ACTIVIST SONG WRITERS
ACTIVIST WEB SITES
ANIMAL RIGHTS
CURRENT ISSUES
END OF FOSSIL
FEMALE ACTIVIST
INFORMATION and SERVICES
LABOR ISSUES
LAUGHING HORSE BOOKS
PEACE MAKERS
PETE'S WRITINGS
PETITION IN DEFENSE OF IRAQI WOMEN
PROGRESSIVE MEDIA
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
UPCOMING EVENTS
WAR ON THE UNIVERSE
For well over a hundred years: now many contributions of African American and Caucasian females have been ignored in our children's textbooks. Information on female abolitionists and suffragists, in particular, has been left out of our classrooms, though their involvement in the civil rights movement in the 19th and early 20th century was considerable. Below you will find one section of Judy Chicago's book, The Dinner Party (1996), presented in order to display the fact that many women, both black and white, contributed a great deal to American culture and the modern-day civil rights movement. These women with their heroic vision, intelligence, and courage are role models for contemporary feminists and freedom fighters of all persuasions. Please click on the internal links below to view the biographical information about each of the extraordinary women listed. Sojourner Truth's page is listed first because it includes a link to a beautiful piece of art Ms. Chicago created specifically for her. In addition, you can read about the history of Ms. Chicago's art and book, as well as the purpose of this web site, in the preface.
Harriet Tubman: (1826 - 1913) Harriet Tubman, who was born into slavery, escaped North in 1849, establishing her famous Underground Railroad, from which she reputedly "never lost a single passenger." She rescued over three hundred men, women, and children, risking her own freedom nineteen times on her heroic trips into the slave states. Dubbed Moses, she became a legendary figure. A reward of forty thousand dollars was offered for her capture, but she was never caught. During the Civil War, she worked as a spy, scout, nurse, and commander in the Union Army of both black and white troops. Tubman expressed her beliefs in freedom and liberty by lecturing, organizing, and inspiring others. In her later years, she linked her work in the black community with feminist activities, attending women's suffrage conventions and helping to organize the National Federation of Afro-American Women (1895).
The Underground Railroad provided fugitive slaves a means to escape from the South. Conductors like Harriet Tubman led runaways from the South, while antislavery Northerners helped by providing safe havens from slave catchers who roamed the Northern and border states searching for escapees. Most of the fugitives fled to Canada. The actual number of slaves assisted during the nearly 80 years that the network existed was not overwhelming, but the publicity generated served to fuel mistrust between the North and the South.
Ida B. Wells: (1862 - 1931) The child of slave parents, Wells initiated her long and dedicated struggle for equality for blacks by sitting in a whites-only railroad coach. She was forcibly removed, after which she instituted a legal suit, which she won. Unfortunately, eventually a higher court struck down the decision. She then became a part owner of the Memphis Free Speech, writing articles condemning lynchings. Undeterred even by the destruction of her office by racist mobs in 1895, she began a one woman campaign against this terrible practice, lecturing in New York and Boston and founding antilynching societies and black women's clubs. In 1893 she published A Red Record, an uncompromising account of three years of lynchings. She participated in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People but, as an uncompromising militant, she withheld her full support from this somewhat conservative organization.
Sojourner Truth: (1797 - 1883) Sojourner Truth was an abolitionist and feminist who, after being freed as a slave, traveled the United States speaking at various conventions for the equality of blacks and women. Her most famous speech was entitled "Ain't I a Woman?" and it was delivered at the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. Truth displayed unparalleled courage in the face of males who sneered and hissed while she spoke on stage. She discarded her slave name when she finally gained her liberty and replaced it with Sojourner. She did this because sojourn meant "to dwell temporarily" (which she thought an apt description of one's tenure in this life), and she chose Truth because that was the message she intended to carry to the world. She told of the horrible treatment she and her family endured at the hands of their owners, including many rapes and assaults. Sojourner came to believe that the liberation of blacks and that of women were closely related, and her antislavery lectures became infused with arguments for women's rights. In 1850 she published her autobiography and, with the proceeds from the book, was able to support herself. During the Civil War she visited and spoke with Union troops; after the war she spent her time finding jobs for and helping newly freed slaves
Anna Ella Carroll: (1815 - 1893) Carroll, who contributed to the Union victory in the Civil War, was a writer of books, pamphlets, and articles on the state of American politics. She was also involved in espionage activities for the Union, which attracted the attention of President Lincoln. He sent her on a mission to the West to investigate and evaluate the Union's war policy. On that trip, she became aware of the inadequacy of the Union's military strategy, which led her to mastermind the Tennessee Plan. It was this plan that finally won the war. However, her achievement went unrecognized as Lincoln and the War Department felt it was necessary to"protect" the public from the knowledge that it was a woman, rather than the army of generals, who had engineered the victory.
Angelina Grimke: (1803 - 1879) Angelina Grimke, along with her sister Sarah, were the first women in the United States to publicly argue for the abolition of slavery. Cultured and well educated, Angelina had gone north from South Carolina with her sister with firsthand knowledge of the condition of the slaves. In 1836 Angelina wrote a lengthy address urging all women to actively work to free blacks. The sisters' lectures elicited violent criticism because it was considered altogether improper for women to speak out on political issues. This made them acutely aware of their own oppression as women, which they soon began to address along with abolitionism. A severe split developed in the abolition movement, with some antislavery people arguing that it was the "Negro's hour and women would have to wait." The Grimkes refused to accept this idea, insisting on the importance of equality for both women and blacks. Angelina's sister became a major theoretician of the women's rights movement, challenging all the conventional beliefs about a woman's place. As to men, she demanded: "All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks."
Frances Harper: (1825 - 1911) Harper's novel about the Reconstructed South, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892), was the first book published by a black American. Born of free parents and self-educated, Harper worked as a nursemaid, seamstress, needlework teacher, and writer. She produced ten volumes of poetry and many articles, along with her novel. Advocating women's rights as well as abolition, Harper lectured at the 1869 meeting of the Equal Rights Association. But when the schism occurred between abolitionists and feminists, she sided with Fredrick Douglass, who believed that the issue of race had priority over that of gender. Harper continued her work on behalf of black women, founding the National Association of Colored Women and serving as its vice president until her death.
