Mohandas Gandhi
I INTRODUCTION
Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), Indian nationalist leader, who established his country's freedom through a nonviolent revolution.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, also known as Mahatma Gandhi, was born in Porbandar in the present state of Gujarāt on October 2, 1869, and educated in law at University College, London. In 1891, after having been admitted to the British bar, Gandhi returned to India and attempted to establish a law practice in Bombay (now Mumbai), with little success. Two years later an Indian firm with interests in South Africa retained him as legal adviser in its office in Durban. Arriving in Durban, Gandhi found himself treated as a member of an inferior race. He was appalled at the widespread denial of civil liberties and political rights to Indian immigrants to South Africa. He threw himself into the struggle for elementary rights for Indians.
II PASSIVE RESISTANCE
Gandhi remained in South Africa for 20 years, suffering imprisonment many times. In 1896, after being attacked and beaten by white South Africans, Gandhi began to teach a policy of passive resistance to, and noncooperation with, the South African authorities. Part of the inspiration for this policy came from the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, whose influence on Gandhi was profound. Gandhi also acknowledged his debt to the teachings of Christ and to the 19th-century American writer Henry David Thoreau, especially to Thoreau's famous essay “Civil Disobedience.” Gandhi considered the terms passive resistance and civil disobedience inadequate for his purposes, however, and coined another term, satyagraha (Sanskrit for “truth and firmness”). During the Boer War, Gandhi organized an ambulance corps for the British army and commanded a Red Cross unit. After the war he returned to his campaign for Indian rights. In 1910, he founded Tolstoy Farm, near Johannesburg, a cooperative colony for Indians. In 1914 the government of the Union of South Africa made important concessions to Gandhi's demands, including recognition of Indian marriages and abolition of the poll tax for them. His work in South Africa complete, he returned to India.
III CAMPAIGN FOR HOME RULE
Gandhi became a leader in a complex struggle, the Indian campaign for home rule. Following World War I, in which he played an active part in recruiting campaigns, Gandhi, again advocating Satyagraha, launched his movement of passive resistance to Britain. When, in 1919, Parliament passed the Rowlatt Acts, giving the Indian colonial authorities emergency powers to deal with so-called revolutionary activities, Satyagraha spread through India, gaining millions of followers. A demonstration against the Rowlatt Acts resulted in a massacre of Indians at Amritsar by British soldiers (see Amritsar Massacre); in 1920, when the British government failed to make amends, Gandhi proclaimed an organized campaign of noncooperation. Indians in public office resigned, government agencies such as courts of law were boycotted, and Indian children were withdrawn from government schools. Through India, streets were blocked by squatting Indians who refused to rise even when beaten by police. Gandhi was arrested, but the British were soon forced to release him.
Economic independence for India, involving the complete boycott of British goods, was made a corollary of Gandhi's swaraj (Sanskrit, “self-ruling”) movement. The economic aspects of the movement were significant, for the exploitation of Indian villagers by British industrialists had resulted in extreme poverty in the country and the virtual destruction of Indian home industries. As a remedy for such poverty, Gandhi advocated revival of cottage industries; he began to use a spinning wheel as a token of the return to the simple village life he preached, and of the renewal of native Indian industries.
Gandhi became the international symbol of a free India. He lived a spiritual and ascetic life of prayer, fasting, and meditation. His union with his wife became, as he himself stated, that of brother and sister. Refusing earthly possessions, he wore the loincloth and shawl of the lowliest Indian and subsisted on vegetables, fruit juices, and goat's milk. Indians revered him as a saint and began to call him Mahatma (Sanskrit, “great soul”), a title reserved for the greatest sages. Gandhi's advocacy of nonviolence, known as ahimsa (Sanskrit, “noninjury”), was the expression of a way of life implicit in the Hindu religion. By the Indian practice of nonviolence, Gandhi held, Britain too would eventually consider violence useless and would leave India.
The Mahatma's political and spiritual hold on India was so great that the British authorities dared not interfere with him. In 1921 the Indian National Congress, the group that spearheaded the movement for nationhood, gave Gandhi complete executive authority, with the right of naming his own successor. The Indian population, however, could not fully comprehend the unworldly ahimsa. A series of armed revolts against Britain broke out, culminating in such violence that Gandhi confessed the failure of the civil-disobedience campaign he had called, and ended it. The British government again seized and imprisoned him in 1922.
After his release from prison in 1924, Gandhi withdrew from active politics and devoted himself to propagating communal unity. Unavoidably, however, he was again drawn into the vortex of the struggle for independence. In 1930 the Mahatma proclaimed a new campaign of civil disobedience, calling upon the Indian population to refuse to pay taxes, particularly the tax on salt. The campaign was a march to the sea, in which thousands of Indians followed Gandhi from Ahmadābād to the Arabian Sea, where they made salt by evaporating sea water. Once more the Indian leader was arrested, but he was released in 1931, halting the campaign after the British made concessions to his demands. In the same year Gandhi represented the Indian National Congress at a conference in London.
IV ATTACK UPON THE CASTE SYSTEM
In 1932, Gandhi began new civil-disobedience campaigns against the British. Arrested twice, the Mahatma fasted for long periods several times; these fasts were effective measures against the British, because revolution might well have broken out in India if he had died. In September 1932, while in jail, Gandhi undertook a “fast unto death” to improve the status of the Hindu Untouchables. The British, by permitting the Untouchables to be considered as a separate part of the Indian electorate, were, according to Gandhi, countenancing an injustice. Although he was himself a member of the Vaisya (merchant) caste, Gandhi was the great leader of the movement in India dedicated to eradicating the unjust social and economic aspects of the caste system.
In 1934 Gandhi formally resigned from politics, being replaced as leader of the Congress Party by Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi traveled through India, teaching ahimsa and demanding eradication of “untouchability.” The esteem in which he was held was the measure of his political power. So great was this power that the limited home rule granted by the British in 1935 could not be implemented until Gandhi approved it. A few years later, in 1939, he again returned to active political life because of the pending federation of Indian principalities with the rest of India. His first act was a fast, designed to force the ruler of the state of Rājkot to modify his autocratic rule. Public unrest caused by the fast was so great that the colonial government intervened; the demands were granted. The Mahatma again became the most important political figure in India.
V INDEPENDENCE
When World War II broke out, the Congress Party and Gandhi demanded a declaration of war aims and their application to India. As a reaction to the unsatisfactory response from the British, the party decided not to support Britain in the war unless the country were granted complete and immediate independence. The British refused, offering compromises that were rejected. When Japan entered the war, Gandhi still refused to agree to Indian participation. He was interned in 1942 but was released two years later because of failing health.
By 1944 the Indian struggle for independence was in its final stages, the British government having agreed to independence on condition that the two contending nationalist groups, the Muslim League and the Congress Party, should resolve their differences. Gandhi stood steadfastly against the partition of India but ultimately had to agree, in the hope that internal peace would be achieved after the Muslim demand for separation had been satisfied. India and Pakistan became separate states when the British granted India its independence in 1947. During the riots that followed the partition of India, Gandhi pleaded with Hindus and Muslims to live together peacefully. Riots engulfed Calcutta (now Kolkata), one of the largest cities in India, and the Mahatma fasted until disturbances ceased. On January 13, 1948, he undertook another successful fast in New Delhi to bring about peace. But on January 30, 12 days after the termination of that fast, as he was on his way to his evening prayer meeting, he was assassinated by Nathuram Godse, a Hindu fanatic.
Gandhi's death was regarded as an international catastrophe. His place in humanity was measured not in terms of the 20th century but in terms of history. A period of mourning was set aside in the United Nations General Assembly, and condolences to India were expressed by all countries. Religious violence soon waned in India and Pakistan, and the teachings of Gandhi came to inspire nonviolent movements elsewhere, notably in the U.S. under the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Martin Luther King, Jr. - "The I have a Dream"
Martin Luther King, Jr.
I INTRODUCTION
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), American clergyman and Nobel Prize winner, one of the principal leaders of the American civil rights movement and a prominent advocate of nonviolent protest. King’s challenges to segregation and racial discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s helped convince many white Americans to support the cause of civil rights in the United States. After his assassination in 1968, King became a symbol of protest in the struggle for racial justice.
II EDUCATION AND EARLY LIFE
Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the eldest son of Martin Luther King, Sr., a Baptist minister, and Alberta Williams King. His father served as pastor of a large Atlanta church, Ebenezer Baptist, which had been founded by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, maternal grandfather. King, Jr., was ordained as a Baptist minister at age 18.
King attended local segregated public schools, where he excelled. He entered nearby Morehouse College at age 15 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1948. After graduating with honors from Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania in 1951, he went to Boston University where he earned a doctoral degree in systematic theology in 1955.
King’s public-speaking abilities—which would become renowned as his stature grew in the civil rights movement—developed slowly during his collegiate years. He won a second-place prize in a speech contest while an undergraduate at Morehouse, but received Cs in two public-speaking courses in his first year at Crozer. By the end of his third year at Crozer, however, professors were praising King for the powerful impression he made in public speeches and discussions.
Throughout his education, King was exposed to influences that related Christian theology to the struggles of oppressed peoples. At Morehouse, Crozer, and Boston University, he studied the teachings on nonviolent protest of Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. King also read and heard the sermons of white Protestant ministers who preached against American racism. Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse and a leader in the national community of racially liberal clergymen, was especially important in shaping King’s theological development.
While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, a music student and native of Alabama. They were married in 1953 and would have four children. In 1954 King accepted his first pastorate at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, a church with a well-educated congregation that had recently been led by a minister who had protested against segregation.
III THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT
Montgomery’s black community had long-standing grievances about the mistreatment of blacks on city buses. Many white bus drivers treated blacks rudely, often cursing them and humiliating them by enforcing the city’s segregation laws, which forced black riders to sit in the back of buses and give up their seats to white passengers on crowded buses. By the early 1950s Montgomery’s blacks had discussed boycotting the buses in an effort to gain better treatment—but not necessarily to end segregation.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a leading member of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was ordered by a bus driver to give up her seat to a white passenger. When she refused, she was arrested and taken to jail. Local leaders of the NAACP, especially Edgar D. Nixon, recognized that the arrest of the popular and highly respected Parks was the event that could rally local blacks to a bus protest.
Nixon also believed that a citywide protest should be led by someone who could unify the community. Unlike Nixon and other leaders in Montgomery’s black community, the recently arrived King had no enemies. Furthermore, Nixon saw King’s public-speaking gifts as great assets in the battle for black civil rights in Montgomery. King was soon chosen as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the organization that directed the bus boycott.
The Montgomery bus boycott lasted for more than a year, demonstrating a new spirit of protest among Southern blacks. King’s serious demeanor and consistent appeal to Christian brotherhood and American idealism made a positive impression on whites outside the South. Incidents of violence against black protesters, including the bombing of King’s home, focused media attention on Montgomery. In February 1956 an attorney for the MIA filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking an injunction against Montgomery’s segregated seating practices. The federal court ruled in favor of the MIA, ordering the city’s buses to be desegregated, but the city government appealed the ruling to the United States Supreme Court. By the time the Supreme Court upheld the lower court decision in November 1956, King was a national figure. His memoir of the bus boycott, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), provided a thoughtful account of that experience and further extended King’s national influence.
IV CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERSHIP
In 1957 King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization of black churches and ministers that aimed to challenge racial segregation. As SCLC’s president, King became the organization’s dominant personality and its primary intellectual influence. He was responsible for much of the organization’s fund-raising, which he frequently conducted in conjunction with preaching engagements in Northern churches.
SCLC sought to complement the NAACP’s legal efforts to dismantle segregation through the courts, with King and other SCLC leaders encouraging the use of nonviolent direct action to protest discrimination. These activities included marches, demonstrations, and boycotts. The violent responses that direct action provoked from some whites eventually forced the federal government to confront the issues of injustice and racism in the South.
King made strategic alliances with Northern whites that later bolstered his success at influencing public opinion in the United States. Through Bayard Rustin, a black civil rights and peace activist, King forged connections to older radical activists, many of them Jewish, who provided money and advice about strategy. King’s closest adviser at times was Stanley Levison, a Jewish activist and former member of the American Communist Party. King also developed strong ties to leading white Protestant ministers in the North, with whom he shared theological and moral views.
In 1959 King visited India and worked out more clearly his understanding of Gandhi's principle of nonviolent persuasion, called satyagraha, which King had determined to use as his main instrument of social protest. The next year he gave up his pastorate in Montgomery to become copastor (with his father) of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
V SCLC PROTEST CAMPAIGNS
In the early 1960s King led SCLC in a series of protest campaigns that gained national attention. The first was in 1961 in Albany, Georgia, where SCLC joined local demonstrations against segregated restaurants, hotels, transit, and housing. SCLC increased the size of the demonstrations in an effort to create so much dissent and disorder that local white officials would be forced to end segregation to restore normal business relations. The strategy did not work in Albany. During months of protests, Albany’s police chief jailed hundreds of demonstrators without visible police violence. Eventually the protesters’ energy, and the money to bail out protesters, ran out.
The strategy did work, however, in Birmingham, Alabama, when SCLC joined a local protest during the spring of 1963. The protest was led by SCLC member Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the ministers who had worked with King in 1957 in organizing SCLC. Shuttlesworth believed that the Birmingham police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, would meet protesters with violence. In May 1963 King and his SCLC staff escalated antisegregation marches in Birmingham by encouraging teenagers and school children to join. Hundreds of singing children filled the streets of downtown Birmingham, angering Connor, who sent police officers with attack dogs and firefighters with high-pressure water hoses against the marchers. Scenes of young protesters being attacked by dogs and pinned against buildings by torrents of water from fire hoses were shown in newspapers and on televisions around the world.
