Committee Updates: Disarm October Events; AHR Honors Baker & Hamer; W$D Backs the THRIVE Campaign

Ray Acheson celebrating the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons outside the UN. Acheson will speak in a webinar sponsored by Disarm/End Wars on October 22. Photo by David Field, used with permission of Ray Acheson.

October 2020

October 2020 Disarm Events: Keep Space for Peace Week & Oct. 22 Webinar with Ray Acheson

By Ellen Thomas
Chair, Disarm/End Wars Issue Committee

October 3 to 10 is " Keep Space for Peace Week" - Please let us know if you plan any events for this week!

“In 2020 we are highlighting the provocative US-NATO military encirclement of Russia & China with 'missile defense' systems that are key elements in Pentagon first-strike attack planning. We urge you to consider organizing a local event during Keep Space for Peace week to help the public see that very expensive military satellites, launched into space by very expensive rockets, are fundamentally key in making it possible for the military to carry out their deadly and immoral deeds on behalf of corporate interests.” – Bruce Gagnon of Global Network to Keep Space for Peace

Learn more on Facebook.

Webinars Future (and Past)

October 22 at 5 pm ET, 2 pm PT – Ray Acheson, the Director of Reaching Critical Will, International WILPF’s disarmament program, speaks about WILPF's active role in disarmament efforts before and since October 24, 1945, the date the United Nations was founded. Register here.

We plan to continue presenting monthly webinars during 2021, and we are gathering speakers for a zoom event in early December about AFRICOM, near UN Human Rights Day. Check the November eNews for an update!

And please share your ideas for speakers and topics in 2021!

The September 20 webinar with Alice Slater and David Swanson of World Beyond War, "Obstacles to Nuclear Abolition Between the US and Russia", has been posted on YouTube AND was livestreamed on Facebook. The Facebook version unfortunately begins in the middle of a sentence, but it also includes a half hour of questions and answers at the end.

All WILPF members are invited to join the Disarm/End Wars Conference Calls, held on the second and last Sundays of each month at 4:30 pm PT, 5:30 pm MT, 6:30 pm CT, and 7:30 pm ET. 

To join the Disarm/End Wars Committee listserv and be kept informed about upcoming meetings, webinars, and events, please email disarmchair@wilpfus.org

Honoring Two Mothers of the Civil Rights Movement

By the HR Committee

Our general election is less than a month away, and it is a good time to remember two African American women activists who struggled tirelessly for civil rights and the right to vote. Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer persisted, organized, and rallied others to register and vote. Because they were women, their efforts tend to get described as “behind the scenes of the movement,” but in fact these women were backbones of the movement with lifelong careers as activists. They cofounded organizations, raised funds, and delivered words that inspired and fueled the movement.

Ella Baker: Mother of the Civil Rights Movement

Ella Josephine Baker was born December 13, 1903 and passed away on December 13, 1986. Her career as an organizer and activist spanned more than five decades, and she is known as “the mother of the civil rights movement.” Photo credit: NAACP/Library of Congress.

According to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights:

Ella Baker began her involvement with the NAACP in 1940. She first worked as a field secretary and then served as director of branches from 1943 until 1946.

Inspired by the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Baker cofounded the organization “In Friendship” to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South.

In 1957, Baker moved to Atlanta to help organize Martin Luther King’s new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She also ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship.

Many people may know of Ella Baker through “Ella’s Song.” This moving song written by Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon and performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock, is based on Baker’s own words about effective organizing. It contains the lyrics well-known to activists now, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.” View one of Sweet Honey in the Rock’s many performances of this anthem on YouTube. 

Here are some video clips about the many contributions of this important leader:

Black History in Two Minutes (or so) with Henry Louis Gates: Ella Baker - The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement

Ella Josephine Baker - African American Trailblazers (7 minutes) – Baker is one of twelve (12) heroic Africa Americans honored for their contributions in areas such as the arts, sciences, politics, education, and business.

Professor Cornel West describes the contributions of Ella Baker in TIME, calling her “the backbone of the movement” (2 minutes).

Fannie Lou Hamer: Powerful Voice for Civil and Voting Rights

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) is an inspiration in our time of renewed voter suppression efforts. Her parents were sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta. She was already picking cotton with them at the age of six, and left school at the age of 12 because she had to work. Hamer’s difficulty registering to vote in 1962 led her to struggle for voting rights for others.

After becoming an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, she was denied the right to vote due to an unfair literacy test, and then was fired by her employer—a Mississippi plantation owner—for her voting activism. According to the National Women’s History Museum biography of Fannie Lou Hamer:

In June 1963, after successfully registering to vote, Hamer and several other black women were arrested for sitting in a “whites-only” bus station restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina. At the jailhouse, she and several of the women were brutally beaten, leaving Hamer with lifelong injuries from a blood clot in her eye, kidney damage, and leg damage.

This didn’t stop Hamer. She cofounded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, helped organize Freedom Summer, traveled extensively to give speeches on civil rights issues, and helped to found the National Women’s Political Caucus. She was eventually frustrated by politics and turned to economic solutions for her community:

In 1968, she began a “pig bank,” to provide free pigs for black farmers to breed, raise, and slaughter. A year later she launched the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC), buying up land that blacks could own and farm collectively. (from womenshistory.org)

The FFC lasted for years and in its heyday was among the largest employers in the county. Another legend of the movement, Hamer showed how much a black woman with passion and conviction can accomplish.

Here are two recordings to give you a sense of this formidable woman’s life and legacy:

Fannie Lou Hamer’s Testimony before the Democratic Credentials Committee in 1964 (audio, 8 minutes and 20 seconds).

In Fannie Lou Hamer: Stand Up by PBS (27 minutes), this civil rights legend is remembered by those who worked side by side with her in the struggle for voting rights. 

Credit: Library of Congress.

Advocate for the THRIVE Agenda and Connect with Public Banking Initiatives

By the Women, Money & Democracy Committee

Climate crisis, global pandemic. Mass unemployment. Racial injustice. Our crises are interconnected. So are our solutions.

Advocating for the THRIVE Agenda and for public banking initiatives are two actions that the Women, Money & Democracy Committee (W$D) is asking WILPF members and the public to get behind.

Urgently, we’re asking our members to contact your representative to ask them to support the THRIVE Agenda, which demands enough public relief money so our people can do more than just survive...they can THRIVE through this long national emergency...just like the big banks and transnational corporations we all bailed out with public money over the last 15 years have thrived. It’s payback time for the American people.  

When the THRIVE Resolution was introduced on September 10, 2020, nearly 90 members of Congress and more than 200 leading grassroots groups, including WILPF US, signed on in support. To build momentum, we are now asking other members of Congress from coast to coast to join us by cosponsoring the resolution.

Here’s the full text of the Congressional resolution.

Longer term, we’re asking our members and the public across the country to connect with local public banking initiatives in their city or state, or begin a local dialogue to bring everyone necessary to the table, to create a public banking alternative.    

Starting in October WILPF’s W$D Committee will publish a Public Banking Toolkit that will be downloadable and printable. It is an anthology of important facts, articles, talking points and tools to promote public banking, connect with local initiatives or start some. It can be used for study groups, advocacy work and outreach.

To order the Toolkit or for more info contact mbgardam@gmail.com.

More to come on public banking in the November eNews!