Adrian C. Louis and the reservation of the mind

“I’m writing about my life. I guess deep down I sort of fancy myself as speaking for certain kinds of people who don’t have a choice—for the downtrodden.” 

Adrian C. Louis 

"Faces skyward, we all seek
songs in the whirlwinds
that parch our slow lives."
Adrian C. Louis from Sun/Dance/Song

Sonny’s Purple Heart
By Adrian C. Louis

"But it’s too late to say you’re sorry." — The Zombies

I
Man, if you’re dead, why are you leading
me to drink after five sober years?
Sonny, can I get a witness?
I had a Snow White vision of the prodigal
son returning to America
that day of my final hangover.
I tried to clear the mixture
of cobwebs and shooting stars
from my brain with spit-warm
Budweiser, but the hair of the dog
just was not doing the trick.
I ended up pummeling myself
seven times that day and named each egg
white load for a Disney dwarf.
The first was Dopey.
The final was Sleepy, I think, or Droopy.

II
Last year you scrawled a letter to me
about your first and final visit
to the Vietnam Memorial and how your eyes
reflected off the shiny black stone
and shot back into your brain like guidons
unfurling the stench of cordite and the boy screams
of men whose souls evaporated
into morning mists over blue-green jungles.
You had to be there, you said.
That’s where you caught the cancer, you said.

III
Sonny. Tonight I had a dream of Mom’s death
twenty years too late and now my eyes
will not close like I imagine the lid
on her cheap casket did.
I was not there when she died.
Home on leave from Basic Training,
you stood in for me
because I was running scared
through the drugged-out alleys of America,
hiding from those Asian shadows
that would finally ace you and now, now
in the dark victory of your Agent Orange cancer,
it gives me not one ounce of ease
to say fuck Nixon and Kissinger,
fuck all the generals and all
the armies of God and fuck me,
twenty years
too late.

IV
History is history and thank God for that.
When we were wise-ass American boys
in our fifth grade geography class,
we tittered over the prurient-sounding
waves of Lake Titticaca … Titti … ca-ca
and we never even had the slightest
clue that Che was camping out
en las montañas de Bolivia …
We never knew American chemists would
kill you slicker than slant-eyed bullets.

V
Damn Sonny. Five sober years done squeaked
by like a silent fart and I’m on autopilot,
sitting in a bar hoisting suds with ghosts,
yours and my slowly evolving own.
When we were seventeen with fake I.D.’s,
we got into the Bucket of Blood
in Virginia City and slurped sloe gin fizzes
while the innocent jukebox blared
“She’s Not There” by the Zombies.
Later that drunken night you puked purple
splotches onto my new, white Levis
and a short, few years into your future
this lost nation would award
you two purple hearts,
one of which your mother pressed
into my hand that bright day
we filed you under
dry desert dirt.

(Adrian C. Louis, "Sonny’s Purple Heart" from Vortex of Indian Fevers. Copyright © 1995 by Adrian C. Louis)

The Sacred Circle
by Adrian C. Louis

Numanah, Grandfather, grant me the grace
of a new song far from this lament
of lame words and fossils of a losing game.
No more flat pebbles skimmed between the wetness
of tongue and thigh and eye again!
I never asked to be the son of a stained mattress
who contemplated venison stew and knew
the shame hidden in grease clouds stuck to the wall
behind the woodstove where Grandmother cooked.
I only wanted to run far, so far from Indian land.
And, God damn it, when I was old enough I did.

I loitered in some great halls of ivy
and allowed the inquisition of education:
electric cattle prods placed lovingly
to the lobes of my earth memories.
I carried the false spirit force of sadness
wrapped in a brown sack in the pocket
of a worn, tweed coat.
In junkie alleyways I whispered of forgotten arrows
in the narrow passages of my own discarded history.
Then, when I was old enough
I ran back to Indian land.
Now I’m thinking of running from here.

Pine Ridge, South Dakota
February 1988

(Adrian C. Louis, "The Sacred Circle" from Fire Water World. Copyright © 1989 by Adrian C. Louis.)

Adrian C. Louis is a member of the Lovelock Paiute tribe from Nevada who lives on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He has written ten books of poetry, two novels and a book of short stories.His most recent book of poetry is Random Exorcisms.

He has been a journalist, editor of tribal newspapers and magazines and has taught at Lakota College and in the Minnesota public university system. He is editor for Lakota Times and Indian Country Today and co-founder of the Native American Journalists Association.

