TIANANMEN, LEIPZIG, and SUNO in NEW ORLEANS

In the fall of 1968 there was a poetry contest at Southern U. in New Orleans.  This was a branch of the much larger Southern U. in Baton Rouge, which around this time was the largest Black university in the world.  Baton Rouge also was home to Louisianad State U., the traditional white state university, which had been built up in the 1920a and 30 by Gov. and then Senator Huey Long.  The Long family had flirted with the Socialist Party decades earlier, but generally, there was only one political party in Louisiana, the Democratic Party.  

    In the early days of FDR;s New Deal, he won wide support, from the the radio priest Father Coughlin to the young Sen. Huey Long from Louisiana, who as governor had provided free text books for kids in public schools and improved roads, building a nes state capitol, and setting a new record for a filibuster in the national Senate.  Of course, he was a Democrat (like everyone else in the South who wanted to win an election, and he did not question segregation a white supremacy, the pillars of the Democratic Parties throughout the South.  The common phrase "the solid South" meant solidly Democratic, and solidly for segregation and white supremacy.

     Like other states after WWII, with expansion of universities, many in New Orleans did not want the added expense of going off to Baton Rough for public education, so there was pressure for a public institution in New Orleans.  The Crescent City actually had a number of universities - Tulane (and Newcomb), a private univ. with a high reputation, and like prestigious universities of the North, with a separate college for women.  It was a whites only institution.  There was Loyola U. of the South, a Roman Catholic institution, which in the 1950s permitted a few Blacks to attend its law school, and perhaps other colleges.  There 0was Dillard U. a private, Protestant univ. for both young Black men and women (in the 1950s there was at least one white student, and in the 60s a few Northern whites did their "junior year abroad" at Dillard.  And there was Xavier U., a Roman Catholic univ. for Blacks, and it had a dental school.

     In the 1950s, to make a state univ. more affordable, LSUNO, a branch of Baton Rouge's LSU, was established in New Orleans.  Originally, all white, but judicial decisions re school integration in the city, leading to the school crisis of November 1960 when two elementary schools were integrated amid great hostility it became an international incident.  Some Blacks began to enroll at LSUNO.   There was one thing forbidden to the new campus - it could not have a football team to compete with LSU's nationally recognized team.  Probably to prevent too much integration at LSUNO, SUNO was founded in New Orleans in a rather new middle-class Black subdivision of the city, Pontchartrain Park.  It was a commuter college with no dorms.  Most students were graduates of the segregated schools of NO, and some chose SUNO because they assumed it would be harder to get a good grade and a degree at the mainly white LSUNO.

    At SUNO, all the students were Blacks.  At first, all the faculty was Black too,  but around 1965 it hired a Korean, and for 1968-69, I was hired to teach History, Vera Krieger in English, and George Haggar, born in Lebanon, to teach Political Science.  He had published in a major PS journal.

     Back to the poetry contest of Fall 1968, both Vera and I were among the judges.  In high school, my debate partner had often partaken in dramatic readings, so I was familiar with that.  Our debate team of 4 guys had won state championship, so I was aware of oral readings.  I don't recall most of the contestants and their readings.  They were conventional.  They could have read Wordsworth or Poe or Whitman, or Keats.  The title of Val Ferdinand's poem, I can recall, but cannot place it on the blog without trouble - his title was "Nig***s In the Streets," and it was delivered with body motion, emotion, action.  After a decade of protests that grew steadily angrier and more violent, his poem and delivery struck a chord  of "relevant" a word of the era.I don't recall the 3rd judge, but all 3 of us voted for Ferdinand who received the prize.

     New Orleans became the center of international news when DA Jim Garrison opened the trial of Clay Shaw for conspiring to murder John Kennedy.  Haggar and I could not attend all sessions, but I drove from SUNO to the court when we had off periods, and we saw some significant testimony, like Dr. Finck from the autopsy who was ordered not to complete his probe of the entrance wound in Kennedy's back.  Both Haggar and I were politically incorrect, and this added to our skepticism of the media.  Haggar informed me that the assassin of Robert Kennedy was a Palestinian, and if ever released, he would be a hero in the Middle East.  Haggar seemed to be close to Lynn French (a male), Ferdinand, and other students who tended toward activism.

