What Lies Beneath

By Eugene Robinson

Anyone who thinks that racism in this country is history really ought to watch the video of Kramer going postal.

Talking About Race

Poor, Black and Dumped On By BOB HERBERT

Ole Miss salute to Meredith helps heal racial past

Judge dismisses lynching charge against Walhalla man

Man charged with hate crimes after scarecrow lynching

A Lesson from a Lynching

SWAT teams shot suspect with 68 bullets

Modern day lynching in Florida: Racist cops shot suspect 68 times

Governor Bush refuses to investigate Freeland’s shooting death

Pain fills diary of deputy's killer

Negro League great Buck O'Neil, 94, dies

“I can’t remember a time when I did not want to make my living in baseball, or a time when that wasn’t what I did get to do,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2003. “God was very good to old Buck.”

O'Neil should be a Hall of Famer

Ken Burns interview from Story of the Game

Hispanic Family Finds Burning Cross in Yard

Bigger Than Hip Hop

A look at the state of black political leadership

Corporal Punishment’s Hidden Costs

By Salim Muwakkil

If the civil rights community began a movement to discourage corporal punishment among African Americans, I believe it would do more to stem the tide of interpersonal violence than any other strategy.

An Abolitionist Leads the Way in Unearthing of Slaves’ Past

Being a Black Man

Straight Outta Boston

Why is the "Boston Miracle" -- the only tactic proven to reduce gang violence -- being dissed by the L.A.P.D., the FBI, and Congress?

Daniel Duane
January/February 2006 Issue

AMONG THE COMPETING STORIES about how to stop gangbangers from slaughtering each other, here's the leading contender from the street: Sometime in '77 or '78, at a South Central L.A. junior high, a Grape Street Crip named Loaf, from the Jordan Downs housing project, sticks a knife into a Bounty Hunter Blood named Night Owl, from Nickerson Gardens, killing him on the spot. One bloody reprisal leads to a hundred bloody more, feuds spread through the two other big Watts projects—Imperial Courts, home of the PJ Crips, and Hacienda Village, home of the Circle City Pirus. With all of them warring against each other—Crip against Crip, Crip against Blood—and the crack wars raging, and L.A. gunslingers wasting 800 people in 1992 alone, Watts becomes the national epicenter of the shadow fantasy that lives in the heart of every American, that Boyz N the Hood dystopia in which lunatic teenagers troll the streets with AK-47s, gunning down suckers without remorse. To be hopeful is to be a fool—it's all going to hell, steer clear—but, to hear Aqeela Sherrills tell it, the answer comes from the black community itself. First, Louis Farrakhan introduces a handful of rival gangbangers to Jim Brown, the retired NFL Hall of Fame running back. Brown directs a self-empowerment nonprofit called Amer-I-Can, and he starts inviting the four gangs up to his posh Hollywood home, feeding them pizza around the pool and pushing them to lay down arms. It's not all love and kisses: One of the PJ Crip OGs, a guy named Tony Bogard, had just shot and killed a Grape, and the Grapes riddle Bogard in return, though not fatally. But Daude Sherrills, Aqeela's older brother and a Grape OG, finally writes a cease-fire treaty based on the text of the Israel-Egypt truce of 1949. The only thing left is to make it real, to walk each other's streets without fear, and it's Aqeela who actually talks a handful of his fellow Grapes into the unthinkable: driving down to Imperial Courts and stepping into the broad daylight of the PJs' turf.

As soon as they show up, Aqeela says, people start running into their houses, yelling, "All the cats from Jordan Downs over here!" But then Bogard emerges, demanding they step into the gym for a conference. "He was talking about how, 'This can't happen just like this! It's going to take years! I just got shot up!'" Aqeela recalls. "But our Gs was over there, too. A lot of these cats is dead now, but they had a higher level of consciousness, and they was all just like, 'Fuck that shit, you know, we ain't never going to heal all that! That's in the past. We got to make this shit right for the little homies.' I was 25 at the time, so a lot of us young cats was like, 'Man, let these old niggas stand in the gym and talk. Niggas ain't going to shoot nobody, let's go outside.'" So they do. They walk right into a crowd of PJs. "The young cats from the Imperial Courts," Aqeela says, "they was like, 'Man, you all wit it? You all wit the peace?' And we was like, 'Yeah, we wit it!'"

Right then, in Aqeela's memory, "it was like, 'Fuck it, it's on!' People yelling it, house to house, it was unbelievable, you could see people coming outside, 'It's on! The peace treaty on!' Mobs of people driving up, girls seeing dudes they been wanting to see for years." By the next morning, which was also the day the Rodney King riots erupted, the cease-fire party had rolled back to Jordan Downs, the Circle City Pirus had shown up to make amends, and yes, even the Bounty Hunters, all those years later, came just to let bygones be bygones. "There were so many peace-treaty babies, it was ridiculous!" says Sherrills.

Aqeela Sherrills, gang member and street worker, in front of the Watts Towers

And here's why this story matters: Gang violence plummeted nationwide in the years that followed, along with an overall drop in violent crime, but while the overall number remains stable, youth homicide is rising again. Since the late 1990s, in fact, the only demographic to see an increase in murder victims is men between the ages of 25 and 34, and 67 percent of killings between young men are gang-related. According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report for 2004, the latest with complete data, juvenile gang homicides have jumped 23 percent since 2000. And there's no new drug epidemic to explain the change, nor is it confined to the ghetto. Much of the new gang activity is occurring in the affluent D.C. suburbs, sleepy Provo, Utah, even the Northern California wine country, which has provoked a new round of that old hand-wringing about how our kids got to be so psychopathic, and why we return again and again to this same awful place. If we brought down the violence before, one can't help wondering, why can't we bring it down again? And that's why the story of the so-called Watts truce is so important: In the dysfunctional national conversation about how to move forward, it turns out that none of the leading players can agree on what worked last time, what exactly is happening this time, or, least of all, what to do next.

"People who really understand the street," according to professor David Kennedy of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, "all understand a fundamental truth: that the stories we tell about gang violence are wrong. There are a couple of basic ones, and they're all wrong."

TALK TO LOS ANGELES POLICE Chief William Bratton, the former New York City police commissioner who currently has jurisdiction over the largest gang-violence problem in the world, and you get a picture of enormous, well-organized gangs proliferating nationwide and even internationally. A veteran of New York's crackdown on the Sicilian Mafia, of Boston's early successful experiment with community policing, and of New York's now-famous "Broken Windows" approach to stopping urban decay, Bratton has successfully encouraged the FBI to develop a new "National Gang Strategy." Targeting the biggest and most advanced gangs with a combination of RICO prose-cution, intelligence gathering, and special investigative techniques, the FBI's new approach is modeled after those used on traditional organized crime—"something that I've been advocating since I came to Los Angeles and saw the scope of the problem," Bratton says. "It was quite clear that it had grown to national proportion, so that gangs that began here in L.A. or Chicago had now begun to spring up in other areas." Local police departments, in Bratton's view, are simply too limited in their jurisdiction. "The tools that the feds can bring into the equation," he says, "their investigative powers, their sentencing powers, it would be crazy not to take advantage of that. I had experienced that in New York, working with the FBI in their attack on the old-style mafias, and how they were able to break their backs, and the belief that you could use many of the same prescriptions against these gangs, whether they be Latino or African American, the two principal groups I have to deal with here." To that end, in fact, an FBI task force has just been established specifically to dismantle Mara Salvatrucha, a.k.a. MS-13, an international gang that started among Salvadoran immigrants in Los Angeles.

In South Central L.A., a gang-intervention counselor talks with a youth named Kemo, who was later killed.

But to hear it from people on the street, like Aqeela Sherrills, who has become a national figure in grassroots peace activism, speaking at dozens of conferences as far away as Croatia, running a Watts-based nonprofit that brokers truces between gangs all over the country, and meeting with the likes of director Michelangelo Antonioni and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, Bratton is missing the point. The mid-'90s drop in crime, in the view of Sherrills, happened not because of any top-down policing strategy but because thousands of men and women just like Sherrills, in a homegrown, street-level effort now called the urban peace movement, began devoting their lives to the tedious work of defusing conflict, day in and day out. Most gangs, they'll tell you, are less about drug dealing or violence than about community, desperate young people looking for surrogate families.

"A lot of people think that there's a level of sophistication within the gang culture like the Mafia," Sherrills says. "Not at all. There's no organization, there's no nothing." The Crips gang, Sherrills insists, admitting that he is still a member, "is not a sophisticated entity in any way. There's probably 1,200 cats in my neighborhood, and it's all broken up into cliques. So you got the Parolees, the Peta Roll Squad, the Boss Players, you got the Tiny Locs, and they all claim Grape. But they all in they own cliques. And you got the jackals in the neighborhood, people who rob folks, the drug dealers, the peacemakers, and then you got the killers. Individuals who are known, who shoot people." Responsibility for the new upsurge in violence, in Sherrills' view, has nothing to do with the gangs at all. It has to do with the system, with America's ongoing refusal to address poverty and racism, its continuing manipulation by the prison-industrial complex, and the government's betrayal of peacemakers, switching funding back over to the construction of jails and the arming of police forces.

L.A. Police Chief William Bratton

Kennedy, a leading academic criminologist and the architect of the only anti-gang-violence strategy that has ever worked against modern street gangs, shares much of Sherrills' view. As chief designer of Operation Ceasefire, Kennedy presided over a public-private antiviolence initiative that got such dazzling results, so fast, that it is now known in law enforcement circles as the "Boston Miracle." Using a mix of prosecutorial and psychological tactics, Ceasefire has since been replicated in so many small to medium-sized cities that it has emerged as academic criminology's answer to the urban peace movement, the favored gang-crime control strategy of the intellectual best and brightest. And like Sherrills, Kennedy sees the emphasis on huge, hyperorganized crime syndicates as a red herring, a distraction from the real engine behind the routine murder of young men in American cities, and a product of the misconceptions that the public and the police have about gangs.

The first of these misconceptions, Kennedy says, echoing Sherrills, is that gang members are murderous superpredators. "That's not true," he says. "One of the interesting things about these guys is that if you can pull one aside and talk to him away from his boys, they start talking about how shit-scared they are, and how they don't like this stuff, but if they don't act in certain ways their friends and their enemies all turn on them. You get the occasional psychopath, but most of these guys do not have the same commitment to violence that they might to making money on the street." In the words of T. Rodgers, founder of the Bloods crew in the notorious "Jungle" neighborhood, where Training Day was set, there are only two kinds of gang members, "cowards and kids, and both of them just want attention."

"Another story is that it's all about drugs," Kennedy says, "and that's not true either." While most gang members do participate in the drug trade, the popular image of Crips and Bloods battling for crack-dealing turf is as outdated as the movie Colors. Nor, in Kennedy's view, is gang violence a sickness somehow endemic to ghetto culture—"because almost everybody in these neighborhoods doesn't participate. Hardly anybody goes this way." In Boston, Kennedy found that even within the most gang-dominated neighborhoods, fewer than 5 percent of young men were gang members. A 2004 outburst of gang killings in San Francisco produced a similar finding: Only about 100 young men in the entire city were thought to be truly dangerous, and a couple dozen were thought to have done most of the killing. "But because almost everybody deals with one or another of those fictions," Kennedy says, "it's very hard to engage with what's really going on."

In East L.A., Porky and Pony of the Marianna Maravilla gang

What's really going on, in Kennedy's view, is small groups of young men encouraging each other to violence. "It's about respect," he says. "It's about boy-girl stuff, it's Hatfield and McCoy." This, too, is nearly uni-versal among people on the front lines, from Sherrills to T. Rodgers to former police captain Rick Bruce in San Francisco's notorious Hunters Point neighborhood: Gang killings are not about huge, hierarchical cri-minal organizations struggling for control of drug-dealing turf. They're about beefs. They're about patterned webs of vendettas and retaliations. Somebody looks at somebody wrong, or two guys want the same girl, and it's on. In San Francisco, for example, nearly 20 tit-for-tat homicides over the past decade have been traced back to a single car auction, after which a gangster killed a man who outbid him for a vehicle. "You have to keep in mind," says T. Rodgers, "that between the ages of 11 and 17 they're warriors untried. From 17 to 21, it's 'What's your claim to fame? I can impregnate every girl on the block. Or I can knock you out with a right or a left.'" It's what University of California-Irvine criminologist George Tita calls "expressive violence rather than instrumental violence." Tita says that even among gangs that are involved in the drug trade—and most are, in some way or other—the leaders will gladly negotiate trade agreements with one another even as their foot soldiers murder each other over petty slights, because strict street codes dictate a violent response to nearly any perceived insult and every individual is terrified of falling short of those codes. But because group psychology, among a relatively small number of young men, is the clear engine of an enormous percentage of urban violence, it's a perfect point of intervention.

KENNEDY WAS A RESEARCHER at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in the early '90s, when the Bounty Hunters and Grapes were gunning each other down and gangs in Boston's poor neighborhoods started doing much the same. The city's response, throughout the early 1990s, was like a blind grope through crime-control strategies. In addition to stop-and-search policies for all suspicious young black men and halfhearted attempts at community policing, there were street workers like the Sherrills brothers talking down gangbangers, even a powerful outreach effort by a coalition of churches, galvanized by a killing during a church memorial for a murdered gang member. Good stuff, and crucial to the success that came later, but it all amounted to gathering the pieces of a puzzle without putting them together—until 1994, when the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) funded Kennedy and his colleagues.

They started by forming a working group of all the law enforcement and community elements already involved—street workers, juvenile corrections, clergy, probation, parole, police—and even added a few, like the DEA. Then, in March 1996, when fighting between rival factions of the Vamp Hill Kings killed three gang members in the space of a month, they made a quick series of arrests, with help from the ATF and even local school police, and held a forum with virtually the entire membership of the Vamp Hill Kings. Supported by local clergy and community members, the working group then did what Kennedy calls "retailing the message." The message went like this: Violence stops now, the adults are taking over, and the new penalty structure says that if anybody in your gang puts a body on the ground, the whole crew pays, and fast. Every unserved trespassing warrant will get served; every petty parole or probation violation will get enforced; smoke a joint in public housing and you'll get evicted; open a single beer on the street or piss on the sidewalk and you'll go to jail. With the help of street workers, Kennedy's working group also made it clear to the Vamp Hill Kings, and soon after to other gangs, that this was not an indiscriminate war on gangs. It was a crackdown on violence alone. Gangs that didn't indulge in violence would be spared. And everyone was getting the same story, so if you chose not to retaliate for a slight, you had an honorable excuse: Your whole crew would go down. Flyers at the forum described a gangster named Freddy Cardoza who'd just gotten 20 years without parole for being caught with a single bullet. The working group balanced the stick with the carrot of job-training services.

Criminologist and Operation Ceasefire architect David Kennedy

The point was to leverage group psychology in such a way that the group itself would have an interest in discouraging violence. It was wildly successful. Within 12 months of the Vamp Hill Kings forum, youth homicides in Boston dropped by 73 percent. In little over a year, Operation Ceasefire returned Boston's youth homicide rate to a place it hadn't been in decades. And in much the way the Watts truce triggered a nationwide paroxysm of truce-making, Attorney General Janet Reno started talking about a nationwide rollout of Operation Ceasefire. More than a dozen smallish cities have actually done it, with stunning results. Indianapolis, for example, saw a 40 percent drop in its annual murder rate, and Rochester, New York, in 2004, saw a one-year drop, from 31 to 9, in the number of young black males murdered. In February 2004, a long-planned Ceasefire intervention for the nation's capital was triggered into action when a gunslinger from a gang that terrorized the Sursum Corda (Latin for "lift up your heart") housing project shot a 14-year-old girl who was a witness to an earlier shooting. Within days, 36 gang members had been arrested on drug conspiracy charges, and dozens of other gangs had been contacted to make sure they understood exactly what had happened to the Sursum Corda gang—and how to avoid a similar fate.

BUT HERE'S THE RUB: Ceasefire, which is also known as the "pulling levers" approach because it involves a simultaneous pulling of all the relevant levers on violence, is very hard to hold together. Our government is built around the parsing out of human life, assigning our need for shelter to one agency, our need for law enforcement to another, our health and employment and education to still others. Getting all those agencies to work together—asking government to address the complex nature of a human life, in a holistic fashion—requires extraordinary commitment from all parties involved. And as soon as you get a new U.S. attorney with other priorities, or your housing authority gets caught up in a distracting scandal, or a lowered crime rate encourages a redistribution of funding, things fall apart. Boston itself saw a 67 percent rise in homicides in 2001, to a near doubling of the 1999 rate. Something similar is happening now in Rochester, with gang violence roaring back after a one-year hiatus. In both cases, Kennedy gives credit for the initial success to everything that's right about Ceasefire—new Ceasefire interventions continue to have dazzling success—and he blames the subsequent failures that have occurred to the loss of momentum that comes with complacency. "As it existed in 1996 or 1997, Ceasefire is entirely gone," Kennedy has said, speaking of Boston. With funding from the NIJ, George Tita and the RAND Corporation ran a pilot Ceasefire program in an L.A. neighborhood that followed the same pattern: After initial success, the working group drifted apart, and nobody in law enforcement or the community took responsibility for keeping it alive.

All this makes it easy for Bratton and L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca to dismiss Ceasefire as having little relevance to Los Angeles, which is significant to the overall national picture because, at some level, Los Angeles is the national picture. Accounting for 75 percent of all 10,000 youth gang homicides committed in California between 1981 and 2001, Los Angeles also accounted for fully 30 percent of the entire mid-1990s drop in the national youth-homicide rate; remove Los Angeles from the picture, and the story is very different, with equal numbers of cities reporting declines and surges in youth homicide. Individual Los Angeles gangs are also dramatically larger in membership than gangs elsewhere, they do spawn copycat gangs in other parts of the country, and they are so deeply entrenched as to be almost like community organizations. As Bratton points out, L.A. now exports Crips, Bloods, and L.A.-branded Latino gangs not only to every major city in the United States—and to most minor ones—but to Canada and Mexico. Aqeela and Daude Sherrills, in fact, were invited to New Jersey last year to work as peacemakers precisely because one of the warring Newark Crip factions was calling itself Grape Street, even though none of the Newark Grapes had ever been to the Sherrills' neighborhood. (Aqeela tells a funny story about Newark Crips asking him about various secret handshakes and rituals they'd learned, wanting to be sure it was all authentic: He'd never seen any of it before.)

Trying to stop American gang violence without stopping it in L.A., in other words, is like trying to reduce global warming with no help from the United States. But if you so much as mention Operation Ceasefire in Los Angeles law enforcement circles, you find a thinly concealed contempt. Baca, who recently helped the Crips and the Bloods reaffirm the 1992 truce, calls the Boston strategy "good for a community that has 50 or less murders a year. I would wish that we had that small a problem in L.A. We have 500-plus gang-related murders a year…spread out over 800 square miles." Baca's own prescription leans toward the liberal—a personal commitment to various nonprofits that teach so-called "life skills" to troubled youth, offering counseling and job training, and mentoring from police officers. Bratton, who is arguably the most important law enforcement official in the United States on the issue of gangs, is equally dismissive of Ceasefire. "There's no magic bullet," he says. "There is no single solution. And while the patient may exhibit similar characteristics, what might work in Boston may or may not work in Los Angeles. Boston's gang problem is very small. I've got 50,000 gang members versus Boston's couple of hundred."

