Reminiscing on Days of Rage, Part II

By Robert Rudner

In November 1999, in the Memphis Federal Court, the case of the King Family versus Loyd Jowers ended turning the government’s explanation of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on its ear. Thirty-one years had passed, and the allegation that the assassination was carried out by a “lone gunman” named James Earl Ray, dissolved.

In painful ways, the 1960s are still alive, as in “Dr. King is dead, long live Dr. King.” Those who never gave up on revealing the actual conspiracy to execute people like Martin King have hope the truth will be revealed.

His murder was not the first such act of state, nor was it the last. Those who remember where they were when Dr. King was killed may recall a certain predominating public attitude that was held toward the martyr that was anything but sympathetic.

Where I grew up there were white people who were openly glad, many even believing the government eliminated a significant threat to their way of life. As for finding a fall guy to take the heat off the actual assassin, the government picked a man who had escaped from the penitentiary and was tracked and handled so that he would be caught. Or, as Chicago police have often said since they hung the Haymarket Martyrs in 1886, “When we frame them, they stay framed.”

But King vs. Jowers established that James Earl Ray could not have been the assassin. For a decade, by process of elimination, the list has been filed down to certain associates of Loyd Jowers, members of the Memphis Police, Tennessee State Troopers, agents of the CIA, the FBI and various domestic military intelligence operations along with J. Edgar Hoover’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO).

By framing Ray, the government deflected the heat of justice while igniting inner-city riots turning the anxiety inwards toward the victims of a racist system.

The 1968 assassinations did not end there. Peace presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy would die in a hail of 13 shots, while his “lone” gunman’s pistol only held eight. At the Olympic games in Mexico City, black fists were raised in protest.

On college campuses, leaders of the student movement lay in pools of blood. In response to the official level of violence, American campuses rose up. Just as Gandhi himself regretfully approved violence against the Nazis after hearkening to the cry of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto – when all non-violent methods are crushed – violence begat violence in the USA.

Nixon’s escalation in Southeast Asia along with COINTELPRO’s dirty tricks at home against his opposition sparked the fuel of resentment in the youth as generation seemed pitted against generation.

In the fall of 1968, with Stonewall in New York, the Days of Rage in Chicago and the Bring the War Home riots in Washington DC, the opening of the Chicago Conspiracy 8 frame ups, and the nationwide assassinations of Black Panther leaders including Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on the West Side, events shook five more years into the spirit of the 1960s. The waves lasted past the war’s end.

Yet to this day, I can never get the mace out of my hair, the teargas and vomit gas out of my lungs and the vibrations of nightsticks out of my head. The great black boomerang in DC that is Mia Linn’s monument to American dead in the Vietnam War records names beginning in 1959 and running into 1975. The “60s” was more than a numerical term intended for a mere decade when measured by troop deaths.

Sixteen years of war is a long time. Afghanistan has had US troops for half that time, and the country is war weary. However, Vietnam never sent anyone over here to harm any Americans. Their struggle was primarily national sovereignty, and had an ideological struggle that related to many students and working-class people.

We heard in the streets “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win!” No such cheering for the Taliban goes on here. Yet drone warfare is a drag, while the suffering of Afghan people breeds a hopeless situation bearing down with attrition.

When I was in DC in November 1969, I met such luminaries as United Farm Workers leader Cesar Chavez and Coretta Scott King. A year after being widowed, she was still wearing black, but had this look of courage and love in her eyes that was contagious.

When Coretta King died in 2006, the government had never apologized for executing her husband. But she went to her grave knowing that many undeniable facts about the murder had been revealed.

That is why I advocate as essential reading, “An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King,” by the King family lawyer in King v. Jowers, William J. Pepper. It will be a test of one’s non-violence just to read it.

How many countries have a national holiday named after someone the government murdered? How angry do you want to get? For if you do not want to get angry, don’t read “An Act of State.” When we remember martyrs like Fred Hampton, Sr., who would have been seventy today, we must recognize anger as an essential response.

In 1969, a group gave themselves a powerful allusion to their own human emotions, called Rising Up Angry. A person like Fred would today have risen in prominence and scope. Yet he was deprived that by Chicago cops acting as a part of a national police force based on political objectives – what is known as “a police state.”

In a time of Homeland Security, and a walking-wounded public whose brains are numbed by corporate entities such as FOX filling heads with Balloon Boys, this generation has their work cut out for them.

In 1970, I started a new life as a part of an educational experiment nicknamed the Chicago School Without Walls, the Public High School for Metropolitan Studies, or Metro. We, the select 350 students from all across the city, were multi-racial and multi-ethnic, were conscious members of a movement to change the educational system. We used the urban tapestry as our laboratory.

For instance, I wanted to study political theater. So, while Jean Genet was in town and “Theatre in the Streets” was basic to the protest movement, I studied at the Second City and Playwright Center.

I was curious to know how the system worked, so I interned at the offices of peace-oriented elected officials such as Republican Senator Charles Percy, who believed in international laws such as the Genocide Treaty, and Democrat Abner Mikva, who then was representative of the 3rd Congressional District, (later became federal judge) and whose offices were around the corner from Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom during the Conspiracy Trials.

I also studied constitutional law with the ACLU, and joined with the Yippies in the Conspiracy defense office.

At 17, I began to learn an awful lot about the system. So, now while Metro alumni plan for a reunion in June 2010, I will bring out the widening ring of memory that burns in my mind. I hope to rekindle the courage that became part of the time so that the martyrs of today will not be forgotten, either.

Whether it is Honduras or Haiti, wherever the US coup, our presence of mind as a democratic people will not be kidnapped. New schooling needs to be done more than ever. After the Olympic opium wares off, imaginations can better thrive tackling the real problems at hand, and not some corporate executive’s fanciful notions. In a post-FOX News world, everything will be a revelation.

I’m looking forward to another bout of the 1960s.

Editor’s Note: Bob Rudner is the 49th Ward Green Party Committeeman, and a long-time resident of Rogers Park.