Veterans for Peace sues City of Boston for St. Patrick's Peace Parade permit

Suit challenges City's eleven month delay in acting on permit application and charges favoritism for South Boston parade organizers who continue to exclude most LGBT groups.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  February 12, 2015

CONTACT:
Christopher Ott, communications director, 617-482-3170 x322, cott@aclum.org Patrick Scanlon, Veterans for Peace, 978-590-4248, Vets4PeaceChapter9@gmail.com

BOSTON -- The local Veterans for Peace Chapter 9, Smedley D. Butler Brigade (VFP) filed a First Amendment lawsuit in federal court today against the City of Boston because the city has refused to act in a timely way on VFP's application for a permit to hold its annual St. Patrick's Peace Parade beginning at noon in Boston on March 15. The delay prevents VFP from being able to effectively organize for its parade and impedes its message.

Since 2011, VFP has organized its inclusive, non-discriminatory parade along the same route used by the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council (AWVC), a group that has refused for many years to allow gay rights groups and others, including VFP, to march with identifying signs. According to Patrick Scanlon, the coordinator of the Smedley D. Butler Brigade of VFP, the AWVC parade has begun at 1:00 p.m. in the past, and the city has relegated the VFP's parade to commencing various distances behind the AWVC parade, forcing it to begin late in the afternoon.

Scanlon said that despite a recent deal touted by Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, in which the AWVC will allow one gay group, "OutVets," to march in the next AWVC parade, the AWVC continues to bar most gay rights, peace and environmental groups. It is not an inclusive parade like VFP's.

"Veterans for Peace applied on March 25, 2014 for a permit to march at noon this coming March 15 to celebrate St. Patrick's Day," said Scanlon,. "We asked the City three times, in June, September and October what was happening with our application, and no one from the City ever responded." The City's refusal to act on the VFP parade application makes it very difficult for VFP to do all the organizing needed to hold a parade, he said.

"Unbelievably, the AWVC has told us in the past that they did not want us in their parade because they did not want the word 'peace' associated with the word 'veteran,'" Scanlon said. "St. Patrick was a man of peace, so the celebration of St. Patrick—the patron saint of Ireland—should be a day to reflect on and celebrate this great saint's deeds and words. Veterans for Peace celebrates the life of Saint Patrick and the proud Irish traditions without militarism. Our Peace Parade celebrating St. Patrick's Day is inclusive and open to anyone who would like to walk for peace. As far as we know, this is the only annual peace

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parade anywhere in the entire country." VFP uses the phrase "The People's Parade for Peace, Equality, Jobs, Environmental Stewardship, Social and Economic Justice" to describe the event.

John Reinstein, a cooperating attorney for the ACLU of Massachusetts, which is bringing the case, explained that the City has violated VFP's First Amendment rights by refusing to act in a timely way on the early VFP request for a permit and by favoring later applications from the AWVC and a road race group, even though those events do not conflict with the VFP parade. He noted that the parade route is already set up and ready by noon when VFP wishes to begin its parade.

"The City acts as if it can just ignore permit applications or hand out or deny permits willy-nilly," said Reinstein. "It doesn't use any clear standards and hasn't even followed its own regulation on parade permits. These permit systems are supposed to be neutrally and fairly enforced. This was anything but that." Attorneys on the case will be asking the federal court to issue an injunction ordering the City to grant a parade permit to VFP for March 15, starting at noon.

Sarah Wunsch, deputy legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, acknowledged that the Supreme Court has held that the Allied War Veterans Council of South Boston had its own First Amendment right to exclude groups from its privately run parade. "But," she explained, "the Supreme Court ruling doesn't mean the City can ignore the application by Vets for Peace to parade earlier in the day or can force them to parade after the AWVC parade."

VFP Smedley D. Butler Brigade is a chapter of the national VFP. Founded in 1985, Veterans for Peace is a national organization of men and women of all eras and duty stations, including from World War II, the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan wars, as well as other conflicts. Veterans for Peace works to expose the true costs of war and to support veterans and civilian victims. For more information, go to www.smedleyvfp.org

For more information about the ACLU of Massachusetts, go to:

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As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Writers’ Corner  

In say 1912, 1913, hell, even the beginning of 1914, the first few months anyway, before the war clouds got a full head of steam in the summer they all profusely professed their unmitigated horror at the thought of war, thought of the old way of doing business in the world. Yes the artists of every school but the Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists and  Surrealists or those who would come to speak for those movements, those who saw the disjointedness of modern industrial society and put the pieces to paint, sculptors who put twisted pieces of metal juxtaposed to each other saw that building a mighty machine from which you had to run created many problems; writers of serious history books proving that, according to their Whiggish theory of progress,  humankind had moved beyond war as an instrument of policy and the diplomats and high and mighty would put the brakes on in time, not realizing that they were all squabbling cousins; writers of serious and not so serious novels drenched in platitudes and hidden gabezo love affairs put paid to that notion in their sweet nothing words that man and woman had too much to do, too much sex to harness to denigrate themselves by crying the warrior’s cry and by having half-virgin, neat trick, maidens strewing flowers on the bloodlust streets; musicians whose muse spoke of delicate tempos and sweet muted violin concertos, not the stress and strife of the tattoos of war marches with their tinny conceits; and poets, ah, those constricted poets who bleed the moon of its amber swearing, swearing on a stack of seven sealed bibles, that they would go to the hells before touching the hair of another man. They all professed loudly (and those few who did not profess, could not profess because they were happily getting their blood rising, kept their own consul until the summer), that come the war drums they would resist the siren call, would stick to their Whiggish, Futurist, Constructionist, Cubist worlds and blast the war-makers to hell in quotes, words, chords, clanged metal, and pretty pastels. They would stay the course.  

