By Josh Healey

I don’t like whiteness. And as a white person looking for some heroes, it’s lonely out here. The museum’s empty. —Macon Detournay from Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach

two fists
attacked the atmosphere
of Olympic Stadium
Mexico City, 1968

Tommie Smith and John Carlos
took gold and bronze
then took Black Power
center stage

that image
tacked on my bedroom wall
centered on the two men
about to receive more hate mail
than Hank Aaron and Muhammad Ali combined

you, Pete,
i barely noticed

every now and then
looked over at the silver stand and wondered
Who’s the white dude?

there you stood
hands relaxed at your sides
back standing solid
eyes straight ahead
like you knew the real prize
wasn’t hanging around your neck

i look closer
see it now:
a small patch on your chest

right before the pedestal
Tommie and John told you what to expect
you asked how you could help
and they gave you the patch:
Olympic Project for Human Rights

shit, Pete!
you had their back

two black men
fighting white
Nixon, white
CoIntelPro, white
South Africa
and you, white
dude, supported black
self-determination

only to be black-
listed back home
in Australia, blacked
out of record books
and our civil rights stories

you were not the focus
of the event, or the photo,
nor should you be
but your name deserves tribute

Tommie Smith (left) and John Carlos carry Peter Norman’s coffin. Photo: Wayne Taylor.

John Brown
Schwerner and Goodman
a short list of white folks
who gave more
than moral support
and a check in the mail

after you died last week
a new picture showed
Tommie and John
arms raised high again
carrying your coffin
mourning a fallen comrade

it was more
than just the patch

over and over again, Pete,
you threw your white fist at the sky
giving black hands a chance to rest
if only for a moment

© Josh Healey, 2008 from Hammertime: Poems and Possibilities. Posted at the Zinn Education Project website by permission of the author for classroom use. For reprints or any other use, contact the author.

Related Resources

“Australian Government will Issue Overdue Apology to 1968 Olympic Hero Peter Norman” by Dave Zirin. The Nation. August 18, 2012.

Salute. A 2008 Australian documentary film by Matt Norman, Peter Norman’s nephew.

The post Elegy for Peter Norman appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

See the short films below and visit her website to learn more.

“Tell Them”

“Rise” Featuring Aka Niviâna

“History Project”

“Dear Matafele Peinem”

Watch More

The post Video Poems by Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Poetry has a lot to offer a world in crisis. For centuries poets have given voice to our collective trauma: they name injustices, reclaim stolen language, and offer us courage to imagine a more just world. In a world out of balance, poetry is an act of cultural resilience.

It’s impossible not to find poems in this fine volume that could be used across the curriculum. This is not an “Isn’t nature beautiful!” book. It begins with colonial dispossession, and includes chapters on the environmental crime of war, food and culture, resource extraction, resistance, and the Global South.

Although the book features great stylistic diversity, the link between people, power, and nature weaves through the book, as in June Jordan’s “Focus in Real Time”: “Who grew these grains/Who owned the land/Who harvested the crop/Who converted these soft particles to money/Who kept the cash. . .” [Description from Rethinking Schools]

Contributors include Homero Aridjis, Brenda Cárdenas, Natalie Diaz, Camille T. Dungy, Martín Espada, Ross Gay, Joy Harjo, Brenda Hillman, Linda Hogan, Philip Metres, Naomi Shihab Nye, Tolu Ogunlesi, Wang Ping, Patrick Rosal, Tim Seibles, Danez Smith, Arthur Sze, Eleanor Wilner, and Javier Zamora.

ISBN: 9780820353159 | University of Georgia Press

The post Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

The United States tested 67 nuclear weapons in the Marshalls, including the 1954 Castle Bravo test on Bikini Atoll, 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The Marshalls are now ground zero for a different kind of colonial invasion — this time of rising seas and king tides, products of “development,” of climate change.

In her poetry, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner confronts the intersection of colonialism, nuclear testing, climate change, and resistance. Her work is beautifully and painfully accessible to middle and high school students. [Description from Rethinking Schools]

ISBN: 978-0-8165-3402-9 | University of Arizona Press

Visit Jetñil-Kijiner’s website to learn more about life, activism, and art.

