I heard the loud thumping of footsteps coming up the basement stairs. Something was very wrong. Marie appeared at the kitchen entrance, distraught and out of breath. Martin Luther King has just been shot dead in Memphis. It’s all over the news. Come downstairs. Now.

A terrible primal rage boiled up from somewhere deep in my consciousness. Not Martin Luther King. Not King. For God’s sake, not him.

I stood for a moment overcome by this terrible anger then said,” They’re going to burn America to the ground tonight. And I’m glad.”

I wasn’t kidding. 

With all of the brouhaha about Mark Felt’s revelation that he was the famous “Deep Throat”, it’s also worth pointing out that Mark Felt was involved in the Cointelpro program which targeted radical groups with illegal surveillance, illegal break-ins and deliberate undercover disruption that included acts of terrorism.

Mark Felt was the Deep Throat who helped break the Watergate story, but he was also deep into a variety of illegal activities that no doubt touched the lives of UM campus activists.

Recently Amnesty International termed the prison at Guantanamo Bay an American “gulag”. The Bush administration and the rightwing seized upon that term in an effort to defend their actions at the prison.

I don’t think Guantanamo is the equivalent of Stalin’s labor camps or Hitler’s concentration camps. But Dachau didn’t start out as an extermination center and the Soviet labor camps were not originally designed to kill large numbers of people. But that’s the road they traveled once they started walking down it. If we tolerate Guantanamo today, we’re in grave danger of walking down the same road.

The Sixties were famous not only of its radical politics, but for its radical experiments in music. John Coltrane pushed the limits of Jazz improvisation. Jimmy Hendrix pushed the limits of the electric guitar. Joanie Mitchell pushed the limits of the song as a poetic art form.

But the term radical comes from a Latin word meaning “root”. For some musicians of the time, radical music meant a return to older forms of folk music and blues.

One such group was the Jefferson Street Jug Band, local College Park musicians who championed such instruments as the whisky jug, washtub bass, kazoo and washboard. 

I had some fine teachers at UM. Barillari for Western Civ, Roelofs for Philosphy, Birdsall for English — but one of my best teachers did not hold any academic position and did not have regular office hours. That person was Gladys Jefferson, president of AFSCME Local 1072, the campus workers’ union.

UM’s sad Jim Crow legacy began to crumble radically in the 1960’s as the impact of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements found its way to College Park. One of the student demands of the time was a call for more Black History.  Although taught on some predominantly Black campuses, it was almost unknown at predominantly white institutions like UM.