On his writing Adrian Louis said:

"Early on in my writing, I did a lot of speaking from behind masks. The older I got, the more honest and direct I became. I think that’s simply human nature. As we grow older, we learn that in the end, a lie will always return to bite you on the ass. But, I am no hero, no shaman/warrior. I am simply a common man. Even though I’ve gotten an education and have written books, I am still a person who grew up using an outhouse. I think people react strongly to my writings for varied reasons. Life can beat you down and I’ve survived my share of trauma, a lot of it self-inflicted. People can relate to that and to the fact that in a lot of my poems I don’t take any prisoners. I think many readers like to find a poem that in some way reflects their own complicated lives."

An online collection of poems is here. His website is here & interviews are here and here.

Brazilian people rise up against a neoliberal coup

Photo of members of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brasilia protesting against the impeachment of Rousseff. Photo:Reuters

I wrote this blog piece earlier in the week about the neoliberal coup that removed the democratically elected President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff.

The coup was supported by the Brazilian corporate and business elite, and appears to have been supported by both the US government and US corporate interests and has installed Michel Temer (the right-wing vice president and U.S. informant) and members of the right wing neoliberal party that has lost every election since 2002.

The coup has led to a sharp outburst of resistance and protest by the Brazilian people. The new government threatened to criminalise and arrest protesters and demonstrators.

A selection of photos from the various protests is here.

Policemen ride their horses during a clash with demonstrators at a protest against the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff, in Porto Alegre, Brazil, May 12, 2016. Photo:Reuters

There were protests at the Cannes Film Festival  where the cast and crew of the Brazilian film Aquarius staged an improvised protest on the red carpet to show support for President Dilma Rousseff, denouncing her suspension as a ‘coup d’état.’ 

The film's writer and Director Kleber Mendonca Filho and Sonia Braga the lead actress and other members of the cast and crew unveiled printed banners ahead of their film’s premiere.

Thomas Frank on why many Americans support Donald Trump

Thomas Frank has written some smart books on the links between the American political and corporate elite and the concerns and aspirations of everyday Americans, the rise of the political right, the failure of the Democratic liberal elite and why ordinary Americans often support politicians and policies that are counter to their own interests.

In a recent article in the Guardian [1] Frank drills down beneath all the rhetoric and outrage about Donald Trump to explore why large numbers of ordinary Americans support him.

Frank dismisses the simplistic moralizing and manufactured outrage of the media and political commentators who dismiss Trump’s working class supporters as ignorant and ill-informed bigots and racists.

As Frank notes, while Trump appears to be a racist himself, racism is not necessarily what motivates many of his followers. Instead Frank writes:

“A map of his support may coordinate with racist Google searches, but it coordinates even better with deindustrialization and despair, with the zones of economic misery that 30 years of Washington’s free-market consensus have brought the rest of America… ……when people talk to white, working-class Trump supporters, instead of simply imagining what they might say, they find that what most concerns these people is the economy and their place in it”

 

Franks suggests that part of Trump's appeal is that he is telling a tale as much about economic outrage, as it is about racism:

 

"Many of Trump’s followers are bigots, no doubt, but many more are probably excited by the prospect of a president who seems to mean it when he denounces our trade agreements and promises to bring the hammer down on the CEO that fired you and wrecked your town, unlike Barack Obama  and Hillary Clinton".

In a similar vein, Jeff Gupo [2] of the Washington Post argues that it is economic distress among older white people in many parts of the country that is driving many voters toward Donald Trump.

Gupo, who has delved into the connection between white mortality, economic anxiety and support for Trump writes:

"[I]t is nonetheless striking that Trump’s promise to "Make America Great Again" has been most enthusiastically embraced by those who have seen their own life's prospects diminish the most — not [only] in terms of material wealth, but in terms of literal chances of survival."

In his Guardian article, Thomas Frank refers to the findings of a recent study by Working America, an organization associated with US Unions, which interviewed some 1,600 white working-class voters in the suburbs of Cleveland and Pittsburgh in December and January. 

The group found that support for Trump is strong, even among self-identified Democrats and not because people are racist or want a racist in the White House, but because Trump speaks about their number one concern- “good jobs and the economy”.

