Hungry Blues

That previous post is the essay I mentioned a while back, which was commissioned by the state of Hawaii. Any day now, you should also be able to find it at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition–Hawaii website. My piece will be one of the items in the 2005 Souvenir Book. This year's theme is the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I was asked to maintain a relatively non-partisan tone for the purposes of government publication. Here's something else I wrote that deals with the same subject matter but expresses my opinions more directly.

I should probably say a word or two about the significance of Martin Luther King Day in my family. Unless you've been reading HungryBlues for a while or you've dug around in my "About" page or older posts (or unless you know me), you may not know that my dad worked for Martin Luther King. In 1962 and 1963, Dad was Special Assistant to the President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I've said elsewhere that my father devoted his life to strengthening American democracy. His work for Dr. King was a crucial influence on him and the power of that relationship has much to do with what I do here on this site and as an activist.

The passing of James Forman this past week makes it especially poignant that this year's Martin Luther King, Jr. commemoration dovetails with the 40th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery March and the Voting Rights Act. In his tribute to James Forman, Charles Cobb, Jr. said, "the southern civil rights movement of the 1960s is largely misunderstood." The little discussed disagreement between King and Forman over whether to make the march from Selma to Montgomery is an example of what I think Cobb meant. While Martin Luther King played the necessary game with federal authorities to get sanction—and protection—for the marchers, James Forman and others in SNCC argued against the march:

[I]t had become very clear to most of us that mass marches like the March on Washington and the Selma-to-Montgomery March had a cathartic effect. Their size created the impression that "the people" had made a show of power and changes would be forthcoming, but actually they served as a safety valve for the American system by taking the pressure off—pressure created by local activity. (James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 441-42.)

In the end, because they did not endorse the march, SNCC did not participate as a group, though members, including James Forman, marched as individuals in solidarity with—and to help protect from violence—the local people who were determined to make the long walk.

Through grassroots organizing SNCC sought to put power into the hands of oppressed people and break the local systems that hurt them. Martin Luther King and the SCLC's great success in bringing the brutality of Southern racism onto the evening news and into living rooms across America elicited the moral outrage and caused the embarrassment necessary to make Congress pass landmark legislation in 1964 and 1965. What many did not see then, and still do not see now, is how those horrific acts of violence are expressions of a racist system whose violence is much broader and much more devastating than what is depicted in the images that have become part of American historical lore.

A 21st century feature of the American racist system is the Bush administration's public relations strategies to sell destructive policies to the people that they hurt. The Armstrong Williams scandal has generated some conversation about this, and Rox Populi has posted another example today, this time coming directly from George W., himself:

The Social Security issue is an interesting issue when it comes to African Americans. After all, the life expectancy of African American males is a lot less than other groups and, therefore, if you really think about that, you have people putting money in the system that aren’t — families won’t benefit from the system. And, therefore, it seems to me to make sense, if I were a part of a group of people that were being disadvantaged by the Social Security system, that I’d at least like to have the opportunity to have some of the money I put in the system passable to my family.

In Bush-speak injustice is when people miss the chance to have their pockets lined with cash—as if it's a forgone conclusion that African Americans die younger than white Americans (via Rox Populi; also see this).

While I'm talking about understanding the Civil Rights Movement, I want to recognize veterans of the Movement whom I've had the good fortune to come to know and work with—all former members of SNCC. First off, I'll mention Marsha Joyner, who invited me to write my essay for Hawaii's MLK Commemoration. Please note that Hawaii's annual MLK Day events join the celebration of King's life with commemoration of the armed invasion and overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. In Marsha's words,

Not only are we paying honor to our host culture, we feel that this is a story that should be told. There are generations of people who live and work here in Hawaii that do not know either story or how they are the same. Both stories stem from the same root: the root of imperialism and racism.

Before I met Marsha, I was woefully unaware of the terrible history of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, one of the great shames of the United States. The other Civil Rights Movement veterans I'd like to mention here are Heather Tilsen Baum, Scott B. Smith, and Linda Dehnad.

When we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, let us celebrate the complexity of the man and what he stood for, as well as remember that the Movement was a mass movement with countless heroes, a band of sisters and brothers in a circle of trust.

Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena. Let us march on ballot boxes until the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs will be transformed into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.

Let us march on ballot boxes until the Wallaces of our nation tremble away in silence. Let us march on ballot boxes until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congress, men who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.

Let us march on ballot boxes until brotherhood becomes more than a meaningless word in an opening prayer, but the order of the day on every legislative agenda. Let us march on ballot boxes until all over Alabama God's children will be able to walk the earth in decency and honor.

—Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Montgomery, Alabama, March 25, 1965 [1]

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 states that “No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.” Its provisions outlaw poll taxes and literacy tests and set up the basis for enforcing equal access to voting. The Act was passed speedily on August 6, 1965, in large part because of the dramatic march from Sema to Montgomery, Alabama in March of 1965.

