Wednesday, February 12, 2020

February Is Black History Month-Down With School Segregation, Legacy of Slavery!

Workers Vanguard No. 1165
15 November 2019
 
Down With School Segregation, Legacy of Slavery!
Part One
We print below, edited for publication, a presentation by comrade L. Singer at a Spartacist League forum held in Chicago on October 26. It was first given in Brooklyn, New York.
Under the reactionary Trump presidency, which revels in unabashed bigotry, there has been a lot of feigned concern in the liberal, pro-Democratic Party bourgeois press about the perils of racism. In the past year, numerous articles reported that New York City has some of the most segregated schools in the U.S. and that only seven black students got into Stuyvesant this year. Stuyvesant is the top elite public high school in NYC that admits 900 kids out of a school system of more than a million students. Mayor Bill de Blasio, a so-called “progressive” Democrat, and schools chancellor Richard Carranza have postured as being for integration, proposing a few token changes that have been met with a vicious backlash. De Blasio had suggested phasing out the racist test that determines admission to the elite schools, proposing to let in the top 7 percent of students from every middle school. Predictably, the mayor abandoned this proposal.
Meanwhile, the same newspapers that claim to be so concerned about school segregation, like the cynical mouthpiece of the ruling class, the New York Times, publish scare articles about other tokenistic proposals, like the idea of getting rid of the elementary school Gifted & Talented programs. Journalist Jelani Cobb aptly described this alarmist campaign as making it sound as if de Blasio was declaring war on smart children. The point is to all but ensure that no change ever happens. Of course, we would support any measure that would provide even a scrap of greater access to quality education. But these plans will not affect the vast majority of NYC students, who would still be confined to underfunded and overcrowded schools that are little more than holding pens, complete with metal detectors, surveillance cameras and “zero tolerance” discipline enforced by armed NYPD cops.
By the way, I have a daughter who is in the Gifted & Talented program in her district. (There are multiple districts within almost every borough.) There are only a few G&T classes of about 35 kids for the entire district of over 30,000 students, and while the district is roughly 15 percent black, there is not one black student in her class. This one “gifted” class is in a school that is 80 percent non-white. If you don’t get into the class when you’re four years old, admission being based on a single test, it’s unlikely you ever will. Meanwhile, the same district has a 70 percent white school that is much better funded. Getting to go there depends on where you live. Parents in that zone don’t need to worry about kids getting into the G&T program because their school is better. So, getting rid of the G&T would actually do little to change the overall racial segregation of the schools. But even little things elicit a big racist furor.
NYC public schools are 70 percent black and Latino. While 43 percent of the city’s population is white, only 15 percent of the public school student body is. And much of that 15 percent goes to the best public schools, where the students are mostly white, while over 70 percent of black and Latino students go to schools that are less than 10 percent white. In NYC, a bastion of enlightened liberalism presently run by the Democrats, as is usual, there are two separate systems of education. Where a student ends up is largely determined by race and class. This is true all over capitalist America. And while New York has its particularities and special means by which schools are segregated, in every major city in the U.S. the reality of segregated education persists and has even worsened in the last few decades. So here we are, 65 years after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and over 150 years after the victory of the North in the Civil War. So, why are schools still segregated?
As Marxists, we understand that black oppression is the cornerstone of American capitalism, a system built from colonial times on the backs of black slaves. This point is fundamental. In this racist, class-divided society, a tiny handful of people own the banks and industry. It is labor power—the sweat and blood of the working class—that is the source of the capitalists’ profits. Black people are specially oppressed as a race-color caste, segregated in the main at the bottom of society and confronted every day with the legacy of chattel slavery. Racial oppression is ingrained in the U.S. capitalist economy and every social institution. Anti-black racism is ruthlessly promoted by the ruling class to keep the working people divided and to conceal their common class interests against the exploiters.
An expression of black oppression in America is the racist rulers’ conscious and systematic denial of quality education to the mass of the black population. The capitalist class hoards the vast wealth of society for themselves. They run the education system to serve their interests, including by promoting bourgeois ideology. The elite schools are intended to prepare the next generation of technocrats, bureaucrats and CEOs. When it comes to the working class and the poor, including whites, the capitalists seek to spend on education only what they think they can realize back in profit from exploiting labor, and they also use the schools for military recruitment. The racist rulers see little use in educating the majority of black and Latino youth because as capitalism decays, it has no decent jobs for them to fill. The lives of the ghetto and barrio poor have already been written off as expendable, leaving them to die on the streets or to be thrown behind bars as millions have been.
The truth is that no reform under capitalism can fundamentally transform the social conditions that continue to imprison the impoverished black masses. The lack of affordable, quality housing is directly connected to the hellish conditions of the schools. Both are endemic to the capitalist profit system. Only the working class has the social power and class interest to wage an uncompromising struggle for quality, integrated education and housing for all. To win full political, social and economic equality for black people requires that the multiracial working class rip the economy out of the hands of the capitalists and reorganize it on a socialist basis, so that production is for human need, not profit. In order to wage this revolutionary struggle, the working class must become the champion of black equality. This also means organizing politically in opposition to all the agencies of the class enemy. The illusions that working people and minorities have in the Democratic Party of racist capitalism and war are a deadly obstacle to the struggle.
That’s my second fundamental point. The Democratic Party, which postures as the friend of workers, black people and all the oppressed, is in fact their class enemy. All the Democrats, including those calling themselves “progressive,” represent the capitalist class and defend its interests. In recent decades, the Democrats, just as much if not more than their Republican counterparts, have maintained segregation in education and have made it, if anything, worse. The bipartisan attacks on public education have gone hand in hand with decades of sustained capitalist onslaught against the living standards of the working class. In the face of this unrelenting class war, the pro-capitalist union misleaders have accepted giveback after giveback, while binding workers to the Democrats. It is vital to replace these labor traitors with a leadership committed to political independence of the working class.
This leads me to my third fundamental point: the need for a revolutionary vanguard party. Central to the program of such a party must be the fight for revolutionary integrationism. This is counterposed to liberal integrationism—the idea that integration and equality can be achieved by reforms under capitalism. Liberal integrationism is basically a lie that amounts to prettifying the brutal reality of racial oppression. Revolutionary integrationism is also counterposed to all forms of black separatism, which, at bottom, are expressions of despair over the prospects for integrated class struggle. Our task is building a revolutionary party that arms the working class with the consciousness that the fight against black oppression is central to the fight to emancipate labor and all the oppressed from the bondage of capitalist exploitation.
The grotesque inequality between the filthy rich and the poor that is seen in all decaying capitalist societies is particularly acute in New York, the center of U.S. finance capital. When de Blasio ran for mayor, he did so promising to tackle inequality, much in the same manner as we see with Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the current presidential campaign. At that time, a lot of reformist leftists were pushing illusions in de Blasio. His “tale of two cities” campaign slogan tapped into real anger among the vast majority in the city who suffered under ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg’s rule. An actual capitalist worth more than $50 billion, Bloomberg and his Wall Street cronies swam in profits, while most everyone else either treaded water or sank deeper into poverty. He attacked the city unions, including calling transit workers “thugs” when they dared to strike in 2005. He closed schools in black and Latino neighborhoods and pushed anti-union charters, installing the citywide system of “school choice,” a fraud that led to even greater segregation of schools.
But de Blasio in office has shown time and again that, like those before him, he is the mayor of Wall Street, ruling on behalf of the financial titans who lord it over the working class—white, black, Latino, Asian and immigrant. Under de Blasio’s reign, billions have been dished out by the city to real estate magnates who throw up luxury skyscrapers, while slumlords hike up rents and drive working people and the poor out of gentrifying neighborhoods. As the homeless population in NYC continues to grow, one out of ten public school students is in temporary housing, including homeless shelters.
Admission to elementary schools is mostly tied to residential districts, and housing in New York City is segregated. In addition, the best middle schools and high schools have other means of keeping black and Latino kids out, including through screening for test scores, absences and lateness. You can have multiple segregated schools in one building. For example, at the John Jay educational complex in posh Park Slope, Brooklyn, there are four high schools, three of which are roughly 90 percent black and Latino. The other school, Millennium, is only 40 percent black and Latino and gets vastly more funding. One parent said: “It’s a Jim Crow system in Brooklyn in 2017.” That same year, after one of the high school principals, Jill Bloomberg (no relation to the other Bloomberg), tried to address segregation at her school and the greater resources allotted to Millennium, she was, no joke, investigated for “communist organizing.” The investigation was eventually dropped. But it testifies to how little has changed and why when the issue of integration is raised, so is the specter of communism.
Finish the Civil War!
When you touch integration, you are touching the question of revolution and the unfinished business of the Civil War. To understand why black youth, and increasingly Latinos, are by and large sent to unequal and inferior schools, one needs to understand the legacy of slavery in this country and that black people today constitute a race-color caste. This caste status was consolidated in the aftermath of the defeat of Reconstruction, so it’s crucial to know that history as a means to understand the present and the way out for the future.
American capitalism was founded on black chattel slavery. The consolidation of slavery gave rise to the concept of what was known as the “Negro” and “white” races. While the idea that there are different races is scientific nonsense, it is a social fact essential to understanding this society. The color line, developed to justify slavery, became permanent and hereditary. Black slaves remained black slaves, as did their children and grandchildren. The peculiar “principle” that in the U.S. determined who would be a slave was the “one drop” rule—one drop of “black” blood makes you black.
The veteran Trotskyist Richard Fraser underscored in his writings some 60 years ago how the concept of race was central to the development of American capitalism. He outlined how the material basis of black oppression drew upon a precapitalist system of production. Slavery played a key role in the development of British industrial capitalism and U.S. capitalism. British textile owners received Southern cotton, which was handled by powerful New York merchants. Those merchants sold manufactured goods to the South.
Although slavery and capitalism were intertwined, they were different economic systems. The Southern plantation system acted as a brake on the growth of industrial capitalism. Throughout the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War, repeated “compromises” sought to offset what was called the “irrepressible conflict” between the North and South. However, each compromise only delayed the inevitable conflict and further entrenched the power of the slavocracy. It took a civil war to smash the slavocracy. The North’s victory was made possible only through the emancipation of the millions of black chattel slaves and the arming of 200,000 free black men and former slaves in a war that destroyed the slave system. There are many good articles on this history in our Black History and the Class Struggle pamphlet series.
On the eve of the Civil War, 90 percent of black people in the U.S. were enslaved, with nearly half the free blacks living in the North. Most of the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision deals with whether black people who were not slaves were citizens of the United States. As Chief Justice Roger Taney, a white-supremacist, put it:
“The question is simply this: Can a negro whose ancestors were imported into this country and sold as slaves become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen, one of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution?”
And Taney continued that black people “had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In other words, black people in the U.S. would forever be marked as inferior because their ancestors had been slaves. The Dred Scott decision would reverberate over and over, and still does today, as a definition of race-color caste oppression.
The fight for education has always been a hallmark of struggles by the oppressed for freedom. In the pre-Civil War South, slaves who dared to learn to read met the lash of their masters’ whips; those who dared to teach them faced imprisonment or met a worse fate at the hands of lynch mobs. Before the 19th century, only South Carolina and Georgia explicitly forbade the teaching of blacks. But the slaveowners learned from the example of slave uprisings in the Western Hemisphere, particularly the Haitian Revolution, which achieved independence for Haiti in 1804. The successful uprising in Haiti, as well as the Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey insurrectionary conspiracies and the Nat Turner revolt, were all organized and led by literate blacks. Laws were passed in all states south of the Mason-Dixon line making it a crime to teach a slave to read or write.
For Frederick Douglass, who fought his way out of slavery and became a political leader of the radical left wing of the abolitionist movement, there was great motivation to educate himself, no matter the cost. He wrote: “‘Very well,’ thought I. ‘Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.’ I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.”
It’s a common view in this country that the South was the seat of American barbarism, while enlightenment was to be found in the North. In reality, the South—because it is where slavery was dominant and where the overwhelming majority of black people lived after emancipation—represented a concentrated expression of the deep racist prejudice that permeated the whole country. Many of the concepts associated with the South originated in the North, found full fruition in the South and were exported back to the rest of the country. Segregation was no less deeply entrenched in the North than in the South. After the American Revolution, the idea of public schools began to take greater hold, coinciding with the expanding capitalist system’s need for basic education of workers. These were called common schools at the time, and in the North they were mostly not open to free blacks, and definitely not to slaves.
While slavery was abolished in most Northern states in the 1820s, these states offered little access to education for blacks. In most major cities, if there was any educational opportunity for black youth, it was in segregated schools. These were not public schools, but schools funded primarily by abolitionists and Quakers.
In some small communities in the North, black children were allowed to attend predominantly white local schools, but they were segregated. In a book I read on this history, a black man described what it was like going to school in Pennsylvania at that time, when black children were not allowed to drink from the same bucket or cup as the white children and had to sit back in the corner away from the fire no matter how cold the weather might be. This treatment of free black people in the North was an early example of caste subjugation: a population—officially free and not slave—could be segregated, discriminated against, and at times violently attacked, for no reason other than their skin color.
It wasn’t until the 1830s that major cities in the North started public schools for black youth, and these schools were inferior. Black parents called these schools “caste” schools. In Boston in 1848, a black printer, Benjamin Roberts, wanted his five-year-old daughter to attend the school closest to their home, which was a white school. Roberts sued the city of Boston on behalf of his daughter. His attorney was abolitionist Charles Sumner, assisted by Robert Morris, one of the nation’s first black attorneys. Sumner argued that segregation was a violation of the Massachusetts constitution and “equality under the law.” He argued that “the separation of children in the public schools of Boston, on account of color or race, is in the nature of caste, and is a violation of equality.” In response, Judge Shaw’s ruling against Roberts states: “It is urged, that this maintenance of separate schools tends to deepen and perpetuate the odious distinction of caste, founded in a deep-rooted prejudice in public opinion. This prejudice, if it exists, is not created by law, and probably cannot be changed by law.”
This 1848 ruling would later be cited in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case to show the compatibility of segregation and a mandate of equality before the law. In Rochester, New York, Frederick Douglass’s young daughter Rosetta applied in 1849 to a private school. She was admitted, but she was told she wasn’t allowed to be in the same room with white students. Douglass objected, but he ended up having her privately tutored. In Illinois in 1849, the state legislature provided for state-supported public schools for the first time, but voted for them to exclude black children.
One of the most profound gains resulting from the defeat of the slavocracy in the Civil War was the establishment of a system of public education for all, black and white. V.I. Lenin, the revolutionary Bolshevik leader, noted in “The Question of Ministry of Education Policy” (1913):
“America is not among the advanced countries as far as the number of literates is concerned. There are about 11 per cent illiterates and among the Negroes the figure is as high as 44 per cent. But the American Negroes are more than twice as well off in respect of public education as the Russian peasantry. The American Negroes, no matter how much they may be, to the shame of the American Republic, oppressed, are better off than the Russian peasants—and they are better off because exactly half a century ago the people routed the American slave-owners, crushed that serpent and completely swept away slavery and the slave-owning state system, and the political privileges of the slave-owners in America.”
[TO BE CONTINUED]
Workers Vanguard No. 1166
29 November 2019
 
