This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Thursday, June 25, 2015
*In
Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Robert Seth
Hayes
http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html
A link above to more information
about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement
Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war
prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag
Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found
Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of the
“voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are
well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of the
cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site, seemed
compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more public
fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand.
Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan
Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense
organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of
advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that
spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement
list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all
serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these
brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and
disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old
Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of
class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise
incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their
cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to
your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make
this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War
Prisoners Now!
*In Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War
Prisoners!-Albert Woodfox
Workers Vanguard No. 1065
3 April 2015
State Vendetta Continues
Free Albert Woodfox Now!
(Class-Struggle Defense Notes)
On February 12, class-war prisoner Albert Woodfox was indicted once again for the fatal stabbing of Louisiana prison guard Brent Miller in 1972. Woodfox has seen this frame-up conviction overturned three times before, only to find himself entombed in solitary confinement in the notorious Angola prison.
Last November, a federal appeals court upheld the 2013 federal district court decision granting habeas corpus relief, overturning his conviction on the grounds of racist grand jury rigging. On March 2, Woodfox briefly emerged from the prison hell that has been his home for over 40 years to attend a hearing in federal district court seeking bail pending his retrial. Determined that this patently innocent fighter for black rights rot in solitary until he dies, the prosecution told the federal court judge who granted Woodfox’s habeas petition that this was a state court matter—and that the judge should just butt out. The judge made no ruling on Woodfox’s bail application, keeping him behind bars.
After they organized a Black Panther Party chapter at Angola prison, Woodfox and fellow inmates Herman Wallace and Robert King, known as the Angola Three, were put in the crosshairs by their jailers. Woodfox and Wallace were framed up for stabbing the prison guard. King was falsely convicted of killing a fellow inmate a year later. Wallace died from liver cancer in October 2013, only three days after his release from prison. In an act both sadistic and vindictive, the State of Louisiana responded to the court order releasing Wallace by indicting him again the day before his death. King was released in 2001 and has been active in the fight to free Woodfox.
As for Woodfox’s conviction, there was not a shred of physical evidence linking him to the murder, and it was later revealed that the key prosecution “eyewitness” was bribed for his testimony at trial. So transparent was the frame-up that prison guard Miller’s widow, Leontine Rogers, believes Woodfox to be innocent and has joined in the call to release him. In 2008, Angola prison warden Burl Cain declared that even if Woodfox were not guilty, he would still keep him in solitary because “I still know that he is still trying to practice Black Pantherism.”
The persecution of Woodfox highlights the ongoing capitalist state vendetta against onetime members of the Black Panther Party—the best of a generation of black activists who sought a revolutionary road to black liberation. Thirty-eight members of the Panthers were killed by the cops and FBI, and hundreds more were framed up and imprisoned on bogus charges. Panther leaders Geronimo ji Jaga (Pratt) and Dhoruba bin Wahad among others spent decades behind bars before their release, while Mumia Abu-Jamal and Panther supporters Mondo we Langa and Ed Poindexter have between them spent over 120 years behind bars for crimes they did not commit.
Now 68 years old, Woodfox has spent decades confined in a two-by-three-meter cell 23 hours a day. According to his lawyers, he suffers from hypertension, heart disease, chronic renal insufficiency, diabetes, anxiety and insomnia—conditions no doubt caused and/or exacerbated by decades of vindictive and inhumane treatment. We reiterate our call for Woodfox’s immediate freedom and encourage our readers to take up his cause.
http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html
A link above
to more information about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners
Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from
2010)
In “surfing” the National
Jericho Movement Website recently in order to find out more, if possible,
about class- war prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read
about in a The Rag Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war
prisoners. I found (the now late) Marilyn Buck listed there but also others,
some of whose cases, like that of the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania
death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal, are well-known and others who seemingly
have languished in obscurity. All of the cases, at least from the information
that I could glean from the site, seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far
more publicity and of a more public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the
task at hand. Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of
class-war prisoners as part of the process of advancing the international
working class’ struggle for socialism. In that spirit I am honoring the class
war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement list this June as the start of
what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all serious leftist militants to do
their duty- fighting for freedom for these brothers and sisters. We will fight
out our political differences and disagreements as a separate matter. What
matters here and now is the old Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is
composed of class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are
likewise incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information
on their cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally,
that comes to your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out
there. Make this June, and every June, a
Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All Class-War Prisoners Now!
All Honor To The Waldenese Heretics! A Smite Of Justice Finally!
