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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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The United States vs. Billie Holiday: The Federal Bureau of Narcotics Was Formed to Kill Jazz

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This article contains The United States vs. Billie Holiday spoilers.

Federal drug enforcement was created for the express purpose of persecuting Billie Holiday. Director Lee Daniels’ The United States vs. Billie Holiday focuses a cinematic microscope on the events, but a much larger picture is visible just outside the lens. Holiday’s best friend and one-time manager Maely Dufty told mourners at the funeral that Billie was murdered by a conspiracy orchestrated by the narcotics police, according to Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari. The book also said Harry Anslinger, head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was a particularly virulent racist who hounded “Lady Day” throughout the 1940s and drove her to her death in the 1950s.

This is corroborated in Billie, a 2020 BBC documentary directed by James Erskine, and Alexander Cockburn’s book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press, which also claims Anslinger hated jazz music, which he believed brought the white race down to the level of African descendants through the corrupting influence of jungle rhythms. He also believed marijuana was the devil’s weed and transformed the post-Prohibition fight against alcohol into a war on drugs. The first line of battle was against the musicians who partook.

“Marijuana is taken by… musicians,” Anslinger testified to Congress prior to the vote on the 1937 Marijuana Tax Act. “And I’m not speaking about good musicians, but the jazz type.” The LaGuardia Committee, appointed in 1939 by one of the Act’s strongest opponents, New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, ultimately refuted every point made in the effective drug czar’s testimony. Based on the findings, “the Treasury Department told Anslinger he was wasting his time,” according to Chasing the Scream. The opportunistic department head “scaled down his focus until it settled like a laser on one single target.”

Federal authorization of selective enforcement should come as no surprise. Just this month, HBO Max released Judas and the Black Messiah about how the FBI and local law enforcement targeted the Black Panthers and put a bullet in the back of the head of Fred Hampton after he was apparently drugged by the informant. In MLK/FBI (2020), director Sam Pollard used newly declassified files to fill in the gaps on the story of the U.S. government’s surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr. Days ago, The Washington Post reported the daughters of assassinated civil rights leader Malcolm X requested his murder investigation be reopened in light of a deathbed letter from officer Raymond A. Wood, alleging New York police and the FBI conspired in his killing.

During the closing credits of The United States vs. Billie Holiday we read that Holiday, played passionately by Andra Day in the film, was similarly arrested on her deathbed. She was in the hospital suffering from cirrhosis of the liver when she was cuffed to her bed. They don’t mention police had been stationed outside her door barring family, fans, and well-wishers from offering the singer comfort as she lay dying. They also don’t mention that police removed gifts people brought to the room, as well as flowers, radio, record player, chocolates, and any magazines. When she died at age 44, it was found that Holiday had 15 $50 bills strapped to her leg, the remainder of her money after years of top selling records. Billie intended to give it to the nurses to thank them for looking after her.

As The United States vs. Billie Holiday points out, the feds had been watching Holiday since club owner Barney Josephson encouraged her to sing “Strange Fruit” at the integrated Cafe Society in Greenwich Village in 1939. Waiters would stop all service during the performance of the song. The room would be dark, and it would never be followed by an encore.

The lyric came from a three-stanza poem, “Bitter Fruit,” about a lynching. It was written by Lewis Allan, the pseudonym of New York schoolteacher and songwriter named Abel Meeropol, a costumer at the club. Meeropol set the words to music, and the song was first performed by singer Laura Duncan at Madison Square Garden.

Holiday and her accompanist Sonny White adapted Allan’s melody and chord structure, and released the song on Milt Gabler’s independent label Commodore Records in 1939. The legendary John Hammond, who discovered Holiday in 1933 while she was singing in a Harlem nightclub called Monette’s, refused to release it on Columbia Records, where Billie was signed.

The song “marked a watershed,” according to David Margolick’s 2000 book Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. Influential jazz writer Leonard Feather called the song “the first significant protest in words and music, the first significant cry against racism.”

