Portfolio at NYU

Posted 11.20.03
Grief and Revolution
A Leftist Soldiers on After 9/11 Claims His Father

By Heather Marie Graham

After two planes exploded into the Twin Towers on September 11th, Jeremy Matthew Glick fielded two different types of calls. Because he shared the name of one of the men who brought down United flight 93 in rural Pennsylvania, rather than allow its terrorist hijackers to hit their next target, frantic loved ones checked in to make sure the Fairlawn, New Jersey native was not the same Glick on flight 93. Next, there were contradicting calls coming in assuring the Glicks that their patriarch Barry was okay, before another would ring to cast doubt on Barry's survival.

For a week the younger Glick searched morgues and scanned Dead on Arrival lists in a quest to find his father. It was finally confirmed that Barry Glick, Risk Manger for the Port Authority of NY/NJ, perished in Tower One when it collapsed because he stayed behind to assist a woman having an asthma attack. As Glick planned to memorialize his father, the man he called his "number one debate partner," he also held on tight to his leftist politics. "I've been a revolutionary for about 12 years," he says. "9-11 didn't set me off." If anything, he says, "It made me more disciplined."

Before the fires at Ground Zero had been fully extinguished, Glick joined a small crew of editors to put together "Another World is Possible: Conversations in a Time of Terror." Published only three months after the attacks, the book presented a wide range of experiences, from a broad range of ethnicities and religions, as a voice against a seemingly monolithic call for violent retribution. Glick has an essay that appears in the book, along with essays from a paramedic, a doctor, a journalist and several others, including some anonymous submissions.

A social justice activist since high school, Glick vehemently disagreed with the eye-for-an-eye mantra chanted by President Bush and a non-dissenting congress post-September 11th. While completing a Master's and working toward a doctorate in English and Africana Studies, Glick balanced his studies with a speaking tour to promote "Another World is Possible" and to talk about why his loss did not shake his leftist beliefs and why he held the U.S. government, dating back to the Carter administration, responsible for his father's murder. Glick also added his signature to the Not in Our Name Statement of Conscience that ran on a full page in The New York Times, twice.

Nearly two years later, still grieving the loss of his dad, 28-year-old Glick continues to speak "literally all over the country" at rallies and lectures. He maintains the same set of principles and sense of urgency against the war on Iraq that he exhibited while speaking against the bombing of Afghanistan. Affiliated with several organizations, he has represented groups like Not in Our Name, of which he is a board member, and September 11th Families for a Peaceful Tomorrow. His speeches challenge U.S. imperialism and foreign policy and put forth a political and historical analysis of why America was attacked in the first place. He also criticizes President Bush and calls for an end to the War on Iraq. "The U.S., under Bush's regime, should not be the arbiter of democracy because you cannot export a democracy you do not have internally," he says. He points out that President Bush was not democratically elected and calls for his impeachment.

A February 2003 interview on the O'Reilly Factor thrust Glick even further into the spotlight. O'Reilly wanted Glick to discuss why he signed Not in Our Name's Statement of Conscience after his father was killed in the World Trade Center attacks. Glick responded with an anti-aggression, anti-war, anti-imperialist assessment of the climate leading to September 11th, his opposition to a war on Iraq, and called into question the oppression of Palestine. The segment quickly devolved into an O'Reilly temper fit -- he got so angry he began shouting at Glick, "Shut up. Shut up." Glick calmly responded, "Oh, please don't tell me to shut up," but O'Reilly ordered Glick's mike cut and ended the interview after accusing Glick of sullying his father's memory. Transcripts of the interview have been widely circulated around the Internet and posted on many a left-leaning web site.

Had O'Reilly let Glick finish, he might have been able to clarify that his anti-war and anti-imperialist stance in no way absolves the guilt of the terrorists who attacked New York and Washington, D.C. Calling al-Qaeda a "goon squad" of an extreme right faction he likens to fascists, he says, "I think the political violence we witnessed on 9-11 is ridiculous and counterproductive. It's horrendous. All it does is alienate people and make them afraid. And, make them afraid of revolution, thinking that revolution equals some sort of random, massive violence."

"[O'Reilly] is a stranger, millionaire, media bigot who tried to slander me vis-à-vis my family," says Glick. He took special offense to O'Reilly's comments about Glick's father. "I'm very cautious not to say what his opinion of 9-11 would be because I don't think it's fair because he's not here." But, Glick asserts that he knows his father also "thought Bush's presidency was illegitimate" and that he was proud of his son's activism.

Glick's mother and sister support him too, but shun the media spotlight. Though Glick's mom has no interest in using her experience for activism, because she feels that her grief is private, he says of her, "She thinks it's useful that I've been able to use my experience to help me with my activism and it's very much in the spirit of what my father would do." After the O'Reilly debacle, Glick's sister wrote a letter to O'Reilly blasting his treatment of Glick.

Glick's activism started in high school, though his reading of revolutionary literature began in grade school. Years before joining the "Free Mumia" struggle in the early 90s, Glick says he was stealing books from his dad's bookshelf in the early 80s. "Dick Gregory's Autobiography," "The Autobiography of Malcolm X," and "Soul on Ice," by Eldridge Cleaver, topped Glick's reading list at age nine. Glick says that early on he developed "the consciousness of a young man of color." Adopted as a baby by a white Jewish family, Glick's origins have been pinned down to North Africa and the Mediterranean. "I'm an X," he says, though terming himself "African-identified."

