From the beginning I had told Martha that I could only stay two weeks and that I had to leave for Austria on the thirteenth to meet my brother.
--In
the beginning, said Mary Rose, I said I had to be back by August 11th.
--I
said from the beginning too, I said, that I had to return to Austria by the 13th.
The
beginning. As if a political situation
could be encompassed by what anyone said from a subjective beginning. Encompassed is perhaps the wrong word. Judged or developed are better. In both our cases, family ties were taking
precedence over political activity, although I would have strongly denied this;
Mary Rose was in a different situation
with a small child to get back to.. At
any rate, by now we considered that we were the real revolutionaries with a
comprehension of revolutionary theory totally lacking in Martha and
Montrice. Despite this laudatory
self-satisfaction, both of us were using family ties to get out; besides her
child, Mary Rose was justified by her annoyance at Martha’s downgrading of
Angela Davis as well as her digs at Mary Rose and Wiff. I thought I was just tired of running them
around and wanted to go back to Austria and relax, but I probably was also sick
of being bossed by Martha, a situation I had allowed to develop and then did
not know how, and now, for the last few days, did not want to bother to
change. In addition, Frankfurt was very
hot, so I began to idealize my memories of the Waldhaus and its little swimming
pool.
The
Darmstadt brothers second trial was scheduled for August 21st, and Martha and
Montrice needed a place to stay until then.
Task Force Albertson, as Max was later to name us, was dissolving
because of fatigue, family, and money, finking out just when the Darmstadt brothers
were getting it together.
Am
I making a moral judgment on myself--the brave proletariat betrayed by the weak
middle class? I was the only middle
class member of the lot, and, at that time, I was still almost upper-middle
class. Mary Rose probably thought of
herself as proletarian, if not defiantly Lumpen, but Martha and Montrice would
not describe themselves in class terms.
I do not know how the Darmstadt brothers thought of themselves, but one
of the reasons they had joined the military had been to get a little ahead, as
well as not to go to Vietnam. As I have
said, if you volunteered, you were supposed to end up in Germany, not ‘Nam.
--Attack,
said Martha.
She
really had a fine political instinct.
Instead of stewing in the contradictions of liberal vs. proletariat
behavior, as I did, she organized a few role-playing sessions for King,
Swinton, Red and Mac to prepare them for their interview with Lt. Col. Poteet,
the Commander of Cambrai-Fritsch, and the one who had had the unfortunate idea, which he might have been regretting ever
since, to lock the 53 up overnight in the Crypto Compound. I found the following, Mary Rose’s written
transcript of the Darmstadt brothers meeting with Colonel Poteet, gathering
dust in the archives of the case. In her
quiet way, she had been invaluable. Here
it is:
On
August 10, 1071 at 10;30 a.m. we entered Major Phillips office half an hour
late because the 93rd Signal Battalion refused to give us transportation to
Heidelberg after being advised that an appointment had been set up at General
Headquarters for us that morning. We had
to go to another unit to obtain transportation.
We
presented the Darmstadt case to Major Phillips as it was in the report (this
document, either from Mary Rose or Voice
of the Lumpen, is reproduced as the first chapter of the present
narrative). Four of us were present
representing the Darmstadt case, as well as the Human Relations committee that dissolved after the new Commanding Officer,
Major Phillips, came into the Command of the 93rd Signal Battalion. The reason for its dissolution was that the
forbidding of more than three people to gather in one place made it impossible
for the committee to function. This
dissolution took place at the beginning of July.
We
presented Major Phillips with the list of grievances along with a Confederate
battle flag (symbol of the Southern States during the Civil War and considered
a provocation by Black soldiers), which is allowed to be sold right outside the
gate of Cambrai-Fritsch Caserne and is allowed to be worn inside the base on
coats or inside cars. We also presented
him with the Article 15 where 53 people were charged with disobeying a lawful
order by Lt. Col. Poteet, along with a statement wherein Commander Bruce D. Stewart
said to Dickon after Dickon wanted to go outside and speak to the people
gathered in front of A Co orderly room where he was being held: “They don’t
want to listen to anything, but I have something here they will listen to
(showing his .45).”
