Last weekend, on February 6, Catherine Walker and I were emailing back and forth about our plans to interview people familiar with the unsolved civil rights murder of her father Clifton Walker 46 years ago. Around mid-afternoon we had a breakthrough; Catherine wrote to tell me about her conversation with the son of a possible eyewitness to the planning of the murder:
I explained to him how important today is: “DADDY’S birthday” How I need his Dad’s # to speak with him to move forward with the Justice quest. He understood.
For months, Catherine Walker and I have wanted to speak with a black man who reportedly witnessed the planning of the murder at Nettles Truck Stop, about 6 miles north of Woodville, MS. The FBI documents say the man
left the vicinity of Woodville, Mississippi, immediately after the murder of Walker … he [said he] knew what would happen if he continued to hang around.
Some Woodville residents who know the possible eyewitness have told me they saw him about four years ago and that he told them he was at the truck stop on the night of the murder, February 28, 1964, and the planning of the murder was what he saw there.
I was pretty sure I’d located the possible eyewitness, and I was in Louisiana, so Catherine and I were making plans to go see him ourselves. Over the last year, both Catherine and I have been in touch with our subject’s son, who lives in Baton Rouge, LA. The son told us that his family is actually kin to the Walkers and that he knows some of Catherine’s cousins well. He has information about the murder that he’s heard from extended family currently living in Louisiana who were in Woodville in 1964. The son has been eager to help. He’s shared the information with us, but he hasn’t felt comfortable arranging a meeting with his father. We originally thought he was trying to protect his father, but he eventually revealed to Catherine that he and his father do not get along.
We wanted the son to tell us his father’s general location or phone number so I could verify that my information was correct. Finally, on Clifton Walker’s 83rd birthday, the son came through, and his information matched mine.
The man we were looking for was at church when we got to his place. His wife and a slew of grandkids were all hanging out in a shotgun shack in a working class black neighborhood outside of New Orleans.
We sat in Catherine’s car outside the house and waited.
A few weeks after his 37th birthday, on February 28, 1964, Clifton Walker was ambushed on the deserted, unpaved Poor House Road, outside Woodville, MS. He was on his way home from the 3-11 pm shift at the International Paper plant in Natchez, MS. Gunmen shot up his car, blew out all the windows, and shot Clifton Walker at close range, multiple times in the head. No arrests were ever made. Walker’s wife Ruby died in 1992 not knowing what really happened. Clifton and Ruby’s five children are still in the dark about the murder.
For the two years I’ve known Catherine, we’ve been gaining on the case, but the progress is slow. We have a collection of federal and state documents, but we haven’t obtained any new documents for over a year. Many of the people mentioned in the documents are dead. Few of them who are still living have been willing to talk. People with knowledge of the case are dying off.
But on Sunday we were feeling hopeful. Catherine made a good connection with the wife of the possible eyewitness when we went up to the house and found out he was at church. Afterwards, while we sat in the car waiting the man to return, Catherine said:
I’m glad he’s in church. That means he’s gonna come back with the spirit in him and he’s gonna be really nice to us. That’s what he’s gonna do. He’s gonna talk to us.
Even if he doesn’t, if he was afraid, he can just tell us what he heard, what he knows that made everyone else think he knew too much. That would help.
Our man came back from church in the late afternoon and we talked with him at length. Though he admitted knowing the people in Woodville that I talked to, he denied having any first hand knowledge of the murder.
But he had some other information we did not expect him to have. He recalled an encounter with the FBI in 1964.
The FBIs came up to my house. They had his picture and all that where he got shot. They had him naked, laying out on the table.
According to him, the photo showed that Walker was shot on his right side—twice in the shoulder, twice in thigh and twice in the lower leg. He also said that the right side of Walker’s face was shot off “on an angle,” as if he was leaning over to the right when he was taking it in the face.
