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Three Stories, One Year

Reproductive Justice

Movements for Decolonization

Music and Revolution

1973 was a fascinating year: Lyndon Baines Johnson, the man who became president of the United States after the assassination of JFK, the man who signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act outlawing discriminatory voting practices that were popularized in the south and disenfranchised thousands of Black people, Latinos, and other historically minoritized groups, and the man who had pledged a War on Poverty, died as the year began. He had overseen much of the decade when the Vietnam War raged. Sending hundreds of thousands of college-age American young men to their deaths, and, by some government estimates, had killed over 1 million Vietnamese people, roughly from 1954 to about 1975. With the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement, the United States was officially out of the war. This was the same year that Richard Nixon began his second term as President of the United States. He would serve but one and a half years of his second term before resigning in disgrace. 1973 was year the Watergate scandal was gaining traction. G. Gordon Liddy, one of Nixon’s associates in the drama, was found guilty of conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping in late January.

AGAIN, all of these things happened in JANUARY! This is to say that these are some of the events that helped shape this infamous year. What I hope to discuss are major events the shaped the following months.

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Roe v. Wade

The landmark Supreme Court decision stating that the Constitution “generally” protected a person’s right to abortion.

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Sample Footer Text

On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court decided one the most influential cases in women’s history of the twentieth century.

The case was brought by Norma McCorvey—under the legal pseudonym "Jane Roe"—who, in 1969, became pregnant with her third child. McCorvey wanted an abortion but lived in Texas, where abortion was illegal except when necessary to save the mother's life. Her lawyers, Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, filed a lawsuit on her behalf in U.S. federal court against her local district attorney, Henry Wade, alleging that Texas's abortion laws were unconstitutional. A special three-judge court of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas heard the case and ruled in her favor.^[4] The parties appealed this ruling to the Supreme Court. In January 1973, the Supreme Court issued a 7–2 decision in McCorvey's favor holding that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides a fundamental "right to privacy", which protects a pregnant woman's right to an abortion. It also held that the right to abortion is not absolute and must be balanced against the government's interests in protecting women's health and prenatal life.^[5]^[6]

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Madrigal v. Quilligan case

October 12, 1973

Doctors sterilize Dolores Madrigal without authorization during the labor of her second child.

At the same time that women across the country were celebrating this massive win for their bodily autonomy, poor women, most of whom were women of color, were fighting a different battle. For decades, under differing directives, poor women of color experienced disproportionate rates of forced sterilizations. Since the time of eugenic boards, the state of Iowa was one such state with a eugenics board, thousands of poor women “deemed unfit” to reproduce were often institutionalized and sterilized against their will. In the southern states, this was brusquely classed a Mississippi appendectomy. Poor women and girls, mostly Black, Latina, and Native women, would enter the hospital for care, sometimes with stomach pains, other times for maternal care, and would leave with tubal ligations. Some were kept in the dark about this barbaric treatment most of their lives. The Madrigal v. Quilligan case was the first case since Buck v. Bell, the 1927 Supreme Court Case that enshrined into the law the constitutionality of state’s rights to forcibly sterilize their citizens, to address the issue of coercive sterilization. The case came to light after a thoughtful young doctor, Dr. Bernard Rosenfield, at the county General Hospital, acted as the whistleblower by exposing testimony on the doctors’ malpractice on low income and minority women. Among the victims were Dolores Madrigal, who claimed that doctors pressured her into signing a sterilization consent form while she was in labor, and Jovita Rivera, who signed the concession document without being counseled on the consequences of sterilization. Dr. Rosenfield requested the legal services of Model Cities Center for Law and Justice, where lawyers Antonia Hernandez and Charles Navarette managed the case. The lawyers collaborated with Comisión Feminil, a feminist organization led by Gloria Molina and argued their case on the basis of Roe v. Wade, claiming that women possessed the reproductive rights to procreate and to an abortion. Unfortunately, the women lost the case. In 1978, Judge Jesse W. Curtis ruled in favor of the county medical center and held that sterilizations were the result of miscommunication and language barriers between the patients and the doctors. Despite losing the case, the plaintiffs influenced the California Department of Health to implement new sterilization procedures, including bilingual informational materials that explained the process and consequences of sterilization. The State of California also revoked their sterilization law, which had enabled over 20,000 unauthorized sterilization operations to occur.

James Quilligan was the head of obstetrics and gynecology of the hospital at the time.