     Haggar told me to be at the flag pole around 8am on the first of a month (April? 1969).

I was there when some students pulled the ropes to bring down the American flag, which they replaced with the black, red, and green of Black Nationalism, and they hoisted the new colors for the university.  Then began a student strike, demanding better facilities, a Black agenda, and facilities more akin to the "white" LSUNO campus.  The student boycott of classes began and lasted weeks, then into the next month.  A few students brought their rifles to the uni.  Class rooms were empty.  At one point the state police (or city one's, I forget) were ordered to come on campus with loaded weapons and bring order to the campus.  Perhaps 40 police with loaded weapons formed a line and began to move slowly from the grass to the buildings.  Then a line of say 60 students, perhaps 30 feed away - 2 lines.  With the Black students were Vera, me, and Haggar, and a Black Muslim young teacher.  The police moving slowly closer.  The Black line beginning to grow.  Then no movement toward the other.  I thought then, if someone throws a rock and hits a cop, there will be blood from bullets.  Neither side is moving.  Glaring at the other.  What is going to happen?

     The police are armed, but they are in a Black university in a Black residential neighborhood.  Armed, they may be nervous.  A thrown rock might cause?  After a few minutes, the student line begins to disperse, then disappears.  The police go slowly to take over the campus.  After several weeks, the strike was broken.  The Governor came to SUNO for the first time and promised some reforms.  (According to Haggar, the governor promised George anything he wanted if he would break the strike.  Haggar maintained, he did not lead the strike.  One strike leader suddenly was editing a new Black newspaper that summer, but it did not mean the governor was paying him off.  

     My promised job that summer was cancelled, and I was told I was now blacklisted.  I have no idea if it is true that I was on a blacklist, I only know I have never held another theaching post in the US.  The talented Val Ferdinand soon headed the Free Southern Theater, changed his name to Kalamu Ya Salaam and edited the most influential Black Collegiate for some years.  Haggar was deported to Canada, wrote a book praising a woman hi-jacker, changed the spelling of his name to Hajjar, and became more involved in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.  Hajjar is still academic, but defemding the cause of Palestinians.   I could find no info on Vera, and as she was rather young, attractive woman, she probably married and has a new name.  I forgot the name of the young Black Muslim teacher.  We all lost our jobs with SUNO, and Ferdinand and other student activists were expelled.  In 1977 Salaam and Tom Dent, son of the former Pres. of Dillard u. in NO were on a trip to Beijing.  overnight google changed its AI, and I cannot find if it was sponsored (paid for) the the Chinese govt., or the US State Dept. or whom?) Afro poets has this about the trip: " In 1977, he was part of the first African American activist delegation to the People's Republic of China.."   I finally found the answer, the trip of some 20 Black American educators was paid for by the Chinese government.  Interestingly, on some sites, Salaam mentions 2 other universities he attended, but does not mention SUNO.  True, he was expelled, but he was a leader of a major student strike there, not as well known as that at Cornell U. which occurred at the same time, but certainly a major strike among Black universities.

      My main point, for a few minutes on SUNO campus, if someone had thrown a rock and hit a policeman, there could have been students wounded, then trouble for the police as they tried to leave the area, and then trouble in New Orleans between the races.  In NO, there was no shooting, no deaths.  In Leipzig and Berlin, tense situations relaxed with no killings.  In Beijing, things went differently.  But I contend, in each case, things could have turned out differently.   Hugh Murray

TO SHOOT OR NOT TO SHOOT - BEIJING AND LEIPZIG

 The local PBS television station ran an old documentary tonight, In Their Own Voice, an hour long discussion on the rist of Angela Merkel.  Born in Hamburg, Fed. Rep. of Germany (West Germany) around 1954, her father, a Lutheran pastor was asked to take a church in the German Dem. Rep. (East Germany).  The baby Angela naturally accompanied her parents.  My point here is not to restate her schooling and her career as a physicist in the DDR.

     My shock with the program is something passed over quickly.  15 April 1989 to mourn the death of a reformist leader of the Chinese Communist Party, students began to gather in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.  Days passed and symbols of dissent appeared, such as a small statue of liberty, and signs urging reform.  On the night of 3 June the first reports of shooting, and the following day troops from the Peoples; Liberation Army began the crackdown on dissent, wounding and killing.  The Beijing spring was over, and the CCP asserted total control of the nation.

