With so many great African American figures dying too young, it is wonderful to celebrate John Hope Franklin’s 94 years of life, filled with so many accomplishments. His book From Slavery to Freedom is an essential reference on my shelf of books on African American history.
John Hope Franklin at home in Durham, N.C., in 2006. (Derek Anderson for The New York Times)
Born and raised in an all-black community in Oklahoma where he was often subjected to humiliating racism, Franklin was later instrumental in bringing down the legal and historical validations of such a world.
As an author, his book ”From Slavery to Freedom” was a landmark integration of black history into American history that remains relevant more than 60 years after being published. As a scholar, his research helped Thurgood Marshall and his team at the NAACP win Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that barred the doctrine of ‘’separate but equal” in the nation’s public schools.
”It was evident how much the lawyers appreciated what the historians could offer,” Franklin later wrote. ”For me, and I suspect the same was true for the others, it was exhilarating.”
Franklin himself broke numerous color barriers. He was the first black department chair at a predominantly white institution, Brooklyn College; the first black professor to hold an endowed chair at Duke; and the first black president of the American Historical Association.
He often regarded his country like an exasperated relative, frustrated by racism’s stubborn power, yet refusing to give up. ”I want to be out there on the firing line, helping, directing or doing something to try to make this a better world, a better place to live,” Franklin told The Associated Press in 2005
DAYTON — David Schock shed tears and felt prickles on the back of his neck as he heard the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on a long-forgotten recording from 1964 at the University of Dayton.
“I thought, ‘I’m standing on holy ground here,’” Schock said from his home in Grand Haven, Mich.
Schock discovered the unlabeled reel-to-reel tape of King’s speech at the UD Fieldhouse on Nov. 29, 1964, in a box of memorabilia owned by Herbert Woodward Martin of Washington Twp. Martin, a UD poet and professor emeritus, is the subject of a documentary film by Schock.
Martin, who never listened to the tape, assumed it was one that he had planned to record over. “Thank goodness I never did that,” he said.
The 50-minute recording captures the late civil rights leader discussing the state of race relations before an audience of more than 6,200 people. King told the crowd: “We’ve come a long, long way, but we have a long, long way to go.”
A day after the FBI asked for the public’s assistance in solving 43 unpunished killings in Mississippi during the civil rights era, researchers say they know of at least 18 more slayings that haven’t been included.
“There definitely needs to be a bigger list,” said Margaret Burnham, professor at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston.
On Thursday, the FBI highlighted 43 killings between 1955 and 1967 in Mississippi.
Burnham said research has uncovered 11 additional cases. She said one name the FBI released is misspelled - it should be the Rev. J.E. Evasingston, who was killed in 1955 in Tallahatchie.
Ben Greenberg of Boston, a journalist and blogger investigating the Feb. 28, 1964, killing of Clifton Walker, north of Woodville, said he’s run across seven names in his research that don’t appear on the FBI list and weren’t cited by Burnham’s research. “And there might be more,” he said.
Three of those - Lula Mae Anderson, Eli Jackson and Dennis Jones - were found dead in a car in December 1963, not far from Poor House Road, where Walker is believed to have been killed by Klansmen….
Surprisingly, all seven additional names that Greenberg found were either mentioned or referenced in the FBI file itself.
He has obtained a copy of the file of the Walker case, but some of the most important information has been redacted, such as the names of the two suspects recommended for arrest by the FBI, he said.
If the FBI is truly interested in solving these cases, the entire files should be released to the families and the public, he said.
He recalled sharing some of the FBI files with the Walker family - files the family had never seen.
“A full approach to justice involves more than just procedures in the courtroom,” he said. “It also involves as full accounting as possible of the truth in the community where the murders occurred.”
May there be many more moments like this. Time is running out; I hope Mr. Elwin Wilson inspires courage among the countless others who also must come forward.
Elwin Wilson was an unabashed racist, the sort who once hung a black doll from a noose outside his home. John Lewis was a young civil rights leader bent on changing laws, if not hearts and minds, even if it cost him his life.
They faced each other at a South Carolina bus station during a protest in 1961. Wilson joined a white gang that jeered Lewis, attacked him and left him bloodied on the ground.
Forty-eight years later, the men met again — this time so Wilson could apologize to Lewis and express regret for his hatred. Lewis, now a congressman from Atlanta, greeted his former tormentor at his Capitol Hill office.
“I just told him that I was sorry,” Wilson, 72, said in a telephone interview Wednesday as he traveled home to Rock Hill, S.C. For years, he said, he tried to block the incident out of his mind “and couldn’t do it.”
