Frank Beacham's Journal

Philip Berrigan, peace activist and former Roman Catholic priest, was born 99 years ago today

Philip Berrigan in 1967

Photo by A. Aubrey Bodine

Philip Berrigan, peace activist and former Roman Catholic priest, was born 99 years ago today.

Berrigan graduated from high school in Syracuse, New York, and was then employed cleaning trains for the New York Central Railroad. He played with a semi-professional baseball team.

In 1943, after a semester of schooling at St. Michael's College, Toronto, Berrigan was drafted into combat duty in World War II. He served in the artillery during the Battle of the Bulge (1945) and later became a Second Lieutenant in the infantry. He was deeply affected by his exposure to the violence of war and the racism of boot camp in the Southern United States.

Berrigan graduated with an English degree from the College of the Holy Cross, a Jesuit university in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1950, he joined the Society of St. Joseph, better known as the Josephite Fathers, a religious society of priests and lay brothers dedicated to serving those of African descent, who were still dealing with the repercussions of slavery and daily segregation in the United States.

After studying at the theological school of the Society, St. Joseph's Seminary in Washington, D.C., he was ordained a priest in 1955. He went on to gain a degree in Secondary Education at Loyola University of the South (1957) and then a Master of Arts degree at Xavier University in 1960, during which time he began to teach.

In addition to his academic responsibilities, Berrigan became active in the Civil Rights movement. He marched for desegregation and participated in sit-ins and bus boycotts.

Berrigan was first imprisoned in 1962 and 1963. During his many prison sentences, he would often hold bible study class and offer legal educational support to other inmates.

As a priest, his activism and arrests met with deep disapproval from the leadership of the Catholic Church. Berrigan was moved to Epiphany Apostolic College, the Josephite seminary college in Newburgh, New York, but he continued his protests.

Berrigan attracted the notice of federal authorities when he and six other anti-war activists were caught trading letters alluding to kidnapping Henry Kissinger and bombing steam tunnels. They were charged with 23 counts of conspiracy, including plans for kidnap and blowing up heating tunnels in Washington.

Although the government spent $2 million on the Harrisburg Seven trial in 1972, they did not win a conviction. This was one of the first reversals suffered by the U.S. government in such cases. Another was The Camden 28 in 1973.

After a life of protest, Berrigan died of liver and kidney cancer at the age of 79 on Dec. 6, 2002.

In a last statement, he said I die with the conviction, held since 1968 and Catonsville, that nuclear weapons are the scourge of the earth. “To mine for them, manufacture them, deploy them, use them, is a curse against God, the human family and the earth itself,” he wrote.

Howard Zinn, professor emeritus at Boston University, paid this tribute to Berrigan saying "Mr. Berrigan was one of the great Americans of our time. He believed war didn't solve anything. He went to prison again and again and again for his beliefs. I admired him for the sacrifices he made. He was an inspiration to a large number of people."

T.S. Eliot was born 134 years ago today.

T.S. Eliot, 1956

Photo by Cecil Beaton

T.S. Eliot was born 134 years ago today.

Eliot was a publisher, playwright, literary and social critic — and one of the most important English-language poets of the 20th century.

Although he was born an American, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalized as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.

The poem that made his name — The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock — was published in Chicago in 1915. It is considered a masterpiece of the Modernist movement.

It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including Gerontion (1920), The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1945).

He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral in 1935.

Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

He received an undergraduate degree at Harvard, studied at the Sorbonne, returned to Harvard to study Sanskrit and then studied at Oxford. After meeting poet and lifelong friend Ezra Pound, Eliot relocated to England.

In 1915, he married Vivian Haigh-Wood, but the marriage was unhappy, partly due to her mental instability. She died in an institution in 1947.

Eliot began working at Lloyd's Bank in 1917, writing reviews and essays on the side. In 1925, he accepted a job as an editor at Faber and Faber, which allowed him to quit his job at the bank. He held the position for the rest of his life.

