Voice of the People
Saturday, February 9th 2008, 4:00 AM
Another pioneer
Allston, Mass.: The Daily News has printed another story about Shirley Chisholm and her pioneering campaign to be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States ("First, there was Shirley," Feb. 6). I take nothing away from Chisholm when I point out that another black woman was the first to win a national party nomination for vice president - in 1980 and '84 - and I voted for her both times. I speak of Angela Davis. Why does Davis receive no respect or recognition for her hard and groundbreaking work? Yes, she ran on the Communist Party ticket, but it was the American Communist Party. And she did receive many votes. For those of you who scorn the Communist Party USA, I invite you to look up its platform for 1972 and compare it to the Republican candidates' speeches this year. They're not all that different - with the exception being that Davis did not advocate invading Iran or bombing Iraqis into submission for their oil.
Michael Blair
3 comments:
"the CPUSA's program in 1972 looks like the Republicans' speeches today?" Is that a compliment?
Angela Davis was asked by Alan Dershowitz to intervene on behalf of Soviet Jews, i.e. to allow them to emigrate. Ms. Davis replied, in effect, that was indifferent to their fate.
This ain't no compliment and Michael Blair should really get some important facts straight, even if his heart is in the right place.
First of all, Richard Nixon was the Republican presidential candidate in 1972(the year of the Watergate conspiracy) and he was running against the anti-war movement(while proclaiming a generation of peace) using his "Nixon" Spiro T. Agnew to attack "radical liberals," radical feminists, radical anything. The Communist party had as much to do with the Republican party in 1972 as Abraham Lincoln, running for reelection of the United States of America, had to do with Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy in 1864.
Given Nixon's role as a "white collar McCarthy"(Adlai Stevenson's pretty on target statement about him)and someone who as president, in Vietnam, Chile, his initial resistance to India's intervention to stop the mass killing in East Pakistan(now Bangladesh) was a cold war criminal who committed on the international scene crimes against humanity.
Angela Davis deserves a great deal of respect for her achievement and as an activist and, we should remember, a scholar and fighter especially for the rights of prisoners, she has and is a figure who is(thanks largely to the CPUSA of which she was a member for many years) a respected and revered figure globally. That she was marginalized in U.S. mass media is understandable, so was and is virtually everyone associated with the CPUSA and, if you stop and think, the labor movement(who can learn anything about U.S. labor history from mass media, and who ever hears any labor leader on that media unless there is a strike)
Actually, I grew up reading the New York Daily News, which isn't today as bad as the NY Post(a liberal labor paper when I was a kid). This was the paper my mother bought, along with a Yiddish language paper. When I got a little older and protested, she(a very sweet woman with a sixth grade education) told me "I never read that page," meaning the editorial page which was filled with rightwing claptrap every day in those days. Although most of the people in my neighborhood read the New York Daily News, along with, for many, a Spanish language paper, very, very few of them ever supported the Republicans in elections. I guess they were like my mother in that they "didn't read that page."
Post a Comment