As for his limited interest in street workers like Sherrills, Bratton wouldn't be the only one with uncertainty about their effectiveness. It's not that anyone thinks their work isn't helpful, but there's no consensus on how instrumental it is, largely because nobody can get any data. Criminologist Tita, for example, takes the work of urban peacemakers so seriously that he has a photocopy of the original Watts truce hanging on his office wall—the one drafted in part by Daude Sherrills—and he keeps a database of 40 years' worth of Watts homicide statistics.

"And look, trust me," Tita says. "I've done the literature search. I'm still looking for—and I have the opportunity to write—the very first real evaluation of a gangs truce. Tell the Sherrills brothers that I'm begging them to come down and meet with me and let's design it together so that there's no ambiguity." But for whatever reason, Tita says, they haven't heeded that call. And with the data Tita does have, he cannot find a single statistically significant effect of the Watts truce. "I even looked at the gangs that signed the treaty versus the other gangs in the community," he says. "Did their rates of participation as homicide victims or offenders change? I couldn't find that either."

The problem with truces, according to T. Rodgers, who still does gang-outreach work in the Jungle, is that "there's always a kid in the back of the group that says, 'Fuck that shit.' And that's all it takes." But Rodgers bridles at the suggestion that he needs evidence to prove the worth of what he does. "I'm just going to say it," he growls. "White folks come in with a magnifying glass and always want to know how shit works with a MacGyver theory. And some things just don't work like that. Some things are acts of God, some things are behavioral miracles." He claims 60 to 70 percent effectiveness in getting gangbanging kids to go straight. "But I didn't track them," he admits. "I'm not the RAND Corporation. I'm just a street worker."

Aqeela Sherrills feels the same way. "Even though the peace in the neighborhood is fragile as fuck," he says, "we maintain it, through dialogue and conversation, and it don't mean ain't nobody getting shot. It means that's all part of the process, that peace is not a destination. It's a journey, like life. And there's a movement in this country that wants everybody to see things through this lens, that if things aren't like this, then it ain't real. But as long as we can consistently come back to the table and have a conversation, the peace exists. As long as I can walk into the Nickerson Gardens and talk to those cats over there, it's on. As long as we can go holler at Sister and PJ Steve, it's on. As long as we can talk to Daude and Big Tank and Cal Boneski and the key brothers at Jordan Downs, the peace is fucking on. And that's our reality. Because if people really knew what the fuck it was like around here, you know, man, they'd cry every fucking day."

ACCORDING TO A 2002 REPORT from the National Institute of Justice, gathering 10 years of gang-related research, the view of street gangs as akin to the Mafia is indeed misguided. Data from a survey among almost 300 large police departments and members of four large Chicago and San Diego gangs found that while a few gangs—MS-13 would be one—are very large and organized, the vast majority show "little evidence of evolution into formal organizations resembling traditional organized crime. Instead, the gangs appeared to represent an adaptive or organic form of organization, featuring diffuse leadership and continuity despite the absence of hierarchy." Most gangs, in other words, are just a bunch of guys hanging out on the corner.

The NIJ report, titled "Responding to Gangs: Evaluation and Research," also found that traditional "get tough on crime" approaches—like the mass arrests of gang members and specialized gang task forces currently being directed at MS-13—have literally zero measurable impact on overall gang violence. (As if to prove the point, a press conference by Sheriff Baca, trumpeting the success of a recent anti-gang street sweep, was marred by simultaneous news of three Compton homicides.) Ditto for the Gang Deterrence and Community Protection Act, the draconian bill passed by Congress in 2005, which defines a gang as having as few as three members—just enough to make a federal conspiracy case—calls for stiff mandatory minimum sentences for gang-related crimes, and puts tens of millions toward prisons: The NIJ report shows conclusively that exaggerated jail terms have no deterrent effect at all.

The only responses that were found to be successful were the "life skills" programs that Sheriff Baca advocates, teaching conflict resolution and positive self-esteem, and, to a much greater degree, the Boston Ceasefire intervention. Ceasefire, in fact, is the only strategy singled out in the entire report as having caused a substantial reduction in youth homicide, and yet Bratton and the FBI appear utterly uninterested. Bratton is also ignoring a report commissioned by the California Attorney General's Office—"Gang Homicide in L.A., 1981-2001"—written in part by George Tita and released in 2004, which concluded with a single, strong recommendation: that L.A. adopt a Boston Ceasefire approach.

This may have to do with the past experience of various players—Bratton headed the Boston Police Department when gang killings had the whole city in a panic, and he left shortly before Ceasefire took effect and made Boston famous for solving the problem. He was also part of New York's "Broken Windows" successes and glamorous takedowns of the Mafia. One approach has worked very, very well for him, in other words, and the other has been mostly somebody else's baby. But Kennedy places the blame on less personal habits of thought. Most of us, he says, jump to one of two very different responses to crime: the criminal justice response, which is all about the moral responsibility of individuals and the belief that tougher enforcement can influence those individuals; or the root-cause approach, which emphasizes the role of racism and economic inequality in crime.

The problem, Kennedy says, is that neither approach leads to an effective crime-control strategy. The criminal justice framework has no way of accounting for the fact that gang crime is overwhelmingly about "incidents in response to incidents in response to incidents that happened before, and which will affect incidents which will happen later," and the root-cause framework ignores the fact that some people simply do need to be locked up. The criminal justice framework does make room for attacking certain groups—as in the anti-racketeering and conspiracy cases that brought down the Mafia and that are now at the center of the FBI's anti-gang strategy. But these cases will never solve the problem if they are not combined with a larger response that targets group psychology. "I don't have any sense," Kennedy says, "that any of the people who put that together talked to anybody who knows about these issues." As a result, Kennedy says, the FBI's new war on gangs is "as tired as it can possibly be."

The biggest problem, though, in Kennedy's view, lies with the dysfunctional nature of American law enforcement. Comparing criminal justice to "a real profession, like medicine," he points out that if there'd been a breakthrough in breast cancer treatment in Boston in the mid-1990s, and 70 percent of women who would have died of breast cancer were living, "then when people were talking about breast cancer in San Francisco they would not say, well, nobody's made any headway on this, this is an intractable problem, we're going to start from scratch. And if they did, then their patients would hold them accountable, but there is no mechanism like that in criminal justice. There is no real professionalism. How do you get to be a judge? Get a law degree. How do you get to be a DA? Get elected. There is no collective knowledge, no relationship between theory and practice. There was a time when surgeons were barbers, and what medicine did was bootstrap itself up. In criminal justice, we're still barbers, and if people in these communities, paying the tax bills and burying their kids and visiting their raped daughters in intensive care, knew the way business was conducted, there would be bodies hanging from oak trees. The presumption that most people have, that this is serious, thoughtful work, and that if you don't get good results it's because absolutely nothing works, is so wrong. And if people really knew, I swear, there'd be blood running in the street."

Daniel Duane is the author of the memoir Caught Inside: A Surfer's Year on the California Coast and the novel A Mouth Like Yours.

Triumph of Felons and Failure

by Bob Herbert

A Mother Adopts, and Discovers Her Own Racism

A white mother who adopts a baby from India confronts her shame that her child's skin is dark, and realizes she needs more diverse friends.

Demagogic side of GOP shuns blacks

Frederick Douglass: "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro"

Happy Birthday Thurgood Marshall

It's the birthday of the first African American to serve as a Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall, born in Baltimore, Maryland (1908).

He applied to the University of Maryland Law School, but he was rejected on the basis of race, so he enrolled at Howard University instead. The first thing he did, upon graduation, was use his law degree to sue the University of Maryland for racial discrimination, and he almost couldn't believe it when he won. Thanks to his efforts, the University of Maryland Law School admitted its first black student in 1935. It was the first time that a black student had ever been admitted to any state law school south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Marshall became the legal director of the NAACP, and of the thirty-two cases he argued for that organization, he won twenty-nine. His biggest case was the landmark Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. He went on to serve as an appeals court judge under Kennedy, and Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1967.

Thurgood Marshall said, "None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody—a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns—bent down and helped us pick up our boots." [Writer's Almanac]

Why Republicans Rip the Voting Rights Act

by Earl Ofari Hutchinson

By stalling in renewal of the hugely important civil rights legislation, the GOP is throwing a bone to conservative Southern whites.

Black leaders kick off clergy conference

DALLAS -- Prominent black leaders said they will work to combat Christian conservatives they say have used gay marriage and abortion to distract from larger moral issues such as the war, voting rights, affirmative action and poverty.

The Revs. Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Joseph Lowery and hundreds of black leaders from around the country are focusing on mobilizing black voters for the fall elections. They kicked off a three-day black clergy conference Monday in Dallas.

"There are no gay people coming to our churches asking to get married," Sharpton said. "But there are plenty of people coming with problems voting or their sons in jail."

NAACP SAYS TV STILL LACKS COLOR

Read at a blog:

Imagine 200 channels of BET. Imagine 10 different types of "Madea's Family Reunion" in theatres every week (with no other choice). Imagine local nightly news that reports only the negativity in YOUR neighborhood. Imagine Chris Tucker as president. Imagine John Conyers as Speaker of the House and J.C. Watts as the minority leader. Imagine a poor European continent. Imagine a wealthy African continent. Imagine a stressed out existence with little forms of positive entertainment available.
If you don't like the scenario, then how do you think Blacks feel? The industry folks would say that the problem is economics; but certain people don't want that to change either.

Posted by pee-wee on June 25, 2006 at 12:05 AM

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick Sues Over Affirmative Action Ballot Issue

DETROIT -- Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick Thursday filed a federal lawsuit against Ward Connerly, alleging the California businessman engaged in widespread voter fraud to get a proposal to ban affirmative action on Michigan's 2006 ballot.

Connerly and his supporters "obtained signatures from 125,000 black and Latino voters by falsely telling them that the petition supported affirmative action," said the lawsuit, which also names Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land and other state officials as defendants. Land has overall responsibility for Michigan elections.

Kilpatrick filed the lawsuit as a private citizen but will be asking Detroit City Council to support the action, said Sharon McPhail, the mayor's city attorney, who filed the suit at the federal courthouse.

Schools' Efforts on Race Await Justices' Ruling

David R. Lutman for The New York Times

Zoe and Jack Ellers, top, are bused to a black section of Louisville.

Voting Rights Act Nailed to Burning Cross by Greg Palast

Bigotry Beneath the Fog by Eugene Robinson

He survived to educate us about racial hatred and violence

African-American Voters Scrubbed by Secret GOP Hit List

Borrowed Bodies

Will Racism Come Home to Roost in the "New" Germany?

Why White People Are Afraid

What do white people have to be afraid of in a world structured on white privilege? Their own fears.

Hip Hop Women Recount Abuse at Their Own Risk

Racial Component Is Found in Lethal Breast Cancer

How Katherine Dunham Revealed Black Dance to the World

Whatever else Katherine Dunham was in her long and productive life, which ended on Sunday at 96, she was a radiantly beautiful woman whose warmth and sense of self spread like honey on the paths before her.

A Brown Girl Dead

by Countee Cullen

With two white roses on her breasts,

White candles at head and feet,

Dark Madonna of the grave she rests;

Lord Death has found her sweet.

Her mother pawned her wedding ring

To lay her out in white;

She’d be so proud she’d dance and sing

To see herself tonight.

Desperate Republicans chase the black vote

Learning About Racism, Live on NPR and CNN

The Furor Over the "Colored Mind Doubles"

Chicago's Abu Ghraib

UN Committee Against Torture Hears Report on How Police Tortured Over 135 African-American Men Inside Chicago Jails

For nearly two decades a part of the city¹s jails known as Area 2 was the epicenter for what has been described as the systematic torture of dozens of African-American males by Chicago police officers. In total, more than 135 people say they were subjected to abuse including having guns forced into their mouths, bags places over their heads, and electric shocks inflicted to their genitals. Four men have been released from death row after government investigators concluded torture led to their wrongful convictions.

...the land of the freaks and the home of the depraved.

Nearly lynched on a grim night in 1960

1933 FELTON TURNER 2006 Rest in Peace

Felton Turner, a Houston man who was attacked in 1960 by white supremacists in retaliation for the student sit-ins of the nascent civil rights movement and had the letters KKK carved into his stomach before being left dangling from a tree limb, died Sunday. He was 73.

Pfizer faulted over drug trials in Nigeria

Report cites use of unproven drug on African children in mid ’90s

Allen seeks race-image makeover

Duke case reopens wounds for black women

Many are fed up with stereotype of hyper-sexual African American female

Black women stew about the narrow, negative ways they are nearly always portrayed. They are either quick-tempered and full of attitude like Tyler Perry’s Madea character or the comedian Mo’Nique, or they are barely dressed and brazenly sexual like the women mimicking strippers in so many music videos

Civil Rights Activist William Sloane Coffin Dies

Historic African-American New Orleans Church Reopened After Weeks Of

Historic St. Augustine Parish in New Orleans was reopened and its church re-consecrated Saturday after weeks of protests and a rectory sit -in that lasted 19 days. St. Augustine, founded in 1841 by slaves and free people of color, is one of the nation's oldest black parishes.

Let's Save 'Racist' Tag For When It Really Matters

By Cynthia Tucker

Activists Reject GOP Anti-gay Advances to African Americans

Christ Among the Partisans

Delancey H. Moore died while buying suits for kids

From St. Clair County to Springfield and beyond, colleagues and friends were stunned to hear news that East St. Louis parole supervisor Delancey H. Moore died in the tornado Sunday that destroyed the K&G Fashion Superstore in Fairview Heights.

Moore, who also was the minister of St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church on North 42nd Street in East St. Louis, was at the store shopping for suits for seven boys who are members of his church, East St. Louis Mayor Carl Officer said.

Moore, 54, was purchasing suits for them to wear to church on Easter, Officer said, because their families were not able to purchase them.

[thx f2b]

It was 38 years ago today that Dr. King was killed.

They said to one another "Behold, here cometh the dreamer. Let us slay him. Then we shall see what will become of his dreams." Genesis 37:19-20

Let us strive to make his dreams come true.



Please sign the Remembrance Book and join me in supporting the Dream. Thank you.

Lessons of the last speech of Dr. King

Approaching spiritual death

Chasing the dream

If you love justice, he is your hero

The Battle for Fred Hampton Way

Would-be robbers drag ATM from store

Didn't this happen in the movie Barbershop?

Not just another dead black man

The Keith Stephens I knew was a joyful, charismatic kid working hard to become a responsible adult. Then he was murdered. He can't become just another statistic.

Black storytellers keep past alive with eye on the future

Black Activists Call for Eminent Domain Restrictions in Virginia

Honoring the first black Naval Academy graduate

Black mothers “don’t reject gay sons”, says study

THE "BLACK" SINS OF BISHOP CHARLES E. BENNISON

Gay Atlanta in black and white

Black Leaders Urge New Orleans Satellite Voting

Black and Male in America

Bid to name street for Black Panther stalls

Rendell, Swann court black voters

A journalist returns to her hometown to uncover the meaning of a horrific lynching.

Museum remembers anniversary of lynching

and by their fruits ye shall know them

IT WASN'T THE DEVIL THAT MADE STUDENTS BURN DOWN CHURCHES by Cynthia Tucker

FBI: No federal charges in Till killing

Ex-Aryan Brotherhood leader says members must kill

Blacks should thank God slavery brought them to America

Good God. This is so offensive on so many levels. ARGh!! [thx MREMan]

Don't forget our history. On this day...

In 1965, the Rev. James J. Reeb, a white minister from Boston, died after being beaten by whites during civil rights disturbances in Selma, Ala.

In 1986, the state of Georgia pardoned Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman who had been lynched in 1915 for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan.

Wortham: Developers pave a part of Doc's past

‘Face’ examines struggles after Civil War

In Georgia eatery, diners equal but separate

Black patrons continue to sit at tables in back

Teen Lynched by Mob Honored in Washington State

A young child is presented to the congregation of St. Augustine's Roman Catholic Church after being Baptized during the mass in New Orleans Sunday, March 12, 2006. St. Augustine Church, founded in 1841 by slaves and free people of color, is among the parishes the archdiocese plans to consolidate as it seeks to deal with $84 million in uninsured losses from Hurricane Katrina. Hundreds of church buildings, including schools, churches and administrative buildings, were damaged when the storm blew in Aug. 29 and four-fifths of the city was covered in water.(AP Photo/Bill Haber)

Ixnay on the N-Word Already

Dave Chappelle finally gave it up. Now everyone else should too.

Big But

Malian musician Ali Farka Toure dies

Dubbed "the African John Lee Hooker," the Grammy-winning bluesman was among West Africa's most internationally successful artists, winning acclaim around the world for his 1994 album "Talking Timbuktu," recorded with Texan guitarist Ry Cooder.

Listen to Nawiye

Gordon Parks Dies at 93

Akron Beacon Journal

Detroit Free Press

I'm a big fan of his. I saw an exhibit of his photography a few years ago that was wonderful. I'll never forget looking at a photo of a "colored entrance" when a black woman and her son came up to view it. I heard her explain to him what the sign meant. I felt as I have before, ashamed to have the same color skin as those who were responsible for the suffering of so many.


Thank you Gordon for the eyes that you opened.

The guy who takes a chance, who walks the line between the known and unknown, who is unafraid of failure, will succeed.~Gordon Parks

Andrew Young: Shameless Son

How could Andy Young, who used to walk with Dr. King, become a corporate shill for Wal-Mart?

That's what I want to know!

Black Ball by Gerald Early

I am a passionate baseball fan. I have been a Cardinals season ticket holder for many years. I resell a lot of the tickets, and some I just give away, but I still go to 25 to 30 games a season. Whenever I look around the stands, I see very few black people, often fewer than 50.

In the entire St. Louis region (both city and suburbs), blacks make up about 19 percent of the population (50 percent of the population of the city itself). The Cardinals almost always draw 35,000 fans a game, and often more than 40,000. Yet I never see anything approaching 7,000 to 8,000 blacks at the park. The Cardinals are a very successful franchise with a strong fan base. Plus, the team has been particularly successful the last two years, winning more regular season games than any other major league team.

Why don’t black people go to baseball games? Some blacks I know suggest that the game is too slow. But why would only blacks find that objectionable and not than any other group? Besides, wouldn’t that mostly affect the young, who have shorter attention spans and the need for MTV-like editing? Don’t middle-aged blacks like baseball?

Some have suggested that not enough African Americans play the game anymore. Less than 10 percent of major league players are African American. Most “colored” players today from Latin America and the Caribbean and consider themselves Hispanic or Latino. Black Americans do not necessarily identify with them, nor do they necessarily identify with black Americans. But the problem with this theory is that it supposes that blacks are only attracted to sports where they have a dominant or pronounced presence, like professional football or basketball. The opposite is clearly not true for whites. After all, most of the people who attend professional sporting events in America — including football and basketball — are white.

