Hungry Blues

Yesterday Circuit Judge Marcus Gordon announced that he is rescheduling Edgar Ray Killen's trial from April 18 to June 13 (via Neshoblog). "I'm concerned with his ability to come to court," Gordon said.

And besides there's a lot of stuff to do before Killen goes to trial.

Gordon said, in addition to the defendant's condition, a lot of other things need to be done, including arranging hotel rooms for witnesses and having jury questionaires filled out, returned and reviewed by attorneys.

We wouldn't want all those professionals on the court staff and in the lawyers' offices to have to work too hard. District Attorney Mark Duncan isn't too worried, though. He told Judge Gordon,

"We'll be ready unless something unforeseen happens."

When Killen was arraigned in court in January, there was a bomb threat that cleared out the Neshoba County Courthouse for thirty minutes. At the time I emphasized how such incidents are part of a long history of domestic terror that is geared towards subduing African Americans. Such terror has always served an equally important purpose: to scare whites out of acting justly.

I'm beginning to think Judge Gordon was the intended audience of that bomb threat, as much as anyone else was. I know, I know . . . It might have just been a senseless prank. Somehow I doubt it, and regardless of who made the threat there does seem to be something making Judge Gordon lose his resolve to hear this case. Or maybe he never had that resolve in the first place. If all this sounds paranoid, let's just start asking questions about why it's taken until 2005 to come even this close to such minimal forms of restitution. But now I digress, since I've already said plenty about that.

I took that giant mush called "Some Links" and divided it into subject areas. This also gave me the chance to fix a few links whose paths had changed since I first posted them, drop a few extraneous things, and add a bunch of links, mostly elections and voting rights related, that I'd put up on No Stolen Democracy. Also added in the Elections section are things that should have been in my mix of links a long time ago, like The Sentencing Project and VotersUnite! Note that for the most part, the link collections are not intended to be at all comprehensive: they are generally things that I've found while researching specific posts on this site or that I consider essentials.

Incidentally, I am not posting current material on No Stolen Democracy. At present, I am maintaining that blog only as an archive of materials relating to the grassroots movement that led to Senator Barbara Boxer joining Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones in her objection to the counting of Ohio's electoral votes on January 6, 2005. If there's anyone out there with some server space who'd like to host the site and save me the monthly fee on typepad, please get in touch.

My one sad discovery in doing this bit of site maintenance is that We Were The Heart of the Struggle: Women in the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement now seems to be gone from the Sage Colleges website. This was a wonderful senior thesis, consisting of oral histories from female participants in a corner of the Movement that tends to be associated almost exclusively with charismatic, male leaders. If you had the foresight to download the files or you figure out before I do how to find cached versions of the files on the Google servers or elsewhere, please email me or comment on this post. I've emailed the professor who is listed on what I think remains of the department site that used to host the thesis, so perhaps I'll get a hold of it that way or possibly even get the department to put the thesis back online.

I've been reorganizing the links in my sidebar. Things may get a little messy over there while I publish the new layout.

Last weekend the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice held a conference on historical injustices, restitution, and reconciliation. Things started off on Thursday with a session led by Rita Bender, widow of Michael Schwerner, and David Dennis, former field secretary for CORE. Their subject was the impending trial of Edgar Ray Killen, who has been charged with the murders of Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman.

Rita Bender hopes people will talk when Edgar Ray Killen finally walks into a Neshoba County courtroom to face murder charges for the deaths of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss., more than 40 years ago.

She hopes they will talk about racism, atonement, and why ''good folks" don't confront evil. She hopes they talk about the many unpunished politicians and police officers who encouraged men like Killen to terrorize their black neighbors.

She hopes. But she's not sure it will happen.

''If having this trial can allow that discussion, then the trial is worth having," said the widow of Michael Schwerner, who was killed along with Andrew Goodman and James E. Chaney in Philadelphia, Miss. in 1964.

But if it's about a small town burying its bloody past and polishing its image, forget it. ''We don't say that we're past all that simply by convicting one crazy old man. . . ."

The Neshoba County district attorney trying Killen's case today says it's unlikely anyone else will be charged with shooting the men and burying their bodies on a muddy farm. But the killers were undoubtedly part of a larger conspiracy, Dennis said. ''It was the culture that existed in the country at that time."

The FBI did not protect black and white activists, who left northern states and southern hometowns to register voters during ''Freedom Summer," he said. The agency did not move quickly to find the workers' bodies, and local politicians accused the civil rights movement of staging the men's disappearances to gain sympathy.

Bender said that many of the local police were Klansmen, and that they exchanged information with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which was formed to resist integration and the looming Voting Rights Act of 1965.

When commission files were finally made public in the late 1990s, lists of civil rights workers' cars, license plate numbers and addresses including hers and her husband's were revealed, she said.

The government spied on activists and threatened those who helped them, she said. Sharecroppers who registered to vote were forced from their land; many who registered also lost their jobs and homes.

''They were the white-glove counterpart of the Klan," Bender said of the officials.

If Killen lives to see trial (via Neshoblog), and if he is actually convicted of his crimes, the small moral victory will convince many that we have finally arrived at the just conclusion of a shameful chapter in our history. You will hear many comments like this one, for example, at Neshoblog. As Bender and Dennis (and Steve Schwerner) explain, the responsibility for the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—and for the widespread fascist terror against African Americans and their allies that was the status quo in Mississippi—extends far beyond Ray Killen's role in these matters. The roots of that terror run deep into the state's infrastructure, and the hanging tree was watered by collusion from the Department of Justice and members of the US Congress.

The current Republicans, and the spineless Democrats who do not meaningfully oppose them, depend on a new, 21st century conspiracy of silence on race. Racist politicians refrain from race baiting, a token number of historic racial murders are finally "solved," the President, whose policies show nothing but contempt for communities of color and low-income people, surrounds himself with Latinos and African Americans.

We are led to believe that the conversation on race is over because it has been artfully excised from the public sphere by Karl Rove and his enablers, the DLC. And if a certain African American leader discusses race and Bush policies in the same breath, the Thought Police IRS is called out to gag his public speech with an audit of his organization. And if Bush and Co. can keep Julian Bond and the rest of us quiet just a little longer, Ward Connerly and his ilk will get their race data collection bans passed to compliment the quieter disappearances of data on discrimination already underway [pdf].