Eliot lectured in the United States frequently in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1957, he married his assistant, Valerie Fletcher. The couple lived happily until his death in 1965 at the age of 76.

The trial for eight antiwar activists charged with the responsibility for the violent demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago on this day in 1969 — 53 years ago today

Photo by Richard Avedon

The trial for eight antiwar activists charged with the responsibility for the violent demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago on this day in 1969 — 53 years ago today.

The defendants included David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee (NMC); Rennie Davis and Thomas Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Youth International Party ("Yippies"); and two lesser known activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines.

Bobby Seale, the eighth man charged, had his trial severed during the proceedings, lowering the number of defendants from eight to seven. The group was charged with conspiracy to cross state lines with intent to incite a riot. All but Seale were represented by attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass.

The trial, presided over by Judge Julius Hoffman, turned into a circus as the defendants and their attorneys used the court as a platform to attack Nixon, the war, racism and oppression. Their tactics were so disruptive that at one point, Judge Hoffman ordered Seale gagged and strapped to his chair.

The Chicago Seven were indicted for violating the Rap Brown law, which had been tagged onto the Civil Rights Bill earlier that year by conservative senators. The law made it illegal to cross state lines in order to riot or to conspire to use interstate commerce to incite rioting. President Johnson's attorney general, Ramsey Clark, refused to prosecute the case.

When the trial ended in February, 1970, Hoffman found the defendants and their attorneys guilty of 175 counts of contempt of court and sentenced them to terms between two to four years. Although declaring the defendants not guilty of conspiracy, the jury found all but Froines and Weiner guilty of intent to riot. The others were each sentenced to five years and fined $5,000.

However, none served time because in 1972, a Court of Appeal overturned the criminal convictions and eventually most of the contempt charges were dropped as well.

About 101 years ago, a fashion faux pas led to The Straw Hat Riot in New York City

A sea of straw hats at a baseball game in about 1920

Photo from Bettmann Archives

About 101 years ago, a fashion faux pas led to bedlam in New York City.

The Straw Hat Riot emerged from the idea that they should not be worn very far into September. (Men usually wore hats outdoors in those days, and straw was popular for summer.)

Every year after the cutoff (which moved around a bit), men would lose their hats to gangs, so newspapers printed reminders. On Sept. 13, 1922, with the date still two days away, some gang members went further. They knocked straw hats off men’s heads, stomping on them and even starting “straw hat bonfires.”

For days, the mobs “terrorized whole blocks,” The Times wrote. Some carried sticks with nails at the end to snatch hats. Others stood along train tracks and swiped hats off passing riders. There were injuries and arrests before the trouble died down.

Three years later, President Calvin Coolidge essentially put an end to the cutoff rule by going for a mid-September stroll in the “tabooed headgear.”

Thanks New York Times!

Ken Kesey was born 87 years ago today

Ken Kesey was born 87 years ago today.

Kesey was an author, best known for his novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s.

"I was too young to be a beatnik and too old to be a hippie," Kesey said in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder.

Born in La Junta, Colorado, to dairy farmers, in 1946 Kesey’s family moved to Springfield, Oregon. He was a champion wrestler in both high school and college in the 174 pound weight division, and he almost qualified to be on the Olympic team until a serious shoulder injury stopped his wrestling career.

Kesey graduated from Springfield High School in 1953. An avid reader and filmgoer, the young Kesey took John Wayne, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Zane Grey as his role models (later naming a son, Zane) and toyed with magic, ventriloquism and hypnotism.

He graduated from the University of Oregon's School of Journalism with a degree in speech and communication in 1957. After a brief sojourn in Los Angeles, he was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in 1958.

Because he lacked the prerequisites to work toward a master's degree in English, he elected to enroll in the creative writing program at Stanford University that fall, where he would develop lifelong friendships with fellow writers Ken Babbs, Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman and Robert Stone.

While at Stanford, Kesey resided on Perry Lane (a historically bohemian enclave adjacent to the university golf course) and clashed with program director, Wallace Stegner.

