You know the Nazis and the KKK are hate groups. There’s no need for some organization to tell you.
And we can all agree that the Camp Fire Girls and neighborhood stamp collectors club are not.
But for the remaining 98 percent of the spectrum of organizations out there, it is usually a matter of opinion as to who is and isn’t a hate group. And the criteria are so subjective that labeling a group as such usually has no value; i.e. one person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.
But wait -- some groups, like the Aryan Nations, are natural perfect fits for the designation “hate group.” That’s an empirical finding.
Yet, when we place that label on even the most indisputably deserving, we are certain to start sliding from the high ground down the slippery slope of “what about” equations run amok.
"What about Stalin and Pol Pot?" conservatives are fond of asking. How can Marxist-Leninist parties not be designated hate groups if the Hitlerian genocidists are? Well, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan supported Pol Pot, so there go the Democrats and Republicans as well.
By unleashing such absolute standards, we could become paralyzed by a realization that every group is a hate group. I mean the Camp Fire Girls and stamp collectors drove to events with oil made more available by the U.S. and U.K forcing a dictatorship on Iran in 1953. The hate implicating process could never end.
An important distinction in this issue: the designation of a “hate crime” is a different matter than a hate group. Presuming hate crimes laws apply equally to all people and don’t infringe on free speech or peaceable assembly (which the Supreme Court has ruled must be the case), legally defining a criminal act a hate crime is proper, and helpful to achieving justice.
But either the state or private organizations designating groups “hate groups?” In the U.S., the state has no such power, because of the longtime doctrine of free association.
Non-governmental social justice organizations do have the right to express the opinion that a group is a hate group. But to see why doing so is fraught with hazards, check the history of that term.
The Southern Poverty Law Center leader Morris Dees largely popularized the concept of the “hate group.” Critics, including writers for The Nation, The New Yorker magazine, and James Madison University researcher Mark Purington, have asserted that Dees has actually neglected social justice causes by focusing the SPLC ‘s efforts on glamorized lawsuits against klansmen, in order to raise millions.
Purington’s JMU thesis said Dees raised $9 million for his Montgomery, Ala. based SPLC via impassioned, shockingly illustrated fundraiser letters about his winning a civil judgment against klan members in the 1980s. Yet that courtroom victory resulted in just a $52,000 payout to the mother of Michael Donald, who was murdered by the klansmen.
Purington acknowledged that Dees had told her in advance that the killers’ destitution meant she would never get more than a pittance of the multi-million dollar award sought. And in fact, $52,000 of the actual $7 million jury award was all Beulah Mae Donald got. Meanwhile the SPLC shared with her not one penny of its $9 million fundraising haul over her case.
Anti-racist activists within and outside the SPLC have blasted Dees for focusing so narrowly on such high profile cases, instead of the overall racial justice struggles the organization so deftly had waged in the 1970s.
Ken Silverstein, writing in Harper’s magazine, said the SPLC legal staff quit the organization in 1986 to protest Dees’ single minded pursuit of the Klan, which they believed was a minor threat compared to the daily injustices facing poor Americans.
Along with shifting toward cases that make for heroic sounding fund raising letters, Purington in his JMU paper and former SPLC staffer Bob Moser in The New Yorker magazine have written that the SPLC’s yearly release of its list of “hate groups” in the U.S. also is geared to boost fundraising.
And that list has been extended too widely to include groups that don’t lynch, bomb or openly espouse racism.
The SPLC’s web site says: “We define a hate group as an organization that — based on its official statements or principles, the statements of its leaders or its activities — has beliefs or practices that attack or malign an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics.”
But Moser, a former staffer under Dees at the SPLC, wrote in his New Yorker piece: “As critics have long pointed out… the hate-group designations also drive attention to the extremists. Many groups, including the religious-right Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom, raise considerable money by decrying the SPLC’s ‘attacks.’ ”
Seth Andrews examines the related problem of the "extremist" list.
Even though just one organization, directed so centrally by Dees and a very few other people, calls organizations like the Family Research Council hate groups, the bulk of the U.S. left is widely thought of as having labeled them as such.
And the Family Research Council is a group that hates. But opposing its agenda requires examining exactly what is wrong with it, piece by piece. And exposing how the elite corporations' political agenda of exploiting the labor of women and minorities is really what maintains the "religious" right.
