In recent years – during and since the Trump presidency – some Leftists have decided that the Left (meaning the Democratic Party) has changed, that they’ve become radical and no longer hold to former principles, particularly freedom of speech. Some are well-known journalists, such as Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi and Intercept founder, later abdicator, Glenn Greenwald. Others are lesser-known, such as Irish-American-Irish writer Jenny Holland and Hollywood critic Sasha Stone, along with former Playboy writer, now Spectator contributor and sometime comedian Bridget Phetasy. These have all resorted to Substack, which was started to give outcast journalists a place to write and market their wares – but which now seems to be in competition with Twitter – although Greenwald has gone in a different direction. All of them, along with former New York Times writer Bari Weiss, academic Jon Turley and British-American pseudo-conservative Andrew Sullivan lament the “sudden” hostility of leftists to the roughly half of Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. The reality is that the Left, which is a pseudonym for Marxists, has ALWAYS been hostile and restrictive of the rights of others, even to the point of executing their opponents. Violence and restriction of the speech of others has long been a hallmark of the Left. Modern leftists have just become more open about it than they were for a time now that they control academia and the media.
The so-called “Left” originated in Europe in the Eighteenth century when intellectuals began lamenting the plight of “the working man” in Europe’s monarchies. (The intellectuals were using the “working man” to advance their own goals, the elimination of monarchies and the aristocracy and replacing them with a government of – guess who.) The term originated in the French Revolution when revolutionaries began referring to “left” and “right” in reference to the seating in the Estates General; those opposed to royal veto privileges were seated on the left while royalists were on the right. The philosophies of the Left were already in place, having been developed by intellectuals advocating the overthrow of European monarchies and replacing them with governments attuned to the needs of the common man of which they, naturally, would be in charge. While leftists were all about the concept of “free speech”, it only applied to those on the left. Those who spoke out against the revolutionaries were subject to be permanently silenced. It didn’t take long before French leftists were running through the streets of Paris with pitchforks and scythes and putting royalists, including King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antionette, to death at the guillotines during the Reign of Terror. Literally, tens of thousands of Frenchmen and women were executed and an estimated ten thousand more died in French prisons. Left-wing politics was off to a violent start.
Violence erupted in Europe again a half-century later when revolutionaries attempted to overthrow European monarchies as the French had done. Led by intellectuals espousing socialist and communist ideas, the revolutions mostly failed and those involved were expelled or imprisoned. (The difference between a communist and a socialist is that communists proclaim that government should meet the needs of all while socialists believe government should meet the needs of those who contribute. The key element of both philosophies is government control.) Thousands, many of whom were Communists, immigrated to the United States.
The concept of communism goes back to at least the eighteenth century. Communistic groups, many led by Europeans, established communal societies throughout the new United States in the early nineteenth century, one of which was near Abraham Lincoln’s Indiana boyhood home. (Lincoln was born in Kentucky but his father moved the family to Indiana while he was a boy.) The Communist League was established in London in 1847 when two communist groups, The League of the Just, an organization formed by German migrants in Paris, and the Communist Correspondence Committees led by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, merged. Joseph Wedemeyer, one of the CCC members, immigrated to the United States and began organizing communists here. Although they were not solely so, the communist organizations were heavily German. He did not form the first communist organization in America, however. A League of Communists made up largely of German immigrants had been established in New York and Philadelphia in 1847. Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and charged Wedemeyer with its US distribution.
Karl Marx’s goal was to promote a worldwide communist revolution, and he saw the United States and Russia as the most likely places for it to begin. Marx believed revolution was possible in the United States by freeing the Southern slaves then joining them with industrial workers in the North to stage a revolution. When the Southern states seceded, Marx, whose New York Tribune articles were widely read in the US, advocated that Lincoln use his Union Army to free slaves rather than to restore constitutional union. (Lincoln initially justified the war as necessary to restore the Union. He made emancipation of slaves in the rebel states a policy in late 1862 in an attempt to gain more support for the war. He did not free slaves in states that remained in the Union or in Tennessee, which was under Union control.) Thousands of German and Irish immigrants joined the Union Army and dozens of Forty-Eighters served as high-ranking officers while others occupied positions in Lincoln’s administration. Wedemeyer and other Forty-Eighters had joined the Republican Party and, after initially supporting John C. Fremont in 1856, worked to get Lincoln elected. They were rewarded with military commissions and positions in Lincoln’s administration. Some Forty- Eighters supported John Brown, the insane abolitionist who sought to incite a slave revolt.
It can be said that the new Republican Party was Leftist. Many members were socialists, and some were communists. Founder Horace Greely was an avowed utopian socialist and acquaintance of Karl Marx, as was Charles A. Dana, Greely’s editor at the New York Tribune. Dana was also a socialist. He had been part of Brook Farm, a utopian commune in Massachusetts. They met Marx during trips to Europe and invited him to be the Tribune’s European correspondent. Marx wrote for the Tribune for more than a decade, or at least the articles were published under his name. The authorship of many was by Fredrich Engels, who also translated Marx’s articles to English. The Tribune was the paper of the Republican Party and Marx’s articles were widely read. The philosophies of “Radicals”, most of whom were Republican although a few were Democrats, who wanted to punish the South were identical to those of European leftists, even to planning to exterminate the Southern population and repopulate the South with Northerners and freed slaves. After the war, Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens told former Confederate general Richard Taylor, whose father, Zachary Taylor, had been president, that he intended to wipe out the entire white population of the South, but Lincoln’s policies as carried out by his successor, Andrew Johnson, prevented it. (Stevens spent his last breath fighting to have Johnson removed from office.) Radicals still attempted a harsh reconstruction policy using the Army to enforce it until moderate Republicans, some of whom were recanting Radicals, begin achieving power and decided enough was enough. Reconstruction ended after more than a decade with the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. (The claim that Reconstruction ended as a result of a compromise with Southern states is bogus – Hayes was already planning to end Army occupation of the South.) Without the Army to back them up, Republicans in the South, who were mostly freedmen (many were Northern blacks who went to the South to organize free slaves in Loyal Leagues to support the Republican Party) and Northern migrants called carpetbaggers, lost power. It is no secret that Republicans were counting on the United States Army to keep them in power.
Marx’s dream of a communist revolution in the United States faded when the German Forty-Eighters lost their influence in the Republican Party, and it became more associated with industrialists and the railroads. Communist Joseph Wedemyer died of cholera soon after the war. Some Forty-Eighters returned to Europe. Carl Shurz, who had moderated his views, helped form a new party, the Liberal Republicans, to oppose Grant, whose administration was rife with corruption, and the Republicans. The Northern factory workers Marx had counted on tended to favor Democrats and weren’t enthusiastic about uniting with freed slaves, who they saw as competition for jobs. As Marx’s political hopes in the US died, he turned his attention toward Russia where he achieved success, although he didn’t live to see his ideas come to fruition. Marx’s goals of a Russian revolution were realized when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks took power in Russia in 1917. The following year, the Bolsheviks began what became known as the Red Terror, a campaign of arrests and executions modeled on the Reign of Terror of the French Revolution. Hundreds of thousands were arrested and executed (Granted, White Russians did their share of executing but not to the extent of the Bolsheviks.) The Russian Civil War lasted from 1917 to 1922. Many White Russians fled the country. (The Soviets would continue to execute hundreds of thousands under Stalin, who succeeded Lenin. Nearly a million Soviets are believed to have been executed under Stalin.) The Bolsheviks immediately began attempting to carry out Marx’s goal of a worldwide Communist revolution. The USSR established Communists International to carry it out. One of their first targets was the United States.