On 4 September 1989 Monday demonstrations for peace (and reform) began at the Nikolai Church in Leipzig, DDR, and though the authorities certainly were aware, and the usual police took notice, still, there seemed to be no consequences.  The following Monday, more demonstrators; and the Monday after that.  Hungary had opened its border to the West, and some DDR citizens had walked right through.  The Leipzig demos kept growing too, reaching 70,000 in early October.  Just down the street from the Nikolai Church was the famous Thomas Church, where Johann S. Bach had been choir director for 27 years.  And nearby was Auerbach's Keller where Faust had begun to seal a deal with Mephistopheles.

On 18 October 1989 Eric Honecker, leader of the DDR  and the ruling Socialist Unity Party resigned.  Was he deemed too soft to crack down, or to rigid?  The leaders of the DDR now seemed unsure of what to do.

On 9 November 1989, allegedly because of confusing announcements people began to rush the check points in the wall, hoping they would be open.  Finally, one did open and the wall was considered open thereafter.

I do not think either the Chinese crack down, or the DDR;s crack up were inevitable.  People made decisions, and German police and the NVA had cracked down on the East Berlin protests of 1963.  Why not in 1989?  An old German friend just wrote me to say I made a mistake.  He says the NVA was not created until 1955, and the Vopos (Peoples; Police remained in their barracks.  Instead Walter Ulbricht, then leading the DDR, called upon his Soviet allies for help, and it is they who crushed the protests of 1953 in East Berlin.  In time, however, the NVA and Vopos gained reputations of following the orders of the DDR leadership.

  One could ascribe the contrast between Beijing and Leipzig by saying China was a huge, rich nation, and it could crack down and tell the rest of the world, f u.  But China was not so rich in 1989, it was NOT the industrial giant we know today.  It was behind Japan and other Asian nations having suffered the Cultural Revolution and other "experiments" that usually did not work.  The DDR was never as rich as West Germany - while America's Marshall Plan helped rebuild the West, the Soviets, who had lost so much from Hitler's invasion, began by plundering what they could from what would become the DDR.  But the DDR had built up over the years; not as rich as its Western cousins, but high on the East European scale.  Why not shoot the peace demos in Leipzig?  Or open up to the West?  I do not think it was an easy decision for leaders of the DDR, certainly NOT inevitable.  To skip over this very important decision I find remarkable.  And I am here to criticize the failure to discuss the people who had to choose, to shoot or not to shoot, that was the question.  A most important one, and with an answer quite different from the one in Beijing just a few months earlier.  NEITHER THE DECISION IN BEIJING NOR IN LEIPZIG WAS INEVITABLE.  People make history; it is not an automatic setting of a clock.  And ignoring that decision, even if the theme of the program was Merkel, is unfair to history.

From April until November 1989 protests in 2 major nations occurred putting the leaders of those nations on the spot.  Each nation was led by communist parties, each had cracked down on dissent before.  The issue came before them again.  What would they do?  China cracked down; the DDR cracked up.  Each might have gone the other way.  The decisions of that year changed the world.  Hugh Murray

(On a personal note - I had taught in Leipzig a few years prior to the Monday demonstrations.  The uni. had a Sprachlager, a camp where students were to use English as much as possible, as it was not easy for DDR students to visit Britain.  One exercise for the students, they were to compose a poem akin to the limerick poems, popular is schools and in pubs.  As my German language was wanting, my British colleagues then demanded that I do like our German students, and compose a Limerick, but in German.  I went along with their demand.  I recall most of my poem - "Da war die Studenten aus Leipzig. sie waren nicht faul, sondern fleissig,  da la ti da, da la ti do (I forgot those lines, ending, Sie fordert die Wahrheit, nicht scheissig."  In English, There were the students from Leipzig, they were not lazy, but hardworking. la ti da, la ti da, They demanded the truth, not BS".  They liked my poem very much. - Hugh)

While in Leipzig, I visited the flat of one of my British teacher colleagues.  We were chatting and a knock on the door.  She opened it, and a handsome young man entered.  She introduced us.  She noted that his field was science, and he worked with Klaus Fuchs.  I immediately recognized the name - Fuchs was a German scientist who hated the Nazis, fled to the west, and became one of the scientists working to develop an A-bomb in the West.  He was also a spy for the Soviets, was caught, and spent a decade in prison.  I had no idea he was working in the DDR, but said, well, as an American, I should leave now, as to cause no troubles - I certainly did not want to be accused of spying.  The gal assured me that as a teacher here, there would be no trouble.  Feeling uncomfortable, I left her flat sooner than anticipated.  As she was a beautiful young woman, I suspect she and her other guest did not miss me.

