Free Speech for Students!
DECEMBER 10 IS THE 60TH ANNIVERSARY of the day that 13-year-old junior high student Mary Beth Tinker and some of her schoolmates in Des Moines, Iowa, decided to show their opposition to the constantly escalating U.S. war against Vietnam. They decided to protest by wearing black armbands to school.
Several days later, more than two dozen armband-wearing students showed up at several Des Moines schools. None carried signs or made speeches or caused any disruption, but school administrators declared that silently wearing a black armband as a means of expression was a violation of discipline. They singled out five students, including Tinker, and suspended them.
That was the beginning of a 4-year legal struggle over the First Amendment rights of public school students. With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Des Moines Five took their case all the way to the Supreme Court, where they established the precedent that, as the high court put it, neither "students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."
Today, more than 55 years later, the Supreme Court’s decision that “In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism,” remains the law of the land. Of course, the Supreme Court has recently made a regular practice of throwing precedents out, but one can always hope. For much more information about the case that established students’ rights, visit https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/constitutional-rights-of-students/
A Message from a Great American
DECEMBER 11 IS THE 90TH ANNIVERSARY of New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses’ decision to remind the thousands of Parks Department workers and the additional thousands of federal Works Project Administration workers on the city payroll that their continued employment depended on the continued good-will of their boss.
Commissioner Moses arranged to have hundreds of copies of large placards printed and posted at every Parks Department work site bearing a handsome portrait of Abraham Lincoln over this headline: "A Message to Park Workers from a Great American”.
Under the headline appeared this text: “The habits of our whole species fall into three great classes, useful labor, useless labor and idleness. Of these, the first only is meritorious and to it all the products of labor rightfully belong; but the two latter, while they exist, are heavy pensioners upon the first, robbing it of a large portion of its just rights. The only remedy for this is to, so far as possible, drive useless labor and idleness out of existence." https://www.nytimes.com/1935/12/11/archives/lincoln-message-to-spur-wpa-men-park-bureau-placards-quote-attack.html
A Pandemic Meets Its Match
DECEMBER 14 IS THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of the first non-experimental use a Covid-19 vaccine in the U.S. The first U.S. vaccine recipient was Sandra Lindsay, an African-American nurse who was head of critical-care nursing at a large hospital in Queens, New York. The choice of Lindsay was fitting, because critical-care health-care workers were one of the pandemics’ worst-hit occupational groups, as were African-Americans in general.
By the time Lindsay got her jab, more than 15 million people in the U.S. had been sickened by Covid-19 and at least three hundred thousand had died. Of course, at first the vaccine could only retard the rate of increase in Covid-19 cases and deaths. It was estimated that during the first 26 months of the vaccine’s availability, its use prevented 120 million infections, 18.5 million hospitalizations and 3.2 million deaths in the U.S. https://annalsofglobalhealth.org/articles/10.5334/aogh.4484
The Death of an Unarmed Prisoner
DECEMBER 15 IS THE 135TH ANNIVERSARY of the death of Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull, who was killed by a federal law enforcement official who was attempting to take Sitting Bull, who was unarmed, into custody.
Sitting Bull was one of the most successful defenders of the rights of Native Americans both by military means and otherwise. He had been one of the leaders of the most successful (for the Native Americans) extended period of open warfare between Native Americans and an experienced, fully-manned, well-equipped, U.S. Army occupation force in the Great Plains.
That period, which U.S. forces called Red Cloud’s War, ended when the U.S. government sued for peace after nearly two years of intermittent heavy fighting. The Army’s suing for peace was, for practical purposes, the Army’s admission of defeat. The treaty that ended “Red Cloud’s War” was a capitulation to the demands the Native Americans had been fighting for; it is said to have been the worst defeat ever for the U.S. Army fighting in North America, with the exception of Confederate victories during the Civil War.
The 1890 incident during which Sitting Bull was shot to death, was, at best, according to the U.S. government’s own testimony, a case of manslaughter committed by a U.S.official, and could reasonably be described as a case of premeditated murder that went awry. What occurred, according to U.S. officials, was that a large party of federal lawmen arrived, unannounced, to arrest Sitting Bull at his cabin in Grand River, South Dakota, but lacking an essential piece of equipment: a wheeled vehicle to carry Sitting Bull to police headquarters. The arrest party that neglected to bring a wagon with them knew that the only way they could transfer Sitting Bull to jail would be to force an uncooperative Sitting Bull onto the back of a horse.
During the noisy effort to force Sitting Bull to mount a horse, a crowd of his Sioux neighbors gathered to demand the release of their leader. Eventually a member of the crowd fired a shot at the leader of the arresting party. As soon as the shot hit the arresting officer, he turned, aimed at the unarmed Sitting Bull, and fired the shot that killed him. The arresting officer never explained why he shot Sitting Bull, but it clearly could not have been in self-defense.
Two weeks after Sitting Bull was killed during a bizarrely botched arrest effort, U.S. forces killed more than 300 Sioux in the Massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-west/an-account-of-sitting-bulls-death
It’s Bigger than Baseball
DECEMBER 16 IS THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY of Major League Baseball’s announcement that it would henceforth consider the Negro Leagues to have been Major Leagues just like the American and National Leagues, and would meld statistics of Negro League players into Major League statistics.
Three-and-a-half years later, when the statistics had been combined, many new names had been added to the record books, including Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston, Satchel Paige and Charlie “Chino” Smith. Slugger Gibson, who died before the first Black player joined the National League in 1947, not only received official recognition, but he had the highest career batting average (.372), the highest career slugging percentage (.718) and the highest career on-base-plus-slugging percentage (1.177). https://missouriindependent.com/2024/05/29/america-at-her-best-negro-leagues-museum-president-says-stat-recognition-is-bigger-than-baseball
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