Down With School Segregation, Legacy of Slavery!
Part Two
We print below, edited for publication, the second part of a presentation by comrade L. Singer at a Spartacist League forum held in Chicago on October 26. The talk was first given in Brooklyn. Part One appeared in WV No. 1165 (15 November).
Most of the first free public schools in the South were established after the Civil War and during Radical Reconstruction, the turbulent decade of Southern interracial bourgeois democracy. The freedmen and their white allies were protected by federal troops, many of them black. The Reconstruction Acts, passed by Congress in 1867, mandated the military occupation of the ex-Confederate states and provided for universal common school education. The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868; this stated that everybody born in the U.S. was a citizen, invalidating the Dred Scott decision. In 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified, granting the right to vote to all male citizens. Black people who served in the Union Army were among the principal leaders of Reconstruction governments and fought tenaciously against segregation.
Thousands of public schools were built, to the enormous benefit of black people and poor whites, although the schools largely remained segregated by race. Some 1,500 schools were built in Texas alone by 1872, and by 1875 half of all children in Mississippi, Florida and South Carolina were attending school. The freedmen’s drive for education for themselves and their children was insatiable, as it was viewed as a path out of conditions of servitude. Thousands of Northern teachers, black and white, flocked to the South to aid the freedmen and were themselves often the target of violence by racists.
There were some attempts to desegregate schools. One effort was led by Robert Smalls, who had earned fame as a slave in 1862 by commandeering a heavily armed Confederate ship in Charleston harbor. He delivered it to the Union fleet, bringing himself and 16 other slaves to freedom. After the war, Smalls was elected to the new South Carolina government. He pushed through legislation to desegregate schools in the state. But when the first black student entered the University of South Carolina, the teachers resigned and the entire student body left the school! In New Orleans in the early 1870s, there was even a brief experiment with integrated public schools. In January 1866, the New Orleans Tribune, the first black daily newspaper in the U.S., published the headline: “All children, without discrimination, will sit together.”
But widespread and violent opposition to “race mixing” ensured that the majority of Southern schools were segregated, and it goes without saying that the black schools were inferior. While abolitionists opposed the heinous institution of slavery, many saw full equality for black people as a whole different matter. As I noted earlier, prior to the Civil War, systematic segregation had taken root in the North, where a fight against the color line was also waged. Radical abolitionist Charles Sumner, in every Congressional session from 1870 until his death four years later, fought against Jim Crow, which he termed “the last tinge of slavery.” Civil War hero Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson was ejected from a local school board in 1869 for demanding an end to segregated schools in Rhode Island.
Frederick Douglass powerfully argued the case for integration, especially as a basis for unity of poor whites and blacks against their common enemy: “The cunning ex-slaveholder sets those who should be his enemies to fighting each other and thus diverts attention from himself. Educate the colored children and white children together in your day and night schools throughout the South, and they will learn to know each other better, and be better able to cooperate for mutual benefit.”
Reconstruction was the first attempt in this country to create a society in which black and white people were equal citizens—which flew in the face of all U.S. history. While Reconstruction is usually viewed as an issue of black and white, the defeat of the slavocracy also accentuated class differences among Southern whites. Democratic Party appeals to white supremacy were a way to block unity between poor whites and blacks. There was no real labor movement in the U.S. before the Civil War. However, it came on the scene afterwards; strikes and other labor protests became widespread. By 1868, the federal government conceded the eight-hour day to federal workers. Karl Marx captured the scene in the first volume of Capital (1867):
“In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded. But out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.”
It was a highly combative labor movement, and that combativity reached its height in the Great Rail Strike of 1877. The crushing of that strike coincided with the final undoing of Reconstruction. Some of the federal troops removed from the South were sent against the rail workers, an early example of how labor rights and black rights are intertwined. The growth of labor militancy in the U.S. and internationally helped persuade Northern capitalists that their class interests, which had led them into the Civil War to destroy the Southern slave system, now compelled opposition to the demands of the black freedmen, as well as to the struggles of the working class.
Despite the tenacious struggles of a few courageous white Radical Republicans like Sumner and his House colleague Thaddeus Stevens, as well as black leaders like Douglass, Reconstruction was defeated. The withdrawal of the last Union troops with the Compromise of 1877 made clear that Northern capital was interested in consolidating the economic advantages of its victory over the Confederacy, not in black rights. Left defenseless before their former owners, black people were driven out of government and off their land as Reconstruction regimes were smashed by naked racist terror.
A number of Supreme Court decisions, taken together, legally codified the end of Reconstruction. They also demonstrated that the courts are part of the bourgeois state machine, whose purpose is to defend capitalist class rule against the exploited and oppressed, regardless of which bourgeois party holds power. The core of the state consists of the police, army and prisons, as well as the courts. In 1883, the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act as unconstitutional. That Act, passed in honor of Sumner the year after his death, was a watered-down version of a bill he had proposed to promote integration. In 1896, the Court affirmed segregation as the law of the land in the Plessy decision. Homer Plessy, a man of mixed-race ancestry, sued in Louisiana after he was arrested for trying to sit in the “white section” of a train. The Court declared that if black people regard separate facilities as racial discrimination, it’s because they choose to interpret them as such, i.e., it’s all in their heads.
Arguing that segregation violates no part of the Constitution or its amendments, the Plessy ruling allowed separate treatment by race so long as it was supposedly equal. In Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution (2003), authors Robert Cottrol, Raymond Diamond and Leland Ware note: “At its zenith this system of segregation would turn Negroes into a group of American untouchables, ritually separated from the dominant white population in almost every observable facet of daily existence.” Laws were put into effect throughout the South mandating separate seating on buses, separate water fountains, separate bathrooms, separate schools, separate Bibles to swear on in court. Laws echoing those that existed in the time of slavery were passed that forbade white teachers from teaching black children.
It is out of the ashes of the defeat of Reconstruction that Booker T. Washington arose as the voice of accommodation to Jim Crow segregation. Washington disparaged Reconstruction and blamed black people for their own oppression, deeming them “unfit” for “high-minded” professions. In periods of defeat, like now, echoes are heard of Washington’s gospel of self-help, appealing to black youth to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps—in other words, to accept the racist status quo and look to the white rulers for patronage.
Heroic struggles erupted in the 1950s and ’60s that aimed to end the formal legal inequalities imposed on black people. Brown v. Board of Education struck down the doctrine of “separate but equal” for schools. But there was immediate and often violent resistance to desegregation, and foot-dragging by the federal government. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, starting in 1959 all public schools were shut down for five years to prevent integration. White kids got vouchers paid for by public funds to attend private schools; the black kids got nothing.
Fundamentally, the civil rights movement did not remedy the systemic racial oppression at the core of U.S. capitalism. Its liberal leadership, exemplified by Martin Luther King Jr., sought legal reforms through pressuring the capitalist Democrats and courts, the same forces maintaining de facto segregation outside the South. In the North, there were no laws forbidding black people to eat at the same lunch counters as whites; but the unwritten laws of American capitalist exploitation kept black people a “last hired, first fired,” doubly oppressed race-color caste. In 1965, the great writer James Baldwin remarked: “De facto segregation means Negroes are segregated, but nobody did it.”
In 1954, addressing how the Brown decision applied to segregation in New York City, the school superintendent insisted, “We have natural segregation here—it’s accidental.” Today, we hear that a lot, too. School officials in the North argued against using the word “segregation” on the grounds that segregation is deliberate—“racial imbalance” was the preferred term. The same thing is heard today, along with “lack of diversity.” While there was some struggle for school desegregation in the mid to late 1950s, it was in the early 1960s that larger struggles broke out.
Democrats and Social Democrats
In Chicago, segregation of housing and schools was openly enforced by the Democratic Party machine of Richard J. Daley. When the school superintendent, Benjamin Willis, was pressured to address overcrowding at black schools, he ordered 100 mobile classrooms rather than busing black kids to white schools. There was a boycott by over 222,000 students in 1963 against the segregation embodied in these “Willis wagons.” The Chicago Tribune called the boycott and other protest a “reign of chaos” and denounced the organizers as “reckless” for pulling kids out of school. That might sound familiar: the current “progressive” Democratic mayor, Lori Lightfoot, has lobbed similar vitriol at teachers who are now on strike. Daley and the Chicago Democrats viciously resisted any attempt at integration and made sure that schools and housing would stay segregated, as they still are.
In NYC, the struggle for integration reached a fever pitch in the early 1960s amid tumultuous struggles for decent housing and jobs and against rampant cop terror. In 1964, massive school boycotts by black and Puerto Rican parents and students were among the country’s largest civil rights demonstrations on record. The first boycott was led by liberal Brooklyn minister Milton Galamison and Bayard Rustin, today an icon of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), who was already an expert in selling out struggles on behalf of the Democratic Party, which he wanted to “realign.” Some 460,000 students didn’t go to school. There was a racist backlash, with 10,000 white mothers, organized as “parents and taxpayers,” marching across the Brooklyn Bridge to denounce “busing.”
A second boycott was called, but this time Rustin wouldn’t support it, labeling it too militant. Liberal white organizations saw the boycott as an inappropriate tactic; the New York Times declared it a “violent, illegal approach of adult-encouraged truancy!” Notably, Malcolm X supported the boycott, observing: “You don’t have to go to Mississippi to find a segregated school system, we have it right here in New York City.”
White Democratic Party politicians and black Democrats in the civil rights movement abandoned the battle. The NYC teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), was led by Albert Shanker, an anti-Communist “democratic socialist” who ran the UFT like a business. He refused to have the union endorse the 1964 school boycott for integration.
The Spartacist League intervened into the boycott. When the struggle for black rights develops a mass character, it poses a direct threat to the capitalist system but cannot go forward without a revolutionary leadership. Our Spartacist article (No. 2, July-August 1964) stated that such a leadership would seek “to educate the black workers about the real nature of the Democratic Party of cold-war liberals, Southern racists, kept union leaders, and Uncle Toms in order to break up the system of two capitalist parties which perpetuates the status quo.”
This struggle was happening in the lead-up to the Civil Rights Act passed in 1964. Here we see the racist role of the Democrats in full effect. It was a Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn, Emanuel Celler, who enabled the incorporation of an amendment that the act could not be used to “overcome racial imbalance” in public schools. There was an anti-busing amendment as well, to stop “any official or court of the United States to issue any order seeking to achieve a racial balance in any school by requiring the transportation of pupils or students from one school to another…in order to achieve such racial balance.” So here you have the Democrats gutting the civil rights legislation they claimed to support in the abstract and upholding the segregation of Northern schools. This anti-busing amendment would be regularly cited in the Chicago Tribune to argue in defense of school segregation.
The civil rights movement mainly benefited a thin layer of middle-class black people, but it could not make a dent in the deep-seated oppression of the black ghetto masses. The formula of equal rights under the law provides no answer to the miserable conditions of black life entrenched in American capitalist society: joblessness, crumbling homes, overcrowded schools, racist cop terror. Fed up with these conditions, Harlem erupted in 1964 and Watts in 1965, as did ghettos across the country over the next three years. These upheavals were an expression of the bankruptcy of the liberal-led civil rights movement in the face of these social conditions.
There was a growth in black separatist sentiment, which did not and could not generate a program of struggle to get rid of racial oppression under capitalism. The black nationalists who raised “community control” made a virtue of the ingrained segregation that was seen as unchangeable. By the late 1960s, “community control” had become a major slogan used by the ruling class, mainly acting through the Democratic Party, to co-opt a layer of young black activists. Many of these activists, including those who voiced white-baiting separatist rhetoric, became overseers of the segregated black ghettos. The actual content of the “community control” slogan was an appeal for more black Democratic Party politicians, cops, judges and administrators. Since then, black mayors have been installed in one major city after another to help contain the discontent of the black masses, while presiding over cop terror and unleashing attacks on social programs and labor.
