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Essay dated January 10, 2002, by James Stephenson of Bridgeport, junior at Central High School
This letter was part of an essay contest, prompted the State Legislature, to declare September 11 a Day of Remembrance.

On September 11th 2001 American suffered one of its most devastating attacks ever. Soon after you did not see anyone without his or her American flag or hear someone saying God Bless America. But then slowly the patriotism slowly died down. Some do not even realize that ground zero is still being worked on as we speak. Then before we knew it patriotism became a thing of the past. But we can never forget such a day, the men that died, the individuals that we are so proud of, and the honor of our country. Therefore I suggest we make September 11th an official holiday in Connecticut.

I choose to write about September 11th because I wanted to do something right. When I look at what happened I just want to go fight the war myself, but I am too young. So, by at least putting this idea out in the open I can feel like I did something in the end.

Making this an official holiday does not mean we have to get a day out of school. Instead of cramming algebraic equations in our heads we could take maybe ten minutes out of a class and do something that will help us remember this unforgettable day. For example we can start and end the day in silence, then go around the classroom and discuss what we remember and how we feel about what happened. And to the young ones who do not know what happened, have their teacher, parent or guardian explain to them what occurred and why we do this on this day. We must also stress that we are still the strongest and freest country we will ever see. We will call this day Remembrance Day.

If you are working on this day, everyone on the job should stop working for five minutes. What these people can do since they have to get back to work is maybe face the flag and say the (P)pledge of (A)allegiance keying in on the last phrase “with freedom and justice for all.” After that just a moment of silence and then back to work.

The whole idea of this day is to remember the men and women who died on this day. Remembering the children who aren’t able to see their father(s) or mother(s) or both any longer, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, and all others who lost friends and family. Let us remember how bless(ed) we are to be alive, well, and free something I can say we all take for granted.

I am not asking for anything big just let us remember. We do not have to make it a holiday, but rather a day of remembrance. Ask someone to do something special that they normally would not do. Who knows maybe by Connecticut doing this that (the) rest of the nation may want to catch on and do it as well. Thank you for your time, and have a blessed day.

here is new york is not a conventional gallery show. It is something new, a show tailored to the nature of the event, and to the response it has elicited. The exhibition is subtitled "A Democracy of Photographs" because anyone and everyone who has taken pictures relating to the tragedy is invited to bring or ftp their images to the gallery (in SOHO) , where they will be digitally scanned, archivally printed and displayed on the walls alongside the work of top photojournalists and other professional photographers.

All of the prints which here is new york displays will be sold to the public for $25, regardless of their provenance. The net proceeds will go to the Children's Aid Society WTC Relief Fund, for the benefit of the thousands of children who are among the greatest victims of this catastrophe.

The causes and effects of the events of 9/11/2001 are by no means clear, and will not be for a very long time. What is clear, though, is this: in order to restore our sense of equilibrium as a nation, as a city, and particularly as a community, we need to develop a new way of looking at and thinking about history, as well as a way of making sense of all of the images which continue to haunt us.

15 images displayed have been purchased by members of the Housatonic community for inclusion in the Houstonic Museum of Art's permanent collection. These images are a visual record of the attack on and destruction of the World Trade Center by terrorists on the morning of September 11, 2001. The photographs serve as a reminder that America, as powerful as we are perceived to be by ourselves and others, is not, in fact, invulnerable.

To view the images in the HMA collection The 15 images purchased by members of the HCC Community

here is new york: a democracy of photographs The here is new york web site offers almost all of the 6000 images that have been collected. You may also purchase images as well as the book here is new york.

Weir Farm National Historic Site and the
Weir Farm Trust

Weir Farm, purchased in 1882 by the artist J. Alden Weir, occupies a prominent place within the history of American art. The Farm’s rocky pastures and dense woods were a source of inspiration for some of Weir’s best work, securing his role as a major and pioneering figure in the American Impressionist movement. Museums across the country own numerous works of art that were created at the Farm by Weir and his wide circle of friends including Childe Hassam, Albert Pinkham Ryder, John Singer Sargent, and John Twachtman to name a few. The home, studio, farm buildings and landscape integral to Weir’s artistic vision have survived intact, making it the finest remaining landscape of American Impressionism.

In 1990, following a twenty-seven year preservation effort that joined community and environmental activists, artists, art historians, local, state and federal officials, Congress established Weir Farm National Historic Site as Connecticut’s first National Park and the only one in the country devoted to American painting. The Farm included the 60-acre historic core located in the towns of Ridgefield and Wilton.

