‘Students First In Line’ Program To Offer Job Training At Needy Schools
All eyes on DePaul
From the National Project to Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academia:
Friends and Colleagues,
As all of you are no doubt aware, students and faculty at DePaul have organized to support Dr. Norman Finkelstein. Last friday, they held a very successful protest at the university convocation (you can read about it at Chicago IndyMedia, which we link to on our homepage: http://defendcriticalthinking.org/).
Wednesday, September 5, will be the first day of classes at DePaul. Students will be holding a press conference and a protest on campus. Dr. Finkelstein is planning on holding his class which the University canceled. It is likely that Finkelstein and other students will be arrested.
The fact that the students, with some faculty support, are taking such a strong stand is a very good thing. They are already having a real impact on the situation. The administration, along with some allies, are increasing their efforts to demonize Finkelstein and intimidate his supporters. (Two examples: “leaking” memos for an article in the Chicago Sun-Times, which is basically a warning to students not to throw away their academic careers, and a disgusting hit-piece on Finkelstein by Andrew Sullivan. Both of these are available on Dr. Finkelstein’s website: http://normanfinkelstein.com/).
All who believe in justice need to use what means they have to stand shoulder to shoulder with those taking action at DePaul. Here are some concrete ways to help:
* Send statements of support to Dr. Finkelstein, with cc to the administration and the students. Finkelstein recently sent a very appreciative note to us saying how much strength he gets from such letters and other efforts on his behalf. Send these even if you have already sent letters already. Here are the pertinent email addresses:
Dr. Norman Finkelstein: normangf@hotmail.com
DePaul Academic Freedom Committee: info@academicfreedomchicago.org
DePaul University President, Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M. – president@depaul.edu
DePaul Provost, Dr. Helmut Epp – hepp@depaul.edu
DePaul Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dr. Charles Suchar – csuchar@depaul.edu
* Sign (if you have not already) our Open Letter to DePaul Faculty: A Battle for the Soul of DePaul, and for the Future of Academia. You can do this at our website: http://defendcriticalthinking.org/. The letter is pasted below this message.
* Call informal and formal faculty meetings at your school to discuss the issues in the case. There are a number of resources available on our website.
* Have a session of your class which discusses the importance of critical thinking and dissent, and how they are concentrated in this case. Students could read the piece by Bill Martin (text and pdf available at our website), as well as the statements by Dean
Suchar and President Holtschneider.
* Be attentive to the developments at DePaul on Wednesday and afterwards, and be prepared to shift gears to respond appropriately.
* Forward this email to colleagues and encourage them to help as well.
The DePaul administration must not be allowed to get away with this ugly capitulation in the face of power. At at a time when the “right to think at all is in dispute” (to quote Brecht in his play about “Galileo”), the stakes are tremendous.
Finally, our website has a link to make financial contributions to the National Project. We would like to retire our debt to the person who fronted the money for the full-page ad which was published in the New York Review of Books earlier this year. Doing so will
allow us to be in the position to do similar things in the future (for example, a full-page ad in the DePaul newspaper). Please consider making a donation.
For the National Project to Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academia,
Reggie Dylan
Greg Knehans
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A Battle for the Soul of DePaul, and for the Future of Academia:
An Open Letter to DePaul Faculty
Over the last year, scholars around the country (and worldwide) have been looking to DePaul University with increasing alarm. The denial of tenure to Dr. Norman Finkelstein on June 8, after a mean-spirited campaign spearheaded by Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, is widely seen, even by those who do not share Finkelstein’s political views, as a blatant violation of the fundamentals of academic freedom and procedural
guidelines. More, it is viewed as a fundamental threat to the intellectual ferment and critical thinking so desperately needed – in academia and in society – at this time in history.
From the beginning there have been faculty from DePaul who have recognized and responded to the gravity of the situation. Though few in number, they have stepped to the fore, often at genuine risk to their own careers. These scholars have investigated and exposed the facts of this case. Their work has laid bare how shameful and dangerous this decision is.
They have taken heart in the response of the students at DePaul, who protested the decision during exam week and at graduation. These students, organized in the DePaul Academic Freedom Committee (www.academicfreedomchicago.org), have continued their work, spending their summer vacation organizing, establishing their own university Without Walls to learn more about the political issues concentrated in
these decisions, and going to the US Social Forum in Atlanta to present a resolution to 10,000 activists.
