Trumps Indictment: Historical and Future Implications IV
June 20, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUN 21, 2024
Yesterday, in North Korea, Russian president Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed a security partnership between their countries that said they would “provide mutual assistance in case of aggression.” The two authoritarian leaders essentially resurrected a 1961 agreement between North Korea and the Soviet Union. According to the North Korean News Agency, the agreement also calls for the two countries to work together toward a “just and multipolar new world order.”
The United States and other western allies have been concerned for two years about the strengthening ties between the two countries. Putin needs weapons for the war in Ukraine, and in exchange, he might provide not only the economic support Kim Jong Un needs—North Korea is one of the poorest countries in Asia—but also transfer the technology North Korea needs to develop nuclear weapons.
In the New York Times today, David Sanger pointed out that Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping have partnered against the West in the past decade but have always agreed that North Korea must not be able to develop a nuclear weapon. Now, it appears, Putin is desperate enough for munitions that he is willing to provide the technologies North Korea needs to obtain one, along with missiles to deliver it.
Meanwhile, Joby Warrick reported yesterday in the Washington Post that Iran has launched big expansions of two key nuclear enrichment plants, and leaders of the country’s nuclear program have begun to say they could build a nuclear weapon quickly if asked to do so. On X, security analyst Jon Wolfsthal recalled the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that successfully limited Iran’s nuclear program and that Trump abandoned with vows to produce something better. Wolfsthal noted that diplomacy worked when “wars and ‘promises’ of a better deal could not.”
Still, the meeting between Putin and Kim Jong Un is a sign of weakness, not strength. As The Telegraph pointed out, just ten years ago, Putin was welcomed to the G8 (now the G7) by the leaders of the richest countries in the world. “Now he has to go cap in hand to the pariah state of North Korea,” it pointed out. National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby added that “Russia is absolutely isolated on the world stage. They’ve been forced to rely, again, on countries like North Korea and Iran. Meanwhile…, Ukraine just organized a successful peace summit in Switzerland that had more than 100 countries and organizations sign up to support President Zelenskyy’s vision for a just peace.”
In that same press conference, Kirby noted that the U.S. is delaying planned deliveries of foreign military sales to other countries, particularly of air defense missiles, sending the weapons to Ukraine instead. Also today, the U.S. emphasized that Ukraine can use American-supplied weapons to hit Russian forces in Russia. This is at least partly in response to recent reports that Russia is pulverizing Ukrainian front-line cities to force inhabitants to abandon them. Ukraine can slow the barrage by hitting the Russian airstrips from which the planes are coming.
China, which declared a “no limits” partnership with Russia in February 2022 just before Russia invaded Ukraine, kept distant from the new agreement between Russia and North Korea. Tong Zhao of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told Laurie Chen and Josh Smith of Reuters: "China is…careful not to create the perception of a de facto alliance among Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang, as this will not be helpful for China to maintain practical cooperation with key Western countries.”
Greg Torode, Gerry Doyle, and Laurie Chen published an exclusive story in Reuters tonight, reporting that in March, for the first time in five years, delegates from the U.S. and China resumed semi-official talks about nuclear arms, although official talks have stalled.
The office of president of the Republic of Korea (ROK), Yoon Suk Yeol, condemned the agreement. “It’s absurd that two parties with a history of launching wars of invasion—the Korean War and the war in Ukraine—are now vowing mutual military cooperation on the premise of a preemptive attack by the international community that will never happen,” it said. An ROK national security official added that the government, which has provided humanitarian aid to Ukraine, will now consider supplying weapons. This is no small threat: ROK is one of the world’s top ten arms exporters.
In the U.S., John Kirby told reporters that while cooperation between Russia and North Korea is a concern, the U.S. has been strengthening and bolstering alliances and partnerships throughout the Indo-Pacific region since President Joe Biden took office. It brokered the historic trilateral agreement between the Republic of Korea, Japan, and the United States; launched AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.; and expanded cooperation with the Philippines.
