Hungry Blues

This part is too important not to quote it also:

Recently, after the verdict and sentencing in the Edgar Ray Killen trial in Neshoba County, you indicated your belief that this closed the books on the crimes of the civil rights years, and that we all should now have "closure."

A day or so earlier, when Ben Chaney, the brother of the murdered African American, James Earl Chaney, criticized you for wearing a Confederate battle flag pin on your lapel daily, you responded by saying it was the symbol of the Mississippi National Guard, and if anyone didn't like your wearing it, "tough."

Not long ago, you actively resisted the effort in Mississippi to remove that Confederate symbol from the state flag. The Confederate battle flag has long been the banner of segregation and racism, not to mention that it has been widely embraced by the Ku Klux Klan throughout the Klan's hateful history.

While chairman of the National Republican Party, you attended functions of the Council of Conservative Citizens, known as the successor to the White Citizens' Councils in the state of Mississippi. When called on your participation with the CCC, you publicly refused to apologize or disassociate yourself.

Nor, it must be said, have you acted alone. In the same week that the Neshoba jury returned its guilty verdicts, your two Republican colleagues, U.S. Sens. Trent Lott and Thad Cochran, refused to join 92 other senators in a resolution of apology for the Senate's repeated failures to pass anti-lynching legislation. Had such federal legislation been passed, it is possible that many lives would have been saved.

Mississippi had the highest number of lynchings of any state in the country; The Clarion-Ledger counted 581, and presumably there were others never included in the count. The message to those who would continue to do harm is loud and clear: Murder of African Americans deserves no apology.

So long as such symbols and coded messages are conveyed by high public officials, your state continues to encourage racism, and the potential for violence which it spawns. The venom is spread, and hatred continues to flourish.

Restorative justice can only come with recognition of the past, acknowledgement of wrongdoing, and acceptance of responsibility in the present by government and individuals to ameliorate the harm done.

People in positions of public trust, such as you, must take the lead in opening the window upon the many years of criminal conduct in which the state, and its officials, engaged. Only with such acknowledgement will the present generation understand how these many terrible crimes occurred, and the responsibility which present officials, voters and, indeed, all citizens, have to each other to move forward

(Read the whole thing.)

Letter from Rita Bender, widow of Michael Schwerner, to MS Governor Haley Barbour, published in the Clarion Ledger last week:

It is unfortunate that it is not yet well known that the state of Mississippi funded the state Sovereignty Commission from 1957 through 1973. The funding came from taxes paid by the citizenry — which means that the African-American population of the state, some 40 percent of Mississippi's population, was forced to pay for the governmental entity which spied upon them; caused them to lose jobs and to be forced off the land they farmed; and participated in crimes of beatings, church burnings and murder.

The Sovereignty Commission funded the White Citizens Councils, which used this money to launch a campaign of disinformation both within the state and in the Northern states. The councils spread racist ideology which served to encourage violence.

The Sovereignty Commission used its funds to hire staff investigators and private detectives. It employed informants. Information gathered included license numbers and vehicle descriptions for persons identified as civil rights activists, as well as physical descriptions of these persons and their day-to-day activities. Medgar Evers was spied upon in this manner for years before his death. So were Mickey Schwerner and I.

The information gathered was passed on to law enforcement officers around the state, many of whom were themselves members of the Ku Klux Klan. There was no secret that the Klan and the police, sheriffs' departments and state highway patrol officers were often one and the same.

Bankers were notified of the identity of African Americans who attempted to register to vote, and bankers then called in loans. The commission contacted employers and land owners about persons attempting to register, or who were otherwise engaged in civil rights activities, resulting in people losing jobs or being forced off land which they had sharecropped for generations.

At the request of the defense, the commission investigated the jury panel in the first trial of Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers in 1964. The commission reported back to the defense its findings as to which members of the panel were not expected to be favorable to Beckwith.

The defense was then in a position to eliminate these jurors from the panel. An arm of the state was assisting the defense in a case the state was supposed to be prosecuting. This is a grotesque perversion of the criminal justice system.

The commission provided its investigative reports to The Clarion-Ledger and other newspapers in the state until 1967, and those reports were then used by the newspapers to distort and defame the civil rights movement. (The Clarion-Ledger has apologized for its activities.)