We
also said that Poteet was too emotionally upset to command his battalion
because every time that he was presented with a problem, he answered only with
comments like Where’s he from? Shut up!
Get out! We requested Major Phillips therefore to supply us with information
and instead had been tricked into a kangaroo court.
The
reason for our request for information concerning the court martial was that
the last time we had requested this
information we found ourselves walking into a Summary Court Martial after we
had refused to accept it. We questioned
the officer in charge, and he said he could not do us justice because of the
position he held in the Army. He
admitted he would not use his own judgment but had to judge us under the
military code in order to keep his rank.
We cannot supply this officer’s name because when he entered the office
his name was not given and he was not wearing a name tag.
Major
Phillips reaction was the statement that we were in the military, and we would
have to abide by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which was depriving us
of our civil rights.
So
we requested to take our case to the Supreme Court because of the fact that
since we were in uniform we had no civil rights but only were ruled by military
law, that is, the UCMJ.
So he insinuated that the complete case would be
dropped but also informed us that he would do all in his power but could make
no promises. He also informed us that
between 18 and 19 July there would be an investigation of the Darmstadt Case
undertaken by himself, General Hollis, and the Inspector General, and a JAG
lawyer.
We
informed him that we were not sure we could trust the JAG lawyer since we had
been tricked into this kangaroo court by a JAG lawyer in the first place. Major Phillips then replied, Give him a
chance.
After
returning to Darmstadt and the 93rd Sig. Bn., we entered the S.1 section and
asked to see Colonel Poteet. We were
then told that we were too late, and I (Red, Sgt. Taylor) replied, How long do
we have to wait? The answer was given by Capt. Carlisle: It is at the Colonel’s
convenience, not yours. So while we were
waiting, the Colonel walked in emotionally upset and ordered three of us out in
the hall, telling Sp/4 MacDonald to remain in his office. We were ordered to stand at attention until
he returned. Colonel Poteet’s tone of
voice was so loud in his office that we heard him tell Sp/4 MacDonald to remain
in his office. Colonel Poteet’s tone of
voice was so loud in his office that we heard him tell Sp/4 MacDonald to sign
that Article 15 and using profane language.
Sp/4 MacDonald requested that Sgt. Tyler be a witness. Col. Poteet then replied that Sgt. Tyler was
waiting in the hall and that Sgt. King should fall out and march us into his
office. After we were marched into his
office, he then started yelling at us as to Where
is Miss Albertson? We refused to
reply because Miss Albertson is a civilian and we were not supposed to have
knowledge of her whereabouts. He then
asked us what time did we leave
Darmstadt that morning for Heidelberg, and I (Sgt. Tyler) replied,
Nine-thirty, sir. He asked us who
authorized us to go and then called Heidelberg to verify our statement. Then he put the 93rd Sig. Bn. off limits to a
member of the 7th Evac. Hospital who was on the committee representing the
Darmstadt Case. He did all this in a
very obscene manner.
Sgt.
King replied that we could not talk to him because he was emotionally upset and
could not control his voice. Poteet then
replied, Why do you keep saying I am emotionally upset? Sgt. King said, Because you cannot control
yourself. Poteet then turned, shaking,
to the window, trying to pull himself together.
This
conversation was witnessed by Lt. Mitchell, Capt. Carlisle, and a Spec/4 whose
name we must get.
This
statement is by four members of the Committee for the Darmstadt Case, which
includes approximately twenty-six soldiers who refused to settle for Article
15’s and demand a thorough investigation into the case.
(taken down on August 10th, 1971)
Unexplained
and undocumented, this document never makes it clear whether the Command asked
for the above interview or whether, under Martha’s direction, Red, Mac, King,
and Swinton had asked for it. However,
Martha was not likely to send her protégés off to see a bunch of racist officers. In trying to reconstruct these old events, I
assume that the Command had called the Brothers in for counseling in one last
attempt to head off the trial. This
report shows that the military was aware of our presence as a support group in
Frankfurt.
