H L GATES PBS SERIES BLACKS AND JEWS - PART3 & 4 - MY REVIEW

  I have enjoyed listening to 4 great orators: first, when I was about 13, I walked across the Airline Bridge to Pelican (baseball stadium) to attend a Billy Graham rally in New Orleans.(1951?)  Seating was segregated, so as not to violate the race laws in the state.  The then young Graham used his knowledge of the Bible with current analogies, at times interrupted by the choir or the powerful voice of George Beverly Shay.  His magnet of salvation caused many to abandon their seats to join the growing mass on the grass who wanted to join up for the Kingdom.  I came near to joining them.     

     On Sunday nights on tv I watched another such speaker, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.  Because New Orleans was the largest city with only one tv channel, I do not know on which network he appeared.  He was a Roman Catholic bishop, but mixed into his message of religion was politics, especially, oppression of the people in Eastern Europe under Communism.  He was most effective with the use of the pause, which made you think more than him shouting.

     3rd was Ronald Reagan.  In 1960 I had cast my first ballot for President, JFK.  In  1964 I favored LBJ, but not as enthusiastically.  Sen. Goldwater, the Republican candidate, was scheduled to speak at Tulane stadium, and as a TU student, I planned to go, to boo if nothing else.  The crowd was for Goldwater, and Louisiana was one of the few states he would carry in November.  The stadium was enthusiastic for Goldwater.  He spoke.  What a bore!  He might have been giving a report to a Senate committee over trivia.  The crowd waited to erupt; but he never gave them a chance.  Only later in the campaign when I heard the radio address on why vote for Goldwater, delivered by Ronald Reagan, did I appreciate the rhetorric of Reagan.  He did not convince me to vote for Goldwater, but he did get me questioning some of my political assumptions.  Reagan was a great orator.

     4th was unexpected.  I was working in China, and provided a computer, expanding my knowledge of how to use it, etc.  In my exploration, I began to listen to some old speeches of Malcolm X.  I do not mean that I agreed with him.  Malcolm did include some of the bitter contempt for opponents, heard in Elijah Muhammad's or later, Minister Farrakhan's sermons.  But Malcolm's political analyses made one think.  Pause, even without a visual cue to do so.  I am white, and I did not agree, but I could see how others could be readily moved by his speeches.  See Anthony Flood's depiction of the 1961 Black Muslim mass gathering at Uline Arena in Washington. DC, at which the honored guests were George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party, he and several members sitting in the audience wearing their uniforms with the red armbands and black swastikas.  From the platform Malcolm spoke friendly words to Rockwell, and Rockwell made a pledge of $20, (perhaps about 7 cartons of cigarettes in those days values).  Malcolm was basically telling the congregants that the good whites were the Nazis.    What could that possibly have to do  with Black-Jewish relations???

     Yet, in the 4-hour program on PBS by Henry Louis Gates, I do not recall seeing Malcolm at all.  What might he have had to do with the topic?  In the early 1960s the Black Muslims held a number of huge gatherings of the faithful for their Founders Day.  A small number of whites were invited guests to these gatherings, and they were not Jews.

http://anthonyflood.com/murraynoifascism.htm

"American Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell (center) at a Nation of Islam (NOI) rally, Uline Arena, Washington, DC, June 25, 1961.  During the collection, he shouted: “George Lincoln Rockwell gives $20!” (almost $135 in today's money).  Malcolm X, noting the applause, asked him: "George Lincoln Rockwell, you got the biggest hand you ever got, didn’t you?”        Elijah Muhammad, NOI founder, invited Rockwell to speak at their next Savior's Day Convention, which he did on Sunday, February 25, 1962, before 12,175 people in Chicago’s International Amphitheater.  (Muhammad Speaks, April 1962, p. 3.)  At the podium, in full Nazi regalia, Rockwell opined “that Elijah Muhammad is to the so-called Negro what Adolph Hitler is to the German people.  He is the most powerful black man in the country.  Heil Hitler!” (Black History and the Class Struggle, Spartacist League, August 1994, p. 37.)   Anthony Flood"

The big question about this series - to what extent is the Gates program on Blacks and Jews a White wash?

