Tony Platt : California Dreamin'

The Bloody Island Massacre of 1850 at the north end of Clear Lake, Lake County, California. Art from Manataka American Indian Council.  
California Dreamin'

California’s public history mostly erases its tragic past, turning profound injustices, such as the genocide of native peoples, into a narrative of Progress.

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / July 12, 2012

“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” -- Joan Didion

BERKELEY, California -- A couple of weeks ago I attended the 3rd Global Conference on Genocide in San Francisco. The conference, organized by the International Network of Genocide Scholars, covered genocides, past and present, in many parts of the world. Just about everywhere, except here. In three days of panels and presentations, I could find only one discussion of California as a site of genocide, and it was in my paper.

California can hold its own with other regions of the world regarding human-made tragedies -- genocide, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, lynching, racial segregation, eugenics, imprisonment without trial, and torture. We know this from the accounts of witnesses and survivors, and from richly descriptive social histories written during the last 30 years.

Yet, California’s public history mostly erases its tragic past, turning profound injustices, such as the genocide of native peoples, into a narrative of Progress. The upbeat version of The California Story as a place of entrepreneurial ingenuity and cutting-edge modernity has served as a cultural firewall, numbing and cutting us off from the state’s bloody history.

It is rare to find in our textbooks, classrooms, and public places a reckoning with our nineteenth century catastrophe: dispossession and massacres of native communities; break up of native families, including a commercial trade in women and children; organized efforts to erase thousands of years of cultural experience; and systematic looting of native graves and artifacts to the benefit of collectors, museums, and universities.

It is even more rare to find accounts of local native resistance, from guerilla warfare during the Gold Rush to battles over land and repatriation in the twentieth century. Crude and racist representations of acquiescent native peoples dominated public space in California for over a century, making it easier to frame their near extermination in the imagery of natural history, subject to inevitable processes of erosion and decline, rather than as a result of human intervention -- a genocide.

Eugenic legacies persist today in the state’s 4th grade curriculum that transforms the colonial, racist imperatives of the Spanish mission system into a romantic origins story of uplift and civilization. And in the 7th grade, when The Diary of Anne Frank is typically taught, it is the rare teacher who makes a connection to California’s catastrophe.

There are so few public acknowledgements of California’s history of atrocities against native peoples that I can list them here:

• In 2005, the state erected a historical marker on Highway 20 in recognition of a massacre by soldiers of Pomo women and children on Bloody Island in 1850.
• In 2006, Eureka City Council returned 60 acres of Indian Island (the site of another massacre) to the Wiyot Tribe as a gesture of reparations.
• In 2007, Bishop Francis A. Quinn in a public speech acknowledged the “past mistakes and serious misdeeds” of the Catholic Church during the Mission period. “The Church apologizes for trying to take Indian out of the Indian. Let the Miwok be Miwok.”

California does not have any monumental, officially endorsed, civic memorials to victims of mass injustice, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the Shoah Memorial in Paris, Memory Park in Buenos Aires, or the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York. Nor do we have any educational and cultural institutions devoted to learning about the motivation, psychology, and organization of perpetrators, such as the Topography of Terror in Berlin or Nazi Documentation Center in Nuremberg.

There is nothing in California comparable to the federal memorial on Bainbridge Island, Washington, that commemorates how the first town under Roosevelt’s 1942 order removed all citizens of Japanese origins; or to Reconciliation Park in Tacoma, an ongoing private-public initiative to remember how the port city ethnically cleansed hundreds of Chinese in 1885.

Due to lack of public funding, California also has a weak public arts presence in memorial culture. By contrast, Berlin's artistic projects are so embedded in daily life that you literally bump into reminders of Nazism at the top of subway exits, or walk past them on the way to work, or see them next to ads in neighborhoods, or stumble over them on the way into a café. For example, hovering in the shadows of the gigantic Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in a nearby park is a kiosk that seductively invites you to look through a peephole at two men or two women kissing, and to imagine their fate under the Nazis.

I understand the political importance of creating large-scale monuments in publicly visible sites, but personally I appreciate memorials that catch you off guard, make you figure out something for yourself, and are part of the everyday landscape. Smaller is not necessarily better than bigger, but often has a wider impact and may last longer.

Coming to terms with this region’s long record of social injustices is necessary in order to chip away at chauvinist notions of the United States as destined by providence and militarism to lead the world, and of the mythic Golden State as a model of multiculturalism. Addressing our history in all its contradictions helps us to guard against hubris and to recognize our modest place in an interdependent world.

We’ll know we’re making progress when we teach the Mission system as part of colonial history, when the genocide of native peoples in the northwest is taught alongside The Diary of Anne Frank, and when a genocide conference held in San Francisco pays serious attention to the region’s sorrowful past.

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. Platt taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). He is a Visiting Professor in Department of Justice Studies, San José State University. His publications have been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. His latest book -- Grave Matters: Excavating California’s Buried Past -- was recently published by Heyday. He lives in Berkeley and Big Lagoon, California, and serves as secretary of the Coalition to Protect Yurok Cultural Legacies at O-pyuweg (Big Lagoon). He blogs on history and memory at GoodToGo. Find more articles by Tony Platt on The Rag Blog]

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Tony Platt : Justice for the Living Dead

A graduate student at an anthropology museum at Berkeley uses a craniometer to measure an ancient Indian skull. This collection alone contained more than 10,000 Indian skeletons. Photo from Life magazine, October 25, 1948. Image from The Buffalo Post.
Death's double standard:
Justice for the living dead

It’s not only the unauthorized digging up of ancestors that haunts the memory of native peoples, it’s also the blatant double standard that adds indignity to insult.

