Category Archives: Social Studies

War made easy

The article below was published on March 29 as a Znet commentary and is excerpted from Norman Solomon’s speech to an antiwar rally in Sebastopol, California, on Sunday, March 19. His latest book is “War MadeEasy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For information, go to: WarMadeEasy.com.

Why Are We Here?

By Norman Solomon

On March 18, during her national radio response to the president, Senator Dianne Feinstein accused the Bush administration of “incompetence”in the Iraq war.

What would be a competent way to pursue the war in Iraq? How would you drop huge bombs on urban neighborhoods in a competent way? How would you deploy cluster munitions that shred the bodies of children in a competent way? How would you take hundreds of thousands of people from their home land and send them to a country to kill and be killed — based on lies — in a competent way?

How do you ravage the housing and health care and education of communities across the United States, while war-profiteering corporations post bigger profits — how would you do that in a competent way?

Senator Feinstein went on to say that it’s so important, for the war in Iraq, for the United States government to “do it right.”

How does one do this war right, when every day it brings more carnage? The only way to do this war right is to not do it at all. Reporting on a new assault by the U.S. military in Iraq, a headline on the March 17 front page of the San Francisco Chronicle said: “Biggest air attack since the invasion seen as delivering a message.”

Delivering a message.

Forty years ago, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara said it was necessary to drop bombs on North Vietnam in order to deliver a message to the Communist leaders in Hanoi. The former war correspondent Chris Hedges, in his book “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” recalls that when he was reporting from El Salvador, one morning he and other reporters woke up at their hotel and discovered that death squads had dumped corpses in front of the building overnight, and in the mouths of those corpses were written messages threatening the journalists.

In Yugoslavia, during the spring of 1999, the bombs fell with the U.S.-led NATO forces delivering a message. And when, at noontime one Friday in the city of Nis, cluster bombs fell courtesy of U.S. taxpayers and ripped into the body of a woman holding a bag of carrots from the market, that too was an instance of sending a message.

Time after time, leaders send messages by inflicting death. On September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden sent a message at the World Trade Center. And in the fall of 2001 the U.S. military sent a message to Afghanistan, where the civilians who died, if we are going to count numbers, were at least as numerous as those who died at the World Trade Center.

And now, George W. Bush continues to send a message with the bombs and the bullets. And we’re encouraged — if not to avidly support — to be passive. To defer. To be inactive.

When people across the United States gather to oppose this war, they are refusing to participate in sending the message of death.

Almost 40 years ago Martin Luther King talked about what he called “the madness of militarism.” And it’s with us, here and now; it’s with us in the United States every time a child is malnourished, every time people need medical care and don’t get it and suffer and sometimes lose their lives, while the military budgets of this country — over half a trillion dollars a year — are spent not on defense but on military expenditures, which dwarf anything that could be accurately described as defense. The madness of militarism that Dr. King talked about is expressed every day by the likes of Senator Feinstein, who demands “competence” in war and says that it must be done right.

We need a peace effort, not a war effort, from the United States. Instead of doing a better job of killing, there’s a movement around this country to compel what is said to be our own government to do a much much much better job of sustaining life — instead of taking it.

The problem isn’t that this war may not be winnable. The problem is the war was and is and always will be wrong, and must be stopped.

At every demonstration for peace and social justice, why are we here? Because those are values we want to live for.

And why are we here on this earth? Why are any of us here? Not an easy question to answer. But activism is a way of insisting that we’re not here to be part of war machinery. We’re not here to be part of the killing, we’re not here to aid and abet or enable those like George W. Bush who lead the charge to slaughter in the name of freedom to serve profit. We’re here with a very different mission.

Charles Sullivan “Matewan Revisited”

[Thanks to Paul O. for the tip on this one.]

Matewan Revisited

By Charles Sullivan

The history of America is the chronicle of class struggle. The current fight is the same fight that working class people have always waged. In the past there were three distinct classes: the upper class, the middle class and the underclass. The middle class is rapidly melding with the under class, leaving us with essentially two socioeconomic classes. In essence, what remain are the rich and the poor. The chasm between rich and poor has never been wider and it is growing every year.

For reasons that must be political, those in power expend much energy and capital denying that America is a class society. Recall how Poppy Bush used to accuse his political adversaries of conducting class warfare, even as his policies, like those of his son, do great harm to working people while benefiting the wealthy. Unrestrained capitalism is the opposite of Robin Hood and it reigns supreme in America. The hypocrisy of the elder Bush’s inane pronouncement is an insult to the intelligence of every working class citizen, who knows about class divisions first hand through long experience. In essence, what we have here is a predator and prey relationship. The rich are today preying upon the poor, just as they have always done.

This relationship is portrayed clearly and accurately through an examination of labor history. One particularly poignant example occurred in the hills of West Virginia in the spring of 1920. This was the battle of Matewan that pitted the mining companies against the coal miners who were desperately trying to organize a union. Far from being atypical of the oppression and wage slavery that characterizes America to this day, the events that unfolded in the coal fields of West Virginia are emblematic of class struggle, as documented by the historical evidence. An examination of these facts reveals the insult and insensitivity of Poppy Bush’s absurd proclamations against the working poor.
Few of us today can appreciate the atrocious conditions that working people once endured. Some of the worst working conditions in the world were encountered in the coal fields of West Virginia. Thousands of men and boys (child labor was also exploited in those days) died in the mines as a result of wanton neglect on the part of the mine owners. The lives of the coal miners were of no greater worth to the mining companies than a turnip. Workers were nothing more than property that was expendable and easily replaceable in the field. The horrid conditions that prevailed in places like Matewan, West Virginia, are almost beyond imagination.

Whole towns were under the oppressive dictatorship of the coal companies, which included the political electorate. Thus the coal companies assumed the role of God not only in the coal fields of West Virginia, but all across the land. Other corporations did the same. The coal miners lived in constant fear and intimidation of their bosses and their goon squads. Their housing was owned by the company. Entire towns were in essence owned by the company. The coal miners were the slaves on whose backs great fortunes were amassed for the mining companies and the robber barons. The mine owners lived like kings, while the miners scratched out a subsistence living in utter squalor. The miners had to purchase their tools, their food and supplies from company stores, whose prices were grossly inflated. The long hours of toil in the wretched and dangerous mines were paid in company scrip. Often at the end of an eighty hour work week, owing to the irregularities that always arose in keeping the company books, the miners actually owed the mining company money.

