The Awful Spring of 1968 – How Martin Luther King, Junior and Robert F. Kennedy were brought ‘together’

We explore the intertwined fates of Martin Luther King, Junior, and Robert F. Kennedy – two men who were linked in tragedy. In the first of two parts, Christopher Benedict starts by considering an awful event in the tumultuous spring of 1968 that brought them ‘together’.

Martin Luther King, Junior and Robert F. Kennedy together in 1963.

Trouble is in the Land

Things were daily going from bad to worse in Memphis. No one could possibly have possessed the foresight to predict how terrible it would get.

The city’s mostly black sanitation workers had been on strike since February 12, 1968 following a breakdown in mediations between their union and newly elected mayor Henry Loeb which took place in the immediate aftermath of an on-the-job accident that claimed the lives of two public employees. Picket lines, sit-ins, peaceful protests, and a gospel singing marathon result in replacement scabs, an enforced curfew, police brutality, and the deligitimisation of their more than reasonable demands for safer working conditions and equitable economic compensation.

Persevering thanks to the endorsement and solidarity of the NAACP and Ministerial Association, the workers are further bolstered by the arrival of Martin Luther King Jr. who announces his orchestration of and participation in an organized citywide march. With King in the lead, an ambulatory rally sets out from Clayborn Temple en route to City Hall on March 28. Many demonstrators carry placards or wear sandwich boards bearing four words, the simplicity of which only adds immeasurably to their profundity. I AM A MAN.

It would not be ungraciously fair or unfair to jump to the conclusion that this self-affirmation was a contemporary repudiation of the Constitutional Convention’s compromise that individual slaves represented only three-fifths of a human being, a damning credence espoused by the founding fathers of a nation which, as King articulated in his I Have a Dream speech, “has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.” It was clear that “her citizens of color” were now intent upon collecting payment of the promissory note on which America had defaulted for nearly two hundred years. “This will not be a dramatic gesture,” vowed Dr. King, “but a demand for long overdue compensation.”

The march never reaches its destination. Vandalism is dealt with harshly, by means of billy clubs, tear gas and bullets. Hundreds of arrests, scores of injuries, and the death of 16 year-old Larry Payne necessitate the intervention of the National Guard shortly after sundown. Dr. King cancels a planned visit to Africa to see things through in Memphis, returning on April 3 to deliver what would prove to be a chillingly prophetic oration at the Masonic Temple.

Addressing the potential of his having walked directly into harm’s way by virtue of the threats issued “from some of our sick white brothers”, King concedes that “longevity has its place, but I’m not concerned about that now. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. And I’m so happy tonight,” he shouts exultantly, his voice soaring as the congregation likewise gives voice to its collective approval. “I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” Martin Luther King retires to the Lorraine Motel. In a boarding house across the street, a white supremacist drifter named James Earl Ray unpacks binoculars and a rifle from a duffel bag.

Miles to Go Before I Sleep

Like the very year itself, the 1968 Democratic Primary season was both a momentous and contentious one. New York’s carpet bagging Senator, Robert F. Kennedy (bobby), faced challenges from three formidable sources. First there was Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who entered the fray after Lyndon Johnson famously declared his intention to neither seek nor accept his party’s nomination. It was common knowledge that, despite the popularity contests at the polls, the party delegates overwhelmingly supported the old stalwart Humphrey.

Secondly, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy succeeded in galvanizing the youth movement which was anti-establishment, anti-war, and as hostile as college-aged peaceniks could be towards Robert Kennedy who, only now that LBJ had removed himself from the equation of presidential succession, spoke out openly and vehemently against Vietnam. Kennedy touched on both matters simultaneously by answering a question from a student at the University of Alabama with the jocular rejoinder that “I said I was for a coalition government in Saigon. Not here.”

Last, but certainly not least, the ever-present ghost of John F. Kennedy haunted his brother, Bobby, to the point where he seemed most of the time, in the words of journalist and Bobby’s close friend Jack Newfield, “half a zombie”. After receiving an emotional twenty-two minute standing ovation on the last day of the 1964 DNC in Atlantic City where he introduced a short film on Jack’s legacy, Bobby is said to have climbed out onto a nearby fire escape and cried. He often wondered whether the ecstatic throngs that showed up for his campaign rallies pulling at his clothing and mop-top hair in the hope of scoring a personal souvenir were there to see and hear him or simply touch a tangible extension of who and what his brother meant to them.

April 4 began, for Kennedy, as little more than the launch of the Indiana primaries. He delivered talks on child poverty, hunger, and joblessness first at Notre Dame University then at Ball State where he was confronted by a young black man about whether the Senator’s faith in white America was justified. “I think the vast majority of white people want to do the decent thing,” Kennedy responded.

Before boarding a plane from Muncie to Indianapolis, where he was to address an inner-city suburb that evening, Bobby received a phone call from his campaign manager Pierre Salinger (who had been JFK’s Press Secretary) informing him that Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis. “When he landed in Indianapolis,” recalled Jack Newfield, “Kennedy was told that King was dead. Shot in the head-a wound not unlike John Kennedy’s. Robert Kennedy gasped and then wept for his adversary turned comrade.”

Something to Be Desired

Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were unlikely allies, and often uneasy ones at that. Bobby and Jack twice interceded on King’s behalf while imprisoned, a politically expedient but not totally disingenuous first effort which succeeded in excusing him from a sentence of hard labor after a protest in Georgia during the closing months of the 1960 presidential election cycle, followed by getting King removed from solitary confinement and placed back into the general population of Birmingham Jail from where he wrote his famous letter in response to fellow clergymen who, not unlike the Kennedys in days not long gone, viewed the civil rights leader as a rabble-rouser and trouble-maker.

It was Robert who, as Attorney General, initiated an investigation into King’s alleged Communist affiliations and approved the home and office wiretapping order requested by J. Edgar Hoover who had become obsessed in a most unwholesome way with the extracurricular sexual exploits of both King and John Kennedy.

King had voiced his displeasure at the failure of the Justice Department to enforce integrated public transit as well as Bobby’s reluctance in providing proper protection for the interracial Freedom Rides which departed Washington DC for points south, leading to arrests, bloody beatings, and the firebombing of one bus in Anniston, Alabama. After initially calling for restraint on the part of the Freedom Riders, Bobby arranged for armed escorts courtesy of the Alabama State Highway Patrol to conduct them safely to Montgomery by Greyhound.

August 1963’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was another thorn in the side of the Kennedys. Despite making good on their pledge of cooperation with the event’s Big Six (King, John Lewis, Roy Wilkins, A. Philip Randolph, James Farmer, and Whitney Young) in coordinating the rally, the excision of the more incendiary passages in John Lewis’ opening speech critical of the Kennedy presidency was guided by the administration’s heavy hand.

The President and Attorney General were far more consistent and pro-active in their handling of James Meredith’s desegregation of the University of Mississippi and even more so in Bobby’s successful standoff with Governor George Wallace who personally acted as a bodily barrier against the admission of Vivian Jones and James Hood into the University of Alabama. King noted that the President “grew a great deal” between his inauguration and assassination with the mournful misgiving that “he was getting ready to throw off political considerations and see the real moral issues.”

While the full extent of JFK’s ideological evolution can only be surmised due to its violent interruption, Robert Kennedy had an additional four and a half years to continue his forward progress before suffering a similarly obscene fate. As Senator of New York, Bobby created the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation after touring the poverty-stricken, drug and gang-infested neighborhood known as Brooklyn’s Little Harlem and being deeply affected by what he saw and who he met there. During the 1968 presidential campaign, he would make purposeful and extensive detours to urban areas where others feared to go-aligning himself along the way with the inner cities’ disenfranchised black communities, Cesar Chavez and California’s fruit-picking migrant workers, and former SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) President, Freedom Rider, Washington Marcher, and Kennedy agitator John Lewis who is now and has been since 1987 the Democratic Congressional Representative of Georgia’s 5th District.

The Awful Grace of God

Lewis, then a member of Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign staff, was waiting at 17th and Broadway, the site of Bobby’s planned rally, along with approximately 3,000 spectators. Although Lewis and fellow aide Earl Graves were aware of Martin Luther King’s assassination, most early arrivals among the gathering were not. The latecomers on the outer perimeter, however, had heard the news and were pressing in, filling the night air with the possibility of sinister unease as riots had already erupted spontaneously and sporadically across the country. Several of Kennedy’s more anxious advisors cautioned him to cancel his appearance and the local police could not and would not guarantee his personal safety should he choose to proceed. John Lewis was of the belief that they simply could not “send them home without saying anything at all. Kennedy has to speak, for his sake and for the sake of these people.”

Bobby had already made up his mind to not only press ahead and address the audience, but to jettison his prepared remarks and speak from the heart rather than read from a piece of paper. Although speechwriter Frank Mankiewicz failed to reach Kennedy with his notes before he stepped to the forefront of a crowded flatbed truck, Adam Walinsky did hand the Senator his frantically composed thoughts. Bobby thanked Walinsky and accepted the draft which he promptly folded and stuffed into a pocket of his overcoat.

For the five minutes that he spoke, “his face gaunt and distressed and full of anguish” recalled television correspondent Charles Quinn, Bobby gripped in his right hand a tightly rolled sheaf of papers on which he had jotted down the skeletal structure of his brief remarks on the desolate drive over, after having dropped a pregnant Ethel off at the hotel, wringing the disregarded sheets with his left hand at various times.

Without preamble or a customary introduction, a visibly distraught Kennedy began by saying, “I have bad news for you, for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world, and that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.” An audible shockwave of torment pulsates throughout the crowd, cries of disbelief, screams of horror. “We can move in that direction (bitterness…hatred…revenge) in greater polarization, filled with hatred toward one another,” he continued. “Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.”

Struggling against the strangulation of naked misery, Bobby for the first time publicly references his brother’s murder while quelling the “hatred and mistrust” that blacks may be tempted to feel and act upon. “I can only say that I had a member of my own family killed,” he avows with curiously detached phrasing, “but he was killed by a white man.”

In times of personal crisis, Bobby sought the solace and wisdom of Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies. On stage at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, he honored Jack with a passage from Romeo and Juliet. “When he shall die, take him and cut him out into the stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night and pay no worship to the garish sun.”

This night is no exception and Bobby, somehow effortlessly unifying the emotional with the cerebral, recites these heart-wrenchingly beautiful words from Aeschylus, “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

“It is not the end of violence, it is not the end of lawlessness, it is not the end of disorder,” concedes Kennedy to the reverently hushed assembly. “But the vast majority of white people and the vast majority of black people in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings who abide in our land.” This is met by affirmative cheers and applause and Kennedy closes by revisiting the Greeks and their dedication “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”

Riots, resulting in thirty-nine deaths, twenty-five hundred injuries, tens of millions of dollars in property damage, and the presence of seventy-five thousand National Guardsmen occurred throughout one hundred and ten cities that night. Indianapolis remained respectfully tranquil.

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Was Switzerland neutral or a Nazi ally in World War Two?

