Remembering the Rich and Radical Political Life of Rosa Parks. Featuring audio of her, on what would have been her 100th birthday!

All that follows is from Democracy Now! (I only added links to the title of Jeanne Theoharis's political biography of Ms. Parks.) You may link back to Democracy Now! by clicking *here*. 

Happy 100th Birthday, Rosa Parks!

Born on Feb. 4, 1913, today would have been Rosa Parks’ 100th birthday. On Dec. 1, 1955, Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Her act of resistance led to a 13-month boycott of the Montgomery bus system that would help spark the civil rights movement. Today we spend the hour looking at Rosa Parks’ life with historian Jeanne Theoharis, author of the new book, "The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks." Often described as a tired seamstress, no troublemaker, Parks was in fact a dedicated civil rights activist involved with the movement long before and after her historic action on the Montgomery bus. "Here we have, in many ways, one of the most famous Americans of the 20th century, and yet treated just like a sort of children’s book hero," Theoharis says. "We diminish her legacy by making it about a single day, a single act, as opposed to the rich and lifelong history of resistance that was actually who Rosa Parks was." We also air audio of Rosa Parks in her own words. In the midst of the boycott in April of 1956, she spoke to Pacifica Radio about the action she took. [includes rush transcript–partial. More to come. Check back soon.]

Filed under  Civil Rights, African-American History, Author Interviews, Jeanne Theoharis

Guest:

Jeanne Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. She is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College and has written extensively about the civil rights and Black Power movements.

Transcript

AMY GOODMAN: A hundred years ago today, civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks was born. It was February 4th, 1913. On December 1st, 1955, when she was 42 years old, she refused to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama. She was arrested, convicted of violating the state’s segregation laws. Her act of resistance led to a 13-month boycott of the Montgomery bus system that would help spark the modern-day civil rights movement and launch Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

We want to go to a clip of Rosa Parks, in her own words. In the midst of the boycott, April 1956, she spoke to Pacifica Radio about the action she took.

ROSA PARKS: I left work on my way home, December 1st, 1955, about 6:00 in the afternoon. I boarded the bus downtown Montgomery on Court Square. As the bus proceeded out of town on the third stop, the white passengers had filled the front of the bus. When I got on the bus, the rear was filled with colored passengers, and they were beginning to stand. The seat I occupied was the first of the seats where the Negro passengers take as they—on this route. The driver noted that the front of the bus was filled with white passengers, and there would be two or three men standing. He looked back and asked that the seat where I had taken, along with three other persons: one in a seat with me and two across the aisle were seated. He demanded the seats that we were occupying. The other passengers there reluctantly gave up their seats. But I refused to do so.

I want to make very certain that it is understood that I had not taken a seat in the white section, as has been reported in many cases. An article came out in the newspaper on Friday morning about the Negro woman overlooked segregation. She was seated in the front seat, the white section of the bus and refused to take a seat in the rear of the bus. That was the first newspaper account. The seat where I occupied, we were in the custom of taking this seat on the way home, even though at times on this same bus route, we occupied the same seat with whites standing, if their space had been taken up, the seats had been taken up. I was very much surprised that the driver at this point demanded that I remove myself from the seat.

The driver said that if I refused to leave the seat, he would have to call the police. And I told him, "Just call the police." He then called the officers of the law. They came and placed me under arrest, violation of the segregation law of the city and state of Alabama in transportation. I didn’t think I was violating any. I felt that I was not being treated right, and that I had a right to retain the seat that I had taken as a passenger on the bus. The time had just come when I had been pushed as far as I could stand to be pushed, I suppose. They placed me under arrest.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Rosa Parks speaking in April 1956 in the midst of the Montgomery bus boycott. She had refused to stand up for a white passenger just a few months before, December 1st, 1955.

Rosa Parks is often described as a tired seamstress, no troublemaker. The fact was, she was a troublemaker, a first-class one. At the time of her arrest, she was secretary of the local NAACP. She raised money to defend the Scottsboro Boys in a rape case that was trumped up, attended trainings at the Highlander Folk School of Tennessee. In fact, she had sat down on the bus before and refused to get up for white passengers. When she died in October 2005, she became the first African-American woman to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda.

Well, I just recently sat down with Jeanne Theoharis, historian, author of the new book, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. She is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College who’s written extensively about the civil rights and Black Power movements. I began by asking her to tell us the story of Rosa Parks.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: This is a story of a life history of activism, of a life history, as she would put it, of being rebellious, right, that starts decades before her historic bus stand and continues decades after. And so, very much what the story I’m trying to tell in this book is the story of that scope. It begins: Her grandfather was a supporter of Marcus Garvey, and so that is really where she gets her start, is with her family, her mother and grandparents. And they sort of inculcate her in a sense of pride and a sense that you demand and expect respect from people around you. And so, it is that spirit that she then brings into the world. She marries Raymond Parks, the first real activist she ever met.

AMY GOODMAN: Marcus Garvey was?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Marcus Garvey headed the Universal Negro Improvement Association. He was a Pan-Africanist and also a proponent of sort of black nationalism and black pride. And her grandfather was a supporter.

So, she meets her husband, Raymond Parks, and he is working on the Scottsboro case. This is 1931. And the Scottsboro case, these are nine young men, ages 12 to 19, who get arrested riding the rails. Right? This is the Great Depression. And very quickly, the charge turns to rape, and very quickly, they are all sentenced to death, except the youngest one. And so, a support movement grows up—

AMY GOODMAN: These are black boys—

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Black boys.

AMY GOODMAN: —teenagers, and white young women.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: Girls.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Basically, these young boys are riding the train, like many people did. When they get arrested, it is discovered there are two young white women riding the train. And it is that moment where these nine young men—again, ages 12 to 19—where the charge then turns to rape. They were not originally arrested for rape. And so this support defense committee, this grassroots defense committee, grows to defend these nine young men. And Raymond Parks is part of that movement, and that’s what he’s doing when she meets him. And so, he’s sort of the first activist she met, and in many ways, that—her political development as an adult starts with sort of being a newlywed with Raymond and working on the Scottsboro case.

AMY GOODMAN: And what happened to the Scottsboro Boys?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Ultimately, they are not—they are not executed, and that movement really prevents that travesty of justice from happening.

So then, in 1943, she sees a picture of a classmate attending a local NAACP meeting, and she realizes that women can be part of the NAACP, and so she decides to go and attend a Montgomery NAACP meeting. And she’s the only woman there. And they’re having branch elections, and so she is elected branch secretary at her very first meeting in 1943. And that begins a decade of activism, right, before her bus arrest, where she is working with the NAACP.

And she’s working with a man by the name of E.D. Nixon. And E.D. Nixon is a sleeping car porter, and he’s active in the union of sleeping car porters. And he and Rosa Parks want to transform the branch into a more activist branch, and so he actually runs for president and wins in 1945. And he and Parks set about to investigate cases of white brutality, work on black voter registration. And this is very controversial. And in fact there is controversy in the branch. There are many middle-class members who oppose this. They try to unseat Nixon and, to a certain extent, Parks. But that does not work.

And so, for this decade before her stand, she is doing this very dangerous work. You know, I think we say NAACP today, and it sounds not so dangerous. But to be a NAACP activist in the '40s, doing what she's doing—she’s traveling the state, she’s taking testimony of people, she’s trying to get them to sign affidavits—that is extremely courageous work. And there’s sort of only a small handful of people in Montgomery, you know, sort of committed to doing that work.

