The Emperor Wears No Cloths
Jack Herer
www.jackherer.com
Chapter Thirteen:
PREJUDICE: MARIJUANA AND THE JIM CROW LAWS
Since the abolition of slavery, racism, and bigotry have generally had to manifest themselves in less blatant forms in America.
The cannabis prohibition laws illustrate again this institutional intolerance of racial minorities and show how prejudice is concealed behind rhetoric and laws which seem to have an entirely different purpose.
SMOKING IN AMERICA
The first known* smoking of female cannabis tops in the Western hemisphere was in the 1970s in the West Indies (Jamaica, Bahamas, Barbados, etc.); and arrived with the immigration of thousands of Indian Hindus imported for cheaper labor. By 1886, Mexicans and Black sailors, who traded in those islands, picked up and spread its use throughout all the West Indies and Mexico.
* There are other theories about the first known smoking of hemp flower tops, e.g., by American and Brazilian slaves, Shawnee Indians, etc., some fascinating but none verifiable. Cannabis smoking was generally used in the West Indies to ease the back breaking work in the cane fields, beat the heat, and to relax in the evenings without the threat of an alcohol hangover in the morning.
Given its late 19th century area of usage the Caribbean West Indies and Mexico it is not surprising the first marijuana use recorded in the U.S. was that of Mexicans in Brownsville, Texas in 1903, and then in 1909 in the port of New Orleans, in the Black dominated Storeyville section frequented by sailors.
New Orleans Storeyville was filled with cabarets, brothels right, your eyes have not deceived you. Because of a curious quirk in the Jim Crow (segregation; apartheid type) laws, black Americans were banned from any stage in the Deep South and most other places in the North and West also). Negroes had to wear (through the 1920s) blackface (like Al Jolson wore when he sang Swanee) a dye which white entertainers wore to resemble or mimic black people. Actually, by Jim Crow law, blacks were not allowed on the stage at all, but because of their talent were allowed to sneak/enter through back doors, put on blackface, and pretend to be a white person playing the part of a black person.
The blackface team of McIntyre and Heath had audiences rollign in the aisles for decades. They repeated this feat in the musical, The Ham Tree.
AND ALL THAT JAZZ
In New Orleans, whites were also concerned that black musicians, rumored to smoke marijuana, were spreading (selling) a very powerful (popular) new voodoo music that forced even decent white women to tap their feet and was ultimately aimed at throwing off the yoke of the whites. Today we call that new music Jazz!
Blacks obviously played upon the white New Orleans racists fears of voodoo to try to keep whites out of their lives. Jazzs birthplace is generally recognized to be in Storeyville, New Orleans, and home of the original innovators: Buddy Bohler, Buck Johnson, and others (1909-1917). Storeyville was also the birthplace of Louis Armstrong* (1900).
* In 1930 one year after Louis Armstrong recorded Muggles (read: Marijuana) he was arrested for a marijuana cigarette in Los Angeles, California, and put in jail for 10 days until he agreed to leave California and not return for two years.
American newspapers, politicians, and police, had virtually no idea, for 15 years (until the 1920s, and then only rarely), that the marijuana the darkies and Chicanos were smoking in cigarettes or pipes was just a weaker version of the many familiar concentrated cannabis medicines they'd been taking since childhood, or that the same drug was smoked at the local white mans plush hashish parlors.
White racists wrote articles and passed city and state marijuana laws without this knowledge for almost two decades, chiefly because of Negro/Mexican vicious insolence* under the effect of marijuana.
* Vicious Insolence: Between 1884 and 1900, 3,500 documented deaths of black Americans were caused by lynchings; between 1900 and 1917, more than 1,100 were recorded. The real figures were undoubtedly higher. It is estimated that one-third of these lynchings were for insolence, which might be anything from looking (or being accused of looking)at a white woman twice, to stepping on a white man's shadow, even to looking a white man directly in the eye for more than three seconds, not going directly to the back of the trolley, etc.
It was obvious to whites, marijuana caused Negro and Mexican viciousness or they wouldn't dare be insolent; etc
Hundreds of thousands of Negroes and Chicanos were sentenced from 10 days to 10 years mostly on local and state chain gangs for such silly crimes as we have just listed.
