July 15, 1977
BARCELONA--Spain might seen like a long way to go to find out the real meaning of the proposal being batted around in Washington to give every American a computerized identification card. The supposed purpose of the card is to help you prove you’re not an "illegal alien" when you try to get a job.

But Spain is a good place to find out about ID cards. Because what you’re talking about here is not a smiling Jimmy Carter promising that the card is for your own good and will never be used for police-state repression.

"Without a card you can’t do anything," says Miguel, a Catalan in his mid-twenties who is a central leader of the Liga Comunista (LC--Communist League), a sister organization of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party.

"The simplest things become impossible. An apartment, a job, a car, a bank account, medical treatment. You constantly have to be on the lookout for police, and if there’s a heightening of repression, you can’t even go around town for fear of a checkpoint."

Miguel explained that at the age of fourteen everybody has to get their National Identity Document, which has your photograph, your address, and other information.

Every time you move, you have to go down to the police station and get a new one. If you haven’t moved for five years, you also have to go down and get a new one.

"The police keep very meticulous records of who is where, cross-indexed with fingerprints," Miguel said. "Everyone gets fingerprinted each time they get a new document."

July 14, 1952
A story that should have been headlined in the Negro press last week was buried in the back pages of the Pittsburgh Courier, as a letter to the editor. In an account that was both vivid and factual, a Negro soldier stationed in France punctured the current political balloons about integration in the Army with the ugly truth about Jim Crow conditions as they are.

"We are the only colored troops here at this post," the soldier writes of himself and his companions. "The rest are made up of Southern whites who have brought to Europe their malicious ‘down home’ traits. All the MPs that patrol the city are white and go out of their way to embarrass the Negro soldier when he visits the city."

As an example, he describes a recent incident:

"One of our men was attacked on a Saturday night while he was visiting the local city by a couple of drunken white soldiers. The colored soldier was walking down the street with two Frenchmen when they (the whites) remarked, "That n----r, who does he think he is?" and proceeded to fight. Another colored soldier, seeing the attacked man’s predicament, came to the rescue. The white soldiers ran."

The only Negro officer in the company was discharged and replaced with a white lieutenant. Removal of the colored officer, Lieutenant Vincent, was a blow to his men since, before his appointment, the unnamed soldier writes, "we lived in drafty tents with no flooring, had no proper mess hall to sit and eat, and were up to our necks in mud. The CO even went so far as to have the men at the gate search us, going out and coming in."  
 
 
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