This Week in People’s History, Oct 23–29
Wrist-Slaps for Racist Terrorists (1964)
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, is the 60th anniversary of a shocking legal decision in McComb, Mississippi (in 1964), that infuriated the African-American community and civil rights activists while giving comfort to the supporters of white supremacist terrorism.
McComb was one of the many Mississippi towns where staff and volunteers for Mississippi Freedom Summer – a project was organized by the Council of Federated Organizations, which was a coalition of the Mississippi branches of Congress of Racial Equality, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee – were working.
For more than three months McComb had been at the center of an intense struggle between the education and voter-registration efforts of Mississippi Freedom Summer organizers and the supporters and McComb's white power structure, which included a mayor who was the Pike County chair of the White Citizens' Council and a police chief who led the local branch of Americans for the Preservation of the White Race.
Over the summer, scores of civil rights volunteers had been arrested in McComb on trumped-up charges including felonious criminal syndicalism; there had been at least 17 bombings of the homes, churches and businesses of African-Americans; four Black churches had been destroyed by arson; white thugs had beaten African-Americans with total impunity. Some long-time McComb residents, both Black and white, who supported the Freedom Summer volunteers were harassed and threatened to the point that they had to move away.
After the federal government authorized a belated investigation of unchecked racist violence in McComb as possible civil rights violations, FBI investigators had quickly discovered an arms cache containing 15 fully fabricated bombs and several thousand rounds of .30-caliber ammunition. They also arrested nine white men who were linked to the arsenal.
The nine men all faced bombing charges that could be punished by death, but on Oct. 23, 1964, a local circuit court judge accepted a guilty- or no-contest plea from each defendant and sentenced each to probation, with no jail time, and a fine of $500 or less.
During sentencing, the judge told defendants, "What you have done has been, to some extent at least, provoked by outside influences. Their [civil rights workers] presence here was unnerving and unwanted . . . some of them are people of low morality and unhygenic." https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/08/freedom-summer-the-violence-committed-against-volunteers-in-1964-in-mccomb-mississippi.html
Stop Global Warming!
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24, is the 15th anniversary of the first International Day of Climate Action, organized in 2009 by 350.org. The day's more than five thousand coordinated actions in 181 countries included marches, rallies, teach-ins, bike rides, and tree plantings. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/international-climate-day-of-action/
An ‘October Surprise’ for the Ages
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25, is the 100th anniversary of a sensationally effective October electoral Surprise (in 1924) – which was totally effective even though it was later shown to be a forgery – but not until 75 years after the damage had been done.
On this day, just four days before a British general election, the right-wing Daily Mail published what it described as a letter to the leadership of the Communist Party of Great Britain from the head of the Communist International in Moscow.
A day later the so-called “Zinoviev letter” was front-page news in every British daily, and in many newspapers around the world.
The letter, “signed” by Grigori Zinoviev, president of the Communist International, called on British communists to "stir up the masses of the British proletariat [and] unemployed proletarians [of whom there were enormous numbers at the time, and] bring pressure to bear . . . in favour of the ratification of the Treaty."
The crucial Treaty, as almost everyone in Britain would have known, was an unprecedented but not-yet-ratified trade deal between the UK and the Soviet Union, which would have included a large UK loan to the Soviet Union. Such a loan would have brought an end to an international trade embargo that had literally starved the Soviets ever since the Russian Revolution seven years earlier.
Not only was Zinoviev supposedly telling British communists to help seal the trade deal, he urged them to improve their "agitation-propaganda work in the army [and] the navy . . . it would be desirable to have ‘cells’ in all the units of the troops, particularly among those quartered in the large centres of the country, and also among factories working on munitions and at military store depots. . . . with the aid of the latter and in contact with the transport workers, it is possible to paralyse all the military preparations of the bourgeoisie.”
If the letter had been real, it would have represented “Russian interference” of the highest order. Its publication had the desired effect of persuading the voters to bring an end to the UK’s first Labour government, and thereby bury the proposed trade deal. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2000/jun/23/uk.media
Nothing New About ‘Lock ‘em Up!’
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27, is the 30th anniversary of the 1994 announcement by the U.S. Justice Department that the prison population topped one million for the first time in U.S. history.
The figure — 1,250,000 people in state and federal prisons — did not even include local prisons, where an estimated 547,000 prisoners were held. Mass incarceration in the U.S. has more than doubled since then. Please follow this link for much more detail from the Zinn Education Project, including a brief introduction to the “Justice In America” podcast: https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/prison-population/
Integrated Schools – ‘Just Around the Corner’
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 29, is the 55th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1969 decision finally putting some teeth behind the court’s 1954 decision that supposedly banned racially segregated public schools.
The 1954 decision might have outlawed “separate-but-equal” schools, but it lacked the essential element of an enforcement deadline. Rather, the court ruled that schools must be desegregated “with all deliberate speed,” leaving what that meant up to the same officials who believed that segregated schools were the only “deliberate” solution to education in a racist society. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/supreme-court-rules-desegregate-at-once/
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