The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

June 07, 2008

Harriet Johnson, 50, Activist for Disabled, Is Dead

June 7, 2008
Harriet Johnson, 50, Activist for Disabled, Is Dead
By DENNIS HEVESI
New York Times

Harriet McBryde Johnson, a feisty champion of the rights of the disabled who came to prominence after she challenged a Princeton professor’s contention that severely disabled newborns could ethically be euthanized, died on Wednesday at her home in Charleston, S.C. She was 50.

No cause has been determined, her sister, Beth Johnson, said, while pointing out that her sister had been born with a degenerative neuromuscular disease. “She never wanted to know exactly what the diagnosis was,” Beth Johnson said.

The condition did not stop Harriet Johnson from earning a law degree, representing the disabled in court, lobbying legislators and writing books and articles that argued, as she did in The New York Times Magazine in February 2003, “The presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life.”

Using a battery-powered wheelchair in which she loved to “zoom around” the streets of Charleston, Ms. Johnson playfully referred to herself as “a bedpan crip” and “a jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin.”

Rolling into an auditorium at the College of Charleston on April 22, 2001, Ms. Johnson went to the microphone during a question-and-answer session to confront Peter Singer, a philosopher from Princeton, who was giving a lecture titled “Rethinking Life and Death.”

Professor Singer had drawn protests by insisting that suffering should be relieved without regard to species. That, he said, allows parents and doctors to kill newborns with drastic disabilities, like the absence of higher brain function or an incompletely formed spine, instead of letting “nature take its course.”

In Professor Singer’s view, infants, like other animals, are neither rational nor self-conscious.

“Since their species is not relevant to their moral status,” he said, “the principles that govern the wrongness of killing nonhuman animals who are sentient but not rational or self-conscious must apply here, too.”

Ms. Johnson had been sent to the lecture by Not Dead Yet, a national disability-rights organization. Describing the event in The Times, she wrote: “To Singer, it’s pretty simple: disability makes a person ‘worse off.’ Are we ‘worse off’? I don’t think so.”

She added: “We take constraints that no one would choose and build rich and satisfying lives within them. We enjoy pleasures other people enjoy, and pleasures peculiarly our own.”

An e-mail exchange followed that encounter in Charleston, leading to an invitation to debate Professor Singer at Princeton on March 25, 2002. Their two encounters were the subject of the 8,000-word Times article, which brought Ms. Johnson considerable attention in the disability rights movement and from the general public.

“Her impact came mostly from her writing,” said Laura Hershey, a disability rights activist with several organizations, including Not Dead Yet. “Millions of people by now have read that article, and it was reprinted in her book. Dozens of people who read the article told me, ‘Wow, I never thought about it that way.’ ”

Ms. Johnson’s memoir, “Too Late to Die Young,” was published in 2005. Her novel, “Accidents of Nature,” about a girl with cerebral palsy who had never known another disabled person until she went to camp, was published in 2006.

Born in Laurinburg, N.C., on July 8, 1957, Ms. Johnson was one of five children of David and Ada Johnson. Her parents taught foreign languages at colleges. Besides her parents and her sister, Ms. Johnson is survived by three brothers, Eric, McBryde and Ross.

The fact that her parents could afford hired help was a salient point in another Times Magazine article Ms. Johnson wrote in November 2003, “The Disability Gulag.” Describing institutions where “wheelchair people are lined up, obviously stuck where they’re placed” while “a TV blares, watched by no one,” she called for a major shift from institutionalizing people to publicly financing home care provided by family, friends or neighbors.

“I sometimes dare to dream that the gulag will be gone in a generation or two,” she wrote. “But meanwhile, the lost languish in the gulag.”

Early on, Ms. Johnson was a troublemaker. At 14, at a school for the disabled, her sister said, “Harriet tried to get an abusive teacher fired; the start of her hell raising.” In her memoir, Ms. Johnson describes how, after watching a Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon while in her teens, she turned against “the charity mentality” and “pity-based tactics.”

Ms. Johnson graduated from Charleston Southern University in 1978, then earned a master’s degree in public administration from the College of Charleston. She graduated from the University of South Carolina School of Law in 1985 and soon went into private practice.

Humor laced her writing. The “crippled children’s school” she attended as a teenager, she wrote in a Times Op-Ed article in December 2006, once considered staging a play based on Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol.” But who would be Tiny Tim?

Ms. Johnson quoted directly from the Dickens book: “Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame!”

“Alas!” Ms. Johnson exclaimed. “A little crutch! An iron frame! In our world, the crutch-and-brace kids were the athletic elite. They picked up the stuff we hard-core crips dropped.”

Posted by lois at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)

June 04, 2008

William P. Ford, 72, Rights Advocate, Dies

June 3, 2008
William P. Ford, 72, Rights Advocate, Dies
By DENNIS HEVESI

William P. Ford, a former Wall Street lawyer who spent more than two decades seeking to bring high-ranking military officials to justice after his sister and three other American churchwomen were murdered in El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s, died on Sunday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 72.

The cause was esophageal cancer, his son William Ford III said.

Mr. Ford’s efforts eventually led to a $54.6 million liability ruling against two former Salvadoran generals in a 2002 civil trial in Florida, where the generals were living after being granted residence by the United States.

Although the ruling was not directly connected to the murders of Mr. Ford’s sister and the other women, it resulted largely from his long and tenacious campaign. The federal court jury found José Guillermo García, El Salvador’s former defense minister, and Carlos Eugenio Vides Casanova, its former National Guard commander, liable for lasting injuries suffered by three Salvadoran immigrants to the United States who were tortured under the generals’ command.

“We pursued the case, with Bill in the lead,” Michael Posner, president of Human Rights First, said on Monday. “In an extraordinary way, he went beyond simply grieving the loss of his sister; he became a leading advocate for justice in El Salvador.”

Mr. Ford had been an influential figure in the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, which in 2004 became Human Rights First.

On the night of Dec. 2, 1980, shortly after the start of El Salvador’s civil war, Mr. Ford’s sister, Ita , a Maryknoll sister; another member of the same order, Maura Clarke; the Ursuline sister Dorothy Kazel; and a lay missionary, Jean Donovan, were abducted, raped and shot to death. The next day, peasants discovered their bodies beside an isolated road and buried them in a common grave. The van they had been driving when they were stopped at a military checkpoint turned up 20 miles away, burned and gutted.

The killings came as the United States was beginning a decade-long, $7 billion aid effort to prevent left-wing guerrillas from coming to power in El Salvador, and the case quickly became the focus of a bitter policy debate about Central America.

“This particular act of barbarism,” a 1993 State Department report said, “did more to inflame the debate over El Salvador in the United States than any other single incident.”

In 1984, four national guardsmen were convicted of murder in El Salvador and were sentenced to 30 years in prison. After 17 years of silence, the guardsmen said they had acted after receiving “orders from above.” Their admissions were made to a delegation from the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, including Mr. Ford.

For years, Mr. Ford lobbied politicians and made speeches, charging that the Salvadoran government had failed to conduct even a rudimentary investigation into the murders. In 1981, he pressed his case with the American ambassador to El Salvador, Dean Hinton, and the Salvadoran president, José Napoleón Duarte.

Mr. Ford also criticized the Reagan administration. The government, he said, “is so obsessed with the East-West confrontation that they are willing to tolerate the murder of American citizens in El Salvador.” The Salvadoran junta had killed more than 30,000 people, he said.

It was an unusual stance for a lawyer who had been on the staff of the New York law firm where Richard M. Nixon and John Mitchell had worked before Mr. Nixon became president and Mr. Mitchell became the attorney general. A year after his sister’s murder, Mr. Ford said he had been “radicalized” by American support for a government “which is no more than a group of gangsters in uniform.”

William Patrick Ford was born in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, on April 28, 1936, the son of William and Mildred O’Beirne Ford. Besides his son William, Mr. Ford is survived by his wife of 47 years, the former Mary Anne Heyman; another son, John; four daughters, Miriam Ford, Ruth Ford, Elizabeth Ford and Rebecca Ford; a sister, Irene Coriaty; and eight grandchildren.

Mr. Ford graduated from Fordham University in 1960 and earned his law degree at St. John’s University in 1966. He was a law clerk to a federal judge and later a founding partner of the law firm Ford Marrin Esposito Witmeyer & Gleser.

Litigating securities and product-liability cases took a back seat for Mr. Ford after that day in 1980. Of the American government, he said a year later, “You can’t take seriously the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty if at the same time you are sending arms, ammunition, trucks and police equipment to a junta which is murdering its own citizens.”

Posted by lois at 06:48 PM | Comments (0)

Bo Diddley, Who Gave Rock His Beat, Dies at 79

June 3, 2008
Bo Diddley, Who Gave Rock His Beat, Dies at 79
By BEN RATLIFF
NY Times

Bo Diddley, a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his own guitars, his own beat and, with a handful of other musical pioneers, rock ’n’ roll itself, died Monday at his home in Archer, Fla. He was 79.

The cause was heart failure, a spokeswoman, Susan Clary, said. Mr. Diddley had a heart attack last August, only months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa.

In the 1950s, as a founder of rock ’n’ roll, Mr. Diddley — along with Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and a few others — helped to reshape the sound of popular music worldwide, building on the templates of blues, Southern gospel, R&B and postwar black American vernacular culture.

His original style of rhythm and blues influenced generations of musicians. And his Bo Diddley syncopated beat — three strokes/rest/two strokes — became a stock rhythm of rock ’n’ roll.

It can be found in Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive,” the Who’s “Magic Bus,” Bruce Springsteen’s “She’s the One” and U2’s “Desire,” among hundreds of other songs.

Yet the rhythm was only one element of his best records. In songs like “Bo Diddley,” “Who Do You Love,” “Mona,” “Crackin’ Up,” “Say, Man,” “Ride On Josephine” and “Road Runner,” his booming voice was loaded up with echo and his guitar work came with distortion and a novel bubbling tremolo. The songs were knowing, wisecracking and full of slang, mother wit and sexual cockiness. They were both playful and radical.

So were his live performances: trancelike ruckuses instigated by a large man with a strange-looking guitar. It was square and he designed it himself, long before custom guitar shapes became commonplace in rock.

Mr. Diddley was a wild performer: jumping, lurching, balancing on his toes and shaking his knees as he wrestled with his instrument, sometimes playing it above his head. Elvis Presley, it has long been supposed, borrowed from Mr. Diddley’s stage moves; Jimi Hendrix, too.

Still, for all his fame, Mr. Diddley felt that his standing as a father of rock ’n’ roll was never properly acknowledged. It frustrated him that he could never earn royalties from the songs of others who had borrowed his beat.

“I opened the door for a lot of people, and they just ran through and left me holding the knob,” he told The New York Times in 2003.

He was a hero to those who had learned from him, including the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. A generation later, he became a model of originality to punk or post-punk bands like the Clash and the Fall.

In 1979 Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon of the Clash asked that Mr. Diddley open for them on the band’s first American tour. “I can’t look at him without my mouth falling open,” Mr. Strummer, star-struck, said during the tour.

For his part Mr. Diddley had no misgivings about facing a skeptical audience. “You cannot say what people are gonna like or not gonna like,” he explained later to the biographer George R. White. “You have to stick it out there and find out! If they taste it, and they like the way it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it!”

Mr. Diddley was born Otha Ellas Bates in McComb, Miss., a small city about 15 miles from the Louisiana border. He was reared primarily by Gussie McDaniel, the first cousin of his mother, Esther Wilson. After the death of her husband, Ms. McDaniel, who had three children of her own, took the family to Chicago, where young Otha’s name was changed to Ellas B. McDaniel. Gussie McDaniel became his legal guardian and sent him to school.

He was 6 when the family resettled on Chicago’s South Side. He described his youth as one of school, church, trouble with street toughs and playing the violin for both band and orchestra, under the tutelage of O. W. Frederick, a prominent music teacher at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Gussie McDaniel taught Sunday school. Ellas studied classical violin from 7 to 15 and started on guitar at 12, when a family member gave him an acoustic model.

He then enrolled at Foster Vocational School, where he built a guitar as well as a violin and an upright bass. But he dropped out before graduating. Instead, with guitar in hand, he began performing in a duo with his friend Roosevelt Jackson, who played the washtub bass. The group became a trio when they added another guitarist, Jody Williams, then a quartet when they added a harmonica player, Billy Boy Arnold.

