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Identity Is Complicated

Rokhl Kafrissen recently published an awesome statement on contemporary Jewish American identity (via Mark Rubin). This is the sort of thing that I wish I'd written, because it comes so close to my own views. Here's points 3 and 4, out of 6, central to the manifesto:

3. Jewish religion cannot be divorced from Jewish culture.

To do so yields the current demographic and spiritual crisis now facing the American Jewish community.

Jewish philanthropists like Michael Steinhardt want to revive the non-Orthodox Jewish community by replacing “victimhood” with “joy.” (See his Jerusalem Post opinion piece in February of this year.) I think we all know that you can read “Europe” for victimhood and “Israel” for joy. Didn’t that attitude get us in this mess? Turn a shul into a temple, a khazn into a cantor and Jewish music into Debbie Friedman — well, you better lock the doors cuz the inmates will be breaking out. Witness our so-called youth crisis. American Jewish culture has turned Camembert into CheezWhiz: It is boring and every young Jew knows it.

Real Jewish Culture is the product of hundreds, thousands of years of joy and pain; it’s the expression of the realities of halokhe [Jewish law] lived in a hostile world. It’s the result of every Jew’s struggle between tradition and modernity. Most importantly, Real Jewish Culture is our connection to those who came before us, and without access to it, well, that bagel in your hand is not a symbol of anything, just a bunch of empty calories masquerading as breakfast.

4. I am not an Israeli.

About two thousand American Jews make aliyah [emmigrate to Israel] every year. Out of a total Jewish population of 5,200,000, this comes out to about .04% of American Jews each year who will choose to live in Israel. I am an American and, like 99.96 percent of my fellow American Jews, I will never become an Israeli. I care deeply about the State of Israel, most of all because my fate is linked to that of every other Jew. But where does the spirit of klal yisroel end and the unquestioning acceptance of Zionism begin?

Open a magazine like Moment and you’d think every Jew in America had already put down a security deposit on an apartment in Jerusalem. Moment bills itself as “Jewish culture, politics, and religion.” Three of four cover stories in a recent issue were Israel-related, with more inside — and this was the music issue! Now, I would understand if this were a newspaper for a small Jewish community somewhere in the world. I doubt that the Jewish community of Honduras has enough news to fill twelve issues of a monthly magazine. But we don’t live in Honduras. We live in the other Jewish state, a country with a Jewish population roughly equal to that of the Jewish state. And let me tell you, we’ve got enough news here to fill up every single Jewish newspaper, magazine, newsletter, leaflet and ’zine.

Mark Rubin, who alerted me to Rokhl's manifesto, doesn't think non-Jews need read it, that it's more for us Jews to talk about amongst ourselves. While the subject matter is an internal conversation, I encourage everyone to read the whole thing. My own experience is that most non-Jews don't know much about American Jewish cultural issues and experiences, beyond the stereotypes and the canned, Jewish institutional PR.

I would just add to Rokhl's assertions about secular and religious Jewish culture(s), that a secular Jewish world-view can also include not just knowledge but practice of Judaism. While Jewish law excludes those who profess belief in Christian or polytheistic religions from Jewish religious participation, there is no requirement that one demonstrate a positive belief in God. It's been my experience that many practicing Jews have changeable ideas and beliefs about theology while remaining consistent participants in the religious community. I don't know how many would go as far as I do to say their world view is closest to secular and agnostic while maintaining a somewhat traditional Jewish religious practice—though I know my mother would as would my great-uncle, my maternal grandfather's brother, who, at age 95, is the minyan facilitator for the daily services at his synagogue in Florida. You have not heard leyning (chanting) from the Torah until you've heard him.

The summer of 2002, my first cousin, who is an Orthodox Jew, invited me to lead the davenning (praying) for his auf ruf, an east European Jewish celebration at morning prayer services in the week before one's wedding. This was a particularly special occasion because my cousin decided to have the auf ruf in my maternal grandfather's synagogue, Young Israel on East Broadway, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.* The Young Israel on East Broadway is a very traditional, Orthodox synagogue, which my grandparents were members of from around time it was founded, until they died six weeks apart, in November and December 2002, respectively, both at age ninety-nine.

I was a little nervous to accept the honor, since I don't regularly attend services in such Orthodox congregations, where the ritual life is very tightly choreographed and fast paced, without a lot of time spent explaining and instructing. Still, there was no way to say no, especially knowing my grandfather would be there (my grandmother was not well enough to attend).

At one point, during the breakfast that followed services (bagels, lox, herring, fruit, etc.), my uncle, whose son was getting married, pulled me aside to report that during services my grandfather turned to him and said, "who would have thought that Paul Greenberg's son could daven like this."

My father, a founder of New Jewish Agenda, who identified not as a Zionist but as a Jewish nationalist supporter of Jewish and Palestinian self-determination in the middle east, was a secular radical in the Jewish socialist tradition, for the first half of his life. As he reached his 40s, he started to become increasingly religious in his outlook, though he never learned to read Hebrew or the ritual skills he and my mother decided I should learn in my eight years of Jewish parochial school.

