You can’t grow up in in the home of a political radical from the 1950s and 60s without hearing Peter, Paul and Mary. I’m very sad to hear of the death of Mary Travis. She raised the roof for freedom and justice her whole career. If there’s a heavenly place where great spirits celebrate together Mary is surely whooping it up with them now.
My google alerts on “Hungry Blues” sometimes turn up interesting things. Steven Taylor of the Fugs has written a song that is also called Hungry Blues. It’s very much in the spirit of the original song that my blog is named after. It’s not quite as good, but it’s a tall order to be asked to measure up to Langston Hughes and James P. Johnson. May the visions of both songs come to pass.
If you’re new to this blog or just have never checked out the song on my About page, here’s the Hughes/Johnson composition. More info about it is available on the About page (scroll to the end).
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
The Prison Policy Initiative—with Demos as a partner—has submitted analysis to the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in Geneva of the discriminatory US Census approach to counting prisoners. PPI and Demos conclude that US Census practices violate international law.
NEW YORK, Dec. 13 — The United States Census practice of counting prisoners in their districts of incarceration rather than their home districts for the purpose of establishing electoral and Congressional representation is a violation of international treaty. This month, the non-partisan public policy and advocacy centers Demos and the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) submitted their analysis to the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) in Geneva.
Demos and PPI urged the committee to scrutinize the racially discriminatory redistricting practice of crediting rural white counties with additional population based on the presence of disenfranchised prisoners in violation of Article 5 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The Demos/PPI comments were included in a larger submission [PDF] prepared by the U.S. Human Rights Network.
The United States ratified the CERD treaty in 1994, and therefore is bound under international law to work to eliminate policies that are intentionally or unintentionally racially discriminatory. The CERD treaty obligates each country to report every two years on its progress at eliminating racial discrimination. The United States submitted its report [PDF] in April and will be questioned by the CERD Committee in Geneva in March 2008. The Committee looks to individuals and organizations in each county to critique the reporting counties report and to highlight omissions.
How US Attorney obtained its indictment against James Ford Seale
How MS AG could have obtained more indictments in Neshoba
What may have been the key to US attorney Dunn Lampton proceeding to obtain an indictment against James Ford Seale for the 1964 murders of Henry Dee and Charles Moore?
It might be that the U.S. Attorney told Charles Edwards, one of the other living suspects, that he could either be a witness or a defendant. It has been reported that Charles Edwards has not been indicted and that he could be a witness for the prosecution:
No charges are expected to be brought against Edwards, who has been interviewed by the FBI and presumably could become a witness against Seale. (C-L 1/25/07)
Perhaps if Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood and Mississippi 8th District Attorney Mark Duncan had used the approach with the other suspects in the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, there would have been more indictments and convictions than only Edgar Ray “Preacher” Killen.
In fact, Jim Hood and Mark Duncan may have had an easier task than the one US Attorney Lampton has thus far accomplished. Hood and Duncan had the additional leverage of having the weight of the 1967 federal convictions to help persuade some of the suspects to cooperate. They could have pointed out to those suspects how easy it would be to convict them on state charges since the same evidence had been sufficient to convict them on federal charges related to the case.
It is still not too late for Hood and Duncan to use this approach to try to obtain a more full measure of justice in the Neshoba murders case.
Some family members of the victims of the Neshoba murders wanted an attorney from the Jackson, MS US Attorney’s office appointed as a special state prosecutor. This approach was successfully used in Birmingham where US Attorney Doug Jones was a special state prosecutor and convictions of the last two living suspects in the Birmingham church bombing case were obtained in 2002. But Hood and Duncan chose not to appoint a special prosecutor.
~ * Full disclosure: I recently joined the board of the ADTJC. —BG
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 29, 2007 at 5:56 pm
As mentioned in my update, below, John Grohol finally replied to my rebuttal—back in the comments at his blog, where he could enjoy a less than rigorous standard for addressing the evidence that I brought to the table.
Grohol has gracioulsy let through the comments that I left today, without long delay. Below is what I wrote back to Grohol in the comments at his blog. Pasted in below the fold is the comment of his, which I am responding to here.
John, Thank you for letting my comment through, finally. And for responding.
In your first four paragraphs you tell me why, perhaps, psychologists, out of a sense of indebtedness to the military for prescription privileges, may be more willing to support torture than psychiatrists and physicians. I don’t see how these historical circumstances should make me feel any better about a psychologist consulting interrogators about which phobias of a detainee to exploit or how long to enforce solitary confinement or at what point to desecrate the Koran or how long or at what point to hood a detainee.
