Bob Mants

Bob Mants: December 14, 2011

Bob Zellner

Bob Mants had something contagious.  He possessed a physical bravery that was sometimes breathtaking.  He is known for that.  But his bravery is not all I am talking about.  Crazyhorse was brave beyond all measure battling with encroaching Europeans seeking to take lands belonging to the Sioux and other tribes. Crazyhorse became know for that.  That great Native American leader is famous and honored as a leader of his people, however, not just for his bravery in battle, but as a thinker with wisdom and the knowledge of how to achieve his people’s goals.

Crazyhorse, quiet and humble, dreamed of uniting and mobilizing the great Teton Circle of the Sioux Nation.  Mants, determined to unite his rural community behind the Black Panther, taught that the combined power of grassroots people could throw off the boot of Southern and American racism. 

        Courage, combined with both wisdom and humility, is what Bob Mants has.  Mants, which is what SNCC people called Bob, had both physical courage and the vision required of a great leader.  Endowed by his Creator with the magnetic personality along with a philosophically strong sense of his own personhood, he earned his knowledge and education through hard work and determination.  The vision part of his makeup, however, I believe, he caught from SNCC.  That, to me, is the contagious part of the puzzle that was Bob Mants. 

         Bob Mants and Bob Moses shared quietness and a reluctance to stand in the stage lights; that became a powerful leadership tool.  Perhaps they acquired such power from our great mentor, Ms Ella J. Baker, the quiet woman who sat by the door.  Bob Mants also learned leadership through his experience in and study of Africa. Ms Baker seldom spoke except to “sum up” or condense the sense of the group.  Like elders in Native American culture and that of Africa, her power lay not in convincing others of her point of view, but by shining a light on what everyone already agreed to or knew.  She often knew we had reached consensus before we did.  Ella Baker wasn’t shy about firm leadership when necessary, however, as evidenced by her opinion there was no contradiction between direct action and voter registration.  Voter registration and political organizing in Mississippi and Alabama, as Mants understood, was direct action.

          Bob Mants was infected by his people’s and the people’s passion for justice.  He passed it to fellow freedom sisters and brothers.  As Michael (Wright) Oshoosi said in his remembrance, “Bob was a steadfast organizer and his demeanor gave people courage…” SNCC organizers exhibited steadiness in extreme situations because most had decided some things were more important than long life.  When one prepares to die for the common good, that person attains immense power.

          Among my many personal memories of Bob is his willingness to correct people when they are wrong.  His quiet demeanor masked a remarkable intellect and a firm pride.  We were together at a symposium at Brown University and I was being unusually bombastic, as I can sometimes be.  Having been in the North for some time, and having trouble being heard in fast talking Yankee circles, I had unconsciously developed a habit of interrupting people.  It seemed necessary if one had anything to say. Mants took exception to my interruptions, needless to say, and told me in no uncertain terms to please wait until he had finished what he had to say before responding.  Thank you, my brother.

          Power to Mants, the ancestors with whom he dwells, and power to the people for whom he fought!

My deepest condolences go to all of Bob’s extended family.  I loved Bob and I did not tell him the last time I saw him.

Bob Zellner

http://www.crmvet.org/mem/mantsb.htm

Zellner Empowers Occupy Movement

Adopted as the feelings of OCCUPY WALL STREET.
All movement people should send to their blogs, facebooks, and other public social media.
EMPOWER THE OCCUPY FORCES
Bob Zellner  Southamton, NY  October 26, 2011
This document was accepted by the NYC General Assembly on September 29, 2011
Translations: French, Slovak, Spanish, German, Italian

As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

• They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
• They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
• They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
• They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
• They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
• They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
• They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
• They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
• They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
• They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
• They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
• They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press.
• They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
• They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
• They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
• They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
• They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
• They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
• They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
• They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
• They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad.
• They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
• They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts.*

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

Shriveled Heart Syndrome Damages Occupy America

Southampton, NY:  Conservatives Using SHS (shriveled heart syndrome) to Counter
Occupy Movement.