Stamping a group with an arbitrary label doesn't inspire us to do these involved tasks. But a gunman said the SPLC’s including the Family Research Council on its hate group list inspired him to enter the FRC’s headquarters in 2012, injuring one person and threatening to kill more. That attack made it seem the whole progressive population was saddled with an unsought image of stoking terrorism.
Dees and other SPLC staffers publicly denied that their issuing the hate group list had the effect of encouraging the attack, adding that the Family Research Council's false and denigrating statements about homosexual people, not the group's opposition to same-sex marriage, is what got it on the list. But such carefully put nuanced points need to lead a justice organization's report, not follow a violent misinterpretation of it.
And that messy episode, combined with mounting accusations first written about in the daily newspaper the Montgomery Advertiser that Dees himself had practiced racial discrimination within the SPLC’s ranks pointed to his days as director being numbered.
Dees was fired by the SPLC in 2019. Moser and other critics said his dismissal alone won’t end the toxic culture of discrimination and elitism within the SPLC.
Much more must be done to fix the mess in its Montgomery HQ.
Too many media sources automatically turn to the SPLC’s yearly list of hate groups as the measure of whether the far right is growing and how fast -- not grasping that the annual list long ago became a self-serving cash-raising trick.
Moser wrote in The New Yorker that since it dumped Dees the SPLC has made small steps to widen its scope, a glimmer of hope that the organization will return to its purpose of fighting injustice. Progressives dropping use of the hazardously open ended term “hate group” would help.
Brian Arbenz, of Louisville, Ky. USA, is a writer, researcher and a resister of fascism.
Sculptor Dawn Yates designed this statue of Charlie Farnsley to invite people to sit down for a talk, just as the erudite, informal Mayor would have. The book the mayor has brought could be a topic. So could social justice, arts, history, technology and much more.
Considering it gave the world Louis Brandeis, Muhammad Ali, Hunter S. Thompson, Diane Sawyer and the two sisters who wrote the Happy Birthday song, Louisville, Ky. is a city with outsized daily influence on hundreds of millions.
But the Louisvillian who affects the most Americans the most often just may be a person with the obscure and deceptively ordinary name of Charlie Farnsley.
How relevant to the life of today’s online socially aware person is this lesser heralded Kentucky political figure of the 1930s and ‘40s?
Well, black lives mattered to Farnsley in the late 1940s, when as Louisville's mayor, he set up an institute to train southern police officers in methods of racial equality and non-brutality.
And the Internet? No mayor did more to bring the cutting edge communications technologies of that era to classrooms and homes.
Mayor Charlie Farnsley honors University of Louisville basketball standout Glenn "Ish" Combs in 1950. Combs had helped lead the Cardinals to a national tournament championship two years before.
On the down side, there was no elected official who did more -- unintentionally; it’s complicated -- to set up today’s regressive taxation, meaning taxing the middle and lower incomes, instead of the rich.
Late in his life, no one encountering Charlie Farnsley on his morning walks in downtown Louisville would figure him for a progressive innovator. But in fact that fellow passing by on sidewalks in the 1970s clad in classic Kentucky Colonel white vest, black string tie and planter's hat was one of the upper south’s Civil Rights trailblazers and one of the nation’s noted intellectuals of the mid-1900s.
More about Farnsley than his walks was in the manner of Harry Truman.
A Louisville mayor, congressman and state legislator during various tenures in the 1930s through the ‘60s, Charlie Farnsley -- in keeping with the informal first name -- was plainspoken and admirably candid.
As mayor from 1948 to ‘53, Farnsley governed in a no-nonsense way, willing to rub complacent politicos the wrong way to get the job done.
The setting up of a Mayor’s Gripe Line phone number to allow Louisville residents to bypass city departments was one of several populist moves that garnered him national news attention.
Belied by his conventional fashion choices, Farnsley was erudite, well read and polished, having studied at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, as well as the universities of Louisville and Kentucky.
More in keeping with his full name of Charles Rowland Peaslee Farnsley, he was a nationally regarded historian, a lawyer, and an enthusiast in Asian literature who once spoke on the CBS radio show “Invitation to Learning” on a panel which included Eugene O’Neill.
As mayor, Farnsley ended racial segregation in Louisville’s libraries, parks, and the municipally funded University of Louisville, opening U of L to black students, many of whom had attended the historically black Louisville Municipal College.
