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Vague And Overbroad Powers

The Black Commentator's Margaret Kimberly notes that Halliburton has won yet another multi-million dollar government contract—this one to build "temporary detention facilities" in case of an "immigration emergency."

The contract may also provide migrant detention support to other U.S. Government organizations in the event of an immigration emergency, as well as the development of a plan to react to a national emergency, such as a natural disaster. In the event of a natural disaster, the contractor could be tasked with providing housing for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) personnel performing law enforcement functions in support of relief efforts.

Kimberly quotes the passage, above, from Halliburton's press release and then comments:

Anyone paying a little bit of attention will ask, "What immigration emergency?" If there is an immigration emergency looming on the horizon it is a big secret. Of course immigrants will be the first ensnared in the net that big brother Bush has in mind, but the net won't stop with them.

What sort of national emergency requires detention centers? America has plenty of prisons. More of our population is behind bars than in any country on earth. There are detention centers for immigration in existence already. As for helping in case of a natural disaster, hurricane Katrina proved that saving American lives is not on the Bush agenda.

When the word detention comes up, hairs should rise on the back of every neck. Thanks to the Patriot Act and the creation of "enemy combatants" these detention centers can be used to lock up anyone for any reason for any length of time that Uncle Sam wishes.

Kimberly hopes for the "best case scenario" in which "this contract may be just the latest hand out to the welfare queen of corporate America," but she also entertains the more likely possibility that "our government is planning to create more [Jose] Padillas." I say "more likely" because history suggests this development is nothing less than a revival of J. Edgar Hoover's Emergency Detention Program, detailed in a 1976 Congressional report:

The development of plans during this period for emergency detention of dangerous persons and for intelligence about such persons took place entirely within the executive branch. In contrast to the employee security program, these plans were not only withheld from the public and Congress but were framed in terms which disregarded the legislation enacted by Congress. Director Hoover's decision to ignore Attorney General Biddle's 1943 directive abolishing the wartime Custodial Detention List had been an example of the inability of the Attorney General to control domestic intelligence operations. In the 1950s the FBI and the Justice Department collaborated in a decision to disregard the attempt by Congress to provide statutory direction for the Emergency Detention Program. This is not to say that the Justice Department itself was fully aware of the FBI's activities in this area. The FBI kept secret from the Department its most sweeping list of potentially dangerous persons, first called the "Communist Index" and later renamed the "Reserve Index," as well as its targeting programs for intensive investigation of "key figures" and "top functionaries" and its own detention priorities labeled "Detcom" and "Comsab"(emphasis added).

Director Hoover advised Attorney General Clark in March 1946 of the existence of its Security Index, although he did not say that it had existed since Attorney General Biddle's 1943 directive. The Index listed persons "who would be dangerous or potentially dangerous in the event of . . . serious crisis, involving the United States and the U.S.S.R." The Justice Department then prepared a memorandum concluding that the available options for action in an emergency were a declaration of martial law or suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus. The FBI Director recommended going to Congress to secure "statutory backing for detention" (emphasis added).

After a conference between Department and FBI officials, the FBI submitted a lengthy analysis of its standards for classifying potentially dangerous persons. The memorandum gave specific examples of "Communists and Communist sympathizers whose names appear in the Bureau's Security Index." However, the FBI did not provide any specific examples in the category "Espionage Suspects and Government Employees in Communist Underground." Assistant Director Ladd advised Director Hoover of the reason for excluding any such examples:

The Bureau has identified over 100 persons who are logically suspected of being in the Government Communist Underground; however, at the present time, the Bureau does not have evidence, whether admissible or otherwise, reflecting actual membership in the Communist Party. It is believed that for security reasons, examples of these logical suspects should not be set forth at this time. (emphasis added)

The Director noted, "I most certainly agree. There are too many leaks."

This past week there was a related revelation about a central repository of alleged terrorism suspects (via Julius Speaks):

The National Counterterrorism Center maintains a central repository of 325,000 names of alleged international terrorism suspects or people who aid them, a number that has more than quadrupled since the fall of 2003, according to counterterrorism officials.

The list kept by the National Counterterrorism Center - created in 2004 to be the primary U.S. terrorism intelligence agency - contains a far greater number of international terrorist suspects and associated names in a single government database than has previously been disclosed.

The keeping of large lists of "suspects" is also part of the Hoover heritage. The Custodial Detention List was established in the early 1940s, abolished by Attorney General Francis Biddle in 1943, and immediately re-invented by Hoover as the Security Index, which was maintained through the early 1970s, when it was re-named as the Administrative Index. At each stage in the game, there were subsidiary indices—such as the Communist Index, the Reserve Index and the Agitator Index—less well-known to the Attorney General and Congressional oversight committees. The 1976 Congressional report states that

By early 1951, the total had increased to 13,901 names [on the Security Index] as the result of an FBI decision after the outbreak of the Korean War to broaden "the basis for inclusion in the Security Index to include alI active members of the Communist Party." The size of the Communist Index, as contrasted with the Security Index, was indicated by the figures from the New York field office which had 2,897 names on the Security Index and 42,000 names on the Communist Index. Since the Communist Index was based on "allegations of Communist activity," it was "a measure of investigations performed." If this proportion applied "throughout the field," as the FBI memorandum suggested, then the Communist Indexes in the field offices contained over 200,000 names.