On Tuesday, at a joint press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in Washington, D.C., NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg explained the cooperation between Russia and North Korea like this. “Russia’s war in Ukraine is…propped up by China, North Korea, and Iran,” he said. “They want to see the United States fail. They want to see NATO fail. If they succeed in Ukraine, it will make us more vulnerable and the world more dangerous.
To that, The Bulwark today added journalist Anne Applebaum’s comments about the determination of those countries to disrupt liberal democracies. Dictators, she said, “are betting that Trump will be the person who destroys the United States, whether he makes it ungovernable, whether he assaults the institutions so that they no longer function, whether he creates so much division and chaos that the U.S. can’t have a foreign policy anymore. That’s what they want, and that’s what they’re hoping he will do.”
Cont below
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUN 21, 2024
Yesterday, in North Korea, Russian president Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un signed a security partnership between their countries that said they would “provide mutual assistance in case of aggression.” The two authoritarian leaders essentially resurrected a 1961 agreement between North Korea and the Soviet Union. According to the North Korean News Agency, the agreement also calls for the two countries to work together toward a “just and multipolar new world order.”
The United States and other western allies have been concerned for two years about the strengthening ties between the two countries. Putin needs weapons for the war in Ukraine, and in exchange, he might provide not only the economic support Kim Jong Un needs—North Korea is one of the poorest countries in Asia—but also transfer the technology North Korea needs to develop nuclear weapons.
In the New York Times today, David Sanger pointed out that Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping have partnered against the West in the past decade but have always agreed that North Korea must not be able to develop a nuclear weapon. Now, it appears, Putin is desperate enough for munitions that he is willing to provide the technologies North Korea needs to obtain one, along with missiles to deliver it.
Meanwhile, Joby Warrick reported yesterday in the Washington Post that Iran has launched big expansions of two key nuclear enrichment plants, and leaders of the country’s nuclear program have begun to say they could build a nuclear weapon quickly if asked to do so. On X, security analyst Jon Wolfsthal recalled the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that successfully limited Iran’s nuclear program and that Trump abandoned with vows to produce something better. Wolfsthal noted that diplomacy worked when “wars and ‘promises’ of a better deal could not.”
Still, the meeting between Putin and Kim Jong Un is a sign of weakness, not strength. As The Telegraph pointed out, just ten years ago, Putin was welcomed to the G8 (now the G7) by the leaders of the richest countries in the world. “Now he has to go cap in hand to the pariah state of North Korea,” it pointed out. National Security Communications Advisor John Kirby added that “Russia is absolutely isolated on the world stage. They’ve been forced to rely, again, on countries like North Korea and Iran. Meanwhile…, Ukraine just organized a successful peace summit in Switzerland that had more than 100 countries and organizations sign up to support President Zelenskyy’s vision for a just peace.”
In that same press conference, Kirby noted that the U.S. is delaying planned deliveries of foreign military sales to other countries, particularly of air defense missiles, sending the weapons to Ukraine instead. Also today, the U.S. emphasized that Ukraine can use American-supplied weapons to hit Russian forces in Russia. This is at least partly in response to recent reports that Russia is pulverizing Ukrainian front-line cities to force inhabitants to abandon them. Ukraine can slow the barrage by hitting the Russian airstrips from which the planes are coming.
China, which declared a “no limits” partnership with Russia in February 2022 just before Russia invaded Ukraine, kept distant from the new agreement between Russia and North Korea. Tong Zhao of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace told Laurie Chen and Josh Smith of Reuters: "China is…careful not to create the perception of a de facto alliance among Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang, as this will not be helpful for China to maintain practical cooperation with key Western countries.”
Greg Torode, Gerry Doyle, and Laurie Chen published an exclusive story in Reuters tonight, reporting that in March, for the first time in five years, delegates from the U.S. and China resumed semi-official talks about nuclear arms, although official talks have stalled.
