Extrajudicial Activism

A few weeks ago, I was going through some of my father's photo albums from the early 1930s, when he was in high school in Georgia. Among them was a picture of a prison gang, of black men dressed in black-and-white-striped uniforms, chained at the ankles, hoeing the field next-door to the school. At the moment the album fell open to this particular picture, the media was abuzz with Senator Dick Durbin's apology for comparing Guantánamo Bay to Nazi camps and Stalinist gulags. The air was highly charged because Amnesty International had made similar accusations; the Red Cross was expressing concern that American doctors were overseeing the administration of torture; the American Civil Liberties Union was expressing outrage that the government was using specious categorizations of "material witness" status to detain people without charge; the Italian government was indicting CIA agents for snatching an Italian citizen and sending him to Egypt to be tortured. There were investigations of thirty-three deaths of detainees in various American camps around the world (there has been little official accounting for those deaths and little public outcry at the lack thereof). And the Center for Constitutional Rights was calling attention to the one-year anniversary of its Supreme Court victory in winning access to federal courts for detainees. Unfortunately, this decision has not resulted in a single detainee having enjoyed a judicial hearing or been privy to any evidence against him, for the Administration has maintained that although enemy combatants may have "access" to the courts, they have no constitutional rights the United States is bound to respect.

As I meditated upon this messy time of ours, it seemed to me that the comparison to Hitler and Stalin is undoubtedly doomed for dismissal as an unconscionably disproportionate overstatement and that the better, if no less upsetting, comparison is to our own history of dual justice during the time of Jim Crow. Also in the news was the conviction of Edgar Ray Killen, the Klansman who planned the murders of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, during the summer of 1964. National attention had been sparked by the fact that two of the victims were white men. During the search for them authorities found at least nine other bodies, the remains of black men whose disappearances and murders had attracted no publicity at all.

I am not suggesting that there is a direct comparison to the brutality of those times and the complexities of the war in which we find ourselves now engaged. But I do worry that, however indirectly or unconsciously, our history shapes our approach to the present and to what we perceive as threatening. My father's daily regard of that field full of men still lives within him; and the life narratives my father passed on to me are haunted by those men. Some of them were dangerous criminals, but some were victims of a contract labor system under which they could be arrested pretty much at random, imprisoned on trumped-up charges and lynched with impunity at any time. The randomness of their confinement and the carelessness with which they might die fostered, rather than suppressed, an oppositional politics of identity in the African-American community.

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