[Link to last class here. Syllabus here.]

[CW TW OMG: Revolutionary War, Civil War, Slavery, Suffragist movement, Civil Rights movement, American Indian movement, Vietnam War and Stonewall riots all under the cut. Language for Stonewall terminology incredibly dumbed down and NOT meant to be reductive but may sound like that, please be kind to yourself before reading. Very long class.]

"Welcome back. Last class, I gave you a brief rundown on laws, justice, and social justice. Today, we're going to talk about what happens when they come in conflict. This planet has some doozies. I'm going to try to stick to the ones that happened in just this country because this country's laws are the ones that'll apply while you're here. It's a good idea for you to know how they came about. Most people here use Wikipedia as their primary information source. Here's what Wiki has to say about Civil Disobedience."

She clicked on the projector and then said, "Again, at the end of class, you'll get a packet with the slides so you can take home and review." Vette's copy was in Aurebesh. The slide clicked on.

Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal of a citizen to obey certain laws, demands, orders or commands of a government or occupying international power. Civil disobedience is sometimes defined as having to be nonviolent to be called civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is sometimes, therefore, equated with nonviolent resistance.

Jack gave them a minute or two to read it. She pulled out a laser pointer and highlighted the last two sentences. Her expression was grave and possibly a little annoyed. "That part right there? That's utter bullshit." She didn't even fine herself for that one. "While the protesters may start out nonviolent, no effective act of civil disobedience in this country has ever been nonviolent. Either the protesters became violent or violence was done on them but to whitewash it this way and make it sound like the only way a protest is valid is if it's not violent is utter crap written by mealy-mouthed tut-tutters who want people who protest to be ignorable."

She looked at the class, "If you feel strongly enough to protest something, you prepare for violence. History has shown that it's gonna happen on one side or the other. History has also shown that laws about social reform almost never change without violence and the ensuing outcry. Let me give you examples."



Another slide. Boston Tea Party

"One of the most famous acts of civil disobedience happened when this country was still a colony of another country. The mother country tried to impose the right to tax this colony, with that money being sent back to the mother country, England, instead of being used here. People here objected. The last straw was when the biggest tea company in the world at the time was given dispensation to sell their tea tax-free in England, export it without duties - another form of taxation - from England. Tea was taxed when it was imported to America and then taxed again when it was sold here in America. It carried the implicit acceptance that England could tax America. Americans weren't having any of it and when the first ship carrying tea tried to land in Boston Harbor, colonists here attacked the ship and threw all the tea overboard into the harbor. It became known as the Boston Tea Party. Sounds nonviolent enough, right? They just threw some tea into the water."

Jack glanced around, "It started a war for independence right here in this country. This is what's known as a defining moment in history because it lit the fuse on a powderkeg that lead to revolution. England's response was newer, harsher laws. The colonies' response was to draft a letter warning England that they would not stand for it. England responded by sending more troops to America. America drafted what is called the Declaration of Independence and sent it back to England saying they were free and equal and no longer colonies. The Boston Tea Party happened in 1773. The Declaration of Independence happened in 1776. It took months to ship things by sea, this is the only reason it took so long to become a war."

She was quiet for a moment. "You should read the whole Declaration but I won't make you. The full text is in your packets. It's a really good piece of prose. The part that's relevant to this class is that this country was founded on the introduction and the preamble." She kicked off another slide.

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

She gave them time to read it. "That's what Wikipedia should have as the definition of civil disobedience: American edition. That's the core this entire country was founded on." She lifted a shoulder, "Obviously, America won the war that started because we're not an English colony right now. It was the first real act of civil disobedience in this country but it sure as he..ck wasn't the last. The end result of this one was a document called the United States Constitution. It outlines the rights of the people of the United States and it's based on that whole 'life, liberty, pursuit of happiness' doctrine. When they wrote it, they knew that times would change and allowed for it to be amended and updated as time went on. No few of these amendments happened after civil disobedience, conflict, and sometimes war. Which brings me to the next major act of civil disobedience."

