Kirk Anderson remembers better than the media . . .
This photo was taken by Donald Baxter, who, like I, participates in a list-serve for veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. He took the photo earlier this week between Atlanta and Birmingham. Check out Donald's excellent web site.
We just bought an Epson all-in-one scanner, copier, printer. Now I can upload photos and documents to this blog! My first success in this department is the picture in my sidebar. That's not an author photo but a photo of my dad, spring of 1961, somewhere in NYC. He was 33 (younger than I am now) and working as Executive Director for the Greater New York Council for a Sane Nuclear Policy. He and my mom had been married ten years and were proud parents to two daughters, my sisters Francine and Jessica, then 3 and 1 years old, respectively.
Now that I've scanned and uploaded one photo successfully, I'll post a few here, in blog proper, as a further experiment.
Here's a photo with Dad and Fran and Jess, Fourth of July weekend, 1961, the girls now just a little over 3 1/2 and 1 1/2 years old:
Next are photos of Dad, early 1940s, probably age 15 or 16, with his parents.
This one is of him and his father, Ben Greenberg, after whom I'm named . . .
This one is of Dad with his mother, Gertrude Swig Greenberg:
I never knew either of my paternal grandparents. They both died before I was born. Reading "Lunch" should help you understand why I see something very pained in my dad's expression, as he poses with his father. In another post, I will write the curious story of the photo of Dad with Grandma Gert.
Well they called me once, and they called me twice
Third time they called me was cold as ice,
They say "Get to the table, Get to the table on time!"
Better make up your mind, if you wanna get to the table on time
Better get to the table, get to the table on time.And the Lord of Lords, He laid out a feast,
He said "Listen to me boys, this will be last one of these,
So you better get to the table, get to the table on time."
Better make up your mind, if you wanna get to the table on time
Better get to the table, get to the table on time. (M. Ward, "Get To The Table On Time")
Seems lately I've been finding more opportunities to blog on things not so related to the subject of HungryBlues. Part of this is about my finding ways to participate in the broader activity of the blogosphere. But it's also because HungryBlues is a memoir of my learning about the history and biography that illuminate my father's life. One of my goals is to gain a better understanding of how my personal history and my own preoccupations are part of the story that I'm telling about my father. It should be the case, then, that even my unrelated musings are actually an important part of what I'm doing here at HungryBlues.
This is meant as a preface to blogging Jeanne D'arc's thoroughly great "Politics and Poetry" over at Body and Soul. But now I don't know why I started this thinking that I'm blogging off subject. That I identify so strongly with Jeanne's piece has everything to do with the things I'm writing about my father. "Politics and Poetry" is a gorgeous expression of the sort of realistic idealism about America that motivated my father to do the work that he did.
Reading through the comments to Jeanne's post, I see there is some discussion about whether idealism about American values is appropriate in leftist politics. From the historical vantage point of this blog, I'd have to say that such idealism is most definitely appropriate—and needed—on the left. It isn't just that, as Donald Johnson comments, "it's the civil rights movement which ennobled Jefferson's words, not the other way around." Civil Rights Movement protest was very much about demanding that the core American ideals apply to African-Americans as well as to whites.
This year's Democratic National Convention in Boston will mark the 40th anniversary of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party's noble failure in Atlantic City. The failure of the MFDP laid bare the hypocrisy of Democrats who professed Jeanne's values. The MFDP failure also exposed the sadly compromised position of liberal Blacks and whites, largely from the SCLC and organized labor (the liberal coalition my father was part of). Yes, it's true that the MFDP representatives were defeated by the "emptiness inside the box," to use Jeanne's phrase—but they came to Atlantic City to demand that the promises of representative democracy be met. They came with a belief in what the wrapping paper seemed to promise would be inside.
I'm mentioning the MFDP now because we, as a nation, desperately need the Democratic Party to stand for what the MFDP stood for. If to get George Bush out of the White House we must support John Kerry, then we must make sure that John Kerry knows that his constituents expect him to live up to the radicalism of the Langston Hughes quote used in the Kerry slogan, "Let America be America again."
It's my impression that even folks reasonably familiar with Civil Rights Movement history don't know about the MFDP. As this year's Democratic National Convention approaches, I'd like to recall the events in Atlantic City with some passages from James Foreman's The Making of Black Revolutionaries. In the 1960s, Foreman was Executive Secretary and Director of International Affairs of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
At the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City Hubert Humphrey, Walter Reuther, Senator Wayne Morsse, Roy Wilkins, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, Allard Lowenstin, and many other forces in the liberal-labor syndrome said that the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee did not understand politics.
We did not understand the political process, they said.
We did not understand how to "compromise," they said.
We did not understand the Democratic Party, they said.
We in SNCC understood politics and the political process. We could compromise—but not sell out the people. And we knew a great deal about the Democratic Party. But the way that the liberal-labor syndrome looked at life was not the way we looked at it. We did not see the Democratic Party as the great savior of black people in this country. Therefore we did not have the habit of following blindly the ass, no matter how stupid he became . . . or how many times he kicked you . . . or did not move forward . . . or lost his way. We were not hooked on his smell. We understood, we understood all too well.
When I arrived at Atlantic City, two days after the others from Mississippi, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer had already testified before the Credentials Committee—the first step in the battle of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation to be recognized as the rightful representatives at this convention. Mrs. Hamer has a way of describing her own life and the lives of other poor people in the Delta with such force that they become very real. Her testimony, carried over national television, stirred the hearts of many viewers. She brought to life the legal brief prepared by Joseph Rauh, the general counsel for the UAW, whose true character we did not yet know, and by Eleanor Norton, a skilled black attorney. The brief argued that the regular delegates could not represent the Democrats of Mississippi because almost half of that state's population was excluded from the entire political process, including the election of delegates; that the regular delegation, aside from its racist basis, could not even be considred "loyal" to the national party because the state Democrats had several times bolted—most recently coming out for Goldwater. . . .
Everywhere in the lobby there were Mississippi farmers, all dressed up in their Sunday-go-to-meeting best. I greeted Mrs. Palmer; she was worried about what-them-white-folks-going-to-do. Upstairs in one of the rooms several of our delegates were stretched out on a bed. They had another meeting to attend, one-of-them-caucuses. Haven't been to so many meetings in all my life, one said. . . .
It was Tuesday night, 8:30 PM, and the convention was about to have the formal opening. As the chairman introduced George Lawrence, former governor of Pennsylvania, members of the Freedom Democratic Party entered the convention hall with passes obtained from sympathetic delegates. There they were, black Mississippians, led by Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, sitting in the seats of the Mississippi delegation. They had voted to reject the proposal of the Credentials Committee—a proposal "giving" them a grand total of two seats as "delegates-at-large." This was not what they had come for, not by a long shot. So they came inside, all of them. This was their protest, their answer to Lyndon B. Johnson.