Of that study Frank writes:

“People are much more frightened than they are bigoted,” is how the findings were described to me by Karen Nussbaum, the executive director of Working America. The survey “confirmed what we heard all the time: people are fed up, people are hurting, they are very distressed about the fact that their kids don’t have a future” and that “there still hasn’t been a recovery from the recession, that every family still suffers from it in one way or another.”
 

Frank cites Tom Lewandowski, the president of the Northeast Indiana Central Labor Council:

“These people aren’t racist, not any more than anybody else is,” he says of Trump supporters he knows. “When Trump talks about trade, we think about the Clinton administration, first with Nafta and then with [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] China, and here in Northeast Indiana, we hemorrhaged jobs.”

“They look at that, and here’s Trump talking about trade, in a ham-handed way, but at least he’s representing emotionally. We’ve had all the political establishment standing behind every trade deal, and we endorsed some of these people, and then we’ve had to fight them to get them to represent us.”

Frank concludes:

"Left parties the world over were founded to advance the fortunes of working people. But our left party in America – one of our two monopoly parties – chose long ago to turn its back on these people’s concerns, making itself instead into the tribune of the enlightened professional class, a “creative class” that makes innovative things like derivative securities and smartphone apps. The working people that the party used to care about, Democrats figured had nowhere else to go, in the famous Clinton-era expression. The party just didn’t need to listen to them any longer.

Yet still we cannot bring ourselves to look the thing in the eyes. We cannot admit that we liberals bear some of the blame for its emergence, for the frustration of the working-class millions, for their blighted cities and their downward spiraling lives. So much easier to scold them for their twisted racist souls, to close our eyes to the obvious reality of which Trumpism is just a crude and ugly expression: that neoliberalism has well and truly failed."[1] Thomas Frank 2016) Millions of ordinary Americans support Trump: here’s, the Guardian, March 7 2016

 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/07/donald-trump-why-americans-support

 [2] Jeff Gupo https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/04/death-predicts-whether-people-vote-for-donald-trump/

 

Corporate executive found guilty faces a jail sentence

"Don Blankenship's conviction doesn't feel like victory but in the grand scope of more than a century of the coal industry's abuse of the people of Appalachia, it may mark a starting place....My heart aches for all those who suffered and died under Blankenship's avaricious lash. The jury showed him more mercy than he has ever shown anyone in his entire existence on this planet. Even if he serves his one year slap-on-the-wrist, we know already that justice will not be done His legacy of poisoning Appalachia will persist long after his name has been forgotten."
Bob Kincaid, president of the Coal River Mountain Watch

Recently, I wrote a blog piece Holding corporate executives criminally responsible for the deaths and harms they cause crimes about the trial of Don Blankenship, the coal baron and CEO of  Massey Energy who was on trial for criminal charges over a coal mine explosion that killed 29 miners at the Massey Energy Upper Big Branch mine in 2010. 

The Upper Big Branch explosion was the worst US mining disaster in nearly fifty years. Blankenship was on trial for violating numerous safety regulations and conspiring to hide violations which ultimately led to the underground mine explosion and the disaster.

Blankenship was a poster boy for 'crony malevolent capitalism' and ran Massey Energy as a lawless enterprise protected by the politicians, public official and lawyers he paid off.

Well, Blankenship has been found guilty by a jury of conspiracy to violate US safety laws. He was cleared of the lesser charges of lying to the Federal Government.

Sadly, he only faces only 1 year in jail, but activists and law enforcement officials praised the decision. U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin called the verdict "a landmark day for the safety of coal workers."
 

Journalist and historian Jeff Biggers wrote that Blankenship's conviction was a "historic first step in holding mining outlaws accountable for their reckless operations." Biggers continued;

 

"For the first time in memory for those of us with friends, family, miners and loved ones living amid the toxic fallout of the coal industry, this conviction may only serve as a tiny reckoning of our nation's complacency with a continual state of violations, but it could begin a new era of justice and reconciliation in the devastated coal mining communities in Appalachia and around the nation."

The Corporate Crime Reporter quotes University of Maryland Law Professor Rena Steinzor, the author of Why Not Jail?: Industrial Catastrophes, Corporate Malfeasance, and Government Inaction, who has argued for more aggressive prosecution of corporate executives:

“This conspiracy was the primary cause of an enormous explosion that killed 29 men in the worst mine disaster in 40 years. Although the jury was not presented with the question whether Blankenship was directly responsible for the explosion, it did decide that he played Russian roulette with his miners’ lives.  By underfunding efforts to comply, harassing employees to ignore safety rules so they could “dig coal” faster, and threatening managers with dismissal if they worked to solve ventilation and other problems at the mine, Blankenship made an already hazardous workplace into a horror show that made men fear for their lives every time they journeyed thousands of feet underground.”
 

