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“Crazy Dion” Diamond at one of his sit-ins as a teenager in Arlington, VA. June 10, 1960

via reddit

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I listened in amazement to the story of how the Soviet Union had solved the problems of economic inequality among the various nationalities in a period of 20 years. This accomplishment was all the more breathtaking in view of the fact that many of these nationalities had been nomadic tribes which had not even reached the feudal stage of social development. Many had no written language and lived at a social level characteristic of about 1000 A.D. The professors were somewhat embarrassed that it had taken so long to achieve these results. But, thought I, if within 20 years after the establishment of a socialist America, [African-Americans ]can erase the ill effects of 300 years of persecution and oppression, I, for one, would be highly satisfied. The Soviet achievement was all the more remarkable because it was accomplished during a period which included counter-revolution, civil war and World War II. Furthermore, during these years the Soviet Union had to depend entirely on its own resources.

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Soviet successes in promoting economic equality of different peoples have been accompanied by achievements of equal magnitude in the sphere of education. Of these, Professor G. Glezerman writes: "An educational newspaper estimated in 1906 that it would take at least 4,600 years to wipe out illiteracy among the Central Asian peoples. According to the most optimistic estimate, it said, the Tajiks, if they survived as a people, could expect to be literate in the year 6500. The Soviet State, however, wiped out illiteracy in the Central Asian Republics in two decades."

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Before the revolution Bashkira's 198 schools were run entirely by priests. Today the Republic has 5,000 elementary and secondary schools, 60 specialized secondary schools, seven colleges and a university. One out of every four inhabitants is engaged in some form of study. Bashkira has 20 research institutes. Employed in its educational and research establishments are 158,000 specialists, including 54 holding the degree of doctor of science and 777 candidates of science. Before the revolution Bashkira did not even have an alphabet or literary language of its own. Today it publishes about 500 books annually, in a total printing of 3,000,000 copies. It has seven professional theaters, 3,000 cultural recreation centers and 2,000 libraries.

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Soviet society is not perfect. Old habits are not easily changed; and, even after many years of Soviet power, many ideological problems remain. But only a utopian dreamer or a peddler of dishonest ideas would attempt to blow up minor defects out of all proportion to their place in the totality.

Whatever ideological problems in regard to racial or national chauvinism the Communist Party and the Soviet government have yet to overcome, the central fact is that the Soviet people have shown the world that racism is not inherent in man. They have shown that once the exploiting classes are removed from power, once exploitation is abolished, the various races of mankind can live in peace.

Ghetto Rebellion To Black Liberation by Claude M. Lightfoot (Pages.146-147, 149, 151)

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Come. And Be My Baby, Maya Angelou

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As a teenager, life gave me lemons.

I ate the lemons—skins, seeds, and stickers.

Many years later, I wrote a guide to help others eat lemons.

This is a guide to leaving home before 18. It ranks among the most important and most personal things I've ever written. It's also one of our most popular guides of all time. So I updated and expanded it. To make it as accessible as possible, we recorded audio and video versions too. My lemon-flavored heart would swell with joy and citric acid to know it reached people who need it.

But it's a fight share it. Heavy topics like this get muted and buried on most social platforms. Even worse, this administration is deleting surveys and data about it; my .gov sources transmogrified into 404s before my very eyes. Gonna post this, and pray that Tumblr does what Tumblr does best.

How To Leave Home Before 18

Video Version 🍋 Audio Version 🍋 Text Version

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They killed our neighbor and his family because they were going home but it seems like it's a bad area Unfortunately banned and they were all killed

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When it comes to understanding migration, this needs to be taken into account: if you are in a rural area in the global south, like Honduras, you have basically no access to social services, medicine, and education. In fact, the funding for those services is actually being cut, as the social security funds have been looted by corrupt politicans appointed by a military coup. Then you have to factor in that you likely have no access to the land, and no access to credit to buy seeds, and have to sell yourself for basically pennies to an agroindustrial giant. The peasants feed the local people; the agroindustries feed the Americans. In Guatamala, there is a neo-corporate fuedalism where you are allowed a patch of land if you are willing to work, unpaid, for coffee plantations which sell their produce to the German company Ritz. If you attempt to settle unoccupied land, a local businessman will claim it is his without any proof, and the police will take his side because the Agrarian Reform Institute, which issues land titles, is controlled by coupists whose main concern is squeezing as much wealth out of the country as possible. Thugs will murder a man and his wife in broad daylight, and the judge will respond by evicting you and your family from the land.