Peter Waldo
Light glows in the darkness You have probably heard the news lately that the Roman Catholic Church’s Pope Francis has asked the Waldenese community of hearty and alive irreverent Protestants to accept the church’s forgiveness for attempting to exterminate their forbears in the late 15th century by order of the then pope, get this, Pope Innocent VIII (eight, right). And they almost succeeded, with now a small remnant still living in small enclaves in various spots around the world. By the way doing nobody harm just like when they were started by a renegade merchant named, well, Waldo, whothought that piety, poverty and doing good works were worthy endeavors. Get this too though Waldo and his gang thought that everybody would be just as well off if there was not a clergy separate from the congregation, that everybody could be a priest (maybe women too?). And you wonder why Rome had the stakes piled up high and the flames on big time. Well, I know everybody studied this group in Western History class in passing, I know I did, as precursors of the Protestant Reformation and martyrs to the cause of enlightenment so I will just leave a link to Wikipedia on the subject for you to look at-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldensians
Here is my problem though and maybe not so much a reflection on the current pope as on the church bureaucracy and inertia but isn’t several hundred years later for forgiveness and reconciliation in the case of Galileo just a little too late to do those fallen martyrs any good. What took so long? This may be a Tweeter Pope but you guys have got to push harder to come into the 18th century, the age of enlightenment. Okay.
Where Have All The Flowers Gone- With Legendary Folk-Singer Pete Seeger In Mind
A while back, a few months ago now I think I mentioned in a sketch about how I came to learn about the music of Woody Guthrie I noted that it was hard to pin just exactly when I first heard his music since it pre-dated my coming to the folk minute of the 1960s where the name Woody Guthrie had been imprinted on lots of work by the then “new breed” protest/social commentary troubadour folk singers like Bob Dylan (who actually spent time in Woody’s hospital room with him when he first came East from Hibbing out of Dinktown in Minneapolis and wrote an early paean called Song To Woody on his first or second album), Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (who made a very nice career out of being a true Woody acolyte and had expected Dylan who had subsequently moved on, moved very far on to more lyrical work), and Stubby Tatum (probably the truest acolyte since he was instrumental in putting a lot of Woody’s unpublished poems and art work out for public inspection and specialized in Woody songs, first around Harvard Square and then wherever he could get a gig, which to say the least were not among the most well know or well thought out of Woody’s works. After some thought I pinpointed the first time I heard a Woody song to a seventh grade music class, Mr. Dasher’s class whom we innocently then called Dasher the Flasher just for rhyming purposes but which with today’s sensibilities about the young would not play very well and would probably have him up before some board of inquiry just because a bunch of moody, alienated hormonally-crazed seventh graders were into a rhyming fad that lasted until the next fad a few weeks or months, when he in an effort to have us appreciate various genre of the world music songbook made us learn Woody’s This Land Is Your Land. Little did we know until a few years later when some former student confronted him about why we were made to learn all those silly songs he made us memorize and he told that student that he had done so in order to, fruitlessly as it turned out, break us from our undying devotion to rock and roll, you know, Elvis, Chuck, Jerry Lee, Wanda, Brenda, Bo, Buddy, the Big Bopper and every single doo wop group, male or female. If anybody wants to create a board of inquiry over that Mister Dasher indiscretion complete with a jury of still irate rock and roll will never die-ers you have my support.
In thinking about Woody the obvious subsequent question of when I first heard the late Pete Seeger sing, a man who acted as the transmission belt between generations, I came up against that same quandary since I know I didn’t associate him with the first time, the first wave of performers, I heard as I connected with the emerging folk minute of the early 1960s. That folk minute start which I do clearly remember the details of got going one Sunday night when tired of the vanilla rock and roll music that was being play in the fall of 1962 on the Boston stations I began flipping the small dial on my transistor radio settling in on this startling gravelly voice which sounded like some old-time mountain man, some old time Jehovah cometh Calvinist avenging angel, singing Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies (who turned outto be folk historian and seminal folk revival figure Dave Von Ronk, who as far as I know later from his politics had no particular religious bent,if any, but who sure sounded like he was heralding the second coming. I listened to a few more songs on what turned out to be a folk music program put on every Sunday evening between seven and nine at the request of some college kids in the area who were going crazy for roots music according to the DJ.
After thinking about it for a while I realized that I had heard Pete not in solo performance but when he was with The Weavers and they made a hit out of the old Lead Belly tune, Good Night, Irene (a song that in the true oral tradition has many versions and depending on the pedigree fewer or more verses, Lead Belly’s being comparatively short). In those days, in the early 1950s I think, The Weavers were trying to break into the popular music sphere and were proceeding very well until the Cold War night descended upon them and they, or individual members including Pete were tarred with the red scare brush.
Still you cannot keep a good man down, a man with a flame-throwing banjo, with folk music DNA in his blood since he was the son of the well-known folk musicologist Charles Seeger who along with the father and son Lomaxesdid so much to record the old time roots music out on location in the hills and hollows of the South, and with something to say to those who were interested in looking back into the roots of American music before it got commercialized (although now much of that early commercial music makes up the key folk anthology put together by Harry Smith and which every self-respecting folkie performer in the early 1960s treated like a bible. Pete put a lot of it together, a lot of interests. Got the young interested in going back to the time when old cowboys would sing themselves to sleep around the camp fire out in the prairies, when sweat hard-working black share-croppers and plantation workers down South would get out a Saturday jug and head to the juke joint to chase the blues away, and when the people of the hills and hollows down in Appalachia would Saturday night get out the jug and run over to Bill Preston’s old seen better days red-painted barn and dance that last dance waltz to that weeping mountain fiddle.
