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Freedom Day, 1963: A Lost Interview With James Baldwin |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=56395"><span class="small">Fern Marja Eckman, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Saturday, 26 September 2020 08:24 |
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Eckman writes: "James Baldwin's first biographer was my aunt Fern Marja Eckman, a prize-winning feature writer and reporter for the New York Post."
James Baldwin. (photo: unknown)
Freedom Day, 1963: A Lost Interview With James Baldwin
By Fern Marja Eckman, The New Yorker
26 September 20
After Baldwin’s biographer died, her niece opened an old desk drawer and discovered a trove of interview material, some of it unpublished.
 ames Baldwin’s first biographer was my aunt Fern Marja Eckman, a prize-winning feature writer and reporter for the New York Post. She died in 2019, at the age of a hundred and three. As her closest living relative, I cleaned out her apartment. Hidden in a concealed drawer of an old mahogany desk, I found transcripts of interviews that she had conducted with Baldwin. Some of that material was included in her book, “The Furious Passage of James Baldwin,” which was published, in 1966, by M. Evans & Company. It is especially interesting to read the carefully typed transcripts of their conversations in light of our current moment.
With the encouragement of Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., the chair of the department of African-American studies at Princeton University and the author of a current best-seller on Baldwin, “Begin Again,” I am making more of this interview material public. The session captured below, part of which appeared in my aunt’s book, is particularly relevant. It took place on the afternoon of October 9, 1963, just two days after Baldwin returned to New York from Selma, Alabama, where he had taken part in “Freedom Day,” a Black voter-registration drive organized by the Dallas County Voters League and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Selma is a town in Dallas County, part of the so-called Black Belt, where Black voting registration was almost nonexistent. In Dallas County, the population at the time was fifty-eight per cent Black; only one per cent of the Black population was registered to vote. More than eighty per cent of the Black population in Dallas County lived under the poverty line and was routinely disqualified from voting by literacy tests and other restrictions. The registration rate among the white population was sixty-four per cent.
The historian Howard Zinn, who attended the march as an adviser to SNCC, wrote in his memoir, “You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train,” “The idea was to bring hundreds of people to register to vote, hoping that their numbers would decrease fear.” In Selma, Baldwin marched alongside SNCC’s executive secretary, James Forman, and other activists. “Freedom Day,” 1963, was a forerunner to events in Alabama in 1965––the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the march from Selma to Montgomery––that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.
At the time of the interview, Baldwin was already a major literary star. He had recently published “Another Country,” as well as “The Fire Next Time,” which originally appeared in The New Yorker and was riding high on the best-seller lists. He and my aunt were joined at the table by Baldwin’s brother David. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
—Leslie J. Freeman
James Baldwin: On Sunday morning [October 6, 1963], James Forman called me and asked me if I would come down that night. The reason was that he had designated October 7th as “Freedom Day,” and that involved a tremendous registration drive. He wanted to make sure that we’d get more than the usual press coverage and that I would write about it and speak that evening at the mass rally. So, in a way, I was being used as bait. I wasn’t at all sure I could. Then I thought about it and I got my ticket, and we flew down, David and I.
He wanted me to get down early because he wanted to brief me on the situation in Selma, Alabama, which is a town I’d never seen, and to prepare me for what Monday would be like. I must say, in that he completely failed. No one could have prepared me for Monday.
We got to Selma early Monday morning, about 1:30 a.m. Alabama time. And we had a talk. Jim gave me some idea of the town itself. The proportion of Negroes is something like fifty-eight per cent, which is, of course, the key to the whole battle. It’s a cotton town. And poor.
We were sitting around talking. You would be aware of—sudden silence fell. And then you’d realize that a car was coming. And that everyone was listening . . . for a car. And, of course, you did, too. You’d see the lights of the car pass the window, in this total silence, and you’d be aware that everyone, including you, was waiting for bullets or a bomb. And the car would pass, and you’d go to the blinds and look out.
Then we’d start talking again. This went on the whole time we were talking. During this same conversation, Prathia Hall, [a SNCC field secretary] who was later arrested, went to the phone. We couldn’t hear what was on the other end of the phone, but we heard Prathia saying, “What happened there? How are your wife and children?” And, “Did you know who they were?” Which is sufficiently disturbing. It turned out that a man named Porter found two white men under his house, fiddling with his gas pipe, at two-thirty in the morning. It was his dog who barked and alerted him. The next day, we saw Porter, and we learned they had come and killed his dog. Then we went out to the [voter-registration] line.
Fern Marja Eckman: Were you scared?
J.B.: Yeah! I was scared physically, because I knew what could happen, and I was scared because I didn’t know how to handle myself. The Deep South depends on a certain kind of—I didn’t want to get anybody else in trouble. I didn’t know what I would say to any of those cops. It’s a principal terror when I’m there. There’s a weird kind of etiquette which I can’t observe, because I wasn’t born there, and you can’t learn it.
We got there around 9:45 a.m. The press people were out there. I don’t know if I can explain to you what it means in a town like that to get that many Negroes out to stand on line to vote.
F.M.E.: Well, try to tell me.
J.B.: Well, it’s almost impossible, you know. Here is a town that’s ruled by terror, that’s ruled by mob. The white population and the police are all the mob, and there’s no protection for any Negro in the town of any kind whatever. You cannot call the police. You’d be out of your mind. And the Negroes are not armed. They cannot protect themselves. It’s not a rich town, so everyone there is, in one way or another, dependent for his livelihood on some white man. Now, to get, as Jim did, three hundred and seventy-five Negroes out to vote—
F.M.E.: How long had they been working on that?
J.B.: They’d been working on it since February. A fantastic thing, you know, to be able to do. Fantastic!
F.M.E.: What age ranges were they?
