Friday, October 23, 2015

*Unfinished Business Of The Black Liberation Struggle-In Honor Of Emmett Till

Reopening The Emmett Till Case-The Case That Has Not Died, Nor Should It*Unfinished Business Of The Black Liberation Struggle-In Honor Of Emmett Till


Reopening The Emmett Till Case-The Case That Has Not Died, Nor Should It

A link to an On Point NPR program on the re-opening of the Emmett Till case.



 www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/07/17/emmett-till-timothy-tyson  



By Frank Jackman



I have, as witnessed below, at various times reviewed some aspect of the Emmett Till case as a matter of historical importance although not to me individually directly since Emmett’s death, murder, happened when I was too young to realize what was going on. I picked up on the civil rights movement for black rights in the Mister James Crow South (and as it turned, turns out the North too) in the early 1960s when I went to downtown Boston and walked a picket line at Woolworth’s in support of the lunch counter demonstrators down South who wanted to have a freaking grilled cheese sandwich without having to face a civil war about it. That is when I first heard about the case, and it has never been far from the surface since.           

Now the Department of Justice, Alabama’s Jeff Session’s DOJ, has reopened the Emmett Till case that his family and partisans have tried to have reopened for many years. The DOJ motivation I am not quite sure of. What I know is that in this case justice will never be done, closure will probably never come but only a better idea of what really happened down in Mister James Crow Mississippi in the 1950s. Still some cases, and Emmett’s is one of them, will never die, nor should they.  





HONOR THE MEMORY OF EMMETT TILL

The following is an appreciation of the life the martyred civil rights figure Emmett Till. It was originally printed in Workers Vanguard, newspaper of the Spartacist League of the United States and reprinted in their Black History series. The beginnings of my personal awareness of the central role of the black liberation struggle in any fight for fundamental change did not stem from the Till tragedy but rather a little latter from the attempts to integrate the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957. The main political point of the article- the centrality of the black liberation struggle to the overall revolutionary struggle against American imperialism and for a socialist solution to the problems of modern society is also my own position on that question. Although the particular case of what happened to Emmett Till may be resolved before that solution occurs it will take such black liberation in order to do proper justice to his name.



Workers Vanguard No. 852 5 August 2005

The Lynching of Emmett Till and the Fight for Black Liberation
50 Years Later

"Before Emmett Till's murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears.... I didn't know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought."
—Anne Moody, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Organizer, 14 years old in 1955, in Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968)

Fifty years ago this month the name Emmett Eouis Till became synonymous with the brutal American tradition of lynching. Till was only 14 years old that summer when he left his home in Chicago to join his cousin on a trip to stay with relatives in Mississippi. Within days of his arrival, young Emmett was kidnapped, tortured and brutally murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Till's gruesome murder, and his mother's courageous campaign to ensure that the world saw at first hand the stark reality of race-terror by displaying her son's mutilated body at his funeral, provoked horror and outrage against racist oppression in America. The lynching of Emmett Till, along with Rosa Parks' defiant stand in Montgomery, Alabama in December of that same year, were key in galvanizing many thousands to join the burgeoning civil rights movement.

Today, a half-century later, black people still sit in the cross hairs of this bloody capitalist ruling class. The explosive struggles of the civil rights movement smashed Jim Crow segregation in the South and broke the back of the anti-Communist McCarthy era. But the social reality remains—black oppression is the cornerstone of capitalist class rule in America. Contrary to assertions that the worst abuses against black people are a thing of the past, a quick survey of the massive prison population, unemployment, miserable ghetto conditions, poverty, deteriorating health care and increasingly segregated schools proves the opposite, not only in the South but throughout the country.

The current federal investigation of the Emmett Till atrocity is one of a handful of decades-old cases reopened beginning with the 1994 conviction of Byron De La Beckwith for the 1963 assassination of Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers. One reason these cases are being opened is to polish the tarnished image of the South. But union-busting "right to work" laws, attacks on black voting rights, Ku Klux Klan terror like the cross-burnings in Durham, North Carolina this May along with Confederate flags, monuments and Dixie anthems still mark the landscape of the "New South." Meanwhile, Northern ghettos trap black people into holding pens, and kill-crazy cops stalk the streets.

Bush's Republican regime pushes ahead to wipe out the remaining gains of the civil rights movement that had been under attack by Democratic as well as Republican administrations for the last three decades. On the heels of the government launching a vindictive IRS tax investigation of the NAACP, the chairman of the Republican National Committee cynically professed at the NAACP's convention in July, which Bush refused to attend, that the Republican Party's decades-long campaign of courting the racist Southern vote away from the Democrats by opposing civil rights legislation, the "Southern Strategy," was "wrong."

The re-opening of Till's case was largely sparked by the determined nine-year effort of a young filmmaker, Keith Beauchamp, and his 2002 documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. The Feds recently exhumed Till's body to seek forensic evidence, additionally claiming it is necessary to verify that it was indeed Till in the grave. The only people who ever cast doubt on this question were the defenders of the lynchers. For America's capitalist rulers, such re-investigations are nothing more than hypocritical attempts to foster the illusion that today's FBI and Department of Justice are different from the very same state institutions that worked hand in hand with the Klan in the South. By the mid 1960s, nearly 20 percent of Klan members were FBI "informants" serving as loyal double agents of both organizations. Even when the Senate passed a meaningless resolution this June apologizing for never passing anti-lynching legislation, several senators, including the two from Mississippi, refused to sponsor the bill.

Capitalism is a system based on exploitation of labor, and, in the U.S., a unique and critical mainstay continues to be the subjugation of the black population at the bottom of society. American Trotskyist Richard Fraser wrote in the same year that Emmett Till was murdered: "The dual nature of the Negro struggle arises from the fact that a whole people regardless of class distinction are the victims of discrimination. This problem of a whole people can be solved only through the proletarian revolution, under the leadership of the working class" ("For the Materialist Conception of the Negro Struggle," January 1955). We of the Spartacist League base our program for black liberation upon Eraser's perspective of revolutionary integrationism, premised on the understanding that black freedom requires smashing the capitalist system and constructing an egalitarian socialist society. One of our founding documents written at the time of the ghetto upheavals of the 1960s states:

"The Negro people arc an oppressed race-color caste, in the main comprising the most exploited layer of the American working class. Because of the generations of exceptional oppression, degradation and humiliation, Black people as a group have special needs and problems necessitating additional and special forms of struggle. It is this part of the struggle which has begun today, and from which the most active and militant sections of Black people will gain a deep education and experience in the lessons of struggle. Because of their position as both the most oppressed and also the most conscious and experienced section, revolutionary black workers are slated to play an exceptional role in the coming American revolution."
—"Black and Red—Class Struggle Road to Negro Freedom," 1967, Marxist Bulletin No. 9

The Lynching of Emmett Till
By all accounts Emmett Till was an amazing kid. He was bright, fun-loving and considerate. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley (earlier known as Mamie Till Bradley), and her family had migrated from Mississippi along with hundreds of thousands of other black farmers and sharecroppers fleeing the Jim Crow South in hopes of finding a better life in the "Promised Land" known as Chicago. She knew firsthand the strict social and racial codes of the South that literally spelled life or death if not followed to the letter. So, when she reluctantly allowed Emmett to accompany his cousin Wheeler to Mississippi, she did her best to instill some sense of the dangers and she recounted that she held "the talk that every black parent had with every child sent down South back then" (Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America by Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson, 2003).