Stuff like that, lots of stuff like that to fill out the American songbook. But Pete also put his pen to paper to write some searing contemporary lyrics just like those “new breed” protest folk singers he helped nurture and probably the most famous to come out of that period, asking a very good question then, a question still be asked if more desperately than even then, Where Have All The Flowers Gone.Now a new generation looks like it too is ready to pick up the torch after the long “night of the long knives” we have faced since those days.
The Labor Party Question In The United States- An Historical Overview-Fight For A Worker Party That Fights For A Workers Government
These notes (expanded) were originally intended to be presented as The Labor Question in the United States at a forum on the question on Saturday August 4, 2012. As a number of radicals have noted, most particularly organized socialist radicals, after the dust from the fall bourgeois election settles, regardless of who wins, the working class will lose. Pressure for an independent labor expression, as we head into 2013, may likely to move from its current propaganda point as part of the revolutionary program to agitation and action so learning about the past experiences in the revolutionary and radical labor movements is timely.
I had originally expected to spend most of the speech at the forum delving into the historical experiences, particularly the work of the American Communist Party and the American Socialist Workers Party with a couple of minutes “tip of the hat” to the work of radical around the Labor Party experiences of the late 1990s. However, the scope of the early work and that of those radical in the latter work could not, I felt, be done justice in one forum. Thus these notes are centered on the early historical experiences. If I get a chance, and gather enough information to do the subject justice, I will place notes for the 1990s Labor party work in this space as well. ********* The subject today is the Labor Party Question in the United States. For starters I want to reconfigure this concept and place it in the context of the Transitional Program first promulgated by Leon Trotsky and his fellows in the Fourth International in 1938. There the labor party concept was expressed as “a workers’ party that fights for a workers’ government.” [The actual expression for advanced capitalist countries like the U.S. was for a workers and farmers government but that is hardly applicable here now, at least in the United States. Some wag at the time, some Shachtmanite wag from what I understand, noted that there were then more dentists than farmers in the United States. Wag aside that remark is a good point since today we would call for a workers and X (oppressed communities, women, etc.) government to make our programmatic point more inclusive.]
For revolutionaries these two algebraically -expressed political ideas are organically joined together. What we mean, what we translate this as, in our propaganda is a mass revolutionary labor party (think Bolsheviks first and foremost, and us) based on the trade unions (the only serious currently organized part of the working class) fighting for soviets (workers councils, factory committees, etc.) as an expression of state power. In short, the dictatorship of the proletariat, a term we do not yet use in “polite” society these days in order not to scare off the masses. And that is the nut. Those of us who stand on those intertwined revolutionary premises are few and far between today and so we need, desperately need, to have a bridge expression, and a bridge organization, the workers party, to do the day to day work of bringing masses of working people to see the need to have an independent organized expression fighting programmatically for their class interests. And we, they, need it pronto.
That program, the program that we as revolutionaries would fight for, would, as it evolved, center on demands, yes, demands, that would go from day to day needs to the struggle for state power. Today focusing on massive job programs at union wages and benefits to get people back to work, workers control of production as a way to spread the available work around, the historic slogan of 30 for 40, nationalization of the banks and other financial institutions under workers control, a home foreclosure moratorium, and debt for homeowners and students. Obviously more demands come to mind but those listed are sufficient to show our direction.
Now there have historically been many efforts to create a mass workers party in the United States going all the way back to the 1830s with the Workingmen’s Party based in New York City. Later efforts, after the Civil War, mainly, when classic capitalism began to become the driving economic norm, included the famous Terence Powderly-led Knights of Labor, including (segregated black locals), a National Negro Union, and various European social-democratic off -shoots (including pro-Marxist formations). All those had flaws, some serious like being pro-capitalist, merely reformist, and the like (sound familiar?) and reflected the birth pangs of the organized labor movement rather than serious predecessors.
Things got serious around the turn of the century (oops, turn of the 20th century) when the “age of the robber barons” declared unequivocally that class warfare between labor and capital was the norm in American society (if not expressed that way in “polite” society). This was the period of the rise the Debsian-inspired party of the whole class, the American Socialist Party. More importantly, if contradictorily, emerging from a segment of that organization, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) was, to my mind the first serious revolutionary labor organization (party/union?) that we could look to as fighting a class struggle fight for working class interests. Everyone should read the Preamble to the IWW Constitution of 1905 (look it up on Wikipedia or the IWW website) to see what I mean. It still retains its stirring revolutionary fervor today.
