Reviews

Book
Review
 

People Wasn’t Made to Burn:  A True Story of Race and Murder in Chicago By Joe Allen (Chicago, Illinois, Haymarket, May 2011)

Review by Paul Street

The case for the modern state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence is well known. We cannot have individuals, families, and other groups running amok in the execution of endless blood feuds, all claiming the right to enforce punishment and exact revenge. That is a formula for barbarism and chaos.

Fine, but are there any justifiable exceptions to the notion that one cannot take justice into one’s own hands? How, for example, is a parent supposed to respond when the state fails to punish or even investigate perpetrators who kill or otherwise terribly harm his or her children? Fold his hands in resignation?

A black Chicago steelworker named James Hickman couldn’t take that passive, nonviolent path in mid-July 1947. Six months earlier, on January 16, James and his wife Annie Hickman’s four youngest children (from 4 to 14) were burned to death in a fire that had, in all likelihood, been deliberately set by Hickman’s landlord, David Coleman.

As historian and journalist Joe Allen shows in his powerful new book People Wasn’t Made to Burn, the Hickman tragedy was one of many fire disasters to claim the lives of dozens of black Chicagoans in the years after World War II. The swelling black ghettoes of Chicago’s segregated South and Near West Sides were plagued by overcrowded and poorly maintained “firetrap” tenements in a time when landlords were known to wield the weapon of arson to discipline and remove tenants. In one of many horrendous episodes, two white arsonists were seen fleeing a large apartment building that housed nearly 300 black tenants on the city’s near West Side in October 1947. The building soon erupted in flames, producing ten fatalities and leaving hundreds homeless.

What was distinctive about the Hickman calamity was that Coleman had previously made repeated threats to “burn out” the Hickmans and other tenants who dared to complain about his refusal to treat them with respect. At the coroner’s inquest following the deaths of the Hickman children, a number of tenants from Hickman’s tenement testified that Coleman had promised to use “fire” on them if they did not leave or stop objecting to their poor housing conditions. A coroners’ jury of six white men recommended that the Hickman case be turned over to the Cook County States Attorney for criminal investigation. But neither the state attorney nor the Chicago police ever pursued a murder inquiry.

In the fall of 1946, the Hickmans had gone to the police in a futile effort to have Coleman arrested for negligence and theft of their security deposit. It was a courageous act for recent migrants from the Jim Crow South where blacks understandably viewed law enforcement officials as deadly enemies. In the spring and summer of 1947, as the fire epidemic continued in the ghettoes, the deeply religious and previously outgoing James Hickman became withdrawn and depressed. He was obsessed with images of his dead children. Had God not entrusted him with the sacred task of protecting those children? 

Hickman’s mood broke in mid-July. That’s when he decided to kill Coleman with a pistol he had purchased four months before. On the sixth-month anniversary of the fire that devastated his family, Hickman rode a city bus to the Near South Side and shot Coleman repeatedly in front of his house, telling his victim that “God is my secret judge.”  Coleman died later that same day.

The Chicago police could not be bothered to investigate Coleman’s action, but they arrived in force at Hickman’s house that evening. They met no resistance from Hickman, who was certain that he had just done what God and justice expected of him. Hickman was taken to Cook County Jail where he spent the next five months as prosecutors held a death sentence over his head.

Allen’s well-crafted book isn’t focused only or even primarily on the true-crime story of Coleman and Hickman’s violent actions. The bigger story in People Wasn’t Made to Burn is the inspiring narrative of what followed: a remarkable public and left-led defense campaign that helped Hick- man win his freedom by showing how working poverty, racism, and civic neglect drove the grieving father to defy the government’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Sparked and guided by leftist militants, including an exceptional cast of leaders and supporters from civil rights, labor, religious, literary, journalistic, and artistic circles, the highly effective “Free Jim Hickman” campaign was a major factor in the state’s decision not to put Hickman through a second murder trial after an initial trial ended in a hung jury on December 16, 1947.

This is an important book. It brings to life a key moment in the forgotten history of impressive, often left-led and labor-affiliated civil rights protests in the urban U.S. North during the late 1940s, prior to the emergence of the modern Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and to that movement’s shift to the urban north (Chicago first and above all) in the summer of 1966.

