Hasta La Gadget!

We are all one, and if we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way. – Bayard Rustin

A few days have passed since the Ferguson non-indictment, making clear how much past is not even past. I think about Bayard Rustin, and how he would advise all of us right now.

Let me ask: are you thinking Rustin who? If you are, that’s OK. That would have been me, too, until recently. I am embarrassed to say that only once I learned of the documentary Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, did I learn of the human rights titan and his central role in the American civil rights struggle.

While Rustin spent decades fighting for peace and for economic justice, I’d argue that all of us should know 1) Rustin convinced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to embrace Gandhian nonviolence; 2) Rustin was the powerhouse director of the 1963 March on Washington; and 3) because Rustin was gay, and unwilling to deny this central part of his being, he lived with fears and discrimination that oft-threatened his ability to protest and organize to the best of his ability. For too many years, adversaries could use publicity of a previous arrest on a “morals” charge as blackmail.

But if Rustin was afraid or daunted, he never showed it. He kept living his life, standing up for anyone who needed a voice. He loved Black people, but as evidenced by his global activism, he loved all people.

Because of Rustin’s mighty example, our organization of Harlem neighbors have chosen to screen Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin on Dec. 3 at Maysles Cinema. Together we will honor and learn from the life of this once-Harlem resident. A post-screening Q&A will feature filmmakers Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer, longtime partner Walter Naegle, Harlem historian and activist Michael Henry Adams and Harlem LGBTQ activist Jennifer Louise Lopez. All monies raised go to the Ali Forney Center, a Harlem-based nonprofit that helps homeless LGBTQ youth.

Why are we doing this? We are neighbors and friends united under the banner Harlem Against Violence, Homophobia and Transphobia. We formed to resist the hate speech constantly displayed by ATLAH Missionary Church on 123rd and Lenox. For several years, they posted hateful messages towards President Barack Obama. But once they posted “Jesus Would Stone Homos” the speech was not only hateful, it was murderous — yet somehow was considered “protected” speech. We decided that instead of picketing, we would raise money for the people who are often most vulnerable to this kind of hurtful religious-based rejection — homeless LGBTQ youth. ATLAH hasn’t stopped posting hateful messages. We haven’t stopped resisting. So far, we have raised $15,605.

I am grateful to filmmakers Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer for sharing Bayard Rustin’s profound life story in such a powerful way, and for being willing to allow us to screen the film for our fundraiser. Brother Outsider is the winner of eight best documentary awards and seven audience favorite awards. The film also won a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary. You really want to see this film! For more about our Harlem work and fundraising, and to buy tickets to the Wed. Dec. 3 event (including incredible Broadway tickets that include backstage cast visits, courtesy of director and Harlem resident Scott Ellis) please visit our site.

Co-producer and director Bennett Singer was kind enough to submit to an interview with me, and share more about the experience of creating Brother
Outsider.

Interview with Filmmaker Bennett Singer

When did you first learn of Mr. Rustin and his work?
It was back in 1986. I had just graduated from college and had an internship at Blackside, Inc., the company that produced Eyes on the Prize (the landmark PBS series on civil rights history). One of my first tasks was to do research on the 1963 March on Washington, which Rustin organized. I had never heard of Rustin before this — but the more I read about him, the more I felt as if I had opened up a novel and met a larger-than-life character. He made such a major difference in so many movements — bringing Gandhi’s tactics of nonviolence from India to America; becoming a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr.; and playing a key role in shaping the strategy and vision of the civil rights movement. And while he was doing all this, he refused to hide or apologize for his identity as a gay man.

How did you decide to make a film about Bayard Rustin?
My college friend Nancy Kates called me in 1997. She had recently gotten her Master’s from the documentary program at Stanford, and she had read a book review of the first biography of Rustin, Jervis Anderson’s Troubles I’ve Seen. Nancy asked what I thought about the idea of making a film on Rustin. I told her it was a fantastic idea, and we teamed up as co-directors. It took us five years, but we managed to get it done!