The Bush administration says we should take some comfort in knowing that US citizens comprise "only a very, very small fraction" of the 325,00 names in the National Counterterrorism Center's central repository. "The vast majority are non-U.S. persons and do not live in the U.S.," a Bush administration official said.

The comments of ACLU legislative counsel for privacy rights, Timothy Sparapani, are more to the point:

We have lists that are having baby lists at this point, they're spawning faster than rabbits.... If we have over 300,000 known terrorists who want to do this country harm, we've got a much bigger problem than deciding which names go on which list. But I highly doubt that is the case.

The existence of these over-swollen lists is evidence of what the new, Halliburton-built detention centers are intended for. The development of an infrastructure for mass detentions does not come out of the blue. It has long been a desired power of the federal law enforcement. Even in 1974, after many of these earlier programs came to light and the Attorney General demanded more precise "guidelines" for how security lists would be maintained, the 1976 Congressional report concluded that "the broad claims of power in the hands of the Executive branch could readily permit a return to the vague and overbroad domestic intelligence policies of the past."

And readily permit a return they have.

FURTHER READING
FOX Unleashes Vile McCarthyite Smear Campaign Against Cindy and the Peace Movement

Seeing Red

[In 1919,] Blacks were damned as Wobblies, socialists, Bolsheviks, or anarchists simply for agreeing with ideas that went beyond political orthodoxy. Even black nationalist (and anticommunist) Marcus Garvey received the communist label because he rejected the subordinate "place" of African Americans. Some blacks, like Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, editors of the socialist Messenger, who coined the term "New Crowd Negroes" to describe the generation of militants, were genuine supporters of social and economic revolution but rejected communist affiliation. Others, like members of the African Blood Brotherhood, embraced the Communist Party. But the federal government and wider public were disinclined to distinguish degrees of adherence or advocacy. Any African American who dissented from Democratic or Republican politics and the socio-economic system of American capitalism was likely to be excommunicated as a "Bolshevist.

(Theodore Kornweibel, Jr., Seeing red: federal campaigns against Black militancy, 1919-1925, p. 20.)

The parallels between the red scares of old and the war on terror of today have long been obvious. Worth noting now is that the link between communism and terrorism in the right wing lexicon has become quite explicit. Over the summer, I linked to this description of a talk at the Heritage Foundation, by John J. Tierney, Jr., entitled, "The Politics of Peace: What's Behind the Anti-War Movement?":

To describe current anti-war protest as a reaction to the invasion of Iraq or an anti-Bush phenomenon is to miss the point. A closer look at the protestors and their associations reveals a pedigree going back at least to the Vietnam era and beyond to the "progressive" and protest politics of earlier decades. The leaders of the "anti-war" movement today are leftists in ideology. Almost all oppose capitalism and believe in socialism; many are Communists. At root, they are anti-American rather than anti-war. Anti-war groups comprise an authentic political movement. They have distinctive forms of organization, outlets for propaganda, favored strategies and tactics, and access to information technology that increasingly allows their communications to be instantaneous and global. In short, they are a political force.

The phrase "seeing red" is from none other than former Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer of the the infamous Palmer Raids.

When Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, in late 1919, submitted to the Senate a lengthy report on the Investigation Activities of the Department of Justice, he warned that America stood at Armageddon: Bolshevists, anarchists, and seditionists were besieging the nation. As part of their diabolical plans, "practically all of the radical radical organizations in this country have looked upon the Negroes as particularly fertile ground for the spreading of their doctrines. These radical organizations have endeavored to enlist the Negroes on their side, and in many respects have been successful." As a consequence, "the Negro is seeing red." (Kornweibel, xiv)

I'm not sure everyone knows that it was Palmer who recruited J. Edgar Hoover to the Bureau of Investigation (what the FBI was first called) in 1919. Hoover was appointed to the anti-radical General Intelligence Division, where he began his legacy by orchestrating the 1919 Palmer Raids, in which 10,000 suspected communists and anarchists were arrested.

Why did the FBI and its domestic intelligence partners remain so consistently hostile to African American aspirations and advocates up through the 1960s? Those who have looked no earlier than the civil rights era have missed an essential point. It was during World War I and the postwar Red Scare that their response to Black Militancy for the next fifty years took shape. In 1917 and 1918 the federal government conducted wholesale investigations of "subversives" and domestic "enemies," including many black suspects.

It was in this earlier period that coordinated domestic spying first came into play, with special emphasis on Black dissent.

The Justice, State, Navy, War, and Post Office departments coordinated these efforts to ensure a thorough crackdown on dissent and suspected treason, subversion, and sedition. Blacks were stereotyped as easily duped by enemy agents. Black disloyalty was assumed to be widespread. No sooner did the war end than fears of German intrigue were transformed into an even greater specter: Bolshevism would sweep across the world and engulf even America. Once again blacks were believed to be especially receptive to the diabolical manipulation of communists, socialists, or other radicals.

