Sharing the Story of the Boston Italians

by Stephen Puleo

Stephen Puleo's latest book is The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day. His previous books include Due to Enemy Action: The True World War II Story of the USS Eagle 56, and Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919, a critically-acclaimed Boston-area bestseller.

As the paperback edition of The Boston Italians is released this month, I wanted to make a few observations about readers' reactions to the book since the hardcover’s debut a year ago. I have received hundreds of e-mails and spoken to nearly two thousand people at presentations throughout the Boston area; the response has been overwhelmingly positive and heartwarming – from Italian-Americans and others – and has fallen into two main categories.

First, there is the resounding opinion that the book was long overdue; that it's simply about time Boston’s second largest ethnic group was the subject of a "non-Mob" book. That the real story – one of Italian immigrants overcoming enormous odds and paving the way for their children and grandchildren to achieve remarkable success – needed to be told.

Kai Wright on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Kai Wright, author of Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay, and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York, wrote a piece for the American Prospect online in remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination on April 4, 1968. "Dr. King, Forgotten Radical," is a call to rescue King's legacy from a narrative that undervalues his role as a radical activist for change.

We've all got reason to avoid the uncomfortable truths King shoved in the nation's face. It's a lot easier for African Americans to pine for his leadership than it is to accept our own responsibility for creating the radicalized community he urged upon us. And it's more comfortable for white America to reduce King's goals to an idyllic meeting of little black boys and little white girls than it is to consider his analysis of how white supremacy keeps that from becoming reality.

Take, for instance, his point that segregation's purpose wasn't just to keep blacks out in the streets but to keep poor whites from taking to them and demanding economic justice. There's a concept that's not likely to come up in, say, the speech John McCain was rumored to be planning for today. "The Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow," King lectured from the Alabama Capitol steps, following the 1965 march on Selma. "And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than a black man."

Wright's words aren't falling on deaf ears: the piece has already been cited in op-eds, at Utne Reader and, according to Technorati, on forty-three different blogs so far, including Alas, a Blog, War and Piece, and Crooked Timber.

You might also want to look back in our archives to read Kai Wright on helping teenagers who come out and the continued relevance of James Baldwin's understanding of race.

Link Roundup

I was on a semi-vacation last week, so this week's link roundup is a bit larger than normal. Enjoy!

Howard Zinn is adding to his People's History of the United States with a new graphic novel, A People's History of the American Empire. Read about it at Tom Dispatch, and check out this Viggo Mortensen-narrated clip featuring Mike Konopacki's artwork and Zinn's words. 

Fantastic review of Eboo Patel's Acts of Faith at Beliefnet. And don't miss Patel's excellent post on pluralism vs. diversity over at OnFaith.

...[I]t’s not about whether diversity is good or bad. Diversity is a fact, and in America it's not going away. The question is how to best engage the fact of diversity in a way that builds social capital and increases civic engagement. And when the pluralists don't engage diversity by building positive social bonds, then we leave a vacuum that is often filled by extremists or bigots.

In light of the recent Obama/Wright controversy (read Chris Bracey's take at BlackProf), Terri Gross talked with James Cone, author of Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968-1998, about Black Liberation Theology. Also listen to the other interview from that show, with Rev. Dwight Hopkins, for a better understanding of the context Rev. Wright's comments were ripped from.

Kai Wright is in the American Prospect on starting over in AIDS research and in the Dallas Morning News about the danger of the high rate of teen STDs.

Penny Coleman attended the Winter Soldiers' conference, and her thoughtful analysis is appearing on Alternet. Be sure to check out her article about Stop/Loss: "Pentagon Holds Thousands of Americans 'Prisoners of War'."

Rabbi Arthur Waskow urges Jews and others to observe a green Passover.

Kevin Jennings, author of Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son, is a hockey fan. And he doesn't appreciate the homophobic atmosphere at Rangers games.

