Otis Q. Sellers, the Scottboro Boys, and me

undefined — The “Boys” with their attorney, Samuel Liebowitz, and Alabama State Militia Guard, 1932.

Ninety-three years ago today, nine Black teenagers, “hoboing” on a freight train between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee, were attacked by a mob of white youths who strongly disapproved of their presence on “a white man’s train.” Thrown off it by their intended victims, the hooligans falsely reported to police in Paint Rock, Alabama, that the teenagers has attacked them. After a search of the train, the police rounded up not only the Black youths but also two white women who then falsely accused them of rape. The prosecution of “The Scottsboro Boys,” the first international cause célèbre of the American Civil Rights Movement, afforded an opportunity for the Communist Party to leave its mark, the first of many, on that movement. This complex historical episode eventually became the subject of academic study, and one of the first scholars to study it was my friend and fellow Aptheker research assistant, Hugh Murray. [1]

Jane, Otis, and Mildred Sellers, probably late 1930s

On that very day, March 25, 1931, Otis Q. Sellers turned 30. He was not yet the grey eminence I knew in the 197os, but the young man finally out of his twenties and on his way to becoming the Bible teacher from whom I learned much. About his life and thought I’ve been blogging into existence, for the past six years, a 96,000-word manuscript. (I’m raising funds to publish it as a book, I hope this year.) Two years into the Great Depression, Sellers was in the middle of his stint (1928-1932) as pastor of Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Newport, Kentucky, which he left (to shorten a long story brutally) “to do my own studies.” On his milestone birthday, what was transpiring 400 miles south of him was on the mind of few Americans, and his wasn’t one of them. That would soon change.

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers, the Scottboro Boys, and me”

Besides race, what did Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Bayard Rustin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King have in common? Hugh Murray on the relationship between civil rights activists and Communists.

New Orleans Woolworth’s sit-in, September 9, 1960: Jerome Smith, Ruth Despenza, Joyce Taylor, Hugh Murray, Archie Allen, William Harrell

My friend Hugh Murray (b. 1938), a native New Orleanian, is a veteran of the African American civil rights movement (CRM), a critic of its betrayal by “affirmative action” (its latest incarnation being “diversity, equity, and inclusion”), and scholar of the 1931 trial of the Scottsboro Boys, the first international American civil rights cause célèbre. Our paths first crossed over a half-century ago in the reading room of the American Institute for Marxist Studies (AIMS) on East 30^th Street in Manhattan. Its director, Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), hired us (and others) as research assistants for the massive project of preparing for publication the correspondence, bibliography, and published writings of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963). For the past few years, Hugh and I have been preparing an anthology of Hugh’s writings for publication later this year, Deo volente.

On his blog, Murray recently explored the tension between the noble, justice-seeking motives of the CRM and the ignoble motives of the Communist movement to which some CRM activists were attracted to one degree or another. (For the CRM one could substitute the labor movement.) It’s a tension I’d rather ignore. It’s easier to concentrate on the horrors of Communism uncomplicated by the fact that many Communists were drawn to it to fight the horrors of lynching and other violence. It was easy for me to call them dupes (among whom I was once numbered) and leave it at that.

Continue reading “Besides race, what did Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Bayard Rustin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King have in common? Hugh Murray on the relationship between civil rights activists and Communists.”

AnthonyFlood.com: An Emerald Anniversary Retrospective

December 2004, Executive Assistant to William J. Ledger, M.D., Chairman Emeritus, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Weill Cornell Medical College. Note the Three Musketeers bar in the shirt pocket.

Twenty years ago today I launched this site’s ancestor: AnthonyFlood.com. (No middle initial.) Building it with Microsoft’s (no-longer-supported) FrontPage, made to order for this low-tech bookworm, I had swiped the look and feel of a color specialist’s site (how could I go wrong?), chose a font that conveys text to the brain with the least eyestrain (Verdana 10-pt Bold), slapped an image of the Owl of Athena in the upper left corner, and experimented with log lines. (An early mouthful was “Where Panentheism, Revisionism, and Anarchocapitalism Coalesce,” developed here; later, the terser “Philosophy against Misosophy.”)

