"I'm not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue,"---- Obama
10 seconds of activism!
- Thread starter _MrBelvedere_
- Start date
_MrBelvedere_
Well-Known Member
If you support the Act, let these Judiciary committee members know your thoughts via this simple form. The Act needs to get voted to leave the committee for a full Senate vote.
Spread the word and pound their inboxes!
http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/about/members
http://blog.mpp.org/medical-marijuana/medical-marijuana-bill-introduced-in-u-s-senate/03102015/ click "ask your Senators to cosponsor" for these states that have senators on the Judiciary committee:
Focus on these non med state committee members:
Alabama
South Carolina
Texas
Louisiana
Georgia
North Carolina
These Judiciary Committee members rep MMJ states and will more likely vote yea just for the clarity it will bring to their state:
Vermont
California
New York
Illinois
Rhode Island
Minnesota
Delaware
Connecticut
If you do not want to reveal your true address for security reasons, just Google and find a RANDOM nursing home/hospital/highRiseApartments/etc in the state and use the address and phone number of the nursing home.
Spread the word and pound their inboxes!
http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/about/members
http://blog.mpp.org/medical-marijuana/medical-marijuana-bill-introduced-in-u-s-senate/03102015/ click "ask your Senators to cosponsor" for these states that have senators on the Judiciary committee:
Focus on these non med state committee members:
Alabama
South Carolina
Texas
Louisiana
Georgia
North Carolina
These Judiciary Committee members rep MMJ states and will more likely vote yea just for the clarity it will bring to their state:
Vermont
California
New York
Illinois
Rhode Island
Minnesota
Delaware
Connecticut
If you do not want to reveal your true address for security reasons, just Google and find a RANDOM nursing home/hospital/highRiseApartments/etc in the state and use the address and phone number of the nursing home.
Last edited:
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
twice as many busts and 10-20 times more dispensaries?
we know you suck at math and all, but seriously.
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
and he hasn't.
Wow, you didn't know there was a difference between 270 PROSECUTIONS ( a fancy lawyer term you probably never heard of) and 20 BUSTS ( A fancy police term for ARRESTS)??
Sorry your so fucking stupid.
Not really.
Best wishes,
NoDrama
UncleBuck
Well-Known Member
so there have been about as many prosecutions in the 6 years under obama, as there were in the 12 years previous, where only a miniscule, tiny, underwhelming number of dispensaries existed as compared to the last 6 years?
yeah, you still suck at math.
_MrBelvedere_
Well-Known Member
If you support the Act, let these Judiciary committee members know your thoughts via this simple form. The Act needs to get voted to leave the committee for a full Senate vote.
Spread the word and pound their inboxes!
http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/about/members
http://blog.mpp.org/medical-marijuana/medical-marijuana-bill-introduced-in-u-s-senate/03102015/ click "ask your Senators to cosponsor" for these states that have senators on the Judiciary committee:
Focus on these non med state committee members:
Alabama
South Carolina
Texas
Louisiana
Georgia
North Carolina
These Judiciary Committee members rep MMJ states and will more likely vote yea just for the clarity it will bring to their state:
Vermont
California
New York
Illinois
Rhode Island
Minnesota
Delaware
Connecticut
If you do not want to reveal your true address for security reasons, just Google and find a RANDOM nursing home/hospital/highRiseApartments/etc in the state and use the address and phone number of the nursing home.
Spread the word and pound their inboxes!
http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/about/members
http://blog.mpp.org/medical-marijuana/medical-marijuana-bill-introduced-in-u-s-senate/03102015/ click "ask your Senators to cosponsor" for these states that have senators on the Judiciary committee:
Focus on these non med state committee members:
Alabama
South Carolina
Texas
Louisiana
Georgia
North Carolina
These Judiciary Committee members rep MMJ states and will more likely vote yea just for the clarity it will bring to their state:
Vermont
California
New York
Illinois
Rhode Island
Minnesota
Delaware
Connecticut
If you do not want to reveal your true address for security reasons, just Google and find a RANDOM nursing home/hospital/highRiseApartments/etc in the state and use the address and phone number of the nursing home.
_MrBelvedere_
Well-Known Member
From non-mmj state Texas senator Cornyn:
Dear Mr. Wu:
Thank you for contacting me with your suggestions regarding the war on drugs. I recognize the time and effort that you are dedicating to actively participate in the democratic process, and I appreciate that you and other concerned citizens have provided me the benefit of your comments on this matter.
Illegal drug abuse is a threat to the fabric of our nation, causing more than 30,000 deaths and billions of dollars in economic losses each year. Efforts to stem the flow of illicit drugs and educate our citizens about the dangers of these substances should be a priority for policymakers nationwide.
Our national drug control strategy must also focus on reducing the growing problem of counterfeit, misbranded, and adulterated substances in the medical and commercial supply chains. Many illegitimate outlets are marketing contaminated or knock-off prescription drugs, while others attempt to dodge existing laws by selling synthetic versions of illegal narcotics, such as heroin and cocaine. Unfortunately, these substances can have tragic effects—often causing serious injury or death. Members of the Senate must continue working to keep children and consumers safe by ensuring that existing laws and agencies provide the oversight necessary to protect consumers from the purveyors of these dangerous drugs.
Furthermore, as you know, several states have legalized marijuana for medicinal and recreational purposes. I support the Supreme Court’s 2001 decision ruling that the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes is not a defense under federal law, but we should always have an open dialogue on social issues, even when they are issues on which we may disagree.
I am always appreciative when Texans take the time to reach out and share their concerns. Thank you for taking the time to contact me.
Sincerely,
JOHN CORNYN
United States Senator
517 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Tel: (202) 224-2934
Fax: (202) 228-2856
http://www.cornyn.senate.gov
Dear Mr. Wu:
Thank you for contacting me with your suggestions regarding the war on drugs. I recognize the time and effort that you are dedicating to actively participate in the democratic process, and I appreciate that you and other concerned citizens have provided me the benefit of your comments on this matter.
