Ali criticizes mixed marriages
Here is a look at the past. Items have been culled from The Chronicle’s archives of 25, 50, 75 and 100 years ago. April 28: Bay Area Jews are commemorating the liberation of the infamous Nazi concentration camp Dachau by honoring some oftenoverlooked heroes — Japanese-American soldiers. Forty-eight years ago this week, Dachau survivor Solly Ganor was dumbfounded to see “strange Oriental soldiers” peering down at him when he had woken up covered with Bavarian snow. “I thought I was hallucinating, but then I heard them speak English,” said the 64-year-old Ganor. Another Dachau survivor, Ernie Hollander, also did not recognize the troops as Americans.
“I thought Japan had won the war and we were all about to be killed,” said the 67-year-old Oakland man. Bay Area Jews are staging a party Sunday to honor their liberators at Temple Emanu-el. According to holocaust historian Eric Saul, about 20 scouts of the 522nd Field Artillery entered Dachau’s ‘Camp X’ finding the crematoria and gas chambers. What gave the episode a twist was that many of the troops came from U.S.-style concentration camps themselves. The soldiers had volunteered for combat duty from the internment camps where Japanese Americans were sent during World War II. During Sunday’s celebration, bagels and sushi will be served.
— Maitland Zane April 27: Muhammad Ali was alternately booed and cheered by anti-war and anti-racist demonstrators here as he punched out a theme of total race separation and jabbed away at mixed marriages. Several hundred of the 15,000 at Civic Center Plaza booed and walked out of the huge assembly as the ex-Cassius Clay and ex-heavyweight world champion hammered out his Black Muslim doctrine. “I don’t want to offend all you integrated couples out there,” he told the crowd from the City Hall steps. But he added, “any intelligent white woman and white man” doesn’t want a “Kinky-haired Negro” marrying into his or her family. Neither, he added, did any intelligent “so-called Negro” want his children marrying whites.
His talk drew shouts of “Ali go home.” Black Panther leader Bobby Seale issued the longest address of the day, drawing guffaws from the crowd as he did a satirical impression of the speaking voice of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. “Brother Martin Luther King had a dream,” he told the crowd earlier. “We (the Black Panthers) also have a dream, too ... but, dammit, we also got a gun.” He was cheered by the crowd when he yelled: “Ronald Reagan is a fascist pig.”
1943
April 22: Rufus H. Kimball, chairman of the public health section of the Commonwealth Club, using a paper, “Nerves and the Military” written by Dr. Joseph Caton, San Francisco psychiatrist, as his source, said that weeding out the mentally unfit is one of the hardest tasks confronting draft officials today. “Modern war is a pretty tough proposition for even the hardest young men.” Kimball explained. “If you train a boy from infancy to the first 20 years of his life by Christian precept and example, if you foster him on kindness and gentleness and then turn him back to savagery and fill him with bloodlust, what is likely to happen? In far too many cases he cracks under the strain.” Other speakers told the group that from 20 to 40 percent of American casualties are mental cases.
1918
April 22: Private Clifton Bell of the 30th Engineers sat in a dugout in the American support trenches in France one afternoon about a month ago and wrote a letter to his friend, Chester Schlamm of 275 Twenty-fifth Avenue, San Francisco. He told of going over the top twice, and in closing says: “P.S. — “Going up tonight.” On the back of the page was written in another hand: “P.S. again — Cliff went up but came back quick with a machine gun ball in his forearm. Got a blighty. Not serious. P.S. again — Wound in right arm — unable to write.”
“It’s no joke going out between the two trenches, and you will find out if ever you have to come over,” he wrote to Schlamm. “As for the trenches, they are not so bad. They have a labor corps that keeps them in repair. They have a boardwalk built above the mud in the bottom of the trench. Every time Fritz drops a shell and breaks the trench and walk the labor corps gets busy and puts it back in condition.” “I went up the other night. Machine guns, shrapnel and a couple of gas shells breaking the stillness of the night. It sure is quite an experience to hear those machine guns prap-prap-prap, and then hear the bullets buzz by your head. It’s also fine to hear the shrapnel burst overhead or plunk into the ground at your feet,” Bell wrote to his mother March 29 from an Australian Red Cross station. “I stopped a machine gun bullet with my right forearm,” he wrote. “I was in the support trenches on my way to the front trench when I was hit. The bullet stopped in my arm after passing through the fellow’s arm in front of me. He is ‘O.K.’ ”