 

And then the war drums intensified, the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their lusts and they, they made of ordinary human clay as it turned out, poets, beautiful English poets (we will speak of American poets when they slip into war footing in 1917)like Wilfred Owens before he got religion, e.e. cummings madly driving his safety ambulance, beautiful Rupert Brookes wondering which way to go but finally joining the mob in some fated oceans, sturdy Robert Graves all blown to hell and back surviving but just surviving, French , German, Russian, Italian poets tooo all aflutter; artists, reeking of blooded fields, the battle of the Somme Muirhead Bone's nothing but a huge killing field that still speaks of small boned men, drawings, etchings that no subtle camera could make beautiful, that famous one by Picasso, another by Singer Sargent about the death trenches, about the gas, and human blindness for all to see; sculptors, chiseling monuments to the national brave even before the blood was dried before the last tear had been shed, huge memorials to the unnamed, maybe un-nameable dead dragged from some muddied trench half blown away; writers, serious and not, wrote beautiful Hemingway stuff about the scariness of war, about valor, about romance on the fly, among those women. camp-followers who have been around  since men have left their homes to slaughter and maim, lots of writers speaking, after the fact about the vein-less leaders and what were they thinking, and, please, please do not forgot those Whiggish writers who once the smoke had cleared had once again put in a word about the endless line of human progress, musicians, sad, mystical, driven by national blood lusts to the high tattoo, went to the trenches to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course, their always fate  ….    

 August 1914 (The Red Wheel #1)

by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, H.T. Willetts (Translator)

August 1914 3.88 of 5 stars 3.88  ·  rating details  ·  1,250 ratings  ·  79 reviews

In his monumental narrative of the outbreak of the First World War and the ill-fated Russian offensive into East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn has written what Nina Krushcheva, in The Nation, calls "a dramatically new interpretation of Russian history." The assassination of tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, a crucial event in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917, is

In his monumental narrative of the outbreak of the First World War and the ill-fated Russian offensive into East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn has written what Nina Krushcheva, in The Nation, calls "a dramatically new interpretation of Russian history." The assassination of tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, a crucial event in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917, is reconstructed from the alienating viewpoints of historical witnesses. The sole voice of reason among the advisers to Tsar Nikolai II, Stolypin died at the hands of the anarchist Mordko Bogrov, and with him perished Russia's last hope for reform. Translated by H.T. Willetts.

August 1914 is the first volume of Solzhenitsyn's epic, The Red Wheel; the second is November 1916. Each of the subsequent volumes will concentrate on another critical moment or "knot," in the history of the Revolution. Translated by H.T. Willetts.

...more

 

A View From The Left-Selma: The Movie and the Real Story Workers Vanguard No. 1060	23 January 2015

The Bankruptcy of Pressuring the Democrats

Selma: The Movie and the Real Story

 

By Brian Manning and John Perry

 

Director Ava DuVernay’s film Selma, based on three months of tumultuous black voting rights protests in 1965, graphically portrays the courage and tenacity of civil rights activists in the face of racial oppression and KKK and state terror in the Jim Crow South. From the Birmingham church bombing and the savage attack on marchers at Selma’s Pettus Bridge to the beatings and murders of black and white protesters, Selma paints a picture of the horrific racist violence.

But fundamentally the movie is a glorification of Martin Luther King Jr.’s liberal program of nonviolent protest and reliance on the federal government and the Democratic Party. The moral of the film is that Selma—the last major battle of the Southern civil rights movement—was a watershed because voting rights for black people paved the way for black elected officials. As longtime Congressman John Lewis said in 2009 right before President Obama’s inauguration: “Barack Obama is what comes at the end of that bridge in Selma.”

The mass mobilization of black people against the Jim Crow system of legal segregation disrupted and challenged the racist American bourgeois order. But from the outset, the civil rights struggles were dominated by a black middle-class leadership wedded to Democratic Party liberalism, with King as its most effective exponent. The movement achieved important, though partial, gains for black people largely in the realm of formal democratic rights, whose main beneficiaries make up a thin layer of the black petty bourgeoisie. To this day, the blood shed to win the right to vote is invoked to herd black people to the ballot box to elect “lesser evil” Democrats.

The civil rights movement met its defeat in the mid 1960s when it swept into the North, where the Jim Crow segregation codes did not exist. Activists ran headlong into the raw reality of black oppression that is woven into the fabric of American capitalism: rat-infested slums, crumbling schools, mass unemployment and rampant cop terror. Fifty years later, and six years after the election of a black president, the hellish conditions of the urban ghetto masses have only gotten worse. While today possessing formal equality under the law, black people remain a race-color caste, integrated into the U.S. economy but in the main forcibly segregated at the bottom of society.

Barack Obama proclaimed that the civil rights movement took black people “90 percent of the way” to full equality. But the yawning gulf between white and black America persists by every measure—employment, income, housing, education, incarceration rates. Black people are still blown away on the streets of America with impunity by the cops simply because of the color of their skin. The massive military mobilizations by the racist capitalist state against protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, last year could have been Birmingham or Selma in the 1960s. Those gains that were won in the civil rights struggles almost immediately came under attack. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, which Selma presents as a crowning achievement, has been gutted over the years, with the Supreme Court dealing it a major blow two years ago.

