Wachsberger notes that the underground press not only produce a few well-known papers but also was truly national and diverse in scope. His goal is to capture the essence of "the countercultural community."
A fundamental resource for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of a dramatic era in U.S. history.
Wachsberger notes that the underground press not only produce a few well-known papers but also was truly national and diverse in scope. His goal is to capture the essence of "the countercultural community."
A fundamental resource for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of a dramatic era in U.S. history.
Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 1
361
Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 1
361Paperback
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Overview
Wachsberger notes that the underground press not only produce a few well-known papers but also was truly national and diverse in scope. His goal is to capture the essence of "the countercultural community."
A fundamental resource for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of a dramatic era in U.S. history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780870139833 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2011 |
| Series: | Voices from the Underground |
| Pages: | 361 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 1
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2011 Ken WachsbergerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-983-3
Chapter One
Messaging the BlackmanJOHN WOODFORD
H. Rap Brown was in jail in Louisiana on trumped-up charges. The Black Panther Party was striding around northern California declaring it the right and duty of our ethnic group—the African American people—to defend itself with arms against brutal police. And there sat I, in what I thought would be a good position to cover the freedom movement, as an editor/writer for Ebony magazine in Chicago.
The problem was, in 1968 both Rap Brown and the Panthers were strictly verboten as sympathetic topics for our country's biggest magazine aimed at African American readers. Ebony's publisher, John H. Johnson, not only regarded the Panthers as bad apples, but also considered covering them as not worth the financial risk. The advertising leash constrains most mainstream media in the land of the avowed freedom of the press, and a Black publisher runs on the shortest leash. (Which is not to say that there have not been many dauntless and high-principled Black publishers who have sacrificed riches to carry the real news, from Joseph Russworm's Freedom's Journal in 1827 and Frederick Douglass's North Star in 1857, to Robert S. Abbott's Chicago Daily Defender in the early decades of this century, to Carlton Goodlett's Sun Reporter in Oakland, California, and Andrew W. Cooper's [New York] City Sun today.)
Regardless of the rationales behind Ebony's censorship, all I knew was that it was barring me and other young writers from covering two of the biggest stories for Black Americans in 1968. I was twenty-six years old, the same age as Huey, but there he was showing the guts to defy a bunch of "racist pigs," and here I was, muzzled while working for a Black publication when I could have worked anywhere else in the country. I'd quit Ivy League grad and law schools to enjoy the satisfaction of being in on "the action" via journalism. I knew something had to give. (The Ebony staff did get some meaty assignments, but none of them was near the battle zones; any story with teeth was usually historical.)
I'd already been ticked off by an earlier demonstration of Ebonyesque servility never reported until now. Ebony had surveyed its readers in 1967 on their preferences in the 1968 Democratic presidential primaries, promising to report the results. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his aides didn't like the results of the poll, however, because it indicated that African Americans strongly favored Robert F. Kennedy over LBJ. The story was written, and the ear of the front cover (the ear is a headline summarizing a key non-cover story) announced that the issue contained the results of the poll. Suddenly the presses were stopped. The poll was cut out of the issue, and the cover was reprinted with a new ear. This maneuver had to cost Johnson Publishing Company plenty in production charges. I don't cite this incident to knock Mr. J. as exceptionally self-interested, however, for he was following the same pocketbook-first principles of U.S. journalism as the heads of publications like the New York Times and Time magazine—both of which received evidence of the killing of the Ebony readers poll, but chose not to follow up with an investigation and news story.
In any event, these and similar practices of American mainstream "free" journalism—whether the owners of the presses were Black or not—were goading me to seek an employer with more guts to cover stories that needed to be told. One late spring day I picked up another Chicago-based publication that I'd previously enjoyed reading only for its kookiness—Muhammad Speaks, the weekly tabloid published by the Nation of Islam (a.k.a. the Black Muslims) under the leadership of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, described by himself and his followers as the Last Messenger of Allah.
