From left to right:

Guillermo Govela, Health Ministry of Mexico

Carlos Campillo, Health Ministry of Mexico

Max Diener, Interior Ministry of Mexico

Alejandro Negrín Muñoz, Ambassador, Foreign Relations Ministry of Mexico

Joel Hernandez, Ambassador, Permanent Representative of Mexico to the OAS

Gabriel Sotelo Monroy, Health Ministry of Mexico

 

Date: March 23, 2012

Place: Washington, DC

Credit: Juan Manuel Herrera/OAS

One mustn't enter the water here at Jones Lake State Park in Bladen County, North Carolina. The park was founded in 1939 as a recreational park for African-Americans during the segregation era in North Carolina. The park was desegregated in the 1960s. It is on North Carolina Highway 242 just outside of Elizabethtown in Bladen County.

Segregation and the North American Railroad

White supremacist leader Bryant Bowles, center with jacket and tie, meets with Anacostia High School students October 6, 1954 during protests against integration at the school following the Bolling v. Sharpe U.S. Supreme Court decision that barred segregation in public schools.

 

Bowles had been active in Baltimore the previous few days advocating for school segregation of the races there where he recruited for the National Association for the Advancement of White People during a rally by 500 people against school desegregation..

 

In Baltimore Bowles held his rally at the Ritchie Raceway and urged white parents to boycott the schools and recruited members to his organization for a $5 membership fee.

 

In Washington, D.C. he was a late arrival with white parents and students conducting a boycott of schools October 4-5th that involved 500 white students boycotting classes at Anacostia and about 300 at McKinley High School on October 4th, the first day of integration. There were some minor scuffles at Anacostia between black and white students on the first day of the integration of classes.

 

The student strike spread to Eastern and six junior high schools on October 5th.

 

McKinley students marched to the Board of Education building October 5th and were herded into Franklin Park by police. A delegation of three students met with assistant school superintendent Norman J. Nelson.

 

Eastern and Anacostia students attempted marches to link up to build support for a school boycott October 5th, but were largely prevented from joining forces by District of Columbia police who halted them on the Sousa Bridge on Pennsylvania Ave. SE.

 

By October 6th when Bowles visited the students, the strikes and school boycotts had collapsed with attendance near normal.

 

Bowles gained some fame by leading a boycott of Milford High School in Milford, DE. The ensuing unrest, which included cross burnings, contributed to desegregation in some parts of Delaware being delayed for another ten years.

 

At one white supremacist rally Bowles is reported to have said that his daughter "will never attend a school with Negroes as long as there is breath in my body and gunpowder will burn."

 

Bowles was tried in 1955 in Dover for inciting to riot. After brief deliberation the jury found Bowles not guilty. Many years later it was learned that one of the jurors was a member of Bowles' organization.

 

Bowles later went to prison for killing his brother in law during an argument in 1958. He was paroled in 1973, but re-incarcerated for a year for a parole violation in 1994. Bowles died at age 77 in 1997.

 

The District of Columbia was one of the few major segregated school systems that moved quickly to integrate schools in the wake of the four May 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decisions outlawing school segregations, including the Bolling v. Sharpe decision banning Jim Crow public schools in Washington, D.C.

 

However, the school system quickly implemented a track system where black students were placed in the lowest tracks that included no college preparation courses and effectively segregated most black students within the schools.

 

The June 1967 Hobson v. Hansen decision broke up the track system, but by when white flight to the suburbs had effectively re-segregated District of Columbia public schools.

 

For a background post on the fight to break up D.C.’s Jim Crow schools, see washingtonareaspark.com/2015/08/20/dcs-fighting-barber-th...

 

For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHskivJu7g

 

The photographer is unknown. The image is a Washington Daily News photograph courtesy of the D.C. Public Library Washington Star Collection © Washington Post.

 

The waves modulate the beach and the beach modulates the waves. The result is a self-sustaining rock-sand segregation pattern.

Kamera: Nikon F3 (1989)

Linse: Nikkor-N Auto 24mm f2.8 (1970)

Film: Rollei P&R 640 @ box speed

Kjemi: Rodinal (1:25 / 13:30 min. @ 20°C)

 

Al Jazeera: UN Special Rapporteur accuses Israel of acts of genocide (publ. 26 March 2024)

 

From the United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner [Document publ. 25 March 2024]:

 

Anatomy of a Genocide

 

Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese

 

Summary

 

After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 13,000 children. Over 12,000 are presumed dead and 71,000 injured, many with life-changing mutilations. Seventy percent of residential areas have been destroyed. Eighty percent of the whole population has been forcibly displaced. Thousands of families have lost loved ones or have been wiped out. Many could not bury and mourn their relatives, forced instead to leave their bodies decomposing in homes, in the street or under the rubble. Thousands have been detained and systematically subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment. The incalculable collective trauma will be experienced for generations to come.

 

By analysing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, this report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. One of the key findings is that Israel's executive and military leadership and soldiers have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.

 

I. Introduction

 

1. In this report, Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 (“oPt”), addresses the crime of genocide as perpetrated by the State of Israel (“Israel”) in the oPt, specifically in the Gaza Strip, since 7 October 2023. As Israel prohibits her visits, this report is based on data and analyses from organisations on the ground, international jurisprudence, investigative reports and consultations with affected individuals, authorities, civil society and experts.

 

2. The Special Rapporteur firmly condemns the crimes committed by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in Israel on 7 October and urges accountability and the release of hostages. This report does not examine those events, as they are beyond the geographic scope of her mandate. Nor does it examine the situation in the West Bank, including east Jerusalem.

 

3. Since it imposed the siege on Gaza in 2007, which tightened the closure imposed since 1993, Israel, the occupying power, has carried out five major assaults before the present one.

 

4. By Day 9, this assault had already caused more deaths (2,670) than Israel’s previous deadliest war against Gaza, in 2014 (2,251). Only a fraction of the mass killing, severe harm and ruthless, life-threatening conditions inflicted on Palestinians over the following five months of assault can be captured in this report.

 

5. UN independent experts, scholars, and states, including South Africa before the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”), have warned that acts committed in this latest onslaught may amount to genocide. The ICJ found a plausible risk of “irreparable prejudice” to the rights of Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group under the Genocide Convention, and ordered Israel, inter alia, to “take all measures within its power” to prevent genocidal acts, prevent and punish incitement to genocide, and ensure urgent humanitarian aid.

 

6. In its defense, Israel has argued that its conduct complies with international humanitarian law (“IHL”). A key finding of this report is that Israel has strategically invoked the IHL framework as “humanitarian camouflage” to legitimize its genocidal violence in Gaza.

 

7. The context, facts and analysis presented in this report lead to the conclusion that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. More broadly, they also indicate that Israel’s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, signalling a tragedy foretold.

 

II. Contextualizing genocide

 

A. Genocide as inherent to settler-colonialism

 

8. Genocide, as the denial of the right of a people to exist and the subsequent attempt or success in annihilating them, entails various modes of elimination. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide”, observed that genocide is “a composite of different acts of persecution or destruction”, ranging from physical elimination to the “forced disintegration” of a people’s political and social institutions, culture, language, national sentiments and religion. Genocide is a process, not an act.

 

9. Genocidal intent and practices are integral to the ideology and processes of settler- colonialism, as the experience of Native Americans in the U.S., First Nations in Australia or Herero in Namibia illustrates. As settler-colonialism aims to acquire Indigenous land and resources, the mere existence of Indigenous peoples poses an existential threat to the settler society. Destruction and replacement of Indigenous people become therefore ‘unavoidable’ and take place through different methods depending on the perceived threat to the settler group. These include removal (forcible transfer, ethnic cleansing), movement restrictions (segregation, largescale carceralization), mass killings (murder, disease, starvation), assimilation (cultural erasure, child removal) and birth prevention. Settler-colonialism is a dynamic, structural process and a confluence of acts aimed at displacing and eliminating Indigenous groups, of which genocidal extermination/annihilation represents the peak.

 

B. Palestine and the context of genocide

 

10. Historical patterns of genocide demonstrate that persecution, discrimination and other preliminary stages prepare the ground for the annihilation stage of genocide. In Palestine, displacing and erasing the Indigenous Arab presence has been an inevitable part of the forming of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’. In 1940, Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Colonization Department stated: “there is no room for both peoples, together in this country. The only solution is Palestine without Arabs. And there is no other way but to transfer all of them: not one village, not one tribe should be left.”

 

11. Practices leading to the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s non-Jewish population occurred in 1947–1949, and again in 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip with mass displacement of hundreds of thousands, killings, destruction of villages and towns, looting and the denial of the right to return of expelled Palestinians.

 

12. Since 1967, Israel has advanced its settler-colonial project through military occupation, stripping the Palestinian people of their right to self-determination. This has resulted in the segregation and control of Palestinians, including through land confiscation, house demolitions, revoked residencies and deportation. Punishing their indigeneity and rejection of colonization, Israel construed Palestinians as a ‘security threat’ to justify their oppression and “de-civilianization”, namely the denial of their status as protected civilians.

 

13. Israel has progressively turned Gaza into a highly controlled enclave. Since the 2005 evacuation of Israeli settlers (which Israel’s current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly opposed), Israel’s settler movement and leaders have framed Gaza as a territory to be “re-colonized” and its population as invaders to be expelled. These unlawful claims are integral to the project of consolidating the “exclusive and unassailable right of the Jewish people” on the land of “Greater Israel”, as reaffirmed by Prime Minister Netanyahu in December 2022.

 

14. This is the historical background against which the atrocities in Gaza are unfolding.

 

III. Legal Framework

 

15. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (“the Convention”) codifies genocide as an international crime the prohibition of which is a non-derogable peremptory norm (jus cogens). The erga omnes obligation to prevent and punish genocide binds all states under both the Convention and customary international law and requires them all to prevent and prosecute genocidal acts. Genocide cannot be justified under any circumstances, including purported self-defence. Complicity is expressly prohibited, giving rise to obligations for third states.

 

16. The ICJ and the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) have jurisdiction over the crime of genocide, and so do State domestic courts. Prior to the establishment of the ICC, ad hoc international criminal tribunals advanced their interpretation of what constitutes genocide, its intent and required evidence.

 

A. Constitutive elements of genocide

 

17. The Convention codifies genocide as “any of the [specified] acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Accordingly, the crime of genocide comprises two interconnected elements:

 

(a) The actus reus: the commission of any one or more specific acts against a protected group, namely:

 

* (i) killing members of the group;

* (ii) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

* (iii) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring

about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

* (iv) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

* (v) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

 

(b) The mens rea: the intent behind the commission of one or more of the above- mentioned acts that must be established, which includes two intertwined elements:

* (i) a general intention to carry out the criminal acts (dolus generalis), and

* (ii) a specific intention to destroy the target group as such (dolus

specialis).

 

18. Both components must be satisfied for conduct to legally constitute genocide. The perpetrator’s intent to destroy the group in whole or in part distinguishes genocidal acts from other international crimes. Specific intent may be established by direct evidence, e.g. statements by high command or official documents, or inferred from patterns of conduct. In the latter case, the patterns of conduct or the manner in which the acts are perpetrated must be such that they “only point to the existence of such [genocidal] intent”, and the existence of intent results in “the only inference that could reasonably be drawn.”

 

19. Evidence of the result is required to establish the commission of three of the underlying acts (killing, inflicting harm and transferring children). For the remaining two acts (inflicting conditions calculated to destroy the group and preventing births), the evidentiary threshold requires proof of an intent to achieve a given outcome, rather than its achievement. Accordingly, if displacement, ethnic cleansing or mass deportation are perpetrated with the requisite intent to destroy the protected group as such, this may amount to genocide. Similarly, these displacement actions can also be evidence of specific genocidal intent.

 

B. State Responsibility and Individual Criminal Liability

 

20. The crime of genocide gives rise to both individual and State responsibility. The Convention stresses the need for individual accountability before domestic or international courts, regardless of any official role held by the perpetrator. Individual criminal liability arises from direct involvement in committing, attempting, conspiring, directly and publicly inciting, planning, instigating, ordering and aiding and abetting (complicity in) genocidal acts, requiring a specific intent to contribute to the destruction of the target group. This implies knowledge of the possibility that an act will result in destruction of the group in whole or in part. Genocide gives rise to State responsibility when an individual has committed genocide exercising state authority; in this case the individual’s conduct is attributable to the State.

 

IV. Genocidal Acts in Gaza

 

21. Genocidal acts can include deliberate actions or omissions, including the failure to protect the group from harm. The evidence presented in the following sections suggests Israel has committed at least three of the acts proscribed in the Convention.

 

A. “Killing Members of the Group”

 

22. This act encompasses deaths resulting from direct actions or arising from neglect, including those caused by deliberate starvation, disease or other survival-threatening conditions imposed on the group.

 

23. Since 7 October, Israel has killed over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, equivalent to approximately 1.4 percent of its population, through lethal weapons and deliberate imposition of life-threatening conditions. By the end of February, a further 12,000 Palestinians were reported missing, presumed dead under the rubble.

 

24. During the first months of the campaign, Israel’s army employed over 25,000 tons of explosives (equivalent to two nuclear bombs) on innumerable buildings, many of which were identified as targets by Artificial Intelligence. Israel used unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on densely populated areas and “safe zones”. In the initial weeks, Israeli forces killed around 250 people daily, including 100 children, in attacks obliterating entire neighbourhoods and essential infrastructure. Thousands were killed by bombing, sniper fire or in summary executions; thousands more were killed while fleeing via routes and in areas declared “safe” by Israel. The victims included 125 journalists and 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers (four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel), students, academics, scientists and their family members.