Now the situation at DePaul has moved beyond egregious violations of academic freedom to vindictive and arbitrary punishment of kafkaesque dimensions. The administration has refused to let Dr. Finkelstein teach his terminal year (once again violating AAUP guidelines), and cancelled his classes (ironically, on “Equality and Social Justice,” and “Freedom and Empowerment”). It has effectively suspended him against his will and in violation of DePaul’s faculty handbook, locked him out of his office and is evidently even threatening to arrest him if he comes on campus.
In the face of this, the fact that Dr. Finkelstein has refused to back down is a very good thing. His resilience and determination is inspiring many others to stand with him, as well as with Dr. Mehrene Larudee, who many feel had her tenure denied because of her public support of Dr. Finkelstein.
On the first day of class (September 5th), Dr. Finkelstein will return to campus to teach his students. The DePaul AFC has organized a press conference and protest, along with an important conference on academic freedom on October 12 at the University of Chicago.
As a faculty member at DePaul, you have an opportunity to make a profound difference by standing with them, in spirit and in body. We encourage you to use whatever means at your disposal to help them reverse a dangerous precedent which is already sending a chilling message to faculty and scholars to self-censor their scholarship and their public roles, or risk their careers.
As DePaul philosophy professor Bill Martin has written (“The Urgent Need to Right Wrongs at DePaul,” available at www.defendcriticalthinking.org), if this injustice is not reversed, “DePaul will be destroyed as a place deserving of respect in the intellectual and academic worlds, and, if this happens, academic freedom will be under attack everywhere.”
We encourage you to join with others at DePaul who have said they will not allow this injustice to stand. Those of us who have been a part of the National Project to Defend Dissent and Critical Thinking in Academia are determined to support you in every way we can.
Selected Signatories (as of 09/03):
Elizabeth Aaronsohn, Ed.D., Central CT State University
Gil Anidjar, Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures, Columbia University.
William Ayers, Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Derrick Bell, Visiting Professor of Law, New York University School of Law.
Robert Brenner, History Department, UCLA.
George Caffentzis, Professor of Philosophy, University of Southern Maine.
Rand Carter, Professor of the History of Art, Hamilton College.
Eric Cheyfitz, Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters, Cornell University.
Ward Churchill, Scholar at Large.
Dana Cloud, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, University of Texas, Austin.
Drucilla Cornell, Professor in the Departments of Law and Political Science, Rutgers University.
Walter A Davis, Professor Emeritus, The Ohio State University.
Richard Delgado, University Distinguished Professor of Law & Derrick Bell Fellow, University of Pittsburgh.
Haidar Eid, Department of English, Al-Aqsa University, Gaza, Palestine.
Mahmoud Ahmed El Lozy, Professor of Drama and Theatre, The American University in Cairo.
Randa Farah, The University of Western Ontario.
Silvia Federici, Emeritus Professor, Hofstra University.
Irene Gendzier, Professor of Political Science, BostonUniversity.
William W. Hansen, International and Comparative Politics, American University of Nigeria.
Stanley Heller, Teacher, Chairperson Middle East Crisis Committee, Connecticut.
Ruth Hsu, Associate Professor of English, University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Francis A. J. Ianni, Professor Emeritus, Columbia University.
Christine Karatnytsky, Scripts Librarian, Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
Charlotte Kates, co-chair, Middle East Subcommittee, National Lawyers Guild.
Mujeeb Khan, Former lecturer, Department of Political Science, DePaul University. (Doctoral Student, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley).
Peter N. Kirstein, Professor of History, Saint Xavier University.
Dennis Leach, Professor of Economic, University of Warwick.
Mark Lance, Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Justice and Peace, Georgetown University
Gary P. Leupp, Professor of History, Tufts University.
Andrew Levine, Research Professor (Philosophy), University of Maryland-College Park.
Peter McLaren, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.
Bruce Malina, Department of Theology, Creighton University.
Bill Martin, Professor of Philosophy, DePaul University.
