Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

July 10, 2016

The Dallas cops

Filed under: police brutality,Texas — louisproyect @ 3:54 pm

Before I transferred down to the Houston branch of the SWP in 1973, I worried a bit about the reign of terror that was a product of KKK collusion with the police department as this photo from a Newsweek article indicated.

06-copandcar_low

It was not just Marxists who were apprehensive about the cops. One morning as I was about to enter the Texas Commerce Bank headquarters in downtown Houston where I was working as a programmer, I spotted a cop telling a white man in a suit and tie that he had a bullet with his name on it. Who knows what prompted that? Jaywalking, I guess.

If Houston was bad, Dallas was no bargain either. About a year into my stay in Houston, I went up to Dallas with a couple of comrades to sell subscriptions to the Militant newspaper at the University of Texas in Arlington, a campus located in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. We had contacts in the student government office who gave us a map of the campus and their blessings. When we stopped back there to say goodbye, they had a panic-stricken look on their face. A campus cop was sitting by the door and out of our sight when we walked in. He ordered us off the campus after recording our ID’s. About a month later, I got a letter from the Dallas-Fort Worth police department telling me that there was a standing order for my arrest if I ever tried to sell the Militant on campus again.

When I was bringing my wife up to date on the Dallas shootings, I mentioned the incident about the Houston cop and his threat to a solid citizen. She was shocked. Afterwards, I thought about how much was being said now about the Dallas police department being a model of race relations, with an African-American chief. I thought that it might be worthwhile to search Nexis for Dallas and police brutality to see what comes up. If Micah Johnson stated that he wanted to kill white cops, I wondered how familiar he was with the city’s history and whether it made much difference with a department that had been “reformed”. It is a very old story and one engraved in minds of the city’s African-American population, I am sure.

  1. The New York Times
    July 6, 1980
    Race Tensions in Dallas Focus On Police Shootings

To a lot of people, the problems began last October, when a 39-year-old black man being held hostage in an automobile was shot to death by the police as he dashed from the car toward freedom.

No action was taken against the officers who had mistakenly shot Lee Douglas Page, and no action has been taken against any police officers involved in a growing number of shooting incidents involving minorities since then.

Recently the Dallas City Council turned down a request for a civilian review board with subpoena power to investigate allegations of police misconduct. The three minority members of the Council voted ”yes,” while the eight white members voted ”no,” prompting an angry walkout by many of the blacks in the audience.

It was a reaction to a question that has caused more black-white antagonism than any issue in recent memory here. Dallas is one of several cities where tensions between minorities and the local police have grown this summer, but it is one of the few where emotions have been focused so strongy on a single issue.

2. The Washington Post
July 5, 1991
Beating of Suspect Filmed in Texas

A Fort Worth police officer beat a handcuffed car-theft suspect with a baton at least 28 times Wednesday afternoon, and a woman captured the incident on videotape.

Officer E. J. Parnell, a three-year veteran of the police department, was suspended from patrol duties.

Police Chief Thomas Windham said Parnell may face criminal charges.

The victim, Ernest Anderson, 21, was trying to escape from a moving police car when the officer stopped along a busy interstate highway and began striking him, police said. Anderson was treated at a Fort Worth hospital before being jailed.

The videotape, made by an unidentified woman standing in a friend’s backyard, shows Parnell hitting Anderson for two minutes using a double-handed, overhead swinging motion. Windham said it appears the officer used excessive force, although many of the blows missed the man. “Obviously the baton is being used in a manner which we do not train,” Windham said.

3. The New York Times
February 21, 1994
Man’s Shooting by Texas Police Provokes Anger

The 22-minute videotape, taken from a camera mounted on the dashboard of a Texas state trooper’s car, is a bit grainy. But the scuffle it depicts one night last fall between a black man and two white police officers comes across clearly enough, especially the bullets hitting the black man as he is running away.

The footage of what began as a routine traffic stop emerged recently in a courtroom in this small city in rural East Texas. The tape, and the legal proceedings surrounding it, have outraged many black people here and even caused some whites to express anger and dismay.

A grand jury cleared both officers of wrongdoing last fall, but the F.B.I. announced last week that its Dallas office was investigating the incident for “possible civil rights violations.”

