A recent controversy over her support of Palestinian rights raises questions for a new generation of activists.
for comments at the United Nations in which he called out “a narrow politics of respectability that shames Palestinians for resisting, for refusing to do nothing in the face of state violence and ethnic cleansing.”
Many decried the tweets as anti-Semitic for their implication that money was behind U.S. support for Israel, evoking old stereotypes about Jewish people. Omar apologized for her statements. Martin Luther King Jr. famously sat in a cell in the Birmingham City Jail and, in the margins of a newspaper, penned an impassioned open letter to the city’s white clergymen — to the world, really — that still serves as a manifesto on race relations. But he had been an outsider; the black community’s main spokesman was the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, for whom the civil rights institute named its award.
With her striking beauty and outspokenness, she captivated a world trying to make sense of the counterculture. Angela Davis enters court for a bail hearing in San Rafael, Calif., on June 14, 1971 with her attorney, Howard Moore Jr., right. Davis was acquitted on charges of supplying weapons for a failed 1970 escape attempt in a Marin County courthouse in which a judge and several prisoners were killed. is a museum that sits across the street from 16th Street Baptist. In 2002, Shuttlesworth became the first recipient of his eponymous award, which has gone to the likes of actor Danny Glover, D.C.
“We were trying to keep our one major fundraising event from becoming an object of protest and something that would not be successful,” he added. In retrospect, “when we took that decision out of the closet and put it into a larger landscape, it really looked bad.”