People Before Profit blog

Tour underway for Wellstone benefit CD

Fri, 18 Apr 2003 04:08:00 +0000

Larry McDonough has been a Legal Aid attorney for almost 20 years, in rural and urban offices around Minnesota. Before law school, he was a high school band director and jazz pianist and he has continued to play ever since.

Since March 5, he has been touring for his CD, which is dedicated to the memory of Paul and Sheila Wellstone, Marcia Wellstone Markuson, Mary McEvoy, Tom Lapic, and William McLaughlin, all of whom died in a plane crash on October 25, 2002.

Both the CD and concerts benefit Wellstone Action, a tax-exempt organization formed to carry on their work. McDonough knew Wellstone for many years, both as an attorney advising him on national housing policy and as a pianist playing at his events. McDonough’s remembrance of them was published around the country last fall, and is posted on his website.

For more information on the CD or tour, go to www.larrymcdonoughjazz.homestead.com

McDonough’s schedule includes:

Fri. April 25, 7:00 p.m.

Third Annual Grand Marais Jazz Festival

Arrowhead Center for the Arts, Grand Marais

(218) 387-1284, MJRpine@aol.com (email).

Sun. Apr. 27, 4-7 p.m.

Beaner’s Central

324 N Central Ave., Duluth

(218) 624-5957, jrwussow@msn.com (email),

$5 cover.

Fri. May 9, 9-12:30 p.m.

Dakota at Bandana Square

Energy Park Drive, St. Paul, $10 cover

(651) 642-1442, Dakotajazz@aol.com (email), www.dakotacooks.com (web).

May Day celebrations in NY

Fri, 18 Apr 2003 04:04:00 +0000

NEW YORK – May Day will be celebrated in New York with a dinner for peace, sponsored by the People’s Weekly World. The event will feature Sam Webb, national chairman of the Communist Party USA, who will be speaking on the subject, “A peaceful world is possible.” Kahlil Almustafa, an exciting young poet, will be only one of the performers on the program. For information and reservations for the May Day dinner, call (212) 924-0550.

A new May Day tradition will begin this year in Harlem with a “Peace and Justice Festival” on Sunday, May 4. Local peace groups, labor and community organizations are hosting a celebration of the international workers holiday, emphasizing culture and the importance of unity.

Sponsors, which include the offices of the two local City Council members, the Working Families Party Club and Uptown Youth for Peace and Justice and the Black Radical Congress, are aiming for a festive event with community performers of every kind of music from hip hop, salsa and merengue, to R&B, folk, cumbia, and rock and roll. The festival will take place at the park at Grants Tomb, on Riverside Drive and 122nd Street and will run from noon to 6 pm. For more information, call (212) 642-1185.

Public access networks hold conference

Fri, 18 Apr 2003 03:57:00 +0000

NEW YORK – As its contribution to Media Democracy Week, the Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN), hosted a conference titled “Media Democracy: Where it’s Headed.”

The three-day conference focused on topics dealing with media and media access. Workshops included social responsibility and community media, creating community media, increasing youth involvement, and looking at media critically: youth media against the war.

According to MNN, which administers public access cable television services in Manhattan, media democracy is about ensuring non-commercial space as an important counterbalance to the mainstream media and helping people in the community gain access and training.

In a short interview with Steve Mendelsohn, executive director of MNN, these questions and others were answered.

Media democracy, he said, “Is about empowerment and developing a medium where ordinary people can express themselves.”

With the 2.8 million dollars a year as its share of franchise fees received from Time-Warner and RCN, MNN provides a mix of programs, produced by people in the community as well as training in administrative, technical and public access programming.

Mendelsohn said that by holding regular training sessions in video production, use of equipment and by making editing facilities, cameras, lights, tripods and other media equipment available to the public, MNN is “creating spaces that allow different voices to be heard.”

He said that while MNN programming can be thematic, artistic, educational, or express ethnic and religious perspectives not usually heard in the mainstream media, it’s most important contribution is the potential to facilitate community dialog and public discussion about information and information access through the media.

Mendelsohn said that while fewer and fewer corporations own more and more of the media and while the federal government is attempting to deregulate ownership “it becomes imperative to safeguard the free exchange of ideas and diverse opinions, which is the mandate of public access television.