On the slide, another bullet: Slavery

"Slavery used to be legal in this country. People with a different skin color, in common parlance called 'black people' from the darker brown tone, were caught and stolen from other countries and brought to this one. Sold as chattle. America's bill of rights didn't apply to them because they weren't considered people, they were property. This kind of bull..crap is called a 'racial-caste' system and it's gross." The anger in her voice is real. She's damping it down so she doesn't scare the children but there's no way to hide how she feels about slavery. "Almost immediately when the Revolutionary War - that's what that last war was called - ended, most of the new free and self-governed northern states passed abolitionist laws declaring slavery unlawful. A movement started to abolish slavery and in almost all of the northern states, slavery was illegal by 1805. The main problem was that during this time, cotton production and cloth manufacturing had boomed in the southern cotton-growing states and none of them wanted to give up their cheap source of labor. In 1808, it became illegal to import slaves to this country at all. It polarized the country and caused something called the 'Mason-Dixon' line between a slave-free state of Pennsylvania and the slave-owning states of Maryland and Delaware."

She looked at the class and pointed out, in case the significance was lost. "This island is in Maryland. Slavery's illegal now - we'll get to that - but it's relevant because you're living in a state that was one of the last to give up believing people were chattle."

"The fight over this issue continued for another half-decade. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected as President on a platform that he would not allow any new states to be slave-owning states. The result was several southern states seceding. Tried to break off and make their own independent little slave-owning country within this one. They called themselves 'The Confederacy' and made themselves a new flag and their own currency and all sorts of crap. It was a whole thing but it boiled down to them wanting the right to say people weren't people and could be things that were owned. The rest of the country refused to let them and in 1861, the American Civil War began. North against South, Abolitionists against the Slave-Owning States. In 1863, the President gave a speech called the 'Emancipation Proclamation' that declared any slave that escaped the Confederacy would be free the moment that person entered the North. Any time Northern troops advanced and took territory in the South, all the slaves within that territory were manumitted - freed. Here's the crappy thing about the Emancipation Proclamation: It only applied to the Southern states that had seceded. Maryland continued to be a slave-owning state within the union. The other really crappy thing about it was that the President said if he could end the war without ending slavery, he would do it, but he couldn't - it would have cost him almost all his support from the Northern abolitionist states. The war was fought for four years and ended in 1865 when the South surrendered. That same year, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was passed that made slavery illegal anywhere in this country. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed that granted all former slaves citizenship in America. In 1870, the Fifteent Amendment was passed and it prohibits the use of race, color, or previous condition of servitude in determining which citizens may vote."

She was quiet for a moment and letting that sink in. "That's kind of the basis to most Amendments. The beginning said 'these are the rights of the people' and then this country spent a whole lot of time and a few wars fighting over what 'people' means and what exact rights they have. Anytime this country determines a group to be sub-people and tries to other them by limiting their rights, conflict happens and slowly but inevitably, the Constitution changes to update. It's slow, it's horribly slow, but it happens. That's worth remembering especially in times like these."

Her tone turned a little wry, "So we've had slavery and the end of slavery and the removal of skin color as a reason to deny someone the right to vote. You know who still didn't have the right to vote? Women of any color. That brings us to the next bullet."

Next bullet: Women's Suffrage

"Women's Suffrage grew right out of the Abolitionist movement. They'd learned how to organize and how to gain social approval to apply social pressure. It happened alongside the abolitionist movement for a large part of it. In 1850, two women by the name of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony became prominent activists and published the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, where she re-wrote the preamble to the Declaration of Independence but added the word 'women'. It's the closing paragraph that's worth noting." A sub-bullet appeared.

Now, in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed, and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of these United States.

