Radical Tea Towel

Pride.

June 13, 2021

C

O

M

M

U

N

I

T

Y 

L O V E

T R U T H

Re-Release: The Stonewall Uprising/

You’re Wrong About Podcast

“In honor of Pride Month and revolutions past, present, and future, we’re re-releasing our episode on the Stonewall Uprising. Let the sunshine in.”

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/re-release-the-stonewall-uprising/id1380008439?i=1000476881136

 

One love.

One love, one heart
Let’s join together and a-feel all right
One love (hear my plee)
One heart
Let’s join together and a-feel alright
Let’s join together (let’s just trust in the Lord)
And a-feel all right (and I will feel alright)

Five years ago in Orland, Florida, one 29-year old man with an automatic military weapon massacred 49 people and wounded 53 more at a gay night club called Pulse.

From the White House on Saturday, June 12, 2021:

In the coming days President Joe Biden will sign a bill designating Pulse Nightclub as a national memorial, enshrining in law what has been true since that terrible day five years ago: Pulse Nightclub is hallowed ground.

We must also acknowledge gun violence’s particular impact on LGBTQ+ communities across our nation. We must drive out hate and inequities that contribute to the epidemic of violence and murder against transgender women – especially transgender women of color. We must create a world in which our LGBTQ+ young people are loved, accepted, and feel safe in living their truth. And the Senate must swiftly pass the Equality Act, legislation that will ensure LGBTQ+ Americans finally have equal protection under law.

In the memory of all of those lost at the Pulse nightclub five years ago, let us continue the work to be a nation at our best – one that recognizes and protects the dignity and safety of every American.

In the name of love. 

The Equality Act is in limbo. A lot is at stake for the LGBTQ community, especially our youth.

After its passage in the House in February, the Equality Act (H.R. 5) has one more hurdle before reaching the desk of President Joe Biden — the Senate. If passed, among other things, it will amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes of people protected from discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, education and federally funded programs, and patch holes in current nondiscrimination protections.

-San Diego Union Tribune, Kimberly A. Ahrens 

Fr. Richard Rohr:

Love for one another. May we place our hope in what matters and what lasts, trusting in your eternal presence and love. Listen to our hearts’ longings for the healing of our suffering world.

Nonviolence starts when we learn how to love ourselves with compassion. Upon beginning shadow work and looking within myself, I was able to heal old wounds, relearn healthy boundaries and thought patterns. Complete love flows through all we say, do, think, and pray after taking steps of transformation. -Susan C./Center for Action and Contemplation

“Moments as big as years.” Virginia Woolf

A bakery lost a client when it made rainbow Pride cookies. So others bought every item in the shop.

Little did she know, though, that her post would go viral on social media and that the line outside the tiny bakery would stretch for several blocks the following day.

Though the bakery opened at 10 a.m., a crowd had already assembled outside the front door by 8:30 the next morning.

“That line brought me to tears. All those people standing in the rain, waiting so patiently to buy a cookie,” Cooley said. “We just wanted to be inclusive, and it was so heartwarming to see how many people felt the same.”
Over the following few days, a steady stream of hundreds of customers arrived to show their support.

“The line just never ended. I had people buying cookies for the person behind them, buying cookies and handing them out to the kids outside. It was beautiful.” Dolder said. “They weren’t going to let this little bakery take a financial hit for showing love and acceptance for the gay community.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/06/09/pride-month-rainbow-bakery-customer/

The day after Confections received backlash for supporting Pride Month, hundreds of customers lined up to buy cookies and show their support. (Jay Eagle)

She was first.

June 11, 2021

“It’s Jeannette Rankin’s birthday! This exceptional Montanan was the first woman elected to Congress. Jeannette’s proud legacy of standing up for her beliefs has long served to inspire folks across our state, and will for years to come.”

-Montana Senator Jon Tester

“Suffrage activist from Missoula County, Montana, Rankin was elected Congresswoman for her home state in 1916, four years before the 19th Amendment.

Thanks to the struggle of women like Rankin, Montana had abolished the sex-based franchise in 1914, making it the seventh US State to do so.

With the help of the political allies she had made campaigning for suffrage, Rankin was then elected to the House of Representatives on the progressive wing of the Republican Party.

This made Rankin the first woman in the history of the US Congress. 

But, while there was now one Congresswoman, there were still millions of American women legally voteless.

It wasn’t until the 19th Amendment was passed in 1920 that women across America were given the right to vote. 

So, with work left to be done, Rankin used her new position in Congress to at last drive through a constitutional amendment enfranchising women.

She was the one who first put forward what became the 19th Amendment – the ultimate triumph of her movement.

But suffrage was not the only thing on Rankin’s agenda. The late 1910s were not, after all, a quiet time in US political history…

In April 1917, Woodrow Wilson summoned Congress to an extraordinary session so that he could get the US to declare war on Germany and join the conflict in Europe.