Watching the PBS hour on Angela Merkel, I learned that she too was a scientist.  Did she work under Fuchs?  Google AI answered, Fuchs and Merkel were in different sections of science.  Moreover, he was about to retire as she was just beginning, so there was no real elder/novis contact between them.  

  

LEE HARVEY OSWALD and GUY BANISTER - Rethinking the Past

 It was fall 1955 and I was beginning my senior year at Warren Easton Sen. High School in New Orleans.  A new movie was to play at the huge Saenger Theater on Canal and North Basin Sts.  I would be double dating with Tex Sanders, a tall, friendly guy, and someone with whom I bowled now and then.  My date was someone I'd dated before, and was talking some to Mary Jane, a gal I did  not know.  The theater was packed, and when it ended, it seemed the vast audience let out a collective sigh of relief.  Unlike the tv families, where each week the problems of the family were solved within a half hour, not counting the commercials.  Perhaps the problems portrayed were not too serious, and the family is happy with the dad's solution.  Yet, in this film, 3 families are portrayed, and none are anything like the tv's version of Father Know's Best, Ozzie and Harriet,  et al.  Sal Mineo's parents send him a check for his birthday, Natalie Wood's dad slaps her and calls her a whore; and James Dean's dad is hen-pecked, dominated by his wife while he wears the apron.  The 3 try to form their alternate family for a night or 2.  A rare critique of the family of the 50s.

As we all attended the same school, we saw each other after.  Mary Jane was a pleasant your gal, and she was worried about me.  She had heard I was pushing race-mixing, for example.  She explained, that is communism, and I should talk to her dad who knew about the topic.  He could set me aright.  I did not realize, but her dad was Guy Banister.  She elaborated, he had been a leader of the FBI in Chicago, and knew about the Communist ways of causing trouble.  She wanted me to meet her father.  After Chicago, Guy Banister had served as temporary Supt. of the New Orleans Police Dept.  He then opened a detective agency.

It was possible her dad had already heard of me.  During the summer of 1955 I had attended Pelican Boys State, sponsored by the American Legion.  I had been elected to the Senate, and we were supposed to debate a proposed law in the Louisiana Legislature on our last day.  The Legion was hoping the topic would be required ROTC in all public schools.  I thought a more pressing issue was at hand and should be debated; I proposed the integration of the public schools of Louisiana.  A fellow senator was aghast, and said my proposal should NOT be debated as I was the only person in favor of it.   Suddenly, many other senators stood up and disagreed with my opponent.  We decided to debate integration on the last day.  How would the vote go?  I had no idea.  Nor did the pro-segregationist Legion, but they must have been sufficiently worried, so that they demanded we close the meeting before a vote could be held.

To satisfy Mary Jane, I went to her hope.  Mr. Banister was sorting mail.  I went to him, introduced myself, he grunted.  There was no real dialog, but we both went through the motions to satisfy Mary Jane, who was a sweet, concerned you gal.  

One forgets the turmoil stirred in the South following the 1954 Supreme Court decision overturning a precedent of over half a century, that separate and equal was the proper way to manage racial affairs.  Segregation was actually older than that, but the Plessy decision had made it national policy.  However, in 1954 syddebkt segregatuib was deemed unConstitutional.  The new decision was seen as a threat to our way of life in the South; part of a Communist plot to cause trouble at home.  In May 1955, to commemorate the Black Monday decision of 1954, most Easton students left the school to march downtown to show how they felt about Earl Warren's horrible decision.  The state got time on  the radio to educate the public on this major issue.  Thus, the State Sovereignty Commission had expert witnesses expose the origins of the American Civil Liberties Union.  Founded by a Communist during the era of WWI, it continued to this day as a trouble-making Commie front.  At least 3-hours of radio time were devoted to this expose.

