March 29, 1974
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - Seventeen hundred Black people made
the trip to Little Rock March 15-17 for the Second National
Black Political Convention.
The point was made again and again that through organizing to gain political power, Black people could begin to deal with unemployment, rotten housing, racist education, and so on. Unfortunately, a strategy did not emerge out of the convention that could lead toward gaining real political power for Black people. This was because the convention organizers and most of the delegates were oriented toward working through the two- party system.
A resolution calling for a Black party was submitted to the resolutions committee by the Georgia delegation. The Democratic Party supporters at the convention did everything they could to prevent a real discussion of this resolution. Maynard Jackson, mayor of Atlanta, put pressure on members of the Georgia delegation to withdraw it. The call for a break with the Democratic and Republican parties and for launching an independent party won the support of a number of delegates. The Wisconsin delegation, which included delegates from the Black Masses Party in Milwaukee, supported the original and later the amended resolution.
March 28, 1949
DETROIT, March 21 - George Novack, National Secretary of
the Kutcher Civil Rights Committee, last night made a stirring
appeal on "The Case of the Legless Veteran" to more than a
hundred unionists and civil liberties defenders at a meeting
here sponsored by the Greater Detroit and Wayne County Kutcher
Civil Rights Committee.
Joining in this appeal for the defense of James Kutcher, who had lost both legs in action in Italy and was fired last summer from his Veterans Administration job for membership in the Socialist Workers Party, were a number of prominent speakers from labor, liberal and church groups.
They included Tom Clampitt, personal representative of Emil Mazey, Secretary-Treasurer of the CIO United Auto Workers; Rev. Charles A. Hill; George Schermer, Chairman of the Michigan Committee on Civil Rights; Dr. Harold L. Sheppard, sociology professor at Way University; Frank Marquart, Educational Director of UAW Briggs Local 212, was chairman of the meeting.
Novack gave a powerful statement of the fact and issues in the Kutcher case. "The cold war against government workers represented by the loyalty purges," he said, "is a threat to all workers. These are police state methods."