Had you seen a feeble lambkin,
Shrinking from a wolf so bold,
Would ye not to shield the trembler,
In your arms have made its fold?
But when she, a hunted sister,
Stretched her hands that ye might save
,
Colder far than Zembla's regions,
Was the answer that ye gave.
On the Union's bloody altar,
Was your hapless victim laid;
Mercy, truth, and justice shuddered,
But your hands would give no aid.
And ye sent her back to the torture,
Robbed of freedom and of fright.
Thrust the wretched, captive stranger.
Back to slavery's gloomy night.
Back where brutal men may trample,
On her honor and her fame;
And unto her lips so dusky,
Press the cup of woe and shame.
There is blood upon our city,
Dark and dismal is the stain;
And your hands would fail to cleanse it,
Though Lake Erie ye should drain.
There's a curse upon your Union,
Fearful sounds are in the air;
As if thunderbolts were framing,
Answers to the bondsman's prayer.
Ye may offer human victims,
Like the heathen priests of old;
And may barter manly honor
For the Union and for gold.
But ye can not stay the whirlwind,
When the storm begins to break;
And our God doth rise in judgment,
For the poor and needy's sake.
And, your sin-cursed, guilty Union,
Shall be shaken to its base,
Till ye learn that simple justice,
Is the right of every race.
Although Frances Harper was not born into a slave family in 1825 in Baltimore, Maryland, she nevertheless suffered from the oppressive slave laws and rampant discrimination of the time.
Let me make the songs for the people,
Songs for the old and young;
Songs to stir like a battle-cry
Wherever they are sung.
Not for the clashing of sabres,
For carnage nor for strife;
But songs to thrill the hearts of men
With more abundant life.
Let me make the songs for the weary,
Amid life's fever and fret,
Till hearts shall relax their tension,
And careworn brows forget.
Let me sing for little children,
Before their footsteps stray,
Sweet anthems of love and duty,
To float o'er life's highway.
I would sing for the poor and aged,
When shadows dim their sight;
Of the bright and restful mansions,
Where there shall be no night.
Our world, so worn and weary,
Needs music, pure and strong,
To hush the jangle and discords
Of sorrow, pain, and wrong.
Music to soothe all its sorrow,
Till war and crime shall cease;
And the hearts of men grown tender
Girdle the world with peace.
Singularly dedicated to the preservation of black culture and traditions, Hurston traveled throughout the South collecting folklore and mythology. During the 1930s she was able to garner WPA grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She published several collections of stories, as well as novels and an autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. But by the 1950s, she was no longer able to find any support for her writing and was forced to work as a teacher, a librarian, and even a maid. She suffered a stroke in 1959 and died in 1960 as an indigent and unknown patient in a county welfare home. Thirteen years later the writer Alice Walker and Hurston scholar Charlotte Hunt placed a commemorative tombstone on her previously unmarked grave, reading: "Zora Neale Hurston, a Genius of the South, Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist, 1901 - 1960."
Dorothea Lange: (1895-1965) Born in Hoboken, New Jersey At the age of 18 she announced her intention to become a photographer. After apprenticing with a photographer in New York City, she moved to San Francisco and in 1919 established her own studio. During the 1920s and early 1930s, Lange worked as a portrait photographer, usually for San Francisco's upper classes.
As a member of the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographic unit under Roy Stryker, Dorothea Lange photographed migrant workers, sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and other victims of the Depression in 22 states, primarily in the South and West, between 1935 and 1942. Her "Migrant Mother" (1936) is one of the classic images of the period.
Lange was born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey, of German descent. As a young girl she was stricken with polio, which left her with a lifelong limp which she believed heightened her sensitivity to the sufferings of others. She attended grade school in New York City's Lower East Side and the Training School for Teachers also in New York.
In 1914 Lange visited the Fifth Avenue portrait studio of Arnold Genthe; he gave her her first camera and encouraged her photographic work during the next year. In 1917-1918 Lange studied at Columbia University with the pictorial photographer Clarence White. Later in 1918 she became employed as a photofinisher in San Francisco, where she worked as a freelance photographer and operated her own studio from 1919 to 1940, at which time she established a studio in Berkeley, California. In 1932, after a decade as a studio portraitist, Lange began to photograph people in their social contexts on the streets of San Francisco. She was the subject of an Oakland, California, exhibition. In 1934 a critical article about Lange written by Willard Van Dyke appeared in Camera Craft.
With Paul Taylor (whom she later married) Lange began work for the California Rural Rehabilitation Administration in 1935. The example set by their efforts was partly responsible for the creation of the photographic unit of the Federal Resettlement Administration later that year. Lange photographed with the RA/FSA from 1935 to 1942. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941 for "photographic study of the American social scene," a project she was prevented from completing by the United States' entry into World War II Lange worked for the U.S. War Relocation Agency in San Francisco in 1942, and for the Office of War Information, San Francisco, from 1943 to 1945. Many of her photographs from this time were lost in transit. Poor health forced Lange to remain inactive for several years until 1950-1951 when she conducted seminars and participated in photographic conferences. In 1954-1955 she was a staff photographer with Life magazine. She worked again as a freelance photographer from 1958 to 1965, accompanying her husband on U.S. aid assignments in Asia, South America, and the Middle East. She died of cancer in Marin County, California, in 1965, just before the opening of her major retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Lange was placed on the Honor Roll of the American Society of Magazine Photographers in 1963. She was honored with solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Art (1960), the Museum of Modern Art (1966), the Oakland Art Museum (1960, 1966, 1971, and 1978), and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (1973). Her work has been included in important group shows, including 6 Women Photographers, The Family of Man, and The Bitter Years: FSA Photographers 1935-1941 at the Museum of Modern Art; Photography in the Twentieth Century at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; and Women of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Art. Her presentation The American Country Woman was the most popular exhibit ever distributed by the U.S. Information Agency. Lange's archive was donated to the Oakland Museum.
