by Eric Spiegelman

36. Sullivan

35. McMahon

34. Izzard

33. Murphy

32. Asner

31. Begley

30. Begley, Jr.

29. Harris

28. Furlong

27. Norton

26. Wood

25. G. Robinson

24. R. Murrow

23. Schultz

22. Muskie

21. Koch

20. Albee

19. VIII

18. the guy who my grandfather always thought I was when I called him on the phone

17. Fisher

16. Cantor

15. Thigpen

14. Money

13. Van Halen

12. Vedder

11. the Confessor

10. Mr.

9. Special

8. Co-

7. the verb ending that indicates past tense

6. Scissorhands

5. Bauer

4. Cullen

3. Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon

2. the guy with the bowling alley law firm

1. DeBevic

Eric Spiegelman is a proprietor of Old Jews Telling Jokes.

by Andrew Piccone

Where does your interest in film come from?

That’s an interesting question. When I was younger I was very interested in women in the arts, and especially film but I only knew a handful of the obvious names. Y’know Dorothy Arzner, but I felt very strongly that films should not be lost. The original films, they must be kept to speak for themselves. When you have nothing but other people interpreting what the films were really like you’re in trouble.

Are you a filmmaker?

My film side is that I edit a film and media journal called Framework and I also write about film — particularly costume design. So no, I’ve never been interested in making films, but film has really been hugely consoling, inspiring and teaching for me, the idea of movies for therapeutic reasons as much as entertainment. You see a movie to calm down, be enlivened, be inspired, to be carried away. Yes, film has been hugely inspiring to me and has influenced my writing a lot.

How did you choose the films for the panel tonight?

Well, that was really Jon Gartenberg, but Tribeca Film Festival has been hugely supportive of NYWIFT (New York Women in Film and Television), we showed here twice before a variety of different films. We sent Jon a list of films that might interest him and he choose those films and decided it might be great to package them together as a group highlighting women in experimental film, he was particularly interested in that.

What else have you seen at Tribeca this year that caught your eye?

I have seen some really good stuff this year. My favorite film was Artificial Paradises, I thought it was just sensational. Directed by a woman as it turns out, Yulene Olaizola. It’s set in Mexico, incredible eye, very unconventional approach to a very typical subject. Very simple, but also very grand, very huge. I thought the film that won best narrative, She Monkeys, was also very interesting. In one sense it made me feel very uncomfortable, which over the years I’ve learned is a sign, and it’s very professionally made, very interesting. Also made by a woman as it turns out, Lisa Aschan.

How do you feel about the state of film in 2011?

Well, I think there is always a fringe and a mainstream in the way human beings are. What those fringes and mainstreams are, not only in terms of their identities but also how they’re made up changes year to year and decade to decade. Also the technology changes a lot of that. Younger people will always have great imagination, great talent. There is always going to be someone who is excited about art that’s from the past, or narrative from the past. I think the shift in technology means that young people are less focused on the size of the screen particularly, the size of the screen is not as important as it has been for past generations. Technology changes things so quickly. I don’t have any bleak thoughts about it, that’s for sure.

Members of the Independent Women: 15 Years Of NYWIFT-Funded Film Preservation panel: From left to right, Cecile Starr, Barbara Hammer and Drake Stutesman.

Andrew Piccone is a photographer in New York.

In the wake of the devastation of last week’s weather — 178 tornadoes in two days! Hundreds dead, many missing — states from Tennessee to Alabama to Texas are beset with looters, we hear. Seven in Ohio! Three in St. Louis! Two in North Carolina! Maybe 20 all told in Alabama! Literally, perhaps three dozens of people have been arrested for looting in the past week.

(Can we have a sidebar? “In Alabama, businesses are prohibited after disasters from increasing the price of items for sale or rent by 25 percent or more above the average price charged in the same area within the last 30 days.” Wow, socialism much?)

Anyway, white America is clearly out of control. Let’s pile them all into the Superdome and then never let them move back home. (Previously.)

If you’re one of the people who still buys DVDs, you should know that Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild is once again available in that format. The rest of you should know that it is available for streaming on Netflix. All of you should see it in the manner of your choosing: it’s really, really good. Also, it is from 1986, which, rather distressingly, was 25 years ago. I saw this movie in the theater 25 years ago. Where has the time gone, etc.

In Gay Equality Battle, Target Is Own Worst Enemy

by Abe Sauer

In a decision that would otherwise merit little attention, a California court recently ruled in favor of a gay rights organization’s challenge to canvass outside a big-box retailer. Because the retailer that sued the gay rights group was Target, the story was a scandal as the gay community continues to hold Target accountable for its history of political donations to groups such as MN Forward that support anti-gay candidates (an activity the chain continued even after a public apology). The decision came just weeks after Lady Gaga caved to pressure and backed out of an exclusive deal with the retailer.

