They called us traitors.
Think about that for one moment: they called us traitors. The same men who had accredited my university only to withdraw all funding, the same men who were stripping us not only of our rights, but also of our dignity as human beings, the ones who considered themselves enlightened and humane for not walling us into ghettos behind barbed wire as their brothers and sisters were doing down south, though the walls that they built of laws and culture were just as vile as the chicken wire and concrete monstrosities that had arisen from Birmingham to the bloody streets of Tampa. It had been made clear that we no longer served any purpose in their society. It had been made more abundantly clear that our presence in the nation of our birth was no longer required. And yet when we took the mess of pottage offered to us for our birthright, when we reluctantly picked up stakes to move to the one nation that had promised to welcome us with open arms...they called us traitors.
Well, as the man said, if this be treason, then let us make the most of it, or so I thought at the time. It was a simple matter of liquidating my family's assets through a front corporation set up by sympathetic whites, then purchasing the tickets for passage on an ocean liner, huddling down in steerage with our like-skinned brothers and sisters so that our presence would not alarm those of lighter hue as they played up above. Purchasing a ticket on an aeroplane was, naturally, out of the question, as Negro terrorist threats had led the airline companies to "temporarily" suspend service to troublesome minorities.
We docked in West Germany, then made our way across a single border to an airport, where fifty of us were herded onto a single prop-driven aircraft that looked as if it had seen far too much service during the Great...during the Second World War. Hours on the craft, with my wife Amelia clutching my arm in fear, with our children alternately dozing and finding whatever mischief they could get into in our cramped quarters. Finally a landing on a snowy runway out in what looked to be the middle of nowhere. Dazed, hungry, and jetlagged, we all made our way down the ramp, following signs helpfully written in English. "Engineers"...that was mine. "Physicians" went off to the side, meaning that I was for now separated from my cousin and his family, who had joined us in our exile. Elsewhere I saw notices for other educated and skilled trades, all useful to a developing society.
We were herded into single-room shacks that I would have turned my nose up at only a few short years ago. Now the two beds, the kitchenette, and the shelves of books seemed the height of unimaginable luxury. However, we had no time to settle, as a thickly accented voice called through the door that the "meetink" would be starting soon.
Bundling up tightly, my family and I made our way down what served as a main street of our makeshift, prefabricated village to a sort of main hall. Soldiers stood at attention as we found our seats, clapping our hands against our arms to ward off the early-morning chill. A short, squat man, bundled in fur, ascended to the stage at the front of the auditorium. He stared at us all with what looked like the same sort of fear and disgust that we were all to familiar with back home.
This was a mistake, I thought. It's going to be just as bad...no, worse, since I barely know a few words of the language, and won't know when trouble is going to hit. I've killed us all.
The man grunted, then spread his arms wide, opening his mouth in the ugliest, most beautiful sight that I've seen in my life.
"Comrades" he shouted in his thickly accented English. "Negro comrades. Welcome to the Soviet Union!"
-Dr. Calvin Hudson, quoted in If I Forget Thee: Tales From The Second Diaspora
LATE NIGHT ACCIDENT ON BELTWAY: SENATOR IN CRITICAL CONDITION
WASHINGTON-New York Senator Jacob Javits was gravely injured in an automobile accident on the Washington, D.C. Beltway last night, in an incident allegedly caused by a hit-and-run driver. Witnesses state that the car driven by Senator Javits was forced off of the road by two Caucasian men driving a late-model black sedan.
-Washington Post, 2/14/62
JAVITS FACING MONTHS OF REHABILITATION, RESIGNS SEAT "FOR GOOD OF NATION"
-AP Wire, 3/2/62
"Cohn speaking"
"Roy..."
"I'll take it."
-Alleged phone exchange between Governor Nelson Rockefeller and former White House Chief Of Staff Roy Cohn following Rockefeller's decision to appoint Cohn to the Senate seat vacated by Jacob Javits
FUGITIVE MALCOLM LITTLE, AKA MALCOLM X, SPOTTED BY CI IN MEXICO CITY. AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS. -H. HUNT
-Confidential
Oh, Wally, it has been a wild ride through the streets and boroughs of the madhouse of the city, and I have been along for every twist and turn of the bumpy track like at the Anaheim homestead of the late Prez, only on the East Coast in the midst of an attempt at renewal and art and love and joy, dodging the tricky revolutionaries on the one side and the hard hats on the other. Harlem is a no-go area, since so many of the bravest, boldest, brightest, and blackest are taking the money and running meaning that all that is left is those who other nations will not take for any amount of money, and though the Northern liberals may squawk and tut tut about the walled ghettos down South, they do little to put even a tiny crack in the mental, spiritual, psychological, and financial walls that separate them from their dark-skinned brothers, and when we look at the poor insane and illiterate ones left behind, I cannot blame them, no I cannot. I cannot even blame them for not shouting and stamping their feet when a pass card system is whispered about though it is doubtful that such a thing will happen whilst Rocky rocks his way through the Governor's mansion out Albany way since even if the Feds decided to crack down on this state I have heard tell from Norman at the magazine that the local and state cops have been told to not cooperate, yes they have been told to tell the FBICIAOSSNSA to take a flying fornication at a rolling donut so three cheers for Rocky and his Rockettes.
