ALICE EMBREE | AUSTIN HISTORY | Save University Junior High

Posted on May 6, 2024 by Alice Embree

Portion of “Heart and Soul” mural by Raul Valdez

By Alice Embree | The Rag Blog | May 6, 2024

This article originally appeared in Alice Embree’s Substack.

AUSTIN — I attended University Junior High (UJH) as did my mother-in-law and my sister.  I was a ninth-grade student during a pivotal year in UJH history, 1958-59.  It was the year UJH desegregated.  I wasn’t an activist then, but I could sense that the times were changing.

Now the times may be changing again, as the historic structure and it’s landmark murals are threatened with demolition.

I feel fortunate to have maintained a friendship with one of the African American students who transferred to UJH.  It has allowed me a glimpse into what it was like from her perspective.  Saundra Kirk wrote this account:

Top-down integration reached my level in 1958, just in time for me and other transfer students from Kealing Junior High in East Austin to attend the 9th grade at University Junior High School. So, Vicky Kirk (as I was called then) along with friends, Sandra Anderson, James Means, Lois Lyons, and Clarence Holmes became token black students amidst a large student body of white and Hispanic children.

Our ninth-grade experience was pleasant and relatively uneventful, until toward the end of the school year, when our principal, Marshal Ashley, called the black students into his office for a quiet meeting. He told us that we were lucky because we would have a certain day off from school. But, we knew that was the day our other classmates would attend the long-anticipated senior picnic in Zilker Park. At that time, blacks were not welcome in Zilker Park, and Barton Springs was still not integrated. — Saundra Kirk

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JONAH RASKIN | STUDENT PROTEST | Columbia protests now and in 1968

Posted on May 2, 2024 by Thorne Dreyer

Demonstration on University of Texas campus, April 27, 2024. Creative Commons image.

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | May 3, 2024

This article was originally published at CounterPunch and was cross-posted to The Rag Blog by the author.

The student protests on the campus of Columbia University this April have reminded me of the protests that took place there 56 years ago. Along with about  700 or so other men and women, I was arrested and jailed at the Tombs in Manhattan. Those arrests didn’t curtail student protests. Indeed, there were demonstrations later that year and again in 1969, 1970, 1971 and 1972. When push comes to shove, Columbia has called on the police again and again and the police have arrived in force and have made arrests.

The current president of Columbia, Minouche Shafik, an Egyptian-born American economist and a baroness, has surely not acted on her own impulses to establish what she might call “Law and Order.” Rather, she has surely followed the orders, the prayers and wishes of trustees, deep pockets, and alumni who have wanted to see demonstrators punished for exercising freedom of speech and for practicing old-fashioned American civil disobedience.

Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots CEO, and a major financial contributor to Columbia —and my classmate — recently said, “I am no longer confident that Columbia can protect its students and staff and I am not comfortable supporting the university until corrective action is taken.” He also said,  “I believe in free speech, say whatever you want, but pay the consequences.”  That doesn’t sound like free speech, not if it comes with a price tag. Back then, the protests were largely about Vietnam. Now, they’re largely about Gaza and Israel. The names have changed, but the underlying story is much the same. Shouldn’t students today have a significant role to play when and where it comes to university investment?

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MICHAEL MEEROPOL | REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS | First, they came for abortion, now they’ve come for in vitro fertilization

Posted on April 22, 2024 by Thorne Dreyer

Alabama Supreme Court. Photo by Jeffrey Reed / Creative Commons

By Michael Meeropol | The Rag Blog | April 22, 2024

The following is an expanded version of a commentary delivered by Michael Meeropol, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Western New England University, over WAMC-FM on March 1, 2024. It has been adapted for The Rag Blog by the author.

Michael Meeropol will be Thorne Dreyer’s guest on Rag Radio at 2 p.m. Friday, April 26, 2024, on KPFT 91.7-FM in Austin and streamed at KPFT.org. Post-broadcast, listen to the podcast of this show anytime, here.

By now it is hard to be outraged by the actions of Trump and his minions.  However, the decision by the Alabama Supreme Court which in effect shut down In Vitro Fertilization availability in that state was so shamelessly supportive of extreme right-wing Christian interpretations of the word of God it took my breath away.