Illegal drug abuse is a threat to the fabric of our nation, causing more than 30,000 deaths and billions of dollars in economic losses each year. Efforts to stem the flow of illicit drugs and educate our citizens about the dangers of these substances should be a priority for policymakers nationwide.
Our national drug control strategy must also focus on reducing the growing problem of counterfeit, misbranded, and adulterated substances in the medical and commercial supply chains. Many illegitimate outlets are marketing contaminated or knock-off prescription drugs, while others attempt to dodge existing laws by selling synthetic versions of illegal narcotics, such as heroin and cocaine. Unfortunately, these substances can have tragic effects—often causing serious injury or death. Members of the Senate must continue working to keep children and consumers safe by ensuring that existing laws and agencies provide the oversight necessary to protect consumers from the purveyors of these dangerous drugs.
Furthermore, as you know, several states have legalized marijuana for medicinal and recreational purposes. I support the Supreme Court’s 2001 decision ruling that the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes is not a defense under federal law, but we should always have an open dialogue on social issues, even when they are issues on which we may disagree.
I am always appreciative when Texans take the time to reach out and share their concerns. Thank you for taking the time to contact me.
Sincerely,
JOHN CORNYN
United States Senator
517 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Tel: (202) 224-2934
Fax: (202) 228-2856
http://www.cornyn.senate.gov
_MrBelvedere_
Well-Known Member
David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
by Malcom Gladwell
The most famous photograph in the history of the American civil rights movement was taken on May 3, 1963, by Bill Hudson, a photographer for the Associated Press. Hudson was in Birmingham, Alabama, where Martin Luther King Jr.’s activists had taken on the city’s racist public safety commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor. The photo was of a teenage boy being attacked by a police dog. Even to this day, it has not lost its power to shock.
Wyatt Walker was a Baptist minister from Massachusetts. He joined up with Martin Luther King in 1960. He was King’s “nuts and bolts” man, his organizer and fixer. He was a mischief maker—slender, elegant, and intellectual, with a pencil-thin mustache and a droll sense of humor. …
The plan Walker devised for Birmingham was called Project C—for confrontation. The staging ground was the city’s venerable 16th Street Baptist Church, next to Kelly Ingram Park, and a few short blocks from downtown Birmingham. Project C had three acts, each designed to be bigger and more provocative than the last. It began with a series of sit-ins at local businesses. That was to draw media attention to the problem of segregation in Birmingham. At night, Shuttlesworth and King would lead mass meetings for the local black community to keep morale high. The second stage was a boycott of downtown businesses, to put financial pressure on the white business community to reconsider their practices toward their black customers. (In department stores, for example, blacks could not use the washrooms or the changing rooms, for fear that a surface or an item of clothing once touched by a black person would then touch a white person.) Act three was a series of mass marches to back up the boycott and fill up the jails—because once Connor ran out of cells he could no longer make the civil rights problem go away simply by arresting the protesters. He would have to deal with them directly.
Project C was a high-stakes operation. For it to work, Connor had to fight back. As King put it, Commissioner of Public Safety Connor had to be induced to “tip his hand”—thereby revealing his ugly side to the world. But there was no guarantee that he would do that. King and Walker had just come from running their long campaign in Albany, Georgia, and they had failed there because the Albany police chief, Laurie Pritchett, had refused to take the bait. He told his police officers not to use violence or excessive force. He was friendly and polite. His views on civil rights may have been unevolved, but he treated King with respect. The Northern press came to Albany to cover the confrontation between white and black, and found—to their surprise—they quite liked Pritchett. When King was finally thrown in jail, a mysterious well-dressed man—sent, legend had it, by Pritchett himself—came the next day and bailed him out. How can you be a martyr if you get bailed out of jail the instant you get there?
Walker realized that a setback in Birmingham so soon after the Albany debacle would be disastrous. In those years, the evening news on television was watched in an overwhelming number of American households, and Walker wanted desperately to have Project C front and center on American television screens every night. But he knew that if the campaign was perceived to be faltering, the news media could lose interest and go elsewhere.
Once started, however, they could not fall back.…In no case, said Walker, could the Birmingham campaign be smaller than Albany. That meant they must be prepared to put upwards of a thousand people in jail at one time, maybe more.”
Several weeks in, Walker saw his campaign begin to lose that precious momentum. Many blacks in Birmingham were worried—justifiably—that if they were seen with King, they would be fired by their white bosses. In April, one of King’s aides spoke before seven hundred people at a church service and could persuade only nine of them to march with him. The next day, Andrew Young—another of King’s men—tried again, and this time found only seven volunteers. The local conservative black paper called Project C “wasteful and worthless.” The reporters and photographers assembled there to record the spectacle of black-on-white confrontation were getting restless. Connor made the occasional arrest but mostly just sat and watched. Walker was in constant contact with King as King commuted back and forth between Birmingham and his home base in Atlanta. “Wyatt,” King told him for the hundredth time, “you’ve got to find some way to make Bull Connor tip his hand.” Walker shook his head. “Mr. Leader, I haven’t found the key yet, but I’m going to find it.”
The breakthrough came on Palm Sunday. Walker had twenty-two protesters ready to go. The march would be led by King’s brother, Alfred Daniel, known as A.D. “Our mass meeting was slow getting together,” Walker recalled. “We were supposed to march at something like two-thirty, and we didn’t march until about four. In that time, people, being aware of the demonstration, collected out on the streets. By the time they got ready to march, there were a thousand people up and down this three-block area, lining up all along the sides as spectators, watching.”
