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      Marjorie Taylor Greene among US public figures hit by threats and swatting

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      The political became personal over the Christmas holiday as the homes of politicos and judges were targeted by threats, protests and “swatting” hoaxes by pranksters who call in fake emergencies to authorities in the hopes of prompting a forceful police response.A swatting hoax targeted the Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Authorities said they were investigating threats against the Colorado supreme court justices who ruled that Trump could not appear on the state’s ballots in the 2024 presidential election because he incited an insurrection on the day of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol.And protesters staged demonstrations outside the home of two Joe Biden White House military advisers as the Israel-Gaza war continued.On Tuesday, police in Rome, Georgia, said a man in New York called a suicide hotline claiming that he had shot his girlfriend at the home of Greene and was going to kill himself next.Authorities said they contacted Greene’s security detail to confirm she was safe and that there was no emergency. Police also confirmed that Greene had been the target of about eight such “swatting” attempts.The Rome police department said it quickly verified that the call was a hoax and did not send officers to the house.In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Greene said: “I was swatted this morning on Christmas Day and a few days ago – Thursday Dec 21st. We received this death threat where this man is saying I will be shot in the head and skinned to make a ‘parasol’.”She said the person was making a reference to Ed Gein, “a psychopath killer who would make things out of his victims’ skin”.Greene added that the person also said “he would like to smash” the heads of her and her boyfriend, the far-right television broadcaster Brian Glenn, “on a curb”. Greene published the text of the threat, which named the purported sender of the message.Meanwhile, in Denver, local police as well as the FBI said they were investigating threats to the Colorado supreme court justices after they ruled that the January 6 attack made Trump ineligible to appear on the state’s ballots as he seeks a second presidency in 2024.A spokesperson at the FBI’s field office in Denver told the Guardian and other outlets that the agency “is aware of the situation and working with local law enforcement”.“We will vigorously pursue investigations of any threat or use of violence committed by someone who uses extremist views to justify their actions regardless of motivation,” the FBI’s statement said.A Denver police department spokesperson told Axios it was “investigating incidents directed at Colorado supreme court justices”. The spokesperson also said police “would thoroughly investigate any reports of threats or harassment”, and officers were “providing extra patrols around justices’ residences”.Separately, CNN reported that the names of the four Colorado supreme court justices who ruled to disqualify Trump from the ballot had since appeared in “incendiary” posts on online forums.In an apparent reference to the justices, a correspondent on a pro-Trump site posted: “All … robed rats must … hang.”According to CNN, analysis by a non-partisan research group working for US law enforcement said that the justices had not been specifically targeted, but “there remains a risk of lone actor or small group violence or other illegal activities in response to the ruling”.The intensifying political climate has given rise to increasing threats to government, judicial and public officials, according to experts. Bloomberg Law reported that the US Marshals Service – which is assigned to keep federal judges safe – cannot fully assess the security risks they face because of failures in its tracking system to cross-reference information.The number of substantiated threats against federal judges climbed in recent years – from 178 in 2019 to 311 in 2022, according to the marshals service. In the first three months of 2023, there were more than 280 threats.The marshal’s service, Bloomberg noted, attempts to distinguish between a “hunter” – someone who attacks a judge – and a “howler”, who threatens but does not act.“It’s not tenable for a democracy to have people expressing their grievances and lacing that discontent with threats of violence at this volume,” Peter Simi at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center at the University of Nebraska Omaha, told the outlet, adding that the behaviour suggested “a certain lawlessness is acceptable and is becoming normalized”.Elsewhere on Monday, pro-Palestinian protesters staged a demonstration near the homes of the US secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, and the White House national security adviser, Jake Sullivan.Near Austin’s home, they held signs calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, where Israel has been waging war since Hamas attacked it on 7 October.The protesters chanted: “Austin, Austin, rise and shine – no sleep during genocide.”A crowd of protesters later adopted a similar tactic outside the home of Sullivan.Posting on X, the activist group named the People’s Forum said it “woke up … Lloyd Austin as he tried to go on with his [Christmas] while arming & supporting zionist genocide against the Palestinian people. Now, we disrupt ANOTHER war criminal: [Jake Sullivan]. The people say NO XMAS AS USUAL!” More

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells climate marchers to be ‘too big and too radical to ignore’ – live

