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Sunday, April 28, 2019
"Troublemaker" Memories of the Freedom Movement
Friday, April 19, 2019
SCOPE50 Newsletter - April 2019
The Struggle Continues!
SCOPE50.org April 2019
Hospital Workers Strike, Charleston, SC, 1969
In 1969, when twelve women at Charleston's Medical College Hospital refused to air their grievances about low wages and long hours individually, as their supervisors insisted they do, they were fired. When other nurses and nurse assistants, both at the Medical College Hospital and two other local hospitals, heard about the dismissals, they went on strike, insisting the hospital rehire the dozen protesters and consider their complaints. The strike lasted for 113 days. SCLC was asked for its support, and Dr. Abernathy, believing this was a logical continuation of the Poor People's Campaign, sent staff to Charleston to assist the hospital workers in their efforts. Dr. Abernathy himself spent half the strike behind bars on a charge of inciting riot.
This March was the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the strike, and several events have been planned in Charleston to honor the strikers and their contribution to the civil and labor rights movements. On March 23, the co-chairs of the renewed Poor People's Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival – Rev. William Barber II and Rev. Liz Theoharis – were guest speakers at a program honoring the women, but they also discussed the need to build a new Poor People's Campaign. Rev. Barber, architect of the Moral Monday Movement, is head of the social justice organization, Repairers of the Breach.
John Reynolds, representing SCLC, also spoke, outlining SCLC's role during the strike and describing some of his responsibilities, for example, leading young people through downtown, ringing cowbells and bouncing basketballs, to discourage the white residents from shopping at the downtown stores as part of a boycott of local businesses to apply economic pressure that might prompt merchants to push the hospitals to reach a settlement.
Louise Brown, one of the 12 hospital workers Vera Small, youngest of the 12 hospital workers
Eventually, the two sides struck a deal. The nurses received a modest raise, and a grievance procedure was set in place. The outcome was hailed as a victory. The strikers' complaints were acknowledged. The Hospital Workers Strike had been a bold fusion of labor power and civil rights protest that transformed Charleston, South Carolina, and the nation.
Poor Peoples Campaign
At its last annual meeting, the SCOPE50 Board voted to partner with the new Poor People's Campaign since SCLC has given up its claim to the Poor People's Campaign, one of SCLC's last major projects, which a number of us worked on. Since that meeting, we have been attempting to put a working relationship together, and we are now at the stage of collaboration. The Rev. William Barber has picked up where Dr. Abernathy and Hosea Williams left off in 1969, and has announced that fairly soon there will be a nationwide bus tour meant to draw attention to the nation's 95 million Americans considered poor or low-income. We will provide more details at a later date.
Rev. Barber states that the number of Americans in poverty has increased by 60%, to 40.6 million, since the late 1960s, according to an Institute of Poverty Studies report prepared for the Poor People's Campaign. The majority of American poor, more than 17 million people, are white. The number of poor blacks is 9.2 million. And about 11 million of the country's poor are Latinos, according to the report. When Dr. King conceived of the Poor People's Campaign in 1968, he believed that we could make a significant dent in poverty. But according to this report, that hasn't become a reality. One of the reasons that SCOPE50 voted to partner with the new Poor People's Campaign is because we feel that this is still an important issue.
Article about Richard Smiley and Lanny Kaufer
In the last issue of the SCOPE50 Newsletter, we reported on the visit that Richard Smiley and Lanny Kaufer made to the Midland School in Los Olivos, California – Richard's high school alma mater – where they shared their experiences in the Civil Rights Movement. A local newspaper (the Santa Ynez Valley News) published an article about their visit, which we thought we would share with you.
