[The Washington Post] America’s first post-World War II race riot led to the near-lynching of Thurgood Marshall

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/02/25/columbia-race-riot-wwii-thurgood-marshall/

On Feb. 25, 1946, a Black woman, Gladys Stephenson, and her son, James Stephenson, who had recently been discharged from the Navy, went to Castner-Knott to pick up a radio that needed to be repaired. William Fleming, a White man who worked at the department store in downtown Columbia, Tenn., charged her for the repair, but the radio still didn't work.

Gladys Stephenson and Fleming got into an argument. Fleming slapped her. James Stephenson interceded, and the two men got into a scuffle. Stephenson shoved Fleming through the store's plate-glass window. White men, hearing the ruckus and seeing Fleming on the sidewalk, attacked James Stephenson. When his mother intervened, she, too, was beaten. The Stephensons were arrested and charged with assault.

Race relations were already tense in Maury County, where African Americans still remembered Cordie Cheek, a Black teenager who was taken from his home, beaten, castrated and lynched after being falsely accused of raping a White girl in 1933.

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Tensions intensified in the South in the months after the end of World War II, when Black veterans returned home to find that Jim Crow laws consigned them to second-class citizenship. When Black veterans pushed for racial equality, White law enforcement officers responded violently.

'They was killing Black people'

Two weeks before the incident at Castner-Knott, Isaac Woodard, a decorated Army veteran who had been discharged earlier that day and was still wearing his uniform, exchanged words with a White bus driver. He was subsequently beaten so brutally by a South Carolina sheriff that he was left permanently blind. Days earlier, veteran Timothy Hood took down a Jim Crow sign in Bessemer, Ala. A streetcar conductor shot him five times, and the police chief followed him home and shot him in the head, killing him. The coroner ruled the killing a "justifiable homicide."

After the Stephensons were arrested, White men began drinking in the Columbia town square and plotting to punish the mother and son for their impudence. The White men went to the jail and demanded that the sheriff, J.J. Underwood, release the Stephensons. Underwood refused. He contacted a prominent Black businessman, who smuggled the Stephensons out of town.

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By then, word of the confrontation at the jail had spread to the nearby Black neighborhood of Mink Slide. Black residents, including many war veterans, suspected their lives were in danger and armed themselves. According to an account in Thomas Brooks's "Walls Come Tumbling Down: A History of the Civil Rights Movement," one of the veterans shouted, "We fought for freedom overseas! And we'll fight for it here!"

Someone shot out the streetlights in Mink Slide, presumably so White intruders would not see where they might direct their gunfire. Hearing the shots, four Columbia patrolmen ran toward Mink Slide, where they were met with gunfire and injured.

Hundreds of state police and other law enforcement officers converged on Mink Slide early the next morning, forcing residents from their houses and confiscating their guns, jewelry and money. Homes and businesses were destroyed.

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Harry Raymond, a reporter for the Daily Worker, a communist newspaper published in New York City that campaigned against racial discrimination, counted 34 bullets in front of a barber shop. He said the letters "KKK" were scrawled on the walls of businesses. A jukebox was smashed in one business and the money removed from it. A bayonet was shoved through the music box in another business, and a grocery store was pillaged. Raymond described the destruction inside a church: "With fiendishness, these men, sworn to uphold law and order, ripped and tore the chapel draperies. Pieces of wreckage were on top of a Bible on the pulpit."

Over the next two days, dozens of Black residents — but no Whites — were arrested. Police identified two of the men, William Gordon and James Johnson, as being the primary troublemakers. When they were being questioned, one of them reportedly grabbed a confiscated weapon and shot and injured one of the police officers. Police responded by shooting and killing Gordon and Johnson.

Black History Month

Thurgood Marshall outside the Supreme Court in Washington in 1958. (AP) (Uncredited/AP)

Walter White, executive director of the NAACP, sent the organization's top attorney, Thurgood Marshall, to defend the 25 suspects charged with rioting and attempted murder. But Marshall contracted pneumonia, and the suspects were defended by Z. Alexander Looby of Nashville, Maurice Weaver of Chattanooga and Harvard law professor Leon Ransom.

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The judge moved the case to nearby Lawrence County, where a jury, resentful of the fact that, according to prosecutor Paul Bumpus, "Maury County had dumped its dirty laundry on them," acquitted 23 of the 25 suspects.

Marshall, who had by then recovered from his illness, represented the two remaining suspects in their appeal in mid-November. The all-White jury found one guilty.