J. Edgar Hoover's first major assignment within the Bureau of Investigation was to establish and systematize its anti-radical efforts. Immersing himself in the radicals' own literature, he embraced its apocalyptic visions and became convinced that America was imperiled not only by white Bolsheviks and anarchists, but by black militancy as well. In his mind there was little difference between civil rights activism, Pan-Africanism, and promotion of communism or socialism; all threatened to unhinge the racial status quo and unleash internal dissension that would leave the nation vulnerable to attack from within or without.... By 1920 these assumptions had become fixed in the minds of those responsible for national security. (Kornweibel, 178-79)

For more on the parallels between the War on Terror and Cold War anti-communism, with specific connection to the Civil Rights Movement, see "MLK, Communist Training Schools, Cindy Sheehan, and Rosa Parks," parts I and II.

MLK, A Look To The Future, Labor Day Weekend, 1957

[The following is a large excerpt from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s closing address to the seminar, "The South Thinking Ahead," at the Highlander Folk School's twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, September 2, 1957 (Labor Day Weekend), Monteagle, Tennessee. I made previous reference to this speech and the 1957 Labor Day Weekend events at Highlander in this two part series, as well as here and here. —BG]

from Martin Luther King, Jr., "A Look To The Future"

I have been asked to speak from the subject: "A Look to the Future." In order to look to the future, it is often necessary to get a clear picture of the past. In order to know where we are going, it is often necessary to see from whence we have come. So I begin with a survey of past developments in the area of race relations.

As we look over the long sweep of race relations in America we notice that there has been something of an evolutionary growth over the years. There have been at least three distinct periods in the history of race relations in this nation, each representing growth over a former period. It is interesting to note that in each period there finally came a decision from The Supreme Court to give legal and constitutional validity to the dominant thought patterns of that particular period. The first period in the area of race relations extended from 1619 to 1863. This was the period of slavery. During this period the Negro was an "it" rather than a "he," a thing to be used rather than a person to be respected. He was merely a depersonalized cog in a vast plantation machine. In 1857, toward the end of this period, there finally came a decision from the the Supreme Court to give legal and constitutional validity to the whole system of slavery. This decision, known as the Dred Scott decision, stated in substance that the Negro is not a citizen of this nation; he is merely property subject to the dictates of his owner.

The second period in the development of race relations in America extended, broadly speaking, from 1863 to 1954. We may refer to this as the period of segregation. In 1896, through the famous Plessy vs. Ferguson decision, the Supreme Court established the doctrine of separate but equal as the law of the land. Through this decision the dominant thought patterns of this second stage of race relations were given legal and constitutional validity. Now we must admit that this second period was something of an improvement over the first period of race relations because it at least freed the Negro from the bondage of physical slavery. But it was not the best stage because segregation is at bottom nothing but slavery covered up with certain niceties of complexity. So the end results of this second period was that the Negro ended up being plunged across the abyss of exploitation where he experienced the bleakness of nagging injustice.

The third period in the development of race relations in America had its beginning on May 17, 1954. You may refer to this as the period of complete and constructive integration. The Supreme Court's decision which came to give legal and constitutional validity to the dominant thought patterns of this period said in substance that the old Plessy doctrine must go, that separate facilities were inherently unequal, and to segregate a child on the basis of his race is to deny that child of equal protection of the law. And so as a result of this decision we find ourselves standing on the threshold of the third and most constructive period in the development of race relations in the history of our nation to put it in biblical terms. We have broken loose from the Egypt of slavery; we have moved through the wilderness of "separate but equal," and now we stand on the border of the promised land of integration.

The great moral challenge that confronts each of us at this moment is to work passionately and unrelentingly for the complete realization of the ideals and principles in this third period. We must not rest until segregation and discrimination have been liquidated from every area of our nation's life. As we stand at the threshold of this third period of race relations, we notice two contradictory forces at work in the South: the forces of defiance and the forces of compliance. On the one hand, we notice a resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and the rise of White Citizens Councils. On the other hand, we notice constructive forces at work seeking to create a new respect for human dignity. In order to get a clear picture of the situation, we may look at each of these forces separately.

The past three years have witnessed the birth in the South of the U. S. Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Almost dead for more than two decades, the Klan has staged a new revival. This organization is determined to preserve segregation at any cost; its methods are crude and criminal. Unlike the Klan of twenty years ago, this new Klan does not list among its members the so-called respectable people. It draws its members from the undereducated and underprivileged groups who see in the Negro's rising status a political and economic threat. And although the Klan will never regain the power that it once possessed, we must not take it lightly. Beneath the surface of all of its actions is the ugly theme of unleashed, unchallenged, racial and religious bigotry. There is always the implied threat of violence.

Then there are the White Citizens Councils. Since they operate on a higher political and economic level than the Klan, a halo of respectability hovers over them. But like the Klan, they are determined to preserve segregation and thereby defy the desegregation rulings of the Supreme Court. They base their defense on the legal maneuvers of interposition and nullification. Unfortunately for those who disagree with the Councils, their methods do not stop with legal tactics; their methods range from threats and intimidation to economic reprisals against Negro men and women. These methods also extend to white persons who will dare to take a stand for justice. They demand absolute conformity from whites and abject submission from Negroes.

The effects of the Councils' activities are not difficult to determine. First, they have brought many white moderates to the point that they no longer feel free to discuss some issues involved in desegregation for fear of what they will be labeled. The channels of communication between whites and Negroes are now closed. Certainly this is tragic. Men hate each other because they fear each other; they fear each other because they don't know each other; they don't know each other because they can't communicate with each other; they can't communicate with each other because they are separated from each other.