But Johnson's people had a trick bag for them. The word was passed in some delegations where we still had support that the Freedom Democrats had accepted the resolution of the Credentials Committee. . . . The Credentials Committee report was adopted by the convention. Some people in SNCC and the MFDP were stunned—others were not. (386-90)
One who learns from his colleague one chapter, or one halakha, or one verse, or one expression, or even one letter, is obliged to pay him honor. This we learn from David, King of Israel, who learned but two things from Akhitofel, yet called him his master, his guide, his dear friend, as it is wrtten, "But it is you, my equal, my guide, my dear friend" (Psalm 55:14). It follows, then, that if King David, who learned only two things from Akhitofel, called him his master, his guide, his dear friend, one who learns from his coleagues one chapter, one halakhah, one verse, one espression, or even one letter surely is obliged to pay him honor. (Pirkei Avot, 6:3)
I was going through unread RSS feeds and found that Jim at Paleojudaica posted a link to the Washington Post obituary for Professor Samuel Iwry, who died on Saturday, May 8 at age 93.
When I was doing my masters in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, back in 1993, I had to pass off on a language requirement. (This is also where I met Jonathan David Jackson, mentioned in this recent post). I'd decided that I had a better chance at breezing through a Hebrew exam than I did at doing well in French, so I was referred to Samuel Iwry as the professor who would examine me.
At the time, I knew nothing about him. I did not realize he'd been such an important scholar or that he'd led such an interesting life.
Samuel Iwry Dies at 93; Scholar Helped Decode Dead Sea Scrolls
By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 13, 2004; Page B06Samuel Iwry, 93, a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls whose life story could rival the plot of an international adventure novel, died of a stroke May 8 at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore.
---snip---
Mr. Iwry made his mark as a scholar when he was a graduate student studying under the renowned archaeologist William Foxwell Albright at Johns Hopkins. His Hebrew language skills helped identify and verify the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
His traditional Jewish education trained him well for the task. He was born in Bialystok, Poland, and graduated from Warsaw University's Higher Institute for Judaic Studies in 1937, with accolades for his facility with Hebrew. His surname means "Hebrew" in the language, and family history says Mr. Iwry was a direct descendant of the founder of the Hasidic movement, Rebbe Israel Baal Shem Tov, who died in 1760.
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, Mr. Iwry became a leader in the underground resistance and escaped to Lithuania. He narrowly survived the crossing of Russia to reach Kobe, Japan, in 1941. He then made his way to Shanghai.
David Ben-Gurion, who later became Israel's first prime minister, appointed Mr. Iwry to serve as Far East representative for the Jewish Agency for Palestine. His job was to negotiate with the British authorities for the escape of thousands of Jewish families who lived in the Far East. After enabling thousands to emigrate to Palestine, Mr. Iwry was captured by the Japanese occupying forces, imprisoned in Shanghai and tortured.
---snip---
As more [Dead Sea] scrolls were discovered into the early 1950s, scholars kept a special phone line between Jerusalem and Baltimore, through London. As Israeli scholars reported what was on the scrolls, Mr. Iwry was on the phone with Albright, giving him "a kind of intimate involvement with the scrolls that people don't know about," McCarter said. Mr. Iwry wrote the first doctoral dissertation on the scrolls and was regarded throughout his life as the expert on them. He completed his doctorate degree in 1951 at Johns Hopkins.
Mr. Iwry was a popular teacher and lecturer, especially in Israel, where he drew large crowds who wanted to hear him speak Hebrew "because he spoke it as it was intended to be spoken," McCarter said. "It was not only for what Sam said, but how he said it that was so beautiful. . . .
Between college and graduate school, I lived in Eugene, Oregon from 1991-1993. I went back to Delmar, NY to live with my parents for the summer of 1993, before I went on to Baltimore for my year at Hopkins. Though I felt more confident in my Hebrew than in my French, I was still sure that I needed to brush up on Hebrew grammar basics. My mom set me up with tutoring from a professor at SUNY Albany, an Israeli linguist who also has a background in Biblical studies. Throughout the summer, I met with her once or twice a week. We'd decided I would take my exam in modern Hebrew, rather than Biblical Hebrew, so she put me through intense drills of basic Hebrew vocabulary, usage and construction rules for all of the Hebrew prepositions and pronouns, conjunctions, the definite article—and, of course, Hebrew verb paradigms (binyanim).
My tutor wanted me to pass the exam, but it also sort of seemed she was concerned that my performance on the exam would reflect on her professionally. My parents were paying for one hour sessions, but my tutor would generally keep me for as long as she felt she could successfully hammer more Hebrew language into my brain. We would work through section after section of her own, unpublished Hebrew textbook. Every so often, unexpectedly, she would shout in Hebrew across the house to her son, S., a few years younger than I, would he take out the trash, did he remember to go to the bank, had he called his father, etc, etc.
Frequently it wasn't until an hour and a half or even two hours later, that my eyes would finally glaze over and my tutor would be satisfied that my mind had reached it's point of maximum Hebrew saturation for that day. She then would give me a pile of blank verb paradigm charts for me to fill in for multiple examples of each kind of verb we'd worked on, along with pages of English sentences for me translate into Hebrew. All my Hebrew sentences were to include vocalization marks (vowels); though fluent speakers and readers don't usually need the marks and don't use them, they carry grammatical information, which my tutor wanted me to master. At the end of the summer, my tutor made a list of the areas we hadn't yet covered and gave me a pile of assignment sheets to take with me to Baltimore, which I was then to send back to her for her to correct and return to me. Anytime I ever had any question about Hebrew grammar, I could and should call her, she said.
Things started up at Hopkins. We had our orientation. I was assigned my advisor, and we worked out my courses and filled out the registration forms. Then there was the wine and cheese welcoming of the new masters students—scheduled on Rosh Hashanah until I complained ("but we asked the Jewish faculty and they said it would be fine . . ."). Then it was time to go see Dr. Iwry. (At Johns Hopkins it is considered decorous to address the professors as Dr.—this after my undergrad years at Brandies where it was typical for undergraduates to address their professors by first name.) When I arrived at Dr. Iwry's office and asked him when we could schedule my Hebrew exam, he would not discuss a date with me. Instead he insisted I begin sitting in on one of the intermediate level undergraduate Hebrew courses. He also sent me off with a reader* of classic Hebrew stories and essays from the first half of the 20th century and said that when I felt I could handle the readings and answer the Hebrew study questions he would give me the exam.