The next day, Walker opened the newspapers to read the media’s account of what had happened, and to his surprise he discovered the reporters had gotten it all wrong. The papers said eleven hundred demonstrators had marched in Birmingham. “I called Dr. King and said, ‘Dr. King, I’ve got it!’” Walker recalled. “‘I can’t tell you on the phone, but I’ve got it!’ So what we did each day was we dragged out our meetings until people got home from work late in the afternoon. They would form out on the side and it would look like a thousand folks. We weren’t marching but twelve, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen. But the papers were reporting fourteen hundred.”
It was a situation straight out of one of the most famous of all trickster tales—the story of Terrapin, a lowly turtle who finds himself in a race with Deer. He hides just by the finish line and places his relatives up and down the course, at strategic intervals, to make it seem like he is running the whole race. Then at the finish line, he emerges just ahead of Deer to claim victory. Deer is completely fooled, since, as Terrapin knows, to Deer, all turtles “am so much like annurrer you can’t tell one from turrer.”
Commissioner of Public Safety Connor was an arrogant man who liked to swagger around Birmingham saying, “Down here we make our own law.” He sat drinking his bourbon every morning at the Molton Hotel, loudly predicting that King would “run out of niggers.” Now he looked out the window and saw Terrapin ahead of him at every turn. He was in shock. Those imaginary one thousand protesters were a provocation. “Bull Connor had something in his mind about not letting these niggers get to city hall,” Walker said. “I prayed that he’d keep trying to stop us.…Birmingham would have been lost if Bull had let us go down to the city hall and pray. If he had let us do that and stepped aside, what else would be new? There would be no movement, no publicity.” Please, Brer Connor, please. Whatever you do, don’t throw me in the briar patch. And of course that’s just what Connor did.
A month into the protest, Walker and King stepped up the pressure. One of the Birmingham team, James Bevel, had been working with local schoolchildren, instructing them in the principles of nonviolent resistance. Bevel was a Pied Piper: a tall, bald, hypnotic speaker who wore a yarmulke and bib overalls and claimed to hear voices. (McWhorter calls him a “militant out of Dr. Seuss.”) On the last Monday in April, he dropped off leaflets at all of the black high schools around the county: “Come to 16th Street Baptist Church at noon on Thursday. Don’t ask permission.” The city’s most popular black disc jockey—Shelley “the Playboy” Stewart—sent out the same message to his young listeners: “Kids, there’s gonna be a party at the park.”8 The FBI got wind of the plan and told Bull Connor, who announced that any child who skipped school would be expelled. It made no difference. The kids came in droves. Walker called the day the children arrived “D Day.”
At one o’clock, the doors to the church opened, and King’s lieutenants began sending the children out. They held signs saying “Freedom” or “Die to Make This Land My Home.” They sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” Outside the church, Connor’s police officers waited. The children dropped to their knees and prayed, then filed into the open doors of the paddy wagons. Then another dozen came out. Then another dozen, and another, and another—until Connor’s men had begun to get an inkling that the stakes had been raised again.
A police officer spotted Fred Shuttlesworth. “Hey, Fred, how many more have you got?”
“At least a thousand more,” he replied.
“God A’mighty,” the officer said.
By the end of the day, more than six hundred children were in jail.
.
.
by Malcom Gladwell
The most famous photograph in the history of the American civil rights movement was taken on May 3, 1963, by Bill Hudson, a photographer for the Associated Press. Hudson was in Birmingham, Alabama, where Martin Luther King Jr.’s activists had taken on the city’s racist public safety commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor. The photo was of a teenage boy being attacked by a police dog. Even to this day, it has not lost its power to shock.
Wyatt Walker was a Baptist minister from Massachusetts. He joined up with Martin Luther King in 1960. He was King’s “nuts and bolts” man, his organizer and fixer. He was a mischief maker—slender, elegant, and intellectual, with a pencil-thin mustache and a droll sense of humor. …
The plan Walker devised for Birmingham was called Project C—for confrontation. The staging ground was the city’s venerable 16th Street Baptist Church, next to Kelly Ingram Park, and a few short blocks from downtown Birmingham. Project C had three acts, each designed to be bigger and more provocative than the last. It began with a series of sit-ins at local businesses. That was to draw media attention to the problem of segregation in Birmingham. At night, Shuttlesworth and King would lead mass meetings for the local black community to keep morale high. The second stage was a boycott of downtown businesses, to put financial pressure on the white business community to reconsider their practices toward their black customers. (In department stores, for example, blacks could not use the washrooms or the changing rooms, for fear that a surface or an item of clothing once touched by a black person would then touch a white person.) Act three was a series of mass marches to back up the boycott and fill up the jails—because once Connor ran out of cells he could no longer make the civil rights problem go away simply by arresting the protesters. He would have to deal with them directly.
Project C was a high-stakes operation. For it to work, Connor had to fight back. As King put it, Commissioner of Public Safety Connor had to be induced to “tip his hand”—thereby revealing his ugly side to the world. But there was no guarantee that he would do that. King and Walker had just come from running their long campaign in Albany, Georgia, and they had failed there because the Albany police chief, Laurie Pritchett, had refused to take the bait. He told his police officers not to use violence or excessive force. He was friendly and polite. His views on civil rights may have been unevolved, but he treated King with respect. The Northern press came to Albany to cover the confrontation between white and black, and found—to their surprise—they quite liked Pritchett. When King was finally thrown in jail, a mysterious well-dressed man—sent, legend had it, by Pritchett himself—came the next day and bailed him out. How can you be a martyr if you get bailed out of jail the instant you get there?
Walker realized that a setback in Birmingham so soon after the Albany debacle would be disastrous. In those years, the evening news on television was watched in an overwhelming number of American households, and Walker wanted desperately to have Project C front and center on American television screens every night. But he knew that if the campaign was perceived to be faltering, the news media could lose interest and go elsewhere.