     MORE TO COME

A Personal Aside - What do Malcolm X, Bernadette Devlin (McAliskey), and I have in common?  By the way, Bernadette Devlin was the leader of the Northern Irland Civil Rights Assn., which in the late 1960s had become militant in demanding equal rights for Roman Catholics in Northern Ireland.  I had gone to Edinburgh to work on my controversial thesis and hopefully receive a doctorate there.  Upon arrival, I was confused by the grafitti on buildings, "Kick the Pope," and "Kick Billy."  I asked.  Billy was King William of Orange, the Protestant Leader who replaced a James II Stuart, after defeating him at the Battle of the Boyne in N. Ireland in 1690.  England remained Anglican, Scotland Puritanical with a RC minority; and Ireland, Protestant with a large RC majority.  It was not until the late 1960s, when I was there that the ABC Cinema became the first movie theater permitted to show films on the Lord's Day.  Pub's were closed on Sundays too, and even closed at 10pm Saturday nights (be up early on the Sabbath to get to the Kirk on time).  A friend, a young man smaller than I, was scouted by a major football team (soccer).  All went well till the final question.  "Do you attend mass on Sunday?"  With yes, he was told they could not have a Roman Catholic on the Ranger's squad.  QUESTION - What do I have in common with Malcolm X and Bernadette Devlin?  Answer - We all were featued speakers at Trotskyist forums in NYC.  Malcolm X sponsored by Militant Labor Forum in Jan. 1965; I was sponsored also by the MLF in Aug. 1966, and Bernadette Devlin (McAliskey) by International Socialist, I think around 1980.  What do I not have in common with Malcolm and Bernadette?  I was not shot.  Malcolm was shot and killed in Feb. 1965.  Bernadette was shot by 3 Ulster Freedom Fighters who invaded her home and she received between 7 and 9 bullets, and lived.  I was not shot or killed.  I had had supper with Bernadette and 4 other university folks at Edinburgh 1969?

    For the record, I was never a member of a Trot political party or of the CP.

 I think it fair to say that Malcolm was NOT in the middle on the Blacks/Jews issues.  He sided with the Nazis as his fave whites.  But Malcolm X is not the only important figure omitted from the PBS series.  Nowhere did I see mention of Harold Cruse.  Cruse wrote a large volume, which in part complains about the dominant influence of Jewish intellectuals inside the Communist Party, USA, which prevented Blacks from establishing their own analysis of their role as a racial minority in the US.  Cruse concedes the importance of the CP, especially in the 1930s, but also the 40s and beyond.  But he sees the CP winning over middle-class Blacks, who are generally interracialists, pushing for integration.  However, by the 1940s Cruse contends, Harlem Blacks not in the middle class, were overwhelmingly segregationists, nationalists.  This was no new division, as in the 1920s the divide between Garvey (and his UNIA) vs. Du Bois and his NAACP.  Cruse implies it is a major lasting divide.  The Communists with their emphasis on the international scene, integration, and following approved moves for minorities, they have abandoned their on analysis, and the essential development of their own culture.  Jewish Communists are responsible for this failing.

     Needless to say, I over simplify, Cruse's view in his 565 page book.  In many ways, I do not aggre with it, but I urge you to read at least one chapter to decide for yourself.  I was teaching at a university, when one morning students pulled down the American flag and replace it at the main entrance with the black, red, and green black liberation flag.  Thence began a student boycott of classes, the Governor, McKeithern, coming to the campus for the first time, and confronting this challenge for the first itme.  I was scheduled to teach that summer, but due to my support of the strike, I was told I was blacklisted.  Have no idea if that was true, just that I never taught in the US again.  Another supporter of the strike, a Lebanese, would be arrested and deported.  But that summer, Black cultural groups began to form in New Orleans.  Before I leave the issue of Black Nationalism, should it be restricted to the US?  What about black support for independence for Black African nations (colonies)?  When Robeson was making films in Britain in the 1930s, he met and befriended some of the extras,  who were students attending British universities.  One was Johnstone Kenyatta, who with Robeson led the British Scottsboro Defence Committee, trying to save the lives of young Blacks accused in Alabama of raping 2 white young women.  A few decades later Johnstone, now known as Jomo, led a Black rebellion against Britain.  Should American Blacks have supported Jomo?  My point - Gates should have mentioned and discussed the important Cruse book, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.

     The Gates series rightly stresses the importance of Freedom Summer in Mississippi in the mid-1960s.  The appearance of West Indian Stokely Carmichael and his push for new leadership summarized with the slogan: Black Power.  This electrified the movement.  The phrase was all over the major tv networks and newspapers.  I was then in NYC and bought the Militant (Trot) and the Daily World (CP, heir to the Daily Worker).  Both were small papers. only 6-8 pages.  The Militant coverage was actually similar to the major media's, stress on Black Power, and possible shake-up of the movement.  The DW coverage was also extensive, but I could not find once in the paper the phrase Black Power.  The CP was not on board with this rejection of interracialism at that time.  On board or not, soon whites were expelled from SNCC.  Even the dedicated Dottie Zellner and her husband were about the last whites to be evicted from SNCC, but evicted they were.

     Though it received little fan-fare, New Orleans CORE had basically gone all Black much earlier.  Founded in 1960 and defied the NAACP to stage the first sit-in in the modern era, it remained quite integrated for the first university year.  When some Black young men were giving unwanted attention to some Newcomb gals, they complained, and the Black male CORE leaders told the guys to lay off.  And they did.  Next year, white guys in CORE  were dating Black gals.  The gals did NOT complain, but went out with the white guys.  Oretha Castle, the Black woman then leading NO CORE objected, as did a Black minister.  When election time in CORE came, Oretha managed to disqualify all white males, and only a few white women were allowed to remain as members.  They soon dropped out.  There was no sloganeering of Black Power, but NO CORE was essentially a Black organization by 1962.  LSUNO, unlike the main school in Baton Rouge, had some Black students, and a British socialist professor provided some interracial meetings.  I brought a Black student from Dillard to a meeting of Young Liberals at Tulane, addressed by Rev. Shuttlesworth.  After a few of us went to a pizza place in the Tulane neighborhood, Maple St., and we were denied service.  So began many picketings and protests.  But these were localized, not at all under the old CORE or NAACP umbrellas.

