Roz Payne archives, www.newsreel.us

Message from Debbie Wei
Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching Advisor

Recently, Grace Lee Boggs, a contributor to the book Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching, has been writing about the importance of Movement Building for us all. She wrote, “Movement leaders recognize the almost pathological fear and despair that oppression creates and therefore the need for the oppressed to find creative ways to move beyond fear to hope and beyond despair to transformation.”

She quotes John Maguire, a friend of King's since their student days and a 1961 Freedom Rider who sent her notes on Movement Building: “… A struggle that starts with the need of a particular racial, ethnic or social group only becomes a movement if it creates Hope and the vision of a new society for everyone…”

Asian Americans like Grace, Yuri Kochiyama, Philip VeraCruz, Kiyoshi Kuromiya, and many other Asian Americans used the lessons of the Civil Rights movement to fill their souls with hope and vision for a society which allowed us all to live with dignity, in the knowledge that the fundamental right to be human is met for us all. Similarly, just as great leaders in the Civil Rights movement looked to Asian leaders as diverse as Ghandi and Thich Nhat Hanh, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse Tung for inspiration, people all over the world, including in Asia and the Pacific, looked to the great struggles for Civil Rights here in the United States to provide hope and vision. To forget this history is to lose a precious tool in our ongoing work for social justice. In these memories lie the power to continue the great work of creating societies of justice and peace, of sustainable futures for us all.

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Teaching for Change and PRRAC work to spread social and economic justice in public education by promoting critical thinking and civic activism. For more information on Putting the Movement Back into Civil Rights Teaching visit www.civilrightsteaching.org.