The Radical Vision of Gerrard Winstanley

 

 

As Winstanley’s writings were published for the most part in separate pamphlet form, I treat their titles (when I mention them) as though they are books, though some are brief.  Page numbers in parentheses all refer to The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, edited by George H. Sabine (1965) and available at archive.org.  Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     Gerrard Winstanley, the seventeenth century leader of the Diggers of St. George’s Hill in Surrey, was a pioneer of direct action and civil disobedience whose group, like the I.W.W., advocated “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old” [1].  Three hundred years later his example remained fresh enough to animate the Diggers of San Fracisco’s Haight-Ashbury who greeted me and several thousand others during the summer of 1967.  Those who gathered there shared with Winstanley not only his brash attitude and uncompromising anarcho-communism; many were pursuing spiritual paths -- Sufi, Daoist, Zen, quasi-Native American – which they saw as parallel to their social vision.  Winstanley’s religion was the foundation of his politics; he was a Christian, but a heterodox one, whose vision was at once more rational and more mystical than that of his fellow Christians who remained in the pews of the Church of England.    

     In terms of politics, he viewed the profit system, whether feudal or capitalist, as inherently and inevitably vicious.   His communism was absolute in terms of the means of production, primarily agriculture in his view.  (He is careful to note his disagreement with the contemporaneous Ranters who were reputed to practice free love [519].)  Well before Proudhon, Winstanley declared unequivocally that “Those that Buy and Sell Land, and are landlords, have got it either by Oppression, or Murther, or Theft; and all landlords lives in the breach of the Seventh and Eighth Commandements, Thou shalt not steal, nor kill” (258).  He imagines a utopia in which everyone will work to “cheerfully put their hands to make these things that are needfull, one helping another” (184), then what is produced would be available to all in free stores: “every family, when they want such things as they cannot make, they shall go to these shops, and fetch without money, even as now they fetch with money” (526) [2].  Though his basic principle is simple, absolute, and, at its heart, entirely voluntaristic, Winstanley provides details for its operation in practice, involving numerous “peace-makers,” overseers, judges, and others [3]

     Winstanley regularly identifies the oppressive feudal system with “the Norman yoak” imposed by William the Conqueror (as though the Anglo-Saxons had not had their own equally oppressive kings).  To him putting commons to agricultural use seemed legal under traditional law.  More significantly, though, and quite apart from his more pragmatic suggestions, he viewed the Diggers as spiritual warriors and the contention as not between classes, but, as he often repeated, between the apocalyptic figures of the  Dragon and the Lamb.  He explicitly declares that his insights are divine openings, occurring in trance or otherwise gifts of God’s grace, “shown by Vision, Voyce, and Revelation” (257).  Winstanley clearly regards himself as a prophetic voice, a herald of divine insights.  He states with utter confidence that “the following declaration of the word of Life was the free gift to me from the Father himself.” [4]  His active interest in the apocalyptic symbols in the books of Daniel and Revelations, a curiosity he shares with many of his century, including Isaac Newton, is reflected in a number of passages [5].

     While a pursuit of esoteric meaning in Scripture is not unusual for his day, Winstanley’s theology was decidedly unorthodox.  His criticisms of the Established Church and its clergy do not advocate for any reforming sect.  (While he did have demonstrable ties to Quaker meetings, his actual membership has not been proven.)  Perhaps Winstanley could not find a doctrinal home in the England of his day, because his theology was, for all the mystical trappings, shockingly rational, a forerunner in significant ways of Deism and “natural religion.” 

     The most striking sign of his dissent even from Dissenters is in his use of Reason as an equivalent for  God.  Though he also refers to God as ”love” (375, 382, etc.), he explicitly says “I use the word reason rather than the word God in my writings” (104) and commonly speaks of “The Great Creator Reason” (251) and “the great Creator, who is the Spirit Reason” (253).  While his attachment to Christian language and to the sacredness of the scriptures remains intact, he was with his elevation of reason a prefiguration of the eighteenth-century advocates of a non-supernatural religion. 

