Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
August 27, 2023
Hello All – 60 years ago, on August 28th, 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC to demand "jobs and freedom." On Saturday, thousands again gathered in Washington to commemorate that historic occasion and to assess how much of King's dream remains unfulfilled. (And a much smaller rally was held in Hastings.)
The demands of the 1963 March included what became the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. But as noted in the article by historian Robin Kelley linked below, the March for Jobs and Freedom quickly lost its focus on jobs, as the forces (including the Kennedys) that would advance a modest civil rights agenda would not open the door to significant economic reforms that might lift millions of people out of poverty, especially in the (Democratic) Jim-Crow South. As one commentator wrote recently: "The march's radicalism hinged on its call for 'a national minimum wage of not less than $2.00 per hour.' Accounting for inflation, that modest-sounding figure translates to more than $19 in today's market. That's $4 more than the Fight for $15 movement demands, $2 more than the $17 recently proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, and $11.75 above the $7.25 federal minimum wage, which hasn't budged since 2009." An economy, especially in the South, that rested so heavily on the super-exploitation of people of color could not concede a living wage to its workers.
What the March did do was to give the "southern" civil rights movement a national platform, and – through the oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the resolute non-violence of the demonstration itself – accelerated movement-building in the Black communities of cities and towns large and small. As Brandon Terry has noted in several books and the article linked below, the "sanitized" memory we have today of King belies his life-long efforts to forge a black and white, union-based coalition of labor on behalf of a progressive economic program. The white racism that King and his movement encountered when attempting to establish a base in Chicago and the North after Selma blunted this objective, and the consequences of this failure remain a cancer on our body politic.
Finally, on the eve of this 60th anniversary of the March for Jobs and Freedom, two of our major newspapers published fascinating oral histories of the march's organizers and some stories behind the March. Highly recommended are "The 1963 March on Washington Changed America. Its Roots Were in Harlem" [New York Times] and "An oral history of the March on Washington, 60 years after MLK's dream" [Washington Post].
Some useful reading on "Jobs and Freedom," 1963
MLK Now
By Brandon Terry, Boston Review [September 10, 2018]
---- The King now enshrined in popular sensibilities is not the King who spoke so powerfully and admiringly at Carnegie Hall about Du Bois. Instead, he is a mythic figure of consensus and conciliation, who sacrificed his life to defeat Jim Crow and place the United States on a path toward a "more perfect union." In this familiar view, King and the civil rights movement are rendered "backward looking and even conservative." King deployed his rhetorical genius in the service of our country's deepest ideals—the ostensible consensus at the heart of our civic culture—and dramatized how Jim Crow racism violated these commitments. Heroically, through both word and deed, he called us to be true to who we already are: "to live out the true meaning" of our founding creed. No surprise, then, that King is often draped in Christian symbolism redolent of these themes. He is a revered prophet of U.S. progress and redemption, Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land, or a Christ who sacrificed his life to redeem our nation from its original sin. Such poetic renderings lead our political and moral judgment astray. [Read More]
Big, Glitzy Marches Are Not Movements
By Robin D. G. Kelley, Boston Review [August 28, 2013]
---- Anyone paying attention to the events leading up to the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington should know by now that this historic gathering rallied under the banner of "jobs and freedom." It has become common knowledge that economic justice was at the heart of the march's agenda, and the main forces behind the event had roots in socialist movements—Bayard Rustin and veteran black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who threatened a similar march two decades earlier after a black woman activist proposed the idea at a Civil Rights conference in 1940. The truth is that the broad economic agenda didn't just drop out of historical accounts; it dropped out of the mainstream movement. First, the big groups—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress on Racial Equality, the NAACP and the Urban League—threw their energies almost entirely behind passing the watered-down Civil Rights bill and supporting a Voting Rights bill under President Johnson. … And finally, Randolph and the circle of leaders controlling the march deliberately excluded black women's organizations from playing any significant role in the movement. [Read More]
News Notes
On Sunday, September 17th, there will be climate-crisis protests around the world, including on in NYC, demanding an end to using fossil fuels. In the Rivertowns, I know of contingents going from CD16, WESPAC, and CFOW. There will also be focused contingents such as a Peace Action group underscoring the role of military activity in promoting climate chaos. For basic information about the march and rally, go here.
