Exiled Black Panthers Living Out The Legacy

[2 articles]

On This Safari, the Exotic Lure Is the American Black Panther

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703447104575118091555091942.html

Aging Fugitive Draws Visitors to Africa; Two Views: 'Criminal' or
'Cool Grandparents'

APRIL 13, 2010
By ALEX P. KELLOGG

IMBASENI, Tanzania­Visitors come to this part of the world to watch
wild animals roam the Serengeti, or glimpse the peaks of Kilimanjaro.
Others come to visit another rarity: the American Black Panther.

For nearly four decades, Imbaseni has been home to two former
American revolutionaries: Felix Lindsey O'Neal Jr., better known as
Pete O'Neal, 69 years old, and his wife, Charlotte, 59. Mr. O'Neal is
a fugitive from justice, having fled the U.S. in 1970 after a felony
gun conviction. The couple are among the few surviving leaders of a
radical movement that marked a tumultuous period in American history.

In 1968, Mr. O'Neal founded the Kansas City chapter of the Black
Panther Party, remembered for its provocative black power message,
its violent clashes with the police and its distinct uniforms­black
leather jackets, sunglasses and berets.

While Mrs. O'Neal, a recognized artist, visits the U.S. periodically,
and their two grown, Tanzanian-born children now live in America, Mr.
O'Neal has never returned. A warrant for his arrest from December
1970 remains outstanding. A request to renew his U.S. passport
several years ago was denied.

So people come to him. At their lush green 4.5-acre commune here, a
45-minute drive from the tourist hub of Arusha, the O'Neals host a
steady stream of visitors­students, volunteers, admirers and the
occasional celebrity­seeking to understand the peculiar history of
radical black activism before it fades from memory. For the O'Neals,
every visit is an opportunity to try to repair the controversial
legacy of the Black Panthers.

"It's remote enough in history that many learn the whole story
there," says A.T. Miller, a University of Michigan faculty member who
takes students on visits to the O'Neals.

Last year, more than 10 groups visited, mostly from U.S.
universities. In the past, the pair has also hosted troubled teens
from Kansas City, some of whom grew up not far from Mr. O'Neal's old
hangouts. Sean Penn and Jude Law have dropped by as well.

Before he visited the O'Neals, Joshua Jenkins, a 22-year-old senior
at the University of North Carolina, knew little about the Black
Panthers, except that they "were the ones with the guns." But after
spending several weeks with the couple, he felt he was listening to
history firsthand. "Their story is so unique that I kind of had to
tell everybody about it," he said. "They're like very cool grandparents."

Mr. O'Neal's tranquil exile doesn't sit well with everyone.

"People who are making a pilgrimage to visit a fugitive Panther in
Africa are on a dangerous path," says David Horowitz, a conservative
commentator who was once active with the Black Panther Party.
Visitors should know that the party ran drugs and even killed people
in the name of revolution, he said. Instead, they are being
"indoctrinated" into Mr. O'Neal's version of what happened.

Mr. Horowitz thinks Mr. O'Neal should go home and face justice. "If
he were honest, he would say he is a criminal," he says.

Mr. O'Neal says he doesn't consider himself a fugitive but rather to
be in "political exile." He insists he isn't guilty of the 1970
conviction for transporting a shotgun across state lines between the
two Kansas Cities.

He says the charges were "trumped up" to curtail his activism. Once
hopeful that multiple appeals would vindicate him, he's now resigned
to the fact that he'll likely never return to the U.S.

At times, Mr. O'Neal's visitors can be critical. "They are
supporters­not of my politics or my political inclinations­but of the
work that we're doing," says Mr. O'Neal. Last month, the O'Neals
hosted roughly 15 study-abroad students and a pair of Baptists from
Mr. O'Neal's hometown, Kansas City, Mo.

While the Black Panthers are notorious for their militant black
nationalist views and armed protests, the organization also promoted
social projects, such as free breakfasts for children and free health clinics.

The O'Neals say they have tried to realize that vision in Imbaseni.
Their sprawling compound, called the United African Alliance
Community Center, includes boarding houses, classrooms, a computer
lab and a basketball court. They support a staff of about 15
volunteers. About 250 people, mostly young adults, will be tutored
there this year in the arts and computers.

Early on, the pair raised pigs and farmed land, earning money by
selling barbecue sauce and sausages locally. After soliciting
donations from supporters, they helped build the village's only
elementary school in the early 1990s, which they say about 1,000
children attend every year. Later, they spearheaded the building of
the village's only well.

"This is our socialist model in miniature," says Mr. O'Neal, who has
twisted his afro of the 1960s into dreadlocks.

Mr. O'Neal admits to a checkered past: high-school dropout, Navy
reject, petty thief and drug abuser. Reading "The Autobiography of
Malcolm X" turned him on to black nationalism, and he signed on with
the fast-growing Black Panther Party in 1968. His Kansas City chapter
operated as a small militia, patrolling streets and challenging the police.

In a black-and-white portrait at his home, Mr. O'Neal brandishes a
shotgun, in a trademark Panther pose, but incendiary rhetoric was his
weapon of choice. He declared on national TV that he would "shoot his
way into the House of Representatives" and "take the head" of an
elected official.

The Kansas City chapter wasn't considered as dangerous as some of its
counterparts. "O'Neal kept a lid on any violence," Clarence Kelley,
the late Kansas City police chief who became director of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation in the 1970s, told the Kansas City Star in
1987. "They made an awful lot of noise. But I don't recall anything
too forceful."

In Oakland, Los Angeles and other cities, however, Panthers were
engaging in deadly shootouts with police or rival groups.

After Mr. O'Neal's conviction on the gun charge, he was let out on
bail while he appealed his four-year prison sentence. He and his
wife, a young Panthers member who was just out of high school, fled
the country, first to Sweden, then Algeria, Mr. O'Neal said, joining
other fugitive Panthers such as the late Eldridge Cleaver. The
O'Neals ultimately settled in Tanzania in 1972.

Although it's 40 years since his conviction, the U.S. hasn't
necessarily given up on capturing Mr. O'Neal. Jeff Carter, a
spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, wouldn't comment directly on
the status of Mr. O'Neal's case. However, "when the opportunity
presents itself to capture a fugitive, we will capture him," Mr.
Carter said. "Look how long it took to get Roman Polanski."

--------

Exiled Black Panthers Living Out The Legacy

http://cchronicle.com/2010/04/exiled-black-panthers-living-out-the-legacy/

April 13, 2010
By Eryn-Ashlei Bailey

The Black Panther legacy lives on Imbaseni, Tanzania. An article
today in the Wall Street Journal, discusses the work of two proud
Panthers, Pete O'Neal and his wife Charlotte. The couple hosts
students and volunteers at their home in Tanzania. People who visit
the couple are those who are "seeking to understand the peculiar
history of radical black activism before it fades from memory. For
the O'Neal's, every visit is an opportunity to try to repair the
controversial legacy of the Black Panthers." On O'Neal's compound,
called the United African Alliance Community Center, the socialist
model remains intact. The O'Neal's founded the villages' only
elementary school in the 1990's and the building of the first well in
Imbaseni. The school is complete with classrooms, rooming quarters,
computers, and a basketball court. One can argue that students at the
O'Neal compound receive better education than some students in the
States. Efforts like the Emmet Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act
of 2007 aim to bring justice to families and injustices during the
Civil Rights Era of the 1960's. How can similar efforts like the
O'Neal's and the Emmet Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007
work together to preserve and protect black culture in the United States?

Yesterday, I wrote about how Gov. Bob McGonnell tried to omit slavery
from his Confederate History Month proclamation. Aside from being
belligerently inconsiderate, McGonnell's actions are the exact reason
why the work of Pete and Charlotte O'Neal is of the utmost
importance. Without their first hand testimonies, the times and
trials of the Black Panther Party will be lost. With systematized
efforts to eradicate black history from the national consciousness,
the O'Neal's work is crucial.

The Black Panther Party is unfortunately remembered as a violent
group of militant blacks that ran drugs, perpetuated violence, and
created political unrest in the country. Little to nothing is known
and about their successful work in instituting medical centers and
free breakfast programs for children across the country. The Black
Panthers were indeed grassroots to the core. The article in the Wall
Street Journal clarifies that Pete O'Neal, as head of the Kansas
City, MO group of the Black Panther Party, was not violent. For Pete
O'Neal "incendiary rhetoric was his weapon of choice". Prominent in
O'Neal's story is Clarence Kelly. Kelly was once the chief of police
in Kansas City when O'Neal was a Panther. Kelly then became the
director of the FBI in the 1970's. Kelly said that: "They (the Kansas
City Panthers) made an awful lot of noise. But I don't recall
anything too forceful." However, the interference of the FBI and the
Black Panther Party led to the Panther's bifurcation in 1972. The
split left members of the party following Eldridge Cleaver who was
then a political exile in Algeria or Huey P. Newton in the United
States. After the split of the Black Panther Party, members who
affiliated themselves with Cleaver became known as the Black
Liberation Army. Remaining Panthers include Assata Shakur who is
still in political exile in Cuba.

The Black Panthers were literally black listed by FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover as a "Black Nationalist Hate Group". Sentiments towards
the Black Panthers remain foul although accounts of their work is
very understudied. In fact, the warrant for Pete O'Neal's arrest in
Kansas City, MO still stands. He claims that the charges of
transporting a gun across state lines is false. The U.S. Marshals
Services are still looking to capture O'Neal should he return to the U.S.

The Emmet Till Civil Rights Crime Act of 2007 aims to review,
investigate, and asses for prosecution cases of homicide against
African-American from 1964-1969. I'm curious if investigators of this
initiative will prosecute F.B.I. agents who launched chemical
warfare, covert operatives, and assassinations against key Black
Panther Party Members including Fred Hampton. The Act is limited as
it only investigates crimes that resulted in murder and that are
unsealed by the F.B.I. The civil liberties of Black Panthers such as
Assata Shakur, Pete O'Neal and Charlotte O'Neal were clearly
obstructed. What methods or systems are being implemented to rectify
the defamation and destruction of their lives?