     Due to the compassion manifested in his redemptive role, Christ is primarily identified with love; thus Winstanley speaks of “Christ who is the universall power of Love.” (446)  This emphasis made the idea of eternal damnation unacceptable to him as it would imply a limitation of divine love [6].  To him God’s “power of Universall Love” (375) can do no less than cause “a thorough salvation . . . and leave none under bondage.” (384)  He is quite explicit that since the deity is “absolutely a God of Love” in the end every man shall be saved, though some at the last hour” (82) since “Christ gave himself a ransom for all” (81).  For him in fact the trees of knowledge and of life are beneficial, not forbidden, though subject to corruption, with the first identified with imagination and the second with love and knowledge (452).

     These concepts of God and Christ underlie and justify his social campaign.  For him the mandate for the truly pious to open what he repeatedly calls the “treasury” of earth to all people is nothing less than allowing love and reason rather than tyranny, crime, and self-interest to govern human affairs.  This partial rationalization of Christianity is evident, as well, in his identification of entities such as Adam, Satan, Eden, Heaven, and Hell as essentially psychological though he never denies their independent existence.  Thus the significance of Adam is not as a historical figure, but as he is manifested in every individual (203).  He refers to “the garden of Eden (mans heart)” (447) and notes that “a half hours silence” is equivalent to being in Heaven (223).  The devil that matters is the one “within you” (95).

     With some asperity , he insists that, in fact, all history including the events in scripture are most importantly located within the individual soul.  “All that which you call the history, and have doted upon it, and made it your idol, is all to be seen and felt within you, before you cast off true peace.” Adam and Christ, Cain and Abel, the Canaanites, Amalekites,  Philistines, he very land of Canaan, Judas, Heaven and Hell, good and bad angels are “all to be seen within” (215).  Therefore “that which a man seeks for, whereby he might have peace, is within the heart, not without” (213) and any people who wish to look for heaven or for hell had best look into themselves (216).

     Winstanley rejects authority and even scriptural revelation as the basis for religious belief, privileging only personal experience.  Thinking that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you” (213) the believer must find inspiration not from books, but inside the soul (204).  For his part he is emphatic in his claim that his own inspiration is of this kind (204), a “free gift to me from the Father himself” (445).  “While I builded upon any words or writings of other men, I builded upon sand.  Man has a teacher within him” (93).  “What I hear another man speak is nothing to me until I find the same experience in  myself” (96).  He claims to receive these “openings,” as the Quakers would call them, from his meditative trance experiences (190, 261, etc.).

     In a few passages, Winstanley comes very close to what sounds like pantheism.  Not only does he call the earth the “mother” of humanity (271), he declares that God is to be seen only in the world.  The deity cannot be fully known and to imagine him is simply “to build castles in the air.”  Not only is God a mystery, the afterlife is as well.  “To reach God beyond the Creation, or to know what he will be to a man, after the man is dead, if any otherwise, than to scatter him into his Essences of fire, water, earth, and air, of which he is compounded, is a knowledge beyond the line, or capacity of man to attain to, while he lives in his compounded body.”  All one can really know is this world.  “The creation is all its dimentions be the fullness of him, that fills all with himself, and if you yourself be part of this Creation, where can you finde God but in that line or station wherein  you stand?” (565)

     In the twenty-first century we remain far short of Winstanley’s recovered Eden in an egalitarian anarcho-communism, yet he can still indicate the need for change and the characteristics if a more just social and economic order.  Any step toward a more equitable sharing of the good things of life heads in the right direction.  In his use of direct and uncompromising non-violent action he is exemplary for protestors to the current corrupt regimes of this earth.  And in religion, he points the way to a more truly catholic Christianity, in which the specific symbols of the Christian tradition are understood a symbolic and in which any person may pursue salvation or enlightenment or liberation without sectarian boundaries.  An inspiring example to the cultural revolutionaries of the ‘sixties who, though not perhaps deprived of the necessities of life (as the poor were in the seventeenth century) nonetheless felt alienation and spiritual hunger and who, like him, followed the dictates of their inner vision to try to practice what in Jewish practice is called tikkun olam, the mending of the world.  Gerrard Winstanley was a mystic as well as a revolutionary.  Over fifty years ago, when I met some of the San Francisco Diggers, their message seemed to me quite compatible with that of Che Guevara, honored during “The Year of the Heroic Guerilla” in 1968, whose slogan that year seemed to be on everyone’s wall.