Once started, however, they could not fall back.…In no case, said Walker, could the Birmingham campaign be smaller than Albany. That meant they must be prepared to put upwards of a thousand people in jail at one time, maybe more.”
Several weeks in, Walker saw his campaign begin to lose that precious momentum. Many blacks in Birmingham were worried—justifiably—that if they were seen with King, they would be fired by their white bosses. In April, one of King’s aides spoke before seven hundred people at a church service and could persuade only nine of them to march with him. The next day, Andrew Young—another of King’s men—tried again, and this time found only seven volunteers. The local conservative black paper called Project C “wasteful and worthless.” The reporters and photographers assembled there to record the spectacle of black-on-white confrontation were getting restless. Connor made the occasional arrest but mostly just sat and watched. Walker was in constant contact with King as King commuted back and forth between Birmingham and his home base in Atlanta. “Wyatt,” King told him for the hundredth time, “you’ve got to find some way to make Bull Connor tip his hand.” Walker shook his head. “Mr. Leader, I haven’t found the key yet, but I’m going to find it.”
The breakthrough came on Palm Sunday. Walker had twenty-two protesters ready to go. The march would be led by King’s brother, Alfred Daniel, known as A.D. “Our mass meeting was slow getting together,” Walker recalled. “We were supposed to march at something like two-thirty, and we didn’t march until about four. In that time, people, being aware of the demonstration, collected out on the streets. By the time they got ready to march, there were a thousand people up and down this three-block area, lining up all along the sides as spectators, watching.”
The next day, Walker opened the newspapers to read the media’s account of what had happened, and to his surprise he discovered the reporters had gotten it all wrong. The papers said eleven hundred demonstrators had marched in Birmingham. “I called Dr. King and said, ‘Dr. King, I’ve got it!’” Walker recalled. “‘I can’t tell you on the phone, but I’ve got it!’ So what we did each day was we dragged out our meetings until people got home from work late in the afternoon. They would form out on the side and it would look like a thousand folks. We weren’t marching but twelve, fourteen, sixteen, eighteen. But the papers were reporting fourteen hundred.”
It was a situation straight out of one of the most famous of all trickster tales—the story of Terrapin, a lowly turtle who finds himself in a race with Deer. He hides just by the finish line and places his relatives up and down the course, at strategic intervals, to make it seem like he is running the whole race. Then at the finish line, he emerges just ahead of Deer to claim victory. Deer is completely fooled, since, as Terrapin knows, to Deer, all turtles “am so much like annurrer you can’t tell one from turrer.”
Commissioner of Public Safety Connor was an arrogant man who liked to swagger around Birmingham saying, “Down here we make our own law.” He sat drinking his bourbon every morning at the Molton Hotel, loudly predicting that King would “run out of niggers.” Now he looked out the window and saw Terrapin ahead of him at every turn. He was in shock. Those imaginary one thousand protesters were a provocation. “Bull Connor had something in his mind about not letting these niggers get to city hall,” Walker said. “I prayed that he’d keep trying to stop us.…Birmingham would have been lost if Bull had let us go down to the city hall and pray. If he had let us do that and stepped aside, what else would be new? There would be no movement, no publicity.” Please, Brer Connor, please. Whatever you do, don’t throw me in the briar patch. And of course that’s just what Connor did.
A month into the protest, Walker and King stepped up the pressure. One of the Birmingham team, James Bevel, had been working with local schoolchildren, instructing them in the principles of nonviolent resistance. Bevel was a Pied Piper: a tall, bald, hypnotic speaker who wore a yarmulke and bib overalls and claimed to hear voices. (McWhorter calls him a “militant out of Dr. Seuss.”) On the last Monday in April, he dropped off leaflets at all of the black high schools around the county: “Come to 16th Street Baptist Church at noon on Thursday. Don’t ask permission.” The city’s most popular black disc jockey—Shelley “the Playboy” Stewart—sent out the same message to his young listeners: “Kids, there’s gonna be a party at the park.”8 The FBI got wind of the plan and told Bull Connor, who announced that any child who skipped school would be expelled. It made no difference. The kids came in droves. Walker called the day the children arrived “D Day.”
At one o’clock, the doors to the church opened, and King’s lieutenants began sending the children out. They held signs saying “Freedom” or “Die to Make This Land My Home.” They sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.” Outside the church, Connor’s police officers waited. The children dropped to their knees and prayed, then filed into the open doors of the paddy wagons. Then another dozen came out. Then another dozen, and another, and another—until Connor’s men had begun to get an inkling that the stakes had been raised again.
A police officer spotted Fred Shuttlesworth. “Hey, Fred, how many more have you got?”
“At least a thousand more,” he replied.
“God A’mighty,” the officer said.
By the end of the day, more than six hundred children were in jail.
.
.
_MrBelvedere_
Well-Known Member
The next day—Friday—was “Double-D Day.” This time fifteen hundred schoolchildren skipped school to come down to 16th Street Baptist. At one o’clock, they began filing out of the church. The streets surrounding Kelly Ingram Park were barricaded by police and firefighters. There was no mystery about why the firefighters had been called in. They had high-pressure hoses on their fire trucks, and “water cannons,” as they were also known, had been a staple of crowd control since the 1930s in the early days of Nazi Germany. Walker knew that if the demonstrations grew so large that they overwhelmed the Birmingham police, Connor would be sorely tempted to turn on the hoses. He wanted Connor to turn on the hoses. “It was hot in Birmingham,” he explained. “I told [Bevel] to let the pep rally go on a while and let these firemen sit out there and bake in the sun until their tempers were like hair triggers.”
And the dogs? Connor had been itching to use the city’s K-9 Corps. Earlier that spring, in a speech, Connor had vowed to combat the civil right protesters with one hundred German shepherd police dogs. “I want ’em to see the dogs work,” Connor growled, as things began to get out of control in Kelly Ingram Park—and nothing made Walker happier than that. He had children marching in the streets, and now Connor wanted to let German shepherds loose on them? Everyone in King’s camp knew what it would look like if someone published a photograph of a police dog lunging at a child.