MLK, Communist Training Schools, Cindy Sheehan, and Rosa Parks (II)

Well you see it may be that the salvation of the world lies in the hands of the maladjusted. (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

~

(Part I)

A couple of weeks ago, I read Cenk Uygur's satire, What Fox News Channel Would Have Done to Rosa Parks. Meditating on the right wing smears of Cindy Sheehan, which were then still relatively new, Uygur wondered "how it would have been in the Civil Rights era if Fox News Channel, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge and the rest of the gang were around back then."

Hannity: “Rosa Parks has turned this whole so-called civil rights issue into a public circus. We have information that Ted Kennedy might have put her up to this. That amazing story when we come back!”

Colmes: “You’re right, Sean. I’m sorry.”

O’Reilly: “To question the government of Alabama and implicitly the entire United States government by defying the political order like this has to be considered treasonous. Civil disobedience is a code word for I hate America. These people are criminals, simple criminals. It's ridiculous that they think they don't have to live by the same rules as the rest of us.”

Scarborough: “Yeah, whatever they just said on Fox News Channel! Well … I mostly agree with it.”

Kaplan: “Can we hire Shep Smith to cover this? Maybe give him his own show?”

Limbaugh: “What did I tell you folks? These libs like Parks would rather live in France where they can sit anywhere they want on the bus. They hate America. They want special privileges to be able to sit anywhere they want. They hide behind the color of their skin to try to undermine this country.”

Coulter: “Rosa Parks is a dyke!”

Blitzer: “Dr. King, is it true that you support the liberal agitator Rosa Parks in her defiance of America? Can you confirm whether she has in fact sat in the back of the bus before? Do you think this makes her a flip-flopper? If she has been so inconsistent on this, how can we trust her on anything?”

What's funny about this satire is that there is nothing funny about it. It is pretty close to reality in the 1950s and 1960s. Today's smears and provocations of dissenters fit into a profile of traditional right wing attacks. It is important to see this, so we who dissent can have more sophistication about the nature of the right's tactics, learn how to protect ourselves and how to respond strategically.

The Mechanics Of Slander
In the two pages of photos inside the Georgia Commission on Education's anti-Communist tabloid there are two photos documenting Mrs. Parks' presence at the Highlander Folk School twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. The first image, on page 2, shows Parks with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy and two other unnamed individuals who appear to be white (the quality of the scanned reproduction is terrible). The caption reads:

Three outstanding leadership people of the infamous Montgomery, Alabama bus incident. The development, precipitation and financing of this inflammatory project called for behind the scenes planning and directions beyond the ability or capacity of local people. The relationship between Communist leadership and racial strife is evident from coast to coast and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes.

What a marvelous mixture of red-baiting and racism: local Blacks could not have planned, financed and executed the Montgomery Bus Boycott themselves; therefore the resistance must have been engineered by a Communist conspiracy. On page 3, the caption for a second picture of Parks reads:

Rosa Parks, who precipitated the Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott, and Ralph Teffertaller of New York's Henry Street Settlement listen to group training under the watchful eye of Abner Berry of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

Now the watchful eye of Abner Berry, who was there as a reporter for the Communist Party's Daily Worker newspaper, exerts magical control over Mrs. Parks and the others present.

Such conspiracies of Communist mind control in the Civil Rights Movement were not just whispered among die hard white supremacists. These slanders were propagated through broad, well funded media campaigns. The "Communist Training School" publication

became the Georgia Commission on Education’s widest distributed and most popular work of propaganda. [M.J.] Heale noted that “Copies were sent to every daily and weekly newspaper in the United States” and “to other federal and state investigating committees.” Once the pamphlet caught on, “The Commission was flooded with requests for more copies, sometimes for a thousand or more at a time,” especially in the South because “interest was strongest in other southern states” (emphasis added). The pamphlet also led other media groups like the magazine Human Events and the Atlanta Constitution to report unfavorably about Highlander.[1]

While the images of Rosa Parks as dupe of the Communists have not survived in popular memory, the Martin Luther King At Communist Training School slander is all over the internet, in relatively mainstream, right wing, anti-King, anti-civil rights propaganda and on many white supremacist websites. (I'm not linking them here, but a little googling yields plenty of examples.)

Defamation: An Enduring Tradition
The other thing that survives is the characterization of the left as morally debased and anti-American. Laura Grantmyre, whose senior thesis I quoted, above, on the dissemination of the Georgia Commission's propaganda piece, sees that this is the fundamental message of their publication.

The pamphlet also proposed the idea that subverted religion and interracial sexuality were part of this Communist training school. The depiction that the Christian religion was a cover for Highlander’s Communism surfaced in the middle of the pamphlet on a page of pictures [Edwin] Friend [the reporter/spy] had taken. A picture of a church car with four men milling behind it had a caption that claimed it was illustrating, “how many units of the Communist apparatus are assisted by organizations purportedly charitable or religious in nature.” This statement claimed that Highlander and its friends were superficially rooted in religion and used faith to give themselves a public image cleaner than that of Communists. By divorcing Highlander from the Church in this way, the pamphlet was aligning them with atheism and Communism. The largest picture on the page insinuated interracial sexuality, where a white woman and a black man appear to be embracing or clapping behind each other’s heads. This was the only picture without a caption, illustrating that the Georgia Commission on Education assumed white people in the South would grasp the idea that not only was it an interracial embrace, but since it was a black man and a white woman, it conjured the idea of the hypersexualized black male rapist and the protection of white womanhood. Within the pages of the pamphlet, the southern ideologies of fear, Communism, atheism, and transgressions of interracial sexual boundaries, were intertwined to leave a deep impact on the elite and popular Southern mind. [2]

