***The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through The Great Depression And World War II- Sultry and Sleek Lena Horne’s Stormy Weather…

… it wasn’t always about the fight to beat the rent-collector for another week to keep a roof over your head, it wasn’t always about the indignity of standing in soup-lines when one was willing and able to work, it wasn’t always about some big world historic struggle to gain dignity, and it wasn’t always about a guy’s number coming up, a girl seeing him off at the station before he was gathered up in some god forsaken troop transport to face, to face whatever was coming, and the waiting. Sure a lot of it was, most of it, but the multifarious varieties of human experience, human experience close to the nub, did not take a holiday just because the economy tanked or the world was facing the night of the long knives. What did she know of class struggles and long knives all she knew was her man was gone, gone away and she was blue, blue as a woman could be and still stand. What did she know of too much production and not enough demand when all she knew was that her man, her only man, had gone, gone and left her with no dough, and no way to get dough. What did she know of world historic monsters afoot when her man has beat it, left her flat, maybe gone back to his other woman, or maybe some new young thing. Yeah, what did she know except the damn man-wanting blues, the baddest blues around. Yeah, what did she know…     

 

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Peter Paul Markin comment on this series:

Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew what it meant to our parents or not, or frankly, during that hellish growing up absurd teenager time in the 1950s trying to figure out our places, if any, in the cold war red scare world, if there was to be a world, and that was a close thing at times,  or whether we cared, music was as dear a thing to them as to us, their sons and daughters, who were in the throes of finding our own very different musical identities. As well, whether we knew it or not, knew what sacred place the music of the late 1930s and 1940s, swing, be-bop swing, be-bop flat-out, show tunes, you know jitter-bug stuff, and the like held in their youthful hearts that was the music, their getting through the tough times music, that went wafting through the house on the radio, on record player, or for some the television, of many of those of us who constitute the now graying fading generation of ‘68. And some of us will pass to the beyond clueless as to what our forebears were attuned to when they came of age in a world, a very darkly-etched world, which they too had not created, and had no say in creating.

Yes they were crazy for the swing and sway of bespectacled Benny Goodman blowing that clarinet like some angel- herald letting the world know,  if it did know already, that it did not mean a thing, could not possibly matter in the universe, if you did not swing, with and without Miss (Ms.) Peggy Lee, better with, better with, swaying slightly lips moistened, swirling every guy in the place on Why Don’t You Do Right vowing he would do just that for a smile and a chance at those slightly swaying hips. Mr. Harry James with or without the orchestra , better with, blowing Gabriel’s horn, knocking down walls, maybe Jericho, maybe just some Starlight Ballroom in Kansas City blasting the joint with his You Made Me Love You to the top of the charts. Elegant Duke Ellington with or without Mr. Johnny Hodges blowing that sexy sax out into the ocean air night in some Frisco club, blowing out to the Japan seas, on Taking The ‘A’ Train. Tommy Dorsey all banded up if there is such a word making eyes misty with I’ll Never Smile Again.  Jimmy Dorsey too with his own aggregation wailing Tangerine that had every high school girl throwing dreamy nickels and dimes into the jukebox, with or without fanfare, Glenn Miller, with or without those damn glasses, taking that Sentimental Journey before his too soon last journey. Miss (Ms.) Billie Holiday, Lady Day, with or without the blues, personal blues, strung out blues too, singing everybody else’s blues away with that throaty thing she had, that meaningful pause, yeah, Lady Sings The Blues. Miss Lena Horne with or without stormy weather making grown men cry (women too) when she reached that high note fretting about her long gone man, Jesus.  Miss (Ms.) Margaret Whiting going for that Old Black Magic. Mr. Vaughn Monroe with or without goalposts. Mr. Billy Eckstine, too. Mr. Frank Sinatra doing a million songs fronting for the Dorseys and anybody who wanted to rise in that swinging world, with or without a horde of bobbysoxers breaking down his doors, putting everybody else to shame (and later too). The Inkspots, always with that spoken refrain catch that nobody seemed to tire of, doing teary I’ll Get By or If I Didn’tCare. The Mills Brothers with or without those paper dolls. The Andrews Sisters with or without rum in their Coca-Cola, The Dewdrops with or without whatever they were doing with or without. Mr. Cole Porter, with or without the boys, writing the bejesus out of  Tin Pan Alley and Broadway tunes. Mr. Irving Berlin with or without the flag, ditto Mr. Porter. And Mr. George Gershwin with or without his brother, creating Summertime and a thousand other catchy tunes. Yeah, their survival music.  

We the generation of ’68, baby-boomers, decidedly not what Tom Brokaw dubbed rightly or wrongly “ the greatest generation,”  decidedly not your parents’  or grandparents’ (please, please do not say great-grandparents’ even if it is true) generation could not bear to hear that music, could not bear to think anybody in the whole universe would think that stuff was cool. Those of us who came of age, biological, political and social age kicking, screaming and full of the post-war new age teenage angst and alienation in the time of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot were ready for a jail-break, a jail-break on all fronts and that included from “their song” stuff. Their staid Eisenhower red scare cold war stuff (he their organizer of victory, their gentile father Ike), hell, we knew that the world was scary, knew it every time we were forced to go down into some dank school basement and squat down, heads down too, hoping to high heaven that the Russkies had not decided to go crazy and set off “the bomb,” many bombs. And every righteous teenager had a nightmare that they were trapped in some fashionable family bunker and those loving parents had thoughtfully brought their records down into the abyss to soothe their savage beasts for the duration. Please, please, please if we must die then at least let’s go out to Jerry Lee’s High School Confidential.  

We were moreover, some of us any way and I like to think the best of us, driven by some makeshift dream, ready to cross our own swords with the night-takers of our time, and who, in the words of Camelot brother Bobby, sweet ruthless Bobby of more than one shed tear, quoting from Alfred Lord Tennyson, were “seeking a new world.” Those who took up the call to action heralded by the new dispensation and slogged through that decade whether it was in the civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture swirl before the hammer came down were kindred. To the disapproval, anger, and fury of more than one parent who had gladly slept through the Eisenhower times. And that hammer came down quickly as the decade ended and the high white note that we searched for, desperately searched for, drifted out into the ebbing tide. Gone. But enough about us this series is about our immediate forbears (but please, please not great grandparents) their uphill struggles to make their vision of the their newer world, their struggles to  satisfy their hunger a little, to stop that gnawing want, and the music that in their youth  they dreamed by on cold winter nights and hot summer days.

This is emphatically the music, the get by the tough times in the cities, on the farms, out in the wide spaces, of the hard born generation that survived the dust bowl all farms blown away when the winds gathered like some ancient locust curse to cleanse the earth and leave, leave nothing except silt and coughs. All land worthless no crops could stand the beating, the bankers fearful that the croppers would just leave taking whatever was left and the dusted crowd heading west with whatever was movable. They drifted west, west as far as California if the old buggy held up and they had enough gas in the tank, not knowing what some old time professor, from Harvard I think, knew about the frontier that it had been swallowed up, been staked out long ago and too bad. Not knowing as well what some old time Okie balladeer knew that if you did not have the dough California was just another Okie/Arkie bust.

Survived empty bowls, empty plates, wondering where the next meal would come from, many times, too many times from some Sally soup-line, some praise the lord before thy shall eat soup-line. Survived that serious hunger want that deprives a man, a woman, of dignity scratching for roots like some porcine beast in some back alley lot, too weak to go on but too weak to stop as well. Survived, if not west, then no sugar bowl city street urchin corner boy hard times of the 1930s Great Depression, always with that vagrant foot up against some brick-laid wall, killing time, killing some dreams,  sleeping under soot-lined railroad trestles, on splintered park benches newspapers for a pillow’s rest (one eye open for swarming festering jack-rollers and club-wielding sadistic cops), and hard bench bus stations (ditto jack-rollers and cops).  Survive the time of the madness just then beating the tom-toms of war and degradation coming from a hungry want-infested Europe filled with venom, those drums heralding the time of the night-takers casting a shadow over the darkened world, portending the plainsong of the time of the long knives, outlawing dreams for the duration.

