The Gentrification Zone

           If you're looking for The Gentrification Zone, that material has been superseded. Please see:

The Black Savior & the White Lady

      or

The Austin Real Estate Market Seen Thru a Palestinian Justice Lens

146 pages, Kindle:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DG9BNGRH/

This is the first chapter of what's on Kindle

           Chapter 1 Gimme Shelter

An African American college campus sits on top of a hill on the eastside of downtown, spitting distance from the Governor’s Mansion, State Capitol and City Hall. Huston-Tillotson University is a historically-black school and is actually the oldest in the city, founded decades before the world-renowned and fabulously wealthy University of Texas. Huston-Tillotson is on 7^th Street, one block north of the city’s infamous party corridor, Sixth Street. This area of the formerly black and Latino eastside has been the most gentrified part of what has been arguably the most-gentrified city in the United States in recent decades, Austin, Texas, aka the World Capital of Live Music, affectionately known as River City like in The Wizard of Oz, because freaky and unnatural shit happens in this Texas city, just like in the movie.

There’s a fence around the campus and at the front gate there is a guard in a guardhouse, even though on the back side of Huston-Tillotson you can sneak in easily enough. “Can I walk around campus and just look?” the guard, who is a middle-aged black woman, unarmed but willing to stand her ground, is asked by a visitor. 

“No, you cannot.”

         The temptation is to tell her that danger to Huston-Tillotson may include prowlers but the biggest risk, by far and away, is posed by white real estate developers. Who don’t even need to visit the property to know they would kill to get it. This campus—all 24 acres—is the most sought after “unattached” land in downtown Austin. Unattached means, in the local context, still owned or inhabited by colored people and as yet un-redeveloped by whites. In this city during recent years “the development community” has tended to think of property ownership by minorities as a purely temporary condition. Black and brown housing, churches, schools—the redevelopment and gentrification here has spared neither the elderly or infirm, not the poor, crazy or vulnerable. As a consequence there’s been Black Flight and the city’s streets have filled with homeless, disproportionately African American considering that there are few Negroes left in town. 

       Recently a quaint retro practice of the Austin police force has been revealed, picking up homeless black people downtown and offering them “courtesy rides,” that cannot be refused, getting the poor or dispossessed out of the way of busy white people downtown and dropping them off in the traditional black homeland of East Austin, a practice said to have been imported from San Francisco, where many of Austin’s newer arrivals are actually from. In Baghdad by the Bay the homeless are reportedly picked up on city streets by SFPD and driven to surrounding counties. It’s a kind of catch-and-release but for people. The reverse is also said to happen, a practice by suburban cops, picking up the homeless outside San Francisco and dropping them off in the city. The only problem in Austin is that the eastside, where the homeless are deposited, is no longer black. 

Dr. Robert Reddick is an African American educator at the University of Texas, who grew up in East Austin and has taken his graduate classes to Huston-Tillotson and is now a high-ranking administrator at Forty Acres, as the UT campus across town is called. He warned a few years ago that moving HTU out of East Austin would be the death of the black community in this capital city. Already the African American population has fallen from close to 15% of the city total to 5%. 

Latinos, who sometimes seem like a hardier and more successful ethnicity when living near invasive white people, have also begun to decline demographically. A local Tejana politician remarked a few years ago that Latinos who were suddenly being offered $200,000 for their modest homes in East or South Austin—which seemed like a lot of money to the homeowners at the time—did not realize that they wouldn’t be able to find housing remotely comparable to their old homes at a similar price anywhere else in the city, and instead would face long commutes to Austin jobs from surrounding counties, if they moved to the suburbs. Many still took the offer. Ditto many local blacks, who mostly moved east. The black community in Austin was already in critical shape at the time Dr. Reddick spoke and is now on life support. The prognosis is just not good. HTU’s location is prime, and by development standards the campus is huge in a town that has already been developed, it seems, to the max. In fact to call the black school’s site merely “prime” is like calling Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos merely “wealthy.” It’s an understatement by a couple of orders of magnitude. 

At one time you couldn’t get white people to go to East Austin. Now you can’t get them to leave. 

At one time in time for example nice college girls—white UT coeds, sweethearts of Sigma Chi or whatever—wouldn’t go east of Interstate 35, which was the border between the white and black sides of Austin. But their boyfriends did go east, often to rent the charms of the legendary Titty Mama, an African American woman with an existential rack who introduced a generation of University of Texas frat boy to the joys of coitus. Today, standing on the corner of the HTU campus, near where Titty Mama once walked a beat—doing her best to bring the races together through the most fundamental commerce, pleasure—you’re only a block or two from the State Cemetery, final resting place of Governor Ann Richards, the late great black Congresswoman Barbara Jordan and Texas empresario Stephen F. Austin, among others. A few blocks beyond the cemetery is the Austin police headquarters, home to los puercos who have shot, beaten and abused generations of African Americans and continue to do so even today. 

A few blocks still further, you arrive on Congress Avenue. South is the Colorado River and north is the State Capitol. Between the two, for example, still on Congress Avenue, is the office tower that houses the Texas Tribune which has played its own racist and sullied part in the gentrification of the city. Practically no white institution, especially parts of the media, is blameless, from the New York Times down to the local newspaper. Everyone has had a piece of East Austin or played a part in its cultural realignment, you could say, in recent years. Looking north from HTU’s campus for example, a relatively short commute is Dell Computers, the city’s largest employer, principal workplace of many of the gentrifiers, and home of the gentrifier-in-chief, Michael Dell, the original computer guy in town who made the decision that black people were expendable and their property could be redeveloped to provide housing for new tech employees, Dinks as they are called, for “double-income no kids.” The great man has not shown any remorse. 