If this theory is true about blacks, what does it say about them? Do they have a need for a certain level of representation because they are a minority? Sports are supposed to encourage a larger sort of identification, beyond the merely racial. Athletes are supposed to possess a larger sense of representation. If not, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters would not have amounted to so much in our culture.

Others say blacks don’t go to baseball games because they are too expensive. But blacks make up a somewhat larger portion of the attendance at football and basketball games, and tickets to those events are even more expensive. Within reason, expense does not stop the average person from consuming something. Some have argued that blacks don’t feel welcome at baseball games because too many whites are there. This is the price one pays for being a minority. There are too many of the majority everywhere. It doesn’t stop blacks from shopping at suburban malls.

Or maybe black people have never really liked baseball that much, even back in the days of segregation, when they briefly had racial leagues. For some or maybe all of these reasons, black people and baseball have become a form of nostalgia in America. We indulged in a bit of that as a culture this week when 17 people from the Negro Leagues and the era preceding them were elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. We might look back now on the era of segregation as a time when black people loved baseball and supported it. We might also look back at it as a time when blacks owned and operated the business of baseball. This aspect the game’s history was also commemorated with these elections and rightly so.

But as is usually the case with dealing with blacks in America, the celebratory (which is the only way we seem able to speak about black history now) imperils intelligibility. Indeed, the need to celebrate becomes almost patronizing — as if the fact that blacks accomplished anything is now worth giving them a pat on the head. (The victims organized and did something!) Celebration can even imperil the primary importance of an achievement, by turning it into a simplistic story about the triumph over adversity. The Negro Leagues now exist in the American Valhalla of sports mythmaking as the triumph over racism and segregation.

I suggest that view is blatantly dishonest. The Negro Leagues were the result of racism and segregation, not the triumph over them. The Negro Leagues were a sign of black people’s weakness and inability to function fully in American society. The Negro Leagues were a sign, not of black people’s pathology, but of America’s pathology.

Effa Manley was largely the focus of the news stories about the special election because she became the first woman inducted into the Hall of Fame (our society loves firsts). The fact that she was a white woman passing for black makes her all the more intriguing. What the newspapers gave us was an image of Effa Manley, the famed co-owner of the Newark Eagles, as a fiery, independent woman who fought for black baseball and tried to protect her players. But the Negro Leagues, with the exception of the years during World War II when black income exploded, were never solvent, always undercapitalized, didn’t control their venues, and were, in most cases, hardly a league at all, except on paper.

Most of the teams couldn’t afford to confine themselves to league games. There was little unity among the owners. They couldn’t even come together to enforce a reserve clause to keep players from team-jumping. And Manley was not the most impressive of the lot. Executives like Cumberland Posey, also elected this year, and Gus Greenlee, who was nominated, were more visionary. Alex Pompez, another inductee, was a far more important figure to Negro League baseball than Manley. Pre-Negro League figures like Ed Bolden and Sol White, whose book “The History of Colored Base Ball” is one of the most valuable sports books written by a black, were more instrumental by far in keeping black baseball alive, against overwhelming odds. Manley was colorful, and that, in this age of celebrity, apparently goes a long way.

Manley, like most whites and blacks who ran businesses that were made possible solely by segregation, never wanted integration in the way that it came. She wanted the Negro Leagues to become a minor league for professional baseball, to be the special place to create the black ballplayer. In essence, she wanted a sort of institutionalized segregation so that a black business could maintain itself. But racialized businesses confine both the black entrepreneur and the black consumer. I point this out not to disparage Manley but to point out the dilemma of black institutions in the United States, of which Negro League baseball was one.

Because of the conditions under which black churches, black colleges and universities and black businesses were established, it is impossible not to see them in a stigmatized way. They were established not to make black people independent nor even to help them establish a culture but to remind them every day that they were inferior to whites. Because of this, I think most blacks have wound up secretly hating both segregation and integration. Disappointed by institutions of their own making, they ended up desiring alien institutions with a history of saying they weren’t good enough to be there.

The story of blacks and baseball is not a nostalgia story but a story about the group memory of institutionalized racism. It is a complex story about ambivalence and adaptation, precariousness, limitation and pride. It is not a story of triumph or tragedy. It is the story of a conflicted people trying, with some success, to make the most of their conflicts.

Prosecutors Target White Supremacist Gang

The inmates had to heat the letter to draw out the message, written in invisible ink. When they did, their orders were clear.

Within hours, prosecutors say, members of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang sneaked into a nearby cellblock and killed two black inmates with handmade shanks as part of an order to "go to war" with blacks.

Barry Bonds, Bad Negro by Gerald Early

Barring conclusive, incontrovertible proof he took steroids, Barry Bonds will one day be inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame. The vote will not be unanimous. Some writers will hold their noses and vote for him. Others will wish, with sort of Ford Frick-like wisdom, to add an asterisk to indicate that some of his achievements may have been made possible by banned substances.

In his Times column about Bonds on Sunday, George Vescey writes that athletes like him “may wriggle around in Nixonian self-pity.” The mention of Nixon brought to mind something else besides self-pity: the smear. To asterisk-ize Bonds absent real proof, as sportswriters are well on their way to doing in their self-righteous zeal — to protect something, perhaps the integrity of “these games” — would be to smear him.

The smear is a useful and necessary tool in the power game of politics. Now, it is useful in cleaning up baseball. Smears are all right, I suppose, when used in a righteous cause and when the object of them is a creep and a jerk (although there are so many of them in popular celebrity culture that it seems a bit mysterious to single out Bonds). Smears are all right, too, in our society because everything has become politicized and moralized. Good liberals find themselves fighting ironically for standards and non-ambiguity, the same as the conservatives. Our world must consist, as did the world of the medievals, of the good, the bad and the ugly. For someone like Thomas Carlyle, that medieval world was a very good world indeed, and one supposes that there were virtues in its limitations: Stern, self-sacrificing discipline mixed with witch burning.

Vescey would much appreciate it if Bonds would retire tomorrow and save the world the possibility of breaking the career home run marks of Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron. He writes that Major League Baseball is hoping much the same, although Major League Baseball — or whoever speaks for that organization — has been mum on the subject to this point. And why not? Bonds is still good box office and box office is what big-time sports are really all about. In the 1960’s Muhammad Ali taught us that people will come out to see the bad guy. And baseball has, after all, survived some awful sketchy characters on the field, from the virulently racist to the utterly drunk to the cocaine-addled. Surely, it can survive and even enjoy being entertained by some artificially puffed-up musclemen.

When speaking of Aaron, baseball’s all-time home run king, Vescey calls him “dignified.” Aaron has certainly become that in recent years, especially as Bonds’ reputation has slipped. But I remember very well Aaron as a player and I don’t recall that word being attached to him then. What I do remember is that most of the knowing coves thought Willie Mays was the superior player and that if Mays had been able to play half-dozen good years in Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium, as Aaron did, instead of the wind tunnel called Candlestick Park, he would have easily broken Ruth’s record. I also remember that most of the knowing coves thought Frank Robinson a better player than Aaron and Clemente a better fielder. But this was all before Aaron became a civil rights martyr, due to the threats he received when closing in on Ruth’s record. After that, I think, he started to become “dignified” instead of being a tough-minded, durable ball player.

The word “dignified” brings to mind for me the actor Sidney Poitier. When I was boy in the 1950’s and 1960’s, he was always called “dignified” by the white press — even when they snubbed him. After he presented the best actress award to Julie Andrews at the 1964 Oscars, reporters pushed him out of the way so he would not appear in any publicity photos with her. He was always forbearing about white racism and snubs and whites generally acting silly in the ways that only they can when interacting with blacks. He was sort of the Jackie Robinson of Hollywood.

Robinson is, of course, another “dignified” black man (at least for the first three years he played in the Dodger organization). He was even dignified when he had to testify against Paul Robeson before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949. Robeson was the bad Negro, who would be best repudiated, in the eyes of the Communist hunters, by the “dignified” Negro, Robinson. Today, Bonds is the bad Negro, the hip-hop sociopath who must be prevented from corrupting the achievements of the dignified Negro, Aaron.

Of course, neither Vescey nor any other white sportswriter would say anything like “Aaron is a credit to his race, the human race,” as the New York sportswriter Jimmy Cannon wrote about Joe Louis, another dignified Negro. But today’s sportswriters might say that Aaron is a credit to the game of baseball, which Bonds clearly is not. I am not sure if Aaron wants to wear the Sidney Poitier mantle, it being cumbersome at best, but it seems as if, in this life, the world must always be divided between bad Negroes and dignified Negroes — and dignity hath its charms. I assume it is easier for whites to understand blacks when they can be classified in this way.

Many blacks I know, being inclined to paranoia as blacks are, think that Bonds is being picked on because he is black. Whites are always out to destroy successful blacks — especially black men — in any way they can. This is what many blacks believe. When the ordinary vicissitudes of life come upon a famous black, most blacks are looking for the racism in the woodpile. And blacks always do what Stanley Crouch calls the flip test. When something bad happens to a black person, they always ask would this have happened to a white? Sportswriters are likely not to vote Mark McGwire into the Hall of Fame. He’s white and he was a god in St. Louis during that big year when he hit 70 home runs. We even named a portion of a freeway after him. (I wonder if Ozzie Smith, who did make the Hall of Fame and helped lead the team to a world championship, something McGwire never did, was a bit miffed about that.)

It is also unlikely that white sportswriters are after Bonds because he is black. (I assume many black sportswriters also don’t care for Bonds.) After all, the white sports establishment wants to protect Aaron’s record and he is black. Bonds apparently is a jerk and has been for many years and he may be a cheater as well, dishonest in a way that seems sordid and selfish. They have fair reasons not to like him.

But the pious framework in which they choose to talk about him ultimately does no one — Bonds, Major League Baseball or the public — any good. There is something about it that seems overweening in its condescension, unbearably self-righteous, self-serving, tendentious. It has the whiff of the sort of unctuousness white sportswriters displayed in days past when writing about black athletes like Dick Allen in Philadelphia in the 1960’s, Muhammad Ali soon after his conversion to Islam or Jackie Robinson once he was freed from his agreement with Branch Rickey to act like a pacifist college student at a 1960 lunch-counter sit-in.

Sanctimonious moralizing produces bad analyzing, I always tell my students.

Let's Throw Bonds a Retirement Party (Before He Changes His Mind)

February 26, 2006
Sports of The Times
Let's Throw Bonds a Retirement Party (Before He Changes His Mind)
By GEORGE VECSEY

OH, boo-hoo. One of these years, Barry Bonds promises us, we are not going to have him to kick around anymore. My response is, the sooner the better.

Bone-on-bone friction in his knee is probably not the only pain Bonds is feeling these days. As obtuse as he has always been, Bonds must know that he can never regain public trust because his personal trainer was caught scurrying to the notorious Balco laboratory.

As he tries to pass the home-run totals of Babe Ruth and Henry Aaron, Bonds is still trying to manipulate the world around him. The latest farce is that Bonds wants reporters to sign a waiver for every one-on-one interview (not that he grants many) to satisfy the legal demands of a reality show he is doing for ESPN, on company time.

Bonds is caught in a modest renaissance of morality. Despite the rather corrupt attitude of some fans — we pay our big bucks to see home runs, and we don't care how they are hit — there are still rules. Athletes may wriggle around in Nixonian self-pity, but deep down, the public knows.

I have no real problem with pitchers who doctor the ball or hockey players who sneak an oversized stick onto the power play. That's up to the officials to catch. Just like the Olympics, I am into degree of difficulty. Go after the big stuff.

In recent days, we have seen examples of weasels getting theirs. Nascar whacked Jimmie Johnson's crew chief for a week because he had blatantly messed with the car's specs. After Johnson won the Daytona 500, he suggested to David Letterman that he didn't want to know what his crew chief was doing.

The next day, Nascar added three weeks to the original suspension. The message was: Don't make fun of us, son. Nascar has come too far to avoid poking its nose into every manned missile hawking the corporate products.

Likewise, I endorse the midnight raid staged when a barred coach, Walter Mayer, was seen nosing around the Austrian Olympic cross-country and biathlon teams. You have to keep an eye on these Austrian skiers: Four years ago, they left behind a junkie's detritus in a house they had shared in Utah.

The recent drug tests came up negative, but there was plenty of suspicious stuff in their den in Italy. Too bad some Austrian competitors missed their beauty rest. That's what they get for harboring a known rogue.

The wink-wink, nudge-nudge drug mentality of cycling stopped being funny in the late 1980's when at least 18 young men from Europe essentially fell off their bikes, quite dead, from using erythropoietin, the blood-thickening drug known as EPO. Some of the revisionism by the Tour de France is cynical — leaking old, inadequate but interesting tests the moment Lance Armstrong retired — but, at the very least, cycling has toughened its testing, a generation or two overdue. Tyler Hamilton, apparently in serious denial, is paying a two-year price for the vigilance. Tough.

Baseball was forced to face reality because of the sloppiness, arrogance, mood swings and body alterations of a generation of sluggers. Bonds made a permanent fool of himself, in grand jury testimony, according to The San Francisco Chronicle, by saying that his trainer had assured him that the creams he had given him contained only flaxseed oil. Bonds is way too much of a control freak to get away with that silliness.

Bonds recently whimpered to USA Today that he was contemplating retirement after this season because baseball just wasn't fun anymore. The Giants are trying to get permission for Bonds to be a full-time designated hitter in spring training because he cannot run. But he's too stubborn to go play in the American League, probably because it would mess with his reality show.

Barry has 708 home runs, behind Ruth's 714 and Aaron's record 755. Major League Baseball is surely hoping Bonds goes away before he breaks the record of the dignified Aaron, but why wait that long?

It isn't fun for Barry? It wasn't fun for Aaron, receiving hate mail for passing the Babe. It wasn't fun for Mickey Mantle, gasping every time his knee buckled. It wasn't fun for Roger Maris, knowing traditionalists were rooting against him. It wasn't fun for Jackie Robinson when fans and opponents shouted vile things at him. It wasn't fun for Josh Gibson and Oscar Charleston and Buck O'Neil to watch mediocrities play in the all-white major leagues. It wasn't fun for the Babe, feeling his body falling apart, sensing the Yankees would never let him manage. It wasn't fun for Lou Gehrig, dying young.

It isn't fun for a lot of us, watching a miserable, bulked-up egomaniac whine. Barry Bonds wants fun? He could retire in spring training, leaving Aaron and Ruth at the top of the list. I'd sign a waiver to cover that.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com

How could you Andrew?

Before:

Fighting for civil rights with Dr King.










After:
















Former United Nations Ambassador and former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young speaks during a news conference in Atlanta Thursday, Feb. 9, 2006. Young will be the public spokesman for Working Families for Wal-Mart, a group organized with backing from Wal-Mart Stores Inc. that defends the world's largest retailer against mounting attacks from its critics, the group announced Monday, Feb. 27, 2006. (AP Photo/Ric Feld, File)

Revelers scream for beads as the Krewe of Orpheus Mardi Gras parade on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans February 27, 2006. REUTERS/Jeff Zelevansky

Martin Luther King III speaks at Coffman Memorial Union at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Monday, Feb. 27, 2006. King said Monday that he wants to apply his father's teachings on nonviolence to today's troubled world, and left open the possibility of doing so separately from the nonprofit center founded by his mother that's now the topic of debate in the King family. (AP Photo/Janet Hostetter)

Unseen. Unforgotten.

Discovery in News archives leads to publication of unseen images of civil rights movement in Birmingham.

May 3-9, 1963 Civil rights leaders disagreed on whether to use students as part of the movement, but public perception changed after photographs showed the children being arrested, sprayed by fire hoses and dodging police dogs.

Good Question: Can a man love God and hate his brother?

Remote Control: The Boondocks

The highly-subversive cartoonist and political commentator, Aaron McGruder makes the transition from the page to the small screen with his deathly funny comic strip, ‘The Boondocks.’

BLACK HISTORY MONTH: 'A Double-Edged Sword'

Feb. 21, 2006 -- The director of Milwaukee's National Black Holocaust Museum reflects on what's missing from school and community observances of Black History Month.

LASTING VALOR: NBC to Honor Black War Hero

Feb. 23, 2006 -- This Sunday, NBC will air a prime-time documentary about the little-known story of Vernon J. Baker, a black WWII soldier who waited half a century for this nation to recognize his valor.

Hotels Slammed for Hosting Supremacists

[thx dewey]

Rappers, as a Rule, Do Not Sing By CLYDE HABERMAN

February 24, 2006
NYC
Rappers, as a Rule, Do Not Sing
By CLYDE HABERMAN

SINCE some members of the Hip-Hop Nation seem to regard themselves as belonging to a separate land, perhaps we need creative ways to deal with the criminals among them. New York officials might want to check out Article 1 of the United States Constitution.

It says, among other things, that no state shall "enter into any agreement or compact with another state, or with a foreign power." At least no state may do so, Article 1 says, "without the consent of Congress."

Why not have New York ask Congress for permission to strike a deal with the Hip-Hop Nation?

If Washington gives the O.K., arrangements could be worked out with recognized leaders of that nation: Russell Simmons, Sean Combs, whomever. They get to go about their business, maybe with a tax break or two thrown in as a sweetener. But they must agree to extradite any of their own who egregiously violate our laws — say, by killing someone.

Just a thought.

Alternatively, we could get real and make clear to certain rappers that they do not belong to a separate nation. They are citizens of New York and the United States, and are expected to tell what they know about a violent crime or go straight to jail, bling and all.

This seems to be the direction in which the Police Department and the Brooklyn district attorney's office are headed in a case involving Busta Rhymes, the nom de rap of a performer whose real name is Trevor Smith. But their progress has had all the speed of ketchup from a newly opened bottle.

About three weeks have passed since a bodyguard for Mr. Smith, Israel Ramirez, was shot to death outside a warehouse in Brooklyn, where his boss was shooting a music video. The basic details are all too familiar in the rap world. There was a typically brainless argument. Nasty words were exchanged. Someone pulled a gun. Shots were fired.

And Mr. Ramirez, 29, the father of three small children, lay dead.

A plainly disgusted Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner, estimated that 30 to 50 people were at the scene but were unwilling to tell what they saw. They include Mr. Smith, who has been as faithful to Mr. Ramirez's memory as Enron was to its shareholders. Help catch the killer of a loyal employee? Not Busta Rhymes.

The police have been left in the ludicrous — or, to be true to this topic, ludacris — situation of practically having to beg for information. So the next step may be to force witnesses to testify before a special grand jury or else face jail time.

"Right now the detectives working the case have met the D.A.'s staff with the notion that they'll be using an investigative grand jury as a vehicle to induce witness cooperation," said Paul J. Browne, a police spokesman.

That sort of grand jury is not commonplace. It is also not clear when one might be formed. But if that's what it takes to make people do the right thing, so be it. The same tactic had to be used to make recalcitrant witnesses talk in the case of Mark Fisher, the Fairfield University student murdered in Brooklyn in 2003.

AH, but we should be more culturally tolerant, some say. It is very difficult, they say, for a big-time rapper to cooperate with the police. He would be seen as a snitch. He would lose credibility on the street. Worse, album sales might suffer.

Poor Mr. Smith. What an ordeal this must be for him.