Tell us about the process of creating this documentary. Did you have any unforeseen challenges? Any great surprises — good or bad?
When we started, the big question was whether we could find enough footage to tell Rustin’s story. Our researchers literally scoured the globe for images, and we wound up with material from about 100 archives in Africa, India, Europe, Canada and the U.S. — including footage of Rustin playing football as a high school student in West Chester, Pennsylvania, circa 1929! We were also really fortunate that Rustin, who was a music major in college, recorded two albums of spirituals (available on CD at www.rustin.org). We used his singing extensively in the film, and the lyrics of songs like “Scandalize My Name” and “Lonesome Valley” have an uncanny way of telling his story. His singing is incredibly poignant.

If you could ensure that Americans knew one thing about Bayard Rustin, what would it be?
For decades, Rustin has been in the shadows, erased from history in large part because of his openness and honesty about being gay. But just last year, in 2013, Rustin received a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest honor a civilian can receive in the U.S. In presenting this award, President Obama described Rustin as “an unyielding activist for civil rights, dignity and equality for all [who] fought tirelessly for marginalized communities at home and abroad. As an openly gay African American, Mr. Rustin stood at the intersection of several of the fights for equal rights.” It’s so heartening to see Rustin being recognized — and to see the intersectionality that was at the heart of his life acknowledged as part of this recognition.

Are there any words or images from the film, or your research, that particularly stick with you?
Before his death in 1987, Rustin requested his FBI surveillance file under the Freedom of Information Act. About 10,000 pages arrived on his doorstep, and his life partner Walter Naegle, who appears in the film and was invaluable to the project, shared the entire file with us. We quote it throughout Brother Outsider to remind people that from the official point of view of the federal government, Rustin — and the entire civil rights movement — was seen as subversive and un-American. The FBI repeatedly referred to Rustin as a “known sexual pervert.” I also think it’s chilling to consider the kind of surveillance that was conducted on Rustin — in which the government wiretaps and monitors a citizen who is not accused of any specific crime — in light of the revelations that Edward Snowden made about surveillance taking place today.

As we cope with different forms of oppression and repression in 2014 America, what guidance do you think we should take from Bayard Rustin’s life work?
“We are all one,” says Rustin at the end of the film. Then he adds: “And if we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way.” That insight about our interconnectedness was at the center of Rustin’s worldview and guided all his work. It stems from his Quaker upbringing and was reinforced by the lessons he learned around the globe as an international human rights activist. And it’s profoundly relevant today.

Why did you choose to work with Harlem Against Violence, Homophobia and Transphobia?
Throughout his six decades as an activist, Rustin encountered hate and violence and racism and homophobia on a regular basis. Some of the resistance he faced came from segregationists; but some of it came from folks within the civil rights community. He was fearless in confronting his opponents and always sought to use the power of nonviolence and love to overcome prejudice and injustice. His story inspires me every single day, and I hope it will inspire activists and citizens who are working to combat fear and hatred in Harlem — and in other places, like Ferguson, that are wracked by conflict and polarization. Like Dr. King, Rustin wasn’t out to defeat his opponents; his goal was to find common ground based on our shared humanity, on the idea that “we are all one.”

A Ferguson woman lost her left eye when police officers in Ferguson shot a bean bag round at the car she was in.

Dornella Conners is now blind in one eye and can barely see with the other, she told KMOV.

She said she and her boyfriend pulled into a Ferguson gas station on Tuesday morning, hours after the decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown was announced.

As she and her boyfriend were driving away from the station, Conners said St. Louis County police surrounded their car.

Conners said her boyfriend was trying to avoid interfering with the police while trying to drive away from the gas station. But police said the car was heading right for them.

That’s when police shot a bean bag round at the car, shattering the passenger window and injuring Conners.

“I’m very upset, very disappointed with tactics that they used trying to get control of situation,” Donnell Conners, Dornella’s father told the station.

The story comes as #BlackoutBlackFriday protests spread across Ferguson and the nation in an effort to call attention to what supporters say was an unjust outcome in Wilson’s case and to bring an end to the consumption-based day after Thanksgiving.

