RETHINKING THE SCOTTSBORO CASE?

   As many of you know, I am now rather conservative politically.  When I was young I wrote about a famous rape case in the US, and defended the Left.  Now that my politics have changed, should I revise my history?  A few months ago Smithsonian Mag on line published an article on the old Scottsboro case of the 1930s.  I immediately replied, and the next day.  But no replies were posted.  Today I decided to check, and my comments were there.  My own politics have changed, but history has not changed.  Facts do not change with fashions.

     Alice George wrote the article "Who Were the Scottsboro Nine?"  in the Smithsonian on line, 23 March 2020.  She has a doctorate.  My comments are below.

• humura • 2 months ago

  This is not for posting. I sent in 2 posts already. I have published several articles on Scottsboro beginning in the 1960s. My British research was never published - thus the link between the SDC, Robeson and Kenyatta. So that should be of general interest. Hugh Murray

  
  
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  humura • 2 months ago

  One more thing. In the UK in the 1930s a Scottsboro Defence Committee was established with 2 co-chairs. One was the American Paul Robeson, who had been an All American football player at Rutgers, earned a law degree, but then became known on stage as a singer and actor. In the 1930s film version of "Show Boat," he sang "Old Man River." In the UK he starred in a number of films and befriended some African students studying in Britain who were extras in the films. Britain still held the largest empire in the world prior to WWII, and many colonials would appreciate films with a Black star. The other chair of the Scottsboro Defence (Brit. spell) Committee was an African, Johnstone Kenyatta. By the 1950s, in America Robeson's career had withered because of the blacklist. And in Kenya, Johnstone became Jomo Kenyatta, the leader of the Mau Mau rebellion against British rule in that country. The Scottsboro cause had brought together many from various parts of the world.

   
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  humura • 2 months ago • edited

  Scottsboro is important for many reasons, but one reason - the role of the Communist Party and its fronts, like the International Labor Defense, in moving the case beyond the small court-room and into the streets around the world. The NAACP sought an attorney to represent the boys in the initial trials. The ILD moved in and wanted to direct the case, and fought with the NAACP to get the support of the boys and their parents. The NAACP wanted a defense in the courtroom; the ILD wanted more, not just a good defense attorney but agitation outside the courtroom. Through the world-wide communist movement, one of the Scottsboro mothers toured Europe, telling of the oppression of Blacks in America. Einstein and many of the notted intellectuals of the day signed petitions to save the Scottsboro boys, sent to officials in Alabama! The Garvey newspaper showed a Scottsboro protest in (pre-Hitler) Germany. The ILD won the first US Supreme Court case maintaining that the initial defense was no defense, and a new trial was required.
  The ILD led a March on Washington in 1933 emphasizing the Scottsboro case, and one woman who picketed the White HOuse (FDR and the Democrats were not interested in ending lynching, legal or not.) was Ruby Bates, one of the alleged victims. She had testified in the 2nd trial that there was no rape. The doctor who examined the girls told Judge Horton in private, that the girls were laughing when he examined them re the "rape." He was convinced they had not been raped, but refused to say so on the witness stand, and if the judge required that he testify, he would lie.
  The Communist led effort saved the Scottsboro boys and led to a combined, legal inside the court defense WITH an effort on the streets, on the media, agitation with which we are now familiar. The Scottsboro boys were innocent and deserved the support. In much of the 1930s and until the mid-50s Communists, were often leaders in the civil rights movement, from sit-ins in Baltimore and DC around 1950 and the Progressive Party anti-seg campaign throughout the South in 1948. The NAACP was not always the leader, and often opposed to action.

  
  

Why White Organizations Are "Racists"

The Left-wing site, Salon, posted an article presenting five reasons why any pro-white organization is necessarily racist.  I tried to post a reply, but was unable to sign in.  So I present my reply here.  
Hugh Murray

 Five reasons a white group is racist:

 1) La Raza (the Hispanic racist group) says it is true;

2 the New Black Panther Party and the NAACP (two groups demanding ever more privileges for Blacks) say it is true;

 3) Some Amerindian groups may say it so (from inside casinos that whites are not permitted to run in many states, and in the one of the few nations in the world where, though I and my parents and grandparents were born here, I cannot identify myself as a native American on hostile, government forms);

4) pro-invader groups who want amnesty for millions of illegal aliens do not want anyone to question the affirmative action privileges these criminal invaders will receive over law-abiding American citizens;

5) academic Left-wingers who will contort law and reason to justify discrimination against poor and middle-class whites in order to promote their pets, who will vote for Left-wing parties.