It is this sort of mind-set that has led critics to dismiss some hip-hop performers as "updated minstrel figures," to borrow from the essayist Stanley Crouch.

The film director Spike Lee has singled out 50 Cent, the glowering rapper who, as a result of a shooting, has more holes in him than a Dunkin' Donuts shop. In a recent interview with Complex magazine, Mr. Lee referred to a movie in which 50 Cent starred. "That whole mantra — 'Get Rich or Die Tryin' — for me that's criminal," he said.

There are other signs of rejection, including talk of an anti-Busta boycott, unless Mr. Smith talks to the authorities.

Thus far, his public remarks have been confined to a written statement in which he expressed his condolences to the Ramirez family. Naturally, he said nothing about the culture of violence that infects the Hip-Hop Nation and explains why his own bodyguard is in the ground.

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

Build the Dream

Dear Jen,

Thank you for your support of the Washington, DC Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation, Inc.

As you know, we are planning to build a memorial to Dr. King on the Mall in Washington, DC to remember and promote Dr. King’s legacy and his universal messages of love, non-violence, and equality.

You've already taken the first important step by supporting our efforts financially. But today I hope you will take a moment to also become a spokesperson for the Memorial by doing the following:

1) Watch the virtual tour of our Memorial by clicking here, and then

2) Spread the word to ten friends here.

Getting the word out is the second most important thing you can do to help us "build the dream".

Thanks again for your support.

Sincerely,

Harry E. Johnson, Sr., Esq.
President and CEO

Gerald Early on Ali’s Missed Opportunity

I spoke to an audience of Washington University alumni last December at the new Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, one of the most impressive monuments ever built to the memory of an athlete, living or dead. It would have been hard to imagine in the 1960’s that Louisville would ever do such a thing for Ali. But as time has passed, Louisville must have come to the realization that, at least as a tourist attraction, Ali is their most famous and highly regarded native. And I suppose that many have come to love him there, as elsewhere, or at least to not hate him. He is a Muslim to boot, and we need to be nice to Islam these days in our war for hearts and minds in the Middle East.

It may have seemed odd at such a shrine to Ali’s transcendence that I told the gathering that as new generations come along and as we ourselves age, we’re likely to see serious revision about the meaning and significance of Ali. My daughters, for instance, both in their 20’s, find old footage of Ali amusing but cannot understand what the big fuss was about. His fights mean nothing to them. Why were people so worked up about them? Why were they so transfixed by his trash talking? I have met several people who lived through the Ali era, who never liked boxing, and who, too, are mystified about why they were so consumed with the fights, why they thought Ali’s winning or losing meant so much. They speak of it now as if they had been in a trance or dream.

My daughters do respect his stance against the draft, but only in the light that Ali was a more honest and sincere draft dodger than Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and others. He couldn’t duck into the National Guard and have a good chance of avoiding altogether going over to Vietnam (many state National Guards weren’t even integrated in the 1960’s); couldn’t hide out in college and get student deferments (he was too poorly educated and boxing was not a college scholarship sport); and couldn’t run off to Canada (he loved living in America too much to do that).

As a noted military historian once told me, the Vietnam War draft was designed to protect from combat the people society most valued. One way of looking at this, as my daughters analyzed it, was that our country thought that Joe Namath, who was classified 4-F because of a bum knee but could still play football every Sunday, was more important than Muhammad Ali. Actor George Hamilton, then dating President Lyndon Johnson’s daughter, was given a hardship deferment to support his socialite mother.

“It was unfair,” they declare with moral outrage, “Ali was just expressing openly what other people felt about that war.” But they still don’t think that his stance against the draft makes him very important. To them, the 1960’s as a whole seemed a sorry time. “He was just a silly, naive guy who was a fighter and a draft dodger,” they said.

To be fair, my prediction of revisionism last December was not all that visionary: Ali revisionism has already begun. Mark Kram’s “Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier,” published in 2001, was an important shot across the bow. In his book, Kram, who died in 2002, takes a highly critical view of Ali during the 1960’s, insisting Ali was neither hero nor race leader. Many of the people I know who are big fans of Ali, particularly those who grew up with the Louisville Lip, were outraged by the book and imputed all sorts of ulterior motives to Kram. The most common story I heard was that Kram had originally written a positive book about Ali, couldn’t get a publisher, and decided to make it negative to get it published.

Now comes Jack Cashill’s “Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed King’s Dream.” Published late last month, “Sucker Punch” is the most thorough-going conservative revisionist view of Ali or, as Cashill puts it, the Ali myth, largely constructed by a white, liberal left cultural elite. Cashill condemns Ali for a whole host of sins: for having “knowingly betrayed Malcolm X”; for “publicly turning his back on his press secretary, Leon 4X Ameer,” which led directly to Ameer’s death; for not having quit the Nation of Islam or protested when its members executed family and friends of the Hanafi sect; for publicly degrading Joe Frazier, his chief nemesis, “along the crudest racial lines”; for being “an unapologetic sexist”; for being “an unabashed racist, calling for an American apartheid and the lynching of interracial couples as late as 1975”; and for rejecting “his country in its hour of need” and expressing “no regret at the fate of those millions we all abandoned.”

Cashill is right on virtually every point. Ali did all these things, and more. Cahill scores some other good points, especially in making the case of how the white left needed Ali. In the end, though, by virtue of its very critique of him, the book endorses rather then undermines Ali’s importance. And Ali’s dissent about Vietnam, no matter its motives, was important for a free society. His hero status is deserved for the most part, despite his considerable flaws.

But what’s important about Cashill’s book has as much to do with the author’s own story, threaded throughout the book: a lower-middle class white boy who grew up around blacks in Newark. His is the story of how New Deal liberalism’s black and white coalition broke apart over economic and social issues, Ali among them. Ali never rose above his divisive times, like Joe Louis did in the 30’s, or Floyd Patterson tried to do in the 50’s and 60’s. Ali was merely an emblem of them. That is Cashill’s view.

Cashill’s father was a police officer who lost his rank on the force when an Italian became mayor of Newark and chose only to reward other Italians, even though Cashill’s father had supported him. His father eventually committed suicide. He struggled in a home with a single mother and three siblings as his neighborhood grew blacker as the 60’s progressed and whites fled in a panic to the suburbs. Eventually he was the lone white kid on the basketball court. Crime increased, services deteriorated, and he faced greater hostility from the blacks around him. At first, he liked Ali, during his Cassius Clay days; but as Clay became more racially self-conscious, joining the the Nation of Islam and speaking more critically of the United States, Cashill grew to dislike him.

I grew up in Philadelphia and knew a number of urban ethnic whites like Cashill. (I exclude Jews from this grouping, as their interactions with blacks were and are very different.) They tended to work hard, keep neat homes, hold conservative views greatly influenced by the church, have philistine tastes, serve their country when called. They were also staunchly Democratic, for two reasons: they believed in unions and they believed in the common man getting a break. The Democrats stood for that.

When blacks began to push for their rights, these whites hated it intensely. They thought blacks were complaining, and the idea of complaining they found distasteful. They also thought that blacks wanted something special because they were black. When blacks had been seen just as other members of the working class, urban ethnic whites seemed to see a certain common cause with them: everyone was Democratic and proud of it. Once blacks became a special grievance group — a move the Democratic Party supported for a variety of reasons — white urban ethnics found them and the party unbearable. They particularly did not want to be blamed for blacks’ troubles, as Martin Luther King seemed to be doing when he held his 1966 march through white, working-class neighborhoods of Chicago. The violent reaction he got was very predictable. As a teenager at the time, I thought he was goofy to attempt what he did, showing that he did not understand the difference in the mind of the white southerner and the mind of the white urban ethnic.

I know many white urban ethnics who felt, in the end, that they paid for the civil rights movement by being made the goats for it. “Rich liberal WASPs could blame us as the bad racist guys who were against integration. But all the integration was falling on us, in our neighborhoods and schools. They didn’t worry much about it out where the rich people lived,” one white ethnic told me a few years ago.

Sports was a common ground between white urban ethnics and blacks, but Ali seemed to violate that, polarizing things as a way to sell himself and his fights. In the end, there is a certain elegiac, tragic sense to Cashill’s book, as if, sadly, Ali failed his moment. I think Ali’s failure truly wounded Cashill, truly disappointed him. In such a whirlwind as the 60’s, it would have been miraculous if it had been otherwise.

Let Your People Stay By JOHN TIERNEY

February 21, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Let Your People Stay
By JOHN TIERNEY

MILWAUKEE

If you were a Democrat watching Coretta Scott King's funeral, you could congratulate yourself on the party's role in past civil rights struggles. But if you saw what's been on television in Milwaukee in the past month, you'd wonder what's become of your party.

Gov. Jim Doyle, a Democrat, looks like public enemy No. 1 for African-American schoolchildren. "He's throwing away my dream," one Milwaukee student says in a TV commercial supporting the city's school voucher program for low-income families. Another commercial shows a black father on the verge of tears saying: "School choice is good enough for the governor's family. I ought to be able to have it, too."

Radio audiences have been hearing an ad calling the voucher battle "one of the greatest social justice issues we have in the country." The speaker is Ken Johnson, an African-American who leads Milwaukee's school board.

You read that correctly: the head of the public school board supports giving students in his system a chance to escape public schools. That would be unthinkable in most cities, but Milwaukee's voucher program has been so successful over the past 15 years that it's won a wide array of converts — except among the Democrats terrified of teachers' unions.

The governor repeatedly vetoed bills passed by Republican legislators who were trying to head off a problem that became official yesterday: there aren't enough vouchers for all the students who want them. The original law limited the number of vouchers to 15 percent of the city's public school enrollment — which works out to almost 15,000 vouchers — but the program has grown beyond that limit.

So the state announced a rationing plan yesterday that would deny vouchers next year to thousands of students, many of them already using vouchers to attend private schools. These students and their parents have been appearing in television commercials, paid for by a pro-voucher group, and showing up at the State Capitol carrying signs reading, "Governor Doyle, Don't Cap My Future."

The pressure has worked. The governor and the Republicans have negotiated a last-minute deal — expected to be enacted shortly — to stave off the rationing plan by allotting extra vouchers. That would spare the Democrats from the immediate prospect of kicking black children out of private schools.

But it still leaves the party in Wisconsin and elsewhere with long-term problems. How long will blacks vote for a party that opposes the voucher programs they strongly favor? And how can Democratic leaders keep preaching their devotion to public schools while sending their own children to private schools, as Governor Doyle does? He's what I call a Lypsy, an acronym for Let Your People Stay.

Doyle told me that he wasn't bothered by the personal attacks, and that he had compromised only to avoid disrupting students' education. He said he was still philosophically opposed to vouchers and didn't fear reprisals from black voters. "I don't think this is an issue that moves voters," he said, arguing that blacks distrust Republicans on too many other issues.

He may be right — for now. Howard Fuller, a prominent advocate for vouchers as well as a former superintendent of Milwaukee's public schools, told me he hadn't seen the popularity of the voucher program translate into much affection for Republicans among his fellow African-Americans, especially his civil rights comrades.

"Those people you saw at Coretta Scott King's funeral are not going to change," he said. "My generation pushed for social change through government solutions, but younger blacks are much more interested in private initiatives. They understand that the public school system cannot by itself be the solution to educating low-income children."

One of those younger blacks is Jason Fields, a first-term state legislator who has defied his fellow Democrats by supporting vouchers. "If the Democratic Party is supposed to be the party of the little guy, where do we get off opposing a chance to help those with the least of all?" he asked. The answer he's heard from his party is that supporting vouchers can end your career if the teachers' union supports a candidate against you in the Democratic primary.

But Fields, who represents a predominantly black district in Milwaukee, is that rare Democrat who will stand up for his constituents against the union. "If they run someone against me, so be it," Fields said. "I'm willing to leave it up to the voters to decide who really cares about African-Americans, and who's just spitting out rhetoric."

[I can't stand Tierney, but if you want to read his b.s., you shouldn't have to pay for it.]

Happy Birthday Toni Morrison

Hatred is epidemic (and it looks like a lynched raccoon)

Contractors upset by raccoon at work site

Minority contractors arrived at work Thursday and found a dead raccoon hanging from a sign pole. Bill Mason, president of the Minority Contractors Association, called it "a racist tactic to scare black people. In the South where I was born, it was common for whites to hang raccoons. It symbolized the hanging of blacks," Mason said.[thx f2b]

Raccoon found hanged at African-American church

Hate crime shocks, puzzles

African American Elders helps forge connections

Like so many African-American women of her generation, Lillie Mae Graham worked her whole life for others — cooking, cleaning and being a caregiver.

Now, at 81, when it should be her turn to get help, she sometimes wonders if anybody even cares if she's alive.

"I wanted to go back home. I'll be feeling down and I'll cry sometimes," said Graham, who lives in a tiny apartment in the Central Area.

Confronting America's Racial Divide, in Blackface and White

Has Summers Lost His Faculty? by Gerald Early

In the Center of it All
Has Summers Lost His Faculty?
Categories: Academia

Harvard President Lawrence Summers is in trouble again. Or let us say his troubles have reached a certain pitch as to make the news again. This time, a number of his faculty are up in arms about the resignation of William Kirby as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Some feel he is being pushed out. Mr. Kirby, a professor of Chinese History, was a professor at my institution, Washington University, before he went to Harvard several years ago. I’m sure he scarcely imagined he would eventually make newspapers across the country in this way. Indeed, when most deans step down from their jobs — whether pushed, bribed, exhausted or fired outright — they never make news beyond the local campus paper.

Most people outside the academy have no idea what any dean of an arts and sciences faculty does. Most deans spend a great deal of time dispensing budgetary allocations, asking donors for money or having department heads and faculty ask them for money. Mr. Kirby, like his peers at other institutions, determines the annual budgets of all the departments of arts and sciences. He determines which departments get approvals for new faculty hires. He greatly influences decisions as to who becomes a department chair. He controls the way fundraising dollars flow to departments and programs. He sits on the tenure committee, oversees tenure decisions and can veto any favorable tenure decision if he doesn’t like it.

In short, it is a powerful job. If a faculty has a dean they like or are used to working with, they loathe change. If the president does not have the complete confidence of his or her faculty and makes a change like this, it could be very difficult. The old saw that the battles in academe are so nasty because the stakes are so petty is not quite true. Harvard is a $25 billion institution, after all.

The arts and science faculty have scheduled a no-confidence vote for February 28. (He has already been the unhappy recipient of one such resolution, last March.) Some are ready to move to have him fired. It seems remarkable that a man who has had such success in life as Mr. Summers seems so inept at keeping his job; that is, as Casey Stengel put it, seems so inept at keeping the people who hate him from joining forces with the people who aren’t sure.

Mr. Summers’s problems started shortly after he became president of Harvard in 2001 and got into a contretemps with Cornel West, an internationally known professor in philosophy and African American Studies. Apparently, Mr. Summers did not think much of Mr. West’s non-academic activities and thought he should be writing more straight scholarship and fewer op-ed pieces. Mr. West did not take kindly either to this advice, the way it was delivered or both. He thought Mr. Summers was racist.

On the one hand, it is not so unusual for a college president or dean to take aside one of his or her star faculty, if he or she thinks the person is not quite living up to the marquee lettering. Sometimes, faculty do badly detour in their careers or are mesmerized by the glamorous world of punditry or suffer a kind of “scholar’s block.” In those cases, some avuncular guidance is often useful.

On the other hand, star faculty are famous people who have achieved considerable notice in the world for something that is, more or less, a real set of accomplishments. Like stars in any other profession, they must be approached and handled with some degree of shrewdness and aplomb. According to reports, Mr. Summers does not have the most pleasing bedside manner. In the elite academic world, contention is rife and rivalry is maddening, egos are fragile and stars can easily walk. Mr. West went to Princeton. This made the front page in The New York Times, in part as a story of race and racism in the academy. But I thought that if a black man can have a choice between working at Harvard or working at Princeton, this hardly seems like a story of victimization. It might even seem an old-fashioned story of progress. (Or, otherwise, in America, some blacks are becoming mighty high-priced victims!)

Last year, Mr. Summers offended many of his women faculty when in welcoming remarks at a conference he said that women might be biologically predisposed to not having great success in pursuing scientific careers. Clearly, men and women are different genetically, but whether this difference amounts to nothing more than that one sex carries fetuses for nine months while the other doesn’t has become a source of great political fractiousness. Mr. Summers stepped right into it with the grace of an elephant washing dishes.

There was some debate as to how he framed and intended the remarks but there is little debate about how they were received. When most college presidents make welcoming remarks at a conference, they indicate that they have no idea what the conference is about and are in a considerable hurry to leave to meet with a donor. So, they employ drowse-inducing bureaucratic non-speak: vague phrases about “excellence,” “the spirit of academic inquiry” and “collegial and interdisciplinary exchange.”

Both to his credit and to his folly, Mr. Summers chose to actually say something, as if what the conference was about was actually of some interest to him! It was this, and other things that did not make the news reports, that led to the first no-confidence resolution. How much more of this Mr. Summers can survive is certainly up in the air. Clearly some deep pockets at Harvard want him around; otherwise he would have been fired long ago, if only as a nuisance who keeps getting Harvard bad publicity as a troubled place. But I suspect the opposition is probably lining up deep pockets, too. Faculty at most prestigious colleges and universities are so wrapped up in their research, their intellectual cliques and their classes that it takes something like an administrative earthquake to get them to pay much attention to broader institutional issues. Once they’re riled, they can give the administration and board of trustees all they can handle.

Now, some have interpreted this business at Harvard as yet another battle in the culture wars, that hoary phrase. Whether Mr. Summers is an incompetent or a brusque breath of fresh air is not really the point. Conservatives think Mr. Summers is disliked by his faculty because he exhibits the speech and the attitude of a neo-con. There is no real free speech at the university these days, their argument continues, unless one accepts all liberal left assumptions about the world. The attempts to oust Mr. Summers proves their case. Liberals bristle at this, claiming that Mr. Summers lacks leadership skills, is a difficult personality and exercises poor judgment.

Now, it cannot be denied that there is a liberal or leftward bias among faculty at most prestigious colleges and universities. This bias, often unnoticed because it is assumed to be a self-evident sane view of the world — rather like believing that the sun rises in the east — can have something of a stifling effect on the dimensions of academic dialogue. There are clearly certain things that cannot be said without the speaker bringing down waterfalls of execration. I know what most of my colleagues want to hear. But then again Mr. Summers may be an incompetent who should be fired regardless of whether he is politically incorrect.

As for my own views of the matter: first, I don’t work at Harvard, so I don’t have to have a view. Second, I learned when I was a kid to be enough of a conservative to every liberal and enough of liberal to every conservative to put people in the quandary of whether they should court me madly as a convert or distrust me as traitor. I take my lessons from baseball: be a good pitcher and give the batter what he wants but not quite in the way he is expecting to get it. There is no other way to live.

Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing | A song written for Abraham Lincoln's Birthday

"The Black National Anthem"

Lift ev'ry voice and sing,
Till earth and heaven ring.
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise,
High as the list'ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast'ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet,
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might,
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee,
Shadowed beneath thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.