It’s not just for southerners, the shriveled heart syndrome, any more.  David
Brooks and other northerners are also susceptible to SHS: it appears to be
contagious.  Canadian born conservative Brooks considers all US citizens
southerners and he’s a Jew who used to be liberal.

During Reconstruction, doctors first described shriveled heart syndrome. It’s
becoming a powerful weapon for the 1% rich due to its history and its
devastating affect on the body politic.  Mostly liberal or progressive doctors
coming down with nurses to bind the wounds of our civil war, these physicians
began listing human symptoms of SHS, heretofore mostly confined to dogs.  In
dogs it is called heartworms.

Southerners often discount the existence of SHS due to its evolutionary
origin.  SHS can best be understood as a social disease evolved over several
centuries with roots in the early years of our nation’s history.

David Books, accused of spreading the disease when he pooh poos empathy as a
useful aspect of society, is an educated historian from the University of
Chicago, a well-known hot bed of empathy.  He should know better.

Empathy, Brooks certainly knows, was the key human emotion our founding fathers
and mothers had to destroy when they needed to simplify slavery by making it
hereditary only for black folks. This original sin, clearly recognized as a
moral compromise, cleared up the question of who were slaves and who were
servants.  It also defined white and black, an improvement over the former
confusion.  People became “white” who had never considered themselves white.
Class, heretofore the prime divider of people, suddenly discovered a twin named
Race.

Shriveled Heart Syndrome then went viral sweeping the body of America with
speed rivaled only by HIV.  It stands to reason that Americans, especially
southerners, where slavery persisted, were hit hardest.  They cultivated harden
hearts while unlearning empathy.  Farm boys and girls, already accustomed to
withholding sympathy and empathy from farm animals as they were exploited and
slaughtered, took the short step to withholding love and sympathy from certain
humans. You can’t stand on your brother’s throat, confiscating the fruit of his
loins, his woman, his labor, his soul without becoming an awfully mean person.
Slavery, defined as an act of war, could be maintained only by a garrison state
augmented by vigilantly terror in the form of the poor white (trash) “paddy
rollers.” This lasted from the early 1600s to the civil war, two full
centuries.

Following Reconstruction, a cruel joke on the freedwomen and men, federal
protection left the south.  Former slaves, told to return to the tender mercies
of their former owners were informed,  “You are not going to get the tools,
seeds and land we promised you as small reparations for years of free labor –
forget forty acres and a mule!  Get over it!  Go back with hat in hand to Massa
and work for whatever he is willing to pay. “
More hardening of the arteries shrunk southern hearts as new forms of slavery
were built - sharecropping and Jim Crow, then prison labor, where bodies were
bought and sold as of old.   As late as 1922 Claude McKay, offering a poetic
lesson in how Shriveled Heart Syndrome is passed down through generations and
from mother to son, wrote:

“The ghastly body swaying in the sun
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.”

He focuses on unrepentant members of the mob ensuring a continuing lineage of
white fiends.

Unfree labor persisted in the south through the New Deal, even to the present.
This year, for instance, the largest prison strike in our history opposing
slave labor, occurred throughout the state of Ga., home of vaunted CNN world
news.

Not a peep of it in the news.  A small article in David Brook’s New York Times,
soon squelched by the Obama administration, reveled the prison uprising to be
nonviolent and well organized, bringing together skin heads, Latino
gangbangers, Muslims, Christians, black folk, white folk - everybody.  Had the
prison revolt been violent, the roads around every private and public prison in
Georgia would have been covered with trucks sporting satellite dishes, dishing
out the thrill for the entire world to see.  But no, this was well organized
and nonviolent.  So get over it, no news here.  Our country can’t allow this to
spread – it’ll kill the cash cow cradle to prison pipeline.