 

25. Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children. Israel failed to prove that the remaining 30 percent, i.e. adult males, were active Hamas combatants – a necessary condition for them to be lawfully targeted. By early-December, Israel’s security advisors claimed the killing of “7,000 terrorists” in a stage of the campaign when less than 5,000 adult males in total had been identified among the casualties, thus implying that all adult males killed were “terrorists”. This is indicative of an intent to indiscriminately target members of the protected group, assimilating them to active fighter status by default.

 

26. Moreover, Israel’s heightened blockade of Gaza has caused death by starvation, including 10 children daily, by impeding access to vital supplies. Lack of hygiene and overcrowded shelters could cause more deaths than bombings, having created “the perfect storm for disease”. A quarter of Gaza’s population could die from preventable health conditions within a year.

 

B. “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”

 

27. This act must involve “a grave and long-term disadvantage to a person’s ability to lead a normal and constructive life”. The harm does not need to be permanent or irremediable, and can be brought about by various causes as torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, sexual violence, persecution, deportation or other conditions “designed to cause victims’ degradation and deprivation of their rights, and to suppress them and cause inhumane suffering and torture”.

 

28. Since 7 October, Palestinians have suffered relentless physical and psychological harm. Many have endured violence and deprivation including severe hunger.

 

29. Israeli forces have detained thousands of Palestinians, mostly men and young boys, often refusing to disclose their whereabouts. Many of them have been severely mistreated, including through torture at times leading to death.

 

30. Israel’s lethal weapons and methods have injured seventy-thousand Palestinians, many with agonizing injuries, in some cases leading to long-term impairment or death.

 

31. By causing critical shortages of medical supplies, including antibiotics and disinfectants, Israel’s actions resulted in hazardous health procedures, such as amputations without anaesthetics, including on children. This has also prevented the administration of life-saving treatment to those with medical conditions, including chronic diseases.

 

32. The survivors will carry an indelible trauma, having witnessed so much death, and experienced destruction, homelessness, emotional and material loss, endless humiliation and fear. Such experiences include fleeing amidst the chaos of war without telecommunications and electricity; witnessing the systematic destruction of entire neighbourhoods, homes, universities, religious and cultural landmarks;85 digging through the rubble, often with bare hands, searching for loved ones; seeing bodies desecrated;87 being rounded up, stripped naked, blindfolded and subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment; and ultimately, being starved, adults and children alike.

 

33. The savagery of Israel's latest assault is best illustrated by the torment inflicted upon children of all ages, killed or rescued from under the rubble, maimed, orphaned, many without surviving family. Considering the significance of children to the future development of a society, inflicting serious bodily or mental harm to them can be reasonably “interpreted as a means to destroy the group in whole or in part”.

 

C. “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”

 

34. This act involves conduct that does not directly kill members of the group, but is capable of leading, through various means, to its physical destruction. These may include starving, dehydrating, forcibly displacing the protected group, destroying objects indispensable for their survival, reducing essential medical services to below the minimum requirement, depriving of housing, clothes, education, employment and hygiene.

 

35. By mid-December, Israel’s bombs and shells had destroyed or severely damaged most life-sustaining infrastructure, including 77 percent of healthcare facilities, 68 percent of telecommunication infrastructure, large numbers of municipal services (72), commercial and industrial sites (76), almost half of all roads, over 60 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, 68 percent of residential buildings, all universities, 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. Israel has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, 208 mosques, 3 churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives (150 years of history). By the end of January, over one million civilians were forcibly displaced southward, their cities devastated.

 

36. Sixteen years of blockade had already transformed Gaza into an isolated, densely populated depleted and nearly “uninhabitable” enclave, when, on 9 October 2023, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, announced a “complete siege (...) no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel”. Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz (then Minister of Energy) went further: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened.” Deliberately denying essential supplies to an already besieged population was destined to cause deaths “more silent than those caused by bombs”.

 

37. The total siege and near-constant carpet-bombing, along with draconian evacuation orders and ever-shifting ‘safe zones’, have created an unparalleled humanitarian catastrophe. Over 1.7 million Palestinians were displaced and forced into overcrowded UNRWA shelters and cramped quarters in southern Gaza, systematically targeted by the Israeli army, and later into makeshift shelters.

 

38. Israel’s assault has decimated Gaza’s already fragile healthcare system. Hospitals, also sheltering displaced Palestinians, have been overwhelmed. By deliberately targeting

hospitals, air and ground attacks gradually turned them into death zones. Israeli soldiers have occupied hospitals, encircling them with tanks and (drone-)snipers. By 12 February, only 11 of 36 hospitals and 17 percent of primary healthcare centres were functioning, only partially. Israeli soldiers have arrested, mistreated and tortured medical staff, patients and displaced people, and forced them – even premature babies – out of hospitals, in some cases causing the death of babies. The doctors who remained have worked night and day, making “impossible decisions” on patients to treat based on chance of survival.

 

39. Ground invasion and aerial bombardment have destroyed agricultural land, farms, crops, animals and fishing assets, gravely undermining people’s livelihoods, the environment and agricultural system.

 

40. From 8–21 October, Israel impeded the entry of any aid into Gaza, subsequently allowing woefully inadequate amounts, largely confined to the south. No fuel supplies were delivered until 18 November. In January, Israel-led attacks against UNRWA, the main agency providing a lifeline of support in Gaza, resulted in several States suspending payments to UNRWA, further aggravating the humanitarian situation.

 

41. By 7 December, over 90 percent of Gaza residents were suffering from severe food insecurity. By February 2024, Palestinians trapped in northern Gaza resorted to animal feed and grass for sustenance, with deaths by starvation on the rise. Between mid-January and the end of February, the UN recorded numerous attacks against Palestinians seeking aid.

 

42. The supply of water was also severely affected. Fuel scarcity hampered water sanitation, driving people to use water contaminated by sewage, solid waste and seawater.

 

43. The impact of these conditions on children is well-known: in Gaza the risk of starvation, with thousands suffering from wasting, is already a tangible horrific reality.

 

44. These human-made conditions have put at risk an estimated 50,000 pregnant Palestinian women and 20,000 newborn babies, and increased miscarriages by up to 300 percent.

 

45. Gaza has been completely sacked. Israel’s relentless targeting of all means of basic survival has compromised the ability of Palestinians in Gaza to live on that land. This engineered collapse of life-sustaining infrastructure corresponds to the stated intentions to make Gaza “permanently impossible to live in” where “no human being can exist”.

 

V. Genocidal Intent

 

46. The definition of genocide requires the commission of any of the listed acts with a specific intent. It must be established that the perpetrator, by committing one or more of the prohibited acts, seeks to achieve the total or partial destruction of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such. This intent must be established either through direct or indirect evidence.

 

47. As genocide is an organized crime, the commission of which invariably implies a collective dimension, evidence of a state plan, including through statements and declarations by state officials, is usually decisive in establishing direct intent.

 

48. Proof of indirect intent can be inferred from facts or circumstances, including the overall context of the acts or omissions, scale of atrocities, systematic targeting of victims based on their affiliation with a particular group, perpetration of other “culpable acts” directed against the group, or repetition of destructive and discriminatory acts. The ICC requires that such facts or circumstances take “place in the context of a manifest pattern of similar conduct directed against the group or... conduct that could itself effect such destruction”. International tribunals have also established that indirect intent can consist of a manifest pattern of similar conduct over time. The systematicity with which genocidal acts are committed implies a degree of “preconceived plan or policy”.

 

49. The nature and scale of the atrocities, if demonstrably capable of achieving the genocidal outcome, are strong evidence of intent. The words of state authorities, including dehumanizing language, combined with acts, are considered a circumstantial basis from which intent can be inferred. Dehumanization can be understood as foundational to the process of genocide. Evidence of context may help determine the intent, and must be considered with the actual conduct: intent should be evident above all from words and deeds, and “patterns of purposeful action”, such that no other inference can be reasonably drawn.

 

50. In the latest Gaza assault, direct evidence of genocidal intent is uniquely present. Vitriolic genocidal rhetoric has painted the whole population as the enemy to be eliminated and forcibly displaced. High-ranking Israeli officials with command authority have issued harrowing public statements evincing genocidal intent, including as follows:

 

(a) President Isaac Herzog stated that “an entire nation out there...is responsible” for the 7 October attack, and that Israel would “break their backbone”;

 

(b) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to Palestinians as “Amalek” and “monsters”. The Amalek reference is to a biblical passage in which God commands Saul “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”.

 

(c) Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians as “human animals”, and announced “full offense” on Gaza, having “released all the restraints”, and that “Gaza will never return to what it was”;

 

(d) IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari stated that focus should be on causing “maximum damage”, demonstrating a strategy of disproportionate and indiscriminate violence;

 

(e) Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter referred to Israel’s action as “the Gaza Nakba”;

 

(f) Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu called for striking Gaza with “nuclear bombs”;

 

(g) Likud MK Revital Gottlieb wrote on her social media: “Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!!...Flatten Gaza. Without mercy! This time, there is no room for mercy!”.

 

51. Such calls for annihilatory violence directed at troops on duty, constitute strong evidence of direct and public incitement to commit genocide. Decades of discourse dehumanizing Palestinians have prepared the groundwork for such incitements.

 

52. Since 7 October, the proliferation of statements inciting genocide have also involved several sectors of Israeli society, religious leaders, journalists, artists, and various professionals (including doctors and political commentators).

 

53. There is cogent evidence that these statements have been internalized and acted upon by troops on the ground. Israeli soldiers have, including on social media channels run by the Israeli military, referred to Palestinians as “terrorists”, “roaches”, “rats”, and have

repeated terms articulated by political leaders, chanting that “there are no ‘uninvolved civilians’”, while also calling for the building of settlements in Gaza, “occupy[ing] Gaza... wip[ing] off the seed of Amalek”, boasting about killing “families, mothers, and children”, humiliating detained Palestinians, detonating dozens of homes, destroying entire residential neighbourhoods, and desecrating cemeteries and places of worship.

 

54. Israel’s Prime Minister and President have stated that Israel was fighting on behalf of “all civilized states and... peoples”, “a barbarism that has no place in the modern world,” that they “will uproot evil and it will be good for the entire region and the world”. This racist rhetoric echoes that of other colonial powers, and tries to construe Israel’s genocidal violence as legitimate in light of Palestinians’ alleged “barbarian” and “premodern” character.

 

VI. Humanitarian camouflage: distorting the laws of war to conceal genocidal intent

 

55. A core feature of Israel’s conduct since 7 October has been the intensification of its de-civilianization of Palestinians, a protected group under the Convention. Israel has used IHL terminology to justify its systematic use of lethal violence against Palestinian civilians as a group and the extensive destruction of life-sustaining infrastructures. Israel has done this by deploying IHL concepts such as human shields, collateral damage, safe zones, evacuations and medical protection in such a permissive manner so as to gut these concepts of their normative content, subverting their protective purpose and ultimately eroding the distinction between civilians and combatants in Israeli actions in Gaza.

 

56. Official statements have translated into military conduct that repudiates the very notion of civilian protection. Israel has thus radically altered the balance struck by IHL between civilian protection and military necessity, as well as the customary rules of distinction, proportionality and precaution. This has obscured one cardinal tenet of IHL: indiscriminate attacks, which do not distinguish military targets from protected persons and objects, cannot be proportionate and are always unlawful.

 

57. On the ground, this distortion of IHL articulated by Israel as a state policy in its official documents, has transformed an entire national group and its inhabited space into a destroyable target, revealing an eliminationist conduct of hostilities. This has had devastating effects, costing the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, destroying the structural fabric of life in Gaza and causing irreparable harm. This illustrates a clear pattern of conduct from which the requisite genocidal intent is the only reasonable inference to be drawn.

 

A. Human Shields and the logic of genocide

 

58. IHL strictly prohibits the use of human shields. Their use constitutes a war crime, as it violates the duty to protect the civilian population from dangers arising from military operations. When human shields are used, the attacking party must take into account the risk to civilians. Indiscriminate or disproportionate harm to civilians remains unlawful and the civilian population can never be targeted.

 

59. Israel has accused Palestinian armed groups of deliberately using civilians as human shields in previous aggressions on Gaza (including in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2022). It also used it to justify high civilian casualties and attacks against paramedics, journalists and others during the 2018–2019 ‘Great March of Return’. UN independent fact-finding missions and reputable human rights organizations have consistently challenged these allegations, sometimes concluding that evidence of human shields had been fabricated. Nevertheless, Israel has used these accusations – sometimes then retracted – to justify widespread and systematic killing of Palestinian civilians in its ongoing assault.

 

60. After 7 October, this macro-characterization of Gaza’s civilians as a population of human shields has reached unprecedented levels, with Israel’s top-ranking political and military leaders consistently framing civilians as either Hamas operatives, “accomplices”, or human shields among whom Hamas is “embedded”. In November, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs defined “the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields” and accused Hamas of using “the civilian population as human shields”. The Ministry defines armed groups fighting from urban areas as deliberately “embedded” in the population to such an extent that it “cannot be concluded from the mere fact that seeming ‘civilians’ or ‘civilian objects’ have been targeted, that an attack was unlawful”. Two rhetorical elements of this key legal policy document indicate the intention to transform the entire Gaza population and its infrastructures of life into a ‘legitimate’ targetable shield: the use of the all-encompassing the combined with the quotation marks to qualify civilians and civilian objects. Israel has thus sought to camouflage genocidal intent with humanitarian law jargon.