White groups do well in prison because whites commit fewer crimes, percentage wise, than minorities.  So whites are often minorities in prison.  And consequently, they are often raped by minorities.  More men are raped each year than women, but the women's movement ignores that.  And interracial rape is overwhelmingly minority on white.  But never mention that as the Left would be offended.

So long as whites are victims of crime and discrimination, there is strong need for Euro rights organizations.

DEMOCRATIC PARTY PROPAGANDA POSING AS HISTORY

HARRY TRUMAN AND THE STRUGGLE FOR RACIAL JUSTICE

By Robert Shogan (Lawrence: U. Press of Kansas, 2013)

Rev. by Hugh Murray

            In April 1965 former Pres. Harry Truman received the annual award from Freedom House at a dinner attended by 1,200 in the Grand Ball Room of the Waldorf Astoria.  Pres. Johnson sent a telegram calling Truman “the man to whom the cause of freedom owes the greatest debt.”(NYT, 14 April 1965)  Earlier in the day Truman called Rev. Martin Luther King a “’rabble-rouser’ who has hurt the Negroes’ cause ‘because he hasn’t got any sense.’”(ibid.)  The day before, he referred to King as a “troublemaker.…When reminded that the civil rights leader had won a Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Truman replied: ‘I didn’t give it to him.’”(NYT, 13 April 65)  In the 1960s Truman was no longer running for office and no longer needed Black votes.  The “civil rights President” was showing different colors.  In March 1960, a month after the first modern sit-ins, Truman declared: “If anybody came to my store and tried to stop business, I’d throw him out.”(NYT, 25 March 60)  In April 1960, Truman was the first guest invited for Cornell University’s “distinguished visitors’ program” where he asserted that “Communists were engineering the student sit-downs at lunch counters in the South…You can never tell,…where you’ll find their fine Italian hand, and it’s not Italian – it’s Russian”(19 April 60)

            It was not only sit-ins that riled the former President.  “Truman…criticized Northerners who have gone South as Freedom Riders as meddlesome intruders.  ‘They stir up trouble…they ought to stay here and attend to their own business and work through the people who are interested in the Negro’s welfare…(NYT 6 June 61)  Two years later, in a talk at a dinner for a Democratic Senator from Ohio, Truman elaborated on his view, “the argument on civil rights has been stirred up by Boston and New England demagogues just as the War Between the States was brought about by Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Lloyd Garrison.  If the Northern busybodies would stay at home and clean up their own back yard, the rest of the country will obey the laws.”(NYT 15 Sept. 63)  Nevertheless, Truman insisted in 1965 that he had “done more for Negroes than any other President,”(13 April 65) and Shogan and other prominent historians appear to agree with him. Indeed, a back-cover blurb by History Channel’s Steven Gillon states: “[Shogan]…tells the story of how Harry Truman overcame the prejudice of his youth to become a powerful force in the struggle for civil rights.”  Shogan, a journalist, is like many academics whose narrative is an endorsement for the Democratic Party.

            Shogan writes well and makes his points.  The problem is what he omits from his history.  True, in the 195 pages of text, he concedes in one paragraph that Truman opposed the sit-ins.  Shogan even cites NYT stories, but few readers will bother to check how important Truman was in the early 60s in labeling sit-ins and other protest actions as Communist directed.

            Shogan rightly notes how little FDR did for Black civil rights in the 1930s.  The creation of the Fair Employment Practices Committee was forced upon Roosevelt by the threat to stage a March on Washington by A. Philip Randolph (whose organization was not the NAACP).  Truman became president upon the death of Roosevelt in spring 1945.  He had won Black votes in Missouri by being fair, honest, efficient, and by supporting creation of a home for wayward Black girls and other local improvements.  He opposed lynching, beating of Black service men home from the war, and general discrimination, but even as Senator, Truman may have favored segregation.  Certainly, he was not in favor of social mixing.  Over time, that may or may not have changed.

