...rummaging through the debris in "post-racial" America...
My Book:
(click photo above)
"The Selma of the North": Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee
Between 1958 and 1970, a distinctive movement for racial justice emerged from unique circumstances in Milwaukee. A series of local leaders inspired growing numbers of people to participate in campaigns against employment and housing discrimination, segregated public schools, the membership of public officials in discriminatory organizations, welfare cuts, and police brutality.
The Milwaukee movement culminated in the dramatic—and sometimes violent—1967 open housing campaign. A white Catholic priest, James Groppi, led the NAACP Youth Council and Commandos in a militant struggle that lasted for 200 consecutive nights and provoked the ire of thousands of white residents. After working-class mobs attacked demonstrators, some called Milwaukee “the Selma of the North.” Others believed the housing campaign represented the last stand for a nonviolent, interracial, church-based movement.
Patrick Jones tells a powerful and dramatic story that is important for its insights into civil rights history: the debate over nonviolence and armed self-defense, the meaning of Black Power, the relationship between local and national movements, and the dynamic between southern and northern activism. Jones offers a valuable contribution to movement history in the urban North that also adds a vital piece to the national story.
Think you know the full story of the civil rights era? Patrick Jones's masterful study of the movement in Milwaukee will make you think again. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, The Selma of the North provides a devastating rebuttal of many of the conventional narratives of the civil rights movement. Here a vibrant nonviolent movement in the de-industrializing Midwest grows into a Black Power movement led by urban youth and a white Catholic priest who use confrontational direct action to lay bare the fissures of racial inequality in the 'liberal' North. --Jeanne Theoharis, Brooklyn College, editor of Freedom North and Groundwork
A well-researched, well-written, and important history. Based on a rich array of sources, this book enhances our understanding of civil rights activism in the postwar urban North and establishes a useful foundation for the comparison of similar developments elsewhere in the country. --Joe William Trotter, Jr., Carnegie Mellon University, author of Black Milwaukee
This book fills a serious gap in the literature of the civil rights revolution, joining studies on other cities in laying the groundwork on race and civil rights in the postwar urban North. Jones tells a good story, capturing events that might otherwise be lost to history. --Arnold R. Hirsch, University of New Orleans, author of Making the Second Ghetto
The Selma of the North is an insightful and invigorating addition to the growing literature on black freedom struggles outside of the South. Jones's important and informative account writes Milwaukee back into the narrative of the civil rights-Black Power era and in the process expands our understanding of postwar America. --Peniel E. Joseph, Brandeis University, author of Waiting Till the Midnight Hour
The Selma of the North is a riveting new story of the civil rights movement in America, a tale on par with Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery in its power and importance. Jones's magisterial research and magnetic prose illuminate the untold story of the battle for the urban north in the 1960s, a battle that shows how race has always been the Achilles heel of white progressives. This story transcends easy dichotomies of black and white, North and South, radical and reformist. How did a group called 'the Commandos' define nonviolence? How did a white Catholic priest become a 'Black Power' leader? If this is not a saga for the age of Obama, I don't know what is. --Timothy B. Tyson, Duke University, author of Radio Free Dixie and Blood Done Sign My Name
A new study by researchers at the University of Kansas finds that "children are aware white males have monopolized the US presidency, and most attribute the trend to racial prejudice," a result that calls into question the idea that children live in a color- and gender-blind world.
The following entry is a reprint of an entry by Kyle Michaelis over at the New Nebraska Network blog...
This just in from a NNN reader in Columbus. It shouldn't come as any surprise that Nebraskans are seeing some very suspicious and outright deceptive tactics being used to gather enough signatures to place a constitutional amendment to end affirmative action on the November ballot:
Thought you might want to hear about petition gatherers tactics in the Columbus area. I went to Wal-mart this morning (not my first choice of retailers but there isn't a whole lot to choose from here) and noticed a table set up outside one of the doors. The table had two small signs saying:
"SIGN UP TODAY" "Are you concerned about jobs?"
Then it had some smaller print that I couldn't read as I rushed past the table knowing what this person was trying to pull on the customers. When I came out of the store, I heard the pitch: "Are you concerned about jobs in Nebraska? Sign up today to eliminate gender and race as a factor in hiring decisions."
The scruffy, homeless looking, mid-twenty year old was only making this pitch to white, middle-aged men.
In this instance, the petition gatherers appear to have completely obscured the fact that this amendment would only affect hiring decisions by the state and by those contracting with the state. Of course, there's a very good chance they didn't understand that distinction for themselves. Such matters are of little concern when they're just trying to make a buck and some misleading language playing on Nebraskans' economic fears can help them to that effect.
I'd assume this "scruffy, homeless-looking" gentlemen was one of the out-of-state, paid petition-gatherers those orchestrating this effort were so excited about bringing to Nebraska after it was reported they'd failed with similar efforts in Oklahoma and Missouri. If this story is any indication, it seems they've also brought with them the same types of deception and fraud employed in those other states.
