Nearly 60 years ago, two Civil Rights activists–singer and songwriter Phil Ochs, and classically trained singer, composer and pianist Nina Simone–wrote and performed two of the most powerful songs of that period: Och’s “Here’s To The State of Mississippi”, and Simone’s “Mississippi, Goddamn.”

 Ochs, a white folk-singer and activist from Far Rockaway, NY, volunteered for the Mississippi Caravan of Music in conjunction with Freedom Summer of 1964, the campaign to register Black Voters in Mississippi. During that summer, three civil rights workers — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were beaten and shot to death by local Mississippi police officers working in kahoots with the KKK.

 Ochs was so outraged by their murders and decades of butchering of Blacks in Mississippi by White Supremacists, that one of his most controversial lyrics still stings us today:  “Mississippi Find Yourself Another Country To Be Part Of.”

 The unrelenting violent attacks against Black communities and children as young as the four, 14-year old Black girls blown to bits in the September, 1963, Sunday-school bombing at Birmingham, Alabama’s 16^th Street Baptist church, coupled with the assassination of Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi, pushed many performers—like Ochs and Nina Simone—to sharpen their music into tools for justice and Civil Rights.

Simone, an international sensation across several musical genres, born into a poor, North Carolina Black family, told PBS that her historic protest song “Mississippi, Goddamn,” simply “erupted” out of her in under an hour, in 1964.  Her lyrics quickly became a Civil Rights anthem, and many Southern States banned her and her music:

“Alabama’s gotten me so upset

Tennessee made me lose my rest

And Everybody knows about Mississippi, Goddamn.”

Simone told the Black Journal, “an artist’s duty is to reflect the times.  That to me is my duty.  And, at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate—when everyday is a matter of survival—I don’t think you can help but be involved.”

While Nina Simone came right at racists with everything she had, Ochs switched the narrative on the KKK, White Supremacists, and public officials who claimed that America could only be great as a White man’s country. 

 In fact, in Mississippi’s Secession Document of 1861, when it joined the Confederacy and declared war upon the United States Government, its’ governing beliefs were stated clearly: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.”  The Mississippi of the 1960’s, it seemed, was still stuck in a 100 year old time warp.

Among the fiercest fighters to save the Union, after their emancipation in 1863, were freed Black slaves.   They believed, with a religious fervor, that “all men were created equal,” and battled brilliantly to protect their right to live free in America, where their families were born, and their ancestors buried.  That was the kind of country they wanted.

So, Ochs expertly flipped the story, and sang about expelling the White Supremacists, whose acts of hate and racial murder were crimes against the US, and humanity.   The illegal, bloody, armed insurrection against the United States Government was crushed—at the cost of Americans killing Americans by the hundreds of thousands– and the Confederacy’s dream of an all-White country with an enslaved Black population was dumped on history’s trash heap.

The leaders of the first failed coup to overturn democracy in the US were only saved from execution for treason by blanket pardons granted by the Tennessee Segregationist Andrew Johnson.   Now, 100 years later, Phil Ochs was offering an alternative to the White Supremacists: You want to secede?  Go!  We want you out of this Democracy, which you tried to destroy.

Earlier this month, in March, 2023, multiple national news outlets reported the beheading and dismembering of Rasheem Carter, a 20-year old Black man in Mississippi, who went missing last year. When his brutalized body was found, the local Sheriff’s Department said that “no foul play” was involved in Carter’s death—sounding as callous about Black lives as Mississippi public officials of 60 years ago. If Phil Ochs, or Nina Simone, were writing their songs of outrage today, their words would spare no one.  This adaptation of “Here’s to the State of Mississippi,” has meaning well beyond one State’s borders:

Here’s to the state of racist child killers,

For underneath their faces, the devil draws no lines,

If you drag their muddy mem’ries, nameless bodies you will find.

Whoa, the corridors of power have hid a thousand crimes,

The calendar is lyin’ if it reads the present time.

Whoa, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of,

White Supremacists find another country to be part of.