I'd read with a sort of scoffing amazement the newspaper's religious columns that explained the Messenger's distinctive mythology—how people who considered themselves to be Whites were somewhat hybrid beings, "Devils" incarnate created by the surgical grafting and bioengineering of the arch-scientist and chief Devil, Yakub. Yakub had accomplished this feat 6,000 years ago by engineering pig genes, or portions of pig anatomy—something like that. All in all, the mythology is no more far-fetched than Mormonism, or Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, the Greco-Roman and Egyptian pantheons, and so on. This passage from the book Muhammad's Message to the Blackman offers a sample of the apocalyptic rhetoric of Allah's Last Messenger:
Their history shows trouble-making, murder, and death to all darker people from the far-off islands and mainlands of Asia as well as the South Seas and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. All have been touched by their destructive hand and evil way of civilization and finally the bringing of my people to make their destruction sure. Actually it was suicide for them to have brought our fathers in slavery. This act was charged to them by the Divine Supreme Being as being the most wicked people on the earth. Now we see the results in the fight of the ignorant among our people to gain sincere love from a people who have no sincere love among themselves.
And then there was the Mother Plane, an invisible aircraft that would take all true-believing Original People to paradise on Judgment Day. One cartoon that appeared every week showed Uncle Sam as the head of the World Serpent—the European and Euro-American coil around the peoples of the Third World.
Another regular-running cartoon showed miniskirted Black and White women, and denounced this revealing fashion as "the filth that filth produces." Another doctrine held that Allah unleashed all natural disasters to weaken and ultimately destroy the rule of the Devil.
The word among the more privileged and/or orthodox ranks of the "so-called Negroes," as the Muslims dubbed them, was that the Black Muslims were ignorant, fanatic, and violent, and the Nation of Islam a haven for ex-cons and confidence men who thrived on conspiratorial cunning. The women were said to be better educated than the men, but appreciative of a rigid creed that would prescribe a husband's monogamist behavior and, presumably, punish a husband who strayed from the Qur'an's moral code. And furthermore, Black men were "gods" under Mr. Muhammad's teachings—potentially an advantage for any wife.
The Black Panther Taboo
I'd been as successfully indoctrinated as the next person to accept the mass media's simplistic image of the Black Muslims. But I felt the poetic force and accuracy in much of Elijah Muhammad's insights and prose. Furthermore, any condescending smile that appeared on my face as I read this particular issue slid away when I saw an interview a Muhammad Speaks correspondent had conducted with Rap Brown in prison, detailing the racist practices in Louisiana that had drawn Rap and other civil rights fighters to challenge the United States' brutal bigotry and variety of apartheid customs. Other articles in the same issue told about the Black Panthers' fight-back against police violence in Oakland, California; about liberation struggles in Africa; about evidence that showed African voyagers had landed in Mexico and other parts of the Americas long before Columbus. Fascinating stuff, and in a publication circulating at 300,000 copies a week, which rivaled, if it didn't surpass, Ebony's figures. (Muhammad Speaks went on to amass the largest circulation of any weekly newspaper in the country except Grit, a rural publication that has never made journalistic waves strong enough to carry it to general attention.)
In one of those fateful coincidences, not many weeks after I'd begun to read Muhammad Speaks with real interest and respect, I learned that the Nation of Islam was looking to hire more aggressive, skillful young journalists to further boost its circulation and reputation. I learned about this plan from what may seem to non-Chicagoans to have been an unlikely source: a Chicago Black Republican associated with certain Black Muslims in a number of businesses, one of which was rumored to be fencing stolen goods. In many ways, the Nation of Islam was a microcosm of the nation at large; in other ways, influenced by the separatist ideology of Elijah Muhammad and his chief disciple Malcolm X, it was an anti-nation.
