iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

They took the saw to the only tree still giving shade. Branches gone, bottles falling like ugly confetti. Arborists of austerity strike again. Hope you like the sunburn. #GOPWarOnHeathcare

0133

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

Ambulance running on fumes and a hologram that just raised the fare. Neon looks great until the battery dies. Welcome to the future where the grid is pretty and the coverage is toast. #GOPWarOnHeathcare

073

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

Final boss is your monthly rate and the continue screen costs a kidney. Pixel clinic crumbling, extra lives sold separately. Game over never looked so bureaucratic. Insert coin, insert dignity. #GOPWarOnHealthCare

053

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

Pretty vines, mean thorns. She reached for care and got landscaping. The lily hospital wilted on schedule. Elegance is free, treatment is not. Somebody prune this policy before it flowers again. #GOPWarOnHealthCare

073

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

Holy light, unholy invoice. The pretty window now has gray patches where the ward used to be. Kneel all you want, the bottle stays empty. Faith healing optional, copays mandatory. #GOPWarOnHealthCare

085

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

Seesaw math: bags go up, bodies go splat. They balanced the books by unbalancing the ward. If this is fiscal fitness, the gym should be sued. Bring a helmet to checkout. #GOPWarOnHealthCare

0157

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

It worked as intended. The constant threat of being blacklisted, losing employment, facing criminal charges and enduring relentless harassment caused the group’s ambitious plans to fall apart. Under immense pressure, the Sojourners for Truth and Justice were forced to dissolve by late 1952. /end

Louise Thompson Patterson, 1960. Patterson was the operational backbone, executive organizer and administrative engine of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice. After the initial Washington mobilization, the collective voted to establish a permanent national framework, appointing Patterson as the Executive Secretary. She took on the task of transforming a three-day protest into a sustained national movement. She traveled extensively to raise money and establish local Sojourners chapters. Because she was the administrative nerve center of the organization, the Department of Justice and the FBI subjected her to relentless surveillance. They eventually seized her passport to cut off her ability to connect with international leftist and anti-colonial organizations. However, Patterson never renounced her leftist commitments. She carried the same organizing blueprint into the 1970s, where she served as a leader in the successful international movement to Free Angela Davis.

0143

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

The FBI viewed the Sojourners for Truth and Justice as a national security threat because they combined Black nationalism, civil rights and communist ideology. The Bureau compiled a nearly 500-page file on the group and used surveillance and intimidation tactics to crush their operations. /9

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (left) and Attorney General J. Howard McGrath confer on the government’s roundup of Communist party officials in Washington, 1951. An informant notified the FBI during the first meetings of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, triggering the creation of their official file. Informants attended their strategy meetings, monitored travel plans and identified the core leaders. During their initial D.C. mobilization, special agents in dark suits followed the women everywhere they went. Agents physically blocked the women from entering pre-arranged meeting spaces. To justify their surveillance and alienate the group from mainstream civil rights organizations, the FBI manufactured alarming narratives about the women. By painting them as violent insurrectionists, the FBI successfully stoked public fear and scared away moderate allies.

1113

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

A major effort was the defense of Rosa Lee Ingram, a Black mother sentenced to death after defending herself against a white attacker. They framed Ingram’s imprisonment not just as a miscarriage of justice, but as state-sanctioned violence against the bodily autonomy and safety of Black women. /8

Rosa Lee Ingram (left) and her teenage sons in jail. In 1947, Rosa Lee Ingram, a widowed Black sharecropper in Georgia, and her teenage sons were sentenced to death for killing an armed white sharecropper who had assaulted her. The immediate, explosive backlash from civil rights organizations, legal defense funds and grassroots coalitions, including the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, forced the trial judge to commute their death sentences to life imprisonment a few months later. The family spent more than a decade in prison, during which time activists persistently campaigned for their release and continuously applied pressure on the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles. On Aug. 26, 1959, Rosa Lee, Wallace and Sammie Lee were finally granted parole and freed. Rosa Lee relocated to Atlanta, where she lived until her death on Aug. 5, 1980, at age 78.

1135

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

The group formulated an early form of Black left feminism, blending anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist perspectives. They sought to expose state complicity and violence directed against Black Americans, pointing out the hypocrisy of the government promoting “democracy” abroad. /7

Shirley Graham Du Bois. Du Bois was the chief intellectual strategist and public voice of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice. While history frequently frames her through her marriage to W.E.B. Du Bois, she was a radical force in her own right, working as an accomplished opera composer, playwright and political theorist long before 1951. Alongside Louise Thompson Patterson, she conceptualized the organization as a radical defense front. She recognized that the government wasn’t just attacking an individual. It was attempting to decapitate Black radical leadership during the Red Scare. She leveraged her extensive network to bring together the 14 founders, framing her husband’s defense not as a private grievance, but as a collective fight for the survival of Black intellectual freedom. Because of her uncompromising leadership, Graham Du Bois was monitored by the FBI and blacklisted.

1133

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

The founders only gave themselves two weeks to pull off the mobilization and were surprised when 132 women managed to travel to Washington, D.C., on such short notice. Fueled by the momentum, they formally established a permanent organization and immediately scaled up their efforts. /6

1125

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

On days 2 and 3, the women marched to and held meetings with officials at the Department of Justice, the War Department and the Pentagon to demand the protection of Black lives. When President Harry S. Truman refused to meet with them, they staged a silent vigil on the White House lawn. /5

Charlotta Bass speaks at the inaugural meeting of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, Sept. 29, 1951. As a veteran journalist, publisher of the California Eagle and a fierce civil rights leader, Bass was known for delivering speeches that targeted state-sanctioned violence and connected local struggles to global movements. She emphasized the vulnerability of Black women under the American legal system, using her platform to proclaim that Black women could no longer afford to play a secondary or quiet role in politics. She argued that because Black women suffered the brunt of economic exploitation and state violence, they had to be at the vanguard of the civil rights struggle. Bass refused to moderate her radical, anti-imperialist views for mainstream appeal. Her address established an early foundation for Black left feminism, intertwining the dismantling of racism, sexism and war.

