#klansman without hoods | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

antoine-roquentin · 5 years

Text

ON NOVEMBER 3, 1979, a caravan of neo-Nazis and Klansmen fired upon a communist-organized “Death to the Klan” rally at a black housing project in Greensboro, North Carolina. Five protestors died—four white men and one black woman—and many more were injured. Fourteen Klansmen and neo-Nazis faced murder, conspiracy, and felony riot charges. Although three news cameras captured the identity and actions of the Klan and neo-Nazi shooters, all-white juries acquitted the defendants in state and federal criminal trials. A civil suit returned only partial justice. The Greensboro confrontation heralded a paramilitary white power movement mobilized for violence, and also revealed a legal system broadly unprepared to convict its perpetrators.1

The shooting at the Greensboro rally was the logical extension of post–Vietnam War paramilitary culture and a series of increasingly violent clashes between the fractious radical left and the nascent white power movement. Sharing a common story of the Vietnam War, disparate Klan and neo-Nazi factions united around white supremacy and anticommunism, and sustained the groundswell by circulating and sharing images, personnel, weapons, and money. In 1979, North Carolina Klansmen had recently discovered a new leader in David Duke. His Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (KKKK), gaining momentum nationwide, had just secured a local foothold in an area with a long tradition of Klan activity and with other active Klan factions. In February, Duke himself came to Winston-Salem to screen Birth of a Nation. The 1915 film depicts Klansmen as heroically saving the South—embodied by white women threatened by interracial sex—from the ravages of blacks and northern carpetbaggers during Reconstruction.2

While neither the post–Vietnam War KKKK nor the white power movement was primarily southern, the film’s invocation of the lost Civil War had particular resonance in North Carolina. For the South, the Vietnam War was not the only American defeat at play in the popular imagination, nor the only war that needed to be reengaged. Indeed, one illustration published in the Alabama-based KKKK newspaper White Patriot portrayed a Confederate veteran standing in formation with a Vietnam War–era Green Beret and a third man wearing a Klan hood.3 At the time of Duke’s visit in 1979, the KKKK showed signs of a southern membership surge as well as openness to new alliances: people wearing Nazi armbands, for instance, attended an exhibit of Klan artifacts at a county library in Winston-Salem.4

At the same moment, an attack waged by Invisible Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan upon black civil rights marchers in Decatur, Alabama, modeled a Klan strategy of forming armed caravans to carry out violence.5 The Decatur altercation wounded four black demonstrators and resulted in a local ordinance prohibiting guns within 1,000 feet of public demonstrations. The Invisible Empire responded by driving a caravan of vehicles past the mayor’s house: “If You Want Our Guns, Come and Get Them,” one sign read. The local police chief made no arrests, unsure if the ordinance applied to a moving caravan of cars. The Invisible Empire, helmed by Bill Wilkinson, famously didn’t get along with several other Klan factions. Nevertheless, an increasing circulation of newspapers and other printed ephemera had begun to link these groups, and articles about the Decatur clash appeared in Klan and neo-Nazi publications as well as in the mainstream press. The incident foreshadowed the caravan of Klansmen and neo-Nazis that would gun down protestors in Greensboro months later.6

In July 1979, local members of the Federated Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party arranged another screening of Birth of a Nation. This time they chose a community center in the small, working-class town of China Grove, North Carolina, about sixty miles from Greensboro.7 Members of the Workers Viewpoint Organization (WVO)—which soon changed its name to the Communist Workers Party (CWP)—organized a rally and march in protest. A hundred self-proclaimed communists as well as black community members stormed the community center, armed with clubs. While Klansmen and Nazis stood on the porch with shotguns, a few policemen managed to keep the groups from attacking each other. The Klansmen retreated into the building as protestors damaged the structure and burned a Confederate flag.8

The scene was remarkably similar to the final sequence in Birth of a Nation, in which the southern family hides in a small cabin as the town is, as the intertitles say, “given over to crazed negroes … brought in to overawe the whites.” As the “black mob” and the carpetbaggers wreak havoc in town, tarring and feathering Klan sympathizers and attempting to force an interracial marriage, those in the cabin are trapped, hopelessly besieged, until a large cadre of robed Klansmen rescues them, accompanied by the strains of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”9

No such rescue party appeared in China Grove. Klansmen experienced the protest as a direct attack. The women huddled in the bathrooms as the men defended the building, vowing revenge. Several Klansmen would later study photographs of the China Grove demonstrators to choose whom to “beat up” in Greensboro on November 3. In the moments before the fatal shooting, a news camera would capture neo-Nazi Milano Caudle murmuring “China Grove” as he drove past the demonstrators, evoking that earlier clash just before the shooting began.10

The CWP, on the other hand, saw China Grove as a success. A Maoist Communist group that advocated political violence, the CWP was largely composed of young, earnest white and Jewish outsiders, many from New York. Several had left jobs as doctors at Duke Hospital to unionize textile factory workers in nearby Greensboro, choosing the town because of its low unionization and the persistent problem of brown lung disease acquired from inhaling cotton fibers. The group also included black activists long involved with the local civil rights movement. While the WVO / CWP claimed a long alliance with the black community in Greensboro, it was a complicated relationship characterized by misunderstanding. Black residents would later express their frustration that the CWP had turned their neighborhood into a site of confrontation without their consent. WVO / CWP leaders claimed China Grove as a victory, ignoring the fears of future violence the confrontation had raised for many group and community members. Following several other Maoist and radical left groups nationwide, the CWP took the official position that organizing against the Klan required aggressive confrontation. They mobilized against what they called a southern Klan resurgence, and against the impact such a movement might have on unionizing and racial cooperation.11

The Klan was, indeed, in the midst of a major membership surge. According to watchdogs, the Klan had been 6,500 strong in 1975 but by 1979 had increased to 10,000 active members plus an additional 75,000 active sympathizers. Duke, at the peak of his popularity on the talk-show circuit, boasted that the KKKK had doubled its membership between March 1978 and March 1979. A Gallup poll, furthermore, showed that the number of people with favorable opinions of the Klan rose from 6 percent in 1965 to 11 percent in 1979.12

While the local community and national press perceived people on both sides of the Greensboro confrontation as dangerous and violent extremists, they also remained deeply engaged in the anticommunism of the Cold War. The Greensboro community, including local media, saw the Klansmen as local boys defending the status quo and the communists as anarchist outsiders who came to town to make trouble. The communists, with their openly revolutionary agenda, were understood as traitorous, radical, and dangerous in a way that Klansmen were not.

The Greensboro shooting was the culmination of almost two years of intense antagonism and repeated clashes between white power groups and the radical left. In July 1978, Tom Metzger, Grand Dragon of the KKKK in California, encountered left-wing opposition when the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and Committee Against Racism (CAR) tried to forcibly prevent Metzger’s Klan from screening Birth of a Nation in an Oxnard, California, community center. According to the KKKK newspaper Crusader, the communists had come to the screening prepared for a fight: “PLP / CAR put over nine police in the hospital, swinging lead pipes rolled in Challenge newspapers.” The Los Angeles Times reported that forty leftist demonstrators had charged the community center, wielding clubs, bottles, and pipes. Police arrested thirteen demonstrators for incitement to riot, assaulting police officers, carrying concealed weapons, and refusing to disperse. Between 180 and 300 more demonstrators—characterized by local police as “mostly Mexican-Americans”—remained on the street, shouting “Death to the Klan, Death to the Klan!” One Klansman, blindsided by a protestor’s lead pipe, suffered a broken nose and lost teeth, according to police. Three law enforcement officers and four demonstrators also sustained serious injuries, and seven more policemen reported minor wounds.13

Similar incidents across the country showed rising tension between the left and the nascent white power movement. In August, leftists attacked neo-Nazi Michael Breda in Kansas City as he was giving a radio interview—twelve to fifteen men with clubs and pipes broke into the radio station and beat Breda and another member of his group, the American White People’s Party. Although the attack lasted less than a minute, Breda and two radio station employees suffered significant head and shoulder injuries. A member of the International Committee Against Racism and the Revolutionary Communists Progressive Labor Party—iterations of CAR and PLP—took credit for the beating. Breda told the Los Angeles Times that the same thing had happened during a Houston radio interview.14

The next summer, Klansmen gathered in Little Rock, Arkansas. They intended to stage a counterdemonstration to some 1,200 to 1,500 mostly black men and women protesting the rape conviction of a mentally disabled black man. The event stirred memories of the civil rights movement: Little Rock had seen some of its most tumultuous moments around the integration of the city’s Central High School in 1957, when federal troops were called in to keep order. As the Chicago Tribune reported of the 1979 march, “To preclude violence … state and city officials sent in extra men and firepower, including 230 state troopers, a full platoon of Alabama National Guardsmen, two armored personnel carriers, and police from surrounding communities armed with AR-15 semiautomatic rifles and pump-action shotguns.” This intense armament foreshadowed another burgeoning paramilitary culture in the escalating militarization of civilian policing.15

Two months later, some forty members of Metzger’s Klan met to discuss “illegal aliens and Vietnamese boat people and communists and other things” in Castro Valley, California. Thirty chanting and stone-throwing CAR members stormed the meeting to break it up. The Klan swiftly responded with a fifteen-man contingent armed with clubs and plywood shields, dubbed the “Klan Bureau of Investigation.” Sheriff’s deputies broke up the fight, which resulted in only one minor injury. The speed of the Klan response showed both an escalation from the Oxnard confrontation the previous year and the expansion of group activities throughout California. Although Metzger had militarized his operation as early as 1974 through the Klan Border Watch and other activities, the California KKKK was now regularly prepared for violent confrontation at public events.16

As violence came to the fore of the movement, distinctions among white power factions melted away. Klansmen and neo-Nazis set aside their differences, which had been articulated largely by World War II veterans with strong anti-Nazi feelings, as the Vietnam War became their dominant shared frame.17 White men prepared for a war against communists, blacks, and other enemies. As one Klansman said just after the China Grove altercation, “I see a war, actual combat, eventually between the left-wing element and the right wing.”18

Klansmen and neo-Nazis united against communism at the same moment that elements of the left fractured and collapsed under the pressure of internal divisions and government infiltration. In Greensboro, for instance, the CWP competed locally with the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party. The members of each group refused to speak to each other and more than once came to blows while attempting to unionize the same textile mill.19

In contrast, white power activists bound by paramilitarism also developed a cohesive social movement managed through intimate social ties. Intermarriages connected key white power groups, and Christian Identity and Dualist pastors provided marriage counseling. White power activists, who often traveled with their families, stayed at each other’s homes and cared for each other’s children. They participated in weddings and other social rituals and depended on others in the movement for help and for money when arrested. They founded schools to teach their ideas. The Dualist Mountain Church, for instance, hung Nazi flags and performed cross-burnings, but also held “namegivings,” weddings, “consolamentum” ceremonies for the sick, and last rites.20

In September 1979, two months before the Greensboro shooting, about 100 neo-Nazis, National States’ Rights Party members, and Klansmen of various groups convened in Louisburg, North Carolina. Leroy Gibson, convicted in 1974 of two civil-rights-era Klan bombings, organized the meeting. Gibson, who claimed twenty years of service in the Marine Corps, said that 90 percent of his faction, the Rights of White People, was composed of veterans. Gibson described paramilitary training and free instruction for local high school students. Harold Covington, leader of the National Socialist Party of America, spoke of Nazi paramilitary training camps in two North Carolina counties. “Piece by piece, bit by bit, we are going to take back this country!” he said, holding aloft an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.21 A rope noose was strung from a tree outside the lodge “for purely inspirational purposes,” as Klan Grand Dragon Gorrell Pierce told an Associated Press reporter.22 Many activists attended the meeting heavily armed.

Participants called the rally the first North Carolina meeting of Klansmen and neo-Nazis, although the groups had begun cooperating as early as February. Activists understood how World War II affected relations between their groups. “You take a man who fought in the Second World War, it’s hard for him to sit down in a room full of swastikas,” Pierce said. “But people realize time is running out. We’re going to have to get together. We’re like hornets. We’re more effective when we’re organized.” Pierce argued that urgent threats—particularly communism—required Nazis and Klansmen to band together.23 They named their coalition the United Racist Front and pledged to share resources.

