Posts Tagged ‘mississippi’

1 Comment

#CED2010 Check-in: Bodies of Water, Graceful Bodies, and Pants on the Ground


2010
01.17

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Art, Photography | 1 Comment »

Thanks for reading Putting Your Body on the Line

Before I begin today’s post, I want to say thank you to everyone who read and forwarded my last post - Putting Your Body – and Life – on the Line.  Over 300 people have clicked on the link to the video in just a few days – I don’t know if they’ve watched the entire 10 minutes, but they’ve at least looked.  And maybe a few donations will have trickled in to the Fannie Lou Hamer Statue Fund. I know it’s a tough time to ask for money, especially when we’ve all just donated to Haitian relief.  I sent a donation to Doctors without Borders, an organization that is already established in Haiti and certainly critically needed right now.  But I think we can all squeeze out just a little bit more, especially with the stark reminder Haiti has given us of just how lucky we are.  Tomorrow morning Ali and Allie, the two seventh-graders who made the video (they are now in tenth grade) will be showing it at the Martin Luther King Community Breakfast and later at the youth luncheon.  I’m really proud of them.  Especially in this photo, which was on the last post:

Mississippi Civil Rights Veterans with Ali and Allie

They are centered in this photo taken in Mississippi at the Mississippi Civil Rights Veterans Conference.

Pants on the Ground

One more item before today’s post.  Did everyone watch Pants on the Ground?   The American Idol audition of 62-year-old “General” Larry Platt who wrote this little ditty because he was tired of seeing kids with their pants hanging around their knees?  It turns out he’s a civil rights veteran who marched with Martin Luther King and others!  I love this guy.  We’re all going to be singing Pants on the Ground, and there are some terrific remixes out there already.

Graceful Bodies, Bodies of Water

We finally made it to today’s post!  Still working with the Creative Every Day theme of Body, I extended the theme a bit to bodies of water.  Leah said we could interpret it broadly!  I’m fascinated with water – the patterns in water, colors, and I’ve been wanting to do a collage using water.  One thing led to another, and I came up with this.

I painted the background on canvas using acrylic paints.  The rectangles and squares are from photos taken in Mazatlan, Pismo Beach, Cambria (both in California) and a fountain at Disneyland.  Most of the paper is glossy but some, such as the long strip on the bottom, is Epson Velvet Fine Art Paper (I do all my printing myself).  I got all that arranged to my satisfaction – after several days of looking, walking away, changing something, etc. But I needed a focus and grabbed that Japanese Print book we were discarding.  I have a feeling that a whole series of collages is going to come out of this book.  So I found the perfect images in color and shape, and they lent such grace to the collage.  So we have Graceful Bodies, Bodies of Water.

I am particularly fond of this because it reminds me of some of the quilts my mother has made.  Hers from cloth, mine from water (figuratively).  It’s very poignant to think of my 86-year-old mom and her quilts as she still goes out to the studio and moves around blocks of cloth, but her memory isn’t there anymore and she can’t sew or quilt.  None of us are sure, but I don’t think she realizes that she doesn’t actually quilt as she’s moving around cloth and planning what to do next.  So in the best scenario, she’s still getting pleasure from it.  For the rest of us, it’s quite poignant.

3 comments

Putting your BODY (and Life) on the Line Every Day


2010
01.14

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in General, Photography | 3 Comments »

The above collage was done in tribute to what I’m about to write.  I took the photo of the woman on a bus in Mississippi.  The background is a jellyfish from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.  I called it Breakthrough, part of my Muse series.   The rest of that series is posted on my art gallery.

Thanks to the blog Creative Every Day, hundreds of people around the world are focusing artistic efforts around the theme of BODY for the month of January.  We can count ourselves amongst the fortunate – people who have the time to ponder such things as our bodies.  Interpreting the theme broadly, I’ve read wonderful posts on the concept of sin relating to women, new life growing within us, and many profound postings.  Such deliberation is useful and good.  It contributes to new insights in understanding us, which lead to understanding the world and our fellow (wo)man, and then perhaps being able to share that understanding.  Paying it forward with deliberation, ideas, and energy that will make the whole a positive force.