Holiday experienced the brutally enforced racial segregation of the Jim Crow laws during her trips south with her bands, according to Billie Holiday, the 1990 book by Bud Kliment. She was also demeaned at the Lincoln Hotel in New York City in October 1938 when management demanded she walk through the kitchen and use the service elevator to get on the stage. Holiday also caught flak for being considered too light skinned to sing with one band, and was on at least one occasion forced to wear special makeup to darken her complexion.

Holiday was 18 years old when she recorded her first commercial session with Benny Goodman’s group at Columbia Records, but knew firsthand that an integrated band would be more threatening than an all-Black group. According to most biographies, Holiday began using hard drugs in the early ’40s under the influence of her first husband, Jimmy Monroe, brother of the owner of Monroe’s Uptown House in Harlem.

Anslinger, the first commissioner for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, was an extreme racist, even by the standards of the time, according to Chasing the Scream. He claimed narcotics made black people forget their place in the fabric of American society, and jazz musicians created “Satanic” music under pot’s influence.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday doesn’t shy away from the drug czar’s blatant racism, but Garrett Hedlund’s Harry J. Anslinger doesn’t capture the full depths of the disgust the man felt and put into practice through his selective enforcement. Hedlund is able to mouth some of the epithets his character threw at ethnic targets, but most of the actual quotes on record are so offensive there is no need to subject any audience to them today. The film barely even mentions the strange and forbidden fruit imbibed in slow-burning paper that Anslinger obsessed over almost as much as Holiday’s song.

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By David Crow

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Ma Rainey’s Life and Reign as the Mother of the Blues

By Tony Sokol

Commissioner Anslinger came to power during the “Reefer Madness” era, and shaped much of the anti-marijuana paranoia of the period, according to Alexander Cockburn’s Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press. His first major campaign was to criminalize hemp, rebranding it as “marijuana” in an attempt “to associate it with Mexican laborers.” He claimed the drug “can arouse in blacks and Hispanics a state of menacing fury or homicidal attack.”

Anslinger promoted racist fictions and singled out groups he personally disliked as special targets. He said the lives of the jazzmen “reek of filth,” and the genre itself was proof that marijuana drives people insane. On drug raids, he advised his agents to “shoot first.” Anslinger persecuted many black musicians, including Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie and Duke Ellington. When Louis Armstrong was arrested for possession, Anslinger orchestrated a nationwide media smear campaign.

The Federal Bureau of Narcotics’ “race panic” tactics had a double standard. Anslinger only had a “friendly chat” with Judy Garland over her heroin addiction, suggesting she take longer vacations between films. He wrote to MGM, reporting he observed no evidence of a drug problem.

Anslinger ordered Holiday to cease performing “Strange Fruit” almost immediately after word got out about the performances. When she refused, he sent agent Jimmy Fletcher to frame the singer. Anslinger hated hiring Black agents, according to both Whiteout and Chasing the Scream, but white officers stood out on these investigations. He did insist no Black man in his Bureau could ever be a boss to white men, and pigeonholed officers like Fletcher to street agents.

Donald Clark and Julia Blackburn studied the only remaining interview with Jimmy Fletcher for their biography Billie Holiday: Wishing on The Moon. That interview has since been lost by the archives handling it. According to their book when Fletcher first saw Billie at the raid on her brother-in-law’s Philadelphia apartment in May 1947, “She was drinking enough booze to stun a horse and hoovering up vast quantities of cocaine.”

Fletcher’s partner sent for a policewoman to conduct a body search. “You don’t have to do that. I’ll strip,” Billie said before stripping and marking her territory in a provocative show of non-violent defiance by urinating on the floor (another action Daniels’ movie glosses over). Holiday was arrested and put on trial for possession of narcotics.

According to Hettie Jones’ book Big Star Fallin’ Mama: Five Women in Black Music, Holiday “Signed away her right to a lawyer and no one advised her to do otherwise.” She thought she would be sent to a hospital to kick the drugs and get well. “It was called ‘The United States of America versus Billie Holiday,’” she recalled in Lady Sings the Blues, the 1956 memoir she co-wrote with William Dufty, “and that’s just the way it felt.” Holiday was sentenced to a year and a day in a West Virginia prison. When her autobiography was published, Holiday tracked Fletcher down and sent him a signed copy.