A lifetime ago, I had it “all figured out”: Whitehead in philosophy, political economy via Rothbard, historical revisionism (e.g., Acton, Barnes). I scanned, in some cases typed from scratch, articles from my paper archives and formatted them for the site. Many global visitors (sometimes descendants of the authors) sent encouraging notes of appreciation for bringing the text of not easily accessible essays to their attention. The articles are worthless for citation purposes, of course, but readers hungry for their contents can consume them.

The site’s live, but dormant; I can no longer update it; it’s all I can do to maintain this one. Take a gander at the index. Behold its holdings for Blanshard, Langer, Lonergan, Hartshorne, Rothbard, Whitehead. My dear friend (and fellow Aptheker research assistant) Hugh Murray (an anthology of whose historical essays I’m editing) has his portal.

And, last but not least, this writer, roadkill in the fight to publish or perish outside of academia, at least had a platform for stuff he wrote that others might consider as he eked out a living in the “corporate world.”

Maverick Philosopher William F. Vallicella, Ph.D., in the hills of Gold Canyon, AZ

One of those others is Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, an analyst’s analyst and early (and continuing) source of encouragement and criticism. (An earlier version of his site is approaching its 2oth.) He thought enough of an essay of John Deck’s (posted because, I say, it “broke Thomism’s hold on me”—I was well on my way to that waste of time called panentheism) to critique my appreciation of Deck. This sparked a decades-long correspondence and a friendship that transcends our differences.

Continue reading “AnthonyFlood.com: An Emerald Anniversary Retrospective”

The contingencies of history: how John Hope Franklin might have become W. E. B. Du Bois’s assistant (thereby almost certainly preventing me and others from becoming Aptheker’s)

In November of 1943, Dr. Rufus Clement (1900-1967), President of Atlanta (now Clark Atlanta) University, forced W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) to resign his professorship effective the end of June 1944. Their views on the best course of action for Black Americans were incompatible, and Clement had the upper hand.

Pondering his next move, Du Bois conferred with James E. Shepard (1875-1947), a longtime friend and founder of North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University) in the spring of 1944. Du Bois could have any position he wanted, Shepard promised. Perhaps Du Bois could continue editing Phylon, which he had founded at Atlanta U in 1940. Intrigued by this unforeseen offer, Du Bois replied in the affirmative, but said he’d need an assistant: at 76, he still had many plans but had to be realistic about how much sand remained in the upper bulb of his life’s hourglass.

Shepard recommended John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). His parents had named him after Du Bois’s friend, co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), past president of Atlanta and then of Morehouse College until 1936. Shepard suggested that the young scholar could take over editing duties when Du Bois retired. (No mere mortal knew that almost two decades of activism and writing still lay ahead of him.) Shepard introduced the men to each other, and they seemed to have hit it off, but Franklin knew he was but one of several men under consideration, and no decision was forthcoming for two years.

Suddenly, however, this prospect evaporated. Walter E. White (1893-1955), NAACP Executive Secretary, met with Du Bois during his trip to New York later that spring (1944), inviting him to return to the organization he had co-founded in 1909—the one he resigned from acerbically a decade earlier. White offered him the position of Director of Special Research with an office in its Manhattan headquarters on West 40^th Street across the street from the main building of the New York Public Library.

The reservations Du Bois may have had about returning did not prevail. “Had Dr. Du Bois returned to North Carolina College,” Franklin wrote, “founded a magazine [sic: Phylon had already been founded], and subsequently retired, leaving the periodical in my hands, I can only surmise that my future would have been quite different.” (Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005, 116-118.)

And not just his future. Moving to New York, Du Bois was back in the same city as Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), the white author of American Negro Slave Revolts, which Columbia University published in 1943. Aptheker asked to meet; they kept their appointment sometime in mid-1946.

Franklin, a Harvard Ph.D., who was racially prevented from serving in the army at a level commensurate with his research training, but had years of teaching under his belt by the war’s end. Contrast his situation with that of Aptheker, a combat veteran of that war and a Columbia Ph.D., but one whose Communist Party affiliation in the early years of the Cold War made him academically radioactive. Also, a condition of his Guggenheim Fellowship (1946-1947) was that he couldn’t take any other employment.

