Mediaboss Marketing

Before he leapt into everyone's Twitter feeds by snatching a Confederate flag from protesters, local Black Lives Matter organizer Muhiyidin d'Baha had long been one of the Charleston area's most vocal activists. With so many people hoping to get started in mobilizing others behind a cause, City Paper reached out to d'Baha for advice on how to effectively organize and address local problems.

Tip No. 1: The first one I think is most helpful is don't prescribe unless you can describe. It's really learning about how to describe the impact of a policy decision or the impact of a situation from a first-person perspective. If you can't do it from a first-person perspective then don't prescribe a solution because you could be actually exacerbating the problem and that might have unintended consequences in the future.

Building on Needs: The second part would be to build out of our needs, out of our real self needs. Centering folks on how a particular policy decision actually impacts them or people they know and then building solutions out of a felt need, so it's grounded and real and it's organic and natural and not conceptual and abstract. That's really important because it gives us longevity to our work. We do a lot less talking and a lot more acting when it's a real, felt need that we have or people that we know have.

Organizing: Organizing friend networks and leveraging social media connections is super important. It's hard to overestimate how important it is in this age of organizing. If folks can literally identify 10 friends that they can bring to action or to protest or to a city council meeting and if we can have 100 people that can organize 10 of their friends and those 10 friends can come out, then we have a reliable base of 1,000 people in town that can show up to support.

Awareness: What we're trying to move from is an awareness-raising element because we've already developed that. That's really important for folks to understand. While they might be activated because of other people who have already organized and raised their awareness, we don't need more people to raise awareness. We need more people to start working on actually developing solutions and organizing our presence within spaces where decisions are made. We need a little less demonstration that's built around awareness raising and much more strategic organizing that's actually influencing the halls of the power and influencing the discourses, the public discourse in particular.

Natives: Another element, especially down here, is that we want to have organizing that centers natives, that centers people that have lived in Charleston. One of the things that I'm experiencing and I'm really disturbed by right now is just how many people who aren't from here are shaping the public discourse and are shaping the public policy. There are conversations that people that have lived here haven't been able to have, even between each other yet. The segregated schools, for instance, that existed way before there was a real estate boom in Charleston and way before gentrification really picked up at the pace it is now. So there's still a conversation that the native community has to have to resolve and to create a solid foundation so we don't replicate some of the sourness that might be in the soil.

Centering Voices: The centering of women's voices is absolutely critical. Down here, men dominate the religious space. Men dominate the political space and the activist space so much of the time that what are identified as "community leaders" are men, so we're really trying to be intentional about uplifting especially women of color and especially trans and queer women of color to really offer their voice. Anybody who's organizing has to be conscious of not replicating the same kind of patriarchy and the marginalization of women's voices that's been going.

Neighborhoods: At a neighborhood base level is where organizing happens. Where you live and the neighborhood association and what's happening in your geographic location, in your neighborhood school, those are the spaces that we need a lot more organizing happening. It's not helpful to have a bunch of people coming from a bunch of different places coming together and one person being recognized as the leader of this amorphous, nebulous group that really doesn't have any long-lasting and sustainable ties to each other because they don't live near each other. I guess the moral of the story there is to do neighborhood-based organizing and don't do such so much issue-based organizing.

Communicate: I think community communication across front lines is super critical. Developing it so the community calendar just focuses on social action in community organizing is absolutely necessary, and we need as many people's help as possible to uplift some of the tools we have. Charleston GOOD (an online grassroots incubator and media outlet) actually has a community-building calendar embedded into it that we utilize a lot.

Collaboration: The recommendation is that instead of everybody organizing their own events for their own specific issues, we look at a weekend and we look at a Saturday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. We figure out a location where we can all go, and we all take one or two hours for our specific issue and we spend a day together listening to each other, organizing each other, leveraging and sharing resources, so folks don't keep on replicating the same kind of dynamics where the people that have the most money or access to the most money are able to get heard the most. If we create platforms that are collaborative, then we can eliminate some of those dynamics.