    By the late 1960s, dashikis, Afros, and the biggest thing on tv by Jan. 1977, Alex Haley's Roots, even if it was fiction.

In Part 4 the question of Jews involvement in the slave trade becomes an issue, as the publication of The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews stressed the Jews role in the slave trade and slavery.  The Nation of Islam (NOI) was not the first to make such claims.  Henri Pirenne argued that with the fall of the Roman Empire and expansion of Islam into former Christian Africa there rose new merchants - the Jews.  They were particularly involved in the slave trade, and the slaves were Slavs, from whence we derive the word slave.  Arabs would be involved in the African slave trade, and African male slaves to guard harems would of course be castrated.  Indeed, in parts of Asia, to prevent thieving family values, castration might be a qualification for government employment.  Noteworthy, Admiral He, the most important Chinese Admiral who probably gave the PRC its claims to the South China Sea, and who headed a fleet with 30,000 sailors (while Columbus  had about a total of 90 on all 3 ships, sailing 50 years after the Chinese.

     On the role of Jews in the Atlantic slave trade.  I do not know.  But when the Brits attempted to end it, I know of no rioting in the synagogues.  But there was rioting on the slave coasts of West Africa by the African slave traders!  They wanted the lucrative trade to continue.

     Yes, there were Jews in the American South and some owned slaves.  But as conservative politician Leander Perez used to remind the Roman Catholic hierarchy in New Orleans when it began to speak against segregation, the Jesuits had been slave owners too.  The vast majority of Southerners 

were Christians, and many of them were slaveholders.

     Hatred of Jews is often a version of hatred of integration, of mixing races.  Sometimes it is hatred of the other race; sometimes just feeling more relaxed around your own; like being with family.  Can we be friends beyond?  Can they?  Probably sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Hugh Murray

FROM ANTHONY G FLOOD'S WEBSITE

 A few days ago National Public Radio's Morning Edition had a segment to remind listeners of the centennial of the birth of Malcolm Little, who became Malcolm X;  I spoke with Mr. Flood soon after on other topics, mentioned the NPR report, and complained to Flood, that as usual, the liberal radio network did not mention an important aspect of Malcolm's critique of the civil rights movement.  Mr. Flood then composed an addition to his website for the following day.  I have copied part of his site and placed it on my own blog today.  It is below -  I copied only one of the 2 letters for my blog.

Marking Malcolm X’s centennial: Hugh Murray’s probing letters from the 1990s.

I missed it by a day (sorry!). The centennial of the birth of Malcolm X and 60 years since his assassination (a few months after his Queens home was firebombed a few miles from me) warrant swiping from my old site two letters that my friend Hugh Murray got published in 1994 and 1995. Without further ado:

 

 

What about the Nation of Islam’s Historical Ties to Fascism?

The New York Times, February 23, 1994

It was widely reported when Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, suspended Khalid Abdul Muhammad, who told an audience at Kean College of New Jersey that Jews are bloodsuckers, gays are sissies, and the Pope is a cracker.

Mr. Farrakhan rebuked the manner in which Mr. Muhammad delivered his message, but Mr. Farrakhan reaffirmed the “truths” of that message! Reporters speculate if this is a repudiation of bigotry or not.  But they are silent about the history of the Nation of Islam on these subjects.

American Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell (center) at a Nation of Islam (NOI) rally, Uline Arena, Washington, DC, June 25, 1961. During the collection, he shouted: “George Lincoln Rockwell gives $20!” (almost $135 in today’s money). Malcolm X, noting the applause, asked him: “George Lincoln Rockwell, you got the biggest hand you ever got, didn’t you?” Elijah Muhammad, NOI founder, invited Rockwell to speak at their next Savior’s Day Convention, which he did on Sunday, February 25, 1962, before 12,175 people in Chicago’s International Amphitheater. (Muhammad Speaks, April 1962, p. 3.) At the podium, in full Nazi regalia, Rockwell opined “that Elijah Muhammad is to the so-called Negro what Adolph Hitler is to the German people. He is the most powerful black man in the country. Heil Hitler!” (Black History and the Class Struggle, Spartacist League, August 1994, p. 37.)

In the early 1960’s, at a large gathering of the Nation of Islam, the featured speaker was Elijah Muhammad, its leader.  But the speaker just before him, addressing Elijah Muhammad’s followers, was George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party.1

In the early 1960’s Malcolm X, as a Nation of Islam spokesman, mocked the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.  At the height of civil rights protest Malcolm traveled to the South, not to partake in civil rights protest, but to negotiate with leaders of the Ku Klux Klan on how to thwart the struggle for civil rights.  This scene is omitted from Spike Lee’s film and from the recent PBS documentary on Malcolm X.