Lewis said Wilson is the first person involved in the dozens of attacks against him during the civil rights era to step forward and apologize. When they met Tuesday, Lewis offered forgiveness without hesitation.
“I was very moved,” said Lewis. “He was very, very sincere, and I think it takes a lot of raw courage to be willing to come forward the way he did. … I think it will lead to a great deal of healing.”
Wilson said he had felt an urge to voice his remorse for years. He talked about his past activities a few weeks ago with a friend, and the friend asked him where he thought he might go if he died.
“I said probably hell,” Wilson said. “He said, ‘Well, you don’t have to.’” (Source)
Before he apologized to Representative Lewis, Mr. Elwin did something perhaps even more difficult: he faced some of the people he had harmed in his own community.
Wilson’s apology was first reported by The (Rock Hill, S.C.) Herald. After reading an article about local black civil rights leaders reacting to President Barack Obama’s inauguration, he and another former segregationist called the paper saying they wanted to apologize.
The paper aired their comments and documented an emotional meeting with the local activists at a former whites-only lunch counter in downtown Rock Hill, where Wilson had antagonized demonstrators during a 1961 sit-in.
After meeting with the local activists, Wilson realized that Lewis must have been the young black man he had attacked at the bus station that same year, when a bus carrying two Freedom Riders rolled into town.
If Mr. Elwin had only apologized to Lewis, I would be moved and impressed. But it is even more urgent that the people within communities where racist terror reigned find ways to face the truth and work towards reconciliation. Many perpetrators and victims and immediate family of victims have already died. Those who remain are aging, many elderly. As my friend Stanley Nelson at the Concordia Sentinel has put it, we can’t do much about slavery, but we can do something about this.
The nation will pause and reflect on the massive “Revolutionary Kool Aid Suicide” of almost a 1000 Americans in their Jonestown refuge in Guyana and the assassination of Congressman Leo Ryan, thirty years ago, on November 18, 1978. This could be my final ten year acknowledgment of the Peoples Temple and Reverend Jim Jones.
CNN was going to tell this story again last night at 9:00 PM. But the Campbell lead-up at 8:00 p.m. was so boring—re-hashing the all day story of Governor Palin and the Republican Governor’s Conference in Miami—that I fell asleep. When I woke up, it was David Letterman time, 11:30, time to enjoy his political jokes. When I turned back to CNN, the news network was showing the horror of the stacked up bodies in a repeat of their 9:00 P.M. special.
But my interest in the Peoples Temple story began before Guyana—in Indianapolis, Indiana—where my connection to the story was made.
In 1998, after watching a version on History Channel, I put it all together in my head. But I better hurry and put my own connection to the story in writing. In 1998, actors connected to me in this story who could have confirmed what I know were living—but they are now gone or about gone. That’s the problem when, as a young adult, you hang with people 15-30 years older than you.
When I visited my grandchildren for my birthday, they announced that I am 74 years old. They are such big liars. I exist in a fantasy of denial. (”Grandpaw—I know how old you are” (who asked them?) “74!!”)
Sometime in 1958-1959 in Indianapolis, Indiana
Damn! She was fine. Brown skin. Not a high yaller—that I felt tended to be uppity in relation to me with my brown skin. Breasts. A behind. And she was aggressive—coming on to me. She came into the ice cream parlor where I was working part-time. I forget WHY I was working there part time. I got her phone number. But it must have been the short period of time between Indiana University Law School and working at the Indiana State Farm—a correctional facility.
But the opportunity to get it on with this fine woman—either for a one night stand or a relationship—was a diversion from my politics of the moment—and I did not call her.
Yet, in about a week, I saw here again in a drug store near my home—and she came on again—showing disappointment that I did not call her. (As I look at it now, this was strange—because the ice cream parlor was way in East Indianapolis—not near my home neighborhood).
She said I could make up not calling her by picking her up and taking her to church—to a Peoples Temple the coming Sunday. That relieved the sexual tension—because I could then play MY game of seduction by doing a neutral thing—where I would be in control.
Peoples Temple? I had no idea. She said it was integrated. So is the Unitarian church I attended. But I was suspicious when she told me the address—located in the Black Ghetto near downtown—and not in an upper class white suburb as was the Unitarian Church.
My new lady friend—I suspected was not college educated. Therefore, I began to imagine that Peoples Temple was like a Father Divine Church that I had read about—and that sparked my curiosity to see what was going on. While growing up as a child in the AME faith—in Terre Haute, Indiana—there was a piano—but no organ. There was no gospel music. Only Wesleyan hymns. No emotionalism—which was frowned upon. (The women who would forget where they were and get happy, would be rushed by church nurses in white uniforms down into the basement where they could shout and cool down before being allowed to come back up and join the congregation).
