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Adopt A Racist Boor For Martin Luther King Day

I really have not kept up on what CORE does these days, but now I am utterly disinclined to try. For Martin Luther King Day 2006, CORE is honoring Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour—panderer to white supremacists who wears the confederate flag on his lapel with pride.

“We have invited Gov. Barbour as a representative of all of the great people of Mississippi in recognition of the state’s progress in race relations after the successful prosecution of the 1964 murders of CORE volunteers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner,” said CORE national spokesman Niger Innis.

“America looks upon Philadelphia, Mississippi’s bi-racial jury holding Edgar Ray Killen responsible for those murders as a shining example of the progress our nation has achieved since the Civil Rights era.”

In observance of the King federal holiday, CORE hosts an annual Ambassadorial Reception and Awards Dinner in New York City. This event has grown to become one of the largest events in the country honoring Dr. King with more than 2,000 people from all walks of life attending each year.

This year’s 21st annual black tie event will be held at the New York Sheraton Hotel and Towers at 7:30 p.m. on Jan. 16, 2006.

If you're relatively new to HungryBlues, you may not know that I have a somewhat different view of the significance of the Edgar Ray Killen trial.

The article is from the Jim Prince edited Neshoba Democrat, so not only do we get the drivel, above, we get a whole lot more about Barbour's "historic" role in supporting the "call to justice" of the Philadelphia Coalition, which Prince co-chairs.

The indictment of the ex-Ku Klux Klan leader in January followed a community-wide call for justice which the governor and other elected officials embraced here in June 2004 at an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the slayings.

At the commemoration the governor said it was a complicit sin to ignore evil....

Gov. Barbour was in Philadelphia and joined in the call for justice at the event which drew about 1,800.

“We know that when evil is done it is a complicit sin to ignore it, to pretend it didn’t happen even if it happened 40 years ago. You have to face up to your problems before you can solve them,” Barbour said at the time.

One year later, on June 21, 2005, a Neshoba County jury found Edgar Ray Killen guilty of three counts of manslaughter in connection with the murders.

Let's just say that neither Barbour's appearance at nor the Philadelphia Coalition's role in the memorial were universally appreciated.

Past honorees have included Laura Bush and Rudolph Giuliani. How many people remember that Giuliani's 1993 mayoral campaign ran a full-blown, racist voter suppression operation to get him elected? I guess Barbour will be in good company.

I'll be even a little more blunt. Haley Barbour refuses to disavow his affiliations with the neo-confederate movement and its powerful Mississippi mouthpiece, the Council of Conservative Citizens—the same organization that under a different name (White Citizens Council) fostered the environment in which a gang of klansmen, including law enforcement, could beat and shoot to death James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman—and so many others—with total impunity. A few nice sounding words on the podium of a farcical memorial don't change anything. As Katrina Survivor Leah Hodges said before the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina, "If I put a dress on a pig, a pig is still a pig."

See also: The “Shakedown Gang”: Roy Innis and the New Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)

Miscounting Prisoners Hurts Rural Communities As Well As Urban Ones

Peter Wagner has a fascinating new piece on Prisoners of the Census. If you're new to what Peter does, his organization, the Prison Policy Initiative, does innovative research and advocacy on the problems that ensue from counting mostly urban Black and Latino prisoners as residents of the predominantly white rural communities where many are imprisoned. Miscounting prisoners in this way diminishes the political clout of the communities the prisoners come from and provides the host communities with a windfall of tax revenues, based on the "increase" in their populations. The surprising thing is that communities who lose money to this arrangement are not the urban ones where the prisoners come from, but the the other adjacent rural areas that don't host prisons.

[M]ost of the money redirected by prison census counts is raised in specialty taxes (liquor taxes, cigarette taxes, recreational park usage fees, hunting-fishing licenses, etc.) and county sales taxes. Not all states have these revenue sources, and in the big picture this is small change, but it is important to see who pays for the windfall received by some.

Dutchess County, NY, can provide a detailed example. In 2003, the town of Fishkill and the small City of Beacon argued over whether the prison counted in one town was really in the other because $85,000 in county sales tax revenues was at stake. Although the prisoners were from New York City, neither the prisoners nor New York City had a valid claim on these funds.

This was not a state sales tax being distributed within the state on the basis of population, but a county sales tax being distributed on the basis of population within the county. The county sets the tax rate — about 3% of each purchase — and keeps that money locally. As a result of their "population" based formula, towns with elevated populations due to prisoners get an extra share. So if that money doesn't belong to New York City or to the prison towns, to whom does it belong?

That money belongs to every other town in the county that does not have a prison. The towns with prisons get a windfall, and every community without a prison is deprived of about 1.7% of the tax receipts it would otherwise receive.

(Read the rest.)

My Father And The Peace Movement (Thumbnail Version)

Sixty years ago today the US dropped the nuclear bomb called Little Boy over the central part of Hiroshima, killing at least 66,000 people.

In honor of this year's Hiroshima Day, I am posting this excerpt from my father's Political Autobiography.

By now the McCarthy period was upon us. The CIO was split and the traditional antagonisms on the left had taken a turn toward suicidal meanness. Then real disaster hit in the form of the Korean War. I got drafted, got married and had all my previous assumptions challenged. War was indeed hell. I was constantly one step away from a court martial. A full Colonel once told me that in his twenty five years in the Army he had never seen a man who was less of a soldier than I was. I thanked him and told him that I was only a civilian with a uniform on. I found myself in Japan after several small wounds and a massive case of dysentery that was written up in the Army Medical Journal. It was in Hiroshima that I had a profound religious experience. In the Hiroshima Museum there is a wall, all that is left of a building destroyed by the bomb. On that wall is etched the shadow of human beings which is all that is left of them. It was there that I came to understand that the distinction between just and unjust wars was blurred and that human existence was at great risk and that only a spiritual revolution would be sufficient if humanity was going to survive.

When I came home neither I or the left was the same. It was the time of the toad. There were no labor jobs open for me and I was sorting out my own thoughts. I did participate in electoral politics and the peace and civil rights movements but establishing myself in the role of husband and father took priority. I went to Columbia University School of General Studies and after a couple of years realized that I was too restless for academic life. As the fifties came to a close and the first stirrings of a new left emerged I was involved with CORE and the organizing of the Committee For A Sane Nuclear Policy. After several years of mundane earn a living jobs I went to work for the United Furniture Workers. I was Assistant President and functioned as the "staff intellectual" and as director of organization. I headed the research bureau, edited the newspaper and directed field organizing. I was often in the South and trying to organize integrated unions. The President of the Union Morris Pizer was one of the last of a vanishing breed of Jewish working class intellectuals. He was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the union hall. After a couple of years the business union element pushed Pizer into a kind of corner and complained that I spent too much on organizing the South. Meanwhile SANE had grown and I was asked to become Executive Director of the Greater New York Council. Here we had some success. We lobbied for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and got it. We established Hiroshima Day by organizing the first large peace march in America. It went from Princeton, New Jersey to the United Nations and 100,000 people assembled under the words from Isaiah "and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and neither shall they study war any more."

Census treatment of incarcerated felons unfairly dilutes voting strength of non-prison communities

Posted on June 22, 2005

NEWS RELEASE JUNE 22, 2005
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT:
Brenda Wright, National Voting Rights Institute (617) 624-3900, ext. 13
Peter Wagner, Prison Policy Initiative (413) 586-4985
http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/news/fact-22-6-2005.shtml

Today, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit is hearing arguments in two cases alleging that New York's felon disenfranchisement laws violate the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution (Muntaqim v. Coombe and Hayden v. Pataki). The National Voting Rights Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative have filed an amicus brief with the Court arguing that the Court should consider the redistricting implications of disenfranchisement as part of the "totality of circumstances" which must be examined under the Voting Rights Act. The brief highlights the New York State legislature's racially discriminatory redistricting practice of crediting rural white counties with additional population based on the presence of disenfranchised prisoners in upstate prisons.

New York State is majority White (62%), but its prison population is majority Black and Latino (82%), so disenfranchising prisoners and parolees results in a disproportionate bar to Black and Latino political participation. In their brief, the National Voting Rights Institute and the Prison Policy Initiative provide new information to the court showing how New York State's disenfranchisement practices combine with its redistricting practices to diminish the voting strength of non-incarcerated persons of color in the prisoners' home communities.

