Can you believe this guy?
The Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, a storied civil rights leader who survived beatings and bombings in Alabama a half-century ago as he fought against racial injustice alongside the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died on Wednesday in Birmingham, Ala. He was 89.
He died at Princeton Baptist Medical Center, his wife, Sephira Bailey Shuttlesworth, said. He also lived in Birmingham.
It was in that city in the spring of 1963 that Mr. Shuttlesworth, an important ally of Dr. King, organized two tumultuous weeks of daily demonstrations by black children, students, clergymen and others against a rigidly segregated society.
Graphic scenes of helmeted police officers and firefighters under the direction of T. Eugene (Bull) Connor, Birmingham’s intransigent public safety commissioner, scattering peaceful marchers with fire hoses, police dogs and nightsticks, provoked a national outcry.
The brutality helped galvanize the nation’s conscience, as did the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing of a black church in Birmingham that summer, which killed four girls at Sunday school. Those events led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, after the historic Alabama marches that year from Selma to Montgomery, which Mr. Shuttlesworth also helped organize. The laws were the bedrock of civil rights legislation.
Steve Jobs was not just another member of the crowd.
After enrolling at Reed College in 1972, he dropped out after only one semesterand, two years later, quit one of his first jobs to backpack around India. He also experimented with LSD and revered Bob Dylan.
In 1997, advertising agency TBWA/Chiat/Day created Apple’s “Think Different” ad campaign, which almost sounds like the title of a biography of the Apple co-founder. The ad series debuted with a television commercial September 28, 1997, featuring Richard Dreyfus reading a poem called “Here’s To The Crazy Ones” while images of famous rebels like Amelia Earhart, Ghandi, and John Lennon flash onscreen.
Steve Jobs himself even narrated one of the “Think Different” commercials, albeit an unaired one.
Take a look at Jobs’ toast to “the crazy ones” in the video (below), courtesy of 9to5Mac.
Steve Jobs has touched all of our lives in some way…
My friend Gilligan says it best:
Because of Jobs’ genius, I don’t know anyone whose life wasn’t touched by his vision and innovation.
And as an Apple stockholder for a number of years, I know that because Jobs had received his final diagnosis, he planned well for his company’s future. But it’s his family, his wife and children, who will grieve the most at the loss of their husband and father.
Here’s a little Michael Jackson….
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, passed away today after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 56. Here is the statement from Apple’s Board of Directors.
Now this is what I’d call class warfare. The GOP talking point term of class warfare is simply projection…
REPORTS OF ARRESTS AND PEPPER SPRAYING AT WALL STREET PROTESTS | There have been multiple reports of arrests and pepper spraying of protesters on Wall Street tonight. According to the Guardian, “there’s a flashpoint on the intersection of Broadway and Cedar Street,with reports of a number of arrests. Police have deployed orange netting to contain protesters. Subway trains have been ordered not to stop at Wall Street station.”
Inspired by Occupy Wall Street, students from around New York will walk out of their classes and march down to City Hall this afternoon. Once at City Hall, the students will join the larger Community/Labor March to Wall Street, which already has almost 3,000 people attending on Facebook.
A few months ago, New York Students Rising, a “statewide network of students and campus-organizations dedicated to defending public higher education and empowering students in New York State,” according to its website, started organizing around budget cuts in the CUNY and SUNY systems and began to plan for a fall protest. Now, thanks to a chance scheduling overlap with Occupy Wall Street, it has morphed into a solidarity march, and other universities are joining in as well.
Students from Columbia, The New School, and NYU have been organizing for the walkouts, scheduled at 3:30 p.m. (for Columbia) and 4 p.m. (for NYU and the New School), in time to get to the 4:30 march. In addition, students and teachers at CUNY and SUNY schools will be holding teach-ins prior to walking out.
According to Joshua Frens-String, a Ph.D student in the history department at NYU and one of the organizers of NYU’s student walkout, there are two main reasons why students feel so strongly about Occupy Wall Street: inequalities that directly affect them and a feeling that they lack real political representation.
Staging a walkout will have a “strong symbolic effect,” according to Frens-String, but he says the idea came from purely practical considerations: The labor march begins at 4:30 and many people are still in school and at work at that time. Still, the act will not be completely devoid of meaning. “We’re inspired by people giving up entire days occupying. The least we can do is give up a few hours,” he explained.
Who knows if the walkouts will get any results, but they show that OWS is gaining support from more than just zombies.