 

61. International law does not permit the blanket claim that an opposing force is using the entire population as human shields en bloc. Any such usage must be assessed and established on a case-by-case basis before each individual attack. The crime of using human shields occurs when the use of civilians or civilian objects to impede attacks on lawful targets is the result of a deliberate tactical choice, not merely arising from the nature of the battlefield, such as hostilities in densely populated urban terrain.

 

62. Nevertheless, Israeli authorities have characterized churches, mosques, schools, UN facilities, universities, hospitals and ambulances as connected with Hamas to reinforce the perception of a population characterized as broadly ‘complicit’ and therefore killable. Significant numbers of Palestinian civilians are defined as human shields simply by being in “proximity to” potential Israeli targets. Israel has thus transformed Gaza into a “world without civilians” in which “everything from taking shelter in hospitals to fleeing for safety is declared a form of human shielding”. The accusation of using human shields has thus become a pretext, justifying the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.

 

B. Turning Gaza as a whole into a ‘military objective’

 

63. International law stipulates that attacks must be “strictly limited” to those objects which “by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action”, whose “total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization” in the circumstances ruling at the time “must offer a definite military advantage”.

 

64. Israel has misused this rule to “militarize” civilian objects and whatever surrounds them, justifying their indiscriminate destruction. According to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “many ostensibly civilian objects may become legitimate targets”, losing their protection under IHL or become “collateral” damage as a result of Hamas’s choice. Gaza’s civilian population and infrastructure are presented as obstructions positioned amongst, in front of and above targets. Instead of abiding by circumstantial status determinations in line with IHL for each attack undertaken, as is required, Israel has characterized the whole territory as a military objective.

 

65. Protected civilian objects can lose their immunity from attacks if and for as long as they are used by combatants in hostilities. However, Israel considers any object that has allegedly been or might be used militarily as a legitimate target, so that entire neighbourhoods can be razed or demolished under fictions of legality. In Israel’s logic, civilian objects, such as houses and apartments, become military objectives by proximity, as if the status of ‘lawful’ target spread through a vicinity by ‘viral contagion’. For example, residential tower blocks, each comprising dozens of floors and hundreds of (functionally separate and autonomously usable) flats, purportedly become military objectives in their entirety if a single flat or room had allegedly been used by armed groups.

 

66. Paradigmatic examples are referred to as “power targets”, encompassing any civilian object, including residential buildings, under the pretext that “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza”. Entire multi-storey buildings have been levelled while full of civilians, knowingly killing hundreds in single strikes. The attack on the Al-Taj tower in Gaza City, bombed on 25 October, killed 101 people, including 44 children and 37 women, and injured hundreds.

 

67. Israel has thus de facto abolished the distinction between civilian objects and military objectives. In the offensive’s first three weeks, entire residential areas across northern Gaza were erased. Meanwhile, neighbourhoods in ‘safe areas’ in the south were already being bombarded. By November, the devastation of cities in northern Gaza far exceeded that of Dresden in 1945.

 

68. Rationalizing patterns of attacks on civilian objects, knowingly killing civilians en masse, has become a military strategy premised upon probable war crimes presented as IHL- abiding. This strategy reasonably and solely infers a genocidal policy.

 

C. Indiscriminate killing as “collateral damage”

 

69. Israel has also sought to provide legal cover for indiscriminate attacks by misusing the notion of ‘collateral damage’, unlimitedly expanding what can be considered ‘incidental civilian harm’. Examples of indiscriminate attacks include attacks that by any methods or means strike multiple lawful targets at once in areas with high concentrations of civilians or civilian objects. To justify killing members of the protected group, Israel has defended such actions as causing only incidental harm to civilians, proportionate to concrete and direct military advantages anticipated.

 

70. Invoking the concept of ‘proportionate collateral damage’ to knowingly shell large numbers of members of the protected group, Israel asserts that when attacks result in more collateral damage than expected, this does not necessarily indicate a violation, since “compliance is conduct-oriented, not result-oriented”.

 

71. However, in all attacks launched against residential towers without warnings, extensive civilian harm has been anticipated as the main outcome. The Al-Taj building was full of families at the time of the 31 October strike, which must have been anticipated as certainly killing or injuring all the civilians living there. The fact that so many people were killed was entirely predictable – hence at least indirectly intended – as is evident from the images that the Israeli military itself published. The attack on the Jabalia refugee camp on 25 October killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, and injured a further 280.234 Israeli military personnel affirmed that the target was one Hamas commander in an underground base.

 

72. For a proportionality assessment to be lawful, the principle of distinction must first be respected, otherwise the civilian harm anticipated from an attack ceases to be an incidental, unintended consequence of the attack itself. While both indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks appear to have been committed systematically and repeatedly throughout the latest Israeli campaign, the fact that both types of unlawful attacks have been consistently deemed by Israel as lawful suggests that it operates under a policy of condoning mass killing.

 

73. Under IHL, the concrete and direct military advantage expected from a single attack must be weighed against the foreseeable incidental harm to civilians and civilian objects. However, in its strained proportionality assessments, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs states that “military advantage [...] may refer to the military advantage anticipated” not from a specific military action but “from an operation as a whole”, alluding to the overall purpose of the war.

 

74. Israel’s proportionality assessments have flouted legal requirements by defining military advantage, in each attack, in relation to the destruction of the whole Hamas organization both politically and militarily. It is manifestly illegal to declare as a war aim the destruction of the other side’s political capacity (particularly in the context of a 56-year military occupation which deprives the occupied population of its right to self- determination). But when such an overall ‘political’ war purpose is taken as the value against which proportionality is to be measures in relation to anticipated harm to civilians, there is virtually no magnitude of expected civilian harm that could ever be considered “excessive” so long as the unlawful political objective, as defined by the attacker, is not met. In this context, the indiscriminate killing of protected persons and destruction of protected objects will always be represented, by the attacker, as “proportionate” incidental harm despite its manifest illegality.

 

75. Presenting indiscriminate lethal violence against the protected group as a ‘proportionate means’ to pursue the war aims points to an intent to target the Palestinian population as a whole, consistent with the genocidal statements announcing the campaign. In other words, Israel appears to represent itself as conducting a ‘proportionate genocide’.

 

D. Evacuations and safe zones

 

76. Under IHL, parties to the conflict must evacuate the civilian population and remove civilian objects from the vicinity of military objectives. Evacuations are admissible, as long as they do not displace the protected persons outside the occupied territory; evacuated persons must be transferred back to their homes as soon as hostilities in the area in question have ceased. The displaced, wounded and sick should be protected through the creation of “hospital and safety zones” – also called “safe areas” or “safe zones” – which shall “be far removed from military operations” and established through agreement between the parties.

 

77. The mass evacuation order of 13 October – when 1.1 million Palestinians were ordered to evacuate northern Gaza in 24 hours to Israeli-designated “safe zones” in the south– was communicated through at least 23 different airdropped leaflets, social media postings, text messages and recorded phone messages. Instead of increasing safety for civilians, the sheer scale of evacuations amidst an intense bombing campaign, and the haphazardly communicated safe zones system, along with extended communications blackouts, increased levels of panic, forced displacement and mass killing.

 

78. Immediately after the 13 October evacuation orders and the transformation of southern Gaza into an ostensible “safe zone”, Israel illegally categorized the inhabitants of northern Gaza who had remained (including the sick and wounded) as “human shields” and “accomplices” of terrorism. This policy points to the intention by Israel to ‘transform’ hundreds of thousands of civilians into ‘legitimate’ military targets or collateral casualties through impossible-to-follow evacuation orders. The mass evacuation order included a staggering 22 hospitals in the area, putting at risk more than 2,000 patients and displaced people sheltering in the hospitals, and depriving those remaining of life-sustaining services.

 

79. The erasure of civilian protections in the evacuated area was combined with indiscriminate targeting of evacuees and inhabitants of the areas designated as safe zones. Since the beginning of its assault, Israel has perfidiously bombarded the designated ‘safe’ areas causing significant casualties. Of the roughly 500 2,000-pound bombs dropped by Israel in the first six weeks of hostilities, 42 percent were deployed in the designated safe zones in southern areas. Israel targeted southern Gaza also with other munitions from air, sea and land, causing large-scale destruction of civilian areas in the “safe zones”.

 

80. By 28 October, two weeks after Israel’s mass evacuation order, about 38 percent of killings in Gaza occurred in the declared safe areas south of Wadi Gaza. By 20 November, 34 percent of all Palestinians killed in Gaza were in this area, and by 22 January, 42 percent were located in the area, which by then held the majority of the Gaza population. Simply put, “safe areas” were deliberately turned into areas of mass killing.

 

81. Similar patterns emerge from Israel’s militarization of the “humanitarian corridors” it instructed the population to use in order to evacuate and reach the safe areas. In contrast with the humanitarian rhetoric through which these “safe routes” were announced, these corridors were systematically and perfidiously targeted by bombardment, shelling and sniper fire, becoming ‘death corridors’. Israel set up checkpoints for facial scans and identity checks, where fleeing Palestinians were often detained and later mistreated and tortured.

 

82. By the end of November, the Palestinian death toll reached 15,000. Responding to mounting international criticism, the Israeli military reconfigured its evacuation mechanisms, introducing a new “humanitarian” tool: the “evacuation grid”. The army published on social media a grid map dividing Gaza into 600 blocks and indicating areas to be “evacuated” and “safe” areas. The system – introduced when the army had cut off Gaza from all forms of communication – threw residents into panic, increasing the level of chaos and, subsequently, the number of deaths. From early December, Israel routinely ordered Palestinian civilians in the areas south of Wadi Gaza to move to new zones designated as safe according to the grid. Immediately afterwards, the army targeted these “safe zones”.

 

83. From the end of December to February, Israel intensified its offensive in the ‘safe areas’ of Al Muwasi and Rafah, which were sheltering the majority of the displaced population. These assaults continued even after the ICJ ordered Israel to “take[s] all measures within its power” to prevent genocide. Instead, by February Israel had killed a further 3,135 Palestinians, many of whom while seeking refuge.

 

84. By the beginning of February, 1.4 million Palestinians had been displaced to Rafah, rendering that governorate the most overcrowded in Gaza with “an average density of over 22,200 per square kilometre, five times its pre-conflict levels”. Continuous bombardment of these “safe areas” targeted premises hosting displaced people and medical facilities.

 

85. Just as the evacuations and safe zones were being implemented, high-ranking Israeli officials advocated for settler colonial replacement. Israel’s Prime Minister advocated for ethnic transfer; Israel’s Finance Minister expressed support for expelling two million Palestinians from Gaza; Israel’s Minister of National Security declared the war to be an opportunity to “concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza”, while other cabinet ministers advocated to “resettle” Palestinians into the Sinai, Western countries, and elsewhere. Israel’s Minister of Communications revealed that the expulsion of the evacuated Palestinians outside Gaza was discussed “at government meetings”. On 12 January, a conference for the re-colonization of Gaza and the expulsion of Palestinians was attended by Israeli ministers.

 

86. The pattern of killings of civilians who evacuated to the south, in combination with statements of some senior Israelis declaring an intent to forcibly displace Palestinians outside Gaza and replace them with Israeli settlers, lead to reasonably infer that evacuation orders and safe zones have been used as genocidal tools to achieve ethnic cleansing.

 

E. Medical Shielding

 

87. A final layer of Israel’s “humanitarian camouflage” concerns its efforts to provide legal cover for systematic attacks against medical facilities and personnel, causing the progressive collapse of Gaza’s healthcare sector. Targeting medical facilities while accusing the enemy of shielding within them had already been employed by Israel as a strategy of “medical lawfare” in previous wars. In the current assault, Israel has invoked this legal strategy to justify genocide through the complete destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.

 

88. Civilian healthcare is specially protected under international law: there is a high threshold for the protected status of civilian medical units to be lost. International law protects hospitals while prohibiting their use for military purposes or as shields for military activities, such as positioning military targets in their proximity. Since the beginning of the hostilities, Israel has framed Gaza’s hospitals as Hamas “headquarters” and spaces used for shielding military activities, aiming to blur the distinction between civilian and military objects, transforming hospitals into “hospital shields”, and legitimizing the destruction of Gaza’s entire healthcare sector.

 

89. In November 2023, Al Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza was hosting tens of thousands of displaced people – when it was besieged and invaded. On 27 October, the Israeli military published a 3D video representing the hospital’s underground as a complex network of tunnels functioning as a “Hamas command centre”. On 2 November, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a legal document designating the hospital as a military centre concealing military assets. The hospital was then placed under siege and invaded in mid-November, with Israel accusing Hamas of using medical personnel as “human shields”. After days of attacks, the hospital was turned into a “death zone”; five newborn babies and 14 patients were injured; at least 31 people were killed, and parts of the hospital turned into mass graves.

