The Chancellor: January 30, 2023 will mark the 90th anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s ascension to the Chancellorship of Weimar Germany. Yet, Hitler did not take power, it was offered to him. Little more than three years after the start of the Great Depression, President Paul von Hindenburg was able to exercise Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution; thereby circumventing representative government to appoint Chancellors to run the government to get Germany out of a worsening economic morass. Three candidates were chosen, all three failed to reverse the declining fortunes of the Fatherland. With investments from the United States drying up and with the Right and Left battling in the streets, prompted, of course, by a thirty-three percent unemployment rate, businessmen, bankers and the military urged the aging Hindenburg to appoint the man he little cared for, that vulgar little corporal from Austria, Adolf Hitler (who became a German citizen the year before in expectation of becoming Chancellor). And this at a time of the Nazi Party’s loss of seats in Reichstag elections. The Establishment of Germany would not, under any circumstances, countenance a candidate from the Left at the helm of the German Government. “We are hiring him,” seeing Hitler as a caretaker of Establishment expectations for Germany. A decision that, twelve years later, would see to the Fatherland becoming a shambles.

Mark Albertson is the historical research editor at Army Aviation magazine in Monroe, Connecticut; and, is the historian for the Army Aviation Association of America.

This session will discuss Joseph Stalin’s “Marxism and Problems of Linguistics” and the language policies of socialist states and some other leftist movements

Our speaker is Yusuf Gürsey who is originally from Istanbul, Turkey and currently lives in New Haven, CT. He is a member of the CPUSA, as well as a member of the US Peace Council in Connecticut and a member of the Steering Committee of the Center for Marxist Education centered in Cambridge, MA. After retiring from being an associate professor of physics in Turkey, he studied graduate level linguistics online at the Virtual Linguistics Campus broadcast from the University of Marburg in Germany. He is an independent researcher, translator and interpreter. His fields of interest in linguistics are historical linguistics (specializing in Turkic and Semitic languages), phonology and socio-linguistics. He is also currently engaged in research in the study of calendars and the history of Middle Eastern peoples, the medieval period and the history of modern Leftist movements.

In February 1971, racial tension surrounding school desegregation in Wilmington, North Carolina, culminated in four days of violence and skirmishes between white vigilantes and black residents. The turmoil resulted in two deaths, six injuries, more than $500,000 in property damage, and the firebombing of a white-owned corner grocery store, before the National Guard restored an uneasy peace. Despite glaring irregularities in the subsequent trial, ten young persons were convicted of arson and conspiracy and then sentenced to a total of 282 years in prison. They became known internationally as the Wilmington Ten.

This lecture addresses three general questions: What occurred in Wilmington in 1971 that climaxed in civil unrest and acts of violence? Why were ten individuals, most of them high school students, framed for crimes emanating from those disturbances? And how did a movement develop to deliver them justice, what was the significance of that movement for our understanding of the African American freedom struggle, and how might such an understanding inform thought and actions today to build an equal society?

Speaker:
Kenneth Janken – Kenny to his friends –  is an American historian and professor of African American studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he has taught since 1991. His research focuses on 20th-century African American history, and his most recent book is The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and the Rise of Black Politics in the 1970s (2015), which won the Clarendon Award from the Lower Cape Fear Historical Society for outstanding book on that region. In addition to the history of the Wilmington Ten, he is the author of two biographies: Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African-American Intellectual (1993); and White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP (2003), which won honorable mention in the Outstanding Book Awards from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America. He has also published academic articles on topics such as the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement in the 1940s, African Americans and world affairs, school desegregation in North Carolina, and a forthcoming history of the post-war Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. South. He is currently researching a biography of anti-fascist-cum-socialist writer Cedric Belfrage, who in 1948 co-founded and edited the National Guardian.