Hard Facts of History

The current F.B.I. director, James Comey, keeps a copy of the King wiretap request on his desk as a reminder of the bureau’s capacity to do wrong. But elsewhere in Washington, the debate over how much the government should know about our private lives has never been more heated: Should intelligence agencies be able to sweep our email, read our texts, track our phone calls, locate us by GPS? Much of the conversation swirls around the possibility that agencies like the N.S.A. or the F.B.I. will use such information not to serve national security but to carry out personal and political vendettas. King’s experience reminds us that these are far from idle fears, conjured in the fevered minds of civil libertarians. They are based in the hard facts of history.

—What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals - NYTimes.com

November 13, 2014 fbi nsa intelligence agencies james comey mlk martin luther king jr civil liberties new york times

A Deep South Cold Case Goes Frigid

Since Catherine Walker Jones received word last November that the Department of Justice had given up on solving the 1964 racial murder of her father, Clifton Walker, I’ve been raising questions about the FBI’s present-day investigation and its treatment of the Walker family.

Now, on Narratively, I take a deep look at the anatomy of the FBI’s failure to properly investigate the Clifton Walker murder case.

The last person to investigate the Walker case was special agent Bradley Hentschel, at least the third agent on the case since it was reopened. Hentschel was assigned to the case in the spring of 2011, when he was twenty-five years old and had been employed as a special agent for less than a year.

For its part, the FBI contends that decades-old cold cases are among the most difficult an agent can be assigned. As the Department of Justice has noted to Congress: “Subjects die; witnesses die or can no longer be located; memories become clouded; evidence is destroyed or cannot be located; and original investigations lacked the technical and scientific advances relied upon today.”

All true, surely — but it was hard for Hentschel to even get the authorization and resources needed in order to conduct the most basic investigative activities in the field.

“I do not want to close this case,” Hentschel said during a telephone interview in 2011, “but if I can’t develop any further leads…it’s going to be a hard sell to the DOJ, to even my supervisor, that I need to be running around two, two and a half hours away from the office with the gas budget the way that it is and everything else, beating down leads on this case or on any other case where we don’t have any active information coming in.”

Get the full story on Narratively.

The video introducing this post and featured with the Narratively article was edited by Clarence Smith, Jr., aka, BOLD Edition.

August 30, 2014 cold case clifton walker civil rights movement mississippi shirley walker wright catherine walker jones poor house road woodville racism fbi doj video clarence smith jr bold edition narratively bradley hentschel publication

Before ‘Freedom Summer,’ A Wave Of Violence Largely Forgotten

My latest from the NPR CodeSwitch blog—about the little-known 1964 racial shooting of Richard Joe Butler, who survived to tell the tale.

Butler is 75 today, and the shooting left him with injuries that have dogged him for a half-century. “I never will forget that morning,” Butler told me in a telephone interview from his Riverside, Calif., home. “I was shot four times with shotguns. … I’ve got one piece of lung and one lung. I can only stand up for a little while. I have to go sit down. If I don’t, I fall.”

But there are psychic scars from the attack, too. He said he still looks over his shoulder in fear of random violence 50 years later, and says he doesn’t go anywhere, including the bathroom, without a gun. “If I sit out on the stoop, this is right where I can reach and get it. It’s been that way for … years,” Butler said. “I’m gonna protect me.”

“I hadn’t even voted then,” Butler told me. “At that time, you wasn’t allowed to vote. You didn’t do nothing but work.”

Read the whole story.

August 5, 2014 cold case richard joe butler mississippi freedom summer civil rights movement ku klux klan neshoba murders james chaney michael schwerner andrew goodman nor codeswitch publication

They Should Not Drink or Bathe?

When the water crisis hit West Virginia, many were horrified, but others mocked the impoverished state - including a Detroit journalist, unaware her city was next. President Johnson’s war on poverty long ago turned into a war on the poor, and residents of both places have been blamed for their own plight. They elect bad leaders and support corrupt companies, people said of West Virginia. They should have paid their bills, people say of Detroit.