This was nearly eleven years ago, so I don't remember all the details so clearly now. But my visits to Dr. Iwry's office went on for a good portion of the semester. I'd show up and report on how I did with the readings he'd specified and then he'd give me something else to do. In between visits with Dr. Iwry, I'd occasionally call up my summer tutor with questions about my work from Dr. Iwry. Each time I called, her exasperation would intensify. How could this Iwry be questioning what she taught me?! But she would also discuss in detail with me any of my questions. And she had me send her some of my work in the mail so she could look it over. Finally after about two months of this, Dr. Iwry agreed to examine me. The exam consisted of reading passages and answering questions from the the same reader he had given me the first time we met. I asked Dr. Iwry if he wanted me to include the vocalization marks. He said that wasn't necessary. My tutor had been a stickler about the vocalization marks, so I decided to put them in anyway, just to show Dr. Iwry what I knew.
After about a week, I went back in Dr. Iwry's office to find out the results of my exam. When I walked in, Dr. Iwry sternly told me to sit down. "Mr. Greenberg," he said, "you've passed the exam." After a weighty pause, he continued, "most students don't have Hebrew like yours. If you don't keep studying, you're in big trouble." I don't remember what was said next, but after another minute or two I was on my way and did not see Dr. Iwry again.
To date, I have somewhat failed Dr. Iwry. I crammed hard for all those months before the exam but didn't have much cause to use my new skills during the intense year of graduate courses, writing workshops, and thesis writing (a manuscript of poems). Though I've made periodic attempts to brush up on what I learned for Dr. Iwry's exam, I've forgotten a lot of the fine points of Hebrew vocalization marks. Nowadays, when it comes to the Hebrew verb paradigms, I only remember the most basic forms—though I had been able to construct most of the exceptional forms.
I tell this story about Dr. Iwry every so often, but it's only at this writing that I think I understand his behavior. As far as he was concerned Hebrew was not a subject that one treats expediently, as a means to satisfy a program requirement. He didn't want to give the exam until he had some confidence that I might approach the study of Hebrew for its own sake.
If I am correct about Dr. Iwry's intentions, then I feel even worse than I used to about my lapses in Hebrew study. But I console myself with two thoughts. First, I assume I will return to more serious study of Hebrew. I still aspire to read serious Hebrew literature for pleasure. Second, I like to think there is at least one thing I am dong right now that would please Dr. Iwry. When I tutor boys and girls for their bar/bat-mitzvahs (my part-time job in the evenings), I very frequently teach them something arcane about Hebrew vocalization marks—the rules for distinguishing between a sheva nach and a sheva na. The sheva is a vocalization mark (it looks like a colon (:) underneath a letter) that sometimes gets pronounced as a semi-syllable, a quick "eh," and sometimes is silent (it's the difference between saying "yoshvei" and "yo'she'vei"). Most Hebrew readers and speakers, even fluent ones, simply do whatever sounds "right" to them, based on whatever conglomeration of regional pronunciation habits they have imbibed from others in their communities. For non-fluent readers, the sheva can be the key to understanding how to parse the syllables of a Hebrew word. I also figure that the kids I teach are too removed from the processes of acculturation that taught their parents and grandparents their habits of Hebrew pronunciation. For these reasons, I prefer to teach my students a rational system. The message is that they themselves can figure out the correct pronunciation, without having to guess and without having to wait for someone else to tell them how it's done. The result is pronunciation that is not entirely the practice of any community of speakers. But my approach satisfies my need and my students' that I be consistent in my instruction.
When my next students celebrate their bar-mitzvahs and bat-mtizvahs, I hope Dr. Iwry will be listening and that these young people make him smile.
---------------------
*I've been racking my brains to remember the name of the book Dr. Iwry gave me to study. It was a hard cover reader, the readings, questions and front-matter all in Hebrew. My impression is that it was published several decades ago and is considered a classic book of its kind. Anyone out there have any idea what book I'm talking about?
With my low rent and my solitude and my Bachelor's
in English, I'm on the West Coast, I'm getting religious
and I'm up to my elbows in dishwater
and I hear voices: Blessed art thou, God of our Fathers,
they say, chanting name after name, from Abraham
to the present, stopping predictably, at the name
of my father. Sunlight through the orange curtains
blotched whitish-brown, like a mishap from bleach—O Father,
these dishes are covered with suds! these greasy plates
and these pots with burnt food on the bottom and the slimy
peanut butter knives, the whole kitchen underwater,
its dark blue cabinets and sky blue ceiling
and the mobile with yellow fish. Outside, unclouded sky—
endless background for the plum tree, white blossoms
stretching over the sun-burned lawn—
O civil servant watching the world from the suburbs
in the East, New York City papers spread open
like maps on your desk, routes to Swing Street
and to Pizer and Dubinsky making their speeches—
it's 1992, the pale sky and plum blossoms like
ex-communists, denouncing poetry, refusing to talk,
the ghosts are talking, I hear you among them, "it doesn't get
better than this, this is heaven."
My dear friend Jonathan David Jackson posted a comment to my previous post. "Another poem please" was his request. Just this once, I'll do as he asks in this regard. But before I do, I think I'll take the opportunity to say a little bit about the poems I've been posting on occasion, here at HungryBlues.
As I detailed here, the first writing I did about my father was in poems. The poems began very shortly after his death. Their emotions and their understandings of history are dense and idiosyncratic. What I'm doing now is, in a certain sense, the aftermath of having written poems. HungryBlues is a kind of prolonged act of investigation and close reading to try to gain more understanding of those first moments of looking back, those first complicated perceptions of a life seen differently because it has just ended. (I was going to write "seen whole," but I don't think that's accurate.)
For the most part, I'm posting poems when it seems to me that some of my prose has entered into conversation with an existing poem. I don't particularly wish to explain what I see as the content of these conversations, at least not directly. However, I do wish to honor Jonathan. For one thing he is such an able and generous reader of my poems. For another thing, Jonathan has been a great inspiration to me and a great encourager of my various pursuits, ever since we first became friends in 1993. Jonathan is truly, the greater, harder working, more dedicated poet, and so, just this once, for him, I'll post a poem before my prose has invited that poem to appear. Though, in fact, this prose that I'm writing now, in answer to Jonathan, does invite a poem.
