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April 26, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Act
Now to Stop the Killing
of an Innocent Man
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
April 25, 2002
Francis
A. Boyle
Home
Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration
David
Vest
Code
Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
Responsibility
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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April 26, 2002
Set this Flag on Fire!
by Jeffrey St. Clair
For the last 50 years, the state of South Carolina
has flown the Confederate flag above the grounds of the state
capitol in Columbia, a noxious emblem of the state government's
unremitting animus toward civil rights laws and desegregation.
The flag was hoisted in 1962 as a show
of defiance against the Supreme Court and the Civil Rights movement.
It soon became a war banner for the segregationist minions marshaled
behind Strom Thurmond's Southern Manifesto. The flag has remained
a shameful glorification of the ante-bellum, slave-holding South
and a daily blight for South Carolina's black population ever
since.
Recall that South Carolina was not only
the ignition point for the Civil War, but the Wal-Mart of the
slave trade. Many of the black Africans brought to South Carolina
as slaves for the  plantation
owners were sent into the swampy rice fields, which proved to
be malarial death camps, where people perished in nearly unimaginable
numbers. Nearly two-thirds of the black children in the rice
plantations perished before reaching the age of sixteen.
Black Africans who weren't forced into
the rice and cotton fields of South Carolina (the Carolina planters
exhibited a peculiar preference for blacks from Senegambia and
present-day Ghana) were sold in Charleston's slave market to
plantation owners from across the South. These brokers of human
beings ended up making millions and enjoying seats as legislators
in the statehouse, where they drafted laws to protect their "property."
When people talk about the flag as a proud symbol of the state's
heritage that's the inescapable and horrific background.
For the past couple of years, the NAACP
and local civic rights organizers, including CounterPunch writer
Kevin Alexander Gray (click
here to read Gray's bracing history of the battle over the flag),
have led a campaign to get the flag removed from atop the capitol
building and entombed in a display case in a nearby museum, which
houses artifacts from what is quaintly referred to in Carolina
as "the war between the states".
When first broached, the demand was met
with derision by state leaders and threats of violence from local
yahoos. Then the civil rights groups launched a nationwide tourism
boycott of the South Carolina. This was no minor threat. Since
the NAFTA-driven collapse of the garment industry, tourism (which
consists largely of the ceaseless promotion of the Southern plantation
lifestyle) has become the mainstay of the state's frail economy.
Soon millions were being lost and businesses (which once not
so long ago proudly catered only to whites by law and now do
so largely based on pricing) started carping to legislators about
what could be done to deal with the noisome boycott.
Ultimately, a so-called compromise plan
was brokered by Democrats in the state legislature and the flag
migrated from atop the capitol dome to a prominent flagpole on
the statehouse grounds, where it flies above statues of  Confederate soldiers and generals
and other monuments to slavery and the enforcers of racial segregation.
Naturally, this satisfied few in the civil rights community and
the NAACP boycott remains in place.
Last week, black activist and brick mason
Emmett Rufus Eddy decided that he had had enough of this ongoing
insult and did something about it. Eddy had tried to pull the
flag down on three previous occasions. Even though a restraining
order barred him from stepping foot on the grounds of the Statehouse,
this time Eddy would succeed.
Assuming the guise of his nom de guerre,
the Reverend E. Slave, Eddy donned a black Santa suit, carried
a ladder bearing the names black rights organizers to the South
Carolina State House, set it up next to the flagpole, climbed
to the top of the flagpole, cut down the Confederate flag, shouted
"this is for the children," and lit it on fire, as
state police heckled him from below and tried to douse him with
pepper spray.
Apparently, the study of physics and
Newton's law of gravity are not requirements at the police academy
in Columbia and the cops were duly surprised when the pepper
spray failed to incapacitate the Reverend Slave and instead blew
back into the eyes of the police officers. The officers later
filed injury claims.
Eddy clung to the pole, telling his pursuers:
"Anybody down there can promise me that this flag will not
go back up until my trial?" Eddy asked. "Anybody can
make that promise? Make that promise and I'll come down."
In South Carolina, old times are not
forgotten. The local paper reported the comments of a passing
motorist as police tried to pull Eddy down: "String him
up right there." [For the record, there were at least 145
lynchings of blacks by white mobs (ie, homegrown terrorism) in
South Carolina from 1882 to 1930, according to the excellent
A
Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings
by Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck.]
Eventually, Eddy was arrested, roughed
up a little by the embarrassed cops, shackled and hauled off
to jail, to taunts and jeers from a crowd of more than 100 (mostly
white) onlookers who had gathered at the site. Within the hour,
the Statehouse's grounds crew secured another Confederate flag
(value: $30) and hoisted the infamous banner once again.
The flag may only cost $30 to replace,
but the State of South Carolina is determined to impose a much
more severe sanct ion
on Eddy. For this modest act of civil disobedience (which some
might call a beautification project), Eddy faces a $5,000 fine
and three years in prison.
The Reverend Slave was bailed out, but
a few days later he was arrested again, supposedly for trespassing
on the statehouse grounds, although he was across the street
at the time. He peacefully resisted by lying down on the sidewalk
and going limp, as the cops hauled him back to jail.
Eddy needs our help and, god knows, the
people of South Carolina need his. Fortunately, Eddy's got two
good lawyers Milton Kimpson and CounterPunch contributor and
civil rights attorney Tom Turnipseed.
Please send what you can to Eddy's legal
defense fund at:
E. Slave Defense Fund,
P.O. Box 4681
Columbia, SC 29240.
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