|
Communist
Councilman from Harlem: Autobiographical Notes Written in a
Federal Penitentiary (1990)
The Negro People on the March
(1956) /
The Path of Negro Liberation (1947)
* * * *
*
Bio-sketch of William L. Patterson
William L. Patterson,
the author of
Ben Davis: Crusader for Negro Freedom &
Socialism, has achieved world-wide renown for his militant
leadership in the fight to preserve constitutional liberties and
to win full civil rights for all Americans--and for the Negro
people in particular.
He was
responsible for the production of the Petition,
We Charge
Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People,
and its presentation to the United Nations in Paris in 1951. In
the late twenties he was National Executive Secretary of the
International Labor Defense which played a leading role in the
defense of the nine innocent Scottsboro Boys. In the fifties he
occupied the same position in the Civil Rights Congress and led
many fierce civil rights battles.
He also led the
international struggle to save the life of the martyred Willie
McGee of Mississippi and the Martinsville Seven of Virginia, all
charged falsely with rape by racists and framed by the highest
courts. In the thirties he organized the Marxist Abraham Lincoln
School, in Chicago. He was twice tried for contempt of Congress
for his vigorous condemnation of the racist policies of the
government of the U.S.A.
He graduated
from Hastings Law College of the University of California and
for a period practiced law in New York City. he is presently
chairman of the National Negro Commission of the Communist
Party, U.S.A. Source:
Ben Davis: Crusader for Negro Freedom &
Socialism (1967) * * *
* *
|
In the fall of 1945, in the
small town of Laurel, Miss., [Willie] McGee, a young black
man, was arrested on charges of raping a white
housewife. . . . McGee's case covered six years
before his appeals were exhausted. On the night of
May 7, 1951, McGee was executed in Mississippi's
portable electric chair. The traveling chair was
moved from county to county, set up in local
courthouses, and connected to generators that
supplied the power that drove the chair. After an
execution, the chair would be dismantled and brought
back to the state capital. The chair is now housed
at the Mississippi Law Enforcement Training Academy,
where McGee-Robinson found it gathering dust in a
corner, surrounded by softball trophies. |
 |
On that night in May 1951,
the chair was set up before the judges' stand in the same
courtroom where McGee had first been convicted. The courtroom
was on the second floor; long wires connected the chair to a
generator below in an alley. Close to a thousand people gathered
on the lawn of the courthouse to witness the execution.
NPR
* * *
* *
 |
Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement
By John
Lewis and Michael D’Orso
Lewis, an
Alabama sharecropper's son, went to Nashville to
attend a Baptist college where, at the end of the
1950s, his life and the new civil rights movement
became inexorably entwined. First came the lunch
counter sit-ins; then the Freedom Rides; the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Lewis's
election to its chairmanship; the voter registration
drives; the 1963 march on Washington; the Birmingham
church bombings; the murders during the Freedom
Summer; the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party;
Bloody Sunday in Selma in 1964; and the march on
Montgomery. Lewis was an active, leading member
during all of it. Much of his account, written with
freelancer D'Orso, covers the same territory as
David Halberstam's
The Children. Halberstam himself appears
here briefly as a young reporter but Lewis imbues it
with his own observations as a participant. He is at
times so self-effacing in this memoir that he
underplays his role in the events he helped create.
But he has a sharp eye, and his account of Selma and
the march that followed is vivid and personal. He
describes the rivalries within the movement as well
as the enemies outside. |
After being forced out of
SNCC because of internal politics, Lewis served in President
Carter's domestic peace corps, dabbled in local Georgia
politics, then in 1986 defeated his old friend Julian Bond in a
race for Congress, where he still serves. Lewis notes that
people often take his quietness for meekness. His book, a
uniquely well-told testimony by an eyewitness, makes clear that
such an impression is entirely inaccurate.—Publishers
Weekly
* * *
* *
Bill Moyers and James Cone (Interview) /
A Conversation with James Cone
* * *
* *
John
Coltrane, "Alabama" /
Kalamu ya Salaam, "Alabama"
/
A Love Supreme
A Blues for the Birmingham Four
/ Eulogy for the Young Victims
/ Six Dead After Church
Bombing
*
* * * *
|
|
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 |
* * *
* *
 |
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
* * *
* *
* * *
* *
 |
Debt: The First 5,000 Years
By David Graeber
Before there was money, there was debt. Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems—to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. The problem with this version of history? There’s not a shred of evidence to support it. Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods—that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors. Graeber shows that arguments about debt and debt forgiveness have been at the center of political debates from Italy to China, as well as sparking innumerable insurrections. He also brilliantly demonstrates that the language of the ancient works of law and religion (words like “guilt,” “sin,” and “redemption”) derive in large part from ancient debates about debt, and shape even our most basic ideas of right and wrong. We are still fighting these battles today without knowing it. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a fascinating chronicle of this little known history—as well as how it has defined human history, and what it means for the credit crisis of the present day and the future of our economy. Economist Glenn Loury /Criminalizing a Race
|
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
* *
* * *
update 20 May
2010
|