The most unambiguous work of creating a mass labor party that we could recognize though really came with the fight of the American Communist Party (which had been formed by the sections, the revolutionary-inclined sections, of the American Socialist Party that split off in the great revolutionary/reformist division after the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917) in the 1920s to form one based on the trade unions (mainly in the Midwest, and mainly in Chicago with the John Fitzgerald –led AFL). That effort was stillborn, stillborn because the non-communist labor leaders who had the numbers, the locals, and, ah, the dough wanted a farmer-labor party, a two class party to cushion them against radical solutions (breaking from the bourgeois parties and electoralism). Only the timely intervention of the Communist International saved the day from a major blunder (Go to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives for more, much more on this movement, He, and his factional allies including one William Z. Foster, later the titular head of the Communist Party, were in the thick of things to his later red-faced chagrin).
Moving forward, the American Communist Party at the height of the Great Depression (the one in the 1930s, that one, not the one we are in now) created the American Labor Party (along with the American Socialist party and other pro-Democratic Party labor skates) which had a mass base in places like New York and the Midwest. The problem though was this organization was, mainly, a left-handed way to get votes for Roosevelt from class conscious socialist-minded workers who balked at a direct vote for Roosevelt. (Sound familiar, again?) And that, before the Labor Party movement of the 1990s, is pretty much, except a few odd local attempts here and there by leftist groups, some sincere, some not, was probably the last major effort to form any kind of independent labor political organization. (The American Communist Party after 1936, excepting 1940, and even that is up for questioning, would thereafter not dream of seriously organizing such a party. For them the Democratic Party was more than adequate, thank you. Later the Socialist Workers Party essentially took the same stance.)
So much then for the historical aspects of the workers party question. The real question, the real lessons, for revolutionaries posed by all of this is something that was pointed out by James P. Cannon in the late 1930s and early 1940s (and before him Leon Trotsky). Can revolutionaries in the United States recruit masses of working people to a revolutionary labor party (us, again) today (and again think Bolshevik)? To pose the question is to give the answer (an old lawyer’s trick, by the way).
America today, no. Russia in 1917, yes. Germany in 1921, yes. Same place 1923, yes. Spain in 1936 (really from 1934 on), yes. America in the 1930s, probably not (even with no Stalinist ALP siphoning). France 1968, yes. Greece (or Spain) today, yes. So it is all a question of concrete circumstances. That is what Cannon (and before him Trotsky) was arguing about. If you can recruit to the revolutionary labor party that is the main ticket. We, even in America, are not historically pre-determined to go the old time British Labor Party route as an exclusive way to create a mass- based political labor organization. If we are not able to recruit directly then you have to look at some way station effort. That is why in his 1940 documents (which can also be found at the Cannon Internet Archives as well) Cannon stressed that the SWP should where possible (mainly New York) work in the Stalinist-controlled (heaven forbid, cried the Shachtmanites) American Labor Party. That was where masses of organized trade union workers were.
Now I don’t know, and probably nobody else does either, if and when, the American working class is going to come out of its slumber. Some of us thought that Occupy might be a catalyst for that. That has turned out to be patently false as far as the working class goes. So we have to expect that maybe some middle level labor organizers or local union officials feeling pressure from the ranks may begin to call for a labor party. That, as the 1990s Socialist Alternative Labor Party archives indicates, is about what happened when those efforts started.
[A reference back to the American Communist Party’s work in the 1920s may be informative here. As mentioned above there was some confusion, no, a lot of confusion back then about building a labor party base on workers and farmers, a two -class party. While the demands of both groups may in some cases overlap farmers, except for farm hands, are small capitalists on the land. We need a program for such potential allies, petty bourgeois allies, but their demands are subordinate to labor’s in a workers’ party program. Fast forward to today and it is entirely possible, especially in light of the recent Occupy experiences, that some vague popular frontist trans-class movement might develop like the Labor Non-Partisan League that the labor skates put forward in the 1930s as a catch basin for all kinds of political tendencies. We, of course, would work in such formations fighting for a revolutionary perspective but this is not what we advocate for now.]
Earlier this year AFL-CIO President Trumka made noises about labor “going its own way.” I guess he had had too much to drink at the Democratic National Committee meeting the night before, or something. So we should be cautious, but we should be ready. While at the moment tactics like a great regroupment of left forces, a united front with labor militants, or entry in other labor organizations for the purpose of pushing the workers party are premature we should be ready.
And that last sentence brings up my final point, another point courtesy of Jim Cannon. He made a big point in the 1940s documents about the various kinds of political activities that small revolutionary propaganda groups or individuals (us, yet again) can participate in (and actually large socialist organizations too before taking state power). He lumped propaganda, agitation, and action together. For us today we have our propaganda points “a workers’ party that fights for a workers (and X, okay) government.” In the future, if things head our way, we will “united front” the labor skates to death agitating for the need for an independent labor expression. But we will really be speaking over their heads to their memberships (and other working class formations, if any, as well). Then we will take action to create that damn party, fighting to make it a revolutionary instrument. Enough said.
