Frank Beacham's Journal

Orangeburg Massacre Remains Unresolved in South Carolina After 47 Years

Racism is a very ugly thing. In the 1950s and 60s, it was far more overt than it is today. Jim Crow laws were openly defended in the South and those demanding civil rights for all citizens were despised, beaten and arrested.

The federal government — then on-board to stop racism — played catch-up in going to court to address the many violations in every aspect of life. For years, there were glitches in civil rights enforcement all over the nation.

One of those glitches happened in Orangeburg, S.C.. In 1968, a loophole in the Civil Rights Act passed four years earlier led to some delay in forcing All Star Bowling Lanes to admit blacks. With two black colleges in Orangeburg and nowhere else to bowl, the bowling alley became a target for civil rights advocates. The black students at the colleges wanted to bowl there and staged a demonstration.

All this might be forgotten today if this racist act hadn’t led to the brutal massacre of several black students by white highway patrolmen. Even worse, it all led to a cover-up of the shooting that continues today — the 47th anniversary of what is known as “The Orangeburg Massacre.”

A conservative Southern governor, wanting to appear tough to his white constituents, overreacted to the civil rights protest ordering a massive show of armed force. As emotions frayed and the situation veered out of control, nine white highway patrolmen opened gunfire onto the campus of South Carolina State College — killing three black students and wounding 27 others.

All the students were unarmed and in retreat from the highway patrolmen at the time of the shooting. Yet, without warning, they were shot in their backs with deadly buckshot.

Until the shooting, South Carolina was a southern state that had proudly celebrated a record of nonviolence during the turbulent civil rights years. It was all a façade. Nonviolence was equated with racial harmony in a white community with a paternalistic attitude toward its poorer black citizens. Equal rights were another thing.

To help protect its “progressive” self-image on racial issues, a web of official deceptions was created by South Carolina’s young governor — Robert McNair — and his administration to distort the facts and conceal the truth about what happened in Orangeburg.

The state claimed the deaths were the result of a two-way gun battle between students and lawmen at the college. The highway patrolmen insisted their shooting was done in self-defense in order to protect themselves from a attacking mob of students.

To bolster that claim and deflect responsibility from its own actions, the state hastily devised a media campaign to blame the riot on Cleveland Sellers, a young black activist working to organize area college students.

Time would prove none of it was true.

At first, the state’s cover-up worked. Later, upon outside scrutiny, it began to unravel. Then, with his legacy threatened, McNair broke nearly forty years of silence in 2006 in an attempt to put the pieces back together.

Ignoring facts proven over the years in court cases and through the first person accounts of eyewitnesses, McNair used local media and friendly “historians” as a tool to help members of his community lie to themselves about their own history. For the last year of his life, he deliberately fogged and distorted the story of the Orangeburg Massacre.

One man who knows the truth minced no words about what happened in 1968.

“They committed murder. Murder…that’s a harsh thing to say, but they did it,” said Ramsey Clark, U.S. Attorney General in 1968. “The police lost their self control. They just started shooting. It was a slaughter. Double ought buckshot is what you use for deer. It’s meant to kill. One guy emptied his service revolver. That takes a lot of shooting. The (students) are running away. Pow, pow, pow, pow, pow, pow!  My God, there’s a murderous intent there. We are lucky more weren’t killed.”

Clark said the student deaths were caused by police criminal acts. “The provocation for the incident was an absurd, provocative display of force,” he said.

Gov. McNair responded to Orangeburg with excessive police power because that was the politically expedient thing to do in 1968, the former attorney general said.  

“Fear, anger, a sense of self-righteousness to justify hating began to be seen as successful politics.” When the tactic backfired, Clark added, state officials fabricated stories that many South Carolinians believe to this day.

After 47 years, the story of the Orangeburg Massacre still simmers, unresolved. It is the chilling saga of the horrors of law enforcement motivated by racism and hatred — and the inability of a Southern state to admit the truth.

The central theme is “mendacity,” the web of lies a community spins in a desperate attempt to maintain it’s self-image and dignity when confronted by its own prejudice. It’s a culture where words are constantly being redefined in order that a people can more comfortably deceive themselves.