-The correspondence of "Beano" to Wally Hedrick, circa May of 1961
Hey, I dug my time in D.C., but I gotta tell you, New York is where the real action is, and Roy freakin' Cohn is a man of action. As a Senator, I still had to spend some time down in Washington, but I got plenty of chances to go back and take the pulse of my constituents at 21 and The Stork Club.
Anyway, the Democrats had turned into a bunch of lemmings, selling out their party's future for a single win in 1960. I mean, sure, it looks good to bang the drum of law and order and civilization and all of that crap, and you can always get people to vote against big scary Negroes and the people that love them what with the bombings and all, but they'd gone way too far. The best part is that they were beginning to realize it, but they couldn't do anything about it. They had the tail of the tiger, and were doing their best to avoid the inevitable feel of the jaws around their flesh. Hah!
Anyway, they were still trying to portray their "Tough On The Niggers"...excuse me, I meant "Tough On Crime" policies as some sort of real solution to the terrorist problem. And that wouldn't have been so bad for them if they were living in a vacuum. But, see, nobody lives in a vacuum except for dust bunnies--yeah, that was a bad one, sorry--and the murmurs had already started. Not just up North, no, though you could swing a dead cat and hit four or five loudmouthed libs in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles who would cry about the poor benighted colored folks being shipped off to the Soviet Union, or some godforsaken African jungle, or something. No, it was happening down South as well. They hadn't thought it through. And, see, that was Roy Cohn's big opening.
--Former Senator Roy Cohn (R-NY), quoted in Land Of Tomorrow: America In The 1960s by Studs Terkel
FACING SOUTHERN LABOR SHORTAGES, PRESIDENT PROPOSES IMMIGRATION OVERHAUL
-The Washington Post, 6/3/1961
QUARRYMEN ANNOUNCE EUROPEAN TOUR
-Music Maker, 6/61
Think about that for one moment: they called us traitors. The same men who had accredited my university only to withdraw all funding, the same men who were stripping us not only of our rights, but also of our dignity as human beings, the ones who considered themselves enlightened and humane for not walling us into ghettos behind barbed wire as their brothers and sisters were doing down south, though the walls that they built of laws and culture were just as vile as the chicken wire and concrete monstrosities that had arisen from Birmingham to the bloody streets of Tampa. It had been made clear that we no longer served any purpose in their society. It had been made more abundantly clear that our presence in the nation of our birth was no longer required. And yet when we took the mess of pottage offered to us for our birthright, when we reluctantly picked up stakes to move to the one nation that had promised to welcome us with open arms...they called us traitors.
Well, as the man said, if this be treason, then let us make the most of it, or so I thought at the time. It was a simple matter of liquidating my family's assets through a front corporation set up by sympathetic whites, then purchasing the tickets for passage on an ocean liner, huddling down in steerage with our like-skinned brothers and sisters so that our presence would not alarm those of lighter hue as they played up above. Purchasing a ticket on an aeroplane was, naturally, out of the question, as Negro terrorist threats had led the airline companies to "temporarily" suspend service to troublesome minorities.
We docked in West Germany, then made our way across a single border to an airport, where fifty of us were herded onto a single prop-driven aircraft that looked as if it had seen far too much service during the Great...during the Second World War. Hours on the craft, with my wife Amelia clutching my arm in fear, with our children alternately dozing and finding whatever mischief they could get into in our cramped quarters. Finally a landing on a snowy runway out in what looked to be the middle of nowhere. Dazed, hungry, and jetlagged, we all made our way down the ramp, following signs helpfully written in English. "Engineers"...that was mine. "Physicians" went off to the side, meaning that I was for now separated from my cousin and his family, who had joined us in our exile. Elsewhere I saw notices for other educated and skilled trades, all useful to a developing society.
We were herded into single-room shacks that I would have turned my nose up at only a few short years ago. Now the two beds, the kitchenette, and the shelves of books seemed the height of unimaginable luxury. However, we had no time to settle, as a thickly accented voice called through the door that the "meetink" would be starting soon.
