by PAUL HEADER
Part One of review and discussion of Linda G. Ford’s Women Politicals in America: Jailed Dissenters from Mother Jones to Lynne Stewart
I was born a protester … My mother had to go to the school a lot and talk to the principal.— Dorli Rainey,
I am being jailed because I have advocated change for equality, justice, and peace. … I stand where thousands of abolitionists, escaped slaves, workers and political activists have stood for demanding justice, for refusing to either quietly bear the biting lash of domination or to stand by silently as others bear the same lash.— Marilyn Buck, at her 1990 sentencing (epigram in Linda Ford’s book, Women Politicals in America)
Personal Truth
Personal experience is like the yeast in good sour dough bread – lifts truth to the heavens. It wasn’t just a shame to see Dorli Rainey, 80-year-old activist, sprayed with corrosive eye-nose-lung chemicals by the bicycling Seattle Police Department during a peaceful Occupy Seattle rally. That was November 16, 2011. We were all kettled in and sprayed by the fascist police force, all warm and fuzzy looking in their spandex bike shorts and on black Trek mountain bikes.
Seattle is a libertarian town, a city of racist and Nazi-loving cops and officers that kill Blacks, Latino/a citizens and Native Americans. The images of Dorli with milk splashed on her face being helped out of the crowd that hit the Associated Press headlines didn’t change the patriarchal and thuggish leaders of the Emerald City.
The legacy of Rachel Carson and her work on environmental fascism by the purveyors of the chemical industrial war complex also was deep in my soul after I read Silent Spring at the impressionable age of 15.
Luckily, when I was a first-year high school student, one of my English teachers turned me onto the National Farm Workers Association and Dolores Huerta’s role in leading with Cesar Chavez grape and lettuce boycotts. Ms Courtney was instrumental in inculcating my interest in women heroes in history, highlighting the work of both Mother Jones and Angela Davis.
A legacy of women activists in the streets and my own participation with their causes goes back when I was in my third year of high school, protesting the invaders trying to block people from receiving services from Planned Parenthood in Tucson. I was alongside women who demanded their right to reproductive medicine facing down angry men and women protected by a phalanx of Tucson Police Department goons.
A year later I was covering the police beat for the Arizona Daily Wildcat, a reporting job that put me face to face with the rape culture – most of the stories I covered involved the sexual assaults on and around campus and then throughout the metropolitan area. Four to eighty (4-2-80) was the figure I had emblazoned in my mind – a four year old girl raped by three men in a drug house and an eighty-year-old artist using a walker raped by what the fascist cops dubbed the “Apologetic Rapist.” All ages, all walks of life, all races, that’s what I had come to know as the rape culture engulfing me.
I wrote about judges who sided with the alleged rapists, double raping the sexually assaulted by admonishing her for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, for wearing provocative clothes, for playing drinking games with young healthy men – “what did you expect would happen?”
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