Today, that racism still exists in South Carolina, as in other places in the country. It has been dressed up and made more sophisticated by the policies of a Republican-controlled legislature that still refuses to even investigate the massacre.

The sad story is after 47 years, the state of South Carolina will not admit it committed murder in the shootings at Orangeburg.

The complete story of the Orangeburg shooting and its cover-up is the subject of my multimedia e-book, “The Legacy of the Orangeburg Massacre.” The price is $9.99. (ISBN-9781629218762).

The book is available at Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s Kindle book store and Barnes & Noble’s Nook store. It can also be bought directly from the store at Vook at http://store.vook.com/ and read online there on Macintosh and PC platforms.

Photo by Bill Barley

It's the 80th Anniversary of the Chiquola Mill Massacre in Honea Path, South Carolina

On the morning of September 6, 1934 — 80 years ago — in the tiny town of Honea Path, South Carolina, friends and neighbors came to blows in a labor dispute. When it was over, seven people were dead and 30 others wounded.

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.

This September is the 80th anniversary of the murders at Chiquola Mill in Honea Path. Honea Path will not commemorate the anniversary. It 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.
 
My name is Frank Beacham. I grew up in Honea Path. My mother was the town's history teacher. My father sold textile supplies. My grandfather, I later learned, organized the posse of gunmen who fired on their fellow workers in 1934.

In order that the murders in Honea Path not be forgotten, I have produced this 48-minute audio documentary. You can listen or download it. I hope you will listen. It will be posted during the month of September.

Audio Program

The 80th Anniversary of the Murders in Honea Path

My e-book, a full multimedia account of what happened in Honea Path is titled Mill Town Murder ($9.99) (ISBN-9781629218465). It’s available at Apple’s iTunes, Amazon’s Kindle book store and Barnes & Noble’s Nook store. It can also be bought directly from the store at Vook here and read online there on Macintosh and PC platforms.

Honoring a Long Overdue Southern Hero

April 11, 2014 was a historic day in Charleston, South Carolina. A monument was unveiled for a man whose brave actions involving civil rights 67 years ago caused him to be ostracized and run out of his home state of South Carolina.

Historically in Charleston, it has been a special kind of hell for black people. As slaves, blacks were publicly whipped, branded and hanged. Later, they were discriminated against on so many levels one couldn’t count them. Things are still far from truly equal.

In the late 1940s, before the rest of the nation started to fight for civil rights, this man — a federal judge who was the son of a Confederate soldier and presided in the city where the Civil War began — took some extraordinarily brave actions on the bench.

U.S. District Judge Waites Waring ruled in 1947 that South Carolina’s all-white Democratic primary was unconstitutional, and later, well before the U.S. Supreme Court got around to agreeing with him, that racial segregation in the schools was inherently unequal.

Waring's controversial opinions made him a pariah in the segregated South. A cross was burned in his yard, bricks were thrown through his windows and he received numerous death threats.

Congressman L. Mendel Rivers of Charleston called Judge Waring “a monster” on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. The judge was shunned by his own relatives, forced to resign from his clubs and even from his own church, and finally from the federal bench. He and his wife fled to New York City for their personal safety.

In South Carolina, punishment for such “sins” is silence. The white people of Charleston made Judge Waring disappear. Largely forgotten in Charleston for more than five decades, Waring is finally being remembered today for the role he played in school desegregation.

A statue of Waring will be dedicated today at the federal courthouse where he heard his cases. Also, a historical marker about the Clarendon County, South Carolina case he presided over was recently placed outside the courthouse.

Waring's 1951 dissent in the Clarendon case was largely followed by the U.S. Supreme Court in its landmark Brown vs. Board of Education outlawing segregated public schools. The Brown ruling came after the appeal of the South Carolina case was combined with similar cases from Kansas, Delaware and the District of Columbia.

Waring was the first judge since the U.S. Supreme Court 1896’s decision in Plessey vs. Ferguson establishing separate but equal in race relations as the law of the land to write an opinion challenging the doctrine.

