SCOPE50 News The Struggle Continues!
SCOPE50.org October 2018
Get Out the Vote
John Reynolds in southwest Georgia and southeast Alabama, promoting Get Out the Vote.
John in Reynolds, GA John with the Chair of the Voter
Registration Board, Pike County, AL
We have also been promoting Get Out the Vote in South Carolina, and Board member Richard Smiley is working in Florida. These last two weeks are crucial in our effort to Get Out the Vote.
Vote for Our Lives Tour
From the March for our Lives group:
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Oral History Project
We are continuing with our Oral History Project, and it is not too late to decide which of the three options we listed in the last newsletter works best for you:
(1) Contact one of the following Board Members to set up a time for a 15-20 minute phone or personal interview: John Reynolds (Email: JohnR99773@aol.com)
Lanny Kaufer (Email: CivilRightsVet@gmail.com)
Sherie Labedis (Email: Sherie@surewest.net)
(2) Be interviewed at a future group gathering to be held in Atlanta and other locations with a large number of SCOPE veterans, and
(3) Provide written answers to a short questionnaire via email.
The first group gathering will be held in Atlanta on January 31-February 1, 2019 (Thursday-Friday), and perhaps into Saturday morning (February 2). In addition to the individual oral history interviews, we are planning a social gathering for those attending. Board member Barbara Williams Emerson is coordinating the Atlanta gathering. If you would like to attend, please let Barbara know. Her e-mail address is bemersonltdbe@gmail.com.
The next gathering will be in Boston in April or May; we will keep you updated. We are also trying to plan a West Coast gathering, maybe between the Atlanta and Boston gatherings.
You can check out the oral interviews that have been completed so far on the SCOPE50.org website. We have set up a YouTube channel for this purpose. We submitted our copyright application on October 3 and are expecting to receive our official copyright status any time now. We have submitted the oral histories that we have collected so far to The Library of Congress.
The Kavanaugh Protests
Jo Freeman covered the protests in Washington, D.C. against the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to become a Justice of the Supreme Court. You can check out her story of what happened at the following links: http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/kavanaugh-confirmation-led-by-the-center-for-popular-democracy-and-mobilized-by-different-groups-protestors-were-overwhelmingly-female-mostly-middle-aged and then http://www.seniorwomen.com/news/index.php/kavanaugh-protests-continue-sexual-predators-on-the-court-hell-no-we-don-t-support-and-november-is-coming
Her photos of September's protests can be seen at http://www.publicseminar.org/2018/10/protesting-kavanaugh/ (See a sample below)
"When the Committee broke for lunch, protesters from all over Hart and Dirksen went outside to march in the rain. Well over a thousand people rallied on the west side of the Capitol."
Carnations were spread on the lawn reading WE BELIEVE CHRISTINE © Jo Freeman
Prompted by her coverage of the protests, Jo Freeman wrote the following essay:
Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come.
Victor Hugo
One of the most striking aspects of the protests against putting Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court was how quickly the issue of sexual assault went viral. There are many reasons to not want Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court but that's the one that caught fire.
Another striking aspect was that 90% of the people who turned out to protest, at least in DC where I participated in those protests, were women. They were mostly older women, not the younger ones who usually populate protests.
As I finally realized after listening to a lot of women (and a few men) tell their stories, pretty much all women have been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives. Older women have lived longer so the probability is greater. They were raised during an era in which no one talked about it, because it was so normative. Now it's coming out. Women, especially older women, are resurrecting buried memories.
Those assaults were not necessarily as bad as the ones that have made recent headlines, but women lived with the fact that they could be groped and grabbed at any time. When I was young I heard jokes about the casting couch. Women who got ahead in their jobs were assumed to be sleeping with the boss. A common cartoon showed a male boss chasing a female secretary around the office desk. No one said "isn't this horrible." It was normative.
Why is that changing now?
Having studied social movements for decades (as well as participating in a few), I know that they come in surges of rapid change preceded by long periods of slow development. One cannot predict when a surge will happen, but when it does, you know it.
Complaints about sexual harassment have been poking their way into public consciousness for many years. Initially public complaints by women were not taken seriously, or were dismissed as idiosyncratic. After "#MeToo" emerged in 2006 more women spoke out. More men in high places were accused not only of acting like "boys" but of abusing their power in order to do so. When sexual abuse by priests of boys became public, it highlighted how pervasive it was in places where it was least expected.