Civil rights veterans visit Santa Ynez Valley; remember Selma March, Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Lisa Andre
The Santa Ynez Valley has a connection to some of the most historic events of the Civil Rights Movement recalled during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday and Black History Month. Richard Smiley, 70, a civil rights activist and 1968 graduate of Midland School in Los Olivos, was invited back to his alma mater in late January to speak to students and teachers about his personal experiences during the height of desegregation and the fight for equal voting rights in the South. Friend and fellow civil rights veteran Lanny Kaufer, a UCSB student during that time, joined him in the presentation.
Richard Smiley
Smiley stood before a wide-eyed group of eager listeners in Midland's library, giving detailed accounts of his youth in Alabama, remembering when the KKK would surround their community meetings. He shared about one event in particular, a peaceful demonstration which quickly escalated, garnering national attention: "Bloody Sunday."
Bloody Sunday: During that time, African Americans made up more than half of Selma's population and constituted a mere 2 percent of the registered voters. Addressing the inequality were hundreds of Selma demonstrators, one of which was 15-year-old Smiley, who from an early age understood the importance of his role in the civil rights movement. "I went to jail every day," Smiley said, explaining how he dropped out of high school at 15 to stand in solidarity with his brothers and sisters. "I had a moral obligation."
On Sunday, March 7, 1965, in their first attempt to march peacefully from Selma to Montgomery, a 54-mile hike over the Alabama River via the Edmund Pettus Bridge and down US Highway 80, an estimated 600 civil rights marchers congregated, protesting the obstruction of African Americans' right to register and vote. They were met with violent opposition by state troopers. Led by Rev. Dr. Frederick Douglas Reese, according to Smiley, "We marched from the church to the bridge and saw 200 white men on horses with billy clubs; then another 200 state troopers. When we kneeled to pray, they attacked us, pushing us back across the bridge and back to the church. They tear gassed us." In all, 17 marchers were hospitalized and 50 were treated for lesser injuries.
Smiley said King flew out to assist, encouraging the protesters to stay focused and remain undeterred. Just two days later on March 9, King led the second march across the bridge, which was met with little resistance. "There were a lot of white people, community leaders -- even dignitaries that showed up to march. There were at least 1,000 this time. Nothing happened. We kept praying," Smiley said. "We would shout, 'What you want now!' and others would yell back, 'freedom!"'
On Sunday, March 21, a third march, amassing as many as 3,200 marchers, headed from Selma for Montgomery on 12-mile-per-day walk that took four days. "The court ruled we had the right to march. We would sleep in tents along the way. There were undercover FBI agents and state troopers protecting the marchers," Smiley said. By the time they reached the capitol on March 25, they were 25,000 marchers strong. And in less than five months, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal legislation that prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
Midland 1968: Taken in by a very nice white lady as a child, Smiley said he was given an ultimatum: Stop the protesting or be kicked out. Referring to his foster mother, Smiley said, "She had her job and reputation on the line. I understood." Despite the difficult choice, he chose the latter. Forced out into the streets, Smiley became homeless at 16, sleeping in churches or wherever there was shelter. He said that the black community took care of him, even guiding him to stay at King's Freedom House in Atlanta for safety. "Dr. King was a joker, he liked to have fun. People tend to think he was always serious, but he was human," Smiley recalled of times spent with the civil rights leader.
Then one day, everything changed. Bob Fitch, a civil rights era photojournalist hired by King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), took Smiley under his wing, reaching out to friend Carl Munger, a faculty member at Midland School (headmaster in 1968), to inquire about enrolling Smiley into school. In response, Munger stopped in Atlanta to interview Smiley. Not long after, Smiley was accepted into Midland and was sent via bus to Los Olivos. "I was the only black student there," he recalled. Smiley further explained how incredibly bonded his cohort of 13 students became, insomuch that when King was killed on April 4, 1968, his class pooled enough money to buy him a flight to attend the funeral in Atlanta. "Our class loved each other," he said.
