My memory can be wrong, but often it is clear and correct - though it may take me a day to retrieve it. I recall a gathering in New Orleans at the home of a slightly older friend Jack P., and his wife Nydia, probably in summer of 1968. It was a small group, about a dozen, and it was to greet Ann Braden, a civil rights and civil liberties activist at least since the 1940s. She and her husband Carl were living in Kentucky, and had blacks visiting their home, or about to sell it to blacks or something on the race issue, and their home was bombed. The local authorities blamed it on the Bradens, and court cases ensued. Ann had written a book on the subject, THE WALL BETWEEN, which I had read when young. They were also activists against HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee. Carl had died, but Ann was coming to NO, and Jack invited some local activists to meet her.
There was general chit-chat and questions, and then things changed with the arrival of Buford W. Posey from Philadelphia. Buford first entered the national news light when in 1963 he alleged that the 3 missing civil rights workers, Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, were murdered, and NOT as local authorities were speculating, in Havana, Moscow, or New York. At this little meeting in NO, Buford elaborated. He knew they were dead because he had received a phone call late into the night, to the effect: "We just killed those 3 **** and you're going to be number 4." I don't recall the exact words but they were harsher than those in the Mississippi archives. Buford added, he recognized the voice: it was that of a local minister. He added, that the sheriff and authorities could have left the 3 out of custody earlier, but the authorities wanted to wait until the Sunday night religious service was over, because some of the congregation would be involved in the attack on the 3 "outside agitators." Buford elaborated about that era. One day a car he did not recognized pulled up in front of his home. Buford went on the porch with his rifle, "Who are you?" he asked the stranger emerging from his car. The stranger now seemed most nervous: "Can you put that gun down. I'm from the Justice Department. I have been sent here (by Bobby Kennedy) to protect you." Buford asked, "Well, where's your gun?" "Oh I don't have one." Buford then told him to get out of here; I have enough trouble protecting myself without trying to protect you, too." I think many on the Left in the South had a very different view toward weapons from the Northern Left. Buford also said he was the only person who had lost his Mississippi citizenship; a law had been passed denying him that and the right to vote. When someone asked him about a court case, he replied it only applied to one and was too costly to try to win just for one person.
The Mississippi historical group maintained Buford got in trouble in 1948 when he supported Democrat Harry Truman instead of States Rights (Dixiecrat) Strom Thurmond for President. But Ann Braden said something to Buford that he got in trouble as a Progressive, and he agreed. Of course, they might have meant progressive rather than the Prog. Party. I suspect he was PP.
New Orleans had some interesting Progressives. NO her native city, playwright Lillian Hellman was a delegated to the PP Convention that nominated Henry Wallace. Gwen Midlo Hall was a teenage member of the Young Progressives, and she would later become a major scholar in black history. Long before the 1963 raid on the Quorum Club on the edge of the French Quarter, there was a raid in 1949 of a Progressive Party party, in the French Quarter and about 70 were arrested for race mixing, etc.
The Progressive Party was a popular front organization, with Communists and non-Communists, and in the South pushing for integration. On the other side, all race mixing, mongrolization, etc. WAS COMMUNISM. Paul Robeson was a leader of the PP, and his defense of the Soviets cost him dearly. From the most popular black man in the world in the early 1940s, to a non-person in America by 1950. Stalin was a dictator, even more murderous that Hitler. Yet, for the uncomfortable question, had there been no Stalin, would there have been an end to legal segregation in the USA? Would there have been de-colonialization of much of the world? Would Britain still rule India, Pakistan, and half of Africa? Would France still rule Vietnam, and the other half of Africa? The Cold War forced change on America and the world, changes neither wanted, and some of that change was for the good.-----------Hugh Murray
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