Those who tried to organize unions were summarily fired from their jobs and evicted from their housing. Many were routinely beaten and murdered by company thugs, such as the Felts Detective Agency. These beatings and murders occurred all across the nation, and those who administered them did so with impunity. The police and the National Guard were under the employ of the mining companies. As they are today, they were called forth to protect the wealth and property of the rich from the justice demanded by the working poor. There was no law and there was no justice for working people. The only protection the workers had was the union. Despite that kind of opposition, miners joined the union by the thousands in Matewan and vicinity in a display of courage that is rarely seen today.

Matewan was different from the norm in an important way: its police chief, Sid Hatfield, a former coal miner, and its mayor, C. Testerman, were both men of courage and moral integrity who stood up to the thugs hired by the mining companies to terrorize the miners and their families. Understandably, such courage and strength of character were an aberration. Under enormous pressure from armed thugs, lesser men in other parts of the country capitulated and cooperated with the corrupt power of the mining companies. These companies were essentially all powerful

Agents of the Felts Detective Agency had been unlawfully evicting union families from their homes, setting their belongings out in the rain. Sid Hatfield and Mayor Testerman attempted to halt the evictions, but to no avail. Then on the afternoon of May 19, 1920, accompanied by a group of armed miners, Hatfield attempted to arrest the detectives including Baldwin-Felts president Thomas Felts, and brothers Albert and Lee, who carried out the evictions. Hatfield and Testerman faced their heavily armed adversaries in the street. Someone fired a shot and a fierce gun battle ensued. In less than a minute eye witnesses reported that more than a hundred shots were fired. Killed in the first volley were Al Felts and mayor Testerman. When the shooting was over, seven detectives, including Lee Felts and two miners were dead or dying in the streets of Matewan. The incident became known as the Matewan Massacre.

The episode made Sid Hatfield a folk hero to working people throughout the world. Here was a man who not only faced the armed thugs hired by the mining company, he shot it out with them in the streets of Matewan and killed two of the notorious Felts brothers. Fifteen months later, however, Sid Hatfield was gunned down in a surprise attack by agents of the Felts Detective Agency on the steps of the McDowell County courthouse. No one was ever tried, much less convicted for his assassination. The murder touched off a fierce armed insurrection by the coal miners that involved more than ten thousand men.

This is the history of class conflict in America—one episode among countless thousands. But it is a history, common as it was, that is rarely told. You will not read about it in the text books used to teach history in our schools. Why? Because events like this tell the real story about America’s long war on working class people. It reveals how our nation’s wealthiest and most influential families obtained their positions of wealth and privilege. It is the kind of history that foments outrage at the injustice that still afflicts working class people to this day. It is a history that demonstrates that ordinary people can fight back and demand justice, even against impossible odds. Better to die a free man than live a slave.

So when I hear the products of class privilege, the Bush family, for example, accusing others of fomenting class warfare it makes me shake with rage because I know the history of my country in sordid detail. I know they are spewing lies that dishonor the countless thousands of working class people who were brutally oppressed and often murdered by their employers and their hired guns. I am also reminded that the Bush family fortune has been amassed like so many other dynasties—through the brutal exploitation of working people known as wage slavery. The Bush clan has no conception about what it is like to struggle, to sacrifice and to honor and uphold justice for ordinary people. If I were a plutocrat, if this were my legacy, I would not want the world to know about it either. It is a disgrace too vile to be put into words. This is what I call America’s secret history—the history those in power do not want you to know about. So spare me the banal talk about a free and democratic society. That is not what America is about.

This secret history explains current events perfectly. Working people are still fighting the same fight against the same foes as did Sid Hatfield and those coal miners at Matewan on that fateful day in 1920. The descendants of those people continue to work the coal fields of West Virginia and they continue to die in the mines. Under burgeoning capitalism the mining companies are now permitted to write the legislation that is supposed to provide for the safety of the miners. Thus the guns of the Felts Detective Agency have been rendered, for the time being, unnecessary. Why resort to violence when legalized bribery works so well? How little things have changed. Working class people continue to be the prey of their corporate employers with little recourse to the judiciary. Unionism, as timid and ineffective as it is these days, continues to wane as corporate power increases. It is the same old drama being played out in modern times by the descendants of the original players—and, like it or not, all of us are participants.

Now the vast majority of workers are ‘at will’ employees without any kind of protection from their employers. Thus, as in the days of Matewan, if a person wants to survive they must submit themselves to the indignity of being the property of their employers. America is a nation that was built upon slave labor. Migrating from job to job is no better than migrating from one master to another. In any case, the worker is the slave of the employer. The tradition continues to this day, although with far more subtlety than in the past. Our elected officials, if calling them so is not to make a mockery of the term, are increasingly under the employ of the ruling elite. The judiciary is stocked with corporate apologists anxious to continue the tradition of fleecing the workers and lining their own pockets with wealth they neither create nor earn. The fact that Industrial slavery bears a close and disturbing resemblance to its cousin chattel slavery is no accident. Its end product is almost as tragic, as the gap between rich and poor widens exponentially. As is the custom in America, the rich have gotten to where they are by riding the poor.

The character and the courage of Sid Hatfield and those coal miners at Matewan, West Virginia, are inspiring. Following their outstanding moral example, let us not capitulate to the modern thugs of American corporatocracy—to the military industrial complex and the champions of empire that would grind us under their heel. Let us read and reread labor history—America’s history—with a sense of hope and optimism, inspired by the example of Sid Hatfield and thousands of people like him. Someone has to stand up to the thugs who have always run this country for private wealth. We must, as history demonstrates so clearly, take heart and show some courage. We must stand for justice for all, no matter the personal cost. Otherwise, we are only paying homage to high minded ideals while betraying them with our misspent lives. We must stand together, shoulder to shoulder and face the enemy.

A life lived in the pursuit of justice for all is the only kind of life worth living. It is an examined life that requires character, courage and a capacity for critical thinking that can see beyond rhetoric and the mere symbols of freedom, to the bedrock of reality. It is a life that demands substance from us. The Wobblies had it right all along. The answer to justice, to world peace, is One Big Union. An injury to one is an injury to all is as true today as it was the day the phrase was coined. We should live by this credo. Justice demands courage and even bravado. As Thoreau so eloquently stated, “A man sits as many risks as he runs.”