When Holiday was released in 1948, the federal government refused to renew her cabaret performer’s license, which was mandatory for performing in any club serving alcohol. Under Anslinger’s recommended edict, Holiday was restricted “on the grounds that listening to her might harm the morals of the public,” according to the book Lady Sings the Blues.

The jazz culture had its own code. Musicians not only wouldn’t rat out other musicians, they would chip in to bail out any player who got popped. When it appeared Fletcher, who shadowed Holiday for years, became protective of Holiday, Anslinger got Holiday’s abusive husband and manager Louis McKay to snitch.

Two years after Holiday’s first conviction, Anslinger recruited Colonel George White, a former San Francisco journalist who applied to join the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. The personality test given to all applicants determined White was a sadist, and he quickly rose through the bureau’s ranks. He gained bureau acclaim as the first and only white man to infiltrate a Chinese drug gang.

White had a history of planting drugs on women and abused his powers in many ways. According to Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs, after White retired from the Bureau, he bragged, “Where else [but in the Bureau of Narcotics] could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?” He “may well have been high when he busted Billie for getting high,” according to Chasing the Scream.

White arrested Holiday, without a warrant, at the Mark Twain Hotel in San Francisco in 1949. Billie insisted she had been clean for over a year, and said the dope was planted in her room by White. Bureau agents said they found her works in the room and the stash in a wastepaper basket next to a side room. They never entered the kit into evidence. According to Ken Vail’s book Lady Day’s Diary, Holiday immediately offered to go into a clinic, saying they could monitor her for withdrawal symptoms and that would prove she was being framed. Holiday checked herself into the clinic, paying $1,000 for the stay and she “didn’t so much as shiver.” She was not convicted by jury at trial.

Afterward White attended one of Holiday’s shows at the Café Society Uptown and requested his favorite songs. After the show was over, the federal cop told Billie’s manager “I did not think much of Ms. Holiday’s performance.”

In 1959, Billie collapsed while at the apartment of a young musician named Frankie Freedom. After waiting on a stretcher for an hour and a half, Manhattan’s Knickerbocker Hospital turned her away, saying she was a drug addict. Recognized by one of the ambulance drivers, Holiday was admitted in a public ward of New York City’s Metropolitan Hospital. She lit a cigarette as soon as they took her off oxygen.

In spite of being told her liver was failing and cancerous, and her heart and lungs were compromised, Holiday did not want to stay at the hospital. “They’re going to kill me. They’re going to kill me in there. Don’t let them,” she told Maely Dufty.

Billie went into heroin withdrawal, alone. When Holiday responded to methadone treatment, Anslinger’s men prevented hospital staff from administering any further methadone, even though it had been officially prescribed by her doctor. Drug cops claimed to find a tinfoil envelope containing under an eighth of an ounce of heroin. It was found hanging on a nail on the wall, six feet from Billie’s bed where the frail and restrained artist could not have reached it.

The cops handcuffed her to the bed, stationed two policemen at the door and told Holiday they’d take her to prison if she didn’t drop dime on her dealer. When Maely Dufty informed the police it was against the law to arrest a patient in critical care, the cops had Holiday taken off the list.

Outside the hospital, protesters gathered on the streets holding up signs reading “Let Lady Live.” The demonstrations were led by the Rev. Eugene Callender. The Harlem pastor, who built a clinic for heroin addicts in his church, requested the singer be allowed to be treated there.

Holiday didn’t blame the cops. She said the drug war forced police to treat people like criminals when they were actually ill.

“Imagine if the government chased sick people with diabetes, put a tax on insulin and drove it into the black market, told doctors they couldn’t treat them, then sent them to jail,” she wrote in Lady Sings the Blues. “If we did that, everyone would know we were crazy. Yet we do practically the same thing every day in the week to sick people hooked on drugs.”

Holiday’s social commentary didn’t end with “Strange Fruit.” She wrote and sang about racial equality in the song “God Bless the Child,” her voice captured the pains of domestic violence. Most of Holiday’s contemporaries were too scared of being hassled by the feds to perform “Strange Fruit.” Billie Holiday refused to stop. She was killed for it. But never silenced.

The United States vs. Billie Holiday is streaming on Hulu now.