“Whereas corporate media provides news and perspectives from a narrow viewpoint, inevitably excluding and marginalizing diverse communities and peoples, media democracy is about providing the training, tools, resources and money to ensure that diverse perspectives are heard,” Mendelsohn concluded.

As part of the conference, MNN hosted a showing of Strange Fruit by acclaimed director, producer and editor Joel Katz. Strange Fruit an award winning documentary on the history and legacy of the song by the same name, chronicles the importance of the song in its historical context and gives examples of how it, and its lyrics, are remembered and used today.

Strange Fruit, written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher and member of the Communist Party, was made famous by the great singer Billie Holiday. To many the song is a cry of protest, and its lyrics articulated the feeling of the African American people, many of whom had been lynched and murdered.

The documentary also deals with the concept of popular front politics and how cultural and artistic expressions can politicize and mobilize broad cross-sections of the people.

The author can be reached at tonypec@pww.org

The artists choice: freedom or slavery

Fri, 11 Apr 2003 04:21:00 +0000

Paul Robeson was born April 9, 1898. Robeson, often refered to as the “tallest tree in the forest,” was a world-famous political activist and leader, actor, singer – truly an American hero. At great personal sacrifice, Robeson stood for peace, equality, workers’ rights, democracy and, yes, socialism, during one of the most difficult and repressive times of our country’s history.

At the time of his death in 1976, the World Magazine published a four-page “Tribute” to this African-American freedom fighter and patriot. Here are some reprints of speeches by Robeson and others in tribute to him, published here in honor of his 105th birthday and to draw strength from his life, for today’s struggles.

* * * * * *

‘Mother is betting on us to save the peace’

By Paul Robeson

The following speech was made by Paul Robeson at the funeral of “Mother” Ella Reeve Bloor in 1951. Bloor was a beloved leader of the Communist Party, labor, peace and democratic movements.

This speech was among many that Robeson delivered at the height of the cold war and its domestic concomitant, McCarthyism. The Korean war was on; the Rosenbergs had been jailed; and scores of Communists and other progressives were being persecuted and prosecuted. Paul Robeson did not escape this infamy.

Mother Bloor is betting on us to save the peace as the true inheritors of our democratic traditions and our traditions of understanding and helping to fashion a world in the process of qualitative change.

For her forbears were part of our own Revolution of 1776 and of the French Revolution of 1789. They joined hands with those peoples of the world who helped to clear the path for democratic procedures and sound the death knell of feudal servitude. Her forbears also helped to free the Negro people – helped to free my slave father. So she fully understood the present world in change and was a firm friend of the Soviet Peoples Republics and Democracies, stretching all over the wide expanse of Europe and Asia. To them she extended, as had Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt, her hand in peace and progress and cooperation with other peoples. She would have no part of that America which fears the power of the people and their finding of new ways to their complete freedom and growth.

She was in the tradition of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Lincoln, Douglass and Thaddeus Stevens. She was horrified when a leader of our nation, one of confederate lineage, declared that the Congress which gave the Negro people their freedom and the American people new freedom was the worst Congress in our history. No, these people were no part of her America. She wanted nothing to do with the imperialists of 1898, swaggering across the world to enslave the people of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, setting their sights on the great land of the East, especially China. She hailed China’s freedom.

And she wanted nothing to do with our present-day swaggerers and would-be conquerors with their callous destruction of heroic and struggling colonial peoples. And most of all, she was devoted to her comrades and close co-workers. She knew them as the salt of the earth – as she fought for their right to speak, right to bail, and their right to be free and continue their fight for American democracy and world friendship.

So she hands her tasks on to us. I say to Mother that never was I so proud as when she told me I was one of her sons among her countless other sons who loved her and will always honor and revere her memory. [We] will carry on – carry on fearlessly, tirelessly and courageously as she did, until this land is truly the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

* * * * * *

Tributes to Robeson

A friend

By Lloyd L. Brown I remember one day during that period [1955] when I was working with Paul in the building next door to this church (that was his brother’s parsonage where Paul was then living) and he called to my attention a quotation from Frederick Douglass.

Himself the son of a former slave, Robeson greatly admired the ex-slave Douglass, and in a voice so filled with passion that I sat there transfixed, he read to me these words of Douglass concerning the oppression of his people in this land!

“What man can look upon this state of things without resolving to cast his influence with the elements which are to come down in ten-fold thunder and dash this state of things to atoms.”