Maybe
Martha’s build-up of agents running rampant in the corridors of the Sun Hotel
was not as wild as I had judged it to be; not that the Command needed
undercover men to check on us driving from base to base in my Peugeot with
French plates, or on the Darmstadt brothers running in and out of the hotel
lobby. If the Manager had informed on us
in the beginning, he would have given his information to the German Secret
Service who would then have passed it on to Military Intelligence. However, at this point, the Darmstadt
brothers and their case were out in the open and far beyond counseling, as the
report shows. The Colonel’s attempt to
go by the book and counsel each soldier separately had not worked at all. The Army would not try anything else before
the trial date.
As
for our group, Mary Rose left as planned.
I took her to the airport. Under
other circumstances, we might have become friends, but although by this time
both of us disliked Martha, neither of us wanted to be disloyal to her. Then I went to the bank to cash my last
travelers checks--enough to pay my hotel bill and get out the next day. I remember that afternoon very well. Martha had come to the bank with me. If she had suggested we start pooling my
money if she took over my hotel bill, or that we share the one or two hundred
dollars I had just cashed, I suppose I might have gone along with it. Up until then, I had paid my own hotel bill
and the gas, and Martha had paid for the other two women and all the food. One hundred dollars or so was not going to
solve any of her financial problems, and by that time, I think, she may not
have been that sure I would agree to share.
I know that once you ask someone for money, and are refused, a bad
pattern is set up that almost always blocks future funding.
She said nothing when I got my money and paid
my hotel bill, but reminded me that we were eating at Wiff’s place that
night. Max had left me the keys of his
apartment in Heidelberg and I planned to spend the night there and start for
Austria the next day. So I told Martha I
had to contact German comrades in Heidelberg to come and leaflet before the
Trial Center on August 21st, but that I would come back for dinner. It is very hard for me to refuse
invitations. Although I do not much like
parties, even the simplest invitation makes me feel my presence is so ardently
desired that I must take a firm grip on reality to refuse, telling myself that
a party is exactly the sort of occasion when one body more or less is
expendable and that the entire assembly does not go into mourning because I
have not turned up.
And
so instead of getting out that afternoon, I said I would be back for
dinner. It was a beautiful August
afternoon, and I drove down to the Neckar to the Vierbürger restaurant for
lunch. It sounds like a fancy hamburger
joint, but it was a small hotel picturesquely situated along the Neckar. The burgers were not chopped meat, but four
castles that used to guard the river before gunpowder was extended from Chinese
firecrackers to European canons; now three of the castles were in ruins. From the terrace of the restaurant, all four
were hidden while across the river and above the trees, the village of Dilsberg
stayed sunlit on the summit of the hill, long after the river valley had fallen
into shadow. Very romantic. There was a grape trellis over the terrace of
the restaurant and deep purple home-made wine in carafes on the tables. I ate and drank and did not think at all, as
is usual with lunches for the express purpose of figuring things out.
I
had nothing against Martha except that she was getting on my nerves, and I knew
she had nowhere to stay in Europe If I didn’t send her to my apartment in
Paris. I had not needed to drive the
seventy-five kilometers down to Heidelberg to find this out. The day before we had all sat in Martha’s
room with a map in order to see where she and Montrice could wait out the two
weeks till the August trial date.
Holland was a prime candidate because people spoke English there, and Wiff,
who had brought the map up from his car, opted for Rotterdam because it was a
seaport and offered getaway possibilities.
--But
I don’t know, he amended. There are a
lot of those West Indian niggers there that would pull a knife as soon as look
at you.
I
took a dim view of this anti-West Indian line and wondered briefly if it had
been inspired by Martha. She had already
begun to make a few disparaging--if I chose to take them that way--references
to Cora, my daughter, who had promised to come over and had not. Cora had gone to the West Indies instead of
coming to Germany, so I thought it likely that Martha was considering West
Indian niggers as a counterproductive pole to her own activities.
--Anyway,
I can’t drive you to Holland, I said and that turned out to be the end of the
plan for the Netherlands.
After
Wiff left, the women sat back and let me take the initiative. No one said anything about there being no
more money. I thought about the Waldhaus in Igls. In my mind it was becoming a sacred grove,
and even if I had been willing to pay for them, the idea of Montrice and Martha
running up phone bills to Philadelphia, rejecting the potato salad, and ruining
my quiet mornings at the swimming pool said nothing to me. Finally, my decision what to do about Martha
was, as I had hoped, resolved by watching the liquid flow of the Neckar from
the terrace below the four hamburgers.