Earlier in the year, a couple months before this last unfortunate PR hit, Target finally announced a new policy governing its political giving, ostensibly expanding oversight of donations and using a “Policy Committee” to vet them. Through this policy change, and increasing the profile of its LGBT Business Council, as well as a lot of money — a lot of money — Target is aiming to repair its reputation on gay equality.

But after talking to Target PR, gay advocacy organizations partnered with Target, and gay employees at the stores, in addition to reviewing the company’s 2011 political donations, what’s clear is that Target has become no more transparent and that its commitment to gay equality merits sincere questioning.

Surprisingly, Target was largely in the right in its California case against the gay rights group, Canvass for a Cause. The retailer has long had a policy restricting access to all non-profit activity on its grounds, Salvation Army bell-ringers or otherwise. In this regard, many members of the gay community even gave Target credit; one blog commenter wrote, “I am openly gay, and all my co-workers know that. I agree with Target’s standings on this, but that doesn’t mean that I agree with they’re [sic] past political donations.”

This sentiment seems to sum up the feelings of a community that is still weighing its feelings on the brand. On the one hand, Target broke its heart. On the other, the retailer should still get credit for publicly, and monetarily, supporting gay equality.

Dot Belstler, executive director for Twin Cities Pride, wrestles with this conflict. While still negotiating with Target about funding this year’s Pride event, Belstler passed along the organization’s official statement, which, in part, reasons that Target is a “model employer” and has donated “in excess of half a million dollars” to LGBT causes, adding “Pride draws a clear distinction between the views of the candidate in question, and the companies that chose to support this PAC.”

While others I spoke with off record in the LGBT activist community refuse to give the retailer the benefit of the doubt, Belstler herself told me that she believes there is more to be gained by engaging Target than by ostracizing it. She notes that Target appears to be making an effort and is certainly spending a lot of money to make things right. Plus, Belstler, along with many others, point to Target’s overhauled political giving process, explained in a new section of its website. Most notably, Target says it now uses a policy committee “to guide the decision-making process regarding financial support of political activities.”

But here begins the confusion about Target’s “revised” political giving.

Even within Target, employees do not seem to understand the differences between the money given to MN Forward that went to support anti-gay gubernatorial Tom Emmer, and the federal Target PAC, through which Target gave significantly large sums of money to anti-gay national politicians like Michele Bachmann and Roy Blunt. (The MN Forward donation was for state candidates, the PAC is for federal ones.)

When Target continued to donate to anti-gay politicians through last fall, even after CEO Gregg Steinhafel made his public apology in August, it was through this federal PAC, which is controlled by Steinhafel, the VP counsel, and political-relations exec Matt Zabel (appointed by Steinhafel after serving as the right-hand man for John Thune of South Dakota, who holds extremely anti-gay positions).

It was through this same federal PAC that Target donated thousands of dollars between January and March of this year to such renowned Congressional homophobes as Orrin Hatch and Pete Roskum.

Just before announcing its new giving policies in February, Target PAC went on a spending spree, doling out $15,000 each to the Democratic and Republican Senate Committees, and directly giving to Orrin Hatch, Jim Matheson, Richard Lugar and Olympia Snowe.

Orrin Hatch’s longstanding anti-gay positions need no introduction. Despite being a Democrat, Hatch’s fellow Utahan, Matheson, has voted in favor of both constitutional amendments against gay equality and openly opposed the Obama administration’s recent decision to stop defending DOMA.

Richard Lugar has voted in favor of a same-sex marriage ban and issued a “worried about unit cohesion” statement regarding his vote against DADT.

While the spending was billed as “bipartisan” giving, among the gang receiving funds, Snowe counts as the gay-friendliest because the only actions she’s taken against gay equality was a vote for the Defense of Marriage Act.

More curious is Target’s giving after the policy committee was announced. While money went to very pro-gay rights Rep. Shelley Berkley, Rep. Ron Kind and Sen. Mark Begich, it was, combined, still $8,000 less than what Target gave to Orrin Hatch and stridently anti-equality Reps. Jim Matheson and Pat Tiberi.

Despite its stated desire to make good, Target Communications did not permit me to speak directly with either of the two chairs of its LGBT Business Council. But through an intermediary, I was forwarded an email response about Target’s most recent giving from one of them:

Target’s PAC contributions went 55% to Democrats and 45% to Republicans. Target PAC donations — including during non-election years, such as 2011 — reflect Target’s support of key business priorities, such as reforms to control organized retail crime or interchange fees (the fees charged to merchants by Visa and MasterCard), trade and other business issues.

Target’s spin, even from its LGBT point people, is that the company’s donations are “bipartisan” because 50 percent go to Democrats and 50 percent to Republicans.

