The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (47 page)

Many eligible Florida voters recently received a letter saying they were removed and had limited time to prove their citizenship. Hundreds of cases emerged where people with longstanding U.S. citizenship were being purged. According to the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, “of those singled out to prove their citizenship, 61 percent are Hispanic when only 14 percent of registered Florida voters are Hispanic,” suggesting an attempt to purge Latinos, who tend to vote Democratic. Recall the year 2000, when then Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris systematically purged African-Americans from voter rolls. The U.S. Justice Department has ordered Detzner to stop the purge, but he and Gov. Scott promise to continue. The Justice Department has sued the state in federal court, as have the ACLU and other groups.

For Georgia Congressman John Lewis, efforts to limit access to vote are not just bureaucratic. “It is unreal, it is unbelievable, that at this time in our history, 40 years after the Voting Rights Act was signed and passed into law, that we’re trying to go backward. I think there is a systematic, deliberate attack on the part of so many of these states, not just Florida, but it’s all across the country. . . . Some people were beaten, shot and murdered trying to help people become registered voters. I can never forget the three civil-rights workers that were murdered in the state of Mississippi on the night of June 21, 1964,” he said, recalling the murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, killed while registering African-Americans to vote.

Back in 1961, Lewis, just twenty-one years old, was a leader of the Freedom Rides, testing new federal laws banning segregation in interstate travel. He and many others were severely beaten when their buses crossed state lines into the Deep South. He sat down at segregated lunch counters, and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, soon rising to chair the organization. He told me about a pivotal moment in his life, and this nation’s history, the march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge:

On March 7, 1965, a group of us tried to march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to dramatize to the nation that people wanted to vote. One young African-American man had been shot and killed a few days earlier, in an adjoining county, called Perry County. Because of what happened to him we made a decision to march. In Selma, Alabama, in 1965, only 2.1 percent of blacks of voting age were registered to vote. The only place you could attempt to register was to go down to the courthouse, you had to pass a so-called literacy test.

As Lewis and scores of others tried to cross the Pettus Bridge in Selma, at the beginning of their fifty-mile march to Montgomery, Lewis recalled, “we got to the top of the bridge, we saw a sea of blue, Alabama state troopers, and we continued to walk, we came within hearing distance of the state troopers. One said, ‘I’m Major John Cloud of the Alabama State Troopers, this is an unlawful march, it will not be allowed to continue, I give you three minutes to disperse, return to your church.’ . . . You saw these guys putting on their gas masks, they came toward us beating us with nightsticks and bullwhips and trampling us with horses. I was hit in the head by a state trooper with a nightstick. I had a concussion at the bridge. My legs went out from under me. I felt like I was going to die. I thought I saw death.”

When I asked Lewis what propelled him forward in the face of such violence, he said, “My mother, my father, my grandparents, my uncle and aunts, people all around me had never registered to vote.” Universal suffrage, the right to vote, is never safe, never secure, never complete. This election season will be one where money from a few will have enormous influence, while the votes of many are being eliminated, their voices effectively silenced.

Unless people fight to dramatically expand voter participation, not just prevent the purges, our democracy is in serious danger.

November 11, 2009

The Man Who Put the Rainbow in
The Wizard of Oz

Thanksgiving is around the corner, and families will be gathering to share a meal and, perhaps, enjoy another annual telecast of
The Wizard of Oz
. The seventy-year-old film classic bears close watching this year, perhaps more than in any other, for the message woven into the lyrics, written during the Great Depression by Oscar-winning lyricist E. Y. “Yip” Harburg. There’s more to the Scarecrow and the Tin Man than meets the eye, and Harburg’s message has renewed resonance today in the midst of the greatest financial collapse since the Depression.

Harburg grew up in New York’s Lower East Side. In high school, he was seated alphabetically next to Ira Gershwin, and the two began a friendship that lasted a lifetime and helped shape twentieth-century American song and culture. Ernie Harburg, Yip’s son and co-author of the biography
Who Put the Rainbow in The Wizard of Oz?
told me, “Yip knew poverty deeply . . . it was the basis of Yip’s understanding of life as struggle.”

Harburg was deep in debt after the 1929 Wall Street crash. Gershwin suggested that Harburg write song lyrics. Before long, he wrote the song that captured the essence of the Great Depression, “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” Ernie said of the music industry then: “They only wanted love songs or escape songs, so that in 1929 you had ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’ . . . There wasn’t one song that addressed the Depression, in which we were all living.”

“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” became a national hit and remains a kind of anthem for hard times, corporate greed, and the dignity of working people:

Once I built a railroad, I made it run, made it race against time.

Once I built a railroad; now it’s done. Brother, can you spare a dime?

In the 1930s, Harburg became the lyricist for
The Wizard of Oz
. He also added the rainbow to the story, which doesn’t appear in L. Frank Baum’s original 1900 book,
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
. This led Harburg to write the famous song “Over the Rainbow,” sung by the then unknown Judy Garland.

While academic debate persists over whether Baum intended the story as a political allegory about the rise of industrial monopolists like John D. Rockefeller and the subsequent populist backlash, there is no doubt that Harburg’s influence made the 1939 film version more political.

