Facing
History
Winter,
2007
NH
225
503.725.9195
Office hours by appointment only
Link: www.facinghistory.org
Text:
Facing history and ourselves: Holocaust and human behavior. Margot
Stern Strom.
Book provided in class the first day: $24.00
Also required: the entire syllabus, including all of the links.
Course description: "Facing History and Ourselves is devoted to teaching about the dangers of indifference and the values of civility by helping [students] confront the complexity of history in ways that promote critical and creative thinking (text)." Therefore, this course will take a brief look at some historical events: the Holocaust, the Civil Rights Movement, the murders of Matthew Sheppard and James Byrd, Jr., and use them to discuss our role in the world, particularly in the United States.
Requirements:
Evaluation: Grades will be based on your participation
in class (100 points), three RP's (10 points each), and the final paper (70
points). You can also write short
papers on topics related to the class for extra credit points.
Timeliness: None of us, myself included, like it when
people we are waiting for don't show up, or are late. If you miss more than two hours of class,
your grade will go down a notch. If
you miss more than four hours of class, your grade will go down another notch.
If you miss more than six hours of class you will not pass.
Similarly,
if you are late two times it will count as one absence, four times counts
as two absences, etc.
No
amount of extra credit work will make up for missed class time. To this end,
please make sure you sign the class list as you enter the room in the morning,
and after breaks.
Grades: |
A = 200-180 | B = 179-160 | C = 159-140 | D = 139-120 |
Friday,
February 2nd: Facing History
Overview
of the class.
What does
it mean, to "face
history"?
Discuss
concepts: democracy,
civic participation,
individualism,
community,
etc.
Break 7:00
- 7:45 - Please read pp. 1-13 in the text.
Movie: Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (? minutes)
Discussion
In-class
Exercise
Reviving
South African History
Academics
debate how to represent and teach the nation's past
The
old South African history books once told tales of valiant Dutch settlers
who trekked to the interior, pushed back the savages who lived there, discovered
great mineral wealth, and set the stage for industrialization. Since 1994,
those tales of European conquest are slowly beginning to disappear from the
nation's classrooms, giving way to epic accounts of black anti-apartheid heroes.
A
war is now being waged for the hearts and minds of South African school children,
and in that debate, history professors are playing a crucial role, with many
arguing for the adoption of a more complex truth. Following South Africa's
transition to majority rule in 1994, the new government, led by the African
National Congress, vowed to overhaul the apartheid-era education system, a
pillar of the old white-supremacist order. Yet despite eight years of studies,
policy proposals, expert panels, and most recently a national educational
blueprint, "Curriculum 2005," a comprehensive restructuring of the
nation's schools has yet to take place. One of the consequences of delayed
reform, despite the appearance of new textbooks, is the continued use of apartheid-era
history textbooks in many schools.
Many
cash-strapped schools still use the old textbooks, as do Afrikaans-language
schools. Most schools, however, are simply waiting for the government to make
decisions on the curriculum, including how large a role history will have.
As a result, little demand exists for the new texts that have been written,
and publishers are reluctant to print them.
Although
some new texts with a black-African slant on history have found their way
into schools that can afford them, impoverished township classrooms are still
using books that try to justify apartheid as an idealistic program "for
the protection of the interests of each racial group and the fostering of
goodwill and cooperation between them by the complete segregation of each
group from all the others."
The
transition has not been as tumultuous at the university level. Some liberal
white academics opposed to the regime in power produced non-propagandistic
scholarship even during the heyday of apartheid. Even so, for some Afrikaner
historians, the abandonment of their views of the past was an abrupt and jolting
change. "I don't think these guys were expecting apartheid to be dissolved,"
says Albert Grundlingh, a professor of history at the University of Stellenbosch,
"so they were a bit late off the mark in trying to come to terms with
it academically."
Disappearing
History
Post-apartheid
school curriculum diluted the subject significantly by subsuming it into a
broader category of social sciences and geography. Many high schools dropped
history altogether, as a result of dwindling enrollments and the widespread
perception among students that choosing elective courses in history would
get them nowhere at a time of high unemployment. To many academics, the weakening
of the place of history in the curriculum was the ultimate irony, at a time
when the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission was examining the most
painful aspects of apartheid. "You had a paradoxical situation, where
a society that was going through a very public ritual about confronting the
past was simultaneously abolishing history instruction in its classrooms,"
says James T. Campbell, a professor of African-American studies at Brown University.
Rob
Sieborger, a professor of education at the University of Cape Town and a leading
advocate of revitalizing history in the schools, says the years of the apartheid
government's using history as propaganda led many students to disdain the
subject. By the time the majority-rule government took power, he says, not
many people thought of history as a way to rebuild national pride and correct
the distortions of the past. The sentiment was, he says, that it was "better
not to have history at all than to have that kind of history again."
