History > 2005 > USA > Racism

Black and white—and red all over

E    25 August 2005

https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2005/08/25/
black-and-white-and-red-all-over 

North Carolina City Confronts Its Past

in Report on White Vigilantes

December 19, 2005
The New York Times
By JOHN DeSANTIS

WILMINGTON, N.C., Dec. 18 - Beneath canopies of moss-draped oaks, on sleepy streets graced by antebellum mansions, tour guides here spin stories of Cape Fear pirates and Civil War blockade-runners for eager tourists.

Only scant mention is made, however, of the bloody rioting more than a century ago during which black residents were killed and survivors banished by white supremacists, who seized control of the city government in what historians say is the only successful overthrow of a local government in United States history.

But last week, Wilmington revisited that painful history with the release of a draft of a 500-page report ordered by the state legislature that not only tells the story of the Nov. 10, 1898, upheaval, but also presents an analysis of its effects on black families that persist to this day.

Culled from newspaper clippings, government records, historical archives and interviews, some previously unexplored, the report explodes oft-repeated local claims that the insurrection was a frantic response to a corrupt and ineffective post-Reconstruction government.

"The ultimate goal was the resurgence of white rule of the city and state for a handful of men through whatever means necessary," the historian LeRae Umfleet wrote in the report's introduction.

The report concludes that the rioting and coup fully ended black participation in local government until the civil rights era, and was a catalyst for the development of Jim Crow laws in North Carolina.

"Because Wilmington rioters were able to murder blacks in daylight and overthrow Republican government without penalty or federal intervention, everyone in the state, regardless of race, knew that the white supremacy campaign was victorious on all fronts," the report said.

In the period immediately after the Civil War, the Democratic Party-ruled government in Wilmington, which was then North Carolina's largest city, was displaced by a coalition that was largely Republican and included many blacks. The loss of power stirred dissatisfaction among a faction of white civic leaders and business owners.

The tensions came to a head on Election Day, Nov. 9, 1898, when the Democrats regained power, according to historians largely by stuffing ballot boxes and intimidating black voters to keep them from the polls. Not waiting for an orderly transition of government, a group of white vigilantes demanded that power be handed over immediately. When they were rebuffed, in the words of the report, "Hell jolted loose."

The mob - which the report said grew to as many as 2,000 - forced black leaders out of town, dismantled the printing press of a black-owned newspaper, The Daily Record, fired into the homes of blacks and shot down black men in the streets.

Estimates of the number of black deaths are as high as 100, state officials said, although they add that there is no way of truly knowing.

"No official count of dead can be ascertained due to a paucity of records from the coroner's office, hospital, or churches," the report said.

Black women and children fled to swamps on the city's outskirts made frigid by November's chill. There are accounts of pregnant women giving birth in the swamps, the babies dying soon after.

No white deaths were verified.

Five years ago, members of the North Carolina General Assembly commissioned a report on the incident that they said would be made part of the state's official record. The final report is to be presented to lawmakers next year.

The release of the draft report - and its painful conclusions - have been politely, if uncomfortably, received in this city.

"I spend a lot of time looking forward and not a lot of time looking in the rearview mirror," said Mayor Spence Broadhurst. "But we can use our history to grow on. It was a horrible situation in 1898, and this is 2005. But I think it is good for us to talk about it and to fully understand it."

Styled after similar efforts to document racial atrocities in Rosewood, Fla., and in Tulsa, Okla., the report begins with a thorough account of Wilmington's status as the Confederacy's premier port, and the complex structure of its black society, which included slaves as well as a sizable population of free black craftsmen before Emancipation. Rifts between black tradesmen and white Democrats in the years after Reconstruction are chronicled, along with the growth of black society in prominence and power. In 1897, a year before the race riot, black residents numbered 3,478 or 49 percent of Wilmington's working population, according to a directory for that year. By 1900 that number had fallen to 2,497, or 44 percent, according to data in the report.

According to the 2000 census, Wilmington had a population of 76,000, and nearly 71 percent of its residents were white and 26 percent were black.

