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Based on my political beliefs I am moderate. For example I believe in acceptance of homosexuality and immigration which tends to be more liberal. In addition, people working hard for what they want and not just having it handed to them is something important to me which reflects more of a conservative view.

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Started of with few students who decided to walk in to a public area that is segregated and refused to leave; more students joined the next day and the movement had spread in many cities. The students began the start to desegregation in public places and eventually achieved that due to their continuous sit-ins. This example shows big importance towards a small group making such a big change; how a couple voices were able to be heard and spread to make a dramatic change. It is important for students to stay passionate, brave, and put their voice to us. We are the future and we determine what it is going to look like.

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The film shows that they were by no means radicals but had lost their belief that America could work, even for blacks like themselves: good students from middle- and working-class families. Mr. McCain says in the film, "I don't know if you've ever felt suicidal at 14 but I did." For Mr. McNeil, the tipping point came when, after returning from Christmas break in New York, he was denied service at the Greensboro Greyhound bus station.

"It was a degrading experience; three hours ago I was a human being with all access," he says, "and now three hours later I'm treated as if I'm some kind of pariah."

And Mr. Khazan, whose father joined the N.A.A.C.P. and whose family dinner table was a place for lively discussions of current events, says: "Emmett Till showed us what could happen if we broke the code."

The executive producer, Steven Channing, a history-professor-turned-filmmaker, said he made "February One" because of his passion for documenting firsthand accounts of the past. He has produced more than 100 films, many of them educational videos for children.

"I went, 'Wow, here are historical figures I can talk to,"' said Mr. Channing, who lives in Durham, N.C. To personalize the story, he decided to use actors.

"Dramatization is risky," he said in an interview. "I think it works. At a screening one person said, 'It feels like memory; it feels like we're remembering it together. They're all saying "I" and "we," and I felt my knees knocking."'

Mr. Channing, who won a regional Emmy for "Alamance," a historical drama about the American Revolution that was broadcast on PBS, needed four years to raise the $300,000 to make "February One." The film has now been shown in New York, Atlanta, Nashville, Chicago and Memphis. It received the first annual Global Peace Film Festival Award in Orlando, Fla., and was named best picture at the 2004 Greensboro Film Festival.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, said in an interview that one of the paradoxes of the success of the civil rights movement is that "the contributions of thousands of brave and courage pioneers -- like people who risked their lives to integrate a lunch counter, of all things -- have been blended into symbols like a Dr. Martin Luther King."

While the story of the Greensboro Four has been documented by historians, Mr. Gates said, the men are not necessarily part of the popular culture. Rebecca Cerese, who produced the film with Mr. Channing, said her own informal survey found that most students at North Carolina A&T had never heard of them.

But there are efforts to honor and remember them. Civic leaders in Greensboro are planning a museum at the old Woolworth store. And "February One" ends with the Feb. 1, 2001, unveiling of a monument to the Greensboro Four at their alma mater, attended by the three surviving men and their families, and the family of Mr. Richmond, who died in 1990.

Although "February One" does not tell viewers what happened to the men after the 1960's, all of them except Mr. Richmond went on to fulfilling careers and lives of relative anonymity, even though they are called on for sit-in anniversaries and speaking events.

Mr. Khazan now lives in New Bedford, Mass., where he is a teacher and counselor for the developmentally disabled. Mr. McCain lives in Charlotte, N.C., where he is a retired sales and marketing executive for a textile company. And Mr. McNeil lives in Hempstead, N.Y., a retired businessman and major general in the Air Force Reserves. The three remain friends.

Mr. Richmond was the only one who settled in Greensboro; the others quickly realized that they had been blacklisted in the city. Mr. Richmond, who left for several years after his life was threatened, returned but could find work only as a janitor. According to "February One" interviews, he turned to alcohol, and two marriages failed. The documentary features a clip from an earlier film, in which he appears emaciated and ill. "At least I've accomplished something, one thing in my life," he says of the sit-in.