All Honor To Denmark Vesey-In Memory
Of The Charleston A.M.E. Victims
As everybody hopefully knows by now
the Charleston A.M.E. has a long and storied history around the balck liberation
struggle going back to slavery times (in another building which along the way
was burned down before its current incarnation). Below is a link to a program featuring
the martyred Denmark Vesey who had his own ideas about how to end slavery. He
might very well have a word or two to say about the South Carolina Confederate flag
of slavery. In fact I know he would. http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/06/18/415465656/denmark-vesey-and-the-history-of-charleston-s-mother-emanuel-church
**When The Blues Is Dues- In Jim Crow Times – 50 Years Later It’s Still Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam”
… his hitchhiked ride, a good guy, a guy in pick-up truck, an almost new 1961 Ford model, who picked him up after dark just south of Richmond, left him off right off Highway 61, just outside of town, Clarksburg, early that next blazing hot afternoon after that good guy had tooled that pick-up about fourteen hours straight with only a couple of pits stops. As he ambled toward the center of town figuring to get a little lunch at the bus stop before heading out on the bus to head west some before he picked up the hitchhike trail again he noticed, he clearly noticed that he was in the colored section of town, or what seemed like it. All kinds of shacks, run-down and worst, junk cars, or worst, the latest, maybe about a 1949 Hudson from what he could see, litters of little black children playing in front of decayed yards filled with debris,and a feel of poverty, not ground-down, groveling poverty but just the poverty of the poor, the poor who have been poor for a few generations and don’t know any other existence. As he passed the rows of shacks some residents gave him short looks, not hostile but more like“whitey, what are you doing here in this section of town, you must be a stranger.”Others just went about their poking around business.
These stares (or indifferences) kept up until he hit the edge of the colored section, or what seemed to be the edge, when he thirsty, thirsty as hell, by this point stopped in a store, one of those old time country-type stores, a store out of some William Faulkner Mississippi novel, he thought, filled with colored folks, and one white man behind the counter. He approached the counter, asked for a Pepsi, cold, ice cold, and large. The white man behind the counter (who turned out to be the owner, and who he would hear of a couple of years later in some televised news report as the leader of that town’s White Citizens Council) said this -“boy, where do you think you are, Boston?”, this here is a nigra store and no whites are served here. By rights I should have you thrown out of town but since you are a stranger I will just tell that if you want a Pepsi, or any damn drink, you will have to go to my store over in town a couple of miles from here up this same road, right next to the bus station which I hope you plan to be using.” He left without a word, but still thirsty as hell.
After walking what seemed like an eternity, now with white stares coming fromall kinds of shacks, run-down and worst, junk cars, or worst, the latest, maybe about a 1949 Hudson from what he could see, litters of little white children playing in front of decayed yards filled with debris, and a feel of poverty, not ground-down, groveling poverty but just the poverty of the poor, the poor who have been poor for a few generations and don’t know any other existence, he reached the downtown bus station, and Mister’s grocery store next door. He went into the store, now filled with white folks, and with a white man behind the counter, approached the counter and asked for a Pepsi, cold, ice cold, and large. In reply the white man said the following-“We don’t take with white folks trading at the colored store so if you want a Pepsi, or any damn drink, you’ll have to get it at the bus station-on your way out of town.” He left, again without a word.
He entered the small bus station, stepped up to the clerk’s counter, bought a ticket to New Orleans, and then asked for a drink of water. The clerk pointed behind him and he went and got that precious drink of water, a drink at the “whites only”drinking fountain not the “colored only” one that his new found instinct told him that he should not use…
…and thus james crow in the flesh. And Mississippi goddam too. Mississippi Goddam Lyrics (1963) Nina Simone
The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam And I mean every word of it
Alabama's gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Alabama's gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Can't you see it Can't you feel it It's all in the air I can't stand the pressure much longer Somebody say a prayer
Alabama's gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
This is a show tune But the show hasn't been written for it, yet
Hound dogs on my trail School children sitting in jail Black cat cross my path I think every day's gonna be my last
Lord have mercy on this land of mine We all gonna get it in due time I don't belong here I don't belong there I've even stopped believing in prayer
Don't tell me I tell you Me and my people just about due I've been there so I know They keep on saying "Go slow!"