The scariest thing to Wall Street about the Occupy Movement is that young
people are getting their own word out.  Social media along, with old methods
like putting out their own News Letter, allows circumvention of David Brooks
and the Times.  They’d like you to believe nothing will be done if you lost
your home and your job – just suck it up!

Dean Baker in his column, BEAT THE PRESS, asks why nothing will be done to help
the 26 million unemployed, underemployed or those giving up looking.  “The
reason,” Dean says, “is that people like David Brooks and rest of the 1 Percent
don't give a damn about you."

This is the shriveled heart syndrome in spades.

BOB ZELLNER
October 21, 2011

MLK Monument Dedication

Oct. 15-16, Washington, DC
 

Report from the front:
Yesterday I spoke briefly to First Lady, Michelle and President Barack Obama. This is a report from the front, the front of the Civil Rights/Political establishment.  I celebrated the entire morning with a small knot of Americans including, in addition to the President and First Lady, and their two children (the dog was missing), John Lewis, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, Joe Biden, Attorney General Holder, General Powell, Tim Geithner, Ken Salazar, on down to Madame Aretha Franklin, James Taylor, Stevie Wonder, Sheryl Crow, Ledisi, Tommy Hilfinger, Rev. Sharpton, Nikki Giovanni, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Mary Mary (both of them) and others too numerous to drop.  I saved two seats up front for Eric Falkenstein and Senator Wofford, but was asked to give up mine for Dan Rather.  Since he is older than me, I agreed.

Strangely, our High Class section was first come first served and I joked with other before-dawn guests that I didn’t usually get up this early for Sunday services.  When Eric and Senator Wofford opted to sit with the masses, I gave their carefully guarded seats to Kerry Kennedy and a friend from Texas.  Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democratic Whip and movement jailbird, sitting with us, joined Dorothy Cotton, Kerry, me and James Taylor in every lusty chorus, especially Lift Every Voice and Sing.  Jumping up and down, we waved and shouted at every well-turned line delivered by good speakers.

Of interest to SNCC, and other once youthful movement veterans, are Joe Lowery, C. T. Vivian, Marian Wright Edelman, Doris Derby and husband, actor Bob Banks, Pam and Julian Bond, along with son, Michael.  There was also Frank Smith, Frank Holloway of Atlanta, Marion Barry, Chuck Neblett, Dorothy Cotton, Bernard Lafayette and Kate, big and little Jesse Jackson. 

  
The point of this name dropping orgy is that listing every person in the so called VIP section wouldn’t approach 1% of even the still living movement leadership cadre. Apparently there was no reaching out to great leaders still with us like Gloria Richardson Dandridge, the Ladner ladies, Joyce and Dorie, Dianne Nash, Dottie Miller, Connie Curry, and Jim Lawson - where was he? 

The guts of this dedication, however, the 99.9%, stood in front of the Big Stage.  They viewed celebs from our section, trundled back and forth, some in wheel chairs, for fleeting appearances before the masses.  Not one bold print name up there, we all know, would have, could have, become what or who they are, absent those folks standing just below.

Consulting a voluminous compendium of notes, I’m astonished that so few references to Occupy Wall Street were heard.  Ambassador Young’s panel, following the dedication and immediately before going to the White House for a movement veteran’s reception, is instructive.  The trio of altacockers, Ambassador Andy Young, Senator Harris Wofford and Congressman John Dingle of Detroit, mentioned only in passing the Occupy America Movement now going worldwide.  WE ARE THE WORLD – OCCUPY IT!

I shouted for them to discuss the Occupy America Movement but they missed the point.  The old men just didn’t get it until every question during Q and A turned on the inspiring new movement upsurge.  Had there been a woman or a young person on the panel things might have been different. 
 
Bob Zellner
October 17, 2011

Occupy the World Movement

October 19, 2011

Southampton, NY: Occupy Wall Street captures the imagination of the people of New York City, possibly the most progressive and diverse city in the world.  This is as it should be. The liberal northeast, in our country’s history, often leads movements for social change; Abolition, anti-lynching, a woman’s right to vote, and labor rights are but a few examples.
 