In one of the most farsighted anti-racist moves by any white mayor, Farnsley, tapping Carnegie and Rockefeller foundation money, establish the Southern Police Institute, an academy where officers from many states would be trained in the importance and the methods of racial equality.
Mayor Farnsley, left, unveils the University of Louisville's
edition of Auguste Rodin's "The Thinker" in 1949.
Representing coming generations, Nancy Speckman,
a member of the family who donated the statue, stands behind
the pedestal. (U of L Archives and Records center photo)
Employing a governing style that combined the sophistication of a Charles with the get-it-done grittiness of a Charlie, Mayor Farnsley established a radio-public address system link to allow Louisville public school students to hear many cities' symphony orchestra concerts in their classrooms.
That technical setup morphed into one of Louisville’s current day public radio stations.
When WAVE-TV became Louisville’s first television station in November 1948, the mayor placed TV sets in city libraries for free public viewing of this must-see technology, which in those formative days included live operas in the studios of WAVE, notwithstanding it being a commercial station.
In yet another move that pays benefits to this day, Farnsley started a tree-planting program that still helps comfort the inner city from Ohio River Valley summer humidity.
Even more beneficial was the mayor’s creating of the Fund for the Arts, the spark of Louisville’s modern day status as a U.S. arts and culture mecca.
Though Louisville is a Mason-Dixon Line border city, as Midwestern as it is Southern, its notable mayor had a pure Southern demeanor, and that combined with his being ardently pro-Civil Rights fascinated national media.
Life magazine’s Margaret Bourke-White did a photo spread on the eccentric populist mayor, and William Manchester did a piece in Harper’s magazine focusing on Farnsley’s successes at building up Louisville’s superb cultural life.
Also illustrating that Charles/Charlie mix, the mayor was every bit as at home honoring two University of Louisville basketball players who brought the college a national hoops tournament title in ‘48 as he was writing in Journal of Art in Society of his call to use academia and culture to create “Cities of Light.”
Charlie Farnsley left Louisville politics in 1953, but resurfaced 11 years later, being elected to Congress for a single term known as the Great Society years, 1964 to ‘66.
Farnsley eagerly voted for Lyndon Johnson’s Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, Job Corps, aid to education, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Family members said he intended to serve only one term, so he could vote for those liberal initiatives without re-election pressures. That plan proved wise in November 1966, as the district -- without Farnsley on the ballot -- went Republican as part of a 35-seat net Democratic loss in the House due to a push back against Civil Rights by many white voters.
If Charlie Farnsley’s mayoral and congressional terms helped spur progress toward racial equality and promoted the arts and health care, his greater legacy may lie in the less passionate but socially relevant issue of regressive taxation.
In the spring of 1948, Farnsley took the helm of a nearly broke city when he was chosen by the Board of Aldermen (the city council equivalent) to fill the term of Mayor E. Leland Taylor, who died.
To keep the city afloat during a time when the streets badly needed improving and child recreation needed expanding, the city could raise property taxes, or put small increases into a broad array of lesser taxes and fees.
But there was one other course of action -- one which Farnsley’s late son Burrel Farnsley (himself a candidate for nominations for mayor and Congress in the 1990s and 2000s) said was one of his father’s greatest legacies -- and it was a whole new concept.
Mayor Farnsley proposed expanding what had been a business license tax into an Occupational Tax on all employees whose workplaces were in the city. The tax would be paid based on whether a person worked, rather than lived inside the city limits.
Burrel Farnsley, who died in 2017 and age 71, said in the 1990s that his father invented the Occupational Tax. Although that precise point has not been verified by any other source, there is no question that Charles Farnsley being the nation's most innovative and publicized mayor, the Occupational Tax -- today a mainstay for U.S. cities -- rode to prominence on his fame.
In 1948, the mayor took to the airwaves on WHAS, the city’s largest radio station, to methodically explain Louisville’s fiscal situation and why this new revenue concept would help. He soon persuaded the Board of Aldermen to approve the Occupational Tax.
Taxing large numbers of people who lived outside the city, including the thousands of Southern Indiana residents who crossed the river to commute to their jobs, was revolutionary -- and politically risky because the newly chosen Mayor Farnsley would have to be formally elected by the voters in a special election in November 1948. The following year the next regular mayoral election would come around, so Charlie Farnsley would have to be elected twice while this new tax was still uppermost in voters’ minds.