In 1968, Smiley finished his last year of high school and graduated from Midland, receiving a letter of completion that enabled him to attend a California community college. "Even when I left Midland, I'd come back and hang with them," he said of his cohorts. "We just celebrated our 50th class reunion in June 2018." Smiley, who currently resides in Tampa, Florida, received his official diploma from Midland in 2003, earned a bachelor's degree from Cal State and a masters degree from the University of Utah. He is a retired 24-year juvenile probation officer and an adjunct professor at Hillsborough Community College.
UCSB South: Ojai resident Lanny Kaufer, 72, a musician, songwriter, retired high school teacher, and part-time university professor, remembered his time as an 18-year-old UCSB student and activist, who not only witnessed the passing of the Voting Rights Act in August 1965, but had a hand in it. Kaufer said he shared his story with Midland students through music, at first describing his summer working with King through a special rap. "I think they were kind of amazed," he said laughing.
Lanny Kaufer (Photo credit Jim Quick)
Further detailing, he said, in 1964, as a freshman at UC Santa Barbara, he heard a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) representative speak about King's new voter registration project scheduled for the following summer. "I thought, 'here's a chance to make a real difference,"' he said. This prompted him to volunteer. "Both of my parents were refugees. My father escaped from the Nazis in '38 and my mother's parents escaped the Russians," he said, relating his activist nature to the moral compass they handed down to him. "My parents always taught me to respect other cultures. I was primed."
As a chapter member of the SCLC program's SCOPE Project (Summer Community Organization and Political Education), Kaufer flew to southern Virginia in the summer of 1965 where he became part of the organized movement canvassing the South in an effort to register black voters. Despite a series of race-related incidents in which he and his team were refused service at a restaurant; a laundromat owner locking them inside the building, threatening them and throwing their clean clothes onto the floor; and an indirect incident that involved a fellow chapter member being driven off the road in his car, Kaufer stayed the course.
Their local SCOPE Chapter was able to extend the hours of voter registration and establish an improvement association that still exists today, by going door-to-door, attending community meetings, showing up at local churches, and doing real "grunt work," according to Kaufer. "We registered 49,000 new voters that summer." The highlight of his summer, he says, was shaking King's hand and hearing him speak, which greatly inspired him. "I got to see the fulfillment of Dr. King's nonviolent strategies. It was really profound for me, but there is still a lot of work to be done."
50th anniversary: From Oct. 1-4, 2015, SCLC's SCOPE Project members from across the country gathered to celebrate 50 years since the fight for justice in the South began. The organization recognized as 'SCOPE 50,' a non-partisan organization which promotes and encourages voter registration nationally, is where Kaufer and Smiley first crossed paths. Little did they know that they also had Santa Barbara County in common. Having both been teenagers when they answered King's call to spend the summer of 1965 in the South registering black people to vote, the two are now on the board of directors for SCOPE 50, where they see each other or talk to each other on a regular basis. "We talk between board meetings," Smiley said.
An Update on Lanny Kaufer's Presentations
Recently, students at Matilija Junior High School in Ojai, California, formed a human swastika on campus, resulting in media coverage which sparked a community discussion on hate. In an article published in the Los Angeles Times, it was reported that authorities say that few hate incidents are reported in this liberal valley town. But at a community forum, several black and Jewish residents reported on their personal experiences with racism and anti-Semitism. The Los Angeles Times article quoted Lanny Kaufer: "As a Jewish person, I was very sad to see this happen. But as a teacher, I see it as a teachable moment. I think it's great that this came out in the open," he said. "I think it's been a long time coming."
The school district has announced plans to require all Matilija students to engage in social and emotional learning curriculum in response to the incident. Lanny has been invited to bring his presentation to all 5th grade classes.
Possible Online Bookshop
A number of us on the Board of SCOPE50 have been trying to figure out a way to promote books that have been written by SCOPE workers and SCLC staff, possibly creating an online bookstore. A small committee, led by Lanny Kaufer and Jo Freeman, are working on this. In the meantime we have put a list of books on the SCOPE50 website (SCOPE50.org) and we will be adding to this list. If you know of additional books that should be on this list, please contact Lanny Kaufer at civilrightsvet@gmail.com.