Social movement surges are usually sparked by a precipitating event, sometimes more than one, which encapsulate people's experiences in a particularly egregious fashion. The precipitating event for the civil rights movement was the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14 year-old boy in Mississippi, and the acquittal of his killers. The early women's liberation movement was started by a series of small crises in different places. There were too many to list here, but some are mentioned in my 1975 book.
The current surge against sexual abuse was precipitated by electing as President a man who bragged about grabbing pussy. The idea snowballed into several million people, mostly women, marching and protesting all over this country, indeed all over the world. While many issues were raised, the signs carried by marchers highlighted the importance of putting a man into the highest office who thought groping women was perfectly OK.
Where this will lead is hard to say. The movement will spread to other issues and other groups – that always happens. But changing practices specifically about sexual abuse requires changing attitudes. That's harder. We don't need more laws. There are plenty of laws in the penal codes prohibiting different types of sexual contact. We need to change the culture.
Not all men grope and grab women (or other men). But all exist in a culture in which such actions are accepted as normal behavior ("boys will be boys"). By way of analogy, a hundred years ago, when lynching was common, only a small portion of the population actually participated in a lynching. But they existed in a culture which looked the other way when it happened, and came up with rationalizations to justify it when it did. It was cultural change that reduced lynching to a rarity. And it's cultural change that will persuade males not to paw females.
There's no easy way to change a culture. It's a little like moving a refrigerator – by hand, without wheels or a dolly. You tug a little on this corner, then push a little on that one. And slowly, you move it across the floor. Of course moving it up or down stairs, without a dolly, and without its falling over – maybe on you, is a lot harder. For that you need help.
When Donald Trump mocked Dr. Christine Blasey Ford for what she told the Judiciary Committee about her experience with Brett Kavanaugh, it was like Trump was sitting on the refrigerator. Support in high places for bad behavior, and demeaning those who talk about it, makes cultural change harder. But it doesn't make it impossible.
We can do it. And we will.
Lynn Goldberg Honored by the NAACP
At its fundraiser on September 21, the Calhoun County (SC) NAACP honored Lynn Goldberg for the work that her SCOPE group did in 1965. Lynn said that the honor belongs to all the folks who worked on the project that summer.
Lynn said she is proud of the work that the Calhoun County NAACP is doing to bring awareness to the value of educating the public and registering to vote. "The struggle continues to improve the lives of our communities."
Facebook Ad
John Reynolds (Board President), Mary Whyte (Assistant Treasurer), and David Childs (SCOPE50 Communications Director) met in early October to come up with a Get Out the Vote campaign. We identified several demographics that we wished to target, and we planned to run two video ads in all of the Southern states – targeting two demographics: the minority community and young people (age 18-34) who might be motivated because of the March for Our Lives movement. We felt that these demographic groups were the ones that we should try to motivate – either to vote or to join in the effort to get out the vote.
At this meeting we submitted the first ad to Facebook that was to run the month of October up until Election Day. We were prepared to submit a second ad. But Facebook rejected our ad without giving us any reason for the rejection other than telling us to read their policy guidelines. After reading the article that appeared on the front page of USAToday on October 22, it appears that Facebook has been over-reacting to criticism that they received over its failure to stop foreign interference during the 2016 presidential campaign. According to USAToday, "Dozens of advertisements removed from Facebook for being political ahead of the November mid-term elections did not appear to express any political view…but they did seem to have something in common: They mentioned "African-American," "Latino," "Hispanic," "Mexican," "women" or "LGBT" or were written in Spanish." So it appears that even though SCOPE50 is non-partisan, this is the reason that our ad was rejected.
Quarterly Board Meeting
The Board will hold its quarterly board meeting via teleconferencing on Wednesday,
November 28, at 3 p.m. We invite all Board members to participate. Any SCOPE50 members with issues that they would like the Board to discuss should submit them to John Reynolds (JohnR99773@aol.com).
Donations
We are in that period when most non-profits are instituting their fundraising efforts. Therefore SCOPE50 is launching a fundraising campaign that will include submitting grant applications to organizations. We will also be making an appeal to SCOPE50 members and SCOPE50 friends; letters should be going out within the next two weeks. Donations can be made to SCOPE50; all donations are tax deductible to the extent allowed by law. Donations can be sent to SCOPE50 at 773 Spinnaker Beachhouse, Seabook Island, SC 29455.
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