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THIS WEEK IN PEOPLE’S HISTORY, JAN 29-FEB 4  
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_ ‘False Witness’ (1955), East St. Louis Desegregates (1950), A
New Deal Triumph (1940), Greensboro Students Lead the Way (1960), Sled
Dogs and Mushers to the Rescue (1925), Apartheid’s Swan Song (1990)
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_‘FALSE WITNESS’_

JANUARY 29 IS THE 70TH ANNIVERSARY of a day that the Cold War’s
anti-radical Red Scare got one of its biggest set-backs, an event that
has been largely forgotten.

On this day in 1955, a professional anti-communist “witness” named
Harvey Matusow, who had for years been making a living swearing to the
truth of mostly made-up stories about radicals he claimed to have
known and worked with, admitted for the first time that much of his
testimony had been false. He even soon published “False Witness,”
a detailed memoir of how he had for years helped to send scores of
people to jail by inventing stories about them. 

In the late 1940s, Matusow had been an enthusiastic member of the
Communist Party, but as the Cold War intensified, he decided to switch
sides and volunteered to be a paid FBI informer. For his first FBI
assignment – to attend and make detailed reports about low-level
Communist Party meetings – Matusow was paid $70 a month, the
equivalent of $915 in today’s dollars. 

Before long, he was a professional anti-Communist, a staff member of
anti-communist organizations and a paid witness against people he
claimed to have been his former comrades. (A minority of his targets
had actually been former comrades, but he made up much of what he
testified about them.) 

During the first half of the 1950s, Matusow worked as an informer and
“witness” for the FBI, the House Un-American Activities Committee,
the Senate Internal Security Committee, the U.S. Department of
Justice, the federal Subversive Activities Control Board, the Ohio
Un-American Affairs Commission, and the Texas Industrial Commission. 

He was such an energetic and enterprising anti-communist that he was
hired by Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Senate Committee on Investigations, He
made reports about or testified, falsely against more than 200
individuals, with the result that some of them went to jail and many
of them were blacklisted and forced to abandon their chosen
professions.

Even though most of the people he accused denied his allegations, it
was almost always his word against theirs. Occasionally his lies were
demonstrably false, such as his story that the staff of the Sunday New
York Times included 126 Communists, when that staff had only 100
employees.  

In “The Great Fear,” a book-length study of Cold War witch hunts,
David Caute wrote; “On a nod from prosecutors,” Matusow and other
paid witnesses, “sold hunches or guesses as inside knowledge,
supporting their claims with bogus reports of conversations and
encounters.” 

After Matusow admitted his career of prevarication, the government’s
attack on him was fierce and effective. He was charged with perjury
for claiming that Roy Cohn had suborned false testimony from him (it
was his word against Cohn’s), convicted, and imprisoned for nearly
four years. For more information visit:
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_EAST ST. LOUIS DESEGREGATES_

JANUARY 30 IS THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY of the integration of public
schools in East St. Louis, Illinois, ending the policy of segregation
that was first put in place in 1865. The local school board made the
change in order to avoid losing more than $675,000 in annual aid from
the state. According to contemporary news reports, the integration was
uneventful, except that several white students boycotted the
integrated schools, at least at first.
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_A NEW DEAL TRIUMPH_

JANUARY 31 IS THE 85TH ANNIVERSARY of the first monthly retirement
check to be issued by the Social Security Administration. The
recipient was Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vermont, who had retired from
her legal secretary’s job in November 1939.
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_GREENSBORO STUDENTS LEAD THE WAY_

FEBRUARY 1 IS THE 65TH ANNIVERSARY of a lunch-counter sit-in at
Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, that started a major,
unexpected, and somewhat inexplicable acceleration in the U.S. civil
rights movement. 

In 1960, lunch-counter sit-ins and other acts of nonviolent civil
disobedience were a tried-and-true tactic of the civil rights
movement. The first Greensboro Woolworth’s sit-in had all the
earmarks of a routine event. Four Black students from North Carolina
Agricultural and Technical University in Greensboro sat down in the
white’s-only section of the segregated lunch counter and politely
asked for service. They were not served, but neither were they
arrested or assaulted. They sat, reading and doing homework, until the
store’s closing time, when they left. The event received
considerable local publicity, but was otherwise little-noticed.

The next day, the four returned with more than 15 friends and they all
sat down, were refused service, and sat there. This time a crowd
gathered to jeer and harass them, but they were neither assaulted nor
arrested.  The next day more than 50 demonstrators sat-in and two
crowds gathered, one to jeer and the other to show their support for
the civil rights militants. On Feb. 4, there were more than 300
demonstrators, who filled every seat in the lunch counter.  As
remarkable as the mushrooming of the Greensboro demonstration was,
what happened next is even more noteworthy. 

Over the next four weeks, demonstrators, many of whom were students,
staged no less than 13 anti-segregation sit-ins in six states; in
Durham, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, and High Point, North Carolina,
Portsmouth and Richmond, Virginia, Tallahassee and Tampa, Florida,
Montgomery, Alabama, in Rock Hill, South Carolina and Nashville,
Tennessee. This list is probably incomplete.

Prior to February 1, the U.S. had never seen such a widespread wave of
anti-racist civil disobedience.  And it didn’t end on February 29.

The demonstrations had an effect. Before the end of July, lunch
counters in Greensboro, Galveston, Texas, Nashville, Tennessee, and
Norfolk, Virginia were integrated.
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_SLED DOGS AND MUSHERS TO THE RESCUE_

FEBRUARY 2 IS THE 100TH ANNIVERSARY of a dogsled relay reaching Nome,
Alaska, after a 675-mile, 5-½-day journey in the dead of winter with
a life-saving shipment of diphtheria antitoxin. 

If the disease outbreak had occurred at any other time of year, it
would have been possible to deliver the antitoxin by air or by sea,
but sled dogs and mushers were the only option in late January. In all
probability, the heroic effort of 20 mushers and about 150 sled dogs
saved scores if not hundreds of lives.
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_APARTHEID’S SWAN SONG_

FEBRUARY 3 IS THE 35TH ANNIVERSARY of South Africa’s apartheid
government legalizing the African National Congress in 1990, 30 years
after the ANC had been banned and many of its leaders imprisoned.
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