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July 3, 2025

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Point of View Op-Ed Point of View Opinion

Towards A National Directory Of Gun Violence by Stan Salett

November 8, 2023 by Stan Salett

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Another week and another mass shooting. This “news” isn’t news any more, or if it is, it passes quickly from the current scene merging into a well of more distant memory. The faces, if we ever saw them are gone, we are left with numbers instead of people, un-mourned “amounts” of bodies, recalled if it all only as statistics, devoid of much meaning and empty of any of the spirit of their passed- by lives.

We are in a war and the enemy is us.

Last week a spark of hope from Lewiston, Maine appeared. A local Congressman confronted with the deaths of people he knew changed his views. He now would consider banning military assault weapons from current wide-spread availability and use. Gun violence had come home and he could no longer ignore it. Gun violence can no longer be ignored. It has eaten away at too much of the interwoven fabrics of our society.

Mass violence has captured much of our national attention, perhaps too much. It is easier, but not easy, to give gun violence a sense of place and drama and if it is not too disturbing a graphic presentation of the scene. Yet mass shootings are a small percentage of deaths by gun violence. (current research estimates only 3% of gun homicides are caused by mass shootings ). The leading cause of death today of young people is gun violence. If AR-15 were a communicable and deadly virus, it would be our number one public health crisis and we would be able to allocate considerable bipartisan support for its eradication.

Still all too few of us are involved. Like the Congressman from Lewiston we need more human contact and understanding of our national tragedy. That is why I am proposing a National Directory of Gun Violence. This will be a national database of victims: their stories, their personalities, their photos or videos and how they died and where. This database will be searchable by name, age, location and other distinguishing characteristics. If designed well, it can become a way for each of us to uncover the human
stories beneath the façade of desensitized language and statistics that shield us from ourselves.

Stan Salett has been a policy adviser to the Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton administrations and is the author of The Edge of Politics: Stories from the Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty, and the Challenges of School Reform. He now lives in Kent County, Maryland.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Op-Ed, Opinion

My involvement in the March on Washington by Stan Salett

August 29, 2023 by Stan Salett

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Editor’s Note: This is an except from Stan Salett’s The Edge of Politics: Stories from the Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty and the Challenges of School Reform.

The origins of the March actually went back to 1941, when A. Philip Randolph, the leader and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, conceived of it as protest against employment discrimination. Randolph had built the Brotherhood into the most powerful African-American labor organization, with the capacity to seriously affect the operation of the nation’s rail system. Randolph called off the march only when Roosevelt agreed to issue an executive order establishing the first Fair Employment Practices Commission. But the idea of a March on Washington had taken root and 22 years later was being actively considered again. But Randolph himself had not been a leading figure in the civil rights movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s. When he suggested in the fall of 1962 that there be a march on Washington to be called the “Emancipation March for Jobs,” to take place on January 1, 1963, the civil rights organizations were not interested.

For many of us the action was not in Washington, D.C. (except what we were doing locally) but in communities all around the country. For the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and Martin Luther King, Jr., the struggle was focused on Birmingham, Alabama (or as we called it in those days, “Bombingham”). Birmingham was still the most segregated and racially hostile city in the country. CORE was focusing on cities nationwide. The other major civil rights groups, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the National Urban League similarly had their own agendas. Working together did not come easily. Yet the events in the spring and summer seemed to do exactly that—force us to work together.

Bull Conner and the Birmingham police became more violent in their attempts to suppress the non-violent demonstrations led by Reverends Fred Shuttlesworth and Martin Luther King, Jr. The NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, Medgar Evers, was assassinated by white racists in Jackson. On June 19 President Kennedy proposed a new civil rights bill. Now there was a reason to come to Washington. King called A. Philip Randolph to tell him that he was ready to discuss a march.

