“The truth, no matter how bad, is never as dangerous as a lie.”
Adam Entous, Lovejoy Award Winner, 2021, NY Times Reporter
The high-profile murders of many journalists show the human costs of free speech and freedom of the press. Colby College honors with its annual Lovejoy Award courageous story-tellers who have faced grave dangers to tell stories that inform our global understanding.
Murder of George Floyd
Liftoff Moment. Darnella Frazier, age 17, changed the world when she took out her cell phone and recorded the murder of George Floyd, later testifying in the murder trial.
Public opinion shifted because this high school junior stood in the right place at the right time with courage to bear witness. Darnella Frazier received a Pulitzer citation. Is this the empowerment needed by those with the courage to change the world?
Below. The January 6, 2021 Attack on the Capitol by a crowd of angry men.
"History is an angel being blown backwards into the future."
Gillian Brockell, The Washington Post. Retropolis.
Liftoff Moment. Congressman Raskin cited Abraham Lincoln’s warning of January 27, 1838 that danger can arise within. His testimony (day 7) reminded us that the lens of history offers us a more objective distant view of the present.
Above. ATF data shows that in 2020, police recovered almost twice as many guns with a short “time-to-crime” — in this case, guns recovered within a year of their purchase — than in 2019. Law enforcement officials generally view a short time-to-crime as an indicator that a firearm was purchased with criminal intent, since a gun with a narrow window between sale and recovery is less likely to have changed hands. More than 87,000 such guns were recovered in 2020, almost double the previous high.
LIFTOFF – Book Recommendations
ALTON – campaign to end free speech: Two murders that provoked Lincoln to run for President is both a book and a screenplay. ALTON aims to inspire LIFToff initiatives in all communities that seek equity and democracy: humans of all colors, genders, religions. As a collective, we are the majority of the world’s population. The books below embrace a range of communities and speak to this vision in unique and provocative ways.
Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could by California Congressman Adam Schiff. #1 New York Times Bestseller • Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner. The “fascinating” (Rachel Maddow) inside account of American democracy in its darkest hour, from the rise of autocracy unleashed by Trump to the January 6 insurrection, and a warning that those forces remain as potent as ever—from the congressman who led the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump. Through his probe into Donald Trump’s Russia and Ukraine-related abuses of presidential power, Schiff came to the frightening conclusion that the principal threat to American democracy now comes from within, which echoes Abraham Lincoln’s January 27, 1838 warning following the murder of Elijah Lovejoy in ALTON.
MANNERS will take you where brains and money won’t by Donald G. James, Gold Award-winner for Nonfiction, offers essential wisdom for preserving our democracy and decency in an angry world. James is a master story-teller who makes the reader feel the suspense of his hard choices. As Congressman Eric Swalwell wrote in the foreword, “Don’t mistake this for milquetoast go-along-to-get-along.” Manners is a way to be rooted in your essence — a way to show up in the world as genuine, authentic, empowered. Donald James shares wisdom from his 35 year career, first as Director of Education for NASA Ames Research Center, the only Black man in a senior position, later as Associate Administrator for Education for all of NASA at NASA HQ. MANNERS celebrates the legacy of James’ loving, wise mother, and how integrity in raising our children can make them confident, respectful, successful members of society and also create a country that is more civil and honest. There’s a lot inside this box.
Testimony: The Legacy of Schindler’s List and the USC Shoah Foundation by Steven Spielberg and The Shoah Foundation tells the story of making Schindler’s List, which inspired Spielberg to found the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California. Steven Spielberg’s encounters with Holocaust survivors, who visited the set and personally told him their stories, inspired his mission to collect and preserve survivor testimony for future generations. In 1994, he established the Shoah Foundation, which by 1998 had video recorded nearly 52,000 eyewitness interviews in 56 countries and 32 languages with the support of a dedicated global network, pioneering interview methods and state-of-the art technologies. The Shoah Foundation inspired It’s Our Story (below) with the disability community.
Being Heumann: An Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith Heumann with Kristen Joiner tells Judy Heumann’s story. Paralyzed from polio at eighteen months, Judy fought to attend grade school after being described as a “fire hazard.” Later she won a lawsuit against the New York City school system for denying her a teacher’s license because of her paralysis, setting precedents that gained rights for all disabled people, which led to her role during Barack Obama’s Presidency as Special Advisor for International Disability Rights, reporting to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Scott Cooper’s invited chapter in ALTON describes how he founded/ directs It’s Our Story to honor the vision and achievements of the disabled community, from Judy Heumann to Victor Pineda co-host of It’s Our Story and founder/ co-director at UC Berkeley of the Inclusive Cities Lab with Gordon Fuller.
