NEWS

Helen Evelev (left) and Tina Shelton (right) attending the Peace Day Philly event on September 20, 2020, at Rittenhouse Square. Photo by Lynn Fitzgerald, used with permission.

Greater Philadelphia Branch Conducts Socially Distant Activism!

By Tina Shelton
Co-chair, Greater Philadelphia Branch
 
The Greater Philadelphia Branch celebrated the International Day of Peace in a socially distant way. We joined the Granny Peace Brigade of Philadelphia for their Peace Day Philly public exhibit. Using a clothesline and facts on what Philadelphia taxpayers pay to the military, the Grannies made an exhibit to highlight what we could spend money on if the house amendment that calls for a 10 percent reduction in the military budget became law.

Branch members handed out leaflets and asked members of the public to comment on the clothesline. Many people were interested in the exhibit, and we noted the bloated military budget especially got their attention. Many even took the time to send a postcard to their senator in support of this amendment to the Authorization Act. (Postcards were prepped by Grannies and address labels for our two Pennsylvania Senators were ready.)

Left: Clothesline Exhibit made by the Granny Peace Brigade of Philadelphia in honor of International Day of Peace 2020. Photo by Tina Shelton, used with permission.

In addition, we held our first ever Branch Zoom meeting, with details on voting rights and how-tos, our annual Peace and Justice Dove Award, and other action items.

Co-chair Tina Shelton can be reached at tinades@verizon.net.

Join the Jane Addams Branch: Next Meeting is November 18 

By Dianne Blais
JA Branch Convener

The Jane Addams branch is a virtual branch made up of at-large members who don’t get to enjoy the sisterhood of having a local branch but work together virtually on projects and actions. We support the WILPF US issue committees and work to grow and strengthen WILPF.

At our next meeting on Wednesday, Nov. 18 at 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET, we will learn more about Jane Addams, the issue committees and WILPF activities.

All at-large members not currently in the JA branch are welcome to join! If you are interested, contact Dianne Blais at dianneblais@aol.com.

Are you feeling increasingly concerned about the US commitment to Choose Democracy? Whoever you are, whatever your age or situation, you can take action! Yes! Even if you’re protecting your health by staying home in these difficult times, you can help Hold the Line for democratic elections and Protect the Vote!

The links above (and more below) go to websites for signing up, finding local connections, background information, scenarios, handbooks, media guides and more! Inform yourself, make choices, and take action.

Action is important – and so is thoughtfulness, leading to considered action that is broadly persuasive.

Reach out (and encourage others to do the same) to talk through ideas, emotions, and reactions. Our feelings are important, and talking about them with trusted others helps us to respond – rather than just react.

Here are additional specific key actions you can do!

Start now! –  

• Reach out and build connections – Prepare today 
• Determine where your influence can be effective – Recognize the tools you have 
• Use media resources – Choose your words and communicate 
• Inform yourself and others – But do not spread rumors or "news" you have not confirmed via reliable sources (ideally, multiple!)

Start preparing now for post-election weeks! Remember: Many key tasks can be done from home.  

 → Reach out TODAY to build connections with a diverse group of people to form a mutual support group! Some may differ politically and nonetheless be ready to act to defend election integrity. Build trust and connections! 

Prepare for uncertain weeks ahead. We all hope for a smooth and peaceful transition, but be prepared! Shop now for groceries, medications, gasoline, and more. Then, next week you’ll be able to focus on influential actions and helping others Òon the lineÓ. Plan ahead! Will you want to help by preparing food, baking, etc.? Get supplies.

 → Which civil structures – and which people in them – can you influence to take a stand for counting all the votes? 

• Media (see below!)
• Local government institutions and officials
• Churches and social organizations
• Educational institutions 
• Work places and labor groups – many labor groups are planning to stop working on Nov. 4 and continue if Trump tries to steal the election

Make a list of your intersections with these bodies: How can you involve them – and/or the people in them – in defending the vote? To whom can you reach out? 

Your tools include phone calls, social media, emails, personal connections, and your abilities! As a part of a support structure, a base for information and communications, and an influence in the community, you can be a resource for those in the streets, taking direct nonviolent actions.

 → Be ready to make use of media! Send out or start drafting social media posts, letters to the editor, and even emails to friends and family.