When the trial ended, Marshall and the other attorneys knew it was not safe for them to remain in Columbia and decided to drive to Nashville. Shortly after leaving Columbia, they realized they were being followed by several cars, including a police car. They were pulled over by the police. Marshall was arrested for being drunk — even though he had had nothing to drink — handcuffed and put in one of the cars.

Raymond, Looby and Weaver were told Marshall was being taken back to Columbia and ordered to continue to Nashville. Looby saw that the police car and the other cars were not returning to Columbia. He followed them as they turned down a dirt road.

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"They're taking him into the woods," Raymond told the others. "They're going to lynch Thurgood Marshall."

Marshall saw a menacing group of White men waiting at the end of the road. But upon seeing Marshall's friends, the police knew that they could not continue with their plans. Marshall was driven back to Columbia to face charges of being drunk.

An elderly judge demanded that Marshall breathe into his face. Marshall obliged. The judge then turned toward the police officer and snapped: "This man hasn't had a drink in 24 hours. What the hell are you talking about?"

Marshall was free to leave but worried about what would happen to him once he got back on the road. Local Black residents escorted Marshall and the others out of town, hiding them in different cars.

The experience made an impression with Marshall, who later argued Brown v. Board of Education in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and went on to become the country's first African American Supreme Court justice. "He had a newly found fear of white mobs and violent policemen," his biographer Juan Williams wrote.

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And the riot had longer-reaching effects — the event and other violence against African Americans prompted President Harry S. Truman to establish the President's Committee on Civil Rights to document instances of racial violence and to make recommendations to address racial discrimination in the United States. In 1948, as a result of the commission's conclusions, Truman signed Executive Order 9981 that ended segregation in the armed forces.

Read more Retropolis:

How Harry S. Truman went from being a racist to desegregating the military

She sued her enslaver for reparations and won. Her descendants never knew.

What happened after a boxer, a revolutionary, a singer and a football star met in a 1960s hotel room

RWDSU-UFCW Leads Organizing Drive at Amazon Fulfillment Center in Alabama

https://aflcio.org/2021/1/26/rwdsu-ufcw-leads-organizing-drive-amazon-fulfillment-center-alabama

via Scott Marshall:

Looks like Trumka is doing the right thing.,

Tim Taylor reviews Robert J. Gordon: Thoughts on Long-Run US Productivity Growth [feedly]

Robert J Gordon is a well known and influential analyst on the perplexing shifts in productivity [our most important value-creating measure for human work] since the onset of the computer age and the vast expansion in the production -- and consumption -- of intangibles.

Here he opens a different door:  new studies reveal a correspondence between poverty and productivity, and recommends big interventions in "education" at age 6 months, not just in K-12. Huge vocabulary gaps between upper and poor classes are a telling marker.

Of course, maybe the first "intervention" should just be ending poverty. That might lessen the cost of the "intervention" in the long run..

Robert J. Gordon: Thoughts on Long-Run US Productivity Growth
https://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2021/02/robert-j-gordon-thoughts-on-long-run-us.html

Leo Feler has a half-hour interview with Robert J. Gordon on "The Rise and Fall and Rise Again of American Growth"  (UCLA Anderson Forecast Direct, February 2021, audio and transcript available). The back-story here is that Gordon has been making the argument for some years now that modern economic interventions, like the rise of information technologies and the internet, have not had and will not have nearly the same size effect on productivity as some of the major technologies of the past like the spread of electricity or motor vehicles (for some background, see here and here). 

Here, Gordon makes a distinction worth considering between growth in productivity and growth in consumer welfare.

Let's divide the computer age into two parts. One is the part that developed during the 1970s and 80s and came to fruition in the 1990s, with the personal computer, with faster mainframe computers, with the invention of the internet, and the transition of every office and every business from typewriters and paper to flat screens and the internet, with everything stored in computer memory rather than filing cabinets. That first part of the computer revolution brought with it the revival of productivity growth from the slow pace of the 70s and 80s to a relatively rapid 2.5% to 3% per year during 1995 to 2005. But unlike the earlier industrial revolution where 3% productivity growth lasted for 50 years, this time it only lasted for ten years. Most businesses now are doing their day-to-day operations with flat screens and information stored in the cloud, not all that different from how they did things in 2005. In the last 15 years, we've had the invention of smartphones and social networks, and what they've done is bring enormous amounts of consumer surplus to everyday people of the world. This is not really counted in productivity, it hasn't changed the way businesses conduct their day-to-day affairs all that much, but what they have done is change the lives of citizens in a way that is not counted in GDP or productivity. It's possible the amount of consumer welfare we're getting relative to GDP may be growing at an unprecedented rate.