Then, speaking very slowly for emphasis, Robeson added: “Well, that’s exactly how I feel!”

And later in his book, Here I Stand, Robeson wrote:

“When we criticize the treatment of Negroes in America and tell our fellow citizens at home and the peoples abroad what is wrong with our country, each of us can say with Frederick Douglass: ‘In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot: for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse sins.’”

His son

By Paul Robeson, Jr. [My father] never regretted the stands he took, because almost 40 years ago, in 1937, he made his basic choice. He said then:

“The artist must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice, I had no alternative.”

He knew the price he would have to pay and he paid it, unbowed and unflinching. He knew that he might have to give his life, so he was not surprised that he lost his professional career. He was often called a Communist, but he always considered that name to be an honorable one.

Paul Robeson felt a deep responsibility to the people who loved him and to all those to whom he was a symbol. … Because Paul Robeson’s views, his work, his artistry, his life, were all of one piece.

Herbert Aptheker, Marxist historian, dies

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 08:17:00 +0000

Herbert Aptheker, Marxist historian and political activist, has passed away at age 87. Few have matched his output of books, pamphlets and articles, all marked by great scholarship, exactingness, intellectual and political integrity and partisanship in the struggle for peace, equality, democratic rights, social progress and socialism. Aptheker authored over 50 volumes, most notably in the fields of African American history and anti-racism, and U.S. history generally. These include his American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), his doctoral thesis which is considered a landmark work in the field, the Documentary History of the Negro People (3 volumes) and a number of volumes of early U.S. history.

One of his most notable achievements was editing of some 50 volumes of the correspondence and writings of W.E.B. Du Bois, the great scholar and leader of the African American people, who joined the Communist Party, USA at age 94. Pulitzer Prize author of the Du Bois Biography, David Levering Lewis, writes in that volume, “... Herbert Aptheker had become indispensable to Du Bois. Du Bois designated him as the ‘best fitted person’ to edit his letters, a decision that would make a comprehensive biography of Du Bois possible.”

Aptheker was no armchair intellectual. He worked in North Carolina and Virginia as an organizer for the Food & Tobacco Workers (1938-39). In 1939 he joined the Communist Party. He served as secretary of the Abolish Peonage Committee associated with the International Labor Defense (1939-40), and was active in Georgia.

During World War II he rose from private to major in the artillery, fighting in Western Europe. In 1966, Aptheker traveled to Hanoi with Staughton Lynd and Tom Hayden during the U.S. bombardment, out of which the book, Mission to Hanoi was written. Aptheker served on the Presidium of the World Peace Council 1960-74. In 1966 he ran for Congress on the Peace and Freedom ticket and for the Senate in 1976 as candidate of the Communist Party against Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

His activity included editor, Masses & Mainstream (1948-52), editor, Political Affairs (1952-63). In 1964, Aptheker and others founded the American Institute for Marxist Studies (AIMS), with Aptheker as director. A whole number of books, scholarly monographs by a wide range of Marxist and left authors and a newsletter were among the products of these years. At a 1984 AIMS dinner fund-raiser on the occasion of Aptheker’s 20th anniversary as its director, speakers and artists such as Leith Mullings, Johnnetta Cole, and Henry Winston, Ernest DeMaio, Ruby Dee, Vinie Burrows paid tribute in person, and eminent African-American scholars such as E. Franklin Frazier, John Hope Franklin, Manning Marable and Cornel West sent messages of appreciation.

Aptheker was the editor of Jewish Affairs from 1978 to the early 1990s. During McCarthyism, Aptheker appeared as an expert witness for the CPUSA in the Smith Act and sedition cases and as a hostile witness before the McCarthy Committee and McCarran Act Board. All through the Cold War years, Aptheker spoke and lectured to large audiences on scores of campuses and such activity continued until the last year of his life.

Barred from formal academic positions until 1969 Aptheker had various associations with such schools as Hostos College, CCNY, University of Massachusetts (Amherst), Yale, University of California Berkeley Law School, Stanford and Humboldt University (GDR).

Aptheker served on the National Committee of the CPUSA from 1957 to 1991. For decades he was among the best known Communists in our country. During the upheaval in the world communist movement connected with the collapse of the USSR, Aptheker left the CPUSA more in sorrow than in anger, with many others and became a member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. In the recent period, the relations between Herbert Aptheker and the Communist Party leadership have been cordial.