On Friday, a Henderson County jury convicted the black man, 28-year-old Lorenzo Colston, of two charges of assaulting a peace officer. Mr. Colston, who was shot in the right elbow and buttocks, paralyzing his arm and causing him to limp, faces up to 10 years in prison on each conviction.

The regional chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has seized on the footage as a portrait of police brutality as vivid as the beating of Rodney G. King, which was videotaped in Los Angeles in 1991. In one sense, the Colston tape is even more graphic; it has a soundtrack, which includes the officers discussing the baton blows that they delivered to Mr. Colston and one of them warning Mr. Colston’s companion early in the incident, “It wouldn’t take much to set me off, all right?”

Repeated viewing of the videotape strongly suggests that Mr. Colston, who was intoxicated and at times appears highly belligerent, would not have been injured had he followed the officers’ instructions. But the tape also seems to make clear that the unarmed Mr. Colston posed no threat to the officers at the moment he was shot, which followed nearly a minute of fighting in which Mr. Colston, using his fists, frequently got the better of the officers.

4. The Guardian,
March 18, 2015
Video released of Dallas police shooting mentally ill black man dead at home

Footage show two officers fatally shooting Jason Harrison, who was holding a screwdriver, within minutes of arriving at home in response to emergency call

Video footage has emerged of Dallas police shooting dead a mentally ill black man holding a screwdriver six seconds after encountering him at his home.

According to a legal filing, Jason Harrison’s mother, Shirley Marshall, called emergency services on the morning of 14 June 2014, telling the dispatcher that her son was bipolar and schizophrenic and that she was worried about him, and he might need to be hospitalised.

Within two minutes of the officers’ arrival at the house, Harrison lay dying. He was killed by six gunshot wounds to the chest, arm and back, an autopsy found.

5. NY Times
June 8, 2015

Jarring Image of Police’s Use of Force at Texas Pool Party

McKINNEY, Tex. — No lives were lost. The incident played out at a suburban pool party, not an urban neighborhood struggling with crime and drugs.

But perhaps it was that suburban setting that helped make the images so powerful and disturbing. Now a video of a police officer pointing a gun at teenagers in bathing suits and shoving a young black girl’s face into the ground has become the latest flash point in relations between the police and minorities.

The cellphone video, taken at the community pool in Craig Ranch, a racially diverse subdivision north of Dallas, has set off another debate over race and police tactics, with activists calling for the officer to be fired and others arguing that the blame should fall at least in part on the teenagers.

6. The Christian Science Monitor
August 12, 2015
Officer fired over shooting of unarmed Texas athlete. Is that enough?;

Dozens of protesters showed up outside the Arlington, Texas, police station Tuesday night to demand Officer Brad Miller be charged with a crime.

The Texas police officer who shot and killed an unarmed college football player during a suspected burglary last week was fired on Tuesday for his actions and could face criminal charges.

Officer Brad Miller, who was still undergoing training with the department at the time, fatally shot 19-year-old Christian Taylor at a Dallas-area car dealership early Friday morning.

About 60 demonstrators showed up outside the Arlington police headquarters on Tuesday night to demand that Mr. Miller be charged with a crime. Many held signs with Mr. Taylor’s name on them or signs reading “Unarmed? Don’t shoot!” The protest was organized by the group Mothers Against Police Brutality.

“There are no winners in this situation,” said Christian’s father, Adrian Taylor Sr., to Reuters. “No matter what decision is made, it doesn’t bring my son back.”

After being called to the scene of the suspected burglary on the morning of August 7, Miller pursued Christian Taylor through the broken glass doors of the car dealership showroom without telling his supervising officer, according to Arlington Police Chief Will Johnson.

Rather than setting up a perimeter around the showroom, Miller confronted Taylor directly and ordered him to get down on the ground, an order with which Taylor did not comply.

When Taylor began to advance toward Miller, the officer drew his service weapon and fired it at Taylor, who is believed to have been about 7 to 10 feet away. He fired a total of four shots. When Miller’s field training officer, who had followed Miller into the showroom, heard the first gunshot, he initially thought the noise came from Miller’s taser.

May 15, 2015

My days in Houston on assignment for the Socialist Workers Party

Filed under: Texas,Trotskyism — louisproyect @ 4:34 pm

In the May 4th issue of the Militant, there’s a peculiar article but probably not that much more peculiar than many that have appeared there in recent years, as the tiny cult enters its death throes.

