The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.60/No.25           June 24, 1996 
 
 
25 And 50 Years Ago  
June 25,1971
DETROIT - On June 10, the Student Mobilization Committee held a demonstration at the graduation ceremonies at Andover High School in Bloomfield Hills, a wealthy suburb.

This was a new situation for the Bloomfield Hills Police Department. Before the event, the organizers of the action were pulled out of class many times to confer with the superintendent of schools, the principal, and police officers. Their chief concern was the "safety" of the keynote speaker at the ceremonies, Edward N. Cole, president of one of the biggest war profiteers - the General Motors Corporation.

On the evening of the demonstration, there were six uniformed police, a great number of plainclothesmen, including three on the roof of the school, and a police dog. One incident occurred when an enraged man attacked two demonstrators and attempted to destroy a huge banner reading: "United States Out of Southeast Asia Now." The police refused to take the man's name or allow demonstrators to file a complaint.

The demonstration consisted of 35 pickets, while 50 to 60 sympathetic graduates wore black armbands and antiwar buttons on their gowns. The graduates face the choice of either fighting and dying in an immoral war, joining the ranks of the unemployed, giving 78 percent of their tax dollars to the war, or working to end the war. The demonstrators urged the latter alternative.

June 22, 1946
Thirty-one hand-picked Negro victims of Tennessee's white ruling class have been standing trial since May 28 in Maury County courthouse, Columbia, Tenn., on a frame-up charge of "attempt to commit murder."

This is the second phase of a campaign of mass terrorism and murder launched against the segregated Negro community of Columbia last February. State troops, coming to the aid of a white lynch mob, blasted Negro homes and business with machine guns, shot and injured scores, invaded and ransacked homes, and drove the helpless Negro population into the streets. They mercilessly clubbed men, women and children, jailed more than a hundred and lynched two men in jail.

The trial is taking place in a Jim Crow courtroom where no Negro has ever served on a jury. Attorneys, provided by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, are introducing evidence proving that Jim Crow prejudice is so widespread that it is impossible to secure a jury that would give the defendants a fair trial.

While this mass frame-up is going on, not a single white hoodlum who participated in the February armed assaults upon the defenseless Negro population has been arrested and indicted. No action has been taken against the two officers of the "law" who shot two jailed Negroes to death in cold blood. The fascists who marked a large KKK on a casket in a Negro undertaking establishment are at large and continuing their sinister work of inspiring a lynch atmosphere.  
 
 
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