Posted on 06/20/2023 6:21:48 PM PDT by marshmallow
This is what the war is really about (other than making money of course).
To hint that somehow Ukrainians are responsible for inventing the rainbow flag idea shows a serious ignorance of Rainbow Flag history. While in recent years it has often been paired with LGBTQ+ ideas, it has more often in the past involved cooperation and efforts by multi ethnic and multi racial communities and people.
I was aware of the Rainbow symbolism long before the gay community adopted it. Here is a link for the Official Trailer (film) of a movie about the First Rainbow Coalition.
https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/the-first-rainbow-coalition/
“The First Rainbow Coalition
Film. Directed and produced by Ray Santisteban. Nantes Media LLC. 2019. 56 minutes.
In this documentary, Chicago’s Black Panther Party forms alliances across lines of race and ethnicity with other community-based movements in the city to collectively confront issues such as police brutality and substandard housing.
Time Periods: People’s Movement: 1961 - 1974
Themes: Housing, Civil Rights Movements, Education, Labor, Organizing, Racism & Racial Identity
The First Rainbow Coalition begins in 1969, when the Chicago Black Panther Party, notably led by Fred Hampton, forms alliances across lines of race and ethnicity with other community-based movements in the city, including the Latino group the Young Lords Organization and the working-class young southern whites of the Young Patriots.
Finding common ground, these disparate groups banded together in one of the most segregated cities in postwar United States to collectively confront issues such as police brutality and substandard housing, calling themselves the Rainbow Coalition. The First Rainbow Coalition tells the movement’s little-known story through rare archival footage and interviews with former coalition members in the present-day.
While the coalition eventually collapsed under duress from constant harassment by local and federal law enforcement, including the murder of Fred Hampton, it had a long term impact, breaking down barriers between communities, and creating a model for future activists and diverse politicians across America. [Description from PBS.]”
Adoption of the RAINBOW by the LGBTQ+ community was a “Jonny Come Lately” move at least 20 years later than the initial Rainbow intended to emphasize the multi racial/multi ethnic composition of the original grouping. Fred Hampton’s formation of the original named group was probably an outgrowth of the previous year’s Resurrection City activities, which was set up with a permit on the Mall in Washington, DC, in May, 1968.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/remembering-poor-peoples-campaign-180968742/
Remembering Resurrection City and the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968
Lenneal Henderson and thousands of other protesters occupied the National Mall for 42 days during the landmark civil rights protest, by Anna Diamond, Reporter, May 2018
“One day in early December 1967, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. laid out his vision for the Poor People’s Campaign, his next protest in Washington, D.C.,: “This will be no mere one-day march in Washington, but a trek to the nation’s capital by suffering and outraged citizens who will go to stay until some definite and positive active is taken to provide jobs and income for the poor.”
Three years earlier, when President Lyndon Johnson declared his war on poverty, 19 percent of Americans—an estimated 35 million—lived below the poverty level. Seeing how poverty cut across race and geography, King called for representatives of American Indian, Mexican-American, Appalachian populations and other supporters to join him on the National Mall in May 1968. He sought a coalition for the Poor People’s Campaign that would “demand federal funding for full employment, a guaranteed annual income, anti-poverty programs, and housing for the poor.”
“Assassinated in Memphis on April 4, King never made it to the Mall, but thousands traveled to Washington to honor King’s memory and to pursue his vision. They built “Resurrection City,” made up of 3,000 wooden tents, and camped out there for 42 days, until evicted on June 24, a day after their permit expired. But the goals of the Campaign were never realized and today, 43 million Americans are estimated to live in poverty. Earlier this year, several pastors started a revival the Poor People’s Campaign with the support of organized labor, focusing on raising the minimum wage.
On the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination and the 50th anniversary of the Campaign, Smithsonian.com spoke with one of the activists who traveled to Resurrection City: Lenneal Henderson, who was then a college student at University of California, Berkeley.” The article continues with descriptions of life and activities within and around the encampment, as well as Mr. Henderson’s experiences and activities while he was there the entire time.
He was asked, “What did the Poor People’s Campaign represent to you? It represented an effort to bring together poor people from different backgrounds and different experiences, who really had not been brought together before. In fact, they’d been set against one another. People from all kinds of backgrounds, and all over the country came together: Appalachian whites, poor blacks, to mule train from Mississippi, American Indians, labor leaders, farm workers from the West, Quakers. It was just an incredible coalition in the making.
Even though the Economic Bill of Rights we were pressing for was never passed, I think it was successful in many ways. For one, the relationships that those folks built with one another carried on way beyond 1968.”
Since I lived near DC at the time, I was well aware of all this activity and happened to meet and speak with some who volunteered or even lived there.
It was suggested people were allowed to organize this encampment because government officials felt it was wiser to have the large number of angry, heaartbroken activists all in one place. The riots in DC and around the country after the MLK assassination had killed people, and frightened many more. There were fears of other organized events throughout the country and the possibility of even more violence. Unlike various events after the recent killing of George Floyd, there was little subsequent national violence. What did happen as a result of Resurrection City was many people from different communities and parts of the country met, planned, and subsequently acted.
https://kairoscenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/ANAUF2-History-sm.pdf
The Poor People’s Campaign was launched April 29, 1968, in Washington, DC. There key leaders of the campaign gathered for lobbying efforts and media events. Then they dispersed around the country to formally launch the nine regional
caravans going to Washington: the “Eastern Caravan,” the “Appalachia Trail,” the “Southern Caravan,” the “Midwest Caravan,” the “Indian Trail,” the “San Francisco Caravan,” the “Western Caravan,” the “Mule Train,” and the “Freedom Train.” On June 24, the day after the permit ended, “the residents remaining at Resurrection City were surrounded by [elsewhere stated as 1,000] police dressed in riot gear and told they had 56 minutes to leave the premises peacefully in order to avoid arrest. After one hour passed, the police forcibly removed and arrested the remaining residents” [elsewhere stated as over 200] and bulldozed anything left behind.
On June 5th I was in a local cafe commiserating with others over the assassination that day of Robert F. Kennedy, a candidate for President. A young black man I had met earlier came in looking in a state of shock. He came from a mixed race suburban family and was a volunteer at Resurrection City. I aked what was the matter, and he said he and others in an eating place had just been robbed at gun point in a downtown area of DC. “Then he burst into tears and asked, “What is the matter with these black people?”
Now, 55 years later we are still asking questions like that and over 40,000,000 Americans of all races are still living in poverty while CEO’s of companies like Pfizer and WalMart are paid $20,000,000 and more a year. Go figure!
This is “Pride Month”. The MFA may only have this on their logo for this month. We will see. After all they are trying to appeal to foreign organizations.
It is good to see that all the Putin supporters here have not been discouraged by the well documented little boy belly kissing incident.
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