Shifting from the openly segregationist language of the civil rights era to a discourse in which anticommunism was used as an alibi for racism, Klansmen spoke publicly of race as a secondary concern. “The one thread that links all Klan factions and other extreme right-wing groups such as Nazis is hatred of communists,” one Associated Press article reported just after the shooting. “Blacks, they say, are pawns of communism, and integration is merely one salvo in the communist battle to destroy the United States.”24

This strategy drew on a long history of Klan rhetoric that intertwined racial equality, communism, labor organization, immigration, anti-imperialism, and internationalism as threats to the “100 percent American” nationalism early Klans sought to defend. Such ideas were linked not only in Klan rhetoric but also on the left. In Alabama, for instance, the Communist Party attempted in the 1930s to mobilize the same groups targeted by Klan vigilantism and harassment. Communists called the Jim Crow South an oppressed nation, pushed for black self-determination, decried lynching, and defended black men accused of rape. They organized for shorter workdays, better labor conditions, and the right of tenant farmers to engage in collective bargaining. Those who opposed communism in the South—not only the Klan, but many southerners—explicitly associated communism with free love, assaults on the family and on the church, homosexuality, the idea of white women becoming public property, and the threat of interracial sex. In this way, communism and unionization were seen as threats to the white supremacist racial order, which the Klan purported to defend.25

In the days before the Greensboro shooting, the men who would join the caravan papered the North Carolina city with posters of a lynched body in silhouette, hanging from a tree. Part of the caption read “It’s time for old-fashioned American Justice.” (Four years later, the same language and graphic would appear on a poster for Posse Comitatus in the Midwest. The Posse would use the Klan graphic in 1983 to encourage its members to stockpile guns and ammunition in preparation for white revolution. The flier promoted its own circulation: “Reprint permission granted,” it read. “Pass on to a friend.”)26

When the Klan and Nazi caravan drove to Greensboro on November 3, its members expected to wage war on communists. The CWP prepared for confrontation as well, anticipating the brawling that had characterized such clashes in previous years. Several communists wore hard hats. Others armed themselves with police clubs and sticks of firewood. Some brought small guns to the demonstration, though these were mostly left in locked cars.27

But the United Racist Front in North Carolina, following the movement at large, had outfitted itself as a paramilitary force. White power activists brought three handguns, two rifles, three shotguns, nunchucks, hunting knives, brass knuckles, ax handles, clubs, chains, tear gas, and mace. Roland Wayne Wood, a neo-Nazi who had served as a Green Beret in Vietnam, had a tear gas grenade, possibly stolen from nearby Fort Bragg; he wore his army boots. They had packed several dozen eggs for heckling and “a .22 cal revolver as fresh as the eggs—a receipt for its purchase was with it.” This implied that the Klansmen and Nazis armed themselves particularly for the November 3 confrontation, with plans to use the guns. They also had two semiautomatic handguns and an AR-180 semiautomatic rifle, a civilian version of a military assault rifle. The Vietnam War’s guns and uniforms framed this attack, much as the war’s narrative framed the larger movement.28

Significantly, although the Vietnam War had also impacted the left, the militarization of the left never matched that of the paramilitary right, in part because of the right’s cultural embrace of weapons and in part because of the matériel and active-duty personnel that the white power movement continued to draw from the U.S. Armed Forces. Veterans led leftist groups like the CWP, continuing a legacy of protest and armed self-defense begun by veterans of color who participated in civil rights, armed self-defense, and other left movements after homecoming. In Greensboro, one of the CWP leaders, Nelson Johnson, was a local black activist who had fought in Vietnam. While some on the left advocated radical activism in the name of anti-colonial self-determination, however, many wavered on the use of violence.29

On the sunny Saturday morning of November 3, 1979, CWP members arrived in Greensboro’s Morningside Homes, a black housing project, to stage their widely publicized “Death to the Klan” demonstration. Three television news crews arrived. At a rally preceding the march, protestors—along with a number of children wearing red berets—milled around the intersection, singing protest songs and burning a Klansman in effigy. While the group expected confrontation during the march, they did not expect it at the rally. And, due to a series of command decisions and miscommunications, local police had not provided on-site protection, but instead stationed their cars and personnel several blocks away.30

Meanwhile, Klansmen and Nazis convened at a member’s home and talked about “getting into some fistfights” with the communists. Caudle showed people a military machine gun and told them he could get more for $280 each. Spurred on by Eddie Dawson, a longtime Klansman and sometime FBI informant, they grabbed guns and formed a caravan of cars. They intended to picket the march, taunting and throwing eggs, but they also brought the guns and planned to use them if necessary. As Klansman Mark Sherer would later testify, “By the time the Klan caravan left … it was generally understood that our plan was to provoke the Communists and blacks into fighting and to be sure that when the fighting broke out the Klan and the Nazis would win. We were prepared to win any physical confrontation between the two sides.”31

As the caravan of cars approached, a news camera zoomed in, refocusing on a Confederate flag license plate. The protestors took up the chant: “Death to the Klan, death to the Klan.” People in the caravan screamed racial slurs. A young black man yelled, “Get up,” beckoning at the Klansmen and Nazis in the cars. A black demonstrator hit a car with a stick as it accelerated at him; the car swerved wildly at the demonstrators. A teenage white girl shouted from one of the cars, calling the protestors “kikes” and “nigger-lovers.” In a pickup truck, Sherer, smiling, hung out of the front window and fired the first shot in the air, with a powder pistol. The air turned heavy with blue smoke. Another Klansman fired, also pointing his shotgun in the air. Sherer fired twice more, claiming later that these shots hit the ground and a parked car.32

A young Klansman yelled into the CB radio, “My wife’s in one of those cars!”33 Klansmen and neo-Nazis climbed out of the vehicles and ran toward the intersection. The groups met, fighting with fists and sticks.34 CWP member Sandi Smith screamed for someone to get the children out of the way; a black woman, eight months pregnant, lost her balance and fell while trying to run away, her legs pelted with birdshot.35 CWP member Jim Waller retrieved a fellow protestor’s shotgun from a parked car, pulled it up, and aimed it at Klansman Roy Toney. They struggled, and the gun fired twice.36

As the shots continued, a few communist protestors reached for their handguns. Caudle climbed out of his powder-blue Ford Fairlane and walked calmly around to the trunk, from which he distributed shotguns, rifles, and semiautomatic weapons to six men. One of these men, Klansman Jerry Paul Smith—a cigarette dangling from his lower lip—dropped one knee to the ground, a gun in each hand, as he fired into the panicking crowd. Others took aim and shot, over and over. One gunman, a survivor remembered, passed up a clean shot at a white woman in order to kill Sandi Smith, a black woman, instead.37 Klansman Dave Matthews, firing buckshot, would later recount, “I got three of ’em”;38 neo-Nazi Roland Wayne Wood, who had a 12-gauge pump shotgun, would claim, “I hit four of the five that were killed and wounded six more.”39 Three minutes after the first shot, twelve Klansmen and neo-Nazis, including Jerry Paul Smith, Wood, Matthews, Harold Flowers, Terry Hartsoe, and Michael Clinton, climbed into a yellow van and drove away. The police didn’t arrive until the gunfire had subsided and the yellow van had fled the scene. By then, five protestors lay dead or mortally wounded; as many as seven more protestors and one Klansman were injured, and damage to the Morningside Homes community would reverberate across generations.40 The dead included Cesar Cauce, shot by a .357 Magnum in the neck, heart, and lungs. Michael Nathan had “half his head shot off.” Jim Waller lay dead with fifteen bullets in his body. Bill Sampson was shot in the heart; Sandi Smith was shot between the eyes. Paul Bermanzohn, who survived, was shot twice in the head and once in the arm. He underwent major brain surgery and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.41

Despite the threats and altercations leading up to the clash, the shooting took Greensboro by surprise. A town of textile mills, rapidly developing Greensboro had a reputation for progressivism but low rates of unionization. The city prided itself on its civil rights history—the Woolworth’s of the first lunch counter sit-in of the civil rights movement, in 1960, would become a designated landmark downtown. Greensboro’s civil rights record, however, turned on a “progressive mystique” that placed a premium on civility, consensus, and paternalism. While protestors experienced a notably lower level of violence in the Carolinas than in the Deep South, North Carolina was still a stronghold of civil-rights-era Klan activity.42

The Greensboro shooting briefly garnered national attention, making Time, Newsweek, and the front pages of several major papers including the Boston Globe, Miami Herald, New York Times, and Times-Picayune. President Jimmy Carter ordered an investigation into Klan resurgence on November 5, and his press secretary announced that a special unit of twenty-five FBI agents had been assigned to the case. Also on November 5, however, the Iran hostage crisis took the front page and held it for some fourteen months. Greensboro became a strange aside, lost in the inner pages of national newspapers.43

But within the white power movement, Greensboro served to energize activists. A few months later, Metzger’s KKKK organized another march in Oceanside, California. Local police had to separate Klansmen from counterprotestors, who shouted “Death to the Klan!” as both sides threw rocks and bottles. Klansmen kicked and beat one member of the Revolutionary Socialist League until blood covered his head and face.44 As they marched, wielding bats, the Klansmen sang a song to the tune of “Sixteen Tons” that lauded the altercation in Greensboro and ended with the refrain, “If the Nazis don’t get you, a Klansman will.”45 The U.S. Department of Justice marked 1979 as a particularly violent year, noting that serious Klan violence had increased 450 percent.46

The movement drew on anticommunism to classify that violence as self-defense. Klansmen and neo-Nazis involved in the November 3 shooting almost uniformly invoked the Vietnam War to justify their actions. As Klansman Virgil Griffin—the Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire KKKK, who had brought a semiautomatic handgun to the November 3 march47—said in a public statement long after the shooting:

I think every time a senator or a congressman walks by the Vietnam Wall, they ought to hang their damn heads in shame for allowing the Communist Party to be in this country. Our boys went over there fighting communism, came back here and got off the planes, and them … that they call the CWP was out there spitting on them, calling them babykillers, cursing them. If the city and Congress had been worth a damn, they would’ve told them soldiers turn your guns on them, we whupped Communists over there, we’ll whup it in the United States and clean it up here.48

Griffin saw the Vietnam War not only as a war between nations but also as a universal, man-to-man conflict between communists and anticommunists. He had tried three times to enlist, he said, but doctors declared him unfit for duty because of his asthma. Griffin’s Vietnam War, real to him, was in the realm of a popular narrative. Within that story, he equated all antiwar protestors with the CWP and all veterans with the Klan.49

Michael Clinton, a Klansman who rode in the yellow van on November 3, had a good record of army service, his wife told a reporter. He was drawn into the Klan because of its anticommunism and its paramilitarism. And the wife of caravan member Harold Flowers, the only Klansman injured on November 3, expressed her anticommunism as a common view: “Everybody has concerns.”50

Following the shooting, the local district attorney’s office pressed charges against all fourteen of the Nazis and Klansmen who had been arrested after the melee. Charges included four counts of first-degree murder, one count of felony riot, and one count of conspiracy.

The defendants called upon the Vietnam War story to raise money for their defense. Several of the men from the caravan posed for a photograph in front of the local Vietnam War memorial. The signed photo circulated in the Thunderbolt under the heading “Dangerous Communists Killed” and was reprinted in other white power publications. In an attempt to raise money for the defense and awareness for their cause, the photo also appeared in the Talon, a white power periodical that made its way—free of charge—to prison inmates.51

Trial proceedings began on August 4, 1980, and from the outset reflected the entrenched racism of the North Carolina judicial system. The allowance of peremptory challenges—dismissal of jurors without explanation—meant that the defense could easily select an all-white jury. With fourteen people on trial, the defense had a total of eighty-four peremptory challenges to use at its discretion: defense attorneys dismissed fifteen black jurors for cause and another sixteen peremptorily. This system so clearly produced racially biased juries that North Carolina would abolish it in 1986.52 In this case, it ensured a jury sympathetic to the defendants.

The all-white jurors were all Christian and therefore likely to be fundamentally opposed to communism, understood in 1979 as a threat to any organized religion and, in the South, tinged with the threat of race mixing. Jurors repeatedly voiced anticommunist rhetoric. Foreman Octavio Manduley, who had fled Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the 1960s, spoke frequently to the press about his strident anticommunism, allegedly telling a reporter that the CWP was like “any other Communist organization” and needed “publicity and a martyr.” He implied that the CWP had staged the November 3 altercation with the intention of getting one of its members killed in order to bring attention to its cause. His view resonated with a summary presented in the Thunderbolt: “The hitch came when they got more martyrs than they intended.” The Thunderbolt also reported that Manduley called the Klan “a patriotic organization.”53

Manduley quickly became a favorite of the white power movement, held up as an example of white, anticommunist, first-wave Cuban immigration. Slain CWP member and fellow Cuban Cesar Cauce, on the other hand, was painted as “a pro-Castro enemy agent” of questionable whiteness. Cauce had come to the United States later than Manduley; the Thunderbolt claimed Cauce was “on the first boatlift of so-called refugees. Fidel Castro used the boatlift to empty his prisons and insane asylums of thousands of undesirables to further destabilize America for his planned communist overthrow of the U.S. Government in the future.” This passage conflated Cauce’s arrival with the 1980 Mariel boatlift, which Castro had indeed used to move inmates to the United States. The white power focus on immigrants as communists and as threats to whiteness was a thread that connected the Greensboro shootings to the Klan harassment of Vietnamese refugees on the Texas Coast.54

Although later proceedings would cast doubt on whether Manduley had really expressed views that the Klan was “patriotic” and the neo-Nazis were “strongly patriotic,” at least one juror did make those comments.55 Other jurors and potential jurors expressed sympathy with the defendants or distrust of the CWP. One prospective juror said of the gunmen, “I don’t believe that they were guilty of anything but poor shooting.” Another said of the slain, “I think we are better off without them.”56 One juror, the wife of a sheriff’s deputy, commented after the not-guilty verdict, “I’m really worried about the spread of communism.”57 A man who was chosen as an alternate juror said he believed that it was less of a crime to kill a communist than to kill someone else. According to the Thunderbolt, another juror “stated that the communists got themselves in too deep when they challenged the Klan to attend their ‘Death to the Klan’ rally.… The Klansmen were simply the superior marksmen.”58

Those responsible for the prosecution of the gunmen also reportedly expressed prejudice. Even district attorney Mike Schlosser drew connections between peacetime communist protestors in North Carolina and communist soldiers abroad; when asked by a reporter about his ability to objectively prosecute the Klan and neo-Nazi gunmen, Schlosser referenced his own experience fighting in Vietnam and added, “And you know who my adversaries were there.” In another public comment, Schlosser reportedly said that the Greensboro community felt the CWP members got what they deserved.59

Besides the anticommunism that framed the proceedings, the state trial failed to take into account the role of two government informants who had foreknowledge of the Greensboro shooting and may have actively incited the altercation. Neither prosecution nor defense called them as witnesses. Two other key witnesses against the white power activists also refused to testify because of their fear of reprisal, surrounded as they were by a paramilitary and demonstrably lethal white power movement.60

Public distrust of the CWP mobilized sympathy for the white power gunmen. Furthermore, CWP members repeatedly undermined their chance at what justice the court could offer. Several of the women widowed on November 3 confounded the Greensboro community when, instead of weeping or grieving, they stood with their fists raised and declared to the television cameras that they would seek communist revolution.61 Days after the shooting, an article appeared in the Greensboro Record that was titled “Slain CWP Man Talked of Martyrdom” and implied that the CWP had foreknowledge of the shooting and that some planned to die for the cause. This damaged what little public sympathy remained. In language typical of mainstream coverage, the story described the CWP as “far-out zealots infiltrat[ing] a peaceful neighborhood.” Even two years later, when the widows visited the Greensboro cemetery and found their husbands’ headstone vandalized with red paint meant to symbolize blood, they would not be able to effectively mobilize public sympathy.62

Community wariness of the CWP’s militant stance only increased after the CWP held a public funeral for their fallen comrades and marched through town with rifles and shotguns. The fact that the weapons were not loaded hardly mattered: photographs of the widows holding weapons at the ready appeared in local and national newspapers. In the public imagination, these images inverted the real events of November 3, when a heavily armed white power paramilitary squad confronted a minimally armed group of protestors. The defendants, depicted as respectable men wearing suits in front of the Vietnam War memorial, stood in stark contrast to the gun-toting widows.63

National and local CWP members took up a campaign of hostile protest of the trial itself. The day before testimony began, the CWP burned a large swastika into the lawn of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms director, and hung an effigy on his property with a red dot meant to convey a bullet wound. In the trial itself, CWP members refused to testify, even to identify the bodies of their fallen comrades. CWP widows who shouted that the trial was “a sham” and emptied a vial of skunk oil in the courtroom were held in contempt of court. Although the actions of the widows may have “shocked the court and freaked out the judge,” as the CWP newspaper Workers Viewpoint proudly reported, the widows’ “bravery” didn’t translate as such to the Greensboro community.64 Even those who may have sympathized with the CWP after seeing the graphic footage of the shooting soon found that feeling complicated by the group’s contempt for the justice system, however problematic that system was.