That being a Democrat means one is gay-rights friendly is absurd. In addition to the Matheson example , look at Target’s recent donation to West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. Manchin is indeed a Democrat, but not only does he strongly oppose same sex marriage, but, last October, he was the single Democrat to join the Republican roadblock of a DADT repeal. Yet, both Matheon and Manchin, amongst others, fall into Target’s definition of bipartisanship as “Democrats.”

So what oversight exactly does the new Policy Committee have?

One of Target’s latest donations, made on March 9 after the announcement of the Committee, was to the Republican Operation To Secure And Keep A Majority PAC, better known as “ROSKAM PAC” for its controller, Congressman Peter Roskam.

Roskam has never met a gay-equality bill he liked; he’s even voted against bills outlawing workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation. As a state assemblyman, Roskam opposed banning employment discrimination based on sexual orientation, saying that it would force churches to hire gays.

Obviously, the question is: if Target now has a committee in place to review these donations, just who green-lit a $2,500 gift to the PAC of one of Congress’s most prominent gay haters?

When asked about who makes up the new policy committee, Target’s Jessica Carlson said, “While I can’t share specifics about the members of our committee, what I can tell you is that the Committee represents a variety of Target leaders with varying perspectives. All details about how that committee works are available on our corporate web site.”

The PAC entry on Target’s new “Civic Activity” page explains that the “Policy Committee determines the factors to be considered when making contribution decisions.” It does not define who sits on the policy committee beyond noting that the committee “consists of our most senior executives in areas most affected by public policy decisions.”

I went back to Target to get specifics on the makeup of the committee and its specific involvement in donations by the PAC (like the ones to Hatch and Roskum). Here was the email exchange:

Me: One more question, were these latest donations made with the review of the new “policy committee”?

Target Communications: The Policy Committee is solely responsible for approving the use of general corporate funds for political contributions. The Target Citizens Political Action Committee (PAC) is funded through the voluntary efforts of our team members. PAC funds are distributed to federal candidates and national party committees that support Target’s core retail business. Donations noted in your recent inquiries were made through Target’s PAC.

Me: So, just so I’m clear myself, Target’s PAC donations are still made solely by Mr. Zabel, Mr. Steinhafel and the VP counsel?

Target Communications: The Target Citizens Political Action Committee (PAC) is funded through the voluntary efforts of our team members. PAC funds are distributed to federal candidates and national party committees that support Target’s core retail business.

Me: Can you answer my earlier question about the policy committee’s involvement in these PAC donations?

Target Communications: I’ve already shared that information.

Me: Sorry, I’m asking again because I’m stupid and don’t understand the answer, which seemed to define what the Target PAC is and not who facilitates its donations. I’m asking who makes the decisions for the donations from the PAC.

Target Communications: …

I received no further responses despite numerous direct questions about who the policy committee is and which donations exactly it governs. In a way, this represents a step backward in terms of transparency — at least under Target’s old policy, the exact executives responsible for political gifts were directly identified. Once out, Target’s political giving has gone in the closet (while at the same time appearing to be more open). Not to worry, Target released a high-end video that demonstrates the company is committed to equality. What more is needed?

Target’s conflict is best embodied in LGBT Business Council co-chair, Daniel Duty. After last year’s $150,000 MN Forward scandal, Duty became a high-profile defender of Target, recently granting an interview with dot429’s magazine about “Being Gay at Target.” In that interview, he says, “I think we felt really good about the company response.”

Until he was promoted to Director of Enterprise Strategy in December, Duty was Target’s Director of Business Partnerships & Negotiations. In that role he strategized on how to use relationships with the gay community to drive profit. For example, at a recent Out & Equal Workplace Summit, Duty was a presenter on “How your Employee Resource Group can engage leaders and drive business results” as well as a workshop “about what Target is doing to leverage its LGBT ERG to drive bottom-line results.”

Target insists its donations to anti-gay equality politicians are just business, but at the same time it sends one of its execs, the company’s LGBT Business co-chair, to lecture on how leveraging LGBT groups is good for the bottom line. A paradox for Target, and Duty.

In his dot429 interview, Duty said of the scandal, “the first thing Target was concerned about” was “how do we ensure our own people feel good about us and that we are going to live up to the inclusive environment that we always talk about?” I spoke with a few of those “own people.”

Far from the protections of Target’s HQ and the gay-friendly Minneapolis metro, gay Target “team members” felt as betrayed as anyone else, but the handful I talk to tell me they didn’t get much of an explanation. One said that the gay employees in Minneapolis might have felt what Duty called “a huge coming together,” but at his store elsewhere in the Midwest, he thinks there was a memo.

From a store in Ohio, Mike (not his real name), a gay Target team member, told me about the reality of being gay at Target.

When I learned about the MN Forward, I was pretty shocked, and I thought they were overlooking things that effected everyone.