Leftists continued to have an influence in the United States through the labor movements, but they also influenced the American church. German theologians became critics of the scriptures and their theories spread to American theological seminaries, particularly after Charles Darwin’s theories of natural selection and evolution of the species became accepted among American academics. As seminaries turned away from the scriptures as authority, they turned toward the “social gospel,” a “gospel” based on social action rather than evangelism. The concept spread through American theological seminaries, including Harvard and Yale. Union Theological Seminary in New York became essentially a training ground for Leftist social activists. The transition to social work was natural. Northern churches had been drawn into the abolitionist movement in the 1840s. Some preachers, particularly Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher, became rapid abolitionists and sent guns to Kansas to fight “border ruffians” from Missouri. (John Brown also had support among Forty-Eighters.) After the war, many Northern churches turned their attention to “the working man,” primarily European immigrants who brought European ideas of labor organization with them. The same workers who captured the attention of liberal preachers and union activists were also the objects of Communist International (Comintern), an organization sponsored by the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to spread Communism internationally. Communist parties were established throughout Europe. A Communist party was established in Japan. Comintern supported communists Mao Zedong of China and Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, whose real name was Nguyễn Sinh Cung, and they supported the Communist Party USA.
The Communist Party USA was founded in Chicago on September 1, 1919, by C.E. Ruthenberg, whose parents immigrated to Ohio from Prussia in 1882. He was born in Cleveland, where his father was a longshoreman and saloon keeper who catered to dock workers. Ruthenberg became a socialist while attending Columbia University and joined the Socialist Party in 1910, the year after his graduation from Columbia Law School. Along with fellow socialists Alfred Wagenknecht and Charles Baker, he was sentenced to a year in jail for violating the Espionage Act during World War I. The three were convicted of impeding the military draft by making speeches against it. After his release from prison, Ruthenberg became active in the extreme left-wing of the Socialist Party. He became executive secretary of the Communist Party America when it was formed. Ironically, Wagenknecht headed the rival Communist Labor Party of America, which formed the month before the CPA. The two parties were intense rivals until 1921 when a new Communist Party America was formed, along with a parallel organization called the Workers Party of America. Ruthenberg died during surgery for peritonitis in 1927. By that time, the organization had become the Communist Party USA.
Shortly after its formation, the Comintern directed American Communists to reach negros (the term African American was not in use at the time). The party formed the American Negro Labor Congress, a front organization designed to attract blacks to the party. The ANLC came out against segregation and spoke out against lynching. After their initial conviction, the CPUSA took control of the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine young blacks who had been convicted of raping two white women on a train traveling between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee. The train passed through northern Alabama and complaints about the blacks were lodged in Scottsboro by whites who had been on it. They hired a New York lawyer named Samuel Leibowitz to represent the defendants. One of the women disappeared then came back to Alabama for the third trial and revealed that she had been in New York. No one knew where she was, or claimed they didn’t, until she made a dramatic entrance as Leibowitz was preparing to rest when he said he had one last witness and Bates entered. She recanted her previous testimony and claimed no rape had occurred and that she decided to come back to Alabama at the urging of Harry Emerson Fosdick, a noted New York leftist preacher. When the prosecutor asked the woman, Ruby Bates, who paid for her clothes, she responded “the Communist Party”. (Witness tampering, anyone?) The other woman, Victoria Price, did not recant. Bates appeared at Communist rallies after the trial, which resulted in a conviction, which Leibowitz appealed. He and the DA reached a compromise that allowed four of the blacks to go free. The intent of the defense of the Scottsboro Boys was to promote communism in the South.
The Communist Party USA also became involved with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, an organization formed to protest the lack of payments to tenant farmers by New Deal agencies created to alleviate financial problems caused by government-mandated decreased production. The payments were going to the landowners, and tenant farmers, who farmed on the landowner’s allotment, were left in the lurch. The Communists saw an opportunity to increase the size of the Popular Front in the United States by affiliating with the union. Communist Popular Fronts allowed participation by non-party members to help achieve party goals. Such people, who included social gospel advocates, some New Deal Democrats, socialists, labor activists, attorneys, publishers, novelists, journalists, liberal preachers, leftist politicians, Hollywood producers, directors, actors and screenwriters, civil rights activists and liberals, came to be known as “fellow travelers.” They were not party members but were in tune with Communist policies. American Communists failed to achieve a revolution as their fellows had in Russia, at least in part because US officials cracked down on them. The US government was well aware of what had taken place in Russia, which had become the Soviet Union, where hundreds of thousands died at the hands of the Bolsheviks. Laws were passed to prevent communists from organizing and Russian immigrants and others believed to espouse communist ideas were deported in what Communists refer to as the first “Red Scare.” Leftist lawyers filed suit on behalf of American communists and socialists and the Supreme Court ruled that they were protected under the First Amendment.
Leftists continued their activities in Europe. Like American leftists, they focused on labor organizing. Although Karl Marx died in 1883, his hopes for revolution in Russia came to fruition as Marxist groups took power after the abdication and execution of Czar Nicholas II. Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks mounted a second revolution and overthrew the provisional government established after the Czar stepped down. Typical of the Left, the Bolsheviks were cruel and murderous. Untold thousands died in Russia and its province of Ruthenia, now known as Ukraine. As soon as they took power, the Bolsheviks established Comintern to spread communism around the world, starting in Europe. Communism took root in Spain, where Spanish Communists calling themselves “Republicans” fought the Nationalists, a coalition of groups led by General Francisco Marco. Support for the communist Republicans was widespread in the United States, particularly among college students, many of whom had become leftist. Communist International, a Soviet-sponsored group, organized the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight for the Republicans. The mixed brigade included the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, made up mostly of Americans and Canadians. Volunteers were interviewed by Communist Party USA members. Most were communists. Some were immigrants or second-generation. Eighty-three members were black. The battalion was commanded for a short time by black Communist Oliver Law, a Texas native who had served in the Army for a time. Law went north and became active in the labor movement, then became a Communist. He was killed soon after taking command of the battalion. His wife’s son became prominent in the CPUSA. Another battalion was named George Washington. An artillery battery was named for abolitionist terrorist John Brown. Franco’s Nationalists prevailed and the surviving international volunteers were deported. Many of those from the US became active in the Communist Party after their return.
Communists were critical of Adolph Hitler’s Germany – until Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact and jointly invaded Poland after which the Communist Party USA opposed US intervention in the war and praised the Nazis. That changed when Hitler invaded the USSR. Communists started clamoring for the United States to enter the war and provide aid to the embattled Soviets. The Roosevelt Administration responded by including the Soviets in the Lend-Lease Program, a program for the United States to provide military supplies and equipment to Allied nations fighting the Axis, as Germany, Italy and Japan had been labeled. Previously, the Allied nations had purchased military equipment from manufacturers in the United States, which had declared itself neutral, but Lend-Lease was funded by US taxpayers and provided to the warring allied nations free of charge. Of some $50.1 billion in Lend-Lease supplies, over $11 billion went to the USSR. Communist Party defectors later testified that the Roosevelt Administration included numerous Communists, some of whom were spying for the USSR, including in the highly classified Manhattan atomic project. Communist infiltration extended to the military. Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, who had been awarded TWO Medals of Honor, is alleged to have been a Communist. He was definitely influenced by Karl Marx. When Hollywood producer/director Merian C. Cooper, who was an Army reservist, returned to the United States after service in China as Claire Chennault’s chief of staff, he met with Army chief of staff George Marshall. During the meeting, he told Marshall that the senior US officer in the China-Burma Theater, General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, who favored Mao and detested Chinese Nationalist head Chiang ki Shek, was a Communist. Marshall became incensed and told Cooper he’d never be promoted or receive another decoration as long as he was in government. True to his word, Marshall withheld Cooper’s promotions and decorations. Cooper did return to combat duty but not with Chennault. General George Kenney, commander of General Douglas MacArthur’s air forces in the Southwest Pacific, asked for Cooper and made him chief of staff of V Bomber Command in his rank of colonel. Kenney and MacArthur tried repeatedly to promote him to star rank, but Marshall refused. After Marshall was out of government, Dwight Eisenhower promoted Cooper and Charles Lindbergh, who had also been blacklisted, to brigadier general.