Switzerland had a curious position during World War Two. It was officially a neutral country, but that neutrality was not always strictly maintained. Here, Laura Kerr considers how neutral Switzerland really was and how helpful it may have been to Nazi Germany…

Fascist leaders Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler together in Munich in 1940. The pair discussed an invasion of Switzerland during World War Two.

Switzerland. Three things come to mind: watches, chocolate and neutrality. And for good reason. Firstly, Switzerland is home to both Rolex and Omega which can boast the titles of ‘first watch on the moon’, ‘James Bond’s official watch since 1995’, and the watch of choice for both the American and British armies during World War One. However despite its truly fascinating watch history, that is not the aspect of Switzerland that I am focusing on today.

Switzerland is the longest standing neutral nation in the world and has not taken part in a war since 1505. Its official stance of non-involvement had been decided during The Congress of Vienna in 1815, in which major European leaders met to discuss the nature of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon.

Up until World War Two, Switzerland upheld her stance of neutrality rather admirably. But despite not engaging in combat during the war, Switzerland’s so called ‘neutrality’ has been heavily scrutinized in recent years, with particular emphasis on border controls, banking and trade with Nazi Germany.

Hitler’s decision not to invade

The first question that needs to be answered to fully understand Switzerland’s position during WWII, is why Hitler did not invade the country while trying to establish the Third Reich. Hitler described Switzerland as a “pimple on the face of Europe” and both its geographical location and culture would seem like a clear target for the Nazis.

A good way to summaries Hitler’s reasoning not to invade Switzerland is simply ‘risk versus reward’. At the prospect of a German invasion, the Swiss improved and invested heavily in their ‘National Redoubt’ (The Swiss National Defense Plan). Along with the tough terrain and modern machinery, this didn’t make the Swiss a particularly easy target.  Not only was the risk high, the reward wasn’t tremendously great for Hitler either. Switzerland and Germany already had a beneficial trading partnership which helped Germany’s war effort. Additionally, the neutral but infamous Swiss banks made Switzerland useful to the Nazis.

There’s little doubt that once the Allies had been defeated, Hitler would have mobilized an attack on Switzerland (a planned invasion was named known Operation Tannenbaum). But as it was, his attention and resources were preoccupied on bigger enemies so any attacks on Switzerland had to wait.

Nevertheless, by 1940 Switzerland was completely surrounded by Axis powers and the Nazis occupied France, making it increasingly difficult to stay clear of the Second World War. It is the ways in which Switzerland allowed and in some ways, assisted, Nazi Germany which makes her “neutrality” so questionable.

Border control

After the Nazis gained power in Germany, many racial minorities attempted to flee to avoid persecution. Switzerland, a neighboring but impartial nation seemed a clear destination choice. As well as an agreement of neutrality, Switzerland had also pledged to be an asylum for any discriminated groups in Europe. They had taken in Huguenots that had fled from France in the 16th century and was an asylum for many liberals, socialists and anarchists from all over Europe in the 19th century. However, this wasn’t exactly upheld during WWII.

In fear of angering Hitler and prompting an invasion, Swiss border regulations were tightened. They did establish internment camps which housed 200,000 refugees, of which 20,000 were Jewish. Importantly though, the Swiss government taxed the Swiss Jewish community for any Jewish refugees they allowed to enter the country.

In 1942 alone, over 30,000 Jews were denied entrance into Switzerland, leaving them under the control of the Nazis. In an infamous speech, a Swiss government official stated “our little life boat is full.” Although the prospect of leaving Jewish civilians to certain death under the Nazis is unthinkable, there are arguments in Switzerland’s defense. Switzerland was a small country (with a population of roughly 4 million) which was completely surrounded by Nazi troops and nations under Hitler’s control. In comparison, the USA (arguably the safest nation for fleeing Jews) repeatedly rejected Jewish refugees and only accommodated approximately 250,000 people between the years from 1939 to 1945; tiny compared to its size. Historians today estimate that the USA could have easily accommodated over 6 million refugees.

But that is not the only controversy when it comes to Swiss border control. It was the Chief of the Swiss Federal Police, Dr Heinrich Rothmund, who proposed the idea of marking Jewish passports with a red ‘J’, and which became an important method of discrimination adopted by the Nazis. The Swiss government wanted to know and control the amount of Jews entering Switzerland but it led to a measure that made fleeing from the Nazis even harder for Jews.

Interestingly, on the March 8, 1995, the Swiss government made an official apology for their involvement with the Nazi Party, in particular their role in developing the ‘J’ stamp.

Banking

To this day, Swiss banks are known for their secretive but successful policies that created one of the strongest economies in the world. They were massively important during WWII, especially to high-ranking Nazis, and became another way in which Swiss neutrality was questioned.

But why were they so important?

Until 1936, the Swiss Franc was the only remaining freely convertible currency in the world. Therefore both the Allies and Axis Powers sold large amounts of gold to the Swiss National Bank and relied heavily on its economic stability. The German national currency was no longer a means of payment in international markets which meant the Nazis relied on Swiss banks in order to buy war machinery and commodities from other countries.

But if the banks accepted gold from both sides, then surely they are still technically neutral? Although that may be the case, it is the type of gold and the secretive way in which it was handled which has caused massive controversy in recent years. For over 581,000 Francs worth of ‘melmer’ gold taken from Holocaust victims was sold and kept by Swiss banks. Following the defeat of the Nazis, Swiss banks struggled with what to do with the gold, whose rightful owners had been killed in the awful genocide.

Trade

Prior to WWII, Switzerland had relied heavily on trade with Germany to build a strong and economically powerful nation. It was an industrialized country with virtually no raw materials, experiencing the same economic depression that was felt throughout both Europe and America. When World War Two commenced, Switzerland worried that any non-cooperation would lead to a cease in vital trade and even more significantly, an invasion. As it was completely surrounded by Nazi controlled countries, the Swiss had two choices: cooperate with Nazi trade policies or fight against them.

Between the years of 1939 and 1945, roughly 10,276,000 tons of coal was transported from Germany to Switzerland and provided 41% of Switzerland’s energy requirement. This demonstrates how the Swiss were keen to stay on good terms with Germany to continue their vital trade.

One thing Switzerland provided to the Nazis in return for important materials was access to the railway that ran through Switzerland and connected Italy and Germany. In the event of an invasion, the Swiss army planned to destroy vital tunnels and bridges, immobilizing the railway for years and making transportation between Italy and Germany nearly impossible. To uphold their neutral stand, Switzerland’s governments laid down restrictions on what could be transported over their railway. The Swiss would only allow sealed boxes to pass through without checking their contents, in exchange for raw materials and trade. Officially, the Swiss banned any transportation of people (troops) or war goods over their railway, but the extent to which this was upheld is very questionable.  

So, despite its attempts, Switzerland struggled to remain truly neutral during the Second World War. In fairness, World War Two was a ‘Total War’ which made it hard to remain impartial for almost every nation. It is the type of involvement, however, that is interesting and less well known to people studying history.

The extent to which a country remains neutral during times of armed conflict goes beyond their lack of involvement in armed combat. A country can only be considered neutral if they demonstrate no bias in business, social and economic activity.

Was Switzerland neutral? Arguably not.

But the extent to which they ‘helped’ the Nazis is a much more complex matter.

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African Security and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Jesse A. Heitz considers the issue of African security in a unique way by answering the question of “Which of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse - Conquest, War, Famine, or Pestilence - has most affected African security in the second half of the 20th century and early 21st century?”  He argues that of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, war has posed the greatest threat to African security. But the other horsemen have had significant roles to play – and are often closely linked to war…

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Viktor Vasnetsov. 1887.

Pestilence – Libya & Kenya

War has a great effect on the horseman known as Pestilence. The term pestilence will extend beyond its biblical connotation.  It will be comprised of both its traditional identity of disease, as well as what can be described as a political disease, that being political instability.

In 1969, Libyan King Idris was deposed in a military coup by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.  The freshly-minted dictator quickly introduced state socialism and nationalized virtually all of the country’s industry, including the all-important oil industry.[1]  Over the next several decades Gaddafi’s Libya militarily intervened in neighboring states and its nationals engaged in terrorist acts around the globe, most notably the 1988 Lockerbie Bombing.[2]  In early 2011, violent protests broke out in Benghazi following the arrest of a human rights campaigner.[3]  Gaddafi’s security forces quickly retaliated, leading to a full-scale civil war.[4]  With help from allied airstrikes, Gaddafi was expelled from Tripoli in August of that year.  Within two months he had been captured and killed.[5] 

While Gaddafi had maintained his rule for four decades through the use of exceptional cunning and political mastery, the Libyan public had grown tired of the rampant corruption within his regime, whose officials often demanded millions of dollars in consultancy fees from foreign firms.[6]  He was documented to have extorted $1.5 billion from oil companies to pay for the Lockerbie settlement, and was said to have siphoned off tens of billions of dollars in state revenue into his own personal coffers.[7]  With Gaddafi’s corrupt, but relatively stable, government gone the post-Gaddafi Libya has been in a veritable state of violent flux ever since.

In Kenya, the course of events has been considerably different insofar as its government never experienced a period of state failure.  However, that is not to say that it did not fluctuate between efficient and ineffective.[8]  The swansong of the British Empire in Kenya, the Kenyan Emergency, lasted from 1952 to 1960.  With the level of conflict and tension so fierce, Britain opted to hasten granting Kenya its independence.[9]  For the following forty years, Kenya was marked by tribal animosity, political assassinations, and human rights violations.[10]  In recent years Kenya has stabilized, but the U.S. State Department has warned that regional instability in the Horn of Africa is the greatest threat to its security.[11]  Kenya has thus far extracted itself from its tradition of political pestilence born out of years of armed conflict and opposition, only to have its newfound stability threatened by the wars taking place in neighboring lands.

The nations of Africa are not the sole actors in the creation of political instability.  Foreign actors continue to jeopardize the political stability of developing nations in Africa.  Once it was perpetrated by the colonial powers, then dueling superpowers at the height of the Cold War, now it is nations that seek to service their own national interests.  For example, Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, which waged war against Robert Mugabe’s forces throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and the oppressive South Africa, found commercial partners in the United States.  The U.S. and its firms purchased large sums of manganese, platinum, and chromium from South Africa[12], while it bought chromium from Rhodesia[13] as well.  It cannot be doubted that such transactions did well to fund and prolong the conflicts raging in those states.

