Portside

JFK’s Profile in Cowardice (1961)

MAY 20 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY of what is known as one of President John F. Kennedy’s profiles in cowardice. 

One day after mobs of Ku Klux Klan thugs and other racists shocked the world by viciously attacking Freedom Riders in three Alabama cities – Birmingham, Montgomery and Anniston – Kennedy issued this statement: “I would . . . hope that any persons, whether a citizen of Alabama or a visitor there, would refrain from any action which would in any way tend to provoke further outbreaks.” 

In other words, it’s okay to legally defy Jim Crow, but don’t do so in a way the Klan doesn’t like. 

By equating the blatantly criminal actions of Alabama racists with the Freedom Riders’ non-violent, constitutionally protected protest, Kennedy earned well-deserved contempt from civil rights advocates. 

Freedom Ride leader James Farmer said “We’ve been cooling off for 350 years!” and Martin Luther King agreed, telling a mass meeting in Montgomery "We've gone too far to turn back. Let us be calm, we are together, we are not afraid, and we shall overcome."

The courageous Freedom Riders ignored Kennedy’s bad advice and continued to risk their lives until they succeeded in kicking Jim Crow off the bus, no thanks to the President of the United States.  http://todayinclh.com/?event=president-kennedy-fails-to-support-freedom-rides

Marvin Gaye’s Greatest Hit (1971)

MAY 21 IS THE 55TH ANNIVERSARY of Motown Records’ release of Marvin Gaye’s album What's Going On, which Rolling Stone magazine rates as the greatest album of all time, a characterization that is widely shared.

Gaye’s eloquent and melodious outrage against the war against Vietnam (What’s Happening Brother), urban poverty and police violence (Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)), and the desecration of the natural world (Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) all ring as true today as they did more than half a century ago. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct2fzw 

George Washington, Frustrated Enslaver (1796)

MAY 23 IS THE 230TH ANNIVERSARY of President Washington taking out a newspaper ad offering a $10 reward to anyone who would apprehend and return to him a 20-year-old enslaved woman who had emancipated herself from Washington’s household in Philadelphia (which was the location of the U.S.capital then).

Washington made many attempts to reenslave Ona Judge, but he never succeeded. She escaped to New Hampshire, where she lived for more that 50 years as a free woman, even though she was always in danger of being arrested and forced back into slavery. For more information about the self-emancipated Ona Judge and her frustrated enslaver, visit https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/may/23

Can’t Repeal an Anti-Racist Law? Then Try to Just Forget About It. (1951) 

MAY 24 IS THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY of a landmark legal victory over Jim Crow that never should have been necessary.

In the early 1950s Washington, D.C., was a city that might as well have been in the deep south as far as segregation was concerned. Only a small minority of restaurants served both Black and White customers, and Washington activists were trying to change that.

After lawyers associated with the progressive National Lawyers Guild discovered that Washington had a Reconstruction Era law, passed in 1873, that required that restaurants serve “any well-behaved and respectable person,” the Washington Coordinating Committee decided to test it. 

When multiracial group of activists asked to be seated in Thompson’s Restaurant and were refused service, they left, but later they insisted that the city government prosecute the restaurant for violating the law. The prosecution took place, but the trial judge ruled that the law could not be enforced because it had “been repealed by implication.”

Fortunately, on May 24, 1951, the D.C. Municipal Court of Appeals ruled that laws could not be repealed by implication. That was not the end of the case, which was eventually ended by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled by a vote of 8-0 that D.C. restaurants were, indeed, required to serve “any well-behaved and respectable person.” https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-one-woman-helped-end-lunch-counter-segregation-nations-capital-180959345/

Blacklist Victim Lives to Laugh at Witchhunters (1956)

MAY 26 IS THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY of the long-delayed abandonment of an anti-communist witchhunt’s case against M.I.T. mathematics professor Dirk Struik.

Struik was a world-renowned mathematician and expert on the history of mathematics.  Among other accomplishments, he was a founder of the Marxist scholarly journal Science & Society. 

After teaching mathematics at M.I.T. for 25 years, he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. When the committee demanded to know whether Struik had ever been a member of the Communist Party, Struik refused to answer, citing his Fifth Amendment right to avoid possible self-incrimination.

Six weeks later, a Boston grand jury indicted Struik on the charge of violating a Massachusetts law against “conspiracy to overthrow the governments of the United States and Massachusetts, and for advocating the overthrow by violence of the government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,”  

Struik pleaded not guilty and was released on bail. Later that day, M.I.T. suspended Struik from his professorship. At the same time M.I.T. agreed to keep him on the payroll because there was no known evidence he had ever done anything other than asserting his constitutional right against possible self-incrimination.

For more than four years the state of Massachusetts neglected to put Struik on trial. Then in an unrelated case, in 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a Pennsylvania law against sedition was invalid, because it criminalized exactly the same conduct that would violate the federal McCarran Act.

The Massachusetts Supreme Court took note and ruled the Massachusetts law was invalid for the same reason. When the 54-month-old indictment of Struik was dismissed, Struik said it was "good news for the forces of sanity in this country." 

M.I.T. quickly restored Struik to his post, but he taught for only three years before he turned 65, which was M.I.T.’s mandatory retirement age. 

Before he died 41 years later at age 106, Struik said, “Mathematicians grow very old; it is a healthy profession. The reason you live long is that you have pleasant thoughts.” https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/29/1053203/how-an-mit-marxist-weathered-the-red-scare/

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