Dear Progressive Reader,

On September 15, 1963, a terrorist incident took place in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, when members of the Ku Klux Klan planted dynamite in the stairwell of the 16th Street Baptist Church. It was only one of several bombings of Black churches in that month alone in Birmingham, but on this morning, four young girls were killed and at least fourteen others injured. The church today is still an active house of worship and for this year’s sixtieth anniversary commemoration, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the keynote speaker. “Our past is filled with too much violence, too much hatred, too much prejudice. But can we really say that we are not confronting those same evils now?,” Jackson told the audience.

Writing recently for our website, Miriam Davidson described the burnings of churches in the Southwest—not from anti-Black racism, but quite possibly from anti-immigrant sentiment. “This crime recalls the dark history of church burnings in the United States, which date back to before the Civil War. African-American churches in the South were targeted for being way stations on the Underground Railroad and for supporting Black emancipation,” Davidson wrote. Other churches have also been targeted for their support of the LGBTQ+ community. And in October 2018 a gunman opened fire inside the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, killing eleven people and injuring six more while shouting antisemitic statements.

Writer Jamie Beth Cohen had relatives among those killed in Pittsburgh that day. This week, from her home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, she reported on a conference taking place this weekend called “The Gospel at War” that used a sword on its literature to promote workshops on confronting feminists, art, and “the yellow bus” (representing liberal curriculum in public schools). Remembering her Jewish grandfather who fought in World War II, Cohen ponders, “If my grandfather, Leonard, were still alive, celebrating with my family here in Lancaster on Erev Rosh Hashanah [September 15, 2023], would he recognize the country he fought for? Or would it remind him of the places his parents fled?” As Justice Jackson reminded the crowd in Birmingham on Friday morning, “Learning about our country’s history can be painful, but history is also our best teacher.”

On our website this week, Carol Burris describes recent laws passed in Oklahoma and North Carolina that further blur the line between public and private schools. Rebecca Wolf pens an op-ed on why Big Ag does not want Congress to pass a fair farm bill when it comes up for renewal this year. And Jeff Abbott reports on the dangerous path through the Darién Gap where more and more migrants are being forced to pass trying to reach safety and asylum in the United States. “Migrants fleeing violence and the impacts of climate change, as well as those migrating in the hopes of economic opportunities and seeking asylum, have been pushed into taking the route because of the implementation of new visa regimes in countries further north,” he explains.

Finally, tomorrow marks the fiftieth anniversary of the torture and murder of legendary Chilean folk singer Victor Jara. A leader in the “Nueva Canción (New Song) movement,” Jara was a musician, a teacher, and a political activist championing the rights of working people in his home country of Chile and elsewhere. In August 1969, he gave a concert in Helsinki, Finland in opposition to the U.S.war in Vietnam. Following the brutal coup led by General Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973, Jara was arrested at his workplace and taken to Estadio Chile, the football stadium being used as a detention center, with thousands of others. His last words from the stadium were in the form of a poem, smuggled out and later recorded by Pete Seeger. On September 16, Jara was killed by Chilean military officers.

Seven of those officers were convicted two weeks ago by the Chilean supreme court with sentences of up to twenty-five years (all of the men are currently between seventy-three and eighty-five years old). But another officer, Pedro Pablo Barrientos Núñez, has been living in Florida for decades, untouched by Chilean courts. In 2016, a suit filed on behalf of Jara’s family in a U.S. federal court found that Barrientos was indeed guilty of firing the bullets that killed Victor Jara, but it was not until July of this year that a judge in Orlando stripped Barrientos of his U.S. citizenship—opening the door for his extradition to face justice in a Chilean court. But will the U.S. government take that next step? It remains unclear. I have been trying to find out for more than six weeks to no avail. Here is my article on what we know about the status of Barrientos so far.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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