BOOKS / Alan Wieder : Paul Buhle's 'Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith'

Paul Buhle's 'Radical Jesus':
Comic artists explore the history
and social message of Jesus Christ

By Alan Wieder / The Rag Blog / December 19, 2013

Paul Buhle, the noted historian, author, graphic novel publisher, and editor of Radical Jesus, is Thorne Dreyer's guest on the 200th edition of Rag Radio, Friday, December 20, from 2-3 p.m. (CST). Rag Radio airs and streams live on cooperatively-run KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas, and is rebroadcast and streamed on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA, Sunday at 10 a.m. (EST) and on KPFT's HD-3 Channel in Houston, Wednesday at 3 p.m. (CST). The podcast of this show can be found at the Internet Archive.

[Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith. Paul Buhle, Editor; Sabrina Jones, Gary Dumm, Nick Thorkelson, Artists (2013: Herald Press); Paperback; 128 pp; $24.99.]

Paul Buhle is one of the most prolific and insightful critics from the American left. While his topics at first glance appear incredibly eclectic, closer reading uncovers a sharp focus that thoughtfully challenges class disparity, racism, and imperialism in the United States and throughout the world.

The breadth of his work, even if you consider only his collaborative graphic titles, is mind-boggling as the topics include Che, Yiddishkeit, SDS, the Wobblies, Emma Goldman, FDR, the Beats, and Isadora Duncan. And now, in collaboration with artists Sabrina Jones, Gary Dumm, and Nick Thorkelson, comes Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith.

Like Buhle’s prior books, Radical Jesus investigates the inequalities that exist in the world, historically and presently, but this time through a theological lens. After an introduction, the sections of the book are “Radical Gospel,” “Radical History,” and “Radical Resistance.”

As a focus for reading the book we can assume that liberation theology began with Jesus and carries on at the present time. Each section is illustrated by a different artist but is pulled together by both content and style. As Buhle explains in the Introduction: “The book has been designed with a purposeful color progression from black and white in the first section, to a color choice reminiscent of the illuminated texts of the Middle Ages, to the full color of modern times.”

Combining substance and style, the drawings and text constantly switch between social issues of the past and the present. Interviewed by a reporter for the Brown University newspaper, Buhle said that he wrote the book for the young people involved in the Occupy Movement.

Oh, let’s say I was speaking to those young people. I’m not a person who goes to church. But I was speaking to those young people and to others who were looking for some alternative, there’s one page in the comic that says no to either passivity or violence. For some other way to respond to the crises, and you know, Americans by and large, still, have this religious thing, this mystique. It’s good to think of a way to speak to them in this fashion.

There are numerous poignant frames in Radical Jesus; below are some samples. With stark black and white graphics page 23 in the “Radical Gospel” section, by Sabrina Jones, begins with a priest looking at a dead man lying in the street, “unclean -- better keep away!” Another priest does the same but then comes the Good Samaritan who helps the man who isn’t dead -- who is the Christian.

Stories of Jesus and class disparity continue in this section with a distressing sequence on preaching and religious leaders on page 35, “They preach – But they don’t practice.” Reminiscent of of Bishop Tutu’s story of Europeans coming to Africa: “We had the land and they had the bible. Then they said, ‘Let us pray.’ And we dutifully shut our eyes, and when we said amen at the end and opened our eyes, why, they had the land and we had the bible.”

But of course Bishop Tutu said much more. Corresponding to Radical Jesus:

This God did not just talk... He showed himself to be a doing God. Perhaps we might add another point about God -- he takes sides. He is not a neutral God. He took the side of the slaves, the oppressed, the victims. He is still the same even today; he sides with the poor, the hungry, the oppressed, and the victims of injustice.

Gary Dumm did the “Radical History” section of the book with Laura Dumm and others. This section tells the story of dissent beginning in the 14th Century and concluding with the abolitionists. John Wycliffe, the Anabaptists, Quakers, and the Grimke sisters are introduced with many other people who challenged church hierarchy in the name of social justice. On page 63, Buhle collaborates with Dumm on a story called “Escape from Galley Slavery.”

Some martyrs were burned at the stake, others were drowned, decapitated, had their tongues ripped out, or their mouths filled with gunpowder. To go to a violent death with cold determination or even good cheer was to prove to all present that the believer placed ultimate trust in God’s judgment.

However, these executions were ultimately cynical and class disparately vicious.

French and Belgian royal courts sometimes offered ‘banquets’ for the intended victim the day before the execution. In the city hall, the accused would be compelled to take the seat of honor between the mayor and a local religious leader while being mocked and offered expensive food and wine.

Many a martyr refused to eat or drink!

Drawing by Sabrina Jones
from Radical Jesus.

The last pages of “Radical History” speak to the Quakers in Pennsylvania losing the fight for Indian rights. Two frames appear on page 85 with the first showing Quaker representatives in the Pennsylvania Assembly resigning and walking out of the chambers in protest of oppressive actions to attack Indians.