Annual SCOPE50 Board Meeting
The annual SCOPE50 board meeting will be held May 16-19, 2019, at a conference facility in the Charleston, South Carolina, area.
A Loss in our SCOPE50 Family
We received the sad news that our friend and colleague Lynn Goldberg had unexpectedly lost her husband Larry. It was a shock to all of us since Lynn had reported a couple weeks before that Larry was responding well to treatment. We encourage all of you to hold Lynn in prayer. Larry had been supportive of SCOPE50 and the work that Lynn had been doing, and he had accompanied her to SCOPE50 events.
Thursday, February 21, 2019
SCOPE50 Newsletter - January 2019
The Struggle Continues!
SCOPE50.org January 2019
REMEMBERING
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Let Us Continue His Work
Two Freedom Fighters
Two freedom fighters in the Civil Rights Movement (Richard Smiley and Lanny Kaufer) went on the road together in January and shared their experiences with a new generation, as part of remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Both are SCOPE50 board members. For Richard, it was a homecoming to his high school alma mater – Midland School in Los Olivos, California. They spent two days at Midland. The first day they talked about their work in the Movement, and the second day they led the students through a workshop on activism and nonviolence.
Sex, Race and Religion Flood the Streets of Washington, DC Over MLK Weekend (excerpts of a posting by Jo Freeman on www.seniorwomen.com
Sex, race and religion marched through the streets of Washington, DC over the long holiday weekend dedicated to the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King. There wasn't much brotherly (or sisterly) love, which would have been a more fitting tribute to Dr. King's memory; neither was there any physical violence, though there were some confrontations.
The Women's March was so successful in 2017 that it has become an annual event. For the third march, protestors were urged to come to Washington DC again, this time on Saturday, January 19, but were told they could march at home if they preferred. By now there are enough local organizations to do just that.
Ironically, it followed by one day the March for Life, which has also become an annual event, held on a weekend near the January 22, 1973 decision by the Supreme Court to limit the state's ability to restrict a woman's access to abortion. (Roe v. Wade) It always meets on the Mall for an hour before marching to the Supreme Court.
This year it conflicted somewhat with a new event. The Indigenous People's March met at the Dept. of Interior at 8:00 a.m. with prayers and songs. Afterward, participants marched to the Lincoln Memorial where there were some unpleasant encounters with other protestors. As if this wasn't enough, on Monday, DC held its 40th local march on MLK day, a long ways from the Mall. Mother Nature was not kind to any of the marchers, as all four days were cold and grey, with intermittent rain.
NOW (National Organization for Women) asked sympathizers to join it on the Supreme Court sidewalk to hold up pro-choice signs while pro-lifers walked by. Feminists have been doing this for years, but this was the smallest counter-protest that I have (barely) seen. While walking around that sidewalk looking for them, I shot photos of the other signs. I went to the end of the block and crossed the street. On the other side, I could see a few pro-choice signs facing the street; their backs to the Court. I also found a couple CodePinkers, who were only observing. I hadn't intended to spend two hours shooting the March for Life (I've done that before) but I had such a good photo spot, with the Supreme Court in the background, that I just stayed and clicked. The US Capitol Police lined both sides of the street to keep anyone on the sidewalk from going into the street. They started doing that after Stop Patriarchy blocked the street in 2015 and 2016 just as the lead March for Life banner approached the Supreme Court. I chatted with one of the cops, who let me leave the curb long enough to take photos of some of the signs as they passed. I always came back to my spot.
The Catholic Church, where male celibates hold the power, is the major people provider for the March for Life. Although evangelical Protestants, Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses are more likely to oppose abortion than Catholics, it is Catholic schools and dioceses who fill their busses with parishioners and students for a trip to Washington, DC. It's their signs that dominate the march.
