Re: Radical literature -- Alan Wald and Al Maund -- and Charles Humboldt and Mainstream

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hunter wrote:
> Wald was key in the 1999 reissuance of a great radical Southern novel on
> race and racism:  The Big Boxcar by Al Maund.

Actually, Al Maund is still alive in New Orleans presently. He is in his 
early 90s, I believe. My friend Nelson Blackstock visited him a year or so 
ago and says that he is still quite lucid and engaging. A Maund article 
(with my preface) from the American Socialist can be read at: 
http://www.marx.org/history/etol/newspape/amersocialist/AmerSoc_5604-a.htm

===

American Socialist, April 1956

[Louis Proyect: The ties between the New Deal left and union movements and 
the burgeoning civil rights movement has yet to be told in the detail it 
deserves. This article from American Socialist is a step in that direction. 
Written by novelist Al Maund , author of ?The Boxcar,? who is still alive 
and in his nineties, he is only described as ?a prominent Southern 
journalist and participant in the new movement of the Negro people.? This 
is understandable since he had just be fired from a college teaching job 
for writing a pro-civil rights article in the Nation magazine under his own 
name. It features an interview with E.D. Nixon, the chair of the local 
NAACP who bailed Rosa Parks out of jail and recruited Martin Luther King 
Jr. to the struggle. Nixon was a close associate of white attorney Clifford 
Durr, a New Deal braintruster who sponsored the Highlander Folk School in 
Tennessee, where Parks spent some time being trained as an organizer. After 
Maund was fired, he went to work as a copy editor at Durr's newspaper. When 
Durr couldn't make a kick-off meeting for the Montgomery bus boycotts, he 
sent Maund in his place. The Highlander school, which was founded in 1932 
and modeled after the Danish folk schools, quickly became a crucial center 
for young organizers in the south, according to Michael Denning in ?The 
Cultural Front?. In addition to Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer and Stokely 
Carmichael also received training at the school.]

Walking their Way to Freedom
by A Special Correspondent

Montgomery? How does one account for the boycott of city buses carried on 
for four months by the 40,000 Negro residents of Montgomery, Alabama? 
Although ?the Cradle Confederacy? has grown in recent years. nothing makes 
it seem other than a sleepy Southern town. No new industries have altered 
its landscape; it leeches off two air-force bases near the city limits. A 
venerable family controls the political strings; Negro voters number a 
pitiful 1,600. The Shinto worship of ancestors as in no other place in the 
region, except perhaps  S. C., and the Negro community bears the surnames 
of white aristocracy?symbolizing a racial relation that remained 
substantially unaltered from slavery days.

Then what happened? Was the boycott an NAACP ?plot?? Although virtually all 
of the boycott spokesmen are NAACP members, one has said that the 
organization ?looked down? on the protest at its outset because it did seek 
integration. The boycotters? original main demand drafted at a mass meeting 
the night of December for racial division of passengers on a first-come, 
first-serve basis. This is the arrangement in effect in most cities.

Two decades of mistreatment provided the fodder for the protest. Every 
Negro who boarded a bus stood a good chance of being abused. Drivers, under 
cover of enforcing segregation statutes, constantly yanked up Negro 
passengers to provide seats for late-coming whites. They passed by Negroes 
waiting at stops. Negroes were required to pay at the front door and then 
get on at the rear, so that drivers sometimes took their fares and drove 
off without them. Drivers even carried pistols in their cash boxes to 
?settle? disputes over change and transfers. Year after year delegations of 
Negroes called on city and transit-line officials, asking better treatment. 
They received nothing, not even a courteous audience, because the white 
fathers thought that the bulk of the Negro population was hopelessly 
dependent on transit service. ?You would think that since we were their 
best customers, they?d try to please us a little,? a Negro stenographer 
commented bitterly. ?But they wanted it easy. They wanted our money and 
wanted to beat on us, too. I have just put them out of my mind. I can keep 
walking forever.?

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Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org


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