If you would like to see a documentary about Pete O'Neil's school in
Tanzania click this link:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/69779/global-voices-a-panther-in-africa#s-p1-so-i0

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The Day Our Sixties Started

The Day Our Sixties Started

http://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2010-04-15/article/35037?headline=The-Day-Our-Sixties-Started

By Becky O'Malley
Thursday April 15, 2010

Somehow I seem to have become an honorary member of the Free Speech
Movement, on their mailing list and invited to their reunions. In all
honesty, I must admit that when the FSM was making waves in 1964 I
was in Ann Arbor making babies. But before that, four years before
that, I was present at the creation, so to speak. I was one of the
five thousand Bay Area citizens who rose in protest against the House
Un-American Activities Committee (commonly known as HUAC), the
trailing edge of ugly '50s McCarthyism which finally got its deserved
comeuppance during the merry month of May in the newly minted 1960s.

Last week I got an email which was sent to the 738 people on the Free
Speech Movement Archives list, a forwarded letter from one Irving
Wesley Hall addressed to "Dear Fellow Traveler". (For those of you
too young to remember, fellow travelers included anyone in the '50s
who didn't believe that members of the Communist Party should be
summarily drawn, quartered and thrown to the wolves.)

He reminded us that the 50th anniversary of "Black Friday", May 13,
1960, is coming right up. He and un-named co-conspirators have set up
a website www.notinkansas.us in order to "rescue 'Black Friday"' from
historical obscurity, to proclaim its relevance today, and--above
all--to celebrate its heroes and heroines" and "insure that the
alternative and corporate media remember Black Friday during the
coming week of May 10-16."

Well, I remember it. It was the second day of hearings that HUAC was
holding in the supervisors' chambers at San Francisco City Hall with
the stated purpose of investigating the international Communist
conspiracy and the obvious real purpose of intimidating political
activists, CPUSA members among them. People subpoenaed by the
committee often lost their jobs, and frequently received death
threats and other forms of harassment.

I was finishing my junior year at Cal, and like a fair number of my
fellow students had learned about planned picketing of the committee
from stories in the Daily Cal. I didn't know a whole lot about
politics in those days, but I had taken a look at the U.S.
constitution in my government course sophomore year, and had gotten
the general idea that the First Amendment was supposed to guarantee
freedom of speech and association.

My roommate for my first two years of college, at a women's school in
the East, was the daughter and sister of distinguished academics who
were fired and blacklisted for refusing to testify in front of
HUAC­her brother eventually went to jail for six months for relying
on the First Amendment when he declined to be interrogated about his
beliefs. Dimly, I perceived an inconsistency that needed to be addressed.

So along with many other students from Berkeley I took the F bus into
San Francisco on Thursday, May 12, and joined the picket line. My
next door neighbor on Ellsworth Street went too. She was a cute girl
who had been raised on a chicken farm in Petaluma, in what I learned
much later was a hotbed of radicalism, but she looked like she
belonged in a sorority. She didn't talk much about politics.

Did we really wear high heels, hats and gloves? I think we did, but
in any event we were advised to dress respectably, and we complied.

The turnout was pretty good, but not huge. The room where the
hearings were held was much too small to hold everyone who wanted to
witness the proceedings, so most of us just walked the picket line
outside. Those who were lucky enough to get inside City Hall chanted
"let us in", but they weren't admitted.

The next day I had a mid-term, so I stayed in Berkeley. Big mistake.
That was the famous Black Friday, the day that San Francisco police
turned fire hoses on chanting protesters, washing them down a long
flight of marble stairs, and loaded them into paddy wagons as they
sang "We Shall Not Be Moved", a tune they'd just learned from the
nascent civil rights movement.

Thanks to the miracle of the internet, you can see the whole thing
on-line today, courtesy of the Media Resources Center at the Moffit
Library of UC Berkeley, in Operation Abolition , a propaganda film
HUAC put together from news footage that was intended to damn the
protesters forever. From today's vantage point it's difficult to
believe that they thought it would help their cause.

There are stirring shots of defiant longshoremen (Archie Brown in
particular) invoking their constitutional rights, along shots of
other figures who became familiar to me later, among them KPFA's Bill
Mandel and attorney Vin Hallinan, father of our own Conn and his
rowdy band of activist brothers.

Seeing the earnest horn-rimmed young men in suits and ties and the
fresh-faced young things in crinoline petticoats(demurely pulling
down their skirts to cover their knees)being dragged down the marble
stairway is nothing if not stirring, even today.

And that's the effect the film had at the time. Operation Abolition
was shown on campuses everywhere (I saw it first in the basement of
the old Newman Hall on Northside) and everywhere it inspired students
to new frontiers of political activism. An answering film, Operation
Correction, was created, but it wasn't really needed.

Here's how Irving Hall tells it on his website:

"Youngsters in their teens and twenties passionately committed to
the Bill of Rights dealt the committee a mortal blow. HUAC's
well-funded cinematic counterattack backfired. Newly politicized
students from across the nation cheered the spunky kids in Operation
Abolition and flocked to Berkeley, eager to change the world.

Much to our surprise, our spontaneous, spirited and courageous
defense of civil liberties changed America forever. Our political
baptism changed our lives forever…."

After Black Friday, opposition to HUAC was big news. Since I'd missed
the main event, I resolved to get a ringside seat on Saturday, May
14. My friend Frank had a car, so we took our sleeping bags and drove
into San Francisco late Friday night so we could be first in line
when City Hall opened in the morning.

This was my first lesson in never trusting the newsies. We did indeed
get in line outside the door at 5 a.m., and we were interviewed by
the Hearst Examiner reporter assigned to talk to the first people in
the queue. I wouldn't tell him my name or anything else, but Frank
said he was a UC maintenance man (true, though also a past and future
student). The story next day said that "Frank ___ , a Cal student,
spent the night with his girlfriend in a parked car on Polk
Street"­scandalous stuff in those days, and he wasn't even my
boyfriend. Fortunately my actual boyfriend didn't object.

Hall continues:

"Because of May 13, I became an activist for life. It was a blessing
to have been arrested, to experience youthful righteous solidarity,
to plead a just cause against mass media lies, to challenge the FBI
and Congress­and win…

Had we not skipped classes that day, protested in the City Hall
rotunda against our exclusion from the hearings, and had we not
spontaneously responded with non-violence when the police attacked,
my life would have taken a completely different course. What if I had
stayed at home? Or not participated in the empowering national
writing and speaking campaign that disgraced the most powerful man in
America, J. Edgar Hoover, and placed under permanent house arrest the
most tyrannical committee of Congress?"

I myself clearly remember watching student leader Michael Rossman
(may he rest in peace), the recording secretary for the Bay Area
Student Committee for the Abolition of the House Un-American
Activities Committee, being interviewed on televison (Sixty Minutes?)
in about 1964 as I sat on the couch in Ann Arbor nursing the latest
baby. The interviewer's spin was that the student movement was over,
that things were soon going to get back to normal. How wrong that
turned out to be.

I'd been working in the local civil rights movement and was starting
to organize against what would become the war in Vietnam. I knew that
there was still a lot of work to be done, and I was confident we
could do it. We did eventually accomplish many exciting things in
those years, though it took a little longer than we'd expected.

When you're young you believe that you can do what needs to be done,
and so you just do it. Seeing all the earnest young people last night
who insisted on being present at the ASUC meeting, trying to shed
some light from their personal perspectives on the Israel-Palestine
imbroglio, reminded me of our youthful selves. Regardless of which
side they were on, their passion was impressive.

The ASUC students who insisted on bringing these problems into the
public discourse are brave, whether you agree with them or not. The
people who have been trying to stifle the debate about what's wrong
in the Middle East in Berkeley and elsewhere look more and more like
the House Un-American Activities Committee. They've won a few
battles­they may even win this little skirmish at UC Berkeley--but
eventually truth will prevail, and they will lose their war to
prevent free and open public discussion of a crucial situation that
increasingly affects the whole world.
--

Irving Wesley Hall emailed yesterday:

Guess where we're celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the 1960
"riot" against HUAC? At the scene of the crime! Communist Dupes will
occupy San Francisco City Hall rotunda once again between noon and
1:30 on May 13. Join riot ringleader Bob Meisenbach, his
co-conspirators and the survivors of the cast of thousands mobilized
in San Francisco in May 1960!

For more information, check his website: notinkansas.us.

.

A Celebration of the Music of Greenwich Village

The Village ­ A Celebration of the Music of Greenwich Village

http://dailybreaknews.com/the-village-a-celebration-of-the-music-of-greenwich-village/25585

Apr 18, 2010

429 Records has brought together a stellar roster of artists for a
project titled THE VILLAGE: A CELEBRATION OF THE MUSIC OF GREENWICH
VILLAGE a musical homage to an influential scene that thrived during
an incomparable era in the history of rock music. The Greenwich
Village neighborhood of New York City in the 1960 s was ground zero
for a musical, political and social evolution­ McCarthy and the Red
Scare era was over, the Vietnam War was simmering and poised to
explode, and the civil rights movement was gaining steam just as
singers like Peter Seeger, Bob Dylan and Odetta were hanging out and
composing fierce and fearless songs that reflected the social
conscience of a generation. The neighborhood was symbolic of a shared
inspiration with artists worldwide gravitating to the vibrant streets
and clubs and as such helped change the course of popular music.

Says Susan Rotolo author of the recent bestseller 'A Freewheelin
Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties' and writer of THE
VILLAGE liner notes: 'The performers from that time, and the songs
they wrote, made a notable contribution not only to the legend of
Greenwich Village but also to music in general. No one who is young,
making music and hanging out, thinks in historical terms, but the
passage of time allows for such a perspective. Cultural history was made.'

With THE VILLAGE, modern day artists look back and pay tribute to the
artists and songs that helped nurture and shape them as successful
musicians in their own right. Shelby Lynne gives a musical shout out
to Dylan with her version of 'Don t Think Twice, It s Alright,'
Cowboy Junkies perform their heartbreaking version of Tim Buckley s
'Once I Was' and Bruce Hornsby checks in with a stunning version of
The Lovin Spoonful s 'Darlin Be Home Soon.' THE VILLAGE also features
performances by Rickie Lee Jones, Lucinda Williams, Rachael Yamagata,
Amos Lee, Sixpence None the Richer, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Rocco
DeLuca, John Oates, The Duhks, and Los Lobos.

.