And in the 1920’s, even before the founding of the Nation of Islam, Marcus Garvey led the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which became America’s largest black nationalist organization.  The association created the Black Cross Nurses, the African Legion, the Knights of the Nile and established the Black Star Steamship Line.  Though black liberals and socialists like A. Philip Randolph and W. E. B. Du Bois bitterly opposed Garvey, Garvey found other associates—the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan.

Garvey and Klansmen met and shook hands in the 1920’s.  Eventually, Garvey was deported and lived in Britain, where he supported the Conservative Party and hoped Britain would transfer some of its African colonies to him.  Garvey also admired some European leaders, like Mussolini.  Garvey even reminded his followers, “We were the first Fascists.”2

Thus, the problem is not a single speech by Khalid Muhammad.  Behind much of black nationalism and the Nation of Islam lurks the idea of fascism.  And black fascism, like white fascism, is still fascism.

When Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus attempt to embrace Louis Farrakhan, they are seeking an alliance with a tradition of fascism.

Notes

1 See William H. Schmaltz’s When George Lincoln Rockwell, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X Shared the Same Stage and Rockwell’s own account.—A.G.F.

2 For the source of this quote, see the third reference note to Hugh Murray, “From the Communist Party to Affirmative Action.”—A.G.F

Hugh Murray, Milwaukee

PS--- Kanye is not the first

In January 1965 Malcolm was the featured speaker at the Militant Labor Forum in NYC.  In Feb. 1965 Malcolm was shot dead.  In August 1966 I was the featured speaker at the Militant Labor Forum in NYC.  Happily, I have not been shot. 

THE GOVERNMENT AND THE LEFT WANT SOME BLACK HISTORY TO DISAPPEAR

  I just posted a comment on a site re the media and the US Govt and their refusal to recognize Black Nationalism and black extremism - which may best explain things like the cause of the black driver of the car into the Christmas parade, killing 6 whites, in Waukesha, Wisconsin in Nov or Dec 2021.  Many academics assert that blacks cannot be racists.  Of course they can, and they can be fascists too.  Hugh Murray

Blacks, like everyone else, can be racists, and can have thinking related to any political ideology. The largest black organization in the US in the 1920s, and which had influence far beyond, was the Universal Negro Improvement Assn., led by West Indian Marcus Garvey. He pushed for black dolls for black girls, the Black Cross nurses, and bought a ship for his Black Star line to return the American diaspora Back to Africa. He opposed the mulatto W.E.B. Du Bois and the then mainly white NAACP; and it may have worked to get the foreigner deported. The Garveyites in the 1920s appear to have worked with another large, similar organization of the 1920s, the KKK. Both sought to retain separation of the races. Even after his deportation, most Garveyites did not join the NAACP.

In the late 1920s, Stalin, a specialist on minorities, wanted the American Communist Party to become more active with blacks, and in the early 30s, a Finnish Party member was put on trial for racism in Harlem, tried, and found guilty by the CP, America's first show trial on racism. A CP front group fought the NAACP for control of the defence of the Scottsboro boys, young blacks accused of rape aboard a freight train in Alabama in 1931. Tho the NAACP hired Clarence Darrow, the radical International Labor Defense hire another top-flight attorney, who so successfully defended the blacks, that the ILD attorneys won 2 major ruling from the very conservative US Supreme Court, saving the lives of the blacks. The CP also promised a Black Belt of majority black counties in the South - an indirect appeal to the Garveyites.

By the mid-30s and Hitler's consolidation of power in Germany, Stalin decided to seek unity with moderates, colonialists, in the Popular Front. Some blacks felt betrayed and left the CP, like George Padmore and others who looked to Pan-Africanism. Garvey, angry at Mussolini for his invasion of Ethiopia (and at Stalin for supplying oil to Italy), Garvey asserted that his UNIA were the first fascists.

In the late 1950s the Black Muslims grew, and like the Garveyites, wanted racial separation. They were opposed to integration, the NAACP, CORE, SNCC. The Black Muslims made deals with the KKK and other segregationists. Malcolm X was ordered to negotiate with the KKK. After CORE began its Freedom Rides in 1961, George Lincold Rockwell, drove his counter - his "hate bus" from Virginia to New Orleans. Rockwell headed the small American Nazi Party. In New Orleans, he and his group also picketed the film Exodus, about the founding of Israel. The following month, Rockwell and several of his fellow Nazis, were invited guests at a large meeting of the Black Muslims in Washington, DC.

But because none of this fits the liberal distorted history of race in America, the media, the academics, the politicians pretend it does not exist.  Under President Biden, he wants to suppress white supremacy and ignore possible black supremists - even though the enormous amount of black on white crime and murder may indicate black supremacy is more of a problem that the white variety, which is more politically correct, especially to the far-left wing and corrupt Biden regime.  It may be politically correct, but historically incorrect.