And here’s to the mouthpieces of racist child killers,

Who say that folks with conscience, they just don’t understand,

As they tremble in the shadow of MAGA Nazis and the Klan.

The sweating of their souls can’t wash the blood from off their hands,

They smile and shrug their shoulders at the dying of a child;

Oh, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of,

White Supremacists find another country to be part of.

And here’s to the homes of racist child killers

Where they’re teaching all their children that they don’t have to care.

All the rudiments of hatred are present everywhere,

And every single family is a factory of despair;

There’s nobody learning such a foreign word as fair.

Oh, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of,

White Supremacists find another country to be part of.

And here’s to the Christian schools grooming Black child killers;

Their books don’t mention slavery, or race, or crimes of hate.

To rule the pure White world, was their Jesus-given fate.

The massacres of Wilmington and Greenwood, never did take place;

How could they if there’s no such thing as crimes against a race?

Oh, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of,

White Supremacists find another country to be part of.

And here’s to the apologists of all these racist killers;

Who cover up their hearts as they crawl into the courts,

They’re guarding all the bastions of their phony legal forts;

Oh, justice is a stranger if it’s non-whites who report,

When the Black man is accused, the trial is always short.

Oh, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of,

Mississippi, Goddamn, find another country to be part of.

And here’s to bogus governments of racist killers;

In the swamp that they created, they’re always bogging down,

And criminals are smirking as they hold Black babies down;

And they hope that no one sees the sights, and no one hears the sounds,

And the speeches of their leaders are the rants of evil clowns.

Oh, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of,

White Supremacists find another country to be part of.

Jack Smith & the Blacksmiths

Are driving Trump beserk.

An Irish cop and 3 Black prosecutors,

Hammering handcuffs for the Jerk.

Alvin Bragg, Tish James,

Fani Get Your Gun;

Trump is a goner,

Lifelong crime spree, DONE.

Hush Money for Stormy,

Tax & Insurance fraud galore;

Georgia’s got the tapes on Don,

Begging for 11, 800 “Voates”, or more.

Jack Smith & the Blacksmiths,

Zeroing in on January Sixth,

Conspiracy, Sedition & the sins of Iago,

Flushing top secrets down the bowels of Mar-A-Lago.

Jack Smith, Blacksmiths, forging chains of steel;

Justice grinding the grifter under its relentless wheel.

Lies stacked on lies, abuse on abuse;

No place to hide, no whining Trump excuse.

Witnesses, evidence, indictments all to come;

Pay no attention to his hysterical screaming–

Convict and incarcerate

The flatulent, racist bum.

Jack Smith & the Blacksmiths,

Building an airtight, iron cell;

For his crimes against Democracy,

Let Trump burn in Dante’s darkest circle of hell.

Dread Scott Adams

Took a gun,

To give his career a shot,

Plus forty-one.

And when Dread Scott

Felt Dilbert wasn’t red, white and true–

He gave his creation,

Forty-two.

“White Power,” said he,

“Give me a Q.”

That’s too Queer!

Will 4chan Nazis do?

Always separate, NEVER Equal,

Dread Scott said.

Mixing colors?

“You outta your head?”

“Right, so right,”

Elon Musk cheered.

“I know Apartheid

And you’ve got it here!”

“Black people are a hate group,”

Dread Scott Adams said,

Forgetting who kept whom in chains,

And whipped and hung them dead.

But he’d been fact-phobic before,

This cartoon of a troll;

Like when he questioned if 6 million,

Was the true Holocaust death toll.

A hypnotist by hobby,

A COVID cure-kook by dark;

Dread Scott Adams made millions off

His culture war of snark.

“It’s OK to be hateful,”

Dread Scott Adams said, certain he was right.

“And, I’m Trumpy-enough to believe,

“It’s OK to be brain-dead blight.”

So, Dread Scott Adams ran away,

From cities much too dark,

To “get the hell away from Blacks,”

And, sharpen his biased bark.