Titled “SWP’s 45 years of rich political history in Texas”, it gives the impression that the party is stronger than ever even though the article is basically a farewell to Texas:

“We can join in increasing labor resistance today,” Warshell said, “like the strike by Steelworkers in area oil refineries and widespread proletarian struggles against police brutality. There are new openings for communists today to build our movement and recruit.

“We’re leaving Houston and closing the branch here,” he said, “but as the class struggle deepens and the party grows, we will be back.”

Increasing labor resistance and leaving Houston? How do these two things go together? Who knows? Who cares?

The SWP once did have a remarkable presence in Houston and the rest of Texas that is referred to briefly:

The SWP and Young Socialist Alliance in Texas grew out of the fight against Washington’s war against Vietnam in the 1960s, said Joel Britton, an SWP leader from Oakland, California. Party branches were built in both Houston and Austin.

As a result of the party’s growing public presence, it became a target of the Ku Klux Klan, as were Black rights’ fighters, anti-war activists, and KPFT, the local Pacifica radio station.

“Houston’s KKK operated with true impunity, tied in with the police force, the sheriff’s department,” and other parts of the so-called justice system, Britton said.

“One of the high points in the fight against Klan attacks was when Debbie Leonard, SWP candidate for mayor in 1971, debated a top Klan leader — not once but twice,” Britton said.

But most of the article is the standard recitation of the party’s “turn to industry” that in fact has left it not only incapable of continuing in Texas but has sealed its doom everywhere else. In a normal organization, there would be feedback mechanisms to allow it to reverse course but in this bizarre cult that is led by someone more than a bit tetched, there is no turning back.

I arrived in Houston in the winter of 1973 in order to help organize a faction fight against a sizable minority in the branch that supported the Ernest Mandel-led wing of the Fourth International that supported guerrilla warfare in Latin America. After a year or so in Houston, the sixties radicalization began to disappear before our very eyes as we scrambled around for new sources of recruitment. It was around this time when I began to feel more and more alienated from the party and its stifling peer pressure both socially and politically that the thoughts of dropping out began to take shape. I only regret that I hung around for another four years.

In any case, you will see the pages from my unpublished memoir about the time I spent in Houston. As is always the case, I am free to post this material under the provisions of fair use legislation, plus rights afforded me as the copyrighted author of the text and the full permission of the artist to circulate the memoir.

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March 16, 2010

Life in Houston

Filed under: Texas — louisproyect @ 7:51 pm

The city of the damned

The media is all abuzz over the truly outrageous proposals of the ultrarightist-dominated Texas Board of Education. The NY Times reported on March 12:

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

“Let’s face it, capitalism does have a negative connotation,” said one conservative member, Teri Leo. “You know, ‘capitalist pig!’ ”

In reporting on this development, the outstanding Harper’s Magazine linked to a collection of items about Texas that had appeared on their monthly Index, a roundup of startling factoids—always backed up by a citation. Here’s a few that should give you an idea of the kind of swamp from which these toxic weeds sprang:

  1. Number of Texas high schools that offered Bible courses as electives last year: 25
  2. Number of these courses that broke the law by being primarily devotional and sectarian, according to a September study: 22
  3. Amount appropriated by the governor of Texas in June to set up border-watching webcams: $5,000,000
  4. Number of U.S. counties where more than a fifth of “residents” are prison inmates that are in Texas: 10
  5. Rank of Texas among states in which the largest percentage of citizens lack health insurance : 1

All this brings me back to the time I spent in Texas in the early 70s as a Trotskyist on assignment. I reported on the confrontation between the party and the KKK here. I think that it would be worth it to give you a flavor of daily life in Houston that was less dramatic than that but related to it nevertheless. These are some random reminiscences about what it was like to live in Houston in 1973 and 1974.

Since this was before the SWP launched its “turn toward industry”, I still could work as a programmer without having people look dagger eyes at me. So within a month after arriving I had a job at Texas Commerce Bank (TCB) reporting to Billy Penrod, a 50ish Gary Cooper look-alike who had been a football player at Texas A&M until a knee injury forced him off the team. Billy once told me that he came from Gonzalez, Texas, a town he described openly as a “Sundown” town although he didn’t use that word. He put it this way: “Louis, if you were a nigger and found yourself in Gonzalez, you’d better not be seen on the street after dark.” Here’s how the preface to James Loewen’s recent book “Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism” put it:

Anna is a town of about 7,000 people, including adjoining Jonesboro. The twin towns lie about 35 miles north of Cairo, in southern Illinois. In 1909, in the aftermath of a horrific nearby “spectacle lynching,” Anna and Jonesboro expelled their African Americans. Both cities have been all-white ever since. Nearly a century later, “Anna” is still considered by its residents and by citizens of nearby towns to mean “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed,” the acronym the convenience store clerk confirmed in 2001.

