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The 50th Anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Death and Cesar Chavez Day -Newsletter April 4, 2018

CMSC
California-Mexico Studies Center

    Read full newsletter here: https://conta.cc/2uGiazo   

 

Martin Luther King’s death tore America apart. We still can’t reckon with African American demands for justice 
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. by Salomon Huerta
 
Because Martin Luther King Jr. now stands as an exalted hero of American history, we tend to assume that his assassination 50 years ago was experienced as a national tragedy. Yet in the days and weeks after his death on April 4, 1968, Americans not only mourned and grieved but also seethed and raged.
President Lyndon Johnson designated April 7, Palm Sunday that year, as a national day of mourning. On April 9, 120 million people watched King’s funeral on television. But Americans were not unified by a collective grief. Some whites were incredulous at the president’s proclamation and marveled that ministers would deliver eulogies for a man they considered a communist agitator; others even celebrated King’s death .    Read More
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On June 17, 2014, El Rancho Unified School District (ERUSD) made history by becoming the first school district in the state of California to adopt Ethnic Studies as a high school graduation requirement. This historic decision has placed ERUSD at the cutting-edge of promoting a global education for students and encouraged the largest school districts in California to follow ERUSD’s lead and adopt similar resolutions.

ERUSD Leader of the Ethnic Studies Revolution (2018) is a documentary that chronicles El Rancho’s Ethnic Studies program evolution, their partnership with Cal State Long Beach that offers Ethnic Studies college-credit classes on Saturdays, a unique approach to creating and implementing their own Ethnic Studies courses, student voices, and the district’s long-term vision about developing a K-12 Ethnic Studies curriculum. Learn more about ERUSD at their website,   click here.

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Saturday, March 31 is Cesar Chavez Day (his birthday) in California.  In 1962, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta joined the organizing efforts of the Filipino farmworkers and founded the National Farm Workers Association (later to become the United Farm Workers, or UFW) in California. Their worker-led movement drew national attention to farmworkers’ struggles and laid the groundwork for other farmworker unions and organizations. Chavez died in 1993 at age 66.
Farmworkers have come a long way since earning 9 cents an hour to pick California’s grapes in the 1960s. Today, they face a whole new set of challenges.
Expenses for farm labor 
Here is a 2012 chart on what farm labor is as a percentage of total farm production expenses, by county. The national average is 8.2 percent and the average for California is 16.6 percent.    Read More
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Community colleges deliver the good jobs that Trump keeps promising. So why does he dump on them?

‘I don’t know what that means, a community college,” President Trump said last week during a speech in northeastern Ohio. “Call it vocational and technical. People know what that means.” The president made similar remarks in West Virginia two months ago, and then again in March at a White House forum on education.
The results of the 2016 presidential election should have made one thing clear: Social and economic mobility are top of mind for Americans. So why does the president keep dumping on community colleges?    Read More

 

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