In drawing state legislative districts, New York uses Census Bureau data that counts the state's mostly urban and minority prisoners as residents of the mostly white and rural prison counties rather than as residents of the home communities where they resided prior to incarceration, where they are deemed legal residents for most other legal purposes. Several upstate legislative districts lack sufficient population to meet accepted one-person, one-vote standards without counting disenfranchised prisoners as part of their population base. At the same time, heavily minority districts in New York City would in all likelihood be entitled to additional representation if prisoners were counted as residents of their home communities for purposes of redistricting.

The brief argues that New York's practice has an historical parallel that the Court should be disinclined to follow. "The practice bears a striking resemblance to the original 'Three-Fifths' clause of the United States Constitution, which allowed the South to obtain enhanced representation in Congress by counting disenfranchised slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment," says Prison Policy Initiative Assistant Director Peter Wagner.

Brenda Wright, managing attorney of the National Voting Rights Institute and the author of the brief, says: "New York's decision to credit disenfranchised prisoners to largely white counties, rather than their home communities, is a critical example of racial discrimination the court should consider."

In the two cases, the Second Circuit has taken the unusual step of granting in banc review by all active judges on the Court. The lower courts initially ruled against the plaintiffs and held that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act does not permit a challenge to prisoner disenfranchisement. The amicus brief of NVRI and the Prison Policy Institute, filed on January 28, 2005, is available on NVRI's website at: http://www.nvri.org/about/new_york_state_policies.shtml and in hypertext on the PPI site at http://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/muntaqim.shtml.

The National Voting Rights Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan legal center. Through litigation and public education, NVRI seeks to make real the promise of American democracy that meaningful political participation and power should be accessible to all regardless of economic or social status. The Prison Policy Initiative conducts research and advocacy on incarceration policy. Among its publications are a report, Importing Constituents: Prisoners and Political Clout in New York , which documents how the transfer of a large, non-voting population to upstate prisons, where it is counted as part of the population base for redistricting, artificially enhances the representation afforded to predominantly white, upstate legislative districts.

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William J. Douthard (aka "Meatball"), Jan. 6, 1947 - Jan. 4, 1981

I first mentioned William Douthard in passing here. At the right is a flier from a civil rights rally I think my father organized, where William spoke (click on the image to enlarge).

William Douthard was a student demonstration leader in Birmingham, Alabama, which was where he and my father met. To many in the Movement, he was known as "Meatball." I always knew him as William.

I have strong memories of William because in 1978 he moved to Bethlehem, NY (a suburb south of Albany), where my family was living. He lived at our house for a while until his job started and he found his own place. One of my vivid memories of when he stayted with us was the time William took me to the Bethlehem Public Library and taught me how to do library research on the Fabian Society. (I believe the topic was suggested by my father, certainly not by my teachers). At one point, as William was guiding me through the process of putting my notes onto index cards, he suddenly stopped me and reprimanded me somewhat sternly for using a word in my notes that I didn't know the meaning of. He insisted I go over to the dictionary and find out the definition before I continued with anything else. At home, it was common to find William and Dad sitting at our kitchen table and playing pinochle for hours on end. I don't remember ever hearing them reminisce about working together in Alabama. Not needing to talk about it may have been the point: they had a strong mutual understanding, and that was probably comforting.

William moved into a condominium on one of the northernmost edges of Slingerlands, the next hamlet over from us in the same town, nestled between the borders of Albany and Guilderland. He married his second wife within the first year or so of being there, and she and her son Kip, a few years older than I, moved in. The condo was on a hill, overlooking the the Normanskill Creek, which forms the northern border of the town of Bethlehem. William had sliding glass doors that opened out onto a concrete patio on the crest of the hill. I remember a barbecue out there, probably the summer of 1979. Kip took me down the hill, over to the other side of Blessing Road, where you can walk down a steep slope, under the spot where Blessing Road runs into Rt. 85. Kip showed me where you can get onto the cross beams underneath the bridge that carries Rt. 85 over the Kill. I was too scared to come out as far as he did on the steel beams, with the cars making the whole structure tremble as they passed. Later on indoors, I wandered into William and Kim's room. On the wall, above the bed, was a poster size head shot of William. Over the poster was a clear, plastic sheet, with red concentric circles, making a bulls eye over William's animated face, and with several darts stuck through, into the wall.

We saw a lot of William until 1981, when he died very young, just shy of his 34th birthday. I don't remember what put him in the hospital (I was 11 at the time), but he developed a blood clot, which was the cause of death.

In the early 1960s in his home town of Birmingham, Alabama he was a leader of the Alabama Student Movement for Human Rights . . . He joined the field staff of the SCLC in 1961 and worked in various campaigns until 1964 when he joined the staff of CORE. Late in 1964 he moved to NYC and worked for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in the Political Education Department. From 1968-1978 William worked with several agencies dealing with the problems of urban youth in NYC, including the Addiction Service Agency and The Family Youth Center in Brooklyn which was unique in its efforts as a community based program.

William was involved in the peace movement as well. He sat on the executive committee of the War Resistors League and served on the Board of Directors of WIN, a publication of the peace movement. He also served on the board of the AJ Muste Memorial Institute.

In 1978 William came to Albany to join the affirmative action staff of the Department of Taxation and Finance, serving as Supervisor of Affirmative Action Plan and Program. His remarkable leadership talents were recognized; and after a short term as Director of Affirmative Action at the Office of Mental Retardation, he was appointed Assistant Commissioner for Affirmative Action in the Department of Corrections where he was serving at the time of his death.

(from the program booklet of William Douthard's Eulogistic Service, held at the Bethel Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama, Saturday, January 10, 1981)

When William first moved to New York City, he lived with my parents then, too, in their co-op apartment on the Lower East Side. William's job at the the NYS Tax Department was through my father, who was Secretary to the Tax Commission. William's first job in NYC, with the ILGWU, was probably also through my father, since the ILGWU was headed by David Dubinsky, and my father worked closely with Dubinsky at the Liberal Party of NY. William also moved quickly into Liberal Party circles, as is evidenced in the February/March edition of the Liberal News, from which I will be posting excerpts soon.

The War Resisters League established a fund in William's memory after he died. While he was alive, William used to send us WRL Peace Desk Calendars each year. We continued buying the calendars for a number of years after he died.

p.s.

Sorry it's been so quiet over here. Had a bad cold last week and was also working on some writing for print publication (more on that soon).

Over Memorial Day weekend we visited my mother, and I spent some more time with my father's papers. I brought a bunch of new papers back home, some of which will be making their way into new posts soon.

New documents include some reports dad wrote for the United Furniture Workers of America, when he was their research director in the late 50s, some issues of the Furniture Workers' newspaper and of the Liberal News, the old newspaper of the Liberal Party of New York, and a lot of stuff relating to dad's work on changing the NYC School Board elections over to the system of Proportional Representation. The Liberal News includes a number of articles by dad and, I am very excited to say, a first hand account by my father's friend William Douthard (aka Meatball to Movement people) of civil rights demonstrations that he led Alabama.

Similar to how I intend my work on my father to illuminate the life of his friend Frankie Newton, I also intend to have this project include things about William, who died much too young in 1981, at the age of 33. In 1978, when I was 9, William moved to the Albany, NY area and lived with my family until his new job fell into place and he had a place to live, and we continued to spend time with him and his wife Kim and their son Kip (from Kim's previous marriage) for the next three years, until his untimely death from a blood clot. William was a marvelous man. It's hard to believe that when I knew him he was younger than I am now. More on William soon . . .

It's Almost Passover (Rerun)

[I never marked the first anniversary of HungryBlues back in March, but I think that gives me occasional license to rerun posts that are more than a year old. What follows is a slightly shortened version my post from this time (on the Jewish calendar) last year. I think I have some more readers since then, and the post resonates differently—at least for me—with more life lived and more writing and research behind me. Chag samei'ach (happy holiday). --BG

As usual, while I'm here at my mom's house, I'm sifting through the documents and objects that fill the house. This time I'm looking through some of the documents from Dad's work on Proportional Representation (PR) in New York City. In the late 1960s, there was a move, ultimately unsuccessful, to bring PR back as the method of electing the New York City Council members. PR was the method used for NYC Council elections from 1938 to 1949. In the early 1970s there was a successful campaign to change the New York City School Board Elections to PR. Both of these efforts were spearheaded by my father, who was Executive Director of the New York Proportional Representation Committee from 1969-1971 and Associate Director of the Special Unit for School Board Elections of the Board of Elections in the City of New York from 1970-1973. The work that he did around the NYC School Board elections was enormous. He used to refer to his 1973 testimony at the New York State Education Department Hearings on Community School Board Elections as his master's thesis. (For a description of the kind of PR that he worked to institute in NYC go here or here.) Before I can write fully about my dad's involvement in PR for NYC, there are many documents here in Delmar that I need to read and there's a lot more that I need to learn about this bit of NYC political history. Still I'm going to post a little from what I've been reading while I'm here on my Passover visit.