Thus we have commentary on Cindy Sheehan such as this from David Horowitz and his charming peace left = terrorist sympathizers diagram (yes, Muslims are the new "Unholy" Communists . . .):

She has made herself a willing tool of anti-American forces in this country that want America to lose the war in Iraq and the war on terror generally. . . . She has joined forces with an Unholy Alliance on the other side in the epic battle for freedom in the Middle East and has shown that she will do and say anything to discredit the United States and its commander-chief -- acts which serve the enemy and endanger American lives. She is a disgrace to her brave son who gave his life for the freedom of ordinary Iraqis and the security of his countrymen. She has betrayed his sacrifice and embraced his enemies.

And this from radio personality Mark Williams:

Cindy Sheehan is on a mission to figuratively urinate on her son's grave and make his death stand for nothing. She represents and symbolizes all those who would cut the legs out from the men and women who are fighting now as we speak, to defend us and to build a new country in Iraq. Cindy Sheehan's not interested in the memory of her son. She's only interested in using her son as a prop to advance her own hatred for the American troops.

And next week, the Heritage Foundation will host an event (via Bill Berkowitz), “The Politics of Peace: What's Behind the Anti-War Movement?”

To describe current anti-war protest as a reaction to the invasion of Iraq or an anti-Bush phenomenon is to miss the point. A closer look at the protesters and their associations reveals a pedigree going back at least to the Vietnam era and beyond to the "progressive" and protest politics of earlier decades. The leaders of the "anti-war" movement today are leftists in ideology. Almost all oppose capitalism and believe in socialism; many are Communists.

Contexts
The Georgia Commission pamphlet on the Highlander Folk School is by no means the first or only example of this kind of media campaign to smear dissenters. It is, however, a particularly potent example, the content of which continues to occupy public discourse about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Having made this alternative comparison between Cindy Sheehan and Rosa Parks, the question I want to ask is this: what popular perceptions led Cenk Uygur to find irony in an imagination of Rosa Parks and the right wing smear machine of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge et. al?

One answer lies in the insipid stories that pass for Civil Rights Movement history, emphasizing sanitized images of individual heroes rather than the movements Parks and King and others participated in. The Civil Rights Movement is not merely the story of noble African Americans using nonviolence to conquer the likes of Bull Conner and the Klan; it is the story of a mass movement to put power into the hands of Black people, power that is still being clutched greedily by an elite, white minority which has yet to travel very far from its racist roots.

The other answer lies in the race and class differences between Cindy Sheehan and Rosa Parks. In my experience, many of my white, middle class activist contemporaries have been spurred by the feeling that we in the US are witnessing unprecedented abuses of government power and that our core democratic principles are under siege by the Bush administration. While I believe this is true, most of these evils we are witnessing are not new. What may be new is that in this period a much broader section of society has been pushed to the outside.

I took my epigraph from the conclusion of Martin Luther King, Jr's speech at the Highlander Folk School twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in 1957. Here is the final passage in it's entirety:

There are certain technical words in the vocabulary of every academic discipline which tend to become cliches and stereotypes. Psychologists have a word which is probably used more frequently than any other word in modern psychology. It is the word maladjusted. This word is the ringing cry of the new child psychology. Now in a sense all of us must live the well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there are some things in our social system to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I suggest that you too ought to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of mob-rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic inequalities of an economic system which takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. I never intend to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating method of physical violence. I call upon you to be maladjusted. Well you see it may be that the salvation of the world lies in the hands of the maladjusted. The challenge to you this morning as I leave you, is to be maladjusted -- as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in terms that echo across the centuries, let judgement run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream;" as maladjusted as Lincoln, who had the vision to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; as maladjusted as Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out in words lifted to cosmic proportions, All men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Yes, as maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dared to dream a dream of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men. He looked at men amid the intricate and fascinating military machinery of the Roman Empire. And could say to them, "He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword." Jesus who could look at men in the midst of their tendencies for tragic hate and say to them, "Love thy enemies. Bless them that curse you. Pray for them that despitefully use you." The world is in desperate need of such maladjustment. Through such maladjustment we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

~
Notes
[1] Laura Grantmyre, The Attacks On the Highlander Folk School: A White Supremacist Response to Anti-Racist Activism (A Senior Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Department of History in Candidacy for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts in History, University of North Carolina at Ashville), p. 13. Grantmyre is quoting M.J. Heale, McCarthy's Americans: Red Scare Politics in State and Nation 1935-1965 (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1998). [.DOC, HTML]

[2] Ibid. 12-13.

MLK, Communist Training Schools, Cindy Sheehan, and Rosa Parks (I)

The excerpt that I recently posted from the Church Committee Case Study on counterintelligence activities directed at Martin Luther King, Jr. provides some of the background for the "Martin Luther King . . . . At Communist Training School" flier I attached to a post about smears and opportunistic defamations of Cindy Sheehan.