In your arguments that follow your history, you continue to have some difficulty keeping quotations and attributions straight. In the passages I quoted from the respective policy statements of the AMA and the APA (psychological), it was the AMA—not the APA–statement that allowed its members two possible roles regarding detainees:
impartial medical care
“developing interrogation strategies for general training purposes.”
Psychologists who participate in interrogations as military Behavioral Science Consultants (BSCs) have only military standards and procedures to guide them—under which they are
authorized to make psychological assessments of the character, personality, social interactions, and other behavioral characteristics of detainees, including interrogation subjects, and, based on such assessments, advise authorized personnel performing lawful interrogations and other lawful detainee operations, including intelligence activities and law enforcement.
This describes participation for psychologists in individual interrogations—not general training.
You write:
If a psychologist, consulting indirectly in the training of interrogators, can help them understand how to obtain information more quickly and with less pain inflicted upon an enemy prisoner, is that in the benefit to our nation’s defense and security?
So inflicting some pain is acceptable? And just how much pain? Please explain what guidelines psychologists have for making such determinations? The APA has not provided any.
You write:
I think part of our challenge, too, in today’s discussion of issues like these is that we focus on the present, short-term situation (”enemy combatants,” which is a slippery slope if I’ve ever heard one), and ignore serious wars like WWII where such training and consultations, to defeat Nazism, was essential to the military’s operation.
Is it somehow short-sighted of me to object to the detention and torture of people not charged with any crime because we might need the ability to do similar things to the likes of Nazis later? Your logic sounds racist to me—as if our largely Arab and Muslim detainee population is somehow disposable for the sake of more “serious wars like WWII.”
Let me restate my point about your quotation methods. In your original blog post, you follow the phrase, “the AMA states” with a block quote. Anyone with even a small amount of academic training would assume that the block quote is something that the AMA has said. But instead, it is something that the APA’s Stephen Behnke said.
Further, I used the phrase, “I believe,” in order to advance an opinion about one particular phrase—not to characterize my entire, fact based argument. That is obvious in my writing. It is a fact that AMA policy only allows physicians to “participate in developing interrogation strategies for general training purposes.” You can quibble with me about what kind of training physicians are allowed to offer interrogators. It is clear, however, that physicians are not allowed to participate—directly or indirectly—in individual interrogations. Psychologists are allowed and they do.
The difference in policy is huge. It is has grave consequences. Psychologists are allowed to participate in individual interrogations in a non-healing capacity. “They employ their professional training not in a provider patient relationship, but in relation to a person who is the subject of a lawful governmental inquiry, assessment, investigation, interrogation, adjudication, or other proper action” (DOD Instruction, 6 June 2006). Psychologists have no professional guidelines for how to behave in this setting. They are supposed to oppose torture, but what constitutes torture has been left wide open for interpretation.
Those were the first words from Scott B. Smith, Jr when he reached me on the phone earlier this afternoon.
He wanted to inform me and all who knew her that Linda Dehnad, his wife, died this morning of undetermined causes at age 69. Linda went to Jackson Hospital in Montgomery, AL last night because she was suffering from severe stomach pain. It happened to be her and Scott B’s wedding anniversary. Exteremely frustrated and at her wits end after waiting for more than five hours to have her pain treated and her condition addressed, Linda asked Scott B to take her home around 9:30 PM. Scott B took care of Linda through the night; he fell asleep for a couple of hours at about 4 AM. When he woke up again at about 6 AM, Linda was dead.
Scott B said, “Linda came back to Montgomery with me to work with the people of Lowndes County. Though she was treated badly, she loved Lowndes County. Linda was a warrior. She never stopped trying to work with people. Anything she could do: she was doing it. She was concerned about the children. When she was teaching and was asked to use corporal punishment, Linda said, ‘I am not a slave owner. I am a teacher.’”
In her last years, Linda had ongoing pain from fibromyalgia. Lindaremained a gifted writer, teacher and photographer and a committed activist. She taught and mentored many, many people, including me (Ben).
Linda has requested that she be cremated. There will be a memorial service on Sunday, July 2, at the Unity Baptist Church in White Hall, Lowndes, County, AL. Church service begins at 11:00 a.m. Memorial service begins at 12:30 p.m.
Scott B welcomes phone calls, email and postal mail with condolences or memories of Linda. He would also welcome financial assistance to pay for Linda’s autopsy. You can reach Scott B by phone at 334-262-7547. His mailing address is 2010 McKinley Avenue, Montogmery, AL 36107. His email address is scottbsmith_jr at yahoo dot com.
UPDATE#1 (6/28): I made a mistake on Scott B’s phone number. Area code is 334, not what I had before. The number, above, is now correct.