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      From 1h agoThe crowd cried out in cheers for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who thanked them for showing up and highlighting the urgency of the climate crisis.“This issue is the issue, one of the most important issues of our time,” she said, adding: “We must be too big and too radical to ignore.”Climate action requires a democratic restructuring of the economy, she said.“What we’re not gonna do is go from oil barons to solar barons,” she told the crowd.The Climate Reality Project, a non-profit global network comprising 3.5 million climate activists, was one of the many organizations present at the march in New York City today.
      We are mobilizing around the summit to leverage national and international pressure to demand leaders change course.
      This is a critical moment for mass mobilization on fossil fuels that could ignite bigger and bolder climate action.
      Here is a tweet by Oil Change International of the various climate change marches that were staged around the world this week, including today’s rally in New York City.
      This is a big, beautiful climate movement & we’re calling on world leaders to #EndFossilFuels NOW. No more talk, we need action!
      Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, announced that she is working on a musical about the climate crisis.She and three cast members previewed a song from the show called Panic. “We want you to panic / We want you to act / You stole our future / And we want it, we want it back.”“Don’t let the cynics win. The cynics want us to think that this isn’t worth it. The cynics want us to believe that we can’t win. The cynics want us to believe that organizing doesn’t matter, that our political system doesn’t matter, that our economy doesn’t matter,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told a crowd of cheering protestors.“We’re here to say that we organize out of hope, we organize out of commitment, we organize out of love, we organize out of the beauty of our future. We will not give up! We will not let go! We will not allow cynicism to to prevail! We will not allow our vision of a collaborative economy, of dignity for working people, of honoring the Black, brown, Indigenous, white working class! We will not give up and that is what we are here to do today!” she added.“The United States continues to be approving record number of fossil fuel leases and we must send a message, right here today – that has got to end!”Earlier this month, AOC spoke to the Guardian and said that “there’s a very real danger here,” in reference to the presidential 2024 elections and the climate crisis.The crowd cried out in cheers for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who thanked them for showing up and highlighting the urgency of the climate crisis.“This issue is the issue, one of the most important issues of our time,” she said, adding: “We must be too big and too radical to ignore.”Climate action requires a democratic restructuring of the economy, she said.“What we’re not gonna do is go from oil barons to solar barons,” she told the crowd.Here are more images coming through the newswires from the march:World leaders have ‘forgotten’ responsibility to Mother EarthVeteran Indigenous organizer Tom Goldtooth, who is executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network, attended the march. “I’m here at the request of spiritual authorities within our Indigenous network,” he said.“They said that this United Nations secretary general’s summit on climate ambition has no spiritual soul to it – that the world leaders have forgotten what the responsibility is to understand the sacredness of Mother Earth.”He decried world leaders’ focus on technological solutions like geoengineering, as well as carbon offset markets, which studies show often do not result in lowered emissions.“We’re here to renew not only our relationship but humanity’s relationship to building sustainable communities based upon regenerative economy, living economy, not a fossil fuel economy,” he said.“The fight for the planet is not a personal issue, it’s a collective issue,” said Grant Miner, a graduate student representing the labor contingent with the Student Workers of Columbia University. “The economy that we have now is structured around killing the planet for profit.”“We’re asking Biden to divest fossil fuels,” said Sincere Cheong, who marched alongside thousands of other people. “The world is being destroyed and if we don’t cut back right now we won’t be able to limit the global warming to 1.5 degrees.”Tens of thousands of people in New York City have kicked off a week of demonstrations seeking to end the use of coal, oil and natural gas blamed for climate change.“This is an incredible moment,” said Jean Su of Center for Biological Diversity, who helped organize the mobilization.
      Tens of thousands of people are marching in the streets of New York because they want climate action, and they understand Biden’s expansion of fossil fuels is squandering our last chance to avoid climate catastrophe.
      Su said the action was the largest climate protest in the US since the start of the pandemic, with organizers estimating around 75,000 protestors taking to the streets in New York City.She added:
      This also shows the tremendous grit and fight of the people, especially youth and communities living at the frontlines of fossil fuel violence, to fight back and demand change for the future they have every right to lead.
      In addition to celebrities and lawmakers, kids from across the country as well as elderly people showed up at the protests, waving climate signs and chanting alongside event organizers.New York’s Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who previously championed the Green New Deal alongside Senator Bernie Sanders, is also expected to address the crowd later this afternoon.Sunday’s demonstration comes ahead of the the United Nations Climate Ambition Summit, which the UN secretary general, António Guterres, says will focus on on bold new climate pledges.In its citations for its climate journalists of the year, Covering Climate Now said:
      Manka Behl of the Times of India was praised by judges for reports “from the frontlines of the crisis in one of the world’s most climate-important countries” and for her interviews with leaders.

      Damian Carrington of the Guardian was credited for science-based reporting that “explains that politics and corporate power, not a lack of green technologies, are what block climate progress”, and cited for leading a reporting team on investigating “carbon bombs” and super-emitting methane leaks.