The second frame, titled “What was Lost,” depicts people in a living room watching a baseball game between the Philadelphia Quakers and New York Iroquois -- shades of Howard Zinn history.

The 39 pages of the book’s last section, “Radical Resistance,” is thick as the art of Nick Thorkelson and the text speak to the many more modern quests for social justice through questions/statements of a grand diversity of people on-the-ground testifying at a faith-based meeting.

The courage of abolitionist Sojourner Truth is portrayed in a story called “Steal Away: Abolitionism and Black Freedom.” We meet those who fought for civil rights in the United States like Rosa Parks, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttleworth, Bob Moses, and many people whose names we don’t know.

The New Jim Crow is portrayed on page 104 with Reverend Jeremiah Wright connecting the incarceration of blacks in the United States with the plight of Jesus. On Reverend Wright: “A prophetic voice much maligned in the mainstream media but cherished by the thousands of black churches allied against mass incarceration.”

“Radical Resistance” also tell us of Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin’s Catholic Worker movement as a lead into the anti-war actions of the Berrigan brothers -- liberation theology and the work and political assassination in El Salvador of Archbishop Oscsar Romero. All of these accounts of activism conclude with stories of people that we have never heard of who fight for social justice in both their communities and throughout the world -- and there lies the "mission" of Paul Buhle and his collaborators in Radical Jesus.

Buhle writes:

The radicalism of Jesus has nothing to do with men hoarding guns against the imagined threat of black helicopters, or bearded fanatics burning down schools for women. Instead, Jesus goes to the roots of assorted hatreds -- not only our destructive exploitation of humanity but also our plundering of creation. All of life is endangered and we cannot afford these hatreds running rampant much longer.

Radical Jesus provides the stories of models, teachers, for the young people for whom Buhle says the book was written. The book’s portraits, graphics, and text are thoughtful and powerful, and are important not only for young activists, but also for all of us who thoughtfully work for social justice.

[Alan Wieder is an oral historian who lives in Portland, Oregon. His latest book, Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War Against Apartheid was published in the United States by Monthly Review Press and in South Africa by Jacana Media. Read more articles by Alan Wieder on The Rag Blog.]

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Paul Buhle : Comix Artist Spain Rodriguez (1940-2012)

Spain Rodriguez: Transforming comics. Image from CBLDF.
The passing of a comix pioneer:
Spain Rodriguez (1940-2012)

By Paul Buhle / Dissent / December 12, 2012

In Trashman: Agent of the Sixth International, the signature saga of his early years, Rodriguez's revolutionaries took revenge on a truly evil American ruling class.

We are now so far from the 1960s and ’70s that the crucial locations, personalities, and moments of one very popular art form’s transformation have been largely forgotten. Spain Rodriguez, with a handful of others (the best remembered are happily still with us: Gilbert Shelton, Robert Crumb, Bill Griffith, Kim Deitch, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, and Sharon Rudahl, to name a few), pushed the comics agenda so far forward that no return to the limitations of superheroes and banal daily newspaper strips would ever be possible.

Comic art, belatedly recognized in The New York Times (and assorted museums) as a real art and not a corrupting children’s literature, owes much to them.

Spain (his birth name was Manuel, his father a Spanish immigrant, his mother an Italian-American artist) grew up in Buffalo, New York, a rebellious working-class kid who wore long sideburns and was impressed by the civil rights movement. He dropped out of art school in Connecticut and, after returning to Buffalo and working a factory job with a motorcycle gang engagement, landed in New York in time for the efflorescence of Underground Comix (styled with an “x” to distinguish itself) in a comic tabloid offshoot of the East Village Other.

His colleagues were a strangely mixed crew, all of them old enough to have been influenced by EC Comics, the most politically liberal and artistically accomplished of the old comics industry, and the one hardest hit by the congressional hearings of the McCarthy era. (As with attacks on the Left, every charge of subversion and perversion hid Middle-American outrage: these were Jews corrupting innocent American youth.)

In a sense, every “underground” artist of these early days sought revenge in the name of comic art, and realized it through the depiction of sex, violence, and anti-war and anti-racist sentiment unthinkable in what remained of the mainstream. Sex and violence, lamentably, became chief attractions to many readers, recalling the “headlights” (aka “sweater girl”) crime and horror comics of the late 1940s, albeit with a left-wing or libertarian ambience.

The whole comix artistic crowd moved to San Francisco around 1970, joining Robert Crumb and a few others already there, part of the acid-rock, post–Summer of Love setting. Underground comix, replicating the old kids-comics format but now in black and white, grew up alongside the underground press, whose reprinting of comix created the market for the books.

Crumb was the artist whose work sold the best, in the hundreds of thousands, but Spain was widely regarded as the most political. He was heavily influenced by the most bohemian of the EC comics world, wild man Wallace Wood, whose sci-fi adventures depicted civilizations recovering from atomic war and whose Mad Comics stories assaulted the 1950s commercialization of popular culture. Wood’s dames were also extremely sexy, too overtly sexy for the diluted satire of the later Mad Magazine.