Greenlining founders emerged from civil rights movement

Greenlining founders emerged from civil rights movement

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/Greenlining-founders-emerged-from-civil-rights-movement-90619124.html

By: Tori Richards and Mark Tapscott
April 12, 2010

It's often said that even the best of intentions can go awry and that
may well be an apt description of the careers of Greenlining
Institute founders Robert Gnaizda and John Gamboa.

The duo grew up on opposite coasts, but in 1993 jointly incorporated
what had been a loose coalition of activists groups into what became
the Berkeley-based activist non-profit devoted to forcing banks and
other powerful institutions to pour more resources into under-served
neighborhoods usually populated by minorities and the poor.

But Gnaizda and Gamboa go way back together, having first met in 1970.

An attorney from Brooklyn, New York, Gnaizda, now 73, was a civil
rights worker in the South, then migrated to the west coast where he
started the radical activist groups California Rural Legal Assistance
and Public Advocates of San Francisco. He was appointed by then-Gov.
Jerry Brown as deputy secretary of the California Department of
Health, Welfare and Prisons.

Gamboa grew up in a Mexican barrio in San Bernardino and dropped out
of high school to work in a steel mill. But he went to community
college and then the University of California at Berkeley, which then
was in the throes of the Free Speech Movement. Now 68, Gamboa
graduated with a social sciences degree and worked for Pacific Bell
Telephone. His leftist activism from within Pacific Bell's marketing
department twice nearly got him fired, and he later organized the
Latino Issues Forum, met Gnaizda, and the two organized a number of
community groups from around California into a loose patchwork of
activism known as the Greenlining Coalition (a purposeful play on the
banking term, "redlining').

From there, Gnaizda and Gamboa evolved the techniques and tactics
they'd first learned in their younger years in fighting racism in
Mississippi and the California barrios to the tasks of "persuading"
giant financial corporations and community banks to re-direct
billions of dollars away from profit-making activities to lending
based on ideologically defined gender and other demographic factors.

"We've been together 40 years," Gamboa reflected. "I've been with him
longer than I've been married. We're almost attached at the hip
because we're partners. We've never argued about what needed to be
done, but we have disagreed on how to get it done."

Gamboa was paid $196,866 in 2008, his last full year as executive
director. Gnaizda was paid $175,834 in his last full year as general counsel.

The two still maintain offices at the Greenlining Institute's
headquarters, but are semi-retired to pursue other activities. Both
remain as advisors to Greenlining's current leader, Orson Aguilar,
who took over after the pair spent several years planning their
exodus and grooming him for the top job.

Gamboa and Gnaizda still have offices at Greenlining and work as
consultants at half pay. "It was time for the young people to take
over, we were dinosaurs," Gamboa said. Gnaizda added: "It's not good
for an organization on the cutting edge to have leaders in position
too long. He'll be better than we were."

--------

Greenlining Institute:
A five-part series on political extortion

Day One:

Radical group perfects legal bank heists
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Radical-Greenlining-Institute-perfected-legal-bank-heists-90621769.html

Good intentions gone astray?
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Greenlining-founders-emerged-from-civil-rights-movement-90621814.html

Day Two:

Uncle Sam opens the bank vault
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Uncle-Sam-opens-the-bank-vault-to-activists-90655894.html

Greenlining & ACORN: Two peas in a pod?
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Greenlining--ACORN--Two-peas-in-a-pod-90658664.html

Day Three:

The little bank that fought back
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/The-little-bank-that-fought-back-Latest-News-on-the-Greenlining-Institute-90774599.html

Resources on Greenlining
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/top-news-stories-For-more-information-on-Greenlining-Institute-90775894.html

Day Four:

California bill pushed 'diversity' standards on charities
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/top-news-stories-California-bill-pushed-diversity-standards-on-charities-90852024.html

Bullets in Greenlining's 'diversity gun'
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/top-news-stories-Bullets-in-Greenlinings-diversity-gun-AB-624-90853484.html

Day Five:

Greenlining hits the road targets private foundation
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/top-news-stories-Greenlining-hits-the-road-targets-private-foundations-90962639.html

Is Greenlining in financial trouble?
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/top-news-stories-Is-Greenlining-in-financial-trouble-90963124.html

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Sarah Palin = Abbie Hoffman

Sarah Palin = Abbie Hoffman

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/d/e/deanarms/2010/04/sarah-palin-abbie-hoffman.php

April 16, 2010
by deanarms

And the Tea Baggers of today share much with the Yippies of yore.

The genius of Hoffman and Rubin and the anarchic Yippies circa 1968
was that they understood how to manipulate the core symbols of
America to create outrage among their opposition and draw attention
to their cause. Their fringe behavior offended the majority but drew
the sympathies of a broad base of supporters - even people who were
not willing to paint their faces and throw excrement at police,
opposed the Vietnam War and sympathized at some level with the
generational struggle that the Yippies symbolized.

I'm not writing this to rehash whether the Yippies' means were proper
or what the meaning of all that stuff was. I am writing to draw what
I see is a remarkable parallel between the guerilla strategies that
the Yippie's crudely implemented and the Teabaggers' ability to grab
media attention that is wildly disproportionate to the actual support
they enjoy. The Washington Post talked about "scores" of Teabaggers
at yesterday's rally. The Chicago Tribune and the local tv stations
here in Chicago covered the Tea Party rally of 1,500 like it was some
million man march. The polls put Teabag support at 18% - a number
which, I believe, includes that penumbra of sympathizers who are
drawn to the symbolism of the tea parties but are not quite prepared
to carry posters depicting President Obama as an orangutan.

The right was quick to appropriate the tools of media manipulation
that the left had pioneered during the anti-war years. "The Selling
of a President" by Joe McGinness is a classic about how Nixon's
campaign repackaged Richard Nixon into commodity that consumers
actually wanted to buy. Central to that effort was his appeal to the
fears and anxieties of the Silent Majority - fears that had been
stoked by the crazy yippies and everyone else on the left. The
right took off from there - Ronald Reagan and his brilliant media
imaging ("Morning in America"), Lee Atwater and Willie Horton, Karl
Rove and his exploitation of the born agains and the southerners and
all that crap. All of these strategies were refined variations on
the central insight that the yippies, and of course many others on
the left, had.

Desecrating the core symbols of our democracy - wearing an American
flag shirt, calling police pigs, rioting at the Chicago Democratic
convention, smoking dope in public, free love, crazy rock music -
will guaranty you media attention. It seems like a given now but it
was news then; nobody had done it before. And of course the converse
will work as well. Rabidly defending those very same symbols -
literally wrapping yourself in the flag, proclaiming undying love for
the "troops" (while refusing to fund VA benefits), flaunting your
purity (while your teenage daughter gets knocked up), disrupting the
Florida recount and town hall meetings in the name of democracy -
will also assure you center stage in the media spotlight.

The bonus for the tea baggers is that, because they loudly proclaim
their patriotism and their love of the constitution, that coverage
will be uncritical. They have used the disruptive tactics pioneered
by the left to create a new right media sensation. Sarah Palin
welcomed all the "patriots" at yesterday's rally. She might not be
bright but she is smart enough to zero in on the phrases and images
that rally her base and infuriate her opponents. Abbie Hoffman in heels.

And now I find myself in the position of my elders in the late
60's. Defending the established political order against the rude and
crude attacks of the insurgents. So here's the dumb question - why
doesn't it look like we're having fun. The yippies were about
nothing if not fun. The teabaggers, as ill-informed and misconceived
as they are, are also having fun.

We're the establishment now. Our hair is gray. I've got a
paunch. I hate whining about how unfair it is that the teabaggers
are getting this fawning coverage. On the other hand, I love Jon
Stewart and Bill Maher and Colbert and Anthony Weiner and Alan
Grayson, folks that have a trace of that anarchic spirit that
celebrate what's great and cool about our politics. And the blogs
that also have regenerated that old energy during that last 6-7 years
- turning around congress during the Bush years and being a central
force in electing a president who has the hallmarks of greatness,
notwithstanding quibbles at the margins for not being progressive enough.

Ultimately we have the satisfaction of knowing that the teabaggers
will be a footnote to history, kind of like the Yippies were. A
phenomenon that is very much of the moment, but one that had a much
greater impression during its time than it will have on the overall
course of events.

.

Music’s peaceful poet for the ‘new left’

Finding social significance

http://homertribune.com/2010/04/finding-social-significance/

Music's peaceful poet for the 'new left'

By Katie Emerick
Apr 14, 2010

Much can be said about the political scope belonging to David Rovics.
He's a troubadour musician and independent artist, an advocate for
free speech, outspoken critic of the military and the government, and
has been providing soundtracks to various activist campaigns for a decade now.
Like the forefathers of folk who inspire him, Rovics' sound is
reminiscent of the "working class" ideologies brought to folk music
by such artists as Utah Phillips, Phil Ochs and Woody Guthrie. His
music has been featured on "Democracy Now!," the BBC and Al-Jazzeera,
and he's written a number of political essays, as well as children's
songs. Armed with his guitar, Rovics isn't afraid to speak his mind
and has traveled the world bringing his message to the people through
wit and humor, self-expression and honesty.
Born into a family of classical musicians, Rovics became a fan of
populist regimes in his early years, rebelling against the
conservative leanings of his hometown. Leaving college early, he
spent several years living in Berkeley, Calif., before moving back
east to become a professional Busker on the subways of Boston. While
Rovics had been making music on the streets, it wasn't until a close
friend was killed that he turned his attention full time to
songwriting; initially as a means of dealing with his grief.
Rovics released his debut album, "Make It So," in 1996. Since then,
he's gone on to release 16 studio and live records, filling them with
original songs that address nearly every hot political topic from
nuclear proliferation to the environment, to Guantanamo Bay. If
simply looking at his album labels is any indication, Rovics is a man
with a message.
In 2003, Rovics released "Who Would Jesus Bomb," and in 2006,
"Halliburton Boardroom Massacre." And while Rovics' revolution is
through music ­ a tool he feels is the most optimistic form of
communication ­ his capacity to provide anthems to a host of
political campaigns is impressive. Perhaps it's his passion that
attracts so many activists to his music, for Rovics is one who lives
what he believes, stating in one song, "Every song I've ever written
has been a love song."
One element that makes Rovics a poster boy for independent music is
the fact that he's made every one of his songs available for free
online. Stating his belief that the music industry is a broken
machine ­ no longer concerned with the quality of what it produces ­
Rovics has gained a greater fan base through free distribution.
Having spent much time over the past 10 years touring across Europe,
Latin America and Asia, he's gathered an arsenal of material from the
experiences and people he's met along the way. But it's Rovics'
strong sense of advocacy that is commendable, whether or not you
agree with what he says. He sings a number of songs about Palestine
and has had tours canceled on him for being "anti-Semitic," despite
his Jewish heritage. Undeterred, however, whenever he's shut down,
Rovics holds strong to his beliefs and has a way with humor that
makes his music and his persona approachable. His talent as a
musician, with fiery fingers traversing the strings, is equally to
his advantage as his humble attitude.
So from concert theatres to union halls, libraries to bars, Rovics
has a song for everyone:
Gardening and bicycles? Check. Hugo Chavez and Hugh Thompson? Check.
Marijuana and polyamory? Check. Endangered species and pirates? Check.
Filled to the brim with wit and irony, Rovics challenges hypocrisy
with an intelligence that's always refreshing on the political scene.
"Well, plastic forks are fun and paper cups are cool, I like to be on
the move when I eat my gruel/ Don't get me wrong, disposable diapers
are fun too/ but my favorite feature of these United States are
parking lots and strip malls."