Resource sharing is absolutely important. I think the culture of resource sharing is what we want to develop. Why it's so hard for us to mobilize together as a community is because we're in individual silos. For the new organizers that are coming in, please join an organization but also push your organization to be in communication with as many other organizations that are operating within the space.

Online vs. Reality: What we're doing is we're exploring a new way of communicating and a new way of organizing in which we organize virtually. We want to express in physical reality then we want to bring that expression back into virtual reality to reflect on and to have that generate some more energy so we can express it in physical reality. There is a dance there that we're learning how to do so we don't get caught up in the social media world because in the social media world we can have 3,500 people that are coming to an event and we can have 100,000 people that have watched a video. But when it comes to a city council meeting to actually push the work forward, it's hard getting people to come out.

Final Tip: Make sure that you're paying young people, especially high schoolers, to do your canvassing and to do your social media engagement. I can't emphasize that enough. Make sure you pay young people to do community engagement because they'll do it so much better than any of us.

View post:
Advice on organizing from Black Lives Matter Charleston's Muhiyidin d'Baha - Charleston City Paper

But on May 4, 1918, Johnson grabbed a two-inch bolo knife and a splintered rifle and did something so remarkable that he earned another name: "Black Death."

Johnson was a US sergeant standing sentry one night in a French forest when a German raiding party attacked. The swarming Germans shot Johnson in his lip, head and side. Yet Johnson kept shooting back. When his rifle jammed, he grabbed it by the barrel and clubbed more Germans. Then he used the bolo knife to stab and disembowel another enemy soldier. He kept throwing grenades until he fainted from blood loss.

When his comrades found Johnson the next morning, they discovered he had killed four Germans and wounded about 20 more. They could still see the bloody trails of wounded Germans who had crawled into the woods to escape Johnson's fury. Johnson had been wounded 21 times but somehow survived the hourlong battle.

"There wasn't anything so fine about it," Johnson would say later when praised for his gallantry. "Just fought for my life. A rabbit would have done that."

Johnson's story captures what's distinctive about the film. He was a black soldier who faced something even more lethal than German bayonets when he returned home. He discovered an America that was also at war with itself. Some of the most ferocious battles during World War I took place not in Europe but on the streets of America -- and some are still being fought today.

What should the President do when a foreign dictator is accused of murdering women and children? Does the US welcome too many immigrants? Are corporations too powerful? Are women treated like second-class citizens? Those might seem like questions ripped from today's headlines, yet they literally provoked riots and lynch mobs during World War I, the film shows.

Few people today, however, know how relevant the war remains because it seems so distant, trapped forever in wobbly black-and-white silent film, historians say.

Here are three battles from "The Great War" the United States is still waging:

They speak in funny accents and don't care about fitting in. So many are pouring across the border that they're threatening the American way of life. They're not real Americans.

That's what many Americans thought of German-Americans during World War I.

If you think political battles over immigration are tough today, they were vicious when America entered World War I, "The Great War" shows. A wave of hysteria aimed at German-Americans swept the nation as it struggled to assimilate what was then its largest ethnic group.

America didn't just declare war on Germany -- it waged war on German-American culture. Newspapers warned of "German troublemakers" and "German traps." People refused to drink German beer, and children were instructed to rip German songs out of music books. In one Ohio town, officials slaughtered all dogs belonging to German breeds.

A German-American coal miner accused of being a spy was even attacked by a mob, stripped of his clothes and hanged from a tree, the film reveals. The Washington Post applauded the mob's actions.

It was a time of demographic panic. When World War I erupted in Europe in 1914, the United States had a population of about 100 million immigrants. Millions of other Americans had parents who were born abroad.

Those citizens who didn't fit the definition of a "real American" faced persecution and torture. One of the most wrenching segments in the film looks at the story of three US citizens who became conscientious objectors to the war. They were David, Michael and Joseph Hofer, otherwise known as the "Hofer brothers."