Gradually, and not without pressure, the other groups came into line and met on July 2 in New York City. Randolph urged the others to accept Bayard Rustin as the chief organizer. Rustin was a controversial figure to several of the organizations. Openly gay and a former member of the Communist party, Rustin had some obvious downsides as the public face of the march. The assembled groups, pressed by Randolph, accepted Rustin as the March coordinator and scheduled the event for August 28. They also agreed that their local D.C. organizations would do much of the planning and March logistics.

Washington–CORE would represent the national organization on the planning committee, and Julius Hobson asked me to join him on the committee. The Reverend Walter Fauntroy represented SCLC and Reverend King, Sterling Tucker represented the Urban League and several people represented the NAACP. The SNCC was the least involved. Our meetings were relatively free of conflict. Maybe it was because the logistical issues were so enormous. At first we estimated that about 100,000 people would participate. As we got word of the growing numbers of bus charters, our estimates increased and increased and increased. About 450 buses were scheduled to leave from the 143rd Street Armory in New York City. Another 80 buses supplied by CORE were scheduled to leave from 125th Street. Special trains were chartered from Penn Station in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Jacksonville and Philadelphia. Eventually, 2,200 buses would come.

With this size of a crowd, security would be a major problem. Among the participating groups CORE was assigned the heavy responsibility of providing security for the March (the “big six” civil rights organizations became the “top 10” with the addition of the National Conference for Interracial Justice, the National Council of Churches of Christ, the American Jewish Congress, and the United Auto Workers). My job within the coalition was to help prepare the security for the March. From the outset, we assumed that the Washington, D.C. police would be of little help. After all, we knew them. These were the folks who were arresting some of us every weekend and throwing us with unconcealed hostility into their wagons and cells. This was a predominantly white, racist police force that we hoped would not stand in our way.

The solution to providing security for the March was to supplement our own efforts with off-duty policemen. The main outside force was drawn from an African-American association of New York City police called the Guardians. These officers would not be in uniform and would not carry weapons, but they would carry handcuffs. Rustin insisted that the off-duty police not be involved in preventing assaults by any right-wing white groups. These problems would be left to the D.C. police, the FBI and our own internal security force led by CORE. Part of my role was to help train our people and assign them to positions on the Mall. Our plan was to have 10 sections, with 50 trained people in each section. CORE’s response to potential violence was to reply with nonviolence. We, of course, would carry no weapons. We would surround any threat with our bodies. This was no philosophical construct. It was something we practiced night after night in July and August.

The March was to take place on the Mall, beginning at the Washington Monument and ending at the Lincoln Memorial, one mile away. Bayard Rustin set up his offices in Harlem. His immediate focus was to raise money to pay for buses and signs and leaflets. Each local affiliated organization was to be responsible for their group. Rustin sent out instructions that each bus would have a captain who would be responsible for seeing that their marchers stayed together and knew where the bus was parked for the return trip. People were urged to wear their Sunday best: men in suits, women in dresses. There would be none of the casual attire that marchers in subsequent years would wear. We were determined to show the American public that we were as main stream as they were even if we were willing to be beaten and jailed and worse for our beliefs. Everyone would be urged to leave Washington after the March. This would be a demonstration, not an invasion.

The day of the March, August 28, 1963, was warm and humid, but not as stifling hot as late summer Washington days could be. This would prove to be fortunate, for a hot day would have caused great strain on our untested medical facilities. I had assigned myself a security group to cover the area immediately to stage right of the Lincoln Memorial and stretching back to the edge of the reflecting pool.

We all arranged to meet at the base of the Washington Monument at 6 a.m., so I could run through final instructions. The Washington Monument that day was a scene of great confusion, with many groups, including the American Nazi Party, trying to get organized. I had led my group through the basic elements of our training in the nights leading up to this day. We planned how we would identify and surround anyone wanting to do harm to the marchers, how we would communicate through walkie-talkies and messengers and where my station would be.