In their conversations about editing Du Bois’s correspondence and papers, Aptheker suggested that he consider Black scholars not weighed down by Aptheker’s political baggage. Du Bois wouldn’t hear of it: Aptheker was “by far the best fitted person” for the job. (Gary Murrell, “The Most Dangerous Communist in the United States”: A Biography of Herbert Aptheker, UMass Press, 62-63)

Ironically, Du Bois regarded his decision to return to the NAACP to be, as Franklin put it, “the worst decision he ever made.” Franklin says Du Bois’s “second autobiography,” that is, Dusk at Dawn, attests to this, but a book published in 1940 could not report on an event that lay five years in its future. Chapter XIX of his third autobiography, however, written 1958-1959, is entitled “My Return to the NAACP.” (Therein one finds much evidence supporting the judgment “worst decision,” but not those very words.) The contrast between Du Bois’s satisfaction with Aptheker and dissatisfaction with White’s abuse of the privilege of hiring him could not be starker.

But for White’s invitation to Du Bois—unexpected, given their strongly divergent views on the priority of Black education and racial desegregation—it is virtually certain that Hugh Murray and I would not have worked as Aptheker’s research assistants on the Du Bois projects in the early 1970s. What shape those projects would have taken under another’s editorial supervision and institutional connections and resources is a matter of speculation. But it is speculation that invites reflection on the seeming contingencies of history.

When fascists were frank: Another look at “We were the first fascists”

Talk of fascism is in the air; fascist violence, masquerading as opposition thereto, in the streets. Its appeal crosses racial lines, and it isn’t the first time. It seems opportune to republish “‘We were the first fascists’: from Garvey to Farrakhan.” — Anthony Flood

“We were the first fascists”: from Garvey to Farrakhan

First published February 21, 2019

On August 13, 1920 Marcus Garvey presided at the convention of the United Negro Improvement Association held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. There he promulgated the Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World. Its 54 points comprise the farthest thing from a fascist manifesto.

And yet, as my friend Hugh Murray noted a quarter-century ago, Garvey “admired . . . leading anti-communists, such as Mussolini. Indeed, in 1937 Garvey proudly proclaimed of his Universal Negro Improvement Association, ‘We were the first fascists.'”[1]

Here’s the full quote:

We were the first Fascists, when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our Fascism.[2]

He said this in 1937, after Mussolini consolidated his rape of Ethiopia.

While many liberals [Murray continues] are the first to hurl the word “fascist” at those with whom they disagree, they usually ignore the fascism of blacks, even when publicly advocated.[3]

A few years after Hugh wrote those words, King’s College Professor of American and English Literature Paul Gilroy came out with “Black Fascism” (Transition, Indiana UPress, 2000, 70-91), a scholarly monograph on Garvey’s boast, the first instance of Black public advocacy of fascism. I recommend it to students of this overlooked chapter of Black American history.

On June 25, 1961 American Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell sat in the Uline Arena, Washington, DC (where the Beatles would give their first US concert a few years later). He was there at the invitation of Nation of Islam (NOI) leader Elijah Muhammad. Thousands were in attendance. During the collection, Rockwell shouted:

George Lincoln Rockwell gives $20!

Continue reading “When fascists were frank: Another look at “We were the first fascists””

Guest Blogger: Hugh Murray on Herbert Aptheker

As I noted in Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness (and elsewhere on this blog), I can trace my friendship with historian Hugh Murray to the early ‘70s, when we were Aptheker’s research assistants. His review appeared on Amazon last week, a first for the book. Below is the expanded version he posted on his own blog.

I’ve appreciated his criticisms enough to share them with you. I especially want to know what you think of Hugh’s defense of Herbert Aptheker as an historian, an evaluation I questioned in the book. Henry Steele Commager, Hugh’s counterexample, ignored African American intellectuals in his monumental 1950 The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s. Consequently, there’s no mention therein of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Richard Wright or any of the creators of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.

Does this neglect disqualify Commager as an historian? Can Commager’s works be trusted despite that neglect? The doctoral advisor to Aptheker’s biographer told him to find another topic, for Aptheker’s works could not be trusted; the judge in David Irving’s libel trial adjudged that Irving’s could not. Since we cannot reasonably make knowing everything the precondition of knowing anything, Hugh argues, we have to live with the fact of bias. How much bias, however, and what kind crosses the line?