Connor stood watch as the children came closer. “Do not cross,” he said. “If you come any further, we will turn the fire hoses on you.” Connor’s jails were full. He couldn’t arrest anyone else, because he had nowhere to put them. The children kept coming. The firemen were hesitant. They were not used to controlling crowds. Connor turned to the fire chief: “Turn ’em on, or go home.” The firemen turned on their “monitor guns,” valves that turned the spray of their hoses into a high-pressure torrent. The children clung to one another and were sent sprawling backwards. The force of the water ripped some of the marchers’ shirts from their bodies and flung others against walls and doorways.
Back at the church, Walker began deploying waves of children to the other end of the park to open another front. Connor had no more fire trucks. But he was determined that none of the marchers cross over into “white” Birmingham. “Bring the dogs,” Connor ordered, calling in eight K-9 units. “Why did you bring old Tiger out?” Connor shouted at one of his police officers. “Why didn’t you bring a meaner dog—this one is not the vicious one!” The children came closer. A German shepherd lunged at a boy. He leaned in, arms limp, as if to say, “Take me, here I am.” On Saturday, the picture ran on the front page of every newspaper around the country.
Does Wyatt Walker’s behavior make you uncomfortable? James Forman, who was a key figure in the civil rights movement in those years, was with Walker when Connor first deployed the K-9 units. Forman says that Walker started jumping with joy. “We’ve got a movement. We’ve got a movement. We had some police brutality.” Forman was stunned. Walker was as aware as any of them just how dangerous Birmingham could be. He had been in the room when King gave everyone a mock eulogy. How could he be jumping up and down at the sight of protesters being attacked by police dogs?
After D Day, King and Walker heard it from all sides. The judge processing the arrested marchers said that the people who “misled those kids” into marching “ought to be put under the jail.” On the floor of Congress, one of Alabama’s congressmen called the use of children “shameful.” The mayor of Birmingham denounced the “irresponsible and unthinking agitators” who were using children as “tools.” Malcolm X—the black activist who was in every way more radical than King—said “real men don’t put their children on the firing line.” The New York Times editorialized that King was engaged in “perilous ventures in brinkmanship” and Time scolded him for using children as “shock troops.” The U.S. attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, warned that “schoolchildren participating in street demonstrations is a dangerous business,” and said, “An injured, maimed or dead child is a price that none of us can afford to pay.”
On the Friday night, after the second day of children’s protests, King spoke at 16th Street Baptist Church to the parents of those who had been arrested that day and the day before. They knew full well the dangers and humiliations of being a black person in Birmingham. Jesus said He’d go as far as Memphis. Can you imagine how they felt with their children at that moment languishing in Bull Connor’s jails? King stood up and tried to make light of the situation: “Not only did they stand up in the water, they went under the water!” he said. “And dogs? Well, I’ll tell you. When I was growing up, I was dog bitten…for nothing. So I don’t mind being bitten by a dog for standing up for freedom!”
Whether or not any of the parents were buying this is unclear. King plunged on: “Your daughters and sons are in jail.…Don’t worry about them.…They are suffering for what they believe, and they are suffering to make this nation a better nation.” Don’t worry about them? Taylor Branch writes that there were rumors—“true and false”—about “rats, beatings, concrete beds, overflowing latrines, jailhouse assaults, and crude examinations for venereal disease.” Seventy-five and eighty children were packed into cells intended for eight. Some had been bused out to the state fairground and held without food and water in stockades in the pouring rain. King’s response? “Jail helps you to rise above the miasma of everyday life,” he said blithely. “If they want some books, we will get them. I catch up on my reading every time I go to jail.”
Walker and King were trying to set up that picture—the German shepherd lunging at the boy. But to get it, they had to play a complex and duplicitous game. To Bull Connor, they pretended that they had a hundred times more supporters than they did. To the press, they pretended that they were shocked at the way Connor let his dogs loose on their protesters—while at the same time, they were jumping for joy behind closed doors. And to the parents whose children they were using as cannon fodder, they pretended that Bull Connor’s prisons were a good place for their children to catch up on their reading.
But we shouldn’t be shocked by this. What other options did Walker and King have? In the traditional fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, told to every Western schoolchild, the Tortoise beats the Hare through sheer persistence and effort. Slow and steady wins the race. That’s an appropriate and powerful lesson—but only in a world where the Tortoise and the Hare are playing by the same rules, and where everyone’s effort is rewarded. In a world that isn’t fair—and no one would have called Birmingham in 1963 fair—the Terrapin has to place his relatives at strategic points along the racecourse. The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity. In the next great civil rights showdown in Selma, Alabama, two years later, a photographer from Life magazine put down his camera in order to come to the aid of children being roughed up by police officers. Afterward, King reprimanded him: “The world doesn’t know this happened, because you didn’t photograph it. I’m not being cold-blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray.” He needed the picture. In response to the complaints over the use of children, Fred Shuttlesworth said it best: “We got to use what we got.”
“I still t’ink Ise de fas’est runner in de worl’,” the bewildered Deer complains after a race in which Terrapin has done something that would get him banished from every competition in the world. “Maybe you air,” Terrapin responds, “but I kin head ou off wid sense.”
The boy in Bill Hudson’s famous photograph is Walter Gadsden. He was a sophomore at Parker High in Birmingham, six foot tall and fifteen years old. He wasn’t a marcher. He was a spectator. He came from a conservative black family that owned two newspapers in Birmingham and Atlanta that had been sharply critical of King. Gadsden had taken off school that afternoon to watch the spectacle unfolding around Kelly Ingram Park.