      Amy Westervelt was described as a prolific, multiplatform reporter for Critical Frequency whose work exposes how fossil fuel companies continue to mislead the public and policymakers alike.
      “Every news outlet on earth can learn from the engaged, hard-hitting journalism that Manka, Damian and Amy bring to the climate story,” said Mark Hertsgaard, the executive director of Covering Climate Now. “It’s reporting like this that arms the public with the power that knowledge gives.”The awards also recognized six Special Honors winners for “rigorous investigative reports, eye-opening exposes of climate injustice, and much-needed analyses of climate solutions”:Covering Climate Now, the global journalism collaboration, is announcing its media awards this week at a time when audiences need to know how and why “the planet is on fire” and what can be done, judges said.CCN’s three climate journalists of the year for 2023 are Damian Carrington of the Guardian, Manka Behl of the Times of India and Amy Westervelt, the founder of the Critical Frequency podcast network.Naomi Klein, the international bestselling author, won in the commentary category, while Ishan Kukreti of the Indian non-profit Scroll.in won for long-form writing.Covering Climate Now is a global collaboration involving some 600 news outlets with a reach of more than 2 billion people, and its media awards program was launched three years ago to spread standards of excellence in climate journalism.This year’s winners were selected from a list of finalists from more than 1,100 entries from 29 countries, and chosen by more than 100 journalists.Children showed up in droves for the march to end fossil fuels.“We’re here today because our planet deserves a future,” Ida, 12, said.Gus, a six-year-old, travelled from Boston for the march with his mother, Laura. “We’re here to end fossil fuels … so we can stop climate change,” he said.Aviva, a seven-year-old Brooklynite who attended the march with her mom and sister, spoke into the megaphone. “Hey hey, ho,” she shouted, as the crowd responded: “Fossil fuels have got to go!”As the climate rally in New York City continues, climate activists in Germany sprayed orange paint on to Berlin’s popular Brandenburg Gate on Sunday in attempts to call on the German government to stop using fossil fuels.“The protest makes it clear: it is time for a political change,” the climate activist group the Last Generation said in a statement, the Associated Press reports.“Away from fossil fuels – towards fairness,” it added.The Associated Press reports that police have blocked the area around the historic gate and confirmed that they have detained 14 activists that are affiliated with the Last Generation.Mentions of gas stoves are emerging as a theme among the many signs protesters are holding up at the march to end fossil fuels.This April, New York became the first US state to ban gas stoves in new residential building construction as research emerged about its dangers for human health.At the march, the Rev Lennox Yearwood, head of the Hip Hop Caucus, likened today’s climate movement to the US fight for racial justice.“We’re at our lunch counter moment for the 21st century,” he said.A native of Louisiana, he said he was excited to see demonstrators support environmental justice activists’ fight to end petrochemical buildout in the south-west US.“We need to end fossil fuels in all forms,” he said.Protesters chanted: “We are unstoppable, another world is possible.”Others sang Leonard Cohen’s Anthem: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”Here is video by the Guardian’s visual reporter Aliya Uteuova on the fossil fuels march in New York City this afternoon.The activists will be marching to the United Nations ahead of the UN Climate Ambition Summit that is set to take place in a few days.Veteran environmental activist Bill McKibben travelled to New York City to attend the march.“I think it’s a real restart moment after the pandemic for the big in-the-streets climate movement,” he said. “It’s good to see people get back out there.”The crowd, he said, reflected the diversity of New York City.“I’m glad to see there’s a lot of old people like me here,” said McKibben, who founded Third Act, an activist group aimed at elders. “We’ll be marching in the back because we’re slow!”Climate scientist Peter Kalmus at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab also spoke at the press conference, saying that he has two kids in high school and that he’s “terrified for their future”.“I’m terrified for my future right now,” he added.“We are so clearly in a fucking climate emergency. Why won’t Biden declare it?” he said. More

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      Cop City protesters charged with racketeering as Georgia takes hard line

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      Dozens of activists who oppose a controversial police and fire training facility in Georgia known as Cop City have been charged with racketeering, appearing to confirm fears from civil rights groups that prosecutors are stepping up an aggressive pursuit of environmental protesters.A total of 61 people – most not from Georgia – were indicted for violating the state’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act last week, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.Some of the defendants face additional charges of money laundering and domestic terrorism, the newspaper reported.In July, a coalition of groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote to the Department of Homeland Security decrying tactics used in authorities’ surveillance of the environmental protesters, and their use of the label “domestic violence extremism” for opponents of the $90m facility under construction on 85 acres of the South River Forest near Atlanta.The letter warned of the “dangers of … vague, overbroad, and stigmatizing terms like ‘domestic violent extremist’ and ‘militant’ to describe individuals who may be engaged in protected first amendment activity”.The US constitution’s first amendment protects Americans’ rights to free political speech and assembly.The most recent indictment was filed by the Georgia attorney general’s office in Fulton county last Tuesday, the AJC reported, and follows months of often violent protests at the site and in downtown Atlanta.In June, Sherry Boston, district attorney for DeKalb county, in which Cop City is located, announced she was withdrawing from criminal cases tied to protests, citing differences with Georgia’s Republican attorney general, Chris Carr, over how they were being handled.At that stage, more than 40 people had been charged with domestic terrorism following incidents in which fireworks and rocks were thrown at police. Police vehicles and construction equipment were also vandalized.“It is clear to both myself and to the attorney general that we have fundamentally different prosecution philosophies,” Boston said. The move handed Carr’s office sole responsibility for charging and prosecuting cases.Protesters have complained of intimidation and heavy-handed action by police, and the shooting death of an environmental activist, Manuel Paez Terán, in a January raid by officers on a camp at the constriction site. Investigators claimed Paez Terán, who was shot 57 times, fired first, but an autopsy found no gunpowder residue on the activist’s body.Paez Terán’s death was believed to be the first of an environmental campaigner by law enforcement in the US, reflecting what campaigners say is an escalation in the criminalization and repression of those who seek to protect natural resources.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNo detailed explanation of the charges against the 61 activists has yet been released, the AJC said. Ché Alexander, the Fulton county clerk of court, told the newspaper the indictment would be released later on Tuesday.In July, three members of a support group that helped earlier Cop City defendants with legal costs were arrested and charged with financial crimes, including money laundering and “charity fraud”. Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, called the three “criminals who facilitated and encouraged domestic terrorism”.In a message posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, on Tuesday morning, the ACLU said it was alarmed by the latest indictments. “This is unprecedented and extremely concerning, and we’re tracking the situation closely,” it said.The activist group Vote to Stop Cop City said the racketeering charges were “a clear assault on the broader movement for racial justice and equity”.In a statement to the Guardian, the group said: “These charges, like the previous repressive prosecutions by the state of Georgia, seek to intimidate protesters, legal observers, and bail funds alike, and send the chilling message that any dissent to Cop City will be punished with the full power and violence of the government.“[District attorney] Carr’s actions are a part of a retaliatory pattern of prosecutions against organizers nationwide that attack the right to protest and freedom of speech. His threats will not silence our commitment to standing up for our future, our community, and our city.” More