Anthony Flood

Herbert Aptheker’s Blindness as Historian—and Blindness Spreads

Hugh Murray

In his short book Mr. Flood has written an essential work for anyone interested in the many volumes of history written by Dr. Herbert Aptheker. The questions Flood raises, however, are not limited to Aptheker, but concern all historians and indeed all intellectuals who were members of the Communist Party USA (CP), and other Communist parties worldwide. The question simply put, “Can they be trusted?” Continue reading “Guest Blogger: Hugh Murray on Herbert Aptheker”

“We were the first fascists”: from Garvey to Farrakhan

Here’s the full quote:

We were the first Fascists, when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our Fascism.[2]

He said this in 1937, after Mussolini consolidated his rape of Ethiopia.

While many liberals [Murray continues] are the first to hurl the word “fascist” at those with whom they disagree, they usually ignore the fascism of blacks, even when publicly advocated.[3]

George Lincoln Rockwell gives $20!

Continue reading ““We were the first fascists”: from Garvey to Farrakhan”

Martin Luther King’s 90th: a friend remembers

The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Prince George Motel, Miami, 1960

Hugh Murray, Civil Rights Movement veteran, Scottboro Boys historian, and my fellow Herbert Aptheker research assistant, marked the 90th anniversary of King’s birth today (which was actually last Tuesday) with an email to friends. I share it with his permission:

To All, HAPPY MARTIN LUTHER KING DAY. I certainly do not believe King was a saint; few people are. He is memorable because of the courage he showed in standing up when it was difficult, and in the end, standing up against all the forces of the US government. While he was preaching non-violence, the Feds paid various Blacks to join his movement and use violence to discredit King. I think the Feds even supplied the weapons. One such was a civil rights photographer, and recently it was discovered just what he was doing for the Feds to undermine King. There is a reason that many documents relating to the assassinations of JF Kennedy and ML King are still kept from the public. Trump angered the Deep State when he opened some of the material, but eventually Trump caved and kept some materials secret. About murders in 1963 and 1968!? It is not to protect the reputations of Lee Harvey Oswald or James Earl Ray. It is to protect government agencies. Well, as the Scots say, cheerio! Hugh Murray

In summer of 1960 King and others (including Jackie Robinson, the centenary of whose birth is ten days away) trained about two dozen civil rights activists, including Hugh, in the strategy and tactics of non-violent civil disobedience. The sessions were held in the Prince George Motel in Miami. The photo at the head of this post was taken at one of them. Here’s the other side of the room. Hugh’s on the right:

A month after this session Hugh helped integrate a Woolworth’s lunch counter in New Orleans, his home town. Forty years ago he recalled this event and others, including the workshop with King, in “The Struggle for Civil Rights in New Orleans in 1960: Reflections and Recollections.” Here are other pix from long ago:

Future Freedom Rider Jerome Smith, a 21-year-old Hugh T. Murray, Jr., and others integrate Woolworth’s counter during the first New Orleans sit-in. September 9, 1960. Below is the same scene from a different angle. Hugh’s third from the right. The gentleman standing behind them is not waiting for a seat to become available, but rather the reason Hugh took off his glasses. No violence ensued at this protest. Both pix are from NOLA.com.

The September 10, 1960 edition of the Biloxi MS Daily Herald links ran “College Students Held in Sit-In in New Orleans” on its first page. After listing Hugh, Smith and several others the reporter notes: “Hugh Murray Sr. attempted to get his son to leave the others but police would not allow him past the barricade.”

It has been my pleasure to provide a platform for my good friend’s papers over the past fifteen years: Hugh Murray: Independent Scholar. His autobiography will be well worth reading. I pray he’ll get around to writing it.

Adolf Hitler: Socialist Activist

Going over articles by my friend Hugh Murray, a veteran of the civil rights movement Image result for hugh t. murray, jr (third from the right; New Orleans lunch counter sit-in, September 9, 1960), I noticed in one of them his elaboration upon an inconvenient (for some) fact of Adolf Hitler’s political trajectory.