Building up a pretty list of those wants on cold nights , name them, food, shelter, sex, two- bits in the pocket, name those hungers, success, dignity, not having to struggle against the want night. Building that phantom list while among tree-lined Hudson River “hobo jungle” riverside fires stoked by fugitives, brethren, the fellahin of the world, upstream from the clogged city, upstream from clogged city prying eyes and prickly cops, cities clogged with broken dreams, or worse of late no dreams, and not enough food to go around, not enough work either and that ate at him, her more that the food hungers. Down in dusty arroyos, parched, no water, no agua aqui senor, lo siento, as they, the bracero brethren, passed the water jug between them and pointed him west, west you cannot stay here gringo, no way. Under forsaken silver-plated bridges, steel beams to rest a weary head, rolled blanket for his pillow, trying to keep the winds at bay.  Survived god knows how by taking the nearest freight west, some smoke and dreams freight, sleeping on some straw-scratched floor, plugging ears with napkins to drown out the rattling rails and deep sleep snores. Taking Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, B&O, Illinois Central, Penn Central, Empire State, Boston and Maine, or one of a million trunk lines to go out, and young as he was, desperate as he was, penniless as he was, search for, well, search for…

Searching for something that was not triple- decker bodies, three to a room sharing some scraggly blanket, an old worn out pillow for rest, the faint smell of oatmeal, twenty days in a row oatmeal, oatmeal with.., being cooked in the next room meaning no Pa work, meaning one jump, maybe not even that, ahead of the sullen dreaded bastard rent- collector (the landlords do not dare come in person so they hire the task out), meaning the sheriff, his damn auction, and the streets are closing in. (What did the Sheriff care that all meager life-times possessions were street-ward bound he was paid by the item tossed.) Bodies, brothers and sisters, enough to lose count, piled high, cold-water flat high, that damn cold water splash signifying how low things have gotten, not even hot water for the weekly bath, with a common commode for the whole floor and brown-stained sink.

Later moving down the scale, down to the lower depths as some Russian writer called them in a book of that name, a rooming house room for the same number of bodies, smudged prison-paned window looking out onto the air- shaft, dark, dark with despair, no air but some fetid foul breeze from the basement furnace, the very, very faint odor of oatmeal, thinned out even further, who knows how many days in a row, from Ma’s make-shift hot plate on its last legs.  Hell, call it what it was a flop house stinking of perspiration and low-shelf whiskeys and wines. Stinking of winos and riffraff in the hallways howling at the moon all night and jack-rollers preying on whoever was witless enough to walk into his lair. All around shadows, moonlight shadows, moonless night shadows the times when the midnight sifters plied their trade and snuck in, snuck in these damn one room hells looking for anything, anything to pawn, anything to feed that junk habit that had them in its grip. Ma, yelling at the kids, jesus, at the kids, milling around the room, that why didn’t they, the jack-rollers, the midnight sifters, the junkies, and the twisted sister street tricks (whores she called them when the kids got older and knew what that word meant) go uptown and bother the Mayfair swells who had dough and leave respectable people alone.        

Others had it worse, tumbled down shack, window pane-less some wax paper taped to hold off the winds and rains coming from the north, tarpaper siding leaving exposed wood to rot and provide homes for fugitive termites and vermin, roof tiles falling leaving poorly patched spots where the spring rains would wash through, wash through to the six buckets which were placed beneath the patches to hold off collapse, a lean-to ready to fall to the first wind, the first red wind, an ill wind, a land wind the old sailors, old tars called it and maybe they were right, coming out of the mountains and swooping down the hills and hollows, ready to fall to the first downpour rain, washed away. Cold water flat, flop house room, tumbled-down shack, leave them behind, get out on the open road, blow the stinks off, get that bindle stick together, a cup, a plate, spoon, a comb just in case you are in a town, some matches, keep dry matches, a pouch of Bull Durham and papers, maybe some change all wrapped in a handkerchief, the worldly possessions of the fellahin, the fugitive, the hobo, the tramp and the bum, grab that slow moving freight before she picks up steam, watch out for the “bulls” and search for the great promised American night that had been tattered by world events, and greed.

Survived the Hoovervilles, the world come down to the great cardboard siding, tin can cartons, discarded boxes, found in some orphan street, dilapidated, to serve as buffer against the hard winter winds, the spring rains and that damn relentless summer heat. Tin can roof thundering sounds at every light rain, slap-dash jerry-built camp explosions along rivers. Mighty rivers like the Missouri and Mississippi and no account ones, trickle down ones, like the Elko and the Dearborn that no longer gushed ramparts. Survived down in hard rock- infested ravines filled with brambles, snakes, gnarly insects ready to do battle once some fugitive arm or leg was exposed. Survived under railroad trestles, the clanking freight trains above, what did Shakespeare call it, yes, murdering sleep, and murdering dreams too. No wonder some guy, some hobo philosopher-king, and don’t laugh there were such fellows, along with broken-down stockbrokers, wreaked high financiers, ex-movie moguls, unemployed cabbies, unemployable union organizers, out-of-work workers of all types, families attached, and habitual malingerers trying to weather another day without working, said that life, his life anyway, and maybe their lives, were nothing but train smoke and wishful thinking. Hell, he didn’t know the half of it, didn’t know that life could get much coarser out on the great Wilderness Road. 

Tossed, hither and yon, cold- water flats, flop-houses, tarpaper shacks, then the great outdoors, what did that guy call it, that writer guy, I forget his name, called it probably from his cozy fireplaced study, fully nourished from the look of his pipe-smoking face on the back jacket of his latest pot-boiler, oh yeah, the romance of the road. Tossed around about six million different ways, name each one instead of counting sheep at night, murdered sleep. But it all came down to this, to the rivers, ravines, trestled-bridges, when the banks, yeah, the banks, the usual suspects, and rightly so from all the evidence, robbed people of their shacks, their cottages, their farm houses, their smokeless back forty dreams, and left them with nothing but the romance of the road. Even that smug pipe-filled writer, Jesus, what was his name, should pause to wonder. Yah, those bastards robbed them, picked them clean, as an old-time balladeer, a free-wheeling, song-writing red, a commie, hell, nothing but a Russkie-loving home-grown Bolshevik in the days when in some quarters, say, Frisco town, Akron, Minneapolis, blessed shut-down Flint, lion Detroit, hog-butcher to the world Chi town, smelter to the world Pittsburgh, sailing under that banner was a badge of honor, or just another fist in the struggle, welcome brother, welcome sister, we need all the hands, no, all the clenched fists we can get, said at the time not with a gun but with a fountain pen, but still robbed them. Cleaned them out, to get lost on that Wilderness Road, that trail of one thousand tears leading west.

Survived the soup kitchens hungers, the gnawing can’t wait in the endless waiting line for scraps, dreaming of some by-gone steak or dish of ice cream, and always that hunger, not the stomach hunger although that was ever present, but the hunger that hurts a man, hurts his pride, hurts a woman’s too, hurts when he, they have to stick their hands out, stick them out and not know why. Not know why a year before the sun was shining, they had dreams of living in that little house, a cottage really, ending their patterned days there, and now had shutter dreams of living in that cold-water flat, the flop-house room, the tar-paper shack forever turning their mouths to ashes. Not knowing why Bill up the street, Jack down the road, Leroy across the way was working, worrying but working, while his two hands were idle, and a million human things still needed to be fixed, to be built, to be created. And she cried a tear on those hands to see how his ignorance of what made the world go round ate at him, ate at his beautiful heart.  