 

90. Media reports challenged Israel’s allegations that Hamas were using hospitals as shields, asserting that there was no evidence to suggest that the rooms connected to the hospital had been used by Hamas; the hospital buildings (contrary to Israeli military 3D images) were found not to be connected to the tunnel network; and there was no evidence that the tunnels were accessible from the hospital wards. In addition, Israeli army reportedly rearranged weaponry at the Al Shifa before news crews visits, raising further suspicions of fabrication after the Israeli army had claimed that a “list of terrorists” it had found in another Gaza hospital–the Al Rantisi–turned out to be a calendar of the days of the week in Arabic. Whether or not Israel’s accusations of hospital shielding at Al Shifa were true – but still remain to be proven –, the civilians in the hospitals should have been protected and not subjected to siege and military attack.

 

91. That the intent behind Israel’s “humanitarian camouflage” in this instance can only be characterized as genocidal is clear for two reasons. First, Israel was aware of the large-scale destruction of the healthcare system since the World Health Organization had reported in mid-November that a “public health catastrophe” was developing in Gaza, with 26 of 35 hospitals no longer operational due to Israel’s bombing and siege. Second, Israel knew that its military operation was resulting in a significant number of wounded. Physical trauma constitutes the most predominant cause of excess mortality in Gaza. It was predictable that forcibly suspending services at the largest hospital in Gaza would seriously harm the prospects for survival of the injured, the chronically ill and newborn babies in incubators. Therefore, by targeting Al Shifa Hospital, Israel knowingly condemned thousands of sick and displaced people to preventable suffering and death.

 

92. The reliance on the strategy of treating hospitals as medical shields, disregarding their function as indispensable hubs of societal survival for the thousands injured and many more seeking shelter, exposes yet another aspect of the genocidal logic underpinning Israel’s military strategy.

 

VII. Conclusions

 

93. The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel's assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group. This report finds that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the following acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to groups’ members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Genocidal acts were approved and given effect following statements of genocidal intent issued by senior military and government officials.

 

94. Israel has sought to conceal its eliminationist conduct of hostilities sanctioning the commission of international crimes as IHL-abiding. Distorting IHL customary rules, including distinction, proportionality and precautions, Israel has de facto treated an entire protected group and its life-sustaining infrastructure as ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorist-supporting’, thus transforming everything and everyone into either a target or collateral damage, hence killable or destroyable. In this way, no Palestinian in Gaza is safe by definition. This has had devastating, intentional effects, costing the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroying the fabric of life in Gaza and causing irreparable harm to its entire population.

 

95. Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long- standing settler colonial process of erasure. For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group – demographically, culturally, economically and politically –, seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources. The ongoing Nakba must be stopped and remedied once and for all. This is an imperative owed to the victims of this highly preventable tragedy, and to future generations in that land.

 

VIII. Recommendations

 

96. The Special Rapporteur urges member states to enforce the prohibition of genocide in accordance with their non-derogable obligations. Israel and those states that have been complicit in what can be reasonably concluded to constitute genocide must be held accountable and deliver reparations commensurate with the destruction, death and harm inflicted on the Palestinian people.

 

97. The Special Rapporteur recommends that member states:

 

(a) Immediately implement an arms embargo on Israel, as it appears to have failed to comply with the binding measures ordered by the ICJ on 26 January 2024, as well as other economic and political measures necessary to ensure an immediate and lasting ceasefire and to restore respect for international law, including sanctions;

 

(b) Support South Africa having resort to the UNSC under article 94(2) of the UN Charter following Israel’s non-compliance with the above-mentioned ICJ measures;

 

(c) Act to ensure a thorough, independent and transparent investigation of all violations of international law committed by all actors, including those amounting to war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide, including:

 

(i) cooperating with international independent fact-finding/ investigative and accountability mechanisms;

 

(ii) referring the situation in Palestine to the ICC immediately, in support of its ongoing investigation;

 

(iii) discharging their obligations under the principles of universal jurisdiction, ensuring genuine investigations and prosecutions of individuals who are suspected of having committed, or aided or abetted, in the commission of international crimes, including genocide, starting with their own nationals;

 

(d) Ensure that Israel, as well as States who have been complicit in the Gaza genocide, acknowledge the colossal harm done, commit to non-repetition, with measures for prevention, full reparations, including the full cost of the reconstruction of Gaza, for which the establishment of a register of damage with an accompanying verification and mass claims process is recommended;

 

(e) Within the General Assembly, develop a plan to end the unlawful and unsustainable status quo constituting the root cause of the latest escalation, which ultimately culminated in the Gaza genocide, including through the reconstitution of the UN Special Committee against Apartheid to comprehensively address the situation in Palestine, and stand ready to implement diplomatic, economic and political measures provided under the United Nations Charter in case of non-compliance by Israel;

 

(f) In the short term and as a temporary measure, in consultation with the State of Palestine, deploy an international protective presence to constrain the violence routinely used against Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory;

 

(g) Ensure that UNRWA is properly funded to enable it to meet the increased needs of Palestinians in Gaza.

 

98. The Special Rapporteur calls on the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to enhance its efforts to end the current atrocities in Gaza, including by promoting and accurately applying International Law, notably the Genocide Convention, in the context of the oPt as a whole.

  

according to wikipedia

 

A hijab or ḥijāb (Arabic: حجاب, (he-zjab)pronounced [ħiˈʒæːb]/[ħiˈɡæːb]) is both the head covering traditionally worn by Muslim women and modest Muslim styles of dress in general.

 

The Arabic word literally means curtain or cover (noun). Most Islamic legal systems define this type of modest dressing as covering everything except the face and hands in public.[1][2] According to Islamic scholarship, hijab is given the wider meaning of modesty, privacy, and morality;[3] the word for a headscarf or veil used in the Qur'an is khimār (خمار) and not hijab. Still another definition is metaphysical, where al-hijab refers to "the veil which separates man or the world from God."[2]

 

Muslims differ as to whether the hijab should be required on women in public, as it is in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, or whether it should be banned in schools, as it is in France and Turkey.

  

According to the Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World, the meaning of hijab has evolved over time:

 

The term hijab or veil is not used in the Qur'an to refer to an article of clothing for women or men, rather it refers to a spatial curtain that divides or provides privacy. The Qur'an instructs the male believers (Muslims) to talk to wives of Prophet Muhammad behind a hijab. This hijab was the responsibility of the men and not the wives of Prophet Muhammad. However, in later Muslim societies this instruction, specific to the wives of Prophet Muhammad, was generalized, leading to the segregation of the Muslim men and women. The modesty in Qur'an concerns both men's and women's gaze, gait, garments, and genitalia. The clothing for women involves khumūr over the necklines and jilbab (cloaks) in public so that they may be identified and not harmed. Guidelines for covering of the entire body except for the hands, the feet and the face, are found in texts of fiqh and hadith that are developed later.[4]

 

In Indonesia, notably the nation with the largest Muslim population, and some cultures or languages influenced by it namely Malaysia, Brunei and the Philippines, the term jilbab is used instead with few exceptions to refer to the hijab, as opposed to its "correct" modern Arabic definition. In some cases, colloquial use of the term Jilbab may refer to any pre-Islamic female traditional head-dress.

 

Qur'an

 

The Qur'an instructs both Muslim men and women to dress in a modest way.

 

The clearest verse on the requirement of the hijab is surah 24:30-31, asking women to draw their khimar over their bosoms.[5][6]

 

And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw their khimar over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to [...] (Qur'an 24:31)

 

In the following verse, Muslim women are asked to draw their jilbab over them (when they go out), as a measure to distinguish themselves from others, so that they are not harassed. Sura 33:59 reads:[6]

 

Those who harass believing men and believing women undeservedly, bear (on themselves) a calumny and a grievous sin. O Prophet! Enjoin your wives, your daughters, and the wives of true believers that they should cast their outer garments over their persons (when abroad) That is most convenient, that they may be distinguished and not be harassed. [...] (Qur'an 33:58–59)

 

Other Muslims take a relativist approach to ħijāb. They believe that the commandment to maintain modesty must be interpreted with regard to the surrounding society. What is considered modest or daring in one society may not be considered so in another. It is important, they say, for believers to wear clothing that communicates modesty and reserve in the situations in which they find themselves.[7]

 

Along with scriptural arguments, Leila Ahmed argues that head covering should not be compulsory in Islam because the veil predates the revelation of the Qur'an. Head-covering was introduced into Arabia long before Muhammad, primarily through Arab contacts with Syria and Iran, where the hijab was a sign of social status. After all, only a woman who need not work in the fields could afford to remain secluded and veiled.[8][9]

 

Leila Ahmed argues for a more liberal approach to hijab. Among her arguments is that while some Qur'anic verses enjoin women in general to Qur'an 33:58–59. “draw their Jilbabs (overgarment or cloak) around them to be recognized as believers and so that no harm will come to them.” and Qur'an 24:31. “guard their private parts... and drape down khimar over their breasts [when in the presence of unrelated men]”, they urge modesty.

 

However according to the vast majority of Muslims Sunni and Shia, al-Mawrid al-Qawrid Arabic dictionary, Hans-Wehr Dictionary of Arabic into English, and the exhaustive ancient Arabic dictionary "Lisan al-arab", (literally the tongue of the Arabs) the word 'Khimar' means and was used to refer to a piece of cloth that covers the head, or headscarf today called 'hijab'.

 

Other verses do mention separation of men and women but they refer specifically to the wives of the prophet:

 

Abide still in your homes and make not a dazzling display like that of the former times of ignorance:(Qur'an 33:32–33)

 

And when ye ask of them [the wives of the Prophet] anything, ask it of them from behind a curtain.(Qur'an 33:53)

 

According to Leila Ahmed, nowhere in the whole of the Qur'an is the term hijab applied to any woman other than the wives of Muhammad..[8][10]

 

According to at least two authors, (Reza Aslam and Leila Ahmed) the stipulations of the hijab were originally meant only for Muhammad's wives, and were intended to maintain their inviolability. This was because Muhammad conducted all religious and civic affairs in the mosque adjacent to his home:

 

People were constantly coming in and out of this compound at all hours of the day. When delegations from other tribes come to speak with Prophet Muhammad, they would set up their tents for days at a time inside the open courtyard, just a few feet away from the apartments in which Prophet Muhammad's wives slept. And new emigrants who arrived in Yatrib would often stay within the mosque's walls until they could find suitable homes.[8]

 

According to Ahmed:

 

By instituting seclusion Prophet Muhammad was creating a distance between his wives and this thronging community on their doorstep.[11]

 

They argue that the term darabat al-hijab ("taking the veil"), was used synonymously and interchangeably with "becoming Prophet Muhammad's wife", and that during Muhammad's life, no other Muslim woman wore the hijab. Aslam suggests that Muslim women started to wear the hijab to emulate Muhammad's wives, who are revered as "Mothers of the Believers" in Islam,[8] and states "there was no tradition of veiling until around 627 C.E." in the Muslim community.[8][11]

  

The four major Sunni schools of thought (Hanafi, Shafi'i, Maliki and Hanbali) hold that entire body of the woman, except her face and hands- though many[who?] say face, hands, and feet-, is part of her awrah, that is the parts of her body that must be covered during prayer and in public settings.[13][14]

 

Some Muslims[who?] recommend that women wear clothing that is not form fitting to the body: either modest forms of western clothing (long shirts and skirts), or the more traditional jilbāb, a high-necked, loose robe that covers the arms and legs. A khimār or shaylah, a scarf or cowl that covers all but the face, is also worn in many different styles. Some Salafi scholars encourage covering the face, while some follow the opinion that it is only not obligatory to cover the face and the hands but mustahab (Highly recommended). Other scholars oppose face covering, particularly in the west where the woman may draw more attention as a result. These garments are very different in cut than most of the traditional forms of ħijāb, and they are worn worldwide by Muslims.

 

Detailed scholarly attention has been focused on prescribing female dress. Most scholars agree that the basic requirements are that when in the presence of someone of the opposite sex (other than a close family member - see mahram), a woman should cover her body, and walk and dress in a way which does not draw sexual attention to her. Some scholars go so far as to specify exactly which areas of the body must be covered. In some cases, this is everything save the eyes but most require everything save the face and hands to be covered. In nearly all Muslim cultures, young girls are not required to wear a ħijāb. There is not a single agreed age when a woman should begin wearing a ħijāb; however, in many Muslim countries, puberty is the dividing line.

 

In private, and in the presence of mahrams, the rules on dress are relaxed. However, in the presence of husband, most scholars stress the importance of mutual freedom and pleasure of the husband and wife.[15]

  

The burqa (also spelled burka) is the garment that covers women most completely: either only the eyes are visible, or nothing at all. Originating in what is now Pakistan, it is more commonly associated with the Afghan chadri. Typically, a burqa is composed of many yards of light material pleated around a cap that fits over the top of the head, or a scarf over the face (save the eyes). This type of veil is cultural as well as religious.

 

It has become tradition that Muslims in general, and Salafis in particular, believe the Qur'ān demands women wear the garments known today as jilbāb and khumūr (the khumūr must be worn underneath the jilbāb). However, Qur'ān translators and commentators translate the Arabic into English words with a general meaning, such as veils, head-coverings and shawls.[16] Ghamidi argues that verses [Qur'an 24:30] teach etiquette for male and female interactions, where khumūr is mentioned in reference to the clothing of Arab women in the 7th century, but there is no command to actually wear them in any specific way. Hence he considers head-covering a preferable practice but not a directive of the sharia (law).[17]

[edit] Men's dress

 

Although certain general standards are widely accepted, there has been little interest in narrowly prescribing what constitutes modest dress for Muslim men. Most mainstream scholars say that men should cover themselves from the navel to the knees; a minority say that the hadith that are held to require this are weak and possibly inauthentic. They argue that there are hadith indicating that the Islamic prophet Muħammad wore clothing that uncovered his thigh when riding camels, and hold that if Muħammad believed that this was permissible, then it is surely permissible for other Muslim males.[citation needed]

 

As a practical matter, however, the opinion that Muslim men must cover themselves between the navel and the knees is predominant, and most Muslims believe that a man who fails to observe this requirement during salah must perform the prayer again,[citation needed] properly covered, in order for it to be valid. Three of the four Sunni Madh'hab, or schools of law, require that the knees be covered; the Maliki school recommends but does not require knee covering.