J.B.: They were from sixty to twenty-one, but the higher proportion of people in the line were young people. The older people in one way or another are, in general, too victimized, too intimidated, too tired, you know? It was the kids—obviously, most of the kids—who led the registration drive.
It was very peaceful in the beginning. We walked up and down the line. Jim was proselytizing as he went. It was very impressive to see. I guess we wandered about for an hour, talking to various people, who kept coming. But no Negro had gone through the doors as of yet. No Negro did go through those doors until ten-thirty, and it was not because there was a great press of people inside. They were determined not to register any Negroes. They dawdled as long as they could. We went away about eleven, and when we came back the posse was out. With green helmets.
F.M.E.: The storm troopers.
J.B.: The storm troopers, yes. And the state troopers’ cars.
David Baldwin: They weren’t in yet.
J.B.: That’s right. There were so many it’s hard to remember the colors. Orange helmets. Orange and blue and green helmets.
D.B.: The blue ones were state troopers. The orange and the green are the posse.
J.B.: Yes. The posse was so many people. The sheriff––Dallas County Sheriff Jim Clark––had deputized anybody who could carry a gun.
D.B.: And white.
J.B.: And white, yes. I should have pointed that out. [Laughs.] It was the orange deputies first. The other cats didn’t come in until later. But, still, everything was very peaceful. We could still talk to the people on the line, and the line was still stretched around the corner. And there was no real hassle. There was only a very faint harbinger of what was to come in the fact that these men behind with the helmets kept saying, “You’re blocking the sidewalk. Move along, move along.” And so on. We kept moving. But there was no question about whether or not we could talk to people.
I guess the crisis began around noon. Just before noon. When did the sheriff get there?
D.B.: The sheriff got there, say, around eleven-thirty.
J.B.: Yes, it was something like that. The sheriff said that the people, if they left the line, they couldn’t get their place back in line. They’d been standing there for more than two hours and couldn’t leave the line to go to the bathroom. Lunchtime was coming, and they were going to close the courthouse for an hour. But the Negroes were not allowed to leave under any pretext whatever.
So Jim decided they had to feed people. We got some money together and went out and got a whole lot of—made up a whole lot of sandwiches. I’m telescoping the story a little now, because lots of things happened in between, which was really a stepping up of pressure. The pressure of us keeping moving got greater and greater. I must go into that whole “keep moving along” bit, because the pressure was there, you know—CBS and cameras, and microphones and things.
F.M.E.: And surely some newspaper reporters?
J.B.: Newspaper reporters, yes, but also cameras––and they were talking to me. And, whenever this happened, along came the deputies, saying, “Move along—you’re blocking the sidewalk.” We kept moving, from the sidewalk to the grass, and from the grass to someplace else. We kept moving. And as we moved these men would stick behind us, and that’s how we ended up in the streets. Then we had to move from there. We were “blocking the sidewalk.” No matter where you were, you were blocking traffic.
F.M.E.: How was their manner?
J.B.: The only word I can find for it was that it was mindless. They sounded like parrots. It was the only phrase they ever used: “Move along—you’re blocking the sidewalk.” And also, I must say, when I finally looked into their faces, they were terrified. With their guns and their helmets. And terrified in a very strange way. Terrified as the mindless are terrified. Because the only way they could react to any pressure was a rock or bullet or gun. They don’t have any other defenses at all! This is the police force the Southern oligarchy has used and created to protect their interests.
Finally, after all this “moving along” bit, Jim Forman wanted to go into the courthouse––a federal courthouse. We started in, and the two guards at the door said we couldn’t come in. And Jim Forman said, “You know, we have to go upstairs to the courthouse. What do you mean we can’t come in?” And they just repeated the same phrase: “You can’t come in.” And when we said, “Why can’t we come in?” “You can’t come in.” And Jim said, “Do you mean you’re forbidding us to enter a federal courthouse?” And he, the first guard, said, “You have to ask him about that.” The other guard looked away, and the first guard finally said, “The chief of this operation”—or whatever phrase he used—said we had to come in “through the front door.” So we went around to the front door, where the line was, and Sheriff Clark said we couldn’t get in there. We had to go around to the side door, so we went around to the side door again, and the guard said we couldn’t get in. And then, you know, we’re standing there, trying to figure out what to do next, and he said, “You’re blocking the door.” [Laughs.] So we moved to the side. This is all happening under the eyes of the Justice Department and the F.B.I., by the way.
F.M.E.: What did they do? They stood and watched?
J.B.: And taking pictures. And making phone calls. I guess it was after that that the trouble with the food started. Around twelve-thirty, Mrs. Amelia Boynton, one of the activists in Selma, and I came back with her car. We didn’t realize we were going to have any trouble about that. I don’t know when I realized it, because Jim and Mrs. Boynton knew it first. They were dealing with the sheriff. We were on the other side of the street. And by this time the state troopers were there. Twelve cars, bumper to bumper. And all their helmets on. I forget the color of their helmets. Blue or green.
D.B.: Blue ones.
J.B.: The helmets were like a garden. So many colors. And, with their guns and their clubs and their cattle prods, they pushed Jim once and one of the Negro photographers. Not with the cattle prod but with a stick. But nothing else. Anyway, the climate was much more tense. And there was a gang of white hangers-on.
F.M.E.: Were you scared?
J.B.: I was furious.
D.B.: I was scared and furious.
J.B.: I was scared in the morning, before it all began, and I was scared the first time I walked around there. But, later on, I wasn’t scared at all. That’s exactly what happened. Your fear is swallowed up by—
F.M.E.: Fury.
J.B.: Fury! Yeah. What you really want to do is kill all those people.
D.B.: Exactly.