This was the nature of Jim Crow Laws until the 1950s and 60s; the laws Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP, and general public outcry have finally begun remedying in America.
We can only imagine the immediate effect the Black entertainers refusal to wear blackface had on the white establishment, but seven years later, 1917, Storeyville was completely shut-down. Apartheid had its moment of triumph.
No longer did the upright, up-tight white citizen have to worry about white women going to Storeyville to listen to voodoo jazz or perhaps be raped by its marijuana-crazed Black adherents who showed vicious disrespect (insolence) for whites and their Jim Crow Laws by stepping on their (white men's) shadows and the like when they were high on marijuana.
Black musicians then took their music and marijuana up the Mississippi to Memphis, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, etc., where the (white) city fathers, for the same racist reasons, soon passed local marijuana laws to stop evil music and keep white women from falling prey to Blacks through jazz and marijuana.
MEXICAN-AMERICANS
In 1915, California and Utah passed state laws outlawing marijuana for the same Jim Crow reasons but directed through the Hearst papers at Chicanos.
Colorado followed in 1917. Its legislators cited excesses of Pancho Villa's rebel army, whose drug of choice was supposed to have been marijuana. Which, if true, means that marijuana helped to overthrow one of the most repressive and evil regimes Mexico ever suffered.
The Colorado Legislature felt the only way to prevent an actual racial blood bath and the overthrow of their (whites) ignorant and bigoted laws, attitudes, and institutions was to stop marijuana.
Mexicans under marijuana's influence were demanding humane treatment, looking at white women, and asking that their children be educated while the parents harvested sugar beets; and other insolent demands. With the excuse of marijuana (Killer Weed the whites could now use force and rationalize their violent acts of repression.
This reefer racism continues into the present day. In 1937, Harry Anslinger told Congress that there were between 50,000 to 100,000* total marijuana smokers then in the U.S. and most of them were Negroes and Mexicans, and entertainers, and their music, jazz and swing were an outgrowth of this marijuana use. Anslinger insisted this satanic music and the use of marijuana caused white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes!
* Anslinger would flip to know there are 26 million daily marijuana users in America now, and that rock & roll and jazz are enjoyed by tens of millions who have never smoked marijuana.
SOUTH AFRICA TODAY
In 1911, South Africa* began the outlawing of marijuana for the same reasons as New Orleans: to stop insolent Blacks! And South Africa, along with Egypt, led the international fight (League of Nations) to have cannabis outlawed world-wide.
South Africa still allowed its Black mine workers to smoke dagga in the mines, though. Why? Because they were more productive!
In fact, in that same year, South Africa influenced Southern U.S. legislators to outlaw cannabis (which many black South Africans revered as dagga their sacred herb).
This is the whole racial and religious (Medieval Catholic Church) basis of where our laws against hemp arose. Are you proud?
Twelve million years so far have been spent in jails, prisons, parole, and on probation by Americans for this absurd racist and probably economic reasoning. (See chapter 4, Last Days of Legal Cannabis.)
Isn't it interesting that in 1985 the U.S. incarcerated a larger percentage of people than any country in the world except South Africa? In 1989 the U.S. surpassed South Africa, and the 1992 incarceration rate is almost three times that of South Africa.
President Bush, in his great drug policy speech September 5, 1989, promised to double the federal prison population again, after it had already doubled under Reagan. He succeeded. In 1993, President Bill Clinton planned to redouble the number of prisoners again by 1996. As of March 1995 he is on schedule.*
*See Appendix in the paper version of this book; fighting the police state.
Remember the outcry in 1979 when former UN Ambassador Andrew Young told the world that the U.S. had more political prisoners than any other nation? (Amnesty International, ACLU.)
LASTING REMNANTS
Even though blackface disappeared as law in the late 1920s, as late as the 1960s, black entertainers (such as Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis, Jr.) still had to go in the back door of theatrical establishments, bars, etc.; by law!
They couldn't rent a hotel room in Las Vegas or Miami Beach even while being the headline act.