The information our interviewee recalled from the FBI’s photo comports with first- and second-hand accounts of numerous bullet holes in at least one side of Walker’s car. It also potentially corroborates what Catherine’s mother Ruby told her—that she, Ruby, was told by FBI agents in 1964 that they found empty shotgun shells all along the banks of the road where Walker was shot. Our new information about the wounds on just the right side of Walker’s body could also help to establish with more certainty the sequence of events that occurred out on Poor House Road.
For three years we’ve had a 1964 Mississippi Highway and Safety Patrol (MHSP) report that described the wounds to Walker’s head but made no indication of wounds to other parts of the body. In the report, highway patrolmen recount photographing Walker’s body at the funeral home at about 7:30 pm on February 29, before the pathologist had arrived to do the autopsy. The photo that the FBI reportedly showed our interview subject may have been one of the MHSP photos or it may have been from the autopsy which was performed later the same night. If this eyewitness report concerning the photo is correct, it raises questions about why such crucial details would have been left out of the MHSP report.
If there was a crowd of men firing on Walker’s car from the banks of Poor House Road road, that substantially increases the likelihood that there are still living perpetrators. And for each person directly involved, there are possible others with knowledge of the perpetrator’s actions.
If the FBI had the photo taken either by the MHSP or the coroner, then there were likely multiple copies and there is a better chance that the photo still exists somewhere. “I would like to even have those pictures,” Catherine said.
I first heard Mark Mulcahy's music three and a half years ago, at a live performance in Somerville, MA. I was blown away by the songs and by his performances of them and have been a huge fan ever since. A couple of months after the show I found an mp3 of one of the songs that I'd heard and I just had to blog it. I wrote:
A ways into the set Mulcahy took his hands off his guitar and he and the bass player and drummer applied their voices, just their voices, to this song. You could hear the sounds from the bar, separated from the lounge by a wall and a hallway. But the performance space was silent while the three men sang this. The sounds of the bar and pretty much everything else in Somerville dropped into the background.
A few days later Mark's management contacted me and asked me to take down the mp3, so I did.
The song is a dialog between two people who've been through something that far too many of this generation's young couples have been through.
A very recent performance of the song is now on YouTube, so I'm posting it for you all again. Great to see Mark is back on stage; I hope he comes through Boston soon.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on January 15, 2010 at 5:16 pm
Since I first posted about The Civil Rights Cold Case Project, we’ve added the trailer for the documentary mini-series that we are currently developing in partnership with WNET.org and Paperny Films. I’m on there with the Clifton Walker Case a few times, starting at around 00:45.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 19, 2009 at 8:45 pm
On the night of Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress – a rarity for any sitting president – we dragged an old tv into the waiting room to show the assembled patients and staff Obama’s speech and get their reactions. Here Robert Taylor and Sheon Slaughter, both uninsured, offered their thoughts. Highland Hospital volunteer Lucy Ogbu and Certified Nurse Assistant Amy Johnson also discuss the implications of the speech.
Highland Hospital is in Oakland, CA. For more information—and for many more video clips from the hospital—check out The Waiting Room.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on October 20, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Many thanks to Pam Spaulding for capturing John Lewis’ speech at Equality Alabama’s gala a couple of weekends ago. John Lewis is an American hero and a powerful speaker; it is fantastic to hear him speaking so strongly on this issue and declaring himself an ally to the GLBT community.
John Lewis took batons to the head, was beaten to unconsciousness multiple times for equality — courage and moral conviction that [Bishop Harry] Jackson and his fellow charlatans of bigotry are bereft of.
Rep. Lewis spoke eloquently about the simplicity of the government staying out of the lives of gay and lesbian couples — there is no need to “save” marriage from two people who simply want to love one another and be legally affirmed in the same way that heterosexual couples are when they marry.
But perhaps the most powerful message was to those in the LGBT community who are waiting for equality to come to them — Lewis charged us to seize the moment, do not accept being told to wait your turn, to demand your rights through your representative, and most of all take personal responsibility — the message we all heard was loud and clear.
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.
This video is from a film by my friend Pete Nicks, who is the guy with the camera in my banner image, above. The film, The Waiting Room, is a timely documentary about our health care system, as seen at The Alameda County Medical Center in Oakland, CA.
