Hungry Blues

Just read this important post by Ampersand over at Alas, A Blog.

HUD is getting ready to screw over domestic violence shelters - call the White House today, please!

Here's an alert from Irene of Stop Family Violence.org.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is on the verge of implementing regulations that could place the lives of women escaping domestic violence at risk and the White House is the only office with the authority to hold them accountable.

In response to a Congressional mandate to obtain an unduplicated count of homeless people in America, HUD has asked service providers, including homeless and domestic violence shelters, food banks, housing authorities and law enforcement to input client information, including name, date of birth, social security number, and temporary residence, into the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) – a computerized database to track people who are homeless. Furthermore, they encourage data sharing between service providers to help prevent duplication. Within any given state there could be literally thousands of people who have access to this information.

Many domestic violence shelters in this country rely on HUD funding and will be required to participate in the HMIS system. Early in the process of developing HMIS standards, domestic violence organizations raised concerns about client safety – explaining that there was a need for domestic violence victims’ identities and temporary residences to remain confidential so that their abusers can’t locate them.

In HUD’s preliminary standards for HMIS, released on July 22, 2003, these concerns were taken into account. However when final HMIS standards were released on July 30, 2004 the exemptions for domestic violence shelters and domestic violence victims had been removed!

If the exemptions for DV shelters aren't restored, domestic violence programs will be forced to choose between turning away critical funding for emergency shelters or violating victims' confidentiality and putting their lives at risk.

As some of you know, Bean works at a DV shelter, and I know that they take secrecy issues extremely seriously. Bean isn't even allowed to tell anyone where her workplace is located! By their nature, DV shelters are sometimes in the business of protecting people from extremely determined stalkers who are doing everything they can to locate their victims. Putting the victims' names and addresses on a federal database would be deadly.

Please phone the White House today - their comment line is 202-456-1111. Here's what you should tell them:

My name is (name). I'm calling from (city, state) to ask President Bush to stop HUD from putting women's lives in danger. The Administration must ensure that HUD restores protections for victims of domestic violence within the Homeless Management Information System. Citizens in my community are extremely alarmed by this breach of safety and confidentiality.

That's the most important step to take. For other steps, visit Stop Family Violence's.org page on the HUD regulations. And if you're a blogger, please consider either linking to this post or (even better) reproducing it or something like it on your own blog.

Frank Newton and Vic Dickenson
Are playing ping pong in the kitchen
From the window, Union Sq

Listen! it's Peewee Russell on the gramophone
Peewee got a letter all the way from China
To The Maker Of Heavenly Music
Nick's, USA

And the pennies we always threw, by the net, in the rug
Anybody who shows up with pennies
Throws them on the floor

Tonight we’ll get Chinese
Tonight we’ll roast marshmallows in the basement furnace
Tonight we’ll hear Vic and Frankie jam!
Vic's got his trombone at the door

We'll see you in the brightening
Yeah Frank, in the brightening

My father graduated from the eighth grade of Public School 89, Elmhurst, NY (Queens), in June of 1941. Like other kids graduating PS 89, he planned to go on to high school about a half mile away, at Newtown High School. According to his 8th grade autograph book, my father's favorite author was Jack London, his favorite book The Sea Wolf; Stardust was his favorite song; he loved baseball and worshipped Mel Ott.

But before my father was out of PS 89, his father was out of his life. He would tell others his parents were separated, but in reality my paternal grandfather, whom I am named after, deserted his wife and three sons. Being a single mother was not easy for Gertrude Greenberg. She was from the affluent Swig family, however, so she moved to Boston to be near them and get their support. In Brighton, they lived at 90 Kilsyth Road, an apartment building built in 1930.

Paul Greenberg w/his mother, Gertrude, 90 Kilsyth Road, c. 1943

Paul Greenberg w/his father, Benjamin, year and location unknown

100 Kilsyth Road, Brighton, Massachusetts

(Oddly, before he moved last month, my close friend Joe was living in the next building up the hill, at 100 Kilsyth Road, for the first eight or nine years that I knew him. A few years ago I came across the picture of Dad and Gert, above. Suddenly I recognized the scene in the photo and I could hear my father telling how he rode his bike down the hill from 90 Kilsyth Road to Beacon Street to get to the Savoy Cafe on Massachusetts Avenue, where he'd go hear Frankie Newton, Pee Wee Russell, Max Kaminsky, Bud Freeman and many others.)

Instead of Newtown High in Elmhurst, my father attended Brighton High School in Boston. His education at Brighton High lasted until he was seventeen. Once his three brothers were all fighting in WWII, life wife with Gert became unbearable for him.

"Don't you have any respect for me?"

Mother of the kitchen, mother of the laundry, mother deserted by my father. I wish I did. Lord where is respect for lonely mother. All I felt was fear that I would not escape.

Pity—yes, Loyalty—yes, Fear—yes, Respect—void.

***         ***         ***
I never formulated a plan. It just happened. Even on the day I left I didn't decide to leave. I just went.

I took my clarinet and went for a walk and was on the highway beyond the circle and thumbing a ride—Destination New York—Destination freedom. Land of dreams, heaven on earth they call it 52nd street.

***         ***         ***
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 roomate[sic]—uninvited. He goddamned me and told me to go home but took me in.

(Paul A. Greenberg, excerpts from sketches for Long Days Short Nights)

(left to right) Frankie Newton, Sidney Bechet, 8June1939 (Charles Peterson)

The year was 1944 when he showed up at Frankie Newton's place on E17th Street, just off Union Square. In his Political Autobiography, my father wrote, "My association with Jazz musicians in general and Frankie Newton in particular shaped my view of human possibility and what suffering was about. . . . Frankie Newton . . . gave me a vision of socialism and art as important components of the human spirit. Frank taught me how to look at Picasso and Evergood and to read poetry ranging from John Donne to Langston Hughes."