During the demonstrations, King was arrested and sent to jail. He wrote a letter from his jail cell to local clergymen who had criticized him for creating disorder in the city. His “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which argued that individuals had the moral right and responsibility to disobey unjust laws, was widely read at the time and added to King’s standing as a moral leader.
National reaction to the Birmingham violence built support for the struggle for black civil rights. The demonstrations forced white leaders to negotiate an end to some forms of segregation in Birmingham. Even more important, the protests encouraged many Americans to support national legislation against segregation.
VI “I HAVE A DREAM”
King and other black leaders organized the 1963 March on Washington, a massive protest in Washington, D.C., for jobs and civil rights. On August 28, 1963, King delivered a stirring address to an audience of more than 200,000 civil rights supporters. His “I Have a Dream” speech expressed the hopes of the civil rights movement in oratory as moving as any in American history: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
The speech and the march built on the Birmingham demonstrations to create the political momentum that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited segregation in public accommodations, as well as discrimination in education and employment. As a result of King’s effectiveness as a leader of the American civil rights movement and his highly visible moral stance he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for peace.
VII SELMA MARCHES
In 1965 SCLC joined a voting-rights protest march that was planned to go from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery, more than 80 km (50 mi) away. The goal of the march was to draw national attention to the struggle for black voting rights in the state. Police beat and tear-gassed the marchers just outside of Selma, and televised scenes of the violence, on a day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday, resulted in an outpouring of support to continue the march. SCLC petitioned for and received a federal court order barring police from interfering with a renewed march to Montgomery. Two weeks after Bloody Sunday, more than 3,000 people, including a core of 300 marchers who would make the entire trip, set out toward Montgomery. They arrived in Montgomery five days later, where King addressed a rally of more than 20,000 people in front of the capitol building.
The march created support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law in August. The act suspended (and amendments to the act later banned) the use of literacy tests and other voter qualification tests that often had been used to prevent blacks from registering to vote.
After the Selma protests, King had fewer dramatic successes in his struggle for black civil rights. Many white Americans who had supported his work believed that the job was done. In many ways, the nation’s appetite for civil rights progress had been filled. King also lost support among white Americans when he joined the growing number of antiwar activists in 1965 and began to criticize publicly American foreign policy in Vietnam. King’s outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War (1959-1975) also angered President Johnson. On the other hand, some of King’s white supporters agreed with his criticisms of United States involvement in Vietnam so strongly that they shifted their activism from civil rights to the antiwar movement.
VIII BLACK POWER
By the mid-1960s King’s role as the unchallenged leader of the civil rights movement was questioned by many younger blacks. Activists such as Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) argued that King’s nonviolent protest strategies and appeals to moral idealism were useless in the face of sustained violence by whites. Some also rejected the leadership of ministers. In addition, many SNCC organizers resented King, feeling that often they had put in the hard work of planning and organizing protests, only to have the charismatic King arrive later and receive much of the credit. In 1966 the Black Power movement, advocated most forcefully by Carmichael, captured the nation’s attention and suggested that King’s influence among blacks was waning. Black Power advocates looked more to the beliefs of the recently assassinated black Muslim leader, Malcolm X, whose insistence on black self-reliance and the right of blacks to defend themselves against violent attacks had been embraced by many African Americans.
With internal divisions beginning to divide the civil rights movement, King shifted his focus to racial injustice in the North. Realizing that the economic difficulties of blacks in Northern cities had largely been ignored, SCLC broadened its civil rights agenda by focusing on issues related to black poverty. King established a headquarters in a Chicago apartment in 1966, using that as a base to organize protests against housing and employment discrimination in the city. Black Baptist ministers who disagreed with many of SCLC’s tactics, especially the confrontational act of sending black protesters into all-white neighborhoods, publicly opposed King’s efforts. The protests did not lead to significant gains and were often met with violent counterdemonstrations by whites, including neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan, a secret terrorist organization that was opposed to integration.
Throughout 1966 and 1967 King increasingly turned the focus of his civil rights activism throughout the country to economic issues. He began to argue for redistribution of the nation’s economic wealth to overcome entrenched black poverty. In 1967 he began planning a Poor People’s Campaign to pressure national lawmakers to address the issue of economic justice.
IX ASSASSINATION
This emphasis on economic rights took King to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking black garbage workers in the spring of 1968. He was assassinated in Memphis by a sniper on April 4. News of the assassination resulted in an outpouring of shock and anger throughout the nation and the world, prompting riots in more than 100 United States cities in the days following King’s death. In 1969 James Earl Ray, an escaped white convict, pleaded guilty to the murder of King and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Ray later recanted his confession. Although over the years many investigators have suspected that Ray did not act alone, no accomplices have ever been identified. In 1999 a jury in a Memphis civil trial brought by King’s family found that a widespread conspiracy not involving Ray led to King’s assassination. However, most investigators continued to believe that Ray was the killer.
After King’s death, historians researching his life and career discovered that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) often tapped King’s phone line and reported on his private life to the president and other government officials. The FBI’s reason for invading his privacy was that King associated with Communists and other “radicals.”
After his death, King came to represent black courage and achievement, high moral leadership, and the ability of Americans to address and overcome racial divisions. Recollections of his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and poverty faded, and his soaring rhetoric calling for racial justice and an integrated society became almost as familiar to subsequent generations of Americans as the Declaration of Independence.
King’s historical importance was memorialized at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, a research institute in Atlanta where his tomb is located. The King Center is located at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, which includes King’s birthplace and the Ebenezer Church. Perhaps the most important memorial is the national holiday in King’s honor, designated by the Congress of the United States in 1983 and observed on the third Monday in January, a day that falls on or near King’s birthday of January 15.
Contributed By:
Robert J. Norrell
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
I INTRODUCTION
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), American clergyman and Nobel Prize winner, one of the principal leaders of the American civil rights movement and a prominent advocate of nonviolent protest. King’s challenges to segregation and racial discrimination in the 1950s and 1960s helped convince many white Americans to support the cause of civil rights in the United States. After his assassination in 1968, King became a symbol of protest in the struggle for racial justice.
II EDUCATION AND EARLY LIFE
Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the eldest son of Martin Luther King, Sr., a Baptist minister, and Alberta Williams King. His father served as pastor of a large Atlanta church, Ebenezer Baptist, which had been founded by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, maternal grandfather. King, Jr., was ordained as a Baptist minister at age 18.
King attended local segregated public schools, where he excelled. He entered nearby Morehouse College at age 15 and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1948. After graduating with honors from Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania in 1951, he went to Boston University where he earned a doctoral degree in systematic theology in 1955.
King’s public-speaking abilities—which would become renowned as his stature grew in the civil rights movement—developed slowly during his collegiate years. He won a second-place prize in a speech contest while an undergraduate at Morehouse, but received Cs in two public-speaking courses in his first year at Crozer. By the end of his third year at Crozer, however, professors were praising King for the powerful impression he made in public speeches and discussions.
Throughout his education, King was exposed to influences that related Christian theology to the struggles of oppressed peoples. At Morehouse, Crozer, and Boston University, he studied the teachings on nonviolent protest of Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi. King also read and heard the sermons of white Protestant ministers who preached against American racism. Benjamin E. Mays, president of Morehouse and a leader in the national community of racially liberal clergymen, was especially important in shaping King’s theological development.
While in Boston, King met Coretta Scott, a music student and native of Alabama. They were married in 1953 and would have four children. In 1954 King accepted his first pastorate at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, a church with a well-educated congregation that had recently been led by a minister who had protested against segregation.
III THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT
Montgomery’s black community had long-standing grievances about the mistreatment of blacks on city buses. Many white bus drivers treated blacks rudely, often cursing them and humiliating them by enforcing the city’s segregation laws, which forced black riders to sit in the back of buses and give up their seats to white passengers on crowded buses. By the early 1950s Montgomery’s blacks had discussed boycotting the buses in an effort to gain better treatment—but not necessarily to end segregation.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a leading member of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was ordered by a bus driver to give up her seat to a white passenger. When she refused, she was arrested and taken to jail. Local leaders of the NAACP, especially Edgar D. Nixon, recognized that the arrest of the popular and highly respected Parks was the event that could rally local blacks to a bus protest.
Nixon also believed that a citywide protest should be led by someone who could unify the community. Unlike Nixon and other leaders in Montgomery’s black community, the recently arrived King had no enemies. Furthermore, Nixon saw King’s public-speaking gifts as great assets in the battle for black civil rights in Montgomery. King was soon chosen as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), the organization that directed the bus boycott.
The Montgomery bus boycott lasted for more than a year, demonstrating a new spirit of protest among Southern blacks. King’s serious demeanor and consistent appeal to Christian brotherhood and American idealism made a positive impression on whites outside the South. Incidents of violence against black protesters, including the bombing of King’s home, focused media attention on Montgomery. In February 1956 an attorney for the MIA filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking an injunction against Montgomery’s segregated seating practices. The federal court ruled in favor of the MIA, ordering the city’s buses to be desegregated, but the city government appealed the ruling to the United States Supreme Court. By the time the Supreme Court upheld the lower court decision in November 1956, King was a national figure. His memoir of the bus boycott, Stride Toward Freedom (1958), provided a thoughtful account of that experience and further extended King’s national influence.
IV CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERSHIP
In 1957 King helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an organization of black churches and ministers that aimed to challenge racial segregation. As SCLC’s president, King became the organization’s dominant personality and its primary intellectual influence. He was responsible for much of the organization’s fund-raising, which he frequently conducted in conjunction with preaching engagements in Northern churches.
SCLC sought to complement the NAACP’s legal efforts to dismantle segregation through the courts, with King and other SCLC leaders encouraging the use of nonviolent direct action to protest discrimination. These activities included marches, demonstrations, and boycotts. The violent responses that direct action provoked from some whites eventually forced the federal government to confront the issues of injustice and racism in the South.
King made strategic alliances with Northern whites that later bolstered his success at influencing public opinion in the United States. Through Bayard Rustin, a black civil rights and peace activist, King forged connections to older radical activists, many of them Jewish, who provided money and advice about strategy. King’s closest adviser at times was Stanley Levison, a Jewish activist and former member of the American Communist Party. King also developed strong ties to leading white Protestant ministers in the North, with whom he shared theological and moral views.
In 1959 King visited India and worked out more clearly his understanding of Gandhi's principle of nonviolent persuasion, called satyagraha, which King had determined to use as his main instrument of social protest. The next year he gave up his pastorate in Montgomery to become copastor (with his father) of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
V SCLC PROTEST CAMPAIGNS
In the early 1960s King led SCLC in a series of protest campaigns that gained national attention. The first was in 1961 in Albany, Georgia, where SCLC joined local demonstrations against segregated restaurants, hotels, transit, and housing. SCLC increased the size of the demonstrations in an effort to create so much dissent and disorder that local white officials would be forced to end segregation to restore normal business relations. The strategy did not work in Albany. During months of protests, Albany’s police chief jailed hundreds of demonstrators without visible police violence. Eventually the protesters’ energy, and the money to bail out protesters, ran out.
The strategy did work, however, in Birmingham, Alabama, when SCLC joined a local protest during the spring of 1963. The protest was led by SCLC member Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the ministers who had worked with King in 1957 in organizing SCLC. Shuttlesworth believed that the Birmingham police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, would meet protesters with violence. In May 1963 King and his SCLC staff escalated antisegregation marches in Birmingham by encouraging teenagers and school children to join. Hundreds of singing children filled the streets of downtown Birmingham, angering Connor, who sent police officers with attack dogs and firefighters with high-pressure water hoses against the marchers. Scenes of young protesters being attacked by dogs and pinned against buildings by torrents of water from fire hoses were shown in newspapers and on televisions around the world.
During the demonstrations, King was arrested and sent to jail. He wrote a letter from his jail cell to local clergymen who had criticized him for creating disorder in the city. His “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which argued that individuals had the moral right and responsibility to disobey unjust laws, was widely read at the time and added to King’s standing as a moral leader.
National reaction to the Birmingham violence built support for the struggle for black civil rights. The demonstrations forced white leaders to negotiate an end to some forms of segregation in Birmingham. Even more important, the protests encouraged many Americans to support national legislation against segregation.
VI “I HAVE A DREAM”
King and other black leaders organized the 1963 March on Washington, a massive protest in Washington, D.C., for jobs and civil rights. On August 28, 1963, King delivered a stirring address to an audience of more than 200,000 civil rights supporters. His “I Have a Dream” speech expressed the hopes of the civil rights movement in oratory as moving as any in American history: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
The speech and the march built on the Birmingham demonstrations to create the political momentum that resulted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited segregation in public accommodations, as well as discrimination in education and employment. As a result of King’s effectiveness as a leader of the American civil rights movement and his highly visible moral stance he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize for peace.
VII SELMA MARCHES
In 1965 SCLC joined a voting-rights protest march that was planned to go from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery, more than 80 km (50 mi) away. The goal of the march was to draw national attention to the struggle for black voting rights in the state. Police beat and tear-gassed the marchers just outside of Selma, and televised scenes of the violence, on a day that came to be known as Bloody Sunday, resulted in an outpouring of support to continue the march. SCLC petitioned for and received a federal court order barring police from interfering with a renewed march to Montgomery. Two weeks after Bloody Sunday, more than 3,000 people, including a core of 300 marchers who would make the entire trip, set out toward Montgomery. They arrived in Montgomery five days later, where King addressed a rally of more than 20,000 people in front of the capitol building.
The march created support for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which President Lyndon Johnson signed into law in August. The act suspended (and amendments to the act later banned) the use of literacy tests and other voter qualification tests that often had been used to prevent blacks from registering to vote.