 

Against all odds?

by Renée Bergland

When I started my book on the nineteenth-century scientist Maria Mitchell, I expected to find that she had triumphed against impossible odds.  “Bias and Barriers” against women’s achievement in the science are pretty intense in the twenty-first century, and I presumed that the obstacles must have been much harsher nearly two hundred years ago. My presumptions were bolstered by earlier accounts of Mitchell that tended to emphasize her exceptional qualities and minimize the encouragement she received from her family and her community. The great surprise for me was that Mitchell faced relatively little bias. In her time, girls were thought of as naturally scientific—and science itself was considered a feminine pastime.

The shocks of history can be hard to parse. On one hand, it’s exciting to realize that there was a time (not that long ago) when a girl like the young Maria Mitchell grew up believing that there was nothing preventing her from achieving scientific greatness. On the other hand, it’s a bit discouraging to realize that when I was born in New York City in the late twentieth century, the odds were worse for girls in astronomy than they had been when Mitchell was born on Nantucket more than a hundred and fifty years before. To add to the depression factor, I worried that uncovering Mitchell’s advantages might make her achievements seem less impressive.

On Human Guinea Pigs

by Carl Elliott

In his 1967 book, Human Guinea Pigs, Maurice Pappworth tells the story of a poor student who had volunteered for a number of medical experiments in exchange for cash. As the student was undergoing a highly complex cardiac catheterization, he went into profound shock and his heart stopped. Only after several minutes was the researcher able to resuscitate him. Pappworth wrote, "The experimenter then continued with the experiment as though nothing had happened." Then the researcher turned to all those present and said, "He must be a fool to repeatedly come back to us."

I have heard that thought expressed many times, although not quite so bluntly. Why does anybody take untested drugs for money, much less earn their living by doing it? Clinical research is regulated far more strictly now than it was in 1967, but it still rests on the willingness of thousands of human subjects to test the safety of new drugs. Many of these subjects are guinea pig pros, who spend a good part of each year in private, for-profit research units, submitting themselves to invasive medical procedures in exchange for cash. Nobody today calls them fools, of course. But many observers assume that guinea pig pros must have something wrong with them -- that they are psychologically disturbed, or that they like to live on the wild side, or as the current jargon has it, they enjoy "engaging in risk-seeking behavior." Nobody seems to consider the more obvious explanation: that they are desperate for the money.

Caroline Healey Dall

by Helen Deese

Each time I hear a news report of an American woman's breaking a new gender barrier--Madeleine Albright's becoming the first woman named as Secretary of State, Nancy Pelosi's becoming the first woman elected as Speaker of the House of Representatives, or, more recently, Hillary Rodham Clinton's coming to be the first woman who is a serious contender for a major party's presidential nomination--I can't help wondering what Caroline Healey Dall would have thought. Dall is the woman who has been my almost daily companion for almost a quarter of a century. Although she died nearly a hundred years ago (in 1912) at the age of ninety, Caroline Dall remains a lively presence for me, and I frequently play the game of trying to analyze what she would do or think in response to a particular twenty-first century event or dilemma. As both an abolitionist and a feminist, would she think it a higher priority for the country to elect its first black president or its first woman president? Although I cannot be certain of her position on such questions, I am sure that she would have been engrossed by them. I am also confident that she would have known her answers instantly and that the chances of her changing her mind would be almost nil, for she was a strong-minded and highly opinionated woman. 

Link Roundup: Margaret Seltzer a sociopath? The Sexing of Science. Lowlights of the Presidential Race.

Is Margaret Seltzer, aka Margaret B. Jones, aka the latest memoirist to be exposed as a fraud, a sociopath who skillfully manipulated her benefactors in the publishing industry? Amy Alexander, co-author of Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African-Americans, ponders the question of blame in the Nation:

Could it be as simple as a case of innocent victims--the editor, the agent, the writing teacher--being duped by one sociopathic young lady?

Maybe. But it also may also be true that when it comes to a hard-luck gang story, McGrath, Bender and others involved in the publication of Love and Consequences were more inclined to err on the side of sensationalism and exploitation over the hard work of grooming an author who might give readers genuine authenticity. And it is more than a bit ironic that their apparent quest for vividly told ghetto authenticity led them to nurture and promote a white woman writer whose story, even if it were true, represented only a one-dimensional version of the Authentic Black Experience.