The commission requested newspapers to suppress the reporting of violence against black persons. For example, the commission succeeded in preventing the reporting of the beatings and church burning in Philadelphia on June 16, 1964. This coverage was omitted from news reports to accommodate the request of a Philadelphia banker, who was seeking to convince an out-of-state investor to bring his business to Mississippi.

Each successive governor served as the Sovereignty Commission chairman. He was sent the investigative reports of the commission. Each governor had knowledge of the full range of shameful, illegal, and often violent activities encouraged or directly engaged in by the commission staff.

Why else can there not yet be closure? There were many acts of brutality, and far too many murders, which were never acknowledged. There are many violent criminals, living their lives among their neighbors in communities throughout the state, who have never been charged or punished for their crimes.

(Read the whole thing.)

No, damn it. Albert Einstein was a political radical and anti-racist.

When it came to how to handle Einstein’s ashes or his house on Mercer Street, everyone involved meticulously adhered to his wishes. But when it involved his ideas, and especially his concerns about what he called America’s “worst disease,” the fact that Einstein wanted his views made as public as possible seems to have slipped past his historians.

(Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor, Preface, Einstein On Race And Racism (via Professor Kim).)

I've been going through a bunch of the documents from when my father was Executive Director of the Greater New York Council For A Sane Nuclear Policy and getting back into the history of the Left and the peace movement in the early 60s.

Albert Einstein was always one of my father's heroes. Maybe Dad knew the anti-racist part, but all I remember hearing is the bumbling genius pacifist in a wrinkled suit version.

More than one hundred biographies and monographs of Einstein have been published, yet not one of them mentions the name Paul Robeson, let alone Einstein’s friendship with him, or the name W. E. B. Du Bois, let alone Einstein’s support for him. Nor does one find in any of these works any reference to the Civil Rights Congress whose campaigns Einstein actively supported. Finally, nowhere in all the ocean of published Einsteinia – anthologies, bibliographies, biographies, summaries, articles, videotapes, calendars, posters and postcards – will one find even an islet of information about Einstein’s visits and ties to the people in Princeton’s African American community around the street called Witherspoon.

Oh this makes me mad...

Yet, despite Einstein’s clear intention to make his politics public – especially his anti-lynching and other antiracist activities – the history-molders have seemed embarrassed to do so. Or nervous. “I had to think about my Board,” a museum curator (who doesn’t want his name used even today) said, explaining why he had omitted some of the scientist’s political statements from the major exhibition celebrating Einstein’s one hundredth birthday in 1979.

Reminds me of the cover up on Helen Keller's radical socialism.

Thanks, Professor Kim, for blasting the truth into the blogosphere.

I think I'm going to have to get this book when it comes out next week.

Read the rest of the preface here.

to cash in...

AP Reporter Heather Clark Albuquerque Journal reports on Shigeko Sasamori's experience as a survivor of the US atomic bomb, dropped on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. Her story is one of the many we must repeat and remember:

The 73-year-old grandmother was a 13-year-old school girl when she saw the nuclear bomb drop from the blue morning sky over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

Sasamori traveled to New Mexico — the birthplace of the atomic bomb — on the 60th anniversary of the Trinity Test to ask scientists to stop nuclear warfare.

"I want to talk to their hearts and beg them not to do it,'' she said.

On that August morning in 1945, Sasamori said she and a friend were setting out to join a work crew that was going to clear a city street less than a mile from Ground Zero.

"I saw the airplane and I saw the bomb drop,'' she said in an interview. "I told my schoolmate next to me 'Look at the airplane, it's so beautiful.'''

Her 13-year-old friend was killed in the blast.

Sasamori then felt a force knock her to the ground.

"The next thing I knew, it's completely blacked out, like dead earth,'' she said. "I wasn't scared. I didn't have any feelings, emotions, nothing.''

As she sat up, she saw gray shapes of people moving silently through the lifting fog. They were covered with gray and black ash, their hair was burned and their blistering and hanging skin was visible through tattered clothing.

"I saw that everybody looked so terrible, just like they came from hell,'' she said. "No one was talking, no one was screaming.''

Ms. Sasamori now lives in Marina del Rey, CA. It is sad that she must witness the profiteering of the National Atomic Museum in Albuquerque:

The museum advertised the $125-per-ticket event on its Web site as a chance to relive the drama, secrecy, excitement and awe of the Manhattan Project. Participants were given a secret identity at the door of the museum and were treated to food, a cash bar, a '40s fashion show, slides of the Trinity test and a panel discussion by historians and test participants. On Saturday, they were taken to the Trinity test site in southern New Mexico for a tour.