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madhavi01 · 2 years ago

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mandennews · 3 years ago

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Global Domestic Coastal Container Market (2021-2026) With Top Growing Companies : COSCO Container Lines, Pacific International Lines, Hamburg Sud Group

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ladiesintrucking · 5 years ago

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“A last-minute court plea – infused with rhetoric about coronavirus fallout – has failed to derail Maersk’s plan to switch from the GCT New York terminal on Staten Island to the APM Terminals (APMT) facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey”. A New York district court judge has “ruled against GCT’s request for a restraining order regarding Maersk’s announced transfer of three services” to APMT Elizabeth. He said the carrier is making the move to “achieve better operational efficiency” after the recent $200 million upgrade to the APMT facility. The judge’s final ruling was filed in court on Tuesday. . . . The bigger picture The coronavirus outbreak has prompted a vast reduction in container line services across the globe. The number of vessels bringing cargo from Asia to the U.S. could decline by 20% or more in May, June and subsequent months. Credit: FreightWaves . . . #ladiesintrucking #thebrokermom #broker #dispatch #supplychainmanagement #logisticsmanagement #transportationservices #boxtruck #van #reefer #ladytruckers #trucking #freight #freightliner #3pl #womenentrepreneur #womenownedbusiness #operations #owneroperator #ladydriven #saddlerocklogistics #yakriver #socialnetwork #thankatrucker #frontlineworkers #prayerchangeseverything #washingtonstate #covid_19 #newyork #maersk (at Maher Container Terminal Port Elizabeth, New Jersey) https://www.instagram.com/p/B_kXLIdj4uK/?igshid=n045fk18xhvt

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hudsonespie · 6 years ago

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CMA CGM OCEANIA LINES – PAD Service To Resume Weekly Rotations

CMA CGM is very pleased to announce that the PAD service linking North Europe with USEC, French Pacific islands, Australia and New Zealand will offer a weekly frequency starting from mid-February 2019.

Image Credits: cma-cgm.com

From Europe, first sailing to offer a weekly frequency will be m/v “EM CORFU” (expected in Le Havre on February 23rd, 2019) From New Zealand, first sailing to offer a weekly frequency will be m/v “EM CORFU (expected in Tauranga on April 16th, 2019)

Rotation will be as follows:

Zeebrugge (as of 20/05) – London Gateway – Rotterdam – Dunkirk – Le Havre – New York – Savannah – Cartagena – Papeete – Noumea – Brisbane – Sydney – Melbourne – Nelson – Tauranga – Manzanillo – Savannah – Philadelphia – Zeebruge.

Napier will be offered by Oceania feeder.

The service will be operated with 13 vessels of ~2,500 TEU nominal, with 600 reefer plugs, CMA CGM deploying 12 vessels.

Reference: cma-cgm.com

Report an Error

from Storage Containers https://www.marineinsight.com/shipping-news/cma-cgm-oceania-lines-pad-service-to-resume-weekly-rotations/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

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auskultu · 7 years ago

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The Military Versus Marijuana

uncredited writer, Los Angeles Free Press, 5 January 1968

SAIGON — The pot generation is fighting the Vietnam War and severely straining the military’s traditionally hard line against marijuana.

A trooper can get a joint in Vietnam just about as easily as he can get a cigaret and it’s almost as cheap. Young GIs coming from the States, where pot smoking has become the thing to do and a symbol of this generation’s revolt, are turning on in downtown bars, squad tents and bunkers.

Army cops arrested 524 soldiers for puffing grass in the first nine months of 1967. This is more than double the marijuana offenses in all of 1966, when 238 were arrested.

Marijuana use was the biggest single offense committed by Army men in Vietnam in the last two years, with the exception of smaller misdeeds such as traffic violations. The biggest increase in offenses has been in narcotics.

Brig Gen Harley L. Moore Jr., departing Usarv provost marshal, points out that at the same time there has been an increase in troop strength and military cops are stepping up their efforts to find mary jane smokers.