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The Nantucket Independent highlights the life of native daughter Maria Mitchell, whose life in science is explored in the forthcoming Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science by Renée Bergland.

Throughout the book, Bergland examines Mitchell's rise from 1847, when she witnessed the flash of a comet... to becoming the "computer of Venus" employed by the Nautical Almanac to calculate by math the orbit of that planet; to her hiring as the first professor of astronomy at Vassar College for women; and to the close of the 1800s when women's roles in the sciences were discouraged and Mitchell lamented that she might be the last of the nation's female scientists.

Bergland notes that while the word "scientist" had no masculine association at the start of the 19th century, by 1873 a male Harvard Medical School faculty member posited that women were physiologically unable to study science and that those who pursued the subject with vigor risked becoming "thoroughly masculine in nature or hermaphroditic in mind."

As of 1875, 10 years after Mitchell was appointed to her professorship, the move toward a male scientific role model had gained societal dominance.

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The Rev. C. Welton Gaddy compiles the worst moments in the race for "Pastor-in-Chief." Watch them on YouTube, where the video has been added to the Beacon Broadside favorites. Mitt Romney's speech on faith in America didn't even make Gaddy's top ten.

The Relevance of Nooses and Lynching in the Age of Obama

by Sherrilyn A. Ifill

In the flush of the current presidential campaign, when crowds of blacks and whites caught up in Obama fever chant together, “race doesn’t matter,” and even the mainstream media seems delirious with the possibility that the U.S. may be poised to elect its first black president, it’s hard to remember that only a few months ago college campuses, high schools and workplaces from Louisiana to New York were sites of racial intimidation. 2007 was the year of the noose. Dozens of incidents, in which nooses were hung in places designed to intimidate black workers and students, seemed to engulf the country. Many of these noose hangings seem to have been set off by the case of the Jena Six -- a Louisiana case in which black high school students faced serious criminal charges after a series of violent conflicts with white students. The friction between the students arose after white students hung nooses from a tree that had long been regarded as reserved as a meeting place for white students. Many whites minimized the noose hangings at Jena and in other places as mere pranks. Blacks, by and large, regarded the noose hangings as hate crimes – messages of intimidation and white supremacy inspired by the nearly 5,000 lynchings of black men and women that took place in the 20th century.

Today, it’s almost tempting to dismiss the rash of noose incidents and attendant focus on the history of lynching as just a strange autumnal anomaly -- some kind of retro race moment, a last gasp of 20th century racism. Nooses had fallen so far outside the national conversation that it came as somewhat of a shock last Tuesday when President Bush finally condemned noose displays in a ceremony at the White House commemorating Black History Month. The noose, said the President “is wrong . .. [and has] no place in America today.” The President forcefully insisted that displaying a noose is “not a harmless prank, and lynching is not a word to be mentioned in jest.” Instead the noose, said the President, “is a symbol of gross injustice.”

The timing of the President’s statement was curious. Months earlier, when noose incidents were on the front page of major newspapers every day, a presidential statement denouncing the display of nooses would have been a powerful and authoritative repudiation of racist symbols. Yet at that time, the President was silent on the issue. As a result, President Bush’s statement last week seemed strangely out of time. It read like a random selection from a stack of draft presidential statements, hauled out for Black History Month. Clearly drafted months ago [and perhaps embargoed for unknown reasons], the President’s statement provided no guidance on how to reconcile the rash of noose displays four months ago with the current mood of racial harmony and possibility sweeping the country.

Link Roundup: Mary Oliver, Sherrilyn Ifill, and YouTube

Books are great—we all love books around here—but seeing a writer in person, giving a reading or a talk, can stimulate the intellect, illuminate the work, and delightfully entertain.

