Anniversary

Nobody Turn Me Around: A People's History of the 1963 March on Washington
Charles Euchner, 2011

Even if the march has been reduced to an "I have a dream" sound-bite, this was the original idea, fifty years ago:

Dr. King's charisma and moral authority—and the power of his speech that day—were crucial to the march, but he is not the center of this book. Euchner writes about the people and politics behind the march, and about the meaning of the event, as reflected by the stories of many who participated that hot summer day.

The idea originated with A. Philip Randolph. During a lifetime of organizing black workers, he first conceived of a mass march on Washington during the 1940s. Returning to the idea in 1963, Randolph was at first rejected by Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League.

Despite his ultimate identification with the march, Martin Luther King Jr. at first declined to participate. Busy with the Birmingham campaign—and unsure of the march's value—it would take much persuasion by some of his closest advisers for him to commit.

After key groups finally agreed to join forces, Bayard Rustin brilliantly outlined an organizational plan for the largest march to ever take place in D.C. It was a feat that would be pulled off in just two months of intense work. In this very quick read, Euchner covers much fascinating background detail of how the march was put together.

In a discussion here, the author says of the organizers and marchers he interviewed

... every time I talked with someone I was carried away emotionally like I'd never been before. I was so overwhelmed by the basic decency and courage of these wonderful people who did so much to end the formal regime of racism. It is really a priceless gift that they gave us. And they gave it to us in so many ways — some dramatic, some ordinary. Honestly, despite the problems we have in this country now, they pale next to what they would be if we lived under the legal system of apartheid that existed in the U.S. until the 1960s.

With ongoing violence all over the south in 1963, the bravery of young activists gave older workers the courage to risk employer reprisals by missing work to be in D.C. That was because Rustin had chosen a Wednesday for the march; in Euchner's words, "so preachers could bring their flocks without missing Sunday services."

The power of Dr. King's speech is undeniable, though Euchner quotes a King aide who was dismayed to hear King insert what seemed like an overused, corny "dream" metaphor. More importantly, what later came to be the media narrative—"the March on DC where MLK had a Dream"—leaves out the point of the march: to demand economic rights, simply as part of a broader concept of equal justice promised to all citizens, yet denied to so many.

There's interesting contemporary coverage in Life's cover story (with work of eleven photographers credited). Dr. King "made the day's strongest speech," read a photo caption, which goes on to highlight not the "dream," but the metaphor that "America has given the Negro people a bad check. It has come back marked 'insufficient funds'"

National archive footage gives a sense of crowd, along with bits of music and speeches.

The march was a triumph—and subsequent civil rights legislation shifted the movement, in Rustin's words, "from protest to politics." The "jobs" part of the formula would become more evident in King's later work. When that joined with his opposition to the Vietnam War, King had come around to Rustin's linking of social justice with economics and opposition to war.

"From protest to politics," fifty years later: not the prettiest picture on the jobs front, to be sure.

And the work to undo justice has achieved much, with the Supreme Court's green light for voter disenfranchisement in states, "stand your ground" laws in the same states, and all the other tactics financed by the right's deep pockets.

The Court's majority wreaked vengeance against the Voting Rights Act, on a pretense of "little evidence of continuing racial discrimination in the states that were required to get preclearance before changing their voting laws." It's the same line the right's paid pundits use: we have a black president; there's no racism—as they use that president's very existence to fuel more racism each day.

Sam Seder and Prof. Eddie Glaude had this discussion of the anniversary. Glaude notes the event has been made into a symbol of "the goodness of America; that we've come so far and we celebrate." Thus ignoring the march's origins: in the black labor movement and as an act of mass non-violent civil disobedience.

Seder points to more recent years, when "everything to do with economics has been swept under the rug." The problem is that this anniversary becomes one of "commemoration in service of a narrative," instead of attention to the real political work needed.

Glaude has much to say about Obama, and how the focus on him as an individual co-opts black progressive traditions and establishes a precedent for how future presidents will deal with race.

Certainly, the right's use of Obama as the example of "no racism to see here" follows years of effort to brand MLK as being on their side. As Charles Pierce puts it, "the great loophole" of Dr. King's speech is the only part conservatives choose to know: the "not judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character" line—

... it subsequently has been used as an opening through which all manner of historically backsliding mischief has come a'wandering in, from "reverse discrimination" to Allan Bakke, to what is going on today with the franchise in too many places, to the reaction to the killing of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Modern conservatives have used that line to conscript Dr. King into their ideology, now that he's dead and unable to speak for himself. ...
...

