Happy Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day

The July 10, 1966, march to City Hall
from Soldier Field.

 (Chicago Tribune
 historical photo)

Today, on Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I thought I would post a short passage from one of Rev. King's most controversial speeches, which was the centerpiece of one of his most difficult campaigns, the Chicago Freedom Movement, in 1966. Not only did Dr. King remark on the virulence of the racism and white resistance he encountered, but at the time of his death three years later, it probably appeared to many people that the campaign had failed.

Dr. and Mrs. Coretta Scott King had visited Chicago and some of its suburban towns several times over the years, and in 1966 they even moved to Chicago to demonstrate the disparate conditions Black people were enduring under the tenure of Mayor Richard J. Daley. As part of the Chicago Freedom Movement, Dr. King urged Black voters to come out in droves and challenge the Democratic machine, controlled by Richard J. Daley. He decried white supremacy and Northern racism. He urged challenges to the Chicago power structure, better schools, housing, representation in government, everything. He also espoused Black pride and support for Black businesses, though he also criticized the nascent Black Power movement. Much like his namesake, Dr. King even presented his demands in person at City Hall, first by taping them to one of the outer doors, and then the following day in person to Mayor Daley, who was enraged by the campaign.

In the long run, despite the problems Black Chicagoans still face, things did change for the better from the status quo just over 50 years, and for lifelong and longtime Black Chicagoans now in their 70s and 80s, the changes were visible and measurable. Here are a few articles about the struggles Dr. King faced, his actions during that tough summer and year, and some of the changes that did happen. Also, I've posted an image from the speech he gave (readers can find the entire speech at the King Center's site), in which he uses the phrase "the fierce urgency of now." It is one of his memorable lines, and as applicable today as then or ever. (I'd also note that, in light of the ongoing crises Puerto Rico faces, it is notable that he mentions Puerto Ricans and the discrimination they face in Chicago in the speech's final paragraph.)

Chicago Tribune: "50 Years Ago Today: MLK Jr.'s speech at Soldier's Field, march to City Hall with demands for Daley"

Chicago Tribune: "Martin Luther King in Chicago"

WGNTV: "Web Extras: Martin Luther King and the 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement"

Chicago Magazine: "The Longest March"

From Dr. King's Chicago Freedom
Movement Speech (courtesy of the King Center)

Commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Newark Rebellion

Protesters and guardsman with a bayonet
(Neal Boenzi/The New York Times)

Fifty years ago today, the Newark Rebellion, also known--still too often ideologically misnamed and misread, I would argue, as the "Newark Riots"--unfolded in New Jersey's largest city. The rebellion was one of a wave of uprisings in the US and across the globe, especially during the tumultuous year that followed, 1968, and left Newark deeply scarred, in human and material terms, and in the local and national imagination. Lasting five days, resulting in 26 dead (mostly Black residents of Newark, as well as a White firefighter and cop) and 700 people injured, the riots left numerous streets in the city in ruins, to the cost of roughly $10 million (roughly $73 million adjusted for inflation today).

A coalition of organizations, including ALI - Abbott Leadership Institute, The North, New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), People's Organization For Progress New Community Corporation, WBGO News, New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, Newark Public Library, City of Newark, NJ - City Hall, Newark NAACP, and The New Jersey Historical Society, has organized a weeklong 50th anniversary commemoration of the rebellion that began yesterday. Events include a prayer and memorial service; a 50th anniversary march to the monument memorializing the rebellion; a public forum to be aired on local NPR-affiliated radio station WBGO; an intergenerational conversation about the rebellion; and, to conclude the week, a conversation at the Newark Public Library involving people who lived through the rebellion.

Commemoration poster

My Rutgers-Newark colleague Junius Williams, who directs ALI and lived through the rebellion, has created a deeply informative website, RiseUpNewark, that provides a rich background to how Newark came to be the city it was and is, as well as specific sections examining the period leading up the rebellion (1950-60) through the decade in which it occurred.  I would venture to say that the vast majority of Newarkers and New Jerseyans have not encountered the trove Williams's site provides, and though it is specific to Newark, its broad outlines suggest a narrative applicable to many other urban areas across the US. Professor Williams has also written a first-person account, "The Rebellion in Newark," that appears in New Jersey Monthly.

