November 18, 2008

The nation will pause and reflect on the massive “Revolutionary Kool Aid Suicide” of almost a 1000 Americans in their Jonestown refuge in Guyana and the assassination of Congressman Leo Ryan, thirty years ago, on November 18, 1978. This could be my final ten year acknowledgment of the Peoples Temple and Reverend Jim Jones.

CNN was going to tell this story again last night at 9:00 PM. But the Campbell lead-up at 8:00 p.m. was so boring—re-hashing the all day story of Governor Palin and the Republican Governor’s Conference in Miami—that I fell asleep. When I woke up, it was David Letterman time, 11:30, time to enjoy his political jokes. When I turned back to CNN, the news network was showing the horror of the stacked up bodies in a repeat of their 9:00 P.M. special.

But my interest in the Peoples Temple story began before Guyana—in Indianapolis, Indiana—where my connection to the story was made.

In 1998, after watching a version on History Channel, I put it all together in my head. But I better hurry and put my own connection to the story in writing. In 1998, actors connected to me in this story who could have confirmed what I know were living—but they are now gone or about gone. That’s the problem when, as a young adult, you hang with people 15-30 years older than you.

When I visited my grandchildren for my birthday, they announced that I am 74 years old. They are such big liars. I exist in a fantasy of denial. (”Grandpaw—I know how old you are” (who asked them?) “74!!”)

Sometime in 1958-1959 in Indianapolis, Indiana

Damn! She was fine. Brown skin. Not a high yaller—that I felt tended to be uppity in relation to me with my brown skin. Breasts. A behind. And she was aggressive—coming on to me. She came into the ice cream parlor where I was working part-time. I forget WHY I was working there part time. I got her phone number. But it must have been the short period of time between Indiana University Law School and working at the Indiana State Farm—a correctional facility.

But the opportunity to get it on with this fine woman—either for a one night stand or a relationship—was a diversion from my politics of the moment—and I did not call her.

Yet, in about a week, I saw here again in a drug store near my home—and she came on again—showing disappointment that I did not call her. (As I look at it now, this was strange—because the ice cream parlor was way in East Indianapolis—not near my home neighborhood).

She said I could make up not calling her by picking her up and taking her to church—to a Peoples Temple the coming Sunday. That relieved the sexual tension—because I could then play MY game of seduction by doing a neutral thing—where I would be in control.

Peoples Temple? I had no idea. She said it was integrated. So is the Unitarian church I attended. But I was suspicious when she told me the address—located in the Black Ghetto near downtown—and not in an upper class white suburb as was the Unitarian Church.

My new lady friend—I suspected was not college educated. Therefore, I began to imagine that Peoples Temple was like a Father Divine Church that I had read about—and that sparked my curiosity to see what was going on. While growing up as a child in the AME faith—in Terre Haute, Indiana—there was a piano—but no organ. There was no gospel music. Only Wesleyan hymns. No emotionalism—which was frowned upon. (The women who would forget where they were and get happy, would be rushed by church nurses in white uniforms down into the basement where they could shout and cool down before being allowed to come back up and join the congregation).

But back as a child while growing up in Terre Haute, Indiana, as I walked by Pentecostal churches, people seemed to be having a good time—the falling out—the jumping up and down, the tambourines. Visiting a service with a childhood friend, I enjoyed the testifying and the praising the Lord.

But I had always moved on because all that emotionalism was below my class as was taught in my Black Bourgeoisie upbringing as an AME.

So, I was eager to come by and pick up my new lady friend for church with two motivations—to execute my Sex game under my control and to observe an experience which must be like a Father Divine experience.

The Experience

I came by the house where my new friend lived with her mother and sisters. Only she in the family was going to Peoples Temple. Their house was also in the hood. A typical working class Black family. I was already beginning to lower my expectations of my new friend—because you can be poor—but have a vision of rising—intellectually—not just financially—like having family members striving to go to college if you can’t. Yet that did not turn me off like my mother would have liked it to; instead, I was more comfortable that I would not be put down and would be in charge.