Earlier, in his sketches for Long Days Short Nights, he wrote:

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.

My father often said that living with Frank was "better than ten college educations."

From mid 1940s until the fall of 1950, my father did organizing work in several CIO unions. He then served 21 months in the US Army in the Korean War, September 1950 to June 1952.

In 1953 and 1954, he attended the Columbia University School of General Studies and earned about a year's worth of college credit. This was the last of his formal education.

In 1973, my father was Director of Special Unit For School Board Elections of the Board of Elections in the City of New York. He used to say his testimony at the New York State Education Department Hearings on Community School Board Elections was his masters thesis. This was my father's official report on his oversight of changing the method of the New York City School Board elections to proportional representation.

Paul Greenberg, 1974

In September of 1974, however, my father decided he would apply to attend the State University of New York's Empire State College, starting in the Spring Semester. He never sent in the application, and I have his written answers to some informational questions that were part of the application.

1. What are your general long range educational, vocational, or professional plans or aspirations? How will a college education effect your plans?
My educational goals are to achieve formal degrees and to fill in the gaps in knowledge and theory that my professional career requires. This achievement will be self fulfilling and at the same time enhance my professional standing. I plan on going on to graduate school after earning my Bachelor Of Arts degree. If it is feasible I would like to go to Law School.

ANSWER EITHER QUESTION 2 OR 3

2. If your professional, vocational, or educational goals are clearly defined, please indicate which, Areas of Study you expect to include in your Concentration and General Learnings. Which of the Organizing Frameworks will you use? State briefly why this Framework is best suited to your needs.

3. If you do not have clearly defined goals, what are some of your major areas of interest? Indicate the area(s) in which you might begin your studies. In which of the Organizing Frameworks do you expect to start?
I would work within an interdisciplinary framework that includes Community and Social Services and Social Theory, Social Structure and Change.

My major interest is Government as an instrument for human service. I would like to explore the dynamics between large governmental units (Federal, State and Municipal) and community and individual needs.

I have spent a number of years in my professional life on legislative needs of communities and on developing democratic processes for community needs. I believe the framework I have chosen will enlarge my understanding of these problems and their solutions and improve my professional performance.

4. What Special Resources for Learning do you have available in your community to assist you in reaching your educational goals? Please indicate how you would use these resources. Some of the community agencies you might keep in mind are colleges, schools, social agencies, laboratories, business organizations, labor unions, government agencies, libraries, recreation groups and hospitals.
If my community is defined by the town I reside in the resources available are: An open non-partisan government structure which has open meetings of the Town Council, Planning agency and other departments. A good library with many services.

The observation and study of government as a case study is available and I could use these facilities for academic research and written reports.

If my community is defined as the Metropolitan Area the resources are unlimited. In New York City there are a variety of libraries and schools with every known resource available. My years of work in government makes it possible for me to get easy access to records and appointments with officials for academic investigation.

I could use these resources for development of written reports or for creative investigation.

5. What kinds of work experiences or other activities might your studies at Empire State College include?
My work as Director of the unit that conducts Community School Board Elections in New York City and my work representing government and social agencies at the State legislature could be excellent tools for academic inquiry.

6. Please list and briefly describe experiences outside of school or college or special circumstances which you feel are pertinent to your admission to Empire State. If you did not graduate from high school or attend college, please give evidence of your readiness to undertake college work.
My professional career which has included years of legislative work for social organizations and government agencies plus my years as an executive of various social organizations are pertinent to my admission to Empire State.

I have been the Research and Publicity Director of the United Furniture Workers of America AFL-CIO. I was a Special Assistant to the President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I was The Executive Director of The Greater New York Council for A Sane Nuclear Policy. I was the Legislative Director of the Liberal Party of New York State. I have been the Special Assistant for Legislation andGovernment hearings for the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation. I have been either Director or Associate Director of all the community school board elections held in New York City since their inception in 1970. I am a consultant to The State Charter Revision Committee for New York City.

These and many more activities and jobs completed are adequate proof of my ability to undertake college work.

Paul and Ben, November 3, 1974

7. What were the reasons you chose Empire State College rather than another college? What were the alternatives to Empire you considered?
I choose Empire State College because of the special nature of the program which will allow me to continue working and fulfill any academic requirements. The system of advance standing may shorten considerably the time needed to achieve a degree.

I considered Ramapo College. My examination led me to believe Empire State was more suited to my needs.

8. What are your current family, occupational, and recreational responsibilities and interests? Which of these would you continue as you pursue your program at Empire State College? Which would you have to give up in order to spend 40 or 20 hours per week required of a full or half-time student?
I am a husband and father of three children. The children are two girls ages sixteen and fourteen and a boy age five. I am currently a full time consultant to the New York State Charter Revision Commission for New York City. I spend some time trying to achieve the level of artist in the photographic medium. I am active in local political and social organizations. I can not abdicate nor do I chose to abdicate from my family. I both enjoy and need the economic reward for my professional work therefore I by necessity will have to limit my photography and organizational work. I also will have to apply a sense of discipline to my time that is now best described as leisure time.

***         ***         ***

My father did not end up going back to school to complete his B.A. in 1974; he did continue to work in the photographic medium. The photos in this final section of my post were all shot and developed by him in that year.

In 1974 we were living in Teaneck, NJ, at 130 Johnson Avenue, minutes from the George Washington Bridge and the route into Manhattan. The picture, above, of me and Dad all dressed up for my aunt Leah's wedding, is on the front steps of that house. This next picture is of me and my sisters in the living room:

Me and Gregory, my friend from across the street, hanging out in my bedroom:

I attended kindergarten at the Bryant School in Teaneck. That's me and one of my school friends; I can't remember his name:

My maternal grandparents for many years had a summer home in the Mohegan Colony, near Mohegan Lake, in Westchester County, NY. We always went for visits. That's me in the lake:

Apparently after they were "brought" to Georgia, the Africans were kind enough to "help" with getting all that cotton picked in the fields. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports [registration required]:

When Michele Mitchell sat down to study history with her daughter last spring, she assumed the third-grade book wouldn't say much about black history. But she wasn't prepared to read that slaves were "brought" here to "help" others.