UPDATE#2 (6/28): There is now a time for the memorial service, added above.
We demand that the local, state and federal government make conditions possible for our immediate return. This includes the following:
The Nagin Administration must make temporary housing such as apartments, hotel rooms, trailers and public housing developments available for us while we rebuild our homes.
The government must put an end to price gouging, stop all evictions and make rents affordable.
Local residents must take the lead in rebuilding our communities and must be hired to do the rebuilding work.
There must be immediate debt relief for debt associated with this disaster.
Quality public education and childcare must be provided for our children.
Quality affordable health care and access to free prescriptions must be provided.
The government must immediately clean up air, water and soil to make it safe and healthy for people to return home.
We demand that the government provide funds for all families to be reunited and that the databases of FEMA, Red Cross and any organizations tracking our people be made public.
We demand accountability for and oversight of the over $50 billion of FEMA funds and the money raised by other organizations, foundations and funds in our name.
We demand representation on all boards that are making decisions about relief and reconstruction. We also demand that those most affected by Hurricane Katrina be part of every stage of the planning process.
We demand that no commercial Mardi Gras takes place until the suffering of the people is lifted.
We are calling for survivors and supporters to participate in a Martin Luther King Jr. Weekend 2006 conference and demonstration to make these demands heard!
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 24, 2005 at 10:27 am
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.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 10, 2005 at 2:05 am
In honor of this year’s Hiroshima Day, I am posting this excerpt from my father’s Political Autobiography.
By now the McCarthy period was upon us. The CIO was split and the traditional antagonisms on the left had taken a turn toward suicidal meanness. Then real disaster hit in the form of the Korean War. I got drafted, got married and had all my previous assumptions challenged. War was indeed hell. I was constantly one step away from a court martial. A full Colonel once told me that in his twenty five years in the Army he had never seen a man who was less of a soldier than I was. I thanked him and told him that I was only a civilian with a uniform on. I found myself in Japan after several small wounds and a massive case of dysentery that was written up in the Army Medical Journal. It was in Hiroshima that I had a profound religious experience. In the Hiroshima Museum there is a wall, all that is left of a building destroyed by the bomb. On that wall is etched the shadow of human beings which is all that is left of them. It was there that I came to understand that the distinction between just and unjust wars was blurred and that human existence was at great risk and that only a spiritual revolution would be sufficient if humanity was going to survive.
When I came home neither I or the left was the same. It was the time of the toad. There were no labor jobs open for me and I was sorting out my own thoughts. I did participate in electoral politics and the peace and civil rights movements but establishing myself in the role of husband and father took priority. I went to Columbia University School of General Studies and after a couple of years realized that I was too restless for academic life. As the fifties came to a close and the first stirrings of a new left emerged I was involved with CORE and the organizing of the Committee For A Sane Nuclear Policy. After several years of mundane earn a living jobs I went to work for the United Furniture Workers. I was Assistant President and functioned as the “staff intellectual” and as director of organization. I headed the research bureau, edited the newspaper and directed field organizing. I was often in the South and trying to organize integrated unions. The President of the Union Morris Pizer was one of the last of a vanishing breed of Jewish working class intellectuals. He was as comfortable in Carnegie Hall as in the union hall. After a couple of years the business union element pushed Pizer into a kind of corner and complained that I spent too much on organizing the South. Meanwhile SANE had grown and I was asked to become Executive Director of the Greater New York Council. Here we had some success. We lobbied for a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and got it. We established Hiroshima Day by organizing the first large peace march in America. It went from Princeton, New Jersey to the United Nations and 100,000 people assembled under the words from Isaiah “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and neither shall they study war any more.”
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 6, 2005 at 9:33 pm
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.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 10, 2005 at 3:21 pm
[I never marked the first anniversary of HungryBlues back in March, but I think that gives me occasional license to rerun posts that are more than a year old. What follows is a slightly shortened version my post from this time (on the Jewish calendar) last year. I think I have some more readers since then, and the post resonates differently—at least for me—with more life lived and more writing and research behind me. Chag samei’ach (happy holiday). –BG
As usual, while I’m here at my mom’s house, I’m sifting through the documents and objects that fill the house. This time I’m looking through some of the documents from Dad’s work on Proportional Representation (PR) in New York City. In the late 1960s, there was a move, ultimately unsuccessful, to bring PR back as the method of electing the New York City Council members. PR was the method used for NYC Council elections from 1938 to 1949. In the early 1970s there was a successful campaign to change the New York City School Board Elections to PR. Both of these efforts were spearheaded by my father, who was Executive Director of the New York Proportional Representation Committee from 1969-1971 and Associate Director of the Special Unit for School Board Elections of the Board of Elections in the City of New York from 1970-1973. The work that he did around the NYC School Board elections was enormous. He used to refer to his 1973 testimony at the New York State Education Department Hearings on Community School Board Elections as his master’s thesis. (For a description of the kind of PR that he worked to institute in NYC go here or here.) Before I can write fully about my dad’s involvement in PR for NYC, there are many documents here in Delmar that I need to read and there’s a lot more that I need to learn about this bit of NYC political history. Still I’m going to post a little from what I’ve been reading while I’m here on my Passover visit.