According to Stone, Stegner "saw Kesey... as a threat to civilization and intellectualism and sobriety" and rejected Kesey's Stegner Fellowship applications for the 1959-60 and 1960-61 terms.

Nevertheless, Kesey received the $2,000 Harper-Saxton Prize for his first novel in progress (the oft-rejected Zoo) and continued to audit the graduate writing seminar through 1960 (taught that year by Frank O'Connor and the more congenial Malcolm Cowley) on a Ford Foundation fellowship granted by Leslie Fiedler as he began the manuscript that would become One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

At the instigation of Perry Lane neighbor and Stanford psychology graduate student, Vik Lovell, an acquaintance of Richard Alpert and Allen Ginsberg, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study under the aegis of Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, where he worked as a night aide.

The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, aMT and DMT on people. Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. His role as a medical guinea pig, as well as his stint working at the state veterans' hospital, inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

The success of this book, as well as the demolition of the Perry Lane cabins in August, 1963, allowed him to move to a log house at 7940 La Honda Road in La Honda, California, an hour south of San Francisco.

He frequently entertained friends and many others with parties he called "Acid Tests," involving music (such as Kesey's favorite band, The Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead), black lights, fluorescent paint, strobes and, of course, LSD.

These parties were noted in some of Ginsberg's poems and are also described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, as well as Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter S. Thompson and, Freewheelin Frank, Secretary of the Hell's Angels, by Frank Reynolds.

In 1959, Kesey wrote Zoo, a novel about the beatniks living in the North Beach community of San Francisco, but it was never published. In 1960, he wrote End of Autumn, about a young man who leaves his working-class family after he gets a scholarship to an Ivy League school, also unpublished.

The inspiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while working on the night shift (with Gordon Lish) at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital. There, Kesey often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs with which he had volunteered to experiment.

Kesey did not believe that these patients were insane, but rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave. Published under the guidance of Cowley in 1962, the novel was an immediate success.

When the publication of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, in 1964, required his presence in New York, Kesey, Neal Cassady and others in a group of friends they called the "Merry Pranksters" took a cross-country trip in a school bus nicknamed, "Furthur."

This trip, described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and later in Kesey's own screenplay "The Further Inquiry") was the group's attempt to create art out of everyday life.

After the bus trip, the Pranksters threw parties they called Acid Tests around the San Francisco area from 1965 to 1966. Many of the Pranksters lived at Kesey's residence in La Honda.

In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who then turned them on to Timothy Leary. Sometimes a Great Notion was made into a 1971 film starring and directed by Paul Newman. It was nominated for two Academy Awards, and in 1972, was the first film shown by the new television network HBO in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana in 1965. In an attempt to mislead police, he faked suicide by having friends leave his truck on a cliffside road near Eureka, along with an elaborate suicide note, written by the Pranksters.

Kesey fled to Mexico in the back of a friend's car. When he returned to the United States eight months later, Kesey was arrested and sent to the San Mateo County jail in Redwood City, California, for five months where he was introduced to a highly recommended San Francisco lawyer, Richard Potack, who specialized in marijuana cultivation.

On his release, he moved back to the family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley, where he spent the rest of his life. He wrote many articles, books (mostly collections of his articles) and short stories during that time.

In 1984, Kesey's 20-year-old son, Jed, a wrestler for the University of Oregon, was killed on the way to a tournament when the team's bald-tired van crashed. It went off the road in icy conditions and down a 185 foot slope. One team member, Lorenzo West, was killed instantly, and Jed suffered a severe head injury. After two days in the hospital, he was declared brain dead and his parents gave permission for his organs to be harvested.

This deeply affected Kesey, who later said Jed was a victim of conservative, anti-government policy that starved the team of proper funding. There is a memorial dedicated to Jed on the top of Mount Pisgah, near the Keseys' home in Pleasant Hill.