"Many people are dead. Those people's souls aren't happy. Why are you celebrating?'' Sasamori said. "You are making a weapon to kill us. So, I feel that's not appropriate to celebrate.''

A museum spokeswoman did not answer a voice mail message and no one answered several phone calls to the museum Friday.

On Aug. 6, Sasamori said she will mark the 60th anniversary of the bomb being dropped on Hiroshima with a more appropriate ceremony: a moment of silence in her home town to remember the dead.

Ms. Sasamori was brought to the US for reconstructive surgery by Norman Cousins in 1955.

One-fourth of Sasamori's body was burned, her fingers were scorched to the bone and she had as many as 30 operations to repair the damage. Three years ago, she underwent surgery for intestinal cancer and doctors now think she has thyroid cancer. . .

Eventually, Sasamori decided to settle in the U.S. where she became a nurse.

Sasamori . . . said she is not angry at Americans for how World War II ended, but rather hates war itself and is saddened by the actions of those who made the bomb.

WHITE SANDS MISSLE RANGE, New Mexico (AP) -- Emmett Hatch's grandmother ordered him to drop to his knees and pray on July 16, 1945, shortly after the world's first atomic blast.

She was awake at 5:29:45 Mountain War Time that morning in Portales to make breakfast and saw the explosion from more than 220 miles (350 kilometers) away.

"She thought it was the coming of the Lord, because the sun rose in the west that day," said Hatch, who was 8 years old at the time.

Hatch joined thousands of others at Trinity Site on Saturday in a restricted area of the White Sands Missile Range for the 60th anniversary of the dawn of the nuclear age.

The Manhattan Project resulted in the two atomic bombs that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Japan in August 1945, essentially stunning Japan into surrender and ending World War II.

(Whole thing.)

~

Photo: Survivor, Shigeko Sasamori, recounts the day 60 years ago that an atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. (AP)

Anniversary of the first atomic bomb testing brings back memories to residents

By James W. Crawley

MEDIA GENERAL NEWS SERVICE

BAXTERVILLE, Miss.

Billy Ray Anderson remembers the day the earth kicked up waves, the ground cracked, chimneys tumbled and the creeks turned black in this corner of the Deep South.

"The ground swelled up," said Anderson. "It was just like the ocean - there was a wave every 200 feet or so."

It was the day the government nuked Mississippi.

At precisely 10 a.m. on Oct. 22, 1964, a nuclear bomb exploded 2,700 feet beneath the loblolly pines of Lamar County. Within a microsecond, the clash of plutonium atoms heated an underground salt dome to the temperature of the sun.

On Saturday, the world will mark the 60th anniversary of the first atomic bomb test at Alamagordo, N.M. The anniversary is significant to Anderson and his neighbors because no Americans live closer to a nuclear-test site. The 1,052 other U.S. nuclear blasts occurred in sparsely populated sections of Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Alaska or in the Pacific Ocean.

Time has erased much of the evidence and memory of two underground nuclear explosions here - the only times the United States detonated atomic bombs east of the Mississippi River. . . .

Before dawn Oct. 22, 1964, scientists and engineers towed the 1,113-pound nuclear bomb, called Salmon, behind a Dodge sedan from the heavily guarded assembly building hidden deep in the pine forest to ground zero. A crane lowered the bomb underground.

Anderson, 69, lives less than a mile from the salt dome - the residents' phrase for ground zero. No one lives closer.

Most days he is at his fishing camp, an eclectic wood-and-sheet-metal building next to a pond and topped by Santa's sleigh and reindeer stenciled in Christmas lights. It's a place he can fish, take a swim, drink beer and tend his tomatoes without interruption.

He remembers the day the bomb exploded as if it were yesterday.

State troopers started knocking on doors at 5 a.m. to evacuate everyone near ground zero. Each adult received $10 and children $5 for their inconvenience.

Anderson drove a water tanker at the test site and waited at the command post as the countdown ticked to zero.

Local and state officials were inside an air-conditioned trailer, watching it on closed-circuit TV, he said.

When the clock hit 10, the bomb exploded with the force of 5.3 kilotons of TNT - one-third the size of the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

"It was like you hit a big drum on top," he recalled. "It made such a big bang, it shook things for miles."