Like most young African Americans, I had been captivated by Malcolm X's sharp refutations of mainstream racist lore in his speeches, TV appearances, and interviews in the print media. The fearless eye-for-an-eye militancy of Malcolm X and Robert Williams, the North Carolina freedom fighter and author of Negroes with Guns, was inspiring to a generation that was not going to do any stepping, fetching, or "yassuhing." This new militancy also had an international component. Blacks were no longer going to kill so willingly or proudly for Uncle Sam overseas for "freedom" we didn't have at home. As Muhammad Ali had put it when he rejected his draft notice inducting him into the U.S. Army: "No Viet Congs ever called me nigger." Ali's pithy expression of political wisdom soon became a political aphorism in the largely antiwar Black community, and it remains so to this day despite efforts to subvert it via slick armed-forces recruitment ads, pro-war movies featuring loyal Black sidekick soldiers, and the elevation of General Colin Powell to head the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I was well aware, however, of the contradictions within the Nation of Islam. I'd heard Malcolm X lecture at Harvard four years earlier, in 1964. This was before he'd gone to Mecca and decided that counterracism was a poor excuse for a revolutionary or uplifting ideology. He'd laced his lecture with a lot of spiteful reverse-racist and cultural-separatist talk that continues to be recirculated today, though in ever-cheaper coin.
Before his self-proclaimed enlightenment in Mecca, Malcolm had been most effective when he spoke on talk shows in a group that included plenty of arrogant Whites whom he turned into straight men, hoisting them on the petard of their own blind bigotry. But Malcolm had no straight men at Harvard that evening. Much of his speech was disappointing.
Even if my own beloved classmate Elizabeth Duffy (we celebrated our forty-fifth wedding anniversary in 2010) had not been of Irish-Bulgarian ancestry, I would have been repulsed by Malcolm's or anyone else's efforts to unite Blacks by fomenting enmity against Whites, Jews, Asians, Latinos, or any other ethnic groups. When the person closest to you in the world is described as being of "another race," it makes the concept of "race" pretty silly, if not—considering the damages done under the myth of race—downright disgusting. Progressive organizations can't be built on mirror images of their oppressor's dogma.
That's not to say I accepted the nonviolent creed of Martin Luther King. To me, nonviolence as a strategic principle required being a whipping boy. I'm not one for turning the other cheek, which is why in the summer after I heard Malcolm's speech, I went to Mississippi with a group other than the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Organized and led by White grad students from Harvard who remain close friends to this day, we taught summer school at Tougaloo College. I wanted to make sure I'd be around Black Mississippians who would bear arms and return fire in a situation calling for self-defense. In retrospect, I figure I lacked the courage, discipline, and altruism required to follow the nonviolent tactics of the heroic SNCC contingent.
But back to the Muslims and me. I had reviewed The Autobiography of Malcolm X for Johnson Publishing Company's literary journal Negro Digest (later Black World) in 1965, during my first stint at Ebony. I argued that establishment Blacks like the columnist and Democratic political operative Carl Rowan were attacking Malcolm for his iconoclasm, Rowan being a favorite of the liberal White elite because he espoused their imperialistic, antisocialist foreign-policy line. A Black American doesn't get far up the media ladder unless he or she is something of a my-country-right-or-wrong apologist in international affairs, and shuts up about any radical differences with the establishment save those that are conceded to be "Black issues," such as South Africa. The network of enforcement of this hush-your-Black-mouth policy is tangled. I consider it no coincidence that just as Malcolm X was trashed by the Rowans, he was also ejected from the Nation of Islam, or driven to leave it, after he described the assassination of President Kennedy by a screwball FBI-informer and CIA-maverick as an example of "the chickens coming home to roost." Malcolm meant that the United States under JFK had attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro, had attacked Cuba, and was keeping in place a violently repressive and impoverishing stranglehold throughout the Third World—and on the African American citizens of the "land of the free."