As I study my father's political life I've been interested in the diversity of his involvements and how they were related in his mind. In his resumé that I posted you can see that in the space of a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he moved from organized labor, to the disarmament movement, to the Civil Rights Movement. Then he was doing state legislative work for the Liberal Party in the mid to late 1960s. An then the PR campaigns in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

One document that I found among the papers relating to the campaign to use PR in the NY City Council elections is a fact sheet, dated 1969 and titled "Proportional Representation (P.R.): A Proposal For Complete Representation In The New York City Council." In this 6 page pamphlet, which I presume my father wrote, there's a section called "P.R. And Civil Rights:"

P. R. is of special importance and usefulness for the advancement of civil rights. In the present transition to full and equal citizenship, in fact as well as in law, it means a great deal to the whole community, as well as to the people directly concerned, for Blacks and Puerto Ricans to be able to use their voice in government. This they can usually do, in district elections, only when they stay hived in "ghettoes" like Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. But the dispersal of ghettoes to secure the integration of the community has been a major objective of the civil rights movement.

P.R. will make it possible for a minority candidate to live anywhere and get votes from anywhere in his borough, and if his supporters poll a sufficient minority of the borough's votes - e.g. something approaching a tenth in a ten member borough - he will be elected. Furthermore, P. R. Gives every voter a preferential vote so that if it cannot help elect his first choice, it can be used at full value for his second choice, or if necessary, his third or fourth. Thus nearly ever Black or Puerto Rican voter can help to elect either a trusted Black or Puerto Rican leader or some other candidate who understands his special problems. The last Council election gave us only 2 Black Councilmen out of 37 and one Puerto Rican.

Of course most voters who do not have the special problems of the ethnic minorities will not vote on ethnic lines, other considerations being of more interest to them, and they can all get representation on whatever basis they think best.

The amounts of support given to candidates of different parties are not likely to be greatly changed - they were not when we had P.R. before - for most voters could elect within their own parties candidates who appealed to them on other grounds as well. But if the parties did not offer candidates with a real appeal to the ethnic minorities, those minorities could elect independent candidates of their own who did appeal to them. (3)

This passage captures three important elements of my father's political interests. First, he believed deeply in the value of political process. Second, in PR, as well as in the disarmament movement, we see him drawn to political work that has the potential for broad appeal across various ideological lines. Third, and this follows from the first two observations, my father's political work was always driven by an idealistic yearning for radical social transformation. This was true when he was briefly a member of the Communist Party, USA in the late 40s. But it was also true after he broke with Communism and threw off the mantle of the revolution. For my father, being a Democratic Socialist meant working within the inherently conservative structures of existing political institutions and systems to bring about Utopia.

Another huge topic which I am nowhere near ready to approach is how my father came to Judaism from his life as a radical, secular Jewish Socialist. This journey of his began in earnest in the 1970s. By the time I was growing up here, in Delmar, my dad's sense of himself as a religious man was fully formed. In the 80s and 90s, he loved quoting from a book by Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution. The book demonstrates that the Exodus from Egypt as recorded in the Torah has been the model for the four modern revolutions, the French, English, American and Russian. Walzer refers to Egypt by its Hebrew name, Mitzrayim, a word which literally means narrow place. I can't find Dad's copy of the book in the house right now, so I don't know if the quotation is accurate, but the way he always said it was that at the end of the book Walzer asks, "so what does all this mean?. . . Wherever you are it's probably Mitzrayim and you dream of a promised land. . . . and how do you get there? Organize . . ."

Last Week Was An Interesting Week

Two Fridays ago (4/8), my mother called to tell me she had just talked with a retired journalist, named Jeff Prugh. Apparently Jeff had come across my posts on the Roosevelt Tatum story, and he wanted to talk with me. Between my father's name and the mentions of Delmar, NY in the Tatum series (I called it "From Delmar to Bombingham"), Jeff figured out how to reach my mother.

Jeff called because he had researched this same story, starting three decades ago, interviewing many of the principle figures who were involved, including the likes of Macon Weaver, the US Attorney who drummed up the case against Tatum in the first place. If you haven't followed the links, or read the posts before, Roosevelt Tatum claimed to have witnessed two Birmingham Police officers planting the bombs that destroyed AD and Naomi King's home on the night of May 11, 1963. The Kings and their five children were in the house when the bombs went off and escaped alive only by good luck. After Tatum made his allegations and made several official statements to this effect, he abruptly retracted his testimony and was then prosecuted for false testimony. Tatum was convicted swiftly and sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

Both Jeff and I—as well as Diane McWhorter—have concluded that Tatum was bullied out of his original testimony through a rigged polygraph test, administered by the FBI in Birmingham. Jeff was astonished to find my work in part because until he read this post, he'd made the same mistake that Macon Weaver had in assuming that the Greenberg mentioned in FBI documents was the famous Civil Rights Movement attorney, Jack Greenberg.

When my mother called two Fridays ago, I was lying in bed, trying to recover from a bad cold in time for a job interview on Monday the 11th. I was still under the weather all weekend, and I wanted to use my spare time to prepare for the interview, so I didn't end up calling Jeff back until Tuesday night (4/12).

It was exciting to compare notes with Jeff because we'd reached so many of the same conclusions from our separate research and because we had each learned things that the other hadn't. While Jeff had spoken to many of the people involved—a number of whom are now dead—I had succeeded in getting additional FBI documents on the case declassified. His research led him more deeply into corruption in Alabama regarding Tatum's case; mine had revealed new details about what happened while Tatum was in Washington, DC with my father and AD King (the next part in the Delmar to Bombingham series, still in the works).

Jeff has done some very interesting work on Dan Moore, a federal marshall who tried to expose the rigging of the grand jury that convicted Tatum. In 1999 Jeff published his research in the Marin Independent Journal , the last paper he worked at before he retired (before that Jeff was a LA Times reporter for twenty-one years, including six as Atlanta Bureau Chief). In 2004, he published an expanded version as part of the King family memoir by Alveda King, AD and Naomi's oldest daughter, who was twelve at the time of the bombing. Here's an excerpt from the version in Marin Indpendent Journal:

In June [1963] while Rooselvelt Tatum is being questioned in Washington, Moore becomes incensed when [sic] learns that his boss, U.S. Marshal Peyton Norville, and Judge Allgood participate in selecting the federal grand jury that would indict Tatum.

In sworn testimony, Moore would say that he told a Washington-based official of the U.S. Marshals Service that his boss had bragged to him about putting his son-in-law on the grand jury.

A Justice Department examiner's report in 1964 would say that "...the jury box was one name short. The then Marshal, Mr. Norville, knowing his son-in-law to be a qualified voter, wrote his name on a piece of paper and put into the box. When the Marshal returned to his office he passed this information to the Chief [Moore] in an informal conversation . . . ."

In 1964, Moore would be subpoenaed by an attorney who represented eight white supremacists and who had been tipped about Moore's allegations that U.S. Marshal Norville had told him he had placed his son-in-law on the grand jury. The eight members of the militant National States Rights Party had been indicted by the Tatum grand jury for disrupting efforts to desegregate some of Birmingham's schools.

After the attorney takes Moore's deposition alleging that the grand jury had been improperly impaneled, Moore is called to Judge Allgood's chambers, and, according to Moore, the judge tells him: "You've got me backed against the wall now. What the hell am I supposed to do?

Moore to Judge Allgood: "Throw 'em all out! Dismiss all the indictments [including Tatum's]!

Amid allegations that the grand jury was tainted, the judge drops charges against the whites—publicly citing "fundamental deficiencies" in the indictment—but the judge doesn't let Moore's testimony impugning the grand jury get in the way of the case the feds had built against Roosevelt Tatum.