The band, first called the Hipsters and then the Langley Avenue Jive Cats, started playing at the Maxwell Street open-air market. They were sometimes joined by another friend, Samuel Daniel, known as Sandman because of the shuffling rhythms he made with his feet on a wooden board sprinkled with sand.

Mr. Diddley could not make a living playing with the Jive Cats in the early days, so he found jobs where he could: at a grocery store, a picture-frame factory, a blacktop company. He worked as an elevator operator and a meat packer. He also started boxing, hoping to turn professional.

In 1954 Mr. Diddley made a demonstration recording with his band, which now included Jerome Green on maracas. Phil and Leonard Chess of Chess Records liked the demo, especially Mr. Diddley’s tremolo on the guitar, a sound that seemed to slosh around like water. They saw it as a promising novelty and encouraged the group to return.

By Billy Boy Arnold’s account, the next day, as the band and the men who were soon to be their producers were setting up for a rehearsal, they were idly casting about for a stage name for Ellas McDaniel when Mr. Arnold thought of Bo Diddley. The name described a “bow-legged guy, a comical-looking guy,” Mr. Arnold said, as quoted by Mr. White in his 1995 biography, “Bo Diddley: Living Legend.”

That may be all there is to tell about the name, except for the fact that a certain one-string guitar — native to the Mississippi Delta, often homemade, in which a length of wire is stretched between two nails in a board — is called a diddley bow. By his account, however, Mr. Diddley had never played one.

In any case, Otha Ellas McDaniel had a new name and the title of a new song, whose lyrics began, “Bo Diddley bought his babe a diamond ring.” “Bo Diddley” became the A side of his first single, in 1955, on the Checker label, a subsidiary of Chess. It reached No. 2 on the Billboard singles chart.

Mr. Diddley said he had first heard the “Bo Diddley beat” — three-stroke/rest/two-stroke, or bomp-ba-domp-ba-domp, ba-domp-domp — in a church in Chicago. But variations of it were in the air. The children’s game hambone used a similar rhythm, and so did the ditty that goes “shave and a haircut, two bits.”

The beat is also related to the Afro-Cuban clave, which had been popularized at the time by the New Orleans mambo carnival song “Jock-A-Mo,” recorded by Sugar Boy Crawford in 1953.

Whatever the source, Mr. Diddley felt the beat’s power. In early songs like “Bo Diddley” and “Pretty Thing,” he arranged the rhythm for tom-toms, guitar, maracas and voice, with no cymbals and no bass. (Also arranged in his signature rhythm was the eerie “Mona,” a song of praise he wrote for a 45-year-old exotic dancer who worked at the Flame Show Bar in Detroit; this song became the template for Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”)

Appearing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1955, Mr. Diddley was asked to play “Sixteen Tons,” the song popularized by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Without telling Mr. Sullivan, he played “Bo Diddley” instead. Afterward, in an off-camera confrontation, Mr. Sullivan told him that he would never work in television again. Mr. Diddley did not play again on a network show for 10 years.

For decades Mr. Diddley was bitter about his relationship with the Chess family, whom he accused of withholding money owed to him. In her book “Spinning Blues Into Gold,” Nadine Cohodas quoted Marshall Chess, Leonard’s son, as saying, “What’s missing from Bo’s version of events is all the gimmes.” Mr. Diddley would borrow so heavily against projected royalties, Mr. Chess said, that not much was left over in the final accounting.

Mr. Diddley’s watery tremolo effect, from 1955 onward, came from one of the first effects boxes to be manufactured for guitars: the DeArmond Model 60 Tremolo Control. But Mr. Diddley contended that he had already built something similar himself, with automobile parts and an alarm-clock spring.

His first trademark guitar was also handmade: he took the neck and the circuitry off a Gretsch guitar and connected it to a square body he had built. In 1958 he asked Gretsch to make him a better one to the same specifications. Gretsch made it as a limited-edition guitar called “Big B.”

On songs like “Who Do You Love,” his guitar style — bright chicken-scratch rhythm patterns on a few strings at a time — was an extension of his early violin playing, he said.

“My technique comes from bowing the violin, that fast wrist action,” he told Mr. White, explaining that his fingers were too big to move around easily. Rather than fingering the fretboard, Mr. Diddley said, he tuned the guitar to an open E and moved a single finger up and down to create chords.

As his fame rose, his personal life grew complicated. His first marriage, at 18, to Louise Woolingham, lasted less than a year. His second marriage, in 1949, to Ethel Smith, unraveled in the late 1950s. He then moved from Chicago to Washington, settling in the Mount Pleasant district, where he built a studio in his home.

Separated from his wife, he was performing in Birmingham, Ala., when, backstage, he met a young door-to-door magazine saleswoman named Kay Reynolds, a fan, who was 15 and white. They moved in together in short order and were soon married, in spite of Southern taboos against intermarriage.

During the late 1950s Mr. Diddley’s band featured a female guitarist, Peggy Jones (stage-named Lady Bo), at a time when there were scarcely any women in rock. She was replaced by Norma-Jean Wofford, whom Mr. Diddley called the Duchess. He pretended she was his sister, he said, to be in a better position to protect her on the road.

The early 1960s were low times. Chess, searching for a hit, had Mr. Diddley make albums to capitalize on the twist dance craze, as Chubby Checker had done, and on the surf music of the Beach Boys. But soon a foreign market for his earlier music began to grow, thanks in large part to the Rolling Stones, a newly popular band that was regularly playing several of his songs in its concerts. It paved the way for Mr. Diddley’s successful tour of Britain in the fall of 1963, performing with the Everly Brothers, Little Richard and the Rolling Stones, the opening act.

But Mr. Diddley was not willing to move to Europe, and in America the picture worsened: the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan and the Byrds quickly made him sound quaint. When work all but dried up, Mr. Diddley moved to New Mexico in the early 1970s and became a deputy sheriff in the town of Los Lunas. With his sound updated to resemble hard rock and soul, he continued to make albums for Chess until his contract expired in 1974.

His recording career never picked up after that, despite flirtations with synthesizers, religious rock and hip-hop. But he continued apace as a performer and public figure, popping up in places both obvious, like rock ’n’ roll nostalgia revues, and not so obvious: a Nike advertisement, the film “Trading Places” with Eddie Murphy, the 1979 tour with the Clash, and inaugural balls for two presidents, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

His last recording was the 1996 album “A Man Amongst Men” (Code Blue/Atlantic), which was nominated for a Grammy. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 and in 1998 was inducted into the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame as a musician of lasting historical importance.

Since the early 1980s Mr. Diddley had lived in Archer, Fla., near Gainesville, where he owned 76 acres and a recording studio. His passions were fishing and old cars, including a 1969 purple Cadillac hearse.

The last of Mr. Diddley’s marriages was to Sylvia Paiz, in 1992; his spokeswoman, Ms. Clary, said they were no longer married. His survivors include his children, Evelyn Kelly, Ellas A. McDaniel, Tammi D. McDaniel and Terri Lynn McDaniel; a brother, the Rev. Kenneth Haynes; and 15 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.

Mr. Diddley attributed his longevity to abstinence from drugs and drinking, but in recent years he had suffered from diabetes. After a concert in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on May 13, 2007, he had a stroke and was taken to Creighton University Medical Center in Omaha. On Aug. 28 he suffered a heart attack in Gainesville and was hospitalized.

Mr. Diddley always believed that he and Chuck Berry had started rock ’n’ roll, and the fact that he couldn’t financially reap all that he had sowed made him a deeply suspicious man.

“I tell musicians, ‘Don’t trust nobody but your mama,’ ” he said in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2005. “And even then, look at her real good.”

Posted by lois at 06:45 PM | Comments (0)

April 29, 2008

Jesse Boyar---Long-time fighter for prisoners

Below is an obituary notice for Jesse Boyar, long-time fighter for prisoners and against the prison system. Jesse's son Patrick spent many many years in the Corcoran SHU but last week Jesse told me that he was relieved that Patrick, who is doing 25-life on a 3rd strike of petty theft with a prior, was transferred to Pleasant Valley State Prison and was doing much better. Jesse was active in FACTS and Extend a Hand for Justice in Bakersfield. For years, Jesse would picket outside Corcoran wearing his VFW cap and sash, greeting visitors to the prison and recruiting them to the work.
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Our Comrade, Jesse Boyar passed away today, but be sure, the brother was not on his knees!! Jesse was a fighter without any intention of laying down.

He came to L.A. for an April 16th action in front of the Governor's office less than two weeks ago with a van load of members from Bakersfield FACTS . At that time he told me that he tho't he was a goner a few days earlier but all I saw was the same feisty man who wouldn't back up from a fight. Like our brother Leon, who left us in 2006, Jesse is the promise of that better, more just society we are fighting so hard to build. I can see them now strategizing our future!!

We've lost a friend, a warrior, a role model and a father whose fight for his son Patrick will be carried on by all Striker families, all prisoner families, all who understand that people are not born to be caged. We will miss you, brother Jesse.
geri silva
FACTS Education Fund
Families to Amend California's Three Strikes

Posted by lois at 09:22 PM | Comments (0)

March 30, 2008

Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65

March 31, 2008
Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
NY Times

Dith Pran, a photojournalist for The New York Times whose gruesome ordeal in the killing fields of Cambodia was re-created in a 1984 movie that gave him an eminence he tenaciously used to press for his people’s rights, died in New Brunswick, N.J., on Sunday. He was 65 and lived in Woodbridge, N.J.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, which had spread, said his friend Sydney H. Schanberg.

Mr. Dith saw his country descend into a living hell as he scraped and scrambled to survive the barbarous revolutionary regime of the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979, when as many as two million Cambodians — a third of the population — were killed, experts estimate. Mr. Dith survived through nimbleness, guile and sheer desperation.

He had been a journalistic partner of Mr. Schanberg, a Times correspondent assigned to Southeast Asia. He translated, took notes and pictures, and helped Mr. Schanberg maneuver in a fast-changing milieu. With the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975, Mr. Schanberg was forced from the country, and Mr. Dith became a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian Communists.

Mr. Schanberg wrote about Mr. Dith in newspaper articles and in The New York Times Magazine, in a 1980 cover article titled “The Death and Life of Dith Pran.” (A book by the same title appeared in 1985.) The story became the basis of the movie “The Killing Fields.”The film, directed by Roland Joffé, portrayed Mr. Schanberg, played by Sam Waterston, arranging for Mr. Dith’s wife and children to be evacuated from Phnom Penh as danger mounted. Mr. Dith, portrayed by Dr. Haing S. Ngor (who won an Academy Award as best supporting actor), insisted on staying in Cambodia with Mr. Schanberg to keep reporting the news.

A dramatic moment, both in reality and cinematically, came when Mr. Dith saved Mr. Schanberg and other Western journalists from certain execution by talking fast and persuasively to the trigger-happy soldiers who had captured them.

But despite frantic effort, Mr. Schanberg could not keep Mr. Dith from being sent to the countryside to join millions working as virtual slaves.

Mr. Schanberg returned to the United States and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Cambodia. He accepted it on behalf of Mr. Dith as well.

For years there was no news of Mr. Dith, except for a false rumor that he had been fed to alligators. His brother had been. After more than four years of beatings, backbreaking labor and a diet of a tablespoon of rice a day, Mr. Dith, on Oct. 3, 1979, escaped over the Thai border. Mr. Schanberg flew to greet him.

Mr. Dith moved to New York and in 1980 became a photographer for The Times, where he was noted for his imaginative pictures of city scenes and news events. In one, he turned the camera on mourners rather than the coffin to snatch an evocative moment at the funeral of Rabbi Chaskel Werzberger, a rabbi murdered in 1990.

Outside The Times, Mr. Dith spoke out about the Cambodian genocide, appearing before students, senior citizens and other groups. “I’m a one-person crusade,” he said.

Dith Pran was born on Sept. 23, 1942, in Siem Reap, Cambodia, a provincial town near the ancient temples at Angkor Wat. His father was a public-works official.

Having learned French at school and taught himself English, Mr. Dith was hired as a translator for the United States Military Assistance Command. When Cambodia severed ties with the United States in 1965, he worked with a British film crew, then as a hotel receptionist.

In the early 1970s, as unrest in neighboring Vietnam spread and Cambodia slipped into civil war, the Khmer Rouge grew more formidable. Tourism ended. Mr. Dith interpreted for foreign journalists. When working for Mr. Schanberg, he taught himself to take pictures.