Those going to the Women's March in DC had to pay their own way. Many local groups organized buses for marchers, but they weren't subsidized. There was a last minute change of location from a march on the Mall with a rally at Lincoln Memorial to Freedom Plaza. That space was too small; people packed the Plaza and flowed into the streets. Many were wearing pink pussy hats that had been popularized by the 2017 March.
The view is overlooking Freedom Plaza, looking down Pennsylvania Ave. toward the Capitol. Credit: Jo Freeman
At 11:00 a.m. the march stepped off for a short walk down Pennsylvania Ave., turning on 11th St. at the Trump International Hotel and again on E St. Barely five blocks, the walk took a long time because the street was packed and people moved very slowly. Banners were often hidden in the crowd. As marchers returned to the Plaza for the rally, most people left. Many had come as family groups; it was cold and there was no place to sit other than at nearby restaurants. On their way out, many went to the White House where they posed for photos and left their signs in the barricades the police had erected to keep protestors from getting too close.
Less than a thousand people actually heard the speakers live, or watched them on jumbotrons. At the other end of Freedom Plaza (only a block away), a group of Native Americans played their drums and chanted. On Pennsylvania Ave. itself, pro-lifers set up their large posters showing dismembered fetuses. Feminists stood in front, using their signs to block the posters. A different opposition group had staked out territory on the sidewalk on the march route. DC Police created a protest pen with yellow crime tape and guarded them to be sure there were no physical confrontations. The message on their signs was a combination of fundamentalist Christianity and anti-feminism.
As was true in 2017, many of the signs carried by marchers had an anti-Trump theme, but the percentage was smaller. Some were professionally printed, but many were homemade with personal sentiments. Anti-Trumpism was not a theme in the few speeches I listened to. While the marchers themselves were significantly white, those on the stage were not. Many races and religions were represented. Speakers trumpeted themes particular to their own groups, such as Black Lives Matter.
Major news coverage before the march focused on whether or not some march leaders were anti-Semitic, largely ignoring the Women's Agenda created for this march. Instead of asking about policy, reporters wrote about "associations." One response was to create a group of Jewish Women of Color to march as a bloc. Several hundred held a Sabbath service at the nearby New York Ave. Presbyterian Church before marching with identifying signs. The other major bloc of non-white marchers were those attending the AFL-CIO's annual MLK conference at the hotel a couple of miles away. The AFL bussed them to its headquarters where they held a labor rally and picked up Union signs before walking to Freedom Plaza to join the women's march. It bussed them back around 2:00 p.m.
There are no official estimates of crowd size anymore. Sometimes march organizers give out their own figures which are usually grossly exaggerated. Newspaper reporters also make their own estimates. Using all of these, my best guess is that there were a few hundred participants in the Indigenous March, two-hundred thousand in the March for Life and one-hundred thousand in the Women's March.
Numbers have more meaning in context. The Indigenous March didn't have a large base or finances. The MLK march is a local march, rather hard to get to without a vehicle, which was held on the coldest day of the weekend. The 46th March for Life was held on the least cold of those days. It has drawn as many as half a million, but not every year. The Woman's March numbers will always be lower than the roughly one million people who came in 2017; there haven't been enough of these for there to be a "normal."
The Supreme Court may take a chunk out of MLK's legacy (from a Jan. 20 article on CNN.com)
"One is called the "child of the storm." Another is "the crown jewel." The third was dubbed "the voice of justice." They are the three great laws of the civil rights movement: the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. A new conservative bloc on the Supreme Court though may soon treat them as something else: outdated "racial entitlements" that need to be put back in their place.
"That's the dreaded future some experts envision for these landmark laws now that Justice Brett Kavanaugh has joined the Supreme Court. They warn that, for the first time, the high court has five firmly conservative judges who were groomed to dismantle the legal legacy of these laws, which have stood for 50 years. "They will chip, chip away at these laws until there is nothing left," says Carol Anderson, author of One Person, No Vote; How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy.