Pestilence & Disease

The final manifestation of pestilence heavily influenced by war is disease itself.  The Darfur Conflict illustrates this well.  Since fighting broke out in 2003 between the Sudanese government, its allied rebel groups and militias, and its enemies in the southern reaches of the country, some 2.7 million have been displaced[14], with an estimated 300,000 deaths.  Of those 300,000 deaths, it is reported that 80% were due to disease.[15]  While humanitarian organizations have made strides in caring for refugees, the threat of violence and attacks on convoys diminishes the ability of aid groups to combat disease by providing medical care and immunizations, clean water, and the rations necessary to stave off malnutrition-related illness.[16]

During and in the wake of war, numerous endemic diseases have surfaced, plaguing civilian populations.  The massive migrations of refugees have allowed a disease such as malaria to infect millions, and as of 1998 Africa accounted for some 90% of the world’s cases of malaria.[17]  Additionally, sub-Saharan Africa is horribly afflicted with varying types of infectious illness ranging from cholera and tuberculosis to dysentery.  Authorities estimate that 70% of the deaths in this massive portion of Africa are due to infectious disease.[18]

Another disease which is decimating many African nations is HIV/AIDS.  According to the U.N., in 2011 there were 1.8 million new cases of HIV for a total of 23.5 million people living with the disease, with some 1.2 million people dying from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.[19]  Stable and relatively conflict free states such as Botswana have achieved an 80% treatment level for its citizens suffering from HIV/AIDS.[20]  For war-torn and recovering states such as South Sudan and Somalia, the treatment rate falls to below 20%.[21]  Perhaps the most horrific correlation between HIV transmission and war is the widespread occurrence of sexual assault in war zones.  For example, scholars have alleged that there was a “willful transmission” of HIV, or the use of HIV as a weapon, during the Rwandan genocide when an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 women were raped.[22] 

One of the forgotten health concerns stemming from war is mental health.  Some sources have stated that the population of Uganda, which has been battling an insurrection in its northern territory for two decades, may have an incidence of PTSD in excess of 50%, and an incidence of clinical depression that sits above 70%.[23]  As shown, war can create and exacerbate the physical and psychological manifestations of pestilence.

Conquest – Troubles in Congo and Rwanda

The second horseman, Conquest, has been showcased in a series of intertwined wars that marred the Congo and its neighbors for decades and continue to define its security.  In the early 1950s, the native peoples of the Belgian colony of Congo achieved citizenship, which placed them on a more even footing with the Europeans that occupied their land.[24]  By 1958, the Congolese people began their march towards independence in earnest with the rise of Kasa-Vubu.[25]  Despite the tangible signs of progress, the call for immediate independence grew louder.  The Belgians had hoped to ever so slowly transition into releasing the reins on the Congo, but after riots in 1959, it was clear that such lofty aspirations were unrealistic.  By June the following year, the Belgians abruptly left their prized colony.[26]  Revolts and rioting quickly ensued, leading to several years of government instability, external interventions, and bloody conflict.[27] 

By November, Joseph Mobutu had seized power in a coup and wasted little time in tightening his grip on the infrastructure barren state, going so far as to rename it Zaire.  He cemented his control over the military, nationalized the industry within the state, and racked up the favor of Western governments who saw him as an opponent of the Communist Sphere.[28]  Throughout the 1970s, he engorged himself on the industry he had absorbed and brutally crushed any opposition to his rule.[29]  By the 1980s, an opposition party under the leadership of Etienne Tshisekedi emerged and kick-started the process of eroding Mobutu’s position.  As the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, the West found decreasing utility from the murderous dictator and began applying diplomatic pressure on his regime.  Mobutu’s control continued to fade as his military began voicing their displeasure.[30]

Events in neighboring Rwanda in 1994 sealed Mobutu’s fate.  At that point Rwanda had a population of approximately seven million people, ripe with ethnic tension between the majority Hutus and the minority Tutsis.[31]  In April of that year, Rwandan President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down and violence erupted almost immediately.[32]  Officials capable of stemming the bloodshed were quickly dispatched.[33]  By the end of the 100-day genocide, nearly three-quarters of the Tutsi population had been wiped out.[34]  Refugees and Tutsi rebel forces flooded into Zaire, eventually launching a counterattack and regaining control of Rwanda.  Then it was the turn of the perpetrators of the genocide to flee to Zaire.[35]

Congolese rebel forces under Laurent Kabila, a longtime Mobutu opponent, which had been growing in strength for years, led the charge against the Hutu rebels operating in Zaire.  With the support of Rwanda and Uganda, Kabila’s AFDL soon marched on Mobutu.  The First Congo War was well underway.  Kabila quickly overthrew Mobutu, who fled into exile, and renamed the nation the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).[36]  Yet, Kabila ruled with a firm hand.  Such a governing style was not in the best interests of his backers, who had hoped to plunder the DRC’s vast resources.[37]  Rwanda and Uganda then began funding the rebel groups fighting to unseat him.  Soon, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, and Chad, all sent troops in support of Kabila, with the intent of serving their own economic interests.[38]

War continued to ravage the DRC for the years that followed.  By 1999, the United Nations had stepped in levying the Lusaka Peace Accord.[39]  All signatories except Rwanda and Uganda withdrew their troops.  With violence still raging, the U.N. grossly increased its peacekeeping force.[40]  In 2006, Rwandan President, Paul Kagame, stated that all of his troops had been removed from the DRC’s Kivu provinces.[41]  Later that year, Joseph Kabila, Laurent Kabila’s son and successor following his 2001 assassination, signed a new constitution which ushered in sweeping reforms.[42] 

In 2008, Rwanda and the DRC, which had been steadily rebuilding the foundations of its government[43], joined forces to fight a rebel group named Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), which had been operating in the DRC’s Kivu provinces.[44]  Unfortunately, by 2012, relations between the two rival states had broken down once more, with the DRC accusing Rwanda and Uganda of arming the M23 band of rebels.[45]  By the close of 2012, the U.N. was forced to maintain a 20,000 man strong peacekeeping force in the DRC.[46]  This seemingly endless string of war has devastated the DRC, with some four million people, nearly all of whom were civilians, perishing.[47]  The recent Kivu Conflict alone has displaced a reported three million people.[48]

Famine – From Ethiopia to Nigeria and beyond

The third horseman to be discussed is Famine.  Again, here we will extend beyond the word’s strict definition.  It will deal with both food shortages and economic difficulties, or hunger and poverty.  War is commonly attributed as a factor capable of causing famine.  In times of war and targeted violence, fields and food production facilities are often damaged or destroyed, efficient transportation is often impaired, and large populations of people are relocated to sometimes barren refugee camps where rations may be substandard.

A prominent example of war impacting or even causing famine could be witnessed through an examination of a portion of the Ethiopian Civil War during the 1970s and 1980s, when Ethiopia’s dictator, Mengistu, withheld food assistance to the Tigray peasantry, of whom his opponents were comprised.[49]  In the Democratic Republic of Congo, war has worsened food shortages.  During the never-ending sequence of war in that country, farmers in certain regions have lost up to 50% of their tools and 75% of their livestock.[50]  The 1984-85 famine in Ethiopia resulted in approximately one million deaths alone.[51]  The Nigerian Civil War, which took place from 1967 to 1970, witnessed 3,000 to 5,000 people lose their lives each day due to starvation.[52]  Famine, while complicated by numerous factors, can most certainly be both a cause and effect of war.

The second form of famine takes the shape of economics.  War has the ability to directly affect the properties that can drive economic decline and stagnation.  War can, and often does, cripple infrastructure, displace civilians including laborers, and foster the growth and extension of disease that can greatly tax healthcare systems.  One only needs to look at Libyan GDP per capita from the years 2010 to 2012 to view the economic impacts war can cause.  In 2010 Libyan GDP per capita was $15,900.  In 2011, the year of the civil war that ousted Gaddafi, it was reduced by over half to a paltry $6,100.  The following year it had rebounded to $12,300.[53] 

As mentioned above, the African continent had long been pilfered by colonial occupiers, self-indulging dictators, and opportunistic states.  There may be no better example of such a situation than that of Sierra Leone during the 1990s.  Rich with diamonds, ominously nicknamed “blood diamonds”, Sierra Leone was once besieged by rebels so brutal that their hallmark was amputating the hands and arms of civilians, including children, yet its neighbors such as Liberia, as well as nations and companies hailing from several different continents, have coldly picked sides based on who promised to auction off diamonds for the lowest price.[54]

War – The ultimate horseman?

In several African nations, economic growth is underway.  The mining and oil industries in particular are rushing into the “Dark Continent” with an almost unprecedented fervor[55], and the resultant influx of revenue for many once perpetually impoverished nations will only serve to bolster their security.  However, Malawian Vice President, Justin Mawelezi, warned in 2002 that armed conflict in southern Africa was a threat to attracting meaningful direct foreign investment.[56]  In other words, war could jeopardize economic growth.

In terms of African security, war has proven itself to be the bringer of pestilence, famine, and conquest.  War can cripple entire institutions such as education[57], it can create armies of child soldiers, and it can propel itself through attracting arms traffickers[58].  What makes the case for war’s supremacy amongst its fellow horsemen is that it is quantifiable and visible, its barbarism and resultant chaos are in plain view.  In biblical terms, war is fully capable of being, and often is, the proverbial “Alpha and Omega”, the beginning and the end of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

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[1] "Libya Profile." BBC News. BBC, 26 June 2013. Web. 12 July 2013. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13755445>.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid

[6] Lichtblau, Eric, David Rohde, and James Risen. "Shady Dealings Helped Qaddafi Build Fortune and Regime." Nytimes.com. New York Times, 24 Mar. 2011. Web. 13 July 2013. <http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/world/africa/24qaddafi.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Charles Hornsby, Kenya: A History Since Independence, (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012), p.3

[9] Duncan Hill, World at War: 1945 to the Present Day, (Croxley Green, Hertfordshire, UK: Transatlantic, 2011), p.22

[10] "Kenya: A Political History." BBC News. BBC, 24 Dec. 1997. Web. 10 July 2013. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/special_report/for_christmas/_new_year/kenyan_elections/41737.stm>.

[11] "U.S. Relations With Kenya." State.gov. U.S. Department of State, 11 Dec. 2012. Web. 16 July 2013. <http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2962.htm>.

[12] Thomas G. Paterson, John Garry Clifford, and Kenneth J. . Hagan, American Foreign Relations: Volume 2, Since 1895, (Boston Mass: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), p.424

[13] Paterson, p.384

[14] "Darfur--Overview." Unicef.org. UNICEF, Oct. 2008. Web. 18 July 2013. <http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/sudan_darfuroverview.html>.

[15] Associated Press. "Study: Most Deaths in Darfur War from Disease." Msnbc.com. NBC News, 23 Jan. 2010. Web. 12 July 2013.

[16] "Darfur--Overview.”.

[17] Thomas C. Nchinda, "Malaria: A Reemerging Disease in Africa." Emerging Infectious Diseases 4.3 (1998): 398-403. Ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. World Health Organization. Web. 15 July 2013.

[18] Maire A. Connolly, and David L. Heymann. "Deadly Comrades: War and Infectious Diseases." The Lancet Supplement 360 (2002): 23-24. Rice University. Web. 11 July 2013.

[19] "Regional Fact Sheet 2012: Sub-Saharan Africa." Unaids.org. United Nations, n.d. Web. 9 July 2013. <http://www.unaids.org/en/media/unaids/contentassets/documents/epidemiology/2012/gr2012/2012_FS_regional_ssa_en.pdf>.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid

[22] Obijiofor Aginam, "Rape and HIV as Weapons of War." Unu.edu. United Nations University, 27 June 2012. Web. 13 July 2013.

[23] Stephen Leahy, "Africa: Untreated Mental Illness the Invisible Fallout of War and Poverty." Allafrica.com. All Africa, 10 Oct. 2012. Web. 19 July 2013.