Next the OWS movement moved to the hinterland, from Wall Street to Main Street, and now, like the Arab Spring, it is going global. WE ARE THE WORLD: OCCUPY IT! 

For example, this just in: OCCUPY HARLEM MOBILIZATION. We stand in solidarity with Occupiers of Wall Street.  Friday, October 28, 2011, 6:30 – 9:30 PM at St. Philip’s Church, 204 West 134th Street (Adam Clayton Powell Blvd).  

The freedom struggle of Black people and their allies around the world provides a vital engine moving things forward, always forward. This newest class war, in the finest sense, can avoid the usual trajectory taken in world economic crises.  Ruling classes traditionally bail themselves out on the backs of the poor, the working class and relatively powerless, what used to be called, Third World Countries.  A favorite saying in the junkyard dog-mean south is, “Don’t worry about the mule, just load the wagon!

The 99% in Greece today launched a general strike against EU and Wall Street austerity measures. All we are saying in the Occupy movement is that the world certainly needs austerity, but it must be of a new kind. No longer can rich 1% nations and individuals appropriate most of the world’s goods and riches.  

We talk, organize, and take action to bring about a world class struggle where people, not power elites and power institutions, decide what’s to be cut and how to nurture and protect humans and animals. 

World Class Struggle depends on building a world-class movement using all the energy, creativity and technology at our disposal. Revolutionaries of North America bear a heavy responsibility, being as we are in the very entrails of Kock-crazed Globezilla wreaking havoc astride the world since the beginning of modern times.

Our determination is strong because the whole world is watching the ridiculous position taken by our ruling class here in good old USA. They say the ship of state will remain afloat simply by cutting welfare, Medicare, public education, emergency assistance, foreign aid, and any other program right-wingers and Republicans oppose.  

These same oligarchs gleefully spent all our public money on expeditionary and preemptive wars, and then they incurred massive debt bailing out billionaires. Because the public was quiescent, our rightwing-tinted ruling class saw they could do anything they wanted to abuse “the people.” 

But they went too far!  They know no shame.  Amazing how men with millions and billions of personal wealth, still want more. After years of redistributing world and American wealth upward, through tax breaks and loop holes for the rich and the super rich, their party, the Republicans, in the face of national and world depression, refused to increase revenue even by closing unconscionable tax loop holes.  No!  Only cuts directed at the middle class and the poorest can be used to correct this rotten economy.

Maintaining their voracious amassing of unprecedented personal and private wealth, our rulers helped themselves to what was left of the public treasury in the name of saving “the financial system.”

Well the ruling classes of the world can no longer do as they please.  State power can now change hands quickly and relatively nonviolently, thanks to the lessons of our freedom movement.

Reform of the system, even if it once seemed desirable, even doable, is no longer possible.  As Stokely/Kuame Ture, Musaka and others famously urged, we now seem Ready for Revolution.

Reform or Revolution, a constant theme in people’s struggle from the beginning, whenever and wherever that was, is now on the table for real. 

Reform seems impossible; its time revolutionaries think about ideas for the near and far future – strategy and tactics. 

The bedrock of protection for Americans, habeas corpus, was given up without a whimper in the name of being more secure.  This strangely unpatriotic action, urged upon our stupid right-wingers by the corporate fascist Kock brothers, sole funders of the Tea Party, was to protect us from terrorist.  At the same time, party geniuses like Michelle and Sarah urged common folk to cling to their guns as protection against the government?  Why would anyone gladly give up habeas corpus while viewing with alarm the power of the central government?  I guess we should be happy that our opposition does not think straight, if at all. 

The occupy movement should give President Obama, a center-right politician, an opportunity to turn more leftward.  It might not be enough to save capitalism, as FDR did, but possibly a left turn will be enough to give him and us some breathing room.  

