Frank Beacham's Journal

The trial for eight antiwar activists charged with violent demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago on this day in 1969 — 52 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 — 52 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.

Crosby, Stills and Nash perform "Chicago"

On Sept. 20, 1963 — 58 years ago —an optimistic and upbeat President John F. Kennedy suggested that the Soviet Union and the United States cooperate on a mission to mount an expedition to the moon. The Soviets and many Americans were caught off guard

On Sept. 20, 1963 — 58 years ago —an optimistic and upbeat President John F. Kennedy suggested that the Soviet Union and the United States cooperate on a mission to mount an expedition to the moon. The proposal caught both the Soviets and many Americans off guard.

In 1961, shortly after his election as president, John F. Kennedy announced that he was determined to win the "space race" with the Soviets. Since 1957, when the Soviet Union sent a small satellite — Sputnik — into orbit around the earth, Russian and American scientists had been competing to see who could make the next breakthrough in space travel.

Outer space became another frontier in the Cold War. Kennedy upped the ante in 1961 when he announced that the United States would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Much had changed by 1963, however.

Relations with the Soviet Union had improved measurably. The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 had been settled peacefully. A "hot line" had been established between Washington and Moscow to help avert conflict and misunderstandings. A treaty banning the open air testing of nuclear weapons had been signed in 1963.

On the other hand, U.S. fascination with the space program was waning. Opponents of the program cited the high cost of the proposed trip to the moon, estimated at more than $20 billion.

In the midst of all of this, Kennedy, in a speech at the United Nations, proposed that the Soviet Union and United States cooperate in mounting a mission to the moon. "Why," he asked the audience, "should man's first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition?"

Kennedy noted "the clouds have lifted a little" in terms of U.S.-Soviet relations. "The Soviet Union and the United States, together with their allies, can achieve further agreements — agreements which spring from our mutual interest in avoiding mutual destruction," Kennedy said.

Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko applauded Kennedy's speech and called it a "good sign," but refused to comment on the proposal for a joint trip to the moon. In Washington, there was a good bit of surprise — and some skepticism — about Kennedy's proposal.

The "space race" had been one of the focal points of the Kennedy administration when it came to office, and the idea that America would cooperate with the Soviets in sending a man to the moon seemed unbelievable. Other commentators saw economics, not politics, behind the proposal.

With the soaring price tag for the lunar mission, perhaps a joint effort with the Soviets was the only way to save the costly program. What might have come of Kennedy's idea is unknown — just two months later, he was assassinated in Dallas.

His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, abandoned the idea of cooperating with the Soviets but pushed ahead with the lunar program. In 1969, the United States landed the first men on the moon, thus winning a significant victory the "space race."

Thanks History.com

Above, Sputnik digital artwork by Erik Simonsen

Ken Kesey was born 86 years ago today

Ken Kesey was born 86 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

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

Ten 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.”

In the above photo, Pete Seeger joins the Occupy Wall Street demonstration.

On this day in 1940 — 81 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 — 81 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 in 1964 — 57 years ago — the Beatles announced in Jacksonville, Florida they would not play to a racially segregated audience

On this day in 1964 — 57 years ago — the Beatles announced in Jacksonville, Florida they would not play to a racially segregated audience.

The concert, at Jacksonville’s Gator Bowl, was originally to have been whites only, but The Beatles refused to perform until they received an assurance from the promoter that the audience would be integrated.

“We never play to segregated audiences and we aren't going to start now,” John Lennon said. “I'd sooner lose our appearance money.”

Charles Evers, brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, was born 99 years ago today

Charles Evers in the 1971 Mississippi campaign for governor. Evers is in the center and a 23-year-old Frank Beacham on the top right

Charles Evers, brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, was born 99 years ago today.

In 1969, Evers became the first African American since the Reconstruction era to have been elected as mayor in a Mississippi city, Fayette, in Jefferson County. In 1971, he ran for governor and later for the U.S. Senate in 1978, both times as an Independent candidate.

As a young reporter for United Press International assigned to the final days of the civil rights movement, I covered Evers' 1971 campaign for governor. He was a fascinating man in a fascinating time.

