Today in Labor History June 7, 2016: Black Lives Matters activist Jasmine Abdullah, an African-American woman, was sentenced to prison for “felony lynching” because she had tried to free a comrade from police custody during a protest. At the time of her arrest, California Penal Code 405a defined “Felony Lynching” as the act of taking an arrestee from a cop by means of a “riot,” a felony punishable with up to 4 years in prison. However, the claim she had “rioted” is entirely spurious. There had been no physical contact with any cops; no injuries or violence; merely a verbal plea to let the other woman free. The previous year, Abdullah had been arrested by Pasadena police on terrorism charges for participating in a “die-in,” a common nonviolent piece of street theater.

The historical basis for “felony lynching” laws were to prosecute members of racist mobs for attempting to force jailers to release African-American prisoners into their custody, so they could torture, rape and murder the prisoner themselves. Scores of black women, as well as men, have been lynched in the U.S. White supremacists would often make a sick spectacle of it, selling postcard images of the victims, or posing with the bodies.

In 2015, Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill that amended the law to remove the word “lynching,” due to the fact that virtually everyone in the U.S. associates the word entirely with the mob murder of black people by white supremacists, and because of the outrage that had occurred the previous year, when another Black activist, Maile Hampton, had been charged with lynching at a Black Lives Matter. Abdullah’s “lynching” arrest had occurred in 2015, before the law had been amended.

#working class #LaborHistory #racism #lynching #BlackLivesMatters #BLM #JasmineAbdullah #BlackMastodon #police #policebrutality #prison

Today in Labor History, May 27, 1894: hard-boiled detective writer Dashiell Hammett was born. From the age of 21-23, he worked as a Pinkerton detective and then joined the army. But he developed tuberculosis and was discharged shortly after joining. In 1920, he moved to Spokane, again to work for the Pinkertons. From there, he hired on as a strikebreaker in the Anaconda miners’ strike in Butte, Montana. However, when the Pinkertons enlisted him to assassinate Native American IWW organizer Frank Little, he refused, and quit the agency.

His first stories were published in the early 1920s. And his 1929 novel, “Red Harvest,” was inspired by the Anaconda Road massacre, a 1920 labor dispute in the mining town of Butte, Montana, when company guards fired on striking IWW miners, killing one and injuring 16 others. During that strike, vigilantes lynched Frank Little, the same man Hammett refused to murder. André Gide called Red Harvest “the last word in atrocity, cynicism, and horror." Time magazine named it one of the top 100 novels of the 20th century. Even so, Hammett is far more famous for The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1934), which were both made into successful Hollywood films.

In 1937, Hammett supported the Anti-Nazi League and the Western Writers Congress. He also donated to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, fighting the fascists in Spain. He was a socialist and served as president of the Communist-sponsored Civil Rights Congress of New York. In 1951, the authorities sentenced him to six months' imprisonment for refusing to cooperate with the US House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities' (HUAC) inquiries into domestic "subversion." Playwright Lillian Hellman, his long-time companion and lover, said that he submitted to prison rather than reveal the names of comrades because "he had come to the conclusion that a man should keep his word."

McCarthy subpoenaed him again in 1953, during his anti-Communist witch hunt. And again, in 1955, he was called to testify about his role in the Civil Rights Congress. Though he served no more jail time, he was blacklisted. He was also convicted in absentia in 1932 of battery and attempted rape. He died in 1961, of lung cancer.

#WorkingClass #LaborHistory #IWW #nazis #antifascism #CivilRights #socialism #communism #Pinkertons #lynching #FrankLittle #indigenous #massacre #strike #union #author #books #fiction @bookstadon

Framing Emmett Till: Exposing Dark Fear follows an anonymous Black writer as he investigates Emmett’s murder, where he confronts unresolved truths. --> #BookThreads #BookSky #BookReview #FramingEmmettTill #AbramsComicArts #GraphicNovel #Netgalley #ARCReview #EmmettTill #CivilRightsMovement #Lynching

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