Bernard Cohen, Lawyer in Landmark Mixed-Marriage Case, Dies at 86 By Neil Genzlinger NYT, Oct. 15, 2020
“Dear Sir,” began the letter from Washington that found its way to Bernard S. Cohen at the American Civil Liberties Union in June 1963. “I am writing to you concerning a problem we have. Five years ago my husband and I were married here in the District. We then returned to Virginia to live. My husband is white, and I am part Negro and part Indian.”
The letter, from Mildred Loving, went on to explain that when she and her husband, Richard, returned to Caroline County, Va., to live, they were charged with violating Virginia’s law against mixed-race marriages and exiled from the state.
“It was that simple letter that got us into this not-so-simple case,” Mr. Cohen said later. The not-so-simple case was Loving v. Virginia, which Mr. Cohen and his co-counsel, Philip J. Hirschkop, eventually took to the Supreme Court. In a landmark unanimous ruling in 1967, the court said that laws banning interracial marriage, which were in effect in a number of states, mostly in the South, were unconstitutional.
Mr. Cohen died on Monday at an assisted-living center in Fredericksburg, Va. He was 86.
His son, Bennett, said the cause was Parkinson’s disease.
The Lovings had married in 1958. Five weeks later they were in their home in Caroline County when the county sheriff and two deputies burst in and arrested them. They pleaded guilty to violating the state’s Racial Integrity Act and were sentenced to a year in jail; a judge, Leon M. Bazile, suspended the sentence on the condition that they leave the state and not return together for 25 years.
By 1963 that restriction had begun to chafe, since they had relatives in Virginia and Ms. Loving missed “walking on grass instead of concrete,” as she put it. A relative noticed her distress.
“I was crying the blues all the time, so she said, ‘Why don’t you write Robert Kennedy?’” she recalled in a 1992 interview with The New York Times. “She said that’s what he’s there for.”
Mr. Kennedy was the attorney general at the time, and Ms. Loving did indeed write to him, asking if the national civil rights legislation then being formulated would provide any relief. Mr. Kennedy in turn suggested she write to the A.C.L.U., where Mr. Cohen was a longtime volunteer.
Mr. Cohen acknowledged that he was not particularly well versed in the relevant areas of law. He faced other obstacles as well, not the least of which was Judge Bazile, whose rulings in the case included this oft-cited declaration: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages.”
The Year’s Obituaries Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Lewis, Kobe Bryant, Chadwick Boseman, Kirk Douglas, Little Richard, Mary Higgins Clark and many others who died this year. Notable Deaths 2020
He began by filing a motion to set aside the sentence, but Judge Bazile took no action on it for months; the Lovings became concerned that they’d been forgotten. But in 1964 a law professor introduced Mr. Cohen to Mr. Hirschkop, who had only recently graduated from law school but knew civil rights litigation. He helped steer the case onto a path that eventually brought it to the Supreme Court, where, Mr. Hirschkop said in a phone interview, he argued that the Virginia law was a violation of the equal protection clause of the Constitution and Mr. Cohen argued that it was also a due process violation.
“Under our Constitution,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in finding in their favor, “the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual, and cannot be infringed by the State.”
Bernard Sol Cohen was born on Jan. 17, 1934, in Brooklyn. His father, Benjamin, was a furrier, and his mother, Fannie (Davidson) Cohen, was a homemaker.
He grew up in Brooklyn and graduated from the City College of New York in 1956 with a degree in economics. He graduated from Georgetown Law School in 1960.
Bennett Cohen said that, after the Loving case, his father did a lot of work in environmental law. In one case, he said, “the Jewish boy from Brooklyn represented some Christmas tree farmers whose whole crop of Christmas trees was destroyed by acid rain.” That lawsuit, he said, forced nearby power plants to reduce their pollution.
From 1980 to 1996, Mr. Cohen served in the Virginia House of Delegates, where among his accomplishments were measures that restricted smoking — a hard sell in a tobacco state like Virginia. Over the years, the story of the Loving case was told in a 1996 Showtime movie; the 2011 HBO documentary “The Loving Story,” directed by Nancy Buirski; and the 2016 feature film “Loving,” based in part on that documentary.
Richard Loving was killed in a car accident in 1975. Mildred Loving died in 2008.
In addition to his son, Mr. Cohen is survived by his wife of 61 years, Rae (Rose) Cohen; a daughter, Karen Cohen; and three grandchildren.