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / May 22, 2012

It’s good news that the United Nations has authorized University of Arizona professor James Anaya, Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to carry out its first investigation into the status of Native Americans in the United States, with a particular focus on American compliance with standards embodied in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to which the U.S. became a signatory in 2010.

The focus of Anaya’s scrutiny no doubt will be on today’s inequalities and injustices that deeply impact 2.7 million Native Americans throughout the country. But let’s not forget the inequities of death.

Despite popular images of tribal members getting rich from gaming pay-offs, the overwhelming majority of Native Americans remain mired in poverty, the victims of structural unemployment and racial exclusion, compounded by devastating rates of diabetes, suicide, infant mortality, and cardiovascular and alcohol-related diseases.

There is a long way to go before, in the words of the Declaration, “indigenous peoples are equal to all other peoples” entitled to the right to “self-determination” and to “be free from discrimination of any kind.”

Inequality is a problem for the dead as well as the living. According to Article 12 of the UN Declaration, native peoples have a right to “the use and control of their ceremonial objects, and the repatriation of their human remains.” Repatriation as a central demand of Native American movements in the United States speaks to the long history of plunder of native artifacts and bodies.

Over a period of some two hundred years, from Thomas Jefferson’s exploration of a Native American barrow near his home in Virginia, to passage of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, several hundred thousand native grave sites -- maybe as many as one million -- were dug up in the name of science, recreation, and commerce.

There was a brisk trade in native body parts and funerary artifacts, propelled by the popularity of commercial and recreational “collecting,” scientific curiosity, and the heritage industry. The artifacts removed from graves ended up in private collections and public display cases around the world, including the Smithsonian, Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, the British Museum in London, and museums in Prague, Zurich, Vienna, and Moscow.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists in universities and museums engaged in a frenzy of acquisition in the hope that native bodies would shed light on the origins of the species or on racial typologies of human difference. They were particularly interested in the bodies of Indians, who, it was believed, had been frozen in time since the Stone Age, and whose remains therefore were thought to hold the key to “secrets of human origins,” as well as provide physical evidence for claims about European superiority and native degeneracy.

This science made it easier to frame the near extermination of native peoples in the imagery of natural rather than social history, subject to inevitable processes of erosion and decline, rather than as the result of human intervention and -- in the case of California -- genocide.

In widely read treatises -- such as Samuel Morton’s Crania America (1839), Ales Hrdlicka’s Directions for Collecting Information and Specimens for Physical Anthropology (1904), and Edward Gifford’s Californian Anthropometry (1926) -- the measurement of brain cavities, nostrils, and degree of slope in foreheads generated all kinds of scientific quackery to justify the civilizational superiority of white Europeans and innate inferiority of native peoples.

Aside from the racist assumptions that guided research on native bodies, the science was also flawed because documentation of provenience of bones and artifacts found in graves was often nonexistent. Moreover, scientists harvested far more corpses than they could ever study. Tens of thousands of native dead were stashed in boxes, cellars, and personal collections, only to be resurrected for display in cabinets of curiosities, museums, schools, and international expositions.

A skull collected on Santa Rosa Island was included in the U.S. exhibition at the Columbian Historical Exposition in Madrid in 1892. In the 1920s and 1930s, a self-styled amateur archaeologist dug up hundreds of dead Tongva Indians and used their bones to decorate his Catalina Museum of Island Indians. To this day, the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls, Oregon, proudly displays native artifacts looted from graves.

With passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, the practice of widespread grave looting was officially stopped. Moreover, NAGPRA requires federally funded institutions to publish their holdings of native body parts, as well as artifacts taken from graves, and to facilitate their return to tribes that are able to make a case for genealogical or cultural connection.

NAGPRA was as significant a piece of legislation for Native Americans as the Civil Rights Act was for African Americans. And, similarly, it represents an unfinished revolution. The pace of repatriating human remains is glacially slow: by 2009, less than five percent nationwide had been returned to tribes. By 2010, the University of California at Berkeley had repatriated only 179 of its 10,000 native body parts.


There is nothing inherently wrong with using the dead to reconstruct the past. With the help of new developments in chemistry, DNA analysis and dating methods, we can learn a great deal from human remains about how our ancestors lived, worked, and died. Respectful collaboration between community groups, advocacy organizations, politicians, and scientists in New York in the 1990s, for example, made it possible to excavate what had been the Negros Buriel Ground, resulting in a detailed portrait of the daily lives of Africans in colonial New Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A similar collaboration between the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, archaeologists, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company -- following the inadvertent exposure of native burials in Santa Clara, California, in 2008 -- produced a great deal of information about the lives and deaths of Ohlone neophytes buried in the mission at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.

For most twentieth century archaeology, however, the decision to excavate and exhume native remains was typically made unilaterally and imposed by fiat. The problem is not with the search for knowledge, but rather the unequal relations of power between investigator and subject, collector and collected; the lack of consultation and permission, the arrogance run wild; and how the products of knowledge are misused.

It’s not only the unauthorized digging up of ancestors that haunts the memory of native peoples, it’s also the blatant double standard that adds indignity to insult. Remembrance and treatment of the dead is a highly selective political project. Some of our collective dead are respected, others humiliated. Consider some examples:

• The priests who worked at Mission Carmel in California from 1771 to 1833 are buried in solid tombs and named in headstones. Junipero Serra, architect of the mission system, is interred in an ornate crypt. The thousands of Ohlones, whose slave labor built and ran the mission, are buried anonymously in mass pits. When I visited Mission Carmel in February with Louise J. Miranda Ramirez, tribal chairwoman of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation, she picked up several items from the ground. “Look,” she showed me, “these are human bones dug up by gophers. I’ve asked the authorities to bring in soil and cover the graves with some protection, but they don’t do anything.”