            As president, Truman surely hoped to get the Black vote.  And he did think that some features of American society should be reformed.  He favored FEPC, but knew Congress would not make it permanent.  He did appoint a commission to report on the race problem, and it produced a liberal report, To Secure These Rights.  Truman was the first President to address the NAACP, and even in the 1960s was praising the NAACP, while in effect smearing all the other civil rights groups, like King’s SCLC, and CORE, SNCC, etc.  Truman did use his power as Commander in Chief to push for integration of the armed services.  Moreover, Shogan demonstrates how Truman used his Department of Justice to become involved in cases pressing for the end of segregation through “friend-of-the-court” briefs, trying to influence the judges by indicating that the government had taken a side in these cases.

            Yes, Truman was the first president to address the NAACP.  But when one of the founders of the organization refused to support Truman in the campaign of 1948, and instead endorsed Henry Wallace and the Progressives, the NAACP fired W. E. B. Du Bois.  In effect, that was the beginning of the NAACP as a Democratic-Party front group.  And two years later, Truman’s Department of Justice arrested Du Bois as a foreign agent.  Though Shogan discusses Du Bois in the era of Democrat President Woodrow Wilson, especially when Wilson segregated the civil service, Shogan omits how Du Bois was treated by Truman.

            Truman praised the NAACP in the 60s.  But Shogan never mentions what Truman’s Administration did to other civil rights organizations.  The NAACP was certainly not the only major civil rights group.  For example, in the 1930s it was the International Labor Defense that led the struggle to free the Scottsboro boys in Alabama.  Later in the 1930s a plethora of new groups formed like the first snick, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, the National Negro Congress, the Civil Rights Congress, the Council on African Affairs, etc.  All these groups were placed on Truman’s Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations.  By the mid-1950s, all of these had been destroyed.  If the NAACP had not fired Du Bois, and become a Democratic-Party front group, might it not have been placed on the Attorney General’s list for destruction, too?

            In many ways, the Southern civil rights movement did NOT begin with sit-ins in 1960.  I would argue it began in with the campaign throughout the South to elect Henry Wallace and the Progressives in 1948.  When Sen. Glen Taylor of Idaho (the Prog. VP candidate) went to Birmingham to address the SNYC, Sheriff Bull Connor arrested him for entering through the Negro entrance.  Henry Wallace spoke at mixed rallies in the South, often receiving rotten eggs and tomatoes hurled by segregationists.  The PP efforts in Georgia were akin to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party efforts in the 1960s. 

            Some of the PP figures would re-emerge in the 1950s;  the Black woman who pushed the NAACP to integrate Central High in Little Rock; and the white women who, in the midst of the threatening white mobs, sought to shield a Black teen seeking to integrate Central High.  Is it a coincidence that SNCC in 1960 became the new “snick”?  There were people in the 1930s and 40s who were dissatisfied with the NAACP’s law-suit approach.  They were not sending atomic secrets to Moscow.  They were sick of the Democratic Party that ruled the South.  They were subversive to the system of segregation.  They formed some of the links between the PP and the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s.

            There are other flaws in Shogan’s volume.  He discusses Truman and Israel and how Sec. of State Marshall was strongly opposed to recognizing the Zionist state.  Yet, Shogan never mentions that in two bi-elections in NYC the American Labor Party (by 1948 the NY branch of Wallace’s Progressive Party) won election to Congress by demanding recognition of Israel.  Did Truman “believe” recognition was good policy?  Or did he realize he needed the Jewish vote?  How much did Truman believe in civil rights?  Or did he realize he needed the Black vote?

            When Shogan discusses the importance of Justice Dept. attorney Philip Elman, Shogan incredibly omits the revelations that Justice Frankfurter was colluding with Elman concerning the school segregation cases bundled in Brown v. Board of Ed.  If another Supreme Court Justice had been discussing with the attorney for the segregationists, former Democratic candidate for President, John W. Davis, on what would be the best arguments to convince all the court of the legality and fairness of segregation, you can imagine the outcry of cheating, foul, corruption, etc.!  They would have demanded the impeachment of the Judge.  Yet, Frankfurter informed Elman that some of Thurgood Marshall’s arguments were unconvincing, and how other integrationist presentations might better sway the court – thus tainting of the court process.  This goes unmentioned in Shogan’s book.

