Resisted War, Resisted Racism, Resisted Silence: George Houser

August 21, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Ninety Nine years is only the last accomplishment of George Houser’s amazing life:

  • WW II conscientious objector, 1940
  • Co-founder of the Congress of Racial Equality, 1942
  • Bus rider with Bayard Rustin into the segregated south, 1948
  • South African anti-apartheid organizer, 1952

The New York Times has an obituary.  How can we absorb his conscientious humanity?

“Deeply influenced by the work of Henry David Thoreau and Gandhi, Mr. Houser joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1938, while a student there.

In 1940, he and a group of classmates, including David Dellinger, who went on to become a member of the Chicago Seven, refused to register for the draft as mandated by the Selective Training and Service Act. The act had been signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt that year.

“As theological students, we had an automatic exemption,” Mr. Houser explained in a 2002 interview with The Journal News of Westchester County, N.Y. “But we wanted to protest peacetime conscription.”

Mr. Houser, Mr. Dellinger and six fellow students were sentenced to prison in November 1940. Their story was the subject of a 2000 PBS documentary, “The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It.”

After serving a year in the federal prison at Danbury, Conn., Mr. Houser joined the staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation as its youth secretary. He later moved to Chicago, where he completed his divinity degree at the Chicago Theological Seminary and received ordination.

In 1942, after Mr. Houser and his friend [James] Farmer were denied service at a Chicago restaurant, they, [Bayard] Rustin and others established what became CORE. Mr. Houser served as the group’s first executive secretary.

Bayard Rustin and George Houser, undated, sitting in at Cleveland restaurant

Bayard Rustin and George Houser, undated, sitting in at Cleveland restaurant

CORE soon became a national organization, enrolling tens of thousands of members in dozens of chapters within its first few years. Endorsing nonviolent protest, it convened sit-ins in public accommodations around the country.

In 1946, ruling in a landmark case, Irene Morgan v. Commonwealth of Virginia, the Supreme Court held that segregation on interstate transit was unconstitutional.

The next year, to test the ruling, Mr. Houser and Mr. Rustin, CORE’s first field secretary, organized the Journey of Reconciliation. They convened a team of 16 men — eight black and eight white — to ride interstate buses through the South.

[Cross posted at All In One Boat]

Filed under Citizen Action, Civil Liberties, Race, Religion

Courage: Not Just a Game

February 4, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Two stories today about shameful history and courageous men.

Charlie Sifford, the first black player allowed on a PGA tour, has passed at age 92. Breaking par, as a caddy at age 13, he was not allowed to play in the PGA until it dropped its white’s only rule in 1961.

“In 1952, he was allowed to play in the Phoenix Open in an all-black foursome that included the former heavyweight champion Joe Louis. When the golfers arrived at the first hole, they found that someone had put excrement into it.”

NYTimes

Tiger Woods has called Sifford “one of the bravest men ever to play this sport.”

Yep.

Ω

Val James, alive and writing his autobiography, Black Ice, helped break the color barrier in another very white sport – professional hockey.  He was the first American born black player in the NHL and endured abuse from Americans and Canadians for years.

Warren Skorodenski, a former Springfield, Mass., Indians goalie who spent parts of five seasons in the N.H.L., recalled Springfield fans yelling racial slurs at James and throwing so many bananas on the ice that linesmen collected them during stoppages of play. A few fans, he said, dressed in Ku Klux Klan-style hoods.

“It was disgusting,” said Skorodenski, who is not mentioned in the book. “To be in his shoes, I just couldn’t imagine.”

In Salem, Va., in 1981, a CBS News crew filming a report on James recorded fans chanting a racial epithet at him. A producer interviewed a proud teenager who brought a watermelon to the game for James. Gallagher shared a copy of the report with The New York Times.

“There is the only way I can explain it for people who don’t understand that feeling,” James said. “Let’s start with women. What’s the worst thing you can call a woman? Imagine having one of those words thrown at you every three seconds for 60 minutes. Now multiply that 40 road games a year.”

NY Times

Filed under Books, Heroes, Race, Sports Tagged with , ,

The Sovereign Citizen Circus Explodes in the FOX Den

April 26, 2014 by Leave a Comment

Welfare thief, cattleman Cliven Bundy of Nevada, has thrilled the circus masters at FOX news and elsewhere for the past weeks.  It all blew up last Saturday when his “I don’t recognize the government of the United States” self dragged out its ugly twin of racial animus. “I’ve often wondered are they were better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy?”