The ground rose. Forty-one years later, Anderson demonstrated the groundswell's height by holding his hands about 18 inches off the ground.

"It really did jar things," he added.

The trailer rocked and rolled. "Those politicians came running out of the trailer, grabbing their handkerchiefs and wiping the sweat off their foreheads," he said. The TV inside was knocked over and the command post's radios were damaged.

Seismographs throughout the United States, plus some in Europe, recorded the shock waves.

After the explosion, Anderson drove to the forward control shack, less than a mile from ground zero.

"The creek was black ... it was running black as it could be," he recalled. Anderson would stay busy for days delivering water to neighbors because the blast soured wells, also turning them black with silt.

Cracks - "big enough to put your hand in" - fractured roads, he said. . . .

Cancer has taken many of their friends, neighbors and family members.

One and a half miles from the salt dome, Grace Burge, 62, spent a recent morning sorting peas for sale at the store she and her husband own.

Asked if the bomb had killed people in Lamar County, she stopped sorting for a second, gazed toward the road and said, "I would say so, but the government says no. . . ."

Two years later, the government officials lowered another steel cylinder into the ground.

Called Sterling, the second nuclear device had a much smaller yield - 380 tons of force.

When Sterling exploded Dec. 3, 1966, the ground barely shook. . . .

Follow-up drilling and testing contaminated soil, groundwater and equipment with radiation. Tons of radioactive debris was dumped into the salt dome and a deep aquifer.

The Atomic Energy Commission razed the buildings in 1972, packed up their instruments and left Mississippi.

(Whole thing.)

[This is from my friend Marsha Joyner, who produced the TV series. I carried something else by her yesterday. --BG]

The official Trinity Site proclaims
For we are all Downwind

Atomic Bomb Series on ‘Olelo Channel 53 (Hawaii)

Sixty years ago on July 16, 1945, the final step of the WWII Manhattan Project took place at Trinity Site, Alamogordo, New Mexico where the first atomic bomb was tested at 5:29:45 a.m. Mountain War Time. The project marked the beginning of an era of nuclear weapons, scientific discoveries, unfathomable injuries and unimaginable sorrows.

The 19-kiloton explosion ushered the world into the atomic age. The second bomb, known as "Little Boy", was detonated over the city of Hiroshima, August 6, 1945. The third bomb, known as "Fat Man", was detonated over the city of Nagasaki, August 9, 1945. The fourth bomb known as “Able” was detonated in Bikini and began 30 years of horrific atomic/Hydrogen bomb tests throughout the Pacific Ocean.

The atomic/nuclear age has wrought worldwide havoc beyond belief. It has had such an impact on our lives, that we should not ignore the history but study it and learn from it.

From 1945 through 1962, the United States conducted atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons. Hundreds of thousands of military personnel and civilians participated in the conduct of those tests, and many of the participants were exposed to ionizing radiation.

July 15, 2005 Channel 53 – 10:00 p.m. “Atomic Bomb part II”

July 17, 2005 Channel 53 – 9:00 p.m. “Cry At The End”

The entire series will be repeated

July 23, 2005 Channel 53

7:30 am “Black Hole”

8:30 am “Atomic Bomb part I"

9:30 am “Atomic Bomb part II"

11:00 am Half Life"

12:30 am "Cry at The End"

July 14, 2005

Authorities to probe 3 civil rights-era slayings in Miss.

By Jerry Mitchell

Federal authorities will examine three unsolved killings from the civil rights era, U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton said Wednesday.

"We just owe it to them," he said.

FBI documents show on May 2, 1964, Klansmen beat and killed 19-year-olds Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee in Franklin County, dumping their bodies in the Mississippi River. On Feb. 27, 1967, 37-year-old Wharlest Jackson was driving home, having been recently promoted to a "whites-only" job in Natchez, when a bomb planted under his truck exploded.

Lampton said it would behoove those with information regarding these killings to fess up now: "The first one to come forward is the one to get some consideration...."

Moore's brother, Thomas, met Wednesday with Lampton, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jack Lacy and FBI agent Kevin Rust.

"Mr. Lampton told me he'd take a personal interest in the case," said Thomas Moore, a retired Army command sergeant major who now counsels troubled youths in Colorado Springs, Colo. "I left his office with a lot of hope. I think he's going to do something."