Women are liquid beings. My bond with another woman was a woman’s
problem--a problem I had absolutely no precedent for. Men had been drinking Brüderschaft since the Dark Ages--back to our barbarians on the
outskirts of Rome--but women had been separate entities, often enemies, each to
each, although red wine was more symbolic of a bond between women than it ever
could be as a bond between men. So I sat
there pouring that dark blood into me and thought about breaking my bond with
Martha. Unsymbolically, I was not
menstruating. That had already happened
my second week at the Sun, causing, by the way, a big conflict with another
woman, the Yugoslav cleaning woman, who had been outraged because I had bled
onto the mattress. God knows what
significance menstrual blood has in Yugoslavia, but she ran down the stairs to
the main desk to tell the poor Manager, and since he would not come up to
see--by then we could have been having ritual sacrifices in our rooms for all
he cared--she ran back up the stairs and down to Martha’s room where we were
having an evaluation session; she tried to get them all to come and see my
bloody mattress. She seemed to be
invoking some custom whereby my shame should be manifest to men and women
alike, but since she spoke very little German, we never knew what it was. All I could think of was the unvirgin bride
who cannot bleed onto the nuptial sheets, but that was certainly not
appropriate.
Back
to the Waldhaus and the swimming pool, an image, and my anxiety that I would
lose the peace of the swimming pool once Martha and Montrice were gamboling
around in it. Not that they would
have. Martha had conjured up the Jersey
Monster in order not to go into the water.
Robert Williams, a well known Black organizer in the U.S., had been
almost killed for trying to integrate swimming pools years ago in one of the
Southern states, North Carolina possibly, and they still remained a long since
gone symbol of segregation. Austria had
been rid of its Nazis long enough to make racial superiority only a memory, and
certainly Martha and Montrice would have had no trouble getting a room in the
Waldhaus and enjoying, after their fashion, all it had to offer.
But I myself wanted to keep them out because I
wanted no responsibility for others and minimum visibility for myself. As a middle-class, middle-aged American, I
stuck out more than the other guests, but not as much as if I had gone on
playing my role of ersatz Black revolutionary.
And with Martha and Montrice in the Waldhaus, that is what I would have
been, just like I was in the Sun. Of
course, what I wanted to be instead was not very clear to me. I had already rejected the role of liberal
lady on vacation, but maybe there was an interior swimming pool in my head that
I did not want to integrate. Mainly,
however, I did not want to be responsible for anyone, and being a mediator
between Martha and Montrice and the Waldhaus was not my idea of a vacation. If they had been nice and quiet and
appreciative of an Austrian summer, it would have been all right. But they wouldn’t have been. That type of behavior was what whites were
always demanding from blacks, quiet appreciation, and so I had not gotten rid
of my racism, despite my illusions that I had.
And
so I finished my coffee on the Neckar and bartered off whatever qualms I might
have had about leaving Martha and Montrice in the lurch by deciding to go back
to Frankfurt with one bottle of the black wine and then give Martha the key to
my apartment in Paris. I even bought
their train tickets, even--I repeat for emphasis-- first class, which I never
took myself. More conscience-assuaging. By the time I got to Wiff’s apartment in
Family Housing, by the time I found it in the dark because all the buildings in
the whole housing area looked absolutely identical to me, I was very late. For dinner, that is. This does not mean there was no food
left. Montrice and Martha always bought
too much. Tonight for the four of us
they had cooked meat loaf, chicken, chitterlings, potatoes, three vegetables
and plenty left over to be thrown out the next day. I was not hungry because of my copious lunch
on the Neckar terrace, but because I intended to break with them, I felt
obliged to eat some of our last supper.
Martha
was looking rather splendid that night, dressed in a long black gown with
rhinestones; she was pretty quiet all the way home. Montrice sat in the back seat and did not say
a word.
The
Sun Hotel was set back in a small square with trees along the facade and an
outdoor cafe next door, now dark and shut for the night. I pulled in under the trees, and switched on
the overhead light in the car. There I
gave Martha a piece of paper with my name, address, and telephone number on it,
along with the addresses of people who could help her in Paris, mostly the
Quaker Center where we had had our anti-Vietnam War meetings for the last five
years. I also gave her the first class
train tickets.