At a Grateful Dead Halloween concert just days after promoter Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash, Kesey appeared on stage in a tuxedo and delivered a eulogy while the Grateful Dead was playing the song "Dark Star," and mentioned that Graham had donated $1,000 for Jed's mountain-top memorial.

In 1994, he toured with members of the Merry Pranksters performing a musical play he wrote about the millennium called Twister: A Ritual Reality.

Many old and new friends and family showed up to support the Pranksters on this tour that took them from Seattle's Bumbershoot, all along the West Coast including a sold out two-night run at The Fillmore in San Francisco to Boulder, Colorado, where they coaxed (or pranked) the Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg into performing with them.

Kesey was diagnosed with diabetes in 1992. In 1997, health problems began to take their toll, starting with a stroke that year. On October 25, 2001, Kesey had surgery on his liver to remove a tumor. He never recovered from the operation and died of complications on November 10, 2001 at age 66.

Here, Kesey talks about LSD

Eleven years ago today, hundreds of demonstrators gathered in Lower Manhattan on what would become Occupy Wall Street

Pete Seeger joins the Occupy Wall Street demonstration

Eleven years ago today, hundreds of demonstrators gathered in Lower Manhattan on what would become Occupy Wall Street.

“They held teach-ins, engaged in discussion and debate and waved signs with messages like ‘Democracy Not Corporatization’ or ‘Revoke Corporate Personhood,’” The New York Times reported.

“Organizers, promoters and supporters called the day, which had been widely discussed on Twitter and other social media sites, simply September 17.”

In the coming weeks, the demonstrators would pitch tents in Zuccotti Park the protests would set off a national movement. But that first day, the protesters found themselves stymied. Their target, Wall Street, had been blocked by police barricades by 10 a.m.

Eventually, though, they made it in: “As a chilly darkness descended, a few hundred people realized one of the day’s objectives by setting foot onto Wall Street after a quick march through winding streets, trailed by police scooters.”

On this day in 1940 — 82 years ago — the first peacetime draft in the history of the United States was imposed

Vietnam Veterans Against the War, 1972

Photo by Frank Beacham

On this day in 1940 — 82 years ago — the first peacetime draft in the history of the United States was imposed.

It came in the form of the Burke-Wadsworth Act, passed by Congress by wide margins in both houses. The measure gave birth to the Selective Service.

The registration of men between the ages of 21 and 36 began exactly one month later, as Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who had been a key player in moving the Roosevelt administration away from a foreign policy of strict neutrality, began drawing draft numbers out of a glass bowl.

The numbers were handed to the president, who read them aloud for public announcement. There were some 20 million eligible young men — 50 percent were rejected the very first year, either for health reasons or illiteracy (20 percent of those who registered were illiterate).

In November, 1942, with the United States now a participant in the war, and not merely a neutral bystander, the draft ages expanded. Men 18 to 37 were made eligible.

Blacks were passed over for the draft because of racist assumptions about their abilities and the viability of a mixed-race military. But this changed in 1943, when a "quota" was imposed, meant to limit the numbers of blacks drafted to reflect their numbers in the overall population, roughly 10.6 percent of the whole.

Initially, blacks were restricted to "labor units," but this too ended as the war progressed, when they were finally used in combat.

"Conscientious objector" (CO) status was granted to those who could demonstrate "sincerity of belief in religious teachings combined with a profound moral aversion to war."

Quakers made up most of the COs, but 75 percent of those Quakers who were drafted fought. COs had to perform alternate service in Civilian Public Service Camps, which entailed long hours of hazardous work for no compensation.

About 5,000 to 6,000 men were imprisoned for failing to register or serve the nation in any form. These numbers were comprised mostly of Jehovah's Witnesses.

By war's end, approximately 34 million men had registered and 10 million served with the military. However, the draft laws remained intact.

Of the more than 72,000 men registering as conscientious objectors (CO), nearly 52,000 received CO status. Of these, over 25,000 entered the military in noncombatant roles, another 12,000 went to civilian work camps and nearly 6,000 went to prison.