Recognizing the importance of preserving this rich artistic legacy, the Weir Farm Trust, a private, nonprofit organization, grew out of a grassroots effort in the seventies to save the Farm. The Trust has since worked in partnership with the National Park Service to implement the long-range plan for development and preservation of the Farm’s profoundly significant resources.

The Trust’s mission is to promote awareness of the Farm’s history and artistic tradition, facilitate its use by contemporary artists, provide educational opportunities, and preserve the Farm’s unique environment. Through its innovative programs and activities, the Trust brings artists and audiences to Weir Farm and seeks to build community and financial support to help ensure its success as a cultural, educational and creative center.

For more information about programs and activities at Weir Farm, please call the Weir Farm Trust at (203) 761-9945 or the National Park Service at (203) 834-1896 for information about tours.

Or you can visit the Weir Farm web site...

Weir Farm Visiting Artists Program

Drawing inspiration from its magical landscape, artists have lived and worked at Weir Farm for 120 years. Underlying the significance of Weir Farm National Historic Site is the preservation of an extraordinary facet of America’s artistic heritage. Equally important, is the preservation of an environment where contemporary artists can thrive. This environment includes not only the physical landscape, but also an atmosphere in which the creative spirit is both fostered and nurtured. Providing outstanding opportunities for promising artists within the context of this environment is a mandate of the Weir Farm Trust and is critical to the success of the long-range management plan of the Farm.

The Visual Artists Program including both resident and visiting artists is the cornerstone of the Trust’s programs for professional artists and is central to its mission. The Visiting Artists component was originally envisioned as the first step towards the development of the residency program. Artists apply to the program in all visual art forms and are selected primarily on the quality of their work through a competitive panel process. These artists have reached a level of maturity in their work and have thoughtfully considered why they would like to work at the Farm. Using Weir Farm as an open air studio, participating artists work over the course of a year to create a cohesive body of work influenced by his or her own experiences of the Farm’s cultural and natural resources.

Since its beginning in 1991, the program has attracted Guggenheim, Fullbright, National Endowment of the Arts Fellows and Connecticut Commission on the Arts grant recipients, as well as winners of other national and international residency and fellowship awards. We are very pleased with this year's outstanding visiting artists Richard Lang Chandler, Maureen Cummins, Steven Dolbin, Camille Eskell, Thomas Mezzanotte and Michael Torlen.

After the conclusion of the work period and as a key benefit of the program, each group of visiting artists is presented in a museum exhibition. We extend our deepest thanks to The Housatonic Museum of Art and to Robbin Zella, Director, for presenting this exhibition of the 2001 Weir Farm Visiting Artists.

J. Alden Weir had a lifelong commitment to nurturing other artists. His spirit is alive and well at the Farm, due in great part to the artists who come to immerse themselves in their work, having been captured by the landscape that continues to inspire.

Constance Evans
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
THE WEIR FARM TRUST

FOREWORD

BY ROBBIN ZELLA, Director, Housatonic Museum of Art

Terrorism. Unspeakable acts. Unthinkable events.

These words explain recent events in New York and Washington, D.C. but less than 40 years ago, these same words could have been used to describe a tumultuous period in American history marked by murders, bombings, and riots.

"The Sixties" was a time of immense political and social upheaval in this country - the struggle for Civil Rights, the Days of Rage, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the Women's Liberation movement and Gay Rights movement, and the emergence of a counterculture were periodically punctuated by assassinations: John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Artist Robert Templeton witnessed the race riots in Detroit, the illustration of which appeared on the August 4, 1967 cover of Time magazine. Deeply disturbed by this event, Templeton resolved to create a pictorial civil rights history to commemorate its leaders for future generations. Lest We Forget: Images of the Black Civil Rights Movement is comprised of 34 portraits completed over the course of twenty years by this nationally known portraitist and includes key figures such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Abernathy, Roy Wilkins, and Rosa Parks.

But while Templeton focused his energy creating these timeless portraits, photographers such as Gordon Parks, Charles Moore and James Karales captured candid shots from the front lines of the movement. Searing images of police dogs attacking demonstrators, firemen hosing down protesters, King being arrested, and the march from Selma to Montgomery, distributed in newspapers around the country as well as in photo-essays in Look and Life magazines, served to speed the cause of civil rights.