J.B.: And you feel that so strongly that you haven’t got time to be afraid. And those faces—my God. You know? The faces of the white in the South is a real blasphemy. Anyway, we started trying to feed the people. Mrs. Boynton came back to report to Jim Forman that the sheriff was not allowing anybody to talk to anybody on the line. And Jim wasn’t talking to anybody on the line. You were not allowed to talk to them.
F.M.E.: Did they give you any explanations?
J.B.: No. The food issue began to be crucial, because if you couldn’t talk to them you couldn’t feed them. And we had all these sandwiches.
F.M.E.: And they’d be tired and have to leave.
J.B.: Well, they didn’t. As a matter of fact, as far as I could tell, nobody left.
F.M.E.: Was it terribly hot?
J.B.: It was very hot. And there they stood. They were leaning on one another’s shoulders, and they took off their shoes and stood around. It turned out we couldn’t even get close enough to the line, as somebody figured out, to put all the sandwiches in a shopping bag and carry it to the end of the line and have those sandwiches passed up by the people on the line. Kind of a bucket-brigade thing. Then Jim and Mrs. Boynton and I walked over to talk to the sheriff. Mrs. Boynton and Jim said that the people had been standing there for a long time, and it was hot, and they were hungry. We had food for them—we’d like to feed them. The sheriff said, “I’ll not have them molested in any way.” Mrs. Boynton said, “We’re not trying to molest them. We’re trying to feed them.” And the sheriff said again—he said it four times, no matter what anybody said. Four times. And this had been the pattern of the whole morning, as though they’d learned one phrase.
F.M.E.: Isn’t there a sign in the zoo—“Don’t feed the animals”? Sometimes they say, “Don’t molest the animals.”
J.B.: That’s probably where he got it from. “I will not have them molested in any way.” And, finally, Jim said, “Are you really forbidding us to talk to these people and feed these people? Don’t you know that’s against the law?” And the sheriff said, “I don’t care if it’s against the law—that’s my order.” And he turned away, with his fat behind and his fat face. And his helmet.
F.M.E.: What’s his name?
J.B.: “Big Jim” Clark. I wish to God that somebody’d blow his head off.
F.M.E.: Wouldn’t help. There’d be another one just like him.
J.B.: No, it would help. There are some people whose only reason to be, whose only human use, is that they should come to a violent death. Their only human use.
F.M.E.: How were the three hundred and seventy-five people on the line? How did they behave?
J.B.: They were very orderly. They were absolutely silent, and they were just standing there. They didn’t say a word to any of us, because we couldn’t get anywhere near them.
F.M.E.: How far away from them were you?
J.B.: We were on the other side of the street. Jim then decided he would take the sandwiches over. And David said, “You’d be playing into their hands if you do. You’re in charge of this operation. If you take the sandwiches over, they’ll put you in jail, and so that destroys your usefulness for the foreseeable—for the rest of this day, anyway.” And, in the same way, Jim thought maybe I should carry one of the registration signs, and David said, “Well, you know, in that case, Jimmy will be arrested, and he’s got to address the mass meeting tonight. They’ll be delighted to have him in jail.” And we prevailed upon Jim not to take the sandwiches. And two boys, [the SNCC activists] Carver Neblett and Avery Williams, about twenty and twenty-one, volunteered to take the sandwiches over, and, well, they did.
D.B.: There was a whole load of sandwiches, and they wouldn’t let them take no more than a little box. They knew—
J.B.: They went over with these sandwiches. You know, a handful of sandwiches. And from across the street we saw the two boys. They approached the sheriff together and were arguing with the sheriff, obviously. The sheriff struck one of them, and then the other boy went down. The posse closed in, and you could see them kicking them. And they were using the cattle prod on them. The cameramen were trying to get this. And the posse—half the posse—was on these two kids, and the other part of the posse was beating up a cameraman and jumping up with their helmets in front of the cameras, to prevent anything from being seen. This is also happening under the eyes of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department. And they finally carried the boys around the corner and threw them into a bus. It’s the last we ever saw of them—for the day.
When the posse started beating up these kids, the mob rushed forward, as though someone had blown a whistle—and this was the signal for slaughter. I’ll never forget that. Because that was what this town is like.
F.M.E.: How large a white crowd was there?
J.B.: It got bigger as it went on. They were integrated with the posse, because they’d driven us away. We were driven off the sidewalk, and we found ourselves on the federal-courthouse steps, where we thought we were protected, and where the sheriff had already arrested three boys carrying voter-registration signs.
F.M.E.: What was the charge?
J.B.: Unlawful assembly. We all had to stand on the federal-courthouse steps. We couldn’t stand anyplace else. And I went inside. The F.B.I. was picking up statements, for what reason I cannot imagine. I went inside to give a statement, and while I was inside David and the cameramen and everybody—this is an integrated crowd—came in to report that the sheriff had driven them off the steps of the federal courthouse.
F.M.E.: Were the reporters friendly?
J.B.: The reporters were very friendly.
D.B.: It was the reporters who asked them if it was against the law to drive us off the federal-courthouse steps. And the F.B.I. man said, “Yes, it’s against the law.” By this time, you’re quite mad. You ask if it’s against the law and they ask you if you had a statement to make. In my statement, I said I’d had sixteen months in Korea. And what for?
J.B.: Yes. The moral of the story, Fern, is that what really happened was that three hundred and seventy-five people who are American citizens, whom the government would put in jail if they didn’t pay their taxes, would put in jail if they did not serve in the Army—this same government says, and makes it known, they can’t do anything to protect them. There were three hundred and seventy-five people in that street yesterday who could have been shot down under the eyes of the F.B.I., and the government could have done nothing about it. All these people were jeopardizing their lives, their jobs, their children, everything they had in order to stand on that line in order to vote, which is an American right and duty. And the government of the U.S., which can mount invasions of Cuba and “protect” the Vietnamese, cannot protect these people! That’s a lie. The government can do anything it wants to do. What it means is that the government does not dare yet to offend the Southern oligarchy. It’s not the F.B.I. who does it, you know, it’s really the power of all these people in Congress who are Southerners, and the fact that Bobby Kennedy doesn’t dare attack them. The Administration doesn’t give a damn.
