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

NYPD 'consistently violated basic rights' during Occupy protests – Report by NYU and Fordham law schools

Photograph: Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters

Via The Guardian


"...evidence that police made violent late-night raids on peaceful encampments, obstructed independent legal monitors and was opaque about its policies"

"Obstruction of press freedoms and independent legal monitoring, including arrests of at least 10 journalists, and multiple cases of preventing journalists from reporting on protests or barring and evicting them from specific sites."

Full article here.

Previous coverage: Freedom of the Press?

Hipstamatic angst, Instagram anxiety

"But, really, it’s time to move the conversation on. This applies to both the supporters and critics."  --David Campbell

"The second we stop thinking, provoking, debating and evolving is truly when a medium wallows. Therefore, I’ve not seen a photo-journalism industry as healthy and exciting as today in many years. " --Ashley Gilbertson

Read the full post with comments here.

W. M. Hunt in Santa Fe: “The Unseen Eye: A Life in Photographs and other digressions ... "

 


Not necessarily by popular demand but at his own insistence, W.M. – Bill – Hunt will recreate his unique performance piece suggested by the text for his book, “The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious” (Aperture 2011). Hunt debuted "A Life in Photographs and other digressions ...” last October when the book was launched.

 “The Unseen Eye: A Life in Photographs and other digressions ... " 

Special performance by W.M. Hunt on Thursday, July 26, 2012 at 6 PM, at Tipton Hall, Marion Center for Photographic Arts at Santa Fe University of Art & Design, 1600 St. Michael’s Drive, Santa Fe, NM. 

Free and Open to the Public. 

This is a monologue with video suggested by the text for my book, “The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious” (Aperture 2011). It’s rude and sweet and funny. It lasts a little over n hour and will be followed by refreshments and a book signing.

This program is supported by Rixon Reed at Photo-Eye and Mary Anne Redding at the Marion Center,

Related:  Q & A with W. M. Hunt

"in 2011, the NYPD stopped someone every 45 seconds"

Must Read: Stop and Frisk Procedures, Photography, Activism and the NYPD: A Conversation with Nina Berman

Via Prison Photography

"I was in the Bronx on another project and I didn’t have my camera out. I saw a man riding a bicycle and a cop stopped him in the middle of the street. He stayed on his bicycle and he just immediately put his arms out in the air, like he knew precisely what position to assume. That’s a whole other thing that interests me; how body language for some people according to their race is a normalized gesture. For white people gestures [associated with Stop & Frisk] would be abnormal gestures.

Last summer, I saw a guy – he looked like he was 17 or 18 years old – in the Bronx and two plain-clothed cops came out and pushed him against a wall and stripped him of everything. It was intense."

Read the full post here.

Open Society Foundation Moving Walls 2013 Exhibit Announced

Kim Jeong-Ya (a pseudonym), 67, lives in China near the North Korean border and belongs to a handful of Chinese human rights activists who dedicate their lives to help both North Korean defectors and abducted South Koreans make a safe passage from North Korea to South Korea via mainland China.

Photo credit: © Katharina Hesse

Via Open Society Foundation

2013 will mark a milestone for the Open Society Foundations’ Moving Walls exhibition. It will not only be our 20th exhibition since starting in 1998 but will be the inaugural exhibition at the Foundations’ new headquarters at the Argonaut building on 57th and Broadway in New York City. Moving Walls is a documentary photography exhibition produced by the Open Society Foundations that features in-depth explorations of human rights and social issues. These images provide human rights evidence, put faces onto a conflict, document the struggles and defiance of marginalized people, reframe how issues are discussed publicly, and provide opportunities for reflection and discussion. Since 1998, Moving Walls has featured over 150 photographers.

For the exhibition that will open in our new office, we received 300 proposals from 49 countries through an open call. The proposals were carefully reviewed by the Documentary Photography Project staff, an advisory committee of foundation staff, and the show’s longtime curators, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas and Stuart Alexander, International Specialist at Christies. We recently completed selection and are pleased to announce that the following photographers have been chosen:

• Katharina Hesse, on North Korean refugees who crossed the border into China
• Fernando Moleres, on young men and boys imprisoned alongside adults and awaiting trial in Sierra Leone
• Yuri Kozyrev, on the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa and their aftermath
• Ian Teh, on the changing landscape of the Yellow River Basin in China
• Donald Weber, on police interrogations in Ukraine

In contrast to our current location, the new exhibition space will be located on the street level in a public conference space. That, combined with being more centrally located on 57th Street, gives us opportunities to engage with the public in a different way. The current office has been a great home to Moving Walls but I am excited for the new possibilities. Stay tuned for more information as we get closer to the opening of the exhibition.



Related: People Get Ready: The Struggle for Human Rights exhibition

40 years later, Mississippi waiter's 'magical moment' renews race relations

 Mississippi: A Self-Portrait
Via NBC Dateline


"He came to me one day and said, 'I got a wonderful black man. His name is Booker Wright. And he's a waiter at Lusco's Restaurant. And what he does, is a minstrel scene. He does a singsong of the menu. And that's the only menu they have. People wanna know the menu, they get, 'Booker, go tell 'em.' And he'll sing them the song of the menu. And it's absolutely delightful.'"