To understand the distinction here, say that you pay a certain amount for access to television and the internet. Now say that over time, the amount of content you can access in this way--including shows, games , shopping , communication with friends, education, health care advice, and so on--rises dramatically, while you continue to pay the same price for access. In a productivity sense, nothing has changed: you pay the same for access to television and internet as you did before. But from a consumer welfare perspective, the much greater array of more attractive and easier-to-navigate choices means that you are better off. 

The expression "timepass" is sometimes used here. One of the big gains of information technology is that, for many people, it seems like a better way of passing the time than the alternatives. 

Gordon also points out that the shift to working from home and via the internet could turn out to involve large productivity gains. But as he also points out, shifts in productivity--literally, producing the same or more output with fewer inputs--is an inherently disruptive process for the inputs that get reduced. 

This shift to remote working has got to improve productivity because we're getting the same amount of output without commuting, without office buildings, and without all the goods and services associated with that. We can produce output at home and transmit it to the rest of the economy electronically, whether it's an insurance claim or medical consultation. We're producing what people really care about with a lot less input of things like office buildings and transportation. In a profound sense, the movement to working from home is going to make everyone who is capable of working from home more productive. Of course, this leaves out a lot of the rest of the economy. It's going to create severe costs of adjustments in areas like commercial real estate and transportation.

When asked about how to improve long-run productivity, Gordon's first suggestion is very early interventions for at-risk children:  

I would start at the very beginning, with preschool education. We have an enormous vocabulary gap at age 5, between children whose parents both went to college and live in the home and children who grow up in poverty often with a single parent. I'm all for a massive program of preschool education. If money is scarce, rather than bring education to 3 and 4 year olds to everyone in the middle class, I would spend that money getting it down as low as age 6 months for the poverty population. That would make a tremendous difference. ... This isn't immediate. These children need to grow into adults. But if we look out at what our society will be like 20 years from now, this would be the place I would start.

For some of my own thoughts on very early interventions, well before a conventional pre-K program, see here, here and here. 

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Enlighten Radio Podcasts:Talkin Socialism: Bamazon!

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Chump change: The Romney–Cotton minimum wage proposal leaves 27 million workers without a pay increase [feedly]

Chump change: The Romney–Cotton minimum wage proposal leaves 27 million workers without a pay increase
https://www.epi.org/blog/romney-cotton-minimum-wage/

Those who had high hopes for a serious minimum wage proposal from the Republican Party will be disappointed: The recent proposal released by Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) would not even increase the minimum wage to 1960s levels, after adjusting for inflation. It is a meager increase that fails to address the problem of low pay in the U.S. economy.

The Romney–Cotton proposal would slowly raise the federal minimum wage from its current level of $7.25 per hour to $10 per hour in 2025. In contrast, the Raise the Wage Act of 2021 would raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2025.

• The Romney–Cotton proposal would leave 27.3 million workers without a pay increase, compared to the Raise the Wage Act.
• Only 4.9 million workers, or 3.2% of the workforce, would receive a pay increase in 2025 under the Romney–Cotton plan, for a total of $3.3 billion dollars in wage increases.
• In contrast, under the Raise the Wage Act, pay would rise for 32.2 million workers, or 21.2% of the workforce, with $108.4 billion in total wage increases.
• 11.2 million fewer Black and Hispanic workers would receive a raise under the Romney–Cotton plan, compared with the Raise the Wage Act.
• 16 million fewer women would see wage increases. Less than one in 20 women (4.1%) would have higher pay under the Romney–Cotton proposal, whereas the Raise the Wage Act would raise earnings for one in every four women (25.8%).
• The average affected worker who works year-round would see their annual pay rise by $700 under the Romney–Cotton plan; under the Raise the Wage Act, the average annual pay increase would be nearly five times that amount ($3,400).

Romney–Cotton's $10 target by 2025 is the equivalent of $9.19 per hour in today's dollars, about 13% less than what the minimum wage was at its high-water mark in 1968.

It is unconscionable that we should pay the lowest-wage workers today less than what they earned five decades ago, while the economy's productivity has more than doubled over the last 50 years. The Romney–Cotton proposal would continue that harmful trend; would maintain a separate lower wage for young workers and those with disabilities; and would—incredibly—fail to increase the separate minimum wage for tipped workers that has been stuck at $2.13 per hour for 30 years.