Planning the fruitless day, fruitless since he was born to work, took pride in work, had worked since twelve to help a struggling family even in good times,  planning around dark hour Sally breakfasts don’t be late, six to nine, but with sermon and song attached, mission stuff in heat-soaked rooms, men smelling of unwashed men, and drink (quick drink, an eye-opener they called it in the shelter,    before entry and hence a strong smell of cheap rotgut). Planning around city hall hand-out lunches eaten on park benches or lawns, peanut butter sandwiches, slapped slap-dash together with a pint box of milk and an apple, maybe. Worse, worse by far the nightly Saint Vincent DePaul suppers, soup, bread, some canned vegetable, something they called meat but was in dispute, lukewarm coffee. Such a feast had only, only if you could prove you were truly destitute with a letter from some churchman, a Catholic churchman, like Protestants, Jews, Seventh-Day Adventist, Quakers, Shakers, Devil-worshippers, Jainists, Buddhists, Moslems, and every other kind of fellahin religionists were not hungry just then, and, in addition to the religious test, under some terrible penalty, you had to say that you had searched for work that day. A hard dollar, hard dollar indeed.

Jesus, out of work for another day, another in a long line of days, long line of Sally, City Hall, Saint Vincent DePaul hand-out days,   with three hungry growing kids to feed, boys, wouldn’t you know it,   kids, boys, who, what did they call what kids did then, oh yeah, eat them out of house and home. A wife, a precious wife, sickly, sickly from boys too close together, sickly from her own delicate frame,  sick unto death of the not having, not having for the boys, their boys, he thought. Making, she making, sick or not, their meager savings, their dole hand -out, their occasional relative money gift, stretch beyond endurance with the weekly bill envelopes always shorting some irate collector. Damn, little work waiting for anybody that day, that day when all hell broke loose and the economy tanked again, stocks tumbled, again, and guys were jumping out high buildings left and right, guys were trying to scrape every dime they could gather in order to not go under and face the high building windows, guys were getting tossed out of work, other guys who were thinking about buying guns and taking what they could take, and take it fast at least that is what it said in the Boston Globe he found on the ground and read while he waited once again in the damn soup line (ditto the reportage in  The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Examiner if anybody was asking). They, the newspapers, said that there was too much around, too many cars, houses, too much wheat, cotton, oil, too many record-players, whatever, Jesus, too much, too many, and he with nothing for those kids, those eat them out of house and home boys, nothing and he was too proud just then to ask for some damn letter to give to those Vincent DePaul hard-hearts. 

And that day not him, not him yet, not him with a sickly wife worrying unto death over bill envelopes, not him with three hungry boys conceived too closely together, not him who was without steady work and glad get what he got when he got it and could shake off the damn charity soup-lines for a time, could thumb his nose at those Vincent DePaul hard-hearts, but others. Others who read more that the Boston Globe (and the dittos)  and who were dreaming of that full head of steam day to come, the day to even things up a little for a mess that they had not made, in places like big auto Flint eyeing those lines and thinking how to shut them down from the inside, out in waterfront Frisco town thinking that in order to make the water bosses cry that they might have to shut the whole place down, out in rubber Akron thinking of maybe even bringing the unemployed, guys like him to stop the scabbing, guys, steel-sweated guys out in hog butcher to the world prairie Chicago thinking of onebig union, hell, even in boondock small trucker Minneapolis thinking of bringing in the wives, sisters, and sweethearts, the whole sweated, misbegotten fellahin world for one big push,

Yeah, they dreamed a lot, in places like bayside Frisco town,  mid-America Akron, trucker Minneapolis, Chi town name your industry, clanky Flint and motor city Detroit, places like Harlan, Birmingham, Los Angeles too, seemed like half the whole fellahin  was dreaming then, and some guys and gals, some stand-up guys and gals were scheming too, talking it up, were not going quietly into the rubbish can of history, dreaming of that day when the score would get evened, evened a little, and a man (and where I say man I say woman too, women who like they used to say in China hold up half the sky), could hold his head up a little, could at least bring bread, maybe some fruits and vegetables, to those three hungry growing kids, those boys who were eating him out of house and home, who didn’t understand the finer point of world economics, just hunger. Stomach hunger not that hunger that gnawed at him, there would be time enough for that for them. Until then, until he decides to not go quietly into the rubbish can of history though, he is left shifting the scroungings of the trash piles of the urban glut, the discard of the haves, the have- nots throw nothing away. On other horizons, Omaha, Grand Junction, Topeka, Davenport, Neola, Muskogee,  places where the corn and wheat grow tall, taller than a man, the brethren curse the rural fallow fields, curse the jack-robber banks, and curse the weather, but curse most of all having to pack up and head, head anywhere, but the here, and search, search like that brother on that urban glut pile for a way to curb  that gnawing  hungry that cried out in the night-want, want that is all. 

Survived too the look, the look of those, the what did FDR (Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the young, or forgetful) call them, oh yeah, the economic royalists, today’s 1%, the rack-renters, the coupon-clippers, the guys, as one of their number said, who hired one half of the working class to fight the other, who in their fortified towers, their Xanadus, their Dearborns, their Beacon Hills, their Upper East Sides, their Nob Hills, and a few other spots, tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the fittest. That crowd, and let’s name names, a few anyway, Ford, General Motors, Firestone, U.S. Steel, fought tooth and nail against the little guy trying to break bread. Fought that brother too out pounding the mean streets to proud to ask for a letter, Jesus, a letter for some leftover food, before he got “religion” about what was what in the land of “milk and honey.”  Wreaked havoc on that farmer out in the dust bowl not travelling some road, some road west knowing that the East was barred up, egging him on to some hot dusty bracero labor filed picking, maybe “hire” him on as a scab against those uppity city boys. Yes, fought every guy trying to get out from under that cardboard, tar paper, windowless soup kitchen world along with a hell of a lot of comrades, yes, comrades, not Russkie comrades although reds were thick in those battles, took their lumps in Frisco, Flint, Akron and Minneapolis, hell, any place where a righteous people were rising, kindred in the struggle to put that survival of the fittest on the back-burner of human history. To stand up and  take collective action to put things right, hell, made the bosses cry bloody murder when they shut down their factories, shut them down cold until some puny penny justice was eked out. And maybe just maybe make that poor unknowingly mean-street walking city brother and that sweated farm boy thing twice about helping those Mayfair swells.      

Survived but took time out too, time out if young perhaps, as if such things were embedded in some secret teen coda, to stretch those legs, to flash those legs, to sway those hips, to flash the new moves not, I repeat, not the ones learned at sixth grade Miss Prissy’s Saturday dance classes but the ones that every mother, every girl mother warned her Susie against, to a new sound coming out of the mist, coming to take the sting out of the want years nights, and the brewing night of the long knives. Coming out of New York, always New York then, Minton’s, Jimmy’s, some other uptown clubs,   Chicago, Chicago of the big horns and that stream, that black stream heading north, following the northern star, again, for jobs and to get the hell away from one Mister James Crow, from Detroit, with blessed Detroit Slim and automobile sounds, and Kansas City, the Missouri K.C. okay, the Bird land hatchery, the Prez’s big sexy sax blow home. Jesus no wonder that madman Hitler banned it, along with dreams.  