As Michael Dell told the New Yorker magazine last year, in a story about Austin’s growth and big-city transformation, regarding the breakneck and uneven/unfair nature of development in recent years, "I tend to be more of a pro-change guy, If you're not comfortable with that, you're gonna have a really hard time." Truer words have never been spoken. 

The daily Austin American Statesman reported a few months ago for example that the African American population center in Austin is now in another county, displacement has been so great. But the direction of Black Flight in recent years, east, towards Bastrop County and the pineywoods of East Texas, is now also threatened because fleeing minorities run into the world’s most obnoxious/richest man, Elon Musk, whose Tesla carworks and tunnel experiments and God-knows-what-else are taking up land and resources there too, on the border of Travis and Bastrop counties. There’s no modest-income way out, in other words, as more well-paid engineers and techies are still arriving. Gentrification is not, however, a natural disaster, it’s purely man-made and blame can be assigned, which serves a useful purpose. In order to identify and shame the bad guys, who are not all white. Most are, with one prominent exception. Some of the names may surprise you. Asked once, a decade ago, about the likelihood that the black woman who was then president of Huston-Tillotson would acquiesce to white real estate developers’ desires to take over her valuable inner city campus, and agree to move the university farther east to a less convenient location—in exchange for a big wad of cash—a major civil rights figure in Austin said that it wasn’t the president of the school you had to worry about, but the H-T university board. Like other cash-poor land-rich black colleges, HTU relies for support on a wealthy group of sponsors that includes rich white businesspeople. In the past, HTU’s board has included a lot of West Austin faces, ex-mayors and even the First Lady of Texas, Celia Abbott. These people call the shots, not the black academic who runs the day-to-day academic affairs. 

Human-made tragedies have human actors and the gentrification of East Austin and the possible selling of the HTU campus would have a handful of prominent players, either directly involved or having laid the groundwork. Michael Dell the computer guy is certainly somewhere at the top of the list. He is apparently not a fan of the colored peoples of the earth, either in Austin, or in Palestine, where he is a rightwing supporter of the State of Israel, a subject that we will return to shortly because it is linked to the views of rich Jewish business interests, just as in East Austin. There is a certain recurring theme in gentrification and in Palestinian disenfranchisement: land. It’s all about real estate. 

Indeed, some of the very same money flows that have disemboweled East Austin have also cut the heart out of the West Bank. The same money, and some of the same people. This is not going to be an antisemitic rant. It’s much more of an anti-Zionist wail, not religion so much as identity, greed and corruption in which some American Jewish businessman are particularly prominent. It’s also about race traitors—Toms in other words—and it’s about whose narratives count, and whose do not. 

A big player in this mix is named Kirk Rudy, a business guy—a real estate developer—past leader of the all-powerful Real Estate Council of Austin, and founder of the most politically important development firm in town, Endeavor Real Estate, which is the largest developer in Central and South Texas, actually, a locally-born company now with properties across the country. Another notable in the corruption context is media maven Evan Smith who is former editor-in-chief of Texas Monthly, where he had the dubious distinction of never hiring or publishing a black person during ten years in the job and is not a fan of the black peeps either. Smith is founder of the Texas Tribune where he kept the lid on reporting about gentrification and is another powerful bad guy in this screenplay. When Smith was interviewing Barry, at the end of his presidency, it was just after Smith had hired his first black staffer at the Tribune, five years into the site’s creation and after hiring dozens of whites and Asians. Barry, the first Black President, came withing months of granting an interview to a journalist who did not employ black people. But being Barry in Austin has been almost solely about Barry, first Black President, not about the less-unique colored peeps. There is of course a cast of thousands when change happens as quickly and on the scale it has happened in Austin in the past quarter-century. In little more than the last decade, for example, the population of the city has increased by sixty percent. As techies and jobseekers have arrived like locusts, not that there’s anything wrong with that. 

One person who cannot be blamed, actually, is Elon Musk, not because he’s a humanitarian or has racial equity credentials but because he has probably never even consciously thought of black housing or gentrification, for bad or good, in his life. There’s a powerful argument to be made that you have to be conscious of wrongdoing in order to do wrong. Musk is clueless. People like Kirk Rudy, Evan Smith and Michael Dell are not. 

In any case, the number two bad guy, the second heaviest of the heavies in this motion picture, the middleman, or bagman, as you like, facilitator to the elimination of black people in East Austin, is former Mayor Steve Adler, who left office two years ago after pushing development to its limits without regard to who got hurt. A few years ago in the middle of Adler’s term in office, someone—the author is unknown—went to the sidewalks around Zilker Park, which has also been in danger of redevelopment—and using a large rubber stamp like the kind a businessowner might stamp a receipt “PAID” or “OVERDUE”—but larger—stamped instead, “EAT SHIT MAYOR ADLER.” To signal dissatisfaction with city policy. Years before that another anonymous tagger, apparently a foreigner, had done the same thing on Sixth Street during the Bush Presidency’s run up to the Iraq War, with all the false talk of weapons of mass destruction. That stamp, every dozen yards or so on the sidewalk downtown, read, “YOUR PRESIDENT LIES,” which of course was true. It’s not clear whether Steve Adler actually eats or has eaten shit in the past, but while in office his hands were certainly covered with the stinky stuff. And he spread it on everything he touched. 