Spain Rodriguez. Photo by Sean Stewart / Babylon Falling.
Trashman: Agent of the Sixth International was Rodriguez’s signature saga in these early years, serialized in underground papers, comix anthologies, and eventually collected in comic book form as Subvert Comics. These revolutionaries took revenge on a truly evil American ruling class in assorted ways, many of them violent, but they also had fun and sex, and were subject to many self-satirizing gags, in the process.

By the middle 1970s, his work had broadened into more social and historical themes, often with class, sex, and violence highlighting his points. Histories of revolutions and anti-fascist actions (and all their complexities) inspired some of his closest reading of real events, but he had no fixed point on the left-wing scale.

He admired and drew about anti-Bolshevist anarchist leader Nestor Makhno and also anti-Stalinist Spanish anarchist Durruti, but he also drew about Red Army members facing death fighting the Germans, and so on. (Several of these pieces are now reprinted in Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection, an anthology from that 1980s series, just published by PM Press.)

In recollections of the internal conflicts among comix artists, sometimes pitting feminists against male-dominated circles, Rodriguez is remembered as having been unusually helpful and egalitarian, a memory that contrasts curiously with his sometimes sado-masochistic plot lines but not so curiously with the gender-equality of the sybarites (“Big Bitch” was Trashman’s female counterpart, the tough working-class broad with sex cravings for weaker men).

He poked and prodded San Francisco’s self-image as a haven of liberated sex, sometimes making his younger self a player on the scene. He also helped set in motion the vital murals movement in San Francisco’s Mission District, but was likely best known on the West Coast for his many posters of San Francisco Mime Troupe openings.

Spain Rodriquez lasted long enough to see his work in square covers (if not often hard covers), his unique and quasi-realistic modernism preserved for generations ahead.

The validation of comic art from near the end of the century onward -- Spiegelman’s Maus and left-wing lesbian Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home high among the evidence of artistic achievement -- found Rodriguez with a Salon series, “The Dark Hotel,” and several books of his own. Devil Dog, a biography of disillusioned Marine Corps general Smedley Butler, and Nightmare Alley, an adaptation of the classic noir novel, are easily among the best. Che, his graphic biography of Che Guevara, reached the furthest, with editions published everywhere from Latin America to Europe, Japan, and Malaysia.

At the time of his death, Rodriguez was amid “Yiddish Bohemians,” a strip about Jewish-American puppeteers during the 1920s and ’30s, in what would be the last in a stunning series of collaborations with playwright-professor Joel Schechter. Rodriguez had started a Woody Guthrie poster for an upcoming Bay Area concert and, had he lived, would have drawn a history of the 2003 San Francisco hotel strike.

After more than 40 years (and the disappearance of well over 90 percent of many little-remembered artists’ work in yellowing pulp), the impact of the Underground Comix world remains more a matter of style than substance, daring more than narrative and artistic content. This is unfortunate, because so many artists had particular contributions worthy of note, worthy of reprinting for the sake of comic art alone.

Spain Rodriquez lasted long enough to see his work in square covers (if not often hard covers), his unique and quasi-realistic modernism preserved for generations ahead. That he never lost his political vision or his sense of humor should go without saying, but those of us lucky enough to see him teach or to be taught by him felt the deep impact of his humanism as well.

Rodriguez died at home in San Francisco, with his wife, Susan Stern, a documentary filmmaker, and his daughter, Nora Rodriguez, by his side. A retrospect of his work, including a short documentary film made by his wife, is now in place at the Burchfield Penny Art Center in Buffalo, the second exhibit in Buffalo to honor this improbable local hero.

[Cultural historian Paul Buhl is professor emeritus at Brown University. He publishes radical comic books and graphic novels. Buhle was the editor of Che and is co-editor of the anthology Bohemians, to appear in 2013, with two strips by Rodriguez. Read more articles by Paul Buhle on The Rag Blog.]

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Mari Jo and Paul Buhle : Wisconsin's Historic 'Solidarity Sing Along'

Solidarity Sing Along at the Wisconsin State Capitol. Photo from Solidarity Sing Along / Facebook.
The historic Wisconsin 'Solidarity Sing Along'

Dubbed the 'longest continuously running singing protest in history,' the Solidarity Sing Along is about to celebrate its 350th performance.

By Mari Jo and Paul Buhle / The Progressive / April 10, 2012

MADISON, Wisconsin -- More than once, left-leaning music critics have pronounced the demise of the Seeger-esque, Almanacs labor-themed song. Along with Pete goes the whole genre of political folk revival, including, for the most disparaging, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. A veritable mess of clichés, our critic snaps. This music, especially the lyrics, neither clever nor funny nor inspiring.

The appearance of Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger himself at the Obama inauguration might have prompted some doubts in this judgment. The Seeger Sessions recorded by Bruce Springsteen in 2009 might have ratcheted up those doubts.