• In the second half of the 19th century, while scientists and collectors raided native cemeteries for booty and bodies, the nation made amends for the Civil War by creating a system of national cemeteries and making a conscientious effort to preserve the names and identities of those killed. Today, a Defense Department unit with an annual budget of $55 million searches the world for unaccounted soldiers killed in the line of duty. No comparable effort is put into retrieving thousands of native remains unceremoniously stored in university, military, and museum basements.


• An expensive effort, led by the FBI, is currently under way to find the remains of a six-year old boy killed in New York more than 30 years ago. Recently, a national scandal erupted when it was revealed that the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware dumped in a landfill the body parts of some victims of the September 11, 2001, tragedy. Similarly, the Pentagon expressed strong condemnation of the Los Angeles Times for publishing photographs of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead Afghan insurgents. No such objections were made when museums and newspapers throughout most of the 20th century displayed native skeletons as objects of curiosity and entertainment.


• A debate is under way today about the propriety of excavating the wreck of the Titanic when it may contain corpses that, say Federal officials, should be accorded the respect of a graveyard and shielded from “looters and artifact hunters.” In contrast, the University of California, Berkeley, is closing the Hearst Museum for two years in order to “renovate and transform its public spaces.” There are no plans, apparently, to give 10,000 native remains stacked in a dank basement a respectful burial or commemorate their theft from native graveyards.

Federal policies of repatriation are a step in the right direction. But most native remains are unclaimed or unknown. What should be a national ritual of remembrance and mourning has become a technical, bureaucratic process. In addition to tribal claims for the return of their dead, there is also a need for public commemoration that speaks to a national tragedy.

Throughout much of the 20th century, while the government built memorials to the victims of world wars and now, as it continues to make efforts to account for every person missing from the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of native bones and skulls have been stored anonymously in basements and boxes, and their burial goods displayed as mementos of a “vanishing race” or as freak show curiosities.

However much we have tried to assiduously forget this sorrowful history, the past continues to reverberate in the here and now. It is time to do justice to our living dead.

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. Platt taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). He is a Visiting Professor in Department of Justice Studies, San José State University. His publications have been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. His latest book -- Grave Matters: Excavating California’s Buried Past -- was recently published by Heyday. He lives in Berkeley and Big Lagoon, California, and serves as secretary of the Coalition to Protect Yurok Cultural Legacies at O-pyuweg (Big Lagoon). He blogs on history and memory at GoodToGo. Find more articles by Tony Platt on The Rag Blog]

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Tony Platt : Remembering Alex Haley and Mario Savio

Alex Haley. Image from Gather.
A Better Day:
Remembering Alex Haley and Mario Savio

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / January 12, 2012

Let me drink from the waters
where the mountain streams flood
Let the smell of wildflowers
flow free through my blood
Let me sleep in your meadows
with the green grassy leaves
Let me walk down the highway
with my brother in peace
Let me die in my footsteps

Before I go down under the ground

-- Bob Dylan, “Let Me Die in My Footsteps,” 1963

In 1963 I moved from England to California, in part to get as far away as possible from my father’s overbearing influence. The political divide between us had deepened as I embraced Marxism and the New Left, while he shunned anything smacking of isms, except capitalism.

As he soured on politics, I was ready to be inspired by Mario Savio standing on a police car in Berkeley's Sproul Plaza, urging us to put our bodies on the gears and wheels of the machine in order to make it stop; and by Malcolm X, as channeled by Alex Haley, saying it was possible for black and white to unite and fight. “In our mutual sincerity we might be able to show a road to the salvation of America’s very soul.”

My father and I, as it turns out, shared a very similar political trajectory: unrealistic optimism followed by pessimistic realism. For Monty, the 30s promised global socialism. For me, the 60s was a vibrant and hopeful era, with socialism spreading throughout the world, social democracy coming to the West, and colonialism on the run in the Third World.

The collapse of utopian dreams is always rupturing, and always unexpected. The rise and fall of Alex Haley, and the spirit and untimely death of Mario Savio epitomize for me the hope and demise of the New Left.

Alex Haley was an unlikely hero. Without any formal training in history, not even a college degree, he wrote two bestsellers that more than any other books written about the United States in the twentieth century changed the public conversation about race.

In The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), he made a black revolutionary into a popular, cultural icon and a model of redemption. And his book Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976) – and, more important, the television mini-series on which it was based -- are credited with generating an unprecedented black-white dialogue, as well as a compelling origins story.

Six million copies of Malcolm X were sold by 1977 and 130 million viewers watched Roots.

Haley wasn’t a particularly good historian. He lifted whole sections from another author’s book for Roots; his ties to his supposed African ancestor, Kunta Kinte, are likely fictional; and recent research on Malcolm X has blown huge holes in Haley’s hagiography. But he was a hell of a good storyteller and the stories he told resonated with millions of people.

I got a sense of his rock-star popularity in 1989 when he visited Sacramento State University, where I was teaching at the time. Nobody seemed to care about his oddly Republican politics, or the plagiarism charges, or sloppy scholarship. “You are the answer to the prayer of our ancestors who hoped during uncertain, terrible times that there would be a better day,” was his upbeat message spoken to a large, mostly youthful crowd on a crisp, fall day.