In interviews about the film, Mr. McCain and Mr. Khazan said they hoped it showed that ordinary people could change history if they were willing to make the sacrifice.

"Inevitably, people ask me 'What can I do?"' Mr. McCain said. "What kind of question is that? Look around you. Once you identify what you want to do, don't ask for the masses to help you, because they won't come."

A clear message of "February One" is that you do not need permission to start a revolution, Mr. McCain said. He recalled that few of his professors or fellow students ever asked him about his civil rights activities. People tended to show up for the big protests, he said, but were not among the foot soldiers.

"It's affected my health in a negative way," Mr. Khazan said of those days. He recalled many nights of only two hours of sleep and receiving at least 10 threatening calls a night during the peak of the sit-in, which ended in July 1960 with a desegregated lunch counter at Woolworth.

Now 63, he said he found meaning in life through his family, work and a conversion to Islam in 1968. On the positive side, the challenges brought out the courage and leadership qualities in all his friends, he said.

"I did not want to get killed or beaten," Mr. Khazan said, although all his friends faced those possibilities, and jail time, too. "I was only 18. It just was, and is, the right thing to do."

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Article on Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr (now Jibreel Khazan) and David Richmond, four black freshman at North Carolina A&T State University whose 1960 sit-in at Woolworth lunch counter in downtown Greensboro, NC, sparked other student sit-ins in segregated places in 54 cities across nine states; four are subject of PBS documentary titled February One; photos (M)

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The Berlin Wall had fallen and became a statement that the communist government was falling apart and students took it into their hands to gather a very large amount of them together and protest. This protest was very important because no matte what the officers did to the protesters they stayed stubborn and peaceful and didn't create any violence. Most significantly, the communist party had relinquished their power allowing for a new president to take head and compromise the communist government. I think it is important for students to participate in political activism because our voices our so valuable and magnified because we are the future. On top of that, we are the generation with the most resources and technology.

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By Lester Kurtz
March 2008
Conflict Summary:
Only eleven days after 17 November 1989, when riot police had beaten peaceful student demonstrators in Prague, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia relinquished its power and allowed the single-party state to collapse. By 29 December 1989, the so-called Velvet Revolution, led by the nonviolent coalition Civic Forum, transformed Václav Havel from a dissident playwright into the President of a democratic Czechoslovakia.

The 17 November event began as a communist-sanctioned commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the martyrdom of Jan Opletal, a student murdered by Nazi occupation forces and a symbol of Czech resistance. The denunciation of the Nazis morphed into an anti-communist protest and eventually a movement. After the official ceremony ended, protesters continued into downtown Prague toward the symbolic Wenceslas Square until confronted by riot police who began to beat them. Although the record remains murky, apparently one of the security force officers posing as a student demonstrator feigned martyrdom and a rumor spread that the police had killed one of the protestors, fanning the flames of outrage.

Havel convened an emergency meeting of the Charter 77 (an organization explained more fully below) activists and others at the Magic Lantern Theatre. The meeting resulted in the creation of Civic Forum, which undertook a series of grassroots actions and public demonstrations, such as people shaking their keys to sound the end of the regime. The movement culminated in a two-hour general strike ten days after the November 17th protest, showing the breadth and depth of opposition and leveraging negotiations with the government and Communist Party officials. These swift developments in turn led to the resignation of the entire Politburo, the formation of a compromise government, and the regime's resounding electoral defeat and creation of a democratic government.
Political History:
Czechoslovakia became a nation state after World War I when it became independent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Following its division and partial incorporation into Nazi Germany until the end of the Second World War, it became a part of the East European Soviet sphere.