Think about how you can move readers, including your friends, to act constructively in the coming days. Start writing down what you want to say, to be clear and articulate. Write it out for yourself, too!

For social media, for the press, for chance conversations – 

Be Ready with Well Considered Points Using These Key Approaches:

• Motivating: What’s important to them? What do they care about?
• Encouraging: They are not alone; now is the time to unite with others and act to protect what’s important! Their actions can make a difference! 
• Modeling: Your tone is a model! Seek to inspire compassion, hope, nonviolence, and belief in positive outcomes based on doable actions. Be specific: List or describe the positive actions they can take; 
• Showing compassion; supporting discourse rather than division: People are doing the best they can for what they believe is right. With some people, listening with an open heart can help make conversation possible. That can open the way to better mutual understanding.  After the elections are over, we’ll want to find some ways we can work together. 

 → Inform yourself and others to help remain rational and calm as we live through these difficult times of pandemic and mounting stress. Do not spread rumors! You can help vet information and, then inform yourself and others. 

Confirm "news" via reliable sources (ideally, multiple!) before you share it! See the background information in WILPF’s alert, "What are you going to do to ‘Protect the Results’?" View Van Jones good-modeling video on the legalities of the possible election process developments. 

To find out what’s happening in your area, seek out local groups working in coalition to Protect the Vote. (Nationally, nearly 200 groups are already partnering!)

We can all participate in meaningful ways to preserve the basis for a democratic future.

Darien De Lu
President, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom US
President@wilpfus.org

Ray Acheson celebrating the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons outside the UN. Acheson will speak in a webinar sponsored by Disarm/End Wars on October 22. Photo by David Field, used with permission of Ray Acheson.

October 2020

October 2020 Disarm Events: Keep Space for Peace Week & Oct. 22 Webinar with Ray Acheson

By Ellen Thomas
Chair, Disarm/End Wars Issue Committee

October 3 to 10 is " Keep Space for Peace Week" - Please let us know if you plan any events for this week!

“In 2020 we are highlighting the provocative US-NATO military encirclement of Russia & China with 'missile defense' systems that are key elements in Pentagon first-strike attack planning. We urge you to consider organizing a local event during Keep Space for Peace week to help the public see that very expensive military satellites, launched into space by very expensive rockets, are fundamentally key in making it possible for the military to carry out their deadly and immoral deeds on behalf of corporate interests.” – Bruce Gagnon of Global Network to Keep Space for Peace

Learn more on Facebook.

Webinars Future (and Past)

October 22 at 5 pm ET, 2 pm PT – Ray Acheson, the Director of Reaching Critical Will, International WILPF’s disarmament program, speaks about WILPF's active role in disarmament efforts before and since October 24, 1945, the date the United Nations was founded. Register here.

We plan to continue presenting monthly webinars during 2021, and we are gathering speakers for a zoom event in early December about AFRICOM, near UN Human Rights Day. Check the November eNews for an update!

And please share your ideas for speakers and topics in 2021!

The September 20 webinar with Alice Slater and David Swanson of World Beyond War, "Obstacles to Nuclear Abolition Between the US and Russia", has been posted on YouTube AND was livestreamed on Facebook. The Facebook version unfortunately begins in the middle of a sentence, but it also includes a half hour of questions and answers at the end.

All WILPF members are invited to join the Disarm/End Wars Conference Calls, held on the second and last Sundays of each month at 4:30 pm PT, 5:30 pm MT, 6:30 pm CT, and 7:30 pm ET. 

To join the Disarm/End Wars Committee listserv and be kept informed about upcoming meetings, webinars, and events, please email disarmchair@wilpfus.org

Honoring Two Mothers of the Civil Rights Movement

By the HR Committee

Our general election is less than a month away, and it is a good time to remember two African American women activists who struggled tirelessly for civil rights and the right to vote. Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer persisted, organized, and rallied others to register and vote. Because they were women, their efforts tend to get described as “behind the scenes of the movement,” but in fact these women were backbones of the movement with lifelong careers as activists. They cofounded organizations, raised funds, and delivered words that inspired and fueled the movement.