"It belittles, for me, the experience," said Mitchell, who is African-American. "I understand it's third grade . . . [but] I had a major issue with the word 'help.' "

After achieving partial success with her complaints in Fayette County, Mitchell said she now intends to ask the state Board of Education to ban the book — "The Story of Our Georgia Community" — for glossing over slavery and African-American history.

Schools in Fayette County, where Mitchell and her daughter Onika Smallwood live, have been using the 64-page paperback for about two years to supplement social studies texts. The book, which comes in a kit with maps and a teacher's manual, is used in third-grade classrooms across metro Atlanta — including some in Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Fulton and Henry counties — according to the publisher. Although the book is approved for use in classrooms statewide, other systems, including Atlanta, Marietta and Decatur schools, do not use it.

Onika, now in fourth grade, remembers trying not to cry when her class read about slaves "helping" pick cotton in the Georgia fields. "We were forced! We weren't even helping!" she said. "That wasn't right. I knew in my heart it wasn't right. . . ."

Cathy Geis, Fayette's social studies coordinator, reviewed the book before it was purchased and defends its use. The main focus of third-grade social studies is citizenship, communities and government, which, she said, is covered in the students' main textbook. Geis said the kit was purchased because it is closely aligned to the state curriculum and provides hands-on activities for students.

So maybe the book should explain why the descendants of those helpful African farm workers still do not enjoy full representation in presidential elections. In 2000

Black voters in Georgia were almost two times more likely than white voters to live in counties that use the most error-prone voting machinery. Almost half (46.23 percent) of Georgia’s black voters live in punch card counties while less than one-quarter (24.73 percent) of Georgia’s white voters live in punch card counties. Conversely, white voters in Georgia (57.88 percent) were 1.5 times more likely than black voters to use optical scanning equipment, which is least likely to yield uncounted votes. Slightly more than one-third of black registered voters (36.53 percent) in Georgia used the optical scan method of voting.

November 2

[final draft from Long Days Short Nights ms., summer or fall, 1963]

by Paul A. Greenberg

Dear Boss,

I am tired of prophylactic assignments. Mo Bartel is dead and every newspaper will have the facts. LITTLE MO BARTEL JAZZ LEGEND DIES IN CHICAGO HOTEL ROOM. Or maybe another hipper headline will read LAST BLUE NOTE FOR MO BARTEL. The story will be the same. 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. They will remember that he got loaded sometimes and told audiences to shut up. Somebody will run a benefit and that will be that.

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.

I wrote the enclosed 10 years ago with a hangover. Mo was on his way to Chicago I was on the same train and we got loaded together in the clubcar. Mo had just quit The Prince after he refused to stay home while the band went south. You remember the time he was busted in Mississippi and you wrote a discretion is better than valor editorial saying his timing was bad.

Well we were commiserating—me with his jail pallor—he with the son of a bitch boss that I work for. I got loaded enough to ask a stupid question and hit the jackpot. I asked him when it all started that is the music. The elusive, non-personal blues wailer hero Mo Bartel told me and I wrote it down and sent it to you. You said it was too personal, too psychological and too dirty for our magazine or any other magazine and that was that except Little Mo is dead and I want you to print it now and make what amends possible to your own soul if you have one.

                                                      Your (ex?) Jazz critic?

(enclosure)
Notes from the childhood of a drunk jazz musician artist hero as remembered by a scurvy critic.

At 15 I was a quiet, skinny, intense and scared kid. My father had split 5 years earlier and my mother wanted me to grow up to make a lot of money and take care of her. She didn’t know what went wrong in her life and tried to compound the same stupidity into my life. I didn’t rebel I withdrew.

We lived in Boston and I worked at a drugstore to help pay the rent and cheated my mother out of tips so that I could go to Boston Symphony Concerts.

The job was fine because I thought people noticed me. That is at first. I liked it when some asked me “please give me a coke” or “may I please have a drink of water.” They were asking me. I was their agent for receiving pleasure and I hoped the girls would notice me. They did and I didn’t like it because I was JewBoy.

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. Except when Keefe Riley played he was human.

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.

After it finished I got up walked upstairs and out down the hill and with tears in my eyes I ran down the hill my clarinet case in front of me covering the fact that I had an erection.

The Jewish community I've been part of for the last ten years is called Havurat Shalom. All services at the Havurah are lay-led by the members. Each year, I usually lead one of the big services on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. This year I led Shacharit, the morning service, which is quite long. Havurat Shalom, which was founded in 1968, was central in creating a Jewish religious counter-culture. One of the things Havurat Shalom and other places brought to alternative Judaism was the idea that Jewish observances should be relevant to the experiences of the participants. One way that folks do this is by relating meaningful, non-Jewish sources to Judaism. In the last couple of years, one thing I've been doing along these lines is relating things I've learned about Civil Rights Movement history to the themes of the Jewish High Holiday season. Below is something I wrote for the service I led yesterday.