Jeannette Rankin was one of only 50 members of Congress to vote against Wilson. A devout pacifist, she would not support America entering WW1.

Singled out for disproportionate abuse by the pro-war lobby, Rankin got support from the radical movement which was then mobilizing against the war. Figures like Fiorello LaGuardia and fellow suffrage fighter, Alice Paul, (my s-hero) backed Rankin.

On 8 December 1941, to a chorus of heckles, she was the only member of congress to vote against declaring war on Japan, saying, “as a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.”

Whilst many credentialed radicals did criticize Rankin’s failure to appreciate the unique nature of WW2 as a war which needed to be fought against fascism and genocide, the subsequent hounding and denunciation of her in the US press was unconscionable.

Her political reputation left in tatters, Rankin declined to run again in 1942.

But she lived a long life after the Second World War – long enough to return to radical fame as an elder in the struggle against the US invasion of Vietnam in the 1960s and ‘70s.

In January 1968, when she was 87 years old, Jeannette Rankin marched through D.C. at the head of 5,000 women protesting against the Vietnam War.” Right on.

-Pete, Radical Tea Towel https://www.radicalteatowel.com 

Today at the G7, Boris Johnson:

think that is what the people of our countries now want us to focus on. They want us to be sure that we are beating the pandemic together and discussing how we will never have a repeat of what we have seen but also that we are building back better together,’ he said.

‘Building back greener and building back fairer and building back more equal and, how shall I, in a more gender neutral and, perhaps a more feminine way. (Yep.)

The Eagle and the Condor prophecy of the Amazon speaks of long ago when human societies split into two different paths—that of the Eagle and that of the Condor. The path of the Condor is the path of heart, of intuition, and of the feminine. The path of the Eagle is the path of the mind, of the industrial, and of the masculine. [https://blog.pachamama.org]

Radical social change.

February 21, 2021

Radical Tea Towel

The Manouchian Group

by Pete Morgan

77 years ago today, Missak Manouchian and twenty-one comrades were shot at Fort Mont-Valérien, on the outskirts of Paris. 

‘Missak was an intellectual and a radical. He read his way through the libraries of the Latin Quarter, and developed a real talent for poetry, as well as translating Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Rimbaud into Armenian, all while working to survive and organizing for revolution!

He was a trade unionist in the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), and in 1934 he joined the French Communist Party (CPF) – a popular home for interwar radicals, from Sartre to Camus.

Under constant threat of arrest, torture, and execution, these anti-fascist heroes were the cutting edge of the Resistance to Nazism and its French collaborators.

77 years ago today, Missak Manouchian and twenty-one comrades were shot at Fort Mont-Valérien, on the outskirts of Paris.

After the executions, the Nazis circulated a propaganda poster in France denouncing the Manouchian fighters as an “army of crime” and emphasizing their foreignness and Jewishness. It was a desperate attempt to turn the French people against their own liberating forces.

As a measure of its ineffectiveness, many of these posters – which showed photos of all the executed Manouchian group members – were graffitied with “MORTS POUR LA FRANCE”.’

They died for France.

Author Victor Hugo may have lived a century before Missak but he too used his position to fight for radical social change in France.

Human Rights Day

December 10, 2020

Radical Tea Towel

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…”

By Pete Morgan

‘It was the intent of the Allied peoples, encouraged especially by Franklin Roosevelt,  that a permanent organization of cooperation between states was needed to avoid yet another descent into world war.

In addition to questions of funding and logistics, the new UN needed a set of basic ideals – a statement of what it stood for.

This came most clearly in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the UN General Assembly on this day in 1948.

A year after the end of the war, the UN’s Commission on Human Rights set up a drafting committee for an ambitious, universal declaration.

The committee was chaired by no less than Eleanor Roosevelt herself. The former First Lady had long been a champion of human rights within the US and around the world, and here was her chance to help craft the soul of the United Nations.’

#HumanRightsDay ♥

 

The greatest president we never had.

October 13, 2020

Henry Wallace

(Picture: Wikimedia Commons)

One of the very best almost-presidents was Henry Wallace (1888-1965) – and he came much, much closer than most.

‘Born into a wealthy Iowa farming family, Wallace hadn’t had the working-class background of a Bernie Sanders or Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. But he certainly had the political instinct for compassion and social justice.

During the 1920s, he rose to prominence lobbying for federal relief to poor farmers which was consistently denied by the traditionally progressive Republican Party.

This led him, in 1932, to switch over to the Democratic Party of Franklin Roosevelt, which was promising America a New Deal in the wake of the Wall Street Crash.

Thankfully, Roosevelt won and he made Wallace his Secretary of Agriculture.