The Final Round – Round 16 Robert W. Lee Memoirs by Lisa Maydwell, a writer and filmmaker, is a suspense-filled story with a deep message that deserves to be a film. In late 1998 the FBI informed Bob Lee, founding member and president of the United States Boxing Association and International Boxing Federation, that they had an ongoing investigation of Don King. They wanted Bob Lee to give them dirt to “bring Don King to justice.” Bob Lee refused. They told him they could make his life miserable. He said he knew that, but he refused again. The Final Round – Round 16 chronicles how the FBI set up their sting, the death of Bob Lee’s daughter shortly after he learned that the FBI had it in for him, how members of the IBF betrayed him, the trial that took place in federal court in Newark, NJ, which included many of the top names in boxing, his conviction for violating the RICO Act and his sentence to 22 months in Lewisburg Penitentiary. Lisa Maydwell is author of a powerful invited chapter for ALTON.
The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman, New York Times Notable Book of the Year, NPR Best Book of the Year, one of Smithsonian’s Best History Books of the Year. In The Field of Blood exposes the swept-under-the-carpet story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, congressmen drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. One representative even killed another in a duel. Many were beaten and bullied in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance, particularly on the issue of slavery. As we see renewed violence, this book is ever more timely today.
Angels and Earthworms by Lorraine Segal, released shortly before the pivotal success of the LGBTQ community in the November 2022 elections, is a powerful story that speaks to diverse communities seeking equity: women, Jews, LGBTQ, and all rebels trying to make the world more inclusive and humane. Segal describes how young girls, who seemed ordinary, turned out to have extraordinary powers that they could learn to use to save themselves and their people, as Segal has done with her memoir. In a time of intense hatreds and projections onto others of our own fears of unworthiness, this book addresses anti-Semitism, misogyny, religious and class cruelty through the eyes of a young girl and later a striving professional in academia. In episodes like “They’re stealing your hats!” Segal provokes deeper questions: Are most of us afraid to call out wrongdoing? Do we turn the other way? Or do we dare we speak up?
This Republic of Suffering by Drew Gilpin Faust, National Bestseller and National Book Award Finalist, is an “extraordinary … profoundly moving” history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. After writing this powerful book, Drew Gilpin Faust then courageously originated what became the initiative described below.
Below. Banner File Photo 2016. The late U.S. Representative John Lewis and former Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust in 2016 unveiled a memorial to enslaved people who worked for past Harvard presidents.
Liftoff Moment. Past President of Harvard University, Drew Gilpin Faust formed in 2016 a committee to examine the role of Harvard University in slavery. She resigned as President of Harvard in 2018. Finally in 2022 Harvard University committed $100 Million to atone for its role in slavery, releasing a 134-page report formally acknowledging its ties to slavery, announcing a plan to amend for its lengthy history of profiting from enslavement, listing some 70 slaves owned by Harvard presidents and staff, and gifts from benefactors deeply involved in the slave trade.
Other universities are now following Harvard’s lead. As a historian, the first woman President of Harvard University, and an antebellum and Civil War Scholar, Drew Gilpin Faust, the originator of this initiative, is no longer President of Harvard to make this her legacy. Some Harvard students are skeptical about how this $100 million will be spent with its champion gone. But Drew Gilpin Faust’s vision could be tapped to work neutrally with Presidents of many universities, committed to forming a network to collaborate on university equity challenges.
White women have not had the same horrific experiences of physical violence, incarceration, and murder that black men have had. Instead, they are repeatedly dismissed, sidelined and disempowered from leading what they conceive. In the deep resentment over slavery and other abuses, white women should not be targets of black anger to the same degree as white men because they too have experienced abuse, a different type of abuse.
Women should collaborate with each other and with all other groups to demand the equity that they have been denied. They can serve as bridge-builders for the cross-sectoral partnerships that need to occur because, in addition to whatever discrimination they’ve experienced as women, they belong to all groups that have experienced discrimination.
The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) for women has had a long history since first proposed a century ago in 1923 by Alice Paul, founder of National Women’s Party, but a century later ERA still has not been added to the U.S, constitution.
FREE RESOURCE
Below: Online historical references (pdf). Click on the title or image to download this list of online references for teachers and students
ALTON – campaign to end free speech
Two Murders that provoked Lincoln to run for President
ALTON is based on the Harvard Ph.D. thesis of author Zann Gill’s father, John Glanville Gill, who was fired from his job as Minister of the Alton Unitarian Church (above), which was once an Underground Railroad haven and is now rumored to be a haunted site. Gill was forced to leave Alton after Ku Klux Klan burnings, reported in TIME Magazine. Fear of the truth swept this story under the carpet for 185 years. A global network of religious leaders today could be funded, empowering their leadership in their local communities.
Liftoff Moment. Senator Bernie Sanders proposed taxation of those who reaped large profits from the pandemic, which was also described in The Nation by author John Nichols. The large transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich during the pandemic could empower social justice leaders as the most cost-effective way to resist fascism.