The
first post-apartheid curriculum, like the first post-apartheid government,
was the result of a negotiated settlement, influenced by other factors as
well. For one thing, just as right-wing pressure groups negotiated amnesty
for the Afrikaner agents of apartheid, so too would they fight to save face
in the nation's history classrooms. For another, the laptop-toting reformers
who led the charge for a technocratic, market-oriented focus in the schools
were quite willing to ditch history in their eagerness to please the employment
market.
In
2000, the report of the History and Archaeology Panel advised the new education
minister, Kader Asmal, who took over in 1999. Mr. Asmal, who in his youth
had been an enthusiastic teacher of history, spent 27 years in exile, during
which he was a law professor at Trinity College Dublin and founded the Irish
anti-apartheid movement. He returned in 1990, taught human rights at the University
of the Western Cape, joined the new government, and was a leading proponent
of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. "Promoting a strong study
of the past is a particular educational imperative in a country like South
Africa, which is itself consciously remaking its current history," the
panel's report declared. "In conditions of flux, historical study of
a probing kind is a vital aid against amnesia and a warning against any triumphalism
of the present."
study
in the national school curriculum.
A
Complex Past
In
August 2001, the education minister told a crowd of academic officials and
former anti-apartheid activists "we should guard against any attempts
to airbrush ... any of the realities of our past. We cannot wish away our
history like the French, who refused to teach about the Commune of Paris for
30 years, or like the Japanese, who until recently obliterated from memory
the brutalization of Nanking and the abuse of 'comfort women.'" He denounced
the technocratic vision of the mid-1990s as well.
"We have allowed ourselves to be led down a cultural cul-de-sac
by narrow, popular perceptions of what constitutes relevant, useful, or vocational
education," said Mr. Asmal. He believes history should be the centerpiece
of a democratic nation's curriculum.
Debate
over what new textbooks should contain still lingers. While the new textbooks
don't harangue readers as much as the apartheid-era propaganda did, biases
of omission are evident. Where the Great Trek, Afrikaner political history,
and the plight of poor white people once filled chapter after chapter in the
old texts, some contemporary texts have omitted them altogether. Once-absent
tales of black-resistance movements now are given considerable space.
Many
Afrikaner historians fear that a new, black-nationalist caricature of history
may well replace the apartheid-era version. "You have books appearing
that interpret the history of South Africa only according to the perspective
of the liberation struggle, ... which I think is a very one-sided approach,"
argues Pieter Kapp, who recently retired as a professor of history at the
country's elite historically Afrikaans-speaking institution. While he appreciates Mr. Asmal's efforts, he fears that they
may involve the imposition of a single, ANC-favored narrative and the elimination
of European history: Not just the history of Europeans in Africa, but any
history of Western civilization at all. "If we're going to use the history
syllabus to teach political correctness and only African history, we're going
to defeat our own objectives of developing a literate and skilled society,"
he says.
Conversely,
Charles van Onselen, professor of history and a critic of Afrikaner nationalism,
has argued that "the teaching of history at school has long been infected
with the 'Great Trek virus,'" referring to apartheid-era textbooks' obsessive
focus on the Afrikaners' "Great Trek" to bring white settlement
to the country's interior. "So powerful was GTV, and so conscientiously
was it spread through the schools by our erstwhile Christian Nationalist masters,
that it destroyed generations of would-be historians." Even so, he considers
the textbook debate "a playground for ideologues and politicians"
and suggests that the result will simply "serve new nationalist masters."
Authors
of new history textbooks contend that the new narrative is necessary.
Yonah
Seleti, a professor of history, chairman of the government's Ministerial Committee
on History and a contributor to one of the new texts, is one of the few black
faces in a field still dominated by white scholars. He believes care must
be taken: "We should not go in to a celebratory triumphant writing of
the past."
Albie
Sachs, a justice of the Constitutional Court, the nation's highest court,
has witnessed much of contemporary South African history firsthand. When he
was working as a civil-rights lawyer, he was detained twice without charges,
and he went into exile in Mozambique, where he was a professor of law at Eduardo
Mondlane University. During that time, he lost an eye and arm to a car bomb
planted by South African government agents. Now Justice Sachs argues that
an intermediary period is necessary in the telling of South African history,
in which an African-centered narrative replaces the European emphasis of the
past.
"There
had been so much denigration and humiliation involved in the way history had
been told," he says, "that there was a need to refute a lot of the
mythology and to establish pride and dignity."
As
early as 1999, Colin Bundy, then vice chancellor of the University of the
Witwatersrand, addressed a national arts festival on the topic of "the
future of our past." Noting that "the textbooks of yesteryear produced
a standardized falsification of the past," he argued for a curriculum
emphasizing the complexity of the past rather than a simplistic Afrocentric
narrative, a "bland, sanitized" tale of reconciliation, or a focus
on nation-building that avoids critical inquiry.
Mr.
Bundy, who is now director of the University of London's School of African
and Oriental Studies, praises the education minister's effort to strengthen
the teaching of history for "giving it the prominence it has."