The officer in the picture is Dick Middleton. He was a modest and reserved man. “The K-9 Corps,” McWhorter writes, “was known for attracting straight arrows who wanted none of the scams and payoffs that often came with a regular beat. Nor were the dog handlers known for being race ideologues.” The dog’s name is Leo.
Now look at the faces of the black bystanders in the background. Shouldn’t they be surprised or horrified? They’re not. Next, look at the leash in Middleton’s hand. It’s taut, as if he’s trying to restrain Leo. And look at Gadsden’s left hand. He’s gripping Middleton on the forearm. Look at Gadsden’s left leg. He’s kicking Leo, isn’t he? Gadsden would say later that he had been raised around dogs and had been taught how to protect himself. “I automatically threw my knee up in front of the dog’s head,” he said. Gadsden wasn’t the martyr, passively leaning forward as if to say, “Take me, here I am.” He’s steadying himself, with a hand on Middleton, so he can deliver a sharper blow. The word around the movement, afterward, was that he’d broken Leo’s jaw. Hudson’s photograph is not at all what the world thought it was. It was a little bit of Brer Rabbit trickery.
You got to use what you got.
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And the dogs? Connor had been itching to use the city’s K-9 Corps. Earlier that spring, in a speech, Connor had vowed to combat the civil right protesters with one hundred German shepherd police dogs. “I want ’em to see the dogs work,” Connor growled, as things began to get out of control in Kelly Ingram Park—and nothing made Walker happier than that. He had children marching in the streets, and now Connor wanted to let German shepherds loose on them? Everyone in King’s camp knew what it would look like if someone published a photograph of a police dog lunging at a child.
Connor stood watch as the children came closer. “Do not cross,” he said. “If you come any further, we will turn the fire hoses on you.” Connor’s jails were full. He couldn’t arrest anyone else, because he had nowhere to put them. The children kept coming. The firemen were hesitant. They were not used to controlling crowds. Connor turned to the fire chief: “Turn ’em on, or go home.” The firemen turned on their “monitor guns,” valves that turned the spray of their hoses into a high-pressure torrent. The children clung to one another and were sent sprawling backwards. The force of the water ripped some of the marchers’ shirts from their bodies and flung others against walls and doorways.
Back at the church, Walker began deploying waves of children to the other end of the park to open another front. Connor had no more fire trucks. But he was determined that none of the marchers cross over into “white” Birmingham. “Bring the dogs,” Connor ordered, calling in eight K-9 units. “Why did you bring old Tiger out?” Connor shouted at one of his police officers. “Why didn’t you bring a meaner dog—this one is not the vicious one!” The children came closer. A German shepherd lunged at a boy. He leaned in, arms limp, as if to say, “Take me, here I am.” On Saturday, the picture ran on the front page of every newspaper around the country.
Does Wyatt Walker’s behavior make you uncomfortable? James Forman, who was a key figure in the civil rights movement in those years, was with Walker when Connor first deployed the K-9 units. Forman says that Walker started jumping with joy. “We’ve got a movement. We’ve got a movement. We had some police brutality.” Forman was stunned. Walker was as aware as any of them just how dangerous Birmingham could be. He had been in the room when King gave everyone a mock eulogy. How could he be jumping up and down at the sight of protesters being attacked by police dogs?
After D Day, King and Walker heard it from all sides. The judge processing the arrested marchers said that the people who “misled those kids” into marching “ought to be put under the jail.” On the floor of Congress, one of Alabama’s congressmen called the use of children “shameful.” The mayor of Birmingham denounced the “irresponsible and unthinking agitators” who were using children as “tools.” Malcolm X—the black activist who was in every way more radical than King—said “real men don’t put their children on the firing line.” The New York Times editorialized that King was engaged in “perilous ventures in brinkmanship” and Time scolded him for using children as “shock troops.” The U.S. attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, warned that “schoolchildren participating in street demonstrations is a dangerous business,” and said, “An injured, maimed or dead child is a price that none of us can afford to pay.”
On the Friday night, after the second day of children’s protests, King spoke at 16th Street Baptist Church to the parents of those who had been arrested that day and the day before. They knew full well the dangers and humiliations of being a black person in Birmingham. Jesus said He’d go as far as Memphis. Can you imagine how they felt with their children at that moment languishing in Bull Connor’s jails? King stood up and tried to make light of the situation: “Not only did they stand up in the water, they went under the water!” he said. “And dogs? Well, I’ll tell you. When I was growing up, I was dog bitten…for nothing. So I don’t mind being bitten by a dog for standing up for freedom!”
Whether or not any of the parents were buying this is unclear. King plunged on: “Your daughters and sons are in jail.…Don’t worry about them.…They are suffering for what they believe, and they are suffering to make this nation a better nation.” Don’t worry about them? Taylor Branch writes that there were rumors—“true and false”—about “rats, beatings, concrete beds, overflowing latrines, jailhouse assaults, and crude examinations for venereal disease.” Seventy-five and eighty children were packed into cells intended for eight. Some had been bused out to the state fairground and held without food and water in stockades in the pouring rain. King’s response? “Jail helps you to rise above the miasma of everyday life,” he said blithely. “If they want some books, we will get them. I catch up on my reading every time I go to jail.”
Walker and King were trying to set up that picture—the German shepherd lunging at the boy. But to get it, they had to play a complex and duplicitous game. To Bull Connor, they pretended that they had a hundred times more supporters than they did. To the press, they pretended that they were shocked at the way Connor let his dogs loose on their protesters—while at the same time, they were jumping for joy behind closed doors. And to the parents whose children they were using as cannon fodder, they pretended that Bull Connor’s prisons were a good place for their children to catch up on their reading.
