The Struggle Continues.’ A new generation pays homage to 1960s

The Struggle Continues.’ A new generation pays homage to 1960s activist Patricia Stephens Due.It’s an iconic image that even the woman



 featured in it never saw before her death. But recently her image was used in Florida and Georgia as a call to action to combat the assault on voting rights. It is the visible determination, grit and refusal to relent in the face of injustice on the woman’s face that both Stacey Abrams of Georgia and the Dream Defenders in Florida recognized could reignite a movement. And the woman in the image is my late wife, Patricia Stephens Due.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A 1969 timeline: Turbulent year signaled major societal change

Image
A 1969 timeline: Turbulent year signaled major societal change The news in 1969 may not have been as big or as bad as in 1968, which had the Kennedy and King assassinations.  But there was more of it in 1969, and whatever happened in any category was usually stranger than what had come before it in a decade that had already been strange to the extreme The most astonishing events could be easily reduced to a handful: Woodstock, People’s Park, Charlie Manson, the Zodiac, the moon landing, the Alcatraz occupation, the Miracle Mets, Broadway Joe, the Weathermen, Chappaquiddick and “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.” Fifty years later, you can mention any of these to someone who remembers, and you will be headed deep into tumult and trivia. It’s why we decided to task our Chronicle writers and critics to take a deep dive into that year’s cultural moments; the landmark bits of music, film and television that helped shape 1969, and the years — decades — that followed. You can read th...
Read more

On this day, 15 May 1948, the British mandate in Palestine ended on the date which is now

Image
On this day, 15 May 1948, the British mandate in Palestine ended on the date which is now  commemorated as Nakba Day - meaning “catastrophe”. Israel declared independence a few hours beforehand, and British forces withdrew that day. The Nakba refers to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to make way for the establishment of the state of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate. The United Nations had approved a plan to partition Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. According to that plan, the 30% of the population which was Jewish would be given 70% of the land. But around 42% of the population of this land would still be Palestinian Arabs.  To ensure a bigger demographic majority, in December 1947 Zionist militias began a programme of ethnic cleansing, to expel the Palestinian Arab population. One early operation was an attack by the Irgun against the village of al-Tira, which killed 12 Palestinians and injured six others. Albert Einstein and other Jewish intellectuals descr...
Read more

What Life in Ancient Rome Was Really Like

Image
What Life in Ancient Rome Was Really Like No other civilization in human history has fascinated the world quite like the Roman Empire. On the battlefield, the Romans were a force the world had never seen before, an unparalleled war machine that could sweep through cities and absorb entire countries into its borders.  At the heart of it all was Rome, the epicenter of the world. But what was it really like to live there? Where did the common Roman person live? What were the Roman games really like? And just how bad were some of those Roman emperors?  From the streets to the senate to the games, this is what life was like in ancient Rome. Most Romans lived in tall (up to 100 feet), rectangular apartment buildings called insula, meaning "island." Rome was crammed with these buildings, which were spaced very closely together, creating a labyrinth-esque network of narrow alleys. These buildings were built so close together that one man wrote that he and the man in the apartment acr...
Read more

Detail from 500 Strong (2021) by Ponch Hawkes.

Image
Detail from 500 Strong (2021) by Ponch Hawkes. Photograph: Ponch Hawkes “In Geelong, I had a lot of women who had split up with their partners in Melbourne and moved [there] for a new life, where housing was cheaper – and part of that reinvention was doing a nude photo shoot.” Each woman had a different relationship to her body. “Some women came prepared to be naked – they had been in a Spencer Tunick photo shoot or grew up in naked households. Others hadn’t taken their clothes off in front of anyone for years and never even wore short sleeves. Some people got modest or awkward and very shy. If someone was trying to hide themselves by crouching or saying they’re fat, I tried to make them feel comfortable about being there and tried to make them feel the best they could.” From polar ice to lightning strikes: the 2020 Frank Hurley awards – in pictures Hawkes made the experience as inviting as possible. “In the studio we had very soft lighting and music playing and there was a reception a...
Read more

The First World War: Was it worth it?

Image
The First World War: Was it worth it? Did the outcome of the First World War justify the enormous loss of life? We ask two leading historians, Gary Sheffield and Richard J Evans, to put the case, both for and against Was the outcome of the First World War, from the British point of view, worth the sacrifice? At the time, the vast majority of the British population thought it was. But the society of today is very different from that of a century ago and, not surprisingly, we struggle to grasp why our predecessors were prepared to endure privation and the death of young men on a vast scale. Even in Ireland, a majority supported the war until the events of 1916–18 overturned the consensus. In 1914 the UK was a democracy, albeit an incomplete one, governed on liberal principles. The masses actively supported a total war that encompassed the whole of society. Without that ‘buy-in’, waging such a conflict would have been impossible. As dreadful as the war was, a German victory was regarded a...
Read more