Just after I finished and my group was dispersing, an NBC television crew rushed up and asked me to bring the group back together and repeat what I had said because they hadn’t been able to film all of it. With a few choice swear words, I told them that this wasn’t being done for their benefit and to “bug off.” Thinking about this incident years later, I suppose in some ways the entire March was being done for TV so that the country as a whole could see the mass movement we had become. But these were later thoughts; at the time I just wanted to get my people into position before the marchers arrived at the Lincoln Memorial.

By 7 a.m. there were fewer people than we had expected. Was this really going to happen? But the trains and buses began to arrive and by 9:30 a.m. there were more than 40,000 people gathered at the Washington Monument. By 11 a.m. the crowd had grown to more th ver the country, what has never been fully understood is that most of the marchers did not come from far out of town. The majority came from the greater Washington/Baltimore area. As we were setting up at the Lincoln Memorial, we later heard that an informal event was happening back between the Washington Monument and the Ellipse where Odetta, Josh White and many others were singing to the growing crowd. Burt Lancaster and other Hollywood celebrities gave short speeches. But the marchers were ready to march and, without any of the known civil rights leaders in attendance, the crowd began to move toward the Lincoln Memorial. The “top ten” had been meeting with President Kennedy and had to be rushed through the moving crowd along Constitution Avenue in order to get to the front.

From my vantage point, under a stand of trees at the Lincoln Memorial, I could see the thickening crowd and the main body of speakers appear at the front stage. The speaker system was not functioning completely. The original system had been sabotaged the night before and had been replaced with the help of the Army Signal Corps. I learned later that there was conflict among the sponsoring organizations over the speech John Lewis, SCLC’s representative, was about to give. Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle objected to what he believed was violent language. Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers was concerned that Lewis would be too critical of President Kennedy. All of this was resolved hurriedly behind the stage and unknown to the growing crowd in front.

My immediate concerns were to look for signs of threat and disturbance. Fortunately, there were no incidents of violence throughout the day. In my sector, we had some people fall out of the trees. We tried, not successfully, to keep people from dipping into the reflecting pool, and we had some people pass out from the heat and excitement of the day. I didn’t hear all of the speeches. Jim Farmer, who was scheduled to speak for CORE, was in jail in Plaquemine, Louisiana. Farmer refused to be bailed out while 230 others remained in jail. He asked Floyd McKissick, CORE’s national chairman, to represent him and read his message, which read in part:

“I wanted to be with you with all my heart on this great day. My imprisoned brothers and sisters wanted to be there too. I cannot come out of jail while they are still in; for their crime was the same as mine—demanding freedom now. Some of us may die, like William L. Moore [a white postman from Baltimore, Maryland, who had been shot to death in northeastern Alabama on April 23, 1963, while carrying a sign urging ‘Equal Rights for All,’ during a walk from Tennessee to Mississippi] or Medgar Evers, but our war is for life, not for death, and we will not stop our demand for FREEDOM NOW. We will not stop till the dogs stop biting us in the South and the rats stop biting us in the North.”

The day was now getting long, and many of us were feeling the effects of too little sleep. The tensions we had felt in steeling ourselves to face violence or whatever unpredictable disruptions our opponents could throw at us had subsided. Mahalia Jackson sang the moving spiritual, “I Been Buked and I Been Scorned,” which seemed to move the crowd again. Rabbi Prinz, whose son was a classmate of mine at Brandeis, then spoke about the Holocaust and how all of us must learn from that experience and not become a nation of onlookers and stand by while some of our citizens were being denied their basic rights and are beaten and murdered. Prinz declared, “It [our nation] must speak up and act, from the president down to the humblest of us, and not for the sake of the Negro, not for the sake of the black community, but for the sake of the image, the idea, and the aspiration of America itself.”