Chris Mato Nunpa, Southwest Minnesota State University.
Ann Elizabeth Mayer, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
Tom Mayer, Professor of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder.
Matam P. Murthy, Professor Emeritus, Department of Mathematics, University of Chicago.
Sadu Nanjundiah, Professor, Physics department, Central Connecticut State University.
Marcy Newman, Assistant Professor of English, Boise State University.
Sam Noumoff, Retired, McGill University.
Sam Peterson, Retired Professor, American University of Cairo, Arizona State University.
Peter Rachleff, Professor of History, Macalester College.
Joseph G. Ramsey, Assistant Professor of English, Fisher College.
Asghar Rastegar MD, Professor of Medicine, Yale School of Medicine.
Rush Rehm, Professor of Drama and Classics, Stanford University, Artistic Director, Stanford Summer Theater.
E. Wayne Ross, Professor of Education, Department of Curriculum Studies, University of British Columbia.
Ken Schubert, Swedish Association of Professional Translators.
Henry Silverman, Professor and Chairperson Emeritus, Department of History, Michigan State University.
Natsu Taylor Saito, Professor of Law, Georgia State University.
Paul Vieille, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris.
Michael Vocino, Professor, University of Rhode Island.
Immanuel Wallerstein, Senior Research Scholar, Department of Sociology, Yale University.
Elana Wesley, Human rights and a just peace activist, Jaffa-Tel Aviv, Israel.
David A. Wesley, Anthropologist, Jaffa-Tel Aviv, Israel.
Howard Zinn, Professor Emeritus, Boston University
(Affiliations for identification only)
Rouge Forum Update; Videos Gone Wild!
Dear Friends,
The Rouge Forum No Blood For Oil web page, used as a reference by teachers all over the world, is updated.
We’re supporting the call for mass direct actions in opposition to the imperial wars on the third Friday of each month as well as organizing teach-ins around the US. Please urge colleagues to join us!
Summer is gone. School is back. The wars expand. Inequality and segregation boom, underpinning the regimentation of what kids know, and how they come to know it, in schools; setting youth up for a future of meaningless jobs or the military, fighting the enemies of their real enemies, here at home. So, the Rouge Forum ratchets up the work.
Part of that project is the organizing tour Susan Harman, Bob Apter, and I will take around California, mainly to listen to educators, parents, and kids about what they see in school, seeking to better analyze concrete problems that connect to the social realities that surround all of schooling. We leave on September 8th, returning when we think we are done, or done in. If you would be willing to meet, please let me know.
The start of school in harsh times means we need to ask, once again, “why am I here, whose interests am I serving, why have school, or, How Do I Keep My Ideals and Still Teach?” Here’s a question and answer piece that may be challenging.
With the NCLB trailing only the empire’s wars on the Congressional agenda, we note that the leadership of NEA is supporting the NCLB by staying on the sidelines, while AFT’s top executives are lobbying hard for its re-adoption, with a few minor modifications. Quislings (mis-leaders) in our midst are part of our focus in this Update.
AFT and NEA executives are not going to fight the NCLB for us, nor will they act to end the wars, because their high salaries (nearing $500,000 at NEA) are drawn from the imperial trough. Their allies are not the rank and file of the unions, but the bosses at the US Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the others who joined NEA and AFT in writing the NCLB at the outset. That is one big reason we formed the Rouge Forum and said: Justice Demands Organization.
Here, for example, is the Chicago AFT’s boss, Ms Stewart, trying to fight her members who sought to vote NO on a tentative five year contract for the city’s teachers and again here
and yet again here.
If you go to Google Video and search for Chicago Teachers Union, there will probably be more videos up tomorrow. In addition, Substance News, based in Chicago, has instant coverage of this attack on whatever there is left of union democracy.
Proof of the Rouge Forum thesis that educators are uniquely positioned to fight for equality, democracy, and freedom, is the exemplary action of Tijuana teachers last week, fighting for pensions, but also on the side of their kids. They shut down the US border at San Ysidro with a mass demonstration. Here is one video of many.
We can learn to search out our own choke points of power in our own cities, learn how to do power analysis that give greater meaning to our actions. In San Diego, we have been working on that.