Some leaders of the American Legion were also leaders of LUAC, the Louisiana Un-American Activies Committee.  In 1963, along with the newly elected DA of NO, Jim Garrison, they would raid the offices of the Southern Conference Education Fund, a pro-race mixing group.  Strangely, LUAC did not go after an open Marxist who was then handing out pro-Castro panphlets, and even given an-hour-long interview on WDSU radio.  Strange that LUAC was not interested in Lee Oswald!  Oh, and the pro-Communist Oswald was getting the leaflets from the office of the staunch anti-Communist, Guy Banister.  How strange!    

MORE TO COME,   HUGH MURRAY

Meanwhile, you might find related material that will explain the Oswald-Guy Banister alliance in New Orleans in summer 1963, and much else in an article recommended by Texan Robert Morrow - The latest exposition on this important topic by Jeremy Kuzmarov of Covert Action Magazine: Should Lee Harvey Oswald Be Exonerated? - CovertAction Magazine

In high school, I found the Unitarian Church and joined it.  My first visit, a Black couple sat beside me.  I thought, should I leave?  Isn't this against the law?  I could feel the blood rush to my face.  I decided to stay, and returned, knowing the church was for integration.  I attended Tulane U. on a scholarship.  Met 2 professors at church, one taught at Dillard (HBCU) and his wife taught at Xavier U. a RC HBCU.  They were both of Jewish heritage, refugees from Nazi Europe.  I asked if I could sit in Dr. Iggers history class at Dillard.  A Black who tried to enter Tulane would have been arrested.  I had no trouble at Dillard, sat in the class for a year and made friends.  No arrest.  In spring 1960 I picketed with the new Consumers' League, don't buy where you can't work group.  Sit-ins begin in North Carolina, and spread south.  But nothing happens in New Orleans.  The local NAACP  opposes such actions.  In the Negro Y on Dryages St. in NO, a local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality CORE is formed.  CORE would sponsor a major training camp for August 1960; 7 members from NO will attend.

One day our teacher/speaker was Jackie Robinson, the baseball player who integrated the major leagues.  It was an election year, and he was openly for Nixon and the Republicans, as were many if not most Blacks in the South who experienced the Democrats as white supremists.  A few days later, to a far smaller audience, Martin Luther King spoke to our CORE group, about his experience in changing the rules with the Montgomery bus boycott.  The reason for the small audience - half of our  CORE folks were in jail.  We had sought to integrate a restaurant inside Shell's City super market.  Most of our goup sat at integrated tables, and they were arrested.  New Orleans Ruth Dispenza and I sat at a table; she was a light-skinned Black, and the waitress thought we were a white couple.  So, no arrest.  King told us he was quietly for Kennedy and the Democrats, though his dad, minister of a major church in Atlanta, favored Nixon and the Republicans.  One reason, Kennedy was a Roman Catholic, and that proved a big drawback even when Al Smith ran against Hoover in 1928.

We returned to NO, and within a week conducted the first sit-in in modern NO history, despite the NAACP's opposition.  The NAACP Youth Chapter quicky supported us with picketing, and the adult organization quietly ended its opposition.  The Mayor and Chief of Police remained hostile, denouncing the violation of state law, and asserted such lawlessness would not be tolerated.  We were arrested, but at night released on bail.  We had missed all meals in jail.  Archie Allen, Black from Dillard, one of the 7 arrested, Carlos Zervigon, Hispanic sympathetic supporter, and I went to a Black place to eat.  We entered and sat at a table.  The waiter approached, "I can serve you (to Archie), but not you two.  He looked again, Wait, I can serve you (Archie) and you (to Carlos), but not you (to me).  Are we going to have a 2nd sit-in the same day.  No.  We just left without eating.

Tulane's policy - students arrested are suspended until proven innocent.  I hhad a weekend job at a Tulane library and was a grad student, but now all was up in the air.  I could not stay home, so went from one friend to another that week.  My dad let me keep the car.  Tulane's Board relented - the old rule for usual crimes would remain, but these were political crimes, so the punishment would not occur.  Meanwhile the local judge had other ideas.  When the 7 of us sat together in his court room, when he entered, he began shouting at us for integrating his court in violation of state laws, and he would hold us in contempt if we did not sit properly.  The 2 whites moved to the side.  We were all found guilty and became convicted felons, years before Donald Trump would be given the same title.