The new mayor saw that suburbanization was about to -- in a horse city’s terms -- blast out of the starting gate, and urban planners and sociologists were already defining “suburban exploitation” by workers and shoppers from outside large cities’ limits. Their cars were wearing down pavement and potentially requiring fire and police protection from cities to which they didn’t pay property taxes.
So taxing them was considered eminently fair -- and today the occupational tax accounts for about 65 percent of the revenue the city collects in taxes. The remainder comes from Property Taxes, and relatively small amounts from taxes on deeds, bank shares and distilled spirits.
When all receipts in Louisville’s 2019-2020 city budget are added in, about half of the $825.9 million in revenue comes from the occupational tax.
The Kentucky League of Cities said 58 percent of the tax revenue in the Bluegrass State’s cities in 2017 came from occupational taxes, and that 83 percent of that OT revenue came from workers, rather than the business licenses of the self-employed.
Speaking about Louisville’s occupational tax before the policy study group National Tax Association in 1953, Farnsley said:
“I can testify that such a tax, if passed with the proper press support and proper education andunderstanding of the people -- and followed immediately with a program of resurfacing streets and doingother things that people can see and understand -- is very successful.
“I did that and got elected a few months after the tax was put in and then was reelected a year later.The first year the tax was not an issue. The second year my opponent used it as an issue, but it apparently didn’t do him any good because I won by the same majority as the year before.”
But in a world so different from the late ‘40s and early ‘50s -- where the richest don’t pay anything close to their fair share in taxes and no longer invest wages and benefits to get good long term workers -- the reality of the occupational tax has been turned around.
Whereas spreading the collecting of taxes horizontally to include non-resident workers was Farnsley's focus, today, communities desperately need to spread taxes vertically to make the rich pay their fare share.
All those “incentive packages” of the last 40 years giving tax breaks and deferments to lure corporations to big and small cities have meant that taxing the workers via the Occupational Tax, which was intended to stop a free ride by suburban exploiters, has also allowed a free ride by corporations and the rich. Many studies have shown that this effect makes tax breaks for corporations a net job loser for cities and towns.
Yet very few politicians explain to the public that the rich not paying taxes is why you pay more, choosing instead to pander to the popular resentment of the poor for being "takers."
In 1948, mayors saw the Occupational Tax in the aforementioned horizontal terms, not seeing the future failure to tax upwardly.
Starting in the ‘80s, states and localities facing cutbacks in federal aid prompted by the Reagan Administration's corporate tax cuts, while also struggling with revenue shortages caused by their own incentive packages, started raising or creating occupational taxes, sales taxes and local income taxes.
Rock-ribbed Republican Indiana, for example, allowed counties to adopt income taxes, and it raised the already regressive state sales tax -- both under a GOP governor.
Regarding that “suburban exploitation” that made the occupational tax so needed, one of Charlie Farnsley’s earlier political initiatives greatly contributed to that problem.
In the late 1930s, Louisville wanted to annex a one-half square mile area with eight whiskey distilleries which opened after Prohibition was lifted.
State legislator Charlie Farnsley supported a bill making it harder for the state’s largest class of cities (Louisville being alone in that class) to annex territory -- a bill tailored for these distilleries’ owners.
The bill became law and soon suburban sections of Jefferson County began taking advantage of the streamlined requirements to incorporate. The postwar housing boom accelerated the trend and by 1948, Mayor Farnsley’s city was hemmed in due to his own prior efforts as State Representative Farnsley.
By the early 1960s, the county had 60 separate cities, many of which were formed out of single subdivisions of fewer than a thousand residents. Charles Farnsley's twin accomplishments of the incorporation law in the '30s and the Occupational Tax a decade later meant that taxing non-resident workers was now much easier than annexing their homes into Louisville’s city limits.
And just as in Louisville, taxing people based on where they work, rather than live has filled municipal financial coffers nationwide. That’s why in the last 60 years Chicago’s population falling from 3.5 million to 2.5 million, Philadelphia’s from 2 million to 1.5 million, and Saint Louis’ from 750,000 to 319,000 does not seriously worry city halls.
So whereas he was one of the great influencers in racial justice, the arts and learning, the greatest legacy of Charles Farnsley may be -- in a tribute to the power of unintended consequences -- that a person is worth more to their hometown as a paycheck stub than a resident.
Brian Arbenz, who started paying Mayor Charlie Farnsley's Occupational Tax in 1978, appreciates daily all the aesthetic triumphs the mayor has brought his city.
