(Editor’s note: Hunter Gray (Hunter Bear, John R. Salter, Jr.) is
a well-known and successful civil rights and labor advocate. He is a retired
professor who enjoys sharing his stories with those who strive for
equality. He recently sent out this note, and has given his permission to share
it with others. Be sure to read his Organizer's Book, JACKSON MISSISSIPPI! Hunter has been an inspiration to me, and so many others, and I hope you enjoy the following. Susan Klopfer,
author, Who Killed Emmett Till)
'Maintaining My Normally High Optimism'
This is a kind of
selective mini-memoir, reaching back into the latter 1950s and the earlier part
of the 1960s – embracing a number of diverse and good people of strong social
justice feelings, much of this in the Red Scare epoch. I could write
much more on that and comparable periods but am keeping this within the limits
stirred by a very recent letter from a long ago student of mine at a small
college, Wisconsin State at Superior, in northern Wisconsin.
Hunter Bear (Hunter Gray, John Salter, Jr.), accomplished activist and professor
Many in Eastern Idaho, including our family, have been hit by
the nationally notorious flu. We all weathered that, some with
anti-biotics, but in my case a troubling cough persisted. My
domestic responsibilities considerably increased of late, and thus not inclined
to take chances, I went to a medical outpost where I was given a chest X
Ray. The doc told me I had pneumonia and, when I asked -- was there
anything more serious, such as COPD which had taken one my best friends some
years ago, I was looked at like I was a high school kid and told pneumonia was
very serious. In the end, with an array of medicines, I threw that
off handily. I may have had it for some time.
The letter came from Mark, now retired from a long and
successful teaching career. It said, in part, “You inspired me then
and although I could never be as strong and as tough as you, I have done a few
good things in a life filled with luck. The memory of you inspires
me still.”
Drinking black coffee and smoking my tobacco pipe for several
hours very early this morning, I traveled back into time. I wrote
Mark later this morning, saying in part:
I very much appreciate your good words – and glad to know my
role at Superior, as activist and teacher, was encouraging in those challenging
days and circumstances.
It’s been a hell of a challenging period for literally everyone
we know. One of my major struggles these days is to maintain my normally
high optimism and faith in most of Humanity. So far, I think I’ve
been successful.
The fact is, in that ‘way back time that doesn’t seem that long
ago, it was “you students” who certainly inspired me! I have always
remembered you all – with the greatest appreciation and Eldri feels exactly the
same way. We handled some very tough challenges effectively
and well. You, yourself, were certainly a major figure in that struggle.
The age difference between myself and you all was obviously
pretty minimal. (I note you are 78 and I am virtually 81.) At
Superior, as at my one year of high school teaching in the Nebraska Sandhills
country a couple of years before I got to Wisconsin, I felt no social distance
between myself as a teacher -- and my students – from whom I always learn
much whatever the setting and times.
In fact, that’s been basically my ethos everywhere I have gone
as a “professor.” I’ve often told classes, “I’m not really a
professor, just pretending to be one.”
+ + +
I wrote a long letter to the paper
attacking HUAC, the film, and praising the student activists.
+ + +
I arrived at Superior State College as it was often known, as an
instructor, in late summer, 1960, fresh from a few months on super isolated
Bear Mountain Fire Lookout in extreme eastern Arizona and armed with a fresh
M.A. from Arizona State, Tempe. I had been hired at the last minute.
I was already a reasonably experienced organizer, militant labor and student
rights, and my own kind of radical, but its president, Jim Dan Hill knew
nothing personal of my background, save that I was a good part Indian,
a veteran and an Arizonian.
No sooner at that college, I learned it was the super
authoritarian fiefdom of its president, General Jim Dan Hill, best described as
a Texas Bircher. My sociology teaching load was very heavy, fine
with me. Hill and I clashed early on when, in his weekly newspaper column,
“Let’s Look At The Record” he praised the witch hunting House Un-American
Activities Committee, and the purely awful red-baiting film, “Operation
Abolition, which attacked the student protestors and their militant
organization – SLATE – who had challenged HUAC during its hearings in the
Bay Area early in 1960 via very vigorous demonstrations.
(Decades later, I met the good Bill Mandel, then about 90, on
our discussion lists He had played a very constructive and centrally activist
ant-HUAC role in those very events. We found we had crossed trails
many times in our lives. I was about the last person interviewed by
Bill on his weekly radio program at Berkeley – KPFA – on Native concerns in
late 2005. Shortly after that, Bill was struck by a car, badly
injured, and became inactive. He remains much missed.)
I wrote a long letter to the paper attacking HUAC, the film, and
praising the student activists. It was published.
And I found I was an instant celebrity in Superior where few,
and certainly virtually no faculty, ever criticized General Hill openly. I
also learned there was a long extant movement against Hill out in the community
– but it had lost a good deal of steam.
Early on, the college Ski Club, all male, saw me and recognized
the kind of faculty sponsor they’d like – not a fussy professorial and
intrusive type. Though no ski buff – I am a snowshoes guy – I agreed
to be their faculty cover. Soon thereafter, the Ski Club had one of
its big parties – no females and pretty tame by today’s standards. But,
perhaps because of my role as sponsor – I wasn’t at the affair – the Dean of
Students, a classic Hill sycophant, officially abolished the Club. We
talked to Student Government which protested the Dean’s action. The
Dean and General Hill then abolished Student Government in total.
I and a good number of students, some Ski and many others, then
had a large mass protest meeting in the college auditorium.