What happened in the Wisconsin Uprising of 2011-2012 provides an even more persuasive counter example. The Solidarity Sing Along, which began on March 11, 2011, with a small group of singers and a one-page song sheet, revived the protest song and made it a major component of the political movement.

The Solidarity singers responded in full voice to Governor Scott Walker’s curtailment of the collective bargaining rights of state workers. In shaping their protest, they mixed familiar civil rights anthems such as “We Shall Overcome” with the sacred songs of the union movement. Every weekday, they engage a shifting population of singers in songs touting the rights of working people, the meaning of class struggle, and, asserting, in words of Billy Bragg, “There Is Power in the Union.”

Solidarity singers continue to gather at the Capitol in numbers ranging from 20-30 to more than 200. Barring officially scheduled events, they circle the Rotunda floor, with their conductor strategically placed before the bust of Robert M. La Follette, the state’s most beloved opposition politician.

Solidarity Sing Along group outside Wisconsin State Capitol. Photo by Rebecca Kemble / The Progressive.
On other days they brave the cold winds, rain, and snow of the Wisconsin winter and, in recent weeks, revel in the unusually warm temperatures. For the outdoor gatherings (Walker banned all instruments from the Capitol), musicians bring an assortment of instruments -- violins, guitars, mandolins, sousaphones, and squeeze boxes -- and play together as “The Learning Curve” pick-up band.

The selection of songs varies from day to day, but every sing-along concludes with the group’s theme song, “Solidarity Forever.” A timely favorite is “Roll Out the Roll Call,” with new lyrics by Sheboyganites Frank and Mary Koczan. “Recall Scott Walker…/Give him a kick in the rear!/ Recall Scott Walker…./Toss him right out on his ear!” If the chorus of Ralph Chaplin’s labor classic routinely produces raised fists, the updated “Beer Barrel Polka” invariably stirs a few in the crowd to polka, German-style. This is Wisconsin, after all.

The driving force through all these performances has been R. Chris Reeder. Although he worked as an actor and stage technician before moving to Madison with his wife, Lisa Penning, Reeder had never directed anything musical before taking on the Solidarity Sing Along. But he is tall and limber and comfortable with occupying center-stage. His voice is distinctive and deep and carries high above the rumbling of a crowd. He says he lacks prior political experience, but was simply eager to jump at the opportunity to oppose Walker’s draconian anti-union legislation.

In a recent interview, Reeder described the sing-along as a source of empowerment for the singers as much as a political statement aimed at the public. It turns out to be both: tourists to Madison regularly drop in the Capitol either to watch from a distance or to join in the singing.

Invitations to conduct sing-alongs are now coming from distant parts of Wisconsin. Recently a small group made the six-hour drive to Ashland to lead a sing-along far “up north.” The Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, a coalition of activist groups founded in 1991, posts songbooks on its website and encourages communities throughout the state to start their own Solidarity Sing Alongs.

Reeder, who was born and raised near Seattle, is at home in Wisconsin. He finds his way to the Capitol between making deliveries to grocery stores for a local artisan bakery. He also receives a small stipend from the Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice, and picks up a few extra dollars from the sale of Solidarity Sing Along t-shirts and sweatshirts emblazoned with the motto “This Is What Democracy Sounds Like.”

So intimate is Reeder with the several dozen regulars and hundreds of admirers that the details of the recent birth of his first-born, August, reached his many fans on the Solidarity Sing Along Facebook page and generated thousands of “likes.”

Heroes, even those possessing great charm, are created by the times, according to the old saw. When Walker tried to force the sing-along out of the Capitol, the singers stood their ground. At every performance, Reeder read the relevant passage in the state Constitution: “The right of the people peaceably to assemble, to consult for the common good, and to petition the government, or any department thereof, shall never be abridged.”

On March 17, 2012, the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin presented Reeder, on behalf of the Solidarity Sing Along, a much deserved award, the William Gorham Rice Civil Libertarian of the Year Award “for the expression of the First Amendment rights of free speech and freedom of assembly.” Even more recently, Leadership Wisconsin, a group that promotes the development of leaders to strengthen communities, tagged Reeder for yet futher recognition.

Dubbed the “longest continuously running singing protest in history,” the Solidarity Sing Along is about to celebrate its “semiseptcentennial,” that is, its 350th performance on April 26th at the Majestic Theatre, Madison’s oldest theater, a former vaudeville house that opened in 1906. The event coincides with the release of a CD of its standard repertoire of songs, which were recorded in February at a local Unitarian Universalist church. (Authors’ disclaimer: we were there for the major session, but sang softly far from the microphone, befitting limited talents.).

The lyrics may not be deft prose, but topicality and regionalism have their place. Woody Guthrie’s iconic ballad now goes: “From Lake Geneva to Madeleine Island/ From the rolling prairies,/ to our lovely dairies,/ Wisconsin was made for you and me!”