...The greatest and most lasting use of the great loophole has been to fasten Dr. King in our history as a devout and relatively harmless national icon, and not the true revolutionary that he was.

If things are grim at the national level, Prof. Glaude sees hope for local coalition building around social justice issues affecting both the poor and middle class, as in North Carolina's Moral Mondays protests. He finds these actions recall the best of the black freedom struggle, in focusing on issues of justice for all. It's a focus that brings about, in James Baldwin's words, a "re-imagining of America."

Euchner ends his book with a passage from Robert Penn Warren's interview of Bayard Rustin. The enduring power and inspiration in the faces of people in D.C. that August day, and in the remembrances of Euchner's interviewees, lies in something Rustin speaks to here—

... I happen to believe... the Negro is, as it were, the chosen people, by which I do not mean that he is superior or that he is better or that he's any more noble. It means, I think, that he has now an identity which is part of the struggle in this country for the extension of democracy.

Taking His Internet And Going Home

Tbogg walks away from a venue where he's long provided perspective along with belly laughs. Before going, he left a pick of greatest hits.

He's been a master at saying what needs to be said, and with admirable wit and brevity. Though one of my favorite bits of Tbogg's writing was in a longer than usual piece last year, in which he cut the Republicans and their "job creators" spiel down to size.

When I was a kid, my dad and his brothers had a dry cleaning business and, back in those days, they actually used to deliver dry cleaning to their customers homes. ... My dad, being the youngest, used to make most of the deliveries ... and he used to tell us how, when he went to deliver dry cleaning to the swells up the hill in La Jolla, often people would leave a note on the door or the gate asking him to leave their clothes because they wouldn’t be home. In those days most people would pay upon delivery, so my dad would knock on the door or ring the house anyway in an attempt to get paid which, at the time, was probably a couple of bucks tops back in those golden days when dimes and nickels weren’t just useless pocket weight. After getting no answer, my dad would leave the clothes to avoid a call to the shop wondering why they hadn’t been delivered which could only mean yet another trip back up the hill. More than a few times, after getting back in the truck, he would look back at the house only to see the curtains move because the occupants were checking to see if he had gone and whether it was safe to come out and collect their belongings.

All of this, of course, to get out of paying a $1.50 for services rendered which, by the way, the customer would invariably dispute the next time they dropped their clothes off if they weren't outright trying get out of paying because of too much starch or maybe a missing button.

He used to tell us all about it over dinner.

But what my dad didn't tell us was that those rich people who lived in those nice houses were the real hard workers in the world (unlike himself and his brothers) and if we worked as hard as those wealthy folks we could be just like them and live in a nice house, and not a $35 a month apartment, and we could drive a big car that we actually owned and maybe even someday have a color TV. Because, even at a very young age and before we had the appropriate words to describe them, he didn’t need to tell us what we instinctively knew about these people and how they got where they were.

They were assholes.

The kind of assholes who would try to screw some guy out of a couple of bucks because he was just a common working man with a family and he didn't make his money the old fashioned way.

By inheriting it.

So Reince Preibus and Marco Rubio can take their remarkably similar Dreams My Father Sold Me stories and blow it out their asses. That starry-eyed pie in the sky bullshit doesn't sell any better now than it did back then. Save it for the rubes at the Americans For Prosperity and Freedomworks rallies.

Those dumbasses will believe anything for the price of a balloon...

"See you in the Norton Anthology," says Roy Edroso—

... Tbogg has for years been one of my favorite writers -- and I needn't qualify that with "in the blogosphere," which is like calling someone the smartest guy on a National Review cruise. That he is known as a "liberal blogger" is just an accident of history, I think -- he's really a satirist... who has hunted where, in our low mean time, the ducks pretty consistently wind up: Out on absurdly elevated media perches, defending the indefensible in loud, quacking voices, just begging for his buckshot.

Part of a satirist's racket is wisdom, and Tbogg has supplied enough of that ... but I've been most grateful for the laughs -- for the times when he has greeted the sententious argh-blargh of internet hierophants with appropriate seriousness, or got right to the nub on the works of Ayn Rand...

Perfect sentiments, as are those of commenters—

JennOfArk
Well, George Tierney Jr. of Greenville, SC, for one is not sorry to see TBogg go.

