"Red" Politics / Red Blood -- And The Signal June 6 Anniversary

["Hunter Gray" <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Note by Hunterbear [Hunter Gray -- formerly John R Salter, Jr]:

Along with countless others, I helped make some history in a number of
places -- and, although my focus remains  always on contemporary challenges,
I don't have any hesitation at visiting old battlefields and crucibles.

This is the 40th Anniversary of the legendary Jackson Movement epoch --
e.g., months of painstaking grassroots organizing under the most challenging
circumstances; our prolonged and bloody Woolworth Sit-In; massive marches;
hideous repression and massive arrests; the huge concentration camp at State
Fairgrounds; The Injunction; ambush murder of Medgar Evers; ever-more
massive demonstrations and arrests; the rigged auto wreck which destroyed my
car and seriously injured myself and Rev. Ed King; and much much more high
and blood-dimmed drama. The struggle reached out to involve Martin King
on-the-scene -- and the Kennedys from Camelot.

For years, the generally sanitized local "official" celebrations of the
Jackson Movement -- while focusing almost solely on the tragic murder and
heroic martyrdom of Medgar -- deliberately or otherwise  miss many of the
other significant dimensions  of the Jackson Movement:  the great courage of
a vast number of grassroots African American people and their non-Black
allies; brutal, wide-ranging and deadly attacks by hordes of police,
sheriffs and deputies, highway patrolmen, deputized and other vigilantes,
Klan types.

And the many dirty filthy garbage trucks used to carry the many hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of arrested demonstrators away to barbed wire, police
dogs, dirty food, and tainted water.

And the cowardly vacillation of much of the National NAACP -- and Federal
subversion.

Some writers have covered this saga with detail and honesty -- and others
have sought simply to cover it up.

I was Advisor to the Jackson Youth Council of NAACP, a member of the Board
of Directors of the Mississippi State Conference of NAACP Branches, a member
of the Executive Board of the Jackson adult NAACP -- and Chair of the
Strategy Committee of the Jackson Movement.

A number of Jackson Movement participants frequently visit our large website
www.hunterbear.org  Among them are Joyce and Dorie Ladner, Ed King, Joan
Trumpauer Mulholland --  and many others. "Keep adding things, always" said
Cleveland Donald, Jr recently in a very long telephone visit.  At 15,  he
was one of our key
Youth Council leaders and is now a well known Black historian.

Jackson does have something these days of an Official Civil Rights Tour. One
of these times I'll take it -- incognito.

But the respectables in Jackson -- and Mississippi generally -- don't ever
invite me to give talks down there.  Many of the speakers they do have were
never involved in the struggle -- if they were even anywhere around.  But
I'll be around for a long time indeed.  Most people on both sides of my
family [and that of Eldri] live close to the century mark.

In those days, the two Hederman papers -- the Jackson Daily News and the
Clarion-Ledger -- were the most rank and racist dailies in the South.  In
time, as Mississippi changed -- along with the rest of  hard-core Dixie --
the younger Hedermans took over and eventually turned the JDN and CL into
[all things considered] relatively good papers.   And then, about the time
we  felt we could half-way depend on this new incarnation of the Jackson
dailies, the younger Hedermans sold out to the Yankee Gannett chain [1982]
and,  themselves moving to New York City, bought the New York Review of
Books -- which they continue to own and control.  Gannett later merged the
two Jackson papers into one Clarion-Ledger.

After the sanguinary Jackson Movement epoch and at the end of the Summer of
'63, I went to work for the radical Southern Conference Educational Fund as
Field Organizer -- and here's a bit of how that was handled by the Old
Jackson Daily News:

Jimmy Ward, Editor, on the front page of the Jackson Daily News, September
26, 1963 did, as he had so often, mixed my Indian background with his
presumption of my politics:

"The Southern Conference Educational Fund, Inc., has announced that Prof.
John R. Salter, Tougaloo College professor who sought to grab control of
Negro agitation in Jackson, has joined Carl Braden, convicted Fifth
Amendment guy from New Orleans. This announcement causes about as much
surprise as day breaking, the moon rising, the sun setting and evening
falling. They are of the same trouble-making tribe. Heap Redskins in that
integrated teepee at Tougaloo.

Jackson gains in citizenship as the mustard-splattered Prof. John R. Salter
of Tougaloo flies East and joins in fellow field traveling Carl Braden,
ex-jailbird who served time for playing mum to Federal agents on his alleged
Communist activities. Salter who also got peppered in lunch counter
demonstrations was supposed to be a great sociology instructor. Now he will
play second fiddle to an ex-convict. What a case of deflation but one must
take orders from on high. Who will be the next to show their real colors.
Not her? Not him? What's going on Tougaloo?

As Prof. John Salter departs and takes up residence in Raleigh, N.C., to
continue his graduate work in hate, let it be recalled that the Daily News
on numerous occasions warned the Negro leadership of Jackson to be careful
of the purposes of those squattin' and sittin' and prayin' incidents last
summer. As Salter joins Braden does the light shine brighter on those
warnings today?

