Jun 14, 2003

Think back to the political climate of the early 1950s: Senator Joseph McCarthy on the prowl. Alger Hiss convicted of “losing China.” Eleven leaders of the Communist Party convicted of “conspiracy to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the United States.”

Rx: Make three calls now / Honor Medgar Evers

Opinion

Fifty years ago I was among thousands camped at the Washington Monument waiting to hear the outcome of the final appeal to President Eisenhower to spare the lives of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. When the denial came, there was anger and grief for these two heroes, victims of the Cold War and McCarthyism.

Opinion

Astonishingly, and sadly, four decades after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. marched in Birmingham, we must ask again, “Do African Americans have the unimpeded right to vote in the United States?”

Opinion

On the morning of June 8, 1983, Rudy Lozano, chief Midwest field organizer of the old International Ladies Garment Workers Union, was murdered in cold blood in his house in the Little Village neighborhood on Chicago’s southwest side. The forces behind his killing have never been conclusively identified.

Opinion

Conservative Republicans boast of freedom, which they equate with tax cuts and a government strong on military power and weak on social services. They demand accountability from everyone but themselves.

Review

An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, by William F. Pepper, Verso, 320 pp., $25

William Pepper’s book An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King makes us realize that extra-judicial executions such as those carried out by the Colombian military and their proxies, the paramilitaries, are not exclusive to South America.

Review

Life of Pi by Yann Martel, Harvest Books, 336 pp., $14

Life of Pi by Yann Martel is a sensational tale of a boy, his religious beliefs and his zoo animals in a lifeboat. It is where Dr. Doolittle meets The Old Man and the Sea.

Review

The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America, by James L. Lorence, University of New Mexico Press, 256 pp, $21.95

To many older progressives, activists, union organizers, socialists and communists, the story of how the movie Salt of the Earth came to be, its production and blacklisting, is a cherished something to be told and re-told.