Michael Steven Smith’s Notebook

Michael Smith’s review of The Assassination of Fred Hampton
[From Law & Disorder on WBAI 99.5fm NYC]

THE ASSASSINATION OF FRED HAMPTON: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther

By Jeffrey Haas, Lawrence Hill Books, $26.95, 376 pages, index

This is a remarkable work, a well told tale, a true crime story, a page turning legal political thriller which is as important for us to comprehend now as it was in the sixties.

Forty years ago this December 4th, National Lawyers Guild attorney Jeffrey Haas was in a Chicago jail interviewing Fred Hampton’s fiancee Deborah Johnson.  She was in her nightgown, pregnant, shaking and sobbing, barely having survived  the hail of 80 bullets that came into her apartment and into her bedroom, just four hours before.   She had  been sleeping at 4 in the morning next to Fred Hampton, the extraordinary young leader of the Chicago Black Panthers. She described to Haas how the police pulled her from the room as Fred lay unconscious on their bed. She heard one of the officers say, “He’s still alive.”   Next, two gunshots. A second officer said “He’s good and dead now.” She looked at Jeff and asked, “What can you do?”

Haas tells the story, interwoven beautifully with his own personal and political biography, of a truly amazing piece of movement lawyering. It took thirteen years of grueling litigation and political agitation outside the courtroom.  Finally, after an l8 month trial, which they lost, and an appeal to the Federal Circuit Court (Hampton v. Hanrahan, 600 F. 2d 600), which they won in a famous civil rights decision,  Haas, Flint Taylor, his Peoples Law Office collective, Dennis Cunningham, and Morty Stavis from the Center for Constitutional Rights,  finally nailed the FBI, the Cook County States Attorney Edward Hanrahan, and the Chicago police for their summary execution of the exceptionally promising - he was only 2l at the time - young black leader. “Who knows what he may have become, if they hadn’t killed him,” his mother Iberia Hampton told Jeff.

FBI head J. Edgar Hoover had an idea of what Hampton might become. He was concerned, in his words written in a Cointelpro directive, about “the rise of a new black Messiah.”  King and Malcolm had already been murdered.   Haas and Taylor uncovered the story about how the government killed Hampton and remarkably, at the end of the day, made them all admit guilt by paying his parents a wrongful death settlement.   It took over 37,000 hours of work.  What a truly amazing piece of lawyering, especially since Jeff was barely out of the University of Chicago law school at the time he undertook to represent the family, and Flint was still a law student at Northwestern. And more amazing still, considering that their law collective had no resources to speak of and were up against a mendacious stalling government whose litigation fund was unlimited.

Lenny Bruce used to quip that “Chicago is so corrupt it is thrilling.” It was run by the machine of Mayor Richard Daley, head of the Cook County Democratic Party, his true source of power.  The machine appointed the judges, investigators, “independent panels”, prosecutors, and police.  But Jeff, just out of law school, and Flint, still attending Northwestern, with little financial resources,  took them on, exposing the conspiracy to assassinate Hampton, the raid and the subsequent cover-up.

Fred Hampton, even at 2l, was an accomplished person. He worked a factory job and saved money to pay his college tuition.  Like Malcolm, he wanted to be a lawyer.   Fred was by all accounts a master orator.  He studied Malcolm’s speeches.  While in high school he founded a youth chapter of the NAACP.   When he turned l8 in l966 he refused to register for the draft, like Muhammad Ali, who famously said, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Vietcong.  No Vietcong ever called me nigger.”     Hampton was well read, rising at least two hours before facing the day to read Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Mao, Marx, Lenin and DuBois.  Like them, he understood that “a revolution is a class struggle.  It was one class - the oppressed - versus those other classes - the oppressor.  Indeed it was this sort of radicalism - the advocacy of black power and socialism - that made him dangerous.  And Hoover knew it.  Black power for Hampton, as Haas  observes, was “not a tool to attack whites, but … a concept to bring blacks together and build their confidence.”