After the Selma protests, King had fewer dramatic successes in his struggle for black civil rights. Many white Americans who had supported his work believed that the job was done. In many ways, the nation’s appetite for civil rights progress had been filled. King also lost support among white Americans when he joined the growing number of antiwar activists in 1965 and began to criticize publicly American foreign policy in Vietnam. King’s outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War (1959-1975) also angered President Johnson. On the other hand, some of King’s white supporters agreed with his criticisms of United States involvement in Vietnam so strongly that they shifted their activism from civil rights to the antiwar movement.
VIII BLACK POWER
By the mid-1960s King’s role as the unchallenged leader of the civil rights movement was questioned by many younger blacks. Activists such as Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) argued that King’s nonviolent protest strategies and appeals to moral idealism were useless in the face of sustained violence by whites. Some also rejected the leadership of ministers. In addition, many SNCC organizers resented King, feeling that often they had put in the hard work of planning and organizing protests, only to have the charismatic King arrive later and receive much of the credit. In 1966 the Black Power movement, advocated most forcefully by Carmichael, captured the nation’s attention and suggested that King’s influence among blacks was waning. Black Power advocates looked more to the beliefs of the recently assassinated black Muslim leader, Malcolm X, whose insistence on black self-reliance and the right of blacks to defend themselves against violent attacks had been embraced by many African Americans.
With internal divisions beginning to divide the civil rights movement, King shifted his focus to racial injustice in the North. Realizing that the economic difficulties of blacks in Northern cities had largely been ignored, SCLC broadened its civil rights agenda by focusing on issues related to black poverty. King established a headquarters in a Chicago apartment in 1966, using that as a base to organize protests against housing and employment discrimination in the city. Black Baptist ministers who disagreed with many of SCLC’s tactics, especially the confrontational act of sending black protesters into all-white neighborhoods, publicly opposed King’s efforts. The protests did not lead to significant gains and were often met with violent counterdemonstrations by whites, including neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan, a secret terrorist organization that was opposed to integration.
Throughout 1966 and 1967 King increasingly turned the focus of his civil rights activism throughout the country to economic issues. He began to argue for redistribution of the nation’s economic wealth to overcome entrenched black poverty. In 1967 he began planning a Poor People’s Campaign to pressure national lawmakers to address the issue of economic justice.
IX ASSASSINATION
This emphasis on economic rights took King to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking black garbage workers in the spring of 1968. He was assassinated in Memphis by a sniper on April 4. News of the assassination resulted in an outpouring of shock and anger throughout the nation and the world, prompting riots in more than 100 United States cities in the days following King’s death. In 1969 James Earl Ray, an escaped white convict, pleaded guilty to the murder of King and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Ray later recanted his confession. Although over the years many investigators have suspected that Ray did not act alone, no accomplices have ever been identified. In 1999 a jury in a Memphis civil trial brought by King’s family found that a widespread conspiracy not involving Ray led to King’s assassination. However, most investigators continued to believe that Ray was the killer.
After King’s death, historians researching his life and career discovered that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) often tapped King’s phone line and reported on his private life to the president and other government officials. The FBI’s reason for invading his privacy was that King associated with Communists and other “radicals.”
After his death, King came to represent black courage and achievement, high moral leadership, and the ability of Americans to address and overcome racial divisions. Recollections of his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and poverty faded, and his soaring rhetoric calling for racial justice and an integrated society became almost as familiar to subsequent generations of Americans as the Declaration of Independence.
King’s historical importance was memorialized at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change, a research institute in Atlanta where his tomb is located. The King Center is located at the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, which includes King’s birthplace and the Ebenezer Church. Perhaps the most important memorial is the national holiday in King’s honor, designated by the Congress of the United States in 1983 and observed on the third Monday in January, a day that falls on or near King’s birthday of January 15.
Contributed By:
Robert J. Norrell
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Monday, July 19, 2010
Nelson Rolihlahla MANDELA -- "Madiba" @92
Nelson Mandela,
born in 1918, South African activist, winner of the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, and the first black president of South Africa (1994-1999). Born in Umtata, South Africa, in what is now Eastern Cape province, Mandela was the son of a Xhosa-speaking Thembu chief. He attended the University of Fort Hare in Alice where he became involved in the political struggle against the racial discrimination practiced in South Africa. He was expelled in 1940 for participating in a student demonstration. After moving to Johannesburg, he completed his course work by correspondence through the University of South Africa and received a bachelor’s degree in 1942. Mandela then studied law at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He became increasingly involved with the African National Congress (ANC), a multiracial nationalist movement which sought to bring about democratic political change in South Africa. Mandela helped establish the ANC Youth League in 1944 and became its president in 1951.
The National Party (NP) came to power in South Africa in 1948 on a political platform of white supremacy. The official policy of apartheid, or forced segregation of the races, began to be implemented under NP rule. In 1952 the ANC staged a campaign known as the Defiance Campaign, when protesters across the country refused to obey apartheid laws. That same year Mandela became one of the ANC’s four deputy presidents. In 1952 he and his friend Oliver Tambo were the first blacks to open a law practice in South Africa. In the face of government harassment and with the prospect of the ANC being officially banned, Mandela and others devised a plan. Called the “M” plan after Mandela, it organized the ANC into small units of people who could then encourage grassroots participation in antiapartheid struggles.
By the late 1950s Mandela, with Oliver Tambo and others, moved the ANC in a more militant direction against the increasingly discriminatory policies of the government. He was charged with treason in 1956 because of the ANC’s increased activity, particularly in the Defiance Campaign, but he was acquitted after a five-year trial. In 1957 Mandela divorced his first wife, Evelyn Mase; in 1958 he married Nomzamo Madikizela, a social worker, who became known as Winnie Mandela.
In March 1960 the ANC and its rival, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), called for a nationwide demonstration against South Africa’s pass laws, which controlled the movement and employment of blacks and forced them to carry identity papers. After police massacred 69 blacks demonstrating in Sharpeville (see Sharpeville Massacre), both the ANC and the PAC were banned. After Sharpeville the ANC abandoned the strategy of nonviolence, which until that time had been an important part of its philosophy. Mandela helped to establish the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), in December 1961. He was named its commander-in-chief and went to Algeria for military training. Back in South Africa, he was arrested in August 1962 and sentenced to five years in prison for incitement and for leaving the country illegally.
While Mandela was in prison, ANC colleagues who had been operating in hiding were arrested at Rivonia, outside of Johannesburg. Mandela was put on trial with them for sabotage, treason, and violent conspiracy. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1964. For the next 18 years he was imprisoned on Robben Island and held under harsh conditions with other political prisoners. Despite the maximum security of the Robben Island prison, Mandela and other leaders were able to keep in contact with the antiapartheid movement covertly. Mandela wrote much of his autobiography secretly in prison. The manuscript was smuggled out and was eventually completed and published in 1994 as Long Walk to Freedom. Later, Mandela was moved to the maximum-security Pollsmoor Prison near Cape Town. Mandela became an international symbol of resistance to apartheid during his long years of imprisonment, and world leaders continued to demand his release.
In response to both international and domestic pressure, the South African government, under the leadership of President F. W. de Klerk, lifted the ban against the ANC and released Mandela in February 1990. Soon after his release from prison he became estranged from Winnie Mandela, who had played a key leadership role in the antiapartheid movement during his incarceration. Although Winnie had won international recognition for her defiance of the government, immediately before Mandela’s release she had come into conflict with the ANC over a controversial kidnapping and murder trial that involved her young bodyguards. The Mandelas were divorced in 1996.
Mandela, who enjoyed enormous popularity, assumed the leadership of the ANC and led negotiations with the government for an end to apartheid. While white South Africans considered sharing power a big step, black South Africans wanted nothing less than a complete transfer of power. Mandela played a crucial role in resolving differences. For their efforts, he and de Klerk were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. The following year South Africa held its first multiracial elections, and Mandela became president.
Mandela sought to calm the fears of white South Africans and of potential international investors by trying to balance plans for reconstruction and development with financial caution. His Reconstruction and Development Plan allotted large amounts of money to the creation of jobs and housing and to the development of basic health care. In December 1996 Mandela signed into law a new South African constitution. The constitution established a federal system with a strong central government based on majority rule, and it contained guarantees of the rights of minorities and of freedom of expression. Mandela, who had announced that he would not run for reelection in 1999, stepped down as party leader of the ANC in late 1997 and was succeeded by South African deputy president Thabo Mbeki. Mandela's presidency came to an end in June 1999, when the ANC won legislative elections and selected Mbeki as South Africa's next president.
MORE SOURCES
Web Links
The Long Walk of Nelson Mandela
PBS Online presents biographical information about South African activist Nelson Mandela; video clips and excerpts from his writings are included.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/mandela/
Nelson Rolihlahla MANDELA -- "Madiba"
The official home page of the African National Congress provides an extensive biography of South African President Nelson Mandela.
http://www.anc.org.za/people/mandela.html
Mandela Speaks
The African National Congress offers biographical information about Nelson Mandela as well as online versions of selected speeches and writings.
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mandela/
Nelson Mandela [Nobel Foundation]
The Nobel Foundation presents a brief biography of South African activist and president Nelson Mandela.
http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1993/mandela-bio.html
Further Reading
For younger readers
Beecroft, Simon. The Release of Nelson Mandela. World Almanac, 2004. In the Days That Changed the World series, for readers in grades 6 to 12.
Denenberg, Barry. Nelson Mandela: "No Easy Walk to Freedom." Scholastic, 1991. For readers in grades 5 to 8.
Finlayson, Reggie. Nelson Mandela. Lerner, 1999. For readers in grades 4 to 7.
Gaines, Ann Graham. Nelson Mandela and Apartheid in World History. Enslow, 2001. For readers in grades 5 to 9.
Kramer, Ann. Nelson Mandela: From Political Prisoner to President. Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 2003. For readers in grades 6 to 10.
Mandela, Nelson. Mandela: An Illustrated Autobiography. Little, Brown, 1996. An abridged version of his autobiography with 200 photographs. Mandela, Nelson Rolihlahla
Benson, Mary. Nelson Mandela: The Man and the Movement. 2nd ed. Norton, 1994. Authoritative account of his life and political career.
Denenberg, Barry. Nelson Mandela: “No Easy Walk to Freedom” Scholastic, 1991. Biography of the South African leader and the history of the struggle against apartheid. For younger readers.
Hoobler, Dorothy, and Thomas Hoobler. Mandela: The Man, the Struggle, the Triumph. Watts, 1992. Overall picture of the man and his role in South Africa. For young adult readers.
Hughes, Libby. Nelson Mandela: Voice of Freedom. Dillon, 1992. The personal story and the political struggle of this contemporary leader. For middle school through adult readers.
Juckes, Tim J. Opposition in South Africa: The Leadership of Z.K. Matthews, Nelson Mandela, and Stephen Biko. Praeger, 1995. Considers Nelson Mandela's leadership in the 1960s.
Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. Little, 1994. Extensive autobiography covers Mandela's birth to May 1994. Also available in an abridged version with 200 photographs as Mandela: An Illustrated Autobiography (1996).
Meredith, Martin. Nelson Mandela: A Biography. St. Martin's, 1998. Admiring but also critical evaluation of the South African president.
Sampson, Anthony. Mandela: The Authorized Biography. Knopf, 1999. A biography that draws on 27 years of unpublished prison correspondence.
Primary Sources
Historic Headlines
South Africa to Free Mandela
The Los Angeles Times published the following article about the release of South African antiapartheid leader Nelson Mandela from prison, where he had spent nearly three decades. Mandela went on to become the Republic of South Africa's first black president. Since the article was published at the time the event took place, it may contain information that has been subsequently revised or updated.
more...
Historic Speeches
Nelson Mandela's Inaugural Address
Nobel Peace Prize winner and former political prisoner, Nelson Mandela, was elected president of the Republic of South Africa in April 1994 in the country’s first multiracial elections. Previously, South Africa had been ruled under the restrictions of apartheid, a policy of racial segregation. Mandela delivered the following inaugural address on May 10, 1994, in Pretoria, South Africa, in front of more than 100,000 people.
more...
Sidebars
South Africa Confronts Its Past
In 1993 South Africa took critical steps toward a multiracial government and majority rule. In an article for the 1994 Collier’s Year Book, author William Minter outlined the history of South Africa’s social, political, ethnic, and economic landscape. Minter traces the region’s agrarian beginnings, its Dutch and British colonization, and the turbulent 20th century, marked by the beginning and end of apartheid. South Africa’s ongoing struggle for democracy culminated with the election of President Nelson Mandela in 1994.
more...
Contributed By:
Patrick O’Meara
N. Brian Winchester
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
born in 1918, South African activist, winner of the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, and the first black president of South Africa (1994-1999). Born in Umtata, South Africa, in what is now Eastern Cape province, Mandela was the son of a Xhosa-speaking Thembu chief. He attended the University of Fort Hare in Alice where he became involved in the political struggle against the racial discrimination practiced in South Africa. He was expelled in 1940 for participating in a student demonstration. After moving to Johannesburg, he completed his course work by correspondence through the University of South Africa and received a bachelor’s degree in 1942. Mandela then studied law at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. He became increasingly involved with the African National Congress (ANC), a multiracial nationalist movement which sought to bring about democratic political change in South Africa. Mandela helped establish the ANC Youth League in 1944 and became its president in 1951.
The National Party (NP) came to power in South Africa in 1948 on a political platform of white supremacy. The official policy of apartheid, or forced segregation of the races, began to be implemented under NP rule. In 1952 the ANC staged a campaign known as the Defiance Campaign, when protesters across the country refused to obey apartheid laws. That same year Mandela became one of the ANC’s four deputy presidents. In 1952 he and his friend Oliver Tambo were the first blacks to open a law practice in South Africa. In the face of government harassment and with the prospect of the ANC being officially banned, Mandela and others devised a plan. Called the “M” plan after Mandela, it organized the ANC into small units of people who could then encourage grassroots participation in antiapartheid struggles.