The sound of blessed swing, all big horns, big reeds, big, well big band, replacing the dour Brother, Can You Spare a Dime and its brethren , no banishing such thoughts, casting them out with soup lines (and that awful Friday Saint Vincent DePaul fish stew that even Jesus would have turned down in favor of bread, wine and a listen to Benny’s Buddha Swings) casting that kind of hunger out for a moment, a magical realistic moment, casting out ill-fitting, out of fashion, threadbare (nice, huh) second-hand clothes (passed down from out- the- door  hobo brothers and sisters tramping this good green earth looking for their place, or at least a job of work and money in their newer threadbare [still nice] clothes), and casting aside from hunger looks, that gaunt look of those who have their wanting habits on and no way to do a thing about it.  Banished, all such things banished because after all it did not mean a thing, could not possibly place you anywhere else but in squareville (my term, not theirs), if you did not have that swing. To be as one with jitter-buggery if there was (is) such a word (together, not buggery by itself, not in those days, not in the public vocabulary anyway). And swing as it lost steam with all the boys, all the swing boys, all oversea and the home fire girls tired of dancing two girl dancing, a fade echo of the cool age be-bop that was a-borning, making everybody reach for that high white note floating out of Minton’s, Big Bill’s Jimmie’s, hell, even Olde Saco’s Starlight Ballroom before it breezed out in the ocean air night, crashed into the tepid sea. Yeah.       

Survived, as if there was no time to breathe in new fresh airs, new be-bop tunes, new dance moves, to slog through the time of the gun in World War II.  A time when the night-takers, those who craved the revenge night of the long knives took giant steps in Europe and Asia trying to make that same little guy, Brit, Frenchie, Chinaman, Filipino, God’s American, and half the races and nationalities on this good green earth cry uncle and buckle under, take it, take their stuff without a squawk. It took a bit, took a little shock, to get those war juices flowing, to forget about the blood-letting that had gone on before when the flower of Europe, when the older brothers and fathers the generation before, had taken their number when they were called.  And so after Pearl, after that other shoe dropped on a candid world Johnnie, Jimmie, Paulie, Benny too, all the guys from the old neighborhood, the corner boys, the guys who hung around Doc’s hands in their pockets, guys trying to rub nickels together to play some jitter-buggery thing, guys who had it tough growing up hard in those bad Depression days, took their numbers and fell in line.

Guys too from the wheat fields, Kansas Iowa, you know places where they grow wheat, guys fresh from some Saturday night dance, some country square thing, all shy and with calloused hands, eyeing, eyeing to perdition some virginal Betty or Sue, guys from the coal slags, deep down in hill country, down in the hollows away from public notice, some rumble down shack to rest their heads, full of backwoods home liquor, blackened fingernails, never ever fully clean once the coal got on them, Saturday night front porch fiddlings wound up carrying a M-1 on the shoulder in Europe or the Pacific. Leaving all those Susies, Lauras, Betties, and dark-haired Rebeccas too waiting at home hoping to high heaven that some wayward gun had not carried off sweetheart Johnnie, Jimmy, Paulie, or young Benny.  Jesus not young Benny. Not the runt of the corner boy litter, not our Benny. Not carried off that sweet farm fresh boy with the sly grin, not carried off that coal-dust young man with those jet-black eyes, and fingers.  

Survived the endless lines of boys heading off East and West, heading off to right some wrongs, at least that is what the guys in charge said, put a big dent in the style of the night-takers, the guys who wanted to cut up the world into two to three pieces, and that was that, cutting the little guy, making the little guys like it, making them take it or else. Some of those little guys, after Pearl for sure, could hardly wait to get to the recruiting office, hardly wait to go mano y mano with the night-takers and their illicit dreams, went gladly from the farms, the factories and the mines, many to never look back, never to farm, to run a production line, or to dig from the earth but make new lives, or lay down their heads in some god forsaken piece of dirt, or some watery abyss. Others, well, others were hanging back waiting to be drafted by their friends and neighbors at the local draft board, hanging back just a little to think things over, to see if maybe they could be better used on the home front, scared okay (as if the quick-step volunteers were not afraid, or should have been) but who gave a good accounting of themselves when their number came up. Still others head over heels they were exempt, 4-F, bad feet, you see. Somebody had to keep the home fires, keeping the womenfolk happy.

All, all except that last crew, the dodgers found in every war,  who got to sit a home with Susie, Laura, Betty and even odd-ball Rebecca were constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, for their ships to sail or their planes to fly. Hanging in some old time corner boy drugstore, Doc’s, Rexall, name your drugstore name, just like when they were kids (a mere few weeks before), talking the talk like they used to do to kill time, maybe sitting two by two (two uniforms, two girls if anybody was asking) at the soda fountain playing that newly installed jukebox until the nickels ran out. Listened to funny banana boat songs, rum and coca cola songs, siting under the apple tree songs, songs to forget about the work abroad, and just some flat-out jitter-bugging stuff, frothy stuff in order to get a minute’s reprieve from thoughts of the journey ahead.

Listened too to dreamy, sentimental songs, Always, I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire, Sentimental Journey, songs that spoke of true love, their true love that would out last the ages, would carrying them through that life together if they could ever keep those damn night-takers at bay, songs about faraway places, We’ll Meet Again, Til Then, songs that spoke of future sorrows, future partings, future returnings (always implying though that maybe there would be no return), future sacrifices, future morale-builders, songs about keeping lamp- lights burning, songs to give meeting to that personal sacrifice, to keep the womenfolk, to keep her from fretting her life away waiting for that dreaded other drop, songs about making a better world out of the fire and brimstone sacrifice before them.

Songs to make the best out of the situation about Johnnie, Jimmie and the gang actually returning, returning whole, and putting a big dent in their dreams, that small white house with the white picket fence (maybe needing a little painting, maybe they could do that together), kids, maybe a new car once in a while you know the stuff that keeps average joes alive in sullen foxholes, sea-sick troop transports, freezing cargo planes, keeps them good and alive. Hell, songs, White Cliffs Of Dover songs, about maybe the damn wars would be over sooner rather than later. Listened, drawing closer, getting all, uh, moony-eyed, and as old Doc, or some woe-begotten soda jerk, some high school kid, wet behind the ears, with that white paper service cap at some obscure angle and now smudged white jacket implying that he was in the service too, told them to leave he was closing up they held out for one last tune. Then, well-fortified with swoony feelings they made for the beach, if near a beach, the pond, if near a pond, the back forty, if near the back forty, the hills, you know, or whatever passed for a lovers’ lane in their locale and with the echo of those songs as background, well, do I have draw you a map, what do you think they did, why do you think they call us baby-boomers.              

The music, this survival music, Harry James, Benny, the Dorsey boys, Bing, Frank, the Mills Brothers, the Inkspots, and on and on wafted (nice word, huh) through the air coming from a large console radio, the prized possession centered in the small square living room of my growing up house amid the squalor of falling roof tiles, a broken window or two patched up with cardboard and tape, a front door that would not shut, rooms with second-hand sofas, mattresses, chairs, desks, tables, mildewy towels, corroded sinks, barely serviceable bathtubs, and  woe-begotten stuffed pillows smelling of mothballs. My broken down, needs a new roof, random shingles on the ground as proof, cracked windows stuffed with paper and held with masking tape in need of panes, no proof needed, overgrown lawn in need of cutting of a shack (there is literally no other way to describe it, then or in its current condition) of a too small, much too small for four growing boys and two parents, house. The no room to breathe, no space but shared space, the from hunger look of all the denizens, the stink of my father’s war wounds that would not heal, the stink of too many people in too small a house, excuse me shack. The noise, damn the noise from the nearby railroad, putting paid to wrong side of the tracks-dom worst of all. Jesus.      

That wrong side of the tracks shack of a house surrounded by other houses, shack houses, too small to fit big Irish Catholic- sized families with stony-eyed dreams. Small dreams of Johnny or Jimmy getting on the force (cops, okay), and Lorrie and Pamela getting those secure City Hall jobs in the steno pool until some bright prospect came by and threw a ring at them but in the meantime shack life, and small faded dreams. Funny, no, ironic but these tumbled-down shacks which seemingly would fall with a first serious wind represented in some frankly weird form (but what knew I of such unnamed weirdness then I just cried out in some fit of angst, cried out against that railroad noise, and that sour smell of sweat) the great good desire of those warriors, and almost to a man they had served, and their war brides who had waited, had fretted while waiting, to latch onto a piece of golden age America.

