History

The Pre-9/11 Hijacking Era Revisited

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the skies belong to usMy post about the Black Panther documentary last month inspired my interest in learning more about the BPP international section.  I was browsing through my library a couple of weeks ago and realized that I had a copy of Brendan Koerner’s book The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking

(Disclaimer: I got this review copy of the book for free from the publisher a couple of years ago, but never got around to reading it at the time.)

This is one of the best books I have read in awhile.  Part investigative journalism, part thriller, this book doesn’t disappoint!  I literally couldn’t put this book down and finished it in three days.  The book centers around Western Airlines Flight 701, which was hijacked in 1972 by Roger Holder and his then girlfriend Catherine Kerkow.  This story has everything – sex, drugs, violence, mental illness, racism and politics.

Koerner does an excellent job of describing the hijackers’ backstory.  Holder and Kerkow, other than the both of them living in the same town of Coos Bay, Oregon briefly, couldn’t have been more different from each other.  He was a black man who felt discriminated against because of his skin color; first while living with his military family in Oregon and then as a soldier in Vietnam who was wrongly court-martialed for a petty crime.  She was a white woman who had a typical working class upbringing who became a masseur that gave hand jobs to male clients and sold marijuana on the side.

Holder had gone AWOL, writing bad checks and dealing with the onset of PTSD when he met Kerkow in San Diego.  He came up with the crazy idea of hijacking a plane, swapping the passengers for Angela Davis, who was on trial at the time for the Marin County incident, and bringing her to the Vietcong in North Vietnam.  The plan was to get ransom money that Holder and Kerkow would use to start a new life in Australia.

Sounds pretty crazy me, and unbelievable that the plane crew believed it, but they got away with it – sorta. Instead of going to Vietnam, they took the hijacked plane to Algeria, where they met up with Eldridge Cleaver and other Black Panthers on the lam.

I won’t give away too much of the story, but it is that wild and crazy and worth the read.  I will say that Catherine Kerkow is still on the run, and wanted by the FBI.  She has been rumored to be living in Cuba, but there is no substantive proof.

But the book is not just about Holder and Kerkow.  Koerner spends most of the book giving a substantive history of the “golden age” of hijackings, which was a common occurrence during the 1960s and 1970s.  I am only old enough to understand hijackings through the context of 9/11.  But even before 9/11, I never knew of a time when there weren’t metal detectors and security guards searching your person at the airport.  It seems impossible for me to imagine a time when people could just walk onto a plane without any of the strict security hassles we deal with today.

Apparently, this atmosphere of innocence did exist for a short time 50 years ago when commercial air travel was becoming more accessible to more people.  Many “skyjackers” saw this as an opportunity to use planes as vessels to gain worldwide attention.  Most of the earliest skyjackers were Fidel Castro sympathizers who wanted to fly to Havana.

Over time, skyjackers’ reasons for taking planes became varied and, well, insane.  Some wanted to bring attention to legitimate struggles like the Palestine question or racism in America, while others hijacked planes to avoid paying taxes or just wanted to get ransom money.  A lot of the hijackers were really mentally disturbed, especially the ones that parachuted off planes mid-flight like D.B. Cooper. Hijackings became so common during this time that there was one or two once a week.

These hijackings straddled the fine line between revolutionary acts and terrorism.  It makes you wonder if everyone during this time was crazy… or just high!

The only hijackings I was aware of before reading this book were the ones carried out by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine during the Black September timeline, and specifically PFLP member Leila Khaled – who hijacked two planes – the first woman to ever hijack a plane.  An interesting documentary about her life was done a few years ago.

The book also introduced me to Delta Air Lines Flight 841, which was hijacked by radical black militants who wanted to copycat the Western Airlines incident. They are mentioned in Koerner’s book, but there was also a more indepth documentary done about that incident too.  In the film, the director goes to Paris to interview one of the hijackers George Brown.

Whatever reason a plane was hijacked back then, the skies no longer belong to anyone today.

The Black Panthers: Diplomats for Revolution

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Black Panther Newspaper Panthers in Kasbah AlgiersLast weekend I saw the new documentary “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.”  I have read a lot about the Panthers since I was in high school.  Much of what I know comes from the larger context of the Black Power Movement, which includes Malcolm X, Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael and the Nation of Islam.  The film is really meant to be a primer for people who don’t know much about the Panthers to get a basic understanding of their most important milestones, like the breakfast program and the murder of Fred Hampton.  The two-hour movie is packed with a lot of information; so much information that many of the topics brought up could be their own documentaries.   

Following the film screening, director Stanley Nelson was present and took questions from the audience.  The most common questions were why was this or that not included in the film.  The reality here is that it was meant to be a two-hour movie, and only so much time to cover all the important topics.  A true movie that included every aspect of the Black Panther timeline would be a 10-hour mini-series!  