People—even those living far from River City—may know Steve Adler as the mayor who, during the pandemic, made broadcasts asking people to stay at home, to prevent spread of the disease. Only later did it become clear that his videos were coming from his condo in Cabo San Lucas. Even a Jewish columnist at the New York Times—Smith, Dell, Kirk Rudy and Mayor Adler, all the heavies that you can count on the fingers of your hand here, as it were, are Jewish businessmen, a description that has nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with reality. Even a Jewish columnist at the Times, which is a publication that is not generally in the business of calling out wrongdoing by Jews, as we’ll see later, wrote that Mayor Adler’s video calls to the public from Cabo “reek[ed] of entitlement and irresponsibility.” That was Mayor Adler’s tenure in office. Watching him at City Hall, where he poured oil on the flames of development, without regard to the consequences for ordinary residents, was like watching a slug or snail move across the sidewalk, except he moved faster. He left a trail. 

Mayor Adler was said to have shown an early interest in the redevelopment of the HTU campus while in office. This was at the same time for example that he was persuading a black Baptist minister to move his congregation east, freeing up inner city land close to downtown for development, much to the chagrin of the black churchman’s parishioners. The black pastor said that Mayor Adler just started showing up at services one Sunday to talk with him, and not because the mayor intended to convert to hardshell Baptist, either. If one were really paranoid, two names associated recently with Huston-Tillotson would cause immediate unease for the gentrification-wary. For black people, that is, those for example who don’t trust white people as a general rule? The first is the aptly-named Diane Land, who is an Austin developer herself and wife of Steve Adler. She’s on the HTU board. Enough said. Almost. A frequently-voiced suspicion is that while in office Mayor Adler continued to do development deals, indeed he admitted to—in some cases—participating in City Council votes in which he said he decided not to recuse himself, because of the small size of his holdings. He is also rumored to have used his family as conduit for what his city position would not allow him to do directly. The former mayor has not answered requests in the past to release a full list of his wife’s holdings, btw. 

The second name that draws interest is Celia Abbott, First Lady of Texas, who a few months ago returned to the Huston-Tillotson board after a two-year hiatus. It’s noteworthy that the destruction of the black community in Austin has been a heavily Democratic activity, and liberal Democrats at that. The Austin City Council which has voted the zoning and the building codes and tax breaks that have empowered the bulldozers, so to speak, has been almost exclusively Democratic throughout its history, and almost perfectly bleeding-heart liberal in recent decades. Everything bad in the world has been described by Austin City Council members as coming from the evil Republicans who control most of the rest of Texas. But in terms of the public corruption that has gone hand and hand with the city’s development, an odd and horrific alliance has also been seen recently between the “hated Republicans,” which is sometimes all that Austin’s chattering classes can talk about—the evil governor, the evil lieutenant governor, to say nothing of the evil state attorney general. Who have nonetheless been doing business with the saintly Democrats. Ms. Abbott’s appearance on the HTU board—she comes from a modest and well-regarded Mexican-Texas family and is said to be a wonderful person in her own right—could nonetheless be disconcerting only because there’s so much money potentially involved, and the R’s like money just as much as D’s do. Her husband, for example, has created a number of “opportunity zones” that favor developers, featuring lower taxes, in East Austin. Celia Abbott’s husband is a hard one to figure in this regard. 

Greg Abbott is one of the most interesting guys in power in the country. He is doubtless genuinely conservative but becoming and staying governor of the great State of Texas requires him, from time to time, not just to be conservative but to be whackjob conservative, a degree of rightwingedness that is extreme and unnatural but that he can achieve if called upon. Still, the Governor has a disability, that requires him to use a wheelchair, and you can’t help but believe that he knows what it’s like to be different from the majority, to be a minority in fact. You just can’t rely on his sympathy, because his record in office is decidedly mixed. 

Recently he ordered state troopers kick ass and take pro-Palestinian protestors’ names at the University of Texas, up the road from Huston Tillotson, but the issue was Israel and, in this country, Israel is usually a special case where rules don’t apply. During the pandemic the governor was not all in on masks or vaccines either, to say the least, but Greg Abbott is leader of a state where a large part of the population was not exactly into pandemic preventatives. In Texas, risk is not often something to be avoided. He was right about chaos on the border before the U.S. government made the call, whether he was right or not about how to fix it. His use of state troopers on the streets of Austin for ordinary police patrols may not have been effective but it is a practice—using state police to supplement local law enforcement—that has been adopted by Democratic governors in New York and in California. Whether he would use his wife’s position on the Huston-Tillotson board, in cooperation with development firms connected to the Democratic establishment, as he has done in the past in Austin, well, it’s not like the Republicans are too picky to do a deal that will lead to money in their coffers. You want to know how they’ll do it, if they do? 

There will be an announcement about a big cash infusion for HTU’s ailing finances. There’s going to be more money, the university’s board will announce, for salaries and new programs and buildings. But the university campus will have to leave downtown and move somewhere farther east “in order to have room to grow.” The new campus will be somewhere in B.F.E. although they won’t say B.F.E. The real driving motive will be to free up land for the bulldozers. 

How will you know when the deal has actually been sealed? 

Have you ever seen a classic movie called The 3 Days of the Condor? Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway and the great Max von Sydow playing a CIA assassin. 

There’s a scene where Robert Redford, who is a CIA analyst on the run, asks von Sydow how he, Redford, will know that he’s been betrayed? And von Sydow considers the question thoughtfully. This is an analogy for how it’ll go down in Austin, too. 

Max says it’ll be a spring day and Redford will be out walking and someone will stop in a car, someone Redford knows—even a friend—who will be smiling and offer Robert Redford a ride. Redford will get in the car and he’ll be whacked. How will you know, more precisely, how events will unfold in the World Capital of Live Music? In Austin it’ll be only slightly different. 