A REMINISCENCE

To a friend

    , When we spoke on the phone yesterday, I mentioned that I studied at NYU in the summers of 1965-66.  My "dorm" had been a hotel a block or 2 north of Washington Square Park.  Apparently, one resident continued to stay in the building even tho it was no longer a hotel, but a dorm.  This was a tall building, probably about 50 stories.  Yesterday, on the phone I had a "senior moment," and could not recall the man's name.  I finally remembered his name - a fellow resident in the NYU dorm when I lived there during the summer of 1965 - Dr. Otto Nathan.  The elderly lady at the reception desk was always mean to him, harassing him, "you don't belong here," etc.  He tried to ignore her as much as possible but had to go through her to ask for his mail, etc.  We had some small chats.  Dr. Nathan was the executor of Albert Einstein's will.

    Other than my 3-day visit to NY - probably in 1962 - this was my first real visit to the city.  Fantastic.  The hotel/dorm was near Greenwich Village, Wash. Square park a block away, the Militant Labor Forum, the Free U. of NY, book stores everywhere, coffee houses on Bleeker, terrific.  And I met a surprising number of folks whom I knew from Tulane U. walking in the area.  I recently read a book and realized that in that 1965 summer I missed an important lecture at the Militant Forum, as its guest speaker was Malcolm X.  His speech from that occasion is discussed in Christopher Caldwell's 2020 book, The Age of Entitlement.  In the next summer, 1966, the same forum would be filled to hear another guest speaker, me.  Malcolm did not come to hear my lecture, either.

     By the mid-70s, the book stores had disappeared, replaced mainly by liquor stores.  The Strand and a few others were the hold outs, but the trend was not good, in so many ways.  By the 1980s, street bums would walk into the 8th St (or St. Marks) Bookstore, steal a few volumes, go outside and place them on their filthy blankets on the sidewalk, and try to sell the looted material.  All part of the decline of NYC.

    By the way, I did not look up Dr. Nathan's name on google, I remembered him (of course, after our phone call).  Now I'm waiting for a spin-off on the tv show Jeopardy, "The Next Day."  Instead of answering questions within a few seconds, contestants would have 24 hours to recall the answers to the required by the game-show host.  For those older than me, another spin-off will be called "The Next Year," giving seniors a year to remember the answer.  Just joking.  By the way, I call the program Jeo-pardy.

    Hey, you may not have to pay rent any more with the new Trump/Pelosi relief law?  

    Hugh Murray

MUHAMMAD ALI ASCENDS, NEWARK SINKS -----By Hugh Murray

            I began reading Jack Cashill’s Sucker Punch: The Hard Left that Dazed Ali and Killed King’s Dream  in 2006 when it was published.  Half way through, I was offered a post in a different country, and my top priorities were suddenly packing, storing, flights, visas, etc.  Sucker Punch fell through the cracks.

            Upon my return to the US two years later, I was again overwhelmed with the everyday problems of finding a new residence and returning to my old job.  Sucker Punch remained boxed.

            In January 2013 after reading and reviewing FDR, Dewey, and the Election of 1944, I  had no new books I passionately wanted to read.   So, I browsed again some of my older books.  There was Sucker Punch, which I had remembered as an interesting work on race relations among the poor/middle class in Newark during the 1950s-70s.  I also recalled this being one of the few books that described an all-too-common phenomenon, the forced evacuation of whites from their old neighborhoods because of the race war.  This is a phenomenon, either ignored by the usual academedia complex or justified because of the racist attitudes exhibited by whites toward their new neighbors of color.  Sucker Punch provided a counter point to the prevailing liberal paradigm.

            I then went to amazon.com to read some of the reviews of the book and was surprised to see that the book was primarily about boxing.  Well, it was about boxing, Muhammad Ali, and his influence on race relations in the US, including the author’s own Newark neighborhood.

            I reread the first half and this time completed the book.  I disagree with Cashill on various issues.  For example, I still think that US involvement in the Vietnam war was wrong.  If there was a domino effect in Cambodia, it was because the US toppled the dominos, in 1970 overthrowing the “neutral” regime of Prince Sihanouk, and replacing him with a pro-American military group led by Lon Nol.  That group, in turn, was overthrown by the Khmer Rouge, the most Marxist, and the most murderous Communist regime ever to seize power (murderous NOT in the numbers it killed, but that the millions it slaughtered amounted to some 25% of the nation’s population).  However, that Khmer Rouge regime would soon be supported by both the People’s Republic of China AND the US.  It was finally invaded by communist Vietnam, and the massive killing fields – with the corpses of a quarter of the Cambodian population – were no longer moistened with fresh blood.  The Vietnamese communists halted the holocaust of the killing fields in Cambodia.  My purpose here is not to defend every action of the Vietnamese communist regime, or to indict every action by the Americans.  The war was brutal on both sides, and when the communists won, their treatment of opponents was sufficiently oppressive that many Vietnamese left their homes to become “boat people,” some of whom did not survive.  My point is that Cashill’s assessment of the Vietnamese war seems extremely one-sided.  Moreover, one’s interpretation of that war will affect the judgments made of other people portrayed in his book.  I still maintain it would have been better, for the US and for Vietnam, if the US had not intervened militarily in that nation in the early 1960s.