 

According to some hadith, Muslim men are asked not to wear gold jewellery, silk clothing, or other adornments that are considered feminine. Some scholars say that these prohibitions should be generalized to prohibit the lavish display of wealth on one's person.[18]

 

In more secular Muslim nations, such as Turkey or Tunisia, many women are choosing, or being coerced, to wear the Hijab, Burqa, Niqab, etc. because of the widespread growth of the Islamic revival in those areas.[citation needed] Similarly, increasing numbers of men are abandoning the Western dress of jeans and t-shirts, that dominated places like Egypt 20 to 30 years ago, in favour of more traditional Islamic clothing such as the Galabiyya.

 

In Iran many women, especially younger ones, have taken to wearing transparent, colorful and very loosly worn Hijabs instead of Chadors or mantoos to protest but keep within the law of the state.

 

The colors of this clothing varies. It is mostly black, but in many African countries women wear clothes of many different colours depending on their tribe, area, or family. In Turkey, where the hijab is banned in private and state universities and schools, 11% of women wear it, though 60% wear traditional non-Islamic headscarves, figures of which are often confused with hijab.[19] [20][21]

 

In many of the western nations, there has been a general rise of hijab-wearing women. They are especially common in Muslim Student Associations at college campuses.

 

Some Muslims have criticized strict dress codes that they believe go beyond the demands of hijab, using Qur'an 66:1 to apply to dress codes as well; the verse suggests that it is wrong to refrain from what is permitted by God.[cit

  

John Esposito, professor of Islamic Studies at Georgetown University, writes that the customs of veiling and seclusion of women in early Islam were assimilated from the conquered Persian and Byzantine societies and then later on they were viewed as appropriate expressions of Quranic norms and values. The Qur'an does not stipulate veiling or seclusion; on the contrary, it tends to emphasize the participation of religious responsibility of both men and women in society.[22] He claims that "in the midst of rapid social and economic change when traditional security and support systems are increasingly eroded and replaced by the state, (...) hijab maintains that the state has failed to provide equal rights for men and women because the debate has been conducted within the Islamic framework, which provides women with equivalent rather than equal rights within the family."[23]

 

Bloom and Blair also write that the Qur'an doesn't require women to wear veils; rather, it was a social habit picked up with the expansion of Islam. In fact, since it was impractical for working women to wear veils, "A veiled woman silently announced that her husband was rich enough to keep her idle."[24]

[edit] Modern practice

 

Some governments encourage and even oblige women to wear the hijab, whilst others have banned it in at least some public settings.

 

Some Muslims believe hijab covering for women should be compulsory as part of sharia, i.e. Muslim law. Wearing of the hijab was enforced by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and is enforced in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Islamic Emirate required women to cover not only their head but their face as well, because "the face of a woman is a source of corruption" for men not related to them.[25] While some women wholeheartedly embrace the rules, others protest by observing the rules in slipshod or inconsistent fashion, or flouting them whenever possible. Sudan's criminal code allows the flogging or fining of anyone who “violates public morality or wears indecent clothing”, albeit without defining "indecent clothing",

 

Turkey, Tunisia, and Tajikistan are Muslim-majority countries where the law prohibits the wearing of hijab in government buildings, schools, and universities. In Tunisia, women were banned from wearing hijab in state offices in 1981 and in the 1980s and 1990s more restrictions were put in place.[26] The Turkish government recently attempted to lift a ban on Muslim headscarves at universities, but were overturned by the country's Constitutional Court.[27]

 

On March 15, 2004, France passed a law banning "symbols or clothes through which students conspicuously display their religious affiliation" in public primary schools, middle schools, and secondary schools. In the Belgian city of Maaseik, Niqāb has been banned.[28] (2006)

 

On July 13, 2010, France's lower house of parliament overwhelmingly approved a bill that would ban wearing the Islamic full veil in public. There were 335 votes for the bill and only one against in the 557-seat National Assembly.

[edit] Non-governmental

 

Non-governmental enforcement of hijab is found in many parts of the Muslim world.

 

Successful informal coercion of women by sectors of society to wear hijab has been reported in Gaza where Mujama' al-Islami, the predecessor of HAMAS, reportedly used "a mixture of consent and coercion" to "`restore` hijab" on urban educated women in Gaza in the late 1970s and 1980s.[29]

 

Similar behavior was displayed by Hamas itself during the first intifada in Palestine. Though a relatively small movement at this time, Hamas exploited the political vacuum left by perceived failures in strategy by the Palestinian factions to call for a 'return' to Islam as a path to success, a campaign that focused on the role of women.[30] Hamas campaigned for the wearing of the hijab alongside other measures, including insisting women stay at home, segregation from men and the promoting of polygamy. In the course of this campaign women who chose not to wear the hijab were verbally and physically harassed, with the result that the hijab was being worn 'just to avoid problems on the streets'.[31]

 

In France, according to journalist Jane Kramer, veiling among school girls became increasingly common following the 9/11 Attack of 2001, due to coercion by "fathers and uncles and brothers and even their male classmates" of the school girls. "Girls who did not conform were excoriated, or chased, or beaten by fanatical young men meting out Islamic justice."[32] According to the American magazine The Weekly Standard, a survey conducted in France in May 2003 reportedly "found that 77% of girls wearing the hijab said they did so because of physical threats from Islamist groups."[33]

 

In India a 2001 "acid attack on four young Muslim women in Srinagar ... by an unknown militant outfit, [was followed by] swift compliance by women of all ages on the issue of wearing the chadar (head-dress) in public."[34][35][36]

 

In Basra Iraq, "more than 100 women who didn't adhere to strict Islamic dress code" were killed between the summer of 2007 and spring of 2008 by Islamist militias (primarily the Mahdi Army) who controlled the police there, according to the CBS news program 60 Minutes.[37]

 

Islamists in other countries have been accused of attacking or threatening to attack the faces of women in an effort to intimidate them from wearing of makeup or allegedly immodest dress.[38][39][40]

[edit] Hijab by country

  

The veil has become the subject of lively contemporary debate, in Muslim countries as well as within Western countries with Muslim populations. For example, in 2006 British government minister Jack Straw suggested that communication with some of the Muslim members of his constituency would be made significantly easier if they ceased covering their faces.[41] In broader terms, the sweep of the debate is captured by Bodman and Tohidi, stating that 'the meaning of the hijab ranges from a form of empowerment for the woman choosing to wear it to a means of seclusion and containment imposed by others'.[42] The subject has also become highly politicized. There is a diverse range of views on the wearing of the hijab in general. Sadiki interviews a woman who views it as 'submission to God's commandments'.[43] Rubenberg illustrates how even secular women in Muslim countries can be made to wear the veil due to a social or political context.[44] Some criticise the hijab in its own right as a regressive device, such as Polly Toynbee stating that it 'turns women into things'.[45] Faisal al Yafai meanwhile argues that the veil should be debated, but that more pressing issues like political and legal rights of women should be a greater priority.[46]

 

Writers such as Leila Ahmed and Karen Armstrong have highlighted how the veil became a symbol of resistance to colonialism, particularly in Egypt in the latter part of the 19th Century, and again today in the post-colonial period. In The Battle for God, Armstrong writes:

 

“The veiled woman has, over the years, become a symbol of Islamic self-assertion and a rejection of Western cultural hegemony.”[47]

 

While in Women and Gender, Ahmed states:

 

“...it was the discourses of the West, and specifically the discourse of colonial domination, that in the first place determined the meaning of the veil in geopolitical discourses and thereby set the terms for its emergence as a symbol of resistance.”[48]

 

The issue of the veil has thus been “hijacked” to a degree by cultural essentialists on both sides of the divide.[citation needed] Arguments against veiling have been co-opted, along with wider “feminist” discourse, to create a colonial “feminism” that uses questions of Muslim women’s dress amongst others to justify “patriarchal colonialism in the service of particular political ends.”[citation needed] Thus, efforts to improve the situation of women in Muslim (and other non-Western) societies are judged purely on what they wear.[citation needed] Meanwhile, for Islamists, rejection of “Western” modes of dress is not enough: resistance and independence can only be demonstrated by the “wholesale affirmation of indigenous culture”[49]—a prime example being the wearing of the veil.

 

Tracing the Victorian law of coverture, Legal Scholar L. Ali Khan provides a critique of the British male elite that wishes to impose its own "comfort views" to unveil Muslim women from Asia, Africa, and Middle East.[50]

 

In her discussion of findings from interviews of university-educated Moroccan Muslim women who choose to wear the Hijab, Hessini argues that wearing the Hijab is used as a method of separation of women from men when women work and therefore step into what is perceived to be the men’s public space, so in this case, when women have the right and are able to work, a method has been found to maintain the traditional societal arrangements.[51]

 

Academic Rema Hammai quotes a Palestinian woman reflective of an "activist" resistance to "hijabization" in Gaza saying that "in my community it's natural to wear" hijab. "The problem is when little boys, including my son, feel they have the right to tell me to wear it."[52] Similarly Iranian-American novelist Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic novel Persepolis, and Parvin Darabi, who wrote Rage Against the Veil are some of the famous opponents of compulsory hijab, which was protested when first imposed.[53]

 

Cheryl Benard, writing an opinion piece in Rand Corporation, criticized those who used fear to enforce the hijab and stated that "in Pakistan, Kashmir, and Afghanistan, hundreds of women have been blinded or maimed when acid was thrown on their unveiled faces by male fanatics who considered them improperly dressed."[54]

 

Lubna al-Hussein, a journalist in Khartoum, was arrested by the Public Order Police for wearing trousers. She is protesting the punishment for breaking hijab: forty lashes and an indeterminate fine.

Asking price was $45.00 each

 

2013 Chicagoland Antique Advertising Slot Machine, Jukebox, Pinball Show

 

Pheasant Run

Saint Charles, Illinois

Kane County, USA

An experiment on how the pattern of segregation of different sized sand in a rotating tube depends on the diameter of the tube.

 

See

www.physics.utoronto.ca/nonlinear/abstracts/CKM04abstract...

  

White supremacist Alabama Gov. George Wallace holds up a Baltimore Sun newspaper May 17, 1972 describing his Democratic primary win in Maryland following an assassination attempt by Arthur Bremer in Laurel.

 

Wallace was recovering from the attempt at Holy Cross Hospital in Silver Spring, Maryland and is pictured with his wife Cornelia.

 

Bremer emptied his revolver hitting presidential candidate Wallace four times May 15th and wounded three other people. Wallace, however, did not die of his wounds but was paralyzed from his waist down.

 

Wallace was a segregationist who in his inaugural speech in 1963 called for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever” and who famously “stood in the schoolhouse door” to block African American students from entering the University of Alabama.

 

He ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 1964, 1972 and 1976. He ran as a third party candidate in 1968 and is the last third party candidate to win electoral votes. In his campaigns, he called for “states’ rights” and used other coded racial language.

 

In 1972, Wallace was the object of protesters in Maryland at Frederick, Hagerstown, Capital Plaza and Wheaton Plaza prior to being shot at Laurel Shopping.

 

At his appearance in Cambridge, Maryland in 1964 during the height of desegregation protest and occupation by the National Guard, a demonstration was broken up by police and National Guard using tear gas and batons.

 

Wallace later moderated his racial views and expressed regret for his earlier remarks. He died in 1998.

 

Bremer initially sought to kill President Richard M. Nixon, but realized it would be difficult so he settled on Wallace stalking him in Wisconsin, Michigan and Maryland.

 

Bremer attended the rally at Wheaton Plaza, but the anti-Wallace crowd booed and threw objects at Wallace so he did not enter the crowd to shake hands, depriving Bremer of the opportunity to attempt the assassination.

 

Briefly beaten while being subdued in Laurel, Bremer was sentenced to 63 years in prison in August 1972. The sentenced was later reduced on appeal to 53 years. At a parole hearing in 1996, Bremer argued that he should be released because, “"Shooting segregationist dinosaurs wasn't as bad as harming mainstream politicians."

 

Bremer was released Nov. 9, 2007 at the age of 57 and will be off of probation in 2025.

 

For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHskzBFDmR

 

The photographer is unknown. The original source was the Wallace for President campaign.

32 toilets, extension / encroachment high mast pole lights

scrap yard segregation tri-cycle carrier

rubbish

Inclusion versus exclusion, segregation, and integration.

DPAC protest at Dept for Education for inclusive education - London 04.09.2013

 

Campaigners from disability groups Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and Alliance for Inclusive Education (ALLFIE) protested outside the Dept. For Education to demand an end to increasing educational segregation of disabled children.

 

This protest was one of four simultaneous protests taking place as the culmination of a national week of action organised by Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) using the campaign title "Reclaiming Our Futures", and were aimed specifically at government departments whose actions are impacting severly on disabled people - Education, health, Transport and Energy.

