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“Land of The Free and Home of The Brave?”

by MarshaRose
July 4, 2006

The Star-Spangled Banner" is the national anthem of the United States.  Francis Scott Key, a 35-year-old lawyer and amateur poet, wrote the lyrics in 1814 after witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland by British ships in Chesapeake Bay during the War of 1812.  It became well known as a patriotic song to the tune of a popular English drinking song, "To Anacreon in Heaven."  It was recognized for official use by the United States Navy (1889) and by the White House 1916), and was made the national anthem by a Congressional resolution on March 3, 1931.

Most of us cannot sing the song and those who can, only sing one verse.

Did you ever wonder why, if the song has four verses, only the first is commonly sung?

Well I’ll tell you.

Growing up in Baltimore, the place is so rich in history.  From America's infancy, democracy's first dream to today's realities . . . Baltimore always figured in the struggle.

My family has lived in Maryland since 1773.  My Great-grandfather, John H. Murphy, Sr., founded a newspaper more than 115 years ago (The Afro-American Newspapers). Moving to Baltimore in 1941, I learned at a very early age about being a Negro (that is what we were in those days).  In the 40's as a student in "segregated" elementary schools I was taught to hate the Jews because “they were Christ killers” and in the middle of war, hate the Germans and the Japanese, while the white man hated me—how absurd!

Every morning in our “separate but equal?” school, we stood to pledge allegiance to the flag – “with liberty and justice for all.” Justice? And oh, the field trips—Historic Baltimore is an abundant resource for teachers—the many many field trips to Fort McHenry—we ran across the ramparts, climbed on the cannons, peeped into the dungeons, imagined the bombs bursting in air—and the flag is still waving.

Oh, how many times had we as children, fought that war—Baltimore being the only school District in America where the children knew about the War of 1812 let alone the Battle of Baltimore?  Each time we held our heads up high and sang,—

O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?

Not ever giving one thought to the mockery of the words –

No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

At that same time America was at war using segregated troops—some African-American soldiers were lynched in uniform.  Black newspapers were charged with sedition for “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” for telling the truth about discrimination in the U.S.

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Even as an adult I climbed on the cannon to watch the new flag with it's 50th star being raised at Fort McHenry. As we celebrated the taking of an indigenous peoples’ land—again not seeing the travesty in the words—

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses?

Would you sing these verses of the song?

Finally, People stood up—enough was enough—enough discrimination—enough disparity—enough injustice—enough inequality—enough of an unjust war—the words rang true—

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust.”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

“None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.”  (Pearl S. Buck)

Here is the full song – all four verses- for your singing pleasure — [below the fold]

For Linda

By Marsha Rose Joyner

For: Linda
From: MarshaRose

“Child of pure unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet, and I and thou
Are half a life asunder,
Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love gift of a fairy tale”.

by Lewis Carroll

Time and distance dims memories!
And we all edit our thoughts.
As the White Queen said, “What good is a memory, when it only works in one direction and that is backwards?” In this day of TV and make-believe we have become desensitized and some things are too beautiful to forget.
Thus was Linda!

“A tale begun in other days,
When summer suns were glowing--
A simple chime that served to time
The rhythm of our rowing--
When echoes live in memory yet,
Through envious years should say, “forget”

Linda lived a life of value undefined by property and prosperity.
She lived a life in pursuit of the beauty nestled in everyone and everything – a beauty that is unrecognized by most of us.

Linda led an ever-changing life exploring the unthinkable and the unknowable. Finding the magnificence that is buried deep beneath the surface.

Linda was compelled to give all that she had – a burden not generally appreciated nor understood.

I do not know the time nor the place when she came into my life – but today as I sit with the knowledge that I’ll not hear her happy voice or see her smiling face - I roam from room to room touching the material things that we shared, the precious items she willingly gave away; a set of 19th Century French classic books; a stack of Civil Rights era recordings, [“The Freedom Singers Sing of Freedom Now!” –Mercury Records –1964 – “The Freedom Movement Told by Coretta Scott King” – Caedmon –1969] and many more; her father’s sculptures and of course her love and wisdom.

Linda understood when we give away a small piece of ourselves we get an even greater reward.

And she did give –
I called her “The Modern Day Harriet Tubman”
This Jewish woman with all the gifts that upper middle class in New York can bestow – opened her household to anyone and everyone fleeing the south. Legends of the Civil Rights Movement, the people who most of us only read about and worshiped at their altar, were real to her – because they had stayed at her home.

Linda gave voice to students of other cultures where English was a second language. She opened them to the elements - a world of communications – gave them the courage to read, write and dream in English. She introduced them to poetry in French and Farsi as well as Mozart on the out of tune school piano.

“I have not seen they sunny face,
Nor heard thy silver laughter:
No thought of me shall find a place
In thy life’s hereafter-
Enough that now thou wilt not fail
To listen to my fairy-tale.”

"Love is grabbing hold of the great lion’s mane." The ancient, fiery, Persian poet Hafiz wrote. And she did!
Linda was a warrior: The struggle for equality and justice was never far from the surface. Linda was prepared to suffer for the greater goodness of the world without falling prey to the continued enticement of money and fame. Linda had to go her own way, embolden the weak, bringing light into darkness with a spirit unbroken by the heartbreak and false promises of a world that did not understand.

Playing Beethoven on her beautiful Baby Grand from her living room overlooking West Loch, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii – Linda told me “the ambient noise of your daily routine is about to increase.”
“That is not possible,” I replied.
Bang! Went the piano top. She stood up. The cats scattered.
“Oh yes, they want to build an incinerator in my back yard – we must stop it!”

I walked over to the Lanai doors - It was a clear, bright Sunday. The afternoon sun, moving toward the south facing shores was just beginning to cast shadows. The gentle winds and billowing soft clouds gave an imperceptible repose to the surrounding loch. The sheer beauty of the waves gently licking the shore belied the carnage, which took place here at West Loch- the site of one of the bloodiest events of WWII.

She was right. The noise did increase. We were back on the path again. This time against the modern day Klan dressed in three-piece suits – the corporations and the City & County of Honolulu government and we did stop the incinerator.

“Come; hearken then, ere voice of dread,
With bitter tidings laden,
Shall summon to unwelcome bed
A melancholy maiden!
We are but older children, dear
Who fret to find our bedtime near.”

Last October, Linda, ScottyB, my son, Christopher and I ventured down to Lowndes County. Me, complete with all of my fears and prejudices and Linda armed only with her camera – she so loved everything about the place. The people who'd been involved in the Lowndes County Movement; the overgrown cemetery with its many secrets; the rustic homes that had provided shelter from the rage; the smell of autumn; and the chill in the air. We should all be privy to her view of Lowndes County.

“Without, the frost, the blinding snow,
The storm-wind’s moody madness—
Within, the firelight’s ruddy glow,
And childhood’s nest of gladness
The magic words shall hold thee fast:
Thou shalt not heed the waving blast.”

Linda’s father told her “even if you do not practice being Jewish – always say you are Jewish so that Hitler will not have won”.

Linda lived and loved around the world – from New York, France, Iran, London, Hawaii, California, and “The Black Belt” being devoted to justice and equality - I think when her father welcomed her into the hereafter his first words to her “thanks to you – Hitler will not have won.”

“And, through the shadow of a sigh
May tremble through the story
For “happy summer days” gone by,
It shall not touch with breath of bale,
The pleasure of our fairy-tale”

Lewis Carroll
“Through the Looking-Glass
And what Alice found there”

MarshaRose

June 28, 2006

"[I]t wouldn't surprise me if we both got up to dance."