Some
of the debate over the teaching of history is about style. Some educators
fear that reverting to traditional history rather than the interdisciplinary
mix being used now will leave out important elements. Haroon Mahomed, of the
Johannesburg-based Gauteng Institute of Curriculum Development, and other
critics say the history revivalists are reverting to a pedagogy that focuses
on the old-fashioned pursuit of objective historical truth through texts instead
of looking into oral traditions, culture, and other forms of knowledge.
SOUTH
AFRICAN HISTORY: 2 VIEWS
Both
South Africa's academic historians and its black and white citizens have conflicting
perspectives on key events in the country's history. Here, presented as extremes,
are some of those perspectives.
Apartheid
View Post-Apartheid View
FIRST
CONTACT, 1652
Representatives
of Jan van Riebeeck's Dutch East India Company land at Cape Town and set up
a "refreshment station" for passing ships from India, with no intention
of establishing a permanent colony.
Colonialism arrives in South Africa and European conquest begins. The
colonists dispossess the local Khoi population and exploit Malay slaves brought
from other Dutch colonies, establishing the foundation for racial inequality.
GREAT
TREK, 1830s
Heroic
Dutch settlers fed up with British rule in the Cape Colony embark on a journey,
known as the Great Trek, north to the rugged interior, where they defeat black
armies and make the remainder of South Africa safe for white settlement. Nationalist-minded Afrikaners, fed up with British restrictions
on slave ownership, trekked north, conquering the interior of the country,
extending colonialism, and taking land from the Zulu, Xhosa, and other tribes.
FORCED
REMOVALS, 1950s-1960s
The
Group Areas Act is passed, dividing the country by race. Apartheid is an absolute
necessity, because all nationalisms are mutually exclusive, and it is in the
interest of both races to live separately from one another. Hence black people
must be relocated to "some of the best parts of the country." Tens
of thousands of black people are violently removed from their homes, entire
neighborhoods are bulldozed, and dispossessed residents are forced to move
to some of the least fertile and most remote regions of the country, where
employment opportunities are scarce, if not nonexistent. Meanwhile, the white
minority secures control of the best land and its mineral wealth.
SEPARATE
DEVELOPMENT, 1960s-1970s
South
Africa's white people recognized the inalienable rights of black people to
self-determination. With the creation of independent black states within the
borders of South Africa, black people no longer had any political rights in
white areas, just as white people did not have political rights in black areas.
White people had to control the areas that had "always been theirs,"
to avoid domination by the majority.
While black homelands had political control over some territory, they
had little access to the real wealth of the country. Even access to urban
employment for people living in the homelands was restricted by "influx-control"
policies. The farce of separate development is made apparent by the general
international refusal to recognize the "independent black states."
ARMED
STRUGGLE, 1960s-1980s
Armed
terrorists staged military incursions from neighboring African states, with
the support of the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, domestic-underground terrorists,
supported by the African National Congress and the Communist Party, attacked
military and police installations. Through all of this, South Africa stood
as a bulwark against the spread of Communism and anarchy, the last outpost
of the civilized Western world on the Dark Continent.
Rampant oppression, systematic disenfranchisement, and state violence
against the black majority necessitated an armed struggle. Support for this
noble cause was accepted from all sources offering it. Sabotage against military
and police installations -- with efforts made to avoid harming civilians
-- was carried out in order to force the state into a negotiated settlement.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also
read: A Work in Progress, by Margot Stern Strom
Saturday,
February 3rd: The Holocaust
Reading
for today: Syllabus
Text: Whatever you can manage to find time for
that relates to The Holocaust
First RP due
Brief
overview of the Holocaust: Please be prepared to contribute to this discussion!
Break
midmorning for 15 minutes
Continued
discussion of the Holocaust.
Lunch: 11:30 -1:00
Discussion
-In particular, why did the U.S. respond the way it did/didn't?
Break: 3:30 -3:45
Small
Groups
Eulogy
to the Holocaust
by
Ruth Mandel
My
dear Great Aunt Erna,
Anyone who knows you would believe it easily, even expect it. They have had
to strap you, hospital-grey-white canvas with worn fuzz on the skin side,
around your wrists and across your legs. To keep you there, prevent you from
kicking your feet over the edge, wresting yourself out of bed, wrenching those
IV's out of your arm, the oxygen tube out of your throat and walking right
out of the hospital, probably unaware that your lungs cannot breathe, your
legs cannot carry you. Your mind, having a mind of its own, would just walk
on out.
Memory
is a kind of oxygen.
The survivor in you ready to take care of yourself, by your own means. But
if you flail and kick yourself free as you are trying, we would lose you,
on foot, to an unwalkable, vague and dreaded landscape. They have bound you,
to protect you from your desire to flee. One strap wraps itself just under
the tattoo Auschwitz gave you, wise and horrible Auschwitz, keeping itself
alive, in a small way, on your arm.
Memory
is a kind of ruin.
The tube in your throat makes it impossible for you to speak; your eyes do
the work, bore through us and plead. Occasionally, you write a word on a blank
white page, pencil shaking in restrained fingers, barely pressing against
the page, almost illegible marks which we try gravely to make out. And your
strapped hands, they too, gesture and implore. All your signals scream, "OUT."