Here's an excerpt (the medical school he mentions eventually became the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), and is now the Rutgers School of Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS)):

For weeks, black people had been saying the community was ready to explode. I heard it in bars and at neighborhood meetings. I heard it from speakers protesting the two hot issues of the day: Mayor Hugh Addonizio’s plan to build a medical and dental school on 150 acres in the Central Ward that would displace 20,000 mostly black and Puerto Rican residents; and the mayor’s decision to place James Callaghan, a white man with a high school diploma, in the position of board secretary (business administrator) for the Newark public schools, instead of Wilbur Parker, the first black CPA in New Jersey. “Keep this shit up and there’s gonna be a riot in Newark!” was the word on the street. (Applause meter off the charts; everybody agreed.)

In addition, the New York Times, which covered the rebellion in real time, devotes a feature on the momentous event's anniversary today. Rather than straight reportage, the Times assembles the voices of people who lived through the uprising, creating an oral historical collage that provides a fuller view than standard reportage usually provides. In many of the accounts, the frustration and sorrow at the conditions that led to the uprising, and its aftermath, are front and center. One of the immediate consequences was the acceleration of White flight, already underway since the 1950s, and the departure of numerous businesses, some of which were departing Newark as cities all over the country were deindustrializing, a shift that continues today.

I think it's fair to say that Newark is on the upswing these days under its current mayor, Ras Baraka, but the turnaround has been a long-term process and is nowhere near complete. Some of the key challenges the city faced before 1967 are still in place, and the still pressing issue of decent wage-paying jobs for the city's residents has not abated. Gentrification, evident near Rutgers-Newark and the downtown area, will only exacerbate this problem, though having (some) people in power, particularly in the city, who want to listen and collaborate with Newark's people is a major advance over the situation of 50 years ago.

A man taken from a building in which
sniper fire was coming (Neal Boenzi/New York Times)

Below are a few excerpts from the Times' curated testimonies. I found some of the feature's photos, like the one at the top of this blog post, particularly evocative and moving.

Junius Williams
As the smoke cleared and the last dying embers of the flames receded, some of us realized the power structure was afraid. First time they had ever been afraid of us in this city. So we began to think of, how are we are going to take advantage of this violence that nobody wanted? My group was formed, the Newark Area Planning Association, and we decided we were going to work on the medical school. We had to cut that medical school down. Some people didn’t want it at all, but some of us saw it as something valuable.

The black community was definitely empowered. Nobody wanted that violence. But at the same time, people were politically adept enough to see that we had the opportunity to turn that destructive power into something that was positive for the community, which if they had just allowed us to do in the beginning, it never would have happened.

Jonathan Lazarus
I grew up in Newark when it was a thriving commercial and manufacturing hub, a city of vast parks, strong schools, wonderful branch libraries and viable neighborhoods, all except the Central Ward, the deliberately overlooked ground-zero ghetto. This all went away with the riots. My family moved to the suburbs in 1957, so we escaped the immediacy of the destruction, but felt its impact for a lifetime.
I worked nights in Newark for the remainder of my news career and saw the scarring effects of those four nights of hell linger for decades. But Newark has definitely managed to turn a corner. 

Development, jobs and commerce are improving. The city has become a higher education center. Political leadership, while imperfect, is superior to previous iterations, both black and white. And, after a 40-year absence, the city ended its food-desert reputation by enticing supermarkets to come in.

Mildred C. Crump
There has been significant progress, but not enough, trust me. But there's been progress for African-Americans. Now we’re a black and brown community. Our Hispanic brothers and sisters were part of the progression that we made. For example, my husband and I bought a house in the South Ward where the Jewish community was in prominence. That could never have happened if 1967 had not happened.

Texas Executes Mentally Impaired, Cites Steinbeck Character + Russian Punk Protesters in Politlcal Show Trial

Marvin Lee Wilson

Yet another travesty of justice and a human tragedy, as well as a grotesque misuse of prose fiction, has just unfolded in Texas, where Marvin Lee Wilson, a 54-year-old man with a neuropsychologist-reported IQ of 61 was killed on Tuesday evening, by lethal injection, for the abduction and murder of Jerry Robert Williams, 21, a police department confidential informant, in 1992. Originally the court sentenced Wilson to death in 1994, but the death sentence was overturned in 1996 by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The case went back to court in 1998, and Wilson was sentenced to death on a capital murder charge. The US Supreme Court ruled, in Atkins v. Virginia, that states cannot execute convicts deemed mentally impaired, but has left the standard for such a decision up to each state. Texas has yet to firmly establish such a standard. Morever, in Wilson's case, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had the opportunity to stay the execution, but chose not to, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals also chose not to consider any other evidence that might have halted Wilson's execution, and Texas's current governor, Rick Perry, refused to grant clemency (which is distinct from a pardon). Since the Supreme Court's reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, 1,301 people total and 500 in Texas have died as a result of state-sanctioned execution.