[24] Sean Rorison, Congo: Democratic Republic and Republic, (Chalfont St. Peter: Bradt Travel Guides, 2008), p. 65

[25] Rorison, p. 66

[26] Rorison, p. 66

[27] Rorison, p. 67

[28] Rorison, p. 68

[29] Rorison, p. 69

[30] Rorison, p. 69

[31] "Genocide in Rwanda." Unitedhumanrights.org. United Human Rights Council, n.d. Web. 16 July 2013. <http://www.unitedhumanrights.org/genocide/genocide_in_rwanda.htm>.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Rorison, p. 70

[36] Rorison, p. 70

[37] "DR Congo." Refugeesinternational.org. Refugees International, n.d. Web. 17 July 2013.

[38] Rorison, p. 71

[39] Rorison, p. 72

[40] Rorison, p. 73

[41] Rorison, p. 74

[42] Rorison, p. 74

[43] "Q&A: DR Congo Conflict." BBC News. BBC, 20 Nov. 2012. Web. 11 July 2013. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11108589>.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Rorison, p. 71

[48] "DR Congo.”.

[49] "Ethiopian Famine 25th Anniversary - Questions and Answers." One.org.us. One, n.d. Web. 16 July 2013. <http://www.one.org/c/us/issuebrief/3127/>.

[50] "Congo: Grappling with Malnutrition and Post-Conflict Woes." Irinnews.org. IRIN Africa, 9 Aug. 2007. Web. 11 July 2013.

[51] "Ethiopian Famine 25th Anniversary - Questions and Answers.".

[52] Hurst, Ryan. "Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970)." Blackpast.org. The Black Past, n.d. Web. 18 July 2013. <http://www.blackpast.org/?q=gah/nigerian-civil-war-1967-1970>.

[53] "Libya." Cia.gov. The Central Intelligence Agency, 10 July 2013. Web. 16 July 2013.

[54] James Rupert, "Diamond Hunters Fuel Africa's Brutal Wars." Washingtonpost.com. The Washington Post, 16 Oct. 1999. Web. 14 July 2013. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/daily/oct99/sierra16.htm>.

[55] Leka, Acha, Susan Lund, Charles Roxburgh, and Arend Van Wamelen. "What's Driving Africa's Growth?" Www.Mckinsey.com. McKinsey & Company, June 2010.

[56] "Instability Scares Off Investment, Malawi Official Warns." Panapress.com. Panapress, 12 Jan. 2002. Web. 15 July 2013.

[57] "Conflict Makes Millions Miss School." Aljazeera.com. Al Jazeera English, 1 Mar. 2011. Web. 15 July 2013. <http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2011/03/201131194628514946.html>.

[58] Kester Kenn Klomegah, "Russia Eyes Africa to Boost Arms Sales." Guardian.co.uk. Guardian News and Media, 04 Apr. 2013. Web. 18 July 2013. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/04/arms-trade-africa>.

The fascinating man who left Racism in the Southern US for Europe and World War One

The story of an incredible person… From the racialized world of Jim Crow Georgia and the boxing rings of England and France to the killing fields of World War One and the celebrated jazz clubs of the Montmartre—Eugene Bullard lived an exceptional life.

Eugene Bullard with his pet in 1917 as a pilot in the Lafayette Flying Corps in France.

Born in Columbus, Georgia in 1895, Bullard, like most Southern blacks of his generation, seemed destined for a life of crude “shotgun houses”, low grade labor, perpetual deference, and limited social mobility. Jim Crow, the region’s racial caste system, proved insufferable as it subjected the region’s black residents to vitriolic racism, de jure segregation that was most certainly separate but anything but equal, and political disenfranchisement. Based on his skin color alone, Bullard was born into a lifetime of second-class citizenship. Part of being a second-class citizen meant living under the never ceasing threat of racial violence. In fact, the Jim Crow South’s predilection for terror tactics made an early, but paramount impression on the young Bullard. His father, a man known as ‘Chief Big Ox” for his vaunted strength and supposed Indian ancestry, was the victim of physical and verbal abuse at the warehouse where he worked (his father worked as a drayman and stevedore along Columbus’s riverfront). After remonstrating with the warehouse’s owner, W.C. Brady, the abuse persisted. Infuriated with the elder Bullard’s plea to Brady, the supervisor responded by striking “Chief Big Ox” with an iron hook. The physically superior Bullard subdued his assailant and calmly launched him into a storage cellar. Brady quickly realized Bullard’s innocence in the situation and engineered a compromise between the two men. However, later that evening, a drunken white mob surrounded the Bullard home, attempting to push their way into both doors. The elder Bullard waited inside with his shotgun in hand while the rest of his family huddled together in fright. Luckily the mob, apparently too inebriated to continue, disbanded, but Bullard, fearing for his safety, fled the city while the tensions cooled. The elder Bullard narrowly escaped what would have most certainly been a lynching, but the incident illuminated the horrid reality of Jim Crow so clearly that even young Eugene, still only a child, could easily understand: though no longer slaves, Southern blacks were hardly free.

To another place

Feeling, on one hand, the intolerable restrictions on black life in the South and the natural wonder lust of youth on the other, the young Eugene took to the road at the ripe age of eleven. Even in his adolescence, the headstrong Bullard desired to be his own man, and after traveling with a band of gypsies and using his skillful horsemanship to earn a wage on a number of farms in southern Georgia, he realized that such a goal could never achieved in caste conscious America. The racially liberal environs of Western Europe, the gypsies assured him, had no such color line. Thus after having his leg gashed open by a white passerby in downtown Atlanta for no reason other than that he was sporting a fashionable “Buster Brown” suit, Bullard hopped a series of trains and boats to Norfolk, Virginia where he would eventually stow away on a ship bound for Hamburg, Germany.

Yet he only made it as far as Aberdeen, Scotland. From there, he migrated south, finally arriving in Liverpool. His time in the English port city would be formative as it was there that he found steady pay in professions that, for one, entered him into tight nit professional circles and brought him a modicum of notoriety. His first venture was show business. Upon arriving in Liverpool he found work at the Birkenhead amusement park which proved to be his gateway into a much larger act—the Belle Davis’s Freedman’s Pickaninnies, a vaudeville act specializing in minstrelsy. Modern readers recognize such shows as highly offensive and otherwise demeaning, but Europe was not America. Bullard, always highly self-aware, had little reservations about mocking racial stereotypes because he realized that doing so in Europe did not reinforce any particular racial order or hierarchy. He found the laugh of the European void of the malice and perversity that characterized the contemptuous American laugh. Having a steady job and steady pay allowed him to try his hand at boxing on the weekends. By the turn of the twentieth century boxing had become the sport of choice for working class Englishmen, and a number of African American boxers had gained considerable fame across the channel. Perhaps the most popular was a young Southerner named Aaron Lester Brown who, like Bullard, fled the suffocating environment of the Jim Crow South, earning him the nickname the “Dixie Kid.” Bullard quickly became Brown’s understudy, and before long the two were touring across England and France on the same match card. While visiting as a boxer, he fell in love with Paris, a city that welcomed blacks and exhibited little apprehensions about black and white interactions. He eventually relocated to the city, becoming, in his mind at least, a proud Frenchman.

War

However, the blaring guns of August 1914 cut his boxing career short. At the age of nineteen, Bullard joined the French Foreign Legion. He fought bravely at the Battle of the Somme, where he proved to be a highly efficient machine gunner. He would go on to survive the initial month of the bloody and prolonged battle of Verdun, but a month into the fighting, an incoming artillery barrage blew open a wound in his thigh as he was carrying a message from one officer to another. Though he would eventually be awarded the Croix de Guerre for his heroism, his service, at least as an infantryman, would end at Verdun. But Bullard would not be ousted so quickly. After finishing his convalescence, he enrolled in the French aviation school, becoming the first African American military pilot. He went on to fly a number of missions, registering at least one acknowledged “kill”.

America’s involvement in the war, however, re-introduced Bullard to the racism he thought he left behind. His accomplishments were not only ignored by the American press, but Edmund C. Gros, an influential American living in France, successfully terminated his piloting career almost as soon as it began. As American troops crossed the Atlantic, the American army sought to maintain the statutes of Jim Crow—black and white soldiers were kept separate, blacks were normally employed in menial services, and black troops were typically led by white officers. Bullard posed a threat to the standing system at home. A common Jim Crow assumption asserted that black men did not have the mental capacity to operate heavy machinery unsupervised, relegating them to mostly tenant farming and unskilled labor. Bullard, being a pilot, negated such a faulty assumption. More importantly, though, Bullard’s mere presence in France made American whites hoping to not upset the racial order uneasy. The French, while very accepting of black troops, were forced to comply with the American demands to take Bullard off the front lines, as they were desperate for the added American manpower. Thus while Bullard became a national hero in France, he was, if nothing else, scorned by the white American military establishment. Just as he was in his early days in Columbus, America’s involvement in the Great War once again designated him a persona non grata.

But Bullard would carry on. Following the war, he began playing drums for a black American jazz band. His new role would prove fortuitous as Parisian nightlife yearned for this new, inherently African American brand of music. With his proficiency in English and French and his wealth of connections in show business from his time with the Freedman’s Pickaninnies, Bullard became a valuable hiring agent for the jazz clubs of the Montmartre. He quickly befriended Joe Zelli, a nightclub impresario who owned popular clubs in New York and London. With the help of Bullard’s friend Robert Henri, the two obtained an all-night club license and went into business together. Soon Zelli’s, the chosen name of the club, became the most popular club in Paris. He then struck out on his own, buying the club, Le Grand Duc. Though his ownership of the club is contested, his presence in the Montmartre scene was undeniable. He mediated contracts and recruited the black American musicians teeming across the Atlantic, finding them work and introducing them to highly influential and wealthy patrons. Bullard’s time in the Montmartre put him in contact with celebrities like Jack Dean and Fannie Ward and even royalty as Edward Windsor, the Prince of Wales and heir to the English throne was a frequent guest of the Le Grand Duc.  

Sadly, whereas the First World War paved the way for Bullard’s entrance into an elite circle of artists and celebrities, the Second World War marked his exit. Fearing the Nazi regime and its racial intolerance, he fled to New York, an ironic twist in an already perplexing life. In New York, he offered to use his influence to help various activist groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). But much to his surprise, he was an unknown. Very few Americans knew about his wartime career and even fewer knew about his time in the Montmartre. Already an older gentleman, Bullard spent his last days as an elevator operator at New York’s Rockefeller Center. In 1959 he was the subject of a special edition of the Today Show, where his wartime service and extraordinary life was put on display. But even then, he was introduced only as the building’s black elevator operator, not Eugene Bullard the vaunted prizefighter, jazz drummer, French national hero, celebrated pilot, or nightclub owner. He died soon after, in 1961 at the age of 66, thus ending a remarkable life that was both a triumph and a tragedy.

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Eugene Bullard being interviewed on the Today Show in December 1959.

References

Craig Lloyd, Eugene Bullard, Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000).

http://www.blackpast.org/aah/bullard-eugene-jacques-1894-1961

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/eugene-bullard-1895-1961

The Red Ball Express – The unknown link in winning World War Two?