Along the way, Allen skillfully uses the Hickman story to provide a number of short, deftly fashioned and highly readable introductions to interrelated aspects of U.S. urban, racial, labor, political, and cultural history. In just 206 pages, Allen not only tells the Hickman narrative, but also reflects on the great northward black migration, postwar housing conditions, urban politics, the black press, industrial and labor history, and the fascinating life stories of various lawyers (including the legendary Chicago alderman Leon Despres); activists (including the young Trotskyist sparkplugs Mike Bartell and Franklin Fried and the brilliant left labor activist and future left author Sidney Lens); labor leaders (including Willoughby Abner and Charles Chiakulas of the United Autoworkers); authors (the black Chicago novelist Willard Motley); journalists (John Barlow Martin, author of an important article on the Hickman case in Harper’s); and artists (painter Ben Shahn and actress Talullah Blankhead) who became involved in the Hickman campaign. People Wasn’t Made to Burn is a book that uses a gripping personal and legal drama to elucidate larger themes of class, race, politics, and history. 

Z

Paul Street is the author of many books, including Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History and (co-authored with Anthony DiMaggio) Crashing the Tea Party: Mass Media and the Campaign to Remake American Politics.
 

Music
Review
 

Eleven Eleven, a New CD From Dave Alvin

Review by John Zavesky

Dave Alvin, Southern California’s best kept secret, is back with an album that will be one of the great releases of 2011. Considering that Alvin is little known outside of roots rock aficionado circles and records for the small independent label Yep Rock, the CD will certainly be missed by many, which is their loss. The former Blasters co-founder has released his 11th album and it contains 11 songs, hence the title. Alvin has been a working class player since the earliest days of the Blasters, delivering roots rock, tinged with blues, R&B and folk. Alvin has observed, “I play American roots music. I play it soft and I play it loud.” Eleven Eleven gives the listener a great dose of both. 

Eleven Eleven’s songs explore love, loss, friendship, and defeat with a brevity and accuracy worthy of Hemingway. The deaths of former musicians and friends Chris Gaffney and Amy Farris, figure into two of the albums songs, “Run Conejo Run” and “Black Rose of Texas.”

Alvin has always been an insightful lyricist who is more interested in how we deal with defeat and loss rather than the specifics of the incident itself. “Harlan County Line” explores the loss of love against the cold, gray backdrop of a mining family fighting the good fight. The “Black Rose of Texas” is a heartrending song that invokes the hard life of playing one nighters and the toll it can take on a player seeking something slightly more substantial than “doing the two-step across the hardwood floor while telling some wild boys white lies” and trying “booze, God, and cigarettes” to find the answers. Likewise, “Run Conejo Run” relates the exploits of Alvin’s former musical partner Chris Gaffney with a dark tone that borders on noir. The love song, “No Worries Mija” takes a left turn with lyrics that seem right at home with Cormac McCarthy’s “No Country For Old Men” when the singer reveals that, “I’m gonna make us some money doing a drive across the borderline. It’s a favor for a friend.” And then warns, “Now let me kiss you goodbye. And if anything should happen please remember you’ll always be mine.” This is not to say that Alvin is all gloom and doom. He offers a rousing and hilarious rockin’ number with his brother Phil on “What’s Up With Your Brother.” Alvin closes the album on an optimistic note with “Two Lucky Bums,” performing a duet with Gaffney recorded shortly before his death from cancer in 2009. “Let’s make a toast to the times we’ve had. The good, the crazy, the rough and the bad. We’ve survived every one. Just a couple of losers who won. And when it’s all said and done. We’re Two Lucky Bums.”

It is the hard-won truths and victories of the working class Alvin focuses on, not the loss itself. The glass is not just half full as far as Alvin is concerned. If you don’t grab that glass and take a healthy belt from it, than that is truly a loss. The characters in his songs may have lost, they may have died, but they were anything but losers for going after the brass ring. Eleven Eleven is roots rock at its finest crafted by a songwriter who continues to see the joy and nobility in the struggle of just getting by.

Z

John Zavesky is a freelance writer whose articles have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Press/Enterprise, Z Magazine, and the San Diego Union, as well as other periodicals. He is currently working on a crime novel.
 

Film
Review
 

Crossing the American Crises: From Collapse To Action, A Documentary Film by Sílvia Leindecker and Michael Fox (PM Press/Estreito Meios Productions)

Review by Ben Dangl

When the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression hit the U.S. on September 15, 2008, filmmakers Sílvia Leindecker and Michael Fox began a journey across the country to see how the economy was impacting people’s lives. Their interviews, which span 2 years and nearly 40 states, draw from farmers, truck drivers, homeless people, workers, immigrants and more. The result is the documentary Crossing the American Crises: From Collapse To Action, a film full of desperation, hope, and solutions.

Leindecker and Fox are the makers of the earlier documentary Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas, and Fox was an editor of the book Venezuela Speaks!: Voices From The Grassroots. Like these earlier works, Crossing the American Crises highlights the voices of people participating in grassroots activism and everyday struggles for a better world.