Meanwhile, Oliver, the other white from NO who had gone to Miami, and was arrested there, was tired of living in a distant burb and wanted to live in the city of NO, and I needed a place,  We decided to look for a place together.  Found one, furnished, $45 a month, living room, bed room, kitchen, bath.  2 blocks from the St. Charles street car line.  I barely knew Oliver.  In Miami we were assigned rooms to integrate the conference, so I roomed with 2 Black students and was surprised when they did not shave in the morning but used a depilatory cream to dissolve the hair.  I learned more about Oliver when we moved together.  First, his annoying habit of never looking at you directly when speaking to you, I found the reason - he was legally blind.  He probably did not know precisely where my eyes were.  I learned he had a rough time growing up, was on the path to becoming a juvenile delinquent, quitting school, etc.  There were 2 people who would set him on the proper path, one a relative, who taught him the basics so he could be an electrician.  If all else failed, he would have a job.  Second, he joined the Civil Air Patrol, and its leader David Ferrie, a pilot who seemed to know so much, pushed Oliver to return to school and go on despite his disability.  David Ferrie was gay, but Oliver, I found out as his roommate, was strictly straight.  Ferrie pushed Oliver to go on, and he did so at Loyola U. (next door to Tulane U).  In time, I was paid to read some of Oliver's sociology text books to him.  Father Fichter at Loyola was pushing him too.  Oliver was a year or 2 older than I was but seemed much more self assured of himself.

One night I returned, and Oliver said, "*i want you to learn how to use this," as  he handed me a box.  I opened it, and surprise, it was a pistol.  A Ruger, like the famous German Luger.  But I had applied for a draft status as a conscientious objector.  Our efforts in CORE were using non-violence to change society.  How can I now start to use a gun?  My parents were getting threating calls on the phone all the time, but no one was after them - it was me they wanted.  We never got such calls, but the reason: we had no telephone.  Maybe the enemy was outside just outside, but we would not know until too late..  Am I supposed to let the blind guy defend us?  While I do nothing?  No, I could not throw this burden on a legally blind man.  I would have to learn how to use the pistol.  And a few weeks later, I wrote my draft board, I was no longer claiming a CO status.  

Around 1952 or53 I graduated from 8th grade at Benjamin Elementary, a co-ed public school.  Next year I planned to attend S J Peters Boys High, for 4 years of high school.  But the entire school system changed, no more boys and girls separate highs, all public highs would be co-ed.  And junior highs were introduced, So K-6, followed by 7-9 for jun. high, and then 10-12 for sen. high.  All co-ed.  So instead of boys high, I went to 9th grade at Beauregard Jun. High, for one year.  That same year in the 8th grade classes was Lee Harvey Oswald.  It is possible we spoke, perhaps in a lunch line, "How much is that?"  In reality we never met, nor did we converse.  Oswald attended Beauregard for 2 years.  At the same time he became a member of the Civil Air Patrol, headed by David Ferrie.  If Ferrie could help other troubled youths, why not Oswald?  Some say while in NYC Oswald had become a juvenile delinquent and was influenced by communists.  Ferrie was strongly anti-Communist, working with refugees from Castro's Cuba, working for Carlos Marcello's mafia, and with Guy Banister and other anti-coms.    When Oswald finished junior high, he could go on to Easton - my high school.  Instead he wanted to join the marines.  How many 17-y-o American communists want to join the marine corps?  I suspect, far more probable, the patriotic Ferrie pushed Oswald in the patriotic direction.  Oswald's mom said a man in a uniform urged her to sign papers so he could join up younger than the usual age.  She did so.  And Oswald joined up.  A patriot!

What did Oliver do after graduation from Loyola, - he signed up with the US Aide for International Development, and he would go to Laos (next to Vietnam) in 1962+.  When he returned, he married, had children and led in improving computers and other devices for the blind and other handicapped.  There is a building named for him on the UNO campus.

Was Oswald following a similar path?  What went wrong?