Soon after [customers] started coming into the stores and complaining, a memo of sorts was sent to all the stores, basically saying that they were sorry about what they were doing and that the only thing they were trying to support was job creation. That also said that they were going to stop the donations to that group because of the anti-gay views. Now, I know it didn’t stop there, but as far as I know, I am pretty disappointed in the company I work for. How they overlook some things and try to justify for ‘job creation.’

I think Target could do better, and it would make more people want to work for them and it would also help sales coming for the gay community.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind companies making political donations, so long as they stick to their morals, and above all, keep [their] promises when it comes to all inclusiveness, and fostering a community of diversity.

When I point out to Mike that Target recently donated to Roskam and Hatch under the banners of bipartisanship and business interests, he says, “I am very disappointed. Of course it doesn’t surprise me.”

The thing about “being gay at target” is that the company’s inclusiveness can indeed be very encouraging — if you’re gay at Target HQ, or a gay employee at a Target in an area that is itself gay-friendly. If you’re gay at any one of the hundreds of Target stores in many of the 38 states that don’t even extend basic sexual-orientation employment protections to their citizens, being gay at Target is only marginally better than being gay at any other plain old job.

Congressman Barney Frank recently reintroduced the national Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), which would assure that all gay Americans had at least the beginnings of the kind of protection Target affords its employees.

But the Republican-led House is not expected to take up the bill, especially since Speaker John Boehner himself has come out against such protections in the past.

Boehner, the congressman from Ohio, where Mike works at Target, is a House speaker who, in addition to making sure Frank’s bill is never taken up, favors constitutional amendments banning same sex marriage and gay adoptions.

Last year, in October, two months after Steinhafel apologized, even when it was clear John Boehner would win his race (he received 68 percent of the vote), the Target PAC gave the Speaker the annual maximum donation.

Barney Frank has never received a dime from Target.

Target can release all the diversity videos it wants, but it will never be able to square its less-public behavior with employees like Mike.

Meanwhile, Target continues to hold up its domestic partner benefits as proof of its dedication to the LGBT community. And while these benefits are certainly above average (as, increasingly, are any benefits at all), they are less and less a hook on which to hang the totality of a brand’s gay rights bona fides.

According to the HRC, the majority of Fortune 500 companies now extend domestic partner benefits to employees (seven of the Fortune 10 do). Orange was just the latest county in Florida to extend same sex partner benefits to all employees.

Last year, about the same time that Target was donating to Michele Bachmann’s reelection campaign, the Department of Defense committed to offering same-sex partner benefits. Yes, the Department of Defense. And as Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, told Military.com in March, “If the Defense Department is going to extend benefits to civilian partners [of civilian employees] it’s not a very big step to say the same rules should apply to military personnel.” She noted that after the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the increasingly unpopular Defense of Marriage Act is the only real barrier to this happening.

And when the US military begins offering domestic partnership benefits to active soldiers, private businesses that want to claim above-board LGBT friendliness are going to have to do better than “same-sex benefits”

At the very moment that Target is negotiating its sponsorship of this year’s Twin Cities Pride event, its MN Forward donation is starting to bear fruit.

Sure, the homophobic gubernatorial candidate MN Forward backed, Tom Emmer, was defeated. But two of the six state representatives that Target’s MN Forward money financed, Rep. Doug Magnus and Rep. Kurt Zellers, will likely vote in favor of Minnesota’s just-introduced measure that puts a constitutional amendment against gay marriage on the 2012 ballot. It’s Minnesota Nice Prop 8. Why is it likely that Target-backed Magnus and Kurt will vote in favor? Because they both already supported the original marriage definition bill sponsored by then-state Rep. Bachmann in 2005.

When viewed in totality, Target’s espousing pro-gay rights claims while engaging in such political behavior is a little like bragging about a glorious sidewalk you built that is meant to go to a house for which you refuse to pay for the construction permit.

All of which isn’t to say Target is against gay equality, even if some of its top executives probably are. But it certainly is no more an advocate of gay equality than the majority of other successful corporations that recognize that discrimination is just plain bad for business.

It seems as though Target thinks spending a lot on gay equality organizations and causes alone will get it back in the good graces of the community. But this idea of buying influence is what got Target here to begin with. Now, not only does the retailer refuse to answer simple questions justifying its latest political giving, it also needs to be held accountable for its behavior, starting with its support of politicians who currently represent a real threat to the rights of Minnesota’s gay community.

Abe Sauer can be reached at abe sauer at gmail dot com.