By the late 1950s Mandela, with Oliver Tambo and others, moved the ANC in a more militant direction against the increasingly discriminatory policies of the government. He was charged with treason in 1956 because of the ANC’s increased activity, particularly in the Defiance Campaign, but he was acquitted after a five-year trial. In 1957 Mandela divorced his first wife, Evelyn Mase; in 1958 he married Nomzamo Madikizela, a social worker, who became known as Winnie Mandela.
In March 1960 the ANC and its rival, the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), called for a nationwide demonstration against South Africa’s pass laws, which controlled the movement and employment of blacks and forced them to carry identity papers. After police massacred 69 blacks demonstrating in Sharpeville (see Sharpeville Massacre), both the ANC and the PAC were banned. After Sharpeville the ANC abandoned the strategy of nonviolence, which until that time had been an important part of its philosophy. Mandela helped to establish the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), in December 1961. He was named its commander-in-chief and went to Algeria for military training. Back in South Africa, he was arrested in August 1962 and sentenced to five years in prison for incitement and for leaving the country illegally.
While Mandela was in prison, ANC colleagues who had been operating in hiding were arrested at Rivonia, outside of Johannesburg. Mandela was put on trial with them for sabotage, treason, and violent conspiracy. He was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1964. For the next 18 years he was imprisoned on Robben Island and held under harsh conditions with other political prisoners. Despite the maximum security of the Robben Island prison, Mandela and other leaders were able to keep in contact with the antiapartheid movement covertly. Mandela wrote much of his autobiography secretly in prison. The manuscript was smuggled out and was eventually completed and published in 1994 as Long Walk to Freedom. Later, Mandela was moved to the maximum-security Pollsmoor Prison near Cape Town. Mandela became an international symbol of resistance to apartheid during his long years of imprisonment, and world leaders continued to demand his release.
In response to both international and domestic pressure, the South African government, under the leadership of President F. W. de Klerk, lifted the ban against the ANC and released Mandela in February 1990. Soon after his release from prison he became estranged from Winnie Mandela, who had played a key leadership role in the antiapartheid movement during his incarceration. Although Winnie had won international recognition for her defiance of the government, immediately before Mandela’s release she had come into conflict with the ANC over a controversial kidnapping and murder trial that involved her young bodyguards. The Mandelas were divorced in 1996.
Mandela, who enjoyed enormous popularity, assumed the leadership of the ANC and led negotiations with the government for an end to apartheid. While white South Africans considered sharing power a big step, black South Africans wanted nothing less than a complete transfer of power. Mandela played a crucial role in resolving differences. For their efforts, he and de Klerk were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. The following year South Africa held its first multiracial elections, and Mandela became president.
Mandela sought to calm the fears of white South Africans and of potential international investors by trying to balance plans for reconstruction and development with financial caution. His Reconstruction and Development Plan allotted large amounts of money to the creation of jobs and housing and to the development of basic health care. In December 1996 Mandela signed into law a new South African constitution. The constitution established a federal system with a strong central government based on majority rule, and it contained guarantees of the rights of minorities and of freedom of expression. Mandela, who had announced that he would not run for reelection in 1999, stepped down as party leader of the ANC in late 1997 and was succeeded by South African deputy president Thabo Mbeki. Mandela's presidency came to an end in June 1999, when the ANC won legislative elections and selected Mbeki as South Africa's next president.
MORE SOURCES
Web Links
The Long Walk of Nelson Mandela
PBS Online presents biographical information about South African activist Nelson Mandela; video clips and excerpts from his writings are included.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/mandela/
Nelson Rolihlahla MANDELA -- "Madiba"
The official home page of the African National Congress provides an extensive biography of South African President Nelson Mandela.
http://www.anc.org.za/people/mandela.html
Mandela Speaks
The African National Congress offers biographical information about Nelson Mandela as well as online versions of selected speeches and writings.
http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/mandela/
Nelson Mandela [Nobel Foundation]
The Nobel Foundation presents a brief biography of South African activist and president Nelson Mandela.
http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1993/mandela-bio.html
Further Reading
For younger readers
Beecroft, Simon. The Release of Nelson Mandela. World Almanac, 2004. In the Days That Changed the World series, for readers in grades 6 to 12.
Denenberg, Barry. Nelson Mandela: "No Easy Walk to Freedom." Scholastic, 1991. For readers in grades 5 to 8.
Finlayson, Reggie. Nelson Mandela. Lerner, 1999. For readers in grades 4 to 7.
Gaines, Ann Graham. Nelson Mandela and Apartheid in World History. Enslow, 2001. For readers in grades 5 to 9.
Kramer, Ann. Nelson Mandela: From Political Prisoner to President. Raintree Steck-Vaughn, 2003. For readers in grades 6 to 10.
Mandela, Nelson. Mandela: An Illustrated Autobiography. Little, Brown, 1996. An abridged version of his autobiography with 200 photographs. Mandela, Nelson Rolihlahla
Benson, Mary. Nelson Mandela: The Man and the Movement. 2nd ed. Norton, 1994. Authoritative account of his life and political career.
Denenberg, Barry. Nelson Mandela: “No Easy Walk to Freedom” Scholastic, 1991. Biography of the South African leader and the history of the struggle against apartheid. For younger readers.
Hoobler, Dorothy, and Thomas Hoobler. Mandela: The Man, the Struggle, the Triumph. Watts, 1992. Overall picture of the man and his role in South Africa. For young adult readers.
Hughes, Libby. Nelson Mandela: Voice of Freedom. Dillon, 1992. The personal story and the political struggle of this contemporary leader. For middle school through adult readers.
Juckes, Tim J. Opposition in South Africa: The Leadership of Z.K. Matthews, Nelson Mandela, and Stephen Biko. Praeger, 1995. Considers Nelson Mandela's leadership in the 1960s.
Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. Little, 1994. Extensive autobiography covers Mandela's birth to May 1994. Also available in an abridged version with 200 photographs as Mandela: An Illustrated Autobiography (1996).
Meredith, Martin. Nelson Mandela: A Biography. St. Martin's, 1998. Admiring but also critical evaluation of the South African president.
Sampson, Anthony. Mandela: The Authorized Biography. Knopf, 1999. A biography that draws on 27 years of unpublished prison correspondence.
Primary Sources
Historic Headlines
South Africa to Free Mandela
The Los Angeles Times published the following article about the release of South African antiapartheid leader Nelson Mandela from prison, where he had spent nearly three decades. Mandela went on to become the Republic of South Africa's first black president. Since the article was published at the time the event took place, it may contain information that has been subsequently revised or updated.
more...
Historic Speeches
Nelson Mandela's Inaugural Address
Nobel Peace Prize winner and former political prisoner, Nelson Mandela, was elected president of the Republic of South Africa in April 1994 in the country’s first multiracial elections. Previously, South Africa had been ruled under the restrictions of apartheid, a policy of racial segregation. Mandela delivered the following inaugural address on May 10, 1994, in Pretoria, South Africa, in front of more than 100,000 people.
more...
Sidebars
South Africa Confronts Its Past
In 1993 South Africa took critical steps toward a multiracial government and majority rule. In an article for the 1994 Collier’s Year Book, author William Minter outlined the history of South Africa’s social, political, ethnic, and economic landscape. Minter traces the region’s agrarian beginnings, its Dutch and British colonization, and the turbulent 20th century, marked by the beginning and end of apartheid. South Africa’s ongoing struggle for democracy culminated with the election of President Nelson Mandela in 1994.
more...
Contributed By:
Patrick O’Meara
N. Brian Winchester
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Street children
Street children
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Afghan street child smiles for the camera in downtown Kabul, Afghanistan (June 2003).
Street children is a term used to refer to children who live on the streets of a city. They are basically deprived of family care and protection. Most children on the streets are between the ages of about 5 and 17 years old, and their population between different cities is varied.
Street children live in abandoned buildings, cardboard boxes, parks or on the street itself. A great deal has been written defining street children, but the primary difficulty is that there are no precise categories, but rather a continuum, ranging from children who spend some time in the streets and sleep in a house with ill-prepared adults, to those who live entirely in the streets and have no adult supervision or care.
A widely accepted set of definitions, commonly attributed to UNICEF, divides street children into two main categories:
Children on the street are those engaged in some kind of economic activity ranging from begging to vending. Most go home at the end of the day and contribute their earnings to their family. They may be attending school and retain a sense of belonging to a family. Because of the economic fragility of the family, these children may eventually opt for a permanent life on the streets.
Children of the street actually live on the street (or outside of a normal family environment). Family ties may exist but are tenuous and are maintained only casually or occasionally.[1]
Street children exist in many major cities, especially in developing countries, and may be subject to abuse, neglect, exploitation, or even, in extreme cases, murder by "cleanup squads" hired by local businesses or police.[2]
In Latin America, a common cause is abandonment by poor families unable to feed all their children. In Africa, an increasingly common cause is AIDS.Contents [hide]
1 Definitions
1.1 Names
2 Numbers, distribution and sex
2.1 Numbers
2.2 Distribution
2.3 Gender
3 History
4 Causes
5 By country
5.1 Russia
5.2 India
5.3 Vietnam
5.4 Bucharest, Romania
5.5 Brazil
5.6 The Philippines
6 Government and non-government responses
6.1 Responses by governments
6.2 NGO responses
7 See also
8 References
9 External links
[edit]
Definitions
The question of how to define a street child has generated much discussion that is usefully summarized by Sarah Thomas de Benítez in, "The State of the World's Street Children: Violence."
‘Street children’ is increasingly recognized by sociologists and anthropologists to be a socially constructed category that in reality does not form a clearly defined, homogeneous population or phenomenon (Glauser, 1990; Ennew, 2000; Moura, 2002). ‘Street children’ covers children in such a wide variety of circumstances and characteristics that policy-makers and service providers find it difficult to describe and target them. Upon peeling away the ‘street children’ label, individual girls and boys of all ages are found living and working in public spaces, visible in the great majority of the world’s urban centres.[3]
The definition of ‘street children’ is contested, but many practitioners and policymakers use UNICEF’s concept of boys and girls aged under 18 for whom ‘the street’ (including unoccupied dwellings and wasteland) has become home and/or their source of livelihood, and who are inadequately protected or supervised (Black, 1993).[4]
[edit]
Names
Street Children is a widely used term in the English language and has analogues in other languages such as French (les enfants des rues), Spanish (niños de la calle), Portuguese (meninos da rua), Hungarian (utcagyerekek), Romanian (copiii străzii) and German (Straßenkinder). Street kids is also commonly employed although it is sometimes considered pejorative.[5] In other languages children who live and/or work in the streets are known by many names. Some examples are listed below:
"gamín" (from French gamin, kid) and "chinches" (bed bugs) in Colombia, "pivetes" (little criminals/marginals) in Rio de Janeiro, as "pájaro frutero" (fruit bird) and "pirañitas" (little piranhas) in Peru, "polillas" (moths) in Bolivia, "resistoleros" (glue sniffers; Resistol is a major brand) in Honduras, "scugnizzi" (spinning tops) in Naples, "беспризорники" (persons without supervised living) in Russia, "Batang Lansangan" or "Pulubi" in the Philippines, "Bụi Đời" (the dust of life) in Vietnam, "saligoman" (nasty kids) in Rwanda, or "poussins" (chicks), "moustiques" (mosquitos) in Cameroon and "balados" (wanderers) in the democratic Republic of the Congo and the Congo Republic.[6]
The term Street Arab came to the fore in the mid-19th century, first appearing in 1848, according to the OED.[7] Horatio Alger's book Tattered Tom ; or, The Story of a Street Arab (1871) is an early example; it is about a homeless girl lives by her wits on the streets of New York. Charles Dickens likewise propagated its early use in 1855 but in a more clearly derogatory sense when he declared "a wretched, ragged, untaught street Arab boy is ugly."[8] In 1890, Danish-American journalist Jacob Riis described street children in New York in an essay titled "The Street Arab".[9] The Victorian association of street children with Arabs is probably reflected in the nomadic tradition of Arabs who were wanderers; the 19th century notion that non-Europeans from less civilized cultures were like children; of European and American travelers who saw many "street children" in Arab countries during the period; and a xenophobic tendency to scapegoat social problems.[7] The term has fallen out of favor.[7]
[edit]
Numbers, distribution and sex
[edit]
Numbers
Estimates vary but one often cited figure is that the number of children living independently in the streets totals between 100 million and 150 million worldwide.
According to a report from the Consortium for Street Children, a United Kingdom-based consortium of related NGOs:
Estimating numbers of ‘street children’ is fraught with difficulties. In 1989, UNICEF estimated 100 million children were growing up on urban streets around the world. 14 years later UNICEF reported: ‘The latest estimates put the numbers of these children as high as 100 million’ (UNICEF, 2002: 37). And even more recently: ‘The exact number of street children is impossible to quantify, but the figure almost certainly runs into tens of millions across the world. It is likely that the numbers are increasing’ (UNICEF, 2005: 40-41). The 100 million figure is still commonly cited, but has no basis in fact (see Ennew and Milne, 1989; Hecht, 1998; Green, 1998). Similarly, it is debatable whether numbers of street children are growing globally or whether it is the awareness of street children within societies which has grown.[10]
[edit]
Distribution
Street children may be found on every inhabited continent in a large majority of the world's cities. The following estimates indicate the global extent of street child populations.