Lead violinist Daithi Wolfe seasonally updated the lyrics of a St. Patrick’s Day favorite: “Scotty Boy, Scotty Boy We Loathe You So…”

Several songs have inspired hand and body gestures. The chorus of “Bring Back Wisconsin to Me,” with new lyrics by Madison folk favorites Lou and Peter Berryman, involves “swaying the Wisconsin Way,” first left, then right. “Roll the Union On” prompts the “rolling” of arm over arm. The ever-popular “Scotty, We’re Coming for You!” (written by the local Indie-Irish-Rock band, The Kissers) ends energetically with index fingers pointed at the Capitol.

It should also be added that the Solidarity Sing Along is nothing but a joyous occasion. We wonder: When in the history of labor choruses did the singer-amateurs have more fun? It’s sheer pleasure to sing the rousing lyrics adapted from Florence Reece’s beloved “Which Side Are You On?”: “Don’t believe the Governor/ don’t listen to his lies/ Working folks don’t have a chance,/ unless we organize!”

[Mary Jo and Paul Buhle are the editors of It Started in Wisconsin: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Labor Protest (Verso Books). This article was first published at The Progressive. Read more articles by Mari Jo and Paul Buhle on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Paul Buhle : 'Climbin' Jacob's Ladder'

Climbin' Jacob's Ladder:
The Jack O’Dell Story

By Paul Buhle / The Rag Blog / May 31, 2011

[Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder: The Freedom Movement Writings of Jack O’Dell, edited by Nikhil Pal Singh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), Hardcover; 298 pp., $34.95.]

Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder is an important document in political history, even more so in exploring the intimate political and cultural history of the left so often undiscussed, or discussed only among trusted friends.

Speaking as a teacher of social movement history (the 1960s in particular), I often advised students that the simplest primary research they could do was right there on the library shelves: the bound volumes of the preeminent African American progressive quarterly journal Freedomways (1961-85).

There hangs a tale, and not a simple one. It is very much the story of Jack O’Dell, if not by any means his whole story, because he became Freedomways' associate managing editor early on, wrote a great many of the unsigned editorials, and did much to provide its framework and its connection with the activists and political actions of the time.

A former intimate advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but also a member of the Communist Party during the 1950s, O’Dell represented and also exemplified the survival of what we may call the Popular Front, actually surviving repression to fight on another day.

We need some serious backstory here. Nikhil Pal Singh, one of the outstanding younger Marxist thinkers of today’s academy and an active participant in many projects, intellectual and activist alike, is the perfect editor for this volume. His Introduction provides rare insight into O’Dell’s life and work.

We can start the story with Hunter Pitts O’Dell (his birth name), a blue-collar Detroiter and then Xavier college student, along with his new friend, future New York rent-strike leader Jesse Gray. O’Dell left college to fight fascism, joining the Coast Guard in 1943 and the racially integrated, radical-minded National Maritime Union.

On ship, he read Du Bois and learned more about the complications of colonialism, communism, and the New Deal.

Coming back from the war, O’Dell enthusiastically signed up with “Operation Dixie,” the ill-fated effort to organize Southern workers, black and white, and thus to transform the most conservative region of the country. But, in the new mood of the Cold War, most labor organizations were busily going backward, and the great hopes for the South died with the purge of the CIO’s once-powerful left.

O’Dell moved into that dangerous, volatile region and quickly demonstrated his leadership skills, earning a “Citizen of the Year” award from Miami’s African-American press for his successful mediation of a racial incident in a local grocery store, turning mob rage into an effective boycott.

He got himself invited to a conference of the still-strong Southern National Youth Congress (where he met or came indirectly into contact with some leading African American militants and intellectuals, including Angela Davis’s mother, Sallye Davis).

But it was Du Bois’s address to this 1946 meeting that really hit home with O’Dell: Reconstruction had been betrayed, and now it was time for a new Reconstruction.

These were not socialistic ideas, necessarily, but they were certainly radical, and, as late as 1946, they were vitally alive among the notions within the New Deal coalition that seemed, despite the death of Franklin Roosevelt, still very strong.

Then the tide turned suddenly, and all sorts of public figures who had been treated with respect and admiration found themselves assaulted with red-baiting and, especially in the South, with black-baiting and new anticommunist laws, as well. Lynching was not quite back in style, but Northern liberals of the Truman variety did not seriously object to FBI pursuit of civil rights activists, if they happened to be tainted with “red” records.

Many prominent liberals, including Senator Hubert Humphrey and his sometime speechwriter Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., made it clear that isolation and prosecution of anything resembling sympathy for the Soviet Union -- or even resistance to the Cold War machine -- was a prerequisite to racial progress. Only the brave or foolish would actually join the Communist Party at a time like this.

Mark O’Dell down among the brave. And not entirely reckless in his bravery. The wider following of the Popular Front -- surrounding the Communist Party but less demanding in many ways -- in the South stubbornly held on in Birmingham, Alabama, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, New Orleans, Louisiana, and a scattering of other spots. O’Dell did what civil rights organizing could be done, at a time when the Alabama legislature banned the NAACP.