            Unlike Cashill, I was no fan of boxing.  But I was a fan of Ali.  To appreciate Cashill’s critique of Ali, an aside on sports in America may be necessary.

            In 1940 the most popular sports in America were horse racing, boxing, baseball, college football, and basketball, possibly in that order.  With the advent of widespread television ownership around 1950, and the need to fill schedules with inexpensive programming, wrestling and roller derby won fans.  Yet, the impression that wrestling was fixed and derby was for the gals placed them more in the entertainment than the sports category.

            The Civil Rights movement and the Left would modify American sports, even boxing.  Cashill discusses the Black heavy weight champion of the early decades of the 20^th century, Jack Johnson, and his romps with white women and fast living, which caused great relief when Johnson lost his crown to the white Jess Willard in 1915.  For over a decade white champs avoided fighting Blacks, in part, to prevent another Johnson scandal.  But in the 1930s Joe Louis gained the throne AND the enthusiastic support of much of white America, especially in his bouts with German opponent Max Schmeling and the Italian Primo Carnera.  Whether they wanted to or not, each fighter came to symbolize New Deal America, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy.  Louis retained his popularity (if not his wealth) into the 1940s and 50s, and he served in the armed services during WWII.  Much earlier in the era of WWI college football had been integrated enough for Paul Robeson to be declared an All American athlete; although very few whites and far fewer Blacks attended university in the first half of the 20^th century.  In the 1940s Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, and major league baseball would be integrated.  Even in minor sports, Althea Gibson was shown in the Movietone newsreels as she won major women’s tennis matches in the 1950s.  American sports, like America itself, was becoming more integrated.

            Cashill’s neighborhood in Newark was also integrated.  Even though his dad was a policeman, this did not prevent him from being robbed as an 11-year-old by two young Blacks.  Because his father was a policeman, however, they were able to bend the rules, enter a school, and apprehend the guilty thieves.

            Why is Cashill’s book important?  In a few pages Cashill describes what academics and the media seek to avoid.  How often have we seen images in movies and on television of Jews anxious to leave Nazi occupied Europe.  They became refugees fleeing as best they could, and if they were lucky, make it to and then make it in America.  Yet, “The St. Louis,” showed another side of their plight, a ship that left Germany in 1939 with a Who’s Who of prominent Jews determined to begin again outside of Hitler’s regime and his reach.  The ship sailed to the New World, to the US, to Cuba, and beyond.  But no nation in the New World would take in even such accomplished Jews.  The ship returned to Europe, and most of the passengers would not survive the holocaust.  In another area, many Americans can recall images on TV of masses of South Vietnamese seeking to crack into the American embassy in Saigon to be evacuated before the Vietnamese Communists gained total control.  Some of those who could not make it to the helicopter evacuation, felt so threatened by the new government that they fled in the waters, becoming the “boat people.”  Some would be picked up by other ships; some would die in the water.

            My point is that refugees are usually shown as sympathetic figures, Jews desperately scrambling out of Hitler’s Europe, the boat people, those trying to get away from floods, volcanoes, tsunamis, storms, - all are sympathetically portrayed in the American media.  Yet, from the 1950s until today, one feature of American life receives little honest commentary: white flight from central cities.

            Not all media portray refugees sympathetically.  In the late 1930s Der Stuermer ran a p. 1 article on Jews leaving Germany for Cape Town, South Africa.  Even before Hitler won power in Germany, the law did not permit those leaving the country to take out more than a few hundred Reichsmarks.  The law was retained, though the economy improved under the Nazis.  Indeed, in the 1930s more Germans were leaving depression ridden America to return to the prosperous Third Reich, than going the other way.  The Stuermer noted that even though Jews were restricted in the amount of cash they could take to Cape Town, they were taking huge crates of furniture, paintings, and other costly objects.  The spin of Julius Streicher’s Nazi paper was clear, the parasitic Jews, even in their departure from Germany, were taking the “goods” that Germany had provided them.  They were taking the wealth of Germany with them.

            America’s academics have followed the Streicher approach – at least on one set of refugees.  White flight to the suburbs is depicted as 1) affluent whites, following WWII, who bought cars and left the overcrowded cities for the greenery of the burbs, often subsidized by government loans, FHA housing, veterans’ benefits, road construction and new infrastructure.  The rich whites thus drove away from the squalid cities to the scenic serenity of the suburbs.  Worse, the rich suburban whites refuse to pay their “fair share” of support for welfare and schools in the ever poorer cities.  White racism is the motivating factor, according to the Left and the academedia complex.  They view the move by whites as Streicher viewed the move by Jews.