On February 17, 1965, police in Marion, Alabama murdered Jimmy Lee Jackson, a Black Vietnam veteran, as he attempted to protect his mother who was marching for the right to vote. His death was ignored by the general public, and the horrified community members and visiting activists were inspired to march from the seat of recent voting rights campaigns in Selma to the larger city of Montgomery. To leave Selma, the marchers had to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they were met by State Public Safety Director Al Lingo’s state troopers, on order from Governor Wallace to stop the marchers. With cameras from national TV news rolling, police drove back the peaceful demonstrators with beatings and teargas, one of the most violent reprisals of its kind, the infamous “Bloody Sunday.”

Andrew Young, former Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, recalled:

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. [2]

At the time, Reverend King was preaching in Atlanta. Like the others from around the nation, he immediately went to join the marchers. After two weeks of false starts, legal battles for proper federal protection of the marchers, and behind-the-scenes negotiations with the Johnson administration, the marchers set out once more. Led this time by King, along with other movement leaders, such as John Lewis and James Forman, they crossed the Petus Bridge with protection from newly federalized Alabama National Guardsmen. After five days of walking, they reached Montgomery unharmed.

On their arrival the marchers were 25,000 strong, and Reverend King delivered the speech from which I quoted in the epigraph, above, the same speech with these famous lines:

I know you are asking today, "How long will it take?" Somebody's asking, "How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?" Somebody's asking, "When will wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of Selma and Birmingham and communities all over the South, be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men?"

Somebody's asking, "When will the radiant star of hope be plunged against the nocturnal bosom of this lonely night, plucked from weary souls with chains of fear and the manacles of death? How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?"

I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because "truth crushed to earth will rise again." How long? Not long, because "no lie can live forever."

And, indeed, it was not long—a mere five months until the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which helped set the United States on a better course towards equality and freedom for African Americans and a better society for all.

The years following the Voting Rights Act are sometimes referred to as the “Second Reconstruction.” As with the first Reconstruction, following the Civil War, the destruction of racist institutions led to social change but was also met with significant resistance. In 1968, the US Civil Rights Commission found that African Americans were

improperly kept off of voting lists, given inadequate or wrong instructions at the polls, had their ballots wrongly disqualified and denied the equal opportunity to vote by absentee ballot. The Commission also found discrimination in the location of polling places and a failure to provide sufficient voting facilities. Racially segregated voter lists and polling places were also found.

The Commission found obstacles to African American political participation at all levels of the electoral process, including redistricting and at-large elections, obstruction of candidates, discriminatory selection of elections officials, and threats of physical and economic harm to politically active African Americans. [3]

Even though life for racial minorities in America has improved in many ways, such exclusionary tactics have not gone away: in the last two decades since the 1980s they have only grown more subtle. According to a recent report, issued jointly by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and People for the American Way, vote suppression in the late 20th and early 21st centuries includes:

• Challenges and threats against individual voters at the polls by armed private guards, off-duty law enforcement officers, local creditors, fake poll monitors, and poll workers and managers.

• Signs posted at the polling place warning of penalties for “voter fraud” or “noncitizen” voting, or illegally urging support for a candidate.

• Poll workers “helping” voters fill out their ballots, and instructing them on how to vote.

• Criminal tampering with voter registration rolls and records.

• Flyers and radio ads containing false information about where, when and how to vote, voter eligibility, and the false threat of penalties.

• Internal memos from party officials in which the explicit goal of suppressing black voter turnout is outlined. [4]

As problems for minority voters have persisted in many parts of the United States, there has been an ongoing conversation about what role the Department of Justice should play in enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Jeffrey Toobin covered the most recent developments concerning federal enforcement in The New Yorker this fall.

On October 8, 2002 . . . [t]he Attorney General had come forward to launch the Voting Access and Integrity Initiative, whose name refers to the two main traditions in voting-rights law. Voter-access efforts, which have long been associated with Democrats, seek to remove barriers that discourage poor and minority voters; the Voting Rights Act itself is the paradigmatic voter-access policy. The voting-integrity movement, which has traditionally been favored by Republicans, targets fraud in the voting process, from voter registration to voting and ballot counting. Despite the title, Ashcroft’s proposal favored the “integrity” side of the ledger, mainly by assigning a federal prosecutor to watch for election crimes in each judicial district. These lawyers, Ashcroft said, would “deter and detect discrimination, prevent electoral corruption, and bring violators to justice.”

Federal law gives the Justice Department the flexibility to focus on either voter access or voting integrity under the broad heading of voting rights, but such shifts of emphasis may have a profound impact on how votes are cast and counted. In the abstract, no one questions the goal of eliminating voting fraud, but the idea of involving federal prosecutors in election supervision troubles many civil-rights advocates, because few assistant United States attorneys have much familiarity with the laws protecting voter access. That has traditionally been the province of the lawyers in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division, whose role is defined by the Voting Rights Act. In a subtle way, the Ashcroft initiative nudged some of these career civil-rights lawyers toward the sidelines. . . . [5]

In these weeks following the 2004 presidential race, pundits have seen the extremely close election results as evidence of a wide range of divisions in our society. Depending on whom you read, the divide may be between religious and secular, Republican and Democrat, rich and poor, native and immigrant, or white and black. In Montgomery in 1965, speaking after the exhausting weeks of one of the more divisive struggles in the Civil Rights Movement, Reverend King had these words to say, which we would do well to keep close at heart:

Thus, the threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the Negro and the white masses alike resulted in the establishment of a segregated society. They segregated southern money from the poor whites; they segregated southern mores from the rich whites; they segregated southern churches from Christianity; they segregated southern minds from honest thinking; and they segregated the Negro from everything. That's what happened when the Negro and white masses of the South threatened to unite and build a great society: a society of justice where none would pray upon the weakness of others; a society of plenty where greed and poverty would be done away; a society of brotherhood where every man would respect the dignity and worth of human personality.