He found a pleasant little town,

A thousand miles from home,

Where Blacks were no where to be found,

And Whites were free to roam.

Yet, Dread Scott Adams

Could not flee the demons in his mind,

To kill them he entranced himself,

And made his vision, blind.

Yes, Abe Lincoln freed the slaves. 

But, as un-whitewashed history teaches us, not without giving far more progressive abolitionists, and Black folks, lots of aggravation and agita.

If you’re tired of Lincoln’s legend being sanitized, or the story of Black Americans being bleached by the College Board, it’s time to turn to the brilliant 1619 Project:  A New Origin Story  created by Nikole Hannah Jones for the New York Times  & Random House (copyright 2021, New York Times Publishing Company), and the insightful and contemporaneous writings of Frederick Douglass, a powerful voice for equality who knew Lincoln well.

Douglass, a former slave, ardent abolitionist, great orator, and one of the most consequential writers, thinkers and leaders in American History—wrote three separate autobiographies from 1845 through 1892.  He is the Douglass whose name should be immediately paired with Lincoln’s, rather than that of US Senator Stephen Douglas, who debated Lincoln about slavery, beat him for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858, and tried to broker a wishy-washy State sovereignty deal on slavery to avert Civil War.

In the 1619 Project, the Lincoln/Frederick Douglass story is meticulously told.  I have excerpted some key portions of that story here:

“In our national story, we crown Lincoln the Great Emancipator, the president who ended slavery, demolished the racist South, and ushered in the free nation our founders set forth. 

But this narrative, like so many others, requires more nuance.  Frederick Douglass would never forget that the president initially suggested that the only solution, after abolishing enslavement that had lasted for centuries, was for Black Americans to leave the country they helped to build.”

Yes, you read that correctly.  Abe Lincoln, considered by many to be the greatest of all American presidents, first favored the deportation of all Black Americans.  It was a position he had favored for years.

 More than a decade after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Douglass was asked to eulogize the assassinated President. 

“ The abolitionist (Frederick Douglass), whose mother had been sold away from him when he was a young child, had met Lincoln a few times during his presidency and had repeatedly prodded Lincoln in his writings and speeches to emancipate the enslaved.”

“At first, Douglass praised Lincoln as “a great public man whose example is likely to be commended for honor and imitation long after his departure to the solemn shades, the silent continents of eternity.”

But, as Jones writes in 1619 Project, Douglass was determined to make clear that he hadn’t simply come to praise Lincoln and “promote the narrative of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator who set his people free.”

Frederick Douglass:  “Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man, or our model…He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.  He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of white people in this country.  YOU are the children of Abraham Lincoln.  We are, at best, only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.”

Douglass was not just referring to Lincoln’s longstanding advocacy of Colonization—relocating American Blacks to either the West Indies or to Africa.  He was directly referencing the North’s necessity of freeing the slaves in order to defeat the Confederacy and preserve the union. Whether by design or default, freeing the slaves had become an essential military tactic for the North to win the War.   Following the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, thousands of freed black, enslaved persons left Southern plantations, and reinforced battered Union troops.  

Historian Bruce Levine, in his book The Fall of the House of Dixie:  The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South (Random House, NY, 2013), drove home the crucial role newly freed slaves had in the Union’s victory over the South:

            “By early 1864, the steady erosion of slavery throughout the loyal border states was as difficult to miss as it was in Union-occupied portions of the confederacy…By mid-September 1864, the Union had enlisted 14,000 Black soldiers (from border states, with another six thousand expected by the end of October…General Lorenzo Thomas praised the new Black regiments as filling up with “the very best class of men.”

What became clearer each succeeding day, was that while Lincoln “freed the slaves,” the newly freed Black men, fighting alongside Union Troops, were critically important in the Union’s victory over the Confederacy in the Civil War.  Once freed, former enslaved people fought fiercely to preserve—and extend—their liberty.  There was no going back.