The pressure from authorities was severe, and arrest could come at any time, so O’Dell lived and worked under a variety of pseudonyms, moved often, met secretly with other activists, and moved on. Snagged in 1958 by the FBI at a job with a black-owned insurance company, he used his constitutional right against self-incrimination and refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, gaining almost instant notoriety as “one of the most belligerent” witnesses ever called.

Leaving the South, he joined his old pal Jesse Gray in tenant organizing and tactically took on a new first name, Jack (his father’s name). Even as the repression got to him, the ground was shifting; the Southern work of Dr. King and others had made all-out suppression of black rights more difficult. Meanwhile, leading liberals now fretted aloud that if the United States could not bring some kind of equality to its minorities, it would face rough going in a world where the new nations were mostly nonwhite, and anticolonialism translated easily into anticapitalism.

Thus O’Dell, the formal intellectual-organizer, emerged and swiftly found himself in the lead, creating, for protest sit-ins, a benefit concert -- featuring the likes of Diahann Carroll, Harry Belafonte, Pete Seeger, and Sidney Poitier.

By the time the 1960 presidential campaign opened, he was asked to coordinate get-out-the-vote efforts in the Bronx for Kennedy, and soon thereafter, joined the staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). That is, close to King and not far from the FBI’s vendetta against King, which intended to unseat and replace the great leader with someone more malleable.

On the verge of becoming Executive Director of the SCLC, O’Dell was instead forced out by the pressure that Kennedy administration operatives put on King.

A new life began with Freedomways: no one wrote more often, across the next 20 years, essays and unsigned editorials alike. O’Dell was hugely valuable for his contacts with activists, artists, and intellectuals. Freedomways was a truly gorgeous-looking magazine, not large in format but slick and full of illustrations, photos, and art of various kinds. A bit like the old pre-1920 Masses magazine or the New Masses at its late 1930s peak, it also resembled the magazines and newspapers of the “New Negro” in Harlem, 1910s to 1920s, saluting black achievement and style.

To say that Communists were involved was obvious to anyone knowledgeable, and looking closely at the masthead: the editor was Esther Jackson, Southern Negro Youth veteran and wife of Communist leader James Jackson. But “Communism” rarely appeared in print here, and the real topics at hand were in the freedom struggle; likewise in antiwar sentiment and mobilization; also in varieties of Pan-Africanism, from Mother Africa to the Caribbean, United Kingdom, United States, and Canada.

It was not a Black Nationalist magazine, an aspect for which it earned considerable criticism and real hostility (Harold Cruse’s polemical attacks, famous at the time, attacked the magazine for failing to credit black capitalism), but which was also the legacy of the Popular Front.

Freedomways carried the dream of the New Deal 1940s resiliently, no matter what others might do or say.

O’Dell’s work was not confined to Freedomways, nor did it end with its demise in 1987. As a close advisor to Jesse Jackson and the PUSH organization, a member of U.S. delegations visiting sites across the troubled Third World, a key intellectual figure in campaigns, from discrediting South African Apartheid to advancing the Nuclear Freeze, he was especially key in the Rainbow Coalition and Jackson’s run for president in 1988. He decided to leave the United States shortly after, and continues his long-lived engagements from Vancouver, Canada.

By including a selection of his writings, Climbin’ Jacob’s Ladder saves much of O’Dell’s work from being left in libraries and forgotten. These essays were not shortened or excerpted: they are historical documents deserving to be understood in their own time and in ours. Each essay is carefully and tellingly introduced by Singh, who modestly takes on himself the task of explaining its context.

These essays are not easily summarized because the political and historical points are so numerous and so precise that readers are urged to take up particulars especially useful to themselves. Singh observes that Marxism is a major source of insight for O’Dell but by no means the only source; as someone wrote about C.L.R. James, his black Marxism is not an adjunct of Marxism but something different, closer to the overlap of two intimately related, but not identical, trends. Nor, of course, is it limited by what he learned in a decade or so of being in or around the Communist Party.

One crucial thing O’Dell did learn, in my view, more a product of the Popular Front than Marxist ideas or Communist interpretations: that current political wisdom always rests on a careful strategic and tactical assessment of the balance of forces. The Democratic Party, to take the obvious example, is never out of the picture -- or the whole of the picture.

Understanding class, racial, and cultural dynamics of social movements offers an organic approach to how things stand and may be changed. Understanding the world picture provides the widest-angle view of the possibilities and dangers.

Thus, the essays here, and Singh’s annotations as well, illuminate a long history of American racism, its connection to slavery days and to colonialism -- legacies painfully alive into the present day.

O’Dell lucidly describes the rise of the civil rights movement, and the brutal response of authorities to the late 1960s uprisings, as a second Reconstruction, and a second project to overturn the consequences of Reconstruction. Strategically, O’Dell sees the political world around the Rainbow Coalition as dangerous, but promising, territory; and the narrowing of the movement to electoral politics (worse, the seeking of foundation money to accomplish social change) as part of a downward spiral.

