1. 13:46 24th Feb 2012

    Notes: 13884

    Reblogged from faintfantom

    image: Download

    rjmakes: mswyrr: mizjenkins: Eve ArnoldSchool for black civil rights activists; young girl being trained to not react to smoke blown in her faceVirginia, 1960 Wow. Puts all my knee-jerk reactions to ignorant assholes on the Internet in perspective. One really important, but often less mentioned, thing about non-violent civil rights work that people did was the months of work-shops and popular education that went on. People got together, discussed their feelings on what they were doing, made collective decisions about how their efforts would be organized and toward what goals, and then did schools like this where people practiced walking out non-violent resistance. According to Rev. James Lawson (interviewed here for the Freedom Riders documentary), who was brought to teach because of his experience in India studying the work of Gandhi, prior to the the efforts to desegregate the downtown area of Nashville—particularly lunch counters—people did popular education/workshops for six months. People talk admiringly about military campaigns, but instances like that had all the precision, commitment, and excellence of a military effort only toward the end of representing everyone rather than upholding strict hierarchy *and* using non-violent tools of warfare. I don’t hold that non-violence should be considered the only option for oppressed people. But I do believe that it’s extraordinary work that deserves wider recognition. I feel like, as with Rosa Parks, there’s this tendency for the narratives of the classical period of civil rights to portray what people chose to do as spontaneous. I feel like that denial of the prolonged, patient, careful, organized groundwork really sucks. The rest of this photo series is also online.

    rjmakes:

    mswyrr:

    mizjenkins:

    Eve Arnold
    School for black civil rights activists; young girl being trained to not react to smoke blown in her face
    Virginia, 1960

    Wow. Puts all my knee-jerk reactions to ignorant assholes on the Internet in perspective.

    One really important, but often less mentioned, thing about non-violent civil rights work that people did was the months of work-shops and popular education that went on. People got together, discussed their feelings on what they were doing, made collective decisions about how their efforts would be organized and toward what goals, and then did schools like this where people practiced walking out non-violent resistance. According to Rev. James Lawson (interviewed here for the Freedom Riders documentary), who was brought to teach because of his experience in India studying the work of Gandhi, prior to the the efforts to desegregate the downtown area of Nashville—particularly lunch counters—people did popular education/workshops for six months.

    People talk admiringly about military campaigns, but instances like that had all the precision, commitment, and excellence of a military effort only toward the end of representing everyone rather than upholding strict hierarchy *and* using non-violent tools of warfare.

    I don’t hold that non-violence should be considered the only option for oppressed people. But I do believe that it’s extraordinary work that deserves wider recognition. I feel like, as with Rosa Parks, there’s this tendency for the narratives of the classical period of civil rights to portray what people chose to do as spontaneous. I feel like that denial of the prolonged, patient, careful, organized groundwork really sucks.

    The rest of this photo series is also online.

    (Source: firsttimeuser)

     
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