In 1940, after years of steadfast support for FDR’s New Deal, Roosevelt chose Wallace to be his new running mate. Wallace then served four years as Vice-President of the United States from 1941-5.

Henry Wallace was one of the most progressive members of Roosevelt’s administration.’

‘Championing economic democracy and internationalism, he said,

“Some have spoken of the ‘American Century’. I say that the century on which we are entering – the century which will come into being after this war – can be and must be the century of the common man… No nation will have the God-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialisation, but there must be neither military nor economic imperialism.”

As Secretary of Agriculture, he spearheaded the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 which used federal intervention to boost the price of farm goods to support the embattled rural economy.

Wallace also backed FDR’s effort to take on the fascist powers from the late-thirties onward, denouncing Nazi racial theory as a “mumbo-jumbo of dangerous nonsense”.

Wallace made the role of VP more dynamic than it had ever been.

He led the Democratic presidential campaign of 1940 from the front before playing a crucial role in the wartime government as chair of Roosevelt’s Board of Economic Warfare.

On 8^th May 1942, Wallace gave the most remarkable speech ever given by a US President or Vice-President.

Scared of Wallace’s progressive beliefs – his anti-imperialism, his commitment to economic justice, and, especially, his open opposition to Jim Crow – the Democratic establishment pushed him off the ballot in 1944, replacing him with the hapless conservative, Harry Truman, all against the wishes of the Democrats’ base.

The post-war period might have gone much better – for America and the world – had Wallace succeeded Roosevelt in 1945 rather than the trigger-happy and hawkish Truman.

While our immediate priority is to kick its current resident out at the ballot box, the story of Henry Wallace shows that the White House needn’t be a home to scandal, incompetence, and prejudice.

One day, perhaps, we could install someone like Wallace and make the Presidency an institution of virtue and vision like it has so rarely been before.’

~Pete, Radical Tea Towel

https://www.radicalteatowel.com

It was Viola Desmond’s turn.

July 6, 2020

Viola Desmond took a stand against racism in Nova Scotia in 1946 when she refused to move from a theatre seat that was reserved for white patrons.

Radical Tea Towel

Today, back in 1914, Viola Desmond was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Rarely as explicit as Jim Crow in the US, racism against black citizens in Canada was no less pernicious.

In Nova Scotia, segregation was widespread.

The Roseland Film Theatre in New Glasgow was a case in point.

The better, main floor seats were reserved for white patrons while black customers were confined to the balcony.

In 1943, Carrie Best, a black Nova Scotian, had tried to challenge this set-up without success.

On 8^th November 1946, Desmond’s car broke down in New Glasgow and so she went to the Roseland Theater to watch a movie while it was repaired.

Unaware of the segregation – it was unofficial because there were no segregation laws in New Glasgow – Desmond moved down to the main floor where she could see better.

It wasn’t long before she was asked to move by a member of staff.

Viola immediately knew what was going on – she’d faced anti-black racism in Canada ever since being barred from beautician training as a young woman in Halifax.

But on that night in Nova Scotia, she took a stand.

Viola refused to leave her seat until she was forcibly thrown out of the theater, injuring her hip in the process.

She was then arrested and spent the night in jail on the absurd claim of a tax violation.

Back home in Halifax, Desmond was convinced by her Baptist pastor, William Pearly Oliver, to challenge her arrest in court (as in the US, the Baptist Church was at the cent re of black civil rights activism in Canada).

Supported by the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (modelled on the American NAACP) and Carrie Best, who had by now set up a newspaper, The Clarion, to advocate for black Canadians, Viola Desmond took the Roseland Theater to court.

She didn’t win, but that’s not the point.

In the atmosphere of 1946, when many Canadians believed they’d just fought a bitter war to overcome racist Nazism in Europe, Viola Desmond’s act of defiance sparked new life into the Canadian civil rights movement at home.

To some in countries like Canada and England, it’s a tempting delusion to see anti-black racism as a ‘US problem’.

This thinking tries to brush histories of white supremacy under the rug, but it also buries the inspiring stories of anti-racist resistance.

From Viola Desmond in Nova Scotia to the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963, the epic of black power and black liberation extends well beyond the United States.

Black lives matter – all over the world.

The Second Coming

June 6, 2020

Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-W.B. Yeats, 1919.

The poem, The Second Coming, was written in 1919 post WWI and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence following the Easter Rising.

[Image: https://www.radicalteatowel.com]

---

Eugene Debs started as a railroad worker and quickly became President of the American Railway Union, the first industrial union in the US, which he helped found. He led a boycott against handling trains with Pullman cars in what became the nationwide Pullman Strike; this granted him a six month sentence in prison for defying a court injunction against the strike.
Debs ran as a Socialist candidate for President of the United States five times, between 1900 and 1920, the last time from a prison cell.

[Image: https://www.radicalteatowel.com/tea-towels/eugene-debs-tea-towel]