But back as a child while growing up in Terre Haute, Indiana, as I walked by Pentecostal churches, people seemed to be having a good time—the falling out—the jumping up and down, the tambourines. Visiting a service with a childhood friend, I enjoyed the testifying and the praising the Lord.
But I had always moved on because all that emotionalism was below my class as was taught in my Black Bourgeoisie upbringing as an AME.
So, I was eager to come by and pick up my new lady friend for church with two motivations—to execute my Sex game under my control and to observe an experience which must be like a Father Divine experience.
The Experience
I came by the house where my new friend lived with her mother and sisters. Only she in the family was going to Peoples Temple. Their house was also in the hood. A typical working class Black family. I was already beginning to lower my expectations of my new friend—because you can be poor—but have a vision of rising—intellectually—not just financially—like having family members striving to go to college if you can’t. Yet that did not turn me off like my mother would have liked it to; instead, I was more comfortable that I would not be put down and would be in charge.
Then we arrived at the church building—which was not like a traditional church—but a big warehouse—with a big neon sign that showed it was a church. There must have been more than a thousand people. Looking back now, having had experiences being in big assemblies, I think it could have been 2000 people there—and though my friend and I were not late, we had to sit near the back. Again, not like a traditional church: everyone was sitting on folding chairs. Not pews.
And noise. Not like in a Methodist church or Unitarian church—where in a back row, you can hear a pin drop. My friend did not have to tell me that the young white athletic man on the stage was Reverend Jim Jones. Speakers were set up all over the place; you could hear what he was saying over the noise, the cymbals, the organ and shouts. Everyone was in an uproar, responding to what he was saying.
If you succeeded in shutting your ears to all this noise, to what he was saying—what he said sounded pretty good, until he got to the monsters and the retribution and end of times forecast in the Book of Revelation. This was 1959-60, so the Gantry movie had not yet come out—but just like the Gantry movie—only magnified. Everything was staged—the mass healings and the frenzied exultations—Black and white—about equal.
But it came to me. This guy is a stone hustler. I realized that, somehow, I had been targeted as a mark to be brought to this place to be enrolled in this church because of its enthusiastic integration of Black and white that was not bound to an upper middle class mentality. After the service, there was a great banquet of food and fellowship with the people which was enjoyable, but something was not right. Everyone seemed brainwashed into an alternate reality, and it felt addictive to hang there and get involved there with my new lady friend.
The young lady was fine. But after I took her home—I never called her back. Because I felt I had been a target. I felt as if she knew who I was before she met me—as if this guy Jim Jones had ordered it. I don’t want to read into the story what I now know in comparison to what I knew then. But as I recall, I just did not like or trust this Jim Jones—using so-called “integration” to be a white Father Divine. And Black people eating it up.
1960 Indiana Human Rights Commission
When I was selected to be the chairman of the Indianapolis NAACP Political Action Committee in 1958, instead of taking care of my law school classes, I was working demonstrations, picketing and pressing for an Indiana Human Rights Bill on public accommodations and employment. My partners were Willard B. Ransom, general counsel to Madam C. J. Walker beauty industries, and my mentor, Attorney John Preston War, counsel for the Indianapolis NAACP and legal director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union. State Senator Nelson Grills and State Representative Andrew Jacobs were co-sponsors of the bill. It passed.
Indianapolis, like the rest of the State of Indiana in 1959—was strictly segregated. Poor whites lived in Southern Indianapolis—near the manufacturing centers. Blacks lived in Northern Indianapolis, from central Indianapolis—the Ghetto—near Indiana Avenue, extending north to the suburbs where upper middle class whites lived. Middle class Blacks were slowly moving into these areas near Butler University—the home school of the Disciples of Christ. (I learned in 1998 that the Disciples of Christ had sponsored Jim Jone’s Peoples Temple—but later kicked him out—which was the reason he moved to California before moving to Guyanna.)
But after our human rights bill passed, Ransom, Ward and myself lost control or influence as to how the Indiana Human Rights Law would be structured and implemented. My alienation with Indiana then began to develop when the moderates chose Reverend Jim Jones to be a member of the Indiana Human Rights Commission. Even my friends did not understand why I was so adamantly against this so-called progressive integrationist, Jim Jones. He was one of the factors, along with my friends supporting him, for my deciding to come to Florida and the FAMU Law School in order to be part of the Southern Movement bursting in 1960.
So, in 1978, when the news of the Jonestown suicide was told to the world, and they noted that this Reverend Jim Jones, from Indianapolis, was the cult leader directing the so-called mass “revolutionary suicide” I was not surprised.
As if I had a premonition.
