Hungry Blues

From the NY Times:

A grand jury in Alabama handed up an indictment on Wednesday in an obscure killing that helped inspire the historic Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. The case is the latest in a series of belated prosecutions of crimes from the civil rights era.In February 1965, a black farmer, Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26, was shot by Alabama state troopers who were suppressing a voting rights demonstration in Marion in the Black Belt. Historians have said the killing indirectly helped lead to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Everyone assumes the identity of the defendant is former Alabama State Trooper James Bonard Fowler.

The identity of the killer has long been known, James B. Fowler, a retired trooper, and on Wednesday Mr. Fowler's lawyer, George Beck of Montgomery, said he could "only assume" that Mr. Fowler was the subject of the indictment.The district attorney would not release the name or the charge until the defendant had been notified.Mr. Beck said, "I think we can all assume that Mr. Fowler was indicted."Mr. Fowler, 73, has admitted the killing in interviews but insisted that the shooting was in self-defense as Mr. Jackson tried to grab the trooper's gun.Books on the civil rights movement have painted a different picture of that night. Multiple accounts say that Mr. Jackson was in a group of demonstrators pushed back by club-swinging troopers into Mack's Cafe and that he watched his grandfather, Cager Lee, 82, being beaten and his mother, Viola Jackson, attacked.When Mr. Jackson lunged to protect her, the historians say, a trooper shot him twice in the stomach.He died eight days later. To protest, activists decided to march from Selma to the state's Capitol in Montgomery. The confrontation on March 7, 1965, or Bloody Sunday, led to the Voting Rights Act.

As the DA proceeds with the prosecution, keep in mind that though Fowler may well be guilty of shooting Jimmie Lee Jackson, historical accounts suggest that there are others who should also be held accountable. As I've written previously:

Eyewitnesses, including civil rights leader Albert Turner and the owner of Mack's Café where Fowler shot Jackson, say that after the shooting, troopers dragged Jackson outside and had a bona fide lynching, beating him to a pulp with clubs and fists....Jimmie Lee Jackson died at Good Samaritan hospital in Selma. But he was carried first to the local hospital in Marion. According to Albert Turner, Jackson waited there an hour without treatment and it was another hour or more before Jackson was admitted at the hospital in Selma, approximately thirty miles away.

This is not to minimize the importance of the indictment. Jimmie Lee Jackson's family needs to have have some measure of justice in the case---as John Flemming has made clear in a moving article in the Anniston Star.

After 43 years, it's about time, Cager Lee [Jr.] and his family say."This is a chance for justice to finally be served," said B.J. Johniken, Cager Lee's grandson and a cousin to Jimmie Lee Jackson. "Back then people could get off for that kind of thing. But it's a new century now," said the 26-year-old City of Anniston employee.For Cager's granddaughter Kristy Thomas, an Anniston resident who works at the incinerator, the convening of the grand jury is something she thought would never happen."I used to listen to my pa-pa tell this story when I was a kid," said Thomas motioning to Cager Lee. "It was clear to me that there was never any attempt to even find who was responsible for this, any effort to try to get to the bottom of it. They thought then, that's the way things should be, that it was just justified because he was a black man. I certainly never thought we would get to the point of actually doing something about it."Joy Lee of Gadsden, a 37-year-old granddaughter of Cager, believes she lives in a better, more inclusive world because of the sacrifices people made during the civil rights movement."Jimmie Lee and others enabled me to have a life and friends I have now," she said. "My best friend is white. Now that's progress, although we still have a long way to go."Her aunt, Kay Johniken, a 49-year-old who works for the Anniston Water Works, agrees, but at the moment has her eye squarely on the events in Selma."This [grand jury] should have happened in 1965," she said. "Alabama was like an island during the civil rights movement. Law enforcement did whatever they wanted and often they were protected by their superiors."...During a lull in the family chatter of a far-away time, Cager Lee excused himself for a trip to the other end of the house for some rest. When he passed from the room, unsteadily, leaning heavily on a cane, daughter Janice Jackson of Gadsden steered the subject to justice."This is what I think that grand jury means to me, to us," she said. "We want Cager to feel that justice was done. For him that shooting was just like it was yesterday. He has to feel that justice was done. It means everything to us."A few minutes later, when Cager Lee shuffled back into the room, he said in a loud whisper, "Well, if that trooper gets indicted, then I'll just say that I feel like he will be getting what is coming to him."