Ella Baker: Mother of the Civil Rights Movement

Ella Josephine Baker was born December 13, 1903 and passed away on December 13, 1986. Her career as an organizer and activist spanned more than five decades, and she is known as “the mother of the civil rights movement.” Photo credit: NAACP/Library of Congress.

According to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights:

Ella Baker began her involvement with the NAACP in 1940. She first worked as a field secretary and then served as director of branches from 1943 until 1946.

Inspired by the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Baker cofounded the organization “In Friendship” to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South.

In 1957, Baker moved to Atlanta to help organize Martin Luther King’s new organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). She also ran a voter registration campaign called the Crusade for Citizenship.

Many people may know of Ella Baker through “Ella’s Song.” This moving song written by Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon and performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock, is based on Baker’s own words about effective organizing. It contains the lyrics well-known to activists now, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.” View one of Sweet Honey in the Rock’s many performances of this anthem on YouTube. 

Here are some video clips about the many contributions of this important leader:

Black History in Two Minutes (or so) with Henry Louis Gates: Ella Baker - The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement

Ella Josephine Baker - African American Trailblazers (7 minutes) – Baker is one of twelve (12) heroic Africa Americans honored for their contributions in areas such as the arts, sciences, politics, education, and business.

Professor Cornel West describes the contributions of Ella Baker in TIME, calling her “the backbone of the movement” (2 minutes).

Fannie Lou Hamer: Powerful Voice for Civil and Voting Rights

Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) is an inspiration in our time of renewed voter suppression efforts. Her parents were sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta. She was already picking cotton with them at the age of six, and left school at the age of 12 because she had to work. Hamer’s difficulty registering to vote in 1962 led her to struggle for voting rights for others.

After becoming an organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, she was denied the right to vote due to an unfair literacy test, and then was fired by her employer—a Mississippi plantation owner—for her voting activism. According to the National Women’s History Museum biography of Fannie Lou Hamer:

In June 1963, after successfully registering to vote, Hamer and several other black women were arrested for sitting in a “whites-only” bus station restaurant in Charleston, South Carolina. At the jailhouse, she and several of the women were brutally beaten, leaving Hamer with lifelong injuries from a blood clot in her eye, kidney damage, and leg damage.

This didn’t stop Hamer. She cofounded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, helped organize Freedom Summer, traveled extensively to give speeches on civil rights issues, and helped to found the National Women’s Political Caucus. She was eventually frustrated by politics and turned to economic solutions for her community:

In 1968, she began a “pig bank,” to provide free pigs for black farmers to breed, raise, and slaughter. A year later she launched the Freedom Farm Cooperative (FFC), buying up land that blacks could own and farm collectively. (from womenshistory.org)

The FFC lasted for years and in its heyday was among the largest employers in the county. Another legend of the movement, Hamer showed how much a black woman with passion and conviction can accomplish.

Here are two recordings to give you a sense of this formidable woman’s life and legacy:

Fannie Lou Hamer’s Testimony before the Democratic Credentials Committee in 1964 (audio, 8 minutes and 20 seconds).

In Fannie Lou Hamer: Stand Up by PBS (27 minutes), this civil rights legend is remembered by those who worked side by side with her in the struggle for voting rights. 

Credit: Library of Congress.

Advocate for the THRIVE Agenda and Connect with Public Banking Initiatives

By the Women, Money & Democracy Committee

Climate crisis, global pandemic. Mass unemployment. Racial injustice. Our crises are interconnected. So are our solutions.

Advocating for the THRIVE Agenda and for public banking initiatives are two actions that the Women, Money & Democracy Committee (W$D) is asking WILPF members and the public to get behind.

Urgently, we’re asking our members to contact your representative to ask them to support the THRIVE Agenda, which demands enough public relief money so our people can do more than just survive...they can THRIVE through this long national emergency...just like the big banks and transnational corporations we all bailed out with public money over the last 15 years have thrived. It’s payback time for the American people.  

When the THRIVE Resolution was introduced on September 10, 2020, nearly 90 members of Congress and more than 200 leading grassroots groups, including WILPF US, signed on in support. To build momentum, we are now asking other members of Congress from coast to coast to join us by cosponsoring the resolution.

Here’s the full text of the Congressional resolution.

Longer term, we’re asking our members and the public across the country to connect with local public banking initiatives in their city or state, or begin a local dialogue to bring everyone necessary to the table, to create a public banking alternative.    