            In addition, 2) there were poorer, more vicious, openly racist whites left in the cities.  When a few Blacks moved into their neighborhoods, these violent whites first sought to intimidate their courageous new neighbors.  When that failed, these whites fled rather than live beside the Blacks.  White racism was again the cause of this white flight.  Whites take their wealth with them, abandoning the inner cities to impoverished Blacks.  This is the view of white flight as seen by the academedia complex.  White racists fled the cities, leaving the metropolises empty of supermarkets, devoid of department stores and pleasant shopping, lacking decent schools, or even doctors.  A few alcohol shops, rehab agencies, and check cashing counters could not fill the empty factories.  By contrast, the burbs blossomed with magnificent shopping malls, high-ranking schools, new hospitals, even modern factories.  White racism has made the cities squalid.

            Cashill’s is one of the few books I know that challenges the liberal spin of this most important development in America during the past five decades – perhaps not as significant as the change in immigration policy, illegal immigration, and abortion, but it is certainly a major change in America’s topography over these decades.

            My point, as illustrated by Cashill’s personal history, is that whites were often forced from their old neighborhood – with insults, threats, and violence.  And like Jews in Nazi Germany, whites could no longer depend on authorities to defend their rights.  Big cities were  dominated by liberal Democrats or “reform liberal Republicans” like New York City’s John Lindsay.  Such Republicans were even more hostile to poor whites than the Democrats.  By the late 1960s liberals would go to any extent to excuse Black criminal behavior, and find some rationale to blame it on the whites – especially working class whites.  Cashill notes the hatred of poor whites in another area – culture.  Although its ratings were good, the network cancelled the Friday night boxing contests, because it had the wrong kind of audience – the poor and lower-classes.

            Cashill is a conservative, the son of a white Newark policeman.  Bettina Aptheker was a red-diaper baby, daughter of two prominent member of the Communist Party, USA.  Yet, there came a point where Black crime in Brooklyn’s Bedford Stuyvesant threatened the lives of Bettina’s parents, and the Apthekers became Jewish refugees fleeing liberal Democratic Brooklyn (the Congressional district of Shirley Chisholm) to travel to California – as the Oakies and Arkies had done 40 years prior.  But while Steinbeck presented the Joad family refugees with enormous sympathy, the whites who flee big-city Blacks and the liberal political machines are shown as racists removing their wealth from the city to the rich burbs.  They are seen as Streicher saw the owners of huge crates being loaded for Cape Town.

            I shall quote some from Cashill’s book on events in Newark.  Cashill had written a fine history interspersing boxing matches, Cassius Clay’s change of name and adoption of Islam, his anti-integration comments, his refusal to be inducted into the military draft, his struggles to maintain his championship against various boxing commissions upset by his refusal to become a soldier, his wives, his connections to Don King, his fights abroad, and his contrast with poor Black boxers.

            Unfortunately, lacking in this book is a simple chronology of heavy weight boxing champions and the major bouts described in this book.  The chronology should also contain all of Clay/Ali’s major fights.

            Cashill is good at not being politically correct and discussing the pro-Axis views of leaders of the Nation of Islam prior to and during WWII.  Yet, he might have connected those views to the earlier major Black nationalist movement, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, created by Marcus Garvey, - a movement extremely popular among Blacks in the 1920s.  Garvey not only made deals with the newly revived Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, he proclaimed of his UNIA, “We were the first fascists.”  The NoI continued in the ideological tradition pioneered by Garvey’s UNIA.

            The following are excerpts from Cashill’s book depicting the progression from Black threats, thieving, and crime against whites that caused first white fright and then white flight.

            (p. 37)(He writes about an event of 1959.)  “They roughed us up some for the hell of it but allowed me [to] keep the nickel.  I chose not to tell my father about the incident.  Roger told his.  Within a year, his family had beat it out of Newark and settled in a distant suburb, the closest one they could afford some fifty miles away.  Roger was the first of my friends to go.  Within five or six years, almost all of my friends would be gone.”

            (p.47)  “Despite some troubling signs, we had no reason to believe that the neighborhood would not always stay together.  Progress was in the air that gilded autumn of 1960.  Racial barriers were falling.  The income gap between blacks and whites was narrowing.  Crime rates were still low and seemed more or less stable.”

            (p.60)  “By 1964, our neighborhood had ‘turned.’  For several years, new families had been moving in, but these were a new kind of family, families without fathers…My mother,…,did not know the gyms and playgrounds as I did.  On the basketball courts, class had no meaning.  Here, all differences devolved down to race, and even the well meaning could sense the uneasy tectonics.  The plates were pulling apart, and the divide between black and white was growing.  We no longer made friends across it.”