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      The Women of NOW review: superb history of feminist growth and groundswell

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      What do a bestselling author, a segregationist congressman and a Black legal scholar have in common? Through a series of serendipitous events, Betty Friedan, Howard Smith and Pauli Murray lit fires that ignited the largest social revolution of the 20th century.Friedan wrote the 1963 blockbuster The Feminine Mystique. Smith added “sex” to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1965, Murray wrote the first legal analysis comparing Jim Crow to gender discrimination. With the benefit of hindsight, this unwitting but timely partnership can be seen as the launchpad of the second wave feminist movement, a movement synonymous with the National Organization for Women, or NOW.Almost 60 years after its inception, we think of NOW as a mainstream national feminist group. But in 1966 it was founded on the radical idea, as Katherine Turk describes it, “to organize and advocate for all women by channeling their efforts into one association that sought to end male supremacy”.In a world where most women were denied credit cards and mortgages, entrance into marathon races, medical school and law school, jobs as bar tenders, editors, pilots, and factory managers, ending male supremacy seemed unfathomable.Turk’s The Women of NOW is a fascinating account of the foundational organization that for many decades served as the central tentpole of this multifaceted movement. Despite the hundreds of books that make up the rich cannon of modern women’s history, Turk has done a much-needed service, writing the first full history of NOW.A professor at the University of North Carolina, Turk devoted 20 years, beginning with her undergraduate thesis, to telling this complex story. With gumshoe reporting precision, she traveled the country, unearthing hundreds of boxes and thousands of files that had been collecting dust in library archives. Combining this detailed documentary roadmap with interviews, Turk weaves the root story of an organization that drove the most transformative mass movement of the modern age.Turk makes sense of NOW’s unwieldy geographic spread and 60-year history by telling it from the points of view of three very different leaders: Aileen Hernandez, Mary Jean Collins and Patricia Hill Burnett. Hernandez, an experienced Black union organizer, Collins, a young working-class political activist, and Burnett, a rich Detroit housewife and former Miss Michigan, personify the broad reach of the organization which tried, and sometimes failed, to represent all women.Collins, who became president the Chicago chapter in 1968, greeted her new cause with giddy enthusiasm, saying joining NOW was “like waking up from a dead sleep, like ‘this is wrong; and everything is wrong.’ And away we went.” Their goal was nothing short of reprograming American society; revamping the way people lived, worked and loved.Hernandez, the most professional of the three, was one of the first five commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. When the commission opened in 1965, its main mission was to strike down workplace race discrimination. To the surprise of its leaders, a third of complaints came from women. When the agency decided it would do nothing in response to complaints from stewardesses who were fired when they turned 32, and AT&T telephone operators denied higher-level jobs, it became clear to Washington insiders like Pauli Murray, Catherine East, Mary Eastwood and Sonia Pressman that the country needed a women’s version of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. On 30 June 1966, 28 women, with Friedan their fearless if flawed leader, created an organization to “bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society and in truly equal partnership with men”. NOW was born.Turk thoughtfully recounts the feminist groundswell and the growth of NOW. It counted just 120 members in 1966 but it grew to 18,000 members and 250 chapters in 1972 and to 40,000 members and 700 chapters in 1974. NOW took on big corporations like Sears, AT&T and the New York Times (over its gender-segregated classified ads). Covered by the mainstream press, lawsuits, protests and press conferences helped spread the word. But as grassroots chapters proliferated, so did different priorities.Growing pains started early and never really subsided. Riven by divisions over race, class and sexual orientation, the organization that aimed to represent all women would eventually sink from its own weight, if not before powering the women’s movement in the 1960s and 70s.Hernandez and Murray, two of the most influential and strategic members of NOW, winced at white women’s “racist slights and oversights”. Lesbians like Rita Mae Brown rebelled against homophobia. But on 26 August 1970, hundreds of thousands of women from all backgrounds took part in the largest nationwide women’s protest in history, the Women’s Strike for Equality. This was the moment the movement went viral.Two years later, when the Equal Rights Amendment passed the House and Senate with huge majorities, Now had enjoyed a five-year run of victories in its righteous and politically popular cause. Seeing the ERA as a one-shot inoculation against systemic sexism, NOW leaders made the fateful decision to double down on the amendment’s 38-state ratification, a single-issue mission that would alienate Black women and invite organized opposition. The effort to amend the US constitution ultimately foundered in the face of powerful conservative forces lead by Phyllis Schlafly and Ronald Reagan.As Turk deftly guides her readers through NOW’s roller coaster of victories and defeats, we come away with a clear blueprint for change – replete with cautionary tales – as we face new challenges to women’s freedom and equality. The Women of NOW can show today’s feminists the path forward. It is a must-read.
      The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