When the Khmer Rouge won control in 1975, Mr. Dith became part of a monstrous social experiment: the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people from the cities and the suppression of the educated classes with the goal of recreating Cambodia as an agricultural nation.

To avoid summary execution, Mr. Dith hid that he was educated or that he knew Americans. He passed himself off as a taxi driver. He even threw away his money and dressed as a peasant.

Over the next 4 ½ years, he worked in the fields and at menial jobs. For sustenance, people ate insects and rats and even the exhumed corpses of the recently executed, he said.

In November 1978, Vietnam, by then a unified Communist nation after the end of the Vietnam War, invaded Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge. Mr. Dith went home to Siem Reap, where he learned that 50 members of his family had been killed; wells were filled with skulls and bones.

The Vietnamese made him village chief. But he fled when he feared that they had learned of his American ties. His 60-mile trek to the Thai border was fraught with danger. Two companions were killed by a land mine.

He had an emotional reunion with his wife, Ser Moeun Dith, and four children in San Francisco. Though he and his wife later divorced, she was by his bedside in his last weeks, bringing him rice noodles.

Mr. Dith was either separated or divorced from his second wife, Kim DePaul, Mr. Schanberg said.

Mr. Dith is survived by his companion, Bette Parslow; his daughter, Hemkarey; his sons, Titony, Titonath and Titonel; a sister, Samproeuth; six grandchildren; and two stepgrandchildren.

Ms. DePaul now runs the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, which spreads word about the Cambodian genocide. At his death, Mr. Dith was working to establish another, still-unnamed organization to help Cambodia. In 1997, he published a book of essays by Cambodians who had witnessed the years of terror as children.

Dr. Ngor, the physician turned actor who had himself survived the killing fields, had joined with Mr. Dith in their fight for justice. He was shot to death in 1996 in Los Angeles by a teenage gang member.

“It seems like I lost one hand,” Mr. Dith said of Dr. Ngor’s death.

Mr. Dith nonetheless pushed ahead in his campaign against genocide everywhere.

“One time is too many,” he said in an interview in his last weeks, expressing hope that others would continue his work. “If they can do that for me,” he said, “my spirit will be happy.”

Posted by lois at 10:37 AM | Comments (0)

March 13, 2008

Henrietta Bell Wells, a Pioneering Debater, Dies at 96

March 12, 2008
Henrietta Bell Wells, a Pioneering Debater, Dies at 96
By DOUGLAS MARTIN, NY Times

Henrietta Bell Wells, the only woman, the only freshman and the last surviving member of the 1930 Wiley College debate team that participated in the first interracial collegiate debate in the United States, died on Feb. 27 in Baytown, Tex. She was 96.

Her friend Edward Cox confirmed the death.

The story of the team, called the Great Debaters in last year’s movie of the same name, began in 1924 at Wiley College, a small liberal arts college in Marshall, Tex., founded a half century earlier by the Methodist Episcopal Church to educate “newly freed men.”

Melvin B. Tolson arrived at the all-black school that autumn to teach English and other subjects. He also started a debate team.

Mr. Tolson, who would win wide distinction as a poet, saw argumentation as a way to cultivate mental alertness. Wiley was soon debating and defeating black colleges two and three times its size.

In 1930, Mr. Tolson decided to break new ground. He managed to schedule a debate with the University of Michigan Law School, an all-white school. Wiley won. Other debates with white schools followed, culminating with Wiley’s 1935 victory over the national champion, the University of Southern California.

Mr. Tolson’s stunningly successful debate team was portrayed in “The Great Debaters,” directed by Denzel Washington. Describing the cinematic young debaters in The Chicago Sun-Times, the critic Roger Ebert wrote, “They are black, proud, single-minded, focused, and they express all this most dramatically in their debating.”

In the fall of 1930, Henrietta Bell, who would later marry Wallace Wells, was a freshman in an English class taught by Mr. Tolson. The professor urged her to try out for the debate team, because she seemed to be able to think on her feet. She was the first woman on the team.

In an interview with The Houston Chronicle in 2007, she said the boys “didn’t seem to mind me.”

But the work was far from easy. Miss Bell attended classes during the day, had three campus jobs and practiced debating at night. The intensity of debating was reflected in Mr. Tolson’s characterization of it as “a blood sport.”

But the hard work paid off. In the interview with The Chronicle, Mrs. Wells declared, “We weren’t intimidated.”

Henrietta Pauline Bell was born on the banks of Buffalo Bayou in Houston on Jan. 11, 1912, and raised by a hard-pressed single mother from the West Indies. When riots broke out in 1917 over police treatment of black soldiers at a World War I training camp, the family’s house was searched. Mrs. Wells recalled being unable to try on clothes in segregated stores.

She did not debate in high school but was valedictorian of her class. She earned a modest scholarship from the Y.M.C.A. to go to Wiley, Episcopal Life reported.

In the spring of 1930, Miss Bell, her teammates and her chaperone arrived at the Seventh Street Theater in Chicago. It was the largest black-owned theater in town, because no large white-owned facility would admit a racially mixed audience, according to an article in The Marshall News-Messenger. Mrs. Wells remembered a standing-room-only crowd.

She wore a dark suit and had her hair cut in a boyish bob. In an interview with Jeffrey Porro, one of the screenwriters of “The Great Debaters,” she felt very small on that very big stage. “I had to use my common sense,” she said.

She remembered Mr. Tolson urging her to punch up her delivery. “You’ve got to put something in there to wake the people up,” he had said.

Mrs. Wells told The Chronicle, “It was a nondecision debate, but we felt at the time that it was a giant step toward desegregation.”

She debated for only one year, because of the need to work for money. She kept up with drama, which Mr. Tolson also coached. After graduating from college, she returned to Houston, where she met Mr. Wells and married. He was a church organist and later an Episcopal minister. She worked as a teacher and social worker.

Mrs. Wells advised Mr. Washington on the movie, using her scrapbooks as visual aids. She urged him to play Mr. Tolson, something he at first was not inclined to do. He called her “another grandma.”

Mr. Wells died in 1987. Mrs. Wells left no immediate survivors.

Her advice to today’s students was straightforward: “Learn to speak well and learn to express yourself effectively.”

She learned this lesson directly from Mr. Tolson, whom she called her crabbiest and best teacher. He was known for issuing intellectual challenges immediately upon entering the classroom.

A typical salutation: “Bell! What is a verb?”

Posted by lois at 06:18 PM | Comments (0)

March 07, 2008

Western MA: Man sentenced to Hampden County Jail for Drug Possession Hangs Himself

Westfield man hangs self in jail
Thursday, March 06, 2008
By GEORGE GRAHAM
Springfield Republican
LUDLOW - A 41-year-old Westfield man hanged himself on Tuesday at the Hampden County Correctional Center.

Kevin J. Small, of Westfield, hanged himself with a bed sheet that he had tied to the top bunk in his cell, said Richard J. McCarthy, spokesman for the Hampden County Sheriff's Department.

A corrections officer discovered Small hanging from the bunk at 5:35 p.m. and immediately cut him down, McCarthy said.

Facility medical personnel worked to revive him, but to no avail, McCarthy said.

Outside paramedics joined the effort at about 5:50 and Small was pronounced dead at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield at about 6:35 p.m., McCarthy said.

Small's death, as with all correctional facility deaths, was investigated by state police detectives, McCarthy said.

Small had been alone in his cell. Although his cell door had been unlocked, there was no evidence that anybody else had played a role in his death, McCarthy said.

The unit's on-duty officer is expected to make rounds every 30 minutes. Electronic and video information verified that he had done so.

McCarthy said Small was serving time for drug possession.

Small was screened at the start of his sentence, and there was no indication that he might be suicidal, McCarthy said.

Small was in a special unit for short-term inmates deemed to be low risk. He was serving the 14th day of a 90-day term, McCarthy said.

The unit, McCarthy said, was not crowded. It has a capacity of 77. Small had been one of 54 inmates there.

The facility has had other suicides, one in January 2006 and another in April 2003, McCarthy said. http://www.masslive.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news-13/1204791655257180.xml&coll=1

©2008 The Republican
© 2008 MassLive.com All Rights Reserved.

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February 26, 2008

Mrs. Johnnie Carr, 97, Is Dead. Civil Rights Leader

“Look back, but march forward,” Mrs. Carr urged the huge crowd of young people.

February 26, 2008
Johnnie Carr, 97, Is Dead; Was Active in Bus Boycott
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Johnnie Carr, an early civil rights activist who joined a childhood friend, Rosa Parks, in the historic Montgomery bus boycott and stayed involved in the movement up to her final days, died here on Friday. She was 97.

Her death was confirmed by a spokeswoman for Baptist Medical Center South, where she had been hospitalized after a stroke on Feb. 11.

Mrs. Carr succeeded the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1967, a post she held at her death. It was that group that led the boycott of city buses in 1955 after Mrs. Parks, a black seamstress, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to whites on a crowded bus.

A year later, the Supreme Court struck down racial segregation on public transportation.

Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, praised Mrs. Carr’s commitment to the civil rights cause. “I think ultimately, when the final history books are written,” Mr. Dees said, “she’ll be one of the few people remembered for that terrific movement.”

As the civic group’s president, Mrs. Carr helped lead several initiatives to improve race relations and conditions for blacks. She was involved in a lawsuit to desegregate Montgomery schools, with her son, Arlam Jr., then 13, the named plaintiff.

In addition to her son, Arlam, Mrs. Carr is survived by two daughters, Annie Bell Beasley and Alma Lee Smith, The Montgomery Advertiser reported.

Mrs. Carr played a prominent role in 2005 on the 50th anniversary of Mrs. Parks’s refusal to give up her bus seat, speaking to thousands of schoolchildren who marched to the Alabama Capitol.

“Look back, but march forward,” Mrs. Carr urged the huge crowd of young people.

She also traveled to memorial services in Washington, where her eulogy for Mrs. Parks was “really the most dynamic” moment, recalled Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Just days before her stroke, Mrs. Carr participated in King Day ceremonies in Montgomery, speaking after a parade. Admirers marveled at her energy and commitment into her 90s.

In recent decades, civil rights landmarks, including the site where Mrs. Parks, who died in 2005, was arrested, have become historic points of interest for tourists.

“When we first started, we weren’t thinking about history,” Mrs. Carr told The Associated Press in an interview in 2003. “We were thinking about the conditions and the discrimination.”

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February 13, 2008

poeta revolutionario raúlrsalinas.

Saludos desde Resistencia Bookstore, Casa de Red Salmon Arts,

It is with great sadness we inform all of our community supporters, comrades, familia and colegas about the passing of our elder, teacher, father, chicanindio, and poeta revolutionario raúlrsalinas.

As you may know, for the past couple of years, raúl has been struggling with his health. We understand that it's difficult for us to let him go, but since the beginning of the year his health continued to be a major challenge. Unfortunately, his body just could not take the strain and was deteriorating at a rapid pace. Even though he has left this realm and it's a great loss para nuestro pueblo, his spirit is strong and lives on in all of us.

As his family provides more information, we will share it with everyone. For now this is just a notification of the passing of our brother. We will notify you about where you can send condolences, flowers, and cards as we get more information. An altar has been created in front of the bookstore on South First St. in Austin, Texas for now. We thank everyone for their good energy and support and prayers in this time of loss and mourning.

CON RESPECTO Y EN LUCHA,
Rene Valdez
February 13, 2008

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January 17, 2008

Milton Wolff, 92, Dies; Anti-Fascist Fighter

January 17, 2008
Milton Wolff, 92, Dies; Anti-Franco Leader
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Milton Wolff, the last commander of the American volunteers who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War and the longtime commander of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, died Monday in Berkeley, Calif. He was 92.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Peter N. Carroll, chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

At first a young Communist rabble-rouser on soapboxes in New York City, Mr. Wolff was wielding a machine gun in Spain by the time he was 21. By 22, he was the ninth commander of what is commonly called the Lincoln Brigade; four of his predecessors had been killed, four wounded; none now survive, the archives confirm.

Mr. Wolff found himself holding together the remnants of North American volunteers on a counteroffensive that moved across the Ebro River to the violent Hill 666 in the Sierra Pandols. It was a last gasp by foreign troops supporting the elected leftist government of Spain against the revolt led by Gen. Francisco Franco. The Americans soon left Spain; Madrid fell in March 1939, and the war was over.