But that's just the trouble "do it slow" Washing the windows "do it slow" Picking the cotton "do it slow" You're just plain rotten "do it slow" You're too damn lazy "do it slow" The thinking's crazy "do it slow" Where am I going What am I doing I don't know I don't know
Just try to do your very best Stand up be counted with all the rest For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
I made you thought I was kiddin' didn't we
Picket lines School boycotts They try to say it's a communist plot All I want is equality for my sister my brother my people and me
Yes you lied to me all these years You told me to wash and clean my ears And talk real fine just like a lady And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie
Oh but this whole country is full of lies You're all gonna die and die like flies I don't trust you any more You keep on saying "Go slow!" "Go slow!"
But that's just the trouble "do it slow" Desegregation "do it slow" Mass participation "do it slow" Reunification "do it slow" Do things gradually "do it slow" But bring more tragedy "do it slow" Why don't you see it Why don't you feel it I don't know I don't know
You don't have to live next to me Just give me my equality Everybody knows about Mississippi Everybody knows about Alabama Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
The Life and Times Of Nina Simone-"Mississippi Goddam,"
-And The South Carolina Confederate Flag of Slavery Too!
Sam Lowell comment:
Below is a link to a program talking
about a new documentary of the great singer Nina Simone. She may have had some
troubles in her life but she had the troubles down in Mississippi just right. And
with what happened in Charleston at A.M.E. church recently and the flap over
the Confederate flag of slavery she would have some choice words for that
situation too.
The name of this tune is Mississippi Goddam And I mean every word of it
Alabama's gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Alabama's gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
Can't you see it Can't you feel it It's all in the air I can't stand the pressure much longer Somebody say a prayer
Alabama's gotten me so upset Tennessee made me lose my rest And everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
This is a show tune But the show hasn't been written for it, yet
Hound dogs on my trail School children sitting in jail Black cat cross my path I think every day's gonna be my last
Lord have mercy on this land of mine We all gonna get it in due time I don't belong here I don't belong there I've even stopped believing in prayer
Don't tell me I tell you Me and my people just about due I've been there so I know They keep on saying "Go slow!"
But that's just the trouble "do it slow" Washing the windows "do it slow" Picking the cotton "do it slow" You're just plain rotten "do it slow" You're too damn lazy "do it slow" The thinking's crazy "do it slow" Where am I going What am I doing I don't know I don't know
Just try to do your very best Stand up be counted with all the rest For everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
I made you thought I was kiddin' didn't we
Picket lines School boycotts They try to say it's a communist plot All I want is equality for my sister my brother my people and me
Yes you lied to me all these years You told me to wash and clean my ears And talk real fine just like a lady And you'd stop calling me Sister Sadie
Oh but this whole country is full of lies You're all gonna die and die like flies I don't trust you any more You keep on saying "Go slow!" "Go slow!"
But that's just the trouble "do it slow" Desegregation "do it slow" Mass participation "do it slow" Reunification "do it slow" Do things gradually "do it slow" But bring more tragedy "do it slow" Why don't you see it Why don't you feel it I don't know I don't know
You don't have to live next to me Just give me my equality Everybody knows about Mississippi Everybody knows about Alabama Everybody knows about Mississippi Goddam
That's it for now! see ya' later
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
As The 100th Anniversary Of The First
Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some
Remembrances-The Culturati’s 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 the
Cubist/Fauvists/Futurists/Constructivists, Surrealists or those who would come
to speak for those movements (hell even the hide-bound Academy filled with its
rules, or be damned, spoke the pious words of peace, brotherhood and the
affinity of all humankind when there was sunny weather), those who saw the
disjointedness of modern industrial society in its squalor, it creation of
generations of short, nasty, brutish lives just like the philosophers predicted
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 gazebo 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, putting another man to
ground or laying their own heads down for some imperial mission.
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 poets like
Wilfred Owens who would sicken of war before he passed leaving a beautiful
damnation on war, its psychoses, and broken bones and dreams, and the idiots
who brought humankind to such a fate, like e. e. cummings who drove through
sheer hell in those rickety ambulances floors sprayed with blood, man blood,
angers, anguishes and more sets of broken bones, and broken dreams, like Rupert
Brooke all manly and old school give and go, as they marched in formation
leaving the ports and then mowed down like freshly mown grass in their
thousands as the charge call came and they rested, a lot of them, in those
freshly mown grasses, like Robert Graves all grave all sputtering in his words
confused about what had happened, suppressing, always suppressing that instinct
to cry out against the hatred night, like old school, old Thomas Hardy writing
beautiful old English pastoral sentiments before the war and then full-blown
into imperium’s service, no questions asked old England right or wrong, like
old stuffed shirt himself T.S. Eliot speaking of hollow loves, hollow men,
wastelands, and such in the high club rooms on the home front, and like old
brother Yeats speaking of terrible beauties born in the colonies and maybe at
the home front too as long as Eliot does not miss his high tea. Jesus what a
blasted night that Great War time was.
