ORGANIZER 15
THE SOUTHERN CONFERENCE EDUCATIONAL FUND [THE GOOD REALITIES] HUNTER GRAY 6/18/02
ROLE OF COMMUNIST PARTY USA IN THE SOUTHERN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT OF MID-CENTURY -- AND MOVEMENT HISTORY [THREE POSTS BY HUNTER GRAY]
THE SOUTHERN CONFERENCE EDUCATIONAL FUND [THE GOOD REALITIES] HUNTER GRAY 6/18/02
The link posted earlier this morning on ASDnet
-- "SCEF and CPUSA" -- is
simply another instance of substantive misinformation. This is the case with
the post's "label" -- and the historical outline given by the link [from
whomever] is certainly replete with errors and omissions. The problems that
confronted a rapidly waning SCEF in the early 1970s and beyond had nothing
to do one way or the other with CPUSA -- which can certainly not be blamed
for those! These difficulties involved other groups and issues of which I,
frankly, know little.
Eldri and I, who had come into Mississippi in the ominous Summer of '61, left the South in
the Summer of '67 and went into the Pacific Northwest and then, for an academic year, to
Coe College in Iowa. From 1969 to 1973, I directed the large-scale grassroots
organization of block clubs and related groups [mostly Black, Puerto Rican, and Chicano]
on Chicago's very bloody South/Southwest Side. Also active in Native affairs and
issues on the Northside, we organized the long-enduring, all-Indian Native American
Community Organizational Training Center [of which I served for a number of
years as Chair -- doing so for some time after we left Chicago.] Later, we
were in Iowa again, then up-state New York, then the Navajo Nation -- and
then to the Northern Plains -- and now to Idaho. The organizing trail is
very much a Romany trail.
SCEF, very broadly Left in a completely non-sectarian
fashion, grew out of
the very fine Southern Conference on Human Welfare -- a courageous and
interracial group of Southern liberals and some radicals originating in the
New Deal era. SCEF had its most effective period from the onset of the 1950s
to the retirement of its excellent executive director, Jim Dombrowski, at
the end of 1965.
During that period, its splendid newspaper, The Southern Patriot, was very
capably edited by Alfred Maund and later by the equally capable Anne Braden.
[ Al Maund, a good friend of mine, is a noted Southern writer and author of
a great novel, The Big Boxcar, and was also editor of Labor's Daily and
later a key staffer of International Chemical Workers Union.] The SCEF
board was a fine interracial cross section of sensible Southern activists --
religious and labor and general social justice folk -- and its advisory
committee extended into Arizona. Aubrey Williams [a major Southern leader
with a highly placed New Deal background] served as its President for years
and was later succeeded by the Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth of Birmingham
[President of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights and National
Secretary of SCLC.]
My own activist links with SCEF began soon after Eldri and I arrived at
Tougaloo in the Summer of '61. Almost immediately I became Advisor to the
Jackson Youth Council of NAACP and a member of the board of directors of the
Mississippi State Conference of NAACP Branches. When we launched our
historic Jackson boycott in late 1962, SCEF -- especially through Jim and
Anne Braden and Carl Braden -- gave us a great deal of invaluable
assistance. The very effective Jackson Boycott Movement became, in due
organizing course, the massive and historic Jackson Movement in which youth
played a major role at all points. I was Chair of its Strategy Committee.
At the conclusion of the very hard-fought, super-dramatic and extremely
sanguinary Jackson Movement era, Jim Dombrowski offered me the position of
SCEF Field Organizer -- with the understanding that I could do my own thing
pretty much in any way I wished. I was pleased to accept. We set my salary
at the precise salary figure drawn from NAACP by my very good friend, the
recently murdered Medgar Evers: $6,500.00 with some expenses and benefits.
At the same time I joined SCEF, my very good friend, Miss Ella J. Baker,
founder and Advisor to SNCC [who had been SCLC's first Executive Director],
accepted Jim's offer of an ongoing position as Consultant. I was
instrumental, with Jim's enthusiastic concurrence, in securing the New York
law firm of Kunstler, Kunstler and Kinoy [known affectionately as KKK] as
SCEF's counsel. [Bill Kunstler had already represented me in several key
Mississippi cases.]
Much was certainly accomplished by SCEF during the next two years or so. I
worked in grassroots civil rights and anti-Klan organization in several very
hard-core Deep Southern areas. Ella played a critical role in liaison work
with SNCC and other projects and gave me much assistance at key points.