Starting in October WILPF’s W$D Committee will publish a Public Banking Toolkit that will be downloadable and printable. It is an anthology of important facts, articles, talking points and tools to promote public banking, connect with local initiatives or start some. It can be used for study groups, advocacy work and outreach.

To order the Toolkit or for more info contact mbgardam@gmail.com.

More to come on public banking in the November eNews!

Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner will deliver virtual presentations on women’s suffrage on October 21 & 22.

By Marguerite Adelman
Burlington Branch

October 2020

With support from a WILPF US mini-grant, the Burlington Branch of WILPF has partnered with the Vermont Suffrage Centennial Alliance and the League of Women Voters of Vermont to host three free virtual presentations on women’s suffrage with Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner on October 21-22, 2020. Four additional programs with Dr. Wagner are being offered to high school students and teachers in Vermont. 
 
Dr. Wagner is a nationally recognized lecturer, author, and storyteller of women’s rights history. One of the first women to receive a doctorate in the United States for work in women’s studies (UC Santa Cruz), and a founder of one of the country’s first college women’s studies programs (CSU Sacramento), Dr. Wagner has taught women’s history for forty-nine years. She served as a historian in PBS’s “One Woman, One Vote,” and appeared as a “talking head” in Ken Burns’ documentary, “Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony,” and penned the accompanying faculty guide. Her Women’s Suffrage Anthology, published by Penguin Classics last year, is an intersectional exploration of the 19th century women’s rights movement.
 
All WILPF members are welcome to attend one or all of the three public programs described below and to invite others to attend. There will be time for discussion with Dr. Wagner at the end of each program, drawing connections to voting suppression issues today. And we'll be emphasizing that people register to vote, get out to vote, and report voting suppression. The timing for these programs couldn't be more inspirational.
 
October 21 (Wednesday): 7 - 9 pm EST – Presentation at St. Michael’s College
Women Voted Here: Before Columbus

While white women were the property of their husbands and considered dead in the law, Haudenosaunee (traditional Iroquois) women had more authority and status before Columbus than United States women have today. Women of the Six Nation Iroquois Confederacy had the responsibility for putting in place the male leaders. They had control of their own bodies and were economically independent. Rape and wife beating were rare and dealt with harshly; committing violence against a woman kept a man from becoming Chief in this egalitarian, gender-balanced society.

October 22 (Thursday): 2:00 - 3:30 pm EST – Presentation at Community Colleges of Vermont
Women's Suffrage: The Rest of the Story

 “I am sick of the song of suffrage”, Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote to Matilda Joslyn Gage in the 1880s. Gage concurred. These two women had begun to think differently than Susan B. Anthony, their co-leader of the National Woman Suffrage Association, who believed the movement should concentrate on getting women the vote. We already have that right, Gage contended. We need to look at the larger issues, Stanton and Gage agreed. Those issues were: creating a system of cooperation, not competition; ensuring that every child born was wanted and women were the “absolute sovereigns” of their bodies; rebalancing economic disparity while gaining equal pay for women, and demanding a “true” religion, one that fostered freedom and equality for all.

October 22 (Thursday): 5:00 - 6:30 pm EST – Presentation at University of Vermont
POWER, PRIVILEGE & THE VOTE: Focus on Women, Culture & Herstories of Suffrage

This presentation explores important influences in the US Women’s Suffrage movement that are often forgotten. Who were the women presidential candidates in the 1800s? What were the challenges they faced? How did the indigenous people influence ideas of women’s suffrage and rights? Who was not included in the US suffrage movement and why? As we approach the 2020 election, how can the herstories of the women’s suffrage movement provide a lens through which to explore the ongoing creation of democracy in our country?

Singer and historian Linda Radtke will open and close all three programs with music which was essential to the movement: each state convention of suffragists began and ended with songs. Linda, a Vermont high school teacher for 31 years and a classically trained singer, will perform these suffrage songs.
 
These programs are partially funded by WILPF US, Vermont Humanities Council, Anne Slade Frey Charitable Trust, Vermont Federal Credit Union, Walter Cerf Fund of the Vermont Community Foundation, Northfield Savings Bank, St. Michael’s College, University of Vermont, and Community Colleges of Vermont.