While Mr. Wolff was in Spain, he became a friend of Ernest Hemingway, who served him his first glass of Scotch; Hemingway was in Spain as a reporter and wrote fiction about the conflict as well. Later, in a pamphlet issued when sculptures of the fighters were unveiled, he called Mr. Wolff “as brave and as good a soldier as any that commanded battalions at Gettysburg.”

After the exhausted volunteers arrived in New York aboard the ocean liner Paris on Dec. 15, 1938, it was Mr. Wolff who laid a wreath outside the railing of Madison Square Park, kept out of the park for want of a permit.

Mr. Wolff never stopped defying authority. He helped lead the fight against United States support of Franco’s government and battled fiercely for civil rights and against the Vietnam War. He even offered the services of the aging veterans of the Lincoln Brigade to the North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, who declined them.

Mr. Wolff was born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn on Oct. 7, 1915. He dropped out of high school and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, a New Deal program for unemployed youths. He was dropped when he protested what he considered the poor treatment of an injured friend, Mr. Carroll said.

He found a job in the garment district and joined the Young Communist League. When a leader called for volunteers to go to Spain, Mr. Wolff raised his hand. He considered himself a pacifist and planned to serve as a medic, but switched to a machine-gun company when his Washington battalion went into action at Brunete in July 1937.

The American volunteers were not actually members of a Lincoln Brigade, though that famous term was commonly used, even among veterans. Some, like Mr. Wolff, joined the Washington Battalion, others, the Lincoln Battalion. These battalions, and two others from other countries, made up the 15th International Brigade.

After the Washington Battalion suffered crushing casualties, it was merged into the Lincoln Battalion. More than 900 of the 3,000 American volunteers in these battalions were killed. It is believed that fewer than 40 are still living.

Mr. Wolff was fighting on the Aragon front in March 1938 and became commander when an artillery hit destroyed the battalion headquarters and killed several ranking officers. Then a captain, he led soldiers through perilous retreats and wandered behind enemy lines until they managed to swim across the Ebro.

One day, Robert Capa, the legendary photographer, snapped Mr. Wolff standing next to Hemingway. The photo appeared on the cover of The Forward, and for the first time his mother knew her son was in combat. He had told her he was working in a factory to free a Spanish loyalist for hazardous duty.

Mr. Wolff always said he first met Hemingway after stealing his mistress, something he told Salon in 1999 that Hemingway did not mind. Hemingway minded more when he found out that Mr. Wolff had no idea who he was. For his part, Mr. Wolff resented Hemingway’s description of villagers loyal to the Republic as having murdered fascists in “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

Mr. Wolff is survived by his daughter, Susan Wallis of Vermont; his son, Peter, of Connecticut; four grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

Mr. Wolff said he was turned down for combat duty in World War II because of concerns about his leftist politics. He later fought successfully against the “subversive” label pinned on the Lincoln veterans for decades. He personally delivered 20 ambulances to the Nicaraguan government when the Reagan administration was supporting rebels against it.

One of his battles after the civil war was leading his veterans to urge the Brooklyn Dodgers to integrate. “The guys were all Dodgers fans,” he said. “It was a way to carry on the struggle.”

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January 06, 2008

Kinkri Devi: Fought Illegal Mining in India

January 6, 2008
Kinkri Devi Is Dead at 82; Fought Illegal Mining in India
By HARESH PANDYA

Kinkri Devi, an illiterate and impoverished woman who had waged a long and at least partly successful fight against illegal mining and quarrying in the mountainous northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, died last Sunday in Chandigarh, India. She was 82.

The cause was age-related ailments, family sources said.

Ms. Devi was born into a poor Dalit, or untouchable, family in the village of Ghaton in 1925. Her father was a subsistence farmer. That she came from a low caste made her struggle against powerful and politically connected mining interests all the more remarkable.

With no hope of an education, she began working as a servant in early childhood and, at 14, married Shamu Ram, a bonded laborer. He died of typhoid when she was just 22, and she was forced to become a sweeper.

Over the years, she watched the world around her change for the worse. Uncontrolled quarrying despoiled the fabled hills in many parts of Himachal Pradesh, harming the water supply and destroying once-rich paddy fields. Seeing the damage in her own district, she vowed to take on the mining interests.

Backed by People’s Action for People in Need, a local volunteer group, Ms. Devi filed a public interest lawsuit in the High Court of Shimla, the state capital, against 48 mine owners, accusing them of reckless limestone quarrying. The quarry owners dismissed her campaign, saying she was only trying to blackmail them.

After a long period with no response to her suit, she headed for Shimla and staged a 19-day hunger strike outside the court until it agreed to take up the issue. The strike won Ms. Devi national and international headlines. In 1987, the High Court not only ordered a stay on mining but also imposed a blanket ban on blasting in the hills.

Faced with the prospect of closing their operations, her opponents threatened to kill her, but she continued to fight. The mine owners appealed to the Supreme Court of India, which ruled against them in July 1995, adding to Ms. Devi’s renown.

The same year, still working as a sweeper, she was invited to attend the International Women’s Conference in Beijing because of the keen interest taken in her by Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the first lady.

A private organization sponsored her trip to China, where Mrs. Clinton asked her to light the lamp at the inaugural function. She spoke to thunderous applause about how the enchanting Himalayas were being degraded by illegal limestone quarrying and how it was up to ordinary people like her to save the environment.

Despite Ms. Devi’s efforts and the Supreme Court ruling, quarrying continues not only in the hills but also in the forest preserves, though with some improved regulation.

She is survived by a son and 12 grandchildren.

Ms. Devi, who could neither read nor write and learned to sign her name just a few years ago, also waged a long campaign for opening a degree-granting college in Sangrah, the village where she spent most of her life.

“It wasn’t in my destiny to study,” she said, “but I don’t want others to suffer the way I did for want of education.”

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December 16, 2007

Henrietta Yurchenco, Pioneer Folklorist, Dies at 91

December 14, 2007
Henrietta Yurchenco, Pioneer Folklorist, Dies at 91
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Henrietta Yurchenco, whose quest to save living music from the past took her from the mountains of Guatemala and southern Mexico to a New York City radio station to the Jewish community of Morocco, died Monday in Manhattan. She was 91.

The cause was lung failure, her son, Peter, said.

Like a linguist nailing down a dying language, Ms. Yurchenco, an ethnomusicologist, recorded music from long ago that faced an unclear tomorrow. In an interview, Pete Seeger said she “went to places people didn’t believe she would be able to find.”

Among her thousands of recordings are ritual songs from North, South and Central American Indians, including peyote chants, and music celebrating everything from love to agriculture, found from Eastern Europe to the Caribbean to Appalachia to Spain.

Oscar Brand, the folk singer and radio personality, citing her work with Native Americans, said, “She went out of her way to discover the soft spots, the shining things you couldn’t see in the mists back in the mountains.”

Ms. Yurchenco was also a radio producer, announcer and interviewer. Beginning in the 30s, she broadcast only folk music, both traditional and modern, at a time when few knew it.

Woody Guthrie called her in 1939 or 1940 and asked if he could be on her live show. Bob Dylan, a little tongue-tied, did one of his early radio interviews with her in 1962. In an interview with NPR in 1999, she said she scoured union halls and immigrant groups to find genuine music.

Ethnomusicologists study music in varying ethnic contexts. Ms. Yurchenco began by tracking down 14 all-but-unknown Mexican and Guatemalan tribes, reaching them with little but a mule and 300 pounds of recording equipment. She eventually recorded 2,000 of their songs for the Library of Congress.

Later, she studied the music of the Sephardim, Jews who had been thrown out of Spain in the 15th century. She arrived in Morocco just as many Sephardim were preparing to move to the new state of Israel, and she seized a last chance to capture their ancient songs in the original context.

Ms. Yurchenco was intrigued by women’s roles in creating music and of the sexual politics involved in making it. Mr. Seeger said women may be the best music collectors, partly because many have the patience to appreciate a grandmother singing a 400-year-old ballad to a baby.

Ms. Yurchenco wrote several books, including a biography of Woody Guthrie. At least one book is still to be published: a study of the music of Morocco’s Sephardic women. She long taught at City College, lectured widely and fought fiercely for her leftist ideals.

Starting in 2005 and continuing almost until her death, Ms. Yurchenco invited like-minded friends to her apartment to sing songs against the Iraq war, often the same ones used against the Vietnam War. Some of their singing was broadcast on Internet radio.

Henrietta Weiss was born in New Haven on March 22, 1916. She told The Villager, a neighborhood newspaper in Manhattan, that her father was “a dreamer who started out in business and failed miserably.” She was a promising pianist who attended the Yale School of Music.

At Yale, she met Boris Yurchenco, an Argentine-born painter, at a meeting of the John Reed Club, named for the American writer who chronicled the Bolshevik Revolution. They were married in 1936, the year she was first arrested in a protest; she was demonstrating against a brass band from Mussolini’s Italy.

In 1939, her musical interests led her to WNYC, the public radio station then owned by New York City. She made friends with people like Burl Ives, the folk singer and Alan Lomax, a legendary music collector.

In 1941, she followed her husband on a trip to Mexico. An engineer from WNYC came along to record music, and she took over when he left. With financial support from groups like the American Philosophical Society, she repeatedly visited the area to record animal sacrifices, healing ceremonies and much else. Scorpions, both yellow and green, were a persistent problem.

Ms. Yurchenco and her husband divorced in 1955. In addition to her son, Peter, of Skillman, N.J., she is survived by two grandchildren.

Legend has it that Mr. Seeger and the Almanac Singers, an earlier name for the Weavers, wrote the song “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” in Ms. Yurchenco’s relatively quiet bathroom during a noisy party in her apartment. Mr. Seeger said that was not quite true, though he recalled her famous parties.

Mr. Seeger explained that Leadbelly, the great folk and blues artist, was in Ms. Yurchenco’s bathroom with the singer Sam Kennedy, who perched on the obvious as he sang “Drimmin Down,” a lament about a dead cow. (Leadbelly later livened up the beat and used the tune for his own cow song, “If It Wasn’t for Dicky.”)

Mr. Seeger liked the melody and added lyrics about wine.

February 11, 2007
Urban Studies | Singing Out
Yearning to Study War No More
By DAVID AUSTIN GURA

IF you had been standing outside apartment 12E in the white brick apartment building at West 22nd Street and Ninth Avenue in Chelsea on Thursday evening, you would have heard songs taking you back four decades, to a time when it almost seemed that by singing loudly enough, it might be possible to stop a war.

It is on Thursday evenings that Henrietta Yurchenco, a 90-year-old former City College professor and radio producer, collects a few of her students to sing the same protest songs she sang and taught 40 years ago. The war on their minds is a new one, but many of the songs they sing, like “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” and “Study War No More,” were the product of wars long past.

Ms. Yurchenco, who this evening was wearing a jewel-studded peace symbol around her neck, still believes in the beauty and power of folk music. And her former students, now in their 40s and 50s, find that same beauty and power in their teacher.

Ms. Yurchenco taught ethnomusicology at City College in the 1960s and ’70s, when another war divided the nation. She held singalongs then, and in 2005, she revived the tradition with friends and former students.

Her charges group themselves around the kitchen table, surrounded by trailing ivy and colorful animal sculptures from Mexico and Guatemala, two countries where she has traveled and recorded traditional music. Ms. Yurchenco runs the singalong like a seminar: distributing lyric sheets, commenting on the repertoire, fielding questions. Every evening has a theme. This evening, the theme was labor, and the lineup included such songs as “Dark as a Dungeon,” Merle Travis’s song about the perils of coal mining, and “The Banks Are Made of Marble,” popularized by Pete Seeger.

When Ms. Yurchenco taught courses on folk music and the blues, students flocked to her home for singalongs. She barely had enough space for everyone. These days, perhaps half a dozen singers show up, although other musicians drop in. Among the regulars is Bob Malenky, a self-described “red-diaper baby” raised on such labor movement staples as “Joe Hill” and “Union Maid.”

At this singalong, after a rendition of “Join the C.I.O.,” Ms. Yurchenco described a fight she had with the song’s author, Aunt Molly Jackson, a cantankerous, Kentucky-born labor activist and folksinger. The fight took place during a picnic in the 1940s at Bear Mountain State Park, attended by musical luminaries like Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and Mr. Seeger. “She was a peppery dame,” Ms. Yurchenco said of Ms. Jackson. “You had to watch out for her.”