Draft evasion only accounted for about four percent of the total inducted. About 373,000 alleged evaders were investigated with just over 16,000 being imprisoned.

The large cohort of Baby Boomers who became eligible for military service during the Vietnam War was responsible for a steep increase in the number of exemptions and deferments, especially for college students.

Besides being able to avoid the draft, college graduates who volunteered for military service (primarily as commissioned officers) had a much better chance of securing a preferential posting compared to less-educated inductees.

As U.S. troop strength in Vietnam increased, more young men were drafted for service there, and many of those still at home sought means of avoiding the draft.

Since only 15,000 National Guard and Reserve soldiers were sent to Vietnam, enlistment in the Guard or the Reserves became a popular means of avoiding serving in a war zone.

For those who could meet the more stringent enlistment standards, service in the Air Force, Navy or Coast Guard was a means of reducing the chances of being killed. Vocations to the ministry and the rabbinate soared, because divinity students were exempt from the draft.

Doctors and draft board members found themselves being pressured by relatives or family friends to exempt potential draftees.

Some conscientious objectors objected to the war based on the theory of Just War. One of these, Stephen Spiro, was convicted of avoiding the draft, but given a suspended sentence of five years. He was later pardoned by President Gerald Ford.

There were 8,744,000 service members between 1964 and 1975, of whom 3,403,000 were deployed to Southeast Asia.

From a pool of approximately 27 million, the draft raised 2,215,000 men for military service (in the United States, Vietnam, West Germany and elsewhere) during the Vietnam era.

The draft has also been credited with "encouraging" many of the 8.7 million "volunteers" to join rather than risk being drafted. The majority of servicemen deployed to Vietnam were volunteers.

Of the nearly 16 million men not engaged in active military service, 57 percent were exempted (typically because of jobs including other military service), deferred (usually for educational reasons), or disqualified (usually for physical and mental deficiencies but also for criminal records including draft violations).

During the 1968 presidential election, Richard Nixon campaigned on a promise to end the draft. He had first become interested in the idea of an all-volunteer army during his time out of office, based upon a paper by Martin Anderson of Columbia University.

Nixon also saw ending the draft as an effective way to undermine the anti-Vietnam war movement, since he believed affluent youths would stop protesting the war once their own probability of having to fight in it was gone.

There was opposition to the all-volunteer notion from both the Department of Defense and Congress, so Nixon took no immediate action towards ending the draft early in his presidency.

Instead, the Gates Commission was formed, headed by Thomas S. Gates, Jr., a former Secretary of Defense in the Eisenhower administration. Gates initially opposed the all-volunteer army idea, but changed his mind during the course of the 15-member commission's work.

The Gates Commission issued its report in February, 1970, describing how adequate military strength could be maintained without having conscription. The existing draft law was expiring at the end of June, 1971, but the Department of Defense and Nixon administration decided the draft needed to continue for at least some time.

In February, 1971, the administration requested of Congress a two-year extension of the draft, to June 1973. It was approved.

Meanwhile, military pay was increased as an incentive to attract volunteers, and television advertising for the U.S. Army began. With the end of active U.S. ground participation in Vietnam, December, 1972 saw the last men conscripted, who were born in 1952 and who reported for duty in June, 1973.

On February 2, 1972, a drawing was held to determine draft priority numbers for men born in 1953, but in early 1973 it was announced that no further draft orders would be issued.

In March, 1973, 1974 and 1975, the Selective Service assigned draft priority numbers for all men born in 1954, 1955 and 1956, in case the draft was extended, but it never was. Jeff Mellinger, the last drafted enlisted ranked soldier still on active duty, retired in 2011.

The pressures of the draft during the Vietnam war had a great effect on the music produced in the period and shaped the classic rock and roll that is still played today.

On this day — 88 years ago — the Textile Strike of 1934 began

On this day — 88 years ago — the Textile Strike of 1934 began.