Carl Braden did a great deal of valuable, on-going work with Northern
supporters -- and was much involved in Appalachian affairs. A key
fund-raising role was carried by Howard Melish. Through The Southern
Patriot, Anne Braden reported Southern civil rights news -- much of which
would otherwise have been obscure -- to a national and international
audience and gave much media-linkage assistance to a wide variety of
grassroots civil rights projects.
Jim Dombrowski, severely crippled by illness [but he marched in the SCLC
demonstrations at Danville, Virginia], continued to very capably hold down
the SCEF national office on 822 Perdido Street, New Orleans. [My old
Chicano Mine-Mill companeros were always intrigued by that address since it,
of course, translates into "Nowhere."] During this period, we were
constantly Red-baited and attacked on many fronts -- including the notorious
Louisiana Un-American Activities Committee/State Police raid on the New
Orleans SCEF office in October 1963, the arrest of Jim and two other SCEF
officials, the seizure of the SCEF records -- and their illegal shipment by
train into Mississippi where they were then taken by Mississippi Senator Jim
Eastland and his U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. SCEF sued and,
in 1965, won a total victory at the USSC level: Dombrowski v. Pfister.
At the end of 1965, Jim retired as SCEF director and Anne
and Carl Braden
became co-directors. At the point Jim retired, Ella and I both left. She,
of course, continued to work with SNCC and related projects and I continued
my organizing work in the South -- in radical grassroots anti-poverty
activism [much support from Highlander Research and Education Center.] Ella
and I and Jim kept in very close touch, always, both during this period and
thereafter all the way through. Jim died at New Orleans in 1983 and Ella
passed away in NYC in 1986. I miss them much indeed.
After our departure, SCEF hired a much larger number of staff people than
had formerly been the case -- essentially on subsistence "Movement wages."
In time, internal difficulties developed.
The major SCEF papers are at State Historical Society of Wisconsin: Jim's
collected papers, those of the Bradens, and mine. [My papers are also held
by Mississippi Department of Archives and History.] An excellent biography
of Jim was done by another good friend of mine and I strongly recommend it:
Frank Adams' James A. Dombrowski: An American Heretic [Knoxville,
University of Tennessee Press, 1992.]
I have a fair amount of material on SCEF organizationally at our large
website www.hunterbear.org -- stemming from
our part of its extremely
productive period -- and a good deal relating to my own work as SCEF Field
Organizer. It all starts at this point
http://www.hunterbear.org/creative.htm
Fraternally -
Hunter Gray [ Hunterbear ]
www.hunterbear.org ( strawberry socialism )
Protected by NaŽshdoŽiŽbaŽiŽ
ROLE OF COMMUNIST PARTY USA IN THE SOUTHERN CIVIL
RIGHTS MOVEMENT OF MID-CENTURY -- AND MOVEMENT HISTORY [THREE POSTS BY HUNTER GRAY]
# 1 From ASDnet [copy to various lists]:
June 12, 2002
I am extremely cautious about most of the people, academic or otherwise, who
comment knowingly and often superciliously on the Southern Civil Rights
Movement but who were never actually there -- and, in some instances, have
absolutely no personal cognizance of the great epoch. There is no evidence
to connect Jack O'Dell [Hunter Pitts O'Dell], an aide of Martin King with
the Communist Party, nor anything to indicate any viable connection between
another King aide, Stanley Levison, and the CPUSA.
But, so what?
One excellent academic who spent a vast amount of time on the Movement --
with his major focus on its venomous FBI attackers -- is Professor Kenneth
O'Reilly, History, University of Alaska. Among his very solid works is
Racial Matters: The FBI's Secret File on Black America -- 1960-1972 [New
York: The Free Press, 1989.]
He states, on page 135: "In reality, there were few ties between the
Communist party and the civil rights movement and only one dusty connection
[Stanley Levison] serious enough to give reasonable men pause."
I recommend Ken's fine book -- 456 pages -- with which I, among many others, had some
considerable involvement. It's not hard at all to find.
===================================================================
[With respect to me -- then John R Salter, Jr -- he includes this
interesting paragraph which I'll take anytime as a solid character reference
[page 110]:
The FBI described Salter as "a chronic complainant," a "determined,
belligerent, and confused young man . . .[who] obviously does not like the
FBI, having without a doubt been influenced by the writings of LOWENTHAL" --
referring to the only critical book on the FBI written during the depths of
the domestic cold war. ]
====================================================================
And, in the end, what in Hell did it matter if someone had a connection with
the CPUSA? Or, if they do right now?