Ben Vereen's 1981 Presidential Inauguration performance for Ronald Reagan presented this country's turn of the century Blackface/Jim Crow laws in a great story, about black comic genius Bert Williams (circa 1890 to 1920).
Vereen had been invited to perform for the Reagan Inauguration and had accepted only on the condition that he could tell the entire Blackface story but the whole first half of Vereen's show, depicting Bert Williams and blackface, was censored by Reagan's people on ABC TV, contrary to the special agreement Vereen had with the Reagan people.
ANSLINGER'S HATRED OF BLACKS AND JAZZ
After retirement, Harry Anslinger personally delivered his papers from his 30 years as the world's top narc to Pennsylvania State University at State College, PA.
From the Anslinger papers and the Washington, D.C., DEA Library (containing the old F.B.N. papers and memos), we have this: From 1943 to 1948, Anslinger ordered all his agents throughout the country to watch and keep marijuana criminal files on virtually all jazz and swing musicians; but not to bust them until he could coordinate all the jazz busts on the same night.
His goal and dream was to bust them all in one giant nationwide sweep! This would garner the front page of every newspaper in America, and make Anslinger more well-known than his 20 year chief rival, the F.B.I. s famous cross-dressing J. Edgar Hoover. The jazz and swing musicians would be shown to the youth of America for what they really were dope fiends.
Anslinger ordered his agents to keep files and constant surveillance on the following low life Americans and their bands, singers, and comedians: Thelonius Monk, Louis Armstrong, Les Brown, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, and Andre Kostelanetz. Also under surveillance were the NBC Orchestra, the Milton Berle show, the Coca-Cola program, the Jackie Gleason program, and even the Kate Smith program. Persons we think of today as wonderful Americans and musical innovators.
For five years they were watched and the files grew. From 1943 to 1948 the federal agents waited to make their move.
Typical of a small time jazz musicians files is the following: Defendant is a colored man in Camden, Texas, born ----, is 5' 8'' tall, 165 lbs., black complexion, black hair, black eyes. He has scars on left forehead, and a tattoo of a dagger and the word - --, on his right forearm. He is a musician and plays the trumpet in small hot bands. He has a very large mouth and thick lips which earned him his name of ---- ---. He is a marijuana smoker. Other files are just as ridiculous, racist, and anti-jazz.
The only reason the big bust of the musicians didn't go down? Anslinger's superior at the Treasury Department, Assistant Secretary Foley, when informed by Anslinger of the nationwide jazz musician round-up, wrote back, Mr. Foley disapproves!
Anslinger's longtime and closest departmental associate and probably his best friend, Dr. James Munch*, was interviewed in 1978 about Anslingers hatred for jazz musicians in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, by Larry Sloman for a book published by Bobbs-Merrill, Reefer Madness, in 1979.
* Dr. Munch, a chemist for the FBN, was widely touted by the Government and press as America's foremost authority on the effects of marijuana during the 1930s and 40s.
Sloman: Why did he [Anslinger] want to go after them [the jazz/swing musicians] so much?
Dr. Munch: Because the chief effect as far as they [Anslinger, FBN] were concerned was that it lengthened the sense of time, and therefore they could get more grace beats into their music than they could if they simply followed the written [musical] copy
Sloman: What's wrong with that?
Dr. Munch: In other words, if you are a musician, you are going to play the thing [music] the way it is printed on a sheet. But, if you're using marijuana, you are going to work in about twice as much music in between the first note and the second note. That's what made jazz musicians. The idea that they could jazz things up, liven them up, you see.
Sloman: Oh, I see.
LATIN DRUG KINGPIN UNMASKED BY POPULAR SCIENCE MAGAZINE
May, 1936
The extent of the marijuana threat in the 1930s is amply illustrated by this photo of an un-named drug smuggler in the years just prior to the enactment of hemp prohibition.
New York state had one narcotics officer at the time.
A Mexican peddler arrested by California narcotics inspectors, with a bale of marijuana, or Indian hemp. Cigarettes are made from leaves and flowers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Used for educational purposes only permission granted by author.
This CD-ROM created on Macintosh computers by Milo and Stephen.