Margaret Bourke White: (1904-1971) "Margaret Bourke White's career as a photojournalist and industrial photographer spanned three decades from 1927 until the mid 1950s. She became one of the most celebrated photographers of that period, producing notable work throughout the United States, Europe, Russia, and India. She was born in New York City and became interested in photography through a course at Columbia University given by Clarence H. White, dean of American pictorial photographers. Her first published photographs, depicting campus scenes, appeared in the Cornell University newspaper; she graduated from Cornell in 1927. "Bourke White's professional career began with an assignment to photograph steel mill activities in Cleveland. Subsequent industrial work brought her to the attention of Henry Robinson Luce, who hired her to do assignments for his newly launched Fortune magazine. She produced extensive picture essays on the meat packing plants of Chicago, the upstate New York glass blowing industry, and the Indiana stone quarries, among other subjects. She also went to the Ruhr valley of Germany, where she documented the steel industry and the rearmament of the German nation.
"In 1930 she made the first of several trips to Russia; with official permission she photographed the birth of industrial expansion and the lifestyle of the people. Her pictures appeared in Fortune, the New York Times Magazine, and in 1931 in her first book, Eyes on Russia.
"In the U.S. her work during the 1930s established her reputation as a journalist. She wrote and photographed articles about industry, drought in the Texas panhandle, and migrant labor. In 1936 she collaborated with the writer Erskine Caldwell on a project documenting the life of sharecroppers in the southern U.S.; the pictures and text appeared in 1937 in the book You Have Seen Their Faces. "In 1936 Bourke White Joined Alfred Eisenstaedt, Peter Stackpole, and Thomas McAvoy to form the photographic staff of Henry Luce's new venture, Life magazine. She was sent to Montana to document the construction of Fort Peck Dam. Her pictures were used for the lead article of the first issue, and one photograph of the dam was chosen as the first cover illustration for the magazine.
"In the years immediately preceding World War II Bourke White and Erskine Caldwell traveled to Czechoslovakia, documenting the people as they lived just prior to the Nazi occupation. The couple was married in 1939 and worked for Life together through the early years of the war. Both Bourke White and Caldwell were present during the German attack on Moscow in 1941; Bourke White was the only western photographer on hand. Bourke White and Caldwell were divorced in 1942. In that same year Bourke White was given credentials as an official U.S. Air Force photographer, with use of her pictures to be shared by the Air Force and Life magazine. She documented the American campaign in North Africa and then followed Patton's push into Germany. At the close of the war she documented the devastation at Buchenwald.
"When the war ended, Life sent Bourke White to India, where she photographed Mohandas Gandhi and recorded the establishment of the Indian state, and then the riots that preceded and followed the partition of Pakistan from India. Bourke White was in India interviewing Gandhi a few hours before he was assassinated in 1948.
"Bourke White's association with Life continued into the 1950s. In the postwar years she photographed the mines in South Africa, covered the guerilla war in Korea, and did a number of photo essays in the U.S., one of the most notable being a study of the Strategic Air Command. Her photographic output gradually became smaller due to Parkinson's disease, to which she succumbed in 1971."
">Emma Goldman: (June 27, 1869 - May 14, 1940) Anarchist, Feminist, Birth Control Activist known as a rebel, an anarchist, an ardent proponent of birth control and free speech, a feminist, a lecturer and a writer.
Born in what is now Lithuania but was then Russia, in a Jewish ghetto, moved early to Königsberg and St. Petersburg, where she became involved with university radicals. Emma Goldman left for America in 1885 with her half sister Helen Zodokoff, working in the textile industry in Rochester, New York. Briefly married in 1887, Emma Goldman moved in 1889 to New York where she quickly became active in the anarchist movement. She became one of the most outspoken and well-known of American radicals, lecturing and writing on anarchism, women's rights and other political topics. She also wrote and lectured on "new drama," drawing out the social messages of Ibsen, Strindberg, Shaw, and others.
Emma Goldman served prison and jail terms for such activities as advising the unemployed to take bread if their pleas for food were not answered, for giving information in a lecture on birth control, for opposing military conscription, and in 1908 she was deprived of her citizenship.
In 1917, with Alexander Berkman, Emma Goldman was convicted of conspiracy against the draft laws, and sentenced to to years in prison and fined $10,000.
In 1919 Emma Goldman, along with her long-time associate Alexander Berkman and 247 others who had been targeted in the Red Scare after World War I, emigrated to Russia on the Buford. But Emma Goldman's libertarian socialism led to her Disillusionment in Russia, as the title of her 1923 work says it. She lived in Europe, obtained British citizenship through marrying the Welshman James Colton, and traveled through many nations giving lectures.
Without US citizenship, Emma Goldman was prohibited, except for a brief stay in 1934, from entering the United States. She spent her final years aiding the anti-Franco forces in Spain through lecturing and fund-raising. Succumbing to a stroke and its effects, she died in Canada in 1940 and was buried in Chicago, near the graves of the Haymarket anarchists.
The Emma Goldman Papers Project has, for 23 years, been dedicated to researching the life and work of Emma Goldman. A radical in her time, in 1902 she warned that the right to free speech of those protesting war might be threatened, and in 1915 she warned of "war madness."
The Emma Goldman Papers project prepared a fund-raising appeal letter in late 2002, featuring quotes expressing those historical sentiments -- and the Associate Vice Chancellor of Berkeley struck those quotes, reportedly fearing that they would be construed as representing University policy.
Candace Falk, the project director, sent the censored letter to a smaller mailing list than had been previously proposed, and then included the censored quotations in a thank-you letter to those who responded. The quotes were also posted on the home page of the web site for the project (see below).
The University's chancellor, Robert Berdahl, responded to the controversy on January 14, 2003, by issuing a statement that acknowledged that the issue could have been handled better.
The New York Times featured the controversy on its front page on January 14, and one response was new financial pledges made directly to the project.
Featured quotes form Emma Goldman, highlighted on the Emma Goldman Paper Project site, January, 2003:
Dolores is one the century's most powerful and respected labor movement leaders. Huerta left teaching and co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez in 1962: "I quit because I couldn't stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes. I thought I could do more by organizing farm workers than by trying to teach their hungry children." Huerta has raised her own 11 children while organizing for the labor movement.
The 1965 Delano Grape Strike launched UFW into a period of fast-paced organizing, with Huerta negotiating contracts with growers, lobbying, organizing strikes and boycotts and well as spearheading farmworker political activities. Always politically active, she co-chaired the 1972 California delegation to the Democratic Convention. She led the fight to permit thousands of migrant/immigrant children to receive services. She also led the struggle to achieve unemployment insurance, collective bargaining rights, and immigration rights for farmworkers under the 1985 Rodino amnesty legalization program. Huerta continues as an outstanding labor and political activist.
