HungryBlues

More on the "Success" of COINTELPRO

Earlier, I wrote at length about this, but here's a little more.

According to David Cunningham:

While the F.B.I.'s campaign against antiwar ''subversives'' was largely ineffective, a considerably less ardent campaign against the Ku Klux Klan and its allies proved devastating. In the late 60's and early 70's, membership in white hate groups dropped as much as 70 percent.

In 1968 ("the late 60s"), Sam Bowers, imperial wizard of The White Knights of the Klu Klux Klan of Mississippi, escaped conviction for the killing of Vernon Dahmer because

in a number of other cases in the 1960s, Klansmen succeeded in harassing, infiltrating or tampering with jurors. FBI documents suggest that's what happened in 1968 when a jury deadlocked 11-1 in favor of the guilt of Bowers, who avoided a conviction then for Dahmer's killing.

My last quote is from an article by Jerry Mitchell on a possible new case against one, but not all, of the parties responsible for the murders of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney.

COINTELPRO was not so devastating as to stop the Klan from obstructing justice in murder cases.

Same point as before: When it comes to the Klan, the FBI has been a miserable failure at law enforcement.

From Delmar to Bombingham (5) — THE BOMBING

On Saturday night, May 11, 1963, at around 11:05, Roosevelt Tatum decided to leave the checkers game he was watching outside Foster's Delicatessen. Birmingham Police Car 22 had just driven up at Foster's and he was worried the officers would take him in for being out past 11:00. Tatum walked a few steps up Avenue I to the corner of 12th Street and turned left on 12th, heading towards Avenue H. Other African-Americans walking in the same Ensley neighborhood as Tatum reported more police cars in the area than usual. Some of the area's Black residents said officers in a police car stopped them from entering the neighborhood. (RT, 14-15, 48)

At 820 12th Street, Tatum found Eva Mae Miller on her darkened front porch. She was barely visible, sitting to the side of the wedge of light from her open front door. Tatum greeted her and asked for a match as he came up on the porch. Miller called inside for her daughter to bring out the box of matches. Tatum sat down on the front step, lit up and talked with Miller for a while. (RT, 15; AGM1, 17-19)

From where he sat on the steps, Tatum could see Birmingham Police Car 49 coming down Avenue H from 13th Street towards 12th Street. The patrol car turned left onto 12th Street, cut its headlights and rolled to a stop across the street at 721 12th Street Ensley, the residence of A. D. and Naomi King. From where she sat, behind one of the porch posts, Miller couldn't see the car pull up. Tatum whispered not to move or speak. To the officers he was invisible on the shadowy steps. (RT, 15-16, 24-25; AGM1, 17-19, 20)

From the passenger side, a police officer got out from Car 49, walked around the back of the car and across the Kings' lawn. He seemed to be tossing something near the porch. The officer ran back to the passenger door and got back into Car 49. As the car pulled away the driver tossed something out of his window and onto the Kings' lawn. The officers weren't yet three houses away, when the first bomb exploded. (RTD, 3; RT, 15-16, 24-25)

Tatum bolted upright and ran towards the King residence. Eva Mae Miller fled inside her house. (AGM1, 17-18; RT, 15, 25) Charles Harper, one of the men over at Foster's Delicatessen, came running to the bombing scene and saw a police car driving along the 800 block of 12th Street, though he couldn't say which police car it was. Eva Mae Miller kneeled at her bed in her front room and started praying. After only a few words of prayer, a second explosion. Crossing the intersection of 12th Street and Avenue H, Tatum had just reached the Kings' front lawn. He was blown backwards and landed in the middle of Avenue H. Charles Harper reached the intersection at about the same moment as Tatum and was blown back against the fire plug on the southeast corner of the intersection. He saw Tatum picking himself up off the pavement. (RT, 17-18; AGM1, 20, 17-18, 20)

The smoke and trash in the air made it impossible to see the King residence. People were yelling and running towards the Kings' home. Across the street at Eva Mae Miller's a curtain fell in the room where she was kneeling. A window pane broke in her second room. (AGM1, 22, 27, 17-18)

Before the smoke and dust had settled, Tatum was back on his feet and rushing with renewed urgency towards the King residence. He ran across the lawn to the back of the house. There, at the Kings' back fence, Tatum found A. D. and Naomi King, with their children, trying to get over. Tatum lifted one of the children over the fence and then helped Naomi King climb over. (RT, 16)

Naomi King had been sitting in the living room. A. D. King and their children had been in bed. The second bomb "uprooted a shrub, blew the brick veneer off the house, collapsed the ceiling, and blasted the front door back into the kitchen. It seemed like a miracle that no one was hurt." (DM, 427)

Within five or ten minutes, Car 49 was back on the scene. As before, it came down Avenue H from 13th Street towards 12th Street, turned left onto 12th Street, and pulled up in front of the King residence. Two officers with soft-peaked caps got out and went over to talk with A. D. King. A few minutes later some more police cars arrived, as well as some motorcycle policemen and a paddy wagon. Police Lieutenant Maurice House pulled up, got out of his car and took charge of the situation. He had been assigned to the new civil rights detail about one month earlier. He had a little more credibility with African-Americans in Birmingham, though he still had clear ties to Bull Connor. (RT, 17; DM, 427)