Lampton said he was impressed with the veteran.

The FBI reopened the case involving the 1964 killings in 2000, and District Attorney Ronnie Harper said he's never considered the case closed. "I requested the assistance of the FBI," he said. "We stand ready (to prosecute) if they develop the case."

Lampton said since authorities already are looking into the pair's killings, he decided to include the Jackson killing as well....

The Clarion-Ledger has obtained nearly 1,000 FBI documents that detail both the extensive FBI investigation and the failure of Mississippi to pursue the killings of Dee and Moore. According to the document, the two were hitchhiking near an ice cream stand on U.S. 84 when a Klansman picked the pair up in a Volkswagen. The Klan had heard rumors of gunrunning by black Muslims and wrongly believed the pair knew something about it, according to the documents.

Klansmen took Dee and Moore into the Homochitto National Forest, where they beat them unconscious, loaded them into another car and dumped their bodies into the Mississippi River, according to the documents.

The men arrested at the time, James Ford Seale, then 29, and Charles Marcus Edwards, then 31, made admissions in the case, according to FBI documents. They were never tried, and both have since denied any role in the killings.

According to FBI documents, authorities confronted Seale and told him they knew he and others took Dee and Moore "to some remote place and beat them to death. You then transported and disposed of their bodies by dropping them in the Mississippi River. You didn't even give them a decent burial. We know you did it. You know you did. The Lord above knows you did it."

"Yes," Seale is quoted as replying, "but I'm not going to admit it. You are going to have to prove it."

When authorities arrested Edwards, he "admitted that he and James Seale picked up Dee and another Negro in vicinity of Meadville, Miss., and took them to an undisclosed wooded area where they were 'whipped,' " a Nov. 6, 1964, FBI document said. "States victims were alive when he departed the wooded area."

(Read the rest.)

This is a little dated, but it's good and Technorati says hardly anyone blogged it. For all my fellow red diaper babies:

Pete Seeger Is 86

by STUDS TERKEL

It is hard to think of Pete Seeger as an elderly gaffer, because the boy in him, the light, remains undimmed. It was sixty-five years ago I first ran into him. He and three of his colleagues, calling themselves the Almanac Singers, were on a cross-country jalopy tour singing and creating songs for the industrial unions aborning. The CIO had begun, and how could there be labor rallies without songs? It was in the true American tradition, like the Hutchinsons, a family of singing abolitionists during the Civil War. Some of the most heartbreaking music of that fratricidal conflict was theirs.

That night when I first encountered the four wandering minstrels was a cold Chicago beauty. At 2 in the morning, my wife heard the doorbell ring. I was away rehearsing the first play in which I had ever appeared. It was Waiting for Lefty, of course. There, at the door, were the four of them. The first was a bantam--freckled, red-haired and elfin. He handed my wife a note saying: "These are good fellas. Put them up for the night." Putting them up was a rough assignment, even for a Depression-era social worker, what with the only spare bunk being a Murphy bed that sprang from the wall. Freckles announced himself as Woody Guthrie. The second was an Ozark mountain man named Lee Hayes. The third was a writer, Millard Lampell. The fourth, somewhat diffident, more in the background, was a slim-jim of 20 or so, fretting around with his banjo. He was Pete Seeger.

Since then, Woody has died. So has Lee Hayes. So has Millard Lampell. Only Pete breathes and sings, mesmerizing audiences, whether they be Democrats, lefties, vegans or even a sprinkling of Republicans. For sixty-five years, he has held forth continuously through periods known more for their bleakness than for their hope: the cold war, the witchhunt, the civil rights and civil liberties battles. Pete has been in all of them. Wherever he was asked, when the need was the greatest, he, like Kilroy, was there. And still is. Though his voice is somewhat shot, he holds forth on that stage. Whether it be a concert hall, a gathering in the park, a street demonstration, any area is a battleground for human rights. That is why describing him as an 86-year-old gaffer is not quite true. The calendar often deceives. This is a sparkling case in point.

Of course, he's been blacklisted so many times he probably holds the dubious record, with the possible exception of Paul Robeson, who was often his partner in crime.