All these events are the background to understanding the 1968 New York City teachers strike. The administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay was trying to bust the public employee unions, which were quite combative in the mid 1960s. There was a transit strike in 1966, led by Mike Quill. On its eve, Quill famously ripped up an anti-strike court injunction. Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller announced that he was “determined that this should never happen again.” The Taylor Law banning public employee strikes was put in place in 1967. When sanitation workers struck in early 1968, Lindsay decided that the time had come to break the public-sector unions.
Teachers had gone on strike in 1967, defying the Taylor Law. A leaflet we put out on September 24 after that strike noted the “policy of ‘professionalism’ advocated by the UFT leadership has held the union largely aloof from many of the past struggles of the ghetto communities, widening the gap between teacher, student and parent. Such a situation [of UFT indifference combined with black nationalist calls for ‘keeping the schools open’] provides a ready excuse for the development of racist attitudes.”
The spark for the 1968 strike came when the newly appointed black superintendent of Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district fired union teachers in order to replace them with non-union ones. Lindsay and Rockefeller, in cahoots with the Ford Foundation, pulled out all the stops to bust the union by mobilizing black people and Latinos in the ghettos and barrios against the strike, using the demagogic call for “community control” of the schools. While politically denouncing Shanker, we stood with the union, which was at that time disproportionately Jewish, in its fight for survival. In our leaflet “New York City School Strike: Beware Liberal Union Busters!” (13 November 1968), we sought to link the struggles of the union movement to those of New York’s black and Puerto Rican working people. Most of the reformist left came out in support of outright strikebreaking, siding with the “community control” crowd.
A few years later, there was a teachers strike in Newark, New Jersey, that played out differently. In 1971, black Democratic mayor Kenneth Gibson attacked the teachers union. However, because the union had an integrated membership and a black woman president, the ensuing teachers strike had substantial support from the city’s black population. The Newark teachers strike exposed the anti-union purpose behind the rhetoric of “community control” that had been wielded three years earlier in an attempt to break the NYC teachers union.
Racist Mobs and Liberals Defeat Busing
By the early to mid 1970s, the fight for school busing had become the front line in the fight for integration. The battle in Boston, a quintessential Democratic Party stronghold, took place almost 20 years after Brown and after every conceivable legal and political obstacle had been thrown up against integrating its schools. In 1974, a landmark Supreme Court decision prohibited busing black schoolchildren from Detroit to the suburbs, where the white schools were. This ruling set a precedent, including in Boston. The busing of black students there was purposely limited to neighborhoods like South Boston, known as Southie, which at the time was one of the poorest white areas outside of Appalachia. The aim was to pit poor and working-class whites against blacks. Again, demagogic politicians inflamed racist sentiments in these white ethnic enclaves under the watchwords of defend “neighborhood schools” and “stop forced busing.”
The Spartacist League intervened in Boston with a class-struggle program, calling to defend school busing as a minimal application of the elementary democratic right of black people to equality. We called to extend busing to the wealthier suburbs, so that poor kids, black and white, could have access to quality education. We called for quality, racially integrated housing and free universal higher education. While the NAACP and such craven reformists as the Socialist Workers Party called for federal troops to Boston, we fought for labor-black defense to stop racist mob attacks and protect black schoolchildren. We knew the defeat of busing in Boston would set the stage for further attacks against black people and for rolling back social gains more broadly, which it did.
All the metropolitan areas in the country with the most integrated schools had mandatory city-suburban busing plans. Most of these plans had been reversed or stopped by the 1990s. In 2007, the Supreme Court threw out school desegregation plans in Seattle and Louisville, enabling the overturn of others that remained across the country and eviscerating the Brown decision.
While busing was an inadequate solution to school segregation, it did not “fail” but was killed by an alliance of liberals in Congress and howling mobs of racists in the streets. The reformist left played its part in this defeat by channeling the fight to defend busing into faith in the Democrats and appeals for federal intervention.
A few months ago, an early Democratic Party presidential debate included the spectacle of Kamala Harris, former California attorney general, going after Joe Biden for opposing busing for black schoolchildren. Of course, Biden supported racist anti-busing measures as a Senator from Delaware. But this criticism is pure hypocrisy coming from Harris. For one, the role played by Biden in killing busing was not his alone, but that of the Democratic Party as a whole. And while a younger Harris personally benefited from the busing program in Berkeley, California, she went on to bus thousands of black and Latino youth, only not to better schools but to prison hellholes.
A number of petty-bourgeois liberal writers have powerfully documented the segregated and horrible conditions of the majority of public schools in this country. But they all propose the same dead-end answer of a better capitalist government to change things, while putting the fundamental blame on racist backwardness among whites.
This is a deeply and viciously racist country. But backward consciousness is not the source of racial oppression, although it is part of sustaining the oppression and degradation of black people, Latinos and other minorities. Racial oppression fundamentally stems from the American capitalist system and division of the working class along racial lines. As veteran American Trotskyist Richard Fraser put it:
“Karl Marx proved conclusively, however, that it was not greed but property relations which make it possible for exploitation to exist. When applied to the Negro question, the theory of morality means that the root of the problem of discrimination and white supremacy is prejudice. This is the reigning theory of American liberalism and is the means by which the capitalists throw the responsibility for the Jim Crow system upon the population as a whole. If people weren’t prejudiced there would be no Negro problem. This contention is fundamentally false.”
— “The Negro Struggle and the Proletarian Revolution” (1953), printed in “In Memoriam— Richard S. Fraser,” Prometheus Research Series No. 3, August 1990
The capitalist rulers have profited immensely by sowing racial divisions, pitting white workers against blacks, Asians against blacks and Latinos, blacks against immigrants and so on. They want to mask the fact that the class division between the workers and the capitalists is the primary dividing line in this society. Truth is, racial oppression serves to deepen the exploitation of all workers. The horrific conditions of life that black and immigrant workers have long endured are increasingly faced by the working class as a whole.
Funding for education and other social services is always rationed in a way that purposely fans racial and ethnic tensions. De Blasio’s pseudo-attempt to get rid of the racist, elite NYC high school exam was fiercely opposed by some Asian parents, who bought into the bourgeoisie’s lie that “merit” is what gets one to the top. To this end, the rulers have long invoked the myth of the Asian “model minority” as yet another way to blame black people for their own oppression. Such pernicious stereotypes also disappear national and class differences among Asians. In NYC alone, some quarter-million Asians live in poverty. Asians are also a component part of labor in the city.
Asians, as well as Latinos and other predominantly non-white minorities, suffer oppression in capitalist America. However, as an intermediate layer, they navigate a society where the main racial divide is between black and white, and every institution is permeated by anti-black racism. Many Latino students in the U.S. attend deeply segregated and impoverished schools. In California, Latinos attend schools that are 84 percent non-white. There is also a whole history of segregation of Latinos on the basis of anti-Spanish discrimination, including “English only” schools.
In 1970, a federal district court ruled that the Brown decision applied to segregation of Mexican students in Texas. In response, Houston school officials classified Mexican students as “white” in order to place them in black schools and then declared those schools “integrated,” while leaving white schools untouched. The rights of workers, Latinos and Asians, black people and immigrants will either go forward together or fall back separately. That’s why we emphasize the fight for bilingual education as part of the struggle for free, quality, integrated education for all. Bilingual education, which is vital for all Spanish-speaking and immigrant children, would also benefit native English speakers.
For Free, Quality, Integrated Public Education for All!
Today, the blame for the lack of learning and for low test scores is cynically put on teachers and their unions. But over the last four decades, public education has come under sustained bipartisan assault, from extreme cutbacks to widespread school closures. The Obama administration led the pack in launching sweeping attacks on the public schools and the teachers unions packaged as education “reform,” which included a major expansion of the privately run charter industry.
Among the advocates of this “reform” are some of America’s biggest billionaires and venture capitalists, like Bill Gates and Sam Walton. Cornell University professor Noliwe Rooks, in her book Cutting School (2017), usefully details how increased privatization of the public schools is a way to slash the cost of educating poor and minority youth and at the same time enables individual capitalists to make lots of money. She writes: “Charter schools,…vouchers, virtual schools, and an alternatively certified, non-unionized teaching force represent the bulk of the contemporary solutions offered as cures for what ails communities that are upward of 80 percent Black and Latino.”
Out of desperation over the awful state of inner-city public schools, many black and Latino parents have been manipulated into thinking that charter schools are some kind of answer. In fact, the overwhelmingly non-union charters are even more segregated than the public schools and are notorious for vicious discipline and excluding non-English speakers and disabled students. We call for class struggle to destroy the charter industry through bringing its teachers and staff into the public schools and the unions. An important step in this direction would be for labor to organize the existing charters, as has already happened in some cases. Teachers at recently unionized charters in Chicago have engaged in strike action; unity in struggle of Chicago public school and charter teachers would give a big boost to further organizing drives.
There has been a series of teachers strikes across the country, beginning in West Virginia a year and a half ago up through Chicago today. These walkouts over better pay and conditions found wide support as well as some expressions of solidarity from other unions. But the potential impact of these battles has largely been wasted by the trade-union officialdom that ties the unions to the same Democratic Party that has been attacking them and devastating public education.
An article on the Chicago teachers strike in the DSA-sponsored Jacobin was titled “It’s Chicago Educators Versus the Ruling Class” (23 October). However, it declares, “Following Sanders’s lead, Harris, Warren, and Biden, have expressed support for union demands, exposing [Chicago mayor Lori] Lightfoot’s pro-big business economic program”—as though these other Democrats don’t have a pro-big business program. They all are capitalist politicians upholding viciously racist U.S. imperialism.
Every child across the country, whatever their background, deserves to attend a school with the same level of resources now allocated to the elite NYC high schools. The same filthy rich ruling class attacking public education and teachers unions from L.A. to Chicago to NYC has been waging a broader one-sided class war against working people in this country. From auto workers in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Flint, Michigan, to transit and sanitation workers in NYC and Chicago, the multiracial working class has every interest in fighting for free, quality, integrated public education for all, up to and including the universities!
But it will take a leap in consciousness and organization for the proletariat to bring its power to bear in this fight, which must be linked to the struggle for its own freedom from capitalist wage slavery. Key to this task is building a revolutionary, internationalist workers party that will politically combat those like the DSA and the reformist Socialist Alternative that push support to the same old racist capitalist Democratic Party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders, as well as Nancy Pelosi and Biden. This support has only led to defeats for the oppressed and blocks the road to liberation.
Our model is Lenin and Trotsky’s Bolshevik Party, which led the working class to power in the Russian Revolution of October 1917. That revolution was a beacon for the workers and oppressed around the world and sent shivers down the U.S. bourgeoisie’s spine. Tsarist Russia had been, in Lenin’s words, a “prison house of peoples” of many oppressed nations and national minorities. By building a revolutionary party based on the social power of the workers, with a clear political program opposing capitalist exploitation, national oppression and all forms of Great Russian chauvinism, the Bolsheviks were able to shatter the old order. They sought to truly provide education to the masses and to do away with the bourgeois distinction between mental and manual labor.
Our task in the U.S. is to build a party like the Bolsheviks, with a heavily black and Latino leadership, that mobilizes all workers to fight black oppression. Communist leadership and interracial class struggle can break down racial and ethnic divisions within the working class. A revolutionary workers party, acting as a tribune of all the oppressed, can bring together the power of labor with the anger of the ghettos and barrios in order to smash this entire system of racist capitalist oppression and bring about workers rule. A socialist revolution will finish the unfinished tasks of the Civil War, achieving freedom and equality for black people in this country. It will take nothing less to realize such a basic demand as, “All children, without discrimination, will sit together”!