Waring wrote that beyond unequal facilities "segregation in education can never produce equality" and called it "an evil that must be eradicated." The Clarendon County case, he wrote, demanded a "strike at the cause of the infection and not merely at the symptoms of the disease."

When Waring and two other federal judges heard the Clarendon case in Charleston in 1951 — a case in which future Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall argued for the plaintiffs — hundreds of blacks lined up outside the courthouse hoping to get seats, although there wasn't room for all.

"They had come there on pilgrimage," Waring recalled in an interview at Columbia University some years later. "It's awfully heartening when you get poor, illiterate, ignorant people to suddenly sniff a little breath of freedom."

After Judge Waring arrived in New York City, he befriended the late CBS journalist Charles Kuralt. The judge was asked by Kuralt how he had come so far, considering his Southern background, to make such a brave ruling.

“Being a judge,” Waring told Kuralt, “I gradually became judicious.”

Kuralt, in his book “Charles Kuralt’s America,” said the next time Waring returned to Charleston was to be buried. Kuralt was at the funeral as a reporter on January 17, 1969.

“I remember no more than six or eight white faces in the crowd; white Charlestonians, including most members of his family, stayed home that day to show their contempt for him. Hundreds of black people stood there shoulder to shoulder to show their respect.”

Kuralt called Waring in his book “an unsung American hero.” And that he was.

South Carolina has changed in many ways since Judge Waring made his famous rulings. But it is far too soon to say that racism there is behind us. It has just taken on a different form in a harsh political establishment that is virtually all far rightwing Republicans.

But at least the silence has ended and Judge Waring got a public appreciation for his bravery and good works. In a political environment like the one in South Carolina, that’s a miracle in itself.

With thanks to the Associated Press and Charles Kuralt!

Possibility Junkie, a New Musical That Targets the Artistic Process

We live in an era of magnified perceptions. For many Americans not in the glorified, hyper-wealthy one percent, this is a time of diminished possibilities and loss of hope. David Ippolito and Gretchen Cryer precisely target those perceptions in a magnificent new play, Possibility Junkie. They hit a slam dunk home run!

Possibility Junkie is a timely look at how we frame our lives and our definition of success in a culture where corporate media and propaganda portrayed as “news” is bombarding us from every direction with constant lies—usually based on fear. It’s tough to create a fulfilling life in an environment where everyone around you worships money and judges every endeavor by how much of a profit it generates.

Yet, that’s what artists do, creating their work while at the same time reflecting a mirror on the foibles of the cultural condition around them. David Ippolito, the central character in this play, is an independent singer-songwriter who has gained a huge following as a troubadour in Central Park for the past 20 years. David is the real deal and this is his inspiring story. I have known David for a decade, watched his work develop and witnessed his struggles in trying to live an honest, artistic life.

There are two key lines in the play. The first is “Keep Hope Alive” and the second is the title, “Possibility Junkie.” Both came from the late Sid Bernstein, the man who brought the Beatles and many other bands to America in the 1960s. Bernstein found David singing in Central Park 15 years ago and they became friends. Sid died at age 95 last August 21. 

In the play, Bernstein’s character is “Burn,” an elderly wise man played beautifully by Rob Barnes, a veteran Broadway actor and singer. Barnes was in the original Broadway casts of Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. Having known Sid as well, I can attest that Barnes carries much of Bernstein in his character.

 

Rob Barnes and David Ippolito

The plot of Possibility Junkie centers around a right wing commentator on FAX News (loosely based on FOX, though it’s hard me to even call it “news.”) David does a song about him in Central Park and a fan records it on video. The video is put on YouTube and goes viral. The FAX commentator, Sean Kilroy (played by Joel H. Jones), gets angry and tries to do David in.

He uses his stunningly attractive assistant, Ainsley Louis (played by Jillian Louis), to spy on David and secretly video tape him, trying to get any kind dirt possible. David falls for Ainsley, a walking, singing bombshell, only to find himself and his friend, Burn, betrayed by her ambitions to get her own TV show.

