THE COLOR INITIATIVE
Showing posts with label PRI's The World. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PRI's The World. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
FREEDOM RIDERS AND WORLD OPINION
ON PRI's THE WORLD:
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My most recent story on the PRI-WGBH-BBC Program "The WORLD".
50 years ago this month, black and white activists boarded buses in Washington and headed into the Deep South. That took courage in 1961.The year before, the Supreme Court had made segregation illegal in interstate travel. But the law wasn’t being enforced in the South. And so those bus passengers forced the issue.
They became known as the “Freedom Riders.”
This month, a racially integrated group of 40 American – and foreign – students recreated the Freedom Riders’ journey. Ray Arsenault, the author of a history of the Freedom Riders of 1961, is leading a group of 40 College students on a tour of one of Alabama’s most notorious sites. This place just outside of Anniston, Alabama, is where fifty years ago, the Ku Klux Klan attacked a Freedom Riders’ Greyhound bus bound for New Orleans. After slashing the tires, the bus was firebombed, which forced the riders into the road.
Along this highway outside of Anniston, Zilong Wang, who was born many years after 1961 in Baotou, China, is thinking about the lessons of non-violence practiced by the original Freedom Riders and how they might guide his beliefs and actions.
“This is not just a healing of the past but also it sheds a light on the future. Not just a future of the United States but also for China, because China will definitely go through a similar period,” Wang said. “How can we use non-violence and civil disobedience to bring meaningful reform into China’s social system under the condition of social harmony and stability, I think we’re learning a lot from them.”
Wang, a philosophy student at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, is one of a handful of students chosen to board a bus from DC to New Orleans, to re-create the journey of 50 years ago along with original freedom riders. They met important figures from the time along the route.
Like John Siegenthaler, who was an assistant to US Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1961. He pointed out the contradictions of era – the Administration was pushing for freedoms around the world even as president Kennedy tolerated segregation and injustice throughout the Jim Crow South.
“The timing of the Freedom Rides and the conflagration that he (President Kennedy) hoped would never come, came at exactly the wrong time,” Siegenthaler said. “Came at the moment when’ he ‘s not able to make a convincing case about freedoms around the world, is not able to convince the Soviet Union ‘look free your people, let your people go. He’s not able to make that case because he had not let his own people go.” Siegenthaler said that the critical worldwide focus on domestic events in the USA helped to push the Administration into supporting civil rights.
Those events included attacks on Freedom Riders at this Trailways Bus Terminal in Birmingham, Alabama. This is the 8th city visited by the students on Freedom Ride 2011. Here Zilong Wang comes face to face with Freedom Rider James Zwerg, whose bloodied face peered from newspapers in 1961 helped compel hundreds of new riders to join the movement. Zwerg offers the college kids some pointers for their struggles, whatever they may be.
Follow the money: “If you want to bring about change you’re going to have to go the decision makers. In trying to change the movie theaters, it wasn’t going to happen,” Zwerg said. “In Nashville, for example, we had to make the people who owned the theaters decide to change.”
On this journey South, Zilong Wang and his fellow travelers also learned about the ultimate price that some paid for the advancement of human rights in the United States. The bus carring the 40 students has stopped in front of the 16th Street baptist Church in Birmingham. A bomb planted here took the lives of four little girls on September 15th , 1963.
Zilong Wang is only one of several foreign students on this tour of history and memory. Bakhrom Ismoilov is studying at Eastern Oregon University. He’s from Tajikistan. He equated some of the violence his country has recently experienced with the segregation of the south during the 1960’s. “It helps me a lot to see how much bigger and how much bigger scale it was. I can definitely relate this to terrorism, and actually putting a population of black Americans in fear,” Ismoilov said.
And over the din of the 16th Street Baptist Church Choir, Doaa Dorgham, a Palestinian born in Kuwait who wears a headscarf, laments what she sees as the irony of past and present discrimination in her adopted American land. “The irony of this situation is here I am celebrating how 50 years ago we made great strides to stop segregation in public transportation and discrimination, and then I’m in an airport and have to go through a body scan and have to go through a pat-down. And how is it that no one is able to see the correlation?” Dorgham asked.
As the Freedom Riders’ Tour winded down, students were asked what they will do with the knowledge they’ve collected along the way. Tanya Smith, who grew up in Haiti, and plans to return there to lead a non-violent movement on behalf of youth, spoke up.
“Just like the Freedom Riders saw the need in society for change, Haitian youth realize the power they do have and the stake they have for building Haiti’s future,” she said. “And I want to be able show that non-violence is more effective in the sense that you’re able to do what you’re doing without resorting to the same tools that your oppressors are using against you.”
Download Audio
My most recent story on the PRI-WGBH-BBC Program "The WORLD".
50 years ago this month, black and white activists boarded buses in Washington and headed into the Deep South. That took courage in 1961.The year before, the Supreme Court had made segregation illegal in interstate travel. But the law wasn’t being enforced in the South. And so those bus passengers forced the issue.