I wish I could show you one of Linda's photographs. I wrote to one of Linda's dearest friends, Marsha Joyner (who publishes on HungryBlues from time to time) that Linda had a genius for seeing the beauty in people. This was evident in many ways, but it was really striking in her photographs.

To what I wrote before, I want to add that Linda Dehnad and Scott B. Smith were married on June 26, 2002 and then moved back to Alabama where Scott B had been active in SNCC and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in the 1960s. In the 1960s, Linda lived in NYC and was a central cog in SNCC's New York office. At that time she was married to Danny Moses, who was also active in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. They had a home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan which was a hub for many of the activists who came north from the South. From her first marriage, Linda is survived by three children, Jay, Julia and David.

Some of what I mean by Linda's genius for seeing the beauty in people is in these excerpts from an email she sent me on April 3 of this year.

I heard Taylor Branch talking in Lowndes County yesterday at the "Mother Church" at a book-signing, the best book signing I've ever seen, because all the people there who'd been involved in the Lowndes County Movement got up to talk and told stories and it was warm and tight and it felt historical. . . .

The first woman to introduce herself was Bernice Johnson, age 91, and I was thrilled because I've come across her name in books, and the name "Bernice" always stops me because of Freedom Singer Bernice (Reagon), and finally I see Bernice Johnson in the flesh. She was two rows ahead of me . . . and I crawled up and we shook hands and I told her, not too loud as to upset the meeting cause someone was speaking, I told her how I'd waited a long time to see her and meet her, and when she shook my hand it was like a clear message. I knew for sure that it meant something like "We are sisters, no doubt about that, and I'm as thrilled as you are." Second time I talked with her, was to ask if I could come over her house and take her picture because the lighting in the church made it hard, and her face is so beautiful I want to catch that beauty in a photo. We talked briefly about how I bet she had boys and men running all around her when she was young, and was she as beautiful then as she is now, and she just laughed and grinned and her eyes shone. Her daughter had to write the last two phone number digits cause she had forgotten them, and I also found out that her hearing aid had conked out and I couldn't figure out if it was fixable or her hearing was beyond help. That didn't seem to matter to her or to me. She squeezed my hand several times and it told me that it would be so much more fun to just get up and dance together and relate in some other way than with words. What struck me first was that it was exactly how I felt, and her message was clear and strong. . . .

Now I'm going to check out the pictures I took yesterday and I hope I have one I like of Bernice Johnson. I'll go visit her whether or not I do, and it wouldn't surprise me if we both got up to dance. Or might just sit in our chairs and do our dancing without standing. Lot's of the older women I was sitting with have an easier time walking than I do, but the doctor is going to put something that's not cortisone in my knees at 7:15 a.m. tomorrow and with luck I'll be standing up without groaning which would be good, because these women had all had a hell of a more difficult life than I have, and they have the right to groan before I do. I don't know. Maybe it makes me fit in more easily as we all laugh at each other's expression of pain.

Scott B. Smith and Linda Dehnad

DSCN0184.jpg, originally uploaded by BenTG.

I took this photo of Linda and Scott B when I was with them in Montgomery, AL last summer.

"Another SNCC warrior has died."

Those were the first words from Scott B. Smith, Jr when he reached me on the phone earlier this afternoon.

He wanted to inform me and all who knew her that Linda Dehnad, his wife, died this morning of undetermined causes at age 69.

Linda went to Jackson Hospital in Montgomery, AL last night because she was suffering from severe stomach pain. It happened to be her and Scott B's wedding anniversary. Exteremely frustrated and at her wits end after waiting for more than five hours to have her pain treated and her condition addressed, Linda asked Scott B to take her home around 9:30 PM. Scott B took care of Linda through the night; he fell asleep for a couple of hours at about 4 AM. When he woke up again at about 6 AM, Linda was dead.

Scott B said, "Linda came back to Montgomery with me to work with the people of Lowndes County. Though she was treated badly, she loved Lowndes County. Linda was a warrior. She never stopped trying to work with people. Anything she could do: she was doing it. She was concerned about the children. When she was teaching and was asked to use corporal punishment, Linda said, 'I am not a slave owner. I am a teacher.'"

In her last years, Linda had ongoing pain from fibromyalgia. Linda remained a gifted writer, teacher and photographer and a committed activist. She taught and mentored many, many people, including me (Ben).

Linda has requested that she be cremated. There will be a memorial service on Sunday, July 2, at the Unity Baptist Church in White Hall, Lowndes, County, AL. Church service begins at 11:00 a.m. Memorial service begins at 12:30 p.m.

Scott B welcomes phone calls, email and postal mail with condolences or memories of Linda. He would also welcome financial assistance to pay for Linda's autopsy. You can reach Scott B by phone at 334-262-7547. His mailing address is 2010 McKinley Avenue, Montogmery, AL 36107. His email address is scottbsmith_jr at yahoo dot com.


UPDATE#1 (6/28): I made a mistake on Scott B's phone number. Area code is 334, not what I had before. The number, above, is now correct.

UPDATE#2 (6/28): There is now a time for the memorial service, added above.

~
Read an interview/conversation with Linda Dehnad and her fellow Civil Rights Movement veterans, Jimmy Rogers and Bruce Hartford.

Watch Night Services

By Marsha Joyner

December 2005

Those of us who grew up in America’s traditional Black communities know of Watch Night Services, the gathering of the faithful in church on New Year's Eve. So as I ventured into the world it came as a surprise to me that other than the Catholic Church, which celebrates the eve of the feast of the Circumcision late on the evening of December 31, primarily white protestant churches generally do not have a church service for a secular holiday.

The service is an opportunity to tell the story of one of the most important milestones in the Blacks’ American history. The Watch Night Services that we celebrate in Black communities today can be traced back to gatherings on December 31, 1862, also known as Freedom's Eve. On that night, Blacks came together in churches and private homes, anxiously awaiting news that the Emancipation Proclamation actually had become law. Then, at the stroke of midnight, it was January 1, 1863, and all slaves in the Confederate States were declared legally free. Blacks have gathered in churches annually on New Year's Eve ever since, praising God for bringing us through another year.


Long before President Abraham Lincoln had ever dreamed of issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, an edict of freedom, Blacks had been hoping and praying for such a measure.

Lincoln had originally conceived of the proclamation as a measure for the self-preservation, rather than for the regeneration, of America. But the proclamation, almost in spite of its creator, changed the whole tone and character of the Civil War. Blacks sensed this more quickly than did Lincoln.

Despite the proclamation’s limitation African-Americans hailed it with much joy. The war, wrote Frederick Douglass, was now “invested with sanctity.” The Emancipation Proclamation did more than lift the war to the level of a crusade for human freedom. It brought some very substantial practical results, for it gave the go-ahead signal to the recruiting of Black soldiers. By midsummer of 1863 Lincoln could report, “The emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops, constitute the heaviest blow yet dealt to the rebellion.”

The esteem that African-Americans had for the Emancipation Proclamation helped to make it one of the most far-reaching pronouncements ever issued in the United States. African-Americans were instrumental in creating the image of the proclamation that was to become the historic milestone. The proclamation soon assumed the role that African-Americans had given it at the outset, and became to millions a fresh expression of one of humankind’s loftiest aspirations—the quest for freedom. The Emancipation Proclamation did not have to await the verdict of posterity: within six months after it was issued on that fateful date of January 1, 1863, the mass of Americans had come to regard it as a milestone in the long struggle for human rights.