Writing about my intentions in poetry is, for me, an embarrassing form of writing and is probably the final reason why I usually post poems without comment. But since I'm commenting now, I'll say a couple of things about the poem I'm about to post. The first thing is that I wrote one version of it 5 years before my father's death, in anticipation of a moment after his death. The second thing is that I was not able to finish revising the poem to my satisfaction until a year or two after he died. In the background of these thoughts, I'm thinking of an old elementary school friend of mine, whose mother is currently in hospice and I'm thinking about the Leah at Jerusalem Wanderings who just buried her father.
jerusalem wanderings is a new blog by, Leah, an American born Israeli woman. She's only been blogging since April, so if you go there now you can read all the posts pretty quickly and be on board for what looks like a great blog to follow. There are several reasons why I love reading jw. For one thing, if you follow events in Israel, even if you follow them closely, it's hard to get any sense of what life is like for people living there. Leah gives many wonderful details that capture bits of daily life in Jerusalem. Also, I like her politics. Outside of Israel, if you're on the left about Israeli-Palestinian issues and you love Israel, you can end up feeling quite embattled and lonely. Leah doesn't pontificate about politics. She reports on Israeli-Palestinian peace movement stuff, but mostly her politics are expressed in what she tells about her personal interactions and experiences. Leah's been living in Israel probably for 20 years or more. There's plenty personal and political that could make her cynical and bitter. But her love of life in Israel is intoxicating. Her love of Palestinians and their culture is also clear. She doesn't hesitate to call folks on their stupid racist assumptions about Palestinians. Let's, see what else . . . the writing is unpretentious and really good. Anyway, go read it . . .
(I found jw while surfing the Jewish Bloggers Webring ( >>) and then realized I'd already read about it in my friend Rebecca's blog, Mystical Politics. Rebecca is currently collecting links to blogs by Orthodox / ultra-Orthodox / Hasidic Jews. If you want to learn about that world, you can find some good links on Mystical Politics. If you know of some good Ortho blogs, stop at Rebecca's blog and leave her a comment or email her with your links.)
Correction: Heard from Leah herself, who told me she's been living in Israel 10 years, not 20. I guessed wrong based on the ages of her children. I assumed her children were all born in Israel, but that was not the case.
I think even your Grandpa Ben was embarrassed
By how Grandma Gert clung to him when he showed up
At a bar-mitzvah. We’d heard he’d taken another name,
Married someone else, run another business,
But it was like he never left . . .
Once, I think I was eleven, she took me to meet him for lunch.
We stood outside the diner for nearly an hour.
When we saw him, she grabbed my arm,
I asked, “who’s he with,” but your grandma didn’t hear
And just pushed past everyone until we stood
In the path of the other two. “Who’re they, Ben?”
I heard the woman ask. “C’mon, keep walking,”
He said, and they were gone, so we
Went home. We never ate lunch.
In honor of Mother's Day, I'd like to make some mention of my mother, who married my father in 1951. When he died in 1997, they were married almost 47 years.
As I've been doing this research about my father, I've been fortunate that I can ask my mother questions. She can add historical information, details about people whose names come up, and interesting stories. Sometimes when I start asking her my questions, though, she gets a little impatient. "I couldn't pay attention to all of that," she says. "I was taking care of your sisters. I had to keep the household together while he was doing all those things."
When Dad met Mom, she was 18 or 19, a pretty college student attending Sarah Lawrence College. She'd gone to the Little Red School House and Elisabeth Irwin High School. She also studied at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Her family, though firmly rooted in Jewish religious culture, was quite cosmopolitan. My maternal grandparents had a subscription to the New York Philharmonic for decades. They had a small art collection. They were politically progressive. My maternal grandmother was a member of the teacher's union in the 40s and requested teaching positions in Harlem. My parents met in the late 1940s through my mother's brother, who was a labor organizer, like my dad, and involved in the same radical circles.
My dad's radicalism and bohemianism were certainly things that must have attracted Mom when she first met him, but she was never really an activist: she was a "fellow traveler." Still she attended enough left wing political meetings and had enough friends who were radicals that she had trouble with McCarthyism when she was working as a teacher in the New York Citiy public schools in the 1950s.
At least as significant as my mother's background and her sophisticated, progressive family was that her family was tightly knit and financially stable. This was a stark contrast to my father's rocky family situation. His father, after whom I am named, was an irregular presence in his life. His mother, Gert, was under a lot of stress, with four sons to take care of and, at best, intermittent support from her husband. She was from the philanthropic Swig family, but their support was limited because they didn't trust her husband. The youngest of the Greenberg brothers, my dad lived alone with Gert during his teenage years in Brighton, MA. In addition to the obvious problems associated with having an absentee husband, Gert had other problems that led her to be cruel to Dad and to demand his emotional support in inappropriate ways. It was under these conditions that my father ran away to NYC when he was 17 years old and wound up as Frankie Newton's roommate. As one of my dad's sisters-in-law said to my mom at a recent Greenberg family reunion, "it's terrible what happened to Paul."
When it became evident that my mother and father would marry, Gert, said, "With Esther, Paul will be fine." To Gert it was clear that my mother could provide my father with an anchor that, to a point of negligence, his own family did not offer. The stability in my mother's family was clearly a big part of what drew my father to her. Once he found her, he pursued her relentlessly.
Despite all of the deficits he had in his upbringing, my father did remarkably well for himself. He was an autodidact who never finished high school and attended Columbia University for two years under the GI Bill. Without ever completing his formal education, he held good jobs and accomplished a great deal in his work life. Without good models from his own family, he nevertheless became a responsible, loving husband and father.
As a boy and as a teenager, my father suffered deep emotional and psychological wounds. There were basic social skills that he never developed. He was prone to fits of rage throughout his adulthood. He earned regular paychecks, and he took part in and relished his family life, but he never learned how to be an equal partner in running the household. He relied on my mother for a great deal and probably never entirely understood the toll it took on her when she was young or as she grew older. On some level, however, he knew very well how much he needed her in his life. Even during times when their relationship was very difficult, he maintained a deep romantic feeling for her.
On this Mother's Day I'd like to honor my mother for how she (and her parents) held our family together while my father did many of the things I am writing about in this blog. I'll end this with a short piece, which Dad wrote in 1994, to call up the romance that brought my parents together.
On a summer night in 1949 we were at a left wing rally. At the conclusion of the planning committee we marched through the crowd in a dramatic attempt to demonstrate a democratic spirit and to further whoop them up. I was carrying the red flag while the music blared the Internationale. I spotted her off to the side, took her hand, and we marched out together. Without having asked I had a "date" for the inner circle party after the rally. At the party the usual beer and pretzels and wild schemes for a non-existent revolution combined with guitars and folk songs.
The song leader started us on the Scottish ballad I Know Where I Am Going. When the song ended a comrade began to harangue: the song was "white chauvinist" because of the line "some say he is black but I say he is bonny." We were still holding hands. I leaned and whispered, "should we leave?" She put her head on my shoulder and said yes. Outside in the warm city night, in the light of the moon and a lamppost I looked into her pretty brown eyes and saw a place I had never been before. I kissed her forehead and then we were heading toward the subway. I could not speak. "Don't blow it" roared through my head. As we entered the subway my head stopped aching from the roar. We started to chatter about revolution. The words of the song were in my head now. "I know where I am going and I know who is going with me."