In an earlier era, the CPUSA -- along with the Socialist Party and other
groups -- made very significantly positive contributions in the struggle for
civil rights, civil liberties and industrial and sharecropper unionism Down
Behind the Cotton Curtain. All of those people risked their lives and
hides -- just like many, many of us did in the early and mid-'60s.
Our real enemies in Dixie were pervasive and strangling economic
exploitation and hideous racism and murderous violence -- and the so-called
"lawmen" [including FBI] and the Citizens Councils and the Klans,
Americans for the Preservation of the White Race and the Birchers, etc. et al.
Jack O'Dell and Stanley Levison -- like virtually everyone who really
soldiered in that Great Freedom War -- were very fine people indeed.
Red-baiting then was a sorry and vicious thing -- and now it's a sick thing
as well.
Fraternally -
Hunter Gray [ Hunterbear ]
www.hunterbear.org ( strawberry socialism )
Protected by NaŽshdoŽiŽbaŽiŽ
#2 From ASDnet [copy to various lists] June 12, 2002
A little more on this ASDnet issue, Leo [Casey], and that's it. My great companion,
my half-Bobcat is in heat, wants her walk, and there's always the rather
remote chance that a male Bobcat will jump forth from the close-by cedars
and provide the kittens we'd really like. We may have to find someone who
has a male Bobcat at stud -- but I'll still try the wild route. I doubt
there's anyone else on ASDnet, or any of these lists, who's dealing at this
time with this kind of challenge.
The issue of historical writing -- and as it pertains to the Southern
Movement -- is certainly worth some of my time at this point.
Taylor Branch, frankly, is not considered a "leading historian" of the
Southern Movement by academic historians or Movement people -- nor is he
even viewed as a historian of any kind. His stuff is a Washington Post
journalist's account, full of errors and omissions [some inadvertent and
some political] -- and he focuses, without really knowing much about the
man in depth, pretty much on Martin King. He also, and very carefully,
avoids any really direct challenge to the liberal establishment. Since he's
pro-Kennedy, Branch tried, some of us feel, to at least obliquely use the
vague and wispy "charges of Communism" against Jack O'Dell and
Stanley Levison to half-way justify Robert Kennedy's sorry covert work with J.
Edgar Hoover against Dr King.
His first book -- Parting the Waters -- with a good deal of pr hype, did
float for awhile -- but quite properly incurred much criticism from Movement
vets and established Movement historians. His second book flopped almost
immediately.
David Garrow, of course, is in an entirely different and far higher
dimension. He's a trained and careful and thoroughly honorable historian
and person. Much of his work is indeed solid. But I think, strongly, as do
others, that in his case -- and several comparable ones -- some
significant things were missed or/and misread since he was never in any
sense a Movement participant. There are things you pick up, you absorb,
from actually being submerged in a Cause and all of its steamy and chaotic
interaction year-after-year that can never been even remotely approximated
in a years-later academic setting.
Garrow's stuff is well worth reading and keeping -- but always with an
awareness that other perspectives are needed. [Garrow commented very
nicely, BTW, about my own book, Jackson Mississippi, around the Spring of
1990 or so, in an interesting article of his in The Progressive dealing
with Movement writing -- calling JM one of the best community-based Movement studies and
one that should be much better known than it was. I'm genuinely appreciative.]
Ken O'Reilly, the historian based at University of Alaska, who I mentioned
a little earlier this afternoon, spent, as his primary "vocation" as we
somewhat Catholics [O'Reilly, Casey I assume, and Gray] would put it, years
and years of intricate study on the FBI's attacks on the Movement. This was
his principal thing and he pursued it with intensity and -- albeit with
sometime good humour -- in a very focused fashion. He went through an
enormous amount of Movement material -- including a whole slew of
FOIA-secured FBI files [including mine.] And he came, again as I indicated
a bit ago, to the conclusion in his massive [456 page] and extremely
detailed Racial Matters: The FBI's Secret File on Black America -- 1960-1972
[New York: The Free Press, 1989] that:
"In reality, there were few ties between the Communist party and the civil
rights movement and only one dusty connection [Stanley Levison] serious
enough to give reasonable men pause." [Page 135]
One of the newly developed mines that came even in the several years
following much of Garrow's work, has been this great array of FOIA-recovered
FBI files of Movement activists -- and also, very importantly, a large
number of very rich oral histories [ Social Action Collection at State
Historical Society of Wisconsin, Southern Historical Collection at UNC,
Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Martin Luther King Center at
Atlanta, and many more indeed.] In addition, there have been many donations
of papers by Movement activists -- and also more books by Movement people.
