Posted on 03/10/2012 8:49:03 AM PST by FrdmLvr
Dear MoveOn member,
When Rosa Parks refused to leave her seat and launched the Montgomery bus boycott, it wasn't just a spontaneous decision. She'd been trained in nonviolent direct action at a place caller the Highlander Center. And the brave folks who organized the freedom rides and the lunch-counter sit-ins had similar training.
Now, from the Wisconsin workers who took over their state capitol to Occupy Wall Street, there's a movement stirring in America focused on the massive inequality that's destroying our country. And it's once again using direct action to change the conversation. To help the 99% movement succeed, we want to kick off the spring by training 100,000 people in nonviolent direct action, in the spirit of Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Rosa Parks—and pave the way for a wave of progressive, nonviolent direct action like the country hasn't seen in 50 years.
Our goal this spring is to provide the same kind of nonviolence training that transformed the civil rights movement—but at a scale no one's ever dreamed of.
If we can train enough people, the 99% Spring could be filled with the kind of bold, highly visible, compelling acts of peaceful direct action and civil disobedience that made the civil rights movement impossible to ignore.
We launched the 99% Spring a couple weeks ago, and there are already hundreds of folks working frantically to make it happen. We've already committed to chip in $100,000 to help groups nationwide get all this off the ground and we're asking every MoveOn member to dig deep and help cover the cost. Can you donate $5?
Yes, I can donate $5 to help launch a national wave of nonviolent direct action.
In the last few weeks, we've seen an amazing response to this idea. A huge army of volunteers from unions, community organizations, and environmental groups, alongside local MoveOn volunteers, are preparing to host trainings in hundreds of cities and planning massive protests nationwide. Students are organizing for spring mobilizations on campuses everywhere. We've got a plan to help make sure all of this happens on a scale that's impossible to ignore. We're working with movement leaders and cultural figures to spread the word online and in the media. We're recruiting everyday people, who have never done anything like this before, to join trainings in union halls, churches, living rooms, and community centers all over the country. We're mobilizing nationwide to bring big new crowds to campaigns everywhere using nonviolence to confront corporate greed, fight back against the foreclosure crisis, and more. And then, on Tax Day, we're ramping up fast for a huge day of direct action all across the country to send an unmistakable message to Washington.
From Occupy Wall Street to the most important moments of the civil rights movement—the freedom rides, the Montgomery bus boycott, the lunch-counter sit-ins—peaceful direct action has turned the tables on the powerful and changed the course of history. This spring, millions of us could do it again. But we need your help to lay the crucial groundwork over the next few months.
Can you chip in $5 to help create a 99% Spring?
https://civ.moveon.org/donatec4/99spring.html?bg_id=hpc5&id=36892-10389527-4zA94Zx&t=3
Thanks for all you do. –Lenore, Robin, Marika, Joan, and the rest of the team
Want to support our work? MoveOn Civic Action is entirely funded by our 5 million members—no corporate contributions, no big checks from CEOs. And our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. Chip in here.
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Also, the 99% Spring, after the Arab Spring. This spring kicks off the election year protests and civil unrest by the left. I received another move on.org email inviting me to a protest rally in Canton at some bank on Thursday, 3/15 at 2:30 in the afternoon. Did they learn nothing from '68? Maybe they've developed a new strategy.
They’ve got “5 million members” but only 335,000 “like” them? That’s some pretty crappy math right there. Somebody is flippin’ lying.
There are almost certainly numbers that are more up-to-date, but from a November 16, 2011 report on a poll by Public Policy Polling:
“The Occupy Wall Street movement is not wearing well with voters across the country. Only 33% now say that they are supportive of its goals, compared to 45% who say they oppose them.”
So please, any FReepers reading this, if you get into a discussion with anyone about the “99%”, be sure to refer to them as the “33%” (and even that’s probably being generous).
I’m not sure I would believe “admissions” from moveon.
Its definitely worth some research though.
No. They are taking credit for Rosa Park’s brave stand, in an effort to profit from it.
