Today, in honor of Black History Month, we remember Flo Kennedy, who was born on this date February 11, 1916, in Kansas City, Missouri. Kennedy was a lawyer, feminist and civil-rights activist. As a lawyer, she represented Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Assata Shakur, H. Rap Brown, and Valerie Solanas (for her attempted murder of Andy Warhol). In 1972 she formed the Feminist Party and filed an Internal Revenue Service complaint alleging that the Catholic Church violates tax-exempt requirements by spending money to influence political decisions. "I'm just a loud-mouthed middle-aged colored lady . . . & a lot of people think I'm crazy. Maybe you do too, but I never stop to wonder why I'm not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren't like me."
She grew up at a time when the KKK was quite active in Kansas City. She remembered her father had to have a shotgun to keep them safe. "My parents gave us a fantastic sense of security and worth. By the time the bigots got around to telling us that we were nobody, we already knew we were somebody." As a young woman, she moved to Harlem and enrolled at Columbia. She was refused admission to their law school because she “was a woman.” She knew it was because she was black. So, she threatened to sue them and they admitted her. She was the only black person among the eight women in her class.
As an activist, she once said, "we have a pathologically, institutionally racist, sexist, classist society. And that niggerizing techniques that are used don't only damage black people, but they also damage women, gay people, ex-prison inmates, prostitutes, children, old people, handicapped people, native Americans. And that if we can begin to analyze the pathology of oppression… we would learn a lot about how to deal with it." As early as 1966, she was picketing and lobbying the media over their portrayal of Black people. She played a prominent role in the protest against the 1968 Miss America Pageant. After the Attica prison uprising, she said, “We do not support Attica. We ARE Attica.” She also participated in the 1973 protests at Harvard over the lack of women’s bathrooms. When asked why she participated in the pouring of urine on the steps of Lower Hall, she said, “I'm just a loud-mouthed middle-aged colored lady with a fused spine and three feet of intestines missing and a lot of people think I'm crazy. Maybe you do too, but I never stop to wonder why I'm not like other people. The mystery to me is why more people aren't like me.
In addition to her activism and legal work, Kennedy also acted in the films “The Landlord” (1970), adapted from Kristin Hunter's 1966 novel, and the independent political drama “Born In Flames” (1983), directed by Lizzie Borden. She also acted in “Who Says I Can't Ride a Rainbow” alongside Morgan Freeman.
Flo Kennedy, c1972, wearing a leather cowboy hat and vest, and a t-shirt that says “bullshit” while flipping the middle finger and smiling at the camera. By http://www.reclaimthemedia.org/files/images/kennedy.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36268845
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we remember the Orangeburg Massacre, which occurred on February 8, 1968 in South Carolina, when highway patrolmen opened fire on black student protesters from South Carolina State, who were trying to integrate a bowling alley. They killed 3 African American students and wounded 33. These were the first student demonstrators killed by the police in the 1960s. 2 days prior, students held a sit-in at the bowling alley. When the police arrested them, hundreds of students arrived from Claflin College and South Carolina State to protest the arrests. As tensions grew, the governor called out the National Guard and Highway Patrol to “keep the order.” 9 cops were charged with deprivation of rights under color of law, but all were acquitted. But one of the student protestors, Cleveland Sellers, was convicted of several riot charges. In 1960, students and others marched through Orangeberg to protest segregation. Police and firefighters attacked them. They arrested 400 and imprisoned them in outdoors in a cattle stockade.
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we celebrate the life of Hubert Henry Harrison (April 27, 1883 – December 17, 1927), a West Indian-American writer, speaker, educator, political activist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by union leader A. Philip Randolph as the father of Harlem radicalism and by John G. Jackson as "The Black Socrates." Harrison’s activism encouraged the development of class consciousness among workers, black pride, secular humanism, social progressivism, and free thought. He denounced the Bible as a slave master's book, and said that black Christians needed their heads examined. He refused to exalt a "lily white God " and "Jim Crow Jesus," and criticized Churches for pushing racism, superstition, ignorance and poverty. Religious extremists were known to riot at his lectures. At one of his events, he attacked and chased off an extremist who had attacked him with a crowbar.
In the early 1910s, Harrison became a full-time organizer with the Socialist Party of America. He lectured widely against capitalism, founded the Colored Socialist Club, and campaigned for Eugene V. Debs’s 1912 bid for president of the U.S. However, his politics moved further to the left than the mainstream of the Socialist Party, and he withdrew in 1914. He was also a big supporter of the IWW, speaking at the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike, and supporting the IWW’s advocacy of direct action and sabotage. In 1914, he began working with the anarchist-influenced Modern School movement (started by the martyred educator Francisco Ferrer). During World War I, he founded the Liberty League and the “Voice: A Newspaper for the New Negro,” as radical alternatives to the NAACP. The Liberty League advocated internationalism, class and race consciousness, full racial equality, federal anti-lynching legislation, enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, labor organizing, support for socialist and anti-imperialist causes, and armed self-defense.