The film, says Ernie Harburg, is about common people confronting and defeating seemingly insurmountable and violent oppression: The Scarecrow represented farmers, the Tin Man stood for the factory workers, and the Munchkins of the “Lollipop Guild” were the union members. Ernie recalled: “There was at least 30 percent unemployment at those times. And among blacks and minorities, it was 50, 60 percent. And there were bread lines, and the rich kept living their lifestyle.”

The Wizard of Oz
was to be “MGM’s answer to [Disney’s]
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
,” Ernie recounts. It was initially a critical success, but a commercial flop. Yip Harburg went on to write
Finian’s Rainbow
for Broadway. It addresses racial bigotry, hatred of immigrants, easy credit, and mortgage foreclosures. In 1947,
Finian’s Rainbow
was the first Broadway musical with an integrated cast. It was a hit, running for a year and a half. When Harburg’s unabashed political expression made him a target during the McCarthy era, he was blacklisted, and was banned from TV and film work from 1951 to 1962. Ironically, in the middle of his blacklist period, CBS broadcast
The Wizard of Oz
on television. It broke all viewership records, and has been airing since, gaining global renown and adulation.

This October,
Finian’s Rainbow
began its first full Broadway revival—the first since it was originally produced six decades ago—to rave reviews. Yip Harburg would be especially proud, no doubt, to know that one of the actors, Terri White, who plays a black sharecropper in
Finian’s Rainbow
, is back on Broadway despite having recently been homeless. From sleeping on park benches to starring on Broadway once again, this is just the kind of tale that inspired Harburg.

In response to his blacklisting, Harburg wrote a satiric poem, which reads in part:

Lives of great men all remind us

Greatness takes no easy way,

All the heroes of tomorrow

Are the heretics of today.

. . .

Why do great men all remind us

We can write our names on high

And departing leave behind us

Thumbprints in the FBI.

Let’s give thanks to Yip Harburg and all heretical artists, past and present, who have withstood censorship and banishment just for talking turkey.

December 31, 2009

The Poetic Justice of Dennis Brutus

Dennis Brutus broke rocks next to Nelson Mandela when they were imprisoned together on notorious Robben Island. His crime, like Mandela’s, was fighting the injustice of racism, challenging South Africa’s apartheid regime. Brutus’ weapons were his words: soaring, searing, poetic. He was banned, he was censored, he was shot. But this poet’s commitment and activism, his advocacy on behalf of the poor, never flagged. Brutus died in his sleep early on December 26 in Cape Town, at the age of eighty-five, but he lived with his eyes wide open. His life encapsulated the twentieth century, and even up until his final days, he inspired, guided, and rallied people toward the fight for justice in the twenty-first century.

Oddly, for this elfin poet and intellectual, it was rugby that early on nagged him about the racial injustice of his homeland. Brutus recalled being sarcastically referred to by a white man as a “future Springbok.”

The Springboks were the national rugby team, and Brutus knew that nonwhites could never be on the team. “It stuck with me, until years later, when I began to challenge the whole barrier—questioning why blacks can’t be on the team.” This issue is depicted in Clint Eastwood’s new feature film,
Invictus
. President Mandela, played by Morgan Freeman, embraces the Springboks during the 1995 World Cup, admitting that until then blacks always knew whom to root for: any team playing against the Springboks.

In the late 1950s, Brutus was penning a sports column under the pseudonym “A. de Bruin”—meaning “A brown” in Afrikaans. Brutus wrote, “The column . . . was ostensibly about sports results, but also about the politics of race and sports.” He was banned, an apartheid practice that imposed restrictions on movement, meeting, publishing, and more. In 1963, while attempting to flee police custody, he was shot. He almost died on a Johannesburg street while waiting for an ambulance restricted to blacks.

Brutus spent eighteen months in prison, in the same section of Robben Island as Nelson Mandela, where he wrote his first collection of poems,
Sirens, Knuckles, Boots
. His poem “Sharpeville” described the March 21, 1960, massacre in which South African police opened fire, killing sixty-nine civilians, an event which radicalized him:

Remember Sharpeville

bullet-in-the-back day

Because it epitomized oppression

and the nature of society

more clearly than anything else;

it was the classic event

After prison, Brutus began life as a political refugee. He formed the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee to leverage sports into a high-profile, global anti-apartheid campaign. He succeeded in getting South Africa banned from the Olympic Games in 1970. Brutus moved to the United States, where he remained as a university professor and anti-apartheid leader, despite efforts by the Reagan administration to deny him continued status as a political refugee and deport him.

After the fall of apartheid and ascension to power of the African National Congress, Brutus remained true to his calling. He told me, “As water is privatized, as electricity is privatized, as people are evicted even from their shacks because they can’t afford to pay the rent of the shacks, the situation becomes worse. . . . The South African government, under the ANC . . . has chosen to adopt a corporate solution.”

He went on: “We come out of apartheid into global apartheid. We’re in a world now where, in fact, wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few; the mass of the people are still poor . . . a society which is geared to protect the rich and the corporations and actually is hammering the poor, increasing their burden, this is the reverse of what we thought was going to happen under the ANC government.”

Many young activists know Dennis Brutus not for his anti-apartheid work but as a campaigner for global justice, ever present at mass mobilizations against the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—and, most recently, although not present, giving inspiration to the protesters at the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. He said, on his eighty-fifth birthday, days before the climate talks were to commence: “We are in serious difficulty all over the planet. We are going to say to the world: There’s too much of profit, too much of greed, too much of suffering by the poor. . . . The people of the planet must be in action.”