The right-wing suits who had brought him into their studios and onto talk radio and into the news pages, skedaddled as fast as their mouths could move.  Of course, those close to home?

…militiamen who showed up with weapons at Bundy’s ranch in Nevada say they continue to support him; indeed, they see the news stories as just another conspiracy. “It’s part of misinformation to maintain the divide,” one militiaman told the Las Vegas Sun [splcenter.org]

Adam Nagourney originally  broke the story

Gail Collins gives a good, quick, amusing summary:

So, what have we learned from the Crazy Rancher Guy saga?

You have undoubtedly heard about Cliven Bundy of Nevada, who refuses to pay federal grazing fees for, um, grazing his cattle on federal land. When government agents, acting on a court order, tried to remove Bundy’s cows, they were met by armed resisters. The agents wisely withdrew rather than risk bloodshed, and the resisters declared victory.

This was Bundy’s happy time. He was a star on Fox News, where his new friend Sean Hannity asked him probing questions like:

“How far are you willing to go?”

“How far are you willing to take this?”

Charles Blow howls his outrage:

How could slaves have been “happier,” when more than 12 million were put in shackles, loaded like logs into the bowels of ships and sailed toward shores unknown, away from their world and into their hell?

How could they have been “happier” to be greased up and sold off, mother from child, with no one registering their anguish?

And, for those who think Mr Bundy is being taken out of context, that his views on race are being misrepresented or are something apart from his anti-government animus, Dana Milbank gives the short version of why we should not be surprised.

The anti-government strain of thought that Bundy advanced has been intertwined with racist and anti-Semitic views over several decades. Not all people who resist the authority of the federal government are motivated by race, of course, and not all racists are anti-government. But there is a long symbiosis between the two.

Among those who rallied to Bundy’s defense in Bunkerville, Nev. — the supporters Heller labeled patriots — was Wiley Drake, an Internet preacher affiliated with the “Oath Keepers” movement. According to reports from the scene, Drake told a crowd of Bundy supporters that they shouldn’t bow to the “half-breed” President Obama.

In general terms, Bundy’s notion of state supremacy — “I don’t recognize the United States government as even existing” — is a variant of states’-rights claims that go back to the Civil War and were revived in the segregationists’ opposition to civil rights laws. Because the federal government has been the protector of minority rights, states’ rights have long been used to justify discrimination.

Specifically, the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks anti-government and hate groups, says that Bundy’s sentiments align closely with those of the “Posse Comitatus” movement, founded by William Potter Gale in the 1970s.

For a mini-seminar in what this is give a listen to this Rachel Maddow piece about the Posse Comitatus and Sovereign Citizen movements.  As the folks over at the Daily Banter say,

What she does here is extraordinary, and that’s precisely what’s so infuriating because she shouldn’t have been the only one digging beneath the surface of Cliven Bundy’s anti-government rhetoric to uncover the darkness at the center of his ideology.

Filed under Race, Weapons Tagged with , ,

Melville and Obama and American Racism

January 20, 2014 by Leave a Comment

“Benito Cereno” [by Herman Melville]  is based on a true historical incident, which I [Greg Grandin]  started researching around the time Mr. Obama announced his first bid for the presidency. Since then, I’ve been struck by the persistence of fears, which began even before his election, that Mr. Obama isn’t what he seems: that instead of being a faithful public servant he is carrying out a leftist plot hatched decades ago to destroy America; or if not that, then he is a secret Muslim intent on supplanting the Constitution with Islamic law; or a Kenyan-born anti-colonialist out to avenge his native Africa.

 No other American president has had to face, before even taking office, an opposition convinced of not just his political but his existential illegitimacy.
… Amasa Delano [In Benito Cereno] represents a new kind of racism, based not on theological or philosophical doctrine but rather on the emotional need to measure one’s absolute freedom in inverse relation to another’s absolute slavishness. This was a racism that was born in chattel slavery but didn’t die with chattel slavery, instead evolving into today’s cult of individual supremacy, which, try as it might, can’t seem to shake off its white supremacist roots.

THIS helps explain those Confederate flags that appear at conservative rallies, as well as why Tea Party-backed politicians like Sarah Palin and Rand Paul insist on equating federal policies they don’t like with chattel bondage. Believing in the “right to health care,” Mr. Paul once said, is “basically saying you believe in slavery.”