AMY GOODMAN: So, how does this moment happen? Actually, as you point out in the book, it wasn’t the first time Rosa Parks sat down on the bus and refused to get up. But explain what was different, when she tried it the first time and when she tried it in 1955.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: So there’s a—right, as you mention, there is a longer history of bus resistance in Montgomery. There had been numerous cases sort of in the decade after World War II, before her arrest in '55, of people getting arrested on the bus. And she's very familiar with many of these cases, so she knows what can happen. A neighbor of hers in 1950 is arrested, thrown off the bus and killed by police. The young Claudette Colvin, in March of 1955, is manhandled by police when she is arrested for her refusal to move. Parks herself had made various stands on the bus. She abhorred the practice that many bus drivers insisted on, where black people would have to pay in the front, get off the bus, and reboard in the back of the bus. And she refused to do that. She had been kicked off the bus by this very same bus driver a decade earlier for refusing to do that. She had had trouble with other bus drivers. She describes some bus driver passing her by because he didn’t—you know, he felt like she was a trouble—you know, she raised trouble. So she had this sort of history of bus resistance. There is this larger history of bus resistance in Montgomery. And then we get to December 1st, 1955.

One other thing is, that summer in August, she had gone for a two-week workshop to Highlander Folk School. They were having a workshop on school desegregation. This is 1955. So, we have the historic decision in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education, but then the Supreme Court comes back in '55, right, and refuses to put a timetable on it, right? It's the historic words: "with all deliberate speed." And so, activists, like Parks, like Myles Horton and Septima Clark, who were running the Highlander workshops at the time—

AMY GOODMAN: In Tennessee.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: In Tennessee. This is a—this is a workshop to bring together people who want to push for and make a plan to implement school desegregation, because the court is clearly not going to press it forward. So she attends this workshop in August, and it is a very important and transformative time for her. She describes it as the first time she felt like she could discuss things with white people and not feel hostility. She’s obviously—there are 48 people attending this workshop. These are all people committed to this work of school desegregation. So, both—her own spirit really lifts. She talks about loving Myles Horton’s sense of humor, getting to just eat and be in a interracial space, that was a matter-of-fact interracial space, that just—that people just ate together, they shared rooms together, they sat outside together, that that freedom was also transformative, personally.

So she comes back, and then, in some ways, the atmosphere of the segregation in Montgomery, the conditions become harder to bear, I think. So, the evening of December 1st, 1955, she’s gotten off work. She actually decides to wait for a less crowded bus, so she goes to a drugstore, buys a few things and boards the bus around 5:30 at night. She sits in the middle section, right? One of the myths is that she was sitting in the white section; she was not. She was sitting in the middle section. The middle section was sort of a no-man’s land, in that the bus driver could ask you to move from that section even though Montgomery city code at the time said black people were not—did not have to get up out of their seats if there was no seats available. But bus drivers routinely violated that city code. So, that night, she’s sitting in the middle section. There are four black people sitting in this row. And at the third stop, the bus fills up, and there is one white man standing. And by the terms of Montgomery segregation, all four people will have to get up so that one white man can sit down. And the bus driver, James Blake, who, like all bus drivers in Montgomery, is carrying a gun, orders them to move. And she refuses.

He says, "I’m going to have you arrested." She says, "You may do that." He gets off the bus, and he first calls the supervisor, his supervisor. And the supervisor says, "Well, get her off the bus." The supervisor—I want to repeat that—just says, "Get her off." He does not say, "Have her arrested." Blake calls the police. The police come and evict her from the bus. And she believes the police don’t want to arrest her. It is Blake who sort of takes that sort of final historical step and says—

AMY GOODMAN: And he’s a white driver.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: He’s a white driver. All the drivers in Montgomery are white. I think one of the less-known facets of the Montgomery bus boycott is that it’s also pressing for black bus drivers. So, yes, he is a white driver. The police—she describes also, in those moments, while Blake is off the bus calling, people grumbling—right, people are clearly nervous. What’s going to happen? The police, you know, take her off the bus. Blake says he wants to sign a warrant. He’s going to come after his run to sign the warrant. And they take her to jail.

And she describes the moment in various ways. She describes it as she had been pushed as far as she could be pushed and that to get up meant that she consented to this, and she did not consent. But one of my favorite passages is also that she talks about finding her arrest annoying. And I think this speaks to how she does not necessarily believe that some movement is going to happen, right? She’s taking this stand because she thinks it’s important. But she finds it annoying because she’s actually working on this youth workshop for the weekend, and she sees this sort of as a distraction, and now she’s gotten herself arrested, right? And who knows how long this is going to take? And who knows what’s going to happen? And who knows if some sort of violent thing is going to happen to her? And so, in that moment, it’s a very hard moment, and then it’s also a moment where she in no way can see what’s about to happen.

AMY GOODMAN: Jeanne Theoharis is the author of the new book, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. On this hundredth anniversary of the birth of Rosa Parks, we’ll continue our conversation in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Pete Seeger singing "We Shall Overcome." He wrote it with others, the enduring anthem of the civil rights movement, at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, where Rosa Parks trained. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we return to our conversation with historian Jeanne Theoharis, author of the book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. I asked her about the fateful day, December 1st, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to obey a white bus driver, James Blake, who ordered her to give up her seat to a white passenger. I asked how long Rosa Parks was detained and what she did next.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: She’s held there about three or four hours. She calls home, and her mother is terrified. "Have you been beaten?" She says, "No." And so, her husband starts to get money together to come get her. Meanwhile, someone on the bus goes to tell E.D. Nixon. And E.D. Nixon calls, can’t find out any information, and then calls a white civil rights kind of couple in town by the name of Virginia and Clifford Durr and gets Clifford Durr, who is also a lawyer, to call and find out what’s happened to her. So, both Raymond Parks and Nixon and the Durrs all come to—down and bail her out. And they all go back to the Parkses’ apartment.

AMY GOODMAN: And the Durrs are white, famous civil rights activists.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: The Durrs, famous, whites, activists, leftists. So they all go back to the Parkses’ apartment that night to talk about what happens next, because Nixon, once he knows that she’s OK, is, in a measure, delighted, because she’s exactly the kind of person that is both respected in the community, she’s middle-aged, she’s 42, she’s super tough, right? so he knows—he trusts that she’s not going to flinch under the kind of pressure that’s going to be brought to bear. And so he really wants her to be a test case. And at first, her husband is very nervous both for her safety and their safety, but also because people hadn’t necessarily stayed together around other cases. So he’s worried. But they decide that she is going to go forward with this case.

So she calls a young lawyer and friend of hers, a black lawyer by the name of Fred Gray, to ask him to represent her. And Fred Gray calls Jo Ann Robinson, who’s the head of the Women’s Political Council, a professor at Alabama State. And the Women’s Political Council had been very active around these issues. And Jo Ann Robinson mobilizes that night, and they decide to call for a one-day boycott on the Monday when Parks is going to be arraigned in court. And so Robinson actually sneaks into Alabama State College in the middle of the night with two students and runs off 35,000 leaflets in the middle of the night. At about 3 a.m., she calls E.D.—this is Robinson—and says, "This is what we’re planning." And so, at 5:00 in the morning, Nixon starts to call some of the ministers in town to get them on board for this one-day plan. And it is not 'til midday, when Rosa Parks, as she often does, takes her lunch to Fred Gray's law office, that she finds out sort of what’s happening.