During most of the speeches I was not playing close attention to the words. My job was to watch the watchers. But when Martin Luther King, Jr., began to speak, I tried to divide my concentration. I had heard King speak a few years earlier in Boston at the Ford Hall Forum. He had spoken then about the Montgomery bus boycott, but with such erudition and classical references in his rhetoric that I felt both emotionally moved and intellectually impressed. The speaker system still was not completely effective in my section. But when King said, “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream,” I heard it and saw the crowd responding. There were “amens” and “you tell ‘em.”

King had broken through the exhaustion that many were feeling so late on that long day. He had planned to end his speech with a call to the audience to return to their communities and continue the struggle. The others in the coalition also had given King a time limit for his remarks, wanting to show themselves as a broad-based group with no single figurehead. King decided on the spot to go beyond any limits and deliver what became the most moving speech of our lives. He slowed down his cadence and talked about his dream for America and for his own children, “where they will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.” He talked about freedom and faith and said finally,

“And when we let freedom ring from every village, and every hamlet and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children— black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to sing in the words of that old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

And then the day ended, but not for me. There was the cleaning up to do. The trash of 250,000 people, tons of it, had to be picked up. All of the cable lines, the portable bathrooms and banners had to be removed. We were determined to leave this special place as if we had never been there at all. And we did. We returned to our work in our communities inspired yet mindful that the struggle for full civil rights had to continue—a reminder made all too real when less than three weeks later “Bombingham” again tragically erupted. On Sunday, September 16, four 14-year-old girls were murdered during a bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. In D.C., CORE went out into the streets and brought out more than 7,000 people. The struggle would continue.

Stan Salett has been a policy adviser to the Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton administrations. He now lives in Kent County, Maryland. 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Op-Ed, Opinion

Deus Ex Machina by Stan Salett

June 11, 2023 by Stan Salett

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Our Lord of Christ Computer
xAnswers all to those who ask
And offers Priests to teach and tutor,
xOthers who need more time in task.
xxBy inputting their deepest dreams,
The supplicants leave little to speculation.
xxThis machine outputs in digital stream,
xnxA flowing language of basic revelation.

-December 2013

Stan Salett has been a policy adviser to the Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton administrations and is the author of The Edge of Politics: Stories from the Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty, and the Challenges of School Reform and Beyond the Scene He now lives in Kent County, Maryland and has been an advisor to the Spy Newspapers since 2010. 

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Op-Ed, Opinion

Spy Poem: Lying by Stan Salett

May 5, 2019 by Stan Salett

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Lying Is Fine
(with considerable apology and great appreciation to E.E.Cummings )

lying is fine)but Truth
  
?o
baby
i
  
wouldn’t like
  
Truth if Truth
were
good:for
  
when(instead of stopping to think)you
  
begin to feel of it, lying
‘s miraculous
why?be
  
cause lying is
  
perfectly natural;perfectly
putting
it mildly lively(but
  
Truth
  
is strictly
scientific
& artificial &
  
evil & legal)
  
we thank thee
god
almighty for lying
(forgive us,o life ! the sin of Truth

Stan Salett has been a policy adviser to the Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton administrations and is the author of The Edge of Politics: Stories from the Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty, and the Challenges of School Reform and Beyond the Scene He now lives in Kent County, Maryland and has been an advisor to the Spy since 2010. 

 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Arts Portal Lead, Arts Top Story

Hush Now: A Poem by Stan Salett

January 4, 2019 by Stan Salett

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Hush Now

Hush now, listen to the moment,
Hear the silent sounds of memory,
Do not speak, do not think, just listen.

And what may come to you,
After the trumpets and salutes,
After the crowds and hurried movements,
Is the silence.

The moment when past and present
And future are one,
When Aha! has become Ahh.

Swallow deeply, close your eyes,
You are here, you are alive,
You are one.

Stan Salett has been a policy adviser to the Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton administrations and is the author of The Edge of Politics: Stories from the Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty, and the Challenges of School Reform. He now lives in Kent County, Maryland. 

