Joe Straley
Template:TOCnestleft Joe Straley was a North Carolina activist.
Joe Straley, 90, died Sept. 21 2005 at UNC Hospitals. Born in Paulding, Ohio, in 1914, Straley taught physics at UNC-Chapel Hill. His local activism began with the Civil Rights movement, and expanded to include opposition to war, the death penalty and U.S. imperialism, especially in Latin America.
Chapel Hill community and civil rights activist Fred Battle says Straley was a person who won the trust of African Americans. Battle was in high school when he first met Straley during efforts to desegregate Chapel Hill's lunch counters. Battle would meet with Straley and the late Rev. Charles Jones at the Community Church of Chapel Hill, a congregation that Straley and his surviving wife, Lucy Straley, helped found more than 50 years ago.
"Joe Straley was a man that really stood up for what he believed in, and his legacy was that he stood up for people's human rights and civil rights, and he was a champion for the disenfranchised people of the community as well as the nation, because he went over to Nicaragua and everything. He was a man that was committed to helping people."
Regardless of the struggle, "you could always count on Joe to be present and involved, and I don't think we will see that again," Battle says. "He leaves a legacy and some shoes that will be hard to fill."
UNC law professor emeritus Daniel H. Pollitt, a Community Church member and longtime friend of the Straleys, said Joe should also be remembered as an accomplished scholar.
"What everybody has forgotten is that he was a physicist," Pollitt says. "Joe taught physics to high school physics teachers, which was a very significant endeavor. Nobody ever thinks of him as a professor, and I do. He was far more than an activist and he was far more than a professor. Among his many other virtues, he was a scholar and a professor and a teacher of the young."
Pollitt says Straley's death leaves a void in the peace community.
"Somebody will step forward eventually, but it will be quite a while before we have anybody with Joe's dedication and his energy," Pollitt says. "Joe's been ill for two or three years, and he's had shingles, which is very painful, but despite all that he kept going. It's hard to find anybody with that combination of energy and drive."
Raleigh activist Gail Phares, founder of the Carolina Interfaith Task Force on Central America (CITCA), worked closely with Straley. It was Phares who introduced Straley the night he received the Peace Action award. Phares says Straley built a local CITCA mailing list in Chapel Hill and Carrboro that included close to 500 people.
"He's one of the most extraordinary people that I've ever known," Phares says. "He was not only a good organizer, but he was just a very dear, loving person. He's one of our elders. I was so grateful he was focused on Central America. He could have focused on anything, but for the last many years that's what he did, and he was clear-thinking right up to the end. It's a big loss."
At the Peace Action awards dinner, Straley acknowledged his wife, Lucy, as "my absolutely best friend." And he answered the boilerplate question: "What's the first thing you'd do if you were president?"
Before giving his answer, Straley asked a friend to "check and see if the coast is clear" and free of FBI agents. Told it was all clear, Straley said his first act as president would be to "get rid of the Star Spangled Banner. Do away with our national anthem; right away--today--not wait till tomorrow.
"And why? Well, folks, I'm tired of singing about the rocket's red glare. I'm tired of hearing about how wonderful is the bombs bursting in midair. I'm tired of the suggestion that I'm going to get down in my Sunday pants and look up at a piece of cloth on that old pole in awe and wonder. I'm tired of 'conquer we must.' I'm tired of having Mr. Bush tell me that the cause is just."
Straley is survived by his wife, sons, David Straley and Joe Straley, Jr., and daughter, Lesley. Also surviving are his sister, Miriam Smith, and his brother, Huston Straley.[1]
600 Local Activists Reclaim Dr. King's Radical Legacy
According to Will Jones, a graduate student at UNC and an activist with the Carolina Socialist Forum, Internationalist Books, and the North Carolina chapter of the Committees of Correspondence.
Chapel Hill - Six hundred people came out Monday, January 20, 1998 for a march and rally in celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King's dedication to radical social change. The Chapel Hill/Carrboro NAACP, in coalition with more than thirty other organizations, organized this year's march to mark recent gains by the UNC Housekeepers Association and the Chapel Hill/Carrboro Black Public Works Association. According to long-time Chapel Hill activist Joe Straley, this was the largest such event the town had ever seen.
The size of the march reflected two months of dedicated coalition work. The NAACP, the BPWA, and the HKA worked with the Carolina Socialist Forum, the Coalition for Economic Justice, the Lesbian Avengers, the Feminist Alliance and other groups to build a coalition to plan the celebration. Organizers sent over 800 letters and flyers asking community and work place organizations, churches, and campus groups to spread the word and to join the march. They spoke before congregations, on the radio, and local cable access television, and passed out thousands of flyers advertising the event.
The day before the march, Carolina Socialist Forum began the celebration with a panel discussion entitled Civil Rights for the 1990s: A Call for Economic Justice. Dr. Gerald Horne, director of the Black Cultural Center, began the forum with an historical view of the relationship between racism and economic exploitation in the United States. Lesbian feminist activist Mab Segrest followed by pointing out the need for a global perspective on social inequality in the present period. Lizbeth Melendez, who is helping Guatemalan poultry workers organize a union in Morganton NC, concluded with a local view of the relationship between racial justice and the union movement. All three speakers stressed the centrality of economic justice in civil rights struggles for people of color, women, lesbians, gays, bi-sexuals, and other targets of discrimination.
Martin Luther King Day began with a rally on the steps of the Chapel Hill post office. Dave Lippman warmed up the crowd with songs, and the Internationalist Bookstore displayed a selection of books on Dr. King and the civil rights movement. As the crowd grew from 50 to 75 to 150 people, Hank Anderson of the NAACP called them closer for a series of speeches.
Speakers included Joe Straley, John Herrera, Gerald Horne, and other Chapel Hill activists. Alley Murphey brought greetings from the Housekeepers Association at Eastern Carolina University, and Chris Smith of the UNC Housekeepers read a poem. By the time Ange-Marie Hancock of the Feminist Alliance and the Coalition for Economic Justice introduced the chants for the march, the crowd had grown to 400.
The march began with a short walk to Silent Sam, a confederate war memorial on the UNC campus. There NAACP president Fred Battle and Yonnie Chapman of the Internationalist Bookstore spoke of the need to acknowledge the history of racism at UNC. Silent Sam, they explained, represents the hypocrisy of a university fabled for its liberalism where many of the campus buildings are named for slave owners. One hall, Saunders, is even named for the founder of North Carolina's Ku Klux Klan. Chapman suggested that one way to rectify UNC's racist past would be to replace Silent Sam with a monument to the black workers who had built and maintained the University for 200 years. UNC student Courtney Scott then led the crowd in the Black National Anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing."[2]