The first stop of their trip is Detroit where the camera cuts to empty store fronts and factories. “Detroit is what it is because of industry and the industrial revolution and capitalism and so-called democracy and how all those failed. And this is what we have left,” Jon Blount of the activist collective Detroit Summer tells Leindecker and Fox. Such bits of hard-won insight from streets, factory floors, and living rooms across America are interspersed throughout the film.

The next visit is to the Rosebud Lakota Indian Reservation in South Dakota where they speak with Alfred Bone Shirt: “We’re seeing that there’s a segment of our society that feel we’re left out, neglected, and abused. Rights are violated. We’re in a depression down here so bad that people just wanna give up.” His words are underscored by footage of the reservation, a place crushed by economic depression.

After stops in Utah, Oakland, and Los Angeles, they head to Route 66, where, Fox tells the camera, they want to “see the direct effects on the local community.” That is what they find at nearly every stop in their tour; very real life stories of how the U.S. economy is making life difficult for people from coast to coast and everywhere in between.

In New Orleans, they speak with people in the Lower 9th Ward, a neighborhood destroyed by Katrina in 2005. Robert Green and his family lived in this community for 38 years before Katrina and, at the time of the shooting of the film, they were still living in a FEMA trailer with his daughter and wife next to a string of empty lots—places where his neighbors’ homes used to be located before the storm destroyed them.

Fox asks Green what he thinks about the government bailout, the major issue of the day. Green tells him, “It’s ironic that it only took [the government] two weeks to issue a $700 billion check. It took them three years after Katrina and this is what you see.” He pointed to the empty lots, saying the names of the families that used to live there. “So basically every house, every family that’s gone actually was a family that should be here now. And if they would have been given the money in two weeks like the way they did in Congress, the way they did in Wall Street, then every last one of these families would have rebuilt their houses and this whole Gulf Coast area would have been rebuilt because everybody in the Gulf Coast is basically like the people down here: family first.”

Crossing the American Crises then turns to the hope people felt in the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Yet after the election, the camera cuts to a stream of grim economic news and stories of people struggling to make ends meet. One college graduate appearing in the film went through 109 job interviews before finally finding a very low-paying position at Staples. A homeless man on the Gulf Coast tells Fox and Leindeker he’ll ask them for money after the interview so he can get some lunch.

On a cold, snowy street corner in New York City, they interview John Lambertus, a homeless man who lost his job in May 2008 and couldn’t find new work. Lambertus points to a plastic bag he’s carrying, saying, “You see this? This is my blanket, another jacket in case this one gets messed up, and another pair of pants. That’s my situation.” He worked in a printing press for 30 years before losing his job. “I’ll be 51 in April and I’m on the street,” he says, the cold wind thundering against the microphone.

So what is to be done with all of this bleak news from the American crises? That leads to the second part of the film: action. Crossing the American Crises goes on to include many solutions to these economic and social problems, focusing on inspiring stories of grassroots alternatives and responses.

There is the Vermont Workers’ Center fighting for affordable healthcare for all, the Green Worker Cooperative in the Bronx that sells recycled building materials, the Santa Fe Alliance in New Mexico advocating for local producers and businesses over tax-dodging multinational chains, and the Iraq Veterans Against the War struggling for veterans’ benefits. There are stories of people working for affordable housing, jobs, better working conditions, improved public transportation and prison justice.

These groups are largely led by the people who are impacted the most by these various crises. Organizers are meeting these challenges in states across the country. “Organizing is the key,” JoAnn Watson from the Detroit Council tells a boisterous crowd at the U.S. Social Forum in her city.

Alongside these stories of hopeful organizing is a vision for a better world. “The people have to act through their own organizations to implement their vision of what life should be like,” explains Kathleeen Cleaver, a law professor at Yale University.

That’s a central message of this film. When the politicians, banks, bosses and economy fail to work for the people, it’s the people that have to form the backbone of movements for economic justice, peace, equality, and rights. In the midst of these crises, those movements are already thriving across the U.S.

As Robert Green from the Lower 9th Ward says, “Basically, we need to start taking back our government, taking back our taxes, start taking back our control from our elected officials because they’re not putting us first.”

Such insight from people across the country makes Crossing the American Crises an impressive film that captures the spirit of America today. Its stories of human hardship, solidarity, and hope paint a portrait of America that is both heart-breaking and inspiring. This documentary is a powerful reminder of the countless social movements working each day to transform this country, from the fields of Oklahoma to the streets of New Orleans. 

Z

Benjamin Dangl is the author of the new book Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America (AK Press). He edits TowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events, and UpsideDownWorld.org, a website on activism and politics in Latin America. Email Bendangl@gmail.com.