“As affairs have turned, it is the central act of my administration, and the greatest event of the nineteenth century,” lamented Lincoln, as he sat in a pensive mood for is his portrait painter Francis B. Carpenter in February 1865. Later that spring, in the waning days of his life, in what was to be a rare moment of self-revelation, Lincoln confided to lifetime friend, Joshua F. Speed that he had come to believe that his chief claim to fame would rest upon the Proclamation. It was the one thing that would make people remember that he had lived.

Those of us who come from an oral tradition must tell this story in every generation; thus we celebrate the Watch Night Services.

~

Image: Heard and Moseley. Waiting for the hour [Emancipation], December 31, 1862. Carte de visite. Washington, 1863. Prints and Photographs Division. Reproduction Number: LC-USZC4-6160 (4-21a) (click on image to enlarge).

The Long Cold Run

That's my friend Jesse's blog. Jesse is a friend from my neighborhood and my Jewish community who is training for his second Boston Marathon this year. As last year, Jesse is running—and fundraising!—for the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute's Marathon Challenge Team. This year, Jesse is keeping a blog where you can follow his training through the cold weather, which includes the added challenge of his being a new dad (Baby Yonatan is about five weeks old!) and, come spring, finding kosher for Passover alternatives to powerade and gu.

Jesse is running his second marathon after overcoming years of knee problems and surgeries that left him unsure he'd ever be able to run again. For his friends who saw Jesse struggle with his injuries, periodically needing to walk with a cane, it was a miracle that he trained and ran last year and a great excitement that he is running the marathon this year, once again.

On April 6, 2005 Carolyn and I received a phone call with the news that we had lost our Uncle Chris to pancreatic cancer at age 44. Twelve days later, I ran the Boston Marathon in Chris’ memory with the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge team. About 6-8 miles into the race, the cheering started to change from “Yay!” to a more focused cheer – “Go Jesse” (my name was on my arms) and "Do it for Chris!" (“For Chris” was on my shirt). I lost count somewhere between miles 8 and 10 of how many times Chris' name was yelled along the course. It was in the hundreds by that point -- with 16 miles to go! There were people thanking Dana-Farber runners for raising money that helped get them treatment, small kids running after us with cups of water or oranges, and my personal favorite -- juice pops at the turn onto Commonwealth Ave! Thanks to your help, I raised $5500 for cancer research.

This year, I am running the Boston Marathon again to raise money for the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge team. The DFMC team’s goal is to raise $3.6 million to support cancer research for the Claudia Adams Barr Program in Innovative Basic Cancer Research. Since 1987, this program has helped to provide hundreds of researchers with the money to begin researching new cancer treatments. Experimental treatments such as the ones developed through the Barr Program gave Chris valuable extra time with his friends and family.

Today, you have the opportunity to help cancer patients from around the world benefit from the treatments developed at Dana-Farber. My personal fundraising goal this year is $10,000. This is almost twice the amount that I raised last year. Please take a moment to click on the DFMC link under “Sponsor Me.” By giving to DFMC, not only are you supporting my dream of running the Boston Marathon, you are supporting the opportunity for cancer patients to receive critical treatment options.

Training for the Boston Marathon in New England is always an interesting challenge. Last year there were frozen water bottles, frozen goo, and a 12 mile run with 30” of fresh snow. This year, in addition to the weather, I’ll be training with a new baby and running the Marathon during Passover! To track this year’s challenges, check back in on the Long Cold Run.

Read Jesse's blog here. Sponsor Jesse here.

Hear Peter Wagner Speak About Prison Policy

I received the following announcement from Peter Wagner's Prisoners of the Census email list:

Tomorrow, Saturday Dec. 3 in Providence RI, I'll be giving the keynote lecture at the "U.S. Prison System: Community and Political Impacts" conference. My lecture will be at 1pm in Starr Auditorium, MacMillian 117
at Brown University. This conference is organized by Students for Sensible Drug Policy, Education Department, Africana Studies, Brown Green Party, Brown Democrats, Democracy Matters, American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Informed Democracy, and Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance.

Next Saturday, Dec. 10, I'm going to be in New York City as the guest speaker at the Community Service Society of New York Roundtable Discussion on Prisoner Re-entry Issues. The discussion is from noon to 3pm in Conference Room 4A at 105 East 22nd Street.

More info about Peter Wagner:

Peter Wagner, JD, Executive Director. Peter Wagner teaches, lectures, and writes about the negative impact of mass incarceration in the United States. His current focus is on working to demonstrate - through graphics, legal research, and state-by-state analyses - the distortion of the democratic process that results from the U.S. Census Bureau's practice of counting the nation's mostly urban prisoners as residents of the often remote communities in which they are incarcerated. The New York Times editorial board has twice supported his efforts to change the way prisoners are counted, and the Boston Globe identified him as the "leading public critic" of the prisoner miscount. He has presented his research at national and international conferences and meetings, including a Census Bureau Symposium, a meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, and a keynote address to a conference at Harvard University. Mr. Wagner's publications include Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York (2002); The Prison Index: Taking the Pulse of the Crime Control Industry (2003); and, with Eric Lotke, Prisoners of the Census: Electoral and Financial Consequences of Counting Prisoners Where They Go, Not Where They Come From, [PDF] 24 Pace L. Rev. 587 (2004).

Also see the Prisoners of the Census and Prison Policy Initiative websites.

The Bus

By Donnie Williams

Because of Rosa Parks and many of the unknown Montgomery residents that were involved in the bus boycott and a lot more, Montgomery is a better place but we need to be better.

The Rosa Parks bus, the real one, is in Detroit at the Henry Ford Museum. It used to be here in Montgomery, but not anymore.

The owners wanted the bus scrapped after it quit running because it was THE bus. They lived in Chicago and owned most of the bus stations in the south in the 1950s.

Roy Hubert Summerford (my father-in-law) was a friend with the station manager and the dispatcher; they told him the Rosa Parks bus was about to forever be gone.

At the bus station, after 3 times being turned down to buy the bus, the owner finally agreed to sell the bus to Hubert. They said the bus would not ever run again without a new motor, but Hubert was very good with cars and trucks and I guess with buses too. After he paid for the bus he worked on it for about 30 minutes and cranked it up and droved it to his 10 acres of land outside the city limits of Montgomery. The bus went dead 3 times on the way to Hubert's land but it cranked back up and kept going. It was in the winter and Vivian and I were waiting on him to bring the bus to the land. We couldn't wait to see The Rosa Parks Bus; we couldn't believe they let that bus go.

Hubert said that the time for America to know about the bus was far from now (1970). The KKK was still very much active in Montgomery. He took on the job of taking care of the bus. He concealed the bus and kept its identity quiet. He feared that they would bomb it. Notice the Cleveland Ave. at the top of the bus. That is the name of the street route that the bus took everyday. As this driver got to a certain place he could roll a bar inside the bus over his head and change the street marker. In 1971 Hubert took it out of the bus and wrapped it in a blanket, then placed it in the closet to keep it safe. We only took it out when we took pictures of the bus. He also said that we would know when the time was right to tell about the bus.

Right away without telling anyone what was on his mind Hubert knew that bus was as important as the Liberty Bell. Hubert knew its proper place was in a museum.

The owner [of the bus station] was still upset with Rosa Parks and did not want that bus in a museum in Montgomery or anywhere. In 1970 the owner was still mad about the bus boycott of 1955 and 56. The boycott had cost the company $3,000 a day.

In 1985 Hubert passed away leaving the bus to his only child, my wife, Vivian Summerford Williams. I began to take care of the bus.

