Re: "Not In Our Town" http://www.pbs.org/niot/ http://www.pbs.org/niot/resources/index.htm Recent events have everyone wondering how we can teach our children, and how they can teach each other, to respect the diversity of our changing communities and our world.
These resources can help begin a dialogue about the challenging and often personally felt issues of prejudice and intolerance.
The Not In Our Town discussion guides can be downloaded immediately or previewed in HTML. While they are designed primarily for the classroom, they are being used effectively by many other groups, including human resource departments, study circles, communities of faith and law enforcement agencies and in living rooms across the country.
The Brief History of Activism will give your students an historical context and broader understanding of the struggles of different groups commonly targeted by supremacist and hate activity.
Educational Resources lists other organizations who offer curriculum strategies for addressing issues of tolerance and citizenship.
Home • Programs • Toolkit • Resources • News http://www.pbs.org/niot/resources/hist.htm History of Activism Colonial America | Young American Republic | Abolitionist Movement | The Twentieth Century | Women's Rights | Native American Organization | The Anti-Defamation League | Civil Rights & NAACP | Japanese American League | Cesar Chavez & Farm Workers | Gay & Lesbian
Not In Our Town II highlights how individuals can and do make a difference. We encourage students to explore how ordinary people can and do shed their passivity, engage in the democratic process and help create a society that values diversity and human rights.
The positive actions highlighted in Not In Our Town II are not unique in history. Today as in the past, people and groups work in many different ways to combat prejudice, discrimination and hate crimes. Not In Our Town I and II show concrete examples of Americans acting on their belief that persecution and injustice based on race, religion, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation must not be tolerated.
Instead of reiterating the many unjust laws and policies our government has allowed, we have chosen to focus on historic examples of groups and individuals who have made a positive difference.
While it is not possible to do a complete survey of the history of social justice and community activism in a study guide of this length, here are a few select topics:
COLONIAL ERA AMERICA
Colonial Era America included residents who fled religious persecution in England. In many ways Americans have been cooperatively resisting discrimination since the beginning. As early as the 1600s, Quakers throughout the colonies rejected slavery; they saw it as an affront to God’s will. For this and other unorthodox beliefs the Quakers themselves often faced discrimination. In the mid-1700s, colonists began to object to what they saw as discriminatory English practices, especially Parliament’s taxing policies: Parliament levied taxes on colonists even though the colonies had no representation in Parliament (“taxation without representation is
tyranny”). To protect their rights, colonists refused to pay certain taxes, engaged in skirmishes with the English authorities, and eventually instigated the American Revolution.
THE YOUNG AMERICAN REPUBLIC
The American Republic declared itself a democracy in which all people were created equal. In practice, though, only Protestant white men achieved any level of equality. Women, non-Protestants, and people of color were routinely—almost uniformly— discriminated against. This inequality did not go unchallenged. Citizens and non-citizens used their voices to effect change. Before the Civil War, black and white abolitionists struggled to convince the American people and government that slavery was unacceptable in a free republic. At times, these abolitionists put their own lives and freedom in jeopardy to work for the freedom of others. African American men won the right to vote in 1870, with the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, but both black and white women continued to be denied that right. Their campaign for the right to vote in national elections did not succeed until Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. During the same period, Jim Crow laws required African Americans in the South to maneuver in subtle but sometimes powerful ways to counteract the effects of overt racial discrimination.