In the present focused blogosphere the Boston Globe report on Rita Bender and David Dennis' talk at Brown University is already ancient history, but their analysis of the Killen trial is far from yesterday's news.

Thank you Nathan Newman for stating it clearly:

why don't they [The New York Times] emphasize the ONLY issue where conservatives want "states rights", which is the traditional area of supporting discrimination by state governments without interference by federal courts. An enterprising reporter would actually go down to the conservative agenda and, by process of elimination of those areas where the GOP supports federal power, reveal that gutting the 14th Amendment's commitment to non-discrimination if [sic] the only "principled" federalist position by the conservative movement.

He is talking about this article concerning the Schiavo case. You can read Nathan's more detailed version of why this is so here.

I didn't have time to do any blogging last Sunday, when it was the fortieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Now we're in the lead-up to the fortieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery March, so this post is still timely. When I wrote about the events surrounding the March earlier this year for the state of Hawaii, I noted that the marchers who set out to cross the Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965 were not only marching for voting rights. The marchers wanted justice for Jimmy Lee Jackson, who was shot by an Alabama State Trooper during protests in Marion, Alabama on February 18, 1965. Al Turner was one of the leaders of the marchers who were attacked on the Pettus Bridge in Selma and was a participant in the protests in Marion the night Jimmy Lee Jackson was murdered. Turner recalled:

[A]fter Jimmy was killed we was infuriated to the point that we wanted to carry Jimmy's body to George Wallace and dump it on the, on the steps of the capitol. We had got about like the white folk are. We had determined or decided that we were going to get killed or we was going to be free. And be frank about it. And all of us just about felt that way. So we had intended to do everything we could so we was mad, I guess you’d say, and we said that we would take Jimmy down and just put his casket on the doorsteps of the capitol. . . . Other people by that time had been killed I think. Reverend Reeves was dead at that time when the march really came off. But . . . Jimmy was the spark plug of the whole thing . . . 

(Albert Turner, filmed interview for Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965 [PDF 32KB], Blackside, Inc., 5-6)

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference's (SCLC) James Bevel understood the potency of the protesters' grief and anger and encouraged them to channel it towards their broader goals.

you have to give people a honorable means and context in which to express and eliminate that grief and speak decisively and succinctly back to the issue. Otherwise your movement will break down in violence and chaos. . . . agreeing to go to Montgomery was that kind of tool that would absorb a tremendous amount of energy and effort and . . . keep the issue of disenfranchisement before the whole nation. 

(Reverend James Bevel, filmed interview for Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965 [PDF 48KB], Blackside, Inc., 10)

And the protesters succeeded in doing just what James Bevel had hoped, in no small part because of the violent reprisals of the State Troopers on the March 7 attempt to cross the Pettus Bridge. The SCLC's Andrew Young's recollection:

By an extraordinary coincidence, an extremely well-publicized documentary of the World War II war crimes trials, Judgment at Nuremberg, had been scheduled for broadcast on national television on March 7. The film was interrupted several times to interject updates and replays of the violence in Selma, and many viewers apparently mistook these clips for portions of the Nuremberg film. The violence in Selma was so similar to the violence in Nazi Germany that viewers could hardly miss the connection. The news film of the beatings on the Pettus Bridge produced such strong national and worldwide revulsion that prominent people from all over the country, both white and black, dropped whatever they were doing and rushed to Selma to join our demonstrations. Church groups also responded immediately; so did our friends in the labor unions. But most touchingly, many ordinary individuals, whose names we will never know, came down simply out of a personal sense of commitment. 

(Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America, 358.)

The events in Alabama in March, 1965 provided the necessary momentum for one of the greatest victories in the Civil Rights Movement—passage of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.

But what about Jimmy Lee Jackson? The trooper who shot him was James Bonard Fowler. He is alive and well in Geneva, Alabama. Fowler has never been questioned by the FBI about Jackson's death. Fowler has never been questioned by anyone. For the first time ever, he has agreed to be interviewed by a journalist, John Fleming, editor at large at the Anniston Star in Alabama. The interview appears in the latest Sojourners Magazine and in the Star.

That night at Mack’s Café, Fowler says, "I don’t remember how many times I pulled the trigger, but I think I just pulled it once. But I might have pulled it three times. I didn’t know his name at the time, but his name was Jimmy Lee Jackson. He weren’t dead. He didn’t die that night. But I heard about a month later that he died. . . ." 

For Fowler, the killing was simply self-defense.

"Jimmy Lee Jackson was not murdered," he says. "He was trying to kill me. I have no doubt in my mind that, under the emotional situation at the time, if he would have gotten complete control of my pistol, he would have killed me or shot me." This is the point he wants to make, the reason he wants to talk. Fowler does not fear indictment. "I don’t think legally I could get convicted for murder now no matter how much politics they got ’cause after 40 years they ain’t no telling how many people is dead," he says.

Al Turner's account of what happened the night of February 18, 1965 differs a bit from the witnesses quoted in Fleiming's article. But Turner's version of the story is more detailed and seems more rooted in the entire night's events and therefore seems the most believable. In Turner's telling, responsibility for Jackson's murder lies with more people than just James Fowler:

the whole town was surrounded that night by . . . auxiliary policy, State Troopers, Sheriffs and everybody who wanted to come in, really who felt like beating folk up. We went around the side of the church in an effort to get back into the church. Some of us tried to go back in the front door and some of us just went where we could, because as we moved they… they also moved. They was whipping us as we went. . . . Billy clubs was broken on people's head. And uh, I got in the back door of the church and quite a few of the people did, but Jimmy Jackson was not able to make it back in the church. He went down the hill below the church into a small cafe. And then immediately his grandfather was hit in the back of the head with a stick, a Billy club, and his skull was bust, his head was burst . . . . Mr. Cagey Lee we called him, and he went to have Jimmy to carry him to the hospital. . . . Jimmy was kind of disturbed at the condition he was in, and he kind of panicked . . . . [s]o he immediately tried to rush out forgetting about what was going on, and take his [grand]father to the hospital. And as he attempted to go out of the door of the small cafe that they were in . . . these troopers met him and forced him back into this building. And of course, Jimmy kind of insisted that he wanted to carry his daddy to the doctor, uh, his grandfather, and . . . they insisted that he did not go. . . . they uh, ganged him simply and physically . . . subdued him and put him on the floor of the cafe and there where they started to whip him up and beat him up pretty bad on the floor of the cafe there. And his mother was in the cafe also. She had come down with her daddy. And she just couldn't stand it no longer, so she took . . . a drink bottle and tried to knock the people up off of her son, because they were going to kill him right there on the floor it appeared. When she hit them, then they knocked her out, and . . . then they took Jimmy and pinned him against the walls of the building and uh, at close range they shot him in the side. Just took the pistol and put it in his side and shot him three times. . . . then they ran him out of the . . . front door of the cafe. And as he run out of the door, the remaining troopers or some of the remaining troopers were lined up down the sidewalk back toward the church . . . he had to run through a corridor of . . . policemans standing with billy sticks. And as he ran by them they simply kept hitting him as he kept running through. And he made it back to the door of the church, and just beyond the church he fell. And of course he was picked up at that point and carried to the hospital. [H]e was carried to the Marion Hospital here in town, and he stayed there about an hour or so before, and nobody would wait on him . . . then he later was taken to the hospital in Selma, where he did receive services. Probably if he had been waited on properly here, his condition would not have been this he may still have died, but it's only speculation. But they did not wait on him. And he… he was probably an hour or two or more probably 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning before he really received . . . medical services after he had been uh, shot and beaten to death. And he was, some people feel that maybe he… he was beaten to death moreso than shot to death. The severe head wounds were pretty bad. But he still died from uh, whatever happened. (Albert Turner, interview for Eyes, 2-3.) 

John Flemming thinks Fowler has

a bristling kind of confidence when you consider events of the last few years. In early January, Mississippi authorities arrested a 79-year-old preacher named Edgar Ray Killen who, investigators say, helped organize the June 1964 murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney in Philadelphia, Mississippi. 

But Fowler knows that for every Edgar Ray Killen, Byron DeLaBeckwith, and Bobby Frank Cherry who gets prosecuted (after decades of living free), there are countless others will never be pursued in any way. In the the Mississippi Burning case, as I've already noted, Killen is only one of ten living suspects. There were originally twenty-one, nineteen of whom were charged in 1964 with conspiring to deprive the three civil rights workers of their constitutional rights (not with murder). In Al Turner's account, there is an unknown number of additional Alabama police (State Troopers? local officers?), as well as Marion Hospital staff, also implicated in the murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson. And we're still only talking about the murders in which the victims names have entered into the official histories and public tellings of Civil Rights Movement era atrocities. As bellatrys noted in her post about Bloody Sunday, more than 50 bombings took place in Birmingham, Alabama between 1947 and 1965, none of which were ever solved, earning that city its Bombingham nickname. Steve Schwerner, brother of slain COFO worker Michael Schwerner, is quick to remind us that

in the six weeks that FBI agents searched for the bodies [of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner], they uncovered the remains of 10 to 12 African-Americans, many of whom had been active in civil rights, and none of whom received national media coverage. 

And then there's all of the violence against participants in struggles that received far less coverage in the press, or in popular retrospection—for example, in St. Agustine Florida, Bogalusa, Louisiana, and Orangeburg, South Carolina. I'd say that Fowler and others like him know the odds against murder charges are pretty good.
            ***         ***         ***

In her post, belatrys took the Bloody Sunday anniversary as an occasion to meditate on how the Civil Rights Movement forced America to face, at least momentarily, its own problems with domestic terror. It just so happens that yesterday on The American Street David Neiwert posted "Our Little Osamas," discussing the US failure to address domestic terrorism. Neiwert focuses on right-wing extremist groups and "the ongoing ideological traffic between the mainstream right and its extremist counterpoint." I share Neiwert's concerns, but I also think it's worth amplifying the comment on Neiwert's post by Sparticus, who says:

The most current parallel of permissive/supportive law enforcement is also the oldest–usually described as police brutality, it is actually systematic racial and class warfare of terrifying dimensions. Rarely called terrorism, yet terrible to experience, institutionalized violence or malign neglect against minorities and poor is arguably so. 

I've written about some related matters, in The Southern Strategy of George W. Bush, a companion piece to my Selma to Montogomery/Voting Rights Act essay.

Other blogs on Bloody Sunday:
Pam talks about Bloody Sunday, the Voting Rights Act, George Bush's professed ignorance of it, racial profiling, and violence against gays and lesbians.

Sally Greene has an interesting post on the opinion by Judge Frank Johnson that set out the rules for the march from Selma to Montgomery.

bardcat was a high school senior in Alabama in March, 1965. His friend Ray was one of the marchers, while he, bardcat, did not march, though he has decided to participate in this year's re-enactment of the event.

Outside The Tent decodes Republican hypocrisies on civil rights, including pandering to homophobes, the Bush administration's abysmal record of civil rights enforcement, and its attempts to limit private right of action of voting rights violations.

I was glad I looked past the first couple of pages of Technorati hits on Bloody Sunday and found travel writer Fred Ferg's 2003 post, which begins with his drive along the route of the Selma to Montgomery march, but is mainly about his visit to an incarcerated friend in Yazoo City, MS.

Update:
Those quotations from Eyes On The Prize interview transcripts are via the Washington University in St. Louis Film And Media Archive, which houses them. A select number of the transcripts are available online as PDF files.

Ray Killen is the one person now being charged with the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Killen is one of ten still living who faced federal conspiracy to deny civil rights or other charges in the 1960s related to the murders of the three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi. The reputed Klansman is scheduled to go to trial on April 18.

Yesterday the 80 year old accused murderer suspect was doing some logging by himself.

The accident happened when a tree Killen had cut fell onto another one, Moran said. As Killen cut the supporting tree, the top tree fell onto his head and drove him into the ground. People nearby called for help.

"It kind of drove him in the ground like a pile driver," Moran [Killen's attorney] said. (Source.)