As a younger man, Barry Glick was also a Marxist struggling against that era's war, Vietnam. Glick says his dad had "great admiration" for SDS, the Black Panthers and the women's movement. "It's not surprising," Glick says, "if you listened to the eulogies [at my father's memorial], where I come from." He then shares a sour irony, "That Sunday after the memorial, in my house, were the people my father always wanted to meet."

"The Left have been the ones who have really, seriously, demonstrated their empathy for my family," says Glick. He adds, "It was like this opening up of a world I had kept separate from my family."

Friends and comrades like Amiri Baraka, long-time activist and New Jersey Poet Laureate, and Mario Africa of the MOVE organization, were among the ranks offering their condolences. That meant a lot to Glick because he felt it was sincere and in no way an attempt to co-opt his family's grief to advance a political agenda.

Glick says specifically of Africa's support, "If anyone could understand what it would be like to lose a family member in that kind of act of violence [it would be] the MOVE family, which had been shot and bombed, literally fire-bombed, by the city of Philadelphia. Before I talked to Mario about it, that was one of the first things I thought about. Wow. I never really knew how they felt. Although those are different circumstances, it's still the same kind of machinations of the state apparatus that is responsible for our mutilated loved ones."

Originally acquainted to Glick through rallies and events around the free Mumia Abu-Jamal movement and the "MOVE 9" -- nine members of the MOVE organization held in prison since 1978 -- Glick and Africa established a friendship as they continued to work together politically. Africa talks of his support for Glick after his father died as reaction based in friendship. Because Glick "has always been there" for the MOVE family, he says, he "really wanted to be there for [Glick] the way he has been, and still is, for us"

One of Glick's regrets from the time period just after September 11th, however, is that he did not speak at his father's memorial (not a funeral because the family still does not have a body to bury). Fearing that the eulogies would become a platform for political ideology he says he "made this proviso that there'd be no politics," though he stood with his sister as she spoke of their father. It was a moment that made him feel "somewhat unprincipled" because he believes that there should be a dialogue of viewpoints whether they are the similar or different. Typically, Glick says, "I'll talk to anybody", regardless if they share the same political outlook. "I feel like you have to talk outside your circle."

As a student at Rutgers/New Brunswick, Glick solidified his commitment toward social justice. In tandem with his campus and local organizing efforts, Glick began a bi-weekly column in the Rutgers Daily Targum, called "Unlearning Privilege." He says his column became the "underground propaganda wing" for Rutger's multi-national Left.

Friend and writer, Dax Devlon Ross, says that Glick was "always into advocacy" at Rutgers. "He would take it upon himself to write an editorial that everybody would [end up] quoting." Ross says that Glick often had his finger on the pulse of what others were thinking and would articulate it in his column. "People could read it and count on it being there." Ross adds, "I hope people understand that [Glick's] values are genuine. Whatever he says is well thought out."

Africa concurs. "Even before the misfortune of losing a family member, [Glick] was a powerful activist in his own right." Africa goes on to say that he is in awe of Glick's ability to be "consistent and strong in his opposition" to war. At a benefit concert for Africa's Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (C.C.C.O.), in Berkeley, California, Glick was one of several activists invited to speak at a concert that featured Chuck D and the Fine Arts Militia, Ani DiFranco, Ozamatli and Michael Franti and Spearhead. "That was great because it was at the Berkeley State Theatre where Hendrix used to play," Glick says. "And there were 4,000 people there."

Speaking to that many people has become par for the course for Glick. In March 2003 he earned raucous applause and ovations as a panel speaker at WBAI's "Echo's of Dr. King's 'Beyond Vietnam': An Evening of Resistance to the War on Iraq" at Riverside Church. The audience was at full capacity, with an overflow in the lobby listening by radio. He was recently interviewed about his views on cable TV station New York One, and traveled to address a coalition of student and community organizers at the University of Illinois at Urbana.

Glick has also signed onto activist and organizer Rosa Clemente's tour, Speak Truth to Power: Hip-hop against the War. "It's the hip-hop generation's opposition to the Bush plan," he explains. The tour features Fred Hampton, Jr., Dr. Ron Daneiels, and Khalil Almustafa among others. In May, Glick is slated to speak at an anti-war conference in Santa Cruz, California.

Aside from traveling the lecture circuit, staying politically active and writing articles for progressive publications interested in his work, Glick continues to work on his doctoral dissertation on themes of black radicalism and dramatic tragedy around the Haitian Revolution and Toussaint L'Ouverture, and Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Though he does not think the revolutionary vanguard will rise out of academia, Glick does think it is important for there to be intellectualism on the Left. He lists Newton, George Jackson, Franz Fanon, Mao and Lenin as thinkers and writers who were scholars and revolutionaries able to reach the masses. To start a cultural revolution Glicks says, "I think we need revolutionaries everywhere."

Africa has faith that, academic or not, Glick will be "somebody who's going to be lighting the way for people for a long time." He adds, "He's going to make a lot of noise and do a lot of good for a long time."