With the CWP widows refusing to tell their stories, attorneys for the defendants built a self-defense case by deploying two widely used white power narratives: one of honorable and wronged Vietnam veterans, and the other of the defense of white womanhood. The defense depended on the claim that CWP members carrying sticks had threatened Renee Hartsoe, the seventeen-year-old wife of Klansman Terry Hartsoe, as she rode in a car near the front of the caravan. Terry Hartsoe testified that he could see the communist protestors throwing rocks at the car and trying to open the door. Such a statement can be seen as alluding to the threat of rape of white women by nonwhite men, a constant theme throughout the various iterations of the Klan since the end of the Civil War.65 White supremacy has long deployed violence by claiming to protect vulnerable white women.

To bolster the claim that the CWP had started the fight, and that the Klansmen and Nazis had acted in self-defense, attorneys called an expert witness from the FBI. Based on the locations of the news cameras that had recorded the altercation, he said, he could pinpoint the origin of each shot with new sound-wave technology. Using this new and insufficiently tested method—later broadly discredited—he testified that the CWP had fired several of the first shots. In other words, the defense convinced the jury that the CWP had started the fight. However, under North Carolina law, the claim of self-defense should have been limited to defendants free from fault in planning or provoking a confrontation. Even had the CWP fired first, the Klansmen and Nazis intended to incite a fight, and had planned it in advance. Their armament alone, and the receipts that showed the timing, indicated as much.66

Meanwhile, some defendants showed little or no remorse for the five deaths and numerous injuries that resulted from the shooting. Defendants testified at the trial that members of the white power movement had displayed autopsy photographs of the CWP victims at a Klan fundraising rally on September 13, 1980. Jerry Paul Smith had obtained copies of the autopsy photos, as well as photos of the dead and mutilated victims taken just after the shooting, from the office of one of the defense attorneys. Smith said someone had displayed the photos at the Klan rally without his knowledge, and that he asked for them to be put away when he saw them.67

The jury spent long hours watching the footage of the shooting—forward, backward, and in slow motion—and witnessed the raw violence of the event. However, jurors heard nothing of the Klan’s use of graphic photographs of the victims for fundraising; they were out of the courtroom when this information came to light. Prosecutors argued that the “jury should hear the testimony, saying it shows the Klansmen acted with malice and have no regrets about the deaths of five Communist Workers Party members,” but the judge disagreed. The jury deliberated without accounting for the continuing violence manifested in the circulation of those images, including profiting from the photographs of the wounded, mutilated, and dead. Such action recalled a long history of circulating lynching photographs. The white power movement was using the pictures to raise money not only for the defense of the “Greensboro 14” but also for acquiring weapons to use in future violent actions—including a projected race war.68

On November 17, 1980, the jury arrived at a unanimous not-guilty verdict after six days of deliberation and twelve major votes. Surprised Klansmen and neo-Nazis wept. The verdict was a national news story. Saturday Night Live even ran a sketch depicting the opening day of “Commie Hunting Season.” The performance received little laughter and scant applause from the live studio audience, and NBC received 150 phone complaints that it was offensive. Perhaps the accuracy of the sketch, despite its overwrought redneck accents and heavy-handed satire, rendered it humorless. The basic point, that a court had effectively condoned the intentional killing of communists, rang true.69

After the acquittal, the white power movement amplified its praise of the Greensboro 14. The Thunderbolt reported at length that the men showed courage during the long trial, from praying and singing “God Bless America” in jail to their heroic homecoming. Family, neighbors, and fellow Klansmen cheered for Smith when he returned home, where “he proudly wore a [Confederate States of America] belt buckle and flew the Confederate flag over his house. One neighbor … remarked: ‘I’ve said all along they ought to pin a medal on those boys.’ ” A journalist reported that Smith’s “feelings toward blacks have softened, partly because of black prisoners he met in jail.” His alleged contrition didn’t last long. Two days later, Smith crashed his car after exchanging gunshots with an unknown person.70

Smith had testified in court that, after a blow to the head, he had no memory of firing into the crowd in Greensboro with a gun in each hand. But he soon traveled to Texas to recount the shooting as a guest speaker at a rally of Klansmen mobilizing against Vietnamese refugees. By 1984, members of the movement could buy a ninety-minute interview of Smith on audiocassette, in which he retold the shooting in detail. The story he allegedly didn’t remember became his currency and celebrity within the movement.71

Indeed, the white power movement took the acquittal as a green light for future action. The Aryan Nations organ Calling Our Nation ran photographs of neo-Nazis in Detroit marching with signs reading “Smash Communism: Greensboro AGAIN.” To some, the trial stood as one battle won in a global war against communism, the same war they had fought in Vietnam. As Klansman and defendant Coleman Pridmore remarked: “This is a victory for America. Anytime you defeat communism, it’s a victory for America. The communists want to destroy America, to tear it down, and they should be tried for treason.”72

The Greensboro case went to trial again on January 9, 1984, this time under civil rights laws in federal court. Although an appeals court blocked a court-ordered federal investigation into “charges of high-level government involvement” under the Ethics in Government Act, this time the court did allow investigation into the role of government informants who provoked or failed to prevent the altercation.73 The FBI and ATF had long used undercover agents in attempts to arrest members of fringe groups on both left and right, and would continue to do so in the years that followed. However, the 1971 end of COINTELPRO made it illegal for undercover operatives to act as agents provocateurs or to initiate or incite violence. The first man in question, Eddie Dawson, was a longtime Klansman who had occasionally reported information to the Greensboro Police Department and FBI. The second, Bernard Butkovich, was a career ATF agent working undercover.74

According to three neo-Nazis and one Klansman, Butkovich—posing as a trucker interested in the movement—had foreknowledge of the Greensboro caravan and did not report it to other agents, his superiors, the FBI, or local law enforcement. He allegedly suggested several illegal activities, encouraging people to get equipment used to convert weapons to fully automatic function and suggesting the assassination of a rival Klan leader. Group members also said Butkovich advised white power activists to harbor the November 3 fugitives after the shooting. The Klansmen and Nazis didn’t take any of his suggestions. Butkovich defended his actions—with the support of his superiors in the ATF—by saying that these statements were necessary to establish him as a credible member of the group for future intelligence-gathering purposes. Butkovich had met Covington and Wood at a White Power Party rally in Ohio in June 1979, but his wire had gone dead, failing to record a lengthy section of their meeting.75

Eddie Dawson, on the other hand, actively worked to plan and provoke the November 3 clash. Dawson gave speeches to fire up the Klansmen and Nazis to protest the CWP rally, according to Klansman Chris Benson’s later trial testimony. And police knew that Dawson was bringing the Klan to confront the CWP. They knew the Klansmen had eggs and planned to heckle, and that they had guns. They knew Virgil Griffin was involved, that he had “a hot head with a short fuse,” and that he frequently carried weapons.76

Dawson obtained a copy of the CWP parade permit prior to November 3 and so he knew where to find the communists. That day, he urged the caravan members to hurry to the CWP rally. At the same moment, the Greensboro Police Department ordered two officers on an unrelated call away from the neighborhood, and sent the rest of the force to lunch. As a result of this sequence of events—as well as prior confrontations between the CWP and the local police that had led the latter to decide that officers would protect the demonstration from afar—no police officers were on the scene when the shooting began.77

The evidence in the federal trial clearly established that the earlier claim of self-defense could not stand. As one prosecutor noted, the Klansmen and Nazis “fired 11 shots before any shot was fired in return,” by which point they had wounded several people. Mark Sherer, who had by then quit the Klan, testified that Griffin had planned to incite a race war in North Carolina and that Smith had experimented with making pipe bombs. Butkovich had overheard a Klansman say the explosives would “work good thrown into a crowd of niggers,” but had failed to mention bombs in his ATF paperwork. Sherer now indicated that the Klansmen and Nazis fired the third and fourth shots, which had been attributed to the CWP by faulty sound analysis in the state trial.78

Despite substantial evidence to discredit the claim of self-defense—and despite the full cooperation and testimony of the CWP—the federal trial exonerated the Klansmen and neo-Nazis a second time. Prosecutors sought to prove that by shooting and killing them, the Klansmen and neo-Nazis denied the CWP members their civil rights for reasons of race. To make this case, the jury instructions specified, the prosecution had to show that race was the “substantial motivating factor” behind the violence. The defense countered that the Klansmen and neo-Nazis acted on political, not racial, motives. They were, as they had said repeatedly, trying to defend the United States from communism. And since the connection between anticommunism and racism in the ideology of white power activists went unexplained, the Klansmen and neo-Nazis walked free again in April 1984.79

The third and final trial began in March 1985. In a civil suit, the CWP widows and eleven injured demonstrators sought monetary damages from the Klansmen, the neo-Nazis, Dawson, Butkovich, the Greensboro Police Department, the City of Greensboro, the State Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, the ATF, and more. The judge dismissed several of these defendants, including the federal agencies that had sovereign immunity, and also dismissed a number of unknown “John Does” because charges against them were too vague. The case went to trial with sixty-three defendants.80

Attorneys for the plaintiffs called seventy-five witnesses over eight weeks; the defense lasted four days. In the most dramatic moment of the trial, former Klansman Chris Benson testified that he had previously lied in court because he feared retaliation. Benson had been the second-highest-ranking Klansman in the Greensboro caravan, and in earlier trials had maintained that the CWP demonstrators provoked the violence. Now he said that white power activists had intended to provoke a confrontation. In cross-examination by Klansmen and Nazis representing themselves, Benson “said he had particularly feared the ‘underground Klan,’ which he described as a paramilitary group that would ‘carry out acts to intimidate people.’ ” Benson named members of the paramilitary Klan, including co-defendant Dave Matthews, and added, “I saw Mr. Matthews shooting at people in Greensboro who were running away from him.”81

Benson, reformed and contrite, stood in stark contrast with most of the other defendants. On the first day of the trial Roland Wayne Wood wore “an olive drab T-shirt with the phrase ‘Eat lead, you lousy red’ printed next to an image of a man in camouflage fatigues spraying automatic weapon fire.” Because Wood chose to represent himself in the civil trial, he wore the shirt in court while acting as a part of the U.S. justice system.82

Despite compelling evidence, the jury, which this time included one black member, delivered only partial justice. In June 1985, it found some of the absent policemen and some of the white power gunmen—Dave Matthews, Jerry Paul Smith, Roland Wayne Wood, Jack Fowler, and Mark Sherer—jointly liable for one of the five deaths and two of the many injuries. Significantly, the only death found wrongful was that of Michael Nathan, the only one of the five people killed who was not a card-carrying CWP member. It might be wrong to shoot bystanders, the decision confirmed, but there was nothing wrongful about gunning down communists. The City of Greensboro paid the full amount of the settlement, covering the costs for Klansmen and neo-Nazis.83

Once again, the white power movement took the settlement payment as endorsement of violent action. As Klansman and Thunderbolt editor Ed Fields wrote in his 1984 personal newsletter, “We must increase activity while we are still free—while juries made up of God fearing White people will free our street activists such as in the Greensboro case.”84 Louis Beam, too, saw Greensboro as a success for the movement. In a film of Beam’s paramilitary camps in Texas circa 1980, he told the camera, “When the shooting starts, we’re going to win it, just like we did in Greensboro.”85

The Greensboro shooting had the effect of consolidating and unifying the white power movement. Most directly, caravan participant Glenn Miller would use the shooting to leverage state leadership in the North Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which would soon change its name to the White Patriot Party, uniform its members in camouflage fatigues, and march through the streets by the hundreds. In his increasingly revolutionary Confederate Leader, Miller expressed pride about the shooting even six years afterward.86 A veteran who served two tours in Vietnam as a Green Beret, Miller used paramilitary camps to prepare his new white army for race war, recruited active-duty soldiers, and obtained stolen military weapons. Soon he would align his force with the white power terrorist group the Order.87

The idea of worldwide struggle against communism also aligned the Greensboro gunmen with antidemocratic paramilitary violence in other countries. Thunderbolt, for instance, called it “very strange” to hear President Ronald Reagan “pleading for money to send to guerillas” fighting against communists in Nicaragua and El Salvador when “right here in America we have a clear case of White Christian family men being shot at by communists who returned fire in a perfect case of self-defense.”88 To the movement, there was little difference between white power gunmen at home and paramilitary fighters who worked to extend U.S. interventions abroad.