      Clara Bingham’s book The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Remade America 1963-1973 will be published in May 2024 More

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      March on Washington: the day MLK – and Dylan and Baez – made hope and history rhyme

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      One hundred years after the civil war, the treatment of African Americans persisted as a gaping wound in the purported land of the free. Then, suddenly in the 1960s, the bleeding from lynchings, bombings, beatings and shootings finally had a seismic effect. It galvanized the noble group who made the 60s so electric: the nimble, passionate and utterly fearless Black and white citizens who banded together to rescue America’s soul.By 1963, the Rev Martin Luther King Jr had become the leader of the first generation since the abolitionists who truly believed they had the power to heal the nation. Since founding his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, King had worked tirelessly to fulfill its mission: “To save the soul of America.”King turned 28 the week after he founded the SCLC. More successfully than anyone since Abraham Lincoln, this Baptist preacher united millions of Black and white Americans in a cause of moral righteousness. They were drawn to his brain, to his soul, to his deep baritone and to his bearing. The novelist Jose Yglesias noted that “King laughed with his whole body, like a man who trusts his feelings”.His Gandhi-inspired choice of weapons put him on an unassailable moral plane. In a nation drenched in violence, he ordered his foot soldiers to fight with nothing but courage, intelligence and decency. In spring 1963, the world recoiled at the cost of that bravery, when the commissioner of public safety in Birmingham, Alabama, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, used clubs, high-pressure hoses and snarling German shepherds to halt a march of more than 1,000 non-violent protesters.When the white establishment of Birmingham gave in and agreed to remove “whites only” signs on restrooms and drinking fountains and to desegregate lunch counters, white terrorists bombed the hotel room where King and his aides had been staying and the house of his brother, Alfred. Miraculously, none were injured.A few weeks later, civil rights leaders were meeting John Kennedy at the White House when he said, “Bull has probably done more for civil rights than anyone else.” At first they were shocked. Then they thought it was joke. Then they realized it was true. Nearly universal revulsion to Connor’s tactics was a big factor in finally pushing Kennedy go on television, in June, to propose a civil rights act, and to deliver probably the greatest speech of his life.Echoing King, Kennedy declared: “One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free … Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise. The events in Birmingham and elsewhere have so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them.”King was exhilarated. He told the president he had given “one of the most eloquent profound and unequivocal pleas for justice and the freedom of all men ever made by any president”. And yet even after that speech, Kennedy was so nervous that Congress would respond the wrong way to a massive demonstration in the capital, it took another five weeks before he publicly endorsed the March on Washington, whose 60th anniversary we celebrate today.Courtland Cox, an early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a key organizer of the March, recalled a day now remembered almost exclusively for the soaring words of King’s “I have a dream” speech but also a peak moment for the collaborative power of music and politics.A month before, Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan traveled to Greenwood, Mississippi, to perform at a voter registration rally.“It wasn’t just a concert,” said Cox. “It was a community event.”Dylan performed Only a Pawn in Their Game, about the assassination of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers just a few weeks earlier. That was also one of the songs Dylan sang before 250,000 people in Washington. When Lena Horne was introduced, she uttered a single word: “Freedom.”Seeger had performed the most important musical pollination of all, when in 1957 King visited the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a training camp for civil rights workers. When Seeger sang We Shall Overcome, it was the first time King heard it. He fell in love with it. In Washington, it was sung by the Freedom Singers, accompanied by Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, and Theodore Bikel – and nearly everyone in the audience.Cox had spent years registering voters in places where “if we got caught we would be shot. Alabama was the most dangerous. In Mississippi I always thought I could get away from a bullet, compared to Alabama where they used bombs and dynamite. I thought your chances were better with a bullet than dynamite.“I’m not sure how you can really express it. During the most stressful things the music would be the wind beneath your wings. It’s one thing singing We Shall Overcome when the police were out there with tear gas. It’s sung in a way that maintains your determination. The music had advocacy.”Peter Goldman wrote all the most important Newsweek stories about civil rights. So he traveled to Washington for the march.He said: “During the mid day break between the mostly entertainment morning sessions and the afternoon speechifying session, some of the musicians were hanging out in the rotunda of the Lincoln Memorial. I’m standing there and Joan Baez walks up behind Bob Dylan and pats him on the butt. ‘Let’s sing, Bobby,’ she said. So the two of them start on a Dylan song. They were joined by Peter and Mary – Paul was elsewhere. They went on for about an hour. Folk songs, freedom songs. Dylan songs.”How big was the audience?“Me. It was one of my luckier days.”In his superb memoir, Chasing History, the great reporter Carl Bernstein writes that the Washington Star deployed more than 60 reporters, installed 10 special telephones up and down the mall, and even commandeered a helicopter to fly film to the newsroom. And yet, somehow, the lead stories in both the Star and the Washington Post failed to mention the main event: King’s extraordinary speech.James Reston, the celebrated New York Times Washington bureau chief, did not make the same mistake. In a front-page analysis, he wrote that King “touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else.“He was full of the symbolism of Lincoln and Gandhi, and the cadences of the Bible. He was both militant and sad, and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile.”Bernstein felt the same way.“For me, listening to Dr King’s speech, with its emotive power, and witnessing the sheer numbers of Black and white people marching together, I was certain I had experienced the most powerful moment of my lifetime – the ‘someday’ from We Shall Overcome was drawing nearer.” More