In San Diego, the superintendent of schools took a week and devoted it to a Support the Troops Surge in which teachers were directed to have even elementary kids fill out cards (carrying ads of war profiteers like Xerox) to mail to troops. Teachers were directed to lead demonstrations and ice cream socials in support of militarism, etc. Thousands of cards found their way to Rouge Forum members, but next time we will expand our activities. If you’re in an area where similar things are planned, please contact me and we can work on flyers, etc.
Jonathan Kozol was once seen as a resister. Now he’s asking school workers to be subversive. What that is, is not entirely clear, But we need to get beyond Kozol and seek a real plan of action in schools and communities. To that end, Indymedia recently published an analysis of Kozol’s work.
Remember, the Rouge Forum will have a considerable presence at the National Council for the Social Studies Conference in San Diego, November 28 to December 2nd. Of special interest is a Border Tour of San Diego. We will have limited seating for this tour, so please sign on early. It will be a good time to learn about the social relations that set up life in So-Cal, and to get together with like-minded people before the convention begins. This tour is going to be terrific.
And save the date for the Rouge Forum Conference in Louisville, March 14 to March 16, 2008.
Here is a link to our flyer on the REAL Labor Day
Wayne and I have a new book, Neoliberalism and Education Reform, just out from Hampton Press.
Check the Rouge Forum Art by Colin Ross.
Thanks to Gil, Amber, Erin, Beau, Ssg. Lloyd, Sean, Wayne, Bill and Marty, Greg and Katie, Ann W., Sally, Perry, Steve, Dave, Marc, Curry, Sandy, Suber, Bob, Melissa and Josh (how is the baby?), Justin, Richie G., Boots, Judy D, David, Sharon A, Lucille K and Lucy W., Alcorn, and Llona.
All the best in the new school year,
r
Renaissance 2010: From the Front Lines
Renaissance 2010: From the Front Lines is a documentary film about the threat to the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union, stemming from privatization and charter school expansion. The film explores the motives and interests driving changes in the educational system by talking with teachers from both traditional and charter schools, students, educational experts and community members impacted by these decisions.
The best coverage of Renaissance 2010 and other educational reform atrocities in Chicago (and across North America) can be found in Substance News and the Substance News Blog.
Substance is a monthly investigative journal that reports on the public schools. Though based in Chicago for the past 30 years, Substance also reports on national education issues including No Child Left Behind. Substance is the only newspaper to combine teaching experience with the tenacity of reporting to tackle the problems facing the country’s education system.
Here’s a review of a film from the latest Z Magazine:
FILM REVIEW: Renaissance 2010: From the Front Lines
RIAA v. The People
The Chronicle News Blog: Antipiracy Lawsuits, Four Years Later
Next month will mark the fourth anniversary of the Recording Industry Association of America’s legal campaign against music piracy, an effort that has seen plenty of college students slapped with thousand-dollar lawsuits. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that has opposed the industry group in court and in public debate, is commemorating the occasion with a caustic report on that lengthy campaign.
“RIAA v. the People: Four Years Later” offers a detailed recap of the recording industry’s lawsuits, which now total nearly 30,000, according to the group’s calculations. The report also profiles the industry’s shifting legal tactics, which have familiarized campus technologists with John Doe subpoenas and pre-litigation notices.
Forum: Who sets the agenda for public eduction?
“Who sets the agenda for public education? Who should, how and why?”
The Charter for Public Education Network recently announced the first in a series of forums on issues of public education for parents, students, educators, trustees and interested members of the public.
When: September 6, 2007
Where: Segal Room, SFU Downtown (515 W. Hastings)
Format: Panel presentation followed by group discussion
Refreshment available
For more information see Charter for Public Education or contact Michael Zlotnik (604-988-8631).
