ABFFE Book of the Month: We Will Be Heard: Voices in the Struggle for Constitutional Rights Past and Present by Bud and Ruth Schultz
 

The ABFFE Book of the Month for August is We Will Be Heard: Voices in the Struggle for Constitutional Rights Past and Present by Bud and Ruth Schultz (Merrell), 978-1-8589-4441-8.  Through interviews and photographs, scholars Bud and Ruth Schultz present the stories of over 90 individuals who spoke out against the government, and often against the status quo in their communities.  The portraits show the history of the fight for free speech and the right to dissent through personal perspectives of both famous and lesser-known individuals, including former Japanese internment camp detainee Fred Korematsu and Janet Nocek, who resisted the FBI’s attempt to subpoena library records.

Interview with Bud Schultz

ABFFE: Why did you decide to write this book?

Bud Schultz: Since the war on terror began, our constitutional rights, our fundamental principles, have been too often sacrificed in the name of security.  For many of us, the reality of that loss hasn’t hit us personally.  But for some, it has been all too real.  In this book, we wanted to make that reality as personal as we could for others—to introduce the people who actually experienced it, to see them, to hear their words.

And we wanted to put that reality of today’s loss of rights into a context, in a setting of other, earlier, denials of constitutional rights.  That this isn’t, unfortunately, something new.  And we wanted to balance the difficulties, the pain, of the intrusions upon their rights with their resilience, their insistence that their rights—that all of our rights—be honored.
 

ABFFE: Many of the people you interviewed and photographed are not particularly famous. How did you find out about them?

Bud Schultz: We got help from groups that defended civil liberties.  Early on, Edith Tiger, then of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, pointed us toward potential interviewees.  We learned about some by reading histories of repressive events, like the 1916 Everett Massacre that led us to Jack Miller or the Kent State killings that led us to Alan and Roseann Canfora.  We discovered others by learning about groups that had been targeted.  Examining the FBI’s campaign against the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador led us to Linda Hajek and Jose Rinaldi-Jovet.  Sometimes it was just a chance meeting.  After the person sitting next to us at a symposium on McCarthyism rose to tell of his experiences before the federal loyalty board, we asked to interview him.  The result: postal clerk Arthur Drayton’s moving story of what it meant to him to be classified as “disloyal.”

ABFFE: What are some of your favorite stories about free speech?

Bud Schultz: Our favorites?  They are all very special to us.  That’s a fact.  Each has its own important lesson, its own drama.  And we can remember, years later, something about each interview, memories we find that make their way into our conversations, even now.

But we can point to some that typify what we respect so much in them all.  George Stith braved physical retaliation, even death, for his efforts to organize sharecroppers into the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in the 1930s.  Minoru Yasui said of his decision to defy the World War II order for Japanese Americans to be interned: “And if I, as an American citizen, stood still for this, I would be derogating the rights of all citizens.  By God, I had to stand up and say, ‘That’s wrong.’”  The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham, was beaten; his house blown up from under him, he was hit with high-powered fire hoses, and arrested “so many times I quit counting” because of his civil rights activities.  Of it all, he said: “But I knew what they were doing, and it wasn’t going to stop me.  I was determined to kill segregation or get killed because of segregation.”  Veteran FBI agent Jack Ryan was discharged in 1987 for his refusal to investigate non-violent antiwar protesters under the bureau’s antiterrorism guidelines: “I thought it was obvious they were not terrorists but were speaking out in a non-violent way against terrorism on the part of our government.  It was a position I refused to take.”

ABFFE: Which stories do you think will be most surprising to readers?

Bud Schultz: Speaking for ourselves, even after being steeped in these experiences for so long, we are still surprised, shocked, at  violation of fundamental principles.  How do we understand our government’s—our government’s—2002 kidnapping (“rendition”) of Canadian Maher Arar, then shipping him to Syria to be tortured and held in isolation for a year in a dungeon-like cell before the innocent man was let go?  How do we understand the dogged two-decade-long effort to deport non-violent, law-abiding Palestinians Michel Shehadeh and Khader Hamide that ended just last October, when it was apparent even to the government that there was no case against them?