India 11 million[11]
Egypt 1.5 million[12]
Pakistan 1.5 million
U.S. 750,000 - 1 million[13]
Kenya 250,000 - 300,000[14]
Philippines 250,000[15]
Congo 250,000
Morocco 30,000[16]
Brazil 25,000[17]
Germany 20,000[18]
Honduras 20,000
Jamaica 6,500[19][20]
Uruguay 3,000[21]
Switzerland 1,000
[edit]
Gender
Although there are variations from country to country, 50% or more of street children are boys.[6][22]
[edit]
History
Children sleeping in Mulberry Street - Jacob Riis photo New York, United States of America (1890)
Children making their home/livelihoods on the street is not a new or modern phenomenon. In the introduction to his history of abandoned children in Soviet Russia 1918 -1930, Alan Ball states:
Orphaned and abandoned children have been a source of misery from earliest times. They apparently accounted for most of the boy prostitutes in Augustan Rome and, a few centuries later, moved a church council of 442 in southern Gaul to declare: “Concerning abandoned children: there is general complaint that they are nowadays exposed more to dogs than to kindness.”[23] In tsarist Russia, seventeenth-century sources described destitute youths roaming the streets, and the phenomenon survived every attempt at eradication thereafter. Long before the Russian Revolution, the term besprizornye had gained wide currency.[24][25]
In 1848 Lord Ashley referred to more than 30,000 'naked, filthy, roaming lawless and deserted children', in and around London.[26]
By 1922 there were at least 7 million homeless children in Russia as a result of nearly a decade of devastation from World War I and the Russian Civil War.[27] Abandoned children formed gangs, created their own argot, and engaged in petty theft and prostitution.[28]
Examples from popular fiction include Kipling's “Kim” as a street child in colonial India, and Gavroche in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. Fagin's crew of child pickpockets in "Oliver Twist" as well as Sherlock Holmes's "Baker Street Irregulars" attest to the presence of street children in 19th-century London.
[edit]
Causes
Children may end up on the streets for several basic reasons: They may have no choice – they are abandoned, orphaned, or disowned by their parents. Secondly, they may choose to live in the streets because of mistreatment or neglect or because their homes do not or cannot provide them with basic necessities. Many children also work in the streets because their earnings are needed by their families. But homes and families are part of the larger society and the underlying reasons for the poverty or breakdown of homes and families may be social, economic, political or environmental or any combination of these.
In a 1993 report, WHO offered the following list of causes for the phenomenon:[6]
family breakdown
armed conflict
poverty
natural and man-made disasters
famine
physical and sexual abuse
exploitation by adults
dislocation through migration
urbanization and overcrowding
acculturation
disinheritance or being disowned
The orphaning of children as a result of HIV/AIDS is another cause that might be added to this list.[29][30]
[edit]
By country
[edit]
Russia
In Russia, street children usually find a home in underground pipe and cable collectors during the harsh winter. These underground homes offer space, shelter and most importantly of all, heat from hot water and central heating pipes.
Russia has 1 million street children,[31] and one in four crimes involves underage youths. Officially, the number of children without supervision is more than 700,000. However, experts believe the real figure has long been between 2 and 4 million.[32]
[edit]
India
Two street children in Chennai, India
India is home to the world’s largest population of street children, estimated at 18 million.[33] The Republic of India is the seventh largest and second most populous country in the world. With acceleration in economic growth, India has become one of the fastest growing developing countries. This has created a rift between poor and rich; 22 percent of the population lives below the income poverty line. Owing to unemployment, increasing rural-urban migration, attraction of city life and a lack of political will, India now has one of the largest number of child laborers in the world.
Street children are subject to malnutrition, hunger, health problems, substance abuse, theft, commercial sexual exploitation of children, harassment by the city police and railway authorities, as well as physical and sexual abuse, although the Government of India has taken some corrective measures and declared child labor illegal.
[edit]
Vietnam
According to data by the Street Educators’ Club, the number of street children in Vietnam has shrunk from 21,000 in 2003 to 8,000 in 2007. The number dropped from 1,507 to 113 in Hanoi and from 8,507 to 794 in Ho Chi Minh City. In the meantime the number of migrant children is increasing. This number is, however, unconfirmed owing to varying definitions of street children. Some experts mention several different categories of street children in Vietnam: "children who have run away from home or who have no home, and who sleep on the street; children who sleep on the street with their family or guardian; children who have a family or guardian and who usually sleep at home, but work on the streets; economic migrants who rent rooms with other working children; and bonded laborers".[34]
There are almost 400 humanitarian organisations and international non-governmental organizations providing help for about 15,000 children, who live in especially difficult conditions.[35]
[edit]
Bucharest, Romania
A report of the Council of Europe of year 2000 estimated that there were approximately 1,000 street children in Bucharest, Romania.
Some Romanian street children are preyed on by sex tourists, mainly from Western Europe, and many can be seen inhaling aurolac (an aluminium-based paint traditionally used for painting a type of wood-burning stove) from plastic bags, the substance of choice for those of limited means.
Romania has made much progress, allowing the number of street children drop to low levels, which is lying at or below the European average. Given that socio-economic conditions continue to improve in Romania, the number of street children is expected to diminish.[36]
[edit]
Brazil
The Federal Government estimates that 31,992 adults live on the streets in major cities.[37] There are no national statistics for minors[38]. An NGO, putting together various local government counts and other estimates, arrived at c. 9578 street-dwellers younger than 18, in state capitals;[39] it estimates they number 25,000 nation-wide.[17] It has also been pointed out that most minors living on the streets are adolescents, rather than children.[39]
The main means of surviving in Brazil's streets include: finding food in garbage bins or on refuse tips; being financially exploited by street sellers as shoe shiners, thieves, prostitutes, drug runners, and street performers.
Street children are known to receive beatings and death from the police or members of the public and also can face imprisonment, malnutrition, disease and AIDS.[citation needed]
[edit]
The Philippines
See full article: Street children in the Philippines
According to the 1998 report, entitled "Situation of the Youth in the Philippines," there are about 1.5 million street children in the Philippines.[40]
75% of street children in the Philippines spend the night in the homes of their families, but spend the rest of the day working in the street. Between 25%-30% of street children often create a sort of family among fellow street children, and some of them may maintain an interrupted relationship with their families and the homes of their families. 5%-10% of street children are completely abandoned.[41] [42]
Street Children as young as 10 years old are often imprisoned under the Vagrancy Act, sometimes in cells which include adults, resulting in recurrent physical and sexual abuse, sometimes by guards as well.[43]
Many street children were in danger of summary execution during the Marcos Government.[44] Human rights groups said the killings have become an unwritten government policy to deal with the street children phenomenon, and that they are openly endorsed by local officials, strengthening the long-running suspicion that the death squads were formed by the government.[45]
[edit]
Government and non-government responses
[edit]
Responses by governments
Because they have not reached the age of majority, street children have no representation in the governing process. They have no vote themselves nor by proxy through their parents, from whom they likely are alienated. Nor do street children have any economic leverage. Governments, consequently, may pay little attention to them.
The rights of street children are often ignored by governments even though nearly all of the world's governments[46] have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.[47] Governments are often embarrassed by street children and may blame parents or neighboring countries.[48][49] Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) may also be blamed for encouraging children to live in the streets by making street life more bearable or attractive through the services they provide.[50]
When governments implement programs to deal with street children these generally involve placing the children in orphanages, juvenile homes or correctional institutes.[51][52] However, some children are in the streets because they have fled from such institutions[53][54][55][56] and some governments prefer to support or work in partnership with NGO programs.[57] Governments sometimes institute roundups when they remove all the children from city streets and deposit them elsewhere or incarcerate them.[58][59][60]
In the most extreme cases, governments may tacitly accept or participate in social cleansing operations that murder street children.[61][62][63]
[edit]
NGO responses
Non-government organizations employ a wide variety of strategies to address the needs and rights of street children. These may be categorized as follows:
Advocacy - through media and government contacts agencies may press for the rights of street children to be respected.
Preventive - programs that work to prevent children from taking to the streets, through family and community support and education.
Institutional
residential rehabilitation programs - some agencies provide an environment isolated from the streets where activities are focussed on assisting children to recover from drug, physical or sexual abuse.
full-care residential homes - the final stage in many agencies' programs is when the child is no longer in the streets but lives completely in an environment provided by the agency. Some agencies promote fostering children to individual families. Others set up group homes where a small number of children live together with houseparents employed by the agency. Others set up institutional care centers catering to large numbers of children. Some agencies include a follow-up program that monitors and counsels children and families after the child has left the residential program.
Street-based programs - these work to alleviate the worst aspects of street life for children by providing services to them in the streets. These programs tend to be less expensive and serve a larger number of street children than institutional programs since the children still must provide for themselves in the streets.
feeding program
medical services
legal assistance
street education
financial services (banking and entrepreneur programs)
family reunification
drop-in centres/night shelters
outreach programs designed to bring the children into closer contact with the agency
Conscientization - change street children's attitudes to their circumstances - view themselves as an oppressed minority and become protagonists rather than passive recipients of aid.[64][65]
Many agencies employ several of these strategies and a child will pass through a number of stages before he or she "graduates". First he/she will be contacted by an outreach program, then may become involved in drop-in center programs, though still living in the streets. Later the child may be accepted into a halfway house and finally into residential care where he or she becomes fully divorced from street life.[66][67]
[edit]
See also
Benposta
Casa Alianza
Covenant House
Homelessness
Kotjebi
Orphan
Relational care
Runaway youth
Street children in the Philippines
Waif
Friends International, an international NGO that provides services to street children.
[edit]
References
^ http://www.unicef.org/evaldatabase/files/ZAM_01-009.pdf UNICEF assessment of street children
^ Human Rights Watch- Abuse of Street Children
^ Page 8, Section 2.2. "State of the World's Street Children-Violence" (PDF). www.streetchildren.org.uk. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ Page 2. "State of the World's Street Children-Violence" (PDF). www.streetchildren.org.uk. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "Don't Call Me Street Kid Campaign English Home". www.iadb.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ a b c "Street Children: WHO 3 of 9". www.pangaea.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ a b c "A-rabs and Arabs", John McIntyre, Baltimore Sun. "The Oxford English Dictionary locates this sense of “a homeless little wanderer, a child of the street” in a citation from 1848."
^ Charles Dickens. Household Words: Volume 10, Bradbury & Evans, 1855. "street+arab" Page 335
^ "XVII. The Street Arab. Riis, Jacob A. 1890. How the Other Half Lives". www.bartleby.com. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ Page 64, Section 7.1.1. "State of the World's Street Children-Violence". www.streetchildren.org.uk. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "Street Children "our lives our words" - NI 377 - The Facts". www.newint.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "UNICEF - Press centre - British Airways staff visit street children centres in Cairo". www.unicef.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "Street Children "our lives our words"". www.newint.org. Retrieved 2010-03-15.
^ "IRIN In-Depth". www.irinnews.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
Russia 1 million
"Doctors of the World - USA: Health is a Human Right". www.dowusa.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "World Street Children News :: Children in detention in the Philippines :: November :: 2003". streetkidnews.blogsome.com. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ Tremlett, Giles (2001-06-15). "Guardian". London: www.guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ a b http://www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/revistas_sesc/pb/artigo.cfm?Edicao_Id=329&breadcrumb=1&Artigo_ID=5145&IDCategoria=5903&reftype=1
^ "Growing number of street children in Germany, report says : Europe World". www.earthtimes.org. Retrieved 2008-03-22.
^ "No night out for street kids - JAMAICAOBSERVER.COM". www.jamaicaobserver.com. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "Ecpat International". www.ecpat.net. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "Street Children "our lives our words" - NI 377 - Ricardo: ‘The only thing I hate in the world is the police’". www.newint.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "Consortium for Street Children". www.streetchildren.org.uk. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ Boswell John (1988). The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. New York. pp. 112, 172.
^ For a brief survey of changes over the centuries in the tsarist government’s response to besprizornost’ and juvenile delinquency, see:
Krasnushkin et al.. Nishchenstvo i besprizornost’. pp. 116–122.
For a bibliography of works published prior to 1913 on besprizornost’ and juvenile delinquency, see:
Gernet M. N. (1912). Deti-prestupniki. Moscow. prilozhenie 3.
For more on homeless children and juvenile delinquency in prerevolutionary Russia, see:
Neuberger Joan (1985). Crime and Culture: Hooliganism in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914. Ph.D. dissertation. Stanford University.
Ryndziunskii G. D.; T. M. Savinskaia (1932). Detskoe pravo. Pravovoe polozhenie detei v RSFSR. 3d ed. Moscow-Leningrad. pp. 273–274.
Liublinskii. Bor’ba. pp. 46–50.
Madison Bernice Q. (1968). Social Welfare in the Soviet Union. Stanford. chap. 1.
Kalinina A. D. (1928). Desiat’ let raboty po bor’be s detskoi besprizornost’iu. Moscow-Leningrad. pp. 18–21.
Ransel David L. (1988). Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia. Princeton.
^ "And Now My Soul Is Hardened". content.cdlib.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ Laura Del Col, West Virginia University, The Life of the Industrial Worker in Ninteenth-Century England
^ And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930, By Thomas J. Hegarty, Canadian Slavonic Papers
^ Bezprizorniki: the Homeless Children
^ "African Orphans Project - help AIDS orphans and streetkids live a better life". inicia.es. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "UNICEF - Ethiopia - Ethiopia: Steady increase in street children orphaned by AIDS". www.unicef.org. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ 'Child by child,' group aids homeless street kids
^ FCF's Work with Russian Street Kids
^ 'Young doctors' minister to India's street children, CNN.com
^ Duong Kim Hong and Kenichi Ohno, "Street Children in Vietnam: Interactions of Old and New Causes in a Growing Economy," Vietnam Development Forum, 2005, p. 6.