There is nowhere else for you to go but Tegucigalpa, where you can work trying to wash car windows or selling snacks to passing cars for a handful of lempira a day. Or perhaps you could work for a few dollars a day in one of the maquila factories making textiles for the American and European market, which are set up in special economic zones called Charter Cities where the constitution and labour laws do not apply, which can close down and spirit away whenever they like to another country when they are more willing to sell their people for even less. And then you have to factor in the hurricanes that sweep through the country, destroying everything, that the rains no longer come when they used to but when they do they come in flooding torrents. Much of the north of Honduras is currently underwater; most of the banana and coffee plantations have been destroyed.

And then you factor in when you tried to change this via electing a better government in 2006, he was overthrown in 2009; when you tried to get organised and resist the coup, your friends, your loved ones, your trade union leaders and peasant resisters all turned up mysteriously dead while the military and police worked with drug gangs disguised as agribusiness like the Dinant coproration to burn down villages that opposed them. For trying to change things in the way that you were supposed to, through non violently protesting, organising, and voting for something better, you were subjected to a decade of counterrevolutionary terror and violence that the “international community” not only ignored but gave its active approval to. All of the factors listed above have not only been ongoing for the last 10 years, they’ve been intensified, hothoused by the global counterrevolutionary terror that was the response to the 2011 wave of post-financial crisis uprisings and revolutions and accelerating climate apocalypse.

And at the same time, all of this is being done so more of the country can be turned into a massive cash cow for the benefit of foreign corporations and domestic oligarchs. The wealth of your country is siphoned off and flows around the American and European financial system, benefiting them and building a consumer disneyland that looks like paradise compared to your situation. That could, even if you are worked for nothing, give you a few dollars to send home that could build your abuela in the countryside a nice home for her to live out her days. What other option is left for you and your family other than joining the exodus of people heading north, to the countries where the wealth and profits and rewards of your homeland’s suffering are being kept. And after you cross mountains and rivers which freeze you to death and sweep you away, you are faced with a massive border wall of ahte and soldiers on horses which hit you with sticks. You are faced with an immigration detention centre that will chain you to your bed while you give birth and separate you from your baby who will be given away for adoption to a white couple. When you make a charge against the border fence in Melilla, fed up with being kept in shacks with nothing while the Northerners debate what to do about the problem people their greed has forced to move, the Moroccan police will beat 35 of you to death.

And then when you get there to that golden paradise, you end up doing work not dissimilar to the work you were doing back home, working for pennies (though pennies that are valuable enough back home to buy the family that remain the tiniest slice of comfort) for an agroindustrial giant that supplies supermarkets with cheap produce picked by cheaper people. While you work in the fields, a crop duster plane will spray you with paraquat; when support organisations try to raise this with OSHA they will ask for the plane’s number, and when this can’t be provided they will say nothing can be done. In fact, inspectors are ordered to stay away from the plantations on the Texas border. A member of the Border Agricultural Workers Project says she hasn’t seen a normal child born on the border in 20 years, such is the effect of agrichemicals. If you fuck up in the slightest, have any interaction with the state, you will be deported and sent back to square one. There are a 14 million migrants in the US in the same precarious state, effectively without any way of enforcing their rights. My aunt is a Mexican migrant in California. Her son was deported because he got a speeding ticket. It was 15 years before she saw him again, other than through the bars of the border fence, when she finally got her green card.

The situation in Honduras can be repeated for almost any other country. Syria, Venezuela, Iraq, South Sudan, Libya, all the headline countries are countries that have been subjected to a severe counterrevolutionary terror. The processes of dispossession and destruction of peasant economies and communities (primitive accumulation to use the Marxist jargon) have been hothoused over the last decade by war and violence. I just wish that relatively comfortable people in the imperialist countries realised that the “migrant crisis” is the result of policies that their governments forced on others. Violence that their elites made their fortunes off. What a monstrous, barbarous way of life we have.