As I study my father’s political life I’ve been interested in the diversity of his involvements and how they were related in his mind. In his resumé that I posted you can see that in the space of a few years in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he moved from organized labor, to the disarmament movement, to the Civil Rights Movement. Then he was doing state legislative work for the Liberal Party in the mid to late 1960s. An then the PR campaigns in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
One document that I found among the papers relating to the campaign to use PR in the NY City Council elections is a fact sheet, dated 1969 and titled “Proportional Representation (P.R.): A Proposal For Complete Representation In The New York City Council.” In this 6 page pamphlet, which I presume my father wrote, there’s a section called “P.R. And Civil Rights:”
P. R. is of special importance and usefulness for the advancement of civil rights. In the present transition to full and equal citizenship, in fact as well as in law, it means a great deal to the whole community, as well as to the people directly concerned, for Blacks and Puerto Ricans to be able to use their voice in government. This they can usually do, in district elections, only when they stay hived in “ghettoes” like Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. But the dispersal of ghettoes to secure the integration of the community has been a major objective of the civil rights movement.
P.R. will make it possible for a minority candidate to live anywhere and get votes from anywhere in his borough, and if his supporters poll a sufficient minority of the borough’s votes – e.g. something approaching a tenth in a ten member borough – he will be elected. Furthermore, P. R. Gives every voter a preferential vote so that if it cannot help elect his first choice, it can be used at full value for his second choice, or if necessary, his third or fourth. Thus nearly ever Black or Puerto Rican voter can help to elect either a trusted Black or Puerto Rican leader or some other candidate who understands his special problems. The last Council election gave us only 2 Black Councilmen out of 37 and one Puerto Rican.
Of course most voters who do not have the special problems of the ethnic minorities will not vote on ethnic lines, other considerations being of more interest to them, and they can all get representation on whatever basis they think best.
The amounts of support given to candidates of different parties are not likely to be greatly changed – they were not when we had P.R. before – for most voters could elect within their own parties candidates who appealed to them on other grounds as well. But if the parties did not offer candidates with a real appeal to the ethnic minorities, those minorities could elect independent candidates of their own who did appeal to them. (3)
This passage captures three important elements of my father’s political interests. First, he believed deeply in the value of political process. Second, in PR, as well as in the disarmament movement, we see him drawn to political work that has the potential for broad appeal across various ideological lines. Third, and this follows from the first two observations, my father’s political work was always driven by an idealistic yearning for radical social transformation. This was true when he was briefly a member of the Communist Party, USA in the late 40s. But it was also true after he broke with Communism and threw off the mantle of the revolution. For my father, being a Democratic Socialist meant working within the inherently conservative structures of existing political institutions and systems to bring about Utopia.
Another huge topic which I am nowhere near ready to approach is how my father came to Judaism from his life as a radical, secular Jewish Socialist. This journey of his began in earnest in the 1970s. By the time I was growing up here, in Delmar, my dad’s sense of himself as a religious man was fully formed. In the 80s and 90s, he loved quoting from a book by Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution. The book demonstrates that the Exodus from Egypt as recorded in the Torah has been the model for the four modern revolutions, the French, English, American and Russian. Walzer refers to Egypt by its Hebrew name, Mitzrayim, a word which literally means narrow place. I can’t find Dad’s copy of the book in the house right now, so I don’t know if the quotation is accurate, but the way he always said it was that at the end of the book Walzer asks, “so what does all this mean?. . . Wherever you are it’s probably Mitzrayim and you dream of a promised land. . . . and how do you get there? Organize . . .”
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on April 23, 2005 at 6:50 pm
I mentioned in part III of this series that I can date the handwritten drafts of Long Days Short Nights because of a passage about Frankie Newton. I am posting that passage here, though it was not intended for publication. It is an unpolished prose sketch, written in one shot, to get the material down on paper. The passage begins with some garbled and embarrassingly sentimental sentences, which I omit. The first sentence in the omitted passage is “Nine years ago he stopped breathing,” which dates the writings in 1963, since Frankie died in March of 1954.