--How
am I to know when trains leave here for Paris?
she asked.
Montrice
made a sound in the back seat.
--You
go on upstairs, said Martha. I’ll be up
in a minute.
Montrice
got out of the car and walked up the steps to the Sun Hotel without saying
anything to me. The hotel looked very
pretty with the lights glowing in the lobby and reflecting up on the green
leaves of the trees. Night light, artificial
or astral, is beautiful, precariously balancing on the flip of a switch or
whisk of a cloud.
--We
may need an escort to get from here to the station, said Martha.
She
was staring straight ahead through the windshield, musing, like a general
mapping out a difficult campaign.
--Here
is the house key, I added.
I
did not find myself very sympathetic, but for the last two days i had not found
Martha sympathetic either.
--All
right, June, she said.
She
took the key in her hand and got out of the car. I thought she was going to leave like
Montrice, but when she had gotten to the top of the three steps, she turned and
stood with the yellow light behind her, a beautiful woman in black, in
diamonds.
--You
be sure and come, she said.
It
must have been like going to the moon for her, the white man’s world where no
one spoke American.
I
drove off to Austria and left her standing there alone.
12. The Second Trial
Press Release
by Task Force Albertson
21 August 1971
The
trial of the Darmstadt brothers was still referred to as the Darmstadt 53,
although about 26 were up for court martial and only four were going on trial
on Monday, 21 August. The Funari Trial
Center was the same as in July, the same parking lot, but this time without
McGuire and CBS television. Small
courtroom upstairs with the four Brothers, Swinton, Tyler, King, and Mac Donald
wearing Class A’s and sitting in the front row near the window, and every other
available seat taken by journalists, from the large press agencies to the
representation of the Revolutionary Soldiers Union in the Netherlands. Martha was there too, but not in the
courtroom, in the witness room which was a sort of enlarged closet with a
single window opening out on a mixed vista of Army barracks and Mannheim
factories. At first I could not think
what she was supposed to have witnessed, since she had not been there when the
incident had taken place, but then someone mentioned mitigation, the second
part of every trial after the accused has been declared guilty but before the
sentence has been passed. Character
witnesses are called whose testimony is designed to influence the sentence,
literally have a mitigating effect on it.
It was actually what had brought her over here first, to be a character
witness for Willie.
I did not know what mitigating effect Martha
would have upon those hard-nosed officers sitting in the jury box, but the
defense lawyers must have thought she would have, or she had managed to
convince them. However, no future
mitigation witness could be present in the courtroom; hence Martha in the
witness room. Since there was no law
that she must be kept in isolation, she held court there and received reports
from the four defendants during the breaks. It was in the witness room that she
saw the CIA photo of the Darmstadt 53, all crowded into the truck that was to
take them to the Crypto Compound, raising their fists in solidarity. The defense lawyers had been very pleased
with it, but Martha thought they, the soldiers, looked too happy.
--No
picture gets published without my orders, she said.
I
was in the witness room when she said this, but she did not look at me, and I
suddenly realized what Martha thought about the trial was not particularly
important. The four defendants were
completely in the hands of their four lawyers:
Bonson, the assigned JAG; Chip Henderson, a JAG sent specially up from
Munich, and two new lawyers, Thomas Culpepper from the American Civil Liberties
Union and a former JAG himself, and Mr. Sidney Howard, a Black lawyer from the
NAACP. Yellin had been fired. I remembered Martha saying he was a bank
robber, not a lawyer, and thought she had probably engineered the firing and
gotten the $300 back the Darmstadt brothers had paid him. As I said, the lawyers had been too busy to
listen to Martha’s ukases about which photographs were to be given to the
press. Their plan was for all three of
them to resign from the case if they were not given a continuance.
The
court convened exactly as on July 21, but Judge Snow noticed right away that
the roster of lawyers at the Defense table had changed.
--What
happened to Mr. Yellin? he asked.
--He
was taken off the case, said Chip Henderson, on his feet at once.
--Then
you and Captain Bronson here will have to go to trial without him, said
Snow. Who are the other people at your
table?