In the 1990s the Montgomery Advertiser newspaper found out about the bus and called me to do a story on the bus, but the time was not right and I said no. They sent a reporter out to the land; I don't know how they found out where the bus was, but they did. The reporter went to the bus without my permission and took pictures of the bus and put it on the front page of the paper and told America what the bus was and where it was. After that I had to check the bus everyday and had to run people away from it a lot. The KKK tried to catch it afire and shot holes in it. After that I had to rent a warehouse and store it inside under lock and key. This time they couldn't find it.

In 2000, the decision was made to sell the bus, so that the world could enjoy it. However selling was difficult because of proper identification. Everyone in Montgomery knew it was "The Bus." At the time Hubert purchased "The Bus," the employees informally passed on the information about the bus.

Robert Lifson, President of Mastronet, Inc., an Internet auction house, decided he wanted to auction the bus for Vivian and me. He began a search for documents authenticating the bus. And he found them.

Mr. Lifson contacted retired employees of the bus company, including Mrs. Margaret Cummings, widow of the former bus station manager, Charles Homer Cummings. Mrs. Cummings provided a scrapbook of newspaper clippings that her husband had kept during and after the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56.

National City Lines (which was the parent company of the Montgomery City Bus Lines) had employed a clipping service to clip and save any newspaper articles about the company’s bus service. Charles Cummings had kept the scrapbook of newspaper articles from the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. Next to articles describing the arrest of Rosa Parks, he wrote "#2857" and "Blake/#2857." James Blake was the bus driver who had Rosa Parks arrested. Mr. Cummings’ relatives confirm that he jotted down the bus number because he felt the events were so important.

In September 2001, an article in the Wall Street Journal announced that the Rosa Parks bus would be available in an Internet auction in October.

Museum staff began researching this opportunity. They spoke to people involved in the original 1955 events, to those who planned other museum exhibits, and to historians. A forensic document examiner was hired to see if the scrapbook was authentic. A museum conservator went to Montgomery to personally examine the bus. Convinced that this was the Rosa Parks bus, the Museum's leadership decided to bid on the bus in the Internet auction.

The Henry Ford museum entered the auction of October 25, 2001, and was the high bidder at $427,919. The other final bidders for the bus, both of whom were convinced of its authenticity, were the Smithsonian Institution and the city of Denver, Colorado.

At the same time, the Museum successfully bid on the Montgomery City Bus Lines scrapbook of newspaper articles with the Rosa Parks bus identified in two places. With additional grants the Henry Ford Museum has completely restored "The Bus."

My mother, Louise Williams had to ride the buses to and from work in the 1950s and knew other women who rode the bus and witnessed how the Blacks were treated and she chose to boycott the buses during the boycott also. She walked or rode a cab, but mostly walked.

I can't explain the feeling that I got everytime I got on that bus. It made me feel great; sometimes I even cried. Now everyone who gets to see and touch the bus at the museum can get to feel that too.

I wrote about the bus and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The book is The Thunder of Angels. I did this for the people who were involved in the boycott and never got their story told. I believe God put this on me to do because of the bus and my mother’s bad experiences on the buses in the 50s. I got to meet a lot of the boycott soldiers who became my friends and they told their stories to me to tell.

Look up The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow by Donnie Williams and you will see a little about the book and myself. Beware I am a new author. I own a grocery store here in Montgomery. It took me 20 years to write this book.

Thanks, Donnie

Photos
All photos courtesy of Donnie Williams, except the final photo of the restored bus. Photo of restored bus by Erica Chappuis. Click on photos to enlarge (except the first one, at top).

~
[Editor's note: It is an honor to publish this article by Donnie Williams for the 50th anniversary of the day when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on the Cleveland Avenue bus in Montgomery, Alabama. This article grew out of the correspondence between Mr. Williams and Marsha Joyner, after he found her latest piece on HungryBlues early in November. In that piece, Marsha was pictured in front of what she and many others had been led to believe was the original bus where Rosa Parks performed her momentous act of civil disobedience on Dec. 1, 1955. Fortunately, Mr. Williams has set the record straight with this teaser for his new book.

Marsha Joyner has posted an MS Word version of this article on the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Coalition-Hawaii website. --BG]

Workers In The Vineyard

By Marsha Joyner

Former President of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition-Hawaii, Marsha Joyner, has name inscribed on the “Wall of Tolerance” at the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama

10-2005

We came in road-weary VW Buses, with backpacks and sleeping bags, willing to sleep on any floor, withstand certain adversity, every abuse and encounter death, to add another face to the struggle for equality and dignity in America during the 1950’s and 60’s. There had been protests against the American evil system of Jim Crow, in the courts and in the streets, but after Montgomery the protests swelled to a collective force.

Now in October 2005, we arrived in Montgomery, Alabama “The Cradle of the Confederacy” on jets, sports sedans and air conditioned SUV’s with matching luggage and stayed at the Embassy Suites, showing evidence of years of wear and tear.

I was moved beyond words to see my name and that of my mother among the 300+ names on the Wall of Tolerance. However, I was more impressed and honored to be with the thousands of allies, veterans of the movement, who were in the crowd and whose names did not appear. Black, white, red, yellow & brown, Uncles & Cousins, Mothers & Sisters, Christian & Jews, Gay & straight; some with walkers and in wheel chairs accompanied by children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, proud to share a moment, that for most, if not all of us, never dreamed would come.

Yes, I had a pittance in the Civil Rights Movement, I was the first “colored girl” to graduate (1956) from an integrated school in Baltimore MD after the Brown vs. BOE (1954), walked many picket lines, participated in sit-in demonstrations, gone to jail for having the audacity to ask to be served a 10 cent hamburger at the White Castle, faced death at the hands of an angry white mob when I had the impudence to attempt to register people to vote and walked the ever moving line of Jim Crow. But today I was in the company of real heroes, people who had practiced non-violence here in the overtly violent south.

It was here in Montgomery that a young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was selected to lead a congregation and began his march toward fame. Here, he preached nonviolence in the face of Jim Crow. Rosa Parks sat down and refused to get up here, and thousands of unnamed “workers in the vineyard” walked to work for more than a year because of her. The bus boycott started here. Heroes whose names are lost to history took a stand for freedom here. People from Hawaii joined the thousands more who walked in the rain and mud for five days from from Selma to Montgomery, seeking the right to vote.

This magnificent day was the dedication of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, which includes the Wall of Tolerance. The wall incorporates the names of people who have dedicated themselves to fighting intolerance in their daily lives. Using digital technology to spectacular effect, the names flow down a curved 20 by 40 foot wall. The names on the wall include Civil Rights workers from all fifty states and Japan.

Patiently, we stood in line to touch, to feel, to smell and take pictures of the bus in which Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat to a white man, as if it were the Holy Grail and to gently touch the waters of the black granite memorial which flow over the names of 40 martyrs who lost their lives during the Civil Rights Movement, a period framed by the momentous Brown v. Board decision in 1954 and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in 1968.

The memorial sits only a few blocks west of the first capitol of the Confederacy, the spot where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office to become President of the Confederate States. From Court Square, the order was sent in 1861 to "reduce" Fort Sumter, beginning the Civil War. Ninety-four years later, on a December evening, Mrs. Rosa Parks began a historic bus ride from Court Square. East is the Dexter Avenue (King Memorial) Baptist Church, where a young pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr., led the movement Mrs. Parks began.

"Fifty years ago, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat just a few blocks away from where we are today," said Center co-founder Morris Dees in his welcoming remarks. "You've come from throughout the United States to be a part of the march that she started. "The placement of your name on the Wall of Tolerance shows the march for justice continues," he said.