Malcolm X Muzzled
Malcolm's barnyard aphorism—like Muhammad Ali's summing up of Black America's relationship to the Vietnamese—was met with overwhelming assent by most Blacks I've known, even those who disapproved of his audacity in saying so publicly. But his comment upset the Black Muslim leaders, who followed the unwritten policy that they should not "interfere" in mainstream American politics. Elijah Muhammad ordered Malcolm to make no more public comments. I've always interpreted this harsh punishment by the Nation of Islam as evidence that some influential Black Muslims, perhaps the same ones who accepted donations from the American Nazis and other White racist-separatist groups, didn't want the group to become a politically militant force. Separatist propagandizing was okay, but independent political organizing was a no-no. For example, Black Muslims were under orders not to vote in any U.S. elections. And the Muslims never did use their economic base to support independent African American political mobilization. (I'm convinced that African Americans will gain the leverage to attack and change the systemic causes of racism only after we form a grassroots-based, militant, programmatic, democratic but non-preacher-led organization like the African National Congress of South Africa.)
Malcolm soon defied the Messenger's gag order, however, and Elijah Muhammad ousted him from the Nation as a "hypocrite"—a category, under Muslim terminology, that puts one in the position of other renegades from secret organizations, from the Mormons to the Scientologists to the Mafia: that is, the position of being marked for death. For several months, Malcolm escaped a few assassination attempts and founded a quasi-Pan-Africanist/ socialist organization. Men linked to the Muslims killed him as he was delivering a speech in Harlem in February 1965. Whether any of the triggermen were also in the FBI or were pawns of an agent inside the Nation has not been proved; but neither of these scenarios strains credulity. J. Edgar Hoover's writings and sundry Freedom of Information documents show that the FBI had several operatives in the Nation—and who could expect it to have been otherwise, for this was a powerful and wealthy organization capable of affecting the sailing of the slave ship of state.
These individuals, events, and intrigues formed the background against which I had to decide whether to leave Ebony for Muhammad Speaks. And if I hadn't already known what a mixed bag the Nation of Islam was, all I had to do was take a look at the news of the day. As I contemplated joining Muhammad Speaks, the Black Muslims were punishing Muhammad Ali for his "No Viet Congs ever called me nigger" statement. Like Malcolm X before him (and it was Malcolm who had converted the Champ to Islam), Ali was being shunned and silenced by Mr. Muhammad and his followers. One friend of the Champ's told me Ali was too vulnerable psychologically to break away from the Nation as Malcolm X had. That may have been true. But Ali may also have felt much more vulnerable physically than Malcolm had been. A healthy percentage of Ali's many multimillion-dollar prizefighting purses went to his managerial team of Muhammad family members and their top aides, so Ali was a chief money earner for the entire elite of the Nation of Islam, far surpassing rank-and-file tithers and contributors from White separatist groups.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 1 Copyright © 2011 by Ken Wachsberger. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword to the Voices from the Underground Series by Markos Moulitsas....................xiiiForeword to the original publication of Voices from the Underground by William M. Kunstler....................xvii
Foreword to the original publication of Voices from the Underground by Abe Peck....................xix
Preface to the Voices from the Underground Series by Ken Wachsberger....................xxv
Preface to the original publication of Voices from the Underground by Ken Wachsberger....................xxxiii
Messaging the Blackman John Woodford....................1
The San Francisco Oracle: A Brief History Allen Cohen....................35
A Fowl in the Vortices of Consciousness: The Birth of the Great Speckled Bird Sally Gabb....................91
Akwesasne Notes: How the Mohawk Nation Created a Newspaper and Shaped Contemporary Native America Doug George-Kanentiio....................109
The Joy of Liberation News Service Harvey Wasserman, with a sidebar by Allen Young....................139
off our backs: The First Four Decades Carol Anne Douglas and Fran Moira....................157
oob and the Feminist Dream Marilyn S. Webb....................185
A Tradition Continues: The Lansing Area's Progressive Press, 1965–Present Ken Wachsberger....................195
Freedom of the Press—Or Subversion and Sabotage? Nancy Strohl....................239
The Guardian Goes to War Jack A. Smith....................253
Muckraking Gadflies Buzz Reality Chip Berlet....................267
Space City!: From Opposition to Organizational Collapse Victoria Smith Holden....................299
A Select Annotated Bibliography of Sources on the Underground Press Anne E. Zald and Cathy Seitz Whitaker, revised by K. R. Roberto....................325
About the Authors....................343
Index....................347