            Truman was an excellent politician.  Yet he did much to retard and destroy the civil rights movement developing in the South in the 1940s and 50s; and he denounced it once in was underway in the 1960s.  Moreover, one can argue that the man most involved in the friend-of-court suits, praised by Shogan, was literally corrupting the Supreme Court.  Meanwhile the Attorney General was heading the campaign against the integration movement (destroying all except the Dem. Party approved NAACP).

            Shogan even criticizes Republican Eisenhower!  In Little Rock, Ike was the first president since Grant to send troops to the South to defend Blacks.  What Democrat would do that?  Shogan is impressed by speeches.  Henry Wallace acted.  President Eisenhower acted.

            Shogan has written a pro-Democratic Party account of civil rights history.  The academedia complex will be satisfied.  Because of the major omissions, this book is an utterly distorted narrative. 

Ann Coulter on the IRS Scandal

I took this from frontpage.com.  An excellent article.  Hugh Murray

Tips for Right-Wingers on the IRS Scandal

June 6, 2013 By Ann Coulter 3 Comments

Instead of showing endless loops of IRS employees wasting taxpayer dollars line-dancing — Breaking news: Government employees waste millions of your dollars every single day! — I think it would be more useful for the public to hear a few crucial facts about the exploding scandal at the Internal Revenue Service.

At Tuesday’s congressional hearings on the IRS, witnesses provided shocking details about the agency’s abuse of conservative groups.

The IRS leaked the donor list of The National Organization for Marriage to their political opponents, the pro-gay-marriage Human Rights Campaign. This is not idle speculation: The documents had an internal IRS stamp on them. The list of names was then published on a number of liberal websites and NOM’s donors were harassed.

The IRS demanded that all members of the Coalition for Life of Iowa swear under penalty of perjury that they wouldn’t pray, picket or protest outside of Planned Parenthood. They were also asked to provide details of their prayer meetings.

Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash. — who was ordered by the D.C. Circuit Court to pay more than $1 million to John Boehner in 2008 for the sleazy maneuver of publishing an illegally taped private conversation — blamed the conservative groups themselves. “Each of your groups was highly political,” he lectured them, noting that they wouldn’t have been asked any questions if they hadn’t requested tax-exempt status.

Even a fair-minded person — not to be confused with Jim McDermott — might hear about the IRS’ harassment of groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or “liberty” in their names and think: “How do we know the IRS wasn’t equally hard on left-wing groups?”

What might be more helpful than clips of IRS staff line-dancing would be for reporters, say at Fox News, to mention a few examples of the wildly partisan left-wing groups that the IRS has certified as tax-exempt.

Among the many left-wing groups with tax-exempt status are:

– ACORN (now renamed as other organizations, but all still tax-exempt), “community organizers” who engage in profanity-laced protests at private homes, dump garbage in front of public buildings and disrupt bankers’ dinners in order to get more people on welfare in order to destroy the capitalist system and incite revolution;

– Occupy Wall Street, which — in its first month alone — was responsible for more than a dozen sexual assaults; at least half a dozen deaths by overdose, suicide or murder; and millions of dollars in property damage;

– Media Matters for America, a media “watchdog” group that has never noticed one iota of pro-Obama bias in the media;

– Moveon.org, which ran ads comparing Bush to Hitler under its 501(c)(4) arm;

– The Center for American Progress, an auxiliary of the Democratic National Committee funded by George Soros and staffed by former Clinton and Obama aides to promote the Democratic agenda;

– The Tides Foundation, which funnels money to communist and terrorist-supporting organizations;

– The Ford Foundation, which has never found a criminal law that isn’t “racist.”

These groups are regarded by the IRS as nonpartisan community groups, merely educational, while dozens of patriotic, constitutional, Christian or tea party groups are still waiting for their tax exemptions.

That’s to say nothing of Planned Parenthood, PBS and innumerable other Democratic front-groups that not only have tax exemptions, but get direct funding from the government.

By contrast, the conservative groups being raked over the coals by the IRS actually were nonpartisan. The tea party forced sitting Republican senators off the ticket in Alaska and Indiana, and toppled “establishment” Republicans in Utah, Delaware, Nevada, Florida and Texas. Far from being a secretly pro-Republican group, the tea party has been a nightmare for Republicans.

Show me one instance where the Center for American Progress was more of a problem for Democrats than Republicans.

It is obviously in the interest of the left to show us liberal groups also harassed by the IRS, so it’s striking that they haven’t been able to produce one yet.