"This event is about honoring heroes," said U. S. Congressman Artur Davis (D-Ala,), who was the dedication's keynote speaker. "It has been the lot of our country that the bravest of us have laid down their lives, some anonymously, some in full view of the world," Davis said. "All share courage and are heroes. That's what we honor today."

He urged everyone to consider "the enduring power of people who are willing to take a stand." Davis continued, “Standing here, five minutes away from where George Wallace declared that men and women could not be equal, there is a new ground rising. There is a new Alabama in sight. There is a new country in sight. But only if we keep believing in each other, in the power of right."

NAACP chairman Julian Bond, greeted with a standing ovation as he was introduced, served as host for the dedication ceremony.

"Each of us is a ripple, and together we are all a mighty stream," said Bond in his closing remark.

Monday, October 24, 2005 sitting in the airport as we said our goodbyes, the overhead TV monitors flashed an alert, “Civil Rights Giant Rosa Parks dies”. We hugged each other, as it seemed she, the woman whose name was on the invitation to the movement, had waited until the conclusion of the tribute to the other unsung heroes to take her final bow.

She left us physically but her legacy will never fade away.

She is at peace!

Marsha Joyner
October 25, 2005

Photos, courtesy of Marsha Joyner (click to enlarge):
Marsha Joyner with her son Chris German (L.) and with Cedrick Ashe (R.), standing in front of the bus on which Rosa Parks made history.
Marsha Joyner and Julian Bond at Southern Poverty Law Center

Correction:
First photo is taken in front of a replica of the Cleveland Avenue bus, on which Rosa Parks made history. The original bus is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan. For more information see "The Bus," by Donnie Williams.

Prison Policy Initiative

Yesterday evening I was one of the co-hosts of a reception for the Prison Policy Initiative. It was a great event with Executive Director Peter Wagner speaking alongside Joseph "Jazz" Hayden and Mark Dubnoff.

Wagner spoke about his innovative work on census policy and felony disenfranchisement. Hayden spoke about his 15 years of work to overturn felony disenfranchisement laws. Dubnoff spoke about being pro bono counsel in Simmons v. Galvin—the case challenging the constitutional amendment adopted by Massachusetts in 2000 to deprive convicted felons of their right to vote.

For the last two years, PPI was sustained by Executive Director Peter Wagner's Soros Fellowship. When the fellowship ran out last spring, Wagner just kept working on his projects, unpaid, but also set himself the task of finding a fiscal sponsor that could accept donations for PPI once it incorporated as a 501c3 nonprofit organization.

Both Hayden and Dubnoff testified to the fact that a wide range of people who work on prisoners' issues have come to rely on the work that PPI does. Hayden traveled from New York City in order to support the cause.

PPI is now a 501c3, and Wagner has found a fiscal sponsor, so you can support the cause, too, by making a tax-deductible donation here.

(Image via Prison Policy Initiative.)

Author Applauds New Possibilities for Solving Civil Rights "Cold Cases"

Regarding this news, Susan Klopfer has put out this press release:

September 17, 2005 -- Sixties voting rights advocate Birdia Keglar was murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen on her way home to Charleston, Mississippi after meeting with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in Jackson.

Keglar's January 11, 1966 death and the murders of her best friend and then her youngest son have never been resolved or even investigated by law enforcement agencies - local, state or federal.

Susan Orr-Klopfer, author of a new book on civil rights in the Mississippi Delta, believes these three "cold case" murders should get the immediate attention of a new Unsolved Crimes Section of the Justice Department.

Under a measure approved Thursday by the U.S. Senate, the new office would target such pre-1970 racially motivated homicides that remain unsolved because of lax state and federal prosecution at the time they occurred.

The bill was inspired by recent efforts to reopen the case of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American youngster who was murdered in 1955 while visiting relatives in the Delta.

"Young Till’s crime was whistling at a white woman while inside a small grocery store. For this, he was lynched and the men who admitted committing the crime went free.

"Birdia Keglar’s crime, 11 years later, was to advocate for voting rights. She and her friend Adlena Hamlett were driving home from Jackson after meeting with Senator Robert F. Kennedy to talk over civil rights issues. But their car was stopped in a small Delta town where they were kidnapped, tortured and murdered by Klansmen.

"Very likely, the Klansmen who killed Keglar and Hamlett were also highway patrolmen. Both women’s bodies were mutilated – both were decapitated and Hamlett’s arms were cleanly severed from her body," Klopfer said.

"Their deaths were attributed to a car wreck by officials. But the car disappeared along with Keglar’s briefcase and witnesses were threatened with murder if they did not remain quiet."

Three months later, after Keglar’s youngest son went to Washington D.C. trying to learn what happened to his mother, he was murdered.

"James Keglar was knocked unconscious and burned alive in his house. This happened hours after he was released from a Clarksdale, Mississippi jail on a bogus charge. He was expecting help from the FBI but it never came, according to his brother."

Klopfer’s book, "Where Rebels Roost, Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited," details these Mississippi Delta murders and dozens of others, including the lynching of young Till.

The book contains newly discovered information on several other Mississippi civil rights murders including "strong evidence that civil rights leader Medgar Evers was not murdered by Byron de la Beckwith who was finally convicted for the crime, but by a friend of Beckwith’s, another member of the Klan who was Beckwith’s superior," Klopfer said.

Klopfer lived in the Mississippi Delta in employee housing on the prison grounds of Parchman Penitentiary for two years while she researched and wrote her 680-page book that contains over 1,400 footnotes as well as names and information regarding nearly 1,000 black people who were lynched in the state – "a small representation of the racial murders and lynching that have taken place in Mississippi," Klopfer said.

Senator Jim Talent, R-Mo., sponsored Thursday’s legislation with Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn. The Senate voted by unanimous consent to add the measure to an appropriations bill that is expected to pass the Senate this week, according to Associated Press reports. The bill was introduced by Talent and Dodd in July after a Mississippi court sentenced former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen to 60 years in jail for the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964.

"There are 13 Klansmen mentioned in the book who are known to the FBI and still living in Mississippi who helped murder Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Robert Goodman. Yet no one has been prosecuted except for Preacher Killen who was not at the murder scene. Maybe some progress will finally come about because of this Senate bill," Klopfer said.

Klopfer said she feels closest to the Keglar and Hamlett murders, however. "These were two older, established Mississippi black women – Adlena Hamlett was 77-years-old and was a well-respected teacher for many years.

"Birdia Keglar was a business woman who was trying to start a local chapter of the NAACP. She was the first black person in her county to vote since Reconstruction following the Civil War. She was earlier represented in federal court by John Doar of the U.S. Department of Justice and was Doar’s first voting rights test case when he came into Mississippi after the election of President John F. Kennedy."

One of Adlena Hamlett’s granddaughters in August told Klopfer about going with Hamlett to the courthouse square as a child to request a ballot.

"Nina Zachery said the clerk tore up the ballot and ordered their departure. But Zachery’s grandmother said not to worry because she – Nina – would be able to vote one day, and that was all that mattered. Hamlett and Keglar were later hanged in effigy at the Tallahatchie Courthuse and were strongly warned by Klansmen to stop their voting rights activities."

Klopfer is the first journalist to write about Keglar and Hamlett. "I learned about this story from a nurse at Parchman whose wife was a relative of Mrs. Keglar. Very little was known about them and it took the entire two years to piece this story together – it was very complicated with numerous entanglements that reached from the Delta to Washington, D.C."

Klopfer also asserts it was significant that Sen. Edward Kennedy led off the questioning of Chief Justice nominee John Roberts on his Senate confirmation hearing this past week.