It’ll be a hot day for example, hot as hell because that’s increasingly what days are like in River City. There will be that press release about a big infusion of cash for the historically black Huston-Tillotson University. The release will say there will be money for new buildings and new faculty and a new campus, somewhere out in the eastern part of the county, maybe in another county altogether. The words “room to grow” will be part of the wording and prominently displayed. The press release may include the names of important members of the board, like the Texas First Lady. If a new university president is mentioned to shepherd the university’s new direction, the body of the old president will be found a few days later, floating face down in the Colorado River, her hands tied behind her back. Austin police will rule suicide. 

Those 24 acres will get new zoning, courtesy of the Austin City Council, for office towers or, alternatively, “mixed use,” with expensive retail on the bottom floors and high-end condos up top. Just as the construction is completed, the developers—who knows, maybe Endeavor Real Estate? Just as the project is completed the developers will go back to the City Council with bad news. That 25% of the housing in the project that the developer promised would be low-income apartments, a promise made in exchange for the great zoning the Council has voted? The developer will say that “the numbers no longer work,” and there won’t be low-income housing on the site after all, and the City Council members will shake their heads and bemoan the cruelty of Fate but will tell the developers, who may or may not have ties to their Council campaigns, not to worry about it. And that will be the official end of the old African-American community in the Texas capital city, the old East Austin. The real heavy in this scenario, the one man who has told white business interests that it’s okay to destroy minority lives in Austin, Texas, Live Music Capital of the World, is actually a Negro. 

He's the black guy who has done arguably the most to wipe out the black community in River City, although he’s had a lot of competition. His name is Barack Hussein Obama II and he was 44^th President of the United States, the first black President in fact. Remember how often Barry was here in River City during his time in office? A hint: He wasn’t here for the tacos, bro. He was really here for the money. Barry corrupted the local government, sold out minorities in Austin not once, not twice but three times. And made a lot of money doing it. He’s making money still. Coincidentally, days after the Hamas attacks on southern Israel last year, as the ferocious Israeli offensive took shape, students at Harvard University began protesting a suddenly-cancelled visit to the university by former President Obama. 

“Barry, Barry, you can’t hide,” they chanted. “We charge you with genocide.” The students were right. 

A significant part of the suffering of the Palestinian people in recent years, and especially in Gaza at the hands of the Israelis, can be laid at the feet of the Obama Administration, Barry himself and his then-United Nations ambassador and now-head of U.S.A.I.D. for the Biden Administration, the multi-talented Samantha Power, a liberal white chick who, among others, including former secretary of State Hillary Clinton, another “liberal,” was an Israelophile in office. Barry and his administration went for the money. Interestingly, and in an intertwined dynamic, the gentrification of minority neighborhoods in Austin can also be laid at the feet of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party he led. It’s all about land, just like in the Middle East, as in the Live Music Capital of the World, and money, as seen thru the lens of corrupt of government. This will not be a moral or ethical treatise. It’s factual, related to land in Austin, and dollar flows from Texas to D.C., and from Washington to Israel. In both places, in Palestine and in Austin, Barry sold out the colored peeps. Let’s take a look. 

First, however, the two names you need to keep in mind. One is of course former Mayor Adler, who was the last mayor of Austin, for eight years, during much of the city’s incredible and unsustainable growth. In an interview with the L.A. Times a few years ago, during his time leading Austin’s City Hall, speaking with a sympathetic journalist who apparently did not check, Adler described his legal specialization as civil rights. He completely forgot to mention the part where he’s actually been a real estate development attorney with a specialty in eminent domain, while doing occasional duty for the Anti Defamation League, representing Jewish not black civil rights. The other person you need to know is the aforementioned Kirk Rudy—a friend of the ex-Mayor and of the ex-President. There is certainly no doubt about his profession. He’s a land developer and the preeminent land guy in Austin, which for the last few years has been the most POC-unfriendly real estate market in the nation. Kirk Rudy is founder of the incredibly successful land development company in the Live Music Capital of the World, Endeavor Real Estate. To set the scene. 

So, like, there’s a protest chant for what happened in Austin, too. Maybe not as good as the Harvard students but it’ll do:

Barry, Barry

          Please don’t lie!

                All you did in Austin

         was

              Gentrify

Dave Chappelle Live at Starbucks!

I'm not big on celebrities but obviously Dave Chappelle is different. The Times said last week he's back in circulation after taking time off for self-reflection or whatever. His wife is Filipina, how cool is that? It just so happens that a few minutes ago the brother himself was at the Starbucks on Lavaca at 3rd Street, which is kind of my office, in the World Capital of Live Music. I knew something was up when a white chick in one of the easy chairs by the east window lit up and then, a blink later, looked cool and uninterested again. I turned my head. He came in with two in the entourage, one guy looked Caucasian which is completely cool, diversity in the supporting cast and all that.

Dave himself came up to the big table where I was working on organic chemistry and said, "Can we sit with you?" For real, he was polite just like an ordinary person. In fact he was more polite than an ordinary person who probably wouldn’t have asked shit before sitting down. Dave was carrying an expensive motorcycle helmet. Did he bring his ride on the plane from wherever? I wanted to ask him what kind of bike he has and tell him that mine, chained up outside, is a three-speed.

 He got his drink and collected his helmet and didn't actually sit down which bummed me out a little. He looked more muscular in person which surprised me too. Somebody tried to stop him on the way out and tell him about seeing his show in New York. I had all kinds of bright repartee thought up while he was in line getting his mocha or whatever but I never got a chance. I could have discussed with him, black male to black male, the cruel realities of growing up in the 'hood, where every day was a struggle just to survive.