^ Greater commitment to Vietnamese street children needed, Asia News
^ [1]PDF (20.5 KB)
^ [2]
^ In Brazil, minors are defined as people younger than 18.
^ a b [3]
^ Street Children - Philippines
^ Teachers' Corner - Background(Detail)
^ The Life of Street Children in the Philippines and Initiatives to Help Them
^ [4]
^ Preda Foundation, Inc. NEWS/ARTICLES: "Nobel Prize Nominee Lauded Around the World Deserted by His Own"
^ Philippine death squads extend their reach - International Herald Tribune
^ The USA and Somalia are the only states that have not ratified the CRC. See HRW Report, "Promises Broken"
^ "PROMISES BROKEN". www.hrw.org. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Manila exec revives bill penalizing parents of street kids - INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos". newsinfo.inquirer.net. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "World Street Children News :: Joint effort to solve plight of street children :: April :: 2006". streetkidnews.blogsome.com. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "World Street Children News :: WFP denies ‘encouraging’ street children in Uganda :: September :: 2006". streetkidnews.blogsome.com. Retrieved 2008-02-10.
^ "Daily Express, Sabah, Malaysia - Only if 500 street kids or more". www.dailyexpress.com.my. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Stabroek News - Gov't Promises residential Facility for Street Children". www.stabroeknews.com. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "JRL - Russia, Children, Homelessness, Moscow Street Children". www.cdi.org. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ Tremlett, Giles (2001-06-15). "Guardian". London: www.guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 2008-02-10.
^ "Dishing Out Food and Hope to Georgia's Street Children". www.wfp.org. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Bolivia: Abandoned Street Children Turn To Drugs". www.wfn.org. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "PMC to build a nest for street kids-Pune-Cities-The Times of India". timesofindia.indiatimes.com. Retrieved 2008-02-09.
^ "Ethiopia: Cruel and inhumane actions against street children in Addis Ababa (World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) Human Rights NGO)". www.geocities.com. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Children of the Dust: Abuse of Hanoi Street Children in Detentions" (PDF). www.hrw.org. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Zimbabwe Police In Roundup Of Harare Street Children And Vendors". www.voanews.com. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Bands of children back on streets in San Jose". www.amcostarica.com. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Armedcon: Countries, Guatemala - Historic Award to Guatemalan Street Children Families". www.essex.ac.uk. Retrieved 2008-02-10.
^ "The Manila Times Internet Edition". www.manilatimes.net. Retrieved 2008-02-12.
^ "Shine-A-Light". www.shinealight.org. Retrieved 2008-02-16.
^ "Street Action". www.streetaction.org. Retrieved 2008-02-16.
^ "What Works in Street Children Programming: The JUCONI Model" (PDF). International Youth Foundation. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Street children in Latin America -- Scanlon et al. 316 (7144): 1596 -- BMJ". www.bmj.com. Retrieved 2008-02-17.
Street Children of Iran: Looking for Light at the End of the Gloomy Tunnel
[edit]
External links
Human Rights Watch: Street children
Street children in the Open Directory Project
Web documentary portraying young people on the streets of Bucharest
Street Children in Gimbi, Ethiopia, including documentary of a specific boy
Street Angels UK - Community, security and development for the people of Salvador, Brazil
Streetconnect.org A clearinghouse of information for and about homeless youth
Documentary film Hummingbird - a documentary about two NGOs in Brazil that work with street kids
Categories: Urban decay | Youth | Adoption, fostering, orphan care and displacement | Children's street culture | Street culture
New features
Log in / create account
Article
Discussion
Read
Edit
View history
Search
Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Interaction
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact Wikipedia
Donate to Wikipedia
Help
Toolbox
Print/export
Languages
العربية
Català
Česky
Dansk
Deutsch
Español
Français
Ido
Bahasa Indonesia
Italiano
مصرى
Nederlands
日本語
Polski
Português
Русский
Simple English
Suomi
Svenska
Türkçe
Українська
Tiếng Việt
中文
This page was last modified on 13 July 2010 at 19:56.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Contact us
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Afghan street child smiles for the camera in downtown Kabul, Afghanistan (June 2003).
Street children is a term used to refer to children who live on the streets of a city. They are basically deprived of family care and protection. Most children on the streets are between the ages of about 5 and 17 years old, and their population between different cities is varied.
Street children live in abandoned buildings, cardboard boxes, parks or on the street itself. A great deal has been written defining street children, but the primary difficulty is that there are no precise categories, but rather a continuum, ranging from children who spend some time in the streets and sleep in a house with ill-prepared adults, to those who live entirely in the streets and have no adult supervision or care.
A widely accepted set of definitions, commonly attributed to UNICEF, divides street children into two main categories:
Children on the street are those engaged in some kind of economic activity ranging from begging to vending. Most go home at the end of the day and contribute their earnings to their family. They may be attending school and retain a sense of belonging to a family. Because of the economic fragility of the family, these children may eventually opt for a permanent life on the streets.
Children of the street actually live on the street (or outside of a normal family environment). Family ties may exist but are tenuous and are maintained only casually or occasionally.[1]
Street children exist in many major cities, especially in developing countries, and may be subject to abuse, neglect, exploitation, or even, in extreme cases, murder by "cleanup squads" hired by local businesses or police.[2]
In Latin America, a common cause is abandonment by poor families unable to feed all their children. In Africa, an increasingly common cause is AIDS.Contents [hide]
1 Definitions
1.1 Names
2 Numbers, distribution and sex
2.1 Numbers
2.2 Distribution
2.3 Gender
3 History
4 Causes
5 By country
5.1 Russia
5.2 India
5.3 Vietnam
5.4 Bucharest, Romania
5.5 Brazil
5.6 The Philippines
6 Government and non-government responses
6.1 Responses by governments
6.2 NGO responses
7 See also
8 References
9 External links
[edit]
Definitions
The question of how to define a street child has generated much discussion that is usefully summarized by Sarah Thomas de Benítez in, "The State of the World's Street Children: Violence."
‘Street children’ is increasingly recognized by sociologists and anthropologists to be a socially constructed category that in reality does not form a clearly defined, homogeneous population or phenomenon (Glauser, 1990; Ennew, 2000; Moura, 2002). ‘Street children’ covers children in such a wide variety of circumstances and characteristics that policy-makers and service providers find it difficult to describe and target them. Upon peeling away the ‘street children’ label, individual girls and boys of all ages are found living and working in public spaces, visible in the great majority of the world’s urban centres.[3]
The definition of ‘street children’ is contested, but many practitioners and policymakers use UNICEF’s concept of boys and girls aged under 18 for whom ‘the street’ (including unoccupied dwellings and wasteland) has become home and/or their source of livelihood, and who are inadequately protected or supervised (Black, 1993).[4]
[edit]
Names
Street Children is a widely used term in the English language and has analogues in other languages such as French (les enfants des rues), Spanish (niños de la calle), Portuguese (meninos da rua), Hungarian (utcagyerekek), Romanian (copiii străzii) and German (Straßenkinder). Street kids is also commonly employed although it is sometimes considered pejorative.[5] In other languages children who live and/or work in the streets are known by many names. Some examples are listed below:
"gamín" (from French gamin, kid) and "chinches" (bed bugs) in Colombia, "pivetes" (little criminals/marginals) in Rio de Janeiro, as "pájaro frutero" (fruit bird) and "pirañitas" (little piranhas) in Peru, "polillas" (moths) in Bolivia, "resistoleros" (glue sniffers; Resistol is a major brand) in Honduras, "scugnizzi" (spinning tops) in Naples, "беспризорники" (persons without supervised living) in Russia, "Batang Lansangan" or "Pulubi" in the Philippines, "Bụi Đời" (the dust of life) in Vietnam, "saligoman" (nasty kids) in Rwanda, or "poussins" (chicks), "moustiques" (mosquitos) in Cameroon and "balados" (wanderers) in the democratic Republic of the Congo and the Congo Republic.[6]
The term Street Arab came to the fore in the mid-19th century, first appearing in 1848, according to the OED.[7] Horatio Alger's book Tattered Tom ; or, The Story of a Street Arab (1871) is an early example; it is about a homeless girl lives by her wits on the streets of New York. Charles Dickens likewise propagated its early use in 1855 but in a more clearly derogatory sense when he declared "a wretched, ragged, untaught street Arab boy is ugly."[8] In 1890, Danish-American journalist Jacob Riis described street children in New York in an essay titled "The Street Arab".[9] The Victorian association of street children with Arabs is probably reflected in the nomadic tradition of Arabs who were wanderers; the 19th century notion that non-Europeans from less civilized cultures were like children; of European and American travelers who saw many "street children" in Arab countries during the period; and a xenophobic tendency to scapegoat social problems.[7] The term has fallen out of favor.[7]
[edit]
Numbers, distribution and sex
[edit]
Numbers
Estimates vary but one often cited figure is that the number of children living independently in the streets totals between 100 million and 150 million worldwide.
According to a report from the Consortium for Street Children, a United Kingdom-based consortium of related NGOs:
Estimating numbers of ‘street children’ is fraught with difficulties. In 1989, UNICEF estimated 100 million children were growing up on urban streets around the world. 14 years later UNICEF reported: ‘The latest estimates put the numbers of these children as high as 100 million’ (UNICEF, 2002: 37). And even more recently: ‘The exact number of street children is impossible to quantify, but the figure almost certainly runs into tens of millions across the world. It is likely that the numbers are increasing’ (UNICEF, 2005: 40-41). The 100 million figure is still commonly cited, but has no basis in fact (see Ennew and Milne, 1989; Hecht, 1998; Green, 1998). Similarly, it is debatable whether numbers of street children are growing globally or whether it is the awareness of street children within societies which has grown.[10]
[edit]
Distribution
Street children may be found on every inhabited continent in a large majority of the world's cities. The following estimates indicate the global extent of street child populations.
India 11 million[11]
Egypt 1.5 million[12]
Pakistan 1.5 million
U.S. 750,000 - 1 million[13]
Kenya 250,000 - 300,000[14]
Philippines 250,000[15]
Congo 250,000
Morocco 30,000[16]
Brazil 25,000[17]
Germany 20,000[18]
Honduras 20,000
Jamaica 6,500[19][20]
Uruguay 3,000[21]
Switzerland 1,000
[edit]
Gender
Although there are variations from country to country, 50% or more of street children are boys.[6][22]
[edit]
History
Children sleeping in Mulberry Street - Jacob Riis photo New York, United States of America (1890)
Children making their home/livelihoods on the street is not a new or modern phenomenon. In the introduction to his history of abandoned children in Soviet Russia 1918 -1930, Alan Ball states:
Orphaned and abandoned children have been a source of misery from earliest times. They apparently accounted for most of the boy prostitutes in Augustan Rome and, a few centuries later, moved a church council of 442 in southern Gaul to declare: “Concerning abandoned children: there is general complaint that they are nowadays exposed more to dogs than to kindness.”[23] In tsarist Russia, seventeenth-century sources described destitute youths roaming the streets, and the phenomenon survived every attempt at eradication thereafter. Long before the Russian Revolution, the term besprizornye had gained wide currency.[24][25]
In 1848 Lord Ashley referred to more than 30,000 'naked, filthy, roaming lawless and deserted children', in and around London.[26]
By 1922 there were at least 7 million homeless children in Russia as a result of nearly a decade of devastation from World War I and the Russian Civil War.[27] Abandoned children formed gangs, created their own argot, and engaged in petty theft and prostitution.[28]
Examples from popular fiction include Kipling's “Kim” as a street child in colonial India, and Gavroche in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. Fagin's crew of child pickpockets in "Oliver Twist" as well as Sherlock Holmes's "Baker Street Irregulars" attest to the presence of street children in 19th-century London.
[edit]
Causes
Children may end up on the streets for several basic reasons: They may have no choice – they are abandoned, orphaned, or disowned by their parents. Secondly, they may choose to live in the streets because of mistreatment or neglect or because their homes do not or cannot provide them with basic necessities. Many children also work in the streets because their earnings are needed by their families. But homes and families are part of the larger society and the underlying reasons for the poverty or breakdown of homes and families may be social, economic, political or environmental or any combination of these.
In a 1993 report, WHO offered the following list of causes for the phenomenon:[6]
family breakdown
armed conflict
poverty
natural and man-made disasters
famine
physical and sexual abuse
exploitation by adults
dislocation through migration
urbanization and overcrowding
acculturation
disinheritance or being disowned
The orphaning of children as a result of HIV/AIDS is another cause that might be added to this list.[29][30]
[edit]
By country
[edit]
Russia
In Russia, street children usually find a home in underground pipe and cable collectors during the harsh winter. These underground homes offer space, shelter and most importantly of all, heat from hot water and central heating pipes.
Russia has 1 million street children,[31] and one in four crimes involves underage youths. Officially, the number of children without supervision is more than 700,000. However, experts believe the real figure has long been between 2 and 4 million.[32]
[edit]
India
Two street children in Chennai, India
India is home to the world’s largest population of street children, estimated at 18 million.[33] The Republic of India is the seventh largest and second most populous country in the world. With acceleration in economic growth, India has become one of the fastest growing developing countries. This has created a rift between poor and rich; 22 percent of the population lives below the income poverty line. Owing to unemployment, increasing rural-urban migration, attraction of city life and a lack of political will, India now has one of the largest number of child laborers in the world.
Street children are subject to malnutrition, hunger, health problems, substance abuse, theft, commercial sexual exploitation of children, harassment by the city police and railway authorities, as well as physical and sexual abuse, although the Government of India has taken some corrective measures and declared child labor illegal.