By the summer of 1955, white racists in Mississippi were seething in bitterness in the aftermath of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which opened the door for integrating schools, albeit hedged with limitations and the reservation of "deliberate speed." The Supreme Court decision to allow school integration was a reflection of a growing movement for black civil rights, for the right to vote and for integration. Black men fought on the front lines in World War II, a war proclaimed to make the world "safe for democracy." Black women migrated to the cities to toil in defense plants. When the soldiers returned, they were determined to have a better life. The end of the war ushered in the beginning of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, the preparation for new imperialist wars to "roll back Communism" everywhere on the planet. Most black people were concerned about the "cotton curtain," the iron grip of the racist Southern police state here at home, and were less likely to buy into or embrace the American bourgeoisie's propaganda about an "Iron Curtain" Soviet threat.

The response of the racist Southern Democrats (the Dixiecrats) to the Brown ruling was one of organized terror and defiance from the highest-ranking officials on down. Francis M. Wilhoit described the role of the Democratic Party in The Politics of Massive Resistance'.
"For it was, after all, the region's political parties—particularly the dominant Democrats—that bore the chief responsibility for politicizing the segregationist masses and getting them to the polls on election day to vote for anti-integration candidates. Furthermore, since membership in Southern parties overlapped with membership in the Klan, the Councils, and other resistance groups, it appeared for a time that the segregationists would get a stranglehold on policy making in the racial area, and prevent even tokenism."

White Citizens' Councils, the suit-and-tie incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, formed to terrorize blacks through vigilante violence and uphold Jim Crow segregation, flourished throughout Mississippi. These councils, claiming a membership of 60,000, were headquartered in the very county that Emmett was preparing to visit. In May that year in Belzoni, Mississippi, Reverend George Lee, local NAACP organizer, was shot to death from a passing car. Just days prior to Till's arrival, WW II veteran Lamar Smith was gunned down in broad daylight on a crowded courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi for urging black people to vote. This was the murderous atmosphere that a lively, self-confident teenager from the North journeyed into that fateful August.

On August 24, after picking cotton all morning, Emmett, his cousins and some friends drove into Money, Mississippi to purchase some candy and sodas at the local grocery store that serviced the black population. The white owner, Roy Bryant, was out of town and his young wife, Carolyn, was tending the store. There are conflicting stories of what happened at the store. Did he whistle? Was he trying to control his stutter? Did he speak up? The only thing that happened that day at the store for sure is that Emmett Till was seen as having "stepped out of line," ignoring "the customs of the South" in the presence of a white woman where this was punishable by death. On August 28, Roy Bryant and his half brother, J. W. Mi lam, came looking for Emmett at his relatives' home, kidnapping him in the dead of night. Three days later the hideously battered corpse of Emmett Till was found in the Tallahatchie River with a 75-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. Mose Wright, Emmett's great uncle, was able to identify his body only by a ring belonging to his lather that the child wore on his finger.

For the vast majority of unnamed lynch mob victims that have filled American history, the story would end here and would have also for Emmett Till if not for the courage and determination of his mother and family. Mamie Till-Mobley immediately alerted the press upon hearing that her son was missing. She fought to have her son's body returned to Chicago after the local sheriff hastily tried to bury the evidence—literally. She defied the Mississippi authorities by opening the padlocked and sealed casket. Most courageously, she insisted that the casket be displayed openly for the world to see, and ensured that graphic photos circulated internationally. An estimated 100,000-250,000 people waited in line for hours at Chicago's Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ to view the open casket. So shocking was Emmett's horrifically mutilated body that an estimated one out of every five individuals needed assistance out of the building. Emmett's death was transformed from "just another lynching" into an internationally known scandal. Although there had been thousands of Southern black men, women and children that met such horrible deaths, this was one that would spark a generation into action.

Mamie Till-Mobley set the tone by immediately demanding an investigation and publicizing the case. Although President Eisenhower and FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover stonewalled her requests for an investigation, she persisted in bringing national attention to her son's lynching. Till-Mobley, her father and her cousin Rayfield Mooty, an Inland Steel worker, traveled to Sumner, Mississippi for the trial of Emmett's murderers and braved a gauntlet of white racists each morning as they entered the courthouse. Her uncle, Mose Wright, who had pleaded with Bryant and Milam not to take his nephew, did what virtually no black man in Mississippi had dared to do for nearly a century. He stood up in court and identified the two white men as the kidnappers. According to Wright's son, Simeon, who was in the same bed when Emmett was dragged away, Mose Wright was determined to testify. Knowing full well that he was risking the same fate as Emmett, he told his family that he didn't know if he would live or die, but he knew for sure that he was going to testify. Before Wright testified, the rest of his family had to be spirited away to Chicago. He joined them immediately following his testimony. Similarly an 18-year-old field hand, Willie Reed, came forward as a surprise witness for the prosecution to testify that he had heard Emmett's screams coming from Milam's barn. As soon as Reed stepped off the stand, he went directly to the train station and left for Chicago, rightly fearing for his life. He suffered a nervous breakdown upon arriving in Illinois. It took a tremendous amount of courage for these black witnesses to stand up to white racists in Mississippi, knowing they might not live to see another day, knowing that the only way to save themselves from the lynch rope was to leave everything behind and escape North. Their actions were not unlike slaves fleeing on the Underground Railroad nearly one hundred years earlier.

At this time, Medgar Evers, a Mississippi NAACP organizer, gained national attention. Evers understood that the only way a case would be built against Bryant and Milam was if he took it into his own hands and mobilized his forces. The NAACP recruited volunteers to dress as sharecroppers and sent them out to gather information. These brave individuals knew full well what lay in store for them should they be detected. Civil rights lawyer Conrad Lynn worked on the case and identified others involved in the killing, but they were never prosecuted. Dr. T. R. M. Howard, leader of the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, helped organize and contributed to pay the costs of the investigation and relocation of the witnesses. He also was eventually forced to flee North. He made speaking tours of the country to expose the reign of terror in Mississippi. For the smallest shred of hope that justice might be served, these people put their lives on the line.

But that smallest shred was really no shred at all in the mid '50s in the Mississippi Delta. The ensuing murder trial of Bryant and Milam was exactly what one would expect. All five lawyers in the county joined the defense team so that none could be appointed special prosecutor in the case. Neither of the defendants denied kidnapping Emmett. The jury came back with a verdict of not guilty in just over an hour. It took them "that long" because they stopped to get a soda, hoping to stretch the time for appearance's sake. The jury came up with the lie that the bloated, rotting body that was dragged out of the Tallahatchie River might not be Emmett at all, but a body planted by his mother and the NAACP. Emmett was supposedly alive and well in Detroit, according to the Southern racists. A grand jury would not even indict them on kidnapping charges. Then, just months after the acquittal, Look magazine published a confession by Bryant and Milam boasting of their lynching of Till.