.

Cartoonist Kim Deitch visits Homewood

Cartoonist Kim Deitch visits Homewood

http://gazette.jhu.edu/2010/04/19/cartoonist-kim-deitch-visits-homewood/

April 19, 2010

The Homewood Art Workshops wraps up its 35th anniversary celebration
with a slide talk by legendary cartoonist Kim Deitch on Monday, April
26. Deitch's talk, "The Search for Smilin' Ed and Other Tales," will
begin at 5:30 p.m. in Room 101 of the Mattin Center's F. Ross Jones
Building on the Homewood campus.

Along with Robert Crumb, Bill Griffith and Art Spiegelman, Deitch
transformed the art of cartooning in the psychedelic late 1960s.
Combining a love of early-20th-century comic strips and animation
with the media-savvy satire of midcentury MAD magazine, these artists
gave a raucously subversive jolt to a nearly moribund medium.

Deitch began doing comic strips for the New York underground
newspaper The East Village Other in 1967. Since then, his work has
appeared in dozens of publications, including RAW, Pictopia, Details,
Nickelodeon Magazine and Little Lit. Among his groundbreaking comic
books and graphic novels are Hollywoodland, The Mishkin Files, A
Shroud for Waldo, The Boulevard of Broken Dreams and Alias the Cat!
His latest book, The Search for Smilin' Ed, will be published by
Fantagraphics in June. Deitch will sign advance copies of Smilin' Ed
at Barnes & Noble Johns Hopkins from 4 to 6 p.m. on Sunday, April 25.

Deitch has been recognized with the comics industry's highest honors,
including an Eisner Award, an Inkpot Award and a retrospective
exhibition at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in 2008. He lives
in New York City.

.

How James Earl Ray assassinated King

"Hellhound on His Trail": The creep who killed MLK

http://www.salon.com/books/laura_miller/2010/04/18/hellhound_on_his_trail/index.html

The seedy true-crime story of how James Earl Ray assassinated a great
American hero

By Laura Miller
Apr 18, 2010

"There is no way a ten-cent white boy could develop a plan to kill a
million-dollar black man," said the civil rights leader James Bevel
of James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. on
April 4, 1968. Even if you aren't inclined to credit the conspiracy
theorists on this one -- and Hampton Sides, the author of a new book
about Ray, "Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther
King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin," is not -- you
can see how the pairing of killer and victim would stick in the craw.
Ray was a nonentity, a toxic loser from a long line of the same,
incapable of forming even the most basic relationships, while King
had the power to capture, embody and mobilize the better self of a nation.

Sides' meticulous yet driving account of Ray's plot to murder King
and the 68-day international manhunt that followed is in essence a
true-crime story and a splendid specimen of the genre ­ a genuine
corker. At its center is the enigma of James Earl Ray, who could be
crafty one moment and appallingly stupid the next. For Sides (the
author of such popular narrative histories as "Ghost Soldiers" and
"Blood and Thunder"), the King assassination has the added interest
of being "the pivotal moment in the place where I come from,"
Memphis, Tenn., although it must be said that the chapters about King
himself are the book's weakest aspect. There's really only one point
where the worlds of two men as different as Ray and King could
intersect, and that's a bullet.

As for Ray himself -- whose real name doesn't appear in "Hellhound on
His Trail" until Page 321, in the last line of the 40th chapter --
Sides deftly constructs the book so that the killer's character
becomes the mystery. Ray starts out in the first chapter as a
nameless convict, "Prisoner #00416-J," who escapes from the Missouri
State Penitentiary at Jefferson City by hiding in a crate of freshly
baked bread. After that, Sides refers to him by whichever of the many
aliases the man used as he wandered from Puerto Vallarta to Los
Angeles to Atlanta to Toronto to Lisbon and finally to London, where
he was apprehended by a sharp-eyed Scotland Yard detective while
trying to board a plane for Brussels.

Sides' ingenious method ensures that a reader who hasn't already made
a study of Ray can judge him only as did the people whose lives he
glided through: by his behavior. He always dressed fastidiously in
suit and tie, though he invariably lived in cheap hotels and
flophouses. "No matter where he was in the world," Sides writes, "his
radar for sleaze remained remarkably acute." He avoided socializing
or having his photo taken, cultivating a "bland and retiring"
appearance and personality that made him eminently forgettable; even
the plastic surgeon who gave him a nose job couldn't remember
anything about the guy.

Ray had a penchant for shabby and crankish self-improvement schemes,
enrolling in a bartending school and taking dance classes and a
correspondence course in locksmithing. He carried a battered
paperback copy of a self-help book, "Psycho-cybernetics," by Dr.
Maxwell Maltz, everywhere he went and tried both psychotherapy (a
treatment no doubt impaired by his reluctance to admit he was a
fugitive from justice) and hypnotism. One of the hypnotists he
consulted (an individual with the extraordinary name of the Rev.
Xavier von Koss) pegged Ray as belonging to "the recognition type. He
yearns to feel that he is somebody." Yet by both necessity and (at
least some of the time) inclination, he avoided making any impression
on anyone.

Wherever Ray lived -- and for much of "Hellhound" it's in Los Angeles
-- he frequented whorehouses, strip joints and red-vinyl-upholstered
"lounges" with names like the Sultan Room or the Rabbit's Foot Club.
This is the same Angeleno demimonde that James Ellroy often writes
about; Sides evokes it vividly, but without Ellroy's skeevy relish
and the longing for several hot showers that Ellroy novels frequently
inspire. Whenever he can, Sides imparts the details that make Ray's
seedy life palpable, from the groceries with which he stocks his
hideout in an Atlanta boarding house (canned milk, bottled French
dressing and frozen lima beans) to his splurge on the $6.24-per-night
New Rebel Motel just outside Memphis on the eve of the assassination.
(Though a true aficionado of cheap motels would know that the brand
of miniature soap they provide is not "Cashmere," but Cashmere Bouquet.)

The people Ray associated with ("knew" seems an overstatement) during
the year between his escape and the assassination were a sundry
assortment of misfits and kooks (he made a road trip with a fellow
who talked to trees and claimed to have cured a woman's arthritis by
burying her panties in the backyard). He most likely supported
himself with petty crime: stickups and low-level drug deals. But he
also became passionately involved in the presidential campaign of
segregationist, and former Alabama governor, George Wallace.

Ray's enthusiasm for Wallace -- a trailblazer for Sarah Palin and
similar demagogues capitalizing on white working-class resentment --
is what makes his story more than just the tale of a hate-fueled
creep who struck down a great man (though it's that, too). Sides
notes that Ray must have had help on two or three occasions, probably
from his brothers, but perhaps also from equally racist wingnuts who
shared his so-called values, whether or not they actively
collaborated on his one major crime. In Wallace's California campaign
offices, Ray found reinforcement for a paranoid political mind-set
that was, as Sides puts it, "composed of many inchoate gripes and grievances."

Something similar could be said of the obsessions of J. Edgar Hoover,
King's great nemesis within the government. The portions of
"Hellhound on His Trail" devoted to Hoover and the FBI are,
tellingly, far more organically integrated into the book's main
narrative than the chapters on King could ever be. You don't have to
believe that the government played an active role in King's
assassination to recognize that Hoover was really just a more
effective and powerful version of James Earl Ray. Exalted and
cleaned-up bigots like Hoover provided tacit moral support for fringe
dwellers like Ray, just as they do today.

King and his lieutenants and friends, for all their shortcomings and
infighting, were operating on a different historical level than the
likes of Ray and Hoover. They were heroes, trying to redraw our
shared image of humanity into something bigger, braver and nobler
than it had ever been before. This truth shines through even as
"Hellhound" moves past King's assassination and into the
investigation, recounted by Sides as a tense police procedural. When
reporters at the funeral for Robert F. Kennedy informed Coretta Scott
King that her husband's killer had finally been caught, she didn't
waste a word on James Earl Ray. She simply "smiled the sad, wise
smile she had perfected through two months of widowhood" and walked away.

.

Court rejects call for fair wages for prisoners

Court rejects call for fair wages for prisoners

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/11/BA821CT606.DTL

Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, April 12, 2010

After renowned attorney J. Tony Serra spent nine months in a federal
prison camp for not paying his taxes, he calculated how much he was
paid for watering the camp gardens - 19 cents an hour - and thought
it might violate a U.N. standard that says inmates should get fair wages.

But the lawsuit that followed in 2007, which sought higher pay for
all federal prisoners in California, faced even longer odds than many
of the cases in Serra's career, celebrated in the 1989 film "True
Believer." On Friday, a federal appeals court delivered a thumbs-down
verdict, saying the government can set prison wages at any level,
including zero.

"Prisoners do not have a legal entitlement to payment for their
work," said the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco
in a 3-0 ruling.

Federal law, the court said, allows the attorney general to arrange
payments to inmates or their dependents "as he may deem proper." Even
the Constitution's 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery and
involuntary servitude, made an exception for convicted criminals, the
court noted.