The Corporate Crime Reporter quotes Rob Weissman from Public Citizen:

“Today’s guilty verdict should send the message to coal company executives that society will no longer tolerate this trade of miners’ lives for coal and profit. Indeed, it should send a message to CEOs across the country: No more recklessly endangering workers’ lives, and you will be held criminally liable if your actions – and inaction – cost lives.”

Articles about the decision are here and here.

The Planned Parenthood shooting, domestic terrorism and the Christian right-wing war on women

"It is offensive and outrageous that some politicians are now claiming this tragedy has nothing to do with the toxic environment they helped create,"

Planned Parenthood Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens

As someone who worked for 6 years in the area of sexual and reproductive health here in Western Australia, it is chilling to see colleagues in the US  being murdered, shot, assaulted and attacked for doing the daily work of supporting and defending women's sexual and reproductive rights.

On November 27, in Colorado USA, Robert Lewis Dean opened fire outside the Planned Parenthood health center in Colorado Springs, murdering 3 people and wounding another 9 in a five hour shootout with Police.

The clinic was equipped with bullet proof vests and a safe room.

Those killed were Jennifer Markovsky, who was attending the clinic with a friend. Garrett Swasey, the Police Officer who first responded to alerts about a shooter at the clinic and Ke'Arre Stewart, a former Iraq war veteran who was standing outside the clinic. Stewart was wounded but managed to enter the clinic and warn those inside to take shelter and call 911.

 

 Vicki Cowart, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Rocky Mountains released a statement that eyewitnesses confirmed the attacker “was motivated by opposition to safe and legal and abortion”.

While anti-abortion advocates and conservative politicians condemned the shooting, there is little doubt that the rhetoric of pro-lifers and Christian extremists and their targeting and demonization of providers like Planned Parenthood, contributed to a culture and environment where some believe it is justifiable to attack clinics and murder doctors and health providers, simply because they provide women with sexual and reproductive services and abortion.

The toxic rhetoric of the Christian right, pro- lifers, Christian extremists and Republican politicians encouraged the use of violence to attack and close down Planned Parenthood services and health professionals and women attending clinics.

 

Reproductive health and abortion providers have suffered an unprecedented increase in hate speech, violent threats and attacks.

 

In the Nation magazine Zoë Carpenter noted that the shooting comes at a time of escalating violence directed at Planned Parenthood and abortion clinics:

 In September, the FBI noted an increase in cyber attacks and arsons, and warned that it was “likely criminal or suspicious incidents will continue to be directed against reproductive health care providers, their staff and facilities.” In October, a Planned Parenthood facility in California was fire-bombed, following three similar incidents in Illinois, Louisiana, and Washington. A clinic in New Hampshire was spray-painted with the word “murderer,” and then, a few weeks later, attacked by an intruder wielding a hatchet.

Attacks, cyber attacks, arson, vandalism, threats and violence against sexual and reproductive health clinics and Planned Parenthood have escalated dramatically  following the release of manufactured and doctored videos which alleged that Planned Parenthood traded in body parts. 

Robert Dean alluded to that video when he told investigators after the shooting 'no more baby parts', referencing a wildly discredited meme circulated by Fox News and other right-wing outlets.

 

Valerie Tarico characterised the shooting as an example of stochastic terrorism, motivated by the rhetoric of the Christian right: 

“Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. In short, remote-control murder by lone wolf.”

Tarico points the finger directly at Republican politicians and right wing Christians:

"After months of verbal assault against Planned Parenthood and against women more broadly, Republican Christianists have gotten what they were asking for: bloodshed....... For months, Republican presidential candidates and conservative Christian members of Congress have been following this script for political gain. Elected Republicans in the states have sought to intimidate women and providers by demanding the release (and even publication) of identifying information and addresses—essentially a target list for perpetrators."

The extremist Christian right were quick to respond to the shooting in their usual style on Twitter:

"No sympathy for any pregnant female who was injured in the Planned Parenthood shooting that was there to get an abortion. She deserved it."