Jillian Louis and Joel H. Jones

Possibility Junkie is an inspiring musical with songs not just written for this play, but written for over 20 years from the heart by David Ippolito. It all melds together in what I don’t lightly call Ippolito’s masterpiece. His “The Last Protest Song” toward the end brought tears to my eyes. With this play, David has now transitioned from being a talented singer and songwriter to being a creator of musical theatre. This is an ideal new format for him.

The expert hand of Gretchen Cryer is also evident in this production. An earlier theatrical presentation by David was too loose and talky, with David ad-libbing each night. That’s gone in this production, no doubt the work of Cryer in co-writing the book and directing the production. Cryer, the mother of television actor Jon Cryer, co-wrote the classic, I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It On The Road. She has David acting loose, but he’s far more precise in his presentation this time.

In fact, there wasn’t a weak player in this excellent cast of actors and singers—featuring in addition to Ippolito and Barnes—J.C. Hall (a terrific hip-hop artist), Joel H. Jones, Jillian Louis, Teresa Reynolds and Vanessa Theus. Music direction was by Mike Murray, with some musicians—especially mandolin player Chris Tedesco—joining the cast dancing on the main stage while playing.

Heather Wolensky’s set design was also unique, featuring actual moving image backdrops of where David plays in Central Park. The various video segments plugged into the play seamlessly. It was “virtual set” technology well used in the story. The choreography by David Eggers is also excellent.

A story that Sid Bernstein once told me came ringing back as I watched Possibility Junkie in a packed house on its opening night. Noting that he had found the Beatles in Liverpool in the 1960s, Sid said he hoped one day he could give Liverpool a gift from America. That gift, he told me, would be David Ippolito. “David’s got it,” Sid said, “and they would love him over there.”

Sid never got the chance to promote David in Liverpool, but the man—who also brought The Rolling Stones, Herman's Hermits, The Moody Blues and The Kinks to the United States—had an insanely good eye for talent.

Possibility Junkie runs through Oct. 20 at the Theatre for the New City at 155 First Ave in New York City.

 

David Ippolito with the real Sid Bernstein

Photo by Frank Beacham

The Sad Loss of George McGovern

It is with great sadness that I write of the death of Senator George McGovern. He was 90 years old and his advanced age simply caught up with him. But George McGovern, as the movie line went, was some kind of man.

He was the first and only candidate I ever truly supported for president. He would have been a great one, but—up against the likes of Richard M. Nixon—he wasn’t vicious enough to get to the White House. Since he ran in 1968, we’ve had no one—and I mean no one—of his character and caliber.

It is hard not to be wistful about how far our national politics has fallen since 1968. I knew McGovern, followed his work and reported on it, listened to his speeches, had a few drinks with him and always admired him.

When in college—being from the still impoverished state of South Carolina—I came to Washington to report on McGovern’s hearings on hunger. In 1968, I was a very green 20-year-old reporter, but I could not help being impressed. Yes, McGovern was a liberal of the highest order—one who wanted to help poor people live a better life.

And, yes, even then he was attacked for that. Little has changed since that day, including the lack of popularity of helping the poor. But I was completely on board with McGovern and his policies.

As one facing the draft and the war in Vietnam, I also appreciated McGovern’s opposition to the war. He was unlike the racist hypocrites who served and still serve in Congress from South Carolina.

Later, when I worked on Capitol Hill for Sen. Robert Byrd, I got to know McGovern and his top aide, Gary Hart (later to become a senator himself). We all became friendly. Hart offered me a job on McGovern’s presidential campaign, which I refused, deciding to leave Washington to become a reporter and writer instead.

In the era of Richard Nixon, whose reign of power turned out to be far more toxic than anyone could even imagine back in the 60s, McGovern offered an antidote of incredible decency and solid thinking.

America’s rejection of him was tough for me to swallow. But one thing is clear—the quality of our presidential candidates has gone down ever since.

I heard McGovern speak again in 2008 in New York City. Even then at his advanced age, he was dead on right with everything he said. I still wanted him to be president more than ever, but it was not to be.