Or I could have impressed him with my knowledge of the Fischer esterification process in which an ordinary carboxylic acid, like acetic acid, and an alcohol, primary or secondary and maybe even tertiary (we're still learning the mechanism) is converted into a fragrant smelling ester, like banana oil. If Dave is in town for a show maybe he'll be back in the next day or two. I'll be here. We have our third test next week, organic is a bitch. Seeing the brother made my day.

My mother, may she rest in peace, would not have approved of Dave Chappelle of course. Let's be honest here. She would've considered him a bad example, a "threat to the advancement of the Negro race," something like that. She caught a bit of Richard Pryor on TV, back in the day, and had heart palpitations. Dave Chappelle is a bad influence. That's what got me so excited that he's here. This city has been gentrified up the ass and now most of my bad influences are white.

It's nice to see the real thing and remember what the Black Race is working for, what we're trying to achieve as a people, and all.

The Jew Mark Clark and the Rapido River Shootout

  Remember the Alamo? Some of that was made up after the fact. A myth of brave men, which the mission’s defenders undoubtedly were, who fought to the last man which they almost certainly did not. It took 150 years more or less for the best source to be uncovered—a memoir by a Mexican Army officer who helped defeat the Texans and who informs us that half a dozen men surrendered and were shot. The manuscript was last said to be in the hands of Texas A&M but doesn't get much play. We’re now about halfway through the same historical cycle on another famous Lone Star battle that has an odor of fabrication or worse. This one features an enduring episode of anti-Semitism and actually had its roots in Italy's bucolic Liri Valley, in January 1944, where the U.S. 36^th Infantry Division, a former National Guard unit known unofficially as the Texas Division—or Texas Army as its soldiers liked to say, and famous for a T shoulder patch on their uniforms—crossed a river on a mission. 

It didn’t bode well that the body of water was not the Rapido River, as planned, but the Gari, a detail that only came to light some years after the war. The German commander speaking post-bellum said that the assault was so disorganized he did not know at the time that it was a major attack. The Texans would gain fame later in the war, in France and in Bavaria, even taking prisoner Nazi Number Two Herman Goering. But that would be Germany in the spring of ’45 and this was Italy during the winter of '43, on the road to Rome, real estate that had at that point in time been fought over for more than two thousand years. The most extraordinary statistic regarding the Texan casualties at the Rapido is that almost half or 900 men were simply missing the next day, floating down the river—or lost, or surrendered which Texans don’t do but they did at the riverbank, apparently in droves. Two whole regiments of the 36^th were broken and there were consequences. 

On March 2, 1944, Texas Independence Day, according to one source,  “with memories of the disaster still fresh, a group of 25 officers of the 36^th Division met in an Italian farmhouse and pledged to do everything possible to prompt a postwar inquiry.” The failure of the attack would shake the State of Texas after the war, leading to a Congressional inquiry after accusations that a lone Jewish officer had destroyed the best of Lone Star manhood—and prompting whispering that continues even today. All in the name of the sideshow that was Italy during World War II. What started that night with an artillery barrage “to soften the Germans up” went wrong quickly and turned even uglier later in Austin. But the gunfight at the Gari, as one would more accurately call it, was a shaky undertaking from the start. There was a bridge that had to be crossed under fire and over the course of the night the attacking Texans made it to the far bank. The next night more men crossed. On the near side of the river, before the shooting started, the expected narrative was Texas exceptionalism, the Alamo redux with an equally glorious result but this time a victory. No one told the Germans. Afterwards the State of Texas's honor required a scapegoat and for that luckily there was a Jew. The attack didn't succeed but that didn't mean it didn't need to be ordered, a Congressional inquiry found that the assault ordered by General Clark was daring but not reckless, case closed. If anything, his reputation has grown, except in Texas where, dead these many years, he is still hated.

There’s a cool old film, probably made by the Signal Corps at the end of the war. It looks like central or Western Europe, maybe Germany, in the garden of a schloss or French castle. No sound but the film shows all the top U.S. Army commanders in Europe socializing, including General Eisenhower and his right hand General Bradley. Clearly these are the victors or the soon-to-be victors. And the survivors. General Patton himself, looking typically bellicose, wearing a ceremonial cavalry uniform—sidearm and polished helmet, like for a parade—is in the garden too. In the clip there’s also a fleeting view of a tall and thin, elegant officer who looks like he could have been a movie producer or Wall Street banker. That's Mark Clark of 5^th Army. The tendency in the American Army of the period—dominated by Southern-born Protestant officers—was to paint General Clark as somehow not real Army, not like the others. That is wrong. He grew up on post, son of an U.S. infantry officer and a Rumanian Jewish mom. Inevitably the horror of what happened at the Rapido has become caught up in our feeling for the man who ordered the attack. Just a few years ago there were whispers still of a yearly reunion, usually in Lubbock—many of the men who served were from West Texas, for whatever reason. The reunion was for survivors of a ghost company of the 36^th that started the Rapido fight with more than 120 men and ended with 17 soldiers and the officers dead.

How and why get rehashed continuously, in books, in colloquia, in chatrooms and on Facebook. These missives mostly have one thing in common, blaming the commanding general. Just last month a woman wrote on the 36^th Division Association Facepage, “There are no Mark Clark fans in this family,” as hating the general is now passed down generation to generation. The Battle of the Rapido River—“Gunfight at the Gari” is better and sounds more authentic to a Texan ear. It's all just another example of the Lone Star myth, the idea that in some areas of human commerce, violence being one, Texans do it better than anyone else. 