Although Ms. Yurchenco’s folk repertoire is vast, she prefers songs that couple easy tunes with provocative lyrics. “We don’t do any mediocre songs,” she said. “The melodies are good; the words are wonderful.” DAVID AUSTIN GURA

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December 10, 2007

Bob Kohler, a veteran gay rights activist

December 10, 2007
On West Village Streets, Tears for a Gay Activist
By TRYMAINE LEE

Friends and colleagues of Bob Kohler, a veteran gay rights activist who died at 81 on Wednesday, took to the streets of the West Village last evening, celebrating the life of the man they called a hero, a griot and a legend of the gay community.

With candles and signs held high, and with pill bottles and ceramic pots filled with some of Mr. Kohler’s cremated remains, dozens of his friends and admirers marched through the streets, chanting to the beat of a drummer, stories of Mr. Kohler’s courage in more than six decades of activism spilling from their lips.

Some cried as they stepped down West 13th Street, Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street to Sheridan Square, ending up at the Hudson River piers, a refuge for many gay youths in the area.

“Till the very end he struggled for us, all of us,” said Jennifer Flynn, 36, a friend and member of a group of mostly lesbian activists who helped to care for Mr. Kohler as he battled cancer in his final days. “He could have lived a comfortable life somewhere. He could have ignored everyone.”

Mr. Kohler was on the front lines of the Stonewall rebellion of 1969, the brawl between gay men and police officers at a bar in the Village that is widely viewed as the start of the American gay rights movement.

He also fought in the Navy in World War II and was a founder of the Gay Liberation Front, among other gay rights groups. Friends said Mr. Kohler emerged from the Stonewall uprising a leader in a newly galvanized gay community and soon adopted a militant brand of activism.

“He always had a liberation impulse,” said Bill Dobbs, a friend for 15 years. “And he remained militant when most people were pushing buttons on remote controls, doing nothing.”

Mr. Kohler also fought for the rights of women and minorities, friends said, and had a following of young gay African-Americans and Latinos who looked up to him for his history of taking on causes beyond traditional gay issues.

“He was the epitome of an ally,” said Bran Fenner, 25, who as a high school student was a founder of Fierce, a group for gay youths of color. “He was able to tell us a history that had been denied to us.”

Well into his 70s, Mr. Kohler continued to be an organizer and activist. In 1999 he was one of the demonstrators seized in a mass arrest outside 1 Police Plaza after the killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed African immigrant shot by the police 41 times.

“I do not equate my oppression with the oppression of blacks and Latinos,” Mr. Kohler told The Village Voice after his arrest. “You can’t. It is not the same struggle, but it is one struggle. And, if my being here as a longtime gay activist can influence other people in the gay community, it’s worth getting arrested.”

Sharlene Cooper, executive director of the New York City AIDS Housing Network, said Mr. Kohler helped her kick a nasty drug habit, cope with a diagnosis of AIDS and get her life back on track.

“As soon as you met Bob you loved him,” she said. “You wish you had 10 Bobs in your life.”

As the group marched down Christopher Street, stopping for a moment in front of the building that once housed the Loft, a clothing boutique Mr. Kohler owned, shopkeepers peered from their windows, and passers-by paused to watch the goings on.

“Whose street?” The crowd chanted. “Bob’s street.”

The group, escorted by a police van, stepped into a park by the piers. The sun had since set and the glow of half-melted candles dotted the circle that had formed around Ms. Cooper, who had called for a moment of silence.

After the bowed heads of many mourners lifted, Phillip Spinelli, a friend of Mr. Kohler’s for more than 40 years, did his best to wipe away the tears streaming down his cheeks.

“I have something to say,” Mr. Spinelli said, raising a pill bottle with some of Mr. Kohler’s remains in it. “He fought for our rights, our life,” he said. “God, help us.”

Then, tossing Mr. Kohler’s remains into the river, he yelled through his tears, “Have a nice swim, honey.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/10/nyregion/10kohler.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=nyregion&pagewanted=print

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November 16, 2007

Clara Fox, Tireless Advocate for Subsidized Housing, Is Dead at 90

November 16, 2007
Clara Fox, Tireless Advocate for Subsidized Housing, Is Dead at 90
By DENNIS HEVESI

Clara Fox, an advocate of subsidized housing for poor and moderate-income people and the founder of the Settlement Housing Fund, a nonprofit organization that now houses 2,200 families in 44 buildings in New York City, died on Nov. 9 in Manhattan.

She was 90 and lived in Manhattan Plaza, the twin-towered complex on West 42nd Street that she helped save from bankruptcy in the mid-1970s.

The cause was kidney failure, said Carol Lamberg, the current director of the Settlement Housing Fund, who succeeded Mrs. Fox in January 1983.

Mrs. Fox formed the Settlement Housing Fund in 1969 by bringing together housing experts from 35 settlement houses, the neighborhood agencies created in the first decades of the 20th century to aid newly arriving immigrants. And though she retired from the organization as its founding executive director, she never stopped advocating for affordable housing.

Until her death, she remained co-chairwoman of the New York Housing Conference, a coalition of more than 70 organizations representing developers, bankers, architects, housing advocates and owners of nonprofit buildings. Among other activities, the group, an affiliate of the National Housing Conference, lobbies the government on housing policy.

“Clara originated the idea of combining low- and moderate-income housing with social programs,” said Conrad Egan, the president of the national conference. When rental buildings were converted to cooperatives in the 1960s under a New York State subsidy program, Mr. Egan said, Mrs. Fox was the first to train former renters in how to manage co-ops.

Ms. Lamberg said: “Clara was one of the first people who advocated for low-income cooperatives. She was also one of the first to bring together social agencies and housing groups to work for better housing. Now there are all kinds of nonprofit groups that create and sustain affordable housing. She had a lasting effect.”

Clara Leon was born in the Bronx on May 10, 1917, a daughter of Ralph and Lillian Frankel Leon. She graduated from the University of Chicago, then earned a master’s degree in sociology there. Her marriage to William Fox ended in divorce in 1950. She is survived by her daughter, Roberta Fox, of Manhattan, and a sister, Florence Blank, of the Bronx.

In the early 1960s, Mrs. Fox, who had been the director of a private nursery school, became New York City’s first coordinator of Head Start, the federally sponsored program that provided eight weeks of education and social enrichment for prekindergarten children from poor families. After leaving Head Start in 1965, Mrs. Fox was asked to become housing coordinator for United Neighborhood Houses, the organization of 35 settlement houses that four years later established the Settlement Housing Fund.

“Clara was very proud of putting together the plan that saved Manhattan Plaza,” Ms. Lamberg said.

Built by a major developer in the mid-1970s, Manhattan Plaza, a complex of 1,688 apartments in two towers between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, was supposed to house middle-income renters. By the time the buildings were completed, Times Square was squalid and inflation was in the double digits. With few renters, Manhattan Plaza faced default.

The city wanted to turn it into a low-income project, a plan opposed by Broadway theater owners. Mrs. Fox led a committee that came up with an alternative: Manhattan Plaza would house performing artists, theater workers and community residents receiving federal rent subsidies. Those who could afford it — later to include Mrs. Fox — would pay market-rate rents.

In 1983, because of her work on the plan, Mrs. Fox was named an honorary member of Actors’ Equity, the professional actors’ and stage managers’ union.

On her retirement from the Settlement Housing Fund, Mrs. Fox told The New York Times: “The thing I feel strongest about is the incredible indifference that seems to exist in government about what’s happening to subsidized housing. We have done worse than any other social program, and what we hear from Congressional representatives is there is no constituency in Washington for low-income housing.”

Posted by lois at 05:22 PM | Comments (0)

November 04, 2007

Johtje Vos, Who Saved Wartime Jews, Dies at 97

November 4, 2007
Johtje Vos, Who Saved Wartime Jews, Dies at 97
By DENNIS HEVESI
NY Times

Johtje Vos, a Dutch woman who with her husband hid three dozen Jews in their home during World War II, shepherding them through a tunnel under the backyard and into the woods whenever the Gestapo pounded on the door, died on Oct. 10 in Saugerties, N.Y. She was 97, and had lived in Woodstock from 1951 until a year ago.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter Barbara Moorman.

During the war years, Mrs. Vos and her husband, Aart, lived in a three-bedroom house on a dead-end road in the town of Laren in the Netherlands, with acres of forest behind it. Mr. Vos, who died in 1990, grew up in Laren and knew every stream and field in the area. That allowed him to lead Jews through the woods to the house at night and back into the woods when the Nazis were coming. Each time a German raid was imminent, a sympathetic Dutch police chief in Laren, a friend of the Voses, would dial their phone, let it ring twice, hang up, then repeat the code.

In all, 36 people were saved by the Voses, with as many as 14 hiding in their home at any one time after the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940.

Evelyn Loeb Garfinkel and her mother, Ilse Loeb, were among the three dozen.

“If Johtje hadn’t done what she did, my mother wouldn’t have survived and I wouldn’t be alive,” Mrs. Garfinkel, of Delmar, N.Y., told The Times Union of Albany after attending Mrs. Vos’s funeral on Oct. 16.

Mr. and Mrs. Vos resisted the notion that they had done something out of the ordinary. Interviewed for the 1992 book “Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust,” by Gay Block and Malka Drucker (Holmes & Meier), Mrs. Vos said, “I want to say right away that the words ‘hero’ and ‘righteous gentile’ are terribly misplaced.”

“I don’t feel righteous,” said Mrs. Vos, who, like her husband, was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, “and we are certainly not heroes, because we didn’t sit at the table when the misery started and say, ‘O.K., now we are going to risk our lives to save some people.’ ”

It started one night in 1942 when a Jewish couple asked to be sheltered for just that night as they ran from the Germans. Soon after, another friend asked them to keep a suitcase containing valuables before he was sent to a ghetto.

The Voses were surprised to discover that their friend was Jewish. “We never talked about Jews,” Mrs. Vos recalled. “They were all just Dutch, that’s all.”

A 3-year-old boy, Mark de Klijn, was later taken in by Mr. and Mrs. Vos as his parents faced deportation. Word filtered through the Jewish community, and other escapees began seeking shelter. Soon, mattresses covered the floor. Unless they were trying to flee even farther, the guests would never leave the house.

Except when the phone rang twice, then twice again. Then Mr. Vos would lead them into a shed attached to the back of the house, down through a camouflaged trapdoor under a coal bin and into a 150-foot tunnel through which they would crawl before slipping into the woods.

Every time the Gestapo came, Mrs. Vos said, “I would take questions from them and lie and lie and lie.”

Johanna (she preferred the nickname Johtje, pronounced YO-tya) Kuyper was born on Dec. 29, 1909, in Amersfoort, the Netherlands, the second of three daughters of Guillaume and Henrietta Storm van Leeuwen Kuyper. Her father, a retired army officer, was the mayor of Amersfoort. Her grandfather Abraham Kuyper had been prime minister of the Netherlands from 1901 to 1905.

As a young woman, Johanna Kuyper went to Paris to work as a freelance journalist, “which was a scandalous thing at the time,” she said. There, she married a young German artist, Heinrich Molenaar, who hated Hitler, she said. The couple left France and moved into the family-owned house in Laren, where their two children were born: Mrs. Moorman, of Glenford, N.Y., and Hetty Crews, who died in 2001. The marriage ended in divorce.

In 1942, Johanna Kuyper and Aart Vos were married. They had four sons, three of whom survive: Dominique, of Woodstock; John, of Saugerties; and Sebastian, of the Netherlands. Their son Peter died in 1973. Mrs. Vos is also survived by 15 grandchildren and 15 great-grandchildren.

As far as Mrs. Vos’s children are concerned, they have another sibling: Moana Hilfman Brinkman, of Amsterdam.

When Mr. and Mrs. Vos were living in the house in Laren, they regularly beseeched Moana Hilfman’s parents to take refuge with them. The Hilfmans refused.

“They said: ‘We are Jews. This is our fate,’ ” Mrs. Vos once recalled. “I begged them to at least let me take their 3-year-old daughter, Moana.”

Only on the night that the Gestapo came did the Hilfmans hand over their daughter to a friend, who spirited her to the Vos home.

“She lived with us for years after the war,” Mrs. Moorman said on Friday. “We consider her our sister.”

