So yeah, Justin Bieber visited the Anne Frank House and left a note in the guestbook calling her “a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.”

Of course everyone went nuts, myself not excluded. There’s the narcissism thing, and the weird time traveler thing — is he imagining her as a belieber now, in her 80s, or imagining himself as a wartime pop star?

But there’s another layer down below all that. Check out this clip, the only moving picture footage of Anne Frank known to exist:

Those few seconds of film were shot in July 1941, on the day of a neighbor couple’s wedding. Anne had just turned twelve. She was a year away from going into hiding, forty-three months away from death.

I don’t know if they show that clip at the Anne Frank House, but if they do, it’s not hard to imagine Bieber watching it and seeing one of his fans. To express that as he did was clumsy, but also somehow sweet.

We know next to nothing about what music Anne Frank liked. Beyond a reference to a Mozart concert on the radio (“I can hardly listen in the room because I’m always so inwardly stirred”), there’s virtually nothing in her writings that speaks to that question.

But we do know that she was a girl who cut out pictures of celebrities and glued them to her bedroom wall, though, because that wall survives at the Anne Frank House. (“Thanks to Daddy,” she wrote, “who had brought my picture postcards and film-star collection beforehand … I have transformed the walls into one gigantic picture.” Over her years in hiding, she added new pictures and covered up older ones, swapping out Deanna Durbin for Leonardo Da Vinci like any self-respecting teen.)

And here’s something about that wall. For all the obsessive documentation of Anne Frank’s live that the last sixty-eight years have seen, and for all the ways that the web facilitates tracking and analyzing and plumbing visual culture artifacts, there’s apparently no full listing of the subjects of the photographs anywhere on the internet, no annotated reproduction of the wall itself. The wall is a document that Anne and her sister created and maintained as their link to the outside world and that life they’d left behind, and hoped to return to, but it appears that none of us have cared enough about that act of creation to excavate and display it in the most thoughtful and fullest way our era can.

Isn’t it possible that Bieber, seeing that wall, imagined his photograph on it? And doesn’t that kind of break your heart?

So yeah, I don’t know. It’s easy to mock. But the more I think about it, the less I want to.

Fifty years ago yesterday, a group of eight white Birmingham clergy published “A Call For Unity,” an open letter criticizing Martin Luther King and other civil rights organizers. The letter, excerpted below and available in full here, prompted King to write Letter From Birmingham Jail.

The authors of A Call For Unity varied in their background and ideology, but all of them considered themselves opponents of segregation. They were, they believed, allies of the anti-racist cause. Several were, in fact, anti-racist activists. Their letter was a call for caution, not capitulation, for slow progress, not retreat.

In the years that followed, some would take King’s words to heart and expand their commitment to forceful anti-racist organizing. Others would become embittered, believing that King had misrepresented and slandered them.

“We are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens, directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely…

“We believe this kind of facing of issues can best be accomplished by citizens of our own metropolitan area, white and Negro, meeting with their knowledge and experiences of the local situation. All of us need to face that responsibility and find proper channels for its accomplishment.

“Just as we formerly pointed out that ‘hatred and violence have no sanction in our religious and political traditions,’ we also point out that such actions as incite to hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be, have not contributed to the resolution of our local problems. We do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified in Birmingham…

“We further strongly urge our own Negro community to withdraw support from these demonstrations, and to unite locally in working peacefully for a better Birmingham. When rights are consistently denied, a cause should be pressed in the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets. We appeal to both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense.”

 King’s response, Letter From Birmingham Jail, appeared four days later.

Seeing that France and Uruguay are about to legalize same-sex marriage, I got curious. So I looked up some stats, because I’m a dork. And I’m sharing them, because some of you are dorks too.