He seemed to look each of us directly in the eye, urging us to find common ground, telling us what we had come to hear. He was on the road, giving his stump speech, the talk that he had delivered so many times since Roots that the only notes he needed were the ones reminding him where he was and to whom he was speaking.

Some of my friends were disappointed because they expected something new or different. But most people there wanted to hear the familiar speech, delivered in his unpretentious style, a message of reassurance and comfort. He told us the story about how he came to write Roots. Like all good folk tales, we wanted to hear the ending that we already knew.

Although Haley’s speech seemed to ramble from anecdote to anecdote, it was in fact finely honed and crafted, a mosaic of disparate threads. Constructed around a narrative that traced his life from childhood to the present, his story was crammed full of moral lessons, biographies, autobiography, motherwit, and parables.

Haley’s message was relentless: a people whose voice has been long silenced and whose vision has been long hidden from history in fact possess a wondrous past that can’t be denied. The crowd listened closely, imagining the untold stories of our individual pasts and the unexplored potentiality of our collective futures. And in case we missed the point, the motif on his stationary proclaims: “Find The Good – And Praise It.”

Haley’s stories moved easily between experience and imagination, a talent that upset critics who prefer writers to come packaged in appropriate boxes -- fictional or non-fictional. By this time, Haley probably wasn’t sure which was which. In Roots, he invented dialogue. Malcolm X wanted Haley to serve as his recorder and clean up his grammar, but Haley engaged his subject in a passionate dialogue that resulted in a memorable book of many voices.

Haley left the Coast Guard in 1959 after a 21-year enlistment. He was 38 years old, searching for a new career. He was an outsider to academia -- he had quit college after two unsuccessful years, despite the advice of his professorial father -- and regarded as an interloper by the Negro literati who, with one notable exception, had no time for a writer who had learned his craft writing love letters for illiterate sailors and public relations pieces for Uncle Sam.

When C. Eric Lincoln, a fellow writer and authority on black Muslims, proposed Haley’s membership in an African American academic group in the early 1960s, years before he became a celebrity, he was voted down because he lacked proper credentials. In response to his inquiry to leading black writers, asking for their advice about how to make it as a freelance journalist, James Baldwin, fresh from his success with Go Tell It On The Mountain and Notes of a Native Son, was the only who took time to see Haley and give him tips about how to survive in New York’s cutthroat literary circles.

Years later, the tables were turned: Haley’s books were selling in the millions and Baldwin was struggling to survive, economically and physically. When Baldwin called, asking for advice and a “loan,” Haley quickly wrote him the first of many checks, “never more than just a few thousand.” Haley told me that he would never forget the “thin-as-a-willow-reed” writer whose generosity defied the snobbish intellectuals who had turned their backs on a struggling writer without status. Later, when Roots made Haley a rich man, he turned over the royalties of The Autobiography to Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz.

Though he got paid well to visit Sacramento State for half a day, there was no show-biz glamour or phalanx of security guards. He walked slowly through the campus, portly and easy-going, stopping to greet the constant stream of admirers who let out squeals usually reserved for movie stars. They came up asking for autographs or to shake his hand, but quickly found themselves answering his questions about their roots.

Still, he was never really comfortable in the public spotlight or around intellectuals. He preferred writing about legends than being one. And so every year, once in the summer and once in the winter for two months at a time, he would retreat to the “fruitful writing isolation of a cargo ship,” crisscrossing the Atlantic and Pacific just as he had done in the Coast Guard.

“It is my impression,” Haley wrote to me during a slow trip to Australia, “that academia contains some of the more grudging folk in this world. With no respect whatever to the institution of academia, I counted one of my luckier things that I did not become a scholar, as my professor father very strongly intended. In fact, there were three sons of us for whom he had this intention, and we turned out to be writer, lawyer, and architect. Dad, bless his heart, was still nonetheless proud of us.”

When Haley finished his talk in Sacramento and the audience rose to give him a standing ovation, I realized that this was the first time I had ever been part of a truly multicultural audience on campus. For a brief moment, the university actually reflected the diversity of our community.

Hundreds of black high school kids, most of whom will never make it to any university under our current system, had come to witness the rare spectacle of an African American as an American hero. They were loud and boisterous during Haley’s speech and, after it was over, they had a purposeful gleam in their eyes, a renewed determination to envision a better day.

Mario Savio on the steps of Sproul Hall, Berkeley, December 2, 1964. Image from WSU Libraries.

Alex Haley’s ability to reach and move a crowd reminded me of the time that 22-year-old Mario Savio reached and moved me. I was in my second year as a graduate student in Berkeley in 1964 when Savio, in protest of the university’s ban on political speech, told a campus crowd on December 2nd that “there’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious -- makes you so sick at heart -- that you can’t take part.” Drawing upon imagery from Thoreau, he called upon to us practice civil disobedience and to jam the gears of the machine.

That day, Savio and 800 others were arrested in Sproul Plaza. I supported the Free Speech Movement, but avoided arrest then since I was nervous about my immigration status. (About a decade later, I’d make amends by getting arrested twice during People’s Park protests at the same site.)

The FSM was a defining moment for activism in the 1960s and for my own political development. Poised between the civil rights struggles of the previous decade and the promise of the antiwar and feminist movements ahead, it offered our generation of students the opportunity to participate in history, to be activists in our own right rather than vicarious participants in other people's struggles.

It was a joy to feel that we might be part of an emergent majority, with the moral authority of justice on our side for once. Savio was not the only leader of the student movement, but his example of self-sacrifice moved many people like myself to deeply consider our political commitments and to put our beliefs into practice. Also, it helped that we were on the winning side: the university revoked its ban on political speech.