In the famous Prague Spring of 1968, massive reform swept through the Czechoslovakian government, with Alexander Dubcek at the helm. Although modest compared to Gorbachev's own 1980s reform in the Soviet Union, human rights and a free press were encouraged, and civil society flourished. This was too much for the Soviet regime of the time, however, and in August of 1968, Warsaw Pact troops invaded. Mass nonviolent civil resistance by Czechs ensued, which increased the cost to the Soviets of their occupation, and stalled their complete control for about eight months. Ultimately, in the aftermath of the 1968 invasion, the most repressive of the East European regimes was installed and the pre-invasion reforms were swept away, leaving serious restrictions on economic activity and education, as well as free speech, even in comparison with neighboring communist countries. Between 1945 and 1989, according to Lawson (2005:83), 250,000 Czechs were imprisoned for political acts; "243 were executed, 3,000 died in prison, camps or mines, 400 were killed trying to cross the border and 22,000 were sent to forced labour camps."

Resistance to the authoritarian government persisted throughout the communist period, from "home seminars" held from the 1950s on down to Charter 77, an organization created to monitor the government's commitment to human rights as part of a Helsinki conference. A robust underground intellectual life flourished within a fairly narrow circle, attracting major European intellectuals who lectured in the home seminars. Opposition to the regime was primarily cultural, rather than political, however, and sometimes symbolically represented in drama and music after 1968, because of the severity of government repression of dissent. A month after the August 1968 Soviet invasion, for example, rock music became a medium for much political dissent, including the Velvet Underground-inspired rock band, Plastic People of the Universe, who donned satin togas, painted their faces with bright colors and wrote incendiary protest songs in English (see Bilefsky 2009). When they were thrown into prison in 1976, Havel himself championed their cause.
Strategic Actions:
The signature actions of the Velvet Revolution were enormous mass demonstrations (up to one-million in a country with less than 16 million total population) and the public rattling of keys as a dramatic collective show of defiance. If the movement had a flair for the dramatic, it was because much of its choreography came from playwright Vaclav Havel. Decades of underground organizing and cultural dissent erupted in a November 1989 choreographed revival of the political memory of previous resistance, against Nazis and Communists. The movement had its roots in parallel structures, especially critical theatre, music, and home seminars that cultivated the spirit of dissent within the country's intellectual culture during the years of the worst repression.

Twenty-one years after official reform of Czech communism had been crushed in 1968 by the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops who invaded Prague and put down the reform movement, memorials to a student killed by the Nazis and to the 1968 Prague Spring and its subsequent repression were orchestrated by students who marched through the city. They were met with police tear gas and water cannons but the students nonetheless created more protest events. Marches and mass demonstrations paralleled grassroots organizing by actors and students around the country. False rumors of a martyred protestor led to outrage and organizing, mass demonstrations, negotiations with government and party officials that forced the resignation of the Politburo, and the creation of a new government dominated by non-communists.

British author Timothy Garten Ash (1990:129), who witnessed the revolution, noted that the Velvet revolution was "swift, entirely non-violent, joyful and funny." Some of the major strategic actions of the civil resistance campaign include:

Protest and Persuasion

* Mass demonstrations, marches
* Rattling of keys to signal the regime's end
* Underground press publishing writings of Vaclav Havel and other intellectuals
* Computers and mimeograph machines used to disseminate announcements, proclamations, and critiques of the regime.
* Songs of banned and exiled musicians sung at public gatherings, published in flyers and bulletins,
* Actors and drama students go to the countryside to speak with people and inform them of actions
* Cardinal Tomasek announces, during a Sunday Mass, "the Catholic Church stands on the side of the nation";
* Negotiations with government officials
* Public appearance by Alexander Dubcek, legendary leader of the 1968 reforms crushed by the Warsaw Pact invasion
* Skillful use of the media, including the official press, to disseminate their grievances and broadcast demonstrations

Noncooperation

* Strikes and boycotts by students, artists, actors;
* Two-hour general strike to demonstrate nationwide dissent that went beyond the more visible students