Federal and state authorities did nothing in response to the racial rioting in Wilmington, and according to the report, the revolt became a model of sorts when violence later erupted in other cities.

A 1906 upheaval in Atlanta, the report said, "suggests that the lack of governmental response to the violence in Wilmington gave Southerners implicit license to suppress the black community under the right circumstances."

In the years after the Wilmington rebellion, blacks and whites alike tended not to speak of it.

"I did not even know it happened until I was a grandmother," said Lottie Clinton, 68, a lifelong resident of Wilmington who is black and a member of the Riot Commission. "My family thought the more positive things I learned, the better off I would be."

Another commission member, Anthony Gentile, a Wilmington contractor who is white, said he had questions initially about whether the report should have been done at all.

"We didn't want to keep open wounds open," Mr. Gentile said. "There were a lot of emotions, and there was a lot of animosity. I was not in favor of doing it."

He continued, "Everyone made mistakes 100 years ago, let's deal with today."

But, he said, "My opinion changed, and I was surprised to learn the depth of feeling that existed and that it was not that long ago."

North Carolina City Confronts Its Past in Report on White Vigilantes, NYT, 19.12.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/19/national/19wilmington.html

Segregation-era signs found in Arkansas

Posted 12/17/2005 7:22 AM
Updated 12/17/2005 9:29 AM
USA Today

LITTLE ROCK (AP) — Workers remodeling an old dime store uncovered a relic found most often in museums and history books: the words "WHITE" and "COLORED" painted over spots where water fountains once hung.

Little Rock, Mayor Jim Dailey looks at the signs where segregated drinking fountains were once installed.
Danny Johnston, AP

"Well, I was pretty amazed," said Charles Moenning, the head of construction on a project to turn the old S.H. Kress store into loft apartments and retail space. "I have never seen anything like that in my life, in person, rather."

The black letters stand out from the beige plaster wall, recalling the days when segregation ruled the South. Blacks and whites were kept apart in schools, transportation and other public places.

Mayor Jim Dailey wants the signs preserved in a museum, calling them "a dramatic reminder of a world that we don't want to go back to."

"I used to shop downtown when I was a kid and I used to remember all of those signs," Dailey said Friday as he dropped by the store.

Kress built the store on Main Street in 1943 and it remained a five-and-dime until the 1960s, when a drugstore moved in and occupied the space until the 1990s. Developer Frieda Nelson Tirado recently bought the vacant three-story building.

Demolition workers clearing the basement for parking spaces were ripping out old walls about two weeks ago when someone noticed the lettering. On Thursday, Moenning helped workers remove the last of the material covering the words. He agreed during the mayor's visit to save the wall from demolition.

Marks on the wall suggest the water fountains were once separated by a partition.

Integration arrived in Little Rock slowly in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1957, a group of black teenagers faced down a mob to integrate Little Rock Central High School.

While the city is perhaps best known for the Little Rock Nine, integration actually started here a bit earlier, said Laura Miller, a historian at the Central High School National Historic Site.

"I believe it was right around 1955 and 1956 when representatives from the NAACP started asking downtown store owners to desegregate water fountains and things like that," she said. "And they did, quietly, without telling their white customers."

But the desegregation of downtown Little Rock wasn't swift. In 1960, students from historically black Philander Smith College staged a sit-in at Woolworth's to protest continuing lunch counter segregation.

    Segregation-era signs found in Arkansas, UT, 17.12.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-12-17-segregation-signs_x.htm

Rosa Parks to be honored with statue

Thu Dec 1, 2005 12:54 PM ET
Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Rosa Parks, the late civil rights activist, will become the first black woman to have a statue built in her image at the U.S. Capitol.

At a ceremony to sign the legislation calling for the statue, President George W. Bush praised Parks for calling America "back to its founding promise of equality and justice for everyone."

"It is fitting that this American hero will now be honored with a monument inside the most visible symbol of American democracy," Bush said.

Thursday marked the 50th anniversary of the day Parks made history for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. Her action, for which she was arrested, galvanized the civil rights movement. Parks died on October 24 at age 92.

Among those at White House bill signing ceremony were Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, Bush's Democratic challenger in the 2004 presidential race, and Bruce Gordon, head of the NAACP.

