Old Fashioned Commie-Nazi Brawl

15.

Perhaps because WAM was “my” organization, I felt an extra twinge of excitement as I joined the picket line at the school board meeting that chill evening of early January, 1974. I found most such demonstrations exhilarating, but this time we were protesting the presence of Nazis – uniformed members of the American Nazi Party – at the meeting. It was nice to be attacking an enemy that was universally dispised for a change, and the party and its base were out in force, perhaps a hundred strong.

After five years, my teaching career had achieved a modicum of stability. I still didn’t have a permanent contract, but I had a year-long temporary assignment as a math resource teacher at Visitacion Valley Elementary School in the southeast corner of the city. I had full pay and full benefits. I spent much time developing a math resource center and working with manageably small groups of students. I didn’t have to take work home with me. My work life was as happy as it had ever been.

As the meeting was about to start, I marched with the WAM picket line into the large auditorium. Seated in a neat row at the center were 14 men dressed in full Nazi regalia.

Led by Yvonne Golden at the microphone, a black teacher whom we identified rightly or wrongly with our arch rival, the Communist Party USA, the crowd chanted “Throw the Nazis out! Throw the Nazis out!”

The Nazis were there to for the second week in a row – the previous week there had been only four – to protest an attempt use bussing to integrate the San Francisco schools.

The chanting went on for at least 20 minutes, without the board even trying to call itself to order. Then, quite suddenly, to my – and everyone else’s – surprise, a group of about a dozen people, men and women I recognized as PLP members rose up behind the Nazis and began physically to carry out the chant. I realized right away to my simultaneous delight and dismay, that my comrades were implementing a secret plan. Fists were flying, people were screaming, chaos reigned.

I didn’t know what to do. Should I join in the melee or just let my comrades do all the work? Then I saw right in front of me a man in a beige sport coat and tie clubbing people – my comrades -- with a short baton. I assumed he was some kind of plain clothes Nazi. On sheer impulse, I grabbed his arm.

His club came down hard on my face, and the salty taste blood filled my mouth. I hit the floor. Seconds later, I was in hand-cuffs, still bleeding from the lip. As I now looked around, I saw the room swarming with uniformed police in riot gear – this move was clearly planned as well. In another five minutes, I was hauled out of the building and thrown into the back of paddy wagon along with a number of my comrades, Ellen, Steve, Bill, and others whose names I no longer remember.

My mouth hurt. I was confused. I was a little scared, though reassured by the presence of my comrades. I guessed I had done the right thing. The fact that the plan had been secret bothered me some, yet I could see that it was done partly to protect me from this very situation, to keep me from being associated with the attack and thereby protect my position with the school district.

We were taken downtown. I was booked on felony assault on a police officer. What? He was a police? I didn’t know that. I thought he was a Nazi. Maybe he was both. Assault? I was trying to stop him from assaulting others. Gradually my doubts about my role were replaced by a sense of righteous victimization. I was a cause.

About 7 of us were arrested, 5 men and 2 women, including Yvonne Golden, who had nothing to do with the attack. The 5 men spent the night in the felony tank at the city jail among the dope dealers and armed robbers, all of whom simply ignored us, as if we were from an alternate universe.

Sasha met me the next morning. She had had to put up the house to pay my $2500 bail. She took me to the dentist, my regular dentist, who stitched up my lip and to his credit, hardly mentioned my notoriety: Our “old fashioned Commie-Nazi brawl” was all over the papers – it even made national news – complete with names of the arrested.

The principal of my school, a well-known racist head of the Teamster’s Union chapter for principals, tried to get me dismissed. Once again I had to meet with the district's Personnel Director, Bob Seymour, a guy who had tried to be fair to me over the years, who kept me around finding me temporary assignments. I had the sense of him trying to be living disproof of my ideology that characterized the school system as fascistically undemocratic. This time he told me that the state would be looking into revoking my credential. I told him that I innocently grabbed the guy’s club, not knowing he was a cop, that I had no connection to WAM, an assertion he clearly didn’t believe.

Sasha was sympathetic, but scared, especially after the Nazis started calling our house. “Tell your commie husband he better be careful,” they said.

“I’m taking the kids to my mother’s in Palo Alto, Henry,” she told me.

“These chickenshit clowns are not going to do anything,” I said.

“Maybe not, but I can’t take that chance.”

I hugged her and I hugged Benjie and Zena, now 8 months old. I watched her drive away with a sinking feeling. Wasn’t I the victim here? Didn’t I need her support? It never occurred to me that her reaction might have had something to do with the fact that she was Jewish. She didn’t deserve it, and on some level I knew that, but I did feel a sense of profound betrayal, an excuse I may have been looking for to give up on the marriage.

I briefly enjoyed a certain celebrity. There were fundraisers to support the “Anti-Nazi Seven” as we’d come to be called. I spoke about how the police had interrupted my freedom of speech, since I had a bandage on my mouth from where I’d been hit. Sasha came to one of these events and spoke thus: “I don’t support Henry’s politics, but I support him. He didn’t do anything wrong.” This was not the kind of thing the party leaders liked to hear from party spouses, and I wanted to crawl through the floor.

Led by Ellen, a feisty blond parent organizer, at the arraignment we all declared that we would defend ourselves in pro per, a tactic the party sometimes used, with mixed success, to attempt to embarrass the judicial system. This time though the party leadership didn’t want to waste resources on a major trial, so when we were offered a plea bargain that reduced the charges to misdemeanor “disrupting a public meeting” with a sentence of 3 weekends in jail, the party jumped at it.

With some support from the union, I was reinstated by the district to my job at Vis Valley. They transferred the principal instead. I doubt whether the principal transfer had anything to do with me, but it did make things easier.

That spring, we served our sentences in the city jail, 3 weekends, Friday night to Monday morning. Despite the fact that Steve, Bill, and I were in jail together, despite our attempts to amuse ourselves by playing hockey with crumpled balls of paper, despite our stimulating cellmates, an interesting crew of Iranian gas siphoners, despite being allowed to bring in all kinds of books including Lenin’s “What is to be Done?” – the experience was excruciatingly boring, perhaps enough so for me to avoid going to jail again for the rest of my life.