“In the wake of #Ferguson, it’s become painfully clear that people of color, and Black people in particular, are still unjustly targeted by law enforcement and the criminal justice system,” reads a statement on BlackoutBlackFriday.org.

Read more: http://www.kmov.com/news/editors-pick/Pregnant-woman-loses-left-eye-during-protests–284108551.html#ixzz3KOoigNBJ

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When I first met Eugenie Carys de Silva last spring on Central Park South in New York City, I was overwhelmed with her academic credentials. Living with her father in Tennessee, she has pushed the envelope of long-distance learning from her rural bedroom. For her academic audacity and global vision, Eugenie will be awarded Luce Leader 2015 of the J. Luce Foundation at a special reception at the Sri Lankan Mission to the United Nations.

H.E. Dr. Palitha Kohona, Ambassador of Sri Lanka to the United Nations,
with Eugenie Carys de Silva at the U.N. Headquarters in June on her
sweet sixteen birthday. Photo: courtesy of Eugenie Carys de Silva.

With dual U.S.-U.K. citizenship, this Renaissance woman graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor’s degree from the on-line School of Security and Global Studies at the American Military University at the age of fourteen in 2013. Last spring, Eugenie earned her Master’s degree in Intelligence Studies at the age of fifteen. This fall she began work on her distance Doctorate in Politics at the University of Leicester in the U.K.

In the interim, she earned a second Master’s degree at the age of sixteen from Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education with a concentration in Legal Studies. Her thesis was entitled An Analysis of Edward Snowden and His Actions. Her first on-line experience was a college preparatory diploma through the Center for Distance and Independent Studies of the University of Missouri from which she graduated in 2010 at the age of eleven.

At the age of eleven, Eugenie graduated from high school in Missouri.
Photo: courtesy of Eugenie Carys de Silva.

Eugenie enjoys writing and the media. She maintains two blogs, one on Peace Studies and the other a general, multidisciplinary platform. She has worked as a news reporter in Kentucky, and a radio show host of a program called “Just Kidding Around” in Tennessee. The Virginia Research Institute has published two of her books, The Adventures of Princess Eugenie: Book 1 & 2.

She is currently writing another book entitled, Don’t Like College? Don’t Go, to be published on Long Island by Linus Publications. Her forte, however, is academic writing. Eugenie is currently editing a special issue for the International Journal for Public Administration in the Digital Age and a book entitled, National Security and Counterintelligence in the Era of Cyber Espionage. The latter will be ready early next year and the former will be completed at the end of next year.

Eugenie graduated with her first Master’s degree from the American Military
University at fifteen. Photo: courtesy of Eugenie Carys de Silva.

Public speaking is another of Eugenie’s passions. Her speech titles especially intrigued me: “Is the Truth Really a Lie? How to Detect Deception: Implications for Addressing Deception from a Domestic and International Perspective;” “Spirituality vs. Religion;” and, “Is a Chemist a Better Intelligence Agent? Applying Key Skills of Chemistry to the Intelligence Field.”

Born in 1998 in Manchester, England, Eugenie will become the youngest Luce Leader in the foundation’s history. She is no stranger to awards, having won so many already. RecordSetter named her both ‘Youngest Person to Read for a Ph.D. Academic Degree in the U.K.’ and ‘Youngest Ph.D. Student in Politics Department.’ Last year she placed first at the Tennessee Academy of Sciences’ Collegiate Division Conference – following in her first place footsteps there over the last five years. This year, Pacific Standard Magazine named her a Top Thirty Thinkers Under Thirty.

Eugenie de Silva likes to let her hair down when she is not studying or writing.
“I refuse to confine myself to academic pursuits and I am quite outgoing in terms
of appearance and social activities. Photo: courtesy of Eugenie Carys de Silva.

The Huffington Post has chronicled Eugenie’s young academic career (link), as has the BBC. The Sunday Observer of Sri Lanka is also following her progress (link).