But there is a silver lining.  That ruling has set off shock waves in the so-called Right to Life Movement because the MAGA extremist Chief Justice, Tom Parker, made explicit the “Christian Nationalist” ideas behind that decision:

Parker wrote:

Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God, who views the destruction of His image as an affront to Himself. [Alabama’s Sanctity of Life statute] recognizes that this is true of unborn human life no less than it is of all other human life–that even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.[i]

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LAMAR HANKINS | POLICE AUDITORS | How police deny us our rights:  A view from YouTube

Posted on March 20, 2024 by Thorne Dreyer
Photojournalist told to stop shooting a Miami police action, refused, and was forcefully arrested. Photo by Thomas Hawk / Flickr / Creative Commons.

By Lamar Hankins | The Rag Blog | March 20, 2023

In 40 years as an attorney, I have encountered the police in many contexts.  I have received three warnings and two tickets for speeding or car malfunctions; I have worked with police as a city attorney, including in municipal court; I have prosecuted disciplinary actions against individual officers on behalf of their Police Chief; I have advised officers who were under threat from a federal prosecutor; I have defended officers who were being fired; I have cross-examined officers who arrested my civilian clients; I have looked at a large number of driving under the influence videos recorded by police cameras; I have challenged individual officers who perjured themselves in testimony before courts; I have read reports from all over the country about police abuse. 

But while I have been aware since I was young that police often deny us our constitutional rights, I never observed them as they did so (except for those cases that made national news) until I discovered recently a category of videos on YouTube, where police officers (and I am using this term to mean all members of law enforcement) can be seen doing their jobs in real time.  

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IVAN KOOP KUPER | NOSTALGIA | The Summer of ’72: A look back after more than 50 years.

Posted on January 26, 2024 by Thorne Dreyer

Coming of age in Houston, Texas, with The Rolling Stones

Photo by John M. Lomax (John Lomax III), first published in underground newspaper Space City!, June 29, 1972, and later in the book Exploring Space City! published by the New Journalism Project in 2021.

By Ivan Koop Kuper | The Rag Blog | January 26, 2024

There was a feeling of excitement throughout the city of Houston and specifically in the neighborhood of Montrose in the summer of 1972. Something was in the air and you could just feel it. The seminal rock and roll band, the Rolling Stones, were coming to town to promote the release of their new double-sided album, Exile on Main Street, and everyone in my circle of friends just knew that this concert was going to be the cultural event of the season.

In the summer of ‘72, whenever it suited me, I could be found swimming and lounging at what was then referred to as the “Montrose Country Club.” In reality this was the outdoor swimming pool on the campus of the neighborhood liberal arts college, The University of St. Thomas. It was a social gathering hot spot easily accessible not only to St. Thomas students, but also to the local bohemian citizenry who resided in the surrounding area. The pool was the ideal spot to take a respite from the brutally hot Houston summers that never seemed to relent until well past Halloween.

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JONAH RASKIN | BOOKS | ‘Material Wealth
: Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg’

Posted on December 28, 2023 by Thorne Dreyer

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | December 27, 2023

[Compiled and annotated by Pat Thomas; PowerHouse Books; 256 pages.]

Pat Thomas has written and published colorful books about the Black Panthers — the defiant organization that rocked the U.S. from coast-to-coast in the 1960s — and Jerry Rubin, the author of DO IT!  and Growing (Up) at 37. His latest book is about Allen Ginsberg, the unofficial U.S. Poet Laureate whose work has been read and enjoyed from Chile and Czechoslovakia to China and everywhere that the spoken word is treasured. Material Wealth
 might be called a scrapbook in the spirit of the Yippies that combines words and images and creates something greater than its parts. Indeed, it’s composed of bits and pieces — photos, sketches, letters, posters and ephemera — that cohere and coalesce.                                                  

It also might be described as Ginsberg “light,” though it also includes plenty of darkness, a territory that the poet covered in his three major poems: Howl — an epic about a generation “destroyed by madness”; Kaddish — an elegy for his mother, Naom — and Wichita Vortex Sutra, an anti-war hymn in which he writes, “I here declare the end of the war!” It’s as timely a proclamation in the age of Ukraine and Gaza as it was during the Vietnam War.                                                

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NORMAN SOLOMON | DEATHS | For media elites, war criminal Henry Kissinger was a great man

Posted on December 14, 2023 by Thorne Dreyer
Henry Kissinger / LBJ Library image / Creative Commons.