Memory
is a kind of terror.
Your first baby, Bina Rachel, born in Tarnopol Ghetto in 1940. And died there,
exactly one year later, on Yom Kippur. "A natural death." Language
tortures us. Natural? Relative to the other deaths, meaning she died in your
helpless, hungry arms. And was not shot, not smothered, not thrown to life
or death, from a racing gas- bound train. A dead bundle, swaddled by your
ribbon-thin hands.
Memory
is a kind of burial.
Your first baby, Bina Rachel, born in Tarnopol Ghetto in 1940. And died there,
exactly one year later, on Yom Kippur. "A natural death." Language
tortures us. Natural? Relative to the other deaths, meaning she died in your
helpless, hungry arms. And was not shot, not smothered, not thrown to life
or death, from a racing gas- bound train. A dead bundle, swaddled by your
ribbon-thin hands.
Memory
is a kind of proof.
Convincing them of a false address in a non-Jewish part of town was dangerous.
When they investigated and countered that you had given a street address higher
than the numbers actually went, you insisted they had heard incorrectly, persuading
them you had said 8 and not 18. Persuading them that your neighbours denied
knowing you because you had committed some disgracing, unmentionable deed.
You spun stories deftly, never sure if they would save your life.
Memory
is a kind of unraveling.
Unknown to you, your sister-in-law was already murdered. You tried to escape
from jail and were sent to Auschwitz, where your indispensable, expert sewing
saved your life. And to Birkenau, where you continued to sew, perhaps the
uniforms of the guards, vestments for the officers, dresses for their wives
- you never said. Three years of saving your life every moment. You, a Jew,
hiding in a death camp, as a Pole who was caught with a Jew. Emerging to a
gassed out, depleted world, to learn of your husband's death, which even now
you cannot bear to speak of.
Memory
is a kind of wail.
You are our lived memory, our certain memory. Our living memory. You have
remembered for us, generously, openly, without demands upon us. A model, teaching
us to remember faithfully, yet still enjoy life's other colours. What questions
I could bare to ask, bear to inflict, you answered with affection, with details,
impressions, dailiness, events.
Memory
is a kind of love.
Remembering was substantive and specific. We sat with my tape recorder running.
You introduced me to your sister-in-law Henya, my father's mother - as you
knew her - your girlish awe and envy, her urbaneness, intelligence, sophistication.
Elegance, your word exactly, saying "Oh how I looked up to her, me a
young girl from the country, she was married and living in the city, I could
just sit and watch, everything beautiful, the way she walked, dressed, how
she talked to me."
Memory
is a kind of family.
And you introduced me to your nephew, my father as a child. Your head tilted
fondly and your glinting eyes gazing off to the side, animated, as though
about to join a giddy family, table in the corner of the room. Your attention
fixed there, you chuckled and described him, circling the crowded table to
nibble food off people's plates-or am I confusing that with how you remember
me.
Memory
is a kind of fusion.
You helped me draw the family tree from which I grew, create remembrances
where I had none. You helped people the sets, props, and wardrobe on a distant,
sparse, smashed stage. Told me who entered, exited, crossed, returned or never
was seen again. The kinds of details that make my eyes flood and my sinuses
rush in anguish. Make me realize fiercely what we have lost. What is missing.
Why we are lonely.
Memory
is a kind of script.
And even then, not getting a photo of you, of your arm. And even then, not
covering it all. And even then I tired, not making as much effort as I should
have, not staying longer. Knowing that I was leaving, and you were staying
in your apartment to contend with the cast whom my questions had invited into
your home-some still struggling to live, some in the throws of horrendous
deaths, some waiting, some watching-all of them our blood, all of them flowing.
Memory
is a kind of danger.
Our daughter Sharon, born after the war to an altered you, and a new husband,
said you recently pointed to my wedding invitation, still posted in the kitchen
of your home and said, "I was in Sweden." My husband's background
has always been a source of cherished memory for you-the place of your liberation,
your first smorgasbord, the hotel sheltering d.p.s, over- looking the sea,
safe haven at the end of the war. The end of the war-Sweden made those words
possible for you. Working again as a seamstress, this time for kind women
for pay. A time of recuperate before returning to assess absolute loss. Wicked
and unmovable loss.
Memory
is a kind of stone.
And now your body is emaciated again. Disoriented and distressed, you have
forgotten how to eat and do not want to remember. Or cannot. Your hand knocks
Sharon's benevolent spoon away. A stroke brought you to the hospital, where
you forgot how to breathe and do not want to remember. Or cannot. The ventilator
tricks your body into remaining alive. Some days your eyes open, others they
do not. Some days you can write again. Others you cannot. You take my offered
hand, squeeze my palm and weave your fingers in and out of mine.
Memory
is a kind of loom.
On Fridays, Sharon lights the hospital-approved electric candles for you.