From the days of chattel slavery, American capitalism has rested on a bedrock of black oppression. Achieving genuine equality will take nothing less than a socialist overturn of the capitalist profit system by the multiracial working class, whose central role in production gives it the social power and objective class interest to put an end to capitalist rule. This country’s rulers ably wield anti-black racism to divide and weaken the working class. In the course of class struggle against the common enemy—the owners of the banks and industry—white workers will be compelled to forego race prejudice. What is crucially needed is to forge a workers party that emblazons the cause of black freedom on its banner: Finish the Civil War! For black liberation through socialist revolution!

The 1965 Selma Protests

In early 1965, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been organizing a voter registration effort in Selma, combating an entrenched system that denied the right to vote through a combination of racist terror, poll taxes and “literacy” tests. In the film, a white registrar challenges an older black woman to name every county judge in the state, and when she cannot, sneeringly stamps “denied” on her application. King announced that his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) would make the town the center of its own voter registration campaign.

As we wrote at the time in “Conspiracy and Treachery in Alabama” (Spartacist No. 4, May-June 1965, reprinted in WV No. 1051, 5 September 2014):

“From the beginning the black voter registration campaign in the South was an assertion of potential independence—directed against the underlying social system as well as the segregationist political apparatus which helps maintain it. Revolutionary in implication because it involved organizing masses of black workers and share-croppers in struggle, the mass character of the movement poses a dangerous threat to the American ruling class and its politicians. Hence they use every means at their disposal to derail the movement—including sending in such kept leaders as Martin Luther King—to head it off and deliver it to the Democratic Party where the job of beheading and neutralizing it can be finished off.”

While lionizing King, Selma makes clear that MLK aimed to use the blood of black civil rights foot soldiers to pressure the capitalist ruling class to grant those demands its liberal wing was willing to concede. Selma portrays King lecturing SNCC militants: “What we do is negotiate, demonstrate, resist. And a big part of that is raising white consciousness, and in particular the consciousness of whichever white man happens to be sitting in the Oval Office.” King’s strategy of nonviolent resistance was in fact a pledge of allegiance to the white power structure.

When King was jailed in early February, Selma exploded with protest marches, and over a thousand protesters were arrested. After the murder of 26-year-old protester Jimmie Lee Jackson by a trooper, the SCLC called for a protest march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery. On March 7, a day subsequently known as “Bloody Sunday,” 2,000 marchers were stopped on the Pettus Bridge by a phalanx of state troopers and deputies, who attacked them with clubs, bullwhips and tear gas, driving them back through the city streets.

The film’s crisis point comes with the second attempt at the march to Montgomery three days later. At the bridge, again faced with a horde of state troopers, King gets everyone on their knees to pray, and then suddenly stands and turns the marchers back. In the movie, King’s decision to turn around is shown as a response to a directive from God. In reality, the directive had come from the federal government. As recounted in Clayborne Carson’s In Struggle (1981), the Feds worked out a secret deal with MLK that if he turned back the marchers, the state troopers would not attack them. The film shows that SNCC members were bitter at King’s reversal. Indeed, SNCC activists began openly talking of King as a coward and sellout. Instead of “We Shall Overcome,” the young militants sang “We Shall Overrun.”

Selma’s portrayal of Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson as a recalcitrant racist who orchestrated FBI wiretapping of King has elicited a howl from liberal commentators. Former Johnson aides and historians point out that Johnson and King actually collaborated closely. In fact, the film captures LBJ’s attitude toward MLK when the president is depicted telling FBI director J. Edgar Hoover: “If he’s a degenerate, what I do know is he’s a nonviolent degenerate and I want him to go on leading the civil rights movement, not one of these bloodthirsty militants.” The Texas Dixiecrat Johnson’s catering to racists (which he did) and his administration’s spying on King (which it did) did not preclude the White House from collaborating with MLK.

As CEO of U.S. imperialism, Johnson was carrying out the will of a section of the American capitalist ruling class, which had its own reasons for acquiescing to the dismantlement of Jim Crow. With the mechanization of agriculture, which largely displaced sharecropping, and the increased urbanization of the black population, the system of legal segregation that had been consolidated to enforce the powerlessness of the black rural poor was rendered obsolete. Jim Crow also exposed the hypocrisy of the U.S. imperialists, who were extolling the supposed virtues of American democracy as part of their Cold War drive against the Soviet Union.

The tempo of the Selma events made it necessary for LBJ to offer some kind of voting rights law. The culmination of the film is the third, final march to Montgomery, portrayed as a brilliant success. We wrote at the time, “The march acquired the character of an ‘official’ parade directly launched from Washington, with a corps of food and latrine trucks, doctors and nurses, swarms of politicians, etc., and Federal troops standing guard along the route.” As the film shows, the march was a sea of American flags waved by an integrated crowd. It amounted to a support rally for LBJ and the Democrats.

SNCC: Breaking with Nonviolence and the Democrats

What Selma disappears is that by 1965 a whole layer of SNCC militants were rejecting King’s liberal pacifist, pro-Democratic Party pressure politics. Far from being a transcendent leader of a unified movement, as Selma portrays, King was one of the political poles against which the left wing of the civil rights movement was defined.

Outrageously, the film slanders SNCC activists, particularly James Forman, as arrogant, petulant opponents of the Selma protests whose main interest was defending their own turf against the SCLC; and King wins every argument with them. In reality, the differences between King and the SNCC activists were over burning political issues, such as reliance on the Democrats and the federal government, along with the question of armed self-defense. (See “SNCC: ‘Black Power’ and the Democrats,” reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 2, 1985.)