The terrible bargain America struck, when the North and South agreed they were going to use the Negro both as agrarian cheap labor and as industrial cheap labor—do you know? And the South created that mindless mob, which rules the South in order to protect the Southern interests and continue to keep the Negro in his place. It’s a creation of the American government.
And, really, you know, finally, the poor white is the great victim in the South. He’s the real victim. It makes him humanly useless and monstrous. But that is the crime. And the Administration is still playing footsie with these people, you know? The judges Kennedy has appointed in the South are designed to protect the oligarchy. This has the effect of exposing, for example, to loss of life, three hundred and seventy-five Negroes yesterday in Selma.
F.M.E.: How did they make it so only fifty could register?
J.B.: What? Fifty, baby? I’m sorry—the last count we had in Selma was twelve to twenty. All day long.
F.M.E.: I thought the Times said—
J.B.: The Times was wrong! The Times doesn’t talk to the Negroes on the line. The first woman came out at eleven o’clock. She went in at ten-thirty. She’d been there since twenty to nine. From nine o’clock until four-thirty, twelve to twenty people registered, all of whom are going to fail the test by the time the next registration day comes around.
D.B.: Doctors, lawyers, teachers are going to fail the test.
J.B.: And the government can’t do anything about it. There were certain things I realized sitting in Selma and watching the local news, for instance. The implication is that the Negroes are so passive that they don’t want to vote. That it’s only people like Jim Forman and Jimmy Baldwin who stir them up. And, even then, they only had a hundred and fifty. And the sheriff kept everything very orderly.
The real drama is the fact that the people can’t vote and the government won’t help them, and that they’re living in a police state with the collusion of the federal government. The last thing we heard as we left Selma, early the next morning, was a housewife saying, “I think I’d better get a gun.” This is a Christian housewife. She said, “I’d better get a gun.” I saw the guns out down there.
And when they shut down [the registration], this whole line of Negroes, just walking by the courthouse, marching in twos—they didn’t get a chance to vote. They all stayed there all day long. You know the day is coming when they will no longer go to the courthouse for redress of grievances. And, when that day comes, the country will have no one to blame but itself.
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The Raids Against the Opposition in Turkey Show Erdogan's Weakness |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=56394"><span class="small">Max Zirngast, Jacobin</span></a>
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Saturday, 26 September 2020 08:20 |
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Zirngast writes: "This morning, Turkish police arrested 82 leading members of the left-wing, pro-Kurdish HDP, while also mounting a separate assault on the opposition in Istanbul."
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (photo: AFP)
The Raids Against the Opposition in Turkey Show Erdogan's Weakness
By Max Zirngast, Jacobin
26 September 20
This morning, Turkish police arrested 82 leading members of the left-wing, pro-Kurdish HDP, while also mounting a separate assault on the opposition in Istanbul. As its own social base crumbles under the weight of economic and public-health crises, Erdo?an’s regime is mounting an increasingly desperate campaign against “the enemy within.”
 his morning, Turkey once again awoke to news of massive police raids against the opposition.
Such news is hardly uncommon. Just two weeks ago, there was a concerted raid against the Socialist Party of the Oppressed (Ezilenlerin Sosyalist Partisi, ESP), with seventeen people first taken into custody and then detained.
But this morning’s raids were a much vaster operation, spanning many provinces all over the country. As the picture became clearer, we came to understand that there were actually two separate attacks going on — with two related but different targets.
The first series of raids, conducted by the chief prosecutor in Ankara, was directed against the leftist, pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP). The HDP has been a thorn in the side of the regime for years, particularly after it managed to enter parliament in 2015 despite the 10 percent threshold for representation.
The official justification was that the raids happened because of the so-called “Kobanê events” of October 6–8, 2014. That’s right — a lightning police response to events that took place six years ago.
“Kobanê events” refers to what happened in late 2014, when the self-declared Islamic State began to attack the Kurdish city of Kobanê in northern Syria, on the border with Turkey. As a result, clashes broke out in several cities in Turkey, particularly in the Kurdish southeast. This is the pretext on which leading HDP politicians are now being taken into custody.
The arrestees include the joint mayor of Kars, Ayhan Bilgen; the former MP and movie director S?rr? Süreyya Önder; the former MPs Altan Tan, Emine Ayna, and Nazmi Gür; and former and current HDP central executive board members such as the academic Beyza Üstün, the feminist researcher Gülfer Akkaya, the socialist writer and Abstrakt editor Alp Alt?nörs, Can Memi?, Günay Kubilay, and Dilek Ya?l?. Overall, there are said to be warrants for eighty-two people in seven provinces.
A particularly tasty nugget of information for understanding what is going on is that Ankara chief prosecutor Yüksel Kocaman, who initiated this attack, was only recently a guest in president Recep Tayyip Erdo?an’s palace after getting married. Together with his wife, Kocaman took the time to pose for a picture with the president.
Twitter Coup?
However, there also was a second series of raids, directed by prosecutors in Istanbul. Officially, it appears as if this second attack is directed against a loose platform called “Movement of the Nameless,” which is active on social media with hashtag campaigns on Twitter.
The people taken into custody in supposed connection to that platform in fact seem rather random, even if they do represent various elements of the leftist and social opposition in Istanbul. Arrestees include the lawyer Tamer Do?an; the writer and intellectual Temel Demirer; the writer and spokesperson for the Party of Social Freedom (Toplumsal Özgürlük Partisi, TÖP) Perihan Koca; and the writer and journalist Hakan Gülseven.