"We should terminate the 500,000 female humans. They could have protected sex. But they're too lazy and slutty."

"Active Shooter Colorado Planned Parenthood. I would think this brave HERO is saving innocent Baby lives!"

Media reporting of the shooting avoided use of the term 'terrorist' to describe the shooter, referring instead to a 'disgruntled' or 'lone gunmen'. 

Vicki Cowart, president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, directly linked the shooting to domestic terrorism when she noted that while the motive for the shooting is unknown it does reflect the 'concerns of many Americans that extremists are creating a poisonous environment that feeds domestic terrorism in this country.

The shooting is further evidence that the greatest terrorist threat to the American people is white American male extremists, particularly right wing and religious extremists.

The website International Security documents  killings of  over 50 Americans by right wing and Christian extremists since 2001, compared to 26 Americans killed in jihadists attacks.

 

The attorney general, Loretta Lynch, called the shooting a “crime against women” getting care at Planned Parenthood.

William Rivers Pitt also noted that the shooting reflects a war on women:

"This is the war on women, underscored. The bellowers who cluster outside these clinics are preventing women from getting checked for cervical cancer, for breast cancer, preventing them from getting birth control, basic OBGYN care and abortions. Why? They would rather see women dead than see them free, and some of them take up arms to reinforce the point."

Since 1977 Planned Parenthood has been the target of 8 murders, 17 attempted murders, 42 bombings, 186 arson attacks, 153 incidents of assault or battery, 100 butyric acid attacks, 373 physical invasions, 383 death threats and 655 anthrax threats from pro life and anti abortion activists. This does not include  similar attacks on independent abortion clinics and private reproductive health clinics.

This is despite only a small proportion of Planned Parenthood services (around 3%) being abortion services. The majority are contraception, reproductive and sexual healthcare and STD screening.

In the New Yorker magazine Amy Davidson noted the silent and muted response of the Republican Presidential candidates to the shootings and highlighted the role Republican Presidential candidates and Republican politicians played in creating the toxic rhetoric directed at Planned Parenthood. So did John Nicholls in The Nation magazine.

In a recent Republican Presidential candidate  debate,  candidate Ted Cruz described Planned Parenthood as a 'criminal enterprise' that was guilty of 'multiple felonies. He supported Americans rising up to fight against Planned Parenthood.

Davidson wrote:

The loudness of the slurs against the organization is in telling contrast to the cautious silence that descended when it became a target of gun violence

Planned Parenthood released this statement in the aftermath of the shooting.

Chile Admits Pablo Neruda May Have Been Killed by Pinochet Regime

"It is necessary to judge these hands stained

by the dead he killed with his terror;
the dead from under the beaten earth
are rising up like seeds of sorrow"
Pablo Neruda (Portrait of The Man)

For the first time the Chilean Government has acknowledged that Nobel prize winning poet Pablo Neruda may have been murdered by the regime of Augusto Pinochet during the US-backed military coup that led to Pinochet seizing power in September 1973.

 

A report in the online publication Common Dreams notes: 

 

Chile's Interior Ministry made the statement in response to a ministry document published in May and obtained by the Spanish newspaper El País. "It's clearly possible and highly probable that a third party" was responsible for Neruda's death, the document said, adding that he was either injected with or orally administered a foreign substance hours before his death.

 

Neruda died just 12 days after the 11 September 1973 military coup, in which Pinochet seized power and overthrew and murdered Salvador Allende, the democratically elected President of Chile. Neruda was a political ally and supporter of Allende. Around 3,000 people were killed during  the brutal 17-year-long Pinochet dictatorship.
 

It was long thought that Neruda died of prostate cancer, but claims by family members and his former driver led to suspicion that the Pinochet regime poisoned Neruda to avoid the possibility that he would become a voice of protest and dissidence overseas.
 

Neruda's driver claimed that while Neruda was making final preparations for exile in Mexico, doctors injected the poet with a substance, after which his health rapidly deteriorated.

 

In 2013 Chilean investigators exhumed Neruda's body for examination. 

 

The initial testing failed to turn up signs Neruda was poisoned, but the judge investigating the case ordered further tests  for substances that were not previously included in the examination. In January 2015, the Head of the Chilean Government's human rights departments said:

 

"There is initial evidence that he was poisoned and in that sense the signs point to the intervention of specific agents ... that could constitute a crime against humanity."

