DC -- Rally: Solidarity Day march (1981) @ National Mall:
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Description of Pictures: September 19, 1981
Solidarity Day was an attempt by organized labor to point out the abuses of the Reagan administration. They consciously tried to avoid having politicians do the speeches so you saw a lot of labor leaders talking instead.
Folks shown in the images include Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Lane Kirkland (AFL-CIO), Correta Scott King, Eleanor Smeal, and Bayard Rustin.
From a biography on Lane Kirkland on http://www.aflcio.org/aboutus/history/history/kirkland.cfm :
Kirkland quickly put his own stamp on the organization. He took up the cause of Solidarity, funneling more than $6 million in aid to Polish workers in the form of cash and communications equipment. This aid was considered instrumental in Solidarity's successful effort to end 50 years of Communist Party rule in Poland. In 1994, President Bill Clinton recognized Kirkland's efforts by presenting him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Solidarity was the theme of Kirkland's leadership of the U.S. labor movement as well. Stressing the importance of unity, he insisted, "All sinners belong in the church." Thanks to his efforts, the Teamsters, the United Auto Workers, the United Mine Workers, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union rejoined the federation. In 1981, Kirkland organized a massive "Solidarity Day" rally in Washington, D.C., to dramatize labor's opposition to the conservative policies of Ronald Reagan's presidency and the following year he strengthened labor's get-out-the-vote effort with a "Solidarity Day 2" campaign. In 1984, breaking with precedent, Kirkland encouraged the early endorsement of Walter Mondale in the Democratic Party primaries, ensuring Mondale's nomination and mobilizing widespread support for him during the general election.
Solidarity Day march
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Solidarity Day marches were a pair of large political rallies in support of or ...More...
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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
SOLID_810005_002.JPG: Gloria Steinem
SOLID_810005_004.JPG: Jesse Jackson about in the middle of the picture
SOLID_810005_007.JPG: Stevie Wonder
SOLID_810005_009.JPG: Thomas Donahue, AFL-CIO
SOLID_810005_015.JPG: ???
SOLID_810005_020.JPG: The speaker is Steven Wallaert. President of PATCO Local 291, who was arrested and jailed for his illegal strike activity. Reagan wiped out the union because of the strike.
SOLID_810005_026.JPG: Bella Abzug (died in 1998) @ Solidarity Now protest
SOLID_810005_031.JPG: Gloria Steinem talking with Senator Don Riegle
SOLID_810005_033.JPG: The speaker is Eleanor Smeal from NOW
SOLID_810005_037.JPG: Benjamin Hooks, NAACP
SOLID_810005_040.JPG: Vernon Jordan, National Urban League
SOLID_810005_041.JPG: Coretta Scott King
SOLID_810005_046.JPG: Father Drinan
SOLID_810005_049.JPG: Lane Kirkland (pointing) and Doug Fraser (UAW) at the speaker stand
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
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2000_DC_LOC200_000424 Library of Congress -- Ceremony: Living Legends Bicentennial Ceremony
1981 photos: From 1979 to 1984, I lived in downtown Washington DC.
From 1979 to 1981, I experimented with some weirder pocket cameras which generated 110mm and 126mm negatives. They were crap.
From 1981 to 2002, photos were taken using a Pentax ME Super camera.
From 1966 to 1989, all of my pictures except those taken with the experimental cameras were slides which is what I had grown up on.
Until 1997, I was taking at most a couple of hundred photos a year.
Image quality is going to be variable because these are scans of slides and/or prints.
The images shown here were scanned in two phases. In the early years of the website, I rescanned a selection of pre-digital images, all at fairly low quality settings. During the COVID pandemic, I launched the Great Rescanning Effort, rescanning ALL of my pre-digital images from various media (prints, slides, negatives, etc) at higher resolution and quality settings. Mutilple versions of images -- some from the initial scannning phase, some from prints, some from slides/negatives -- were posted so there are frequently duplicate images on the same page. At some point, I hope to have time to do a final review and get rid of the duplicates but that'll have to wait until all of the pre-digital images are finally posted.
Trips this year: None except to visit my girlfriend up in New York.
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