Will the departure of Prof. John R. Salter, heap big trouble-maker who
leaves Tougaloo College to play second fiddle to an ex-convict known as Carl
Braden, have any influence on the frequency of parties being conducted
between students of different institutions of higher learning hereabouts?
Will students still be worried over their grades if they don't participate
in
those fancy parties? Who will answer these questions?"

See this entire clipping and my notes on it at
http://www.hunterbear.org/creative.htm

And  my Personal Background Narrative at
http://www.hunterbear.org/narrative.htm


[Carl Braden, btw, had never used the Fifth Amendment in his appearance
before HUAC.  He used the First -- in a major test case which he lost.
Later, however, Pete Seeger used the First and won.  Also, as SCEF Field
Organizer, I didn't play "second fiddle" to Carl or anyone else.  Basically
I worked pretty much on my own all over the hard-core South, reporting to
our excellent Executive Director, Jim Dombrowski, and to the SCEF Board of
Directors.]

This date, June 6th, marks the 40th Anniversary of The Injunction -- known
in law and historically as City of Jackson v John R Salter, Jr.  I consider
it my Real graduate degree in activist organizing.

In addition to myself, the other named targets were:  Dick Gregory
[activist, comedian]; Ed King [Tougaloo chaplain]; Dr A.D. Beittel
[President of Tougaloo Southern Christian College]; J.W. Jones [SNCC
worker]; Rev. Charles Jones [Campbell College chaplain]; Gloster Current
[National Director of Branches, NAACP]; Mercedes Wright [Southeast Regional
NAACP Youth Director]; Medgar W. Evers [Mississippi Field Secretary, NAACP];
Willie Ludden [Southeast Regional NAACP Youth staff]; Dave Dennis [Field
Secretary, CORE]; Bette Anne Poole [Tougaloo student activist]; Johnny
Frazier [Mississippi NAACP Youth leader]; the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People; the Congress of Racial Equality; the trustees
of Tougaloo College -- and then, apparently to wrap all of this up, the
terminology, "their agents, members, employees, attorneys, successors, and
all other persons in active concert with them" was duly attached.

See  http://www.hunterbear.org/most_sweeping_anti.htm  for a look at the
thing.. [On the several pages around it is additional material on the
Jackson Movement -- and, further on in our website, much on the Southern
Conference Educational Fund and my work as its Field Organizer.]

City of Jackson was probably the most sweeping anti-Movement injunction
handed down in the history of the Civil Rights Movement.  [I was, as I've
mentioned, Chair of the Strategy Committee of the Jackson Movement. ]  The
several page  injunction sought to prohibit us from organizing and carrying
out demonstrations,  from conspiring to do so, and "from doing anything to
consummate conspiracies" to do so.  It was served on me  on June 6, 1963 by
a large  retinue of heavily armed deputy sheriffs, wide-brim hatted, who
appeared to feel they were handing me Writ from God (and not just from the
Chancery Court.)  We defied the injunction, of course, and did so massively.

The injunction was prepared by the late Thomas Watkins, one of Mississippi's
most brilliant (if utterly twisted on race) attorneys -- used by the State
as a special consultant in key civil rights cases.  Here is the basic text
of Watkins' piece of strange art:

"Now, therefore, you are hereby commanded and temporarily enjoined, until
further order of this court, from engaging in, sponsoring, inciting or
encouraging mass street parades or mass processions, or like demonstrations
without a permit, unlawful blocking of the public streets or sidewalks,
trespassing on private property after being warned to leave the premises by
the owners or person in possession of said private property, congregating on
the streets or public places as mobs, and unlawfully picketing business
establishments or public buildings in the City of Jackson, Hinds County,
Mississippi, and from performing acts calculated to cause breaches of the
peace in the City of Jackson, Hinds County, Mississippi, and from conspiring
to engage in unlawful street parades, unlawful processions, unlawful
demonstrations, unlawful boycotts, unlawful trespassing, and unlawful
picketing, and from doing any acts designed to consummate conspiracies to
engage in said unlawful acts of parading, demonstrating, boycotting,
trespassing and picketing or other unlawful acts and from engaging in acts
and conduct customarily known as "kneel-in's" (sic) in churches in violation
of the wishes and desires of said churches.

You will refrain from doing any of the foregoing acts until the further
notice of this Court, upon penalty of contempt."

The first hearing on City of Jackson v. John R. Salter, Jr. was scheduled
for mid-September -- 90 days away.  As I say, we defied the damn thing
massively.


Turbulent times -- bloody, and  ruthlessly candid and honest.

And deeply effective in the Trail to the Sun.

Hunter Gray  [Hunterbear]  Micmac / St Francis Abenaki / St Regis Mohawk
www.hunterbear.org
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'

In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the
game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the
high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own
inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down
on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings.  Then
it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and
remembering way. [Hunterbear]