The Remnant Of The 1960s Folk Minute-With Scattered To The Wind Coffeehouses In Mind

The Remnant Of The 1960s Folk Minute-With Scattered To The Wind Coffeehouses In Mind




By Laura Perkins

Funny when I was a young girl, maybe in early high school in the very late 1960s, I gravitated to the then ebbing folk music minute of the earlier part of that decade. Previously I had been tied up with the Bobby Vee/Sandra Dee, as my companion Sam Lowell calls it, “bubblegum music” before the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who and the rest broke the spell and revived rock and roll as it should have been and was meant to be back in the classic mid-1950s when it was youth rebellion music. (That folk drift also broke the George Jones/Loretta Lynn country twaddle spell which my father had been addicted to and would only allow on the farm house radio. Later some of that country sound, the early country sound of groups like the Carters and individuals like Hank William would be reprieved.) The most amazing thing though was that while I had grown up on that farm not ten miles from the place, from Café Lena in Saratoga Springs, one of the totem pole places of the folk music movement, I had never heard of it (and would actually not go there until many years later after owner Lena Spenser had passed away). Didn’t know either about the whole Greenwich Village/Harvard Square/North Beach explosion which produced a crop of folk singers, some of who are still at it like Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, and Joan Baez and others like Eric Von Smidt, Geoff Muldaur and Jim Kweskin of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band who gave it up once they couldn’t stay with the pace (although the latter two have returned after a long hiatus), they developed other interests or there were dried up dough problems. How could I out in that isolated cold world of the farm and its eternal drudgery not aided by that tyrannical father.