Reverend George Lee, Lamar Smith, Emmett Till, Willie Edwards, Jr., Louis Allen, Cpl. Ducksworth, Jr., and Viola Gregg Liuzzo are the ordinary heroes - black and white - memorialized in the film A Time For Justice. Produced by three-time Academy Award-winner Charles Guggenheim, this film is a moving account of the crises in Montgomery, Little Rock, Birmingham and Selma and is an homage to those who gave their lives for the cause of freedom and equality. Although the civil rights movement ended legal apartheid in this country and wrought significant changes in American life for African-Americans, women and other marginalized groups, it is nevertheless true that inequalities and racism remain, and so the struggle continues.

I would like to thank the following people for their contributions to this exhibit: Leonore and Kevin Templeton for the loan of Robert Templeton's work; Parker Stephenson, Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York for assisting with the selection and loan of photographs, and Instructor Tony Ball for his comprehensive catalog essay. In addition, special thanks to Shelley Solomon, Assistant Principal at Hall High School in West Hartford and Professor Peter Ulisse for their contributions to educational programming; and to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Parrish Art Museum, Southhampton, NY; and Bobs M. Tusa, Librarian, University of Southern Mississippi for assistance with research; Dr. James Mooney for educational panels, Helen Barnett for public relations and Blaine Kruger for design.

Robbin Zella, Director, Housatonic Museum of Art

Return to LEST WE FORGET exhibit home

THE PROMISE OF EQUALITY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

by Tony Ball, Instructor of History

On August 25, 1864, over a year and half after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, a black woman named Annie Davis wrote President Abraham Lincoln from Maryland. Her words remain poignant to this day:

Mr president It is my Desire to be free. to go to see my people on the eastern shore. my mistress wont let me you will please let me know if we are free. and what i can do. I write to you for advice. please send me word this week. or as soon as possible and oblidge.

There is no record of a response from the Lincoln Administration. Of course Annie Davis was not free; the Emancipation Proclamation explicitly excluded those slaves that were in Union-controlled territories, or in slave states like Maryland that had not joined the Confederacy. As Lincoln had famously noted during the Gettysburg Address, the American War for Independence had commenced some "four score and seven" years earlier. But the American Revolution, the long and sometimes violent struggle to make the vaulted principles of the Declaration of Independence a reality for African-Americans and other dispossessed peoples, was only just beginning.

In 1865, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution prohibited slavery in the United States. The 14th Amendment defined American citizenship based on birth (not race), and guaranteed to all persons equal protection and due process of law. The 15th Amendment forbade states from denying citizens the right to vote based on their race, color, or previous condition of servitude. With these Civil War Amendments and Congress' Reconstruction program, there was, for the first time in our history, a chance to bring about a more racially just society. Less than a decade after the United States Supreme Court had declared that no African-American could ever be considered a citizen of the United States, the first blacks were elected to the Congress, as well as to the legislatures of the several southern states.

Like emancipation for Annie Davis, true progress towards racial justice was elusive. For one thing, most white Americans in the 19th century simply did not believe in equality and were committed to maintaining political, economic and social control over African-Americans. In 1877, Congress officially ended Reconstruction, ordering the withdrawal of the remaining federal troops from the south. Southern whites were free to turn back the clock on equality and reverse those gains that had been made by African-Americans in the years immediately after the Civil War. Black voters were disenfranchised and the legal, economic and social system refined to keep blacks in virtual, if not actual, bondage. Jim Crow laws, mandating the physical separation of the races, were vigorously enforced, and those African-Americans who sought to leave the South for America's Midwest and West often had to do so under cover of darkness.

Thousands of African-Americans like Annie Davis were only half-free, completely subjugated and segregated in a society in which privilege and skin color were inextricable. It would take two world wars and an economic depression to bring the nation forward, and to hold Americans to the ideals of liberty and equality that form the foundation of our republic.

In 1910, the noted African-American sociol- ogist W. E. B. DuBois, the anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells, educational pioneer John Dewey, and other progressives helped form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Although just two decades earlier the United States Supreme Court had declared in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that the forced segregation of blacks was constitutional as long as they were given "equal" facilities, the NAACP was committed to the strategy of using litigation to widen opportunities and address racial injustice. Early victories before the Supreme Court in the late 1910s and 1920s suggested that the NAACP had embarked on the right course.

Meanwhile, African-American soldiers had served with distinction during America's involvement in World War I (1917-1918), and returned to the United States with greater expectations for equal treatment and economic opportunity. However, the broader society was still ill-prepared for meaningful advances in civil rights. Indeed, after the production of the notoriously racist film The Birth of a Nation in 1915, organizations like the Ku Klux Klan experienced a resurgence, and African-Americans were increasingly the victims of lynching and other forms of racial violence. Indeed, even as black intellectuals and artists thrived during the years of the Harlem Renaissance and as African-Americans migrated to Northern industrial cities from the South in greater numbers, racial violence and injustice became even more entrenched.