Last night Philip Glass told this story about how John Cage once emptied the house during a performance. Cage had gotten it into his head to do a spoken performance where he made a cut-up poem out of syllables or something? Man, it sounds like the worst thing ever, just being trapped in a room with John Cage endlessly making vowel noises at you, and so he achieved a 100% audience walkout. Glass’ point was that there has to be a place to try and make things and achieve failure along the way (typical Buddhist!) and he was telling this story because this was at the 40th anniversary dinner for The Kitchen, which to its great credit still provides a space for young creative people in New York City to experience flop sweats. Then Sina Najafi, the editor of Cabinet magazine, told me a related story about Mierle Ukeles, which is at this point, with me telling you, really is something of a game of telephone and may range in accuracy anywhere from “apocryphal” to “entirely accurate,” the failures being mine.

Ukeles wrote the Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969 in, yes, 1969. (“Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time.”) And her work became about, well, work: cleaning up, taking care of things, garbage and the performance of often invisible labor. If you’ve heard of her, it’s because of her project of shaking the hands of all of New York City’s 8,500 sanitation workers and thanking them. (It took 11 months.)

Ukeles had proposed a series of projects to the Wadsworth Atheneum, one of which was cleaning out a mummy case, and one of which was cleaning the galleries.

So she shows up on the appointed night to clean. The museum has closed. She has the keys and gets her mop and bucket and whatnot and she realizes… that there really is no one there. Not even the curator is there to see her show. She’s not sure if she should be miffed or what. Like she’s actually doing a performance for literally nobody — just like the janitors would do. (I mean obviously there are questions here about performance that emulates work and actual work. It’s not like the janitors would be performing for an audience!)

Anyway, she’s like, okay, well, this is the point, right? I guess I’ll start cleaning. So she’s like mopping this big old museum. And finally, after a while, some art handler comes downstairs from where he’d been up late, packing art or messing around or something.

And so this lone guy is watching her perform/work, following her around, while she’s getting down in the corners with a rag or whatever. This goes on for ages. I imagine this being just like Night at the Museum but extremely boring. Finally, the place is clean, and he bursts into applause.

Then I imagine their parting as being awkward, as it usually is when the ratio of performers to audience is 1:1.

Year later she runs into him at a party, and he’s Mike Kelley, now a famous artist, and he tells her it was the greatest thing ever.

And as with all good stories, there’s both more and also far less to the tale.

Today in stupidity: “Holding up the supermarket industry as a model for the equitable distribution of life’s necessities is like holding up the NFL as a model of gender parity. Evidently, you can become a professor of economics — and can write on economics for the opinion page of the nation’s leading business newspaper — without knowing anything at all about how and where the most basic, everyday goods might be bought and sold in America.”

Awww, won’t someone give this adorable baby polar bear cub a home? Look how cute she is! Elsewhere in bears, here you will find pictures of a mama Kamchatka teaching her cubs to climb a tree.

“There can’t be answers today. While I was still alive writing this, I was sad to know I’ll miss these things — not because I won’t be able to witness them, but because Air, Marina, and Lauren won’t have me there to support their efforts. It turns out that no one can imagine what’s really coming in our lives. We can plan, and do what we enjoy, but we can’t expect our plans to work out. Some of them might, while most probably won’t. Inventions and ideas will appear, and events will occur, that we could never foresee. That’s neither bad nor good, but it is real.”
 — Vancouver writer Derek K. Miller asked that a final post be published on his blog after he died, which happened on Tuesday. You may not want to read it. Because it is devastatingly sad. But it is also beautiful and inspiring. I am very glad that I read it.

by David Hill

Every year for the past 55 years during the week leading up to the Kentucky Derby, Louisville has hosted one of the nation’s largest parades, the Pegasus Parade. Every year but one. In 1967, the parade and all the other traditional “Derby Week” events were cancelled. That year, instead of the usual festival and fanfare, tension was in the air. Civil rights protests and counter-protests had brought the city to the brink of full unrest. As race day approached, Louisville’s mayor asked the governor to call in the National Guard to help police Churchill Downs. The Ku Klux Klan had announced they would also be in attendance at the race in full regalia, ready and willing to stop any potential disruption.

Against this backdrop, a thoroughbred racehorse named Proud Clarion arrived from Lexington to stable at Churchill Downs.

It was fitting that Proud Clarion would arrive to a city forgoing fanfare. He wasn’t supposed to be there. The horse hadn’t won a single stakes race in his two years of racing. He had never run the mile-and-a-quarter distance of the Derby, and most of his wins were in short sprint races. He had just run a surprising second in the Blue Grass Stakes at Keeneland racecourse in Lexington a few weeks before. This win somehow instilled his trainer, Loyd Gentry Jr., with enough confidence to enter him in the Run for the Roses. Gentry’s bid was ridiculed by horsemen all over Louisville. So much so that one week out from the biggest race of his (or Proud Clarion’s) life, Gentry still hadn’t found a jockey to take the mount.

As Gentry searched for a jockey, it was far from a lock that the city would even have a Derby at all.