THE WAITING ROOM will follow three people waiting in their own way: Wright Lassiter, the hospital’s CEO, who is struggling to run an under-funded public hospital while waiting for the health care system to change, Lydia Vasquez, a young uninsured woman waiting for the birth of her first child, and Kevin Washington, a young uninsured man who has slipped through the cracks, waiting for a miracle after being diagnosed with a terminal illness. These narratives will be punctuated by content interstitials culled from the social media space, both user-generated and produced: videos submitted online, blog posts cinematically dramatized, conversations between patients and policy makers in Washington, DC, photos and stories from the front lines of the hospital waiting room.
It’s not just a film; it’s a project. Read the rest to find out more about it.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 24, 2009 at 2:31 am
Southern African American community resists corporate organized rightwing protestors. Above the shouts the community tells its story and why they need health care for all to overcome historic health disparities.
(h/t Jared Storey)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 13, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Though I did not know his name until today, Heinz Edelman has been one of my artistic heroes for decades. He was the illustrator and designer who made the visual landscape of the animated Beatles film Yellow Submarine. Heinz Edelman has died at age 75.
The movie’s mod-psychedelic look, which typifies the era’s spirited graphic art, emerged around the same time as the related psychedelic work of Terry Gilliam, Alan Aldridge and Victor Moscoso, but it has its own whimsical aesthetic. The bulbous Blue Meanies, which personify an evil mood as actual villains, pursue the innocent, well-coifed cartoon Beatles across an ever-shifting milieu of mysterious seas and holes that can be magically picked up and moved. The yellow submarine itself stops in an ocean of pulsating watches, representing time, to light a cigar for a friendly sea monster.
Notably, the designs prefigured contemporary music videos, especially in their use of dancing typography. Letters spelling out the lyrics “Love is all you need” morph into a strobing neon wallpaper pattern.
“He became famous because of his work on ‘Yellow Submarine,’ ” said the graphic designer Milton Glaser, a friend. “But that celebrity actually obscured his real talent and imagination.”
A highly successful advertising and editorial illustrator in Germany, England and the Netherlands, Mr. Edelmann was known for combining Impressionist and Expressionist sensibilities leavened with wit, humor and irony. He developed a distinct graphic style that influenced many artists in Europe and the United States. He was given a Masters Series exhibition at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2005.
In the 1960s he was experimenting with a stylized, soothingly fluid, neo-Art Nouveau manner. That caught the eye of Al Brodax, producer of a successful animated Beatles television cartoon series for children. He chose Mr. Edelmann to be the chief designer of his first feature-length animated film, “Yellow Submarine,” built around a 1966 song of the same name, credited to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, with lead vocals by Ringo Starr.
It was not easy to get initial approval for “Yellow Submarine.” The Beatles were unenthusiastic about Mr. Brodax’s more conventional-looking cartoon series (not done by Mr. Edelmann), Newsweek reported in 1968; their manager, Brian Epstein, was a stumbling block as well.
The tide turned, Newsweek said, during a stroll through the Tate Gallery in London, where Mr. Brodax and Mr. Epstein happened upon J. M. W. Turner’s “Peace — Burial at Sea” and marveled at that painting’s intense colors.
“Wouldn’t it be great if we could get those colors to move?” Mr. Brodax asked.
Mr. Epstein replied, “We would need great art.”
Mr. Edelmann was the perfect artist, Mr. Epstein finally agreed, and “Yellow Submarine” had some of the Turner’s shimmering quality.
It was a career-defining work, “designed, for the most part beautifully,” Renata Adler wrote in The New York Times in 1968, “in styles ranging through Steinberg, Arshile Gorky, Bob Godfrey (of the short film ‘The Do It Yourself Cartoon Kit’), the Sgt. Pepper album cover, and — mainly, really — the spirit and conventions of the Sunday comic strip.”
Despite the huge influence of “Yellow Submarine” on the culture of the time, Mr. Edelmann admitted that he could never quite connect with the 1960s aesthetic. Once the film was complete, he altered his approach to avoid being pigeonholed as a psychedelic artist, becoming considerably less ethereal and decorative and turning to what was on the surface his darker side, though it was never really morose but rather ironic.