But as Rita Schwerner Bender, widow of slain civil rights worker Michael Schwerner reminds us in the attached podcast, "these trials are in no way the end; these trials are only the beginning."UPDATES

• Jerry Mitchell reports there is an inconsistency in Fowler's self-defense claim.
• Both the Birmingham News and the Chicago Tribune confirm that Fowler is the person charged in yesterday's indictment.
• James Bonard Fowler has turned himself in.

Rita Schwerner Bender - Crimes of the Civil Rights Era - Harvard Univ. - 27 April 07 [ 0:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

[DSCN9388.jpg, originally uploaded by BenTG.]

43 years ago today, Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee were hitchhiking from Meadville, MS and were picked up by James Ford Seale. Seale and others took the two 19-year-old Black men into the Homochitto National Forest, which surrounds the highway, tortured and interrogated them. Later the same day, several of the Klansmen hauled Dee and Moore in the trunk of a car across the state line into Louisiana and then 100 miles north to a spot on the Mississippi River and dumped them in, weighting their bodies down with a jeep engine block and pieces of railroad track.

The Dee-Moore murders were originally referred to as the "Torso Murders" because the young men's bodies were found in parts. The first body parts were discovered by James Bowles, a fisherman, in the Old River adjunct of the Mississippi River on July 12, 1964. Information from Klan informant Ernest Gilbert led Navy divers to the rest of the young men's remains three and a half months later, on October 31. The MS Highway Patrol conducted a murder investigation in conjunction with the FBI. On November 6, 1964, MS Highway Patrol officers arrested James Ford Seale and Charles Marcus Edwards for the murders of Henry Dee and Charles Moore. But District Attorney Lennox Forman never brought the case to the Grand Jury and dropped the charges altogether by January 11 , 1965.

On January 24, 2007, reputed Klansman James Ford Seale was arrested on charges of kidnapping and conspiracy in connection with the murders of Dee and Moore. US Attorney Dunn Lampton will prosecute the case in the Southern District Court of Mississippi in Jackson. Jury selection is scheduled to begin May 29, 2007. Pre-trial hearings are currently underway.

Thomas Moore, is pictured above, with a photo of his brother Charles Moore, at the Crimes of the Civil Rights Era conference, which I also attended this past weekend, at Harvard and Northeastern.

Let us hope that James Ford Seale is convicted and that Mr. Moore and the family members of Henry Dee can feel able to have some closure in this terrible crime. Let us also hope that the trial of James Ford Seale is an occasion for honest discussion of a largely suppressed history of racist oppression and violence. Klan violence is only part of the story.

RELATED POSTS

• Belated Justice for Civil Rights Era Crimes
• Mississippi's Dangerous Attention
• Getting the Facts on James Ford Seale
• The Face of Henry Hezekiah Dee
• Economy of Souls

While I was at Harvard Law School on Friday, the reunion was underway, but who knew what was in store...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
APRIL 28, 2007

CONTACT: DEBORAH POPOWSKI, NATE ELA
HLS ADVOCATES FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

GONZALES EMBARRASSED AT HARVARD REUNION

Attorney General Surprise Visit at 25th Reunion Met by Student Protests

Cambridge, Mass. - Alberto Gonzales was confronted by student protesters and forced to leave through a back door on Saturday during a visit to Harvard Law School for his 25th reunion. After two weeks clinging to save his job and defending allegations that he fired eight U.S. Attorneys for political reasons, what might have been a relaxed day of reminiscing with old classmates became instead yet another reminder that both his job and his reputation are in serious jeopardy.

The Attorney General was on campus, unannounced to students, to deliver a lunchtime speech. But word quickly spread that a suspicious motorcade had been spotted by the campus center, and by the time Gonzales and his fellow classmates assembled on the law library steps for their class photo, a group of current students were there to greet him, having donned black hoods and orange jumpsuits. As the photographer told the class of 1982 to smile and say "cheese," the students yelled out that saying "torture," "resign" or "I don't recall" might be more appropriate.