McGovern remains a shining symbol of the best of this country’s political left—particularly in relation to the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s when the country was torn by U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and the corruption and abuse of power of the Nixon administration.

Even he recognized the mixed results of his 1972 candidacy, saying, "I opened the doors of the Democratic Party and 20 million people walked out." McGovern had also become more forceful in recent years in drawing historical parallels between the Nixon and Bush administrations and the Vietnam and Iraq wars.

McGovern's post-political career generally enhanced his reputation. Tom Brokaw wrote in 1998 that “he remains one of the country's most decent and thoughtful public servants.”

Sadly, the nation has run out of this breed of politician. Now, in this election, we’ve hit bottom on all sides. But, for those who remember, it wasn’t always that way.

George McGovern was definitely some kind of man. I’m proud to have known him and thankful I lived in his time. May he finally rest in peace.

George Stoney: Changing a Town and the Lives of Its People Forever

                    

George Stoney, the great documentary filmmaker, has died at age 96. Though he had made films since the early 1950s, Stoney made one in 1995 that turned my world upside down.

The Uprising of ’34, made with his former student, Judith Helfand, was about the Textile Strike of 1934. In it was a section about how, on September 6, 1934, seven workers were shot and killed and 30 others wounded at the Chiquola Mill in my home town of Honea Path, South Carolina.

It was an act that has shaped the town’s history and attitudes in ways that few could have imagined. I had a special interest in the film because my late grandfather, Dan Beacham, Honea Path’s mayor and superintendent of the mill in 1934, organized the gunmen who fired their weapons at the workers. That day became known as “Bloody Thursday.”

My grandfather died in 1936, many years before I was born. When I was growing up in Honea Path during the 1960s, the subject of the mill violence was taboo. There were hints of what happened, of course, but the topic was never discussed in the open. I learned the truth about Honea Path’s history in 1994 from a rough-cut of Stoney’s film.

Since that film essentially ended Honea Path’s six-decade long secret, I’ve learned about the history of the town and its people through many conversations and stories. I wrote about it in my book, Whitewash: A Southern Journey through Music, Mayhem and Murder.

As a writer who makes his living telling stories, I was shocked to find one of the most compelling stories I’ve ever heard connected to my own family and hometown. Even more shocking, I found, was how an event of such magnitude and importance to the lives of generations of Honea Path families could have been hidden and buried for so long. Of course the reason that I and so few of my fellow baby boomers didn’t know the story of Chiquola Mill was because it was purposely denied us.

There was a campaign of fear and intimidation after the shootings that effectively erased public discussion of what had happened. Fearful workers who wanted to keep their jobs put a self-imposed lid on their own past. Somehow, as the years went by, the violence at Chiquola evolved into a source of shame.

George Stoney, a Southerner himself, understood all this. He explained more to me about where I came from than I ever learned while living there. After the film’s release, he came to Honea Path and we did a radio talk show together. He organized a retreat at the Highlander Center in Tennessee where we discussed what happened in Honea Path for several days.

Later, we spoke, not only in his classes at New York University, but at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and the Museum of Natural History in New York City. We always winged it and the endless conversations were never boring.

As I learned from all this, a documentary filmmaker’s job is never done. George invited me to one of his film classes last year at NYU, still teaching well into his 90s.

George addressed the many myths that built up over the years about the workers who died in Honea Path more than 75 years ago. They were called an isolated group of troublemakers and rabble-rousers. Some, mainly the mill’s former management, claimed they deserved what happened to them.

He saw it another way. He thought these mill workers risked everything—their jobs, their freedom and ultimately their lives—for a cause they believed in. They made a decision to exert some control over their changing place in an increasingly industrialized world. Their method was to attempt to organize their fellow workers into a labor union.

The amazing chain of events that caused friends and neighbors in Honea Path to turn on one another with weapons has to be viewed in the context of the time. In 1934 the cork finally blew and labor protests erupted all over the United States. There were 1,856 work stoppages involving 1,470,000 workers.

