final credits - frank wilkinson
Frank Wilkinson was a housing official whose run-in with Senator Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) started him on a five-decade long campaign against government spying.
He was one of the last two people jailed for refusing to tell the Committee whether he was a Communist.
It all started when Wilkinson was head of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, spearheading a project to replace the sprawling Mexican-American neighbourhood of Chavez Ravine with 3,500 new public-housing units.
Real estate interests that viewed public housing as a form of socialism accused Wilkinson of being a Communist.
Under oath at a City Council meeting, Wilkinson declined to answer the claims. LA Mayor Fletcher Bowron punched a man in the audience who had called him a "servant of Stalin."
After Wilkinson was questioned by the California Anti-Subversive Committee he was fired along with four other housing officials and five school employees.
The housing project was scuttled and the land eventually became the site of Dodger Stadium, new home to the former Brooklyn Dodgers. The episode inspired a recently released album by Ry Cooder called "Chavez Ravine." One song, "Don't Call Me Red," goes, "God will love you if you just play ball."
In 1955, Wilkinson was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and he used what he believed was a novel approach. Instead of claiming his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination, he refused to answer on First Amendment grounds (freedoms of belief, speech and association), saying the committee had no right to ask him.
The committee requested that Congress cite Wilkinson for contempt and in 1958 he and a co-worker, Carl Braden, became the last men ordered to prison at the committee's request. Wilkinson spent nine months in jail.
Upon his release, Wilkinson travelled the country, speaking and protesting through his National Committee to Abolish HUAC. When HUAC was abolished in 1975 (its functions were simply transferred to the House Judiciary Committee) Wilkinson formed the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation and later the First Amendment Foundation, which defends the right to dissent.
Wilkinson found out the FBI was keeping tabs on him and he fought for the release of over 132,000 documents covering 38 years of surveillance.
The files contained information about an assassination attempt in 1964. In 1987, a federal judge ordered the FBI to stop spying on Wilkinson and to never do it again.
In 1999, Wilkinson received a lifetime achievement award from the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1995, the City of Los Angeles issued a citation praising Wilkinson for his "lifetime commitment to civil liberties and for making this community a better place in which to live."
Frank Wilkinson died January 2nd, 2006 at the age of 91 from complications from infection.