When SNCC was formed in 1960, it was a constituent part of the Southern black liberal establishment, the youth group of what W.E.B. Du Bois had termed the “talented tenth.” But through bitter experience, SNCC had been radicalized by its grassroots organizing of poor black sharecroppers, which repeatedly brought it into direct conflict not just with the Dixiecrats, but the whole racist, capitalist state.

The film alludes to the 1961-62 protests in Albany, Georgia, where SNCC activists were already becoming disenchanted with King. When civil rights protesters were getting arrested by the hundreds in late 1961, King intoned: “Don’t get weary, children. We will wear them down by our capacity to suffer.” The next summer, black youth fought back with bricks and bottles when cops attacked a rally outside a black church. King declared a “day of penance” for the “violence.” SNCC, though, refused to condemn the protesters. In Albany, many SNCC members began to refer to MLK privately and derisively as “De Lawd.” This epithet is slipped into the movie so fleetingly that those unfamiliar with the history would not even notice it.

Selma was bracketed by the uprisings in Harlem in 1964 and Watts in 1965, which had a profound impact on SNCC militants. It was now clear that the “turn the other cheek” pacifist ethos was losing its resonance for increasing numbers of the embittered urban black masses. In response to Watts, King declared, “It was necessary that as powerful a police force as possible be brought in to check them [the ghetto masses].” King’s defense of cop terror to smash the ghetto explosions was the ultimate proof of what his one-sided “nonviolence” was about.

Up to that point, the young SNCC militants broadly accepted nonviolence. Now many asked themselves how nonviolence and voter registration could answer the oppression of Northern ghetto blacks. After “Watts had exploded in August, 1965,” Forman later wrote, “could we still call ourselves ‘nonviolent’ and remain in the vanguard of black militancy? If we were revolutionaries, what was it that we sought to overthrow?” (The Making of Black Revolutionaries, 1972).

It was SNCC activists who invited Malcolm X to Selma to speak after King’s arrest. In keeping with today’s liberal myth that King and Malcolm X were moving toward a meeting of the minds, the movie falsely portrays Malcolm X apologizing to Coretta Scott King for his criticisms of her husband. That apology never happened (nor was Malcolm ever the mealy-mouthed wimp shown on screen). In fact, Malcolm bitterly opposed King’s kowtowing, and that never changed. Around the same time, after a fascist punched King in a Selma hotel lobby, Malcolm fired off a telegram to Nazi führer George Lincoln Rockwell:

“This is to warn you that I am no longer held in check from fighting white supremacists by Elijah Muhammad’s separatist Black Muslim movement, and that if your present racist agitation against our people there in Alabama causes physical harm to Reverend King or any other black Americans who are only attempting to enjoy their rights as free human beings, that you and your Ku Klux Klan friends will be met with maximum physical retaliation from those of us who are not hand-cuffed by the disarming philosophy of nonviolence, and who believe in asserting our right of self-defense—by any means necessary.”

After the Selma protests, in April 1965 Stokely Carmichael and other SNCC activists stayed on to work in neighboring Lowndes County. There they organized an independent political party, taking a snarling black panther as its symbol, which soon came to be called the Black Panther Party. Although narrowly based on a single impoverished rural county, the Panthers were important because they were organized in opposition to the Democratic Party. As Carmichael said, it was “as ludicrous for Negroes to join [the Democratic Party] as it would have been for Jews to join the Nazi party in the 1930s.” Local residents agreed. One recalled, “SNCC mentioned about the third party and we decided we would do it, because it didn’t make sense for us to go join the Democratic party when they were the people who had done the killing in the county and had beat our heads.” Although Selma deals with numerous capitalist politicians, it doesn’t mention what party they were in. Why? They were all Democrats: from LBJ to Governor George Wallace to the local Alabama segregationists—to MLK!

The Lowndes County Black Panther Party was also important for its open advocacy of armed self-defense, which was a burning necessity for the black movement in the South. In Monroe, North Carolina, beginning in 1959 local NAACP head Robert Williams’ courageous battle against KKK terror (described in his 1962 book Negroes with Guns) became a beacon to black militants throughout the South. Indeed, Forman had visited Williams in 1961 just before the FBI hounded Williams into exile in Cuba. In Lowndes County, the SNCC activists were influenced by and defended the local black sharecroppers who owned guns and were willing to use them against racist attack. By 1965, the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense and Justice had spread to Alabama. Civil rights rallies in Lowndes County were often defended by these armed self-defense squads.

Class Power and Black Rights

Nonviolence versus armed self-defense was the way in which the question of reform versus revolution was posed in the civil rights movement. The emergence of a layer of radical black youth groping for an alternative to liberalism cried out for the intervention of Marxists to win them to a proletarian revolutionary perspective. In the early 1960s, the predecessor of the Spartacist League, the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) within the ostensibly Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP), advanced a program of revolutionary integrationism—the fight for the assimilation of black people into an egalitarian socialist society. This perspective, which was developed by veteran Trotskyist Richard Fraser, recognized that there can be no social revolution in this country without the united struggle of black and white workers led by a multiracial vanguard party, and there is nothing other than a workers revolution that can open the road to black freedom.

The RT fought for an active intervention into SNCC and other forces in the left wing of the civil rights movement, as a crucial opportunity for the crystallization of a black Trotskyist cadre. But the SWP majority refused to do so, covering its abstention with an opportunist “dual vanguardist” outlook that implicitly defined the SWP as a “white party” whose only contribution to the black struggle was to enthuse over “whatever the black people want.” The RT was expelled from the SWP in 1963-64.