In 1932 26-year-old Myles Horton, who had grown up near Savannah, Tennessee, founded the Highlander Folk School in Grundy County, Tennessee near the community of Monteagle. He founded the school on land owned by Lillian Wyckoff Johnson, a prominent Tennessee educator from Memphis. Dr. Johnson had purchased the land to establish a center to provide education for the local inhabitants, who were isolated mountaineers. Although Monteagle is not in the Smoky Mountains, it is in an area on the western edge of the Appalachians that at the time was remote. Horton was a product of Union Theological Seminary. The school’s cofounders were socialist Don West, a Georgia activist and Congregationalist minister, and a Methodist minister and social reformer from New Orleans named James A. Dombrowski, another Union product. West was a communist although he denied ever being a card-carrying member of the party. Yet he was the District Director of the Communist Party in North Carolina. (Party membership denial was/is common among communists. Fidel Castro denied that he was a communist until after his successful revolution.) They were all Leftists. Several school staff members were Communist Party members. Those who weren’t were fellow travelers. Horton denied being a communist, but he certainly came close. His ideas were definitely Leftist. After turning the property over to Horton, West and Dombrowski, Dr. Johnson returned to Memphis. Although she supported Horton and the school publicly, privately she had reservations. Horton and West considered her “an elitist”. The goal of the school as stated by Horton and as stated today is “to establish a new social order”, a revolution.
For the first twenty years of its existence, the Highlander School focused on teaching labor leaders how to organize workers and strike. The school was heavily involved in labor organizing among miners in Tennessee, and cotton mill and garment workers in the South, particularly in the Carolinas. Although the labor movement was successful in North Carolina and the South, their efforts killed the US clothing manufacturing industry as it moved overseas. Successful union members found themselves out of a job. Horton’s original intent had been to organize sharecroppers in the South, but the school instead turned its attention to segregation and black civil rights. Noted activist Rosa Parks, who became famous for her role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, was trained at the Highlander School. The school played a major role in training civil rights activists until Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference assumed the role. King was also associated with the school. Whether he attended the school prior to the Montgomery Bus Boycott when his name became prominent is uncertain. He was definitely involved afterwards. The school was shut down by the state of Tennessee in 1961 after an investigation determined that it had violated several laws. However, it was reestablished in Knoxville and affiliated with the University of Tennessee. In 1971 the school relocated to New Market, a small town near Morristown, where it continues to train Leftist activists.
Rosa Parks is touted as being a hard-working black woman who refused to give up her seat near the front of a bus driven by James F. Blake because she was too tired to make her way to the back and was arrested. According to Parks, the white section filled up and Blake moved the sign marking the white section and told four black passengers, including her, to move back. She refused and Blake had her arrested. In reality, Parks was an activist who had been trained at the Highlander School to do just what she did, and she got on the bus with every intention of being arrested. While she did have a job working for Clifford and Virginia Durr, a leftist white couple – the Durrs sent her to the Highlander School – she was secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP and although she denied Communist Party membership, she and her husband were involved with the Montgomery chapter. She had been hand-picked to challenge the Montgomery bus system after other candidates failed to pass muster because of issues in their background. Parks had been working as an NAACP investigator for more than a decade. She was involved in the case of Recy Taylor, who claimed she was abducted and raped by seven white men in Abbeville, Alabama in 1943. Parks organized a nationwide protest when Taylor’s alleged assailants were not indicted. Parks denied that she knew Blake was driving the bus. She claimed he had driven off and left her in 1943 and she’d sworn she’d never ride on a bus driven by him again. But she did. She came in through the front door and took a seat just behind the white section, so she obviously knew he was the driver (she claimed she didn’t). Four rows of seats on Montgomery busses were designated for whites under Alabama law. Drivers had the option of designating additional seats for the white section if the designated seats filled up. Parks was arrested and the Montgomery NAACP used her arrest, as they had planned, to organize a protest against the bus company. Similar protests were organized in other segregated cities, not only against bus companies but also against department store chains with segregated lunch counters. Parks is often called “The Mother of the Civil Rights Movement”, which is true in the sense that she was a trained activist who prompted a protest that got national attention.
Although violence and suppression of rights are Communist trademarks, they were not present in the United States, except for labor strife, until the 1960s. This may be because the Soviets were engaged in internal strife then were occupied by their fight against the German invaders in World War II and lacked the resources and resolve to promote armed rebellion in the United States, with whom they were allied against Germany and, at the end of the war, Japan. Soviet Communists supported the Spanish Republicans and Mao’s Chinese Communists, and their resources were stretched thin. They were also hampered by US government action, first in the early 1920s then again in the Fifties during the period leftists refer to as “the Second Red Scare”. The McCarthy hearings followed by the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee with the resultant exposure of many American Communists hampered their efforts. Leftists advocated that the hearings violated the First Amendment. Freedom of speech became a major talking point for the Left, but their idea of freedom of speech is limited to THEIR speech, not to those who disagree with them. When the American Civil Liberties Union defended the right of American Nazis to parade in Skokie, Illinois in 1977, leftists were incensed.
Civil rights demonstrators initially adopted a policy of non-violence, a tactic taught at the Highlander School. But leftists, including those involved in civil rights, became more militant during the Vietnam War. Some were open in their support for the communist government of North Vietnam – SDS officials met with North Vietnamese representatives in Cuba in 1968. By this time, American leftists were moving away from the idea of their own parties and turning to the Democratic Party. Socialists and communists turned to the Democrats after Franklin Roosevelt became president and instituted leftist policies. Harry Truman continued Roosevelt’s policies and added some of his own. Some Southern Democrats, who were upset over Truman’s civil rights policies, left the party and became Dixiecrats under the leadership of Senator Strom Thurmond. Although he wasn’t a leftist himself – his brother was – John F. Kennedy instituted policies leftists approved. After he was killed, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, continued his agenda and added some of his own. Still, Johnson was opposed by those on the Far Left because of the Vietnam War. An army of Leftist protestors descended on Chicago for the 1968 Democratic Party Convention. The protests turned into a riot. As a result of the protestor’s actions, conservative Democrats began leaving the party in droves and joining the Republicans. Richard Nixon, who had prosecuted Alger Hiss, was elected president that year. Four years later he would win the presidency with the largest electoral vote margin in history. (Leftists would get him out of office with the furor over the Watergate break-ins.) The Democratic Party has become more and more leftist since 1968. One former leftist writer claimed the party she supported was “middle of the road.” This woman is approaching fifty. The Democratic Party hasn’t been middle of the road since FDR!