Read all Melville, Obama and the Tea Party

Filed under Books, Fiction, Race Tagged with ,

Rand Paul: Denying While Playing the Racial Supremacy Game

July 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Updates below:

*

Rand Paul, standard bearer for a particular brand of American Libertarianism, either knew about his new media director’s past as the masked Southern Avenger for 13 years and decided it didn’t matter, or he didn’t know and hired a key aide without doing even a pro-forma background check.  I have to think the former since even a bonafide libertarian would care if say, a pedophile, joined his staff, and would therefore, have some sort of background check set up.

Southern Avenger

Perhaps Paul himself doesn’t think having Jack Hunter, a man who celebrates the birthday of Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth,  on his staff is a problem — for himself.  Perhaps he sees it as the epitome of libertarian tolerance. But Rand Paul is a p-o-l-i-t-i-c-i-a-n.  His success in his chosen field depends not on his personal feelings alone, but on  thousands of voters.  Did it not occur to him that someone who ‘compared Lincoln to Saddam Hussein and suggested that the 16th president would have had a romantic relationship with Adolf Hitler if the two met,’ would be a force-field pushing not a few voting hands to another lever?

From 1999 to 2012, Hunter was a South Carolina radio shock jock known as the “Southern Avenger.” He has weighed in on issues such as racial pride and Hispanic immigration, and stated his support for the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

During public appearances, Hunter often wore a mask on which was printed a Confederate flag.

Prior to his radio career, while in his 20s, Hunter was a chairman in the League of the South, which “advocates the secession and subsequent independence of the Southern States from this forced union and the formation of a Southern republic.”

Rand Paul’s statements against American warmongering are to be applauded, but as in certain Japanese universities we should all rumble the floor with the foot beats of disapproval when he hires a man who has led the way in mainstreaming ugly strains of the country’s racist past.

[And yes, people do change, as Hunter has claimed he has. If so how about some public self analysis?  How about a real look at what he did as the Southern Avenger and some conversation about what led him to change from those ideas?  How about letting himself be grilled, as other public penitents have done?  How many hours did he hold forth on the idea that ‘A non-white majority America would simply cease to be America for reasons that are as numerous as they are obvious – whether we are supposed to mention them or not.”?  Can we have one-tenth of the time to decide if he has really changed?  ]

The Free Beacon, a conservative on-line source, broke the story about Hunter.   The Daily Caller, for which Hunter has written recently, with a muted pen, headlines that his old ideas are no longer with him.  Chris Hayes, of MSNBC, who featured the Paul-Hunter relationship on Tuesday‘s show, said that Paul himself, had three racist strikes against him and should be known as holding such views.

*

Updates:

Keeping It Real on ‘neo-Confederate Libertarians’

…the neo-Confederates, the Lew Rockwells and that whole crew are fundamentally about white supremacy and nativism. And the Paul clan has been thick as thieves with those folks forever.

Who knows what’s in their hearts and frankly who cares? But none of this latest stuff should surprise us. And I don’t know why real libertarians waste any time making any sort of common cause with these folks.

The Libertarian War over the Civil War

[The Libertarian magazine] Reason is firmly in the anti-neo-Confederate camp. In 2008 they reported on the racist newsletters put out under Texas Rep. Ron Paul’s name and criticized the presidential candidate for allying himself with that strain in libertarianism. In response, they received scores of angry letters accusing them of selling out the movement. The neo-Confederates are largely centered around libertarian author Lew Rockwell (who worked with Paul and is widely suspected to have written the offensive newsletters), his website LewRockwell.com and his think-tank the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Filed under Extremism, Race Tagged with , , ,

Rosa Parks: More Militant than Meek

February 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Charles Blow at the NY Times, brings to view a new book on the woman whose Civil Rights fame is second only to Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks.  She was not, it turns out, the humble seamstress she is often portrayed as being.  She had long rankled at the treatment of her family and friends by whites.  She talked back and on more than one occasion was restrained by those older and more experienced.

When she was a child, a young white man taunted her. In turn, she threatened him with a brick. Her grandmother reprimanded her as “too high-strung,” warning that Rosa would be lynched before the age of 20. Rosa responded, “I would be lynched rather than be run over by them.”

the idea that she stayed seated on the famous bus ride because of physical fatigue is pure fiction.

“I didn’t tell anyone my feet were hurting,” the book quotes her as saying. “It was just popular, I suppose because they wanted to give some excuse other than the fact that I didn’t want to be pushed around.”

The book also lays out Parks’s leading role in the bus boycotts and her decades of activism after the civil rights movement.

The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks, by Jeanne Theoharis, you might want to read it.