Posted by lois at 10:39 PM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2007

Vernon Bellecourt, Who Protested the Use of Indian Mascots, for example the Cleveland Indians (!) Dies at 75

October 17, 2007
Vernon Bellecourt, Who Protested the Use of Indian Mascots, Dies at 75
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Vernon Bellecourt, an Ojibwa Indian who waged a long campaign for native rights, most visible in battling the use of Indian nicknames by sports teams, died Oct. 13 in Minneapolis. He was 75.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, his sister-in-law, Peggy Bellecourt, said.

Mr. Bellecourt (pronounced BELL-kort) first gained notice in 1972 as a principal spokesman for the American Indian Movement when the group organized a cross-country caravan to Washington, where members occupied the offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He later worked to gain international recognition for Indian nations and their treaties, partly by meeting with controversial foreign figures like Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya and Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader who died in 2004.

But it was as president of the National Coalition on Racism in Sports and Media that Mr. Bellecourt achieved his greatest visibility. When teams with names like the Indians, the Redskins or the Chiefs appeared in high-profile contests, he was often there to protest.

He was arrested twice for burning an effigy of the Cleveland Indians’ mascot, Chief Wahoo, and protested the Washington Redskins at the Super Bowl.

Mr. Bellecourt said Indian nicknames for sports teams perpetuated stereotypes, making it easier to forget the real identities, problems and demands of Native Americans.

The argument gained traction. In 2001, the United States Commission on Civil Rights criticized the use of Indian images and nicknames by non-Indian schools, calling them “insensitive in light of the long history of forced assimilation that American Indian people have endured in this country.”

With many other forces in play, how much Mr. Bellecourt’s campaign has influenced colleges and universities to abandon Indian mascots is hard to gauge. But in recent years, more than a half dozen have done so, including the University of Illinois this year. In 2005, the National Collegiate Athletic Association barred Indian mascots during postseason tournaments. A few newspapers have quit using Indian-related nicknames.

Professional sports teams have been more resistant, although Mr. Bellecourt applauded in 1996 when Syracuse’s Class AAA baseball team became the Skychiefs after 62 years of being the Chiefs. What Bellecourt called his “big four” targets — the Washington Redskins, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Cleveland Indians and the Atlanta Braves — have not budged.

Bellecourt was born WaBun-Inini, meaning Man of Dawn in Ojibwa, on Oct. 17, 1931, on the White Earth reservation in Minnesota. His father was disabled by mustard gas in World War I, and his mother raised 12 children on government benefits in a home with no running water or electricity.

Mr. Bellecourt dropped out of parochial school after the eighth grade and worked at odd jobs. He was convicted of robbing a bar in St. Paul and sent to prison at 19. (The state expunged the conviction from his record in 1979, The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported.)

In prison, he learned how to be a barber, then went to beauty school after his release. He soon owned two beauty parlors in the Minneapolis area and thought he was on his way to being a millionaire, he told The Star Tribune in 1999. He moved to Denver and sold real estate.

A sense that he was losing his heritage combined with an admiration for his brother Clyde, a founder of A.I.M. in the late 1960s, led Mr. Bellecourt to help start an A.I.M chapter in Denver. He was soon involved as a spokesman and negotiator in the 1972 Washington demonstration, known as the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan. The next year, he played a small part in the 1973 occupation at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

In 1974, Bellecourt helped organize an international conference of native peoples under United Nations auspices to proclaim their rights. After Leonard Peltier was convicted for killing two F.B.I. agents during a shootout at Pine Ridge in 1975, Mr. Bellecourt became a leader in the campaign to free him.

Mr. Bellecourt’s first trip to see a foreign leader was in 1989 when he met with Col. Qaddafi, whom he described as a “very warm, sensitive human being,” and later visited at least a half dozen more times. In August 2007, he traveled to Venezuela to meet with President Hugo Chávez about getting free or cheap heating oil for Indian reservations.

Mr. Bellecourt is survived by his wife, Carol Ann Bellecourt, from whom he was separated; his companion, Janice Denny; six children; and seven grandchildren.

Mr. Bellecourt never stopped repeating that Indians were people, not mascots. At a playoff game in 1993 between the Minnesota Vikings and the Redskins, he declared, “We don’t like your chicken feathers, your paint, your cheap Hollywood chants.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/17/sports/17bellecourt.html?ref=obituaries&pagewanted=print

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August 23, 2007

Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies

New York Times
August 23, 2007
Grace Paley, Writer and Activist, Dies
By MARGALIT FOX

Grace Paley, the celebrated writer and social activist whose acclaimed short stories explored in precise, pungent and tragicomic style the struggles of ordinary women muddling through everyday lives, died Wednesday at her home in Thetford Hill, Vt. She was 84 and lived most of her life in Manhattan before moving to Vermont in 1988. .
Her husband, Robert Nichols, told the Associated Press that she had battled breast cancer. The agency did not say whether her death was directly connected to that illness.

Ms. Paley's output was modest, just 45 stories in three volumes: "The Little Disturbances of Man" (Doubleday, 1959); "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974); and "Later the Same Day" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1985). But she attracted a devoted following and was widely praised by critics for her pitch-perfect dialogue, which managed to be surgically spare and unimaginably rich at the same time.
Her "Collected Stories," published by Farrar, Straus in 1994, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. From 1986 to 1988, Ms. Paley was New York's first official state author.
Ms. Paley was among the earliest American writers to explore the lives of women - mostly Jewish, mostly New Yorkers - in all their dailyness. She focused especially on single mothers, whose days were an exquisite mix of sexual yearning and pulverizing fatigue. In a sense, her work was about what happened to the women that Roth and Bellow and Malamud's men had loved and left behind.
To read Ms. Paley's fiction is to be awash in the shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit, with its wild onrushing joy and twilight melancholy. For her, cadence and character went hand in hand: her stories are marked by their minute attention to language, with its tonal rise and fall, its hairpin rhetorical reversals and its capacity for delicious hyperbolic understatement. Her stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg be read aloud.
Some critics found Ms. Paley's stories short on plot, and in fact much of what happens is that nothing much happens. Affairs begin, babies are born, affairs end. Mothers gather in the park. But that was exactly the point. In Ms. Paley's best stories, the language is so immediate, the characters so authentic, that they are propelled by an inherent urgency - the kind that makes readers ask, "And then what happened?"
Open Ms. Paley's first collection, "The Little Disturbances of Man," to the first story, "Goodbye and Good Luck":
"I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn't no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don't be surprised - change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused. Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she don't notice how big her behind is getting and sings in the canary's ear for thirty years. Who's listening? Papa's in the shop. You and Seymour, thinking about yourself. So she waits in a spotless kitchen for a kind word and thinks - poor Rosie.
"Poor Rosie! If there was more life in my little sister, she would know my heart is a regular college of feelings and there is such information between my corset and me that her whole married life is a kindergarten."
Hooked.
For Ms. Paley's immigrant Jews, the push and pull of assimilation is everywhere. Parents live in the East Bronx or Coney Island; their grown children flee to Greenwich Village. A family agonizes over its lively daughter's starring role in her school's Christmas pageant.
Later stories were even darker. Women are raped; children died of drug overdoses. Threading through the books are familiar characters, in particular Faith Darwin, the subject of many of Ms. Paley's finest stories, grown older and world-wearier.
Though Ms. Paley's work also rings with Irish and Italian and black voices, it was for the language of her childhood, a heady blend of Yiddish, Russian and English, that she was best known. Reviewers sometimes called her prose postmodern, but all of it - even the death-defying, almost surreal turns of logic that were a stylistic hallmark - was already present in Yiddish oral tradition. For instance:
A man meets a friend on the street.
"So, how's by you?" the friend asks.
"Ach," the man replies. "My wife left me; the children don't call; business is bad. With life so terrible, better not to have been born."
"Yes," his friend says. "But how many are so lucky? Not one in ten thousand."
Grace Goodside was born in the Bronx on Dec. 11, 1922. (The family changed its name from Gutseit on coming to the United States.) Her parents, Isaac and the former Manya Ridnyik, were Ukrainian Jewish Socialists who had been exiled by Czar Nicholas II - Isaac to Siberia, Manya to Germany. In 1906, they were able to leave for New York, where Isaac became a doctor. They had a son and a daughter, and, approaching middle age, a third child, Grace.
Her childhood was noisy and warm. There were stories and singing and good strong tea. Always, there was argument. The Communists hollered at the Socialists, the Socialists hollered at the Zionists, and everybody hollered at the anarchists.
Ms. Paley studied for a year at Hunter College before marrying Jess Paley, a film cameraman, at 19; the marriage ended in divorce in 1972. Hoping to be a poet (she studied briefly with Auden at the New School), she wrote only verse until she was in her 30's. But little by little, the narrative speech of the old neighborhood - here, that of young Shirley Abramowitz in "The Loudest Voice" - began to assert itself:
"There is a certain place where dumb-waiters boom, doors slam, dishes crash; every window is a mother's mouth bidding the street shut up, go skate somewhere else, come home. My voice is the loudest.
"There, my own mother is still as full of breathing as me and the grocer stands up to speak to her. 'Mrs. Abramowitz,' he says, 'people should not be afraid of their children.'
" 'Ah, Mr. Bialik,' my mother replies, 'if you say to her or her father "Ssh," they say, "In the grave it will be quiet." ' "
A self-described "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist," Ms. Paley was a lifelong advocate of liberal social causes. During Vietnam, she was jailed several times for antiwar protests; in later years, she lobbied for women's rights, against nuclear proliferation and, most recently, against the war in Iraq. For decades, she was a familiar presence on lower Sixth Avenue, near her Greenwich Village home, smiling broadly, gum cracking, leaflets in hand.
Ms. Paley, who taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence and the City College of New York, was also a past vice president of the PEN American Center.
Some critics have called Ms. Paley's work uneven, but what they really seemed to mean is that it was too even: similar people in similar situations in similar places. But the stories that worked - and many did - were so blindingly satisfying that the lesser ones scarcely mattered. In her best work, Ms. Paley collapsed entire worlds into a few perfect paragraphs, as in the opening of "Wants," from "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute":
"I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
"Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
"He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
"I said, O.K. I don't argue when there's real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.
"The librarian said $32 even and you've owed it for eighteen years. I didn't deny anything. Because I don't understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.
"My ex-husband followed me to the Books Returned desk. He interrupted the librarian, who had more to tell. In many ways, he said, as I look back, I attribute the dissolution of our marriage to the fact that you never invited the Bertrams to dinner.
"That's possible, I said. But really, if you remember: first, my father was sick that Friday, then the children were born, then I had those Tuesday-night meetings, then the war began."

Her other books include a collection of essays, "Just As I Thought" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998), and three volumes of poetry, "Leaning Forward" (Granite Press, 1985); "New and Collected Poems" (Tilbury Press, 1991); and "Long Walks and Intimate Talks" (Feminist Press, 1991). A film, "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute," based on three stories in the collection and adapted by John Sayles and Susan Rice, was released in 1983.
In an interview with The New York Times in 1978, Ms. Paley put her finger on the grass-roots sensibility that informed her work.
"I'm not writing a history of famous people," she explained. "I am interested in a history of everyday life."

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company


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August 13, 2007

Moe Fishman Dies at 92; Fought in Lincoln Brigade

August 12, 2007
Moe Fishman Dies at 92; Fought in Lincoln Brigade
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Moe Fishman, who as a 21-year-old from Astoria, Queens, fought Fascists in Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was severely wounded, then led veterans of that unit in fighting efforts to brand them as Communist subversives, died on Aug. 6 in Manhattan. He was 92.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Peter Carroll, chief of the board of governors of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

Mr. Carroll said that about 40 of about 3,000 American veterans of the Spanish Civil War volunteers are living. It had been the job of Mr. Fishman, as executive secretary-treasurer of the veterans, to announce deaths.

At times he was almost alone in keeping the group going, Mr. Carroll said, particularly during the long, ultimately successful legal battle to remove the group’s subversive label. Mr. Fishman put out a newsletter, kept scrupulous books, ran the office daily and spoke widely.

In an interview with Esquire magazine in 1962, he said: “I’m the organization. If there’s something to decide, I talk it over with the guys and then decide what I’m going to do. Cockeyed, but that’s the way it is.”

The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 after Gen. Francisco Franco set out to overthrow the newly elected leftist government. Americans soon volunteered to fight Franco in what came to be called the Lincoln Brigade.

It was actually a battalion. Officially, Americans joined it or the Washington Battalion. The two American battalions, which informally have come to be known as the Lincoln Brigade, joined with four other battalions of volunteers from other countries to form the XV International Brigade.