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      The Movement Made Us: true story of family and the civil rights struggle

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      In the crowded field of books about social activism, truth is the element that distinguishes good from great. In his first book, David Dennis Jr has mastered the process.The Movement Made Us: A Father, a Son, and a Legacy of a Freedom Ride is written with his father, David Dennis Sr, a hero of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The book opens with raw truth and maintains that standard, never using ambiguity as a shield against accountability.Dennis Sr never intended to be involved in the movement. In fact, the life he dreamed of when he went to Dillard University in New Orleans had nothing to do with activism at all. He wanted to be an engineer.When he started attending meetings of the Congress of Racial Equality (Core, which he would direct in Mississippi), he did so not out of bravery, nor driven by a desire to fight for a better world for Black people. Nor was he driven by a refusal to stand idle against white nationalism. At first, he was driven by motives familiar to any freshman who finds himself the first in his family to attend college. He wanted to meet attractive girls, keep his head down, finish school and get a job.Whether you consider that selfish, or self-preservation, it is unmistakably human. The Movement Made Us never shies away from the humanity of our civil rights heroes and heroines and the truth about a country that forced even the least prepared “soldiers” to fight a war that still hasn’t ended.In a chapter entitled God and Fear, Dennis Sr and Jr invite readers to experience the tension in the room as figures including John Lewis, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Andrew Young, CT Vivian, Wyatt Tee Walker and the director of Core, James Farmer, discuss whether a freedom ride – an organized incursion into the south, by public transport and in support of voting rights – should be cancelled because of extreme threats and the promise of jail on arrival.King objects. Questions arise about whether he is too important to the movement to ride. “He ain’t special,” one attendee shouts. King’s commitment was never in question but something far worse was being projected to other leaders: his assumed “superiority”. Dennis Sr and Jr draw readers into such tensions, allowing them to sit with the fear, anger and authenticity of the moment.Describing pivotal historic moments, the authors use truth as their compass, unafraid of where it may lead. No subject is above examination. The truth of our country is far more brutal than many Americans want to believe.Americans often see their history through rose-colored glasses. The Movement Made Us holds history to the sun, willing to let the rays burn. In a chapter entitled A Weekend in Jackson, the young activist Joan Johnson is questioned by the police who want to know about the “leaders” of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.“Lil’ [n-word] you in the NAACP,” the cop spat.“Yes,” she declared.Her words met with a beating. She fell to the floor, tried to protect her head. The police kicked her and demanded to know “who runs the NAACP?”“The people.”Each time she was asked the same question, Johnson gave the same answer. She was beaten unconscious, left in a pool of her own blood. The authors reveal that she was 16 years old at the time. The rawness of the image leaves no room to pretend that such domestic terrorism precluded the torture of women and children.America and the police force it protects and serves are not alone in being held to the light. The authentic life of David Dennis Sr, college student turned civil rights veteran, is examined closely too.After his close friend Medgar Evers was shot dead on his own front lawn, Dennis Sr nearly succumbed to survivor’s guilt and grief. The trauma and turmoil he describes will pose questions in the mind of the reader. Questions like, “What becomes of those who survive when their fellow soldiers are murdered with impunity? Where do their bodies and minds store the pain from the emotional and physical violence inflicted? What happens to marriages and families when one spouse promises for ever but can barely imagine a world beyond tomorrow?”This book addresses these questions with truth. Father and son wrestle with their answers. There are no clear winners. Noting how the family became an unwilling casualty in the war, Dennis Jr shares what it was like to be the son of a civil rights legend who barely escaped his own share of assassination attempts:
      The white men who fired shots at your back may have missed you but they hit our lineage. They left bullet holes in the foundation upon which your future families are built.”
      The Movement Made Us is not for those unprepared for veracity. Readers will experience a father sometimes reluctant to revisit the past and a son navigating his identity as a griot, recording history while protecting the father he loves.At its core, The Movement Made Us is about legacy, leadership, healing and accountability. It is more than a story about a father and his son. It is more than a story about the civil rights movement. It is a master class on allowing truth to anchor you and finding the balance between accountability and honoring. This is a lesson that should be replicated in America as a whole.Dennis Jr states: “This is the part where we break and tear the things that have been fixed in place.” His words are directed towards his father, but for a country in need of real healing, it is an evergreen declaration.
      The Movement Made Us is published in the US by Harper More