Mary Oliver is one of Beacon's most popular writers, and, according to the Poetry Foundation, author of five of the top seven best-selling poetry books last year. When she tours, she fills auditoriums, which, as any poet in America can tell you, doesn't often happen for poetry readings. In fact, her reading on Monday as part of Seattle's Arts and Lectures series sold out in record time, and tickets were reported to be changing hands on Craigslist for as much as $100 per seat.

So does she live up to the hype? Beautifully, says Seattle Post-Intelligencer book critic John Marshall, who says "the poet orchestrated her reading like a maestro, alternating poems of humor with poems showcasing bittersweet truths and honest emotions."

Many were drawn to the Oliver event by her approachable verse with its intense focus on the natural world and its quiet delights, but she soon dispensed with any notion that the evening was destined to be some sort of ecumenical worship service of nature or the poet herself. That seemed a possibility when many in the crowd of 2,500 gave Oliver a standing ovation even before she had uttered a word.

But Oliver's self-effacing sense of humor soon punctured such awe, delivered with a Seinfeldian sense of timing.

"I have a little dog and I'm working hard to make him famous," Oliver said.

Knowing murmurs rippled through the crowd.

"And he deserves it," she added, to widespread laughter.

Another Beacon author, Sherrilyn Ifill (On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century), recently spoke at University of Maryland Law School about a troubling time in the history of race relations in America. Introducing the documentary film Banished, scheduled to air on Independent Lens on PBS later this month, Ifill discussed  "'racial cleansing' of blacks from communities that have remained virtually lily-white, even in the 21st century." In this Baltimore Sun article, columnist Gregory Kane talks about the importance of acknowledging the history of banishments, and of making reparations to citizens whose property was stolen from them after they were driven from their homes in at least twelve different counties:

That dreaded "R-word" is indeed dredged up in Banished. When blacks were driven from Forsyth County in 1912, many left behind land that they owned. They were never paid for that land. It was simply gobbled up and sold by whites who saw an opportunity to make a quick - and easy - buck. Neither the blacks who lost land nor their descendants have been compensated.

But you don't need to leave your house to see a reading or a book talk anymore—in fact, you don't even need to leave your desk chair! The Cambridge Forum, which has featured Katherine Newman, Philip Winslow, and Fred Pearce, among other Beacon authors, has audio and video available on their website. Unfortunately, we can't link to the Cambridge Forum videos via our new YouTube profile, but there are a lot of other good tidbits to be found: Thich Nhat Hahn, Eboo Patel, even Wallace Shawn reading Howard Zinn. For your enjoyment, here's one of our favorites at the moment: Lester Young and Billie Holiday performing "Fine and Mellow".

The People Speak: Performances from Howard Zinn's Voices of a People's History of the United States

by Allison Trzop

Several weeks ago, a couple of folks from Beacon -- including Director Helene Atwan -- had the pleasure and the privilege of attending several readings and tapings for a miniseries being shot over at Emerson College’s Cutler Majestic Theatre here in Boston.

Hosted by Executive Producer Howard Zinn -- not only a wildly influential historian and one of the most inspirational activists of modern times, but also one of the most imminently likable people alive --"The People Speak" featured an all-star line-up performing excerpts primarily taken from Zinn’s book Voices of A People’s History of the United States. The four performances, broken into segments titled "Class," "Women," "Race," and "War," were the culmination of tremendous work by Zinn, Anthony Arnove, and Chris Moore of "Project Greenlight," as well as actors Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

While every last one of the actors who participated should be loudly applauded (yet again!), standout performances included John Legend pouring his heart and soul into Nina Simone’s "Mississippi Goddamn"; Marisa Tomei reading the words of Cindy Sheehan; David Strathairn standing in for a member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which for those of us who loved Good Night, and Good Luck was hilarious; Josh Brolin doing more for Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun than any high school lit class ever could; and every last time Staceyann Chin walked onstage.

Did you ever expect to hear Viggo Mortensen sing Bob Dylan?

For those who couldn’t make it into the filled-to-capacity Cutler Majestic, you can read more about it over at Alternet,  watch some more clips on YouTube, and, with any luck, the producers will find a home for the miniseries.