For you and for God. God, whom you have talked to each and every Shabbat,
at sunset, eyes closed gently. You lit the candles, sheltered them with your
hands and whispered once the blessing though your fingers. Your arms circled
slowly to shepherd their light, spread it among us and across time. Head bowed
and eyes covered by your fingers, once more the blessing, this time your throat
still and just your lips reciting. You, the women before you, beside you,
after you, with you.
Memory
is a kind of prayer.
a
kind of oxygen
a
kind of ruin
a
kind of terror
Memory
is a kind of burial a kind proof a kind of unraveling a kind of
wail Memory is a kind of love a kind of family a kind of
fusion a kind of script Memory is a kind of danger a kind
of stone a kind of loom. And prayer.
At
76 your memory
is
briskly walking away form you,
leaving
you,
and
leaving us,
behind.
Who
will do the remembering now?
Who
is remembering now.
Erna:
March 15, 1918 - March 10, 1995
Lovingly,
Ruth
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ruth
Mandel is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. She is currently working on
a poetry and photography manuscript, titled: Photographs We Will Never
See, about the Holocaust's continuing reach. She has been published in
Contemporary Verse 2, The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead, and is forthcoming in Prairie Fire.
Butterflies:
a memorial to children who died in Holocaust
By
TIM BULLARD
MYRTLE
BEACH - Last Thursday, 1.2 million paper butterflies covered a field on Oak
Street at the Chabad Jewish Center, blocks from where an apartment months
earlier had been desecrated with anti-Semitic graffiti.
The
butterflies were unleashed on April 23 to mark Holocaust
Memorial Day and to commemorate the 1.2 million-plus children slaughtered
in the death camps of Hitler's Nazi regime. The project was the dream of the
wife of a survivor of Terezin
Concentration Camp, which was in a small town 35 miles northwest of Prague. There were enough Terezin prisoner-musicians
for a full symphony orchestra, hence the operetta "Brundibar" or
"Bumblebee."
Of
the Czech Jews taken to Terezin, 97,297 died, including 15,000 children under
15, and only 132, including Hugo Schiller of Myrtle Beach, survived to tell
the story. The butterfly dream was created by his
wife of 43 years, Ellie. The
inspiration originated from a poem, "The Butterfly," written by
Pavel Friedmann, a child interned at Terezin Concentration Camp and later
murdered. His drawings and poems were collected to remember the children when
the camps were liberated. Schiller
began to get others to help her, collecting one paper butterfly for each child's
life. "We did it,"
she said April 23.
The
Chabad of Myrtle Beach and Temple Emanuel helped along with assistance from
more than 3,000 groups through the Internet and other countries around the
world, including Austria, Israel, Canada, Brazil and Australia. The recent ceremony at the Chabad Center featured dignitaries,
citizens and pastors gathered in the rain, which was interrupted by sunshine.
The school there has 125 students.
The
project has gotten national attention in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
TIME For Kids, USA Today and many community newspapers and dailies which published
feature stories and photos of their own children making paper butterflies
to send to the Myrtle Beach project.
Chabad leaders and pupils were inundated with buckets and cases of
butterflies, each from five to seven inches, which volunteers were still unloading
and unleashing at the time of the ceremony.
Speakers
included the Schillers, Rabbi Yossi Narparstek of Chabad, Msgr. Thomas R.
Duffy of St. Micahel's Church in Garden City, Myrtle Beach Mayor Mark McBride,
former Mayor Bob Grissom, Rep. Mark Kelley, Rabbi Israel Silber of Temple
Emanuel-el, the Rev. Wayne Brown of First Baptist Church of Myrtle Beach,
Noah Goldberg and Rabbi Doren Aizenman, also of Chabad.
Musical entertainment was by the Chabad Choir with "Butterfly
Song" and "De'Jour." Brown led an impromptu song from "Godspell."
In
the rain, Msgr. Duffy talked about life and death, viewing the expansive field
of butterflies before the ceremony. "He (God) encourages us to choose
life," Msgr. Duffy said. "I want to thank the children and the administration
for making it possible for so many children across the world to give us that
love." "The tragedy, the sadness and the
loss cannot happen again," said Aizenman. Kelley, fighting back tears, said it was not a day for politicians,
but a day to remember, "God's people killing God's people is wrong."
"This is a very special day in this city," said McBride.
"We can never forget atrocities."
Silber,
a chaplain for the Horry County Police, talked of an incident in Sept. 23,
1942, when a Jewish ghetto was surrounded by German soldiers. "Today is a day of unity," said Brown,
who has visited a concentration camp. "I couldn't believe it. Love is
greater than hate. We learn from the past. We hope for the future. The tears
of heaven were falling earlier, and now the sun is here."
Butterflies
on the wall contained comments such as these, about a victim: "She was
killed by Hitler's Nazis in 1942 in Treblinka. She was 14 years old when she
died."
There
were six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, with newer reports estimating
that total closer to seven million.
For
more information, call the Chabad Jewish Center at (843) 448-0035 or Schiller
at (843) 449-7051, or visit http://www.holocaustcenter.com/ on the Internet.