"Sen. Kennedy reminded Roberts that people died for the right to vote. Sen. Kennedy is concerned about reauthorization of the 1965 Voting Rights Act – and opposition to equal voting rights and other civil rights supplied the motives for all of the murders listed in this book."

Klopfer left Mississippi at the end of August and said she added newly discovered information to the book even as she was packing to leave.

# # #

About My Language

[Kaspit raised some concerns about my use of the word "genocidal" in my first post about FEMA and the Red Cross. Since others may have felt similarly, I'm going to offer an initial response to my friend's comment out here, as a new post. For ease of reference, I'm going to repost Kaspit's comment in the comments to this post. --BG]

Kaspit,

Thanks for your feedback. I value it a great deal and hope we can have more exchanges on these and other related topics. At the moment it is a little difficult for me know how to modulate my anger in a way that isn't off putting to some (maybe many). Some of that may be warranted by the scale of injustice and some of that may be a reflection of my having much shorter experience than you in doing social justice work, and maybe with experience you learn how to take things better in stride in order to be more effective politically.

That said, this is my personal blog and not the website of an advocacy organization, and I don't know that I necessarily need to do anything differently. I provide the links for my sources, which others can use in other ways, if they wish. I also think there is some value in being open about how angry-making recent events are for me and, I'm sure, for many others (including you, I would guess).

A philosophical and moral question in many areas of the Katrina tragedy is at what point does willful neglect carry the weight of intent? The legal profession uses the categories of gross negligence and wanton misconduct* to describe forms of negligence that border on or are equivalent to intent. Regardless of what could be argued in a court of law, on a moral level I believe that government and Red Cross officials have crossed that line, showing "indifference to whether harm will result."

Willful withholding of food and water that can only result in death, illness, and irreparable harm definitely qualifies in this department, in my opinion—especially when the evidence shows that there is no practical or administrative reason, at this point, that the Red Cross could not have been delivering relief inside of New Orleans for some time. As I said in my post, it is a genocidal policy. That is, the policy has genocidal effects. I do not see how those crafting the policy can be unaware of those effects. Therefore, I hold them responsible.

Maybe it would be helpful if I say a little on how I think about the relationship between institutional and individual expressions of racism (and other forms of oppression). One of my analytical aphorisms is that institutionalized racism promotes individual, local acts of racism. For example, in the 2004 presidential election in Ohio, elections officials created long lines at the polls in heavily African American neighborhoods by purposefully withholding voting machines from those areas. Because there were up to 10 hour waits to vote in some of these places, there were horrendous parking problems. Many had to park illegally in order to be able to vote. At some polling places, poll workers went around threatening to have voters' cars towed, forcing voters to choose between staying in line and paying towing fees. There were also gross acts of cruelty against disabled and elderly voters whom poll workers forced to stand in line with no option to sit or receive other appropriate accommodations.

I feel reasonably confident that those officials, who were administering racist policies at an institutional level, did not instruct poll workers to discriminate against Black voters in local situations. I do, however, hold elections officials culpable for cultivating an atmosphere in which it was okay for individual poll workers to violate the voting rights of, and demean, Black voters. Maybe not legally culpable (lawyers, please opine...)—but definitely morally culpable.

Similarly, long standing institutionalized racism in NOLA made Black people disproportionately vulnerable to profoundly neglectful government policies, individual acts of neglect, and overt, racist aggression on the ground.

I think I understand part of your criticism to be that it is not practical to argue that policies under discussion are genocidal in their effects. In fact, I think you're saying that it's not even that practical to try to convince Americans that the Red Cross is messing up. Maybe from a political strategy / policy making standpoint you are right. However, I feel a moral obligation to speak about the ramifications of behaviors as I see them.

I do hear you when you point out that that the word "genocidal" is potentially inflammatory and that wielding it at the outset, before I've made my argument, may undermine my argument for some readers. On reflection, I think you are probably right and that if I had it to do over, I might have used the word later in my post and defined it in my post. Still, I stand by the usage and think that stating it upfront also has some value, the value of breaking a taboo on speaking directly about the nature of injustices that we have all witnessed.

I know there are fine points in your analysis that I have not addressed as of yet. As time permits, I'll try to get to them back in the comments thread.

Your friend,

Ben

Notes

*Links are to legal definitions in Michigan state law and are being used as reference points only. I make no legal claims about the technical application of "gross negligence" and "wanton misconduct" in Louisiana state or national contexts.

Jonathan David Jackson Responds To Steven Sherman

Jonathan left this in the comments. I think it should be read by all.

I guess my only problem with Sherman's CounterPunch article (a great publication by the way) is the identification of the peace movement as "predominately white" and the manner in which the author's very writing narrows the pitch of his message to apparently privileged white peace movers who must now bring their attention to downtrodden blacks.

What peace movement is predominately white and where? Just because Steven Sherman hasn't interacted with a lot of blacks for peace (or other non-whites, for that matter) does not mean that blacks and indeed many nonwhites are not actively thinking, writing, and working for peace. And, in consideration of the fact that whites in many major cities are becoming voting minorities as latino/a and hispanic populations rise, it is incredibly important that we interrogate the problems inherent in dichotomous discourses of "majority/minority."

Nor are the black poor of New Orleans without agency (meaning, the power to act). While they may not be economically powerfull, it is imperative that we consider their power to vote, and their power on a number of spiritual and intellectual levels.

Ben, that's why your own posts on the FRAUD of the black Republican-turned mayor were so apt. There may be people who are actually afraid of those poor New Orleans blacks' power--the same power that put that fraud of a black mayor into office in the hope that he would do something, anything, for them--the hope that as a black person he would somehow empathize with the blistering, entangled racism and classicism that informs so much of everything Southern-style. Exposing the complexity of simultaneous power and powerlessness...that's what I got from those recent posts on the New Orleans mayor, the walking "race-card."

There is a quiet undercurrent of "saviorism" (to coin a term) in Sherman's otherwise strong and well-meaning rhetoric. In truth, blacks' commitment to peace in the face of racism and violence has defined peace movements in so many ways in 20th century America:

Baynard Rustin developed concepts of peaceful activism from satyagraha and applied them to his early socialist and anti-racist activities. Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr. then further refined satyagraha for the civil rights movement and, of course, King was killed at the height of his agitation against the Vietnam war. Many of the agitation protest strategies employed by peace movers everywhere are constructed in the spirit of the kinds of protests that these black women and men designed. We must not forget how black workers essential contributions inform peace movements.

So, even if in your town, you only see white peace workers at your meetings, their activities contain the presence of black cultural workers as well as many different people all over the world who have sacrificed so much for peace.

The first step for any progressive movement is not to ever think that it is "predominately anything" but to reconceive of their movement as stretching beyond the bounds of people who individual workers within specific locales see in their day-to-day activities. Fundamentally, there is a level of consciousness-raising that is necessary within us as well as outside of us so that we interrogate the silent colorlines that inform our quotidian social realities and make us think that our movements can be defined within majority/minority polarities.

Essential Analysis From Kaspit

Go read Kaspit's Ten days after hurricane Katrina: interim critique for a thorough yet concise critique of I) Preparation, II) Response, and III) Political smoke and mirrors and for many valuable links for further reading. Take special note of Kaspit's grasp of the environmental issues that follow the Katrina disaster. It is unfathomable that the EPA is being kept out of NOLA cleanup management. (Did you know that??)

Go read.

With Silent Lips She Cries

by Marsha Joyner

With silent lips she cries. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

This is etched in stone on the Statue of Liberty—as Lady Liberty looks out to the Atlantic Ocean, her back turned to the rest of us.