Happy Birthday Mr. Lincoln

Remember the Niagara Movement

Liberty, freedom and the inherent right of self-determination will never be granted unto the oppressed by the oppressor. The victims of exploitation and tyranny must always take the right of democratic self-rule from those who deny it from them.

Early American radical and revolutionary Patrick Henry famously summed up the downtrodden battle cry-"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"

This patriotic declaration of humankind's inherent right to self-determination is a primary attribute of the truly courageous souls.

No organization personified this attitude and its subsequent mission more than the Niagara Movement.

Founded in 1905 by W.E.B. Du Bois, Monroe Trotter and 30 others in a Buffalo church, this organization rejected the accommodation policies of Booker T. Washington.

Dubois summed up this group's mission: "We want full manhood suffrage, and we want it now…We are men! We want to be treated as men. And we shall win." Du Bois and his fellows were obvious men of courage, undaunted in their determination for equality. Many women also joined the organization, which also advocated full suffrage for women.

The general public often characterized the Niagara movement as "too radical" to achieve its ends. This accusation was well deserved because the chief political tool of the Niagara Movement was to use unconventional means, such as strikes and protests, to fight for their cause.

Caucasians and accommodationists such as Booker T. Washington said the Niagara Movement would only continue to pour gas on to the fire of racial tension. Some still accuse men like Dubois and Trotter of using fear tactics to achieve equality. They argued that the best way for African Americans to achieve equality was to wait and use the proper channels of participation.

But really, how could African Americans use "the proper channels of participation" if they were denied those channels? The real question we must ask when we are confronted with civil disobedience is "what would I do if I were in their situation."

Say, for example, U students were severely persecuted just for the fact that we go to the U. We were beaten, lynched, raped, killed, bombed, shot at and denied jobs, education and general human dignity. What would you do?

I like to think that most U students would have the attitude of Patrick Henry. Certainly, unconventional political participation is necessary to achieve equal rights for those who are denied them.

The Niagara Movement, the precursor for the NAACP, was a necessary movement organized by true American patriots. The U.S. government officially honors and recognizes slaveholders such as George Washington and genocidal tyrants like Columbus, but refuses to recognize people like Du Bois and Frederick Douglass. It's obvious to see whose history the government respects.

American history ought to tell the story of the Niagara Movement and those early black patriots. America would not be the land it is today without their sacrifices and persistence.

Think of how our society could be if we hearkened to the principles of the Niagara Movement. We would cease to be the land of inequality and warmongering and start to live out the ideal of the Declaration of Independence-that all men and women are created equal.

Research opens author's eyes to 'Confederate Kinfolk'

Family research its own reward

Bvenitta's grandmother told her Bill Williams got in "a spot of trouble and had to lay low" but didn't share details.

...a black mob lynched a white man for the alleged criminal assault of a black girl who died afterward, Bvenitta said. She learned Bill Williams was sentenced to be hanged in 1889 for his part in the death of the white man but he was pardoned because of a public outcry.

Through her research of newspaper stories and court records, Bvenitta learned the white man who was arrested for the rape of the black girl was going to be released for lack of evidence. That's when Bill Williams and other black men decided to hang the white man, she said.

From slavery to the Hellfighters of Harlem

Rev. Robert Woods - Robert Aikens' great grandfather - lived as a slave in the south during the 1800s.

Harrison Vroman, a Harlem Hellfighter during World War I, is flanked on the left by daughters

'Colorblindness' disrespects diversity

Former 'Heart of Segregation' Pays Homage 'to a Black Woman'

An Appreciation: Coretta Scott King (1927-2006)

An Appreciation: Coretta Scott King (1927-2006)
By Jelani Cobb, Special to AOL Black Voices

When the young Coretta Scott sang publicly, she stood erect and clasped her hands before her, a model of grace, quiet self-assurance and refinement. Those who were fortunate enough to witness her performance had a unique window into the next five decades of her life.


Historian Darlene Clark Hine has written that black women leaders have a long tradition of "dissemblance" -- constructing a public persona that serves the race's need for an "ideal black woman" and simultaneously leaving the true individual protected from the antagonism of a racially hostile society. The recognized faces of Mary Church Terrell or Ida B. Wells-Barnett or Ella Baker as the representative of the race leave us wondering generations later, who Ida or Mary or Ella really was. The paradox is that the more we see of this individual, the less we actually know about her.


We saw a great deal of Coretta Scott, perhaps more than anyone else in these years and with her death we are not only left bereft of our most vital link to Martin, but also made profoundly aware of how little we knew or understood her. The third act of her life -- the one that followed her years as an Alabama farm girl and as a famous preacher's wife, the one that began on April 4, 1968 -- was a public performance that she played with the same grace, quiet self-assurance and refinement.

If you were able to get beyond the official Coretta, you would have seen the woman whose roots lay in rural Alabama. Her family, unlike most other black Alabamans, owned their own land. But Coretta Scott was not a product of the rural gentry. Few would have known that the closest thing to a first lady of black America had grown up picking cotton. Few would have known that she continued to reside in the same working-class community where she and Martin had lived together.

She was a graduate of Antioch College pursuing a graduate degree in music when Martin King, the brash, smooth-tongued city boy from Atlanta cold-called her. King had been given her number by a mutual friend and within moments got her to agree to have lunch with him. Coretta endured the open hostility of Martin's father (who had selected another woman for him to marry) and his wedding-day attempt to dissuade them from going through with their marriage plans. As a young wife, she struggled with Martin's refusal to agree with her desire to use her education outside the home (an issue that, interestingly enough, also became a source of conflict between Betty Shabazz, who held a nursing degree, and her husband Malcolm X.)


Beyond the grinding daily pressure of class expectations and confinement to the role of wife and mother, Coretta was married to a man who essentially knew from age 26 his pursuit of justice would lead to a violent death. Any doubts about that possibility were erased during the Montgomery Bus Boycott when their home was bombed. There were other burdens too.


It was Coretta whom J. Edgar Hoover's FBI sought to turn into King's Achilles heel. In 1965, the agency sent audiotapes of King's sexual liaisons with other women to Coretta as a means of derailing the leader and thereby the movement. The actual toll of this is unknown and perhaps unknowable, though years later Coretta wrote that such matters in a union between soul mates are ultimately inconsequential -- a profound statement of commitment and love one suspects was written by official Coretta.


Coretta Scott King was frequently compared to Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and on the surface the comparison was apt. Both women were thrust into history by the assassination of a husband whom history has regarded as a great idealist. Both endured unimaginable travail with vast reserves of grace -- a feat anyone who has ever lost a love one, understands as heroic. And the images of Coretta Scott King and Jacqueline Kennedy at their respective husbands' funerals have been burned into our collective memory. But that is where it ends. While Bouvier Kennedy had the weight of the presidential seal to ensure that her husband would remain a cherished icon of his native land, Coretta Scott King was left with only the sad history and official amnesia that has greeted black martyrs since that first African decided not to board a slave ship. Jacqueline Kennedy was free to become Jacqueline Onasis without fear that her husband would be forgotten. Coretta had no such assurances. Ask yourselves how many of us recall and honor Harry T. and Harriet Moore, the NAACP officials who were killed by a firebomb in 1950. Even by 1968, their noble work was remembered as a distant echo. It is possible, in the most ideal of scenarios, that the world had actually been changed by Martin’s work and his vision. But such vague hopes are cold comfort to a grieving wife and wounded extended community.

It was Coretta's will that ensured we carried Martin with us, that his vision continues to be spoken of in the present tense. The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-violent Social Change was literally created in the family basement. It was Coretta's undaunted efforts to have Martin's birthday made into a national holiday that solidified her status as a hero in her own right. A student of American history would have no reason to suspect that the nation would honor a slain black man with a national holiday. Coretta believed.


With time, she came to use her status in overtly political ways -- endorsing Walter Mondale over Jesse Jackson in 1984 and publicly challenging the black community to combat homophobia and address the issue of HIV-AIDS. Last month, Coretta made a surprise appearance at a dinner banquet. The audience was shocked that she had mustered the strength to appear in public after suffering a major stroke. But to those of us familiar with her story, there was no reason for surprise. This is the sort of thing that heroes do.

Would Mrs. King Have Approved? by Rep. Diane Watson

Lessons Taught by Grammy by Eugene Robinson

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Eulogy for the Young Victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing

18 September 1963 - Birmingham, Ala.

Apolitical? Nope.
[thx kos]

Embracing the chaos

But the "conversation" about our leaders and nation was just that, words that moved, lifted and sometimes pricked. Such is our prized tradition. There are times where we do get it right.

Coretta Scott King's Four Children Speak of Her Illness, Final Days

The Presidents and Mrs. King

Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., center left, talks with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. center right, during funeral services for civil rights leaders Coretta Scott King, Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2006 at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga. Sen. Robert Menendez, D- N.J. is at left, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J. is at right. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

An enlarged section of a class and faculty photo shows Coretta Scott King, marked as 355, taken Nov. 15, 1945, is on display in the library at Antioch College, Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2006, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. King graduated from Antioch College in 1951. (AP Photo/Courtesy Antioch College)

For Coretta Scott King, a funeral fit for a leader in her own right

Poet Maya Angelou (C) speaks at funeral services for Coretta Scott King as U.S. President George Bush and his wife Laura listen at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia February 7, 2006. REUTERS/Jason Reed

PBS coverage

MAYA ANGELOU: I pledge to you, my sister, I will never cease - I mean to say, I want to see a better world. I mean to say I want to see some peace somewhere. I mean to say I want to see some honesty, some fair play. I want to see kindness and justice. This is what I want to see, and I want to see it through my eyes and through your eyes Coretta Scott King.

(Singing) I open my mouth to the Lord, and I won't turn back no -- I will go. I shall go. I'll see what the end is going to be.

DN! Last tributes to Mrs. King

Four presidents join thousands at King funeral

If you get a chance, please watch Mrs. King's funeral on Cspan. In particular, I found the speeches of Jimmy Carter, Reverend Joseph Lowery, John Conyers, Maya Angelou, Malaak Shabazz to be very inspiring.

Here is Reverend Lowery's standing ovation



Children view the flowered draped casket of Coretta Scott King following the funeral ceremony at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Ga., Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2006. (AP Photo/Ric Feld)


More on King Funeral

Funeral Site for King Stirs Unease

How many more would have been turned away if the funeral was held at Ebenezer? I like the symbolism of Ebenezer better but realistically, the bigger the better in this instance.

Stephanie Wanzaa (R) leads her daughter Joi away from the funeral for Coretta Scott King at New Birth Missionary Baptist after being turned away in Lithonia, Georgia February 7, 2006. Wanzaa said they had walked for three miles to get to the funeral as hundreds who tried to attend the service were turned away. REUTERS/Tami Chappell

Coretta Scott King, National Widow by Gerald Early

The death of Coretta Scott King brings a certain aspect of the 1960’s to near-closure. There were four widows of assassinated public figures of major renown at that time: Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of President John Kennedy; Betty Shabazz, wife of Nation of Islam minister Malcolm X; Ethel Kennedy, wife of slain senator Robert Kennedy; and of course Mrs. King, wife of Martin Luther King, Jr. Only Ethel Kennedy is still alive, and she is not a significant public presence. Of all these women, only Mrs. King worked tirelessly to advance her husband’s name and his cause. Indeed, of all of them, Mrs. King became the national widow, a woman who could not have remarried if she wanted the public standing to do what she proceeded to do.

Coretta Scott King made being the widow of Dr. King a political and cultural position. She used her famous husband, as certain driven women have done before her, to empower herself and, ironically, achieve her identity through the maintenance and propagation of his myth. That she as a black woman was able to build a national shrine for a black man – one whom many believed was a communist and fewer truly esteem than their public pronouncements might suggest – is a considerable feat of energetic single-mindedness, worthy of admiration.

Skeptics might think it was all a form of marital neurosis: a score-settling obsession with the only thing you’ve got. That is, Mrs. King’s pursuit was, in part, settling scores with Dr. King himself (his womanizing had to be painful and humiliating for any wife, no matter how liberal or forward-thinking she saw herself or how grand the cause of civil rights) and settling scores with his critics. And it should be remembered that at the time of his death, Dr. King had critics by the bunch.

It must have been difficult to be married to Martin Luther King. He was never home. Mrs. King had to bear the burden of rearing their four children virtually alone. She also had to bear the burden of being a model wife to a man struggling to maintain a triple identity. He was a preacher (being a preacher’s wife by itself is enough to make many women seek psychiatric help, so demanding is the job); he was an international public figure, and he was a constrained black man whose bourgeois morality was crucial to his legitimacy and authority. Dr. King also had to be a model of humility and selflessness in a way few race leaders have been required to be: he could not in any way seem to profit from his fame and position. Any move of that sort, given the intense F.B.I. scrutiny he was under, would have resulted in his complete downfall and the destruction of the civil rights movement. So, for instance, he had to give away his Nobel Peace Prize money. He left his family very little money when he died. In “At Canaan’s Edge,” the final volume of his study of the King years, Taylor Branch writes:

Settlement was imminent in April [1965] on Coretta’s quest for them to buy a first home in Atlanta after five years as renters, but King still resisted. To him, even a modest house of $10,000 was a haunting luxury, unbecoming his commitment to the poor. His renunciations of material comfort and bourgeois ambition vexed Coretta, especially since his constant journeys most often left her behind with four children in a cramped space. She accommodated what she called the “guilt-ridden” barbs of a man whose “conscience fairly devoured him.”

Dr. King’s guilt was intensified by his philandering. He had many women on the road, the privilege of a male celebrity who needs lots of sex to boost his ego and calm his nerves. (It was a standard perk for big-time black preachers, in any case.) Indeed, according to his biographers, he was about to tell Mrs. King before he died that one mistress had become a favorite and that they ought to divorce. (If the biographies are accurate, it seems unlikely their marriage would have survived into the 1970’s, had Dr. King not been assassinated.)

Dr. King was also under enormous pressure, as Mrs. King acknowledges from the outset in her book, “My Life With Martin Luther King, Jr.” He was the head of a mass movement that he had virtually come to symbolize and without him could hardly exist as something coherent. He also felt pressure because he was a man trying to create a political center and keep himself there, neither too far left nor too conservative. He tried to combine the political tactics of the union organizer with the drama and aura of Billy Graham-style religious campaigns, an enormous strategic and ideological strain. He was also under the constant threat of death, as were members of his family. Dr. King suffered “breakdowns,” bouts of exhaustion, as they were called; but Mrs. King must have suffered similarly.

Dr. King was surely driven by guilt, as a good many social crusaders are, at least religious ones: guilt that motivates them to change society, guilt about why they are driven to do this at some cost to their personal lives, and guilt that arises from how they are supposed to exploit whatever success they achieve. All of this adds up to 15 years of a difficult and complex marriage between two ambitious people who were first generation members of the post-World War II black educated elite.

Therein lies an interesting story of how these ambitions complemented, and how they may have thwarted, particular desires. The fathers of Mrs. and Dr. King came from large families, but both Coretta and Martin were born and reared in small southern families, a sign of upward expectations on the part of their parents. Only people reared in a certain way, with certain important aspirations, would wind up with the idea that they could change the country and that they ought to. Mrs. King graduated from Antioch College and the New England Conservatory; Dr. King from Morehouse, Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University. It is little wonder they became the leading couple of civil rights movement. In them and through them, the torch of black national leadership was literally passed to a new generation.

Mrs. King achieved three institutional changes during her life after her husband’s death: the establishment of the Martin Luther King Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta; the establishment of the national King holiday, signed into law in 1983 by President Ronald Reagan, a conservative who suspected King was a communist; and the establishment of the Coretta Scott King Award for children’s books.

For these successes she deserves considerable acclaim in her own right as one of the remarkable women of her time. She became Dr. King’s Paul, in effect. She not only institutionalized his beliefs and ideas, spread his influence directly and indirectly in a number of spheres, particularly among young people — she also firmly established both his myth and the inviolability of it. And she slew his enemies as well, for his canonization, through his holiday, has so elevated him that he transcends criticism. Even conservatives dare not speak against him, and most have come to accept him as a civic hero, a genuine American Founding Father, the man who had race relations sorted out the right way before Black Power, government spending, affirmative action and irresponsible race hustlers came along to wreck the Dream, that beautiful articulation of a color-blind America.

Such elevation had not happened for any black leader before Dr. King — not W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, A. Philip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall, Adam Clayton Powell, Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Lester Granger, Charles S. Johnson or anyone else. Some of these leaders may have left some kind of an institutional presence behind, but none has had Dr. King’s reach, prestige or power. Of course, Dr. King was probably the most famous and important leader black America ever produced, but what has happened subsequent to his death was not inevitable or a natural result of his life and accomplishments.

What distinguished Dr. King from the others, in great measure, was that he was married to someone like Mrs. King, who wanted for him, in the end, what he could not have wanted for himself. Sometimes a marriage can work that way, as Mrs. King clearly proved. Sometimes a marriage can last well beyond the death of a spouse.

Coretta Scott King "A Woman for All People"

Reserved but never Reticent

Civil rights era needs successor: Class equality

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, left, who founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference along with Martin Luther King Jr., and former Atlanta mayor and U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, second from left, join others during the dedication of a stretch of County Road 29 in honor of Coretta Scott King, Sunday, Feb. 5, 2006, in front of Mount Tabor AME Zion Church in Marion, Ala. (AP Photo/Butch Dill)

A workman uses a shovel in the rain as he prepares a temporary gravesite for Correta Scott King at the King Center next to the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta February 6, 2006. Coretta Scott King, wife of Martin Luther King Jr., died on January 31 at the age of 78. Behind right is the crypt of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

More than 68,000 attend visitation for Mrs. King

Oprah Winfrey touches the hand of Coretta Scott King at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church during a public viewing in Atlanta February 6, 2006. REUTERS/Jason Reed-Pool





Rev. John Cross, left, pastor of the 16th Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Ala., which was bombed during the civil rights movement is escorted by his daughter, Barbara Cross, as they to pay their respects to Coretta Scott King. (AP Photo/POOL. Renee' Hannans Henry/Atlanta Journal Constitution)

In the Center of it All by Gerald Early | Black History Month

10:28 pm
28 Days


We have arrived once again at Black History Month, that time of year devoted to the remembrance and celebration of all things African American as something like a public duty or civic penance, depending on one’s view. PBS is rolling out African American Lives, a four-hour special by Henry Gates; Turner Classic Movies will devote a day to Sidney Poitier, Ethel Waters and Paul Robeson; public service announcements on many radio stations will remind us about the lives of great black Americans – an inventor or a civil rights lawyer – who most of the public has never heard of; bookstores will prominently display books by black authors or about black people in their windows; school children will be told about the glories of the civil rights movement. For 28 days the red, white and blue will be swathed in the red, black and green flag of black liberation. And here I am at The New York Times.

Is it all passé, having separate space on the calendar about blacks? Does it all smack of a kind and gentle form of Jim Crow? Or, looked at another way, why celebrate this particular minority group without celebrating others? Why not a Chinese American History Month, a Filipino American History Month , an Italian American or Irish American History Month? Why are blacks the exceptionalist group among American non-white and European minorities?

