George Jackson and the Soledad Brothers Meanwhile, Fay met George Jackson. Huey Newton had told Fay about George Jackson and asked if she could help him. Jackson (whose family had relocated to California) was serving a life sentence in Soledad Prison for a $70 robbery, according to his sympathizers. The truth is a bit otherwise. […]
Go to Part 1 Legal Work for the Movement When she returned to Berkeley, Fay “felt energized.”[i] So did other returnees. Mario Savio, fresh from Mississippi, launched the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at UC Berkeley that fall, kicking off the wider radical crusade of the 1960s. When the police began to clear Sproul Hall of […]
Introduction Fay Stender earned fame as a radical attorney in the 1960s and 1970s, defending two of the most prominent Black Panthers in highly publicized court cases. During the course of her career in left-wing activism, she embraced numerous “causes” with a passion as flamboyant as it was unbalanced. She worked strictly within the stream […]
The author returns to the Project’s origins in Chapter Four, and here is where I diverge from Smith’s analysis. As mentioned in discussing Chapter One, the author sees the Project as perhaps the ultimate stretch of Western liberalism and individualism. I see the Project more as a discontinuity, not only from Western tradition generally, but […]
Christian Smith, The Sacred Project of American Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. The Left’s seizure of the academy has been manifest for some time. Christian Smith’s The Sacred Project is a case study of this phenomenon in a discipline where the Left’s grip is near total, analyzed from the perspective of his specialty […]
“The defense of the Western canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise. If multiculturalism meant Cervantes, who could quarrel with it?” Harold Bloom, The Western Canon It’s been remarked that in the last two decades of his life, the infamous Yale literary critic Harold Bloom was sufficiently preoccupied […]
Recently, I wrote an article, posted here, on the 1969 Academy-Award-winning film “Midnight Cowboy.” I’m old enough to have seen it in a theater back when it was first released—of course, no DVDs or streaming in those years. I hadn’t seen it again until this year, a gap of a half-century no less. What particularly […]
In an era in which every work of art is scrutinized by establishment critics according to prevailing political sensitivity, it is not surprising that the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature is now mired in controversy. Perhaps calling it a controversy might be a bit of a stretch considering how little impact literature –or most art, […]