Allison Trzop is an assistant editor at Beacon Press.

Going To the Territory: The Black Conservative Tradition in American Politics

by Christopher Alan Bracey

During a recent promotional event for my book, Saviors or Sellouts: The Promise and Peril of Black Conservatism, From Booker T. Washington to Condoleezza Rice, a middle-aged African American woman asked me a question that I’ve been hearing a lot these days. Although she agreed with much of what conservatives past and present had to say about issues affecting the black community, she refused to think of herself as a conservative because, in her mind, conservatives (echoing Kanye West’s criticism of the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina) “don’t really care about black people.”

The problem, she elaborated, was one of tone. Black conservatives, in her mind, were unduly hostile in their criticisms of the blacks in general, and poor and urban blacks in particular. She simply couldn’t bear to align herself – at least publicly – with these hostile voices. She was, in her own mind, a black conservative masquerading as liberal – and suffering within a deep political crisis as a consequence.

As the 2008 Presidential Campaign lurches forward, Americans of all stripes will be called upon to contemplate and vote their politics. For many African Americans, Barack Obama’s pursuit of the Democratic nomination has, in some ways, reanimated a conversation that has taken place quietly within the black community over the past decade – a conversation about the increasingly conservative nature of black politics.

To be sure, blacks are overwhelmingly registered Democrats. But are blacks overwhelmingly liberal? In a season in which the dominant rhetoric on both sides of the political aisle is one of “change,” what sort of change is needed to best empower the African American community?

Condoleeza Rice

As I detail in the book, there is a growing perception that conservatism within black America is gaining momentum. In 1972, fewer than ten percent of blacks identified as conservative. Today, nearly thirty percent, or 11.2 Million, African Americans do. Fifty-six percent of black voters supported Virginia’s 2006 ban on same-sex marriage. Other polling data reveal that the majority of blacks support other conservative policies, such as privatization of social security, school vouchers.

Do everyday blacks, who believe a more conservative pathway is most attractive, dare to state these views publicly, particularly when the Democratic nomination is at stake? More importantly, if, in the spirit of public discourse, certain blacks declared themselves to be conservative, what exactly does that mean? Is there a black conservative tradition, or multiple traditions? And what obligation, if any, do liberals and progressives have to engage this conservative tradition in a serious way?

Dispatch from the Sundance Film Festival

by Thomas N. DeWolf

The snow is falling outside the home several of us have rented in Park City, Utah, to attend the Sundance Film Festival in support of our cousin Katrina Browne’s film Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. It is 19 degrees outside, which is warmer than it has been. The cold and the white stuff haven’t diminished the size of the audiences in the films I’ve seen so far.

I’ve not been to this or any other film festival outside my hometown before. I doubt that I ever would have were it not for the high honor of having Sundance select for competition the film that features our family struggling with the legacy of slavery by exposing New England’s—and our own ancestors’—complicity in the slave trade.

The film premiered here, appropriately enough, on Monday, January 21: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. We were honored by the presence of Congressman John Conyers, Jr., Chair of the House Judiciary Committee. On Monday morning, he participated on a panel dedicated to the message and mission of Traces of the Trade, and attended the film’s premiere that night. It was particularly significant to be with the man who introduced the legislation—four days after Dr. King’s assassination—that ultimately resulted in the establishment of the national holiday fifteen years later in 1983. Conyers has introduced legislation (H.R. 40) that would establish a commission to study the legacy of slavery and possible remedieseach session since 1989. It has never had a hearing until last month. As Chair of Judiciary, he is finally in a position to move this important legislation forward that has languished for so long.

Monday Link Roundup: Tuesday Edition, featuring Tom DeWolf, Kai Wright, and Eboo Patel

Beacon Author Tom DeWolf (Inheriting the Trade)—who blogged here on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the U.S.—is at the Sundance Film Festival this week with his cousin Katrina Browne, director of Traces of the Trade. The book and the film deal with their shared family history as descendants of the most successful slave-trading family in our country's history, and they present an opportunity for greater discussion slavery's legacy in the U.S.