Nonviolent Intervention

* Mass demonstrations occupying Wenceslaus Square, the symbolic center of the nation
* Demonstrators surrounding the parliament building
Ensuing Events:
After the 1989 democratic transition, efforts to craft new democratic constitutions for the Czech, Slovak, and federal governments were subverted by the remaining Communists and others. This fissure in the new republic led to what some have dubbed the "Velvet Divorce," which created two independent nations: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. (Vaclav Klaus, then finance minister and later prime minister, claimed that Slovakia was a drag on the economy; [see Lawson 2005: 95].) In the Czech Republic, where Havel remained in office until 2003, the fragile Civic Forum coalition fractured into competing political parties. The socialist economy was quickly privatized with considerable initial economic success. The state security apparatus (Statni Bezpecnost, the StB), which was condemned by the dissident Havel as a "hideous spider whose invisible web runs right through the whole of society", was dismantled and the formal links between the military and security forces were severed. The military was depoliticized and transferred from communist to democratic civilian control. During Havel's administration, the size of the armed forces was cut almost in half and the number of generals reduced from 240 to 20 (Lawson 2005: 102).

Both successors to Czechoslovakia have a multiparty parliamentary system and enjoyed rapid economic growth until the 2009 global economic crisis. On the 2009 Human Development Index, the Czech Republic was rated very high and Slovakia high. The Czech Republic was the first East European country to join the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and it joined the European Union, as did Slovakia. The cost of the economic transition was considerable, however, and many Czechs reported a significant loss of purchasing power for basic goods from 1988 to 1993 (see Krejčí and Machonin 1996).

In 1997, at the urging of President Havel, the Plastic People reunited and in 2009 they were celebrated at Prague's National Theater with a production of a Tom Shepherd play, "Rock 'n' Roll," staged in London and New York as part of the celebrations of the success of the Velvet Revolution.
For Further Reading:
Ackerman, Peter and Jack DuVall. A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict. New York, NY: Palgrave, 2000.

Ash, Timothy Garton. The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of '89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague. New York: Random House, 1993.

Ash, Timothy Garton. "Velvet Revolution: The Prospects." The New York Review of Books 56, (December 2009), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23437 (available March 10, 2010).

Auer, Stefan. "Violence and the End of Revolution After 1989." Thesis Eleven no. 97 (May 2009): 6-25.

Bilefsky, Dan. "Czechs' Velvet Revolution Paved by Plastic People." New York Times, 16 November 2009, 10.

Bilefsky, Dan. "Celebrating a Revolution with Roots in a Rumor." New York Times, 18 November 2009, 16.

Brook, Daniel. Modern Revolution: Social Change and Cultural Continuity in Czechoslovakia and China. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2005.

Brown, Scott. "Prelude to a Divorce? The Prague Spring as Dress Rehearsal for Czechoslovakia's 'Velvet Divorce,'" Europe-Asia Studies 60 (2008): 1783-1804.

Chtiguel, Olga F. "Without Theatre, the Czechoslovak Revolution Could Not Have Been Won." The Drama Review 34 (Autumn 1990): 88-96.

Constanza, Justine A. "Covert Defiance: An Interview with Former Dissident Jan Urban." The Free Library, 2009, http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Covert+defiance:+an+interview+with+former+dissident+Jan+Urban.-a0214458854 (available March 8, 2010).

Day, Barbara. The Velvet Philosophers. London: Claridge, 1999.

Ginkel, John, and Alastair Smith. "So You Say You Want a Revolution: A Game Theoretic Explanation of Revoution in Repressive Regimes." The Journal of Conflict Resolution 43 (June 1999): 291-316.

Glenn, John K. "Competing Challengers and Contested Outcomes to State Breakdown: The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia." Social Forces 78 (September 1999): 187-211.

Glenny, Misha. "The Year of the Crowd: Prague." New Statesman (March 16, 2009): 35.

Havel, Václav. "Power of the Powerless." 1978. http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/showtrans.php?cat=clanky&val=72_aj_clanky.html&typ=HTML (available March 8, 2010).

Krapfl, James. "The Diffusion of 'Dissident' Political Theory in the Czechoslovak Revolution of 1989" Slovo Vol. 19 No. 2 (Autumn 2007).

Krejčí, Jaroslav, and Pavel Machonin. Czechoslovakia: 1918-1992 a Laboratory for Social Change. London: Macmillan, 1996.