American history, as dismal as it often is, is also the history of class struggle against oppression. Therein lies its greatest value—its eternal hope. It is the long continued fight that has always kept America from being what it could become—a bastion of democracy and hope, bristling with peace. This is because a privileged few do not want to share the wealth of this nation with those who create it. They intend to keep it for themselves, as their predecessors did. So we must keep alive the idea of One Big Union. It represents our best hope for halting the exportation of jobs that pits worker against worker across political boundaries. To accomplish this Herculean task requires that we have the courage and the wisdom to bring back the revolutionary unionism championed by people like Eugene Debs, Mother Jones, Emma Goldman and Big Bill Haywood. Sid Hatfield and mayor Testerman have already shown us the way. Do we have the fortitude and the courage to follow their example?

Note: the author gratefully acknowledges and thanks long time union organizer Anthony Debella for providing the inspirational impetus behind this piece.

Charles Sullivan is a photographer and free lance writer residing in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. He welcomes your comments at earthdog@highstream.net

Click below to post a comment on this article

Comment (0) | Trackback (0)

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

Welcome to Resisterville

There was significant media coverage of Allen Abney, a retiree from Kingsgate, B.C., who was recently arrested at the U.S. border on a federal warrant for deserting the U.S. Marines in 1968. Many folks firgured that Abney deserted because of ideological opposition to the Vietnam war. But last week, after being released from a military brig in the U.S., Abney had nothing but praise for the Marines and described his desertion as the result of youthful ignorance and a desire to visit home (Abney was born in the U.S., but raised in Canada).

While Abney doesn’t fit the profile of American war resisters who fled to Canada, the incident has focused the media on the issue of war resistance and in today’s Vancouver Sun there is a story about Nelson, B.C. the home to a community of Vietnam-era American war resisters.

Unlike Abney, the resisters profiled by Doug Ward remain anti-war and stedfast in their condemnation of U.S. military agression.

See the article below:Saturday » March 25 » 2006

Welcome to Resisterville
Unlike ex-marine Allen Abney, many Vietnam dissenters remain steadfast against the U.S.

Doug Ward
Vancouver Sun

Saturday, March 25, 2006

CREDIT: Peter Battistoni, Vancouver Sun
Jeff Mock, a Quaker-raised American who resisted the Vietnam-era policies of his government and moved to Nelson, says living here makes him glad his sons don’t have to deal with the Iraq war.
NELSON – It was 37 years ago, but Brian Bailey still remembers clearly the day a police officer in Berkeley, Calif. fired a load of buckshot that splintered Bailey’s motorcycle helmet, putting him on a road leading to the Slocan Valley in the West Kootenay.

“One of the cops tried to blow my head off with a shotgun,” said Bailey, getting riled up as he recalled what happened to him at the 1969 student demonstration near a piece of land protesters famously dubbed People’s Park.

“I was already upset about Richard Nixon being president and the Vietnam War. But getting shot was the last straw,” said Bailey, now 64, explaining why he quit his motorcycle repair shop and joined other friends in search of cheap land in B.C.

They found it near Nelson in 1970 and Bailey has been in the area since. His feelings about the Slocan Valley haven’t changed since the day he arrived. “Just look at the view out there,” said Bailey, sitting in the front room of a neighbour’s house, pointing to the panorama of snow-capped mountains. “You look at that and go: Wow.”

And his vitriol towards the current U.S. government is as unchecked as his long grey beard. “The only way I can describe my reaction to the American government is that I want to throw up whenever I think of it.”

Bailey is one of the estimated 100,000 Americans who moved from the U.S. to Canada because of the Vietnam War. Surprisingly, slightly more women came north than men, according to John Hagan, a University of Toronto professor and author of Northern Passage: American Vietnam War Resisters in Canada.

About 50,000 were draft-age war resisters or “draft dodgers.” About half these people, according to Hagan, remained in Canada. About 40 per cent of this group — 10,000 or so — remained in B.C., many in the Kootenays.

These Americans blended into Canadian society, becoming hockey dads and moms, MLAs, local politicians, professionals and entrepreneurs. The absorption of these Americans into Canadian life was so seamless that their historic migration is often forgotten, although every so often something happens that reminds us of their flight north to a much more peaceful Canada.

One continuing reminder is the American invasion of Iraq, which some say is turning into a quagmire reminiscent of the Vietnam War.

“The Iraq war has brought back memories of why I left the U.S.,” said Jeff Mock, a Nelson tofu-maker who fled to Canada in opposition to the Vietnam War.

“It’s made me glad that my two sons, who are of military service age, don’t have to deal with that.”

The Vietnam War era was also recalled earlier this month when Allen Abney, a retired man from Kingsgate, was arrested at the U.S. border on a federal warrant for deserting the U.S. Marines in 1968.

Initially, it was assumed by many that Abney had bolted from the Marines because of the Vietnam War. And that upon his release from a military brig in California last week, Abney might have harsh words about that war and the marines who placed him in custody.

But Abney did not fit the conventional profile of a Vietnam War-era resister. Abney was born in the U.S. but raised in Canada. He had wanted to be a marine throughout his youth and volunteered while living in Toronto.

Abney, now a 56-year-old grandfather, said that his decision to desert had nothing to do with either being opposed to the Vietnam War or being afraid to go.

“I just got to thinking one night, being dumb and stupid, that it would be nice to go back home.”

He said that the other war resisters came to Canada “out of their belief that the war was wrong, and I respect that position.” Abney added that this was not his view of the war.

Abney went on to praise the marines and “the young warriors” currently fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sitting in the kitchen of his old character house in Nelson, Mock said Abney’s pro-military remarks didn’t reflect the Americans he knew who came to Canada.

“He [Abney] had been a kid who didn’t want to get himself shot, I suppose, and was afraid enough to come to Canada. But it’s not the reason I came to Canada or why most of the people that I know did.

“Most people I knew either believed that war was immoral or that the Vietnam War was immoral. I believed both of those things.”

Mock, 57, grew up near New York City in a pacifist Quaker family. He was offered conscientious objector status on religious grounds by his local draft board, which meant he wouldn’t have to serve in Vietnam.

But Mock couldn’t bring himself to accept an offer that was not available to other young Americans. And he wasn’t about to join the military. So prison time appeared inevitable.

“But my girlfriend didn’t want me going to jail and so we came to Canada instead.”

His girlfriend, Irene, drove Mock to Canada in a friend’s Volkswagen bus in 1970, eluding the agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who were looking for him.

Bob Lerch also avoided going to Vietnam and now lives in the Slocan Valley where he owns a car repair shop called Organic Mechanix.

Sitting inside his garage, Lerch said he didn’t believe Abney’s statement that he regrets bolting from the marines.