The Red Ball Express was a supply line that was set up to ensure that the Allied troops who invaded France in 1944 were well supplied. It wasn’t just any supply line though; it was vital to the Allies’ advance against Nazi Germany in the latter months of 1944… Here, Greg Bailey tells this World War Two story.

A Red Ball Express convoy is waved on near Alenon, France. September 1944.

Like the Pony Express, whose legend has lasted far longer than its short history, the Red Ball Express, the vital supply line across France supporting the Allies’ war-effort against Germany, has earned a well-deserved heroic reputation. The around-the-clock stream of truck convoys was as important as any battle fought in World War II.

The Red Ball Express was created on the battlefield to solve an unforeseen but welcome development. The planners of D-Day anticipated there would be enough supplies, primarily gasoline, to support the advancing combat units while engineers completed a gas supply line from the Normandy landing area to the rear of the combat area. For a time, as the Allies slowly fought their way through difficult hedgerow country, the supplies piled up. But after Bradley’s division broke through the German lines, General George Patton saw an opening and aggressively took it. He charged across France and the army soon began to run out of supplies. By mid August Patton had to slow down his advance for lack of fuel. The gasoline and other supplies his men needed were piled up far from the front. "My men can eat their belts” Patton said, "but my tanks gotta have gas."  The solution was a special unit running on designated roads to move the supplies. Borrowing the name from the railroads, the Red Ball Express was born.

The Express at work

The Red Ball Express only ran from the end of August to the middle of November 1944. Men and trucks from scattered units were hurriedly brought together.  During those few months the convoys running on the designated roads marked by red ball signs, hauled more than 400,000 tons of materials from the Normandy beaches to the ever changing front lines of the Allied campaign. The loads included ammunition, medical supplies and food but above all gasoline in five gallon jerricans that were needed to keep the fuel hungry tanks and other vehicles advancing toward the enemy. Patton called the operations of the Red Ball Express “our most important weapon.”

Patton’s most important weapon was a combination of one of the best examples of American ingenuity and one of the most shameful episodes of American history.  Although the army used several models of truck during the operations, the mainstay was the two and a half tom Jimmie. The Jimmie had a five-ton cargo capacity.  The no frills version of the civilian truck, the Jimmie, was designed to be easily and quickly assembled. With simple, interchangeable parts, during the Red Ball Express’ operations, mechanics were able to swap out engines and transmissions by the side of the road often under enemy fire. Tires were a problem, often flattened on the road by discarded C-ration cans.  Under these tough conditions, each Jimmie had a life expectancy of less than a year.

Valiance in the face of Discrimination

What really pushed the operation was the men driving and repairing the trucks Three quarters of the Red Ball Express personnel were African Americans serving in all black units with white officers over them, barred from serving in combat under the segregation laws of the time. The white troops lived in separate quarters and were kept away from their comrades during and after duty.  British Major General H. Essame said: "few who saw them will ever forget the enthusiasm of the Negro drivers, hell-bent whatever the risk, to get General Patton his supplies."

Despite the sting of discrimination the men charged with the vital supply mission went above and beyond. On an average day 83 transportation units operated almost 900 trucks on the network of roads closed to all other military or civilian traffic.  On paper the speed limit for the five truck convoys was 25 mph with each truck spaced out in 60 feet intervals. In reality drivers disabled the governors on the truck engines to exceed the posted speed limits and the trucks were sometimes overloaded above their five-ton capacity.

During the first days of the Express, as the front lines nearly ran out of supplies, drivers set out with maps torn out of the pages of the Stars and Stripes newspaper.  And while the route was a solid line on a map, in reality the roads were narrow and twisting, pock marked with battle damage, running through fields of dead livestock and hidden snipers. The trucks ran at night with obscured headlights soon called cats’ eyes. Along the roads drivers passed the remains of trucks wrecked in accidents or destroyed by enemy fire.

Indeed, although the Red Ball Express was officially a non-combat unit, drivers were drawn into battles. Some of the trucks were fitted with 50 caliber machine guns and all of the personnel carried rifles with them. In these battles, black drivers left their trucks and fought alongside white soldiers and then returned to their second class status behind the wheels of their trucks marked with bullet holes. Against these hazards the Red Ball Express pushed on, with drivers completing the average 600-mile round-trip with little or no rest.

The murkier side

There was a dark side to the operation. In his 2000 book The Road to Victory author David Colley tells how bottles of premium French wine were traded for far more valuable cans of gasoline. Prostitutes along the way accepted jerricans as payment.  A few fully loaded trucks disappeared into the Paris black market under the unchallenged story that the trucks were destroyed by enemy fire.

By November other supply lines including pipelines and secured ports and rail lines had taken over the task of the Express. The Red Ball Express trucks were using a great amount of fuel to deliver gas to the increasingly distant destinations. The Red Ball Express had completed its mission. Other operations ran on other routes but the Red Ball Express image lived on it part because of the red circles on the transportation units insignia.

Tributes

After the war the Red Ball Express was celebrated in the Broadway musical Call Me Mister. “Steam was hissing from the hoods when they showed up with the goods. But they turned around and went back for more.”  A wildly inaccurate film on the Red Ball Express was released in 1952 staring actor Jeff Chandelier leading mixed white and black crews on trucks through burring villages to delivery gas to the stranded tank crews. An equally inaccurate sitcom on the Express ran for a short time on CBS in the 1970s.

But perhaps the most sincere tribute was expressed by the simple words of Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower. After calling the Red Ball Express the “lifeline between combat and supply”, Eisenhower said:

To it falls the tremendous task of getting vital supplies from ports and depots to the combat troops, when and where such supplies are needed, material without which the armies might fail. To you drivers and mechanics and your officers, who keep the ‘Red Ball’ vehicles constantly moving, I wish to express my deep appreciation. You are doing an excellent job.

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Greg Bailey is a history writer from St. Louis. His book The Voyage of the F.H. Moore and Other 19th Century Whaling Accounts was published last year.

Wisdom Higher Than a Fool Can Reach: The Amazing Life of Poetess Phillis Wheatley

Phillis Wheatley was an amazing and intriguing woman who became a famous and noteworthy poetess in the latter eighteenth century. And what is most intriguing is that in an age of slavery and discrimination she was black. Here, Christopher Benedict tells her story…

The frontispiece to Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects.

On Being Brought from Africa to America

“Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there’s a God, that there’s a Savior too,

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

‘Their colour is a diabolical die.’

Remember, Christians, Negroes black as Cain,

May be refin’d and join th’ angelic train”

This eight line poem was written in 1768 by a young woman of fourteen named Phillis Wheatley. That it, and some 145 others she composed, would alternately subject her to the chaotic complexities of renown and acclaim, the attention of British nobility and America’s Founding Fathers, a tribunal before Boston’s most esteemed magistrates, ministers, and men of letters, not to mention the dismissive scorn of later, more enlightened and less subordinate generations can be best understood by taking the very nature of her blurred identity into consideration.

Her forename was gleaned from Timothy Finch’s schooner the Phillis, which deposited the seven year-old “slender, frail female child” on the Boston wharf at Beach Street on July 11, 1761 after plundering Guinea’s Isles de Los, Sierra Leone, and Senegal (where she is believed to have lived) of its inhabitants for use as human merchandise in America’s slave trade. The assignation of Phillis’ last name would result from her having been purchased, sickly and nearly naked but for a bit of soiled carpet, by Susanna Wheatley “for a trifle” (fewer than £10) to serve as housemaid.

The home, owned by affluent tailor and merchant John Wheatley, was located near Massachusetts’ original State House and within easy earshot, in years soon to come, of the Stamp Act riots and later the Boston Massacre, claiming the life of the Revolution’s first known black martyr Crispus Attucks, which Phillis would document in verse with On the Affray in King Street, on the Evening of the 5th of March, 1770.

Phillis achieved literacy through a combination of Susanna’s encouragement, the tutelage of the Wheatley’s teenaged children Nathaniel and Mary, and Phillis’ own natural desire for extracting sustenance from their English, Latin, Greek, and biblical lessons with an insatiable hunger for knowledge.

Such an impression did Phillis make on John Wheatley that he attested to her phenomenal scholarly advancement, noting that, “she, in sixteen months’ time from her arrival, attained the English language, to which she was an utter stranger before” and “as to her writing, her own curiosity led to it.”   

In 1765, she had already committed to paper her first poem, To the University of Cambridge in New England, and had another, On Messrs Hussey and Coffin, submitted by Susanna to the Newport Mercury, published only two years later, the first by a black woman in America.

Susanna, who by this time had excused Phillis from her previously appointed chores to perfect her chosen craft, would facilitate the collection of her early works into a proposed book containing 28 titles through advertisements that ran through the February to April 1772 editions of the Boston Censor, a Tory newspaper. Owing to the popular misapprehension that a simple slave girl could have been in no way responsible for these supposedly original creations, few offers for the requested 300 subscriptions to fund the project came forth.

On Virtue

“I cease to wonder, and no more attempt

Thine height t’ explore, or fathom thy profound

But, O my soul, sink not into despair,

Virtue is near thee, and with gentle hand

Would now embrace thee, hovers o’er thine head”

It is impossible to imagine the emotional state of Phillis, not yet twenty years old, only a little more than half of which had been spent as a kidnapped stranger in a strange land and even fewer familiar with its linguistic peculiarities, being asked to appear before a committee of eighteen of the colony’s most prestigious citizens to verify the authenticity of her writings and, in essence, become a spokesperson (quite literally) of her entire race.

In October 1772, at the urging of John Wheatley, Phillis was interrogated at length (most likely at Boston’s Town Hall) by an assemblage which included among its celebrated quilled pens and powdered wigs, those of Governor Thomas Hutchinson, Lieutenant-Governor Andrew Oliver, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Joseph Green, and the Reverends Charles Chauncy, Samuel Cooper, and Samuel Mather (son of Cotton Mather, who played a fringe role in the 1692 Salem Witch Trials).

Though there is no surviving transcript with which to flesh out the details of how they arrived at their conclusion, the matter was resolved to the satisfaction of all present, to the degree that when Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was finally published the following year, Phillis’ book was printed with the following testimonial, bearing the signatures of all eighteen of her questioners:

We whose Names are under-written, do assure the World, that the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa, and has ever since been, and now is, under the Disadvantage of serving as a Slave in a Family in this Town. She has been examined by some of the best Judges, and is thought qualified to write them.

With skepticism rampant throughout the colonies, Susanna had gotten a copy of the manuscript in the hands of London publisher Archibald Bell by employing as a courier the captain of her husband John’s England-bound commercial trade ship. Phillis had already established a readership across the Atlantic thanks to the success of the widespread 1770 publication of On the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, her requiem for the recently deceased evangelical preacher, beloved both in the United Kingdom and its colonies. She would soon be accepted and treated as a celebrity, rubbing shoulders with royalty, having accolades and gifts heaped upon her by icons even in their own time and whose books today line our shelves and whose portraits adorn our currency. 

An Hymn to the Evening

“Majestic grandeur! From the zephyr’s wing,

Exhales the incense of the blooming spring.

Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their notes,

And through the air, their mingled music floats.”