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      in US Politics

      Martin Luther King, founding father: Jonathan Eig on his epic new biography

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      Jonathan Eig’s new biography of Martin Luther King Jr was only published last week but it has already been hailed by the Washington Post as “the most compelling account of King’s life in a generation”. The documentarian Ken Burns described it as “kind of a miracle” and the New York Times declared it “supplants David J Garrow’s [Pulitzer-winning] 1986 biography, Bearing the Cross, as the definitive life of King”.In a remarkable act of generosity, Garrow opened his files to Eig and acted as his consultant. Garrow now agrees with other critics, calling Eig’s book “a great leap forward in our biographical understanding” and “the most comprehensive and original King biography to appear in over 35 years”.Eig is a former Wall Street Journal reporter who has written five other highly regarded books, including bestselling biographies of Lou Gehrig and Muhammad Ali. This week, Eig chatted about how his book on King came about and what he hopes readers will take from it.The Guardian: I read somewhere that the new book came out of your work on Ali.Eig: Yeah, it was completely organic. I was interviewing people who knew both of them and every time they would start talking about King, I would just get more curious. So I felt like I already had their phone numbers. I could call them back and get another meeting and this time talk about King. And I could do that before they got any older.The Guardian: When I wrote The Gay Metropolis I started with the oldest people I could find. Did you do that?Eig: 100%. It was like actuarial tables: factor for age and health and go after those who are the most frail. I hate to be crude about it, but that’s exactly what I did. Basically I was calling everybody all at once.The Guardian: How long did this one take?Eig: This one was six years. That’s full-time work, like 60 hours a week for six years.The Guardian: You had access to thousands of FBI files that weren’t available to previous biographers. How did that come about?Eig: I got somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 new documents. Donald Trump signed an order to release documents that were gathered during congressional hearings on JFK’s assassination. And I think accidentally that also led to the release of all the MLK FBI stuff, because the Church committee [a 1975-76 Senate panel on government intelligence activities] investigated them both.I really think Dave Garrow was the only one who went through every file. I went through a lot of them and Garrow was kind of like the first reader and he would tell me what was important and I, of course, looked through a lot on my own. But I don’t really know that too many other people were out there looking at this stuff.The Guardian: You did more than 200 interviews. Why were there so many people who knew King who were much more forthcoming than they had been before?Eig: Because they were older and because Coretta [Scott King, King’s wife] was gone. They were more comfortable saying things that they wouldn’t have said before. Certainly when it came to talking about Dorothy Cotton [one of King’s mistresses], people were really reluctant to say anything while Coretta was alive.The Guardian: I always tell my young friends writing a great book is all about what you leave out. Do you agree?Eig: (chuckling) Yeah. Even at 600-something pages! I left out a lot. At one point – I’ll be honest – I asked Colin Dickerman [his original editor] if I could do a three-volume work. I wanted to do one from childhood to Montgomery and then from Montgomery to maybe Selma and then Selma to death. Wisely, Colin disabused me of that idea. I’m trying to give the reader not just a good book but a readable book. I told my wife, I want people to cry at the end of this book – and they’re not gonna cry if I’ve put them to sleep!The Guardian: What do you know now that you didn’t know when you wrote your first book, about Lou Gehrig?Eig: It took me a couple of books to figure out that journalists’ archives are really valuable … When you find a good interview a journalist did with one of your subjects, go to his archives and see if the notes are there, see if the tapes are there.I got David Halberstam’s notes from his interview with King and he describes King taking his kids to the swimming pool and his daughter falls and scrapes her knee. And King grabs a piece of fried chicken and rubs it on her knee and says, “You know, chicken is the best thing for a cut.” It’s just a sweet little moment that didn’t make Halberstam’s story. But it was in his notebook.The Guardian: You describe King as one of America’s founding fathers. I’d never seen that before.Eig: Yeah. It was my idea. It was inspired somewhat by reading some of the 1619 Project. They talk about the idea that Black activists were seeking to force the country to live up to the words of the founding fathers. And that’s what kind of triggered it for me. I think you can make an argument that King more than anyone else is a founding father. He’s trying to create the nation as it was meant to be.The Guardian: The great Texas journalist Molly Ivins said something similar: “There’s not a thing wrong with the ideals and mechanisms outlined and the liberties set forth in the constitution of the US. The only problem is the founders left a lot of people out of the constitution. They left out poor people and Black people and female people. It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our constitution to everyone in America.”Eig: Yeah, I, I like that.The Guardian: What would you most like people to feel from reading your book?Eig: I hope people see King as a human being and not this two-dimensional character we’ve made him into since he became a national holiday and monument. [They should know] he had feelings and suffered and struggled and had doubts, because I think that makes his heroism even greater.I certainly want people to appreciate just how radical he was. A lot of people reduce him to this very safe figure who was all about peace, love and harmony. But he was challenging us in ways that made a lot of people uncomfortable, which is partly why the FBI came down on him the way they did.The Guardian: The thing that I think is probably most forgotten about him is that he was as anti-materialism as he was anti-militarism. Would you agree?Eig: That’s right. And it drove Coretta crazy because he would never even buy nice stuff for the house. And of course he left no money behind when he died. So he took it really seriously.
      King is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux More