On July 12, 1963, Governor Ross E. Barnett of Mississippi testified before the Senate Commerce Committee that civil rights legislation was "a part of the world Communist conspiracy to divide and conquer our country from within." Barnett displayed a photograph entitled "Martin Luther King at Communist Training School" taken by an informant for the Georgia Commission of Education [sic], which showed Dr. King at a 1957 Labor Day Weekend seminar at the Highland [sic] Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee with three individuals whom he alleged were communists.

There is actually more to the story than what is explained by the Church Committee report (that's Church as in Senator Frank Church). I want provide some elaboration in this new series of posts for two, related reasons: a) this history is inherently interesting and important to understand and b) this history can help us understand some of what is presently being directed at Cindy Sheehan and others voicing political dissent in the US.

The flier was not just submitted to the Senate; it was also part of a broader public relations campaign to defame King, as in the billboard pictured here. Furthermore, when the Georgia Commission on Education conducted its surveillance at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, they weren't just going after MLK. The image of Martin Luther King as one of "'four horsemen' of racial agitation," advancing the "Commmunist doctrine of 'racial nationalism,'" was pulled from a larger publication that was disseminated by the Georgia Commission.

The image of King at Highlander is from a four page newspaper sized propaganda piece that was produced by the Georgia Commission in 1957. The Highlander Folk School had a special twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, which was attended by activists from around the country. The Georgia Commission sent a spy, who took pictures and produced a report naming many of the participants .

At right is the top half of page 1 (click on image for the full sized image on the MS Department of Archives and History website). Here is an excerpt from the lead article in the top left column.

During the Labor Day Weekend, 1957, there assembled at Highlander the leaders of every major race incident in the South, prior to that time since the Supreme Court decision. This meeting was directed by Reverend John B. Thompson, chaplain, University of Chicago. Reverend Thompson has a lengthy record of Communist affiliations which appears elsewhere in this folder. The direction of the entire school was under the leadership, as usual, of Myles Horton.

There were representative leaders of the TUSKEGEE, ALABAMA BOYCOTT, the TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA BUS INCIDENT, the MONTGOMERY ALABAMA BUS BOYCOTT, the SOUTH CAROLINA - NAACP SCHOOL TEACHERS INCIDENT, the KOINONIA INTER-RACIAL FARM - AMERICUS GEORGIA, and CLINTON, TENESSEE SCHOOL INCIDENT among others.

They met at this workshop and discussed methods and tactics of precipitating racial strife and disturbance.

The meeting of such a large group of specialists in inter-racial strife under the auspices of a Communist Training School and in the company of many known Communists is the typical method whereby leadership training and tactics are furnished to the agitators. This was a general workshop and would be the most common method of developing a long range program. (Emphasis added.)

The left most column on the front page also includes profile articles on the founders of Highlander and on its Executives. On the right half of page 1 is an incredible list of more than ninety liberal and progressive groups said to be Communist Front organizations. Also on the right half of the front page is an article profiling each of the supposed Communist Front organizations that is listed in the House Committee On Un-American Activities Committee's "Guide To Subversive Organizations and Publications."

Open up the newspaper and you get a full two page spread* of photos of the Highlander Labor Day Weekend, 1957 attendees, with captions naming them and characterizing their alleged Communist affiliations. Running across the top of the two facing pages is a huge headline that reads, "Labor Day Weekend at Communist Training School 1957." An "Editorial Comment" on the back page* explains:

It has been our purpose, as rapidly as possible, to identify the leaders and participants of this Communist training school and disseminate this information to the general public. This Commission would appreciate your furnishing to us any further identifications you can make.

It behooves each of us to learn more of Communist infiltration and the direction of Communist movements. Only through information and knowledge can we combat this alien menace to Constitutional government.

Almost all of the rest of the back page* is a listing of the alleged Communist Affiliations of four of the purported leaders of HIghlander Folk School, James Dombrowski, John B. Thompson, Don West and Aubrey Williams. For each of these men, there is an extensive list of memberships, speaking engagements, political statements and petitions signed that the Georgia Commission would have us believe are evidence of Communist affiliations. Dumbrowski's list has forty-five items, Thompson's thirty-six, West's eighteen, and Williams' forty-three. The level of detail in these lists suggests that they were provided either by the FBI or by the House Committee on Un-American Activities or both.

Notes
*Because the Georgia Commission on Education report is printed as a newspaper, the pages are scanned in halves and therefore a little tricky to read on screen. For your convenience, here are the links again, more clearly specified:

• Page 1: top half, bottom half
• Page 2: top half, bottom half
• Page 3: top half, bottom half
• Page 4: top half, bottom half

~
Photo: Highlander Research And Education website.

FOX Unleashes Vile McCarthyite Smear Campaign Against Cindy and the Peace Movement

Headline is from Bob Fertig at Democrats.com. He writes:

In order to trash Cindy, [FOX's John] Gibson called on Ira Stoll, editor of the rightwing New York Sun and author of "Cindy Sheehan's Crowd." Stoll attacked Cindy for working with "extreme groups and individuals":

Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, and Military Families Speak Out all have representatives on the steering committee of United for Peace and Justice, an anti-war umbrella group. They share that distinction with the Communist Party USA.