Thirty years later, in 1994, I was back in Sproul Plaza for the Free Speech Movement's reunion. In the intervening years, my political activism cost me my job at Berkeley, but I was lucky to get a tenure-track job at Sacramento State. Mario had not been as lucky. It took him until 1984 to get a science degree and until 1989 to get his master’s degree.

He was nearly 50 years old when he started teaching math and philosophy as a lecturer at Sonoma State University. By then the boom years in academia were over and part-time jobs were the norm.

There was a large crowd on hand at the reunion, including a new generation of activists who were eager to witness a slice of history and hear old-timers justify our pasts. Mario Savio -- now graying, balding, and pony-tailed, like many of us in the crowd -- spoke with vigor and eloquence about our legacy, likening us in the words of T.S. Eliot to "the hidden laughter of children in the foliage." There we had been, in the margins and shadows of political power, but still alive and kicking, "sudden in a shaft of sunlight even while the dust moves."

Mario was not there that December day in 1994 to sentimentalize or bury our movement. If it had been hard on him to live with fame and notoriety in the aftermath of the 1960s, it was even harder to be treated in the 1990s as an icon of a long-gone past. He insistently spoke to the present, of the growing boldness of an increasingly reactionary political system, attacks on immigrant and women's rights, and the rollback of civil rights gains. Be vigilant, don't mourn, and get organized, he told us.

A few months later, Mario and I worked together in the Campus Coalitions for Human Rights and Social Justice, a loose-knit organization of campus activists in northern California. Our challenge, no less, was to go against the tide of immigrant bashing, prison building, and welfare cutting. In particular, we focused our efforts on opposing the so-called California Civil Rights Initiative, which as Proposition 209 on the 1996 ballot asked voters to go beyond even the most conservative Supreme Court decisions to end all forms of state-supported affirmative action.

It was an uphill battle. Mario had been more hopeful than most of us that the attack on affirmative action would generate a political revival by combining youthful idealism with wise experience, creating the basis for a new, vibrant, cross-generational movement. Pity he didn’t live to see the rise of the Occupy movement; he would have been out there on the front lines.

It was difficult for him to accept the degree to which universities had by the 1990s become sites of demobilization and cynicism. When his health, already a problem for many years, got worse, his friends urged him to slow down and take it easy, which, for a short while, he did. "Obviously I needed to pull back," he wrote me in May of 1996. "In the past I have not had the good sense to read my own signals right. Guess I'm growing up -- at last, and just in time!"

But, quickly, he was back in the fray, compelled by the news that the anti-affirmative action forces were in disarray and that, with enough effort and work, we had a chance to defeat Proposition 209. Mario worked with his son Nadav day and night to produce a pamphlet, "In Defense of Affirmative Action," which was used widely on campuses in the last few weeks of the campaign. It helped to close the gap in the polls, but with insufficient money, the damning of faint support by the National Democratic Party, and a low voter turnout, our anti-209 campaign failed by eight points.

Mario suffered a heart attack and went into a coma a few days before the elections, and died the day after without regaining consciousness. He left life as he lived it, intensely committed and passionate in his public politics, gracious in private to his friends. I miss his shaft of sunlight.

• Alex Haley (1921-1992)
• Mario Savio (1942-1996)

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Truthdig, History News Network, Z Magazine, Monthly Review, and the Guardian. Platt, now an emeritus professor living in Berkeley, California, taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). This article was also posted to his blog, GoodToGo. Read more articles by Tony Platt on The Rag Blog.]

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Tony Platt : Prison Strike at Pelican Bay

Image from Los Angeles Times.
The shame of California:
Prison strike at Pelican Bay

This strike has drawn worldwide attention to the widespread use of torturous practices by the United States against its own citizens.

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / August 9, 2011

BIG LAGOON, California -- I’ve been eating well this summer, enjoying the local fruits and vegetables of Northwest California, while 60 miles away a group of men risked their health by refusing to eat for three weeks.

I’m in Big Lagoon, surrounded by ocean, lagoon, and forest in an area of coastal California described by National Geographic as among the top 20 “unspoiled” tourist destinations in the world. An hour’s drive north of here is Pelican Bay State Prison, a state-of-the-art hellhole that was recently the center of a three-week hunger strike led by prisoners in the Secure Housing Units (SHU).

Pelican Bay was California’s first supermax prison, built in 1989 on 275 acres of clear-cut forest near Crescent City. With an annual budget of $180 million, it has a payroll of more than 1,600 guards and service workers.

The prison was built for 2,280 prisoners, but its current census is close to 3,500, almost half of whom are housed in a prison within the prison, the SHU, an X-shaped cluster of brutalist concrete buildings, surrounded by guard towers, electronic fencing, and barren ground.

Here, more than a thousand men, whose families live hundreds of miles away, are imprisoned 23 hours a day in 8 x 10 foot, windowless, constantly lit cells, subject to sensory deprivation and social isolation, sometimes for years.

The hunger strike at Pelican Bay, which lasted from July 1st to July 22nd, was led by long-term prisoners in the SHU. It is estimated that on any given day in the United States, at least 25,000 prisoners are held in isolation, and perhaps as many as another 80,000 are kept in segregation units, typically in isolation. Writing in The New Yorker (“Hellhole,” 30 March 2009), Atul Gawande calls this practice “legalized torture,” resulting in long-term physical and mental damage to many of its victims.