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As I mentioned, the issue of coercive sterilization had wrecked havoc among many communities of color. In 1972, a 26-year-old Native American woman walked into a California medical office requesting ‘a womb transplant’. Six years earlier, as a young mother struggling with alcoholism, a doctor working for the Indian Health Service (IHS) had removed her uterus—assuring her that it could be ‘replaced’ later. Dr Connie Redbird Pinkerman-Uri, herself of Choctaw and Cherokee descent, explained to the devastated woman that she had been involuntarily sterilized.

Beginning in the 1830s, the U.S. ratified a series of treaties with Native nations, in which tribes ‘traded’ land, sovereignty, and jurisdiction for goods and services, including medicine and healthcare. Simultaneously, the Supreme Court began detailing the federal trust responsibility; this legal precedent established that because tribes were relegated to a ‘domestic dependent status’, the federal government assumed authority over and responsibility for tribes and their members. Although unevenly applied, the treaties and the trust responsibility positioned healthcare as a commodity for which Native peoples had already paid. This process culminated in 1954 as healthcare provisions for Native Americans were formally consolidated into the Indian Health Service (IHS). Unlike the privatized, pay-per-service system of healthcare generally available in the U.S., the IHS provides no-cost healthcare services via federally administered hospitals and clinics primarily located on reservations. During the early 1970s, fears of overpopulation and resource scarcity, as well as changing racial demographics, motivated the Nixon administration to promote ‘family planning’. Under this policy, federally-funded sterilizations increased nearly 300 percent from 1970 to 1977. Because the IHS was often the only healthcare provider geographically and financially available to Indigenous women on reservations, they were particularly vulnerable to paternalistic and racist abuse by IHS physicians and social workers. Shocked by the experience of her young sterilized patient in the early 1970s, Dr Pinkerman-Uri began systematically asking other Indigenous women about their experiences of sterilization. Quickly, she concluded, IHS doctors were running a ‘sterilization factory’.

In some cases, doctors did not provide an interpreter to explain procedures or options in the appropriate language, nor a witness to the consent. If they verbally warned of procedural risks, physicians often failed to explain the procedure’s irreversibility or to discuss alternative modes of birth control. Some providers included a social worker who would threaten halted welfare payments or removal of the patient’s children if they refused sterilization. Others waived the mandatory 72-hour waiting period before a sterilization, pressuring postpartum women already under sedation to consent. These practices culminated in a horrific pattern of exploitation, in which Women of All Red Nations (WARN)—an Indigenous women’s activist organization—contends sterilization rates were as high as 80 percent on some reservations, as compared to a national average of 15 percent for white women. By the close of the 1970s, Dr Pinkerman-Uri estimated that less than 100,000 Indigenous women of childbearing age remained unsterilized.

https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/anti-racism/involuntary-sterilization/

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AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT (AIM)

It was these kinds of injustices—the brutal fight for existence to have control over their own bodies, on their own lands, that spurred Native peoples in the United States to act against the US government. For many first nations across the country, the US government had already taken too much. The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 was one law among others through the 1940s and 1950s that are referred to as Indian Termination. It was an effort by the U.S. government to hasten the assimilation of American Indians. Some scholars have characterized the law as an attempt to encourage people to leave Indian reservations for urban areas, which resulted in poverty, joblessness, homelessness for many in the new urban environment.^[7]^[8] By 1968, AIM was founded in urban Minneapolis, Minnesota, and other activist groups were established in cities after termination.

In the summer of 1968, Native American activists Dennis Banks, George Mitchell, and Clyde Bellecourt gathered hundreds of like-minded individuals in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Armed with ultimate goal of forcing the United States to recognize Native American sovereignty, the activists formed the American Indian Movement group, or the AIM.

The American Indian Movement’s goals were: 1) the recognition of Indian treaties by the United States government, 2) sovereignty over land and people, and 3) the protection of Native peoples and their liberties. AIM has sought to accomplish these goals over the past five decades by bringing a multitude of successful lawsuits against the federal government in the hopes of changing U.S. policy.

Key events for the American Indian movement include the group’s formation in Minnesota in 1968, as well as the initial occupation of Alcatraz Island in 1969. The movement also organized the “Trail of Broken Treaties” March, where protesters marched on Washington, D.C.

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Siege of�Wounded Knee�February 1973

On February 27, 1973, about 250 Sioux Indians led by members of the American Indian Movement converged on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, launching the famous 71-day occupation of Wounded Knee.

