This Week in People’s History, July 17–23
How Jazz Came to Rhode Island in 1954
70 YEARS AGO, on July 17, 1954, the very first Newport Jazz Festival opened its doors (regular readers of This Week in People’s History will be forgiven for thinking: “Didn’t I read this last week?” No, last week was the 65th anniversary of the first Newport Folk Festival.) The first Newport Jazz Festival was a huge success, standing-room-only from start to finish with headliners like Ella Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Gene Krupa, Gerry Mulligan, Oscar Peterson and George Shearing. Visit https://postgenre.org/newport-jazz-history/ for many photos and a detailed look back.
United Front Against Fascism
55 YEARS AGO, on July 18, 1969, a 3-day United Front Against Fascism conference in Oakland, California – sponsored by the Black Panther Party and attended by some four thousand people – held its first session at Oakland Auditorium. The event was attended by representatives of a multiplicity of radical and progressive organizations, including the Communist Party USA, International Liberation School, Medical Committee for Human Rights, National Lawyers Guild, Peace and Freedom Party, Progressive Labor Party, Socialist Workers Party, Southern Conference Educational Fund, Students for a Democratic Society, Third World Liberation Front, United Farm Workers, Young Lords, Young Patriots, and Young Socialist Alliance. After devoting three days to listening to speeches from Panther leaders and others and attending workshops about organizing and outreach, the conference resolved to establish a national network of some 15 somewhat confusingly named National Committees to Combat Fascism.
Self-Defense to the Rescue
105 YEARS AGO, on July 19, 1919, a mob of young white men, many of them wearing military uniforms, attacked a group of African-Americans in the vicinity of Washington, D.C.’s majority-Black U Street neighborhood, The attack was similar to scores of similar melees in U.S. cities that summer, but it was unusual in that the African-American community took up arms and erected street barricades, resulting in a stand-off with the attacking whites. Once the successful defense of the Black community had been established, the city police and federal government, which had for days refused to intervene, went into action. Some two thousand federal troops separated the warring sides, and an uneasy peace was restored. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/red-summer-dc/
Teamster Pickets Killed by Minneapolis Police
90 YEARS AGO, July 20, 1934, is remembered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as “Bloody Friday.” In the midst of a Teamster strike that began on May 16, police opened fire on an unarmed group of picketers, killing two and wounding 67. Four days later a huge throng of mourners, estimated to have been as many as 100,000, lined the funeral procession’s route.
After the funerals, an official commission was appointed to investigate the deadly violence. According to the commission’s report, "Police took direct aim at the pickets and fired to kill. Physical safety of the police was at no time endangered. No weapons were in possession of the pickets."
The strike was settled a month later, on terms that provided the union with most of what it had demanded. https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2008/07/remembering-truckers-s…
Vietnam’s Disastrous 1954 Partition
70 YEARS AGO, on July 21, 1954, negotiators in Geneva, Switzerland, solemnly agreed to observe a 2-year cease fire in the Vietnamese population’s war to end foreign domination of their country. According to the agreement’s terms, the country would be divided into two administrative regions for two years. During that time, France would remove all of its troops. Then, on July 20, 1956, the entire population would vote in an election to choose a government for the whole country.
The planned election never took place, because the U.S.-supported government in the southern administrative region refused to allow it. The reason for not allowing the election in the south was the virtual certainty that "had elections been held, possibly 80 percent of the populace would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh," according to the 1963 memoir of Dwight Eisenhower, who had been U.S. president in 1956. https://portside.org/2013-01-22/vietnam-unfinished-debt
Whitewash as Public Service
20 YEARS AGO, on July 22, 2004, almost three years after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, released its final report. If the report had found the White House, the CIA, the FBI, Defense Department and Federal Aviation Administration egregiously at fault for failing to detect and prevent the success of the plot to carry out the world’s largest-ever terrorist attack, it might have doomed the re-election chances of George W. Bush, so the White House and other executive branch agencies spared no effort to prevent the commission from making such a finding.
Even though some of the commissioners and their staff members were aware they were being subjected to unbelievable testimony from the Defense Department and the Federal Aviation Administration, they lacked the ability to compel those agencies’ truthful testimony about what they were covering up and why.
Similarly, the commission and its staff were unable to overcome White House, CIA and FBI stonewalling that prevented the commission from understanding both the strong indications about an imminent attack and the incompetence of the feeble efforts to deal with them. The result was, in the words of Harper’s Magazine, "Whitewash as Public Service: How The 9/11 Commission Report defrauds the nation" https://web.archive.org/web/20080704140008/http://harpers.org/Whitewash…
The Civil War Before the Civil War
165 YEARS AGO, on July 23, 1859, a group of 10 militant, armed abolitionists crossed a short distance from Kansas into Missouri, where they successfully broke abolitionist John Doy out of the St. Joseph, Missouri, jail. Doy was serving a 5-year sentence for having abducted 13 enslaved people and attempted to transport them far enough north so they could be emancipated.
After Doy had been caught in the act, tried and found guilty, 10 of his fellow abolitionists in Kansas developed a plan to break him out. Three of them went to the jailhouse posing as two heavily armed bounty-hunters with a prisoner; once inside the jail, the three were able to overpower the jailors long enough for the other seven to join them and carry Doy across the Missouri River to freedom. The men who arranged for Doy’s successful escape came to be known as The Immortal Ten.
Doy, knowing that as a fugitive he was not safe anywhere in the vicinity of the south, relocated to Rochester, New York, where he published a widely-circulated account of his experience, The narrative of John Doy, of Lawrence, Kansas. You can watch a short documentary about the rescue of John Doy here: https://youtu.be/1-4T2xh61s0?si=cG3j1kHouW4ybBOs
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