First reports in studies now being made indicate less than half of one percent of all the men in Vietnam smoke pot, according to military sources. This would put the figure at about 2,500 men. GIs scoff at the official estimates. Pfc X, an admitted grass smoker, estimates two-thirds of the military here have at least tried mary jane. John Steinbeck Jr. sparked a flap recently when he returned to the U.S. from a Vietnam tour and said 85 percent smoke.

Recent news stories about use of marijuana by Vietnam GIs were splashed across many U.S. newspapers and military officials, nervous about their public image, clammed up.

In early October United Press International reported that 95 GI prisoners in the Usarv stockade at Long Binh filled out questionnaires about pot. Of the 95 men, 79 admitted smoking it at least once. They fell into three categories: 45 percent had used pot before entering the service, 10 percent since entering the military and 45 percent since coming to Vietnam. A total of 58 percent of the 79 had smoked grass more than 20 times.

After the UPI story and other articles appeared, Usarv officials claimed UPI figures were wrong but said they couldn’t release the correct ones because the stockade survey had since been placed under classification. A high-ranking military police officer, however, confirmed that the UPI figures were “about right” and the reporter who did the story said he got them from a highly reliable source.

Usarv officials pointed out the men who answered the stockade questionnaires were “losers,” convicted troublemakers who can’t be considered representative of GIs in Vietnam.

The findings of the stockade survey sparked a larger study, which is now being conducted among Stateside-bound GIs as they pass through the 90th Replacement Bn at Long Binh on their way home. They’re asked to fill out anonymous questionnaires about their use of marijuana. Results of the study probably won’t be available for several months, said an officer.

Marijuana is easy to conceal and difficult to detect. Because of the stiff military penalties few GIs are willing to admit they use pot. These factors, along with the military smokescreen, make it hard to pin down an accurate picture of the actual use of the drug. The truth probably lies somewhere between official estimates and GI rumor.

Pot grows plentifully throughout Vietnam and is easy to buy wherever a soldier happens to be. In An Khe just outside the 1st Air Cav Div base camp in the Central Highlands, a joint costs from 17 to 34 cents. For troopers who like to roll their own, a small I packet which will make five reefers costs about $2. The sticks and the loose stuff are wrapped in coarse pink paper or old newspapers.

Down south in Saigon and Bien Hoa the sellers are more sophisticated — and they charge more. Pushers empty the tobacco from American filter cigarets, fill the paper with pot and reseal them with a hot iron into commercial packages. A pack of 20 goes for about 600 piasters ($5) in Saigon and 400 pees ($3.40) in Bien Hoa.

Vietnam’s mary jane is dirt cheap compared with the price in New York, where an ounce of average pot sells for $15 to $25 and the highly regarded Acapulco Gold goes for $50 an ounce. Its low price and availability have tempted some troopers to send grass home to friends or to build up a supply which will be waiting for them when they return Stateside. Pfc X and Pfc Y say large numbers of soldiers are mailing pot home but here again, GI rumor probably exaggerates.

But some soldiers are doing it.

On Sept. 26 1st Cav Div CID agents, tipped off by an informer, stopped a Pfc as he was boarding a Stateside-bound plane at the end of his Vietnam tour. In the lining of the go-to-hell jacket the young soldier wore, agents found a pound of marijuana.

Earlier this year Pfc Webster Murphy was kicked out of the Army and sept to prison for a year for possession and use of marijuana and for attempting to mail it to the U.S. The 173d Abn Brig trooper’s letter, containing about 20 grams of pot, had been intercepted.

CID agents classify the three grades of mary jane available in Vietnam as coarse, medium and fine. In the Central Highlands the medium grade is most common and has some of the stems and seeds chopped up with the leaves. The fine grade has no stems and seeds.

GI users fall into two basic categories—potheads who acquired the taste back in the U.S. and the first-timers who experiment with it in Vietnam.

A military police official estimates that about a quarter of the 524 arrested in the first nine months of this year were first-time smokers. Most military officials believe—and hope—that only a small fragment of the pot smokers are regulars who turn on several times a week. The official view is that the majority of GI mary jane smokers are rear area troops who indulge during their off-duty time. Most officers claim line troops don’t often use the stuff in the field but one military police officer admits, “We just don’t know how many combat troops smoke.”