Sunday, February 4th: The
Civil Rights Movement
Reading
for today: Syllabus
Text: 13-15, 68-77, 505-513, 524-531 (26 pages
in all).
Second RP due
Racism
and the United States -be prepared to discuss this!
Break
mid-morning
Discussion
Discussion
Break
3:30 -3:45
Small Groups
Class
will end today at 4:30.
Veterans
of Hope:
The
founder of the well-known acappella group, "Sweet Honey in the Rock,"
tells of finding her voice, in this Veterans of Hope interview.
At
Albany State College we began to protest things. They had arrested students
for trying to buy bus tickets from the "white" window at the Trailways
bus station, and we had marched from the campus in sympathy with them.
By
this time the SNCC (Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee) people were there, and we had decided we were going
to do this march. There were no people at the meeting point, maybe six or
seven of us. It was decided that was too few, so we went to classrooms and
told people to come to the march.
Then
we left the campus and headed out. Maybe there were 10 people, so I just kept
my face ahead. I knew if I turned around, I would just run back to the campus. When we got to the bridge, we had to turn
to walk across the Flint River Bridge. Annette, who was walking with me, said,
"Bernice, look back." I looked back and as far as I could see, all
the way back to the campus, there were people. I tell you I never knew where
they came from. I never heard them coming. Those students left their classes
and joined that line. It was like, "good-goodness-it-can-happen!"
The power of finding that you can step out and sometimes you'll have company
before you get there!
We
circled the jail twice and went back to Union Baptist Church, and Charlie
Jones said, "Bernice, sing a song." I started "Over My Head"
and the spiritual goes, "Over my head/I see trouble in the air."
So I flipped "trouble" into "freedom." It was the first
time I had ever done that, especially with a sacred song, a spiritual that
came from slavery. I realized that there was something about the march that
had moved me to a position where I could use the songs I had been taught.
...
The singing in jail went on endlessly. Hours and hours. There were times we
talked, but we sang more than we did anything else. And so the way in which
we created community was through singing. That was when we felt the union.
When we talked, then we could feel the diversity and the complexity of the
union. And then sometimes when we would talk, the talk would go on for awhile
and just because of the intensity of the diversity, we'd have to start singing
again.
...
The changing of my voice came after jail. In the first mass meeting, they
asked me to sing, I sang the same song, Over My Head/I hear Freedom in the
Air, but my voice was totally different. It was bigger than I'd ever heard
it before. It had this ringing in it. It filled all the space of the church.
I thought that was because I had been to jail; it was because I had stepped
outside the safety zone.
Vincent
Harding and Rosemarie Freeney Harding, themselves veterans of the southern
Freedom Movement, are co-founders and co-chairs of the Veterans of Hope Project.
Contact the Project at 2201South University Blvd., Denver, Colorado, 80210,
tel: 303/765-3194.
Please
go to the Civil Rights Memorial
website. Make sure the volume of your speakers is turned up, so you can listen
to the initial voice clip. Also, please explore the site some, and come to
class prepared to talk about what you learned/found.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
David
Morse's essays and stories have appeared most recently in Dissent and
Friends' Journal. He can be contacted at his Web site: www.david-morse.com.
For more information, or to find out how to oppose further military action
against Iraq, see: www.peaceresponse.org/iraq.shtml
Telling
the Children's Story
One
evening in 1996, Craig
Kielburger was scheduled to deliver a speech before the Ontario Federation
of Labour (OFL) convention in Toronto. Armed with stories and facts about
the plight of child workers around the world, Kielburger planned to talk about
his mission to bring an end to child labor. As he took the stage, squinting
slightly from the glare of the spotlights, amusement rippled through the crowd
of 2,000 when they saw that his head barely cleared the podium - until
someone brought him a stepstool. But the laughter soon turned to curiosity
and, when he began to speak, to admiration.
"According
to the International Labour Organization, there are more than 250 million
working children. That's equal to the entire population of the United States,"
he said, shoving aside his notes as he gestured emphatically, his clear, green
eyes appearing to take in each member of the audience. "No one has a
good excuse for ignoring this problem."
The
audience periodically interrupted his talk with applause, and no one seemed
to notice that he'd gone well over his scheduled time. When he finished, the
audience rose to their feet, wildly clapping their hands. As the applause
finally began to wane, a member of the OFL briefly grabbed the microphone
to announce that the organization would be granting a surprise donation of
$5,000 to Kielburger's organization, Free the Children, for the purpose of
building a rehabilitation center for child laborers in India. That gesture
was soon matched by many of the other organizations present. At the end of
the evening - an evening in which Free the Children had merely intended to
raise awareness that child labor did indeed exist - Kielburger had raised
$150,000 for the cause.
He
was 12 years old.
An
issue of the heart
Iqbal
Masih was sold to a Pakistani carpet factory when he was four years old
as collateral on a loan his parents had taken out to pay for their eldest
son's wedding. For six years, Iqbal worked 12 hour days, six days a week,
tying the tiny knots that make up the expensive Pakistani carpets coveted
by tourists.