[Prose sketch from Long Days Short Nights ms., summer or fall, 1963]
by Paul A. Greenberg
My first memory is not music but tennis. I met Frank when I was barely in my teens. I don’t remember whether it was at a friend’s house or at a record shop but he was looking for someone to play tennis with the next day. In my youthful exuberance I exaggerated my prowess and we arranged a date. You may recall that Newton was a big man and athletically well developed. After 5 minutes it was obvious that this was a tennis lesson not a game. Newton: “It’s a good thing you are nice because you sure ain’t a tennis player.” He invited me to the club he was working in. My memory fails but I believe it was in the Fenway in Boston. I do remember Vic Dickenson and Horsecollar Williams and Pete Brown were in the band. And I do remember that it swung. Lord it swung. I brought my clarinet but Frank said no he would not be embarrassed but I might be if my playing was equal to my tennis. He was right. During the next few years I saw Frank every time he was in Boston which was frequently. I learned a lot of music by the osmosis of listening. We established a man-boy relationship that was fatherly without being paternal, brotherly without being filial. We explored sports, books, politics and mostly people. I learned how to listen, doubt, and feel. I learned much about being human and some of the anguish of being negro.
I first became aware of the problem of friendships “across the wall” when we were walking in an area where Frank felt we were not welcome. He asked me to walk half a block behind him. I asked him why the parade? He said if we were jumped I should run like hell. I had thought about his being paranoid then. It was later that I found out there was wisdom in his approach. I still don’t know if I would have run like hell or not.
The summer of my 17th year I arrived in N.Y. with 65 cents, a clarinet which I played at best poorly, and the ill fitting clothes I had on and presented my self to Newton as his new roommate—uninvited. He goddamned me and told me to go home but took me in. Times were tough. Frank’s jobs were infrequent but we shared what he had. I remember some of the dates. Some of the people who played those dates were Sandy Williams, Pete Brown, Art Hodes, [Bill?] Pemberton, Pops Foster, Hank D’Amico, Ike Quebec, Roger Ramirez, Frank Orchard, Bob Casey. The places? Webster Hall, a club in the Bronx, organization dinners in Brooklyn. What was the music like? Moody! Some nights it was terrible, a fight all the way. Others it swung. By now Frank was playing the flugelhorn. It’s a shame we don’t have records. He played it with love and what music. The horn had belonged to Boston friend, Doc Kiley who died in the army and left it to Frank who treasured the friendship and the horn. Several years later a fire destroyed the apartment and in the remains he found a twisted piece of the horn which he made into a piece of jewelry which hung around his neck. What are the real memories? I learned about girls, drinking and fun. I found out what shuffling meant. I learned anti-conformity. Some of the memories are clear. I can’t always distinguish what I saw from what I heard. There were three neighborhood youngsters, brothers. Frank called these little toughs Big Jazz, Little Jazz and No Jazz. He taught the kids in the neighborhood. He was always puzzled by the fee question. He felt playing was a good discipline. On the other hand he said, “How much do you charge a note.” His attitude was that any kid that wanted to learn had a right to a good teacher. He was a great teacher even if the lessons were spasmodic and on a whimsical basis.
(This prose sketch was previously published in “The Search For Frankie Newton,” by Jennifer Wagner, in The Historical Society of Washington County, Virginia Bulletin, Series II, No 39a, 2002.)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on February 23, 2005 at 10:49 pm
In 1994 my father spoke during the week of Martin Luther King Day at Temple Gates of Heaven, a Reform synagogue in Schenectady, NY. In his speech, he commented on Black-Jewish relations in a way that illuminates his own relationships with Black folks.
I don’t intend to raise the question of Black-Jewish relations in part because I think it has been addressed to little avail at length by our community and in part because I think what I will raise speaks to the question in a more meaningful way than the usual discussion that tries to rekindle a better past that I personally don’t think ever existed. . . .Simply put we who are conscious and actively Jewish live within two cultures Jewish and American. Our effort individually and collectively is to find a place of comfort and ease so that we can have both.
Let me say quickly and emphatically right here so that there is no misunderstanding. The Jewish American experience and the Black American experience are not the same nor can we find an easy equation between the two. I am indicating that we share this relationship to America. We want our own identity and we want to participate fully in our country’s bounty and its decision making.
In the same speech, my father recalled the experience that first made him clearly aware of his Jewish identity and first made him conscious of living in two cultures.