The American stock market crash in October, 1929, and the ensuing Great Depression devastated African-Americans, who were disproportionately employed in the hard-hit agricultural sector of the economy. However, the Depression also helped forge a political realignment in the United States in which African-Americans, long faithful to Lincoln's Republican Party, were now part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Democratic New Deal Coalition. Together with intellectuals, Catholics, Jews, poor farmers and organized labor, African-Americans were part of a new progressivism in the United States which would redefine American society and government's role within it.

Despite the importance of African-Americans to Roosevelt's political coalition, little actual progress was made in the area of civil rights during the 1930s. Roosevelt steadfastly declined to endorse federal anti-lynching laws, and much of the legislation aimed at alleviating the effects of the Depression excluded African-Americans. When the United States' entry into World War II seemed an inevitability, the African-American labor leader A. Philip Randolph threatened a demonstration in the nation's capital to protest unjust treatment at home. Roosevelt responded by issuing an executive order which forbade government contractors from discriminating in hiring or wages based on race, and Randolph called off the march on Washington. As they had in World War I, African-American soldiers, sailors and airmen played a crucial role in the second World War, although again in segre-gated units. Significantly, blacks and women were vital to the nation's wartime industries which produced the munitions, planes, ships, tanks and other equipment necessary in the prosecution of the war.

World War II forced Americans to look more carefully at their own record on race and civil rights and further raised the expectations of African-Americans. In 1946, Franklin Roosevelt's successor Harry Truman created the Federal Committee on Civil Rights; two years later Truman ordered the desegregation of the U.S. armed services. Meanwhile the NAACP continued its litigation strategy. When a black student at the University of Oklahoma was not allowed to sit in the same classroom with white students, the NAACP filed suit. The Supreme Court invalidated the University of Oklahoma's segregation policy, ruling that forcing the student, G. W. McLaurin, to sit in an adjoining hallway could not be considered equal treatment as required by the 14th Amendment or the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. At the same time, the Court indicated its willingness to reconsider Plessy's "separate but equal" doctrine altogether, and NAACP attorneys began to envision an end to legally enforced Jim Crow segregation.

That opportunity came with the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in which Chief Justice Earl Warren declared on behalf of a unanimous court that the segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race violated the Constitution's 14th Amendment, because "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." This ruling was a major victory for the NAACP and for Thurgood Marshall, who argued the case before the Court and would subsequently be named the nation's first African-American Supreme Court justice. However, getting southern states to adhere to the Court's mandate would be no easy task and after the Brown decision the civil rights strategy clearly shifted from litigation to political activism and protest.

White resistance to desegregation was fierce. In the summer of 1955, a 14-year-old boy named Emmett Till was lynched in the small town of Money, Mississippi, presumably for having said "bye, baby" to a white woman in a candy store. Throughout 1955, local sheriffs in the South stepped up the enforcement of Jim Crow laws and customs, notwithstanding the clear direction of the Supreme Court towards invalidating such segregation.

In Montgomery, Alabama, a 15-year-old girl black named Claudette Colvin was arrested for refusing to give her bus seat over to a white passenger. Montgomery's civil rights community considered rallying to Colvin's cause but ultimately decided that Colvin, who was unmarried and pregnant at the time, might not be the best person to symbolize the pernicious effects of Jim Crow segregation. Some months later, in December of 1955, a 43-year-old seamstress named Rosa Parks was arrested by Montgomery's police also for having refused to vacate her bus seat to a white passenger. This time, the civil rights community in Montgomery mobilized, forming a Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA) and calling for a boycott of the city's public transportation system. The MIA selected as its president a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. and the modern civil rights era had begun.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted over a year. Although the practice of boycott in America went back to the days preceding the War for Independence, King and the entire MIA leadership were indicted on charges of "conspiring" to disrupt the city's bus system. Bayard Rustin, one of King's closest advisors, urged the Montgomery boycott organizers to submit freely to arrest following the non- violent principles of Mohandas Gandhi. The adoption of passive resistance, and King's subsequent articulation of principles of non-violence based on Christian theology, elevated King as a moral leader and gave him national stature.