The office of president of the Republic of Korea (ROK), Yoon Suk Yeol, condemned the agreement. “It’s absurd that two parties with a history of launching wars of invasion—the Korean War and the war in Ukraine—are now vowing mutual military cooperation on the premise of a preemptive attack by the international community that will never happen,” it said. An ROK national security official added that the government, which has provided humanitarian aid to Ukraine, will now consider supplying weapons. This is no small threat: ROK is one of the world’s top ten arms exporters.
In the U.S., John Kirby told reporters that while cooperation between Russia and North Korea is a concern, the U.S. has been strengthening and bolstering alliances and partnerships throughout the Indo-Pacific region since President Joe Biden took office. It brokered the historic trilateral agreement between the Republic of Korea, Japan, and the United States; launched AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.; and expanded cooperation with the Philippines.
On Tuesday, at a joint press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in Washington, D.C., NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg explained the cooperation between Russia and North Korea like this. “Russia’s war in Ukraine is…propped up by China, North Korea, and Iran,” he said. “They want to see the United States fail. They want to see NATO fail. If they succeed in Ukraine, it will make us more vulnerable and the world more dangerous.
To that, The Bulwark today added journalist Anne Applebaum’s comments about the determination of those countries to disrupt liberal democracies. Dictators, she said, “are betting that Trump will be the person who destroys the United States, whether he makes it ungovernable, whether he assaults the institutions so that they no longer function, whether he creates so much division and chaos that the U.S. can’t have a foreign policy anymore. That’s what they want, and that’s what they’re hoping he will do.”
Cont below
Cont from above
Trump himself is a more and more problematic candidate. This week, author Ramin Setoodeh, who has a new book coming out soon about Trump’s transformation from failed businessman to reality TV star on the way to the presidency, has told reporters that Trump has “severe memory issues” adding that “he couldn’t remember things, he couldn’t even remember me.”
Trump is supposed to participate in a debate with President Biden on June 27, and while Biden is preparing as candidates traditionally do, with policy reviews and practice, Trump’s team has been downplaying Trump’s need for preparation, saying that his rallies and interviews with friendly media are enough.
With new polls showing Biden overtaking the lead in the presidential contest, right-wing media has been pushing so-called cheap fakes: videos that don’t use AI but misrepresent what happened by deceptively cutting the film or the shot.
Social media has been flooded with images of Biden appearing to bend over for no apparent reason at a D-Day commemoration; the clip cuts off both the chair behind him and that everyone else was sitting down, too. Another, from the recent G7 summit, appears to show the president wandering away from a group of leaders during a skydiving demonstration; in fact, he was walking toward and speaking to a parachute jumper who had just landed but was off camera. A third appears to show Biden unable to say the name of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas; in fact, he was teasing Mayorkas, and the film cuts off just before Biden says his name.
On Monday, June 17, Judd Legum of Popular information produced a deep report on how the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group has been flooding its local media websites with these and other stories suggesting that President Biden is “mentally unfit for office.” Legum noted that these stories appeared simultaneously on at least 86 local news websites Sinclair owns.
Finally, today, in the New York Times, Charlie Savage and Alan Feuer reported that two of Judge Aileen Cannon’s more experienced colleagues on Florida’s federal bench—including the chief judge, a George W. Bush appointee—urged her to hand off the case of Trump’s retention of classified documents to someone else when it was assigned to her. They noted that she was inexperienced, having been appointed by Trump only very late in his term, and that taking the case would look bad since she had previously been rebuked by a conservative appeals court after helping Trump in the criminal investigation that led to the indictment.
She refused to pass the assignment to someone else.
Trump’s lawyers’ approach to the case has been to try to delay it until after the election. Judge Cannon’s decisions appear to have made that strategy succeed.