I mention "prose fiction" in Wilson's case, because according to the Beaumont Enterprise, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, in a 21-page 2004 ruling detailing what factors could be in considered in capital punishment cases and denoting what it considered mental impairment cited the fictional character Lennie Small, from the late 1962 Nobel literature laureate John Steinbeck's 1937 novella Of Mice and Men. The court stated that

Texas citizens might agree that Steinbeck's Lennie should, by virtue of his lack of reasoning ability and adaptive skills, be exempt. But, does a consensus of Texas citizens agree that all persons who might legitimately qualify for assistance under the social services definition of mental retardation be exempt from an otherwise constitutional penalty?

As it turns out, Steinbeck's son Thomas Steinbeck was unaware of this use of his father's work until he read about it in the Guardian UK newspaper online, and he and his wife have been outraged about it since. Both called for clemency for Wilson. As he notes, the court treats a fictional character as if he were real and arrogates to him the sympathy and mercy of "Texas citizens," yet failed to stop the execution of a real person--in this case Wilson--who is verifiably mentally impaired, under the standards of real-world neuroscience, which is to say, who was not to be accorded the same putative "exemption." Thomas Steinbeck's expounded on the matter

I am deeply troubled by today's scheduled execution of Marvin Wilson ... I had no idea that the great state of Texas would use a fictional character that my father created to make a point about human loyalty and dedication, ie., Lennie Small from 'Of Mice and Men,' as a benchmark to identify whether defendants with intellectual disability should live or die. My father was a highly gifted writer ... and the character of Lennie was never intended to be used to diagnose a medical condition like intellectual disability.

As I said, Wilson died by lethal injection yesterday evening.  A number of people, including nine in Texas alone, are scheduled to undergo state execution in the United States through January 14, 2012. If you do not believe in the death penalty, please take the time to contact state authorities to appeal for clemency.

***

As a result of their March 2012 public protest, an anti-Putin, anti-Kremlin "punk prayer" in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior, three members of the collective Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29, have been imprisoned in a Russian jail for the last five months, and are currently on trial, facing between 7 and 3 years of jail, on the charge of "hooliganism." The court decision is planned for August 17. A number of major musicians across the globe, including Madonna, as well as people all over the globe (you can do so here, via Amnesty International), have spoken out and called for these performers, known for their outspoken critiques of the Russian government under Vladimir Putin and their brightly-colored balaclavas, to be released and the blatantly political charges against them thrown out, but so far such calls have met with silence from the Russian authorities. Who are "Pussy Riot"? Here are a few videos, including one from this past spring in which Maria Alyokhina (Alekhina) describes the conditions in which they're being held.

Панк-молебен "Богородица, Путина прогони" Pussy Riot в Храме ("Punk prayer" "Hail Mary, Putin Put," Pussy Riot in the Church)
Alyokhina talks about detention conditions
Группа Pussy Riot жжет путинский гламур (Group Pussy Riot sets fire to Putin's glamor)
Pussy Riot на Красной площади песня Путин зассал (Pussy Riot at Red Square, singing "Putin zassal")

Russian Writers Lead Protest Walk + Daniel Sada's Almost Never

Boris Akunin (© RIA Novosti. Ilia Pitalev)

"[Writers are] engineers of the human soul."

