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June 15, 2006
Juneteenth
The Ann Arbor NAACP will be sponsoring the 12th annual Juneteenth celebration this Saturday, June 17th at Wheeler Park in Ann Arbor from noon to 5:00pm.
The celebration will include music, games, food and fun. For more information call the NAACP at 769-5976.
The celebration of Juneteenth started 141 years ago in Gaveston, TX. It was there on June 19th, 1865 that a Union Army General rode into town and announced to the people of Galveston that the Civil War had ended in April of that year and that slavery was abolished. This marked the freedom of the last 250,000 slaves in this country. This, despite the fact that the Emancipation Proclaimation had been signed by Abraham Lincoln two and a half years earlier.
See the Juneteenth.com web site for more information and for an online look at the dramatic artwork of Tom Feeling's book The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo, which is also available in the University of Michigan Library Juvenile Collection on Hatcher's third floor, ND 237 .F27 A25 1995
Posted by swortman at 08:14 AM | Comments (0)
June 09, 2006
Life After the Holocaust: Stories of Holocaust Survivors After The War
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum offers a poignant online exhibit called Life After the Holocaust: Stories of Holocaust Survivors After The War
The site, which requires a Flash 8 plug in, follows the experiences of 6 Holocaust survivors and their immigration to he United States. Users of the site can download audio files of the complete interviews and download transcripts of these interviews. The exhibit is organized by themes, such as Speaking Out, Starting Over, and Living with the Past. These themes combine the interview audios with pictures, both past and present of these victims. The site design is somber and powerful.
The United States Holocaust Museum site also has an online Holocaust Encyclopedia which can be searched alphabetically or by specific topics such as "The United States and the Holocaust", "Jewish Resistance", and an "Introduction to the Holocaust".
The museum site also provides an excellent research area, with links to other web sites on the Holocaust, and a number of excellent bibliographies, including one on University of Michigan's famous alumnus, Raoul Wallenberg
If you are interested in this site you may also want to look at the University of Michigan Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive, a collection of over 52,000 video interviews of Holocaust survivors around the world.
Posted by swortman at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)
June 08, 2006
How to Prevent a Toxic Campus Climate
Dr. Patricia Gurin, acting director of the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan and Dr. Kelley Maxwell, director of University of Michigan’s Program on Intergroup Relations are quoted in a recent article on preventing a toxic campus climate and evaluating institutional climate when it comes to diversity in a June 1 article in Diverse: Issues in Higher Education Online
It never seems to get any better...
This year started with an incident on University of Michigan's campus in which white students(s) were acused of using racial slurs and attempting to urinate on or throw beer on two Asian students and it ended with the Duke lacrosse team incident. That's very depressing.
This recent article in Diverse Online talks about how campuses are working on preventing these situations and how campuses are going about evaluating their institutions climate. Several people from University of Michigan, both past and present are quoted and mentioned in this article.
Posted by swortman at 08:49 AM | Comments (0)
June 07, 2006
U.S. Supreme Court To Rule on Race in K-12 Education
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear appeals on cases from Washington and Kentucky related to the legality of taking race into account when placing students in public schools. Read the recent CNN article for more information.
Keeping schools integrated seems to be a never ending battle. What happened to the corporate support for the importance of diversity for students in our multicultural/global world, filed as briefs in the Gratz v. Bollinger Supreme Court case in 2001?
We should be paying more attention to the nearly forty years of writings on the subject of public school inequality published by Jonothon Kozol, author, educator, and conscience of our nation. The title alone , of his most recent book is a sobering statement, The Shame of the Nation : The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America (LC 212.62 .K691 2005 in Shapiro & Social Work Library at U-M)
Posted by swortman at 10:59 AM | Comments (0)
Nominations for the 17th Annual James Neubacher Award
If you want to recognize the efforts of someone who fights for the rights of people with disabilities, you don’t have much time. The nomination deadline for the 17th Annual James Neubacher Award is June 14, 2006.
Visit the Neubacher Web site http://www.umich.edu/~hraa/neubacher/ for nomination forms as well as information about the Award and James Neubacher, an alumnus of the University and an advocate for equal rights and opportunities for people with disabilities.
Questions? Contact Anna Ercoli Schnitzer, Chair, James Neubacher Award Committee at mailto:schnitzr@umich.edu.
Sponsored by the Office of Institutional Equity.
Posted by swortman at 08:46 AM | Comments (0)