The Attorney General's visit to his alma mater coincided with the third anniversary of the release of photos depicting the torture of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and came the day after a German federal prosecutor dismissed a case alleging that Gonzales was responsible for approving the policies that resulted in those abuses. These facts were not lost on Deborah Popowski, a second-year law student who had just finished organizing a nationwide student sit-in urging Congress to pass pending legislation that would restore detainees' rights to habeas corpus. "When I heard he was on campus, I was stuffing envelopes with letters to Congress in an office two floors above. I dropped everything. Gonzales needs to know that after approving poorly-reasoned memos that distort the rule of law and justify torture, he is simply not welcome here."

At a time when many in the nation are calling for Gonzales to resign, one third-year student managed to communicate the mood of his own alma mater directly to Gonzales. While the Attorney General's security detail kept protestors at bay and the photographer prepared the class photo, she slipped though the law library's front doors and approached Gonzales from behind. "On behalf of many other Harvard Law students," she said, "I'd like to tell you that we are ashamed to have you as an alumnus of this school. And we're glad you're here to be able to tell you that." Gonzales thanked the student and offered to shake her hand, but was refused. After the class photo was taken, several of the Attorney General's classmates clapped and approached the protesting students to thank them for their efforts.

Following the group photo, Gonzales ducked into the library to take a stroll around the main reading room, which, on the weekend before final exams, was full of students going over their notes. When the protestors caught up with Gonzales, the cavernous reading room, ordinarily a place of hushed whispers, echoed with chants of "shame" and "resign." Gonzales was quickly whisked down a back staircase, out a basement emergency exit and into a waiting SUV. As the motorcade pulled off from in front of historic Austin Hall, Thomas Becker, a second-year law student, stood in an orange jumpsuit and black hood, waving goodbye. When the cars were out of sight, Becker pulled off his hood, smiled, and said "good riddance."

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, second row from top, center, poses with members of the Harvard Law School class of 1982 as law student protester Thomas Becker looks on.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, holding number 588, poses with classmates from the Harvard Law School class of 1982 as law student protester Thomas Becker looks on.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Harvard Law class of 1982 and holding number 588, poses for a reunion photo as Thomas Becker, a second-year law student, looks on.

Today's the day of the conference. Margaret Burnham, who is one of the conveners, has a great op-ed in today's Boston Globe.

A quiet campaign against the old shibboleth that justice delayed is justice denied is being waged in communities across the country, particularly in the South. An arrest in January of a 71-year-old man in connection with a 1964 race killing follows a now familiar pattern, in which family members who lost their loved ones to racist violence decades ago press interminably for criminal prosecution and other forms of redress.

The Mississippi Klansmen who killed Henry Dee and Charles Eddie Moore 43 years ago were confident they would never have to answer for the torture and murder of these two African-American 19-year-olds --- until four months ago, when a US grand jury indicted one of them in the abductions and slayings.

The killers had picked up the two youths, who were hitchhiking near a federal forest, then tortured them and dropped their bodies in the Mississippi River, where they were found two months later during the massive hunt for the murdered civil rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. A cover-up investigation cleared the accused in the Dee-Moore killings, but Charles Moore's brother, Thomas Moore, would not let the case die. His efforts bore fruit last January; the case is a priority of the FBI's new program to solve these old hate crimes....

Here's a small teaser from the talk I'll be giving at the conference this afternoon:

Since my first casual perusals in fall 2005 of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission documents about Klan activity in southwest Mississippi, I have thought there must be more to the story of Henry Dee and Charles Moore than what was being told by the US Attorney's office and by the available published accounts. For the past year or so, I have been working closely with Freedom Movement Attorney John Dorsey Due, Jr., who did some important work in southwest Mississippi during the months just prior to Summer Project of 1964. Some of our questions about the case finally took me to Mississippi last week, to do archival research and conduct interviews.

In this talk, I will compare the indictment of James Ford Seale and historical sources, to show inconsistencies that might help us better understand the role of Klan violence in the racist systems of Mississippi.

I can't share the rest with you yet, but I will be addressing some of the issues that Burnham raises in her op-ed:

These murder cases reflect the most heinous of the hundreds of crimes committed against Americans during the civil rights movement. By one scholar's account, more than 20,000 people were wrongfully arrested in the struggle to break the back of segregation. State and local law enforcement colluded with the perpetrators of anti-civil rights violence, who consequently enjoyed full immunity. When the offenders were brought to court, typically --- as in the Dee-Moore murders --- they were undercharged and released after sham proceedings.