Then we arrived at the church building—which was not like a traditional church—but a big warehouse—with a big neon sign that showed it was a church. There must have been more than a thousand people. Looking back now, having had experiences being in big assemblies, I think it could have been 2000 people there—and though my friend and I were not late, we had to sit near the back. Again, not like a traditional church: everyone was sitting on folding chairs. Not pews.

And noise. Not like in a Methodist church or Unitarian church—where in a back row, you can hear a pin drop. My friend did not have to tell me that the young white athletic man on the stage was Reverend Jim Jones. Speakers were set up all over the place; you could hear what he was saying over the noise, the cymbals, the organ and shouts. Everyone was in an uproar, responding to what he was saying.

If you succeeded in shutting your ears to all this noise, to what he was saying—what he said sounded pretty good, until he got to the monsters and the retribution and end of times forecast in the Book of Revelation. This was 1959-60, so the Gantry movie had not yet come out—but just like the Gantry movie—only magnified. Everything was staged—the mass healings and the frenzied exultations—Black and white—about equal.

But it came to me. This guy is a stone hustler. I realized that, somehow, I had been targeted as a mark to be brought to this place to be enrolled in this church because of its enthusiastic integration of Black and white that was not bound to an upper middle class mentality. After the service, there was a great banquet of food and fellowship with the people which was enjoyable, but something was not right. Everyone seemed brainwashed into an alternate reality, and it felt addictive to hang there and get involved there with my new lady friend.

The young lady was fine. But after I took her home—I never called her back. Because I felt I had been a target. I felt as if she knew who I was before she met me—as if this guy Jim Jones had ordered it. I don’t want to read into the story what I now know in comparison to what I knew then. But as I recall, I just did not like or trust this Jim Jones—using so-called “integration” to be a white Father Divine. And Black people eating it up.

1960 Indiana Human Rights Commission

When I was selected to be the chairman of the Indianapolis NAACP Political Action Committee in 1958, instead of taking care of my law school classes, I was working demonstrations, picketing and pressing for an Indiana Human Rights Bill on public accommodations and employment. My partners were Willard B. Ransom, general counsel to Madam C. J. Walker beauty industries, and my mentor, Attorney John Preston War, counsel for the Indianapolis NAACP and legal director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union. State Senator Nelson Grills and State Representative Andrew Jacobs were co-sponsors of the bill. It passed.

Indianapolis, like the rest of the State of Indiana in 1959—was strictly segregated. Poor whites lived in Southern Indianapolis—near the manufacturing centers. Blacks lived in Northern Indianapolis, from central Indianapolis—the Ghetto—near Indiana Avenue, extending north to the suburbs where upper middle class whites lived. Middle class Blacks were slowly moving into these areas near Butler University—the home school of the Disciples of Christ. (I learned in 1998 that the Disciples of Christ had sponsored Jim Jone’s Peoples Temple—but later kicked him out—which was the reason he moved to California before moving to Guyanna.)

But after our human rights bill passed, Ransom, Ward and myself lost control or influence as to how the Indiana Human Rights Law would be structured and implemented. My alienation with Indiana then began to develop when the moderates chose Reverend Jim Jones to be a member of the Indiana Human Rights Commission. Even my friends did not understand why I was so adamantly against this so-called progressive integrationist, Jim Jones. He was one of the factors, along with my friends supporting him, for my deciding to come to Florida and the FAMU Law School in order to be part of the Southern Movement bursting in 1960.

So, in 1978, when the news of the Jonestown suicide was told to the world, and they noted that this Reverend Jim Jones, from Indianapolis, was the cult leader directing the so-called mass “revolutionary suicide” I was not surprised.

As if I had a premonition.

My friend John Due has sent to me his remembrance of Peoples Temple and Reverend Jim Jones as a guest post for Hungry Blues. John is now a retired civil rights-community organizer lawyer living in Gadsden County, FL. John and I met on the internet and have a mutual interest in the movement in Mississippi—where he worked during the 1964 Freedom Summer and where I currently investigate racial violence from that time. But before Due moved to Florida in 1960, he was an activist in Indiana. He sent this post to express how he felt how he was a mark for Peoples Temple and Reverend Jones and how we all must take care in any movement. —BG

As a lifelong New Englander, I spent the final days of this election season in California. On the evening of November 5, after searching every newsstand for a newspaper to remember the historic day that came before, I finally found a copy of the San Jose Mercury Times. The two headlines read: “Obama Elected Nation’s First Black President in Commanding Victory” and “Gay Marriage Ban Heads Toward Victory.”