I'd never read this quote before, and having done so today, hesitated to reprint it, despite its truth, mainly because of who uttered it and how he acted on its ramifications. I'm talking about Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator whose ruthlessness has no peers in the modern history of that country. The tally of Stalin's victims is vast beyond accounting, perhaps, but the names of writers he persecuted and murdered is less hazy to many, and any student of literary history could find parallels throughout the annals of literature. But I'm not posting about authoritarians' and totalitarians' persecution of writers so much as clumsily searching for a way to highlight an important event that took place the other day in in Moscow: a peaceful march  of opposition and resistance to the May 7, 2012 reelection of Russian president Vladimir Putin, led by a dozen of Russia's most famous writers, which drew over 10,000 participants. Among the march's organizers were poet and conceptual art pioneer Lev Rubinstein (1946-), journalist Sergei Parkhomenko, and disability rights activist, economist and journalist Irina Yasina (1964-), and other leaders included internationally renowned detective fictionist and translator Boris Akunin (1956-) and poet, journalist, and essayist Dmitrii Bykov (1967-).

The route proceeded from a statue of Russia's poetic icon, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), exiled, as New York Times reporter Ellen Barry notes, by Czar Alexander I, to one of Alexander S. Griboyedov (1795-1829), whose ludic send-ups of the Czarist-era bluebloods were proscribed until after his death. At the park housing Griboyedov's bust, in the Chistye Prudy neighborhood, anti-Putin activists have set up an Occupy-style encampment, which has so far not been attacked, though Putin has vowed to do so. Only a week before, a demonstration against Putin's reelection and inauguration near the Kremlin culminated in a brutal assault by the police forces, with 700 people arrested, some for allegedly doing nothing more than wearing white protest ribbons, and the state forces have remained on the prowl for any signs of antigovernment protest.  Moreover, opposition figureheads Alexei Navalny (1976-) and Sergei Udaltsov (1977-) were jailed for 15 days on May 10, 2012, for "disobeying police orders" as they met with supporters in Moscow, and, according to the Times, "Russia’s Parliament is considering a draft law that would increase fines for causing unrest at demonstrations to 1.5 million rubles, or about $50,000, and introduce a penalty of up to 240 hours of compulsory labor."

As a result, opposition activists decided to rethink their tactics, engaging in more artful "dilemma protests," such as flash gatherings, nonviolent resistance, ludic small-group activities, and site occupations, not unlike those of the Occupy Movements across the US and the rest of the globe.  The organizers of this march decided four days ago to see if the very act of walking together, on a "test stroll," without a permit, through Moscow's streets would provoke a police response involving "being blocked, beaten, poisoned with gas, detained, arrested or at least subjected to stupid molestation with questions." It did not, thankfully, and one point the phalanx of protesters, many clutching the books of the march's leaders, spanned over a mile. Afterwards, marchers got autograph and an opportunity to chat with the writers and each other, then dispersed.  As of today, the Chistye Prudy encampment remains , but for how long it's hard to say. A much larger March of Millions is planned for June 12, 2012 in Moscow. Perhaps writers across the globe should consider June 12 solidarity marches, on behalf not only of the Russian people, democracy, freedom of speech and protest, but against authoritarian and totalitarian forces, including corporate ones, worldwide.

+++

Today Reggie H. sent along Marie Arana's May 10, 2012  Washington Post review of an exciting new publication by Graywolf Press, the first novel by late Mexican genius Daniel Sada (1953-2011) to be translated into English, Almost Never (2012, originally published as Casi nunca by Anagrama in 2008). The translator is Katherine Silver, co-director of the highly regarded Banff International Literary Translation Centre (BILTC), which several translators I deeply admire have attended. Rachel Nolan gave Almost Never rhapsodized over the novel in the April 20, 2012 New York Times. Sada passed away late last year after many years of battle with kidney disease, but in his brief writing life he was not only prolific, but made his name as one of the more important and inventive prose writers not just in Mexico but in the Spanish language, winning numerous national literary prizes and the adulation of peers across the Hispanophone world. The late Robert Bolaño (1953-2003) in particular sang Sada's praises many times, while Nolan, in her laudatory article, wrote this: "If you read only three novelists on Mexico — and you should read many more, but that’s your affair — choose Juan Rulfo, Roberto Bolaño and Daniel Sada." That is very high praise, especially considering how many exceptional contemporary let alone past Mexican fiction writers there are.