Dan Moore continues to press for propriety in the federal courthouse in Birmingham. However, he becomes persona non grata. He refuses an offer of a lifetime pension of $3,971 a year ($331 monthly) if he would retire on the spot, after nearly 20 years with the U.S. Marshals Service, and claim what he says would be a bogus disability. He would describe the offer as "a crooked scheme designed to steal public money and to cover up what I knew about obstruction of justice in the Tatum grand jury."

            ***         ***         ***
Earlier the same Tuesday evening that I spoke with Jeff Prugh (4/12), I found a voicemail on my cell phone after I got out of yoga class. The call was from Bob Adamenko, an old friend of my dad's. Back in October, Bob stumbled on Hungry Blues posts from July about Ray Charles and the 1963 concert he played in Birmingham, organized by my father, as a benefit to send Birmingham residents to the March on Washington. In the comments to one post, Bob wrote:

ben, I was a friend of your wondeful father. your mom would rebember me and my wife elaine. please call me at home. after your dad moved up to albany with the family we stayed in touch and eventually lost contact. I was on line doing some research on the liberal party and i came upon hungry blues. please call me any time. I would love to talk to you. Bob Adamenko-[phone # deleted for commentor's privacy] ps. I have the negatives of that show in birminham (emphasis added)

I called Bob immediately, of course, and we had a great, wide ranging conversation—Birmingham, Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Liberal Party, CORE, James Farmer, the Lower East Side . . .

Bob had been in charge of security for the concert and had taken pictures. Bob was emphatic that I should have the negatives. "If anyone should have them, you should. They belong to you . . ."

Until last week, that was the last I'd heard from Bob. But then there he was on my voicemail, saying he'd been in the hospital again but he is doing better now and he needs my address so he can send my the pictures. I called Bob as soon as I got home from class. I couldn't catch everything he told me about the negatives because my son Aaron (who is now two, by the way) was resisting bed time, and exuberantly showing off his command of two word phrases and multi-syllabic words as he climbed into his high chair to join me and Ruth in our ritual, post-yoga class take out.
            ***         ***         ***
Last Friday (4/15), I received some interesting mail: 1 oversized, padded envelope, from Jeff Prugh; 1 9 x 12 manilla envelop, from Bob Adamenko; 1 flat, cardboard mailer, 6 x 8 1/2, from Jonathan David Jackson.

Jeff sent me a copy of Alveda King's book and a photocopy of the Marin Independent Journal article (not archived on the paper's website). Bob sent me several contact sheets from the Birmingham negatives, a contact sheet of negatives of scenes from Washington, DC in 1963, the day before the March on Washington, two large prints, and a letter of recommendation that my dad wrote for him in 1976, while Dad was Secretary to the New York State Tax Commission. Jonathan sent me his new chapbook of poems (also see this post).

I spoke with Bob on Saturday, to tell him his envelope arrived. He told me he's sending the negatives next.

One of the prints from Bob was a press photo (at right) from John Lindsay's first appearance after he won the New York City Mayor's race in 1965. Lindsay was a Liberal Republican, with a capital "L" and a capital "R." That is, he ran in 1965 on a joint Liberal/GOP ticket. In 1965, my father was Assistant to Executive Director and Legislative Representative for the Liberal Party of New York, and he was one of the driving forces behind Lindsay's mayoral campaign. In this victory photo, you can see the Liberal Party banner overhead. In front, from left to right, it's Robert Adamenko, Paul Greenberg, and John Lindsay.

I'm not at all certain, but I think that might be my mother, very partially visible behind Bob's left shoulder, standing next to Dad.

Update 7/9/05: Jonathan David Jackson's website is down; links to it removed for now.

Ah Yes, That Liberal Republican, Rudolph Giuliani

Well, no.

Giuliani helps raise campaign cash for Lott

February 22, 2005, 5:28 PM EST

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) _ When he was Senate minority leader, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott helped support New York City as it recovered from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said.

On Tuesday, Giuliani was in Mississippi to give Lott some political help, speaking at a luncheon that raised $200,000 for Lott's campaign fund.

"I'm here because he's a great leader for Americans," Giuliani said as he stood with the senator during a news conference.

(via Mississippi Political.)

Hungry Blues III

In 1994 my father spoke during the week of Martin Luther King Day at Temple Gates of Heaven, a Reform synagogue in Schenectady, NY. In his speech, he commented on Black-Jewish relations in a way that illuminates his own relationships with Black folks.

I don't intend to raise the question of Black-Jewish relations in part because I think it has been addressed to little avail at length by our community and in part because I think what I will raise speaks to the question in a more meaningful way than the usual discussion that tries to rekindle a better past that I personally don't think ever existed. . . .

Simply put we who are conscious and actively Jewish live within two cultures Jewish and American. Our effort individually and collectively is to find a place of comfort and ease so that we can have both.

Let me say quickly and emphatically right here so that there is no misunderstanding. The Jewish American experience and the Black American experience are not the same nor can we find an easy equation between the two. I am indicating that we share this relationship to America. We want our own identity and we want to participate fully in our country's bounty and its decision making.

In the same speech, my father recalled the experience that first made him clearly aware of his Jewish identity and first made him conscious of living in two cultures.

I don't remember whether I was seven or eight but the scene is vivid in the feeling part of my memory. We were living in Taunton, Massachusetts. Until that day (it must have been summer because I wasn't in school) I was only vaguely aware of being Jewish. I had heard the family stories, I was somewhat embarrassed by my paternal grandmother's accent and I loved Bible stories especially the Exodus tale.

They were starting a baseball game. Sides were being chosen. I stood there expecting to be chosen around fourth or fifth. I was realistic about my ability. I wasn't the best but I was far from the worst. I made up in determination what I lacked in size. While waiting in pleasant expectation lightning struck. "Do you want Jewboy? I don’t want him on my side." It took several seconds for me to realize he was talking about me. JEWBOY! JEWBOY! JEWBOY! The word crashed through my being. My insides were raw with pain. "I am an American," I screamed in a tearful combination of fear and rage. "Jewboy!" " Jew cry baby!" "Mockie!" Christkiller!" "Scram, Jews can't play baseball." I stood my ground and yelled the most meaningful words I could find, "it's a free country!" I don't know who threw the fist blow but a general melee ensued. I was badly bruised and I would like to believe several of my tormentors carried home some effects of my frantic and violent surge of energy.

In the 1930s and 1940s antisemitism was still quite overt in the US. My father's tormentors may not have understood much about the culture he came from, but they stood ready to keep him out of theirs. Dad had a number of stories like this one, lessons in being on the outside. The most developed one, and the most fully fictionalized, is "Lonesome Blues", the story I posted in September, named after the song [RealPlayer] by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. In "Lonesome Blues," the high school years of a suicide jazz musician, Mo Bartel, closely mirror my father's.

The other live factor in my life was basketball. I was going to show them that a Jew could be as tough as anyone. I made the team by determination rather than skill. Years later I asked Tony Nucola, who was our coach, why he put me on his squad and he told me that any one who fought that hard to play was worth having on the team. I don’t know whether he did me a favor or not. I was always playing 9 men. The opposing 5 and our other 4.

This time around, he knows where he stands. His imaginative and intellectual powers are dominated by the activity of assessing boundaries, identifying gatekeepers and allies, and developing entry and exit strategies.

Do you remember my Tuesday to Saturday Blues? That's what it was all about. Keefe invited me on Tuesday and I had to wait until Saturday. I went and didn't over and over. I was sure they were putting me on. I would flunk the test and be the laughing stock of the school. They would remember I was Jewish and ask me to leave. One country indivisible with liberty and justice for all that crap and they would call me Jewboy and I would start a fight. I wouldn't know what to say. I hated popular music.

On Saturday I walked up the hill to Keefe's house like a car with a couple of spark plugs out. By the time I got there I was shaking, inside my stomach felt like mush. Mrs. Riley, pretty, friendly, lovely Mrs. Riley answered the door and told me "the boys are down in the basement."

Eight boys looked like an army and sounded like two. I was trapped. Eight enemies of my privacy were looking at me, surveying me. I was searching for something to say when Keefe made it easy—easy like scaling Everest easy like dying. "Hi Mo. Guys this is the clary man I told you about Mo Bartel. Mo did you bring any sides?"

"Yeah, two my left and right." I made it. I was in and still breathing.

Someone shoved a coke in my hand and I was able to ward off questions about how long I was playing or who my teacher is when Keefe shouted above the din "let's get organized and start spinning some sides first one for Mo, Pops Armstrong's Lonesome Blues featuring Johnny Dodds on clarinet."