In 1994, when Mr. Cohen received a distinguished service award from the Virginia Trial Lawyers Association, he gave an acceptance speech in which he lamented that public opinion of lawyers had turned negative, focusing on a few big-dollar civil verdicts and stereotyping anyone seeking redress in the courts as being part of an overly litigious society.
“There seems to be months of trial time available for Pennzoil to sue Texaco and for Polaroid to sue Kodak,” he said, “but cluttering the court with everyday people has become bad form, bad habit, bad business.”
He worried, he said, about the chilling effect.
“In a society of laws, driven by centers of economic and financial power,” he said, “if the courts are not available for the average person to seek justice, then the average person will not receive justice.”
What does fascism mean atpresent
?In
responding to this question Ernesto Taverso’sNew
Faces of Fascism, Populism and the Far Right, takes
us back to the past before confronting the contemporary world, and potential futures.
Born
in Italy, but having made his academic career in France, writing studies of German Jewish philosophy, Nazism, anti-semitism, and the two World Wars, Taverso has an international reputation. Since 2013Traversohas
been professor in Cornell University in the US he was a member of the TrotskyistLigue
communiste révolutionnaire, (LCR)until
it merged with other groups at the foundation of theNouveau Parti anticapitaliste
(NPA)in 2009. He has retained an audience on the radical left both
in France, and with 8 books translated, in the English-speaking world.
Les nouveaux visages du fascisme, d’Enzo Traverso, Paris, Textuel, 2017. Available in English: The New Faces of Fascism Populism and the Far Right Enzo Traverso. Verso, 2019. “German Fascism,…
Is
there anything in Roediger's book that wasn't already in Barbara
Ehrenreich's FEAR OF FALLING? (think her book is from the
1980s?)
He cites her and Harry Braverman as well:
Even during continuing downturns in class
conflict, Marxist and ex-Marxist writers have followed up on [C.
Wright] Mills’s work. Up to the present, they have continued and
deepened earlier left narratives of falling—though now with little
possibility of falling into something grand. Their work has
thereby intersected with mainstream media interest in, and
political obsessions with, the decline of the middle class.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s career, producing both serious materialist
analysis of the professional-managerial class and popular
journalism on its “fear of falling,” stands out in this regard.
Studies in the labor process established how thoroughly and easily
scientific management moved from factories to offices, making
management able to monitor productivity and even motions of office
workers. Harry Braverman’s classic Labor and Monopoly Capital
offered the provocation that office work, rationalized, became
manual labor.34 The middle class thus fell as a whole, fell in
segments, fell by occupational category, and, in the work of
Ehrenreich, Newman, and countless journalists, fell, poignantly,
as individuals.35
To give us an idea of how the NY Review of Books has changed --- it used to REGULARLY (in the late 1960s) publish Noam Chomsky (that's where I first read something by him in 1966) ----
In 1972 (I think) they actually had Paul Sweezy (!!!) review J.K. Galbraith's ECONOMICS AND THE PUBLIC PURPOSE --
To give us an idea of how the NY Review of Books has changed --- it used to REGULARLY (in the late 1960s) publish Noam Chomsky (that's where I first read something by him in 1966) ----
In 1972 (I think) they actually had Paul Sweezy (!!!) review J.K. Galbraith's ECONOMICS AND THE PUBLIC PURPOSE --
after the end of the Indochina War, they moved right and suddenly NOAM was NEVER published ---- and I am hard pressed to think if ANY of the books by Monthly Review authors have been reviewed in their pages ----
In fact, it wasn't till a couple of years ago that ANY Chomsky's books were reviewed there ....
But I have to admit that I still enjoy reading it ---- and it often gives me ideas of what books out there would be worth reading ---
Wide Awakes were inspired, in part, by the John Brown League of the League of Freedom, which itself came out of organizing around hopeful rescue plans to free Brown and hi8s captured comrade after Harpers Ferry. This had been done in some notable cases in Kansas, but the Virginaians had the captives from Harpers Ferry werre more closely watched. The League spent much of its time in the North protected Norathem abolitionists the Federal marshals hoped to arrest and cart down to Washngton for Congressional hearings Dick Hinton recalled escorting Wendell Phillips to a meeting where the old abolitionist had a navy revolver in his pocket and the first row of pews in the church were filled with Socialist Turners.
These were led more by veteran radicals--land reformers and Fourierists as well as abolitionists, and those German Socialist Turners. organized Some under the nose of the slaveholders from Washington to Wheeling to St. Louis.