When I was a boy my Irish and Italian friends reminded me that their ethnic groups did not try to have Columbus Day or St. Patrick’s Day extended into week-long celebrations. (This was in the 1960’s, before Negro History Week became Black History Month.) I always replied by saying, “Why not? There are a lot of weeks in the year that aren’t doing anything.”

Detractors of various political persuasions argue variously: 1) Black History Month is assigned to the shortest month of the year, a sign that our nation does not really take it seriously. 2) African American history ought to be discussed throughout the year, not just during one month. 3) Black History Month reduces African American history to “contributions” made to a larger history of the nation. It becomes a sub-history, a history contingent on the larger narrative of white history. 4) Black History Month is divisive, part of the fragmentation and multiculturalization of American history, where every group must have its own version of history and cannot share a common one.

Taking these objections in turn: the creator of this commemoration, Carter G. Woodson, who earned a Ph.D. in history from Harvard and became one of the most prolific African American historians ever (though, with his crabbed writing style, never the easiest to read), chose the second week in February for Negro History Week in 1926 because of the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln (Feb. 12, which, when I was a kid, was a national holiday) and Frederick Douglass (Feb. 14), although, of course, Douglass never really knew when he was born. Lincoln’s birthday was clearly the more important because it tied African American history to the one white person who could make it a transcendent topic of human importance to both blacks and those whites who cared about this issue at all.

Could he have chosen a better month? Thirty one days hath July and August but Negro History Week was primarily for school children and most didn’t go to school during those months. In December, it would have been overshadowed by Christmas. In March or April, Easter might fall. January may have been good: the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on the first day of 1863. But Woodson didn’t want the week tied to a particular historical act. He wanted instead to emphasize the larger historical issues of the Union and the process of social transformation that Lincoln as a historical figure made possible.

In short, he wanted to place the week in such a way that blacks would seem “present at the creation” of a new society, indeed, their condition being the cause of it. As historian Paul Johnson has asserted, the Civil War made the United States a nation. So why not tie it to Lincoln? The week was expanded to a month in 1976 and there seemed to be little reason to change it at that point to another, longer month.

The argument that Black History Month in fact segregates black history misses two points: first, that blacks, on the whole, rightly or wrongly, feel their history is sufficiently precarious — actively suppressed as it was for a good part of the 20th century — to merit a guaranteed space on the national calendar to ensure discussion of it. The very nuisance quality of the occasion, which some disparage, is the very element that makes it of some cultural and historical importance to blacks. They have always had to assert themselves as a nuisance group in order to achieve much of anything in this country. For some, to say that black history should be integrated into the fabric of American history in some way denies the power of black history as a political polemic. Second, it can also be argued the segregation of the month only serves to remind the nation as a whole about how segregated blacks have been in our national life, a point that should not be forgotten.

Most nationalist or Afrocentrist types disparage any vision of a history built on “contributions.” This perspective asserts that black people have a whole, organic history independent of any purely “American” context or “American” understanding. As a radical friend told me in the 1970’s, “There are no ‘sub’ realities. There are only competing realities.”

“Minority classification fatigue” is understandable, but it also takes on more than a little of the quality of “majority envy.” It is hard to say whether Woodson saw Negro History Week as “contributionism,” it is unlikely, judging from “The Mis-Education of the Negro,” Woodson’s most popular and accessible book, which legitimated for many blacks the idea that history is nothing more than political propaganda that either works for or against one’s self-interests. But “contributionism” is obviously only a strategy, a way for an outside group with relatively limited power to work its way toward intellectual and emotional ownership of the majority’s history. A sense of ownership of America and of its institutions, something blacks were denied for most of their history in this country, is essential for their future here.

Some conservatives have argued that Black History Month is divisive, part of the leftist pluralist vision of American history. There is actually very little to support this view. Black History Month is part of a push for inclusion, not separation. Its “pluralist” bent was only a recognition of the racism that forced the study of black people to be a separate academic and civic enterprise. There have been separatist moments among American blacks: during the 1850’s, for instance, and again during Marcus Garvey’s heyday in the early 1920’s (a holdover from the 1890’s), and later during the Black Power era of the late 1960’s. But African Americans on the whole have displayed far less of a separatist temperament than the French in Canada or the Basques in Spain or the Koreans in Japan after World War II or many other groups around the world.

The creation of Negro History Week and, later, Black History Month, has probably done a great deal to ensure a sense of black civic pride and commitment. What I think irritates some conservatives is not that the occasion is separatist but rather that blacks, through it, make a persistent claim to a form of exceptionalism as both a minority group and historical victims. But what makes them exceptions is slavery. And some would argue that if Black History Month reminds the nation of slavery, it is doing a good service, for that is a topic most of us would rather forget.

It might be thought from all of this that I am, on the whole, favorably disposed to Black History Month, and that this piece is a defense of it. But actually, I am not. As a boy, I remember Negro History Week as pain and embarrassment: Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune, and a few other historical blacks were trotted out by stern black teachers in what seemed to be nothing so much as a fit of racial piety that lacked both conviction and purpose. And, alas, there was the subject of slavery, which no one could make sense of except that for some mysterious reason white folk enslaved blacks and for an equally mysterious reason, a few hundred years later, decided to free them.

As a boy, none of this seemed heroic, interesting or even intelligible. It only made me wonder how I was supposed to relate to black people and why. That is, what did this past, such as it was, have to do with me? Black History Month, or Negro History Week, was the institutionalization of uplift, which I hated, as I was subjected to it almost daily in some form or fashion.

The preoccupation with uplift seemed to prove to me that blacks had swallowed their own sense of inferiority. Why was I being burdened with that problem? The tale of people obsessed with their inferiority, with being “cured,” was no kind of historical narrative that was going to do me any good as a kid. So, for a long time, I associated Black History Month with a kind of two-bit therapy that tried to turn guilt into pride, that only the persecuted could fashion. I was, on that score, always a skeptic.

King Funeral Reflects Civil Rights Gains

King Funeral Has Surprise in Site Choice

State of Flux

Frist has the nerve to talk about his respect for Mrs. King.

Funny, that respect wasn't very obvious when Frist tried to kill a Senate resolution against lynching last year.[Via]

Kaylon Foster (L) prays with classmates as they pay their respects in front of the crypt of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. at the King Center in Atlanta January 31, 2006 in honor of Coretta Scott King. Coretta Scott King, who surged to the front of the fight for racial equality in America after her husband Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968, died at age 78, friends and family said on Tuesday. REUTERS/Tami Chappell

Talking Points: For Liberia a New Leader, and a Ray of Hope

January 31, 2006
Talking Points: For Liberia a New Leader, and a Ray of Hope
By HELENE COOPER

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa's first woman president, survived her country's troubled and violent past. Now she intends to set a new course for its future.

It's a good bet that few Americans registered that Laura Bush went to Monrovia, Liberia on Jan. 16 to attend the inauguration of Africa's first democratically elected female president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. To Americans, their country's connection to West Africa's first independent nation is as tenuous as an occasional mention in seventh-grade history books. It's just as good a bet that Liberians, in droves, took notice of Mrs. Bush's short visit. The truth is, almost all of Liberia's conflicts and wars — and there have been many — have their root in a single place: the United States.

So, as it happens, does Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf, who is descended from both former American slaves and native Liberians. Her dual ancestry may make her a particularly appropriate person to help Liberia overcome its complicated history, and move forward.


I. Liberia's American Origins

It started in the early 1800's with America's "Back to Africa" movement. In 1816, a group of philanthropists and abolitionists from the Northern states joined with some scattered slave-owners in the South to establish The American Colonization Society. America was in the throes of the "Back to Africa" campaign which started in part as a response to an unsuccessful slave revolt in Virginia. Many Southern plantation owners blamed the insurrection on the growing number of freed blacks in the country, who they believed were inciting slaves to revolt.

The belief was that America could have free blacks, or it could have enslaved blacks, but it could not have both. To defend the institution of slavery in America, there had to be a place to send the growing numbers of freed blacks. So arose the "Back to Africa" movement.

Those pro-slavery supporters joined forces with slavery opponents, such as Rev. Robert Finley. Finley, a Presbyterian minister from New Jersey who is credited with founding the American Colonization Society, believed that since America would never accept blacks as equals, they would be better off in Africa.

A lot of prominent Americans supported the movement, including Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House; General Andrew Jackson, who was 16 years away from being elected president, and Francis Scott Key, who had just composed the words that would later become the national anthem. All of them showed up at the first meeting of the American Colonization Society in Washington, D.C., in December 1816. Interestingly, most of the supporters at the meeting were from slave states; about half were slave-owners themselves. They didn't want to end slavery; they just wanted to get rid of the free black population.

Consider what Clay, a slaveholder from Kentucky and one of the founders of the group, said at its first meeting:

"Of all the classes of our population, the most vicious is that of the free colored. It is the inevitable result of their moral, political and evil degradation. Contaminated themselves, they extended their vices all around them, to the slaves, to the whites. Every emigrant to Africa is a missionary carrying the credentials in the holy cause of civilization, religion and free institution."

So, clearly, from the start, the movement was plagued by contradictions. The same miscreants who needed to be shipped out of the country were going to be good God-fearing men promoting Christianity in Africa.

The colonization society sent two agents to West Africa to scout for land. They went to the British colony of Sierra Leone, where their request for land for America's freed blacks was turned down. But the British did introduce the Americans to John Kizzell, the son of an African chief, who was kidnapped and sold into slavery when he was visiting his uncle on the coast. Mr. Kizzell landed in South Carolina, where he was sold to a Charleston family, just before the start of the Revolutionary War. During the war, he escaped and joined the British, who protected him until the war was over and then sent him to Nova Scotia, then England, and finally, in 1792, to Sierra Leone, where he became the equivalent of a big man around town: he used his English and Westernized accoutrements and values to serve as a negotiator between the Europeans and the West Africans.

Mr. Kizzell steered the American agents to nearby Sherbro Island, a malaria-infested swamp ruled by a variety of competing African kings. He negotiated with the African kings on Sherbro to provide land for the coming freed blacks from America. During his two-way mediation, he left out a lot of things to both sides. For instance, he didn't tell the American agents that the African kings expected any freed blacks to reside on Sherbro under their rule — to, in effect, become assimilated into the African village structure. Nor did he tell the African kings that the Americans expected they were colonizing their own country, and bringing the uncivilized Africans under their rule. The African kings were suspicious of Mr. Kizzell and the motives of the Americans. But while they didn't agree to sell the land outright, they didn't disagree either.

This non-agreement agreement was enough for the American Colonization Society. And so it was, that on the freezing, blustery winter afternoon of February 6, 1820, the first ship, called the Elizabeth, left New York harbor with 88 American blacks and three white members of the American Colonization Society. Just before the Elizabeth set sail, the ship's passengers drew up Liberia's first constitution, the Constitution of 1820, which required that the new settlement operate under United States laws. Thus began America's first and only attempt at empire building.


II. Liberia's Troubled History

The native Liberians didn't exactly welcome the new American colonists, and several battles were fought between the two sides early on. But the colonists had guns and cannons provided by the American Colonization Society, and they won all of the early skirmishes.

Shortly after the American Colonization Society contingent arrived, they changed the name of the capital city, Christopolis, to Monrovia, after President James Monroe. They called the nation Liberia, Latin for "Land of the Free."

On July 26, 1847, Liberia declared itself an independent nation — the first independent nation in Africa — in a document that borrowed heavily from the American Declaration of Independence. Liberia's 1847 Constitution explained, among other things, why it had become necessary for the nation to cut its ties to the American Colonization Society.

The native Liberians, by and large, were left to form the 95 percent of the population with access to very little of the country's wealth. They invented a derogatory term for the non-natives: "Congo people." The phrase came about in the early 19th century, after Britain abolished the slave trade on the high seas. British patrols seized slave ships leaving the West African coast for America, and returned those captured to Liberia and Sierra Leone, whether they came from there or not. The native Liberians, many of whom had engaged in the slave trade themselves, were not happy about this new business of freeing the slaves and dumping them in Liberia. Since most of the slave ships entered the Atlantic from the mouth of the massive Congo River, all newcomers became known as Congo people. The name also came to apply to all non-native Liberians, even those freed blacks who had arrived from America.

Ironically, the Congo people set up the same type of ante-bellum society they had left behind in America. They installed themselves at the top of the social hierarchy, monopolized the big government jobs, and basically ran the official economy. They wore top hats and tails to festive events, built big houses with wide verandas and hired native Liberians as their servants. It wasn't much different from the style of living in which the Europeans who colonized the rest of Africa were engaged, except for one thing: in the case of Liberia, the people at the top were black.

For 150 years, Liberia's ruling elite showcased its society and economy as one of Africa's finest. A lush tropical slice along the Atlantic, it was the only country in sub-Saharan Africa never colonized by Europeans. Many of Liberian's Congo people looked on smugly as coup after coup engulfed other African countries after the Europeans pulled out. The belief among many was that this could never happen in politically stable Liberia, because it was never colonized by Europeans. Until it did.

In the early hours of the morning on April 12, 1980, a group of enlisted Liberian soldiers led by Master Sgt. Samuel K. Doe, a native Liberian member of the Krahn ethnic group, stormed the executive mansion and killed the president's security detail. President William R. Tolbert, in his dressing gown, came out of his bedroom on the top floor and tried to get to his wife and children's quarters. He was bayoneted and disemboweled.

Liberia, for the first time since its founding, was under the management of native Liberians. Unfortunately, the new President Doe was just as bad, if not worse, than his predecessors. He carved out the country's wealth for his native Krahn group, and targeted members of other ethnic groups, along with the Congo people. He had political opponents rounded up and executed.


III. The Rise of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf

During one of his purges, after an attempted coup in 1985, Mr. Doe's forces arrested Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. Her crime was trying to register an opposition political party. The government soldiers came to her house at night, taking Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf to the army barracks at Schiefflin, about 11 miles outside of Monrovia. They put her in a cell with about 15 other prisoners, all men. Just past midnight, the soldiers returned to the cell with a rope, which they used to tie together the hands of all the prisoners, except one. When they ran out of rope they relieved Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf of her shoelaces, and used them to tie the last man to the group. As she stood, shaking, in a corner, the soldiers led the 15 men outside, and executed them.

Still later that night, another soldier entered Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf's cell, and tried to rape her. He was stopped by another soldier.

"They say you're Gola," her savior said. Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf was descended from the American blacks who founded the country, but she had a native Liberian strand.

She nodded. "My grandpa was Gola."

"What village?" the soldier asked.

"Julejuah."

"You speak Gola?"

"A little."

"Okay," the soldier said. "I will sleep on the floor here in your cell tonight so no one hurts you."

Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf survived the night, and 20 years later, on Jan. 16, as Laura Bush watched, she was inaugurated president of Liberia, the first woman ever elected president of an African country. She won 59.4 percent of the vote in the runoff election held in November, beating a former soccer player and native Liberian, George Weah.

The country she took over this month is not the same place it was before the 1980 coup that unseated the descendants of the American blacks; it isn't even the same place it was in 1985 when Mr. Doe threw Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf into that prison cell. After the Doe coup, the historic division between the Congo people and the native Liberians splintered into rivalries between almost all of the country's ethnic groups. In 1989, Charles Taylor, a Congo Liberian backed by the Gio and Mano, invaded from the Ivory Coast, where he had massed an army. Fourteen years of war, devastation and lawlessness ensued, including the execution of President Doe. Mr. Taylor was elected president in 1997 — beating Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf — and was later accused of helping launch wars in Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone. By the time he was driven from power in 2003 — under a deal forged by West African countries, the United Nations and the United States — Liberia was a bullet-ridden shell of itself.

It would be nice to think that after more than 150 years of injustice followed by 26 years of bloodshed, this great-great-great granddaughter of American blacks and native Africans can finally bring some measure of reconciliation to Liberia. Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf must walk in both worlds, and convince a people exhausted and brutalized that the things that unite them are far greater than the things that divide them. She'll need the help of the outside world, particularly the United States. But in the end, it will be the Liberians themselves who determine whether their country finally lets go of the past and gets on with the business of reconciliation and rebuilding.

Lela Moore contributed research for this article.

Skeletons Discovered: First African Slaves in New World

Goodbye Coretta Scott King. Thank You.

Coretta Scott King, 78, Widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dies

"It's a bleak morning for me and for many people and yet it's a great morning because we have a chance to look at her and see what she did and who she was." - poet Maya Angelou on ABC's "Good Morning America."

"She was a strong, caring, and inspirational woman, whose legacy will be remembered for generations to come." - President Jimmy Carter

"We will miss her. But she certainly picked up the baton when it was dropped by her husband's assassination and continued to move forward in the civil rights arena." - Rep. Charles Rangel

"She was truly the first lady of the human rights movement. The only thing worse than losing her is if we never had her." - the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York.

"Martin Luther King and Coretta Scott King awakened the conscience of a nation that began the journey toward equality, knocking down the walls of discrimination based on race, on religion, and on ethnicity. We have all benefited so much from their inspiration and their leadership." - Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.

"She wore her grief with grace; she exerted her leadership with dignity." - the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

"In our own struggle against apartheid in South Africa, Coretta and Dr. Martin Luther King were at all times a towering presence, who ... provided guidance, inspiration and, indeed, helped us to maintain the unshakable belief that we, too, would overcome." - South African President Thabo Mbeki.

Some collected quotes of Mrs. King's

Coretta Scott King's accomplishment's included syndicated column

Coretta Scott King: Homophobia Same as Racism

Coretta Scott King on the role of prayer in the civil rights movement

Coretta Scott King gives her support to gay marriage

King dies in Mexico seeking treatment for ovarian cancer

Memo to Big Oil: Africans Oil Belongs to Africans

Alito Sees No Wrong in All-White Juries by Earl Ofari Hutchinson

The Bush Report Card, Part Two: Blacks, Iraq and the War President

Why Has Greed Made Far Too Many Black Churches Lose Their Way?

The Killing Fields

Relevant Saint

The Bush Report Card, Part One: How Has Urban Black America Fared?

DNA Exonerates Fla. Man After 24 Years

"There ain't no compensation for what they done to me," said Crotzer, whose mother died while he was in prison. "But I'm not bitter."

Crotzer said he was looking forward to a barbecue with his family, who promised him his favorites — pork chops and banana pudding. Then, he said, he wanted to take a bath in a real bathtub.

"I want to soak," he said. "I want to get some of this off me."

Alan Crotzer, right, hugs his sister Wanda Sanders after holding a news conference following his release from prison Monday morning Jan. 23, 2006 in Tampa, Fla. Crotzer was released from prison after almost 25-years, when DNA evidence proved he did not take part in a 1982 brutal Tampa, Fla., rape and robbery. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)
lan Crotzer, center, throws his arms up in the air as he leaves the Hillsborough County Courthouse early Monday, Jan. 23, 2006, in Tampa, Fla., with law student Sam Roberts, left, and attorney David Menschel, right, after being released from prison. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)

Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having your legs cut off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. It means seeing your mother and father spiritually murdered by the slings and arrows of daily exploitation, and then being hated for being an orphan. ~Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, 1967

Black gay rights group turns to clergy

"Plantation Protestations" -- A RW political correctness scam

Exhibit on racism stuns visitors

Howell display of 'Hateful Things' draws steady crowd to Opera House on King holiday.