“It’s hard for me to imagine him saying that all of a sudden his life was a mistake,” said Lerch, adding that “there’s lots of people who came up here and I’ve never heard anybody, who stayed here, say that.”

Lerch believes that Abney was pressured by the U.S. Marines to be pro-military upon his return to Canada. “If I had his choice, I’d do the same thing. I mean, in order not to go to prison, I’d say anything.”

Abney, in response to Lerch’s remark, said: “That comment is certainly not true. The marines didn’t pressure me one bit to say anything, one way or the other.”

Lerch doesn’t advertise his draft dodger status. He says on his auto shop’s website that he moved from New York City in 1974 to the Slocan Valley for a “lifestyle change.”

But Lerch, 59, is clearly proud of his decision not to go to Vietnam.

“Basically I didn’t want to kill anybody, especially a bunch of farmers,” said Lerch.

“The Vietnamese weren’t attacking the states. And I’d had friends who had been drafted and they came back so screwed up.”

Just as Lerch was about to be drafted into the army, a friend returned from Canada. “He told me: ‘You wouldn’t believe how nice it is up there.’ He was going back and asked if I wanted to come.”

Lerch crossed the border in 1970 and spent his first few years working in Vancouver, often on construction crews with other young Americans working illegally until they could get their landed immigrant status.

Eventually, he bought an old school bus and headed for the Maritimes to buy some land. On the way he stopped in the Slocan Valley and didn’t go any further east.

“I got here and said: ‘Wow. This is the nicest place I’ve ever been to in my whole life’ and I stayed.

“There were hundreds of other Americans here. And we were accepted even though we looked a little weird back then, being hippies.”

Many of the young Americans were helped by the descendants of an earlier wave of war resisters drawn to the Kootenays in the early 1900s — the Doukhobors, a sect of Christian pacifists who left Russia to avoid serving in the czar’s army.

Among the other Americans in the Slocan Valley were the parents of Aubrey Nealon, who wrote and directed A Simple Curve, a movie released earlier this year that tells a coming-of-age story about the son of hippie, draft-dodging American parents living in the valley.

“There were a lot of Americans here and they formed the largest subgroup in my little community of New Denver,” recalled Nealon.

He said that this well-educated, middle-class group of newcomers “not only fit in but they took charge in many ways. Many of them were trying to build a new and better way of living.”

Among the Americans Nealon knew growing up was Gary Wright, now the mayor of New Denver and chair of the Regional District of Central Kootenay.

Corky Evans, the MLA for Nelson-Creston, is another prominent American refugee. Evans has said that he came to Canada in 1969 with his wife and two step-children to give them a better life.

Evans, who settled in the Slocan Valley, described himself as a war resister but said he did not dodge the draft as his draft board would not have forced someone with a family to enlist. Indeed, he was granted deferment status a month after arriving here.

Nealon said that Wright and Evans are examples of how the war resisters brought new ideas and energy into the area.

“It’s made for an interesting cultural mix. You go to these small Kootenay towns and they don’t seem like your average tiny town in the middle of nowhere, which is what they are.

“There are three places on the main street of New Denver where you can get a delicious cup of cappuccino. It’s been like that for years and this is a town of only 600 people.”

The idea came to Issac Romano one day while he was sitting in a cafe on funky Baker Street in Nelson. There should be an event and a monument, he thought, to remind Canadians of the presence of Vietnam War resisters in Canada.

Romano, 57, was a family counsellor and longtime peace activist from Seattle with the touchy-feely, earnest air of a new-age therapist.

He’d been granted a deferment during the Vietnam War. He’d developed a strong respect for Canadian life through his connection with Or Shalom, the Vancouver synagogue attended by many left-wing Jews.

Romano came to Nelson from Seattle in 2001, drawn by a new job, and he became impressed by the numbers of American war resisters in the Kootenays. He decided something had to done to honour their contribution to the region and to the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Romano held a news conference in 2004 to announce his idea for a large bronze monument in the form of a man and a woman greeted by a Canadian with outstretched arms.

All hell broke lose.

A small story about the event in the Nelson Daily News made its way over the wire services to the right-wing TV network Fox News. The conservative base of the Republican party, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, was incensed by Romano’s idea. The City of Nelson website was bombarded with e-mails from angry Americans.

The local council and chamber of commerce freaked out about the potential loss of American tourist dollars.

Many of the draft dodgers and war resisters living in the area were disappointed by the reaction of Nelson’s business class. Not so much because they wanted a monument — more because they didn’t like to see their community cave into fear of right-wing Americans.

Nelson resident Ernest Hekkanen, 59, left his Seattle home in 1969 and crossed the border at Blaine. He doesn’t mince words when talking about how many in Nelson turned against Romano’s plan for a monument.

“This is a little cloistered, parochial community that feels as though international difficulties should not impinge upon its middle-class existence,” said Hekkanen. “Most of them have about as much spine as a hunk of Jell-O.”

Under pressure, Romano withdrew the suggestion, but didn’t give up his idea of a gathering to recall the draft-dodger phenomenon.

The event is called the Our Way Home Reunion and it is set for July 6-9 at the Brilliant Cultural Centre in Castlegar. Romano has lined up an impressive list of speakers, including George McGovern, the former senator who was the presidential candidate for the Democrats in the 1972 U.S. election. Tom Hayden, the Sixties protest leader, is expected to attend. So are singers Buffy Saint-Marie and Holly Near.

Romano isn’t worried that Fox News will use the reunion to agitate its viewers — he’s happy to spark debate about the Vietnam War and the current Iraq war.

He said the furore over his efforts to honour draft dodgers living around Nelson has forced many Americans to reconsider the Vietnam War “by asking the question: ‘Why did good people leave?’ ”

Romano does not expect the Our Way Home Reunion will spark much opposition in the Kootenays. He said that local businessmen and politicians came to realize that the tumult over the monument “generated far more publicity for Nelson than all of the city’s paid-for advertising.”

The Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story about the draft dodgers in Nelson and the New York Times ran a feature article with the headline: “Greetings from Resisterville.”

Hekkanen, the Nelson-based artist and writer of a long list of self-published books, is one American refugee helping Romano with the Our Way Home project.

Hekkanen, who says that “I describe myself as a draft dodger with pride,” feels a duty to continue his opposition to the U.S. military-industrial complex.

“My feeling, even now, is that if you are not contributing to bringing down the Republican White House, then you are probably culpable of war crimes being committed in the Iraq.”