            ***         ***         ***
Last year, when I was leading a service on Yom Kippur I looked for spiritual messages in some of the powerful moments when the moral authority of nonviolent resistance overcame violent and aggressive evil. For example, I looked at one of the amazing stories from the SCLC’s campaign in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963. Dr. King describes a moment when Police Commissioner Bull Connor had ordered his men to open fire hoses on a large group of protesters. As King tells it,

Bull Connor’s men, their deadly hoses poised for action, stood facing the marchers. The marchers, many of them on their knees, stared back, unafraid and unmoving. Slowly the Negroes stood up and began to advance. Connor’s men, as though hypnotized, fell back, their hoses sagging uselessly in their hands while several hundred Negroes marched past them, without further interference, and held their prayer meeting as planned. (Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can't Wait, 71)

Stories like this one are important; they communicate the real power of this movement and give us a visceral reminder of its importance in our nation’s history. But I also worry about stories like this that give the Civil Rights Movement such mythic dimensions. I worry that many people have come to believe that the successes of the Civil Rights Movement are due only to the moral convictions and the heroic fortitude of the protesters. The protests, however, had a very specific, crafted intent, "the surfacing of tensions already present," in the words of Dr. King.

To cure injustices, you must expose them before the light of human conscience and the bar of public opinion. regardless of whatever tensions that exposure generates. Injustices to the Negro must be brought out into the open where they cannot be evaded . . . to precipitate a crisis situation that must open the door to negotiation . . . [so that] the pressure of public opinion becomes an ally in your just cause." (quoted in David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: MLK, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 228)

What is more, the surfacing of tensions already present was sometimes of greater importance than the purity of means we usually suppose. In the last phase of the Birmingham protests in May of 1963, the SCLC conducted protests where the assumption was that onlookers who were not participating would most likely incite the Birmingham Police to violence. Wyatt Tee Walker, the SCLC’s Executive Director at the time, made no excuses for these tactics when he talked about them later: “I didn’t believe in provocation—unless the stakes were right.” Or as Andrew Young, another close advisor to Dr. King, put it: “The movement was really about getting publicity for injustice . . . the injustice was there under the surface and as long as it stayed below the surface, nobody was concerned about it. You had to bring it out into the open.” (264)

This is not meant as an exposé of the SCLC but rather as a way to see that even in situations that are generally understood as hallmark successes of the Movement, nonviolent resistance may not have been enough to overcome the repressive violence of Southern racism.

In an earlier struggle, led primarily by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, there was some unplanned violence on the part of protesters. James Forman, who was SNCC’s Executive Secretary, tells of a move by SNCC and local leaders in Albany to defy a federal injunction against protest marches:

We began working with Reverend Wells, a grass-roots preacher who had been helpful to us in the past. We discussed the injunction question with him; he agreed and began preaching to the people. The result was a night march, led by Reverend Wells after a stirring address. Over one hundred people filed out from the church, moved by the experience of that night. They were arrested and violence broke out. The black youth of Albany began to stone some whites. The police marched in formation through the black community and some of them were stoned.

The next day Dr. King issued a statement on his own. . . . When I arrived at his house the next morning, the press had already been called. I saw the statement, repudiating the local blacks and asked him not to do this. The whites were responsible for the violence and people were only reacting to a long history of violence and repression. But my arguments had no effect. . . .

[T]he statement was issued and Dr. King’s reputation for nonviolence was upheld. (James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 275)

In this story, Dr. King felt he had to uphold his reputation for nonviolence rather than make a statement that acknowledged the frustrations of local community members who lived day to day with repressive violence from whites.

At a pragmatic level, King’s ability to raise money for his organization depended on his nonviolent reputation, and he was under great pressure from President Kennedy and from Attorney General Robert Kennedy to project an image of African American resistance that was wholly nonviolent.

It may sound like I’m making a case against nonviolent resistance, but I’m not. My point is that there were times when the need—which may have been unavoidable—to express commitment to nonviolence hid from view just how bad our problems with racism were. I believe that the persistence of the narrative of a nonviolent overcoming of violent repression has kept our country from facing the depths of the problem as it existed 40 years ago and the depths of the problem as it exists today.

Teshuvah is the process of turning and returning in order to make things right. In response to our collective and individual failures, we have to ask: What tactics have been working? How far have they gotten us? In getting this far what have we failed to see? What work is there still to do? Why are we so attached to our current ways of doing things if they are not getting us where we need to go? What new tactics must we devise?

[Yom Kippur is over, so I was catching up on some blogs and saw this at Prometheus 6, which reminded me I meant to put up the following overview of persons who faced federal charges in the 1960s for the murders of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner. This overview is courtesy of the Arkansas Delta Peace and Justice Center. For a companion to piece to Earl's thing at P6 and the overview, below, see Highways to Nowhere by Wallace Roberts.]

Persons who faced federal charges in the 1960s

No one has ever faced state murder charges or any other state charge.

Listed below: name, living or deceased, present residence.

1964
December 4, 1964

•FBI arrests 21 suspects in connection with the murders of the three civil rights workers.

•The 19 men charged with conspiring to deprive the three young men of their constitutional rights are:

Bernard Akin - deceased

Jimmy Arledge - living, Meridian, MS

Horace Doyle Barnette - deceased

Travis Maryn Barnette - deceased

Otha Neal Burkes - deceased

Olen Burrage - living, Philadelphia, MS

James Thomas "Pete" Harris - living, Meridian, MS

Frank Herndon - deceased

James Edward Jordan - deceased

Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen - living, Union, MS

Billy Wayne Posey - living, Meridian, MS

Deputy Cecil Price* - deceased

Sheriff Lawrence Rainey - deceased

Alton Wayne Roberts - deceased

Jerry McGrew Sharpe - deceased

Jimmy Snowden - living, Hickory, MS

Jimmy Lee Townsend - deceased

Herman Tucker - deceased

Oliver Warner - deceased

•The two men arrested on charges of withholding knowledge of a felony are:

Earl Akin - deceased

Tommy Horne - living, Meridian, MS

1965
January, 15, 1965

•FBI arrests 18 in connection with the trio's killings. Original defendants Earl Akin, Burkes, Horne and Warner aren't indicted. Philadelphia Patrolman Richard Willis is added as a suspect.