Set in the same impoverished region as the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre, this is considered the last major battle Native peoples fought for sovereignty in the 19^th century, the ended with the United States Amry slaughtering approximately 300 Lakota Indians in the area of Wounded Knee Creek in southwestern South Dakota. The massacre was the climax of the U.S. Army’s late 19th-century efforts to repress the Plains People. This brutal assault broke any organized resistance to reservation life and assimilation to white American culture, until AIM took up the cause anew in the late 1960s.

The occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 called global attention to unsafe living conditions and generations of mistreatment from federal and local agencies. The occupation, which began during the evening of February 27, is hailed as one of AIM’s greatest successes. “The 1973 conflict at Wounded Knee involved a dispute within Pine Ridge’s Oglala Lakota Tribe over the controversial tribal chairman Richard Wilson. Wilson was viewed as a corrupt puppet of the BIA by some segments of the tribe, including those associated with the American Indian Movement. An effort to impeach Wilson resulted in a division of the tribe into opposing camps that eventually armed themselves and entered into a two-and-a-half month conflict that involved tribal police and government; AIM; reservation residents; federal law enforcement officials; local citizens; nationally prominent entertainment figures; national philanthropic, religious, and legal organizations; and the national news media. When the siege ended on May 9, 1973, two Indians were dead and an unknown number on both sides were wounded, including casualties among federal government forces.”

Following the end of the 1973 stand-off, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation had a higher rate of internal violence. Residents complained of physical attacks and intimidation by President Richard Wilson's followers, the so-called GOONS or Guardians of the Oglala Nation. The murder rate between March 1, 1973, and March 1, 1976, averaged 56.7 per 100,000 per annum (170 per 100,000 over the whole period). Detroit had a rate of 20.2 per 100,000 in 1974 and at the time was considered "the murder capital of the US". The national average was 9.7 per 100,000.^[41]

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Radical “Militant” Youth

Many people were a part of various movements and participated in these radical years after the assassination of prominent civil rights leaders. In many way these deaths pushed for a more so-called militant stance by young activists who had seen the blood shed of the decade before. Demanding more than rights, they were demanding dignity, self-determination and more radically, power, organizations like the Black Panthers from Oakland California infamously chanted “All Power the PEOPLE!”

Most of these groups surged to prominence around the same time but were part of groups that felt affinity with those in the civil rights struggle.

A.I.M.—American Indian Movement was started in the Midwest but had strong connections to the Bay Area. From November 20, 1969, to June 11, 1971, Native Americans took over and held Alcatraz Island as Indian Land. The Occupation of Alcatraz Island" was led by the Native American group, Indians of All Tribes (IAT). By late May, the government had cut off all electrical power and telephone service. In June, a fire destroyed many buildings.

On June 11, 1971, a large force of government officers removed the last 15 people from Alcatraz.

Gay Liberation—While there had been early brawls that were beginning to push people to the edge in places like San Francisco, nothing moved the LGBTQ community like a so-called routine bar raid at the Stonewall bar, a well-known gay bar in New York City’s Village neighborhood on June 28, 1969. As police officers attempt to raid the bar under the pretense that it had an expired liquor license, patrons had been pushed to the edge. Raids like this were becoming all together more frequent and more violent. The riots lasted for several days. Graffiti appeared on the walls of the bar, declaring "Drag power", "They invaded our rights", "Support gay power", and "Legalize gay bars.“ As some more older gay organizations like the Matachine Society attempted to quell unrest in the neighborhood, night after night so-called hippies, Black Panther organizers, and even activists from the Young Lords came out to support the new movement.

Black Power (as exemplified by the Black Panthers)—The Black Panther Party, originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, was a political organization founded by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton in October 1966 in Oakland, California. The armed themselves and demanded self-respect and believed in self-defense. They started various programs in their coommunities supporting lunch and breakfast programs in the their neighborhoods as well as consciousness razing meetings. The movement spread to New York, Chicago and other major cities. Fred Hampton one of the main organizers and leaders was assassintated by FBI agents in December 1969 while we was asleep in bed. Part of an FBI program—COINTELPRO that was created to quash radical, so-called militant protest.

Chicano Movement—The Chicano movement has its inception in the fight for farmworkers rights, but really came into it’s own during one of the largest student walks outs (still to this day!) The East Los Angeles Walkouts or Chicano Blowouts were a series of 1968 protests by Chicano students against unequal conditions in Los Angeles Unified School District high schools. The first protest took place on March 6, 1968. Chicano and Chicanas began to mobilize and by August 1970, held in East Los Angeles, what was called the Chicano moratorium. The largest anti-Vietnam War demonstration by any minority group in the United States, including African Americans. Estimates of the demonstrators, mostly Chicanos, or Mexican Americans, range from 20,000 to 30,000. It was also the largest demonstration during the Chicano Movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, the most significant civil rights and community empowerment movement by Mexican Americans in the country to that time. Chicanos and Chicanas, like Black power radicals, were not only demanding respect for civil rights and self-determination, but the fight for power.