The three South Dakota men were members of the Hutterites, a group of Christian pacifists. Hutterite men already drew suspicion because they wore long beards and hair and spoke German.

When the Hofer brothers were drafted, they refused to fight or wear a uniform. They were imprisoned in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and brutally treated. They were denied food and water, forced to stand in freezing temperatures with scant clothing, and chained in a cell for up to nine hours a day. Two of them died. But none recanted their religious beliefs.

As a final indignity, the body of one of the two brothers who died was dressed in the military uniform he refused to wear when he was alive.

Brutality wasn't confined to the trenches of Europe. There was plenty of it in the streets of America.

When President Donald Trump dispatched Tomahawk missiles to an air base in Syria last week after the country's ruler was accused of launching lethal chemical attacks, he was operating from a script first penned by President Woodrow Wilson during World War I.

It was Wilson who said America should enter the war to make the world "safe for democracy." The notion that America had a moral responsibility to respond militarily to atrocities abroad began during World War I, "The Great War" shows.

"The modern version of the United States is born in this war," says Carlin, the "Hardcore" podcast historian.

"The Great War" also shows how the idealism of war can be used to crush populist movements.

World War I occurred during a surge of progressive activism in the United States. The labor movement was powerful, and socialists, communists and anarchists were common figures in public life. Women were leading the anti-war effort as well as crusading for the right to vote.

Yet much of this progressive momentum was halted by a crushing of popular dissent by the federal government, the film shows.

During the war, Wilson signed the Espionage Act and Sedition Act, which made it illegal to say almost anything against the United States or its war effort. Criticism of the US became dangerous. American internment camps didn't begin with the Japanese in World War II. The US government created them for political prisoners during World War I, the film shows.

That suppression even targeted one of the most famous progressive leaders of the time, Eugune Debs. Debs was the Bernie Sanders of his day. A socialist labor organizer and presidential candidate, he was arrested in 1918 for giving an anti-war speech and sentenced to 10 years in prison under the Espionage Act.

Wilson ultimately paid a price for his clampdown on radical and liberal groups. After the war ended, he tried to create a League of Nations that would mediate international disputes and prevent another world war from erupting. But he couldn't get the US Senate to agree to join the League, in part because his crackdown on anti-war activity had alienated or weakened any potential progressive allies.

Wilson would die of a stroke just six years later. He is depicted in the film as a tragic figure -- idealistic but deeply racist, a gifted politician who could have seen his League of Nations succeed if he had just bent a little to his political opposition.

She was born to a prosperous Quaker family in New Jersey but spent her life reviled by much of the American public. She was attacked by angry mobs and force-fed in prison after going on a hunger strike. Once, prison officials even tried to declare her insane.

Nevertheless, Alice Paul persisted.

One of the revelations of "The Great War" is the prominence of American women in the debate about World War I. It was a time of surging women's activism that would culminate in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote.

Paul is one of the most fascinating characters in "The Great War." She would have fit right in with the massive Women's March on Washington the day after Trump was inaugurated. She placed relentless pressure on Wilson by asking how America could fight for democracy abroad while denying women the right to vote at home.

Black American soldiers fought some of the same battles to proclaim their humanity, the film points out.

When many entered the war, they were initially kept from the fighting by being assigned to clean latrines pits and unload supplies. Some were paired with French fighting units, who treated them with more respect than their white counterparts. Some of the most moving images from the film show black soldiers smiling and bantering easily with French troops.

"Folks didn't think about the etiquette of white supremacy any more than a fish thinks about the wetness of water. But when you step out of a system that people have told you is the only way, and then you look around and there are these people in the world working under a different set of rules, it changes people's imagination."

White America, though, wasn't ready for this New Negro. When these black soldiers returned home, many were greeted by the "Red Summer," often described as a wave of deadly race riots that swept through at least 25 American cities in 1919.

Calling them race riots, though, doesn't fully capture what happened, says Lentz-Smith, author of "Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I."