This month, a racially integrated group of 40 American – and foreign – students recreated the Freedom Riders’ journey. Ray Arsenault, the author of a history of the Freedom Riders of 1961, is leading a group of 40 College students on a tour of one of Alabama’s most notorious sites. This place just outside of Anniston, Alabama, is where fifty years ago, the Ku Klux Klan attacked a Freedom Riders’ Greyhound bus bound for New Orleans. After slashing the tires, the bus was firebombed, which forced the riders into the road.
Along this highway outside of Anniston, Zilong Wang, who was born many years after 1961 in Baotou, China, is thinking about the lessons of non-violence practiced by the original Freedom Riders and how they might guide his beliefs and actions.
“This is not just a healing of the past but also it sheds a light on the future. Not just a future of the United States but also for China, because China will definitely go through a similar period,” Wang said. “How can we use non-violence and civil disobedience to bring meaningful reform into China’s social system under the condition of social harmony and stability, I think we’re learning a lot from them.”
Wang, a philosophy student at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, is one of a handful of students chosen to board a bus from DC to New Orleans, to re-create the journey of 50 years ago along with original freedom riders. They met important figures from the time along the route.
Like John Siegenthaler, who was an assistant to US Attorney General Robert Kennedy in 1961. He pointed out the contradictions of era – the Administration was pushing for freedoms around the world even as president Kennedy tolerated segregation and injustice throughout the Jim Crow South.
“The timing of the Freedom Rides and the conflagration that he (President Kennedy) hoped would never come, came at exactly the wrong time,” Siegenthaler said. “Came at the moment when’ he ‘s not able to make a convincing case about freedoms around the world, is not able to convince the Soviet Union ‘look free your people, let your people go. He’s not able to make that case because he had not let his own people go.” Siegenthaler said that the critical worldwide focus on domestic events in the USA helped to push the Administration into supporting civil rights.
Those events included attacks on Freedom Riders at this Trailways Bus Terminal in Birmingham, Alabama. This is the 8th city visited by the students on Freedom Ride 2011. Here Zilong Wang comes face to face with Freedom Rider James Zwerg, whose bloodied face peered from newspapers in 1961 helped compel hundreds of new riders to join the movement. Zwerg offers the college kids some pointers for their struggles, whatever they may be.
Follow the money: “If you want to bring about change you’re going to have to go the decision makers. In trying to change the movie theaters, it wasn’t going to happen,” Zwerg said. “In Nashville, for example, we had to make the people who owned the theaters decide to change.”
On this journey South, Zilong Wang and his fellow travelers also learned about the ultimate price that some paid for the advancement of human rights in the United States. The bus carring the 40 students has stopped in front of the 16th Street baptist Church in Birmingham. A bomb planted here took the lives of four little girls on September 15th , 1963.
As the Freedom Riders’ Tour winded down, students were asked what they will do with the knowledge they’ve collected along the way. Tanya Smith, who grew up in Haiti, and plans to return there to lead a non-violent movement on behalf of youth, spoke up.
“Just like the Freedom Riders saw the need in society for change, Haitian youth realize the power they do have and the stake they have for building Haiti’s future,” she said. “And I want to be able show that non-violence is more effective in the sense that you’re able to do what you’re doing without resorting to the same tools that your oppressors are using against you.”
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
Questions about the Killing of Black Africans in Libya
THE COLOR INITIATIVE
At the onset of the conflict in Libya, citizens in open revolt against a brutal government rounded up mercenaries and slaughtered them on the spot.
Almost all of the three-thousand or so mercenaries transported to Libya to defend Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s embattled regime are dark-skinned men from Niger, Chad, Mali and elsewhere throughout the vast Sub-Saharan. An undetermined number are in fact black Libyan citizens from the south of the country. (Read Complete Article at Race Talk.Org)
At the onset of the conflict in Libya, citizens in open revolt against a brutal government rounded up mercenaries and slaughtered them on the spot.
Almost all of the three-thousand or so mercenaries transported to Libya to defend Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s embattled regime are dark-skinned men from Niger, Chad, Mali and elsewhere throughout the vast Sub-Saharan. An undetermined number are in fact black Libyan citizens from the south of the country. (Read Complete Article at Race Talk.Org)
Friday, December 31, 2010
COLOR INITIATIVE 16, 17, 18 19:
December 28-31, 2010 on THE COLOR INITIATIVE on PRI's The World (PRI, BBC and WGBH)
NOMADIC MIGRATION AND SKIN COLOR
Malta is the smallest of the twenty-seven EU nations, and in the view of many Maltese, it is under siege. With other routes to continental Europe closed off, thousands of African immigrants in recent years have steered closer to Malta in their torturous and risky journey north from Libya on the waves of the Mediterranean. But most of the approximately 8,000 asylum seekers that have reached Malta in recent years are "accidental tourists”. Few ever intentionally land on the island nation of 400,000. Rather, it is leaky boats and lack of sea-know-how that LANDS them there. Once in Malta, some are detained for nearly two years, essentially living between where they come from and where they'd like to go. And many of them believe—rightly or wrongly—that their skin color plays a role in their ultimate fate. In the following multi-part series, I interview desperate asylum seekers, a detention camp warden, the new US Ambassador to Malta, fishermen who saved lives at sea and another who said he was instructed not to stop, courageous Maltese naval men, Somali women and children, Malta's Justice Minister, social workers, a Jesuit priest-advocate whose car was firebombed and Maltese who feel they're being overrun by refugees (given the size of their island nation). We also travel to Geneva to speak with a representative of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and to Italy to speak with residents of Pozzallo and Taormina, Sicily, in this exploratory series.