A throng of Ensley's African-Americans were gathered around the bomb scene. Some were saying the police had gotten there awfully quickly and maybe they had something to do with the explosion. Some were throwing bricks, rocks, and bottles. Wyatt Walker arrived on the scene and went outside with A. D. King to calm the crowd. Some of the assembled were singing "We Shall Overcome." King yelled out through a police bullhorn, "Why must you rise up to hurt our cause? You are hurting us, you are not helping." (RT, 53, 17; DM, 427)

The crowd kept getting angry and wanted to fight the police or anybody they could. At one point a county sheriff's car pulled up with four men inside. One got out and was hit on the side of the head with an object. He got back inside the sheriffs car and all four men left the scene. (RT, 17)

Tatum stayed on Avenue H opposite the Kings' house. While Tatum was standing there on Avenue H, he heard another explosion—what turned out to be the bomb at the A. G. Gaston Motel intended for his brother, Martin, who, fortunately, had left Birmingham. Tatum ran over to his house at 1109 Avenue J to see if the St. James Baptist Church, across the street from his address had been bombed. When he saw there hadn't been a bomb there, he went back to the bombing scene at the King residence. (RT, 17-18)

Around 3:30 a.m., after things had quieted down and people weren't throwing things anymore, Tatum went over to Charles Harper's house, in the same block of 12th Street as Eva Mae Miller. Tatum and Harper and his mother and his sister and his brother-in-law all sat on the front porch and talked. Tatum saw Car 49 parked across the street until about 4:00 a.m. It's tires, along with those of several other patrol cars, had been cut. At about daybreak, Tatum returned home and ate. (RT, 18)

Afraid the police would beat or kill him if he said anything about what he saw, Tatum nevertheless felt compelled to return to the bombing scene after he ate. He was at 824 12th Street Ensley, the home of his wife's aunt, Rosie Johnson, at around noon when the FBI came around house to house to interview witnesses. When the agents questioned Tatum, he gave them his account of being the first person on the scene of the bombing. He said that beforehand he'd seen a dark Corvair which others had also mentioned. Tatum said that he saw the Corvair, heading east on 12th Street Ensley, toward Avenue F, pass very near to him and that he had assumed the Corvair passed in front of the King residence. (RT18, RTD, 3)

On that Sunday, Mother's Day, May 12, 1963, the day after A. D. and Naomi King's house was bombed, Tatum had had some urge to tell the FBI agents what he'd really seen. But his wife Lilly Mae Tatum was in the doorway to the house and the street was full of people. It was all too clear that anything he said right then was likely to get back to the police department. (RT, 27)

---------------------------------------------
Reference Key
AGM1: A. G. Gaston Motel. No FBI file number. Witness testimonies in report of SA Robert P. Womak, Birmingham Office, 16 July 1963.
DM: Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution.
RT: Roosevelt Tatum. FBI HQ-0460048526. Prosecutive Summary Report, Names And Addresses Of Witnesses And Testimony Of Each.
RTD: Roosevelt Tatum, Deposition. June 27, 1963. Estate of Paul Greenberg.

Images
1. The Kings: A. D., Naomi, Al, Darlene, Alveda, Derek
2. The bombed out residence of A. D. and Naomi King, 721 12th Street Ensley, Birmingham, Alabama

Both images from: The A. D. King Foundation

Don't Thank COINTELPRO. Thank Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner.

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man)

Monday was the 40th anniversary of the murders of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman.

In late 1963, at age 20, unable to maintain a peripheral involvement in the struggle for human dignity, James Earl Chaney joined CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and began organizing voter education classes in Meridian, Mississippi. He served as liaison to Michael Schwerner and was responsible for COFO's (Congress of Federated Organizations) Voter Education program in the backward, heavily Ku Klux Klan stronghold counties of southeast and east central Mississippi.

On June 16, 1964, armed members of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan "Fire bombed" the Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, Mississippi, a rural community in notorious Neshoba county. Weeks earlier, James Earl Chaney had earned the trust and respect of church leaders and convinced them to allow Michael Schwerner, the director of the Meridian, Mississippi COFO office, to speak at the church. After many meetings, James Earl Chaney, Michael Schwerner and church leaders made plans for the church to be used as a training site for voter registration classes for the disenfranchised Black community in rural Neshoba county.

Not until one week later, June 21, 1964, did James Chaney and Michael Schwerner have a chance to investigate the ruins of the Mount Zion church. With them was Andrew Goodman, a young Jewish volunteer from New York, who was to coordinate the Neshoba county voter registration project. After investigating the ruins of Mount Zion church and before starting their return trip to Meridian, Mississippi, the three civil rights workers visited some parishioners who were beaten by the Ku Klux Klan on the night of the fire bombing.