Hampton was targeted by the police and arrested several times on technical traffic violations.  After being arrested for “mob action” he was put on the FBI’s Key Agitator Index, Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Ratner on Talking with Sartre, Conversations and Debates
[from the radio show Law & Disorder on WBAI 99.5fm NYC]

Michael Smith and I have been reading John Gerassi’s new book, Talking with Sartre, Conversations and Debates.[1] The book is a shortened form of three years of on and off conversations Gerassi had with Sartre in the early 1970’s.  The book is utterly remarkable. It is as if you are  seated at the table with Sartre and asking him and debating with him questions on Marxism, existentialism, his life with Simone de Beauvoir, his depression, his plays, novels, political activism, and views about anti-colonial and revolutionary violence both before and after a revolution. In this short piece I write only about this latter subject—taken from the book– in which he takes positions which are almost never found in writings on the political left in the United States today. Even if one disagrees with Sartre, which Michael Smith and I do, it is a timely discussion in today’s world.

What Makes a Revolutionary?

Gerassi and Sartre discuss what makes a revolutionary. Sartre had great respect for Che and seems to have agreed with Che that “a true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” However, Sartre also said that a revolutionary was possessed of both “hatred and love.”  Hating injustice and hating the enemy. Sartre believed it was necessary to hate the enemy in order for a revolution to succeed. As Sartre said,

“That’s very important hatred. Without it one stops too soon.  It happened in the French Revolution; I think it happens in every revolution, when those who do not hate the enemy suddenly say, Enough already, and stop short of accomplishing the complete restructuring of society, and the result is that the revolution is betrayed.” (56)

Executions in Cuba After the Revolution

Sartre then applies some of his thinking to the Cuban Revolution—at least from an ethical point of view. Gerassi asks Sartre about Fidel putting on trial the Batista torturers where the evidence of their guilt was overwhelming. Gerassi says that even Time magazine claimed the trials were a catharsis and saved the country from a bloodbath of vengeance. Presumably, this was because the people would have taken justice in their own hands and enacted vengeance without trials. But then 365 torturers were executed and that showed that Fidel was “not just a bourgeois reformer but a genuine revolutionary” and Time and the United States condemned him.  Gerassi then asks what Sartre thinks of the executions when all knew including Fidel that the real culprits were the owners of United Fruit, IT&T and other corporations for who Batista exploited the people of Cuba.
Sartre answers “that under an ideal situation, the torturers could have been rehabilitated.” But he agreed with Fidel that at

“that moment a bloodbath had to be avoided, and these torturers were scum, after all, so if executing them for their proven crimes, even if the president of IT&T is ultimately responsible, will avoid that bloodbath, then ethically their execution was justified….”

However, Sartre points out that had the trials taken place a year later and there was no risk of a bloodbath, “then no, their executions would not have been justified.” (98-99)

Counter Terror Against Terror

Sartre was consistent on the question of the morality of counter terror against terror. (This is not to say he recommended it as a tactic.)  He supported the FLN in fighting the French for the liberation of Algeria even if that meant killings on the streets of Paris. In the context he even believed the Baader-Meinhof group was “totally justified.”  As Sartre says, Read the rest of this entry »

A Salute to My Friend Dianne Feeley on Her 70th Birthday:

I got to New York City from Detroit in l97l to work in the publicity and sales department of Pathfinder Press.   Dianne was already there.  She came to New York from California to work with The Catholic Worker people. She knew Dorothy Day.   She left the Catholic Worker movement on the issue of abortion, becoming a revolutionary socialist and early feminist.  She joined the Socialist Workers Party, which in those days was a pretty good and promising outfit, and went to work at Pathfinder.

Pathfinder published a number of early feminist titles on history, literature, and anthropology.  Dianne was there during its halcyon days.  George Novack, one of the “New York Intellectuals” that Alan Wald wrote about,  was an editor. He was very fond and admiring of Dianne.  His companion Evelyn Reed wrote Women’s Evolution, about the pre-history of women, and their great accomplishments in advancing humanity.  Also an editor was George Breitman, who had come from Detroit and had edited Malcolm X Speaks and written Malcolm X:  The Evolution of a Revolutionary.  He too greatly appreciated Dianne as a young and thoughtful comrade.

We published books on the labor movement, like Farrell Dobb’s 4 volume history of the l934 Minneapolis strikes and the rise of the Teamsters and Fred Halstead’s definited history on the anti-Vietnam war movement, Out Now, Ernest Mandel’s Introduction to Marxist Economic  Theory, and books on John Coltrane and Lenny Bruce.  We also published more pamphlets than practically any other publisher except the government.

It was Dianne’s job to promote the books and pamphlets and mine to sell them.