An ambulance responded to a call at 148 Brooks McDill Road in the Conehatta community, said Newton County Sheriff Jackie Knight.

A tree fell on Killen and shattered the femur in both legs, knocking him unconscious, officials said.

An ambulance and fire department units were dispatched at 3:15 p.m. Killen was taken to Laird Hospital in Union and then to Rush Foundation Hospital in Meridian and was still in “a lot of pain but was awake and lucid,” Knight said. . . .

Neshoba County District Attorney Mark Duncan said Thursday night from his home that a serious injury would impact the trial.

“We will just have to wait and see what the extent of his injuries are. We can be ready for trial at any time but obviously if it’s some kind of serious injury it may affect the scheduling of the trial,” he said. . . .

Jerry Edwards, Killen’s stepson, said that Killen was still in the emergency room at Rush at about 9 p.m., awaiting transfer to University Medical Center in Jackson.

Edwards said Killen was awake and alert.

“He was cutting trees and one had gotten stuck and he was cutting another tree to dislodge it. When it came loose it hit him in the head and knocked him to the ground,” Edwards said, breaking both legs. (Source.)

In the email I received about this incident last night, it was noted that this is oddly similar to when in 2001 Cecil Price died in an accident for which there were no witnesses soon after he began talking with Mississippi Attorney General Moore, who was considering bringing state charges against some of the men who had previously been charged with conspiracy. "If [Price] had been a defendant, he would have been a principal defendant. If he had been a witness, he would have been our best witness. Either way, his death is a tragic blow to our case," Moore said.

It is a noteworthy coincidence, FBI Director Robert Mueller was in Jackson, MS on his first visit to the state since he became head of the Bureau in 2001. The news reports do not provide clear explanation of Mueller's specific purposes for visiting Mississippi's FBI field office at this time.

The nine other men still living who have not been charged in the current case but who in the 1960s faced federal conspiracy to deny civil rights or other charges related to the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner are:

Jimmy Arledge - presently living, Meridian, MS
Sam Bowers - presently living, Central MS Correctional Facility
Olen Burrage - presently living, Philadelphia, MS
James Thomas "Pete" Harris - presently living, Meridian, MS
Tommy Horne - presently living, Meridian, MS
Billy Wayne Posey - presently living, Meridian, MS
Jimmy Snowden - presently living, Hickory, MS
Jimmy Lee Townsend - living
Richard Willis - presently living, Noxapater, MS

(List by courtesy of Arkansas Delta Peace & Justice Center.)

One should certainly ask why none of these men have been charged, but that is not precisely the question. Here's Steve Schwerner, brother of Michael:

reopening the case would mean more if Mississippi looked deeper into the conspiracy around the civil rights workers back then.

"I think there's no doubt that Killen was one of the organizers," Mr. Schwerner said. "The state of Mississippi had this Mississippi Sovereignty Commission which gave the [Ku Klux] Klan information on the whereabouts of my brother. I'd like to know what state legislators were involved. The FBI was close to many of the sheriffs in the South" (emphasis and link added).

Mr. Schwerner said the death of his brother made his family "icons" in the movement, but said that did nothing for the plight of blacks and the Civil Rights Movement. He said his father raised money for the groups his son was involved in, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress on Racial Equality.

The Civil Rights Movement has been watered down and packaged to the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr., and a handful of other leaders, Mr. Schwerner said. He said the actual movement was more broad-based and involved countless people whose names and faces we will never know.

When he was asked previously to comment on the charges against Killen, Steve Shwerner also noted that

in the six weeks that FBI agents searched for the bodies, they uncovered the remains of 10 to 12 African-Americans, many of whom had been active in civil rights, and none of whom received national media coverage (emphasis added).

If Ray Killen lives to see trial and the current Attorney General, Jim Hood, delivers an unambiguous conviction for murder, that will be justice meted out in the smallest of measures. And you can bet there will be proclamations far and wide about the end of a terrible chapter in our history. Unfortunately, this isn't history. Mississippi Goddamn.

FURTHER READING

While I haven't been blogging, I've still been reading blogs, so here's a rundown on some of the highlights.

From the latest additions to my blogroll
• I've linked to Yvette at Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast, but I didn't realize I hadn't blogrolled her until I started writing this post. Yvette's was running a near daily series of posts for Black History Month. Some of my favorites: High-tech Fruit and Strange Lynchings, Black Children without Borders, Gumbo.

• Also recently added is Big Mama's Joint. Big Mama just opened shop last month. It was good from the start, and now the she's turned the place into a group blog with Y-Factor and CSM. Both CSM and Big Mama have been writing about Maureen Jagmin, crusader for school resegregation in Chicago who got caught on tape saying just what she really thinks about "poor blackie." I didn't need to read it to believe it, but reading it is unbelievable... Anyway, they've got all sorts of stuff going on over there. Go check it out.

• A little less recent already (time flies...) is Marian's Blog. Marian's Blog is sort of a special place in the blogosphere because Marian is a little more worldly than most of us blogging out here.

A native of Washington, DC, Marian Douglas' professional experience includes gender, ethnicity and diversity, broadcast journalism, communication research, and post-conflict reconstruction.

She has worked in Africa, Europe and the Americas; her languages include French, Spanish and Italian and functional Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Macedonian. Ms Douglas is an observer member of ALNAP - the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action - an international forum for improving quality and accountability of humanitarian action, based in London, UK. In fall 2004 she was a plenary speaker during the 2004 European Social Forum at London's Alexandra Palace, and was a participant in the Joan Kroc Institute's November conference on women in conflict negotiation and U.N. Resolution 1325.

And there's more . . . There's really too much to try to list, but I'll mention a few things to give you some idea of her range. In January Marian had two posts about the popularity of David Duke in Russia, nicely illustrative of the symbiotic relationship between racism and antisemitism and the cross pollination of Eurpoean and American racisms. Sandra Dee died at about the same time as Hunter S. Thompson, and Marian was more affected by Dee's (aka Alexandra Zuck) passing. Marian's two most recent posts (at this writing) stand at the dizzying crossroads where the personal and the political, gender and race, the national and the international all intersect.