Of course once I started thinking I'd post something for Ronn's Poem On Your Blog Day, books started raining off the poetry shelves. But given the hour, I'm going to try to keep to just a poem or two.
I have a favorite poem—among many favorite poems—which is not a truly great poem. Or maybe it is a great poem, but compared to other poems by the same author it's hard to call it great and be emphatic about it.
The poem is by Frank O'Hara.
POEM
That's not a cross look it's a sign of life
but I'm glad you care how I look at you
this morning (after I got up) I was thinking
of President Warren G. Harding and Horace S.
Warren, father of the little blonde girl
across the street and another blonde Agnes
Hedlund (this was in the 6th grade!) what
now the day has begun in a soft grey way
with elephantine traffic trudging along Fifth
and two packages of Camels in my pocket
I can't think of one interesting thing Warren
G. Harding did, I guess I was passing notes
to Sally and Agnes at the time he came up
in our elephantine history course everything
seems slow suddenly and boring except
for my insatiable thinking towards you
as you lie asleep completely plotzed and
gracious as a hillock in the mist from one
small window, sunless and only slightly open
as is your mouth and presently your quiet eyes
your breathing is like that history lesson
(1960)
Little things in this poem take my breath away:
1. The whole poem takes place as the speaker's lover's eyes are opening from sleep. The lover's eyes are opening in the first two lines and they're still just opening in the last two lines.
2. What that "what," hanging off the end of the last line of the first stanza, does to the tone of the second the stanza.
3. "elephantine traffic"
a) something about that gets the feeling of watching traffic from the my recently deceased (both at 99, 6 weeks apart), maternal grandparents' 13th floor window on the lower east side of Manhattan (the co-op apartments on Grand Street, between Essex and Clinton). When I was a small boy, I'd stand at the window, looking out over my grandmother's plants on the sill, and watch the cars and the pedestrians and the bigger kids playing basketball.
b) the way "elephantine" comes associatively from the day's "soft grey way" the same way Horace S. Warren comes from Warren G. Harding and blonde Agnes come from the first blonde girl. The two packages of Camels in the speaker's pocket probably would not have come up except for the similar kind of associative thinking that gets him from elephants to camels.
4. "thinking towards you"
There is a beautiful emotion in this even as it seems to complain of being too cerebral.
5. the last 5 lines
The subtle shifts in tone and diction are marvelous. O'Hara masters similar effects more perfectly in other poems. But if it's slightly clumsy here, it's also charming without exactly trying to be so.
6. "your breathing is like that history lesson"
This is a beautiful line. Such quiet, understated tragedy. The speaker is able to expand the millisecond of his lover's beautiful waking by allowing his distractable nature to have free reign. The speaker's mind flits from association to association, whether in word, image, or memory. He means to be enraptured by his lover's breathing but he's missing it the same way he missed whatever it was he should have learned about Warren G. Harding (whose name is so ugly, compared to the rest of the words in this poem).
The second poem I want to include is by Muriel Rukeyser. By chance it has the same generic title as O'Hara's poem. I'm not going to comment on this one except to say it is a favorite of mine because of how it helped me to feel less alone in the aftermath of September 11.
POEM
I lived in the first century or world wars.
Most mornings I would be more or less insane,
The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,
The news would pour out of various devices
Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.
I would call my friends on other devices;
They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.
Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other.
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
I lived in the first century of these wars.
(from The Speed of Darkness, 1968)
From Secrecy News:
ISOO REPORTS A 25% RISE IN CLASSIFICATION ACTIVITY
"Allowing information that will not cause damage to national security to remain in the classification system, or to enter the system in the first instance, places all classified information at needless increased risk," said the ISOO report, published this week.
"ISOO has asked all agency heads to closely examine efforts to implement and maintain the security classification system at their agencies... This effort includes ensuring that information that requires protection is properly identified and safeguarded and, equally important, that information not eligible for inclusion in the classification system remains unclassified or is promptly declassified."
via MemoryBlog
Last Thursday I had the honor and the pleasure of receiving an email from Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution. As I mentioned in Part 3 of From the Delmar Archive to Bombingham, Alabama, her excellent book contains one of the only published accounts of the Roosevelt Tatum episode which I have been writing about. Her book has been extremely important for me as I try to understand the the Tatum story.
It was gratifying to hear from her that she is eager to see what I write in Part 4 of the series. I explained to her that I've been struggling to find the time to work on Part 4, but that I hoped to post it soon. If you're reading this, you know that Part 4 is now posted. I also explained to her something that I haven't explained in my blog. The previously declassified file on Roosevelt Tatum that I received is not the only set of FBI documents I have on his case. After I received the first file, I appealed the deletions in the file and eventually received some more documents pertaining to the case.
Until recently, I read documents as they arrived and then put them aside, intending to work on them later. Now that I'm really doing this project, I've been getting more organized, but there are a few things that I know I have in my house that have not yet turned up. I knew I had more documents on Roosevelt Tatum, but I wasn't sure where they were. My protocol in starting this blog has been begin with what you've got: the main thing is to get writing.
Of course when Diane McWhorter started asking me questions about my work on Roosevelt Tatum, that got me looking for the additional documents again. I don't think I've found everything, but I did find one small sheaf of pages from the FBI that adds some interesting information to the case. Really, what they add is more narrative. I've given you most of the relevant facts, but now I've got a little more of the story.
But first, tomorrow, I'm planning to bring my computer into the shop. When I get it back I will get working on these new documents, hopefully getting the new post up faster than I did Part 4 of the series. This is also to say that Part 5 will now be based on the new documents. The analysis of Tatum's various statements will have to wait until Part 6. And then, finally, I'll be done with this series. Until I find the rest of the documents.
I'm really itching to get on to some of the other things I've got lined up for blogging. Coming down the pike will be some stuff on the AGVA Salute to Freedom, a benefit concert held at Miles College in Birmingham, to raise money for transportation to the March on Washington. Once I've blogged the concert, it will be time to post a fragment from my dad's never completed autobiographical novel, Long Days Short Nights. And then I've got hundreds of pages of FBI documents on The Greater New York Council for a Sane Nuclear Policy in the years Dad was executive director for that organization.
But first I have to endure being without my beloved Power Book while it's being repaired. Here's hoping the repair will be speedy and effective.
I'll be able to check my email from my wife's computer and do some web surfing during the day when she's at work and her computer is here at home. But it won't be the same.
On July 3, 1963, Roosevelt Tatum was interviewed another time by FBI Agents in Birmingham, Alabama. In this meeting Tatum signed a statement recanting his previous allegations regarding the role of the Birmingham Police in the bombing of A. D. and Naomi King's home. Here is an excerpt from Tatum's retraction:
I did not see any suspicious persons or suspicious cars that night and I have no knowledge whatever as to who may have been responsible for the explosions at Rev. King's home. . . .