***

If it were up to Hosea Williams, there wouldn’t have been a Kentucky Derby that year. For a while it seemed like it might actually be up to him, too. Williams was one of the country’s foremost organizers and agitators, and he had come to Louisville that year to kick up some serious dust.

When Williams arrived in Kentucky in February of 1967, the city was actually known around the country for its progressive stance on civil rights. One of the only major Southern cities to integrate their schools without incident, Louisville had escaped much of the unrest and protest that had spread across other Southern urban centers in the ’60s. But in 1967 all of that was changing, and African-American Louisvillians found themselves taking to the streets, marching, sitting-in and facing arrests.

For three years, civil rights leaders in Louisville had been pressing the board of aldermen to pass a bill to make it illegal to refuse to sell or rent property based on race. Since desegregation, white flight had had a dramatic impact on the city, and housing discrimination was further exacerbating the city’s racial divide. A group of influential black ministers and civil rights leaders formed the Committee on Open Housing (COH) to organize a protest movement in support of the fair housing bill. After suffering several defeats, the COH were ready to give up on lobbying the board of alderman and turn to the kinds of tactics that had been so effective elsewhere in the civil rights movement. Led by Rev. A.D. King — brother of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. — the committee asked the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) to send them some help. The SCLC sent them Williams.

Hosea Williams was a creative organizer, a veteran of seminal civil rights battles like the Birmingham Project-C campaign, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Battle of the Bridge in Selma. Upon his arrival in Louisville, he huddled up with the committee’s leaders to discuss strategy. His recommendation: that the protests should target the people in a position to help the fair housing law pass — that is, the city’s aldermen, the mayor, as well as members of the Concerned Citizen’s Committee, a politically influential segregationist group.

In the first week of March, the campaign kicked off with a march to Mayor Kenneth Schmied’s furniture store. In the following weeks there were further marches and demonstrations in front of the aldermen’s homes. The aldermen lived in all-white neighborhoods, and the marchers were often met by jeering crowds of angry residents.

The campaign soon grew even more provocative. On March 14, the COH held a sit-in during a meeting of the board of aldermen. Police reacted brutally — stomping on participants and dragging them down the stairs of the courthouse. Their actions fanned tempers, as the community reacted to the sight of children and elderly women being physically assaulted and mistreated.

Attempting to quell the protests, Mayor Schmied was quick to lay the blame on “outsiders,” specifically calling out the SCLC organizers that had come to Louisville. This got the attention of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He wired Schmied a telegram which praised Louisville’s “reputation for pioneering in social progress” while also condemning the attacks on protesters and the city’s refusal to pass fair housing legislation.

In order to give the issue some national attention, Dr. King decided to bring the national SCLC board meeting to Louisville. On March 30, he led a march and rally of nearly 400 people, effectively putting the opponents of fair housing in Louisville on notice that he and the SCLC were making this fight a national priority.

Following Dr. King’s visit, A.D. King decided the COH should hold their marches to aldermen’s homes nightly. In Luther Adams’s Way Up North in Louisville, A.D. King is quoted as saying that the marchers were just out “home shopping” in the aldermen’s neighborhoods. “You can’t buy anything until you’ve looked at it,” he joked. The counter-protests turned uglier. After one of the nightly “home shopping” marches, police reportedly confiscated Molotov cocktails from a group of young whites.

The COH’s protests continued through April. Mayor Schmied passed ordinances to make it easier for police to arrest demonstrators; hundreds of protesters were thrown in jail, emptying COH’s reserves as the organization was forced to post bail for so many of its members. During one protest, A.D. King was hit in the head by a rock and his teenage daughter knocked to the ground. Hearing of the incident, Louisville native Muhammad Ali — who had recently announced his decision to defy the draft — rushed home to show his support for the fair housing movement.

Ali wasn’t the only celebrity who came to town to support the movement. Comedian-turned-activist Dick Gregory showed up as well. In fact it was he who first brought up the idea of disrupting the Kentucky Derby. At a protest outside the jail that held a young SCLC organizer, Gregory said, “I ain’t going to lay down in front of a horse myself but there’s a lot of cats that will. If it comes to closing the Derby up, we’ll just have to close it up.”

The idea made many of the movement’s leaders — including A.D. King and Anne Braden (a prominent white civil rights and labor activist who had made national headlines after purchasing a home in an all-white neighborhood for a black family who had previously been denied the right to buy there) — nervous. They knew that shutting down the Derby — an almost religious institution in Kentucky — would be perceived as an unforgivable transgression. But others, Williams most vocally, took up the idea. Williams strongly believed that the threatening to shut down the Derby was precisely the leverage the movement needed. And he wasn’t bluffing, either. Williams believed that if the group threatened to shut down the Derby, they had to be prepared to follow through.

“Derby or no derby,” he said, “there’s going to be some hell in Louisville until a housing bill is passed.”