At the time, the main body of the AFL-CIO union bureaucracy was headed by open Cold War crusaders, who had been installed in the red purges of the late 1940s and ’50s. Another section of the union tops, epitomized by United Auto Workers head Walter Reuther, gave a labor gloss to MLK’s pressure politics. Both these wings of the labor bureaucracy were anti-Communist and openly hostile to labor and black militancy. The petty-bourgeois SNCC radicals, who were isolated from the mass of the black working class, equated the rotten politics of the labor bureaucrats with the union ranks. Without the intervention of Marxists, they had no concept at all of the power of the working class, much less the need to oust the bureaucrats to unleash that power.

In 1966, after his election as SNCC chairman, Carmichael raised the call for “black power” in a speech in Greenwood, Mississippi. Young black radicals picked up “black power” as the rallying cry against the preachers’ sermonizing and the liberals’ begging. It was a rejection of “faith in the system,” a vow to take matters into their own hands.

In intersecting these militants, the SL, which had been founded in 1966, explained that the “black power” slogan was contradictory. It raised questions whose answers lay outside the framework set up by the capitalist class, but was not consciously anti-capitalist. The “black power” movement was premised on the view that black militants should organize black people and forget about whites. We warned in “Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom” (Spartacist No. 10, May-June 1967): “The slogan ‘black power’ must be clearly defined in class, not racial terms, for otherwise the ‘black power’ movement may become the black wing of the Democratic Party in the South.”

We called for a “Freedom-Labor Party” as the axis to link the exploding black struggle to the power of labor, North and South. That call was coupled with a series of other transitional demands: a Southern organizing drive backed by organized labor; workers united fronts against federal intervention; organized, armed self-defense. But the SL was too small to reach and influence more than a very small number of radicalized black activists.

The hardening of the black/white line in the New Left radical movement sealed us off from subjectively revolutionary black militants of the period. SNCC had expelled all its white members by the end of 1966. Absent a Marxist working-class perspective, many of the best of the “black power” militants turned toward one or another form of black nationalism, a petty-bourgeois ideology that has always been unable to generate a program for struggle in this country. It is based on fiction, as American blacks are not a nation and have not aspired to separation except when prospects for united struggle seemed foreclosed.

The avowedly revolutionary and anti-capitalist Black Panther Party (BPP), founded in Oakland in 1966, crystallized the best of a generation of black militants. But despite their militancy and personal courage, the Panthers’ nationalist program was disdainful of the multiracial working class. Instead, the Panthers looked to the lumpen ghetto masses. Their isolation from the proletariat left them especially vulnerable to government repression. The FBI’s brutal COINTELPRO vendetta killed 38 BPP members and jailed hundreds more on frame-up charges. Within a few years, many leading Panthers would join moderate SNCC members back in the fold of the Democratic Party.

From Selma to Ferguson

The killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York have galvanized young anti-racist activists bitterly aware that six years after Obama’s election the conditions of black America are as hellish as ever. When seven of them met with Obama on December 1, he issued the same advice the racist LBJ gave King: go slow. Some protesters have organized “die-ins” at showings of Selma to draw attention to their demands, and a series of “Reclaim MLK” events were held around MLK Day. The die-in demands, typical of other protests, are straight from the liberal playbook of appeals to the federal government: from “repurposing” law enforcement funding to demanding that the “Obama Administration develops, legislates and enacts a National Plan of Action for Racial Justice.”

A host of reformist socialist groups today are pushing King’s program of pressure politics. The International Socialist Organization (ISO) published a review (socialistworker.org, 15 January) hailing Selma as “magnificent” and crowing that the film shows “what he believed was needed to win: determination, courage, sacrifice.” Like the movie, the ISO disappears the split that led black youth to reject King in favor of “black power,” instead reducing these debates over fundamental questions to “how they together developed and honed their strategy and tactics”!

The reformists like to tout the “transformative” last year of King’s life, when he supposedly was moving toward an “anti-capitalist” and “democratic socialist” perspective. His belated opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967 (at a time when a wing of the American bourgeoisie was also seeking to cut its losses) is cited as Exhibit A. In reality, King was explicit that with angry black youth and workers looking for a revolutionary solution to their own oppression, he was compelled to oppose that war to retain credibility. Far from reflecting a move toward anti-capitalism, King proclaimed that “the pursuit of peace” was “our greatest defense against Communism,” and that poverty should be combated because it was “the fertile soil in which the seed of Communism grows and develops.”

As we wrote ten years after King’s assassination in “Bourgeoisie Celebrates King’s Liberal Pacifism,” reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 2):

“We must break through the myths of ‘passive resistance,’ crack the mask of ‘King the Peaceful Warrior,’ and present a revolutionary analysis of the failure of the civil rights movement to provide a program for fighting the social and economic oppression of blacks under American capitalism.... While the reformists cover for King to camouflage their own treacherous tracks, the task of creating a black communist cadre requires destroying politically the exalted symbols of passive defeatism and reliance on the bourgeois state which led to the death of the civil rights movement.”

Free The Remaining Move 9 Prisoners- Phil Africa Passes ....

 

Workers Vanguard No. 1060	23 January 2015

Phil Africa

1956-2015

 

On January 10, MOVE member Phil Africa died at the State Correctional Institution in Dallas, Pennsylvania. Phil had been incarcerated since he was framed up, along with the rest of the MOVE 9, for the killing of a Philadelphia police officer during the 1978 cop siege of MOVE’s Powelton Village home. Circumstances surrounding Phil’s death remain murky. Only a week earlier, he was seen to be his usual vibrant and active self.