See also the Democracy NOW! video featuring Jetñil-Kijiner:

Related Teacher Stories

Read two Rethinking Schools articles, “Teaching to the Heart: Poetry, Climate Change, and Sacred Spaces,” a teacher’s account of how she introduced Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s poetry to her middle school classroom, and “Climate Change, Gender, and Nuclear Bombs” by Bill Bigelow.

The post Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

When the Hunger Was Upon Us

We owned less than fourteen per cent
of our own land.
We were not allowed to:
vote;
teach;
bear arms;
own a horse worth five pounds;
buy land or farms.

The English
prohibited the export of our woollen goods:
destroyed our industry to protect their trade.
Rents were sent to absentee landlords
and spent in London.
Our country bled,
while English gluttons grew florid,
as port, the colour of blood, flowed freely
in the big town mansions
and the manor houses on country estates.

Bumper crops of wheat, oats and barley,
vegetables, butter and bacon,
were taken by the landlord for rent.
We survived on potatoes –
until the blight.
Stalks stayed green,
but leaves turned as black as sin.
Our crop was a stinking and slimy
black mass of corruption.

When the hunger was upon us
clergy and gentry ate their fill
while we scavenged for berries and roots,
cabbage leaves and kelp,
nettles and weeds,
till our land was as barren
as if a plague of locusts
had passed this way.

Our scarecrow children,
lay like sacks of sticks
scattered on a sprinkling of straw
and let go of life without a murmur;
or died at the roadside,
their mouths stained green
from chewing grass,
their bodies, no more than parchment-covered bones,
half eaten by rats and starving dogs.
Though they were leaf-light,
we were too weak to bury them
beneath even a handful of stones.

Landlords sent hired men
to fire the thatch above our heads
and tumble our walls with crowbars.
We clutched at coats and cooking pots,
clung to door posts
from which we were torn
like lice plucked from the groin.
Our little ones
clawed our breasts and brains
with cries of hunger, fear and pain.
Dragoons drove us from the ruins of our holdings,
from land we had reclaimed from bog
with hand and spade.
They tore up our foundations
to make way for sheep and cattle
which brought a better profit.

For resisting,
our backs were flayed
into raw red meat,
or we were hung in rows,
like carcasses on a butcher’s rail.

We scraped holes in hillsides.
The tools of our new trades:
fingers to form begging bowls;
fingernails for rooting,
like hogs, in the clay.

And in the peat bog,
we trailed across the
unmarked graves of soldiers,
who marched into no one else’s land,
who tried to take nothing
but what belonged to them,
whose names are not recorded.

To politician, priest and landlord,
famine was the will of God.
A natural calamity.
Social structure would collapse,
they said,
if they gave free food.
So soldiers patrolled the cornfields,
and warships escorted wheat ships
from our ports.

When our country
became too ragged for even
a beggar’s coat,
we emigrated
– or were emigrated:
flung onto a foreign land
and left to crawl on bellies
through mud and stones,
and died like starfish
spreadeagled on the sand.

We died of scurvy –
with toothless gums as soft as dung.
We died of dysentery –
passing blood instead of shit.
We died of relapsing fever –
dwindling deathward turning yellow.
We died of cholera –
retching out the lining of long-empty stomachs.
We died of famine dropsy –
our bodies swelling like over-ripe fruit until we burst.
We died of typhus –
delirious and vomiting,
stinking like rotten sheep,
our faces turning as black
as our blighted crop.
We died of hunger –
chewing rags until we were too weak
to work our jaws,
or cry,
or even whisper,
Goodbye, my love,
goodbye.

We died –
in sod huts,
sharing a bed of straw
with the already dead;
in ditches,
into which we crawled
like famished dogs;
in workhouses,
or outside them when
the gates were shut against us;
on public works,
when we had not the strength
to lift a spade or take another step;
on emigrant boats,
in airless holds,
wailing for water through blistered lips;
and going down into the cathedral of the sea
in the close dark berths of coffin ships.

We died
of malnutrition and fever
while the granaries overflowed.
We fled from our homes
where death
sat at our tables
and slept in our beds.

We asked for
no export of cattle and grain –
rejected under the banner of
Free Trade.
We asked for
state finance for new industry and railways –
rejected under the banner of
Private Enterprise.
We asked for
food,
and England sent
an army of occupation.
For wine
they gave us our loved ones’ blood.
For bread
they gave us steel
and lead.