One more thing re the Oswald-Banister connection.  In summer of 1963 I finally finished my MA Thesis and would be able to graduate in August with a Master's degree.  My thesis was long, some 260 pages on the Scottsboro, Ala. rape cases of the 1930s, in which I discussed the conflict between the NAACP and a Communist front group, the International Labor Defense, for control of the case and contrast in tactics. Summer in NO is hot and humic, but I was going to the Tulane Library, which like most air-conditioned buildings of that era, was cold, so I had to carry a sweater on entering.  Summer break, and few were in the library.  I opened the door and no one.  Near the stairs was a small table, and today there was a stack of leafets on it.  As I passed it, I read, "Hands off Cuba, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee."  I only knew one person who had been involved with Fair Play in another city, a Tulane U. grad student in philosophy.  I took a leaflet, and went to look for him in the library's closed area except for grad students.  He was at his desk.  I raised the leaflet so he could see it, and asked, "What are you putting out?"  "Iet me see that."  He knew nothing about it, nor did I.  Should we send our names to the PO address on the leaflet?  I joked, well, it might be the FBI.  We decided to do nothing till we knew more.  He took the leaflet and taped it to the door to his dorm room.  Where it remained until November. 1963.

On Tuesday, 26 November I was back from my new teaching job, and my mom told me 2 men at the front door wanted to speak with me.  They wanted to know about the leaflet.  I explained, I had thought it was published by a friend, Harold Alderman, a philosophy student at Tulane, but he knew nothing about it.  Nor did I.  I did not follow up with an letter to the address on the leaflet.  They asked of my views on Kennedy, and I said, look at the back of my car, I retained the Kennedy sticker for the 1960 election.  They left.  Soon after, the phone rang.  It was Alderman telling me he had given my name to the FBI.  Neither of us knew about the origin of the leaflets.  The irony, had we written to the address, it would have gone to the office of Guy Banister, anti-com so he could have added our names to his list of local commies.  The first book that mentions me is a volume of the Warren Report, perhaps v. 26, that describes this incident.  I suspect I was already on Banister's enemies list.

One ajent asked me if I had heard of anyone having connections to Oswald.  I had gone out Friday night to a bar looking for friends.  "Who the hell is Oswald?" was my question.  One person told me they had heard Bob Heller, a Tulane student had seen Oswald distributing leaflets in NO and had spoken to him.  The agent took notes, and later interviewed Heller.  Heller had seen Oswald leafletting and wondered if he might need legal help, but did not talk to Oswald.  Sineibe called me a fink every time he saw me on campus.  I have no regrets about cooperating to find what happened in Dallas.  Would I have a right to criticize the Warren Commission if I had not cooperated with its inquiry? 

When the FBI agents came to see me, I basically said I knew nothing, because that is what I thourht at that time.  In the summer of 1963 I had no idea the Fair Play leaflets were stsored at the office of Guy Banister.  I had no idea that Oswald was working out of Banister's office, and the 2 appeared together in various locals.  Had I known that the week after the assassination, I would have brought that up with the FBI.  But I would not learn of the Oswald-Banister connection until the Garrison probe of the later 1960s.  How could the vehiment anti-com Banister work with the self proclaimed Marxist Oswald.  It is the subject the government sought to avoid.  Another reason they hated Garrison, the only elected official in the US to openly challenge the lies of the Warren Report.

THE MIDDLE EAST IN WWII

I have been ill for several days.  Perhaps I can begin to repair this post.  The reason for it, I recall an old map of the area during WWII.  Iran was divided into 3 parts - the northern third of the country was occupied by Joseph Stalin's forces.  The sourthern third by those of Winston Churchill's British Empire, and the middle third was what was left of independent Iran.  Churchill, some decades earlier, had thought that the communist menace should have been smothered in the cradle in the early years of the Russian Revolution.  The Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 was a great surprise to the world, the 2 fiercest foes were suddenly "friens," and all the propaganda they had raged against the other was now buried, as each would use their hatchets on other nations.