I remember my first day.  Alighting from the 9th St. cross town bus, and walking over to our building at 4l0 West Street, which had been  an old ship repair building next to an elevated highway. We had raised the money and bought and fixed up the place.  It was on l0th St. and the West Side Highway, which in those days was a seedy industrial venue.  Now of course the neighborhood is quite fashionable.  The old SWP headquarters has been knocked down and in its place sit two toney all glass buildings by the famed archetect Richard Meirs.

But back then,  we, because all the work was paid for and performed by party comrades, redesigned the 5 story wreck.  In it we had Pathfinder’s office, as well as the offices of the SWP, the Young Socialist Alliance, the International Socialist Review, the magazine we published, the editorial offices of The Militant, our newspaper, the editorial offices of Intercontinental Press, a weekly Marxist news magazine, and the editorial and business offices of Pathfinder Press.  Our warehouse from where we shipped cartons of books was next door in a separate outbuilding.  Dianne was part of what we all proudly thought was “the big red machine.”

I opened the door, there was but one small sign for security purposes, identified myself, and was buzzed in and told to walk up to the 4th floor.  There I found Dianne in an inner windowless office, sitting behind one of four desks. The two others were occupied by Karolyn Kerry and Louise Armstrong. They both smoked.  Alot.  Dianne had the third desk and the forth was mine.  All mine.  I entered the hazy room, introduced myself, and sat down amidst the cloud.  There we spent several years and got to be friends and comrades.  And we got out a lot of excellent literature to the movement across the country.  Tens of thousands of titles.

Dianne moved on to Pittsburgh, going into industry, and then on to Detroit, where you all were lucky to be with her.  I remained in New York CIty, where I am active with The Marxist School and the Center for Constitutional Rights and occasionally write for Against the Current.    We were both expelled in the early 80s by a degenerated SWP, an act of liberation as we now see it.  After we were kicked out the kicker outers adorned our building with a huge 4 story mural of various revolutionaries.   Dianne and I joked that it was sort of a Dorian Grey event, for as they grew more into a shriveled sect, their building was festooned by the working class’ finest.

Dianne went on to do fine work for the movement, in her plant as a union activist, and in Solidarity, as is being recounted tonight.  She is an admirable accomplished woman of grace and kindness and of superior intelligence.   She and my wife Debby have remained on the same political wavelegnth for all these years.  We so much enjoy seeing her and hosting her when she comes to New York City.  We are sorry not to be here with you.

Dianne, you’re wonderful.

With comradely greetings,

Michael Smith
New York, NY
November l5, 2009

Remembering Alan Berkman

    After battling recurrent cancers for half his life,  Alan Berkman died in Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York City around seven o’clock in the evening of June 5, 2009.  He was under a death sentence with a cancer that was going to kill him.  He chose to try a risky stem cell transplant procedure where he first had to have chemo-therapy to knock out his own stem cells and then replace them with the stem cells of a donor.  Even finding the donor was difficult, the holocaust having significantly narrowed the gene pool of persons who might have a match.  One was found.  Alan entered the hospital knowing he might not get out. He understood what his doctor’s were telling him.  He himself was a doctor, a sixties graduate of Columbia’s school for physicians and surgeons and now a professor there in the school of public health.

 Alan’s first was struck by cancer when he was in prison.  He did eight years, four of them in solitary.  He diagnosed himself.  But to no avail.  The authorities would do nothing, as if they wanted him to die.  They must have hated Alan. A communist.  A Jew. A doctor.  A supporter of blacks and latinos and native Americans at the second battle of Wounded Knee.   They knew his history.  It was quite a dossier.  A sixties radical.  SDS.  Active in the anti-war movement.    A practising doctor in New York’s poor neighborhoods. Forced underground for years because he wouldn’t give up the name of a woman he treated for a gunshot wound she got in a failed Brinks truck robbery that killed two cops and a security guard in Rockland County.  Then arrested and convicted and doing hard time  in a maximum security prison. He helped a cop killer.  And now he is in our hands.   But Alan was unbent and unbowed.  He was tough.

Finally his family and attorneys got him medical attention.  He told me they operated on him while handcuffed to a gurney.  Deep stomach surgery where the muscles need to be cut.  When he awoke from anesthesia they took the handcuffs off and made him get up off the gurney and walk.  He got cancer again before getting out on parol.  Amazingly Bill Kunstler and Ron Kuby prevented the State from taking away his medical license.  He started working as an AIDS doctor in the South Bronx.

