SCOPE50 News The Struggle Continues!
SCOPE50.org July 2017
SCOPE50 Annual Board Meeting:
The SCOPE50 Annual Board meeting was held on Seabrook Island, South Carolina, June 21-24. (Highlights of the minutes were distributed to the e-list on July 20.) One of the decisions made by the Board was that we will hold our next Annual Meeting at the same place in May 2018; however, the Board will have phone conferences throughout the year. On June 22 we held a mass meeting on Johns Island where members of the Board spoke to the community at large. The Board felt that this was a successful meeting, and most of the reaction we have received since was positive as well. The mass meeting was streamed live on the SCOPE50 Facebook page, and nearly 300 people watched the meeting. Also, a front-page article appeared in the July 21 issue of the local islands newspaper, The Island Connection. Below is a photo of Board members Lanny Kaufer, Richard Smiley, Jo Freeman, Mary Whyte and John Reynolds, which was taken at the mass meeting.
During the week, a number of the Board members toured a number of the significant sites in Charleston, including some of the tourist attractions. But we also visited Mother Emanuel AME Church, which that week was commemorating the second anniversary of the massacre of nine church members who were attending Bible study on June 17, 2015. Jo Freeman and I attended the Sunday church service at Mother Emanuel on June 25.
Operation Breadbasket: An Untold Story of Civil Rights in Chicago, 1966–1971
Cathy Deppe, who worked on the SCOPE project in Greene County with Thomas Gilmore, as well as the Christmas project in Birmingham, has forwarded information about a book that her brother, Martin Deppe, recently wrote about Operation Breadbasket. Begun by Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement, Operation Breadbasket was directed by Jesse Jackson. Rev. Martin Deppe was one of Breadbasket's founding pastors. "Under the motto, 'Your Ministers Fight for Jobs and Rights,' the program put bread on the tables of the city's African-American families in the form of steady jobs."
According to a description of the book on Amazon, Rev. Deppe "traces Breadbasket's history from its early "Don't Buy" campaigns through a string of achievements related to black employment and black-owned products, services, and businesses. To the emerging call for black power, Breadbasket offered a program that actually empowered the black community, helping it engage the mainstream economic powers on an equal footing. Deppe recounts plans for Breadbasket's national expansion; its sponsored business expos; and the Saturday Breadbasket gatherings, a hugely popular black-pride forum. Deppe shows how the program evolved in response to growing pains, changing alliances, and the King assassination. Breadbasket's rich history, as told here, offers a still-viable model for attaining economic justice today."
Cathy Deppe has shared some of her brother's recent experiences talking about the book. After speaking at the Human Rights and Social Justice Institute, he met Rev Al Sharpton who informed him that he had read the book and his whole staff was now reading it. Rev. Deppe was among a group that Jackson honored at the event, including C. T. Vivian, Andrew Young, Fr. Mike Pfleger, and Jeremiah Wright.
The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity
We need to keep our eyes on the Trump Voter Commission. What are they trying to do with the voting process? This commission was primarily set up because Trump claimed that millions illegally voted in the 2016 election. The Commission has been trying to obtain voter information from states, but many states have resisted this effort. The voting process is important to this country. We may once again be called upon to bear witness to disenfranchised voters. We can't allow this administration to move us back sixty or so years. SCOPE50 will partner with organizations such as the National Conference of Black Legislators to see how this commission is impacting various communities, particularly the black vote.
Charleston Workers Renew Region's Ties to the Highlander Center
– Excerpts from a Portside article by Kerry Taylor, July 19, 2017
Seventy years ago, a group of cigar factory workers from Charleston, South Carolina, traveled almost 500 miles to the Highlander Folk School, a leadership training school founded in East Tennessee in 1932. There, the workers introduced the school's musical director to a gospel song that had boosted their spirits during a protracted strike the previous year. Highlander staff taught the song to thousands of labor and civil rights movement activists over the years and, as its popularity spread, "We Shall Overcome" became an anthem for human rights causes worldwide.
In the footsteps of the tobacco workers, three Charleston food and hospitality industry workers attended an education and organizing workshop at Highlander earlier this month sponsored by Raise Up for $15, the Southern expression of the national "Fight for $15," the SEIU-backed movement for a livable wage and union rights for low-wage workers.
In the years between the tobacco workers' visit and this month's workshop, hundreds more Charleston-area workers and activists have made the trek to Highlander. None made more of an impact on Highlander (and U. S. history) than Septima P. Clark, a Charleston teacher. Highlander cofounder Myles Horton was so impressed by the literacy and citizenship education work being done by Clark and her associates on the Sea Islands near Charleston that he soon invited her to join the staff. In 1961 the Citizenship School they developed was adopted by King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as its educational and leadership development program.
Bill Saunders of Johns Island, South Carolina, still remembers witnessing Clark's 1959 arrest at Highlander on trumped up charges that she had violated state liquor laws. Saunders fumed in anger and frustration as he watched police brutalize Clark and take her away. The bitterness has remained with Saunders, who is now 82.
Shortly after Clark's arrest, Highlander, located at the time in Monteagle, was closed by the state of Tennessee. The closure culminated a long campaign of harassment and intimidation directed at the school and its leaders. It reopened as the Highlander Research and Education Center on farmland in New Market, Tennessee, its location since 1961.
A new Poor People's Campaign
A portion of the above Portside article made reference to a new Poor People's Campaign. Organizers are planning a series of protests spotlighting poverty and economic disparities coinciding with the 50-year anniversary of the campaign spearheaded by Martin Luther King, Jr. in the final months of his life. This group does not appear to be affiliated with SCLC. You may wish to check out their website: https://poorpeoplescampaign.org/
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