Earl Hamilton, a Nelson school teacher who moved to Canada from Michigan in 1970, is more ambivalent about the Our Way Home Reunion.

“Reunion? I’m not sure we were ever unified,” said Hamilton, sipping coffee at the Oso Negro Cafe, a landmark of Nelson’s alternative subculture.

Hamilton, 58, said he considers himself fully Canadian, not American, adding that he had little interest in seeing a monument erected to honour draft dodgers.

“It’s not something I want to memorialize. It’s like: I’m in my life. I don’t have a great feeling of camaraderie for American expatriates. It’s not my peer group.”

Not that Hamilton has lost his anti-war bent. Hamilton was given a draft deferment in 1969 and allowed to work in a university hospital as a janitor. But he decided to leave America when some other janitors responded to the deaths of four anti-war demonstrators at Kent State University by writing on a blackboard: National Guard 4, Kent State 0.

“I just told my supervisor that I’m not working here anymore,” recalled Hamilton. “I realized that I had had enough of the political culture of the U.S.”

Now Hamilton wonders whether Canada will welcome new American war resisters avoiding service in the Iraq war.

He believes the new Conservative government is too willing to please the Bush administration. “I don’t believe that Canada is now a haven for pacifists and conscientious objectors. It’s become a place where whatever America says goes.”

Hagan, the University of Toronto professor who has researched the Vietnam War resisters, plans to attend the Our Way Home Reunion.

Hagan, also a draft dodger, said that many resisters are now in their late middle-age — “a time when people might naturally think back about what happened.”

But the focus of many of these Vietnam War resisters isn’t just on the past. He knows many in Toronto who have helped spearhead efforts to give sanctuary to young Americans avoiding service in Iraq.

“When we came in the Sixties, we were able to settle in because there was a lot of support for us. There is a memory of that and a desire to provide it for a new set of arrivals.”

dward@png.canwest.com

– – –

COUNTING BODIES

More than 58,000 U.S. military personnel died in the Vietnam War, with about 300,000 wounded, according to World Book Encyclopedia.

According to the website Vietnam War, one million Vietnamese combatants and four million civilians were killed in the war.

The U.S. casualty number in Iraq, according to the Washington Post, as of March 17 stood at 2,310 (1,808 in hostile actions, 502 in non-hostile actions).

According to Iraqbodycount.net, Iraqi civilian deaths since March 20, 2003 are between 33,773 and 37,895.

Jensen & Wosnitzer: “Crash” is a white-supremacist movie.

Robert Jensen and Robert Wosnitzer’s ZNet commentary on the Oscar-winning best picture “Crash,” make an insightful argument about the film’s misdiagnosis of America’s race problem. The core problem is not racial intolerance, but rather white supremacy.

ZNet Commentary
Crash
March 24, 2006
By Robert Jensen and Robert Wosnitzer

“Crash” is a white-supremacist movie.

The Oscar-winning best picture — widely heralded, especially by white liberals, for advancing an honest discussion of race in the United States — is, in fact, a setback in the crucial project of forcing white America to come to terms the reality of race and racism, white supremacy and white privilege.

The central theme of the film is simple: Everyone is prejudiced — black, white, Asian, Iranian and, we assume, anyone from any other racial or ethnic group. We all carry around racial/ethnic baggage that’s packed with unfair stereotypes, long-stewing grievances, raw anger, and crazy fears. Even when we think we have made progress, we find ourselves caught in frustratingly complex racial webs from which we can’t seem to get untangled.

For most people — including the two of us — that’s painfully true; such untangling is a life’s work in which we can make progress but never feel finished. But that can obscure a more fundamental and important point: This state of affairs is the product of the actions of us white people. In the modern world, white elites invented race and racism to protect their power, and white people in general have accepted the privileges they get from the system and helped maintain it. The problem doesn’t spring from the individual prejudices that exist in various ways in all groups but from white supremacy, which is expressed not only by individuals but in systemic and institutional ways. There’s little hint of such understanding in the film, which makes it especially dangerous in a white-dominant society in which white people are eager to avoid confronting our privilege.

So, “Crash” is white supremacist because it minimizes the reality of white supremacy. Its faux humanism and simplistic message of tolerance directs attention away from a white-supremacist system and undermines white accountability for the maintenance of that system. We have no way of knowing whether this is the conscious intention of writer/director Paul Haggis, but it’s emerges as the film’s dominant message.

While viewing “Crash” may make some people, especially white people, uncomfortable during and immediately after viewing, the film seems designed, at a deeper level, to make white people feel better. As the film asks us to confront personal prejudices, it allows us white folk to evade our collective responsibility for white supremacy. In “Crash,” emotion trumps analysis, and psychology is more important than politics. The result: White people are off the hook.

The first step in putting white people back on the hook is pressing the case that the United States in 2006 is a white-supremacist society. Even with the elimination of formal apartheid and the lessening of the worst of the overt racism of the past, the term is still appropriate, in ideological and material terms.

The United States was founded, of course, on an ideology of the inherent superiority of white Europeans over non-whites that was used to justify the holocausts against indigenous people and Africans, which created the nation and propelled the U.S. economy into the industrial world. That ideology also has justified legal and extralegal exploitation of every non-white immigrant group.

Today, polite white folks renounce such claims of superiority. But scratch below that surface politeness and the multicultural rhetoric of most white people, and one finds that the assumptions about the superiority of the art, music, culture, politics, and philosophy rooted in white Europe are still very much alive. No poll can document these kinds of covert opinions, but one hears it in the angry and defensive reaction of white America when non-white people dare to point out that whites have unearned privilege. Watch the resistance from white America when any serious attempt is made to modify school or college curricula to reflect knowledge from other areas and peoples. The ideology of white supremacy is all around.

That ideology also helps white Americans ignore and/or rationalize the racialized disparities in the distribution of resources. Studies continue to demonstrate how, on average, whites are more likely than members of racial/ethnic minorities to be on top on measures of wealth and well-being. Looking specifically at the gap between white and black America, on some measures black Americans have fallen further behind white Americans during the so-called post-civil rights era. For example, the typical black family had 60 percent as much income as a white family in 1968, but only 58 percent as much in 2002. On those measures where there has been progress, closing the gap between black and white is decades, or centuries, away.

What does this white supremacy mean in day-to-day life? One recent study found that in the United States, a black applicant with no criminal record is less likely to receive a callback from a potential employer than a white applicant with a felony conviction. In other words, being black is more of a liability in finding a job than being a convicted criminal. Into this new century, such discrimination has remained constant.