So that she could personally supervise the publication of her book, Susanna sent Phillis, chaperoned by the Wheatley’s son Nathaniel, to London whereupon she was squired about town to see the sights, including a tour of the Tower of London with Granville Sharp, one of the first English abolitionists.

She was received by the Earl of Dartmouth, who gave her the five guineas necessary to purchase the collected works of Alexander Pope, and was presented with a folio edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost by one-day Lord Mayor Brook Watson.

Even Benjamin Franklin, who was in London grieving the case for peaceful independence on behalf of the American colonies before the classes of the British citizenry, from the highest to most humble, deviated from his schedule of oratory and article writing to spend time with Phillis. She thought highly enough of him that she intended to dedicate her next book to the bespectacled diplomat. 

A momentous meeting with King George III, for whom she had written To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty in 1766 following his repeal of the Stamp Act, unfortunately did not occur as Susanna Wheatley’s health suffered a sudden decline, necessitating the immediate return of Phillis and Nathaniel. Susanna improved physically (for the time being) and, though Phillis would continue to live with them, she and John emancipated her shortly after her abrupt homecoming. A shipment of her books arrived at the New Haven customs office from London which she solicited by subscription, even imploring local publishers not to use them as a template from which to print and distribute copies of their own and, thus, undercutting her independent endeavor.

As heady as 1773 was for Phillis, the following year would prove just as sobering, bringing as it did the British occupation of Boston, the death of Susanna, and the resulting grief-stricken flight of John to points unknown. Phillis left for a time as well, living with the Wheatley’s daughter Mary and her husband in Providence until just before the Redcoats had been driven out of Boston.

A handwritten letter was sent by Phillis in October 1775 to Continental Army headquarters in Cambridge, MA addressed to the subject of her poem His Excellency General Washington, a copy of which was enclosed, “though I am not insensible of its inaccuracies”.

Four months later arrived a personal reply wherein George Washington apologized for “the seeming but not real neglect” of his delayed response while self-deprecatingly worrying over “however undeserving I may be of such encomium and panegyric”. His effusive praise is augmented by an invitation for Phillis to call upon him, adding that “I shall be so happy to see a person so favored by the Muses”.

She did, weeks later, journey to from Boston to Cambridge where the General and his officers lavished their attentions upon her and Washington pledged to reprint her poem, a promise he made good on when it appeared in the March 1776 Virginia Gazette. Thomas Paine followed suit, publishing her ode to General Washington in the April edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette. 

An Hymn to the Morning

“Ye shady groves, your verdant gloom display

To shield your poet from the burning day,

Calliope awake the sacred lyre,

While thy sisters fan the pleasing fire.”

Voltaire lent his endorsement to Phillis Wheatley’s work and she was sent a package from John Paul Jones, just prior to his embarking for Paris aboard the warship Ranger, containing praise of her writing along with hand selected copies of his own. 

Francois, the Marquis de Barbe-Marbois, whose request for statistical information on the American colonies inspired Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, had read Phillis’ verses, “in which there is imagination, poetry, and zeal”.

Jefferson, a slaveholding Francophile who would later be lionized by no less than Frederick Douglass, bristled at this praise being accorded the talents of an indentured servant (a black one, anyway-and heaven forbid, a woman - as he pointedly excused from the conversation former European slaves and prisoners Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus) who could never qualify as the white man’s cerebral equal.

Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry...Religion, indeed, has produced a Phillis Whatley (his spelling), but it could not produce a poet.

She is thereby reduced to a functional automaton capable of reading and, perhaps, comprehending Milton and Pope, the Athenians and Romans, but, creatively, of no better than their soulless mimicry.

Blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances,” supposed Jefferson’s vile but not unoriginal claim, “are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.

It is noteworthy, illustrates Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard professor and author of The Trials of Phillis Wheatley, that “Wheatley’s freedom enslaved her to a life of hardship.” Fame brought no fortune to Phillis, who married John Peters, a free black man whom Gates describes as a “small-time grocer and sometime lawyer”, in 1778. Their years together were ones of financial and personal strife compounded by the deaths of two infants and the failures of Peters’ business ventures, landing him in debtor’s prison and stranding Phillis at home with another unwell child.

Although a handful of New England newspapers did publish some of her last poems, she was unable to gather subscriptions sufficient to cover the printing costs of her second book and, to add to her humiliation, was forced to take work as a scullery maid.

Phillis Wheatley, only thirty years old, died on December 5, 1784 and was followed a little over three hours later by her infant son. Her own widowed husband was the first to soil her literary legacy by selling the only copy of her manuscript, which to this day has never been found.

Her reputation was called severely into question by black radicals during the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, when Wheatley was denigrated as “an early Boston Aunt Jemima”, “a colonial handkerchief head”, and reflective of “the nigger component of the Black Experience”.

The spark of this controversy ignited a contemporary reevaluation of her life, beliefs, and writings. Although her prestige is still open to debate and her physical remains are in an unmarked grave somewhere in Boston, Phillis Wheatley was selected in 1993 for inclusion in the Boston Women’s Memorial on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall along with Abigail Adams and Lucy Stone, whose bronze sculptures thoughtfully consider one another from a triangular formation.

“Let placid slumbers sooth each weary mind,

At morn’ to wake more heav’nly refin’d,

So shall the labors of the day begin

More pure, more guarded from the snares of sin.”

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World!

Sources

• The Trials of Phillis Wheatley by Henry Louis Gates (Basic Civitas Books, 2003)
• Negro Poetry and Drama by Sterling Brown (Westphalia Press,1937)
• A Shining Thread of Hope by Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson (Random House, 2009).
• Encyclopedia of African American Women Writers, Volume 1, edited by Yolanda Williams Page (Greenwood, 2007)
• Benjamin Franklin Holds Up a Looking Glass to the British Empire (Schiller Institute, September 2012)
• http://www.cityofboston.gov

Spanish Civil War - History of a Battle for Europe’s Soul – Spain’s Great War (Required History)

So, you think that World War 2 began in 1939?

Then you’re evidently not familiar with the Spanish Civil War.

The war was Spain’s Great War. The country suffered death, destruction, and repression on an unprecedented scale. There were large-scale military battles that left tens of thousands dead. The world witnessed some of the largest air battles that it had ever seen. People from all parts of society, from labor unionists to priests, were heartlessly murdered. Extremists and radical groups saw an exponential rise in their size and influence.

But, it was not just Spain that experienced its Civil War. The Spanish Civil War was also Europe’s and the world’s war. There was significant international involvement and interest in the war from the start, and it was a microcosm of the far greater war that was to follow it. It involved battles between democracy and dictatorship, Fascism and Communism, Germany and the USSR. The Great Powers of Europe tested out military strategies and new technologies, while tens of thousands of idealistic foreigners joined the war to battle against Fascism.  At the same time, the great democracies of Britain and France played a more muddled role.

Get the book on Amazon

This introduction to the Spanish Civil War is the second book from George Levrier-Jones. The book considers the brutal war that arose between the political left and right in Spain over the years 1936-1939.

The topics in the book include:

• 19th Century Spain and the path that led to the Spanish Second Republic
• The chronic instability and changes of the Spanish Second Republic
• The major differences between the two sides
• How the 1936 election led to the Spanish Civil War breaking out
• International involvement and the instability of 1930s Europe
• Why the Great Powers of Europe intervened in the war
• The early Nationalist advances in the war
• How General Francisco Franco consolidated the Nationalist side
• The civil war within the Spanish Civil War
• The great Republican counter-attacks and General Franco’s responses
• Events across Spain from Madrid to the Basque Country, and Barcelona to Valencia
• The closing stages of the war
• What the victors did in the years and decades after winning the war

The approximately 100-page book is the perfect complement to the Spanish Civil War History audio series that is available as part of the ‘History in 28-minutes’ podcasts.

So come and join the past – buy the book now!

Communism and Race in the 1930s Deep South

The Deep South has a history of racial animosity, but what happened when somebody tried to unite whites and blacks? Well, in Great Depression era Atlanta, Angelo Herndon tried to do just that. And he did so as a committed Communist. Bennett H. Parten returns to the site and explains what happened when the authorities tried to prosecute Herndon under an antiquated law…

General Research Division, The New York Public Library. (1926 - 1947). Let me live : the autobiography of Angelo Herndon. Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-d7dc-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Atlanta, Georgia is an anomaly, if not an oxymoron. It’s a commercial and industrial oasis in the middle of an agricultural desert, a regional capitol with an international profile, and an emblem of the Old South with an insatiable appetite for modernity. In the early 1930s, the city’s exceptionality emerged again as it somehow juggled being both a hub for Communist activity and a bastion of conservatism. The city, sadly, could only juggle this thorny coexistence for so long.

Fueled by civic boosterism and an influx of Northern capital, Atlanta experienced a period of rapid growth during the first few decades of the 20th century; however, the dawning of the Great Depression brought the engines churning industrial development to a screeching halt. As a result, unemployment lines swelled, the number of homeless grew, and wages were cut, leaving many to survive off of the city’s limited relief budget.

Enter Angelo Herndon. Born in Ohio, Herndon arrived in Atlanta by way of Kentucky and Alabama. While working for the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company in Birmingham, he was exposed to Communism through various labor organizers drifting through the Deep South. Officially joining the party in 1930, Herndon became an organizer and gained a degree of notoriety in Alabama, prompting a string of arrests and his eventual migration to Atlanta.

A volatile city

By the time he arrived in 1932, Atlanta’s relief situation had reached boiling point. The city’s relief budget was exhausted and payments were suspended. A number of citizens pushed the county commissioners to alter the budget so that there was more relief funding, but a number of commissioners believed the level of suffering in the city had been exaggerated, demanding that evidence of such hunger and starvation be proven before altering the budget. In a show of force, Herndon organized and led a “hunger” march on the courthouse in Atlanta that, by the time it was finished, accrued close to 1,000 angry workers demanding a continuation of the relief payments.

Never before had the city seen such a concerted statement on behalf of its working men and women. The march frightened Atlanta’s conservative commercial elite, revealing to them just how volatile and unstable the city had become. What frightened them the most, however, was the social make-up of the marchers. Poor whites as well as poor blacks marched step by step with one another, breaking Jim Crow South’s rigid social hierarchy. Interracial class solidarity on the part of the working men and women would, in the eyes of the business elite, only breed more discontent and challenge the city’s traditional conservative political leadership.

Their response was to simply destroy the movement by attacking where they believed it began: the Communists. Atlanta police began targeting suspected organizers and kept a watchful eye on the post office since the only piece of evidence on the leaflets used to announce the protest was a return address marked P.O. Box 339. Eleven days after the march, on July 11, 1932, Angelo Herndon was arrested while retrieving mail from the box in question.

Herndon was formally charged by an all-white grand jury with “attempting to incite insurrection” under an old statute originally designed to prevent slave insurrections. He received legal counsel from the International Labor Defense, better known as the ILD, whom placed noted Atlanta attorneys Benjamin Davis Jr, the son of a prominent Atlanta newspaper editor and Republican politician, and John Geer at the head of the Herndon case. The two young black lawyers designed a defense that sought to attack the constitutionality of the antiquated insurrection law and Georgia’s judiciary system by calling into question Georgia’s informal practice of excluding African Americans from serving on juries; Herndon’s defense would thus be one that would attempt to strike a major blow to the justice system’s role in preserving Georgia’s Jim Crow laws in addition to exonerating Herndon.