The British liked to say that the Germans were “easy to trick but hard to panic” and after an artillery bombardment warned of a coming attack, the Texans' only chance was if the Germans panicked which they did not. That was not explanation enough later in Austin however. And even today on websites devoted to military history there’s bullshit chatter about “the Jew Clark being promoted,” after the battle, “by the Jew Eisenhower,” although General Eisenhower was not Jewish. As with the Alamo, neither logic nor fact has been consistently applied. The big-balled Texan persona is everywhere however. Today if you visit the National Guard barracks at Camp Mabry, in West Austin, there’s a museum much-devoted to the 36^th, and a marker tells you all you need to know about the spirit of the troops. “In bars and clubs, both at home and, eventually, overseas, soldiers who wore the T-Patch insignia of the division were apt to insist that everyone within earshot stand when they sang ‘The Eyes of Texas.’ If men from other units refused to do so, the result was usually a brawl.” As for the commanding general, the plaque reads, “Bitter survivors swore they would never forgive Mark Clark for ordering the hopeless assault and most maintained a healthy hatred or disgust for the general for the rest of their lives.” Unlike the Alamo where facts were lacking for so long, the events in the Liri Valley are more a question of interpretation, not dueling details. In the Rapido context it wouldn’t have mattered if Mark Clark was black or Hispanic or Muslim, or if the era were today. Whether it’s money in play, or power, or as with the officers and men of the 36^th—reputation—there’s always a reason for blaming others. Race is the excuse. Witness Robert E. Lee, who ordered the charge at Gettysburg that caused 6,000 casualties among his own men, including over 1,000 dead, and doomed the Confederacy, but Southerners were still naming their sons after him for generations. And in the Texas narrative, the bloodier the better. It was losing that hurt so bad.

General Clark had influential defenders even at the time. Dwight Eisenhower is said to have described Mark Clark as the best staff officer he ever knew, which is considerable praise since President Eisenhower’s own reputation in the Army was built on being a good staff officer. For his part General Clark never testified before Congress and is said to have never spoken publicly, after the war, about what happened at the Gari. But he did put his thoughts down on paper. “Nothing,” he wrote, “can minimize the losses of the 36^th Division, which I selected for the tough unglamorous job at the Rapido because I knew its men had the stuff to get across the river if anybody could.” He was totally unapologetic of the pressure to win that everyone was under in Italy, including the enemy, backwater theater of operations or not. “I heard no more about this attack until after the war, when I was stationed in Vienna. At that time, a meeting of former officers of the 36^th Division in Texas passed a resolution asking Congress to investigate the Rapido River failure, which was blamed entirely on me.” Vendetta was next.

When he was nominated by President Truman as Ambassador to the Vatican, Texas' senior U.S. Senator Tom Connally protested. (Future president LBJ who was junior senator did not object to the appointment.) Protestants are said to have objected because of Clark’s parentage even though troops under his direct command liberated Rome from the Nazis. For which he was also criticized, by the British, who called General Clark a glory-hound. When the road to Rome was finally open, and the Germans were in retreat, instead of chasing the Nazis, General Clark went to the Eternal City, can you blame him, the first European capital to fall to the Allies during the war. His later career proved that he was indeed a great general.

During the fighting in Korea, after Douglas MacArthur was sacked as commander of United Nations forces, a tactician was brought in, to stabilize the military situation. Then General Clark assumed command in order to finalize the ceasefire with the People's Republic and North Koreans. That was a staff officer's job and one that he accomplished. He was the kind of general whose battlefields include a negotiating table. Later in Washington, where he also served, he coined the phrase “intelligence community” for the matrix of federal agencies that Edward Snowden recently outed. In the end Texans did not forgive him but the Army's officer class accepted him. The general's final posting was as superintendent of The Citadel, in the heart of the old U.S. Army establishment. That appointment officially ended the second Battle of the Rapido River, fought after World War Two and won by General Mark Clark. Both the first and second battles of the Rapido were lost by Texans.

          

Black Power Revisited the L.P.

          

 Mother once received a letter from William Faulkner. Or so she said. The letter was supposedly from the Nobel-prizewinner himself—the writer who Flannery O’Connor, no mere scribbler herself, called the Dixie Limited. Faulkner was master of Southern Gothic among whose haunting characters are the bear of “The Bear” and my personal favorite Joe Christmas the mulatto killer of Light in August. Mother said she threw Faulkner’s letter away. Her papers are now at Emory University, my siblings did it without consulting me, not that that’s a problem, maybe one day an archivist will come across Faulkner’s note. Probably not. But the chances that Mother did receive a communication from the great man are better than even and even though accuracy was not always a hallmark of her work.

My mother was fortunate to live and work in another time when there were only a couple of degrees of separation between most people. African Americans were either still slaving for a white man or white woman or not. Mother was a black female journalist in an age when that particular description was unheard of, not that it’s common even today. And the world was a smaller place back then. Blacks involved in the arts or letters or politics knew each other because there weren’t many to know, especially if they were making a living doing whatever they did. And you knew white people because they were running things then as now. White society was based on skin color and wealth but in our own culture there was a studied informality because most everyone was black and poor. Our intelligentsia included and includes many athletes and performers. Due in part to Communist influence—Brother and Sister served the same as Comrade. Mother wasn’t a Red but she knew a few. There was cooperation, you feel me, achieving common aims.  