The boycott finally came to an end on December 21, 1956, after the U.S. Supreme Court declared Montgomery's bus segregation unconstitutional. But King was committed to taking the civil rights agenda forward. He helped form a new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), whose focus extended beyond desegregation of transportation facilities to education, voting rights, employment and economic opportunities.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower had succeeded Harry Truman in 1953. Eisenhower gave only lukewarm support to the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education. However, he did back the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first federal anti-discrimination legislation since the end of Reconstruction. In 1957 Eisenhower also sent 1,100 federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce a federal court order mandating the admission of black students to the city's Central High School.

In the early the 1960s, young people began to take a more active role in the growing civil rights movement. Black college students developed the strategy of the sit-in, aimed initially at forcing the desegregation of local restaurants in places like Greensboro, North Carolina. Student activism represented a new phase in the civil rights movement as well as the beginning of the political, cultural and social turmoil of the 1960s. In April, 1960 young people met and formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SNCC initially embraced nonviolent strategies but during the 1960s its use of direct confrontation and increasing militancy would stand it in sharper contrast with King and the older, more conservative civil rights leaders.

In 1961, college students began partici-pating in "Freedom Rides" in which interracial groups challenged segregation aboard interstate buses and trains. When John Lewis, one of the black riders and a future member of Congress, entered a Greyhound station in Rock Hill, South Carolina, he was brutally attacked by a white mob. The local police stood by and watched. That incident and subsequent violence against freedom riders highlighted the need for strong federal leadership. King and other civil rights leaders appealed to President John F. Kennedy for support. But Kennedy was hamstrung by his own party; southern Democrats constituted a powerful bloc in the Senate and were committed to defeating any additional civil rights legislation.

That reality led the NAACP, SNCC, the SCLC and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) to focus their efforts on voter registration and education in the South. Despite their differences, all of the major civil rights groups began to view political empowerment as a necessary precondition to further progress. But political enfranchisement struck at the heart of the white power structure, and led to escalating levels of violence and suppression against civil rights activists. Alabama's state courts prohibited protest, and in April, 1963, King was arrested in Birmingham for engaging in a nonviolent march. From his Birmingham jail cell, King wrote a famous letter which crystallized his philosophy and energized the civil rights movement. Freedom, wrote King, "is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." The goal of nonviolent direct action was "to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community... is forced to confront the issue."

That crisis had certainly arrived in 1963. In May much of the nation and indeed the world was outraged when Birmingham's police chief, Eugene "Bull" Connor, set his fire hoses and police dogs on young children, assembled to peacefully protest continued segregation and injustice in the city. This, and the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, the following month illustrated the point that white segregationists were willing to use terror and violence to stem the tide of change.

In response to the violent turn of events, the Kennedy administration proposed more sweeping civil rights legislation, but again this effort was stymied by southern Democrats. A coalition of civil rights organizations sought to support Kennedy's initiatives by planning a new protest on Washington, 22 years after A. Philip Randolph's threatened protest in the nation's capital had been called off. In August, 1963, over a quarter million marchers gathered before the Lincoln Memorial to hear King's dream for a racially just society, in which people would be judged not "by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." King's impassioned plea did not stop the racial violence. Just two weeks later four little girls attending Sunday school in Birmingham were killed when a bomb planted by white racists exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church.

After John F. Kennedy's assassination in November, 1963, the civil rights movement took a new turn. Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was committed to the civil rights agenda. Moreover, as a former southern senator himself, Johnson had the standing and political skill to effectively deal with the members of his own party who had stymied legislation in the past. Johnson engineered Congressional passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, made all segregation in public facilities illegal, established an Equal Opportunity Employment Commission to combat job discrimination, and banned gender discrimination in employment and education.

As Congress was taking up the civil rights legislation, activists continued their voter registration and education efforts. The major civil rights organizations targeted Mississippi for a massive voter registration drive to begin in the summer of 1964. Mississippi's "Freedom Summer" attracted scores of college students from throughout the nation who braved racist local law enforcement, the Ku Klux Klan and the hostilities of white mobs to enfranchise African-American voters. The murder of three student activists - James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner - in June and a wave of church bombings, shootings and beatings, did not prevent the organizers of the "Freedom Summer" from empowering hundreds of black voters. However, the violence perpetrated against the Freedom Summer activists, as well as the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam, persuaded many young people in the civil rights struggle that the time had come to abandon the core principles of nonviolence and passive resistance that King had popularized.