A campaign orchestrated by plantation owner, arch-segregationist Mississippi Senator, James O. Eastland, tried to smear Emmett Till and his dead father Louis as rapists. The U.S. army had executed Louis Till in 1945. While serving in Italy, he was charged with raping two white women and killing another, charges that many who served with him stated were lies. The same man, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who as a general signed the execution order of the elder Till, sat as U.S. president and refused to investigate the lynching of the son. When Eastland managed to secure the army death records of Louis Till—the same records that Mamie Till-Mobley had been denied—and leaked them to the press, the

NAACP took a step back from the case, concerned to maintain their image of "respectability."
Louis Till was not the only man to be executed or "disappear" under such dubious circumstances during World War II. In her autobiography, Mamie Till-Mobley spoke to the chilling stories she heard from other black soldiers and friends of Louis Till of the "problem that followed them overseas from the United States." She described 3 a.m. line-ups of black soldiers by racist white officers and Military Police. A woman would be brought in to identify one of the soldiers and the "black soldiers who got pointed out at three in the morning were always taken away. They were not brought back." As Mamie Till-Mobley astutely pointed out,

"It seemed that the army really didn't need much more proof than a late-night identification to take black soldiers out. But based on what Louis's friends told me, it seemed the real offense wasn't always against white women. Often, it was really against white men. A number of women in those late-night lineups, it seems, were only identifying the men who slept with them, not men they were accusing of rape.... But for many of the white officers and soldiers from the South, there also was a custom about that sort of thing.... Louis died before he could see what would happen to his son. Bo [Emmett's nickname] died before he could learn about what had happened to his father. Yet they were connected in ways that ran as deep as their heritage, as long as their bloodline.... Maybe Emmett did wind up like his father, an echo of what had happened ten years earlier. Maybe they were both lynched."

Lynching—"As American as Baseball and Church Suppers"
In 1924, a young Communist from Indochina named Nguyen Ai Quoc—later known as Ho Chi Minh—wrote:

"It is well known that the Black race is the most oppressed and the most exploited of the human family. It is well known that the spread of capitalism and the discovery of the New World had as an immediate result the rebirth of slavery, which was for centuries a scourge of the Negroes and a bitter disgrace for mankind. What everyone does not perhaps know is that after sixty-five years of so-called emancipation, American Negroes still endure atrocious moral and material sufferings, of which the most cruel and horrible is the custom of lynching."

The story of Emmett Till lays bare the harsh reality of black life in a country built on human bondage. The fight for genuine black equality remains an unfinished task of the American Civil War. The 200,000 ex-slaves and Northern blacks who fought in that war helped turn the tide of the war in favor of the Union Army, but the victorious Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of equality. Radical Reconstruction was the most democratic period in U.S. history. But the Northern capitalists looked at the devastated South and saw opportunity—not for building radical democracy, but for profitably exploiting Southern resources and the freedmen. With the "Compromise of 1877," the last of the Northern troops were pulled from the South and Reconstruction came to an end. Freed blacks were disenfranchised, politically expropriated and kept segregated at the bottom of society. The institution of Jim Crow segregation began to take shape, marked by strict racial codes, returning the black population to a position of complete subservience, enforced by violence. How or when to address whites, where to live, eat, sit, shop, wash your hands, or take a drink of water were all strictly regulated and backed up through a system of race terror—the omnipresent threat of the lynch rope.

In the period following Reconstruction, in the late 19th century, lynching reached its height. Lynching is rightfully equated with the summary torture and execution of black people. But this was not always the case. The term "lynch law" is believed to have come from Judge Charles Lynch, a patriot in the American Revolutionary War. Upon discovery of a Tory conspiracy in 1780, Lynch was said to have presided over an extralegal court that meted out summary punishment to the pro-British Loyalists. Such methods were given free rein in a burgeoning young country with a vast frontier and a roughly established legal system. The evolution of lynching into an act of race terror is organically linked to the history of black chattel slavery. Lynching became a form of sadistic black subjugation in reaction to the rise of the anti-slavery abolition movement, developing into a widespread social phenomenon in the wake of the defeat of Reconstruction. By the end of the 19th century, "lynch law" had a specific meaning. At its height in the 1880s and 1890s, as many as two to three black people were lynched per week. Sociologist John Dollard wrote in 1937: "Every Negro in the South knows that he is under a kind of sentence of death; he does not know when his turn will come, it may never come, but it may also be any time."

American historian Leon F. Litwack has found that of the thousands of recorded lynchings, about 640 involved "accusations of a sexual nature"—the most notorious and hysteria-inducing accusation. The targets of the race terrorists were often those who owned competitive businesses and farms, the man who managed to acquire some property and was deemed by the racists to not have enough humility, the man who challenged the system, the man who was educated and/or prosperous. W. E. B. Dubois put it this way: "There was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency" (Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow [1998]).

In many cases, lynchings were not spontaneous mob violence but planned and advertised events bringing trainloads of spectators from near and far. These were ordinary, "church-going, upstanding" citizens, drawn together in a grotesque racist ritual. The "pillars of the community" were often directly involved or had prior knowledge, and they always approved afterward. "Lynching was an undeniable part of daily life, as distinctly American as baseball and church suppers. Men brought their wives and children along to the events, posed for commemorative photographs, and purchased souvenirs of the occasion as if they had been at a company picnic" (Philip Dray, At The Hands of Persons Unknown [2002]). Celebratory postcards of mutilated and charred bodies were sent through the U.S. mail to friends and relatives. James Baldwin noted on seeing the red clay hills of Georgia for the first time, "I could not suppress the thought that this earth had acquired its color from the blood that had dripped down from these trees."

The Civil Rights Movement
As Mamie Till-Mobley remarked in a TV documentary, "When people saw what had happened to my son, men stood up who had never stood up before. People became vocal who had never vocalized before. Emmett's death was the opening of the civil rights movement." Ten thousand people rallied in Harlem the Sunday following the acquittal. Thousands packed meeting halls and overflowed into the streets to hear Mamie speak around the country. Labor rallies and demonstrations were held to protest the lynching of Emmett Till and race-terror in Mississippi. The CIO Steelworkers Union to which Fill's grandfather belonged wired the Mississippi governor demanding justice.

In the convulsive years that followed, social protest exploded into the civil rights movement. Eventually, Jim Crow, the poll taxes and sham rules that prevented black people from voting were abolished, and segregated schools and other public facilities were formally opened up. However, the civil rights movement was stopped cold when it came North and confronted the hardened economic foundations of black oppression, rooted in American capitalism. The heroic struggles of many thousands of black and white activists were betrayed by the liberal perspective of the leadership of the civil rights movement. Much as the organizers of the demonstrations against Till's murder appealed to Eisenhower, the strategy of the liberal-led civil rights movement was based on appeals to a section of the American bourgeoisie to right the historic wrongs done against black people, as though black freedom could be attained under the capitalist system.

There were important exceptions to this, exemplified by militant black leaders such as Robert F. Williams, the head of the NAACP branch in Monroe, North Carolina, which heavily recruited from the black working class of the area. Williams, who was denounced by liberal civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, put forward a program of armed self-defense to fight race-terror as opposed to reliance on the capitalist state and its politicians. This earned him the enmity of the liberal NAACP, which disowned him, as the FBI hounded him out of the country. Williams found refuge in Cuba in 1961 and then China, before returning to the U.S. in 1969. In 1965, the Louisiana-based Deacons for Defense and Justice organized patrols to protect blacks and civil rights workers. At about the same time, in Gulfport, Mississippi, the black longshoremen's union threatened to close the port down if civil rights activists were injured or arrested.