The Romney–Cotton plan would also couple this meager minimum wage increase with a nationwide mandate for employers to use E-Verify, the federal government's web-based electronic employment authorization system. This part of their proposal is a blatant attempt to scapegoat immigrants for the behavior of low-wage, low-road employers. E-Verify does not afford sufficient privacy and due process protections, giving employers an additional tool to discriminate and retaliate against workers when they speak up about workplace abuses, wage theft, and health and safety violations—or when they try to join with other workers in union-organizing efforts.

Without a broad immigration reform that legalizes the unauthorized immigrant population, a nationwide E-Verify mandate will push millions of working people into the informal economy, degrading wages and working conditions and undermining the freedom of association and ability of workers to join together to improve labor standards for all. It will also create additional incentives for employers to misclassify workers as independent contractors—already a disturbing trend in the U.S. economy—which will allow employers to distance themselves from responsibility for labor and employment violations.

In short, the Romney–Cotton plan would do little to improve the working conditions of the low-wage workforce.  It compares especially poorly with the Raise the Wage Act of 2021, which raises the federal minimum to $15 by 2025 and gradually eliminates all subminimum wages. A single adult working full time today, in 2021, needs at least $15 an hour to maintain a modest but adequate standard of living in virtually every area of the country, according to the Economic Policy Institute's Family Budget Calculator. The Romney–Cotton proposal comes nowhere close to that level: Future automatic increases after 2025 would keep the Romney–Cotton minimum wage stalled at $10 per hour in real, inflation-adjusted terms; in nominal terms, it would be roughly $11.54 in 2030.

The tables below provide a detailed comparison of the impact of the Romney–Cotton plan and the Wage the Raise Act of 2021 on the low-wage workforce.

Table 1

Table 2

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Dean Baker: To Prevent the Resurgence of the Pandemic, Can We Talk About Open-Source Research? [feedly]

To Prevent the Resurgence of the Pandemic, Can We Talk About Open-Source Research?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/beat_the_press/~3/LRr-RLzAMF4/

As the vaccination campaign picks up steam, we have many public health experts warning us about a possible resurgence of the pandemic due to the spread of new vaccine resistant strains. The logic is that, as more people are protected against the predominant strain for which the vaccines were designed, it will allow room for mutations to spread, for which the current vaccines may not be effective. This can leave us in a whack-a-mole situation, where we have to constantly alter our vaccines and do new rounds of inoculations to limit the death and suffering from the pandemic.

This situation would seem to make the urgency for open-sourcing our research on vaccines even greater than in the past. The point is that we would want evidence on new strains to be shared as quickly as possible. We also would want the evidence on the effectiveness of the current batch of vaccines against each new strain to be quickly shared.

The Problem of Patent Monopolies

That is not likely to happen as long as drug companies are trying to maximize the profits from their government-granted patent monopolies. They have little incentive to share evidence that their vaccines may not be effective against particular strains. Regulatory agencies may make this determination and publicly disclose their findings, but it is not in the interest of, for example Pfizer, to make this determination and widely disseminate its findings.

The issue of protecting intellectual property claims in the pandemic has gotten considerable attention in the rest of the world, if not in the United States, as a result of a resolution put forward at the World Trade Organization by India and South Africa. This resolution would suspend patent and other intellectual property claims on vaccines, treatments, and tests for the duration of the pandemic. While it enjoys overwhelming support in the developing world, the United States and other wealthy countries stand nearly united in opposition.

After the resolution was put forward a number of analysts argued that ending intellectual property protections would not speed the diffusion of vaccines. (They generally did not address the issue of treatments and tests.) Their argument was that producing the vaccines involved sophisticated manufacturing processes, which others producers could not replicate even if not blocked by patent monopolies. They also argued that there were intrinsic limits to how rapidly production could proceed and that these limits would not be affected by the removal of patent monopolies.

As far as the first point, there is no dispute. Pfizer, Moderna, and other vaccine manufacturers have specific knowledge of manufacturing processes that is not widely available. While producers elsewhere could probably in time replicate their processes, we would want these companies to directly share their manufacturing expertise.

This can be done in two ways. We can pay them for transferring their knowledge. This would mean having seminars and consultations with engineers at other manufacturers to allow them to get up to speed as quickly as possible. Ideally, we could negotiate terms with that would be acceptable to these companies.

But suppose Pfizer, Moderna, and the rest insist they are not selling, or at least not at a reasonable price. Then we go route two. We offer big bucks directly to the people who have this knowledge. Suppose we offer $5-$10 million to key engineers for a couple of months work with engineers around the world. Yeah, Pfizer and Moderna can sue them. We'll pick up the tab for their legal fees and any money they could lose in settlements. The sums involved are trivial relative to lives that could be saved and the damage prevented by more rapid diffusion of the vaccines.