Moreover, the traditional civil rights focus on desegregation seemed to ignore many of the pressing social and economic problems faced by African-Americans outside the south. The once booming industry that had attracted blacks to the northeast and midwest were beginning to close, and America's central cities had fallen into a rapid decline. The black nationalist and Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X came to stand for a more militant urban movement, which questioned the wisdom of nonviolence as well as the emphasis on integration. Malcolm X's assassination in 1965 did little to quiet this more strident activism. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael became chair of SNCC. He moved to expel SNCC's white members and to promote more militant confrontation. Even the word "Nonviolent" in SNCC's acronym was changed to "National," clearly indicating the new direction the organization was taking. "Black Power" became Carmichael's favorite slogan. H. Rap Brown, Carmichael's successor at SNCC, declared violence "as American as apple pie."

In October, 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in Oakland, California. The Party's minister of education, Eldridge Cleaver, became one of the nation's most eloquent and controversial spokesmen for the new militancy which advocated the violent overthrow of repressive political and economic systems.

Part of the problem was that after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent 1965 Voting Rights Act, the goals and objectives of the civil rights movement became much less clear. King began to speak more clearly about issues of poverty and oppression that transcended racism, launching plans to begin a Poor People's Campaign in 1967. He also spoke out against the war in Vietnam. But the issues of poverty and American policy abroad were far more complex than dismantling Jim Crow segregation in the south, and their solutions far more elusive.

To many, King's assassination in 1968 marked the end of the traditional civil rights movement. SNCC was virtually defunct by 1969 and most of the Black Panther leadership was either jailed, exiled or dead by the end of the decade. There can be little doubt that America still has a long road before (to quote King's "I Have a Dream" speech) the nation rises "up and lives out the true meaning of its creed." But the changes which occurred in American society during the late 1950s and 1960s were indeed profound, and moved the nation far closer than it has ever been to fulfilling the constitutional promise of equality and justice for all.

Tony Ball
Instructor in History
Housatonic Community College
December 27, 2001

FREEDOM TOUR

MARCH 13, 2003 THROUGH APRIL 18, 2003

SOURCES ABOUT CURRENT ISSUES
From a variety of viewpoints on FREEDOM

WEB SITES

www.firstamendmentcenter.org - annual report on survey of public views on the First Amendment
www.nytimes.com - Check out all points of view on the opinion pages.
www.Moveon.org - Information on the peace movement
www.truthout.org -Daily digest of critical news analysis
www.choices.edu – One of the most popular Iraq-related curriculums
www.aclu.org - The American Civil Liberties Union, “defending the Bill of Rights”
www.facinghistory.org - Facing History and Ourselves – many resources for teachers
www.tjcenter.org -Thomas Jefferson Center for Protection of Free Expression
www.eff.org/privacy - Electronic Frontier Foundation. Obtain document – USA PATRIOT Act which greatly expands government surveillance powers
www.ala.org - Resolution on USA PATRIOT ACT - a “present danger to the constitutional rights and privacy rights of library users”
www.nccev.org - National Center for Children Exposed to Violence, Yale University. A Teachers Guide for Talking to Your Students

VIDEOTAPES, CDs and MOVIES

Freedom: A History of US videotapes and DVDs, available from PBS VIDEO: 1-800-344-3337, or http://teacher.shop.pbs.org/

Freedom: A History of US CD available from Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings

Glory, About the Civil War African American regiment

Amistad, About the mutiny of the slaves taken from Africa

BOOKS

Freedom, A History of US, by Joy Hakim. Oxford Press, 2003
The Greatest Sedition is Silence, Pluto Press by William Rivers Pitt, best-selling author and H.S. teacher in Boston.
A People’s History of the U.S. by Howard Zinn

Educational Materials Prepared by Janet Luongo, Educational Consultant

FREEDOM TOUR

MARCH 13, 2003 THROUGH APRIL 18, 2003

The Exhibit: FREEDOM: THE HISTORY OF US
Goals of the Freedom Tour

SUGGESTED HIGHLIGHTS – Freedom Tour & Tour Follow-up

Sources About Current Issues (From a variety of viewpoints on FREEDOM

FREEDOM TOUR

MARCH 13, 2003 THROUGH APRIL 18, 2003

THE EXHIBIT: FREEDOM: THE HISTORY OF US

The current exhibit is Freedom: The History of US, sponsored by G.E. In a letter informing schools about the exhibit, Gus Serra, Manager of Community Relations and Communication at G.E., wrote:

“History can play an important part in helping young people understand events of the day.”