•Original defendants not indicted are:

Earl Akin - deceased

Otha Neal Burkes - deceased

Tommy Horne - living, Meridian, MS

Oliver Warner - deceased

•Added as a suspect is:

Philadelphia Patrolman Richard Willis - living, Noxapater, MS

1967
Feb. 28, 1967

•A federal grand jury indicts a new group of 19 defendants:

Bernard Akin - deceased

Jimmy Arledge - living, Meridian, MS

Former and future sheriff E.G. "Hop" Barnett - deceased

Horace Doyle Barnette - deceased

Travis Maryn Barnette - deceased

Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers - living, Central MS Correctional Facility

Olen Burrage - living, Philadelphia, MS

James Thomas "Pete" Harris - living, Meridian,MS

Frank Herndon - deceased

James Edward Jordan - deceased

Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen - living, Union, MS

Billy Wayne Posey - living, Meridian, MS

Deputy Cecil Price* - deceased

Sheriff Lawrence Rainey - deceased

Alton Wayne Roberts - deceased

Jerry McGrew Sharpe - deceased

Jimmy Snowden - living, Hickory, MS

Herman Tucker -deceased

Philadelphia Patrolman Richard Willis - living, Noxapater, MS

Oct. 20, 1967

•The jury convicts of conspiracy:

Jimmy Arledge - living, Meridian, MS

Horace Doyle Barnette - deceased

Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers - living, Central MS Correctional Facility

Billy Wayne Posey - living, Meridian, MS

Deputy Cecil Price* - deceased

Alton Wayne Roberts - deceased

Jimmy Snowden - living, Hickory, MS

•The jury acquits:

Bernard Akin - deceased

Travis Maryn Barnette - deceased

Olen Burrage - living, Philadelphia, MS

James Thomas "Pete" Harris - living, Meridian, MS

Frank Herndon - deceased

Sheriff Lawrence Rainey - deceased

Herman Tucker - deceased

Philadelphia Patrolman Richard Willis - living, Noxapater, MS

•Three men receive mistrials:

E.G. "Hop" Barnette - deceased

Edgar Ray "Preacher" Killen - living, Union, MS

Jerry McGrew Sharpe - deceased

•Bowers and Roberts receive 10-year sentences; Price and Posey, six years; Arledge, Snowden and Horace Doyle Barnette, three years. By 1970, their appeals exhausted, they go to prison. None serve more than 6 years. Mississippi never charges anyone with murder or with anything else.

2001
May 6, 2001

•Cecil Price, who had begun to cooperate with state authorities investigating the trio's deaths, died of head injuries allegedly suffered in a fall. There were no reported witnesses to the alleged fall.

By Joan C. Browning (December 12, 2000)

My first vote for a presidential candidate was counted. The FBI observers watching over my polling place assured it, though eighteen of Telfair County, Georgia’s election officials were indicted in Federal District Court. They were charged with election fraud, vote fraud, conspiring against the rights of citizens and casting and counting or causing to be cast and counted fictitious or illegal votes. Four of them were convicted.

1960 presidential election
I was eighteen when, on November 8, 1960, Mother took me to vote at the Towns precinct, Telfair County, Georgia. Back then, Georgians were the only eighteen year olds allowed to vote in America.

We walked down a sandy dirt lane past gaggles of white men bunched around pickup trucks and, standing apart, a pair of stone-faced white men wearing dark suits and narrow neckties. The Towns polling place was a tiny decrepit wooden former one-room school building. A tree limb had grown through the room, coming in one window and exiting the other. We had to duck under it on our way to the table at the front of the room.

The heavy-jowled scowling white male election officials seated at the table handed each of us a paper ballot. They watched us mark our ballots. Then we then handed the voted ballots back to them. Telfair County did not believe in secret ballots.

John Kennedy became president in that 1960 election by slim and disputed vote totals. Some say that the change of one vote per polling place in Illinois would have given the Electoral College votes to Nixon instead of Kennedy.

Georgia was a still one-party (Democratic) state so Telfair County would not play a part in that presidential election. The Towns precinct usually reported a unanimous one hundred percent Democratic tally.

It didn’t matter whether I preferred Kennedy or Nixon. Mother and I had agreed to trade our right to vote for the candidate of our choice for using our votes to test whether the Courthouse Crowd actually counted our ballots. We voted for the Republican, Richard M. Nixon.

Our votes were counted. The Courthouse Crowd certified the Towns precinct tally as Kennedy, 59, Nixon, 7.

Mother was part of the New Crowd, a group organized by white World War II veterans and other disenfranchised whites to wrest control from the Talmadge Courthouse Crowd that had ruled imperiously since the 1930s. Dr. Duncan B. McRae, our family physician, and scion of one of the oldest white families in the county, led the New Crowd. They wanted fair elections, including the secret ballot.

The New Crowd had convinced the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to observe Telfair County voting that year. Two years later, the New Crowd published advertisements of the Georgia Code requiring the secret ballot and promising "…the Telfair County election will be observed by the F.B.I. on election day. If there are any irregularities or complaints during the election, the F.B.I. will be nearby to take appropriate action." By 1962, the county sheriff joined the New Crowd in calling for outside law enforcement assistance on election day.

Telfair County needed outside intervention in its elections. Reporters regularly won journalism awards for exposing Telfair County corruption of all kinds, but especially election fraud. The 1946 General Election was one of the most blatant.

1946 General Election
One issue dominated the 1946 Georgia governor’s race – a crude racist appeal for the restoration of the White Primary that the United States Supreme Court had just declared unconstitutional. The White Primary barred African-American Georgians from voting in the Democratic Party primary. Since Georgia was a one-party state, election in the Democratic primary was "tantamount" to being elected. The General Election merely ratified the primary results.