MLK celebration speaker stresses lingering racism problems

Anti-Racism group fights for victims

Cross burned at a church in St. Paul

Black Caucus Boycotts MLK Event over Voter ID Bill in Georgia

Historic Absence of Black Leaders Underscores Conflict in State Legislature

Alabama Remembers Black Soldier's Defiance

MONTGOMERY, Ala. // Five years before Rosa Parks launched a bus boycott by refusing to give up her seat to a white man, a uniformed black soldier balked at an order to board a bus through a back door and paid with his life.

Janey McIntyre of Florence, Kentucky wipes away a tear as she watches a videotape of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech during a ceremony at the Florence Government Building. She said the speech always moves her to tears.
(Photo by The Enquirer/Patrick Reddy)

King's dreams for higher learning

Does a Body and Soul Good

Residents reflect on Martin Luther King Jr.

MLK Day: Dreams and nightmares

LearnOutLoud.com Celebrates Martin Luther King, Jr. Day with the Launch of MLK Out Loud, a Complete Resource for King's Audio and Video Content

M.L. King's widow makes surprise visit

Martin Luther King Jr. Day 20 Years Later: Civil rights supporters say the message is still important today

Before he was a leader, King was a pastor

Happy Birthday Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be 77 years old today. The civil rights leader, minister and recipient of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize was born in 1929 and assassinated in 1968.[via]

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. collapses after praying in Montgomery over bus-integration violence. Jan. 15, 1957.


I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledges the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial for his "I Have a Dream" speech during a march on Washington, D.C., on Aug. 28, 1963. About 250,000 people attended the march to urge support for impending civil-rights legislation.

Now, I say to you today my friends, even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: - 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'

Mississippi patrolmen shove Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other marchers during the 220-mile "March Against Fear" from Memphis, Tenn. to Jackson, Miss. June 8, 1966.


Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Hosea Williams (left), Jesse Jackson, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Ralph David Abernathy on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel Memphis hotel, a day before King's assassination. April 3,1968.

...And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land. So I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man.

Today still stuck in yesterday

BBC'S FLAGSHIP news programme 'Today' has come under fire for refusing to apologise after a guest who made a racist comment went unchallenged.

Edward Stourton, a presenter on BBC radio 4's Today programme ignored a comment by an army expert who used the phrase "nigger in a woodpile."

Shocking: white Americans burning a black person on a woodfire, an horrific practice that led to the expression.

Medal of Arts winner reads poetry, shares insights on King

Afternoon with Ruby Dee held at Wright State

Residents sound off to rights panels

Discrimination is 'alive and well' in Iowa and needs to be addressed far more effectively, the state and local groups are told.

Canvas captures artist's inner conflict

Roanoke artist Joel Gill feels the conflict of being a black man in love with a South that doesn't always love him back.

A courageous mother's reaction to son's murder

City's bloody stain seen with new eyes

Poet chose a heroic task

Children's book about Emmett Till set in classical sonnet verse form.
By Chauncey Mabe
Books Editor
Posted January 15 2006

When a publisher asked Marilyn Nelson, the poet laureate of Connecticut, to write a children's book about civil rights martyr Emmett Till, she paid her young readers the ultimate compliment.

She did not write for them.

"I just wrote what I normally would have written," says Nelson, one of the luminaries at this year's Palm Beach Poetry Festival, "and added notes at the back for references. I did not write specifically for young people."

What's more, Nelson, who could have chosen the ease of free verse, instead wrote A Wreath for Emmett Till in "a heroic crown of sonnets" -- a sophisticated and difficult classical poetic form.

Nelson declares herself "a formalist," a member of that small but increasingly significant segment of the poetry world that turns its back on experimental trends to explore traditional fixed forms.

"Freer forms have run their course," Nelson says. "They've reached the point where most of the poetry I pick up is uninteresting. If you wrote most of what passes for poetry today in prose and forgot the line breaks, I doubt anyone would suspect it's a poem."

In addition to Nelson, the second annual poetry fest, which starts Friday, boasts a lineup of prize-winning writers, including Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, Susan Mitchell, Tony Hoagland and Laure-Anne Bosselaar. All events will be at Old School Square in Delray Beach.

a challenge in rhyme

Devotion to rhyme and meter in poetry is one thing, but with A Wreath for Emmett Till, Nelson posed herself an especially thorny challenge. A crown of sonnets consists of seven sonnets written on a theme, with the last line of each rhymed, 14-line poem serving as the first line of the next. A heroic crown of sonnets, however, extends the sequence to 15 poems.

"It's wonderful fun," she says of the struggle to find worthwhile rhymes in English, which is notably poorer than Romance languages in that respect. "Agony, painful, but fun. Even with a rhyming dictionary there aren't that many rhymes. When you find the right one, the right rhyming phrase, it's terribly exciting."

Illustrated by Phillipe Lardy, A Wreath for Emmett Till was published last year -- the 50th anniversary of Till's lynching -- to rapturous reviews.

According to Kirkus Reviews, "Only Marilyn Nelson can take one of the most hideous events of the 20th century and make of it something glorious." Critics were awed by the nerve, dexterity and clarity of lines such as "A mob/heartless and heedless, answering to no god,/tears through the patchwork drapery of our dreams," which ends one sonnet.

The next begins: "Tears, through the patchwork drapery of dream,/for the hanging bodies, the men on flaming pyres,/the crowds standing around like devil choirs."

A life's desire

Mixing poetry, formalism and history has proven a potent brew for Nelson. Her first children's book, Carver: A Life in Poems (2001), about the great black scientist, was also not written with the age of its readers in mind. But Nelson had the "good luck" of finding a children's publisher who liked the manuscript.

"The Carver book pushed me over into this different publishing world and market," Nelson says. "I haven't made any changes in the way I write, but now I have a wonderful and much larger audience than the usual poetry audience, and it's an important way to develop a future audience for poetry."

Born in Cleveland in 1946, Nelson, the daughter of an airman and a teacher, was raised to value books, reading and education as she followed her father from one Air Force base to another. She started to write while

A judge's hanging: The Lynching of Andrée Ruffo

Judicial activism, abused youths

by Beryl Wajsman, Institute for Public Affairs of Montreal
Tuesday, December 13, 2005

"Rigorous law is often rigorous injustice."
~ Terence

"Justice must be seen to be done as well as to be done."
~ Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Quebec, and indeed all of Canada, witnessed the scales of justice falling and the sword of justice blunted once again this past week. A five-judge panel of the Quebec Court of Appeal, which included Pierrette Rayle the wife of Judge John Gomery, ordered the censure and removal of youth court Judge Andrée Ruffo for repeatedly speaking out on the inadequacies of the youth protection system.

Her "crime" was that she was heard in public, and not just seen in courtrooms, lending her voice and vision in support of aiding abused youths and reforming the system that has failed them so spectacularly and so often. In a society that runs between the raindrops, populated by citizens that dare not care, ruled by governors who can no longer tell right from wrong, this ruling should come as no surprise.

We live in a country that applauds McCarthyite witch-hunts that encourage innuendo, rumour and guilt by association in order to protect powerful vested interests, but we denounce those who speak truth to power and dare to challenge those same interests. As Judge Ruffo put it so well, "We have created codes and perverted our very language to shield a status quo that in so many cases does evil and brings harm to some of the most vulnerable among us."

Defiant as always, Judge Ruffo intends to challenge this ruling in the Supreme Court. Only one other judge in the history of Quebec has been ordered removed. That Judge was Richard Therrien, who had failed to disclose his past membership in the terrorist FLQ. I guess free speech is now as threatening to the state as fire bombs.

The Ruffo affair is as eloquent a testament to the need for radical judicial reform as there ever was. Canadians like to pretend to support an "activist" judiciary, but when we finally see an activist judge who walks the walk and not only talks the talk, she is silenced. Judicial activism cannot be narrowly defined as dry words on paper. Law, as Lord Acton wrote, must never be allowed to be used as a two-edged sword of craft and oppression. It must become the "...shield of the innocent and the staff of the honest..." Judges like Ruffo who lend their names to petitions; who speak out; who attempt to rouse the resolve of a feckless public are those very shields and staffs.

We need to break loose the chains that keep locked the doors of courts and council rooms apart and let in the brisk, stinging air of freedom to blow away the calcified cobwebs that clog the arteries of justice made so sclerotic by decades of judicial clubbiness and chumminess. We need to bring to an end law by dictat and fiat so far removed from the very citizens it judges. We need an elected judiciary accountable and responsible to the people, not just to its own judicial boards and political overseers.

A great irony in the Ruffo affair is that only the Quebec Minister of Justice can actually remove her from office. Yet how can any elected official remove her in good conscience when there have been so many cases of judicial interference by elected officials, even Ministers, with no reprimand whatsoever? Those were cases of the compromise of judicial independence. Ruffo has only been reprimanded for speaking out against a youth protection system that does not work. Not for compromising the integrity of cases in her court.

In an interview given recently, Judge Ruffo recounted how a judicial colleague made light of her naiveté soon after her appointment because she had exhibited a belief that judicial independence really existed in Canada. She has learned through bitter experience how right her senior colleague's cynicism was.

This is not to say that there are not many excellent and independent judges in our system. There are. But Canadians' constant boast that our appointed judiciary is somehow more superior than America's elected one is nothing but sophomoric sophistry. No judicial system will ever be free of political interference. We should all just be big boys and girls and get used to that. Not every social ill can be resolved. But at least with an elected judiciary there will be a chance for the public and the Fourth Estate to examine compromises of judicial trust out in the open and not allow the political elites that appoint judges to hide behind the cloaks of stomach-churning false pieties.

One of Judge Ruffo's actions particularly irritated the Appeals Court panel. In 1988, she ordered two teenagers driven to the office of the Health and Social Services Minister because there was no place for them in the youth protection system. The panel stated in its reprimand that, "Putting public administration on trial doesn't contribute to resolving the case of the child." The panel was dead wrong.

Judicial silence and inaction in the face of a system that does not work is nothing less than complicity in perpetuating the injustices it supposedly seeks to cure. And that is true for any muted voices of criminal court judges as well. Toeing the line is like doing the crime.

Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg, was asked why he insisted on putting German judges on trial who had served under the Nazi regime. After all his inquisitors asked, weren't they just following the laws that were on the books. His response is a lesson for the ages that we ignore at our peril. "When judges acquiesce to acting only within the narrow parameters of statutes of inherent evil, they are as complicit in the resulting crimes as the very men that created those evils."

Judge Ruffo chose not to acquiesce. It is a profile in courage that will not be vanquished. And if we remain silent, then the epitaph for Canada will be Alan Paton's poignant plea, "Cry, the beloved country."

Beryl P. Wajsman is the president of the Institute for Public Affairs of Montreal.

Educator discusses link between nonviolence, civil rights

BY DIANE KNICH, The Island Packet
Published Saturday, January 14, 2006
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On the day of the historic march on Washington in 1963, Herman Blake was in a coffee shop on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, Calif. As Martin Luther King Jr. made his famous "I Have a Dream" speech, the highlight of the event, Blake and fellow graduate students talked about the futility of the effort.

Photo: Herman Blake, director of the University of South Carolina Beaufort's new Sea Islands Institute, speaks at the university's south campus Friday.
Jonathan Dyer/The Island Packet

"In the 1950s and 1960s, I was an angry young man," Blake, director of the University of South Carolina Beaufort's new Sea Islands Institute, told a group of students, faculty and community members at the university's south campus Friday. "Cynicism, doubts and fears kept me from embracing nonviolence" as a strategy for oppressed people to promote social change.

"I am one who came late to the veneration of Dr. Martin Luther King," he said.

USCB sponsored Blake's presentation, titled "The Dreamer and The Dream in a New Millennium," to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Blake, the former director of African-American studies at Iowa State University and founder of the Oakes College at the University of California Santa Cruz, where he was the provost until 1984, said he was slow to embrace the philosophy of nonviolence. But now he's deeply committed to it.

And in that way, he said, he is like King, a man who also developed his philosophy, methods and strategies over time and through education.

King, a Baptist minister who was the son and grandson of Baptist ministers, believed in the power of Christian love. But he was not certain it could overcome the oppression and racism in America at that time, Blake said.

King studied the writings of different philosophers and was moved by the work of Mohandas Gandhi.

He learned in theory that the "Christian method of love operating through Gandhi's method of nonviolence could be a potent weapon in the struggle against oppression," Blake said.

But King's intellectual theory wasn't put to the test until the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1955. There, Blake said, King found it worked.

King was asking for a great deal from black people in the south in the 1950s, Blake said. These were people for whom "bombing, lynching and unspeakable acts of terror were part of their daily lives."

But King asked them "to respond to violence with passive resistance, (to respond) to anger with silence, and to meet hate with love," Blake said.

"As people respond to hate with love, they are transformed," he said. "The nonviolent approach does something to the hearts and souls of those who are committed to it."

It also demands a lot of its followers because it requires them to "avoid internal violence of the spirit," Blake said. "Not only must you refuse to shoot a person but (also) refuse to hate a person."

To carry out King's dream and vision in a university setting today, Blake said, students must exercise discipline and study challenging theories. They should not study "the easy, the simple and familiar."

Faculty members should "hold high expectations for students within a framework of respect for their intellects."

"So often, students use their persuasive power to get faculty members to ease up expectations," Blake said.

But students must be challenged to develop creative visions of future, he said.

"We have the chance to shape the future in unimaginably good ways."

Upstate Leaders Look To Propose S.C. Hate Crime Law

The Terrorist Worker

Friday, January 13 2006 @ 11:16 PM PST

The night the subway strike was called, the TWU headquarters was crammed with TV anchors sending news to a city holding its breath. The mood was sour. NBC anchor Melissa Russo whispered loudly into her cell phone, “Who do these workers think they are, throwing a whole city into chaos if their demands aren’t met.” I knew two things, the strike was on and the media were going to make it ugly.

The Terrorist Worker

January 13, 2006 02:44PM EST

The night the subway strike was called, I knew the media were going to make it ugly.

By NICHOLAS POWERS
The Indypendent (New York City)

And ugly it was. The subway strike of 2005 can be summed up by a phrase: “Black workers are Evil Doers.” When the Transit Workers Union 100, a majority Caribbean, Latino, Asian- and African-American local, walked off the job, the corporate elite began to attack. The first target was the minds of working-class New York, and the first battle to be fought was to keep them from identifying with TWU strikers and imitating them. The media immediately fused images of criminals, terrorists and spoiled children to the picketing workers.

The night the subway strike was called, the TWU headquarters was crammed with TV anchors sending news to a city holding its breath. The mood was sour. NBC anchor Melissa Russo whispered loudly into her cell phone, “Who do these workers think they are, throwing a whole city into chaos if their demands aren’t met.” I knew two things, the strike was on and the media were going to make it ugly.


And ugly it was. The subway strike of 2005 can be summed up by a phrase: “Black workers are Evil Doers.” When the Transit Workers Union 100, a majority Caribbean, Latino, Asian- and African-American local, walked off the job, the corporate elite began to attack. The first target was the minds of working-class New York, and the first battle to be fought was to keep them from identifying with TWU strikers and imitating them. The media immediately fused images of criminals, terrorists and spoiled children to the picketing workers.

It began when Mayor Bloomberg said the TWU had “thuggishly turned their backs on New York.” He was quickly criticized for it. Soon, as the New York Times and Village Voice reported, on the public message board of the TWU website the mostly Black union was called monkeys and Toussaint was called Osama Bin Laden’s sweetheart.

The relentless framing of strikers as criminals continued in the New York Post as “Jail ’Em” was stamped over a photo of Toussaint behind bars and inside a photo of a cell on Riker’s Island. Eventually the strikers went from criminals to terrorists. Mayor Bloomberg was relatively subtle, using the code word that the TWU had “hijacked” the city.

Others went farther. Columnist Andrea Peyser wrote of the strikers, “The terrorists made it their mission to kill the economy. This brand of homegrown enemy pretends to have the city’s interest at heart while it tkes aim at the most vulnerable workers.”

In a city where people walked bridges to get home after Sept. 11, to label a strike “hostage taking” and workers “terrorists” redirects the lingering fear and rage of that day at workers. None of this is new; equating organized workers with terrorists is a standard in the Right’s repertoire.

In 2004, Education Secretary Rod Paige called the largest teachers union, the National Education Association, “a terrorist organization.” In 2002, in a stand-off between the West Coast-based International
Longshore and Warehouse Union and its employers, Tom Ridge, the director of Homeland Security, called union head Jim Spinosa and warned him against striking, saying it would threaten national security.

Yet if workers are also citizens, how do they threaten their own nation’s security? This only makes sense if national security is defined by the profit margin of the corporate class. During the strike, our class divisions opened up, but the corporate media stitched them together with racially coded coverage. In the case of the TWU, a nonwhite union, tabloids implicitly invoked the difference between legal citizenship and cultural citizenship by equating transit workers with Al-Qaeda.

The corporate class was faced with an internal enemy, the workers whose interest in pay and benefits clashes with the capitalists’ interest in profit. Yet the rightwing media depicted it as a struggle within labor. Usually in the tabloids, members of the working class appear as characters in titillating crime stories.
This time, they were cast as victims of a criminal strike by a selfish union.

“It’s not the way I want to get to work,” said a one-legged man lurching across the Brooklyn Bridge. The New York Post showed him bundled in yellow coat, gripping his crutches. He doubled as a symbol of a city crippled by the TWU strike and an alibi for the right.

The non-union working class has been hobbling for years since Sept. 11 as rising rents and falling wages have made the city too expensive to live in. But during the subway strike they finally got love as the New York Post, Daily News, the New York Times and the major news channels placed a halo of victimization on stranded workers.

TV anchors wielding microphones amplified the stories of ruined Christmas, tired feet and children with no gifts to open. Working-class New York appeared in the media as innocent victims of a selfish strike by greedy union workers. Yet in a reversal that approaches the absurd, the fact that missing a few days of work makes them vulnerable to real poverty does not add to an argument against unions but shows the very real need for them.

The final image of the strikers was of spoiled children pouting for undeserved gifts. In essence they were accused of being brats unable to control their appetites in the service of the greater good. It is an image that contradicts the very goal of the strike, which was about pensions, the ability to live decently in one’s old age.

Implicit in this last attack on the striker as spoiled children is a whole system of undeclared beliefs, the invisible ideology that supports capital. If the value of human life is determined by the labor it can sell, if we aren’t working to make a surplus profit for others, we are uselessly rotting, like fruit on a tree.

The image of spoiled workers is in silent dialogue with Billie Holiday’s anti-lynching song, “Strange Fruit,” a ballad about the lynching of blacks whom whites could not totally control, a violence it took our media only three days of a strike to begin justifying.

http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2006/01/63259.html

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=20060113231617677

Lynching’s lingering legacy

Lynching’s lingering legacy

Kevin Pitts
December 15, 2005

Not long ago, while visiting Atlanta, I had the opportunity to view a photographic exhibition titled “Without Sanctuary,” which presented deeply disturbing images of blacks who were victims of lynchings. I can recall my father and I walking slowly past each black-and-white photo in silence, gazing at the sometimes burnt and castrated bodies of black men dangling from trees, surrounded by smiling and overjoyed white men in Southern states such as the one we were standing in. It was frightening.