 That’s when I met him.  About twenty years ago.  He helped me on a case.  We drove out to Brooklyn to see the client and then had dinner, the first of many.  A steak and a martini.  Alan and Barbara, Debby and me.  We four.  Good friends and comrades.

We went back to that restaurant a couple of weeks ago, just before Alan checked into Memorial.  We thought we would see him the next week at the event honoring him and Dr. David Hoos for co- founding HEALTH GAP.  But that was not to be.  His doctors couldn’t give him the time and he was whisked into the hospital for first the chemo and then the transplant.  Alan got the new cells but died before they could take root.

When HEALTH GAP was formed with the help of ACT UP and HOUSING WORKS the anti-viral aids medicine ”cocktail” cost ten to fifteen thousand dollars a year.  Big pharma controlled manufacturing and distribution with their intellectual property rights.  Alan helped change that , not having the requisite respect for private property. Now the drugs cost about eight-seven dollars a year and some four million people are taking the medicine, prolonging their lives.

Dr. Alan Berkman in 2006 with AIDS activists from Rwanda.

Alan wasn’t religious.  Religion to him was superstition.  Being part of a sect was too narrow and confining for Alan.  The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition.  The historian Isaac Deutscher had a phrase for it, “the non-Jewish Jew.”  Alan was in line with the great Jewish heretics, rebels, and revolutionaries of modern thought;  Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Freud, and Einstein.  They too went beyond the boundaries of Judaism, finding it too narrow, archaic, constricting.

I don’t wish to stretch the comparison.  Alan was not so much a radical thinker as a man of action.  But his intellectual understanding - and he was well educated and widely read - powered his activity.  He had in common with these great thinkers the idea that for knowledge to be real it must be acted upon. As Marx observed:  “Hitherto philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point however is to change it.”

Like his intellectual predecessors Alan saw reality in a state of flux, as dynamic not static, and he was aware of the constantly changing and contradictory nature of society.  Alan was essentially an optimist and shared with the great Jewish revolutionaries and optimistic belief in humanity and a belief in the solidarity of humankind.

The stem cell procedure failed to save him.   Alan Berkman has passed, but his work and his example have taken root.  Goodbye dear friend.  We all remember you with the two best words in our language: Love and Solidarity.

Michael Steven Smith

New York City
June 6, 2009

Dear Friends,

I heard Malcolm speak when he came to The University of Wisconsin in 1963.  He had yet to break with The Nation of Islam and was protected by several of their bodyguards.  All were dressed nattily in suits and small knotted narrow neckties.  Malcolm had light skin and reddish hair.  “Detroit Red” they had called him when he lived there.   He spoke in a cadence which was musical.  I can’t remember the details of what he said.   The short of it was that he counseled fighting back.  He had a wonderful sense of humor.  A lovely and courageous man, I thought then.   He once posed for a photo in front of a Levy’s rye bread advertisement which proclaimed “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s.”  Despite my atheism, I identified with him, supported him, followed his evolution into a revolutionary and supporter of socialism.  I smiled when he said, reflecting on reforming capitalism, that a chicken can never lay a duck egg.  And if it ever did, well,  it would be a pretty revolutionary chicken.   A friend of mine had a photo of him on her apartment wall and said she loved Malcolm.  I knew what she meant.

I remember clearly the night Malcolm X was murdered in the winter of l965, a cold February night.   I had come home late to my law school dorm at NYU and picked up the New York Times, which you could get after midnight.  The story of his death was on the front page.  Crushing.  The true story emerged later, the story of Co-intellpro and how the government assassinated Black leaders in order to “prevent the rise of a new messiah,” in J.Edgar Hoover’s words.

It was a blow we are still reeling from.  Imagine the level of consciousness and organization we in America would be at if Malcolm was still here, instead of say Reverend Al Sharpton, whom the media foists on us as a leader.  Or, truth be told, Barack Obama, who just appointed General MacChrystal, an assassin, to head the U.S. imperial forces in Afganistan.  Obama, promoted by modern advertising, as Chomsky has written, foisted  upon us as “Brand Obama”, in Chris Hedges description, a Black man with the keys to the car, now driving the empire, misleading, widely, for the time being, supported by both those who profit from empire and those who don’t.