Harold Covington, an American Nazi Party Leader and veteran who claimed to have been a mercenary soldier in Rhodesia, did not participate in the Greensboro caravan, but sent several of his men to the skirmish. Shortly before the shooting, Covington wrote a letter to the Revolutionary Communist Party, which he mistook for the CWP. “Almost all of my men have killed Communists in Vietnam and I was in Rhodesia as well,” he wrote, “but so far we’ve never actually had a chance to kill the home-grown product.”89 Covington, who saw himself as a person who killed communists—he killed them abroad and he intended to kill them at home—showed how violence at home and anticommunist interventions abroad would link white power organizing with a network of mercenary soldiers who waged war in Central America and beyond.

Katherine Belew, Bring the War Home

295 notes · View notes

palmerasenfuego · 4 years

Text

An Open Letter to His Cop Father

My hope is to make clear, maybe for the first time, my perspective on a variety of points of contention between you and me, not so that we can reconcile them necessarily, but so that I won't feel the need to tiptoe around you any more. Addressing this problem I have with codependency and self-censorship has been my task ever since I left my ex, and I think you yourself would agree that in the last year and a half, I have become much more vibrant and present than I ever was as the kowtowed ghost who let his controlling girlfriend dictate the terms of his existence. In the following letter I strove to be unsparing, but only for the sake of clarity. I don't hold any resentment towards you. I want to take ownership of my own role in our dynamic so that we can move into the future, unencumbered.

A few months ago, you and I argued over my career with regard to the classes I plan on taking for my Masters in library science. After we'd each calmed down, you said that you were only suggesting I keep my options open, as we'd both noted that the future of public libraries, and indeed social services generally, is uncertain at best and possibly doomed. You merely meant to suggest that I look into classes that would prepare me for information career opportunities in the private sector, in the probable case that public libraries no longer exist in the future.

At the time I didn't want to argue any more, and I agreed that you had made good points. I would keep my options open. What you didn't understand, however, was that I only grew "defensive" about my plans after I thought I presented them as exactly what you claimed to be suggesting—that is, I would look into a variety of library and information science related fields while keeping my focus, somewhat idealistically, on public libraries. But then you interjected, as you so often do, with all the reasons why my plan might not be such a great idea. Had I considered the uncertain future of public libraries? (Of course I had.) Wouldn't a librarianship at a prestigious museum be a more stable and lucrative career? (Maybe, but nothing's a safe bet.)

Because I stood my ground, because I intend to fight for what I believe in while I still can, you accused me of being 'defensive.' There's always an underlying tension between us, you said, which is something I don't deny. Why do I always seem resentful? you asked. You accused me of only viewing you as a resource to draw on without any care for you as my father, a totally unfair and manipulative thing to say of your son who followed you and your other son for a decade, watching you coach his brother’s baseball team, without him; your son who desperately wished his father understood his art and literature recommendations, but knows they'll usually go unheeded; your son who, despite knowing what his father did to his mother, and resenting that his father won't speak with his mother at all, still loves his father.

You can't seem to recognize sometimes that your mistakes could have had any effect on the way you and I relate, and I think you think any antagonism between us is me blindly rebelling, an absurd image to have of me, the most docile black sheep any flock has ever had. To be clear, what causes the tension between us is a feeling in me that I won't even be heard if you've previously decided you're in the right. So rather than speak up, I generally keep my mouth shut, which is not healthy for me, nor is it productive of the kind of relationship I'd hope to have as an adult with my father.

You would prefer that I not stake my future on public librarianship, because you would not do that. Therefore, I shouldn't do that. I don't care whether you disagree with me. Ultimately, none of this letter is about convincing you of anything. What I want to address is that I have never felt like my voice would be heard, by you or anyone, really, which is in part a result of having my perspective so often subjected to critical (over)analysis from you, as in our argument over public libraries. Or, it’s a result of having my enthusiasm mocked anytime you and my brother didn't appreciate something I did. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a masterpiece of American art, and you Philistines didn't watch more than 15 minutes of it, but to this day you make fun of me for wanting to watch it with you.

When we had disagreements over any supposed transgression on my part, you quickly dropped the pretense towards being a concerned parent to assume your interrogation persona, with me the guilty-until-proven-innocent suspect. One of the oldest tricks to get someone to fess up is asking the same question several times, forcing the suspect to repeat their story. Any time you seemed suspicious I wasn't answering your questions straight, it would be "You sure? Positive? Nothing else?" The only thing missing was the aluminum chairs and the spotlight in my face. All disagreements were structured this way, with you above, already having the answers, and me below, forced to acquiesce to the judgement presumed. Attempts to defend myself when I felt I was unfairly accused were met with the reprimand to not "talk back," something I've internalized deeply, corrosively, finding myself drawn, in friendships and in love, to those who shout me down or laugh me out. As a result, my natural cowardice and timidity have festered for years.

You have long urged me, since childhood, to be more assertive, less passive, to stop "playing the victim," and these were not unfair or inaccurate criticisms. Like Kafka with his father, none of this is to say I blame you for the effect you've had on me and my inability to speak up. I was a timid child, easily influenced by social pressure and a need for approval, most especially from you. From my child's view I was enamored of what you seemed to represent, which I suppose is unremarkable, as sons and fathers go. Perhaps also unremarkable of fathers and sons is how elusive your approval seemed to be. There was never outright disapproval of me from you, and I always knew you "supported" me. But let's not pretend like we at times did not and do not appear alien to one another. Which is normal, healthy, so long as it's accepted, because we’re separate people, but the trouble fathers and sons get into is they each seek validation from the other—the father struggles to impose his own standards on the son and see his progeny flourish as so judged by the standards imposed, and the son seeks to establish himself as his own person, separate but unable to escape the looming shadow of his father, the son's primary model for what a person is.

One instance where I probably tried to voice an objection to your discipline, an instance where I knew the gravity of the issue you wanted to convey but disagreed that what I'd done deserved such a strong reprimand from you, was when I drew a Klansman in my notebook, being the bored and doodling 8th grade boy that I was, watching a documentary about the Klan in history class. I wasn't approving of the Klan by drawing a man in a pointed hood, but to your credit, you saw an opportunity to make clear the need to take seriously the violence and oppression that African-Americans have faced in this country, and to never trivialize symbols of that violence and hatred. (Fatefully, I was similarly firmly scolded by my mom when she saw a swastika in one of my notebooks, which is when I learned my Polish grandmother escaped the Nazis as a small child in the belly of a freight ship, traumatized by the sight of dead stowaways floating past her, and this after the death of her brother at the hands of fascist thugs.)

When the black community today raises the cry "Black Lives Matter," what they want is a reckoning from American society for the way that black life has historically been deemed disposable. Africans were ripped from their mother country, brutalized on a treacherous trans-Atlantic voyage, and sold off in a land where the climate and environment were entirely alien, their various languages as unintelligible to one another as to their masters. They were subjected to centuries of horrific slavery, whippings, rape, and familial rupture. Any who managed to escaped their bondage risked dogged, murderous pursuit by slave patrols. The de facto opponents of slavery won a civil war and slavery was abolished, and for another century black people were terrorized with lynchings by whites (who were never prosecuted), all while being denied economic opportunity and treated as less-than-second-class citizens in public spaces, not to mention suffering a complete lack of political representation. It wasn't until 1968 that the political rights of African-Americans were codified into federal law, but the mere granting of rights does nothing to address the long term devastation wrought on the black community, which built this country for free, this country that so long denied them not only equal rights and opportunity, but denied them their humanity. And to this day, black people go murdered, in broad daylight, in their cars, or while they sleep, both by the police and by others, without justice. "Black Lives Matter" needs to be said because American society does not seem to acknowledge that black life matters, despite America's lofty ideals for itself as a place of equal protection under the law. If black lives matter, then all lives matter, but not all lives matter until black lives matter.

Saying "Blue Lives Matter" is to be presented with that history, turn it around and say "Yeah, well what about us cops?" No one chooses to be black; all cops choose to be cops. If you want the profession of policing to have the respect you demand people give it, then cops should be aware what they're signing up for: a thankless, demoralizing job that answers to the public, and not the other way around. To say "My job is hard so we matter too!" when, after centuries of oppression, the black community says, "Our lives matter!" is a gross exercise in bad faith. This is why "Blue Lives Matter" is offensive, utterly bankrupt beyond the expression of resentment towards an imagined enemy. American society has no doubts about the value of the lives of police officers. What easier way is there to bring the full force of the American justice system, with a swift investigation and aggressive prosecution, than to murder a cop? The justice system has time and again demonstrated the societal value of police officers' lives. The same can not be said of black lives, which is why "Blue Lives Matter" is far more trivializing of the racism still faced by black people in America than some 13-year-old kid's drawing of a Klansman.

Part of me worries that writing this is futile, that you'll see this as another instance of me "talking back," i.e. saying what challenges your airtight prosecutor's argument. Another part of me thinks what I’m saying resonates with your bedrock American and Catholic values. After all, I had to get my principles from somewhere. But if this doesn't move you, I will rest well knowing that at the very least I'm not shutting myself up any more, and that I'll finally be coming to you as a man and not as your child, facing you squarely, head no longer bowed.

I love you.

#blm #letter

4 notes · View notes

rametarin · 4 years

Text

The chickens come home to roost, circa late 90s, early 00s. A long post about Jimmy Kimmel being cancelled.

So hi there. I’m in my 30s now, but 16-20 years ago, American media was at a different point in race relations.

We’d just come off of a really hostile 90s. To call someone black had become to call them, “colored,” and you got lambasted, dragged, shamed and chided for not using the term African American. To use ‘black,’ and ESPECIALLY, ‘blacks,’ you were considered the same sort of out-of-touch or openly intolerant example of America’s hostility to black people that we associate someone using the word ‘colored’ for, today.

“It’s AF-RI-CAN A-MER-I-CAN!” They’d yell at you, to remind you every syllable whenever you wanted to reference race in a discussion. Contrast with ‘white.’ This got so ingrained in our vocabulary on penalty of reputation loss for performative wokeness that people just hair-twitch started calling black people african-american whether they were american or not. That’s the root of that bit of stupid, by the way.

But sometime around 1998 to 2001 there was a renaissance in culture and media. The cold shower of using the wrong term went away. The spread and popularity of rap across suburban and rural America and more integration and interactions across groups, as well as just aging out of the sour and bitter taste of the 90s race riots, meant different groups felt more comfortable just fucking around together with banter and jokes. Without someone inherently assuming it came from a place of societal or historical prejudice.

You still could not and would not just flash around the N-word with a hard R, but uh. Young mixed groups of friends got dangerously comfortable letting their white friends use ‘nigga.’ White people did not just suddenly start using it thinking that was okay. Older people that’d lived through when that word was only ever uttered by ignorant or hateful people, whether black or white, discouraged young people from doing that even in jest. During the 00s, that was a generational divide. “The N-Word is a no-no and if I catch you doing it, I’ll beat you up.” Vs. “The N-Word is a no-no and if you’re caught doing it, I might lose my son.”

But the teenagers and early 20-somethings were like, “Oh get with the times, Grandpa! It’s not the 60s-80s anymore! We’re all hip-hop and integrated now!”

Which was not 100% true but if the folks popularizing hip-hop and performing had too big a deal with white fans using the words, they were quiet about them while making their money.

Anyway. That brings us to Comedy Central’s contribution.

Comedy Central started airing stand-up comedians. Race topics got popular. They were ALWAYS popular, but that topic and the people doing it got received to a new generation. It became more socially acceptable to laugh about and be light hearted about. It was diverse, it was inclusive, and it established that such things were okay to talk about freely, in the proper context.

In essence, the days of Cousin Karen and Becky using every opportunity to shame you on behalf of, “our shameful history” every time someone said something like “blackened chicken,” were over. And people were fucking happy for it.

More loose and relaxed attitudes about race jokes, especially, ESPECIALLY when liberal people made them, of any color, was something of a privilege that they reserved only for liberal whites or non-whites of any political denomination. You could say nigger if you were a George Carlin, but not if you were a conservative comedian, since that was synonymous with the George W. Bush type school. The old yee-haw twiddle-banjo XXX jug sippin’ white hood wearing klansman type. It was as much bait to make conservative people upset they weren’t on the list of people that could acceptably say it as much as it was about comradery and acceptance among minority groups. N-Word passes were very common.

And if you were wealthy and liberal enough, entrenched enough with, “the right causes and cultures,” then you could write them for yourself. Whether or not they were validated by black society.

Comedy Central has never made the fact it is/was a largely liberal organization a secret. It served as a place to give black, Asian and Jewish people a soap box and podium to perform and tell their jokes. From The Man Show, to Tough Crowd with Colin Quin, to Crank Yankers, to Chappelle Show, to Mind of Mencia, to the Sarah Silverman Show. That entire decade saw a lot of race based comedians doing shit that they knew at the time was wrong, but, “Hey, we’re living in the future. It’s a different time and a different culture. We’re over it so much that we’re doing it ironically, so it’s okay.”

Well. Here we are, 16-22 years into the future. And much the way the synth keyboard sounded like the future in the 80s, now synth keyboards just sound like the 80s. A whole new generation of 12-18 year old kids see those shows and performs, at least the white ones, as just as archaic and aged and out-of-touch as the comedians from the 1980s to the 1950s and 1920s. Just representing the same, racist expressions and examples of a white supremacist society that took the liberty of upholding that age old mainstay of American media and entertainment; minstrel shows, blackface and making fun of black people.

Even back then I knew there was no such thing as a safe N-word Pass. You use the word nigger even jokingly among friends, you’re tricking yourself into thinking using that word for entertainment won’t come back to bite your ass someday. Doesn’t matter how liberal, progressive or whatever you are, you are not allowed that close.