"THE NIGGER WAS FOUND ON TOP" read the August 5, 1964 headlines of the Meridian Star, a local newspaper. While enroute to Meridian, Mississippi the three civil rights workers were stopped by a Neshoba County sheriffs' deputy and turned over to the Ku Klux Klan. They were murdered and their bodies buried in an earthen dam. The 44 day search for their bodies was national and massive. The body of James Chaney was a "mangled mass". The injuries, besides the bullet holes, it was said "could only occur in a high speed airplane crash!"
(The James Early Chaney Foundation)

This and other of the murders of civil rights workers and African-American residents in the south make this piece by David Cunningham in Sunday's New York Times Magazine particularly outrageous and hard to fathom. Cunningham's article, presumably a precis of his recent book, compares FBI counter intelligence programs (known as COINTELPRO) against New Left political organizations and against the Ku Klux Klan. He states:

While the F.B.I.'s campaign against antiwar ''subversives'' was largely ineffective, a considerably less ardent campaign against the Ku Klux Klan and its allies proved devastating. In the late 60's and early 70's, membership in white hate groups dropped as much as 70 percent; paranoia over infiltration reached such heights that the national Klan leader, Robert Shelton, threatened to use polygraph tests and truth serum to gauge members' loyalty. While the F.B.I. sought to dismantle the New Left, it merely hoped to control the white right. And yet its activities did far more damage to the racists than to the radicals.

Cunningham has some strange ideas about what made these programs "effective" and about what constituted "damage." It seems to be true that the FBI had a role in dissipating the membership and activities of the Klan. But the FBI was an abysmal failure in its duty to pursue Klan members who were responsible for viscious, violent crimes.

In the case of the Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman murders, seven Klansmen were convicted for violating the civil rights of the three young men and sentenced to three to ten years in prison, none of them serving more than six years. No one has ever been charged with the murders of the three civil rights workers. There have been murder convictions in the earlier case of the 1963 murders of Denise McNair, Addle Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, the four young girls who were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama: in 1977 Klansman Robert Edward Chambliss was convicted of one count of murder in Carol McNair's death, and in 2001, Klansman Thomas Blanton was found guilty of four counts of first degree murder, and sentenced to life imprisonment. The woeful delay in these convictions was the clear fault of the FBI, which had all the evidence necessary for them but would not release it when prosecutors asked for the FBI documents pertaining to the case. There were also others implicated in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing who were never charged with any crime. In 1961, when Klansmen and other white supremacists ambushed and brutally beat Freedom Riders in Birmingham, it was on a tip from the FBI and with cooperation from the Birmingham Police.

These are just three reasonably well known cases. The depth and breadth of FBI involvement in and support of the Klan's violent suppression of African-Ameicans and their allies requires a book length catalog. Suppression of African-American militancy was a shared goal of the FBI and the Klan. (In fact, stemming African-American militancy was a career-long objective of J. Edgar Hoover from as early as the 1920s.)

Bureau intelligence "assets" were neither neutral observers nor objective investigators, but active participants in beatings, bombings and murders that claimed the lives of some 50 civil rights activists by 1964. . . .

The FBI was instrumental in building the Ku Klux Klan in the South, "setting up dozens of Klaverns, sometimes being leaders and public spokespersons. Gary Rowe, an FBI informant, was involved in the Klan killing of Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights worker. He claimed that he had to fire shots at her rather than 'blow his cover.' One FBI agent, speaking at a rally organized by the Klavern he led, proclaimed to his followers, 'We will restore white rights if we have to kill every negro to do it. . . .'"

The Klan's "supplemental" role, particularly as a private armed force sporadically deployed to arrest the development of movements for Black freedom, is best considered by comparison to other Bureau operations. Unlike other COINTELPROs, the "Klan - White Hate Groups" program was of a different order entirely. Senior FBI management and a majority of agents in the field endorsed the Klan's values, if not the vigilante character of their tactics; from militaristic anti-communism to extreme racial hatred; from ultra-nationalism to misogynist puritanism. . . .

FBI inaction in the area of civil rights enforcement wasn't simply a matter of . . . "FBI racism." Rather, FBI bureaucratic lethargy, when it came to protecting Black lives, underscored its mission against subversion for constituents whose privileges and power were threatened by a militant movement for Black rights.

Strikingly different from anti-communist COINTELPROs that enmeshed broad social sectors in a web of entanglements, FBI monitoring of the Klan was strictly confined to the organization itself. No serious efforts were made to explore the supplemental role of White Citizens' Councils, many of which were active Klan fronts, let alone investigate the obvious and widespread police complicity in racist violence. Bureau surveillance of the Klan was purely passive, hardly the directed aggression reserved for left-wing targets.

("COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story," a presentation of the Congressional Black Caucus to U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, September 1, 2001.)

By what measure does 50 deaths of civil rights activists by 1964 count as minimal damage? The Senate's Church Committee, which investigated COINTELPRO, found that

[t]he cases included attempts (sometimes successful) to prompt the firing of university and high school teachers; to prevent targets from speaking on campus; to stop chapters of target groups from being formed; to prevent the distribution of books, newspapers, or periodicals; to disrupt or cancel news conferences; to interfere with peaceful demonstrations, including the SCLC's Poor People's Campaign and Washington Spring Project and most of the large anti-war marches; and to deny facilities for meetings or conferences.

As the above cases demonstrate, the FBI was not just "chilling" free speech, but squarely attacking it.

The tactics used against Americans often risked and sometimes caused serious emotional, economic, or physical damage. Actions were taken which were designed to break up marriages, terminate funding or employment, and encourage gang warfare between violent rival groups. Due process of law forbids the use of such covert tactics whether the victims are innocent law-abiding citizens or members of groups suspected of involvement in violence.

By what measure were these covert action programs against the New Left "largely ineffective"? How many marriages had to be ruined, how many dedicated activists had to be ostracized after being falsely labeled as FBI informants, how many jobs had to be lost for the COINTELPROs against the New Left to be considered "successful"?