 

The death of an American revolutionary: Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015)

'I think that too much of our emphasis on struggle has simply been in terms of confrontation and not enough recognition of how much spiritual and moral force is involved in the people who are struggling. We have not emphasized sufficiently the cultural revolution that we have to make among ourselves in order to force the government to do differently.'

Grace Lee Boggs

 

'Activism can be the journey rather than the arrival'

Grace Lee Boggs

 

'We are not subversives. We are struggling to change this country because we love it'

Grace Lee Boggs

 

After 75 years of committed social and political activism, the legendary Chinese-American author, activist, philosopher and campaigner Grace Lee Boggs (1915-2015) has died. Boggs was one of the oldest American activists and campaigners.

 

Grace Lee Boggs was involved with the civil rights, labor, Black Power, Asian-american, feminist, climate change and urban renewal movements. 

 

Boggs was a deep thinker, committed to the role of philosophy in social change. She did not believe in mindlessly doing in the name of good. For her people had to think deeply and critically about the world around them.  She distinguished between what she called protest organising and visionary organising. Whilst recognising the importance of the former, she called for more of the latter.

 

Boggs also refused to be put in any particular "cause" box,  using her voice for civil rights, education reform, anti-racism, climate change, urban revitalization, and countless other issues that she saw as all undeniably connected.

 

She thought that the systematic failures of capitalism were  at the heart of most social pathologies and social problems, and believed that transformation would come not from the actions of elected leaders, but through action at the grassroots level. 

 

A film about her life and ideas  American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs was released in 2014.

 

The New York Times wrote:

 

Her odyssey took her from the streets of Chicago as a tenant organizer in the 1940s to arcane academic debates about the nature of communism, from the confrontational tactics of Malcolm X and the Black Power movement to the nonviolent strategies of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and finally to her own manifesto for change — based not on political and economic upheavals but on community organizing and resurgent moral values.

 

In the online journal Guernica, Michelle Chen writes that Grace Le Boggs lived in Detroit from the 1950s, with her husband, activist and auto worker James Boggs, in the early days of the civil rights movement.  Chen writes:

 

 'Her life has spanned numerous human catastrophes, from the Great Depression and the atom bomb to the incineration of Vietnam. But what keeps her optimistic is the fact that she’s also lived through “the great humanizing movements of the past seventy years,” including the black freedom struggle, the antiwar campaigns, and other historic mass actions. Detroit is now at the vanguard of an even more massive transition, she argues, evolving a new way of organizing society that focuses on self-reliance and a rejection of material excess.'

 

Grace Lee Boggs wrote extensively about the history and potential of revolution as the driver of radical social change, based on an optimistic belief that revolutionary change was just around the corner 

 

In the early 1970s she co published Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, a sweeping historical text that explores forms of Marxist revolution through uprisings in China, Russia, Vietnam, and contemporary community-based groups.

 

In 2011, aged 95, she wrote her fifth book  The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, in which she reimagined revolutionary politics as a project of holistic transformation connected to global and historical transformations and intimately embedded in the individual soul.

 

"People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values."

 

In an interview she said:

 

I think that rebellions arise out of anger, and they’re very short-lived. And a revolution has some sense of a long time frame, millions of years that we’ve been evolving on this planet. We have to think in a very different sense than the way we think now. We think in terms of quick fixes, that solutions will come out of a few protest demonstrations, and calling upon the government to do something. And we can keep trying to do that, and it won’t work. 

 

Boggs argued that it is the people most directly affected by injustice, the victims of injustice, who are the real agents of revolutionary change:

 

I think the trouble is that most people tend to look for quick solutions. .............I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another. We have to see today in light of the transition, say, from hunting and gathering to agriculture, and from agriculture to industry, and from industry to post-industry. We’re in an epoch transition.....We have to think of revolution much more in terms of transitions from one epoch to another.

 

Interviews, articles and obituaries are here, here, here, here and here.

The murder of Emmett Till (July 25 1941-August 28 1955)

"The story of Emmett Till is one of the most important of the last half of the 20th century. And an important element was the casket.... It is an object that allows us to tell the story, to feel the pain and understand loss. I want people to feel like I did. I want people to feel the complexity of emotions."

Lonnie Bunch III, director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture  

On August 28 1955 , fourteen year old African American teenager Emmett Till who was visiting relatives, was abducted and murdered in Money, Mississippi by two white men who claimed he was disrespectful to a white woman by whistling at her.