The
owner of the factory added fines to his parents' loan when he made mistakes
and for the bowl of rice he was given each day - making it impossible for
the loan to ever be repaid. Iqbal lived under the constant threat of being
beaten with sticks or metal tools. When he was 10, he escaped with the help
of a human rights organization that later sent him to school. He traveled
to many countries, speaking out against child labor. But in 1995, 12 year-old
Iqbal was murdered. His mother remains convinced that the carpet factory owner
had a hand in his killing.
Iqbal's
story was covered in major newspapers around the world, although often relegated
to the back pages. It was soon forgotten by both the mainstream media and
its readers.
Seven
thousand miles from Pakistan, however, another 12 year-old boy committed Iqbal's
story to memory, an act that marked the birth of a youth-driven movement against
child labor that would span 20 countries.
Craig
Kielburger was searching through a Toronto newspaper for the comics when a
photo of Iqbal caught his eye. He read Iqbal's story and held it up as a mirror
to his own life in Canada - going to school, hanging out with friends, running
with the cross country team. What he saw reflected back at him were profound
differences between the two. "I was shocked. In school, I had learned
about the American Civil War and the Underground Railroad, but I thought slavery
was something out of the past, that it had been abolished," he says.
With
the dawning realization that slavery was still very much in existence, Kielburger
photocopied the article on Iqbal Masih and gathered statistics on child labor
at the local library. With all the idealism and zeal of youth, he spoke to
his class about what he had learned, and his crusade against child labor had
begun. Well, maybe you couldn't have called it a crusade just then. What he
actually did was invite some friends over for "pop and pizza" to
discuss Iqbal's story.
"After
that, about ten of us started doing small things to help," he says. "It
wasn't anything dramatic. We passed around a couple of petitions to political
leaders and heads of corporations. Then, a few of us gave speeches in schools
and for religious and community groups, and it just began to snowball from
there."
On
one occasion, Free the Children members learned that Kailash
Satyarthi, an Indian leader in the fight against child labor, had been
imprisoned for his actions on behalf of child workers. They collected 3,000
signatures and wrote a letter to the prime minister of India asking for Satyarthi's
release. The petition and the letter were sent to India in a shoebox wrapped
in brown paper.
Satyarthi
was eventually released. During a subsequent trip to Canada, he recalled the
box that had been sent to India in his name: "It was one of the most
powerful actions taken on my behalf," he said, "and, for me, definitely
the most memorable."
The
Kielburger home eventually became the world headquarters for Free the Children
(FTC), a nonprofit organization that works to abolish child labor practices
worldwide. Today, over 100,000 children in 27 countries - including Canada,
the US, Mexico, India, Brazil, Ghana, and Pakistan - have been involved
in FTC activities, and the organization receives thousands of letters each
week from children who want to get involved. Although each office has a few
adult volunteers who help with recruitment, bookkeeping, and mentoring, most
of the energy and momentum behind FTC's efforts comes from its members - all
of whom are under 18.
"Every
young person has an issue that hits them in the heart," says Kielburger.
"But I believe that society has taught them they don't have the power
to change things, that they have to wait until they're adults to achieve results."
Perspectives
from Southeast Asia
After
his success with the Ontario Federation of Labour, Kielburger planned a trip
to Southeast Asia to visit the children working in labor camps and on the
streets and bring their perspective back to the developed world.
He dipped into his savings and pooled money from his allowance and
from doing odd jobs around the neighborhood to purchase his plane ticket.He
enlisted Alam Rahman, a 25 year-old friend from Bangladesh, to go along as
his chaperone, and he set up meetings with human rights groups in the countries
he would be visiting. Finally, on December 9, 1995, Kielburger boarded a KLM
flight to Dhaka, Bangladesh.
Through
their travels, they would meet with children from the labor camps, slums,
and back alleys of Bangladesh, Thailand, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. One of
those children was Muniannal,
a girl whose age Kielburger estimates was around eight. Muniannal worked in a back alley in Madras,
sorting through used syringes with lightning speed to separate the needles
from the plastic. Through an interpreter, Craig asked her where the needles
came from. In a hushed voice so her supervisor wouldn't hear her, she replied
that they had were from "hospitals and off the streets."
His
brow furrowed with concern, Craig asked whether the facility was concerned
about her contracting diseases like HIV/AIDS. Again came the soft, Hindi reply
as the girl squatted on the pile of syringes, apparently unconcerned about
a stray needle pricking her bare feet. "She will wash it," the interpreter
translated. "She won't get any treatment."
Messenger
for the children
Kielburger
met with children who had grown up on a brick kiln in West Bengal, who had
lung diseases from breathing in the dust from the carpets they wove in Varanasi
sweat shops, who sold their bodies on streets in the Philippines under the
watchful eyes of their adult pimps. But he still found a spirit of hope in
them that in turn gave him the inspiration to take action on their behalf.
"Meeting
these children is like a gift. When I was in Thailand," he says, "I
saw a street girl with an orange. She automatically took it and split it with
her friend - no question about the matter. And in India, another group of
street children were carrying this child with no legs from place to place,
because they didn't want to leave him behind.
