/05

Memorial Day, 1937
▻https://jacobinmag.com/2017/05/memorial-day-massacre-little-steel-strike-violence-police

https://images.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/28105339/memorial-day.jpg

Few people think of unions or the plight of the working class when they think of Memorial Day. But they should. On that day, eighty years ago, one of the most important events in American history unfolded, an event that transformed the course of labor rights in this country.

In 1937, most of the country celebrated Memorial Day on May 30, which was a Sunday. In Chicago, the holiday could not have been better accommodated by the bright and warm weather. This made the city’s southernmost reaches an incongruous backdrop to the killing that day of ten unarmed men by the Chicago Police.

This incident, known as the “Memorial Day Massacre,” is what makes this holiday so essential to American history.

The Panthers and the Patriots
▻https://jacobinmag.com/2017/05/black-panthers-young-patriots-fred-hampton

https://images.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/19133352/rainbown-coalition-wttw2-2-1.jpg

In July 1969, the Black Panther Party convened a huge meeting in Oakland that attracted radical groups from across the country. They called it the Conference for a United Front Against Fascism.

On a Saturday afternoon, between speeches from representatives of the Communist Party, the Farm Workers Union, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a man wearing a huge belt buckle with crossed pistols took the stage. Dark glasses covered his eyes, and his jacket and military-style beret bore Confederate flags.

“We come from a monster,” he said in a heavy Southern accent. “And the jaws of the monster in Chicago are grinding up the flesh and spitting out the blood of the poor and oppressed people, the blacks in the South Side, the West Side; the browns in the North Side; and the reds and the yellows; and yes, the whites — white oppressed people.”

The speaker’s name was William “Preacherman” Fesperman, and he belonged to the Young Patriots Organization, a radical group formed by young men on Chicago’s poverty-stricken North Side. Its mission was to organize poor whites to stand up for themselves, in solidarity with communities of color.

While the organization survived only a few years, it embodied a radical notion: that disenfranchised whites could throw off the shackles of racism and struggle alongside black and brown people to create a new society.

The Worst Person in the Room
▻https://jacobinmag.com/2017/05/roger-ailes-obituary-fox-news-sexual-harassment-richard-nixon-ronald-rea

https://images.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/19123433/34353965460_3aae82b451_b-e1495213510380.jpg

“Roger Ailes didn’t just have bad politics. He was a bad person.”

Some people have abhorrent politics but pleasant personalities. Others are terrible people with good politics. Roger Ailes was neither.

It’s a strange phenomenon that people can hold terrible politics while being otherwise decent human beings, and that others can have praiseworthy political beliefs that stand at odds with their personal odiousness. Roger Ailes, the former longtime Fox News head who died yesterday, belongs in neither of these two categories, being instead a combination of both politically and personally reprehensible.

He did more to shape modern politics than almost any other figure in recent history, first perfecting the art of substance-less image-making, and later pioneering a once-unique form of ugly, fear-mongering propaganda that brought us eight years of Bush and, at last, Trump.