My friend John Due has sent to me his remembrance of Peoples Temple and Reverend Jim Jones as a guest post for Hungry Blues. John is now a retired civil rights-community organizer lawyer living in Gadsden County, FL. John and I met on the internet and have a mutual interest in the movement in Mississippi—where he worked during the 1964 Freedom Summer and where I currently investigate racial violence from that time. But before Due moved to Florida in 1960, he was an activist in Indiana. He sent this post to express how he felt how he was a mark for Peoples Temple and Reverend Jones and how we all must take care in any movement. —BG
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 15, 2008 at 7:29 pm
As a lifelong New Englander, I spent the final days of this election season in California. On the evening of November 5, after searching every newsstand for a newspaper to remember the historic day that came before, I finally found a copy of the San Jose Mercury Times. The two headlines read: “Obama Elected Nation’s First Black President in Commanding Victory” and “Gay Marriage Ban Heads Toward Victory.”
A week later, the word “victory” still stings.
I am not from California, I am not gay and the idea of marriage is not particularly appealing to me, and yet I am profoundly troubled by the vote last week to approve proposition 8, a ban on same-sex marriage in California.
You should be troubled too, whether you are directly affected or not. From Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” On November 4, a great injustice was brought upon California as well as Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas, where other discriminatory propositions were passed.
President-Elect Barack Obama is living proof that injustice can be overcome and equality can triumph over intolerance. And yet, being in California after volunteering with the Vote No on Prop 8 Campaign to defend marriage equality, I could not help but feel disheartened on election night by a loss that I was not expecting.
Just a short time after leaving my Vote No on 8 polling station in Alameda County on Tuesday night, my grandmother called to tell me that Barack Obama had been elected president. I was heading to the San Francisco Vote No on 8 Campaign party. I was preparing for a long night of nervous, but cautiously optimistic TV watching and couldn’t quite believe this incredible news. I had to grill my overjoyed grandmother on her sources before I believed it.
The streets of San Francisco sprang to life. People were honking horns, yelling “Yes we can!” and dancing in celebration outside the Vote No on 8 party location. People were celebrating inside too—at least in the beginning.
The first poll numbers listed on the LA Times California electoral map projected on two giant screens in the main room showed Proposition 8 ahead in the polls right from the start. But we told ourselves not to despair; after all, the numbers only reflected a few reporting precincts and didn’t yet include the major metropolitan areas of LA and San Francisco.
When the LA area poll numbers started popping up on the screen, I felt the caution in the air.
As the night went on, and the number of reporting precincts increased with little change in the percentage of no on 8 votes, the mood became decidedly somber. I looked to the Vote No on 8 Campaign organizers who had given me my volunteer training. They looked scared. I watched as the line of reporters packed up their cameras and computers. The press would not be covering a victory party that night.
I thought of one of my fellow Vote No on 8 polling station volunteer, who had just married his husband the week before. Would courts end up deciding if the passing of proposition 8 would alter the legal standing of his marriage?
Disillusionment set in as I stood in a room amongst people who were stripped of a fundamental right, vote by unfair vote. Perhaps I hadn’t been in CA long enough to be bombarded by all the negative ads or to understand the size and scope of the Yes on 8 Campaign. Visiting from my beloved Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was baffled by the poll numbers that came flooding in to support a ban on same-sex marriage. Surely on a night so victorious for racial equality in America, such overt discrimination against another group of Americans could not be injected into the California constitution?
Through lies and manipulative advertising, proponents of proposition 8 were able to force discrimination into the California constitution and, on a day that will always be known as a victory for racial equality, we received a painful reminder of how far we have to go on the road to GLBTQ equality.
The GLBTQ community is being singled out because of the pervasive and accepted discrimination throughout our society, now further established into law. GLBTQ rights are human rights. “Young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled,” as President-Elect Obama called out during his victory speech, must play a role in defending and promoting the rights and dignity of one and all.
On November 15, be part of history. Join the Impact is a nationwide protest of proposition 8 being organized at City Halls across the country this Saturday. Join the protest at location near you and get involved in your community. The movement for equality is not just a gay rights movement; it is a civil rights movement. It must not be a Californian movement; it must be an American movement.
There’s no stopping the movement that has started, and I am so proud to have joined my friends and family in the struggle. Someday people will look back and marvel at the progress we made for equality, as we are marveling today at the progress marked by President-Elect Obama.
Amanda Cary is a global AIDS advocacy associate at a health and human rights organization in Cambridge, MA.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 14, 2008 at 8:13 pm
Our election of Barack Obama to be President of the United States of America has been filling me with overwhelming emotions. As it has been doing for so many people.