    Rosa Parks to be honored with statue, R, 1.12.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-12-01T175407Z_01_YUE163434_RTRUKOC_0_US-LIFE-PARKS.xml

Parks not seated alone in history

Posted 11/28/2005 11:01 PM
Updated 11/29/2005 2:56 PM
USA TODAY
By Larry Copeland

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Claudette Colvin has been all but lost to history in this quintessential Southern city where the modern civil rights movement began 50 years ago. (Photos: Remembering the boycott)

African American women walk along the sidewalk during a bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., in February, 1956.
Don Cravens, Time & Life Pictures

She was arrested for refusing to give her seat on a city bus to a white passenger — nine months before Rosa Parks' same act of quiet defiance launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott in December 1955.

From here, the civil rights movement swept across the South, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. becoming its primary voice. Parks went on to become an icon, "mother of the civil rights movement" and the first woman to lie in honor at the U.S. Capitol after her death in October. Colvin, who had flirted with immortality at age 15, faded into decades of obscurity.

Yet Colvin believes her actions on March 2, 1955, helped pave the way for Parks. That belief is shared by Fred Gray, the chief legal strategist of the bus boycott, which lasted for 381 days until the city ended its policy of segregation on buses.

This week, Colvin, Gray and four other lesser-known but pivotal boycott figures will get a measure of recognition. They — and all the ordinary Montgomery blacks who made the boycott succeed — will be honored Thursday at a reception marking the opening of a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibit on Rosa Parks and the bus boycott. The exhibit premieres Friday at the Alabama State Capitol.

As the boycott unfolded in the streets, Colvin and three other women who had been discriminated against on buses went to court. They sued, alleging that bus segregation ordinances denied them equal protection under the law. Their lawsuit led to a 1956 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Montgomery's segregated transportation was unconstitutional.

The women — Colvin, Aurelia Browder, Susie McDonald and Mary Louise Smith — and Gray will be feted Thursday along with Johnnie Carr, president since 1967 of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which led the boycott.

For Colvin, it's been a long time coming.

"Rosa got the recognition," says Colvin, now 66 and a retired nurse's assistant in New York. "I didn't even get any recognition. I was disappointed by that because maybe that would have opened a few doors. After the 381 days, I was not a part of things anymore. When I heard about stuff, it was like everybody else, on TV."

It's been 50 years since black people here struck down a system that denied them dignity and their rights as American citizens. Two generations of Southerners have grown up knowing legalized segregation only through history books.

But the memories of that ugly era are etched in the faces of those who lived it. Their recollections of what they endured, and how they hated it, still resonate.

A milestone arrest

Parks was arrested Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to give her bus seat to a white passenger. Leaders of Montgomery's nascent civil rights movement called for a one-day boycott Dec. 5. Even they were astounded at its success: 50,000 black maids, janitors, yardmen, factory workers and students stayed off the buses.

"It seemed like they were ready," says Carr, 94. "We had put up with it for so long. You had to stand up over an empty seat because it was in the white section. They were really fed up with it."

For 381 days, most black people stayed off the buses. They formed car pools. They gave strangers rides. Whites arranged transportation for their maids and housekeepers.

The four-year traveling exhibit, "381 Days: The Montgomery Bus Boycott Story," was developed by the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the Troy University Rosa Parks Library and Museum here. It is financed by AARP, a lobbying group for people 50 and older.

Organizers say they hope the exhibit will bring the unvarnished reality of the bus boycott home to viewers. "In some ways, we've romanticized the civil rights movement," says Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution. "We often forget just how strong the walls of segregation were, just how close to the surface racial hatred was. This wasn't simply a walk in the park."

Attorney Gray, 74, says it's important to look back — but also to look ahead. "My interest and my concern is not so much to ... commemorate what happened 50 years ago but to look at where we are now. We have to realize racism is not going to go away by itself."

A spontaneous act

In other circumstances, there might now be streets all over the South named for Claudette Colvin. She might have been awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom and celebrated as an American heroine.