As for the standard adopted by the United Nations at a 1955
conference on the treatment of prisoners, it declared only that
nations should establish a system of "equitable remuneration" for
prison work, without specifying any particular wage level, said Judge
Richard Clifton in Friday's ruling. What's more, he said, the
standard isn't a treaty, isn't binding on the United States and can't
be enforced in court.

Serra's lawsuit sought at least the federal minimum wage, now $7.25
an hour. When he filed the suit two years ago, he said he wasn't
complaining about personal mistreatment at the federal prison camp in
Lompoc (Santa Barbara County) but about systemic unfairness.

His job watering the gardens for five hours a day, Serra said, was
part of a nationwide network of prison camps churning out products
for contractors and federal agencies that might otherwise buy the
same goods from private, unionized plants.

Serra, 74, has represented scores of controversial clients in a
nearly 50-year legal career while living a Spartan life and driving a
rundown car. He successfully defended Black Panther leader Huey
Newton on murder charges and was part of the defense team that won an
acquittal in a 1973 Chinatown murder. James Woods played a lawyer
modeled on Serra in "True Believer," loosely based on the Chinatown case.

Serra pleaded guilty in 2005 to willfully failing to pay $44,000 in
federal income taxes in the late 1990s, his third tax conviction. A
self-described lifelong tax boycotter who had spent four months at
Lompoc in 1974 for a tax protest related to the Vietnam War, he
agreed to pay $100,000 in back taxes after his last conviction.

He said he'd try to follow the law in the future, observing that it's
harder to fight the system when you're locked up in it.
--

E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.

.

Interview with Laura Whitehorn on The War Before

An Interview with Laura Whitehorn on The War Before

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20100414141102743

By Sara Falconer
Linchpin anarchist Newspaper April 2010 (Canada)

The War Before: The True Life Story of Becoming a Black Panther,
Keeping the Faith in Prison, & Fighting for Those Left Behind. By
Safiya Bukhari. Edited by Laura Whitehorn. Preface by Wonda Jones.
Foreword by Angela Y. Davis. Afterword by Mumia Abu-Jamal.
--

In 1968, Safiya Bukhari witnessed an NYPD officer harassing a Black
Panther for selling the organization's newspaper on a Harlem street
corner. The young pre-med student felt compelled to intervene in
defense of the Panther's First Amendment right; she ended up
handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police car.

The War Before traces Bukhari's lifelong commitment as an advocate
for the rights of the oppressed. Following her journey from
middle-class student to Black Panther to political prisoner, these
writings provide an intimate view of a woman wrestling with the
issues of her time­the troubled legacy of the Panthers, misogyny in
the movement, her decision to convert to Islam, the incarceration of
out spoken radicals, and the families left behind. Her account
unfolds with immediacy and passion, showing how the struggles of
social justice movements have paved the way for the progress of today.

Why was it important for you to tell Safiya's story now?

Safiya's story has been and will remain important for anyone who
wants to understand the history of this country over the past 75
years. The history of the Black liberation struggle defines American
history in every period, but from the Second World War to now,
following the trajectory of that struggle is crucial. At the moment,
as people in the U.S. try to figure out what happened to their hopes
for Obama and a Democratic Party-led government, going back to
reflect on why Black people have yet to receive justice or equality
may be just the education the country needs. Her writings remind us
of why the struggle for justice is a struggle against capitalism and
imperialism.

Safiya writes about her experience of sexism in the Black Panther
Party, and how Panther women adopted some successful strategies to
empower themselves. How do you see those power dynamics playing out
in current movements today?

Like the non-progress on fundamental issues of justice for the Black
community as a whole, the status and real situation of women has
barely budged forward. In both areas, there are more people in the
middle echelons now­academics, professionals and the like. But the
basic issues of racism, white and male supremacy and sexism remain as
deeply entrenched as ever in the economic, political and social
structures of our society. While the Left has incorporated more women
and people of oppressed nationalities in its ranks, the concepts of
leadership that elevated white men to those positions in the mid-20th
century have not fully been analyzed and altered. Safiya's writings
offer a profound position on the power women offer in radical
movements: Not just the people who do the work, but the people who
provide lucid thinking, courage and heart. I don't think it's an
accident that so many of the people we see actively engaged in trying
to win release of political prisoners, and making sure they are not
forgotten, are women.

As a woman political prisoner, what particular challenges did you
face and how did you overcome them?

The biggest challenge was to keep my heart from irrevocably breaking.
Every day, in every jail or prison I was in, I witnessed the
destruction of families and communities caused by the incarceration
of so many Black and Latina women. Another challenge was the sexual
assault prisons force on us­daily pat searches by male guards, an
utter lack of privacy or ability to protect our bodies from those
men. It exerts a corrosive effect on a woman's sense of herself.

The way these challenges and others (such as the dehumanizing effect
of powerlessness) are overcome every day in women's prisons is by the
collective power of a community of women. The love and support women
prisoners offer one another provides the basis for every level of
resistance, from individual refusal to succumb, to more collective
efforts to win better conditions. Often, those group efforts arise
from a combined leadership of some of the least privileged women
along with the most politicized. When those acts of resistance took
place they were essentially revolutionary.

Another challenge was that the prison system and government deny the
existence of political prisoners. To call people who have resisted
and tried to create systemic change in this society criminals or
terrorists is not only a way to mask their existence, but also a way
to assert that U.S. society is just fine, really democratic and free.
Political prisoners resist being criminalized by doing political
organizing inside, studying and reading, and staying as connected as
possible with political movements on the outside. That is why
organizing among leftist groups for support for political prisoners
is so important.

Both you and Safiya organized for social justice not just before and
after, but while you were in prison ­ what advice would you give to
prisoners who want to be effective activists?

The first thing I had to do when I was arrested­suddenly thrown into
a horrid situation and facing many years behind bars­was to review
all my beliefs and actions, to know that whatever I faced, it was
worth it. (Safiya writes of this process in her book.) Once I did
that (it's partly a process of getting over the shock of being
arrested and imprisoned), I kept seeking a connection to other
activists. I did my first year or so in Baltimore City Jail. I got my
hands on a telephone book and found addresses for every progressive
organization I could think of. I wrote to them, and a few sent people
in to visit me. That was key: Knowing that there were people on the
street who were aware that I was there.

On the inside, I had to relearn much of my organizing knowledge,
taking my lead from the other women (some of whom had been in jail
many times before; most of whom understood power relations
intimately­a viewpoint of the powerless, the disenfranchised) about
how to organize for our demands. One particular example: The food in
Baltimore City Jail was beyond horrible. We knew the Christmas dinner
was going to be particularly bad. I urged that we throw our trays on
the floor, creating a rebellion. The other women won me over to a
different plan: We organized every friendly staff person, everyone's
families, the medical staff, etc. to help us hold our own holiday
party. We told them why we needed to do it: that we were family, and
a horrendous Christmas dinner would hurt us. The result was that we
had a kind of independent, lovely party­we even managed to get some
folks to smuggle a bit of real booze in (as opposed to the rot-gut
hooch we were able to cook up). The prison administration was
frightened, because we were refusing to allow them to make us upset
and powerless. I learned from that ­ instead of ending up beaten up,
in the hole, and with possible extra charges, we were happy and felt
extraordinarily strong. And we did it as a group.

For Safiya, what was key (she writes about this in The War Before)
was that she did not share the fear the other women had when it came
to exercising basic rights. She had the benefit of a political
awareness and education. By citing Constitutional rights, she was
able to help people get legal materials. And as a revolutionary, she
understood this to be her work­and fulfilling. She also understood
the need for repairing family rifts, and she helped to found a group
called MILK­Mothers Inside Loving Kids. She saw this as part of the
struggle against genocide, because destroying the Black family is one
aspect of genocide.

Safiya also teaches us something truly central to organizing
anywhere: She loved the fight for justice. If that is your
motivation, then you find ways to fight wherever you are. Safiya did
that, always.

How can people on the outside support that work without taking power
away from the prisoners who are working on those projects?

I think those of us on the outside have to recognize three key needs:
communication, honesty and respect. The main way I experienced the
problem of "taking power away" while I was inside was when people
would forget that I didn't know what they were planning, or what had
been done­and when people would tell me that something had been
wildly successful, when really it had not. It is tempting to tell
prisoners that the work is going better than it may be; that is
dangerous, because while we're inside, we don't have another reliable
source. What I mean by respect is this: On the outside, you don't
necessarily have a good sense of the limitations and dangers
prisoners face. The most well intended comment or letter could end up
causing someone to be thrown in the hole. I think it is crucial
always to find out from a prisoner what his or her actual situation
is before planning any work. But I also think it's important to say
frankly what you think should and can be done, and to state any
disagreements you have with a prisoner's view. When I was in prison I
was no smarter than I had been on the street. I did know my
conditions better than comrades on the outside, but I was not, by
dint of being a political prisoner, more to be revered than they.
Trying to maintain equality­I guess that would be what I would urge.

I also think it's worthwhile to try to help people inside get all the
resources and information possible. In New York, we try to make sure
all the NY state political prisoners have a sub to the NY Times,
along with any Left journals and newspapers they want. Books through
bars and other groups are important for getting prisoners other kinds
of educational materials and info.

Safiya's legacy is apparent in Jericho and the many political
prisoner support groups around the world. Yet, as you point out,
despite a widespread fascination with the rebellion of the 60s, there
has been relatively little interest in the plight of the
revolutionaries from that era and beyond who are still imprisoned.

What can the book teach us about taking that work to the next level
in building a mass movement to free political prisoners?

The book may surprise people. Safiya's thoughts on how to build
support for political prisoners evolved over the years, and her
original conception of Jericho was a bit different from what Jericho
became. The War Before, by putting together many of Safiya's
positions and ideas on political prisoners, provides a great starting
point for us to evaluate and improve our work. Mostly, I think the
book's message points to an important way to approach the issue.
Safiya's sense of revolution was not something that happened in one
period, then disappeared in the next. She traces, in the pages of the
book, the gestation of the issue of political prisoners from the days
of the BPP to the day she died in 2003. She saw possibilities of how
to build support for­and how to fight for release of­political
prisoners that have yet to be enacted. Over and over, in various
ways, she shows us how the fight to free political prisoners is
essential to the fight for justice. Her writings strip away much of
the verbiage and illusion surrounding both struggles. She also
wrestles with some of the obstacles to this work, suggesting ways to
overcome them. The War Before also shows the enormous capacity of
Safiya's heart and spirit­the solidarity basic to fighting for any
sort of social justice and freedom.