But despite determined struggle to fulfill the unfinished promise of the Civil War—the promise of black freedom— the civil rights movement could only go so far. The Democratic Party co-opted many of the black leaders into their ranks. They and their political heirs today sit on Capitol Hill, in the statehouses and city halls, administering this system which is based on racial injustice and class oppression, while posing as defenders of black and working people.
For Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

The lynching of Emmett Till was not an aberration. Such inhuman acts of violence were part of the fabric of the American Jim Crow South—a system that could only be enforced through violence. Nor did the smashing of Jim Crow mark the end of racial oppression in the U.S., in the North or the South. The laws enforcing segregation may be abolished, but segregation and inequality remain as facts. The death penalty represents the lynch rope as the ultimate form of institutionalized state terror, backed in the streets by racist cops who carry out their own summary executions. The continued oppression of black people some 40 years after the inauguration of formal, legal equality demonstrates that black oppression is an intrinsic component of the capitalist order in the U.S.

The capitalist rulers promote the poison of racism to keep the working class divided—to pit white workers against black workers—in order to more easily maintain their rule. But black people are not simply victims. Black workers represent a large component of the organized labor movement. The way forward lies in multiracial class struggle. A key obstacle to this perspective is the pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, which ties the working class to its exploiters, particularly by promoting illusions in the Democratic Party as a "friend" of labor and blacks.

The road to black freedom lies in the struggle to shatter this racist capitalist system through proletarian socialist revolution, and the power to do that lies with the working class. But this power cannot and will not be realized unless a class-struggle labor movement actively champions the cause of black liberation. The key to unlocking the chains that shackle labor to its exploiters is the political struggle to build a revolutionary internationalist leadership of the working class.

At the time of the Civil War, Karl Marx, the founder of modern communism, captured a fundamental truth of American society in his statement that "labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." The Spartacist League fights to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party that will wrest the tremendous productive resources of this country out of the hands of the capitalist owners and put these resources into the hands of the working class, those who produce the wealth of this society. Only then will racial oppression be a thing of the past. Finish the Civil War! For black liberation through socialist revolution!

The Latest From The "Fight For $15"-The Seemingly One-Sided Struggle Continues-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 And “Fight For $15” Are The Slogans Of The Day.

The Latest From The "Fight For $15"-The Seemingly One-Sided Struggle Continues-It's High Time To Push Back-Push Back Hard-30 For 40 And “Fight For $15” Are The Slogans Of The Day.


CA_LA_CC_1_I_gimmekimmy
@gimmekimmy
  • CA_LA_05_CC_CaliforniaNOW
  • CT_Hartford_CC_2
  • FL_Tampa_CC_2
  • CA_LA_05_CC_CaliforniaNOW (1)
  • GA_Atlanta_CC_1_T_timfranzen
    @timfranzen
  • IL_Chicago_CC_chifightfor15




  • Click below to link to the Fight For $15 website  for the latest national and international labor news, and of the efforts to counteract the massively one-sided class struggle against the international working class movement.

    http://fightfor15.org/april15/
     

     

    Ralph Morris and Sam Eaton a couple of old-time radicals, old-time now in the early 2000s unlike in their youth not being the Great Depression labor radicals who had been their models after a fashion and who helped built the now seemingly moribund unions, (or unions now rather consciously led by union leaders who have no or only attenuated links to past militant labor actions like strikes, plant sit-downs, hot-cargo struck goods, general strikes and such and would go into a dead faint if such actions were forced upon them and are so weakened as to be merely dues paying organizations forwarding monies to the Democratic “friends of labor” Party). They had come of political age as anti-war radicals from the hell-bent street in-your-face 1960s confrontations with the American beast during the Vietnam War reign of hell. Ralph from the hard-shell experience of having fought for the beast in the Central Highlands in that benighted country and who became disgusted with what he had done, his buddies had done, and his government had done to make animals out of them destroying simple peasants catch in a vicious cross-fire and Sam, having lost his closest high school hang around guy, Jeff Mullin, blown away in some unnamed field near some hamlet that he could not pronounce or spell correctly. The glue that brought them together, brought them together for a lifetime friendship and political comity (with some periods of statutory neglect to bring up families in Carver, Massachusetts and Troy, New York respectively) the ill-fated actions on May Day 1971 In Washington when they attempted along with several thousand others to shut down the government if it did not shut down the war. All those efforts got them a few days detention in RFK stadium where they had met almost accidently and steel-strong bonds of brotherhood from then on.     

    They had seen high times and ebbs, mostly ebbs once the 1960s waves receded before the dramatic events of 9/11 and more particularly the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003 called off what they had termed the “armed truce” with the United States government over the previous couple of decades. So Ralph and Sam were beside themselves when the powder-puff uprising of the Occupy movement brought a fresh breeze to the tiny American left-wing landscape in the latter part of 2011.  That term “powder puff” not expressing the heft of the movement which was not inconsiderable for a couple of months especially in hotbeds like New York, Boston, L.A. and above all the flagship home away from home of radical politics, San Francisco but the fact that it disappeared almost before it got started giving up the huge long-term fight it was expected to wage to break the banks, break the corporate grip on the world and, try to seek “newer world”). Ralph and Sam were not members in good standing of any labor unions, both having after their furtive anti-war street fights and the ebbing of the movement by about the mid-1970s returned to “normalcy,” Ralph having taken over his father’s electrical shop in Troy when his father retired and Sam had gone back to Carver to expand a print shop that he had started in the late 1960s that had been run by a hometown friend in his many absences. However having come from respectable working-class backgrounds in strictly working-class towns, Carver about thirty miles from Boston and the cranberry bog capital of the world and Ralph in Troy near where General Electric ruled the roost, had taken to heart the advice of their respective grandfathers about not forgetting those left behind, that an injury to one of their own in this wicked old world was an injury to all as the old Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) motto had it. Moreover despite their backing away from the street confrontations of their youth when that proved futile after a time as the Vietnam War finally wound down and yesterday’s big name radicals left for parts unknown they had always kept an inner longing for the “newer world,” the more equitable world where the people who actually made stuff and kept the wheels of society running and their down-pressed allies ruled.   

    So Ralph and Sam would during most of the fall of 2011   travel down to the Wall Street “private” plaza (and site of many conflicts and stand-offs between the Occupy forces on the ground and then Mayor Blumberg and his itchy cops) which was the center of the movement on weekends, long weekends usually, to take part in the action after the long drought of such activity both for them personally and for their kind of politics. They were crestfallen to say the least when the thing exploded after Mayor Blumberg and the NYPD the police pulled down the hammer and forcibly disbanded the place (and other city administrations across the country and across the world and police departments doing likewise acting in some concert as it turned out once the dust settled and “freedom of information” acts were invoked to see what the bastards were up to).