Jack Herer
www.jackherer.com
Chapter Thirteen:
PREJUDICE: MARIJUANA AND THE JIM CROW LAWS
Since the abolition of slavery, racism, and bigotry have generally had to manifest themselves in less blatant forms in America.
The cannabis prohibition laws illustrate again this institutional intolerance of racial minorities and show how prejudice is concealed behind rhetoric and laws which seem to have an entirely different purpose.
SMOKING IN AMERICA
The first known* smoking of female cannabis tops in the Western hemisphere was in the 1970s in the West Indies (Jamaica, Bahamas, Barbados, etc.); and arrived with the immigration of thousands of Indian Hindus imported for cheaper labor. By 1886, Mexicans and Black sailors, who traded in those islands, picked up and spread its use throughout all the West Indies and Mexico.
* There are other theories about the first known smoking of hemp flower tops, e.g., by American and Brazilian slaves, Shawnee Indians, etc., some fascinating but none verifiable. Cannabis smoking was generally used in the West Indies to ease the back breaking work in the cane fields, beat the heat, and to relax in the evenings without the threat of an alcohol hangover in the morning.
Given its late 19th century area of usage the Caribbean West Indies and Mexico it is not surprising the first marijuana use recorded in the U.S. was that of Mexicans in Brownsville, Texas in 1903, and then in 1909 in the port of New Orleans, in the Black dominated Storeyville section frequented by sailors.
New Orleans Storeyville was filled with cabarets, brothels right, your eyes have not deceived you. Because of a curious quirk in the Jim Crow (segregation; apartheid type) laws, black Americans were banned from any stage in the Deep South and most other places in the North and West also). Negroes had to wear (through the 1920s) blackface (like Al Jolson wore when he sang Swanee) a dye which white entertainers wore to resemble or mimic black people. Actually, by Jim Crow law, blacks were not allowed on the stage at all, but because of their talent were allowed to sneak/enter through back doors, put on blackface, and pretend to be a white person playing the part of a black person.
The blackface team of McIntyre and Heath had audiences rollign in the aisles for decades. They repeated this feat in the musical, The Ham Tree.
AND ALL THAT JAZZ
In New Orleans, whites were also concerned that black musicians, rumored to smoke marijuana, were spreading (selling) a very powerful (popular) new voodoo music that forced even decent white women to tap their feet and was ultimately aimed at throwing off the yoke of the whites. Today we call that new music Jazz!
Blacks obviously played upon the white New Orleans racists fears of voodoo to try to keep whites out of their lives. Jazzs birthplace is generally recognized to be in Storeyville, New Orleans, and home of the original innovators: Buddy Bohler, Buck Johnson, and others (1909-1917). Storeyville was also the birthplace of Louis Armstrong* (1900).
* In 1930 one year after Louis Armstrong recorded Muggles (read: Marijuana) he was arrested for a marijuana cigarette in Los Angeles, California, and put in jail for 10 days until he agreed to leave California and not return for two years.
American newspapers, politicians, and police, had virtually no idea, for 15 years (until the 1920s, and then only rarely), that the marijuana the darkies and Chicanos were smoking in cigarettes or pipes was just a weaker version of the many familiar concentrated cannabis medicines they'd been taking since childhood, or that the same drug was smoked at the local white mans plush hashish parlors.
White racists wrote articles and passed city and state marijuana laws without this knowledge for almost two decades, chiefly because of Negro/Mexican vicious insolence* under the effect of marijuana.
* Vicious Insolence: Between 1884 and 1900, 3,500 documented deaths of black Americans were caused by lynchings; between 1900 and 1917, more than 1,100 were recorded. The real figures were undoubtedly higher. It is estimated that one-third of these lynchings were for insolence, which might be anything from looking (or being accused of looking)at a white woman twice, to stepping on a white man's shadow, even to looking a white man directly in the eye for more than three seconds, not going directly to the back of the trolley, etc.
It was obvious to whites, marijuana caused Negro and Mexican viciousness or they wouldn't dare be insolent; etc
Hundreds of thousands of Negroes and Chicanos were sentenced from 10 days to 10 years mostly on local and state chain gangs for such silly crimes as we have just listed.