With thousands who had gathered before him in the name of justice and freedom, it was clear to Reverend King that “we are not about to turn around. . . . We are on the move now.” In his closing, King came back to his refrain: “How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We have come a great distance on that arc. Let’s keep moving.

Notes
[1] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Our God Is Marching On,” Speech, March 23, 1965. Full text available at:
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/prestapes/mlk_speech.html

[2] Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 358.

[3] Julian Bond and Ralph Neas, The Long Shadow of Jim Crow: Voter Intimidation and Suppression in America Today (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and People for the American Way, 2004), 15-16, http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=16367.

[4] Ibid. 3-4.

[5] Jeffrey Toobin, “Poll Position,” The New Yorker, September 20, 2004, http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040920fa_fact.

Additional Sources
Lisa Cozzens, "Selma," African American History, May 25, 1998, http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/selma.html.

James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1997).

John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery To Freedom, Sixth Edition (New York: McGraw Hill, Inc., 1988).

David J. Garrow, Bearing The Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., And The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage Books, 1986).

• January 14, 2005 Text of Letter from Reps. Conyers, Nadler, Scott and Jackson Lee to
  DOJ AG Ashcroft Requesting Appointment of Special Counsel to Investigate Ohio Voting Irregularities (pdf)
• January 13, 2005 Conyers Request Blackwell's Comments on Ohio Voting Irregularity Report (pdf)
• January 12, 2005 Text of Letter from Reps. Conyers and Waxman to
  GAO Comptroller Walker Requesting an Investigation into Long Lines at Polling Places (pdf)
• January 7, 2005 Ohio voting problems show need for election reform (pdf), Op-Ed by Congressman
  John Conyers Published in The Detroit News
• January 6, 2005 Congressman Conyers' Floor Statement Concerning the Electoral College Objection (pdf)
• January 6, 2005 Preserving Democracy:  What Went Wrong
  in Ohio (pdf) A Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff
• January 4, 2005 Text of Fundraising Letter from Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell (pdf) More info: http://www.bluelemur.com/index.php?p=528
• Eyewitness Accounts of Ohio Voter Disenfranchisement (pdf)

      
        

Sign the America Coming Together petition.

quote of note:
The case received national media attention, largely because two of the three victims were white, Schwerner believes. In fact, he said, 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. . . .

“When we talk about the heroes of the civil rights movement, most of the real heroes are people whose names we’ll never know,” he said. “They were people indigenous to the area, most of them black, most of them women, who were just doing what they had to do. A movement isn’t dependent on one person. It’s masses of people getting together and saying, ‘we’re not going to tolerate these conditions,’ and then doing something about it.”

January 13, 2005
Yellow Springs News
Yellow Springs, Ohio
By Diane Chiddister

In June 1964 Steve and Nancy Schwerner were vacationing in Providence, R.I., when they turned on the television news and saw that three civil rights workers were missing in Mississippi.

When Steve Schwerner called home and discovered that his little brother, Mickey, was one of the missing, he immediately knew Mickey was dead, although it took six weeks for the bodies to be discovered.

Last week a Mississippi preacher and alleged Ku Klux Klan member was arrested for killing Michael Schwerner and two other civil rights workers, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. In Neshoba County, Miss., Edgar Ray Killen, 79, was charged with three counts of murder after a grand jury ruled that sufficient evidence still exists to convict him. Killen is the first person charged with the killings, which galvanized the civil rights movement.

After 40 years with little movement in the case, Schwerner, a retired Antioch College dean of students, feels some gratification that Mickey’s alleged killer may be brought to justice, he said in an interview this week. But Schwerner also believes that Killen’s arrest in no way completely answers the larger and more complex question of why his brother was killed.

“There is a certain justice and reasonableness in having Killen indicted,” -Schwerner said. “But if that’s where it stops, the reasonableness dissipates. He didn’t act alone. And more importantly, what were the forces which allowed this to happen?”

Those forces, Schwerner believes, include the complacency of local, state and federal law enforcement agencies in a racist society, along with the possible complacency of the state and federal governments. And 40 years later, Schwerner feels troubled by the bigotry he still sees around him.
[click to continue…]

"This is going to be a whitewash. They are
going to use the most unrepentant racist as the scapegoat, leave the
others alone because they are more powerful, more wealthy and more
influential — and then move on." (Ben Chaney, brother of James Chaney, LA Times)

The news broke last Friday, January 7 that Klansman Ray Killen was arrested on murder charges for the 1964 slayings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi. This is a major step towards justice that will never be adequately served. There were at least nineteen people implicated in the murders. Until last week, no one has ever faced state murder charges or any other state charge. Commenting on the arrest, Rita Bender, widow of Michael Schwerner, said,

In many ways, those men were pawns . . . They were manipulated by a state apparatus that was determined
to preserve a racist society by whatever means. That doesn't mean they
are not individually liable for their acts, but there is a lot more
liability and a lot more responsibility than just them.