And take their struggle survival music from Doc’s jukebox, from the Starlight Ballroom, from WDJA, with them as if to validate their sweet memory dreams, their youthful innocence before the guys got caught up, caught up close and personal, the ugliness of war, the things they would not speak of unto the grave, and the gals not asking, not asking for all the money in the world but sensing that he, they, had changed, had lost some youthful thing. That radio, that priceless radio console taking pride of place, as if a lifesaver, literally, tuned to local station WDJA in North Adamsville, the memory station for those World War II warriors and their war brides, those who made it back. Some wizard radio station manager knowing his, probably his in those days, demographics, spinned those 1940s platters exclusively, as well as aimed the ubiquitous advertisement at that crowd. Cars, sofas, beds, shaving gear, soap, department store sales, all the basics for the growing families spawned (nice, huh) by those warriors and brides.

My harried mother, harried like all the neighborhood large brood mothers, harried by the bleak wanting prospects of the day with four growing boys and not enough, nor enough food, not enough, well, just not enough and leave it at that. Maybe bewildered is a better expression for her plight, for her wartime young marriage adventure not wanting to be left with only a memory of my father if things went wrong in the Pacific. As so she took to turning the radio on to start her day, hoping that Paper Dolls, I’ll Get By, or dreamy Tangerine would chase her immediate sorrows away. Yea, a quick boost of their songs was called for, their spring youth meeting at some USO dance songs before he shipped out. Those songs   embedded deep in memory, wistful young memory, or so it seemed as she hummed away the day, used the music as background on her appointed household rounds. And whether she won or lost the day’s bout with not enough, with some ill-winded message from some bill due, seemingly always some four boy hurt, some bad father work news, the list of her daily sorrows and trepidations could have stretched to infinity she perked up, swayed even to those tunes.

That stuff, that mother dream stuff, that piano/drum-driven stuff with some torch-singer, Peggy Lee, Helen Morgan, Margaret Whiting, maybe even a sneak Billie thrown in bleeding all over the floor drove me crazy then  Some she bleeding with the pain of  her thwarted loves, her man hurts, her wanderings in search of something in this funny old world, her waitings, waiting for the good times, waiting in line for the rations, waiting, waiting alone mind you, for her man to come home, come home whole from some place whose name she could not pronounce, they should have called it the waiting generation, just flat-out drove me crazy then. Mush stuff at a time when I was craving the big break-out rock and roll sounds I kept hearing every time I went and played the jukebox at Doc’s Drugstore over on Walker Street down near the beach (not the old torn down Doc’s of their generation over on Billings Road if that is what you are thinking). As far as I know Doc (the son of their Doc), knowing his demographics as well as that radio executive at WDJA, did not, I repeat, did not, stock that stuff that, uh, mush for his rock-crazed after school soda fountain crowd, probably stocked nothing, mercifully before about 1955. Funny thing though while I am still a child of rock and roll this so-called mushy stuff sounds pretty good to these ears now long after my parents and those who performed this music have passed on. Go figure. 

********

Stormy Weather

 

Songwriters: BELL, DAVID A

Don't know why there's no sun up in the sky
Stormy weather
Since my man and I ain't together,
Keeps rainin' all the time

Life is bare, gloom and mis'ry everywhere
Stormy weather
Just can't get my poorself together,
I'm weary all the time
So weary all the time
When he went away the blues walked in and met me.
If he stays away old rockin' chair will get me.

All I do is pray the Lord above will let me walk in the sun once more.
Can't go on, ev'ry thing I had is gone
Stormy weather
Since my man and I ain't together,
Keeps rainin' all the time

 

From The Archives-The Struggle To Win The Youth To The Fight For Our Communist Future-Join the Spartacus Youth Clubs!-What We Fight For

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Logo Of The Communist Youth International

Markin comment on this series:

One of the declared purposes of this space is to draw the lessons of our left-wing past here in America and internationally, especially from the pro-communist wing. To that end I have made commentaries and provided archival works in order to help draw those lessons for today’s left-wing activists to learn, or at least ponder over. More importantly, for the long haul, to help educate today’s youth in the struggle for our common communist future. That is no small task or easy task given the differences of generations; differences of political milieus worked in; differences of social structure to work around; and, increasingly more important, the differences in appreciation of technological advances, and their uses.

There is no question that back in my youth I could have used, desperately used, many of the archival materials available today. When I developed political consciousness very early on, albeit liberal political consciousness, I could have used this material as I knew, I knew deep inside my heart and mind, that a junior Cold War liberal of the American For Democratic Action (ADA) stripe was not the end of my leftward political trajectory. More importantly, I could have used a socialist or communist youth organization to help me articulate the doubts I had about the virtues of liberal capitalism and be recruited to a more left-wing world view. As it was I spent far too long in the throes of the left-liberal/soft social-democratic milieu where I was dying politically. A group like the Young Communist League (W.E.B. Dubois Clubs in those days), the Young People’s Socialist League, or the Young Socialist Alliance representing the youth organizations of the American Communist Party, American Socialist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S.) respectively would have saved much wasted time and energy. I knew they were around but not in my area.

The archival material to be used in this series is weighted heavily toward the youth movements of the early American Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party (U.S). For more recent material I have relied on material from the Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth group of the Spartacist League (U.S.), both because they are more readily available to me and because, and this should give cause for pause, there are not many other non-CP, non-SWP youth groups around. As I gather more material from other youth sources I will place them in this series.

Finally I would like to finish up with the preamble to the Spartacist Youth Club’s What We Fight For statement of purpose:

"The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter."

This seems to me be somewhere in the right direction for what a Bolshevik youth group should be doing these days; a proving ground to become professional revolutionaries with enough wiggle room to learn from their mistakes, and successes. More later.

************


(Young Spartacus pages)

The Spartacus Youth Clubs intervene into social struggles armed with the revolutionary internationalist program of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. We work to mobilize youth in struggle as partisans of the working class, championing the liberation of black people, women and all the oppressed. The SYCs fight to win youth to the perspective of building the Leninist vanguard party that will lead the working class in socialist revolution, laying the basis for a world free of capitalist exploitation and imperialist slaughter.

1 Mobilize students behind the social power of the multiracial working class! Picket lines mean don’t cross! For union-run minority job recruitment and training programs! For union hiring halls! Down with union-busting “workfare” schemes! Jobs for all at union wages! Organize the unorganized! Unionize the South! Down with multi-tier wages, which pit younger and older workers against each other! Cops, prison guards, security guards out of the unions! Keep the bosses’ government and courts out of the unions!

2 Black oppression is the bedrock of racist American capitalism. Finish the Civil War! For black liberation through socialist revolution! For mass labor/black mobilizations to stop the fascists and race-terrorists! No to gun control! For the right of armed self-defense! No reliance on the capitalist courts or politicians! Fascist terror is not a question of “free speech.” Stop the Nazis! Stop the KKK!

3 For free, quality, integrated public education for all! Nationalize the private universities! Down with the racist purge of higher education—defend affirmative action, no to tuition hikes! No to budget cuts! For an end to tracking! For open admissions, no tuition and a state-paid living stipend for all students! Abolish the administration—the universities should be run by those who work and study there! Down with police occupation of public schools! Cops off campus!

4 For women’s liberation through socialist revolution! For mass, labor-backed mobilizations to defend abortion clinics! Down with parental consent laws and “squeal rules”! For free abortion on demand! For free, quality 24-hour childcare! For free, quality health care for all! Equal pay for equal work! Down with anti-gay laws! Down with reactionary age of consent laws! Full democratic rights for homosexuals! Government out of the bedroom! Down with the anti-sex witchhunt! Down with all laws against consensual activities, called “crimes without victims,” like pornography, gambling, drug use, prostitution and “statutory rape”!