I don’t remember whether I was seven or eight but the scene is vivid in the feeling part of my memory. We were living in Taunton, Massachusetts. Until that day (it must have been summer because I wasn’t in school) I was only vaguely aware of being Jewish. I had heard the family stories, I was somewhat embarrassed by my paternal grandmother’s accent and I loved Bible stories especially the Exodus tale.They were starting a baseball game. Sides were being chosen. I stood there expecting to be chosen around fourth or fifth. I was realistic about my ability. I wasn’t the best but I was far from the worst. I made up in determination what I lacked in size. While waiting in pleasant expectation lightning struck. “Do you want Jewboy? I don’t want him on my side.” It took several seconds for me to realize he was talking about me. JEWBOY! JEWBOY! JEWBOY! The word crashed through my being. My insides were raw with pain. “I am an American,” I screamed in a tearful combination of fear and rage. “Jewboy!” ” Jew cry baby!” “Mockie!” Christkiller!” “Scram, Jews can’t play baseball.” I stood my ground and yelled the most meaningful words I could find, “it’s a free country!” I don’t know who threw the fist blow but a general melee ensued. I was badly bruised and I would like to believe several of my tormentors carried home some effects of my frantic and violent surge of energy.
In the 1930s and 1940s antisemitism was still quite overt in the US. My father’s tormentors may not have understood much about the culture he came from, but they stood ready to keep him out of theirs. Dad had a number of stories like this one, lessons in being on the outside. The most developed one, and the most fully fictionalized, is “Lonesome Blues”, the story I posted in September, named after the song [RealPlayer] by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. In “Lonesome Blues,” the high school years of a suicide jazz musician, Mo Bartel, closely mirror my father’s.
The other live factor in my life was basketball. I was going to show them that a Jew could be as tough as anyone. I made the team by determination rather than skill. Years later I asked Tony Nucola, who was our coach, why he put me on his squad and he told me that any one who fought that hard to play was worth having on the team. I don’t know whether he did me a favor or not. I was always playing 9 men. The opposing 5 and our other 4.
This time around, he knows where he stands. His imaginative and intellectual powers are dominated by the activity of assessing boundaries, identifying gatekeepers and allies, and developing entry and exit strategies.
Do you remember my Tuesday to Saturday Blues? That’s what it was all about. Keefe invited me on Tuesday and I had to wait until Saturday. I went and didn’t over and over. I was sure they were putting me on. I would flunk the test and be the laughing stock of the school. They would remember I was Jewish and ask me to leave. One country indivisible with liberty and justice for all that crap and they would call me Jewboy and I would start a fight. I wouldn’t know what to say. I hated popular music.On Saturday I walked up the hill to Keefe’s house like a car with a couple of spark plugs out. By the time I got there I was shaking, inside my stomach felt like mush. Mrs. Riley, pretty, friendly, lovely Mrs. Riley answered the door and told me “the boys are down in the basement.”
Eight boys looked like an army and sounded like two. I was trapped. Eight enemies of my privacy were looking at me, surveying me. I was searching for something to say when Keefe made it easy—easy like scaling Everest easy like dying. “Hi Mo. Guys this is the clary man I told you about Mo Bartel. Mo did you bring any sides?”
“Yeah, two my left and right.” I made it. I was in and still breathing.
Someone shoved a coke in my hand and I was able to ward off questions about how long I was playing or who my teacher is when Keefe shouted above the din “let’s get organized and start spinning some sides first one for Mo, Pops Armstrong’s Lonesome Blues featuring Johnny Dodds on clarinet.”
Love on first sound? Three minutes on another planet. I mean it hit me like where have you been all my painful life. This was what I felt. The truth head on. It cried without the tears showing, it screamed pain without being sent to the nuthouse. It was all about being alone, alone, alone.
He was in and still breathing but in is a state of mind and out was still where he was, and Johnny Dodds was talking about it and
After it finished I got up walked upstairs and out down the hill and with tears in my eyes I ran down the hill…
I am interested in this complicated process of Mo Bartel née Paul Greenberg’s identification with African American culture—among other things, that it occurred, at least in the story, in a room full of white high school boys. They knew about Louis Armstrong’s mid 1920s breakthrough, modernistic refashioning of New Orleans jazz. Mo didn’t, but they seemed to think he would. In their eyes a Jewish clary man had a touch of the exotic and was automatically identified with jazz rather than the classical music he was learning to play. They wanted to entertain him or prove they were in the know.
I am interested in the story’s rough hewn prose style and in how Mo Bartel, and his foil, the narrator, fit into the literature of American Jewish urban experience, which should be familiar to anyone who has read Nat Hentoff or other jazz literature, like Max Kaminsky’s forgotten classic My Life in Jazz. But when looking at this story as a text about my father, there is something else to know. The drafts of it, along with the other sketches and segments for the novel Long Days Short Nights it was to be part of, are handwritten on the backs of copies of the flier at right (click on image to enlarge).