"It's when the phrase 'equal rights' really became a rallying cry here in America. They used the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as leverage to pry against. It proved the Constitution could be amended to include another class of people not specifically spelled out in the preamble. They held rallies and protests, marches and pickets. They began burning copies of the President's speeches in public. Most of the protests were less violent because of the general taboo at the time of violence toward women. The women still got arrested. Confined to psychiatric hospitals. Fined. They went on hunger strikes while in jail and were bound and force fed with their teeth knocked out so a tube could be put down their throat. Milder violence, definitely not non-violent. It wasn't until 1920 that the Ninteenth Amendment was ratified and made part of the Constitution and gave women the right to vote. They fought that fight for seventy years. It's worth pointing out that even after the Amendment was passed, Maryland wanted to remove the women's right to vote as 'unconstitutional'. I keep making this point because the laws in this state are more backward than the rest of the country and always have been, but this is where you live now and you need to know this."

She let that sink in.

"This country has its problems. One of the great things about the Constitution that governs the laws is that it can be changed, it can be amended. Only once in history has it ever been amended to remove a right - the Eighteenth Amendment was some idiocy that tried to make alchol illegal - and that one is also the only Amendment to ever be repealed by another Amendment, the Twenty First."

She went on. "Constitutional crises aren't the only time civil disobedience happens. These ones I just spent time going over? They laid the bedrock for it. They showed people how to organize, how to protest, how to make their point heard in a way it could not be ignored. How to garner support for their idea and how to put pressure on the people who can change laws to do something about it. It lead to the next few."

Another bullet. Civil Rights Movement

"This took place in the 1950s and 60s. White people wanted to feel superior so they started this whole racist thing where people of color had to have their own spaces. There were rules and state laws that dictated where people of color could shop, where they could eat, where on the bus they could sit. It was crap. Racist nonsense is never anything but crap. This conflict has more than a few examples of how civil disobedience is never non-violent. The protestors were. They marched, they went into 'whites-only' restaurants and sat down. They went into the 'whites-only' section of the bus and sat down. They called for boycotts of places and asked white people to stand with them in the boycotts. The activists insisted on calm and non-violent protests. Their non-violence was met with extreme violence. They were arrested, they were beaten, they were hung. They had firehoses and dogs turned on them. They didn't let any of that stop them. The violence against them turned public opinion. Civil disobedience lead to social pressure and that evolved into lawmaking. It resulted in passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Open Housing Act of 1968, every single one of those laws written just to say 'No, you jackasses can't discriminate against someone because their skin's a different color'."

Another bullet. Vietnam War

"I'm not even going into the history of this war because that alone would take an hour. It was an ugly war in a foreign country and it killed a lot of people. American opposition to the war grew almost from the start. In no small part because it resulted in a military conscription of any male age 18 or older. That had happened before but since this war had opposition almost from the get go, this was seen as imposing conscription to chill the speech of the opposition and boy did people ever get angry about it. They protested the conscription by burning their draft cards, breaking into conscription headquarters and destroying the draft lists. Mass protests broke out, anti-war slogans spraypainted on buildings, marches, people chaining themselves together, people defecting to other countries so they couldn't be conscripted, riots happened. One guy set himself on fire." A beat, "Don't do that. It doesn't end well for you and it almost never changes anyone's mind or opinion. Speaking of fire, that was kind of a theme for this one. At one of the universities, activists and police clashed and the police started shooting, killing four students and wounding nine in what's been called the 'Kent State Massacre', and after that, students at universities all over the country rose up - even the people who hadn't been protesting the war before, they sure as sh..heck.. protested police killing kids who'd just been standing there yelling - heck, most of the ones that died were innocent and just walking by."

Another bullet. American Indian Movement

"This is one that's still ongoing but it started with two major acts of civil disobedience. Alcatraz Island, a closed island prison that had just been sitting there empty, was occupied by Native American protestors. Doesn't get much more non-violent than boating out to an empty rock and camping on it. They hung out on that rock for almost two years. Started a radio broadcast, published a newsletter. Tried to get people to pay attention to their concerns. It was peaceful and that's probably why it failed. It ended when the government simply shut off utilities to the island and left them without power or phone lines. Most of the people left on their own. Police went in and arrested the few that were left.