It's up to us to remain vigilant and strong if such tactics are to meet with a similar fate, failing in Nebraska as well.
...younger children of the mostly immigrant Latinos in Georgia are learning and internalizing that they are different from white -- and black -- children not just because they have the wrong skin color but also because many of their parents lack the right papers. They are growing up in a racial and political climate in which Latinos' subordinate status in Georgia and in the Deep South bears more than a passing resemblance to that of African-Americans who were living under Jim Crow. Call it Juan Crow: the matrix of laws, social customs, economic institutions and symbolic systems enabling the physical and psychic isolation needed to control and exploit undocumented immigrants.
When we come at the immigration issue from a divisive and reactionary place, we dehumanize immigrants and, in the process, denigrate not only them but ourselves, too.
In Nebraska, we have had a number of recent examples. For instance, the Unicameral tried to pass legislation blocking in-state tuition for children of undocumented immigrants, a purely mean and punitive move designed to take away one of the key ladders to independence and self-determination. Or, our bone-headed Attorney General, John Bruning, has refused to enforce federal fair housing legislation because a couple of the cases involved undocumented immigrants, even though federal law is clear that immigration status does not justify discrimination. In both instances (and others), conservative politicians and their followers have forgotten the humanity of immigrants, instead opting to exploit them as symbolic pawns in an increasingly desperate political game.
People! Let us wake up to the humanity of others: Immigrants - documented or not - are PEOPLE, HUMAN BEINGS, and as such, deserve to be treated with compassion and justice, regardless of their status.
What does all this reaction say about us? What does it reveal about the soul of our nation?
Take a moment. Click the above map to enlarge. Spend some time looking at this "op-chart" from the NYTimes which depicts recent noose incidents around the U.S...
One of the dark, ugly sides of the civil rights era - and largely ignored or forgotten in the popular history of that time - was the "massive resistance" of many whites throughout the North to even modest attempts to address pervasive racial inequality, particularly when it came to housing. This massive resistance often equaled or exceded the more well-known episodes of white racist violence in the South during this period. A stunning example of this came in 1966 when Dr. King led a group of non-violent open housing advocates through a nasty gauntlet of thousands of screaming white residents in the Marquette Park neighborhood of Chicago. Throughout that summer, civil rights activists had marched through predominately white communities like Gage Park on the Southwest Side and Belmont Cragin on the Northwest Side to press local officials to enact an ordinance barring discrimination in the sale or rental of property. At each site the peaceful demonstrators were reminded of the bitter opposition to racial integration that thrived across the city and the nation. The level of hate in Marquette Park was particularly dazzling. White on-lookers hurled obscenities, firecrackers, sticks, rocks and debris. To the tune of the Oscar Meyer hot-dog song, choruses of, “I wish I were an Alabama trooper/This is what I would truly love to be/Because if I were an Alabama trooper/Then I could kill the niggers legally,” filled the air. A rock the size of a fist struck King in the face, knocking him to the ground in a daze. A knife, hurled by another counter-demonstrator, missed the minister, but lodged in the neck of a white marcher. One march organizer said of the white counter-demonstrators, "They were looking at a people of color and rejecting them at face value.” Afterward, a clearly rattled King told the media, “I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen---even in Mississippi and Alabama---mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago. I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.” And Chicago was not an isolated incident... overall that summer, 43 American cities were roiled by racial violence. The next year, in Milwaukee, an estimated 10,000 angry white residents poured into the streets to again oppose peaceful open housing marchers. There, they threw rocks, cherry-bombs, sticks, and even human feces. They held white power signs with hateful slogans and attacked demonstrators with their fists.
Why is this history not as well known as the stories of Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery and other southern locales? What are the implications of not telling these stories? What are the lessons and legacies of these northern stories of white massive resistance? And, in a broader sense, how do the narratives we create of the past affect the way we understand our present and where we need to go in the future?
As a society, we have yet to come to terms with this nasty aspect of our collective past, even though today our nation remains deeply segregated. At the dawn of the 21st century, it remains true that an influx of more than a couple black families in a white neighborhood more often than not prompts an exodus of white residents. Black residents in white neighborhoods continue to consistently report general hostility by white neighbors in the form of slights, racial slurs and, in some cases, acts of vandalism and even violence. To be sure, the system has "refined" white privilege by shrouding it in discriminatory loan and real estate practices, in institutional mechanisms that are often "invisible," at least to many white people. But, the general problem of segregation and white resistance to integrated housing remains.
...take a look at this brief documentary footage of the 1966 open housing marches in Gage Park Chicago, including remarks by Dr. King.
Support today's national day of protest in support of the Jena 6. Wear black. Talk to your friends and neighbors about this incident. Oppose racism in all forms, in Louisiana and in your own backyard...