Later, after the explosions, I saw Police Squad Car #49 parked at the King residence. I remember thinking that Car #49 got to the scene mighty soon after the explosion and I also knew Car #49 does not patrol that area. There was some talk later among the people who gathered at the scene that the police sure got there quick and I thought maybe the police had something to do with the explosion. However, I did not see any police car around the King residence before the explosion and I have no knowledge that anyone connected with the Police Dept. was involved in any way.
Some five or six weeks later I got drunk one Saturday, and went to Rev. King's house and told him and some white fellow named Greenberg that I actually saw two police men in Car 49 place something on Rev. King's property just before the explosion. After I told my story, Rev. King or somebody called the FBI, and I told the F.B.I. [sic] the same bunch of lies. The plain truth is I don't know anything whatever as to who may have caused this explosion. I saw no suspicious persons or cars that night and there is absolutely no other information which I can furnish. (Roosevelt Tatum. FBI HQ-0460048526. Prosecutive Summary Report, Names And Addresses Of Witnesses And Testimony Of Each. 52- 53.)
On August 26, 1963, the details concerning Tatum's admitted false testimony were brought before a Federal Grand Jury. Two days later, the Grand Jury returned an indictment, charging that Roosevelt Tatum
did, in a matter within the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice of the United States of America, knowingly, willfully [sic], and unlawfully make a false statement to a representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in that . . . the defendant stated that on the night of May 11, 1963, Birmingham Police Car Number 49, occupied by two police officers placed an explosive charge in front of the residence of A. D. W. King in Birmingham, Alabama; and that one of the police officers placed an explosive charge in front of said residence, when in truth and fact, as the defendant then and there well knew, the aforesaid statement was false. (6)
Tatum was charged with violating Section 1001, Title 18 of the U. S. Code.
September 23, 1963. Tatum's lawyer, Orzell Billingsley, filed a motion to quash the indictment.
September 25, 1963. Tatum entered a plea of not guilty to the charge against him.
November 18, 1963. Tatum's trial at the US District Court, at Birmingham, Alabama. Tatum changed his plea to guilty and was sentenced under Section 4208B, Title 18, US Code. Before sentencing him, the court placed Tatum in the custody of the Attorney General for a 90 day period of observation and study.
March 31, 1964. Roosevelt Tatum appeared for sentencing in US District Court, Birmingham, Alabama. His sentence: one year and one day imprisonment from the date of his original commitment, November 18, 1963.
It turns out that Roosevelt Tatum was charged with false testimony because US Attorney Macon L. Weaver was looking to charge someone with false testimony. A memo dated July 16, 1963, from FBI Special Agent In Charge (SAC) in Birmingham to the FBI Director, reveals that
U. S. Attorney Macon L. Weaver, at Birmingham, has evidenced considerable interest in receiving reports of any individuals in this Division who furnish false information to the Governmentand [sic] is, of course, very much interested in rendering prosecutive opinions in any case where there is a violation of Section 1001, Title 18, U. S. Code. He has specifically requested copies of any reports in connection with the bombing investigation which indicate that witnesses have furnished false information. (Roosevelt Tatum. FBI HQ-0460048526.)
Either Weaver requested documents from the FBI because he was hoping to find someone to prosecute, or he knew about the Tatum story and wanted the evidence he needed to bring a case against him. The FBI complied with Weaver's request, but the Justice Dept. also took away his prosecutive authority in "cases of of this type involving a racial situation." In a July 26 memo from Special Agent In Charge, Birmingham to the FBI Director regarding Weaver's request for reports on individuals who furnished false information, the SAC reported that, despite the Department's prohibition, Weaver felt compelled to make known to them his view that Roosevelt Tatum should be prosecuted by the Department.
On August 19, 1963, Justice Clarence W. Allgood, of the US District Court, Northern District of Alabama, approved the Birmingham Board of Education's desegregation plan. The next day, on August 20, at 9:26 p.m., there was another bombing in Birmingham. This time the target was Arthur Shores, an African American civil rights attorney, who lived there. Diane McWhorter describes the scene after the bombing:
When the Reverend Nelson "Fireball" Smith arrived, A. D. King and Charles Billups were already on the top of a police car making pleas for peace. "If you are going to kill someone, kill me," A. D. King shouted at the crowd. "The police are mad; now y'all go on." Detective Maurice House said, "A. D., don't say we're mad, you'll get us all killed." Some officers, expecting as much, had been issued submachine guns. "They stand here with pistols and other magic power," King persisted. "We can't beat them tonight. We are going to win this town regardless of what they do. Stand if you must—stand in love, not violence." A barrage of rocks answered him. A policeman positioned between two parked cars was felled by a flying rock, and Smith's leg was hit. He and King went into Shores's house to attend to a chip fracture on Smith's shinbone, leaving the mob to its momentum. (Carry Me Home, 482)
The next day, on August 21, US Attorney Macon L. Weaver issued a press release:
THE EVENTS OF LAST EVENING, FOLLOWING THE BOMBING OF ATTORNEY ARTHUR SHORES HOME WHEREIN BIRMINGHAM POLICE OFFICERS WERE STONED BY NEGRO MEMBERS OF THE NEGRO COMMUNITY MAKE IT NECESSARY TO MAKE THIS UNPRECEDENTED STATEMENT CONCERNING A CASE UNDER INVESTIGATION.