Williams proposed a number of tactics for disrupting the Derby. Tactics such as “drive-ins,” during which activists would flood the streets around Churchill Downs with their own cars, driving as slowly as possible in order to create a traffic snare that would prohibit horse owners from getting their mounts to the post in time. He also advocated that, once the race started, a group of protesters actually move onto the track and hold a sit-in on the stretch in order to stop the race altogether. Many members of the COH wanted instead to simply call for a boycott of the Kentucky Derby, hoping the threat of lost revenue would be enough to pressure the city aldermen. Others still felt that the Kentucky Derby was off-limits and they should avoid targeting it at all.

***

One week out from the Kentucky Derby, and the groups hadn’t reconciled. But as a nod to Williams and his supporters, the COH’s leadership agreed to have the nightly marches wind from white neighborhoods to end at Churchill Downs. Reprisals were swift. Hundred of marchers were rounded up and arrested in the racetrack parking lots, A.D. King and Anne Braden among them.

With many members of the COH leadership in jail, Williams was able to take the reins. He called for “trial runs” of some of his direct-action tactics.

As Proud Clarion and other Derby hopefuls arrived in Louisville they encountered traffic jams all around the track. Horses slated for weekday races were forced to “scratch” when they were unable to reach the track in time for the post. The Monday before the Derby, five young men, including Robert Sims, a SCLC organizer, were on the apron near the stretch watching the day’s races. During an afternoon race, as the horses entered the back stretch, Sims and the others climbed over the rail, scuttled out into the middle of the stretch of the race course, and sat down in the dirt. As the horses rounded the turn into the final stretch run, their surprised jockeys pulled up tightly on their reins, bringing the race to a dead-stop.

The young activists were arrested, and the city of Louisville had their first glimpse of their worst nightmare — what could potentially be the scene on the First Saturday in May.

Local civil rights leaders were nervous about Williams’ “trial run” gambit, and they braced themselves for the reaction. But the reaction, while coming fast, wasn’t what they’d feared. “It exploded, and it exploded in our favor,” recalls Hal Warheim, a local activist, in Freedom on the Border, a collection of oral histories. “That Monday night the church was packed full of enthusiastic people who, I guess, finally realized that we were for real, we were serious, we were damn serious, dead serious, and would go to any length to get this ordinance. It just mysteriously pumped new energy into the movement.”

Mayor Schmied made no attempt to negotiate an eleventh-hour settlement. Instead, he panicked and asked the governor to send in National Guard troops. The Ku Klux Klan announced it would also be attending the race in force. As King and other members of COH leadership were released from jail, the city had already shut down Derby Week and was preparing for riots on Derby Day.

Concerned that Williams had gambled too high and lost, King called his brother back to Louisville to help diffuse the situation. The day before the Kentucky Derby, Dr. King appeared before a crowd of several hundred protesters and announced that the Committee for Open Housing would not make any effort to disrupt the Derby. Organizers, he said, would instead hold a march in downtown Louisville, quite possibly the most deserted downtown street in America on the First Saturday in May.

***

The 1967 Kentucky Derby was held on a rainy, humid day. The oppressive weather seemed suited for an event attended by over a thousand armed soldiers, police and Klansmen. However, the oppressive weather didn’t quite suit Damascus, the odds-on favorite to win the race. Before the race began, Frank Whiteley Jr., Damascus’s trainer, remarked that his horse was uncharacteristically sweating. Whiteley believed that his own anxiety that day probably affected his horse as well. “I don’t know what got him stirred up, but he was stirred up,” Whiteley said. “I was tense. You can pass that on to your horse.”

Proud Clarion felt no such tension. His blue-collar race history belied his fancy pedigree. He had only one big-time stakes race under his collar, and not a single stakes win in his life. He landed a jockey, Bobby Ussery, just two days before the race. And he was heading in to the race at 30–1 odds. Nobody believed in Proud Clarion. Like the working-class citizens of Louisville’s black community, Proud Clarion had not a lot to lose, but a whole world to win. Unlike the Committee for Open Housing, though, Proud Clarion pulled no punches on Derby Day.

As the 1967 Kentucky Derby unfolded, both Damascus and Proud Clarion raced in the middle of the pack, settling in behind the front running Barbs Delight. Both horses’ jockeys waited until the final turn to kick it in to gear and make their move. But as the horses rounded that turn into the final stretch — the same turn that days before had brought Robert Sims and his cohorts into the jockeys’ view — it was Proud Clarion who found his higher gear. He rocketed past Damascus, maneuvered into the middle of the stretch, and in swift, workmanlike fashion narrowed the gap between Barbs Delight and the rest of the pack. Proud Clarion won the Kentucky Derby by a single length in record time, and he did it at odds of 30–1. There had been no protests, no riots, no arrests. Everyone assembled — fans, horsemen, soldiers, and Klansmen alike — were in collective shock.