And so, they are planning, again, for just a one-day boycott, at this point, on the Monday. And people are very worried. Will people do it? Will people stick together? And then Monday comes, and it is this amazing—people stay off the bus. She describes it as sort of the best moment of the whole thing. And that night, at a mass meeting at Holt Street Baptist Church, people decide to carry on the boycott sort of—and make it, you know, a longer boycott.

AMY GOODMAN: And they choose a young minister who’s just come into town to be their leader.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Martin Luther King.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: They choose him for a number of reasons. In part, he’s young. He’s new. He’s not—he doesn’t have any—he’s not firmly aligned with one side or the other. His church is actually located right across—it’s downtown; it’s right across from the Capitol. So they have the first meeting—the ministers have the first meeting at his church on E.D. Nixon’s sort of idea, in part because it’s so centrally located, and again, because Nixon sees that King doesn’t have enemies in town. And then, it is at Holt Street where we get the first taste of sort of Martin Luther King’s sort of, you know, kind of political and oratorical brilliance, right? because the speech he gives that night is an incredible speech.

AMY GOODMAN: December 5th, 1955.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Exactly.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Rosa Parks helped to—helps to launch Dr. Martin Luther King.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Yes, she does. Yes, she does. And in many ways, she—there’s this interesting moment. So, on Monday, right, she goes to court. She’s very quickly convicted. And then she goes back with Fred Gray to his law office. She doesn’t go back to work. She doesn’t go home. She goes to his office, and she answers—

AMY GOODMAN: She worked at Woolworth’s?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Ah, sorry, she worked at Montgomery Fair. She’s an assistant tailor. Montgomery Fair is the biggest department store in Montgomery at that point. So she’s—she’s working in the men’s shop. But she doesn’t go back to work. And she answers phones in Fred Gray’s office that Monday, and she doesn’t tell people it’s her, right? So this is sort of the paradox of how she negotiates this role. So she’s—she wants to be useful, so she’s answering all these calls. People are wanting to know what’s happening, what they should do. She’s not saying it’s her. And then, meanwhile, she stays and answers phones, while Fred Gray and Nixon and King have a meeting where the Montgomery Improvement Association will be born, right? So, in some sense, she—she’s sort of doing this kind of behind-the-scenes work while the kind of leadership is being formed on that Monday afternoon.

AMY GOODMAN: You talked about December ’55 coming just a few months after the murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi—

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —fourteen-year-old African-American boy, seared into the history and consciousness of this country, what happened to him. Describe what happened and how Rosa Parks was affected by it.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: The lynching of Emmett Till happens in August of 1955. But just days before she makes her stand, they’ve had this mass meeting. So, part of what happens is, the two men—because of the attention to the lynching, the two men are actually put on trial, which is sort of a rarity, but they are acquitted. This is Bryant and Milam. And so, a campaign comes up to kind of raise awareness around this, sort of organized in part by Mamie Till, his mother, and T.M. Howard. And so they’ve had—T.M. Howard comes to Montgomery just days before, and they’ve had this big mass meeting. And so, it’s very much on her mind. When she talks about sitting there in those moments, she talks about thinking about her grandfather, she talks about thinking about Emmett Till. And she’s—

AMY GOODMAN: When had he come into town, in Montgomery?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Howard comes in—I think it’s just literally four or five days. They’ve had this big mass meeting.

AMY GOODMAN: Four or five days...?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Before her arrest, so—

AMY GOODMAN: So at the end of November, right after Thanksgiving.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Exactly, exactly. And so it’s really fresh, right? And the organizing is really fresh, right? So, the lynching itself happened in August, but the kind of movement to sort of raise awareness is happening and has come to Montgomery just days before her bus stand. And so she’s very much thinking about that. And the bus driver says, you know, "You all should make it light on yourself and get up." And she thinks to herself, "This is not making it light on us as a people." And she’s thinking about Till, and she’s thinking about this kind of longer history, you know, and the Klan coming to her grandparents’ house, you know, and sort of coming by. And so, it’s very much kind of how she’s—you know, it’s with her that day.

AMY GOODMAN: The Klan came to her grandparents’ house?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: And her grandfather would sit out at night, often with a gun, to protect the house. And she would sometimes sit with him. After World War I, there’s this sort of backlash partly against black service during World War I, and there’s all of this kind of this uptake in violence in 1919, and so that also comes to Pine Level, to Alabama, where she grows up. And so she very much talks about remembering her grandfather sitting out on the porch with a gun, again, ready for sort of the Klan, if they come.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Jeanne Theoharis, author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks. When Rosa Parks died in 2005, there was a huge memorial service for her in Washington, D.C. She was the first African-American woman to lay in state at the Capitol Rotunda, then her body brought to a church before the big funeral in Detroit. And I remember the networks talking about Rosa Parks. I mean, there’s no question it was a big moment, and the media took notice. I remember CNN saying Rosa Parks was a tired seamstress—

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right.

AMY GOODMAN: —she was no troublemaker. But Rosa Parks, as you point out, was a first-class troublemaker.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: She was.

AMY GOODMAN: So how did the image of her change? What did people understand at the time in 1955?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: I mean, I think there’s sort of two different things at work. Certainly during the boycott itself, they background Rosa Parks’s political history for the safety of the movement, right? Immediately, I mean—

AMY GOODMAN: You mean they put it on the back burner.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: And they play it down, right? They tend to talk about her as a good Christian woman. They tend to talk about her—and this is King, this is the black press, this is even Parks herself, right? They don’t tend to foreground her political history, in part because civil rights protests—this is 1955—are getting—you know, this is the Cold War. They’re immediately redbaited. All sorts of crazy rumors come up about her: She’s a communist plant, she’s an NAACP plant, she’s Mexican, she has a car, she’s not even black—I mean, just all manner of rumors in Montgomery spring up. And so, in part to counter the idea that these are outside agitators, outside forces, coming to—you know, coming to Montgomery, there is a tendency to talk about her, right, just as a kind of local woman, seamstress, Christian, right? So, that obviously then, in the decades afterwards, takes on a life of its own, in terms of her political history.

The other thing, I think, that contributes to this is Rosa Parks leaves Montgomery in '57 and spends the second half of her political life in Detroit, sort of fighting the racism of the Jim Crow North. And so, in many ways, she leaves the South as this movement that she's helped to galvanize sort of takes on, and she has this new place in which she’s sort of struggling in and part of a movement and that is not getting the same kind of attention.

But fast-forward—I think, by the '90s, right, and 2000s, right? In many ways, in the wake of the establishment of the King holiday, we see the civil rights—the history of the civil rights movement begin to get kind of reshaped and twisted into this very happy, limited story of a—this American movement that rises up and changes America, and then we vanquished racism, and there's this dreamy Martin Luther King and this quiet Rosa Parks. They’re sort of the two people we get in that narrative. And that’s a very happy story, and it makes us feel good about ourselves as a nation. And that story, I think, is part of what is at the center of the kind of national spectacle made of her passing.

