We All Bound Up Together

We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the Negro. You pressed him down for two centuries; and in so doing you crippled the moral strength and paralyzed the spiritual energies of the white men of the country. When the hands of the black were fettered, white men were deprived of the liberty of speech and the freedom of the press. Society cannot afford to neglect the enlightenment of any class of its members.

Center for Civil & Human Rights

Images from my visits to the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, GA in 2016 and my last visit to Washington, DC in 2017 when I finally went to see the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial.

Pamela Turner: Two for the Carnage of One

Do this in remembrance of me. It’s psychological warfare physical murder spiritual bondage. Our sanity means nothing to the intentionally persistent assassins of our humanity. Our humanness has no value in the confrontation of violent entitlement& and moral disregard that assumes murder of “others” is the white person’s right – a privilege awarded to […]

A Message of Remembrance on Passover

Dear Colleagues, As we look ahead to the beginning of Passover, I want to share a bit of JDC history. Tomorrow – the eve of Passover – is the seventy-sixth anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In 1943, April 19 was the night of the first seder, just as it is this […]

Quote: Two things are wanting in America…

But two things are wanting in American civilization a keener and deeper, broader and tenderer sense of justice; a sense of humanity, which shall crystallize into the life of the nation the sentiment that justice, simple justice, is the right, not simply of the strong and powerful, but of the weakest and feeblest of all God’s children; a deeper and broader humanity, which will teach men to look upon their feeble brethren not as vermin to be crushed out, or beasts of burden to be bridled and bitten, but as the children of the living God; of that God whose may earnestly hope is in perfect wisdom and in perfect love working for the best good of all. Ethnologists may differ about the origin of the human race. Huxley may search for it in protoplasm, and Darwin send for the missing links, but there is one thing of which we may rest assured that we all come from the living God and that He is the common Father. The nation that has no reverence for man is also lacking in reverence for God and need to be instructed.

(1875) Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, from “The Great Problem to be Solved”

Speech: “What, To The Slave, Is The Fourth Of July?”

by Frederick Douglass, 1852 Mr. President, Friends and Fellow Citizens: He who could address this audience without a quailing sensation, has stronger nerves than I have. I do not remember ever to have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor with greater distrust of my ability, than I do this day. A […]

Red Cry – Today’s Genocide in America

I know of no other instance in history where a great nation has so shamefully violated its oath. Our country must forever bear the disgrace and suffer the retribution of its wrongdoing. Our children’s children will tell the sad story in hushed tones, and wonder how their fathers dared so to trample on justice and trifle with God.

Henry Benjamin Whipple, Negotiator for the U.S., Bureau of Indian Affairs, Annual Report, 1876

[The Indian] must be imbued with the exalting egotism of American civilization so that he will say ‘I’ instead of ‘We’ and ‘This is mine’ instead of ‘This is ours.’

John Oberly, 1888, U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs

…just another strongman…

I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept […]

Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution

…once a judicial opinion rationalizes such an order to show that it conforms to the Constitution, or rather rationalizes the Constitution to show that the Constitution sanctions such an order, the Court for all of time has validated the principle of racial discrimination. … The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of urgent need.”

Right to Life: Protest=Love

A series of portraits and signs carried in marches and rallies protesting police brutality. The images were taken in New York City and Baltimore between 2014-2015. Click here to purchase any of the below prints. Click here to purchase any of the above prints.

#americarising

We can do better.

human rights