From elsewhere
• Via Sisyphus Shrugged, TBogg notes that David Duke was brought on as a guest on The O'Reilly Factor to discuss Ward Churchill. No More Mister Nice Blog provides some follow up.

• My friend Rebecca, who was my roommate 10 years ago, has collected a bunch of the evidence that discredits Ward Churchill's claims to Native American identity and his scholarship, which he produces with no academic credentials. Aside from being an utterly offensive and inauthentic voice of the left, he is a sham and and a con.

• I mention the David Duke appearance on the O'Reilly Factor because it's an indicator of the mainstreaming of white supremacy, which David Neiwart wrote about on The American Street last month.

• Via Sharp Tools, Nathan Newman discusses the Republican bill to raise the minimum wage. A new dawn of Liberal Republicans? Hardly. The bill will also license sweatshops, kill overtime, and ban state minimum wage laws.

Licensing Sweatshops: While a $1.10 per hour minimum wage increase by itself would help 1.8 million workers, Santorum includes a poison bill exempting any business with revenues of $1 million or less from regulation -- raising the exemption from the current $500,000 level.

The upshot: while 1.2 million workers could qualify for a minimum wage increase, another 6.8 million workers, who work in companies with revenues between $500,000 and $1,000,000 per year, would lose their current minimum wage protection.

Killing Overtime: It gets worse-- the 40-hour work week would be abolished and companies would not have to pay overtime if they cut hours the next week. The proposal is called "flex time", but workers would have no say in the matter. Their hours could be rearranged, upsetting child care and other weekly routines, and companies would no longer have the deterrent of having to pay overtime as a way to encourage giving workers a regular weekly schedule.

Banning State Minimum Wage Laws: But here's a kicker from a GOP supposedly dedicated to states rights. Santorum's bill would ban states from requiring employers to pay tipped workers with a guaranteed wage. Employers could pay tipped workers nothing and force them to live off tips, while states would be preempted from creating a higher wage standard for tipped workers.

(Whole thing.)

• While editing this post and checking some of the links, I noticed that Newman now has a roll call of the Republican House Members who voted yes on Santorum's bill.

The GOPers will now go home and tell their constituents that they voted to raise the minimum wage, but the Democrats wouldn't join them in a "thoughtful" compromise. This makes it all the more important to be ready in the future to respond in opeds and other venues to rebut those claims and nail each of these Senators for this vote AGAINST minimum wage workers, AGAINST overtime protections, and AGAINST tipped workers.

• Digby's Confessions Of An Old New Democrat is an excellent overview of the Democratic Leadership Council's disastrous realignment of the Democratic Party.

• Some people believe that their religious upbringing or the religious upbringing of their parents is merely a set of beliefs, to be accepted or repudiated. It takes a certain degree of privilege to not see one's religious background as part and parcel of the cultural context that shapes one's world view. I always find this set of blinders frustrating to discuss, so when I tried most recently, I got myself into a bit of a tiff with PZ Myers over at The American Street. Myers thinks I have a persecution complex and I think he's trading in some unexamined antisemitism to define himself as an athiest. You be the judge.

• The Real Cost Of Prison's Weblog covers news relating to mass incarceration. It is part of The Real Cost Of Prisons Project, an activity of The Sentencing Project that "brings together prison/justice policy activists with political economists to create popular education workshops and materials which explore both the immediate and long-term costs of incarceration on the individual, her/his family, community and the nation."

• Drop That Book! Here's A Gun, Instead. Riggsveda, the new kid on the block at Corrente, picked up one of those jaw droppers in the the Republican hypocrisy department: The FBI is not doing anything to prevent firearms sales to known terror suspects.

"We're in a tough position,'' an FBI agent told the New York Times. "Obviously we want to keep guns out of the hands of terrorists, but we also have to be mindful of privacy and civil rights concerns, and we can't do anything beyond what the law allows us to do."

Critics of the Bush administration have said that it has put the interests of gun owners before the advice of counter-terrorist officers because of an inbuilt sympathy for weapons enthusiasts. In particular, they pointed out that the former attorney general, John Ashcroft, had for many months prevented the FBI from matching its terrorist watch list against lists of gun buyers on civil liberties grounds.

Of course, a quick perusal of the venerable NRA's website fails to reveal any concerns on this issue at all, despite all their law and order blather about crime. But not to worry. Ashcroft's Patriot Act is still keeping us safe from dangerous readers at the library.

• I've been enjoying That Colored Fella's coverage of the Jeff Gannon story. There are too many posts to link, and Bloghorn doesn't seem to provide categories, so just head on over and start scrolling down. In one post where TCF discusses the right wing backlash over liberal bloggers who have covered this scandal that the mainstream media is ignoring, he responds to Slate writer Josh Levin's racist, sexist, and elitist "Rappers And Bloggers: Separated At Birth!" You can read my comments in the comments.

• Also in the right winger hypocrisy department:

They were livid over SpongeBob Square Pants' participation in a video advocating tolerance, and fuming about Buster the Bunny's visit to a lesbian household. So where's the outrage from the Christian right over the Jeff Gannon Affair? Despite a chunk of time having passed since the Gannon Affair was first uncovered, Christian-right organizations are still cloaked in silence. As of Feb. 24, there wasn't any news about the Gannon Affair available on the web sites of Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, or the Traditional Values Coalition. As best as I could determine, no special alerts about the Gannon Affair have been issued; and no campaigns have been launched to get to the bottom of the matter.

(From The Dispassion of the Christian Right by Bill Berkowitz, on Alternet.)

• Professor Kim and Negrophile are both providing links on the gruesome murder of Rashawn Brazell, an African American, gay man, in Brooklyn, NY. Kim features the comments of Karsh, who is asking why the press is not paying attention.

Should African-Americans still be surprised that in 2005, mainstream media still doesn't give a shit about talking about these kinds of incidents when a person of color is the topic? (Not so) surprisingly enough, even Gay.com turns up nothing when a search is done for Mr. Brazell (similar for Southern Voice and Queer Day, but the New York Blade does have a blurb about it.)