About the Author

Nigel Gray is an Irish-born, Australian, multi-award-winning author of more the eighty books, mostly for children. His latest publications are Strangers, a novel for adults, A Baker’s Dozen, a collection of 13 stories for upper primary age children, and the picture book, A Country Far Away.

Posted on the Zinn Education Project website with permission. (c) Nigel Gray.

The post When the Hunger Was Upon Us appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

When the trumpet sounded
everything was prepared on earth,
and Jehovah gave the world
to Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other corporations.
The United Fruit Company
reserved for itself the most juicy
piece, the central coast of my world,
the delicate waist of America.

It rebaptized these countries
Banana Republics,
and over the sleeping dead,
over the unquiet heroes
who won greatness,
liberty, and banners,
it established an opera buffa:
it abolished free will,
gave out imperial crowns,
encouraged envy, attracted
the dictatorship of flies:
Trujillo flies, Tachos flies
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, flies sticky with
submissive blood and marmalade,
drunken flies that buzz over
the tombs of the people,
circus flies, wise flies
expert at tyranny.

With the bloodthirsty flies
came the Fruit Company,
amassed coffee and fruit
in ships which put to sea like
overloaded trays with the treasures
from our sunken lands.

Meanwhile the Indians fall
into the sugared depths of the
harbors and are buried in the
morning mists;
a corpse rolls, a thing without
name, a discarded number,
a bunch of rotten fruit
thrown on the garbage heap.

Original in Spanish

Cuando sonó la trompeta, estuvo
todo preparado en la tierra,
y Jehova repartió el mundo
a Coca-Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, y otras entidades:
la Compañía Frutera Inc.
se reservó lo más jugoso,
la costa central de mi tierra,
la dulce cintura de América.

Bautizó de nuevo sus tierras
como “Repúblicas Bananas,”
y sobre los muertos dormidos,
sobre los héroes inquietos
que conquistaron la grandeza,
la libertad y las banderas,
estableció la ópera bufa:
enajenó los albedríos
regaló coronas de César,
desenvainó la envidia, atrajo
la dictadora de las moscas,
moscas Trujillos, moscas Tachos,
moscas Carías, moscas Martínez,
moscas Ubico, moscas húmedas
de sangre humilde y mermelada,
moscas borrachas que zumban
sobre las tumbas populares,
moscas de circo, sabias moscas
entendidas en tiranía.

Entre las moscas sanguinarias
la Frutera desembarca,
arrasando el café y las frutas,
en sus barcos que deslizaron
como bandejas el tesoro
de nuestras tierras sumergidas.

Mientras tanto, por los abismos
azucarados de los puertos,
caían indios sepultados
en el vapor de la mañana:
un cuerpo rueda, una cosa
sin nombre, un número caído,
un racimo de fruta muerta
derramada en el pudridero.

Written in 1950 as part of the Canto General.

Learn More

From Arbenz to Zelaya: Chiquita in Latin America. (Interview on Democracy Now! on July 21, 2009). When the Honduran military overthrew the democratically elected government of Manuel Zelaya two weeks ago there might have been a sigh of relief in the corporate board rooms of Chiquita banana,” writes journalist Nikolas Kozloff. “Earlier this year the Cincinnati-based fruit company joined Dole in criticizing the government in Tegucigalpa which had raised the minimum wage by 60%.” Kozloff goes on to trace Chiquita’s “long and sordid” political history in Central America.

The post The United Fruit Company appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

David Rovics website is full of “songs of social significance.” http://davidrovics.com.

Listen to the song here.

Lyrics to Hills of Tennessee

Beneath the Nashville skyline
There on Music Row
Songwriters churn out lyrics
Behind the laptops’ glow
Country stars go shopping
Looking for the perfect fit
A&R men roam the streets
Looking for another hit
While just a couple hours’ drive
And a hundred light years from the city
They’re blowing up the hills of Tennessee
The scope of devastation
Is a challenge to compare
If you’ve been to Hiroshima
Then perhaps you’re almost there
Cause that’s how much dynamite
Is used up every week
To make barren wasteland
From what was once a mountain peak
Where all the watersheds and rivers
And forests used to be
They’re blowing up the hills of Tennessee

They used to have miners
Send them underground
But people are expensive
So they found a way around
Just bomb the hills to hell
And buy off the EPA
With ten percent the workforce
And twenty times the pay
Do it in the name of God
And private property
They’re blowing up the hills of Tennessee