The trial

But Georgia’s seasoned justice system would not go down without a fight. As the trial commenced, the defense team set its sights toward the legality of all-white grand juries like the one that indicted Herndon. All of the witnesses testified that there had not been a black participant on a grand jury in recent memory, but in the absence of proof that African Americans had been systematically excluded, Judge Wyatt, whom Davis had said “used the law with respect to Negroes like a butcher wielding a knife to kill a lamb,” would not be moved (Davis 62-63). The legal team left the courtroom after the first day in an air of defeat.

The second day started off much better for the defense. The duo of Greer and Davis, with the help of attorneys A.T. Walden and T.J. Henry, launched an attack on the prospective jurors, getting one to confess to Ku Klux Klan membership. The team eventually landed on twelve jurors deemed suitable. The charge of insurrection was then debated. Atlanta policemen Frank Watson was the first to testify, reading off a list of items found in Herndon’s room. The list included rather harmless materials such as membership and receipt books, but Herndon did possess two books, George Padmore’s The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers and William Montgomery Brown’s Communism and Christianism, that emphasized the Communist Party’s policy of self-determination for the South’s “Black Belt”, a stretch of land in the heart of the Deep South that housed large numbers of African Americans. The prosecutor, accompanied by a large map of Georgia, pointed out to the jury that under this policy a large majority of the state would fall under black political leadership, all but destroying the state’s white political stranglehold. But even with this evidence, Davis’s cross examination of Watson revealed that Watson never actually witnessed Herndon distribute radical literature or give a speech with revolutionary intent; Watson had merely seen Herndon checking his mail.

When Angelo Herndon took the stand, the momentum won with the Watson cross-examination again shifted away from the defense. In the witness stand, Herndon unleashed quite an oration, one more idealistic than inflammatory. He unabashedly emphasized the interracial aims of the party, pointing out the immense levels of suffering of both poor whites and poor blacks. He described the horrid conditions of the Fulton County jail, claiming that he had to share a jail cell with a dead man whom was denied proper medical treatment. His most radical claims, though, were made when he blamed the capitalist regime for race baiting, constantly pitting white versus black as a substitute for the natural animosities between the rich and the poor. Needless to say, Herndon’s own testimony did not do him any favors with the jury.

Closing the trial

As for the closing remarks, each of the four attorneys—two defense counselors and two prosecutors—took turns. When it came time, Benjamin Davis, vaunted for his oratory skills, released an emotional critique of the justice Herndon had been served. He charged that Herndon had simply been attempting to better the conditions of Atlanta’s working people in a peaceful way as the march on the courthouse was not violent nor did it cause any harm. According to Davis, Herndon was charged not for inciting insurrection but for being black, and his attempts to unite both races for the common welfare should be lauded. Davis’s remarks drew ire from the whites in the courtroom as well as those in the jury. Whenever he approached the jury box during his summation some of the jurors refused to listen and turned their backs on him. Davis, unfazed, went on. He read from one of the radical pamphlets found in Herndon’s possession that described the lynching and burning of a pregnant black woman. The description was so graphic and Davis’s dramatization so intense, one spectator fainted.

His summation hinged on the inherent irony of supposed “justice” in Georgia: a peaceful interracial Communist protest was condemned as insurrectionary while the justice system turned a blind eye to lynchings and other forms of racial oppression. He concluded his remarks by stating that if a guilty verdict was served, it would be derived only from the “basest passion of race prejudice”, and such a verdict would be “making scraps of paper out of the Bill of Rights” and the Constitutions of both the United States and Georgia (Herndon 351-354). Sadly, such an impassioned plea for justice was rendered fruitless as the white jury found Herndon guilty as charged.

But the battle was not over. Almost immediately, Davis and company submitted their appeal. Over the course of five years, their appeals garnered almost no headway at the national or local level. Finally, in 1937, with his case in the national spotlight—and Let Me Live, Herndon’s newly published autobiography on the bookshelves of civil libertarians and liberal thinkers nationwide—the Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s insurrection stature, arguing that it violated the First Amendment. Herndon was exonerated, and Georgia, a bastion of white conservatism, was forced to release an avowed Communist and radical interracial labor organizer. Jim Crow obviously did not die with Angelo Herndon, but his victory stood as a major blow to conservative Georgia’s ability to deal out so called “justice” in the courtroom.

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Bibliography

Davis, Benjamin J. Communist Councilman from Harlem: Autobiographical Notes Written In A Federal Penitentiary. New York: International Publishers, 1991.

Hatfield, Edward A. "Angelo Herndon Case." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 03 December 2013. Web. 30 June 2015.

Herndon, Angelo. Let Me Live. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Martin, Charles H. The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. 

The Intriguing Lost Conversation of the Civil Rights Movement: The Writer and the Monk - James Baldwin and Thomas Merton

Racial tensions have sadly been all too common in the United States over the years. Recent events in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere are but the latest in a long line of racial issues. Here, Edward J. Vinski presents a fascinating view on race in America, with the help of two very different people who wrote at the height of the American Civil Rights movement.

Photograph of a Young Woman at the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. with a Banner, 1963. From the U.S. Information Agency.

When one reads, one enters into a conversation with the writer. Such conversation, although naturally different from the more traditional face-to-face method, allows us to travel across time and distance and even to resurrect the dead. This, of course, is only in a manner of speaking, but in the world of letters the conversation is real. We may hear the words of persons long since dead and descriptions of places we might never visit.

For a brief moment during the height of America’s Civil Rights movement, an unconventional conversation occurred between two men: one, James Baldwin, an African American writer living in Europe, the other, Thomas Merton, a white Trappist monk living in a Kentucky monastery.  While their different backgrounds alone might make their interaction appear somewhat unusual, they shared a social consciousness that transcended their worlds. In this, they were, perhaps, more similar than they might initially seem.  What makes their conversation truly unique, however, is the way they communicated to each other and ultimately to their readers: they conversed primarily through a series of letters not addressed to each other.

The “Correspondence”

In his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, Baldwin demonstrates what it means to be black in America and how whites are, in fact, viewed by their black counterparts. The two essays take the form of letters[1]. The first and shorter of the two, “My Dungeon Shook”, is written as a “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation.” In it, Baldwin describes his own father, recalling that “he was defeated long before he died because at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 3), and he admonishes his nephew that “you can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger” (p. 4). Through this initial statement, Baldwin shows the connection between the movement toward black freedom and that of white freedom as well. By using the offensive word “nigger” he underscores this fact that American Blacks are an invention of White Americans. It is this creation that causes “defeat “ in those created, as in the case of the senior Baldwin, and it is the crime of which Baldwin accuses his countrymen. He writes that they are destroying:

Hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it […] but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime (p. 5).

Their so-called innocence lies in the fact that White America fails to see the crime. “They are, in effect,” Baldwin writes, “still trapped in a history they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it” (p. 8). As such, the truth about integration is not that it means the acceptance of blacks by whites. Rather, Baldwin tells his nephew, “the terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them” (p. 8).

In his long-form essay “Letters to a White Liberal”, written in response to The Fire Next Time, Merton recognizes this very assumption among whites that white society is somehow superior to that of blacks. Perhaps more accurately, White America exists under the assumption that it has somehow achieved perfect human completeness.  From this perspective, as Baldwin suggests, blacks are “to be accepted into white society” (Merton, 1964, p. 58). Baldwin and Merton both call attention to the fact that equality does not mean the elevation of one group to the standards of the other. Rather, true integration and equality requires movement on both sides. “Your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to,” writes Baldwin, “[…] if she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 96). Merton concurs. In the only direct correspondence between the two men, Merton wrote a letter to Baldwin shortly after he read The Fire Next Time. In it, he states that human completeness comes only from the realization that “I am therefore not completely human until I have found myself in my African and Asian and Indonesian brother because he has the part of humanity which I lack” (Merton, 1964/2008, p. 226).[2]

Even if true equality means that blacks must unilaterally become more like whites, Baldwin questions whether blacks would accept these conditions. He writes that:

I do not know many Negros who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t want to be beaten over the head by the whites […] white people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this […] the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 21).

Years earlier, Merton had come to a similar conclusion. Working for a time among Harlem, New York’s poor, sick and dispossessed at Baroness Catherine de Hueck’s Friendship House led him to conclude that “there is not an Negro in the whole place who does not realize, somewhere in the depths of his nature, that the culture of the white man is not worth the dirt in Harlem’s gutters” (Merton, 1948/1976, p. 386). Not only do they not wish to be integrated in to such a world, the sickness, drugs and death of Harlem stood not only as a contrast to the corruption and greed of white society, but as an indictment against that very society. Reflecting on what he saw, Merton concluded that such pockets of resistance against White American society may be all that prevents God’s wrath from wiping that very society from the planet.

While both men recognize that the races need each other to achieve perfection, they also acknowledge that awareness of this fact is difficult for people to grasp. Baldwin indicates that such a realization is more difficult for those in power writing that “people are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal […] but they love the idea of being superior” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 87). For whatever reason, Americans have long mistrusted standards of civilization that are not cut from the European model. As a result, white Americans have come to believe that they possess something “[…] that black people need or want.  And this assumption […] makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards” (p. 93).

Merton concurs. Whites, according to him, all too frequently assume that they have nothing to gain from blacks and that black society is therefore “more or less worthless” (Merton, 1964, p. 59), thus echoing the sentiment expressed in his letter to Baldwin. The truth that both writers present is that “different races and cultures are correlative. They mutually complete each other” (Merton, 1964, p. 61).

The problem is that the self-knowledge necessary to change this perception would require an abandoning of the most cherished American myths: that of “freedom-loving heroes” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 100). These are the myths that whites believe and about which blacks know better[3]. As such, most blacks “dismiss white people as slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing” (p. 101). Blacks can’t hate whites, according to Baldwin, because they know how much whites have to lose if integration was to become complete, and that the fear of this loss is such that it is impossible for whites to act with love toward them.

Merton draws the same conclusion, writing:

If the Negro […] enters wholly into white society, then that society is going to be radically changed. This, of course is what the white South very well knows and it is what the white Liberal has failed to understand (Merton, 1964, p. 8).

Equality, thus, can only be obtained through sacrifice particularly on the part of whites. The world they knew will be radically altered on economic, social, and psychological levels. But this is the price to be paid for a new society. “The only way out of this fantastic impasse is for everyone to face and accept the difficulties and sacrifices involved, in all their seriousness, in all their inexorable demands” (Merton, 1964, p. 9).       

The writer and the monk bring their respective books to a close with calls to action. Baldwin attempts to rally “the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks” of America. “If we […] do not falter in our duty now, we may be able […] to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country, and change the history of the world” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 104-105). But if we fail, he writes, the prophecy of the old spiritual will come to pass: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time!” (p. 105).