Additional Resources:
Dolores Huerta - American labor leader and social activist
Notable Hispanic Women. Gale Research, 1993. De Ruiz, Dana Catherine and Richard Larios. La Causa: The Migrant Farmworkers' Story. Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 1992. Dunne, John Gregory. Delano: The Story of the California Grape Strike. Farrar, 1976. Perez, Frank. Delores Huerta. Econo-Clade Books, 1999. NOTES: Juvenile literature, ages 9-12. Correspondence under the Records of United Farm Workers of America, Office of the President. 44 linear ft., 1951-1971. Wayne State University, Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor History and Urban Affairs. Detroit, Michigan.Mother Jones: (1843? - 1030)
Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America by Elliott J. Gorn Published by Hill and Wang ; February 2001; ISBN 0-8090-7093-6 Copyright © 2001 Elliott J. Gorn
The life of Mother Jones is a faded memory, a half-forgotten story. A black-and-white image of an old woman or perhaps the words "Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living" are all that most people know of her. Yet during the early twentieth century, Mother Jones was one of the most famous women in America. Passionate speeches and dramatic street theater kept this fiery agitator in the news. For over a quarter century she held center stage, exposing disturbing truths about child labor, the poverty of working families, and the destruction of American freedoms. Her admirers called her labor's Joan of Arc and the miners' angel; enemies labeled her a dangerous radical -- indeed, the most dangerous woman in America.
Picture her, grandmotherly, sweet-faced, white-haired, swaying throngs of working-class people with her resonant oratory. Legend tells how she faced down gun-toting thugs and how she endured frequent imprisonment without fear. She cherished her image as a fighter. When introduced to a crowd as a great humanitarian once, she snapped, "Get it straight, I'm not a humanitarian, I'm a hell-raiser." She articulated for working men and women the belief that they had created the world with their own hands and that by right it belonged to them. She was a militant matriarch uniting the family of labor through her words and her raw physical courage.
Although Mother Jones was most vividly associated with bitter mine wars, she also worked with railroad trolley-car, textile, brewery, garment, and steel workers. In an age of outrageous exploitation, her fight was wherever people organized for humane hours and decent pay. She was the Johnny Appleseed of American activists, giving speeches and organizing across the continent, sleeping in workers' cabins, boardinghouses, or the homes of friends. Asked to state her residence to a congressional committee, she declared, "I live in the United States, but I do not know exactly in what place, because I am always in the fight against oppression and wherever a fight is going on I have to jump there . . . so that really I have no particular residence." She added, "My address is like my shoes; it travels with me wherever I go."
Her contemporaries marveled at her. "She is a wonder," the poet Carl Sandburg wrote of Mother Jones during World War I. "Close to 88 years old and her voice a singing voice; nobody else could give me a thrill just by saying in that slow, solemn, orotund way, 'The kaisers of this country are next, I tell ye.'" Clarence Darrow, America's greatest trial lawyer of the early twentieth century, wrote that "her deep convictions and fearless soul always drew her to seek the spot where the fight was hottest and the danger greatest." The feminist author Meridel Le Sueur was only fourteen years old when she first heard Mother Jones speak, but she never forgot it: "I felt engendered by the true mother, not the private mother of one family, but the emboldened and blazing defender of all her sons and daughters."
At first glance, Mother Jones was not a likely candidate for such renown. An Irish immigrant who had survived famine, fire, plague, hard labor, and unspeakable loss, she was nearly as dispossessed as an American could be. She had ambition and talent, certainly, but those were no guarantee of success. How did she come to prominence?
Her fame began when, toward the end of the nineteenth century, she transformed herself from Mary Jones into Mother Jones. Her new persona was a complex one, infused with overtones of Christian martyrdom and with the suffering of Mother Mary. Perhaps it is best to think of Mother Jones as a character performed by Mary Jones. She exaggerated her age, wore old-fashioned black dresses, and alluded often to her impending demise. By 1900, she had stopped referring to herself as Mary altogether and signed all of her letters "Mother." Soon laborers, union officials, even Presidents of the United States addressed her that way, and they became her "boys." The persona of Mother Jones freed Mary Jones. Most American women in the early twentieth century were expected to lead quiet, homebound lives for their families; few women found their way onto the public stage. Ironically, by making herself into the symbolic mother of the downtrodden, Mary Jones was able to go where she pleased and speak out on any issue that moved her. She defied social conventions and shattered the limits that confined her by embracing the very role that restricted most women.
Her fame did not last. Eugene Debs, labor leader and Socialist Party candidate for President, recalled of his old friend, "She has won her way into the hearts of the nation's toilers, and her name is revered at the altars of their humble firesides and will be lovingly remembered by their children and their children's children forever." Debs was wrong; few grandchildren ever heard of her exploits. Mother Jones fell victim to what the English historian E. P. Thompson has called "the enormous condescension of posterity." My purpose in writing this book is to resist such amnesia. The early decades of the twentieth century were filled with dissent and conflict; radicals helped foster a creative dialogue in American society. During the years of her greatest visibility, from the turn of the century through the early 1920s, Mother Jones had one of the most unique and powerful voices in that dialogue. One hundred years after she first appeared in the news, almost a fifth of America's children live in poverty. They are the children of Mother Jones. Working families struggling for decent lives are her heirs, too. Indeed, all who raise their voices against social injustice and resist the easy complacency of our times are the sons and daughters of Mother Jones. Copyright © 2001 Elliott J. GornIf you'd been present at one of the many violent miners' strikes that erupted during the late 1800s, you probably would have seen Mother Jones at the head of the crowd shouting those exact words. It must have been an amazing sight-a small, grandmotherly woman suddenly coming alive to fire up the proceedings with an explosive mix of passion and eloquence. She was a glorious study in contrasts, Mother Jones, meaning that the little granny who seemed the picture of innocence was actually, for a time, branded "the most dangerous woman in America."
What fueled the fires of Mother Jones' passion? Her own rock-solid beliefs, certainly, and probably two tragedies that marked her earlier years. In 1867, while living in Memphis, she lost her entire family-her husband and four children-to an epidemic of yellow fever. She moved to Chicago, but when the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 swept the city, she lost everything. The Great Fire brought her to the union movement. She turned to the unions for aid and was attracted to their crusade to improve the life of the working classes. Mother Jones decided to join their fight.
