Forwarded from Beth and Bill Massey (Matrix)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis, The following is a letter Bill Massey wrote to Workers World a
couple of years ago.  I think it would be a good contribution to the
discussion on the Matrix Reloaded.  A movie changed his life and at 69
he still hasn't quit struggling.  Bill is on his way to the A.N.S.W.E.R.
conference but I am sure he wouldn't mind the letter being posted.
Neither of us have joined the list.  We just lurk (I think that is the
term) sometimes.

Beth Semmer Massey

LETTER TO WW Stanley Kramer Monica Moorehead's recent article on the
death of filmmaker Stanley Kramer recalls for me how one of his films
and a mass movement changed my life.

In 1962 I was a 27-year-old, not totally backward white worker (without
a job) living in New York City. Tiring of the rejections my job hunting
was producing, I ducked into one of the rerun movie theatres on 42nd
Street where Kramer's "Judgment at Nuremberg" was showing. Like "The
Defiant Ones" it was not a revolutionary film. In fact, as I later
learned, it had serious flaws in its history and its politics.

But I did not know that at the time. What I did know was that I on the
one hand had grown up in an area of the Bronx with a large Jewish
community, of whom many were my playmates and friends. Of the many jobs
I had as a very young child, one was heating up the soup and turning on
the lights for an elderly Jewish couple on each Saturday afternoon when
their Orthodox religion forbade them from doing it on the Sabbath (I was
a sabat goy). Another was helping out at the weekly Sunday night dance
at the synagogue right across from my house.

On the other hand I was raised in a home where anti-Semitism and
anti-communism were intertwined and ever present. There were so many
pictures of the anti-Semitic Father Charles Coughlin in our house that I
thought he was a relative to me or my six brothers and sisters.

"Judgment at Nuremberg" attacked my contradictions with a message that
the Nazis succeeded because those who opposed them did nothing. Being
ignorant I did not know that this was not true. I made a one-to-one
relationship between the situation of Jewish people in Germany and Black
people in the United States. From this I decided that if those in
Germany who disagreed with the Nazis should have joined in active
support of the Jewish people, then those here who disagree with the
United States form of Nazism should give active support to the struggle
of Black people.

So I hitchhiked to Albany, Georgia, where I got arrested along with
Eddie Brown, a young Black man from Albany trying to integrate the lunch
counters in Crowe's drugstore. Our action was sponsored by the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, which, along with the Southern
Christian Leadership Council, was leading the struggle. We wound up in
the same jail with Dr. King and many other fighters. The jail of course
was segregated.

Had there been no struggle going on I would not have known what to do.
But because there was a Movement there, it allowed me to act on the
message I got from the film. To act means to fight for your beliefs. It
shows that even backward people can be drawn into the struggle and
educated. That is, if there is a Movement there when they see the need.

I give thanks to Kramer, I give many thanks to those who built the Civil
Rights Movement and gave meaning to my life, and I really thank Workers
World Party and its newspaper for making the struggle everlasting.

Bill Massey Chicago

- END -

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