I learned that the San Francisco Gateway Arch was established on October 18th, 1970 and was created by Clayton Lee, it was also based on ceremonial gates from Chinese villages. The first connection between my decade and the world today is the fight for equality and freedom is still the same. There were many movements in the 1970’s-1980’s like the first Pride march and “The Summer of Love”. The Pride March continues to be a long running annual tradition called the Pride Parade, this is similar to the idea of spreading positivity and sharing differences that was extremely common during “The Summer of Love”. The second connection is the black lives matter movements. The Black Panther movement was huge in the 1970’s which was the fight for the equality of black people. Today, it’s very easy to go on the internet and watch a new music video, interview, speech, or post about people speaking out about the injustice to black lives that is commonly broadcasted on the news or going viral online. The way that people make public statements has changed a lot since the 1970’s. In the 1970’s, social media wasn’t invented yet so the way that people spoke out was by doing marches and dedicating sections to these problems in the papers. Now, it’s easy to make a simple comment online and have so many people read it within minutes of you posting it. The Pride Parade is still annual and it remains as a place of representation to everyone, no matter color, gender, or sexuality. My personal favorite artifact is the painting because I think it was the most fun to make. As well as the fact that I resonated with the painting the most. To me, the painting is showing that the world is very big and bold and to live in a world with all kinds of different people, means we have to learn to coexist. I think I learned most about what was happening politically at the time. During this time, there was a lot of movements and rebelling against what was considered normal back then. If you could change one thing about this project, what would it be?I would change the book requirements. For our group, our book was really hard to read and keep up with. It didn’t follow a specific plot but it felt like very small instances chained together. I know that happened to a few other groups so I would change the requirements so we could have a wider variety of books to pick from. We read Virgin Soul by Judy Juanita. This book is set in the 1960-1970's San Francisco. This book follows a girl who is going into college named Geneice. Geneice captures information from her boyfriend named Allwood who inspires her to break out of her mould. Geneice and Allwood part ways as they head to separate colleges. In general, this book follows her on her journey while trying to maintain her mental health, social life and GPA. Sadly, by the second year of her college education, her GPA begins to drop and Geneice becomes involved in drug usage. In the midst of joining the Black Panther movement, the story expands on the different aspects that came with her coming of age story such as guns and shoplifting. This story was definitely not for those of the faint of heart.
Here is our slideshow presentation!:
Here are all of our artifacts!:
Here is what our group brought in for the potluck!: