JOURNEY TO FREEDOM

States are prohibiting teaching about events none of us will ever forget. They’re banning history and discussion of the damage done by years of violence and discrimination. But Paul Murray did his part in keeping it available.

You may know Paul. His children went through Albany Schools. He headed the School Board and taught at Siena College. In 1966, Paul went to Mississippi with the American Friends Service Committee to help with the Civil Rights Movement. Later he went back as an expert witness in civil rights litigation.

At Siena, Paul organized a course on the Civil Rights Movement. Instead of lecturing, he got people from this area with personal experience in the Movement to discuss it with his students, and took some of his students to Mississippi to meet people Paul had worked with.

Students loved the course and made a video of Professor Murray’s last class. But the passing of someone he’d invited made Paul realize the need to preserve their memories and keep the history alive.

Here’s a sample.

Miki Conn worked for Bayard Rustin, principal organizer of the March on Washington, where King shared his dream. Miki organized the fleet of busses that brought people to the March – a huge undertaking that brought some hundred thousand people to Washington in 1963 – then she ran the information booth. Paul had her talk about it.

My wife and her college friends integrated a movie theatre in Greensboro, NC, while the famous Woolworth sit-ins were taking place downtown – Paul asked her to talk about it.

Paul had me explain crucial legal cases to his students but since I was at the March and heard King describe his dream, Paul had me talk about that too.

Alice Green grew up in the Adirondacks and fought discrimination of every kind in this area since childhood, creating and running the Center for Law and Justice. Paul had her talk about it.

Julie Kabat wrote about her late brother who taught in a Mississippi freedom school in the summer of 1964. Paul brought some of her brother’s students to describe how different it felt to be treated with respect by a young white man.

Nell Stokes was a teenager in Montgomery, Alabama, when the community organized the bus boycott to protest being forced to give their seats to white people and move to the back of the bus. Nell volunteered with the cab company providing rides during the bus boycott and talked about it at Paul’s invitation.

Those are just a sample. Now retired from teaching, Paul wanted to preserve their experience for anyone interested in the Civil Rights Movement. He arranged interviews, a videographer, and inclusion on the Siena College website. We just celebrated the video’s release. (It should be available at Siena.edu/Journey to Freedom by the time this airs, indexed by those interviewed.)

For some participants, religion played a large part. I know Paul is deeply involved in describing the efforts of the Catholic Church to address the violence and segregation to which African-Americans were subject. It’s a matter of great pride in the Jewish community that there were rabbis on the podium with Martin Luther King – after slavery in America and the Holocaust in Europe, they understood each other, the humanity of people of all backgrounds, the cause of freedom, the threat of racial hatred, the violence that follows and the importance of overcoming it.

Compensating for wrongs done is what law usually does. What’s unfair is letting it fester. Thanks to Dr. Murray and Siena for making this history available to all.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on February 6, 2024.

Julie Kabat signs and discusses Love Letter from Pig: My Brother’s Story of Freedom Summer

Thursday, September 28 at 6pm 

The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza

1475 Western Ave

Albany, NY 12203

Civil Rights veteran Paul Murray will lead a conversation with Julie and two of her brother Luke’s Freedom School students, Andreesa and Dorothy, who grew up in Meridian, Mississippi and now reside in Albany. 

Description

In the summer of 1964, the FBI found the smoldering remains of the station wagon that James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman had been driving before their disappearance. Shortly after this awful discovery, Julie Kabat’s beloved brother Luke arrived as a volunteer for the Mississippi Summer Project. Teaching biology to Freedom School students in Meridian, Luke became one of more than seven hundred student volunteers who joined experienced Black civil rights workers and clergy to challenge white supremacy in the nation’s most segregated state. During his time in Mississippi, Luke helped plan the community memorial service for Chaney, attended the Democratic National Convention in support of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and even spent time in jail for “contributing to the delinquency of minors.” This arrest followed his decision to take students out for ice cream. Through his activism, Luke grappled with many issues that continue to haunt and divide us today: racialized oppression, threats of violence, and segregation whether explicit in law or implicit through custom.

Sadly, Luke died just two years after Freedom Summer, leaving behind copious letters, diaries, and essays, as well as a lasting impact on his younger sister, nicknamed “Pig.” Drawing on a wealth of primary resources, especially her brother’s letters and diaries, Kabat delves deep into her family history to understand Luke’s motivations for joining the movement and documents his experiences as an activist. In addition to Luke’s personal narrative, Kabat includes conversations with surviving Freedom School volunteers and students who declare the life-long legacy of Freedom Summer. A sister’s tribute to her brother, Love Letter from Pig: My Brother’s Story of Freedom Summer addresses ongoing issues of civil rights and racial inequality facing the nation today.

 

About the Author

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Julie Kabat has toured internationally as a composer, performer, singer, and storyteller. She previously worked for over forty years as a teaching artist in public schools.

The civil rights and labor movements and American values

A few nights ago I was reading a history of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s a history that I know well but I found myself in tears. The values that advocates for African-Americans have fought for are the values that we prize as Americans, values that make us feel safe and welcome – that we don’t have to account for where we pray or whether it’s in English, Latin, Hebrew or Arabic; we don’t have to account for where we or our parents were born; whether we’re the children of laborers or executives; whether we’re covered by the pale skin of Scandinavians, the swarthy skin of Italians, the red skin of Native Americans or Indians from the Asian subcontinent – we respect each other and each other’s struggles, “merit and conduct.”[i] Our values are universal human values, not tribal ones. That was a huge advance in human history, and although it dates from the European Enlightenment and was rooted in reaction to centuries of religious wars there, America was its exemplar, proudly so, with the Statue of Liberty lifting her “lamp beside the golden door!” How painful that it’s those fundamental American values, the values of our Founders, though too often honored in the breech, values we fought for in a very bloody Civil War, that we now have to defend again against people claiming America as their birthright.

It’s not just what happens to someone else, though it would have been enough for a young Dodger fan first encountering the abuse heaped on Jackie, the team’s Black hero, or for a musical family to encounter the abuse heaped on Marion Anderson, the incomparable Black contralto, but all this was going on in the shadow of World War II which killed more than sixty million people for the sake of Hitler’s racial pride, six million of them in his specific attack on people of Jewish descent in the Holocaust. No one had to explain to me that loving our neighbors, a part of all of our fundamental scriptures, has to be either universal or it becomes a cruel joke. And coming on the heels of the Great Depression of the 1930s I equated the movement for labor rights with the movement for racial justice – both movements for decent treatment of people who had not been treated decently.

Working white men and women once understood that slavery was aimed at them as well as Blacks, that slavery kept their wages down and made it hard for them to support themselves and their families. Rich whites have long understood that the way to maintain their power was to drive a wedge between whites and blacks. White workers could satisfy their desire for status by disparaging Blacks. And everybody lost except the rich. Divide and conquer was their path to victory. And Americans repeatedly bought the pride and went to the soup kitchen.

Some of the unions also understood that. Soon to be Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg submitted briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, on behalf of a major union federation that shortly after became part of the AFL-CIO, urging an end to segregation.

But now the rich have poor whites fighting poor Blacks and both are worse off for it – again.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. For the podcast, please click here. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on March 14, 2023.

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[i] Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 3148 (1866) (June 13, 1866).

Controlling Our Bodies Requires Saving American Democracy

— For the podcast, please click here. —

Most people don’t realize that Roe v. Wade was the brainchild of two Nixon appointees, Justice Harry Blackmun and Chief Justice Warren Burger – the so-called Minnesota twins because they had grown up together in Minnesota. Blackmun had been counsel to the Mayo Clinic and he and Burger had corresponded about abortion rights well before Roe v. Wade came to the Court. So they were ready and waiting for it.

As a moral issue Roe was about people’s rights to control their own bodies. It has never seemed a close moral case to me. But the legal implications of litigation are often much more complex than the moral issues. Roe was controversial from the beginning even among liberal law professors. I particularly remember an article by John Hart Ely criticizing the legal foundations of Roe. And Gerald Rosenberg famously argued in The Hollow Hope that women would have had a more secure right to abort without Roe. I’m in print, in an article with my friend David Schultz, disagreeing with Rosenberg.

But I want to make a different point than the ones that Ely, Rosenberg, or David and I made, that it is important to understand the price we have paid for the freedom we believe in and what that means for the future.

When Roe was decided, the Court was mopping up some of the civil rights cases in the midst of a backlash. Many of us remember the White Citizens Councils and racist violence. But most of the country was appalled. The racists had no chance of taking over the country. They had no claim to the moral high ground, and even its opponents understood that. Segregation, lynching, denials of voting rights were basically indefensible.

But Roe was a bugle call to many religious groups. The racist and religious groups reached different people despite some overlap. Church groups had a religious fervor and an organizational engine that the racists could not achieve by themselves. Karl Rove and others put many of them together. In doing so, they created a movement that threatens the core of American self-government.

Racism clearly underlies a great deal of what is happening now in the country and a large part of support for Mr. Trump. But the religious fervor of church groups built a separate movement around gender and sexual issues before some of the religious groups merged with the racists. The combination is lethal.

By nationalizing the social, gender and sexual issues on top of the Civil Rights revolution, the Court made a large group of Americans willing to attack American democracy. It was once possible, though unfair and expensive, for people who believed in the freedom to control their own bodies to rely on the law in states like New York and Massachusetts even though they’d be wise to stay out of Mississippi, Alabama, Texas and other states that had tried to destroy the country in the Civil War. But now, freedom-loving people cannot be sure of freedom anywhere in the country when American popular government is under attack by racists who recognize no rights but their own. What was a religious movement aimed at a moral issue is now fueling an attack on democracy itself.

Let’s be clear – no dictatorship, no government based on aiming weapons at its own people, supports women’s rights, privacy rights or sexual rights. In other words, with their sights trained on popular government, everything is at risk, all the freedoms we care about. The price of protecting everyone’s control of their own bodies is that we all have to fight for democracy with everything at our disposal.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on April 26, 2022.

Fannie Lou Hamer and the Holocaust

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The relation between a couple of reviews in the New York Times struck me. In a review of two books about Fannie Lou Hamer, one of the great organizers of the Civil Rights Movement in the South, Jill Watts commented that the 1966 defeat and replacement of the “integrationist leadership [of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] … by Black nationalist members … triggered the group’s decline and drained much needed external support from Hamer’s local crusades.” On the preceding page in the hard copy, Yaniv Iczkovitz criticizes the search for “universal lessons in lieu of attending to the actual persecution of Jews” in the Holocaust. Those two reviews take opposite views of the balance between engaging allies and taking ownership of our own groups’ struggles.

I understand the need to take over one’s movement. Popular movements need to keep changing; moving the goal posts keeps up the excitement and loyalty. But the very point of popular movements is the audience. Strategies that forget their audience lose their way.

My wife and I had the privilege of meeting Fanny Lou Hamer when I was a Legal Aid attorney in St. Louis. One of my clients was an organization called Black Survival. As its name suggested, it was an organization of and by African-Americans. We respected and sought each other’s views and worked out a strategy together. None of us evaluated, let alone discounted, each other’s suggestions based on the color of our skin. In court, I necessarily had a leading role. In other formal settings, I was often used as window dressing, a role I understood and did my best to play. Gathering signatures door-to-door on a very successful petition drive was their job. Our goal was very public – to prevent construction of a highway that would have split businesses, professionals and churches from their patrons, clients and congregations, destroying many of the most constructive aspects of their community – consequences they instinctively understood but consequences for which it was my job to amass numerous white PhDs for documentation and support. Our battle was advanced at a meeting with the Mayor in front of the cameras, and eventually resolved in our favor by the Nixon Administration. Allies mattered.

Like many minorities, Jews often share the instinct to emphasize differences rather than commonalities. To many Jews, the Holocaust was unique and uniquely bad. Tragically, that’s false. Genocidal struggles have been despoiling humanity both before and after the Holocaust with great regularity. The Holocaust can be a window into the struggles of humankind, an avenue for common revulsion and a path to brotherhood and common humanity. That would be better both for humanity in general and for Jews specifically. For many Christian theologians, the tragedy of the Holocaust included the horrendous misbehavior of self-professed Christian peoples and countries. That understanding, not our unique self-understanding, has been the basis for subsequent progress here, in Western Europe, and other parts of the world.

Am I too naïve in hoping that the world will again march toward brotherhood?

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on December 14, 2021.

Marian Anderson

I’m one of the lucky people who got to hear Marian Anderson live. My dad and I got to speak with and shake her hand after her performance in Chautauqua. A decade later, I heard her again at The March on Washington, singing the National Anthem before Dr. King spoke. Arturo Toscanini described her as having a voice that comes along “once in a hundred years.” My ears told me the same thing and I can still hear her voice in my memory, singing both the classical and the spiritual repertory. Her recital at the Lincoln Memorial, arranged by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, when the Daughters of the American Revolution barred her from singing in Constitutional Hall because of her race, was a major event of the Civil Rights Movement. She would go on to break the color barrier at Constitution Hall, become the first African-American to solo at the Metropolitan Opera, and was well-loved by audiences both in America and all over the world.

A lengthy article in the New York Times, designed partly to review a new boxed set of her work, brought up strong emotional reactions as it described her career. She was a jewel, well-worth remembering and hearing again and again.

My feelings about this election

It’s hard to describe my feelings. The great founding documents of our country seemed like they’d always be with us. When we participated in the Civil Rights Movement we thought were working for a better America. We never believed it could all disappear. We were brought up reciting the Gettysburg Address. We knew parts of the Declaration of Independence by heart. Some of us knew deals with the devil of slavery underlay the creation of the Constitution but also knew it had given us a platform to make a better world for everyone. We took it all for granted. Until the White House tenant threatened to take it all away.

I was born in New York City. Before I was four years old I knew this country was fighting with everything at its disposal to defeat Hitler and his Nazi butchers, who were exterminating Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gays, Poles, Slavic peoples, political opponents, people with disabilities and those Hitler called “useless eaters” in concentration camps. I felt safe in Brooklyn, and proud. I remember telling myself I lived in the greatest city in the greatest country in the world. How great is that. Kids are naïve but I believed in and loved this country. I thought I knew what it stood for and what it stood for was great, admirable, and indeed the world admired us for it.

Our country’s Founders understood that people in a democratic republic must learn to share and care about each other. John Dickinson signed our Constitution, paid a fine to free slaves and wrote, “By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall!” In 1782, Congress approved our national motto, e pluribus unum, out of many one, for the Great Seal of the United States.

This country opened its arms to Christians, Jews and Muslims. Universities, founded on sectarian lines, gradually widened their welcome. The Founders repeatedly described the need for immigration. The public school movement intentionally brought rich and poor together. The 19th century Army, recruited on ethnic and linguistic lines, needed an integrated fighting force. Teddy Roosevelt told us that “the military tent, where all sleep side-by-side, will rank next to the public school among the great agents of democratization.” By the end of the 2nd World War the Army played a large part in breaking down ethnic and religious barriers among us. Soldiers formed friendships with men all over the country, introduced each other to their families, often to future brides.

Corporations broke down barriers among employees so they could work together. Integration preceded Brown by centuries – race was just the latest barrier to break down. It was breaking down before World War II, when African-American stars like Paul Robeson and Marian Anderson were wildly popular with national audiences on stage, screen, radio and opera. The world was changing before Jackie Robinson stepped onto Ebbets Field. National polls revealed that the public supported Brown. Martin Luther King would say, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It’s pretty personal for me. I married a North Carolina girl, whose ancestry traces to the British isles, and always felt welcomed by her family.

So when Trump encourages people who celebrate Hitler and display their guns to scare and intimidate public officials, suggests they use their Second Amendment rights to lock up candidates, that there are good people among those who spawn hate crimes, and threatens not to accept the election results, he cuts the very guts out of the country I love. I don’t know how to express how sad, depressed and anxious I feel. Alan Paton wrote a book about South Africa he called Cry the Beloved Country. I stop myself from crying while there is still a chance to save it.

We all need to vote.

— This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on October 27, 2020.

Response to School Shootings

After this latest school shooting with 17 dead, I’ve read wonderful pieces by people who lost loved ones to guns, and banal pieces by wonderful writers whose imaginations were fried by the horror. What’s left? Sometimes I try to convince, or fire the choir. Here I’m trying to understand why we can’t put the guns away.

There are many strands in our struggle over guns.

• Some decided the Civil Rights Movement justified refighting the Civil War. There’s literature at gun shows and conclaves of gun owners that would be out of place anywhere else.
• Some associations, like the NRA, respond to their most committed, and extreme, members. The NRA’s extremists found a way to hold and even enlarge their membership while pushing it further toward the wrong – the opposite of left is certainly not a synonym for correct.
• Some politicians have been scaring people for decades. It’s us against them and support your police – hardly an issue until it’s used to justify shooting some people in the back – that’s against the law for everyone else and I can’t support so-called “law enforcement” that shoots people in the back.

Let me suggest another. The Founders’ divisions persist. The Founders talked and wrote about the general welfare, the opposite of selfishness. They did not glorify freedom from regulation. The record shows amazing levels of social regulation – and by the way you couldn’t keep ammunition in your house – it belonged in armories. The Founders believed in social responsibility, though they certainly did not always act the part.

On the other side, their “Don’t Tread on Me,” patriotic slogan is now taken as an emblem for extreme libertarianism. I’ve seen people so sure of their right to do whatever they wanted that they were outraged when cutting their driveway through a neighbor’s property and cutting down her flowering bushes drew a very angry response. And once the Revolution ended British restraints on westward settlements, the former colonists couldn’t wait to snatch Indian land across the Appalachians. Indians didn’t count any more than slaves did; in fact Indians were often enslaved as well as exterminated. If “we” want something, and “we” can get it, then “we” should take it. “Don’t tread on me.”

Many schools reduced violence by banning guns, but many gun enthusiasts think more kids with guns would make schools safer. Many cities reduced violence by keeping guns off the streets. To a carpenter problems can look like nails; to orthopedists problems can look like broken bones; to gun owners ….

The tools we hold invite the responses we make. They dis or disobey us, here’s my tool and it makes these surgical cuts in your internal organs. So as innumerable old western movies celebrated, you had to “hang ‘em up.” (Whoever thought those movies could teach us anything?)

It’s not just macho culture; not just about gender or sex. It’s about getting what we want, controlling the world, not sharing or living in it.

Trayvon Martin never threatened George Zimmerman even if he convinced a bizarre jury that he was in reasonable fear, but Zimmerman had a gun which made it easy to shoot a man in the back. That’s a piece of “American culture” I can do without. I much prefer people with the decency and the wisdom to try to live together in peace, paz, pacem in terris, shalom, salaam – peace in any language and the peace that we claim in all faiths.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, February 20, 2018.

For Peaceful Counter-protests

There is a debate that follows political activism – whether to be peaceful or violent. I’ve seen reviews of contrary scholarship. One view is that the old KKK used many of the same tactics as the modern “Alt-right,” using clownish outfits to draw in supporters so that laughter just helps their strategy and is an unhelpful response: The Ku Klux Klan Used the Same Trolling Tactics as the Alt-Right: https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-ku-klux-klan-were-memelords. Instead that scholar argues that Klan opponents at the turn of the 20^th century literally beat them up. There were communities that kept the Mafia out the same way. But that view underestimates the impact of the Klan. Literally it kept a large part of the U.S. intimidated, quiet about their depredations, and unwilling to investigate or convict for a century. I don’t see good evidence that violence held the Klan in check.