And we can see exactly this coming to pass now that Jimmy Kimmel is being retroactively cancelled as a scapegoat and example of, “a more privileged and insensitive time.” The illusion that if you were just progressive and liberal enough, on, “the right side of history,” voted for the right people, your heart was in the right place, you believed in the right things, then you could avoid being cancelled since you were doing it ironically.

He’s not even being judged as an individual. Just an extension of the times and people he represents. A piece of prop and furniture of a bygone era, not even a person. When they talk about his ‘crimes’ for being an insensitive and casually racist/sexist person, it’s not about whether he’s changed or not. It’s about whether what he did makes him require ‘proper punishment’ now.

No matter how hard he cries or how much his friends like Adam Carolla insist they were just jokes, or meant in good fun, or that there was no malice behind them, or that they were in mockedy of true bigots, or not intended as real blackface but just absurdism, the fact he did those at all is enough to de-person him. And once condemned, they expect a very specific kind of restitution now.

In the past they used to use social pressure and introduce this sort of thing to you by grooming you. Suggesting ways to, “come good for the crimes of your ancestors.” Or “personal racism.” Mostly by donating your real estate, money and future earnings/income to black charities and black organizations that specialize in blackness. But they only would suggest doing something indirectly. That indirect way where they wouldn’t actually specify what they wanted, just chide you for not doing something specific without telling you what it is.

Now they come out and say: “Give up your property, give up your money, shut up, sit down, sit at the back of the bus, you deserve this.” They don’t just string you along and try to get you to volunteer, “what you could do for your crimes.” Because too many people would stop short of that and just flog themselves, mourning how the past was dead and they couldn’t go back to save anyone.

When what they wanted from the start was people submitting to their ideology, donating land, real estate and labor to black separatism.

Kimmel is being made an example of to normalize this cancelling, and cancelling of any institution or body that gave people like Kimmel, Carolla, Silvermann, Quinn, etc. a voice and platform. And saying because of it, those organizations (Comedy Central) owe restitution to the black community. Saying they are responsible and must own up to their responsibility, and come good.

Except they want them to come good in the form of blank checks and unending acknowledgement that the past cannot be undone until they, themselves, the perpetrators, are undone. or owned by the victims.

There IS no way to apologize. There is no way to wipe the sins away. There is just death or being killed. Even losing everything you have won’t fix the problem, because the perpetrator still exists. And they want you feeling like you’re perpetually obligated to work to right a wrong you voluntarily perpetrated against an entire people.

Kimmel tried to go straight after his Man Show days. He accepted the indoctrination at face value and believed it was progressive and the proper way forwards. He cleaned up his image and act. He agreed to other peoples terms. He played ball on their principles.

And now he’s bring dragged and judged by them for clout and sacrificed to make a point.

You can expect a bunch of famous white comedians (Jewish and otherwise) getting the boiling kettle and expectation to publicly apologize for their “racism and privileged bigotry,” next. And judged harshly as an example of their racist, white supremacist era, if they do not. Any admission of guilt or wrongdoing in the past, and they’ll expect you to hold yourself accountable to their belief the only proper way to repent is to advantage black people.

2 notes · View notes

cryptovalid · 4 years

Text

Watchmen: My favorite show of 2019

Now that I’ve watched HBO’s Watchmen in its entirety, I can safely say that it is by far my favorite show I’ve seen this year. The more I think about it though, the less it seems to offer a coherent statement about vigilantism, power and violence the way the original graphic novel did. I don’t think this makes it any less clever, bold or satisfying to watch, but Watchmen is more interested in playing with the weight and drama of themes than actually expressing a clear, useful thesis about them.

The show is a sequel to the graphic novel, taking place in 2019, when the fallout from the 1987 story finally comes home to roost.

To give you some more context, I’ll be talking about Alan Moore’s 1986-1987 maxiseries of comics first, and then comparing it to the new television series narratively. In terms of acting and production values, I’d say that the show is great across the board, although your mileage may vary. This is doubly true of its narrative: I’m curious if the show is too confusing for people who’ve never read the comic, and the show doesn’t show a lot of reverence for the characters of the original. In my opinion, this is for the best and actually completely in the spirit of Alan Moore’s work. From here on out, There be Spoilers for the comic, movie and the tv series.

Watchmen (1987) by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons is by far my absolute favorite superhero comic. It is the only graphic novel to be named as one of Time’s 100 best novels of the twentieth century. It’s certainly not true that it is the only graphic novel that deserves that kind of honor, but it is not on that list for bad reasons. This post would be too long if I listed all of Watchmen’s many achievements, so I will just say this: Watchmen investigates how the existence of masked vigilantes and superheroes would change the real world, and its answer is not positive. No matter how you slice it, in order to inflict violence on strangers or save the world based purely on your own moral compass, you have to be either hopelessly naive or narcissistic, sadistic, fascistic, fetishist, manic, or untethered from human experience in one way or the other. However you imagine them, superheroes escalate danger. They are not cooperative or peace-loving by their nature, the comic says. ‘Superheroes’ will do terrible things in the name of ‘saving the world’ or ‘doing the right thing’. In this sense, the book is thoroughly anti-utopian but also anti-superhero, and it commits to this by depicting all of its ‘protagonists’ as deeply flawed, ultimately dangerous or inept people.

In terms of plot, the big twist that effects the show is that the smartest man in the world, the vigilante Ozymandias, predicts that nuclear armageddon is inevitable unless he convinces the global superpowers that there is a massive alien threat, making their feuds appear petty and risky by comparison. He literally kills millions of people with a genetically engineered giant monster that he teleports to New York, not including the dozens of murders to prepare the ground and cover up this fact. The fear that more monsters like this could appear prevents nuclear war at the last second, but another vigilante named Rorshach figured out Ozymandias’ plan and wanted to expose it, which would undo its intended peacemaking effect. He was killed, but his notes survived.

In the end, the only vigilante with actual superpowers, Dr. Manhattan, is so far removed from human experience because of his godlike powers and his nonlinear perception of time, that he seems to retreat from Earth itself, expressing a desire to create life elsewhere.

This is the backdrop against which Watchmen (2019) frames itself: what would that alternate history look like about 20 years later? But instead of focusing on the evils that vigilantism and superpowers would create, this sequel puts race and policing at the core of its narrative. The main protagonists: Angela Abar, Will Reeves, Laurie Blake and Wade Tillman are all cops and all of them are at one point in their lives masked vigilantes. They are also pitted against white supremacist terrorists, and the show depicts them as regularly violating the constitutional rights of suspects and killing lots of people in justifiable situations. The show depicts both cops and civilians in both real and historical race riots.

But the more I think about it, the less I can identify a coherent thesis about the origins or nature of racism or the morality of extra-judicial violence. It seems to say ‘violating a person’s human rights is alright as long as they’re racist’, and I mean, I can’t be too mad about that, but it also implies that the cops are basically good, that it is possible to root out specific racist conspiracies and that’s all that’s needed to set things right. There’s a definite assumption that most of the time, we can just trust cops to have integrity. The show rarely frames unmitigated violence as a systemic issue; even when the government is implicated. The protagonists are also relatable and sympathetic, and their victory against the white supremacist conspiracy is without any real moral complications or ironic personal costs. This show, unlike its source material, is pro-vigilante. Or at most neutral on the subject.

Its message about racism is more straightforward, but also a little hollow. Racist violence is shown viscerally, but also roundly condemed, ridiculed, and avenged by the protagonists. But that’s really as deep as it goes. All racists in this show are openly and stereotypically Southern whites. There is very little exploration or covert or insidious racism: there is a clear divide between literal neo-KKK types and antiracist avengers, with little ambiguity in between. We are not really shown what drives racists to be racist. The most motivation racists are given is a resentment over two attempts at improving the world: Reparations for the Tulsa Massacre, and the aforementioned plot to stop the Cold War by faking extradimensional invasion. Not that I’m begging for a humane portrayal of racist terrorists, but it does make it extremely easy for actual, less obvious white supremacists to ignore any criticism because ‘at least they’re not like the Seventh Kavalery’. It in short, doesn’t give viewers any special insight into racism and how to deal with it in the real world.

What Watchmen does do beautifully is representation. The first masked vigilante, Hooded Justice, who in the comic was a clear reference to a Klansman, is reimagined as the victim of a threatened lynching, who fights his attackers still wearing the noose and hood they put on him. He then pretends to be white to gain the support and cover he needs to be a vigilante. This man, Will Reeves, named himself after his childhood hero, the historical inspiration for the Lone Ranger, Bass Reeves. As a child, he was smuggled out from the Bombing of Tulsa in the trunk of a carriage, much like Moses or Superman. We later discover that HJ is bisexual and is essentially strung along for years by the media-savvy Captain Metropolis for publicity purposes and sex, and ends up desillusioned by his white allies. We also learn that Angela Abar, the de facto main character, is in fact his granddaughter, and she becomes involved in his decades-spanning plans to root out the racist conspiracy that the plot revolves around.

Perhaps even more interesting is the decision to integrate Doctor Manhattan into this sequel as a jewish and a black man. Rather than simply recasting the part, the show frames the revelation in a way that Dr. Manhattan might experience it: out of order, but also clearly telegraphed. The show uses this to characterize Dr. Manhattan as someone whose decisions do not adhere to standard causality. Why does he start to woo Angela Abar in the first place? Because from his perspective, he’s always been in love with her. Just like nothing ever ends, it doesn’t really begin from his perspective either. One day, he walks into A Bar and starts explaining to Angela Abar that they will be in a relationship for ten years, which wil then end in tragedy. While she is understandably skeptical, Regina King and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II really manage to sell both the frustrating absurdity and the transcendant romance of this idea. In the end, Osterman chooses to take the shape of a dead man based purely on the fact that Angela is most attracted to, and goes to great lengths to lose is powers and become human again, as a black man named Calvin Abar, who we first meet as Angela’s charming stay-at-home husband and father to their adopted children. The fact that he is Dr. Manhattan all along is revealed to us in my favorite sequence in the whole show. We, the audience, fall in love with both the husband as well as the God, Jon Osterman, as both are vulnerable and honest about who they are. Even though everyone knows it can’t last. These scenes are both heartbreaking and beautiful, and are foreshadowed masterfully from the beginning. This is what I mean when I say the show is clever.

The dialogue is witty and the cinematography, editing and plotting do a subtle job of worldbuilding. There are very few exposition dumps and characters rarely do or say things just to help the plot along; they are always driven by their own motivations rather than those the viewer might prefer in their hurry to learn more.

As a result, characters feel smart and their personalities and relationships develop more naturally. From Jeremy Irons’ Ozymandias to Hong Chau’s Lady Trieu to Jean Smart’s Laurie Blake, they all come across as clearly defined assholes with a charismatic competence.

The world and its history also unfold at their own pace. This can be confusing in the first couple of episodes. It isn’t explained why cops wear masks, what ‘Redfordations’ are, or why squids rain from the sky often enough that a siren goes off whenever it happens. Instead, viewers piece a lot of it together from context. The details make it feel very believable. It makes me feel like I’m discovering an alternate history the way a lost time traveler might.

In the end, it is not the themes that make this version of Watchmen so enjoyable. Its the intricate details of its world and the interactions between its characters that make Watchmen 2019 so fun to watch. And as far as on the nose messages go, ‘vaporize as many racists as possible‘ isn’t that bad.

#Watchmen 2019 #Watchmen HBO #reviews #fave shows #fave show of 2019 #Dr. Manhattan #Angela Abar #Hooded Justice #Cal Abar

8 notes · View notes

veronica-rich · 5 years

Note

Tell us more about why a white celebrity is a hero for calling a black man a white supremacist, please. And do it without your Klansman hood, please, Adolph.

Tell us an identity, dickwad. You’re already using a pseudonym on this site; how fucking afraid are you for people to know you’re a gaslighting MAGAte, Nonny?

;-)

12 notes · View notes

ramrodd · 5 years

Link

Green Book captures the Atticus Finch-white savior vote for Best Picture while Black Klansman and Black Panther trigger the inner Bob Ewell, giving a clear MAGA hat victory to the evening.

COMMENTARY:

The selecton of Green Book as Best Picture is a clear white Hollywood establishment victory, given both Black Panther and Black Klansman in the running. The only greater affirmation of the core MAGA hat values of the Academy would have been Vice being named.

I am not qualified to judge the artistic merit of any of the films up for Best Picture. Black Panther is the only one I've seen because the inflation generated by Trumponomics is on the verge of becoming Venezuelian hyper-inflation and I couldn't afford to see any movies this last year except Black Panther. So, I don't really have any basis for comparison except the public response.

I've seen a lot of Spike Lee's work, starting with "She's Got To Have It". By and large, white people don't like to see the world through Spike Lee's eyes, although I personally don't understand why. He's like Woody Allen if Woody Allen had a big uncut dick. They both have an oblique sensibility. At some level, neither one quite escapes the film school absurdist genre, but Woody's white and the French absurdist motif is far more comforting than the 'hood. In the final analysis, Spike is a bit too Boyz to Men for the Academy.

The Green Book, on the other hand, isn't just another Driving Miss Daisy essay on the shared humanity explicit in the second great commandment of Jesus, but a full blown etude on the transcendent orchestration of Atticus Finch as a divine symphony of benevolent white supremacy. All white Americans see themselves as Atticus Finch, fighting the good fight in the name of God, apple pie and the US Constitution. It is the one shared psychosis sustaining the mental illness of American white racism.

I mean, nobody identifies with Bob Ewell, but, put a MAGA hat on him, and he'd fit right in at a Mar A Lago hoedown, a Pro-Life Rally on the Mall with the Covington Kids or at a Trump rally anywhere in America.

Now, it's not clear to me Bob Ewell would have voted for the Green Book if he was in the Academy. It would have been all he could handle to sit through a movie where a white guy had a black boss, much less the white supremacist nightmare of Black Panther and the assault against The Invisible Empire of Black Klansman. My guess is he would have voted for A Star is Born for the country music and a peek at Lady Gaga's Total Brazilian even if it is something of a chick flick, the dark horse being Christian Bale's Total Brazilian as a natural turn-on for his inner MAGA hat patriotism.