Once I had heard Joni Mitchell on a friend’s radio (we were not allowed to have our own radios or record players since dear father did not want to hear the “noise” he called it) I think or maybe a young Rosalie Sorrels (who I found out later but then unknown to me had stayed at Lena’s for various periods of time as had her friend folksinger/songwriter/genial anarchist Utah Phillips) I was hooked and have paid attention to the ebbs and flows, mostly ebbs, since then. A lot of what kept me going on the folk jag once I shed my two ex-husbands who were both serious rockers of the Tom Petty (the late Tom Petty) type, I don’t know how many times I heard his Saving Grace around those respective marriage houses until I went crazy, was when I started hanging around with Sam Lowell who also writes here and who knows a million things, a million songs about folk music having a been a music critic here and at the Folk Almanac. (Sam in what under the previous regime was titled emeritus status when he retired but now just a vanilla occasional writer under the new regime which he had helped bring in. Every chance we got we would try to make folk performances in the area, especially of the aging artists who had names in the 1960s but who were starting to slip away into that good night, raging or otherwise. Checking out guys like Taj Majal, Dave Von Ronk, Tom Rush, and gals like that Rosalie Sorrels mentioned above, Anita Dolan, Etta James to see if they still had “it.” Some did, some didn’t.                

Over let’s say the past couple of decades though, almost as long as Sam and I have been companions, though except in old time coffeehouse hang-outs like Club Passim (the successor club to the legendary Club 47 over on Mount Auburn Street which I never got to hang out in), The Blue Note, and Café Algiers in Cambridge, a couple places like the Club Nana and Jimmy Swain’s in the Village, Hugo’s and the Be-bop Club in  North Beach the pickings have been pretty slim. You can travel through vast swaths of the country and be stymied in any effort to find such establishments. Although one time we found one in Joshua Tree in California run by a couple of not so ex-hippies who apparently didn’t get the news the folk minute was over but who were keeping the faith and who were able to draw second-tier acts like the late Jesse Winchester, Jesse Colin Young and Chris Smithers out to the palms and desert.

The real nut, the thing that still holds the “folk community” together if we can designate those still standing under that banner is a network of privately run labor of love coffeehouses like that Desert Bloom Coffeehouse out in Joshua Tree just mentioned. How much these places form a conscious network is up for debate since they are scattered around certain urban areas where the folkie remnant live, mainly on the Coasts or nearby. Attending one of these the other weekend Saturday got me thinking about a few things in my now long coffeehouse experiences and this little piece.

This piece brought to life after I convinced site manager Greg Green that this was not a nostalgia trip back to the 1960s but a look at a remnant of that movement that still exists, is still somewhat vibrant today. He rolled his eyes, looked at Sam who I made the mistake of taking with me since he is a hardened veteran, an actual participant in the early 1960s folk minute, which I thought might help my case. Not knowing that part of the change in regimes had been centered on breaking away from the 1960s nostalgia trips they were coming to define this space to the exclusion of the rest of the American left cultural and political historical experiences and hence the rolling eyes. That look at Sam as well as if to say he wanted no nonsense about who or what was in the firmament, folk, rock, hippies, beatniks, dope addicts, summers of love and that whole cartload of things he had come to detest about the 1960s before he took over fully from the previous regime. Only now coffeehouse stuff. Agreed. 

As Sam likes to say here is the hook. Here is the social reality too. Most of these private coffeehouses are housed in churches, church auditoria usually, and put on by church members and their friends. Sam calls the whole network ‘the U/U circuit” since a great number of them in New England at least are in Universalist-Unitarian churches, sometimes with both “Us,” sometimes singularly. Usually they are held once a month and have names like Second Street Coffeehouse, The Turks, Beautiful Day and so on. Everybody committed to these presentations, the volunteers, does “Jimmy Higgins” work turning on the lights, setting up tables and chairs, working the sound system where somehow there is always one technie grabbed from somewhere who rules the roost. Setting up a refreshment stand after all it is a coffeehouse and so you must provide coffee and…to the captive audience.

The question of performers at these events is a separate issue. Some of these are what are in what is called an “open mic” format simply meaning that anyone who wishes to sign up, after paying a nominal cover charge at the door to cover house expenses, can perform usually one or two songs and do so in some kind of order which varies with the venue. You would be surprised how many old folkies who I will discuss in a minute come out of the woodwork at the beck and call of an “open mic.” Some of the more venturesome venues like that Desert Bloom out in Joshua Tree try to lure whatever still standing professional folk singers can be corralled for cheap money (which also allows for higher cover charges-usually not too crazy like big ticket places). Iris Dement, Greg Brown, Tom Paxton, Tom Rush, Taj Mahal acts like that but that is the exception.

What usually takes place in these sites is what Sam and I saw that other week at the Second Coming Coffeehouse down in Carville about forty miles from Boston. The setting a U/U Church naturally. The set-up in the auditorium lights on, maybe fifteen tables four seats to each, sound system checked, coffee and… put out, a small table with CDs for sale, a standard set-up. This night there wa an “open mic” where one of our friends was performing, performing as the “feature” meaning that she got a half hour, maybe eight songs with an encore, for her set. She was sandwiched in between a few one song jacks and janies before her and a few afterward to make the evening complete.

What interests me every time I go to one of these things, and Sam and I have talked for hours about it afterward, is what road did these committed folkie performers take away from making a career out of doing folk venues and recordings. While there are a few duds overall the performance level is high amateur with many seemingly professionally trained voices, interesting lyrics by those who write and test out their own compositions and some virtuosity among the instrumentalist. We know some of the stories somebody like our feature friend Rosalita. We know Rosalita gave up the road after about ten years when her voice just gave out from overuse and so the “circuit” allows her to use it in more measured terms which she tends to her business as a graphic artist. Like every other musical genre, maybe more so as a sidebar genre folk music careers are a very tough dollar to make money at. No matter how good you are in a genre that is not mainstream enough to have more than a few making money at the venture.

Certainly a good number of performers are totally committed to their craft if not their profession. Sam and I during intermissions will ask that very question, asked their stories. The answers are as varied as the interviewees. Wanting to be stable which the road, especially the folk road in small clubs scattered all over forbids one to do, wanting a family, having been trained in another profession which allows for time and space to do this “volunteer” work, to flat out not motivated enough to go the distance. All good answers and true. True too I hope that this little slice of the American life gone a bit by the wayside now as the aficionados get greyer never grows extinct. That the U/U churches never close their doors to the music and the to aficionados.                        


Tuesday, February 11, 2020

Stand By Your Man-Marlene Dietrich And Tyrone Powers’ “Witness For The Prosecution” (1957) –A Film Review

Stand By Your Man-Marlene Dietrich And Tyrone Powers’ “Witness For The Prosecution” (1957) –A Film Review




DVD Review

By William Bradley   

Witness For The Prosecution, starring Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Powers, Charles Laughton, based on a story by murder mystery writer Agatha Christie, directed by Billy Wilder, 1957

If you have noticed over the past few months that many of the reviews, film reviews in particular, have material added to them which is not directly, and in many cases not indirectly, related to the film itself that is not happenstance but by design. Not the design of any individual reviewer but by the preferences of new site manager Greg Green and the Editorial Board that was created in the wake of the internal struggle with the old regime and its seemingly increasingly autocratic site manager. The new regime’s idea is two- fold, one, to be more transparently democratic in assignment selection and, two, to demonstrate to the reader the inner workings of a social media site and its day to day workings. Whether one or either of those reasons is satisfied in any particular review is up to the reader to decide.

In any case I have been asked, I won’t say ordered, by Greg Green acting under authority of the Editorial Board, to explain how I got this assignment. (I might add here as well that I came on board this site after the internal struggle had died down so I know only what I have heard as rumor around the “water cooler” about the disputes and the process that led to the new regime.) A couple of months ago I had to go to Washington, D.C. on another assignment for another social media site and was asked by Greg to stop by the National Gallery of Art to take a look at the Vermeer and friends (my term since I forget what the official title was but that will do) exhibition that was being held there. I did a review on it which can be found in the December 2007 archives although I know nothing, or knew nothing about 16th and 17th century art, Dutch and Flemish art in its golden age, which Bart Webber who does know about the subject took me to task on.

That trip also started the ball rolling on how I came to be a Marlene Dietrich “expert” even though I know nothing about the old-time black and white films which she starred in or the first thing about her career. This is where the example of how assignments are divvied up here comes into play. During that Washington trip I had also gone for my own purposes to the National Portrait Gallery to meet somebody and noticed walking through the halls that they had a Marlene Dietrich exhibit, mostly photographs, complete with a several page brochure about the life and times of the woman. When I passed in the Vermeer assignment in for editing I mentioned to Greg, my mistake granted, I mentioned in passing something about the Dietrich exhibit. A few days later I was saddled not with an assignment about the exhibit but a film that Greg was hot to have reviewed a thing called Stage Fright starring Ms. Dietrich among others.