I am grateful to Mr. Edelman for his part in the creation of this imaginative world that has long been one of my favorite places to visit. Thank you, Heinz Edelman. Rest in peace.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 26, 2009 at 3:35 am
investigate whether the Valley Club violated federal civil rights laws when it kicked out a group of children from the Creative Steps Day Camp and canceled the camp’s contract.
“When the minority children got in the pool all of the Caucasian children immediately exited the pool,” Horace Gibson, parent of a day camp child, wrote in an email. “The pool attendants came and told the black children that they did not allow minorities in the club and needed the children to leave immediately.”
The next day the club told the camp director that the camp’s membership was being suspended and their money would be refunded.
One of the most astounding of many astounding moments in this story was the public statement from John Duesler, president of the Valley Swim Club, which said:
“There was concern that a lot of kids would change the complexion … and the atmosphere of the club.”
As the ColorOfChange.org letter to Holder notes, canceling the Creative Steps Day Camp’s contract
after learning that the children at the camp were largely African-American and Latino [is] a possible violation of section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
[T]he staff at Girard College, a private Philadelphia boarding school for children who live in low-income and single parent homes, stepped in and offered their pool.
“We had to help,” said Girard College director of Admissions Tamara Leclair. “Every child deserves an incredible summer camp experience.”
The school already serves 500 campers of its own, but felt they could squeeze in 65 more – especially since the pool is vacant on the day the Creative Steps had originally planned to swim at Valley Swim Club.
“I’m so excited,” camp director Alethea Wright exclaimed. There are still a few logistical nuisances — like insurance — the organizations have to work out, but it seems the campers will not stay dry for long.
NBC Philadelphia also reports that US Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA) will investigate the discrimination claim.
“The allegations against the swim club as they are reported are extremely disturbing,” Specter said in a statement. “I am reaching out to the parties involved to ascertain the facts. Racial discrimination has no place in America today.”
Oh, lastly, kudos to the owners of Gumdrops & Sprinkles in Wayne, PA who gave the Creative Steps kids a free day of candy and ice cream making while they are waiting for all the the details with Girard College to be worked out. If you want to show Gumdrops & Sprinkles some love for showing the Creative Steps kids some love, click on the store photo and leave Gumdrops & Sprinkles a comment on their Yelp page.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 9, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Three men have now been charged with assault in an attack on Vancouver Island that appears to have been racially motivated.
The accused, aged 19 to 25, were arrested after Jay Phillips, 38, was punched and kicked in the parking lot of a Courtenay fast-food restaurant on Friday. The men have been released and are scheduled to appear in court at the end of August….
RCMP Const. Tammy Douglas said there are indications the attack was racially motivated and the Mounties have asked their hate crime team to look into it.
It is, however, being treated as an isolated incident and will not be labelled a hate crime until all the evidence is in.
“We don’t believe these people are white supremacists or have those sorts of affiliations,” RCMP Insp. Tom Gray told reporters on Tuesday.
The answer to Kulpreet is more people have feelings of racist hate than we’d like to believe. Jay Phillips says the attack on him was not an isolated incident.
In an interview on Tuesday, Phillips told CBC News the attack was not an isolated incident.
He said that he and other minorities in this town are often yelled at and pushed around — and they’re tired of it.
We have yet to face and address our past and our past lives strongly in the present.
People using a particular racial epithet are “calling me a slave,” Phillips said.
“I’m nobody’s slave. That’s a hate crime to me and I want these guys prosecuted to the maximum.”
The men’s intent was obvious, Phillips said. Beside the racial epithets, they threatened him and his family with violence.
“Get the hell out of town, we’re going to come back and lynch you,” Phillips recalled the men screaming. “I remember the word ‘lynch’ quite a bit — ‘we’re going to lynch you and your whole family.’”
It is fortunate that Phillips was able to defend himself. I admire his courage and his coming forward to speak publicly about the incident in solidarity with other racial minorities in his community.