And as 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, artists, beautiful artists like
Fernand Leger who could no longer push the envelope of representative art
because it had been twisted by the rubble of war, by the crashing big guns, by
the hubris of commanders and commanded and he turned to new form, tubes, cubes,
prisms, anything but battered humankind in its every rusts and lusts, all
bright and intersecting once he got the mustard gas out of his system, once he
had done his patria duty, like speaking of mustard gas old worn out John Singer
Sargent of the three name WASPs forgetting Boston Brahmin society ladies in
decollage, forgetting ancient world religious murals hanging atop Boston museum
and spewing trench warfare and the blind leading the blind out of no man’s
land, out of the devil’s claws, like Umberto Boccioni, all swirls, curves,
dashes, and dangling guns as the endless charges endlessly charge, like Gustav
Klimt and his endlessly detailed gold dust opulent Asiatic dreams filled with
lovely matrons and high symbolism and blessed Eve women to fill the night,
Adam’s night after they fled the garden, like Joan Miro and his infernal boxes,
circles, spats, eyes, dibs, dabs, vaginas, and blots forever suspended in deep
space for a candid world to fret through, fret through a long career, and like
poor maddened rising like a phoenix in the Spartacist uprising George Grosz
puncturing the nasty bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie the ones with the real
dough and their overfed dreams stuffed with sausage, and from the bloated
military and their fat-assed generals stuff with howitzers and rocket shells,
like Picasso, yeah, Picasso taking the shape out of recognized human existence
and reconfiguring the forms, the mesh of form to fit the new hard order, like,
Braque, if only because if you put the yolk on Picasso you have to tie him to
the tether too.
And do not forget when the war drums
intensified, and the people, their clients, patrons and buyers, cried out their
lusts and they, they, other creative souls made of ordinary human clay as it
turned out sculptors, writers, serious and not, musicians went to the trenches
to die deathless deaths in their thousands for, well, for humankind, of course,
their always fate ….
*In
Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Freed -Antonio
Guerrero
http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html
A link above to more information
about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement
Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war
prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag
Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found
Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of
the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal,
are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of
the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site,
seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more
public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand.
Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan
Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense
organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of
advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that
spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement
list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all
serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these
brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and
disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old
Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of
class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise
incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their
cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to
your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make
this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All
Class-War Prisoners Now!
Yes, You Had Better Shake, Rattle And Roll That Thing-With Big Joe Turner In Mind
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
In the old days, the old days when the songs were just starting to be weaned off of the old time religion gospel high heaven savior thing and come down in the mud and of hard drinking, hard lovin’, hard woman on your mind, yeah, the old birth of the blues days, the blue being nothing but a good woman or man on your mind anyway, around the turn of the 20th century and you can check this out if you want to and not take my word for it a black guy, a rascally black guy of no known home, a drifter, maybe a hobo for all I know, and who knows what else named Joe Turner would come around the share-cropper down South neighborhoods and steal whatever was not nailed down, including your woman which depending on how you were feeling might be a blessing and then leave and move on to the next settlement and go about his plundering way. Oh sure like lots of blues and old country music as it got passed on in the oral traditions there were as many versions of the saga as there were singers everybody adding their own touch. But for the most part the story line about old ne’er-do-well Joe Turner rang very similar over time. So Joe Turner got his grizzly self put into song out in the Saturday juke joints out in places like the Mississippi Delta where more legends were formed than you could shake a stick, got sanctified once old when Willie’s liquor, white lightning home-made liquor got to working, and some guy, maybe not the best singer if you asked around but a guy who could put words together to tell a story, a blues story, and that guy with a scratch guitar would put some verses together and the crowd would egg him on. Make the tale taller as the night went until everybody petered out and that song was left for the next guy to embellish.
By most accounts old Joe was bad man, a very bad man, bad mojo man, just short of as bad as Mister’s plantation foremen where those juke joint listeners worked sunup to sundown six days a week or the enforcers of Mister James Crow’s laws seven days a week. Yeah, Joe was bad alright once he got his wanting habits on, although I have heard at least one recording from the Lomaxes who went all over the South in the 1930s and 1940s trying to record everything they could out in the back country where Joe Turner was something like a combination Santa Claus and Robin Hood. Hell, maybe he was and some guy who lost his woman to wily Joe just got sore and bad mouthed him. Stranger things have happened. In any case the Joe Turner, make that Big Joe, Turner I want to mention here as far as I know only stole the show when he got up on the bandstand and played the role of “godfather” of rock and roll.
That is what I want to talk about, about how one song, and specifically the place of Big Joe and one song, Shake Rattle and Roll in the rock pantheon. No question Big Joe and his snapping beat has a place in the history of rhythm and blues which is one of the musical forbear strands of rock and roll. The question is whether Shake is also the first serious effort to define rock and roll. If you look at the YouTube version of Big Joe be-bopping away with his guitar player doing some flinty stuff and sax player searching for that high white note and Big Joe snapping away being very suggestive about who and what should shake you can make a very strong case for that place. Add in that Bill Haley, Jerry Lee, and Elvis among others in the rock pantheon covered the song successfully and that would seem to clinch the matter.