That’s white supremacy. Many people, of all races, feel and express prejudice, but white supremacy is built into the attitudes, practices and institutions of the dominant white society. It’s not the product simply of individual failure but is woven into society, and the material consequences of it are dramatic.

It seems that the people who made “Crash” either don’t understand that, don’t care, or both. The character in the film who comes closest to articulating a systemic analysis of white supremacy is Anthony, the carjacker played by the rapper Ludacris. But putting the critique in the mouth of such a morally unattractive character undermines any argument he makes, and his analysis is presented as pseudo-revolutionary blather to be brushed aside as we follow the filmmakers on the real subject of the film — the psychology of the prejudice that infects us all.

That the characters in “Crash” — white and non-white alike — are complex and have a variety of flaws is not the problem; we don’t want films populated by one-dimensional caricatures, simplistically drawn to make a political point. Those kinds of political films rarely help us understand our personal or political struggles. But this film’s characters are drawn in ways that are ultimately reactionary.

Although the film follows a number of story lines, its politics are most clearly revealed in the interaction that two black women have with an openly racist white Los Angeles police officer played by Matt Dillon. During a bogus traffic stop, Dillon’s Officer Ryan sexually violates Christine, the upper-middle-class black woman played by Thandie Newton. But when fate later puts Ryan at the scene of an accident where Christine’s life is in danger, he risks his own life to save her, even when she at first reacts hysterically and rejects his help. The white male is redeemed by his heroism. The black woman, reduced to incoherence by the trauma of the accident, can only be silently grateful for his transcendence.

Even more important to the film’s message is Ryan’s verbal abuse of Shaniqua, a black case manager at an insurance company (played by Loretta Devine). She bears Ryan’s racism with dignity as he dumps his frustration with the insurance company’s rules about care of his father onto her, in the form of an angry and ignorant rant against affirmative action. She is empathetic with Ryan’s struggle but unwilling to accept his abuse, appearing to be one of the few reasonable characters in the film. But not for long.

In a key moment at the end of the film, Shaniqua is rear-ended at a traffic light and emerges from her car angry at the Asian driver who has hit her. “Don’t talk to me unless you speak American,” she shouts at the driver. As the camera pulls back, we are left to imagine the language she uses in venting her prejudice.

In stark contrast to Ryan and his racism is his police partner at the beginning of the film, Hanson (played by Ryan Phillippe). Younger and idealistic, Hanson tries to get Ryan to back off from the encounter with Christine and then reports Ryan’s racist behavior to his black lieutenant, Dixon (played by Keith David). Dixon doesn’t want the hassles of initiating a disciplinary action and Hanson is left to cope on his own, but he continues to try to do the right thing throughout the movie. Though he’s the white character most committed to racial justice, at the end of the film Hanson’s fear overcomes judgment in a tense moment, and he shoots and kills a black man. It’s certainly true that well-intentioned white people can harbor such fears rooted in racist training. But in the world “Crash” creates, Hanson’s deeper awareness of the nature of racism and attempts to combat it are irrelevant, while Ryan somehow magically overcomes his racism.

Let us be clear: “Crash” is not a racist movie, in the sense of crudely using overtly racist stereotypes. It certainly doesn’t present the white characters as uniformly good; most are clueless or corrupt. Two of the non-white characters (a Latino locksmith and an Iranian doctor) are the most virtuous in the film. The characters and plot lines are complex and often intriguing. But “Crash” remains a white-supremacist movie because of what it refuses to bring into the discussion.

At this point in our critique, defenders of the film have suggested to us that we expect too much, that movies tend to deal with issues at this personalized level and we can’t expect more. This is evasion. For example, whatever one thinks of its politics, another recent film, “Syriana,” presents a complex institutional analysis of U.S. foreign policy in an engaging fashion. It’s possible to produce a film that is politically sophisticated and commercially viable. Haggis is clearly talented, and there’s no reason to think he couldn’t have deepened the analysis in creative ways.

“Crash” fans also have offered this defense to us: In a culture that seems terrified of any open discussion of race, isn’t some attempt at an honest treatment of the complexity of the issue better than nothing? That’s a classic argument from false alternatives. Are we stuck with a choice between silence or bad analysis? Beyond that, in this case the answer may well be no. If “Crash” and similar efforts that personalize and psychologize the issue of race keep white America from an honest engagement with the structure and consequences of white supremacy, the ultimate effect may be reactionary. In that case, “nothing” may be better.

The problem of “Crash” can be summed up through one phrase from the studio’s promotional material, which asserts that the film “boldly reminds us of the importance of tolerance.”

That’s exactly the problem. On the surface, the film appears to be bold, speaking of race with the kind of raw emotion that is rare in this culture. But that emotion turns out, in the end, to be manipulative and diversionary. The problem is that the film can’t move beyond the concept of tolerance, and tolerance is not the solution to America’s race problem. White people can — and often do — learn to tolerate difference without ever disturbing the systemic, institutional nature of racism.

The core problem is not intolerance but white supremacy — and the way in which, day in and day out, white people accept white supremacy and the unearned privileges it brings.

“Crash” paints a multi-colored picture of race, and in a multi-racial society recognizing that diversity is important. Let’s just not forget that the color of racism is white.

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege. He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. Robert Wosnitzer is associate producer of the forthcoming documentary on pornography “The Price of Pleasure.” He can be reached at robert.wosnitzer@mac.com.

American Sociological Association names “essential protest songs”

In the latest issue of the ASA sponsored journal Contexts, the editors compile a list of “essential protest songs.”

There are 14 songs on the list including standards as “We Shall Overcome,” Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’ ” and the 1930s union anthem “Which Side Are You On?”

You can listen to a selection of essential protest song clips here

Here’s the full list of songs with commentary by the editors of Contexts:

“Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
Lyrics by James Weldon Johnson; music by J. Rosamand Johnson. Key lyric: “We have come over a way that with tears has been watered / We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.” Known as the “Black National Anthem”—the antidote
to “America, the Beautiful.”

“Which Side Are You On?”
By Florence Reece. “Don’t scab for the bosses, don’t listen to their lies / Us poor folks haven’t
got a chance unless we organize.” Written during the labor struggles in Harlan County, Kentucky, in the 1930s, it was later adopted by the civil rights movement.

“Strange Fruit.”
Performed by Billie Holiday. By Abel Meeropol (who later adopted the children of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg). “Pastoral scene of the gallant south / The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth.” A chilling protest against lynching. Maybe the greatest protest song of all time.