In his eulogy, “Douglass launched into a breathtaking litany of Lincoln’s shortcomings, referring in part to their White House meeting with Black leaders in August 1862, just a little over four months before the Emancipation Proclamation was issued: 

         “Our faith in him was often taxed and strained to the uttermost…when he strangely told us that we were the cause of the war; when he still more strangely told us that we were to leave the land in which we were born.” 

However, as Jones writes in The 1619 Project,  “though the Union was worth more to Lincoln than enslaved people’s freedoms, Douglass said: ‘under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood.”

“Douglass understood that Lincoln’s ideas about Black people changed during the course of the War.  The president had been deeply moved by the valor of the Black men who’d help save the Union, and had been influenced by Black men such as Douglass, whom he held in high esteem.  Though the first version of his Emancipation Proclamation advocated Colonization (resettlements of the Black population), by the end of the Civil War, Lincoln had abandoned these efforts and advocated for the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery.  In his final speech before his assassination, Lincoln expressed an openness to enfranchising a limited number of Black men—particularly educated men and those who’d fought in the War.”

Historian Christopher James Bonner, author of Remaking the Republic:  Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship, offered his perspective to The 1619 Project:

“ That last speech calling for partial inclusion of Black Americans, that’s an evolution, and among the many tragedies of Lincoln’s death is that he did change so much in such a short period of time,” Bonner said.  “Still, the final stage of Lincoln is still a person who only believes in partial Black inclusion and who is only advocating for certain Black people on certain terms.  It’s valid to expect that he would have continued to evolve, but what we do know is that in the unfortunately short period of his presidency, Lincoln wasn’t an advocate for full equality.”

Formerly enslaved Black Americans were not interested in any half-way solutions.  Jones writes in The 1619 Project, that when the Civil War ended “suddenly freeing four million Black Americans, few were interested in leaving the country.

“Instead, most would have fervently supported the sentiment of a resolution against Black colonization put forward at a convention of Black leaders in New York, some decades before:

 “This is our home, and this our country.  Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers…Here we were born, and here we will die.”

I froze when I heard Eric Swalwell responding to MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace about the continuing death threats against him and his family. I had heard his tone of voice before.

Swalwell was preternaturally calm, and I recognized that chilling tone of voice going back many, many years. It was the even, accepting voice I heard come out of Bobby Kennedy, when I was 15 years old and campaigning for him for the U.S Senate from New York in the Sunset City Shopping Center of North Babylon, Long Island, in 1964, the year after his brother was assassinated.

It was the same resigned, accepting voice I heard over and over again four years later, on tapes of Martin Luther King’s “Mountaintop” speech to the striking Memphis Sanitation Workers, the night before he was killed.

And, it was the same calm, resigned-to-fate voice I heard, face-to-face, from Yitzhak Rabin, in the Israeli Prime Minister’s office, in 1992, when Governor Mario M. Cuomo and I met with him, three years before Rabin was murdered at a peace rally, by an extreme Right Wing Jewish terrorist.

Listening to Swalwell describe the threats on his life, and the deadly lies being spread about him by House GOP Speaker Kevin McCarthy, spooked me. Not just because of the shock of what he was saying, but because the 42-year old father of three young children appeared to be matter-of-factly confronting his fate.

MSNBC’s Wallace, on her January 18, 2023 Deadline White House show, was asking Swalwell about Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s actions to block him from serving on any House Committees, in clear retaliation for Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar — who had uttered anti-Semitic and racist hate speech, and threatened violence against others — being excluded from Committees when the Democrats controlled Congress. Swalwell, who served on both the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees during the last Congress, mentioned the Washington Post story earlier that day which gave Kevin McCarthy “Four Pinocchios” for flat out lying. (“McCarthy’s Specious Attacks on Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell.”)

“It’s clear Speaker McCarthy is willing to trade the lives of my children — whose lives have been directly threatened because of his lies — for a few bucks, “ Swalwell said, in a calm, even voice. “The FBI has repeatedly contradicted his lies, but he persists in telling them out of political vengeance.”

