NAACP’s letter demands UW restore Fredric March’s good name
September 2021
Dear University of Wisconsin-Madison & University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Communities:
… Guided solely by social-media rumor and grievously fact-free, mistaken conclusions – the name of Wisconsin native and Golden Age acting icon Fredric March was stripped from both UW-Madison’s Fredric March Play Circle (in late 2018) and UW-Oshkosh’s Fredric March Theatre (in late 2020). These name removals took place when enough people chose to believe mere word of mouth that the two-time Oscar winner and two-time Tony winner was a member of the Ku Klux Klan (or its offshoot) and a white supremacist.
We know emphatically that not only was Fredric March not any of these — by a measure of 180 degrees — but that he was, to the contrary, for more than five decades one of 20th-century Hollywood’s earliest, greatest and most boisterous racial-justice activists.
Indeed, for 30-plus-years – through the end of his life – he was a close ally of the NAACP upon whom the organization knew it could rely. And so we remain confused as to why, on both Wisconsin campuses, the avalanche of readily accessible primary- and secondary-source materials detailing Mr. March’s loud, concerted and enduring lifetime commitment to fighting racism and anti-Semitism was never pursued, discovered, consulted, heard or made public – and why neither UW-Madison nor UW-Oshkosh has moved to correct this clear and unconscionable rejection of conspicuously demonstrable historic truth and academic rigor.
Our statements here have been supported on the public record by a number of nationally revered and respected progressive academics and historians – and by individuals who actually knew Mr. March – including Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch III (founding director of the John Lewis-birthed National Museum of African American History & Culture); civil rights author and professor Raymond Arsenault; performer/activist Harry Belafonte; actor/activist James Cromwell; and late UW-Madison professor Max Otto (Clarence Darrow/“Fighting Bob” La Follette intimate, NAACP compatriot and internationally acclaimed humanist philosopher).
When it comes to labeling Mr. March a civil rights hero, what other conclusion could one come to about a man who:
- As a young Wisconsin teen delivered the same anti-white-supremacy speech given by Massachusetts high school senior Paul Robeson a few years later?
- Risked his massive box office in 1939 Jim Crow America by coming on board as one of the very few Hollywood stars unafraid to act as a primary sponsor of Marian Anderson and her historic Lincoln Memorial concert?
- Met in Harry Belafonte’s New York apartment for a 1963 secret strategy session with Martin Luther King and others on the eve of Dr. King’s momentous journey to Birmingham?
- Co-signed a telegram to President Kennedy with James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, Ossie Davis, Lena Horne, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, A. Philip Randolph and others condemning the president for his failure to adequately protect “the rights of 20 million negro citizens”?
- Was asked by NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins in 1964 to deliver the keynote at the national 10th-anniversary celebration of Brown v. Board of Education?
- Was one of the civil rights stalwarts selected in 1968 to host the grand, CBS-televised-coast-to-coast reopening of Ford’s Theatre in the nation’s capital along with racial-justice icons Harry Belafonte, actor Robert Ryan and choreographer Carmen De Lavallade?
- Spent the bulk of his career seeking out roles in one socially-conscious film after another?
Read the entire letter, names of the signatories, who include the late Ed Asner and Lou Gossett Jr. and the complete list of recipients.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: E-mail the recipients with your support! Especially UW system president Tommy Thompson and Rebecca Blank!
Education
Blaska Policy Werkes 
That is some really good $#!T but now who is going to go to bat for Chamberlin Rock because it is equally important in resisting the cancel culture?
Chancellor Blank used private donations to her office to pay the 50K removal fee instead of actually doing something meaningful like directing donated money towards literally thousands of good meals to feed the poor and homeless. What a useless woke dumb-ass.
Why aren’t Madison bleeding hearts troubled by her misguided priorities?
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I would like to know who donated money to this misbegotten exercise in wokeism/virtue signaling, money that could have been used to provide scholarships for needy students, including minorities–i.e., it could have done some actual good in the real world, not that idiots like Blank and her minions care about actual good or the real world. She’s finally getting some payback for jumping through every hoop placed in front of her by the tiny vocal minority (i.e., Black Students Union) who think they deserve to dictate university policies. Flood her and Tommy’s mailbox with demands for restoring the names of March and Butts to the Union theatre and art gallery. For good measure, urge Tommy to censure her and Leavitt, the Chancellor of UW-Oshkosh. Don’t relent!