Emmett's murderers were the husband and brother of the white woman he supposedly disrespected.

In the US this weekend the significance of Emmett Till's life is being commemorated by civil rights activists, relatives of the black teen and other families "victimized by racial violence", including the family of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown , who are uniting for a commemorative weekend in Chicago to remember Till and to continue the legacy of Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley.

Emmett Till was born and lived in Chicago and at the time of his murder he was visiting family in Money, Mississippi.

A few days before his murder Emmett went into a local store, Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market, and, on a dare, said something to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the owner's wife who was working behind the counter. A few nights later, the woman's husband, Roy Bryant, and her half brother, J.W. Milam, went to house where Emmett Till was living with his great uncle  and forced him into their car. After driving around they beat Till and drove to the Tallahatchie River. 

Emmett Till was forced carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered to take off his clothes. He was beaten nearly to death, had his eyes gouged out, was shot in the head, and then his body was tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire and he was thrown into the river.

Emmett Till's corpse was found three days later. He was found with a bullet hole in his head, barbed wire wrapped around his neck and a cotton gin fan weighing him down  He was so disfigured that his Mississippi relatives could only identify him by an initialled ring. 

(photo of Emmett Till in his casket) 

 

Bryant and Milam were subsequently arrested and charged with murder.

 

Authorities wanted to bury the body quickly, but Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, requested the body be sent back to Chicago. After seeing her son's mutilated remains, she arranged an open-casket funeral to show the brutality of the white murders.

Tens of thousands of people attended his funeral or viewed his casket and images of his mutilated body were published in black-oriented magazines and newspapers, rallying popular black support and white sympathy across the U.S.

Less than two weeks after Emmett’s body was buried, the two murderers went on trial in a segregated courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi. There were few witnesses besides a relative of Emmett Till who positively identified the defendants as Emmett’s killers. On September 23, the all-white jury deliberated for less than an hour before issuing a verdict of “not guilty,” explaining that they believed the state had failed to prove the identity of the body.

 Many people around the country were outraged by the decision and also by the state’s decision not to indict Milam and Bryant on the separate charge of kidnapping.

Months after the trial and immune from further prosecution, the two men openly admitted to a national magazine that they had abducted, mutilated and murdered Emmett Till.

Roy Bryant never showed remorse for the murder, claiming in an interview in 1992 that Emmett Till had ruined his life, stating "Emmett Till is dead. I don't know why he can't just stay dead" Ray Bryant died in 1994 aged 63. 

The murder of Emmett Till  was a pivotal event for the African American civil rights movement and provided a spark that contributed to igniting the civil rights movement in the USA by exposing the brutality of the conditions of black civil rights in Mississippi.

The killing of Emmett Till has inspired songs (for example by Bob Dylan), movies, books, artistic displays and memorials.

Till's mother Mamie Till-Mobley published a book titled Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America, which is  currently being made into a feature film. 

The book was co-written with  journalist Christopher Benson and was nominated for a 2004 Pulitzer Prize and won a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award special recognition that year.  She died in 2003, aged 81, 58 years after her son's murder. 

Bob Dylan' song The Death of Emmett Till appears on the

The Bootleg Series, Vol 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964

 

The Death of Emmett Till
By Bob Dylan

’Twas down in Mississippi not so long ago
When a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door
This boy’s dreadful tragedy I can still remember well
The color of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till
Some men they dragged him to a barn and there they beat him up
They said they had a reason, but I can’t remember what
They tortured him and did some things too evil to repeat
There were screaming sounds inside the barn, there was laughing sounds
out on the street
Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst a bloody red rain
And they threw him in the waters wide to cease his screaming pain
The reason that they killed him there, and I’m sure it ain’t no lie
Was just for the fun of killin’ him and to watch him slowly die
And then to stop the United States of yelling for a trial
Two brothers they confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till
But on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit this
awful crime
And so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed to mind
I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see
The smiling brothers walkin’ down the courthouse stairs
For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free
While Emmett’s body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea
If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust
Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood
it must refuse to flow
For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!
This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man
That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan
But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give
We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live

Copyright © 1963, 1968 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991, 1996 by Special Rider Music

Read more: http://www.bobdylan.com/us/songs/death-emmett-till#ixzz3k6sIgfJW