And so for me . . . the
importance of this case is to use it to talk about the result of racism
and state-sponsored terror. (emphasis added)

State-sponsored terror. It reaches fully into the present. The terror apparatus is part police and/or FBI and part civilian. Sometimes the civilian and law enforcement terror is coordinated, sometimes not. In the Neshoba County murder case, the three young men were first arrested by Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and his deputy Cecil Price—both Klansmen—and then later released into the hands the other Klansmen who murdered the civil rights workers. Among the civilian Klansmen, were at least two FBI agents, one of whom allegedly fired shots at Chaney.

It is not known whether the three were beaten before they were killed.  Klan informants deny that they were, but there is some physical evidence to the contrary.  What is known is that a twenty-six-year-old dishonorably discharged ex-Marine, Wayne Roberts, was the trigger man, shooting first Schwerner, then Goodman, then Chaney, all at point blank range. (FBI informant James Jordan, according to a second informant present at the killings, Doyle Barnette, also fired two shots at Chaney.)  The bodies of the three civil rights workers were taken to a dam site at the 253-acre Old Jolly Farm.  The farm was owned by Philadelphia businessman Olen Burrage who reportedly had announced at a Klan meeting when the impending arrival in Mississippi of an army of civil rights workers was discussed, "Hell, I've got a dam that'll hold a hundred of them."  The bodies were placed together in a a hollow at the dam site and then covered with tons of dirt by a Caterpillar D-4.

While the bodies were being buried, Price had returned to his duties in Philadelphia.  Around 12:30 A. M., Price met with Sheriff Rainey.  Given their Klan membership and the  close relationship between the two, it is almost imaginable that at that time Price did not relate, in full detail, the events following the release from jail of Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney.

At the CORE office in Meridian, meanwhile, staffers were growing increasingly concerned about the long overdue civil rights workers.  Calls inquiring about their whereabouts turned up no helpful information.  At 12:30 A.M., a call was placed to John Doar, the Justice Department's point man in Mississippi.  Less than a week earlier Doar had been in Oxford, Ohio warning Summer Project volunteers that there was "no federal police force" that could protect them from expected trouble in Mississippi.  Doar feared the worst.  By 6:00 A.M., Doar had invested the FBI with the power to investigate a possible violation of federal law. (Source.)

The pervasive reach of the terror mechanisms has a profoundly subduing effect on community members.

For many Americans, the silent complicity of Philadelphia
residents -- many knew the civil rights workers had been killed
while the FBI searched for them -- was almost as shocking as
the crime itself.

Local toughs taunted FBI agents and intimidated
journalists, and a climate of fear in the town insured that
those who spoke out against the murders were quickly silenced.

A white women who lost her Sunday School teaching job when
she criticized the murders compared the climate in the town to
Nazi Germany.

The incidents continue. Some of them get into the news, but to outsiders, catching them on one of the wire services, they seem like isolated incidents. This photo, at right, is outside the Neshoba County, Mississippi courthouse last Friday. The AP caption reads:

Neshoba County circuit judge Marcus Gordon, left, waits outside the
county courthouse as Mississippi Highway Patrol Trooper Eddie Hunt,
background, stands guard as lawmen investigate a bomb threat, Friday,
Jan. 7, 2005 at the courthouse. Moments earlier, Gordon presided at a
hearing where reputed Ku Klux Klan member Edgar Ray Killen was
arraigned on murder charges in the slayings of three civil rights
workers more than 40 years ago. After a thirty minute search, the
building was reopened.

Inside the courtroom, before the bomb scare, along with the judge and the defendant, were members of the African American community like Jewel McDonald (right), whose families were also brutalized by the Klan in 1964.

Jewel McDonald, 58, who is black, remembers the choking fear of that summer, when she was so terrified of arson that she put all her valuables in a cardboard box and stowed it in a chicken coop.

She waited up one night for her mother and brother, who were attending a meeting at Mount Zion Baptist Church, and was horrified to see them return beaten and bloody. They had been attacked by Klan members.

The next day, three young men showed up at her house, inquiring about the beatings. She didn't know their names, but the next night she learned them when reports of the disappearance of three civil rights workers — two white and one black — were on the radio.

"Our mouths flew open, and my mother said, 'Oh, my God,' " McDonald said. "That's when we knew: If they weren't dead now, they would be."

In communities with this kind of history, memory is a potent weapon. I've written previously to argue disenfranchisement of African American voters in Jacksonville, Florida should be seen in the context of that city's little discussed Council of Conservative Citizens and the state's long history of Klan activity, persisting to this day. During the last days of 2004, while I was wrapped up in efforts to block certification of the electoral vote on January 6, I received an email from the Florida NAACP that was a significant addendum to my point.