"You say riots and people think breaking shop windows and stealing stuff," she says. "They don't have a sense of what white mob violence really looks like. This is going into a black community on a rampage, trying to destroy black wealth, trying to hurt or kill black people. Folks say they're more akin to pogroms in the Jewish communities than any kind of riots we're seeing now."

This is the world Sgt. Johnson returned to after his heroic exploits in France. The French army awarded him its highest medal for valor. But the US Army didn't mention his 21 wounds in his discharge papers or give him disability pay. He returned to his job as a railway porter in Albany, New York, but his injuries made it impossible to continue.

Johnson's health faded as he descended into alcoholism and poverty. His wife and children left him, and he died in 1929 at age 32. His descendants believed he was buried in a pauper's grave.

But Johnson's story still had a surprise or two left.

A son, Herman, would join the famed Tuskegee Airmen during World War II and eventually lead a campaign to commemorate his father. Politicians got involved. A monument was built in Albany to honor Johnson. And the US Army awarded him a posthumous Medal of Honor.

But the Army's highest decoration for valor came with a strange twist. During its research, the Army discovered that Herman Johnson wasn't actually related to the man he thought was his father. The Army attributed Johnson's mistake to "historical inaccuracy, not fraudulent representation."

Then something else happened.

It turned out Johnson was never buried in a pauper's grave. Someone remembered the soldier known as "Black Death." He had been buried with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery, the final resting place for famous American soldiers such as Gen. George C. Marshall, President John F. Kennedy and World War II hero Audie Murphy.

Henry Johnson started as a railroad porter, then became the "Black Death." Ultimately the Great War left him with one last title:

American hero.

See more here:
From Syria to Black Lives Matter: 3 ways WWI still shapes America - CNN

Black Lives Matter Cincinnati (BLMC) hosted a discussion about the Cameo Nightclub shooting, as well as police and race relations on Saturday in the Bush Recreation Center in Walnut Hills.

At the start of the meeting, the organization stated that the police were unwelcome and asked any law enforcement present to leave.

Ashley Harrington, a member of the BLMC Steering Committee, began the discussion with a presentation on crime, legality and the circumstances that have hindered black people.

Crime and legality are both social constructs in the U.S. that are tied to class, race and capitalism, Harrington said.

She compared todays mass incarceration to slavery of the past. Todays prison system exists only as a form of free labor, said Harrington.

Harrington defined social alienation, which is an intentional high degree of distance between individuals and the society they live in.

There was equal representation of both races, as well as a variety of ages, and an almost equal amount of men and women in the room.

Three members of the Steering Committee that were present shared their ideas about police relations. All of the speakers agreed that police do not help, but only further create violence and fear within primarily black communities.

BLMC showed a video of Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters, purportedly saying, "Cameo had a lot of people in there who are not good peoplethe majority had criminal records."

The event included a moment of silence for all of the victims of the shooting and their families.

Following that, the speakers discussed ways for communities to rise up together and respond to police brutality together, and then they proposed coming up with a uniform solution in which all communities could respond together.

At the end of the meeting, all of the people in the room were given the opportunity to ask questions and share ideas.

A lot of the discussion centered on gun violence.

Throughout the meeting, the main idea was to combat the current narrative and representation of black people in the media, to reduce police presence in Cincinnati and to build a sense of community among those living in this city.

We cant allow for this rhetoric that it is the fault of the black community, said BLMC Steering Committee member and University of Cincinnati student Mona Jenkins. We are going to stand up and respond to this. We need to start creating community opportunities for ourselves because others are not going to do it.

Jenkins spoke about issues like the closure of the Walnut Hills Kroger that many residents have relied on for years, as well as the opening of a gifted school in the area while the neighborhood school is failing.

Some leaders of Black Lives Matter Cincinnati offered information on black psychologists for anyone struggling with mental illness or coping with loss after the Cameo shooting.