The various anti-war, anti-racism, women’s liberation, gay liberation, Mexican liberation, American Indian Movement etc. groups may not have been Marxist per se, but their leaders definitely were. Betty Freidan, whose book The Feminine Mystique, is credited with setting off the feminist movement, was an avowed Marxist from her teen years and a labor activist. In addition to Freidan, several founders of the National Organization of Women were Marxist. Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who sued to end prayer in schools, was a socialist. She tried twice to defect to the Soviet Union – they wouldn’t have her! The various student groups, black, white and Mexican, were led by avowed Marxists and Maoists. By the sixties, younger leftists were turning away from Soviet-oriented Marxism. Their new heroes were Cuban leader Fidel Castro and his Argentine henchman, Che Guevara, North Vietnam president Ho Chi Minh and Chinese Communist Mao Zedong. Mao’s Little Red Book was popular on college campuses. Students posted Guevara’s picture on their dorm room walls and wore T-shirts with it emblazoned on it. Although they depended on high school and college students for their support, most of the leaders were older than the students of the day. Tom Hayden, for instance, was born in 1939 and graduated from the University of Michigan in 1961, BEFORE the United States became heavily involved in Vietnam, although President Kennedy would increase the number of military advisors there late in the year. Hayden co-founded the Students for a Democratic Society, a far left-wing organization, in 1960. SDS leader Bernadine Dohrn, who founded the Weatherman, was born in 1942 and graduated from college in 1963 then completed law school and was admitted to the bar in Illinois. Most of the leaders of the “student” groups had been radicalized while their members were still in grade school. They were influenced by leftists like Norm Chomsky who had come of age in the 1940s.
The SDS and other organizations that followed it were referred to as “the New Left” but they were still Leftist in orientation and in their support for the goals of Karl Marx. The SDS was actually not a new group, but a reorganization of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, which was descended from the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, a socialist group formed in 1905 by leftists Upton Sinclair, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, Walter Lippman and other prominent leftists of the day, one of whom, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was one the financiers of abolitionist John Brown’s failed attack on the Harpers Ferry arsenal and planned slave revolt in Virginia. The original group became the League for Industrial Democracy and remained socialist but it’s student affiliate merged with the Communist National Student League in 1935 and became the American Student Union, a Communist front organization. The ASU went dormant during World War II then reorganized in 1946 as the Student League for Industrial Democracy. (A new ASU was formed in 2022.) Hayden and Allan Haber, who came from a leftist family, changed it to the Students for a Democratic Society and began advocating militancy.
The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee organized in April 1960 at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina as an organization for students involved in lunch counter sit-ins in the segregated South. One of the founders was Diane Nash, a biracial woman who had organized the first successful lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee while a student at Fisk University. The SNCC started out as and was seen as a black students’ organization, but it began receiving support from white activists, particularly in the North, and the SDS. Tom Hayden’s first wife, Sandra “Casey” Cason, was heavily involved with the SNCC. She left Hayden to return to the South – she was from Texas – to work with the black group. Stokely Carmichael, a Trinidad native who grew up in Harlem and the Bronx, took over as SNCC president and began promoting Black Power. Initially, the term referred to the need for blacks to regain control of the organization, which had been taken over by whites, but it morphed into a larger idea of gaining power for blacks in all aspects of society, which came to include academia. Under Carmichael’s leadership, the SNCC left the broader civil rights movement and aligned with the SDS. Carmichael would eventually alienate many civil rights leaders and would move to Africa.
The new emphasis on Black Power was influenced, at least in part, by the violent riots in Watts, a section of Los Angeles, that broke out after police arrested a black motorist for drunk driving and his mother got involved. A crowd gathered and someone claimed police had kicked a pregnant woman. The resulting riots continued for almost a week. Rioting broke out the following year in Hunters Point, a San Francisco community, after a police officer shot and killed a black teenager he caught stealing a car. Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, two Marxist-Leninist activists who worked at the North Oakland Anti-Poverty Center, took note of the community reaction and founded what became the Black Panther Party, an organization that claimed it was protecting the black community from the police. Although the Panthers did some social work in the black communities, their primary objective was patrolling with weapons. They raised money to buy their first shotguns selling copies of Mao’s Little Red Book at inflated prices on the Berkley campus. (Mao’s book was practically required reading on college campuses.) A year later Newton shot and killed officer John Frey, who had pulled him over in a traffic stop. He was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, but the conviction was later overturned on the grounds of a judicial error. Two other trials resulted in hung juries. The Panthers and other Marxist groups used Newton’s imprisonment to recruit new members and raise money. In April 1968 Panthers, including Eldridge Cleaver, got into a gunbattle with police and one Panther, a teenager, was killed. Cleaver, who later admitted the Panthers ambushed the police, was charged with attempted murder. While out on bail, he left the country and fled to Cuba, a popular destination for American leftists when they were accused of crimes. He later went to Algeria, where he claimed he was supported with funds from North Vietnam.
Cleaver was not the only Panther to flee the country for Cuba. Huey Newton was charged with a number of violent crimes and fled. Panther Joanne Byron, who goes by the name Assata Shakur, received a life sentence for murdering a police officer in New Jersey. With assistance from the Black Liberation Army, a Panther offshoot who supported themselves by robbing banks and engaged in guerrilla activities, Byron escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women. She allegedly hid out in Pittsburgh for a year, then flew to the Bahamas. She made her way to Cuba and asked for asylum, which was granted. She has remained in Cuba but has become a hero to activists in the United States. The BLA was believed to be responsible for at least 70 violent acts, including the murders of thirteen police officers. Black Marxists were responsible for a spate of airline hijackings. In each case, the hijacker would demand to be taken to Cuba. One group of hijackers took the airplane on to Algeria, then made their way to Paris. One from that group, George Brown, is still at large. Between 1968 and 1972, there were no less than 90 attempted hijackings to Cuba, most of them successful. The hijackings led to the assignment of armed Federal air marshals to airline flights.
The student movements of the sixties and seventies were closely associated with the drug culture, or counterculture as it is often called. Prior to the sixties, few whites smoked marijuana or used other drugs. Marijuana was popular among young blacks in the North while Puerto Ricans in New York and others across the nation, particularly Hispanics, became known for sniffing model airplane glue, which had a narcotic effect. The late sixties is when pot became popular, along with narcotics and hallucinogens, particularly LSD, commonly known as acid. Noted LSD advocate Timothy Leary was broken out of jail by members of the radical Marxist-Leninist group The Weathermen and transported to Algeria where he sought assistance from Eldridge Cleaver and the Black Panthers government-in-exile. Marijuana and other drugs were a regular feature at antiwar rallies, which often featured musical groups associated with the drug culture. (In many respects, the drug culture and the leftist antiwar movement were one and the same.)
Black Marxists were violent but white Marxists were equally so. The SDS was particularly violent. In less than a year in 1969-1970, there were some 8,200 violent acts on and around college campuses, including bombings, attempted bombings and threats of bombing. Radicals Sam Melville and his lover, Jane Alpert, set off bombs in New York, injuring 20 people. Not to be outdone, Marxist Puerto Ricans launched 40 terrorist attacks in New York, killing five and injuring at least 69. A radical Jewish group, the Jewish Defense League, was also responsible for attacks in New York, but it is considered “far right” rather than Marxist. Four young radicals set off a bomb at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The university had a contract to do mathematics research for the Army and the bomb was aimed at the research facility. The explosion killed one researcher and injured three others, one seriously. Two of the bombers, brothers Karl and Dwight Armstrong, had previously attacked the Badger Army Ammunition Plant with homemade bombs they dropped from a light airplane they had stolen from the airport at Middleton. The bombs failed to explode. After the Army research facility bombing, the bombers fled to Canada. David Fine was captured in California and served three years of a seven-year sentence. He got a law degree but was refused admission to the Oregon bar due to “lack of good moral character,” an exception to many of the sixties radicals who became lawyers and academics. Leo Burt, who went to Toronto with Fine, has yet to surface.