If you were following actions and protests leading up to January 6, you know that January 3 was a big day: there was an important rally in Columbus, Ohio to demand that all votes be counted, all irregularities investigated, and Ohio's Electors not be seated until we have an accurate final count.  Around the country on the 3rd and on the surrounding days, there were other events in solidarity with Ohio's voters.

On January 1, 2005 there was a big event in Jacksonville, too, but it wasn't about the election. The flier sent by the Florida NAACP read:

March for JUSTICE & PEACE

Florida State Conference NAACPJacksonville Branch NAACPJacksonville Leadership Coalition
OUR FAMILIES AND CHILDREN ARE BEING
KILLED
AT THE HANDS OF POLICE OFFICERS
PLEASE ATTEND OUR

“MARCH ON JACKSONVILLE”
STOP THE KILLINGS!!
Community March and RallySaturday, Jan 1st @ 7:30 a.m.Assemble in front of Bethel Baptist Institutional Church215 Bethel Baptist StreetJacksonville, Florida
We Will March To The Sheriff’s Office(March distance 1.1 Mile)
For further information contact:(321) 279-4807 or (305) 915-4701(Parking will be available)

NEWS RELEASE

For immediate release: January 13, 2005
Contact: Rick Lass, NM Coordinator at 505.920.0540
Blair Bobier, Media Director at 541.929.5755

NM SECRETARY OF STATE GIVES GREEN LIGHT TO COUNTIES TO CLEAR VOTING MACHINES; COBB SAYS NM OFFICIALS ARE OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE

2004 Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb today accused New Mexico election officials of "deliberately obstructing justice" by giving counties the green light to clear electronic voting machines while a demand for a recount of New Mexico's controversial presidential vote is still pending.

New Mexico had the nation's highest percentage of under-votes for the presidential race. In addition, there are still many unanswered questions about provisional ballots, missing votes and the integrity of voting machines which don't produce a paper trail.

"The conduct of New Mexico's Governor and Secretary of State has gone from bad to worse. They have gone from showing a complete disregard for New Mexico law and for the integrity of the democratic process to deliberately obstructing justice. Clearing the electronic voting machines while a recount demand is pending will destroy critical evidence about what happened on Election Day. This is outrageous and makes you wonder what they are trying to hide," said Cobb.

The recount request by Cobb and Libertarian Party presidential candidate Michael Badnarik is now the subject of a lawsuit pending in the New Mexico Court of Appeals.

In a letter faxed today to the New Mexico Attorney General's office, an attorney representing the two presidential candidates objected to the voting machines being cleared and suggested that the Secretary of State was "shirking her responsibility to insure uniform application of the election laws" by allowing county clerks to decide on their own whether or not to clear the voting machines.

"Although, generally, voting machines can be cleared 30 days after the official certification of the vote, New Mexico law is clear that this can't happen when a recount has been initiated. With an appeal pending in the New Mexico court system, any adjustment to the machines at this time is clearly inappropriate and contrary to state law," said Lowell Finley, one of the attorneys representing the candidates.

Voting rights attorneys will file a request for a temporary restraining order tomorrow against the State Canvassing Board and county clerks seeking to prevent them from clearing voting machines.

The State Canvassing Board, consisting of the New Mexico's Governor, Secretary of State and Chief Justice, met tonight and formally rejected a proposal from Cobb and Badnarik for a partial recount of the presidential vote, which would have expedited the process, saved time and avoided any costs to taxpayers. Previously, the Secretary of State had unilaterally rejected this proposal though she lacked the authority to do so.

"New Mexico's Governor and Secretary of State are doing such a poor job of following state law that they're starting to make Ohio's Kenneth Blackwell look good by comparison," said Cobb-LaMarche Media Director Blair Bobier.

For more information about the Cobb-LaMarche campaign and its recount efforts in New Mexico and Ohio, see http://www.votecobb.org.

(link)
By Charles Cobb Jr.
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, January 12, 2005; Page C01

In 1962 in Nashville, at a conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, this big guy touched me on the shoulder.

"You're Charlie, and you're down there in Mississippi?"

It stopped short of being suspicious or belligerent, but it was definitely a sort of "And just what are your intentions?" question.

He was James Forman, executive secretary of SNCC -- which organized voter registration campaigns in the toughest areas of the South during the civil rights movement -- and he wanted to know who I was because I was northern, in Mississippi working with SNCC and had had absolutely no contact with SNCC headquarters, ever.

I said, "Yes, I'm Charlie." I was all of 20 years old, and I had dropped out of Howard University that spring to come South.

He nodded and walked away. I think I must have represented a kind of frustration to him showing up in Mississippi, laying claim to the organization the way I did. How could you have an organization if people could do that? Whatever he had in mind, Forman never brought it up to me.

And it is not the substance or lack of substance of that first encounter in Nashville that I am thinking of as I recall that day. Instead it is an image of how big he was. The frail Jim Forman weakened by colon cancer those of us in Washington saw in recent years hid just how big and vibrant Jim Forman was. He was a tough guy. First impression: maybe a longshoreman or Teamster. A good size to have if you were going to tackle white supremacy in the blackbelt South the way Forman did.

