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Google has its good points. Now and then I find on it something of mine, or relating to me and others I've known in the past. I am not an inveterate/constant letter writer -- but try, at least, to write carefully and selectively and with maximum effectiveness. Here is one of several KKK letters I wrote during our Northeastern North Carolina Black Belt campaign in the mid-60s. The Alabama-based United Klans of America was at that time extremely strong in North Carolina. By the State's estimate -- there were maybe 20,000 in 1964 / 65. Along with other smaller hate groups, United Klans was a deadly adversary of ours. In those days, I received a great many death threats. Even the laggard and usually hostile FBI was sufficiently concerned to send a young agent to our home in Raleigh early in 1965 with a warning that the UKA in Bessemer Alabama (near Birmingham) and that in Wake County, NC [Raleigh] were involved in a plot to bomb our house. He said the Feds could do nothing in the situation and nodded approvingly when I showed him my .38 Special Smith and Wesson revolver. We lived in an all-Black neighborhood on the very edge of Raleigh. I advised our heavily armed neighbors who always watched our home when I was gone for various periods of time up in the Black Belt area. I could get back home only intermittedly. Maria was barely three, if that -- and Eldri was pregnant with John. In the end, that Klan plot fizzled. http://web.co.wake.nc.us/lee/vf/kkk/19650201lwua/19650201lwua.pdf (One of my letters calling for state action against the KKK in North Carolina. Just found on Google!) Here is a link to a United Klan leaflet from our campaign in Halifax County, NC. It's one of a number during that period. Held at night in a field, several of us secretly watched it from a grove of pines. Had no problem seeing and listening to it since it was lighted and broadcast to the conclave of many hundreds via a generator on the back of a flatbed truck. Three huge burning crosses. http://www.hunterbear.org/a_typical_klan_rally.htm >From our Lair of Hunterbear website: I've been an organizer all of my life and I always will be one -- and you have to be tough, damn tough, to be a really effective organizer. Here, quoted by Attorney David Kopel [formerly an assistant district attorney in Manhattan and an active civil libertarian] in his essay, "Trust the People," is a part of the critically important legacy given by Frank Dolphin to me. "In the 1950s and 1960s, a new civil rights movement began in the South. White supremacist tactics were just as violent as they had been during Reconstruction. Blacks and civil rights workers armed for self-defense. John Salter, a professor at Tougaloo College and chief organizer of the N.A.A.C.P.'s Jackson Movement during the early 1960s, wrote, "No one knows what kind of massive racist retaliation would have been directed against grass-roots black people had the black community not had a healthy measure of firearms within it." Salter personally had to defend his home and family several times against attacks by night riders. After Salter fired back, the night riders fled. The unburned Ku Klux Klan cross in the Smithsonian Institution was donated by a civil rights worker whose shotgun blast drove Klansmen away from her driveway. State or federal assistance sometimes came not when disorder began but when blacks reacted by arming themselves. In North Carolina, Governor Terry Sanford refused to command state police to protect a civil rights march from Klan attacks. When Salter warned Governor Sanford that if there were no police, the marchers would be armed for self-defense, the Governor provided police protection." Our classic Klan story from North Carolina, of course, is the huge -- really huge -- United Klans rally held in the northern part of Halifax County on Easter Sunday, 1965. It began in the early afternoon and drew UKA members from all over the South. We defeated that non-violently -- among other things via our mass picnic of Blacks and some Indians immediately adjacent to the Klan affair. In the end, the Klan leaders cut the affair short -- never even made it into the night. Their three huge crosses burned in the daylight. http://hunterbear.org/handling_the_klan_on_easter_sund.htm Our multi-county Northeastern North Carolina Black Belt project was eminently successful. And, in the end, we drove the Klan out of that entire region. http://hunterbear.org/NORTH%20CAROLINA_OUR%20SUCCESSFUL%20BLACK%20BELT%20MOVEMENT.htm A KKK group has recently formed here in Pocatello -- Empire Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, affiliated with its home base in Florida and related to several Klan units in Georgia and elsewhere. Worth keeping an eye on -- but Idaho really isn't its natural habitat. However, there are some other similar "things" in our region. We always have a couple of loaded firearms in our house -- 'way up high on the far western edge of Pocatello and a stone's throw from BLM lands. In Solidarity, Hunter Bear HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´ and Ohkwari' Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO www.hunterbear.org (much social justice material) See the Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]: http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm For the new, just out (11/2011) and expanded/updated edition of my "Organizer's Book," JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- with a new and substantial Introduction by me. We are close upon the 50th anniversary of the massive Jackson Movement of1962-63.: http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm Personal Background Narrative (with many links): http://hunterbear.org/narrative.htm ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
