and set us adrift. On that boat, there was no room to lie down, so they all had to sit up straight, waking or sleeping. I cannot describe the despair. There were dramatic pictures of mothers with half-dead children in their arms but something even worse was there. Whenever you go to refugee camps in a war zone where terrible things have happened, where bodies might be stacked up, and disease everywhere, you still find children who gather before the camera with a smile. This was the first time in my life that no child smiled. I called the pictures, "the boat of no smiles." The boat was hardly moving- they didn’t even know where to go. Then we were approached by another Thai boat with a megaphone ordering me off at gunpoint— they were afraid someone would let them dock knowing there was an American aboard. I had mixed feelings about getting off. I wrote the story and sent the pictures immediately, and they ran. Peter Arnett did a story also and a few others. Within a couple of days the administration asked the AP to present the photos to Congress. And Carter said let them come to America. The Congress had been thinking about it, sure, but the pictures did it, pushed it over. To me that was the only thing I ever done that I cared about, valued. Pictures do work, at least sometimes. They carry conviction. Go back to the pictures in Speak Truth to Power and you can look at them in another way. These people, those faces, are the person next door. These are real people, and the pictures prove that no one made this up– they are the evidence that they exist. Ordinary people, doing extraordinary things.  --Eddie Adams

Related: Forthcoming Exhibition -

                        People Get Rady: The Struggle For Human Rights

                        July 6 - September 23, 2012