The fresh prosecutions are only one facet of a multi pronged movement to restore justice to the victims of the mid-century breakdown in law enforcement that was designed to crush civil rights protest....

Taken together, these developments signal a countrywide endeavor to understand how law enforcement can be misused and manipulated in times of political turmoil.

There's a link on the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice web site for a live webcast of the conference proceedings. I don't think the researchers' round table will be broadcast, but there are a lot of other exciting things going on.

Commentary by Lance Hill
April 26, 2007

There is a long overdo discussion beginning in New Orleans on how to address race and class issues and bridge the growing racial divide in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. For many months there was little recognition in the mainstream media that displaced African Americans felt locked out of their city or that there was any foundation for these feelings. Feelings of exclusion were dismissed as the product of paranoid conspiracy theories or politicians exploiting groundless fears. But the growing distrust and resentment was evident in the findings of social scientists more than a year ago. A Louisiana Recovery Authority survey of displaced citizens conducted in the first months of 2006 revealed a profound racial division over the future of the city. When asked how important was it that New Orleans “return to its pre-hurricane racial mix,” 88% of black respondents responded “extremely important,” while 67% of white respondents felt that it was “not important at all.” Last October, Tulane Professor Loretta Pyles conducted a survey in one predominantly African American neighborhood that was heavily flood damaged. The study revealed that 84% of the respondents did not trust other races, which is three times the rate of national surveys asking the same question.

More recently, the Louisiana Chapter of the Sierra Club recently honored St. Bernard Parish Council President Henry “Junior” Rodriguez with their “Legislative Leadership" award. This, despite the fact that Rodriguez has a long and un-apologetic history of publicly using racial epithets and took the lead in passing the "blood relative rental law" last October that effectively prevented blacks from renting in St. Bernard Parish. The law made it a crime for white home-owners to rent to anyone other than a “blood relative,” effectively making it impossible for blacks and Latinos to rent in the 96% white parish. That a putatively liberal organization like the Sierra Club can countenance racism by honoring a man with a long history of open bigotry is a sign of a serious problem that begs for a community-wide dialogue; and it’s a case study in how not to build racial unity and counter racism.

[click to continue…]

Thanks to Susan Klopfer, I found my way over to this video from the new, about to be released, record by Mavis Staples. I think I'll be stopping in at Newbury Comics on my lunch hour tomorrow. Now if only there was a way for me to get to the Apollo Theater in May; damn that show looks good.

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David Ridgen is a documentary film maker for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I've mentioned him before in passing because he has been making a documentary film about the Henry Dee and Charles Moore murders case, called Mississippi Cold Case.

David Ridgen also sometimes contributes to written CBC news articles. David Ridgen wrote to me recently to let me know that he co-wrote the CBC article that confirmed that Franklin County Advocate publisher Mary Lou Webb is the widow of David Webb, former publicity director of Americans for the Preservation of the White Race. I was critical of the CBC article, and of a Clarion Ledger article which repeated the information about David Webb four days after the CBC, because I had published this information about six weeks earlier and neither the CBC nor the Ledger cited me as a source.

David Ridgen wanted me also to know that he had found the same information about David Webb at least as early as May 2006. That is the download date he has on his copy of the document from the Sovereignty Commission files that I cited. David also forwarded a June 9, 2006 email to his editor Michael Hannan, which contained portions of the Mississippi Cold Case script dealing with David and Mary Lou Webb (but did not make the final cut).

Clearly I was wrong, and I apologize for insinuating that David and his co-author were dishonest about their sources.

I still think the phrase "document obtained by CBC News" is misleading, since the document is publicly available in the online Sovereignty Comission files. But David wanted to distinguish between the research he provided from the style of the article which was largely his co-author's. I accept this distinciton, given the care that David took to document his earlier knowledge of the David Webb's APWR affiliation.

The latest action alert from PHR's Campaign Against Torture:

Dear Benjamin,

April 28 will be the third anniversary of the disclosure of the detainee abuse that took place at Abu Ghraib after the US invasion of Iraq. Over the last three years there has been a continuous outcry against the Administration's interrogation policies, including among the military and intelligence communities. The Department of Defense (DoD) has developed clearer guidelines prohibiting most abusive practices but it still continues to involve mental health professionals in the interrogation of detainees, making them active members of the "Behavioral Science Consultation Teams" (BSCTs). Ambiguities in the DoD guidelines and weaker standards for the CIA leave room for continued abuse and not enough accountability.