"They
don't want to be seen as little creatures who need help," he says. "The
only gift you can give them in return for the time they spend with you is
to carry their stories home with you."
But
even before Kielburger had returned to Canadian soil, he carried their message
to more people than he'd dreamed possible. He had been travelling for about
seven weeks when he heard that Canada's Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien,
was also in Southeast Asia with a trade delegation. "Frankly," says
Kielburger, "human rights wasn't on his agenda. Just a couple of months
earlier, Canada's minister of foreign affairs had announced that Canada -
wouldn't be the boy scout of the world. This was the attitude we were dealing
with, and we were frustrated."
He asked the prime minister to meet with him and some child laborers
but was turned down.
In
a move that was part luck, part stroke of brilliance (although he doesn't
see it that way), Kielburger and Free the Children bumped up the date of the
press conference they'd been organizing for the local media, inviting the
barrage of Canadian reporters that were following Chrétien. He and
10 year-old Asmita Satyarthi (daughter of Kailash, the man on whose behalf
FTC had sent the box of signatures to India) "pulled an all-nighter"
getting ready for the conference, during which they would be joined by two
former child laborers. Two dozen journalists from high-profile Canadian newspapers
and journals, and all of the major Canadian TV networks rearranged their schedules
to attend.
During
the conference, one of the reporters asked Kielburger if he was meeting with
the prime minister. Kielburger responded that Chrétien had said he
was too busy to meet with him, Asmita, and most importantly, the exploited
street children. "Forget being the prime minister," he said. "It's
his moral responsibility to do this."
When
Kielburger called home the next day, he found that splashed across the front
of all the major newspapers in Canada were headlines about how he had "upstaged"
the prime minister, and how Chrétien had snubbed him. Five days later,
Chrétien's office called Craig to arrange a meeting. And although Kielburger
didn't walk away from that meeting feeling Canada would lead the way toward
ending child labor, he did come out with something else of value - the national
media loved his story.
The
young and the dreamers
Upon
Craig's return to Canada, he found that Free the Children had been catapulted
to an organization of national prominence. He was greeted by camera flashes
and microphones thrust at him by the hands of eager reporters. His face continued
to pop up on the covers of newspapers and magazines across Canada and the
US, and he told the stories of the exploited children he met on Good Morning,
America, CNN News, and other well-known television programs.
But
behind every interviewer's smile was the profound amazement that a young boy
could speak so eloquently, could gain media attention for his organization,
and could bring an issue most people preferred to sweep under the rug into
the international spotlight. After all, he was thirteen. (He'd celebrated a birthday during his trip.)
"Young
people have to work twice as hard as adults to gain credibility," he
says. "The night before I came home from Southeast Asia, a radio talk-show
host in Toronto announced that at my age, I should be interested in girls,
sex, and video games - certainly not child labor. It's astounding how so many
people share that definition of a 'normal' child. They limit the spirit and
enthusiasm of children.
"In
fact," he continues, "I met with drug dealers who have greater faith
in children to run drugs than I see people in the US and Canada put in their
own kids."
Today,
under Craig's direction, Free the Children continues to accomplish much on
behalf of child laborers. They've connected with the nonprofit organizations
Craig meets on his travels to build rehabilitation and education centers for
children rescued from bonded labor and to create alternative sources of income
for adults in these countries. (In India, for example, 55 million adults are
unemployed, while 55 million children work in labor camps and on the streets.)
Free
the Children chapters have popped up around the world, and each runs its own
campaigns for more humane labor practices. The FTC club in Paso Robles, California,
for example, organized a Nike boycott and collected Nike shoes and clothes
from students who didn't want to support Nike's notorious sweatshops. The
Calcutta, India, chapter held a rally to protest the practice of forcing handicapped
children to work as beggars and drug runners. Shortly thereafter, the Indian
government promised to take action to stop this practice.
Aside
from the extra media attention he's garnered because of his youth (he's now
16), Kielburger feels that children and teenagers have an advantage when it
comes to activism.
"Adults
find taking action on large issues like child labor a lot scarier than we
do," he says, "because they're more entrenched in their thinking.
They say things like: 'Oh, I can't do that. I have a job and a family'&
'But young people haven't become conditioned to think in a little box; we
don't even know a box exists.
"People
put us down as being young and dreamers, which I frankly find encouraging.
It's the dreamers who thought that one day the Berlin Wall would fall or that
apartheid in South Africa would end."
By
Tracy Rysavy associate editor of YES!
Contact
Free the Children International at 1750 Steeles Avenue West, Suite 218, Concord,
Ontario L4K 2L7; 905/760-9382; Fax: 905/760-9157; E-mail: freechild@clo.com;
Web: www.freethechildren.org
Craig
Kielburger's book, Free the Children, is available from HarperCollins
publishers. Author royalties from the book's sales go directly to FTC.
(Chavez is the son of Dolores
Huerta and nephew of César
Chavez, founders of the United Farm Workers Union.)