James Forman, who died Monday at 76, leaves a lot behind, most of it unrecognized and unappreciated. I am writing as one of those shaped by Forman. It is worth making the argument right here, and Forman would appreciate it, that the southern civil rights movement of the 1960s is largely misunderstood. His own invisibility as one of the great forces in that movement is one example of just how deeply it was misunderstood.

There he is in my mind's eye, pressing his ideas on Martin Luther King Jr. or the NAACP's Roy Wilkins: You don't have to be so cautious with the president. Let's get people out on the street.

There he is, arguing with us -- the young and inexperienced -- about disciplined organizing, challenging us to think about more than a cup of coffee at a lunch counter or even voting rights.

One of my favorite photographs from those days, 1963, I think, is of Jim gazing into the distance from behind the bars of a jail in Americus, Ga. I look at it often, even now, wondering just what he is thinking, what he is seeing. Does he really feel the price we are paying is worth what we are gaining? I wonder.

As an unruly lot of kids, most of us in our early twenties, more than a few of us still in our teens, James Forman -- "Jim" to some of us, but more often and oddly as just "Forman," as Julian Bond noted -- organized us. He was older; at 33, older than King, when he became executive secretary of SNCC and began molding, as Bond puts it, "SNCC's near-anarchic personality into a functioning, if still chaotic, organizational structure."

You have to constantly think about what it is you are really fighting for, Jim taught us. And it was Jim who began to connect us to Africa, the southern African liberation movements, in particular. He had done graduate work in African studies at Boston University. The slogan "One Man One Vote," which we used in our voter registration campaigns across the South, was borrowed from the independence movement in what is now Zambia.

His age gave him a kind of gravitas that, without question, was needed among a group like ours, ready and willing, as fellow SNCC member Joyce Ladner once cracked, "to argue with a lamppost."

Because he was right down there on the ground with us, his was an important voice among the handful of adult voices we listened to carefully. The age difference underscores a deeper point about those years that is often missed: Much of the southern civil rights movement was powered by a convergence of young people with older people who were willing to share their experiences and permit use of networks they had built over years of activism.

Forman shaped our organization from the deep well of his own experiences. He spent most of his early childhood on a farm with his grandmother in Holly Springs, Miss. He'd been a reporter for the Chicago Defender, covering Little Rock. In 1960 he went to Monroe, N.C., in support of the controversial NAACP leader there, Robert Williams, who argued for self-defense, to the dismay of the organization's national headquarters.

One of his most significant lessons for SNCC and the broader movement itself was Forman's constant injunction to "Write! You've got to Write!"

Forman was a trained historian who understood the importance of a written record. Of all the organizations involved in the southern movement during the early 1960s, SNCC left the clearest written trail. SNCC's research department was the movement's best. It meant that we SNCC field secretaries entered rural counties with concrete information about who and what we were up against. Ultimately this research department would lay the foundation to a challenge to the Mississippi Democratic Party that would change the national Democratic Party forever.

He had left a teaching job to work with SNCC, and that first day entering SNCC's Atlanta office was pretty discouraging: "One room. Greasy walls. A faint light from a dusty plastic skylight overhead. The mustiness. The smell. The mail all over the floor," he wrote later. The phone rang and it was Newsweek "wanting information I did not have."

There would have been no SNCC without James Forman.

Forman was a radical intellectual but oriented toward action more than words and political babble, not that he was ever shy about his political thoughts. But in the South of those days, more often than not, Forman kind of commandeered you and sent you into action. And without discussing it, he somehow made it clear that he believed you had the ability to do the job. This is a rare quality, a gift that is still missing from so many inter-generational relationships, be they between political activists or others.

In the end, this is the great debt to Forman owed by those of us who worked with him. Whatever we did in SNCC, we would have been lost were it not for Forman's strong steady hand helping to guide our efforts.

I already miss his special strength.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

------------
photo: James Forman, February, 2004 (Gary Kuwahara -- Csu Dominguez Hills Via AP)

(link)
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 11, 2005; 6:37 PM

James Forman, 76, who as executive secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s dispatched cadres of organizers, demonstrators and Freedom Riders into the most dangerous redoubts of the Deep South, died Jan. 10 of colon cancer at Washington House, a local hospice.

At the height of the civil rights movement, Mr. Forman hammered out a role for SNCC among the so-called Big Five, the established civil rights organizations that included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Congress of Racial Equality and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. SNCC in those years was the edgier, more aggressive organization, pushing the South specifically and the nation generally toward change.

On numerous occasions, Mr. Forman himself was harassed, jailed and beaten during forays to register voters and organize protests in communities willing to use any means necessary, including terror, intimidation and murder, to resist the dismantling of the region's rigid system of apartheid.

"Accumulating experiences with Southern 'law and order' were turning me into a full-fledged revolutionary," Mr. Forman wrote, recalling his experiences of 1962-63. Although he moved increasingly leftward during his years at SNCC, he was edged out of the organization in the late 1960s when Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown and other, younger members considered him insufficiently militant.