Consider the following:

• Medics, physicians and psychologists played direct roles in the severe abuse of Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged "20th 9/11 hijacker" and others.
• The public record now shows that the abusive interrogation techniques used against Mohammad al-Qahtani and many others at multiple sites may have originated with the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) military training program at Fort Bragg, NC.
• Military psychologists---senior officers in SERE---helped write guidelines that allow psychologists to continue participating in interrogations.

In the three years since the Abu Ghraib scandal, the evidence supporting PHR's strong advocacy for a ban on all health professional participation in interrogations has increased substantially. Yet much more needs to be known about what has happened in the past and what continues to occur.

Please join PHR’s Campaign Against Torture in urging Congress to fully investigate the techniques used in CIA and Department of Defense interrogations, those who authorized them, and the involvement of health professionals in these abusive practices.

Sincerely,

Len Rubenstein
Executive Director
Physicians for Human Rights

I always feel guilty when I don't blog for more than a week or two, and now I've just learned that one of my favorite state legislators has put Hungry Blues on a list of blogs that her staffers are supposed to follow. What an honor, but now I feel even a little more guilty...

Anyway, the reason that I haven't been posting much, and that when I have it's largely been YouTube videos, is that I've been deep into research for an article on the 1964 murders of Henry Dee and Charles Moore in southwest Mississippi (background in Jackson Free Press and Clarion Ledger). I'm not yet on deadline for the article, but I'm also presenting on my research at Harvard Law School at the end of this month. (Local friends: my session at the conference is closed to the public. Sorry I can't invite you.)

I've blogged about the Dee-Moore case a couple of times since the indictment in January of James Ford Seale, one of the alleged perpetrators. In one post, I turned up evidence that suggests that some locals from Meadville, MS who have been critical of the mainstream press' treatment of the case are at best dishonest and at worst participants in a cover up. In the couple of weeks that followed my post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the Clarion Ledger each separately confirmed my core finding: Mary Lou Webb, publisher of the Franklin Advocate, is indeed the widow of the same man whom I found listed as Publicity Director for Americans for the Preservation of the White Race, thought by the FBI to have been a front group for the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

Webb practically gloats over the fact that the mainstream press bought the lie that James Ford Seale was dead.

Webb said Seale had been laying low for a while, and it was possible that some people might have thought he died.

“I honestly don’t think the majority of the people did,” she said.

If most people knew that Seale was just "laying low for a while," then why didn't Franklin County Sheriff James Newman assist US Attorney Dunn Lampton in his investigation and let him know that a prime suspect was available for questioning in Roxie? One also wonders why Dunn Lampton didn't bother to check the death records to confirm the false reports of Seale's death, spread by the Klansman's son. Same question about the death records should be posed to the NY Times, CBC, Clarion Ledger and all the rest.

What I found disappointing about the CBC and the Ledger's treatment of the information about David Webb was that neither acknowledged that the first report of it was by an independent blogger. My source was a document in the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission files, available to all online. Yet the CBC referred to the document as "A document obtained by CBC News ," as if someone leaked it to them exclusively. Though the Ledger's Jerry Mitchell didn't bend over backwards to pretend he'd specially "obtained" the document on Webb, he also was silent about the earlier findings.

In a discussion thread at the Jackson Free Press, I said further that

the FBI documents referred to in the CBC and CL articles are all publicly available on the ABC News website. In other words, the only thing new that anybody did was ask Mrs. Webb for comment.

It's definitely valuable that the CBC and CL pulled more info together and published it; but I think it's a disservice to all when they mystify the nature of their information. Aside from my vein [sic] desire to have Hungry Blues quoted or cited in the mainstream news, this sort of half-truth telling about sources discourages people from thinking they can learn the truth for themselves.

While I'm mentioning my personal connection to the Clarion Ledger's (generally excellent but narrow) coverage of the James Ford Seale indictment, let me also direct you to Jerry Mitchell's recent story about white supremacists who have been rallying in support of Seale.

Reputed Klansman James Ford Seale may have drawn criticism from some, but in white supremacist circles, he's being lauded as a patriot and a prophet.