Perhaps the most violent of the sixties radicals were The Weathermen, also known as the Weather Underground and Weatherman, who took their name from a line in a Bob Dylan protest song. An extremely radical group founded in Ann Arbor, Michigan as a faction of the SDS, the group’s stated goal was the overthrow of the United States government by creating a revolutionary party that would rise up against “the imperialists.” They were close associates of Castro’s Cuba and North Vietnam. Founders passed out a position paper at an SDS convention in Chicago in 1969 in which they called for “a White fighting force” to join with the “Black Liberation Movement” and other radicals to destroy US imperialism and found a classless communist world. The Weathermen grew out of Northern efforts to organize an interracial movement among urban poor. They supported the Black Power movement and were violently opposed to the US role in the Vietnam War. They advocated that all struggle was anti-imperialist and anti-racist. Weathermen went so far as claiming all white babies were “tainted with the original skin of white privilege.” (Sound familiar?) They called white babies white pigs. Weathermen were obsessed with radical murderer Charles Manson. Bernadine Dohrn made statements praising Manson for the murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and others. Soon after they organized, The Weathermen began planning a large protest in Chicago in hopes of inciting a riot. As it turned out, participation was not as great as hoped but protestors, who came in from other cities, caused some damage and injuries during conflicts with the police. One Chicago politician was severely beaten. The Weathermen then began a campaign of bombing government buildings and banks. They placed bombs at the US capitol then announced it was in protest of the invasion of Laos. In 1975 – two years after the US withdrew from Vietnam – they bombed the State Department building and claimed it was because “the US was escalating the war.”
The Weathermen founders were Bernadine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, Mark Rudd, and others, all of whom were radical leftists. Dohrn was a lawyer with a law firm in Chicago; she had done work for Martin Luther King. Ayers, whose father was CEO of Commonwealth Edison, had been radicalized at the University of Michigan. Rudd was a New Jersey Jew who worshipped Che Guevara. Rudd and Dohrn, along with other SDS leaders, were invited to Cuba in 1968 to meet with Cuban, Soviet and North Vietnamese communists. Soon after their founding, the Weathermen issued a declaration of war against the United States, an act of treason as defined in the Constitution, yet none of the Weathermen were charged with treason. After initially proclaiming their enmity with the United States, the Weathermen decided to go underground and establish cells around the country to carry out violent terrorist acts. Although the Weathermen were credited with numerous bombings, the only recognized casualties were among themselves – but not for lack of trying. Members of the New York cell were building nail bombs in the basement of a Greenwich Village townhouse that they planned to set off at “a military noncommissioned officers men’s dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey” (probably the NCO club) when one of the bombs exploded then set off two others. The townhouse was completely destroyed, and adjoining structures were damaged, including one occupied by actor Dustin Hoffman. Three of the Weathermen, one of whom was a founder and another was Bill Ayers’ girlfriend, died and two others were pulled out of the wreckage. The survivors then fled to bomber Kathy Boudin’s parents where they remained overnight, then went underground. The townhouse belonged to the father of Cathy Wilkerson, the other survivor. Both women were eventually apprehended and served terms in prison for armed robbery. After prison, Boudin became a college professor at Columbia and Wilkerson taught high school.
The Weathermen escaped Federal indictment and possible conviction for treason on a technicality. Some of the evidence against them had been obtained by electronic surveillance without a warrant, which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional. Rather than attempting to prosecute and risking exposure of foreign intelligence assets, the Department of Justice elected to drop charges against Weathermen members. Thus, perhaps the most radical Marxists of the period escaped prosecution. Bernadine Dohrn was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list when Federal charges against her were dropped. She served less than a year in jail for refusing to testify against another former Weatherman in an armed robbery case.
Veterans of the antiwar movement and the media greatly overstate the movement’s impact on the Vietnam War and the ultimate communist victory, but there is no doubt that the leaders, at least, were attempting to promote a communist victory in the beleaguered country. Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese president, was called a nationalist but was actually a dedicated Communist whose hero was Vladimir Lenin. After spending several decades in the Soviet Union and China, Ho returned to Vietnam during World War II with the intention of establishing a Communist government. North Vietnam was a Communist state. Naturally, American communists wanted to see it triumph over the South Vietnamese government. Opposition to US military involvement in Vietnam goes back to 1954 when Quakers demonstrated outside the Pentagon after the French defeat in Indochina. Although US combat troops were not involved in Indochina, the US provided combat airplanes to the French and Air Force transports flew French wounded to France and moved anticommunist Vietnamese from the North to South Vietnam when the country was partitioned. The Eisenhower administration sent military advisors to South Vietnam (as it did to numerous countries around the world) but their numbers were limited. There were about fifty in Vietnam when John F. Kennedy took office.
After training Laotian communists and participating in the Laotian civil war, North Vietnam started infiltrating troops into South Vietnam to support indigenous communist forces in the late 1950s. Ho had left Viet Minh units in the south after the partitioning of the country by the Geneva Accords ending the war with the French. (Neither the United States nor representatives of the State of Vietnam, which became South Vietnam, signed the accords.) He intended to use them to overthrow the new South Vietnamese government but was talked out of if by the Chinese, who advocated that he could accomplish his objectives through elections. When the elections weren’t held, Ho ordered his followers in the South to take action against the Diem government. He moved cadre north for training then moved them back again, along with supplies. To avoid detection, the communists moved through North Vietnam-controlled eastern Laos along trails that came to be known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The indigenous communists, the Viet Cong, built up and began mounting attacks on South Vietnamese installations while waging a terror war through bombings, particularly of popular restaurants and hotels frequented by Westerners.
Newly inaugurated President John F. Kennedy sent the first non-advisory US Army personnel, a radio intercept unit, to Vietnam in May 1961. Later that year Kennedy, who was embarrassed over the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, escalated the US role in Vietnam when he sent some four hundred US Army special forces advisors to the country along with a Marine helicopter squadron. Additional units followed, including Air Force air commandos and troop carrier transports. For the next three years, the US role in the war was advisory and logistical. In August 1964, Kennedy’s successor, former Texas Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, authorized air strikes against targets in North Vietnam after an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin. Although the Gulf of Tonkin incident is represented as having been contrived, in reality there was a real incident. On the night of August 2, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked the US Navy destroyer Maddox off the North Vietnamese coast. Two nights later, Maddox and Turner Joy, another destroyer which joined Maddox, picked up radar and electronic signals indicating the presence of hostiles. The two ships fired at the radar targets. Whether or not there was an actual attack is open to conjecture – North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap denied that an attack took place, and the Navy was suspicious that the radar signals were actually static. Regardless, LBJ obtained what is known as The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution from Congress which authorized him to carry out whatever actions were needed, including military action, to assist any member of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty, commonly known as SEATO, without a declaration of war. The resolution passed with only two senators, Wayne Morris of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska voting against it.