Her act of defiance was spontaneous. When Colvin got on a bus with three friends, she didn't intend to challenge the segregation law, which said black riders in certain seats had to give those seats to white riders who wanted them.

"It wasn't planned or anything," she says. "When the bus began to fill up, the driver told us he wanted our seats. Three of the girls got up. I remained seated."

The driver hailed police. Colvin "struggled when they dragged her off the bus and screamed when they put on the handcuffs," according to Parting the Waters, a 1988 account of the civil rights movement by Taylor Branch.

Black activists, who had been awaiting a case they could use to challenge the city's bus segregation laws, sprang to her defense. But they soon decided that Colvin would not make the ideal symbol.

She was just 15 and given to outbursts of profanity, Taylor writes: "Worse, she was pregnant. Even if Montgomery (blacks) were willing to rally behind an unwed pregnant teenager — which they were not — her circumstances would make her an extremely vulnerable standard-bearer." They would wait nine more months for Parks, whose reputation was without blemish.

Today, Colvin says adamantly that she wasn't pregnant when arrested: Her son was born in March 1956.

"I believe they used Rosa Parks because they felt she would appeal to the adults and to middle-class people because she's fair-skinned and I'm dark-skinned," she says. "If I was fair-skinned, it would have been a different story. They would have used me."

Nevertheless, Gray says, "Claudette was a very pivotal person. She really gave moral courage to Mrs. Parks and to me and other people who were involved in the movement."

    Parks not seated alone in history, UT, 29.11.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-11-28-montgomery-bus-boycott_x.htm

AN IMPERFECT HERO:

Less-known Colvin

took stand on Montgomery bus

before Parks

November 4, 2005
BY CASSANDRA SPRATLING
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
Detroit Free Press

Before there was a Rosa Parks known to the world, there was Claudette Colvin.

Her name never rose to international prominence even though she, too, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus months earlier.


She was 15 and tired of injustice, just like Parks. In fact, she was one of the young people in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's youth council, of which Parks was the director.


Colvin, now 66 and living in the Bronx in New York, was among the thousands at Wednesday's funeral for Parks in Detroit.


"We wanted to give honor to her for picking up the torch and carrying the torch for freedom in a soft and quiet way," Colvin said Thursday. She had traveled to Detroit for the funeral with one of her sisters.


Colvin was one of two black women arrested before Parks on charges of violating the laws requiring racial segregation on Montgomery's public buses.


Colvin was arrested and jailed for two hours on March 2, 1955.


Mary Louise Smith was 18 years old when she was arrested Oct. 21, 1955 -- a little more than a month before Parks took her stand by remaining seated on a city bus.


Smith, now known as Mary Louise Smith Ware, 68, attended the memorial service for Parks in Montgomery, where she still lives.


"I had to pay my tribute to her," Ware said in a telephone interview Thursday. "She was our role model."


Prior to the start of the bus boycott, Montgomery civil rights leaders were looking for the perfect person to rally around.


They chose not to use Colvin or Ware because they wanted to find someone of unquestionable character.


Colvin became pregnant that summer. She said the pregnancy resulted from statutory rape. But being an unwed pregnant teenager, for any reason, carried a shameful stigma in the 1950s.


Ware's father was rumored to have a drinking problem, although she said he did not.


No one could question Parks' character.


Colvin said she has no bitter feelings about Parks receiving such worldwide acclaim while the general public doesn't know her name.


"It was the organization that pushed her up front," Colvin said. "Many other people suffered similar injustices."


In her own soft voice, Colvin recalled what happened to her that March afternoon when she was arrested:


She and three other students boarded a city bus after school.


Just like Parks on Dec.1, 1955, they sat in the colored section.


The law required that once the white section filled, blacks had to move back to accommodate whites needing seats.


As the bus began to fill, the driver asked the four students to move.


Three students complied.


Colvin did not.


"I said, 'It's my constitutional right to sit here,' " Colvin said, recalling one of the lessons at the youth council meetings.


A few blocks later, the bus stopped. Two police officers got on board and told her to get up.


"You don't know the law around here, girl," she recalled one of them saying.