It has been hard to put any of this into words. For me it begins with my being a child of the Civil Rights Movement. As many readers of this blog know, in the early 1960s, my father worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as Special Assistant to Martin Luther King, Jr. He worked in the SCLC NY office and fought on the front lines of the civil rights battle in Birmingham, AL. One of the youth leaders of the Birmingham movement, the late William Douthard (aka Meatball), lived with us when he first moved to Albany, NY in 1978.
I started this blog to write about my father’s history in the Movement and in the process I have had the privilege of getting involved with the broader community of Civil Rights Movement veterans. I’ve made new friends and joined hands with them in the continuing struggle for racial justice in America.
It is incredibly potent to see images of a Black man elected to be President—in a historic, landslide victory, no less. To see that, and to see America’s embrace of the Obama family, and to see Michelle and Barack’s two little Black girls who are going to grow up in the White House—is to see barriers broken that I hoped but did not expect to see broken in my lifetime.
This is not the ultimate fulfillment of the struggle imparted to me by my father and his comrades—but it is a watershed moment. America still has a long way to go. And we don’t know what kind of president Obama will turn out to be; he may well end up being a centrist Democrat in the tradition of Bill Clinton. There are also indications that his administration will promote unprecedented changes in American government and society. It is likely that the Obama administration will be a mix of these things. But Obama’s candidacy and election are more than these emotions and are more than the sum his policies and accomplishments of his administration.
One of the Civil Rights Movement veterans I’ve gotten to know is Joyce Ladner. Joyce grew up in Palmers Crossing, Hattiesburg, MS. She and her sister Dorie became leaders in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and were involved in much of the civil rights struggle in Mississippi. Joyce has gone on to be a prominent sociologist, a pioneer in Black women’s studies, a president of Howard University, a Clinton appointee to the District of Columbia Financial Control Board and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution.
In January, Joyce launched her Ladner Report blog to support Barack Obama in the midst of the contentious and often ugly Democratic primary race. Before the election results were known on Tuesday night, she wrote:
Joyce Ladner and Michelle Obama
I am posting this piece before the election results are in, so I don’t know if Senator Barack Obama will become President Obama. I going out to an election returns party tonight. But the race has already been won. I don’t know if the numbers will allow us to call him “President Obama” but what I do know is this: we have turned this country around. It can not, it will not shift back to the greed, mean spiritedness, selfishness, and all the other negative adjectives I could call it.
I was reminded of a passage written by Franz Fanon:
Each generation must define its mission,
Fulfill it, or betray it.
I think Fanon’s words have a lot of relevance today because older generations worked in this campaign to restore us to our better selves, while the young stepped forth to define their missions. In time, they, too, will step up and figure out how to carry them out. They will have a great transformational leader in a President Obama.
With this in mind, I told a fellow volunteer at the Obama campaign office today that the laws of the universe helped to shift us away from the horrors that led people to rise up and clamor and work for CHANGE. Obama was a conduit for the change we citizens must have. He understands that too because he keeps telling us that the election is not about him but it’s about US.
I spent some time yesterday and today waving my Obama sign at major intersections in this beautiful Florida city that is so deeply Republican. I saw many McCain-Palin supporters taking their last breaths in their old identities. Several very old men gave me the finger sign, which shocked me because they looked like it was hard for them to raise their arms. Infirm. Old. Set in 19th century ideas, but still nasty, hostile, and in some cases racist. It’s not enough to say that these people are driven entirely by self interest. It goes deeper than that. It is about the redefinition of who we are as a nation. It taps into the better part of our selves for the negative experiences to which we have been subjected are destroying our inner spirits….
Let’s hope this two year experience many of us have had with this campaign will leave us all with a renewal of energy and optimism, that will fuel our desire to sacrifice for the changes the society needs. I have not had experiences similar to those in this campaign since I was a college student civil rights activist. I hope we who had similar experiences in the past can now feel content to bequeath to the younger generations that same sense of struggle and morality, optimism and hope, hard work and sacrifice. They are up to the task and we should be more than ready to move to the side and urge them to lead.
May God protect Senator Obama and may he guide and protect us as well, as we work for higher purposes and goals that demand that we all step outside ourselves to work for the greater good.
On Wednesday morning, I wrote an email to my friend John Due.
