Guest Blogger: Erin Daly

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Erin Daly (left) as today's guest blogger.
Erin is Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Faculty Research and Development at Widener Law School in Wilmington, Delaware. She earned her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her J.D. cum laude from the University of Michigan, then practiced 1st Amendment and employment law at the San Francisco law firm of Cooper White & Cooper.
Since entering academia in 1993, she's produced many publications on comparative environmental law, constitutional law, and transitional justice, among them Reconciliation in Divided Societies: Finding Common Ground (2006), for which a Nobel Peace Prizewinner, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, wrote the foreword. Co-authoring the book (issued in paperback in 2010) with Erin was Jeremy Sarkin, the South African legal expert about whom we posted yesterday.
Erin has served as a Vice-Chair of the Young Lawyer’s Division Law and Media Committee of the American Bar Association. Earlier this month, Erin was elected the Chair of the Section on International Human Rights of the Association of American Law Schools (a position that IntLawGrrl Christiana Ochoa held a while back). In her guest post below, Erin recaps the Section's "new voices" programs during AALS' 2010 annual meeting, discusses Section plans, and welcomes suggestions for the coming year.
Erin dedicates her post to Coretta Scott King (1927-2006), about whom we IntLawGrrls have frequently posted. She was, of course, the widow of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (prior posts) -- and she was also a civil rights and human rights activist in her own right. Today the United States observes Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. It is, as Erin writes, a holiday that Coretta Scott King

named in honor of her husband, but which is really a testament to her own lifelong commitment to making the world a better place through service to others and to holding up ideals of equality and human dignity, whether in the context of literacy, poverty eradication, or the rights of minorities of all kinds in the United States and abroad. She took on each new challenge with grace and intelligence and continued throughout her life to push for greater rights for all.

(source for 1984 Charles Tasnadi/AP photo of her leading a picket of South African embassy in Washington, D.C.) Today we are honored to include Coretta Scott King in our list of foremothers just below the "visiting from..." map at right.

Heartfelt welcome!

On October 14

On this day in ...
... 1964 (45 years ago today), 35-year-old civil rights leader Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. became the youngest person named a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, established in 1901 to recognize acts "for the furtherance of brotherhood among men and to the abolishment or reduction of standing armies and for the extension of these purposes." He was due to receive the award in Oslo on December 10 (right (credit); audio clip here). The New York Times reported that in Oslo, the woman who 8 days earlier had presented her credentials as U.S. Ambassador to Norway, Margaret Joy Tibbetts, said:

'As an American and representative of the American people, I want to express joy and gratitude that one of my fellow countrymen has been awarded this prize.' She praised the role of Dr. King 'among his fellow countrymen.'

King was the 12th American so honored (the 21st, as we've posted, is Barack Obama); he said in he would donate the $54,000 prize to the civil rights movement. (King would later become the namesake of my home institution and the California International Law Center at King Hall.) He was in his hometown of Atlanta with his wife, Coretta Scott King (above, far right), who said:

'For many years we have had to contend with the other side. For something like this to happen makes it all worthwhile.'

(Prior posts are here and here.)

On November 2

On this day in ...

... 1983 (20 years ago today), in a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House, with Coretta Scott King and civil rights leaders of many races attending, U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed legislation that established Martin Luther King Day. (photo credit) A decade earlier, Illinois legislator Harold Washington, who would become Chicago's 1st African-American mayor, had succeeded in making the day a state holiday in Illinois; however, efforts on the national level stalled for many years. Among those opposing the measure was U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), today the GOP nominee for President. As a result of the 1983 U.S. law, the 3d Monday in January now is the only holiday that honors an individual American.

... 1963 (45 years ago today), the military seized power in South Vietnam, killing President Ngo Dinh Diem (below right). Investigating the matter years later, the Church Committee, a mid-1970s congressional group that investigated CIA activities, concluded

that the United States government offered encouragement for the coup, but neither desired nor was involved in the assassinations. Rather, Diem's assassination appears to have been a spontaneous act by Vietnamese generals, engendered by anger at Diem for refusing to resign or put himself in the custody of the leaders of the coup.

What Dr. King did

Backlash has been part and parcel of decades-old struggle to set aside this day in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., born 79 years ago this month. Most years backlash has come from the right, often from elements once aligned with segregation. (On that point, see this excellent op-ed.)
This year questions have come from a different direction. A Democratic presidential candidate has indicated that King was a talker, that it was President Lyndon B. Johnson who delivered civil rights to people of color in the United States. What was said:

Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act. It took a president to get it done. ... The power of that dream became real in people's lives because we had a president ....

In view of this claim, it seems appropriate to recall at least some of what Dr. King did -- not only through the act of talking, but also through the acts of submitting to arrest, of marching, of putting himself before hostile crowds.
What Dr. King did, after he won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize (above), was to act upon his understanding that civil rights depended on peace.
What Dr. King did was this: he defied the President to whom, that 1 candidate said, King owed everything. King opposed the Vietnam War, and in so doing, spoke against war itself. The 1st audio-visual item below, a brief video pastiche, demonstrates the nature and scope of his opposition. The 2d audi0-visual item below, a longer audio clip of a sermon in which King explained his opposition, found evil in the sending of poor people of all races to kill another nation of poor people:

We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with a cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same school room. So we watch them in brutal solidarity, burning the huts of a poor village. But we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago or Atlanta. Now, I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

Recalling prior encounters with segregationist sheriffs, King continued:

Oh, the press was so noble in its applause, and so noble in its praise when I was saying, 'Be non-violent toward Bull Connor'; when I was saying, 'Be non-violent toward Jim Clark.' There's something strangely inconsistent about a nation and a press that will praise you when you say, 'Be non-violent toward Jim Clark,' but will curse and damn you when you say, 'Be non-violent toward little brown Vietnamese children.'

What Dr. King did is evident in this timeline:

► March 2, 1965: "King asserted that the war in Vietnam was 'accomplishing nothing' and called for a negotiated settlement."
► March 25, 1967: "King led his first anti-war march in Chicago ... and reinforced the connection between war abroad and injustice at home: ‘'The bombs in Vietnam explode at home—they destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America.'"
► April 4, 1967: In a speech entitled "Beyond Vietnam," King spoke out against the war in front of "3,000 people at Riverside Church in New York City."
► April 15, 1967: Despite the NAACP's resistance to his linkage of peace and civil rights, King, along with Dr. Benjamin Spock (with whom Coretta Scott King had been marching for years) and 10,000 others, demonstrated against war in a march, pictured at right, to the United Nations headquarters in New York.
► April 30, 1967: King gave the sermon quoted above at his church, Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta.
► March 31, 1968: In a sermon at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., King called Vietnam 'one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world.'
Four days later King died, felled by an assassin's bullet -- 4 days, that is, after Johnson announced both that he he would begin to end the war and that he would not seek to remain President after the November election, 4 days after the President had yielded to antiwar entreaties of King and others.
What Dr. King did, through word and deed, was to help force a President to hasten the cause of peace on a troubled planet.
It took a dreamer to get it done.