Highlander Research and Education Center (Wiki)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_Research_and_Education_Center
The Highlander Research and Education Center, formerly known as the Highlander Folk School, is a social justice leadership training school and cultural center located in New Market, Tennessee. Founded in 1932 by activist Myles Horton, educator Don West, and Methodist minister James A. Dombrowski, it was originally located in the community Summerfield in Grundy County, Tennessee, between Monteagle and Tracy City. It was featured in the 1985 documentary film You Got to Move.
Highlander has provided training and education for the labor movement in Appalachia and throughout the Southern United States. During the 1950s, it played a critical role in the American Civil Rights Movement. It trained civil rights leader Rosa Parks prior to her historic role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as well as providing training for many other movement activists including the members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Septima Clark, Anne Braden, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, Ralph Abernathy and John Lewis in the mid- and-late 1950s. Backlash against the school’s involvement with the Civil Rights Movement led to the school’s closure by the state of Tennessee in 1961. It reorganized and moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where it reopened, later becoming the Highlander Research and Education Center.
I'm surprised to see them admit this. Certainly not how it is taught. MLK was also 'trained'.
I’m not finding any evidence of a connection between Rosa Parks and the highlander center. You would think they would be very proud of her but I don’t find any mention of her.
All I'm getting from them is a general sense of dissatisfaction. There are no concrete plans for real improvements.
And from moveon’s view. Ms. Parks is “safely dead” and thus can’t be contacted about the truth of its claim about her.
Kinda like using the name of Ceasar Chavez to promote illegal immigration despite the fact that he called open borders a threat.
The only catch to this bit of leftist fluff is that Rosa Parks never considered herself a ‘civil rights leader’. She was tired and weary and sat down on a seta in the front of the bus....the left loves to conflate their importance.
There’s also a more powerful and direct difference between Rosa Parks and the Occupy movement.
Rosa Parks was protesting an obvious injustice that was apparent to everyone looking at it. Segregation, racial separation, and the entire edifice of race-based preference was obviously immoral on its face.
The demands of the Occupy movement, on the other hand, are just rehashed Marxist beliefs pasted onto the faces of the clueless and the politically motivated. There’s a Grand Canyon of distance between tearing down segregation and tearing down capitalism and the American civic society.
Most of us see that, too.
The Occupy movement is holding out hope that they’ll be the 21st century Bolsheviks, a small group of cadres who will be able to take over the reins of power when the system is in chaos. Occupy hopes to forment that chaos. They’re waiting for their moment, true, but they’re also making sure to hasten the day.
God help us.
This moral equivilence is laughable. Saying that if a righteous movement uses certain tactics then one becomes righteous by using them also does not follow. It would be like saying the American Revolution used guns so we are justified in shooting anyone who opposes free contraception.
I am from SE Tennessee..I have always heard the same info on civil rights demos of the 60’s...
A couple of weeks ago I heard George Soros claim credit for the “Arab Spring” and he is also behind this occupy stuff. I do think that it’s time that those of us who care should stop paying for cable TV since they are basically our enemy. Hit em where it hurts.
I really don’t think they want it known that Rosa Parks was trained for this. The narrative has always been that she was a diminutive, poor, down-trodden woman who refused to give up her seat to a no-good racist white man and move to the back of the bus after a long, tiring day at work. She was supposed to be a role model for all down-trodden Negros everywhere to rise up and do the same. It wouldn’t have had the same impact if it wasn’t staged like this. This was a story. Otherwise it would have just been another protest.
wow, never heard of the Highland Center.
I’m actually disheartened, I never knew the extent of the Marxist influence in the civil rights movement.
Where do we go from here? There is an entire generation that has been brainwashed.
I’ve got to go watch an escapist movie on Netflix or something, spent this morning “discussing” with a black man on facebook with a black fist as his profile picture claiming to be a Christian. My head is exploding!
Rosa Parks was using an assumed name.....While at Highlander Center she was known as Al Sharpton.
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