    Of more concern since they had already known about what the government could do when it decided to pull down the hammer having learned a painfully hard lesson on May Day 1971 and on a number of other occasions later when Ralph and Sam and their comrades decided to get “uppity” and been slapped down more than once although they at least had gone into those actions with their eyes wide open had been the reaction of the “leadership” in folding up the tents (literally and figuratively). Thereafter the movement had imploded from its own contradictions, caught up not wanting to step on toes, to let everybody do their own thing, do their own identity politics which as they also painfully knew had done   much to defang the old movements, refusing out of hand cohering a collective leadership that might give some direction to the damn thing but also earnestly wanting to bring the monster down.

    Ralph and Sam in the aftermath, after things had settled down and they had time to think decided to put together a proposal, a program if you like, outlining some of the basic political tasks ahead to be led by somebody. Certainly not by them since radical politics, street politics is a young person’s game and they admittedly had gotten rather long in the tooth. Besides they had learned long ago, had talked about it over drinks at Jack Higgins’ Grille in Boston more than once in their periodic reunions when Ralph came to town, how each generation had to face its tasks in its own way so they would be content to be “elder” tribal leaders and provide whatever wisdom they could, if asked.  Working under the drumbeat of Bob Marley’s Get Up, Stand Up something of a “national anthem” for what went on among the better elements of Occupy are some points that any movement for social change has to address these days and fight for and about as well. Sam, more interested in writing than Ralph who liked to think more than write but who contributed his fair share of ideas to the “program,” wrote the material up and had it posted on various site which elicited a respectable amount of comment at the time. They also got into the old time spirit by participating in the latest up and coming struggle- the fight for a minimum wage of $15 an hour although even that seems paltry for the needs of today’s working people to move up in the world:      

    “Victory To The Fast-Food Workers......Fight For $15 Is Just A Beginning-All Labor Must Support Our Sisters And Brothers- Free All The Striking Fast Food Protesters!

    Comments of a supporter of the “Fight for $15” action in Downtown Boston on September 4, 2014 as part of a national struggle for economic justice and dignity for the our hard working sisters and brothers:

     

    No question in this wicked old world that those at the bottom are “the forgotten ones.” Here we are talking about working people, people working and working hard for eight, nine, ten dollars an hour. Maybe working two jobs to make ends meet since a lot of times these McJobs, these Wal-Marts jobs do not come with forty hours of work attached but whatever some cost-cutting manager deems right. And lately taking advantage of cover from Obamacare keeping the hours below the threshold necessary to kick in health insurance and other benefits. Yes, the forgotten people.

     

    But let’s do the math here figuring on forty hours and figuring on say ten dollars an hour. That‘s four hundred a week times fifty weeks (okay so I am rounding off for estimate purposes here too since most of these jobs do not have vacation time figured in).That’s twenty thousand a year. Okay so just figure any kind of descent apartment in the Boston area where I am writing this-say one thousand a month. That’s twelve thousand a year. So the other eight thousand is for everything else. No way can that be done. And if you had listened to the young and not so young fast-food workers, the working mothers, the working older brothers taking care of younger siblings, workers trying to go to school to get out of the vicious cycle of poverty you would understand the truth of that statement. And the stories went on and on along that line all during the action. 

     

    Confession: it has been a very long time since I have had to scrimp and scrim to make ends meet, to get the rent in, to keep those damn bill-collectors away from my door, to beg the utility companies to not shut off those necessary services. But I have been there, no question. And I did not like it then and I do not like the idea of it now.  I am here to say even the “Fight for $15” is not enough, but it is a start. And I whole-heartedly support the struggle of my sisters and brothers for a little economic justice in this wicked old world. And any reader who might read this-would you work for slave wages? I think not. So show your solidarity and get out and support the fast-food and Wal-Mart workers in their just struggles. 

     

    Organize Wal-Mart! Organize the fast food workers! Union! Union! 

    ******

    With Unemployment Too High, Way Too High - The Call "30 For 40"- Now More Than Ever- The Transitional Socialist Program

    Click Below To Link To The Full Transitional Program Of The Fourth International Adopted In 1938 As A Fighting Program In The Struggle For Socialism In That Era. Many Of The Points, Including The Headline Point Of 30 Hours Work For 40 Hours Pay To Spread The Work Around Among All Workers, Is As Valid Today As Then.

    http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/index.htm

    Guest Commentary

     

    From The Transitional Program Of The Fourth International In 1938- Sliding Scale of Wages and Sliding Scale of Hours

    Under the conditions of disintegrating capitalism, the masses continue to live the meagerized life of the oppressed, threatened now more than at any other time with the danger of being cast into the pit of pauperism. They must defend their mouthful of bread, if they cannot increase or better it. There is neither the need nor the opportunity to enumerate here those separate, partial demands which time and again arise on the basis of concrete circumstances – national, local, trade union. But two basic economic afflictions, in which is summarized the increasing absurdity of the capitalist system, that is, unemployment and high prices, demand generalized slogans and methods of struggle.

    The Fourth International declares uncompromising war on the politics of the capitalists which, to a considerable degree, like the politics of their agents, the reformists, aims to place the whole burden of militarism, the crisis, the disorganization of the monetary system and all other scourges stemming from capitalism’s death agony upon the backs of the toilers. The Fourth International demands employment and decent living conditions for all.

    Neither monetary inflation nor stabilization can serve as slogans for the proletariat because these are but two ends of the same stick. Against a bounding rise in prices, which with the approach of war will assume an ever more unbridled character, one can fight only under the slogan of a sliding scale of wages. This means that collective agreements should assure an automatic rise in wages in relation to the increase in price of consumer goods.

    Under the menace of its own disintegration, the proletariat cannot permit the transformation of an increasing section of the workers into chronically unemployed paupers, living off the slops of a crumbling society. The right to employment is the only serious right left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is left to the worker in a society based upon exploitation. This right today is being shorn from him at every step. Against unemployment,“structural” as well as “conjunctural,” the time is ripe to advance along with the slogan of public works, the slogan of a sliding scale of working hours. Trade unions and other mass organizations should bind the workers and the unemployed together in the solidarity of mutual responsibility. On this basis all the work on hand would then be divided among all existing workers in accordance with how the extent of the working week is defined. The average wage of every worker remains the same as it was under the old working week. Wages, under a strictly guaranteed minimum, would follow the movement of prices. It is impossible to accept any other program for the present catastrophic period.

    Property owners and their lawyers will prove the “unrealizability” of these demands. Smaller, especially ruined capitalists, in addition will refer to their account ledgers. The workers categorically denounce such conclusions and references. The question is not one of a “normal” collision between opposing material interests. The question is one of guarding the proletariat from decay, demoralization and ruin. The question is one of life or death of the only creative and progressive class, and by that token of the future of mankind. If capitalism is incapable of satisfying the demands inevitably arising from the calamities generated by itself, then let it perish. “Realizability” or “unrealizability” is in the given instance a question of the relationship of forces, which can be decided only by the struggle. By means of this struggle, no matter what immediate practical successes may be, the workers will best come to understand the necessity of liquidating capitalist slavery.

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

    As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech “On Socialist Man” (1966):

    “We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man’s making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies—hunger, sex and death—besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement have taken on.... Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these.” 