1. Eleven countries, not including France and Uruguay, have marriage equality nationwide.
2. Three more — Brazil, Mexico, and the United States — have marriage equality in some jurisdictions but not others.
3. Although same-sex marriage is legally recognized for less than half of Brazilians, Brazil is the country with the most same-sex-marriage-legal citizens, at 92.6 million.
4. Nearly a quarter of the people in the whole world who live in places where same-sex couples can marry live there.
5. France’s new law will make it the second most populous marriage equality jurisdiction, with 65.4 million people.
6. France’s law will increase the number of folks who have marriage equality worldwide by 15%.
7. Uruguay will bump up the numbers by another 3.7 million, less than one percent.
8. After France and Uruguay take the plunge, the land of marriage equality will have a population of about 452 million people.
9. That would be the third largest country in the world, if it were a country.
10. That’s about six and a half percent of the world’s population.
11. Right now, the largest country with full marriage equality is South Africa, with 50.6 million people.
12. In the United States, 49.4 million live in marriage equality jurisdictions.
13. More South Africans have marriage equality than Americans, in other words.
14. Full marriage equality in the US would boost the global total by nearly fifty percent.
15. The list of present and impending marriage-equality countries, in descending order of population is this: Brazil*, France, South Africa, The United States*, Spain, Argentina, Canada, The Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Mexico*, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Uruguay, Iceland.
16. That’s sixteen countries, of which only two are primarily English-speaking.
17. Canada is the world’s only majority-English country with full marriage equality.
18. The Netherlands is the world’s only majority-non-religious country with full marriage equality.
19. Nine of the sixteen are majority or plurality Catholic.
20. Including seven of the ten most populous.
21. That means that nearly two-thirds of the people in the world who live in marriage equality jurisdictions live in Catholic countries, though less than a fifth of the world’s population is Catholic.

#themoreyouknow

Update | As @SpringaldJack notes on Twitter, counting the US jurisdictions where same-sex marriage is recognized as marriage equality jurisdictions counts residents of those jurisdictions “as having marriage equality, which they don’t.”

There are jurisdictions in the US which recognize same-sex marriage. There are no jurisdictions in the US with full marriage equality. (The situation is apparently similar in Mexico. Brazilian couples’ status appears to be a bit more complex.)

I’ve been preoccupied with other stuff today, so haven’t had the chance to liveblog this, but a number of students, faculty, and staff are striking today and tomorrow at Indiana University.

The group aren’t aiming to shut the university down, but they have reportedly reduced attendance considerably, and are staging teach-ins, marches and other events on both a campuswide and class-by-class basis. They’re calling for a reduction in tuition in fees, an end to privatization and outsourcing, salary hikes, an increase in African American enrollment, and repeal of two laws targeting undocumented immigrants. (Background on the strike here and here.)

Breaking news on the strike can be found at the #IUonstrike Twitter hashtags and from the @IUonstrike account. There’s a student newspaper story on a morning march here, and a Tumblr here.

More later.

High school students in Newark will walk out of classes today at noon, marching to Rutgers Law School to attend a State Assembly budget hearing on education funding.

The demonstration is being staged by the Newark Students Union (Facebook | Twitter) to protest school closings and budget cuts. A 2010 walkout drew thousands of students to Newark’s city hall, leading Governor Chris Christie to complain that school officials had done “a lousy job” in keeping students on campus.

You can follow all the action on twitter at the #NPSWalkout hashtag, and I’ll be updating this post once things get underway.

11:50 am | Students have started walking out.

12:30 pm | Reports on Twitter of walkouts at eight Newark high schools: Bard, Central, East Side, Vocational, Science, Technology, University, Weequahic.

12:50 pm |Students at East Side and Weequahic high schools say that exit doors have been locked and they have been prevented from leaving.

1:00 pm | Reports of a late walkout at West Side HS.

1:25 pm | @NewarkStudents reports that there are delegations present from Arts, Shabazz, and North Star Academy at the demonstration, in addition to all those listed above.

1:30 pm | Need to go teach. More later.

4:30 pm | So, the walkout and demonstration are over. One local newspaper estimated participation at one thousand students, though they also claimed “half a dozen schools,” when the true number is at least twice that, so who knows? One important thing to remember is that participation was clearly suppressed by school officials — they warned students that they could be punished for participating, and at several schools reportedly took aggressive measures to prevent students from leaving. Given that, a walkout rate of around ten percent of the city’s high school students is quite dramatic.

4:50 pm | Journalist Rania Khalek has an excellent liveblog on the day’s events. Go read it.

4:55 pm | The Star-Ledger story I linked above reported participation from American History, Arts, Central, Science, Technology, and University. I saw tweets from students who had walked out at Bard, Vocational, Weequahic, and West Side as well, and walkout organizers reported that students walked out of East Side and Shabazz. That’s twelve, plus North Star Academy, a charter.