It would be the largest strike in the labor history of the United States, involving 400,000 textile workers from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the U.S. Southern states.

The strike swept through Southern cotton mills, outpacing the union organizers and employing "flying squadrons" which traveled by truck and on foot from mill to mill, calling the workers out.

Textile workers in the North went out on strike in great numbers as well, although they were spread more evenly across different industries and had more diverse grievances than the Southern cotton mill workers. Within a week, hundreds of thousands of textile workers nationwide had left their jobs and the industry was shut down.

The mill owners were initially taken by surprise by the scope of the strike. They immediately took the position that these flying squadrons were, in fact, coercing their employees to go out on strike.

Gov. Ira Blackwood of South Carolina took up this theme, announcing that he would deputize the state's "mayors, sheriffs, peace officers and every good citizen" to maintain order, then called out the National Guard with orders to shoot to kill any picketers who tried to enter the mills.

Mill owners persuaded local authorities throughout the Piedmont region to augment their forces by swearing in special deputies, often their own employees or local residents opposed to the strike. In other cases, they simply hired private guards to police the areas around the plant. Violence between guards and picketers broke out almost immediately.

In Honea Path, South Carolina, my hometown, seven picketers were shot to death and more than twenty-seven others were wounded on September 6th. Most were shot in the back as they were fleeing the picket line.

There was no National Guard on duty — only anti-union workers deputized by my grandfather, Dan Beacham, who ran Chiquola Mill. The bloody riot at the town's cotton mill on that warm Thursday morning shaped the lives of two generations to follow — not because of the shock of what was known, but by what was unknown.

Fear, threats and intimidation were used to silence the story of the greatest tragedy in the town's history. My grandfather, who was also the mayor and town judge, organized the posse of gunmen who fired on their fellow workers in 1934. It was a communal town secret for more than 60 years.

Today is the 87th anniversary of the murders in Honea Path. Over time, I have learned more about the story and I found the answer to a burning question: How did friends and neighbors in my small hometown reach the point of killing each other over a labor dispute? It never made sense to me.

Essentially, from my research, the “why” was reduced to a simple formula: Religious Fundamentalism + Corporate Greed = Mass Murder. As modern industrial philosophy was being formed in the 1930s, fundamentalist preachers sided with the mill owners over their workers. An explosion was triggered.

I have written the full, updated story of the Chiquola Mill killings in the new fourth edition of Whitewash: A Southern Journey through Music, Mayhem and Murder. It is a compelling story and the first real history of Honea Path. It’s available at: http://tangiblepress.net/Whitewash.html

In order that the murders in Honea Path not be forgotten —on the 80th anniversary — I produced a 48-minute audio documentary. You can listen or download it for free at the link below.

Window from the abandoned mill is where gunmen fired at the workers. It has since been destroyed.

Photo by Frank Beacham

Why Does Honea Path, South Carolina Not Acknowledge Its Own History?

If you visited my hometown of Honea Path, S.C. on this 88th anniversary of the most important event in its history, you will witness something very odd. There will be no acknowledgement by the town of the 1934 killings at Chiquola Mill. Total silence!

This tiny town never acknowledges the anniversary of the outright murder of seven mill workers or twenty-seven others, most shot in the back after demonstrating to establish a labor union at the mill. All were heroes who changed this country for the better, but it appears that Honea Path would rather forget the tragedy.

The story has been erased, not only from the history books, but from the public consciousness of those people most affected by it. An instrument of fear was so powerful that parents were afraid to tell the story to their own children. It formed a lifelong social contract for the entire community's survival.

Remnants of the old textile mill still stand, though years ago there was funding to tear it down. The town government was so incompetent, the money was wasted. A demolition company took what was valuable and then sold bricks from the mill on eBay as souvenirs of the “historic” mill. The town even turned down grants to turn the abandoned mill into a textile museum that could have brought tourists to the sleepy town.