Kumar, Krishnan. "The Revolutions of 1989; Socialism, Capitalism, and Democracy." Theory and Society 21 (June 1992): 309-356.

Lawson, George. Negotiated revolutions: The Czech Republic, South Africa, and Chile. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005.

O'Hara, Natalia. 2009. "Velvet Recall: 'A Spiritual Revolution.'" [Interview with Monsignor Tomas Halik]. Transitions Online (November 16, 2009). http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=45496367&site=ehost-live (available March 5, 2010).

O'Hara, Natalia. "We are not like them.'" [Interview with Simon Panek] (November 23, 2009). http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=45580131&site=ehost-live (available March 5, 2010).

Oslzly, Petr. "On Stage with the Velvet Revolution." The Drama Review 34 (Autumn 1990): 97-108.

Paulson, Joshua. "The Liberation of Czechoslovakia - 1989." pp. 271-275 in Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20th Century Practice and 21st Century Potential, by Gene Sharp, with the collaboration of Joshua Paulson and the assistance of Christopher A. Miller and Hardy Merriman. Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers Extending Horizons Books, 2005.

Taylor, Cory, director. "Power of the Powerless," Documentary film narrated by Jeremy Irons. Los Angeles: Agora Productions, 2009. http://www.thepowerofthepowerless.org/film.htm.

Shephard, Robin H. E. Czechoslovakia: The Velvet Revolution and Beyond. New York: St. Martins, 2000.

"Vaclav Havel Official Website" http://www.vaclavhavel.cz/

Večerník, Jiří. "The Middle Class in the Czech Reforms: The Interplay between Policies and Social Stratification." Communist and Post-Communist Studies 32 (1999).

Wolchik, Sharon L. "Czechoslovakia on the Eve of 1989." Communist and Post-Communist Studies 32 (1999): 437-451.

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Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution (1989) | ICNC

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Download PDF Version Continue to ICNC home page Access more Nonviolent Conflict Summaries By Lester Kurtz March 2008 Conflict Summary: Only eleven days after 17 November 1989, when riot police had beaten peaceful student demonstrators in Prague, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia relinquished its power and allowed the single-party state to collapse.

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Parkland school shooting: 17 lives taken

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Parkland school shooting: 17 lives taken

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This photo is taken during the memorial of the 17 lives of the 17 people that were killed on February 14, 2018 by a previous student who opened fire in the school. Whether the issue is the way people are able to buy guns or the minds behind the guns there needs to be a change made to keep students safe and happy while trying to be educated. Gun violence in schools has happen multiple multiple multiple times and each time everyone gets sad and talks about it for a little bit and then there is a point where it is forgotten. It becomes not as important, and the cycle repeats over and over. Students and parents shouldn't have to feel unsafe at school and shouldn't have to mourn the lives of these students/teachers so young.

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This song is towards women and the expectations they are held to. It tells women to let go of their insecurities that society and media brings on. This matters to me because as a female society makes us women out to try and be something and someone we aren't. Society and media uses females as an object and a look-book and not as the intelligent and uniquely beautiful women we are.

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Globalization as a racial project: Implications for human trafficking

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Globalization as a racial project: Implications for human trafficking

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The main idea of this article is to address the global issue of human trafficking and

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A Prosecutor's Vision For A Better Justice System - Adam Foss

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A Prosecutor's Vision For A Better Justice System - Adam Foss

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The idea in this specific Ted Talk is how we should fix the justice system and make it so that we aren't sending so many people to jail and putting billions of dollars there instead of putting the money in a place to help them not end up in jail for such young and innocent mistakes. This video stood out to me because he has such a unique perspective on the justice system. He has specific stories and examples where instead of doing so much work in order to send the people to prison, he does a lot of research on figuring out a way to move them to where they are trying to go or what they are trying to achieve.

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Adam Foss: A prosecutor's vision for a better justice system

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(NOTE: Adam Foss has been under investigation by the Suffolk County District Attorney's office. For more details and TED's response, read "An update on allegations about a TED speaker" below.)