John was born in Indiana, where he attended Indiana University. There, in 1957, three years before the Southern sit-in movement, he helped organize a testing campaign of segregated off-campus housing, restaurants and barber shops. After several more years of activity in the NAACP and union organizing, John went to Florida A&M in Tallahassee to attend law school and get in involved in the Civil Rights Movement there. John worked for the Southern Regional Council in Atlanta, which sent him to Mississippi in 1964, where he conducted a dangerous investigation of violent reprisals against Black citizens and their SNCC and CORE workers seeking the right to vote in Southwest Mississippi—the same area of Mississippi my current investigations of civil rights era racial violence focus on. John has been active in practically every civil rights organization one could name. More recently he was a leader of the successful campaign for Miami-Dade County to adopt the most comprehensive living wage ordinance in the country. John’s wife, Patricia Stephens Due, a civil rights leader in her own right in the Tallahassee movement and beyond, co-authored with one of their daughters, Tananarive Due, the book Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.
My subject line to John was “Congratulations to us all.”
I’m thinking of you and your family today. I just tried to call your home to say congratulations and that the news that we have elected Barack Obama as President of the United States is more meaningful because I know you.
John replied in a vein similar to Joyce’s blog post:
Like John Lewis—as Obama has said—my wife, myself, your father and other unsung heroes are and were the Moses Generation.
Obama said he was of the Joshua Generation, like you are.
And crossing the Red Sea that was made easy by the Lord is nothing compared to the River Jordan that you and your children will have to do because the Jordan is still not crossed yet. You will soon find out the difference between McCain saying “I,” and Obama saying “You.”
So I accept your congratulations as a matter of recognition of helping to put you and your generation in place. “To Come This Far.” Now it is your turn. So I agree—”Congratulations to us all.”
Neither Joyce nor John have illusions that Obama is the silver bullet for our nation’s woes. They are ardent supporters of Obama, who see him and his candicy as having invigorated my generation and American politics with the capacity to now start moving ahead to the next stages of evolution. It will be no less of a struggle. But there is hope now that we can meet it. Yes we can.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 7, 2008 at 9:42 am
You may have noticed that Hungry Blues has changed its look. After more than two and a half years with my heavily modified versions of Scott Wallick’s VeryPlainTxt theme, I’ve been feeling the urge to change up the look of my site. When I came across Lucian E. Marin’s Journalist theme a little over a year ago, I wanted to switch to it right away. When it was first released, however, it didn’t offer widgets for managing the sidebar, and I didn’t have the time to learn how to widgetize it myself. But the Journalist theme is now fully widgetized, so I’ve made the switch (and a few modifications).
In addition to changing the design, I’ve added the Disqus comment management system, I’ve pared down the sidebar, and I’ve added pages for my Opentape and for my other activitiy around the web (twitter, flickr, tumblr, last.fm, ma.gnolia, etc.) via friendfeed.
I made one other change, which, for me, was the biggest. When I launched this blog in 2004, the tagline was “Searching the life and times of my father, Paul Greenberg,” and that has remained the tagline until this redesign. Now the tagline is the much blander “Ben Greenberg’s weblog.” One reason for the change is that the original tagline has sometimes misled new visitors to site. I’ve received a good number of comments and emails addressing me as Paul. While it’s an honor to be mistaken for my dad, I’d rather avoid the confusion.
But the main reason for changing the tagline has to do with how other things have changed since I began this blog. When I started Hungry Blues I was figuring out, through my blogging, what my father’s history had to do with my present. That isn’t really a question anymore. I’ve made the connections, and it’s changed the course of my life. Around the time I moved this site from the hosted Typepad blogging service over to my own Wordpress setup, I wrote:
Starting this blog has led me to friendships and political activism with Movement veterans. It has taken me to Mississippi and Alabama. Hungry Blues has led to my current work as a journalist and in internet communications for a human rights organization.
The focus of Hungry Blues broadened, but most everything on the blog has been part of “searching the life and times of my father.” This is still the case, and it will continue to be explained on the About page.
Today is the fourth of Cheshvan on the Jewish calendar—my father’s eleventh yahrtzeit (anniversary of death). It just so happened that in 1997, the fourth of Cheshvan fell on Election Day. It was oddly apropos for my dad. He fought for voting rights in the South as one of Dr. King’s lieutenants, was an expert on proportional representation, designed and implemented the overhaul of New York City’s method of school board elections and was a director of and advisor to many electoral campaigns—perhaps most notably those of New York City Mayor John Lindsay.
Bob Adamenko, Paul Greenberg and John Lindsay in 1965 at Lindsay's first public appearance after becoming Mayor of NYC.
It’s sad that my father did not live to see this presidential election. He would be so thrilled with Barack Obama quite possibly on the threshold of becoming America’s first Black president—and with how Obama’s campaign has been so expansive and revitalizing for American politics. (I can also imagine the arguments he would get into about whether Obama is a progressive candidate; the main thing would be to argue, not to settle on a position.)
Thank you to the readers and commenters at Hungry Blues, to the people from my father’s past who have contacted me through this site, and to all of the new friends and contacts I’ve made through the work I started here.