Two years earlier, before he became Speaker, McCarthy unsuccessfully tried to have Swalwell removed from the House Intelligence Committee because of his work on the Trump Impeachment effort, and his pointed criticism of Trump. Now, using the power of House Speaker, McCarthy thought it was time to resuscitate the grotesque ghost and the dishonest tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy to assassinate the character of Eric Swalwell. Like his horrific and hateful namesake, the “new” McCarthy reached back 8 years, for a case against a Chinese spy that Swalwell helped the FBI resolve.

Despite the FBI’s repeatedly praising Swalwell’s work with them on the case, the California McCarthy — who sliced baloney in a Central Valley deli before being elected to Congress — waved an imaginary “classified FBI file” at Swalwell and the press, to justify his unjustifiable action.

Without revealing any evidence or any documentation, Kevin McCarthy remarked to reporters on January 12, “ If you got the briefing I got from the FBI you wouldn’t have Swalwell on any committee…” Echoes of Joseph McCarthy’s “I have here in my hand, the names of…,” filled the room. Neither of the mendacious McCarthys had any evidence, shame, nor character.

Death threats against the articulate Congressman Swalwell, his staff, and his family were nothing new. In October 2021, appearing on MSNBC’s Deadline White House with Nicole Wallace, Swalwell detailed death threats from a Tucker Carlson fan who “threatened to kill my entire family.”

One year later — on the day in late October, 2022 that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul Pelosi was viciously beaten in his own home by a crazed conspiracy theorist looking for “Nancy,” a Pennsylvania man, Joshua Hall, pleaded guilty to making threats against Swalwell and his staff.

Swalwell refused to stay silent about the threat, writing on social media :

“A staffer of mine — one month into her job — received a call from a man saying he’s coming to my office with an assault rifle to kill me. I hesitate to share this, but how else do I tell you we are in a violent time and the architects are Trump & McCarthy. Bloodshed is coming.”

As if on cue, the newly-elected GOP House Speaker — beholden to the extreme right wing, QAnon quacks of his Party for election to his post after 15 ballots — continued with his character assassination of Eric Swalwell. Coming in the incendiary political climate of violence against public officials, McCarthy had to know that his casual character assassination could result in the real thing. He just didn’t care.

Swalwell told Nicole Wallace precisely that, during his live Deadline White House appearance of January 18, which came a few days after the arrest and firing of Indiana lab worker Jonathan Reesh, who threatened by phone, to break “Swalwell’s fucking face,” and wishing that his wife and 3 young children, would be “raped and murdered:”

“People parrot what Kevin McCarthy is saying, when they call and make threats. He knows that; we’ve told him that. I have publicly broadcast to him that when you do this it leads to threats to me, my wife, our kids. Recently, someone said they were going to rape and kill my children, and they used the language that Kevin McCarthy was using.”

Swalwell’s three children are 6, 5 and 2 years old. The son and brother of law enforcement professionals, the East Bay Congressman has zero tolerance for intolerance , hate speech, or threats of violence. A former Assistant District Attorney in Alameda County, Swalwell knows that swift action, arrest, conviction and sentencing is the best way to shut down violent actors.

The Biden Administration can immediately take bold steps to protect Swalwell, by providing his family with 24-hour Secret Service protection. Additionally, to swiftly and efficiently expose Kevin McCarthy for the dangerous liar he is, Biden can declassify portions of the FBI report which fully exonerates Swalwell. President Biden’s reading from the report at a White House Press Conference, along with FBI Director Christopher Wray, would help protect Congressman Swalwell and his young family from both types of assassination.

The GOP Speaker’s words and actions against Eric Swalwell — coming in the same week when another Trump fanatic and failed New Mexico MAGA candidate for pubic office reportedly hired assassins to kill local Democratic public officials — must be seen as an incitement to commit violence against a specific lawmaker.

Either the newest, national political abomination named McCarthy doesn’t understand that, or, like Trump, he knows exactly what evil his words unleash, and simply doesn’t care about the consequences.