She refused to move. Each cop grabbed her by an arm and removed her from the bus. They forced her to hold her handcuffed hands outside the window of the squad car.


"They said that I'd clawed them," she said. "I may have. I don't remember. I was very emotional. I did have long nails. I only weighed about 110 pounds."


Colvin was sentenced to one year of probation for charges that included violating the segregation laws.



She had had enough

She's not sure what caused her to take a stand against segregation that day.


"When you've been abused daily and you see people humiliated and harassed, you just get tired of it," Colvin said.


The humiliation at the local "5 and 10" store was especially painful for teenagers.


When she and her friends walked into the store, they could smell the delicious aroma of freshly popped popcorn, roasted peanuts and sizzling wieners and hamburgers. But they couldn't sit at the lunch counter to eat any of it. They had to go to the basement, where there was a counter they could stand at if they wanted to eat in the store.


"In my memory, I can still smell it."


Her 11th-grade class had dedicated February, the month before her arrest, to celebrating black history. She suspects that may have contributed to her decision.


"We learned about people like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington and Marian Anderson," she recalled. "Harriet Tubman was my favorite."


"All these things were in the back of my mind," she said. "I guess there was too much of the spirit of Harriet Tubman in me that I couldn't get up. I was paralyzed."


Colvin left Montgomery for New York in 1968 because she had difficulty finding and keeping work after her arrest, just as Parks had left for Detroit in 1957. Colvin retired last year after 35 years of working as a nurse's assistant in a New York City nursing home.


Although Colvin and Ware aren't as widely known as Parks, their names have a permanent place in U.S. history. They were among the four plaintiffs in the court case that ended segregation on the city's buses. It was fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.


Attorneys decided not to use Parks in the lawsuit because they wanted to build a case that clearly challenged the legality of bus segregation. Parks had been charged with disorderly conduct.


"I'm not disappointed," Colvin said. "Let the people know Rosa Parks was the right person for the boycott. But also let them know that the attorneys took four other women to the Supreme Court to challenge the law that led to the end of segregation."

    AN IMPERFECT HERO: Less-known Colvin took stand on Montgomery bus before Parks, DFP, 4.11.2005, http://www.freep.com/news/nw/colvin4e_20051104.htm

 

In Detroit, a Day to Honor Rosa Parks

November 3, 2005
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

DETROIT, Nov. 2 - In this, Rosa Parks's adopted hometown, the first row on hundreds of city buses sat empty on Wednesday, saved for the memory of Mrs. Parks and all she had done on another bus miles from here 50 years ago.

And so, as the politicians, the civil rights leaders, the famous musicians and the ministers packed into a massive church here to honor Mrs. Parks with formal speeches, ordinary people also swapped stories about her as they went about their days, to work and back, on the bus.

Most had seen Mrs. Parks over the years, speaking to their grade school class or turning up at a dedication. Others had waited hours outside before a frigid dawn on Wednesday to see her coffin at a museum here or to watch her white hearse pass.

"What she did for us was amazing," said Janine Thompson, as she rode the Woodward Avenue bus home from her restaurant job downtown. "She was wonderful."

Outside the Greater Grace Temple, thousands of people who had taken the day off from work waited to see a horse-drawn carriage carry Mrs. Parks's coffin toward a cemetery. In downtown offices, others brought televisions to watch more than six hours of remembrances and a call to action from a long line of dignitaries: the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, the Rev. Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, former President Bill Clinton and on and on.

Mr. Clinton said Mrs. Parks had ignited "the most significant social movement in modern American history, to finish the work that spawned the Civil War and redeem the promise of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments."

Mr. Sharpton said she and her fellow civil rights pioneers "didn't talk a fight; they fought the fight."

Mr. Jackson dismissed the myth of Mrs. Parks as a simple seamstress who was just too tired to stand up one day. He said she was instead a militant and a freedom fighter.

While Mrs. Parks, who died last month at 92, helped start the civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat for a white man on a bus in Alabama, Ms. Thompson said work remained right here in Detroit, the city Mrs. Parks chose to leave the South for in 1957.