Pelican Bay, like many of California’s prisons, was built on formerly agricultural land in a region seeking to resuscitate its depressed economy. The hardscrabble Crescent City, briefly a boomtown during the Gold Rush and once a beneficiary of the lumber and commercial fishing industries, has one of the state’s highest unemployment rates and among the most stingy public services.

When the state borrowed from public funds to build the high security prison at a cost of $277.5 million to taxpayers, it was supposed to boost the local economy. But the benefits primarily went to local landowners, and construction and utility companies; to national chains like K-Mart, Ace Hardware, and Safeway; and to the politically powerful guards’ union. Meanwhile, the county’s unemployment rate is almost 14 percent and one out of three people live in hand-to-mouth poverty.

Secure Housing Unit at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California. Photo by Adam Tanner / Reuters.
The city’s misery is compounded by its record rainfall and susceptibility to tsunamis. Unless work or family requires you to stay in Crescent City, this is a place to drive through on the way to somewhere else. No wonder that prisoners comprise about 46 percent of the city’s 7,600 population. Small towns that hoped for a bonanza by inviting prison construction, says Ruth Gilmore in Golden Gulag, are victims of a boondoggle.

California may lag behind many other states in high school graduation rates, welfare benefits, and investment in public health, but when it comes to punishment, we rank at or near the top. Between 1852 and 1964, California built only 12 prisons. Since 1984, the state has erected 43 penal institutions, making it a global leader in prison construction. Today, 90 penitentiaries, small prisons, and minimum-security camps stretch across 900 miles of the fifth largest economy in the world.

In 1982, the prison system cost taxpayers 2 percent of the General Fund; by 2006, it cost almost 8 percent. In 2008, more than one out of six state workers in California was employed by the Department of Corrections, almost three times as many as were employed in Health and Human Services.

In the last decade, “corrections” (with 61,000 employees) has increased its share of state workers, passing the state university system (46,000), second only to the University of California (86,000). Meanwhile, prison suicide and recidivism rates approach twice the national average. And we have one of the most extravagant penal systems in the country, costing taxpayers about the same as the state spends on higher education.

Most of the new prisons have been built in out-of-the way rural areas, like Crescent City, making it easier to lose sight of the humanity of the people we warehouse: mostly men (93 percent), mostly Latinos and African Americans (two-thirds), mostly from big cities (60 percent from Los Angeles), and mostly unemployed or the working poor, victimized by drastic changes in California’s economy over the last 20 years. The prison system is the shame of California, testimony to the persistence of institutionalized racism, the widening economic divide, and the gutting of social programs.

Prisons function as an unemployment program comparable to early capitalist workhouses, except they’ve become warehouses for unused labor rather than sites of production. When prisoners return to their communities, observes Gilmore, the cycle is repeated: they are locked out of “education, employment, housing, and many other stabilizing institutions of everyday life. In such inhospitable places, everybody isolates.”

On July 1st, a small group of prisoners in Pelican Bay’s SHU, calling themselves the Short Corridor Collective, initiated a hunger strike, calling for the abolition of long-term solitary confinement, improvement in programs for SHU prisoners, and an end to various abusive administrative procedures.

Unlike a similar action by prisoners in 2002, this strike drew the support of thousands of prisoners throughout the state. Moreover, Prison Hunger Strike Solidarity was so successful in getting out information about the strike that European human rights organizations urged the Governor to respond to prisoners’ demands and The New York Times carried an Op Ed condemning the “bestial treatment” of prisoners in Pelican Bay State Prison (Colin Dayan, “Barbarous Confinement,” 17 July 2011).

During the strike, according to the Short Corridor Collective, at least 17 strikers, including three leaders, were transferred to another prison for medical treatment. The Collective ended the action on July 22nd after gaining the right to wear cold weather caps, to have calendars in their cells, and to have access to educational programs in the SHU.

Though these concessions by prison authorities are modest, we should not underestimate the larger significance of the strike. It draws worldwide attention to the widespread use of torturous practices by the United States against its own citizens; it forces the government of California to sit down, face-to-face, and negotiate with people who have been demonized as semi-human beasts; and it raises the possibility of once again incorporating prisoners into a larger struggle for social justice.

The civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s regarded prisoners as an important constituency, forging intimate ties between community and prison. It fought for massive decarceration, abolition of capital punishment, and ending the racial double standard of arrest and incarceration.

It will take a similar movement today to expose the tragedy of American injustice and make prisoners human again. Thanks to the Short Corridor Collective and thousands of activist prisoners, we now have an opportunity to renew the struggle.

For more information about the strike at Pelican Bay and its consequences, go to Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity.

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Truthdig, History News Network, Z Magazine, Monthly Review, and the Guardian. Platt, now an emeritus professor living in Berkeley, California, taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). This article was also posted to his blog, GoodToGo.]

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Tony Platt : My Friend Betita Martinez

Betita Martinez. Photo from SF Gate.
'The heart just insists':
My friend Betita Martinez

As the daughter of a dark-skinned immigrant from Mexico City and a blue-eyed North American, she felt racism in the air, 'but I did not have words for it then.'

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / December 27, 2010

I’m visiting my old friend Betita Martínez a few days before her 85th birthday. I bring chocolate chip cookies, and my laptop to show her photographs of a recent trip to Europe and Morocco. Our conversation is not the grand political discourse it used to be. It’s more of an ode to the everyday.

We’ve known each other for 35 years, from the time we worked together on a radical pamphlet about the police, through our years as comrades in a Marxist organization, and during the last two decades as leftists struggling to find our way through the dystopian gloom.