In the House of Representatives, "the Squad" – including now our own representative Jamaal Bowman -- faces an uphill fight for passing good legislation and preventing horrible stuff. Jacobin Magazine just published a useful balance-sheet of the Squad's accomplishments.
While the "plan" to dump a million-plus gallons of radioactive water from Indian Point into the Hudson River may be thwarted, Japan has begun to a million-plus tons of radioactive water from its failed Fukushima nuclear plant into the Pacific Ocean. Needless to say, a zillion people are unhappy about this. Read more here.
Boris Kagarlitsky, one of Russia's leading dissidents and an opponent of Russia's war against Ukraine, has been arrested and jailed. This article describes the background to Kagarlitsky's arrest and the difficult situation of dissidents generally, and links ways for us to protest.
Finally, some good news, a judge in Montana has ruled in favor of a group of young people claiming that they have a constitutional right to a healthy environment, and that state regulators, etc. must be allowed to consider the climate impact of their regulatory decisions. A wonderful story!
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting, we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil is held in Yonkers on Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
This week's Rewards for stalwart newsletter readers focus on The Freedom Singers, who were on stage at the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom to perform "We Shall Not be Moved." Several of the original Freedom Singers were students at Albany State College (GA), who when arrested in 1962 used the "jail in" to become a singing group. Much of their music transformed the lyrics of gospel songs into freedom songs. Connected with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the group became ambassadors of the Freedom Movement to the North, raising funds for the Movement and explaining (esp. to Northern students) what the struggle was all about. In 1973 one of the founding Freedom Singers, Bernice Johnson Reagon, initiated Sweet Honey in the Rock, which carried on and popularized freedom music – such as "Ella's Song" – for new generations. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
We Are Witnessing the First Stages of Civilization's Collapse
By Michael T. Klare, The Nation [August 22, 2023]
---- In his 2005 bestseller Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, geographer Jared Diamond focused on past civilizations that confronted severe climate shocks, either adapting and surviving or failing to adapt and disintegrating. Among those were the Puebloan culture of Chaco Canyon, N.M., the ancient Mayan civilization of Mesoamerica, and the Viking settlers of Greenland. Such societies, having achieved great success, imploded when their governing elites failed to adopt new survival mechanisms to face radically changing climate conditions. … The question today is: Will our own elites perform any better than the rulers of Chaco Canyon, the Mayan heartland, and Viking Greenland? [Read More] And relevant here – "Global Subsidies for Fossil Fuels Skyrocket to $7 trillion per Year, as 2023 Promises to be Hottest on Record," by Juan Cole, Informed Comment [August 26, 2023] [Link].
Art – Awakening – Abolition
By Peter Linebaugh, Counterpunch [August 25, 2023]
---- The cover of Janie Paul's Making Art in Prison: Survival and Resistance shows a painting of a man in prison who stares at us. We see him on the other side of wire. In the background behind him are ten other prisoners in the yard. The artist is Rafael DeJesus. The man stares implacably. Neither vacant nor accusatory the expression is sad though not quite accepting. It is alert, as if to say to us, "your move." Our move must be abolition. [Read More]
The Deluge Facing Africa's Leaders Is Going to Get Worse
By Alex de Waal, New York Times [August 14, 2023]
---- An uninterrupted swath of African countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea is now under military rule. Mali, Guinea, Chad, Sudan, Burkina Faso and, most recently, Niger. Some of the putschists deposed elected leaders, like Niger's president, Mohamed Bazoum. Others forestalled elections or even overthrew the leaders they had installed. This is more than a series of distant and regrettable events. It's a sign that a large part of the continent — mostly in an area south of the Sahara known as the Sahel — has fallen off the path of building functioning states. It raises an unsettling question that affects the whole world: How can poor and insecure countries forge political order and give their citizens the confidence that democratic government can deliver what they need? [Read More]
And on the coup in Niger – "When Is a Coup Not a Coup? When the U.S. Says So," by Nick Turse, The Intercept [August 19, 2023] [Link]; and "What's Happening in Niger Is Far From a Typical Coup," by Vijay Prashad, ZNet [August 16, 2023] [Link].
