Agenda today:
1. Journal queries
2. Study
3. Make a new banner
4. March
5. Index to MLK Day projects
1. Journal queries:
What have I done lately to teach or support freedom, equality, and dignity for all people?
How can I better define myself as part of the human (rather than white) race?
3. Study:
Each year I read more of the writing of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This year I chose quotes from The Black Power Defined (1967). This gave me insight both on the unique task of the African American and on my own role. Here are a few quotes:
"When a people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance only when they have accumulated the power to enforce change. The powerful never lose opportunities- they remain available to them. The powerless, on the other hand, never experience opportunity- it is always arriving at a later time."
"The other economic leader available to the Negro is as a consumer. The Southern Christian Leadership Council has pioneered in developing mass boycott movements in a frontal attack on discrimination. In Birmingham it was not the marching alone that brought about integration of public facilities in 1963. The downtown business establishments suffered for weeks under our almost unbelievably effective boycott. The significant percentage of their sales that vanished, the ninety-eight percent of their Negro customers who stayed home, educated them forcefully to the dignity of the Negro as a consumer."
“And so we shall have to create leaders who embody virtues we can respect, who have moral and ethical principles we can applaud with an enthusiasm that enables us to rally support for them based on confidence and trust. We will have to demand high standards and give consistent, loyal support to those who merit it."
"In the future we must become intensive political activists. We must be guided in this direction because we need political strength, more desperately than any other group in American society. Most of us are too poor to have adequate economic power, and many of us are too rejected by the culture to be part of any tradition of power. Necessity will draw us toward the power inherent in the creative uses of politics."
I began to plan this banner on a train trip several weeks ago.Supplies: Old scrap of canvas, square, pencil, paint pens, acrylic paints, flat and round brushes
1. First I drew it out several times on paper...
2. ...then measured and lined out the canvas with pencil.3. Then I outlined the words in pencil, using my own invented font, and again with paint pen.
4. Next I filled in the words with black and red acrylic paint, and when that dried I filled in the bands of color around the words.5. I cut short pieces of lathe and drilled holes in the centers, then stapled the top and bottom of the canvas to the lathe.
4. March:
Today I attended the annual NAACP Martin Luther King Jr. march and the following celebration. The speeches were rousing and the music was fine.
4. Index to MLK Day Projects:
I often teach a class for this no-school day, but not this year. Here are some projects from past years, with links:
Peace paintings
Peace sign pretzels
Collaborative poster
Friendship bracelets
Peace paintings
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