—
(More information about the photo of my dad and John Lindsay is here.)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 2, 2008 at 3:12 pm
For an elaboration on why the McCain/Palin hate mongering is a losing strategy see Abby’s post.
I feel like McCain is doing a great job appealing to the bottom 16th percentile…. And “shoring up” the bottom 16th percentile isn’t going to win him any elections. There’s just not enough population there.
Let me tell you what I’m not saying: I’m not saying that people who are voting for McCain are stupid. But I think that their support for him must come from the work he’s done in his political life BEFORE the last few weeks or their allegience to their party, because the way his campaign has gone, the only new people left listening are likely people who don’t quite comprehend complex policy. Shouldn’t the smart “winning chess move” kind of thing to do right now be appealing to the swing votes? Surely swing voters are not too impressed with what they are seeing.
Attacks get people at a gut level. They are easier to hurl than calm, non-responsive even thinking. These frothed up crowds are the product of that kind of campaigning, and they are dangerous. In fact, I’m scared now EVEN IF OBAMA WINS. That isn’t strategic chess-playing. That’s reckless irresponsibility, because creating seething anger among groups of people is never a good idea!
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 11, 2008 at 11:15 pm
Westmoreland was discussing vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s speech with reporters outside the House chamber and was asked to compare her with Michelle Obama.
“Just from what little I’ve seen of her and Mr. Obama, Sen. Obama, they’re a member of an elitist-class individual that thinks that they’re uppity,” Westmoreland said.
When asked to clarify, Westmoreland said it again, pretty much to say, you heard me, they’re uppity n—s.
Asked to clarify that he used the word “uppity,” Westmoreland said, “Uppity, yeah.”
I bring up tne N-word because that is the debased level of rhetoric that the word “uppity” belongs to, especially when a white Southerner is directing it at Blacks.
The worse part is it isn’t vague. Uppity is exactly the term white thugs and terrorists used to use for high-achieving blacks–right before they burned down their neighborhoods and ran them out of town.
I suppose this might seem hyperbolic to some. It is a factual, historically accurate statement.
When I interviewed the children of Samuel O’Quinn, an African American man who was shot dead by a sniper at the gate to his property in Centreville, MS in 1959, they said that the main problem their father had with whites was that he was well educated and successful.
Samuel O’Quinn was a graduate of the Tuskegee Institute—”the highest form of education you could get” at that time, if you were Black, Rance O’Quinn emphasized.
“My mother and father gave away a fortune,” Rance O’Quinn continued. “They gave money to every cause, the building of every church. They bought the bus for the kids to go to school and paid the bus driver to take children to school.”
“That’s why he was hated,” added Phalba O’Quinn Plummer. “They said he was biggity. They would say ‘uppity’ and ‘biggity.’ ‘Biggity’ means too big for his britches.”
Five years after Samuel O’Quinn was murdered, in April 1964, his eldest son, Clarence, was attacked on the Centreville Post Office steps by Chief of Police Bill Ivey. “You damn uppity nigger, you think you own the town,” Ivey said, as he beat O’Quinn with other whites looking on. Clarence O’Quinn’s 94 year old grandmother, mourning the murder of her son Samuel, urged Clarence to leave town. “You have a life worth living; you should not throw it away,” she said. “You have no rights and privileges here.”
“I left Mississippi that same day,” Clarence O’Quinn recalled. “I was humiliated. I was alone. There wasn’t a Black person other than myself that I remember being at that post office, and I felt the evilness that lurked throughout Mississippi and Wilkinson County at that time. The separation from family, from friends was horrible and still is. Many have stood in my shoes and had no place to go.”
“We used to see kids get beat up,” Rance O’Quinn said. “There were lynchings that were never reported. Kids never showed up again. You’d see them in school today; tomorrow you never heard from them and you never would know what happened to them.”
“So and so run away,” his sister Laura O’Quinn Smith added. “That’s all people said. ‘They run away.’”
Lynn Westmoreland’s slur was a conscious evocation of the the racist sentiment that Blacks who refuse to be subservient to whites should be put in their place through violence—beatings, bombings, murder. Westmoreland’s slur is also a call to arms to extremists who would still carry out Klan-style violence. Westmoreland is not fit to govern. I hope his colleagues in Congress are fervently asking for his resignation.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on September 4, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Did Martin die in vain on that fateful day of April 4, 1968? What has transpired in these 40 years with respect to King’s dream? There are several events in the Bible where the number 40 is of paramount importance—can any of them be related to our struggles these past 40 years? Rain 40 days and 40 nights (original flood); Israelites in wilderness 40 years; Jesus in the wilderness 40 days; Ascension occurred 40 days after the resurrection; Pentecost occurred the 50th day; (do we have to wait for another 10 years for The Dream (Pentecost)?). No I have not become a religious fanatic, but these things came to mind in my thinking about the plight of the US today, forty years after the assassination.
