After America was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 consigning 127,000 people of Japanese ancestry to internment camps. Fred Korematsu challenged the internment all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In “Korematsu v. United States” (1944), the Court sided with the government.
In 1988, Congress passed and President Ronald Reagan signed legislation which apologized for the internment on behalf of the U.S. government. The legislation said that government actions were based on “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership”. The U.S. government eventually disbursed more than $1.6 billion in reparations to Japanese Americans.
From the award-winning PBS series American Experience comes We Shall Remain, a provocative look at the historical relationship between Native Americans and the United States government. In 1973, American Indian Movement activists and members of the Lakota Indian tribe residing on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota occupied the town of Wounded Knee, demanding the removal of a corrupt tribal council leader and a redress of past grievances. The 71 day stand-off between approximately 200 American Indians and the U.S. Government brought national attention to the institutional assault against the cultural identity of American Indians and the poverty and corruption on Indian reservations. The courageous stand by the activists led to a groundswell of public support allowing thousands of assimilated Indians across the country to reaffirm their cultural pride.
Black In America is a multi-part series of documentaries hosted by reporter Soledad O’Brien on CNN. The series focuses on black culture in America and includes panel discussions on issues facing the black community. The fifth installment in the series, Who is Black in America? focuses on how skin tone and mixed ancestry affect racial identity. This episode questions whether being black is determined by the color of your skin, society’s perception, the dominant culture of your family, or self-identification? Soledad O’Brien follows the story of 2 young Philadelphia poets as they explore their racial identity through workshops conducted by their mentor, Perry “Vision” Divirgilio of Philly Youth Poetry Movement. Scholar Yaba Blay analyzes the influences skin color can have on racial identity and social opportunity.
Having been dormant for decades, the Ku Klux Klan reemerged in the U.S. after the 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision, gaining momentum in the U.S. as the civil rights movement grew. That the Klan would rise once again wasn’t surprising, but where the reincarnation took place was. North Carolina was long considered the most progressive southern state; its image was being burnished weekly on CBS by the enormously popular “The Andy Griffith Show.” In 1963, North Carolina salesman Bob Jones chartered what would become the largest Klan group in the country, which, under his leadership, grew to some ten thousand members. In the process, the group helped give the Tarheel State a new nickname: “Klansville, U.S.A.”
Ran Gavrieli is a gender studies scholar at Tel Aviv University. He works with youth and adults in building positive self image in a world inundated by exploitative sexual imagery. In this TedX talk, Gavrieli lectures on the physical and psychological abuse which occurs in the porn industry, its relationship to human trafficking and the negative psychological effects watching pornography has on sexual intimacy and gender power relationships.
When former Nebraska police officer Kathryn Bolkovac was recruited by DynCorp International to support the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia, she thought she was signing up to help rebuild a war-torn country. But once she arrived in Sarajevo, as a human rights investigator, heading the gender affairs unit, she discovered military officers involved in human trafficking and forced prostitution, with links to private mercenary contractors, the UN, and the U.S. State Department. After bringing this evidence to light, Bolkovac was successively demoted, threatened with bodily harm, fired, and ultimately forced to flee the country under cover of darkness—bringing the incriminating documents with her. Thanks to the evidence she collected, she won a lawsuit against DynCorp, publicly exposing their human rights violations. Her story, recounted in the book The Whistleblower: Sex Trafficking, Military Contractors, and One Woman’s Fight for Justice, later become the Hollywood feature film The Whistleblower. Bolkovac discusses her story, human trafficking, and other topics with Tanya Domi, whose reporting broke this story.
On March 8, 1971, a group of eight anti-war activists calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania and removed every document they found. The group later leaked the removed documents to the press, revealing the FBI’s covert counter-intelligence program, CoIntelPro, designed to infiltrate, monitor and disrupt social and political movements. Documents also revealed a mass surveillance campaign being conducted against politicians, celebrities and prominent social leaders. These discoveries led the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee investigation which put an end to the program and led to reforms in the FBI’s domestic security investigations.
Despite FBI director J. Edgar Hoover assigning 200 agents to investigate the burglary, the FBI was never able to determine the identities of the activists responsible for the break-in. In January 2014, the former activists identities were finally revealed by Betty Medsger, the former Washington Post reporter responsible for breaking the story in 1971, in her book, “The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI.”
Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! interviews three of the original activists; John Raines, Bonnie Raines and Keith Forsyth, along with their their attorney, David Kairys. The former activists discuss how they planned and executed the break-in, and how they managed to keep their identities hidden all these years. Also discussed is the FBI smear campaign against the outspoken Hollywood actress Jane Seberg; the suicide letter sent to Martin Luther King Jr. by the FBI; and the assassination of Black Panthers leader Fred Hampton. Their story is relevant now more than ever amidst revelations about the current domestic surveillance abuses and the FBI’s entrapment tactics and informant culture which many critics believe has led to a manufactured war on terror.
A short documentary on the current dilemma that countless Americans are facing, from those on the streets, to those who simply cannot afford housing on their low wage jobs within a crippled economy.
On May 13, 2014, Gov. Chris Christie ordered that a tent city in Camden, N.J. be bulldozed and its residents evicted. State Department of Transportation spokesman Steve Schapiro said the push was prompted by complaints, namely from Cooper University Hospital. “They won’t have the option to come back as they have in the past,” said Camden County spokesman Dan Keashen. Homeless residents of the tent city discuss the eviction from their tent community and the uncertainty surrounding what comes next.
After decades of public corruption in Camden, New Jersey, the city announced it could no longer afford its own police force and would reduce costs by ending its collective bargaining agreement with the police union. Despite statements by Mayor Dana Redd and Police Chief Scott Thompson that the only way to “put more boots on the ground” was to reduce salaries, Camden announced that it would only be rehiring half of the former officers as part of the new county police force. The new department will be prohibited from unionizing and the qualifications for new applicants were lowered by placing a one year moratorium on civil service testing.
Camden Civil Rights Project 