Voting was limited to about 20 percent of the state’s adults. The White Primary made sure that African-American votes played no role in the "tantamount" primary election. Georgia also kept white voters out of the system. Whites trying to register to vote faced illogical literacy tests. Potential voters could be asked questions such as "How many drops of water are in this glass?" Once registered, a voter’s name could be randomly purged, requiring re-registration.

Today’s Electoral College discussion reminds me that Georgia also disenfranchised urban voters by using a form of the Electoral College called the "county unit" system. The county unit system of weighing votes meant that it took more than a hundred Fulton County (Atlanta) votes to equal each Telfair County vote.

James Carmichael and my Telfair County neighbor, Eugene "Gene" Talmadge, contended for the Democratic party’s nomination for governor in 1946. Gene, "The Wild Man of Sugar Creek," was financed by the keep-taxes-and-government-services-low corporations – the railroads, Coca Cola, Georgia Power Company. He campaigned on the single issue of keeping African-Americans disenfranchised.

Carmichael received more popular votes statewide than Eugene Talmadge, but under the "county unit" system, Talmadge won the Democratic primary anyway.

In the General Election that fall, the Talmadge Telfair County Courthouse Crowd certified a consolidated county return showing 1,788 voters. Although Gene Talmadge was the only name printed on ballot for governor, 77 of the 1,788 ballots were tallied as write-in votes for his son, Herman Talmadge for governor. In addition to the official countywide voter turnout of 1,788, though, an extra 48 write-in votes were counted for Herman for governor. The 48 extras came from Helena precinct, where those 48 voters "over voted" for both Talmadges for governor. Both votes were certified.

Atlanta Journal reporter George Goodwin found that the last 34 of Helena precinct’s 103 voters had voted in alphabetical order, beginning at the letter A and continuing through the letter K.

Goodwin couldn’t locate fourteen of those 34 voters. The twenty he did find denied having voted at all.

Six of them had lived in Telfair County but had moved away more than two years before the election. Two were dead, one for four years, one for seven years. A Marine had been out of the county more than a year. One was reported to be a fictitious person.

Of the real Telfair County residents Goodwin found, one said he did not vote, and he did not have a wife although his wife was listed as voting. The wife in another couple said, "We never voted for nobody," and that she had never voted in her life and as far as she knew, she had never been registered to vote.

One name was listed twice. Another said that he had once been erroneously registered under the name on the list and that he had corrected his registration, but "neither me nor my wife voted in the general election," he said. "I remember it was raining that day and the windshield wiper on my car was broken, and neither of us went to the polls."

When the Courthouse Crowd certified the county election returns, they added votes: Cobbville precinct listed 86 persons on the voter list, but reported 186 votes; in Jacksonville, 27 became 127; Temperance’s 24, certified as 124; Milan’s 242 was crudely erased and "4" had written over the "2", making Milan’s certified total 442. Telfair County certified 600 "phantom" votes.

Under the county unit system, it would take more than 65,000 Atlanta votes to merely equal the fraudulent votes in Telfair County.

(Telfair County was not unusual. Augusta’s kingmaker Roy Harris boasted that he could change the election returns of more than thirty of Georgia’s 159 counties after the polls had closed.)

Gene Talmadge was declared the elected governor in 1946 but died of cirrhosis of the liver before being sworn in. The "three governor" ruckus ensued. That handful of Helena precinct phantom votes decided the "winner" of the governor’s race.

When the legislature met to choose a governor from the two persons receiving the most write in votes, historian Numan V. Bartley wrote that "669 diehard anti-Talmadge voters had written in Carmichael’s name; 637 Republicans had written in D. Talmadge Bowers, the nominal Republican candidate; and [Herman] Talmadge had only 519 votes, apparently eliminating him from consideration. Fortuitously, the Talmadge managers "found" an additional 56 ballots for Talmadge from the family’s home county of Telfair. … The majority of those 56 voters had the same handwriting and some resided in graveyards … but from the perspective of county unit politics, Herman Talmadge now had 675 votes and thus was the leader among the write-in candidates. The legislature promptly elected him governor."

Herman and his drunken, pistol-wielding supporters commandeered the Governor’s office. He declared martial law and began ransacking the state. He and the legislature were busy restoring the White Primary when, after sixty days, the courts tossed this "pretender" out of the Georgia governor’s office.

Herman Talmadge later acknowledged that the Helena precinct vote was fraudulent. He said that he had passed the word to his friend Stanley Brooks at Helena to get him a few write in votes for governor. Talmadge said, "George Goodwin of the Journal went down and checked the votes in Helena, and found that they had voted in alphabetical order. Stanley Brooks could have had them vote in any order he wanted to, alphabetical or otherwise, in the Helena precinct. Stanley figured that it was just too much trouble to pass the word, I’ll just fix it here."

2000 presidential election
The philosophy of "one citizen, one vote," where the votes of a president and a pauper carry the same weight, still struggles against the antidemocratic forces that favor the easily miscounted votes of the few.

The current presidential election reminds me of that 1946 Georgia governor’s race. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of Florida votes are not included in the "certified" election return. The certified winner’s vote lead shrinks to less than two hundred votes, if all the votes now counted are included. We are told that votes counts are seldom accurate anywhere in America. The Electoral College is valuing some votes more than others, much the same way as Georgia’s old county unit system.

Even the issues are strikingly similar. George Bush is not nearly as entertaining an orator as Ole Gene, but his message, cleaned up a little, is much the same: low taxes, furl the social safety net, pander to a few of the very rich. Like Ole Gene, he rouses the masses through emotional appeals, replacing Gene’s white supremacist rantings with tirades against women’s control of their bodies, teachers, and all those "others" impatient for their full rights as Americans.

To keep his promises, though, he must be sure that his brother’s chosen election officials, and perhaps its legislature, prevent the counting of some of Florida’s votes. Stanley Brooks, where are you now that George needs you?