--We
submitted their names according to rule, said Henderson. Mr. Thomas Culpepper, formerly of the United
States Army, now retained by the American Civil Liberties Union for this case,
and Mr. Sidney Howard of the National Association for the Advancement of the
Colored Peoples.
Judge
Snow looked down at his file and up again.
--I
have nothing to do with who you fire or hire, he said. You and Capt. Bonson were both here on July
21st, and you are here today, and I consider that you have had more than enough
time to prepare your case. Your clients
certainly have more than sufficient legal representation.
--We
have not been able to interview all the witnesses in the time allotted, said
Henderson. And since we have received
reinforcements from the States...
Here
he nodded at Mr. Culpepper and Mr. Howard.
--We
are requesting a continuance in order to bring the new lawyers up to date with
the facts of the case.
--Well,
I’m refusing it, said Snow. You’ll go to
trial today.
--Then,
said Chip. I resign.
--No,
said Judge Snow. You do not resign from
this case. I am giving you a direct
order to sit down and remain in this courtroom.
Snow
was a major, Chip captain, so he sat down, and Culpepper got to his feet.
--You
may be able to give Capt. Henderson a direct order, said Culpepper. But I am not in the Army, and I cannot go to
trial under these circumstances.
He
began collecting his papers.
--Mr....The
judge paused to glance down at his file...Culpepper, I certainly cannot give
you a direct order, but I can see that you are never allowed inside a military
court again.
At
this critical moment, Mr. Howard of the NAACP got to his feet and called for a
recess. The judge and all the lawyers,
defense and trial counsel, looked at him.
--Granted,
said Judge Snow.
The
courtroom was, as usual, ordered to rise to its feet as the Judge exited the
room.
--Culpepper
should have pushed it to a confrontation, said the correspondent for the
Revolutionary Dutch Soldiers Union.
--Snow
was ready to go to trial, said Max. But
I bet he is on the phone to Headquarters right now.
Mr.
Howard of the NAACP became the hero of the hour. Years of wheeling and dealing for the NAACP
had conditioned him to the advantages of well-timed appeals, strategic
retreats, flanking maneuvers, and rescue work of all kinds. The previous day, Chip had explained to him
at a Wiener Wald lunch about what lawyers called the LS/MFT technique with
appeals; the appeal automatically went
up the chain of command to land on the desk of the same judge who had been in
charge of the case, Judge Snow in other words, who would stamp the appeal Legally
Sufficient /Mighty Fine Trial, that is, refuse the appeal and classify the case
(the acronym came from Lucky Strike/Makes Fine Tobacco, a well-known
advertising slogan of the time). So
little Mr. Howard, Black, fat, and forty, had adapted himself like a good
lawyer to this new condition, and used the recess technique, not the appeal
technique. But it must have occurred to him that his colleagues had not planned
very far ahead at that lunch and had no strategy beyond resigning en
masse: Henderson would try again to
resign, Culpepper would resign, Howard himself would resign, and Mr. Bonson,
the assigned JAG? I guess none of them
thought even Judge Snow would think Bonson could go on alone.
It
is easy to be a Spartan mother, as Alice B. Toklas said to Gertrude Stein, and
it was easy for me to criticize from the outside. I had taken my personal distance from the
case, although I was there to support the ACLU that did not particularly need
my support. Its lawyers, paid
strategists, might, I thought, have foreseen that Snow might just choose one or
two alternate behavior patterns to that which they optimistically assigned to him;
that is, granting the continuance immediately when Henderson and Culpepper
threatened to resign. In fact, I do not
think it should have been particularly hard to foresee that Snow’s reflexes as
an Army officer would certainly be to get tough.