Like an invisible tsunami
Man-made and hidden from our eyes
Where every living thing is killed
And the rest of it just dies
For a four inch seam of coal
They’ll just wipe out life on earth
Look on the New York Stock Exchange
To see how much it’s worth
Sam won’t be making moonshine
No more banjo on his knee
They’re blowing up the hills of Tennessee

And back in Nashville
The cancer wards are filling up
They’ve got to filter the water
Before they can put it in a cup
Can’t go vacation on Blair Mountain
Not here in real life
It’s only good for songs now
No place to take the wife
Cause there’s nothing left there
But mudslides and misery
They’re blowing up the hills of Tennessee
They’re blowing up the hills of Tennessee

The audio online and MP3 download for “Hills of Tennessee” can be found here. (Don’t forget to make a donation to the artist if you download the song.) For more songs like this, check out David Rovics’ Waiting for the Fall.

Copyright David Rovics 2010, all rights reserved.

Related Resources

• Got Coal? Teaching About the Most Dangerous Rock in America by Bill Bigelow, Rethinking Schools, Spring 2011
• Coal at the Movies: Classroom DVDs on Coal and Mountaintop Removal Mining compiled by Bill Bigelow, Rethinking Schools, Spring 2011

The post Hills of Tennessee appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Listen to the song.

Lyrics

1921 was the year
Seems like yesterday to me
Let me tell you about what happened then
Back in the mine country
We were fightin’ hard to build a union
‘Cause at forty cents a ton
There was no way to feed a family
When the minin’ day was done

The strike had lasted for a year
When they shot down Smilin’ Sid
He was a lawman who stood up for us miners
That’s the only crime he ever did
A hundred miners locked up with no trial
There in Mingo-town
But the last straw came in Sharples
When they gunned the women down

(Chorus)
We’re marchin’ on to Mingo
Ten thousand men and countin’
Here in the hills of West Virginia
At the Battle of Blair Mountain

We shouted through the hillsides
In every union hall
We’re marchin’ on to Mingo
Teach them a lesson, once and all
We commandeered every freight train
To the Kentucky line
Took every car that crossed our path
And all the guns and ammo we could find

The union leaders tried to stop us
Mother Jones told us to turn back
But we had learned ourselves from the gun thugs
There’s a time to talk and a time to attack
We had no leader, we didn’t need one
We all knew the way through Logan County
And we all knew once we got there
We’re gonna hang Sheriff Chapin from a sour apple tree

(Chorus)

David Rovics website is full of “songs of social significance.”

For three days and nights we fought them
the front was ten miles wide
All the cops and scabs in West Virginia
Were there on the other side
They dropped explosives from their airplanes
Such a thing you never saw
They shot us with machine guns
It was the operator’s law

We dug trenches and wore helmets
That we brought from the Argonne
All the way from France to Logan
We fought from dusk to dawn
President Harding sent in the Army
And we left our line to them
But the hills of West Virginia
Will long remember when

(Chorus)

Copyright David Rovics 2003, all rights reserved.

The audio online and MP3 download for “Battle of Blair Mountain” can be found here. (Don’t forget to make a donation to the artist if you download the song.) For more songs like this, check out David Rovics’ Songs for Mahmud.

Background

Order online.

Thunder in the Mountains by Lon Savage. 1990. 216 pages. Foreword by filmmaker John Sayles (director of Matewan) and an introduction by historian John Alexander Williams.

The West Virginia mine war of 1920-21, a major civil insurrection of unusual brutality on both sides, even by the standards of the coal fields, involved thousands of union and nonunion miners, state and private police, militia, and federal troops. Before it was over, three West Virginia counties were in open rebellion, much of the state was under military rule, and bombers of the U.S. Army Air Corps had been dispatched against striking miners.

The origins of this civil war were in the Draconian rule of the coal companies over the fiercely proud miners of Appalachia. It began in the small railroad town of Matewan when Mayor C. C. Testerman and Police Chief Sid Hatfield sided with striking miners against agents of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, who attempted to evict the miners from company-owned housing. During a street battle, Mayor Testerman, seven Baldwin-Felts agents, and two miners were shot to death.

Hatfield became a folk hero to Appalachia. But he, like Testerman, was to be a martyr. The next summer, Baldwin-Felts agents assassinated him and his best friend, Ed Chambers, as their wives watched, on the steps of the courthouse in Welch, accelerating the miners’ rebellion into open warfare.