After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed Congress, the Johnson Administration began seeking a means of forcing North Vietnam to give up its plans to conquer South Vietnam. Ho’s Communists had no intention of giving in. On February 7, Viet Cong attacked Camp Holloway, an Army airfield a few miles from Pleiku. Seven Americans were killed and 107 wounded. In retaliation, LBJ ordered the commencement of ROLLING THUNDER, a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Originally intended to only last a few weeks, the campaign continued until November 1, 1968, when Johnson ordered a bombing pause just before the presidential elections. North Vietnam was not bombed again until 1972. A Marine antiaircraft missile battalion deployed to Da Nang from Okinawa. They were the first ground combat troops sent to Vietnam. They were followed by the 3rd Marine Division, which began deploying to Da Nang in March 1965 to protect Da Nang Air Base. A few weeks later the Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade flew from Okinawa to Bien Hoa. At the time, Marines were all-volunteer as were paratroops. No draftees were involved. That would change later in the year when additional Army units were deployed to Vietnam.
The introduction of ground combat troops meant casualties would increase. From 1959 through 1964 there had been less than 500 deaths in Vietnam, many of them to accident and other causes. There were 1,863 deaths in 1965 alone. That number would triple in 1966. There had been a military draft since the Korean War, with draftees serving two years in uniform then going home. Young men saw it as an inconvenience but there was little resistance. College students were generally exempt. Now that the country was again involved in a war, it occurred to young men that there was a chance they might die, although the chances were small in comparison to the numbers of men actually serving in the armed forces. (Some 1.7 million men were drafted during the Vietnam War. Not all went to Vietnam. Of the some 58,000 who died in the war, 30%, or less than 18,000, were draftees, slightly over 1% of all men drafted.) College students, who had student exemptions, began protesting the draft. Leftists encouraged young men to flee the country to avoid being drafted. As casualties increased, there was a slightly higher percentage of negro deaths compared to the black population of the country, and civil rights activists seized on this and began accusing the United States of black genocide. Actually, the reason for the higher percentages was that blacks volunteered for elite units such as paratroopers and reenlistment rates among blacks were higher. Consequently, there were more blacks in the initial units deployed to South Vietnam. However, the rate would drop as more troops went to Vietnam. Overall, some 12.4% (7,264) of the 58,193 men (less eight women) who died in Vietnam were black. This is roughly 1% higher than the national black population. Mexican-American leftists would later claim that Mexican-Americans died at a higher rate than their percentage of the population but they were listed as white and no records of Mexican-American deaths exist.
Anti-war activists attempted to turn military personnel against the war. Coffee houses were established near military bases where activists held teach-ins to influence impressionable young men to turn against the war. Their efforts were not as successful as represented in the media. While underground newspapers circulated around some military bases, they weren’t widely read. I spent 12 years in the Air Force and the only copies of underground newspapers I ever saw were copies my first wife, a young Woman in the Air Force, saved from when she was stationed at Travis AFB, California because she was mentioned in them – she was doing undercover narcotics work for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. There was a race riot on the Navy carrier ESSEX and there was racial unrest on military bases, mostly during the final years of US involvement in the war as the US role was declining. Those involved were mostly first termers. I was stationed at Clark Air Base, Philippines in 1969-70. Night duty NCOs were required to wear a sidearm and keep the doors chain locked because of threats by black activists to take over one of the C-130 flying squadrons and steal the revolvers that were kept to issue to flight crews departing on missions to Southeast Asia. There were also threats of blacks taking over the airmen’s club. No actual incidents occurred.
Some underground newspapers encouraged soldiers to go to Vietnam then kill their commanding officer. As the war continued, fragging incidents, where someone used explosives, often hand grenades, to kill or maim others, usually officers and NCOs, became more frequent. All told, there were roughly 1,000 fragging incidents in Vietnam involving explosives resulting in the deaths of roughly 100 men. However, these numbers do not include men killed by firearms. There is no way to know if any of these deaths were prompted by antiwar efforts in the States. Statistics on Vietnam casualties show that 234 were intentional homicides with almost 1,000 nonintentional homicides. It was not uncommon to find booby-traps set up in Air Force transports after hauling troops, particularly Vietnamese. There was an instance with which I am familiar where a hand grenade in a coffee cup was found under the cockpit of a C-130 by a flight engineer during preflight. The grenade had been placed in such a way that it would roll out, probably during takeoff when G-forces are higher, and come out of the cup and explode. This incident occurred at Cam Ranh, where Vietnamese were not allowed on the flight line, meaning the grenade had to have been placed by someone with access to the parking ramp, an American. My wing lost a C-130 and crew to a midair explosion around the same time. Although some believed the crew flew into an area of naval artillery firing, sabotage was not ruled out.
I was in Vietnam during the massive protests against the US “incursion” into Cambodia. There were no protests against the operation in Vietnam. Most of us applauded the move. Unlike students in the States, we knew that North Vietnam had turned eastern Cambodia into their own playground. North Vietnamese used “neutral” Cambodia as a sanctuary and supply base. I was a C-130 crewmember and we had been operating into remote airfields along the Cambodian border for more than a year and were subject to frequent rocket attack from across the border. One of our airplanes was shot down by a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun that moved back and forth across the border. North Vietnamese troops would attack US and South Vietnamese units in South Vietnam then flee across the border where they could not be pursued. After the incursion, those airfields were as quiet as any rural airport in the United States. We saw the protests as an indication that college students in the States were clueless as to what was actually taking place in Southeast Asia. I heard about one incident where a C-130 pilot in another unit went to his squadron commander and asked to be taken off flying status in protest of the operation. He was psychologically evaluated and put in a mental ward. He became a pacifist after the war and worked with communists in Central America as a medical doctor and wrote a book about his experiences. There are reports that at least one B-52 pilot refused to fly a mission over Cambodia just before bombing came to a halt in 1973. Another asked to be removed from flight status in December 1972 after Nixon ordered B-52 attacks on Hanoi and a large number of airplanes were lost to missiles.
There was a decline in discipline in the military and widespread drug use in the lower ranks, but this is more due to the US culture as a whole than the antiwar effort. Lower ranking military personnel are typically recent high school graduates, and drug use among high school students skyrocketed in the late sixties as teenagers emulated their idols in the music industry. Drug use by American teenagers went from nil in the early sixties to widespread by 1970. Hair length became a status symbol and the military regulations requiring short haircuts were at odds with the styles of the time. Blacks started wearing Afros, which didn’t conform to military regulations, and the style was copied by young whites with frizzy hair (or permanents.) Discipline in units in Vietnam was aggravated by the knowledge that the United States was deescalating its role in the war. Nobody wants to be the last man killed in a war and troops were reluctant to go out on operations they saw as pointless.
There was also the problem of lowered mental standards, which occurred during the Johnson Administration when the military was directed to accept 100,000 men who would have previously been disqualified for military duty by their performance on the mental aptitude tests administered to prospective recruits. As many as 350,000 substandard men were recruited from 1966-1971, when the program was discontinued. Johnson touted the program as a means of helping young men get out of poverty. The program particularly affected blacks, who were often disqualified for military duty because of poor performance on the entrance tests or medically. I enlisted in the Air Force at the induction center in Memphis in 1963. There were five of us who were enlisting in the Air Force and about 50, all black and mostly from Mississippi, who had been sent up by their draft boards for induction into the Army. One of the medics told us that they’d have to send most of the blacks home because they either couldn’t meet the mental qualifications or had medical problems such as syphilis. Those are the kind of men Project 100,000 affected. The majority of Project 100,000 men went to the Army, where they were assigned to non-technical units, reportedly about half in the infantry. The other half became cooks, truck-drivers, freight handlers or performed other menial tasks. The Air Force received the lowest percentage at 9% while the Navy and Marine Corps each received 10%.
