Historical Spaghetti: You Can't Make This Stuff Up

The story of the African American civil rights movement often gets boiled down to just a few moments featuring but a few key figures, at the expense of many who worked tirelessly to enact lasting change. For instance, the Montgomery Bus Boycott responsible for the Supreme Court ruling that segregation of public transportation was unconstitutional, is often oversimplified to the effect that many of the key participants and organizers, who were women, with the exception of Rosa Parks, were left out of the celebrated story. Many mark the boycott as the emergence of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a prominent black civil rights leader. However, there is much more to the story than these two figures reveal. Moreover, even though Parks is credited for catalyzing the boycott, she has not been given enough public recognition for many of the other ways in which she was already a stalwart militant for the cause of equal civil rights. In the past few decades, however, historians have worked tirel...

You can read Part I of this story at https://historicalspaghetti.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-daily-evergay-part-i.html.   Quotes from LGBT students at WSU published in The Evergreen during the 1970s. On display in the WSU library. A brief recap: Beginning in the early 1970s, lesbians and gay men at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington began to organize themselves into a conscious community. One aspect of this newfound community was the creation of student organization Gay Awareness (GA) in November of 1975. In Part II I detail debates about the organization's funding and its early activities. Click on the images in the article to read the issue in which they were printed. Between November 1975 and July 1976, the WSU student newspaper The Daily Evergreen ran more than 45 articles discussing the activities of the newly-formed student organization Gay Awareness (GA). It was the first organization of its type on the Pullman campus. Many of these Evergreen articles ...