5 Down with racist anti-immigrant laws! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! Organize foreign-born workers into the unions! No deportations! No to racist “English only” laws! Down with anti-Hispanic, anti-Arab, anti-Asian, anti-Semitic and all racist bigotry!

6 Down with the “war on terror,” which is a war aimed at immigrants, labor, the left and minorities! Free all the detainees! Abolish the racist death penalty! Free Mumia Abu-Jamal! Free all class-war prisoners! There is no justice in the capitalist courts! Defend victims of racist cop terror and police frame-up! No illusions in civilian review boards or “community control” of the police! For labor mobilizations against racist cop terror! Down with the “war on drugs,” a racist war by the ruling class against black and Hispanic youth! The capitalist state—at its core consisting of the cops, courts, prisons—is the executive committee of the ruling class, an instrument of organized violence by the capitalists against the workers and the oppressed. It must be smashed through workers revolution!

7 Defend separation of church and state! Defend science against superstition and mysticism! Keep religion out of the schools! No prayer in the schools! Down with the teaching of creationism! For the teaching of evolution! No government funding for religious, private or “charter” schools!

8 Defeat U.S. imperialism through workers revolution! U.S. and allied forces out of Iraq, Afghanistan now! Down with the neocolonial occupations! For class struggle against U.S. capitalist rulers at home! No illusions in the UN—a den of imperialist thieves, their victims and their lackeys! All U.S./UN/NATO troops out of the Balkans, Haiti! For the right of independence for Puerto Rico! U.S. troops out of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean! U.S. imperialist butchers: hands off the world! No to the draft! Not one man, not one penny for the imperialist military! Drive ROTC, CIA and police recruiters off the campuses!

9 For international working-class solidarity! Down with the chauvinist poison of protectionism! Workers of the world, unite! For unconditional military defense of the deformed workers states of Cuba, China, North Korea, Vietnam and Laos against capitalist counterrevolution and imperialist attack! For workers political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucrats and establish regimes of workers democracy, based on the power of workers councils, and revolutionary internationalism!

10 Break with the racist, warmongering Democratic and Republican parties of capitalism! No support to any capitalist parties, including Greens! For a revolutionary, multiracial workers party that fights for socialist revolution! Look to the example of the heroic, Bolshevik-led workers of 1917 Russia! For new October Revolutions! For the international rule of the working class!

15 May 2011

The Spartacus Youth Clubs are the youth groups of the revolutionary Marxist Spartacist League/U.S., section of the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist).

City College of New York-Reinstate the Morales/Shakur Center! Cops Off Campus!

(Young Spartacus pages)

Workers Vanguard No. 1034	15 November 2013

We reprint below an October 26 leaflet issued by the New York Spartacus Youth Club. The City College of New York (CCNY) is one of 24 public colleges and schools that make up the City University of New York (CUNY). As we go to press, the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community and Student Center, a room in CCNY’s North Academic Center (NAC), is still shut down with a sign above the door that reads, “Careers and Professional Development Institute.”

The Spartacus Youth Club denounces the outrageous eviction of the Morales/Shakur Center by the CCNY administration on October 20. As the Center was raided and all of its contents confiscated, campus cops shut down the entire NAC building, arresting a CUNY alumnus. The timing of this raid is no coincidence, coming off weeks of CUNY protests against the reinstatement of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) military recruiters and the appointment of war criminal David Petraeus as a visiting professor. At an anti-Petraeus protest on September 17, cops brutally attacked the crowd and six protesters were arrested, all part of an attempt by the CUNY administration to stifle leftist activism. The sinister eviction of the Morales/Shakur Center represents an attack on the democratic rights of all campus groups to organize. Reinstate the Morales/Shakur Center! Drop all charges against CUNY protesters! ROTC and Petraeus out of CUNY!

The Morales/Shakur Center was a space for leftist, minority and other student groups and community organizations to hold meetings and events. Assata Shakur is a former Black Panther who was framed up for the 1973 killing of a New Jersey state trooper. Guillermo Morales was a member of the FALN, a Puerto Rican nationalist group. Shakur is now being hunted by the FBI as part of a racist “anti-terror” vendetta.

The CUNY administration is currently considering a new draconian policy on “expressive activity,” i.e., campus protests. The proposed rules enhance the powers of the administration to crack down on protest and other political activity. Along with this attack on democratic rights, the CUNY Board of Trustees has been on a drive to make the city university more exclusive, making it harder for black, Latino, poor and immigrant students to attend. CCNY, which sits in the middle of Harlem, has seen the enrollment of black students plummet in the last 10 years, from 31.2% in 2001 to 14.4% in 2010. In 2011 a new round of tuition hikes was pushed through—accompanied by the violent repression of students who protested it. This was just the latest wave in a decades-long campaign to reverse the gains of the 1969 student strike, which won open admissions for high school graduates to CUNY’s community colleges and lowered entrance requirements at the four-year universities. In 1976 tuition was imposed for the first time in 129 years and has gone up steadily. Open admissions has been whittled away over the years, and was completely gutted in 1999. We fight for free, quality, integrated education with a full stipend! For open admissions! Abolish the student debt!

The Morales/Shakur Center was won in 1989 as a result of massive student struggle against tuition hikes at CUNY. But under capitalism these gains are always reversible. Universities under capitalism serve the purpose of upholding bourgeois ideology and training the next layer of technicians and managers. We hold no illusions in the administration to act in the interest of students—we say abolish the administration, for student-teacher-worker control of the university! In order to remove the universities from the control of the bourgeoisie, you need a workers revolution to sweep away the whole capitalist system. Students, who have no real social power to transform society, must ally with the multiracial working class which can bring production to a halt. To do away with the decaying capitalist system, we need a socialist revolution.

At the recent protests in defense of the Center, some students have expressed the view that the campus cops work for the students since the students pay tuition. The Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee also peddles illusions that the cops can be pressured into serving students and the oppressed by calling for “any security force to be controlled by the community” (RSCC Platform). In reality the cops carry out the orders of the administration and the capitalist state, not the students. The role of all cops under capitalism is to defend the interests of the bourgeoisie—they cannot be reformed. The brutal enforcement of capitalist rule is their job, whether in the ghettos and barrios, on the picket lines, or on the campuses. Cops off campus!

With the mayoral elections approaching, students and workers are being told to place their hopes in the liberal populist de Blasio. The illusion is that this capitalist politician will bring some relief from the racist police brutality, union-busting and attacks on democratic rights that marked Bloomberg’s years. Don’t be fooled! Whether it’s through Wall Street Democrat Obama or more left-talking local politicians like de Blasio, Ydanis Rodriguez or Charles Barron—the Democratic Party is charged with defending the interests of the racist, imperialist capitalist system. And don’t forget it was Democrat Obama’s FBI that increased Assata Shakur’s bounty to $2 million. Break with the Democrats! We need a class-struggle workers party independent of and in opposition to all parties of capitalist rule. If you are interested in a program to get rid of capitalism and imperialism once and for all, check out the Marxist Spartacus Youth Club, youth group of the Spartacist League, and our paper, Workers Vanguard.

Let the Fire Burn-A Powerful Documentary on the 1985 Bombing of MOVE-A Review by Conor Kristofersen Workers Vanguard No. 1034	15 November 2013

Let the Fire Burn-A Powerful Documentary on the 1985 Bombing of MOVE-A Review by Conor Kristofersen

On 13 May 1985, black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode and his city administration, acting in collaboration with the Feds, firebombed the West Philadelphia home of the MOVE organization, a mostly black, back-to-nature commune. It was the culmination of a daylong police siege, during which over 10,000 rounds of ammunition had been pumped into the house. With the Fire Department under orders to “let the fire burn,” high-pressure water cannon on site sat idle for over an hour. In the ensuing inferno, eleven people were incinerated, including five children, and hundreds were left homeless as an entire city block in the black working-class neighborhood was reduced to ashes.

