Duane Michaels. “This photograph is my proof. There was that afternoon when things were still good between us and she embraced me, and we were so happy. It did happen. She did love me, look see for yourself!”
Black Lives Matter is held to such a ridiculously high standard. If anyone who is REMOTELY associated with BLM commits an act of violence, white people use it as an excuse to smear the name of the entire movement.
Cops can murder unarmed Black people and many white folks still jump to defend the police force.
Photo: From left, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Cynthia Wesley. (AP)
On September 15th, 1963, a bomb planted by white supremacists ripped through Sixteenth Street Baptist Church killing four little girls – Addie Mae Collins (14 years-old), Cynthia Wesley (14 years-old), Carole Robertson (14 years-old) and Denise McNair (11 years-old) – and injuring several others. The tragedy marked the third bombing in eleven days in Birmingham, Alabama.
In the 1960’s, Birmingham was one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. State and local politics were dominated by the Ku Klux Klan, the city police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, who promoted violence against black communities and the Governor George Wallace, who was a staunch segregationist. These factors combined to heighten anti-black sentiment and create a particularly dangerous environment for African Americans. Racially motivated attacks on black homes and churches grew so common that the city was referred to as “Bombingham.”
Photo: This terrorist act was a brutal reminder that the success of the march and the changes it represented would not go unchallenged. In the face of such violence, the determination to continue organizing intensified. These glass shards are from the church’s stained-glass window. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Gift from the Trumpauer-Mulholland Collection.
For these reasons, African American civil rights activists made Birmingham a focal point of their desegregation campaign. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was famously arrested in the city in the spring of 1963 while leading a nonviolent demonstration. The media coverage of the extreme police violence against protestors that day along with King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jailgarnered much-needed national support for desegregation, and more broadly, for African American civil rights. The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was at the center of this activism. As a well-known gathering place for civil rights leaders and a pillar of the black community, it was a significant the target. The church had received several threats, but when a federal court order mandated the racial integration of Alabama schools, white supremacists turned hateful words into deadly action.
Ultimately, the bombing had the opposite effect that the attackers intended. The funeral for three of the girls drew 8,000 people and inspired continued protests for African American civil rights. Public outrage over the bombing also contributed to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church remains etched into our collective memory as Americans. The importance of the church bombing has been strongly felt by generations of activists, from the black power movement to Black Lives Matter. Today, this history challenges us to confront a difficult past and make lasting change in the same spirit of the summer of 1963.
Tsione Wolde-Michael is the Writer/Editor for the Office of Curatorial Affairs, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. She is also a Doctoral Candidate in History at Harvard University.
The transphobia in our humor is a systematically harmful device that shapes how people think of trans people, and the transphobia itself hurts like hell.
Trans women especially are exploited as being deceivers and men and digusting. Evenn seeemingly small things are harmful, take this example from the show “Friends” in which Ross Gives Rachel a ridiculous and heavy horrible makeup job:
Ross: (About Rachel’s makeup) Okay, there you go.
Rachel: (Looks in the mirror) Sure. Sure, I’ll just sit next to the transsexual from purchasing.
This is actually a big problem, trans women are thought to be transvestites, they’re painted to be ugly clowns in drag, the image of trans women is this:
And this always elicits a laugh, it’s laughable when a male character does something feminine, and seeing this is what makes people honestly think this is what trans women are.
Another Quip is the Always popular “Slept with a boy” Joke:
In the Bridget Jones Movie there’s a point where A character is talking about being “deceived” by a transgender sex worker where he says:
Daniel Cleaver: “I spent the night with a gorgeous Thai girl who turned out to be a gorgeous Thai boy!”
Which says trans women are actually Men, and that they are sexually predatorial deceivers, another example being “The Hangover Part II”
In this scene Stu is hungover and talking about the “Hot chick” he slept with, but then she is revealed to be transgender
And He honestly falls backwards in fear and disgust while the other characters look at her penis in horror. The people watching then laugh because the joke is that he slept with a trans woman whch is evidently hilarious.
This is especially ridiculous because look at this woman:
The fact that she is trans is so disgusting to them that they don’t see anything else about her.
Other jokes are based purely around the fact that a person is trans. I don’t truly understand what’s so funny about that but they think so, for example:
(honestly this^ wouldn’t be funny even if it weren’t offensive)
“Bruce Jenner will be here doing some musical performances—he’s doing a his and her duet all by himself…I’m just busting your balls, while I still can.”
Get it? She’s trans. that’s the joke. It’s fucking hilarious.
These kinds of Agressively demeaning and misgendering jokes are disgusting and sytematically oppressive. It’s not just a joke.
Jokes aren’t funny when our lives are in danger about these things. Trans people get killed because when someone finds out they are transgender they are so ashamed by their attraction to them, and you know where that comes from? Jokes. Very unfunny Jokes, and the people who laugh at them.
It honestly makes me feel so unhappy when I constantly see transphobic humour in the stuff out there that claims to be ‘comedy’…it’s not just in disgusting trash like Family Guy, even shows that are normally pretty good and enjoyable will often have at least one line or even sometimes a whole episode which has transphobic BS passed off as ‘comedy’
It’s depressing that there is so little out there that doesn’t use people like me as the punchline of a ‘joke’
Call people out on it every single time. Make them think before they speak.
When patients were committed to the Willard Asylum for the Insane in Upstate New York, they arrived with a suitcase packed with all of the possessions they thought they needed for their time inside.
Most never left. The mental hospital had an average stay of nearly 30 years. When patients died, they were buried in nameless graves across the street of the asylum. Their suitcases, with all their worldly possessions, were locked in an attic and forgotten.
In 1995, an employee of the mental hospital discovered the suitcases, 400 of them. They date from 1910 to 1960.
Now, photographer Jon Crispin is cataloging each suitcase and opening a window into the lives - and the minds - of the people deemed too unwell to be allowed in society.
Go here for more information and to sign up for notification on further development of the project
Motivation is overrated. No amount of motivation would’ve gotten me through hours of my accounting textbook. No “vision” is enough to keep me awake til the crack of dawn on an essay that I don’t even know if the professor will check. Discipline is what determines how far you go. On those days when your cute little list of #goals and vision of yourself 5 years from now aren’t enough, discipline will pull you out of bed and get you to work. I wish I knew this in high school because I thought I couldn’t work without motivation. I wasted so much time trying to find purpose before I realized that working now, albeit blindly, will ensure that I could chase any purpose I discover in the future. Sure, motivation is crucial, but it’s not consistent. It’s not reliable. You can only rely on yourself and your grit.