Before we hoist one for Pete, let's also remember that he's one of the best choirmasters in the country. He may not have the technique of Robert Shaw, but the result is just as explosive. Imagine an audience of thousands as Pete sings, say, "Wimoweh." As Pete waves his arms gently, the audience reacts as a professional choir might. I've seen a wizened little man, who obviously is somebody's bookkeeper, at the command of Pete become a basso profundo, reaching two octaves lower than Chaliapin. This is the nature of Pete Seeger, who reaches out toward the further shores more effectively and more exhilaratedly than anyone I've ever run into.

Hail Pete, at 86, still the boy with that touch of hope in the midst of bleakness. There ain't no one like him.

(The rest is over at The Nation)

Might as well mention, in case you missed it the first time around, that I did a little bit about Pete Seeger a just over a year ago. I was actually writing about Louis Armstrong, but Pete figured into it, too.

In that post from last summer, I mention getting Pete Seeger's Children's Concert at Town Hall on cd after having listened to the lp endlessly as a child. The cd has been getting a lot of play around here lately because at almost 2 1/2 my son is now old enough to have his own enjoyment of Pete Seeger.

Even if you don't have kids, the Children's Concert is really worth getting. My wife gets choked up almost every time she hears all the children in the audience singing along—which only makes Pete's "touch of hope in the midst of bleakness" that much more poignant, especially these days . . .

The concert was recorded in 1962, so all those kids are grown up and older than I am. I sometimes wonder who they are in the world today.

By Marsha Rose Joyner

Aloha,

On August 6th we will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the signing by Lyndon B. Johnson of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And of course, our own, the late Congresswoman Patsy T. Mink was instrumental in is formation and passage.

Almost one hundred years after the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution granting voting rights to everyone, non-whites in America had not enjoyed the full measure of freedom. The cost of Freedom was exceptionally high.

We, The Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition- Hawaii are requesting that you join with us in a VOTER REGISTRATION DRIVE. We feel that it is the best way to commemorate this event as well as celebrating the lives of all of the people who sacrificed so that we may enjoy the right to vote.

Many people from Hawaii made huge sacrifices and involved themselves in the voter registration campaign in the southern states. Southern Blacks who tried to register to vote--and people of other races who supported them--were typically harassed, beaten or killed.

For years, hundreds of thousands of people had worked and died to secure human rights for everyone in the U.S. July 2, 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson signed The Civil Rights Act into law. Yet some of the southern states still resisted granting voting rights to everyone. The physical abuse was unimaginable and the economic manipulation deplorable for those who tried to register to vote.

The Selma-to-Montgomery March for voting rights ended three weeks--and three events--that represented the political and emotional peak of the modern civil rights movement. On "Bloody Sunday," March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights marchers headed east out of Selma on U.S. Route 80. They got only as far as the Edmund Pettus Bridge six blocks away, where state and local lawmen attacked them with “billy-clubs” and tear gas and drove them back into Selma. Two days later on March 9, Martin Luther King, Jr., led a "symbolic" march to the bridge. On Sunday, March 21, about 3,200 marchers set out for Montgomery, walking 12 miles a day and sleeping in fields. By the time they reached the capitol on Thursday, March 25, they were 25,000-strong.

“At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man's unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama (March 7, 1965). “There is no Negro problem. There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an American problem,” President Johnson said in his message to Congress three weeks after the televisions images of Bloody Sunday were shown to the world.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which required equal access to public places and outlawed discrimination in employment, was a major victory of the black freedom struggle, but the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was its crowning achievement. The Act had an immediate impact. Within months of its passage on August 6, 1965, one quarter of a million new black voters had been registered. Winning the right to vote changed the political landscape of the United States. When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, barely 100 African Americans held elective office in the U.S.; today there were more than 10,000.

The biggest impediment to voting is not the KKK or the white citizens council or economic sanctions; it is apathy. Today, far too many people do not appreciate or do not know of the struggles that women, African-Americans, Asians, Pacific Islanders and other minorities have gone thru for the right to vote.

The Voting Rights Act was costly—100 years, thousands were arrested and served time in jails across America, while others gave their lives for the right to vote. People stand today on the ground won by people yesterday, it is a debt we owe.

Via Facing South:

Greyhound Cuts Affect Rural and Small-Town African Americans

I blogged recently on how the Greyhound bus line is cutting stops to small towns all across the country, including much of the Southeast. This site has a list of all the known towns to lose their stops so far (and it won’t end here, as Greyhound says their “streamlining” program is only 62 percent complete). The cuts, it seems, will weigh heavily on rural and small-town African Americans, particularly in the Black Belt cutting across Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and other states. It will certainly have a disproportionate effect on black passengers in North Carolina. (Click here to listen to a report on the Greyhound cuts from North Carolina Public Radio.)

