“Alligator Alcatraz” Echoes Angel Island

“Alligator Alcatraz,” as a grotesquely flippant nickname for a Florida incarceration camp, makes light of what will happen to the people there. It’s really an inaccurate comparison as well, since Alcatraz was a max-security prison for America’s most violent, already-convicted criminals. The more accurate comparison would be with Alcatraz’s neighbor in San Francisco Bay, Angel Island, just two miles away. Like Alcatraz, Angel Island is surrounded by cold, shark-infested waters. Unlike Alcatraz, it was, from 1910-1940, a federal immigration station that processed 550,000 travelers to the U.S.

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It’s Women’s Equality Day! Are You Registered to Vote?

On August 26, 1920, our Constitution grew, as did our society’s recognition of who is seen as equal under the law. That was the day the 19th Amendment became part of the very foundation of our legal system, giving the right to vote to women!

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We Must Recover Our National Creed

There are occasions in the daily grind of our existence, when we’re all mostly preoccupied by our scheduled tasks and deadlines, that an event of historic proportions breaks through our collective self-absorption and screams at us to pay attention to our life together as a nation.  

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