Though red-baiting her is no worse than any of the other vile attempts to smear Cindy Sheehan, this particular tactic enrages me in a special way. I've been working on another post that relates to red baiting, not in connection to Cindy Sheehan, but I'm going to talk a little about it now.

In the late 50s the FBI's New York Field Office decided that my father should be investigated for possible inclusion on the Security Index. What was the Security Index? That was the 1950s and 60s version of the Custodial Detention Program (CDP), whose purpose was

to enable the government to make individual decisions as to the dangerousness of enemy aliens and citizens who might be arrested in the event of war.

( Book III of the Final Report of the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect To Intelligence Activities, 1976)

The Security Index was the new name given the CDP after Attorney General Francis Biddle issued a directive to abolish the program in 1943 because

The evidence used for the purpose of making the classifications was inadequate; the standards applied to the evidence for the purpose of making the classifications were defective; and finally, the notion that it is possible to make a valid determination as to how dangerous a person is in the abstract and without reference to time, environment, and other relevant circumstances, is impractical, unwise, and dangerous. (Ibid.)

The primary basis of the investigation of my father for inclusion in the Security Index was his membership on the executive committee of the Socialist Unity Forum and his attendance at meetings of the Young Socialist Alliance. He had committed no crimes, but he associated with socialists.

What did the investigation entail? Here's a partial list, gleaned from my father's FBI file, released to my family under the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts:

• Trips by FBI agents to the NYC Marriage License Bureau and to the NYC Board of Elections to gather data on residences, employment and family
• Reports from a neighbor in my parents' apartment building who was spying for the FBI
• Bogus phone call to my mother from an FBI agent claiming to be a NY County Clerk's Office Representative. In the guise of being interested in empanelling my father for a jury, the agent grilled my mother about my father's place of employment.
• Bogus phone call from an FBI agent to my father's place of employment. Pretending to be an insurance company representative, the agent verified my mother's information about my father's employment.
• Agents who attended political meetings and made leading statements to provoke others in attendance to go on record with views that could make them eligible for further investigation or otherwise "incriminate" them.
• A surprise visit from two Special Agents who started asking questions first and identified themselves second: "After the SAS identified themselves GREENBERG remarked 'No, I have nothing to say to you!' He refused any further approaches to conversation including possibilities for a later appointment."

A significant basis for conducting these invasive and harassing procedures was information about my father's affiliations and activities provided by civilian informants whose information was not necessarily reliable and whose intent was discernibly vindictive.

When we talk about invasions of privacy associated with the Patriot Act it is important to remember what the stated purpose of such practices were in the past: to create "a suspect list of individuals whose arrest might be considered necessary in the event the United States becomes involved in war" ( Book III of the Final Report of the US Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect To Intelligence Activities, 1976).

If one qualified for the Security Index, one's name was placed on a special Security Index card. If the FBI found that a subject did not qualify for the Security Index and his or her card should be canceled,

[t]he cancelled Security Index cards on individuals taken off the Index after 1955 were retained in the field offices. This was done because they remained "potential threats and in case of an all-out emergency, their identities should be readily accessible to permit restudy of their cases." These cards would he destroyed only if the subject agreed to become an FBI source or informant or "otherwise indicates complete defection from subversive groups."(Ibid., emphasis added)

The practice of red baiting has had terrible ramifications in the lives of thousands of innocent Americans whose only crime was holding views or having political associations that challenged the status quo. In many cases the only evidence of their crime was unsubstantiated allegations that they held views or had political associations that challenged the status quo.

Please read the rest of Bob Fertig's post and join him in telling Fox to stop smearing Cindy Sheehan and her allies.

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."

Genius Scientist Discovers His Research May Be Used For Evil, Becomes Pacifist

No, damn it. Albert Einstein was a political radical and anti-racist.

When it came to how to handle Einstein’s ashes or his house on Mercer Street, everyone involved meticulously adhered to his wishes. But when it involved his ideas, and especially his concerns about what he called America’s “worst disease,” the fact that Einstein wanted his views made as public as possible seems to have slipped past his historians.

(Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, Preface, Einstein On Race And Racism (via Professor Kim).)

I've been going through a bunch of the documents from when my father was Executive Director of the Greater New York Council For A Sane Nuclear Policy and getting back into the history of the Left and the peace movement in the early 60s.

Albert Einstein was always one of my father's heroes. Maybe Dad knew the anti-racist part, but all I remember hearing is the bumbling genius pacifist in a wrinkled suit version.

More than one hundred biographies and monographs of Einstein have been published, yet not one of them mentions the name Paul Robeson, let alone Einstein’s friendship with him, or the name W. E. B. Du Bois, let alone Einstein’s support for him. Nor does one find in any of these works any reference to the Civil Rights Congress whose campaigns Einstein actively supported. Finally, nowhere in all the ocean of published Einsteinia – anthologies, bibliographies, biographies, summaries, articles, videotapes, calendars, posters and postcards – will one find even an islet of information about Einstein’s visits and ties to the people in Princeton’s African American community around the street called Witherspoon.

Oh this makes me mad...

Yet, despite Einstein’s clear intention to make his politics public – especially his anti-lynching and other antiracist activities – the history-molders have seemed embarrassed to do so. Or nervous. “I had to think about my Board,” a museum curator (who doesn’t want his name used even today) said, explaining why he had omitted some of the scientist’s political statements from the major exhibition celebrating Einstein’s one hundredth birthday in 1979.