Really COINTELPRO was not so much a program as it was a period in the FBI. The US Government has sponsored activities of the kind associated with COINTELPRO before the "program" was created and has continued such activities since the program's "demise." Throughout the COINTELPRO years and beyond, as the FBI has continued covert action against dissenting American citizens, cold-blooded murderers were left alone to enjoy life with arrogant impunity, some of them openly admitting their crimes with confidence that they would never be prosecuted. By what measure were FBI covert actions against the Klan "effective"?

Cunningham concludes:

If history shows us anything, it's that the agency's future successes won't come through increased surveillance powers alone. Instead, the bureau's success against the Klan was primarily a product of agents' ability to grasp the motivations, concerns and passions of everyday Klan adherents. Repeating that success today poses a steep challenge.

Cunningham pays lip service to current concerns that a) the Patriot Act will lead to excesses in surveillance and b) US responses to terrorism have not shown an interest in addressing the causes of violent anti-US sentiment. Yet, taken as a whole, Cunningham's article reads more as an apologia for the Patriot Act. The challenge is not, in Cunningham's thinking, how to avoid the gross abuses under COINTELPRO but how to find the right balance between surveillance and study of the motivations of enemies to our American way of life.

Earlier in his article, Cunningham explains that

the bureau enjoyed certain advantages when it took on the white right. For one thing, Klan members tended to see themselves as strongly patriotic and vehemently anti-Communist -- and they admired J. Edgar Hoover for sharing those traits. Whatever their own views on civil rights, F.B.I. agents had a ready-made connection with their targets.

Agents consistently exploited this connection when seeking out Klan members. Within only a matter of months, the F.B.I. was able to recruit hundreds of informers.

The shared values among FBI agents and Klansmen were, as stated above, militaristic anti-communism, extreme racial hatred, ultra-nationalism, and misogynist puritanism. Cunningham implies these values are patriotic while the dissent of the New Left was not. As I've suggested before, the demands of Civil Rights Movement activists for a truer democracy through the application of American values to all Americans is one of the deepest forms of patriotism I know. It is this sort of patriotism, more than anything else, that continues to teach me about the positive meaning of my American identity.

David Cunningham's article in the NY Times Magazine has been the only mention in the Times of Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman this week of the 40th anniversary of their murders. Reading Cunningham, one might think that the main legacy of the three slain civil rights workers was that they inspired COINTELPRO-White Hate, which gave us much too little much too late. Their legacy is much more meaningful than this. Their legacy is the freedom they hoped African-American citizens of Mississippi could come to have. The taste of this freedom is the taste of freedom for all, freedom that does not require that some surrender their human dignity and personal safety or forfeit the rights and benefits of our wealthy society.

Listen to Ben Chaney, brother of James, on the Tavis Smiley Show. See the program of this year's memorial to Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman at the Mt. Zion Church, Philadelphia, Neshoba County, Mississippi. Read some coverage of the memorials and find out about Ben Chaney's Freedom Ride 2004. Learn about Freedom Summer and the Freedom Schools. Learn about the 1967 "Mississippi Burning" Trial.

Let's Keep Going on Ray Charles

If they could keep it up ad nauseam and beyond with Reagan, we can keep it going on the Right Reverend Ray Charles, who, after all, should be remembered for more than a day or two.

Julian Bond wrote a fantastic op-ed piece in Tuesday's Boston Globe, which I missed. I'm honored to have received it from him via email today—far and away the best thing I've seen on Ray Charles. Everything that Jeanne D'Arc and Mat Callahan and I had wanted to say, Bond says better and more fully:

Soul's everyman

By Julian Bond  |  June 15, 2004

RAY CHARLES first came to many over the AM airwaves from a world that has almost vanished, the highly segregated 1950s black South. Black people had little contact with or interference from whites. Charles inhabited that world, and he celebrated it as had few before him.

Wherever we were while listening on scratchy radios, before we ever actually saw him in person, we knew where his congregations found him -- in roadhouses and honky-tonks. We knew him, the places where he sang, and the people he sang to and about.

His audiences were indeed congregations. He was known then as the Bishop of Atlanta, the Right Reverend Ray Charles, because he dared take church songs and secularize them. His music was more sophisticated than that usually heard at Atlanta's Royal Peacock or Washington's Howard Theatre or New York's Apollo. . . .

If the characters were standard and the sentiments sometimes cliched, the voice made all the difference. No one sang like that. No one made the cliche singular and personal. No one made you feel as bad -- as if his sad song had happened to you alone.

Ray Charles seduced with his voice. He once wished in song he "could holler like a mountain jack," and holler he did. In cries and wails, screams and moans, punctuated by church chords, throbbing from the gutter on Saturday nights, he was everyman.

You've got to read the whole thing.

Julian Bond was also one of the featured speakers at the memorial service for Charles, held earlier today.

Via Donald Baxter, some photos from the service (registration required). Also on the same news site, a retrospective collection of Ray Charles photos (from which the one above was taken).

Mr. Bond was also kind enough to send me a poem he wrote years ago. Charles liked it and put it on the back of a record:

The Bishop of Atlanta Ray Charles 

 

The Bishop seduces the world with his voice

Sweat strangles mute eyes As insinuations gush out through a hydrant of sorrow Dreams, a world never seen Mounded on Africa's anvil, tempered down home Documented in cries and wails Screaming to be ignored, crooning to be heard Throbbing from the gutter On Saturday night Silver offering only, The Right Reverend's Back in Town Don't it make you feel all right?