The April issue of All the Way, a white supremacist magazine in Mississippi, features Seale on its cover. His black-and-white police mug shot has been colorized, giving him blue eyes and red hair to match the flags in the background....

Richard Barrett, who produces All the Way and heads the Nationalist Movement in Mississippi, said that letter "will go down in history next to the 95 theses that Martin Luther nailed to the church door at Wittenburg in 1517 - if the onslaught of communism in our country is overcome, and that's a big if."

I've been enjoying the pleasure of getting the comments on my posts about James Ford Seale spammed with the full text of paeans to Seale by Barrett and his Nationalist cohort.

If you want to read something related to all of this that is much more interesting than what the Nationalist Movement thinks of James Ford Seale, then check out Donna Ladd's recent tour de force, "Fighting Back in Klan Nation," about the late Reverend Clyde Briggs, who was at the helm of the local African American resistance to white domination and violence in Franklin County in the 1950s and 1960s.

For something a little lighter, please enjoy the following, which was discovered in the process of attempting to appease my four-year-old's voracious appetite for YouTube videos of the Beatles.

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More sooner, I hope.

UPDATE: Please see my Apology to David Ridgen

Click on the link to view a brief local TV news spot on last weekend's International Women's Day event in East Biloxi, MS.

International Women's Day Debut In Biloxi (Windows Media Player)

The report is a nice snapshot of community activity on the Gulf Coast, which still struggles tremendously from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and ongoing governmental neglect, more than eighteen months later. The report also features Sharon Hanshaw, Executive Director of Coastal Women for Change; I interviewed Sharon in 2006 for my Dollars & Sense article, before she founded CWC.

DVD Maniacs has posted a nice review and overview of the new DVD release of my cousin Alan's fantastic film, Land of Look Behind. Here's reviewer Ian Miller's discussion of the film:

Alan Greenberg is an interesting character. It would seem that his life is made up of random encounters and friendships with some serious heavy hitters (Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger), but he has also worked behind the scenes on such divergent productions like MANDINGO and Bertolucci's 1900, and most importantly has had a thirty-two year creative partnership with German auteur/madman Werner Herzog (GRIZZLY MAN, EVEN DWARVES STARTED SMALL). While the exact nature of what it exactly is that he does in that partnership is hazy at best (Greenberg jokingly refers to himself as Herzog's "typist", referring to the fact that he banged Werner's story notes for FITZCARRALDO and COBRA VERDE into workable scripts), Werner's fearlessness in the face of nature and highly dangerous individuals obviously rubbed off on Alan enough for him to take on the formidable task of making LAND OF LOOK BEHIND, a film ostensibly documenting the funeral of reggae superstar/shaman Bob Marley that turns out to be much more.

After showing a map of the island of Jamaica (focusing on the area called "land of look behind"), we see a man with a machete and giant spleef chopping down fruit stalks to gather miniscule toads that live inside them for the length of their lives. He then goes on to explain (in a very musical patois) that we are in the shanty town of Quickstep, at the edge of the nasty Land Of Look Behind badlands/forest, ominously named by the locals as "Me-no-send-you-no-come". He then proclaims to the wilderness his desire for some industry to come and build factories so he and his townspeople could have some work, instead of collecting toads for some biologist. Soon we are in the presence of Jammy Galloway, a rasta who explains his devotion to Jah and his purpose for "eating" herb before leading a group of devotees through some chanting and drumming, then we're off to the procession of the recently deceased Bob Marley's casket through Kingston, where seemingly all day-to-day business has stopped in order for all and sundry to pay respects (the shot of families sitting atop a parked Esso fuel truck is an arresting one). We see the funeral itself, with what had to be the largest open gathering of Rastafarians in the history of the outlaw religion (all inside are covering their dreads, but not so much outside, where one serious young man declares that "When a prophet dies, twenty thousand lions are born", while a non-dread exclaims that "Bob Marley smoked one hundred spleefs a day! One hundred spleefs a day!!"). Other scenes include performance clips from Lui Lepki and Gregory Isaacs (who is also interviewed), a visit with poet Mutabaruka, and a riveting sequence where a young man named Hansel drags on a spleef until it's gone and sings along to Bob and The Wailers' "Crazy Bald Head" in total reverie, and the viewer sees exactly what director Greenberg intends: a sense of dignity and devotion to self and the serving a higher purpose that tears away at the squalor and oppression of one's daily life.