“Pastures of Plenty.”
By Woody Guthrie. “Every state in this union us migrants has been /‘Long the edge of your cities you’ll
see us, and then / We’ve come with the dust and we’re gone in the wind.” Guthrie’s ode to America’s migrant workers.

“The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
By Bob Dylan. “There’s a battle outside and it’s raging / It’ll soon shake your windows
and rattle your walls.” Tough call between this and Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “Masters of War,” “With God on Our Side,” etc., etc.

“We Shall Overcome.”
Adapted from a gospel song, the anthem of the civil rights movement. “Deep in my heart, I do
believe / We shall overcome some day.” Infinitely adaptable.

“Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ‘Round.”
Also adapted from a Negro spiritual. “I’m gonna keep on walkin’, keep on talkin’ / Fightin’ for my equal rights.” Another powerful civil rights anthem.

“I Ain’t Marching Anymore.”
By Phil Ochs. “It’s always the old to lead us to the war / It’s always the young to fall / Now
look at all we’ve won with the saber and the gun / Tell me is it worth it all?” An antiwar classic, complete with a revisionist history of American militarism.

“For What It’s Worth.”
Performed by Crosby, Stills, and Nash. By Stephen Stills. “There’s something happening here /
What it is ain’t exactly clear / There’s a man with a gun over there / Telling me I’ve got to beware.” Eerily foreboding.

“Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud).”
By James Brown. “Now we demand a chance to do things for ourself / We’re tired of beatin’ our head against the wall and workin’ for someone else.” A Black Power anthem by the Godfather of
Soul.

“Respect.”
Performed by Aretha Franklin. By Otis Redding. “I ain’t gonna do you wrong while you’re gone / Ain’t gonna do you wrong ‘cause I don’t wanna / All I’m askin’ is for a little respect when you come home.” The personal is political.

“Redemption Song.”
By Bob Marley. “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our
minds.” Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” is also a contender.

“Imagine.”
By John Lennon. “Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger / A brotherhood of man.” Lennon as utopian socialist.

“Fight the Power.”
By Public Enemy. “Got to give us what we want / Gotta give us what we need / Our freedom of
speech is freedom or death / We got to fight the powers that be.” An exuberant hip-hop call to arms.

Pat Robertson: They are “racists, murderers, sexual deviants and supporters of Al-Qaeda, and THEY COULD BE TEACHING YOUR KIDS!”

Well, Rev. Pat Robertson is at it again.

The last time we paid attention to Rev. Pat he was warning the residents of Dover, PA that they’d face god’s wrath for voting in a school board that advocates science, rather than religion, in the science curriculum.

And before that Rev. Pat was appealing to the Bush administration to “take out” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Now that didn’t seem very Christian.

Now, Robertson, the fundamentalist Christian, theocrat, founder of the Christian Coalition, fascist, host of the popular television show the 700 Club, and former Republican presidential candidate called liberal professors “racists, murderers, sexual deviants and supporters of Al-Qaeda” on his March 21 broadcast.

HERE’S THE VIDEO: “America’s 101 Worst Professors”

According to People for the American Way, on the 700 Club on Tuesday, March 21, 2006,

Robertson displayed characteristic anger and frustration at what right-wingers proclaim is another manifestation of liberalism in this country while reviewing (and hawking for sale on the CBN website) the new book by extremist David Horowitz titled, The Professors: The 101 most dangerous academics in America. Robertson waxed glowingly about the book which he says sheds light on the radical academics at American universities claiming, however, that it is just a “short list” of the “thirty to forty thousand” left wing professors who he calls “termites that have worked into the woodwork of our academic society and it’s APPALLING.”

Rev. Robertson launched an attack on “radical” liberal professors saying; “They are racists, murderers, sexual deviants and supporters of Al-Qaeda – and they could be teaching your kids!”

Later in the program he told his viewers, “These guys are out and out communists, they are radicals, they are, you know, some of them killers, and they are propagandists of the first order…you don’t want your child to be brainwashed by these radicals, you just don’t want it to happen. Not only brainwashed but beat up, they beat these people up, cower them into submission. AGGGHHH!!!!’

According to Inside Higher Ed: “David Horowitz, in e-mail interviews Wednesday, acknowledged that he could not show that any of the professors he criticizes in his book actually killed anyone, although he said some may meet the legal test for having helped others to kill. He slammed the Florida legislative report as irrelevant … So who are the murderers Robertson was talking about? Horowitz in his book does not attribute any individual deaths to any of the professors who make his list, but the book jacket does mention “murderers.””

The Virginian Pilot reports that “Pat Robertson’s television ministry continues to ride a wave of ever-mounting contributions, which have almost doubled in less than a decade” and that donors gave $160 million dollars to Robertson’s CBN network in 2005 – an increase of 21% over the previous year.

I Wonder What Kind Of Message I’m Sending To The Troops

From: The Onion

“I Wonder What Kind Of Message I’m Sending To The Troops”
By Jane Merrick
March 13, 2006 | Issue 42•11

I support the troops from the bottom of my heart. But my question is, do they know that? What if I’m somehow sending them the wrong message?

The other day I lost the magnetic yellow ribbon from my car, and I didn’t even notice until my neighbor pointed it out. Just think: It could have fallen off days or even weeks before! And there I was: driving up and down all over town just as happy as you please, all but announcing, “Jane Merrick doesn’t support our troops!”

I went to the gas station to buy another magnet right away, but they were sold out. So here I am without one. And the way everybody is around here, they’ll talk. What if this gets back to the troops somehow?

Or take the other night when my husband and I were watching Leno. He cracked this wiseacre one-liner about the president, and it just busted Ted and me up. Then suddenly, we both trailed off and stared at each other in ominous silence. I’ll admit the joke seemed harmless enough, but just imagine those poor soldiers, covered with the arid dust and sand of a foreign land, huddling for cover, engaging in pitched small-arms firefights with enemy insurgents on a daily basis. What would they think if they saw me sprawled out on the living-room sofa set, eating pretzels, cackling with irreverence at the expense of their commander in chief?

If I unwittingly sent a message to the troops that hurt their feelings, I am truly sorry. I would never knowingly make them feel that nobody back here in the homeland believed in them or thought they weren’t incredibly special, which they are. I don’t want to accidentally lower our troops’ self-esteem, especially in a time of crisis like this. Maybe after the war is over, that may be the time to raise questions about our leaders and laugh at the TV hosts, but certainly not now. Right now, we have to think about the troops. And, even more important, the messages we may or may not be sending them.