[edit]
Vietnam
According to data by the Street Educators’ Club, the number of street children in Vietnam has shrunk from 21,000 in 2003 to 8,000 in 2007. The number dropped from 1,507 to 113 in Hanoi and from 8,507 to 794 in Ho Chi Minh City. In the meantime the number of migrant children is increasing. This number is, however, unconfirmed owing to varying definitions of street children. Some experts mention several different categories of street children in Vietnam: "children who have run away from home or who have no home, and who sleep on the street; children who sleep on the street with their family or guardian; children who have a family or guardian and who usually sleep at home, but work on the streets; economic migrants who rent rooms with other working children; and bonded laborers".[34]
There are almost 400 humanitarian organisations and international non-governmental organizations providing help for about 15,000 children, who live in especially difficult conditions.[35]
[edit]
Bucharest, Romania
A report of the Council of Europe of year 2000 estimated that there were approximately 1,000 street children in Bucharest, Romania.
Some Romanian street children are preyed on by sex tourists, mainly from Western Europe, and many can be seen inhaling aurolac (an aluminium-based paint traditionally used for painting a type of wood-burning stove) from plastic bags, the substance of choice for those of limited means.
Romania has made much progress, allowing the number of street children drop to low levels, which is lying at or below the European average. Given that socio-economic conditions continue to improve in Romania, the number of street children is expected to diminish.[36]
[edit]
Brazil
The Federal Government estimates that 31,992 adults live on the streets in major cities.[37] There are no national statistics for minors[38]. An NGO, putting together various local government counts and other estimates, arrived at c. 9578 street-dwellers younger than 18, in state capitals;[39] it estimates they number 25,000 nation-wide.[17] It has also been pointed out that most minors living on the streets are adolescents, rather than children.[39]
The main means of surviving in Brazil's streets include: finding food in garbage bins or on refuse tips; being financially exploited by street sellers as shoe shiners, thieves, prostitutes, drug runners, and street performers.
Street children are known to receive beatings and death from the police or members of the public and also can face imprisonment, malnutrition, disease and AIDS.[citation needed]
[edit]
The Philippines
See full article: Street children in the Philippines
According to the 1998 report, entitled "Situation of the Youth in the Philippines," there are about 1.5 million street children in the Philippines.[40]
75% of street children in the Philippines spend the night in the homes of their families, but spend the rest of the day working in the street. Between 25%-30% of street children often create a sort of family among fellow street children, and some of them may maintain an interrupted relationship with their families and the homes of their families. 5%-10% of street children are completely abandoned.[41] [42]
Street Children as young as 10 years old are often imprisoned under the Vagrancy Act, sometimes in cells which include adults, resulting in recurrent physical and sexual abuse, sometimes by guards as well.[43]
Many street children were in danger of summary execution during the Marcos Government.[44] Human rights groups said the killings have become an unwritten government policy to deal with the street children phenomenon, and that they are openly endorsed by local officials, strengthening the long-running suspicion that the death squads were formed by the government.[45]
[edit]
Government and non-government responses
[edit]
Responses by governments
Because they have not reached the age of majority, street children have no representation in the governing process. They have no vote themselves nor by proxy through their parents, from whom they likely are alienated. Nor do street children have any economic leverage. Governments, consequently, may pay little attention to them.
The rights of street children are often ignored by governments even though nearly all of the world's governments[46] have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.[47] Governments are often embarrassed by street children and may blame parents or neighboring countries.[48][49] Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) may also be blamed for encouraging children to live in the streets by making street life more bearable or attractive through the services they provide.[50]
When governments implement programs to deal with street children these generally involve placing the children in orphanages, juvenile homes or correctional institutes.[51][52] However, some children are in the streets because they have fled from such institutions[53][54][55][56] and some governments prefer to support or work in partnership with NGO programs.[57] Governments sometimes institute roundups when they remove all the children from city streets and deposit them elsewhere or incarcerate them.[58][59][60]
In the most extreme cases, governments may tacitly accept or participate in social cleansing operations that murder street children.[61][62][63]
[edit]
NGO responses
Non-government organizations employ a wide variety of strategies to address the needs and rights of street children. These may be categorized as follows:
Advocacy - through media and government contacts agencies may press for the rights of street children to be respected.
Preventive - programs that work to prevent children from taking to the streets, through family and community support and education.
Institutional
residential rehabilitation programs - some agencies provide an environment isolated from the streets where activities are focussed on assisting children to recover from drug, physical or sexual abuse.
full-care residential homes - the final stage in many agencies' programs is when the child is no longer in the streets but lives completely in an environment provided by the agency. Some agencies promote fostering children to individual families. Others set up group homes where a small number of children live together with houseparents employed by the agency. Others set up institutional care centers catering to large numbers of children. Some agencies include a follow-up program that monitors and counsels children and families after the child has left the residential program.
Street-based programs - these work to alleviate the worst aspects of street life for children by providing services to them in the streets. These programs tend to be less expensive and serve a larger number of street children than institutional programs since the children still must provide for themselves in the streets.
feeding program
medical services
legal assistance
street education
financial services (banking and entrepreneur programs)
family reunification
drop-in centres/night shelters
outreach programs designed to bring the children into closer contact with the agency
Conscientization - change street children's attitudes to their circumstances - view themselves as an oppressed minority and become protagonists rather than passive recipients of aid.[64][65]
Many agencies employ several of these strategies and a child will pass through a number of stages before he or she "graduates". First he/she will be contacted by an outreach program, then may become involved in drop-in center programs, though still living in the streets. Later the child may be accepted into a halfway house and finally into residential care where he or she becomes fully divorced from street life.[66][67]
[edit]
See also
Benposta
Casa Alianza
Covenant House
Homelessness
Kotjebi
Orphan
Relational care
Runaway youth
Street children in the Philippines
Waif
Friends International, an international NGO that provides services to street children.
[edit]
References
^ http://www.unicef.org/evaldatabase/files/ZAM_01-009.pdf UNICEF assessment of street children
^ Human Rights Watch- Abuse of Street Children
^ Page 8, Section 2.2. "State of the World's Street Children-Violence" (PDF). www.streetchildren.org.uk. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ Page 2. "State of the World's Street Children-Violence" (PDF). www.streetchildren.org.uk. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "Don't Call Me Street Kid Campaign English Home". www.iadb.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ a b c "Street Children: WHO 3 of 9". www.pangaea.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ a b c "A-rabs and Arabs", John McIntyre, Baltimore Sun. "The Oxford English Dictionary locates this sense of “a homeless little wanderer, a child of the street” in a citation from 1848."
^ Charles Dickens. Household Words: Volume 10, Bradbury & Evans, 1855. "street+arab" Page 335
^ "XVII. The Street Arab. Riis, Jacob A. 1890. How the Other Half Lives". www.bartleby.com. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ Page 64, Section 7.1.1. "State of the World's Street Children-Violence". www.streetchildren.org.uk. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "Street Children "our lives our words" - NI 377 - The Facts". www.newint.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "UNICEF - Press centre - British Airways staff visit street children centres in Cairo". www.unicef.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "Street Children "our lives our words"". www.newint.org. Retrieved 2010-03-15.
^ "IRIN In-Depth". www.irinnews.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
Russia 1 million
"Doctors of the World - USA: Health is a Human Right". www.dowusa.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "World Street Children News :: Children in detention in the Philippines :: November :: 2003". streetkidnews.blogsome.com. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ Tremlett, Giles (2001-06-15). "Guardian". London: www.guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ a b http://www.sescsp.org.br/sesc/revistas_sesc/pb/artigo.cfm?Edicao_Id=329&breadcrumb=1&Artigo_ID=5145&IDCategoria=5903&reftype=1
^ "Growing number of street children in Germany, report says : Europe World". www.earthtimes.org. Retrieved 2008-03-22.
^ "No night out for street kids - JAMAICAOBSERVER.COM". www.jamaicaobserver.com. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "Ecpat International". www.ecpat.net. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "Street Children "our lives our words" - NI 377 - Ricardo: ‘The only thing I hate in the world is the police’". www.newint.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "Consortium for Street Children". www.streetchildren.org.uk. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ Boswell John (1988). The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance. New York. pp. 112, 172.
^ For a brief survey of changes over the centuries in the tsarist government’s response to besprizornost’ and juvenile delinquency, see:
Krasnushkin et al.. Nishchenstvo i besprizornost’. pp. 116–122.
For a bibliography of works published prior to 1913 on besprizornost’ and juvenile delinquency, see:
Gernet M. N. (1912). Deti-prestupniki. Moscow. prilozhenie 3.
For more on homeless children and juvenile delinquency in prerevolutionary Russia, see:
Neuberger Joan (1985). Crime and Culture: Hooliganism in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914. Ph.D. dissertation. Stanford University.
Ryndziunskii G. D.; T. M. Savinskaia (1932). Detskoe pravo. Pravovoe polozhenie detei v RSFSR. 3d ed. Moscow-Leningrad. pp. 273–274.
Liublinskii. Bor’ba. pp. 46–50.
Madison Bernice Q. (1968). Social Welfare in the Soviet Union. Stanford. chap. 1.
Kalinina A. D. (1928). Desiat’ let raboty po bor’be s detskoi besprizornost’iu. Moscow-Leningrad. pp. 18–21.
Ransel David L. (1988). Mothers of Misery: Child Abandonment in Russia. Princeton.
^ "And Now My Soul Is Hardened". content.cdlib.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ Laura Del Col, West Virginia University, The Life of the Industrial Worker in Ninteenth-Century England
^ And Now My Soul Is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918-1930, By Thomas J. Hegarty, Canadian Slavonic Papers
^ Bezprizorniki: the Homeless Children
^ "African Orphans Project - help AIDS orphans and streetkids live a better life". inicia.es. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
^ "UNICEF - Ethiopia - Ethiopia: Steady increase in street children orphaned by AIDS". www.unicef.org. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ 'Child by child,' group aids homeless street kids
^ FCF's Work with Russian Street Kids
^ 'Young doctors' minister to India's street children, CNN.com
^ Duong Kim Hong and Kenichi Ohno, "Street Children in Vietnam: Interactions of Old and New Causes in a Growing Economy," Vietnam Development Forum, 2005, p. 6.
^ Greater commitment to Vietnamese street children needed, Asia News
^ [1]PDF (20.5 KB)
^ [2]
^ In Brazil, minors are defined as people younger than 18.
^ a b [3]
^ Street Children - Philippines
^ Teachers' Corner - Background(Detail)
^ The Life of Street Children in the Philippines and Initiatives to Help Them
^ [4]
^ Preda Foundation, Inc. NEWS/ARTICLES: "Nobel Prize Nominee Lauded Around the World Deserted by His Own"
^ Philippine death squads extend their reach - International Herald Tribune
^ The USA and Somalia are the only states that have not ratified the CRC. See HRW Report, "Promises Broken"
^ "PROMISES BROKEN". www.hrw.org. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Manila exec revives bill penalizing parents of street kids - INQUIRER.net, Philippine News for Filipinos". newsinfo.inquirer.net. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "World Street Children News :: Joint effort to solve plight of street children :: April :: 2006". streetkidnews.blogsome.com. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "World Street Children News :: WFP denies ‘encouraging’ street children in Uganda :: September :: 2006". streetkidnews.blogsome.com. Retrieved 2008-02-10.
^ "Daily Express, Sabah, Malaysia - Only if 500 street kids or more". www.dailyexpress.com.my. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Stabroek News - Gov't Promises residential Facility for Street Children". www.stabroeknews.com. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "JRL - Russia, Children, Homelessness, Moscow Street Children". www.cdi.org. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ Tremlett, Giles (2001-06-15). "Guardian". London: www.guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 2008-02-10.
^ "Dishing Out Food and Hope to Georgia's Street Children". www.wfp.org. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Bolivia: Abandoned Street Children Turn To Drugs". www.wfn.org. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "PMC to build a nest for street kids-Pune-Cities-The Times of India". timesofindia.indiatimes.com. Retrieved 2008-02-09.
^ "Ethiopia: Cruel and inhumane actions against street children in Addis Ababa (World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) Human Rights NGO)". www.geocities.com. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Children of the Dust: Abuse of Hanoi Street Children in Detentions" (PDF). www.hrw.org. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Zimbabwe Police In Roundup Of Harare Street Children And Vendors". www.voanews.com. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Bands of children back on streets in San Jose". www.amcostarica.com. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Armedcon: Countries, Guatemala - Historic Award to Guatemalan Street Children Families". www.essex.ac.uk. Retrieved 2008-02-10.
^ "The Manila Times Internet Edition". www.manilatimes.net. Retrieved 2008-02-12.
^ "Shine-A-Light". www.shinealight.org. Retrieved 2008-02-16.
^ "Street Action". www.streetaction.org. Retrieved 2008-02-16.
^ "What Works in Street Children Programming: The JUCONI Model" (PDF). International Youth Foundation. Retrieved 2008-02-07.
^ "Street children in Latin America -- Scanlon et al. 316 (7144): 1596 -- BMJ". www.bmj.com. Retrieved 2008-02-17.
