Robin D.G. Kelley and Makani Themba at The Nation write—Why the Highlander Attack Matters. The arson attack on the Highlander Center, a longtime leader in racial and social-justice work, is not merely a hate crime—it’s an act of war:
News of the March 29 arson attack on the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, shocked and angered progressives across the country. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but the blaze destroyed Highlander’s main office building, along with valuable organizational records and historic documents that had not been archived at the University of Wisconsin and other repositories. Yet, for the many familiar with its storied history of movement-building, research, radical education, and cultural work, the devastation goes much deeper than property loss. It’s as if a sanctuary was violated.
And violated it was. Making crystal clear their terrorist intention, the attackers left their mark on the parking lot by spray-painting a symbol derived from the fascist Romanian Iron Guard during the 1930s that is commonly used by white supremacists. The same symbol was painted on one of the guns used in the recent murderous attack on two mosques in New Zealand, and scrawled alongside swastikas on the University of Tennessee Knoxville campus in November.
The attack on Highlander is the latest in a rising wave of racist terror targeting black, brown, and indigenous communities, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and gender non-conforming folks. For Highlander’s co-executive directors, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson and the Rev. Allyn Maxfield-Steele, the attack was disheartening, frustrating, and terrifying, but hardly surprising. “Because of our history,” they wrote in a recent press release, “we are not surprised that this space, one where marginalized people working across sectors, geographies, and identities, show up consistently, has been repeatedly targeted over our 87 years of existence.”
The leadership, staff, and many activists associated with Highlander’s ongoing social-justice work understand the attack as not merely a hate crime by misguided individuals but an act of war. Situated on about 200 acres of land just east of Knoxville, Tennessee, Highlander has long been on the front lines of a protracted war on workers, poor farmers, people of color, and other marginalized communities. In a region ravaged by the worst excesses of capitalist and racist exploitation—plant closures, environmental catastrophe from coal mining, dispossession, opioid addiction, state-sanctioned violence—Highlander is one of the few progressive safe spaces where movements connect, dream, and build for the local, national, and global fight back. [...]
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“It is not great wealth in a few individuals that proves a country is prosperous, but great general wealth evenly distributed among the people . . . It is the struggling masses who are the foundation [of this country]; and if the foundation be rotten or insecure, the rest of the structure must eventually crumble. We must help everyone achieve prosperity in this country in order to survive, or we will fall like every great nation before us. Americans have a can do attitude. We can and will make every citizen prosperous, if we only determine to do it.” ~~Victoria Woodhull, first woman presidential candidate (on the Equal Rights Party ticket in 1872)
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On this date at Daily Kos in 2007—Another glowing Reid piece:
While the GOP leadership is under assault from their incompetence and corruption, ours continues to get glowing praise.
There's nothing fancy about Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate. Sartorially, he is a symphony in brown. He hails from a Nevada eye-blink called Searchlight, but isn't at ease in the spotlight. "I would just as soon never have a press conference," he says. An amateur boxer in his youth, the 65-year-old Reid's idea of a good time is to watch reruns of famous bouts on ESPN Classic. A favorite was on the other night: the 1955 epic between Archie Moore and Rocky Marciano. "Moore flattened Rocky early," Reid said. "Had him down, almost out. But by patience and sheer determination Marciano came back, round by round, and won. Both guys were cut and bloody when it was over." [...]
Reid, with 37 years in politics, is prospering partly by doing what shrewd boxers do in the early rounds to survive: let the other guy overreach. Proudly unphilosophical, he thinks the Democratic Party needs no soul-searching. "I believe in simplicity," he says. "Health care, pensions, energy independence--that's my agenda." [...]
While Reid himself is low-key, the allies he organizes throughout the city--polltakers, consultants, liberal lobbyists--are not. He has commissioned virtual "war rooms," which coordinate the use of focus-grouped attack language in ads and speeches on two main issues. The first was Social Security. Now comes the war of words over the Senate's hallowed "filibuster rule," which allows a minority of 41 members to use the privilege of talking endlessly to kill any legislative action--such as a judicial nomination they don't like. Reid's poll-tested line of attack: ending the filibuster rule would destroy the separation of powers envisioned by the Founding Fathers. It's not clear whether Frist has the support—or the nerve—to press for a vote on ending the rule. His own advisers are divided.