 

At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.  [7]

 

The same love of all humanity that motivated Gerrard Winstanley in Surrey animated Emmet Grogan, Peter Coyote, and Peter Berg in San Fransisco’s Haight, and countless others before and since.  Perhaps, I flatter myself, even this essay can spread a little love.  

 

  

 

1.  Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World.

2.  The vision was realized by the San Francisco Diggers.  The Haight-Ashbury store had several incarnations including at 1090 Cole.  A Black People’s Free Store later opened at 1099  McAllister, then one in New York City at 264 East 10^th Street, and many other cities followed.. 

3.  For details see in particular The Law of Freedom in  a Platform or True Magistracy Restored.

4.  Fire in the Bush p. 445.

5.  See, for instance, pp. 87-90 in The Breaking of the Day of God and 464-472 of Fire in the Bush.

6.  Universalism, though later condemned, was taught by early church fathers such as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Diodorus of Tarsus.

7. From “From Algiers, for Marcha. The Cuban Revolution Today,” later reprinted as “Socialism and man in Cuba 1965” in The Che Reader (2005).

8.  The Ranters seem to have gone further in  the directions of antinomianism and pantheism.  The most reliable statement of their ideas is likely in Laurence Clarkson’s A Single Eye (1650) which declares “what act soever I do, is acted by that Majesty in me God be in all things” and “if God be in all, why are not all things one in God?”  Though Winstanley takes pains to distinguish himself from this even more radical group, particularly due to the allegations that they (including Clarkson) practiced promiscuous sexual relations, in his own day they were viewed as similar.

Woody Guthrie’s House of Earth

 

drawing by Woody Guthrie

 

 

     Amid the Betty Crocker cookbooks and bestsellers from past decades on the shelves of the local Salvation Army store, I was surprised to come across a novel called House of Earth by Woody Guthrie.  As a teenager during the folk song revival I sought out Pete Seeger in a Skokie synagogue and Skip James in a Cambridge coffee house, and became familiar with Woody Guthrie through Folkways records.  I enjoyed his semi-autobiographical novel Bound for Glory in the Dolphin paperback with its quirky offhand drawings by the author and felt a moment of melancholy when now and then I saw a story about the singer’s physical decline and eventual death.  Yet I was entirely unaware of House of Earth which remained unpublished until 2013 [1].  

     I had known that Guthrie was a prolific writer, author not only of several thousand songs, but of a regular column in the People’s World, the West Coast sister publication of the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, but House of Earth was a surprise to me. Unlikely as it seems, the book was published by Johnny Depp, who has convinced Harper Collins to make him editor of a new line named Infinitum Nihil after the actor’s production company [2].

     For more than fifty years Bound for Glory has taken a place on my shelves, not with twentieth century American literature, but in the folk/political area of the music books, near the Little Red Songbook of the I.W.W. and The Oxford Book of Ballads.  Guthrie’s importance in American popular music, his influence spreading though Bob Dylan, Billy Bragg, and others to the present day, seemed to me to outweigh his literary credentials.  His role in American politics, too, while righteous, was irrelevant to his admission to the slopes of Parnassus.  

     He did take some pains with his literary style.  Though he cultivated the image of a dispossessed and penniless Okie naïf, Guthrie had in fact been raised in a solidly middle-class home.  His father, rather like Ella May’s father, cast as a villain in House of Earth, was a successful businessman who bought distressed properties, owning at one time thirty pieces of land.  A power in local politics, he served as district county clerk and was said to have purchased the first automobile in Okemah.  He was, in addition, a racist and Ku Klux Klansman who participated in at least one lynching [3].  Furthermore, by the time he wrote Bound for Glory and, later, House of Earth, Guthrie had the aid of Marjorie Mazia, his wife from 1945-1953 and a principal dancer with Martha Graham’s company, a woman at home in New York City artistic circles.  So Woody, no less than his disciple Bob Dylan, cultivated a stage persona of a penniless and rootless wandering troubadour.

