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COMMUNIST PARTY
Haberman Sees AFL-CIO 'Cleanup'
Milwaukee Sentinel
(Friday, October 12, 1956)
George A. Haberman told a luncheon meeting of
management executives at the Wisconsin Hotel that 'these few' CIO men
are still inculcated with the doctrine of the communist party.
"In the minds of these people we find this
teaching cropping up now and then . . . We find impetuous individuals in
collective bargaining stalemating good relations between management and
labor." Haberman said at the meeting sponsored by the Milwaukee
Chapter, Society for the Advancement of Management.
Haberman said the AFL over the years has learned to
work with management. He said his labor organization is anxious to help
the companies with which it deals thrive and prosper because only then
can workers share in this prosperity through increased wages.
Haberman traced the alleged leftist influence in the
CIO to the days of the founding of the organization when John L. Lewis
and a committee of 15 international union representatives broke away
from the AFL on the issue of craft versus industrial unionism.
With limited funds and personnel, the new labor
organization needed help to survive. Haberman said, adding,
'Unfortunately Lewis went to the wrong place for assistance. He
recruited from the communist party'.
Party members gained prominence in the CIO because
they were "well trained, well educated and could speak on any
subject." Haberman said, Before long, in many local unions
"they were in the driver's seat," he contended.
He cited as an example the wartime strike of the
United Auto Works at the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Co. "Because
of the influence of one individual a strike emanated," Haberman
said. "And who can say how many of our sons in the armed services
died because of it."
[Haberman apparently was referring to Harold
Christoffel, former president of UAW-CIO Local 248 at Allis- Chalmers.
Christoffel subsequently was ousted by the UAW, convicted of perjury for
denying membership in the communist party and sent to prison]
Haberman indicated the State Federation of Labor,
which is composed of AFL unions representing some 200,000 workers, is
less than enthusiastic about the merger with the Wisconsin CIO, whose
rank-and-file membership has been estimated at 80,000 to 100,000
members.
"We do not care for this merger in Wisconsin,
but we have a mandate to carry it out," he said.
"Time after time we have disagreed with the
people who are doing business with us. Politically, economically,
educationally, and organizationally, we have not seen eye to eye."
Haberman said that "under present negotiations,
we feel we will use up most of the time (allocated by the national
AFL-CIO for state organizations to merge) trying to find a mutual
amiable solution." The deadline is December 4, 1957."
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Lynchsong
By Lorraine Hansberry
I can hear Rosalee
See the eyes of Willie McGee
My mother told me about
Lynchings
My mother told me about
The dark nights
And dirt roads
And torch lights
And lynch robes
The
faces of men
Laughing white
Faces of men
Dead in the night
sorrow night
and a
sorrow night
1951
Source:
AmericanLynching |
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Writer Lorraine Hansberry's
sober eulogy of the death of Willie McGee weighed heavy on the
hearts and minds of the American Left. On May 8, 1951, a crowd of
five hundred lingered outside the courthouse of Laurel, Mississippi,
to witness the execution of yet another black man convicted for
allegedly raping a white woman. His 1945 lightning trial resulted in
a guilty conviction delivered in less than two and a half minutes by
an all-white, male jury, setting off a heated five-year legal
struggle that drew national headlines. Despite an aggressive appeals
defense team who attempted every legal maneuver in the book, the US
Supreme Court ultimately chose not to intervene. With the legal
lynching of the Martinsville Seven in February, Ethel and Julius
Rosenberg's conviction in March, followed by the execution of McGee
in May, 1951 was a bad year for Left-leaning lawyers (Parrish 1979;
Rise 1995). Most discouraging, national news sources like the New
York Times and Life magazine red-baited the "Save Willie
McGee" campaign and—as Life reported—its "imported" lawyers (Popham
1951a; Life 1951). Few felt McGee's passing with as heavy a heart as
his chief counsel, thirty-one-year-old Bella Abzug. |
Before Abzug became a representative in
Congress and a leader in the peace and women's movements, she confronted the
Southern political and legal system at the height of the early Cold War.
Retained in 1948 by the Civil Rights Congress (CRC)—a New York-headquartered
Popular Front legal defense organization—the novice labor lawyer honed her civil
rights . . .
Source:
https://Litigation-Essentials.LexisNexis
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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Hopes and Prospects
By Noam Chomsky
In this urgent new book, Noam Chomsky
surveys the dangers and prospects of our
early twenty-first century. Exploring
challenges such as the growing gap
between North and South, American
exceptionalism (including under
President Barack Obama), the fiascos of
Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S.-Israeli
assault on Gaza, and the recent
financial bailouts, he also sees hope
for the future and a way to move
forward—in the democratic wave in Latin
America and in the global solidarity
movements that suggest "real progress
toward freedom and justice." Hopes and
Prospects is essential reading for
anyone who is concerned about the
primary challenges still facing the
human race. "This is a classic Chomsky
work: a bonfire of myths and lies,
sophistries and delusions. Noam Chomsky
is an enduring inspiration all over the
world—to millions, I suspect—for the
simple reason that he is a truth-teller
on an epic scale. I salute him." —John
Pilger
In dissecting the rhetoric and logic of
American empire and class domination, at
home and abroad, Chomsky continues a
longstanding and crucial work of
elucidation and activism . . .the
writing remains unswervingly rational
and principled throughout, and lends
bracing impetus to the real alternatives
before us.—Publisher's
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update
7 January 2012
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