THE ABOLITIONIST MOVEMENT
Many nineteenth century Americans, both African American and white, saw the institution of slavery as a gross injustice and fought to abolish it. Three of the greatest abolitionists, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass, had been born into slavery themselves. Frederick Douglass escaped in 1838 and soon began lecturing about his experiences. He became the most prominent African American abolitionist, speaking across the northern United States, founding an anti-slavery newspaper, and meeting with Abraham Lincoln several times to discuss the issue. Douglass also protested discrimination against free African Americans in the northern states. Another great abolitionist orator, Sojourner Truth,the first African American woman to speak out against slavery, was famous for her rhetorical power. Harriet Tubman gained fame as a “conductor” on the underground railroad, the network of guides and safehouses that helped escaped slaves reach freedom in Canada. After escaping slavery herself in 1849, Tubman returned to the South nineteen times to free others. During the Civil War, Tubman worked as a nurse, a scout, and a spy for the Union army—in one campaign she helped free 750 slaves. Thanks to the efforts of these and other abolitionists, slavery was outlawed in 1865 with the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Throughout the twentieth century, the struggle for civil rights has been one of the strongest forces producing social and political change in America. The 1950s and 1960s, saw African Americans and white sympathizers unite in unprecedented numbers to effect long overdue changes in American law: the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 secured civil rights for all American citizens—at least in legal terms—regardless of race or ethnicity. Yet legal equality does not necessarily trans-late into real equality. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act, many individuals and groups worked hard to make equality a reality—to put an end to discrimination, promote tolerance, stop hate crimes, and press for redress of past wrongs. African American civic leaders and clergy continued to be at the forefront of the fight against discriminatory practices. Encouraged by African American successes, Latinos orga-nized in the 1960s and 1970s to demand equal rights, forming groups to promote cultural pride and combat prejudice. Also in the 1960s and 1970s, women argued more strongly for their equal rights, which had never been constitutionally guaran-teed; Native Americans took action, asserting traditional rights to land and resources that had been denied them for centuries; and Asian Americans, long denied funda-mental rights because of race, worked through legal channels to correct wrongs of the past.
WOMEN’S RIGHTS: SUFFRAGE AND THE SECOND WAVE
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.” So began the Declaration of Sentiments drafted at the 1848 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. This conference was called by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, abolitionists spurred to action when they were barred from participating in an anti-slavery convention because of their gender. Seneca Falls was the beginning of the women’s suffrage (voting rights) movement in the United States. Suffragists pro-moted their cause by holding parades, rallies, and public speeches, and through acts of civil disobedience, such as voting illegally. Suffragist activism led to Wyoming’s granting women the vote in 1869. Many other states, mostly in the West, followed suit, but the majority of American women still were not allowed to vote. The National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA), founded by Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, focused on the goal of passage of a Constitutional amendment guarantee-ing universal voting rights for women. The suffrage amendment, first introduced in Congress in 1878, was finally passed as the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. A period of relative inaction followed; then, in the 1960s, activists such as Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem launched the “Second Wave” of the women’s movement. They focused on raising awareness of unequal treatment and passing laws to fight sexual discrimination in the economic and social realms. The laws they championed today guarantee equal pay for men and women working in the same jobs, prohibit job discrimination on the basis of gender, and bar sexual discrimination in schools receiving federal funds.
NATIVE AMERICAN INTER-TRIBAL ORGANIZATIONS
Most Native Americans in the United States are not only citizens of this country, but also members of independent tribes with their own governments. Because of this, Native American activism has generally focused on promoting autonomy for tribal governments as well as protecting the civil rights of individuals. Tribal governments, regional inter-tribal associations, and national organizations such as the National Congress of American Indians, founded in 1944, and the Native American Rights Fund, founded in 1970, work to protect the rights of Native Americans, both collectively and individually. These organizations have successfully pushed legislation protecting the sovereignty of tribal governments on reservation lands, restoring tribal rights (such as hunting and fishing rights) guaranteed by historical treaties, and gaining U.S. government recognition for tribes that have been “terminated,” or stripped of their sovereign rights.
THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE
The world’s most active organization in the fight against anti-Semitism is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), founded in 1913. The ADL combats Holocaust denial, neo-Nazism, and other types of anti-Semitism, and works toward tolerance not only for Jewish people but for all minority groups. One of the League’s most important missions is its campaign against hate crime (crimes in which victims are singled out because of their race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation). ADL experts study hate crime and develop programs to reduce the violence, including diversity awareness training and laws that dictate harsher-than-usual penalties for hate crimes. About 40 U.S. states have laws based on or similar to the ADL’s model for anti-hate crime legislation. In 1993 the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of hate crime “penalty enhancement,” and a federal hate crime statute was included as part of the 1994 U.S. Crime Bill. The ADL also promotes the separation of church and state in order to protect religious freedom for all.