While lawyers have not been able to access the case files yet, it appears that the charge is “coup attempt via social media.” Further information seems to suggest that the Turkish state wants to present the “Movement of the Nameless” as a terrorist organization that seeks to stage a coup via tweets.
While the justifications for both these attacks are absurd, the target of each is relatively clear. In the first case, the target is the Kurdish movement and particularly the HDP; in the second, it’s the social opposition that crystallized in the Gezi Uprising in 2013. While there are currently no protests of that scale, the regime around Erdo?an still fears that a coalition of social dynamics similar to Gezi could take to the streets again.
But there are also deeper objective factors behind these assaults. The social and economic crises in Turkey are constantly deepening, and the regime seems to be unable to get them under control. The pandemic was horrendously mishandled, hospitals are overloaded, health workers are dying, and even the doctors’ association is protesting the government’s handling of the crisis.
A recent ill-fated attempt to discredit the protesting doctors by Erdo?an ally Devlet Bahçeli of the fascist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) backfired, as the doctors were defend by large swaths of society. Added to that, the economic crisis continuously worsens, and the impoverishment of the population is advancing rapidly.
No wonder social support for the regime is dwindling. The most recent poll shows the pro-regime coalition of the AKP and MHP parties with a combined score of 38.8 percent. Thus, while the regime has more or less established full control over all the central organs of the state, it still lacks social legitimacy. It is attempting to solve this crisis through more and more violence, directed both externally and internally. The troubled relations with more or less all neighboring countries are an indication of the former trend; this morning’s attacks are further proof of the latter.
Wider Clampdown
It is very clear that, with these attacks and the recent raids against the ESP, the regime is testing the waters. Very likely, this will be only the beginning of a campaign against all political and social opposition in Turkey, which could eventually encompass even the bourgeois opposition. If this strategy works, we could be faced with snap elections very soon.
Yet there is also resistance. Even though it is difficult to take to the streets in mass numbers in these days, declarations of solidarity have been made in many cities across the country already.
Furthermore, the regime has not been able to get social media under its control, as much as it wishes. A recently passed internet law to be enforced starting October 1 attempts to accomplish this. The law will essentially require all companies to have a representative based in Turkey and to share information with the Turkish state. It is yet to be seen if companies like YouTube and Twitter, which are important platforms of the opposition, will comply with this demand — and what will happen if they don’t.
For the time being, it is paramount that we stand in solidarity with all the revolutionary and democratic forces in Turkey — forces that are mounting a heroic struggle for a free society.
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A Former Outlaw Appreciating the Republican Life |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47905"><span class="small">Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website</span></a>
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Friday, 25 September 2020 12:49 |
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Keillor writes: "Back in my youth, I wanted to be an artist and imagined this required a reckless life, big mood swings, unfiltered smokes, straight gin, black clothing, and now I feel that inspiration can arise out of quiet and order and a peaceful disposition."
Garrison Keillor. (photo: MPR)
A Former Outlaw Appreciating the Republican Life
By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
25 September 20
 n the spring, there was a shortage of vegetable seeds and now, I’m told, there is a shortage of canning jar lids. This doesn’t affect me, locked down in Manhattan, but it brings back memories of my childhood home, the half-acre garden, the big tomato, corn and cucumber crops, the steamy kitchen with the pressure cooker going full tilt.
As a child, I worried that we might be poor and maybe canning was a sign that we were. Our neighbors were not canners. The dread of the stigma of poverty stuck with me until I was 18 and went to college and actually was poor and took it as a point of pride. I was a poet specializing in unintelligible poetry, and poverty was a mark of authenticity. Geniuses were, of necessity, poor. My girlfriend, however, came from a suburban Republican family and over time, against my principles, I came to love them, especially her mother, Marjorie. She had grown up in North Dakota in the Depression, when dust blew through the windows, her father and brother drunk in the barn, and she set out to make a graceful life of her own and maintain a cheerful atmosphere, avoiding the sort of dark brooding that filled my poetry, and I stepped into the role of boyfriend and enjoyed their company, and gradually they corrupted me and instilled strong bourgeois leanings that an outlaw poet should shun.
It was Marjorie’s fault: I honest to God loved to be around her as she cooked dinner, her Rob Roy in hand, smoking a Winston, chatting about friends and family, prospective travels, nothing about happy childhood memories of which she seemed to have none. She had risen from hardscrabble origins to make a nice life, peaceful, no outbursts of shouting, no ugliness, wall-to-wall carpeting, art on the walls, no trashy behavior, good manners.
I think of her these days as the pandemic has imposed a small life on us. I’m old, I stay home to avoid crowds, we cook at home, our apartment is about the size of their bungalow — LR, DR, 2 BR, Kit — except they also had a den, which we don’t. I don’t know anyone who has a den these days. But it’s a pleasant small life that Marjorie would recognize, a life I avoided for about forty years of gallivanting around, and now I find, to my surprise, that I’ve become fond of it. I turn on the ball game, I pour a ginger ale and pretend its Scotch, I smell the chicken cooking, and I remember that gentle Republican family at home on a Saturday afternoon. Easily satirized but comforting nonetheless.
I was a busy man for about forty years, doing shows, writing books, and in the course of it I gradually lost touch with the world around me, social media, cable TV, apps, electronics, all the current acronyms, GDP, LED, YOLO, POC, ROFL, AFAIK, GPS, LGBTIQQIAA+, and I am an old man enjoying baseball, a crossword puzzle, writing letters with a black pen on white stationery, a dish of ice cream, a cup of licorice tea, all of which were around fifty years ago. The one advantage of modern electronics is that I can Google Jelly Roll Morton or Bill Monroe or Little Richard and there it is on YouTube, no need to pull the vinyl out of the sleeve and set down the needle. The more things change, the more they are the same. I’m in Manhattan but really I’m in a village of the Upper West Side along Columbus Avenue, the drugstore, the grocery, a bookstore, the church on 99th. Like most people who value rationalism and low blood pressure, I ignore politics completely and wait for November 3rd and hope for clarity.