Unlike my native New York City, Houston took its jaywalking laws seriously. I was warned by comrades not to ever try to cross the street when the light was red. I got an idea of what frightened them one morning as I approached the front door of TCB and heard the traffic cop telling some guy in a business suit who had gotten on his wrong side: “Mr., I got a bullet in this here gun with your name on it so you better not give me no lip.”

My first year or so at TCB involved a fair amount of hazing until people got used to me. I might have been a Yankee and a red but I knew well enough to keep my politics to myself. I worried especially about the guy who sat in a cubicle opposite mine who used to read the bible everyday at lunch. I now understood why people had coined the term “Bible Belt”.

Whenever I got restless and went to a nearby shopping mall to find a book to read, the pickings were really slim. On the tables at my neighborhood Barnes and Noble, you’d might find some vaguely interesting postmodernist novel or a quasi-Marxist analysis of the pirate trade, etc. but down in Houston it was wall-to-wall “inspirational” texts with titles like “How Jesus can make you rich”. The obsession with getting rich in Houston was widespread. If Jesus couldn’t help you, you’d be able to pick from a thousand different books on how to make a million dollars in real estate or franchise businesses that everybody referred to as bidness.

I lived in the Montrose neighborhood, not far from downtown. Montrose was home to Houston’s bohemia, what there was of it, and the gay community. On the main drags, Montrose and West Alabama Boulevards, you’d see lots of adult (pronounced Ay-dult, emphasis on Ay) bookstores, topless dancing clubs, Burger Kings and Liquor Stores. My girlfriend Debby had been working as a topless dancer until the SWP organizer told her to cut it out. Yes, our branch had a rather heterodox membership.

One of the more interesting branch members native to Houston was a guy named Gene Lantz who was living in a commune in Houston as a kind of benign Charles Manson who slept with various female members of the household. They struck me less as flower children than as Desperate Housewives. All had become separated from their husbands and suburban lifestyles and were eager to blend in with the motley crew of Trotskyists that had colonized their city.

One day Gene brought me by to visit an old friend of his who was famous for keeping a 700 pound gorilla in his living room. Not quite in his living room, but in a cage that abutted it. The animal’s pen was at the end of a twenty foot tunnel that led toward the living room and was in the habit of running down the tunnel gathering speed until he careened against the bars. The owner got a big kick out of this since it tended to scare the bejeesus out of first-time visitors like me. I fantasized occasionally about the gorilla getting his hands on his captor and ripping his face off.

One of my best friends outside the party was a young woman who had graduated from the University of Texas and had taken a job at TCB. Her boyfriend, like my boss, had been a football player whose college career had been cut short by a knee injury. She was the first person at work I felt free to discuss my politics with but she was more amused than shocked by my beliefs. It was close enough in time to the big SDS goings on at the U. of Texas for her to understand where I was coming from. I used to spend lots of time hanging out with the two of them at their rented house in Montrose drinking gin and tonics and shooting the breeze. They tried to hook me up with a friend of theirs named Dana something who was a reporter for the local television network. We never really hit it off but I was glad to spend time with her occasionally, a welcome break from the increasingly cult-like feel of the SWP branch.

Perhaps the greatest lesson I got from living in Houston for close to three years was how out-of-touch the Trotskyist leadership was with conditions on the ground in the USA. The city was swept up by a mad appetite for getting rich and the unionized workers, mostly in the oil refineries we first considered colonizing long before the turn, were totally into the cowboy life-style of the Lone Star state whether they were Black or white. Everybody dreamed to have a pickup truck, a four-bedroom house and a weekend ranch if they ever got that promotion that would afford it. I found my socialist ideals increasingly out of whack with the reality and sooner or later the contradiction would be too great to bear. Within three years the SWP would discover the industrial working class and make “petty bourgeois” elements like me so unwelcome that resignation would be the only acceptable course of action. More about that on another day.

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