Like Kanya West, Spike Lee is a little bit of a cry-baby. I mean, just getting a nomination is a crap shoot and Glenn Close managed to resist the urge to grab the Oscar away from Olivia Colman, so, while I'm sympathetic to his sense of injustice, the ushers did him a favor keeping him in the room.

And if white folks can get past the good feelings about being white the Green Book is engineered to produce and recognize the connection between the need for the Green Book, back in the day, and the MAGA hats, today, they might begin to see #blacklivesmatter through Spike Lee's eyes and how much they look, talk and act like Bob Ewell, with or without a MAGA hat.

#transformingamericafirst

1 note · View note

xoruffitup · 6 years

Text

BlacKkKlansman: Double Consciousness & Extremist Identities

I saw BlacKkKlansman last night, and I’m still trying to properly breathe around the cold stone it left in my chest. I’ve been thinking about it constantly, and whenever that happens I always feel the need to write some sort of analysis to try to articulate why I’ve reacted so strongly to something. So, here’s my half-baked BlacKkKlansman review.

First things first, I’m white. Of course, that affects the way I view the world and whatever art/media I choose to consume. I fully recognize that my experience and takeaway from this film are likely very different from those of a viewer of color. And sure, I can say that I try to be progressive in how I live my life and I took college courses on race politics and minority marginalization, but at the end of the day, this is a film about black voices and black equality and those are topics I have no right to discourse on. So please, if something I write below seems misguided or uneducated, please let me know so I can self-examine and adjust.

First of all: The simple fact that this movie had such an effect on me as a white viewer. I was in a crowded movie theatre, with an audience of diverse age and race, and never in my life have I felt such a powerful moment of silent, unified shock when the credits started. The ending left every single person speechless. White privilege means that when I read news articles or books about institutionalized racism in our country, I have the option of closing the book, walking away and thinking about something else for a while. Not the case whatsoever with this movie - It didn’t discriminate in its devastating impact. While I’ve read about Black Power ideologies, there’s always an aspect of such movements that are designed not to be fully understood by those outside of it. These are not for me. This seems as intentional as it is justified. Black communities are excluded from so many mainstream ‘white’ narratives or locuses of power, these movements are the sole spaces that belong entirely to them and which they entirely control. They are designed to alienate, the same way these communities are alienated from so much else in society. However, BlacKkKlansman seemed accessible to a multitude of viewpoints and cultural/racial positions. The film does not strive to tell the audience how they should feel, but leaves elements of interpretation up to the viewer by presenting a chorus of voices, rather than a single one; By presenting multifaceted characters experiencing conflicts of identity - Rather than a single protagonist with a single political message. This is certainly not to say that a film is only good if it panders to the understanding of white viewers, but in this case I was impressed by the multiplicity of narratives and perspectives that were portrayed.

What’s so thought-provoking to me about the film was the decision to tell the story from the position of the undecided and conflicted center. By following Ron and Flip’s investigation, we watch each character grapple with the opposite sides of extremism. While Flip has to ingratiate himself with the Klan members who would revile his Jewish heritage, Ron has to spy on his own community at Black Student Union events as they call for war against the police. Both characters must play roles in order to pretend to fit into the groups they look like they should belong to. In Flip’s case, feeling threatened and despised by the Klan’s ideals makes him re-evaluate the meaning of the Jewish identity he never thought much about. For Ron, he feels torn between his loyalty to his people, and to his own hard-sought and prized work as a policeman (an institution equally reviled by Patrice and Klan members). Ron and Flip both wear masks, and their feelings of separation from “their” respective communities makes them each consider the conflicting identities within themselves.

Aptly, Patrice speaks to Ron in one scene about double consciousness. She questions whether it is possible to be both a black woman and American citizen. To her, putting her country first would be a betrayal to her black identity. In juxtaposition, the Klan members dress up their intolerance behind the values of “America first” (I can barely describe the chills that went through me when the Klan members all started chanting it.) Ron’s struggle throughout the film is exactly this - His determination to be both a black man and a police officer. He and Patrice disagree on whether it’s possible to change a corrupt system from within, and the movie leaves ambiguous how much Ron succeeds in this front. It’s crushingly infuriating when, towards the end of the film, Ron is himself detained and beaten by policemen who don’t believe he’s an undercover cop. But shortly thereafter, he enjoys a triumphant entry into the police station where all his white colleagues congratulate his work and embrace him. The scene when he calls David Duke to reveal his identity with his three colleagues giggling on either side of him is downright charming in its camaraderie and gaiety. It looks like acceptance; But tempered by the fact that all his hard work on the investigation was ultimately scrapped in the end.

These themes of double consciousness and ambiguity permeate the film, and lend to its impactful success. Split-screen parallels are presented between Klan and Black Power movement meetings - Certainly not to equate the two, but to show in stark, unmistakable terms that these are the polar opposite, yet intimately interrelated effects of racism. This is how distantly racism divides our country - And how it leads to beliefs on either side that people will kill for. Towards the climax, a Black Student Union meeting listens to the horrific history of a young black man being brutally lynched, while the Klan members cheer and applaud a scene in Birth Of A Nation depicting the hanging of a black man. Neither side exists without the other to perceive it as a threat - And both stand firm in their respective beliefs that their hatred of the other side is justified.

Yet, the film wasn’t the story of the Klan, nor of the Black liberation movement - It was the story of the two men caught in the middle, looking for footing on quickly-shrinking ground between the two sides, as their mutual hatred brings the two warring sides to an inevitable conflict. It is the same story of many modern viewers, wondering how in hell we’ve come to the present moment with “Black Lives Matter” on one side and Trump proclaiming “America First” on the other - with not an inch of common ground or even common perception between the two.

Although I hope most viewers would intuit which side is truly more justified in their grievances, a strength of the film was its balanced, rather than caricatured depiction of the Klan members; Who believe that yes, they live in a racist country - “An anti-white racist country.” The chilling brilliance in the depiction of David Duke was how harmlessly normal he first seems - Cheerfully spouting off phrases like “you’re darn tootin’“ on the phone to Ron and ending the conversation with a chipper “God bless white America!” This is exactly how ideologies of hate become disguised as civilized, mild-mannered “values.” David Duke has given up the flashy title of “Grand Dragon” for the more innocuous “National Director” (or something to that end). The first time he goes undercover, Flip is quickly admonished never to call the Klan “The Klan,” but rather “The Organization.” In a conversation between Ron and one of his superiors at the police station, it’s even discussed how a high-ranking Klansman might have the long-term goal of placing “one of their own” in the White House, after they’ve disguised their intolerance and bigotry under the empirical rationales of policy. It’s one of the most painful moments of the entire film.

Yet, while Flip has to endure the Klan members’ talk of killing black people, and Ron hears Kwame Ture speak about race wars with inevitability, another stroke of the film’s thoughtful genius is the choice of individual who actually enacts violence - Felix’s utterly apple pie looking housewife. She looks like the plump, harmless woman you wouldn’t want to be in line behind at the grocery store because she’s likely to have fifteen coupons. She is the last person you would expect on sight to leave a bomb at the house of a young black woman. And yet, this is another powerful message: How the vulnerable and susceptible can so easily become radicalized. I certainly don’t have sympathy for her because she’s an adult who made her own decisions; But I’m also aware of the way her Klansman husband manipulated her into becoming what she was, and it’s an extra layer of nuance I appreciated.

Finally, I’ll wrap this up on a personal, perhaps silly, note. There were multiple layers of this film that really disturbed me, and it’s taken me a good 24 hours to put my finger on this last one: I’m not sure I enjoyed Adam Driver as Flip. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m all over that shoulder gun holster look and he looked 500% finer in flannel than any man has a right to. Also, I’m not sure I would feel this same discomfort if he’d been played by a lesser-caliber actor, or one who I don’t have such an attachment to. But I realized that on an instinctive level, it upset me to see his face under a Klan hood, and to hear him say vile racist comments. Rationally, of course I know that A) He’s acting, and B) Even his character is acting, but Adam’s an utterly convincing actor, playing an undercover detective who’s very good at his job. Maybe both his and Flip’s performances were too good. I asked myself why it didn’t bother me the same way to hear Ron spout racist bullshit on the phone. Part of it is because he isn’t played by an actor I happen to deeply respect and admire, but there’s more to it than that. There’s a passage in the NYT review that got as close to my nebulous discomfort as anything I could express:

"The most shocking thing about Flip's (Adam Driver's undercover detective role) imposture is how easy it seems, how natural he looks and sounds. This unnerving authenticity is partly testament to Mr. Driver's ability to tuck one performance inside another, but it also testifies to a stark and discomforting truth. Maybe not everyone who is white is a racist, but racism is what makes us white.”

Adam’s performance as Flip is discomfiting because it shows how easily a white person can take up the mask of extreme bigotry and intolerance, and how easily they can be perceived as supporting a hate movement, regardless of their true internal ideologies. I know Flip doesn’t mean the things he’s saying, but he’s damn convincing because he looks the part. His whiteness paired with his words - regardless of whether they’re genuine - is powerful and terrible. And racism is what lends him the ability to put on that convincing mask. And if racism is what “makes us white,” Adam as Flip makes me wonder if I could do the same. If, for whatever reason, the situation was such that I had to convince someone I believed in these things... Would I surprise myself by finding that I’m capable of saying things equally terrible? Is this a role that every white person is capable of, at a certain subconscious level, because of systemic racism and implicit biases?

In conclusion: This movie has fucked up my life. It’s genius and I think I need to see it again. (If I can stomach it...)

#BlacKkKlansman #Adam Driver #John David Washington #Flip Zimmerman #Ron Stallworth

14 notes · View notes

if-you-fan-a-fire · 4 years

Photo

“‘Had No Lawful Excuse Judge Says Of K.K. Klan,” Toronto Star. April 16, 1930. Page 01 & 02. ---- Court Objects to Statement of Klansman’s Counsel in Philips Appeal ---- A CHRISTIAN ACT --- Insisting that the members of the Ku Klux Klan who took Isabel Jones of Oakville from her colored lover’s house on Feb. 28 last and placed her with the Salvation Army in order to separate her from Ira Johnson, had lawful excuse for what they did and were legally justified in wearing a hood, Dr. W. A. Philips, Hamilton chiropractor, appealed to the first divisional court at Osgoode Hall to-day from the conviction registered against him on March 10 by Magistrate McIlveen at Oakville.

At the outset, members of the court objected to the argument of C.W.R. Bowlby, accused counsel, that no force had been used and that the men from Hamilton had ‘acted like clergymen doing a Christian act.’

Mr Justice Grant: ‘What right had they to take this girl from the house?’

Mr. Justice Hodgins: ‘If they had not succeeded in what they intended, would they have gone back to Hamilton?’

Mr. Justice Grant: ‘They had no lawful excuse for taking this girl from her home and placing her where they thought she ought to be.’

Perfect Gentlemen Mr. Justice Hodgins asked if the men from Hamilton formed an organization of any kind. Counsel replied that they had been referred to as the Ku Klux Klan, but that there was no ground for that assertion in the evidence.

Asked how many men had come from Hamilton, he said there were 15 cars with about four or five men in each. ‘They acted like perfect gentlemen,’ he added.

Mr. Justice Hodgins: ‘You mean there was no violence shown?’

Chief Justice Mulock interrupted to ask who Dr. Philips was. ‘A chiropractor,’ was the reply.

‘Who calls him a doctor, then?’ Chief Justice Mulock objected. Mr. Bowlby agreed that there was no justification for the title.

The section of the code under which Dr. Philips was found guilty refers to anyone ‘being unlawfully found with his face masked, blackened, or otherwise disguised by night without lawful excuse.’

Mr. Bowlby insisted that this section referred to persons who were disguised for the purpose of house-breaking or burglary, of committing some other indictable offfence. He submitted that no criminal offence had been committed by the acused, and that he had a lawful excuse for wearing a hood on the night in question.

If a new trial is granted, the accused asks in his notice of appeal that it be without a jury.

Ask Increased Fine Edward Bayly, K.C., deputy attorney-general, presented a cross-appeal for an increase in the sentence by imposing a jail term, on the grounds that the sentence imposed was too light, ‘having regard to the character of the offence, namely, that the law was taken into the hands of the accused and that there was a great show of potential force.’

#oakville #kidnapping #forced removal #ku klux klan #white terrorism #masked criminals #racism in canada #white supremacy #chiropractor #fear of a black planet #miscegenation #black canadians #great depression in canada #ontario court of appeals #osgoode hall #crime and punishment in canada #history of crime and punishment in canada

0 notes

true-halloween-tales · 7 years

Text

2017: #11-VACATION FROM HELL, PART 1: NO BULL!

Back in 1989… Ronald Reagan was replaced by George Bush Sr. as President of the United States. Voyager 2 was approaching Neptune. Salmon Rushdie’s Satanic Verses novel had a controversy including an international death threat against the author. The Dali Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The final episode of the classic series of Doctor Who aired (see 2018: #2-GUIDE TO DOCTOR WHO). Monty Python’s Graham Chapman died. Tim Burton’s classic Batman film was released in theaters. And I turned 20 years old. Time for an adventure, how about a vacation?

I had been in contact with my friend known in these tales as Fu Man Chew. He gained the nickname by chewing on a raw ginseng root for an afternoon. He was highly interested in the latest technology, and purchased a black shiny sports car he called KITT, from Night Rider. It had a removable T-top, a CD player for six cds, powerful speakers were everywhere, and it even had two type of radar detectors. Fu Man Chew was up for a journey, except for one problem. He had relocated to Sarasota, Florida two years previous. So he had to drive to Chicago, visit his relatives, then we were off. But where to go?