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      in Elections

      FBI broke own rules in January 6 and BLM intelligence search, court finds

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      FBI officials repeatedly violated their own standards when they searched a vast repository of foreign intelligence for information related to the January 6 insurrection and racial justice protests in 2020, according court order released Friday.FBI officials said the thousands of violations, which also include improper searches of donors to a congressional campaign, predated a series of corrective measures that started in the summer of 2021 and continued last year. But the problems could nonetheless complicate FBI and justice department efforts to receive congressional reauthorization of a warrantless surveillance program that law enforcement officials say is needed to counter terrorism, espionage and international cybercrime.The violations were detailed in a secret court order issued last year by the foreign intelligence surveillance (Fisa) court, which has legal oversight of the US government’s spy powers. The Office of the Director of the National Intelligence released a heavily redacted version on Friday in what officials said was the interest of transparency.“Today’s disclosures underscore the need for Congress to rein in the FBI’s egregious abuses of this law, including warrantless searches using the names of people who donated to a congressional candidate,” said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Security Project.“These unlawful searches undermine our core constitutional rights and threaten the bedrock of our democracy. It’s clear the FBI can’t be left to police itself.”At issue are improper queries of foreign intelligence information collected under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which enables the government to gather the communications of targeted foreigners outside the US.That program, which is set to expire at the end of the year, creates a database of intelligence that US agencies can search. FBI searches must have a foreign intelligence purpose or be aimed at finding evidence of a crime. But congressional critics of the program have long raised alarm about what they say are unjustified searches of the database for information about Americans, along with more general concerns about surveillance abuses.Such criticism has aligned staunch liberal defenders of civil liberties with supporters of Donald Trump, who have seized on FBI surveillance errors during an investigation into his 2016 campaign. The issue has flared as the Republican-led House has been targeting the FBI, creating a committee to investigate the “weaponization” of government.In repeated episodes disclosed on Friday, the FBI’s own standards were not followed. The April 2022 order, for instances, details how the FBI queried the section 702 repository using the name of someone who was believed to have been at the Capitol during the January 6 6 riot. Officials obtained the information despite it not having any “analytical, investigative or evidentiary purpose”, the order said.The court order also says that an FBI analyst ran 13 queries of people suspected of being involved in the Capitol riot to determine if they had any foreign ties, but the justice department later determined that the searches were not likely to find foreign intelligence information or evidence of a crime.Other violations occurred when FBI officials in June 2020 ran searches related to more than 100 people arrested in connection with civil unrest and racial justice protests that had occurred in the US over the preceding weeks. The order says the FBI had maintained that the queries were likely to return foreign intelligence, though the reasons given for that assessment are mostly redacted.In addition, the FBI conducted what’s known as a batch query for 19,000 donors to an unnamed congressional campaign. An analyst doing the search cited concern that the campaign was a target of foreign influence, but the justice department said only “eight identifiers used in the query had sufficient ties to foreign influence activities to comply with the querying standard”.Officials said the case involved a candidate who ran unsuccessfully and is not a sitting member of Congress, and is unrelated to an episode described in March by congressman Darin LaHood, an Illinois Republican, who accused the FBI of wrongly searching for his name in foreign surveillance data.Senior FBI officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to reporters under ground rules set by the government, attributed the majority of the violations to confusion among the workforce and a lack of common understanding about the querying standards.They said the bureau has made significant changes since then, including mandating training and overhauling its computer system so that FBI officials must now enter a justification for the search in their own words than relying on a drop-down menu with pre-populated options.One of the officials said an internal audit of a representative sample of searches showed an increased compliance rate from 82% before the reforms were implemented to 96% afterward. 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