Hubert Harrison, pictured here in 1913, in a suit and fedora. By Unidentified Photographer - American Labor Museum, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=80055166
Today in Labor History, February 4, 1913: Rosa Parks was born in Tuskegee, Alabama. In 1943, she joined the NAACP, eventually becoming the branch secretary, where she investigated cases and organized protest campaigns around cases of racial and sexual violence. In spite of local policies to disenfranchise African American voters, she still registered to vote and did vote from 1943 on. In 1955, she refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, in a planned direct action against Jim Crow, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Later in her life, she became a supporter of the Black Power Movement and an anti-Apartheid activist.
Today in Labor History January 30, 1836: Gustave Lefrancaise (1826-1901) was born. Lefrancais was a French revolutionary member of the First International. He participated in the Paris Commune and cofounded the anarchist Jura Federation.
Black and white photo of Gustave Lefrancaise (1826-1901), looking off to the right, with beard and moustache. By Unknown author – http://www.estelnegre.org/documents/lefrancais/lefrancais01.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16218183
Today in Labor History January 26, 1886: In Decazeville, France, miners attacked the home of the mine engineer, Watrin, after he slashed their wages by 10%. He died when they threw him from his window. Paul Lafargue, Cuban-French revolutionary and son-in-law of Karl Marx, who wrote about the strike in June of 1886, considered the strike to be one of the seminal moments for French socialists over the past 15 years.
Black and white portrait of Paul Lafargue, with moustache, seated and looking to his looking to his right, with his hand resting on his chin. By German Fehrenbach - Originally: RGASPI. F.389. Op.1. D.99. L.15.Online: КАРЛ МАРКС: К 200-летию со дня рождения Архивные документы и музейные коллекции из фондов РГАСПИ | Возникновение рабочих партий, в том числе социал-демократических (only image), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1650920
Today in Labor History January 17, 1915: Lucy Parsons, anarchist and IWW cofounder, organized and led a hunger march of 1,500 people in Chicago. They carried banners saying, “We want work, not charity,” and “We refuse to starve!” Police attacked them with clubs and shot at them. Amazingly, no one was killed. They also arrested 15, including Parsons, for marching without a permit.
Photo of Lucy Parsons with the following quote: Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination.
Today in labor History January 17, 1961: The CIA orchestrated a coup that tortured, murdered, and overthrew Congo’s first democratically elected president, Patrice Lumumba. This was after a previous failed coup against him by Mobutu Sese Seku, who would later become dictator from 1971 until 1997.
Congo won independence from Belgium in 1960, after years of brutal colonial rule which slaughtered up to 10 million people, or half its entire population. However, imperial powers continued to exploit the people of Congo, even after independence. President Eisenhower authorized the assassination of Lumumba because of his ties with the Soviet Union. The U.S., and its European allies, wanted control over Congo’s resources, particularly its rich uranium deposits, both to fuel their civilian and military nuclear programs, and, in particular, to keep them out of the hands of the Soviet Union, which was allied with Lumumba.
The wonderful 2024 documentary “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” does a really great job of uncovering the concealed history of the 1961 assassination of Lumumba and the coup d’etat in Congo. But it’s really about so much more: Cold War machinations, propaganda, and covert operations; the superpowers’ jockeying for control of puppet regimes and spheres of influence in the global south; the Pan-African movement; racism in the U.S., the Civil Rights movement, and the repression against it; and, of course, jazz music, including tons of interviews and live footage of Lumumba, Ghanian president and revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah, activist and writer Andree Madeleine Blouin, Malcolm X, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miriam Makeba, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, surrealist artist Rene Magritte. There’s even a “slumber party” with Fidel Castro at Malcolm X’s home, in New York, after the U.S. authorities convince all the hotels in New York to refuse Castro a place to sleep during a UN conference.
One of the people the CIA used in its early attempts to assassinate Lumumba was chemist Sidney Gottlieb, who ran the agency’s secret MKULTRA mind control program. Gottlieb tried, but failed, to kill Lumumba with poisoned toothpaste. He also tried, and failed, to assassinate Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar and with radioactively poisoned shoes. MKULTRA was a continuation of Nazi mind-control experiments, which utilized mescaline against Jews and Soviet prisoners, hoping it could be exploited as a “truth” serum. The program gave hallucinogenic drugs, like LSD and Mescaline, to 7,000 unwitting U.S. war veterans, as well as many Canadian and U.S. civilians.