I performed a wee bit of research, found some places of interest, took extensive notes, collected maps, made plans, and hatched schemes. The destination was to California – or bust. Was the greatest adventure about to begin? I took a couple of weeks off work from the drug store I worked at, and we sallied forth across the country (see 2014: #3-WORKING IN HELL). We first headed to the Wisconsin Dells. We left Chicago so early that we rolled into the Dells around 1 pm. We visited the wondrous Paul Bunyan restaurant and devoured a gargantuan repast (see 2015: #2-PHANTOMS). We climbed through the narrow tunnels of a somewhat white, styrofoam house named Xanadu, and enjoyed excessive mini golf. We continued northwest then headed west across Minnesota in the dark of night, still the same day since we left Chicago. There was a wrong turn, and we fizzled out at a rest area somewhere past Rochester.

On day two we zoomed out of southern Minnesota and into South Dakota. Listening to Prince’s Batdance with the T-top off in the blazing sun, dry air, golden fields, and hills of South Dakota. We stopped for the night in Pierre, South Dakota, a town piled on hills next to the Missouri River. After visiting a Dairy Queen that only had vanilla, we saw Ghostbusters 2 at a theatre. I was horrified to see I had developed a serious sunburn with that T-top off all day. Fu Man Chew diabolically laughed at me, claiming that the sunburn made me look like the god Pan. I dyed my hair blond that night to increase the Pan effect. Driving that single day under the hot, heavy sun branded several deep wrinkles into my forehead that have never gone away to this day. The marks of Pan are permanent!

On day three we were in western South Dakota. We spent a few hours in Badlands National Park. This place was a vast area with no trees, no vegetation, a road, and an enormous expanse of brown and grey rocky, craggy ground. There were large areas containing cones of natural rock that were close together. These areas were completely impassible. It was about 90 degrees and dry in this forlorn vestibule of Hell. I attempted a Herculean feat by climbing up a craggy hill. As I descended, the rock began breaking apart under my Herculean feet. I slid down about ten feet, my knee gave out, and I fell over into the invigorating dry rock and sandy dirt. After leaving the joys of the Badlands, KITT passed a multitude of tourist attractions featuring life-sized dinosaur replicas to terrify the tiny tots. KITT sped down the hot highways and over the sparse grassy hills to Rapid City, South Dakota. Nearby possible locations to visit included Mount Rushmore and Devils Tower as seen in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. We did visit Mount Rushmore; it was primarily a bunch of large noses. I expect that in millions of years when the aliens visit, all they will find remaining of human civilization will be those noses but with the heads broken off, thinking us to be a species of nose people.

We visited some neat caves in the Black Hills with crystal hanging stalactites. I noticed that one beautiful, white, crystal stalactite-stalagmite formation formed the appearance of a hooded, hulking figure. I was deeply disconcerted why it was named the Klansman, why that was ok. If this was a horror film, this was the moment of an evil foreshadowing. There are so many other names that could have been given to that rock formation: White Death, the Ghost, or the Big Booger. It is so true that hatred is the poison in this country! We escaped the Cave of Racism and drove through the Black Hills, passing more tourist attractions of dinosaurs as Batdance replayed for the sixteenth time. There were very few cds released in 1989 since cds were a new thing then. Luckily I had The Residents Heaven? and Hell! cds to play (see 2012: #1-SPOOKY MUSIC). KITT passed the large Chief Crazy Horse Mountain that was slowly being carved by American Indians of Chief Crazy Horse riding a horse; at this rate it might be finished in 300 years. We were having a reasonably good time, but we we were getting hungry. And then we went to the Mount Rushmore Restaurant, and everything changed.

The Mount Rushmore Restaurant looked very much as it does in Hitchcock’s classic film, North by Northwest. We were rather ravenous. I placed an order and took a seat at a booth. Fu Man Chew placed his order and sat down after me, but he was inexplicably red and speechless. After the food was served, he refused to eat. Angry times ten. It was not anything I did; whatever happened was when he was separate from me in line ordering his dinner. It seemed that a waitress made a rude comment to him. He would not talk. I devoured my dainty dinner since I did not know what else to do. We soon left. Fu Man Chew was not speaking, and he seemed rigid and tense. So we headed towards the Devils Tower, hopefully to reach it before nightfall – but there was an undefined tension in the air. We tried to select a route to Devils Tower, and I rationalized that a slower, more relaxed route might be wise due to Fu Man Chew’s stress. It turned out to certainly be a scenic road in the Black Hills National Forest, but it also was a gravel road. Fu Man Chew kept it under 25 mph as we headed to Wyoming silently. I looked for more cds. He would not talk. Still red. Angry. Then it happened.

An enormous black bull was on the right side of the road, just standing there in the forest. As the red sun set, the bull glared at us with an evil hatred and a dripping snout (see 2009: #8-ATTACKED BY BATS, BULLS, AND BIRDS). The huge, horned, demonic black bull – came charging at KITT as we passed by! I alerted Fu Man Chew who was seriously shocked. He glanced at the mirror and his eyes nearly popped out cartoonishly. The bull was running at us faster than he was driving. It was about three feet away from the car and gaining on us! He pressed down the gas pedal, and we sped up to 30 mph. The bull continued chasing us – quite fast – and it placed its head down with those sharp horns of destruction heading right for us. The narrow road turned, and I informed Fu Man Chew in my Mr. Spock tone that the right side of the car was starting to go off the edge of the road into a gully. He took evasive action, too quickly and forcefully, and the car skidded sideways in the gravel. Time suddenly seemed to flow strangely.

I soon learned that skidding sideways at 30 mph on a gravel road meant that your car would start flipping upside down like in the movies. KITT proceeded to flip over very quickly and also very slowly at the same time. How many times did it flip over? I really don’t know, but at least once. Did I loose consciousness? I am not even sure. I soon found myself upside down – with the car also upside down! We were twenty miles from the nearest town without a phone, on a mountain in the Black Hills. We were in the middle of a thick forest. The sun was setting into deep, hellish reds as I heard the chilling banshee-like malevolent moans emanating from the nearby lurking bull. Luckily it was out of sight.

Fu Man Chew frantically inquired if I was ok. I had no idea how badly I was injured, and I felt numb. I climbed out of the car, and my knees gave out as soon as I stood, and I fell over. I soon found only a cut on one finger and on my knee. The windshield and windows were broken into tiny pieces. I had not been wearing a seat belt. If I had been, most likely I would have been decapitated since the roof was smashed down on the passenger side. Fu Man Chew was ok and hyper. We spent a long time salvaging items from KITT. There was a very long search for Fu Man Chew’s wallet which was finally found in the dashboard of his car. The bull from Hell bellowed in the dark forest but was not seen. I relied on my Boy Scout survival skills and made a fire (see 2016: #13-SUMMER CAMP).

About ninety minutes later, a man and his son showed up. Their first words of friendliness included that it was illegal to have a fire there. They were on fire watch at a distant mountain which they pointed at, a speck in the darkness. They saw the smoke and spent ninety minutes driving towards it. I thanked them for their rescue, and they soon left promising that help would be on the way. I put out the fire and waited in the dark as the bull surely lurked somewhere nearby with that dripping snout. The county police finally showed up. The single sheriff inexplicably interrogated us. I later learned that it was illegal to have cattle on that land; it was federal land. No bull belonged being there. A rancher was breaking the law by allowing his cattle to graze and roam in the national forest. By midnight the inquisitive sheriff left, promising the tow truck driver would arrive. After an eternity of waiting in the dark with that bull lurking and smirking in the darkness, the tow truck drove up.

The tow truck driver was a Lord of the Rings hairy dwarf covered in dirt and grease named Mr. Butterfield. He flipped the car over with his tow truck in minutes. We got into his tow truck, and I sat in the front next to his hairy self. Mr. Butterfield did not speak clearly in any way, but managed to grunt out that there were no vacancies anywhere nearby, not even at Bates Motel. He announced that he was taking us to his home to stay the evening. I looked back at Fu Man Chew to see if he thought that this was a kidnapping, but he just sat in wide-eyed silent shock. Mr. Butterfield drove at maniacal speeds down the highway forest road towing KITT. My eyes bulged as he drove really fast straight through curves down the opposite lane. He laughed that some locals do this, causing out of state people to be run off the road to their deaths. Just last year they found a couple dead in their car off the road where they drove into a canyon and were covered up by vegetation. They were pinned in their car for days and died. He laughed and cackled as we speed down the dark road at 80 mph in the dark.

That drive down the dark road lasted about forty-five minutes, and it could have been a scene from a horror film. The brown grease-covered, short, dwarf-like, aged, tow truck driver, Mr. Butterfield, drove like a maniac. It was like a David Lynch scene as he made comments only he understood as he suckled on some sort of disgusting tobacco. It was well past 1 am when he started slowing down. He uttered something that sounded like Mohelmot, the language of the Mole people, and he drove into a private road (see 2014: #4-STRANGE MONSTERS IN SONGS). We learned that all of the lodgings in the area were typically fully booked this weekend every year – because it was the July 4th weekend. He showed us into his ranch-style country home which was located on a large piece of remote property. He led us into the basement and warned of the bed. It was a semi-broken water bed in a partially finished basement with some odd wall hangings. There was a flag of sorts with a very aggressive eagle figure capturing a sad cartoonish rat with the words “Die Anarchist.” As I checked myself for any possible anarchist identifying paraphernalia, my attention became fixed on the wall. There was a shotgun. As the light went out we barely fell asleep. Were we in danger?

Little did I know that my misadventures had just begun on this vacation from hell. I was far from Route 66 in many ways… and now was much closer to Route 666… (To be continued in two days with 2017: #12-VACATION FROM HELL, PART 2: STRANDED IN THE DESERT).

#1989 #wisconsin dells #badlands #vacation from hell #true halloween tales #Halloween #south dakota #mount rushmore

1 note · View note

dragons-in-bowties-blog · 6 years

Text

BlacKkKlansman reminded me that racism looks different now but hasn't changed

This essay contains light spoilers of BlackKkKlansman.

Last week, I sat down at a small local theater to watch BlacKkKlansman, Spike Lee's latest film about a Black undercover cop, Ron Stallworth, who tries to unravel the Colorado Springs chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. I had heard that the film, loosely based on real events and Stallworth's memoir Black Klansman, was necessary viewing-plus I grew up on films like Malcolm X and Crooklyn-so I was down to see what all the talk was about. I was also curious after Boots Riley, director of Sorry To Bother You, shared an intense yet honest take on the movie via Twitter. Riley mentioned that Spike Lee was apparently paid by the NYPD to “to help in an ad campaign that was 'aimed at improving relations with minority communities.'” Yikes.

And just ten minutes into the movie, I knew BlacKkKlansman was going to be an emotional experience. I heard the N-word multiple times in rapid succession-sometimes from the mouth of an older white police chief played by Robert John Burke.

Over the course of the two-and-a-half hours long film, I witnessed clips from Birth of a Nation, a KKK initiation ceremony, and a morbid detailing of the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington. There were also extensive mentions of the Black Power movement, but honestly, the scenes recalling unabashed white supremacy are the parts of BlacKkKlansman forever etched into my memory. To tie the historic events of the film into everyday occurrences of modern racism, the phrase “Make America Great Again” was alluded to, and the movie closed with real-life footage from the Charlottesville riots. The latter was triggering, to say the least.

Focus Features

BlacKkKlansman's bridging of the time gap between these various injustices-and the events of the film itself-force fed me information that I already knew to be true: Racism has always been present in America.

It has changed its face a bit. Overseers are now officers, as KRS-One's “Sound of da Police” told us, the War on Drugs is actively destroying the Black community, and racist legislation is often hidden under the appearance of “normal” politics. Ultimately, the disenfranchisement of those who are not Christian and white cannot be ignored just because it's now normal for oppressors to hide behind social constructs like religion, and for politics to be drenched in in racist people's dark ideas of what America should look like.

Racism may look different now, but at the same time, I know that racism has not evolved. It is just as violent as it was 200 years ago, and Black people and people of color-the building blocks of America-are still upholding the country through physical and emotional labor. Young men and women are still being violently murdered for doing nothing more than breathing while Black. Donald Trump is possibly more mentally aligned with the forefathers of America than any other president. Like slaveholders George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Trump fearlessly stands to uphold the racial inequalities that are woven so tightly into this country.

Focus Features

BlacKkKlansman was set in the 1970s. Social studies textbooks make it seem as if the '60s were the end of the fight for civil rights and the '70s were all about glitter, sex, and disco.

That's historically inaccurate. Radical communist Angela Davis was falsely imprisoned in 1970 and Bernard Whitehurst Jr., an innocent, unarmed Black man was killed by the police in 1975. The real Ron Stallworth even spent three years infiltrating and undoing a Black liberation movement himself and reporting it to the FBI around this same time (a fact that Riley includes in his critique of the film). We continue to make strides for the basic right to live without persecution: Graffiti artist Michael Stewart was murdered in the '80s, Rodney King was beaten by white police officers in the early '90s, and Trayvon Martin was gunned down by a racist six years ago. Philando Castile, Nia Wilson, Eric Garner…these injustices continue.

To me, BlacKkKlansman is forcing us to ask ourselves what progress really is.

With all of the dash cams and the instant spread of information via social media, we still have yet to put much of a stop to racism. This film is showing us a mirror of ourselves in the past, present, and future, and it is asking us to point out the differences. Yeah, I've never seen a burning cross in real life, but I have seen footage of a woman getting run over by a car because she stood with Black people who demanded fairness. Some unofficial members of the Klan, or “the organization” as it is called in the film, have decided to adopt tiki torches. Others are trading in their hoods and sheets for suits and running for office. Watching BlacKkKlansman hurts because it reminds me that, in so many ways, society is stuck.

The post BlacKkKlansman reminded me that racism looks different now but hasn't changed appeared first on HelloGiggles.

