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Second Offshore Operation

 

Concurrent with the ongoing activities of the Four Freedoms Federation, contractual undertakings were entered into with regards to buying the offshore radio ship which had been used to broadcast between 1987 and 1988 as Radio Newyork International. One of the intended new uses for this ship was to broadcast under the call sign of Radio Tiananmen in support of Chinese students. Because of governmental opposition to the project the plan was dropped in favor of relaunching Wonderful Radio London once more. This time the ship was to be docked in a US harbor and the onboard studios linked to the shortwave transmitters of WWCR in Tennessee whose signal could be heard in the United Kingdom. To this end two British companies were formed and registered in Chelmsford, England. However, due to complications involving the actual registration of the ship and the inability of the seller to provide proof of legal ownership, this plan also faltered.

John Lilburne Research Institute

 

It was during a quest to both discover and document the history and development of the copyright laws in both the UK and USA, that resulted in the creation of John Lilburne Research Institute. This development took place when members of the Federation discovered the genealogical and legal connections between the lives of John Lilburne (c.1614–1657) and President Thomas Jefferson (1700–1800), and the subsequent interest taken by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in this subject. According to Genie Baskir (who helped to form the Four Freedoms Federation), the son of Hugo Black informed her that his father had begun to call himself a legal leveller in 1947 when he began to incorporate the ideas of John Lilburne into his Supreme Court Opinions.

Justice Black also began championing his view that the United States Bill of Rights had been made applicable to the various states. Justice William O. Douglas joined Black when he began to draw attention to Lilburne in his non-court writings. Black and Douglas were also a part of the majority Opinion in Miranda v. Arizona that was written by Chief Justice Earl Warren. In his written work for the Court in this case, Warren quoted from the 1637 trial of John Lilburne as the origin of the United States Fifth Amendment. This same theme was then picked up and advanced in various books produced by notable publishing houses. However, regardless of this research, very little of it had found its way into school textbooks which treated the development of British and American history as two, separate and often unrelated subjects when in reality both subjects were intertwined with each other.

Challenging school textbooks

 

One of the first appearances made by the Four Freedoms Federation was before the Texas Education Agency and its School Textbook Review Committee in Austin, Texas. This challenge led to a regionally famous civil action that was brought by Genie Baskir as a test case against a Texas Independent School District. The case dragged on for three years following an appeal which was suddenly denied when a newspaper feature covered the event. Other public engagements that were held in various parts of the United States during the 1987 included protests regarding the American Express tour of the 1215 Magna Carta which ignored the major contribution towards the development of personal liberty and human rights by John Lilburne.

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