Herbert Aptheker is survived by his daughter Bettina Aptheker, Chair of the Women’s Studies Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and by two grandchildren. His wife and close co-worker of 50 years, Fay, passed away a few years ago.

It is evident that Herbert Aptheker’s prodigious scholarly output and life’s activity will have a profoundly positive influence for generations to come on the struggle for social progress and socialism. Many of his books are still available from International Publishers.

Where is Salt of the Earth?

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 04:57:00 +0000

DALLAS – On Feb. 19, KERA public radio broadcast its regular afternoon talk show with host Glen Mitchell, but his guests were out of the ordinary. United Farm Workers of America legend Dolores Huerta and filmmaker Eva Bodenstedt were speaking about a very special movie, Salt of the Earth. Quickly, the phones began to ring. Almost all of the callers asked the same question, “How can I see it?”

Americans have been asking how they can view Salt of the Earth since it was completed in 1953. To this day, most of them are still asking. Salt of the Earth has the distinction of being the only movie ever completely banned in America. For more than two decades, hardly anyone saw it except a fortunate few who were invited to private showings of a 16-millimeter version with serious sound defects. In the late 1980s, an excellent video version finally became available. Today, anyone with $35 can order a copy from the AFL-CIO’s Labor Heritage Foundation, 888 16th St. NW, Suite 680, Washington D.C. 20006. Include $3 for postage and handling.

The history lesson that comes with the video is free. The lesson is that any film that extols the virtues of ordinary working people, shows Mexican Americans in a good light, and reveals that women can triumph over all the backwardness and cruelties holding them back is likely to have a hard time with a capitalist system of film production and distribution. In the early 1950s, as the anti-communism disease spread through every aspect of American life, such a movie moved right to the top of the witch-hunters’ list. Post-production facilities were denied to the movie, distributors were afraid to book it into their theaters, critics were afraid to mention it, and employers in the film industry made certain to prevent all of those who made the movie, including the incredibly talented Mexican movie star Rosaura Revueltas, from getting any further work! Revueltas, in fact, was deported!

Most of the stars of the movie, including Revueltas’ leading man Juan Chacon, weren’t actors. They were zinc miners in Grant County, New Mexico, and they had just been victorious in the Empire Zinc Mine strike. One of the most dramatic and successful tactics used in the strike, when the miners’ wives took over after the men were legally enjoined from picketing, is re-enacted in the film.

Huerta and Bodenstedt told their Dallas radio audience how excellent the movie is. They explained the difficulties of producing it and the impossibility of getting it shown. They also revealed that they were on their way to Santa Fe, N.M., for a special Salt of the Earth 50th Birthday Conference at the College of Santa Fe, Feb. 27-March 1. There, at the Greer Garson Theater, the movie was shown. In addition to Huerta and Bodenstedt, audiences heard from Virginia Chacón, striker and wife of lead actor Juan Chacón; Anita and Lorenzo Torrez, strikers and film participants; Sylvia Jarrico, wife of producer Paul Jarrico; and Becca Wilson, daughter of screenwriter Michael Wilson.

Lorenzo and Anita Torrez collaborate today on the Salt of the Earth Labor College in Tucson, Ariz. Lorenzo is the chairperson of the Arizona Communist Party. After the 50th Birthday Conference, he continued on to another speaking engagement on Salt of the Earth and the victorious strike that inspired it. He helped with both, and has been happy to speak about them for all these 50 years.

The author can be reached at pww@pww.org

Artists need to find something true

Fri, 04 Apr 2003 04:54:00 +0000

Review

Laura Cantrell, When the Roses Bloom Again, Diesel Only, Fall 2002

When our daughter was little we used to drive all night from New Jersey to Tennessee to visit her grandparents. Somewhere in Virginia we’d pick up one bluegrass program or another on the radio.

Those Appalachian melodies wafting out of the dark as we rolled through the night always made me feel cozy – and gave me chills at the same time. I get the same feeling when I listen to the music of Laura Cantrell.

Cantrell, whose latest CD is When the Roses Bloom Again, has an international fan base despite working in a bank by day and performing by night.