To maintain the prestige of our lawyers, I might
pretend here that the whole maneuver had been planned from start to finish, and
that Mr. Howard’s timely intervention was also planned beforehand, if Snow did
not give the continuance. But, in fact,
there was no alternate plan. Henderson
and Culpepper were as surprised as everyone else when their proposal was
refused. So Mr. Howard had saved the day
by calling for a recess. The action had
passed directly from Chip to Howard, over Culpepper’s head. Culpepper, of course, was certainly ready to
walk out and take the chance that Snow would not be able to make good on the threat
to prevent him from practicing in military courts which, due to his own tour in
the military, was his specialty. Chip,
with Bonson’s dubious help, would have been left to struggle alone through an
inadequately prepared defense. And if
Chip had gone all out and left the courtroom too, disobeying a direct order
from Snow, then not only would he have been faced with a court martial himself,
but his action would have left the Darmstadt brothers with one court-appointed
lawyer, and possibly Mr. Howard who had just flown in from the States and was
unfamiliar with the case. Henderson’s
offense would have been added to the cause for the trial: first, the soldiers had disobeyed a direct
order; then their lawyer had. The whole
issue of the Crypto Command and their unlawful imprisonment would never have
surfaced again, even if Mr. Bonson had wanted to raise it--which is more than
doubtful. If, if, if...but Mr. Howard
called for a recess and from then on the case fell into the category of NAACP
cases. Not going up against the NAACP
was pretty much an Army policy, to avoid being called racist, especially in
Europe. I went back to the witness room
where the four Darmstadt brothers were already explaining to Martha what had
happened.
--What
are those honky lawyers doing out there?
said Martha angrily. I don’t want
to see my brothers in jail.
She
obviously packed the NAACP lawyer in with the whites; I had noticed that Howard
had made no attempt to contact her, and I assumed she was as upset as I was
about the backfiring of the strategy that had seemed so sure at lunch. But outside of the Darmstadt brothers
themselves, no one seemed to care what she thought. None of the lawyers had come into the witness
room to consult her, since that was forbidden, but she might have gone out into
the corridor and spoken her mind; however, she had always had a sense of when
she would not be listened to.
The
lawyers strategy had firmed itself up again by the time the recess was
over. Snow came back from wherever he
had telephoned and said he was granting the continuance for the 30th of
September, but it was absolutely the last continuance, no matter what the
circumstances.
As it turned out, none of this was necessary because
within the week, General Herring had all the charges against the Darmstadt 53
dropped. Canceled. Because of Martha’s sticking to Thursgood Stickney back in August? I would say our trip to Herring’s office in
early August certainly had made the General aware that the Darmstadt case was
being publicized. Martha herself had
only become actively involved in the case after her visit to General Herring;
but he had had a look at her and knew, as she herself had said, what she could
do. I even assume that he bracketed her
with Thursday, as part of the same pressure group. After all, they had come to his office
together, and Thursday probably had not seen him since. Despite Thursday’s efforts to shake Martha,
it was also in his interest to present a united front of the Black community.
As for Montrice, who had enabled Martha to
get taken to the General’s office in the first place, she had been sent home to
Philadelphia directly from Paris, probably to hit Martha’s sponsor for more
funding. Anyway, the lawyers were jubilant:
Victory all along the line! they
said. All along the line was not a
synonym for total victory, as the brothers found out when they got back to
Cambrai-Fritsch Caserne. Lt. Colonel
Poteet had come out of the incognito he had maintained during the various
trials and broke up the remaining twenty-six brothers by transferring them to
separate bases around Germany and
Europe. He had waited until the day the
lawyers were flying home to do so, but he had reckoned without Martha. She was staying in Darmstadt with Swinton or
King, I forget which, and got out to the airport and up to the control tower
just as the plane was reaching the end of the runway and made them stop the
plane. I don’t know what she told them,
but it was the sort of thing she could do very well. The two lawyers in Europe, Chip Hendersen and
Tom Culpepper, came back, but they had no authority over what the Colonel did
with his own command. He had the right
to transfer his men to different bases or units, a Standard Operating Procedure
with troublemakers. Max got some
publicity out by quoting the brothers as saying that instead of the Darmstadt
53 , there would be 53 Darmstadts; it
was a good slogan and picked up by the few journalists that were still
interested, but it did not mean anything.
I thought that Swinton, King, Tyler, and MacDonald would probably arrive
at their new stations as heroes, but I did not see them as long-term agitators
for GI rights.