Once we were short of money and in New York City, where the New York Times wasn't hiring black people, and Mother drove in a black Mercury Comet—with me in the back seat—to a club where Duke Ellington was playing. His name was on the marquee outside. This would have been '61 or '62, that era, Kennedy had been elected but not yet killed, in the historical context, and in my personal life my older brother was getting on my nerves. Mother said she was going into the theater to get “Duke” to cash a personal check. She came back with money, what can you say? It was a smaller community being black back then. So, like, the backstory on the Faulkner letter is that Mother was editor of a small African-American newspaper in L.A. back in the day and she had a fondness for writing provocative editorials about race relations at a time and in a place—the Golden State of California—in the years just after World War II—when diversity was not as popular a concept as it is today. After publishing fiery prose she licked stamps and mailed copies to social and political leaders who, not being subscribers to the Tribune, otherwise might not see her work. One piece made its way to Oxford, Mississippi, home of the Dixie Limited. My mother recounted for me Faulkner’s response in a single sentence, either that was all she retained or all he had written, it’s still etched in my memory more than half a century later. And once again it’s my belief that the chances are better than 50-50 this is fact not factoid, not because Mother was unfailingly accurate in her reportage but because of what she reported that Faulkner said. 

“I am all for the emancipation of the Negro,” she quoted the great man, “but if they come marching down my street I’ll be waiting on my porch with my shotgun.” If that wasn’t William Faulkner it should have been. 

The reason to remember the Dixie Limited today is not just great prose, even if he was dismissive of the Negro and even if his characters preyed upon blacks just as flesh and blood whites did and do. The reason to remember William Faulkner is because he understood thoroughly the fundamental aspect of the struggle over ethnicity in this country. It's been about violence—committing it, being victim of it or writing about it, as with Faulkner and my mother. 

One evening in my relative youth my then-sister-in-law the playwright Pearl Cleage who came from militant stock explained the Black Liberation tri-color flag to me. “Black is for the people, green is for the land,” she told me in complete earnest, looking me dead in the eye, “and red is for the blood that must be shed to get there.” She looked at me for a moment longer still, to be sure the message had been passed on. My mother shed blood in print. One of my siblings even described the rat-a-tat-tat of a Smith-Corona typewriter, throughout the 1960s and usually after midnight, sounding like gunfire, into the morning. 

As for rhetoric or the actual words themselves—Faulkner had that right too. And there we haven’t done too badly either. You knew that racism was doomed when Motown got involved, protest you could dance to. Music, painting, movies, TV—daily interactions with the white man or white woman—decentralization and the wide reach of the civil rights movement has been its genius. There has been a rebellion going on and everyone is involved but no one in control, on or off the field. Led by performers or athletes as everyone everywhere seems to know what to do without being told. And we keep notes. We have the clippings because of people like my mother.

Her magazine work, though limited, was outstanding. There’s a piece she wrote about crossing the South by bus, back in the day, being in West Texas and forced to drink from a blacks-only water fountain, the classic symbol of Jim Crow oppression next to a noose, in the Greyhound terminal in Big Spring. That scene is part of my memory of family outings as a kid, just like going to Duke to cash a check. That story was in The Nation, actually, getting a drink at the black water fountain in Big Spring. A dispatch from the front in the race wars, so to speak.

If you asked me as a kid what Jim Crow was like—as it was explained to me by Mother at the time, on the road in the Comet until it died and then on the seats at the back of the Greyhound bus—it was like a tax that was added to your daily life and you paid and you paid and you paid and if you stopped paying they killed you or sent you to prison. Does that sound extreme? Not in our social circle. 

Mother praised Yassar Arafat in her later years. “I am not Jesus Christ,” she liked to say, old Negro wisdom that described her own foreign policy, “if someone strikes me I’m not going to turn the other cheek.” There are so many stories—because she lived in interesting times. That doesn’t mean it’s all true. The most important anecdote to verify—her defining moment as a journalist—was in the Bay Area and also defines her as a black woman in America. It needs to be confirmed, thumbs up or thumbs down—factual or not—whether Mother really ratted out University of California Professor Angela Davis to the FBI after the Marin County Courthouse Massacre. As above, the chances are better than 50-50 it's true. 

Mother was covering cops for the Hearst paper in San Francisco, then the Examiner, now the Chronicle—her boss was Randy Hearst whose daughter Patty—nom de guerre Tania, you couldn't make this up—was principal femme fatale of the Symbionese Liberation Army, the SLA, as in “slay.” Just like the incestuous inbred Dixie we had escaped, the Bay Area was also home to some freaky shit. The other extreme politically but just as extreme and just as dangerous, maybe more. So, like, everyone—it seemed—it’s important to pause for a moment and note that my mother’s professional reputation is at stake here. She wasn’t alone. Everyone had conflicts of interest, those days in the Bay Area, no one was pure in service of whichever ideology. Everyone in San Francisco knew someone who was on the run, from the police or from the draft board, it was a time when, if the cops found marijuana in your backpack you could still go to prison, especially if there was a hand grenade with the weed. The moral question of the day in San Francisco and in Oakland was whether to call the FBI tipline. 

Mother claimed that she saw Tania one day on the street in the Financial District, my mother was coming or going to the newspaper offices, Patty was being sought at that point principally for bank robbery—we won’t get into that. It was possible that Mother did see Tania. We'll never know. At this point it was relatively late in my mother's career as a newspaper reporter, covering cops for Randy Hearst and trying to keep an eye out for the boss's daughter on any story where there was gunplay. My mother had to hump it, frankly, it was a hard job in the Bay Area especially where there was a lot of gunfire and there were a lot of cops, state, federal and local. The Black Panthers respected her, that was important, but the Bay Area’s institutions were all under siege, including the Panthers, and a lot of civic interchange ended up on the police blotter. A la the Red Brigades or Bader-Meinhof Gang, mostly it was overachieving white kids but there were all races and colors. Everyone had a plan to change society while knocking over a branch bank of Wells Fargo in the meantime. Today the goal of terror is to kill a lot of people but back then it was to kill certain people and Mother saw it all covering San Francisco P.D. 