The exhibit is based on the book, Freedom: A History of US by Joy Hakim, and was made into a landmark series of 16 TV documentaries that aired on PBS for eight weeks beginning in January, 2003. The videos are available from PBS and study guides and activities are available at www.pbs.org. When students come for the Freedom Tour, they may see excerpts from the PBS series. The following is from the introduction to the PBS guide:

“Freedom is an exciting, even dangerous idea. It means independence – the ability to act without being coerced by others. Freedom requires risk taking, courage and a willingness to struggle for the possibility of a better future. Freedom is one of the founding principles of the United States. The United States has offered hope for people seeking freedom. At the same time, many Americans have been denied freedom. When the Bill of Rights was written, slavery was an accepted institution and married women were considered their husbands’ property. The freedoms that today offer us protection and opportunities for change should not be taken for granted.”

There couldn’t be a better time for you to see this exhibit, because the issues it covers are very alive at this moment in our nation as issues of democracy and our constitutional freedoms are being hotly debated in Congress and all across the United States.

The exhibit reproduces revolutionary documents – primary sources - of our history that proclaimed our rights to self-government and freedom. It shows evidence – letters, photographs, art work - of the work of courageous men and women who took great risks as concepts of freedom evolved.

As preparation for the exhibit and, as a follow-up, we encourage your students to conduct research and engage in discussions and debate on their views about the past and present state of our freedoms. This is not a mere academic exercise, but the results of the research and the actions taken can affect the students and the future history of our great country.

GOALS OF THE FREEDOM TOUR

After viewing the exhibit and participating in dialogue, students will:

• Learn or review important facts from our history
• Gain insight from history that helps us understand the present
• Understand more about the process of history – analyzing and interpreting primary sources: letters, photographs, drawings, paintings, and documents, such as
  • The Declaration of Independence,
  • The U.S. Constitution
• Engage in critical thinking on the following:
  • Freedom is a concept that is evolving
  • Compromises were made in our past history

  There is an ongoing tension that continues today between freedom and security, the ideal and the rea,l and citizens and governments.

The exhibit was developed by Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Meserve-Kunhardt Collection and is presented by PictureHistory

Educational Materials Prepared by Janet Luongo, Educational Consultant

FREEDOM TOUR

MARCH 13, 2003 THROUGH APRIL 18, 2003

Return to Educators Home

SUGGESTED HIGHLIGHTS – FREEDOM TOUR

Tours are interactive; students who are currently studying American history are asked to contribute what they know about the periods or events depicted. Students are asked to comment on what they see, think and feel about the reproductions of visuals and documents.

The tour begins with the colonial period and ends with the twentieth century, but most of the panels are on the 19th century and the Civil War.

Trained guides will start with a basic review of the founding principles of freedom. They will choose from 8-12 of the following highlights, according to the suggestions of the teachers and the interest of the students.

Painting by Paul Revere – The Bloody Massacre, 1770

A snowball fight began this killing of colonists.
Student Question: What do you know about Paul Revere?

The Declaration of Independence – a “revolutionary” document

“We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Student Question: What do you think of the above underlined phrases?

All “men” are created equal (who does this exclude?)
The “rights” to “liberty”
and “consent of the governed.”

Power Derived from the Consent of the Governed

The Declaration of Independence determines that the government is set up by the people, to represent the people, and to serve the people. People have the power to dissolve the government:

“…whenever any Form of government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles.”

After a “train of abuses” or a “Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government.”

The colonists threw off the rule of Britain under the King George III. The tension between the people and government has existed throughout history and all over the world.

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES

Right of Impeachment

“The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the U.S. shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

In the Constitution “impeachment” appears six times. The Founders had lived under King George III and had accused him of usurping the power of the people, being above the law and criminal abuse of authority.

After the Civil War, during Reconstruction, The House of Representatives impeached President Johnson for things like encouraging racial bigotry and slowing the process of achieving “justice for all.” But because he did not commit “high crimes”, therefor he was acquitted in the Senate trial.

A similar thing happened to President Bill Clinton. He was impeached by the House in 1998 for lying under oath about sexual misconduct, but acquitted by the Senate for the same reason: it was not proven he had committed high crimes. President Richard Nixon resigned in the 1970’s because he faced almost certain impeachment by the House and a probable conviction in the Senate. 56 men in his administration were convicted of crimes and some went to jail. Twenty large corporations were found guilty of making illegal contributions. The House began to prepare the articles of impeachment following the guidelines of our Constitution: obstruction of justice regarding the Watergate break-in, violating the constitutional rights of citizens by authorizing illegal wiretaps. Today former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark has drafted articles of impeachment against President Bush, V.P. Richard Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft. Some of the charges are: “deprivations of the civil rights of the people of the United States and other nations, assuming powers of an imperial executive unaccountable to law and usurping power of Congress, the Judiciary and those reserved to the people of the U.S.”