 

Phil was held in total isolation in the hospital for five days during which time his wife of 44 years, Janine, was denied the right to call him on the grounds they were not blood relatives. On January 9, he was transferred to prison hospice care, where he died the next day. According to the New York Times (14 January), a prison spokesman attributed his death to “unspecified natural causes.” But what is “natural” in America’s dungeons where so many—especially black men, and those standing up to racist capitalist oppression—are incarcerated for life?

 

From its appearance in the early 1970s proclaiming the right of armed self-defense, the predominantly black, radical back-to-nature MOVE commune was met with vicious cop terror. After a year-long siege, on 8 August 1978 an army of nearly 600 police surrounded the MOVE home to evict its defenseless residents. The police unleashed a furious fusillade so intense that one of their own officers, James Ramp, was killed in the police cross fire. At least eight witnesses testified that no gunshots came from the MOVE house, and no fingerprints of any MOVE member were found on the weapons supposedly taken from their home.

 

The MOVE 9 were among the first activists supported by the Partisan Defense Committee’s program of stipends for class-war prisoners. In 1985, eleven of their MOVE family members, including five children, were massacred by Philly cops in collaboration with the Feds. In 1989, Phil wrote the PDC, a class-struggle legal defense organization associated with the SL: “It is clear by the murders of our family on May 13, 1985 and the denial of parole to MOVE members who are eligible for parole on other cases this system has no intention of releasing MOVE members before our maximum sentences are served.”

 

A regular feature of PDC Holiday Appeal fundraisers in recent years has been the auction of Phil’s paintings to raise money for our stipend fund. In a recent letter, Phil thanked the PDC for “all the support you’ve given those of us locked away in these hell holes and your constant activities aimed at bringing every one home!” We honor Phil’s memory by keeping up the fight for all class-war prisoners.

Out Of The Mouths Of Babes In Boston- No Justice, No Peace- Black Lives Matter- You Have Got That Right Young Brothers and Sisters-Speaking Truth To Power-The Struggle Continues  

A lot of people, and I count myself among them, see the new movement against police brutality and their incessant surveillance of minority youth, mainly black and latino, that seems to be building up a head of steam to be the next major axis of struggle. The endemic injustices are so obvious and frankly so outrageous that the pent-up anger at the base of society among we the have-nots is so great that it needed visible expression. The past six months have given us that. But below is an example, a beautiful graphic example, of just how deep the hurts go, and how deep into society these injustices are felt. Read on.

 

        

We Are Coming Father Abraham 300,000 Strong- In Honor Of Old Abe Lincoln On His Birthday 

 

 

 

…he, Father Abraham he, pug-ugly he that no monument chiseled stone could render beautiful (damn, that age of photography, that Mathew Brady and his merry band, that damn warts and all pre-digital photography, when a painterly touch, say Winslow Homer’s, might have made him, well, just plain). Yes, warts and all, sitting arched in stone in judgment, eternity self-judgment (did he do this or that right to further furrow his brow first of all, overall, preliminary assessment right on union and abolition).  He, furrowed and pug-ugly, thus no catch for gentile Kentucky bourbon belle daughters, or so it seemed, all Kentuck born and Illini-bred (where the best they could do was say nigra when talking about the slave problem. And later, much later the sons and grandsons of poor as dirt Kentuck hills and hollows mountain boys, Harlan County roughs, picked that up nigra expression too, and went to their graves with that on their lips, jesus.). He all keep the races split, let them, the blacks, (nigras, remember) go back to Canaan land, go back to Africa, go to some not union place but keep them out of  Chi town (sounds familiar) had a conversion, maybe not a conversion so much  as a lining up of his beliefs with his walk the walk talk.                 

So he ran for president, President of the United States, not as a son of William Lloyd Garrison, all Newburyport prissy and hell- bent on damning the Constitution, his Abe well-thumbed, well-read constitution , or some reformed  wild boy Liberty man barely contained in the Fremont Republican dust but a busted out Whig when whiggery went to ground, (hell, no, on that tack, otherwise he would still be stuck in Springfield or maybe practicing law in bell-weather podunk Peoria, although he would note what that burg had to say and move slowly). Nor was he some righteous son, Thoreau or Emerson-etched son, of fiery-maned Calvinist sword-in-hand black avenging angel Captain John Brown, late of Kansas blood wars and Harpers Ferry liberation fight (he had no desire to share the Captain’s blood-soaked fate, mocked his bloody efforts in fact, as if only immense bloods would render the national hurts harmless when later the hills, hollows and blue-green valleys reeked of blood and other stenches).

His goal, simple goal (in the abstract), was to hold the union together, and to curb that damn land hunger slavery, that national abyss. And since they ran politics differently in those days (no women, latinos, nigras to fuss over) and were able to touch up a picture or two (and stretch his biographic facts a bit when the “wide awakes” awoke) he won, barely won but won. And then all hell broke loose, and from day one, from some stormy March day one, he had to bend that big long boney pug-ugly body to the winds, his winds.           

And he did, not unequivocally, not John Brown prophet proud, fearlessly facing his gallows and his maker, to erase the dripping blood and canker sore from his homeland, but in a revolutionary way nevertheless, broke down slavery’s house divided, broke it down, no quarter given when the deal went down. So more like some latter day Oliver Cromwell (another warts and all man) pushing providence forward with a little kick. More like old Robespierre flaming the masses with the new dispensation, the new word slave freedom. Kept freeing slaves as he went along, kept pushing that freedom envelope, kept pushing his generals south and west and east and tightening , anaconda tightening, the noose on the old ways until Johnny Reb cried uncle, cried his fill when righteous Sherman and his cutthroat bummers got to work too. Yes, old Father Abraham, the last of the revolutionary democrats, the last of the serious ones, who couldn’t say black better that nigra, and never could, but knew the old enlightenment freedom word, knew it good.        