While most of us licked our wounds and picked up our interrupted lives, she protested with anybody who would march in the 1990s and was never without a sheaf of leaflets in the 2000s. She kept the faith, while mine wavered. “The heart just insists on it,” she once explained.

Betita looms large in my memory as a professional revolutionary who managed on a few hours of sleep and an occasional steak, with little time for small talk. This wasn’t always the case. At one time she was on the fast track to professional success.

Elizabeth Martínez grew up in the white section of Washington, D.C.’s segregated suburbs in the 1920s and 1930s. As the daughter of a dark-skinned immigrant from Mexico City and a blue-eyed North American, she felt racism in the air, “but I did not have words for it then.”

Her father, Manuel Guillermo Martínez, who had witnessed the Mexican revolution as a young man, worked his way up from a clerk in the Mexican Embassy to professor of Spanish literature at Georgetown; and her mother, Ruth Sutherland Phillips, got a master’s degree from George Washington and taught advanced high school Spanish.

Soon Betita was emulating her parents’ hard work ethic, joining the bridge club in high school and prepping for college and a career. She was the first Latina at Swarthmore, graduating with honors in history and literature in 1946. Here she began a lifelong friendship with fellow student (and later renowned economist) Andre Gunder Frank, a Jewish scholarship boy from Europe who, like Betita, knew what it felt like to be in exile, never feeling quite settled anywhere.

After college, using her mother’s vaguely British middle name, Liz Sutherland plunged into the post-war ferment of New York’s cultural scene. With her contacts from Swarthmore opening doors to institutions typically closed to women and Latinos, jobs came quickly and easily: as a translator and researcher at the United Nations (1947-1953), an administrative assistant in the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art (1957-1958), an editor at Simon and Schuster (1958-1963), and Books and Arts Editor at The Nation (1963-1964).

Betita Martinez. Photo by Margaret Randall.
For some 15 years Liz hobnobbed with cutting edge artists and literati, and married one, the writer-activist Hans Koning. She moved easily between the beat milieu of the Village -- hanging out with Diane Di Prima, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and other demimonde intellectuals -- and chic patrons at Fifth Avenue soirées. This ability to function in very different worlds would serve her well later in life when she had to fundraise for grassroots causes and translate radical rhetoric into palatable liberalism for middle-class audiences.

Among her friends were photographers Edward Steichen (her boss at MoMA) and Robert Frank, and the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. She could more than hold her own reviewing French new wave and English kitchen sink movies in the la-di-da Film Quarterly.

“If the film speaks its piece well, it lacks the magic of the unsaid,” she wrote in 1961 about Karel Reiz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. “There is nothing here to make you shiver, no awareness of ‘the million-eyed Spyder that hath no name.’ The characters are all there, but they are more recognizable than illuminating.”

Unusually for somebody still in her 30s, she had honed literary skills as an editor, designer, and writer. Most of us hope to be good at one of these things in a lifetime. She did them all really well.

In 1960, just two years into her job with a prestigious publishing firm, Simon and Schuster -- and already an editor -- she was assigned to work with the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman on the publication of Four Screenplays (including “Wild Strawberries” and “Seventh Seal”). She saw the landmark book “through from start to finish,” she told a reporter for Saturday Review. During a visit to Sweden to meet Bergman, they had lunch together on a set. “What was it like to talk with him, what’s he like?” I once asked her, wide-eyed. “He said I had nice legs,” she replied.

The following year she was off to Cuba, meeting with writers and filmmakers creating a “cinema of revolution.” That was her first turning point: “When Cuba declared itself socialist, so did I.”

In 1964, Liz served as go-between and editor for the militant black-led organization SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) and Simon and Schuster, resulting in an extraordinary book of photographs, The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality. It opens with three tranquil, rural images of the Deep South, followed by a carnival scene of a lynching in graphic detail.

Lorraine Hansberry gets credited for the introduction, as do Danny Lyon, Roy de Carava, and others for their photographs, but Betita’s name is nowhere to be seen. (She was similarly unacknowledged for her editing role in Stokely Carmichael’s Black Power, another iconic publication.)

She finally gets her due years later for helping Jim Forman write one of the most significant memoirs of the civil rights movement, The Making of Black Revolutionaries. Holed up in a house in Puerto Rico, she helped him not only get his writing in shape, but also broaden his “understanding of the vast and deplorable role of the United States government in suppressing the rights of all nonwhite people.”

In the mid-1960s, now in the prime of her life, Liz Sutherland made the shift from publishing to joining the Movement, giving up a sure-thing life of privilege for long hours and low pay for the next 45 years.

She became director of SNCC’s New York office, getting the word out and raising funds from Jewish sympathizers when she wasn’t on the road in Mississippi and Alabama, or making overtures on behalf of black nationalists to the Chicano-led UFW organizing migrant workers in California.

“I did not grapple with my particular identity then, with being half Mexican and half white,” she recalls. “The work said who I was.” And the work was grueling, especially for a single parent. Her pre-teen daughter Tessa “endured many lonely hours and TV dinners” when her mother was interviewing civil rights workers in the South. “She understands about Mississippi.”

A few years later, three pivotal events propelled her political development in a new direction. First, SNCC had, as she put it, “an identity crisis” and decided it “should be an all-black organization.” Stokely Carmichael made clear in a speech given in Berkeley in 1966 that “we cannot have white people working in the black community.” No one “white-baited me to my face,” says Betita recently, but to most of the SNCC staff she was “classified as white.”