Like I said on Vermeer and friends I knew nothing about Ms. Dietrich’s career, her private life, or her aura in films except the photos I had seen and the brochure. I gave Greg what I thought was a pedestrian review which he, after serious editing, posted. A few weeks later now that I was a Dietrich “expert” he cornered me to do the film under review, Witness for the Prosecution, directed by legendary director Billy Wilder. By rights this assignment should have gone to Sam Lowell who is something of a Billy Wilder expert. Mr. Wilder was last seen in this space in a review by Sam of his classic Sunset Boulevard where Sam tried to figure out how Joe Average Hollywood screenwriter wound up dead, very dead in has-been silent film star Norma Desmond’s swimming pool. Greg brushed that objection and suggestion off telling me that I needed to “broaden my horizons,” a favorite expression of his it seems. So here goes.       

Even I know that the minute you mention any storyline, film or book, involving Agatha Christie, that murder, murder most foul is in the air. Usually the murder of a high society or wealthy figure for money, dough ,moola for some off-hand expenses. That is the case here where Vole, the Tyrone Powers role, is picked up for the murder of a wealthy widow whom he had befriended for the prosecution’s contention that he did it for that big haul dough. Worse, worse for Vole anyway, was the hard fact that the old dame left him a bundle. The problem though is that if he doesn’t get out from under that murder rap he won’t get a chance to spent nickel one of the loot.  

Enter two figures to the rescue. First Vole grabs the best barrister in town (the guy in the English justice system who gets to try the cases, murder cases anyway), the sickly Sir Wilfrid Robarts, the Charles Laughton role, who having some doubts  about Vole’s innocence, really about whether he can get his man off and away from the big step-off gallows, nevertheless takes the case. Takes the case once Vole can give an airtight alibi-his wife. His German-born cool and demure wife Christine, the Dietrich role, whom he picked up in some German gin mill during his post-World War II British Occupation duty and brought back to London when he was discharged from the service. Christine would all assumed back up Vole’s story that he could not have been at the murder scene since he was home with his ever-loving wife, her, at the time.

An easy acquittal and all will be well. Whoa, hold on Christine as it turned out showed up at trial not to defend her husband but as a witness for the prosecution of the title. She contradicted Vole’s story to the dismay of the good barrister. Now there is a tradition in Anglo-American jurisprudence that says a wife cannot testify against her husband. Good idea except Christine was already married to a German national when she married Vole. Bigamy and no alibi and no exception so Vole’s goose is cooked although for what purposes who knows.      

Those Christine purposes are what drives the latter part of the film and as the announcer at the end of the film tells the audience, tells me, don’t let on about the ending. Don’t tell whether Christine did what she did for love or money. Don’t tell why Vole desperately needed that withdrawn alibi. All I will tell you is Christine is cool, calm and collected during this whole process. The look that she had groomed over many years and many performances. I will say this one has many twists that will keep you guessing right until the end.

“Turn My Nightmares Into Dreams”-The Rolling Stones’ “Sister Morphine”-For The ‘Nam Brother Slade Jackson With The “Burns-Novick “Vietnam War” Documentary In Mind

“Turn  My Nightmares Into Dreams”-The Rolling Stones’ “Sister Morphine”-For The ‘Nam Brother Slade Jackson With The “Burns-Novick “Vietnam War” Documentary In Mind   




By Bart Webber

(If you have tears now is the time to weep-RIP, Slade Jackson, RIP)

Slade Jackson always had a running nose these days, always sounded like a foghorn too. Yeah, you don’t even have to think another thought because you know without blinking an eye that the brother, the broken down from hard times in Vietnam brother, is up against a big fat jones and does not know how, does not care to know how to break the fucking habit. Funny in ‘Nam (only guys who have actually been there are entitled to use that shorthand for the hellhole as a few of his friends from the old days, from the old neighborhood, like Ben Bailey learned when they tried to emulate him on that sacred term and got nothing but icy stares for their efforts) Slade had been among the “alkies” and not the “dopers” in the division of the who did what to take away their pain, take away their constant fears, take away the dirt and grime too in the company out in the “boonies” of the Central Highlands of stinking ‘Nam.

Slade had almost naturally been revolted by the mostly black brothers and Hispanic hermanos when they lit up their damn blunts and he would get the second-hand smoke in his face when they wanted to taunt the alkies. Otherwise he got along with the brothers and hermanos, he had to almost every one of them were better soldiers than he was and a couple wound up saving his young white ass when the deal went down. Had naturally been back in the old neighborhood around 1965 when it became time for the young bucks to come of age in the drinking world attached to whiskey and beer. And deeply imbibed the alkie culture that went alone with the booze. But enough of that because this story is about dope, dope pure and simple. Yeah, Slade and his corner boys had laughed about the stupid beatniks and their dope who had better not come around their neighborhood, or else. (On that beatniks thing the inner suburbs were well behind the time since what they were objecting to were the early hippies on Boston Common with their long hair, beards, guys, weird clothing like granny dresses for women, their vacant dope-tinged stares and their free love, free sleep out on the Common, pan-handling ethos, and not the beats who were by then with their cold ass jazz, berets, black attire and indecipherable words passe, ancient history, gonzo.)                 

But that was then and this was now, the last four years now he had descended to the pits of hell (his term in his more lucid moments less frequent now), had run to sweet cousin cocaine, the good girl, and an occasional jolt of horse, the bad boy, when the money was fresh, or when he could cadge some credit from the “fix-it” man (also less frequent now). The trail down had started simply enough after coming home, coming back to the “real” world after the hellhole of Vietnam (also a term reserved for those who had been there although Slade would not give the icy stare when those who had not been there said the word), after the few months in the hospital at Da Nang recovering from that bastard Charlie’s stray spray of bullets that caught him, purple heart caught him, in the left thigh and had left him with a lifetime limp and some pain on wet or humid days. He had come back expecting no hero’s welcome after all his years were 1969 to 1972 long after almost everybody but the weird generals had given up the ghost of war and heroes, had received none but almost from day one back he was anxious to get away, anxious not see family and the old neighborhood boys. Had moved on in his head, moved on in his pain. Needed to seek kindred, needed to have some fucking peace in his head if anybody was asking  (when he went to the VA for some help he put the matter more elegantly although with results that made it clear it did not matter if he said “fucking” or “go fuck yourselves”).      

So Slade had drifted away from hometown Riverdale a score or so of miles outside of Boston, had had one job after another until he hit the West Coast, the place where he had landed after having come back to the real world and had thought about when decided he needed a fresh start. Trouble was he couldn’t find any work, couldn’t find any unskilled work for which he was fit having dropped out of school in the eleventh grades except maybe bracero work in the fields which was below his dignity (he told somebody that he had had his fill of “spics” in the Army anyway and hoped he never saw one again although as soldiers they were fine, better than him anyway), couldn’t hold the few day labor jobs that came his way. Started drinking heavily, mostly cheap day labor wines (“What’s the word, Thunderbird, what’s the price, forty twice”), and hanging around parks with guys, some fellow vets from ‘Nam but mostly older guys who had been around the block one too many times. A loser only made worse by his thigh pain acting up more and only made worse by his deeper alienation from the real, real world.

One day he was in San Luis Obispo having hopped a series of local freight trains working his way down from Salinas (where he had done stoop labor with the “braceros” after all so you know where his head and soul were at just then) when he stopped in the “jungle,” the hobo, tramp, bum hang-out along the railroad siding when he met John Arrowhead (an appropriate moniker for a man who was one hundred percent Native American, indigenous person, an Indian), who had served in ‘Nam with the 101st Airborne who told him he was heading down to Westminster south of L.A. to join what he called the “brothers under the bridge.” At first Slade did not understand what John was speaking of, though the cheap wine he was drinking and cheaper marijuana he was smoking had fogged up his head. Then John explained that there were maybe one hundred, one hundred and fifty guys, all ‘Nam guys who could not face the real world coming back and had joined together under a railroad bridge and created their own world, their own commune if you wanted to put the situation that way. (John did not, could not express his thoughts that way but that was how Slade explained it to Ralph Morse, an old high school corner boy and fellow veteran, one night when he had come back to Riverdale because he had no other place to go to “die” as he said to Ralph when asked about why he had come back to town). 

Slade decided that he would hobo his way down to Westminster with John to see what was up, to see if the brothers under the bridge could make him feel like a man, like a human being again. The night before Slade and John left John passed  Slade his cheapjack joint and while in the past Slade had passed a million times when a joint or pipe had been passed around that night he was feeling so blue about his prospects that he did his first weed. Nothing to it but he slept soundly, or as soundly as anybody sleeping on the ground in a hobo camp could, for the first time in a long time.

A few days later arriving in Westminster after having flagged down three freight trains to get there and warding off a bunch of punk kids in El Segundo who wanted to “hassle the bums” Slade could not believe that these brothers under the bridge had created their own world outside of town. Had created a tent city but more importantly for the first time in a long time he felt at home. So when somebody passed him a joint, a “welcoming joint” the guy had called it (a guy from the notorious 23th Division in ‘Nam) he took a handful of tokes without a second thought. That, when somebody had asked him later when he made his first of about ten tries at “detox,” was when he charted the beginning of his slippery slope ride down to the gates of hell. There had been so much dope at the tent city (brought in by guys who had connections in Mexico and old connections to the Golden Triangle opium trade in Vietnam) that it became impossible for him to resist if he had wanted to resist when the dope train started.              

Slade went along okay for a while, felt at home, felt he finally belonged somewhere, and fuck, finally found some relief for his physical pain that was acting up the longer he suffered under it. Got some relief for the pain in his head, something to put out the fire in his head (not his way of expressing the matter but Ralph’s shorthand way of putting it many years later when the subject of Slade Jackson came up among the surviving corner boys who had known Slade in sunnier days). He worked hard to help keep the place in shape, in as good shape as any band of brothers living out in the winds could do. Then one freaking night (Ralph’s expression, not Slade’s) the whole world collapsed, the cops from about seven different units local, county, state who knows maybe federal this before every law enforcement agency had the particular agency emblazoned on their slickers so it was hard to tell descended on the camp and ran everybody who could be run off the hell off, ripped down the tents and communal dining areas, everything. Arrested a few guys who had outstanding warrants against them and that was that. Gone.