Robert Fisk: Even I question the ‘truth’ about 9/11
The Independent (UK): Robert Fisk: Even I question the ‘truth’ about 9/11
Each time I lecture abroad on the Middle East, there is always someone in the audience – just one – whom I call the “raver”. Apologies here to all the men and women who come to my talks with bright and pertinent questions – often quite humbling ones for me as a journalist – and which show that they understand the Middle East tragedy a lot better than the journalists who report it. But the “raver” is real. He has turned up in corporeal form in Stockholm and in Oxford, in Sao Paulo and in Yerevan, in Cairo, in Los Angeles and, in female form, in Barcelona. No matter the country, there will always be a “raver”.His – or her – question goes like this. Why, if you believe you’re a free journalist, don’t you report what you really know about 9/11? Why don’t you tell the truth – that the Bush administration (or the CIA or Mossad, you name it) blew up the twin towers? Why don’t you reveal the secrets behind 9/11? The assumption in each case is that Fisk knows – that Fisk has an absolute concrete, copper-bottomed fact-filled desk containing final proof of what “all the world knows” (that usually is the phrase) – who destroyed the twin towers. Sometimes the “raver” is clearly distressed. One man in Cork screamed his question at me, and then – the moment I suggested that his version of the plot was a bit odd – left the hall, shouting abuse and kicking over chairs.
Usually, I have tried to tell the “truth”; that while there are unanswered questions about 9/11, I am the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, not the conspiracy correspondent; that I have quite enough real plots on my hands in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, the Gulf, etc, to worry about imaginary ones in Manhattan. My final argument – a clincher, in my view – is that the Bush administration has screwed up everything – militarily, politically diplomatically – it has tried to do in the Middle East; so how on earth could it successfully bring off the international crimes against humanity in the United States on 11 September 2001?
Well, I still hold to that view. Any military which can claim – as the Americans did two days ago – that al-Qa’ida is on the run is not capable of carrying out anything on the scale of 9/11. “We disrupted al-Qa’ida, causing them to run,” Colonel David Sutherland said of the preposterously code-named “Operation Lightning Hammer” in Iraq’s Diyala province. “Their fear of facing our forces proves the terrorists know there is no safe haven for them.” And more of the same, all of it untrue.
Within hours, al-Qa’ida attacked Baquba in battalion strength and slaughtered all the local sheikhs who had thrown in their hand with the Americans. It reminds me of Vietnam, the war which George Bush watched from the skies over Texas – which may account for why he this week mixed up the end of the Vietnam war with the genocide in a different country called Cambodia, whose population was eventually rescued by the same Vietnamese whom Mr Bush’s more courageous colleagues had been fighting all along.
But – here we go. I am increasingly troubled at the inconsistencies in the official narrative of 9/11. It’s not just the obvious non sequiturs: where are the aircraft parts (engines, etc) from the attack on the Pentagon? Why have the officials involved in the United 93 flight (which crashed in Pennsylvania) been muzzled? Why did flight 93’s debris spread over miles when it was supposed to have crashed in one piece in a field? Again, I’m not talking about the crazed “research” of David Icke’s Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster – which should send any sane man back to reading the telephone directory.
I am talking about scientific issues. If it is true, for example, that kerosene burns at 820C under optimum conditions, how come the steel beams of the twin towers – whose melting point is supposed to be about 1,480C – would snap through at the same time? (They collapsed in 8.1 and 10 seconds.) What about the third tower – the so-called World Trade Centre Building 7 (or the Salmon Brothers Building) – which collapsed in 6.6 seconds in its own footprint at 5.20pm on 11 September? Why did it so neatly fall to the ground when no aircraft had hit it? The American National Institute of Standards and Technology was instructed to analyse the cause of the destruction of all three buildings. They have not yet reported on WTC 7. Two prominent American professors of mechanical engineering – very definitely not in the “raver” bracket – are now legally challenging the terms of reference of this final report on the grounds that it could be “fraudulent or deceptive”.
Journalistically, there were many odd things about 9/11. Initial reports of reporters that they heard “explosions” in the towers – which could well have been the beams cracking – are easy to dismiss. Less so the report that the body of a female air crew member was found in a Manhattan street with her hands bound. OK, so let’s claim that was just hearsay reporting at the time, just as the CIA’s list of Arab suicide-hijackers, which included three men who were – and still are – very much alive and living in the Middle East, was an initial intelligence error.