This was the nature of Jim Crow Laws until the 1950s and 60s; the laws Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP, and general public outcry have finally begun remedying in America.
We can only imagine the immediate effect the Black entertainers refusal to wear blackface had on the white establishment, but seven years later, 1917, Storeyville was completely shut-down. Apartheid had its moment of triumph.
No longer did the upright, up-tight white citizen have to worry about white women going to Storeyville to listen to voodoo jazz or perhaps be raped by its marijuana-crazed Black adherents who showed vicious disrespect (insolence) for whites and their Jim Crow Laws by stepping on their (white men's) shadows and the like when they were high on marijuana.
Black musicians then took their music and marijuana up the Mississippi to Memphis, Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, etc., where the (white) city fathers, for the same racist reasons, soon passed local marijuana laws to stop evil music and keep white women from falling prey to Blacks through jazz and marijuana.
MEXICAN-AMERICANS
In 1915, California and Utah passed state laws outlawing marijuana for the same Jim Crow reasons but directed through the Hearst papers at Chicanos.
Colorado followed in 1917. Its legislators cited excesses of Pancho Villa's rebel army, whose drug of choice was supposed to have been marijuana. Which, if true, means that marijuana helped to overthrow one of the most repressive and evil regimes Mexico ever suffered.
The Colorado Legislature felt the only way to prevent an actual racial blood bath and the overthrow of their (whites) ignorant and bigoted laws, attitudes, and institutions was to stop marijuana.
Mexicans under marijuana's influence were demanding humane treatment, looking at white women, and asking that their children be educated while the parents harvested sugar beets; and other insolent demands. With the excuse of marijuana (Killer Weed the whites could now use force and rationalize their violent acts of repression.
This reefer racism continues into the present day. In 1937, Harry Anslinger told Congress that there were between 50,000 to 100,000* total marijuana smokers then in the U.S. and most of them were Negroes and Mexicans, and entertainers, and their music, jazz and swing were an outgrowth of this marijuana use. Anslinger insisted this satanic music and the use of marijuana caused white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes!
* Anslinger would flip to know there are 26 million daily marijuana users in America now, and that rock & roll and jazz are enjoyed by tens of millions who have never smoked marijuana.
SOUTH AFRICA TODAY
In 1911, South Africa* began the outlawing of marijuana for the same reasons as New Orleans: to stop insolent Blacks! And South Africa, along with Egypt, led the international fight (League of Nations) to have cannabis outlawed world-wide.
South Africa still allowed its Black mine workers to smoke dagga in the mines, though. Why? Because they were more productive!
In fact, in that same year, South Africa influenced Southern U.S. legislators to outlaw cannabis (which many black South Africans revered as dagga their sacred herb).
This is the whole racial and religious (Medieval Catholic Church) basis of where our laws against hemp arose. Are you proud?
Twelve million years so far have been spent in jails, prisons, parole, and on probation by Americans for this absurd racist and probably economic reasoning. (See chapter 4, Last Days of Legal Cannabis.)
Isn't it interesting that in 1985 the U.S. incarcerated a larger percentage of people than any country in the world except South Africa? In 1989 the U.S. surpassed South Africa, and the 1992 incarceration rate is almost three times that of South Africa.
President Bush, in his great drug policy speech September 5, 1989, promised to double the federal prison population again, after it had already doubled under Reagan. He succeeded. In 1993, President Bill Clinton planned to redouble the number of prisoners again by 1996. As of March 1995 he is on schedule.*
*See Appendix in the paper version of this book; fighting the police state.
Remember the outcry in 1979 when former UN Ambassador Andrew Young told the world that the U.S. had more political prisoners than any other nation? (Amnesty International, ACLU.)
LASTING REMNANTS
Even though blackface disappeared as law in the late 1920s, as late as the 1960s, black entertainers (such as Harry Belafonte and Sammy Davis, Jr.) still had to go in the back door of theatrical establishments, bars, etc.; by law!
They couldn't rent a hotel room in Las Vegas or Miami Beach even while being the headline act.
