Sandy Hook
Champions of Democracy
October 7, 2019
Modeled after FDR’s historic 1941 speech to Congress, laureates receive honors in the following categories: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear, and the freedom medal.
“Today’s political moment calls for a regrounding in Rooseveltian values, which each of this year’s laureates embodies. As FDR told our nation almost 80 years ago, we must never give up our fight for democracy.”
Roosevelt Institute Presents 2019 Four Freedoms Awards to Champions of Democracy
Oct. 5th
Ceremony highlights the importance of democratic values in a challenging political landscape
‘Today, the Roosevelt Institute celebrated the Four Freedoms Awards, honoring Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s legacies and those who exemplify core freedoms that uphold our democracy. The Four Freedoms Awards are presented in alternating years by the Roosevelt Institute in the US and Roosevelt Stichting in the Netherlands, FDR’s ancestral home. For the first time since 2011, the New York event has returned to Hyde Park and was attended by 265 people, including Han Polman, King’s Commissioner in the Province of Zeeland & Chair of the Roosevelt Foundation and a delegation of over 30 from the Netherlands.
This year’s recipients are:
- Freedom Medal: Lonnie Bunch for his significant contributions to American culture and society as a historian and storyteller. Bunch is the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture and is currently secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. He is the first African American to hold this position.
- Freedom of Speech and Expression: The Boston Globe for its call to news organizations to publish editorials in support of a free press and their critical role in democracy.
- Freedom of Worship: Krista Tippett for her honest pursuit of ancient and enduring human questions about our spiritual traditions.
- Freedom from Want: Franklin Thomas for dedicating his life to public service, community development, and philanthropy. Thomas was the first African American president of the Ford Foundation, where he focused on issues relating to urban poverty, human rights, and anti-apartheid initiatives.
- Freedom from Fear: Sandy Hook Promise for recognizing the need to build community and engage in powerful advocacy around gun violence following an unthinkable tragedy.
“The Four Freedoms Awards represent a continuing dedication to the values my grandparents, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, so embodied—beliefs around human freedoms and security, shared well-being, and the importance and strength of the democratic process,” said Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, Board Chair of the Roosevelt Institute. “I am so pleased that this event has returned home to Hyde Park. It’s not only the birthplace and home of my grandfather, but it’s especially important as the site of his Presidential Library and Museum.”
“The Four Freedoms and those who champion them are more important now than ever,” said Felicia Wong, President and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute.“Today’s political moment calls for a regrounding in Rooseveltian values, which each of this year’s laureates embodies. As FDR told our nation almost 80 years ago, we must never give up our fight for democracy.”
Past recipients of the Four Freedoms Awards include Presidents Truman, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton; international luminaries, such as Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama; and treasured Americans, including Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, journalist Dan Rather, civil rights leader Coretta Scott King, and Equal Justice Initiative founder Bryan Stevenson. You can learn more about the Four Freedoms Awards here.
About the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum
The Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum is America’s first presidential library—and the only one used by a sitting president. Conceived and built under President Roosevelt’s direction and opened to the public in 1941, the Library is administered by the National Archives and Records Administration. Members and donors form a vital base of support for many of the Library’s key initiatives and help keep our doors open to visitors and students from around the world.
About the Roosevelt Institute
Until economic and social rules work for all Americans, they’re not working. Inspired by the legacy of Franklin and Eleanor, the Roosevelt Institute reimagines the rules to create a nation where everyone enjoys a fair share of our collective prosperity. We are a 21st-century think tank, bringing together multiple generations of thinkers and leaders to help drive key economic and social debates and have local and national impact. The Roosevelt Institute is also the nonprofit partner to the FDR Presidential Library and Museum.
To keep up to date with the Roosevelt Institute, please visit us on Twitter or follow our work at #RewriteTheRules.
###
“…we need to get our of their way.”
February 24, 2018
“I wanted to make sure that even if our souls were left behind on that classroom floor, our voices would echo on to the halls of Congress.”
-Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg
What History Says About the Parkland Moment
How high school students hope their activism will change gun legislature. History shows how that could – and couldn’t – happen.
by Karen Yuan
The teenage survivors of the Parkland shooting have become nationally prominent activists for gun control almost overnight. But while they’ve drawn attention to their positions, these students will face an uphill journey: Yesterday, the Florida House voted down a motion to consider banning assault weapons—as Stoneman Douglas students watched from the gallery.
After mass shootings, discussions around gun violence—especially gun control legislation—often flare up and then die down, without new legislation, as the news cycle moves on. With help from our archives editor, Annika Neklason, I dug into the Atlantic archives, looking for insights into what might come out of this moment—and what might not.
THE PARKLAND MOMENT: AN ATLANTIC HISTORY
-
The weapon used by the Parkland shooter, the AR-15, has a storied history. The weapon at the center of today’s debate took an unusual path to prominence. James Fallows explored in 1981 how the AR-15 was developed, advocated for, and modified in the military. In the 1960s, after a series of evaluations, the Defense Department had recommended its lightness, reliability, and “lethality.” The weapon was soon deployed in Vietnam. But without a few more bureaucratic interventions, it might never have become notable.