Honea Path represented a microcosm in a whirlwind of worker unrest. The shooting of the Honea Path mill workers was a pivotal moment in the General Textile Strike that was sweeping the South. Though the efforts of the workers ended in defeat and much suffering followed, the deaths of the seven Honea Path men was 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 American workers. One example was child labor. Before 1938, when the Fair Labor Standards Act outlawed employment of children under sixteen, the concept of “helping” was used in the mills.

Very young children were taught factory skills by their parents and soon “helped” by working in the mill to increase the family's piecemeal earnings. “Helping” became a form of apprenticeship and a major part of the mill’s labor system. Because this practice is now illegal, children have a better chance at a quality life by getting to stay in school rather than be exploited as cheap labor.

Other major reforms that came out of the labor unrest was the establishment of the minimum wage and the 40-hour work week. These are reforms—a direct result of what happened in Honea Path—have permeated modern life in the United States and have extended far beyond the textile industry. That’s why these workers were heroes and why their history should be honored.

The corrosive division that poisoned Honea Path after the shootings and the sense of shame that followed the shooting was concocted by those responsible for the violence. Fortunately that has mostly ended now, if for no other reason than fewer and fewer remain with us who can give a first person account of what happened.

Now, we have lost George Stoney, too. The Honea Path story is just one of many that George told. What a life! What a wonderful ability to change people's lives through storytelling. That’s what George Stoney did so well.

RIP, George!

 

Fox and CNN Get the Supreme Court Ruling Wrong

It is remarkable to me how people continue to watch, defend and put up with the sorry state of television news.

When I worked at United Press International in the 1970s, we had very difficult desegregation busing decisions that required quick, but thorough analysis. If I had gotten a decision wrong on the UPI wire, I would have been fired then and there. That’s no longer the case.

Both Fox News and CNN got the story flat wrong. In their rush to get the news out, coupled with their built-in bias as to what the decision would be, both networks initially reported that the Supreme Court had struck down the law’s individual mandate. Of course they were wrong, because the opposite actually happened.

“The mandate is gone,” Shannon Bream, a Fox News correspondent, announced at 10:08 a.m. as a graphic flashed on the screen that called it unconstitutional. A moment later, one of the Fox anchors, Megyn Kelly, cautioned that Bream might be wrong.

“We’re getting conflicting information,” Kelly said, while reading from Scotus blog, an a web site about the court. Citing the blog, she accurately told viewers that “the individual mandate is surviving as a tax.”

At the same time on CNN, relaying information from a producer, Bill Mears, on the phone inside the court building, a correspondent, Kate Bolduan, said, “It appears as if the Supreme Court justices have struck down the individual mandate.”

“Wow,” said Wolf Blitzer, the anchor, who immediately said that if the court had indeed done what she had said, it would be a setback for President Obama and the Democratic Party. Despite his qualified words, a banner on the screen read, “Supreme Ct. Kills Individual Mandate.” The mistake lingered for six minutes — well after other television networks and news outlets had reported that the opposite was true.

Editors and producers at several organizations said they would emphasize accuracy over speed in any coverage of the decision, lest they risk being wrong. But today news organizations hire amateur reporters at low pay scales and expect them to have the skill to report accurately. Fox was even taking information from a blog, not first-hand reporting. This was absolute proof of the low state of TV news.

“CNN regrets that it didn’t wait to report out the full and complete opinion regarding the mandate,” a spokeswoman said in a statement. “We made a correction within a few minutes and apologize for the error.”

Fox News did not issue an apology. In a statement, Michael Clemente, a Fox executive, said flatly, “Fox reported the facts as they came in.” Clemente should be fired for his arrogance, much less his incompetence.

Even the President of the United States, watching like much of the nation, was fooled by the bad reporting. He, of all people, should have known better.

That’s the difference in news today. It should be strong proof that television coverage is unreliable and amateur at best. Turn them off is my advice.

Civil War Buff Becomes Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina

In another bizarre event in my home state of South Carolina, former state Sen. Glenn McConnell, an avid civil war enthusiast, has ascended to lieutenant governor of the state after the indictment and conviction of the current Republican holding that office.