THE NAACP AND OTHER CIVIL RIGHTS ORGANIZATIONS
Racially-segregated schools and public facilities were the law in many parts of the United States until Oliver Brown, a railroad worker, sued the Topeka, Kansas board of education in 1951. His daughter had been barred from attending a public school in her neighborhood because she was African American. The case—known as Brown v. Board of Education—went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Thurgood Marshall, then chief counsel for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), successfully argued that the principle of “separate but equal” is unconstitutional. Marshall later became the first African American Supreme Court justice. Through the 1950s and 60s, the NAACP and other African American organizations such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) championed desegregation. They won many other important court cases overturning laws restricting the civil rights of African Americans. They also successfully pushed for new laws guaranteeing these rights: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination based on race, sex, religion, national origin, or color and protected every individual’s right to vote, seek employment, use public facilities, and patronize public places. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 provided for equal treatment in the sale or rental of housing. These acts ended de jure racial segregation (segregation by law), although de facto segregation (segregation in fact) is still a major problem today.
THE JAPANESE AMERICAN CITIZENS LEAGUE
The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL), founded in 1930, is a national organization devoted to protecting the rights of Japanese Americans. Its mission has evolved over time to include effective social activism. In 1946 an initiative that called for validation of the alien land law was introduced in California. The JACL mounted vigorous opposition by reminding voters of the contributions made by Japanese American citizens and soldiers. In large part because of the JACL’s efforts, the proposition was defeated. In 1956 the JACL placed Proposition 13—an initiative calling for repeal of the alien land law—on the California ballot. Proposition 13 passed with overwhelming public support. The JACL fought for the right to citizenship for foreign-born Japanese living in America, particularly for the parents of American-born soldiers who fought in World War II. In 1978 the JACL asked Congress to evaluate the wartime internment of Japanese Americans to “determine whether a wrong was committed;” as a result of the arguments and evidence presented, the House of Representatives in 1987 concluded that the United States government should make a formal apology to Japanese Americans and provide financial compensation for survivors of the internment camps.
CESAR CHAVEZ AND THE UNITED FARM WORKERS
When César Chávez first began organizing Latino farm workers in the 1960s, labor unions had long been a useful and successful tool for those who strove to improve conditions in the workplace. Until the 1930s, Latinos had been largely excluded from mainstream American labor organizations; after the 1930s, Latinos were generally allowed to become union members, but experienced discrimination in some unions. In 1962 Chávez and others founded the National Farm Workers Association in California, an independent union that later became a part of the major umbrella organization for unions, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), and changed its name to the United Farm Workers of America (UFW). Under Chavez’s leadership, the UFW achieved significant gains for farm workers (both Latino and non-Latino) through successful boycotts of agricultural products. The UFW continues to press for better wages and working conditions for farm workers. The activities that Chavez and his dedicated organizers led inspired the Chicano activism of the 1960s and 70s, helping to create a Latino civil rights movement.
THE NATIONAL GAY AND LESBIAN TASK FORCE
The modern gay rights movement is considered by many to have started with the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969. Since that time, numerous groups have been established to promote civil rights for lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals. One of the most influential is the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), founded in 1973, which has worked to combat anti-gay violence and to improve the legal status of gay men and lesbians in the United States. Important advances in gay rights have been made since the 1960s. Several states have repealed laws that made homosexual acts illegal, despite the fact that in 1986 the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of such laws. Several states have also passed laws prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, housing, and other areas. When Colorado passed an amendment to its state constitution banning this type of civil rights protection for gay men and lesbians in 1992, the United States Supreme Court ruled the amendment unconstitutional. Three mass marches on Washington—in 1979, 1987, and 1993—have helped place gay and lesbian rights in the national spotlight.