There was the gunfight—some call it a massacre—at the Marin County Courthouse, across the Bay, where Judge Haley got killed, which was the bloodiest somehow for me as a kid even though the body count was relatively low. Have you ever seen the photograph of His Honor with the barrel of a shotgun taped to his head? That was the Marin massacre, and it changed Mother's life. Because after Marin, University of California Professor Angela Davis did a runner.

Mother had good sources among black revolutionary cadres, apparently better than the FBI—she found out that Dr. Davis was in hiding in New York. That is the backstory, that is another anecdote from my childhood, and Mother wrote the story, God forbid. Randy Hearst published it and the FBI picked up Dr. Davis in N.Y. a short while later, on a charge of having provided the guns used in the courthouse in Marin. That’s the story that my family accepts as factual today, more or less. It’s part of my memory—kind of—borderline, out there in the haze, in the periphery of what was important to me at age fourteen, going to school in the Oakland hills, thank you very much, not in the Badlands of downtown Oakland where a Negro could get killed. Tom Hanks was in the class behind me at Skyline High, btw, how cool is that? Although we didn't know he was a big deal at the time.

There were so many shootings and so many shoot-outs that it was hard as a kid to know which ones to worry about. The SLA killed the Oakland school superintendent, by the way, a few months before me and my siblings enrolled in the district. The superintendent was a brother with a PhD—which was a big deal back then—a highly-educated Negro, of which there was a shortage, no fault of our own. 

Dr. Marcus Foster, may he rest in eternal peace. Dr. Foster answered his door one night and they shot him with cyanide-tipped bullets, everything was so over the top, so bloody, you couldn't just kill somebody you had to kill them a certain way. Please. Anyway my mother wrote the story, Angela Davis got picked up and even if she beat the charges which she did—it’s still a legitimate question. Did Mother sell out The Movement? The answer is in a box at Emory. My belief is that what she saw in San Francisco frightened her first and then changed her forever. She got us out, actually, relocated the family to L.A. while she continued to commute during the week to work in Baghdad by the Bay. There in the city she shared an apartment with my sister Michelle, may she rest in peace also, who wrote about movies for Hearst. Michelle claimed to have discovered Bruce Lee, by the way, and my bet is that is not true. Anyway, it was all too much for Michelle too, in the end. She went mad in S.F. That’s my belief too—that era, that time. She did it in the right order though, she went crazy in San Francisco but died in L.A.

Michelle had a favorite T-shirt, white with black letters reading across the front, "RATED X BY AN ALL-WHITE JURY." After a while it seemed like it was the only one she wore. She had the predisposition, too much serotonin or too little and San Francisco was the wrong place to be. 

To be young, artsy and black in a city with no moral code--values gone, or in transition—no barriers to behavior, in an era of no restraint. It drove her crazy literally. One Friday when Mother was home in Southern California, on her day off, there was a call from the City Desk in San Francisco. The Symbionese Liberation Army was cornered in what the press would later call a “bad part" of Los Angeles, which meant a black neighborhood. 

The SLA viewed itself as a military unit and a family with Field Marshal Cinque at its head, btw. That's all the background you need. They'd made the move to the Southland for the climate, you might say, like my own family, and it turned hotter than expected. 9,000 rounds were fired that day or so the Chronicle reported. 

The FBI and LAPD both poured bullets into the house and a fire erupted and all six people inside died. It was a brutal day in a brutal time and what the City Desk most wanted to know, when Mother came home to call in her notes, as the authorities identified the bodies—this is my memory and it may not be totally accurate but it’s close. What the City Desk wanted to know first and foremost was Tania among the dead? Which she was not. 

Anyway, that was pretty much it, emotionally, physically and mentally for Mother, not Tania, although Tania took it hard too when they busted her ass later, in Baghdad by the Bay. Mother could take joy in the civil rights movement because she grew up in it, the Panthers always called her Mrs. Lomax after all, not by her given name—sometimes “Sister,” but probably not more than once. The Black Panthers knew she was from another generation and the title Mrs was important. But when you added the SLA and the Weathermen to the mix, and everyone else who had a gun or a grievance, it was just too much for her. She started to shut down. Mother was pretty much PTSD by that point, she hung up her notebook and tried to make sense of what she had seen. Retired at age fifty-five. And barely left the house for the next four decades. It did give her time to write.

Her principal long work, the writing that she is best known for but never published is a novel called The Ten Most-Wanted White Men, the account of a young brother, just out of the U.S. Army and knowing how to kill, who decides to assassinate the ten most prominent white bigots in America. How cool is that? Which turns out to be a difficult but interesting task. 

One of the targets—Mother told me while she was deep in the writing—was Alabama Governor George “Segregation Forever” Wallace. She used real names, that was the beauty of her work. This was before Governor Wallace repented and found God, of course. Mother never did repent or find God, this was her revolution and in some sense it's mine, thru her. It's been bloody and if it were up to my mother it would have been bloodier still. 

The bottom line in anecdotes like these from The Movement and in our black lives, these last few decades, roughly the span of my lifetime because Mother did not live to see the mountain top—or maybe she just did, not close up but distant and in a haze. The single message that has been repeated time and time again in the last 400 years of our co-existence with white people on this continent: Resist any way you can. Violence is okay, by whatever means, you feel me? 

There’s been no fixed orthodoxy, no Little Black Book like Mao's Little Red Book although someone should write one now just to make it sound as if, for historical purposes—for dramatic usage—we were more organized than we really were. No master plan ever existed—there were diverse ways of taking down the competition. Violence aside, the words, longform like Faulkner. Southern Gothic is a perfect title of the genre because it really was some freaky shit.