Is there a road back upward? In an optimistic Afterword, written in 2009, O’Dell notes the mass enthusiasm for a certain black presidential candidate. The enthusiasm was more real than the candidate, as it now appears in history’s rearview mirror. But O’Dell was shrewd enough, as always, to point to the movement of history. Things never stay the same.

[Cultural historian Paul Buhle is professor emeritus at Brown University. He publishes radical comic books and graphic novels, and is a contributor to Monthly Review, where this article was also published.]

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Paul Buhle : Pekar and Kupferberg were Oblique Jewish Intellectuals

Harvey Pekar (left) in 2003, and Tuli Kupferberg in 1968. Photos from Getty Images / Forward.
Harvey Pekar and Tuli Kupferberg:
They looked at the world from an oblique angle

By Paul Buhle / The Rag Blog / July 28, 2010

See "On the grumpy but sweet Harvey Pekar," Below.

Harvey Pekar and Tuli Kupferberg died on the same day, July 12, and shared much, including peacenik politics, a strong sense of humor, and a passion to carve art out of the fragments of popular culture. But they were almost an American Jewish generation apart, a detail that now seems difficult to grasp entirely, but is still crucial.

Kupferberg, born in 1923, was a real bohemian of the pre-beatnik era, a hipster whose leap off a New York bridge in an attempted suicide famously appeared, without his name, in Allen Ginsberg’s seminal poem “Howl.” He once told me that he had become an anarchist in the mini-boom of postwar anti-bomb, anti-government sentiment among intellectuals and artists on both coasts.

He recalled being a young man bitterly opposed, from the left, to Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate of 1948. Meanwhile, Pekar, then 9, was following his mother’s lead, passing out Wallace leaflets in his Cleveland Jewish neighborhood. He shared his Bialystok-raised parents’ joy at the birth of Israel.

The two future artists were both shaped by the Depression and by Franklin Roosevelt, two key influences upon practically any American Jew of those years. But Kupferberg had briefly become a Trotskyist even before Roosevelt died, while Harvey remained, till the end of his life, at one with his family memory that the great leader had saved them all personally, as well as the country, from disaster.

Kupferberg and Pekar were both college dropouts -- but with a difference. Bright and focused, born on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Kupferberg graduated cum laude from Brooklyn College in 1944 (psychology and English), and hit the wall only as he began working on an advanced degree in sociology, at The New School. After that, as he recalled, he faced with equanimity a long and productive life as a luftmensch, a person who makes his living, as it were, “from the air.”

By contrast, in one of Pekar’s several autobiographical comic art books, “The Quitter,” he bitterly regrets dropping out of college after only two semesters in his native Cleveland. He couldn’t get his head around schoolwork, and slipped into bohemianism almost by accident. The two were evidently major jokesters as schoolchildren, which may have marked them out as a particular Jewish type, prepared to look at the world from an oblique angle when offered the possibility of getting friendly laughs.

Despite these differences, Kupferberg and Pekar were deeply interested intellectually, and even more deeply involved personally, in urbanism, the decay and sometime revival of the neighborhood for good or ill. Through his life’s work there, Kupferberg made himself into an iconic figure of the Lower East Side, latterly fighting gentrification, just as Pekar was forever in Cleveland, actually moving to one neighborhood from another across several decades, ahead of the bulldozers and the urban renewal that never renewed much of anything.

Their work -- in Kupferberg’s case, words, drawings and music -- was full of neighborhood people, all types, storefronts, crowds, friends (in Harvey’s case, his own first two wives, who were often not so friendly) and a sensibility all their own.

They hit upon art forms whose uniqueness will remain, long after their deaths, the signature of a time and place, hinting always, but in highly curious ways, at something larger.

Drawing by Tuli Kupferberg.

Kupferberg began writing poetry early and, if he had agreed to the definition, would be rightly classified as a Beat Poet in what might be called the Ferlinghetti or City Lights school: humane, free form, and uncensored, above all raging against the madness of the Cold War arms race. In 1958, with his future wife, Sylvia Topp, he brought out Birth, a literary magazine that would publish the likes of LeRoi Jones and Diane di Prima, among others. Living off B Street, selling 1001 Ways To Live Without Working, a beatnik humor book of his own, on the street, he ran into another poet, Ed Sanders.

The two of them opened the Peace Eye Bookstore in 1964, and were the most famous of The Fugs, one of the delightfully outrageous rock groups of the coming era. The Fugs performed endlessly at peace demonstrations and other venues. Paul McCartney foiled autograph hounds by signing himself “Tuli Kupferberg.” The Fugs wore themselves out by 1970, but Kupferberg went on and on, performing in many ways, often as inauspiciously as sending out packets of his photocopied cartoons to friends (I was one of them). Peace and resistance never failed as themes.

Pekar famously met cartoonist R. Crumb in the early 1960s, and gradually came to the conclusion that anything, even the Russian novels he loved so much, could be done in comic form. His long-running series of comics, “American Splendor,” was launched in 1976 (he, too, began as a self-publisher) and continued on almost until his death, in one format or another.

