Rad Movie Nite @ Solidarity Salon
Saturday 31 May -- Deacons for Defense. This fascinating film, reviewed
in the current issue of the Freedom Socialist newspaper (see below) is
an Australian premier. The movie challenges pacifism with its
examination of armed defense by Blacks during the civil rights era in
Louisiana.
Dinner will be served at 7 pm and screenings kick off at 7.45 pm
Solidarity Salon: 580 Sydney Road, Brunswick
* Dinner, movie and popcorn $12 * Movie and popcorn only $6 * Wine, beer
and soft drinks available
Proceeds will benefit the Australian Freedom Socialist Bulletin and
Freedom Socialist $7,500 fund drive which runs from 1 March - 30 June 2003.
Phone or e-mail bookings appreciated to assist with planning and catering.
Phone 9386-5065 or e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Mark your diary!
Saturday 28 June - Celebrate the anniversary of the Stonewall riots
which sparked the birth of the modern gay liberation movement at a
special screening of Black Is...Black Ain't. In his final film, Marlon
Riggs, renowned Black gay producer/director, explores African American
identity and fearlessly challenges homophobia, sexism, patriarchy and
racism as it exists in Black America. This innovative documentary pushes
people of all colours to examine the stereotypes that Black equals male
and heterosexual, while exploring Black feminism.
Review:
Deacons for Defense: True Story of Armed Resistance
by Monica Hill
Teach! That's what Deacons for Defense does best. It teaches
hidden history from the civil rights movement. It shows the
stand-tall results of facing paralyzing fear. It lays out
the political types who are on stage in every struggle for
social change.
In these times of antiwar mobilizing and organizing to save
civil liberties, Showtime's made-for-cable movie, based on a
true profile in courage, is sharply relevant.
The Scene
It is the mid-1960s in Bogalusa, Louisiana, 60 miles
northeast of New Orleans, and the Ku Klux Klan is up in
arms. Literally.
After years of struggle undeterred by billy clubs, fists,
guns and white-supremacist mobs, the civil rights movement
had finally wrung the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act out of
Congress. But there is no evidence of this victory in
Bogalusa. And city politicians, businessmen and their
gun-toting KKK cronies mean to keep it that way.
Relative to the population, the KKK chapter in Bogalusa is
the largest in the country. Bogalusa is a company town, run
by the Seattle-based Crown Zellerbach Company. Both paper
mill and town are fully (and illegally) segregated.
Out-of-state civil rights organizers are showing up, and
Black young people are eager to bring some of Freedom Summer
to town. Pickets and boycotts begin to pepper Bogalusa.
This is the real backdrop for the movie, in which the
protagonist, a composite character called Marcus, is
movingly portrayed by Forest Whitaker. Terrified of Klan
violence, Marcus forbids his daughter to participate in the
protests.
Action!
Angry at weeks of disruptive protests and boycotts, city
fathers decide to deal with them the "old-fashioned way." As
their rioting cops descend on the demonstrators, Marcus
dashes in and puts a chokehold on one of the cops taking a
swing at his teenage daughter. He is arrested and severely
beaten.
"See what they did? They beat me like a dog. They gonna do
the same to our kids, and their kids. I got to do
something."
Marcus and his coworkers hold a meeting. (In life, this
meeting occurred not in a church, as the movie places it,
but at the Black labor hall.) It does not take long for
these disciplined union men and war veterans to form an
organization of self-defense that is willing and able to
meet force with force - the Deacons for Defense and Justice.
Ossie Davis, playing a well-meaning liberal minister to the
hilt, urges the men to disavow any kind of violence. He
offers to meet with the mayor and get that worthy to
"guarantee the safety of the Negro people," in return for
which he will see to it that no more rallies take place in
front of City Hall.
No way, the Deacons say. They elect officers and begin
buying citizen band radios for their roving car patrols.
With the help of longshoremen in New Orleans, they also lay
in guns and ammunition.
Pacifism vs. self-defense
A common KKK terror tactic was to send carloads of men
speeding through the Black community and firing guns into
homes. After one of these nightriding attacks, the Deacons
return fire. The Klan speeds away, and that is the end of
nightriding in Bogalusa. Says the minister to Marcus later,
"Fear of the Klan made me less than a man. You freed me,
son."
Armed Deacons regularly guard the local civil rights office.
But two northern white staffers are committed pacifists.
"This movement is nonviolent - that is the essence of the
movement," pleads one of them, played by Jonathan Silverman.
"Don't tell me about the essence of your summer vacation,"
responds Marcus. "Alive is better. "
Protest against segregation and discrimination at the mill
and Klan violence mounts. Although the pacifist civil rights
organizations refuse to come to Bogalusa, the Congress of
Racial Equality (CORE) sticks with them, and their fight is
getting attention from the national press. The Seattle
bosses of the paper company order desegregation at the mill,
and a vengeful Klan is arming.
But what really scares the local politicians and the federal
Department of Justice is that Blacks are arming also.
"Coloreds with pistols and hand grenades," lament the city
officials fearfully. "Two armies gathering," worries the
Justice Department. "They're spreadin' communism and
niggerism," exhorts the Grand Pooh-Bah of the KKK.
Protected by the Deacons, the Black community presses on.
Finally, the Justice Department becomes concerned that the
Deacons phenomenon will spread, and pressures state and
local authorities to order their police to stop helping the
Klan.
The real-life Deacons did, in fact, go on to organize dozens
of chapters throughout the South. In his book Lay Bare the
Heart, civil rights leader James Farmer, who marched in
Bogalusa, asks, "Who or what could control the haters? The
governor? The president? The spirit of Gandhi? Or the barrel
of a gun!"
Reprinted from The Freedom Socialist, Volume 24 # 1, April - June 2003
..
--
--
Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Archived at http://www.cat.org.au/lists/leftlink/
Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop
Sub: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Unsub: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