More here:
Black Lives Matter Cincinnati discusses Cameo shooting - The News Record

AlterNet

Watch: SNL Hilariously Mocks Pepsi's 'Tone Deaf' Commercial that Exploits Black Lives Matter Protests AlterNet Since premiering the ad earlier this week, PepsiCo has taken a beating from the public and the press for co-opting Black Lives Matter and various other socially conscious protest movements in a cynical attempt to sell soda, resulting in a public ... Pepsi's uncool attempt to borrow a Black Lives Matter imageMiami Herald (blog) Kendall Jenner's Controversial Pepsi Ad Sparks Black Lives Matter DebateCBS Baltimore / WJZ Infamous Pepsi Kendall Jenner Cop Video shot in Thailand, Actors Clueless As To Racial Anglelegal Insurrection (blog) Daily Caller -Washington Post -RollingStone.com -PepsiCo all 324 news articles »

Continued here:
Watch: SNL Hilariously Mocks Pepsi's 'Tone Deaf' Commercial that Exploits Black Lives Matter Protests - AlterNet

Screenshots via Facebook and Breitbart

Their online mentions are not great.

Apr 05 2017 11:00 am

Right-wing media outlets including Breitbart, TheBlaze and Drudge Reportspent the last two days postingaboutBlack Lives Matter Philly, saying the groups black-only April meeting discriminates against white people.

But the organization, which has designated black-centered spaces since its inception in 2015, is defending the practice and asking critics to check their civil rights history.

Black-centered spaces provide black people with the opportunity to come together to strategize, organize and heal in fellowship without the fear of violence and co-optation, said L. Williams, a BLM Philly member who requested Billy Penn not publish her first name for safety purposes.

Earlier this week, Black Lives Matter Philly an affiliate of the national Black Lives Matter organization advertised its April 15 open meeting, noting this is a black only space.When someone tweeted at the organization Monday morning regarding the policy, they pointed out that Malcolm X took our same stance and replied that anyone who identifies as a person of the African Diaspora was welcome to attend. If not, you can support us in other ways.

By Monday afternoon, The Daily Caller published an article titled Black Lives Matter Philly Bans White People From Its Meetingsand Breitbart wrote white people banned from Black Lives Matter meetings in Philadelphia.Later that day, Drudge Report tweeted out the Daily Caller article to its more than 1.1 million Twitter followers. The Blazealso published an article about it Tuesday.

This morning, Black Lives Matter Philly released a lengthy statement about the backlash, writing We are unapologetically Black and believe having Black only spaces where Black people can come together to strategize, organize, heal and fellowship without the threat of violence and co-optation is an important part of Black liberation.

The organization wrote that the idea of black-only spaces is associated with the teachings of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Marcus Garvey and other black leaders. The teachings, they wrote, saythat we, Black people, are in the best position to define and create our own plan and path towards freedom and liberation based upon our own unique experiences as Black people in the United States.

They continued:

BLM Philly isnt the first or the only membership organization to restrict access to certain spaces based on a variety of criteria. There are religious ceremonies and events that people cannot attend unless they are a member of that faith.There is a huge difference between a systematic denial of a persons access to public spaces such as restaurants, hotels, schools and hospitals simply based on their skin color, and saying that a meeting is a Black-centered space. Trying to compare legal segregation and structural racism to lack of access to our meetings is a false dichotomy and the epitome of privilege.

Williams said Black Lives Matter Philly has routinely held meetings considered black-centered spaces, but this is the first time theyve dealt with widespread backlash.She said the grouproutinely directs others toward other organizations they can get involved with, including the Philly chapter of Standing Up for Racial Justice, a national organization that aims to mobilize white people for racial justice, POWER, Philly for REAL Justice and other groups in the city.

She said despite the relentless online attacks, Black Lives Matter Philly remains dedicated to hosting events with black-centered spaces.

Its been tiring, Williams said. Were trying to actively work to end white supremacy and racism, and our entire last 36 hours we have spent having to defend our position.

Go here to see the original:
How Black Lives Matter Philly is responding to 36 hours of right-wing media attacks - Billy Penn