In 1937, Mr. Fishman was a high-school dropout working in a laundry and driving a truck. He was also a member of the Young Communist League, having joined partly to meet like-minded young women at dances the organization sponsored, he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2004.

He also liked how the Communists responded when a family behind on the rent was evicted and thrown on the streets with its furniture. He told The Times that party members would use an ax or hammer to break the lock on the door and put the family back in.

Many believe that at least half of the volunteers for the Lincoln Brigade were Communists, but Mr. Fishman’s reasons for joining were more complex, he told The Times in 1969.

“Why did I go?” he said. “That’s hard to say. That’s a key question. I was active in trade union work. I wanted to travel. I belonged to the 92nd Street Y.M.H.A., and we were very anti-Fascist, much opposed to Hitler, Franco.”

He was born Moses Fishman on Sept. 28, 1915, and grew up in Astoria. On the day he was to depart for Spain, he left for work at the usual time to deceive his parents. Halfway down the stairs, he realized he had forgotten his toothbrush, returned for it and broke it in half so it would fit in his pocket. (It was the only thing he brought back from Spain, he told The Hartford Courant in 2000.)Mr. Fishman called his parents when he got off the subway near the dock, and they cried when he told them his plans. His mother had never seen his father cry. He himself was unafraid. “When you’re 21, there’s no bullet meant for you,” he told The Times in 2000.

On July 5, 1937, during the Brunete offensive west of Madrid, a sniper hit Mr. Fishman’s thigh, leaving 32 pieces of bone and metal. He spent a year in Spanish hospitals, and a pin was put into his leg. At one point the leg became infected, he told The Courant. He was then in and out of hospitals in the United States for two years.

During World War II, Mr. Fishman was in the merchant marine. Afterward, he and other Lincoln veterans became involved in aiding refugees from Franco’s Spain. President Harry S. Truman’s attorney general labeled the veterans group subversive. In 1950, when such organizations had to register with the government, the entire executive committee of the Lincoln Brigade veterans resigned. Mr. Fishman stepped in to become secretary-treasurer.

After a federal court removed the subversive label in the 1970s, Mr. Fishman wrote a colleague that the change might not be good. He wryly suggested doing something subversive so as not to appear irrelevant to rebellious youth. (Mr. Fishman later dropped his party membership, Mr. Carroll said.)

Mr. Fishman is survived by his partner, Georgia Wever, of Manhattan, and his sisters Lilly Litsky, of Santa Cruz, Calif., and Pearl Fishman, of Yonkers.

He never tired of a lively demonstration. But he came to prefer sitting in a folding chair, as he did in 2004, when he hailed protesters at the Republican National Convention in Manhattan. When they saw his Lincoln Brigade banner, they applauded back. In an interview with The Villager, a neighborhood newspaper, he said, “They come up — these young girls — they want you to take a picture with them and they kiss you.”

Other late-life adjustments were harder. In 2001, an article in The Economist recounted how he stumbled over the word “globalization” at a protest against globalization. “It was so much easier to say when we called it imperialism,” he was reported to have said.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/nyregion/12fishman.html

Posted by lois at 09:59 PM | Comments (0)

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, 90, Rights Pioneer, Dies

August 13, 2007
Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, 90, Rights Pioneer, Dies
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, whose defiance of white supremacy while traveling through the Upper South in the summer of 1944 led to a Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated seating on interstate bus lines, died Friday in Hayes, Va. She was 90.

The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said her granddaughter Janine Bacquie.

Irene Morgan’s fight against segregation took place a decade before the modern civil rights movement changed America. Taken up by the N.A.A.C.P. and argued before the Supreme Court by Thurgood Marshall, later the court’s first black justice, it proved a forerunner to Rosa Parks’s storied refusal to yield her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala.

Mrs. Morgan, a worker in a plant that made World War II bombers and the mother of two small children, was returning to her home in Baltimore aboard a Greyhound bus in July 1944 after a visit to her mother in Gloucester County, Va.

When the bus grew crowded, the driver told her to give her seat to a white person. Mrs. Morgan refused, and when a sheriff’s deputy tried to take her off the bus in Saluda, Va., she resisted.

“He put his hand on me to arrest me, so I took my foot and kicked him,” she recalled in “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow!” a 1995 public television documentary. “He was blue and purple and turned all colors. I started to bite him, but he looked dirty, so I couldn’t bite him. So all I could do was claw and tear his clothes.”

Mrs. Morgan was arrested and pleaded guilty the next October to resisting arrest, paying a $100 fine. But she refused to pay a $10 fine for violating a Virginia law requiring segregated seating in public transportation.

She appealed, and the N.A.A.C.P., seeking a test case over segregated interstate transport, represented her.

“She was young, attractive, articulate and, judging by her poised performance in Saluda, strong enough to withstand the pressures of a high-profile legal battle,” Raymond Arsenault wrote in his book “Freedom Riders.”

When Virginia’s highest court ruled against Mrs. Morgan, the N.A.A.C.P. appealed to the Supreme Court. Mr. Marshall and his fellow N.A.A.C.P. lawyer, William Hastie, argued that segregation aboard interstate buses — Mrs. Morgan’s bus was traveling from Virginia to Maryland — represented an unconstitutional burden on the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce and that it threatened free movement across state lines.

The N.A.A.C.P. brief in Morgan v. Virginia stated that “we are just emerging from a war in which all of the people of the United States were joined in a death struggle against the apostles of racism.”

On June 3, 1946, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 1 in favor of Mrs. Morgan. Justice Stanley F. Reed wrote that “seating arrangements for the different races in interstate motor travel require a single uniform rule to promote and protect national travel.”

But the Southern states disregarded the ruling. In 1947, an interracial group led by Bayard Rustin, who helped organize the March on Washington two decades later, staged bus rides through the Upper South testing compliance.

Rustin and two other riders were arrested in North Carolina and served three weeks on a brutal prison farm. In 1961, Freedom Riders rode buses through the South to protest segregation and were met with violence in Alabama that stunned the nation.

Irene Morgan Kirkaldy, who was born and reared in Baltimore, lived on Long Island and ran a child-care center in Queens with her second husband, Stanley Kirkaldy. At age 68 she received a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University, and five years later she obtained a master’s degree in urban studies at Queens College.

She is survived by her daughter, Brenda Morgan Bacquie of Hayes, and her son, Sherwood Morgan Jr., of Dover, Del., from her marriage to Sherwood Morgan Sr., who died in 1948; her sisters Justine Walker, of Baltimore, and James Ethel Laforest, of Upper Marlboro, Md.; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Stanley Kirkaldy died in November.

In 2000, Gloucester County, where Irene Morgan got on that bus six decades earlier, and where she lived in her final years, honored her on its 350th anniversary.

A year later, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Citizens Medal. “When Irene Morgan boarded a bus for Baltimore in the summer of 1944,” the citation read, “she took the first step on a journey that would change America forever.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/us/13kirkaldy.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=obituaries&pagewanted=print

Posted by lois at 09:55 PM | Comments (0)

July 27, 2007

1986 Article by Harmon Wray: CCA/Private Prisons: "Cells for Sale"

This was posted on: http://www.texasprisonbidness.org/

Southern Changes. Volume 8, Number 3, 1989
Cells for Sale
By Harmon L. Wray, Jr.

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 3-6

The rush to transfer government services and functions from public to profit-making hands has lately found its way to the "field" of incarceration and corrections. The current leader in this new growth industry is the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, chartered in January of 1983 and financed by Hospital Corporation of America founder Jack Massey of Massey Burch Investments, Inc., the South's largest venture capital company. According to CCA president and former Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Tom Beasley, the Corrections Corporation of America alma to ~be to jails and prisons...what Hospital Corporation of America has become to medical facilities nationwide."

Declaring that "the market is limitless," Beasley (age 43) hopes to "solve the prison problem and make a lot of money at the same time." CCA currently has seven contracts to own and/or manage detention centers, treatment facilities, jails and workhouses for federal and local jurisdictions in several Southern states--three in Tennessee, one in Florida, two in Texas (for illegal aliens), one in North Carolina. But this is small potatoes compared with what CCA intends to do: take over the entire prison system of particular states, and prepare for a bid on the federal system. "The private jail market is ripe," reports Barron's, the business weekly. "And it is brokers, architects, builders, and banks-not the taxpayers-who will make out like bandits.. In less than a year, CCA has more than doubled the size of its staff, now at 500.

The proposal CCA made to the State of Tennessee in the fall of 1985 was the boldest move yet in prisons-for-profit and showed why the company is considered the most aggressive and well-connected of the capitalist corrections firms. CCA initially proposed to buy out and operate the state's prison system, under federal court order since 1982, as well as build and manage two new prisons (later expanded to five new institutions). Thanks to effective lobbying by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) and the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee, the CCA bid was tabled last year by the Democratically-controlled state legislature. The action came during a special session called for the prison crisis by Republican governor Lamar Alexander, a CCA supporter who once rented a garage apartment to law student Tom Beasley. Alexander has spent seven years overseeing an unconstitutional prison system but has never set foot inside one of his state's prisons.

This year, the General Assembly, under the influence of nine full-time, high-powered CCA lobbyists paid an estimated $100,000, passed a more moderate privatization bill. Before the session Tom Beasley had

Page 4
said, "I intend to get a chunk of this system." Soon he will: the 180-bed Carter County work camp opens September 1, probably under CCA operation. But the legislation (which AFSCME plans to challenge in court) prohibits further privatization of Tennessee prisons for three years.

The ambitions of Beasley and other prison entrepreneurs are not limited to Tennessee. In fact, once CCA lost its bid for all Tennessee prisons, it pursued a smaller "chunk" primarily in order to avoid the embarrassment of having no home-state contracts to advertise in its sales pitch to other jurisdictions. Last December Beasley said that if the Reagan administration decided to sell the federal prison system (as the The Wall Street Journal had just reported it might), CCA would make an offer. CCA was one of three firms bidding for the multi-million dollar Moundsville, W.Va., prison, site of a New Year's Day prisoner rebellion. Reportedly, CCA has been working on proposals for state prison systems in Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Misissippi, and Kentucky, as well as several western states. At this writing, CCA contracts to operate jails are pending in Sante Fe, N.M., and Key West, Fla. Meanwhile, CCA's Tennessee competitor, Corrections Associates Inc. (CAI), recently landed Tennessee and Alabama county jail contracts and a prison consulting contract with the Alexander administration. CAI's good fortune came on the heels of the resignation of its new president, Hubert McCullough, as Governor Alexander's finance commissioner.

The McCullough-Alexander connection is only one of many personal, business, and political linkages evident in the prisons-for-profit field. Like CAI's McCullough, CCA lobbyist Tom Ingram, 39, a former journalist and social worker, has been a prime mover with the anti-labor Tennessee Business Roundtable. Ingram also managed Alexander's two winning gubernatorial campaigns and served as his chief-of-staff for four years before forming his own public relations and business consulting firm. Others in the CCA-Alexander circle include CCA stockholders who are current and former Alexander cabinet officers, CCA administrators who are former state GOP chairpersons, a CCA lobbyist who was a Democratic state senator, and two prominent public figures who in 1985 sold their CCA stock to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest: Honey Alexander (the governor's wife held $5,000 of stock) and House Speaker Ned Ray McWherter ($33,000), the Democratic nominee to succeed Alexander. In this fall's general election, McWherter faces former Republican governor Winfield Dunn, a Memphis dentist who became a multi-millionaire as an executive for Hospital Corporation of America. Both Dunn and McWherter have called for the state to experiment with private operation of some prisons.

Another connection is the US Military Academy. Before graduating from Harvard's law and business schools, CCA treasurer and major investor Doctor R. Crants was Beasley's West Point roommate. CCA stockholder Samuel W. Bartholomew, of the Nashville law firm Donelson, Stokes &Bartholomew, was their classmate ('66).

Three of Bartholomew's children are also stockholders. Another West Point alum and major CCA investor is T. Don Hutto, the corporation's executive vice-president. Hutto, an ex-prison guard who became commissioner of corrections in Virginia and Arkansas, has since 1984 been president of the American Correctional Association, which oversees prison accreditation standards. Unlike other corrections-related professional associations-the National Sheriffs Association, the National Conference of State Trial Judges, the National Association of Criminal Justice Planners, and the American Bar Association--the ACA under Hutto's tenure has supported prison privatization.