***

The decision to not disrupt the Derby bought the Committee for Open Housing and Dr. King no goodwill. The board’s position on the ordinance remained unchanged, and the board and mayor showed less willingness than ever to negotiate. When Dr. King returned to Louisville weeks later to try to help reignite the protests, he was struck by a rock thrown by a protester. He carried the rock to a rally at a church that night, held it before the assembled crowd, and declared, “Upon this rock we are going to build an open city. [We will] create a crisis so great that this city will have to respond.”

In truth, the weeks and months following the 1967 Kentucky Derby saw the Committee for Open Housing’s demonstrations draw fewer and fewer participants while meeting greater, and more violent, resistance. Eventually, the marches and other elements of the direct-action campaign were abandoned in favor of a new strategy. The Kentucky AFL-CIO and the local Democratic Party met with COH leaders and hatched a deal: if the COH would register black voters in Louisville and turn them out to vote the Democrats on to the board of aldermen, the Democrats would pass the fair housing legislation they wanted. The COH agreed and, in 1968, the Democrats took control of the board of aldermen. They made good on their promise, passed the ordinance, and the Committee on Open Housing took the success of their campaign on the road, registering voters across the state and pushing for what would later become the Kentucky Fair Housing Act.

***

In April 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. That same week, at Bowie Race Course, a horse called Dancer’s Image won the Governor’s Gold Cup. The horse’s owner, a wealthy New Englander named Peter Fuller, donated all of the horse’s winnings to Dr. King’s widow, Coretta Scott King. Fuller hailed Dr. King as “a great American who died trying to make this country free for all people.” He then packed his horse up and headed for Louisville. Like Hosea Williams before him, Fuller was going to Louisville to kick up some serious dust.

In 1968 there was no traffic jam on the way to the stable. And Dancer’s Image had no problem finding a jockey to ride him in the Kentucky Derby. The rider of Proud Clarion, Bobby Ussery, was happy to take the mount. But while Dancer’s Image was no long shot, his arrival was much whispered about among Churchill’s chattering class. Because of his public support of the civil rights movement, Peter Fuller received a chilly reception from Louisville’s old guard as well as a number of threatening phone calls and anonymous death threats. When Fuller requested extra security from Churchill Downs for his family and his horse he was denied — despite the deluge of armed security rolled out for the previous year’s Derby. He was everything the Louisville gentry was hoping wouldn’t return after 1967: an outsider, an opinionated liberal, an integrationist, a Yankee interloper.

The animosity towards Fuller and his horse only made him more strident and confident. He boasted the day before the race that Dancer’s Image would easily win. In a stunning act of hubris, he publicly rehearsed his run from the owner’s box to the winner’s circle before the gathered horsemen and punters at Churchill Downs.

The 1968 Derby didn’t unfold the way the race had the year before. Dancer’s Image didn’t rate off the pace the way that Damascus and Proud Clarion had. He took the final turn in last place, trailing the entire field. As they came around the turn Ussery accidentally dropped his whip. He was forced to slap the horse on the neck with his bare hands to urge him to go — a bizarre sight on a track. Ussery slapped and slapped and, in turn, Dancer’s Image galloped and galloped, closing quickly against the entire field to win a breathtaking race. Fuller trotted to the winner’s circle. His stride was confident — after all, he already knew the way.

Two days after the 1968 Derby, Churchill Downs announced that they had detected an illegal substance in Dancer’s Image’s urine. Phenylbutazone (“bute” for short) is a drug used to treat flu-like symptoms in horses. It’s legal in most states for racehorses, and, interestingly, it was legal in every single Kentucky Derby both before and after 1968. The rules that year said that bute could not be administered within one week of the race, and a veterinarian testified that he had given Dancer’s Image the drug six days and seven hours before the race. The mistake gave the horse no unfair advantage, but Churchill Downs nevertheless stripped him of the title. The 1968 Kentucky Derby champion is now listed as Forward Pass, the horse that ran second. In the official records, Dancer’s Image is listed as having finished in last place.

Peter Fuller spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and several years fighting the ruling, exhausting every single one of his legal appeals. Believing the ruling to be the Louisville racing establishment’s way of getting retribution for the racial unrest the year before, Fuller never again set foot at Churchill Downs for another Kentucky Derby. He vowed never to return to Louisville unless he had a horse that he knew, as certainly as he knew in 1968, would win the Derby. If he did ever find such a horse, he told the Boston Globe in an interview conducted 40 years later, he would name the horse Dancer’s Revenge.

David Hill is an organizer and writer in Brooklyn, NY. He writes for Negative Dunkalectics. He likes Archarcharch in the Derby. Follow him on twitter here.

Top photo by Jim Ferguson, used with permission; second photo courtesy of Kentuckytourism.com.