The Struggle for Human Rights

The struggle for human rights is highlighted by the Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, (MLK Day) celebrated as a National Holiday. MLK advocated a complex, multifaceted view on human rights. In Georgia, where I live, we elected a man to the U.S. Senate, Rafael Warnock, who holds the senior pastor position at the Ebenezer Baptist Church where MLK was the senior pastor. Today, at Ebenezer, on MLK JR. Sunday, President Biden was a special guest speaker.

Joe Abruscato and I wrote a series of books in the 1970s that focused on humanistic education, science, and psychology. The books explored how our species can learn from each other, foster the right of all citizens to be free and develop their lives in a community of humanistic values. The series included these books: Loving & Beyond: Science Teaching for the Humanistic Classroom (1976), The Whole Cosmos Catalogue of Science Activities for People of All Ages (1977), and The Earthpeople Activity Book (1978).

In the Earthpeople book, we explored our humanity, from our roots, history and herstory, the spaceship earth with live on, people around the world and what they do, and what our future holds. We wrote in the introduction

This book is about hope. We have confidence in the people of earth. Although we have many problems facing us in the world today—hunger, wars, poverty, pollution, and serious crime—we also have hope. We believe that every earthperson has a desire to put these rampant problems to rest. In this book we explain some ways that earthpeople have tried to solve these problems. We have hope.

Joe Abruscato and Jack Hassard, 1978, The Earthpeople Activity Book, Santa Monica: Goodyear Publishing Company.

The Struggle for Human Rights

In this post I want to share what we wrote about human rights, and how it has been a struggle throughout our existence as a species.

Here are the first two pages from Chapter 5 of the book that focuses on our continuous struggle for human rights. With today being MLK Day, I thought some of the images from our book might be relevant.

The struggle for human rights has been dangerous and carried out by courageous people throughout human history. There are many examples that anyone can choose to highlight the kind of courage that it takes to change the power structure of those who prevent and hold on to their own power, suppressing others who simply want the freedom to read and think, to vote without the racial segregation enforced by the Jim Crow laws, to choose the health of their own families, and to have a government that protects the democratic values that can result in human rights.

We focused on three courageous Americans who are examples of humans who exemplified the courage to speak out and act on their beliefs that all people should be free. We selected John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), Lucretia Mott (1793-1880) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968).

Martin Luther King, Jr.

During this period of my writing, I believed that involving students directly in cooperative activities would help them develop new ideas and the ability to communicate with others. We designed several activities to help students explore the King Center, civil rights activists, racism, prejudice and the history of the struggle for human rights. Naturally, Martin Luther King’s life underscores the nature of the struggle for human rights.

When I was a boy of about 13, i often visited one of my neighbors who was studying at Boston University. We lived just west of Boston in the town of Natick. He told me stories about how Black Americans in the South were being abused, killed and living in segregated communities. He said that a fellow student told him and other graduate students in their program about the situation in the South.

It was Martin Luther King who my neighbor was talking about. He and MLK were studying for their doctorate in philosophy and theology at BU. Ten years later, in 1966, I received my Masters degree in science education from BU. Three years after later, after earning my Ph.D. in science education from The Ohio State University, I took a position as assistant professor of science education at Georgia State University, only a few miles from the Ebenezer Baptist Church.