ON JUNE TWENTYTWO, SIXTYTHREE [sic] A NEGRO MALE WHO RESIDES IN THE VICINITY OF REV. A. D. W. KING/S [SIC] RESIDENCE CONTACTED REV. KING AND JACK GREENBERG, ATTORNEY FOR THE SCLCU [sic], AND GAVE A STATEMENT IN WHICH HE ALLEGES THAT HE SAW TWO OFFICERS OF THE BIRMINGHAM POLICE DEPARTMENT IN A SPECIFIED NUMBERED CAR BOMB THE RESIDENCE OF A. D. W. KING. REV. KING CONTACTED THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION AND ON THE SAME DATE THIS SAME PERSON GAVE A STATEMENT TO THE FBI OF SUBSTANTIALLY THE SAME FACTS. HE WAS LATER FLOWN TO WASHINGTON BY THE REV. KING WHERE HE WAS INTERVIEWED IN THE OFFICE OF A PROMINENT NEW YORK CONGRESSMAN. HE WAS INTERVIEWED AT THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE AND ALSO BY TWO TOP AGENTS OF THE FBI IN WASHINGTON. DURING ALL OF THESE INTERVIEWS HE GAVE SUBSTANTIALLY THE SAME STATEMENT THAT HE SAW TWO BIRMINGHAM POLICE OFFICERS BOMB THE RESIDENCE OF REV. KING. ON JULY THREE, SIXTYTHREE [sic], THE SUBJECT WAS GIVEN A POLYGRAPH EXAMINATION BY A SPECIALLY TRAINED AGENT OF THE FBI AT THE FBI OFFICE IN BIRMINGHAM, ALA., AND AT THE THIRD QUESTION BY THE POLYGRAPH EXAMINER THE SUBJECT ADMITTED THAT HE WAS LYING AND THAT THE ENTIRE STORY WAS SOMETHING THAT HE MADE UP, AND HE GAVE A WRITTEN STATEMENT TO THAT EFFECT. HE WAS ACCOMPANIED BY CLARENCE B. JONES, AN ATTORNEY FROM NEW YORK CITY, AT THE TIME HE TOOK THE POLYGRAPH EXAMINATION. THE STORY THAT WAS ORIGINALLY GIVEN BY THIS PERSON HAS BECOME WELL KNOWN IN THE NEGRO COMMUNITY, BUT THE STATEMENT THAT HE WAS LYING IS NOT KNOWN AT ALL, AND, FOR THAT REASON IT IS FELT THAT THESE FACTS SHOULD BE MADE KNOWN, AND I CALL UPON THE RESPONSIBLE NEGRO LEADERS OF THIS COMMUNITY TO HELP INFORM THE NEGRO CITIZENS THAT THERE IS NO TRUTH IN THE STORY AS ORIGINALLY GIVEN. I FEEL THAT THE ROCKING AND STONING OF THE POLICE DEPARTMENT LAST NIGHT WAS A DIRECT RESULT OF THIS FALSEHOOD THAT IS BEING CIRCULATED IN THE NEGRO COMMUNITY.
THE IRRESPONSIBLE ACT OF A PERSON OR PERSONS UNKNOWN IN THE BOMBING OF ATTORNEY ARTHUR SHORES [SIC] HOME LAST EVENING CONSTITUTES AN UNPROVOKED ATTACK ON THE PEACE AND TRANQUILITY OF THIS COMMUNITY, AN ACT CALCULATED TO CAUSE FURTHER RACIAL UNREST.
THE FBI IS WORKING, AS ALWAYS, CLOSELY WITH THE LOCAL POLICE DEPARTMENT TO BRING TO THE BAR OF JUSTICE THE PERPETRATORS OF THIS CRIME AGAINST SOCIETY. OF MORE IMMEDIATE CONCERN HOWEVER IS THE ANIMOSITY THAT EXEMPLIFIED ITSELF LAST NIGHT WHEN POLICE OFFICERS WERE STONED AS THEY ARRIVED TO INVESTIGATE THE BOMBING. (Roosevelt Tatum. FBI HQ-0460048526. Teletype from SAC, Birmingham to Director, FBI, August 28, 1963. All-caps in original.)
Weaver's audacity in this press release is appalling. Weaver chose to publicize investigative information for a case that was then currently under investigation. His information appears to be based on some of the same documents that I have, which are now declassified but were not then, in 1963. Seems his main information came from Tatum's own statements to the FBI, such as when Tatum referred to my father as a "white man named Greenberg" in his June 22 statement to the Birmingham FBI (see Part 3). Weaver mistook Paul Greenberg for Jack Greenberg, since Jack is the famous Greenberg in the Civil Rights Movement.
The biggest irony in Weaver's statement is that the rock and brick throwing by African-Americans that followed the August 20 bombing of Arthur Shores' home was mild in comparison to the rioting that followed the May 11 bombings of the A. G. Gaston Motel and A. D. and Naomi King's home:
The arrival of the white squad cars [at the Gaston Motel] sent the crowd into a rage. Now the former bystanders hurled bricks and bottles at the officers. Members of the mob shouted "Kill 'em! Kill 'em!" at the policemen, who, waiting for reinforcements, moved back. They did little for nearly an hour. Violent protesters ransacked the twenty-eight block area around the motel. Smashing the windows of patrol cars and fire trucks, the mob vented its pent-up frustration. Innocent travelers caught in the area attracted rocks thrown from the crowd and suffered most of the white injuries. One police officer received several stab wounds. Captain James Lay, a black civil defense worker, saved the life of a white cabbie, W. A. Bowman, who inadvertently drove into the riot and was knifed by black men. They torched his taxi after turning it over. The flickering orange and red flames of the gasoline brightly contrasted with the thick black clouds that billowed above the car. Several Italian-owned grocery stores went up in smoke as rioters attempted to burn all white-owned property in the neighborhood. But the sparks knew no race and quickly spread the fire to black-owned houses. Soon the hot night sky blazed with the intensity of a blast furnace. In addition to the exploitative ghetto groceries, the African Americans looted liquor stores and other businesses. At the height of the riot, some 2,500 black people participated in the violence. (Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle, 301)
The well-founded perception that members of the Birmingham Police were allied with with the Ku Klux Klan and were involved in terrorism against African-Americans was not a new idea propagated by Roosevelt Tatum. What was new was the violent response of African-Americans to a bombing in Birmingham. Since 1947, more than fifty racial bombings had occurred. Even without clear evidence of Klan involvement, the police corruption was clear: the first person ever convicted in connection with the Birmingham bombings was Roosevelt Tatum.
After the August 20 bombing of the Shores residence, when an African-American crowd once again turned out with bricks and stones to hurl at the police, the time was ripe for Macon Weaver to "render[ ] prosecutive opinions," as he was "very much interested" in doing. It was already old hat for racist whites to assert that African-Americans were the perpetrators of bombings against their own community members. It may be that the racists' aim of undermining the moral authority of non-violent resistance by provoking violence from the African American community may have unleashed something more than was intended. McWhorter quotes vice president of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), Abraham Woods, who said in an oral history that
What I saw at Sixteenth Street, what I saw at the motel, was the forerunner of what happened . . . Later it was "burn, baby, burn." . . . That came later and I saw it coming. I saw it coming. (McWhorter, 437n)
Violent expressions of anger, long stifled by brutish, institutionalized intimidation and Jim Crow, may have made racists fearful in a new way—fearful of violent resistance and of possible outside perceptions that such violence was at worst an even response to what African-Americans had suffered. In a curious way, the national viewing of images of non-violent children and adults being attacked by dogs and blown down with fire hoses may have led to wider identification with the anger expressed in the rioting. Or at least Macon Weaver may have feared that this would be the case. Though the national media published virtually no photographs of the May, 1963 Birmingham riots (McWhorter, 437), Weaver may still have sought to deligitimate African American grievances in order to ease the city back into the status quo that had existed before the civil rights demonstrations.