Notes
*If you click on the Young Israel link, above, you can also see an arial shot of the apartment buildings where my grandparents lived through all the years that I was alive to know them. They lived at 383 Grand Street, in what are known as the Seward Park Cooperatives. In the area marked "Seward Park," between Essex and Clinton, there are two buildings. 383 Grand Street is the one closer to Essex and to Grand.

Twenty-Fve Years

Twenty-five years ago today (12/9), I was eleven years old, going on twelve. I swear I knew every Beatles song by heart, knew every published detail of the band's history. And John was my favorite. He was the coolest one. His songs were the best ones. HIs solo work was the strongest. He had real politics.

I was eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast. My mother was making my lunch for school. My dad still smoked then, and he was out on the front porch in his bathrobe, having a cigarette in the cold because he wasn't allowed to smoke in the house.

He came inside with the morning paper, the Albany Times Union, and the terrible headline. I don't remember what the wording was, but I remember pouring over the article, reading it again and again, trying to understand how it could have happened, how that man could have done something like this. I remember the heat in my face, not quite crying but tears blurring my eyes.

These were the suburbs, the middle class life my father had striven for. When we moved there it was part of my parents' decision, half conscious, half not, that I would grow up insulated from politics and violence.

It took a long time for me to lose the innocence cultivated in the Albany suburbs. This violence was senseless, without political valence. But it was the first chink, the first time I felt loss, December 9, 1980.

Oh What A Beautiful City

Pete Seeger continues to be a big favorite for my toddler. Standing in the chair in front of our stereo, he pulls the Pete Seeger CD of choice out of the stack, gets the disc out of the case, opens the CD player drawer, places the disc in, closes the drawer—and finds his favorite songs by himself.

This all started with him simply calling out the names of songs or artists he wanted to hear and repeating the name with great insistence, until we relented. Then he started asking for CDs to put into the player himself. And now, most recently, he's been cuing up the desired songs without help.

The first song we saw him do this with was Sweet Potatoes, on We Shall Overcome: The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert (1963). Our little boy figured out how to press the track advance button three times to get to track 3 on disc 2. What really blew our minds, though, was when he figured out how to get to track 18 on the Children's Concert At Town Hall (Abiyoyo). I'm pretty sure that at 2 1/2 he hasn't learned to count to 18 but rather has learned to recognize what the track number for Abiyoyo looks like in the CD player display. Still, it's pretty darn cool . . .

It's a good thing I like Pete Seeger so much. Instead of getting sick of the recordings, I've been finding new pleasures in songs I hadn't paid as much attention to when I was younger. The first song that struck me this way was Pete's rendition of the the John Lair song, Little Birdie. The liner notes say Pete learned the song in the 1940s from one the Coon Creek Girls, who were Lair's proteges. Pete's mountain-style banjo on this track is hypnotic, and the lyrics are beautiful. When I tried to find a transcription of them online, there were many versions of the song, but none with words that Pete sings on this recording—which makes me think that it was Pete himself who came up with this most deeply poetic and mysterious version of the song that I've come to love so well:

Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes you fly so high?
It's because I am a true little bird
And I do not fare to die?

Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes your wings so blue?
It's because I've been a grieving
Grievin' after you.

Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes your head so red?
Well after all that I've been through
It's a wonder I ain't dead.

Little birdie, little birdie,
Come sing to me a song.
I've a short while to be here,
And a long time to be gone.

In the middle two verses, the movement between the images and the states of mind and emotion they signify reminds me of reading William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Exprience (of all things). Maybe that's just the ballad tradition bubbling up through both the 19th and 20th centuries, but I can't really say.

Now to the song that got me writing this post in the first place: Oh What A Beautiful City, as performed on We Shall Overcome. You can read the lyrics of a different version here, but first just sit back and listen.

The credits say Pete's version is as adapted and arranged by Marian Hicks. There is almost nothing about her on the internet, and there do not seem to be any recordings to her name. In looking around, I discovered a noted arrangement by Edward Boatner, who seems like an interesting figure in Black musical history whom I hadn't heard of before.

I really want to know about Marian Hicks. If any readers can tell me more about her, or if anyone knows good recordings of Oh What A Beautiful City by African American gospel artists, or any other interesting recordings, or anything else about the song's history, please let me know in the comments.

UPDATE
My wife recalls reading in Rise Up Singing that Marian Hicks was an African American friend of Pete Seeger's family and that he learned to sing the song from her. I don't actually have copy of RUS, but I'll check this out as soon as I can.

CORRECTION
Second stanza of Little Birdie corrected from "dreaming" and "dreamin'" to "grieving" and "grievin'."

Staying On Subject

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

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

--Stabat Mater

studyholic,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Special thanks to hf and to b.)

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

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.

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.

p.s.

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

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

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

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

Block Artist

Speaking of children, my two year old has been doing wonderful things with blocks.