Can a war criminal really be a “noted statesman”?

By Norman Solomon | The Rag Blog | December 13, 2023

For U.S. mass media, Henry Kissinger’s quip that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” rang true. Influential reporters and pundits often expressed their love for him. The media establishment kept swooning over one of the worst war criminals in modern history.

After news of his death broke on Wednesday night, prominent coverage echoed the kind that had followed him ever since his years with President Richard Nixon, while they teamed up to oversee vast carnage in Southeast Asia.

The headline over a Washington Post news bulletin summed up: “Henry Kissinger Dies at 100. The Noted Statesman and Scholar Had Unparalleled Power Over Foreign Policy.”

But can a war criminal really be a “noted statesman”?

The New York Times top story began by describing Kissinger as a “scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered the United States’ opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam, and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake American power relationships with the Soviet Union at the time of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values to do so.”

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LAMAR HANKINS | MIDDLE EAST | Hamas, Israel, and the Palestinians

Posted on December 5, 2023 by Thorne Dreyer
Israel’s Wall in Bethlehem, West Bank. Photo by Montecruz Foto / Creative Commons.

To criticize Israel’s government and policies is not antisemitic.

By Lamar Hankins | The Rag Blog | December 5, 2023

I am reluctant to write about Israel at this politically- and emotionally-charged time because there is little respect for free speech in our country, which has long been known for free speech.  Groups and individuals — right, center, and left — want to cancel the right of free speech for those with whom they disagree.  I am also reluctant to broach the subject with Jewish friends and acquaintances for fear of damaging our relationship, even though I have always made clear distinctions between the State of Israel and being Jewish.  To criticize Israel’s government and policies is not antisemitic.

I try to approach the world through logic, reason, and empiricism, rather than through authority, tradition, or religious or political dogma.  With that in mind, and with compassion for those being harmed on all sides, I realize that if I don’t discuss Hamas, Israel, and Palestinians, I leave the discussion up to those who are willing to distort history and current affairs to suit what too often is informed by prejudice, false information, and fear.  But my biggest difficulty today is sorting out fact from fiction.

And we can’t separate fact from fiction without understanding what has happened and is happening from the perspective of the other.  We must understand the experience of Israelis and Jews and Palestinians, both Hamas supporters and all the rest.  Understanding the other’s perspective does not mean that we excuse unconscionable behavior.  But without understanding the other’s experiences, their emotions, and the realities of their lives, there never will be a just peace in this part of the Middle East.

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JONAH RASKIN | FILM | The reign of terror waged against the Osage. A review of the movie ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

Posted on November 21, 2023 by Thorne Dreyer

By Jonah Raskin | The Rag Blog | November 24, 2023

Jonah Raskin will discuss this article and related issues on Rag Radio, Friday, Nov. 24, 2-3 p.m. (CT) on KOOP 91.7-FM in Austin or streamed at KOOP.org.

For the past 600 years and maybe far further back in time than that, indigenous people all over the world have taken a terrible beating, though they have also survived. Novelists, poets, painters, playwrights, and filmmakers have told that story of genocide and resistance in its many iterations over and over again, and still the wars go on. David Grann tells a small part of that global phenomenon in his nonfiction book, Killers of the Flower Moon, a bestseller. Now, famed director Martin Scorsese has adapted parts of Grann’s story for a long movie that describes the war that white settlers, businessmen, and lawmen waged in the 1920s in the state of Oklahoma against a Native American tribe called the Osage.

The Osage called the war that was waged against them a “Reign of Terror.” When oil was discovered in Osage territory in Oklahoma, the Indians suddenly became wealthy. In many ways they assimilated white values, without totally surrendering their own heritage and language. Both resistance and compliance went on at the same time.

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LAMAR HANKINS | DEATH AND DYING | Dying on our own terms in Texas

Posted on October 12, 2023 by Thorne Dreyer

Texans are unlikely to see a medical assistance in dying law any time soon, but other options are available for those facing an unacceptable, protracted death that lacks the dignity most people seek.

By Lamar Hankins | The Rag Blog | October 12, 2023

[Lamar Hankins will be Thorne Dreyer’s guest on Rag Radio from 2-3 p.m., Friday, October 13, 2023, on KOOP-FM 90.1 in Austin or at KOOP.org.]