Order The War Before for just $9.57:

Or write to:

The Feminist Press at CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue
Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
--

Sara Falconer is a Toronto-based journalist and social media
specialist. She is part of the collective that produces the Certain
Days: Freedom for Political Prisoners Calendar. As a member of the
Toronto Anarchist Black Cross, she helps produce 4strugglemag, an
online and print zine of writings and analysis by and for political
prisoners and their supporters.

.

David Hilliard inspires food sharing

Project Share feeds the masses

http://www.dailylobo.com/index.php/article/2010/04/project_share_feeds_the_masses_

By Andrew Beale
April 19, 2010

Thanks to the efforts of Project Share, Inc. hundreds of people that
would otherwise go hungry can eat every week.

Paul Eichhorn, food box coordinator, said Project Share serves 40,000
hot meals every year, in addition to providing food boxes, clothing
and other needed items such as diapers.

"We work with 50 or 60 different organizations to provide these
meals," he said. "We have a garden that grows vegetables for the food boxes."

Eichhorn said on a typical day Project Share feeds about 150 people
at its Yale Boulevard building, and its services are available in
Spanish as well.

Project Share is filled with people Sunday night, many walking there
even through the rain. Eichhorn predicted that a lot of people
wouldn't come to eat Sunday, since they can't catch a bus in the
rain. Nevertheless, Project Share ended up feeding 102 people that night.

On Sunday, the free meals provided at Project Share consisted of
tacos, fruit, beans, rice and cookies. There was also milk and cups
of candy-colored juice. Each plate contained food to constitute a
good dinner, and people were welcome to seconds after everyone had eaten.

Eichhorn said he got involved with Project Share after sitting in on
a UNM class taught by David Hilliard, a former leader of the Black
Panther Party. Eichhorn said Hilliard's class built Hope's Half Acre,
the garden that grows vegetables for the food boxes.

He said Hilliard only taught the class for a year, and then was
dismissed from UNM. Eichhorn speculates that Hilliard was fired
because of "right-wing people" who were unhappy with having a former
Black Panther at the University.

"David Hilliard refreshed my faith in the UNM school system, in that
they were doing something positive," he said. "On the other hand,
they let him go after his contract ran out."

Eichhorn said students who are interested in helping can donate items
or volunteer at the organization.

A diverse selection of people are served by Project Share, Eichhorn
said. About 25 percent of the people who eat there are homeless, he said.

"There's quite a cross-section of people here. There are some folks
just getting out of jail, some folks that are homeless, some folks
that can't afford medication," he said. "You have a lot of your
working-class families that just can't make it this month."

Eichhorn said part of his responsibilities at Project Share include
working security for the organization.
"If you cause trouble, I'll throw you out. You can't show up here
drunk," he said.

Project Share has seven paid staff, as well as dozens of volunteers
that occasionally help out, Eichhorn said. He said they also use
people who have to do court-ordered community service.

"That's part of our mission, is to give people a place to do
community service," he said. "For a lot of folks, it's an eye-opener."

Eichhorn said the paid staff's salary comes from grants written to
charitable organizations. He said some of the money comes from the
city and the state. Project Share isn't eligible to receive money
from some organizations, because they don't keep track of every
person who comes to eat there.

"Some of these organizations, the reporting requirements are
ridiculous," he said. "Like United Way, they wanted us to check
everybody's picture ID when they came here. Uh, no, not gonna do that."

Students from Albuquerque Academy volunteer at Project Share on the
third Sunday of every month, said Heidi Meyers, Academy volunteer
coordinator and student.

"I think Project Share is one of the most important organizations in
New Mexico, because you can see the immediate effects on the people
you're helping," she said. "In that way I think it's a lot more
personal than volunteering somewhere else."

Meyers said 12 or 13 Academy students come to Project Share every
month. She said she got involved with Project Share because she's
interested in helping people.

"I'm really interested in cooking, so my pet issue is hunger," she
said. "It's also good for the Academy kids to get out there and see
different communities."

Rick Marckstadt said he volunteers regularly and eats most of his
meals at Project Share. He said he's been volunteering with the
program since 2005, and he thinks Project Share provides a valuable service.

"Since the recession and stuff, we got more families here ­ the
homeless. It really helps out the community," he said.
Marckstadt said he's exploring other, less conventional, fundraising
options for Project Share.

"We're trying to get a hold of the Hooters girls to do a carwash, and
the money would go to Project Share," he said. "It's not bad with the
Hooters girls. You see more skin at the beach."

Eichhorn said the program gives out food boxes with a variety of food
to people who come with a note from a school counselor, a nurse or
doctor or a charity detailing their need.

He said Project Share also distributes cat and dog food for people
who may not be able to afford it.
"If you're having a hard time feeding yourself, sometimes your best
friend can't eat too well either," he said.

.

Mumia's case in the age of Obama

Mumia's case in the age of Obama

http://socialistworker.org/2010/04/13/mumia-and-the-obama-era

By Daphna Thier and Lee Wengraf
April 13, 2010

NEW YORK--Hundreds of activists gathered at Columbia University April
3 for a day-long conference and evening plenary about the case of
Pennsylvania death row prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. The event was
organized by Educators for Mumia Abu-Jamal (EMAJ), with the help of
co-organizers LUCHA, a student activist group at Columbia University,

Called the "voice of the voiceless," Mumia is a former Black Panther
and journalist who has been on death row for 28 years, wrongfully
convicted for the killing of a police officer.

Sent to death row on the basis of police-coerced testimony and
blatant racial bias, his trial and subsequent appeals have been a
travesty of justice, denounced by human rights organizations and
activists worldwide, from Amnesty International to the NAACP.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to grant Mumia's petition
for an appeal on several grounds, including evidence of
discrimination against Black jurors, considered one of Mumia's most
promising avenues for a new trial. In the face of clear evidence that
justice in the courts for Mumia is hard to come by, activists
recently launched a campaign demanding a civil rights investigation.

Topics of the workshops at the conference, which more than 50 people
attended, included "Mumia 101," in which EMAJ Coordinators Professor
Mark L. Taylor and Professor Johanna Fernandez gave an informative
layout of the initial facts of the case, and "Organizing on
campuses," where Columbia students led a discussion on student
movements and networking.

In another session, Suzanne Ross of the Free Mumia Coalition-NYC laid
out the strategy to secure a civil rights investigation from U.S.
Attorney General Eric Holder and the Justice Department's Civil
Rights Division.

The campaign for a civil rights investigation is nearly a year old,
launched on the heels of the legal setback in 2009, with the U.S.
Supreme Court's refusal to grant Mumia's appeal. Over 20,000
signatures petitioning for a civil rights investigation were
delivered to the Justice Department in December 2009. Supporters
signing on to the call included Noam Chomsky, U.S. Rep. Charles
Rangel, NAACP Board Chair Julian Bond, trade unionists from Venezuela
and Ecuador, and many more.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

AN EVENING plenary at the conference was titled "Live From Death Row:
Mumia at the Crossroads in the Age of Obama" and took up the slogan
"We need his voice, we need his life."

Dr. Cornel West, Professor Vijay Prashad, Professor Jamal Joseph and
Pam Africa of the MOVE organization spoke to roughly 400 people,
filling the large hall to the brim.

Opening the evening's event, Pam Africa reminded us of mass movements
past. Pam described Mumia as a "free man on death row." She called
for mass action, leading the crowd in chants of "The people, united,
will never be defeated."

Professor Jamal Joseph, a former Black Panther, gave a very powerful
speech filled with humor and optimism, describing the legacy of the
Black Panther Party. "We need movement...everyone here is a great
weapon because everyone here has the power to organize," Joseph concluded.

Professor Vijay Prashad spoke of people becoming more and more
"disposable." "They don't just want Gaza--they want to be human," he
said. "Mumia is Gaza. Mumia is Guantánamo Bay...a 'disposable' who
refuses to remain disposable but wants to be a human."

Dr. Cornel West spent the evening moving up and down the stage to
hand out hugs to Frances Golden (Mumia's literary agent), Pam Africa,
the IMPACT peformers and others, and rooted enthusiastically for all
the speakers. "Mumia comes from a tradition," he said, referring to
Frederick Douglass, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and more.

He accused the ruling class of having an "obsession with the 11th
Commandment: 'thou shall not get caught'...[The] age of Reagan
continues in the age of Obama." He called not for prisons but for
"education, rehabilitation...for 2.3 million people in the jails" and
called out for a movement of poor people and the working class.

A taped greeting from Mumia filled his audience with warmth, love and
inspiration. Mumia spoke on the election of Obama, stating that,
"People voted because they wanted to end the war, they wanted
change...and still the machine of oppression goes on."

Reflecting on the Black Panther Party, Mumia said what motivated
them, always, was to "serve the people...We didn't get paid, we
didn't want to get paid, we were paid by the love people gave us."
Addressing young people, Mumia recalled that Huey Newton was 24 years
old when he founded the Black Panther Party, and he didn't send a
letter to Martin Luther King asking, "Is this a good idea?" "Never
think of what you can't do. You're young for a reason. You have to do
what you were born to be--active."

The next step in the struggle for justice for Mumia is a march on the
Justice Department in Washington, D.C., scheduled for April 26.

Visit the Free Mumia Abu Jamal Coalition Web site for information
about the march.
http://www.freemumia.com/

.

Still Groovin’ After All These Years

[2 articles]

Still Groovin' After All These Years

http://www.lagunabeachindependent.com/news/2010-04-16/Arts_%28and%29_Entertainment/Still_Groovin_After_All_These_Years.html

Sound Spectrum celebrates Record Store Day

By Daniella Walsh
4/16/10

Record Store Day on April 17 shines a promotional spotlight on the
culture and survival skills of independent recordstore owners.

Such stalwarts are indeed rare, survivors of free Internet
downloading and similar music business perils that sunk major chains.

Laguna Beach is home to one of the oldest, perhaps even the grooviest
of the holdouts who remain.