Garrow certainly used what he could. But somewhat newer historians, such as
O'Reilly and John Dittmer and others, have been able to use these resources
to the hilt. Taylor Branch, who could have, used relatively little of any of
this stuff.
Berta Green, from New York City, and a great person, was a Trotskyist. She
set up the very effective and very broadly Left defense committee for the
framed up and railroaded victims of the Monroe, North Carolina situation --
where a sensibly armed Black community repelled a substantial attack from
heavily armed Klansmen in 1961. She asked me to serve on that committee --
Committee to Aid the Monroe Defendants -- and I was delighted to do so. All
sorts of traveling visitors came to our home and stayed for a day or two or
three: many fellow Movement activists, all kinds of radicals, liberal and
left journalists, FOR students of non-violence et al. One visitor, who came
twice, was a very nice person, George Meyers, National Labor Secretary of
CPUSA -- who was interested in "What's happening down here?" and we filled
him in, and fed him, as we did everyone. He was an excellent gardener up in
Baltimore -- and visited with Eldri on that topic far into the night while
I, an early riser who had to hit the road at dawn, sacked in early.
A couple of final points:
It's a bit odd to hear a DSA'er [yourself] disparage the "on the scene"
civil rights experiences and insights of anyone -- but certainly someone
like myself who is a trained sociologist, who entered the Southern Movement
as an already experienced but politically unaffiliated Leftist, and who was
extremely involved in those major, highly significant six Dixie years in
which I soldiered. That era -- '61 well into '67 -- marked the major
Movement high water period and great transition in the hard-core South. You
learn things, consciously and unconsciously about a Movement [and about
oneself] in a six year red-hot Crucible that you'll never find anywhere
else -- and certainly not in a university library or in any archive. It is
like military combat in many ways. Or, too, like forest fire fighting.
My other point is to simply reiterate that, in those intense and
blood-dimmed and very, very turbulent years, I never met anyone who was
CPUSA in the Southern Movement. There is no reason to believe that, had
they been there, they'd have been anything except sensitive and receptive to
the will of the Movement. But no outside group of any kind -- any kind at
all -- could have "controlled" or "dominated" or even
"influenced" something as wild and chaotic as the Great Southern Movement. Martin King knew that
very well indeed. "There go my people," he often said, "and I must
run to catch up with them."
He said it well and very accurately. It was a hell of a great River -- a
River of No Return.
Yours In The Faith - Hunterbear
Hunter Gray [ Hunterbear ]
www.hunterbear.org ( strawberry socialism )
Protected by NaŽshdoŽiŽbaŽiŽ
----- Original Message -----
From: "Leo Casey" <LeoCasey@aol.com>
To: <asdnet@igc.topica.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 12, 2002 7:34 PM
Subject: RE: [ASDnet] O'Dell and Levison of SCLC [and "Communism"]
> David Garrow and Taylor Branch are the two leading historians of the
> American civil rights movement, and both write from a perspective
> completely sympathetic to the movement. Garrow dedicated a whole
book to the subject under discussion here. But we are supposed to ignore their
research, and the evidence they supply for their conclusions, on behalf
of an argument that can only say "I was there." I don't think so.
>
> Leo Casey
>
#3 From ASDnet [copy to various lists] June 13, 2002
Nathan Newman's short post of this morning leads me to make a few final
comments. I covered matters relating the Southern Movement and the
Communist Party USA rather thoroughly yesterday and suggest that, if you
didn't read those carefully -- do.
I have organized [often teaching in conjunction with that] very effectively
from about 1955 to the present moment. When I came into the South in '61, I
was already a reasonably well established, ecumenically-oriented
independent Left radical. I was also and still am a person who has no
problem at all with people being members of the Communist Party USA -- or
most other radical groups.
I worked very actively and with great intensity in the Southern Movement
from 1961 well into 1967. And I worked in many challenging sections of the
South, worked with a wide variety of organizations, went to many many
meetings, and met countless Southern Movement civil rights people at all
levels. From the time I entered the South, I maintained close relations with
the excellent left-wing Southern Conference Educational Fund [ the
rechristened Southern Conference on Human Welfare], whose New Orleans-based director was
an old friend, Jim Dombrowski -- and, for a very significant stretch of important
time, I served as SCEF Field Organizer. SCEF overlapped with SCLC and SNCC and had excellent relations with Highlander as
well. [My very large website www.hunterbear.org
has much material from my Southern work as well as from my other organizing campaigns since the
mid-1950s. I have also lectured and taught extensively on all of this,
written a great deal -- including a well-received book, given a number of
extensive oral histories, contributed my collected papers etc.]