BBC radio personality John Peel called her debut album “my favourite record of the last 10 years and possibly my life.” Rolling Stone said she is a “modern woman with an old-timey heart, with a voice pitched somewhere between the bluesy realism of Lucinda Williams and the vintage femininity of Kitty Wells.” Elvis Costello picked her to open for him on his 2002 tour.

Cantrell, along with Rosanne Cash and Jesse Harris, performed March 21 at a benefit for Housing Works, a New York City organization whose programs assist homeless and formerly homeless people with AIDS. Among the songs Cantrell performed was one from When the Roses Bloom Again – “Conqueror’s Song” – which is only too timely.

Written by Dave Schramm during the first Gulf War, this heartbreakingly beautiful song (which asks the question, “How many more fell today?”) could become an anthem for everyone hoping to stop this war on Iraq and save lives – the lives both of our troops and of innocent Iraqis (see sidebar).

With so many celebrities speaking out against the war – or at least for their democratic right to do so – I asked Cantrell her view of the role of artists at a time like this.

“It’s a confusing moment to be any person in this country,” she said, let alone a public one. “Artists need to find something true,” which can come out in many different ways.

For example, Cash is a member of Musicians United to Win Without War and has written on her website about her position. On the other hand, singer Iris DeMent canceled a performance last week in Madison, Wisc., after her opening act had already appeared, because she said she had decided, after hours of agonizing over it, that it “would be trivializing the fact that my tax dollars are causing great suffering and sending a message to the world that might is right.”

Cantrell noted that there’s a “level of self-consciousness” among artists trying to find their way in these troubling times. They’re not experts on war and they aren’t pretending to be, but many also feel a responsibility to speak up.

Cantrell said she agrees with Steve Earle, who said during a recent concert, “It’s never un-American to express a dissenting opinion.”

“You have to be true to your own sense of connection to a song,” Cantrell said. “If the spirit moves you to sing a peace song, that’s what you should do.”

For the past 10 years Cantrell has perhaps been best known as the host of “The Radio Thrift Shop” every Saturday afternoon on “free-form” radio station WFMU in Jersey City, N.J. (see box).

“It’s a community-run station,” Cantrell told the Sunday Times of London, “all the people on air are volunteers. It attracts people who are historians of their genre.” In other words, whatever music you love, you’ll find a DJ on WFMU who loves it too – and plays it for free.

WFMU is “our own little utopian radio existence,” Cantrell said, and is funded entirely by listener donations. The station’s main goal in choosing its on-air staff is to find people with the ability to do interesting programs with a personal, rather than corporate, point of view.

Even as the economy has gone downhill in recent years, WFMU has been overfulfilling its fund drive goals. Cantrell attributes this to the fact that listeners realize “these unedited media outlets” are fewer and fewer and they appreciate it when they find one.

Although WFMU’s content is not particularly political, Cantrell said its DJs enjoy “being an outlet for [music and ideas] that aren’t going to get on a commercial [station].”

The popularity of her radio show – she was voted “Best Radio DJ” in the 2001 Citysearch “Best of New York City” poll – gave her the confidence to begin performing. She started to record, she told the Times, “just to see if we could make a recording that was as satisfying as our live shows.”

Those demos found their way (via a friend) to Scotland where the Shoeshine label asked her to record a full CD. That was 2001’s Not the Tremblin’ Kind, which won acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Now comes When the Roses Are in Bloom and Cantrell is again being hailed by everyone from Billboard to USA Today.

When the Roses Are in Bloom contains 12 songs – four of which Cantrell wrote – and all of them terrific. As Rolling Stone said about her, “On the radio, Cantrell plays country music the way it used to be [and] she sings it the way it ought to be.”

– Carolyn Rummel (crummel@pww.org)

* * * * * *

Conqueror’s Song

You keep all your aces so close to your chest – tell me how many more fell today

you overcame fortune and overlooked fame – tell me how many more fell today

Tell me your reasons for fighting – tell me your kindness has saved the day

tell me I’m over-excited, how many more fell today?

A siren is sounding but this ain’t no drill – tell me the names of your friends today

your awesome ignorance shines in you still – tell me the names of your friends today

Give me one reason to like you – give me good reason to think like you

Honestly I think you’ve tried to – how many more fell today?

We’ve played along with your conquerer’s song

played along with your conquerer’s song too long

Tell me I’m over-excited – How many more fell today?

You keep all your aces so close to your chest – How many more fell today?

– words and music by Dave Schramm