Ben Vereen's 1981 Presidential Inauguration performance for Ronald Reagan presented this country's turn of the century Blackface/Jim Crow laws in a great story, about black comic genius Bert Williams (circa 1890 to 1920).
Vereen had been invited to perform for the Reagan Inauguration and had accepted only on the condition that he could tell the entire Blackface story but the whole first half of Vereen's show, depicting Bert Williams and blackface, was censored by Reagan's people on ABC TV, contrary to the special agreement Vereen had with the Reagan people.
ANSLINGER'S HATRED OF BLACKS AND JAZZ
After retirement, Harry Anslinger personally delivered his papers from his 30 years as the world's top narc to Pennsylvania State University at State College, PA.
From the Anslinger papers and the Washington, D.C., DEA Library (containing the old F.B.N. papers and memos), we have this: From 1943 to 1948, Anslinger ordered all his agents throughout the country to watch and keep marijuana criminal files on virtually all jazz and swing musicians; but not to bust them until he could coordinate all the jazz busts on the same night.
His goal and dream was to bust them all in one giant nationwide sweep! This would garner the front page of every newspaper in America, and make Anslinger more well-known than his 20 year chief rival, the F.B.I. s famous cross-dressing J. Edgar Hoover. The jazz and swing musicians would be shown to the youth of America for what they really were dope fiends.
Anslinger ordered his agents to keep files and constant surveillance on the following low life Americans and their bands, singers, and comedians: Thelonius Monk, Louis Armstrong, Les Brown, Count Basie, Cab Calloway, Jimmy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton, and Andre Kostelanetz. Also under surveillance were the NBC Orchestra, the Milton Berle show, the Coca-Cola program, the Jackie Gleason program, and even the Kate Smith program. Persons we think of today as wonderful Americans and musical innovators.
For five years they were watched and the files grew. From 1943 to 1948 the federal agents waited to make their move.
Typical of a small time jazz musicians files is the following: Defendant is a colored man in Camden, Texas, born ----, is 5' 8'' tall, 165 lbs., black complexion, black hair, black eyes. He has scars on left forehead, and a tattoo of a dagger and the word - --, on his right forearm. He is a musician and plays the trumpet in small hot bands. He has a very large mouth and thick lips which earned him his name of ---- ---. He is a marijuana smoker. Other files are just as ridiculous, racist, and anti-jazz.
The only reason the big bust of the musicians didn't go down? Anslinger's superior at the Treasury Department, Assistant Secretary Foley, when informed by Anslinger of the nationwide jazz musician round-up, wrote back, Mr. Foley disapproves!
Anslinger's longtime and closest departmental associate and probably his best friend, Dr. James Munch*, was interviewed in 1978 about Anslingers hatred for jazz musicians in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, by Larry Sloman for a book published by Bobbs-Merrill, Reefer Madness, in 1979.
* Dr. Munch, a chemist for the FBN, was widely touted by the Government and press as America's foremost authority on the effects of marijuana during the 1930s and 40s.
Sloman: Why did he [Anslinger] want to go after them [the jazz/swing musicians] so much?
Dr. Munch: Because the chief effect as far as they [Anslinger, FBN] were concerned was that it lengthened the sense of time, and therefore they could get more grace beats into their music than they could if they simply followed the written [musical] copy
Sloman: What's wrong with that?
Dr. Munch: In other words, if you are a musician, you are going to play the thing [music] the way it is printed on a sheet. But, if you're using marijuana, you are going to work in about twice as much music in between the first note and the second note. That's what made jazz musicians. The idea that they could jazz things up, liven them up, you see.
Sloman: Oh, I see.
LATIN DRUG KINGPIN UNMASKED BY POPULAR SCIENCE MAGAZINE
May, 1936
The extent of the marijuana threat in the 1930s is amply illustrated by this photo of an un-named drug smuggler in the years just prior to the enactment of hemp prohibition.
New York state had one narcotics officer at the time.
A Mexican peddler arrested by California narcotics inspectors, with a bale of marijuana, or Indian hemp. Cigarettes are made from leaves and flowers.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Used for educational purposes only permission granted by author.
This CD-ROM created on Macintosh computers by Milo and Stephen.