Filed under Books, Organizing, Race Tagged with ,

The Appalling Past (has of course not yet passed…)

October 6, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The NY Times obituary of a man I had never heard of, Pedro A. Sanjuan, stopped me completely this morning, reminding me how recent the past is, and how, from today, appalling:

His first battleground was the Maryland portion of Route 40, a federal highway. The ambassadors of Chad and Sierra Leone were among eight diplomats who had been refused service along there. The Chad ambassador was on his way to present his credentials to President Kennedy. The 7-year-old son of a diplomat was refused a glass of water.

Mr. Sanjuan visited more than 90 restaurants and drive-ins along the highway, and persuaded about half to serve blacks. He testified before the Maryland legislature on behalf of civil rights legislation. He met with representatives of the Congress of Racial Equality, the civil rights group known as CORE, which staged protests to pressure the restaurants. He spoke to civic groups.

“We pour millions into foreign aid,” he said. “How senseless it is to ruin this tremendous effort by refusing to serve a cup of coffee to a customer whose skin is dark.”

… One African delegate to the United Nations, Mr. Sanjuan was told, had been barred from an airport restaurant while passing through Atlanta and consigned to a stool in a hangar, where he ate a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. The delegate later became his country’s prime minister.

…The situation festered until the Maryland legislature passed a law in 1963 opening public accommodations. The landmark federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 cemented the progress. Historians say publicity about the diplomats had accelerated these steps.

It goes without saying that even the good work he, and the Kennedy brothers did, was tinted with infamy:  their alarm was for the diplomats and their families, not the Americans who were treated even worse, daily.

Filed under Race Tagged with ,

Another White Supremacist Hate Spree

August 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Arrests in Yuba City, CA, of a man and woman

“The indictment in this case alleges horrendous crimes were committed as part of defendants’ white supremacist campaign to kidnap and murder targets on the basis of race, color, religion and perceived ‘degenerate’ conduct,”

This following the massacres of Sikhs in Wisconsin and the burning of a mosque in Missouri last week – post.

Read more:

 

Filed under Race Tagged with ,

Ron Paul Supporters Hacked: Not Pretty

February 3, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Several sites have picked up on claims by Anonymous that it has hacked into American Third Position (A3P) and discovered a trove of data linking Ron Paul with members of A3P and the Board of Directors, as well as Nick Griffin of the British National Party.

International Business Times was the first to report, but it has been followed by Little Green Footballs, a formerly dependable right-wing site (now not so much,) which  calls A3P  “racist Neanderthals,” and Pensito Review.

Paul’s campaign denies any connection with A3P.

I can’t find any of the actual “dump,” from Anonymous, just their statement about what it found, and a list of racist sites it  claims to have defaced.   Release them, please.  We’d like to see.

The New Republic in its January 17, 2012 edition posted a long article detailing the articles that appeared under Ron Paul’s name in his newsletter Survival Report, in the 1990s — most of which Paul has recently claimed were not actually his thoughts. Yes, of course, people do change their minds over matters as serious as these.  To be convinced of a change, however, ownership of both before and after has to be acknowledged.

From left, Paul at the 2007 Values Voters debate with Don Black, of the neo-Nazi web site Stormfront, and his son, Derek Black

Filed under Politics, Race Tagged with , ,

Gingrich Rides the Horses of Animus And Vituperation to South Carolina Victory

January 21, 2012 by 1 Comment

Well, the good people of South Carolina have hung a flapping, hysterical albatross around the the Republican Party and the country at large, even if Newt Gingrich bombs with the rest of us.  His victory in the GOP primaries today, ensures that his brand of vituperative nastiness will be hoisted  like a shining trophy for the infatuated to find their own, screaming reflections in.

Charles Blow, who wrote before the shameful win, has much to say about the man

Republicans are willing to forgive his flaws and his past because he connects with a silent slice of their core convictions — their deep-seated, long-simmering issues with an “elite” media bias, minority “privilege” and Obama’s “otherness.”

He’s the street fighter with a history of poisonous politics who not only goes there but dwells there. He makes his nest among the thorns of open animus and coded language.

Gingrich went on to say, “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.” Points scored. The crowd ate it up.

As for the president, Gingrich this week at a campaign stop called the president’s decision to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline “stunningly stupid.” Even more points. The crowd jumped to its feet and pumped fists.

 

I’d say that the disgruntled whispers I hear among some folks that they won’t vote for Obama because they are soooo disapointed might try getting regruntled, less they leave us the rest of us facing the north end of this horse moving south….

 

Filed under Politics, Race Tagged with ,

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