The huddled masses: the poor of all sizes, shapes and colors,
The people whose skin color is red, yellow, brown or black, whose eyes are slanted, whose religious Sabbath is celebrated on Friday or Saturday, the disabled,
Those whose sexual preferences are not "normal"(?), are we the wretched refuse,
The brown skinned people who struggle across a hostile border to realize an unkept promise— yearning to breathe free—

Mahatma Gandhi said, "passive violence fuels the fire of physical violence; and if we want to put out the fire of physical violence, logically we have to cut off the fuel supply." What is passive violence? According to Gandhi and his grandson Arun, passive violence is what we do to criticize and disrespect other people’s lives, their heritage, their history and their values. I will have to add ignoring or acting as if the huddled masses do not exist.

As the TV cameras give us a look into the faces of displaced people, children without parents, old folks without homes, the sick and dying left behind. We must ask the question, are they the wretched refuse? Are they tomorrow’s terrorists?

What happens to them two weeks from now when the cameras stop rolling, when the public moves on to the next headline? Is that what the huddled masses will look like?

For those of us who have glanced at the other side, can we say, “send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me”?

Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society, with a large segment of people in that society, who feel that they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose. People, who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don't have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.”

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop it now. I don’t have the answer, but I do know that collectively we can.

West End Blues

The flooding in New Orleans reached its current epic proportions when—after one levee was breached on Monday morning, August 29, in the eastern, downriver portion of the city, known as the Ninth Ward—another was breached across town at the 17th Street Canal Levee, very early Tuesday morning, August 30.

The 17th Street Canal separates New Orleans’ Jefferson Parish (west) from Orleans Parish (east). The canals of the city, as well as the Mississippi riverbanks and the shore of Lake Pontchartrain are lined with earthen levees that usually keep the low-lying city from from being flooded. But as high water and wind from Katrina scoured the levees, large sections washed away, including a section reportedly several hundred feet long along the eastern side of the 17th Street Canal. . . .

The breach in the levee along the canal’s eastern bank is obvious as a break in the tan line that runs along other portions of the canal. The hole allowed Lake Pontchartrain to pour into the neighborhoods known as the West End. Some homes and other buildings are completely submerged, while the roofs of others appear to float above the murky water.

The West End is 90% white, 1.7% Black. 9.1% of its residents were living in poverty. The Lower 9th Ward is 98.3% Black, .5% white. 36.4% of its residents were living in poverty. On average in New Orleans, 66.6% of the residents are Black, 26.6% are white, and 27.9% lived in poverty. One of the wealthiest and whitest parts of New Orleans, the West End was presumably one of the areas whose residents mostly got out of New Orleans in time to escape the devastation that is now there (though their homes and other possessions may not be so lucky).

The map, above right, shows NOLA neighborhoods by percent white, with the West End outlined in red. Click here to see the same map done for percent African American, Asian and Latino. All demographic data in cited in this post are drawn from 2000 census data, as assembled by the Greater New Orleans Data Center.

The West End has been a wealthy area of New Orleans since the the turn of the 20th century. With lake front property, it was a resort area whose patrons wanted to hear the African American vernacular dance music, known as jazz.

West End was originally called New Lake End to distinguish it from Old Lake End, which sometimes referred to Milneburg.

New Lake End served as a port for craft traveling along the New Basin Canal. Between 1835 and 1876, individuals involved in the coastwise trade and those who belonged to yachting and rowing clubs primarily frequented New Lake End.

The Mexican Gulf Ship Canal Company had begun construction of a harbor with railroad facilities when the city acquired the company’s partially built embankment at the New Basin Canal and the Seventeenth Street Canal. The 100 foot wide bank was raised to a height of eight feet. Subsequently, the New Orleans City and Lake Railroad routed trains to the embankment, which was developed to house the West End resort.

A hotel, a restaurant, a garden and various amusement spots were built on a large wooden platform that was constructed over the water. In 1880, New Lake End took the name West End. Sailing and rowing regattas added to the popularity of West End. Over the next 30 years, West End achieved popularity to rival the resort at Spanish Fort.

West End contributed to the early development of jazz in New Orleans. Its bandstand was a center for early jazz concerts performed by notable jazz musicians including Louis Armstrong. The famous jazz song “West End Blues” was inspired by this resort area.

In 1921, the city completed improvements that included the construction of a seawall 500 feet further out in the lake and filling in the space between the old embankment, expanding the park to thirty acres, all of which resulted in the present West End Park. The first houses were built near West End Park around the 1920s.

Within the city of New Orleans, African American vernacular dance music originated in a number of places, far across town from the West End. One of the most vibrant homes of early jazz was the Back o' Town neighborhood, where Louis Armstrong grew up.

Back o' Town included illicit gambling and prostitution houses as well as residences. The adjacent South Rampart Street corridor contained more respectable AfricanAmerican businesses and legitimate places of entertainment. From the turn of the century through the 1920s, Back o' Town had a concentration. of saloons, social halls, dance clubs, and vaudeville theaters where early jazz was played. These ranged from low-down dives, such as the Red Onion, to a middle-class ballroom like the Parisian Garden room in the Pythian Temple building. Most of the area has been redeveloped for government offices, parking areas, high-rise office buildings, and the Superdome. The Red Onion, the Pythian Temple Building, the Odd Fellows and Masonic dance hall, and the Iroquois Theater remain. Louis Armstrong's birthplace, Union Sons hall, the Astoria Hotel and Ballroom, Spano's, and several other important early structures have been torn down.

Another source of musicians for the wealthy audiences on the West End would have been the Eighth and Ninth Wards.

The Eighth and Ninth wards begin east of Elysian Fields Avenue. This was a racially mixed workingclass neighborhood at the turn of the century. Woodmen of the World Hall, where early jazz was played, still stands. Famous residents of the area included Papa Jack Laine, Manuel Mello, Manuel Perez, and John Robichaux.

The African American working class people of the Ninth Ward were still supplying labor for the the greater economy of New Orleans, up until last week, when their neighborhood was destroyed and they were left to the death and chaos of their flooded neighborhood and city. (Map above right: NOLA neighborhoods by percent African American, Lower Ninth Ward outlined in red, other racial composition maps here.)

People in the Lower Ninth Ward use the bus to get to work because of lack of finances, lack of private cars. You've got to use the bus even though the services continue to be limited. You've got to use the bus because that's the only means you have to get out to make money. There are no jobs here, and there is nowhere you can walk to do things. (75 year old African American social worker, Fall 2003)

"In other parts of the city, a lot of people have the option of walking to their jobs. But on this side, because of the canal, we are separated from the city.” (53 year old African American laborer, Fall 2003)

Whereas only 6.1% of West End residents had no vehicle available, a third of Ninth Ward residents were without vehicles prior to Katrina. There were things that could have been done to get Ninth Ward residents and others without cars out of the city, along the lines of what Malik Rahim has pointed out.

We have Amtrak here that could have carried everybody out of town. There were enough school buses that could have evacuated 20,000 people easily, but they just let them be flooded. My son watched 40 buses go underwater - they just wouldn't move them, afraid they'd be stolen.

People who could afford to leave were so afraid someone would steal what they own that they just let it all be flooded. They could have let a family without a vehicle borrow their extra car, but instead they left it behind to be destroyed.

There's lots of ways to guess at the meaning of Louis Armstrong's rendition of his mentor Joe "King" Oliver's West End Blues. Maybe it was just a blues written while in the West End. Maybe it was a blues for people whom Oliver performed for on the West End. Maybe it was a blues for all the people who worked in the West End and lived someplace else. Right now it's a blues for all of New Orleans, though some folks have it worse than others . . .