Nomadic Migration Part I: From Somalia to Denver, the long way
Around the world, people are on the move in search of better lives. That is particularly true in Africa, where a wave of migrants is trying to reach Europe. Despite the dangers, they keep trying – and most do not succeed. Those who do are often on the move for years before they find a place to call home. In the first in a series of reports on nomadic migration to Europe and the United States, Phillip Martin tells the story of one man’s difficult journey to the US. Download MP3
Nomadic Migration Part II: From Libya to detention in Malta
Malta sits between Africa and Europe.Because of its location, wave after wave of illegal immigrants traveling by boat have come ashore on a regular basis.Though migration waves have slowed down dramatically in recent months from a high of nearly 3000 in 2009, the tiny island nation of 400,000 citizens, receives more asylum seekers –for its size—than any other EU country.In an effort to discourage illegal immigration, Malta has one of the toughest detention policies in Europe, and some say it goes too far.
This is part two of Phillip Martin’s special report on nomadic migration and skin color. Download MP3
Nomadic Migration Part III: The challenges faced by Africans living in Malta
Since 2002, thousands of Africans have journeyed through deserts and risked their lives to reach the shores of the Mediterranean and north to Europe. Some have been rescued at sea by the Maltese navy and transported to Malta, which lies between Africa and continental Europe. When their requests for asylum elsewhere are denied, they become stuck – often indefinitely – in the EU’s smallest nation-state. In part 3 of his series on nomadic migration and skin color, Phillip Martin reports. Download MP3
Nomadic Migration Part IV: Leaving Malta:
Since 2002, nearly 10,000 African migrants – trying to get to mainland Europe – have landed on the tiny island nation of Malta. Many were rescued from leaky boats by the Maltese navy. Once there, they can be detained in prisons for up to 18 months and then languish for years in Malta without jobs and, and in some cases, without a decent place to live. But some manage to move on – and find new homes in Europe and in the U.S. This is Phillip Martin’s final report in our special series on nomadic migration and skin color. Download MP3
The Color Initiative is funded by the Ford Foundation
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
THE JUNGLE BOYS OF THE PHILIPPINES
The Jungle Boys is a makeshift band of percussionists from across the Philippines. Their rehearsal space is the beach. Reporter Phillip Martin brings us this audio postcard.
http://media.theworld.org/audio/08102010.mp3Down Load Mp3 Audio
Sunday, May 9, 2010
REPORTING ON PRIVATE ARMIES IN MINDANAO
Vigilantes, Private Armies and Death Squads
On Monday, May 10th, voters across the Philippines will head to the polls to elect a new President and hundreds of local and provisional officials. But many poll watchers are concerned about the potential for violence. In recent weeks, 12 local political leaders have been gunned down, allegedly by members of politically connected “private armies”. Efforts to rein in private militias became a matter of urgency following a pre-election massacre last November on the island of Mindanao. I report from General Santos City.
On Monday, May 10th, voters across the Philippines will head to the polls to elect a new President and hundreds of local and provisional officials. But many poll watchers are concerned about the potential for violence. In recent weeks, 12 local political leaders have been gunned down, allegedly by members of politically connected “private armies”. Efforts to rein in private militias became a matter of urgency following a pre-election massacre last November on the island of Mindanao. I report from General Santos City.
Sunday, September 2, 2007
MOST RECENT Huffington Post Commentary
Why So Many Iraqis Hate Us?
Try "Towel Head" On for Size
Read More: Abu Ghraib, Baghdad, Bbc, BBC Poll, Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq, Iraq Surge, Iraq War, Klan, Middle-East, PRI's The World, Racial Prejudice, Racism, Southern Poverty Law Center, U.S. Military, Video, Winter Soldier, Breaking Politics News
In the five years that the U.S. military has occupied Iraq, the reasons for hating Americans have mounted: the looting of Mesopotamian treasures, rising violence and crime in the streets, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, the leveling of An Najaf, and also add "sand nigger" and "camel jockey" to the list.
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Posted April 11, 2008 | 07:50 PM (EST)