The reverse view is that violence feeds the Alt-wrong. This is the same point many have made about violence in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine. Violence feeds the sense of discrimination that is a large part of the Alt-wrong rhetoric and sense of grievance. Thus it becomes a recruiting tool. Plus the Alt-wrong appears way more ready to use violence to harm and intimidate than any other populations in America:  Don’t respond to fascists with violence. A German town offers some helpful tips. See:

The Civil Rights Movement put a very large effort into staying nonviolent. Violence was always the tool of the enemy and demonstrations were arranged to highlight that violence for a national audience, preferably on television. That effort was much more successful in shutting the Klan down than the earlier confrontations.

I would add that the contemporary American public is much more hostile toward violence than it was in 1900, despite the posturing, violence and intimidation of the Alt-wrong. So it is very important to avoid becoming the perpetrator of violence, and to follow the tactics of Dr. King and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. By contrast the antiwar movement, against the war in Vietnam, did resort to property destruction and my judgment was that they lost support in those demonstrations. I much preferred demonstrations carrying candles to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, or the reading of the names of American servicemen killed, and similarly powerful, but nonviolent demonstrations. I would follow the insight of Dr. King and the Civil Rights demonstrators in the present struggle and keep ourselves peaceful.

With all good wishes for you and for our country, Steve

The Dagger in the Heart of Labor

Last week I spoke about labor. Next week is the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s speech at the 1963 March on Washington. I intended to connect the two. After hate intervened in Charlottesville, that’s even more urgent.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Progressive Movement was making great strides on behalf of American workers and farmers. Gradually, the political parties adopted parts of the Progressives platform and many of their proposals were eventually adopted. But in the South, white elites drove a stake through the heart of the Progressive Movement by dividing workers on race. It took the Great Depression of the 1930s to wake America up.

The March on Washington that many of us remember as Martin Luther King’s great triumph was actually called by a coalition of labor leaders. Labor understood that workers had to stand together or they would be trashed together. If you could underpay African-American workers you could underpay everyone. The AFL-CIO, clear about the ways our fates interrelate, was a major supporter of the Civil Rights Movement.

But some politicians used racial prejudice to drive a wedge into support for progress, to prevent government from providing benefits and services for all of us, and then take the “savings” as tax breaks for themselves. Far more whites land on the public safety net but politicians want us to believe it’s just African-Americans. Far fewer African-Americans than whites depend on public schools but politicians want us to think money spent on schools is wasted because “they” get it. In area after area, politicians convinced many of us to starve public services. They want whites to think we would never need what African-Americans would get. They tell us we don’t want to spend anything on “them.” We should be allies, but the politics of race turns us into competitors.

Last time, I described how states and the Supreme Court have been undermining labor’s political role even as it augments management’s. So-called free market “conservatives” don’t want to do anything for the public, for you, your kids and your parents. They tell us that the market solves all problems for the deserving and only the undeserving need help, even while sanctimonious business men poison and defraud us. The real culprits want the freedom to take advantage of us while piling on more tax breaks for themselves. Racial prejudice just makes it easier for them to hide their own misbehavior.

So I want to make three points. First, racial prejudices do the greatest harm when politicians exploit them. I applaud those who condemn the violence and the perpetrators specifically. White supremacists don’t just object to policies – they hate everyone different from them. And no, Black Lives Matter is not a racist organization – objection to racism isn’t racism.

Second, the Supreme Court handed us heavily armed racists massing and marching to intimidate the rest of us. That must stop. Guns have no place in politics or public debate. Worse, white supremacists here admire Hitler, and study his path to power. Hitler’s Brown Shirts terrorized Germany. These folks are terrorists.

Third, Trump has done permanent damage to American politics. His close ties to groups which hate a large portion of America because they think we have the wrong parents is outrageous and highlights the danger of those hate groups. Trump has shown a path to power that every decent American must reject.

I was in front of the Lincoln Memorial when Dr. Martin Luther King shared his glorious dream. I thrilled to his words. But the March on Washington which we remember for Dr. King’s words was called and organized by the labor leaders of America dreaming of unity for all the working men and women of America. It is still a dream. We have to make it come true.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, August 15, 2017.