Student Question:: When do you think it’s justified to exercise our constitutional right to remove our leaders from office?

First draft of U.S. Constitution

The compromise on freedom: In order to get Southern states to ratify the constitution, a clause was added by Pierce Butler, one of the wealthiest slaveholders from S. C. It required the return of slave fugitives to their owners.

Student Question: Is compromise necessary sometimes?

The Bill of Rights

Amendments to the Constitution adopted in 1791.

Student Question:: What freedoms to we have from our Bill of Rights? (freedom of religion, speech, press, to assemble, petition the government)

Listen to this description and try to figure out what period it is describing:

War is imminent. Foreigners are feared. Laws are passed to restrict the civil liberties of non-citizens and citizens as well.

Though this may sound like present-day U.S. since September 11, 2001, it is actually a description of the U.S. just seven years after the Constitutional amendments called the Bill of Rights were adopted (paraphrased from Joy Hakim’s book). The Sedition Act of 1798 signed into law by President Adams made it a crime to criticize the government. Today most historians believe these were bad laws.

Habeas Corpus

Our U.S. Constitution addresses the abuse of being held in prison without being charged. That is called “habeas corpus.”

Section 9 of Article I states:

“The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.”

Today Attorney General Ashcroft tells us our security requires that we suspend habeas corpus, and our government is holding suspected terrorists and hundreds of prisoners at our base in Guantanamo Bay without formally charging them with a crime. In Congress, some conservatives and liberals are joining to question these laws.

Student Question: Is the Patriot Act passed in October 2001, and the newly Patriot II Act currently being drafted by Attorney General Ashcroft a necessity to secure our liberties, or a threat to our liberties?

Visual: “Slave Market of America.”

Abolitionist broadside of the 1830’s that exposed the brutality of slavery, calling it a violation of the Bible, the Declaration, and the Constitution.

Students: Describe what do you see

Visual: Map of U.S. after the Missouri Compromise with territories added as of 1820. By John Melish

Student Question: What do you know about the expansion of the U.S. territories? What were the issues?

Advertisement for John Warner Barber’s A History of the Amistad Captives, New Haven, CT 1840.

Student Question: Who knows the story of the Amistad?

Louis Adolph Gautier engraving of Stump speaking”, a painting by George C. Bingham. NY 1856.

Student Question: How important is it to be politically aware and to vote?

Abraham Lincoln, manuscript fragment of “House Divided” speech, ca. 1857. Draft for his acceptance speech as U.S. Senator.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave, and half free.”

Student Question: Why are these words so famous?

Abolitionist Flag of U.S. 1858. 10 X 5 feet. Discovered in 1996 and displayed here for the first time.

Student Question: Count the number of stripes and stars? Why so few?

Union Camp Life: Sketchbook of watercolors by Henry Berckhoff, 1861-63.

Student Question: What do you see? What does this tell us about the life of an ordinary soldier (who was also a skilled artist)?

Henry C. Parrott, letter to his sister, Oct. 1862

“We were pretty well cut to pieces...”

The Dead at Gettysburg: Photographs

Student Question: Do you think the realities of fighting in a war are different from the promises of recruiters, and the glamour of uniforms and medals?

“Men of Color, to Arms!” 1863

Frederick Douglass lobbied Lincoln to organize black regiments.

Photograph of anonymous private, 1863

Student Question:Do you think white Americans respected the African American more, as Frederick Douglas predicted they would, once he “had an eagle on his button, a musket on his shoulder, and the star spangled banner over his head?”

Emancipation Proclamation,” engraving 1864

Student Question: What did this mean for our nation?

Fifteenth Amendment Celebrated 1870

Student Question: What hopes did African Americans have?

Susan B. Anthony

She voted illegally, was convicted and jailed.

Student Question: Did Susan B. Anthony have a lot of courage? Are there any things that you would have the courage to speak up about?

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Student Question: What do you know about him and how he advanced the cause of freedom?

TOUR FOLLOW-UP

Use it or Lose it

We all know what happens to our muscles when we don’t exercise. We lose our strength. Use it or lose it. The same thing happens to our mind. Use it or lose it. We, as citizens of a democracy, need to exercise the freedoms of speech, press and assembly granted us in our remarkable document, The Constitution of the United States. The same principle applies: Use it or lose it.

We encourage you to use the exhibit information and questions for follow-up research projects, discussions and debates on the important issues brought up by the book, videos and exhibit, Freedom: A History of US.

Some sources are listed here...

Educational Materials Prepared by Janet Luongo, Educational Consultant