For a film that had no actual distributor, LAND OF LOOK BEHIND has gone on to be considered one of the greatest documentaries of it's decade, if not ever, and it's easy to see why: there is no pompous narration, no cloying sense of sympathy for the subjects, nor is it outwardly trying to manipulate the viewer's emotions. Plain and simple, it just drops you into an area and lets the pictures and people tell the story. Taking Herzog cinematographer Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein along because of his intrepid nature as well as his masterful eye, Greenberg does a fine job of catching some really memorable images and scenes (the Rasta jail, audience members dancing in total ecstasy), and manages to edit all of it into a cohesive whole that never drags. While those coming in looking for an out-and-out tribute to Marley the artist will be disappointed, they will be rewarded by a touching overview of what he represented to the people of his homeland, a much more fitting homage indeed.

Read the rest to learn about some of the special features of the DVD package.

Read my tribute to Alan and view some clips.

Buy it now.

Sometime early on in my discovery of YouTube I thought to search on Woody Guthrie. I found this one forty-five second clip, which noted that it was

[o]ne of the two surviving film clips of Woody Guthrie performing. This one is from 1945. The other, with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, is already on YouTube.

Somehow I can't even remember if I ever found my way over to the other clip. You'd think I would have, since it sounds so cool—Woody with two Blues greats.

But what I just discovered the other night is that the one other clip of Woody Guthrie is actually one of two clips (making a total of three) from a sixteen minute, 1947 film, called "To Hear Your Banjo Play," featuring Pete Seeger playing and narrating. Just recently clampittandgaddis posted the short film to YouTube in two parts. Conveniently the clips with Woody are at the beginning of the second part.

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The first clip is with Baldwin "Butch" Hawes, sometime member of the Almanac Singers. I'm not sure what the song is; if anyone out there can identify it, please leave a comment. The second clip is the one with Brownee McGhee and Sonny Terry---the three of them playing "John Henry." This is pretty much the whole thing (the older YouTube clip cuts off and is blurry), though with some voice overs and jump cuts. It's a great performance; and there is something incredibly thrilling about getting to actually see Woody perform: his recordings, and Pete Seeger's performances of his songs, are some of the earliest musical memories that I have. And of course it should not be lost on us that this is a rare scene of racial integration in the sixteen minute film from 1947. (It looks like the the work crew laying down railroad tracks in one of the jump cuts from the "John Henry" clip is also integrated.)

Though the film presents itself as a history of the banjo, really, it's a history of American folk music, which has an underlying message about race. Early in the film, in a contrived dialogue with an off camera Alan Lomax (who wrote the film), Pete says,

American Negro slaves made the first real banjos a couple of hundred years ago, out of old hollowed gourds and possum skins, I guess, but then the banjo spread all over the whole country. Everyone loved it. It traveled west in the covered wagons. Later on the banjo went out of style. Got countrified. Nowadays, you're liable to hear it played by some old farmer...

And this brings the banjo into Southern white folk culture. Later in the film, leading in to the Woody Guthrie clips, Pete says,

Two races met here in the South. Together they built the South, and together they made a new kind of music.

Pete moves through a number of settings, from New York City, to the Appalachian hills of Virginia, to the deep South, and makes the point that much of what we think of as American has its roots in African American culture and labor. The energy and attractiveness of pop culture in NYC and of white Southern folkways and customs come from those places where Blacks and whites meet---as laborers and as cultural workers. While this may not be news to many now, it was probably a radical assertion to make in 1947.

The film closes with a hokey set up to get Pete sitting in with a guitar player and fiddler at a square dance. You watch as Pete wails on his African instrument to whip up the all white Margot Mayo American Square Dance Group (they are great!).

You should also watch for the near 80-year-old Uncle Buck, early in the film, as he tears up the dance floor. (JDJ: do you have any comment on the dancing he's doing? Does it fit into the film's scheme of cultural migrations and transformations?)

And for the Appalachian gospel rendition of "What Wondrous Love is This?" It's beauty is unearthly and haunting.

You can watch "To Hear Your Banjo Play" all the way through, in a single, higher quality, larger format mpeg on Google Video. The video is also posted on the Internet Archive.

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