AMY GOODMAN: Who was Rosa Parks’ hero?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Rosa Parks’ hero, she describes as Malcolm X. She very much—she loved, she admired, she had—I mean, she had tremendous admiration for King, but she describes Malcolm X as her personal hero. Rosa Parks was a lifelong believer in self-defense. Obviously she gets that from her grandfather. In many ways, Malcolm X reminds her of her grandfather. Malcolm X’s willingness to sort of talk about sort of Northern liberalism and Northern hypocrisy, Malcolm X’s very early opposition to the war in Vietnam—all of these things are very similar to her sort of political outlook, and therefore, I think, she very much looks to him.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s interesting, talking about Vietnam. You write about Rosa Parks as an internationalist.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right, right. I mean, she is a very early opponent of the war in Vietnam, as is John Conyers. And she—in many ways, she—she comes to volunteer on John Conyers’ very first campaign, right, for this new—

AMY GOODMAN: Longtime congressmember, dean of the Congressional Black Caucus.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right. And he runs for the very first time. Michigan gets a new congressional seat in 1964 that looks like it’s going to, like, perhaps elect a second African American to Congress from Michigan. And this young civil rights lawyer, right, is running on this platform of jobs, peace and justice, right? So he’s running on a kind of anti-Vietnam platform in '64. Rosa Parks, very attracted to this, volunteers on his campaign in 1964 and gets Martin Luther King to come to Detroit on behalf of Conyers, right, basically prevails on King. King is staying out of doing this kind of political stuff; he doesn't. But he can’t say no to her. And this is a very crowded primary; eight people are running. Conyers wins by less than a hundred votes. And so, one of the things that he thinks really contributes is King coming, and part of what gets King to come to Mont—to Detroit, excuse me, is Rosa Parks asking him. And so, one of the first thing Conyers does is he hires Rosa Parks to work in his Detroit office. And he is very much in the forefront of kind of the opposition to Vietnam. And so—and she—and that’s—both of them are sort of working on that, and so she takes—she is part of that sort of—like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She’s supportive of the Jeannette Rankin Brigade, of the Winter Soldier hearings that are held in Detroit.

AMY GOODMAN: The American soldiers who came back from Vietnam and talked about the atrocities they committed there.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Right. And those hearings are held in Detroit, and then John Conyers actually goes—you know, is sort of one of the voices to kind of make—to bring those—bring the Winter Soldier hearings to sort of Congress.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s when John Kerry became famous, as this soldier who’s returned and goes to Congress and testifies against the Vietnam War.

JEANNE THEOHARIS: Absolutely, absolutely. And so, that happens in Detroit, and it happens, in part, through kind of Conyers’, you know, kind of work on it.

AMY GOODMAN: Why didn’t Rosa Parks run for Congress in 1964 when the second seat opened up in Detroit?

JEANNE THEOHARIS: She is not someone who seeks or wants that kind of public limelight. She finds her fame sort of hard to bear. She is a sort of stalwart activist. She is a steadfast activist. But Conyers talks about her speaking with her presence, that she went to tons of things, she did what she could do to support, you know, prisoner defense committees, to support the anti-Vietnam—all sorts of movements, but she is not someone who likes to be in—in the front, in the limelight, in the way that running for Congress would have been.

AMY GOODMAN: Historian Jeanne Theoharis, author of the new book, The Rebellious Life of Rosa Parks, professor of political science at Brooklyn College, has written extensively about the civil rights and Black Power movements. When we come back, we speak with Theoharis about what happened after Rosa Parks was arrested and convicted in 1956, how she dealt with losing her job. This is Democracy Now!

What is Women's Courage When Men Define the Terms?

image is from here

Over at Shakesville, I just read Melissa's post "Women are Brave", which you may link back to by clicking *here*. Rather than post a comment on a feminist blog, I'll put my comment here in my own space. I've learned that a male voice isn't always appropriate, and is often enough unwelcome, in spaces designed to be woman-centered.

Her post led me to think back to something I once read by Andrea Dworkin on the subject. I did some searching and found Andrea Dworkin's chapter in her book Our Blood, called "The Sexual Politics of Fear and Courage". A scanned version of the book is available to be read as a pdf document (or may be downloaded) *here*.

As I reflect on Melissa's blog, Dworkin's work, and on the purgatory of contemporary U.S. society, I am struck with the degree to white men define the terms so many of us live by. Inside a white male supremacist system, "courage" is traditionally and ubiquitously understood to be masculine in nature, belonging to men; a capacity understood patriarchally to be inherently male and associated with strength. Fear is understood to be feminine in nature, the "natural" province of women, and is associated with weakness. For men and boys to be what men determine to be "weak", including by being afraid, is--so the status quo society says--to be less manly and more like a woman or girl. For women to be courageous and strong as men define it, is to be unwomanly and more like a man. If she isn't punished for being "brave" in the patriarchal definition of the word, she might gain temporary male status.

In Melissa's incisive account of a stand-up comedy club, I find examples of how men define not only terms but also act them out in social spaces. At the club, a combination of men's sexual violence against women, including the threat of violence and "jovial" harassment and objectification, ensures that women aren't likely to be too unafraid. As Dworkin has stated, "By the time we are women, fear is as familiar to us as air. It is our element. We live in it, we inhale it, we exhale it, and most of the time we do not even notice it." Curiously, the only men I know personally who seem to have this deep-seated fear-orientation to the world are male survivors of child sexual abuse. While women do, in fact, live with courage and bravery as they negotiate many challenges and obstacles, men do their best and worst to make sure fear, in women, is never completely irrational or unwarranted.

The misogynist violence that men direct at women ensures that those men aren't seen--by other woman-hating men--as too weak. Rape is one of many acts in which males may cast off their supposed weakness and exercise patriarchal power by terrorising and violating women. War is another realm where men get to be brave and heroic by doing violence and 'conquering' fear, against the bodies, minds, and spirits of threatened people. Military war, when perpetrated by the Western world, is also the place where imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism are acted out in patriarchal terms. Invasion is always sexualised in the male supremacist imagination.

It's going to be interesting to see how U.S. female soldiers in military combat are regarded by male soldiers: will the women be seen as heroic, like the men? Will any individual woman in military combat be treated more like one of the guys? Or will her patriarchally-defined courage be seen as tainted by her gender? (Sort of the way bigoted straight men argue that marriage is tainted if queers--defined by dominant straight male society as feminine men and masculine women--can do it too.) A serious concern is that any woman in military combat may be additionally vulnerable to rape by male soldiers who want to be sure she doesn't believe she's equal to men. I say additionally because we know this is already happening endemically and systematically to civilian girls and women, and to women troops off the battlefield. Or, rather, off the battlefield that men name as such, for many private and social spaces men occupy are battlefields for women, such as the bed, the home, the workplace, and the street.

We also know that U.S. male soldiers practice rape against the women and girls of invaded countries, usually populated by people of color: even a partial list of such countries invaded and/or occupied by U.S. troops or covert operations is long: Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, El Salvador, Grenada, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan. Taken together, the body count is in the many hundreds of thousands; how many of those murder victims were also victims of rape is impossible to say. It was likely to be grossly under-reported or not reported at all: all forms of men's sexual violence is under-reported because terrorising people and forcing submission works to silence and shame them. If we leave out all other European countries that made conquest and occupation of other sovereign nations a national pastime, and only focus on Britain's imperial invasions, we are left with very few countries untouched by brutal, white imperial/patriarchal force. (Source for that comment is *here*.)

What we may notice internationally in the West is that when European white women are in seats of typically and traditionally white male power, they sometimes argue, over the disdainful shouts of men, for equality not supremacy. See, for example: To End Extreme Poverty, Let’s Try Ending Extreme Wealth or this: This bold equality push is just what we needed. In 1997.

