Portside

The Bill of Rights’ Birthday

235 YEARS AGO, after nine weeks of debate, on Sept. 25, 1789, the U.S. Congress approved 12 Constitutional Amendments and forwarded them to the states for ratification. The required number of states ratified ten (not 12) of them, thereby adding what is known as the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. 

If you’re interested in learning more about the Bill of Rights, take this very informative 10-question quiz, courtesy of the New York Public Library: https://live-legacy-admin.nypl.org/blog/2017/12/15/quiz-how-well-do-you-know-your-rights

For extra credit, identify the speaker in the photo above. The answer is at the very bottom of this page. 

Nixon’s Phony Brave Face

55 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 26, 1969, three weeks before what would be the largest-ever anti-war protests in the U.S., including 250,000 demonstrators in Washington, D.C., streets. President Nixon was asked at a White House press conference, “what is your view concerning the demonstrations being planned for this fall against the Vietnam War?” He replied, with a scowl, “under no circumstances will I be affected by it.” 

He was lying; at the time he spoke, Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Nixon’s entire cabinet were desperately trying to stem the rising tide of anti-war sentiment, the same opposition to the war that had torpedoed the reelection chances of the previous president, Lyndon Johnson. https://wagingnonviolence.org/2019/11/anti-vietnam-war-moratorium-mobilization-nixon/

Resist Illegitimate Authority!

57 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 27, 1967, a watershed moment in the movement to stop the U.S. war against Vietnam occurred when a 9-point manifesto, A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority, with hundreds of signatures. 

It declared “the war is unconstitutional and illegal. Congress has not declared a war as required by the Constitution.” Additionally, “this war violates international agreements, treaties and principles of law which the United States Government has solemnly endorsed.” Click here to see the call’s full text: https://web.viu.ca/davies/H323Vietnam/Call.ResistAuthority.1967.htm

“Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!”

160 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 28, 1864, a large and highly disparate group of radical workers and intellectuals – including Owenites and Chartists from England, Proudhonists and Blanquists from France, nationalists from Ireland and Poland, Italian Mazzinists, and German Socialists – packed into London’s St. Martin’s Hall where they established the International Workingmen's Association, which was later known as the First International. 

It was the first organization of its kind. Almost certainly the best-remembered of the organizing group was 46-year-old Karl Marx, who had been living in London exile for 15 years. After the founding meeting, Marx was selected as a member of a committee that drafted the organization’s program and constitution. Marx remained a dominant figure in the First International until it ceased to exist in 1876. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/iwma/index.htm

Free Speech is Worth Fighting For

115 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 29, 1909, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizers in Missoula, Montana, unveiled a brand-new civil disobedience tactic that was so effective that it quickly became a trademark of IWW organizing campaigns. 

The tactic, which was to pick a free-speech fight with the police, worked like this: a single IWW organizer would stand in a public space and start to give a speech denouncing the bosses or the police or the capitalist system or any contemporary issue. IWW organizers, who were known as Wobblies, were good speakers, so a small crowd would gather to listen. Before long, a police officer would order the speaker to be quiet, either because a permit was required, or just because the cop didn’t like what he or she was saying.  

When the speaker continued anyway, the cop would arrest the speaker (for disorderly conduct or breaking a law against public speaking) and take him or her to the police station. Immediately another Wobbly would take the speaker’s place and continue the anti-capitalist harangue. When speaker number two was arrested and taken away, speaker number three would continue the speech and soon be arrested. And so it would continue, as speaker after speaker was arrested and immediately replaced.  

Free-speech fights were effective because passers-by wanted to listen to people who got arrested for doing nothing more than speaking, especially when one of the subjects of their speeches was freedom of speech. Not only that, but the Wobblies had enough members to fill every available jail cell. In Missoula, where the tactic was invented, the city government called it quits after two weeks, dismissing all the charges and calling a halt to more arrests. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_speech_fights

Racist Violence at Its Worst

105 YEARS AGO, on Sept. 30, 1919, one of the bloodiest U.S. racist massacres of the 20th or 21st centuries began near the Arkansas Delta town of Elaine, about 80 miles southeast of Little Rock. Over the course of three days, a very large number of Black farmers and members of their families were murdered, and untold others were forced to flee the region with nothing but the clothes on their backs, never to return. The number of dead – 100 at the least and perhaps as many as 800 – is unknown, because the only eyewitnesses who could talk about the events without forfeiting their lives were the white perpetrators of the crimes, who had no interest in acknowledging the enormity of what they had done.

Even though almost all of the victims were unarmed and defenseless, not a single one of the many white killers was ever arrested or charged with a crime. Even worse, more than 100 Black men were charged with having killed five white men during the shooting, and 12 of those charged were sentenced to death. 

The deadly violence was inflicted on the farmers, who were all sharecroppers, because they dared to stand up for their rights by joining the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. They needed to organize, because, as sharecroppers, they were continually victimized and exploited by the whites who owned the land they farmed.  

The shooting started when three white lawmen attempted to force their way into a church where some 200 farmers were holding a union meeting. The farmers, fearing such an intervention, had posted armed guards outside the church, who exchanged fire with the lawmen, killing one of them. In response to the gunfire, hundreds of white men from the region “began to hunt Negroes.” Visit https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/elaine-massacre/ for access to several more detailed accounts of the Elaine Massacre.

When Students Fight, They Win

60 YEARS AGO, on Oct. 1, 1964, the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley burst forth onto the scene in an epic confrontation. On one side were police attempting to enforce the University’s rules against on-campus political activity; on the other side were thousands of fire-up students, who were determined to force the administration to stop interfering with the students’ exercise of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. After months of struggle, the students achieved most of their objectives and learned many valuable political lessons in the process. https://jacobin.com/2020/09/berkeley-free-speech-movement-hal-draper

Answer to the extra-credit question about the photo at the top of this page. The speaker is William L. Patterson, who was New York’s most well-known radical lawyer and the executive secretary of the Civil Rights Congress in 1949 when the photo was taken.   

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