Given her academic propensity, how is it, I wondered when I first met her, that this young woman is not socially awkward? A nerd? She laughed when I asked as it is one of her most common questions. She told me:

I understand that my actions may represent me as the epitome of a nerd, but I consider myself ‘not your average nerd,’ which is how I describe myself on social media. I believe that a truly intelligent individual is one who is well rounded both academically and socially.

Eugenie also avoids stereotyping as she enjoys non-academic pastimes such as fashion; she has frequently modeled and competed in local competitions, placing for “best hair” and “best eyes.”

Our Foundation presents its annual Luce Leadership Awards to young leaders working to better humanity, either in the U.S. or abroad who embody the characteristics of honor, intelligence, benevolence, and integrity. Through her sincerity, academic achievement, focus on global studies, background in Sri Lanka, the U.K., and the U.S., and belief that humanity can improve itself through education, Eugenie Carys de Silva embodies the virtues of young global leadership.

See Stories by Jim Luce on:

Education | Sri Lanka | Women & Girls | Young Global Leadership

The James Jay Dudley Luce Foundation (www.lucefoundation.org) supporting young global leadership is affiliated with Orphans International Worldwide (OIWW), raising global citizens. If supporting youth is important to you, subscribe to J. Luce Foundation updates here.

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BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — An Alabama man died on a commercial flight from Atlanta to Seattle and the airplane was diverted to Billings Logan International Airport.

Yellowstone County Coroner Cliff Mahoney tells The Billings Gazette (http://bit.ly/1z2jiEI ) that the passenger was 70-year-old Charles Blackwell of Atmore, Alabama. Blackwell suffered a heart attack on a Delta flight on Wednesday. The airplane was diverted to Billings at about 3 p.m. and paramedics took Blackwell’s body off the plane.

Mike Glancy with airport operations in Billings said a medical doctor on the flight had been tending to the man. The flight departed for Seattle two-and-a-half hours after arriving in Billings.

___

Information from: The Billings Gazette, http://www.billingsgazette.com

Most Americans know some version of “The Thanksgiving Story.” It is a story that is invariably set in New England and involves pilgrims, Native Indians and a harvest feast. As schoolchildren, we are taught about the colonists on the Mayflower and their hard first winter. We learn about the selfless assistance the Pilgrims received from their new Indian neighbors who taught them how to plant native crops so they would not starve to death. When those crops bore fruit, the magnanimous Pilgrims invited local Indians to join them in a meal of thanks. As we get older, we learn a slightly darker version of this story, one that acknowledges tragedy more than togetherness. We recognize that this national origins story glosses over the reality of genocide, disease and war.

Whatever the interpretation, the story of Thanksgiving has always been set in the seventeenth century, in colonial New England, in the earliest days of the English presence in North America. Few ever stop to think why we celebrate this moment. When you think about it, it does not make a lot of sense. We have a national holiday to celebrate an obscure dinner party that took place almost four hundred years ago. Why? How did this come to be?

The answer to these questions has less to do with colonial history than it does with the nineteenth century and the decades leading to the Civil War. In the decades that preceded the Civil War, Americans found themselves in an intense cultural battle over the nation’s history. As sectional tensions evolved in the 1830s, 1840s and metastasized in the 1850s, North and South developed increasingly divergent “origins stories” over America’s genesis. Sectional politics shaped sectional interpretations of history just as debates over free labor and slavery polarized national discourse. Beginning roughly in the 1830s, Americans launched themselves into an historical turf war, one that reflected the contemporary political tensions emerging between North and South.

Northern scholars, for example, celebrated the New England Puritans as the forefathers of American democracy. Scholars from prestigious northern universities like Harvard and Yale studied the founding fathers of the New England colonies in great detail. They argued that it was the Puritans who first set down the basic principles of government and organized the social contract. It was from the North, they claimed, that the origins of our great American democracy sprung forth.