But what about the weird letter allegedly written by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian hijacker-murderer with the spooky face, whose “Islamic” advice to his gruesome comrades – released by the CIA – mystified every Muslim friend I know in the Middle East? Atta mentioned his family – which no Muslim, however ill-taught, would be likely to include in such a prayer. He reminds his comrades-in-murder to say the first Muslim prayer of the day and then goes on to quote from it. But no Muslim would need such a reminder – let alone expect the text of the “Fajr” prayer to be included in Atta’s letter.
Let me repeat. I am not a conspiracy theorist. Spare me the ravers. Spare me the plots. But like everyone else, I would like to know the full story of 9/11, not least because it was the trigger for the whole lunatic, meretricious “war on terror” which has led us to disaster in Iraq and Afghanistan and in much of the Middle East. Bush’s happily departed adviser Karl Rove once said that “we’re an empire now – we create our own reality”. True? At least tell us. It would stop people kicking over chairs.
Well, it is August
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How Did Elvis Get Turned Into a Racist?
RIP Elvis Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977)
In an op-ed published a few days ago in The New York Times, Peter Guralnick examines how Elvis got turned into a racist and why that myth persists despite the lack of evidence to support it.
Guralnick wrote a two volume bio of Presley as few years ago, which I high recommend. The first volume, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (1994) is one of the best biographies I’ve ever read, some how he manages to make the biography a story of not only Elvis but US culture in the 1950s.
The New York Times
August 11, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
How Did Elvis Get Turned Into a Racist?
By PETER GURALNICK
ONE of the songs Elvis Presley liked to perform in the ’70s was Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes,” its message clearly spelled out in the title.
Sometimes he would preface it with the 1951 Hank Williams recitation “Men With Broken Hearts,” which may well have been South’s original inspiration. “You’ve never walked in that man’s shoes/Or saw things through his eyes/Or stood and watched with helpless hands/While the heart inside you dies.” For Elvis these two songs were as much about social justice as empathy and understanding: “Help your brother along the road,” the Hank Williams number concluded, “No matter where you start/For the God that made you made them, too/These men with broken hearts.”
In Elvis’s case, this simple lesson was not just a matter of paying lip service to an abstract principle.
It was what he believed, it was what his music had stood for from the start: the breakdown of barriers, both musical and racial. This is not, unfortunately, how it is always perceived 30 years after his death, the anniversary of which is on Thursday. When the singer Mary J. Blige expressed her reservations about performing one of his signature songs, she only gave voice to a view common in the African-American community. “I prayed about it,” she said, “because I know Elvis was a racist.”
And yet, as the legendary Billboard editor Paul Ackerman, a devotee of English Romantic poetry as well as rock ’n’ roll, never tired of pointing out, the music represented not just an amalgam of America’s folk traditions (blues, gospel, country) but a bold restatement of an egalitarian ideal. “In one aspect of America’s cultural life,” Ackerman wrote in 1958, “integration has already taken place.”It was due to rock ’n’ roll, he emphasized, that groundbreaking artists like Big Joe Turner, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry and Little Richard, who would only recently have been confined to the “race” market, had acquired a broad-based pop following, while the music itself blossomed neither as a regional nor a racial phenomenon but as a joyful new synthesis “rich with Negro and hillbilly lore.”
No one could have embraced Paul Ackerman’s formulation more forcefully (or more fully) than Elvis Presley.
Asked to characterize his singing style when he first presented himself for an audition at the Sun recording studio in Memphis, Elvis said that he sang all kinds of music — “I don’t sound like nobody.” This, as it turned out, was far more than the bravado of an 18-year-old who had never sung in public before. It was in fact as succinct a definition as one might get of the democratic vision that fueled his music, a vision that denied distinctions of race, of class, of category, that embraced every kind of music equally, from the highest up to the lowest down.
It was, of course, in his embrace of black music that Elvis came in for his fiercest criticism. On one day alone, Ackerman wrote, he received calls from two Nashville music executives demanding in the strongest possible terms that Billboard stop listing Elvis’s records on the best-selling country chart because he played black music. He was simply seen as too low class, or perhaps just too no-class, in his refusal to deny recognition to a segment of society that had been rendered invisible by the cultural mainstream.
“Down in Tupelo, Mississippi,” Elvis told a white reporter for The Charlotte Observer in 1956, he used to listen to Arthur Crudup, the blues singer who originated “That’s All Right,” Elvis’s first record. Crudup, he said, used to “bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place where I could feel all old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.”