    Maine Peace Walk Pot Luck Supper & Program Schedule -October 9 to 24

    Maine Peace Walk Pot Luck Supper & Program Schedule -October 9 to 24 

    peacewalk banner
                                                                                                                                     Art work by Russell Wray
     
    • Day 1 (Ellsworth) Friday, October 9 -   Ellsworth Unitarian Church (121 Bucksport Rd) Evening potluck and kick-off program at 6:00 pm. Homestays needed.    Host: Starr Gilmartin 667-2421
    • Day 2 (Orland) Saturday, October 10 - Potluck supper 6:00 pm and program at H.O.M.E (90 School House Rd.) Sleep at H.O.M.E.  Host: Starr Gilmartin 667-2421 or Lawrence 415-565-9867
    • Day 3 (Belfast) Sunday, October 11 - First Church UCC (104 Church St) Pot luck supper (unadvertised) 6:00 pm, public program 7:00 pm.    Home stays needed & sleep at church: Cathy Mink 323-5160 & Bev Roxby 669-2903.      Host: Joel 338-2282 or 323-0940 at the UCC Church
    • Day 4 (Camden) Monday, October 12 - Our Lady of Good Hope Catholic Church (7 Union St) Pot luck supper and program at 6:00 pm. Home stays needed. Host: Maureen Kehoe-Ostensen 763-4062
    • Day 5 (Rockland) Tuesday, October 13 - Potluck supper and program at Unitarian church (345 Broadway) at 6:00 pm. Homestays needed.  Host: Midcoast Citizens for P & J (Steve Burke 691-0322)
    • Day 6 (Damariscotta) Wednesday, October 14 - Friends Meeting House (77 Belvedere Rd) Potluck Supper and program at 6:00 pm. Sleep at Meeting House.  Host: Friends Meeting (Sue Rockwood 570-854-4458)
    • Day 7 (Bath) Thursday, October 15 - UCC Neighborhood Church (corner of Washington & Centre) Potluck supper and program at 6:00 pm. Homestays needed.  Host: Bruce Gagnon 904-501-4494 & Karen Wainberg 371-8190
    • Day 8 (Day off) in Bath Friday, October 16 - Stay at same homestays again this night. Potluck supper at Addams-Melman House (212 Centre St) at 6:00 pm. Host: Bruce Gagnon 904-501-4494 & Karen Wainberg 371-8190
    • Day 9 (Brunswick) Saturday, October 17 - Pot luck supper at Sternlieb home (21 McKeen St) at 6:00 pm. Walker music program. Home stays needed in Brunswick. Host: Selma Sternlieb 725-7675
    • Day 10 (Freeport) Sunday, October 18 - Pot luck supper at First Parish Congregation Church (on US 1) at 6:00 pm and program. Sleep at church. Host: Paula O’Brien 865-6022 & Sukie Rice 318-8531 & Cheryl Avery 865-0916
    • Day 11 ( Portland) Monday, October 19 - State Street Church-UCC (159 State St.) Pot luck supper & program at 6:00 pm.  Homestays needed. Host: Grace Braley 774-1995
    • Day 12 (Saco) Tuesday, October 20 - First Parish Congregation Church on corner of Beech & Maine. Pot luck supper and program at 6:00 pm. Home stays needed.  Host: Tom Kircher 282-7530
    • Day 13 (Kennebunk) Wednesday, Oct 21 - New School (38 York Street). Pot luck supper and program at 6:00 pm. Sleep at school.  Host: Olive Hight 207-590-9505
    • Day 14  (York Beach) Thursday, October 22 - York Beach (52 Freeman St) Supper, music program & sleeping spot at 6:00 pm. Host: Pat Scanlon 978-474-9195 & Smedley Butler Brigade of Boston-area VFP
    • Day 15 (Portsmouth) Friday, October 23 - Supper and program at St. John’s Episcopal Church (100 Chapel St) at 6:00 pm.  Home stays needed, Host: Doug Bogen 603-617-6243
    • Day 16 (Finale in Portsmouth) Saturday, October 24 - Meet at Market Square 10:00 am. Walk thru downtown and back over bridge to Kittery. Rally & speakers at shipyard gate (deliver letter). Walk back to Market Square for final closing circle around noon. Host: Doug Bogen 603-617-6243
     
    ~ The walk is being sponsored by Maine Veterans for Peace; PeaceWorks; CodePink Maine; Citizens Opposing Active Sonar Threats (COAST); Peace Action Maine; Veterans for Peace Smedley Butler Brigade (Greater Boston); Seacoast Peace Response (Portsmouth); Maine Green Independent Party; and Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.
     
    For full walk route schedule details see http://vfpmaine.org/walk%20for%20peace%202015.html 

    I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind

    I Hear Mother Africa Calling-With Odetta In Mind


     


     


    Sam Eaton, nothing but the son of a son of a son of an old swamp Yankee, that’s a Yankee who did things like yeoman’s military service under General Washington against the bloody British when the call came for brave men to come and help in freedom’s fight and who later forged his way, family in tow, to struggle with the rough stony New England land which fought him and his every inch of the way almost as hard but for sure longer than those bloody Brits, tumble rock fought him down in Carver in the southeastern corner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts where he tried to eke out an existence against the grim fresh breast of earth and marsh as a “bogger,” a man who worked the dreaded cranberry bogs for which that town was once famous, worked in harness raking the damn berries for some benighted Thanksgiving dinner, so yes, a swamp Yankee as against the Beacon Hill Brahmins who reaped the benefits of the bloodstained freedom fight without the risks and settled into a quiet life of coin counting and merchandise buying, had been puzzled at the age of fourteen at a time when he first heard a blues song, Howlin’ Wolf’s How Many More Years on a fugitive radio station down in Carver one night in the late 1950s (a song that later, much later, seemingly a technological millennia later, he would see of Wolf on YouTube taken from a performance at the Newport Folk Festival in the early 1960s where he sweat roll from his ebony cheeks and forehead flowing down his face like some ancient Nile River snaking its way to the sea, deep voice seeming to get deeper with each drop of water would practically  eat the harmonica he had in the cusp of his hand talking, no preaching to himself, taking himself to task, about some woman, some mean mistreating mama if the truth be known who had him in a sailor’s knot, has him all twisted up, had him so depressed and blue his wanted to go under the grasses but who in the end took the walk of the beaten down, beaten around  and left old Minnie high and dry which Sam had sensed was happening way back when on that fugitive radio.).

    That “fugitive” part just mentioned not being some pirate station off the coast which he had heard that some people who couldn’t get their music on the regular dial were doing somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean (he would find out later that this station was out in the North Sea someplace and was there because of the uproar in England, like in the states over the demon effect rock and roll was having on the Queen’s subjects, her gaggle of children who somehow heard the fresh new breeze from America was heading their way and which he found out more about still later when he saw a film starring the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman about the subject) the result of some mystical still not understood airwave heading out into the atmosphere all the way from Chicago where occasionally around eleven o’clock (ten Chi town time) he would pick up Be-Bop Benny’s Blues Hour over WALM, a station that billed itself as the “Blues is the dues” station.