Next time they protested, the Natives did it a little differently and that one wasn't non-violent. It's called the Wounded Knee Incident and happened in 1973. The Natives moved into a town that had been built on the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre and kicked everyone out. Wrecked some sh..stuff. Houses and buildings, mostly. Did a lot of property damage. The government sent in armed forces to surround the town and blockade it. Eventually shut off services like water and power. It was winter and very cold in that area so they suddenly had no heat. The government had surrounded the town with snipers, high-powered rifles, and other such armaments that civilians can't fight against. The people in the town had at best handgun and rifles. There was a lot of shooting back and forth. Several people died. In the end, they came to an agreement for a peaceful withdrawal and went home and the government took back the town.

I bring these up because as exercizes in civil disobedience.. they're not great. They gained some sympathy but they weren't truly effective, and they got several people dead. It is a good example of an overreach for government response. Blockading a town with high-powered armaments? Sh..Heck."

Another bullet. Stonewall Riots

"This one's also still ongoing. The government of this country likes to try to control sex. Who can have it and who they can have it with, who can use birth control, who can dress like what, what positions you can use during sex, whether you have to be married, whether you can use sexual aids.. it's a mess, kiddos. They keep trying to make stupid rules and people keep protesting them." She rubbed her forehead, "This example's going to get messy and I'm going to have to dumb it down a lot but I am more than happy to talk to you after class or during teacher hours or whenever about this. The first dumbing down I have to do for this is to give you definitions of two terms you'll hear that you might not know the meaning of. 'Heterosexual' means sexual activity between a male and a female. 'Homosexual' means sexual activity between either two men or two women.

She paused and sighed, "Trust me that this is the dumbest lowest-common-denominator definition out there and it's not entirely accurate because it's based on the idea that there's only male and female. Which is wrong. But for the basis of this example, the idiots who try to make the rules would really like to codify human beings into one of those two buckets so I'm using the term as a 'red vs. blue' thing and not for any other reason. It's the basis for a lot of bigotry and awfulness. For the purposes of this, I'm putting a lot of things under the 'homosexual' tag and I'm not real happy about it. It's a vague umbrella and it's not real accurate but it was the reason people at the time got all pissed off about a guy who wanted to present as a woman or a woman who wanted to present as a man or the folk who made up their mind about which they wanted to present themselves as from day to day or the ones who didn't want to present as either norm. Those people? They're the ones who fought the hardest, the ones who went to prison, the ones who fu..fricking died for this fight and to use the word 'homosexual' as an umbrella term for this talk is not at all meant to ignore their existence. Like I said, I'm dumbing this down to the point it gives me a headache. I want you to know that before I start talking.

The long of the short of it is that being homosexual used to be illegal. In some places, it still is. During the era of the Stonewall Riots, you didn't even have to be proven to be homosexual to be arrested. If you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, if you dressed outside the narrow scope of 'masculine' for males or 'feminine' for women, if you were seen dancing with someone of the same gender or holding their hands. Even if you could prove you weren't or at least make a good case for it, that arrest was on your record forever and good luck getting a job or accepted to schools. It was a life-damaging event. If you were found guilty you were either put in prison or put in a psychiatric hospital and given such treatments as electroshock, cryotherapy, and other similar tortures. Not a fun time.

As you've seen in the other examples, people don't like being told they don't deserve to be treated equally. This is no exception. Homosexuals began to form activist committees, notably the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. They worked to change public opinion toward homosexuals. They started pickets outside workplaces that had fired homosexuals, they formed protests over prison camps for homosexuals in Cuba. They protested increasing police brutality against their community by staging a riot in a donut shop. Police had walked in and asked to see ID and the law at the time said if your clothing didn't match the stereotype for the gender presented on your ID, you were arrested. Men in dresses or women dressed in men's clothing with a masculine haircut, as very crude examples. When the police shoved people in the police cars, the onlookers began throwing trash at the police and shouting at them and the police fled without arresting anyone. They call it 'a riot' but people throwing trash and shouting isn't 'a riot'. It's kind of what you should do when you see your friends and neighbors getting arrested for a garbage reason, but we'll get to that in a later class. The next clash was a riot. Police tried this trick again in another cafeteria and the people were a lot more violent and some sh..stuff got wrecked for days. That's a riot, when people and places get damaged in the protest. From here on in, the protests only got stronger. Homosexuals began marching in the streets, they formed secret dance clubs and bars of their own where they could be safe, founded their own magazine and successfully fought in court to be allowed to send the magazine through the postal service. The police doubled down. They raided the clubs and bars and arrested everyone. They started an entrapment campaign where they'd send a male officer into bars and have him talk to other men and if the man let the officer buy him a drink, off to jail with him. People were angry about the treatment.