Two years later in l967, I moved to Detroit.  A real Black nationalist place.  I appreciated that Malcolm had lived there.  When Pathfinder Press published Malcolm Speaks, edited by George Breitman and then a second seminal volume by Breitman, Malcolm X:  The Evolution of a Revolutionary,  I got them carried by the central book distributor in the area and they appeared in many bookstores Detroit.  Later when I worked for Pathfinder in New York City I helped get them distributed nationwide.   They are still in print. Malcolm has been relegated to an icon, the fate as Lenin wrote, of many revolutionaries.  His picture adorns a U.S. postage stamp.  This is now.  Who can tell the future?   I think it is likely that what Malcolm stood for, Black consciousness, uinity in action, identity with those struggling against imperialism worldwide, independence from the two capitalist parties, self-defense by any means necessary, a deep sense of love, as Che said,  those ideas will have a time to come to the fore.

A birthday salute to our brother Malcolm X,

Michael Smith

5.l9.09

Harvey Goldberg brought to life the history of social movements in Europe and much of the world to thousands of students during his teaching career at Oberlin College, Ohio State University and at the University of Wisconsin. His passionate and electrifying lectures regularly filled halls to maximum capacity. Many of his lectures were recorded. Below please find one of my favorites:

Ideology of Private Property 2/25/1977

Where did the idea of Private Property come from and how did the world work before then? What has become of mankind since the concept took hold. What beliefs do you hold regarding the sanctity and persistence ofprivate property and what would happen if you gave up those beliefs? These are some of the questions that are addressed in this spellbinding lecture

You can find more his recorded lectures at the Harvey Goldberg section of the The Brecht Forum website. - put together by Richard Bonomo

Left Forum Panel 2007

Bush and Company’s War on Civil Liberties and What It Means For Our Future

Law and Disorder Radio / Center for Constitutional Rights

Chair: Michael Steven Smith - Author/Attorney Download/Listen [9 MB]

Dalia Hashad - Director of Amnesty Int’l USA program Download/Listen [12 MB]

Vince Warren - CCR Executive Director Download/Listen [12 MB]

John Ehrenberg - Author and Professor L.I. University Download/Listen [10 MB]

The Dissidents: Cuban State Security Agents Reveal the True Story
by Rosa Miriam Elizalde and Luis Baez
published by Editora Politica/ LaHabana, 2003

This is an important and persuasive book. It should be brought to the attention of all those who are inclined to support Cuba but who are not fully informed about the “dissidents”, tried and imprisoned by the Cuban government last year. “Progressive Cuba bashers,” to use Richard Levins’ apt term, mistakenly believe, like David Frankel, writing in the September/October 2004 issue of Against the Current, that those imprisoned were victimized “for non-violent expression of views the regime can’t tolerate.” This is not the case as this book proves.

In his speech given at the launching of this book, which is printed as the introduction to the English edition, Felipe Peres Roque, Cuba’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, observed that “the so-called ‘dissidents’ in Cuba are a creation of the aggressive policy of the U.S. government…and form part of the strategy to obtain, through pressure and blackmail, the condemnation of Cuba in the (U.N.) Commission on Human Rights, which can then be used as justification for the blockade.” While tolerated for years, it was only after Bush made “pre-emptive war” against Iraq and, without a sense of irony, labeled Cuba “terrorist,” and put it high on its list for “regime change” that the “dissidents” were arrested for provocation and subversion - not for “non-violent expression of views the regime can’t tolerate” - and brought to justice. Their efforts to build a network to overthrow Cuban socialism, to “aid in the transition,” as American legislation authorizing money (some 20 million so far under the l966 Helms-Burton Act) delicately puts it, was thwarted by these agents of Cuban State Security. Read the rest of this entry »

ON THE BORDER by Michael Warschawski

Reviewed by Michael Steven Smith

Profoundly moving, beautifully written, intellectually penetrating, On The Border by Israeli socialist Michel Warschawski, is the outstanding political memoir of the generation of sixties radicals. Warschawski is the singularly most eloquent and effective anti-colonialst leader Israel has produced. “Mikado,” as he is known, is respected internationally for his unconditional, if not always uncritical, support of and solidarity with the Palestinians.

The problem of the Zionist project, from its inception in the l9th century, until now, is that there were already Arabs living in Palestine. Theodore Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, conducted his first Zionist congress in l897 in Basel, Switzerland. (The German Jews of Munich refused to host the congress on the grounds that they were successfully assimilated and therefore there was no Jewish question.) Afterwards the rabbis of Vienna sent two representatives to Palestine on a fact finding mission. They cabled back, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” Read the rest of this entry »