A Father’s Day “No Kings” Tribute to a Lifelong Anti-fascist

It is Father’s Day as I write these words. And it’s one day after No Kings Day. My father, Dr. Richard Reichard, would have approved – he was a lifelong anti-fascist. 

In the Air Force in World War II, he was shot down behind fascist lines in Croatia, where the Croatian resistance took him and his surviving crewmates overland to the Adriatic coast, and from there by boat to Allied-held southern Italy. Not all his crewmates survived the war, but he did. 

After the war, my father went to graduate school at Harvard, where he became secretary of the Harvard chapter of the Communist Party, a move that later led to his being fired from his newly acquired teaching position at George Washington University, where none other than former F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover was on the board of directors and insisted on vetting every teaching candidate. 

Soon after getting fired by GWU, my father was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee. My mother sat next to my father, and my older brother and I sat on my mother’s knees as my father refused to cooperate with the committee’s witch hunt.

Eventually Dad got a teaching job at Cornell College in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, where History Department Chair Dr. William “Bill” Heywood, a pacifist World War II war resister, and Dr. Erik Kollman, a refugee from Hitler’s Austria, stuck their necks out and played key roles in my father’s hiring. But my father’s tenure at Cornell became problematic as his sympathy for increasing student radicalism over the Vietnam War became more and more open and apparent. Finally, in 1969, he made a clean break from Cornell and took a teaching job at then Queens College, now Queens University, in Charlotte, North Carolina.

But my father’s activism wasn’t over. Not even close. It just switched tracks.

When we moved to Charlotte, the city was beginning to emerge from the old south, but strong vestiges of its past remained. In 1971, radical Black activists Charles Parker, T.J. Reddy and Dr. James Grant were tried for the September 1968 burning of the Lazy B horse stable, where Reddy had been turned away when he sought to go riding at the Whites-only stable in September 1967. The men became known as the Charlotte Three, and their case coincided with that of the Wilmington Ten, nine Black men and one White woman who were framed for the bombing of a white-owned grocery store during a slow-boil Black uprising in Wilmington, North Carolina.  Both trials were, in the words of Bob Dylan, a pig circus – they never had a chance.

The North Carolina Political Prisoners Committee was formed to defend the Charlotte Three and Wilmington Ten, and my father was on the committee. At the age of 12, he brought me to the Charlotte Three trial – on school days.  And when a slate of three openly Klan school board candidates held a rally at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, Dad took me and my brothers to it. It all added up to an education no school could offer. My father knew history when he saw it – and he knew education when he saw it. 

Amid all this a Black couple moved into an all-White Charlotte neighborhood and had their new home repeatedly shot at, and Dad slept on their couch, after alerting the media that a white person would be on the receiving end of any future drive-by shootings.

In the seven years we lived in Charlotte, well-known radical journalist, trade unionist and activist Carl Braden, husband of equally well-known journalist, educator and civil rights activist Anne Braden, was a regular visitor in our home, and Carl loved telling me and my brothers how he was the only American to ever be convicted of sedition. He wore it like a badge of honor.

Another regular visitor to our home was Ray Robinson, a radical Black activist from Black-owned Revolution Farm in Alabama who later died under mysterious circumstances at the 1973 American Indian Movement Wounded Knee occupation.

Later on, in 1977, when Dad moved to Chicago, he became active in Amnesty International and tirelessly pounded out letters on his typewriter to heads of state, urging the release of political prisoners locked up in their hellhole dungeons. 

In Chicago, my father was on first-name basis with his neighbor Barack Obama, who seemed to like Dad’s eccentricities. And my father became good friends with his next-door neighbor Lisa Fittko, who fought street battles with Nazis in Berlin in the 1930s as Hitler rose to power in Germany, and who led Jews, including the philosopher Walter Benjamin, over the Pyrenees from occupied France to safety in Spain, while Hitler ravaged Europe. 

And that was my father. Friend, father, teacher, writer, and shaper of lives. In 1982, I was living and working in the south Texas town of Harlingen with refugees from Reagan’s wars in Central America, and I went to a party populated by Harlingen’s small progressive community. At the party I met a woman from Iowa, and I told her my father had taught at Cornell College. She asked me his name, and when I told her, she said, “Oh my god, from kindergarten through college, the best teacher I ever had.”

Yeah, same here. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. We miss you.

Lawrence Reichard is an activist and freelance journalist in Belfast, Maine.  He can be reached at thedeftpen@gmail.com. 

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