Former Lt. Gov. Ken Ard pleaded guilty Friday to criminal charges of spending campaign funds on personal expenses and fabricating donations. That money went for things like iPads, clothes, football tickets and family vacations, the indictment said.

By state law, this left McConnell, as President Pro Tempore of the state senate, to become the state's new second in command. 

McConnell is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Secession Camp #4. The Sons of Confederate Veterans were charged in 1906 by Lt. General Stephen Dill Lee, Commander General of the United Confederate Veterans, with "the vindication of the cause for which we fought."

In 2000, when the Confederate flag was brought down from atop the dome of the State House, McConnell successfully advocated flying another Confederate flag from a flagpole in the front of the Statehouse, on the grounds, near the Confederate Soldier Monument.

He rejected the suggestion that the Confederate flag be placed in a glass case by saying, "Encasement represents entombment," and by saying that he wanted "no part in symbolically burying the Confederate banner." The resulting bill that was passed in 2000 was called a compromise.

McConnell vigorously fights attempts to take down the currently-flying Confederate flag, and he declares such attempts as having the goal of carrying out a "cultural genocide." He has been featured as a guest on The Political Cesspool, a radio show that promotes the Confederacy.

McConnell, a Confederate heritage defender who has owned a Civil War memorabilia business, reportedly gets a kick out of reenacting battles and is known for firing his personal cannon, dubbed "Big Ray." Only in South Carolina!

Some Thoughts on “What’s Next” for Occupy Wall Street

The past week has been an exciting time in New York City. We have seen a popular uprising grow and expand—aided by a tin-eared billionaire mayor and a violent and over-zealous police department dedicated to protecting the wealthy. As with many of the dictators that have fallen around the world recently, these New York officials are as lost and isolated as Gadhafi was in Lybia or Mubarak in Egypt.

There is a global trend at work and it’s in reaction to the huge and growing disparities in wealth and political power throughout the world. Today’s government leaders have hit bottom—enabling and supporting a culture of shallow commercialism, intellectual bankruptcy, corporate corruption and phoniness in everyday life that is crushing ordinary people. 

Honest, objective news media has evaporated, entertainment is becoming no more than corporate-created fluff and public education has come down to brainwashing a generation that the best life offers are financial deals that make money. 

Art, music and the creating of anything that enhances human life is minimized in today’s over-commercialized culture. All that matters in the short term is a soul-killing chase for bucks and the drudge work that usually goes with it. 

Today, the rich actually “make” very little. Manufacture of goods is done offshore at poverty wages. The wealthy today essentially create shady schemes to shift money around and charge the masses for their efforts. Those that aren’t devious enough to find success at that—and that is most of us—are left out.

I, for one, am sick of it. I want a different life. I want different values. I want out of a system that has created fiendish values and meaningless work that pays little and does nothing but enhance the lies perpetrated by the wealthy drones and the two political parties.

So what’s next? I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. It is clear that both the Democrats and Republicans offer zero for the future. Both parties are bankrupt of ideas and controlled by lobbyists for the wealthy or right-wing whackos that are now self-destructing.

Before this election cycle, I would have said that third parties had little chance of getting elected in the United States. But times change and I think the day has arrived that a third-party candidate could be elected president. I also believe that most Americans side with Occupy Wall Street, despite what fraudulent institutions like “Fox News” or its pundits say.

The problem is who would run? It would be need to a strong, Ralph Nader-like progressive. Elizabeth Warren comes to mind, though she is already running for the Senate in Massachusetts.

I came out of the 1960s and realize the major fight ahead is for a younger generation. For so long I worried they didn’t care or weren’t energized. Now that has changed and the corrupt power structure has done all the right things to magnify their efforts throughout the world. This now must be translated to political action that can have a lasting effect in the world. The street protests are fine, but the movement needs to grow.

What’s needed is a presidential candidate with all the charisma of a Barack Obama, but this time with the spine to carry the things out that need to be done and not collapse to the interests of the wealthy and special interests. We also need progressive members of Congress to support this new president. That's a big order, but the time is certainly right.

