By Harold Henderson
Peery wasn’t arrested, and he knows that the Chicago Police have been guilty of far worse abuses. But he says, “These humiliations keep driving you toward a position where you break contact with whole groups of people and don’t think of them as individuals.”
If the 20th century were a house, its basement would be packed with mildewed leftist manifestos. What sets Peery’s manifesto apart is that it’s addressing the issues of the 1990s, not trying to replay the 1960s or the 1930s. I asked Peery’s longtime friend Lew Rosenbaum, former proprietor of Guild Books, if he thought Peery had changed over the years. “Yes and no,” Rosenbaum replied. “Anyone who is constantly being confronted with new information must change. As events and times change, the tactical approaches must necessarily change. At times such momentous events take place as to derail even the strategic considerations. It takes a very flexible person to recognize these changes, and a very principled person to recognize the goal in unfamiliar terrain.”
“Pop read snatches of the letter aloud. When he finished reading, he dropped the letter to the floor, buried his face in his hands, and wept from his guts. ‘Oh, God,’ he moaned over and over. ‘I’d rather it had been me. My poor brother–my baby brother.’
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“White man’s justice declared the murderer insane at the moment he pulled the trigger and released him. Pop knew the law of the Missouri hills. He carefully disassembled his .38, cleaned it, oiled it, cleaned the fat lead bullets, loaded the pistol, and laid the extra bullets in the suitcase beside the gun. Horrified, Mom watched him. When he closed the suitcase she said, ‘Ben, if you go and avenge this one death, who is to avenge yours? Who’s to care for the eight you leave behind?’
That harsh, overt racism is now mostly gone, says Peery, because the economic need for it has largely disappeared. But some of the attitudes of the 1930s that he describes have hung on. “During one of the bull sessions on religion [with white YMCA youth], I raised some point of religious dogma Father Thompson had pointed out to me,” he writes. “I became little less than a saint. . . . In their ignorance, they were afraid of us. When they found out that we didn’t fit their stereotypes, they went to the opposite extreme. They then thought there was no such thing as black, antisocial criminals. This stereotype was harder to fight than the other.”
“Up ahead, around the long curve in the road a white man and two girls were handing the soldiers buckets of water. The two girls would run to the well while the man held out the buckets. ‘Thank you.’ ‘Much obliged, suh.’ The long gulps of cold, clear Louisiana well water were the sweetest drink of my life. “God, that’s good. Thank you, mister.’ ‘Least we can do, soldier. You all boys is givin’ everything.’