And with that decision was born one of the most effective labor leaders of all time. It is said that she could single-handedly keep a strike alive with her rhetoric. This talent made her famous with the unions, and despised by the strike-breaking companies they were fighting. The authorities began to target her for arrest, and she was thrown in jail too many times to count-even when she was in her eighties.
Well into her nineties, Mother Jones was fighting for the rights of garment, steel, and streetcar workers. Today, she is considered a heroine of the working classes. If the poor or the disadvantaged have a protecting saint, she might very well be seen in the stormy face of Mother Jones.
Excerpted from the book Cool Women with permission of publisher, Girl Press. Learn More About Mother Jones Mother Jones Autobiography
GLASS CELING BIOGRAPHIES
Aunt Molly Jackson, one tough women. Aunt Molly was an organizer for the National Miners’ Union. She was a nurse and a midwife. She chronicled the history of her people in songs and in stories. She suffered hardship and injustice and lived through the deaths of many dear ones but kept her spirit strong and kept her songs and stories alive. Rosalie Sorrels delivered her words as truly as she could speak them, but if you take the time, you can hear her speak them herself on an album called The Songs of Molly Jackson on Folkways Records where the songs are sung by John Greenway, but Aunt Molly’s own voice relates how the songs came to be.
"AUNT MOLLY JACKSON, her relatives from the fascist country of Harlan County, Kentucky, all come to Leadbelly's house almost every day.... AUNT MOLLY JACKSON would sing us an hour or two of Bloody Harlan County, songs of organizing the coal miners to beat the thugs of old Sheriff Blair. MOLLY told tales from her life as a mountaineer midwife, sung us the songs that she used to make the sweethearts lose their bashfulness, the husband and the wife go back to their bed, the lonesome ones take up a new heart, and the older ones to be in body and action as quick, as funny, as limber and as wise as the younguns coming up. MOLLY IS LIKE LEADBELLY. She is the woman Leadbelly. She is in her cotton apron what Leadbelly is in his bathrobe. She talks to him exactly as to her reflection in her mirror. He speaks back to her like the swamplands to the uplands, the same as his river would talk to her highest cliffrim. She loves him in the same half jealous way that he loves her, because he sees and feels in Aunt Molly the woman who has found in her own voice the same power on earth as he has found."
Only a miner, killed under the ground,
Only a miner, but one more is gone.
Only a miner but one more is gone,
Leaving his wife and dear children alone.
They leave their dear wives and little ones, too,
To earn them a living as miners all do.
Killed by some accident, there's no one can tell,
Their mining's all over, poor miners farewell!
Leaving his children thrown out on the street,
Barefoot and ragged and nothing to eat,
Mother is jobless, my father is dead,
I am a poor orphan, begging for bread.
When I am in Kentucky so often I meet,
Poor coal miners' children out on the street.
"What are you doing?" to them I have said,
We are hungry, Aunt Molly, and we're begging for bread."
"Will you please help us to get something to eat?
We are ragged and hungry, thrown out on the street."
"Yes, I will help you," to them I have said,
"To beg food and clothing, I will help you to get bread."
I woke up this morning, with the worst blues I ever had in my life;
Not a bite to eat for breakfast, a poor coal miner's wife!
When my husband works in the coalmines, he loads a carload every trip;
Then he goes to the office at the evening to get denied of scrip.
Just because they took all he made that day to pay his mine expense,
A man that will work for just coal oil and carbide, he ain't got a stack of sense.
All the women in the coal camps are sitting with bowed down heads,
Ragged and bare-footed, and the children cryin' for bread.
No food, no clothes for our children, I'm sure this head don't lie;
If we can't get more for our labor we'll starve to death and die!
Don't go under the mountain, with a slate hangin' o'er your head;
And work for just coal oil and carbide, and your children cryin' for bread.
This mining town I live in is a sad and lonely place
Where pity and starvation is pictured on every face!
Some coal operators might tell you the hungry blues are not there.
They're the worst kind of blues this poor woman ever had.
Monday, September 30, 2002 Rona Marech, Chronicle Staff Writer PROFILE Faith Petric It's all about the song for folk club's queen Lifelong activist's repertoire has 'em all beat.
It was getting on toward midnight, and the old Victorian in the Haight was crackling with music. In the front parlor, a dozen musicians jammed and hooted about hometowns and heartbreak, while bass, guitar and harmonica players cranked out swing music in the basement. And strumming away in the living room was Faith Petric, the 87-year-old grande dame of the household and presiding elder of the full-blown banjo- and guitar-laced sing-along. "If there were no poor and the rich were content," she sang in her papery voice, "it could be a wonderful world, oh yes, it could be a wonderful world."
The assembled loyalists know Petric as the Fort Knox of folk music -- a one- person San Francisco institution who has been holding jam sessions in her renowned fortress on the hill for the past 40 years. The octogenarian has been collecting music since childhood and protesting from the left since the Spanish Civil War. She plays host on alternate Fridays to the San Francisco Folk Club, writes a column in Sing Out! magazine, sings at monstrations with the Freedom Song Network and occasionally takes calls from folk legend Pete Seeger, who calls her "one of the most extraordinary people in the world."
Since retiring in 1970 -- yes, 1970 -- she's been an off-the-true-vine, full-time folkie, traveling, performing and singing about injustice, mother nature and, when she's feeling salacious, the unnecessary fuss over "wee-wees."
"Faith, to me, is a model of a folk singer. I mean someone who sings songs from our tradition, from common property that belongs to all of us," said storyteller and folk star Utah Phillips, whose first West Coast performance was in Petric's living room. "And she has been a role model as an activist. . . She gives all of us who are younger than her the courage to forge ahead." But please refrain from asking Petric whether music keeps her young -- or expect a dash of her signature saltiness.
"When I'm introduced as 86 years young, I could murder," she said on the eve of her 87th birthday bash jam. "I am not youthful. I'm oldful. "The idea that youth is the only time you're vital and interested -- that myth makes millions of dollars for people who want to make you feel there's something wrong with you. . . . Youth is all right, but that's only part of life."
Sometimes, she sings a song to this effect, one that friends love and routinely mention.
