Corrections

March 3, 2009

Dear Young Spartacus,

I noticed an error in Seymour’s talk on the black question (WV930) [“Revolutionary Marxists and the Fight for Black Freedom” (13 February)], when he says that “King led a march for ‘open housing’ into the white Chicago suburb of Cicero.” In fact King cancelled the march to appease [Chicago mayor] Daley; it was others like SNCC and CORE who went ahead with it.

Is a correction already in the works? A useful book on this question is Confronting the Color Line: The Broken Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Chicago by Anderson and Pickering.

What Seymour said is actually a widely held myth, and correcting it would be an opportunity to illustrate how the Democratic Party smothers the fight for black freedom.

Keith

* * *

In “SDS Old & New: From Tepid Liberalism to Radicalism and Back Again” (WV No. 927, 2 January), referring to Trotsky’s “For Grynszpan: Against Fascist Pogrom Gangs and Stalinist Scoundrels” (February 1939) we described Herschel Grynszpan as “a German youth who had assassinated a Nazi.” As a reader pointed out, Grynszpan was born in Germany to Jewish parents who had immigrated from Poland.

We thank our readers for these corrections.