—
Notes: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-20-2024
Trump himself is a more and more problematic candidate. This week, author Ramin Setoodeh, who has a new book coming out soon about Trump’s transformation from failed businessman to reality TV star on the way to the presidency, has told reporters that Trump has “severe memory issues” adding that “he couldn’t remember things, he couldn’t even remember me.”
Trump is supposed to participate in a debate with President Biden on June 27, and while Biden is preparing as candidates traditionally do, with policy reviews and practice, Trump’s team has been downplaying Trump’s need for preparation, saying that his rallies and interviews with friendly media are enough.
With new polls showing Biden overtaking the lead in the presidential contest, right-wing media has been pushing so-called cheap fakes: videos that don’t use AI but misrepresent what happened by deceptively cutting the film or the shot.
Social media has been flooded with images of Biden appearing to bend over for no apparent reason at a D-Day commemoration; the clip cuts off both the chair behind him and that everyone else was sitting down, too. Another, from the recent G7 summit, appears to show the president wandering away from a group of leaders during a skydiving demonstration; in fact, he was walking toward and speaking to a parachute jumper who had just landed but was off camera. A third appears to show Biden unable to say the name of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas; in fact, he was teasing Mayorkas, and the film cuts off just before Biden says his name.
On Monday, June 17, Judd Legum of Popular information produced a deep report on how the right-wing Sinclair Broadcast Group has been flooding its local media websites with these and other stories suggesting that President Biden is “mentally unfit for office.” Legum noted that these stories appeared simultaneously on at least 86 local news websites Sinclair owns.
Finally, today, in the New York Times, Charlie Savage and Alan Feuer reported that two of Judge Aileen Cannon’s more experienced colleagues on Florida’s federal bench—including the chief judge, a George W. Bush appointee—urged her to hand off the case of Trump’s retention of classified documents to someone else when it was assigned to her. They noted that she was inexperienced, having been appointed by Trump only very late in his term, and that taking the case would look bad since she had previously been rebuked by a conservative appeals court after helping Trump in the criminal investigation that led to the indictment.
She refused to pass the assignment to someone else.
Trump’s lawyers’ approach to the case has been to try to delay it until after the election. Judge Cannon’s decisions appear to have made that strategy succeed.
—
Notes: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-20-2024
Obama wasn't kidding when he said that the Russians don't make anything, and apparently they doubled down into fossil fuel investment, instead of portfolio diversification, which has been an investment no-brainer for quite awhile now, or...don't put all your eggs in one basket.
And now for something different...
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/cY19b7TzmKmz2tQ8/
And now for something different...
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/cY19b7TzmKmz2tQ8/
MidnightSonneteer said:Obama wasn't kidding when he said that the Russians don't make anything, and apparently they doubled down into fossil fuel investment, instead of portfolio diversification, which has been an investment no-brainer for quite awhile now, or...don't put all your eggs in one basket.
And now for something different...
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/cY19b7TzmKmz2tQ8/
That was fucking fabulous! And fuck you, MAGA who want to discriminate against such a phenomenal human being.
And now for something different...
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/cY19b7TzmKmz2tQ8/
That was fucking fabulous! And fuck you, MAGA who want to discriminate against such a phenomenal human being.
PoetWarrior said:I'm afraid that America is in big trouble, but we've been there before. I'm old enough to remember 1968...if we survived that era, we can survive this.
Ha! In 1969 I was protesting against Nixon and the Vietnam war outside my school in England! I was only 11 years old and in the 5th grade, I believe.
Seems much worse now, though.
Ha! In 1969 I was protesting against Nixon and the Vietnam war outside my school in England! I was only 11 years old and in the 5th grade, I believe.
Seems much worse now, though.