Few people want to discuss dying, including most Texans.  Nevertheless, more and more people are demonstrating a willingness to plan for what every person will eventually face.  The use of advance directives; the proliferation of Death Cafes, where death and dying issues are discussed in an informal setting; organized discussions in many social, nonsectarian, and religious groups; and the passage of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) laws in several states over the past few years attest to an increasing interest in thinking about and discussing death and dying.

The need for assistance in dying

Many people don’t see the need for assistance in dying.  I will point to four examples by way of explanation.  An inoperable brain tumor can lead to painful headaches and seizures that leave a person in misery, with no hope of recovery.  As the symptoms get closer and closer together, they may have no opportunity for a peaceful life.  Often, the medications prescribed to control the symptoms leave the person unable to function in any normal way.  Death is certain, but how soon it will come is unknown.  Brittany Maynard, who had an inoperable brain tumor at the age of 29, explained her decision to use the MAID law in Oregon to end her own life:

Having this choice at the end of my life has become incredibly important. It has given me a sense of peace during a tumultuous time that otherwise would be dominated by fear, uncertainty and pain.  Now, I’m able to move forward in my remaining days or weeks I have on this beautiful Earth, to seek joy and love, and to spend time traveling to outdoor wonders of nature with those I love. And I know that I have a safety net.  I hope for the sake of my fellow American citizens that I’ll never meet that this option is available to you.  If you ever find yourself walking a mile in my shoes, I hope that you would at least be given the same choice and that no one tries to take it from you.

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ALICE EMBREE | LATIN AMERICA | The First 9/11: Fiftieth anniversary of the coup in Chile

Posted on September 10, 2023 by Thorne Dreyer

September 11, 2023, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 military coup in Chile.

Painting by Carlos Lowry, 2023.

By Alice Embree | The Rag Blog | September 10, 2023

The Austin Committee for Human Rights in Chile began after the coup.  It is where I deepened my understanding of U.S. complicity in that coup.  It’s where I was called Compañera, where I met a partner who had been in Santiago that fateful day.  The long shadow of dictatorship, lasting 17 years, marked my life and others I came to know in the Chile solidarity movement.  Our solidarity efforts echo a previous generation’s experience with the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, a long shadow of dictatorship.

As we live in a time of peril, climate apocalypse, state bans on bodies, local bans on books, and sustained attacks on democracy, I can’t help but feel we are on a precipice.  Imbued with remembrance of movement victories and a sense of solidarity, we live with a palpable fear of losing ground, of losing democratic rights we thought were inalienable.

I was moved by Ariel Dorfman’s recent article, “Defending Allende,” in the New York Review.  He was there when Allende won the presidency.  He speaks of it beautifully:

I had one of the most moving epiphanies of my life on the night of Allende’s election on September 4, 1970. After listening to him promise a delirious crowd that he would be el compañero presidente when he entered La Moneda in two months’ time, I wandered along the streets of Santiago with my wife and friends and witnessed the wonder, pride, and determination on the faces of workers and their families as they walked through the center of the city.

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LESLIE CUNNINGHAM | CIVIL RIGHTS | The March on Washington: Now 60 Years Later

Posted on August 27, 2023 by Thorne Dreyer


Hundreds of thousands descended on Washington, D.C.’s, Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963. U.S. Government Photo.

Now it’s the 60th anniversary.  Ten years ago (see my article below) I was marking a lot of half century points in my life; the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and momentous events of the months following it loomed large.  Somehow it’s a decade later and I’m still alive, but my head’s been reeling with what’s happened during this time — the good, the bad, and a lot of ugly.  This is very frightening to those of us who remember the 1950s — segregationist violence, McCarthyism, and the very real danger of nuclear annihilation. Today it’s the resurgence of overt racism, homophobia, violent white supremacy, and Christian nationalism that we once thought had become fringe but is now a serious power.  

 So once again, what is to be done? I wrote about “seeing all those people, all those BLACK people, all those men and especially women, young and old, whose event this was. Seeing their seriousness and power and determination. They were the instigators, they were the organizers, they were the leaders of their own struggle.” What I felt vaguely in 1963 was that black and brown people (“especially women”) would also be the leaders of a multiracial movement for change, and that I did not want to be in organizations and campaigns dominated by Anglo people — though I’ve found myself doing just that at various times in the last 60 years.

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