Ed Tant

Rights Rites Rouse Athens, GA!

The Athens Human Rights Festival is an annual springtime political and cultural event in Athens, GA.

For nearly 30 years, the rights festival has featured issue-oriented speakers like activist Dave Dellinger

and Athens  musicians like Vanessa Vego, shown in the photos above from festivals in the 1980s.

A fun-filled and family-friendly Children’s Area is a centerpiece of each year’s Athens Human Rights Festival, and the three kids in the photo above seem to be enjoying the springtime weekend. Fun for older folks is guaranteed when the Divas drag queen revue takes the stage at the festival (right). Speakers are a mainstay at the festival that began in 1979 as a memorial to protesters killed at Kent State and Jackson State campuses in 1970. In the photo below, civil rights warhorse John Lewis makes his point. Firebrand attorney Millard Farmer holds forth in the photo below right.

“Llama Chuck” Harper and his four-legged friends are festival fixtures that delight folks young and old at the annual event. Face-painting is a popular way to have fun at the Athens Human Rights Festival, as this happy little fellow in the photo at left shows with his smile. Charity and community service are big parts of every festival. In the photo below, from the tenth annual rights fest back in 1988, Deb Bernstein speaks for festival charities.

Jesse Jackson spoke to a record crowd at the 2001 Human Rights Festival in downtown Athens. Other well known festival speakers have included poet Coleman Barks, Freedom Rider Hank Thomas, international activist Nisha Anand, physicist Michio Kaku and ‘60s hell-raiser John Sinclair.

The Athens Montessori Choir is always a festival favorite (above). Longtime local musician Tommy Jordan has played at every Athens Human Rights Fest.  That’s him in 1987 in the photo to the right.

Antiwar activist Brooke Campbell, whose brother was killed in the Iraq war, blasted the Bush administration in a touching and timely speech at the 27th Athens Human Rights Festival in 2005. Former CNN anchorwoman Lynne Russell (above) told festivalgoers about the dangers of the government surveillance in her 2004 festival appearance. Vietnam vet Larry Colburn, who saved lives at My Lai, spoke at the 20th festival. In the photo below, the late Athenian Dr. Louis Carrick  of Industrial Workers of the World, works an info table. Carrick was an IWW member while working at Detroit auto plants in the  1930s.

Dave Dellinger (1915-2004) spoke at Athens Human Rights Festivals in 1981, 1995 and 1997 and at the American Radical Gathering that was held in Athens in 1999.  A rebel without a pause for more than 60 years as an activist for peace and justice, Dellinger was best known as the lead defendant in the tempestuous Chicago 7 show trial of antiwar leaders in 1969 and 1970. Forty years ago, in 1967, Dellinger led protesters on the  legendary March on the Pentagon that Norman Mailer immortalized in his book, “Armies of the Night.”  Dellinger was influential in convincing Dr. Martin Luther King to speak out against the war that same year.  Dellinger was educated at Yale, Oxford and Union Theological Seminary and through what he called “refresher courses” in jails and prisons for nonviolent protest.  He is the author of several books including his autobiography, “From Yale to Jail.”

John Lewis

Millard Farmer

Brooke Campbell

Lynne Russell

Larry Colburn

Dave Dellinger at the 1997 rights festival