MidnightSonneteer said:Yep. That dude comes across as a real life John Steed:)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steed
I love that he fought the Republican establishment, and even in war he was totally himself. I mean silk scarves and Vogue magazine! I love it. How brilliant or talented one is has absolutely nothing to do with who they love. I don't understand the fear that leads to discrimination that republicans, and in particular MAGA, harbors against them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steed
I love that he fought the Republican establishment, and even in war he was totally himself. I mean silk scarves and Vogue magazine! I love it. How brilliant or talented one is has absolutely nothing to do with who they love. I don't understand the fear that leads to discrimination that republicans, and in particular MAGA, harbors against them.
"I love that he fought the Republican establishment, and even in war he was totally himself. I mean silk scarves and Vogue magazine! I love it. How brilliant or talented one is has absolutely nothing to do with who they love. I don't understand the fear that leads to discrimination that republicans, and in particular MAGA, harbors against them."
Just goes to show that every culture and country throughout history has had to wage that battle however they could, against all the extremist monocultural apologia of their particular times and places.
Conservatism has never been anything more than a thinly veiled monarchist reiteration effort, easily seen through once a person becomes familiar with the rhetoric that they select and implement toward the all to commonly untutored masses.
What are they really after when they use words like..."originalist"...when citing medieval legal precedent?
A giant step backwards, that's what.
Just goes to show that every culture and country throughout history has had to wage that battle however they could, against all the extremist monocultural apologia of their particular times and places.
Conservatism has never been anything more than a thinly veiled monarchist reiteration effort, easily seen through once a person becomes familiar with the rhetoric that they select and implement toward the all to commonly untutored masses.
What are they really after when they use words like..."originalist"...when citing medieval legal precedent?
A giant step backwards, that's what.
June 21, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUN 22, 2024
Sixty years ago today, on June 21, 1964, twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman mailed a postcard to his parents in New York City. He had arrived in Meridian, Mississippi, the day before to work with Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old former New York social worker, and James Chaney, a 21-year-old Black man from Meridian, to register Black voters in what became known as Freedom Summer.
“Dear Mom and Dad,” Goodman wrote. “I have arrived safely in Meridian Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy.”
Mississippi had become a focal point for voter registration because fewer than 7% of Black Mississippians were registered, but members of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, dedicated to preserving segregation and to keeping Black people from voting, intended to stop the people challenging their power. They had come to loathe Schwerner— like Goodman, a Jewish man— who along with his wife, Rita, had taken over the field office of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Meridian and had begun grassroots organizing.
At meetings, Ku Klux Klan members routinely talked about killing Schwerner, but without authorization from the Klan’s state leader, Sam Bowers, they held off. Several weeks before Goodman arrived in Mississippi, they got that authorization.
On June 21, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman set out to investigate the recent burning of a church whose leaders had agreed to participate in voter registration, an arson that, unbeknownst to them, was committed by the same Klan members who had received authorization to kill Schwerner.
After the three men left the burned church, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price stopped their car, arrested Schwerner for speeding, and held Chaney and Goodman under suspicion that they were the ones who had burned the church. Once night had dropped, after they paid the speeding ticket and left the Philadelphia, Mississippi, jail, Price followed them, stopped them, ordered them into his car, and then took them down a deserted road and turned them over to two carloads of his fellow terrorists. They beat the men, murdered them, and buried them in an earthen dam that was under construction.
Aside from the murderers, no one knew where the three men had gone. Their fellow CORE workers had begun calling jails and police stations as soon as they didn’t turn up according to schedule, but no one told them where the men were. By June 22 the men’s friends had gotten FBI agents from New Orleans to join the search. On June 23 the agents found the station wagon the men had been driving, still smoldering from an attempt to burn it.
As the agents searched—turning up 8 murdered Black men, but not the three they were looking for— President Lyndon B. Johnson, who as Senate majority leader had wrestled the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through Congress and who had pushed hard for a stronger civil rights law since becoming president in November 1963, harnessed the growing outrage over the missing men.