0 notes

antoine-roquentin · 5 years

Quote

Public distrust of the CWP [Communist Workers Party] mobilized sympathy for the white power gunmen. Furthermore, CWP members repeatedly undermined their chance at what justice the court could offer. Several of the women widowed on November 3 confounded the Greensboro community when, instead of weeping or grieving, they stood with their fists raised and declared to the television cameras that they would seek communist revolution.61 Days after the shooting, an article appeared in the Greensboro Record that was titled “Slain CWP Man Talked of Martyrdom” and implied that the CWP had foreknowledge of the shooting and that some planned to die for the cause. This damaged what little public sympathy remained. In language typical of mainstream coverage, the story described the CWP as “far-out zealots infiltrat[ing] a peaceful neighborhood.” Even two years later, when the widows visited the Greensboro cemetery and found their husbands’ headstone vandalized with red paint meant to symbolize blood, they would not be able to effectively mobilize public sympathy.62 Community wariness of the CWP’s militant stance only increased after the CWP held a public funeral for their fallen comrades and marched through town with rifles and shotguns. The fact that the weapons were not loaded hardly mattered: photographs of the widows holding weapons at the ready appeared in local and national newspapers. In the public imagination, these images inverted the real events of November 3, when a heavily armed white power paramilitary squad confronted a minimally armed group of protestors. The defendants, depicted as respectable men wearing suits in front of the Vietnam War memorial, stood in stark contrast to the gun-toting widows.63 National and local CWP members took up a campaign of hostile protest of the trial itself. The day before testimony began, the CWP burned a large swastika into the lawn of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms director, and hung an effigy on his property with a red dot meant to convey a bullet wound. In the trial itself, CWP members refused to testify, even to identify the bodies of their fallen comrades. CWP widows who shouted that the trial was “a sham” and emptied a vial of skunk oil in the courtroom were held in contempt of court. Although the actions of the widows may have “shocked the court and freaked out the judge,” as the CWP newspaper Workers Viewpoint proudly reported, the widows’ “bravery” didn’t translate as such to the Greensboro community.64 Even those who may have sympathized with the CWP after seeing the graphic footage of the shooting soon found that feeling complicated by the group’s contempt for the justice system, however problematic that system was. With the CWP widows refusing to tell their stories, attorneys for the defendants built a self-defense case by deploying two widely used white power narratives: one of honorable and wronged Vietnam veterans, and the other of the defense of white womanhood. The defense depended on the claim that CWP members carrying sticks had threatened Renee Hartsoe, the seventeen-year-old wife of Klansman Terry Hartsoe, as she rode in a car near the front of the caravan. Terry Hartsoe testified that he could see the communist protestors throwing rocks at the car and trying to open the door. Such a statement can be seen as alluding to the threat of rape of white women by nonwhite men, a constant theme throughout the various iterations of the Klan since the end of the Civil War.65 White supremacy has long deployed violence by claiming to protect vulnerable white women.... After many years of ineffective, smaller prosecutions, the Fort Smith trial marked the first serious attempt by the federal government to recognize the unification of seemingly disparate Klan, neo-Nazi, and white separatist groups in a cohesive white power movement, and to prosecute the movement’s leaders in light of this understanding. Affidavits documented nearly a decade of control by Beam, Butler, and Miles, and also named Miles’s home as the command center for the Order.66 “They preached war, prayed for war and dreamed of war,” said Justice Department prosecutor Martin Carlson. “And when war came, they willingly accepted war.”67 The indictments presented a serious enough threat to white power leaders that Beam decided to flee the country, setting off a series of events that would shape the outcome of the trial. Before Beam fled he married a woman whose martyrdom would later rally the movement and appeal to the mainstream. After the fishermen’s dispute, Louis Beam had led a chaotic personal life. He separated from his third wife in 1981, and an ugly custody battle followed the split. Beam took his young daughter to Costa Rica for two years. After his return to Texas in late 1984, he moved permanently to the Aryan Nations compound. He didn’t break his Texas ties, however, and took long trips there frequently.68 Sheila Toohey was a pretty, blond twenty-year-old Sunday school teacher at the Gospel Temple, a Christian Identity congregation in Pasadena, Texas. Beam’s young daughter was one of her students. Perhaps Beam met the Toohey family during the fishermen’s dispute: his Texas Knights of the Ku Klux Klan had run a bookstore in Pasadena. Toohey came from a family that lived in a trailer in nearby Santa Fe, Texas—the site of the Klan rally where Beam had burned a boat painted “U.S.S. Viet Cong” during the fishermen conflict in 1981.69 “Louis fell in love with Sheila immediately,” wrote J. B. Campbell, a white power movement activist who also claimed mercenary service in Rhodesia.70 Campbell’s laudatory essay later appeared on Beam’s personal website under the heading “Love” and framed with images of roses: [Beam had] been visiting her father, talking politics, and couldn’t believe his friend could have such a beautiful, sweet and unaffected daughter as Sheila, who lived at home with her parents and brothers in Santa Fe, Texas. Sheila taught Sunday school. She’d had to wear a back brace from a recent car accident and was in constant pain, although she would never burden anyone by mentioning it. In the following weeks Sheila noticed that Louis was coming over for dinner quite frequently and that he was talking with her more than with her father. He actually likes me, she realized. Within a few months Louis asked Sheila to marry him.71 The passage focused on Toohey as a vulnerable white woman—in constant pain but never mentioning it—and subservient to the man who “actually like[d]” her. Her position as a Sunday school teacher confirmed her innocence, presumed virginity, fitness for motherhood, and, since she taught children at a Christian Identity church, subscription to a white power political theology. That she lived surrounded, and presumably cared for, by her father and brothers emphasized her movement from one set of male guardians to another. It also highlighted the twenty-year age difference of the newlyweds. Toohey was Beam’s fourth wife; the first three had each been around sixteen years old when they married and around twenty years old when they divorced.72 Beam and Toohey married at a Christian Identity church in Pennsylvania in April 1987.73 After the wedding, with seditious conspiracy charges issued, Louis and Sheila Beam traveled to Mexico to avoid trial, taking his seven-year-old daughter with them, though without the proper documents. They settled in Chapala, near Guadalajara, in a community of white American expatriates. Beam spent four months on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list before authorities caught up with him in November 1987.74 One night the Beams returned home after grocery shopping. While the couple was unloading the food from the car and his daughter was still sitting in the vehicle, authorities apprehended Louis Beam. Sheila Beam “glanced out the kitchen window down at the car and was appalled to see Louis bent over the hood with a gun to his head,” according to Campbell’s narrative. Sheila Beam would later say that the officers never identified themselves as policemen and she assumed the attack was a robbery or kidnapping. Purportedly defending herself, she grabbed her husband’s weapon and shot a Mexican federal officer three times, wounding him. Authorities detained her in Mexico for ten days while they extradited Louis Beam to the United States, where he spent the next five months in prison during the sedition trial. A Mexican judge found Sheila Beam not guilty for reasons of self-defense in November 1987, and she was released and deported back to the United States. The officer she shot in the chest and abdomen remained hospitalized.75 To white power activists, this story was about endangered white women, but it was also about government betrayal. Rumors flew that federal agents had used phony drug charges as a pretense for the arrest, in order to extradite Louis Beam to the United States. This narrative placed innocent Sheila Beam in the crosshairs of a renegade state.76 However, Beam would most likely have been subject to extradition in any case, with or without drug charges.77 In an affidavit, Beam presented herself as an innocent white woman in need of the protection of white men. She said that she sustained an abdominal injury when the arresting officers threw her over a chair, and was then taken to jail and kept handcuffed for five days. She also said that the chief of police threatened her with torture, and that she was forced to sign documents in Spanish that she couldn’t read. She testified: While I was in the Guadalajara jail, I was physically and psychologically mistreated. I was kept with my wrists handcuffed behind my back for five days; my wrists were so swollen that my hands were turning colors and my watch was cutting off the circulation. I was hand-fed by a little Mexican boy with his dirty fingers. Officers would come into my cell and leer at me and caress their weapons. I was chained to the bed, which had a filthy, rotten mattress, and when I would try to sleep, they would kick the bed to jar me awake and keep me from sleeping. I was refused water for extended periods and medication for my back injury or my back brace. I was denied medical attention for my abdominal injuries and suffered from vaginal bleeding for several days afterward.78 Her testimony positioned her as endangered. It placed her in peril and in the presence of male racial others—the “Mexican boy” feeding her with “his dirty fingers,” and the officers. It presented men of color “caress[ing] their weapons” as they “leer[ed]” at her, invoking masturbation.79 It also placed her in a violated bedroom space, “chained to the bed, which had a filthy, rotten mattress.” Within the broader frame of pro-natalism, this language positioned Sheila Beam’s body as vulnerable to attack by men of color, and emphasized it as a site of combat where battles might be won or lost through the birth or absence of white children. The vaginal bleeding she said she suffered after her imprisonment hinted at both rape and miscarriage of a white child, and would have signified a double martyrdom. Jailed at the moment when the state had finally turned to the prosecution of the white power movement, Sheila Beam acted the martyr in a way that further united activists and appealed to people beyond the movement. Her wounded body served as a constant symbolic reminder of state failure and betrayal. Metzger lobbied for her release; Kirk Lyons, who represented Beam in the sedition trial and would become the go-to attorney of the white power movement over the next decade, sent an associate, Dave Holloway, to help the Toohey family advocate for her return. Back home, the Tooheys answered the phone with the entreaty, “Save Our Sheila.”80 After her release Lyons told one reporter, “It made a Christian out of me again. Her being freed was a miracle to me.”81 In the mainstream press, too, Sheila Beam became a sympathetic figure in local newspapers and major publications alike. A series of articles in the Galveston Daily News focused on her injuries, stating as fact that she had been “severely beaten” and raising the possibility that she “may have been sexually assaulted.” The same reporter uncritically repeated white power claims that FBI agents had refused to arrange her release to the United States, and described “physical and psychological coercion” during her ten-day imprisonment.82 Other articles linked her faith in God to her hopes for the acquittal of all the trial’s defendants,83 and mentioned her pain and injuries with no mention of the reasons for Louis Beam’s arrest or Sheila Beam’s actions in shooting and wounding the officer.84 The Houston Chronicle reported that she returned to the United States sobbing and limping, escorted by her father and an associate of Lyons, and was met by her mother and three brothers at the airport. The article emphasized that Sheila Beam had a swollen abdomen and walked with such a pronounced limp that two people had to support her.85 A photograph of Sheila’s return in the Miami News featured a flattering photograph of her leaning against her brother’s chest, holding flowers and flanked by a pretty, smiling, female friend. The caption referred to her “break[ing] out in tears” upon her return, and to her being “charged with shooting a Mexican federal police officer during the arrest of her husband at their … home.” It elided any reference to Christian Identity or participation in the white power movement, either by Sheila Beam or by her husband. It didn’t even name Louis Beam, much less discuss his pending seditious conspiracy charges or his stint on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Nevertheless, it made clear that Sheila Beam shot the officer at her home, emphasizing domestic defense beneath a photograph that portrayed her as vulnerable, small, and feminine.86 For her own part, Sheila Beam delivered a political performance of martyrdom both in comments to the press and in her actions. After her release, she flew directly to Fort Smith, where Louis Beam had been transferred to a federal prison hospital following a weeklong hunger strike. White power leaders praised her selfless devotion. “Despite her severe internal injuries and equally severe psychological damage,” Campbell wrote, “Sheila postponed her required emergency surgery and flew to Ft. Smith to reassure her husband.”87 Sheila Beam went to her husband’s side despite her severe pain, the story had it, illustrating the sacrifice of the white female body to the needs of the movement. During the trial, the presence of Sheila Beam’s wounded and wronged body entered the official record in several ways. Lyons invoked her injuries regularly, interrupting testimony about her arrest to ask the pursuing FBI agent what had happened to her back brace and conspicuously leaving court to pick her up at the airport. Sheila Beam continued to speak about her injuries and abuse to the press, and claimed her husband’s innocence with the simple position that since he had quit the Klan in 1981, he couldn’t now be guilty of sedition. In truth, he had quit the Klan to join Aryan Nations and lead the white power movement on a larger scale. She also reminded newspapers that her husband held the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Army Commendation Medal, and the Air Medal for Heroism, staking out his moral authority as a hero of the Vietnam War.88 It is difficult to gauge the impact of such performative acts on the outcome of a jury trial, but Sheila Beam’s symbolic work toward acquittal should not be discounted. Even in the pages of academic accounts that have argued that white power paramilitarism partially or wholly excluded them, women nevertheless appear as historical actors who impact events. In Rafael Ezekiel’s widely cited ethnographic study, for instance, which includes his observation of the Fort Smith trial, he notes that “a sister appears for a young fellow who is already serving a long term for involvement in The Order’s robbery of an armored car … entering the court, she touched her brother’s arm, quietly, as she passed him.”89 With these actions, the “sister”—no name given, as she did not qualify as an activist in this study, but perhaps it was Brenna or Laura Beth Tate, sisters of David Tate—conferred humanity upon her brother, appealed to the jury, and neutralized the racism of the movement.90 Similarly, Ezekiel recounts the presence of Louis Beam’s “young new wife,” Sheila Beam, although she isn’t named in his account.91 Ezekiel describes how the couple make frequent eye contact across the room. She had been the Sunday school teacher of Beam’s daughter. A reporter ungraciously described her to me as “a Yahweh freak.” Here in court she wears a frilled white blouse; during Beam’s arrest in Mexico, she shot an armed Federale who had failed to identify himself.92 In other words, Sheila Beam played her part as a movement activist by creating and embodying a particular narrative of her innocence, the arrest, the justified shooting of the Mexican officer, and her husband’s wrongful detention—one persuasive enough to be accepted uncritically by journalists and academic observers.93

Katherine Belew, Bring the War Home

#thinking about amber guyger #she only has 2 white people on her jury #but there's still a level of identification with the prerogatives of whiteness that might override that

30 notes · View notes