A few days later Slade having lost contact with John Arrowhead found himself in El Cajon down south of San Diego in a rundown rooming house filled with stinking braceros and street winos who had enough dough for a flop for the night. He had been busted up some by a night stick-wielding cop with nothing but rage on his face so Slade was in some pain. He asked one guy, a dark Spanish-looking dude if he had any dope, weed, to clear his head. No weed. This was in the days when cocaine was just coming up the Mex pipeline in big bricks, kilos rather than ounces. That dude connected with somebody he knew and a few hours later he was back showing Slade how to cut the stuff, how to do blow by using a mirror and a razor blade to cut it up and taking a rolled dollar bill and snorting it up your nose. Slade’s first reaction was a jolt, a rapid beating of his heart like he was going to have an attack. That jolt did not last that long but after that first attack subsided he felt no pain in his thigh, felt no anger in his heart. He grabbed the razor blade and diced up another line. You know the story from there, or can guess it. Know the end too.                              

But no you don’t know. Don’t know how sweet cousin made his days go by faster, made the ‘Nam nightmares that had plagued him, had robbed him of his sleep, had made the night sweats go away for a while (even he admitted before he got to be a too far gone daddy in the days when he at least accepted the idea of “de-tox” that it was only for a while, only until the effect subsided). Then reality hit, the reality that to keep an even keel he needed more dope and more dope meant more money, and there was not enough money in the world to curb his hurts. He hustled first cons, then himself. Became a sneak thief and stole everything that was not nailed down. Finally winding up as usually happened with a guy with a big habit acting a stupid “mule” for Ronnie Romero, the big connection guy in El Cajon.           

One night he had been out at a park after bringing a load of goods over the border when a middle-aged guy, a be-bop kind of guy, what in the old days in places like New York City and Frisco town they called a hipster, hipster meaning cool back then sized him up and asked him if he wanted to “get well.” Get back on top. Slade, now so deep into the drug scene that he was game for anything said sure. That max daddy hipster put the first, although not the last needle in Slade’s arm. He had a rush ten times greater than any cocaine boost had ever given him. Somehow he knew for a while that he had better not go to the mat with horse, with boy. And for a couple of years he would do a hit on occasion while working for that hipster around town selling his wares. But in the end he forgot the first rule-the seller does not test the merchandise. And so there was a direct correlation between his increased horse use and the lessening of his cousin.          


No one knew Slade was dying when he came back to Riverdale after many years absence, after shedding a pants full of weight, after failing his last chance “de-tox” at Smiley VA Hospital in Frisco. But Slade knew before the end because he told Ralph one night that he had heard the “noise of wings,” a phrase he remembered from a childhood hymn, Angel Band, that had always impressed him because previously he had believed that those angel wings were silent. One night they found one Slade Jackson, purple heart Vietnam War veteran in a back alley humped up in a pile. The cause of death-heart failure. The real cause-Slade Jackson could never get enough dope in his system to turn his nightmares into dreams.       

Yeah, No Question War Is Hell-With Peter Weir’s “Gallipoli” (1981) In Mind

Yeah, No Question War Is Hell-With Peter Weir’s “Gallipoli” (1981) In Mind 




By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

As the readers of this site may know I recently have retired, maybe semi-retired is a better way to put it, from the day to day, week to week grind of reviewing film old and young as I just hit my sixty-fifth year. That stepping aside to let Sandy Salmon take his paces on a regular basis did not mean that I would be going completely silent as I intended to, and told the current site administrator Greg Green who I knew slightly from the film festival circuit, mainly Sundance and Augusta when he worked at American Film Gazette, as much, to do an occasional film review and general commentary. This is one of those general commentary times. What has me exercised is Sandy’s recent review of Australian director Peter Weir’s World War I classic Gallipoli starring Mark Lee and Mel Gibson. I take no issue with Sandy since he did a fine job. What caught my attention was Sandy’s comment about Archie’s, the role played by Mark Lee, fervent desire to join his fellow Aussies on Gallipoli peninsula as a patriotic duty and a manly adventure. When I did my own review of the film back in 1981 when the film first came out I make a number of comments about my own military experiences and those of some of the guys I hung around with in high school who had to make some decisions about what to do about the war of our generation, the Vietnam War of the decade of the 1960s.  

While the action of the Australian young men itching to get into the “action” of World War I (which by the way we have just finished commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that end it 2018) preceded us by fifty years a lot of the same ideas were hanging our old-time working- class neighborhood in Vietnam War times. More than a few guys like Jim Leary and Freddie Lewis were like Archie ready, willing and able to go fight the “red menace,” tip the dominoes our way, do their patriotic duty take your pick of reasons. Maybe in Freddie’s case to get out of the hostile household that he grew up in and maybe Jim like Archie a little for the adventure, to prove something about the questions he had about his manhood. I did not pick those two names out accidently for those names now are permanently etched on that hallowed black granite wall down in Washington that brings tears to my eyes old as I am every time I go there.       

Then there were guys like me and Jack Callahan, Pete Markin who didn’t want to go into the military, didn’t want to enlist like Jim and Freddie but who having no real reason not to go when our local draft boards sent “the letter” requesting our services did go and survived. The main reason that we did not want to go, at least at the time, not later when he got a serious idea of what war was about, was it kind of cramped our style, would put a crimp in our drinking, doping, and grabbing every girl who was not nailed down. Later Pete and I got religion, realized that the other options like draft refusal which might have meant jail or fleeing to Canada were probably better options. But we were like Archie and Frank in Gallipoli working class kids even though we had all been college students as well. When in our past was there even a notion of not going when the military called, of abandoning the old life in America for who knows what in Canada. We did what we did with what made sense to us at the time even if we were dead-ass wrong.         

And then of course there is a story like Frank Jackman’s who grew up in a neighborhood even down lower on the social scale than ours, grew up in “the projects,” the notorious projects which our parents would threaten us with if we didn’t stop being a serious drain on the family’s resources. Frank somehow was a college guy too and like us “accepted” induction although he had more qualms about what the heck was going on in Vietnam and about being a soldier. But like us he also accepted induction because he could see no other road out. This is where the story changes up though. Frank almost immediately upon getting to basic training knew that he had made a mistake-had no business in a uniform. And by hook or by crook he did something about it, especially once he got orders for Vietnam. The “hook” part was that through a serious of actions which I don’t need to detail here he wound up doing a little over a year in an Army stockade for refusing to go to Vietnam. Brave man.  The “crook” part was also through a series of actions which need not detain us now, mostly through the civilian courts, he was discharged, discharged from the stockade, honorably discharged as a conscientious objector.           

Archie, Frank and their Aussie comrades only started to get an idea, a real idea about the horrors of war when they were in the trenches in front of the Turks also entrenched on Gallipoli peninsula and being mowed down like so many blades of grass. Archie and most of the crew that joined up with him were among those blades of grass. It was at the point where Archie was steeling himself to go over the top of the trenches after two previous waved had been mowed down and then himself  being cut down by the Turkish machine-gun firing that I realized how brave Frank Jackman’s actions were in retrospect.

Poet's Corner- Langston Hughes- Black Liberation Fighter, "Pre-Mature Anti-Fascist" and Poet


Poet's Corner- Langston Hughes- Black Liberation Fighter, "Pre-Mature Anti-Fascist" and Poet

Commentary

February Is Black History Month


The name Langston Hughes is forever linked to the poetic form of the blues, the Harlem Renaissance and the struggle for black liberation. Less well know is his role an "pre-mature anti-fascist" volunteer with the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15th International Brigade in Spain, organized by the Communist International to defend republican Spain. That is why he is honored in this space today. That he later distanced himself from his earlier attachment to communism, as he saw it, does not negate that when it counted he was counted in. Hughes was hardly the first, nor would he be the last, to break from his radical past. We honor that past and fight against the politics of his later turn.

This article by Langston Hughes is from the newspaper of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion in Spain

"Negroes in Spain," from The Volunteer for Liberty (1937)

In July, on the boat with me coming from New York, there was a Negro from the far West on his way to Spain as a member of the 9th Ambulance Corps of the American Medical Bureau. He was one of a dozen in his unit of American doctors, nurses, and ambulance drivers offering their services to Spanish Democracy.

When I reached Barcelona a few weeks later, in time for my first air-raid and the sound of bombs falling on a big city, on of the first people I met was a young Porto Rican of color acting as interpreter for the Loyalist troops.
A few days later in Valencia, I came across two intelligent, young colored men from the West Indies, aviators, who had come to give their services to the fight against Fascism.

ALL FIGHT FASCISM

And now, in Madrid, Spain's besieged capital, I've met wide-awake Negroes from various parts of the world -- New York, our Middle West, the French West Indies, Cuba, Africa -- some stationed here, others on leave from their battalions -- all of them here because they know that if Fascism creeps across Spain, across Europe, and then across the world, there will be no more place for intelligent young Negroes at all. In fact, no decent place for any Negroes -- because Fascism preaches the creed of Nordic supremacy and a world for whites alone.

In Spain, there is no color prejudice. Here in Madrid, heroic and bravest of cities, Madrid where the shells of Franco plow through the roof-tops at night, Madrid where you can take a street car to the trenches, this Madrid whose defense lovers of freedom and democracy all over the world have sent food and money and men -- here to this Madrid have come Negroes from all the world to offer their help.

