Right-wing opponents of women's rights must be very disappointed. They had scored heavily last year when state ERAs were defeated in New York and New Jersey. Confident that this trend would continue, Phyllis Schlafly, national leader of Stop ERA, called Massachusetts the "bellwether" state. If voters rejected the ERA here she said, it would spell doom for the amendment around the country.

Support for the Massachusetts ERA was especially high among Blacks. A September 26 poll conducted by the Boston Herald-American showed 97 percent of the Black community backing it.

However, the Bay State Banner, the Black community paper, came out for a "no" vote on the ERA. Its October 14 editorial mistakenly argued that passage of the amendment would cripple affirmative-action programs for Blacks by enabling courts to outlaw these programs as discriminatory against whites. The editorial completely ignored the special problems and discrimination faced by Black women--more than half our community.

Black women have a dual fight. We have to fight racism because we are Black. And we have to fight sexism because we are women. Black women--and the whole Black community--need the ERA.  
 
November 26, 1951
Atrocity stories by capitalist war propagandists are almost invariably faked or grossly exaggerated. The claim that Chinese or North Koreans have murdered 6,270 U.S. prisoners of war is no exception. What distinguishes this claim, issued by Col. James M. Hanley, Judge Advocate General of the Eighth Army, is its extreme crudity.

The very timing of his report--so convenient for stalling cease-fire negotiations--would alone make it suspect. But the report is a fraud on the face of it. It contains not the shadow of proof and the latest date cited in it is Dec. 10, 1950.

Even Gen. Matthew B. Ridgeway has reluctantly admitted that "the total number of U.S. dead as a result of the atrocities and for whom bodies have been recovered is 365," that "there is no conclusive proof as to the number of dead" and that "neither the fact nor manner of death" of most of the soldiers listed in Hanley's report has been established.

The actual text of Col. Hanley's original report contains only one specific incident involving American troops, the alleged killing of 200 U.S. Marines near Sinhung on Dec. 10, 1950, on order of a Chinese regimental commander.

I.F. Stone of the N. Y. Daily Compass points out that the cumulative total of all Marines officially listed as missing on Dec. 28, 1950 was only 79. Stone questioned U.S. Marine authorities in the Pentagon and learned they had never heard of the incident, had no reports of any Marines killed as prisoners of war and had heard from returned POW's that prisoners were, in fact, well-treated by the Chinese.  
 
 
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