Ten North Carolina towns are losing their Greyhound stops: Dunn, Hamlet, Hickory, Mount Airy, Raeford, Red Springs, Rockingham, Spindale, Wadesboro, and Wingate. Eight of these ten towns have African-American populations well above the state average (ranging from 25.1 percent in Spindale to 56.6 percent in Wadesboro). Those eight towns together are 37.6 percent African-American (compared to a state average of 21.9 percent).

Since the effect of the lost stops is greatest in smaller, more isolated places with fewer transportation options, I think it’s significant that the typical loser in Greyhound’s effort at greater efficiency is a small town with relatively large numbers of African Americans.

Moreover, it might be a slight public-relations problem that one of the other two towns (the only ones with lower than average numbers of black citizens) is Mount Airy. In case you didn’t know, this is the home town of Andy Griffith and the model for the fictional Mayberry, widely perceived as the archetypal American small town.

Archetypal white small town, that is -- African Americans make up only 8.1 percent of its population, though I think you’d guess zero percent based on the tv show.

Timothy Mays was a former Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worker. He became famous to the world on March 7, 1965 in Selma, Alabama. Mays was among the civil rights marchers who set out that day to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were beaten and tear gassed by Alabama State Troopers. News cameras were there when a State Trooper clubbed and knocked down Mays, who was carrying an American flag, which he kept aloft throughout the entire violent episode of the attempted march. "A trooper knocked me down, but I wouldn't drop the flag," he said. "I held on to it. My intention was to keep that flag until I died." Despite offers to buy the American flag for as much as $50,000, Mays would not sell it for any price. Instead, he promised to donate the flag to the Selma-Montgomery Historic Trail Interpretive Center now being built in Lowndes County.

Timothy Mays died on Wednesday, July 6, at 5:23 a.m. from complications relating to his injuries in a car crash two years ago. He was sixty-one years old.

Timothy Mays was born in White Hall, in Lowndes County, Alabama. His mother, Mary Francis Mays, was a pillar of the Civil Rights Movement in Lowndes County. Timothy Mays was a SNCC worker in Mississippi and then went on to work in Pike, County in Troy, Alabama, where US Representative and former SNCC Chairman John Lewis is from. Mays worked in the Tuskegee Institute Community Education Project (TICEP) while a student there. Mays was also a member of the Black Panthers community self defense unit, where he served as co-chairman of security operations, formulating plans concerning the defense of homes in case of attack by the Ku Klux Klan.

Targeted by Klansmen to be murdered, Mays was shot at on a number of occasions. Timothy Mays worked to make sure Tent City inhabitants got fed and helped them find new housing. Tent City was a settlement on Black-owned property, near Route 80 in Lowndes County, formed in 1965 for sharecroppers who were kicked off their land for voter registration activity. He also worked on other, similar projects to help Blacks who were evicted from their land.

Timothy Mays was a close and trusted friend of Stokely Carmichael. Between the time that Carmichael left SNCC in 1967 and when he moved to Africa in 1969, he made secret return trips to Lowndes County. When he came into town, Carmichael always traveled with Mays. While they were both in SNCC together, Carmichael regularly deposited copies of his papers with Mays for safekeeping.

Timothy Mays represented himself in civil rights lawsuits on a number of occasions and won each time. During the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, there were student demonstrations at Alabama State University in Montgomery. Governor Wallace ordered Mays expelled from Alabama State for his participation in the demonstrations. Timothy Mays won a suit on his own behalf to be readmitted into the university, where he subsequently finished his Bachelors degree. More recently Timothy Mays represented himself in a discrimination suit after he was fired from Alabama Bureau of Tourism. Mays won, getting his job back and was awarded back pay, which he had not received before his death. After he won his job back, Mays was transferred to the Alabama Bureau of Tourism and Travel, where he was working until this week.

Former Lowndes County, Alabama SNCC worker Scott B. Smith said, "Timothy was a man before his time in Montgomery." Mays did not believe that the Black church establishment in Montgomery had the interests of the people at heart. He frequently came up with his own ideas for civil rights work, which he pursued independently. When Hyundai was looking for a factory location in the South, it was Mays who spoke with the company's president and convinced him to put the plant in Montgomery. The state of Alabama held a banquet honoring Mays for his contribution to improving its economy.