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Sylvia Robinson, a critically acclaimed singer and producer for popular acts in genres such as rock, blues, disco, and funk, is known as the “Mother of Hip Hop”

Sylvia had a passion for music since a young age, and at fourteen years old she dropped out of school to follow her dream of producing music, In 1950 she began recording music for Colombia Records under the stage name “Little Sylvia” where she found moderate success.

Sylvia later became the founder and CEO of the independent company “Sugar Hill Records” after spending over a decade of writing and producing music under others. In 1979 Sylvia was credited as being the driving force for the songs “Rappers delight” by Sugar Hill Gang and “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Both groups worked under her label and wrote music with her guidance, Making her the pioneer of the Hip Hop movement, As these records were the first in rap history to receive radio and chart success selling over a million copies. This cemented rap as being a viable and legitimate art form in the public eye, and her legacy of picking up independent black artist fueled the continued development of Hip Hop culture.

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Not Even This by Ocean Vuong

Keep reading

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On 28 January 1917, Carmelita Torres, a 17-year-old Mexican maid who worked in the United States, refused to take the mandatory gasoline bath given to day labourers at the border, and convinced 30 other trolley passengers to join her. 

Her protest spread in what became known as the bath riots. Torres was one of many workers who crossed the border between Juarez and El Paso each day. In the name of public health, Mexican workers were frequently subjected to degrading and humiliating treatment. They had to strip naked, brave, undergo a toxic gasoline bath, and have their clothes steamed. The stated aim of the programme was to kill lice, which can spread typhus. However, it was not applied to everyone crossing the border: just working class Mexicans. 

In addition to gasoline being poisonous, it was also a deadly fire risk. A group of prisoners in El Paso being treated with gasoline were burned to death in an accidental fire. Furthermore, US health workers were secretly photographing naked Mexican women.

 On January 28, anger at the practice finally exploded, and within a few hours Torres had amassed a crowd of several thousand mostly women protesters. They blocked all traffic and trolleys into El Paso. They pelted immigration officers with rocks and bottles when they try to disperse them, and when US and then Mexican troops arrived they received the same treatment. The riots were eventually suppressed by the soldiers, and Torres herself was arrested. This appeared to have the effect of discouraging future protests. 

The enforced bathing and fumigation of Mexican workers with toxic chemicals like gasoline, and later DDT and Zyklon B, continued until the 1950′s. The use of Zyklon B at the border appealed to scientists in Nazi Germany, who in the late 1930′s began using the agent at borders and in concentration camps for delousing. Although notoriously they later used it to exterminate millions of people in the Holocaust.“

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Leaves halfway through changing color on Wroclaw University Museum of Natural History, Poland

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"epic aoc/bernie/whoever statement dunking the new drumpf administration" oh my god nobody gives a fuuuuuck. nobody. anywhere in the world. worthless do-nothings who won't lift a finger to actually oppose the inhumane actions of the us empire but are more than happy to say the right keywords to proc gullible idiots into giving them their mom's credit card number and the three special digits on the back. shut up

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I am frustrated that my campaign is going slowly and I have only been able to raise travel costs for 2 out of 18 family members.

Please help me evacuate my family from Gaza before the fighting resumes.

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Call for Help 🆘🚨

Support a Mother's Struggle for Her Children 🇵🇸

Dear friends,

My name is Nasreen, a 37-year-old mother of four: Leila (13), Amal (8), Mohamed (4), and baby Samaa (1). We are a family of seven, living in Gaza with my ailing mother and my brother Islam. After losing my children's father, I became their sole provider, striving to offer them safety and a decent life amidst the devastation.

We lost our home, and our current shelter offers no protection from the cold. My children, who used to laugh and play, now suffer from fear and hunger. We lack food, milk for baby Samaa, diapers, warm clothing, and medication for my mother. My brother does his best to support us, but job opportunities are almost nonexistent, and we survive on scarce aid that barely meets our basic needs.

I now turn to you in a moment of desperation, asking for your help. Your support can provide my family with warmth, food, and hope. If you cannot donate, please share our story so it may reach those who can help us.

Thank you for standing by us in our darkest times 🙏❤️

✅️Vetted by @gazavetters , my number verified on the list is ( #334 )✅️

You can visit our Instagram account

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the drink you spilled all over me

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Inae - 기억-이루어지는, 2023 - Acrylic on canvas