Secondly, Elizabeth Sutherland and several other refugees from SNCC contributed to “an energized convergence of women in New York City,” as one observer has noted, and were in on the ground floor of the women’s liberation movement. Elizabeth was a member of the New York Radical Women’s collective -- a group that included Joan Brown and Shulamith Firestone -- and contributed an article (with Carol Hanisch, instigator of the celebrated protest of the Miss America pageant in 1968) to the first issue of Notes From The First Year, a theoretical journal of radical feminism, priced 50 cents to women and one dollar to men.

The Hanisch-Sutherland essay, which follows right after Anne Koedt’s “The Myth of the Vaginal Organism,” is organized as a series of answers to typically asked questions about feminism. For example, don’t some women “naturally want to be housewives?” To which the authors of “Women of the World Unite -- We Have Nothing To Lose But Our Men!” reply: “Anyone who thinks she feels good as she surveys her kitchen after washing the 146,789th batch of sparkling dishes isn’t being ‘natural’; she’s literally lost her mind.”

As Elizabeth Sutherland became Betita Martínez, she made sure that issues of gender were not put on the back burner. In 1970, she contributed “Colonized Women: The Chicana” to Robin Morgan’s Sisterhood is Powerful, an anthology that became required reading for a generation of feminists. Today, Morgan quickly recalls Betita’s “intensely feminist intelligence and commitment. Her stubborn insistence on freedom and power for all members of communities of color -- including, surprise! women -- got her into a lot of hot water. But that never stopped her.”

Thirdly, a trip to Cuba in 1967 connected her with an inspirational gathering of Latin American revolutionaries that triggered her own identity crisis: “the ground of my life was shifting, stretching.” She took off for New Mexico in 1968, where she founded a Chicano movement newspaper, El Grito del Norte, and organized the Chicano Communications Center. “A voice inside of me said, ‘You can be Betita Martínez here. It feels like home’.”

It felt like home until the mid-1970s, when Betita left New Mexico and joined a leftist organization in San Francisco, hoping to be part of a movement that would transcend identity politics. Ten years later, after the Marxist left imploded, she returned to grassroots work, searching for ways to bring communities of color together, speaking out fiercely against racism, sexism, and war -- saying “NO to any definition of social justice that does not affirm our human oneness.”

While illness limited Betita’s mobility when she reached her 80s, she kept on writing, as she’d done all her life. Without a university base or philanthropic support, she has accomplished what most academics never do in a lifetime: written several books that have left a deep impact on readers searching for socially relevant, well researched, and thoughtful history and commentary.

Among her lasting contributions are Letters From Mississippi (1964), The Youngest Revolution: A Personal Report on Cuba (1969), 500 Years of Chicano History (1976), and 500 Years of Chicana Women’s History (2008), not to mention hundreds of journalistic essays. In 2000, she received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, but not the private pension, home ownership, and other perks that typically crown an academic career.

Betita Martinez. Photo by Tony Platt / The Rag Blog.
Recently, Betita looked more deeply and honestly into the self-inflicted wounds that can’t simply be blamed on the Man, “the human toll of righting wrong.” It troubles her that for too long the Chicano movement was seen as a subsidiary of the African American movement; that women in SNCC and Chicano organizations were too often considered subordinate to “male warriors” and assigned housewifely duties; that in the name of fighting for a “humanist society,” Marxist organizations could treat its cadre so brutally.

And while she gave all to her extended political family, Betita “deeply regrets neglecting another identity: being the mother of a young daughter who needed much more attention than she received in those years.”

Now it’s the mother who needs and gets much more attention from her daughter. A stroke makes it hard for Betita to see, hear, and remember yesterday’s visitors, yet she insists on living by herself with her dog Honey in a small, rented apartment in San Francisco’s Mission district, surrounded by books, posters, mementos, and rows of filing cabinets. "I love all dogs and some people," she says. But she’s always delighted to see visitors, and disappointed when we leave.

Today, the talk is about a trip Cecilia and I took recently. Her eyesight is not good, so she sits almost on top of the screen of my laptop as I scroll through hundreds of photographs that for me are already in the twilight between just now and the past.

As she imagines the photos through a blur, I tell her stories to go with the images: riding a lurching camel through pillowy sand dunes in the Sahara, shopping in an outdoor market in Provence for just-picked fruits and vegetables, circling Jeff Koons' gigantic flowering puppy that sits calmly outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao, watching kids splashing through a swimming pool installation on the roof of the Hayward Gallery in London, and stumbling over memory plaques in Berlin.

She happily munches cookies, and lights up when I come to photos of our new dog. "You must bring Buster here,” she says. We must all go to Morocco to see the camels." She laughs at the absurdity and attractiveness of the possibility.

She’s thirsty and I look for a glass near her sink. "This one?" I ask. "Yes," she replies, "that one. It's a mere bagatelle." I do a double take and she laughs. "I haven't heard that in a long time," I say. "Me neither," says Betita. "How come I can remember that, but can't remember the name of the person who helps me every day?"

We stop for a moment, pondering the marvelous trickiness of the brain. Then, just as we have often done together, we muse about the meaning and origins of this trifle of a word. As I search her well-used English and French dictionaries, and read out aloud all the detailed information I can find, I am reminded of the many times that we have done this together, sharing our pleasure in words and language, and for this moment all is as it was.

Happy birthday to Elizabeth (Betita) Martínez, born 12 December 1925.

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. He has written for the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Truthdig.com, History News Network, Z Magazine, Monthly Review, and the Guardian. Platt, now an emeritus professor living in Berkeley, California, taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). This article was also posted to his blog, GoodToGo.]

Thanks to Bernardine Dohrn /The Rag Blog

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