     The most prominent element of the character he played and, doubtless, paradoxically the most cultivated aspect of his writing style, is his use of dialect.  Guthrie himself embraced folk expressions and irregular usages as signs of authenticity indicating his membership in an idealized proletariat.  While the non-standard language of a writer like the Nigerian Amos Tutuola is natural, the reader has reason to suspect Guthrie of being self-consciously folksy to create his persona.  He criticized Steinbeck’s Okie speech in Grapes of Wrath [4], yet the reader from another time and place is hardly in a position to judge.  For both writers dialect builds an environment in which the rhetoric of the “uneducated” comes to seem standard and, instead of ignorance, is associated with experience, knowledge, and truth. 

     The second most prominent aspect of Guthrie’s style is its ebullience, extravagance, and plenitude.  He is given to catalogues and lists and what the Middle Ages would have called amplificatio, creating a sense of teeming life, carnivalesque richness of life celebrating itself.  The pattern was set already in Bound for Glory.

 

The white folks talked of this and that, hogs, horses, shoes, hats, whiskey, dances, women, politics, land, crops, weather and money . . . Kids of all three colors, and an occasional mixture of each, crawled, walked, run, chased loose chickens, took in after cur dogs, clumb poles, fell across wagon tongues, and slipped down on the sidewalk with a brand new pair of shoes on.  Ice cream cones was waving up and down the street.

                                (Bound for Glory Ch. V) 

 

In this passage the discussion topics are multiplied until all sense of a given focus is lost; the children are doing so many things that they are doing nothing in particular.  Rather than a concrete and specific scene, the reader is left with a vague impression of a maelstrom of action.  As here, though, while the world may seem a bit out of control, the predominant mood is clearly joyful affirmation.  The expenditure of energy even in privation, whether in work, struggle, or love-making, is redemptive, the only route to full humanity and an abundant experience of life.

     The extravagant rhetoric of Bound for Glory fills House of Earth as well. 

 

“Let it be rotten, Lady . . . Guess it’s got a right to be rotten is it wants to be rotten, Lady.  Goldern whizzers an’ little jackrabbits!  Look how many families of kids that little ole shack has suckled up from pups.  I’d be all rickety an’ bowlegged, an’ bent over, an’ sagged down, an’ petered out, an’ swayed in my middle, too, if I’d stood in one little spot like this little ole shack has, an’ stood there for fifty-one years.  Let it \rot!  Rot!  Fall down!  Sway in!  Keel over!  You little ole rotten piss soaked bastard, you!  Fall!” (13)

 

Here the six descriptive terms beginning with “rickety” puff up the passage without adding new information.  They do, however, convey Tike’s prodigious élan vital, his impatient ambition, his delight in food and sex and life.  The reader will little care whether anybody had ever actually said “Goldern whizzers an’ little jackrabbits!”  Such an expression is, perhaps, more effective for those who cannot judge its faithfulness to the actual spoken dialect.

     In several passages Guthrie lists brief phrases or single words to build a scene. 

 

Belly band.  Back band.  Neck yoke and collar.  Buckle it up.  Snap it down.  Carry it off and hang it up.  Smokehouse.  Woodshed.  Cow stall.  Manger.  Henhouse.  Big house.  Backhouse.  Cellar.  Tap.  Bolt.  Nut and screw.  Skinned knuckle.  Cut finger.  Burned arm.  Scalded shinbone.  Wheels.  Hubs.  Spokes.  Seat.  Brogans.  Clodhoppers.  Tit squeezers.  (106-107)

 

This passage ends with an elemental sexual image: “The penis of the stud slipping into the mare, and the sweaty hot open womb of the cow as she waited for the bull” (107), but the book’s erotic incidents are by no means limited to livestock.  An extended and explicit scene of joyful marital sexuality, of the sort that the author surely knew could not be published in 1947, occupies nearly half of the book’s first section “Dry Rosin.”  Love-making is a solace available to the poor without charge as well as a powerful way to give assent to life. 