Love on first sound? Three minutes on another planet. I mean it hit me like where have you been all my painful life. This was what I felt. The truth head on. It cried without the tears showing, it screamed pain without being sent to the nuthouse. It was all about being alone, alone, alone.

He was in and still breathing but in is a state of mind and out was still where he was, and Johnny Dodds was talking about it and

After it finished I got up walked upstairs and out down the hill and with tears in my eyes I ran down the hill...

I am interested in this complicated process of Mo Bartel née Paul Greenberg's identification with African American culture—among other things, that it occurred, at least in the story, in a room full of white high school boys. They knew about Louis Armstrong's mid 1920s breakthrough, modernistic refashioning of New Orleans jazz. Mo didn't, but they seemed to think he would. In their eyes a Jewish clary man had a touch of the exotic and was automatically identified with jazz rather than the classical music he was learning to play. They wanted to entertain him or prove they were in the know.

I am interested in the story's rough hewn prose style and in how Mo Bartel, and his foil, the narrator, fit into the literature of American Jewish urban experience, which should be familiar to anyone who has read Nat Hentoff or other jazz literature, like Max Kaminsky's forgotten classic My Life in Jazz. But when looking at this story as a text about my father, there is something else to know. The drafts of it, along with the other sketches and segments for the novel Long Days Short Nights it was to be part of, are handwritten on the backs of copies of the flier at right (click on image to enlarge).

Presumably Dad was the organizer of the event: William Douthard (aka Meatball) was his very close friend from when he was working for the SCLC in Birmingham, Martin Luther King was his boss, and James Farmer was a close associate, whom he revered. I don't know how well Dad knew Constance Baker Motley, but they were both part the Civil Rights Movement community in New York. My family lived in Co-op Village and Dad was highly active in left organizations on the Lower East Side. So the flier has my father written all over it in more ways than one.

During some of his most direct involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, his inner life was preoccupied elsewhere. He didn't treat the political fliers as documents to save for posterity, but as surfaces on which to write and fictionalize his life—as if his committed activism was only the backdrop for a personal journey. Of course the two things were not really separable. In fact, the suicides in "Lonesome Blues" may well be precisely what underlies my father's participation in the Southern Freedom Movement. From "Lonesome Blues," first paragraph:

They will say he was only 37 years old no one knew he was sick that he left a wife and two children and 300 records behind. They will find out he was broke and remember he was the first whiteman to tour with Prince Kingsley.

In the summer and fall of 1963 Paul Greenberg was thirty-five years old and a one time aspiring jazz clarinetist; he had a wife and two daughters, and kept a sizable collection of records, a large portion of which were jazz. I said suicides, in the plural, because there are really two. There's Mo Bartel who seems to have taken his own life in a Chicago hotel room, and there's the journalist-narrator, whose method of narrative transmission spells a kind of professional suicide, a sacrifice of his means of publication in exchange for the hope that his revelation of Mo Bartel's inner life will see the light of day.

I don’t want the assignment. I wrote the Mo Bartel story 10 years ago and you didn’t print it. Enclosed is the carbon copy of the story filed with you then. Print it and buy all of his records with my check otherwise forget it. I won’t interview his wife or any of the guys he played with. Fire me—get a new Jazz Critic for our lousy magazine but I won’t do that kind of story.

The narrator dies a professional death so that the biographical Mo Bartel, whose music is already immortal, can have life after death.

At my father's funeral, my girlfriend, now the woman I'm married to, said it's a good thing he couldn't carry a tune: otherwise he wouldn't have done all this important political work. Lack of musical talent had much to do with it, but for him jazz was "a way of walking, talking. / Had it in his soul." His story in politics was the story of a lonely, Jewish high school kid in Brighton, Mass. who was catapulted by Johnny Dodds' clarinet into Frankie Newton's apartment in Union Square and into the Communist Party, the unions, SANE, and the Civil Rights Movement. The jazz life was a fading, youthful dream, and Dad was at a painful threshold, a moment just prior to when loss translates the past into nostalgia.

The final thing to note here is that I can date the handwritten draft material for Long Days Short Nights with assurance only because there is an extended passage about Frankie Newton that locates the manuscript in time. That bit of prose will make up part IV of this series.

Miscounting Prisoners: The New Three-Fifths Clause (Part 1)

Since the 2000 presidential election, there has been increased awareness of the disenfranchisement of ex-felons, which affects African Americans disproportionately. This was one of those issues that helped a lot of people see just how much racism has been at play in current electoral controversies. Whenever you think you're observing racism at play, it's good to start asking historical questions. The answers will often speak volumes about the current situation. Some initial digging about the historical roots of felony disenfranchisement is enough to make it clear that this form of disenfranchisement is right up there with things like voter intimidation as living vestiges of America's shameful Jim Crow system.

At the end of the Civil War, however, lawmakers found new uses for felony disenfranchisement laws. The newly adopted Fifteenth Amendment allowed African Americans to vote – in theory. In practice, Southern whites soon began to rewrite their state constitutions to remove African Americans from politics. Declaring proudly and explicitly their goal of white supremacy, these lawmakers used a variety of legal schemes to disempower African Americans, including literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses and all-white primaries. Most of these laws have been called out as racist and unconstitutional, and have been wiped from the books. Felony disenfranchisement laws are the notable exception.

Mississippi’s 1890 constitutional convention was among the first to use felon disenfranchisement laws against African Americans. Until then, Mississippi law disenfranchised those guilty of any crime. In 1890, however, the law was narrowed to exclude only those convicted of certain offenses – crimes of which African Americans were more often convicted than whites. The Mississippi Supreme Court in 1896 enumerated these crimes, confirming that the new constitution targeted those “convicted of bribery, burglary, theft, arson, obtaining money or goods under false pretenses, perjury, forgery, embezzlement or bigamy.”

Other states followed suit. Many newly disenfranchisable offenses, such as bigamy and vagrancy, were common among African Americans simply because of the dislocations of slavery and Reconstruction. Indeed, the laws were carefully designed by white men who understood how to apply criminal law in a discriminatory way: the Alabama judge who wrote that state’s new disenfranchisement language had decades of experience in a predominantly African-American district, and estimated that certain misdemeanor charges could be used to disqualify two-thirds of black voters.

“What is it we want to do?” asked John B. Knox, president of the Alabama convention of 1901. “Why, it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this State.” (Emphasis added)

Any discussion of remedy is, therefore, a discussion about whether we have the political will to undo institutionalized racism and fight its adherents.

So what about the Three-Fifths Clause? Well I was over at the National Voting Rights Institute (NVRI) website and discovered that felony disenfranchisement has some other dimensions that have not been part of the current discussions on election reform. NVRI has joined the Prison Policy Initiative in filing an amicus brief in Muntaqim v. Coombe, a case challenging New York's prisoner disenfranchisement laws under the Voting Rights Act.

A combination of policies regarding the census, political redistricting and felon disenfranchisement are discriminating against racial minorities in New York state. The state denies incarcerated prisoners the right to vote, yet counts prisoners as residents of prisons where they are incarcerated when drawing its state legislative districts. This practice dilutes minority voting strength by enhancing the voting power of upstate rural prison districts, at the expense of the urban minority communities where most prisoners retain their legal residence. . . .

The brief explains how New York's policy of crediting prison towns with the presence of disenfranchised prisoners for purposes of redistricting enhances the voting strength of white communities that host prisons while diluting the representation afforded to urban communities of color. Representatives of these rural upstate districts make little pretense of treating prisoners as actual constituents.

State Senator Dale Volker, a conservative Republican who represents one such district, has acknowledged in an interview that he would sooner seek votes from the cows in his districts than from the prison inmates because "they would be more likely to vote for me." If prisoners were counted as residents of the communities where they resided prior to incarceration, rather than as residents of prison towns, a number of urban communities of color would in all likelihood be entitled to greater representation in the legislature. Several predominantly white upstate legislative districts would not have sufficient population to justify a representative were it not for the disenfranchised prisoners.

The brief points out that New York's assignment of disenfranchised prisoners to upstate rural districts for purposes of redistricting bears a striking resemblance to the original "Three-Fifths" clause of the United States Constitution, which allowed the South to obtain enhanced representation in Congress by counting disenfranchised slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional apportionment. (Emphasis added.)