But we shouldn’t be shocked by this. What other options did Walker and King have? In the traditional fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, told to every Western schoolchild, the Tortoise beats the Hare through sheer persistence and effort. Slow and steady wins the race. That’s an appropriate and powerful lesson—but only in a world where the Tortoise and the Hare are playing by the same rules, and where everyone’s effort is rewarded. In a world that isn’t fair—and no one would have called Birmingham in 1963 fair—the Terrapin has to place his relatives at strategic points along the racecourse. The trickster is not a trickster by nature. He is a trickster by necessity. In the next great civil rights showdown in Selma, Alabama, two years later, a photographer from Life magazine put down his camera in order to come to the aid of children being roughed up by police officers. Afterward, King reprimanded him: “The world doesn’t know this happened, because you didn’t photograph it. I’m not being cold-blooded about it, but it is so much more important for you to take a picture of us getting beaten up than for you to be another person joining in the fray.” He needed the picture. In response to the complaints over the use of children, Fred Shuttlesworth said it best: “We got to use what we got.”
“I still t’ink Ise de fas’est runner in de worl’,” the bewildered Deer complains after a race in which Terrapin has done something that would get him banished from every competition in the world. “Maybe you air,” Terrapin responds, “but I kin head ou off wid sense.”
The boy in Bill Hudson’s famous photograph is Walter Gadsden. He was a sophomore at Parker High in Birmingham, six foot tall and fifteen years old. He wasn’t a marcher. He was a spectator. He came from a conservative black family that owned two newspapers in Birmingham and Atlanta that had been sharply critical of King. Gadsden had taken off school that afternoon to watch the spectacle unfolding around Kelly Ingram Park.
The officer in the picture is Dick Middleton. He was a modest and reserved man. “The K-9 Corps,” McWhorter writes, “was known for attracting straight arrows who wanted none of the scams and payoffs that often came with a regular beat. Nor were the dog handlers known for being race ideologues.” The dog’s name is Leo.
Now look at the faces of the black bystanders in the background. Shouldn’t they be surprised or horrified? They’re not. Next, look at the leash in Middleton’s hand. It’s taut, as if he’s trying to restrain Leo. And look at Gadsden’s left hand. He’s gripping Middleton on the forearm. Look at Gadsden’s left leg. He’s kicking Leo, isn’t he? Gadsden would say later that he had been raised around dogs and had been taught how to protect himself. “I automatically threw my knee up in front of the dog’s head,” he said. Gadsden wasn’t the martyr, passively leaning forward as if to say, “Take me, here I am.” He’s steadying himself, with a hand on Middleton, so he can deliver a sharper blow. The word around the movement, afterward, was that he’d broken Leo’s jaw. Hudson’s photograph is not at all what the world thought it was. It was a little bit of Brer Rabbit trickery.
You got to use what you got.
.
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_MrBelvedere_
Well-Known Member
“Sure, people got bit by the dogs,” Walker said, looking back twenty years later. “I’d say at least two or three. But a picture is worth a thousand words, dahlin’.”11
1 In William Nunnelley’s biography of Connor, titled Bull Connor, Nunnelley identifies the relevant section of the Birmingham city code as section 369, which prohibited serving “white and colored people” in the same room unless they were separated by a partition seven feet high with separate entrances.
2 My mother, who is West Indian, was taught Anansi stories as a child and told them to my brothers and me when we were young. Anansi is a rascal, who is not above cheating and sacrificing his own children (of which he invariably has many) for his own ends. My mother is a proper Jamaican lady, but on the subject of Anansi she becomes the picture of mischief.
3 In Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, Lawrence Levine writes: “The rabbit, like the slaves who wove tales about him, was forced to make do with what he had. His small tail, his natural portion of intellect—these would have to suffice, and to make them do he resorted to any means at his disposal—means which may have made him morally tainted but which allowed him to survive and even to conquer.”
4 The historian Taylor Branch writes of Walker: “Walker was a hotspur. As a New Jersey high school student in the 1940s, he had heard Paul Robeson say that if being for freedom and equality meant being a Red, then he was a Red. Walker promptly joined the Young Communist League. One of his high school papers was a five-year plan for a Soviet-type economy in the United States, and he dreamed of carrying out technically ingenious assassinations against leading segregationists.”
5 Walker continued: “We were just going to give ourselves up to the mob and felt that would appease them. Let them beat us to death, I guess.”
6 Pritchett actually came to Birmingham and warned Bull Connor about King and Walker. He wanted to teach Connor how to handle the civil rights tricksters. But Connor wasn’t inclined to listen. “I never will forget, when we entered his office,” Pritchett remembers, “his back was to us…some big executive chair, you know, and when he turned around, there was this little man—you know, in stature. But he had this boomin’ voice, and he was tellin’ me that they closed the course that day…said, ‘They can play golf, but we put concrete in the holes. They can’t get the ball in the holes.’ And this gave me some indication as to what type of man he was.”
7 This was a running theme with Walker. One time in Birmingham, the city filed an injunction against the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which meant that Walker had to appear in court. The question was: If Walker was tied up in court, how would he run the campaign? Walker’s answer was to register with the court and then have someone else show up in his place every day thereafter. Why not? He said, “You know, all niggers look alike anyway.”
8 Stewart was a huge figure in Birmingham. Every African-American teenager listened to his show. The second part of his message to his listeners was “Bring your toothbrushes, because lunch will be served.” “Toothbrushes” was code for “be dressed and prepared to spend a few nights in jail.”
9 Forman writes: “It seemed very cold, cruel, and calculating to be happy about police brutality coming down on innocent people…no matter what purpose it served.”
10 King thought long and hard before agreeing to use the children. He had to be talked into it by James Bevel. Their eventual conclusion was that if someone was old enough to belong to a church—to have made a decision of that importance to their life and soul—then they were old enough to fight for a cause of great importance to their life and soul. In the Baptist tradition, you could join a church once you were of school age. That meant that King approved of using children as young as six or seven against Bull Connor.