Some of the topics that were briefly discussed in the film that I would have liked to have learned more about include the misogyny within the Party, the alleged crimes committed by Ericka Huggins, Jamal Joseph and others, and the weird, criminal behavior of Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver.  But, again, maybe these subjects need their own dedicated movies.

What stood out to me was the international solidarity the Panthers attempted to create after Cleaver went into exile in Algeria via Cuba, following a police ambush in Oakland that killed young panther Bobby Hutton in 1968.  By this time, the Panthers had already gained a reputation as revolutionaries by other oppressed groups worldwide and connected with other liberation struggles.  

Algeria was already a hotbed of revolutionary acts, since its violent independence from France in 1962.  (To learn more about the Algerian struggle, read Frantz Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism and watch Gillo Pontecorvo’s powerful The Battle of Algiers. – both well worth your time!)  By the time Cleaver and company came to Algeria in 1972, President Houari Boumediene had turned his country into a haven for other revolutionaries seeing refuge.  The Panthers were granted an office space in the old North Vietnamese embassy, a small, monthly stipend from the Algerian government and were allowed to grant asylum to other Panthers coming from America.  Kathleen Cleaver once said that the BPP international chapter was the “embassy of the American Revolution, receiving revolutionary visitors from all over the world,” and sharing news about “revolutionary developments within the United States.”  

However, the Cleavers overstayed their welcome and were eventually kicked out of Algeria, after the fiasco behind the hijacking of Western Airlines Flight 701.

By the time the Cleavers left, Pete O’Neal, former chairman of the Kansas City BPP chapter, found refuge in Algeria and became the new leader of the international section.  O’Neal was a hardcore Marxist who felt that his prosecution by the US government on gun charges was politically motivated.

Eventually O’Neal and his wife Charlotte were also forced out of Algeria and moved to Tanzania, which was ruled at the time by socialist President Julius Nyerere.  O’Neal still lives in Tanzania on his farm where he advocates for community development and self-reliance.  PBS also produced this documentary about O’Neal a few years ago, which I highly recommend.

Two Gone, But Not Forgotten Musical Geniuses

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Nina SimoneNina Simone and Rahsaan Roland Kirk were two larger-than-life, musical geniuses who never received the commercial recognition they should have received during their respective lifetimes.   Recently, two documentaries about Simone and Kirk came out that give a new perspective on their lives and give them the highest praise due to them.  I loved both films and I hope you will see them too!

What Happened, Miss Simone

I didn’t know much about Nina Simone’s life before the documentary beyond listening to her records.  But after watching it, I had a greater understanding of where she was coming from both musically and politically.  Raised in the segregated South, Simone had to overcome many racial barriers in the music world.  She was denied a scholarship to Curtis Institute of Music because she was black, but ended up at Juilliard.  To pay for school, she played piano in Atlantic City, where she perfected her mix of jazz, gospel, blues and classical music.

She had a very messy private life.  I knew that she had bipolar disorder, but didn’t know about the domestic abuse she suffered under her husband, as well as being emotionally abusive to her daughter.  And, apparently, she fired a gun at a record company executive she thought was stealing royalty money from her.  Her volatile behavior was only known to a few people until after her death.

But she is best known for her powerful songs, which became some of the most important music of the civil rights movement.  “How can you be an artist and not reflect the times?” she once said.   Hit songs like Mississippi Goddam and Young, Gifted and Black became anthems for the era.  However, her career suffered commercially because of her radical politics.  She was denied appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show because she embraced black power.

Simone would be reduced to singing in small nightclubs in Paris for a few hundred dollars a performance.  Her mental illness also became more pronounced as the years progressed, and she eventually died from breast cancer.  But her musical legacy lives on.

One of her best performances, including Mississippi Goddam:

Rahsaan Roland KirkThe Case of the Three Sided Dream

Rahsaan Roland Kirk was an interesting character.  He was a jazz multi-instrumentalist who considered himself a “journey agent” and his band members “poets.”  He was blind, but he had vivid dreams that helped him see his music.  The movie title is named after his most famous album, which was also political in nature, with rants about the Watergate scandal and racism.

Kirk once proclaimed that jazz was black classical music.  In the early 1970s TV shows like the Ed Sullivan Show preferred to have pop stars come on to perform instead of jazz musicians because they were more commercially acceptable.  Kirk mounted a campaign to get “black classical music” on mainstream television by having fellow “jazz militants” disrupt live television programs like the Dick Cavett Show with whistles.  Kirk finally got Ed Sullivan’s attention and was invited to perform, but only under the condition that he performed a nice, non-threathening Stevie Wonder song.

Being a man that literally toots his own horn, he went against the establishment and played the powerful “Haitian Fight Song” with Charlie Mingus and other poets.

One of his most memorable performances:

Ota Benga, Race and Human Zoos

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Ota BengaI recently read Pamela Newkirk’s latest book, Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga, which chronicles the story of the young Congolese man who was (captured and?) brought to the United States over a century ago to be “exhibited” at the St. Louis World’s Fair and then in an even more controversial “exhibit” in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo with an orangutan.  The book is so fascinating because it seems SO insane and unreal that a human being would be put on display like… an animal in a zoo.

