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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.
CODEPINK Statement on Vigil Outside of Walter Reed Hospital (Source)
Contact: Allison Yorra: 202-487-5112
August 26th, 2005
Right-wing attacks on peaceful vigil come on same day as announcement that Walter Reed Hospital will be closed.
Washington, DC – Since March 25, CODEPINK: Women for Peace members in Washington, DC have been holding vigils outside Walter Reed Hospital every Friday evening, to shed light on the plight of injured soldiers.
Gravely and seriously injured soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan arrive at Walter Reed for treatment late at night, under cover of darkness, so that the public does not become aware of the number of soldiers wounded and the severity of their injuries.
These are vigils, not protests, and participants have included Washington, DC-based members of Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, and DC Labor Against the War, who all want more support for veterans.
“Since we started these vigils, we feel we have helped put the spotlight on the needs of the soldiers and helped achieve positive results, such as greater VA funding and a rollback of attempts to make soldiers pay for their own meals, phone calls, daily hospitalization fees and increased co-payments,” said CODEPINK’s Gael Murphy, one of the vigil’s organizers.
The vigilers still have concerns about veterans’ care, such as a projected $3 billion shortfall for 2006 VA funding, the closing of veterans hospitals (including Walter Reed), the bureaucratic hurdles facing soldiers with long-term disabilities who are trying to get disability payments, and the Army’s recent statement that it is “revisiting” 72,000 cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PSTD) recorded in past 5 years because misdiagnosis and fraud have inflated the numbers. “We are continuing the vigils because there is still a need to push for better care,” said Laura Costas of CODEPINK and Military Families Speak Out, whose brother served in Iraq. “Yes, we want to bring the troops home, but we also want to ensure that they are well-cared for when they return.”
The vigilers have often received encouragement from the wounded soldiers and their families, who often join the vigil themselves. “The first time I attended one of the vigils, a soldier’s wife invited me to come inside and visit her severely wounded husband,” said Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK. “He shared his worries about the care he would get when he returned to his hometown and the financial burden on his family, and he thanked us for being there. His parting words were ‘Please don’t forget us like veterans of other wars have been forgotten.’”
In recent weeks, the vigil has attracted some people who have tried to change the tone and message of the vigil, including yelling and holding up inappropriate signs. The organizers have asked the newcomers to be respectful and wonder if they might indeed be infiltrators whose aim is to disrupt the vigil.
The organizers also suspect that the sudden attention to the vigil on the part of the conservative media is part of a well-orchestrated smear campaign against the peace movement. “With the war in Iraq so disastrous and public opinion turning against this war, there is a new desperation on the part of the some conservative groups,” said CODEPINK co-founder Jodie Evans. “Despite their mud-slinging, the peace movement continues to gain momentum, as we see in Crawford, Texas and will see at upcoming massive anti-war rally on September 24 in Washington DC.”
PHOTOS of the vigil are available from Andrea Buffa, [email protected].
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:
~
Photo: Highlander Research And Education website.
When I posted about Pete Seeger's version of "Oh What A Beautiful City," I said I wanted to know more about Marion Hicks, who has song writing credit in the liner notes. My wife thought she remembered some details in Rise Up Singing, which I haven't had the chance to check myself. I did, however, write a query to Guy Carawan, who replied saying he doesn't know much about Marion Hicks but confirmed what my wife remembered in Rise Up Singing and added a little detail with the full note from RUS:
Marion Hicks was a cook in Brooklyn who taught this traditional song to the Seeger family.
Guy reports that Marion Hicks is credited with new words and adaptation of words and music.
Before I got this reply, I combed through my CDs to see if I had another version of the song on one of my blues or gospel CDs. Lo and behold Reverend Gary Davis recorded "Twelve Gates To The City" in 1960 on a record called, Harlem Street Singer.
Of course, when I heard back from Guy Carawan, he mentioned the Reverend Gary Davis version of the song and said he considers it the "gold standard."
In my original post, I also referred to Edward Boatner, who seemed like an interesting figure in African American musical history whom I had not known about. DK wrote in with some interesting details about Boatner, his arrangement of "Oh What A Beautiful City," and two of the singers who have sung his arrangements. The closing quote from Barbara Hendricks is wonderful.