A week later, the word “victory” still stings.

I am not from California, I am not gay and the idea of marriage is not particularly appealing to me, and yet I am profoundly troubled by the vote last week to approve proposition 8, a ban on same-sex marriage in California.

You should be troubled too, whether you are directly affected or not. From Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” On November 4, a great injustice was brought upon California as well as Florida, Arizona, and Arkansas, where other discriminatory propositions were passed.

President-Elect Barack Obama is living proof that injustice can be overcome and equality can triumph over intolerance. And yet, being in California after volunteering with the Vote No on Prop 8 Campaign to defend marriage equality, I could not help but feel disheartened on election night by a loss that I was not expecting.

Just a short time after leaving my Vote No on 8 polling station in Alameda County on Tuesday night, my grandmother called to tell me that Barack Obama had been elected president. I was heading to the San Francisco Vote No on 8 Campaign party. I was preparing for a long night of nervous, but cautiously optimistic TV watching and couldn’t quite believe this incredible news. I had to grill my overjoyed grandmother on her sources before I believed it.

The streets of San Francisco sprang to life. People were honking horns, yelling “Yes we can!” and dancing in celebration outside the Vote No on 8 party location. People were celebrating inside too—at least in the beginning.

The first poll numbers listed on the LA Times California electoral map projected on two giant screens in the main room showed Proposition 8 ahead in the polls right from the start. But we told ourselves not to despair; after all, the numbers only reflected a few reporting precincts and didn’t yet include the major metropolitan areas of LA and San Francisco.

When the LA area poll numbers started popping up on the screen, I felt the caution in the air.

As the night went on, and the number of reporting precincts increased with little change in the percentage of no on 8 votes, the mood became decidedly somber. I looked to the Vote No on 8 Campaign organizers who had given me my volunteer training. They looked scared. I watched as the line of reporters packed up their cameras and computers. The press would not be covering a victory party that night.

I thought of one of my fellow Vote No on 8 polling station volunteer, who had just married his husband the week before. Would courts end up deciding if the passing of proposition 8 would alter the legal standing of his marriage?

Disillusionment set in as I stood in a room amongst people who were stripped of a fundamental right, vote by unfair vote. Perhaps I hadn’t been in CA long enough to be bombarded by all the negative ads or to understand the size and scope of the Yes on 8 Campaign. Visiting from my beloved Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was baffled by the poll numbers that came flooding in to support a ban on same-sex marriage. Surely on a night so victorious for racial equality in America, such overt discrimination against another group of Americans could not be injected into the California constitution?

Through lies and manipulative advertising, proponents of proposition 8 were able to force discrimination into the California constitution and, on a day that will always be known as a victory for racial equality, we received a painful reminder of how far we have to go on the road to GLBTQ equality.

The GLBTQ community is being singled out because of the pervasive and accepted discrimination throughout our society, now further established into law. GLBTQ rights are human rights. “Young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled,” as President-Elect Obama called out during his victory speech, must play a role in defending and promoting the rights and dignity of one and all.

On November 15, be part of history. Join the Impact is a nationwide protest of proposition 8 being organized at City Halls across the country this Saturday. Join the protest at location near you and get involved in your community. The movement for equality is not just a gay rights movement; it is a civil rights movement. It must not be a Californian movement; it must be an American movement.

There’s no stopping the movement that has started, and I am so proud to have joined my friends and family in the struggle. Someday people will look back and marvel at the progress we made for equality, as we are marveling today at the progress marked by President-Elect Obama.

Amanda Cary is a global AIDS advocacy associate at a health and human rights organization in Cambridge, MA.

This video short about the Old Negro Space Program provides yet another vantage point from which to consider the recent US election. It was a different time. More info available here.

"I guess if we ignore it, it'll probably go away" by like_shipwrecks (Nicole).

