#sncc

[describe-things]

[ID: Two black and white photos of Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael, a young Black man, saying into a microphone with a sardonic expression, "In order for non-violence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none, has none." End ID.]

[whenweallvote]

We are saddened to hear about the passing of Dorie Ann Ladner, lifelong voting rights activist. 🕊️🗳️

Ms. Ladner participated in every major civil rights protest of the 1960s, including the March on Washington and the march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. She was a key organizer in her home state of Mississippi, with contributions to the NAACP and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In June 1964, she launched a volunteer campaign called “Mississippi Freedom Summer,” with a goal of registering as many Black voters as possible. 

We remember and honor Dorie through the words of her sister and fellow activist, Joyce Ladner: as someone who “fought tenaciously for the underdog and the dispossessed,” and “left a profound legacy of service.”

[icantthinkofsomethingfunnyeither]

Deep Dive: A history of Black-Palestinian solidarity

[blackpantherblog]

[readyforevolution]

[garadinervi]

Gloria Richardson, May 6, 1922 / 2023

(image: Gloria Richardson (center) with Stanley Branche (left), Riggs Robinson (right) and other demonstrators during a 1963 march in Cambridge, MD. Photo: © Leonard McCombe/The Life Picture Collection/Getty Images)

[ausetkmt]

They marched for desegregation — then they disappeared for 45 days : NPR

This photo of the group known as the Leesburg Stockade Stolen Girls was taken by Danny Lyons, a former SNCC photographer. It helped confirm the girls' location to their parents and civil rights activists. Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos hide caption

In the early 1960s, civil rights protests were picking up speed across the country. Sometimes, protest marches included children as young as 12 years old.

Usually, children who were arrested at protests were bailed out by activist groups, or eventually released to their parents. But on July 19, 1963, during a march to desegregate a theater in Americus, Ga., a group of Black girls was arrested — and for the rest of the summer, their parents had no idea where they were.

One of those girls was Lulu Westbrook-Griffin.

"We were gung-ho young people who want to change the system," Westbrook-Griffin told Radio Diaries.

Westbrook-Griffin was 12 years old at the time. Her older brother, nineteen-year-old James Westbrook, was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. With SNCC, Westbrook organized a march to desegregate the Martin Theatre, the only theater in Americus.

At least 40 people attended. But as the marchers approached the theater, local police demanded that they disperse, and began beating them with clubs and setting dogs on them.

"Some of us were taken by our feet and arms and thrown in a paddy wagon, and I was one of them," Westbrook-Griffin recalled.

Westbroook-Griffin's brother escaped arrest. "I told Mom that night: 'They drove her off in a paddy wagon and I have no idea where they went,'" James Westbrook said.

Along with at least 13 other girls, Westbrook-Griffin was transported to a single cell of the Leesburg Stockade — an abandoned, Civil-War-era building more than 20 miles away from Americus.

For the next 45 days, the girls would be subject to squalid living conditions. The stockade lacked running water, plumbing and beds. As the weeks passed, conditions only deteriorated.

"We were putting our waste in the shower drain because the toilet was overflowing," Westbrook-Griffin recalled.

Back in Americus, SNCC activists and parents were focused on locating the missing girls.

"Americus is a small town where everybody knew everybody," James Westbrook said. "It was a network of parents trying to find out, day by day, where their children were."

Throughout July and August, SNCC activists went from jail to jail in search of the missing girls. At one of SNCC's mass meetings, someone mentioned a rumor that the girls were being held in the old Leesburg Stockade.

Danny Lyon was a photographer for SNCC at the time. "James Foreman, who was executive secretary, said to go down and check it out," Lyon told Radio Diaries.

Lyon drove to the Leesburg Stockade after dark. There, he took clandestine pictures of the girls and their living conditions through bars of the building.

Lyon's photos confirmed the girls' location to parents and activists, providing leverage as they fought with authorities for the girls' return. Finally, on Sept. 1 – 45 days after they were taken – the police released the girls to their parents. Danny Lyon's photos appeared in Jet magazine in late September and in a special issue of SNCC's The Student Voice newspaper in 1964.

Westbrook-Griffin and the other girls were never formally charged after the march. They also weren't given a reason for why they were held in the stockade so long.

"Was it to break me? Was it to make me fearful? Was it to teach me a lesson?" Westbrook-Griffin says. She wonders to this day why the girls were kidnapped. "But when you look back at it now, you realize it pretty much was a badge of honor rather than a badge of disgrace. We were part of something that matters."

Lulu Westbook-Griffin and the other girls in the Leesburg Stockade were never formally charged. And local law enforcement never explained why they were held in the stockade for so long.

The stockade is still standing. In 2019, the state of Georgia put a historical marker on the site, acknowledging the incident. It reads, "Because their families were not initially told their location and the girls never faced formal charges, they became known as the Leesburg Stockade Stolen Girls."

[muspeccoll]

Graphic design from Movement, the newspaper of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. This issue is from April 1969 and features abolitionist John Brown on the front page. The back page features an illustration of three members of the Black Panther Party adapted from a photo by Stephen Shames. The text below is an adaptation of a line from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "The panthers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction." In the center of the issue, an article features the death of Sammy Younge, Jr., a Black college student and activist who was murdered in 1966.