Project C had come to an anti-climactic end. At the national level, the situation in Birmingham was central in leading John F. Kennedy to draft the civil rights bill which was passed in 1964. The perceived success of the SCLC's work with the ACMHR brought the SCLC new national prominence and prestige and an enormous spike in financial contributions. "Within a month of the ambiguous resolution [of the Birmingham campaign], the SCLC took in more money than it had seen in the previous calendar year" (Eskew, 314). At the local level, however,
[i]n the aftermath of the demonstrations, the police department attempted to return to the status quo of race relations. Police chief Jamie Moore responded to the civil disorders by purchasing "100 riot type (military) 12 gauge pump shotguns" . . . During June and July of 1963, officers reexerted their control over the black community. Yet the brutal response to the protest marches compromised the authority of the police. Through force, policemen kept the poor and desperate elements of the community in line. For black people in Birmingham this force often meant "justifiable homicide." On June 28, a policeman killed Blaine Gordon Jr., a seventeen-year-old black male. On July 6, a detective shot, but did not kill, thirty-three-year-old Johnny Patterson, also black. On August 4, an officer killed James Scott Jr., age thirty-five, another black male. The ease with which policemen shot and killed black men reflected a pathology within Birmingham's law enforcement that contributed to future racial crises. (313-14)
If you read much of Diane McWhorter's Carry Me Home, you see that the ongoing, deadly Police violence against African-Americans in Birmingham was something more than a pathological expression of racism. McWhorter depicts in great detail a sickening web of alliances among police, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Birmingham FBI. "Return to the status quo of race relations" meant a return to a shabby facade of civility that was maintained by the constant threat of violence. Tatum's original allegation, effectively that the Police and the KKK were one, was not the only of its kind. The FBI interviewed, but never investigated the testimony of, a witness who saw the Gaston Motel bombers receive police escort away from the scene of the crime. (McWhorter, 436) There was also another witness, in addition to Tatum, who implicated the police in the bombing of the King residence.
Macon Weaver wanted to use Roosevelt Tatum as an example of what would happen to anyone else who tried to speak truth about the deep corruption of the Birmingham Police. But the timing of Weaver's press release suggests further that he wanted to use the authority of the law to give an air of legitimacy to the most absurd of racist doublespeak. As McWhorter puts it:
The [FBI] was selectively pursuing a cipher who was only alleging a police-Klan conspiracy that its own star informant [Klansman Gary Thomas Rowe Jr.] had already uncovered, and for a crime that the FBI, if it had wanted to establish federal jurisdiction over the Klan, could have slapped on virtually every Klansman it had ever interviewed. (483)
It was a favorite racist assertion that violent crimes against African Americans, such as bombings, were perpetrated by African Americans themselves. Now Weaver was ramping such assertions up a notch by attempting to establish that the race riots were caused not by racist oppression but by lies and rumors spread by an unreliable African American.
Though Weaver could not prosecute the case himself, he got his wish, nonetheless, through his publicity tactics. On August 23, the FBI Director received a memo from SAC, Birmingham, stating that
Ausa [Assistant US Attorney] R. Macey Taylor advised that in view of the public interest in instant case, U. S. District Judge C. W. Allgood will probably present instant case early Monday, next. Federal Grand Jury is meeting in Birmingham on that date. (Roosevelt Tatum. FBI HQ-0460048526.)
That same weekend, A. D. King and Roosevelt Tatum held a press conference to counter Weaver's statements. Page 1 of the August 24 edition of The Birmingham News reported that
Tatum said the FBI polygraph experts instructed him to say "no" to every question they asked him. He said they never asked him about what he saw the night of the bombing but only quizzed him concerning his children and unrelated matters.
"The said they were going to show me how the lie detector operated," Tatum said. "I had never seen one before."
The Negro said they asked if he had a baby named "Bronco."
"I started to say yes," the Negro said, "but they had told me to say no, so I did."
Tatum said the two agents questioned him at length, then told him he had lied and that they were going to prosecute him. He said that they told him he would be sentenced to five years in federal prison.
The Negro said he signed a statement admitting he had lied about police bombing King's home because of threats of the FBI.
Tatum said he now wants to take another lie detector test and welcomes a federal grand jury investigation into the matter.
King said there was another Negro named "Skeets" who also saw a police car near his (King's) home the night it was bombed. The Negro preacher said Attorney Clarence Jones of New York, who is now working on the march on Washington, will confer with Birmingham Negro leaders about what to do next within a few days.
On August 26, as stated above, the Federal Grand Jury convened and returned its charges against Roosevelt Tatum.
Roosevelt Tatum's trial was on November 18, 1963. Mark Lane writes
The record reveals that Tatum appeared in Judge Allgood's court [in] the morning . . . His lawyer was excused so that he could try another case that morning with the understanding that he would return to try the Tatum case at 2 o'clock that afternoon. Yet the afternoon session began with Billingsley entering the plea of guilty while Tatum stood silently by.
The lawyer was not present on the day of the sentence and Roosevelt Tatum, standing alone, was sentenced by Judge Allgood to a penitentiary for one year and one day. (Murder in Memphis, 40)
After Tatum made his mysterious change of plea from not guilty to guilty, Judge Allgood addressed him from the bench, saying Tatum's crime "could have resulted in the loss of life and may have . . . " (Birmingham Post Herald, November 19, 1963)
Allgood was probably referring to the death of John Coley on September 4, 1963, the night Arthur Shores' house was bombed a second time, sparking another riot.
Twenty-year-old John Coley, who had hopped a ride to the riot scene with his close friend Eddie Coleman, happened into a barrage of gunfire and collapsed facedown on the ground. Coleman called his friend's name. Coley raised his head and tried to say something but couldn't. . . .
Coley had . . . been hit in the head, though it was the #0 buckshot lodged in his liver that would account for his being dead on arrival at University Hospital. Several officers stationed in Coley's vicinity had been using that size pellet, and for the time being the police were so confident of their right to fire on the rioters that they told the [Birmingham] News's Tom Lankford that they shot Coley when he "burst from a house firing a gun," as if they had not been surrounded by hundreds of eyewitnesses who could contradict them. . . .
What the blacks who had gathered around Coley's corpse noticed was his dead-on resemblance, despite a twenty or so-year age difference, to Fred Shuttlesworth. They had no doubt that Coley was a victim of mistaken identity, that his murder had been another assassination attempt. The police would have to settle for merely kicking Shuttlesworth as he lost his footing and fell. (McWhorter, 499-500)
Towards the end of 1964 Roosevelt Tatum was released from prison. He left Birmingham, where he could not find a job, to look for work in New York City. Before leaving his friends and his family he said that he had told the truth about the bombing of A. D. King's house. His friends say that he insisted that he would keep on telling the truth, whatever the cost.
He died in 1970, at the age of 46. (Lane and Greggory, Murder in Memphis, 40-41)
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photo by Charles Moore
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