Edward Boatner arranged gospel songs for real divas (I hate the way the word is applied these days) Jessye Norman and Barbara Hendricks. Hendricks, one of the greatest voices in opera, released a 1983/4 recording on EMI called Negro Spirituals, using Boatner's arrangement of What A Beautiful City. . . . She recorded the spirituals after a trip to South Africa where she had been invited to celebrate the inauguration of Nelson Mandela. She said:I was reminded with deep emotion of the roots of my beloved Negro Spirituals, the first music that I heard or sang as a child... This music is an integral part of who I am and lives in me at all times, even as I sing Mozart, Debussy, Shostakovich or Puccini. The Negro Spiritual is the music of all past and present victims of human rights abuse and refugees everywhere; the universality of the emotion they express places them among the songs of humanity.Here's a link to a bio of Hendricks.
http://www.emiclassics.com/artists/biogs/bheb.html
Reverend Gary Davis, "Twelve Gates To The City" (1960)
Allegations of Communist influence in the civil rights movement were widely publicized in the summer of 1963 by opponents of the administration's proposed public accommodations bill. 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, which showed Dr. King at a 1957 Labor Day Weekend seminar at the Highland Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee with three individuals whom he alleged were communists. When Senator Mike Monroney challenged the accuracy of this characterization, Barnett stated that he had not checked the allegations with the FBI and suggested that the Commerce Committee do so. The FBI subsequently concluded that the charges were false.
Later that day, Senator Monroney asked Director Hoover for his views on whether Dr. King and the leaders of other civil rights organizations had Communist affiliations. Senator Warren G. Magnuson also asked Hoover about the authenticity of the photograph, the status of the Georgia Commission on Education, and the nature of the Highlander Folk School. Director Hoover forwarded these requests and similar inquiries from other Senators to the Justice Department with a memorandum summarizing the COMINFIL* information about SCL [sic]:In substance, the Communist Party, USA, is not able to assume a role of leadership in the racial unrest at this time. However, the Party is attempting to exploit the current racial situation through propaganda and participation in demonstrations and other activities whenever possible. Through these tactics, the Party hopes ultimately to progress from its current supporting role to a position of active leadership. [Emphasis added.]In the same memorandum, Director Hoover brought up the subject of Advisers A and B's alleged Communist affiliations.** He claimed that the Communist Party had pinned its hopes on Adviser A, and that although Adviser B had resigned from the SCLC, he continued to associate with Dr. King.
On July 15, Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama testified before the Senate Commerce Committee in opposition to the Civil Rights bill, berating officials for "fawning and pawing over such people as Martin Luther King and his pro Communist friends and associates." Wallace referred to the picture displayed by Governor Barnett three days before and added:Recently Martin Luther King publicly professed to have fired a known Communist, [Adviser B], who had been on his payroll. But as discovered by a member of the US Congress, the public profession was a lie, and Adviser B had remained on King's payroll.On July 17, the President announced at a news conference:We have no evidence that any of the leaders of the civil rights movement in the United States are Communists. We have no evidence that the demonstrations are Communist-inspired. There may be occasions when a Communist takes part in a demonstration. We can't prevent that. But I think it is a convenient scapegoat to suggest that all of the difficulties are Communist and that if the Communist movement would only disappear that we would end this.On July 23, Robert Kennedy sent to the Commerce Committee the Justice Department's response to the queries of Senators Monroney and Magnuson:Based on all available evidence from the FBI and other sources, we have no evidence that any of the top leaders of the major civil rights groups are Communists, or Communist controlled. This is true as to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., about whom particular accusations were made, as well as other leaders.Burke Marshall, who aided in formulating these responses for the Justice Department, told the Committee that rumors of communist infiltration in the civil rights movement had caused the Administration considerable concern.
It is natural and inevitable that Communists have made efforts to infiltrate the civil rights groups and to exploit the current racial situation. In view of the real injustices that exist and the resentment against them, these efforts have been remarkably unsuccessful.
At that point, in some sense the business was a political problem, not from the point of view of the support that the civil rights movement was giving the administration or anything like that, but how to be honest with the Senators with this problem facing us and at the same time not to give ammunition to people who for substantive reasons were opposed to civil rights legislation.
Generally, for years the civil rights movement in the South and to some extent in some quarters in the North ... were constantly referred to as communist infiltrated, communist inspired, radical movements ... So that the political problem that I would identify with this whole situation would be that and not a question of whether or not there was support given the Administration by civil rights groups in the South.
(UNITED STATES SENATE, SUPPLEMENTARY DETAILED STAFF REPORTS ON INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES AND THE RIGHTS OF AMERICANS, BOOK III, FINAL REPORT OF THE SELECT COMMITTEE TO STUDY GOVERNMENTAL OPERATIONS WITH RESPECT TO INTELLIGENCE ACTIVITIES, DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., CASE STUDY, APRIL 23 (under authority of the order of April 14), 1976)
NOTES
*COMINFIL is how the FBI referred to its "Communist Infiltration" investigations.
**Excerpted here is section III B of the MLK Case Study, linked in the citation, above. The background on Advisers A and B can be found in section III A, available at the same link, above. The red baiting of MLK's advisers has been discussed at length by David Garrow. Stanley Levison, Jack O'Dell and Bayard Rustin were all red baited out of prominent roles in the SCLC (Rustin was also gay baited).
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and keep
on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
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