As I replied to Reggie, I'd been told of Sada but it wasn't until I saw his email that I recalled two prior encounters with his name: one, a 2006 Bomb interview, conducted by Mexican novelist José Manuel Prieto and translated by one of the best contemporary translators of Mexican poetry, poet and book artist Jen Hofer, and this 2011 epicedium, in The Paris Review, by author, journalist and critic Francisco Goldman. In the Prieto interview, Sada ranges widely in discussing his work, describing his reasoning behind his use of Spanish prosody in writing verse-novels (about which I'll say more below), and what he learned from Juan Rulfo (1917-1986) one of Mexico's canonical literary figures and the author of Pedro Páramo (1955), with whom he took a writing class. Of his lessons from Rulfo, he says:

He once recommended that I shouldn’t persist in intellectualizing everything I was experiencing, because that would end up getting in the way of my perception. Reading is perpetual nourishment, never a vehicle for vanity. Intellectuals, in general, are braggarts, perhaps because they do not possess a true interior landscape. Artists are more silent; they are observers and have, naturally, a great capacity for astonishment. Artists are continual absorbers, and it is perhaps only much later that they pick and choose. These are all Rulfian concepts, and were spoken, I will confess, very close to my ear, as if they were secrets that can only be told in low tones.

 Goldman talks about Sada's influence on and aid to Bolaño, who set many of his novels in Mexico, where he spent his adolescence, but which he never returned to after his move to Spain in his early 20s, while also describing Sada's work and its significance, and their confabulations over the years.  One of my favorite passages in Goldman's memoriam comes when he translates a reminiscence by Sada's friend and editor at Tusquets Mexico:

He wasn’t interested in luxury or power, though his prose is a true luxury. Nobody could write the way he could. In life, he only ever boasted about one thing: his way of writing. To the students who took his writing workshops, he gave one of the simplest but most valuable pieces of advice: in literature there are no excuses. You have to organize your life to be able to write at least a half a page every day. After a week, you’ll have enough words to finish a story, after a month enough for a novella, after a year enough for a novel or a collection of stories … Some of his first novels were written under great economic duress, but they are among his best: Una de dos, Albedrío. t took him six years to write his most ambitious novel, amid personal upheaval and much moving around, but he never lost his energy or concentration …  

Daniel Sada (Pascual Borzelli Iglesias © New York Times)

About Sada's innovation: I cannot pretend to have read his work, but from what I can tell, he distinguished himself not just by overall narrative adroitness, tending towards the baroque (as with Cuba's unsurpassable José Lezama Lima (1910-1976)), but through his use of traditional Spanish prosody as the foundation for his novels.  As he told Prieto:

It is in no way a desire to be flashy or overly elaborate that leads me to use octosyllables, hendecasyllables, alexandrines, decasyllables or heptasyllables. I have a deep knowledge, from childhood, of the most elemental constructions of these metric forms, so characteristic of Spanish. In my primary school in Sacramento, Coahuila, Panchita Cabrera, a rural schoolteacher who was an ardent fan of the Spanish Golden Age (a type that no longer exists) taught us these phonetic techniques with one goal in mind: that we might fine-tune our ears in order to appreciate the expressive delicacy and virulence of our language. In fact, to be honest, it’s more difficult for me to write free prose, because I don’t have any technical (phonetic) resources on hand that might provide some support.

"Octosyllables, hedecasyllables, alexandrines..." I couldn't make that up. As a result it makes his work quite difficult to translate into English, which uses a very different stressed prosodic system. (Among American writers of the last 50 or so years, I immediately thought of Vikram Seth (1959-), who wrote his astonishing novel Golden Gate in "Onegin stanzas," as well as of Anne Carson (1950-), Peter Taylor (1917-1994), and Thanhha Lai (1965-), each of whom wrote works of fiction in verse, but none in conventional meter or even blank verse.) On top of this, he apparently also was a master of puns and other forms of wordplay, as well as rhetorical devices and figures, and a good deal of this is lost--as it must be--in English.  Rereading the Prieto interview, I thought of Spanish-language wordsmiths like Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929-2005) and Julián Ríos (1941-) both of whom, however, also knew (and in Ríos's case, still does) English, and wrote Spanish prose, playful and elaborate, that could still be rendered into English. Cabrera Infante even possessed the remarkably rare capacity not just to write in English but to pun in it as well, and to write puns that could signify in many cases in both languages. But Sada's languages were all drawn from the registers of Mexico, and so Silver's labor, and that of subsequent translators, will require a golden-drummed ear. I'm eager to peek at Sada in the original, though I imagine my Spanish will be too rudimentary to grasp his richness, but I also want to read Silver's translation and compare it, to learn what she was able to successfully bring over, or, invent as needed.