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I know I already did a Quote of the Day today, but I just stumbled across this one at Amanda Hess’s new blog, and I need to post it too.

Background: Dana Beyer was a candidate for the Maryland House of Delegates yesterday. An eye surgeon, she made health care reform a central issue in her campaign. She put up a respectable showing in the race — in that branch of the Maryland state legislature, each district is represented by multiple Delegates, and Beyer finished fourth, just a few points behind the three incumbents.

Beyer is transgender, and after she conceded, the Washington Blade asked her what effect she thought her identity had had on the race. Her answer is the Quote of the Day:

“The media didn’t bring it up other than the gay media. It was never raised in my interviews with the Post or the Gazette. With all the other media, people didn’t seem to think it was relevant. And no voter has ever, back in 2006 or this year, ever brought up the issue. And one could say, ‘Oh well they’re just being very polite,’ but it’s hard to believe that the 15,000 doors I knocked on were all just very polite people. Or that they were truly homophobic but they were just being nice to me. I don’t believe that. I think they really didn’t care.”

“The first demonstrations we had were just a handful of people. In fact when Dr. King himself went to jail, only fifty-five people would go with him. So, when young people today ask me, ‘When are we going to be able to get together like you all were in the sixties?’ — nobody was ‘together’ in the sixties! It was a small group of dedicated people who got it started…

“And then the kids took it over.”

–Andrew Young, interviewed by Spike Lee for the documentary 4 Little Girls, discussing the Birmingham campaign.

I’ve used this as a Quote of the Day once before, but I just love it so much…

Today is the 47th anniversary of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing, in which four black girls were killed by white supremacists who planted dynamite at the steps of their church.

The bombing is one of the best known incidents in the history of the American civil rights movement. There are a few things about it, however, that most folks don’t know, but should.

First, the girls who were killed that day weren’t small children. They were adolescents — three were fourteen years old, and the fourth, Denise McNair, was eleven. They were kids, but they weren’t the little kids of popular memory. Their lives were taken from them as they were on the verge of becoming young women.

Second, they weren’t the only black people killed in Birmingham that day. As tempers flared throughout the city a white police officer shot and killed 16-year-old Johnny Robinson. Robinson, who was shot in the back, had earlier thrown rocks at a car draped with a Confederate flag. Later that day, Virgil Ware, thirteen, was riding on the handlebars of his brother’s bike when he was shot by Larry Joe Sims, a white sixteen-year-old returning from an anti-integration rally.

The teen who killed Virgil Ware was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and sentenced to two years probation. The officer who killed Johnny Robinson was never charged with a crime.

There is a mythology to our collective memory of the civil rights movement, a mythology in which the righteousness of the integrationist cause is sometimes misrepresented as innocence. Teenagers become — as in the title of Spike Lee’s magnificent documentary on the church bombing — “little girls.” A teenager driven by anger to throw rocks at racists disappears entirely.

We should remember Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley — and Johnny Robinson and Virgil Ware, too. And we should do them the honor of remembering them as they were.

This post is the eighth in a series of twelve counting down the top dozen student activism stories that will be making news on the American campus in the new academic year. Follow Student Activism on Facebook and Twitter to keep up with all these stories and many more!

Students across the United States have been pressing hard this last year for passage of the DREAM Act, a federal bill that would give undocumented immigrants, brought to the country as children, a path to citizenship. (Under the bill, either military service or college enrollment would make such young people eligible for legal status.)

The DREAM Act has been bouncing around Congress for several years now, and with the Republican Party likely to make big gains in both houses this November, 2010 is looking like the bill’s make or break year. National student groups have been working with students on campuses across the country on a final push in recent weeks.

Multiple reports today suggest that Senate majority leader Harry Reid plans to bring the bill to the floor next week, so stay tuned…

Update | Here’s a post from the blog Firedoglake saying Reid confirmed at a press conference just now that he intends to attach the DREAM Act to the upcoming defense authorization bill. The Associated Press is now reporting that Reid “wants to” attach the DREAM Act to the defense bill, but “wouldn’t say whether he has the votes for the amendment.”

September 17 Update | The New York Times says this morning that the DREAM Act showdown has given “the student movement a chance to show its muscle.”

In Anoka, Minnesota, in July of this year, a gay teenager named Justin Aaberg killed himself. He killed himself because he was being bullied, and he was bullied because he was gay.

He was one of three gay students in his district to kill themselves in the last year.

Justin’s mother Tammy is campaigning to bring LGBT-positive anti-bullying education programs to the Anoka-Hennepin school system, but the school district is resisting, and other parents have started organizing against her.

Tammy Aaberg is right, of course, and the parents who oppose her are wrong. But her rightness and their wrongness isn’t what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about something else we can do about bigotry, without going through school boards or waging big campaigns.

I want to talk about talking.

My daughter Casey is seven, and going into second grade. This summer she went to a day camp outside the city, which meant half an hour or so on the bus each direction every day. The campers and counselors brought CDs to play on the ride.

Which is how she wound up singing “Don’t Stop Believing” in the back of our minivan when she and I and her little sister were on a camping trip to Niagara Falls a few weeks ago.

It took me a while to figure out that she’d learned the song from the Glee soundtrack, but figure it out I eventually did, and then I found their version of the tune online and we put it on repeat, the three of us belting it out over and over again.

By the time we’d got back to the city, I’d decided to let them watch the show.

Which is how we wound up on my bed a few nights ago watching the episode in which Kurt (the gay kid in the high school glee club from which the show takes its name, for all my elderly readers) tries to land a solo singing a song written for a female singer. The episode in which Kurt’s dad, an adorably well-meaning and supportive auto mechanic, gets an anonymous phone call threatening violence against his “fag” son.

I paused the show at that scene.

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