dessalines-raised-sword:

I forgot to share this on the right day but still important anniversary.

snkrfnd:

astrodidact:

This is Ruby Bridges. Ruby Bridges is still alive today. This is recent history, not ancient history. My mother is the same age as Ruby Bridges. This is the recent, lived history of our families. I cannot stress enough that people in our community RIGHT NOW lived through this and in some instances still relive similar experiences today that no child should go through.

For most of us, our families were just like Ruby OR they were like the cruel classmates hurling threats at other children like Ruby and then they did their best to raise another generation to hate.

Please support Ruby and her story which Scholastic announced will release September 6, 2022.

Scholastic Announces New Picture Book by Civil Rights Icon Ruby Bridges

Scholastic is proud to announce the publication of "I Am Ruby Bridges," a new picture book by Civil Rights icon Ruby Bridges illustrated by 

Black Enterprise

uncleromeo:

if you don’t do anything else today,

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you’ve ever met. it doesn’t have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don’t know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.

grahminradarin:

arctic-hands:

I don’t see people talking about this so today is the 110th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, in where the factory owners locked working women and girls inside to “eliminate the risk of theft” (in reality it was too keep them from taking breaks), which resulted in the gruesome deaths of 123 mostly immigrant women and girls and 23 men, many of whom jumped to their deaths from the ninth floor either in a panicked attempt to escape or in order to die quickly. There were reports that some of the workers were on fire already as they jumped.

The eighth floor of the building was able to telephone the tenth floor to warn them about the fire, but the factory on the ninth floor where these women and girls labored had no such communication and such warning.

The factory owners were criminally charged with manslaughter for actions that contributed to the mass deaths but acquitted. However, this tragedy led to mass sympathy to the labor movement, and unions spurred on safety regulations that passed in New York state and eventually the entire country, and activists were able to reduce child labor in the process.

This tragedy is a reminder that has been forgotten in the 110 years since: every safety regulation– every scrap of paperwork contributing to the hundreds of pages of red tape people like to complain about–every word of it was written in the blood of a laborer.

111th anniversary

elodieunderglass:

campyvillain:

soooo today i learned that back in the early 90s, coca cola tried making this thing called “ok soda” as a marketing stunt to beat out pepsi since they had way more of a hold on the “younger/rebellious” generation at the time, and their way of doing that was naming it “ok soda” so that they could copyright the word “ok”, the most popular word in the world, and at the same time brand it as an…ironic soda??? like the whole thing with it was that they tried to brand ok soda as a counterculture soda but instead of making it about typical 90s RADICAL EXTREME!!! fodder the theme of it was uh. unsettling capitalist brutalist dystopia. instead of being bright and colorful the color scheme was only stark whites, grays and reds and the cans looked like this. bold shapes and labels stating ominous, robotic things with a figure always staring dead into you on the front, no coca cola branding on it at all.

sometimes there would be “prize cans” of this stuff where instead of having soda inside it there would be hats. and they didn’t sell this option in boxes by the way they just put prize cans in random vending machines. and put like 25 cents in it so hey. you could get an actual soda that isn’t just hats. maybe.

did i mention that this soda also had a fucking MANIFESTO??? because yeah it sure had that printed on some cans and it goes as follows

and there’s these things called “coincidences”, which… yeah it doesn’t make it sound any less ominous

and you might be wondering how the soda itself tastes like does it taste good? ok? well apparently it was just a regular “citric” tasting soda but somehow they fucked it up so bad that it was compared to “carbonated tree sap”, and instead of trying to make the drink taste better they included that it tasted like shit, INTO THE ADVERTISING SCHEME ITSELF. they would literally advertise that it tasted like ass as a part of the ironic marketing, no i am not kidding.

but if you thought that’s where it ended there’s one more curveball and without any exaggeration, you will not expect what i am about to tell you.

take a look at this guy.

this guy is the “face” of ok soda, as in he was printed on the most cans and technically served as a mascot of sorts for the entire thing. his face was a major part of the branding, and this design for the cans was one of if not the most common.

okay. cool. no issue there right?

take a guess on who this guy is based off of.

the artist’s coworker? a generic guy? the artist himself? a relative? some random reference model they hired?

CHARLES MANSON. YES, THIS IS REAL. MEANING FOR A BRIEF MOMENT IN TIME, CHARLES MANSON’S FACE WAS USED AS A MEANS TO SELL COCA COLA.

the lead artist himself has even come forward to say this is the case. and now you may be asking wait. how’d he do this? how’d he possibly get away with this, years after the crimes had been committed?

well according to him, it was simple. apparently none of the contracts he signed said anything against putting a mass murderer on the can. so. there’s THAT.

unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it, ok soda never really caught on since *surprise surprise!* teens really don’t want to buy soda that looks like a brutalist art museum, and it never had a wide release so it was only a thing for like two years between 1993 and 1995. but from what i’ve heard there’s still people who are giving this soda a small modern following, collecting all the cans and merchandise and even coming up with stand in recipes for the soda formula itself.

so yeah! that was ok soda.

what the fuck

100 years in the future people are going to conflate this soda with our era and those of us who are alive to see it will be extremely angry about it

prismatic-bell:

nudityandnerdery:

dogsuffrage:

“Only 1% of white people in the US had slaves” is a great example of using a fact for misinformation. That is true, but extremely manipulative bc it cuts out really important details about the statistic.

1) It includes the more populous Northern states that did not allow slavery.

2) It ignores the fact that family units were much larger and only the family patriarch tended to actually own the slaves for the family, meaning there were significantly more slave-holders than slave-OWNERS. So you need to measure by household.

So, using the exact same data (the 1860 census) you can determine that about 25% of households in the south had slaves. In Mississippi alone 49% of households had slaves. South Carolina is 46%. The 1% figure I’ve believed in the past is propaganda to undersell the role of the general white population in slavery and to undersell just how much everyday southern whites benefitted from slavery.

And I haven’t even mentioned that slave owners often rented out their slaves…

And ignores how many people, even without necessarily owning slaves, fought vehemently against the idea of abolition. Even in states that didn’t allow slavery, there were incidents of violence against abolitionists.

It also ignores that even then, white people knew it was wrong, so they’d use euphemisms. My Grampa was a genealogist and turned up an ancestor’s will from 1807 that included the phrase “to my wife I leave my slave Cris, being my wife’s servant….”

Notice how nice and neat he went from “slave” to “servant”? I’d bet a nickel somewhere in there was a way to say he didn’t technically own slaves.

ALSO. If you’re wondering why it says basically “I leave my property, which belongs to my wife,” EVERYTHING IN THE HOUSE BELONGED TO THE MAN. That will also includes a section where he bequeathed to his wife her clothes, her kitchen implements, her jewelry, and so on. And it specifically names them as ALREADY BEING HERS. So we can here establish that 100% of the adults in that household had slaves. It’s just that only one person in the house could legally own them.

This shit is real. Remember, there are three kinds of untruths: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

estellaestella:

I wish there were more images from the Met Gala like this- not just revelling in the glamour of fashion but also acknowledging the human cost of it.

On the one hand this picture is a reminder of how far America has come in terms of race relations, giving us hope for further evolution (which is so sorely needed). On the other hand, it reminds us of the blood, sweat and tears that went into building America’s cotton industry. Sadly, there are huge travesties and injustices that still happen in the name of fashion.