Between The Lines - John Pawelek: Remembrances of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights March (Week Ending Jan. 30, 2015)

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Between The Lines on Stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

You can also listen to full unedited interview segments from Counterpoint, which are generally available some time the day following broadcast.

Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.

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Remembering the 1965 Selma to Montgomery Civil Rights March

Posted Jan. 21, 2015

Interview with John Pawelek, professor at the Yale University School of Medicine, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

The new movie "Selma" reconstructs the historic 1965 civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, organized to press for voting rights. The film has generated a lot of buzz, though no major Academy Award nominations. Realizing that younger generations know little about the civil rights era, several black business leaders got together to support the distribution of hundreds of thousands of free movie tickets to middle and high school students across the country.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the march on Selma, and it comes in the midst of the "Black Lives Matter" campaign, in which people of all races around the country are organizing mostly nonviolent direct action protests in the street to draw attention to the unjustified killings of numerous unnamed African American men and boys by white police officers. Almost all of these killings have been deemed "justified" by local district attorneys or grand juries, and very few officers are ever held accountable or suffer any consequences for the lives lost.

Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with John Pawelek, a professor at the Yale University School of Medicine, who answered Martin Luther King Jr.'s call for people of good will around the country to support the march across Alabama. Here, he describes his experience as a participant in 1965 march, his reaction to watching the movie depiction of the actual events and the state of today’s civil rights movement.

Find more commentary about the historical significance of the march, Selma the movie and today’s "Black Lives Matter" civil rights movement by visiting .

JOHN PAWELEK: I was 22 years old and with a young bride and I was in graduate school in biological sciences at Brown University. And Brown University was – if you saw towards the end of that movie, it was one of the nodes that was organized, I guess, nationwide – but Brown was sending out all these posters all over the place. All the black and white stuff of the real footage was just incredibly powerful to me, because I remember it. I'm (now) 72, and I was 22, so it was 50 years ago, but it just came back. Everything I remember was in that movie. I don't think I was in it, in the black and white section, but I remember a lot of the scenes there in the black and white. I recognized people, I recognized the National Guard with their fixed bayonets, all that stuff.

BETWEEN THE LINES: So, tell us how you wound up in the Montgomery airport on the fifth and last day of the Selma to Montgomery march.

JOHN PAWELEK: The notice went out, as you saw in the movie, that MLK was calling for people to come from all over the U.S. to [participate] in this third march of his. So three of us at Brown University, we got up at midnight and we flew down with 50 or 60 people on this old cargo ship and we landed at the airport before dawn, and what we were just shocked to see when we got into the airport there were just hundreds and hundreds of people just sleeping on the floor there. They got them all up – we were dead tired – and outside the airport there were these lines and lines as far as you could see of pickup trucks driven by black farmers. And they had come in and we were herded into these pickup trucks and it was still dark. And we finally got to this staging area that was five miles outside of Montgomery, so they had gone 45 miles and we joined the march and went in with five miles to go. And by that time the march had swelled to 20,000 people from all over. They put us in at the back, and I was, I was on the outside because I was big and tall, and I had a black girl, we were walking arm in arm, and that was an outlandish thing for a black girl and a white guy to be even touching each other.

BETWEEN THE LINES: There's a scene in the movie where the two white ministers are attacked and one of them, the Unitarian minister James Reeb, is killed. The Southerners who were attacking the civil rights marchers often said that they hated the white supporters of the Southern blacks even more than they hated the black people who were fighting for their rights. Did you feel especially vulnerable there on the outside of the column of marchers?

JOHN PAWELEK: Yes, we did actually. I can't say we didn't. Even though there were state troopers with fixed bayonets, people were running between them and spitting on my whole left side, in disdain. And they kept doing it and the National Guard did nothing. I was just soaked by the time we got into the square with spit. So that's it. That's really what we heard. And then we heard this wonderful oratory from King, and that was really something. And then we were picked up by the pickup trucks and driven back.

BETWEEN THE LINES: I covered one of the protests in New Haven after the non-indictment of the police officer in the Mike Brown killing, and I interviewed your son and his young son there. Your grandson said he was marching to end racism. And I know one of your other sons is a Unitarian minister who is very active in anti-racism work. What do you think about the Black Lives Matter movement, which erupted last year in the wake of several killings of unarmed black men and boys by white police officers?

JOHN PAWELEK: (Sighs) This whole question of racism, it just won't die, and it keeps resurfacing and now it's a very, very big topic of discussion. I thought everything was peachy fine when Obama was elected, I thought that was the most spectacular time in the history of America, and it didn't really happen, did it? Racism going away...

BETWEEN THE LINES: Do you feel like the movie, Selma, was accurate in depicting the different strains within the movement?

JOHN PAWELEK: Yes, this film was remarkably, impeccably accurate. From the news of the day we were following up at school, I mean that's all I got, but this was precisely what the background story was, and that was fascinating to watch because they reconstructed that beautifully. And then they melded the last part into the black and white, which was showing actual scenes. I thought it was a brilliant film, just brilliant. It was just probably one of the most intense experiences of my life to see that reconstructed before me. That was really something. And it's not getting any Academy Award nominations, except a couple, I think. But the guy that played Martin Luther King, oh my God, that was Martin Luther King to me. He just was. He was exactly the way he talked, the way he looked. That was incredible. And it's not getting the Academy Award nominations that it should be. Big discussion about that – is that racism in Hollywood again?