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Arts Portal Lead, Arts Top Story

Op-Ed: Trump Is Creating a New World Order – Where China and Russia Will Be Its Leaders by Stan Salett

July 9, 2018 by Stan Salett

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It has become commonplace to describe how we are experiencing dramatic disruptive changes in how we communicate, how we purchase and how we see the world around us. Gone are the chains of bookstores, many newspapers and magazines and many movie theaters. The telex, the fax, the phone booth, all gone. Retail stores and shopping malls are closing in record numbers. Once-powerful media companies are being sold off and dismembered. Our largest taxi companies own no cabs; our largest hotels own no rooms. We no longer use or need travel agents. Welcome to the Age of Disruption.

We are living in a period famously described and anticipated by Joseph Schumpeter’s monumental work, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. In it Schumpeter coined the phrase, “creative destruction.” Schumpeter described it as a process “that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.”

In Trump, we have a president who is gladly riding the wave of disruption and leading what he obviously views as the destruction of the old world order. In this view, the United States is clinging to a position of solitary dominance through a perceived series of failing multi-nation international alliances like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization that only survive through U.S. taxpayer subsidy.

To Trump, this is a losing hand and does not reflect the real power and political reality of today. He sees China and Russia not as modestly modified former Communist states but as recently emerging capitalist societies. He views this new world not through the prism and norms of traditional diplomacy but being constructed anew through reciprocal trade agreements.

Insufficiently noted in this emerging new world order is the influence of Henry Kissinger. Soon after Trump’s election, Kissinger was interviewed on “Face the Nation” (December 18, 2016). At that time, Kissinger called Trump, “a phenomenon that foreign countries haven’t seen,” and said, “I believe he has the possibility of going down in history as a very considerable president.”

Throughout Trump’s presidency, Kissinger has been a continuing if largely unnoticed presence. As Trump visits NATO and then Russia, it would be good for more of us to realize that the old world order has been in disrupted and the new world order is emerging as a great power alignment of the U.S., China, and Russia. Donald Trump sees himself as the agent of this change. Like it or not, it’s happening while a national media wonder what Michael Cohen had for breakfast.

Stan Salett has been a policy adviser to the Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton administrations and is the author of The Edge of Politics: Stories from the Civil Rights Movement, the War on Poverty, and the Challenges of School Reform. He now lives in Kent County, Maryland. This essay was originally published in Alternet.com on July 9, 2018.

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: 3 Top Story

Poem: The White Male Dilemma by Stan Salett

February 14, 2014 by Stan Salett

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The White Male Dilemma

He was here before the beginning
When he was easily winning
Women, gays and others of color,
Seldom entered his circle of power.
That was a time,
Has it all gone by?
Does he have to buy in?
Should he lie?
Where is his place,
In this new world he can see,
Every day of his life,
In the streets,
In the malls,
In the movies,
And on TV?
His time may be passing,
His status declines
His opponents are massing
He can see all the signs.
But he will not go away,
He says he’s here to stay.

He wants his country back!

Stan Salett
December, 2013

The Spy Newspapers may periodically employ the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the clarity and accuracy of our content.

Filed Under: Archives

Poem: Veterans Day (Arma Virumque Cano)

November 11, 2013 by Stan Salett

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I sing of arms and of the men and women,
Who forced by fate,
Set sail to distant shores,
And faraway places,
With strange sounding names.
Who are seldom the sons and daughters,
Of the makers of our military missions.
Who, in our name, straddle the earth,
Like a postmodern virtual colossus,
Bringing death and destruction,
To distant enemies seen or presumed.
Who try to be all that they can be,
And hope that it is enough.
Who are self-selected,
And not always eager participants,
In making the world safe,
For free trade and constitutional democracy.

For without them,
How could we extend our American Empire.
And without them,
How could we offer the world,
Peace in our time,
And on our terms.

Stan Salett
November 11, 2002

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Filed Under: Archives

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