During World War II, Charles and Medgar Evers both served in the United States Army. Charles fell in love with a Filipino woman overseas. He could not marry her and go to his native Mississippi because of her "white" skin color. Mississippi had enshrined Jim Crow rules in its constitution, which prohibited interracial marriages.

In Mississippi in 1951, Charles and Medgar grew interested in African freedom movements. They were interested in Jomo Kenyatta and the rise of the Kikuyu tribal resistance to colonialism in Kenya, known as the "Mau-Mau" Rebellion as it moved to open violence.

Along with his brother, Charles became active in the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), a civil rights organization that also promoted self-help and business ownership. He drew inspiration from Dr. T. R. M. Howard, the president of the RCNL, who was one of the wealthiest blacks in the state.

Between 1952 and 1955, Evers often spoke at the RCNL's annual conferences in Mound Bayou on such issues as voting rights. Around 1956, Evers's entrepreneurial gifts and his civil rights activism landed him in trouble in Philadelphia, Mississippi. He left town and moved to Chicago.

There, he vowed to support the movement back home, and fell into a life of hustling, running numbers for organized crime and managing prostitutes. The money he made was said to have been substantial, and much of it was used to underwrite the Civil Rights Movement.

In 1963, Byron De La Beckwith shot Medgar Evers as he arrived home from work. Evers died in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. Charles Evers was shocked and deeply upset by news of his brother's death.

Over the opposition of more establishment figures in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) like Roy Wilkins, Charles took over Medgar's post as head of the NAACP in Mississippi.

In 1969, Charles Evers was elected mayor of Fayette, Mississippi, the first African-American mayor in his state since Reconstruction. By then, Fayette had a majority of black residents, but African Americans had been effectively disfranchised in Mississippi from 1890 until passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Fayette had no industry, which meant it had almost no residents who had grown up outside the area. Its white community was known to be hostile towards blacks. Evers' election as mayor had enormous symbolic significance statewide and national resonance. The NAACP named Evers the 1969 "Man of the Year."

John Updike mentioned Evers in his popular novel, Rabbit Redux. Evers popularized the slogan, "Hands that picked cotton can now pick the mayor." Evers served many terms as mayor of Fayette. Admired by some, he alienated others with his inflexible stands on various issues. Evers did not like to share or delegate power.

The political rival who finally defeated Evers in a mayoral election used the slogan: "We've seen what Fayette can do for one man. Now let's see what one man can do for Fayette."

In 1971, Evers ran but was defeated in the gubernatorial general election by Democrat William "Bill" Waller, 601,222 (77 percent) to 172,762 (22.1 percent). Waller had been the original prosecutor of Byron De La Beckwith.

In 1978, Evers ran for the Senate seat vacated by James O. Eastland. He finished in third place behind his opponents, Democrat Maurice Dantin and Republican Thad Cochran, but he received 24 percent of the vote. Cochran won the election and still holds the Senate seat.

Evers died on July 22, 2020 in Brandon, Mississippi at the age of 97.

On this day — 87 years ago — the Textile Strike of 1934 began. It nearly destroyed my hometown

On this day — 87 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 here.

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 here for free.

This 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 87th 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 87th 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

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

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.

Fifty-seven years ago today, The Beatles and Bob Dylan met for the first time and smoked a joint together. Al Aronowitz introduced them.

Al Aronowitz at a Beat Generation conference at NYU, 1994

Photo by Frank Beacham

Fifty-seven years ago today, The Beatles and Bob Dylan met for the first time and smoked a joint together. The Beatles had just played a concert in Queens on August 28, 1964.

Later, at the Delmonico Hotel in Manhattan, they met Bob Dylan, who was introduced by a friend, a reporter named Al Aronowitz. It was on this day that the Beatles were first introduced to marijuana by Dylan and Aronowitz, who had brought along the joint.

Dylan had assumed The Beatles were well acquainted with the drug, after mishearing the lyrics to “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” He mistakenly thought the line went “… and when I touch you I get high, I get high … ” instead of “I can’t hide, I can’t hide.”

Years later, Aronowitz, who became a personal friend, told me the story and I didn’t believe him — that is until I checked it out and found it to be true.