When Mr. Forman joined SNCC in 1961, it was a loose federation of student organizations housed in a grubby, windowless room in Atlanta, across the street from the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on Auburn Avenue. He moved to Atlanta at the urging of Ella Jo Baker, who had been the SCLC's first executive director. She believed the students, most from black colleges in the South, some of them veterans of sit-ins in Nashville, Tenn., and elsewhere, needed a separate organization to channel their energy and dedication.

As an Air Force veteran who was about a decade older than most of those involved with SNCC, he had the drive and experience, and the administrative abilities, to give focus to the organization, universally pronounced "Snick." Appointed executive secretary within a week of his arrival, he set about paying old bills, radically expanding the staff and planning logistics for direct-action efforts and voter-registration drives in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and elsewhere.

For the next four years, working in southern towns that are now touchstones of the civil rights movement, he was responsible for making sure that SNCC organizers were fed, housed and transported from one place of engagement to another, getting them out of jail and raising money for the organization's continued existence.

"He imbued the organization with a camaraderie and collegiality that I've never seen in any organization before or since," said Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP and SNCC's communications director during Mr. Forman's tenure.

"Jim performed an organizational miracle in holding together a loose band of nonviolent revolutionaries who simply wanted to act together to eliminate racial discrimination and terror," said Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.), who was a member of SNCC. "As a result, SNCC had an equal place at the table with all the major civil rights organizations of the 1960s. Americans may not known Jim's name as a household word, but if they look around them at the racial change in our country, they will know Jim by his work."
[click to continue…]

Guests: Malcolm X; Morrison, Alan; Walker, Wyatt Tee; Farmer, James
(Original guests, 1963)

Update Guests, 1992: Farmer, James and Walker, Wyatt Tee

Theme: Civil Rights                   

Audio/Visual: sound, color
                    Keywords:
                   

Janice Hopkins Tanne

New York

Eliminating racial inequality in health care in the United States would have saved the lives of almost 900 000 black people from 1991 to 2000, says a report published in the
American Journal of Public Health ( 2004;94: 2078-81) . Equality of care would have saved five times the number of lives saved by new technologies and treatments, the investigators say. 

Health officials talk about the impact of HIV and heart disease on black people during a briefing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta Credit: JOHN AMIS/AP

The study used information from the National Center for Health Statistics to look at the effect on mortality of improved medical technology and treatments and the effect of eliminating differences in health care between black and white Americans. 

From 1991 to 2000, age adjusted mortality declined by an average of 0.7% a year. The study assumed that the decline in mortality was due entirely to improvements in medical care through better drugs, devices, and treatments. The investigators calculated that improvements in care prevented 176 633 deaths. 

However, if the death rate among black Americans was the same as that among white people, 886 202 deaths would have been prevented—more than fives times as many as were saved by improvements in care. 

"I was impressed by the size of the difference. I didn't expect it to be that big... I always knew the mortality rate of black babies was twice that of whites. I didn't know that mortality in middle-aged African Americans was twice as high as whites," said Dr Steven Woolf, one of the report's authors and professor of family medicine, preventive medicine, and community health at Virginia Commonwealth University. 

Age adjusted mortality among the white male and female populations was an average of 29% and 24% lower, respectively, than that among the black male and female populations. Mortality among black infants and black adults aged 25 to 54 was more than double that among the corresponding white groups. 

A co-author, David Satcher, a black American who is a former US surgeon general and is currently director of the National Center for Primary Care at the Morehouse School of Medicine, Atlanta, said that access to care was a big factor. Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely to be uninsured or underinsured and underserved. 

The authors noted the limitations of their study, including the assumption that racial disparities could be easily eliminated. The study also assumed that the overall decline in mortality was due entirely to improvements in medical care, rather than assuming that some of the decline may have been the result of factors such as environmental and lifestyle changes. 

Dr Woolf said "We need to re-engineer the system, to cope with increasing disparities in access to health care." 

Update: I forgot the link to this article from the electronic British Medical Journal.

James Forman was one of the major leaders in the Civil Rights Movement. He was Executive Secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Comittee (SNCC) from 1961-1968. He died earlier tonight.

Forman's memoir The Making of Black Revolutionaries is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the development and events of the Movement. In his introduction to the 1997 re-issue of Forman's book, Julian Bond wrote:

He molded SNCC's near-anarchic personality into a functioning, if still chaotic, organizational structure, and insured that most of its parts functioned smoothly most of the time. He brought his trained historian's eye and values to our work, thereby accounting for the large repository of field and other reports, giving SNCC the best detailed records (for its short life) among its contemporary and often competing organizations.

"Write it down" was his constant injunction; because he insisted, the SNCC files contain often lyrical descriptions of exactly how an organizer goes about his or her work. Here one may learn who the real "leaders" are, and how those who aspire to leadership can be helped to develop to their fullest. The SNCC field-secretaries' reports, written at Forman's insistence and withheld at great peril, offer a day-to-day account of community organizing that cannot be found anywhere else. SNCC, of course, because of Forman's leadership and personality, was unlike any other organization. (xi-xii)

Through his memoir, James Forman has been one of my guiding spirits. His memoir is a great activist's handbook and an important window into the experiences of African Americans in the 20th Century.