The House had passed a civil rights bill in February 1964, but southern segregationist Democrats in the Senate filibustered it from March until June 18, when news stations covered the story of hotel owner James Brock pouring acid into a whites-only swimming pool at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida, after Black and white people jumped into the water together. The water diluted the acid and the swimmers were not injured, but law enforcement arrested them. Seeing a white man pour acid into a swimming pool to drive out Black people created such outrage that senators abandoned their opposition to the measure.
On June 19, Republican Everett Dirksen (R-IL), the Senate minority leader, managed to deliver enough Republican votes to Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) to break the filibuster. The Senate passed the bill and sent their version back to the House. Johnson used the popular rage over the three missing voting rights workers to pressure the House to pass the bill, and it did.
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2.
Just before he wrote his name, Johnson addressed the American people on television. Tying the new law to the upcoming anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he noted that “those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning…. Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom. Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders.”
Johnson celebrated that the bill had bipartisan support of more than two thirds of the lawmakers in Congress and that it enjoyed the support of “the great majority of the American people.” “[M]ost Americans are law-abiding citizens who want to do what is right,” he said. “My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail.”
Those opposed to Black equality saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act as a call to arms. On July 16, two weeks after Johnson signed the bill and a little more than three weeks after Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner disappeared and while they were still missing, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater strode across the stage at the Republican National Convention to accept the party’s nomination for president. To thunderous applause, he told delegates that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The votes of the delegates from South Carolina, the state that launched the Civil War in defense of American slavery, were the ones that put his nomination over the top.
On August 4 the bodies of the missing men were found in the dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
It turned out that Deputy Sheriff Price, who had arrested Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, and his boss, Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey, were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Price had alerted his fellow Klansman Edgar Ray Killen that he had the three men in custody, and Killen called the local Klan together to attack the men when they got out of jail. Then Price dropped the three civil rights workers into their hands.
While the state of Mississippi would not prosecute, claiming insufficient evidence, in January 1965 a federal grand jury indicted 18 men for their participation in the murders. The Ku Klux Klan members, who were accustomed to running their states as they saw fit, did not believe they would be punished. An infamous photograph caught Price and Rainey laughing during a hearing after their federal arraignment on charges of conspiracy and violating the civil rights of the murdered men.
Ultimately, a jury found seven of the defendants guilty. Killen walked free because in addition to being a Klan leader, he was also a Baptist minister, and a member of the jury would not convict a minister. Price was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison (he served four). Rainey, who was not at the murder scene, was found not guilty, but he lost his job and his marriage and blamed the FBI and the media for ruining his life.
Cont below
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
JUN 22, 2024
Sixty years ago today, on June 21, 1964, twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman mailed a postcard to his parents in New York City. He had arrived in Meridian, Mississippi, the day before to work with Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old former New York social worker, and James Chaney, a 21-year-old Black man from Meridian, to register Black voters in what became known as Freedom Summer.
“Dear Mom and Dad,” Goodman wrote. “I have arrived safely in Meridian Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy.”
Mississippi had become a focal point for voter registration because fewer than 7% of Black Mississippians were registered, but members of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, dedicated to preserving segregation and to keeping Black people from voting, intended to stop the people challenging their power. They had come to loathe Schwerner— like Goodman, a Jewish man— who along with his wife, Rita, had taken over the field office of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Meridian and had begun grassroots organizing.
At meetings, Ku Klux Klan members routinely talked about killing Schwerner, but without authorization from the Klan’s state leader, Sam Bowers, they held off. Several weeks before Goodman arrived in Mississippi, they got that authorization.
On June 21, Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman set out to investigate the recent burning of a church whose leaders had agreed to participate in voter registration, an arson that, unbeknownst to them, was committed by the same Klan members who had received authorization to kill Schwerner.
After the three men left the burned church, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price stopped their car, arrested Schwerner for speeding, and held Chaney and Goodman under suspicion that they were the ones who had burned the church. Once night had dropped, after they paid the speeding ticket and left the Philadelphia, Mississippi, jail, Price followed them, stopped them, ordered them into his car, and then took them down a deserted road and turned them over to two carloads of his fellow terrorists. They beat the men, murdered them, and buried them in an earthen dam that was under construction.