Which leads to the question: so what? Then they should not drink or bathe? They should swallow poison or roam the streets in search of water fountains? Their children, who have no stake in this battle, are supposed to suffer, and their parents are supposed to watch? Is that the lesson we are passing on - that poor children are inherently undeserving of a basic provision in one of the richest countries in the world?

—Sarah Kendzior, “Water is a human right, but who is considered a human being?”

July 23, 2014 water human rights detroit saran kendzior lyndon baines johnson war on poverty children

Courtesy of My Sister

Reverend Dr. William Barber of the North Carolina Moral Monday movement delivers the keynote address at the just concluded American Federation of Teachers convention in Los Angeles. Courtesy of my sister Francine who was there as a Chicago Teachers Union delegate.

July 15, 2014 william barber chicago teachers union los angeles american federation of teachers north carolina moral monday movement family

Ink Mixed with Blood

“The ink in the pens that President Johnson used to sign the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were mixed with blood,” Barber said from the pulpit, drawing the word blood into about four syllables. “Every taste of freedom we have came through the blood. Every ounce of equality came through the blood. And in the name of the blood of those who sacrificed, we ought to be fired up, and we ought to organize. We ought to register, and we ought to vote like never before.” The entire sanctuary jumped to its feet.

—Shifting Tactics, Moral Monday Movement Launches a New Freedom Summer

July 7, 2014 civil rights act voting rights act william barber moral monday movement

Against Our Vanishing

Poetry is a principle of power invoked by all of us against our vanishing. The making of poems is a practice – a work human beings can do – in which civilization has invested some part of its love of itself and the world. The poem is a trace of the will of all persons to be known and to make known and, therefore, to be at all. Insofar as love wills the existence of what it loves, the principle of poetry is a collective and perpetually renewed act of love that brings the world to mind, and mind to mind, as the speech of a person – at the moment of the vanishing of world and persons, which is every moment of conscious life. Poetry is one means by which human beings engage, as they can, in the maintenance of a human world in which they can meet one another, affirm one another, remember, see, and foresee one another.

—Allen Grossman, Summa Lyrica

June 30, 2014 allen grossman poetry quote

The Lecture

Place a man in the center, and he becomes
The man who has prepared for a lifetime
To answer, and now is ready.

Sometimes,
There are trees at the edge of the clearing,
More often a sea. He talks on and on.
And his voice is carried up by the thermals
At the sea’s edge, or down among the dark
Anfractuous trees, and the textile moss.
The lesson is staggering, and the examples
Come to hand like sheaves in a great harvest.

But, in fact, there are no trees, there is no sea,
And the center is some eccentric region
Of a bed or a room, and the question
Is the half-demented glance of a child,
Or a blurred silence on the telephone,
For which the man who has prepared a lifetime
Is ready.

But the harvest is a great harvest.

After a long time, the voice of the man
Stops. It was good to talk on and on.
He rises. And the sea or forest becomes
A level way reaching to night and the thunder.

But, in fact, there is no night. There is
No thunder

– Allen Grossman

I post this poem today in honor of its author, who was a great poet and an inspiring, gifted and compassionate teacher, who died this morning. He was my professor when I was an undergraduate at Brandeis University and then again at Johns Hopkins, the year I did a Masters there in The Writing Seminars. I read and for a time seriously wrote poems because of Allen Grossman. I hear poems and encounter the world through his lessons and his voice still. More than 20 years later, I am still learning from him.

June 27, 2014 allen grossman poem poetry brandeis univeristy the johns hopkins university

Remembering James Chaney

Everyone knows James Chaney, the civil rights martyr. Fewer remember James Chaney, the civil rights activist.

James Chaney

James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered by a mob of Klansmen in Neshoba County, Miss. on June 21, 1964. For 44 days, hundreds of FBI agents and Navy sailors searched for the missing civil rights workers, until their bodies were found on August 4, buried in an earthen damn. During the massive hunt for the slain young men, Rita Schwerner, Michael’s young widow, said, “We all know that this search with hundreds of sailors is because Andrew Goodman and my husband are white. If only Chaney was involved, nothing would’ve been done.”

After reading and writing about these murders for 10 years, one thing that strikes me this year is that the whiteness of two of the victims continues to play a role in our perceptions.