On Sat, Oct 17, 2020 at 8:08 AM Louis Proyect <lnp3@...> wrote:
We know, from the historical record, that the Wide
Awakes began to assemble in Hartford, Connecticut, on the night of
25 February 1860. An anti-slavery politician from Kentucky,
Cassius Clay, came to speak. Escorting him, a group of young men
formed a parade by torchlight. Someone improvised a cape, made out
of oilcloth, to protect his clothes from the dripping oil of the
torches. He was quickly imitated – a dashing new look was born.
A Wide Awake, in
costume. Photograph: The Progress-Index and Pamplin Historical
Park
Advertisement
A week later, the first Wide Awake Club was formed in
Hartford. Thirty-six young men agreed to buy their own capes, just
in time for the next political visitor. On 5 March, he arrived, an
unusual speaker from Illinois, gaunt and angular. Lincoln had just
given his great speech at the Cooper Union in New York, and as one
observer put it, the “presidential bee” had begun to buzz around
him. That night in Hartford, the Wide Awakes lit their torches,
donned their capes and escorted Lincoln to his hotel.
The new look spread like … wildfire. The capes were
splendid, especially when augmented by military caps, the
flickering light of the torches and all those painted eyeballs,
staring out from large banners.
I too enjoy reading the NY Review of books but as a publisher, I am chagrined that they refuse to cover or review contemporary proletarian literature. I have regularly sent them the Blue Collar Review which, like our most recent issue. includes well known poets like Marge Piercy as well as being an important journal of our times. I have also sent them some of the Books we have published but never, not once have any been reviewed. As literary review sites go. I prefer the London Review of Books. At least they occasionally publish journalists banned in our country like Seymour Hersh.
The NY Review of Books, which started out as a fairly leftist journal in the 60s, has moved closer to the center but it is still worth reading. It just redesigned their website with articles accessible to non-subscribers by registering for a free account. That probably means you'll be entitled to read one to three articles per month or something like that. Some articles will be accessible carte blanche. I will send them a link to them, just as I did on the cancer piece.
Boyer, a self-proclaimed
Marxist feminist, tells her story only in the service of a larger
project—to explore breast cancer as comprehensively as possible:
as a disease, as a historical entity, as a means of exposing the
precarity of the individual inside larger capitalist systems.
“Cancer,” she writes,
is in our time and place one of the most effective
diseases at eradicating the precise and individual nature of
anyone who has it, and feminized cancers—in that to be seen as a
woman is also to be, in a way, semi-eradicated, this eradication
deepened by class, race, and disability—even more so.
The Undying,which won the
Pulitzer Prize last spring and has recently been published in
paperback, opens with a discussion of influential women who also
had (and most of whom died from) breast cancer: Alice James,
Rachel Carson, Jacqueline Susann, Susan Sontag, Charlotte Perkins
Gilman, Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Fanny
Burney. Each of them wrestled with how and why to speak or write
about her experiences with the illness; if women’s stories are
often neglected, women’s illness stories are even more so. Carson,
who was diagnosed while writingSilent Spring(1962)—a central
work in the cultural and environmental history of cancer—never
spoke publicly of the disease that killed her four years later.
Sontag’sIllness
as Metaphor(1978)directly takes up the
“conventions of concealment” surrounding cancer, exploring how the
mystifying language used to describe the illness as a “fight” to
be won resulted in widespread shame and secrecy, so that the name
of the illness, “felt to have a magic power,” came to be rarely
spoken out loud. Though written after Sontag’s own cancer
treatment, it is distinctly not a personal book. Lorde directly
addressed the silence surrounding cancer in the 1970s with her
bookThe Cancer
Journals(1980)—radically, Boyer notes, in
light of the decades before, using “the words ‘I’ and ‘cancer’
together.”
Some
six decades—threegenerations—ago,
this journal developed a set of arguments about British
state and society that were distinctive, and controversial
at the time, as they have remained since.footnote1What
bearing, if any, do they have on the present conjuncture,
generally—if not incontestably—described as a
turning-point in the history of the country? To get a
sense of the question, it may be of use to resume briefly
the original theses sketched innlrin
the early sixties and their sequels. Their novelty lay in
both their substantive claims, on which debate has
principally focused, and their formal concerns, which set
them apart from ways of thinking about the United Kingdom
current on the left, and beyond, in those years. Four
features in the journal’s approach to the country were
new. It aimed at a (naturally, schematic) totalization of
its object, that is, a characterization of all the
principal structures and agents in the field, rather than
exploration of partial elements of it. It sought to
situate the present in a much longer historical
perspective than was customary in political commentary.