In 1967, the year of the Monterey Pop Festival, Jim Otto, an
entrepreneur of the counterculture, who learned to navigate a fickle
industry defined by Darwinian theories of survival, established Sound
Spectrum. Besides selling records, Otto also stayed afloat early on
by as an independent ticket agent, selling concert tickets. ("Imagine
selling tickets without computers, with nothing but a phone and a
book of seating charts," he quipped.)

Otto's stayed in business long enough to enjoy a recent resurgence
among independent music stores due to reviving interest in vinyl
recordings, which create an earthier sound than that emanating from
computers and MP3 players.

"People are rediscovering vinyl because of the sound quality," he
said. Newly issued recordings pressed today are thicker and less
prone to warps and scratches than those made during The Beatles'
heydey in the '60s. Young music collectors and their elders are
snapping them up again and thus business savvy groups such as MGMT,
Vampire Weekend, Broken Bell and others offer fans a twofer by
putting their music on vinyl and including a computer downloading
code as well, Otto said.

Nevertheless, Otto credits his store's longevity to service and
adaptability to customer tastes. "Sometimes entire families come in,
parents with their children, even grandparents with
grandchildren­boomers and kids listening to the same stuff," he
remarked. He also selects the store's background music to speak to
his clientele. "I select music I like, but more often I check out
what section customers gravitate to and play something from that," he
said. He carries nearly anything from jazz to rap, from acoustic folk
to heavy metal. (When not dejaying at the store, he hosts "Reggae
Showcase" at KSBR 88.5 FM on Sundays from 3-6 p.m.)

Housed in a converted 1930s home, Sound Spectrum still resonates
hippie ambience: music bins and shelves are made from faded wood,
posters and t-shirts line walls, ethnic and summer-of-love style
jewelry are displayed along with postcards of icons like Janis
Joplin. (Note the $10 vintage 1971 calendar whose days coincide with
those of 2010.)

Over all, the vibe suggests one could encounter the ghosts of Janis
Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison or Timothy Leary and others now
departed after closing time. Also to mind come members of the
so-called Laguna Hippy Mafia to which Otto reputedly belonged, but
about which he prefers to stay mum. "Those who say don't know; those
who know don't say," he said.

Instead he likes to talk about the creative ways vinyl recordings are
presented, including a re-edition of Hendrix's "Valleys of Neptune."
Featuring a watercolor painting on the record sleeve, it reveals
that, unbeknownst to many, Hendrix was also a promising painter.

To help celebrate National Record Store Day several music companies
and groups have issued albums exclusively to independent record
stores. There are editions by the Elvises, Presley and Costello, Jeff
Beck, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Soundgarden, Jakob Dylan
and Phoenix (on pink vinyl yet), among others. "You can't get those
at any of the big chains or on the Internet," Otto said.

--------

Old-school vinyl reigns supreme today

http://www.ohio.com/entertainment/91167794.html

Neighborhood record shops celebrate with new releases, collectibles,
live music and prizes

By Malcolm X Abram
Apr 17, 2010

The digital download revolution has killed most of the big-chain
record stores, leaving giant catch-all retailers such as Walmart and
Best Buy as well as mall mainstay F.Y.E. to pick up the slack.

Likewise, the compact disc, the sales of which continue to plummet
while download behemoth iTunes grows, already has one plastic foot in
the music format graveyard alongside cassettes, eight-tracks,
reel-to-reel, mini discs and others.

But while chain music stores and CDs have proven ephemeral,
independent record stores ­ and the old-school vinyl the majority of
them stock ­ are apparently eternal.

In 2008, 1.8 million LPs were sold, and more than 2.5 million in
2009, while digital album and track sales rose only 8.3 and 16.1
percent respectively, according to Nielsen Soundscan. Digital sales
made up 40 percent of all music sales in 2009.

In 2007 a group of concerned music lovers banded together and founded
Record Store Day, to celebrate the more than 700 ''indie'' stores in
the United States and hundreds more around the world. In its short
history, Record Store Day has grown each year as labels and their
artists, big and small, pay tribute by offering special
limited-edition vinyl and (some) CDs to entice music lovers to enjoy
the ''unique culture'' of the neighborhood shop.

Record Store Day 2010 is today and stores throughout Northeast Ohio
have stocked their display cases with first-come, first-served collectibles.

While some labels are offering items on vinyl, CD and even a few
DVDs, area record stores say vinyl is king.

Pete Freeman of Vinyl Underground in Kent, which opened last November
and is celebrating its first Record Store Day, said all the calls he
has been getting have been about the many slabs of limited vinyl
releases. One is a highly coveted Jimi Hendrix EP on colored vinyl,
Live at Clark University, which Freeman is looking forward to owning himself.

''I haven't gotten a single call or e-mail on a CD or DVD that's
releasing for Record Store Day,'' Freeman said.

Vinyl is ''a format that's been around since the turn of the [last]
century in some form or another. It's lasted over 100 years now, so
it definitely holds its own. CDs, MP3s are just the next wave of the
hottest, newest thing, but records are something that are to stay.''

Freeman also points to the fact that there is a resale market for vinyl.

''There's also an investment aspect. It's something that you have to be
aware of and take care of and it's something you can trade back in.
There aren't many used MP3 stores, now are there?'' he said.

In addition to the official Record Store Day releases, the store will
have some rarities from its and Freeman's personal collections,
including the extremely rare and infamous ''butcher cover'' Beatles
LP and some rare Elvis Presley 78s, as well as a sidewalk sale
(weather permitting). Live performances start at 6 p.m. by local
bands We Know Karate, Most Beautiful Losers, Extra Crispy and DJ
Forrest Getemgump.

Spin More Records in Kent has participated in all four Record Store
Days, and will have live music at 1 p.m. from singer/songwriter
Valerie, as well as door prizes and a raffle. Among the exclusives
available will be CD and vinyl reissues of Devo's Duty Now for the
Future and a 12-inch single of two new Devo songs, Fresh/What We Do.

Dave Ignizio, co-owner of Square Records in Highland Square in Akron,
said last year's Record Store Day was the busiest day his store has
had in its six years of business, and he had several people waiting
outside for the store to open. Ignizio, who has participated in all
four events, said it's growing rapidly and he worries that it could
become ''too commercial.''

''The first year there was only a dozen or so releases, and last year
it got up into the 30s, and this year's just exploded and everyone
has jumped on the bandwagon,'' he said, noting he'll have 65 to 75 exclusives.

Square Records will have performances beginning at noon by Matt Haas,
Qix, White Pines, Swindlella and Akron Sound & Visual System, as well
as goodie bags of T-shirts, stickers, posters and promo CDs for
purchases of more than $25.

But Ignizio and other proprietors also noted that the spirit of the
event is being tainted by buyers who get the exclusives and
immediately put them on eBay. ''That happened a lot last year. If you
looked maybe two hours after stores opened, you saw a ton of stuff on
eBay, and it's like, c'mon people,'' he said.

Among his exclusives will be ''a good amount'' of the Black Keys'
12-inch two-song preview of the upcoming album Brothers, a 10-inch
vinyl by Afro-Beat king Fela Kuti and specials from the Doors, indie
rockers such as Modest Mouse, psych-rock pioneer Roky Erickson and
Sonic Youth reissues.

One owner, Scott Shepard of Time Traveler in Cuyahoga Falls, didn't
think he'd make it to another Record Store Day but hopes this year's
edition is as successful as 2009's. ''Last year was really good.
People actually cared last year. It was phenomenal.''

Shepard's store has been operating in the red for a few years, and he
admits he fell prey to the same foibles as the big chains ­ too much
inventory and not enough buyers.

For several months, Shepard has been having a 25 percent off sale on
his inventory, but for Record Store Day, he'll be bumping the savings
up to the appropriate 331/3 percent.

Shepard said he's doing ''OK'' but hopes to move into a smaller space
where he can specialize in the hard-to-find items his loyal clientele seeks.

It's a lesson that many indie stores have learned: One of the keys to
survival is carving out your niche, be it indie rock, jazz,
hard-to-find items or vinyl, finding the audience and serving it.

Malcolm X Abram can be reached at mabram@thebeaconjournal.com or 330-996-3758.

.

Tuna Talks at Aspen Cannabis Crown

Tuna Talks at Aspen Cannabis Crown

http://www.pr.com/press-release/226604

Robert Platshorn, author of Black Tuna Diaries and according to High
Times Magazine, "America's longest imprisioned non-violent marijuana
offender," will be a speaker at Aspen's Cannabis Crown April 17-18.

Aspen, CO, April 14, 2010 --(PR.com)-- Aspen's Cannabis Crown Almost Sold Out

Twice as Big as Planned!

What was planned as small competition, hoping to draw up to fifteen
hundred people has sold almost three thousand tickets. Reservations
continue to pour in for the two day event that begins here on April
17th. Originally planned as a medical marijuana seminar and area
growers competition, The Cannabis Crown has taken on a life of its
own. Visitors from all over the country will gather here to see the
judging, attend the seminars on medical marijuana, learn the history,
and be entertained. Even the city is getting into the spirit with a
BarBeQue and music in the town square followed by a Treasure Hunt.

With full legalization of marijuana on the next ballot in California,
there is tremendous interest in what many are calling the next great
economic opportunity. Seminars for medical, legal, patient care and
business opportunities, given by the top experts will dominate the
two day event. Visitors will see all the latest products and services
on display by our vendors. Not enough you say...there's more. There
will be bands, comedians, celebrity speakers and a sneak preview of a
major new movie. Oh..and a hundred and forty growers competing for the Crown.

Visitors will get to meet High Times Editor Rick Cusak, speakers from
NORML, cannabis oriented health care providers, educators and
lawyers.They can mix with the celebrities. Bruce Perlowin, featured
on CNBC's Marijuana Inc, will be here to talk about the commercial
opportunities offered by his company, Medical Marijuana Inc. Former
pot smuggler and famous TV Pitchman, Robert Platshorn, dubbed by the
government the Black Tuna, will tell tales of the wild days of the
South Florida smuggling trade and his thirty years in prison as what
High Times magazine calls "America's longest serving prisoner for a
non-violent marijuana offense".