Both Professor Kim and Negrophile remind us that the press' silence on Rashawn Brazell resonates with its silence on Sakia Gunn. (Follow the link on Gunn's name for J.K. Jaffe's award winning Indymedia story.) Kim has details on the plea bargain in Sakia Gunn murder prosecution.

Well, no.

Giuliani helps raise campaign cash for Lott

February 22, 2005, 5:28 PM EST

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) _ When he was Senate minority leader, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott helped support New York City as it recovered from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said.

On Tuesday, Giuliani was in Mississippi to give Lott some political help, speaking at a luncheon that raised $200,000 for Lott's campaign fund.

"I'm here because he's a great leader for Americans," Giuliani said as he stood with the senator during a news conference.

(via Mississippi Political.)

1.

The hospice nurse checks again
The water temperature.
Swelling in the hands,
The legs, the sensitive feet,
My father in the lift device
Shows no discomfort,
Even beams a little,
Looking at me.
Fluorescent light in the poster frames.
Around a breezy field, silver coastline . . .
The patient closes his eyes
And moans as he is washed.

2.

Dream #2: I pull into the driveway
With a gift for the dying man.
Pink blossoms crowd the rose bush.
At this point in the story,
The sun-bleached, unlovely petals
Should already have littered the lawn
And disappeared. Why these clusters
Around the light post, why still
These flowers hiding the metalwork?
The neighborhood is busy with autumn raking.
Call and response of bamboo, plastic, steel.
The sun shines. The cicadas drone.

3.

An autumn drive, the suburb’s decorative elms and poplars.
Then the rural scenery, the foliage all around.
Fiery reds, greens edged with yellow,
The sky cloudless, without depth.
Then the look out point, the destination.
From the open car window, a view of the Helderbergs.
At the guardrail, a boy throwing stones into the treetops, below,
Then the clamor of beating wings, a flight of starlings
Rising, dome shaped, then taking off
In every direction, the air cold, the dying man tired.

4.

Frank’s Orchestra had three records, six songs

This is it, this next one

I mentioned in part III of this series that I can date the handwritten drafts of Long Days Short Nights because of a passage about Frankie Newton. I am posting that passage here, though it was not intended for publication. It is an unpolished prose sketch, written in one shot, to get the material down on paper. The passage begins with some garbled and embarrassingly sentimental sentences, which I omit. The first sentence in the omitted passage is "Nine years ago he stopped breathing," which dates the writings in 1963, since Frankie died in March of 1954.

[Prose sketch from Long Days Short Nights ms., summer or fall, 1963]

by Paul A. Greenberg

My first memory is not music but tennis. I met Frank when I was barely in my teens. I don't remember whether it was at a friend's house or at a record shop but he was looking for someone to play tennis with the next day. In my youthful exuberance I exaggerated my prowess and we arranged a date. You may recall that Newton was a big man and athletically well developed. After 5 minutes it was obvious that this was a tennis lesson not a game. Newton: "It's a good thing you are nice because you sure ain't a tennis player." He invited me to the club he was working in. My memory fails but I believe it was in the Fenway in Boston. I do remember Vic Dickenson and Horsecollar Williams and Pete Brown were in the band. And I do remember that it swung. Lord it swung. I brought my clarinet but Frank said no he would not be embarrassed but I might be if my playing was equal to my tennis. He was right. During the next few years I saw Frank every time he was in Boston which was frequently. I learned a lot of music by the osmosis of listening. We established a man-boy relationship that was fatherly without being paternal, brotherly without being filial. We explored sports, books, politics and mostly people. I learned how to listen, doubt, and feel. I learned much about being human and some of the anguish of being negro.

I first became aware of the problem of friendships "across the wall" when we were walking in an area where Frank felt we were not welcome. He asked me to walk half a block behind him. I asked him why the parade? He said if we were jumped I should run like hell. I had thought about his being paranoid then. It was later that I found out there was wisdom in his approach. I still don't know if I would have run like hell or not.

The summer of my 17th year I arrived in N.Y. with 65 cents, a clarinet which I played at best poorly, and the ill fitting clothes I had on and presented my self to Newton as his new roommate—uninvited. He goddamned me and told me to go home but took me in. Times were tough. Frank's jobs were infrequent but we shared what he had. I remember some of the dates. Some of the people who played those dates were Sandy Williams, Pete Brown, Art Hodes, [Bill?] Pemberton, Pops Foster, Hank D'Amico, Ike Quebec, Roger Ramirez, Frank Orchard, Bob Casey. The places? Webster Hall, a club in the Bronx, organization dinners in Brooklyn. What was the music like? Moody! Some nights it was terrible, a fight all the way. Others it swung. By now Frank was playing the flugelhorn. It's a shame we don't have records. He played it with love and what music. The horn had belonged to Boston friend, Doc Kiley who died in the army and left it to Frank who treasured the friendship and the horn. Several years later a fire destroyed the apartment and in the remains he found a twisted piece of the horn which he made into a piece of jewelry which hung around his neck. What are the real memories? I learned about girls, drinking and fun. I found out what shuffling meant. I learned anti-conformity. Some of the memories are clear. I can't always distinguish what I saw from what I heard. There were three neighborhood youngsters, brothers. Frank called these little toughs Big Jazz, Little Jazz and No Jazz. He taught the kids in the neighborhood. He was always puzzled by the fee question. He felt playing was a good discipline. On the other hand he said, "How much do you charge a note." His attitude was that any kid that wanted to learn had a right to a good teacher. He was a great teacher even if the lessons were spasmodic and on a whimsical basis.

(This prose sketch was previously published in "The Search For Frankie Newton," by Jennifer Wagner, in The Historical Society of Washington County, Virginia Bulletin, Series II, No 39a, 2002.)

So I said I was going follow my Miscounting Prisoners post with two more posts, to make a three part series for Black History Month. I've been working on Part 2 on and off, but I got into my Hungry Blues series (I, II, III), which has it's own relevance for Black History Month. I'm beginning to wonder if I'll finish the Miscounting Prisoners series before February is up, though there is still the weekend... Anyway, no matter, since explorations of Black history should always spill out over the bounds of the official twenty-eight days .