Reminds me of the cover up on Helen Keller's radical socialism.

Thanks, Professor Kim, for blasting the truth into the blogosphere.

I think I'm going to have to get this book when it comes out next week.

Read the rest of the preface here.

Studs On Pete

This is a little dated, but it's good and Technorati says hardly anyone blogged it. For all my fellow red diaper babies:

Pete Seeger Is 86

by STUDS TERKEL

It is hard to think of Pete Seeger as an elderly gaffer, because the boy in him, the light, remains undimmed. It was sixty-five years ago I first ran into him. He and three of his colleagues, calling themselves the Almanac Singers, were on a cross-country jalopy tour singing and creating songs for the industrial unions aborning. The CIO had begun, and how could there be labor rallies without songs? It was in the true American tradition, like the Hutchinsons, a family of singing abolitionists during the Civil War. Some of the most heartbreaking music of that fratricidal conflict was theirs.

That night when I first encountered the four wandering minstrels was a cold Chicago beauty. At 2 in the morning, my wife heard the doorbell ring. I was away rehearsing the first play in which I had ever appeared. It was Waiting for Lefty, of course. There, at the door, were the four of them. The first was a bantam--freckled, red-haired and elfin. He handed my wife a note saying: "These are good fellas. Put them up for the night." Putting them up was a rough assignment, even for a Depression-era social worker, what with the only spare bunk being a Murphy bed that sprang from the wall. Freckles announced himself as Woody Guthrie. The second was an Ozark mountain man named Lee Hayes. The third was a writer, Millard Lampell. The fourth, somewhat diffident, more in the background, was a slim-jim of 20 or so, fretting around with his banjo. He was Pete Seeger.

Since then, Woody has died. So has Lee Hayes. So has Millard Lampell. Only Pete breathes and sings, mesmerizing audiences, whether they be Democrats, lefties, vegans or even a sprinkling of Republicans. For sixty-five years, he has held forth continuously through periods known more for their bleakness than for their hope: the cold war, the witchhunt, the civil rights and civil liberties battles. Pete has been in all of them. Wherever he was asked, when the need was the greatest, he, like Kilroy, was there. And still is. Though his voice is somewhat shot, he holds forth on that stage. Whether it be a concert hall, a gathering in the park, a street demonstration, any area is a battleground for human rights. That is why describing him as an 86-year-old gaffer is not quite true. The calendar often deceives. This is a sparkling case in point.

Of course, he's been blacklisted so many times he probably holds the dubious record, with the possible exception of Paul Robeson, who was often his partner in crime.

Before we hoist one for Pete, let's also remember that he's one of the best choirmasters in the country. He may not have the technique of Robert Shaw, but the result is just as explosive. Imagine an audience of thousands as Pete sings, say, "Wimoweh." As Pete waves his arms gently, the audience reacts as a professional choir might. I've seen a wizened little man, who obviously is somebody's bookkeeper, at the command of Pete become a basso profundo, reaching two octaves lower than Chaliapin. This is the nature of Pete Seeger, who reaches out toward the further shores more effectively and more exhilaratedly than anyone I've ever run into.

Hail Pete, at 86, still the boy with that touch of hope in the midst of bleakness. There ain't no one like him.

(The rest is over at The Nation)

Might as well mention, in case you missed it the first time around, that I did a little bit about Pete Seeger a just over a year ago. I was actually writing about Louis Armstrong, but Pete figured into it, too.

In that post from last summer, I mention getting Pete Seeger's Children's Concert at Town Hall on cd after having listened to the lp endlessly as a child. The cd has been getting a lot of play around here lately because at almost 2 1/2 my son is now old enough to have his own enjoyment of Pete Seeger.

Even if you don't have kids, the Children's Concert is really worth getting. My wife gets choked up almost every time she hears all the children in the audience singing along—which only makes Pete's "touch of hope in the midst of bleakness" that much more poignant, especially these days . . .

The concert was recorded in 1962, so all those kids are grown up and older than I am. I sometimes wonder who they are in the world today.

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.

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 . . ."

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.

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.

For This Final Day of Hanukah

Hanuka Bell

Dinga lingle lingle, I ring your bell
Knocka knock knockie knock at your door
The week of Hanuka now is here
And you must be sad no more

I’ll help you clean and scrubbity scrub
I’ll dress you pretty and sweet, sweet, sweet,
I’ll dance you right out your door, door, door,
And you must be sad no more.

Here’s my old man that drives my old horse
Hitched up to my junky old cart
His clothes look older than you and me
But he talks with a song in his heart

Grandma tells tales of old Hanuka times
Us kids walk all back to those years
She waves both her hands and a fire lights her eye
And she never looks sad anymore.

Hanuka time is the time for us all
To tell things that troubled our minds
To untie old knots of bad feelings we’ve had
And try not to look sad anymore

It’s dinga lingle lingle, I dingle your bell
Yes, I knocka knock knock at your door
Eight days of sweet Hanuka make me feel like new
So I don’t look so sad anymore

Words by Woody Guthrie, Music by Paul Morrissett
TRO © 2003 by Ludlow Music, Inc.

Recorded on The Klezmatics, Woody Guthrie's Happy Joyous Hanuka .

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