"Such steady erosion would halt what some call the "Second American Civil Rights Revolution." It would also destroy a central plank in the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. When the nation celebrates the King holiday on Monday, much of the focus will be on his stirring speeches and dramatic marches. But these three laws are as central to King's legacy as his "I Have a Dream" speech. While he wasn't the only person who fought and died for these laws – there were countless others who did the same – King's role in their passage was indispensable.
"Today these laws touch virtually every American. They have changed everything from how women are treated in the workplace to protecting people with disabilities. Yet few realize these laws came about only because of a brutal struggle. And even fewer may be aware how a new high court could unravel them – all while claiming to honor the civil rights leader." (For more information, read the full article at https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/20/us/mlk-legacy-supreme-court/index.html .)
Shelby Jacobs
Most of us who know Brother Jacobs as one of our own, perhaps do not know of his history with NASA's space program. NASA has honored him as one of its innovators and unsung heroes (https://www.nasa.gov/50th/50th_magazine/unsungHeroes.html ). As Project Manager of the Apollo-Soyuz orbiter, Shelby designed instrumentation that would capture one of the most repeated images in space history: the separation between the first and second stages of the Apollo 6 spacecraft in 1968.
From an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune, "After three years of testing and perfecting, the cameras recorded the famous footage just seconds after the launch on April 4, 1968. Jacobs said the video proved the viability of the Saturn V rocket separation process. It was also the first time video had captured the curvature of Earth from space. But the mission's success was overshadowed by another event that day: the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. It was a troubling full-circle moment for Jacobs. Inspired by King's marches for voting rights in 1965, Jacobs spent two weeks in Georgia that summer canvassing neighborhoods to register black voters." (Note: Shelby was one of the SCOPE workers in Fort Valley, Georgia.)
From the Columbia Memorial Space Center website: "The Columbia Memorial Space Center, a Smithsonian Affiliate, is hosting an exhibit that honors Shelby Jacobs, the engineer who developed the camera systems that captured amazing images during the Apollo missions. Jacobs's contribution to space exploration and his achievements revolving around work and life as an African American aerospace engineer in the 1960s is showcased in Achieving the Impossible: The Life and Dreams of Shelby Jacobs. The exhibit runs through Spring 2019.
An unsung hero, Jacobs gave the world the famous "Blue Marble" image that provided definite proof that the Earth was round."
Additional information can be found at the following websites:
https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?guid=ebb229b3-a00b-4d94-9753-4c001c63ebca
Rise Up: The Movement that Changed America
Another SCOPE member – Jim Keck – appears in a documentary about Dr. King which is available for viewing via the History Channel Vault through March 3. In the 60s, Jim was an SCLC field organizer in Chicago under the tutorage of James Bevel and Jerry Herman. Later, in the 70s and 80s, he was a professional community organizer in Chicago.
Hosea Williams
January 5 would have been Hosea Williams' 93rd birthday. At the last meeting of the SCOPE50 Board, the decision was made to honor Hosea on his birthday. We would like to reprint here, for those who may not have seen it, the biographical information that appears on our SCOPE50 brochure:
We pay tribute to Hosea L. Williams, the Director of the SCOPE Project. "Hosea" was a renowned Civil Rights leader who played a crucial role in sustaining demonstrations that led to the Movement's greatest legislative accomplishments – the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. A Field General for Martin Luther King Jr., he was inspired by King's teachings to "clothe the naked and feed the hungry" and founded Hosea Feed the Hungry and Homeless in 1970, currently the largest direct-to-client food service organization in the Southeast and a provider of medical and educational aid in Haiti and Philippines.
Over 125 arrests and numerous beatings during civil disobedience and direct action protests throughout the South, Washington, DC, Chicago, and New York City. In 1987, he organized the largest march since the sixties in segregated Forsyth County, GA. Hosea was inducted in the inaugural ceremony of the International Civil Rights Walk of Fame at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site.