     Interestingly, when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain declared war on Germany.  Stalin was supposed to invade too, but the Soviets were involved in an undeclared war in Asia, officially Mongolia vs Manchukuo, a Soviet satellite vs a Japanese satellite.  The Soviets beat the Japs rather handily, and some 6 weeks after Germany invaded Poland from the West, Soviets invaded from the east.  There is a telling moment in the film, Europa, Europa, as Poles are seen swimming across a river to the East to flee the incoming German troops.  Suddenly, some are not swimming back.  What happened?  News of Soviets invading from the East.  Many Poles now thought it preferable to head toward the Germans, while Jews kept fleeing eastward toward the Soviets and away from the Germans.  Hitler and Stalin divided Poland and much of Europe.  In summer 1941  Hitler launched his surprise attack against the Soviets; not Germany alone but Finland, Roumania, Bulgaria, etc., civilized Europe against the communist menace.  And Stalin's forces lost, surrendered, and were swept out of their positions. Others content the reason the Soviets did so poorly then, they were preparing their own sneak attack on Hitler, and were prepared for offence, parachutes, other types of equipment, but not for defense.  Since Hitler struck first, his forces suddenly had millions of POWs, and the armies of Europe marched to crush the Soviet empire.  By December, Moscow itself was in sight.  The end of the war, in Germany's favor might be concluded by early 1942.  As many Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, and especially Ukrainians joined the Germans, things were dire for Stalin.  It was decided a quick way to supply Stalin with needed material would be through Iran, so Stalin and Churchill agreed ib tge 3part division of Iran.

     There was a famine in Iran, 1942-43.  Were the Soviets diverting food for Iranians to shipments to the USSR?  Or a natural drought that can occur in the Middle East.  Meanwhile, in India Churchill is still blamed for a famine killing millions in the Jewel in the Crown of Britain.  A friend recently thought the defacing of a London statue of Churchill was quite fitting.

     The Teheran Conference from 28 Nov. to 1 Dec. 1943 had the first meeting of the Big Three, Churchill, Stalin, and America's Pres. Franklin Roosevelt.  Each nation agreed to the implementation of further plans to weaken and defeat Germany, and Stalin promised to enter the war against Japan after the European war concluded.  The Allies won the war, and Britain withdrew on time from the southern third of the nation.  Stalin delayed about 9 months and more negotiations, but eventually left the northern sector of Iran too.

     My point, in all the discussion now about Iran, almost no one mentions that the nearest major power is Putin's Russia.  Admittedly, Putin has had his hands full in Ukraine, but how tempting is it for him to think of Iran perhaps 90 miles across the Caspian Sea???  It is not that close, but Russia is the only major power that close to Iran, juar a Caspian away.  And in a nation that was once 1/3 Russian (Soviet)  Hugh Murray

FROM RT - THE HORRIBLE CONSEQUENCES OF RACIAL QUOTAS

 

UK released killer because ‘detaining him was racist’ – inquiry

Valdo Calocane, a migrant who killed three people in 2023, was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but was not institutionalized

©  Zac Goodwin / PA Images via Getty Images

Valdo Calocane, a migrant diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia who went on a deadly stabbing spree in the UK in 2023, was previously released by mental health workers for fear of being labeled racist, an inquiry into the Nottingham triple murder has heard.

Calocane, who went to the UK from Guinea-Bissau in 2007, fatally stabbed teenage university students Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, and another man, Ian Coates, on June 13, 2023. He went on to steal Coates’ van and ran down three pedestrians, leaving them with serious injuries.

On Monday, a public inquiry heard that Calocane was pronounced a paranoid schizophrenic in July 2020 and placed under the care of Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. It transpired that the man, who had failed to turn up to appointments and refused to take his medication, was later discharged by the NHS.

During the proceedings, it also came to light that at one point in 2020, mental health professionals considered isolating the aggressive patient after he attempted to kick down a neighbor’s door. However, the NHS staff decided to release Calocane into the community over concerns related to the “over-representation of young black males in detention,” the inquiry learned. The decision was made despite one psychiatrist warning that “perhaps [he] will end up killing someone.”

READ MORE: Dutch Starmer critic barred from UK

On top of that, the bereaved families accused the Nottinghamshire police of attempting to cover up their failures to arrest the paranoid schizophrenic before he went on the deadly stabbing spree.

Calocane had a history of violent assaults as well as stalking and harassment complaints. None of the incidents apparently attracted the police’s attention.

The pedestrian survivors alleged that the local authorities originally told them that they had no prior dealings with Calocane. During the inquiry, however, a representative of the Nottinghamshire police acknowledged that the force had been aware of a series of “unpleasant and antisocial” incidents involving him. The official insisted, however, that “they did not reasonably herald that he would become a triple killer,” and that it was “simply not correct” to suggest a cover-up.

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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