But as I said, we are among the fortunate.  In this post I want to pay tribute to the idea of BODY in its most extreme.  I want to write about Fannie Lou Hamer, a black woman who put her BODY on the line, literally, almost every day of her life in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement.  She didn’t have the luxury we have as highly actualized human beings sitting on the top of Maslow’s Pyramid.  She was fighting for us, though – every one of us, every day.  Her BODY was on the line for all of us who believe in equal rights for all.

Born in 1917 on a plantation in Mississippi, Fannie Lou Hamer had 19 brothers and sisters.  In 1962, at the age of 44, Mrs. Hamer learned  from SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, that she had the right to vote.  She immediately went to the Sunflower County courthouse to register, and upon returning to the plantation, learned she had lost her job and her home. And of course, she wasn’t allowed to register.

Sunflower County Courthouse today

Being black in Mississippi was about as bad as it got.  I learned a great deal about this woman in 2006-2007 when my granddaughter Ali did a History Day project at school.  She was in the 7th grade and along with a friend, another Allie, spent six months of dedication daily, researching and making a ten-minute video about this remarkable woman for the competition.  (History Day designates parameters for projects – videos can only be 10 minutes long, and every year has a theme.)  The theme for that year was Triumph and Tragedy.  And as their coach, I had to be present when they were working in the tech lab, so I spent just about as much time as they did.  The project, however, is theirs and theirs alone.  I advised.  They produced.

Ali and Allie and I were invited to go to Mississippi to present the video at the Annual Conference of Mississippi Civil Rights Veterans.  It was a life-changing moment.  So many people we’d read about and whom I’d been reading about for many years in studying the civil rights movement with students were in that room.  The foot-soldiers, the ones who had the absolute courage, both white and black, to put their bodies on the line while fighting for the right to vote – the most basic right in our society – were there, along with more well-known names.  Many of the Freedom Singers were there, and wow, could they sing.  And they all did quite literally put their bodies – their lives – on the line.  On one occasion, Fannie Lou Hamer was severely beaten, lost the sight in one eye, and walked with a limp thereafter. On another, she was released from jail because of the intercession of Andrew Young, Martin Luther King’s right-hand man at the time, just hours before she and others were to be released from prison at midnight.  In Mississippi, that meant certain death.  Ali and Allie interviewed Andrew Young on the phone and heard that story first-hand.

But she didn’t quit – her BODY took the beating, but her spirit carried on. Seeing so many of these folks made history real and immediate.  The next picture is one of Ali and Allie in Mississippi with Charles McLaurin and Lawrence Guyot – both on the front lines of the movement.  In fact, McLaurin co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party with Mrs. Hamer and later, when she ran for State Senator, was her campaign manager.

My Ali, Charles McLaurin, Lawrence Guyot, and Allie

A photographer from the Smithsonian, who had been part of the movement, was present and he took the next photo.  They asked Ali and Allie to be in this photo as the future of the movement.  Wow.  I can hardly describe how I felt. I won’t even try.

Mississippi Civil Rights Veterans with Ali and Allie

I mentioned Fannie Lou Hamer’s spirit.  She had a compelling singing voice and used it to keep her spirit and the spirits of those around her focused on the positive and the goal.  Eyes on the prize.

While we were in Mississippi, we went to Ruleville, her home town, and visited the Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden and Gravesite.  She was known for a phrase that she uttered every day and asked be put on her tombstone: I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Allie, me and Ali at FLH gravesite

I think it’s important that people remember and understand Fannie Lou Hamer.  We need knowledge of the past to improve the present and plan for the future.  We need examples of the sacrifice and bravery with which people met life – things we haven’t been asked to do on that scale.  At least I don’t think most of us have been asked to risk our bodies every single day from birth.

This link will take you to a page from which you can view the 10-minute video.  I promise it’s worth your time.  It’s my page on a national committee to raise money for a statue of Fannie Lou Hamer to be constructed and placed in the Memorial Garden and Gravesite, which is a stop on the Civil Rights Trail.  If you want to donate, there’s a link on the page to NBUF, The National Black United Fund, which is accepting the donations on our behalf.

But what I really want to do is pay tribute to the idea of BODY in it’s most extreme, and to a woman who was willing to risk her body to do what was right.  Fannie Lou Hamer is a real hero.