Without white people among the victims, James Chaney’s death would not have been important to authorities or the country at large. But with the white victims present there is a tendency in memorializations to overlook Chaney’s humanity—to remember him only as the black victim rather than as a person who contributed tirelessly to the civil rights movement.

The roles that the three civil rights workers were playing in the freedom struggle are generally not heavily emphasized today, but recollections tend to include that Andrew Goodman was arriving in Mississippi as a Freedom Summer volunteer and that Michael and Rita Schwerner were running a CORE community center in Meridian, Miss. But what about the civil rights work of James Chaney?

As a small corrective to this myopia, here are some passages from white southern journalist William Bradford Huie’s Three Lives for Mississippi, originally published in 1965 and still essential reading on Neshoba murders.

CORE workers Michael Schwerner, Rita Schwerner and Lenora Thurmond, wrote to the national office of CORE on April 23, 1964 to request that James Chaney be hired as staff at the Meridian community center where they all worked.

We’re writing to ask a favor. We know that CORE is short of funds, and therefore we debated a long time before bringing up this subject … but we feel that it is important. We would like to implore the National Office to place a young man on field staff.

James Chaney is 21 and a native of Meridian. Since the office was established here, long before any of the three of us arrived in town, he has been working full time, doing whatever work was necessary. When he started to get the community center in order, James worked with Mick building shelves, loading books, painting. He has canvassed, set up meetings, gone out into some of the rough rural counties to make contacts for us. Tonite he is running a mass meeting here in Meridian. In short, there is no distinction in our minds or his as to the amount of work he should do as a volunteer, and we as paid staff. We consider James part of the Meridian staff, and he is in on all major decisions which are made here.

In February, when there was so much work to be done in Canton, Matt Suarez asked for help and James went. He worked in Canton for almost a month, helping to organize for Freedom Day. He spent about a week in Greenwood, prior to the Freedom Day there. He was sent into Carthage, and would have continued to do voter registration work there, though only a volunteer, had it not been decided to temporarily abandon that spot.

James has never so much as asked us to buy him a cup of coffee, though he has no means of support. We believe that since he long ago accepted the responsibilities of a CORE staff person, he should be given now the rights and privileges which go along with the job.

Thank you for listening to our request…
For freedom,
(signed) Rita and Mike Schwerner
Lenora Thurmond

According to Marvin Rich, a CORE representative who traveled among and evaluated the work of the local community projects,

On this trip I made to Louisiana and to Jackson, Canton and Meridian, Mississippi, there were requests for additional staff from each community. Chaney was the only one hired.

Sue Brown was one of the first African Americans from Meridian to work for CORE. She introduced James Chaney to Matt Suarez in 1963, which led to Chaney’s ongoing presence at the Meridian community center. It was Brown who was making the initial phone calls on June 21, 1964 to inform the state COFO offices and the FBI that Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman had not returned from Neshoba County and had not been heard from.

I remember seeing him in high school before he dropped out. He was the typical young Mississippi Negro, from a broken home, who becomes a dropout. His father was gone; his mother had five children; and they all tried to do what they could to keep bread on the table. He didn’t have much to say, and he always walked with his head down. He did odd jobs, like a painter’s helper or a carpenter’s helper. He knew he wasn’t going anywhere. His speech was crude: he used words like ain’t. So he was the kind the Movement means everything to. He got so he could get up before a small crowd and urge them to join the Movement. He’d go hungry and do all the dirty work, just for the chance to stay around the Center where he felt like something was going on. I guess with the Movement he found his first sense of participation. Mickey knew how to put him at his ease, so Mickey could count on Jim Chaney to walk through hell with him.

And walk through hell James Chaney did. But he had already given his life to the Movement many months before he was murdered, and for this he should also be remembered.

Freedom Summer Forecast

“We can expect three things this summer,” he reads. “One: Beatings. Two: Arrests — and not for one or two days, could go on into future. Three: Someone to be killed.”

—50 Years Ago, Freedom Summer Began By Training For Battle : Code Switch : NPR

June 17, 2014 freedom summer civil rights movement npr npr codeswitch andrew goodman michael schwerner james chaney oxford ohio