In 1994 my father spoke during the week of Martin Luther King Day at Temple Gates of Heaven, a Reform synagogue in Schenectady, NY. In his speech, he commented on Black-Jewish relations in a way that illuminates his own relationships with Black folks.

I don't intend to raise the question of Black-Jewish relations in part because I think it has been addressed to little avail at length by our community and in part because I think what I will raise speaks to the question in a more meaningful way than the usual discussion that tries to rekindle a better past that I personally don't think ever existed. . . .Simply put we who are conscious and actively Jewish live within two cultures Jewish and American. Our effort individually and collectively is to find a place of comfort and ease so that we can have both.

Let me say quickly and emphatically right here so that there is no misunderstanding. The Jewish American experience and the Black American experience are not the same nor can we find an easy equation between the two. I am indicating that we share this relationship to America. We want our own identity and we want to participate fully in our country's bounty and its decision making.

In the same speech, my father recalled the experience that first made him clearly aware of his Jewish identity and first made him conscious of living in two cultures.

I don't remember whether I was seven or eight but the scene is vivid in the feeling part of my memory. We were living in Taunton, Massachusetts. Until that day (it must have been summer because I wasn't in school) I was only vaguely aware of being Jewish. I had heard the family stories, I was somewhat embarrassed by my paternal grandmother's accent and I loved Bible stories especially the Exodus tale.They were starting a baseball game. Sides were being chosen. I stood there expecting to be chosen around fourth or fifth. I was realistic about my ability. I wasn't the best but I was far from the worst. I made up in determination what I lacked in size. While waiting in pleasant expectation lightning struck. "Do you want Jewboy? I don’t want him on my side." It took several seconds for me to realize he was talking about me. JEWBOY! JEWBOY! JEWBOY! The word crashed through my being. My insides were raw with pain. "I am an American," I screamed in a tearful combination of fear and rage. "Jewboy!" " Jew cry baby!" "Mockie!" Christkiller!" "Scram, Jews can't play baseball." I stood my ground and yelled the most meaningful words I could find, "it's a free country!" I don't know who threw the fist blow but a general melee ensued. I was badly bruised and I would like to believe several of my tormentors carried home some effects of my frantic and violent surge of energy.

In the 1930s and 1940s antisemitism was still quite overt in the US. My father's tormentors may not have understood much about the culture he came from, but they stood ready to keep him out of theirs. Dad had a number of stories like this one, lessons in being on the outside. The most developed one, and the most fully fictionalized, is "Lonesome Blues", the story I posted in September, named after the song [RealPlayer] by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. In "Lonesome Blues," the high school years of a suicide jazz musician, Mo Bartel, closely mirror my father's.

The other live factor in my life was basketball. I was going to show them that a Jew could be as tough as anyone. I made the team by determination rather than skill. Years later I asked Tony Nucola, who was our coach, why he put me on his squad and he told me that any one who fought that hard to play was worth having on the team. I don’t know whether he did me a favor or not. I was always playing 9 men. The opposing 5 and our other 4.

This time around, he knows where he stands. His imaginative and intellectual powers are dominated by the activity of assessing boundaries, identifying gatekeepers and allies, and developing entry and exit strategies.

Do you remember my Tuesday to Saturday Blues? That's what it was all about. Keefe invited me on Tuesday and I had to wait until Saturday. I went and didn't over and over. I was sure they were putting me on. I would flunk the test and be the laughing stock of the school. They would remember I was Jewish and ask me to leave. One country indivisible with liberty and justice for all that crap and they would call me Jewboy and I would start a fight. I wouldn't know what to say. I hated popular music.On Saturday I walked up the hill to Keefe's house like a car with a couple of spark plugs out. By the time I got there I was shaking, inside my stomach felt like mush. Mrs. Riley, pretty, friendly, lovely Mrs. Riley answered the door and told me "the boys are down in the basement."

Eight boys looked like an army and sounded like two. I was trapped. Eight enemies of my privacy were looking at me, surveying me. I was searching for something to say when Keefe made it easy—easy like scaling Everest easy like dying. "Hi Mo. Guys this is the clary man I told you about Mo Bartel. Mo did you bring any sides?"

"Yeah, two my left and right." I made it. I was in and still breathing.

Someone shoved a coke in my hand and I was able to ward off questions about how long I was playing or who my teacher is when Keefe shouted above the din "let's get organized and start spinning some sides first one for Mo, Pops Armstrong's Lonesome Blues featuring Johnny Dodds on clarinet."

Love on first sound? Three minutes on another planet. I mean it hit me like where have you been all my painful life. This was what I felt. The truth head on. It cried without the tears showing, it screamed pain without being sent to the nuthouse. It was all about being alone, alone, alone.

He was in and still breathing but in is a state of mind and out was still where he was, and Johnny Dodds was talking about it and

After it finished I got up walked upstairs and out down the hill and with tears in my eyes I ran down the hill...

I am interested in this complicated process of Mo Bartel née Paul Greenberg's identification with African American culture—among other things, that it occurred, at least in the story, in a room full of white high school boys. They knew about Louis Armstrong's mid 1920s breakthrough, modernistic refashioning of New Orleans jazz. Mo didn't, but they seemed to think he would. In their eyes a Jewish clary man had a touch of the exotic and was automatically identified with jazz rather than the classical music he was learning to play. They wanted to entertain him or prove they were in the know.

I am interested in the story's rough hewn prose style and in how Mo Bartel, and his foil, the narrator, fit into the literature of American Jewish urban experience, which should be familiar to anyone who has read Nat Hentoff or other jazz literature, like Max Kaminsky's forgotten classic My Life in Jazz. But when looking at this story as a text about my father, there is something else to know. The drafts of it, along with the other sketches and segments for the novel Long Days Short Nights it was to be part of, are handwritten on the backs of copies of the flier at right (click on image to enlarge).

Presumably Dad was the organizer of the event: William Douthard (aka Meatball) was his very close friend from when he was working for the SCLC in Birmingham, Martin Luther King was his boss, and James Farmer was a close associate, whom he revered. I don't know how well Dad knew Constance Baker Motley, but they were both part the Civil Rights Movement community in New York. My family lived in Co-op Village and Dad was highly active in left organizations on the Lower East Side. So the flier has my father written all over it in more ways than one.