An irony of the antiwar movement is that it increased in intensity AFTER the US started pulling troops out of South Vietnam. In June 1969, after taking office in January, President Richard Nixon ordered General Creighton Abrams, who had assumed command of US forces in South Vietnam, to take steps to reduce American casualties. The first troops were withdrawn the following month. Troop withdrawals continued with troop levels dropping from a high of 536,100 in 1968 to 475,200 the following year and continuing downward each year until 1972 when they were down to 24,200, mostly aviation personnel.
Yet even though the US was withdrawing from the war as Nixon’s strategy of Vietnamization took hold, the Weathermen continued their efforts to defeat the US government. Bombings continued. On May 19, 1972, an important date for revolutionaries, a female Weatherman set off a bomb in a women’s restroom in the Air Force section of the Pentagon. The act was probably in retaliation for the resumption of bombing of North Vietnam after the North Vietnamese launched a full-scale invasion of the South in a failed attempt to capture Saigon. No one was killed but the resulting plumbing leaks damaged files in nearby offices. In 1974 Weatherman published a book called Prairie Fire, the Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism, in an attempt to influence leftists who had not been radicalized. They formed the Prairie Fire Discussion Committee which became the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee in 1975. The PFOC continues the work of the Weathermen and SDS. Weathermen formed the May 19th Communist Organization, using the birthdays of Ho Chi Minh and Malcom X, a member of the American established Nation of Islam, who once wrote a letter to President Truman in which he declared himself to be a communist. The leadership was largely female. M19CO was a combination of the Weathermen and the Black Liberation Army and was a far-left armed terrorist group. While the Prairie Fire organization sought to use legal means to achieve revolution, M19CO operated underground and was planned to develop an armed leftist militia. M19CO members broke Joanne Byron out of prison and held up a Brinks armored car to get money to be used to create “New Afrika” in the South. M19CO continued bombings in the 1980s, with their last bombing in 1985. By that time, most of the members, many of whom were women, had been arrested on various charges and the organization disintegrated.
With the Vietnam War now history, support for Leftist organizations dwindled. The United States entered a relatively quiet period with limited military action. The draft ended in 1973 and the Army became all-volunteer; the Air Force and Navy already were and had been for decades while the Marine Corps used a few draftees during Vietnam. There was no draft to protest and Ronald Reagan’s invasion of Grenada and George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama were short-lived operations that didn’t last long enough for any opposition to organize. The Weatherman fell apart and the SDS became a shadow of its former self. The radicals of the sixties and seventies got into politics and became journalists, movie producers, college professors and high school teachers. Only a handful, David Horowitz and Eldridge Cleaver in particular, recanted.
One civil rights icon who didn’t exactly recant is James Meredith, the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi. Unlike other black activists, Meredith didn’t see the need for more political action, he knew he already had rights and wanted to exercise them. He enlisted in the Air Force after his high school graduation in 1951 and served until 1960 when he got out to further his education. He’d taken college courses while in the service. After his discharge, he enrolled in an all-black school in Jackson. Legal decisions had outlawed segregation of schools and he applied to the University of Mississippi. When his application was rejected solely because of his race, he got Medgar Evers, the head of the NAACP in Mississippi, to help him file suit. After several appeals, the Supreme Court upheld a ruling by the Fifth Court of Appeals that Meredith had the right to be admitted to Ole Miss. He was finally admitted on October 1, 1962 and graduated the following year with a degree in political science. Three years later, Meredith decided to march, solo, from Memphis, Tennessee to Jackson, Mississippi to demonstrate to blacks in the rich Mississippi Delta that they should not fear reprisals for registering to vote. Meredith specifically directed the bigtime civil rights leaders to stay away, this was his march and his alone. Unfortunately, he was sprinkled with birdshot a few miles south of Memphis. Although his wounds were not serious, he was hospitalized. Meredith intended to complete the march, but civil rights leaders saw an opportunity for publicity and Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael and others took it over. King publicized the march and brought in people, black and white, including movie stars, union bosses and the media. Meredith did not continue the march but did join it for it’s final day when the marchers reached Jackson. The following year, Meredith was living in New York and working on his law degree at Columbia when he ran for Congress against Adam Clayton Powell AS A REPUBLICAN! In 1972 he ran for the Senate against Senator James Eastland. In 1967 he supported former Governor Ross Barnett, the man who had blocked his way into Ole Miss, in another run for governor. He took a job on the staff of conservative Republican North Carolina Senator Jess Helms in 1989. In 1991 he supported former KKK head David Duke in his quest to become governor of Louisiana. Meredith said Duke’s views were in line with his own. As he saw what was happening in the civil rights movement, Meredith accused civil rights leaders of being power-hungry conmen. In 2002 at the fortieth anniversary of his admission to Old Miss, Meredith said, “Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.” Meredith has stated that the problem for blacks is not white supremacists, it’s white liberals.
Although the sixties and seventies are long in the past, Leftist radicals have had a profound influence on society, particularly through academia. For one thing, college students found that staying in school was a better way to avoid the draft than hopping the border to Canada. (Thousands of Canadians – some 30,000 – 40,000, some of whom were women – went the other way and came to the United States to enlist in the military, 134 Canadians died or were reported MIA. One Canadian soldier was awarded the Medal of Honor.) As long as a man remained in school, he could get a student deferment. Consequently, many pursued masters and doctorates then became academics. Civil rights groups influenced colleges and universities to add courses such as black studies and women’s studies to their curriculum. Black studies was added to the curriculum at Berkely because of pressure from black activists, who had begun studying “black history” in group sessions. The idea caught on as colleges and universities saw offering degrees in such fields as black history and women’s studies as money-making efforts. Congress had authorized educational payments for Vietnam Era veterans and Pell Grants as well as government-backed student loans. A high percentage of former students defaulting on student loans are black. They went to college and were awarded degrees in spurious fields then found their degrees were only good in academia or with civil rights organizations. Women with degrees in women’s studies become women’s studies teachers
Leftists once clamored for free speech, at a time when Communists and socialists were being censored. They weren’t really about free speech for everyone; they were about free speech for themselves and their associates. It’s no surprise that modern academics and students censor and “cancel” conservatives who hold ideas not in conformity with those of leftists. Academics and college students came up with the concept of “hate speech,” a form of speech that can only be defined by those with an ax to grind. So far, there are no laws restricting speech in the United States. However, popular opinion has accomplished restriction of speech by ostracizing those who use words they claim is “hate speech.”
Leftist lawyers – one member of the movement described them as “a bunch of Marxists” – came up with the concept of “critical race theory”, a belief that the legal system is influenced by race. The founders of the movement were black, Mexican and Amerindian lawyers with connections to the Black Power and Chicano Movements of the Sixties. The Chicano Movement was/is a Mexican youth movement started by leftist Hispanics after they saw the success of blacks with the civil rights movement. A key focus of the movement is the belief that Northern Mexico was the ancestral land of the pre-Columbian Aztecs called Aztlan and that it was stolen from Mexico by the Treaty of Hidalgo. The concept of “white privilege” originated among radical leftists in the Black Power movement, Weathermen and Black Liberation Army as did the emphasis on white supremacy.
The American Indian Movement (AIM) was started by convicts, mostly from urban areas who had left the reservation in the 1950s with Federal assistance. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, they were Ojibwe. Their goals are the same as those of the Black Power movement, except for Indians rather than blacks. In order to attract members, AIM started focusing on issues dating back to the nineteenth century when tribes were put on reservations and white settlers moved into their former lands. The leaders of AIM were not necessarily Marxists-Leninists, but they were influenced by those in the Black Power movement and based their movement on civil rights tactics – protests against events such as the celebration of the landing of the Mayflower in Boston. They have engaged in protests that turned violent, particularly those at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Although AIM has protested government actions on Indian land, their main object seems to be the prevention of assimilation of native peoples.