StringOnAStick
... I'll miss the blog, but my sadness is well tempered by support for his reasons for hanging it up. Life is indeed too short. I hope he isn't done with writing; he's too damned good and I would be immeasurably sad if I let myself think I'll never see another perfect Tboggism.

hellslittlestangel
Well, he says he'll be on Twitter. If that isn't giving up writing, I don't know what is.

From The Very Sad To The Pathetic

Two pieces of news to do with the state of journalism. The very sad one was first: Doug Case, AKA Doghouse Riley, gone quite suddenly, at just 59.

... I didn't know much more about him than he chose to reveal on his own blog. But I knew he could write -- something which was obvious to anyone who read his posts and comments -- and hey, a soupçon of literary mystique never hurt B. Traven. Perhaps the biggest mystery (or maybe, considering the state of the modern media, just the greatest injustice) is why people like David Brooks and Ross Douthat had sinecures at the New York Times, and Doghouse didn't.

A real writer, with much to say; so different from what Charles Pierce's remembrance calls "cowardly, masthead-climbing pissants."

Pierce particularly valued Case's blog for this—

Mr. Riley was the go-to source if you needed material to deflate the national pretensions of Indiana's value-sized governor, Mitch Daniels, who managed to fool national pundits, fools, and David Brooks, but I repeat myself twice. ...

Here's the official obituary, ironically from the Indianapolis Star, which the redoubtable Doghouse used to serve up en brochette a couple of times a week. But if you seek his monument, look to Purdue University, where Mitch Daniels, onetime presidential timber, is reduced to doing his best Mel Gabler imitation on the subject of Howard Zinn. Every day that this squirt isn't president is testimony to the warm heart and good works of J. B.S. (Doghouse) Riley, man of the blogs.

With the death of local news in most places, the loss of a voice like Case's makes that vacuum greater.

I mainly saw his work in comments, especially as one of the alicuati. mortimer's comment gets at what I missed.

I'm going to miss Doghouse for all the reasons given here and then some: the breadth of his knowledge about history, his lawyerly skill at building perfect arguments, and because, like our genial host, he could also be screamingly funny. Whether tossing off a perfect one-liner to caption a picture of Michael Douglas: "The good news is that we know ass-kissing doesn't cause cancer, else there'd be fewer Americans now than in the 15th century," or a tour de force of pure stand-up on the Bush Museum, his generous wit generated LOLs like it was a public service. Hell, the only way I could get through a David Brooks column was knowing that I might get to read Doghouse shredding it to pieces later -- there's no way I can do it solo now.

But for all that, and his blistering rants on Indiana politics, he came across to me as a guy with a big heart in the right place. I can't find it at the moment, but a few years back he wrote a post (or two) about a student in his wife's school who died for lack of a working heater (IIRC) that was righteous, angry, and terribly moving. Despite having never met Douglas Case or corresponded with him, I feel like I just lost someone who was great to know, which is a sad but marvelous thing on these Internets. I'm glad I got to "know" him.

About a week later, and the world of big money media was in a tizzy. When the WaPo's editorial page can't sink much farther, it's hard to care much about this.

On the other hand, Pierce had a very funny update next day. Among comments—

Pat Healy
I put a WaPo editorial page into a bird cage, and the bird complained that I'd made his cage dirtier.

Tom Klee adds this, from America's Finest News Source (once again channeling an alternate, just world)—

"Following yesterday's announcement that Amazon.com founder Jeffrey Bezos would be purchasing daily newspaper The Washington Post, sources confirmed today that Post associate editor and legendary investigative journalist Bob Woodward had already been repositioned at a new staff position in one of Amazon's main warehouses just outside of Seattle.

Amazon.com sources say that Woodward, who is reportedly now a junior warehouse associate at the web company's Bellevue-based warehouse, will be primarily responsible for stocking the factory shelves, tracking and packaging online orders, and several other daily tasks related to the location's inventory."

Lest We Forget

On this day, twelve years ago.

Among comments—

Bob Yates -

Charlie, Charlie, what f*ckup could you be writing about? ... in 2010, Guilliani said "we had no domestic attacks under Bush."

Pat Healy -

But it's all good, because it led to some chuckles years later at the White House Correspondents Dinner, where Shrub did a routine about searching for the WMDs which had not yet been found in the Grand Adventure in Iraq, which had only been made possible by Shrub's failures of 12 years ago.

Matthew Pensinger -

Now...

WATCH THIS DRIVE!