Aronowitz was quite a character. He was the original manager of The Velvet Underground, getting the band their first gig at a high school auditorium. Members of Velvet Underground stole Aronowitz's tape recorder and dumped him weeks later when they met Andy Warhol.

Aronowitz also claimed that Dylan wrote the song, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” while staying in his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. That I could never prove.

Back in the mid 1990s, Aronowitz and I bonded when we began exploring the internet for our work. I got there first, and Al was impressed since he was a technophobe. He wrote this about me in his, “The Blacklisted Journalist” column, and published it on the net in the mid-1990s:

“I have found a spiritual brother in my journalism-in-exile. By putting his writings on the Internet, Frank is doing the same thing I'm doing: addressing the future. In other words, talking to posterity. I write my pieces as if I'm addressing a friend of mine in cyberspace a thousand years from now. But in Frank, I feel I've found a friend of mine in cyberspace RIGHT NOW! Writing in cyberspace is not the same as chiseling it in stone, but I think stone erodes more easily. I try to write stuff that's going to last and I think Frank does, too,” Al wrote.

“Therefore, it is with great pride and pleasure that I sneak myself the honor of featuring Frank Beacham's page as a pre-eminent link to my own. That's because, in reading his (material), I immediately felt his mind to be linked to my own. In that one essay, Frank Beacham saw things exactly the way I see 'em. Reading only one essay, I immediately felt my brain connected to his brain...it took me only one of his essays to persuade me that Frank's one of my men.”

Al died on August 1, 2005 at age 77.

Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi 66 years ago today

Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi 66 years ago today.

While visiting family in Money, Mississippi in 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, was brutally murdered for flirting with a white woman four days earlier.

His assailants — the white woman's husband and her brother — made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye and shot him in the head. They then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river.

Till grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago, and though he had attended a segregated elementary school, he was not prepared for the level of segregation he encountered in Mississippi.

His mother warned him to take care because of his race, but Emmett enjoyed pulling pranks. On August 24, while standing with his cousins and some friends outside a country store in Money, Emmett bragged that his girlfriend back home was white.

Emmett's African American companions, disbelieving him, dared Emmett to ask the white woman sitting behind the store counter for a date. He went in, bought some candy, and on the way out was heard saying, "Bye, baby" to the woman.

There were no witnesses in the store, but Carolyn Bryant — the woman behind the counter — claimed that he grabbed her, made lewd advances and then wolf-whistled at her as he sauntered out.

Roy Bryant, the proprietor of the store and the woman's husband, returned from a business trip a few days later and found out how Emmett had spoken to his wife. Enraged, he went to the home of Till's great uncle, Mose Wright, with his brother-in-law J.W. Milam in the early morning hours of August 28.

The pair demanded to see the boy. Despite pleas from Wright, they forced Emmett into their car. After driving around in the Memphis night, and perhaps beating Till in a toolhouse behind Milam's residence, they drove him down to the Tallahatchie River.

Three days later, his corpse was recovered. It was so disfigured that Mose Wright could only identify it by an initialed ring. Authorities wanted to bury the body quickly, but Till's mother, Mamie Bradley, requested it be sent back to Chicago.

After seeing the mutilated remains, she decided to have an open-casket funeral so that all the world could see what racist murderers had done to her only son. Jet, an African American weekly magazine, published a photo of Emmett's corpse, and soon the mainstream media picked up on the story.

Less than two weeks after Emmett's body was buried, Milam and Bryant went on trial in a segregated courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi. There were few witnesses besides Mose Wright, who positively identified the defendants as Emmett's killers.

On September 23, the all-white jury deliberated for less than an hour before issuing a verdict of "not guilty," explaining that they believed the state had failed to prove the identity of the body. Many people around the country were outraged by the decision and also by the state's decision not to indict Milam and Bryant on the separate charge of kidnapping.

The Emmett Till murder trial brought to light the brutality of Jim Crow segregation in the South and was an early impetus of the African American civil rights movement.

Here’s a short film on the death of Emmett Till featuring Bob Dylan’s famous song.

Thanks History.com