While the prisons-for-profit trend has national dimensions, CCA leadership has focused much of the attention onto the South, where all of CCA's current contracts and most of its financial backers are located (investors include Vanderbilt University, Hospital Corporation of America, and that symbol of public service delivery, the Tennessee Valley Authority, itself often the target of privatization initiatives). Many members of CCA's management staff have worked in corrections departments in Southern states, including Virginia, Louisiana, Texas, and Alabama.

Critics of corporate punishment have raised a number of issues which call the privatization trend into serious question. Tennessee Attorney General Michael Cody and the ACLU National Prison Project note that the state would retain ultimate legal and fiscal responsibility for assuring private prisons' compliance with state and federal constitutions and court orders. It also appears clear that governments cannot contract their civil liability to private concerns. Noting CCA's lack of a track record in operating a state prison for long-ternm adult offenders, Cody also questions its estimates of operating and capital expenses and doubts the state's

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ability to buy back its prisons in case of a private firm's bankruptcy, incompetence, or unwillingness to continue. Cody suggests that privatization might encourage the public to believe, mistakenly, that Tennessee can solve its corrections problems simply by building more prisons.

A 1985 Tennessee legislative report points out that privatizing does not mean that construction costs are not a liability of the state; rather, the liability has been deferred." Mark Gray of AFSCME wonders if an artifically low cost presented in an initial contract would lead to government dependency on the private firm, making it "impossible to resume operations in the future without huge capital investments. The private contractor is then in a position to raise its prices" in order to maximize profits. Former Minnesota corrections chief Ken Schoen has pointed to "defense" contractors' use of similar tactics as a way of "capitalizing on the public's fears to assure an ever-expanding system, while the basic insecurities remain."

Closely associated with such economic concerns is the question of just how a private firm will be able to operate prisons as inexpensively as it claims. Public employee unions like AFSCME and the Tennessee State Employees Association point to workers' loss of civil service rules and benefits under private prison managers, along with the possibility of lower wages, a minimal workforce, an anti-union atmosphere, and inadequate training of correctional officers. It may be no accident that corrections capitalists' favorite hunting ground for contracts has been the historically low-wage and under-unionized South. And, whether they are called "prison guards" or "correctional officers," those workers who staff our society's cages are already among the lowest paid of all government employees.

Certainly, prisoners themselves could suffer harmful effects from possible cost-cutting for the sake of profit maximization. CCA's initial proposal to Tennessee proclaims the intention of developing a "full-employment economy within the correctional system." Given the history of Tennessee's and other Southern states' "privatization" and "profitization" of prisons, one might be excused for expecting some contemporary variations on the old convict lease systems and chain gangs. Journalist Ronnie Dugger's discomfort over the proposed privatization of the Texas prison system might also apply to other Southern states: "In the company prison, we will be putting state-sentenced inmates under the command of the employees of the corporation and forcing the state-sentenced inmates to labor for the profit of the corporation. What will keep a privately-owned Texas prison from being in its very nature a state-created system of slave labor for private profit?" Constitutionally, slavery is legal as punishment for crime, and our Southern prison populations are, of course, overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately black and Hispanic.

Apprehensions on the part of prisoner advocates and those who abhor slavery may not be unfounded when one considers the professional history of T. Don Hutto, the man CCA touts as its foremost corrections expert. The CCA's executive vice-president's career includes a stint as warden of the Ramsey Unit in Huntsville, Texas, in the 1960s, when the system of using inmates to guard and discipline other inmates, later outlawed in federal court, was "at its strongest," according to the Texas Observer. A 1985 article in The Nation reported that during Hutto's tenure as corrections commissioner in Arkansas the US Supreme Court ruled that state's prison system unconstitutional and found that officials "evidently tried to operate their prisons at a profit." "Inmates were required to work on prison farms ten hours a day, six days a week, often without suitable clothing or shoes, using mule-drawn plows and tending crops by hand....Punishment for minor misconduct included lashing with a wooden-handled leather strap...and administering electric shocks to 'various sensitive parts of the inmate's body.' The trial court called the prisons 'a dark and evil world completely alien to the free world.'" When confronted with this criticism, a CCA offical responded that The Nation essay was "a libelous article" and that Hutto had in fact cleaned up the unconstitutional Arkansas system.

The questions raised by Hutto's track record and by a look at the history of profit-making out of the hides of prisoners were echoed by Michael Walzer in The New Republic: "Helpless men and women have never fared well at the hands of profit-seeking entrepreneurs. The incentive system is all wrong. Who will look after the interests of prisoners? Who will be watching the prison owners as they run their 'own' business?"

Prisoners and their advocates in many Southern states lock at the decades of class-action litigation efforts to remedy their unconstitutional prison systems (now ten years in Tennessee) and wonder how much longer it would have taken had the prisons been

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privately owned during that time. The potential for foot-dragging and buck-passing would surely increase substantially under private ownership and implementation of state functions. The Tennessee Senate Speaker's favorable response to the privatization concept speaks volumes: "If somebody else ran it, somebody else would be in court. We wouldn't."

An analogy with recent corporate mobility trends, another point made by Walzer, is especially striking when seen in a Southern context: "This is probably the chief economic advantage of privatization-that it offers a (temporary) escape from the enforcement of constitutional norms. The resulting savings are like the profit added when a factory moves from a union to a non-union territory. If the union catches up, the old situation is restored. Similarly, if the courts catch up, we will find oursleves again where we are now, with judges struggling to do what state legislatures and Congress ought to do-reform the prison system."

Perhaps the most critical flaw in the privatization move is that it is inherently expansionist. A corporation paid per prisoner and per diem will look to lock up more and more people for longer and longer stretches. Recall the historic Southern practice of determining the county sheriffs' pay according to their jail counts. CCA's Tennessee proposal assumed a steadily expanding prison population (despite the falling crime rate), and its preferred per diem method of being paid has already led to cost overruns for local taxpayers at its Chattanooga penal farm.

The US locks up a larger percentage of its population than any country in the world, with two exceptions: South Africa and the Soviet Union. Some of our Southern states rank even higher than those nations. We ought to be reducing our costly, ineffective, cruel, race- and class-biased overreliance on incarceration in favor of community-based alternative sentences for non-violent offenders, such as victim restitution programs. Other effective alternatives to incarceration include intensive probation, community service work, victim-offender mediation, and required drug and alcohol treatment, GED preparation, vocational training, and job placement. Such options are used frequently with white collar criminals, but perpetrators of street crimes are scarce in these programs.

Organizations such as AFSCME, the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Sheriffs Association, the Vera Institute of Justice, and the National Association of Criminal Justice Planners have all voiced the fear of an inevitable expansionism in this new "growth industry." Vera Institute's Michael Smith, noting that "the private sector has an enormous investment in stimulating demand," fears corporate advertising campaigns to heighten the public's fear of crime and trigger a "lock 'em up" reaction resulting in an increasing number of cages, captives, and dollars.

NACJP director Mark Cunniff, calling CCA's Tennessee takeover proposal "incredible," points out that "private contractors can lobby in ways that a public agency cannot." When those doing the lobbying are close friends and political advisers of governors and legislators, many of the traditional lobbying techniques will be unnecessary.

Perhaps Ken Schoen has put it best: "Private operators whose growth depends upon an expanding prison population may push for ever harsher sentences. With the public's unabating fear of crime, and the lawmakers shrinking from any move that appears to be soft on criminals, the developing private prison lobby will be hard to resist. Any drop in the crime rate will be attributed to long prison sentences. An increase will add weight to the call for more prisons. And the taxpayers will finance the profit-makers while double-locking their doors at night."

Michael Smith says that the scenario sketched out above "worries me enough so that I want to look first at making government innovative and responsive." This points toward a possible third option, between the inefficient and incompetent status quo and the CCA-type prisons-for-profit. Walzer suggests, "...we should deputize nongovernmental agencies to perform some prison-like functions....we all might benefit, prisoners, too, from a little flexibility, unorthodoxy, experimentation. But this will have to be the work of nonprofit agencies, with publicly recognized programs and explicit authorization. We should not be contracting out, as if these were not our prisoners; we should be bringing new ideas into the orbit of public service."

The most reasonable conclusion to be drawn from all this is simply that the citizens and legislatures of our Southern states should avoid the new "dungeons for dollars" game like the plague. The privatization debate distracts us from the real issue of our society's failure to deal with crime in any way other than a knee-jerk, repressive fashion. This is especially true in the South, which tends to have the highest incarceration rates, the longest sentences, and the most executions.

Most citizens-white and black, rich and poor, male and female-regularly report that crime and punishment constitute one of the most salient and urgent issues in their lives. Almost no one, however, is satisfied with our criminal justice system as it is.

As I have suggested, there are alternative approaches to the issue of crime and punishment, but only a few prisoners, lawyers, academics, and prison reform advocates seem to know or care much about them. As in the field of health, our society's primary approach to crime ought to be a preventive, environmental, "public health" strategy. The implications of this approach reach beyond even such a necessary action as the denial of easy handgun access. We must resist and recast the media glorification of violence, insist upon economic and political equality irrespective of race and sex, confront the climate of national militarism, and reconstruct an American culture and economic system propelled by human greed. Meanwhile, we will continue to have to lock up violent, dangerous offenders, but, for the many others, our motto should be "from the cage to the community," which is largely where the problem is and must be dealt with. We must refuse the exploitation of public hysteria and institutional fatigue by the entrepreneurs of captivity.

Harmon L Wray, Jr., lives in Nashville where he is a staff consultant with Project Return and teaches prison ministry at Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Go to Article List for Southern Changes. Volume 8, Number 3, 1989
Previous: The Shame of Contra Aid Article Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 18-19

The Beck Center Southern Regional Council

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July 26, 2007

Real Cost of Prisons Project Website Reminder

The Real Cost of Prisons Project website (www.realcostofprisons.org) is constantly updated with new research and papers focused on providing ideas and information to strengthen the work of organizers, family members, students, policy makers and others. PDFs of our three comic book are on line in addition to individual comic book pages which can be downloaded free and used for flyers, tabling, newsletters. There also links to hundreds of organizations. Two of our newest sections: "Comix from Inside" and "Writing from Prison" include political and analytical writing and artwork by men and women who are incarcerated.

Posted by lois at 11:22 AM | Comments (0)

July 24, 2007

In Memory of Harmon Wray

The Tennessean
Wednesday, 07/25/07
Prisoner advocate Harmon Wray, 60, dies
By John Egerton
For The Tennessean

Harmon L. Wray was about to graduate from Southwestern College in Memphis in April 1968 when, a short distance across town, an assassin's bullet took the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the lightning rod of the Civil Rights Movement.

Countless people around the world have been moved to lives of service
by the martyrdom of Dr. King. Harmon Wray was one of them.

When Mr. Wray died of a massive brain hemorrhage in Nashville's St. Thomas Hospital Tuesday, he was in his 40th year of selfless commitment to a particular class of American outcasts: the more than 3 million men and women in the nation's prison population.

"He left campus to march with the sanitation workers in Memphis," recalled Mr. Wray's mother, Celeste Wray, "and he was in the audience when Dr. King made his last speech, the night before he was killed. No mother could want a better son than Harmon. He gave his life for others. I was intensely proud of him."

Mr. Wray was born in Memphis on Nov. 10, 1946, the only child of Celeste Hardy and her husband, Harmon Lee Wray. He graduated with honors from Southwestern (now Rhodes College) in 1968 and then earned a master's degree in religion from Duke University in 1970.

During that time, he entered the process of ordination into the ministry of the United Methodist Church.

Though he pursued a doctorate in ethics at Vanderbilt Divinity School in the 1970s, Mr. Wray stopped short of completing his dissertation - a study of religious radicals in the 20th-century South - and chose to be an activist rather than a scholar.

"I got what I came for," he told friends after he quit. "I got the experience, the knowledge, the personal associations. The only thing I left behind was the degree itself, and it meant nothing to me - and even less to the people I wanted to serve."

It was during those years that Mr. Wray began working with two Nashville-based organizations, the Southern Prison Ministry and Tennesseans Against the Death Penalty, both of which had religious motivations but no church affiliation. He was employed from time to time at the state and national levels of the United Methodist Church to work with task forces on various social issues.

"Somewhere along in there," recalled Don Beisswenger, now retired from the Vanderbilt Divinity School faculty, "Harmon decided not to seek ordination. It was an act of personal integrity for him, based on his understanding of the radical gospel of Jesus."

In the 1990s, while teaching part-time as an adjunct professor