Its analytical framework was avowedly theoretical, drawing
on then unfamiliar resources of a continental—principally
Gramscian—Marxism. It was resistant to the typical habits
of social patriotism, left or right, folkloric or
historiographic, of the period.
How to
thinkthe political
fall-out of the coronavirus crisis? In the
summer number ofForeign Affairs,
Francis Fukuyama—having sketched a future of
protracted crisis—offered an alternative
picture: the pandemic had exposed the demagogy
and incompetence of populists and taught the
benefits of professionalism and expertise.
Bolsonaro was now floundering, while Trump had
failed to lead. Merkel, by contrast, had done
impressively well.covid-19
may ‘lance the boil of populism’, Fukuyama told
thebbc,
because ‘there’s a correlation between being a
populist and doing badly.’ The argument was
picked up by Gideon Rachman at theFinancial Times,
under the header, ‘Coronavirus could kill off
populism’. Trump and Bolsonaro had demonstrated
their inability to face reality, whereas Merkel
had had an excellent crisis, Rachman thought.
All in all, ‘liberals have good cause to hope’.
TheWashington
Post’s Ishaan Tharoor joined the chorus:
Merkel, the ‘consummate anti-populist’, had
emerged as a political heroine, whereas Trump
and Bolsonaro had led the Western hemisphere’s
worst-hit nations. Under their rule, ‘confirmed
cases soared, while public approval of the
presidents plummeted.’
The middle class is the quintessential American
category. It’s of foundational significance, although it is only
since the Reagan era that it has had its current degree of
political cachet.
Being middle class means being above the market. The
middle class has the stability and the resources to choose what it
wants to do, and who to work for. It’s the American ideal,
realised.
As nice as that sounds, it’s not all positive. The ideal
also harbours a reactionary kernel that equates such freedoms with
ethnicity. If you’re not white, you have to fight for them.
I really enjoyed reading Eli R.’s recent article, “Life As A Rank-And-File Teamster,” discussing his work at United Parcel Service (UPS), and his eagerness to build a rank and file movement in the Teamsters. But, I was also dismayed by what I saw as a mistaken view of past efforts by socialists at UPS.
The article makes a sweeping indictment of “failed pamphleteering and cheerleading from a distance of various Left sects over the past 50 years,” which “has given us a strong demonstration of what not to do.” Counter-posed to this is the “need to build relationships through organizing in the workplace — the elementary site of capitalist exploitation and thus solidaristic worker resistance.”
Of course, I agree with the latter part of his statement. The importance of workplace organizing and solidarity “from below” should be indisputable. But I think Eli R. has set up a straw man argument regarding “left sects” which hides a deeper political argument. Is it really necessary to write out of history “failed pamphleteers” or “cheerleaders”—who would even know they ever existed? Who is this directed at? I’m not sure, but the hidden argument here is about the role of socialist politics in day-to-day organizing in the workplace today. That’s not surprising because in one version or another, it has been at the heart of debates about socialism and trade unionism for a long time.
We know, from the historical record, that the Wide
Awakes began to assemble in Hartford, Connecticut, on the night of
25 February 1860. An anti-slavery politician from Kentucky,
Cassius Clay, came to speak. Escorting him, a group of young men
formed a parade by torchlight. Someone improvised a cape, made out
of oilcloth, to protect his clothes from the dripping oil of the
torches. He was quickly imitated – a dashing new look was born.
A Wide Awake, in
costume. Photograph: The Progress-Index and Pamplin Historical
Park
Advertisement
A week later, the first Wide Awake Club was formed in
Hartford. Thirty-six young men agreed to buy their own capes, just
in time for the next political visitor. On 5 March, he arrived, an
unusual speaker from Illinois, gaunt and angular. Lincoln had just
given his great speech at the Cooper Union in New York, and as one
observer put it, the “presidential bee” had begun to buzz around
him. That night in Hartford, the Wide Awakes lit their torches,
donned their capes and escorted Lincoln to his hotel.
The new look spread like … wildfire. The capes were
splendid, especially when augmented by military caps, the
flickering light of the torches and all those painted eyeballs,
staring out from large banners.