Cindy Adams' Show Business Report On AGVA's Show In Birmingham, Ala.

By Cindy Adams
Show Business
August 10, 1963
Vol. XXIII, No. 32, pgs. 3, 7

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.—Aug. 5th was B-Day. B-for-Brimingham. The day 105 soldiers in grease paint invaded this Civil Rights battlefield for the first integrated show in its history. . . .

The two chartered planes, subsidized by private donations took off from LaGuardia. Sprits were high. Cracked one white performer, "Hey, things are changing. I'm sitting in the back of the plane!" Cracked a black one, "This is the only passenger plane in history with a tail gunner in the rear. . . .

An estimated 20,000—colored and white—brought their own bridge chairs, camp chairs and backyard chairs in what was tagged locally, "Seats for Freedom." Those without chairs rented them on the grounds for 25c. Or brought pillows. Or squatted on the grass. . . .

An additional 45-minute delay was caused by the late arrival of Ray Charles. His bus couldn't proceed to the stage because opening the gate would have meant thousands could pour in helter skelter. Near mayhem was averted by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King who quickly stepped forward toward the helmeted policemen on duty, he formed a human chain to stem the onrush. It wasn't needed. His presence was enough.

The "stage" was an elevated slab of plywood put together with spit. Near the 3/4 mark, when Johnny Mathis was eight bars into his opening song, the entire bandstand collapsed. With it went some invited guests. I was one of them, so was Leo Shull, Johnny Mathis, Wm. B. Williams, James Baldwin. It was like an earthquake. Two sections of the stage suddenly split . . .

Simultaneously, all electrical equipment went dead. Some of us were slightly injured. Several had broken limbs, one had both legs broken. All of us were badly shaken. We'd been repeatedly warned of possible violence. In the ensuing darkness and chaos, we wondered if it was to hit now.

In true show-must-go-on tradition, Alabama's Christian Choir struck up a gospel. The remaining performers did their turns sans lights, mikes & music since many instruments had been broken.

Not one person left during the 30-minute blackout. When the five-hour show finally closed at 1:30 a.m., the audience was still stomping and applauding for more.

A caravan of private cars returned the troupe to Municipal Airport because neither Birmingham's "white" taxis nor the "colored" would drive the integrated group. The plane was delayed an hour. First, because of a security check. Rumors of a bomb threat had reached the airfield. Second, because the colored chauffeur of one vehicle was detained 30 minutes and fined $45 for going 60 miles an hour. Attempts by the stars to ascertain how 1936 bus could go 60 miles an hour brought surly responses. This, after a two way radio discussion between the officers and their supervisors as to whether or not they should "lock the driver up for his crime."

At 9 a.m., 21 hours after this weary band of minstrels took off, they returned. Like one tearful but grateful Negro lady, who'd driven all the way from Houston to see the show put it, "Never ever will we forget this evening."

AGVA Salute to Freedom in the New York Times

Rally at Birmingham
BIRMINGHAM, Ala., Aug. 6 (UPI)—An integrated rally, to raise money to send Negroes to Washington for a massive integration march, ended abruptly last night when the makeshift stage partly collapsed.

Johnny Mathis was singing his first number when the wooden stage at the Miles College stadium sagged and the lights went out.

L. H. Pitts, president of the college, said that when Mr. Mathis started singing, many people jumped on the stage, causing it to fall about two feet to the ground. The front part of the stage on which Mr. Mathis was standing remained upright.

—NYT, Wednesday, August 7, 1963

The UPI reporter seems to think the stage was the most interesting character at this remarkable event.

Some More on Ray Charles

About that Show Business article that mentions Ray Charles' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.

I want to hazard a guess that Ray Charles' role in funding and, possibly, collecting the talent for the Salute to Freedom '63 may be underplayed by Leo Shull in the article I included in my last post. The parallel images of a white man and a Black man, each powerful in the entertainment industry, flying into Birmingham in his own jet plane, is suggestive of parallel roles. I have no doubt that Joey Adams played the significant role described in the article. But it's also the case that Show Business was a paper that tracked entertainment events and gossip in New York City. Charles' music career began in Seattle and moved to LA. Joey Adams would be the man whose power in the entertainment industry would be of principle interest to Shull, and Shull probably would not have had as much access to Charles as he did to Adams.

I can't get beyond speculation here without doing research outside of the internet, probably primary source research. However, as I said in my previous post, the music is the main thing. I got an email from Lee Ballinger of Rock and Rap Confidential, who wanted me to read this fine piece by Mat Callahan:

Brother Ray

Ray Charles was among the greatest musicians of all time. He was a master. His work established standards of excellence in method and result that can guide the efforts of all who aspire to making great art. This quest for quality operates within a broader field of social interaction of which Brother Ray was a vital, conscious participant. From songs such as ''Them That Got" to "Busted" to "Hey Mister," Charles chose to voice the suffering and struggle of the common people. While he was never specifically identified as a 'political' artist, his work demonstrates that all authentic popular art embraces every concern of common life, excluding none. Thus, philosophy, politics, spirituality, love and lust boil and bubble in a funky stew; often clashing and contradicting just as they do in lived life. In his album 'Message From The People', Charles sought to express, explicitly, the anguish and the aspirations bursting forth in the tumultuous Sixties. By opening the album with "Lift Every Voice and Sing," the Negro National Anthem, Charles made the connection between a previous generation of African Americans struggling for freedom and the Black Liberation Struggle which, in 1967, had ghettoes throughout the US in flames. When he joined Aretha Franklin at the Fillmore auditorium to sing Aretha's "Spirit in the Dark," all our dreams of unity and an end to injustice were expressed in glorious, thunderous song.