     Why, then, am I placing House of Earth next to Bound for Glory instead of in the neighborhood of For Whom the Bell Tolls and Black Boy?  Because his subcultural vernacular seems more designed to bear the simple significance of uneducated country speech more than it casts new light though its folk poetry on what is being described and the lists of adjectives he piles upon each other never mean much more than the first one, Guthrie’s writing rarely escapes a sameness of tone.  It is an encouraging, inspiriting, optimistic tone, indeed, redolent of vitality and a joyful embrace of lived experience, but it is always much the same.  Indeed, for all his stress on hard times, Guthrie’s music and his prose are both quickened with a tireless optimism that turns a bit flat due to its unchanging tone, its being so insistently positive.  His friend Pete Seeger similarly could not open his mouth without seeming so cheery he approached dangerously close to sounding corny.  He and Woody both could sound child-like and funny and ever sanguine, they could manage to be a bit sentimental, but neither could approach tragedy, ambivalence, or complexity.  Perhaps this simplicity arose as a reflection of a dualistic political vision pitting virtuous workers against wicked capitalists, but what well serves a socio-political polemic is likely to fall short as art. 

     Woody Guthrie wrote our alternative national anthem in “This Land is Your Land” and national anthems have quite properly no place for ambiguity.  Apart from its reductive vision, which, while striving to capture lived experience in a torrent of words, in fact leaves out the difficult questions, the book has other faults.  While the child’s birth that ends the narrative appropriately marks a climax foregrounding the renewal and continuance of the cycle of life, it leaves unresolved other important issues of Tike and Ella May’s life: will they build an adobe house?  Will they ever manage to save some money?  Will they realize why they are exploited?  Furthermore, the repeated earlier references to a pain in Ella May’s breast are clearly meant to foreshadow a cancer diagnosis which never arrives.  Hod the book been publishable, an editor would never have permitted it to stand as it does.

     Yet we must be glad to have it, now available after decades in  manuscript.  Guthrie’s descriptions of nature, owing surely some debt to Steinbeck’s alternating chapters in Grapes of Wrath, are often lyrical and closely observed.  The book is largely dialogue and makes a very speedy read.  Guthrie manages in include as ornaments fragments of bluesy songs he loved.  I will thank Johnny Depp and Prof. Brinkley for bringing those who love Guthrie’s music and admire his politics another artifact of his fertile imagination.  For over fifty years KXQR in New York City has presented a folk music show called Woody’s Children, and, in a real sense, we are all Woody’s children.  With House of Earth many will come to know a bit more about the roots of contemporary American culture.

 

 

 

1.  Guthrie also wrote Seeds of Man which was published by E. P. Dutton in 1976.

 

2.  House of Earth is the imprint’s second publication, following The Unraveled Tales of Bob Dylan by Rice University professor Douglas Brinkley.  Brinkley worked on House of Earth as well, and the laudatory introduction is credited to both Depp and Brinkley. 

 

3.  The 1911 murder of Laura and L. D. Nelson.

 

4.   Introduction to House of Earth, Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp, p. xxxi.

 

Note on another Dust Bowl novel

     I have only just learned of Sanora Babb’s novel Whose Names Are Unknown, another treatment of the Depression era Dust Bowl by a native of the region with more reason even than Guthrie to know hard times there.  Like House of Earth, Babb’s novel was not published for decades.  According to Ed Vulliamy’s essay “The Vindication of Sanora Babb” in The New York Review of Books for August 19, 2021  Babb, like Guthrie, thought her depiction of the Okies was more realistic than Grapes of Wrath.  She also thought herself a “better writer” than Steinbeck, a claim Vulliamy finds dubious, though his comments on her work are generally laudatory.  For those interested in the era’s writing, Babb’s work (including her memoir An Owl on Every Post) seems required reading.