In all of that time, I met no one -- in the Southern Movement -- who was
known to me as a member of CPUSA. There were older people, in the Movement, who had been
CP members [including some of the older Guild lawyers] -- but who were, for whatever
reasons, no longer. [I don't ask questions.] There were, I'm sure, CPUSA members sprinkled
in some of the larger Southern cities -- but there weren't really a great many CPUSA
members anywhere in the United States itself by 1960.
Unbelievably cruel repression from the late '40s onward and profound
factionalism [e.g., 1957] had taken their grim toll. CPUSA certainly was
involved in things in other parts of the country -- on civil rights speaking
trips outside the South, I would occasionally meet their people at
gatherings, along with all sorts of other supporters -- but the CPUSA had
lost its base in the South by the time the [relatively] contemporary
Southern Movement emerged in the late '50s.
In the brutally repressive atmosphere engendered by the Cold War, the CP
units that were more isolated and less secure were the first to break up or
their remnants driven "underground". That included, for example, Arizona
[when I was still in high school] and it certainly included the basic South.
Jack Newfield [of Village Voice] came out with an interesting book about
1967: A Prophetic Minority: the American New Left. This, among other
things, makes the point that CPUSA entered the '60s with no involvement in
the Southern struggle and did not develop any. Whatever his ideological
perspective, that's an accurate assessment.
There were some Trotskyists in the South during the Movement period and, as
I mentioned yesterday, I worked with the very fine Berta Green [of New York]
as a member of her broadly left Committee to Aid the Monroe Defendants.
Progressive Labor made a few efforts to build a Southern base but got
absolutely nowhere. We enjoyed having George Meyers, National Labor
Secretary of CPUSA, as our houseguest on two occasions -- but he came only
as one of many visitors seeking to learn "What's happening?"
No one that I knew anywhere in the Southern Movement then saw Jack O'Dell or Stanley
Levison as then being Communists -- during the basic period of the
Southern Movement [late '50s well into the '60s.]
Yesterday, my initial post on this matter said this early on -- and I had to
repeat it a couple of times thereafter:
"In an earlier era, the CPUSA -- along with the Socialist Party and other
groups -- made very significantly positive contributions in the struggle for
civil rights, civil liberties and industrial and sharecropper unionism Down
Behind the Cotton Curtain. All of those people risked their lives and
hides -- just like many, many of us did in the early and mid-'60s."
[Hunterbear]
What's the lesson in all of this? I'll mention two.
First, it's very regrettable that there were so few "bridge people" between
the older Left with its vast reservoir of experience and insight -- and that
Left which emerged as the Sixties progressed. I had the perspective of
old-time Wobblies and industrial union vets of the Rocky Mountain setting --
but I was still relatively young myself when I entered Mississippi in that
ominous Summer of '61. Hopefully, next time around -- which is much upon us
now -- we'll have all sorts of sensibly manifested Lines Across the Years.
We all need each other more than ever before.
Secondly, back in May, I posted a piece on Red Scares and civil liberties in
the context of our rapidly burgeoning and hideous current crisis. Here are
two of my paragraphs from that piece of mine -- and, with those, I shall
close:
==================================================================
"But civil libertarian approaches back in the Last Red Scare could often be
very dangerously relativistic in many quarters: Communists -- and
Trotskyists -- were among those frequently consigned to limbo and left to
fend for themselves by the civil liberties "respectables", as were often
those simply alleged to be CPUSA or SWP. In some instances, renegade
academics such as Sidney Hook, pandering to the witch-hunting forces, took
the position that CPs, for example, had no right to teach and should be
given no civil liberties protection whatsoever. This was more than a
slippery slope. It proved to be a skid road right over the very steep
canyon wall. The ACLU copped out badly in those years -- leading to the
formation, by Harvey O'Connor and Corliss Lamont and others, of the
effective Emergency Civil Liberties Committee [later the National Emergency
Civil Liberties Committee.]
Organize, fight, and continue organizing and fighting -- on all fronts -- is
the only way in which these dark, stifling clouds and their lethal lightning
can ever be driven from the sky: hopefully forever. But this time around,
let's hope that "an injury to one is an injury to all" has really genuine
flesh and bones and feathers on it -- and teeth in it! -- and produces
effective and supportive action to all victims of the witch-hunters, whoever
and whatever they are. " Hunter [Hunterbear]
==================================================================
Fraternally and In Solidarity -
Hunter Gray [ Hunterbear ]
www.hunterbear.org ( strawberry socialism )
Protected by NaŽshdoŽiŽbaŽiŽ