"We'll march again confound them all, don't quibble at my age," the final chorus of "Grandma's Battle Cry" goes, "I'll shield you with my brittle bones, I'll nourish you with rage Born in a log cabin in Idaho in 1915, Petric first learned music from her father, an itinerant Methodist preacher. They had an old pump organ at home, and the family would sing popular songs from the turn of the century. Later, she discovered cowboy songs -- dusty, sometimes wistful tunes about adventure and the Wild West. At one time, as a child trooping from one small Idaho town to the next, she imagined she could learn all the songs in the world.
By the time she was 13, her parents had split up. "I had what might be called a dysfunctional family," she said. She was sent away to live in a boarding house before heading off to Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash. After graduating, she made her way to San Francisco, and, like many women at that time, slipped in and out of the labor market for years. She worked for the state, then for a marketing research firm and, briefly, in a shipyard in Hoboken, N.J.
In 1945, she moved to Mexico for the year to give birth to her daughter. "Now, very few people blink an eye," she said, "but at that time, an illegitimate child was still a bugbear." She did marry once, when her daughter was 3, but it didn't last. "Ruined a good friendship," she said. All the while, music and activism shaped her life. In the '30s, as the Depression dragged on and the civil war in Spain raged, she became an unreconstructed "left-winger." She added anti-war and union songs to her music bank.
She learned to play the guitar.
Later, she marched for civil rights in Selma, Ala. She was the first one to stand up for the openly gay couple who moved into her neighborhood. She co- founded the Freedom Song Network and, with her like-minded, left-leaning cohorts, enlivened hundreds of protests with hopeful songs about peace and justice.
"If you learn a song, it stays with you," she said. "You don't remember a pamphlet."
That said, she gets awfully huffy at the suggestion that folk music begins and ends with protest songs. Folk music, she'll intone with a straight spine, includes love songs, cowboy music, ballads, lullabies, jazz, blues and bluegrass. "It tells the truth about history -- not just lessons from school about generals and robber barons and politicians. It's about the lives people lived and what happened to them. The tragedies, hopes, dreams -- all of that. . . . Folk music is what folks sing."
Or another way of putting it: "I ain't heard no horses singing it."
In 1948, Dave Rothkop founded the San Francisco Folk Club, "the legitimate child of Hiroshima and the Cold War," according to the group's literature. Petric began running the club in 1962, and before long, the Friday meetings had migrated to her Clayton Street home. The club has never advertised or so much as listed itself in the phone directory. It's just one of those under-the-radar San Francisco things. On a Friday night years ago, Greg Jones crawled into a cab with his guitar and directed the driver to the Haight. "Going to Faith's?" the cabbie asked. That's how it is: You play in the park or get in the right taxi and eventually, someone sends you to Petric's house.
Musicians know they can learn songs or just jam all night, when the impulse strikes. The sessions end when the last person leaves.
"It's kind of like extended family in some sense. It's like people hanging out, playing on their porches," said Richard Rice, 43. "You don't find that much anymore." With a folk revival stirring, several dozen people and half as many guitars will materialize on a busy night. Sixty showed up for Petric's birthday celebration last week. Still, it pales in comparison to the old days, when as many as 100 folkniks regularly would crowd into five sweaty rooms, playing bluegrass in one, swing in another, country-western music somewhere else.
"There'd be so many people in the living room, you couldn't sit down," Petric said.
At one such meeting in 1972, Petric first decided to become a performer. In her kitchen late one night, five folk clubbers dreamed up the Portable Folk Music Festival. They bought an old school bus, and 15 people and one dog set out to tour the country. They returned some months later with 18 people and two dogs.
"I got bit by the bug. I loved it," Petric said. "From then on, I became a traveling folkie."
Since she retired at 55 from a job at the former state Department of Rehabilitation, she's devoted as much as half the year to playing at festivals, clubs and protests around the world. She traveled through England with another Folk Club entourage, Frisco Fire Band. She's a fixture at folk gatherings such as the Old Songs Festival and the Hudson River Revival. In 1998 and 2001, she toured Australia.
"All of your life, someone dictates what you have to do," she said. "Then you retire and at last you can do what you want to do."
This summer, Petric played at the Oregon Country Fair. She traveled to Puget Sound for a guitar workshop. She sang at an anti-nuclear protest on the anniversary of Hiroshima. As she has for 20 years, she toured with the Chautauqua Group, which brings a variety show to small towns that have little live theater. Her voice has thinned, and she plays just enough guitar to accompany herself. Nothing fancy, she says. But underneath the long, gray hair and the workaday glasses is a natural performer who knows just when to bend a note or raise an eyebrow.
She likes to trot out on stage and zing the audience with lyrics like, "If you haven't got a penis, you can't become a priest" or 'It's only a wee-wee, so what's the big fuss?"
"She can go on in a crowded place where people are talking. Very few acts can do this. Suddenly, she gets the crowd quiet," Rice said. "Who can explain that quality? She looks at you when she's singing. She's got that look on her face. She's right there. She knows how to work that room." To boot, her ability to remember tunes is legendary. "She knows so damn many songs," Phillips said. "If you get stuck for a song -- you remember a fragment or heard a rumor, you can call up Faith and chances are that she knows it." Or if she doesn't, he added, she can probably find it in her extensive collection of folk records, books and publications.
Petric claims her memory occasionally confounds her these days. "Before, any song I wanted to sing was there," she said. There were hundreds and hundreds. "Now I have to rehearse songs before I go on stage." Nonetheless, she knew more -- many, many more -- lyrics than anyone else at the recent Friday night folk gathering. As always, when someone stumbled with the words, she'd gently pick up the loose strand and nudge him along, singing "The bankers and the diplomats are going in the army," or "We're gonna keep on walking forward . . . never turning back."
The banjo and the guitars flickered in and out. The fire in the living room blazed. Sometimes a smile played on her lips. There was a tune she particularly brightened at, the one about the Buenos Aires mouse who chewed through the cables and brought business to a halt -- a true story, someone said. "Hurray for the little mouse who f-- up the clearing house!" She giggled there before drawing out the last line. "If one little mouse can set them all awry --" Beat.
"Why not you and I?"
Rona Marech
It’s blowing in the wind again it’s drifting in the rain
Before the dead have moldered yet or wounded healed their pain
I am so old my children that I remember when
I marched to hail the armistice and I was barely ten.