"Timothy was a walking historical dictionary who pursued civil rights even until his death," Smith said.

FUNERAL INFORMATION (UPDATE):

• Funeral services will be held on Wednesday, July 13, 2005 at Bell's Funeral Home in dowtown Haynesville, AL (near the post office). Viewing of the body will be from 10-11 a.m.
• After the fueral there will be mixing and some food (prepared by Timothy Mays' mother, Mary Francis Mays), at the White Hall City Hall and Community Center.

~

This obituary was based on interviews with Scott B. Smith and Linda Dehnad and the following news reports:

• Civil rights activist Mays dies at age 61 (Montgomery Advertiser)
• Timothy Mays: Civil Rights Activist Dies at Age 61 (National Park Service)

View recent video of Timothy Mays speaking about Bloody Sunday here.

UPDATE 7/14/05: Additional details about Tent City (general location and year of formation) added in paragraph four.

CORRECTION 8/4/20: This post originally stated that Timothy Mays' mother lived in Tent City. His sister, Barbara, has informed me that this is incorrect. Neither their mother nor others in their family lived in Tent City, though Timothy Mays worked with the residents who lived there.

CORRECTION 8/7/20: I have two more very belated corrections, originally submitted by Timothy Mays' daughter Timothea Mays-McCall in 2006. This post originally stated that Timothy Mays was a member of the Black Panthers in Lowndes County, AL. Though he was close friends with Stokely Carmichael, who led the Black Panthers, Mays himself was not a member. This post also originally stated that Timothy Mays worked for and sued the Department of Transportation. He worked for and sued the Alabama Bureau of Tourism, not the Department of Transportation. I also had incorrectly published Timothy Mays' time of date and time of death as June 8, 2005 at 8:00 a.m. He died on June 6, 2005 at 5:23 a.m.

I apologize to the Mays family for these errors and for not having corrected them when I first received notice of them.

MISSISSIPPI TRIED TO RALLY SOUTHERN NEIGHBORS TO SHARE SPY FILES

JAY HUGHES, Associated Press Writer

(03-18) 14:24:14 - 1998

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) -- Even as the tide of civil rights swelled in the late 1960s, Southern states linked forces to mount a unified front against integration.

Documents in the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission files viewed Wednesday shed light on the short-lived Interstate Sovereignty Commission and the quest its creators envisioned.

According to minutes, the interstate commission was organized May 4, 1968, at the Monteleone Hotel in New Orleans. Representatives from the sovereignty commissions of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi were present, as was a politically connected lawyer from Georgia. . . .

From the beginning, records show, Southern sovereignty commissions cooperated with other states' and federal investigators, exchanging files on spying victims that often mixed fact and fiction. They also collaborated on strategies to undermine civil rights legislation and swapped propaganda ideas.

The interstate commission's purpose was defined in minutes of its second meeting, held the next month in Jackson. Eight aims were listed, including: ``explore possible areas of cooperation and coordination in the work of the separate commissions,'' cooperate in lobbying and filing anti-integregation litigation, ``exchange information for state use'' and ``gather and exchange information concerning high school and college campus activities in regard to Communistic influences, narcotic traffic, subversive activities and pornographic literature.''

The charter interstate members were ambitious, vowing to ``explore possibilities for encouraging establishment of similar organizations in other states with immediate emphasis on states where such organizations have been allowed to lapse.''

That Mississippi led the interstate effort isn't surprising. Documents show the state's sovereignty agency, established in 1956, was a template for the Louisiana and Alabama commissions, established in 1960 and 1963 respectively.

``Congratulations on forming a Sovereignty Commission in Alabama!'' Erle Johnston, a Mississippi Sovereignty Commission director, wrote to Eli Howell, tapped to run Alabama's agency.

``We both agree there will be many areas in which the commissions of both states can work together,'' Johnston wrote after Howell visited the Mississippi offices to see how things were done.

(Whole thing.)

The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission was such an inspiration to segregationists in Alabama that Alabama went ahead and started its own Sovereignty Commission, modeled on Mississippi's. All involved were quite pleased.

Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Records

SCR ID # 99-25-0-6-1-1-1

Mississippi Department of Archives & History

http://www.mdah.state.ms.us