 

Following the individual actions, all four groups of campaigners merged on the Dept for Work and Pensions headquarters for a larger protest against benefits cuts to disabled people which, they claim, affects them disproportionately.

  

All photos © 2013 Pete Riches

Do not reproduce, alter, re-transmit or blog my images without my written permission. I remain at all times the copyright owner of this image.

 

Hi-Res, un-watermarked versions of these files are available on application solely at my discretion

If you want to use any image found in my Flickr Photostream, please Email me directly.

 

Media buyers and publications can access this story on Demotix

 

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about.me/peteriches

Though constructed in 1912 as the Baxter Hotel, this building, at the heart of Denver’s Five Points community, achieved its prominence in the years following 1929. With its name change and establishment of the Rossonian Lounge, the hotel became one of the most important jazz clubs between St. Louis and Los Angeles. Jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, George Shearing, and Dinah Washington stayed at the hotel and entertained in the Rossonian Lounge between their major Denver engagements. These shows were often staged after the musicians finished their scheduled performances at the same Denver hotels that refused them lodging due to the racial segregation existing at the time.

      

Replica of an apartment in the Abraham Lincoln Tower, Rio de Janeiro.

 

The Ideal Place

Nest, Den Haag 2012

  

A campaign to counter the social segregation of Barra da Tijuca, a neighborhood in the south west of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

  

This project is focussed on what used to be called ‘Athaydeville’ an area in Barra da Tijuca that nowadays is called Centro da Barra. Barra da Tijuca in Rio de Janeiro is known as an area for the rich, the fortress of the ‘nouveau riche’, providing a way to escape from the violence and unsafety in the city. Barra is often characterized as the ‘new Miami’, with distances requiring the use of cars and a landscape defined by its shoppingmalls, condominiums and gated communities. Barra da Tijuca represents the mentality of a city in which people, if they are able to afford, prefer to withdraw themselves behind the walls of gated communities. We believe that these places create a bigger segregation and therefor a greater social injustice.

 

In order to understand Barra da Tijuca we focussed our project on the early urban devellopment. In the sixties Barra was still underdeveloped. It was a beautiful natural reserve with clean and quiet beaches, swamps and a big variation of vegetation and animals. The city of Rio de Janeiro needed to expand its borders because of population growth and Barra provided the space. In the early adds of the new developments, Barra was promoted like: ‘O paraiso existe: este aqui!’ (Paradise exists: it is here!) or ‘Viva no paraiso: a nova forma de viver’ (Living in paradise: a new way of living). Most of these new projects would be constructed in urban islands, like Athaydeville. In the late sixties the main devellopments started and the open fields, swamps and dunes soon became an urban eldorado for real estate developers and the paradise got occupied.

 

It is said that when Rio de Janeiro ceased to be Brazil’s capital in 1960, the city government wanted to compromise this loss of importance by competing with Brasilia’s ambitious modernistic urban planning and architecture. Rio needed to invest in an urban development that was similair spectacular. So they asked Lucio Costa to design a masterplan for the urban expansions towards the SouthWest of the city, that was bigger than the master plan of Brasilia. But unlike Brasilia, Costa could not start from scratch; the land in Barra was already divided by a lot of different private investors who had speculated with the land during the sixties. The political situation was very unstable. Some years before the developments in Barra started, the coup took place that resulted in a military regime. The dictatorship stimulated capitalist industrialization. In 1967 the economy began an impressive climb. Sadly, in those years of the supposed “economic miracles,” criticism and labor unrest were suppressed with arrests, torture, and censorship. This political climate gave space for speculation and corruption. One of the people that took full advantage of it was Mucio Athayde.

 

Mucio Athayde, the developer that worked together with Oscar Niemeyer created a plan for Centro da Barra. This plan was called Athaydeville and it would include 76 residential towers, with sophisticated names like: Torre Abraham Lincoln, Torre Charles de Gaulle, Torre Ernst Hemmingway and Torre Jean Jaques Rousseau. In the promised plans the towers would be accompanied with public community services like a school, a club, parks etc. The municipality was afraid of an uncontrolled urban sprawl of hundreds of these towers, so they commissioned Lucio Costa to regulate the urban growth in the region. Lucio Costa liked Niemeyers design and based his Master plan of Barra on the design of Niemeyer. The original plan of Lucio Costa included several ‘islands’ of circular towers for different social classes with in between the preservation of the natural landscape. Lucio Costa’s master plan was supposed to be used as an open grid; the architects should have had the artistic freedom to experiment and use their own signature. Also he wanted to leave parts of the region open, in order to plan these parts in a later phase. Lucio Costa needed the control of a powerful municipality that would support this approach, but instead the local politicians seemed to be more in favor of the private sector that proposed clear money-making plans. This frustrated Costa so much, that he disconnected himself from the project. Despite all the advertisement campaigns the circular towers of Mucio Athayde didn’t become very successful either. Due to construction flaws and bad design the project failed completely. People didn’t want to live inside tiny apartments that looked like pizza slices. This failure gave way to other developers that started building more successful condominiums, with less sophisticated names like: Sun Coast, Costa Blanca, Sunset, Aloha and Barra Summer Dream.

 

Our research is concentrated on one of the circular towers, called the Abraham Lincoln tower. ‘Desenvolvimento e Engenharia’ (Mucio’s company) pretended for almost 35 years to strive for completion of the Abraham Lincoln tower, but in fact nothing happened. In 2005 the company got bankrupt. The original buyers of the apartments never got what they paid for. At least 250 of the 454 apartments in tower H do have owners. Some of them are waiting 41 years, some inherited an apartment and some bought one in the late eighties when Mucio started a new advertisement campaign. It’s questionable if Mucio Athayde ever aimed to finish the tower – we read somewhere that he invented the trick of leaving buildings unfinished – a trick that has been used by other developers as well, like Encol. Some speculate that the bankruptcy of Dessevolvimento was self-inflicted. In 2004 the tower got squatted by more than 400 people from the surrounding favelas. They say that this invasion of tower H was set up by the developing company itself, in order to receive an official complain of the owners. These complain eventually led to their bankruptcy. This bankruptcy. freed Mucio Athayde from further responsibility.

 

The invasion and the lawsuit brought the owners together for the first time in four decades. ‘Associação de Adquirentes da Torre H’ started to work on plans for the completion of their tower. They are looking for a developer who wants to finish the tower and sell the rest of the apartments The lawyer of the Association told us that if the association doesn’t succeed within two years, the tower will be imploded. The landmark that reminds us of the failure of the plano piloto for Barra and the golden age of real estate scams, will be changed soon. It will either be finished or demolished.

 

The stories related to the failure of Torre Abraham Lincoln should not be forgotten. In 2004 the name ‘Athaydeville’ officially changed. Many people agreed with the name-change and interpreted this as an indication of a better future for Centro da Barra. Some were more critical they may agreed with the necessity of changing the name of the area but they warned for the negative consequence of erasing the past too suddenly. According to the critics changing the name is an example of how the country deals with the remembrance of the years of the repression and the golden age of the corruption scams.

Exposition : The color line

Du mardi 04 octobre 2016 au dimanche 15 janvier 2017

 

Quel rôle a joué l’art dans la quête d’égalité et d’affirmation de l’identité noire dans l’Amérique de la Ségrégation ? L'exposition rend hommage aux artistes et penseurs africains-américains qui ont contribué, durant près d’un siècle et demi de luttes, à estomper cette "ligne de couleur" discriminatoire.

 

—————

 

« Le problème du 20e siècle est le problème de la ligne de partage des couleurs ».

 

Si la fin de la Guerre de Sécession en 1865 a bien sonné l’abolition de l'esclavage, la ligne de démarcation raciale va encore marquer durablement la société américaine, comme le pressent le militant W.E.B. Du Bois en 1903 dans The Soul of Black Folks. L’exposition The Color Line revient sur cette période sombre des États-Unis à travers l’histoire culturelle de ses artistes noirs, premières cibles de ces discriminations.

 

Des thématiques racistes du vaudeville américain et des spectacles de Minstrels du 19e siècle à l’effervescence culturelle et littéraire de la Harlem Renaissance du début du 20e siècle, des pionniers de l’activisme noir (Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington) au réquisitoire de la chanteuse Billie Holiday (Strange Fruit), ce sont près de 150 ans de production artistique – peinture, sculpture, photographie, cinéma, musique, littérature… – qui témoignent de la richesse créative de la contestation noire.

Bokaler på Bennetsv väg i området Örtagården i kommunala fastighetsbolaget MKB:s lokaler i Rosengård, Malmö, fotograferade 20140724.

 

Photo: News Øresund - Johan Wessman

© News Øresund(CC BY 3.0)

 

Bostad+lokal=bokal. Butikslokaler i bottenplan och bostad en våning upp är en satsning som MKB gjort på Rosengård i Malmö men är ett vanligt koncept såväl utomlands som i Sverige förr i tiden.

 

Detta verk av News Øresund är licensierat under en Creative Commons Erkännande 3.0 Unported-licens (CC BY 3.0). Bilden får fritt publiceras under förutsättning att källa anges.

The picture can be used freely under the prerequisite that the source is given. News Øresund, Malmö, Sweden.

www.newsoresund.org.

News Øresund är en oberoende regional nyhetsbyrå som ingår i projektet Øresund Media Platform som drivs av Øresundsinstituttet i partnerskap med Lunds universitet och Roskilde Universitet och med delfinansiering från EU (Interreg IV A Öresund) och 14 regionala; icke kommersiella aktörer.

Outside the Old City of Jerusalem during the week-long festival of Sukkot, men board the bus from the front door and women from the rear. They were urged to do so by hired ushers carrying megaphones containing recorded messages repeatedly urging women to board from the rear and men from the front. One of the ushers, in the yellow vest, can be seen by his reflection in the bus window.

A group of 400 civil rights demonstrators rally on the steps of the state capital in Annapolis, Md. March 2, 1964 protesting police tactics during anti-segregation demonstrations in the small Eastern Shore town of Princess Anne.

 

Sixty-two were injured when police and fire fighters cleared the streets in Princess Anne Feb. 22, 1964 using police dogs and fire hoses against civil rights demonstrators seeking to desegregate a restaurant in the town.

 

The Maryland chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) sponsored the demonstrations attempting to desegregate the Eastern Shore and began picketing in Annapolis March 2nd in response to the brutality in Princess Anne.

 

A special session of the state legislature had been called to consider both a tax increase and an increase in teacher salaries. The crisis forces Gov. Milliard Tawes to put the full weight of his office behind a bill banning discrimination in businesses that accommodated the public across the state.

 

At one point the CORE demonstrations were so disruptive to the state legislature that the NAACP asked the group to suspend demonstration and go home. CORE refused.

 

A weak bill passed the legislature the previous year that permitted counties to “opt out” and the entire Eastern Shore did so. The special session ultimately passed a bill that covered the whole state, but exempted establishments that sold alcoholic beverages.

 

Segregationists petitioned the new law to a referendum in November where it passed 53%-47%, despite ;white supremacist opposition..

 

The federal 1964 Civil Rights Act, however, predated Maryland’s law when it was signed July 2nd by President Lyndon Johnson and provided broader protections than Maryland's.

 

For more information and related flic.kr/s/aHsk4UiXYi

 

The photographer is unknown. The image is a Bettmann photograph obtained via an Internet sale.

 

The often forgotten subplot of John Waters' "Hairspray" is 1960's segregation. In Baltimore it kept Little Inez (right) played by Tiara N. Whaley from auditioning for "The Corny Collins Show". Her mom, Motormouth Maybelle, played by Eleanor Lawrence Wyche, owns a downtown record shop and is the host of Negro Day on "The Corny Collins Show."

 

John Waters’ ultimate Baltimore musical – “Hairspray”—comes to the CCBC Essex stage this weekend and runs through Aug. 7. Based on the 1988 New Line Cinema film classic written and directed by Waters, this delightfully campy homage to 1960's Baltimore will have you dancing in the aisles. The multiple Tony winner ran for more than six years on Broadway and now we've got it back in Baltimore!

 

The plot revolves around Tracy Turnblad’s dreams of dancing on “The Corny Collins Show” (In Baltimore, everyone knows that would be “The Buddy Deane Show”!). First, the teenage Tracy (played by Sarah Ford Gorman of Towson) has to convince her Mom Edna (John W. Ford of Perry Hall) to let her audition. Then, when Tracy achieves her dream and becomes an overnight sensation, she launches a campaign to integrate the show. Along the way, there is romance with teenage hunk Link Larkin (played by Shane Lowry of Fallston) and rivalry with stuck-up Amber Von Tussle (played by Elisabeth Johnson of Bel Air).

 

All of this is played out against the shadow of 1960’s segregation, which prevents black teen dancers from being part of the show. Motormouth Maybelle (played by Eleanor Lawrence Wyche of Baltimore City), is the owner of a downtown record shop and the host of "Negro Day" on “The Corny Collins Show.” Her talented son, Seaweed (played by J Hargrove of Baltimore City) falls in love with Tracy’s best friend, Penny Pingleton (played by Anna Holmes of Bel Air.) His sister, Little Inez, (played by Tiara N. Whaley of Edgewood) wants to audition for the regular show.