Presumably Dad was the organizer of the event: William Douthard (aka Meatball) was his very close friend from when he was working for the SCLC in Birmingham, Martin Luther King was his boss, and James Farmer was a close associate, whom he revered. I don’t know how well Dad knew Constance Baker Motley, but they were both part the Civil Rights Movement community in New York. My family lived in Co-op Village and Dad was highly active in left organizations on the Lower East Side. So the flier has my father written all over it in more ways than one.
During some of his most direct involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, his inner life was preoccupied elsewhere. He didn’t treat the political fliers as documents to save for posterity, but as surfaces on which to write and fictionalize his life—as if his committed activism was only the backdrop for a personal journey. Of course the two things were not really separable. In fact, the suicides in “Lonesome Blues” may well be precisely what underlies my father’s participation in the Southern Freedom Movement. From “Lonesome Blues,” first paragraph:
They will say he was only 37 years old no one knew he was sick that he left a wife and two children and 300 records behind. They will find out he was broke and remember he was the first whiteman to tour with Prince Kingsley.
In the summer and fall of 1963 Paul Greenberg was thirty-five years old and a one time aspiring jazz clarinetist; he had a wife and two daughters, and kept a sizable collection of records, a large portion of which were jazz. I said suicides, in the plural, because there are really two. There’s Mo Bartel who seems to have taken his own life in a Chicago hotel room, and there’s the journalist-narrator, whose method of narrative transmission spells a kind of professional suicide, a sacrifice of his means of publication in exchange for the hope that his revelation of Mo Bartel’s inner life will see the light of day.
I don’t want the assignment. I wrote the Mo Bartel story 10 years ago and you didn’t print it. Enclosed is the carbon copy of the story filed with you then. Print it and buy all of his records with my check otherwise forget it. I won’t interview his wife or any of the guys he played with. Fire me—get a new Jazz Critic for our lousy magazine but I won’t do that kind of story.
The narrator dies a professional death so that the biographical Mo Bartel, whose music is already immortal, can have life after death.
At my father’s funeral, my girlfriend, now the woman I’m married to, said it’s a good thing he couldn’t carry a tune: otherwise he wouldn’t have done all this important political work. Lack of musical talent had much to do with it, but for him jazz was “a way of walking, talking. / Had it in his soul.” His story in politics was the story of a lonely, Jewish high school kid in Brighton, Mass. who was catapulted by Johnny Dodds’ clarinet into Frankie Newton’s apartment in Union Square and into the Communist Party, the unions, SANE, and the Civil Rights Movement. The jazz life was a fading, youthful dream, and Dad was at a painful threshold, a moment just prior to when loss translates the past into nostalgia.
The final thing to note here is that I can date the handwritten draft material for Long Days Short Nights with assurance only because there is an extended passage about Frankie Newton that locates the manuscript in time. That bit of prose will make up part IV of this series.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on February 23, 2005 at 3:37 pm
Not long after my father died in 1997, I started collecting Frankie Newton’s recordings myself. There’s the core group of twenty some songs that were recorded under Frankie’s name, with bands that he led. But then there’s another fifty or so recordings with other bandleaders and in loose, pickup bands. As with any musical obsession of mine, I devoured liner notes and quickly formed interests in the other musicians on the recordings and what else they recorded and with whom, outside of the original Newton sides.
Through Newton, I came to know a fantastic constellation of jazz stylists who all came through the swing era, the era of big bands, and produced an exciting range of small group recordings that at various times:
• take popular forms to great heights of refinement and virtuosity — e.g., Benny Goodman (cl.), Charlie Christian (g.) and Lionel Hampton’s (vibe) 1939 “Stardust”; Edmund Hall (cl.) and Sidney (trp.) and Wilbur (trmb.) De Paris’ 1944 turbo charged “I’ve Found A New Baby”
• explore directions outside conventional swing formats — e.g., Rex Stewart (crn.), Django Reinhart (g.), Barney Brigard (cl.) and Billy Taylor’s (b.) breathtaking and inspired 1939 performance of “I Know That You Know”; Pee Wee Russell (cl.), Zutty Singleton (d.) and Joe Sullivan’s (p.) wild, dare I say primal, 1941 trio version of “Sing, Sing, Sing,” known as “Deuces Wild”
• give direct and powerful expression to a blues or standard — e.g., Sidney Bechet’s bowl you over 1939 soprano sax rendition of “Summertime,” with Teddy Bunn (g.), Meade Luxe Lewis (p.), Johnny Williams (b.), Sid Catlett (d.); Jelly Roll Morton’s 1939 vocal performance on “Buddy Boldon’s Blues” (doesn’t really count as small group, since the band is just Morton accompanying himself on piano)
With each new find, and with each jazz reference book, I came back to the same frustration that there is terribly little biographical information about Frankie Newton. It was frequently the case that I knew more about him from my conversations with my father than I could find in published materials. I desperately wanted to know more.