Some readers who know generally of McCarthyism but aren’t familiar with its details may be surprised to learn that Socialist Jim Kutcher, who lost both legs in a foxhole in Italy in World War II, could several years later be discharged from the Veterans Administration for disloyalty even after Eleanor Roosevelt intervened on his behalf, or that Carl and Anne Braden could be indicted for sedition, and Carl convicted and imprisoned, after buying a house for an African American family in a white neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky, at the height of the Red Scare.  “In the atmosphere of the 1950s, a combination of anti-black and anti-red mania gripped this community. If you haven’t lived through a community hysteria,” Anne told us, “it’s hard to imagine.” 
 

ABFFE: In your opinion, how has the struggle to protect constitutional rights changed over the time span in which these incidents occurred?

Bud Schultz: The nature of the struggle reflects the nature of the attacks.  Some assaults on constitutional rights have been long lasting, as were the struggles against them.  Taking speech to the streets cost lives in 1916 (the Everett Massacre) as it did in 1939 (the Memorial Day Massacre) and in 1970 (the Kent State killings).  The police response to more recent public demonstrations, the one Kate Sorenson describes in Philadelphia in 2000, have not been lethal, but oppressive, nevertheless.  Just as the IWW did almost a century earlier, in 1916, so, too, demonstrators in 2000 in Philadelphia insisted on the exercise of this fundamental right.  Deportations for political beliefs and associations began early in the last century, dramatically expanded with the 1920 Palmer Raids, were reinstituted under the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and continue to this day even after the relevant provision of that act was declared unconstitutional.

Other forms of repression have been relatively short-lived, but decades long.  Congressional committees investigating citizens’ beliefs and associations were common in the McCarthy era, as were federal, state and local loyalty programs, but are moribund today.  Conviction under one or another form of federal or state sedition law, too frequent in the 1920s and 1950s, has not occurred for decades after unfavorable court decisions.  Mass incarceration, like that of the Japanese Americans during World War II, has not been repeated.  But, proposals for mass incarcerations existed earlier and plans were laid later to do just that.  Fred Korematsu, the leading internment resister, emphasized when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom decades later, “We should be vigilant to make sure this will never happen again.”  In 2003 he filed an amicus curiae brief in support of persons held without changes in Guantanamo Bay.
 

ABFFE: What do these stories tell us about the state of free expression and the First Amendment in the United States today?

Bud Schultz: There are times of fear—sometimes justifiable, sometimes exaggerated or imaginary—when we accept and accommodate to intrusions upon our fundamental rights.  As shown by these first-hand accounts, this was true for the first Red Scare after World War I, for the second Red Scare after World War II, and at other times in the past century.  It’s true today, when fear of the terrorist has sanctioned a mix of old and new forms of repression: the secret detention of terrorist suspects abroad and the incarceration and deportation of Middle Easterners here; the eavesdropping on our phone conversations in direct violation of law and the Constitution; the revoking of habeas corpus; and FBI surveillance of peaceful antiwar groups.  There have also been today’s innovations: the “extraordinary renditions” Maher Arar endured, the circumvention of due process with secret evidence as Hany Kareldeen described it to us, the placing of political dissidents on No-Fly lists, as Barbara Olshansky described it, and the intrusions on the privacy of library patrons without a court order and with gag orders imposed on librarians under the Patriot Act.  “I never thought about what it would be like to have the right to speak freely taken away,” librarian Janet Nocek told us of her challenge of the FBI’s use of National Security Letters.  “I lost a friend on September 11 on one of the planes that went into the World Trade Center,” she said. “I certainly know how terrible a terrorist attack is. But, to me, the terrorists win if we give up what makes this country what it is.”

That’s what these stories tell us, we believe.  We lose our essence when we compromise our fundamental principles in moments of fear.  What that means, we believe, is that now, as in times past, we must heed Fred Korematsu’s words, “…make sure this will never happen again,” or, in the words of a patriot before him, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
 

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