Back in my youth, I wanted to be an artist and imagined this required a reckless life, big mood swings, unfiltered smokes, straight gin, black clothing, and now I feel that inspiration can arise out of quiet and order and a peaceful disposition. I hope so. In my youth, I wrote a great deal about death and now, with death in the air, I write about gratitude for love and music and work and good-hearted Republicans. God grant us more of them.
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FOCUS: The Case for Ending the Supreme Court as We Know It |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=54698"><span class="small">Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, The New Yorker</span></a>
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Friday, 25 September 2020 11:45 |
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Taylor writes: "The insistence that the Supreme Court is not a political body is a principle of high folly in American politics."
People line up at the Supreme Court to hear arguments in Brown v. Board of Education. (photo: Getty)
The Case for Ending the Supreme Court as We Know It
By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, The New Yorker
25 September 20
 ast week, Donald Trump was confronted with a new accusation of sexual assault (Trump, as always, denied it), and then delivered a bizarre speech at the National Archives, demanding ideological conformity in public-school curricula through what he described as “patriotic education” that “celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history.” Instead of facing scrutiny or scorn for these latest outrages, he has been awarded yet another opportunity to select a Justice to serve on the Supreme Court. Trump barely concealed his delight at the chance to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, tweeting at the Republican Party, the morning after Ginsburg’s death, “We were put in this position of power and importance to make decisions for the people who so proudly elected us, the most important of which has long been considered to be the selection of United States Supreme Court Justices. We have this obligation, without delay!”
It is simply unconscionable that Trump—who lost the popular election by millions of votes; who was impeached last December, for abuse of power; and who has openly espoused racist, xenophobic, and sexist ideas, while also encouraging political violence against his perceived opponents—will, with voting in the Presidential election already under way, select a third candidate for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. Of course, no one has forgotten that, after Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, 2016, the Republican Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, refused to hold a Senate hearing for President Obama’s nominee to the Court, Merrick Garland, effectively blocking Obama from choosing Scalia’s replacement. Now, with McConnell still in power, there is little doubt that the Senate will hold a confirmation hearing for Trump’s candidate. Not only does the likelihood of another Trump appointment shred the illusion that the Supreme Court stands above the political rancor of the executive and legislative branches; it weaponizes the Court, by gifting Trump one more opportunity to limit the political rights of the minority populations that he disparages and despises.
Trump’s influence on American jurisprudence has been the quietest and most successful part of his destructive Presidency. He has appointed more than two hundred judges to federal courts, surpassing almost any other recent President at this point in their tenure. He has also made sure that the judges he has selected for these lifetime appointments are among the youngest ever—on average, forty-eight years old—insuring the longevity of their impact. And, with eighty-five per cent of his appointees being white, he has cemented the gross mismatch between the federal judiciary and the public. This latest development should certainly call into question the haphazard rules and procedural tricks that allot Trump the power to decisively tip the scales of justice in his favor. Pressed further, one might also ask: Why should the Supreme Court, an unelected body that is richer, whiter, and more male than the United States is, continue to have such outsized power in the lives of ordinary people?
The insistence that the Supreme Court is not a political body is a principle of high folly in American politics. Just last fall, Chief Justice John Roberts lamented the perception that the Court was politicized, saying, “When you live in a polarized political environment, people tend to see everything in those terms. That’s not how we at the Court function, and the results in our cases do not suggest otherwise.” In reality, appointments to the nation’s highest court reflect the current balance or imbalance of political power, making it impossible to neatly untie them from the political bodies that determine who sits on the Court and who does not. Anyone who doubts this need look no further than the partisan rage displayed by Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his Senate confirmation hearing, in late 2018. From blaming an inquiry into his personal history on “revenge on behalf of the Clintons” to proclaiming “What goes around, comes around” to Senate Democrats, the future Justice arrogantly flexed raw Republican power.
Moreover, as the branch of government that is least accountable to the American public, the Supreme Court has tended, for most of its history, toward a fundamental conservatism, siding with tradition over more expansive visions of human rights. Indeed, at the most significant moments in African-American history, the Court reflected the most reactionary elements of the culture in its efforts to abridge, degrade, or simply eliminate the rights of African-Americans. In 1857, it famously ruled, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, that African-Americans were not and could not be citizens of the United States; Chief Justice Roger Taney concluded that African-Americans were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” It took a civil war and its revolutionary upending of American society to reverse the Supreme Court’s damaging ruling, leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which guaranteed to all, including the formerly enslaved, the same rights that are “enjoyed by white citizens.” The Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing birthright citizenship to all and creating the legal principle of equal protection before the law, was built on the foundation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. In combination with the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited racial discrimination as an obstacle to voting, these acts of Congress were intended to elevate African-Americans into the role of citizens, equal before the law and empowered by the ballot to shape the world in which they lived.
But, within a generation of the passage of this historic legislation, the Supreme Court slowly and assuredly denuded that legislation’s most potent power: constructing the personhood of those who were once property. The Court’s decisions in the aftermath of Reconstruction reduced the amendments to their most literal meanings, ignoring their expansive conceptions as means to protect the rights of newly freed people and guarantee them—indeed, all people born in the United States—the privileges and protections of U.S. citizenship. In 1883, the Supreme Court heard a group of cases that had been bound together to test the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited discrimination in hotels, trains, and other public accommodations and “places of public amusement.” In an 8–1 decision, the Court ruled that it was legally permissible to ban African-Americans from public accommodations and decried African-American demands to participate in the public sphere as “special” rights to which they were not entitled. Though the stench of slavery still polluted the air, the Court offered willfully ignorant proclamations of color blindness. In response to African-Americans’ demands for equality, the majority opined, “There must be some stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a citizen or a man are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men’s rights are protected.” Of course, “other men” had not been enslaved, nor subjected to savage acts of violence and harassment, nor banished from public life as an affront to their claims of citizenship.