Rejected by several journals in the late ’90s, Hugh’s “Affirmative Action and the Nazis: Or: Why Liberals Cannot Understand a Holocaust” at last found a home in 2004. Here’s the salient passage (lightly edited; my commentary follows):

Turmoil erupted inside Germany. On New Years 1918-19, the radical Spartacists attempted a coup, but were foiled by soldiers returning from the fronts [of the Great War] who formed into new groups, the Freikorps (free corps). They killed the two Spartacist leaders, Karl Liebknecht and the Jewish Rosa Luxemburg. Elsewhere events went in the opposite direction. In the large southern German province of Bavaria a republic was also proclaimed, led by the Jewish journalist Kurt Eisner, then by the Jewish playwright Ernst Toller, and finally by the Jewish Communist Eugen Leviné . Apparently, one of the supporters of this radical Left regime was a young corporal, recently released, who had been gassed in the trenches toward war’s end, Adolf Hitler (far right, seated, with his Bavarian Reserve Infantry comrades).

The television program The Rise and Fall of Adolf Hitler: [Part] I, The Private Man contains some revealing sequences. [It’s available on YouTube.] I quote from the narration:

With the defeat [of Germany in 1918], revolution broke out across Germany. In Bavaria a revolutionary government was set up. The socialist president Kurt Eisner was shot on the street in [25] February 1919. The people turned out to say farewell. Hitler had returned to his Munich regiment, his only foothold, his only home. He was threatened with demobilization and a return to the hostel. A fellow soldier later remembered that Hitler seemed like a stray dog, searching for a new master. In the funeral procession for the Jewish Socialist Eisner was a detachment from Hitler’s regiment wearing both red armbands and black armbands. The film clip shows a lance corporal marching with the officers—Adolf Hitler. Continue reading “Adolf Hitler: Socialist Activist”

Herbert Aptheker: Apothecary for a Red Teenager

In the early 1970s, I was an acolyte of Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003). Known for his writings on African-American history he was also, during the Cold War, a theoretician of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA).

While many of my contemporaries became hooked on pharmaceuticals or alcohol, the apothecary for this teenage rebel was an apologist for the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, and Leonid Brezhnev. Memories of the five years of my Stalinist sojourn are still a source of shame, even though more than eight times that interval has passed.

In November 1969 an ad in the Communist Party’s Daily World newspaper caught my eye. (Why I was reading that rag as a high school junior is a tale for another time.) Later that week Aptheker was scheduled to lecture on W.E.B. DuBois at the Center for Marxist Education (CME), then located on Manhattan’s West 15th Street, on the same block as my Jesuit military high school. (That building, now a co-op, abuts a 21st-century extension of my pre-Civil War alma mater.)

The evening arrived. Exiting the elevator on the fourth floor I made a right turn into the main room. CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall, who would welcome me into the Party in less than three years, addressed the group of about 75. Then he introduced Dr. Herbert Aptheker.

I remember nothing of the lecture’s content. (I hadn’t then even heard of Du Bois.) The lecturer’s command of his material, however, and the aplomb with which he delivered it impressed this most impressionable of young minds. (One can hear how he sounded then by listening to this February 18, 1968 Du Bois lecture.) Conservative in fashion and demeanor, Aptheker, then 54, had a military bearing and matching haircut. Appearing to me to be more learned than any five of my teachers or adult relatives combined, he held me spellbound for over an hour.

I bought Aptheker’s books and pamphlets by the bushel by heading east from my high school across Union Square and entering the CPUSA’s Jefferson Book Shop on 16th Street, just east of Union Square. I scooped up everything of his I could and made time to absorb every line. While I now recognize Aptheker’s political essays as essentially propaganda, they then modeled for me the finest prose. They made the power of rhetoric a topic for me. For the first time I thought, “I’d like to be a writer!”

As Director of the American Institute for Marxist Studies (AIMS) Aptheker had an office on East 30th Street. Visiting it one day I introduced myself as a member of the Young Workers Liberation League, the latest edition of the Young Communist League. I took advantage of AIMS’s library of Marxism (mostly its Stalinist subdivision). Whenever school was out, I’d make my way to AIMS and get lost in its shelves. Taking a break from reading, I’d catch Aptheker typing with two fingers, the aroma of coffee and hamburger wafting into the reading room outside his office. With trepidation at first, I’d ask him a question.

Continue reading “Herbert Aptheker: Apothecary for a Red Teenager”