The Young Lords— Puerto Rican young activists that organized both in New York and Chicago and like the Black Panthers, spent time creating the necessary infrastructure that was neglected in their communities. From soup kitchens to health clinics.

Asian American Movement—The AAM differs from previous Asian American activism due to its emphasis on Pan-Asianism and its solidarity with U.S. and international Third World movements such as the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF). Daryl Joji Maeda states that, "Its founding principle of coalition politics emphasizes solidarity among Asians of all ethnicities, multiracial solidarity among Asian Americans as well as with African, Latino, and Native Americans in the United States, and transnational solidarity with peoples around the globe impacted by U.S. militarism".[1] The movement was mainly student-based, emerging simultaneously on various college campuses and urban communities. The AAM was largely concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City but even extended as far as Honolulu. The movement created community service programs, art, poetry, music, and other creative works; offered a new sense of self-determination; raised the political and racial consciousness of Asian Americans

Anti-Vietnam War—The movement against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War began small–among peace activists and leftist intellectuals on college campuses–but gained national prominence in 1965, after the United States began bombing North Vietnam in earnest. Anti-war marches and other protests, such as the ones organized by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), attracted a widening base of support over the next three years, peaking in early 1968 after the successful Tet Offensive by North Vietnamese troops proved that war’s end was nowhere in sight.

The famous world renowned champion boxer, Mohammad Ali—who was part of the Nation of Islam, like Malcolm X—became one of the most famous "conscientious objector. Ali, then heavyweight champion of the world, declared himself a "conscientious objector," earning a prison sentence (later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court) and a three-year ban from boxing.

Ali emphatically stated: “Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.”

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Celebrating 50 Years of Hip-Hop

Coke La Rock and DJ Kool Herc

On August 11, 1973, DJ Kool Herc was the DJ at his sister's back-to-school party. He extended the beat of a record by using two record players, isolating the percussion "breaks" by using a mixer to switch between the two records. Herc's experiments with making music with record players became what we now know as breaking or "scratching". In the 1970s, block parties were increasingly popular in New York City, particularly among African American, Caribbean and Latino youth residing in the Bronx. Block parties incorporated DJs, who played popular genres of music, especially funk and soul music.

Due to the positive reception, DJs began isolating the percussive breaks of popular songs. This technique was common in Jamaican dub music, and was largely introduced into New York by immigrants from the Caribbean, including DJ Kool Herc, one of the pioneers of hip hop. Herc has repeatedly denied any direct connections between Jamaican musical traditions and early hip hop, stating that his own biggest influence was James Brown, from whom he says rap originated.Even before moving to the U.S., Herc says his biggest influences came from American music.

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MUSIC AND REVOLUTION

Hip Hop music in its infancy has been described as an outlet and a voice for the disenfranchised youth of marginalized backgrounds and low-income areas, as the hip hop culture reflected the social, economic and political realities of their lives.^[53]^[54] Though Hip Hop music and culture had already been in the making and underground before and in the early 1970s with African Americans with notables such as Cornbread, Disco King Mario, and Kool DJ Dee, it easily spread to the those of Latin and Caribbean origin later who added certain elements to hip hop music, including DJ Kool Herc, DJ Disco Wiz, Grandmaster Flash, and Afrika Bambaataa.^[55]

Hip hop music was not officially recorded for play on radio or television until 1979, largely due to poverty during the genre's birth and lack of acceptance outside ghetto neighborhoods.^[28] Old-school hip hop was the first mainstream wave of the genre, marked by its disco influence and party-oriented lyrics. The 1980s marked the diversification of hip hop as the genre developed more complex styles and spread around the world. New-school hip hop was the genre's second wave, marked by its electro sound, and led into golden age hip hop, an innovative period between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s that also developed hip hop's own album era. The gangsta rap subgenre, focused on the violent lifestyles and impoverished conditions of inner-city African American youth, gained popularity at this time. West Coast hip hop was dominated by G-funk in the early-mid 1990s, while East Coast hip hop was dominated by jazz rap, alternative hip hop, and hardcore hip hop. Hip hop continued to diversify at this time with other regional styles emerging, such as Southern rap and Atlanta hip hop. Hip hop became a best-selling genre in the mid-1990s and the top-selling music genre by 1999.

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