CGC Journal - May 2024
We're Building a Co-learning Community of Empathetic Societal Change Agents
MAY 2024 | ISSUE 10
LAW AND ORDER
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Current Events - News with historical context
Law and Order
Emily’s Corner - Emily’s reflections and insights
Protecting kids against racist adults
Talking With Kids -
3 Conversations: Homelessness, Racist Jokes, What is a Country?
Celebrating Change Agents -
Student Protesters
Conversation Starter -
Where have you found exploration and inquiry with another group?
Recommended Resources -
This month’s recommended resources
Community Corner -
We want to hear from you. We invite our community of co-learners to share with us what they are witnessing and experiencing in society where they live, work and play.
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LAW AND ORDER
We should remember this spring of 2024, when dozens of American colleges and universities became the site of prolonged student protests. Some universities have been persuaded to reconsider certain financial investments that many students believe are indirectly supporting the war in Gaza, which they want to end.
The uprising across campuses of America’s higher education institutions is now considered to be one of the largest student protests of the 21st century, eclipsing the 2018 March for Our Lives, which was at that time the largest student-led American protest against gun violence in the 21st century.
We should remember this spring of 2024, and how many university leaders chose to respond to student protests, leveraging the power of government violence to compel compliance with law and order. At least 2,300 arrests of students, professors and solidarity activists have been made across more than 50 campuses over the past few weeks. We should remember, if we can.
Because America apparently suffers from acute amnesia. By comparison, the current student protest movement is relatively small in relation to previous waves.
In the late 20th century, students protested across more than half of the 4,000 campuses of higher education against racial segregation, the war in Vietnam, South African apartheid and the war in Iraq.
Media reported that after numerous waves of peaceful campus protests through the 1960s that led to killings on campus at Kent State by the Ohio National Guard in 1970, an estimated 4 million students took part in a national student strike that led to many universities canceling classes, and some were forced to completely shut down for the year.
We should remember the past or we may be doomed to repeat it.
IMPASSIONED VOICES OF YOUNG ADULTS
1980s. Students staged repeated and prolonged protests against South Africa’s apartheid. They occupied buildings and even set up “shanty towns” on campus and demanded universities divest from any support of companies involved in South Africa. Many universities relented. At least 155 declared they had complied with student demands, according to CBS media reporting and the Washington Post.
Of course, most protests do not result in desired outcomes by the protesters. When students protest the decisions of adult leaders, too often leaders respond by forcibly shutting down the voices of protest. And that clash of intergenerational titans can sometimes lead to horrific outcomes.
Maintaining Law and Order
1970. Kent State was the site of student protests against the war in Vietnam. The National Guard were called in on May 4 to disperse 3,000 students that had gathered on campus. Four people were killed. Nine others wounded. Two of the people who died weren’t even involved in the protest.
1970. Less than two weeks after Kent State, more students lost their lives protesting the war in Vietnam. This time the campus was Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. Police wounded 12 students and killed two. One was a 17-year-old high school student.
1969. UC Berkeley. Anti-war student protesters were subjected to tear gas dropped from helicopters. Police killed one student. UC Berkeley’s ongoing series of protests throughout the 1960s developed into a reputation that clashed with the governor’s ideology. That governor was Ronald Reagan. Here’s the story creatively produced by a student.
1960. Students from North Carolina A&T staged a sit-in at Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, NC to protest racial segregation laws, systems, public policies and private sector practices. That sit-in occurred on the heels of the Freedom Rides produced by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) throughout the 1940s and 50s.
The Greensboro Four sit-in was motivated by stories of the brutal murder of Emmitt Till, a Black teenager killed in Mississippi in 1955. The student sit-ins sparked a national movement that led to the Negro Revolution, which rose up in 1963 (centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation) as a nonviolent direct-action protest in nearly 1,000 cities … led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
INTERGENERATIONAL IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT
Today, we’re witnessing an intergenerational clash between young adults in America who disagree with the decisions and behaviors of older adults. Most young people do not subscribe to the ideology of racial hierarchy (valuing and devaluing humans by the mythological construct of race) nor believe that unjust wars are solutions to international relations.
Yet, still somehow this dynamic of older adults choosing to sustain the status quo of our inherited past mistakes continues to conflict with younger generations who have yet to be fully indoctrinated into this inherited mentality. Older adults would do well to remember the history of this intergenerational clash of titans.
America’s youth do not tolerate well the injustices they see in the decisions made by many of those in seats of power, wealth and influence. Too many decisions have led to unjust laws, inequitable economic systems, as well as public policies and private sector practices that have segregated our society along racial lines and resulted in foreign wars that have produced enormous loss of life, destruction of entire communities and cities, and lasting residual human trauma and environmental damage.
Student want change in our society. They will inherit the same conditions we inherited, unless those systemic conditions can be changed. So, when young people raise their voices, their signs, their impassioned pleas, they do so because they are the future leaders of the society we currently steward. And they don’t like our decisions.
REFLECTIONS
When young adults raise their collective voices, how should older adults respond?
When college students are agitated enough to organize and assemble in solidarity to make specific demands of those who steward the power structure, how do a majority of those in power respond?
What do we do (you and I) as witnesses?
How does our role as tacit bystanders have impact?
What strategies do colleges and universities have in place to orientate and educate students about the history of these intergenerational clashes BEFORE they erupt into campus disruptions?
How do institutions of higher education leverage the power of education to engage students around societal issues that have continued to fester in wounds beneath the superficial scab of law and order?
CREATIVE EXTREMISTS
In his book, “Why We Can’t Wait,” a young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., included his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” as the entire chapter five. His words were prescient. King’s caution remains relevant for this moment in time. Although he was addressing the issue of government violence in response to the peaceful protests of thousands of adults and students (and many children) in the Birmingham protests against racial segregation, his salient points apply to the student-led protests we witness today.
“I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice, and that when they fail in this purpose, they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
“I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"...
“You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation.
“I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the young high school and college students…
“You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. Though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter, I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. So, the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.
“Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?
Perhaps… the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”
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