Louis recorded the song in Chicago, after he had left New Orleans and had already spent some time in New York City. The Hot Five/Hot Seven recordings were not three minute digest versions of what he was doing in the clubs. Rather, the ensembles and the arrangements were assembled especially for the studio dates. Louis' West End Blues were designed for the act of recording and were therefore a blues for all us.

Anyone with an ounce of compassion also has more than just a touch of the West End Blues—especially if they're asking questions like Marsha Joyner's questions.

Did Katrina open our eyes to a problem, which has been glossed over? Are we seeing the under belly of America, the poor, the minorities, the people who could not afford to evacuate; whose very existence depends on the meager handout of the government. A government, which we saw was too long delayed in coming to the rescue.



Did Katrina show us an America that we pretend does not exist? The magnitude of everyday suffering is intolerable and such conditions must be changed through social action. We, members of SNCC and countless others, worked tirelessly to enact social changes only to see subsequent Administrations dismantle them. We are now back to square one. Like Victor Hugo, again, we must convince America that the poor, the minorities, the outcast, the people stealing in the midst of Katrina, the outcast—the misérables—are worth saving.

Louis Armstrong And His Hot Five, West End Blues

June 28, 1928, Chicago

Les Misérables Deja vous All Over Again

By Marsha Joyner

New Orleans, the city of romantic myths and memorable music, Gulfport, Pass Christian, little towns and villages whose names only appear on a AAA map are “Deja vous all over again”. If you will remember in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, he had to come to grips with the social problems of the day, which demanded reflection upon the nature of society and, therefore, upon the nature of man.

He showed us a man who went to jail for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. Of course, while he is in jail his family starved to death. We became acquainted with children who need to be fed, men who need jobs, and women who need to be treated humanely. By the end of the play we were crying out for change. The suffering of the people was more than we could endure.

And so it has been with the people suffering from Katrina. People dying in the flood ravished streets, baking alive on roof tops in 95 degree heat, five days without food and water, crowded into the domed prison without the basic sanitary facilities. “Les Misérables”, American style.

Over the course, thanks to the the television coverage of Katrina, we witnessed poor people trapped in a social/political system with no way out. What little they had to sustain life, washed away by the most powerful forces of nature.

President Bush said, ''there ought to be zero tolerance of people breaking the law during an emergency such as this, whether it be looting or price-gouging at the gasoline pump or taking advantage of charitable giving or insurance fraud." Troops with guns are meant for desperate people breaking through stores, wading through polluted water to get the necessities of life, dry clothes, drinking water, medicines and a loaf of bread; not for the rich corporate entities.

Did Katrina open our eyes to a problem, which has been glossed over? Are we seeing the under belly of America, the poor, the minorities, the people who could not afford to evacuate; whose very existence depends on the meager handout of the government. A government, which we saw was too long delayed in coming to the rescue.

Did Katrina show us an America that we pretend does not exist? The magnitude of everyday suffering is intolerable and such conditions must be changed through social action. We, members of SNCC and countless others, worked tirelessly to enact social changes only to see subsequent Administrations dismantle them. We are now back to square one. Like Victor Hugo, again, we must convince America that the poor, the minorities, the outcast, the people stealing in the midst of Katrina, the outcast—the misérables—are worth saving.

Aloha pumehana

Marsha

Staying On Subject

Bruised, derided, cursed, defiled,
she beheld her tender Child
All with scourges rent:

For the sins of His own nation,
saw Him hang in desolation,
Till His spirit forth He sent.

--Stabat Mater

studyholic,

Sorry it's taken me a little while to respond to your second comment. But maybe it's a good thing that some time has passed and there is more information about the statement we've been discussing. It has also given me a chance to think some more and talk some of this over with a couple of friends.

As far as the "My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel" statement goes, either

a) Cindy Sheehan didn't say it, or
b) she wants to distance herself from any such statement

"[T]hat doesn't even sound like me," she said to Anderson Cooper. It does not sound like her now, anyway, and I affirm what she is doing now. If she did say it, I think I would have advised her to distance herself from the statement a little differently, but she did solidly disown it. I have to agree with you when you say, "People can change and people make mistakes."

A friend of mine reminded me of a Jewish ethical principle that was very important to my father—dan b'kaf z'chut, judging others (and yourself) in the scale of merit.

Our Rabbis taught: A person should always regard himself as though he were half guilty and half meritorious. If one performs one good deed, happy is he for weighing himself down in the scale of merit. If one commits one transgression, woe to him for weighing himself down in the scale of guilt, for it is said, “But one sinner destroys much good” (Ecclesiastes 9.18). On account of a single sin which he commits much good is lost to him.
 
R. Eleazar son of R. Simeon said: “Because the world is judged by its majority, and an individual too is judged by the majority of deeds, good or bad, if he performs one good deed, happy is he for turning the scale both for himself and for the whole world on the side of merit; if one commits one transgression, woe to him for weighing himself and the whole world in the scale of guilt, for it is said, ‘But one sinner.’ – on account of the single sin which this man commits he and the whole world lose much good.' ” (Talmud, Kiddushin 40a)

In the end we are judged by the sum total of our actions, and right now Cindy Sheehan's message is unambiguous and morally compelling.

I think my friend DK is correct that currently the world sees Cindy Sheehan as a living Stabat Mater—making it rather difficult to think clearly about anything negative that might be attributed to her. It is therefore a good thing that we can look at the remark in question by itself, uncolored by any ideas of what Cindy may have meant by it.

So let's go back to the statement: "My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel." Speaking to you as a Jewish person who is opposed to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and who supports the rights of Israelis and Palestinians to political self-determination, I am saying the statement trades in—or, at the very least, invites—antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish control of US foreign policy.

Perhaps to support this claim, I should elaborate on the history of the antisemitic tract, Protocols of the Elders of Zion and link to current examples of the kind of thing I think the statement comes from and encourages more of. Perhaps you would want to debate whether assertions that the war in Iraq is a war for Israel are antisemitic. However, I do not think I need to debate the rights of others to criticize Israel. Asking me to do that inappropriately changes the subject.

Consider this scenario. It's December 2002. Trent Lott has recently spoken at the birthday and retirement party for Senator Strom Thurmond, saying, "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either." You bump into an African American friend who asks you if you've heard about the Lott statement and immediately starts cursing him out for being a racist.

In an effort to be fair minded you tell your friend, "Hey, Lott's entitled to criticize the American electorate. After all, it is true that Mississippi has a terrible economy and its schools are a mess. I think Lott just means that Thrumond's a Southerner who understands the problems of the South and is uniquely qualified to address them."

Your friend storms off, really pissed. To her, it doesn't matter what Thurmond may understand about the special needs of Mississippi or anywhere else in the South. To her any praise of Thrumond's agenda is praise of states' rights, segregation, Jim Crow. But if you didn't already know the history, you needed to have asked her why she thinks supporting Thurmond is inherently racist, above all else. If you'd asked that question, instead of launching into a defense of Lott's right, on principle, to be critical of the American electorate, your friend might have rattled off from memory the quote from Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign speeech:

I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theatres into our swimming pools into our homes and into our churches.

I know the analogy isn't perfect. But I hope it makes the point.

(Special thanks to hf and to b.)

~
Painting: Mater Dolorosa by Spanish artist Luis de Morales (Public Domain, via Wikipedia).
Photo: Cindy Sheehan, Crawford, Texas (Lonestar Iconoclast)