One of the many salient points DeWolf makes in his book is that slavery was not a "Southern problem," but an integral part of the economic lives of those north of the Mason-Dixon Line as well. This interview from NECN highlights DeWolf's Rhode Island roots and New England's "hidden history" of slavery. When asked by host Chet Curtis why the subject of Northern culpability in the trade isn't explored in the history books, DeWolfe offered this insight:

The North won the Civil War, and the winners get to write the history books. A professor we met with called it "constructed amnesia," that we create this mythical story of the great abolitionists from the North marching south to straighten out those Southerners. When in fact, there were portions of New York that contemplated seceding with the South prior to the Civil War.

(We embed the NECN story here—if it doesn't appear in your reader click here to watch).

While DeWolfe ducks the paparazzi at Sundance, Kai Wright is reading tonight at the Hue-Man Bookstore in New York. Time Out New York interviewed Kai about his new book, Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York. Kai talked about his own feelings of alienation as young, black, gay man living in Dupont Circle, a gay neighborhood in Washington, D.C.

“It started to dawn on me that yes, it was a gay neighborhood, but it was a white gay neighborhood, and I was a young black man. I didn’t belong. And I didn’t feel any better.” He recalls that there was a “layering of race over sexuality, and the feeling that there had to be a choice.” (Link)

On Colorlines, Wright discusses the Obama-Clinton campaigns, in the wake of "their racially loaded fight over the comparative historical import of Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson." He warns both Democrats of avoiding "the diversity debate," citing the 2004 race of an example of a "weak-kneed dodge" that served neither the Democrats nor the country well:

The Democratic establishment cried foul when Republicans loaded state ballots with divisive initiatives on gay rights. Eleven states asked voters to weigh in on same-sex marriage, pumping up the conservative vote and, some argue, costing John Kerry a win—he lost nine of the states, most infamously Ohio.

The problem, however, wasn’t the existence of a debate about gay rights—that’s inevitable as long as gays refuse to cower in the closet—it was national Democrats’ refusal to participate meaningfully in it. At the state level, 94 percent of legislators who voted against the 22 proposed constitutional amendments banning gay marriage won re-election, according to the gay rights group Equality Federation. (Link)

Finally, be sure to Tivo Good Morning America tomorrow and Thursday. Eboo Patel, author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation, will be featured in a two-part segment highlighting the Interfaith Youth Core. We'll post a link to the segments when they hit the ABC website.

200th Anniversary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act of 1808

by Thomas N. DeWolf

Americans love to celebrate. We commemorate historic events (Thanksgiving, Independence Day) and people (Presidents Day, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day). But few are aware of the significance of January 1, 2008: the 200th Anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the United States. We tend to remember the end of the institution of slavery as one result of the Civil War. African Americans have commemorated Juneteenth, a celebration of the day, on June 19, 1865, when slaves in Texas were finally told about the Emancipation Proclamation two and a half years after it was implemented. But America has all but ignored the date that marks the end of the slave trade.

This past year, Great Britain spent the equivalent of $40 million to remember their 200-year old abolition law from 1807. They educated students, invested in museums and commemorative services, and considered the legacy of slavery and the impact it still has today. They taught anew the heroic actions of historic figures like Wilberforce, Newton, Equiano, and Clarkson, who led England’s fight to end their evil commerce in human flesh.

Here in the United States we are doing precious little to mark the occasion of our equivalent historical watershed event. To my knowledge, the only official action toward commemorating the date, a bill to establish a commission to “ensure a suitable national observance of the bicentennial anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade” (H.R. 3432), was introduced in August 2007, passed in the House (October) and the Senate (December 19 ), but with all funding eliminated. It remains to be seen whether this remains an ineffectual symbolic gesture or if funding will be forthcoming in 2008, obviously after the January 1 anniversary. Beyond that, the only government-sponsored event planned, of which I'm aware, is a public symposium hosted by the National Archives on January 10.