 

Cockpit in Court Summer Theatre, in residence at CCBC Essex, presents “Hairspray – The Broadway Musical” July 22 through Aug. 7, 2011 on the Mainstage in the B Building at CCBC Essex, 7201 Rossville Boulevard. Tickets are $20 general admission, $18 for seniors (60+) and $12 for children 12 years old and under. For tickets and information, call the CCBC Box Office at 443-840-ARTS (2787).

 

...

 

Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.

 

Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.

 

Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood.

 

Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

 

...

 

Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

 

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

 

...

 

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.

 

We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.

 

We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.

 

We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "For Whites Only".

 

We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.

 

No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

 

...

 

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

 

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

 

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

 

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

 

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

 

I have a dream today.

 

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

 

I have a dream today.

 

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

 

...

 

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

 

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.

 

Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

 

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

 

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

 

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

 

...

 

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi and every mountainside.

 

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Words taken from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" Speech, March on Washington, DC, August 28, 1963

  

The panels and the selection of the text are of students in Meckelfeld, Lower Saxony.

Full video at: www.bitchute.com/video/kZQzr8Xqa1CO/

 

Vaccine passports are in NYC. Learn about your rights at www.thehealthyamerican.org @newyorkfreedomrally

 

Jim Covid show your papers mandatory vaccine segregation social credit system law comes to broadway, times square and just about every single entertainment venue in new york city. a few people from New York Freedom Rally went to Times Square, New York City @restaurantrow a couple of days ago, door to door to see if anyone would serve them without vaccinations. they gave civil rights literature to business owners and educated them on their legal liability, then @joespeakstruth & Curtis Orwell continued to times square with their bullhorns to educate people about the key to the city global tyranny mark of the beast system immunity passport law in new york city

 

A February 1951 image of Gardner Bishop, the founder and organizer of the Consolidated Parents Group that fought for seven years for better schools in the District of Columbia and ultimately won the Bolling v. Sharpe U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools in Washington, D.C.

 

Gardner Bishop and his neighbors’ middle school-age children were crammed into a school with half the capacity of white schools, forced into part time shifts and walking blocks to annexes in order to sit at elementary school desks. There were no recreational facilities and no equipment for learning such as labs or typewriters. At the same time white-only schools had vacancies and often-lavish facilities.

 

Bishop organized a strike, formed a new parents organization, picketed, rallied, and filed court suits until the whole so-called “separate but equal” system came crashing down in 1954.

 

The lawsuit that Consolidated Parents was responsible for, Bolling v. Sharpe, not only desegregated schools in the District, but also broke new ground in interpreting the “due process” clause of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.

 

Bishop was a native of Rocky Mount, N.C. He moved to the District in 1930 and lived at 1113 Montello Ave. NE during the 7-year fight for better schools. He owned a barbe3rshop at 1515 U St. NW for many years where he also cut hair.

 

For more information and related images, see www.flickr.com/gp/washington_area_spark/564wW3

 

Read the story of DC desegregation from the pickets to the courts: washingtonspark.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/dcs-fighting-bar...

 

The photographer is unknown. The image is an Afro American photograph published in February 1951.

 

This wall was built in the 1940s to separate a new subdivision for white people from a black neighborhood. Part of it runs along the edge of a park and has been decorated with art work. For more on the wall and segregation in Detroit, see my web page at www.theseekerbooks.com/detroit/Segregation.html

A demonstrator carries a “Down Jim Crow” sign with a depiction of an arrow through the crow at the Youth March for Integrated School in Washington, D.C. April 18, 1959.

 

The demonstration drew 26,000 people to Washington, D.C. April 18, 1959 as estimated by U.S. Park Police.

 

The group met at 7th Street NW on the national Mall before marching down Madison drive to the Washington Monument grounds where they rallied at the Sylvan Theater and were addressed by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of the SCLC, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Tom Mboya of the All African People’s Conference.

 

This was the third national march in as many years designed to speed progress implementing the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in schools.

 

The 15,000 who attended the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, the 10,000 who attended the 1958 youth march for school integration and the 26,000 who attended the 1959 youth march for school integration seem small by today’s standards, they exceeded any protest march since the 30,000 who attended the 1932 Bonus Army demonstrations.

 

These national marches also provided the test runs for mobilization and logistics that would be necessary to successfully stage the seminal 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom.

 

The national actions also cemented Rev. King’s status as the pre-eminent civil rights leader.

 

For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHskWwU99i

 

The photographer is unknown. The image was an Internet find.

I really don't understand the use of barbed wire in the middle of a large clump of nettles.

Freedom Riders Greyhound Bus Terminal Station in Washington, D.C. USA

 

Freedom Riders were civil rights activists who rode interstate buses into the segregated southern United States in 1961 and following years to challenge the non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decisions Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia (1946) and Boynton v. Virginia (1960), which ruled that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. The Southern states had ignored the rulings and the federal government did nothing to enforce them. The first Freedom Ride left Washington, D.C., on May 4, 1961

 

The first Freedom Ride began on May 4, 1961. Led by CORE Director James Farmer, 13 riders (seven black, six white, including Genevieve Hughes, William E. Harbour, and Ed Blankenheim) left Washington, DC, on Greyhound and Trailways buses. Their plan was to ride through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, ending in New Orleans, Louisiana, where a civil rights rally was planned. Most of the Riders were from CORE, and two were from SNCC. Many were in their 40s and 50s.

 

The Freedom Riders' tactics for their journey were to have at least one interracial pair sitting in adjoining seats, and at least one black rider sitting up front, where seats under segregation had been reserved for white customers by local custom throughout the South. The rest of the team would sit scattered throughout the rest of the bus. One rider would abide by the South's segregation rules in order to avoid arrest and to contact CORE and arrange bail for those who were arrested.

 

Greyhound Bus Terminal Station

1100 New York Avenue, NW Washington, DC, 20005

1100newyorkavenue.buildingengines.com/node/29

 

Photo

Washington, D.C. USA North America

04/07/2013

marabastad, pretoria. old polaroids and slide scans, around 1980

  

Marabastad was a culturally diverse community, with the Hindu Mariamman Temple arguably being its most prominent landmark.

 

Like the residents of other racially diverse areas in South Africa, such as District Six, "Fietas" and Sophiatown, the inhabitants of Marabastad were relocated to single-race townships further away from the city centre.

 

These removals were due to Apartheid laws like the Group Areas Act. Unlike Sophiatown, Fietas and District Six, it was not bulldozed, but it retained many of its original buildings, and became primarily a business district, with most shops still owned by the Indians who had also lived there previously.

 

Some property was however owned by the city council and the government, resulting in limited development taking place there. In addition, a large shopping complex was built to house Indian-owned shops.

 

The black residents of Marabastad were relocated to Atteridgeville (1945),

 

the Coloured residents to Eersterus (1963), and the Indian residents to Laudium (1968).

 

There are plans to revive once-picturesque Marabastad, and to reverse years of urban decay and neglect, although few seem to have been implemented as of 2005.

 

History[edit]

Marabastad was named after the local headman of a village to the west of Steenhoven Spruit. During the 1880s he lived in Schoolplaats and acted as an interpreter.

 

During this period some Africans lived on the farms where they were being employed and also chose to live on other, undeveloped land. Schoolplaats could also not accommodate all the migrants and this resulted in squatting.

 

An overflow from Schoolplaats to the north-west and Maraba’s village occurred and in August 1888 the land was surveyed by the government. The location Marabastad was established and was situated between the Apies River in the north, Skinner Spruit in the west, Steenhoven Spruit in the east and De Korte Street in the south.

  

There were 67 stands varying between 1400 and 2500 square meters each. Residents were not allowed to own stands, but had to rent them from the government at 4 pounds a year.

 

They were allowed to build their own houses and to plant crops on empty plots. Water was acquired from the various bordering rivers and 58 wells situated in the area.

 

The township was not private owned and was managed by the Transvaal Boer Republic. At the outbreak of the Second Boer War in 1899 there were no rules and regulations with regard to Marabastad.

 

Africans who streamed to Pretoria during the war were living in squatter camps near the artillery barracks, the brickworks and the railway stations at Prinshof.

 

This resulted in the development of ‘New Marabastad’ in the area between Marabastad and the Asiatic Bazaar in 1900 by the British military authorities. They had been occupying the city since June 1900 and resettled refugees in the area. By 1901 there were 392 occupied stands in the New Marabastad and there was no real segregation between Africans, Asians and Coloured people.

 

Although New Marabastad was intended as a temporary settlement the military authorities granted permission for in their employ to erect brick houses. This resulted in the erection of other permanent structures like schools and churches.

 

The new Town Council was established in 1902 and it was accepted that the residents of New Marabastad would be moved to other, planned townships.

 

In 1903 New Marabastad had grown to 412 stands while Old Marabastad still only had 67. Along with the Cape Location, which was situated in the southern part of the Asiatic Bazaar, it fell under the jurisdiction of the City Council of that year.

 

The greatest problem was the provision of water and this was only addressed after the war. Due to the fear of epidemic all wells in the area had been filled during the war, and a single public tap had replaced the entire system.

 

New Marabastad didn’t have any wells or taps. There was an attempt to rectify this in 1903 by providing more taps, but the number was still inadequate.

In 1906 New and Old Marabastad became one location.

 

Rates were determined and sanitary and building regulations came into effect. These regulations didn’t achieve their objections as a result of municipal maladministration and the fact that Africans could not own land and afford well-built permanent houses.

 

Streets remained unpaved, the water supply was inadequate and there were no sanitary facilities worth mentioning. More and more shacks appeared. By 1907 conditions improved marginally, but the streets were left in their unkempt state and by 1910 this had still not been addressed.

 

The Native Affairs Department accused the Pretoria Town Council of inefficient administration, which had led directly to this situation.

 

Removals[edit]

 

South Africa portal

The relocation of residents of Old Marabastad had been on the agenda of the town council since 1903 and in 1907, when the council decided to build a new sewage farm, it became a reality.

 

It was decided to remove all residents of the area to a new location further away from the city centre and to demolish the old township. Now followed the struggle of finding a suitable site.

 

The site on the southern slope of Daspoortrand was decided on in 1912 and in January planning for the ‘New Location’ started. It would include a number of brick houses that could be rented from the municipality.

 

By September of the same year the first relocations were taking place and demolishing of old structures commenced. It was a slow process and Old Marabastad was only completely destroyed by 1920.

The lack of space remained a problem and New Marabastad was experiencing severe overcrowding.

 

By 1923 the last houses of the second municipal project was completed in New Location and Marabastad residents who had been exposed to the worst conditions were allowed to move in first.

 

In 1934 part of the Schoolplaats population was moved to Marabastad and the squatter problem became more severe.

 

There was no room for expansion due to a lack of space.

An attempt to solve these problems manifested itself in the establishment of Atteridgeville in 1939. The Marabastad community would be moved here and compensation was offered to previous owners of property in the form of new houses they could rent, but not own.

 

The war slowed down the process considerably, but 1949 had moved three quarters of the population of Marabastad to Atteridgeville, and by 1950 the transition was complete

Nelson Mandela dies aged 95. One of the world's greatest statesman passes away having changed mankind's destiny for the better. The heavens welcome a great man. Mourners pay their respects at his statue in London's Westminster Green

one of three sculptures in Kelly Ingram Park by James Drake (b. 1946)

 

dogs and firehoses and water cannon were used by police under direction of Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner "Bull" Connor in attempt to disperse demonstrators during spring,1963 African American civil rights action • resulted in arrests of Revs. N.H. Smith Jr., A.D. King and John T. Porter, who had led march in support of already jailed Revs. Martin Luther King, Jr, Fred Shuttlesworth and Ralph Abernathy, leaders of the non-violent Birmingham Campaign to end racial segregation

 

Children's Crusade followed, 959 children ages 6–18 arrested, May 2 • Kelly Ingram Park (West Park) was epicenter of massive protest • Revolution Frozen Time -LA Times • Rev. Martin Luther King's Letter From a Birmingham Jail • more on King's letter • National Register #84000636, 1984

 

Civil Rights Battlegrounds Enter World of Tourism -New York Times • Alabama Civil Rights Trail

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy gives an impromptu speech to District of Columbia civil rights marchers June 14, 1963 outside the U.S. Justice Department.

 

Kennedy defended the administration, but conceded there was more work to do on civil rights.

 

He was confronted by local CORE leader Julius Hobson who asked Kennedy why FBI agents in Jackson, Mississippi did not act when they saw an African American man beaten. Kennedy responded that, “The FBI is not a national police force and has no authority beyond gathering evidence in such cases.”

 

Kennedy was also asked why the Justice Department didn’t hire more African Americans. Kennedy responded that when their administration took over there were only 10 of 500 attorneys in the department that were black and now there were 60.

 

Demonstrators challenged Kennedy that 60 out of now 900 attorneys was not enough. Kennedy responded that, “He was not going to go out and hire a Negro just because he wasn’t white.”

 

Watching the proceedings at the Justice Department, but not joining the group,, Malcolm X offered his thoughts to a Washington Post reporter:

 

“Whenever sheep try to integrate with the wolf, then there is a step forward for the wolf, not the sheep….They have fair housing in New York, but it is worse perhaps than here. This is nothing more than political trickery. The law means nothing when you are Jim Crow….The whites here and Kennedy were just salving their guilty consciences.”

 

The day began with two marches to Lafayette Park. One began at 16th and Fuller St. NW and the other from 8th and H Street NE.

 

The marches started out with only a dozen people at each location, but hundreds joined along the parade route in the action initiated by Julius Hobson of the District of Columbia branch of the Congress of Racial Equality.