This essay, by Bill Quigley, comes from Blackagendareport.com In the intro to the piece, Quigley writes:
The hi-speed catastrophe and no-speed recovery of New Orleans has provided us with unwanted lessons about the nature of the U.S. regime and the criminal class in power. The besieged citizens of the city have, by necessity, become thoroughly politicized, as they cling to home and hearth by their fingernails - while a great Diaspora languishes in scattered patches of the American vastness, internal exiles. Those who remain have undergone a crash course in what it really means to be a citizen of a country that respects only money. They have learned the imperatives of activism, self-reliance, and leadership-creation from the ranks.
Well, here we are, two years after the worst natural disaster in American history. Two years after Hurricane Katrina killed roughly 2,000 people and forced the dirty little secret of race and poverty in American society into the mainstream consciousness, at least for a few weeks. And, here, two years later, the Gulf Coast remains devastated... and poverty runs rampant across the nation. This is the shame of our society, domestically.
Over the next few days I will be posting what I think are some good materials on Katrina during this anniversary period. I hope you will take some time to check them out and I hope we might all meditate deeply on the implications of this ongoing disaster for our nation... and give some thought to what we might do to make a more compassionate and just society.
I am starting with an essay by Earl Ofari Hutchinson because it focuses on poverty, which is by no means a regional issue. It is a national epidemic, yet there remains no political will to do anything about it. For a nation so wealthy, this is pathetic... and immoral. Remember after Katrina hit, there was all this blabbering by politicians, business leaders and other "important people" about a new "War on Poverty"? Nothing ever came of it. The money that was appropriated, like much of the money that was thrown at Iraq, was wasted, or mismanaged, or "disappeared" altogether.
I live in Nebraska. Omaha is home to the third poorest black community in the nation and the poorest for black children. A full 60% of all African American children in Omaha live in poverty! That is not a typo. Sixty percent! I grew up in Cleveland, one of the poorest cities in the country. About one third of all people in that city live in poverty. And on and on and on...
In the article, Hutchinson writes,
"They all missed the real story and tragedy of Katrina: the naked face of poverty that shocked the world two years ago remains just as naked and shameful two years later. And Bush and the Democrats are to blame for it...
"The national soul searching about attacking poverty has evaporated. The nearly $100 billion that Bush says his administration has shelled out to aid the recovery effort has either been wasted on showy and ineffectual redevelopment, public works reclamation and retrenching projects, inflated construction contracts, or has flat-out been 'misappropriated' (some would say 'stolen')."
I think this article provides an important paradigm shift on the immigration issue. I hope you will take the time to give it a read:
One of the dark, ugly sides of the civil rights era - and largely ignored or forgotten in the popular history of that time - was the "massive resistance" of many whites throughout the North to even modest attempts to address pervasive racial inequality, particularly when it came to housing. This massive resistance often equaled or exceded the more well-known episodes of white racist violence in the South during this period. A stunning example of this came in 1966 when Dr. King led a group of non-violent open housing advocates through a nasty gauntlet of thousands of screaming white residents in the Marquette Park neighborhood of Chicago. Throughout that summer, civil rights activists had marched through predominately white communities like Gage Park on the Southwest Side and Belmont Cragin on the Northwest Side to press local officials to enact an ordinance barring discrimination in the sale or rental of property. At each site the peaceful demonstrators were reminded of the bitter opposition to racial integration that thrived across the city and the nation. The level of hate in Marquette Park was particularly dazzling. White on-lookers hurled obscenities, firecrackers, sticks, rocks and debris. To the tune of the Oscar Meyer hot-dog song, choruses of, “I wish I were an Alabama trooper/This is what I would truly love to be/Because if I were an Alabama trooper/Then I could kill the niggers legally,” filled the air. A rock the size of a fist struck King in the face, knocking him to the ground in a daze. A knife, hurled by another counter-demonstrator, missed the minister, but lodged in the neck of a white marcher. One march organizer said of the white counter-demonstrators, "They were looking at a people of color and rejecting them at face value.” Afterward, a clearly rattled King told the media, 
“I’ve been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen---even in Mississippi and Alabama---mobs as hostile and hate-filled as I’ve seen in Chicago. I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.” And Chicago was not an isolated incident... overall that summer, 43 American cities were roiled by racial violence. The next year, in Milwaukee, an estimated 10,000 angry white residents poured into the streets to again oppose peaceful open housing marchers. There, they threw rocks, cherry-bombs, sticks, and even human feces. They held white power signs with hateful slogans and attacked demonstrators with their fists. 
And, in a broader sense, how do the narratives we create of the past affect the way we understand our present and where we need to go in the future?
Support today's national day of protest in support of the Jena 6. Wear black. Talk to your friends and neighbors about this incident. Oppose racism in all forms, in Louisiana and in your own backyard... 
This essay, by Bill Quigley, comes from Blackagendareport.com In the intro to the piece, Quigley writes:
Well, here we are, two years after the worst natural disaster in American history. Two years after Hurricane Katrina killed roughly 2,000 people and forced the dirty little secret of race and poverty in American society into the mainstream consciousness, at least for a few weeks. And, here, two years later, the Gulf Coast remains devastated... and poverty runs rampant across the nation. This is the shame of our society, domestically. 