In addition to his story telling, the Tuna will sign copies of his
highly acclaimed memoir, "Black Tuna Diaries". As a special treat,
Bobby is bringing a sneak preview of the new feature film "Square
Grouper". An opus to the heyday of the pot smugglers, produced by
rakontur, the folks who made "Cocaine Cowboys", one of the most
popular documentaries of all time, . Much of the new film is based on
Platshorn's book. Visitors to The Crown will be the first to get a
peak at Square Grouper, which will not be released until the fall.

So much to see and do, that the event had to be spread across two of
Aspens finest hotels, the Gant, and the Sky. Some tickets are still
available at www.canabiscrown.com. Come early and stay late to find
out who is the winner of this year's Cannabis Crown.

For more info and Press Credentials please contact www.cannabiscrown.com

Info, photos, and interviews available from Robert Platshorn. Email
tunaville@yahoo.com, phone 954-773-6967

Book info at www.blacktunadiaries.com

Contact Information
TV Publishing
Robert Plathsorn
954-773-6967
tvpublishing@gmx.com
www.blacktunadiaries.com

.

Mants an important figure in civil rights movement

Mants an important figure in civil rights movement

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20100415/NEWS02/4150343/1009/Mants-an-important-figure-in-civil-rights-movement

April 15, 2010

WHITE HALL -- He might not have been as well-known as John Lewis or
Stokely Carmichael, but Bob Mants forged his own civil rights
reputation, at times on the back of a borrowed mule.

Mants, who was a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader,
also had a colorful nickname -- "the tall guy in the high-water pants."

He got the moniker high above the water March 7, 1965, as he helped
lead the first march from Selma to Montgomery to press for equal voting rights.

Instead, Mants and Lewis, now a U.S. congressman, and 600 other
peaceful protesters were met on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma,
where Alaba­ma state troopers and Dallas County sheriff's deputies
confronted them.

The lawmen used tear gas, billy clubs, cattle prods and other violent
means to stop the group from walking to the Capital City.

Film of the brutality was shown on national television that night,
angering the nation and leading to passage of the historic Voting
Rights Act five months later.

When SNCC veterans gather in Raleigh, N.C., today for a four-day
reunion to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their long-defunct
organization, Selma's "Bloody Sunday" violence will be a major topic
of discussion.

What Mants wore on the bridge might have been practical on that
chilly afternoon in Selma, but it would never have won any awards for
sartorial splendor.

His pants stopped 5 inches above his ankles, which were covered by
black socks. He also wore a black topcoat and a "Big Apple" cap with
a snap brim.

"Hey, it's what was in style back then, and you thought you were hip
if you wore that stuff," Mants said in a recent interview at his
Lowndes County home. "They called it the 'Continental Look.'"

A few years before the bridge brutality, Mants was a skinny Atlanta
high school kid who desperately wanted to become involved in "The Movement."

He was quickly noticed as someone willing to handle any chore to earn
his civil rights spurs. SNCC leaders could see he had what it took to
assume more important duties.

"I was 16 and the youngest member of the Atlanta Student Movement,"
he said. "Our house was only two blocks from the SNCC office."

Mants, who celebrates his 67th birthday April 25, did just about
everything as an SNCC volunteer in the early 1960s. He served as a
janitor, made sure picket signs were in good order, answered the
phones and stuffed envelopes.

He also listened intently as SNCC leaders discussed their next moves.
The civil rights movement was getting hotter by the day, with
protesters beaten and arrested during demonstrations. As he grew
older and honed his organizational skills, Mants found himself in
southwest Georgia, where he helped with voter registration efforts
during the "Albany Movement."

He wanted to be a doctor and briefly became a premed student at
Morehouse College, but there was something else that drove him toward
his association with SNCC.

It was the 1955 murder of Em­mett Till in Money, Miss. Mants was 12
when Till, 14, was beaten, shot and thrown into the Tallahatchie
River for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

"He was two years older than I was at the time, and it has had the
most profound effect on my life," said Mants. "I remember asking my
teacher what a wolf whistle was. I still get emotional about Emmett
Till and what happened to him."

A decade after Till's murder, Mants stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge
in Selma, knowing that something bad might be about to happen to him.

He was in the second line just behind Lewis. They were closest to the
railing and could see as they reached the apex of the bridge that it
was a long way down to the Alabama River.

Hosea Williams of the Southern Christian Leadership Con­ference was
next to Lewis. Behind him was Albert Turner, an Alabama SCLC official
from nearby Perry County.

Mants said SNCC leaders didn't want to take part at first, but
eventually agreed and met SCLC officials at Brown Chapel AME Church,
which served as headquarters for the Selma protests.

"(Lewis) and I were the only two with SNCC at the time, and a coin
was flipped to see who would be where in the front rows," Mants recalled.

Williams and Turner were picked to represent the SCLC, and they lined
up with Lewis and Mants outside the church where hundreds of others
were organizing to march.

The troopers and deputies waited for most of the marchers to cross
the bridge before they went after them. Mants could sense what was
about to happen.

"What we saw has been described as a sea of blue because of the
trooper uniforms in front of us," said Mants. "Then I heard 'clack,
clack, clack, clack, clack' from troopers unbuttoning their tear gas
bags and then putting on their masks.

As clouds of gas began to spread over the bridge, troopers with billy
clubs and deputies with cattle prods on horseback rushed into the
group, pushing the four leaders back into the marchers behind them.

Lewis took a vicious whack on the head and suffered a skull fracture.
Panic separated the others, and Mants looked up to see a woman in need of help.

"I guess I must have weighed about 125 pounds soaking wet," he
recalled. "I picked her up and carried her down a ravine. She had her
sleeping bag and a quilt with her, and it dragged behind us. Somehow,
we made it to the bottom away from the tear gas."

The national outrage that followed led to a successful march to
Montgomery two weeks later. That time, the protesters had the
federalized Alabama National Guard to protect them every step of the way.

While the marchers moved through Dallas, Lowndes and Montgomery
counties, Mants focused on voter registration ef­forts.

He teamed with Carmichael, one of the civil rights movement's most
outspoken leaders. It was quite a duo -- flamboyant Carmichael and
soft-spoken Mants.

They took turns knocking on doors of sharecropper houses and trailers
in an area where angry white landowners eventually would evict them
for trying to register to vote.

Lowndes County, which was 70 percent black, had few black voters on
the rolls when Mants and Carmichael arrived. By the time they and
other SNCC workers were finished, enough black voters were registered
to change the face of politics in the county.

A black panther was used as the symbol for the Lowndes County Freedom
Organization. California militants liked it so much that they picked
it up to symbolize their Black Panther Party. SNCC also helped erect
a "Tent City" so that those booted off their land in Lowndes County
had a place to stay until permanent housing could be found for them.

The Jackson family allowed Mants, Carmichael and other SNCC workers
to use a house it owned during their stints in the county. The house,
owned by Matthew Jackson Sr., became known as the "Freedom House."

The little building had an outhouse and a well, along with a window
view that Mants has never forgotten.

"There is nothing more beautiful than an Alabama moon on a cold
night," he recalled. "I loved to sleep in the front room so I could
look at the moon."

The SNCC workers spent most of their time away from the house as they
encouraged people to exercise their right to vote. Lowndes is a big
county with lots of space between neighbors.

"We canvassed people all over the county, and I can still remember
riding a borrowed mule along dirt roads to get to where they lived,"
said Mants. "The mule and me were quite a sight, that's for sure."

When the demonstrators ar­rived in Montgomery on March 24, 1965,
Mants and Carmichael were on hand to greet them, but they soon
returned to Lowndes County to resume their voter registration efforts.

As the 1960s moved into its second half, SNCC's influence began to
wane as the war in Vietnam and the space race cap­tivated the
nation's attention.

"I think part of SNCC's demise can also be traced to infiltration of
it by government agents like the FBI," said Mants. "And a lot of us
just wanted to move on to other things."

Mants attended a college in New England and returned to Lowndes
County, where he served a term as a county commissioner. He was the
only out-of-state SNCC worker to put down roots in the county.

He prefers to call himself an organizer rather than a leader, but
those who have seen him work hard to help people believe he has been
unfairly forgotten by many chroniclers of the civil rights era.

"I think one of the reasons for this is the fact that Bob has never
been one to promote himself," Alabama historian Richard Bailey said.
"When he says something, you know he's not stretching it to make
himself look good."

Jerome Gray, former field co­ordinator for the Alabama Democratic
Conference, said Mants' low-key approach to civil rights could be one
of the reasons he is not mentioned in the same breath as Lewis,
Carmichael, Andrew Young or Hosea Williams.

"It's interesting that a lot of young people who study the civil
rights movement were unfamiliar with Bob's role in it, but they are
now finally realizing how important he was," Gray said.

One historian who was well aware of Mants' contributions is Taylor
Branch, who won the Pulitzer Prize for the first of three remarkable
books on the civil rights movement.

Mants, who currently works as a farm management specialist at
Tuskegee University, is mentioned numerous times in "At Canaan's
Edge," the third and final installment in the epic trilogy.

As he grows older, Mants has become more reflective of his civil
rights past and is opening up more about his role in the movement.
He's also finally decided to write his autobiography about those days.

"I've never been one who tried to capitalize on whatever celebrity
status I may have had back then," he said. "I've always tried to be
well-anchored."

Jo Ann Mants, a school­teacher in Selma who was a teenage civil
rights protester in Georgia where she grew up, couldn't agree more,
saying: "A lot of prophets of old were not glorified, and Bob
certainly did not do what he did for any personal glory."

The two, who met in 1963 in Americus, Ga., have been married for 43
years and have three children, seven grandchildren and enough civil
rights memories to fill several books.

She has often suggested that her husband write his autobiography, and
now that he is working on one, she couldn't be happier.

"It was a very dangerous time for civil rights workers and their
families," she said. "You never knew whether you would live another
day at times. You were constantly looking over your shoulder. I
always worried about Bob when he went out at night to work on some
civil rights project."

Mants and Carmichael met for the last time in 1998. Instead of at the
little "Freedom House," it was inside Mants' large, attractive house
not far from the White Hall Town Hall.

Carmichael was dying of prostate cancer and, as the two old friends
began to talk, they reminisced about the time they helped to register
thousands of formerly disfranchised voters.

"He made me promise to write my book," Mants said. "He told me, 'You
are the only one who really knows the story about what we did in
Lowndes County.'"

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