Academic, Militant Suffragette, Nashville
Between 1929–1939 activist Rose Arnold Powel campaigned to have Susan B. Anthony, the heroine for the long crusade for woman’s suffrage, to be the fifth head sculpted by Gutzon Borglum into Mount Rushmore. If America had any claim in the world’s attention to be a place where justice and equality were truly served, the inclusion of the woman who saved democracy from it’s sin of omission by leading the fight for women to vote should have been included in this “National Shrine to Democracy”.
—Paraphrased from The Woman on Mount Rushmore, from Landscape and Memory by Simon Schama.
“Consider: the once-iconoclastic women’s’ [sic] movement has somehow been twisted to mean that most women should work outside their homes and give their children over to so-called professional daycare at the expense of real family life, not to mention “freedom” for women to serve in the military. Uh, wasn’t one of the original goals of the women’s’ [sic] movement an end to militarism and corporate domination?
Similarly, the black power/equal rights/anti-discrimination movement has largely turned into a demand for people of color to be included in the corporate world. Turns out, the corporate masters are only too happy to include people of color in their hierarchies. It helps legitimize them. Just ask Michael Steele, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, or … Barack Obama. But don’t ask Stokely Carmichael or Rev. Martin Luther King. For all their differences, they would be united in spitting nails about what the movement they once led has come to.
Both these movements, women’s’ [sic] liberation and black power, have lost their original thread, which was a critique of the corporate capitalist state and its dehumanizing effects on society. Similarly, the labor movement, which started out as a socialist/communist/anarchist assault on the status quo, ended up trading its radicalism for a bigger pile of crumbs from the capitalist table.”
—Brother Martin, Deep Green Perspective: Scripts from The Green Hour radio show on WRFN-LP, Nashville Tennessee