Phillips suffered cuts and bruised ribs when the trio got him to the ground.
But his background in mixed martial arts made him more than a match for his attackers.
Phillips said he hoped news of the attack would benefit others in the community.
“I don’t want this to happen to anybody — anybody,” Phillips said.
“There’s a lot of native people here, a lot of Asian people here. Nobody should have to go through this.”
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on July 8, 2009 at 3:11 am
Sometimes I think I´m gonna lose my mind
But it don´t look like I ever do
I loved so many people everywhere I went
Some too much, others not enough
I don´t know, I may go down or up or anywhere
But I feel like this scribbling will stay
Maybe if I hadn’t seen so much hard feelings
I might not could have felt other people´s
So when you think of me, if and when you do,
Just say, well, another man’s done gone
Just say, well, another man´s done gone
This clip is from the fabulous documentary, Man in the Sand, about the making of Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue record. Mermaid Avenue is the first in what has become a small series of recordings by artists tapped by Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora to set unrecorded Guthrie lyrics to music. After his death, it was discovered that Woody had left behind 1000 some lyrics that had never been recorded as songs with music.
I watched Man in the Sand last night on Netflix. I’ve loved Mermaid Avenue since it came out in 1998 but did not realize this documentary about the making of the record has been around nearly as long. It’s really, really good. It’s a like a diamond in the rough. So many sparkling, unpretentious moments of beauty. (Though it also grapples with the pretentiousness of Guthrie and of the artists who participated in the Mermaid Avenue recordings.)
The film worked on me emotionally on so many levels. The movie begins with Billie Bragg’s quest for Woody’s America, in an attempt to understand Woody well enough to approach the daunting responsibility of giving musical life to his unrecorded lyrics. These scenes and others throughout the film are deeply evocative of the times my father lived through and the left politics that shaped my family’s experience and world view.
Then there are all the approaches to Woody.
Bragg’s approach to Woody’s America, which I already mentioned.
Woody’s daughter Nora’s approach to her father—how she has used her work as her father’s archivist and as the midwife to the musical rebirthing of his songs to come to know him better and in ways that were not possible for her during his short lifetime; he was ill with Huntington’s disease most of the time she knew him and he died when she was 17. Inter-cut with scenes of Bragg and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and others recording Woody’s lyrics are scenes of Nora speaking intimately, often fighting back her tears, about her family life, both her childhood memories of it and what she has come to understand later as a historian.
Arlo Guthrie appears in just one brief sequence—to recount how he learned that This Land Is Your Land was by his father one day when it was taught to him at school. He recalls running home in tears because the other kids knew his own father’s song better than he did. Woody was already ill and not playing much music. But Woody, with physical difficulty, showed Arlo the chords and helped him learn to play it. So much of Woody’s tragic complexity is in this brief story, which Arlo caps with a slightly coy rendition of one of the now famously long suppressed verses of the song.
Another tragedy that the film is now echo for is the untimely death of Wilco’s Jay Bennett, who died very unexpectedly this past May at age 45. While there are many other evocative scenes from the film that I wish I could have found on YouTube, this one is lovely, with Tweedy’s vocal more spare and plaintive than on the Mermaid Avenue version, accompanied just by Bennett, whose lovely piano playing is out of frame until the camera tracks around to the position where you can see the both of them in frame.
In many of the scenes with Billy Bragg and Jeff Tweedy and the others from Wilco and with Natalie Merchant and Corey Harris, it looked to me like they, as well as others involved in the project, kept getting these jolts, as if they are repeatedly startled by beauty they are finding in Woody’s poetry and in the music it has inspired in them.
The film coveys the often painful contradictions among noble human values, the exultations of human creativity and the flawed humanity of the people who fight for equality and freedom and try to make enduring, beautiful things. It shows these many dimensions in Woody and in the people who came together to make more of his songs known and make him more knowable to us as an artist, as a social conscience and as a man.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 24, 2009 at 2:35 pm
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
BLOG POSTS
COMMENTS
PODCASTS