Would you get beat up and hurt for your or someone other than yourself’s rights, how about killed? This is question that many Americans asked themselves when they heard about the freedom rides. C.O.R.E (congress of racial equality) was looking for more than an all black protest or boycott. They wanted a movement, they wanted something bold. 

They decided on integrating interstate buses which were breaking the law by segregating buses and waiting rooms. They needed all kinds of people, young and old, white and black and clergymen, to make it work. Once someone volunteered they went through “non-violent training” to test how they would react to getting beaten.

“The training that we did prior to getting on the buses was largely devoted to seeing how the person reacts.” Gordon Carey. From the videos and photos I saw, the training seemed pretty physical with people actually hitting other freedom riders as a test but the actual way they were treated even worse. After training it was time to get on a bus but no training could prepare them for what happened next. 

The first couple of weeks were easy and didn’t require any of their training however the further south they got the more violent the residents became. 

One day one of the buses was stopped and fire bombed, the people outside blocked the doors and screamed “burn the niggers.”I never understood why people got so angry about things like this that were perfectly legal yet not “acceptable.” It seems that the white mob would strike at any sign of desegregation not just big things like voting rights. 

Luckily the freedom riders managed to escape but were harshly beaten as soon as they got off the bus. C.O.R.E just kept sending buses. The people on those buses just kept getting arrested though. Neither side was seeming to give when finally all the prisoners were released and the segregation signs were taken down. 

A little superimpose I made:

Some additional information:

Freedom riders

Civil rights 

1955, Money Mississippi Emmet Till is visiting from Chicago when he decides to buy some gum from a mini mart. The shop was named Bryant’s grocery and meat mart. What happened next may have been one of the most influential things to kick off the civil rights movement. As hea paying for the gum he talks to the chequeout lady in a manor she found offensive and he husband Roy Bryant and her half brother kidnapp him 4 days later. They then torture and shoot him in the head and throw him in the river. 
We learnt about the civil rights movement event by event in chronological order so the murder Emmet till on August 28th was the first thing we learned about. We discovered the horror in the actions of Roy and J.W Milam. But things got a little more boring after that with not much else happening until the freedom rides in 61. That is not say people didn’t start talking about change. 

I think this lack of powerful movements was due to the fact that the south was ruled by fear. Lynch mobs roamed the streets at night and racist police officers by day. This is way it took so long for people to stand up and say enough. Fear is what white citizens in the south relied on to keep African Americans in check, that is why they were so surprised when a 14 year old boy challenges that fear just by whistling. The two murderers Roy and J.W were so caught up in tradition that they took it to far by torturing and killing Emmet just to maintain this fear. 
The older man playing checkers with Till’s cousin seemed to know what would happen if he whistled at the white girl and warned against it. He had experienced a life time of racism in the south while Emmet had experienced the north. This left him unaware of the segregation in the south. After his body was found by two young kids in the river strapped to part of a cotton Jin his mother decide to hold an open casket funeral in Chicago. This became one of the most famous funerals ever because of all the publicity that his mother employed by sending pictures of Emmett’s disfigured body to the newspaper.
The story of Emmett Till is truly a story one of good versus evil of right and wrong. Which is why I made this picture in the style of my French Revolution post from last year.  

   

 

To showcase my learning I used an example I’m most proud of (Star Wars blue sky). A piece I feel represents my growth as a learner (Podcast) and Growth mindset work (D.I.).

Star Wars blue sky is the work I’m most proud of

Podcast Growth learning 

D.I.

  

 

Watch our play here. Going into this I was not very confident that this was going to go well. But it did over time as we dominated the instant challenges realized that we might actually crush it which we nearly did but I guess it was for the best I don’t want succes going to my head. 

This is the story of Glen Wong and his father and grandfather.

 Glen Wong’s Story

So this is a little late because reasons but trust me it’s worth it. When presented with the daunting task of being forced to study Star Wars I thought about what if the story of A New Hope was told as myth on earth… long ago in country far away. 

So I was originally going to study the Vikings and the way they told storys through banners and oral legend. But I couldn’t find much evidence of the Vikings doing something similar to what I wanted to do. So I looked to the Japanese who used a kind of traditional paper the closest thing I found to it was papyrus although Egyptian it was very close to what the Japanese used. 

First I drew what I wanted on paper and then lay that on graphite paper then in turn lay that on the papyrus. After doing this I pushed down on the top layer with a diffrent coloured pencil so to see what I traced and what I hadn’t. The result was this. 

  

What looks like pencil is actually just the “magic” of the graphite paper. After this stage I slowly started painting and pening? Is that a word I gunna say it is. Pening in where the pencil was. And it started looking lol key this.
  

After doing this for three pages and the whole movie it looked like this.

  

Persepolis is one of the books I have genuinely enjoyed reading for school and may even read part 2. The whole thing is not the best book I’ve ever read but certainly not the worst. The book was kinda boring at the beginning and got a little weird at times.

I love the way that people would die out of nowhere, it added suspense to moments like the bombing of Marjane’s street. A a good example of this is when her uncle dies and all is shown is a newspaper clipping with his face saying executed. This tension was not under used in the last 50 pages of the book. There wasn’t really a conclusion more of a cliffhanger. As we see her mother being carried away by her dad. I noticed the book had a very serious topic and some graphic scenes but the style was that of a children’s novel. I feel this may have been a way of getting a younger audience like 10 up while still having it be serious. I feel some style elements undercut the tone like her smoking a cigarette or listening to music it was confusing the way it just cut from stuff like that to serious stuff like war and bombings. This may be realistic style but is one I think works most of the time but can get confusing at times. Overall I would recommend you read this book and think what was one of the better school assigned books that I’ve read. 

https://youtu.be/E9QMZmiIqas

This group project has been sucking all our school time for the past 2-4 weeks it has devoured everyone in a tsunami of work, planning, filming and building. This process has been messy at best and at worst absolute chaos. This is the reality of making a machine to represent a historical movement that bend history on an inevitable past that would end up right now in the present with us making this machine. Had a slight thing gone different in any of these I would not be here writing this and you would not be hear reading it. This butterfly effect is mirrored in our project. If some tiny detail was changed at the start the whole thing would be different. Like at the beginning when I suggested the machine be based off traveling. The whole project would look completely different. I think this is a really cool way to look at it. To beat visualize the work and planning that went into this project I made a short iMovie. 
https://youtu.be/XEUzKq9aLJY

For my blue sky project I choose to make a pen for calligraphy that I can then sell on eBay for the right price online. This is a challenge that requires me to make a pen first so this how far I got at this point. In the video I will explain what making a pen like this. I learnt everything from a video by yoke co who charge a huge amount of money for something I can make at home.

http://youtu.be/Zs9a2sqGyr4

Which is part of the reason I’m doing this to prove that if you want something that costs a lot of money then just make it. This is something that I really believe which I hope is conveyed in this project.