Activists share their glory days

Over a goblet of red wine at the White Dog Cafe on Monday night, Muffin Friedman told a crowd of 15 people how she met her first husband while chained to a chair inside a courtroom. Then there was Aishah Shahidah Simmons, who remembered being in an "activism boot camp from birth on" in which her father, Michael Simmons, taught her that Christopher Colombus did not discover America and that Tarzan was a racist show. Such were the tales heard at Monday night's program, "Is There an Activism Gene?", in which four local protesters -- each of whom recently received awards from the activist organization Bread & Roses -- were invited to discuss how values of activism can be transmitted through generations. The activists came together over dinner at the Sansom Street restaurant to tell how they each succeeded in creating an environment that fostered social change. For instance, Michael Simmons, the national coordinator of the American Friends Service Committee, travels around the world promoting human rights issues. In the late 1960s, he was incarcerated for 2 1/2 years for refusing to join the military. His daughter, Aishah, who also spoke at the event, is an independent documentary filmmaker who protests against social injustices -- her most recent film, No, is about rape -- as an advocate of the black lesbian community. Even though she said she may have resented having to attend assorted rallies as a young girl, Aishah said she soon grew into her legacy, following in her father's footsteps as an activist. "In retrospect, it made me stronger," Simmons said. Like Aishah, Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, a junior at Wesleyan University, was raised with leftist core values. Yet she found her unconventional upbringing to be a great advantage as she was always taught to "look underneath what's going on." "They gave me the optimism and the principles that [my] life is not going to be better depending on how much money I make," said Friedman-Rudovsky, who was jailed for her involvement in the World Bank protests last spring in Washington, D.C. Turning to the generation to which all Penn undergraduates belong, Friedman-Rudovsky urged college-aged young adults not to "succumb to the stereotype that youths are apathetic." "You can do something as simple as sign a petition or attend a protest. Act on those beliefs and those values and have the knowledge that things will change," she said. Sue Ellen Klien, the organizer of the event, said she was very pleased with the outcome of the night's discussion. "Whenever people tell their personal stories and share them with others," Klien said, "there is something very meaningful about that." Likewise, Kenny Brownstein, one of Klien's friends, said she found the talk very informative and could relate to the topic at hand. His children, he said, are actually the activists in the family, but he has "benefited because [he] has learned so much about things that [he] would never have heard about" had his offspring not been so involved in activism.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.