This disturbing combination of felony disenfranchisement law and census policy is not unique to New York State. So far, the Prison Policy Initiative has issued reports on the effects of such policies in fifteen states: Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Montana. Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas.

The comparison between the function of the US prison system and our older, more explicitly racist laws should be enough to give readers pause. In honor of Black History Month, however, I will follow this post with two more to make a three part series. In Part 2, I will look further at the history of US racism to show what the structural purposes are behind many racist laws and policies. In Part 3, in light of the historical context in Part 2, I will look further at some of the implications and effects of miscounting prisoners. A brief review of the institutionalization of American racist ideology will show that though the implementation has changed, the basic structures upon which America was built remain very well intact.

Further Reading:
Prisoners of the Census
The Sentencing Project

David Dinkins Called Him A Ronald Reagan Republican

Or, Why My Father Despised Rudolph Giuliani

The following is from an important history of Republican voter suppression tactics. Citations follow, below.

Mayoral Politics in New York, 1993

The 1993 New York City mayoral contest was a bitter rematch between incumbent Democrat David Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor, and Republican Rudolph Giuliani. Four years earlier, Dinkins had edged out Giuliani 50-48%. Racial issues, and fears of racial division, loomed large in the 1993 campaign—as did fear of fraud and intimidation. A New York Times article summed up the latter worries shortly before the election:

The Dinkins campaign expressed concern that off-duty police officers supporting Giuliani might intimidate Democratic voters, while the Giuliani campaign demanded extra police officers to make sure no fraud occurred in polling places where the Mayor’s supporters outnumber the challenger’s.141

Giuliani representatives earlier had sent a letter to the New York City Police Commissioner, Raymond Kelly, asking for at least 2,700 police officers to be assigned to the polls, in addition to the “thousands” of volunteer poll watchers provided by the Republican Party.142 Kelly responded by assigning 3,500 officers and creating 52 “captains” to supervise the poll watching.143 This decision was a compromise designed to please both sides: the 3,500 poll-watchers were assigned to watch for voter fraud, and the 52 captains were assigned to ensure the poll-watchers did not intimidate voters. Mayor Dinkins warned that it was improper for poll-watchers (especially officers who supported Giuliani) to “exert their influence and intimidate people” and “to throw their weight around.”144

Meanwhile, New York State Republican Party Chairman William Powers made it clear that his party’s volunteer poll-watchers would be out in force in majority- Democratic precincts: “We will be manning polls that have never seen a Republican before,” he announced.145 The Giuliani campaign had been worried for months by rumors that many Democratic voters registered more than once or were illegal immigrants.146

On Election Day morning, Mayor Dinkins held a news conference stating that “we appear to be seeing an outrageous campaign of voter intimidation and political dirty tricks afoot in today’s election.”147 This allegation was based on three initially unsubstantiated reports by Dinkins’ poll-watchers, and Giuliani responded, “I can assure you this has nothing to do with my campaign and it is precisely what we expected of them.”148 The reports were that off-duty police officers physically threatened a Dinkins volunteer and that intimidating posters had been placed in black and Latino neighborhoods.149 The second report was later confirmed. Posters had been placed at several polling places, and read: “Federal authorities and immigration officials will be at all election sites. . . . Immigration officials will be at locations to arrest and deport undocumented illegal voters.”150 Dinkins called on the Department of Justice to investigate, and a statement issued by the department advised voters to disregard the posters and pledged “to protect the rights of minority voters.” It also announced that “the Department of Justice and the FBI are conducting an investigation to determine who prepared and posted these notices.”151

The investigation coincided with charges of minority vote suppression in the New Jersey gubernatorial contest and added to the racially charged atmosphere in New York City. In addition to the threatening posters, reports emerged that ten homeless men showed up at a predominantly black and Hispanic voting site in Bedford-Stuyvesant and tried to disturb the voting process; one of the men admitted to having been paid $60 for the purpose but did not identify the source.152 Others among the ten told a Democratic poll-watcher they had been promised $70 and a hot meal by an organization called Together We Stand.153 Another person not connected with the homeless men reported that Republican poll-watchers asked for the green cards of prospective voters in East Harlem.154

Giuliani defeated Dinkins by almost the same margin Dinkins had won in their first contest: 51-48%. On November 29 Al Gordon, New York State Democratic Party chairman, claimed he had evidence of over seventy-five instances in which voter intimidation and minority vote suppression had occurred on Election Day, and promised to forward his evidence to the Justice Department in hopes of preventing future Republican ballot security programs.155 His evidence, he said, revealed a pattern of harassment that seemed to him to be orchestrated not by the Giuliani campaign but by the Republican Party at the state level. “We are not calling for an overturning of the election,” he said. “We are saying that there was a pattern of thought-out harassment by the Republican Party and that they have to stop.”156

He cited instances in which homeless men disturbed voters by asking for their identity and instances in which poll-watchers tried to slow down the voting process by asking for several forms of identification.157 He also cited the testimony of Denise Ryan, a Dinkins poll-watcher who reported that in her precinct “four large white men came into the gymnasium and proceeded to stand in the doorway, blocking the door. . . . An elderly gentleman trying to get in couldn’t even see past them.”158 Gordon concluded, “I think it was an effort to delay, harass and intimidate voters just in the minority communities.”159 However, Republicans retorted that the same kind of behavior was taking place in predominantly Republican precincts. “There was voter intimidation by them—not by us,” said John Sweeny, a lawyer for the New York Republican Party.160 State party chairman Powers called Gordon’s accusations “a cheap political stunt.”161 There were no definitive resolutions of these allegations. Charges and countercharges regarding the same issues—vote fraud and vote intimidation—would continue with a vengeance in New York City five years later.

------
137 United States of America et al. v. Charleston County, S.C., et al., 34.
138 Ibid.
139 United States of America et al. v. Charleston County, S.C., et al., 34.
140 McDonald, “The New Poll Tax,” 28.
141 Celia W. Dugger, “2 Sides Seek More Police to Stymie Intimidation and Fraud at Polls,” The New York
Times, 1 Nov. 1993, B5.
142 Ibid.
143 Ibid.
144 Ibid.
145 Ibid.
146 Ibid.
147 Michael Rezendes, “Giuliani Projected N.Y. Victor,” The Boston Globe, 3 Nov. 1993, 1.
148 Todd S. Purdum, “Giuliani Ousts Dinkins By A Thin Margin,” The New York Times, 3 Nov. 1993, A1.
149 “Dirty Pool At Polls Alleged; Dinkins, Giuliani Trade Allegations,” The Record (New Jersey), 3 Nov.
1993, A14.
150 Thomas B. Edsall and Malcolm Gladwell, “Vote Probe Targets N.Y. City Turnout; Bid to Deter
Minorities Claimed,” The Buffalo News (New York), 12 Nov. 1993, A1.
151 “Dirty Pool At Polls Alleged,” A14.
152 Edsall and Gladwell, “Vote Probe Targets N.Y. City Turnout,” A1.
153 James C. McKinley, Jr., “G.O.P. Accused of Disrupting Minority Voting in New York,” The New York
Times, 1 Dec. 1993, B2.
154 Edsall and Gladwell, “Vote Probe Targets N.Y. City Turnout,” A1.
155 “Dirty Tricks in Mayoral Election? Democrats Accuse, GOP Denies,” The Record (New Jersey), 1 Dec.
1993, A14.
156 Seth Faison, “Mayor’s Race Poll Abuse is Charged,” The New York Times, 30 Nov. 1993, B3.
157 Ibid.
158 “Dirty Tricks in Mayoral Election?,” A14.
159 Marc Humbert, “Authorities Probe Election Charges,” The Times-Union (Albany), 30 Nov. 1993, B2.
160 Ibid.
161 “Dirty Tricks in Mayoral Election?,” A14.

(Chandler Davidson, Tanya Dunlap, Gale Kenny, and Benjamin Wise. REPUBLICAN BALLOT SECURITY PROGRAMS: VOTE PROTECTION OR MINORITY VOTE SUPPRESSION—OR BOTH? (pdf 476kb) A REPORT TO THE CENTER FOR VOTING RIGHTS & PROTECTION, SEPTEMBER 2004. 77-79)

Further reading:
Dr. Clint Wilson. David Dinkins Elected First Black Mayor of New York, November 7, 1989.
Tom Robbins. Sundown on the Patronage Party: Liberals Sink as Working Families Rise.