When we consider the politics of many prominent, activist women of color, we see comprehensive intersectional analysis and proposals for global peace and justice. See, for example: Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development, by Vandana Shiva, and The Winona LaDuke Reader: A Collection of Essential Writings.

A flip side of this issue of gender and courage is seen when we try and make heroes of  men who preached against many forms of violence, such as Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or John Lennon. This is not at all to say either man was non-violent historically in their own lives. At least John Lennon spoke honestly about his abuses as such and endeavored to be a different kind of man in his later years. At least Dr. King set an honorable example of how to love one's enemy while holding them accountable for their crimes against humanity. But when such men advocate peace-not-war, or equality with women, they become vulnerable to being stigmatised 'feminine'.

Referencing Melissa's post, it says a great deal that men on stage doing comedy or men in the audience, need to reinforce and verbalize the worst aspects of male supremacist/patriarchal practice, and in particular to affirm a phallic identity. I admire the woman who did her own comedy, successfully, disproving so much that is taught in a racist patriarchal society like ours about women's power to create something new that is solely hers while deeply shared, in the midst of a culture of sexual predation and cultural appropriation. More power to her. More power to all women fighting for justice and equality.

Despite the saying that sits atop this post, liberally redefining terms won't shift society's political hierarchies. Many of us strive to make language express the complexities of who we are. As I listen to those singly or multiply oppressed, I hear again and again how difficult it is to make the dominant language speak their truths. It is courageous, isn't it, to endure and survive rape and warfare? I'd say so. But will patriarchal men ever see the courage of it, or only determine her survival to be a residual sign of his weakness?

However we maneuver meanings and memes, such effort is insufficient if our goal is liberation. The means and machinery of gynocidal straight male supremacy and genocidal and imperialist white supremacy must be shut down; new systems and institutions fostering equality and non-violence must become the status quo. Only then will new definitions have rooting and resonance beyond small, non-dominant groups of people. And only then will whole truths be spoken about life under siege, without interruption and mistranslation by the former masters.

Referring back to the phrasing in the image above, I'd say: "When peace-work is routinely seen as courageous, and war-making is popularly viewed as the work of cowards, we will know substantive, life-affirming change has occurred."

And when women of color define the terms we all live by, and govern globally, I will know we have radically purged ourselves of purgatory, razed hell, and brought heaven down to Earth.

Rape, India, and White Male Supremacy

image is from here

Rape is manufactured and mass produced in the U.S. and is marketed all over the world. This is done, in part, by patriarchal and white supremacist men carrying their racist misogyny to other regions of the globe. White men, especially but not only from the United States, travel to many places, including Southeast and South Asia, with the express purpose to rape girls and young women. The men then hide this crime from everyone, including their spouses and children. Millions of girls are trafficked and sold as slaves because of white men's belief that girls and women ought to belong to them to be used and abused sexually, economically, and socially.

I have not written here about the preponderance of rape in India because as a white Western male, I know such news is misused in the West to promote an idea that misogyny is worse in other places than within the U.S. Misogyny is organised and expressed in similar and dissimilar ways around the world; in the U.S. rape, battery, the sexual sale and renting of women and girls, forced sterilisation, restrictive regulations on abortion, economic inequality and capitalist exploitation are among the many ways woman-hating violence manifests. Violence occurs disproportionately against women of color. Indigenous women, for example, are raped more than non-Indigenous women in the U.S., overwhelmingly by white men. But when non-white men, here and internationally, are identified as abusers of women, that is erroneously determined to mean that white men are less violent than other men.

Feminists of all colors have been explicitly and systematically organising against men's violence against women for the last several decades. They have challenged male supremacist entitlements to take what they desire; they have confronted the industries that promulgate the idea that women want to be raped and sadistically hurt; they have fought for economic justice and civil rights, the lack of which keep women vulnerable to men. And even with this level of resistance, men still rape and do other harm to women, mostly with inpunity and with the perverse idea, shared among men, that such violence makes them more of a man.

Men of all colors commit atrocities against girls and women although some cultures have not historically promoted and protected men's commitment to violence. Structurally, socially, and economically, white men are most oppressively empowered and are therefore the most dangerous. Nonetheless, white men promote the lie that men of color are more dangerous: more dangerous to women and more dangerous to men. It is against great and overwhelming evidence that white men believe this.

Such a distorted view ignores the reality that colonial/imperialist invasion by white men into India is part of the story of how rape happens there. It is not the whole story, but invasion by white men anywhere brings the rape of girls and women with it. Military invasion is one form of assault against a country that is carried out with sexual violence against female bodies. Male soldiers commit rape systematically--not all male soldiers, but too many for the rape to not be systemic and protected. U.S. male soldiers rape not only the girls and women of occupied countries, but the women who militarily serve along with them.

This doesn't mean were it not for white men, no rape would occur. It is to notice, however, that white men's chronic and cancerous invasions of other countries and human bodies is historically undeniable but ought not be assumed to be inevitable. White supremacy, male supremacy, and corporate capitalism intersect and become mutually reinforcing.

Below is a perspective directly out of India that takes into account how the sexism of economics factors into the preponderance of rape. It is by the great feminist, philosopher, and activist Dr. Vandana Shiva. I believe her voice is so important and that what she has to say ought to be centered in Western conversations about how to stop rape. I post her words here to hopefully bring her message to a few more people. (You may click on the title just below to link back to the source website.)

Vandana Shiva: Our Violent Economy is Hurting Women

Wednesday, 23 January 2013 17:07 Vandana Shiva

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Source: Yes Magazine

Violence against women is as old as patriarchy.

Traditional patriarchy has structured our worldviews and mindsets, our social and cultural worlds, on the basis of domination over women and the denial of their full humanity and right to equality. But it has intensified and become more pervasive in the recent past. It has taken on more brutal forms, like the murder of the Delhi gang rape victim and the recent suicide of a 17-year-old rape victim in Chandigarh.

In India, rape cases and cases of violence against women have increased over the years. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) reported 10,068 rape cases in 1990, which increased to 16,496 in 2000. With 24,206 cases in 2011, rape cases jumped to incredible increase of 873 percent from 1971 when NCRB started to record cases of rape. And Delhi has emerged as the rape capital  of India, accounting for 25 percent of cases.

The movement to stop this violence must be sustained till justice is done for every one of our daughters and sisters who has been violated.

And while we intensify our struggle for justice for women, we need to also ask why rape cases have increased 240 percent since 1990’s when the new economic policies were introduced.

Could there be a connection between the growth of violent, undemocratically imposed, unfair economic policies and the intensification and brutality of crimes against women?

I believe there is. I am not suggesting that violence against women begins with neoliberal economics. I am deeply aware of the deep gender biases in our traditional cultures and social organizations. I  stand empowered today because people before me fought against the exclusions and biases against women and children: My grandfather sacrificed his life for women’s equality, and my mother was a feminist before the word existed.

Violence against women has taken on new and more vicious forms as traditional patriarchal structures have hybridized with the structures of capitalist patriarchy. We need to examine the connections between the violence of unjust, unsustainable economic systems and the growing frequency and brutality of violence against women. We need to see how the structures of traditional patriarchy merge with the emerging structures of capitalist patriarchy to intensify violence against women.