So why does Honea Path refuse to remember its past? I’ve thought a lot about that question. I think it’s a combination of old time stubborn Southern pride, belief in corporate-generated myth and collective mendacity — the fog of lies created to hide the truth about the past. This silence comes down to the very essence of what history is about. It's the story of our lives. To hide it is to deny the forces that shaped our very being.

If you think all this is very passive, think again. During a visit to Honea Path over the Christmas holiday in 1996, my family’s long-time physician confronted me in a very public way at lunch hour in a local restaurant and proclaimed loudly that I should be shot for writing about the story. No jury, he shouted to the gathered diners, would convict the shooter. He wasn't kidding.

Due to the residual propaganda put out by the old mill owners — including my grandfather, who ran the mill — many in the town somehow feel ashamed about what happened in 1934. They shouldn't feel fear or shame at all. Though the workers efforts ended in defeat and much suffering to follow, the deaths of the Honea Path Seven were certainly not in vain. The disillusionment of the workers and the outrageous conduct by the mill owners made a strong impression on the Roosevelt Administration.

This helped spur passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. Out of these laws came reforms that vastly improved the lives of all workers in the United States. These laws abolished employment of children under sixteen in the mill, helping young people stay in school to get an education. The establishment of the minimum wage and the 40-hour work week came directly out of the Honea Path tragedy.

Though Honea Path has a rich history, the town has tried hard to forget. It’s a sad story. However, the good news is intelligent young students often call me, asking about the event they find so hard to understand. I try to help them learn the truth — one person at a time. In this environment, it is the only way to keep the story alive.

—

A few years back, I published a multimedia e-book of Mill Town Murder for e-book reading devices and computers. The format didn’t take off and publishers quit carrying the titles.

So, on this 88th anniversary of the Honea Path shootings, I am giving them away. Go here for the download for the computer of your choice. They still work on most computing devices.

Mill Town Murder-.ePub; Mill Town Murder-.Mobi

Funeral of textile workers killed in Honea Path, South Carolina during the Textile Strike of 1934. It was the largest funeral in the town’s history.

The mill management would not allow the funerals to be held in mill-owned churches.

“Honea Path,” a song written and performed by Matthew Grimm and Red Smear

One of the first novels of the Beat movement of the 1950s, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, was published on this day in 1957 — 65 years ago

Neal Cassady (left) and Jack Kerouac, 1952

Photo by Carolyn Cassady

One of the first novels of the Beat movement of the 1950s, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, was published on this day in 1957 — 65 years ago.

The novel chronicles the cross-country wanderings of a Kerouac-like hero, Sal Paradise, and his pal, Dean Moriarty, based on Neal Cassady, and their free-ranging encounters with drugs, free love and the budding counterculture.

The book, which Kerouac wrote in just three weeks, became an instant classic.

This was helped when New York Times writer Gilbert Millstein gave the book a rave review on the day it was published. Millstein wrote "the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is."

"Jack went to bed obscure," Kerouac's girlfriend told a reporter, "and woke up famous."

Although a credo of the Beat-inspired movement of the 1960s was "Never trust anyone over 30," Kerouac was 35 when the book came out. He had long been associated with the Beat movement, and the novel is filled with characters based on Beat figures like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

Kerouac was born in March, 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. The son of French-Canadian parents, he learned English as a second language. In high school, Kerouac was a football star and won a scholarship to Columbia University. In World War II, he served in the Navy, but was expelled for severe personality problems. He became a merchant seaman.

In the late 1940s, he wandered the United States and Mexico and wrote his first novel, The Town and the City. His later novels included The Dharma Bums (1958), The Subterraneans (1958), and Lonesome Traveler (1960).

Kerouac was a heavy drinker when he died in Florida from an internal hemorrhage, at the age of 47, on October 21, 1969.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked, On the Road, 55th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. The novel was chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

Thanks History.com

Jack Kerouac reads from “On the Road”

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963 — 59 years ago today

The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom or "The Great March on Washington," as styled in a sound recording released after the event, was one of the largest political rallies for human rights in United States history and called for civil and economic rights for African Americans.