War & Peace
(Video) Noam Chomsky – Opening Remarks for the International Peace Summit for Ukraine [June 12, 2023] – 7 minutes
---- Prior to the June 10 & 11 International Peace Summit in Vienna, Joseph Gerson recorded Noam's brief and cogent remarks, which opened and framed this conference with participants drawn from 32 countries. Noam was clear that for peace and to prevent escalation, it is essential to win a ceasefire and begin diplomatic negotiations for a just and peaceful end to the war. [See the Program]
War Without Humans [2011]
By Barbara Ehrenreich, Tom Dispatch
---- For a book about the all-too-human "passions of war," my 1997 work Blood Rites ended on a strangely inhuman note: I suggested that, whatever distinctly human qualities war calls upon — honor, courage, solidarity, cruelty, and so forth — it might be useful to stop thinking of war in exclusively human terms. After all, certain species of ants wage war and computers can simulate "wars" that play themselves out on-screen without any human involvement. … A decade and a half later, these musings do not seem quite so airy and abstract anymore. The trend, at the close of the twentieth century, still seemed to be one of ever more massive human involvement in war — from armies containing tens of thousands in the sixteenth century, to hundreds of thousands in the nineteenth, and eventually millions in the twentieth-century world wars. [Read More]
'Oppenheimer': an artistic visual tapestry of the bomb's science and power intricacies
By Lovely Umayam, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [August 17, 2023]
---- Paradoxically, the audience must feel Oppenheimer's love for his work to feel his horror and remorse after the Trinity test. Once the "gadget" successfully exploded on New Mexico, Oppenheimer had effectively weaponized the very thing he found so wondrous at Göttingen. Oppenheimer's curiosity, ego, and moral blindness that came with the exigencies of war transformed him from a theoretical physicist eagerly exploring the underpinnings of the universe to a bomb-maker entangled in political machinations largely out of his control. … By the final hour of the film, the audience endures not only the humiliation of Oppenheimer, but also the oppressive air of bureaucracy, with scene after scene of bureaucrats flicking through their binders, speaking on podiums, or huddled together, devising their next political move. I found a subtle message in this visual shift: the terrifying realization that the most destructive weapons in the world are ultimately left in the hands of fallible men—the jealous, the petty, and the power hungry. [Read More]
The War in Ukraine
Possibly significant also has been a flurry of articles quoting Pentagon and other spokespeople to the effect that Ukraine's military strategy is flawed (focusing on the east rather than exclusively on the south), and that Ukraine's "counteroffensive" is not working because of an unwillingness to "accept casualties." (The New York Times recently estimated Ukraine's casualties in the war as 70,000 killed and up to 120,000 wounded.) Why the Pentagon et al. is giving publicity to this line of criticism is a mystery to me: is it the beginning of the USA abandoning its blank-check commitment to Ukraine? Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone examines some of these statements in "Big Brave Western Proxy Warriors Keep Whining That Ukrainian Troops Are Cowards" [Link].
Two useful articles to read in their entirety this week are "U.S.-Backed Roll of the Dice Leaves Ukraine in Worse Crisis," by Code Pink's Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies [Link]; and "Washington Needs an Endgame in Ukraine," by Samuel Charap, Foreign Affairs. The latter article is important esp. because Foreign Affairs is the flagship publication for the US foreign policy elite.