If these companies actually pursued lawsuits it would also be a great teaching opportunity. It would show the world how single-mindedly these companies pursue profits and how incredibly corrupting the current system of patent monopoly financing is.

Okay, but let's say we can overcome the obstacles and get the knowledge from these companies freely dispensed around the world. We still have the claim that there are physical limits to how rapidly vaccines can be produced.

There are two points here. First, while there clearly are limits, we can still move more quickly in the relevant time frame. No one had vaccines in March of 2019, but the leading producers had capacity to produce tens of millions of doses a month by November, a period of less than eight months.

Unfortunately, the pandemic is still likely to be a serious problem in much of the world in October of this year. This means that if we replicated the facilities of Pfizer, Moderna, and the other leading manufacturers, we would be able to have additional supplies in a time frame where it would still be enormously helpful, and the October target assumes no learning that speeds up the process.

On this point, Pfizer recently announced that it had discovered changes in its production process that could nearly double its production rate. This is of course great news, but it means that the authoritative voices who assured us that there was no way to accelerate the production process, were not exactly right.

Pfizer's discovery of production efficiencies also raised the obvious question as to whether Pfizer's engineers are the only people in the world with the ability to uncover ways to speed the production of vaccines. In other words, if knowledge of Pfizzer's production process was freely shared with engineers throughout the world, do we really believe that no one else could come up with further improvements?

Fighting the Variants

This gets us back to the value of going full open-source to combat the spread of new vaccine resistant variants. At this point we have more than a half dozen vaccines that are being widely distributed in countries around the world. In addition to the U.S. and European vaccines, there are at least two from China (the country has apparently just approved a third), a vaccine from India, and a vaccine from Russia. These vaccines have varying effectiveness rates and undoubtedly will also have different rates against different strains.

As it stands, there are serious complaints about lack of transparency on results from the non-U.S.-European manufacturers, however even the U.S. and European manufacturers have not been fully open with their trial results. It would be ideal if all these companies fully disclosed their clinical trial results, so that researchers throughout the world could see which groups of people each vaccine was most effective with, and how it fared in protecting against the various strains.

Getting full disclosure is something that would have to be negotiated, but this is why god created governments. In principle, this should be a doable lift. After all, it is to everyone's benefit to have the pandemic controlled as quickly as possible. And the specific task involved does not require a great effort. The manufacturers of the vaccines have the data, we just need to have them post it on the web.

If we had full information on the effectiveness of each vaccine and we freely allowed manufacturers everywhere to produce any vaccine, without regard to intellectual property claims, we would be best situated to contain the pandemic and quickly respond to the development of new strains. Of course, this will raise questions about whether our current system of patent monopoly financing is the best way to support the development of new drugs and vaccines, but that seems a risk worth taking.           

The post To Prevent the Resurgence of the Pandemic, Can We Talk About Open-Source Research? appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Fwd: [WEBINAR] Register now: Achieving Economic and Racial Justice for Black Workers: Policy Priorities for 2021 and Beyond

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Economic Policy Institute <newsletter@epi.org>
Date: Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 10:22 AM
Subject: [WEBINAR] Register now: Achieving Economic and Racial Justice for Black Workers: Policy Priorities for 2021 and Beyond
To: <jcase4218@gmail.com>

Join EPI for a discussion on policies for recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and overcoming longstanding racial disparities in the labor market.

View this email in your browser Friend, As the nation recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic, we must define what economic justice and racial justice look like for Black workers in the 21st century. Join EPI's Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy (PREE) on Wednesday, February 24, for a discussion that identifies essential policies for achieving recovery, as well as necessary structural and systemic changes that are key to remedying longstanding racial disparities in the labor market. Register for "Achieving Economic and Racial Justice for Black Workers: Policy Priorities for 2021 and Beyond." For updates and to share this event on social media, use #PolicyPriorities2021. Wednesday, Feb. 24 4 p.m.–5:30 p.m. ET / 1 p.m.–2:30 p.m. PT Economic Policy Institute Zoom   Featured speakers: Marc Bayard, Director, Institute for Policy Studies Black Worker Initiative Rebecca Dixon, Executive Director, National Employment Law Project Kyle Moore, PREE Economist, Economic Policy Institute Moderator: Valerie Wilson, PREE Director, Economic Policy Institute   Please donate to EPI, so we can continue to host great events. Register Today Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

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