Benga was brought to America by wannabe explorer and literally insane person Samuel Verner, who originally came to the Congo as a missionary, but then evolved into an opportunist who exploited Benga.  What’s even crazier is the fact that almost all the actual scientists, anthropologists and ethnographers mentioned in the book who have college degrees in their fields allowed their own racial bias over actual science to support the madness that happened to Benga.

It was quite common at the time to display people mostly from “less civilized” countries in human zoos or “ethnological exhibits” to showcase the “hierarchy of races,” with white people at the top and everyone else following below.  Racial biases at the time correlated with evolution theory, which is better known as scientific racism.

Ota Benga and sharpened teethHuman zoos were most popular from the late 19th century and up until the beginning of World War II throughout Europe, especially in Germany, and in the United States.  These displays were also the only way for most people to “experience” other cultures, as commercial travel by sea was limited to the wealthy few.  At the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, Ota Benga and other Congolese pygmies were put on display in a “native village”.  Benga was the highlight of his “village” because of his sharpened teeth.  Verner started the rumor that Benga’s teeth looked that way because he was a cannibal.  However, according to Newkirk’s book, other anthropologists of that era had documented that Benga’s teeth were pointy because it was culturally acceptable and actually considered attractive within his tribe.

There were other native villages representing other ethnic groups.  The United States had recently acquired Guam, Puerto Rico and the Philippines as territories, so natives from those faraway places were brought to the fair to be displayed, along with members from the Alaskan Tlingit and Apache tribes, including Apache chief Geronimo.  Coincidentally and in a weird twist, an “intelligent” horse called Beautiful Jim Key that could allegedly read and write was also on display.

Okay…

Following the fair, some of the exhibited people didn’t go back to their countries of origin.  Some of them died because of exposure to climate or illness.  Anticipating these deaths, some American scientists took the corpses for “further examination” – you know, science.

Benga went back to the Congo briefly with Verner after the fair, but came back (recaptured?) to the United States in September 1906 to be displayed at the Bronx Zoo.

According to scientific racism, blacks were usually right above apes, which was most likely why Benga was put into the monkey house.  The exhibit became an instant hit.  Thousands of New Yorkers came to see Benga in his cage.  Sometimes he was allowed to roam the zoo on his own, but then he was chased, heckled and physically taunted by spectators.

Of course there was outrage from the local black community, especially from black clergymen like Rev. James H. Gordon.

“Our race, we think, is depressed enough, without exhibiting one of us with the apes,” Gordon said.  “We think we are worthy of being considered human beings, with souls.”

The mounting protest forced the zoo to take Benga out of the exhibit, and place him under Gordon’s custody.  But by then, the damage was already done.  Benga lived in Gordon’s orphanage for a while, and then moved to Virginia to get formal training and work in a factory.  His mood went downhill soon after in what we consider today as post-traumatic stress disorder.  Around this time commercial ship travel ended abruptly due to the onset of World War I, making it impossible for Benga to move back to the Congo.  At the age of 32 and alone without any family and few friends, Benga committed suicide.  At no time in Benga’s short life, except while living in Congo, was he ever free either mentally or physically.

While this all happened a century ago and human zoos in theory are a thing of the past, this doesn’t mean that certain racial stereotypes and perceptions from that era don’t exist today. In today’s society black males are still treated like animals that should be caged or killed.

The high number of unarmed black males who are shot dead in American streets like wild animals in the jungle by the police these days should be noted. This “shoot first, ask questions later” is a form of scientific racism that is translated differently in 2015.

There was more outrage for the killing of Cecil (Rhodes) the Lion than there has been for the recent rash of police brutality.  Of course, protection of endangered animals is important, but it shows how little black lives matter today.  Heck, if you want to be outraged about something bad happening in Zimbabwe, why not call out the human rights abuses against black Zimbabweans by the Mugabe regime?  People are literally starving to death there because Robert Mugabe has politicized food.  I would be remiss to not say that black lives also matter if the perpetrator is black. whether it’s in Zimbabwe, the United States or anywhere else.  Black-on-black violence is also a serious problem.

But getting back to my point, the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and blacks and Hispanics make up nearly 60 percent of the total prison population.  Blacks are also more likely than whites to be arrested for non-violent drug offenses.  There are more black males in jail or have had some type of interaction with the criminal justice system today than were enslaved at the height of slavery.

A new study from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene shows that imprisoned black and Hispanic males are more likely to be put into solitary confinement and treated poorly than their white counterparts.

kaliefbrowderThen there was Kalief Browder, a young man who spent two years in solitary confinement at Rikers Island without ever standing trial or found guilty of any crime.  He was accused of stealing a bag.  Browder was released from jail, and he was putting his life back on track by going back to school.  But, like Benga, he was never able to recover from his prison experience and committed suicide earlier this summer.

Prison is the new mental illness and human zoo.

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