In 2004, the fiftieth anniversary of the debut of Shake by Big Joe, there had been considerable talk and writing again by some knowledgeable rock critics about whether Shake was the foundational song of rock. That controversy brought back to my mind the arguments that me and my corner boys who hung out in front of Jimmy Jack’s Diner in Carver, a town about thirty miles south of Boston, had on some nothing better to do Friday nights during high school (meaning girl-less, dough-less or both). I was the primary guy who argued for Big Joe and Shake giving that be-bop guitar and that wailing sexy sax work as my reasoning while Jimmy Jenkins swore that Ike Turner’s frantic piano-driven and screeching sax Rocket 88 (done under an alias of the Delta Cats apparently for contract reasons a not uncommon practice when something good came up but you would not have been able to it under the label you were contracted to) was the be-bop beginning and Sam Lowell, odd-ball Sam Lowell dug deep into his record collection, really his parent’s record collection which was filled mainly with folk music and the blues edge played off that to find Elmore James’ Look On Yonder Wall. And the other corner boys like our leader Frankie Riley lined up accordingly (nobody else came up with any others so it was those three).
Funny thing Frankie and most everybody else except I think Fritz Taylor who sided with Jimmy Jenkins sided with me and Big Joe. The funny part being that several years ago with the advent of YouTube I started to listen to the old stuff as it became available on-line and now I firmly believe that Ike’s Rocket 88 beats out Shake for the honor. As for the old time Joe Turner, well, he will have to wait in line. What do you think of that?
*In
Honor Of Our Class-War Prisoners- Free All The Class-War Prisoners!-Gary Watson
http://www.thejerichomovement.com/prisoners.html
A link above to more information
about the class-war prisoner honored in this entry.
Make June Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month
Markin comment (reposted from 2010)
In “surfing” the National Jericho Movement
Website recently in order to find out more, if possible, about class- war
prisoner and 1960s radical, Marilyn Buck, whom I had read about in a The Rag
Blog post I linked to the Jericho list of class war prisoners. I found
Marilyn Buck listed there but also others, some of whose cases, like that of
the “voice of the voiceless” Pennsylvania death row prisoner, Mumia Abu-Jamal,
are well-known and others who seemingly have languished in obscurity. All of
the cases, at least from the information that I could glean from the site,
seemed compelling. And all seemed worthy of far more publicity and of a more
public fight for their freedom.
That last notion set me to the task at hand.
Readers of this space know that I am a longtime supporter of the Partisan
Defense Committee, a class struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense
organization which supports class war prisoners as part of the process of
advancing the international working class’ struggle for socialism. In that
spirit I am honoring the class war prisoners on the National Jericho Movement
list this June as the start of what I hope will be an on-going attempt by all
serious leftist militants to do their duty- fighting for freedom for these
brothers and sisters. We will fight out our political differences and
disagreements as a separate matter. What matters here and now is the old
Wobblie (IWW) slogan - An injury to one is an injury to all.
Note: This list, right now, is composed of
class-war prisoners held in American detention. If others are likewise
incarcerated that are not listed here feel free to leave information on their
cases in the comment section. Likewise any cases, internationally, that come to
your attention. I am sure there are many, many such cases out there. Make
this June, and every June, a Class-War Prisoners Freedom Month- Free All
Class-War Prisoners Now!
All Honor To The Waldenese Heretics! A Smite Of Justice Finally!
Peter Waldo
Light glows in the darkness You have probably heard the news lately that the Roman Catholic Church’s Pope Francis has asked the Waldenese community of hearty and alive irreverent Protestants to accept the church’s forgiveness for attempting to exterminate their forbears in the late 15th century by order of the then pope, get this, Pope Innocent VIII (eight, right). And they almost succeeded, with now a small remnant still living in small enclaves in various spots around the world. By the way doing nobody harm just like when they were started by a renegade merchant named, well, Waldo, whothought that piety, poverty and doing good works were worthy endeavors. Get this too though Waldo and his gang thought that everybody would be just as well off if there was not a clergy separate from the congregation, that everybody could be a priest (maybe women too?). And you wonder why Rome had the stakes piled up high and the flames on big time. Well, I know everybody studied this group in Western History class in passing, I know I did, as precursors of the Protestant Reformation and martyrs to the cause of enlightenment so I will just leave a link to Wikipedia on the subject for you to look at-https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldensians
Here is my problem though and maybe not so much a reflection on the current pope as on the church bureaucracy and inertia but isn’t several hundred years later for forgiveness and reconciliation in the case of Galileo just a little too late to do those fallen martyrs any good. What took so long? This may be a Tweeter Pope but you guys have got to push harder to come into the 18th century, the age of enlightenment. Okay.
