Wednesday, October 17, 2007
This website will help you generate a letter to request your FBI file under the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts.
Brought to you by the same folks who set up Get Grandpa’s FBI File.
ShareThis
Also filed in
|
|
Get Grandpa’s FBI File is a great new website that makes easy the process of requesting FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act. You just fill out and submit a simple web form, and then you are practically done. The website generates the request letter(s) for you to print out, which you send to […]
Thursday, September 29, 2005
While most of the press sleeps and the Department of Justice makes us wonder how what the department has to do with justice, the ACLU is on the case.
ACLU Seeks Information on the Fate of 6,500 New Orleans Prisoners
September 28, 2005
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: media@aclu.org
Locked Prisoners Were Abandoned by Guards When Katrina Struck; More Than 500 […]
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 […]
Thursday, August 19, 2004
On Saturday morning, June 22, 1963, at around 9:00 a.m., A. D. King answered his front door and found Roosevelt Tatum. He was crying and saying he had something in his heart he wanted to tell. Tatum came inside and immediately noticed Paul Greenberg, the only white man among the dozen or more people in the house. Tatum had overcome his fear and wanted to say what he saw. When Tatum explained what he’d seen six weeks earlier, King asked him to talk to the FBI. Tatum agreed and King called the FBI office to say that a man was at his home who saw persons responsible for the bombing.
From where he sat on the steps, Tatum could see Birmingham Police Car 49 coming down Avenue H from 13th Street towards 12th Street. The patrol car turned left onto 12th Street, cut its headlights and rolled to a stop across the street at 721 12th Street Ensley, the residence of A. D. and Naomi King. From where she sat, behind one of the porch posts, Miller couldn’t see the car pull up. Tatum whispered not to move or speak. To the officers he was invisible on the shadowy steps. (RT, 15-16, 24-25; AGM1, 17-19, 20)
From the passenger side, a police officer got out from Car 49, walked around the back of the car and across the Kings’ lawn. He seemed to be tossing something near the porch. The officer ran back to the passenger door and got back into Car 49. As the car pulled away the driver tossed something out of his window and onto the Kings’ lawn. The officers weren’t yet three houses away, when the first bomb exploded. (RTD, 3; RT, 15-16, 24-25)
When I found my second set of FBI documents on Roosevelt Tatum, I saw that they would allow me to fill in some of the narrative of what happened to Roosevelt Tatum after the bombing of A. D. and Naomi King’s house. I had intended for my next post in this series to tell some of that story. As I studied the second set of documents and then went back and forth between them and the first set of documents, I began finding more and more of the story of the bombing, dispersed among the details of the two sets of documents.
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
ISOO REPORTS A 25% RISE IN CLASSIFICATION ACTIVITY
Wednesday, April 28, 2004
Last Thursday I had the honor and the pleasure of receiving and email from Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. As I mentioned in Part 3 of From the Delmar Archive to Bombingham, Alabama, her excellent book contains one of the only published accounts of the Roosevelt Tatum episode which I have been writing about. Her book had been extremely important for me as I try to understand the the Tatum story.
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
On July 3, 1963, Roosevelt Tatum was interviewed another time by FBI Agents in Birmingham, Alabama. In this meeting Tatum signed a statement recanting his previous allegations regarding the role of the Birmingham Police in the bombing of A. D. and Naomi King’s home. Here is an excerpt from Tatum’s retraction:
I did […]
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
. . . on June 22, 1963 at around 9:00 AM, Roosevelt Tatum appeared at A. D. and Naomi King’s house. By Tatum’s own account, “I was crying and I told Rev. King that I had something in my heart and I wanted to tell somebody. . . . I have had this thing on my conscience since the date it happened, and I wanted to tell somebody about it so I would feel better”
Name: ROOSEVELT TATUM
Race: Negro
Sex: Male
Address: 1109 Avenue J, Ensley, Birmingham, Alabama
Date of Birth: February 18, 1924
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
I’d always known he did Civil Rights work for the SCLC in Birmingham, but the only concrete thing I’d ever heard about was the benefit concert he helped organize at Miles College (more on that later). I’m pretty sure Dad was the first person I ever heard call the city Bombingham, but he never said anything about his involvement in the investigation of one of the bombings there—not to me and not to my mother.
A friend of mine pointed out that in my Innaugural post, my link to the National Security Archive for information about the Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts (FOIPA) opens a page titled How to Make a FOIA Request.
I was born in 1969 when my father was 41. From about age 18 to age 36 (1945-1963) he was directly involved in many of the political struggles that shaped the American left—labor, disarmament, civil rights. From about age 14 to age 41(1941-1969), my father had close relationships with some of the finest jazz musicians of the swing era—Pee Wee Russell, Max Kaminsky, Rex Stewart and, especially, Frankie Newton. In the years following my birth, my father continued to be active politically and remained a passionate jazz listener, but the formative experiences that had shaped him were moving further into the past.
By the time I was growing up and could hear about my father’s earlier, exciting experiences, they had an air of unreality about them. In the suburbs of Albany, NY, talk about Minton’s and the Cafe Society or about labor or nuclear arms or civil rights activism seemed exotic. People Dad knew and worked with were names in History. At my public high school there was just the smallest handful of African-American students. At home, just a mile away from school, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, JR was simply Martin, my dad’s old boss. My father also was not one for keeping track of details or keeping chronologies straight. His memories were all in soft focus, warmed in the glow of his nostalgia.
I started researching my father’s life and times by accident . . .
BLOG POSTS
COMMENTS
PODCASTS
TUMBLELOG