Cyclones and hurricanes have always occurred. But as the Orissa Supercyclone, Cyclone Nargis, Cyclone Aila, Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Sandy show, the intensity and frequency  of cyclones has increased with climate change.

Our society has traditionally had a  bias against the girl child. But the epidemic of female feticide and the disappearance of 30 million unborn girls has taken that bias to new levels of violence and new proportions. And it is into this context of the dynamics of more brutal and more vicious violence against women (and multiple, interconnected forms of violence) that the processes unleashed by neoliberalism are contributory factors.

Firstly, the economic model focusing myopically on “growth” begins with violence against women by discounting their contribution to the economy.

The more the government talks ad nauseum about “inclusive growth" and “financial inclusion,” the more it excludes the contributions of women to the economy and society. According to patriarchal economic models, production for sustenance is counted as "non-production." The transformation of value into disvalue, labour into non-labour, and knowledge into non-knowledge is achieved by the most powerful number that rules our lives, the patriarchal construct of GDP—Gross Domestic Product—which commentators have started to call the Gross Domestic Problem.

National accounting systems which are used for calculating growth as GDP are based on the assumption that if producers consume what they produce, they do not in fact produce at all, because they fall outside the production boundary.

The production boundary is a political creation that, in its workings, excludes regenerative and renewable production cycles from the area of production. Hence, all women who produce for their families, children, community, and society are treated as "non-productive" and "economically inactive." When economies are confined to the marketplace, economic self-sufficiency is perceived as economic deficiency. The devaluation of women’s work, and of work done in subsistence economies of the Global South, is the natural outcome of a production boundary constructed by capitalist patriarchy.

By restricting itself to the values of the market economy, as defined by capitalist patriarchy, the production boundary ignores economic value in the two vital economies which are necessary to ecological and human survival. They are the areas of nature’s economy, and sustenance economy.  In nature’s economy and the sustenance economy, economic value is a measure of how the earth’s life and human life are protected.  Its currency is life-giving processes, not cash or market price.

Secondly, a model of capitalist patriarchy which excludes women’s work and wealth creation in the mind, deepens the violence by displacing women from their livelihoods and alienating them from the natural resources on which their livelihoods depend—their land, their forests, their water, and their seeds and biodiversity. Economic reforms based on the idea of limitless growth in a limited world, can only be maintained by the powerful grabbing the resources of the vulnerable.  The resource grab that is essential for “growth” creates a culture of rape—the rape of the earth, of local self-reliant economies, and of women. The only way in which this “growth” is “inclusive” is by its inclusion of ever larger numbers in its circle of violence.

I have repeatedly stressed that the rape of the Earth and rape of women are intimately linked, both metaphorically in shaping worldviews, and materially in shaping women’s everyday lives. The deepening economic vulnerability of women makes them more vulnerable to all forms of violence—including sexual assault.

Thirdly, economic reforms lead to the subversion of democracy and privatization of government. Economic systems influence political systems. The government talks of economic reforms as if it has nothing to do with politics and power. Leaders talk of keeping politics out of economics, even while they impose an economic model shaped by the politics of a particular gender and class. Neoliberal reforms work against democracy. We have seen this recently with the Indian government pushing through "reforms" to bring in Walmart through FDI in retail. Corporate-driven reforms create a convergence of economic and political power, a deepening of inequalities, and a growing separation of the political class from the will of the people they are supposed to represent. This is at the root of the disconnect between politicians and the public that we experienced during the protests that have grown throughout India since the Delhi gang rape.

Worse, an alienated political class is afraid of its own citizens. This is what explains the increasing use of police to crush nonviolent citizen protests, as we have witnessed in Delhi. A privatized corporate state must rapidly become a police state.

This is why the politicians must surround themselves with ever increasing VIP security, diverting the police from their important duties to protect women and ordinary citizens.

Fourthly, the economic model shaped by capitalist patriarchy is based on the commodification of everything, including women. When we stopped the WTO in Seattle, our slogan was, “Our world is not for sale."

An economics unleashed by economic liberalization—an economics of deregulation of commerce, of privatization and commodification of seeds and food, land and water, women and children—degrades social values, deepens patriarchy, and intensifies violence against women.

Economic systems influence culture and social values. An economics of commodification creates a culture of commodification, where everything has a price, and nothing has value.

The growing culture of rape is a social externality of  economic reforms. We need to institutionalize  social audits of the neoliberal policies which are a central instrument of patriarchy in our times. If there was a social audit of corporatizing our seed sector, 270,000 farmers would not have been pushed to suicide in India since the new economic policies were introduced. If there was a social audit of the corporatization of our food and agriculture, we would not have every fourth Indian hungry, every third woman malnourished, and every second child wasted and stunted due to severe malnutrition. India today would not be the Republic of Hunger that Dr. Utsa Patnaik has written about.

The victim of the Delhi gang rape has triggered a social revolution. We must sustain it, deepen it, expand it. We must demand and get speedy and effective justice for women. We must call for fast-track courts to convict those responsible for crimes against women. We must make sure laws are changed so justice is not elusive for victims of sexual violence. We must continue the demand for blacklisting of politicians with criminal records.

We must see the continuum of different forms of violence against women, from female feticide to economic exclusion and sexual assault. We need to continue the movement for the social reforms needed to guarantee safety, security, and equality for women, building on the foundations laid during India's independence movement and continued by the feminist movement over the last half-century. The agenda for social reforms, social justice, and equality has been derailed by the aganda of “economic  reforms" set by capitalist patriarchy.

And while we do all this we need to change the ruling paradigm that reduces society to economy, the economy to the market, and is imposed on us in the name of “growth."

Society and economy are not insulated from each other . The processes of social reforms and economic reforms can no longer be separated. We need economic reforms based on the foundations of social reforms that correct the gender inequality in society, rather than aggravating all forms of injustice, inequality, and violence.

Ending violence against women needs to also include moving beyond the violent economy to nonviolent, sustainable, peaceful, economies that give respect to women and the Earth.

---

Vandana Shiva is an internationally renowned activist for biodiversity and against corporate globalization, and author of Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply; Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace; Soil Not Oil; and Staying Alive. The last section of this essay was adapted by the author from “Forest and Freedom,” written by Shiva and published in the May/June 2011 edition of Resurgence magazine. Shiva is a YES! contributing editor.

Mohawk Nation News 'Awakening, 150 Million Murdered Indigenous'

There is no meaningfully inclusive women's liberation while genocide against Native/Indigenous women is on-going. This is a cross-post. Please click on the title just below to link back to this information at Mohawk Nation News.

MNN: AWAKENING, 150 MILLION MURDERED INDIGENOUS

Mohawk Nation News

http://www.mohawknationnews.com

Posted on January 16, 2013

Calling out from the earth to us Indigenous people are 150 million of our men, women, children and babies who were murdered by the white race for our lands. They are urging us to bring back natural law and order for the sake of the future generations, who are waiting to be released to us by our great Mother Earth. 

Our ancestors are not gone, invisible, forgotten. We are here.

The Canadian and US corporations are trying to find and punish “leaders” of the Idle No More movement.  Our ancestors in each of us are calling us. Even the plants and animals are waiting for us to hear them.  

Canada is vulnerable. All infra-structure is critical to transport our resources to international markets for their war program. This will end. The Corporation of the US is involved when their source of electricity, oil and gas are at stake. US Military Northern Command or NORTHCOM has already been given the green light through 911 treaty fraud to invade Canada at any time they deem fit.  