Once Frank saw Booker Wright perform the menu recitation, he arranged to film the routine the next day. So Booker Wright recited the menu for Frank's camera. Then, without warning, he shifted gears and launched into a monologue that had been 40 years in the making:

"Now that's what my customers, I say my customers are expecting from me," he began. "Some people nice. Some is not. Some call me Booker. Some call me John. Some call me Jim. Some call me @!$%#! All of that hurts but you have to smile. The meaner the man be the more you have to smile, even though your're crying on the inside.

"You're wondering what else can I do. Sometimes he'll tip you, sometimes he'll say, ‘I'm not gonna tip that @!$%#, he don't look for no tip.’ I say, 'Yes sir, thank you.' I'm trying to make a living."

For nearly two minutes, Booker Wright, spoke straight to the camera, and straight from the heart.
       
"Night after night I lay down and I dream about what I had to go through with. I don't want my children to have to go through with that. I want them to get the job they feel qualified. That's what I'm struggling for," Booker concluded.

"I went there to photograph a minstrel show," Frank says, "And I stayed there to hear a man talking about his life and what his dreams are. And it was so moving."

Related video:  Former NBC News producer Frank De Felitta recalls a time he and his film crew faced some real danger in 1960s Mississippi

Vivian Maier: 1954, New York   ©Maloof Collection

ARTNews

Summer, 2012
Reviews, Santa Fe

Vivian Maier

Monroe Gallery of Photography

Among eccentric photographers of the 20th century, Vivian Maier stands out for her self-effacing reclusiveness. For much her life she worked as a nanny, and the tens of thousands of images she made remained unknown until a Chicago real-estate agent and amateur historian discovered them in 2007, less than two years before her death. Maier’s black and-white photos mostly depict street life in Chicago and New York, and bear comparison with the works of Helen Levitt, though Maier’s eye was more wide-ranging and her approach occasionally experimental, as when she ventured into pure abstraction in a manner reminiscent of Aaron Siskind. This show of images from the 1950s through the early ’70s offered a generous introduction to her remarkable output.
Like Levitt, Maier had an affection for children, capturing a small boy with one leg thrust forward, holding tight to a man, presumably his father, who adjusts the boy’s shoe. And like Weegee, she sometimes shot the seamier side of urban life, as in a photo of two men dragging another man down the street (Christmas Eve, 1953). But she was equally alert to the glamour of the city, paying homage to beautiful women in elegant hats and opulent furs. 

Some of the works here offered startlingly dramatic viewpoints: a man and woman, shot from above, hold hands across a restaurant table; a quartet of older women, pinned in a trapezoid of light, wait against a wall like characters in a Beckett play (1954, New York). Maier’s humorous side surfaced in an untitled image of a ragtag couple, the man standing on his head, in front of a poster for a strip joint. In another, Arbus-like shot, two men—one of them a stooping giant—inspect the goods in a shop window as a pair of curious women gape in amazement.

The show ended with a self-portrait of Maier, smiling wistfully, captured in the reflection of a mirror being unloaded in front of a drab apartment complex—as unassuming in art as she was in life.

By Ann Landi
 ©ARTnews



 

"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

Remarkable account of cops and prosecutors who set aside their own prejudice to crack extortion ring that preyed on Gay men

This photo first appeared in Life’s 1964 issue about homosexuality. Barney Anthony put up a sign warning homosexuals to stay out of his Hollywood bar. “I don’t like him,” he said. “There’s no excuse. They’ll approach any nice-looking guy. Anybody does any recruiting, I say shoot him. Who cares?” Photo by Bill Eppridge



Via Slate

The rise and incredible fall of a vicious extortion ring that preyed on prominent gay men in the 1960s.

By William McGowan

Posted Wednesday, July 11, 2012, at 5:00 AM ET

"In the year following the Western Union arrest, the NYPD and the FBI, working in parallel (and sometimes at odds), would uncover and break a massive gay extortion ring whose viciousness and criminal flair was without precedent. Impersonating corrupt vice-squad detectives, members of this ring, known in police parlance as bulls, had used young, often underage men known as chickens to successfully blackmail closeted pillars of the establishment, among them a navy admiral, two generals, a U.S. congressman, a prominent surgeon, an Ivy League professor, a prep school headmaster, and several well-known actors, singers, and television personalities. The ring had operated for almost a decade, had victimized thousands, and had taken in at least $2 million. When he announced in 1966 that the ring had been broken up, Manhattan DA Frank Hogan said the victims had all been shaken down “on the threat that their homosexual proclivities would be exposed unless they paid for silence.”

Though now almost forgotten, the case of “the Chickens and the Bulls” as the NYPD called it (or “Operation Homex,” to the FBI), still stands as the most far-flung, most organized, and most brazen example of homosexual extortion in the nation’s history. And while the Stonewall riot in June 1969 is considered by many to be the pivotal moment in gay civil rights, this case represents an important crux too, marking the first time that the law enforcement establishment actually worked on behalf of victimized gay men, instead of locking them up or shrugging."

Full article here.

Related: People Get Ready: The Struggle For Human Rights