As for the African American perspective, it was good to note the episode showed that the lynchings did continue during FDR's first two terms with little progress being made to abate them. However, to FDR's credit, African Americans were brought into his administration in numbers that were unprecedented in American history. And Eleanor and Franklin appeared to have had no qualms in inviting African Americans to dine with them at the White House. Ultimately, FDR was the People's President, all of the Peoples President, in so many ways.
FDR's and Eleanor's remarkable ability to transcend the constraints of their class was well documented last night but earlier in the day, I came across an even more profound transcendence. In reading, about the lynching that occurred in Okemah in 1911, I was intrigued by the fact that one of the leaders of the lynch mob was a reputed Ku Klux Klan member who happened to be a local landowner and sometime political wannabee. This local landowner was undoubtedly a product of his class, and his times wherein black folks were not viewed as being quite human. Thus, the lynching of a black woman and her child was not something to be ashamed of but rather something to be proud of as fulfilling one's civic duty.
A little more than a year after the lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson, this local landowner became the father of a baby boy. Emulating his father, the boy became a racist. However, he did not remain so. After a series of personal tragedies, the boy began to change. The boy came to transcend the constraints of his race and his class to become a People's Poet and Songwriter. Indeed, in my own youth, I fondly remember first learning to sing his most famous song while in the fourth grade in elementary school in 1962-63 Glasgow Air Force Base, Montana. You see, the boy who became the Favorite Son of Okemah, Oklahoma, happens to be Woody Guthrie and the song I learned to sing was This Land Is Your Land.
Your can read about This Land Is Your Land at
However, I think we all can remember this:
- This land is your land, this land is my land
- From California to the New York Island
- From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
- This land was made for you and me.
- As I was walking that ribbon of highway
- I saw above me that endless skyway
- I saw below me that golden valley
- This land was made for you and me.
- I roamed and I rambled and I followed my footsteps
- To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
- While all around me a voice was sounding
- This land was made for you and me.
- When the sun came shining, and I was strolling
- And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling
- A voice was chanting, As the fog was lifting,
- This land was made for you and me.
- This land is your land, this land is my land
- From California to the New York Island
- From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
- This land was made for you and me.
In addition to being the writer of This Land Is Your Land, Woody Guthrie is today credited as being the inspiration for such artists as Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. And in one of the more remarkable images of the twenty-first century the song by the Boy from Okemah, the child of a lynch mob racist, was sung by two of his disciples at the inauguration ceremonies for the first President of the United States who happens to be of African descent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnvCPQqQWds
It is an amazing world. Please have a great weekend and enjoy it.
Peace.
Contrary to popular belief, Guthrie was not raised in poverty but was, in fact, the son of a middle-class real estate agent, Cray said. Woody's father, Charley Edward Guthrie, served as court clerk after moving his bride and children to Okemah in April 1907. Charley earned accolades from the local newspaper, which described him as a citizen of "irreproachable private life."
Giving up his general store gig, Charley opted for a career in real estate, Cray said. Woody's father, a registered Democrat, began preaching against the evils of the Socialist Party and Eugene V. Debs.
At the time of Oklahoma's birth, the agriculture and livestock industries tugged at the burgeoning state that had adopted the official motto of Labor omnia vincit (English translation: "Labor conquers all things"). Although southern Democrats controlled the first legislatures and Oklahoma's constitutional convention, the popularity of the Socialist Party increased among the poverty-stricken on the prairie. According to Cray, the state's Socialist Party grew until Oklahoma had the largest membership of any state in the union.
To combat this invading ideology ‹ and to keep the Socialists from taking away votes from Democratic presidential nominee Woodrow Wilson ‹ Charley fired several salvos. According to "Ramblin' Man," letters sent to the Okemah Ledger's editor circa 1911 included topics such as "Free Love the Fixed Aim of Socialism," "Socialism the Enemy of Christian Religion" and "Socialism Guards Secret Philosophy."
A dozen days after Wilson earned the Democratic presidential nomination, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born to Charley and Nora Belle Guthrie on July 14, 1912. During that same year, Logsdon said an African-American activist recruited blacks to sell everything and travel by ship back to Liberia in an event dubbed the "Chief Sam Movement." African-American citizens camped in the all-black town of Boley in Okfuskee County.
"Remember, in 1921 Tulsa had a huge race riot," Cray said. "It wasn't the blacks who were revolting; it was blacks who were victimized. And Woody used the word 'nigger' as a kid ‹ that was just standard fare. Now it wasn't a pejorative, really. Woody didn't see it, but there was a lynching in Boley.
"I have no doubt that Woody grew up with this kind of background (of racism), and it's a tribute to him that he overcame it." Other diverse influences included Okemah being located on Creek Indian land. "Woody definitely changed directions because he was in a different atmosphere," Logsdon said.
Something else was brewing on the prairie. Tenant farmers near Okfuskee County planned to storm Washington, D.C., to take back the government at a time when Socialists opposed World War I and encouraged resistance to the draft, according to Logsdon. During the summer of 1917, agitators responsible for rousing the "Green Corn Rebellion" in Oklahoma were influenced by a "strong strain of socialism," author O.A. Hilton wrote in "Chronicles of Oklahoma."
In "Ramblin' Man," Cray chronicled this "last spasm of prairie radicalism" as a ragtag band of armed farmers that gathered south of Okemah for the implausible march. These protesters viewed World War I as a "rich man's war, poor man's fight."
During his father's failed bid for Oklahoma's corporation commissioner post, Cray said, young Woody learned "short speeches to say standing up in the wagon, cussing the Socialists, running the Republicans into the ground and bragging on the Democrats."
"I certainly think that since Woody even helped his dad campaign for local office, that Woody was exposed to politics in a general sense," Cray said. "He realized that politics was sort of part of the lifeblood of any community.
"(Woody) was intensely optimistic. That's something he got from his father. And in a kind of perverse way, it led him to leave his father's yellow-dog Democrat voting to move leftward because it was the Left ‹ and being quite frank, the Communist Left mostly ‹ that was advocating the kind of things that Woody cared most about, such as race relations, equal or fair redistribution of income. These are things that were close to Woody. *They definitely weren't (Democratic ideals at that time). They had to push for it. It was this sense of optimism that led Woody to believe that things could be improved."
***
THE LONG ROAD TO PEEKSKILL presents the story of Woody Guthrie’s personal transformation from a youthful Oklahoma racist to the ardent anti-racist champion who, along with many others, risked his life holding the line against American fascism during the notorious Peekskill riots of 1949.
Conventionally known for his championing of the poor white Dust Bowl migrants, Guthrie also left an extensive body of songs condemning Jim Crow segregation, lynching and race hatred. Most of these songs were never recorded, but they are the legacy of this remarkable journey that eventually brought Guthrie into the fellowship of Lead Belly, Josh White, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and Paul Robeson.
The Long Road to Peekskill is both a harrowing and uplifting presentation, showing through the example of Woody Guthrie that racists are not born, but made - and that they can be unmade.