Pekar went through dozens of artists, giving them dialogue and precise directions (in the form of comic panels with stick figures). He couldn’t pay them much: Making his own living never ceased to be a struggle. But the award-winning, 2003 film American Splendor rendered him a public personality, especially on campus, where lecture fees and book sales finally gave him a modicum of financial security. It was long overdue.

One of Kupferberg’s own favorite strips (I received it several times) showed a grandmother with Kupferberg as a child. In one panel he is whistling; in the next, Granny warns, “Yidishe kinder fayfn nit!” [“Jewish children don’t whistle!”] It was obviously a fond, oddball memory of another time. Pekar also had his connection to the culture of the mameloshn, or mother tongue.

In the months before his death, Pekar was working (with me and a handful of artists) on “Yiddishland,” a book that begins with him and his Yiddish-speaking grandfather in Cleveland around 1944. He still wanted to tell his vanished relatives that he had become a Yidishe shrayber, a continuator of Yiddishkeit, and he had, in his own way, reached that goal before the end came. Neither of these deeply Jewish artists is likely to be forgotten soon.

[Cultural historian Paul Buhle is professor emeritus at Brown University. He edited several comics in collaboration with Harvey Pekar, including The Beats. They collaborated on Yiddishland, to be published next Spring by Abrams ComicArts. Contact Paul Buhle at feedback@forward.com. This article was also published in the Jewish weekly Forward.]


Above, from the American Splendor series, cover art by R Crumb. Below, Harvey Pekar by Jeff Smith / The Pekar Project.

On the grumpy but sweet Harvey Pekar

[Paul Buhle and Harvey Pekar collaborated on five books. Karen Winkler of The Chronicle of Higher Education asked Buhle about working with Pekar.]

You worked with Harvey Pekar on several projects, including books on the Beats, SDS, the Wobblies, and the New Deal. How did your collaboration come about?

I was working on my second historical comic, about the Students for a Democratic Society, and I could gather (in some cases writing about my own life) local stories that worked as scripts, but the big narrative was terribly difficult for me, probably because the collapse of SDS was such a huge disappointment in my younger life. Harvey happened to call me and he needed money. I offered him my advance if he would write the narrative. We started there and went on til the end.

Pekar was known for his sometimes irascible commentary. What was it like to work with him?

He pretended to be grumpy. He was grumpy about making very little money for his work, and also about the rightward drift of America after his earliest years, in a family that admired FDR and hoped for a more egalitarian society. But he was truly sweet, generous, and supportive of young artists.

How was his viewpoint on life reflected in his work?

Harvey was able to conceive of his work as his life and vice versa. He may have borrowed the idea from his 1960s close friend, Robert Crumb, but he took it in a different direction, to deeply ethnic, blue collar Cleveland. Many of his early stories were about his own personal relationships but also about his neighborhoods, his job (work at the VA hospital for 36 years) and his interests, such as jazz.

You're a historian. How did Pekar's perspective inform your interpretation of history?

I like to think that I broadened his vistas in his published work, in the sense that in our five books, he read very widely about large historical questions and developed scripts that tell the story differently from a scholarly study, but just as well and in many cases, much better. You didn't need to agree with Harvey's take on SDS or the Beat Generation, for instance, to see that he had strong opinions and a distinct aesthetic.

He was deeply interested in history, as he was in literature and art. If I were describing some Cleveland setting, I would start with demography. He would start by describing a local Serbian restaurant he liked whose owner was actually a Croat, and so on: that was his way of explaining and exploring history.

What do you think will be his legacy in the world of comics and graphic novels?

There were not many artists and writers (he never drew comics, but he gave artists very specific directions, along with dialogue) in the U.S. whose work, before the turn of the new century, shaped the emergence of comics as an accepted, serious art form. Along with Harvey, I count Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Ben Katchor, and Alison Bechdel. These were also practically the only artists of "alternative comics" who made a living.

He expanded what comics can do. When I worked with him on the adaptation of Studs Terkel's Working, I realized -- as an oral historian and teacher of oral history -- that he was also to comics what Studs was to the interview. He knew how to listen to people. He raised the level of comic art.

Did you have another project in the works with him?

Yiddishkayt or Yiddishland (we are still debating the title) will, I hope, appear next year. It meant a lot to Harvey, a native Yiddish speaker. It's the story of secular Jewish-Americans who carried on the centuries-old legacy of Yiddishkayt, and did wonderful things with the language and culture until time ran out. His scripts for this book, to be published by Abrams ComicArt, are more than masterful, and he knew it.

Also see:

• "Paul Krassner: Remembering Tuli Kupferberg" by Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / July 14, 2010.
• "Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs: Rock's Inner City Shaman" by Carl R. Hultberg / The Rag Blog / July 13, 2010.
• "COMICS / Paul Buhle: Beyond the Superhero" by Paul Buhle / The Rag Blog / July 23, 2009.

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