While
they had agitated, however, the four of them had certainly done the right
thing. Not only had they refused to sign
Article 15’s, but they had persuaded half of the men who had been imprisoned
overnight not to sign them either. Then
they had formed a Committee for Human Rights, and when Poteet had illegally
declared it illegal, they took the initiative of getting a civilian lawyer, the
best one they knew of in Germany. Their
case had not stopped there. In fact, it
was lucky for them that Yellin was greedy and rushed off to Vietnam for more cases. They had felt their case dying on its feet,
and had gone to the Black civilian support group in Frankfurt, which turned out
to be Voice of the Lumpen, which turned out to be connected with Task Force
Albertson. Martha disliked the name, and
she disliked the Lumpen, but she had known a good case when she saw it. She had also been motivated by getting it
away from the VOL; after that morning when they came over to the Hotel Sun with
the brothers, we never heard from them again.
Max had already interested the Establishment Press and CBS television,
as well as the Dutch and German Revolutionary Youth Groups, for the first
trial. This publicity, plus the increase
in outside support between and after the two trials had been instrumental in
pushing the military powers that be into eventually dropping all charges.
In
fact, Poteet himself can be seen as one of the last overtly racist
officers. Racism has not stopped in the
Army, or back in the World, as the soldiers call it, and when either the
military or civilian establishments can get away with it, they try. Poteet’s reaction and action are typical. That night in the Crypto Compound he not only
singled out the Black troops, and only the Black troops, for punishment, but
also put their specific white enemies on guard over them. The whole incident was supposed to be passed
off as a minor riot, the kind that did not happen the night we went to
Hanau. In retrospect, a riot that night
in Hanau would have played into the hands of the prosecution by taking the
place of the Darmstadt affair as the latest riot, thus creating a picture of
Blacks being unruly and somehow ripe for discipline. Perhaps the fact that we had gone out to
Hanau, and Thursday, pushed by Martha, had gone out there escorted by two Black
MP’s in a jeep, had warned the whites not to start anything. That whites usually provoked these riots,
counting on racist support from the military was always minimized.
Although Poteet had gotten his revenge by
dispersing the twenty-six Brothers, by Christmas
he himself had been transferred quietly away from Cambrai-Fritsch Caserne, back
somewhere in the States. I wonder if he
ever made full colonel.
As
for Martha, I never heard from her again.
I did hear that she stayed in Darmstadt for awhile with either Swinton
or King, even possibly marrying one of them.
But she then went back to Philadelphia and was not taken up by Shirley
Chisholm’s office in Washington, D.C. I
never heard of Thursgood Stickney again either and wonder if he had been
dropped or had just gone back to the Republicans where he belonged. To my knowledge, he never made congressman.
My
friendship with Martha had ended long
before the trial reopened. I did the
right thing too, as the song says, and
took the four Darmstadt brothers to see her in Paris one weekend--but the
French whores wouldn’t have anything to do with them, even though they had
brought four suitcases of their best clothes.
I asked Jim O’Kelly to take them to Les Halles, and he said the girls
were afraid they would get beat up; not so much because the Brothers were Black
but because there were four of them together.
In Paris, Montrice went on not speaking to me, but Martha was minimally
polite and ran up a five hundred dollar phone bill from Paris to
Philadelphia. I had sort of guessed she
might, but my guilt about dropping her had given me an all-or-nothing attitude,
and since she was a guest at my apartment, I could not see limiting the phone
to local calls, let alone cutting it off.
Those were the days when I was still a romantic.
The
euphoria of the summer, of course, was a thing of the past. So was the spirit of the sixties, still
hanging on in 1971 when we were carried along by the idea that with good
intentions alone we could beat back prejudice, injustice, and oppression. We did beat them back momentarily in the
Darmstadt case. Given the military
framework, I agree with the lawyers that it was victory all along the
line. Max went supporting GI’s, working
with the Lawyers Military Defense Committee in Heidelberg, linked to his
activity as a journalist. Eventually he
left Germany for Australia where he continued his career as reporter.
As
for myself, I left Paris a year later and regressed to my Waldhaus personality;
not in Austria but in Dilsberg, the village I had seen on top of the hill the
day I decided to leave Martha. I now
teach college English, to supplement my dwindling income, in one of the
American universities affiliated with the U.S. Forces in Germany. It ran the usual security check on me, but my
involvement with this old trial does not seem to be on the books.
The
End
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