That was the war against all war, to save
I marched for Spain when some years passed and marched and marched and then
Another war to end all war and so I marched again;
I marched in Minneapolis, Chicago and Duluth
In San Francisco and New York I marched to shout the truth.
I marched in Hiroshima and knelt before a stash
Of tens of millions bones of people atomized to ash,
And with the distant tumble of new regiments of men
I read the warning on the tomb: “This must not come again.”
Chorus
I marched to staunch Korea’s blood, I marched for Vietnam,
I march to stop the napalm and I marched to stop the bomb.
I’ve marched and marched and marched, oh lord,
I’m sure I’ve done my due
I’ve marched since I was barely 10 and now I’m 72.
I should be lying in the sun or dreaming in the grass
But how when generals everywhere are polishing their brass?
Entranced with dreams of four-star roles, so help me Lord, they’re glad!
It’s said that whom the Gods destroy they first must render mad.
Their burning eyes see no man’s lands and armies posed for action,
And you my warm and loving ones you’re merely an abstraction.
It’s geopolitics again, and oh, with what finesse
The players push their pawns about, these masterminds of chess.
How cunningly they plot each move, how skillfully they spar.
And checkmate one another like the maters that they are.
How stimulating, how intense, a word to lose or gain,
Except for one dismaying fact: the players are insane.
Composed, dispassionate they play this game that madness spawns,
And I can’t even look away. My children are the pawns.
Chorus
Some people keep on fighting when they’ve lost an arm or leg,
Some still keep up the struggle when they’re fragile as an egg;
I’ve heard men shouting “I object!” with voices turned to gravel,
I’ve seen a woman raise a fist who couldn’t lift a gavel,
And even with a broken heart one still can make a stand
So lead my children, lead the way, reach back and take my hand.
We’ll march again, confound then all, don’t quibble at my age!
I’ll shield you with my brittle bones, I’ll nourish you with rage!
Chorus (add: We’ll march again, confound them all don’t quibble at my age!
I’ll shield you with my brittle bones, I’ll nourish you with rage!)
Malvina Reynolds The Magic Penny Award, named after the song by Malvina Reynolds, is a Children's Music Network tribute to people in our community who have dedicated their lives to empowering children through music. It is the intent of CMN to give this award annually, at our national gathering, to honor the lifetime achievement of someone whose work most embodies our mission. In October 1999 the first award was given posthumously to Malvina herself, through her daughter, Nancy Schimmel. More info from Nancy Schimmel about her mother, Malvina Reynolds
Let's Go Dancing Till the Break of Day: A Remembrance of Malvina Reynolds by Nancy Schimmel From Pass It On! Issue #35 (Spring 2000) My mother, Malvina Reynolds, once told me that when she was young, she would lie in bed and imagine that she was onstage, dancing, with a spotlight following her. She wanted to be a movie star, but she assumed that that would never happen, so she decided she'd be a teacher instead and work a smaller stage. Although she never actually taught except briefly as a student in college, she did reach center stage in her own way performing the songs she wrote. Malvina recorded 6 albums for adults and 3 for children and kept writing and performing until a few days before her death at the age of 77.
She was born in San Francisco on August 23, 1900. Music was always a part of her life. To wake up his children in the morning, her father would wind up the phonograph and play a record. Her parents didn't have much money, but they saw to it that their children had violin lessons. When Malvina and her brother grew up, they both played violin in dance bands.
Malvina, who dreamt of being onstage and eventually realized that dream, was a shy person. As she herself wrote, I was a lonely child; I can't remember any friends in grade school except Esther. Why she picked quiet, shy me for a friend, I don't know. She was bold, laughing, quick. She would sit back of me in school and slowly pull one hair out of my braid. Miss Geary would say, "Hit her! With your ruler!" I never would. I liked Miss Geary. I intended to be a teacher, and would be like her-a good sport.... I am still shy with people. I can easily face and talk with and sing to a hundred or a thousand. But at a party, next to a stranger, I haven't much to say.
Malvina found friends, but she didn't often find a group she fit into: The times I have been happiest were the rare times when I was one of a gang.... I had a kind of gang when we lived on Buchanan Street [in San Francisco]. I must have been seven or eight. We would sit in the light of the street lamp in the evening on the high wooden flight of stairs, a dozen of us, and while the bigger boys played "One Foot Off the Gutter," I would make up long stories to tell the others. I don't remember what the stories were about, but they must have been interesting; I can remember the young voices in the evening, calling me to come out.
Malvina's worldview was strongly shaped by hearing her parents discuss politics with their friends. They were socialists, and she said that that view "always made sense" to her. They were also openly opposed to U.S. participation in the First World War, which they considered an imperialist war. In fact, on the morning of her high-school graduation exercises, Malvina was warned by a friendly teacher that she and her cousin were to be refused their diplomas in front of everybody because of her parents' political views.
I had first come to the attention of the principal's office with a premature women's liberation movement on the school grounds. At noon, the boys could leave the grounds to play around on the streets and to get hot dogs, hamburgers, coffee, and pop at the little store across the street. I circulated a petition that the girls be allowed out of the yard at noon also. The answer was no. It wasn't proper for girls to be on the street. [The girls then asked that the boys be restricted, and were told] if the school tried to restrict the boys they'd just climb the fence. Probably in the same situation now, the girls would climb the fence. Then, nothing happened except that quiet, shy me was fingered as a troublemaker.
It was while she was in high school that Malvina first met William "Bud" Reynolds, at a socialist dance. He was a merchant seaman, seven years older, handsome, and even more shy than she. He was self-educated, having left school after the eighth grade. They read poetry to each other in Golden Gate Park, but when he proposed, she refused. Encouraged by her mother, she had her sights set on college and a career. She got into the University of California at Berkeley without a high-school diploma, and it was while doing graduate work in English there that she did some student teaching. She used pop songs to teach her high-school students about rhyme scheme and meter, as they were not poetry readers. Malvina found her "gang"-her compatible, accepting group - in the English Department at UCB and stayed around to get "all the degrees possible," as she says in Love It Like a Fool, the film documentary made about her. She married someone else, and so did Bud. He ran for governor of Michigan on the Socialist ticket, with the slogan, "You provide the evictions, we'll provide the riots!" They found each other again after she was divorced, and this time she said yes.