Detroit has wrestled with a sinking population, due in part to white flight; with an unfortunate new distinction as the nation's poorest major city; and with what Ms. Thompson, 23, suggests is a subtler, urban racial divide of a new generation.

"It's not as obvious as it was that day in Montgomery, but we're segregated in this city now in many ways," Ms. Thompson said, looking around at a bus filled almost exclusively with black people. "In restaurants you see it. At work you see it. Honestly, I think Rosa Parks would be disappointed. I want to believe that one person can change the world like she did, but I don't know if I believe one person can solve things here."

At the moment, two men are vying to be that person.

Kwame M. Kilpatrick, a charismatic young mayor who swept into City Hall four years ago promising change from the older, grayer administration that had come before, faces a tough re-election challenge next Tuesday from Freman Hendrix, who was a member of that earlier administration and who outpolled Mr. Kilpatrick in a primary.

Everything in this city, even politics, seemed to pause for Mrs. Parks's funeral on Wednesday, but on most days, this campaign for mayor has been anything but quiet.

For months, Mr. Kilpatrick, 35, has fought off controversies, one after the next: reports of dubious charges on a city credit card, stories of thousands of city dollars spent to lease a Lincoln Navigator for his family, assertions that the city's budget is headed toward insolvency.

"My opponent is the king of smoke and mirrors," Mr. Hendrix said earlier in the week in an interview at his campaign headquarters. "His budget's been smoke and mirrors. His crime statistics have been smoke and mirrors."

Mr. Hendrix, who is 55 and served as the deputy mayor and chief of staff for Dennis Archer, the former mayor, contends that Detroit is in far worse shape than it was four years ago when Mr. Kilpatrick arrived.

"There seems to be no capacity to manage the city's fiscal affairs," Mr. Hendrix said, promising that he would immediately cut "nonessential" city jobs, start collecting overdue taxes and pull the city out of its budget deficit in three years.

Mr. Hendrix ticked off conditions that he said had worsened in Detroit: homelessness, poverty, joblessness and, he said, even the bus system.

"I'm fully aware of exactly what I'm walking into," he said, shaking his head.

But for his part, Mr. Kilpatrick said he believed that Detroit had improved vastly during his term, and he pointed to an increase in development downtown and in trade shows, conventions and sporting events coming to town. The city budget, he said, will be balanced soon.

And other woes of the city, including its reliance on the auto industry, he said, came long before he did. "What's been happening in Detroit over the last three years has been happening for the last 50," Mr. Kilpatrick said,

As for the cars and credit cards, Mr. Kilpatrick said he wondered whether such claims and questions would ever have drawn so much notice if he were not who he is.

"In Detroit, when you have a 30-year-old running for office, an African-American man who was called the Hip-Hop Mayor, everything kind of takes on a life of its own, unfortunately," he said.

In a campaign that was reaching its final, feverish days, admiration for Mrs. Parks seemed to be one of the rare points on which the two candidates could agree.

"She is the conscience of this country," Mr. Hendrix said.

Mr. Kilpatrick said, "She made it possible for a 35-year-old African American man to have the audacity to think he could be mayor in this country."

Peter Bible, 54, was not at the service; he was riding the bus as he does most days. He said he was not so sure about Detroit's politicians now. "I have lost faith in the newer ones - it's all about too much money and too much politics," he said.

Earlier this week, he took the bus to see Mrs. Parks's coffin. Though he has lived all his life here, Mr. Bible had never seen Mrs. Parks but he said he felt he owed her that much.

"She looked like an angel," he told several other passengers.

He said he longed for the leaders of an era now gone, people like Coleman A. Young, Detroit's first black mayor, and Mrs. Parks.

Gretchen Ruethling contributed reporting from Chicago for this story.

    In Detroit, a Day to Honor Rosa Parks, NYT, 3.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/03/national/03detroit.html?hp&ex=1131080400&en=cac6630b2974cb38&ei=5094&partner=homepage

US bids farewell to civil rights icon Rosa Parks

Wed Nov 2, 2005 10:20 PM ET
Reuters
By Tom Brown

DETROIT (Reuters) - Thousands of mourners, some of whom waited for hours in the cold, paid a final tribute on Wednesday to Rosa Parks, who galvanized the U.S. civil rights movement by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in the segregated South a half a century ago.