    He was not sure but he thought then that Be-Bop Benny was a black guy, a Negro (the “polite” word of common usage then to signify blacks, now far out of style and thus the need to explain to generations born after who accept the racial designation black or Afro-American or some other local derivative), although he heard his father, Prescott, who was the last of a long line of downtrodden independent Eaton boggers who would soon thereafter go belly up and sell out to the mega-growers, call them “n----rs” without a trance of rancor or self-consciousness and put “damn” in front of that term with rancor when he had been drinking rye whiskey and bemoaning his fate and said the “n” word were being treated better than he and his were). Although Sam had never seen a black man in person then since they did not follow the bogging trade and none lived in town or went through it as far as he knew he thought that if Be-Bop wasn’t then he was at least from the south because his voice sounded strange, had a drawl, had kind of a mumble-rumble quality to it and he was saying all kinds of be-bop, cool daddy, hot mama, from jump street kind of stuff. And for a time, a fair amount of time he did not like to hear that scratchy raspy voice, or that blues is dues stuff either. That was the source of his puzzlement.

    See Sam had not really been happy when he heard that station come over the fugitive airwaves on late Sunday nights (although the song was okay, no, more than okay, cool even if he didn’t quite understand why the Wolf was letting some mean mistreating mama get him down, get him so crazy that he wanted to go six feet under which even naïve Sam knew meant old Wolf was losing it but that kind of hard-bitten lyric was not to his taste then since he was just getting that bug, just wanted to hear about roses and playthings, stuff like, happily ever after stuff). As a dedicated fourteen old white boy from a town with no Negro families, not even people who were connected with those workers in the town like his father and a couple of older adult brothers and uncles who worked the cranberry bogs, he was not interested, or maybe consciously interested is better, the blues.

    Sam was totally into rock and roll, totally into listening to WMEX the local radio station out of Boston which was being interfered with by that blues is dues station out of Chi town at eleven o’clock (remember ten Chi town time). Interfered with his listening to Bill Haley blast away on Shake, Rattle and Roll, Elvis doing Tomorrow Night and Good Rockin’ Tonight, Johnny Grey doing a great version of Rocket 88, Sam Jackson doing This Is Rock, Bobby Sams doing One Night Of Sin good rocking stuff that DJ Arnie Ginsberg would play on his At The Hop show where he played songs that had dropped off the charts but were diamonds of rock and roll. So at fourteen he could not figure out, nor could they when he asked his friend Jack Caldwell who knew everything about roll and rock, what the appeal was of that Wolf tune. But that beat, that chord progression, that going down to the messy forlorn earth and then coming back up again would follow him for a long, long time. He never really found an answer, a satisfactory answer until he looked beyond the fugitive sound, looked back to why the blues was even the blues. Looked more to the way it made him feel when times were tough, when he would get into his depressive shell, and a blues is dues song would break the bad ass spell.               

    Not until later did Sam figure some stuff out after he had kind of given up on rock and roll for a while, maybe around sixteen, seventeen, when the music seemed, well, square, seemed to be about blond-haired, blue-eyed guys searching for (and getting) blond-haired blue eyed girls with a “boss” car and dough as a lure, maybe a surfer guy cruising the beaches out west, out California way, none of which he and his had much of, the dough and car part, and Carver being kind of landlocked no surfer profile, and so kind of distant from the life of a son of a son of a son of a swamp Yankee.

    Started figuring stuff out too when he got into his folk music thing for a minute, music which mainly made him go up a wall but which he put up with because Sara Leonard, his girlfriend or the girl he wanted to be his girlfriend got all excited about it when she saw Joan Baez in Cambridge at some club (the original Club 47 as it turned out where Joan and lots of other folkies hung out) and insisted that he like the songs or hit the road, you know how that is (this Sara by the way all dark hair and the whitest of white skin got hung up on the iron-your-hair-like Joan Baez craze and he would have to sit in the Leonard parlor cooling his heels while Sara did her ritual). Jesus. Part of that folk thing although he was not sure how and why was about the blues, about down south music from the plantations and sharecropper cabins, and how they made music to keep themselves from going crazy when the hammer came down and they needed some way to express their rage at their plight without getting hung up on a tree somewhere or shot in the back down some dirty road.      

    The critics, and don’t ever ask Sam who these guys are since all he cares about is the music, about the blues, who performs it and whether it will take the bite out of his depression or not and not some discursive history stuff although if you talked about the Civil War, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, some guys called the Diggers (not boggers, not as far as he knew), or about the Renaissance he will listen all day, as long as you realize that you will be listening all night, say that the blues, you know, the quintessential black musical contribution to the American songbook along with first cousin jazz that breaks you out of your depression about whatever ails you or the world, was formed down in the Mississippi muds, down in some sweat-drenched bayou, down in some woody hollow all near Mister’s plantation, mill, or store. Well they might be right in a way about how it all started in America as a coded response to Mister’s, Master’s, Captain’s wicked perverse ways back in slavery times, later back in Mister James Crow times (now too but in a different code, but the same old Mister do this and not that, do that but not this just like when old James ran the code). Sam believed however they were off by several maybe more generations and off by a few thousand miles from its origins in hell-bent Africa, hell-bent when Mister’s forbears took what he thought was the measure of some poor grimy “natives” and shipped them in death slave boats and brought them to the Mississippi muds, bayous and hollows (those who survived the horrendous middle passage without being swallowed up by the unfriendly seas). Took peoples, proud Nubians who had created very sharp and productive civilizations when Mister’s forbears were running around raggedly wondering what the hell a spoon was for when placed in their dirty clenched fingers, wondered still later how the heck to use the damn thing, and why and uprooted them whole.          

    Uprooted you hear but somehow that beat, that tah, tat, tah, tah, tat, tah played on some stretched nailed string tightened against some cabin post by young black boys kept Africa home alive. Kept it alive while women, mothers, grandmothers and once in a while despite the hard conditions some great-grandmother who nursed and taught the little ones the old home beat, made them keep the thing alive. Kept alive too Mister’s forced on them religion strange as it was, kept the low branch spirituals that mixed with blues alive in plain wood churches but kept it alive. So a few generations back black men took all that sweat, anger, angst, humiliation, and among themselves “spoke” home truth low down mean mistreating mama, two-timing man, cut you if you run, weary tune blues on juke joint no electricity Saturday nights out in the back woods accompanied by Willie’s fresh made brew and then sang high white collar penance blues come Sunday morning plain wood church time.  Son House, Charley Patton, Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt and a lot of guys who went to their graves undiscovered in the salt sweat sultry Delta night carried on, and some sisters too, some younger sisters who heard the beat and heard the high collar Sunday spirituals.

    Some sisters like Odetta, big-voiced, big-voiced in a naked world, speaking of freedom trains with her brothers and sister jam packed on the road, speaking of sweated field hand labor for damn Mister, man, women and child, speaking of that dirty bastard Mister James Crow and his do this and do that and don’t do this and don’t that like his charges were mere children to ordered about, or hung from stange fruit trees and lying down in some shallow bottomland grave chains tied around the neck, speaking of the haunted northern star which turned Mister’s plantation indoors as it headed north, speaking of finding some cool shaded place where Mister would not disturb, couldn’t disturb and making lots of funny duck, odd-ball,  searching for roots white college students whose campus halls she filled, marvel, mainly marvel, that they had heard some ancient Nubian Queen, some deep-voiced Mother Africa calling them back to the cradle of civilization, calling them back to where all, everything began.  