And the War against Hill was on. Mark, my good and
very recent correspondent, was among the first to join the effort. It
was then that I learned that Mark’s uncle, a resident of Superior, was a
national VP of the American Federation of Teachers – and an old friend of Bill
Karnes, also a national VP of AFT, and president of Phoenix Local 1010 of AFT.
Among my several active union affiliations was my at-large membership in 1010.
+ + +
We began systematically contacting
potential allies – e.g., political, labor, and general community members.
+ + +
Bill was one of a great many AFL-CIO unionists in Arizona and
elsewhere who politely and firmly ignored the flow of attempted mandates from
the Federation’s top level – most generated by the predatory Steel Union –
seeking to prevent contact with the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, widely seen
by its critics as “Communist.” My own relations with Mine Mill were
very close indeed. Bill Karnes and other teacher unionists had always
appreciated Mine Mill’s considerable assistance in organizing AFT locals in the
mining towns. AFL-CIO craft unions were much involved with Mine Mill
in fighting the copper companies. And, in any case, Mine Mill, with
10,000 plus members in Arizona – the largest union in the state which, in 1956
and 1957, had won bargaining rights at two major Magma Copper properties –
could hardly be ignored.
One of Bill’s best high school students, Rodney, eventually went
to UC at Berkeley where he immediately connected with under-grad and grad
students who were forming the radical campus political party, SLATE. One
of the latter was the older economics student Clinton Jencks, always a
widespread and beneficial influence, and late of Mine Mill, Salt of the Earth,
the Jencks Case. They were all involved together in the anti-HUAC
fight.
Back at Superior, our student movement, mostly Anglo but some
Native, mushroomed fast. We put out a regularly issued and fiery but
rational mimeographed protest journal, focused on many education
issues and certainly student and faculty academic freedom – and, too, faculty
and staff salary discrimination. We began systematically contacting potential
allies – e.g., political, labor, and general community members. The somewhat
dormant, broad and very diverse anti-Hill community movement began to stir –
then came vigorously alive.
But the students, Mark and many others indeed, who often didn’t
see themselves as activists, were the consistent spear-point. General
Hill attacked me as an atheist and an advocate of free love (the latter for my
support, voiced in my Marriage and Family course, of the Swedish system of
trial marriage.) Only a little more surreptitiously did he and his cohorts
attack me consistently as a Communist. FBI documents of concerning
me, secured many years later via FOIA/PA, indicate Hill brought the willing FBI
into it all as an ally very early on.
The fight went through the entire spring semester of 1961.
+ + +
Thus I met Eldri, and we were married
a few months later at a very well attended wedding.
+ + +
Mark’s AFT uncle introduced me, at an AFT conference, to
Governor Gaylord Nelson (later U.S. Senator). We had a short but
very productive discussion. Soon after that, the Gov appointed a
member of the Board of Regents as a kind of college overseer. At the
end of that spring term, Hill was given only three or so more years and his
powers were sharply limited. He was required to get Regents’
approval for any significant policy and fiscal appropriations decisions.
Eldri, then employed on campus by several Lutheran churches as
their student counselor, had come to my attention when a member of the still
functioning Ski Club (however unofficial its status) and an Irish Catholic,
told me that “a Lutheran girl” had a phonograph record of SLATE’s anti-HUAC
protests. Thus I met Eldri and we were married a few months later at a
very well attended wedding. We left Superior in the summer of 1961
for Mississippi teaching and organizing -- and my later organizing with the
leftist Southern Conference Educational Fund in the Northeastern North Carolina
Black Belt. We finally left the South in 1967 and went on to many other tough
campaigns, and college/university teaching – often an activist endeavor in its
own right.
Eldri
Over the years, Eldri and I kept in touch with as many of our
old friends and fellow combatants as we could. In the fall of 1965,
I carefully wrote the basic draft of what became the first edition of my book
on our massive Jackson Movement of 1961-63. When that was finally
published in 1979, it did OK sales-wise – but I also sent over 100 copies as
gifts to as many of our old fighting friends I could locate.
During the civil rights period, I went on a few speaking
junkets. Bill Karnes, in Arizona, played a key role, along with Harry Stamler,
a veteran radical, in setting up speaking engagements for me in Phoenix
metro. Aware that my only life insurance was my GI/VA policy which I
had continued, and that I couldn’t get one in Dixie, Local 1010 quickly
provided a good one for me.
+ + +
In the old days – going back in time
a good ways – it has always seemed to me that friends and foes alike were much
more candidly open in their positions, often duking it out, mostly nonviolently
but sometimes not.
+ + +
The Arizona Mine Mill Council was as pleased to have me as its
major speaker on the civil rights movement as I was to appear before that very
large gathering of its many Arizona local unions.
General Hill returned to Texas. In 1981, a good
friend, Duane Hale, Creek Indian and an academic historian, ran across Hill at
the West Texas Historical Conference. He reported that the Old
Dragon was old and frail.
Many years after all of this, I learned from our good friend,
Stephen Zunes, who we have known since he was a precocious seven year old, that
Bill Karnes was his cousin on his mother’s side. Not surprised at
all.
In the old days – going back in time a good ways – it has always
seemed to me that friends and foes alike were much more candidly open in their
positions, often duking it out, mostly nonviolently but sometimes not. Nowadays,
all sorts of disingenuous stuff, often covert back-biting and back-knifing,
seem much more common on the part of our adversaries, and occasionally even a
few of our ostensible allies.
The people I have mentioned fondly and well were, and those
who remain still, are very fine people. I wouldn’t try ideological
analysis on any of them and their productive contributions -- or their
multitude of interesting inter-connections. As my old cowboy/artist
and radical mentor, Frank Dolphin, was sometimes prone to trenchantly note:
“Like pulls to like.”
Hunter Bear