The Southern Poverty Law Center recently issued a report about the 888 organized hate groups operating in our country—a staggering 48% increase since 2000 in white supremacist, neo-Nazi, anti-immigrant extremist, anti-gay and other groups. Is this the content of our character? Are we not living up to the dream? Or is it a nightmare?
When the government of the United States lied about the connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and a connection between 9.11.01 and Operation Iraqi Freedom.
When the government of the United States lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq being a threat to the United States peace.
When the government of the United States allows the economy to get out of hand and its citizens suffer while it spends 3 trillion dollars on an unwinnable war. Is this the content of our character?
Martin Luther King, Jr said:
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Can we afford to stand by and silently allow this to happen?
40 years after his death what would Martin Luther King, Jr. say about this election season? We have a Black man and a White woman running for the highest office in the land. But as a nation have we shown our commitment to ending injustice, racism and sexism? When the media bashes immigrants, and overweight people are the targets of jokes… Do we pay homage to Dr. King and his dream one day a year and then go back to being a purveyor of violence and hate? Is this the content of our character?
As the ranks of hate and violence swell, people of concern must stand up and be counted.
Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
(Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love, 1963)
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method, which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
(Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Stockholm, Sweden, December 11, 1964)
Moses led the Israelites out of bondage and into the wilderness. For forty years they labored and toiled in the desert. He did not reach the promised land with them. However, they grew in strength, throwing off the shackles of bondage. The Bible tells us they made the final journey to the promised land.
Will it take another 10 years or 40 years for us to rise from the ashes of bondage, hate and violence? And awaken from this nightmare to live out the true meaning of the content of our character?
— Photo: The family of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. walk in the funeral procession of the slain civil rights leader in Atlanta on April 9, 1968. (AP)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on April 4, 2008 at 8:23 am
I’ve uploaded to scribd.com the complete PDF version my article in the March/April issue of ColorLines Magazine, “The Legacy of a Murder,” about the 1959 murder of Samuel O’Quinn in Centreville, MS. You can read it in the handy viewer, embedded in this post, or you can go to the article’s page on Scribd and download the PDF to your computer. (Hint: you can read the article in full browser mode by clicking on the browser icon in the top right of the scribd tool bar, below.)
In doing my work on racial violence in Southwest Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s, it is exciting to get to know some of the other people doing similar work.
Syracuse University College of Law Professors Janice McDonald and Paula C. Johnson direct the Cold Case Justice Initiative, which has been playing a role in the investigation of the December 10, 1964 murder of Frank Morris in Ferriday, La.
I’ve therefore been having some interesting conversations with Professor McDonald, who sent me the promotional postcard for the CCJI. The front of the postcard, displayed above, says that the CCJI is:
A interdisciplinary project that engages Syracuse University College of Law faculty and students to seek justice for racially motivated murders during the Civil Rights era on behalf of the victims, their families, local communities, and society at large.
No Longer Forgotten: Frank Morris (in visor) December 10, 1964, Ferriday, Louisiana. Photo courtesy of Concordia Sentinel, Ferriday, La.
The Cold Case Justice Initiative (CCJI) was founded in response to the 1964 Ferriday, La. murder of shoe shop owner Frank Morris, which remains unsolved. Forty-four years ago, two suspected Klan members forced Mr. Morris into his shoe repair shop at gunpoint and set the store on fire. Morris died four days later of his severe burns.
The back of the postcard (not pictured here) elaborates:
Law students, under the supervision of Professors Paula C. Johnson and Janis L. McDonald, researched thousands of documents and worked with local investigative reporters which led to witnesses providing new information, to the appointment of a special agent by the FBI, and to a pledge by the U.S. attorney for a full review of the case. The students efforts ignited law enforcement investigation of additional deaths long suspected by the community to be racially motivated and committed by the Klan. Professors Johnson and McDonald developed the course, “Investigating and Reopening Unsolved Civil Rights Era Murders,” first offered during the 2007-2008 academic year. This interdisciplinary course introduces students to civil rights history, civil rights law, criminal procedure, evidence, advocacy skills, and global human rights in the context of investigating specifically assigned civil rights era murder cases in the Southeastern U.S. Overall, the course emphasizes this work as part of the social and professional responsibility of lawyers, legal educators, and law students. This ongoing project will insist on vigilant attention to these long unresolved racially motivated killings and continuing issues of racial justice. For more information visit http://coldcaselaw.syr.edu
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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