One can reasonably argue that the law to end the slave trade was less than effective. Enforcement efforts were often half-hearted; those who continued trading illegally did so with vigor, particularly prior to 1820 when the penalty for conviction of slave trading became death. (Even this change to the law was largely toothless, as the penalty was only applied once, during the Civil War). Yet the 1808 law was a turning point. It helped energize the abolition movement and provided government affirmation that slave trading was not only immoral but criminal.

The Legacy of Lynchings in Halloween Decorations

Halloween is a time for "gallows humor," but macabre displays of fake bodies swaying from trees are not a laughing matter for those who understand the legacy of lynching in America.

From Crystal Lake, Florida, to Stratford, Connecticut, hanging dummies have been stirring up debate and protest. This year, however, we’ve had almost non-stop news coverage of noose-related incidents following the events in Jena, Louisiana. Could it be that we still need a primer on one of the more violent chapters of America’s history?

An article in the SF Gate talks more generally about the spate of noose incidents that have made news recently. Sherrilyn Ifill, a Beacon author whose book On the Courthouse Lawn chronicles the history of lynching in America, addresses the disconnect between white and black perceptions of the image of the noose:

"Many white people are unaware of the incredible power of the lynching story for African Americans," said Sherrilyn Ifill, a professor of law at the University of Maryland and a former civil rights attorney. "Lynching was a message crime. It served to tell the black community that there were boundaries. Don't get too educated. Don't vote. Don't get too wealthy. Don't look at a white woman.

"It was not just used to punish an individual, but to serve as a threat to others."

What can you do to be more sensitive to the racial overtones of certain types of Halloween imagery? Diary of an Anxious Black Woman offers a few tips on how to avoid racist subtexts in your Halloween decorations, costumes, and how you interact with trick or treaters. It's an excellent, informative read.

Happy Halloween!

Indigenous Peoples Day

by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

“I'm convinced that indigenous peoples are the moral reserve of humanity.” Evo Morales, Aymara, President of Bolivia, Democracy Now! September 26, 2007.

Every year as October 12 approaches, there is a certain sense of dread that can be felt in indigenous communities in the Americas. That it is a federal holiday in the United States is regarded as hideous, a celebration of genocide and colonization. However, beginning thirty years ago, indigenous peoples formed an international movement, demanding, for one thing, that October 12 be commemorated as an international day of mourning for the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas. Informally, the day has been appropriated as Indigenous Peoples Day.

International Non-Violence Day

October 2 is Gandhi's birthday and also the first International Non-Violence Day. Does this mean that the headlines tomorrow will be devoid of murder, war, and oppression? Unlikely, but it does give us a chance to reflect of the teachings of Gandhi and what they mean to us today.

Beacon Press and the Pentagon Papers

On this Banned Books Week, almost 36 years after Beacon Press published the Pentagon Papers in defiance of all efforts by the government to suppress them, we're reminded of the critical and continued need for books deemed “dangerous.” To remember that a single publication once held the power to enrage the president, incur an FBI witchhunt, and briefly lift the oppressive hood of ignorance that those in the highest echelons of power seek to suffocate us with is a source of great hope, as well as an inspiration for all the current (and the forthcoming!) dangerous books out there.—Allison Trzop

Read about Beacon's role in the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

Allison Trzop is an assistant editor at Beacon Press. In June of 2007, she had the honor of meeting three dangerous men—Daniel Ellsberg, Robert West, and Senator Mike Gravel—as part of an anniversary panel on the Pentagon Papers, moderated by Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman. “Beacon Press and the Pentagon Papers”(pdf) was originally submitted as her master’s degree project in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College.

Banned Books Aren't Going Away

by Christopher M. Finan

Censorship is very American.

After all, the First Amendment was something of an afterthought.  The Founding Fathers did not plan to protect freedom of speech and freedom of the press in the Constitution.  The Bill of Rights was a concession to critics who argued that the Constitution did not provide adequate protection from government tyranny.

How right they were!  Only a few years later, one group of the Founding Fathers passed the Alien and Sedition Acts in an effort to silence another group of Founding Fathers.