11 Walker makes a similar claim about the famous photographs of protesters being hit by Connor’s water cannons. The people in the photographs, he says, were spectators like Gadsden, not demonstrators. And they had been standing outside 16th Street Baptist Church all afternoon—on a typically humid Birmingham spring day. They were hot. “They had gathered in the park, which is a shaded area. And the firemen had set up their hoses at two corners of the park, one on Fifth Street and one on Sixth Street. And the mood was like a Roman holiday; it was festive. There wasn’t anybody among the spectators who were angry, and they had waited so long, and it was beginning to get dark now. So, somebody heaved a brick because they knew that—in fact, they had been saying, ‘Turn the water hose on. Turn the water hose on.’ And Bull Connor, then somebody threw a brick, and he started turning them on, see. So they just danced and played in the hose spray. This famous picture of them holding hands, it was just a frolic of them trying to stand up [unintelligible] and some of them were getting knocked down by the hose. They’d get up and run back and it would slide them along the pavement. Then they began bringing the hose up from the other corner, and instead of Negroes [unintelligible] they ran to the hose. It was a, it was a holiday for them. And this went on for a couple of hours. It was a joke, really. All in good humor and good spirit. Not any vitriolic response on the part of even the Negro spectators, which to me, again, was an example of the changing spirit, you know. When Negroes once had been cowed in the presence of policemen and maybe water hoses, here they had complete disdain for them. Made a joke out of it.”
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1 In William Nunnelley’s biography of Connor, titled Bull Connor, Nunnelley identifies the relevant section of the Birmingham city code as section 369, which prohibited serving “white and colored people” in the same room unless they were separated by a partition seven feet high with separate entrances.
2 My mother, who is West Indian, was taught Anansi stories as a child and told them to my brothers and me when we were young. Anansi is a rascal, who is not above cheating and sacrificing his own children (of which he invariably has many) for his own ends. My mother is a proper Jamaican lady, but on the subject of Anansi she becomes the picture of mischief.
3 In Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom, Lawrence Levine writes: “The rabbit, like the slaves who wove tales about him, was forced to make do with what he had. His small tail, his natural portion of intellect—these would have to suffice, and to make them do he resorted to any means at his disposal—means which may have made him morally tainted but which allowed him to survive and even to conquer.”
4 The historian Taylor Branch writes of Walker: “Walker was a hotspur. As a New Jersey high school student in the 1940s, he had heard Paul Robeson say that if being for freedom and equality meant being a Red, then he was a Red. Walker promptly joined the Young Communist League. One of his high school papers was a five-year plan for a Soviet-type economy in the United States, and he dreamed of carrying out technically ingenious assassinations against leading segregationists.”
5 Walker continued: “We were just going to give ourselves up to the mob and felt that would appease them. Let them beat us to death, I guess.”
6 Pritchett actually came to Birmingham and warned Bull Connor about King and Walker. He wanted to teach Connor how to handle the civil rights tricksters. But Connor wasn’t inclined to listen. “I never will forget, when we entered his office,” Pritchett remembers, “his back was to us…some big executive chair, you know, and when he turned around, there was this little man—you know, in stature. But he had this boomin’ voice, and he was tellin’ me that they closed the course that day…said, ‘They can play golf, but we put concrete in the holes. They can’t get the ball in the holes.’ And this gave me some indication as to what type of man he was.”
7 This was a running theme with Walker. One time in Birmingham, the city filed an injunction against the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which meant that Walker had to appear in court. The question was: If Walker was tied up in court, how would he run the campaign? Walker’s answer was to register with the court and then have someone else show up in his place every day thereafter. Why not? He said, “You know, all niggers look alike anyway.”
8 Stewart was a huge figure in Birmingham. Every African-American teenager listened to his show. The second part of his message to his listeners was “Bring your toothbrushes, because lunch will be served.” “Toothbrushes” was code for “be dressed and prepared to spend a few nights in jail.”
9 Forman writes: “It seemed very cold, cruel, and calculating to be happy about police brutality coming down on innocent people…no matter what purpose it served.”
10 King thought long and hard before agreeing to use the children. He had to be talked into it by James Bevel. Their eventual conclusion was that if someone was old enough to belong to a church—to have made a decision of that importance to their life and soul—then they were old enough to fight for a cause of great importance to their life and soul. In the Baptist tradition, you could join a church once you were of school age. That meant that King approved of using children as young as six or seven against Bull Connor.
11 Walker makes a similar claim about the famous photographs of protesters being hit by Connor’s water cannons. The people in the photographs, he says, were spectators like Gadsden, not demonstrators. And they had been standing outside 16th Street Baptist Church all afternoon—on a typically humid Birmingham spring day. They were hot. “They had gathered in the park, which is a shaded area. And the firemen had set up their hoses at two corners of the park, one on Fifth Street and one on Sixth Street. And the mood was like a Roman holiday; it was festive. There wasn’t anybody among the spectators who were angry, and they had waited so long, and it was beginning to get dark now. So, somebody heaved a brick because they knew that—in fact, they had been saying, ‘Turn the water hose on. Turn the water hose on.’ And Bull Connor, then somebody threw a brick, and he started turning them on, see. So they just danced and played in the hose spray. This famous picture of them holding hands, it was just a frolic of them trying to stand up [unintelligible] and some of them were getting knocked down by the hose. They’d get up and run back and it would slide them along the pavement. Then they began bringing the hose up from the other corner, and instead of Negroes [unintelligible] they ran to the hose. It was a, it was a holiday for them. And this went on for a couple of hours. It was a joke, really. All in good humor and good spirit. Not any vitriolic response on the part of even the Negro spectators, which to me, again, was an example of the changing spirit, you know. When Negroes once had been cowed in the presence of policemen and maybe water hoses, here they had complete disdain for them. Made a joke out of it.”
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