Lumumba in 1960, with glasses and a bowtie. By unknown photographer / Anefo - http://proxy.handle.net/10648/a9c3a120-d0b4-102d-bcf8-003048976d84 Nationaal Archief, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63950207
White bold text over a dusk city skyline reads: ‘Only in the realm of economy are the workers able to display their full strength; for it is their activity as producers which holds together the whole social structure and guarantees the existence of society.’ Attribution below: Rudolf Rocker, 1938.
today’s #AltTxt#yaddayadda are images of a subreddit Confessions post: “I’m a developer for a major food delivery app. The 'Priority Fee' and 'Driver Benefit Fee' go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it.”
Hours before thousands would exchange gifts and money and other resources for their "festivities" the upper half of the #WorkingClass was distributing #Charity#Eugenics and #AntiBlack advice to "protect" one another from we the dirty and disgusting marginalized poor
I don't understand how anyone can expect to change the #facism that the so called EEUU is rooted in and think that anyone has a right to say who gets to live and who gets to die
Today in Labor History December 20, 1971: Doctors Without Borders was founded by French doctors and journalists in the wake of the Biafra succession. Their first mission was in support of victims of the 1972 Nicaraguan earthquake. In the mid to late 1970s, they provided aid to refugees from the Khmer Rouge. They spent 9 years (1976-1984) in Lebanon during their civil war. They’ve spent decades in Africa helping in the battles against AIDS and Ebola. Their volunteers have been attacked by soldiers, kidnapped and bombed. In 1999 they won the Nobel Peace Prize.
Today in Labor History December 19, 1925: Lepa Svetozara Radić was born. She was a Serbian communist and antifascist, executed by the Nazis in 1943 at age 17 for shooting at Nazi troops. As they tied the noose around her neck, they offered her amnesty if she revealed the names of her comrades. She replied that she wasn’t a traitor and that they’d make themselves known when they avenged her death.
Hanging of Lepa Radić, February 1943. By Unknown - https://znaci.org/fotografija.php?br=5749, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58583801
Today in Labor History December 15, 1970: Polish youth and workers torched the Gdansk Communist Party headquarters and quietly watched it burn. Elsewhere in Poland, ZOMO riot police shot miners striking at "Manifest Lipcowy" mine in Jastrzebie, Upper Silesia, wounding four.
Today in Labor History December 4, 1969: Chicago Black Panthers, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, were assassinated by the Chicago Police, with assistance from the FBI. Hampton was chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party (BPP) and deputy chairman of the national BPP. He founded the antiracist, anti-classist Rainbow Coalition, which included the Black Panthers, Young Lords and Young Patriots (a radical poor white people’s movement). On the night of the assassination, an infiltrator drugged Hampton with barbiturates. He remained unconscious when the cops entered his bedroom, dragged away his pregnant girlfriend, then fired several shots into his chest and head.
For more on the revolutionary anti-racist organizing of the Young Patriots and their role in the Rainbow Coalition, read “Hillbilly Nationalists,” by Amy Sonie and James Tracy.
Hampton speaking at a rally in Grant Park, Chicago, September 1969. By UPI - Old: Newspapers.comCurrent: Medium, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128482051
Today in Labor History December 4, 1964: Police arrested over 800 students at the University of California, Berkeley, after they took over the administration building during the Free Speech Movement. They occupied the building in protest of the Regents’ decision to forbid protests on the college campus.
Mario Savio, leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, is restrained by police as he walks to the platform at the University of California's Greek Theater in Berkeley on Dec. 7, 1964.
Robert W. Klein/AP
Today in Labor History December 1, 1914: The famous labor song, "Solidarity Forever," was written on this date by IWW songwriter and cofounder Ralph Chaplin. He wrote the song for a hunger march to be led by Lucy Parsons in Chicago (on January 17, 1915). The song has been translated into many other languages, including French, German, Polish, Spanish, Swahili and Yiddish. And it is still commonly sung at union gatherings in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. The inspiration for the song came from the brutal 1912-1913 Paint Creek-Cabin Creek mining strike, in West Virginia, led by Mother Jones and others. Private cops and vigilantes murdered at least 50 miners and their family members during that strike. Impressed with the solidarity and resolve of the miners, Chaplin began work on the song.
Today in Labor History November 25, 1947: The "Hollywood Ten" were blacklisted by Hollywood movie studios for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The blacklist lasted for 13 years, when Dalton Trumbo, a former Communist Party member, was finally credited as the screenwriter of the films “Exodus” and “Spartacus.” Some of the stars accused of having Communist ties included Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Katharine Hepburn and Fredric March. In 1941, Walt Disney blamed "Communist agitation" for the cartoonists and animators' strike. In 1945, Gerald L. K. Smith, founder of the fascist America First Party, began giving speeches attacking the "alien minded Russian Jews in Hollywood." Ronald Reagan, who was president of the actor’s union, testified before HUAC that a clique within the union was using "communist-like tactics." His first wife, actress Jane Wyman, blamed his allegations against friends and colleagues as a factor leading to their divorce.
