Taraji P. Henson on Biden 2020: 'Save us, Joe!'

[Uncle Joe]

(snip)

Henson also made a mention of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who announced his presidential campaign last month.

“He reminds me of Ann Atwater,” Henson, 48, said, referring to the civil rights activist. “He doesn’t care who gets mad.”

“And he was back there arm in arm with Martin Luther King marching,” Henson continued. “That’s somebody I can trust. He was willing to die for the cause, you understand?”

Henson — who appeared in a 2016 campaign ad for then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton — told ITK just last month that it was “too early” to get behind any potential 2020 candidates.

(snip)

https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/435647-taraji-p-henson-on-biden-2020-save-us-joe

A little more information about Ann Atwater.

Ann Atwater (July 1, 1935 – June 20, 2016) was an American civil rights activist in Durham, North Carolina. Throughout her career she helped improve the quality of life in Durham through programs like Operation Breakthrough (Durham, North Carolina), a community organization dedicated to fight the War on Poverty. Her loud, demanding, and assertive personality enabled her to be an effective activist and leader when advocating for black rights, such as better private housing. Atwater promoted unity of the working-class African Americans through grassroots organizations.

She is best known for co-leading a charrette in 1971 to reduce school violence and ensure peaceful school desegregation, which met for ten sessions. She showed that it was possible for whites and blacks, even with contradictory views, to negotiate and collaborate by establishing some common ground.

(snip)

According to C.P. Ellis, Ann Atwater had a bold and strong personality. Her voice was deep and powerful and had the ability to energize her audience. These personality traits allowed her to be the effective leader she was. She was not afraid to voice her opinions loudly and proudly. She was also not afraid to tell anyone to “go to hell” if she felt like it.[16] She realized that the most effective method at getting people to listen to her was to “holler at them.” When she called a meeting, she meant business. In one meeting with a councilman, Atwater recalls that when he was not taking her seriously as she was trying to make her points, she would hit him on the head, surprising him so much that he would listen to her afterwards. In other situations like city council meetings, Atwater would express her opinions but the councilmen would not want to listen to a black woman talk, so they would turn their chairs away from her. In response she would turn those chairs back around herself so they would face her. Her bold actions surprised many of the councilmen to the point that they had to listen to her. Some people may not have liked how demanding and outspoken she was, but those qualities enabled her to be the successful activist she was.[17]

After Atwater co-led the charrette, she continued to work with the poor and middle-class black community in Durham. She married Willie Pettiford in 1975, and became a deacon at the Mount Calvary United Church of Christ.[18] From 2006 until her death, Atwater worked with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove at the School for Conversion as a "freedom teacher," mentoring young people and activists in community organizing and fusion politics. The school's Ann Atwater Freedom Library continues her work of "making surprising friendships possible".[19]

Atwater died June 20, 2016.[20]


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Atwater

[Power 2 the People]

1. +1

[namahage]

2. How did she know that Sanders was marching

"arm in arm" with MLK? Was she there?

I mean, everyone criticizes John Lewis about his statement that he "didn't see" Bernie marching with MLK, but are willing to quote someone who couldn't witness it?

[Uncle Joe]

3. Perhaps she took Bernie's word that he did march in D.C. during MLK's speech or

perhaps she has seen the video of a young Bernie Sanders being arrested while chained to two black women while protesting segregation in Chicago

or perhaps Taraji saw the video of Bernie; a mayor in the "small white" state of Vermont endorsing Jesse Jackson in 1988

or perhaps it was a combination of the three with the latter giving credence to the first.

[Uncle Joe]

4. This is a nice informative read regarding the national reverberations from the protests in Chicago

In August 1963, 21-year-old college student Bernie Sanders was arrested during a school segregation protest in Chicago. Sanders joined hundreds of demonstrators, most black parents and students, in protesting the installation of mobile classrooms to relieve overcrowding at black schools without transporting black students to white schools with open seats. Protestors barricaded the proposed construction site, and some physically blocked construction trucks and police cars. A new Sanders campaign advertisement features recently discovered video footage and a photograph of his arrest at this protest over five decades ago. “When I saw Bernie Sanders getting arrested for protesting segregation it was powerful,” actor and activist Danny Glover says in the ad. “The presidential candidate that has put himself on the line to be on the right side of history. I think Bernie is one of us. I think Bernie is with us.”

Sanders’s civil-rights record has been a subject of debate during this year's presidential campaign, and this school segregation protest is the most visible evidence of his activism. More important than strengthening Sanders’s credentials among black voters, his 1963 arrest is a window into the civil rights movement in the North and highlights a little-known turning point in the history of civil rights and education equality. The fights over segregation in Chicago are not as well known as the battles in Little Rock or Selma, but in the mid-1960s Chicago became the most important test case for implementing civil-rights legislation that prohibited school segregation.

The protest in which Sanders participated was part of a decade of civil-rights activism designed to force Chicago to address school segregation in the city. The demonstrations escalated in 1963 and included a massive “Freedom Day” school boycott organized by the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), a civil-rights coalition including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, black and white parents, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the organization with which Sanders was affiliated. Over 220,000 students (47 percent of total enrollment) stayed away from public schools on October 22, 1963, with many attending Freedom Schools at churches and community centers.

(snip)

HEW’s abrupt reversal in Chicago reverberated locally and nationally. Representative Pucinski described the decision as “an abject surrender by HEW—a great victory for local government, a great victory for Chicago.” The New York Times saw the Chicago fund case as “a singular instance of a northern city’s cry of ‘states rights’—more precisely, ‘city’s rights’—to defeat a Johnson Administration strategy.” For New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Chicago “represented the first abject surrender to the principle that separate but equal is wrong in the South, but acceptable in the North—particularly if a city can muster enough Northern politicians and educators with a segregationist mentality to practice this shameful hypocrisy.”

(snip)

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/bernie-sanders-and-a-civil-rights-turning-point/479739/