Hosea was born, just prior to the Great Depression, on January 5, 1926 to a blind, single, teen-aged mother, the daughter of sharecroppers, and a student at the "Macon School for the Colored Blind," whose death left him orphaned at ten years old. He died November 5, 2000.
He was awarded the Purple Heart after being wounded in World War II by a Nazi bombing, which caused a year-long hospitalization in Europe. During his discharge trip, a near-fatal attack for violating "Jim Crow" laws at a "White Only" water fountain in his home state resulted in a second hospitalization.
He earned a Bachelor Degree in Chemistry under the GI Bill and became a Research Chemist with the US Department of Agriculture, one of the first Blacks hired in this capacity. Awarded Honorary Doctor of Laws and Distinguished Alumni Award by Morris Brown College.
He represented the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) on a "Worldwide Brotherhood Tour" to seventeen nations in 1971, including traveling to the People's Republic of China, before President Nixon, as the ninth American admitted in half a century.
Hosea served in all levels of state elected office – Georgia General Assembly, Atlanta City Council, and County Commissioner – as well as a businessman, newspaper publisher, television host, and sole contributor of the Hosea L. Williams Papers, 1958-2000.
Civil Forfeiture in South Carolina
In a joint investigation, The Greenville News and Anderson Independent Mail looked at every South Carolina civil asset forfeiture case (4,000+) from 2014 to 2016. Their examination was "aimed at understanding this little-discussed, potentially life-changing power that state law holds over citizens – the ability of officers to seize property from people, even if they aren't charged with a crime." The investigation yielded a clear picture of what is happening. Police are systematically seizing cash and property – many times from people who aren't guilty of a crime – netting millions of dollars each year. Over the three years, law enforcement agencies seized $17 million from people in South Carolina they thought had gotten the money through illegal means. South Carolina law enforcement profits from this policing tactic: the bulk of the money ends up in its possession. Several examples of the police seizure of property/cash were given.
An Atlanta businessman was stopped on I-85 for speeding. He was not criminally charged in the 2016 incident. However, deputies discovered $29,000 in his car and decided to keep it. In another case, when a woman dropped a friend off at a Myrtle Beach sports bar, drug enforcement agents swarmed her car and found $4,670 in the car. Her friend was wanted in a drug distribu-tion case, but the woman was not involved. She had no drugs and was never charged in the 2014 bust. She worked as a waitress and carried cash because she didn't have a checking account. She spent more than a year trying to get her money back.
These seizures leave thousands of citizens without their cash and belongings or reliable means to get them back. They target black men most, the investigation found – with crushing consequences when life savings or a small business payroll is taken. About 65 percent of the people targeted for civil asset forfeiture in SC from 2014 to 2016 were black males in a state where African-American men make up just 13 percent of the population. Nearly 20 percent of the more than 4,000 people who had money or items seized over three years were never charged with a crime and another one in five were found not guilty or had charges dismissed.
Many people never get their money back. Or they have to fight to have their property returned and incur high attorney fees. The average time between when property is seized and when a prosecutor files for forfeiture is 304 days, with the items in custody the whole time. Often, it's far longer, well beyond the two-year period state law allows for a civil case to be filed. The entire burden of recovering property is on the citizens, who must prove the goods belong to them and were obtained legally. Since it's not a criminal case, an attorney isn't provided. Citizens are left to figure out a complex court process on their own. Once cases are filed, they have 30 days to respond. Most of the time, they give up.
Many other states are reforming their forfeiture process. Fifteen states now require a criminal conviction before property can be forfeited. Although South Carolina lawmakers have crafted reform bills, none have made it out of committee.
Atlanta Oral History Gathering
It was announced in the last SCOPE50 Newsletter that the Atlanta gathering would take place Jan. 31-Feb. 1. Unfortunately, that had to be cancelled due to the unavailability of hotel rooms because of the Super Bowl that weekend.
SCOPE50 Newsletter - October 2018
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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