Intolerance

“Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice,” Somalian feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali (above)Alfred Paget as Belshazzar in "Intolerance"

“Intolerance” was a three and a half hour 1917 epic silent film by D. W. Griffith, who denied he was seeking redemption for the racist glorification of the Ku Klux Klan in “The Birth of a Nation” (1915). “Intolerance” consists of four parts, including the Persian King Cyrus the Great’s conquest of Babylonia, the religious persecution of Jesus, the massacre of French Huguenots on St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572, and the exploitation of American mill workers in Griffith’s own time.
Janet Bayer and grandson Nick at protest

A Catholic priest in the wealthy Indianapolis suburb of Carmel, Theodore Rothrock, branded Black Lives Matter organizers “maggots and parasites feeding off the isolation and addiction of broken families and offering to replace any current frustration and anxiety with more misery and resentment.”  This outrage caused a thousand protestors to gather at St. Elizabeth Seton Church demanding that Father Rothrock be suspended, including Janet Bayer and grandson Nick, eagerly chanting “Black Lives Matter.”  A small number of counter-demonstrators defended the priest.  Bishop Timothy Doherty not only suspended the offender, who subsequently half-heartedly apologized, but ended the announcement by saying, “Black Lives Matter.”Times photo by Kyle Telechan

Vandals spray-painted a racial slur on a bakery and café that Black entrepreneur Sameka Coaxum was attempting to launch in a predominantly white neighborhood in Hammond.  Mayor Tom McDermott denounced the act of racism and had city officials remove the ugly remark without delay. The Times obtained this statement from the victim: “In order to make a change, someone has to be a trailblazer and take a hit and I feel I have taken that hit,” Sameka Coaxum said. “There’s no other African American businesses in this district and Hammond needs to change with the times. It’s time to transition over to 2020.”

The Chesterton Tribune received letters to the editor denouncing the peaceful Black Lives Matter (BLM) march that I participated in, claiming the BLM organizers are Marxist revolutionaries.  Answering this rubbish in “Voice of the People” was Rich Hawksworth in words less diplomatic and more sarcastic than I’d have chosen but no less effective:

    Heaven forbid black folk – Marxists no less! – descend on Chesterton and threaten that snuggly-safe feeling that white folk have come to expect.  I’m sure the angst experienced by local residents during the recent Juneteenth rally was awful, just awful.  Surely, George Floyd, in his last moments on Earth, would have empathized with your discomfort.  No doubt, Ahmaud Arbery, as he was being hunted down and assassinated by white vigilantes, would have identified with your fear. And surely, Breonna Taylor, in the moments before she was murdered in her own home by police officers would have recognized the utter terror you experienced as “leftists” gathered in Thomas Park.  Perhaps it is time to shelve the pathetic white privilege and strive for the equality that our founders promised, but never delivered.
circa 1922

IU historian Jim Madison appeared on the radio program “All In” in connection with 1925 Ku Klux Klan records from Hamilton County recently made available to scholars. Found in a trunk 25 years ago, they include dues receipts from about a thousand Klan members from the Noblesville area. Madison has a forthcoming book titled “The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland” that will document how powerful this hate group was in Indiana during the 1920s.  He quoted the book’s first line: “The Klan was as dark as the night and as American as apple pie.”  Members, both men and women, considered themselves good, God-fearing, 100% Americans whose enemies were Catholics, Jew, immigrants, and African Americans in that order.  He debunked the idea that many were coerced into joining or that Klaverns (local chapters) quickly faded away after Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson was convicted of murdering a young woman he’d raped. Several Klan members were on the jury that found him guilty. Americans want “comfort history,” Madison stated, but the truth is that Hoosier history isn’t always noble.  Unlike a century ago, the modern Klan consists of a few misfits, white supremacists who nonetheless can cause mischief.

Four years before, in the summer of 1963, 15 Blacks girls in Americus, Georgia, attempted to buy tickets at the front entrance of a movie theater and got locked up for 45 days in a Civil War-era structure. The so-called Leesburg Stockade Girls were discovered a month into their captivity by photographer whose photo alerted their parents to where they were captured public attention.

RIP: Chesterton resident Bobbie Dean “Injun Bob” Gajdik, 77, whom I knew as the friendly bouncer at Leroy’s Hot Stuff when Dave’s band Voodoo Chili played there. Tim “Voodoo Daddy” Brush won him over and he loved the classic rock songs they played.  Even though there was officially a cover charge, anyone who told him they were friends of the band he’d let in free.  Leroy’s was a biker bar; and, as Dave once told me, bikers are great supporters and don’t start fights but know how to finish them.  The obit mentioned that Gaidik was an avid motorcycle rider and that “his stories will be missed.”  Sadly, I never heard those anecdotes but recall that he was a tolerant man and proud of his Native American ancestry.  I wish I’d known him better and was happy to learn that longtime companion Carol Mitchell and many close friends, including Dave Shivalec, were with him when his health declined. I first went to Leroy’s with Mike Bayer to see Hoosier blues artist Duke Tomatoe.  Stevie Van Zandt played an incandescent set there.  Their Mexican food is so good Kevin Horn often orders it for the Horn’s New Year’s Eve parties.  It’s a friendly place, and something will be missing with Bobbie Dean gone.

Reading about the antiwar protests against Dow Chemical Company at the university if Wisconsin in October 1867 in “They Marched into Sunlight” by David Maraniss, I was saddened by the enmity between protestors and police, who were ordered to clear a building as a result of administrators’ incompetence.  Maraniss mentioned English grad student Michael Krasny, who was disgusted by Johnson’s escalation of the war but who had grown up in a working-class neighborhood in Cleveland and had friends and relatives who were soldiers and cops. Music major John Pikart, who opposed the war but feared his friends obstructing the building might be arrested and expelled, felt conflicting emotions in the heat of the confrontation.  Maraniss wrote:

    He was furious about the police attack, by their use of nightsticks, by the fact that the administration had allowed the confrontation to take place, yet he was also disturbed by the mass psychology of the angry crowd. That night he wrote a friend: “It was a terrible sight.  Than the students by the door starting spitting on the police and screaming at them.  The police charged with their clubs. . . . I have never seen such hysteria and hatred in so large a group of people. On my way out, I looked back to se the whole crowd screaming “Dirty Fascist Honky” at the police.