…and now he belongs to the ages, and rightfully so, warts and all. 

February Is Black History Month- Hats Off To Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement

 

 

 

DVD Review

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

Free at Last: Civil Rights Heroes, film documentary, Image Entertainment, 2005

 

[This documentary was produced and reviewed well prior to the rightly well-received Martin Luther King biopic, Selma, but still holds up well to acknowledge the man other who made the struggle down South the defining event of those times-Frank Jackman-2015

 

Every major (and most minor) progressive social struggle in America from the struggle for independence from Great Britain through to the struggle for slavery’s abolition up to the struggle for women’s rights and gender equality today has had more than its share of heroes and martyrs. The purpose of the documentary under review, Free At Last: Civil Rights Heroes, rightly, highlights some of those lesser known heroes and martyrs from the struggle for black civil rights that came to national prominence in the1950s and 1960s (although arguably that conscious struggle goes back to the 1930s and before).

Although, in the end the question of black equality had to be addressed (and still has to be addressed) nationally the thrust of the black civil rights movement that is featured in this film is the struggle for something like a democratic revolution by blacks and their supporters in the police state-like American South. That barbaric de jure and de facto Jim Crow system officially, as a matter state and social policy, held blacks in second class citizenship (or lower). The struggle to overcome that ingrained (and profitable, profitable for whites of almost all social strata) was almost, of necessity, going to create more than its share of heroes and martyrs.

The case of fourteen- year old Chicago resident Emmett Till and his horrible murder at the hands of white marauders in Mississippi in 1955, the first of the three separate segments that make up the film graphically highlights the problem. For the mere allegation of “whistling at a white woman while black” (if that allegation had any substance) young Emmett was brutally mangled and thrown into the local river. When his mother, righteously, made a cause out of this bestial murder all hell broke loose, at least on the surface. And the case galvanized blacks and whites nationally, alerting many for the first time to the hard fact that something was desperately wrong down in Mississippi (and not just there). But justice, Mississippi justice, to paraphrase poet Langston Hughes, is justice deferred. As detailed in almost all the cases highlighted in the film those directly responsible for the actions against the civil rights workers were either never brought to justice or only after something like a long drawn out legal civil war. No one should forget that aspect of the struggle either.

The other cases highlighted from the assassinated Medgar Evers to the four Birmingham girls murdered in their church when it was bombed to the three civil rights workers slain in Philadelphia, Mississippi that drew nation-wide attention to slain white civil rights workers Viola Liuzzo and Reverend James Reeb, murdered for “being white while working for black civil rights” exhibit those same kinds of sickening results. Let me put it this way after viewing the film footage here, especially Bull Connor’s attack dogs being let loose on civil rights demonstrators in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama that was one of the first visual images that drove me into the civil rights struggle, I still wanted to throw something at the screen. And you wonder why fifty or so years later I still say Mississippi (or fill in your preferred state) goddam. Kudos here.

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes - Lincoln Memorial: Washington

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

February is Black History Month

 

 

Lincoln Memorial: Washington

Let's go see Old Abe
Sitting in the marble and the moonlight,
Sitting lonely in the marble and the moonlight,
Quiet for ten thousand centuries, old Abe.
Quiet for a million, million years.

Quiet-

And yet a voice forever
Against the
Timeless walls
Of time-
Old Abe.

 

…he, Father Abraham he, pug-ugly he that no monument chiseled stone could render beautiful (damn, that age of photography, that Mathew Brady and his merry band, that damn warts and all pre-digital photography, when a painterly touch, say Winslow Homer’s, might have made him, well, just plain). Yes, warts and all, sitting arched in stone in judgment, eternity self-judgment (did he do this or that right to further furrow his brow first of all, overall, preliminary assessment right on union and abolition). He, furrowed and pug-ugly, thus no catch for gentile Kentucky bourbon belle daughters, or so it seemed, all Kentuck born and Illini-bred (where the best they could do was say nigra when talking about the slave problem. And later, much later the sons and grandsons of poor as dirt Kentuck hills and hollows mountain boys, Harlan County roughs, picked that up nigra expression too, and went to their graves with that on their lips, Jesus.). He meant to keep all the races split, let them, the blacks, (nigras, remember) go back to Canaan land, go back to Africa, go to some not American union place but keep them out of Chi town (sounds familiar) had a conversion, maybe not a conversion so much as a lining up of his beliefs with his “walk the walk” talk.

So he ran for president, President of the United States, not as a son of William Lloyd Garrison, all Newburyport prissy and hell- bent on damning the Constitution, his Abe well-thumbed, well-read constitution, or some reformed wild boy Liberty man barely contained in the Fremont Republican dust but a busted out Whig when whiggery went to ground, (hell, no, on that tack, otherwise he would still be stuck in Springfield or maybe practicing law in bell-weather podunk Peoria, although he would note what that burg had to say and move slowly). Nor was he some righteous son, Thoreau or Emerson-etched son, of fiery-maned Calvinist sword-in-hand black avenging angel Captain John Brown, late of Kansas blood wars and Harpers Ferry liberation fight (he had no desire to share the Captain’s blood-soaked fate, mocked his bloody efforts in fact, as if only immense bloods would render the national hurts harmless when later the hills, hollows and blue-green valleys reeked of blood and other stenches).