Instead, they hearken back to the Bush years to claim that the IRS once audited the NAACP, which is treated as ipso facto political harassment.

First of all, the NAACP doesn’t exactly have a sterling record of rectitude when it comes to organization funds. In the 1990s, the NAACP used tax-exempt contributions to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars of hush money to the mistress of then-executive director Benjamin F. Chavis Jr. — as detailed in enraged columns by Carl Rowan at the time.

Find a tea party organization that’s done that, and we’ll understand the IRS conducting a three-year proctology exam on the group.

Second, the Bush-era audit of the NAACP was prompted by a blindingly partisan speech given by NAACP chairman Julian Bond at an organization meeting in Philadelphia in July 2004. Bond attacked a slew of elected Republicans by name, denouncing the entire party as one whose “idea of equal rights is the American flag and Confederate swastika flying side by side.”

That’s what we call “black-letter law” on improper activity for a tax-exempt organization. As a 501(c)(3) group, the NAACP is prohibited from supporting or opposing any candidate for elective office.

The NAACP responded to the IRS’ letter by screaming from the rooftops that it was political payback. Consequently, Bush’s IRS commissioner requested that Treasury’s inspector general investigate the IRS’ tax-exempt unit for political bias. The IG’s report found no politics in the NAACP audit and — to the contrary — that more “pro-Republican” groups (18) than “pro-Democratic” groups (12) had been audited.

Nonetheless, the NAACP simply refused to cooperate with the IRS. There was nothing the Bush administration could do. No Republican was going to allow the NAACP’s tax-exempt status to be revoked on its watch. Two years later, the IRS simply issued a letter clearing the group.

Today, the NAACP openly engages in partisan activity, such as a current weeks-long protest of Republican legislators in North Carolina.

Finally, a tip to the Democrats trying to defend the IRS: As a devoted true-crime TV viewer, I can tell you that when you’re caught red-handed, it’s never a good defense to say, “Why would I be so stupid to kill my wife right after taking out a huge life insurance policy on her?”

You were that stupid and you got caught.

BLACK REPUBLICAN ALLEN WEST; MISSISSIPPI BLACK STUDENTS

Rep. Allen West: That's Racist! NAACP: No, It's Not

By Gregory J. Krieg | ABC OTUS News – Fri, Aug 10, 2012

(The Democrats had place an ad on television showing Black Republican Congressman Allen West beating up white women.  West countered saying the add was racist, playing to old stereotypes of Black men and white women.  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the largest non-religious mainly Black organization in the US proclaimed the add was not racist.)

My comment:

Hugh Murray  •  Delafield, Wisconsin  •  1 day 2 hrs ago

The NAACP has been a Democratic Party front group ever since 1948 when it fired one of its founders, W. E. B. Du Bois - (the main Black founder of the organization) when he refused to endorse Democrat Harry Truman and instead openly supported Henry Wallace on the Progressive Party ticket. After winning re-election, Democrat Truman's Justice Department had the 80-year-old Du Bois arrested.
The reaction by the NAACP to the ad attacking a Black Republican is what one can expect from a Democratic Party front group.

Feds: Authorities in Meridian, Miss. Violated Rights of Black Children

By Jason Ryan | ABC OTUS News – Fri, Aug 10, 2012

(The US Dept. of Justice files suit against Meridian Mississippi alleging that anti-crime measures were anti-Black racist.)

My comment:

Hugh Murray  •  Delafield, Wisconsin  •  1 day 2 hrs ago Remove

The Department of Justice under Obama is filled with Black racist officials. When in Philadelphia (site of many Black racist flash mobs), a public school, about 80% Black with Black school officials and Black security guards, was home of constant bullying and beating of Asian students. After years of school sponsored Black racist attacks, Obama-Holder's Dept. of Justice investigated, found nothing wrong, and suggested Asians learn to respect Blacks more! The Obama-Holder DoJ has sued schools for suspending Blacks out of proportion to their numbers in the student body (not asking if Black students are more disruptive and violent above their percentage of the student body). And the Obama-Holder DoJ dismissed the voter intimidation lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party.
I do not know anything about the policies of Meridian, but I know about the Black racist policies of the Obama-Holder Justice Department. President Obama is the most racist President to hold office since Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Obama is a Black racist, and his policies prove it.