Many black Americans have tried to psychologically repress these disturbing images of lynching by reasserting these images are rusty relics of America’s bloody past. But as this nation recently reached the grim milestone of 1,000 prisoners executed, it is time to readdress the injust and arbitrary matter in which capital punishment has been applied in this country across racial lines. It’s also time to readdress the pervasive, institutional racism that defined capital punishment during the era of lynching and continues to define it today.

Recently, a groundbreaking study published in the American Sociological Review paralleled in-depth historical lynching data and recent capital punishment data of 10 Southern states and found the number of death sentences issued for black defendants was significantly higher in states that had a deep history of white vigilante lynching of blacks. They go on to uncover death sentences in these Southern states increased as the state’s population of blacks began to expand. The authors correctly theorize that just as lynching was used as a political tool to handle the apparent racial threat from freed slaves, capital punishment, understood as more socially acceptable, is applied under the disguise of legality as a reaction by paranoid Southern whites who equate black presence with the threat of violence.

Data that address how the death penalty is applied racially buttress the arguments of this study. With regards to the legal application of the death penalty we see in Maryland, a state with one of the highest percentages of blacks on death row, a death sentence is eight times more likely in a white victim case than a black victim case. This is also seen by the fact that blacks represent 42 percent of the inmates on death row, but only 12 percent of America’s population.

Historically, lynching has always been founded on a civil war between the American masculinities of black and white men. White men eager to protect the “purity” of white womanhood from the false mythical notions of the sex-crazed black brute gathered groups of white men and formed lynch mobs. Today, the racist sentiment is not as visceral but the framework of that racist architecture that places the fates of black men in the hands of white men is still very much intact. This is evident when nearly 98 percent of the chief district attorneys in counties with the death penalty in America are white.

The Supreme Court had an opportunity to address the institutional racism that still haunts the death penalty in this country, but it failed to do so in 1987, with McCleskey v. Kemp. In this case, the high court seriously erred and ruled complex statistical studies, similar to the Sociological Review’s report, insufficient as evidence of racial wrongdoing in particular cases.

With this legal avenue closed to the black community, we all must turn to our state-level politicians and urge them to embrace the words of Justice Harry Blackmun and “no longer tinker with the machinery of death.”

In my first column this semester, I wondered in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina how much black life mattered to this nation, and with these recent correlations between lynching and capital punishment, I’ve been forced to re-think that question again. If we are to move into 2006 and continue to fight for democracy in Iraq, we must lead by example and abolish the death penalty. We must show the world all citizens, black or white, Shiite or Sunni, are to be treated as equals in the hands of justice.

Kevin Pitts is an English literature graduate student. He can be reached at kpitts2@umd.edu.


© 2006 Diamondback Online

Author talks about his book that covers lynching in Collinsville

Author talks about his book that covers lynching in Collinsville

BY ELIZABETH DONALD
News-Democrat

Carl Weinberg said he knew he might be stirring up a hornet's nest by talking about the lynching of Robert Prager.

Weinberg spoke Tuesday at the Collinsville Public Library about his book, "Labor, Loyalty & Rebellion: Southwestern Illinois Coal Miners and World War I." In it, he talks extensively about the lynching of Robert Prager, a German national who was hung from a tree by Collinsville residents in 1918.

Once known only as "Collinsville's sin," the Prager lynching was the dirty secret that was never taught in schools or spoken of in polite company.

"We didn't even know about it, the story wasn't told," said long-time resident Lois Metzger, who attended Weinberg's speech.

But in spite of the once-secret nature of "Collinsville's sin," every seat in the library meeting room was filled Tuesday.

Many stopped afterward to tell Weinberg their own stories about family and neighbors who had been witnesses to that time period.

Doris Crowell told him about her grandfather, who was a police officer on duty that night and tried to help protect Prager by hiding him in the jail cells at City Hall.

But Weinberg said his research went beyond the reasons a mob dragged Prager out of town and hanged him, to see how the pro-war movement put immense pressure on striking mine workers, calling them unpatriotic to strike during "the war for democracy."

The miners were accused of being pro-German, he said, and that may have contributed to the mindset that allowed the lynching to happen. And Collinsville, he said, was one of the most strike-prone towns in Southern Illinois.

"Many workers were constantly being accused of being disloyal, and that may have put intense pressure on them to prove how loyal they were," Weinberg said.

Weinberg said the Prager lynching, which came after Prager tried and failed to join the miners' union, was in a way a "perverse tribute" to the high level of union solidarity in Collinsville, and showed the divided nature of American support for World War I.

"Throughout the nation, working people were suspicious of the claim that America was fighting a war for democracy," he read from his book. "Many refused to put their class battles on hold over here while the government exhorted them to fight the enemy over there... Collinsville should be proud of its heritage of collective struggle for a better world, not ashamed of the fact that it was not one big, happy, patriotic family."

Contact reporter Elizabeth Donald at edonald@bnd.com or 345-7822, ext. 21.

Four teens plead guilty to lynching

GAFFNEY — Five white teenagers have been sentenced to prison terms after pleading guilty Tuesday to second-degree lynching charges in an attack on a black teenager this summer.

Christopher Scott Cates will serve six years in prison after pleading guilty to lynching and assault, said Murray Glenn, a spokesman for the Cherokee County prosecutor's office

Jason Grice, Justin Ashley Phillips and Kenneth Eugene Miller Jr. will have to spend three years in prison each and Jerry Christopher Toney will have to spend 30 months in prison, Glenn said. All will be on probation for five years after serving their prison terms.

"We will absolutely not tolerate this type of behavior at all," Circuit Judge Jack Early told the five teens. "It is a most cowardly way to act. ... I'm going to send a message with your sentence."

Lynching is the term used in South Carolina for any crime committed by a group against an individual in which the victim is not killed.

Although prosecutors in the case said it appeared the attack was racially motivated, that is not an element of the crime of lynching. Federal investigators determined the attack was not a hate crime.

Investigators say the five chased and beat up 16-year-old Isaiah Clyburn as he walked home from a friend's house on July 7.

The teens apologized for the attack and a representative for the victim's family said Clyburn had forgiven his attackers.

In an interview on Court TV, Clyburn said he would ask his attackers why they chose him. "Why did you have to do it to me?" Clyburn said. "I ain't never hurt none of y'all."

Seventeen-year-old Amy Woody also was charged in the case, but prosecutors say she was remained in one of the teens' trucks during the attack. She was to be tried separately on a charge of misprision of a felony after police say she withheld information from investigators.

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My Ancestors' Violence

Disarray at Center for Dr. King Casts Pall on Family and Legacy

NATIONAL DESK

Disarray at Center for Dr. King Casts Pall on Family and Legacy
By SHAILA DEWAN (NYT) 1645 words
Published: January 14, 2006

CORRECTION APPENDED

ATLANTA, Jan. 13 - Over the years, the city that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called home has grown accustomed to stagnation and disrepair at the institution established in his name by Coretta Scott King in 1968, even as it has paid her sons six-figure salaries.

But now as Mrs. King is recovering from a stroke that left her partly paralyzed and unable to speak, problems at the nonprofit institution, the King Center, have become so bad that some family members are pushing to sell its buildings.

That proposal and myriad other difficulties -- including a federal investigation into the center's use of taxpayer money and an estimate by the National Park Service that the complex of buildings needs $11 million in repairs -- have deepened a rift among Dr. King's four children, two of whom vehemently oppose a sale, and further reduced the center's standing.

''The center really had the potential to be a nonviolent change agent,'' said Mtamanika Youngblood, who recently stepped down as executive director of the community development organization for Sweet Auburn, the King Center's neighborhood. ''That opportunity may be gone.''

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, among Dr. King's top lieutenants, said that he had not taken sides in the family dispute but that he worried about its toll on Mrs. King, who long ago relinquished leadership of the center to her sons.

Mr. Lowery said that when he visited Mrs. King recently, she insisted on walking without assistance.

"When she got to the sofa she almost collapsed,'' he said. ''And this can't help her.''

Originally envisioned as a ''living memorial'' to Dr. King, the center does not offer much to visitors. Three small permanent exhibitions are tucked away on a second floor. The ecumenical chapel is customarily locked. Kingfest, an annual cultural event, was discontinued years ago.

Of the activities surrounding Martin Luther King Day on Monday -- a symposium on human rights, a youth conference, film screenings, a march -- the King Center is involved in only three, a board member said, including a fund-raiser for the center and a signing for a new book by one daughter, Yolanda King, ''Embracing Your Power in 30 Days.''

Last month, the center's board, controlled by Dr. King's younger son, Dexter Scott King, announced it was considering the sale of the King Center complex, which has been appraised at $11 million, to the National Park Service. Martin Luther King III, the elder son, and his sister Bernice soon called a news conference in protest.

''Bernice and I stand to differ with those who would sell our father's legacy and barter our mother's vision, whether it is for 30 pieces of silver or $30 million,'' Martin King said, adding that the sale of ''irreplaceable assets of the African-American community'' undermines its pride and cultural capital.

Acknowledging that the board, which until recently had been made up almost entirely of family members, had been ''remiss'' in its oversight and programming, Mr. King said the solution was to strengthen and diversify the board. Bernice King said government ownership would result in a loss of ideological independence.

None of the four King children responded to requests for interviews. and the center did not answer repeated requests for information. In a brief phone conversation, a center spokesman said he could not provide a list of the board members because he did not know who they were.

One member, Dr. King's sister, Christine King Farris, spoke briefly to a reporter but declined to comment on the family's disagreement.

Asked about the center's programs, Ms. Farris said, ''We've done a lot, we've done training and publications and so forth, we've done quite a bit.''

Mr. Lowery said he sympathized with both sides in the disagreement. On the one hand, he said, the center has been saddled with the expense of caring for its building and grounds, which include an administration building, a public building, a reflection pool and Dr. King's crypt. On the other hand, he said, it was reasonable for the Kings to hesitate before selling the property to a federal government that spied on their father and sought to destabilize the civil rights movement.

To the children, the legacy of Dr. King has provided both a source of pride and the burden of high expectations and scrutiny, Mr. Lowery added.

''I don't have any problem with the family making money,'' he said. ''I'd like to see them rich. As long as they didn't neglect the other part.''

In earlier years, there might have been considerable public resistance to selling the King Center complex. But now, many think it is the right move for the organization and could allow it to refocus on programs.

''Do we let the King Center fall apart just for the sake of holding on?'' asked Tyrone Brooks, the head of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials.

The center, originally called the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, was founded by Mrs. King after her husband's assassination. She raised $8 million to build the current complex in 1981. Its mission statement calls for building ''a national and international network of organizations'' that promote ''the Beloved Community that Dr. King envisioned.''

The complex is within the boundaries of the national King historic site, which encompasses a section of Auburn Avenue that includes Dr. King's birth home; Ebenezer Baptist Church, where three generations of Kings served as pastors; and a visitor's center run by the National Park Service.

The district is one of the South's most popular tourist sites, with 600,000 visitors a year. For years, the Park Service, which also gives tours of the church and home, has been eager to buy the King Center's physical property, in part because of visitor complaints about the center's condition, and in part to expand its exhibition space and gain access to the center's rarely used auditorium. The terms of a sale would probably allow the King Center to continue to occupy part of the complex.

Public attention focused on the aging King Center almost a year ago, when The Atlanta Journal Constitution began a series of investigative articles about its finances. The articles revealed that the King Center needed repairs and ended most years with a deficit, yet paid Dexter King almost $180,000 and Martin King $150,000 in salaries and had given millions to a for-profit company run by Dexter King.

Center officials told the newspaper that the company, Intellectual Properties Management, was a contractor that provided many of the center's employees. The articles prompted an investigation into the center's finances by the Interior Department, which had recently increased the center's annual stipend to $1 million from $500,000, and at about the same time the Education Department began investigating the center's use of grant money given to develop a civil rights curriculum, Park Service officials said.

At the close of the last fiscal year, the board members voted to take the chairmanship from Dexter and give it to his brother Martin, who then had the King Center's locks changed.

A month later, the locks were changed again, amid reports that Dexter King had regained control, appointed eight additional board members and installed his cousin, Isaac Scott Farris, as president. At the news conference last month, Martin King called the new board ''an unconstitutional arrangement.''

Dexter King's entrepreneurial spirit has generated controversy since the moment he first took control of the King Center board in 1994 as his mother's designated successor. He battled the Park Service over land where he wanted to build an interactive, for-profit museum, disbanded the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday commission because it was a fund-raising competitor and licensed his father's image to cellular phone companies for commercials.

Dexter King, who has always been clear about the fact that he does not consider himself a civil rights leader, said he was trying to reach a new audience through projects like an MTV biography of Dr. King.

At the same time, the King Center discontinued its nonviolence training seminars and symposiums. Critics, including the civil rights leaders Hosea Williams and the Rev. Joseph Roberts, the recently retired pastor of Ebenezer, complained that the King Center had failed to take the lead on contemporary issues like poverty, voting rights and the Iraq war. Scholars said access to the center's archives, a trove of civil rights-era documents, was restricted.

''To think that these folks have multimillion-dollar budgets -- what do they do with them?'' said Bob Holmes, a state representative and director of the Southern Center for Studies in Public Policy at Clark-Atlanta University. ''I ask my grad students, 'Can you name any activity you've been involved in or you know about that the King Center does?' And they can't.''

Correction: January 20, 2006, Friday A front-page article on Saturday about problems at the King Center, the Atlanta memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., misstated the middle name of its president and misstated the number of Kings who were pastors at Ebenezer Baptist Church. The president is Isaac Newton Farris Jr., not Isaac Scott Farris. Two Kings, Dr. King and his father, were pastors there, not three.

Photos: Students on a field trip yesterday walked past the gravesite of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the King Center in Atlanta. The King family has disagreed on the center's future. (Photo by Jessica McGowan for The New York Times); Bernice A. King and her brother Martin Luther King III faced reporters in Atlanta on Dec. 30, vowing to fight a possible sale of the King Center. (Photo by Brant Sanderlin/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated Press)(pg. A12)

Chart/Map: The historic district in Atlanta is one of the South's most popular tourist sites, attracting 600,000 visitors a year to the neighborhood where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. lived and worked.

Map of Atlanta, Georgia, highlighting King Center.

A Color Film. Story? Black and White. By HARVEY ARATON

January 12, 2006
Sports of The Times
"Glory Road" depicts Texas Western's landmark victory over Kentucky in the 1966 N.C.A.A. championship game.



BUTCH BEARD was in the car when he answered his cellphone, heading home to a Baltimore suburb after eight days on the road, where no glory was gained.

For the standard small-school payday, Beard's Morgan State University team sacrificed itself at the altar of second-ranked Florida, losing, 92-49, in the hapless manner it had fallen earlier this season to Washington (118-51), Miami (83-51), Virginia Tech (77-49), George Washington (102-75) and Seton Hall (93-46).

At 0-13, with three starters from a lineup of unheralded underclassmen sidelined for academic reasons, competing for a historically black university with a sparse sports budget, Beard's Bears are not likely to reach inspirational heights anywhere soon, with the possible exception of a local theater.

"I'd like to take the kids to see the movie," he said earlier this week. "Just so they can see that if they work hard, really set their minds to it, they might have a chance some day when they play the white schools."

The movie, "Glory Road," opens across the country tomorrow, telling the story of the landmark 1966 national championship game, when an all-black starting five from Texas Western, now the University of Texas at El Paso, beat Adolph Rupp's all-white Kentucky Wildcats. Interestingly, once-segregated Division I powerhouses like Kentucky remain to Beard "the white schools" - a perception largely based on his current position, but also on the understanding of who derives the greatest benefits from all that black talent fast-breaking across America's television screens from November through the first week of April.

A healthy cynicism has helped and occasionally hurt Alfred Beard throughout a basketball journey that has included his starting at point guard for the 1975 N.B.A. champion Golden State Warriors, playing for the Knicks and coaching the Nets. But this proud and decent lifer, whose closest confidants included Red Holzman, began way back in Rupp country - in Hardinsburg, Ky., then a town of 1,400, where he picked cotton on his uncle's farm and waited for Cawood Ledford, the legendary voice of Kentucky basketball, to report from distant outposts of the Southeastern Conference.

"From the age of 10, I sat by the radio by my uncle to listen to Kentucky games," Beard said. "Back then, you knew what it was if you were black, but that didn't preclude appreciating the way they played, or rooting for them." At least until the night of March 19, 1966, when Beard and his roommate at the University of Louisville, Wes Unseld, watched racial barriers and stereotypes crumble on their portable television screen.

Beard said that his Morgan State players, like many young people, tended to take societal advancements for granted but that he, better than most, could explain the shades of gray in the Disney-produced story of black and white.

There has long been contentious debate regarding Rupp: Was he a zealous defender of segregation or what Beard diplomatically called him, "a product of his time"? Maybe the moral of the story that Beard can impart to his team is that Rupp, presented an opportunity to blaze a trail across the South, played it conservative and safe and cast himself in the eyes of many as racist, though "Glory Road" is said to make no judgments.

That night in 1966, Beard said, he and Unseld wondered what might have been had Rupp recruited them with the same enthusiasm with which he chased Pat Riley and Louie Dampier. Unseld, a Louisville product, chose his hometown college over Kentucky in 1964 because, as he recently told The Louisville Courier-Journal: "I think with as much power as (Rupp) had, if he wanted someone with as much intelligence and skill as some of those white players, he could have had them long before me. They never seriously recruited me."

Beard was left with a similar impression when Rupp appeared in his home one year later. "It seemed like he might have been getting pressure from the administration or the alumni to recruit us but that he didn't want to deal with it," Beard said. "He said some things that were insulting."

Beard chose Louisville to partner with Unseld. He could not have played for Kentucky in 1966, based on freshman-eligibility rules, but Unseld, a sophomore, would have certainly changed the racial dynamic of the night and, possibly, the outcome.

Instead, they sat in their Louisville dorm room, Beard's brain flooded with warring emotions. "I had been a big U.K. fan and Pat Riley had shown me around their campus, so it wasn't like I hated Kentucky that night, all right?" he said. "But as the game went on, and here were these black kids winning, I felt something deep inside me. I wanted them to win, and when they did, it opened up opportunities for kids who before that could only go to places like the one I'm at now."

Given the graduation rates, the academic scandals, the blithe commitment to education, a subtext to "Glory Road" should be that progress came with a price, part of which Beard has paid as a coach of a primarily black school. For all the famous players he has run with or coached, when he visits the home of a recruit, he knows the one crucial question he cannot answer satisfactorily: how many Morgan State games are on TV?

The truth is, Beard said, the issues he has been outspoken on, the institutional battles he has fought, haven't been as important since his wife, Ruth Ann - a longtime educator who reared their four children while giving him the space to chase his dreams - died last Mother's Day.

He is in the last year of his contract and, almost 59, doesn't know what he will do next. If this is the end of a long basketball life, Beard isn't asking for much before he goes. He would like to see his players get what "Glory Road" is about and, by March, a victory that will be significantly historic only to him.

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