What would the troops think about our yard? And I don’t mean just about our flag. When I don’t bag our leaves, am I basically saying, “To heck with you, troops”?

Are the troops aware of all the remodeling I’ve been doing in the basement rec room? If so, what message are they getting from that?

I read in the paper that a lot of the troops are complaining about the war, and want to come home. They’re putting their lives on the line. It’s my duty to support them, but I get confused. What message am I sending the troops if I read articles like that? For that matter, what kind of a message are those troops sending themselves? They are the troops, but it almost sounds like they’re not supporting the troops!

I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that last statement to sound anti-troops.

If the troops knew what I was thinking, what would they say? “First she has it one way, then she changes it all around”? Maybe they’re saying, “Who does this lady think she is? She doesn’t know what she wants! Our morale is sapped! We’re losing our will to fight!” America would be defeated by Iraq, and terrorists would rule over us.

Oh gosh, no! I just want to clear up any possible misunderstandings over previous mixed messages I might have sent the troops.

I support them, and I implore them to provide me with any feedback they may have on how I might be adversely affecting their daily lives.

Passing of a Southern Civil Rights Pioneer—Anne Braden

On March 6, Anne Braden, revered white anti-racist southern activist Anne Braden died at the age of 81 in Louisville, KY.

While I lived in Louisville I had the opportunity to meet Anne who was tremendous force in working against racism, segregation, and white supremacy.

“Braden catapulted into national headlines in mid-1954 when she and her husband Carl Braden were indicted for sedition for their leadership in desegregating a Louisville, Kentucky, suburb. Their purchase of a house in an all-white neighborhood on behalf of African Americans Andrew and Charlotte Wade violated Louisville’s color line and provoked violence against both families, culminating with the dynamiting of the house in June of 1954. A subsequent grand jury investigation concentrated not on the neighborhood’s harassment of the Wades, but looked to the Bradens’ supposedly communistic intentions in backing the purchase, and they were indicted for sedition that fall. The couple’s sedition case made national news and earned them the ire of segregationists across the South, which was reeling from the U.S. Supreme Court’s condemnation of school segregation in its Brown ruling earlier that spring.

Only Carl was convicted, and that conviction was later overturned. The sedition charges left the Bradens pariahs, branded as radicals and “reds” in the Cold-War South, and they became fierce civil libertarians who openly espoused left-wing social critiques but would never either embrace nor disavow the Communist Party publicly because they felt that to do so accepted the terms of the 1950s anticommunist “witch hunts.” (From The Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression press release on Braden’s death.)

For a detailed account of Braden’s life and work, I strongly recommend the book Subsersive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Stuggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South, by Cate Fosl. KAARPR press release continuted:

“Anne Braden’s memoir of the case, The Wall Between, was published in 1958, becoming one of the few accounts of its era to probe the psychology of white southern racism from within. Their case also introduced the Bradens to the civil rights movement blossoming farther south, in which white allies were few and far between. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., meeting Anne Braden in 1957, pronounced her “the most amazing white woman” in her unswerving dedication to civil rights. The Bradens soon joined the staff of a regional civil rights organization, the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), and began traveling the region to solicit greater white support for the movement. As the 1960s dawned, Anne Braden became a mentor and role model to younger southern students who joined the movement—a role she maintained for the rest of her life. Although she was suspect in some circles, Braden publicized and supported the student sit-ins in the pages of SCEF’s Southern Patriot newspaper, which she edited, and she encouraged a broader vision of social change that would include peace and economic justice. She was also instrumental in Louisville’s Open Housing movement in the later sixties, and among the leading white voices who helped to bring peace to the turbulent second generation of school desegregation, in which busing brought open violence to Louisville and other cities in the mid-1970s.

After Carl Braden’s untimely death in 1975, Anne Braden remained a central proponent of racial justice in Louisville and across the South, eventually evolving from pariah to heroine. Braden’s primary message was the centrality of racism in the U.S. social fabric, but she constantly stressed that civil rights activism was as much whites’ responsibility as it was that of people of color. “Hers has been among the most forceful and persistent of white voices for racial equality in modern U.S. history,” according to her biographer, Catherine Fosl, author of Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (2002).

In speeches delivered in the nearly six decades of her activism, Braden would frequently reflect on her odyssey from segregationist youth to anti-racist advocate: a process she called “turning myself inside out.” Reared in a middle-class, pro-segregation family, Braden changed as a young reporter covering the emerging civil rights movement in 1947 Alabama, where she had observed two separate and unequal systems of justice meted out in the Birmingham courthouse. She subsequently left the supposed neutrality of mainstream journalism to apply her considerable journalistic talents to the aid of African Americans in their quest to end segregation. Her efforts against southern racism, her friend and fellow activist Angela Davis reflected, “enabled vast and often spectacular social changes. . . that most of her contemporaries during the 1950s would never have been able to imagine.”

Decades later, Braden was still working against racism and for justice and peace. In the fall of 2005, she joined other Louisville activists on buses bound for the anti-war demonstration in Washington D.C. even though she went in a wheelchair. She was a frequent voice in the Rainbow Coalition nationally and a co-founder of the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, as well as being active in local issues including police brutality, housing-not-bombs, environmental racism, civil liberties, and lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender and other human rights. In the 1990s she became the recipient of many awards, including the first ever Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty, bestowed on her by the American Civil Liberties Union in 1991. She also became a teacher, offering social justice history courses at the University of Louisville and Northern Kentucky University. Braden was still teaching at the time of her death and was still fired by the passion for justice that had guided her adult life. She had completed a proposal for a local activist summer camp only the day before her hospitalization.

Braden was born Anne Gambrell McCarty on July 28, 1924 in Louisville, Kentucky, to Gambrell and Anita McCarty. Most of her childhood was spent in Anniston, Alabama, where she lived through her high school graduation. She graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1945, and held news reporting jobs at the Anniston Star, the Birmingham News, and the Louisville Times in the late 1940s. After Anne’s marriage to Carl Braden in 1948, the couple had three children: James, Anita, and Elizabeth. James and Elizabeth Braden survive their mother, along with two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Braden’s church was St. George’s Episcopal in Louisville.

A community memorial service will celebrate the life and work of Anne Braden on Sunday, April 23rd, 2006, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, at the Memorial Auditorium, 4th and Kentucky Streets, in downtown Louisville. In lieu of flowers, donations will be received to support the continuation of her work for justice, payable to the Carl Braden Memorial Center, Inc., and sent to P.O. Box 1543, Louisville, KY 40201. “