On the eve of the twentieth century, the Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson transformed the regional injustice of Jim Crow into the national lie that separate could be equal, codifying the racial apartheid of the South as the law of the land. For decades, freed African-Americans had worked arduously to define the meaning of Black citizenship; the retrograde Court worked quickly to foreclose it. In doing so, it eviscerated, for millions of African-Americans, any notion that justice is blind, compelling one observer to describe the Court as the “grave of liberty.”
The accomplishments of the Court while led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, from 1953 to 1969, stand out as exceptions in the body’s long history of regression. But even the decisions from this period that we now laud for upholding or defending freedom were made within a larger climate of social unrest or revolt, and were often aimed at reversing damage that the Court had done in the first place. The Court is celebrated for its historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education, in 1954, which banned segregation in public education, but it was merely undoing policies and practices that it had set in motion with Plessy. It was also responding to the broader dynamics of the emerging civil-rights movement, which threatened to embarrass the United States on the global stage just as the country was attempting to project itself, during the Cold War, as a beacon of democracy. In 1952, the Truman Administration submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court encouraging it to rule against segregation. As the brief noted, “The United States is trying to prove to the people of the world of every nationality, race and color, that a free democracy is the most civilized and most secure form of government yet devised by man. . . . The existence of discrimination against minority groups in the United States has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the Communist propaganda mills.” The Brown decision was a public indicator of progress, but its decree was quickly undermined when, the following year, the Court prescribed that school desegregation be undertaken with “all deliberate speed.” Without a directive that the ruling should take effect immediately, the South was provided legal cover to drag its feet, as the racist “massive resistance” to school integration began to take hold.
At other moments, the coercive power of a mass social movement compelled the Court to act in proactive, even radical, ways. Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., a landmark case addressing housing discrimination, was decided in June of 1968, just months after a series of uprisings catalyzed by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The decision surpassed the Fair Housing Act, which was signed that April and set to be phased in over a two-year period, by making racial discrimination in the buying, selling, renting, or financing of housing illegal, effective immediately. The majority’s ruling looked to the Thirteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and declared that housing discrimination, regardless of whether the source was public or private, was a “badge and incident” of slavery. Justice Potter Stewart, writing for the majority, compared racial discrimination in housing to the “Black Codes” enacted at the end of the Civil War, saying that “when racial discrimination herds men into ghettos and makes their ability to buy property turn on the color of their skin, then it too is a relic of slavery.”
But, just six years after the Jones decision, the Court, led by a new Chief Justice, Warren Burger, stymied the progress of civil rights. In Milliken v. Bradley, the Court was asked to decide if Detroit suburbs were required to include Black children from the city in a metropolitan-area-wide school-desegregation plan. With the Black movement in retreat, and the political winds moving decidedly to the right—characterized by then President Richard Nixon’s description, in 1971, of “fair housing” as “forced integration”—the Court came to a remarkably different conclusion than it did in 1968. Burger, writing for the majority, claimed that racial segregation in Detroit was “caused by unknown and perhaps unknowable factors,” and concluded that there was no evidence that “governmental activity” had played any role in the “residential patterns within Detroit.” The Court had not forgotten its Jones ruling, in which it plainly described the existence of segregation and linked its origins to state action and private discrimination. Instead, the changing political climate cast similar facts in a different light. It was also a different Court. By the end of his disgraced Presidency, Nixon had appointed four Justices, conjuring a conservative majority that stemmed the momentum from the “rights revolution” for decades.
The Court retains this penchant to shape politics, even with issues seemingly settled by law. Take voting rights. African-Americans in the South finally secured unobstructed access to the ballot box with the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was intended to end the shameful legacy of race-based voter suppression in the region. But, in fact, the question was not settled. In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion for the landmark reversal in Shelby County v. Holder, which ended the act’s key enforcement provisions. Just three weeks before George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of Trayvon Martin, compelling Alicia Garza to utter the phrase “Black lives matter” for the first time, Roberts argued that these civil-rights protections were no longer necessary because “our country has changed.” Predictably, states across the South began to implement new voting restrictions that overwhelmingly affected African-Americans. Alabama announced that it would require voters to present photo identification, and then, in Black-majority counties, proceeded to close Department of Motor Vehicles offices.
Even when the Court has ruled in ways that appear to be in the interest of minorities or socially and economically marginalized populations, its decisions can be ephemeral, susceptible to partisan shifts, while creating the dangerous illusion of permanence. The Roe v. Wade decision, in 1973, was made in the midst of the women’s-liberation movement, in which reproductive freedom and access to abortion were central demands. In subsequent decades, the changing political climate, including the strategic decisions of liberal feminist organizations to focus their resources and organizing on electoral politics, and not on the street-level mobilizations that won the right to abortion in the first place, has contributed to the erosion of support for abortion rights. The idea that sympathetic politicians were the key to maintaining access to abortion missed the historical lesson that pressure generated by social movements has the greatest potential to overcome the inherently conservative bent of the Court. We now live with the reality that a man accused of sexual assault by multiple women will have the power to make life-altering decisions about our lives, including whether we will retain the right to a legal abortion. The fluidity with which rights can be bequeathed and taken away, in fact, reduces rights to privileges. In a truly democratic society, civil rights should not be contingent on a fortuitous combination of Supreme Court Justices.