The turning point in this was an event that happened at the Stonewall Inn. It was an underground homosexual dance club. You were only let in if you were known to the bouncers or a regular vouched for you. They had a whole system set up - the inside was painted black and lit with colored lights. If white lights went on it meant the police were coming and everyone was to stop dancing or touching. They bribed the police to look the other way or to tip them off if a raid was about to happen so they could clear the place out. They had caches of alcohol set around in storage places so that if they were raided for that, they could resume business right away.

The night of the Stonewall Inn raid, there were over 200 people inside. Police showed up and the standard procedure was to line everyone up and check their ID. Anyone presenting as female was sent into a bathroom with a female officer to have them check whether they were a vulva-owning person or not. It didn't go as planned because people refused to produce ID and they certainly as hell refused to go into a bathroom to have someone peep between their legs to see what was there. Cops were making everyone uncomfortable by 'fact checking' women presenting as men as an excuse to get their hands on some breasts right in the room with everyone else. There were arrests but they didn't have transport so the arrestees were kept indoors and the people not arrested were sent out of the bar. They didn't leave. They hung around outside. Since nothing gathers a crowd like a crowd, more people joined them. By the time the arrestees began being let outside, there were hundreds of people in that crowd. They started chanting, they started taunting the cops. Rumors started floating through the crowd that people inside were being beaten because you could see it was true. People had bruises from being hit with billy clubs. One person escaped from the cops four times, kept trying to run away in handcuffs and kept getting dragged back. A police officer hit them in the head with a baton and they looked at the crowd and shouted, "Why don't you guys do something?"

She paused and looked around, "This is the crux of civil disobedience. Being civilly disobedient is being the person who sees injustice and does something. When you see your someone getting hauled off to jail, beaten by cops for something that shouldn't even be a crime? You don't stand there and watch. That makes you just as bad as the cops who are beating on the person in cuffs.

And this crowd? They didn't just stand there. They went nuts. They attacked the cops with coins and beer cans, handbags and high-heeled shoes. They pushed the cop cars over, they slashed the tires. Someone found a pile of bricks and began to throw those, too. The police barricaded themselves and a few arrestees inside the inn and the crowd lit garbage on fire and threw it through a broken window to smoke them out. They tore wood off the windows and busted in the door. Someone tried to light the place on fire. The police threatened to shoot but there were just too many of them for that to be a valid tactic. More police showed up and started attacking the crowd but the crowd didn't give in. They chanted mockery at the police, they fought back. They formed a chorus-girl kickline and started singing. It was broken up in the wee small hours of the morning.

The crowd came back a second night for more protesting and it went about the same way. Cops went in, wading in and beating people, arresting them. The difference is that this time the crowd numbered in the thousands. When the press reported on it negatively and using slurs, almost a thousand people mobbed that news agency in protest. This community was utterly done with being marginalized and they were starting to fight back. They started getting in the polices' faces when they came to arrest them. They stopped picketing politely. They made noise. They got attention. A year later, the first Gay Pride parade happened on the anniversary of the Stonewall riot. Within two years there were activist groups all across the country working toward equal rights. That's the ongoing legacy of the riot. It's still going on. Laws are changing and will continue to change because that pressure isn't going to stop."



"The takeaway from all of these is: Quiet, polite protests don't make history. If you want to change the future, you need to make history and that usually involves making an awful lot of noise. Sometimes it even involves breaking the law to change the law."