The operation to “evict” those inside MOVE’s Osage Avenue home, which resembled more the leveling of a Vietnamese village, began with the proclamation: “Attention, MOVE. This is America!” Indeed, the hideous crime that followed was a concentrated expression of the racist state terror meted out to black people every day in capitalist America. None of the perpetrators ever faced charges, while Ramona Africa, the sole adult survivor, was arrested and served every day of a seven-year prison sentence. The only other person to make it out of the MOVE house alive was 13-year-old Birdie Africa, later known as Michael Ward, who recently died at the age of 41.

From the day of the massacre, and ever since, the Spartacist League has solidarized with the victims of this racist atrocity and vowed to sear it into the memory of the working class. The recently released documentary Let the Fire Burn is a valuable tool for this very purpose, making it a must-see. The director and producer, Jason Osder, has described in interviews the impact that the bombing of MOVE had on him as an eleven-year-old growing up in Philly. He spent more than ten years collecting clips from television news programs, police videos and other archival film footage that comprise the documentary. The result is a vivid chronicle of the day of the slaughter and its background, namely the ever-escalating cop vendetta against MOVE, a group that first appeared in 1972 denouncing “the system” and would come to proclaim the right of armed self-defense in the face of brutal state repression.

Minimal narration (in the form of captions) is given to this footage in an effort by Osder to force his viewers to “interpret and deal with” the events of May 13. What filmgoers are forced to deal with are the visceral and shocking images of mass murder by the state that the capitalist rulers would prefer for people to forget. There is no escaping the devastating explosion of MOVE’s roof, the flames that engulf Osage Avenue and the unapologetic racism of the cops. In one of the more shocking moments, cops can be heard laughing and joking in the background of a police video of the burning house: “They won’t call the police commissioner a motherf----r anymore!” The cover-up is also evident, with Mayor Goode and Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor shown blatantly lying and contradicting each other’s stories about who ordered who to put out the fire, if anyone had at all.

The bombing polarized the “city of brotherly love.” In its aftermath, liberals and virtually the entire left rushed to alibi Goode, Philly’s first black mayor, who vowed: “I’d do it again.” These apologists for Goode exuded disdain for the intended victims of racist state repression, even as they expressed shock at the “excessive” force and the harm done to b1acks whose houses were burned down in the process. Among those groups attempting to straddle the line between MOVE and its murderers was the Socialist Workers Party, which helped organize a May 30 demo in Philadelphia, purportedly to protest the massacre. We initially pledged to mobilize 100 supporters to stand with MOVE, which was planning to attend. But after the organizers had the gall to debate whether to censor MOVE at the protest, MOVE pulled out and in solidarity so did the SL. The demonstration was a travesty, with the emcee announcing that organizers “wanted it to be made very clear to the city administration and the City of Philadelphia that we are not marching today in support of MOVE” (Philadelphia Daily News, 31 May 1985).

Some weeks later, we held a public forum in New York City where MOVE supporters LaVerne Sims and Louise James were able to express their outrage and pain. In the discussion period, a member of the League for the Revolutionary Party (LRP) rose to denounce us for not sufficiently polemicizing against MOVE—at a public meeting specifically called to honor the memory of the MOVE martyrs! To attack them would have been obscene. But that’s exactly what the LRP did. In its publication Proletarian Revolution (Summer 1985), the LRP blamed the victims, writing: “MOVE’s isolation opened it up for a police siege.”

The mass murder of MOVE members was a signature act of the Reagan years, which were marked by a concerted drive to reverse the gains of the civil rights movement and other social struggles of the 1960s and early ’70s. The bourgeoisie had also thrown down the gauntlet before the organized workers movement, exemplified in the mass firing of 13,000 striking members of the PATCO air traffic controllers union by the White House in 1981. This all-sided social reaction was the domestic reflection of U.S. imperialism’s Cold War push to “roll back Communism” internationally, from the threats of nuclear annihilation of the Soviet Union to efforts to crush leftist insurgents in Central America. Only days before the MOVE bombing, Reagan had returned from saluting Nazi SS graves in Bitburg, Germany.

As we wrote in our front-page article “Philly Inferno: Racist Murder!” (WV No. 380, 31 May 1985), which was part of our coverage of the atrocity reprinted in Black History and the Class Struggle No. 3 (February 1986):

“The Osage Avenue massacre was supposed to be a message to anybody who gets ‘out of line’ in Reagan’s America—blacks will get the Philly treatment, labor will get the PATCO treatment and everyone, not least the Marxists, will get the ‘terrorist’ treatment. But you can fight the terrorists in City Hall and the White House and win. Black people do have social power: they are concentrated in some of the key sections of the American proletariat, constituting its most militant layer. But to unlock this power means breaking the capitalist two-party stranglehold, fighting for a workers party to mobilize labor and oppressed blacks in revolutionary struggle against this racist, capitalist system. Avenge the Philly inferno—For black freedom through socialist revolution!”

Lies and Racist Mass Murder

For all its merits, Let the Fire Burn shies away from addressing a vital part of the story of the MOVE bombing: the fact that the responsibility for this horrendous crime went well beyond Mayor Wilson Goode and his ghoulish coterie of Philly cops and extended right up to the Ronald Reagan White House. The film leans heavily on footage of the investigation commission that was set up by Goode to absolve his administration but which nonetheless was compelled by the sheer magnitude of the massacre to reveal its horrors. Yet Let the Fire Burn does not even allude to some of the most important testimony before those hearings, which implicated the Feds in what was a carefully planned conspiracy to commit state terrorism.

Even before the commission was convened, chief Sambor told the New York Times (19 May 1985) that two days before the bombing he had gone over the assault plans with FBI agents, who “found the plan sound.” At the hearings, both Sambor and Goode’s managing director, Leo Brooks, who was nominally in charge of the operation, testified that the use of explosives had been planned for over a year. The commission obtained evidence from the FBI that agents had supplied Philly cops with nearly 40 pounds of the military explosive C-4. Other testimony before the commission revealed that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms helped the city obtain military-grade arms for the assault, including Browning automatic rifles, an M-60 machine gun and an anti-tank gun.

Mayor Goode’s handpicked eleven-member commission would later seek to whitewash the coldblooded state murder in the report on the findings of its nine-month investigation. The commission acknowledged the obvious racism behind the assault and declared that the deaths of the five children “appear to be unjustified homicides.” At the same time, it called MOVE “an authoritarian violence-threatening cult,” implying the adults deserved to die!

Washington’s role was apparently too hot for the commission members to handle, so they went to absurd lengths to avoid implicating federal authorities. While noting that an FBI agent had delivered the C-4 plastic explosive to the Philadelphia police, the commission report claimed that “neither agency kept any records of the transaction.” As such, the report concluded that FBI officials “unwittingly furnished the commission with inaccurate and untruthful accounts of that agency’s involvement.”

Years-Long Campaign of State Terror

The film depicts the odd lifestyle and social views of MOVE and shows them shouting obscenities at their neighbors and the cops over outdoor loudspeakers. A wave of racist propaganda painting MOVE as violent crazies accompanied the 1985 slaughter. In Reagan’s America, to be black and a social nuisance was enough to be made a non-person and bombed to smithereens. In fact, the eclectic MOVE group reflects a long tradition in this country of attempted non-cooperation with the state on moral, religious or political grounds, from Quaker pacifists who refuse to fight in wars to right-wing tax resisters.