 

The specific demands were the adoption of anti-discrimination housing regulations and adoption of fair employment regulations in the city by the District Commissioners.

 

Among the groups joining CORE were Women’s Strike for Peace, Americans for Democratic Action, NAACP, the Washington Peace Action Center, Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy, SCLC, the Federation of Civic Associations, Democratic Central Committee and the Student Peace Union.

 

The Teamsters Union paid for printing of 100,000 handbills and the Industrial Union Department of the AFL-CIO paid for 4,000 flyers to publicize the event.

 

By the time the rally got underway at Lafayette Park, the Washington Post estimated 3,000 were in attendance. It was the largest local civil rights demonstration since a series of Marion Anderson concerts acted as a protest for rights.

 

Rev. Smallwood Williams, president of the D.C. branch of the SCLC, got the rally underway with a prayer that said in part:

 

“Thou hast made us to know that men of all races must learn to live together as brothers or die as rats…We pray for an immediate elimination of racial segregation, bigotry, bias and Jim Crow-ism, that America will have an immediate new birth of freedom.”

 

From Lafayette Park the group marched to the District (now Wilson) Building where Walter Tobriner, president of the D.C. commissioners, told the group that fair housing regulations would be adopted within the year and promised “early hearings” on a fair employment practices regulation.

 

The marchers then headed to the Justice Department where they were demanding federal protection of civil rights demonstrators and that the Justice Department hire more black people.

 

For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHskgSB6Zi

 

Photo by Schmick. The image is courtesy of the D.C. Public Library Washington Star Collection © Washington Post.

 

Click the "All Sizes" button above to read an article or to see the image clearly.

 

These scans come from my rather large magazine collection. Instead of filling my house with old moldy magazines, I scanned them (in most cases, photographed them) and filled a storage area with moldy magazines. Now they reside on an external harddrive. I thought others might appreciate these tidbits of forgotten history.

 

Please feel free to leave any comments or thoughts or impressions... Thanks in advance!

Click the "All Sizes" button above to read an article or to see the image clearly.

 

These scans come from my rather large magazine collection. Instead of filling my house with old moldy magazines, I scanned them (in most cases, photographed them) and filled a storage area with moldy magazines. Now they reside on an external harddrive. I thought others might appreciate these tidbits of forgotten history.

 

Please feel free to leave any comments or thoughts or impressions... Thanks in advance!

The Baltimore delegation in the Youth March for Integrated Schools heads down Madison Drive on the Mall toward the Washington Monument grounds April 18, 1959.

 

The demonstration drew 26,000 people to Washington, D.C. April 18, 1959 as estimated by U.S. Park Police.

 

The group met at 7th Street NW on the national Mall before marching down Madison drive to the Washington Monument grounds where they rallied at the Sylvan Theater and were addressed by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. of the SCLC, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Tom Mboya of the All African People’s Conference.

 

This was the third national march in as many years designed to speed progress implementing the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing racial segregation in schools.

 

The 15,000 who attended the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, the 10,000 who attended the 1958 youth march for school integration and the 26,000 who attended the 1959 youth march for school integration seem small by today’s standards, they exceeded any protest march since the 30,000 who attended the 1932 Bonus Army demonstrations.

 

These national marches also provided the test runs for mobilization and logistics that would be necessary to successfully stage the seminal 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom.

 

The national actions also cemented Rev. King’s status as the pre-eminent civil rights leader.

 

For more information and related images, see flic.kr/s/aHskWwU99i

 

The photographer is unknown. The image was an Internet find.

Parts of the Birwood Wall, a 6 foot tall half mile long wall built to separate a new white neighborhood from an existing black neighborhood in 1940 near 8 Mile Road in Detroit. It was built in order to satisfy Federal Housing Administration Loan Requirements for segregated neighborhoods.

 

Olympus IS-3

Kodak Ektar 100

The city of Gary plans to raze the long-abandoned St. John's Hospital, which was built in 1929 during an era of segregation to serve the city's black community at a time when they were not welcome at "white hospitals." The decrepit hospital building at 22nd Avenue and Massachusetts Street in Midtown had been vacant since it closed in 1950, and was repeatedly named one of Indiana's most endangered buildings by Indiana Landmarks in recent years.

www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/10/18/son-former-slav...

 

www.nwitimes.com/business/local/historic-st-john-hospital...

 

www.insideindianabusiness.com/story/41079270/historic-hos...

 

sites.google.com/site/stjohnshospitaldpg/

 

blackchristiannews.com/2019/09/gary-indiana-to-demolish-h...

Rapid strata formation in soft sand (field evidence).

Photo of strata formation in soft sand on a beach, created by tidal action of the sea.

Formed in a single, high tidal event.

 

This natural example of rapid, simultaneous stratification refutes the Superposition Principle and the Principle of Lateral Continuity.

 

Superposition only applies on a rare occasion of sedimentary deposits in perfectly, still water. Superposition is required for the long evolutionary timescale, but the evidence shows it is not the general rule, as was once believed. Most sediment is laid down in moving water, where particle segregation is the rule, resulting in the simultaneous deposition of strata/layers as shown in the photo.

Where the water movement is very turbulent, violent, or catastrophic, great depths of stratified sediment can be laid down in a short time. Certainly not the many millions of years assumed by evolutionists.

The composition of strata formed in any deposition event. is related to whatever materials are in the sediment mix. Whatever is in the mix will be automatically sorted into strata/layers. It could be sand, or material added from mud slides, erosion of chalk deposits, volcanic ash etc. Any organic material (potential fossils) will also be sorted and buried within the rapidly, formed strata.

 

See many other examples of rapid stratification with geological features: www.flickr.com/photos/101536517@N06/sets/72157635944904973/

 

Stratified, soft sand deposit. demonstrates the rapid, stratification principle.

Important, field evidence which supports the work of the eminent, sedimentologist Dr Guy Berthault MIAS - Member of the International Association of Sedimentologists.

(Dr Berthault's experiments (www.sedimentology.fr/)

And also the experimental work of Dr M.E. Clark (Professor Emeritus, U of Illinois @ Urbana), Andrew Rodenbeck and Dr. Henry Voss, (www.ianjuby.org/sedimentation/)

 

Location: Sandown beach, Isle of Wight. Formed 07/12/2017, This field evidence demonstrates that multiple strata in sedimentary deposits do not need millions of years to form and can be formed rapidly. This natural example confirms the principle demonstrated by the sedimentation experiments carried out by Dr Guy Berthault and other sedimentologists. It calls into question the standard, multi-million year dating of sedimentary rocks, and the dating of fossils by depth of burial or position in the strata.

 

Mulltiple strata/layers and several, geological features are evident in this example.

 

Dr Berthault's experiments (www.sedimentology.fr/) and other experiments (www.ianjuby.org/sedimentation/) and field studies of floods and volcanic action show that, rather than being formed by gradual, slow deposition of sucessive layers superimposed upon previous layers, with the strata or layers representing a particular timescale, particle segregation in moving water or airborne particles can form strata or layers very quickly, frequently, in a single event.

And, most importantly, lower strata are not older than upper strata, they are the same age, having been created in the same sedimentary episode.

Such field studies confirm experiments which have shown that there is no longer any reason to conclude that strata/layers in sedimentary rocks relate to different geological eras and/or a multi-million year timescale. www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PVnBaqqQw8&feature=share&amp.... they also show that the relative position of fossils in rocks is not indicative of an order of evolutionary succession. Obviously, the uniformitarian principle, on which the geologic column is based, can no longer be considered valid. And the multi-million, year dating of sedimentary rocks and fossils needs to be reassessed. Rapid deposition of stratified sediments also explains the enigma of polystrate fossils, i.e. large fossils that intersect several strata. In some cases, tree trunk fossils are found which intersect the strata of sedimentary rock up to forty feet in depth. upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/08/Lycopsi... They must have been buried in stratified sediment in a short time (certainly not millions, thousands, or even hundreds of years), or they would have rotted away. youtu.be/vnzHU9VsliQ

 

In fact, the vast majority of fossils are found in good, intact condition, which is testament to their rapid burial. You don't get good fossils from gradual burial, because they would be damaged or destroyed by decay, predation or erosion. The existence of so many fossils in sedimentary rock on a global scale is stunning evidence for the rapid depostion of sedimentary rock as the general rule. It is obvious that all rock containing good intact fossils was formed from sediment laid down in a very short time, not millions, or even thousands of years.

 

See set of photos of other examples of rapid stratification: www.flickr.com/photos/101536517@N06/sets/72157635944904973/

 

Carbon dating of coal should not be possible if it is millions of years old, yet significant amounts of Carbon 14 have been detected in coal and other fossil material, which indicates that it is less than 50,000 years old. www.ldolphin.org/sewell/c14dating.html

 

www.grisda.org/origins/51006.htm

 

Evolutionists confidently cite multi-million year ages for rocks and fossils, but what most people don't realise is that no one actually knows the age of sedimentary rocks or the fossils found within them. So how are evolutionists so sure of the ages they so confidently quote? The astonishing thing is they aren't. Sedimentary rocks cannot be dated by radiometric methods*, and fossils can only be dated to less than 50,000 years with Carbon 14 dating. The method evolutionists use is based entirely on assumptions. Unbelievably, fossils are dated by the assumed age of rocks, and rocks are dated by the assumed age of fossils, that's right ... it is known as circular reasoning.

 

* Regarding the radiometric dating of igneous rocks, which is claimed to be relevant to the dating of sedimentary rocks, in an occasional instance there is an igneous intrusion associated with a sedimentary deposit -

Prof. Aubouin says in his Précis de Géologie: "Each radioactive element disintegrates in a characteristic and constant manner, which depends neither on the physical state (no variation with pressure or temperature or any other external constraint) nor on the chemical state (identical for an oxide or a phosphate)."

"Rocks form when magma crystallizes. Crystallisation depends on pressure and temperature, from which radioactivity is independent. So, there is no relationship between radioactivity and crystallisation.

Consequently, radioactivity doesn't date the formation of rocks. Moreover, daughter elements contained in rocks result mainly from radioactivity in magma where gravity separates the heavier parent element, from the lighter daughter element. Thus radiometric dating has no chronological signification." Dr. Guy Berthault www.sciencevsevolution.org/Berthault.htm

 

Visit the fossil museum:

www.flickr.com/photos/101536517@N06/sets/72157641367196613/

 

Just how good are peer reviews of scientific papers?

www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6154/60.full

www.examiner.com/article/want-to-publish-science-paper-ju...

 

The neo-Darwinian idea that the human genome consists entirely of an accumulation of billions of mutations is, quite obviously, completely bonkers. Nevertheless, it is compulsorily taught in schools and universities as 'science'.

www.flickr.com/photos/truth-in-science/35505679183

Two of the four stools at the woolworths counter originally in Greensboro, N Carolina. On February 1, 1960 four college black students decided they wanted to get served in the whites only counter and sparked the (de)segregation issue. It culminated on July 25 when the entire counter was declared open for all races.

 

Barack Obama owes those four brave souls for paving the road to his election.

 

Displayed in the National Museum of American History, Washington DC

Cape Town, South Africa

A couple of older gals peddlin' away on Jones Lake at Jones Lake State Park in Bladen County, North Carolina. The park was founded in 1939 as a recreational park for African-Americans during the segregation era in North Carolina. The park was desegregated in the 1960s. It is on North Carolina Highway 242 just outside of Elizabethtown in Bladen County.

Local call number: RC12419

 

Title: Gentlemen protesting segregated bus seating: Tallahassee, Florida

 

Date: December 24, 1956

 

General note: Reverend C. K. Steele (center left), Reverend Dan Speed (center right) and Reverend A. C. Redd (pastor of the St. James CME Church [now, 2009, the Florida Tax Watch headquarters on Bronough Street]) protested segregated seating on Tallahassee city buses by sitting in the middle instead of at the back of the bus. This action ended a boycott of nearly seven months, brought on by the arrest of two FAMU women students for sitting beside a white woman. As a result of the boycott, 21 members of the Inter Civic Council were convicted on charges of operating an illegal transportation system set up as a car pool without a franchise.

 

Physical descrip: 1 photoprint - b&w - 8 x 10 in.

 

Series Title: Reference collection

 

Repository: State Library and Archives of Florida, 500 S. Bronough St., Tallahassee, FL 32399-0250 USA. Contact: 850.245.6700. Archives@dos.state.fl.us

 

Persistent URL: www.floridamemory.com/items/show/34854

 

Visit Florida Memory to find resources for Black History Month and to learn about the contributions of African-Americans in Florida history.

 

The Reverend Charles Kenzie Steele was among the first group of inductees into the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame.

 

DPAC protest at Dept for Education for inclusive education - London 04.09.2013

 

Campaigners from disability groups Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) and Alliance for Inclusive Education (ALLFIE) protested outside the Dept. For Education to demand an end to increasing educational segregation of disabled children.

 

This protest was one of four simultaneous protests taking place as the culmination of a national week of action organised by Disabled People Against Cuts (DPAC) using the campaign title "Reclaiming Our Futures", and were aimed specifically at government departments whose actions are impacting severly on disabled people - Education, health, Transport and Energy.

 

Following the individual actions, all four groups of campaigners merged on the Dept for Work and Pensions headquarters for a larger protest against benefits cuts to disabled people which, they claim, affects them disproportionately.

  

All photos © 2013 Pete Riches

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