One of the most recent Marxist-Leninist movements is Black Lives Matter, started by three black women, two of whom claimed to be “trained” Marxists and the third a labor organizer, who claimed frustration over the acquittal of George Zimmerman of the murder of Trayvon Martin, a black Florida teenager. The three women seem to have been ignorant of George Zimmerman’s own racial makeup. His mother was Peruvian, and she has African ancestry. Zimmerman’s Germanic name and white father caused many to fail to realize he is of mixed race and technically black. It was more suiting to leftist aims to paint Zimmerman as a white man who murdered a black teenager. The three women were flabbergasted that the jury found that Zimmerman shot Martin in self-defense, or at least they claimed to be. They started using the Twitter hashtag #BlackLivesMatter and turned it into a crusade against police killing of blacks. Never mind that Zimmerman wasn’t a police officer, he was acting as a neighborhood watch. Leftists painted Martin as a hero and Zimmerman as a white supremacist who killed the teenager without cause.
Since it’s founding, Black Lives Matter has protested the killing of blacks by police, starting with the shooting of black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Protestors claimed police officer Darren Wilson shot Brown while he had his hands up saying, “don’t shoot”. This claim was not corroborated by witnesses and Wilson was cleared of any violations in the incident. The shooting and the failure to indict provoked racial unrest in Ferguson and around the nation, much of it provoked by Black Lives Matter. There can be little doubt that BLM’s presence influenced the outcome of the trial of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, who died in police custody after being arrested when he was found to be under the influence of drugs, which turned out to be Fentanyl. Although the autopsy found that Floyd died of heart failure, the state of Minnesota claimed his death was due to asphyxiation caused by the pressure of Chauvin’s knee on his neck. A teenager copied footage of Chauvin with his knee on Floyd’s neck and posted it on social media. BLM organized demonstrations in cities all over the country, at a time when public assemblies were forbidden due to COVID, some of which disintegrated into riots. There was widespread rioting in Minneapolis and calls to “defund the police.” BLM has attracted millions of dollars in funding from corporate interests.
Then there is antifa, an organization dating back to the early Twentieth Century when the original Antifa was organized in Germany by the Communist Party of Germany in the early 1930s. The German Communists advocated Joseph Stalin’s theory of social fascism, which basically claimed that any form of political belief standing against Communism was fascist. The modern antifa is a worldwide movement with roots in the West German student movements of the sixties. The first groups were founded by Maoist communists. There is a connection with the punk rock music scene of the 1980s, when leftist punkers organized in Minneapolis in opposition to other punkers they saw as racists. Punkers go back to the ”skinheads” of the sixties and seventies, who originated in the UK among working-class youth who wore their hair short rather than adopting the modish long hair of the Beatles and later rock and rollers. Antifa, which is made up of communists, anarchists and socialists, see themselves as antiracist social justice warriors who are combating the “far-right,” a term that is used to describe imaginary individuals and groups in the United States. (The term “far-right” was coined to describe dictatorial governments, namely the fascists of Europe and Asia of the 1930s.) Antifa protests speaking engagements of people they see as far-right, racist, white supremacist or anything not in line with their thinking and often engage in violence. Water bottles filled with concrete are a favorite weapon. They also engage with police who they see as instruments of fascism (which is anything in opposition to communism.) Antifa includes Leftist academics, who are engaging in a war of censorship and “cancellation” of conservatives in academia and on college campuses.
Prominent leftist organizations include the Jewish Antidefamation League, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. The ADL was founded in 1913 by wealthy Northern Jews as a reaction to the arrest of Leo Frank, the Jewish manager of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, one of his employees. Originally organized by the B’Nai B’Rith, from which it split after Frank was convicted, the ADL’s efforts were aimed at influencing the public through newspapers and other media against the “defaming” of Jews. The ADL fought for decades to have Frank, who was hung after being broken out of prison, pardoned. They were finally successful in 1986. The ADL was basically spinning its wheels until the revelation of Nazi atrocities gave them a massive boost. ADL chapters began infiltrating “extremist” groups and partnering with the FBI. Since then, the ADL has represented itself as monitoring antisemitism (which is basically criticism of any Jew) and the monitoring of “hate groups.” The ADL has become essentially private secret police who spend their time looking for people they believe to be antisemitic.
Monitoring of “hate groups” is also the business of the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization based in Montgomery, Alabama. Founded by attorney Morris Dees, who had made a fortune in direct marketing, in 1971, the SPLC traffics in exposing “hate groups “. It’s essentially a non-Jewish version of the ADL, although much of its staff is made up of Jewish lawyers. Previously, Dees had sued the Montgomery YMCA for discrimination when it refused admission to two black boys to a summer camp. Dees, who had represented a Klan member in 1962, was hired by Mary Louise Smith Ware, a black activist who had been arrested prior to Rosa Parks for refusing to change seats on a city bus. Smith Ware had previously been a party to a suit against the mayor of Montgomery challenging the city and Alabama’s segregation laws. The case went to the Supreme Court. The case against the YMCA was challenged because it is a private organization and not bound by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Dees’ staff found evidence of a secret agreement between the city of Montgomery and the YMCA. The court ruled that the YMCA had a private charter from the city and was thus subject to the Fourteenth Amendment. The court ordered the YMCA to integrate its facilities. It also ordered the organization to integrate its board, but that ruling was overturned on appeal. Dees and his organization developed a strategy of suing to obtain judgments against “hate groups” in an attempt to bankrupt them. The SPLC began labeling various groups, particularly those associated with conservatives, as “hate groups” and posting information about them on its web site. The SPLC list and the ADL’s lists are frequently used as sources by journalists writing about particular individuals and groups. Dees was accused of inflating the numbers and roles of “hate groups” as a tool to attract more contributions from his supporters, who are mostly Northern leftists. He was also accused of discrimination in the organization. Dees would eventually be fired from the organization he founded.
Morris Dees is definitely leftist. A lifelong Democrat, after campaigning for George Wallace in 1958, he claimed he “had an epiphany” in 1967 while sitting in the Cincinnati airport waiting out a snowstorm and decided to switch sides and devote his life to civil rights. He served as the national finance director for the campaigns of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter then was national finance chairman for Ted Kennedy’s primary campaign against Carter in 1980. The head of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt, also has a history in left-wing politics. He served in the Obama administration and was appointed as a member of the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of critics of Facebook’s monitoring policies. Margaret Huang, who replaced Dees as head of the SPLC, also has a background with leftist organizations. The staffs of both the ADL and SPLC are heavily leftist.
In closing, I’ll say that there shouldn’t be any surprise at the efforts of leftists to censor speech and even thought. SPLC head Margaret Huang has said that one of her goals is to reduce the numbers of those espousing “white nationalist” ideas. That, my friends, falls under the category of controlling thought. In fact, controlling thought seems to be the goal of the Left in general. Their goal is to stifle independent thought and force everyone to follow their lines of thinking, which goes back to the ideas of Karl Marx, Fredrick Engels and other communist leaders from Lenin to Ho Chi Minh, who seemed to think that if people didn’t think like them, they should be imprisoned or executed. I fear what may be coming, not for my sake but for my children and grandchildren.
tennesseeflyboy 