I’m sure President Obama and his up to now uncomprehending staff wish they had, by executive order, put millions to work on infrastructure, as soon as the bottom fell out.  These millions of workers, continuing to pay rent and mortgages, would have allowed housing and jobs, the center piece of the bust, to bounce back quicker. I never understood why this could not be done at the same time measures were being taken to save the banks.  Isn’t the bureaucracy big enough to do several big tasks at the same time?

We are in deep cocoa, however, if President Obama fails to get another term.  His relative progressivism keeps harsher measures of the Patriot Act off the necks of change agents. A Perry or even Romney, White House might land many of us in prison or underground.  We can be “disappeared” due to lack of habeas corpus, PRODUCE THE BODY!

Ready for revolution?  Let’s hope that we are.  It might be delayed a while but it can no longer be stopped.

Bob Zellner
Southampton, NY.

Our Pilgrimage in the Rear View Mirror

The trip this year was outstanding.

It was serene and peaceful, as democrat and republican lions bedded down with democrat and republican sheep.  Not an angry or radical word was spoken and all was well with the world.

But wait!  It transpired during the most horrendous tumult the world has recently seen. Mubarake, the Egyptian dictator, had just fallen to people power as had Tunisia.  Remember him, we’ve almost forgotten his name. Libya rose up against Kaddafi. Bahrain’s people were demanding rights while Saudi Arabia and the US were poised to prop up its ruling class.  Yemen and Syria were suddenly afflicted with democracy and then the physical world fell apart. 

Japan cracked, then went up in smoke and flood while their vaunted technology failed utterly, spewing radioactive clouds over its people before wafting on the winds to California.  We were awed at the simple engineering mistake of putting backup generators in basements, vulnerable to the tsunami.  Hawaii shook belching flame and ash while waiting for the tidal wave and its native people yearned for freedom.  Seismologist and climatologist mused over the possibility that global heating might contribute to the outbreak of quakes and volcanoes.

Maybe we should not have been quite so out of it and serene, given the world situation, not to speak of Wisconsin and the continued assaults on our own democracy.

Another outstanding feature of the Faith and Politics Alabama Pilgrimage this year was the large size of the delegation and the enthusiasm with which everyone approached each new adventure – Birmingham local speakers at the 16th Street Baptist Church were inspiring with their stories of recovering from the bombing and death.  The band for the p3 young peoples was mind blowing.  Average age 14.

The Rosa Parks museum was a high point where every single pilgrim bought my book.  It was fun for me to have such a high-powered captive audience at Rev. Abernathy’s church, which is so central to the civil rights movement.  Everyone laughed with me over how timid us little white boys were as we got swept up in the movement with veterans like John Lewis and Dianne Nash, Bernard Lafayette, and those gorgeous singers, Betty Fikes and Dorothy Cotton.  Every person in the church seemed to understand the power of Ms Parks saying to me that I had to take a stand, or as John Lewis says, “Get in the way.”

To Faith and Politics and its new and old leadership, I say keep the faith and the good works!

Bob Zellner March 21, 2011

Tune in to The Injustice Files, Friday, March 4

Keith Beauchamp has done more to re-open cold case civil rights murder cases than anyone.  Please help Keith, CBS, and me get the word out about this great documentary to be shown tomorrow. William Moore is a true American Hero who was murdered in my home state of Alabama. We know who assassinated him but the murderer is still being protected by God knows whom?

Dear Friends,

Please tune in this Friday (March 4, 2011) for "The Injustice Files" Episode 3: He Walks Alone.

On the Investigation Discovery Channel at 9pm est /8pm CST.

Episode 3: 'He Walks Alone ' profiles the murder of William Lewis Moore who was the first known white martyr of the American civil rights movement! Please spread the word!

Thanks in advance for your support.

Sincerely,

Keith A. Beauchamp
Executive Producer/Host
"The Injustice Files"

P. S. View a sneak peek of Episode 3 here:
http://investigation.Discovery.Com/videos/the-injustice-files-the-dangers-of-southern-activism.Html#icpgn=idhpdrl4

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