During some of his most direct involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, his inner life was preoccupied elsewhere. He didn't treat the political fliers as documents to save for posterity, but as surfaces on which to write and fictionalize his life—as if his committed activism was only the backdrop for a personal journey. Of course the two things were not really separable. In fact, the suicides in "Lonesome Blues" may well be precisely what underlies my father's participation in the Southern Freedom Movement. From "Lonesome Blues," first paragraph:

They will say he was only 37 years old no one knew he was sick that he left a wife and two children and 300 records behind. They will find out he was broke and remember he was the first whiteman to tour with Prince Kingsley.

In the summer and fall of 1963 Paul Greenberg was thirty-five years old and a one time aspiring jazz clarinetist; he had a wife and two daughters, and kept a sizable collection of records, a large portion of which were jazz. I said suicides, in the plural, because there are really two. There's Mo Bartel who seems to have taken his own life in a Chicago hotel room, and there's the journalist-narrator, whose method of narrative transmission spells a kind of professional suicide, a sacrifice of his means of publication in exchange for the hope that his revelation of Mo Bartel's inner life will see the light of day.

I don’t want the assignment. I wrote the Mo Bartel story 10 years ago and you didn’t print it. Enclosed is the carbon copy of the story filed with you then. Print it and buy all of his records with my check otherwise forget it. I won’t interview his wife or any of the guys he played with. Fire me—get a new Jazz Critic for our lousy magazine but I won’t do that kind of story.

The narrator dies a professional death so that the biographical Mo Bartel, whose music is already immortal, can have life after death.

At my father's funeral, my girlfriend, now the woman I'm married to, said it's a good thing he couldn't carry a tune: otherwise he wouldn't have done all this important political work. Lack of musical talent had much to do with it, but for him jazz was "a way of walking, talking. / Had it in his soul." His story in politics was the story of a lonely, Jewish high school kid in Brighton, Mass. who was catapulted by Johnny Dodds' clarinet into Frankie Newton's apartment in Union Square and into the Communist Party, the unions, SANE, and the Civil Rights Movement. The jazz life was a fading, youthful dream, and Dad was at a painful threshold, a moment just prior to when loss translates the past into nostalgia.

The final thing to note here is that I can date the handwritten draft material for Long Days Short Nights with assurance only because there is an extended passage about Frankie Newton that locates the manuscript in time. That bit of prose will make up part IV of this series.

ELECTION RIGGING 101
A National Teach-In

On the 2004 election and what we must do to restore democracy

With Bob Fitrakis
Ohio Attorney, Editor, Free Press of Columbus OH

with Lynn Landes, Jonathan Simon, Medea Benjamin, Larry Bensky, Butch Wing, Emily Levy

Jim March (Black BoxVoting), Kathy Dopp (US Count Votes), John Gideon, (VotersUnite!), Bob Kibrick, (VerifiedVoting) and many more!
scroll down for complete program listing
Saturday, Feb. 26th

10am - 4pm

1st Congregational Church

2501 Harrison St. Oakland

$10 suggested donation

please bring lunch

Program Overview

I. The Arc Of Justice: We've Been Here Before

* DVD excerpt: Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., "Martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement"
* Lynn Landes, journalist, "How America Used to Vote"
* John Gideon, VotersUnite!, "Analysis of HAVA Misinformation in the Press"

II. Voter Suppression

* DVD excerpt: "Columbus Ohio Election Day Footage", by Linda Byrket, http://www.votecobb.org/video/#video5
* Bob Fitrakis, Free Press (Columbus, Ohio), "The Taking of Ohio Prior to Nov. 2"
* Emily Levy, Project Coordinator for Richard Hayes Phillips, Ph.D., "Ohio--How the Election was Stolen"
* Warren Stewart, National Ballot Integrity Project, "Recounting New Mexico"

5 Minute Stretch
III. What Happened In 2004: Exit Polls - Were They Right?

* DVD excerpt: Susan Truitt, Ohio attorney
* Jonathan Simon, Alliance for Democacy, "The Edison/Mitofsky Report: The Bottom Line You Won't Hear on Nightline"
* Allyson Washburn, US Countvotes.org, "An Alternative Explanation for the Exit Poll Discrepancy: Fraudulent Vote Tallies"
* Larry Bensky, KPFA, "The Disappearing Media"

IV. The Age of the Machines

* Jim March, BlackBoxVoting.org, "How to Hack a Diebold Vote Tabulator"
* Wayne Madsen, journalist, "The Privatization of the Vote"

Lunch (45 Minutes)
V. Litigation

* Paul Lehto, Washington attorney, "Verifying Democracy 101: Sue First, Ask Questions Later"
* Bob Fitrakis, Free Press, "History of Moss v. Bush, the Sanctions, Future Legal Actions"

VI. Legislation

* Butch Wing, political director, Rainbow PUSH, "Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr.'s Constitutional Amendment Guaranteeing the Right to Vote"
* Bob Kibrick, Verifiedvoting.org, "Pending Federal Legislation for Electoral Reform"
* Sharon Cornu, Alameda County Central Labor Council, "Organized Labor and Election Reform"
* Medea Benjamin, Code Pink, "A Voters' Bill of Rights"

VII. Action

* Walter Riley, community activist, "Organize County by County, Precinct by Precinct"
* Lynn Landes, journalist, "A Paper Ballot is the Only Solution"
* Alan Dechert, Open Voting Consortium, "Open Source Code Machines"
* Kathy Dopp and Allyson Washburn, UScountvotes.org, "A Plan to Restore Democratic Elections by 2006"
* Open Microphone -- Share proposals and join in citizen action to reclaim electoral democracy

This Teach-In has been organized by the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club, http://democraticrenewal.us
and the MMOB (Mainstreet Moms Operation Blue), http://www.themmob.com.

For full program details, click here: http://www.wellstoneclub.org/involve/teachin.htm

If you plan to be attend, please click here to send an RSVP
(say Yes! in the subject line)

Help spread the word! Click here to download a PDF flyer you can print and hand out

Dan Ashby
e-mail: dan@redefeatbush.com
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