Maj Robert Donovan, assistant provost marshal at the 1st Air Cav Div, believes few troops smoke in the field because, “They have a strong sense of loyalty to other soldiers they’re with and they fear what people will think.” There are indications, however, that some smokers carry their pot to the field.

Boredom may well be a much bigger reason for soldiers in Vietnam to smoke pot than it is for young guys in the States. One of the oldest and truest cliches repeated by military men is: “Combat is hours of boredom interspersed by moments of terror.”

Says one high-ranking military police officer: “Two guys go on duty in a bunker. They can’t take a radio. They can’t take something to read because they can’t have a light. They run out of conversation. So they take a few reefers.”

In past years GIs who wanted to escape the boredom on guard duty slipped in a bottle or a few cans of beer. This generation’s bag is pot.

Some GIs say their officers and NCOs know there’s pot in the company but don’t turn in the smokers, especially in combat outfits. “If a guy’s been on the line awhile and is experienced,” said one trooper, “why should the company commander turn him in for smoking a little pot? He’s going to lose the man and get a green replacement.”

The strong bonds of loyalty and friendship which grow between men, officers and EM who face the dangers of combat together also can make a line officer or NCO reluctant to turn a trooper over to MPs.

Many military authorities theorize that the Viet Cong are big suppliers of pot. It’s a good source of income for the VC, they argue, and reduces the effectiveness of U.S. troops. “The enemy is the big pusher,” warned the 1st Can Troop Topics. “The use of marijuana in Vietnam not only endangers the life of the user but also the lives of those depending upon him for the successful accomplishment of his mission. The VC are much aware of the effect of the drug and are instrumental in providing a supply.”

First Cav cops admit they have no hard evidence to support this theory but maintain it is reasonable to assume the VC are picking up extra money by selling grass. Usarv MP officials say they have not found any evidence of VC pot selling but believe the theory has merit.

Very few American troopers are trying to make money by selling mary jane. There’s little profit for a GI middleman because the stuff is cheap and easily available from Vietnamese peddlers.

But from the tip of the Delta I to the top of the DMZ soldiers are smoking pot. The official military estimate that one out of every 200 GIs is a pot puffer adds up to one-half of one percent of all the men in Vietnam.

Today’s soldiers generally are much better educated than GIs of past wars and wiser in the ways of mary jane, thanks to increasing use of pot in the U.S. and widespread publicity about it. They’re less likely to buy the grim predictions that a man on a marijuana high becomes violent, even to the point of killing; that pot users often graduate to hard, addictive narcotics, or that the stuff produces psychosis and brain damage. And the growing use of pot indicates few GIs are scared off by the threat of a DD and five years in the pokey.

Still, the official line on marijuana is often the hard one, based on the old bugaboos.

“A lot of our leaders have the mistaken idea that marijuana gives permanent damage,” said Lt Col W. R. Davis, division surgeon of the 1st Cav, “and that there is a probability of untoward reactions.” There are very few cases of psychotic reactions to marijuana, he said, and no mental or bodily damage results from its use.

There are some signs that the military’s hard line on marijuana is cracking a little. U.S. soldiers in Europe usually are tried by general courts martial for marijuana offenses. Offenders in Vietnam rarely face a general court, which is the only jury that can hand out the maximum of a DD and five years, unless marijuana is coupled with another serious offense.

More often, men caught with pot are tried by special courts, which can’t give a bad discharge or more than six months in jail. Some are punished by Article 15. In one Army division during the first nine months of 1967 eight men were tried by special courts and two were given Articles 15 for pot. Both Articles 15 and four of the courts involved men in line outfits.

“We’ve talked to some kids who smoked marijuana and we haven’t prosecuted them,” said a legal officer in the division, “because we were convinced they tried it once and didn’t use it regularly. Every college kid in the U.S. is experimenting with pot. We can’t expect our soldiers not to.”

Said another legal officer: “Military justice has grown up some in this respect. If a kid with an otherwise good record as a soldier is caught with a marijuana cigaret in his pocket, he usually won’t be hit with a general court.”

The marijuana problem, Gen Moore recently told a reporter, is a nuisance, not a catastrophe.

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