position:civil rights leader

  • Paris streets, squares named in honour of LGBT+ figures

    Fifty years after New York City’s Stonewall riots laid the foundation for modern gay rights, Paris is carrying on that legacy by naming an array of streets and squares after historically important LGBT+ figures.

    New to the city map are Stonewall Riot and Harvey Milk squares – the first in recognition of the famous rebellion against Manhattan police in 1969; the latter in honour of the American civil rights leader and first openly gay politician to be elected in California.

    Other squares, gardens and passageways pay tribute to the likes of Irish gay rights activist Mark Ashton, French transsexual politician and poet Ovida-Delect and bisexual American writer and filmmaker Susan Sontag.

    There’s also a commemorative plaque in honour of Gilbert Baker, the man who invented the rainbow flag. Add to that Pierre Seel Street, named for the openly gay Holocaust survivor, and Place Renée Vivien, in honour of the British poet known for her Sapphic verse and party days during the Belle Epoque.

    Increasing LGBT+ visibility

    The new unveilings bring to more than 40 the number of people immortalised through plaques erected around the city – with most of them smattered about the vibrant 4th arrondissement, home to Paris’s unofficial gay district.

    These sorts of gestures are an important way of increasingly the visibility of the gay community and cementing its place in history, says Fabien Jannic-Cherbonnel, a journalist with the French LGBT+ news site Komitid.

    “France is very keen on talking about its history and the great men who shaped the country – and these plaques show people that women and LGBT+ figures are a part of that history, and they also helped to make this country what it is today,” he says.

    Paris playing catch-up

    While other European cities such as Amsterdam and Berlin are perhaps a little further ahead in celebrating the LGBT+ legacy, with their so-called “homomonuments” drawing in tourists, Paris is steadily playing catch-up – so much so the Town Hall has dared to label it the “flagship city of inclusion and diversity”.

    The street-naming gesture comes just ahead of this weekend’s pride march. Like many cities across the world, Paris cranks up the colour in June to celebrate gay pride – and this Saturday the capital will look like the rainbow city that mayor Anne Hidalgo has been striving to deliver.

    Tempering the pride party, however, is last month’s report by the French not-for-profit organisation SOS Homophobie, which noted a 15 percent rise in the number of homophobic attacks reported in 2018, compared with the previous year.

    While the NGO described 2018 as a “black year”, Jannic-Cherbonnel says the numbers aren’t necessarily evidence that homophobic assaults are on the rise.

    “This is a reflection of the number of calls that SOS received – which means that people are talking about it,” he says. “They know when something is wrong and when something happens they will report it.

    “I’m not convinced there’s a huge increase in homophobia in French society, especially in Paris, but we are talking more about it – which is good because this is all about visibility, which in turn helps to fight homophobia.”


    http://en.rfi.fr/france/20190626-paris-streets-squares-named-honour-lgbt-figures?ref=tw
    #LGBT #homosexualité #Paris #France #toponymie #noms_de_rue #Harvey_Milk

  • Fifty years since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. - World Socialist Web Site

    https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/04/04/king-a04.html

    Fifty years since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
    By Fred Mazelis

    4 April 2018

    April 4 marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support the struggle of African-American sanitation workers for decent wages and human dignity. In the days leading up to this anniversary, the media has been filled with articles on the life and legacy of the slain civil rights leader.

    The example of King raises questions that have lost none of their urgency in the past five decades. A serious discussion of this period shines a bright light on present-day American society and exposes the lies and hypocrisy of the defenders of the status quo who falsify King’s legacy.

    #droits_civiques #Martin_Luther_King

  • Martin Luther King Jr. Spent the Last Year of His Life Detested by the Liberal Establishment
    https://theintercept.com/2018/01/15/martin-luther-king-jr-mlk-day-2018

    In an April 1967 speech at Riverside Church in New York City, the civil rights leader publicly denounced American involvement in Indochina.

    […]

    The backlash from a liberal establishment that had once praised King for his civil rights campaign came as hard and fast as his allies had feared.

    The New York Times editorial board lambasted King for linking the war in Vietnam to the struggles of civil rights and poverty alleviation in the United States, saying it was “too facile a connection” and that he was doing a “disservice” to both causes. It concluded that there “are no simple answers to the war in Vietnam or to racial injustice in this country.” The Washington Post editorial board said King had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country and his people.” A political cartoon in the Kansas City Star depicted the civil rights movement as a young black girl crying and begging for her drunk father King, who is consuming the contents of a bottle labeled “Anti-Vietnam.”

    In all, 168 newspapers denounced him the next day.

  • The Ugly Revolution
    Michael Rogin
    http://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n09/michael-rogin/the-ugly-revolution

    A falsification that held more universal sway among whites than did any Stalinist rewriting of history in the Soviet Union transformed black Americans in the post-bellum South from victims of re-subjugation into political and sexual predators.

    It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with the collusion of the Kennedy brothers) conducted a campaign to discredit King. The organisation’s assistant director, William Sullivan, compiled from the Bureau’s wiretaps and bugs a tape of the noises of the civil rights leader’s extramarital activities. He sent it to King with a letter threatening to expose him; purporting to be a ‘Negro’, the letter-writer proposed suicide as King’s only way out.

    Elevating King to the pantheon of founding fathers, however, has served as a ritual of national self-congratulation that obliterates the radical movement in which King lived, breathed and died.

    (...)

    Ronald Reagan, who had opposed not only the civil rights movement but also the national legislation ending legal discrimination and guaranteeing the black right to vote, was the President who signed the Bill declaring King’s birthday a national holiday. There were two reasons for this historical irony. First, King was being celebrated as ‘poster boy’ (Dyson’s term) for the achievement of formal legal equality by those claiming that the struggle for racial justice had been won. Second, Reagan was paying back the debt he owed King, since the entry of racial conflict into national politics overthrew the FDR/Johnson New Deal coalition and put the former actor in the White House.