In Memory of my Generation’s People’s Heroes

     In every town are war memorials: statues, parks, shrines, and solemn ceremonies recalling those who donned uniforms and obeyed their officers, and indeed the travails of such people (on all sides and in all wars) can be considerable. Their suffering touches many, and their commemoration is accordingly social and official. Politicians and relatives alike glibly say that their sacrifice maintained American freedom, though what there is of American freedom has not been threatened from without since the War of 1812, most certainly not by Kaiser Bill, Ho Chi Minh, or Saddam Hussein.
     Those who died for the people’s cause are fewer, and sparks of their memory (such as this) are obscure and idiosyncratic. Yet it is this group that has, by the purest voluntarism in most cases, sought to advance humanity as a whole in work that has laid the foundation of the comparative comfort enjoyed by many today. The grasping hands of the powerful will make no concession voluntarily; even the mildest of reforms come only when forced. Frederick Douglass was correct in his celebrated analysis and deserves quoting yet one more time.

If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. [1]

     In other countries and in the USA in days gone by, the killing of political rebels was wholesale and unashamed. The first verse of the old song “The Red Flag” spoke no more than sober reality for all its clothing of sentimental rhetoric.

The People's Flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts' blood dyed its every fold. [2]

     Though every country produced such people’s martyrs, I mean here to commemorate only Americans. I conceive the group broadly otherwise, accepting as those who labored for a brighter future: community and labor organizers, socialists, anarchists, communists of various stripes, supporters of civil rights, feminists, ecologists and gay activists. I include people outrightly assassinated by law enforcement or military as well as some who ended their own lives as a political statement. [3] No scholar of American history, I simply write about the people whom I recall and a few others whose names I only recently learned. This list is unsystematic and certainly incomplete, but I feel that simply naming these few names is justified by simple respect for those who genuinely sacrificed for us all. Perhaps, as well, the young and others unfamiliar with the people mentioned here might learn. I welcome additions.
     My own roll call includes only my generation and emphasizes the movements of the sixties, though I am aware of massacres such as those during the Homestead strike in Pennsylvania in 1892 (nine killed), at Lattimer -- another Pennsylvania mine near Hazleton, Pennsylvania -- in 1897 (nineteen dead), at Ludlow, Colorado in 1914 (twenty-six killed), Everett, Washington in 1916 (twelve victims) and the 1921 Rising of Logan County, West Virginia in which between fifty and a hundred workers fell, the Little Steel Strike of 1937 when ten demonstrators were killed by Chicago police and sixteen more fell in Youngstown, Ohio. I am aware that controversy has muddied the narrative for such victims of the judicial system as Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, and Mumia Abu-Jamal. Whatever the details, like those regularly killed on urban streets by police officers, these people did not receive fair trials or just sentences and thus are victims of political persecution whatever their guilt or innocence.
     Doubtless the greatest number of political killings occurred in the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Fortunately in this case, scholars have documented the deaths of activists, and they are remembered in the only such monument of which I am aware, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Archivists have verified the deaths of forty-one people in the Movement from 1954-1968. [4] They include also a list of seventy-four others who had not yet been killed or for whom the historical research had been in process when the memorial was dedicated. Among those honored there are such well-known names as James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, who died in the 1964 Freedom Summer in Mississippi as well as others such as Lamar Smith who had organized voters in his community and was shot on the courthouse lawn in midday in Brookhaven, Mississippi in 1955 and William Lewis Moore, a white postman from Baltimore murdered in Attalla, Alabama during his solitary march against segregation in 1963.
     A late spasm of criminal racist violence occurred in 1979 when Klan and Nazi Party members killed five Communist Workers activists during a protest in Greensboro, North Carolina: Sandi Smith, James Waller, Bill Sampson, Cesar Cauce, and Michael Nathan. The dead included three physicians (one of whom served as president of a textile workers local). The police provided no protection; indeed, there were not present on the scene of the demonstration though it had been announced well in advance, and the assailants were acquitted by all white juries in spite of film documenting the murders.