Today in Labor History November 19, 1915: Joe Hill, IWW organizer and song writer was executed by a Utah firing squad after being convicted of murder on trumped-up charges. His final message from prison was “Don’t mourn, Organize!” His ashes were supposedly sprinkled in every state of the union, except Utah, because he had said, "I don't want to be found dead in Utah." They were also sprinkled in Canada, Sweden, Australia and Canada. Some of his most famous songs were “The Preacher and the Slave,” “The Rebel Girl,” “There is Power in a Union,” “Casey Jones, the Union Scab,” and “Mr. Block.” In 1988, an envelope containing his remaining ashes was discovered.
Linocut print (1979) depicting Joe Hill, by famed IWW artist Carlos Cortez. His story is told in brief at the top of the poster, alongside the address of the IWW. He holds a paper reading 'If we workers take a notion, we can stop all speeding trains, every ship upon the ocean, we can tie with mighty chains, every wheel in the creation, every mine and every mill, fleets and armies of all nations well at our command stand still'.
The Luddites didn't inherently reject all technology. They resisted the enforced and rapid introduction of mechanization into their trade that was degrading working conditions, putting people out of work, lowering wages, lowering the quality of the product, and replacing skilled adult labour with unskilled and often child labour.
Today in Labor History November 11, 1919: Armed "patriots" from the American Legion attacked and destroyed the IWW labor hall in Centralia, Washington, killing five. They then kidnapped, tortured, castrated and lynched Wesley Everest, a WWI veteran and an IWW organizer. No one was ever prosecuted for Everest’s murder, but 6 Wobblies (IWW members) were convicted of killing an American Legion and spent the next 15 years in prison, as a result.
Mural depicting Westley Everest and the Centralia Massacre, in Centralia, Washington. The mural shows Everest rising from his grave, surrounded by items that reference the Industrial Workers of the World.
Lately I think about one of the lesser known aspects of the Marxist analysis of capitalism a lot.
A hugely important concept in Marxism is the idea that class societies - but industrial ones such as capitalism most of all - cause alienation of the worker from their work.
A village's woodworker thousands of years ago is involved in every part of the production process: they process raw trees into workable wood, the wood into shapes and elements, the elements into an object, and the object into a finished product - say, a wardrobe. It's theirs; a tangible object they created and then own to do with what they please. Often, they then sell the fruit of their labour, essentially exchanging the entire labour value that went into the wardrobe for its equivalent in monetary value (capital).
They're involved in every step. Their product is uniquely theirs from material to finish. If they see the wardrobe they made, they might feel pride and an emotional connection. Also, they'll know not just about finishing or adorning a wardrobe, but also about the properties of trees, the types of saws, the pitfalls of joining wood pieces together. Everything that goes into the finished product is a part of their skillset.
And most importantly, they reaped the entire value of the labour they performed. It even belongs to them legally; it's their own property. They could choose not to sell it, but to keep it. Or experiment with something on a whim. Nobody to tell them what they can or cannot do with the labour skills they have.
Nowadays, that work is split into tons of roles, because industrialisation happens on such a scale and complexity that a single person or even a whole business couldn't possibly do it all.
So, there's someone whose entire job is felling trees. Or assisting in felling trees as a spotter. Then there's someone who works at a sawmill, overseeing one single machine on the production lines. Someone who designed a table at a computer but never laid a hand on their own wood. Someone to apply finishing to a table someone else assembled.
None of these people go into an Ikea and feel pride or connection to a dining table they worked on. Compared to the labour they contributed to the product, they are paid a fraction of what they produced. The rest, the vast majority, the surplus value, goes to their boss in the shape of the finished product that they can sell without ever moving a muscle.
An employed woodworker under capitalism never has any ownership over a piece of furniture they created with their own hands! Even though they made it, it belongs to the owner. Not only that, but a bulk of the value also goes to the company who contracted them, the company who contracted them, all the way to the top.
This is one of the main drivers of depression in the working class. Very few people feel like their life means anything. Their skills are only applicable at a workplace that they don't own or have any control over. They can't choose to build a wardrobe if the boss tells them to build a table. They can't decide on safety standards, material choice or anything else. They're alienated from their own labour. They're reduced to tools.
I'm not anti-work. I'm anti-capitalism. I feel a pride in my skillset and the potential of my labour. I can create things. But I don't want to be a tool in someone else's toolkit, under someone else's control, someone who tells me what to use my creativity and labour potential for, while paying peanuts compared to what I made and to add insult to injury take away the finished product too.
DRESSED FOR THE DEPRESSION(on purpose) | Lady Izdihar ( www.youtube.com )
A look at my everyday 1930s outfit and why I dress this way. ...