Much neglected in historical accounts, Thunder in the Mountains is the only available book-length account of the crisis in American industrial relations and governance that occured during the West Virginia mine war of 1920-21. [Publisher’s description.]

ISBN: 9780822954262 | University of Pittsburgh Press

The post Battle of Blair Mountain appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

Linocut by Carlos A. Cortéz. Source: SAAM.

A songwriter, itinerant laborer, and union organizer, Joe Hill became famous around the world after a Utah court convicted him of murder. Even before the international campaign to have his conviction reversed, however, Joe Hill was well known on picket lines and at workers’ rallies as the author of popular labor songs and as an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) agitator. Thanks in large part to his songs and to his stirring, well-publicized call to his fellow workers on the eve of his execution — “Don’t waste time mourning, organize!” — Hill became, and he has remained, the best-known IWW martyr and labor folk hero. [From AFL-CIO history.]

Joe Hill’s firsthand experience with working conditions led him to membership in the I.W.W. in 1910. Almost at once he started writing songs to unite a working class that was fractured into ineffective pieces due to language and cultural differences. Using the music of popular hymns and tunes, Hill added lyrics that soon were sweeping through labor picket lines throughout the nation. Hill’s 1910 song, “Workers of the World, Awaken!” was a call to action:

Lyrics

Workers of the world, awaken!

Break your chains, demand your rights.
All the wealth you make is taken
B y exploiting parasites.
Shall you kneel in deep submission
From your cradles to your graves?
Is the height of your ambition
To be good and willing slaves?

Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Fight for your own emancipation;
Arise, ye slaves of ev’ry nation, in One Union Grand.
Our little ones for bread are crying;
And millions are from hunger dying;
The end the means is justifying,
‘Tis the final stand.

If the workers take a notion,
They can stop all speeding trains;
Every ship upon the ocean
They can tie with mighty chains;
Every wheel in the creation,
Every mine and every mill,
Fleets and armies of the nation,
Will at their command stand still.

-Chorus-

Join the union, fellow workers,
Men and women, side by side;
We will crush the greedy shirkers
Like a sweeping, surging tide;
For united we are standing,
But divided we will fall;
Let this be our understanding-
“All for one and one for all.”

-Chorus-

Workers of the world, awaken!
Rise in all your splendid might;
Take the wealth that you are making —
It belongs to you by right.
No one for bread will be crying,
We’ll have freedom, love and health,
When the grand red flag is flying
In the Worker’s commonwealth.

-Chorus-

Learn More

KUED-7 Utah offers a documentary film about Joe Hill.

The post “Workers of the World, Awaken!” by Joe Hill appeared first on Zinn Education Project.

David Rovics website is full of “songs of social significance,” http://davidrovics.com.

David Rovics wrote “Union Makes Us Strong” to communicate “the most fundamental message I and others like me are trying to communicate — in union we can achieve anything.”

Lyrics

Back in the Depression farmers held the line
When the bank came for an auction together they’d combine
They knew that when divided they could never win
But they stood shoulder to shoulder and didn’t let the bankers in
They stood shoulder to shoulder, that’s how they kept their farms
If one of them was threatened it was for all to be alarmed
They said this was their land and they’d help each other stay
That’s how they kept their farms, that’s why the bankers went away
‘Cause the union makes us strong (2x)

Back in the Depression there was not enough to eat
But the Union of the Unemployed was in the driver’s seat
If the cops did an eviction, took the bed and put it out
The neighbors would carry it in, sing a song and shout

(Chorus)

I can hear him talking, you’ve got to look at the long view
Back in the Depression almost everybody knew
If competition was so great why don’t they do it with themselves
Instead of buying off the Congress and ruling by cartel

(Chorus)

During the Depression people fought and won back then
Now the battle’s global and it was must be won again
They will try to divide us but even on the darkest day
While I listen closely I hear a billion people say

(Chorus)

The audio online and MP3 download for “Union Makes Us Strong” can be found here. (Don’t forget to make a donation to the artist if you download the song.) For more songs like this, check out David Rovics’ Troubador: People’s History in Song.

Copyright David Rovics 2010, all rights reserved.

The post Union Makes Us Strong appeared first on Zinn Education Project.