Another Night of Victory for Daniel Ortega—This Time in 1979

   
Reading that Daniel Ortega is heading for a third term as president of Nicaragua brings back memories of a very unusual night in 1979—when I, and other reporters—ate rice and drank Johnnie Walker Red into the wee hours with the future president in a dark, candlelit bar at Managua’s InterContinental Hotel.

Earlier that day, July 17, Nicaragua's longtime leader, Gen. Anastasio Somoza Debayle, was overthrown after an insurrection led by the FSLN, the Sandinista National Liberation Front, a group whose leaders included Ortega. Earlier, Somoza had left the country, flying to exile in Miami.

Rebels were shooting in the air and the celebrations, though dangerous, were going on in the streets. I had been eating cans of tuna fish seemingly for days—there was no food to be had—and had just returned from a tour of Gen. Somoza’s “safe house,” where cans of caviar were ripped open and tossed across the room.

In an earlier time, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, I had shared a couple of beers with General Somoza during an outdoor party for the astronauts at the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn. He seemed like a pleasant enough guy, on his best behavior for a visit to the United States. I didn’t know how dictators operated back then. 

I was at the Intercontinental Hotel during the revolution for NBC News and walking down a stairwell when I ran into Ortega, an exuberant young 34-year-old leader of the rebellion. I had met Ortega earlier, while shooting video of the Sandinistas in the jungles as they approached Managua. The tension of the earlier days was missing—this time Ortega was relaxed and gleeful. 

There may have been no food or electricity in the hotel, but the cheerful Ortega, who spoke perfect English, invited me and other members of the press to join him for some newly discovered booze and rice in the hotel bar. Now, he was a different man, one about to take hold of the reigns of power.

That night he was jubilant and everyone’s best friend. Born poor, his parents had been opposed to Somoza. His mother was imprisoned by the National Guard. Two of his brothers died in combat. He, himself, was arrested at age 15 for political activities, and became an early member of the FSLN. 

During his imprisonment, Ortega was severely tortured. After his release, he was exiled to Cuba, where he received several months of guerrilla training. He later returned to Nicaragua secretly.

That night, at least, Ortega told of the good things he would do for his long exploited people. At the time, the things he said made me feel good. I saw hope for this poor country.  He was a friendly, very articulate man, not someone I could comprehend to be a killer. But, in Latin America, I have since learned, nothing is as it seemed.

Ortega went on the be in a five-person Junta of National Reconstruction, the only member from the FSLN. Soon, President Ronald Reagan accused the FSLN of joining Soviet-based Cuba in supporting Marxist revolutionary movements in Latin America. Reagan and company authorized the CIA to begin financing and arming rebels, who were known as the Contras. Some of the Contras were former officers from Somoza's National Guard.            

This turned out to be one of the largest political scandals in U.S. history—the Iran Contra Affair—when Oliver North and several members of the Reagan administration defied an amendment to sell arms to Iran, and then used the proceeds to fund the Contras. Between 1980 and 1989, over 30,000 Nicaraguans died in the conflict between the Sandinista government and the Contras. 

In the 1984 general election, Ortega won the presidency with 67 percent of the vote and took office on January 10, 1985. Now 65, Ortega appears to have won his third term, though not consecutive. More than 600 complaints of voting irregularities have emerged so far.

The New York Times reported that Ortega proved to be a shrewd political strategist. He adopted policies aimed at pleasing his base of poor and working-class Nicaraguans, including supplying them with government-donated food. At the same time, he actively reached out to independents and conservative business leaders with his free-market approach to the economy.

Much of his support, the newspaper reported, was due to an alliance with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, which brought about $2 billion to the Nicaraguan economy over the past several years. If Ortega makes it this time, he becomes the first president in Nicaragua’s modern history to serve three terms. 

As I look back to that time, I have mixed feelings and one genuine souvenir. When I entered Nicaragua, my passport was stamped with General Somoza’s government insignia.  When I left a couple of weeks later, a line was crossed through the stamp and the letters FSLN were written with a magic marker.  The new government hadn’t had time to make up new emigration stamps yet.