At some point in 1999 I remembered how in 1991 my father had relished reading to me from a set of liner notes by an expert who did, in fact, appreciate Frankie’s greatness. The record was God Is In The House, a collection of live after hours performances by Art Tatum. In the early 1940s, a Columbia University student named Jerry Newman, had portable disc recording equipment that he took around to private jam sessions. He captured priceless moments of jazz improvisation from a period when records were only three to four minute studio recordings, generally limited in their structure and scope. The recordings Newman collected are rare, often arresting documents of how the music was played in front of live audiences. God Is In The House captures Tatum at five venues in 1940 and 1941. Some of the performances are just him on solo piano, some include other musicians. The last two tracks, “Lady Be Good” and “Sweet Georgia Brown,” are with Frankie Newton and Ebenezer Paul (bass) at Clark Monroe’s Uptown House. The writer of the notes is Dan Morgenstern:
The two final performances . . . are sensational. Newton is up to playing with Tatum—his ear is sure enough not to be thrown by the unorthodox backing, especially on “Sweet Georgia Brown.” On “Lady Be Good,” Newton shows us where Sweets Edison comes from. A master of mutes (including the almost whispery one he plays here), he was one of the three great post-Armstrong trumpeters, along with Roy Eldridge and Lips Page. It’s good to have these indications of his worth; he was under-recorded throughout his career.
The complexities of Tatum’s accompaniments and solos are such that it is impossible to take these two performances in at even several hearings. You’ll find yourself listening first to Art, then to Frank, then to both, again and again. “Sweet Georgia Brown,” I humbly submit, is one of the most remarkable pieces of spontaneously improvised jazz music ever captured by a recording device.
When we did our Frankie Newton session in 1991, Dad read out the whole two paragraphs, giving that last sentence particular emphasis, as if it were vindication of all that he believed in. He explained that Morgenstern is a famous jazz critic, a professor at a university, maybe Princeton.
I wondered if Dan Morgenstern could help me find out more about Frankie Newton. A little googling revealed that Morgenstern is the director of the Institute of Jazz Studies, housed not at Princeton but at Rutgers. I sent him a letter on September 7, 1999. More than a month went by. I’d just about given up all hope of receiving a reply when in mid-October an envelope arrived in the mail with “Institute of Jazz Studies” in the return address. A letter from Morgenstern! It began:
Dear Benjamin Greenberg,
I was both delighted and saddened to receive your letter. Delighted because for more years than i can remember I’d hoped in some way to find a man I could recall only as “Paul.” We met somewhere in Greenwich Village–in a jazz joint, a bar, at someone’s house party–and had an intense, wonderful conversation about Frankie Newton during which I learned some of the things your letter conveys about your father. (Our brief encounter took place so long ago that I had not yet begun to write professionally about jazz–I was just “hanging out” and absorbing all kinds of stuff–so your father would not have remembered when he later read my liner notes, but I’m so very pleased that he did so, and seems to have approved.)
. . . let me just note that I never knew Frankie–by the time I came to the U.S., in late April of 1947, he was already elusive, and it wasn’t until about a year later that I really became aware of his true stature in the jazz trumpet pantheon–I knew only a few records. But one of those, “The Blues My Baby Gave To Me,” had made its mark, so when I met and became friends with Nat Lorber, whom everyone called “Face,” who played the trumpet and whose three heroes (after Louis, of course) were Hot Lips Page, Roy Eldridge and Frankie, I was ready to learn. I saw Frankie just once–not playing, but having a bite to eat in a little village restaurant and bar called Calypso-plus-something I can’t recall–but was too timid (not quite 20 yet) to approach him. That was around 1950 . . . and then, in 1954, Frankie died, just on the verge of trying a comeback. But Nat spoke vividly of him, and then that moment with your father, and other recollections by musicians, almost make me feel as if I somehow knew him.
I was beginning to feel I somehow knew him, too. And getting closer to Frankie Newton was also getting closer to my father.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on February 22, 2005 at 2:30 am
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
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 
BLOG POSTS
COMMENTS
PODCASTS