[Pen-l] Reign of terror in Houston

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

To help move along my comic book memoir, I have supplied the artist 
with a number of photos to base her drawings on. Some I found on the 
Internet and others I found in Columbia library books, like Joseph 
Greensteen, aka "The Mighty Atom". The Mighty Atom was a vegetarian 
strong man who styled himself after Samson and who still was able to 
bend iron bars across his nose in his mid 70s, when I used to watch 
him perform at his bungalow colony in my home town in the Catskills.

One of the photos turned out to be highly elusive. Before I moved 
from Boston to Houston to work with the SWP branch down there in 
1973, there was a Militant article from 1970 or 1971 that showed a 
Houston cop in a Klansman hood standing next to his patrol car. Both 
his badge number and the patrol car id were covered with black tape. 
Since I am persona non grata with the SWP, I could not even call them 
up to get a copy of the photo. It is so bad that an old friend from 
my party days who never quarreled with them at all told me that he 
couldn't call either. Apparently unless you are part of their tightly 
controlled ex-members network, you might as well be in the 9th circle 
of Hell with me.

I finally came across the photo this week in an interesting article 
on Klan terror in Texas.

full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/08/16/reign-of-terror-in-houston/

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