For musicians, in particular, his influence is too great to be measured. His marriage of blues, jazz and gospel forms gave birth to Soul—both a musical genre and a philosophical perspective. This continues to be a cornerstone of all serious music making, regardless of genre, since, to be truly great, music must have Soul.

While we will miss him we will never lose him as long as we maintain our fidelity to this guiding principle. Ray Charles made timeless music.

Lift Every Voice and Sing.

In Callahan's idea of popular art that "embraces every concern of common life," there is a bit of the idealism about popular music that I associate with old left writings about Jazz and Blues from the 1930s and 1940s. In Callahan we lose a little bit of the forceful individual vision that brought together diverse, seemingly incompatible elements of popular music, sacred and secular, Black and white. Callahan's demotic reading of Charles' music is not, however, some kind of vulgar Marxism.

Jeanne D'Arc has another post on Ray Charles, this time criticizing how Stanley Crouch mythologizes Ray Charles as "above politics, above race, and above — as Stanley Crouch phrased it — 'whining and crying about how hard it was.'" I'm glad Jeanne found my first post on Charles, with its evidence of his political commitment to the Civil Rights Movement, a useful counter to Crouch.

Crouch idealizes the music as well as the man. Crouch writes, "We don't even need to talk about rhythm and blues or the blues or his love of jazz. He had a full house of talent." Crouch concludes, saying, "Charles was one of those special few who expands the democratic experience by proving that neither color nor a handicap mean that one is less a man or less a woman." But Crouch's American democracy is an elitist one.

Charles may have had the strength of character not to complain, yet his strength as a musician came from his mastery of European ("Classical") traditions and diverse American vernacular traditions. Too much emphasis on the individual talent encourages gross detachment of individuals from their communities. Vernacular musical forms—blues, jazz, gospel and, yes, country—originate in specific communities. If Ray Charles had forgotten where his music came from, we would not still be marveling at the authority with which he wrote and performed it.

Ray Charles Helped Integrate Birmingham

The Ray Charles moment in the blogosphere has mostly come and gone, but this blog dwells a little more in the past than most, so before I get back to other things I've got to do a little bit about Ray Charles.

In August of 1963, when my father was working for the Southern Christian Leardership Conference (SCLC) in Brimingham, Alabama, he served as one of the chief organizers of the Salute to Freedom '63—a concert financed largely by Joey Adams, president of the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA). In the flier Dad saved from the event, you can see him listed as the contact for ordering tickets. You can also see that Ray Charles and His Band were the headliners.

I actually don't have much more to say about Ray Charles' life or music than has already been said. Some required blogispatic reading on Ray Charles: Professor Kim, Jeanne D'Arc's first post and her follow-up, James, Nakachi.

The music (via Natalie Davis) is the main thing, of course. But I've got to add some more history. Over at CBS they're saying stupid stuff like this: "Charles considered Martin Luther King Jr. a friend and once refused to play to segregated audiences in South Africa. But politics didn't take."

According to afgen.com:

It was on the road in the 1950's that the realities of segregation, its evils, its injustices, even its ludicrous moments, became apparent to Charles and his troupe of traveling musicians.

It was a concert day in Augusta, GA that brought the issue of segregation vs. civil rights to a head for Ray Charles.

"A promoter insisted that a date we were about to play be segregated: the blacks upstairs and the whites downstairs.

"I told the promoter that I didn't mind segregation, except that he had it backwards. . . After all, I was black and it only made sense to have the black folk close to me. . . Let him sue. I wasn't going to play. And I didn't. And he sued. And I lost." This was the incident that propelled Ray Charles into an active role in the quest for racial justice, the development of social consciousness that led him to friendship with and moral and financial support of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960's.

"...early on, I decided that if I was going to shoot craps on anyone's philosophy, I was putting my money on Martin Luther King Jr.

"I figured if I was going to pick up my cross and follow someone, it could only be Martin."

Despite his deep commitment to King and the cause of black Americans, Charles came to the logical conclusion that there was no place for him physically in the front lines:

"First, I wouldn't have known when to duck when they started throwing broken bottles at my head. And I told that to Martin personally.

"When he intentionally broke the law, he was hauled off to jail. And when you go to jail, you need money for lawyers, for legal research, for court fees, for food for the marchers. I saw that as my function; I helped raise money." His awareness of racial injustice was not limited to the home front: The same years he fought the war against racial injustice in the American South found in Charles a growing awareness of racial injustice abroad, particularly the notorious policy of apartheid in South Africa.

I wrote in to ask afgen.com the source(s) for the above. I'll let you know what I find out.