We haven't digitized our copy of this newspaper, but you can read it online through the Freedom Archive. The newspaper itself is available in our reading room as part of the Underground Newspaper Collection.

[kosmik-signals]

[petervintonjr]

Everybody say hello to Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons: activist, teacher, and researcher. Born in 1944 Memphis, Gwendolyn was the first generation in her family to attend college (Spelman, 1962). She credits her grandmother, Rhonda Bell Robinson, with having instilled in her the family's history and its reckoning with slavery, her own hardships growing up as a sharecropper, and how Mississippi was objectively the "worst of the worst" for Black people. Gwendolyn solemnly promised her grandmother that she would never go to Mississippi. (And don't even get her started on the epic confrontations with teachers and school officials about the "inappropriateness of her hair." Boy, it's sure nice that that sort of racial dress-code pettiness isn't a thing anymore, huh?)

In the 1960's, inspired by several Spelman professors (to include Howard Zinn), Gwendolyn actively and enthusiastically became involved in the SNCC against her family's wishes. She participated in sit-ins and endured several arrests, ultimately jeopardizing her Spelman scholarship. She helped prepare curricula for Freedom Schools and coordinated mock voter registrations, working under Bob Moses (see Lesson 112 in this series) and alongside James Forman and her fellow Spelman alum Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson (see Lesson 66). Eventually she came into the orbit of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and ultimately found herself taking over as director of the Mississippi Summer Project in 1964 when its previous director, Lester McKinney, had been picked up by Laurel police. She herself was arrested in Jackson following a march; being held, beaten and tortured for 15 days in a makeshift prison constructed on the county fairgrounds.

Gwendolyn later moved briefly to New York, and then to Atlanta where she worked on Julian Bond's state campaign (see Lesson 72). She continued to work with the local chapter of the SNCC, authoring a controversial position paper on Black Power that argued against expelling its white members. Around this time Gwendolyn also (unsurprisingly) found herself on the FBI's notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) target list. Inspired by the speeches of Malcolm X, Gwendolyn joined Nation Of Islam in the late 1960's and changed her name to Zoharah (also taking her husband Michael Simmons' last name), and moved to Philadelphia. However her strong feminist principles contravened a number of NOI teachings, putting her at odds with the organization's stance on women as submissive helpmeets. Over the next 20 years she worked for the American Friends Service Committee, travelling to Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and (significantly) Palestine.

Gwendolyn retired from the University of Florida in 2019; conducting and leading research that explores Islamic feminism and the cultural impact of Sharia law on Muslim women. Today Simmons is senior lecturer emerita, continuing to travel and lecture on gender equality, and on many other issues affecting Black Americans, feminism, and social inequities. Her and Michael Simmons' daughter Aishah Shahidah Simmons, is herself an accomplished documentary filmmaker. (Teachers: Need some resources to engage your students this Black History Month? I'll send you a pile of these trading cards, no cost, no obligation. Just give me a mailing address and let me know how many students in your class. No strings attached, no censorship, no secret-relaying-of-names to Abbott or DeSantis or HuckaSanders.)

[coleaep]

💀MASTERLIST💀

🌹=smut

🤍=fluff

💀=angst

Evan peters

Period 🤍

Summary:

Yn gets cramp attacks and Evan is there for her

Favs from others:

Wall s!x 🌹

Taissa Farmiga

Im home 🤍

Taissa comes home from work and Yn spends the rest of the night with her as well as the morning

Tate Langdon

Nothing yet

Favs from others:

Kit Walker

Hard💀

Favs from others:

Kyle spencer

Nothing yet

Favs from others:

Dad!evan peters one shots

Tired 🤍

KURT COBAIN

After the show🌹

In the morning🤍

At his worst💀

Dad!Kurt

Back to bed

LUKE HEMMINGS

Lazy Night🤍

[lisamarie-vee]

[protoslacker]

I was 13 in 1968 and we lived in South Carolina. I remember being outraged by the killing of three students and the wonding of 20 more by police gunfire. But I was also certainly just a boy.

I do have some pleasant memories of 1968. I felt more accepted and confident in school. I also paid attenton to the news and when I think about that year I remember a pale of sadness about the state of the world.

I don't think that pale has ever lifted.

[letters-to-rosie]

from The Student Voice vol. 1 no. 1, the publication of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, June 1960

[blackpantherblog]

[readyforevolution]

“This country has always used Negroes as a political tool against Blacks. Without a common Black political doctrine, America will use (and is using) Blacks against Blacks. Blackness must be political in our behalf. Individuals can no longer be immune to public political criticism because they are ‘Black and proud’. There must be revolutionary political criticism of counter-revolutionary positions and acts. Some individuals who gain popularity in Black America are later used as tools by White America. In most cases, White political interest comes as a result of the existing popularity of the Black individuals. Understand, popularity does not reflect correctness. Blackness alone is not revolutionary.”

H. Rap Brown

Chairman, SNCC