Lamar W. Hankins : The March for Jobs and Freedom After 50 Years

50 years later:
The March for Jobs and Freedom

While King's 'I Have a Dream' speech is clearly worthy of distinction, our memories of the event have shunted aside one of the primary purposes of the March: to push for a $2-per-hour minimum wage.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / August 24, 2013

[A series of events marking the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedem is being held Saturday, August 24-Wednesday, August 28, in Washington, D.C., highlighted by a Realize the Dream March and Rally on Saturday, 8 a.m-4 p.m., and a March for Jobs and Justice on Wednesday, 11:30-4 p.m., led by veterans of the '63 event and featuring speeches by President Obama and former presidents Clinton and Carter.]

August 28, 2013, will mark the 50th anniversary of what is now called “The March on Washington,” but was officially named “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” I was unable to go to Washington, D.C., 50 years ago, but I remember where I was, and the March was certainly on my mind. A friend and I were on a trip through Houston. We stopped at a Foley’s store and spent some time in the appliance section watching the March on the televisions displayed.

Another friend I had known in high school was working for a federal agency in D.C. at the time. He and his fellow employees were sent home for the day (a Wednesday) because the government feared violence, clear evidence of the state of race relations at the time. My traveling companion and I were pleased to see that the March was as peaceful as its organizers had hoped it would be.

There were stirring speeches by John Lewis, now a Congressman from Georgia, as well as Martin Luther King, Jr. Others well-known in public life were in attendance or sent their remarks to be read by others. James Farmer, head of the Congress of Racial Equality, was in jail in Louisiana. His remarks were read by Floyd McKissick. Author James Baldwin’s remarks were read by Sidney Poitier.

Others, including labor leader Walter Reuther and actor and singer Josephine Baker gave brief speeches. A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin played key roles in organizing the March, which was supported by the major civil rights organizations active at that time, as well as the AFL-CIO, and other union and religious groups.

Many musicians and singers performed, including Marian Anderson; Joan Baez; Bob Dylan; Mahalia Jackson; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Odetta; and Josh White. Actors present included Charlton Heston, Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Diahann Carroll, Ossie Davis, Sammy Davis, Jr., Lena Horne, and Paul Newman, along with comedian Dick Gregory.

March on Washington, 2013.

What we hear most about the March was the famous “I Have a Dream” speech of Dr. King. While the speech is clearly worthy of distinction, our memories of the event have shunted aside one of the primary purposes of the March: to push for a $2-per-hour minimum wage.

Had that goal been achieved and a $2 minimum wage been passed and indexed for inflation, the minimum wage today would be $15.26 based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index Inflation Calculator.

It happens that $15.26 is less than what a living wage in San Marcos-Austin-Georgetown would be today for one adult supporting one child. That figure, according to the Living Wage Calculator maintained by MIT, is $19.56 for those living in San Marcos/Hays County, Austin/Travis County, and Georgetown/Williamson County. The Living Wage Calculator takes into account the following costs:

• It uses the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s 2010 low-cost food plan, with regional adjustments. A family of four with two adults and two young children is expected to spend about $650 on food, less than $22 a day for the four.
• Child care costs are determined from a report, “Parents and the High Cost of Child Care - 2011 Update” published by the National Association of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies.
• The cost of health care is derived from the “2010 Consumer Expenditure Survey” prepared by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the “2010 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey” published by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services.
• Housing costs are from “2010 Fair Market Rents” produced by U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development.
• Transportation expenses are from the “2010 Consumer Expenditure Survey.”
• Other necessities are derived using regional adjustment factors from the “2010 Consumer Expenditure Survey.”
• Tax figures include estimated Federal payroll taxes as well as Federal and State income taxes for the 2011 tax year.

These Living Wage calculations show that we are nowhere close to what an inflation-adjusted minimum wage would be had it been $2 an hour in 1963. In fact, we are at less than half that amount with a current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. And President Obama earlier this year, in the face of strong opposition, requested an increase in the federal minimum wage to a pitifully inadequate $9 per hour.

These facts about what income can provide a minimal standard of living in the U.S. demonstrates that we have an economic system unwilling to provide Americans with a living wage when left to its own devices. But, as we are learning from current efforts by workers at fast food restaurants to be paid adequate wages, the companies that own these businesses are raking in plenty of profits from the labor of workers.

These companies could both thrive and allow their workers to live decently. An undergraduate student at the University of Kansas who researched McDonald’s company-owned stores found that the fast food giant could double all employee salaries by increasing the cost of a Big Mac by 68 cents, without giving up one penny of profits. And Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, believes that McDonald’s is so large, vast, and lucrative that the company could easily manage a major wage increase for its employees without damaging its profits.

Recently, fast food workers in New York City, St. Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Flint, Michigan, have been demanding that they be paid something closer to a living wage and that they be allowed to have the chance to form a union without intimidation by management. They ask to be paid $15 an hour, just under what the 1963 $2 per hour minimum wage demand would be if adjusted for inflation.

As a result of these recent efforts to obtain fairer pay, work stoppages and walkouts have occurred in fast food restaurants in several cities. Their efforts are being aided by the Service Employees International Union and could be advanced further if those of us who consume fast food support them.

If consumers respond to the moral issues related to fast food businesses by refusing to patronize fast food restaurants that won’t pay a living wage to their employees, this movement could finally realize a part of King’s dream and a primary objective of the 1963 March on Washington.

Nothing could be a more fitting memorial to the man who was killed while supporting sanitation workers in Memphis, who sought better wages, than for minimum wage workers throughout the country finally to be paid a fair wage that allows them and their families to live adequately.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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David McReynolds : Reflections on the '63 March on Washington

A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin on the cover of Life Magazine, September 6, 1963.

A socialist remembers:
Reflections on the March on Washington

The climate in Washington, D.C. that day was timorous. White Washingtonians feared some riotous upheaval.

By David McReynolds / The Rag Blog / August 24, 2013

August 28th will be the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedem.

Increasingly I realize, at 83, that there just aren't that many of us around who were there that August day 50 years ago. I knew Bayard Rustin -- chief organizer of the March -- (and will return to his name in a moment) and like many of us in the War Resisters League, the Socialist Party, and virtually all left organizations, was involved in the organizing for the event.

The decision to hold the March in mid-week rather than on a Saturday was very deliberate: Saturday marches are fairly easy to build, since few have to take time off from work, but a demonstration in the middle of the week means real commitment.

The climate in Washington, D.C. that day was timorous. White Washingtonians feared some riotous upheaval. It was then (and still is) easy for tourists to be unaware that the bulk of the population of the city is black. And what, the white minority wondered, would happen with thousands of angry Blacks coming to town.

Many businesses closed down. President Kennedy had made serious efforts to persuade Dr. King and the March organizers to call off the event. For a weekday the city was remarkably quiet. One must keep in mind the political climate of 1963.

The Civil Rights Revolution (it was nothing less than that) had only begun in December of 1955 in Montgomery. Ahead lay the bloodshed, the murders, the police violence, all of which had brought the leadership of the Black community into agreement on the need for some powerful symbolic action -- and that action was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

It's important, first, to look at the slogan: Jobs and Freedom. The link was very deliberate -- for what was freedom without a job?

I remember three things about the day.

One was the sound of thousands of souls, black and white, marching together toward the Lincoln Memorial, with the chant "Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!" It was truly black and white together. "White Washington" may have been fearful, but the trade unions were out in full force, and church and social justice groups had turned out their congregations and members.

The second thing I remember -- and I suspect few saw it -- was the failed effort of the American Nazi, George Lincoln Rockwell, to stir up a riot. I give him credit for raw courage: he stood up on a park bench and began an oration against "Kikes, Niggers and Communists." What happened next was a testament to careful planning on the part of the March organizers. Several dozen young Black youth formed a large circle around Rockwell and his followers, and, with their backs facing Rockwell, linked arms to make it clear that no one would be able to get through to the man and give him the violence he had sought to provoke.

The third thing I remember was King's speech. Sometimes at these marches and demonstrations -- and over the years I've attended many -- I simply made sure I got to the rallying point so the "count" would be maximized, and then I drifted away for a drink (those being the days when I drank) or a hamburger. There are so many speeches, and they are so boring. But this time I stayed -- and remember as if it were yesterday the cadence of King as he spoke, "I have a dream".

There were, I was aware, compromises; John Lewis, the courageous young Black civil rights leader, had had to to modify his comments a bit. (I suspect Lewis, looking back today, might realize the compromises in his language were much less important than the March itself.)

For Bayard Rustin the March was a great triumph. Life magazine carried a cover with A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin standing together on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

I've been invited to take part in a forum at a "Celebration of the Life of Quaker Bayard Rustin " on Sunday, August 25, at the Friends Meeting in Washington. They will show the film, Brother Outsider, followed by a panel with Mandy Carter, Bennett Singer, and myself.

I'm reluctant to take part, since, while Bayard was a deeply important part of my life -- he and A.J. Muste were the two mentors for my politics. I knew him well, and had under him at Liberation magazine and the War Resisters League. But I feel that the political path Bayard took after the March was a disturbing shift to the right, and that this must be discussed if we are to confront his life honestly.

As I said, I'm reluctant to do this since Bayard was one of the most courageous men I ever knew.

In connection with the events this month there is a new book out by Paul Le Blanc and Michael D. Yates, A Freedom Budget for All Americans. Published by Monthly Review Press, the book is due for print in September. (I have the uncorrected proof, which Paul Le Blanc was kind enough to send me.) Bayard had been very concerned that the March would not lead to the next steps, which he felt should be an effort to put forward a political and economic program to give the civil rights movement a "floor," a program for full employment.

The original Freedom Budget foundered because the authors sought to sell it to the publilc without realizing the need to take on the military budget. From Bayard's point of view, such an approach would "politicize" the budget and sink it, but in the real world of politics, which somehow Bayard failed to grasp, it was impossible to advance such a radical proposal at a time when the Vietnam War was so soon to absorb the attention of the nation.

It is good to have two socialist thinkers sketch out not only the history of the original Freedom Budget, but also give us an updated look at what such a budget might look like today.

[David McReynolds was the Socialist Party's candidate for President in 1980 and 2000, and for 39 years on the staff of the War Resisters League. He also served a term as Chair of the War Resisters International. He is retired and lives with his two cats on New York's lower east side. He can be reached at davidmcreynolds7@gmail.com. Read more articles by David McReynolds on The Rag Blog.

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Dick J. Reavis : Diverse 'Moral Monday' Movement Captures Imagination in North Carolina

Demonstrator being arrested during a protest at the Legislative Building in Raleigh, N.C., Monday, May 6, 2013. Photo by Gerry Broome / AP.

'Moral Monday':
Diverse NAACP-led movement
'achieves mass' in North Carolina

“When I got to an A.M.E. [African Methodist-Episcopal] church for a meeting called by the NAACP and saw that 70 percent of my audience was white, I knew that something was happening in North Carolina!” -- Rev. William Barber

By Dick J. Reavis / The Rag Blog / June 6, 2013

RALEIGH, North Carolina -- Four weeks ago, on Monday, April 29, an encouraging but puzzling progressive movement was born in an unlikely locale, North Carolina.

It calls itself “Forward Together” or sometimes, “Moral Monday.” It is led by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and it began when a group of 17, thoroughly integrated by age, sex, and race, refused to disperse during a protest inside the state’s General Assembly.

The “Moral Monday” protests have continued, and, at last notice, are gaining ground. On June 3, as a crowd estimated as high as 1,600 gathered, 151 demonstrators repeated the offense of the 17, bringing the total number of arrests to 309.

Most media observers believe that when and if the total surpasses 500, the campaign will attract significant national attention. Already the local press has got it right. “Moral Monday Achieves Mass” said the headline on a June 4 front-page story in the Raleigh News & Observer.

The movement is unquestionably onto something, but it’s also a puzzler in several ways. In the context of state politics, it is essentially a racial and Democratic rising. In 2008, by the narrowest of margins, a majority of North Carolinians voted to elect Barack Obama. The state hadn’t gone Democratic in a national election since 1976. The outcome was in part a reflection of racial demography: African Americans account for 22 percent of the state’s population, nine points above the national average.

North Carolina had long been governed by “moderate” Democrats, but Obama’s victory set off a white backlash that led to twin Republican victories, first in 2010 legislative races. In 2012, the state favored Romney and gave the GOP -- including numerous economic libertarians and Tea Party cranks -- veto-proof strength in both its legislative chambers.

Pat McCrory, an ostensibly business-as-usual Republican and mayor of Charlotte, the “Wall Street of the South,” won the governor’s race -- and immediately revealed an alliance with the ultra-right.

In a virtual blitzkrieg of activity, the General Assembly has passed or soon will pass bills whose consequences will upset almost everyone: measures to shorten the duration and amount of unemployment insurance payments, to impose a sales tax on medicines and groceries, and to abolish an enrollment cap on elementary classrooms.

Measures nixing federal funds to expand Medicaid, requiring voter IDs, and trimming voting hours are a part of the package, as is a bill to abolish inheritance taxes on estates of more than $5 million. The ultra-right’s push has suffered only one setback: a bill declaring Christianity as the state’s official religion didn’t get out of committee.

Rev. William Barber.

North Carolina is the least-unionized state in the nation and its white Democrats are led by Blue Dogs; fervent opposition wasn’t expected and hasn’t come from either quarter. Inspiration has instead come from the Rev. William Barber, an African-American backcountry preacher, not so polished as the grave and decorous Martin Luther King, but nearly as rousing, more eclectic or inclusive, and, odd as it may seem -- funnier!

Barber is a Baptist who, noting that one of the legislative proposals currently threatening the state is called House Bill 666, quipped that, “Some of y’all liberals won’t believe me, but I believe that even the computers numbering those bills are guided by the Word of God!” But Monday he turned his podium over to an LGBT spokesperson -- a white lesbian mother whose partner is black. Barber’s style may be archaic, but his message isn’t, as the old song says, “Gimme that old-time religion / It’s good enough for me.”

Internally, Barber’s movement is more akin to King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) -- with an emphasis on “Christian” and “Leadership” -- than to that of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) or Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).

The freewheeling debates of the Occupy movement, in which even fools could speak, are not a part of the scene. Instead, a coterie, including legendary white civil rights worker Bob Zellner and lawyer Al McSurely -- an organizer whose home was in 1967 bombed by the sheriff’s department in Harlan County, Kentucky -- plan what the movement will do from day to day.

The puzzling thing is that the response to their call has not been what anyone anticipated. While rallies in support of the cause are more representative of the state’s population, most of the movement’s arrestees -- including this reporter -- have been whites older than 50, most of them, college-educated -- Mother Jones and MSNBC fans. Physicians, professors, and even a few locally-elected officials are in their ranks.

Ten days ago, to build support for Moral Monday, Barber and his closest aides began a statewide speaking tour. “When I got to an A.M.E. [African Methodist-Episcopal] church for a meeting called by the NAACP and saw that 70 percent of my audience was white, I knew that something was happening in North Carolina!” Barber declared. But he wasn’t speaking in what we call “all seriousness”: he was noting an irony that puzzled, and maybe amused him, too.

Nobody has yet been able to fully explain the arrest-sheet demographics. Cuts in unemployment insurance don’t take effect until July 1: maybe the unemployed don’t yet know what’s in store, some people say. Others point out that today mugshots of the arrestees are posted within hours on the Internet, from which they are universally available, maybe forever.

Twenty years ago, only lawmen could tap such information electronically. Knowing this, college students are justifiably afraid that an arrest record will follow them for the rest of their lives. A few people complain about the dominance of god talk in Moral Monday speeches, but outspoken atheists are still beyond the pale here.

The commentary is not always doubtful, however. Ever since the fall of Reconstruction, a consensus has prevailed among Southern radicals. The greatest obstacle to the region’s progress, they’ve said, has been that whites were unwilling to follow black leadership. Barber’s rise as the head of a mostly white army has broken that taboo.

Because its demographics are new and could shift in unpredictable ways, no one is really predicting Moral Monday’s future, and I think there’s a good reason why. Nearly 50 years ago, I was an SCLC volunteer. One of my first duties was to redirect traffic from a parking lot at one venue to another, for a speech by Dr. King.

I resented the assignment because it meant that I wouldn’t get to hear him. But when I complained to a veteran field staffer, he imparted a bit of wisdom that’s still good coin. “Dr. King and them aren’t going to talk about anything but where the Movement is going,” he said. “But if anybody knew, this wouldn’t be a movement!”

[Dick J. Reavis is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University. A former senior editor at Texas Monthly magazine and the author of six books, Reavis was a contributor to the original Rag in Austin and was active in the civil rights and anti-war movements. He may be reached at dickjreavis@yahoo.com. Read more articles by Dick J. Reavis on The Rag Blog.]

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FILM / Dave Zirin : '42' is Jackie Robinson's Bitter Pill

 

A Review of '42':
Jackie Robinson's bitter pill

This was a man tortured by the fact that his own experience was used as a cudgel against building a public, fighting movement against racial injustice.

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2013

See "Dave Zirin Writes from the Busy Intersection of Sports and Politics" by Thorne Dreyer at Truthout, and listen to Dreyer's March 22, 2013, interview with Zirin on Rag Radio.

This week in Major League Baseball was Jackie Robinson Day. This is when Commissioner Bud Selig honors the man who broke the color line in 1947 and pats MLB on the back for being “a leader in the Civil Rights Movement.” It’s possible to appreciate that Selig honors one of the 20th Century’s great anti-racist heroes. It’s also possible, out of respect for Jackie Robinson, to resent the hell out of it.

Ignored on Jackie Robinson Day are baseball’s decades of racism before Jackie broke the color line. Ignored are Robinson’s own critiques of baseball’s bigoted front office hiring policies. Ignored is the continuance of the racism that surrounds the game in 2013. Ignored is the fact that today in Arizona, Latino players live in fear of being stopped by police for not having their papers in order.

The recent film 42 about Jackie Robinson’s entry into the Major Leagues shares this contradiction. I can certainly understand why many people I respect love this film. I can understand why a teacher I know thinks it’s a great primer for young people who don’t know Jackie’s story. I understand why, given the high production values and loving depictions, Jackie Robinson’s family has been outspoken in their appreciation.

But I didn’t like it, and with all respect, I want to make the case that I don’t believe Jackie Robinson would have liked it either.

Early in the film, Jackie Robinson, played by newcomer Chadwick Boseman, says, "I don't think it matters what I believe. Only what I do." Unfortunately that quote is like a guiding compass for all that follows. The filmmakers don't seem to care what Robinson -- a deeply political human being -- thought either. Instead 42 rests on the classical Hollywood formula of “Heroic individual sees obstacle. Obstacle is overcome. The End.”

That works for Die Hard or American Pie. It doesn’t work for a story about an individual deeply immersed and affected by the grand social movements and events of his time. Jackie Robinson's experience was shaped by the Dixiecrats who ruled his Georgia birthplace, the mass struggles of the 1930s, World War II, the anti-communist witch-hunts, and later the Civil Rights and Black Freedom struggles. To tell his tale as one of individual triumph through his singular greatness is to not tell the story at all.

This is particularly ironic since Jackie Robinson spent the last years of his life in a grueling fight against his own mythos. He hated that his tribulations from the 1940s were used to sell a story about an individualistic, Booker T. Washington approach to fighting racism.

As he said in a speech,

All these guys who were saying that we've got it made through athletics, it's just not so. You as an individual can make it, but I think we've got to concern ourselves with the masses of the people -- not by what happens as an individual, so I merely tell these youngsters when I go out: certainly I've had opportunities that they haven't had, but because I've had these opportunities doesn't mean that I've forgotten.

This was a man tortured by the fact that his own experience was used as a cudgel against building a public, fighting movement against racial injustice.He wanted to shift the discussion of his own narrative from one of individual achievement to the stubborn continuance of institutionalized racism in the United States. The film however is a celebration of the individual and if you know how that pained Mr. Robinson, that is indeed a bitter pill.

The film's original sin was to set the action entirely in 1946 and 1947. Imagine if Spike Lee had chosen to tell the story of Malcolm X by only focusing on 1959-1960 when he was a leader in the Nation of Islam, with no mention of his troubled past or the way his own politics changed later in life. Malcolm X without an “arc” isn’t Malcolm X. Jackie Robinson without an “arc” is just Frodo Baggins in a baseball uniform.

The absence of an arc, means we don’t get the labor marches in the 1930s to integrate baseball. We don’t get his court martial while in the army (alluded to in the film without detail). We don’t get Jackie Robinson’s testimony in 1949 at the House Un-American Activities Committee against Paul Robeson. We don’t get his later anguish over what he did to Robeson. We don’t get his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement when he was a barnstorming speaker across the south.

We don’t get his public feud with Malcolm X, where Malcolm derided him as a “White man’s hero” and he gave it right back saying, "Malcolm is very militant on Harlem street corners where militancy is not that dangerous. I don't see him in Birmingham.” We don’t get his daring, loving obituary to Malcolm after his 1965 assassination at a time when the press -- black and white -- was throwing dirt on his grave.

We don’t get his support of the 1968 Olympic boycotters. We don’t get the way his wife Rachel became an educated political figure who cared deeply about Africa, as well as racial and gender justice in America. We don’t get the Jackie Robinson who died at 52, looking 20 years older, broken by the weight of his own myth. We don’t get Raging Bull. We get Rocky III.

But if the focus of 42 is only going to be on 1946 and 1947, then there is still a lot to cover: namely Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson, and their relationship to the Negro Leagues. Rickey -- with Robinson’s support -- established a pattern followed by other owners (with the notable exception of Bill Veeck), of refusing to compensate them for their players.

On the day Robinson signed with the Dodgers, Rickey said, "There is no Negro League as such as far as I'm concerned. [They] are not leagues and have no right to expect organized baseball to respect them." This led to the destruction of the largest national black-owned business in the United States.

You would never know this from 42. Instead the film chooses to affix a halo to Branch Rickey’s head. Instead, under a prosthetic mask, Harrison Ford plays Rickey as a great white savior, and not even Han Solo can make that go down smoothly.

Fairing better than Ford is the terrific performance of Chadwick Boseman as Robinson. Jackie Robinson could be sensitive about his voice, which was clipped and somewhat high-pitched. Boseman’s voice is so smoky it could cure a ham and his eyes and manner give hints of an internal life the film otherwise ignores.

There is no doubt in my mind that Jackie Robinson, if alive, would call on Bud Selig and Major League Baseball to stop using his history as an excuse to do nothing about the racial issues that currently plague the game. But there is also no doubt in my mind that Jackie Robinson, ever the pragmatist, also would support this film publicly.

He was an honorable person who would have been humbled by the effort made to make him look like a hero. He would have seen the value in being a role model of pride and perseverance for the young. But at home, alone, he would have thought about it. And he would have seethed.

This article was also posted at The Nation blog.

[Dave Zirin is sports editor at The Nation and the author of the new book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down (The New Press). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Civil Rights, SDS, and Student Activism in Austin, Texas, 1954-1973

Massive march against the War in Vietnam, Austin, Texas, May 8, 1970. Image from The Rag Blog.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 13: 1954-1973/2 -- Student Activism and the Anti-War Movement at the University of Texas

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / April 17, 2013

[This is the second section of Part 13 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Inspired by the early 1960s Civil Rights Movement protests of groups like the Congress of Racial Equality [CORE], the Southern Christian Leadership Council [SCLC], and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC], and in response to the 1965 escalation of the Pentagon’s War in Viet Nam, an increasing number of students and non-students in Austin, Texas, became involved in New Left and countercultural groups like SDS and in underground press journalism during the 1960s.

There was substantial New Left activity in other Texas cities, including Houston where underground newspaper Space City! helped pull together an active movement community, but Austin -- which had always been a center for cultural and political iconoclasm -- would become one of the nation's New Left hot spots.

As Beverly Burr observed in her thesis, "History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-88)":

The Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] formed a chapter in the early spring of 1964. From 1964-7, the UT chapter of SDS began to build the local white, radical student movement. Alice Embree, one of the early participants in SDS at UT, said that when she went through registration at the beginning of the Spring 1964 semester, there was an SDS information table. She conjectured that 4 or 5 people started the group.

The early focus of the group was participating with black student activists in the sit-ins at downtown Austin restaurants... In mid-October 1965, SDS held a death march protesting U.S. policy toward Vietnam. This protest was apparently the first antiwar demonstration on the campus during the 1960s. About 70 students participated in the march and rally... SDS had attempted to get a parade permit to march on the streets during the rally but the permit had been refused by the City Council...

SDS held its first fall 1966 meeting in late October [1966]... At the same time, students organized an underground newspaper called The Rag... Most of the staffers were SDSers who created the paper not only to publicize issues of importance to the movement but also in reaction to the corporate controlled mainstream media... During the fall [of 1966] 10 SDS and Rag women... held a sit-in protesting the draft at the Selective Service in Austin. In January of 1967 several demonstrations were held against Secretary of State Dean Rusk while he was in town... Over 200 came to the second protest which succeeded in canceling Rusk’s dinner at the UT Alumni Center...

The first conflict between SDS and the University occurred later in the spring of 1967 during Flipped-Out Week... SDS had planned a week of activities including a speech by... Stokely Carmichael..., an anti-war march to the Capitol, and Gentle Thursday... The activities attracted several thousands... The week after Flipped-Out Week, SDS distributed flyers... to plan a Monday protest against Vice President Hubert Humphrey who would be speaking at the Capitol... On Monday, about 150 students protested at the Capitol against the war in Vietnam. Later that day, UT withdrew recognition of SDS as a campus organization...

UT initiated disciplinary proceedings against 6 students involved in the anti-war protest... against Hubert Humphrey... Simultaneously the UT administration... called for the arrest of George Vizard, a non-student. Vizard was arrested by Austin police... The police brutally arrested him in the Chuckwagon, a café and radical hangout in the Student Union... Over 250 outraged students and faculty members... founded the University Freedom Movement [UFM].

University Freedom Movement rally,
UT campus, 1967. Photo from The Rag.

But despite subsequently well-attended free speech rallies and extralegal campus protests by UFM supporters during the rest of April 1967, the six anti-war students who were being disciplined by the UT administration were all placed on probation for their political activity on May 1, 1967. Yet the anti-war countercultural movement in Austin continued to gain more local popular support, and in October 1969, around 10,000 people protested in Austin against the Republican Nixon Administration's failure to end the Pentagon’s War in Vietnam .

African-American student and non-student Movement activists also continued to organize anti-racist protests during the late 1960s in Austin. As the “History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin ” thesis also noted:

In 1966, the Negro Association for Progress [NAP] was formed... During the spring of 1967, NAP... members converged on the office of... athletic director and... football coach Darrell Royal to find out why UT was not accepting or recruiting black athletes... In October [1967]... NAP held an illegal demonstration for black student rights... In the spring of 1968 NAP was replaced by the Afro-Americans for Black Liberation [AABL]...

In May [1968]... the owner of a Conoco station... attacked a black musician... Larry Jackson of Austin SNCC and Grace Cleaver, chair of AABL, called on all persons opposed to racism to picket [and to boycott the station]... Jackson requested that SDS participate in the action and the group agreed. The students held several sit-ins at the gas station. City police arrested about 50 in the demonstrations... That fall AABL won 2 academic programs in Afro-American Studies...

And in a Feb. 1, 2003, speech before the W.H. Passion Historical Society at the Southgate-Lewis House in Austin, former Austin SNCC activist Larry Jackson also recalled how a SNCC chapter came to be formed in Austin during the late 1960s:

I was born in central East Texas, a little town called Hearn... And that’s the place I first began my activities in civil rights... I first got involved in a lot of civil rights activities when I was in high school in Hearne, Texas. And I was trying to integrate the pool... I left Hearne, Texas because I was involved with so much strife there...

And in Houston I became very active in school activities at Texas Southern... And what really got me here in Austin was I had previously worked on the Martin Luther King speech day in Houston... And at the music hall, outside of the TSU people and a few whites to hear Martin Luther King speak, there was not 200 people there. And this happened in 1967... And I ended up coming here on a speaking deal with Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown. That’s how I got to Austin , Texas... And so he was speaking out there at the University of Texas. So I stayed on here because I was gonna form a SNCC chapter here in Austin...”

Austin was also a center for the fast-growing women's liberation movement and, according to Jo Freeman in Women: A Feminist Perspective, the landmark Supreme Court decision on abortion, Roe v. Wade, "was the project of a small feminist group in Austin, Texas and the lawyer [Sarah Weddington] who argued Roe before the Supreme Court was one of its participants."

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Anne Lewis' Documentary About Anne Braden Is 'Gem of a Film'

Filmmaker Anne Lewis on Rag Radio in the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, Friday, February 22, 2012. Photo by William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio Podcast:
Documentary filmmaker Anne Lewis,
co-director of Anne Braden: Southern Patriot

By Rag Radio / The Rag Blog / February 27, 2013

Documentary filmmaker and University of Texas senior lecturer Anne Lewis, whose most recent work, Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, was called a "gem of a film" by folksinger and civil rights activist Joan Baez, was Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Friday, February 22, 2013.

On the show, Lewis discussed her impressive body of work as an independent filmmaker and, in particular, her acclaimed film about the remarkable Southern civil rights fighter Anne Braden.

She also addressed recent developments at the University of Texas at Austin, where university president Bill Powers has made radical proposals to "increase efficiency" at the the school, in part by privatizing much of the university staff. Powers' plans have drawn reaction from faculty, students, and union activists on the UT-Austin campus, and Lewis wrote about the issue in The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio is a syndicated radio program produced at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin, Texas. This episode was produced during KOOP's Spring 2013 Membership Drive and includes fundraising pitches for the cooperatively-run all volunteer public radio station.

Listen to or download our interview with Anne Lewis, here:


Anne Lewis is an independent filmmaker, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin's School of Radio-Television-Film, and an active member of the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU-CWA Local 6186) and NABET-CWA. She has been making documentary films since 1970. Most of her filmmaking depicts working class people -- often women -- fighting for social change. She is associated with Appalshop, an arts and education center located in the heart of Appalachia.

Anne Lewis was associate director of Harlan County, U.S.A, and the producer/director of Fast Food Women, To Save the Land and People, Morristown: in the air and sun, and a number of other social issue and cultural documentaries. She was associate director/assistant camera for Harlan County, USA, the Academy Award-winning documentary, which focused on the Brookside, Kentucky, strike of 1975. After the strike, Lewis moved to the coalfields where she lived for 25 years.

Lewis was co-director with Mimi Pickering of the 2012 film, Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, a first-person documentary about the extraordinary life of the American civil rights leader. The film was first screened by the Austin Film Society on July 18, 2012.

Filmmaker Anne Lewis.

Writing at The Rag Blog, William Michael Hanks called the film "a wellspring of intellectual reason, a blueprint for action [that] includes some of the most iconic footage from the civil-rights movement ever seen." The Rag Blog's Hanks, himself a former documentary filmmaker, joined us in the interview, discussing with Lewis her unique use of first person narrative in constructing the film.

According to The Texas Observer's Susan Smith Richardson, Anne Braden, a middle-class white woman from Alabama who "rejected her racial privilege in the Jim Crow South and devoted her life to fighting racism," was considered a "traitor to her race" by many who opposed her. Braden and her husband Carl, who together published the crusading Southern Patriot newspaper, were targets of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunts. Braden, who was an inspirational figure among movement activists, was called "eloquent and prophetic" by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Joan Baez called Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, "a gem of a film, accented with freedom fighters who speak firsthand about carving a path through a traumatized, violent, racist South, to make way for one of the largest and most effective nonviolent movements for social change the world has ever seen."

To learn more about Anne Lewis' work, visit her website, AnneLewis.org.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor and long-time alternative journalist Thorne Dreyer, a pioneer of the Sixties underground press movement, Rag Radio is broadcast every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CST) on KOOP, and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EST) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA.

The show is streamed live on the web by both stations and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, March 1, 2013: Louis Black, co-founder and editor of the Austin Chronicle and co-founder of the South by Southwest Music, Interactive, and Film Festival (SXSW).
Friday, March 8: Novelist David McCabe, author of Without Sin, based on a true story of a sex trafficking ring exploiting young, undocumented women.
Friday, March 15: Legendary producer Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records, and filmmakers Maureen Gosling & Chris Simon, This Ain't No Mouse Music!

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Bob Feldman : Texas Civil Rights Movement Wins Big Victories, 1954-1973

White and African American students from Austin area colleges sit in at a segregated lunch counter on Congress Avenue in Austin, April 1960 as part of a concerted effort to integrate lunch counters. Image from Austin History Center.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 13: 1954-1973/1 -- Civil rights efforts to desegregate schools, public facilities, have wide success.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / February 25, 2013

[This is the first section of Part 13 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Between 1953 and 1964, the percentage of non-agricultural workers in Texas who were unionized dropped from 16.8 to 13.3 percent; but the number of labor union members in 1964 in Texas  -- around 375,000 -- remained about the same as it had been in 1953. As F. Ray Marshall’s Labor in the South observed:

The main losses in Texas were the OCAW, which had 31,000 members in 1955 and about 20,000 in 1964; and UAW, whose membership had declined from 16,057 in 1955 to about 14,000 in 1964; the carpenters, who had 27,321 members in Texas in 1957 and about 15,000 in 1964; the packinghouse workers, who had 2,035 members in 1955 and 1,200 in 1964; and the textile workers who had 720 members in 1955 and only 185 in 1964.

The main unions to gain membership in Texas between 1960 and 1964 were the American Federation of Government Employees, the National Association of Letter Carriers, the state, county and municipal employees; the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the Amalgamated Meat Cutters.

Yet between 1947 and 1973, the number of factories in Texas increased from 7,128 to 14,431; and the number of factory workers in Texas exceeded 730,000 by 1972.

By 1960, the number of African-Americans who still lived in rural Texas had dropped to 256,750 and the number of African-American tenant farmers and sharecroppers in Texas had dropped to 3,138, while the number of African-Americans in Texas who still owned their own farms had declined from 52,751 in 1940 to 15,041 by 1960.

And “by 1960 only 8 percent of all black workers in Texas remained in rural areas -- a sharp decline from the 32 percent of two decades before,” according to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans. But, in contrast, the “urban black population in Texas grew from 428,110 in 1940 to 905,089 in 1960,” according to the same book.

Although “Texas Attorney General John Ben Shepperd made a concerted effort to drive the NAACP out of Texas by suing the association” in 1956, according to Merline Pitre’s In Struggle Against Jim Crow, after the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled that racial segregation in U.S. public school systems was unconstitutional, African-American civil rights activists in Texas continued to protest against racism within Texas society during the 1950s and 1960s; and -- despite the political opposition of some white Texans who wanted to preserve legalized segregation in the state -- were able to win some of their anti-racist demands between 1954 and 1973.

As Black Texans recalled, “protests by local black organizations and court cases brought the integration of publicly owned restaurants, golf courses, parks, beaches and rest rooms in Houston, Beaumont, and other Texas cities during the 1950s.” In 1954, for example, Houston ’s public golf course and public library were desegregated; and between 1954 and 1956 all major Texas cities ended racial separation on their city buses.

Yet, “at Texarkana College in 1955 -- a crowd of whites prevented blacks from enrolling” and “White Citizens Councils, an anti-desegregation group…appeared in Texas during the summer of 1955 and soon claimed a membership of 20,000,” according to Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas, with 250 delegates attending its 1955 convention.

And, “although enrollment at UT was fully integrated by 1956, blacks were banned from varsity athletics and relegated to segregated and substandard dormitories;” and “Austin in the early 1950s was still segregated in most respects -- restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, drug stores, public schools, parks, swimming pools, hospitals, housing and public transportation,” according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History.

Barton Springs, for example, “was off limits to blacks as late as 1959” and “some residents saw in [former Austin Mayor] Tom Miller’s plans for an interstate highway  just an extension of the wall of separation,” according to the same book. [I-35, in effect, created a barrier between downtown Austin and mostly African-American East Austin.]

Near Fort Worth, “forceful opposition to school integration at Mansfield” also developed in the fall of 1956 “when over 250 whites stopped the entry of black pupils into formerly white schools” and then-Democratic Texas Governor Shivers “used Texas Rangers, not to disperse the mob, but to remove the students,” according to Black Texans; and “Mansfield schools remained segregated for at least two more years,” despite the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, according to the same book.

Houston also still had the largest racially segregated public school system in the United States in 1957. And while Southern Methodist University (SMU) administrators finally began allowing African-American applicants to attend this college in 1955, Texas Tech, Rice University , Baylor University, and Texas Christian University administrators apparently didn’t allow African-American applicants to become students on their campuses until 1960.

So, not surprisingly, anti-racist civil rights protests and demonstrations by both students and non-students in Texas continued during the 1960s. As Black Texans recalled:

In the early 1960s black and white students from Texas Southern University in Houston, the University of Texas in Austin, and other colleges across the state began to protest restaurant and theater segregation. Bishop and Wiley college students in Marshall undertook one of the first series of non-violent demonstrations in Texas during the spring of 1960. Prairie View students with limited white support boycotted Hempstead merchants in the fall of 1963.

Local chapters of the NAACP and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) also picketed, petitioned and boycotted against segregation in Austin, Houston, and San Antonio... In El Paso, where Negroes formed only 2 percent of the population, the city desegregated public accommodations by ordinance... In some smaller East Texas towns, such as Huntsville and San Augustine, sit-ins and protests remained necessary even in 1965 to bring integration of public accommodations...

Since University of Texas “dormitories were still segregated” and African-American students at UT were “still excluded from varsity athletics” in 1960, in Austin during the spring of 1960 “black and white students protested UT’s dormitory and athletic policies” and also “picketed nearby restaurants” and “staged sit-ins at downtown [Austin] lunch counters, according to Austin: An Illustrated History. But the same book also observed:

Most downtown eateries stood pat... Demonstrations accelerated in December [1960] when groups of 100 to 200 UT students participated in "stand-ins" at the two movie theaters on the Drag...Hundreds of demonstrators celebrated Lincoln’s birthday in 1961 with stand-ins at both movie houses on the Drag and the State and Paramount theaters downtown... In September [1961] the two theaters on the Drag agreed to integrate... Sit-ins at a white dormitory brought disciplinary probation to several participants... Finally, the regents gave in on integrated housing in 1964...

At UT in Austin (whose student body included only around 200 African-American students in 1961), the Students for Direct Action campus group (which was founded in the fall of 1960) also picketed in 1962 at “the Forty Acres Club, a newly-opened private "whites-only" faculty club often used for university meetings and entertaining official university visitors,” according to the 1988 “History of Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin (1960-1988)" thesis by Beverly Burr that was posted on the UT Watch website.

And in the fall of 1962 student activists on UT’s campus also founded the Negroes for Equal Rights (NER) and Campus Interracial Committee [CIC] campus civil rights  groups which were successful in pressuring the University of Texas administration to finally hire its first African-American faculty member (an assistant professor of civil engineering named Ervin Perry) in May 1964; and to finally allow African-Americans to become members of the UT faculty’s Forty Acres Club in March 1965.

Yet despite the early 60s civil rights protests in Austin, as late as the fall of 1963, Austin’s 24,413 African-American residents “were still barred from half or more of Austin’s white-owned restaurants, hotels, and motels and from business schools and bowling alleys,” “9 out of 10 black elementary-age children attended schools that were at least 99 percent black” and “discrimination in employment and housing was common,” according to Austin: An Illustrated History.

So, not surprisingly, Austin’s NAACP chapter held a six-day civil rights filibuster at an April 1964 meeting of Austin’s City Council to demand that it pass an anti-discrimination ordinance; and Joan Baez even appeared at a“freedom hootenanny” in the front of Austin’s City Hall before an audience of 200 local civil rights movement supporters on the first day of this Austin NAACP civil rights filibuster.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Population Growth and Civil Rights Victories in Texas, 1940-1953

Herman Sweatt was the first African American to attend the University of Texas after a 1950 Supreme Court decision. Photo courtesy of UT Press / Daily Texan.

The hidden history of Texas

Part 12: 1940-1953/2 -- Population growth and some significant civil rights victories.

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / February 18, 2013

[This is the second section of Part 12 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

As Texas’s manufacturing industry expanded to produce more weapons and supplies for U.S. government needs during World War II, the need for factory workers in Texas increased; and more people in Texas moved from rural areas into cities and towns between 1940 and 1953.

By 1950, over 7.7 million people now lived in Texas and around 60 percent of all people in Texas now lived in urban areas. By 1950, for example, 596,163 people lived in Houston, 434,462 in Dallas, 408,407 in San Antonio, and 278,728 in Fort Worth; however, Austin's population was still only 132,459 in 1950.

According to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans, “World War II almost doubled the number of black industrial workers” in Texas -- from 159,000 to a peak of 295,000 in 1943. But during World War II “the Consolidated Vultee plant” still “segregated its assembly line; and Baytown oil refineries paid blacks less than whites for the same work,” according to Randolph Campbell’s Going To Texas.

Many Texas-born African-Americans continued to leave white supremacist Texas society between 1940 and 1953 for states in the Northeast, Midwest, or West in which racial segregation was not legalized and where they had often been able to find factory jobs during World War II. But in Houston -- where the total population had grown from 384,514 to 596,163 between 1940 and 1950 -- the “black population increased from 86,302 to 125,400” during the 1940s, according to Merline Pitre’s In Struggle Against Jim Crow.

And -- despite an anti-black riot by white racist Texans that occurred on June 15, 1943, in Houston -- African-American civil rights activists in Houston and elsewhere in Texas between 1940 and 1953 began to win a few victories in their campaigns for an end to legalized racial discrimination, white supremacy, institutional racism, and interpersonal racism in Texas society and daily life.

In 1943, for example, a Houston NAACP “boycott against Winegarten Store [Sic: Correct spelling is "Weingarten's"] led to the dismissal of one of the store’s security guards, who had struck a black customer” and “an NAACP-led demonstration made it possible for blacks to attend a production of Porgy and Bess at the Houston Music Hall and be seated on the same floor levels as whites,” according to In Struggle Against Jim Crow.

In addition, “on Apr. 6, 1943... representatives of the Negro Committee of the Houston Teachers Association presented the school board with a petition for pay equalization” and “on Apr. 13, 1943, rather than take a chance on a... lawsuit, the Houston school board agreed to make the salaries of black teachers and principals equal to those of their white counterparts who possessed the same credentials and performed the same duties,” according to the same book.

Then in 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Texas’s white Democratic primary law to be illegal in its Smith v. Allwright decision in a legal case that African-American civil rights groups in Texas had initiated. And in 1946 -- when 5,000 new members were recruited into the Houston chapter of the NAACP -- African-American civil rights activists in Texas began to challenge the racist admissions policy of the University of Texas in Austin.

As In Struggle Against Jim Crow recalled:

Lulu B. White... executive secretary of the NAACP’s Houston branch, and the NAACP’s state director... led fight...to integrate the University of Texas... Urged on by the NAACP and accompanied by Lulu White and other supporters, Herman Sweatt attempted to register at UT in Austin on Feb. 26, 1946. After a discussion with [then-University of Texas] President Theophilus Painter and other university officials, Sweatt left his application at the campus and returned to Houston... Sweatt sued university officials on May 16, 1946 for denying him admission...

In April 1949, Joseph J. Rhoades, president of Bishop College, organized a mass registration attempt sending 35 black college seniors from across the state to apply to various professional programs at UT... When they arrived at the registrar’s office seeking admission, they were told that they could apply at TSUN [Texas State University for Negroes; later renamed Texas Southern University]. These students then decided to stage a demonstration, marching from the university to the State Capitol. They carried placards... One sign read, "Texas Can’t Afford a Dual System of Graduate and Professional Education" Another proclaimed, "Separate and Equal Education Is a Mockery."...

The Supreme Court announced its findings in Sweatt v. Painter on June 5, 1950. In a unanimous decision the Court ordered Sweatt admitted to UT.

Also, “during the summer of 1946... the death of a black man gave rise to the largest mass protest demonstration that the city of Houston had ever witnessed” and “the NAACP... converted the funeral for Berry Branch, killed by a white bus driver, into a rally” in which “all labor unions in the city were represented,” according to the same book.

Yet despite the legal victories, there was still a poll tax in Texas that was utilized to block many African-Americans from being able to vote and the “only civil service positions” African-American residents were allowed to hold in Houston before 1945 “were in the post office,” according to In Struggle Against Jim Crow.

In addition, in 1948 only 15 of Houston’s 503 police officers were African-Americans and the “custom” of “the most blatant among the Houston companies” in its discriminatory policies between 1940 and 1953 -- Hughes Tool -- was still “to hire whites at 60 cents an hour and blacks at 50 cents an hour, although they were performing the same tasks,” according to the same book.

And,  “Austin in 1951 changed its city council representatives from geographical districts to an at-large basis which guaranteed control of all seats by the white majority,” according to Black Texans.

The number of African-Americans who lived in Texas only increased from 924,391 to 977,458 between 1940 and 1950, as many African-Americans left Texas for the West Coast, Midwest, or Northeast; and as late as 1945 there were still only about 45,000 people of Jewish religious background who lived in Texas.

But by 1950, the number of Latinos of Mexican descent living in Texas -- 1 million -- now exceeded the number of African-Americans who lived in the state.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Sanitizing Black History Every February

Rosa Parks, agitator. Image from Jezebel.
Sanitizing Black history every February

Rosa Parks had a life-long history of activism against injustice, but school children are seldom told the true story about her life of agitation and struggle against oppression.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / February 5, 2013

I don’t like to read about Black history during February each year because most of what I find is so sanitized. Black history is full of the stuff of human history -- courage, anger, intellect, rebellion, fear, intimidation, foolishness, agitation and, a hundred other descriptors. But what I hear less about than almost anything is agitation.

Dick Gregory used to say that an agitator is that thing in a washing machine that gets the dirt out. Others (notably Jim Hightower) have used that same idea to explain why agitators are needed.

The earliest use of that formulation that I have found is recounted by Mike Miller, a veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, SNCC, and the Industrial Areas Foundation (Saul Alinsky’s organization), in an article about working with SNCC in 1963 in Mississippi:

I went to a mass meeting in Ruleville -- you all know that Ruleville was the home of Fannie Lou Hamer. There were maybe 20, 30 people, but we called that a mass meeting in those days. And at this mass meeting, an old Black man got up, and as he spoke he put an arm up like this, and he started moving it. And he said: "You know" -- his voice was trembling -- "they call you Freedom Riders outside agitators. I got an old style washing machine in my home. It has a thing at the top; it goes back and forth like this." He pointed to his arm. He said: "You know what that thing is called? It's called an agitator. You know what that agitator does? It gets the dirt out.”

The history of Blacks in America is filled with agitators. Of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., was an agitator, but mostly we hear only about his “I Have A Dream” speech. Malcolm X was an agitator, but most of what we hear about him is -- well, we don’t hear much about him in the mainstream media.

But now we have a new book about Rosa Parks that sheds some needed light on the myth that she was just a poor seamstress whose feet were too tired to walk another step when the bus conductor in Montgomery ordered her to give up her seat to a white man.

Charles Blow reviews The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks in The New York Times. The book explains that Rosa Parks had grown up in a family that would not allow its members to be treated as second-class. Parks had been trained for community organization work (agitation) at the Highlander Folk School.

She had encouraged and helped to defend women who had been ordered to give up their bus seats to a white person. She was ready when the bus driver ordered her to do the same, and she refused to move, leading to her arrest and the subsequent Montgomery bus boycott that lasted over a year until the buses were desegregated. She had a life-long history of activism against injustice, but school children are seldom told the true story about her life of agitation and struggle against oppression.

If we go back to the beginning of American slavery, we find many similar stories among Blacks in North America -- stories of rebellion, agitation, and often death. Africans did not go willingly into the slave ships after their capture and detention on the west coast of that continent. These Africans came mostly from the west coast and from two to three hundred miles inland from an area bordered by the Senegal River and what is now Angola.

They were from tropical rain forests and grasslands. They came from tribal backgrounds, as well as from city-states then found in the Niger Delta, and from large, complex kingdoms that had existed for several centuries in the Sudan, with whom Europeans traded. They spoke many different languages and had many different cultural traditions.

The Portuguese began the African slave trade to benefit Portugal about 50 years before slave ships headed for the North American continent. Rebellions on the slave ships led many ship owners to take out what historian Benjamin Quarles has called “revolt insurance.” Beginning in 1522, slave revolts occurred in the Caribbean from Hispaniola to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica, St. Vincent, and the Virgin Islands, along with a famous one in Saint Dominique (which later became known as Haiti).

By the mid 1700s on the mainland, slaves could be found from Delaware to Texas. In the South, slave owners depended on militias to keep rebellions under control. Thom Hartmann recently explained how this worked :

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.

The same practices were followed elsewhere in the South, where slave patrols kept order among slaves to prevent rebellions and punish those thought to be planning to revolt. Still, slave revolts did occur. Perhaps the largest slave revolt in the continental U.S. was in 1811 near New Orleans. It took both the militias and the U.S. army to quell it.

The unsuccessful revolt planned by Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 was thwarted by the betrayal of some participants. Slave owners were so fearful that other slaves would learn of Vesey’s plan that a trial record of that history was destroyed so that it could not be seen by slaves or others sympathetic to their cause.

Many Americans have heard of Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia, which occurred nine years later, in which about 70 slaves escaped and rampaged from plantation to plantation, killing at least 55 people. Had their ammunition not run out, Turner and his group may have been successful in freeing many slaves, but realistically the odds were stacked against them.

Virginia had over 100,000 men in militias, heavily armed and outfitted, who stood ready to protect the financial interests of the slave owners. It is no wonder that more rebellions did not occur, but when they did, it was because someone was willing to be an agitator against an unjust and inhumane system.

Agitation and its companion -- rebellion -- also made itself known in efforts to escape slavery. Perhaps the most famous agitator for escape to freedom was Harriet Tubman, a Black woman born into slavery. She escaped from slavery when she was 19 and subsequently helped more than 300 other slaves escape.

She reportedly always carried a gun because she had no intention of ever being enslaved again or having the fugitives she helped enslaved. For Tubman, she would either be free or dead: “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man would take me alive.”

Another escaped slave who became one of the most famous Black people of his time, both before and after the Civil War, was Frederick Douglass, who was a lecturer, newspaper editor, and writer. Perhaps Douglass’s most famous words are these:

The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle... If there is not struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without the thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

While I’ve barely scratched the surface of the Black agitators who helped move this country forward and helped it escape its disgusting past, we need always remember that progress does not come without the agitators. Especially during Black history month, we should remember this lesson, and teach our children, as well as the adults, about our agitators, especially our Black agitators.

We need to stop whitewashing these agitators, sentimentalizing and sanitizing what they did, and acknowledge that it was their agitation that made the difference in our struggle to achieve freedom, equality, and justice for all people -- whether they are black, brown, yellow, white, or a blend of colors.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Dr. King and the Civil Rights-Labor Alliance

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy lead a march by sanitation workers in Memphis, March 28, 1968. Photo by Sam Melhorn / AP.

Martin Luther King and the
civil rights and labor alliance

King knew that black and white workers' struggles for economic justice were indivisible; that civil rights could not be realized in a society where great differences in wealth and income existed...

By Harry R Targ / The Rag Blog / January 21, 2013

Dr. Martin Luther King arrived in Memphis on March 18, 1968 to support the sanitation workers of that city who had been on strike for five weeks. These workers had many grievances that forced them to protest.

Garbage workers had no access to bathroom or shower facilities. They were not issued any protective clothing for their job. There were no eating areas separate from garbage. Also sanitation workers had no pension or retirement program and no entitlement to workers compensation. Their wages were very low.

Shortly before the strike began two workers died on the job and the families of the deceased received only $500 in compensation from the city. Finally, after Black workers were sent home for the day because of bad weather and received only two hours pay they walked off the job.

On March 28, 10 days after King arrived, violence disrupted a march led by him. He left the city but returned on April 4 to lead a second march. On that fateful April day, King told Jerry Wurf, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees or AFSCME: "What is going on here in Memphis is important to every poor working man, black or white, in the South." That evening Martin Luther King was killed by a sniper's bullet.

It was logical for King to be in Memphis to support garbage workers. Despite a sometimes rocky relationship between the civil rights and labor movements, King knew that black and white workers' struggles for economic justice were indivisible; that civil rights could not be realized in a society where great differences in wealth and income existed, and where life expectancies, educational opportunities, and the quality of jobs varied by class, by race, and by gender.

The more progressive and far-sighted leaders and rank-and-file union members in the AFL-CIO knew it too. At the time of King's death working people were coming together to struggle for positive social change around the banner of the Poor People's Campaign.

Dr. King's thinking on the need for an alliance between the civil rights and labor movements was expressed many times. As far back as 1957 at a convention of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) he asserted that "organized labor can be one of the most powerful instruments in putting an end to discrimination and segregation."

During an organizing effort of the Hospital Workers Local 1199 in the fall of 1964, King was a featured speaker at a fundraising rally. He said of the 1199 struggle,

Your great organizing crusade to win union and human rights for New Jersey hospital workers is part and parcel of the struggle we are conducting in the Deep South. I want to congratulate your union for charting a road for all labor to follow-dedication to the cause of the underpaid and exploited workers in our nation.

Shortly after, Dr. King left a picket line of Newark hospital workers on strike to fly to Oslo, Norway, to receive the Nobel Prize.

Upon his return from Norway, King returned to the picket line; this time in support of Black women workers of the Chemical Workers union at the Scripto Pen Plant in Atlanta. He said there: "Along with the struggle to desegregate, we must engage in the struggle for better jobs. The same system that exploits the Negro exploits the poor white..."

At the Negro American Labor Council convention of June, 1965, King called for a new movement to achieve "a better distribution of wealth within this country for all of God's children." In February, 1966, King spoke to Chicago labor leaders during his crusade for the end to racism and poverty in that city. He called on the labor movement which had provided techniques and methods, and financial support crucial to civil rights victories to join in the war on poverty and slums in Chicago.

Such an effort in Chicago, he said, would show that a Black and labor alliance could be of relevance to solving nationwide problems of unemployment, poverty, and automation.

One year before his death, King spoke at another meeting of Hospital Workers 1199. He said a closer alliance was needed between labor and civil rights activists to achieve the "more difficult" task of economic equality. The civil rights movement and its allies were moving into a new phase to achieve economic justice, he announced. This would be a more formidable struggle since it was in his words "much more difficult to eradicate a slum than it is to integrate a bus."

In early 1968, Dr. King incorporated his opposition to the Vietnam War with his commitment to economic justice. He called for an end to the War and the utilization of societal resources to eliminate poverty. To those ends the Poor People's Campaign was launched. It demanded jobs, a guaranteed annual income for those who could not find work, the construction of 6 million new homes, support for employment in rural areas, new schools to train jobless youth for skilled work, and other measures to end poverty.

While preparing the Poor People's Campaign, King got a call to go to Memphis. Before leaving he sent a message to be read at the seventh annual convention of the Negro American Labor Council. He wrote that the Council represented "the embodiment of two great traditions in our nation's history: the best tradition of the organized labor movement and the finest tradition of the Negro Freedom Movement." He urged a black-labor alliance to unite the Black masses and organized labor in a campaign to help solve the "deteriorating economic and social conditions of the Negro community... heavily burdened with both unemployment and underemployment, flagrant job discrimination, and the injustice of unequal education opportunity."

Forty years later the social and economic injustices of which Dr. King spoke continue. But so does his vision of a working class movement united in struggle to survive, a movement of Blacks, whites, and Latinos, men and women, young and old, and organized and unorganized workers.

The times have changed but the importance of Dr King's political vision remains.

A version of this article was first published on January 13, 2009, at Diary of a Heartland Radical.

 [Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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FILM / William Michael Hanks : 'Anne Braden: Southern Patriot'

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot:
A film by Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering

By William Michael Hanks / The Rag Blog / July 14, 2012

"The meaning of life is in that struggle which human beings have always been able to do -- to envision something better... that's what makes human beings divine." -- Anne Braden

If you find yourself in Austin Wednesday, July 18, be sure to see the screening of Anne Braden: Southern Patriot. This significant new documentary -- directed by Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering and released by Appalshop Films -- is being  presented by the Austin Film Society and The Texas Observer at the Alamo Drafthouse South, 1120 South Lamar in Austin, at 7 p.m.

Anne Lewis, who is a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin and a contributor to The Rag Blog, will be at the screening to discuss the film. There have also been recent screenings of Anne Braden: Southern Patriot in San Jose and San Francisco, California.


Who is a “patriot”? The Minute Men, the Continental Army in Valley Forge, Jefferson and Adams debating on the floor of Congress, or maybe the volunteer who serves her country in time of war?

Perhaps, but the one thing that all patriots share is a love of their country and the courage to fight for what they believe in -- to fight for their personal vision of a better America. That is, and will always be, the definition of true American patriotism.

At the close of World War II, America needed patriots. The poor and people of color were on the bottom rung of the ladder with no hope of advancement -- America was an apartheid state. True American patriots who would see a better way and risk their blood and treasure to move us towards a better world were needed more than ever.

America's pastime, baseball, was integrated in 1946 when Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers. But racism in America was far from over. Two years later, Anne McCarty married Carl Braden and they began a lifetime of activism together. Through the lens of Anne Braden's life we see the challenges and victories of the civil rights movement.

(Along with her husband Carl, Anne Braden, who died in 2006, edited the iconic Southern Patriot newspaper, published by the Southern Conference Educational Fund.)

In 1954 Anne and Carl bought a house for a black family in a white neighborhood. That set in motion an unimaginable sequence of events that swept Anne into the spotlight, accused of being a communist, and sent her husband, Carl, to prison for sedition against the state. In time it was held that sedition was a federal crime, not prosecutable by the state, and Carl was set free. But, by then, Anne Braden had a glimpse of a better America and worked tirelessly throughout her life to see it became a reality.

There are several remarkable things about this documentary. The technique of the first person narrative is used throughout the film and it flows seamlessly from one person to another as the story of the civil rights struggle throughout the South unfolds. Iconic footage of civil rights demonstrations is intercut with reflections by Anne Braden and other civil rights workers, former co-workers, and scholars -- including Cornel West and Angela Davis -- descriptions of how they were vilified and branded “communists” for trying to realize a better vision of America.

The first-person technique requires rigorous discipline in editing to keep the narrative flowing through the voices of different persons. Anne Braden: Southern Patriot is an outstanding example of that challenging form. Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering are both award-winning filmmakers and this film is a landmark work in both content and style.

Who was Anne Braden? In the 1950's she was a young woman with a determination to follow her conscience. She was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and moved with her family to Alabama where she enjoyed the privileged life of a child of the middle class. As a young girl, she began to notice the disparities in race relations and she began to develop an active social conscience. A conscience that would not let her stand by and look the other way. Her life is an example of right action -- pursuing the vision of a better world.

Anne Braden:

The meaning of life is in that struggle which human beings have always been able to do -- to envision something better... that's what makes human beings divine.

Anne Braden's life touched others and inspired them to action. Bob Zellner describes his first experience as an organizer in the South:

My first job at SNCC was to head a campus traveling program. The first staff meeting I went to was in McComb, Mississippi, where a freedom march was being planned. I joined the march and was beaten, arrested, and almost lynched that first meeting. They kept calling me a god-damned, nigger-lovin', son of a bitch Jew from New York. And I said well, nine out of 10 is not bad but I'm not from New York!

Anne had taught us you could be for an open political discussion... you can be for integration... and you could still be a good person... a normal person. If it was Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King who convinced me to join the struggle, it was Anne Braden who showed me how to do it.

Anne Braden:

The real danger comes from people in high places, from the halls of Congress to the boardrooms of our big corporations, who tell white people that if their paychecks are eaten up by taxes it’s not because of our bloated military budget but because of government programs that benefit black people. If young whites are unemployed, it’s because blacks are getting all the jobs. Our problem is the people in power who are creating a scapegoat mentality. That’s what is creating the danger of a fascist movement in America.

Anne Braden sensed that what she faced in Alabama was the same fascism that the Allies had just announced a victory over in WWII. In an eerie echo of the recent past, the words of Herman Goering, Hitler's Third Reich Marshall at the Nuremberg trials offer a key to understanding the dynamics in Alabama. He speaks of “war” but substitute any government policy and the formula still works:

Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy. And, it is always a simple matter to drag people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

This simple, age-old, and effective strategy has been used by our leaders, particularly since WWII and the “Communist threat," to suppress dissent and silence voices of righteous anger. But, it did not silence Anne Braden.

Faced with an intractable segregationist power structure in Alabama, Anne and Carl Braden set about doing what they could for social justice in spite of it. Nothing seemed to stop her. She was inspired by a glimpse of something better -- a better life for blacks and whites -- and she saw no reason why it should not be.

When she heard Martin Luther King portrayed as a “dreamer," Anne insisted that "Martin Luther King was not a dreamer, he was a revolutionary.” and she would quote MLK's Riverside Church speech: “True compassion is more than flinging coins to a beggar... true compassion realizes that a society that produces beggars needs to be entirely restructured."

Anne Braden: Southern Patriot is a wellspring of intellectual reason, a blueprint for action, and it includes some of the most iconic footage from the civil-rights movement ever seen. Here Anne Braden describes her discovery of a simple but effective strategy:

If you use every attack as a platform, they can't win and you can't lose. If they leave you alone you keep on organizing, if they attack you, you have a platform to reach a lot more people, so you really can't lose.

In 1965 President Lyndon Johnson signed the most sweeping civil rights legislation in U.S. history and Dr. Martin Luther King won the Nobel Peace Prize. But civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi, and beaten in Birmingham and Selma. The struggle goes on. Each generation must shoulder the responsibility of providing oversight to their government. And if we don't, the inexorable concentration and abuse of power will continue.

Anne Braden and Cornel West.
Jackie Robinson retired after the 1956 season, before the Dodgers left Brooklyn for Los Angeles. Twenty five years after his historic debut, Jackie Robinson, the grandson of a slave, agreed to throw out the first ball of the 1972 World Series. He was dissatisfied with the progress of race relations. “As I write this 20 years later, and sing the anthem, I cannot salute the flag. I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1917, I knew that I never had it made.”

So, what do we do if our founders do not rise from the grave to set our country right? We do what they intended us to do -- rise from our slumber and act -- if we have the conscience and the fortitude -- if we have the guts.

The ills that are imbedded in the darker angels of human nature, are in turn reflected in society. We may trace the disease of social oppression through history. And, as certainly as a physical disease diminishes the body, so do societal ills diminish the body politic.

It's not surprising that most of our so-called leaders are afflicted with pride, avarice, and self interest; that is to be expected -- power corrupts. But it is for that very reason that the conscience of the people must call on the brighter angels of our nature.

We are at a crossroads in America -- a crises of conscience. Fortunately, there is a simple, effective cure. Really, all we have to do is follow the example of Anne Braden.


Anne Braden: Southern Patriot, a documentary by Anne Lewis and Mimi Pickering, will screen at the Alamo Drafthouse South, 1120 S. Lamar, Austin, Texas at 7 p.m., Wednesday, July 18. Don't miss it.

For ticket information: The Austin Film Society.

[William Michael Hanks has written, produced, and directed film and television productions for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the U. S. Information Agency, and for Public Broadcasting. His documentary film, The Apollo File, won a Gold Medal at the Festival of the Americas. Mike, who worked with the original Rag in Sixties Austin, lives in Nacagdoches, Texas. Read more articles by Mike Hanks on The Rag Blog.]

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