Bush delegates some of the worst ranting to his subalterns. When I turn off the television sound, his heavy-jowled angry white men could have been seated at Towns precinct in 1960.

The expansion of the right to vote did not come easy. People I know braved terror, intimidation, brutality, economic sanctions, and all the antidemocratic arsenal in order to expand the right to vote. Some were murdered for wanting to vote.

The kinds of citizens barred from the voting booth in the Telfair County, Georgia, of my youth – African-Americans, the New Crowd, women, the poor – turned out in Florida in record numbers. Now, the antidemocratic gang is trying to elevate another "pretender" to the Oval Office by refusing to count their votes.

America tried to repent of its sin of African slavery by fighting a bloody war to free slaves. It sold out those newly freed African-Americans in the 1876 election, when southern white supremacists traded Electoral College votes to Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for total control of African-Americans and their white allies. It took three quarters of a century more of freedom struggle to bring forth the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s.

If the voting rights gained in the Second Reconstruction are negated in this election, who has enough faith in American democracy to create the Third Reconstruction?

Joan C. Browning is a writer and lecturer who has made her home in West Virginia. She was a 1961 Freedom Rider. Autobiographical information is available in the chapter, "Shiloh Witness," in Constance Curry, Joan C. Browning, et. al., Deep in Our Hearts: Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement (University of Georgia Press, 2000); in the article, Joan C. Browning, "Invisible Revolutionaries: White Women in Civil Rights Movement Historiography," Journal of Women’s History, Fall 1996; and on her web site.

© 2000 all rights reserved, Joan C. Browning

The next post will be by Joan C. Browning, a writer and lecturer who was a Freedom Rider and a Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worker in the 1960s. I'm including her 2000 essay, "My vote was counted . . . . At least once," as part of my effort to point out the unfortunate continuities between past and present problems with racism and voting rights. As long as things like electronic voting scandals, racial profiling and suspicious hanging deaths of African Americans are viewed as contemporary phenomena, the real problems will not go away.

In her essay, Ms. Browning writes about the sordid history of voting rights in Georgia, where she grew up. Sadly, getting your vote counted in Georgia is still a challenge. The following map from the Harvard University Civil Rights Project study, Democracy Spoiled, shows Georgia's rate of residual ballots (aka, spoiled ballots, ballots cast but not counted) by county in the 2000 presidential election.

Some readers might be surprised to see how high the rates were in 2000. The average rate of ballot spoilage in the nation as a whole was 1.94%. You can see here that almost every county in Georgia exceeds the national average, and in many cases the rate is several times over 1.94%—as much as seven and half times over. (For more on what these figures have to do with racism, read the study and see my long essay, We Who Believe in Freedom . . .)

As Joan puts it in her essay,

America tried to repent of its sin of African slavery by fighting a bloody war to free slaves. It sold out those newly freed African-Americans in the 1876 election, when southern white supremacists traded Electoral College votes to Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for total control of African-Americans and their white allies. It took three quarters of a century more of freedom struggle to bring forth the Second Reconstruction of the 1960s.

If the voting rights gained in the Second Reconstruction are negated in this election, who has enough faith in American democracy to create the Third Reconstruction?

Joan tells me she is available for paid speaking gigs. She can talk about the 60s and other topics.

See update at the end of Up From the Comments: When Are We Going To Have A War On Terror?

Jeff from Montgomery, Alabama used to know a kid named Deroyal Carter.

The lynching/Tuskegee part caught my eye first. Then the full name clicked. I've asked around, and there are people who know the name. People ask if it's the same guy; the age is about right, we agree...

In Tallassee, AL, not very far away at all, football is a religion in the truest Alabama sense of the word. Deroyal Carter was a player in Pee Jinks (little league) who starred in fall 1986. I did P.A. announcing for the games.

Fall of 1991, I worked the ticket gate. Our neighbor coached the junior varsity. They dominated all their competition. Among the standouts on that tearm was a tailback and kick returner named Deroyal Carter.

The Wall Street church where the funeral was held is just down the road from where my dad grew up, maybe 2 miles. It's a very small world, indeed. . . .

I'm asking everyone I know with any Tallassee connections what, if anything, they might have heard. I'll keep asking. And share whatever I might find.

But it seems there truly is nothing new under the sun.

(Whole thing.)

There's a saying in the Jerusalem Talmud, "Whoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world" (San. 4:1, 22a). That world begins with a tight circle of family and then moves outward in wider concentric circles. Jeff may have been in Deroyal Carter's orbit. My sympathies are with him if this was the case. And if Winston Carter wasn't Jeff's Deroyal, there are others for whom he was. May his memory be a blessing.

Oh yeah, we've already got one. It's just that our home grown terror doesn't count.

I've been continuing a conversation in the comments with Kevin Hayden about the Tuskegee police and Mark Potok from the Southern Poverty Law Center. I'm putting the exchange out here because Kevin's comments gave me a chance to say in short form something I had in mind to say in a longer link- and source-filled post. Nothing against Kevin: he's done a lot to help and he keeps showing that he cares.

I have an ongoing worry that good progressives and liberals have stopped treating racism front and center as an ongoing major political concern. In other posts, I've been saying that voting problems won't get fixed until the racism is routed out of the electoral process. My point right now is that we can't talk about what's right and what's wrong with anyone's conduct around the death of Winston Carter without talking about racism and its history in the South.

After trying to find the good in Mark Potok's email, Kevin tried to be even handed about the Tuskegee Police:

Any speculation about why it has taken takes Tuskegee's police department 30 days so far to investigate this without providing answers to the family may be only that. I covered a suicide in a Massachusetts jail where the local police were not forthcoming for several weeks, so I don't know if there's an established timeline that police departments try to meet.