The circulation of our goods, resources and energy drives the war economy.  Our duty is to stop the war problem. Critical infrastructure is at our mercy.  Blockades are deadly to the economy.  Millions are employed in the theft of our natural resources.  All consultation for our resources is between industry and government, not with us. That is why the wars continue.  

Corporations tire of Indigenous protests. They want to deal directly with Harper’s corporate Indians who are willing to be paid off without consulting us, to have the guise of legality for their contracts. Our ancestors won’t allow that. We will stop genocide.  We the owners want a list of the shareholders of each corporation. Our ancestors direct that any involved in the genocide of our people will not be doing any business on Great Turtle Island.  

Corporate Chiefs and band councils are agents of the crown, who take an oath to the Queen of England. They are no longer in but out of the canoe.  

Canada holds $3 trillion of our Indian Trust Funds. The Queen and her family take a cut on everything that’s done in Canada. It is used to finance non-stop war and to kill us off.  The criminals responsible for the biggest holocaust in all humanity will be held accountable.  

Split of Indian Trust Money:  4% goes to the Vatican, international Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.  3% goes to the Mediating Group? 2% for the ASM?  1% to the eternal trust deposit forever.  The Queen signs this deal.   

Nothing can stop this awakening of our people.  We stand with nothing to lose.  The fight is ours to win. 

Faces coming to us.   

As Robbie Robertson sings in “Ghost Dance”:  “Crazy Horse was a mystic, he knew the secret of the trance.  Sitting Bull, the great apostle of the ghost dance.   Come on, Commanche. Come on, Blackfoot.  Come on, Shoshone.  Come on, Cheyenne. We shall live again.  Come one, Arapahoe.  Come on, Cherokee.  Come on, Paiute.  Come on, Sioux.  We shall live again.”  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLM1H8JH9XA

MNN Mohawk Nation News kahentinetha2@yahoo.com  For more news, books, workshops, to donate and sign up for MNN newsletters, go to www.mohawknationnews.com  More stories at MNN Archives.  Address:  Box 991, Kahnawake [Quebec, Canada] J0L 1B0

Did Jodie Foster Come Out? Yes: Here's the Complete Transcript of Jodie Foster's Coming Out Speech, Accepting the Cecil B. DeMille Award for Lifetime Achievement in Television and Motion Pictures at The 70th Golden Globes, January 13, 2013

***UNEDITED, UNBLEEPED TRANSCRIPT OF COMING OUT SPEECH BELOW***

Revised on 16 Jan. 2013.

Preface: 
There's much more to be said about this whole matter. Lenses interrogating white supremacy, male supremacy, Western culture, the systematic eradication of lesbian existence, white queer politics, and feminism can all focus different points of attention on this event. I was quite disturbed to see Mel Gibson's face so front and center at this year's Golden Globe awards. I consider his expressed values and abusive and oppressive behavior (virulently anti-woman, homophobic, racist, and anti-Semitic) to be antithetical to progressive social change. But for right now, I'm narrowing the lens considerably to focus on who Jodie was to me in my early and later life.

Jodie and I are the same age and I grew up watching her on television and in movies, including lying atop my aunt and uncle's station wagon with my cousins while seeing her in Napoleon and Samantha at a Drive-In, with my parents watching Tom Sawyer on the big screen (indoors), on the small screen on The Partridge Family and Paper Moon, and in ABC Afterschool Specials, and in movies from The Little Girl Who Lived Down The Lane to The Hotel New Hampshire, to her especially fine and feminist work in The Accused and Silence of the Lambs, to Sommersby and Maverick, to two of my favorites in which I also thought she was brilliant: Nell and Contact. I also saw her in Taxi Driver, but not when it came out as it was rated R and I was underage, as was she.

I've watched her grow up and wondered early on about her sexuality. Among my lesbian and gay friends in my adult life, it was kind of known she was a lesbian. Not known the way I might now my best friend was lesbian or gay, but just known, the way it is known that Meryl Streep is heterosexual, but with the added secrecy about the actual orientation that straight folks don't need because they believe being straight is normal and natural. Being lesbian and gay is just as normal and just as natural--if any sexual or affectional orientation and ways of naming oneself can be said to be natural; it's just less prevalent and is, too often, socially despised.

So it was very cool for me to finally hear her come out beyond acknowledging a female partner as she did in 2007. I probably would have thought the speech was cooler if she did so while using the word Lesbian to describe herself. But it surprised me to read online that some people doubt she came out at all! Below is a transcript of her speech from 13 January 2013 as she accepted the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes ceremony at the Beverly Hills Hilton in California.

I think after reading this and re-watching the speech, there will be little doubt about whether she did or did not come out as lesbian. Here is the complete unedited speech in which she addressed several matters in addition to coming out, such as her love for her ex-partner, her sons, the future of her career (she's not retiring, by the way), and her, perhaps most poignantly of all, the expression of her abiding love for her mother at this time of her mother's dementia. Source for the transcript is *here*.

Well, for all of you SNL fans, I'm 50! I'm 50! You know, I need to do that without this dress on, but you know, maybe later at Trader Vic's, boys and girls. What do you say? I'm 50! You know, I was going to bring my walker tonight but it just didn't go with the cleavage.

Robert [Downey Jr], I want to thank you for everything: for your bat-crazed, rapid-fire brain, the sweet intro. I love you and Susan and I am so grateful that you continually talk me off the ledge when I go on and foam at the mouth and say, "I'm done with acting, I'm done with acting, I'm really done, I'm done, I'm done."

Trust me, 47 years in the film business is a long time. You just ask those Golden Globies, because you crazy kids, you've been around here forever. You know, Phil you're a nut, Aida, Scott — thank you for honouring me tonight. It is the most fun party of the year, and tonight I feel like the prom queen.

Thank you. Looking at all those clips, you know, the hairdos and the freaky platform shoes, it's like a home-movie nightmare that just won't end, and all of these people sitting here at these tables, they're my family of sorts, you know. Fathers mostly. Executives, producers, the directors, my fellow actors out there, we've giggled through love scenes, we've punched and cried and spit and vomited and blown snot all over one another — and those are just the costars I liked. But you know more than anyone else I share my most special memories with members of the crew. Blood-shaking friendships, brothers and sisters. We made movies together, and you can't get more intimate than that.

So while I'm here being all confessional, I guess I have a sudden urge to say something that I've never really been able to air in public. So, a declaration that I'm a little nervous about but maybe not quite as nervous as my publicist right now, huh Jennifer? But I'm just going to put it out there, right? Loud and proud, right? So I'm going to need your support on this.

I am single. Yes I am, I am single. No, I'm kidding — but I mean I'm not really kidding, but I'm kind of kidding. I mean, thank you for the enthusiasm. Can I get a wolf whistle or something? Jesus. Seriously, I hope you're not disappointed that there won't be a big coming-out speech tonight because I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago back in the Stone Age, in those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family and co-workers and then gradually, proudly to everyone who knew her, to everyone she actually met. But now I'm told, apparently that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a prime-time reality show.

You know, you guys might be surprised, but I am not Honey Boo Boo Child. No, I'm sorry, that's just not me. It never was and it never will be. Please don't cry because my reality show would be so boring. I would have to make out with Marion Cotillard or I'd have to spank Daniel Craig's bottom just to stay on the air. It's not bad work if you can get it, though.