The cop vendetta against MOVE got its start at a time when Philadelphia was lorded over by Mayor Frank Rizzo, a law-and-order racist. In one scene in the film, he rails against a “vocal minority” that has supposedly gained undue influence over the country. Under his direction, police planted themselves on MOVE’s doorstep, hounding members and supporters every time they left their home. Arbitrary stops, beatings and arrests became the norm. In 1976, blackjack-wielding cops descended on a MOVE celebration, and in the resulting melee Janine Africa’s newborn infant was trampled to death.

Beginning in May 1977, the cops put MOVE under round-the-clock surveillance. The following March, police set up a full-scale barricade, sealing off a four-block area of MOVE’s Powelton Village commune with eight-foot-high fences and cutting off gas and water service. Early on August 8, 600 cops surrounded the home. One member of the Philly cops’ notorious “Stakeout” squad, James Ramp, was killed by his fellow cops when they opened fire on the house. In the documentary, a brief clip of a witness insistently pointing at the source of the gunfire is included, followed by the caption: “MOVE members believed there was a police cover-up and that officer Ramp was actually killed by friendly fire.”

Nine MOVE members were framed up for that killing and eight remain imprisoned to this day, one having died in prison. Radical journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal would become a supporter of MOVE in the course of reporting on the trial. Already known and despised by local police, Mumia became even more of a marked man as a result.

In the film, officers recounting the 1978 assault to the commission state that Delbert Africa emerged from the house with a knife and was then subdued. The documentary then jumps to footage of the scene showing an unarmed Delbert Africa with empty hands raised in the air. Cops proceed to almost beat him to death, slamming his head into the ground with their boots.

Little changed for the oppressed black masses after Rizzo left office in early 1980. The campaign against MOVE continued unabated for several years, building up to 13 May 1985. The documentary shows the overwhelming firepower deployed by the state that day: water cannons, tear gas, automatic weapons and, finally, the powerful mixture of Tovex and C-4 dropped by helicopter on the roof of MOVE’s Osage Avenue home. As the house burned, police were stationed at key locations in a back alley with shotguns and Uzis. When two MOVE members emerged from the blaze, one was gunned down by the cops and the other, a child, was driven back inside to die in the fire.

While some cops may relish it more than others, their job is to enforce racist law and order on behalf of the capitalist rulers. Toward the end of Let the Fire Burn, the film highlights the testimony before the commission by one cop who recalled leading Birdie Africa away after he emerged from the burning building. A caption concludes his story: the cop’s locker was later scrawled with the epithet “n----r lover” and he left the police force, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

Of Racist Cops and Black Democrats

Going back before MOVE, Philadelphia was known for its killer cops. Foremost among them were those in the Stakeout unit, an urban death squad made up largely of veteran military sharpshooters. This squad was established by Rizzo, then-deputy police commissioner, as part of the drive by the city rulers to crush any expression of opposition to vicious racism and police brutality after the city’s black ghetto erupted in 1964. Together with the department’s “red squad,” it spearheaded the brutal repression of the Black Panther Party and other black militants in the city. Later, when the police turned their attention to MOVE, Stakeout cops again played a forward role, from the vicious beating of Delbert Africa to the shooting in the Osage Avenue alley seven years later.

The city itself was a bastion of racist reaction. In the 1920s, Pennsylvania had the fourth-largest Klan concentration in the country; the Philadelphia area alone had 30,000 Klansmen. The city’s capitalist rulers played on racial divisions to pit white workers against black workers, who were last-hired and first-fired. Ethnic and racial hostilities in Philadelphia were further exacerbated with the devastation of its heavy industry, particularly in the 1970s. In this context, the racist bonapartism of the Philadelphia police became even more pronounced as the cops were deployed to keep the lid on this pressure cooker of discontent.

Another reaction by the ruling class to black discontent and rebellion in Philadelphia, as well as other cities across the country, was to install black mayors to contain the rage and frustration. But Wilson Goode—who instructed the cops to get MOVE “by any means necessary” prior to the firebombing of West Philadelphia—is the ultimate proof that the black Democratic mayors were and are the frontmen for the bourgeoisie’s war on black people, as well as on workers and all the oppressed. In the aftermath of the fire, Jesse Jackson spotted in the charred remains of people’s lives a chance to push a little black capitalism. His main concern was that Goode hire black contractors to rebuild the destroyed homes!

From the 1921 bombing of black Tulsa, Oklahoma, to the 1993 incineration of the Branch Davidian religious sect outside Waco, Texas, the American capitalist rulers have a long history of mass murder of those considered to have stepped out of line. When it came to MOVE, authorities first branded them “terrorists” to justify their slaughter. As we noted shortly after the 1985 massacre: “Our duty to combat the state vendetta against MOVE is part of our unremitting campaign against the government’s targeting of troublesome opponents as ‘terrorists’” (WV No. 381, 14 June 1985). This is all the more the case today, with the bourgeoisie having amassed a vast arsenal of surveillance and police powers under the pretext of the “war on terror.” Ultimately, it will take a workers revolution to put the capitalist state apparatus of violence and murder out of business for good and bring justice to its hired thugs who have committed untold crimes.

From Death Row to “Slow Death Row” Workers Vanguard No. 1034	15 November 2013

From Death Row to “Slow Death Row”

For over 20 years, a central focus of the PDC Holiday Appeals was the urgent fight to free Mumia Abu-Jamal from the executioner’s hands. A former Black Panther Party spokesman, renowned journalist and MOVE supporter, Mumia was framed for the 1981 killing of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to die explicitly for his political beliefs. First taking up Mumia’s defense in 1987, the PDC and the Spartacist League made his case known through publicity and protest to a wide range of death penalty abolitionists, student groups, black activists and the labor movement. From the beginning, we fought for the understanding that the power of labor must be brought to bear in the fight to win Mumia’s freedom. Indeed, it was an outpouring of protest internationally, including by trade unionists, which helped win a stay of execution for Mumia in August 1995.

Mumia’s conviction was based on lying testimony extorted by the cops, a “confession” manufactured by the police and prosecutors and phony ballistics evidence. Time and again, federal and state courts refused to even consider the massive evidence that Mumia was innocent, including the confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner. In December 2011, ten years after a ruling by a federal judge that overturned Mumia’s death sentence, the Philly district attorney’s office announced that it would no longer pursue Mumia’s legal lynching, finally removing him from death row to what he termed the “slow death row” of life in prison without possibility of parole.

The deprivation of basic rights that marked his trial and imprisonment continues unabated. For nearly a month after he was released from death row, Mumia was held in solitary confinement. Then in August 2012, he was secretly resentenced in direct violation of Pennsylvania law, which mandates a hearing where the prisoner has the right to be present and heard. Mumia’s appeal of that backroom sentencing, filed in February, was unanimously rejected in July by the Pennsylvania Superior Court.

It appears that Mumia’s legal efforts to win his freedom have now hit a brick wall—not even the prospect of parole awaits him. In commenting on the denial of his most recent appeal, Mumia told two PDC representatives who visited him in August that state authorities never want to see Mumia in their courtroom again. Despite this, Mumia remains strong, unbowed, politically engaged and writing prolifically. In addition to his own musical studies, we discussed the musical genius of Curtis Mayfield, the latest excrescences of the U.S. “war on terror,” the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, the documentary Long Distance Revolutionary about Mumia that was released early this year, the struggle to finally win the right to a contact visit with his son Jamal Hart and the prospects of a Miami Heat “three-peat.”

It has been many years since thousands took to the streets for Mumia. As the PDC said after the D.A.’s efforts to kill him were abandoned: “The state authorities hope with the latest decision that Mumia’s cause will be forgotten and that he will rot in prison hell until he dies. This must not be Mumia’s fate.”