Merton’s ending is, perhaps, less dramatic, but just as powerful. Recognizing the difficulty that whites have in understanding the message of the Black Americans, he writes:

This is the message which the Negro is trying to give white America. I have spelled it out for myself, subject to correction, in order to see whether a white man is even capable of grasping the words, let alone believing them (Merton, 1964, p. 70).

Then, acknowledging that the truly prophetic vision of a racially equal America’s potential can only come from the perspective of Blacks, he brings this message home: “For the rest, you have Moses and the prophets. Martin Luther King, James Baldwin and the others. Read them, and see for yourself what they are saying” (p. 70).

Conclusion

The passage of the thirteenth amendment abolished slavery in the United States, but it did not end racial injustice. The Brown vs. The Board of Education court decision helped integrate American schools, but did not end racial inequality. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s did not end racial tensions. The last half-century has been one in which periods of relative calm are punctuated by flare-ups of old resentments and suspicions. The events of Ferguson, Missouri; Staten Island, New York; and Baltimore, Maryland have been nothing but the most recent examples of long-simmering racial tensions boiling over. With each event, there are calls for a national conversation on race. Sadly, people on both sides of the divide often bristle at and deflect any real attempts at open discussion. In the meantime, opportunists seek to achieve their own ends. In so doing, they add a further level of distraction to matters, often doing little more than confirming the worst fears of those on whichever side they seem to oppose.

The truth is that the story of America is intertwined with the messy story of racism, and until the entire nation comes to grips with this disturbing fact, it is likely that a resolution to the problem will continue to elude us. Fifty years ago, Thomas Merton and James Baldwin exchanged “letters” devoted to this topic. If there is any significant lesson to be learned from their “correspondence” it is this: racism in America will not be solved by the nation’s liberals or conservatives, politicians or activists.

Rather, change will be brought about by its prophets who can see the problem from a self-critical, but not self-condemning perspective.

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Author’s note

I ask to be excused a slight stylistic indulgence.  In light of my thesis that the written word allows a measure of immortality, I have written most of this piece in the present tense. I believe that the conversation is too important to have simply happened once and for all in the past. Rather I believe that Merton and Baldwin continue to speak to each of us to this very day.  

References

Baldwin, J. (1963/1985). The fire next time. New York: The Modern Library.

Campbell, J. (1991) Talking at the gates: A life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking.

Leeming, D. (1994). James Baldwin: A biography. New York: Arcade

Merton, T. (1948/1976). The seven storey mountain. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.

Merton, T. (1963/2008). Letter to James Baldwin. In W.H. Shannon and C.M. Bochen (Eds.). Thomas Merton: A life in letters. New York: Harper One.

Merton, T. (1964). Seeds of destruction. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Footnotes

1. The New Yorker, in which the essays were published before being collected in The Fire Next Time, required that all submissions be in the form of a “Letter from….” (Campbell, 1991)

2. As not all of Baldwin’s personal papers have been released to the public, I am not aware of whether he replied to Merton. 

3. This is not an exclusively American problem. While visiting an elementary school in Senegal, Baldwin was outraged to find the children’s textbook referring to their ancestors from Gaul (Leeming, 1994)

Robert Kennedy’s amazing climb up Mount Kennedy: Always Do What You Are Afraid to Do

Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a wave of tributes and memorials commemorated him around the world. One such memorial was the naming of a mountain in Canada – Mount Kennedy. Here, Christopher Benedict explains the story of how JFK’s brother, Robert Kennedy, attempted to make the first ever ascent of the mountain.

The Kennedy brothers in 1960. Robert is in the middle, with John on the left, and Ted on the right.

Difficult and Perplexing Times

There is no setting the clock on grief. Tragedy does not come with a catch-all instruction manual to help survivors cope in some uniform fashion with the incomprehensible. Retreating into a cocoon of counter-productive and self-destructive tendencies-denial, despondency, and inactivity-may suffice for most people. But, Robert F. Kennedy was not most people.

Which is not to suggest that he was impervious to such things. In the time spanning Jack’s murder and his own, he took to wearing his brother’s naval jacket, literally cloaking himself in sorrow. However, he also accepted this most wretched of calamities as a provocative personal challenge. To struggle against the stagnation of pre-conceived notions and overcome confidential fears and ideological obstacles to achieve forward progress in his own thought process and, therefore, of the society of which he was an active participant and public servant.

“He had always been a taker of risks from that day, so many years before, when he had thrown himself off the yawl into Nantucket Sound in his determination to learn to swim,” historian, Special Assistant to the President, and family friend Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Bobby, “and John Kennedy had said he had shown either a lot of guts or no sense at all, depending on how you looked at it.”

When the National Geographic Society proposed that the surviving Kennedy brothers Robert and Edward join the assemblage of experienced climbers seeking to be the first to ascend the Canadian mountain peak named for their fallen brother, a horrible plane crash less than seven months after Jack’s assassination, in which Ted suffered three broken vertebrae, two cracked ribs, and a collapsed lung, removed him from the equation.

It would have been more than understandable had Robert, terrified of heights and otherwise “rash but not reckless” in Schlesinger’s estimation, begged off the expedition, especially given the perilous nature of recent circumstances. For most people, this would have been perfectly acceptable. But, again, Bobby was not most people.

Lofty and Magnificent

Tributes to the martyred President John F. Kennedy emanated from all points on the globe common and obscure, his name and/or likeness affixed to coins, plaques, statues, stamps, streets, high schools and law schools, office buildings, an international airport in Queens, New York, the former Plum Pudding Island in the South Pacific from which Lt. Kennedy and his surviving PT-109 crew were rescued during World War Two after their craft had been demolished following an encounter with a Japanese destroyer.

The Canadian government had something in mind on a much grander scale. Though initially, in the opinion of Bradford Washburn, not grand enough. Washburn, founder and director of Boston’s Museum of Science, was a cartographer and mountaineer with an impressive list of first ascents to his credit, most notably the West Buttress of Mount McKinley, North America’s highest mountain.

He urged the Canadian Parliament to reconsider their original choice for Mount Kennedy, a 12,200-foot peak which he referred dismissively to as “a burble”. The uncharted 14,000-foot Yukon mountain near the Alaskan border that he had in mind was one Washburn had discovered himself from a Fairchild ski-plane during a 1935 mapping mission for National Geographic. Thirty years later, he was now gathering a survey and summit party on behalf of National Geographic and the Boston Museum of Science to set out for Mt. Kennedy and its two adjoining peaks. The expedition would include in its ranks Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Mt. Everest in 1963, Barry Prather, who was a support member of the 1963 team but fell ill with pulmonary edema and was unable to continue, Mount Rainier park ranger Dee Molenaar and fellow Washington state native George Senner, British Columbia Mountaineering Club member James Craig, National Geographic photographer William Allard, and last  - but not least - New York Senator Robert Kennedy.

Asked by Whittaker about his training regimen for the upcoming journey, Bobby joked, “Running up and down the stairs and hollering, help!”

Lightheartedness was a fine defense mechanism to ward off the fear which must have been substantial to a novice climber. Even Whittaker worried over the potential for avalanches caused by melting spring snows, not to mention the concerns inherent to exploring uncharted territory where “one doesn’t know what those problems will be.” 

Mount Kennedy as shown from an airplane in 1984. Mount Kennedy is the high peak towards the left. Source: Gary Clark, available here.

Commitment of Body and Mind

His first actual sighting of the mountain came, “lonely, stark, forbidding” Kennedy recalled, on March 23, 1965 from a relatively safe sixty-mile distance in the confines of a Royal Canadian Air Force helicopter. The team members were deposited at 8,700 feet where Base Camp One had been established on the newly christened Hyannis Glacier for their first night’s stay. The following morning, the expedition gained an additional 4,000 feet of elevation over the unwelcoming terrain of Cathedral Glacier to reach the High Camp through a snowstorm that, by early evening, had developed into white-out blizzard conditions. This turn of events threatened the next day’s planned summit attempt.

Fortunately, wrote Robert Kennedy for his Life cover story, “during the night the snow stopped, the stars became bright, and the northern lights appeared over the ridge of the mountains.” As picturesque as it was propitious for the task at hand, their tents were nonetheless buffeted by 50 mph winds which “made sleep impossible” but also “either cleared or packed the fresh snow which had fallen and made our climb to the summit that much easier.” Not that it would be free of near disaster.

After waking at 6am to amenable temperatures of 5 above 0 for a breakfast of “soup, mush, and chocolate bars”, the climbers geared up and set off on their final assault at 8.30am. Bobby had learned well from his mountaineering mentors who were all duly impressed with the Senator’s efforts. He was, after all, a veteran of the legendary Kennedy football games on the front lawn at Hyannis Port which would not uncommonly end in bloody noses and bruised egos for brothers and sisters alike. He kept his attention on the progress of “how far we would be in 100 steps” but would also create a diversion in his mind by way of mentally reciting poems as well as passages from Churchill and Emerson. It was not for lack of focus, but simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that Bobby, negotiating a 65-degree incline, suddenly plunged into an icy crevasse up to his shoulders. Quickly pulled free, he looked down from whence he emerged unable to see the bottom, pondering in retrospect the advice given by his mother Rose: “Don’t slip, dear.”

What Am I Doing Here?

“I had three choices: to go down, to fall off, or to go ahead”, reflected Bobby, who was told by a newspaper reporter prior to his departure that he had already written Kennedy’s obituary. With the grim determination for which he was famous (and feared), he reassessed that “I really had only one choice.” 100 feet from the summit, the ridge flattened and widened considerably and it was about here that he was untethered from his rope team of Jim Whittaker and Barry Prather.   

Whittaker, who had been awarded the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal by President Kennedy during a Rose Garden ceremony a mere four months before JFK was killed in Dallas, was the first to selflessly urge Bobby ahead of the pack of proud and accomplished climbers so that he could be the first man to set foot on the summit of Mount Kennedy.

Ironically, at approximately 1pm Robert Kennedy unfurled and planted at the pinnacle of the mountain a three-foot tall flag bearing his family’s crest - the official moment of death ascribed to his brother. He also set in the snow, “with mixed emotion”, two PT-109 tie clasps as well as a golden inaugural medallion which complemented the bound copy of the President’s historic “Ask Not” address encased in plastic. “It was with a feeling of pain that the events of 16 months and two days before had made it necessary,” Robert later wrote. “It was a feeling of relief and exhilaration that we had accomplished what we set out to do.”

Happy to be home, Kennedy would neither scale another mountain nor entertain the desire to do so. Removed from the immediacy of quick thinking and physical exertion necessary in the present moment, however, Bobby was finally able to treasure the views and elements which “I’m sure would have greatly pleased the man for whom the mountain was named.”

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Sources

• Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1978, Houghton Mifflin)
• Our Climb Up Mt. Kennedy by Robert Kennedy (Life Magazine, April 9, 1965)
• Mountain Tribute to JFK Evoked by Kennedy Trip to Yukon by Michael Jourdan (National Geographic, August 5, 2013) 
• The Strange History of Mount Kennedy, http://www.theclymb.com/stories/out-there/the-strange-history-of-mount-kennedy/