Street Children of Iran: Looking for Light at the End of the Gloomy Tunnel
[edit]
External links
Human Rights Watch: Street children
Street children in the Open Directory Project
Web documentary portraying young people on the streets of Bucharest
Street Children in Gimbi, Ethiopia, including documentary of a specific boy
Street Angels UK - Community, security and development for the people of Salvador, Brazil
Streetconnect.org A clearinghouse of information for and about homeless youth
Documentary film Hummingbird - a documentary about two NGOs in Brazil that work with street kids
Categories: Urban decay | Youth | Adoption, fostering, orphan care and displacement | Children's street culture | Street culture
New features
Log in / create account
Article
Discussion
Read
Edit
View history
Search
Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Interaction
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact Wikipedia
Donate to Wikipedia
Help
Toolbox
Print/export
Languages
العربية
Català
Česky
Dansk
Deutsch
Español
Français
Ido
Bahasa Indonesia
Italiano
مصرى
Nederlands
日本語
Polski
Português
Русский
Simple English
Suomi
Svenska
Türkçe
Українська
Tiếng Việt
中文
This page was last modified on 13 July 2010 at 19:56.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
Contact us
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Mother Teresa of Calcutta(The Story)
Mother Teresa of Calcutta
Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997), Roman Catholic nun, founder of the Missionaries of Charity, and recipient of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her humanitarian work (see Nobel Prizes). In 2003, six years after her death, Mother Teresa began a passage to sainthood with her beatification by Pope John Paul II. Beatification is the first step toward canonization, the act that proclaims a person’s sainthood.
Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on August 27, 1910, to Albanian parents in Skopje, which at the time was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. (The city is now the capital of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.) At the age of 12, she decided to become a nun. At age 18, she joined the Order of the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto in Ireland. After training in Dublin for a few months, she went to Dārjiling (Darjeeling), India, where the order had missions. When she took her first religious vows there in 1931, she chose the name Teresa for Saint Theresa of Lisieux, the patron saint of foreign missionaries. For the next 15 years she taught at Saint Mary’s High School in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Disturbed by the presence of the sick and dying in the city’s streets, she felt called, in her words, “to leave the convent and help the poor, while living among them.” In 1948 she was granted permission to leave the convent and work as an independent nun. That year she founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious order to help the sick and destitute.
In 1950 the Missionaries of Charity received official approval from the Roman Catholic Church, and Mother Teresa became a citizen of India. Members take four vows on acceptance by the religious order. In addition to the three basic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, a fourth vow is required pledging service to the poor, whom Mother Teresa described as the embodiment of Christ.
In 1952 Mother Teresa opened the Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart) Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta. She also opened orphanages, hospitals for lepers, and other homes. By the time of her Nobel Prize, branches of the Missionaries of Charity had been established in many countries. In awarding the prize, the Nobel Committee cited her work in “bringing help to suffering humanity.” She was forced to scale back her activities in 1990 because of declining health. Mother Teresa: In My Own Words, a collection of her anecdotes and quotations, was published in 1996. In 1997, because of Mother Teresa’s poor health, Sister Nirmala was chosen to succeed her as leader of the Missionaries of Charity. People around the world mourned her death on September 5, 1997. How to cite this article:
"Mother Teresa of Calcutta." Microsoft® Encarta® 2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008.
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997), Roman Catholic nun, founder of the Missionaries of Charity, and recipient of the 1979 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her humanitarian work (see Nobel Prizes). In 2003, six years after her death, Mother Teresa began a passage to sainthood with her beatification by Pope John Paul II. Beatification is the first step toward canonization, the act that proclaims a person’s sainthood.
Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on August 27, 1910, to Albanian parents in Skopje, which at the time was under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. (The city is now the capital of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.) At the age of 12, she decided to become a nun. At age 18, she joined the Order of the Sisters of Our Lady of Loreto in Ireland. After training in Dublin for a few months, she went to Dārjiling (Darjeeling), India, where the order had missions. When she took her first religious vows there in 1931, she chose the name Teresa for Saint Theresa of Lisieux, the patron saint of foreign missionaries. For the next 15 years she taught at Saint Mary’s High School in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Disturbed by the presence of the sick and dying in the city’s streets, she felt called, in her words, “to leave the convent and help the poor, while living among them.” In 1948 she was granted permission to leave the convent and work as an independent nun. That year she founded the Missionaries of Charity, a religious order to help the sick and destitute.
In 1950 the Missionaries of Charity received official approval from the Roman Catholic Church, and Mother Teresa became a citizen of India. Members take four vows on acceptance by the religious order. In addition to the three basic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, a fourth vow is required pledging service to the poor, whom Mother Teresa described as the embodiment of Christ.
In 1952 Mother Teresa opened the Nirmal Hriday (Pure Heart) Home for Dying Destitutes in Calcutta. She also opened orphanages, hospitals for lepers, and other homes. By the time of her Nobel Prize, branches of the Missionaries of Charity had been established in many countries. In awarding the prize, the Nobel Committee cited her work in “bringing help to suffering humanity.” She was forced to scale back her activities in 1990 because of declining health. Mother Teresa: In My Own Words, a collection of her anecdotes and quotations, was published in 1996. In 1997, because of Mother Teresa’s poor health, Sister Nirmala was chosen to succeed her as leader of the Missionaries of Charity. People around the world mourned her death on September 5, 1997. How to cite this article:
"Mother Teresa of Calcutta." Microsoft® Encarta® 2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008.
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009. © 1993-2008 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
AMF Foundation Summit.
Dear Friends,
The 4th annual summit and Award Night.
Date:15th July 2010
Time: 4pm prompt
Venue:Bristol Hotel Limited,34 Adeaga street, U-turn B/stop,Abule-Egba,Lagos.
Speakers - Dr.L.S Aminu , Dr.Ekundayo O. , Barr. Mike Okhihiemen ,CNO Okunade.
Waterless Toilets - What the Third World Needs Now
by Ellen Bell
Home Products n' More
For millions of people living in third world countries, access to basic sanitation facilities is limited or nonexistent. In many of these areas, the lack of running water means that the same rivers used for bathing and obtaining cooking water are also used for defecating and dumping garbage. The biggest problem with such contamination is the threat of waterborne illness, a leading cause of death among infants and children in impoverished countries. One of the best possible solutions to this problem is waterless toilets.
Waterless toilets are not a new invention; in fact, they've been around for decades. One of the biggest barriers to their use and integration in third world nations is education. Groups like the Peace Corps and UNICEF routinely go into such countries to promote better sanitation by making waterless toilets available and educating people on how to use and maintain them. Unfortunately, there are far more areas that need such assistance than there are volunteer groups and funds to provide it.
There are various types of waterless toilets available today, and some are more feasible than others for use in third world nations. Probably the most commonly used is the sawdust toilet because of its extremely simple design. Consisting of nothing more than a five gallon bucket fitted with a toilet seat on top, sawdust toilets are very inexpensive to build and distribute on a large scale. All that is required to maintain the system is an ample supply of sawdust, peat moss, sand, or any other fine particulate substance. This material is used to cover the waste inside the toilet after each use, so as to prevent odors in the bathroom area. In arid climates with plenty of sandy soil, these systems are quite feasible for people to maintain. However, sawdust toilets are a good solution only for people living in remote or rural areas, because they do require some land in an area at least fifty yards or so from the primary residence. This land should be a location where the composting pile can be kept and buckets routinely emptied as they fill up. Obviously, in densely populated urban areas, this would not work.
A better alternative for urban areas are waterless composting toilets. These are professionally manufactured systems that are designed to hold all waste and compost it internally. The primary problem with this solution is the cost. Waterless composting toilets are often prohibitively expensive and require grants or donation from generous benefactors to implement them on a large scale. The advantage to composting toilets is that they don't require a lot of land space, since all waste is handled within the toilet itself. They are very simple to use and maintain; however, they do require an ongoing supply of bulking material, such as peat moss and wood chips. This bulking material should be added to the toilet on a daily basis in order to maintain the correct balance of carbon and nitrogen within the compost. This will help the waste to break down quickly and without creating unpleasant odors. Access to such a bulking material may be limited in some urban areas and also might be financially unfeasible for people to purchase, and this could create another potential barrier to their use. Ideally, if an urban municipality could supply bulking material to residents at a minimal cost, this hurdle could be overcome.
One way or another, better sanitation facilities are desperately needed in third world countries. Millions of people fall ill and thousands die each year due to illnesses caused by contaminated water supplies. Waterless toilets would allow residents of such countries to dispose of their waste in a hygienic manner without wasting or contaminating their limited freshwater resources.
For more information on waterless toilets and composting toilets, please visit http://www.composting-toilet-store.com/
Home Products n' More
For millions of people living in third world countries, access to basic sanitation facilities is limited or nonexistent. In many of these areas, the lack of running water means that the same rivers used for bathing and obtaining cooking water are also used for defecating and dumping garbage. The biggest problem with such contamination is the threat of waterborne illness, a leading cause of death among infants and children in impoverished countries. One of the best possible solutions to this problem is waterless toilets.
Waterless toilets are not a new invention; in fact, they've been around for decades. One of the biggest barriers to their use and integration in third world nations is education. Groups like the Peace Corps and UNICEF routinely go into such countries to promote better sanitation by making waterless toilets available and educating people on how to use and maintain them. Unfortunately, there are far more areas that need such assistance than there are volunteer groups and funds to provide it.
There are various types of waterless toilets available today, and some are more feasible than others for use in third world nations. Probably the most commonly used is the sawdust toilet because of its extremely simple design. Consisting of nothing more than a five gallon bucket fitted with a toilet seat on top, sawdust toilets are very inexpensive to build and distribute on a large scale. All that is required to maintain the system is an ample supply of sawdust, peat moss, sand, or any other fine particulate substance. This material is used to cover the waste inside the toilet after each use, so as to prevent odors in the bathroom area. In arid climates with plenty of sandy soil, these systems are quite feasible for people to maintain. However, sawdust toilets are a good solution only for people living in remote or rural areas, because they do require some land in an area at least fifty yards or so from the primary residence. This land should be a location where the composting pile can be kept and buckets routinely emptied as they fill up. Obviously, in densely populated urban areas, this would not work.
A better alternative for urban areas are waterless composting toilets. These are professionally manufactured systems that are designed to hold all waste and compost it internally. The primary problem with this solution is the cost. Waterless composting toilets are often prohibitively expensive and require grants or donation from generous benefactors to implement them on a large scale. The advantage to composting toilets is that they don't require a lot of land space, since all waste is handled within the toilet itself. They are very simple to use and maintain; however, they do require an ongoing supply of bulking material, such as peat moss and wood chips. This bulking material should be added to the toilet on a daily basis in order to maintain the correct balance of carbon and nitrogen within the compost. This will help the waste to break down quickly and without creating unpleasant odors. Access to such a bulking material may be limited in some urban areas and also might be financially unfeasible for people to purchase, and this could create another potential barrier to their use. Ideally, if an urban municipality could supply bulking material to residents at a minimal cost, this hurdle could be overcome.
One way or another, better sanitation facilities are desperately needed in third world countries. Millions of people fall ill and thousands die each year due to illnesses caused by contaminated water supplies. Waterless toilets would allow residents of such countries to dispose of their waste in a hygienic manner without wasting or contaminating their limited freshwater resources.
For more information on waterless toilets and composting toilets, please visit http://www.composting-toilet-store.com/
Dear Intending Member
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to AMF. This is a Humanitarian Organization established in July 15th, 2006. With the Mission statement of 'Making a difference in the lives of the suffering ones via the help of keen and compassionate families and friends'.
The Foundation was established by Afolabi T.Louis with the providing relief materials for the less-privileged and caring for the rejected.
Dear Intending Member,
What can I say to convince you about your intention to making a dynamic living, your decision of living a purposeful Life; I doff my hat for you. By completing the form over-leaf, is your first step toward living an imparting Life. Reminiscence upon the day I was called to be the Secretary General of this noble Foundation, I was so afraid and confused that I couldn’t utter a statement on the podium, a lot of questions came running through my mind ‘Just suppose I failed, Just suppose it didn’t work, just suppose it turned a fiasco’ , but I was determined just as you are today to living a purpose driven life ,so I persisted in my work in making a positive difference in the lives of the suffering ones, great has been the story ever since.
Permit me to share with you the story of Lee Brown a cotton-picker turned real estate agent making $45,000 a year. One day she noticed a little girl begging in her neighbourhood, but did not respond immediately until it was too late, the girl was gone. Ever since, Lee Brown decided to make a difference by sponsoring first- grade student with poor background from Primary to the level of higher learning. She has personally contributed £10,000 every year, in additions to raising donations for others. Her decision rescued students who would have ended up on the street. Please take this ample opportunity that is beckoning on you, don’t let it slip-away, is your turn to make history like Lee did.
It takes tenacity; the ability to hold that which you have decided, in making a difference and most especially when you don’t know how to go about it. Your helplessness can only be helped when you are set to help, your present status not withstanding. Don’t wait for the perfect time cause there is no such time. David Livingstone (1813-1873), Scottish missionary and physician, who spent half his life exploring southern and central Africa, received a letter from an organisation who wants to send helpers to him when he was in Africa, asked him if he had found a good road in his area, he replied ‘if they only want to come when there’s a good road, don’t send them. I want people that will come when there’s no good road’.
AM Foundation my alma-mater in administration taught me a better way of been an administrator which has really helped my career. Friend, the more of responsibilities you carry the more responsible you become which is the sign of greatness. A basic tenet of greatness is getting involved in the act of greatness in order to be great. You want to be great in life? get involved. AM Foundation is a better platform to express yourself; this is an organisation where your words count no matter your status and creed. There is always a lacuna begging for your attention to be filled in this foundation. Let us rock the boat together to destination hope, a place of hope to the hopeless, succour to the broken hearted and land of opportunity.
In the words of Mother Teresa, she said “If you are kind, people will accuse you of selfish motives; be kind anyway. The good you do today, most people will forget; do good anyway. Give the world the best you’ve got and it may never be enough; give your best anyway. In the final analysis it’s between you and God; it was never between you and them anyway”. My dear, I have so much to say but I won’t be able to express it all on this page. Get actively involved in this business of putting smiles on faces and see how dramatic your very life will be transformed. Is not all about your joining that matters, but the impart you make when you are in that matters. Welcome to AMF, your first step to Dynamic Living.
OWOLOYE RAPHAEL. S .
Secretary General
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)