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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, JULY 17–23  
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_ Jazz in Rhode Island (1954), United Against Fascism (1969),
Self-Defense Works (1919), Pickets Killed by Minneapolis Police
(1934), Vietnam’s Disastrous Cease-Fire (1954), Whitewash as Public
Service (2004), Civil War Before the Civil War (1859) _

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_HOW JAZZ CAME TO RHODE ISLAND IN 1954_

70 YEARS AGO, on July 17, 1954, the very first Newport Jazz Festival
opened its doors (regular readers of This Week in People’s History
will be forgiven for thinking: “Didn’t I read this last week?”
No, last week was the 65th anniversary of the first Newport Folk
Festival.) The first Newport Jazz Festival was a huge success,
standing-room-only from start to finish with headliners like Ella
Fitzgerald, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Gene Krupa, Gerry
Mulligan, Oscar Peterson and George Shearing. Visit
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detailed look back.

_UNITED FRONT AGAINST FASCISM_

55 YEARS AGO, on July 18, 1969, a 3-day United Front Against Fascism
conference in Oakland, California – sponsored by the Black Panther
Party and attended by some four thousand people – held its first
session at Oakland Auditorium. The event was attended by
representatives of a multiplicity of radical and progressive
organizations, including the Communist Party USA, International
Liberation School, Medical Committee for Human Rights, National
Lawyers Guild, Peace and Freedom Party, Progressive Labor Party,
Socialist Workers Party, Southern Conference Educational Fund,
Students for a Democratic Society, Third World Liberation Front,
United Farm Workers, Young Lords, Young Patriots, and Young Socialist
Alliance. After devoting three days to listening to speeches from
Panther leaders and others and attending workshops about organizing
and outreach, the conference resolved to establish a national network
of some 15 somewhat confusingly named National Committees to Combat
Fascism.

_SELF-DEFENSE TO THE RESCUE_

105 YEARS AGO, on July 19, 1919, a mob of young white men, many of
them wearing military uniforms, attacked a group of African-Americans
in the vicinity of Washington, D.C.’s majority-Black U Street
neighborhood, The attack was similar to scores of similar melees in
U.S. cities that summer, but it was unusual in that the
African-American community took up arms and erected street barricades,
resulting in a stand-off with the attacking whites. Once the
successful defense of the Black community had been established, the
city police and federal government, which had for days refused to
intervene, went into action. Some two thousand federal troops
separated the warring sides, and an uneasy peace was restored.
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_TEAMSTER PICKETS KILLED BY MINNEAPOLIS POLICE _

90 YEARS AGO, July 20, 1934, is remembered in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
as “Bloody Friday.” In the midst of a Teamster strike that began
on May 16, police opened fire on an unarmed group of picketers,
killing two and wounding 67. Four days later a huge throng of
mourners, estimated to have been as many as 100,000, lined the funeral
procession’s route. 

After the funerals, an official commission was appointed to
investigate the deadly violence. According to the commission’s
report, "Police took direct aim at the pickets and fired to kill.
Physical safety of the police was at no time endangered. No weapons
were in possession of the pickets."

The strike was settled a month later, on terms that provided the union
with most of what it had demanded.
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_VIETNAM’S DISASTROUS 1954 PARTITION_

70 YEARS AGO, on July 21, 1954, negotiators in Geneva, Switzerland,
solemnly agreed to observe a 2-year cease fire in the Vietnamese
population’s war to end foreign domination of their country.
According to the agreement’s terms, the country would be divided
into two administrative regions for two years. During that time,
France would remove all of its troops. Then, on July 20, 1956, the
entire population would vote in an election to choose a government for
the whole country. 

The planned election never took place, because the U.S.-supported
government in the southern administrative region refused to allow it.
The reason for not allowing the election in the south was the virtual
certainty that "had elections been held, possibly 80 percent of the
populace would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh," according to
the 1963 memoir of Dwight Eisenhower, who had been U.S. president in
1956. [link removed]
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_WHITEWASH AS PUBLIC SERVICE_

20 YEARS AGO, on July 22, 2004, almost three years after the 9/11
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, released its
final report. If the report had found the White House, the CIA, the
FBI, Defense Department and Federal Aviation Administration
egregiously at fault for failing to detect and prevent the success of
the plot to carry out the world’s largest-ever terrorist attack, it
might have doomed the re-election chances of George W. Bush, so the
White House and other executive branch agencies spared no effort to
prevent the commission from making such a finding. 

Even though some of the commissioners and their staff members were
aware they were being subjected to unbelievable testimony from the
Defense Department and the Federal Aviation Administration, they
lacked the ability to compel those agencies’ truthful testimony
about what they were covering up and why. 

Similarly, the commission and its staff were unable to overcome White
House, CIA and FBI stonewalling that prevented the commission from
understanding both the strong indications about an imminent attack and
the incompetence of the feeble efforts to deal with them. The result
was, in the words of Harper’s Magazine, "Whitewash as Public
Service: How The 9/11 Commission Report defrauds the nation"
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_THE CIVIL WAR BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR_

165 YEARS AGO, on July 23, 1859, a group of 10 militant, armed
abolitionists crossed a short distance from Kansas into Missouri,
where they successfully broke abolitionist John Doy out of the St.
Joseph, Missouri, jail. Doy was serving a 5-year sentence for having
abducted 13 enslaved people and attempted to transport them far enough
north so they could be emancipated. 

After Doy had been caught in the act, tried and found guilty, 10 of
his fellow abolitionists in Kansas developed a plan to break him out.
Three of them went to the jailhouse posing as two heavily armed
bounty-hunters with a prisoner; once inside the jail, the three were
able to overpower the jailors long enough for the other seven to join
them and carry Doy across the Missouri River to freedom. The men who
arranged for Doy’s successful escape came to be known as The
Immortal Ten. 

Doy, knowing that as a fugitive he was not safe anywhere in the
vicinity of the south, relocated to Rochester, New York, where he
published a widely-circulated account of his experience, _The
narrative of John Doy, of Lawrence, Kansas. _You can watch a short
documentary about the rescue of John Doy here:
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