-
A proto-school shooting in 1988 looks eerily similar to those of today. That year, in Virginia Beach, a student used a semi-automatic weapon he’d bought from a federally licensed dealer without facing checks to shoot teachers and classmates. In 1993, Erik Larsen said that gun manufacturers, dealers, and regulators “virtually assure [the] eventual use [of guns] in … school yards of America.” That was five years before Columbine.
-
The Clinton-era assault weapons ban passed in Congress by only one vote. In 1994, Bill Clinton signed a law that restricted the number of military features a gun could have and banned large capacity magazines for consumer use. But in Congress, many opposed it, wrote Patrick Griffin, Clinton’s chief congressional affairs lobbyist. And by strong-arming the passage of the law, Clinton helped to create the intense partisanship that now defines Congress—which his party lost to the Republicans that year. His victory “stands as an enduring cautionary tale.” The law expired in 2004.
-
The Parkland students may already understand that change won’t come easy. What sets Parkland apart, wrote Robinson Meyer last week, is how its teenagers are familiar with the reality of “a school for children [becoming] a charnel house.” They’ve grown up observing a lack of change. They were born after Columbine shocked their parents’ generation. “So when that hideous transformation struck their school,” wrote Meyer, “they already knew what they wanted to do.” And their perspective is recasting an “otherwise clichéd national debate.”
NPR
NPR’s Ari Shapiro speaks to Nicole Hockley, who lost her son Dylan during the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, about offering support to parents who lost a child in last week’s school shooting in Parkland, Fla. She went to Florida to help parents there, and went with them to the White House.
“…and I just said to them, you know, if you keep fighting all the time, it’s draining, it’s negative and it can destroy you. But if you stay focused on the win and on something constructive and what you’re – you know, focus on the end game, what you’re trying to achieve, that’s going to keep you motivated and keep you going because they’ve got a lot of momentum now.
And they’re building up to, you know, the March 24 March For Our Lives. And they have a lot of momentum in the country behind them. And I was saying, you know, you need to also focus on March 25 and beyond because eventually the media will turn away. The spotlight will go away. And it’s how you use your voices in that silence because that’s when the long-term battle really starts.”
[…]
“…it was like Sandy Hook all over again. And everywhere I went – the school, the hospital, the disaster center – I was just triggered on every single level to the point that I actually got incredibly physically sick on the weekend because I think my body just crashed. But it’s – and even seeing the media now, the clips of the kids leaving the school and the crying, it’s Sandy Hook all over again five years later. And it kills me that we’re still allowing our kids to die and not taking enough actions to protect them. That’s just – as a person, as a mother, that’s just heartbreaking.”
CNN
More than 800,000 students live in school districts where shootings have happened. That’s 2% of the US population.
Entire communities are damaged, from students who escaped to those attending schools in the area, to parents, friends, neighbors, clergy. As one Parkland, Florida, rabbi put it after the attack there a week ago, a shooting reverberates throughout the population — no one is truly untouched by such a tragedy.“The entire community is torn and broken. Every child that was killed has five or 10 best friends that watched it happen and that dodged a bullet,” Rabbi Shuey Biston told NPR on Friday. “And we’re grieving together. We’re mourning together.”
https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/21/politics/school-districts-that-have-seen-shootings/index.html
The Eagle Eye is a student newspaper written and published by the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. They continue to report post the massacre and community tragedy.
MSD mourns the loss of students and teachers at candlelight vigil
Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and professional in residence at Kent State University’s school of journalism. To find out more about Connie Schultz (con.schultz@yahoo.com) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.
“We need to get out of their way.”
And the Children Shall Lead Us
by Connie Schultz
“There’s always been a certain percentage of Americans who don’t age well. Their regrets for their own wasted youth or their misspent lives harden them and make them all-too-eager to see the next generation fail. The only thing that’s changed for people like that is the forum for their rage.
If you are even tempted to think they’ll run out of steam, I suggest you get off your couch and out of those chatrooms and go meet some of the young people of this country.
Rush to do this. It’s only a matter of time before they leave you behind.”
https://www.creators.com/read/connie-schultz/02/18/and-the-children-shall-lead-us
In Parkland, journalism students take on role of reporter and survivor
The day after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Melissa Falkowski texted her students. As the school’s newspaper adviser, the teacher knew she and her students had a responsibility. “[I told them] nobody could tell this story the way that we could tell it,” she says. “The kids really embraced that.”
On that fateful Wednesday afternoon, their community lost 17 of its own—a soccer player, football coach, geography teacher, and member of the marching band among them—after a gunman opened fire at the school. Already, members of the school newspaper, The Eagle Eye, along with its broadcast journalism program, WMSD-TV, are sharing their experiences in their own outlets and in the national spotlight, treading the increasingly murky line between journalism and activism.
Senior David Hogg, who is WMSD’s news director, interviewed his fellow classmates during the massacre and has also become one of the most visible faces in its aftermath. The thoughtful, media-savvy student journalist has been vocal on cable news, passionately proclaiming on places like CNN: “We’re children. You guys are the adults….Work together, come over your politics and get something done.” Delaney Tarr, a senior and another of Garner’s students, delivered a rousing speech at a rally on Saturday, calling for swift and immediate change: “Because of these gun laws, people that I know, people that I love, have died, and I will never be able to see them again.” A total of 43 students belong to school’s print/online journalism program; another 200 are in the broadcast program.
Columbia Journalism Review
by Alexandria Neason & Meg Dalton
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/parkland-school-shooting.php
(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)