The write-up of the Salute to Freedom '63, which follows, doesn't place a lot of emphasis on Ray Charles, but it shows him putting his money into the Civil Rights Movement. It also shows him putting his body on the line a little more than he said he did in his quoted recollection, above. Given the strength of the Klan and other racist terror groups in Birmingham, racist violence was a clear risk for all performers and concert goers. The rioting in May after the bombings of A. D. and Naomi King's home and the A. G. Gaston Motel surely added to tension that must have been in the air as thousands assembled for this event—"the first integrated show and audience in the history of Birmingham."

NEITHER HEAT, BOMBS, NOR BIRMINGHAM COPS SHALL STOP THE SHOW—IT MUST GO ON

By Leo Shull
Show Business
August 10, 1963
Vol. XXIII, No. 32, pgs. 1, 10

Two invasion planes flew into Birmingham, Alabama, Monday August 4 and captured the city.

"They captured the right people, too," said Reverend Martin Luther King, "the Negroes and whites who are fighting to attach Birmingham and the whole South to the United States of America." Joey Adams, President of AGVA, had decided to integrate Birmingham for the entertainment industry.

The first plane of show people drafted by Adams had 76 aboard. "The Spirit of 76," said Joey, who had conceived, produced and financed the show and was now the denmother & nursemaid to the apprehensive collection of talent. The second plane departed afterwards and had Ray Charles and his orchestra, crewmen and staff. Mr. Charles and his manager, Milt Shaw, with Stan Seidenberg, had chartered and paid for this plane. [emphasis added]

In the first aircraft with Joey Adams were his wife, Cindy, and stars, celebrities, newspapermen, Life and Sat Eve. Post and other photographers, disc jockeys and commentators of radio and Tv stations, plus several hundred pounds of food and drink, donated to Mr. Adams and his "Salute to Freedom" riders by Max Asnas, Stage Delicatessen. The planes were paid by donations which Mr. Adams got from Northerners, including $500 from Radio City Music Hall, Maurice Uchital ($2,500); David Dubinsky of ILGWU ($500); Jacob Potofsky of the Hatmakers' Union, $250. Union official Harold Gibbons, $1,000, AGMA, $200, and Int'l Building Trades, $200 plus many smaller contributions.

To dare say, and a Yankee at that, that an integrated show would be smuggled into Birmingham to encourage Negroes and whites to integrate into a black and white audience was like waving a red flag in front of a bull O'Connor—an intolerable insult.

The enemy camp decided to meet it with volleys of silence, from the Mayor of the city, the police, political figures and the Birmingham press which never printed a stick of linotype before or after the event. Blackout.

The police and Mayor had refused protection, because "this was the first integrated show and audience in the history of Birmingham," declared Rev. A. D. King, brother of Martin Luther, who had organized 500 volunteers to deal with the local problems and preparations, including ticket sales for the show. [emphasis added]

Taxi drivers had refused to transport the show's cast and personnel. Rev. King then collected a caravan of 50 private-car volunteers. Hotels had refused lodgings; Adams got a motel, run by A. G. Gaston, former Negro undertaker and now owner of the motel, the local Negro bank and Negro insurance company to provide lodgings. Restaurants refused service. Adams brought along his own food. The city theatre and auditorium owners had refused a meeting hall.

Adams and King got a Negro college campus. There were no chairs. Adams issued a radio call via Negro disc jockey in Birmingham asking people to carry their own—on the night of the show, for three miles people could be seen walking to campus, carrying their own chairs—they had also paid $5 per ticket to see the show.

There was no stage nor lights.

"Build one, buy lights," said Adams. "I'm sending a check for the lumber, lights and electricians. And don't spend a cent of the ticket sales, keep it all to pay for 'The March to Washington Aug. 28,' I'm paying all expenses for this 'Sale to Freedom in Birmingham.'"

Threatening calls and letters, promises of bombings, riots and physical injury all failed to deter the group or the show which went on 9 pm and lasted for five hours. Klu Kluxers [sic] and white violence groups began to hold meetings.

Joey Adams had collected for his production Johnny Mathis, Nina Simone, comedian Al Bernie, writers James Baldwin and Harry Golden, Dick Merson, assistant director of News; Billy Taylor and Wm. B. Williams of WNEW; Paul Duke, magician; Billy Rowe, former NYC Deputy Police Coor., now Joe Louis' partner, and Conrad Buckner, dancer, the Gamm Sisters, The Raelettes, Clyde McPhatter, The Shirelles, Dick Gregory, Magid Triplets, the Alabama Christian Movement Choir of 150, the whole orchestra of The Harlem Apollo Theatre led by its conductor, Reuben Phillips. The Alabama musicians union refused to permit Negro and white musicians to play in the same stage.

The cast and crew got off the plane, had lunch at the Gaston motel, then went to a nearby hall and began rehearsals with the orchestras. Sid DeMaye, of AGVA, began co-ordinating the stage routine.

Meanwhile in New York and over press wires the story began to go out. The radio stations from the North began phoning in for progress reports. The newsmen and photographers—about 50—began work. So did Cleveland Robinson, chairman of the "March on Washington Committee," Clarence Jones of the Ghandi Society.

On the campus, Dr. Lucious H. Pitts, president of Miles College, had mustered volunteer students and alumni to prepare an organization of ushers, service personnel; the carpenters and roof-makers, lighting men and technicians were working in the 98 degree heat—an unusually hot day.