     The police regularly reacted with fierce disregard for law during demonstrations in those days and were sufficiently reckless that occasionally someone died. Dean Johnson was killed in Chicago in 1968 at the beginning of the historic demonstrations around the Democratic Convention, and in 1969 James Rector died in Berkeley while demonstrating in behalf of People’s Park. Most everyone is at least aware of the 1970 attack at Kent State in Ohio in which National Guardsmen fired sixty-seven rounds at demonstrators, killing Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder, and Allison Krause. One hears considerably less about the deaths of Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green less than two weeks later at Jackson State in Jackson, Mississippi, or about Samuel Ephesians Hammond Jr., Delano Herman Middleton, and Henry Ezekial Smith who were shot and killed by police in 1968 at South Carolina State in Orangeburg while protesting a segregated bowling alley. The victims in Mississippi and South Carolina, needless to say, were black.
     Many people remember television news reports of the dramatic suicide of the Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức in Saigon in 1963. The evening news on the American networks showed the monk maintaining his meditation posture as his body burned. A few might recall the self-immolation of Quaker Norman Morrison in 1965 below Secretary of Defense McNamara’s Pentagon office. The fact is that a bit before Morrison’s act, Alice Herz, an eighty-two year Holocaust survivor, had similarly emulated Thích Quảng Đức in Detroit in 1965. A little later that year Roger Allen LaPorte burned himself in protest in New York City as did Florence Beaumont in Los Angeles in 1967, Bruce Mayrock in New York City in 1969 (protesting Biafran War policies), George Winne, Jr. burned himself in San Diego in 1970, as did Gregory Levey in Amherst in 1991 (protesting the Gulf War), Kathy Change in Philadelphia in 1996 (protesting “the present government and economic system”), and Malachi Ritscher in Chicago in 2006 in reaction to the Iraq War. [5]
     It is difficult to calculate the precise number of wholly unjustified killings of Black Panthers by law enforcement. Their attorney Charles Garry claimed that police had wantonly murdered thirty Panthers between January of 1968 and December of 1969 alone. A hostile journalist challenged the circumstances of many of these killings, conceding only the deaths of Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, and Mark Clark as altogether unjustified. [6] Considering the state’s interest in lying or obscuring the facts in many of these cases and the unquestioned program by the government to foment violence among black activists, it may never be clear what happened in many of these cases.
     The case of Hampton and Clark is particularly egregious. In one of the clearest examples of political assassination by the state in American history, the Chicago police with the aid of the FBI and an informer in the Black Panther organization drugged Hampton with secobarbitol and then burst into the Panthers’ apartment with guns firing in 1969, killing the two while they lay in bed and wounding four others. No one was ever prosecuted for the violence though the families of the dead and injured won a civil suit years later due to the overwhelming evidence of criminal behavior on the part of the government.
     Throughout history the wealthy have held the power. They have never ceded a penny to others unless they had no choice, while the poor are regularly sent off to the front lines of imperialist wars and other military adventures. Through organization, struggle, strikes, and demonstrations the masses have gained a modicum of comfort in the developed world. If today slavery and child labor have ended, women have the vote, labor unions have won some measure of shorter hours, job safety, and a piece of the economic pie, albeit far smaller than workers deserve, it is only because of those who have championed the people’s causes. If you and I appreciate what we have of leisure, a portion of the fruits of our labor, and a bit of space in which to raise the next protest, it is only right that now and then we devote a moment’s thought to those who have been willing to put their bodies on the line in defense of us all.



1. West India Emancipation speech in Canandaigua, New York, August 3, 1857.

2. The Irishman Jim Connell’s song has been an anthem of the British Labour Party and the IWW, among other organizations. It was recently sung by those celebrating the election of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Party Leader.

3. I do not include many righteous activists who were themselves wielding deadly force such as the Weather Underground’s Diana Oughton, Terry Robbins, and Ted Gold who died in the Greenwich Village townhouse in 1970 or Americans such as priest James Carney and former Green Beret David Arturo Baez who had joined insurgents and were killed by the Honduran military in 1983. In the case of Black Panthers the record is often obscure though the government’s desire to eliminate the organization is certain. (See note 6 below.)

4. Their list is available at https://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/civil-rights-memorial/civil-rights-martyrs.

5. The New York Times story on Levey’s death in 1991 mentions two other self-immolations protesting the Gulf War and eight in protest to the Vietnam War but provides no further details.

6. See Edward Jay Epstein “The Black Panthers and the Police: A Pattern of Genocide?” in The New Yorker for February 13, 1971.