The Climate Crisis
(Video) Plantation Disaster Capitalism: Native Hawaiians Organize to Stop Land & Water Grabs After Maui Fire
From Democracy Now! [August 18, 2023]
---- With the death toll from the Maui wildfires at 111 and as many as 1,000 still missing, we speak with Hawaiian law professor Kapuaʻala Sproat about the conditions that made the fires more destructive and what's yet to come for residents looking to rebuild their lives. Decades of neocolonialism in Hawaii have redirected precious water resources toward golf courses, resorts and other corporate ventures, turning many areas into tinderboxes and leaving little water to fight back against the flames. Now many Hawaiians say there is a power grab underway as real estate interests and other wealthy outsiders look to buy up land and water rights on the cheap as people are still reeling from the loss of their family members, livelihoods and communities. [See the Program] Also of interest – "Maui Fire Coverage Ignored Fossil Fuel Responsibility," by Robin Andersen, FAIR [August 25, 2023] [Link].
As the Red Rock Desert Broils Us in Beauty, Will We Have to Leave?
By Terry Tempest Williams, New York Times [August 18, 2023]
---- Aridity is baked into the people and places of the American Southwest. We possess a dry demeanor influenced by a landscape that is often cracked and weathered by wind, water and time. You see it in our faces and you feel it on the ground, but we hardly have a vocabulary for the extreme version of heat and drought we are now living through.… The red rock landscape I love and have lived in for a quarter of a century is a blistering terrain. The heat bears down on our shoulders with the weight of a burning world. We can hide from the heat in the desert in our air-conditioned homes, ours cooled by a heat pump powered by solar panels. But there is no place on Earth where we can escape the climate emergency for the duration. This is not being a doomer. This is dwelling with the facts that mirror our own lived experience. [Read More]
The State of the Union
The Constitution Prohibits Trump From Ever Being President Again
By J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe, The Atlantic [August 20, 2023]
---- As students of the United States Constitution for many decades we long ago came to the conclusion that the Fourteenth Amendment, the amendment ratified in 1868 that represents our nation's second founding and a new birth of freedom, contains within it a protection against the dissolution of the republic by a treasonous president. This protection, embodied in the amendment's often-overlooked Section 3, automatically excludes from future office and position of power in the United States government—and also from any equivalent office and position of power in the sovereign states and their subdivisions—any person who has taken an oath to support and defend our Constitution and thereafter rebels against that sacred charter, either through overt insurrection or by giving aid or comfort to the Constitution's enemies. The historically unprecedented federal and state indictments of former President Donald Trump have prompted many to ask whether his conviction pursuant to any or all of these indictments would be either necessary or sufficient to deny him the office of the presidency in 2024. [Read More]
Israel/Palestine
Why we created the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism
By Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi and Heike Schotten, Mondoweiss [August 24, 2023]
[FB – Prof. Rabab Abdulhadi teaches at San Francisco State in California, but she lives in Westchester and is an active member of JVP-Westchester] ---- At this point, it could not be clearer that Zionism is a political ideology tightly enmeshed with racism, fascism, and colonial dispossession. But the conditions for studying and resisting Zionism are incredibly difficult because Zionism has been framed by its proponents as "Jewish liberation," while opposition to Zionism has been historically framed as antisemitic (or even, as the ADL habitually characterizes left-wing groups, framed in the rhetoric of totalitarianism). … Despite the false antisemitic labels used to smear research and teaching on Zionism and Palestinian liberation, scholars and activists continue to produce crucial new knowledge in these areas. Extending well beyond the academy, this research is being undertaken by activists and organizers as well, in the United States, Palestine, and around the world who are directly confronting these systems of surveillance and repression. [Read More]
Six Tropes to Look Out for That Distort Israel/Palestine Coverage
By Lara-Nour Walton, FAIR [Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting] [August 22, 2023]
---- To say that U.S. news skews pro-Israel raises many an eyebrow, since the public has been conditioned to believe otherwise. … Yet such claims have been litigated, and the verdict is plain: U.S. corporate media lean in favor of Israel. As Abeer Al-Najjar (New Arab,7/28/22) noted: "The framing, sourcing, selection of facts, and language choices used to report on Palestine…often reveal systematic biases which distort the Palestinian struggle." Some trends are more ubiquitous than others, which is why it is vital that news readers become acquainted with the tropes that dominate coverage of the Israeli occupation. [Read More] 