Aside from the murderers, no one knew where the three men had gone. Their fellow CORE workers had begun calling jails and police stations as soon as they didn’t turn up according to schedule, but no one told them where the men were. By June 22 the men’s friends had gotten FBI agents from New Orleans to join the search. On June 23 the agents found the station wagon the men had been driving, still smoldering from an attempt to burn it.
As the agents searched—turning up 8 murdered Black men, but not the three they were looking for— President Lyndon B. Johnson, who as Senate majority leader had wrestled the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through Congress and who had pushed hard for a stronger civil rights law since becoming president in November 1963, harnessed the growing outrage over the missing men.
The House had passed a civil rights bill in February 1964, but southern segregationist Democrats in the Senate filibustered it from March until June 18, when news stations covered the story of hotel owner James Brock pouring acid into a whites-only swimming pool at the Monson Motor Lodge in St. Augustine, Florida, after Black and white people jumped into the water together. The water diluted the acid and the swimmers were not injured, but law enforcement arrested them. Seeing a white man pour acid into a swimming pool to drive out Black people created such outrage that senators abandoned their opposition to the measure.
On June 19, Republican Everett Dirksen (R-IL), the Senate minority leader, managed to deliver enough Republican votes to Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) to break the filibuster. The Senate passed the bill and sent their version back to the House. Johnson used the popular rage over the three missing voting rights workers to pressure the House to pass the bill, and it did.
Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law on July 2.
Just before he wrote his name, Johnson addressed the American people on television. Tying the new law to the upcoming anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, he noted that “those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning…. Americans of every race and color have died in battle to protect our freedom. Americans of every race and color have worked to build a nation of widening opportunities. Now our generation of Americans has been called on to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders.”
Johnson celebrated that the bill had bipartisan support of more than two thirds of the lawmakers in Congress and that it enjoyed the support of “the great majority of the American people.” “[M]ost Americans are law-abiding citizens who want to do what is right,” he said. “My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail.”
Those opposed to Black equality saw the passage of the Civil Rights Act as a call to arms. On July 16, two weeks after Johnson signed the bill and a little more than three weeks after Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner disappeared and while they were still missing, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater strode across the stage at the Republican National Convention to accept the party’s nomination for president. To thunderous applause, he told delegates that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The votes of the delegates from South Carolina, the state that launched the Civil War in defense of American slavery, were the ones that put his nomination over the top.
On August 4 the bodies of the missing men were found in the dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
It turned out that Deputy Sheriff Price, who had arrested Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, and his boss, Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey, were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Price had alerted his fellow Klansman Edgar Ray Killen that he had the three men in custody, and Killen called the local Klan together to attack the men when they got out of jail. Then Price dropped the three civil rights workers into their hands.
While the state of Mississippi would not prosecute, claiming insufficient evidence, in January 1965 a federal grand jury indicted 18 men for their participation in the murders. The Ku Klux Klan members, who were accustomed to running their states as they saw fit, did not believe they would be punished. An infamous photograph caught Price and Rainey laughing during a hearing after their federal arraignment on charges of conspiracy and violating the civil rights of the murdered men.
Ultimately, a jury found seven of the defendants guilty. Killen walked free because in addition to being a Klan leader, he was also a Baptist minister, and a member of the jury would not convict a minister. Price was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison (he served four). Rainey, who was not at the murder scene, was found not guilty, but he lost his job and his marriage and blamed the FBI and the media for ruining his life.
Cont below
cont from above
Voters in the 1964 election backed Johnson’s vision of the country, rejecting Goldwater by a landslide. Ominously, though, Goldwater won his own state of Arizona and five states of the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. The Republican Party had begun to court the segregationist southern Democrats.