But seriously, if you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you'd had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then maybe you too might value privacy above all else. Privacy. Some day, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was.

I have given everything up there from the time that I was three years old. That's reality-show enough, don't you think?

There are a few secrets to keeping your psyche intact over such a long career. The first, love people and stay beside them. That table over there, 222, way out in Idaho, Paris, Stockholm, that one, next to the bathroom with all the unfamous faces, the very same faces for all these years. My acting agent, Joe Funicello — Joe, do you believe it, 38 years we've been working together? Even though he doesn't count the first eight.

Matt Saver, Pat Kingsley, Jennifer Allen, Grant Niman and his uncle Jerry Borack, may he rest in peace. Lifers. My family and friends here tonight and at home, and of course, Mel Gibson. You know you save me too.

There is no way I could ever stand here without acknowledging one of the deepest loves of my life, my heroic co-parent, my ex-partner in love but righteous soul sister in life, my confessor, ski buddy, consigliere, most beloved BFF of 20 years, Cydney Bernard. Thank you, Cyd. I am so proud of our modern family. Our amazing sons, Charlie and Kit, who are my reason to breathe and to evolve, my blood and soul. And boys, in case you didn't know it, this song, all of this, this song is for you.

This brings me to the greatest influence of my life, my amazing mother, Evelyn. Mom, I know you're inside those blue eyes somewhere and that there are so many things that you won't understand tonight. But this is the only important one to take in: I love you, I love you, I love you. And I hope that if I say this three times, it will magically and perfectly enter into your soul, fill you with grace and the joy of knowing that you did good in this life. You're a great mom. Please take that with you when you're finally OK to go.

You see, Charlie and Kit, sometimes your mom loses it too. I can't help but get moony, you know. This feels like the end of one era and the beginning of something else. Scary and exciting and now what? Well, I may never be up on this stage again, on any stage for that matter. Change, you gotta love it. I will continue to tell stories, to move people by being moved, the greatest job in the world. It's just that from now on, I may be holding a different talking stick. And maybe it won't be as sparkly, maybe it won't open on 3,000 screens, maybe it will be so quiet and delicate that only dogs can hear it whistle. But it will be my writing on the wall. Jodie Foster was here, I still am, and I want to be seen, to be understood deeply and to be not so very lonely.

Thank you, all of you, for the company. Here's to the next 50 years.

Thank you, Jodie, for 47 years of quality work in the entertainment industry. I hope in the next fifty, you get the life you most desire.

White Jewish Feminist Herstorian and Philosopher, Gerda Lerner (1920 - 2013) has died at the age of 92

Professor Gerda Lerner, in a handout from the University of Wisconsin, Madison

University of Wisconson, Madison [this photo and caption's source is here]

The Creation of Patriarchy, by Gerda Lerner is probably one earliest feminist books I owned. It helped me understand patriarchy as a force born of human history, not God, not Nature. What I appreciated about Gerda Lerner was her courage in creating and promoting new academic disciplines which have served so many women across race, ethnicity, region, language, and era.

From *here* (Feminist Philosophers blog):

Historian, feminist, and author of The Creation of Patriarchy Gerda Lerner died Wednesday, Jan. 2, 2013, in Madison, Wisconsin.  She was 92.

Most American scholars reading this post do not remember a time when women’s history was not at least a possible area of study.  This is thanks in part to Lerner’s efforts, as she contributed to the creation of the first graduate program in women’s history in the USA.  Before I read feminist philosophy, I read Creation of Patriarchy. Yet despite the tremendous impression that work made on me, I’m disposed to quote the passage from her more enjoyable read, Fireweed: A Political Autobiography, cited by the NYT in the obituary linked above: “My perfectionism, insistence on anti-fascist commitment in word and deed, and general ‘heaviness’ as a person set me apart from others.”

She certainly was a distinctive presence.

From *here* (Wisconsin State Journal):

Long before Gerda Lerner helped redefine the study of history to give women a more prominent place in it and before she established the doctorate program in U.S. women's history at UW-Madison in the 1980s, she had to live through one of history's worst horrors and — barely — survive it.

Lerner (then Kronstein), who died Wednesday night in Madison at age 92, spent her 18th birthday in a Nazi jail in Vienna expecting death and being fed food scraps by two gentile cellmates after authorities cut rations to Jews.

"They taught me how to survive," Lerner told the State Journal in 2001. "Everything I needed to get through the rest of my life I learned in jail in those six weeks."

Lerner, UW-Madison professor emerita of women's studies, was able to escape alone to New York in the late 1930s. Decades later she started an academic career as a historian of women who led a movement almost from its infancy, eventually writing 11 books, earning 18 honorary degrees and in 2002 becoming the first woman recipient of the prestigious Bruce Catton Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Historical Writing from the Society of American Historians.

"She's one of two people from what you might call the eldest generation of this wave of women's history," said Linda Gordon, a New York University professor who taught women's history at UW-Madison with Lerner in the 1980s and 1990s. "She had an enormous influence."

While earning an undergraduate degree in the early 1960s at the New School and her doctorate at Columbia University in 1966 at age 46, Lerner grew frustrated by the portrayal of history as told by textbooks and professors.

"The teachers told me about a world in which ostensibly one-half the human race is doing everything significant and the other half doesn't exist," she told the Chicago Tribune in 1993.

It became her life's work to balance out the story. She founded the women's studies program at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., which included the first graduate program in women's history in the country. In 1980, after the death of her husband, Carl, a theater director, she moved to UW-Madison to establish a Ph.D. program in women's history.

Although women could get a Ph.D. in women's history at that time, their programs of study were not orderly and structured. Lerner wanted to create a degree that was rich in depth — the sort of program a Ph.D. candidate in American studies or another area would follow — but that included extra work in women's history.

Structure, sequence and staffing were her goals, and she chose UW-Madison because it already had a high-ranking, high-status history department from which Lerner created a model that would eventually be imitated elsewhere.

Throughout her career — Lerner retired from UW-Madison in 1991 — she maintained a vigorous schedule as a historian and writer, earning respect early as the editor of "Black Women in White America" in 1972, one of the first books to document the important struggles and contributions of African-American women in American history.

"What was unique is that she understood women are not all alike, that race and class make a very, very big difference in their lives and you can't generalize about all women," Gordon said.

Later contributions included her two-volume magnum opus, "The Creation of Patriarchy" in 1986 and "The Creation of Feminist Consciousness" in 1993.

"Fireweed," a memoir covering Lerner's years before she started on her academic path, came out in 2002 and was later adapted into a play by Heather McDonald.

Lerner established and funded a fellowship at UW-Madison that goes annually to a first- or second-year graduate student in women's history with a preference given to non-traditional students such as older women. When she earned her doctorate at Columbia at age 46, she was told her age and preference for studying women's history would doom her career.

"The fact that I could not take that advice was a very important thing," she told the State Journal in 2002. "The history of women had been forgotten, oppressed, silenced and marginalized until the last 30 years. I'm one of the people that helped bring that history alive, to point out it was valid and important. I couldn't have done that without my long history of resisting conformity."

In August 2011, UW-Madison named the third floor of the newly renamed Vel Phillips Hall (formerly Friedrick Hall) after Lerner.

Survivors include sister Nora Kronstein, daughter Stephanie Lerner Lapidus, son Dan and four grandchildren. Services will be private.

— State Journal reporter George Hesselberg contributed to this report.