In this last week, as it became clear he was dying, Forman's friends from SNCC started posting memories of him on Civil Rights Movement Veterans. I'm sure there will be many more postings on the site in the weeks to come; they will be well worth reading.

Rest in peace, Mr. Forman.

(Caught this one in my work on No Stolen Democracy, but it really belongs over here. --BG)

Update from PFAW Election Protection Hotline

Dear Volunteers,

Thanks to volunteers and activists like you, the Election Protection Coalition is pressing ahead and making progress. We have two major post-election objectives:

Ensure that the votes cast in 2004 are properly counted; and,
Prepare an election reform agenda to push at the federal, state and local levels. As we get ready for 2005, here's a brief update on where we stand.

Preliminary Review of Election Problems and Reform Agenda Unveiled
We are shattering the myth that the 2004 election ran smoothly, a myth that has become the conventional wisdom for many pundits and politicians. To tell the real story, People For the American Way Foundation and other Election Protection partners released on December 8 a preliminary review of the election problems documented by our efforts. Based on an analysis of the nearly 40,000 written complaints and more than 200,000 phone calls taken by Election Protection volunteers, the report identifies the top five problems voters encountered in 2004 and outlines preliminary recommendations to fix them. Take a moment to read the report and help spread the word to friends: http://www.pfaw.org/go/EP/shattering_myths (.pdf).

GAO Will Investigate 2004 Voting Process
Last month, thousands of Election Protection activists wrote Congress to demand a nationwide investigation of voting problems in this year's elections. Backed by those and other letters from constituents, members of Congress called for the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office to conduct a thorough investigation. The GAO has agreed to do so and will study a range of systemic election issues, including the accuracy of the vote count and the methods used to count the vote. We'll keep you posted as this investigation takes further shape. Election Protection activists will most certainly be needed again on this matter.

PFAW Foundation Files Suit to Protect Ohio Provisional Ballots
People For the American Way Foundation filed a lawsuit on November 24 seeking to overturn arbitrary rules that led election officials in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) not to count one third, or more than 8,000, of the provisional ballots cast on November 2. The percentage of provisional ballots rejected this year is almost twice the percentage thrown out in 2000. Representing several individual voters whose ballots were among those not counted, PFAW Foundation's legal team is asking that election officials check the provisional ballots against voter registration cards, not electronic voting lists that are known to contain errors. The lawsuit also requests remedies for voters affected by poll workers who did not notify them of their correct polling place. You can stay current on this case, which is currently pending at the county appellate district court, and our other election-related legal efforts on our Casewatch page: http://www.pfaw.org/go/EP/casewatch.

Public Hearings Collect Voter Problems, Experiences and Ideas
Election Protection coalition members and allied organizations are conducting a series of public hearings to gather additional information on election inequities, irregularities, and voter suppression efforts, and to help build public support for a reform agenda in the states. Well-attended hearings have already been held in Ohio and Texas, bringing to light voting obstacles from the pervasive confusion among poll workers concerning provisional ballots to reports of authorities towing the vehicles of voters standing in long lines. Additional hearings, scheduled throughout January, will be held in at least six states (Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, New Mexico and Colorado). Election Protection activists will be invited to attend hearings and help keep voting problems and the people affected by them before the media.

As you can see from just this short recap, the Election Protection team has been hard at work since November 2, and our efforts will only increase in 2005. Your participation, action and insight will lead our march toward a fair and reliable election system for every American.

Thank you for your incredible support. We hope you enjoy the holiday season.
Sincerely,
Ralph G. Neas
President
People For the American Way Foundation

(via Ohio Election Fraud.)

I'm not blogging over here right now, but this, just in from the Arkansas Delta Peace & Justice Center, needs immediate publication. --BG

Kay Cobb has been interviewed by the White House as a candidate for the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. She would be a permanent replacement of Charles Pickering who has been serving in a temporary capacity for the past year. She has spoken at least twice to Council of Conservative Citizens groups.
            ***         ***         ***
The Council of Conservative Citizens is a reincarnation of the White Citizens Councils that sprang up in the South in the 1950s and 1960s to oppose school desegregation. Like the League of the South, a neo-confederate group to which it has many links, the 15,000-member Council has tried without success to mask its white supremacist ideology to better promote a right-wing political agenda.The link to the Council of Conservative Citizens is www.cofcc.org.
            ***         ***         ***
Kay Cobb
Presiding justice, Mississippi Supreme Court

Term ends: 2008

CCC links: As a candidate for the post she'd been appointed to a year earlier, introduced speaker Virginia Abernethy, a member of the CCC editorial advisory board, at a Sept. 23, 2000, Marshall County, Mississippi CCC event also attended by the CCC's top national leaders, CEO Gordon Baum and President Tom Dover; spoke to the Webster County, Mississippi CCC in Mathiston on Sept. 25, 2000.

Comment: Cobb said she spoke at the invitation of friends of her family to what she saw as a group of "ultra-conservative, mostly older, white, rural citizens."