A blog about a criminal enterprise
Back in July 1962, when, according to Donald Trump, America was “great,” I was in the Deep South, working to register Black voters. It was a near-hopeless project, given the mass disenfranchisement of the region’s Black population that was enforced by Southern law and an occasional dose of white terrorism.
It all started in the fall of 1961, the beginning of my senior year at Columbia College. My roommate (Mike Weinberg) and I, both white, had joined the campus chapter of the Congress
In early November 1966, my sister and I―armed with a bucket of home-made paste, a wide brush, and a thick roll of “Vote No” posters―headed off from my student apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan to plaster the surrounding area with the signs. The Patrolman’s Benevolent Association (PBA), a very powerful police union, had placed a referendum on the New York City ballot to remove civilians from the Civilian Complaint Review Board.
We were a very small part of a