It was statements like these that caused Elvis to be seen as something of a hero in the black community in those early years. In Memphis the two African-American newspapers, The Memphis World and The Tri-State Defender, hailed him as a “race man” — not just for his music but also for his indifference to the usual social distinctions. In the summer of 1956, The World reported, “the rock ’n’ roll phenomenon cracked Memphis’s segregation laws” by attending the Memphis Fairgrounds amusement park “during what is designated as ‘colored night.’”
That same year, Elvis also attended the otherwise segregated WDIA Goodwill Revue, an annual charity show put on by the radio station that called itself the “Mother Station of the Negroes.” In the aftermath of the event, a number of Negro newspapers printed photographs of Elvis with both Rufus Thomas and B.B. King (“Thanks, man, for all the early lessons you gave me,” were the words The Tri-State Defender reported he said to Mr. King).
When he returned to the revue the following December, a stylish shot of him “talking shop” with Little Junior Parker and Bobby “Blue” Bland appeared in Memphis’s mainstream afternoon paper, The Press-Scimitar, accompanied by a short feature that made Elvis’s feelings abundantly clear. “It was the real thing,” he said, summing up both performance and audience response. “Right from the heart.”
Just how committed he was to a view that insisted not just on musical accomplishment but fundamental humanity can be deduced from his reaction to the earliest appearance of an ugly rumor that has persisted in one form or another to this day. Elvis Presley, it was said increasingly within the African-American community, had declared, either at a personal appearance in Boston or on Edward R. Murrow’s “Person to Person” television program, “The only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes.”
That he had never appeared in Boston or on Murrow’s program did nothing to abate the rumor, and so in June 1957, long after he had stopped talking to the mainstream press, he addressed the issue — and an audience that scarcely figured in his sales demographic — in an interview for the black weekly Jet.
Anyone who knew him, he told reporter Louie Robinson, would immediately recognize that he could never have uttered those words. Amid testimonials from black people who did know him, he described his attendance as a teenager at the church of celebrated black gospel composer, the Rev. W. Herbert Brewster, whose songs had been recorded by Mahalia Jackson and Clara Ward and whose stand on civil rights was well known in the community. (Elvis’s version of “Peace in the Valley,” said Dr. Brewster later, was “one of the best gospel recordings I’ve ever heard.”)
The interview’s underlying point was the same as the underlying point of his music: far from asserting any superiority, he was merely doing his best to find a place in a musical continuum that included breathtaking talents like Ray Charles, Roy Hamilton, the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi and Howlin’ Wolf on the one hand, Hank Williams, Bill Monroe and the Statesmen Quartet on the other. “Let’s face it,” he said of his rhythm and blues influences, “nobody can sing that kind of music like colored people. I can’t sing it like Fats Domino can. I know that.”
And as for prejudice, the article concluded, quoting an unnamed source, “To Elvis people are people, regardless of race, color or creed.”
So why didn’t the rumor die? Why did it continue to find common acceptance up to, and past, the point that Chuck D of Public Enemy could declare in 1990, “Elvis was a hero to most… straight-up racist that sucker was, simple and plain”?
Chuck D has long since repudiated that view for a more nuanced one of cultural history, but the reason for the rumor’s durability, the unassailable logic behind its common acceptance within the black community rests quite simply on the social inequities that have persisted to this day, the fact that we live in a society that is no more perfectly democratic today than it was 50 years ago. As Chuck D perceptively observes, what does it mean, within this context, for Elvis to be hailed as “king,” if Elvis’s enthronement obscures the striving, the aspirations and achievements of so many others who provided him with inspiration?
Elvis would have been the first to agree. When a reporter referred to him as the “king of rock ’n’ roll” at the press conference following his 1969 Las Vegas opening, he rejected the title, as he always did, calling attention to the presence in the room of his friend Fats Domino, “one of my influences from way back.” The larger point, of course, was that no one should be called king; surely the music, the American musical tradition that Elvis so strongly embraced, could stand on its own by now, after crossing all borders of race, class and even nationality.