It took place in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963 — 59 years ago today.

Martin Luther King, Jr., standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, delivered his historic "I Have a Dream" speech advocating racial harmony during the march.

The march was organized by a group of civil rights, labor, and religious organizations, under the theme "jobs, and freedom." Estimates of the number of participants varied from 200,000 to 300,000. Observers estimated that 75–80 percent of the marchers were black.

The march is widely credited with helping to pass the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965).

Gospel legend Mahalia Jackson sang "How I Got Over," and Marian Anderson sang "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands." This was not Marian Anderson's first appearance at the Lincoln Memorial. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution refused permission for Anderson to sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall.

With the aid of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anderson performed a critically acclaimed open-air concert on Easter Sunday, 1939, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Joan Baez led the crowds in several verses of "We Shall Overcome" and "Oh Freedom." Bob Dylan performed, "When the Ship Comes In," for which he was joined by Baez. Dylan also performed "Only a Pawn in Their Game," a provocative and not completely popular choice because it asserted that Byron de la Beckwith, as a poor white man, was not personally or primarily to blame for the murder of Medgar Evers.

Peter, Paul and Mary sang "If I Had a Hammer" and Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind." Odetta sang "I'm On My Way." Some participants, including Dick Gregory criticized the choice of mostly white performers and the lack of group participation in the singing.

Dylan himself said he felt uncomfortable as a white man serving as a public image for the civil rights movement. After the March on Washington, he performed at few other immediately politicized events.

The symbolism of the March was contested before it even took place. In the years following the March, movement radicals increasingly subscribed to Malcolm X's narrative of the March as a co-optation by the white establishment. Liberals and conservatives tended to embrace the March, but focused mostly on King's "I Have a Dream" speech and the legislative successes of 1964 and 1965.

The mass media identified King's speech as a highlight of the event and focused on this oration to the exclusion of other aspects. For several decades, King took center stage in narratives about the March. More recently, historians and commentators have acknowledged the role played by Bayard Rustin in organizing the event.

On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., the African American civil rights movement reached its high-water mark when Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke to about 250,000 people attending the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The demonstrators — black and white, poor and rich — came together in the nation's capital to demand voting rights and equal opportunity for African Americans and to appeal for an end to racial segregation and discrimination. The peaceful rally was the largest assembly for a redress of grievances that the capital had ever seen, and King was the last speaker.

With the statue of Abraham Lincoln — the Great Emancipator — towering behind him, King used the rhetorical talents he had developed as a Baptist preacher to show how, as he put it, the "Negro is still not free."

He told of the struggle ahead, stressing the importance of continued action and nonviolent protest. Coming to the end of his prepared text (which, like other speakers that day, he had limited to seven minutes), he was overwhelmed by the moment and launched into an improvised sermon.

He told the hushed crowd, "Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettoes of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair."

Continuing, he began the refrain that made the speech one of the best known in U.S. history, second only to Lincoln's 1863 "Gettysburg Address":

"I have a dream," he boomed over the crowd stretching from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, "that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.' I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

“I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today."

King had used the "I have a dream" theme before, in a handful of stump speeches, but never with the force and effectiveness of that hot August day in Washington. He equated the civil rights movement with the highest and noblest ideals of the American tradition, allowing many to see for the first time the importance and urgency of racial equality.

He ended his stirring, 16-minute speech with his vision of the fruit of racial harmony:

"When we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"

In the year after the March on Washington, the civil rights movement achieved two of its greatest successes: the ratification of the 24th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished the poll tax and thus a barrier to poor African American voters in the South; and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited racial discrimination in employment and education and outlawed racial segregation in public facilities.

In October, 1964, Martin Luther King, Jr., was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. On April 4, 1968, he was shot to death while standing on a motel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee — he was 39 years old. The gunman was escaped convict James Earl Ray.

Here is film from King’s speech at the march

Thanks History.com