Bundling up tightly, my family and I made our way down what served as a main street of our makeshift, prefabricated village to a sort of main hall. Soldiers stood at attention as we found our seats, clapping our hands against our arms to ward off the early-morning chill. A short, squat man, bundled in fur, ascended to the stage at the front of the auditorium. He stared at us all with what looked like the same sort of fear and disgust that we were all to familiar with back home.
This was a mistake, I thought. It's going to be just as bad...no, worse, since I barely know a few words of the language, and won't know when trouble is going to hit. I've killed us all.
The man grunted, then spread his arms wide, opening his mouth in the ugliest, most beautiful sight that I've seen in my life.
"Comrades" he shouted in his thickly accented English. "Negro comrades. Welcome to the Soviet Union!"
-Dr. Calvin Hudson, quoted in If I Forget Thee: Tales From The Second Diaspora
LATE NIGHT ACCIDENT ON BELTWAY: SENATOR IN CRITICAL CONDITION
WASHINGTON-New York Senator Jacob Javits was gravely injured in an automobile accident on the Washington, D.C. Beltway last night, in an incident allegedly caused by a hit-and-run driver. Witnesses state that the car driven by Senator Javits was forced off of the road by two Caucasian men driving a late-model black sedan.
-Washington Post, 2/14/62
JAVITS FACING MONTHS OF REHABILITATION, RESIGNS SEAT "FOR GOOD OF NATION"
-AP Wire, 3/2/62
"Cohn speaking"
"Roy..."
"I'll take it."
-Alleged phone exchange between Governor Nelson Rockefeller and former White House Chief Of Staff Roy Cohn following Rockefeller's decision to appoint Cohn to the Senate seat vacated by Jacob Javits
FUGITIVE MALCOLM LITTLE, AKA MALCOLM X, SPOTTED BY CI IN MEXICO CITY. AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS. -H. HUNT
-Confidential
Oh, Wally, it has been a wild ride through the streets and boroughs of the madhouse of the city, and I have been along for every twist and turn of the bumpy track like at the Anaheim homestead of the late Prez, only on the East Coast in the midst of an attempt at renewal and art and love and joy, dodging the tricky revolutionaries on the one side and the hard hats on the other. Harlem is a no-go area, since so many of the bravest, boldest, brightest, and blackest are taking the money and running meaning that all that is left is those who other nations will not take for any amount of money, and though the Northern liberals may squawk and tut tut about the walled ghettos down South, they do little to put even a tiny crack in the mental, spiritual, psychological, and financial walls that separate them from their dark-skinned brothers, and when we look at the poor insane and illiterate ones left behind, I cannot blame them, no I cannot. I cannot even blame them for not shouting and stamping their feet when a pass card system is whispered about though it is doubtful that such a thing will happen whilst Rocky rocks his way through the Governor's mansion out Albany way since even if the Feds decided to crack down on this state I have heard tell from Norman at the magazine that the local and state cops have been told to not cooperate, yes they have been told to tell the FBICIAOSSNSA to take a flying fornication at a rolling donut so three cheers for Rocky and his Rockettes.
-The correspondence of "Beano" to Wally Hedrick, circa May of 1961
Hey, I dug my time in D.C., but I gotta tell you, New York is where the real action is, and Roy freakin' Cohn is a man of action. As a Senator, I still had to spend some time down in Washington, but I got plenty of chances to go back and take the pulse of my constituents at 21 and The Stork Club.
Anyway, the Democrats had turned into a bunch of lemmings, selling out their party's future for a single win in 1960. I mean, sure, it looks good to bang the drum of law and order and civilization and all of that crap, and you can always get people to vote against big scary Negroes and the people that love them what with the bombings and all, but they'd gone way too far. The best part is that they were beginning to realize it, but they couldn't do anything about it. They had the tail of the tiger, and were doing their best to avoid the inevitable feel of the jaws around their flesh. Hah!
Anyway, they were still trying to portray their "Tough On The Niggers"...excuse me, I meant "Tough On Crime" policies as some sort of real solution to the terrorist problem. And that wouldn't have been so bad for them if they were living in a vacuum. But, see, nobody lives in a vacuum except for dust bunnies--yeah, that was a bad one, sorry--and the murmurs had already started. Not just up North, no, though you could swing a dead cat and hit four or five loudmouthed libs in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles who would cry about the poor benighted colored folks being shipped off to the Soviet Union, or some godforsaken African jungle, or something. No, it was happening down South as well. They hadn't thought it through. And, see, that was Roy Cohn's big opening.
--Former Senator Roy Cohn (R-NY), quoted in Land Of Tomorrow: America In The 1960s by Studs Terkel
FACING SOUTHERN LABOR SHORTAGES, PRESIDENT PROPOSES IMMIGRATION OVERHAUL
-The Washington Post, 6/3/1961
QUARRYMEN ANNOUNCE EUROPEAN TOUR
-Music Maker, 6/61