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I’ve just hit Tallahassee for the 61st annual National Student Congress of the United States Student Association, and I’ll be blogging from the ground here for the next six days.
USSA is the oldest and largest student-led national student organization in the United States. Founded in 1947, it’s a confederation of student governments and State Student Associations that prioritizes grass-roots organizing and legislative lobbying from its headquarters in Washington DC.
Much more about USSA, and this year’s Congress, to come…
Today is Nelson Mandela’s 93rd birthday, which seems like as good a reason as any to tell this story.
Mandela’s first experience in political organizing didn’t come in the anti-apartheid movement. It came in student government at his undergraduate college, the University of Fort Hare.
In his senior year, Mandela was nominated for Fort Hare’s Student Representative Council, a six-member student government. But in a mass meeting shortly before the elections, the student body of the college voted to boycott, citing the poor quality of the food on campus and the weakness of the SRC itself.
Twenty-five students out of the campus of 150 broke the boycott and voted in the election, and Mandela was elected. He and the rest of the SRC-elect refused to take their seats. Another election was held, a similar number of students voted, and Mandela again refused to serve. Mandela again refused to serve, and was expelled for his protest. He would go on to finish his undergraduate education by correspondence at another university.
Billy Bragg debuted a new song on stage this weekend, a throwback to the topical political tunes of his youth. Titled “Never Buy the Sun,” it’s a commentary on the scandals currently engulfing the British tabloids owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International.
If you haven’t been following that story, it’s a doozy. For several years now, it’s been known that the weekly News of the World tabloid had illegally hacked into certain celebrities’ voicemail messages as part of its newsgathering operations. But in the last few weeks that story has been completely transformed, as the full scope of the hacking and related misbehavior has come to light.
First it was revealed that the paper gained access to the cellphone voicemail of teenaged murder victim Milly Dowler while Dowler was still missing. Journalists at the time went so far as to delete messages from the system in an effort to free up space for more incoming calls, leading Dowler’s parents to conclude that their child was still alive and checking her phone. It has also been suggested that the deletions misled police as to the facts of the crime, hindering their investigation, and may even have destroyed evidence in the case.
Not long after the Milly Dowler story broke, it was charged that News of the World had hacked into the phones of British servicemembers who had been killed in action, and into those of relatives of victims of the terrorist bombings that struck London on July 7, 2005. More recently, it’s been learned that the paper had made a habit of bribing police officials for tips, and just today, a series of revelations emerged about how papers throughout the News International organization targeted former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his family.
This is a huge scandal in Britain right now — it’s already led to the permanent closure of News of the World and several high-profile arrests, and it’s been compared to Watergate in its potential scope and significance.
Which brings us back to Billy Bragg. Billy’s been a political songwriter for a very long time now, and about a quarter century ago he wrote a song about the British tabloids called “It Says Here.” He’d been messing around with an updated version over the last week or so, but kept finding that new developments were overtaking his songwriting, so eventually he wound up putting together something completely new — “Never Buy the Sun.”
“Never Buy the Sun” is a good song, but its title, and its most repeated lyric — Scousers never buy the Sun — depend on a bit of knowledge of British history that most Americans don’t have. Here’s the skinny:
On April 15, 1989, Liverpool’s local football (soccer) team was playing an important game at Hillsborough Stadium, a neutral venue. At the time, Hillsborough — like many British stadiums — had non-reserved seating and high fences between the stands and the playing field. There was a big crowd for that day’s match, and a bottleneck developed at the entrances at the Liverpool end of the field. Large numbers of fans remained outside even after the game began, and when police opened a small gate to eject a fan, some members of the crowd surged forward. In response, the police opened several larger exit gates to serve as an additional entrance, without putting crowd control measures in place to direct foot traffic. As a result, thousands of fans pressed forward into stands that had no room to accommodate them, and those in the front had no ability to leave — or even move — when they began to be crushed by those behind. Ninety-six people were killed in the crush, one of the worst such disasters in British history.
Four days after the Hillsborough Disaster, the Sun newspaper — like the News of the World, a part of Murdoch’s News International empire — ran a front-page story claiming that as events were unfolding, Liverpool fans attacked and urinated on police who were trying to bring events under control, sexually abused the body of a girl who had died in the crush, and picked the pockets of the dead.
These were all lies.
The Sun did not immediately retract its story, and the paper has subsequently veered between apology and justification. Sales of the paper in Liverpool plummeted in the wake of of the incident, and have never — twenty-two years later — recovered. Today Liverpool is one of Britain’s largest cities and the Sun is one of the country’s best-selling newspapers, but only a few thousand copies of the paper are sold in Liverpool each day. Many newsstands won’t even carry it.
In local slang, a person from Liverpool is called a Scouser.
And Scousers never buy the Sun.
Heading down to Washington today for tomorrow’s Campus Progress national conference. I’ll be moderating a panel on students and youth in social justice movements in the United States with Carmen Berkeley of Choice USA (a former US Student Association president), John Halpin of the Center for American Progress, and Evangeline Weiss of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
It should be a really good panel. If you’re going to be at the conference, stop by and say hi!
NOTE: The conference schedule has changed to accommodate Bill Clinton’s schedule (he’s keynoting). Our panel starts at 11:00 now.
Throughout the student movement of the 1960s, most American college students were denied the right to vote.
From the birth of the American republic the voting age had stood at 21. Pressure for earlier voting had been building since 18-year-olds were first drafted in the Second World War, but despite the baby boom, the student movements of the sixties, and the deaths of thousands of Americans under 21 in Korea and Vietnam, reform went nowhere for decades. It was only in May 1970, after National Guard troops shot and killed four students during a protest at Kent State University, that Congress finally took action.
In the aftermath of Kent State, with the nation reeling from the spectacle of its own troops gunning down its own students, the 18-year-old vote was introduced as an amendment to the Voting Rights Act. One senator threatened to filibuster the renewal of the Act if that amendment was not incorporated into it.
The Voting Rights Act, as amended, was signed into law by President Nixon that June. The Supreme Court declared the provision unconstitutional that winter, ruling that Congress didn’t have the power to enfranchise youth in state and local elections, but the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress the following spring and ratified by the states in record time, gave 18-to-20-year-olds the vote for good.
That ratification came forty years ago today.
With the lowering of the voting age, college students became a significant voting bloc in American politics. In the 1970s, for the first time, students could exercise political power not just in the streets, but in the voting booth as well.
A new kind of student politics demanded a new kind of organizing, and so 1971 also saw the creation of the National Student Lobby, America’s first national student-funded, student-directed lobbying organization. State Student Associations (SSAs) and state student lobbies soon followed, making the 1970s an unprecedented boom-time for student electoral organizing.
The SSAs of the 1970s transformed American politics and higher education forever, altering the balance of power between students and educational institutions while giving students a voice in state and national politics that reached far beyond the campus.
Happy birthday, youth voting!
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