1113

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

When the women arrived in the capital, they gathered for an inaugural convention in which young poet and playwright Lorraine Hansberry read the group’s indictment of racial capitalism and state violence. She said, “We cannot … sit by and watch our lives destroyed by an unreasoning hate.” /4

Lorraine Hansberry. Years before she achieved global acclaim for her 1959 masterpiece A Raisin in the Sun, a 21-year-old Hansberry was immersed in radical, left-wing journalism and organizing. At the inaugural convention for the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, she took the stage to read the group’s proclamation to the 132 assembled women. Working as a writer and editor for Paul Robeson’s progressive newspaper, Freedom, Hansberry subsequently published a groundbreaking report titled “Women Voice Demands in Capital Sojourn.” This piece documented the group’s actions for the public, bypassing the heavily censored mainstream media of the McCarthy era. Organizing with the Sojourners shaped Hansberry’s early grasp of “the woman question,” helping her weave early intersectional feminist and anti-colonial themes into her later literary works.

1134

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

The effort was spurred by the indictment of 83-year-old W.E.B. Du Bois on charges of being an “unregistered foreign agent” due to his peace activism and anti-nuclear stance. Black women leaders were alarmed by the government’s weaponization of the Red Scare to silence civil rights leaders. /3

1134

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

In early September 1951, 14 prominent Black women penned the manifesto “A Call to Negro Women.” They invited Black women nationwide to join them for a “Sojourn for Truth and Justice,” using the name to honor the legacy of Sojourner Truth and describe a brief, targeted trip to Washington, D.C. /2

The cover of the zine titled A Call to Negro Women: A (Little-Known) Black Feminist Manifesto, with an introduction by Mariame Kaba, an essay by Ashley D. Farmer and design and illustration by Jordan De Loach. It centers on the 1951 founding document written by the radical civil rights group Sojourners for Truth and Justice. The manifesto moved away from polite civil rights rhetoric and replaced it with a fiery, uncompromising indictment of the U.S. government. It put the concept of “triple oppression” into raw, emotional prose. It argued that Black women bore a unique, devastating burden under American capitalism because they were simultaneously exploited as Black people, as women and as workers. The manifesto refused to blame racism on “ignorant individuals” or Southern extremist groups. Instead, the authors accused the state of being complicit in racial terror by failing to pass anti-lynching laws and using the legal system to cage Black families.

1123

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

#ResistanceRoots Today in history, 1951: The Sojourners for Truth and Justice begin a three-day assembly in Washington, D.C., with a march and silent vigil on the White House lawn. More than 132 Black women from 14 states arrived in the capital to demand federal action against racial terror. /1

Members of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice gather during their initial mobilization, Sept. 29 to Oct. 2, 1951. More than 132 African American women from 14 states descended on the nation’s capital to demand an end to racial violence, Jim Crow laws and the systemic oppression of Black women. While the poor quality of the photo makes it difficult to pinpoint every face from left to right, several core organizers and notable figures are prominent in the center-front cluster: Louise Thompson Patterson, Charlotta Bass, Shirley Graham Du Bois and Eslanda Goode Robeson. Other trailblazing figures who participated in the Washington, D.C., delegation included legendary activist Mary Church Terrell, journalist Claudia Jones and a young Lorraine Hansberry, who read the group’s manifesto aloud during the convention.

15221

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

More plastic, less glow? Pollution threatens deep sea’s bioluminescent life, experts warn

#ResistanceEarth In the darkness of the deep sea, 80% of organisms use bioluminescence to find food, deter predators and attract mates. Now more plastic debris is sinking into the abyss. When deep-sea organisms ingest it, it can hamper their ability to emit light. news.mongabay.com/short-articl...

news.mongabay.com

Scientists are raising concerns that deep sea plastic may be affecting the ability of bioluminescent organisms to find mates and food.

15133

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

Shooti @bambooshooti.bsky.social · 7h

They painted the clinic as a piñata and called the smash a savings plan. Coins rain upstairs, gauze runs dry downstairs. Beautiful wall, ugly harvest. Somebody fetch a ladder and a spine. #GOPWarOnHealthCare

0116

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

The Repub Senator for Alaska is from a wealthy Cincinnati family and has millions in investments. Mary Peltola is an Alaska native who understands the state's struggles. You can help her flip this seat by visiting her website, where you'll find ways to donate and volunteer. marypeltola.com

marypeltola.com

Home - Mary Peltola

It's simple: The fight for Fish, Family, Freedom depends on fixing the rigged system in DC.

0209

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

Shooti @bambooshooti.bsky.social · 7h

In a state where the price of everything from gas to groceries is sky high, Alaskans are looking for someone to do something. Mary Peltola gets it, and has a plan for lowering the cost of living in the state. Elect Mary Peltola U.S. Senate, Alaska

Graphic supporting Mary Peltola for U.S. Senate, Alaska.

24519

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

bsky.app/profile/ekta...

043

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

Yeah, elect a convicted felon for a president, get a crime syndicate for a government. It's the fault of the 77 million Americans who didn't care that he was a criminal. #VoteBlue to correct that mistake!

43519

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social

bsky.app/profile/ekta...

032

Reposted by @marikosegawa.bsky.social