Former President Bill Clinton said her simple act of civil disobedience in 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama "ignited the most significant social movement in American history."

The casket carrying Parks, who died on October 24 at age 92, was placed in a horse-drawn hearse for a procession to a Detroit cemetery after a seven-hour church service. Entombment in a mausoleum well after sunset was private.

Clinton recounted how he remembered Parks' historic act when he was a nine-year-old boy riding a segregated bus to school every day in Arkansas.

The next day, he said, he and two friends decided to pay tribute to Parks by sitting in the back of their bus.

"She did help to set us all free," he said.

After her arrest, Parks was convicted of breaking the law and fined $10, along with $4 in court costs. That same day, black residents began a boycott of the bus system that lasted for 381 days, led by a then-unknown Rev. Martin Luther King.

Legal challenges led to a Supreme Court decision that forced Montgomery to desegregate its bus system and ultimately helped put an end to laws separating blacks and whites at public facilities across the South.

She left Montgomery and moved to Detroit not long after her arrest.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, one of the last to speak at the end of the joyous service, said the police who arrested Parks "had guns, she had a breast full of righteousness. ... Sister Rosa you are our eagle bird of hope. ... You allowed the rebirth of hope."

Sen. Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat and the only black in the U.S. Senate, said Parks "held no public office, she wasn't a wealthy woman, didn't appear in the society pages, she did not have an advanced degree (but) when the history of this country is written ... it is this small, quiet woman whose name will be remembered."

PETITE PARKS A "GENTLE GIANT"

Bishop Charles Ellis, pastor of the Greater Grace Temple where Wednesday's funeral was held, called the diminutive Parks "a gentle giant of a woman." Her funeral, he said, was a "national victory celebration. ... Because she humbled herself in life God has highly exalted her in eternity."

The seat waiting for her in heaven, Ellis said, was reserved for her 50 years ago in Alabama.

The service was held inside the 4,000-seat church, a $33 million facility opened just a few years ago by members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church congregation. Aretha Franklin, the "queen of soul," offered a moving arrangement of "The Impossible Dream."

Some waited for hours in a predawn chill to get into the church where they were joined by such figures as Sen. John Kerry, the unsuccessful 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, Clinton's wife Hillary, the Democratic senator from New York, and Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam.

The service, punctuated by Gospel hymns from two choirs that sent the congregation swaying, followed tributes to Parks from across the country.

Her body was placed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda last Sunday, the first such honor ever accorded a woman. There was also a service in Alabama.

The Rev. Bernice King, daughter of the civil rights leader, told the service she came on behalf of her mother, Coretta Scott King, who recently suffered a stroke.

Parks, she said, "was the catalyst of one of the most important freedom movements not only in American history but in world history .. indeed she became the symbol and personification of our nonviolent struggle for liberation and human dignity."

    US bids farewell to civil rights icon Rosa Parks, R, 2.11.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-11-03T031908Z_01_SIB270747_RTRUKOC_0_US-PARKS.xml

Thousands attend Rosa Parks' funeral in Detroit

AP > USA Today
Posted 11/2/2005 7:45 AM Updated 11/2/2005 1:05 PM

DETROIT (AP) — A soaring rendition of The Lord's Prayer moved thousands of mourners at the funeral of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks on Wednesday, with a preacher bidding: "Mother Parks, take your rest."

A hearse carrying the casket of Rosa Parks heads to her funeral site early Wednesday.
By Duane Burleson, AP

Former President Clinton, his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton, and hundreds of other mourners paid their respects at Parks' open casket before the start of the funeral service that included the prayer in song by soprano Brenda Jackson. (Related video: Thousands gather)

Those in the audience held hands and sang We Shall Overcome as family members filed past the casket before it was closed just before noon.

Bishop Charles Ellis III of Greater Grace Temple led the service for 4,000 people packed in to say goodbye to the diminutive figure who sparked a civil rights revolution by refusing 50 years ago to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Ala.