This is Nicole. She is one of the many talented photographers whose work I follow on flickr.

The same night that the country voted for a Black president, majorities of voters voted against gay families and the rights of gay people in California, Florida, Arizona and Arkansas.

Nicole is angry and so am I.

We are PEOPLE. We are not an alien race. We are not a cult. We are people, with lives, jobs, families, and feelings. We are constructive members of society and to deny us of rights that all PEOPLE should have is just WRONG.

Voting against us is not going to make us or the issues disappear. We’re not giving up. We’re fighting back. We aren’t going anywhere.

We didn’t vote away racism and we didn’t vote away other bigotry and inequality, and these votes against GLBT people were one of this Election Day’s ugliest demonstrations of what we have not yet overcome.

In California it’s been saddening to also see another demonstration of what we have not yet overcome as some protesting the bigotry of Proposition 8 have been directing their anger at Black Californians. The thinking and behavior is racist—and it’s wrong-headed to target a particular group as responsible for the fearfulness of a cross-section of the electorate.

My friend Adina pointed out that whether you’re talking about the possible inappropriate participation of the Mormon Church in political organizing for Prop 8 or the possible votes of some Black voters for Prop 8, the fight really lies elsewhere.

But let’s be real here—there was 49% turnout in San Francisco County and 55% turnout in Alameda which voted overwhelmingly against Prop 8. There was 59% turnout in San Mateo county. If we the supporters of marriage rights for all had done a better job of helping our neighbors and friends to vote, the result would have gone the other way. The result was in many respects a failure of execution. I care much less about yelling at Mormons and much more about turning out allies and persuading people on the fence about justice for all.

This is precisely how Obama won out over the fearfulness that could have prevented many more people from voting for him. We need to help the people who want to support us to follow through and we need to reach out to the people we can influence. That kind of reaching out is infectious and is what will win the day. It will win elections—but more importantly it will win us the community we need to move forward as a society.

We were way back in the crowd, on a patch of the lawn where it was possible to see the jumbotron only from tiptoe, and completely impossible to see the stage. So, when my flexed toes finally gave out, while Barack Obama’s words resonated around us, I kept myself occupied by looking around at the people standing packed around me.

There was the middle-aged Black lady to my right, absorbed alternately in clasping her hands in reverent disbelief and cheering boisterously. When McCain, in his concession speech, spoke of the historic moment of electing our first African-American president, she shouted, “That’s RIGHT!” and shook her head fervently, eyes wide and rimmed with tears.

There was the grandmother behind me, who dialed up some family member on her cell phone and held it out up over the crowd to hear, saying only, “Listen. This is live.”

And there was the couple in front, two men dressed in vests for a night much warmer than this one. The shorter of the two had a view of the TV screen and was leaning over someone else’s shoulder to watch. His partner stayed still, not looking up to the screen, just shaking his head and weeping. He kept it up all through Obama’s speech. He kept having to remove his glasses to wipe his eyes.

So that’s it. That’s how it was, in Grant Park, with hundreds of thousands of people on the eve of the election. There was no riot and there was no ruckus. People were too busy to riot, and what they were busy with was crying.

Not that it wasn’t also celebratory. As the crowd dispersed I found myself on the receiving end of vehement handshakes from all sorts of strangers—congratulations, they said, and I told them “you too” since I didn’t know how better to respond.

On the bike ride home, going south on King Drive, every car that passed leaned on its horn. “Obama!” the drivers would shout, waving their arms out the windows. “Obama!” we yelled right back, at stop signs and to people out on porches and to kids outside the convenience store. It was like nobody could believe their luck. We had to keep shouting it back and forth to each other, to affirm it—yes, this is real, and it’s not going to go away. It’s happening to us, now.

And already I can feel the cynic in myself mobilizing. There’s a time for that—a certain spirit of political skepticism that I tend to think of as healthy—but for now, just for the moment, I am holding it off. I think we just witnessed something big, and I’m not going to pass my quick judgment on that. It has been too long coming.

Rebecca Thal is a student at the University of Chicago.

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.

A new opentape for you all.