 

Schwerner says questions remain unanswered in slaying of brother

quote of note: The case received national media attention, largely because two of the three victims were white, Schwerner believes. In fact, he said, in the six weeks that FBI agents searched for the bodies, they uncovered the remains of 10 to 12 African-Americans, many of whom had been active in civil rights, and none of whom received national media coverage. . . .

“When we talk about the heroes of the civil rights movement, most of the real heroes are people whose names we’ll never know,” he said. “They were people indigenous to the area, most of them black, most of them women, who were just doing what they had to do. A movement isn’t dependent on one person. It’s masses of people getting together and saying, ‘we’re not going to tolerate these conditions,’ and then doing something about it.”

January 13, 2005
Yellow Springs News
Yellow Springs, Ohio
By Diane Chiddister

In June 1964 Steve and Nancy Schwerner were vacationing in Providence, R.I., when they turned on the television news and saw that three civil rights workers were missing in Mississippi.

When Steve Schwerner called home and discovered that his little brother, Mickey, was one of the missing, he immediately knew Mickey was dead, although it took six weeks for the bodies to be discovered.

Last week a Mississippi preacher and alleged Ku Klux Klan member was arrested for killing Michael Schwerner and two other civil rights workers, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. In Neshoba County, Miss., Edgar Ray Killen, 79, was charged with three counts of murder after a grand jury ruled that sufficient evidence still exists to convict him. Killen is the first person charged with the killings, which galvanized the civil rights movement.

After 40 years with little movement in the case, Schwerner, a retired Antioch College dean of students, feels some gratification that Mickey’s alleged killer may be brought to justice, he said in an interview this week. But Schwerner also believes that Killen’s arrest in no way completely answers the larger and more complex question of why his brother was killed.

“There is a certain justice and reasonableness in having Killen indicted,” -Schwerner said. “But if that’s where it stops, the reasonableness dissipates. He didn’t act alone. And more importantly, what were the forces which allowed this to happen?”

Those forces, Schwerner believes, include the complacency of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in a racist society, along with the possible complacency of the state and federal governments. And 40 years later, Schwerner feels troubled by the bigotry he still sees around him.

Some Notes On The Education of Paul Greenberg

My father graduated from the eighth grade of Public School 89, Elmhurst, NY (Queens), in June of 1941. Like other kids graduating PS 89, he planned to go on to high school about a half mile away, at Newtown High School. According to his 8th grade autograph book, my father's favorite author was Jack London, his favorite book The Sea Wolf; Stardust was his favorite song; he loved baseball and worshipped Mel Ott.

But before my father was out of PS 89, his father was out of his life. He would tell others his parents were separated, but in reality my paternal grandfather, whom I am named after, deserted his wife and three sons. Being a single mother was not easy for Gertrude Greenberg. She was from the affluent Swig family, however, so she moved to Boston to be near them and get their support. In Brighton, they lived at 90 Kilsyth Road, an apartment building built in 1930.

            
[Paul Greenberg w/his mother, Gertrude, 90 Kilsyth Road, c. 1943]         [Paul Greenberg w/his father, Benjamin, year and location unknown]

(Oddly, before he moved last month, my close friend Joe was living in the next building up the hill, at 100 Kilsyth Road, for the first eight or nine years that I knew him. A few years ago I came across the picture of Dad and Gert, above. Suddenly I recognized the scene in the photo and I could hear my father telling how he rode his bike down the hill from 90 Kilsyth Road to Beacon Street to get to the Savoy Cafe on Massachusetts Avenue, where he'd go hear Frankie Newton, Pee Wee Russell, Max Kaminsky, Bud Freeman and many others.)

[Photo: 100 Kilsyth Road, Brighton, Massachusetts]

Instead of Newtown High in Elmhurst, my father attended Brighton High School in Boston. His education at Brighton High lasted until he was seventeen. Once his three brothers were all fighting in WWII, life wife with Gert became unbearable for him.

"Don't you have any respect for me?"

Mother of the kitchen, mother of the laundry, mother deserted by my father. I wish I did. Lord where is respect for lonely mother. All I felt was fear that I would not escape.

Pity—yes, Loyalty—yes, Fear—yes, Respect—void.

            ***         ***         *** I never formulated a plan. It just happened. Even on the day I left I didn't decide to leave. I just went.

I took my clarinet and went for a walk and was on the highway beyond the circle and thumbing a ride—Destination New York—Destination freedom. Land of dreams, heaven on earth they call it 52nd street.

            ***         ***         *** I arrived in N.Y. with 65 cents, a clarinet which I played at best poorly, and the ill fitting clothes I had on and presented my self to Newton as his new roomate[sic]—uninvited. He goddamned me and told me to go home but took me in.

(Paul A. Greenberg, excerpts from sketches for Long Days Short Nights)

The year was 1944 when he showed up at Frankie Newton's place on E17th Street, just off Union Square. In his Political Autobiography, my father wrote, "My association with Jazz musicians in general and Frankie Newton in particular shaped my view of human possibility and what suffering was about. . . . Frankie Newton . . . gave me a vision of socialism and art as important components of the human spirit. Frank taught me how to look at Picasso and Evergood and to read poetry ranging from John Donne to Langston Hughes."

[Photo: (left to right) Frankie Newton, Sidney Bechet, 8June1939 (Charles Peterson)].

Earlier, in his sketches for Long Days Short Nights, he wrote:

I learned how to listen, doubt, and feel. I learned much about being human and some of the anguish of being negro.

I first became aware of the problem of friendships "across the wall" when we were walking in an area where Frank felt we were not welcome. He asked me to walk half a block behind him. I asked him why the parade? He said if we were jumped I should run like hell.

My father often said that living with Frank was "better than ten college educations."

From mid 1940s until the fall of 1950, my father did organizing work in several CIO unions. He then served 21 months in the US Army in the Korean War, September 1950 to June 1952.

In 1953 and 1954, he attended the Columbia University School of General Studies and earned about a year's worth of college credit. This was the last of his formal education.

In 1973, my father was Director of Special Unit For School Board Elections of the Board of Elections in the City of New York. He used to say his testimony at the New York State Education Department Hearings on Community School Board Elections was his masters thesis. This was my father's official report on his oversight of changing the method of the New York City School Board elections to proportional representation.

In September of 1974, however, my father decided he would apply to attend the State University of New York's Empire State College, starting in the Spring Semester. He never sent in the application, and I have his written answers to some informational questions that were part of the application.

[Photo: Paul Greenberg, 1974]

1. What are your general long range educational, vocational, or professional plans or aspirations? How will a college education effect your plans?
My educational goals are to achieve formal degrees and to fill in the gaps in knowledge and theory that my professional career requires. This achievement will be self fulfilling and at the same time enhance my professional standing. I plan on going on to graduate school after earning my Bachelor Of Arts degree. If it is feasible I would like to go to Law School.

ANSWER EITHER QUESTION 2 OR 3

2. If your professional, vocational, or educational goals are clearly defined, please indicate which, Areas of Study you expect to include in your Concentration and General Learnings. Which of the Organizing Frameworks will you use? State briefly why this Framework is best suited to your needs.

3. If you do not have clearly defined goals, what are some of your major areas of interest? Indicate the area(s) in which you might begin your studies. In which of the Organizing Frameworks do you expect to start?
I would work within an interdisciplinary framework that includes Community and Social Services and Social Theory, Social Structure and Change.

My major interest is Government as an instrument for human service. I would like to explore the dynamics between large governmental units (Federal, State and Municipal) and community and individual needs.

I have spent a number of years in my professional life on legislative needs of communities and on developing democratic processes for community needs. I believe the framework I have chosen will enlarge my understanding of these problems and their solutions and improve my professional performance.

4. What Special Resources for Learning do you have available in your community to assist you in reaching your educational goals? Please indicate how you would use these resources. Some of the community agencies you might keep in mind are colleges, schools, social agencies, laboratories, business organizations, labor unions, government agencies, libraries, recreation groups and hospitals.
If my community is defined by the town I reside in the resources available are: An open non-partisan government structure which has open meetings of the Town Council, Planning agency and other departments. A good library with many services.

The observation and study of government as a case study is available and I could use these facilities for academic research and written reports.

If my community is defined as the Metropolitan Area the resources are unlimited. In New York City there are a variety of libraries and schools with every known resource available. My years of work in government makes it possible for me to get easy access to records and appointments with officials for academic investigation.