His goal, simple goal (in the abstract), was to hold the union together, and to curb that damn land hunger slavery, that national abyss. And since they ran politics differently in those days (no women, latinos, nigras to fuss over) and were able to touch up a picture or two (and stretch his biographic facts a bit when the “wide awakes” awoke) he won, barely won but won. And then all hell broke loose, and from day one, from some stormy March day one, he had to bend that big long boney pug-ugly body to the winds, his winds.

And he did, not unequivocally, not John Brown prophet proud, fearlessly facing his gallows and his maker, to erase the dripping blood and canker sore from his homeland, but in a revolutionary way nevertheless, broke down slavery’s house divided, broke it down, no quarter given when the deal went down. So more like some latter day Oliver Cromwell (another warts and all man) pushing providence forward with a little kick. More like old Robespierre flaming the masses with the new dispensation, the new word slave freedom. Kept freeing slaves as he went along, kept pushing that freedom envelope, kept pushing his generals south and west and east and tightening , anaconda tightening, the noose on the old ways until Johnny Reb cried uncle, cried his fill when righteous Sherman and his cutthroat bummers got to work too. Yes, old Father Abraham, the last of the revolutionary democrats, the last of the serious ones, who couldn’t say black better that nigra, and never could, but knew the old enlightenment freedom word, knew it good.

…and now he belongs to the ages, and rightfully so, warts and all.

***Poet’s Corner- Langston Hughes -50-50

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

February is Black History Month

 

50-50

 

I’m all alone in this world, she said,
Ain’t got nobody to share my bed,
Ain’t got nobody to hold my hand—
The truth of the matter’s
I ain’t got no man.

Big Boy opened his mouth and said,
Trouble with you is
You ain’t got no head!
If you had a head and used your mind
You could have me with you
All the time.

She answered, Babe, what must I do?

He said, Share your bed—
And your money, too.

 

Langston Hughes

 

The whole world knew, or at least the important parts of that world, that summer of 2012 downtown Boston world (near the Common say from the Public Gardens to Newbury Street but also near birth place Columbus Avenue), knew that Larry Johnson was Ms. Loretta Lawrence’s every day man (and it goes without saying her every night man too). Make no mistake, girls, women, even though they didn’t hold hands in public or throw public kisses at each other, they were an an “item.” Loretta at five-ten and rail thin, fashion model day thin and what in the old days was called a very light “high yella,” mixed blood from some old South Mister’s wanting habits and some “passing for white” along the way but in any case very highly sought after just then for coffee table magazine shoots didn’t look like trouble, but anytime a a woman gave Larry a side glance look Loretta’s eyes said keep your hands off. And they did, those in the fashion industry, mostly her fellow models, and maybe a few longing sidewinder guy designers too. But somebody had Larry’s attention and Loretta was going to get to the bottom of it.

It had all started back in February when Larry asked her for a hundred dollars one night, out of the blue. Now Larry had been on a tough stretch ever since the financial collapse in 2008 (although it only bagged him in early 2010) when the markets went crazy and he got caught short, and since business was bad he eventually got that old dreaded pink slip from the big finance company that had hired him straight out of the Harvard Business School MBA program to diversify their employee mix. (Larry found out later that one manager, who had publicly said he was crazy to get him had told a friend of his that he hired Larry to add “color” to his staff). Nobody was hiring so he had just been kind of living off his old time bonuses, and a little of this and that.

 

Funny, funny now, Larry and Loretta had met at a bar down in the financial district where he had stopped off for a drink after passing his resume around for about the umpteenth time and she had just finished a shoot (for a cosmetic company as they were trying to expand their markets that had keyed on her for her ravishing looks, brown hair, brown eyes, very light brownish high cheek-boned skin which was a plus since whatever diversity there was in the fashion market the hard fact was there was a drop off when dark as Africa black women graced the covers of most magazines or other advertising venues) down near the water at International Place and her photographer had offered to buy her a drink. His eyes met hers, her eyes met his in return and before anyone really knew it he had moved in on her like something out of one of those old time thriller romance novels that you read and at the end can’t believe that you spent your good hard-earned rest reading and cannot believe either that the “she” of the story would be so stupid in the end to have gotten mixed-up with a wacko like that.

Larry had moved in on her too, literally, after a few weeks of downy billow talk and his argument (which she was okay with, she wasn’t saying she wasn’t) that two could live as cheaply as one (which isn’t true but close enough) and he could cut down on expenses during his rough patch. And it was nice, nice to have a man around, with man’s things, a man’s scent, and a man’s silly little vanities that she had not experienced since Phil (she would not use a last name because Phil was well known, too well-known) had left her a few years back. Every once in a while though she would notice a ten here or a twenty there missing from her pocketbook but figured that either she, spendthrift she, had spent it on some forgotten bobble or Larry had taken it for some household thing and didn’t report the fact (although she, they, had insisted on a collective counting of expenses). Then came the night of Larry’s official request. And she gave it to him, a loan, a loan was all it was. The first time.

After a few more requests for dough, and the granting of those requests, Loretta started to try to figure out what the heck he was doing with the dough (he said it was to help get a job, or he needed new shirts, or something, something different each time). Then she thought about Phil, not about the money part (Jesus, he had thrown his dough at her when he was strong for her, called her his little money-machine and laughed) but as he started losing interest in her he stopped showering the money because he was seeing another woman on the side and showering it on her (that “her” being a friend of hers, and not even beautiful, just smart). And so she started thinking that Larry, Larry the guy who was sharig her bed every night (every night so it had to be a daytime dalliance), was having another affair. She resolved that Larry would get no more money, no more loans, as he called them and if she found out that he was two-timing her that woman had better leave town because, two-timer or not, bum-of-the-mouth or not, he was her man and she had told one and all hands off. And she meant it.