Civilian defense guards had been gathered to take over the protection job that the police refused and had always given to all other public gatherings—and these Negro volunteers came with shot guns to protect the audience from Klu Kluxers [sic] who had paraded a few days earlier in protest against the show.

Makeshift floodlights had been set up to light the way for the ticket buyers and to show up any lurking hoodlums or invaders. There were no toilet or rest room facilities, no water, since the field was about a half mile from the college, and five miles from the center of town. . . .

Altho the show was not scheduled till about nine, the audience began to come at noon. Adams had expected 5,000; more than 20,000 people bought tickets, and brought chairs. Many white ticket agencies accepted tickets for sale, a new first.

The Negro people, who had reason to dislike whites, treated the "Salute to Freedom" members with generous welcome and affection. The response to the show at times was deafening, and great roars greeted many of the acts and the quips of MC Adams, Rev. Martin Luther King, Joe Louis. Adams made a point of publicly embracing many Negro members of the local committees, a sight that would have caused instant arrest a few months ago. The Negroes watched with disbelief and amazement as Negroes and whites chattered, worked and mingled on stage and at the Gaston Motel (which had been bombed a few months ago when they found that Martin Luther King was sleeping on the second floor. A wall of new bricks replaces the old shattered one). Some Negroes asked if they could walk on the street with white members of the show; never seen in Birmingham before.

NBC and other television companies had brought their cameras, as did many of the film newsreel companies.

White and Negroes sitting and eating together became the big photo catch for Negro photographers shooting for Southern Negro newspapers and magazines. More than a dozen Negro disc jockeys journeyed to Miles College and were introduced on the stage. They had been broadcasting this coming event for weeks.

Said James Baldwin to the audience: "This is a living, visible view of the breakdown of a hundred years of slavery—it means that white man and black can work and live together. History is forcing people of Birmingham to stop victimizing each other."

The only member of the United States Government or any of the fifty states to acknowledge there was a new kind of integration drive, was NY's Senator Jacob Javits. He sent a telegram to Joey Adams saying: "Congratulations to all those participating in this significant variety show, my warmest praise goes out to you for this inspiring show which deserves the support of all America interested in freedom and human dignity. Birmingham is an appropriate site for this event. I think this will become the symbol of the breakthru so long awaited and tell the people present I will work to overcome the Senate filibuster to bring civil rights this year."

About four hours after the show began as Johnny Mathis began his song, the stage collapsed and fifty people were hurled down, some of them struck by the falling lumber. The whole field went dark. Electricians restored lights in about a half hour, the audience stayed, the show went on. One man with two broken legs, and the other wounded were taken to hospitals.

The noise of the crash made people think a bomb had gone off, some jumped, John Mathis dove for the floor. (This writer was thrown clear to the grass below.) One of the Magid Triplets was injured, but he did his turn later anyhow. Orchestra instruments were broken, they will be paid for from the $10,000 fund Joey Adams raised.

Upon the return trip, a warning came that a bomb was on one of the planes. It was searched, then all plane riders were halted at the airport gate and questioned, some searched for possible bomb or weapon. The Ray Charles plane flew off. Then the 76 on the second plane embarked. At 5 am it took off. At 9 am it landed at LaGuardia, New York City, U.S.A., Aug. 6, nineteen sixty three.

From the Delmar Archive to Bombingham, Alabama (update)

When I found my second set of FBI documents on Roosevelt Tatum, I saw that they would allow me to fill in some of the narrative of what happened to Roosevelt Tatum after the bombing of A. D. and Naomi King's house. I had intended for my next post in this series to tell some of that story. As I studied the second set of documents and then went back and forth between them and the first set of documents, I began finding more and more of the story of the bombing, dispersed among the details of the two sets of documents.

Chunks of witness testimonies that had been blacked out in the first set of documents, appeared mostly intact in the second set. And, interestingly enough, names that were blacked out in the second set of documents often appear in the first set of documents. Moving back and forth between the two sets of documents allowed me to reconstruct more of what happened on the night of the bombing.

It has been a problem for me, as well as for others who have tried to understand this case, that Tatum's five testimonies and the testimonies of other witnesses all contain many inconsistencies. The inconsistencies became the basis for the FBI to question the veracity of Tatum's claims. I have assumed all along that my father believed Tatum was telling the truth, and held on to the deposition Tatum gave in Emanuel Celler's office for this reason. As I've pieced things together, I have repeatedly asked myself how I might understand the problematic inconsistencies if I start from the assumption that Tatum was, in fact, telling the truth when he said that he witnessed two Birmingham police officers bomb A. D. and Naomi King's house. This assumption, coupled with some analysis of the inconsistencies in Tatum's testimonies, has allowed me to make judgments about what in the conflicting details is true and what is not.

The narrative of what happened to Tatum after the bombing is still in the works, and is crucial for an understanding of his actions and statements. But first I must tell the story of the bombing itself, as I now understand it. So now Part 5 in this series will be my take on what really happened on 12th Street Ensley, Birmingham, Alabama, the night of May 11, 1963.

I hope to post Part 5 within the next few days. In the meantime, I will not make any more predictions about how many more parts there will be in this series or what they will contain. History is too unpredictable.

(From the Delmar Archive to Bombingham, Alabamama, Parts 1, 2, 3, 4)

Remembering Reagan

Kirk Anderson remembers better than the media . . .