Southerners, of course, argued a very different story. Southern scholars explained that American was founded in the South. They claimed that America began with the Jamestown colony in Virginia where, afterall, the English established their first, successful North American colony in 1607 — nearly a decade before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. While northerners invented a story about Puritans in which the Pilgrims represented the seedbed of American democracy, southerners championed their own origins story: a kind of romance myth about a young Indian girl named Pocahontas who they claimed to have “saved” John Smith and embraced all things English. It was at Jamestown that the English first laid claim to their American desity. It was not the Puritans up in Yankee New England who founded this nation, but rather Pocahontas of Virginia who was the mother of us all.

The roiling political anxieties of the 1840s and 1850s breathed fire into these competing historical narratives. Northerners and southerners dug their heels into deeply mythologized stories about the national past. The stakes were extremely high: who could lay claim to America’s desitny, the North or the South? Could we trace America’s roots to the landing at Plymouth Rock? Or did the saving of John Smith in Jamestown represent the “true” story of America’s founding? Southerners were not about to concede that the nation began in Yankee New England, a place they increasingly associated with the grind of factory labor and the heartless greed of industry. Northerners would never agree to an American past forged in the slave South, where they saw the cruel exploitation of African Americans as antithetical to American liberty. As sectional politics grew increasingly fierce, ideas about the past shaped the present. Northern states began to adopt “days of thanks” to celebrate the contributions of their Puritan forebearers. After the outbreak of Civil War, a Virginia cavalry troop dubbed themselves the “Guard of the Daughters of Powhatan.” Their flag depicted an image of Pocahontas, linking the cause of the Confederacy to a defense of southern colonial history.

For all of the contentiousness and division, however, both northern and southern interpretations of American history shared an important common theme — one that makes these debates particularly relevant for us to understand today. Both versions of these historical “origins stories” contained a shared, assumed and intense commitment to the fiction of an Anglo-American past. For all their public assertions of difference, both North and South articulated visions of America’s founding that celebrated English origins and implied that the nation began as — and would become — a white, Anglo-Saxon empire. Whether it was the Puritans who invited the Indians to dinner, or Pocahontas who rejected her “savage” ways to marry an Englishman, sectional debates over history allowed both northerners and southerners alike to engage in a narrative celebration of America’s manifest whiteness.

Much like the historical debates themselves, the impulse to white-wash the American past emerged out of contemporary circumstances. Part of the reason that northerners began to cling to the Puritan story was because it allowed them to celebrate a white, racial past during a time when the North felt itself under siege by foreign immigrants. From the colonial period onward, the North had always been ethnically pluralistic, but during the nineteenth century, people from all over the world — and particularly from Germany and Ireland — descended upon northern cities to work in burgeoning factories and industry. This flood of immigrants cause a nativist panic among those who treasured their sense of Anglo-American superiority. A story of Puritan origins institutionalized a sense of white racial destiny for northerners who felt their significance increasingly marginalized by foreign immigration. In the South, the historical fetish for the “Indian princess” Pocahontas helped mask an ongoing genocidal Indian removal policy. As national leaders rounded up southeastern Indians and marched them out of the South in a Trail of Tears, southerners found historic justification of their ethnic cleansing policies in the conversion of a young Indian girl to English culture.

The historical stories that Americans told about themselves in the early nineteenth century reflected our nation’s long and tragic efforts to supress the reality of diversity. Today, we are stuck with a Thanksgiving tale about the New England Pilgrims because the North won the war and claimed the right to tell the story.

But there is an alternative version of the Thanksgiving story, one that might provide better perspective on our currently divided nation. In 1863, in the bowels of Civil War, Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation to establish the first national day of Thanksgiving. He called on his “fellow-citizens in every part of the United States” to “set apart and observe the last last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving.” Lincoln’s proclamation made no mention of Pilgrims or Indians. He did not mention North or South nor did he speak of founding fathers or national origins. Rather, Lincoln called attention to our desperate need for collective healing. Lincoln proclaimed a national Thanksgiving Day to “commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife” that the nation faced. He called for a day in which we might sit down and work to “heal the wounds of the nation.”

Today, perhaps as poigniently as in 1863, such a spirit of Thanksgiving is desperately needed.