The events of this tumultuous and tragic year, from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic to the fresh uprisings against racist police violence, have compelled a national reckoning like no other, opening new public, mainstream conversations about how we might remake this country more equitably. Those discussions have been most pointed when trained on the destructive role of police in Black and brown communities. Activists have advanced an unpopular but compelling argument to “defund the police” and redistribute law-enforcement budgets to programs that might more effectively respond to social and economic crises in poor and working-class communities. We have also seen a growing demand for some form of universal or guaranteed health care, reflecting deepening frustrations with a health-care system in which access is largely contingent on employment and, even then, is deeply constrained by costs. For-profit health care was unpopular before, but now, as millions have lost their jobs because of the contracting pandemic-era economy, it seems as cruel as it is unjust. One measure of the mounting discontent with the rapacious inequality that defines American society is the number of people who have warmed to the ideas of socialism and the redistributive economics at their core. In a Pew Research poll conducted last year, forty-two per cent of Americans had a positive view of socialism. Months later, Gallup found that young adults’ attitude toward socialism is even rosier, with nearly half viewing it positively. In moments of acute crisis, people question the norms and institutions of a social order that gestated the problems in the first place.
Trump’s constitutional power to manipulate the Court in his favor has compelled mainstream elected officials to make dramatic demands that the Supreme Court change. The former Attorney General Eric Holder recently described the conservative majority as “illegitimate,” because of the Senate’s refusal to confirm Merrick Garland, and said that, if Republicans move forward with confirming Ginsburg’s replacement, and Democrats win the Presidency, “we need to think about court reform. And, at a minimum, as part of that reform package, I think additional Justices need to be placed on the Supreme Court.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have not ruled out Court-packing, should the Republicans succeed at filling Ginsburg’s seat before the election. They have also said, in Pelosi’s words, that they will “use every arrow in our quiver” to block Trump’s nominee. But neither Schumer nor Pelosi has said what exactly that means. Joe Biden, for his part, called on Republicans in the Senate to “follow your conscience” as regards the Court. “Don’t vote to confirm anyone nominated under the circumstances President Trump and Senator McConnell have created,” he continued. “Don’t go there.” But, sure enough, Mitt Romney—the lone Republican who voted to remove Trump from office, for corruption, during the Senate impeachment trial—pledged to vote to hold a Senate hearing for the President’s nominee, all but assuring the candidate’s ascension to the Supreme Court. Clearly, there is no honor among thieves, and the most troubling part is that Biden thought there was.
The Republican Party’s provocation to rapidly replace Ginsburg has already been met with thousands of people assembling at the steps of the Supreme Court. In a sharp rebuke to Trump, at least one Times and Siena poll—of residents in North Carolina, Arizona, and Maine, taken before Ginsburg’s death—found that fifty-three per cent of those asked think that Biden should pick the next Justice. A nationwide Reuters and Ipsos poll conducted after Ginsburg’s death found that sixty-two per cent of those asked think the winner of the November election should pick the new Justice. There is popular recognition that Republicans are attempting to preserve the political influences of a disgraced President. But, for those who oppose a Trump nominee, the equivocating and fractured Democratic Party is an unreliable ally in what will be a bitter struggle. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that Democrats in Congress must “commit to using every procedural tool available to us” to insure that the vacancy is filled by the next President, including impeaching Trump or Attorney General William Barr, but many of her colleagues would likely oppose such tactics. Senator Tim Kaine, of Virginia, argued that it would be “foolish” to consider impeaching Trump or Barr, and went on to say that he was asking “Republicans to be true to their word,” apparently holding out hope that they would relinquish the opportunity to reshape the Court in their own image.
Those with the most to lose from a reactionary Trump Court have the least access to the levers of power that could slow this fast-moving process. But they can still attempt to interrupt it with popular protest and resistance. Even if popular resistance is not successful in stopping Trump’s nominee, it will be crucial in the long, ongoing struggle to expand the rights of the people of the United States. As the historian and writer Howard Zinn, whom Donald Trump disparaged in his speech at the National Archives, once wrote,
Knowing the nature of the political and judicial system of this country, its inherent bias against the poor, against people of color, against dissidents, we cannot become dependent on the courts, or on our political leadership. Our culture—the media, the educational system—tries to crowd out of our political consciousness everything except who will be elected President and who will be on the Supreme Court, as if these are the most important decisions we make. They are not. They deflect us from the most important job citizens have, which is to bring democracy alive by organizing, protesting, engaging in acts of civil disobedience that shake up the system.
This doesn’t mean that it is unimportant who wins the Presidency or who is appointed to the Supreme Court. What it does mean is that ordinary people are not powerless to challenge the political and economic élite who have such disproportionate authority over our lives. But our power is often located outside of the institutions of tradition and influence. It is through acts of solidarity and struggle that we have been able to secure our rights and liberties in the United States, and, from the shape of things to come, that is how those rights and liberties will have to be defended. This means building movements to pressure an increasingly right-wing Supreme Court, making it more difficult for that body to further usurp the rights of regular people. It also means calling into question the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the Court. If Trump is successful in adding another right-wing Justice, he will only continue to erode the Court’s legitimacy, adding further evidence that it can be brazenly used to achieve what could not be accomplished through legislative means. The multiplying failures of our existing society have led many of us to reconsider institutions, policies, and practices that have continued to reproduce racial and economic inequalities. In this moment of exalting uprisings and reëmergent social movements, we cannot overlook the disturbing history of the Supreme Court and its regressive role in American society.
What do we do about the Court? There is an obvious and pressing need now to do whatever is politically permissible in stopping Trump from further distorting its composition. But, beyond that, there is also a need to make it part of our national reckoning with the history and traditions of racism in the United States. It is long overdue to end the Court’s undemocratic role in U.S. society.
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