The Bill of Rights
The right of peaceful assembly, with excerpts and poems from Esther Cantu, Judy Callarman, and Tillie Friedenberg.
TRANSCRIPT
America’s Declaration of Independence says that all Americans have certain inalienable rights and that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, although if you read it closely, I think it says Life, Liberty, and the purfuit of happineff because their s’s looked like f’s back then. But that’s not the point. The point is that the founders of this country thought it important to spell out in more detail what those rights were, and they did that through a series of ten amendments to the recently approved Constitution. The first state that ratified those first ten amendments, also known as The Bill of Rights, was New Jersey—on November 20, 1789. To commemorate the event, three pieces related to the First Amendment’s right of the people to peaceably assemble.
Emma Tenayuca was a labor leader, union organizer, and civil rights activist. She’s best known for her work organizing Mexican workers in Texas during the 1930s. Here’s Esther Cantu’s poem, “Emma Tenayuca.”
I, Emma at 16, made history in 1933.
I spoke out. It was forbidden.
I fought for people in low paying jobs
people who shelled pecans, made clothes, rolled cigars
people who needed better pay and working conditions
I walked in protest. I shouted, “Huelga, Huelga!”
I was arrested many times.
I never thought in terms of fear. I thought in terms of justice.
I was a well-known Red!
Black listed, I lived through unemployment and poverty.
In my fight for social justice, I sacrificed everything.
They called me la pasionera; but my passion faded.
Threatened, forced to leave my home,
I remained committed to the end.
In time I made my way back to the city that had shunned me.
Years later they valued my work. It was not in vain.
My life was complicated; my simple tombstone reads,
Thy Will Be Done.
Esther Cantu’s poem “Emma Tenayuca” from Passager’s Winter 2017 issue.
In 2008, Passager published an issue commemorating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death. Here from that issue, this recollection from Judy Callarman.
It was a cold early morning in 1962 as I crossed the mall on the University of Texas campus in Austin. Something different—a quality of sound—grabbed my attention and I looked up. At the far end of the mall, several hundred students of many races stood in a line, arms linked, all the way from one side to the other. I slowed down and listened, but I could not hear what they were saying until I was closer. They were all looking intently at the top of the library below the Tower. In unison, several hundred quiet voices read over and over the words inscribed there: “You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.”
Feeling a bit shaken, I went on to my class, which may well have been American literature. One of our assignments that semester was to read works of Henry David Thoreau, one of the original civil disobedience men. About 40 years later, I learned that Martin Luther King first heard of the concept of nonviolent struggle when he was a freshman in college, studying Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience.” I read that King was at first skeptical that it had any potential as an agent of social change. Disturbed, I studied the upturned faces that morning as I walked around the end of the line of people toward the building where my class met.
Later, when I told my parents about the incident in a phone call home, my father said, “I wouldn’t get mixed up with that civil rights stuff if I were you.” “Don’t worry, I won’t,” I said. But I still wish I had had the courage to skip my class and join them.
Judy Callarman from Passager’s Marin Luther King Commemorative issue.
We’ll end with an excerpt from Tillie Friedenberg’s memoir “To My Fellow Poets,” also from Passager’s Martin Luther King issue.
We gathered in Alabama, thousands of us from many parts of the country: housewives, familiar Hollywood and Broadway figures, students, poets, academics, religious leaders of all denominations, trade unionists, united in our mutual outrage at what we had been seeing on TV—a small group of black people being prodded with electric cattle prods by local police because they were demonstrating, peaceably, their determination to register to vote. They were knocked to the ground by heavy streams of water, and set upon by attack dogs. This violence was perpetrated by local officials intent on depriving them of their constitutional right to make choices at the polls, intent on degrading them, on teaching them to “stay in their place.”
We who marched defied them, knowingly risking our lives. Three student volunteers from other states had already been murdered, their bodies rotting in Alabama ditches as we marched. Martin Luther King was in and out of jail. Rosa Parks, an uppity black woman, refused to move to the back of the bus. My husband and I and our two teenage daughters marched with Dr. King, and we were afraid, but other emotions and realizations overrode our fears. We kept marching to Montgomery: we sang songs of eventual victory, joined hands with strangers to our left and right, empowered by the knowledge of the many who live their lives acting on the belief that the right to live, and to live decently, is an inherent human right.
Tillie Friedenberg from Passager’s Martin Luther King Commemorative issue.
We’ve been listening to pieces related to the First Amendment’s guarantee of peaceful assembly. The No Kings protests that took place across the U.S. a few weeks ago were examples of that right. The most recent amendment to the U.S. Constitution, by the way, was number 27, making sure that if Congress gives themselves a pay raise, it won’t apply to the current members but will only be implemented after the next House of Representatives election, so voters will have a chance to hold their representatives accountable for any pay increases. It was originally proposed in 1789 but wasn’t ratified until 1992, making its ratification the longest in U.S. history.
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For Christine, Rosanne, Mary, Asher, and the rest of the Passager staff, I’m Jon Shorr.
Due to the limitations of online publishing, poems may not appear in their original formatting.
Not pictured: Judy Callarman