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Your on very thin ice Gary. Several of the words you used are on the banned list put forward by the Wisconsin GOP. Keep it up and Vos will have the capital police at your door.
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How embarrassing for Rebecca Blank, as well as for the UW system. The letter makes her look ignorant.
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Actually, it reveals her ignorance. But the real embarrassment stems from her complete lack of curiosity. She accepted the woke narrative of some idiot activist, without question. Where in the world would you go to investigate an accusation of this nature? How about the very school where it happened? No, better to just throw this old guy under the bus. Nobody knows who he is anyway, and after all, he is white, so no harm there.
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I’d say it stems from her horror at being called racist, not from lack of curiosity.
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I feel sorry for Blank’s husband.
Perhaps there is good reason he’s never home anymore.
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Speaking of slavery. How many of us sitting here are using a computer to either write in response, as I am now, or read, as I have been, the thoughts of others on the computer or a cell phone?
How many of those who are in the woke cancel culture also use the computer or a cell phone to read about or promote their social activism?
Do people realize that by using a computer or a cell phone you are actively participating in the promotion of SLAVERY? Yes, you are. We all are. Our entire western society is complicit in the promotion of SLAVERY in our modern day by using these and many other devices, even the clothes we wear, made by SLAVES in Communist China and in other countries around the world.
There are many, many excellent resources on this subject that are available to any and all to use to see just how much modern day slavery has embedded itself in our society.
https://www.breakpoint.org/china-uses-forced-labor-to-produce-laptops-and-were-buying-them/
https://networks.h-net.org/node/11465/discussions/6992718/slavery-today-chinese-government-organized-mass-slavery-incl-21st
Click to access china.pdf
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/05/slavery-will-never-be-history-turn-blind-eye-to-china
https://21wilberforce.org/modern-day-slavery-china-abuses-uyghurs-in-detention-camps-and-forced-labor/
Then of course there is this report from our own governments Department of Labor, produced in 2018 under the direction of the big meanie, Donald J. Trump, as President of the United States, that outlines all the countries that participate in slavery. https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ILAB/ListofGoods.pdf
After reading these links and the links contained within them, one can only imagine the horrors of living as a modern day slave in China. One can also look at other countries that allow the selling of women and children as slave laborers to produce goods that we use every day or as sexual slaves.
Sexual slavery happens even in modern day America. Right now, today, as you are reading this, some woman or child somewhere in America is being raped by someone who purchased them.
So bottom line is: If these “woke” people really want to make a difference in stopping slavery, then instead of removing a rock, or the name of Frederick March, they should instead concentrate on eradicating modern day slavery by doing their own research and finding out and calling out governments and businesses who either participate in or turn a blind eye to modern slavery.
That would be “WOKE”
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“The National Basketball Association said Thursday it is pulling its next All-Star Game from Charlotte, N.C., because of a state law stating that transgender people must use bathrooms associated with their birth gender when in schools and public buildings.
The exit from North Carolina is a major blow for the state’s largest city, which stands to lose at least $100 million in economic benefits as a result, according to state Sen. Jeff Jackson, a Charlotte Democrat.
The NBA said it might return the All-Star Game to Charlotte in 2019, pending “an appropriate resolution” to the state law, and said it plans to announce a new site soon for the game in February 2017.”
***NBA honchos are selectively woke because the league continues to do a tremendous amount of business with repressive, slave oriented, communist China.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/nba-pulls-all-star-game-from-charlotte-over-north-carolina-bathroom-law-1469138932
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Several years ago when UW invited the feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot to campus I reached out to the chancellor’s office to register my displeasure. As I said in my email, while I sympathize with the group’s anti-Putin agenda, as an Orthodox priest and chaplain for Orthodox Christian students at UW, I objected to their methods. The group desecrated two Orthodox cathedrals in Moscow with the “punk” prayers.
A few years later when the Association of Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics posted a picture of Zombie Jesus on Easter, I again reached out to the UW explaining why this was offensive.
In both cases, I asked to speak with those responsible only to be rebuffed.
Ah well.
Fr Gregory
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