George Seldes Quotes

The first non-PRI President in over 70 years.

The Muslim Brotherhood Government had just been deposed by a popular coup d’etat carried out by the Egyptian military. The Brotherhood flooded into the streets to protest the coup and some of them attacked police with weapons. The military overreacted and in an effort to clear the demonstrators from the streets killed hundreds of them. This brought out signs like this.

This quotation illustrates a new tactic adopted by the Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) in 2014. They trained very young children (with their parents permission) in how to handle themselves in a protest when the police arrive and tell them to disperse. By having children as young as 11 protesting shutting down streets in Washington so that they would get arrested. Coping with young children committing civil disobedience was something the police were not used to and involved much more complex procedures than arresting adult demonstrators. In addition, the sight of such young children being arrested for civil disobedience attracted much attention from the media, thereby publicizing the immigration issue. Elias and his mother were both U. S. citizens. In 2006 Elias’s father, an undocumented Mexican immigrant, returned to Mexico to apply for a visa to visit his wife and son. He was denied, so he crossed the border without papers. He was deported from the family home in 2008 and Elias and his mother had not seen him since then. Under the then existing immigration rules and laws, even a person whose spouse and children were U. S. citizens residing in America, could not even get a visa to visit them much less get citizenship. The Obama administration’s “family friendly” policies collapsed with immigration where the policies broke up otherwise intact families.

The benefit concert had been organized by a musical group called The People's Artists and it featured baritone Paul Robeson and folk singer Pete Seeger both great musicians with leftist political views. The beneficiary organization was The Civil Rights Congress which was fighting for a stay of execution for six African-American youths sentenced to death in New Jersey. Peekskill, only 25 miles from New York City had 3 major demographic groups: Lower and middle class white workers, middle class blacks who vacationed in the area, and liberal white intellectuals many of whom were Jewish who also vacationed in the area. Robeson had given a speech on Paris a few weeks earlier that was misquoted and the American Legion and others who had been fired up by this editorial and other anti-Communist, anti-Black and anti-Semitic rhetoric. The Concert was attacked by an organized white group who beat ticket holders and staff. The local police did not intervene, and in the aftermath of what had turned into an assault over 700 whites from the Peekskill area applied for membership in the KKK (Klu Klux Klan). See {72167} for Robeson's misquoted statement which was one of the triggers for this assault. The attack galvanized many groups of the area who were not going to let the thugs deny free speech and the following month the concert was performed. The concert itself was free from violence, though marred by the presence of a police helicopter overhead and the flushing out of at least one sniper's nest. An incredible Twenty thousand people showed up. Security, organized by labor unions, was tight with union men standing in a protective circle around the entire concert grounds and sitting with Robeson on the stage. The Musicians performed without incident.

His strategy was to fill the jails of Birmingham, and asked the young people to help. The next days saw virtually all the Birmingham high school students our of school and in the streets protesting which was then against the un-Constitutional laws of Birmingham and Alabama. The students were arrested by the droves and the white authorities, believing that they were being firm against “radical lawbreakers”, fell into the trap, and became a travesty to most of the country and the rest of the world and the hundreds of jailed students beaten and assaulted raised the consciousness of whites as well as Blacks.

Johnson rued that the Governor and other authorities of Alabama could not block or harass the Civil rights protesters.