            (p.73)(Again he is writing about 1964)  “Then, too, few in out neighborhood were any keener on integration than Muhammad Ali.  The concept no longer meant what it had when my family moved to our already integrated block ten years earlier.  Fairly or not, it now meant the collapse of property values, the implosion of community, the harassment of children.  Just months after we listened to the Liston fight together, Kenny was jumped in Branch Brook park and (74) had his front teeth knocked out.  That was enough for his parents.  They sent him to live with his aunt in a soulless, slapdash suburb sixty miles from Newark.  They followed him there a year later.  Raymond and his family moved away the same year.  My friends were not alone.  From 1950 to 1967, Newark lost 143,000 white residents, almost a third of its 1950 population of 438,000.”

            (p.85-86)  He describes the veiled threats he endures on the basketball court, and how his Black teammates prefer a loss to having him score.  His younger sister is taunted and her blond hair pulled by the girls at school.  The father was not dead, an older brothers left.  His mother was “forced to move” to a better public housing project in Newark.  “There would be no ‘white flight’ for her.  She had nowhere to flee to.”

            The weakness of Cashill’s interpretation of events is that he attributes much of the growing anti-white racism to Ali.  Ali may have contributed to this, but his joining the Muslims was as much an effect as a cause.  For example, look at the NoI’s Muhammad Speaks 1960-61.  There is a back-page story of Malcolm X addressing a student assembly at Howard University.  There is a photo of the audience.  In the picture one sees exuberant students literally jumping for joy at Malcolm’s message, and one student – not identified – is clearly the young Stokely Carmichael.  In 1966 during a march for civil rights in Mississippi, Carmichael would originate the slogan “Black Power,” which would quickly undermine and overwhelm the civil rights the Civil Rights movement.  I was one of the first members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) chapter in New Orleans in 1960.  By 1962 the NO CORE chapter had expelled all of its white members – it thus expelled some half its membership!.  Black nationalists then seized power of CORE chapters in other cities – Brooklyn and Detroit.  The same rejection of integration and civil rights was occurring in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.  By 1966 CORE and SNCC were no longer integrated or civil rights organizations.  All whites had been purged from these organizations.  Black nationalists swept away integration; Black racism prevented discussion (only lecturing at best, insults and treats surfacing more frequently).  Crime, rioting, and violence shoved aside non-violence and trampled civil rights.  “Snick” provides and interesting transformation – from the “popular front/communist front” Southern Negro Youth Congress of the 1940s and 50s, to the Students Non-Violent Coordinating Committee of the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, to the Students National Coordinating  Committee of the Black Nationalists of the late 1960s.

            Much of this was occurring before Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali.  Ali is NOT the cause.  His conversion to Islam was symbolic of the change already occurring in Black America.

            Was Ali cheered by the white Left?  You bet.  Ali refused to fight in what the Left deemed an unjust war.  Cashill’s view is simple: boxers like Joe Louis fought for American values; Ali fought for the racism of the Nation of Islam.  But Ali also refused to fight in what many Americans, including myself, concluded was an unjust war.  In that sense, Ali boxed not only for Black racism, but for international morality.

            Could Ali have saved Newark?  If he had rejected Black racism and pushed for integration and treating all people equally, could he have changed events in America’s big cities?  If he had been drafted, if he had carried the American flag, could Cassius Clay have saved Newark?  Even as Muhammad Ali, he could not even save boxing!  The tectonic plates of American sport were also spinning around: now professional football, basketball, then college football, baseball, hockey, soccer, then perhaps boxing, and further down, horse racing.

            The 1960s in America were a time of a cultural revolution.  In addition to the growth of the hippie movement, the flower children, the peace people, the women’s movement grew in power.  To all of these new elements, boxing was just too violent.  Yes, they all wanted to cheer, and they would love to cheer on Blacks, but boxing was not the venue in which to do it.  Indeed, boxing with its Black champs only reinforced the wrong stereotypes, that Blacks were violent animals.  Basketball, by contrast, was graceful, with tall men floating to the hoops.  Many of the newer players were Black, and they were good at the game.  They were worthy of cheers, not because they were affirmative action quota hires, but because they were good, often the best.  More Blacks engaged in college football and universities integrated and expanded, and professional football soon had Blacks as the major group of players.  The Left could then cheer Blacks in basketball and football; they could ignore the animalistic sport of boxing.

            Black racism is a powerful ingredient in American society, one that cannot be studied in academia, because academics allege that, by definition, it cannot exist.  It is hard to get funding to study what the Left and the academedia complex declares to be non-existent.  And if you question that definition, you may be expelled from the scholarly community.  However, the required blindness on the issue of Black racism will eventually render most sociological studies on racism to be worthless.  Muhammad Ali was not the cause, but merely an example of Black racism.  In addition, I would contend, he provided a moral example by refusing to participate in an unjust war.

            I know too little about boxing to criticize much of Cahill’s well written book on that particular topic.  I can say his book is a good read.  His criticism of the Nation of Islam is valid.  His assessment of the Vietnam war is one-sided.  His reminiscences of Newark, a challenge to the silence and distortions of the academy.  Overall, Cashill has written an excellent book.