"DELUDED MOORS"

On the opposite side of the trenches with Franco, in the company of the professional soldiers of Germany, and the illiterate troops of Italy, are the deluded and drive Moors of North Africa. An oppressed colonial people of color being used by Fascism to make a colony of Spain. And they are being used ruthlessly, without pity. Young boys, mean from the desert, old men, and even women, compose the Moorish hordes brought by the reactionaries from Africa to Europe in their attempt to crush the Spanish people.

I did not know about the Moorish women until, a few days ago I went to visit a prison hospital here in Madrid filled with wounded prisoners. There were German aviators that bombarded the peaceful village of Colmenar Viejo and machine-gunned helpless women as they fled along the road. One of these aviators spoke English. I asked him why he fired on women and children. He said he was a professional soldier who did what he was told. In another ward, there were Italians who joined the invasion of Spain because they had no jobs at home.

WHAT THEY SAID

But of all the prisoners, I was most interested in the Moors, who are my own color. Some of them, convalescent, in their white wrappings and their bandages, moved silently like dark shadows down the hall. Other lay quietly suffering in their beds. It was difficult to carry on any sort of conversation with them because they spoke little or no Spanish. But finally, we came across a small boy who had been wounded at the battle of Brunete -- he looked to be a child of ten or eleven, a bright smiling child who spoke some Spanish.

"Where did you come from?", I said.

He named a town I could not understand in Morocco.

"And how old are you?"

"Thirteen," he said.

"And how did you happen to be fighting in Spain?"

BRING MOORISH WOMEN

Then I learned from this child that Franco had brought Moorish women into Spain as well as men -- women to wash and cook for the troops.

"What happened to your mother", I said.

The child closed his eyes. "She was killed at Brunete," he answered slowly.
Thus the Moors die in Spain, men, women, and children, victims of Fascism, fighting not for freedom -- but against freedom -- under a banner that holds only terror and segregation for all the darker peoples of the earth.

A great many Negroes know better. Someday the Moors will know better, too. All the Franco's in the world cannot blow out the light of human freedom.



The Weary Blues

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway ....
He did a lazy sway ....
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man's soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan--
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more--
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied--
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.


Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Langston Hughes

Freedom Road

written by: Langston Hughes, sung by:Josh White


Hand me my gun, let the bugle blow loud
I’m on my way with my head up proud
One objective I’ve got in view
Is to keep ahold of freedom for me and you

That’s why I’m marching, yes, I’m marching
Marching down Freedom’s Road
Ain’t nobody gonna stop me, nobody gonna keep me
From marching down Freedom’s Road

It ought to be plain as the nose on your face
There’s room in this land for every race
Some folks think that freedom just ain’t right
Those are the very people I want to fight . . .

United we stand, divided we fall
Let’s make this land safe for one and all
I’ve got a message and you know it’s right
Black and white together, unite and fight!

Once More Around The Good Book Social Doctrine- With Dorothy Day And Peter Marras’ Catholic Worker Movement In Mind

Once More Around The Good Book Social Doctrine- With Dorothy Day And Peter Marras’ Catholic Worker Movement In Mind   



By Si Lannon

The late Peter Paul Markin was a piece of work. So said Frankie Riley, a guy who should know since he was the acknowledged leader of the North Adamsville corner boy of whom Markin was something like the leading intellectual light in the early 1960s but more on that in a minute. So said Frankie one night when a bunch of the old gang still standing (not all are some have laid down their heads of late, a couple forever etched on that black granite wall down in Washington, and some too physically feeble to make the journey, and of course Markin) were at the Black Swan in downtown Adamsville talking over old times, something like a periodic reunion. Frankie, a successful lawyer now winding down his practice and passing the day to day operations to the younger partners while he becomes an odd-ball term “of counsel,” in such gatherings would usually be the one to start on about Markin.

Stop.

In order to avoid confusion let’s use Markin’s old time neighborhood moniker “ Scribe” which Frankie had anointed him with way back in junior high school when he was forever writing something or about to write something in the little notebook complete with pencil that he always carried with him in his off-the-wall out of fashion shirts that his mother, frugal mother from dirt poor land, would select for him (shirts as part of the twice yearly-start of school and Easter time-shopping spree at the Bargain Center for new cheap out of fashion clothing). So Scribe it is.          

At this gathering at the local watering hole, the first such outing since the summer of 2017 when they gathered to put a small memoir book together in honor of Scribe, Frankie mentioned that he had forgotten to say something about Scribe that was important to help understand what he was all about. And why after all these years since the mid-1970s when Scribe was murdered down in Sonora, Mexico after what appeared to be a busted drug, cocaine, deal and he wound up in a dusty dirt back alley with two slugs in his head the old gang still mourned him and were still trying to figure out what the hell made the guy tick.

That summer of 2017 gathering had been prompted by Scribe childhood closest friend Alex James’ return from a business trip out to San Francisco where quite by accident he found out about the 50th anniversary commemoration of the Summer of Love which was centered in that town and had gone to a stone crazy exhibition at the de Young Museum in old hang out Golden Gate Park where he freaked out over the music, photographs, clothing and incredible poster art (which was then just advertisement material for concerts and other events but really outstanding works of art in their own right)            

As a result of being immersed in the old days when Alex got back to Boston he corralled the guys with the idea of doing a small presentation book in honor of their fallen comrade. They all, all at the Black Swan anyway, had been out to Frisco in 1967. Guess who had been the motivating force for that see-saw trip been out to see what was happening in the “newer world” he had been talking about since the early 1960. Once they agreed, and agreed to write short sketches, Alex had his youngest brother, Zack who writes here on occasion and was a leader of the revolt of the “Young Turks” which purged the previous site manager, edit and have the book published. It is from an afterthought once the book had been put to bed that Frankie remembered a very important component of Scribe’s persona.        

Frankie, after checking to see if the statute of limitations had run on the various crimes the corner boys had committed in the old neighborhood to grab dough for, what else, girls, cars, dates,   walking around money that Scribe was the mastermind behind. (Frankie said that checking business was a joke but the guys knowing Frankie just rolled their eyes.) He had related how he had been the leader and the operations guy for the various car-jackings, burglaries, con jobs, heists, “clips” but evil genius Scribe was the planner. To this day Frankie can get smiles out of the guys when he mentions one caper that almost got them caught while in a big house up in Adamsville Center. Guess who had been the leader of the almost fateful attack. Ever after by unanimous agreement Frankie was in charge once they project went out the door.  

That was the larcenous side of Scribe, and the rest of them too, the world owned them a living for having grown up dirt-poor in the working poor Acre neighborhood and so they struck out to do a little self-interested redistribution of those worldly goods. So you see there was the fore-seeing new day coming let’s get on board side to Scribe and the larcenous too which Frankie covered in his memoir piece some detail remembering or exposing stuff they had all forgotten. (Frankie not a lawyer for nothing with that skill set). But Scribe was noble man too, a social justice partisan all mixed in except toward the end when according to Josh Breslin who was the last to see Scribe alive north of the border he let his serious cocaine habit get the best of him, Let the dope make him feel better about his Vietnam horror military service, his busted marriages and his deep depression as it became apparent that the “newer world” he sought was slipping away, was getting eaten alive but the night-takers he called them. 

What tipped Frankie to his memory lapse had been triggered by seeing a copy of something called the Catholic Radical when he had gone out to Worchester on some church legal business and subsequently a conference where that copy had been on the table. (It should be mentioned Frankie had been a lapsed Catholic for many years until one day a few years ago he had been a guest at a wedding in a Catholic church and that stirred long ago memories and fears for his “soul.) That paper reminded him about Grandma O’Brian, Scribe’s maternal grandmother who was a serious Catholic Worker devotee going back to the Great Depression when she had actually met Dorothy Day in New York. The Scribe would always be speaking of some social issue from the paper, Catholic Worker, he found lying around Grandma’s house. Grandma O’Brian by all accounts was a “saint” loved by all who knew her and knew too how brave she had been to put up with a lot of crap married to tyrant Daniel O’Brian a real villain whom all the young neighborhood kids would stay away from in order to avoid one of his tirades.

To give an idea of how bad Scribe’s own family household life was like he could be found many days at Grandma’s house seeking shelter from that whirlwind storm. He would read books, take notes in that little squirrely notebook, and discuss issues with Grandma. Like a lot of people, good godly people Grandma had a few blinds spots like her negative attitude toward black people who were getting “uppity” down south in Scribe’s youth (it would take several years before he got straight on his own racial attitudes) but overall she had been on the right side of the angels. Talked about abolishing the death penalty (Grandma had never gotten over the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti by the Commonwealth in 1927 even though they were Italian), war, and nuclear disarmament.

In a lot of ways you can see all of Scribe’s contradictions through that Catholic Worker background. While Frankie was remembering the good parts of Scribe he flashed back to one episode, really two come to think of it, which summed up Scribe’s whole life struggle. Scribe must have been about fourteen, maybe fifteen, in 1960 when he had read in the Catholic Worker  that there would be a demonstration, something like that for nuclear disarmament to be held at the Park Street entrance to the subway, a historic protest site on the Boston Common. This rally was being called by Doctor Spock’s SANE, some Quakers and other peace-type groups and individuals. And Catholic Worker. Scribe was all hopped up to go even though Frankie had tried to talk him out of it, told him that the “Communists,” Stalin’s heirs’ dreaded supporters, told him he might get beaten up by guys hanging around the Common who didn’t like the stinking “commie, red, “peace” word, He couldn’t be deterred. So what did they do? They made as always when the opportunity presented itself a bet, a five dollar bet, big money for poor kids, Scribe wouldn’t go into Boston for the event scheduled on an October afternoon. Scribe won and to this day Frankie can’t get over the fact that he lost, lost to a holy goof like Scribe.                 

Here’s the Scribe contradiction part. All during the lead-up to the demonstration Scribe had been working on a caper, had been casing a house where the owners had been away for a while. The weekend after that demo they “hit” the house and got a big haul. Big enough for dates, gas money, booze, and walking around money for months. Yeah, Frankie was sure he had it right Scribe was a piece of work.