    And then Sam knew, or began to know, what that long ago fugitive beat that stayed in his head meant.         


     
     

    Join The Last Days Of The Maine Peace Walk

     

    Thursday, October 22, 2015

    On The Death Of Voting







    In Cambridge- The U.S. - Saudi Alliance: Disaster for the Middle East

    The U.S. - Saudi Alliance: Disaster for the Middle East


    Boston area launch of the Coalition against the US-Saudi Alliance

    When: Friday, November 13, 2015, 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
    Where: First Church in Cambridge • 11 Garden Street • near Harvard Square T stop • Cambridge
    The US-Saudi Arabia alliance was founded after World War II for oil and empire. Saudi Arabia crushed Arab Spring in Bahrain, is bombing innocent civilians in Yemen, exports extremism and is creating closer ties with Israel.
    The US-Saudi relationship is a key reason for the instability and terror inflicted across the Middle East by murderous sectarian groups, repressive governments and US and Saudi bombing campaigns. Breaking up this destructive US-Saudi relationship will be a major step towards peace in the region.

    Medea Benjamin

    Code Pink, speaking on the corrupt US-Saudi alliance; Code Pink is a co-founder of the Coalition Against the US-Saudi Alliance

    Rabyaah Althaibani

    on war & human rights abuses in her homeland of Yemen
    Sponsored by United for Justice with Peace
    Cosponsored by: American Friends Service Committee, Massachusetts Global Action, Massachusetts Peace Action, UNAC (United National Antiwar Coalition), and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom
    contact: info@justicewithpeace.org617-383-4857
    Related Events:
    5 pm: Rally in Harvard Square against the war on Yemen
    Saturday 10am: Brunch hosted by Women's International League for Peace & Freedom - Newton - call 617 244 8054

    Upcoming Events: 

    Sweet Dreams Of Peace-With The Lyrics Of Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream In Mind

    Sweet Dreams Of Peace-With The Lyrics Of Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream In Mind  

     



    From The Pen Of Sam Lowell  

     

    A lot of folk music, of what Pete Markin, my late friend and fellow corner boy at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys in North Adamsville where we came of age, called the folk minute of the early 1960s after it had been blasted out of place, hell back to Clinch Mountain, Black Mountain, or Hard Rock Candy Mountain by the British musical invasion, you know the Beatles and Stones and subsequent acid-etched rock craze, Airplane, Grateful Dead, The Who was mixed up in my mind with all the various political currents of the time. Stuff like when we were kids and wet behind the ears dutifully going down to some basement air-raid shelter on a teacher’s command to wait out the horrid fact of whether we would survive the next few hours of the Russkies had decided that that the jig was up for the world and had unleashed an atomic nightmare on us. Worse when we were short-ordered to take cover under our decrepit desks for the same purpose like that would save us from the hell-fire explosions we knew were coming along with that atomic blast.

     

    I made Markin (that is what we all called him early on before in high school our corner boy leader at Jack Slack’s, Frankie Riley dubbed him “The Scribe” for his two thousand arcane facts and his kind of weird ideas which we didn’t, get this, give a rat’s ass about when all we cared about was girls, cars and getting dough for girls and cars) laugh one time when I said I would rather drop my drawers and “moon” the bastard reds if that was to be my last hurrah. Stuff like that red scare business where commies, you know, reds, guys and gals who took dough from Moscow, in gold they said and did everything under the sun to undermine the American way of life back in the golden age of that possibility. Stuff like black civil rights down South that many North Adamsville fathers and mothers were getting all nervous about in all-white North Adamsville because they knew the blacks who lived in Boston not that far away would figure out a way to head to our town and disrupt our way of life. And stuff like social commentary on the way people lived in little boxes all the same, didn’t want to take risk number one to watch out for the other guy and we were happy to keep their heads down and eyes to the ground while guys like Grandfather Ike took care of business for all of us.     

     

    Now Markin was, due a lot to the horrible home life he had with his mother carping on him all the time and not letting him breathe breath number one without letting out with some notion that he was going to hell for his sins, escaped a lot to Harvard Square in Cambridge where the local folk scene was centered then in the slew of coffeehouses and cafes where everybody with any pretension to know three chords and a couple of lyrics was holding forth on any given night. So until he came back to earth with the revival of rock and roll, the music that we all really grew up with, with Mick, Keith, John, Paul, Ringo, George and later Grace, Marty, Jim, Jimi, Janis, Davis, Neil and the rest Markin would just because he was Markin go on and on about this folk singer or song or that one.

     

    Me, well I could take it or leave it then, and now. Some of the stuff frankly made me grind my teeth, and worse when Markin would shepherd me over to some ill-lit coffeehouse for a sipped cup of coffee and a pastry in order to listen to some old traditional song with about sixty-five verses, or some modern song that had a lot to do with loneliness, angst, the struggle down South and the campaign against nuclear war. Yeah, stuff like that which was only made tolerable by the nice looking girls with long what looked like ironed hair it was so straight who were friendly as long as you knew a couple of the songs and were ready to go on and on about their pedigree. (Markin did yeoman’s work and bailed me out of a couple of tight spots when I was questioned on the subject since he had those two thousand folk facts at the ready that if you can believe this really impressed those girls.)

     

    All of these memories hit home recently, summer of 2015, when I was at a conference convened to support and get others to support the recently agreed to the Iran nuclear weapons plan hammered out by the this government and Iran in order to neutralize the nuclear threat from that quarter for a while. One night the entertainment consisted of a group of four local folk-singers (the locale New York City so local folk singers still means the Village) who regaled us with songs from that folk minute I started out mentioning here. Naturally for the crowd the edge was toward the political protest kind of song and in case anybody in the audience had forgotten the lyrics or had been too young to have been washed by that minute they were provided in nice little packets so that everybody as is usually the case with this folk music set can sing along. That is when the lyrics to Last Night I Had The Strangest Dream hit me after I reviewed the words which I had not heard for a long time.    

     

    Now the gist of the song is that somehow, someplace, sometime, the leaders of the world presumably pushed hard by the peoples of the world, the little people, the as Markin called them, “the fellaheen” after a Jack Kerouac fashion he took up after reading the Mexican Girl section of his classic buddy travelogue On The Road, agreed to ban weapons and war as the means of solving the on-going disputes in the world. A great idea, no question, although more honored in the breech than the observance. I got to thinking though that since we were at a meeting to push the Iran nuclear agreement forward that this more limited way to deal with the pressing issues was far more likely to be the way to end the damn arms race than to have a United Nations room full of dignitaries signing off on some paper agreement. That got me thinking about how people must have felt, must have been dancing in the streets, when the armistice was signed ending the blood-bath of World War I, when the Russians headed fast-forward into Berlin in Europe World  War II, when in all ignorance they heard the Japanese had surrendered to the atomic bomb in Pacific World War II, when the nuclear test ban treaty was signed, when that last helicopter lifted off from that American Embassy roof-top in Saigon, and a hundred other smaller ends to the horrible wars of the 20th century now seeping into the 21st century. Small episodic dances no question, but maybe paving the way. Let’s hope so with this latest possibility. And while I still grind my teeth at the sound of most approaching folk songs and curse Markin for ever introducing me to the genre this song I will gladly join in singing.