In a message dated Mon, 23 Oct 2000 9:51:56 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Ted Morgan <epm2@lehigh.edu> writes: <First, as Michael Wright points out, Bruce is <referring to a public opinion poll that demonstrated <stronger antiwar opposition among the non-college <educated, more working-class, more minority segments <of the population. Michael Wright pointed out no such thing. The poll data Franklin cited concerned itself ONLY with respondents classified by educational certification completed. There was no mention of racial or occupational groupings. Further, I criticized Franklin for making an unsubstantiated claim about "college students." There was no data for that classification in the Gallup survey he reported. Additionally I argued that Franklin's implicit assumption that favoring withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam in 1971 indicated a "dove" mentality of moral opposition to the war was an error. In response to William Mandel, I must emphasize out that he did not quote me accurately. My statement was that repression of DISSENT is truly color-blind. Unless one wants to argue that a black man raping a white woman is a political, insurrectionary act, then that statement does not address the issue of whether blacks in the old South were more likely than whites to be sentenced to death for rape. Further, I would like to point out that I was talking about state-sponsored political repression -- not KKK- style vigilante actions. If Mandel wants to argue that historically, whites have been given a special break by the forces of state-sponsored repression of political dissent, I would like to hear his evidence. ~ Michael Wright Norman, Oklahoma In a message dated Mon, 23 Oct 2000 9:48:46 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Bill Mandel <wmmmandel@earthlink.net> writes: << As father of Bob Mandel, one of the Oakland 7, and as an individual, white, with lifetime experience with repression myself, I must object to Michael Wright's statement that "repression is truly color-blind." Bob had been in Mississippi with SNCC in 1963 and 1964. Yes, half a dozen whites were killed in that struggle, but the number of Blacks whose lives were taken was qualitatively greater, a fact that explained the early reticence of African-American southerners to become involved in the voting registration effort. Nine years before 1960, the accepted date for the beginning of the civil rights movement, I had been in the South with a nationwide mass delegation in an unsuccessful effort to save the lives of seven Blacks sentenced to death for the rape of a white woman. Never mind the fact of evidence that this had been an act of prostitution, the pertinence to Wright's statement is that no white had ever been executed for rape in the history of the state of Virginia, where this occurred. Discriminatory race-based execution was an act of repression, as it continues to be today nationwide. Incidentally, the story of the manner in which the Black population of Richmond rallied to our support, and the sense of fairness displayed by an absolute majority of the whites we called by systematically going through the entire phone book, is my one contribution to the written history of African Americans. I give it twenty pages in Saying No To Power. William Mandel >>
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