“The lack of prejudice on the part of Elvis Presley,” said Sam Phillips, the Sun Records founder who discovered him, “had to be one of the biggest things that ever happened. It was almost subversive, sneaking around through the music, but we hit things a little bit, don’t you think?”
Or, as Jake Hess, the incomparable lead singer for the Statesmen Quartet and one of Elvis’s lifelong influences, pointed out: “Elvis was one of those artists, when he sang a song, he just seemed to live every word of it. There’s other people that have a voice that’s maybe as great or greater than Presley’s, but he had that certain something that everybody searches for all during their lifetime.”
To do justice to that gift, to do justice to the spirit of the music, we have to extend ourselves sometimes beyond the narrow confines of our own experience, we have to challenge ourselves to embrace the democratic principle of the music itself, which may in the end be its most precious gift.
Peter Guralnick is the author of “Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley.”
Rouge Forum Update: V-J Day and More
Dear Friends,
Depending on where you are, tomorrow is V-J day, celebrating the fact that the mass of the world’s people rose up, made shocking sacrifices, and crushed fascism, if only temporarily. Today, little note of VJ day is taken in the corporate media, perhaps because so many prominent Nazis in Germany and fascists in Japan were restored to power or brought to the USA under Operation Paperclip. The efforts of these fascists reverberate even today as we witness the reemergence of fascism, in somewhat new forms. But VJ day is a reminder that fascism shall not prevail. What is fascism?
Back to School!
For those developing literacy syllabi, remember Patrick Shannon’s outstanding presentation at the last Rouge Forum conference in Detroit, Pedagogies of the Oppressors: Critical Literacies as Counter Narratives and also linked here.
And, for audio, check out Wayne Ross’ web site where, in collaboration with Michael Baker, he is now podcasting Michael’s radio show on education and schooling. Michael’s guests include Peter McLaren, Noam Chomsky, Rich Gibson, Nancy Patterson, Prentice Chandler, and many others discussing education and schooling from a perspective that is rarely heard on the airwaves.
Visit the web site and click on “Room 101” in the menu. You can listen and subscribe to the podcasts from the site. The podcasts are also available free on iTunes. More information on the podcast and links are available here.
For those interested in the ongoing debates about how resistance can be built against war, militarism, and the enslavement of education in History circles, here is a note to the Historians Against the War, where I serve on the Steering Committee, urging openness, organization, and ethics as central to the project.
From September 7 to 19, my friend and longtime union organizer, Bob Apter, and I will be touring California, starting out from San Diego. We would like to meet with educators, students, parents, community organizers, who are interested in exploring ideas and action about schools and the wars, as well as those who are just concerned with the way teachers and kids are getting treated in an increasingly regimented environment. How are you keeping your ideals, and still teaching?
As much as anything, we want to listen to people, to learn what new teachers are hoping for, and what more experienced education workers see has changed—and what can be done. We want to meet with school retirees who can lend long-term perspectives. We also hope to connect with other anti-war coalition members along the way, to see how the work is going in other areas of the state, or around the US, so we can learn from one another.
We hope to connect with Susan Harman in mid-tour and go on to travel Northern California with her in the latter half of the trip.
In San Diego, Rouge Forum members have worked with the San Diego Coalition for Peace and Justice in developing a coherent strategic plan for the year, focused on schools, the wars, and broadening the base of existing progressive groups. We started with an analysis of the particular condition in San Diego, using this as a template.
Every community is different, but the questions posed can be used anywhere.
Remember, the Rouge Forum will have a considerable presence at the National Council for the Social Studies Conference in San Diego, November 28 to December 2nd. Of special interest is a Border Tour of San Diego. We will have limited seating for this tour, so please sign on early. It will be a good time to learn about the social relations that set up life in So-Cal, and to get together with like-minded people before the convention begins. This tour is going to be terrific.
And, not for the kiddies, here is George Carlin answering the critical question: why have school?
Last, internationally known marxist scholar, Dave Hill, wants a new position. Here is his vita. Dave has earned the right to a good spot. Let’s see if we can help Dave land a great job.
Happy New School year. Remember to tell the kids: We can understand and change the world. We do not have to be missionaries for capitalism.
best, r