I could use these resources for development of written reports or for creative investigation.

5. What kinds of work experiences or other activities might your studies at Empire State College include?
My work as Director of the unit that conducts Community School Board Elections in New York City and my work representing government and social agencies at the State legislature could be excellent tools for academic inquiry.

6. Please list and briefly describe experiences outside of school or college or special circumstances which you feel are pertinent to your admission to Empire State. If you did not graduate from high school or attend college, please give evidence of your readiness to undertake college work.
My professional career which has included years of legislative work for social organizations and government agencies plus my years as an executive of various social organizations are pertinent to my admission to Empire State.

I have been the Research and Publicity Director of the United Furniture Workers of America AFL-CIO. I was a Special Assistant to the President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I was The Executive Director of The Greater New York Council for A Sane Nuclear Policy. I was the Legislative Director of the Liberal Party of New York State. I have been the Special Assistant for Legislation andGovernment hearings for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. I have been either Director or Associate Director of all the community school board elections held in New York City since their inception in 1970. I am a consultant to The State Charter Revision Committee for New York City.

These and many more activities and jobs completed are adequate proof of my ability to undertake college work.

7. What were the reasons you chose Empire State College rather than another college? What were the alternatives to Empire you considered?
I choose Empire State College because of the special nature of the program which will allow me to continue working and fulfill any academic requirements.The system of advance standing may shorten considerably the time needed to achieve a degree.

I considered Ramapo College. My examination led me to believe Empire State was more suited to my needs.

8. What are your current family, occupational, and recreational responsibilities and interests? Which of these would you continue as you pursue your program at Empire State College? Which would you have to give up in order to spend 40 or 20 hours per week required of a full or half-time student?
I am a husband and father of three children. The children are two girls ages sixteen and fourteen and a boy age five. I am currently a full time consultant to the New York State Charter Revision Commission for New York City. I spend some time trying to achieve the level of artist in the photographic medium. I am active in local political and social organizations. I can not abdicate nor do I chose to abdicate from my family. I both enjoy and need the economic reward for my professional work therefore I by necessity will have to limit my photography and organizational work. I also will have to apply a sense of discipline to my time that is now best described as leisure time.

            ***         ***         ***My father did not end up going back to school to complete his B.A. in 1974; he did continue to work in the photographic medium. The photos in this final section of my post were all shot and developed by him in that year.

In 1974 we were living in Teaneck, NJ, at 130 Johnson Avenue, minutes from the George Washington Bridge and the route into Manhattan. The picture, above, of me and Dad all dressed up for my aunt Leah's wedding, is on the front steps of that house. This next picture is of me and my sisters in the living room:

Me and Gregory, my friend from across the street, hanging out in my bedroom:

I attended kindergarten at the Bryant School in Teaneck. I believe that's me and one of my school friends:

My maternal grandparents for many years had a summer home in the Mohegan Colony, near Mohegan Lake, in Westchester County, NY. We always went for visits. That's me in the lake:

Political Autobiography

by Paul Greenberg, circa 1991

Maybe it was 1937 when my oldest brother and I were in a local WPA theater production of Waiting For Lefty. I remember thinking that a union organizer was the noblest of all jobs even better than playing right field like Mel Ott. I also thought that Jewishsocialist was one word and that Jews who were not socialists were the exceptions even though my mother's family was among the exceptions.

We were a decidedly secular family. Judaism was some old fashioned thing that my paternal grandmother held onto and it was sort of embarrassing. I did love seders at my Aunt Beck's house because my Uncle Sam made Exodus come alive. To me Moses was a union organizer and socialist revolutionary and John L. Lewis all rolled into one.

When I was 10 we moved back to New York from Taunton, Mass. I don't remember who lent me a copy of Michael Gold's Jews Without Money. I am still in debt to him because I never returned the book and because I better understood where my father came from. Several years later and back in Boston I was suspended from Brighton High School for circulating this "dirty" book.

It was at Brighton H.S. that I joined the American Student Union and was part of the most left faction. I had two competing dreams. One was to be a great Jazz clarinetist and the other was to be a union organizer.

My love for Jazz made me acutely aware of racial injustice. I tried to be a professional musician but gave it up for the sound reason of not enough talent. My association with Jazz musicians in general and Frankie Newton in particular shaped my view of human possibility and what suffering was about. Buzzy Drutin and Ruby Braff both wonderful Jewish Jazz Men from Boston taught me the similarity between the blues and some aspects of Jewish music. May they both create for many more years.

Both Frankie Newton and Rex Stewart, who was a marvelous trumpet player in the Duke Ellington band, gave me a vision of socialism and art as important components of the human spirit. Frank taught me how to look at Picasso and Evergood and to read poetry ranging from John Donne to Langston Hughes. Rex turned me on to Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Jack London's The Iron Heel.

In 1946 realizing that I wasn't going to make a living at music I got a job for 15 dollars a week with the CIO and went to Winston Salem North Carolina to help organize the Winston Salem Tobacco Company. It was a massive effort that failed. The company is still not union. It was here that I first saw and heard Pete Seeger. It was at the end of road when the National Guard had broken the Union that those who held the line were taught the adaptation of the spiritual I Will Overcome with the new words We Shall Overcome. It was Zilphia Horton of the Highlander Folk School who came and taught it to us. I can still hear her slightly shrill soprano with a tear drop in its sound and I can still feel the sense of power in defeat as we joined hands for our last walk on the picket line.

When I returned to New York I worked at odd jobs including a record store in Greenwich Village that was a hang out for Bohemia and the emerging Beats. I was the record salesman for Jazz friends like Peewee Russell and Cozy Cole and various artists and poets. It was fun and I learned a great deal but I was restless and soon found a Job with the United Textile Workers in Boston. I worked with a Black organizer named Jack Lee. He was an extraordinary man. He was light enough to "pass" and often did in order to organize in areas that would not welcome a Black man. He was steeped in Black history and introduced me to the work of W.E.B. Dubois. He was also something of a Jewophile and spoke a considerable amount of Yiddish and knew all about Jewish labor and socialist history.

Again I was involved in a losing battle. The post war recession was a full fledged depression in the mill towns of Lawrence and Lowell and Haverill. The sight of workingmen out on the streets looking at the shut down mills still haunts me. Every time I hear Woody Guthrie's "I don't want your millions mister... I just want my old job back again," I see those towns and those men and remember that even the movie theaters were closed except on weekends. We also worked on the Walter O'Brien for Mayor of Boston election campaign. This was the campaign that produced the song "Charley And The MTA" that had a resurrection in the sixties.

Soon I went back to New York and went to work for the UOPWA [United Office and Professional Workers of America]. I was organizing in the direct mail industry and got my first taste of gangster unions. The Senior organizer had been a seaman and organizer for the National Maritime Union. He greeted me on the staff by saying, "It's good to see a young buck like you. You ain't married and you ain't got no kids and you will take chances that old guys like me won't take." My chance time came soon enough. Every time we organized a shop a gangster union showed up with a "contract." It was of course a sweetheart contract and if we struck this tall skinny guy would lead some scabs in past our picket line. One morning around six A. M. there was Skinny ready to lead his scabs when they arrived. The Senior organizer said, "Paul go get him before the cops arrive." I crossed the street and was playing head on sidewalk with him when the cops arrived and arrested us both. At the trial our lawyer claimed I was minding my own business when Skinny insulted my mother and the next thing any one knew he had me on the sidewalk. His lawyer was arguing from somewhat nearer the facts. There being no other witnesses the judge dismissed the case with a lecture about unions getting together instead of fighting. Twenty years later, while moving, I was going through old papers and I found a clipping from a New York paper about that arrest. It stated that Paul Greenberg and John Dioguardi were arrested in a labor dispute. It was only then that I realized that Skinny was the later famous mobster Johnny Dio.

It was about this time that I met Esther Novogrodsky. This was a momentous event. She is of course my wife and aside from being my best and most constant friend she introduced me to her family who are the models of Jewish religious concern that began my wrestle with tradition.

By now the McCarthy period was upon us. The CIO was split and the traditional antagonisms on the left had taken a turn toward suicidal meanness. Then real disaster hit in the form of the Korean War. I got drafted, got married and had all my previous assumptions challenged. War was indeed hell. I was constantly one step away from a court martial. A full Colonel once told me that in his twenty five years in the Army he had neve