In 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan spoke in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on August 3, sixteen years almost to the day after the bodies of the three men had been found.
“I believe in states' rights,” he said. “I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”
In January 2004 a multiracial group of citizens who wanted justice for the 1964 murders met with Mississippi state attorney general Jim Hood and local district attorney Mark Duncan, as well as with Andrew Goodman's mother Carolyn Goodman and brother David Goodman, to ask Hood to reopen the case. In January 2005 a grand jury indicted Killen, who had organized the Klan to go after Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, for their murder.
On June 21, 2005, a jury found the 80-year-old Killen guilty of manslaughter.
He died in prison six years ago.
—
Notes: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-21-2024
Voters in the 1964 election backed Johnson’s vision of the country, rejecting Goldwater by a landslide. Ominously, though, Goldwater won his own state of Arizona and five states of the Deep South—Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. The Republican Party had begun to court the segregationist southern Democrats.
In 1980, Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan spoke in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on August 3, sixteen years almost to the day after the bodies of the three men had been found.
“I believe in states' rights,” he said. “I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I'm looking for, I'm going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.”
In January 2004 a multiracial group of citizens who wanted justice for the 1964 murders met with Mississippi state attorney general Jim Hood and local district attorney Mark Duncan, as well as with Andrew Goodman's mother Carolyn Goodman and brother David Goodman, to ask Hood to reopen the case. In January 2005 a grand jury indicted Killen, who had organized the Klan to go after Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, for their murder.
On June 21, 2005, a jury found the 80-year-old Killen guilty of manslaughter.
He died in prison six years ago.
—
Notes: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/june-21-2024
MidnightSonneteer said:
Just goes to show that every culture and country throughout history has had to wage that battle however they could, against all the extremist monocultural apologia of their particular times and places.
Conservatism has never been anything more than a thinly veiled monarchist reiteration effort, easily seen through once a person becomes familiar with the rhetoric that they select and implement toward the all to commonly untutored masses.
What are they really after when they use words like..."originalist"...when citing medieval legal precedent?
A giant step backwards, that's what.
HEIL!
Just goes to show that every culture and country throughout history has had to wage that battle however they could, against all the extremist monocultural apologia of their particular times and places.
Conservatism has never been anything more than a thinly veiled monarchist reiteration effort, easily seen through once a person becomes familiar with the rhetoric that they select and implement toward the all to commonly untutored masses.
What are they really after when they use words like..."originalist"...when citing medieval legal precedent?
A giant step backwards, that's what.
HEIL!
Ahavati said:
Ha! In 1969 I was protesting against Nixon and the Vietnam war outside my school in England! I was only 11 years old and in the 5th grade, I believe.
Seems much worse now, though.
While you were learning about monarchies and imperialism, I enlisted and was headed off to '
Nam. (Just out of curiosity, did you know...at age 11...WHY you were protesting Richard M. Nixon? :-)
Ha! In 1969 I was protesting against Nixon and the Vietnam war outside my school in England! I was only 11 years old and in the 5th grade, I believe.
Seems much worse now, though.
While you were learning about monarchies and imperialism, I enlisted and was headed off to '
Nam. (Just out of curiosity, did you know...at age 11...WHY you were protesting Richard M. Nixon? :-)
PoetWarrior said:
While you were learning about monarchies and imperialism, I enlisted and was headed off to '
Nam. (Just out of curiosity, did you know...at age 11...WHY you were protesting Richard M. Nixon? :-)
My father had served two tours in 'Nam before we were stationed in England. Damn straight I knew.
Thank you for your service. What branch?
While you were learning about monarchies and imperialism, I enlisted and was headed off to '
Nam. (Just out of curiosity, did you know...at age 11...WHY you were protesting Richard M. Nixon? :-)
My father had served two tours in 'Nam before we were stationed in England. Damn straight I knew.
Thank you for your service. What branch?