My mother was writing her dissertation when I was little and got her PhD in 1936. But it was the middle of the Depression; she was Jewish, a socialist, and a woman; and she couldn't get a job teaching. But when the Second World War broke out, she got a job on an assembly line in a bomb factory, and Bud went to work as a carpenter in a shipyard. My mother came from a long line of women who worked outside the home. Her grandmother ran a deli while her husband read Torah. Her own mother and father ran a naval tailor shop. When I was in the fifth grade, my mother's father died, and she and my father and grandmother ran the shop together. While my father worked as a carpenter and organizer and ran the family business with my mother, he also changed my diapers, and he made breakfast most mornings. He encouraged and helped my mother in her songwriting career, but he made the decisions about money. My mother wasn't always happy with them. He died seven years before she did, and while she missed him terribly, she told me it did give her a certain satisfaction to be making her own business decisions.
Malvina had always written newspaper articles about her factory days, as well as poems, stories, and the occasional song but she didn't begin songwriting in earnest until she was about 45. A songwriting group had formed in Los Angeles around Earl Robinson and the People's Songs crowd (the People's Songs Bulletin was the forerunner of Sing Out! magazine.) Her first songs were for adults. She did write "Magic Penny" early on, but didn't think of it as a song for young children. She was writing the line "Let's go dancing till the break of day" while I was at one of those awkward junior-high dances. I'm sure she was wishing she was dancing, too my father didn't dance, and I was my mother's folk-dance partner). There were strong political statements made in many of my mother's songs, but it was often done with humor, gentleness, and poetic images. Of course the humor and gentleness were basic to her children's songs, but she could make points there, too. For example, her song against drug use, "It's Up To You," starts out whimsical, saying, "You might have been born a ladybug, you might have been born a bat"; but it gets serious eventually, when it says, "You were born a being with a mind and a voice, and the power of choice."
Although she gradually began to write more children's songs, Malvina was careful to point out that she didn't exactly fit the stereotype of the children's performer and songwriter. In a workshop on children's music that she gave at the Pied Piper Music Festival in 1977, she said, I don't think of myself primarily as a writer of children's songs. In fact, I tend to avoid that title, because the first thought is, you know, this nice old grandma who makes cookies and sings for kids, and that's not my character at all. I have a very acid edge toward many aspects of modern life, and I'm pretty outspoken about it. I don't mind crossing swords with people when I disagree with them, and I'm not your nice old grandma. However, I always make it clear that the reason I have this sharp cutting edge is because I do care for people. I care about children, and I think the world is ripping them off, taking away their natural environment and much more than that-the natural progression of their tradition-and leaving them stripped, uneasy, uncomfortable, and in deep trouble, and it's because of that that I'm so sharp. Julie Thompson, producer of several of Malvina's albums, interviewed her on the radio in Los Angeles in 1977. In answering a question about children writing their own songs, Malvina said, Now, the spoken voice has rhythm and a kind of preliminary...melody line, and that's why we have national music, because the music takes its rhythms and tunes from the spoken language. That's why it's so hard to translate songs....When children are playing or talking, they're often singing, and you can pick up on something like that and turn it into a song. They love it, but they do it themselves. They'll say, "Ha-ha, look what you did!" and there's a little song, or, "Maaama-I don't want it,” and you've got a song. Anything that's said expressively and with emphasis will work, and if you let it ride on that, you'll find they'll be making up songs in no time at all. If we take a constructive attitude...and don't expect them to have perfect rhythm or perfect pitch...and don't give them the idea that they can't do it, they will. My husband was told that he couldn't sing. His family all had fine voices, and I guess his wasn't as good. They used to make him shut up, and all of his life he wouldn't sing, except when my daughter was a little bitty girl. He would sing for her, and she thought he had the most beautiful voice in the world! In answer to a question about using traditional songs with children,
Malvina said, People don't realize that many of these lovely, clever, funny children's songs that have come down to us are not transmitted from parent to child, but from one generation of children to another. The younger ones hear the older ones sing the songs, play the games, and make up the instruments, and then they carry it on to the next generation. And it's a whole world of its own. A great many songs now are created for children by grown-ups, but I try myself to get into a purer frame of mind when I'm singing for them, in the sense that I'm trying to speak directly and not let a whole lot of over-civilizing, over-perfecting, or mechanical influences get between me and the listener. So perhaps some of my songs will someday get to be part of that kind of tradition, which I would love to see happen. Copyright 2000 Nancy Schimmel
Nancy Schimmel is a storyteller, author, and award-winning songwriter (a late bloomer in this regard, as her mother was), living in Berkeley, California. Note: Much of the material quoted in this article is taken from a radio interview and notes from a workshop on children's music given by Malvina at the 1977 Pied Piper Music Festival. These are used with permission from Nancy Schimmel. The entire interview and notes appear in Patty Zeitlin's book, A Song Is a Rainbow (Scott, Foresman, 1982). Other quotes are taken from Malvina's unfinished autobiography. More info from Nancy Schimmel about her mother, Malvina Reynolds
Like a mountain's there to climb
And food's there to be eaten,
Woman's there to rape
To be shoved around and beaten.
CHORUS:
The judge took his position,
The judge he wouldn't budge,
So we've got out this petition
And we're going to screw the judge.
Now if you beat a horse or dog
Or violate a bank,
Simonson will haul you in
And throw you in the clink,
But violate a woman,
Your equal and your peer,
The judge will slap you on the wrist
And lay the blame on her.
CHORUS
To draw a true conclusion
From what Simonson has said,
Woman has to live in fear
And cover up her head.
She has to dress in prudish
And lock herself in cages.
And this kinky judge in Madison
Is from the Middle Ages.
NEW CHORUS:
The judge took his position,
The judge he wouldn't budge,
So we've got out this petition
And we're going to dump the judge.
ACTIVIST SONG WRITERS
ACTIVIST WEB SITES
ANIMAL RIGHTS
CURRENT ISSUES
END OF FOSSIL
FEMALE ACTIVIST
INFORMATION and SERVICES
LABOR ISSUES
LAUGHING HORSE BOOKS
PEACE MAKERS
PETE'S WRITINGS
PETITION IN DEFENSE OF IRAQI WOMEN
PROGRESSIVE MEDIA
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
UPCOMING EVENTS
WAR ON THE UNIVERSE