I do think they were wrong to publicly label it a suicide before such investigation is completed. Does the investigation continue because therey've seen physical reasons that might contradict that first ruling? Do they investigate to be certain they satisfy the disbelieving family that they uncovered every stone? Who knows?

Failing to secure the scene - no matter what they conclude - is a monumental gaffe that may always leave a taint on their results. North, South, East or West, there's no excuse for trained professionals to demonstrate such incompetence and I certainly hope those who made the mistake are properly disciplined for their failure to maintain standards the public must expect.

For now, I suspect we can only wait. But perhaps it'd be prudent to ask local police chiefs what a reasonable range of time one should expect of such an investigation.

I don't mean to defend the errors nor grant defense where one's due, but if we were to assume they DID find something to suggest it's a homicide/lynching, then wouldn't it also be a reasonable assumption that they'd be pursuing one or more suspects? If so, revealing details publicly could injure their case and diminish their odds for a successful prosecution.

Potok could use a refresher in public relations, and even the dismay he feels about all the past erroneous publicity does not excuse the defensive and condescending tone of his email to me. But I agree that jumping to conclusions achieves nothing.

Possibly the best response is for everyone watching this to phone the dept at (334)727-0200 and ask that you be emailed a notification when the investigation's complete. Without being hostile in any way, that would send the clear message that the interest in the case is sufficient to deter any motivation for anything less than than a professional conclusion.

I should think that would increase their motivation to avoid any further errors.

I think Kevin's idea about everyone calling the Tuskegee Police Department is a very good one, but I don't agree with his whole take:

First point of disagreement is in the post you're commenting on: when does this start to look suspicious enough to warrant action from the SPLC? If part of what looks suspicious is the poor quality of the police investigation, then what good does it do to wait and see what the police turn up first?

But I have a more serious thing to disagree about, too. It's fine to say that the police may have their reasons for not going public with all their information. BUT, we are talking about an incident where a black man was found hanging from a tree in a public place. That is ENORMOUSLY symbolic and can only be experienced as an act of TERRORISM by the African American communities in the area.

We are talking about something that reads as racial terrorism in an area that has a pitiful legacy of incident upon incident of racist violence going uninvestigated— bombings, shootings, cars getting run off the road, beatings, you name it. It is well documented that in the past such things went on with full knowledge of the police and that, in fact, the police were often the perpetrators themselves. Very few of the countless incidents were ever investigated. The police on the force now are the children and grandchildren of the Police/KKK coalition that used terror tactics to keep the "peace" by subduing and intimidating black folks. The past is still very near.

Right now, the Tuskegee Police has a professional and a historical responsibility to quell the legitimate fears of the community that they are supposed to serve. This means conducting the investigation seriously and carefully and as publicly as circumstances allow—even if this only means regular announcements that they are working hard at the investigation and will reveal the developments as soon as possible. If the police has good reason to think that this is a suicide then they must give some indication as to why.

If the police cannot vigorously maintain the sort of conduct I just outlined, they collude either in effect or by intent with terrorist murderers and send the message to all African Americans in the area that in Alabama lynchings are still a-okay.

Af far as the SPLC goes, if they are worth anything as an organization, they should be keenly aware of the symbolic force of Winston Carter's death and be doing EVERYTHING possible to bring pressure on the police to start acting appropriately.

Update (9/15/04): I was a little exercised when I was writing the above. I think I should have been more careful in what I said in one place, in the main clause of this sentence:

The police on the force now are the children and grandchildren of the Police/KKK coalition that used terror tactics to keep the "peace" by subduing and intimidating black folks. (emphasis added)

I don't know anything about the backgrounds of the police officers in Tuskegee. I'm sure that the Sheriff and any other African Americans on the force would be deeply offended to be called "children and grandchildren of the Police/KKK coalition." I also suspect there are whites on the Tuskegee police force who are not "Police/KKK" legacies and who might be offended to labeled as such. I apologize for these implications.

The point I was trying to make with my hyperbole is how in Tuskegee and its environs there are sure to be living victims and perpetrators of racist terrorism and that the children and grandchildren of the victims and perpetrators are part of social fabric of the area. The past is still very much part of the present, and there is no way for a death such as Winston Carter's to be experienced without loud historical resonances.

While I'm still seething about the Southern Poverty Law Center, I want to thank Jeanne D'Arc for directing her traffic to my my recent update on the Winston Carter story. I appreciate the readers, of course, but more than that I appreciate Jeanne's moral clarity. Writing yesterday, on September 11, she said,

This day reminds us that evil is sometimes an enormous thing that it is impossible to turn away from.

But far more often it's hidden in places almost no one notices

And she linked to me and to a story that Dwight Meredith is covering:

There you have it. A mentally ill man was denied water for at least thirteen days because some jail employee was afraid that he might have to mop the floor. As a result, a human being almost died and suffered kidney damage that will require him to undergo thrice weekly dialysis. The decision to turn off the water was inhuman (indeed, we would be outraged if someone did that to a dog). The decision costs hundreds of thousands of dollars (one month in an intensive care unit, two more months in a hospital and a lifetime of dialysis). What is the reaction to that scandal?

The blogosphere is more concerned with the history of fonts and typewriters.

The media outside of Texas studiously ignore the story.

One media outlet in Texas thinks that the story is about whether the Dallas jail gets sued.

The repsonsible elected local official allows that if someone is going to make a big stink about one crazy prisoner, he will consider whether or not an investigation is warranted.

It is a sad story, and not just for James Monroe Mims and his family.

Thanks for your attention. You may now return to discussing the exact characteristics of an IBM Selectric circa 1970.

When no one notices it seems like no one cares. When no one appears to care it compounds the suffering of those who, while enduring loss and personal hardship, must also gather their energy to deal with bureaucracies that seem designed to defend evil with banality and passivity.