Daily Archives: January 20, 2014

In the archivist world, they call them the stacks, the seemingly endless rows of boxes and folders that contain the details of history.

At the Wisconsin Historical Society, a portion of these stacks contains much more than the minutiae of an era. A massive civil rights collection holds items from of a powerful time in American history evidence of hope and hatred, examples of breathtaking bravery and pure evil.

One is always tempted to ask, What in the world is all this stuff doing in Wisconsin, of all places? said Mimi Feingold Real, a UW-Madison history graduate student in 1965-66. And why not Wisconsin?

For the next several months, the Historical Society will highlight the portions of its collection that pertain to the civil rights movement and the Freedom Summer Project, the 1964 nonviolent movement to integrate voting in Mississippi. The documents are part of more than a thousand boxes of material relating to the civil rights movement. For the Freedom Summer project, more than 30,000 documents have been digitized and are available to anyone with the click of a computer mouse.

That the documents are in Wisconsin at all is due to the work of students like Real, who headed into the heart of the South to collect them at a time when tension was high and danger ever present.

In a movement that had Freedom Riders, Freedom Summer and Freedom Schools, they were the Freedom Archivists. Their work resulted in a unique grassroots collection that has been a valuable resource for scholars.

There is no serious civil rights book written in the last 50 years whose author didnt come handle these papers, said Michael Edmonds, deputy director of the Library-Archives Division of the Historical Society and the organizer of the Freedom Summer project.

The often personal nature of the documents gives the collection its power, Edmonds said. There are letters from volunteers to friends and family, as well as hate mail. There are phone logs that give a play-by-play of history as it happened, including a chilling entry from June 21, 1964, of a call that came into a toll-free line set up for workers in the field:

Mickey Schwerner, driving w Andy Goodman (NYC) & Jas. Chaney (Negro/Meridian) left Meridian this am 9-10 heading for Philadelphia in Neshoba Co to investigate church burning. Expected back 4:00. Havent been heard from since.

The civil rights workers had been picked up by police, released but then followed and stopped by the Ku Klux Klan. Two days later, their car was found burned. Six weeks later, their bodies were found buried under a dam near Philadelphia, Miss.

Original post:
Freedom Summer anniversary puts spotlight on Historical Society collection

The Winter Classic at Michigan Stadium on New Year's Day attracted an amazing 105,491 fans.

The Freedom and Liberty ice hockey teams know they won't draw that kind of crowd, but they expect a good one when they meet at 7:15 p.m. on Feb. 5 in what they hope will be the first of many Bethlehem Winter Classics.

The setting will be the Bethlehem Municipal Ice Rink on Illicks Mill Road. There will be a $2 admission charge with all proceeds going to Dream Come True of the Lehigh Valley.

The game will not count in the Lehigh Valley Scholastic Hockey League standings, but still should be a hotly contested game in the cold outdoor setting.

"It's a great idea and there's a lot of people pulling together to make this happen," Freedom coach Brandon Zittrer said. "The Winter Classic in the NHL attracts so much attention and as a community event, this has the potential to be a huge thing and something that can grow into an annual event."

Zittrer said that many local sponsors have come on board, including his own Soldiers Construction and Landscaping company.

"The bottom line is that it's great for the kids because they get to play hockey, which is what they love to do," Zittrer said. "Here they get to play it at different level than normal. It's an outdoor rink and the ice is better there than at most indoor rinks in the area. All the glitz and glamour is great, but ultimately, this is about the kids and we want them to have a good time with it."

Zittrer, a 2005 Freedom graduate who played ice hockey during his high school days, is hoping that the game is not only a showcase for the two teams, but also for the sport in general. In the Lehigh Valley, scholastic ice hockey is a club sport not sponsored by the school districts.

"Typically, ice hockey players start at a very young age and their skills are developed and they are at a point now where many of the kids are looking to go and play college hockey," Zittrer said. "We have great kids and this is definitely a fast-paced sport that's fun to watch."

The players and their parents are doing what they can to spread the word about the game, which came together in a hurry. There should be plenty of standing room available around the glass for fans.

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Freedom and Liberty ice hockey to stage their own Winter Classic on Feb. 5

In moving forward, Malaysia has to assent that freedom of press is no longer an option but a necessity.

COMMENT

A free press, the freedom of which is limited and under wraps, is the very first element that could bring more democracy in a country but only if the press is freed from muzzling and self-censorship.

In the drive for press freedom, the opposition has to play a bigger role in pressing Najib Tun Razaks government to keep up to its promises on guaranteeing such freedoms.

It is obvious that the government will not offer more freedom to the local print press; keeping a firm hold on the newspapers, which is vital to prevent the opposition to take over Putrajaya.

The opposition leaders must however keep up with their promises, made umpteen times, to put foreign officials in the loop on issues of press freedom and must campaign radically in favour of press freedom.

However, the situation is getting worse for the local media.

In recent months, there has been a valse (French term for waltz) of staff movements in the local media scene, with large groups of journalists and support teams leaving the likes of the Malaysian Insider and even the NST, for greener pastures.

Yet with the suspension indefinite and most probably for good of The Heat, the print media world has turned jittery. We should expect a towing to the official line in the printed articles that we are going to read in this despairing year 2014 for the media.

Nevertheless, not all is lost for the fight for a free press, since the 2015 deadline for the formation of the Asean Economic Community (AEC) could augur well for the media world.

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Press freedom essential to survive