"Mother Parks, take your rest. You have certainly earned it," Ellis said.

Mourners waited in long lines in the chilly morning to honor Parks. Hours before the funeral began, the line to get one of the 2,000 available public seats at the church extended more than two blocks west in Parks' adopted hometown.

Claudette Bond, 62, had been waiting since 6 p.m. Tuesday in a lawn chair. She was first in line and didn't budge, even as temperatures dipped below 40 degrees.

"This will never happen again. There will never be another Rosa Parks," said Moses Fisher, a Nashville, resident waiting for the chance to get a seat.

As a white hearse carried Parks' body from the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, where viewing lasted until the pre-dawn hours, dozens of people holding pictures of Parks crowded around it. As it began moving, they shouted, "We love you!"

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has called Parks "the mother of a new America," was to be one of several speakers at the funeral. Aretha Franklin was to sing, and Philip R. Cousin, a senior bishop of the AME Church, had prepared a eulogy.

Parks was 92 when she died Oct. 24 in Detroit. Nearly 50 years earlier, she was a 42-year-old tailor's assistant at a department store in Montgomery, Ala., when she was arrested and fined $10 plus $4 in court costs for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery city bus.

Her action on Dec. 1, 1955, triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in December 1956 that segregated seats on city buses were unconstitutional, giving momentum to the battle against laws that separated the races in public accommodations and businesses throughout the South.

But Parks and her husband, Raymond, were exposed to harassment and death threats in Montgomery, where they also lost their jobs. They moved to Detroit with Rosa Parks' mother, Leona McCauley, in 1957.

Parks was initially going to be buried a family plot in Detroit's Woodlawn Cemetery, next to her husband and mother. But Swanson Funeral Home officials confirmed Tuesday that Parks would be entombed in a mausoleum at the cemetery and the bodies of her husband and mother also would be moved there.

    Thousands attend Rosa Parks' funeral in Detroit, UT, 2.11.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-11-02-rosa-parks_x.htm

Thousands to Pay Final Respects to Rosa Parks in Detroit

November 2, 2005
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

DETROIT -- Thousands of people waited in long lines in the chilly morning Wednesday to honor Rosa Parks at her funeral and pay final respects to the civil rights pioneer.

Hours before the funeral began, the line to get one of the 2,000 available public seats at Greater Grace Temple extended more than two blocks west of the church in Parks' adopted hometown. The funeral was to start at 11 a.m., but was delayed as the crowd continued gathering in the church.

Claudette Bond, 62, had been waiting since 6 p.m. Tuesday in a lawn chair. She was first in line and didn't budge, even as temperatures dipped below 40 degrees.

"This will never happen again. There will never be another Rosa Parks," said Moses Fisher, a Detroit native and Nashville, Tenn., another waiting for the chance to get a seat.

As a white hearse carried Parks' body from the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, where viewing lasted until the pre-dawn hours, dozens of people holding pictures of Parks crowded around it. As it began moving, they shouted, "We love you."

Civil rights leaders, dignitaries and politicians were among the 4,000 expected to attend the funeral. Among them were former President Clinton, his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has called Parks "the mother of a new America," was to be one of several speakers at the funeral. Aretha Franklin was preparing to sing, and Philip R. Cousin, a senior bishop of the AME Church, had prepared a eulogy.

Parks was 92 when she died Oct. 24 in Detroit. Nearly 50 years earlier, she was a 42-year-old tailor's assistant at a department store in Montgomery, Ala., when she was arrested and fined $10 plus $4 in court costs for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery city bus. Her action on Dec. 1, 1955, triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in December 1956 that segregated seats on city buses were unconstitutional, giving momentum to the battle against laws that separated the races in public accommodations and businesses throughout the South.

But Parks and her husband Raymond were exposed to harassment and death threats in Montgomery, where they also lost their jobs. They moved to Detroit with Rosa Parks' mother, Leona McCauley, in 1957.

Parks held a series of low-paying jobs before U.S. Rep. John Conyers hired her in 1965 to work in his Detroit office. She remained there until 1987.

Parks was initially going to be buried a family plot in Detroit's Woodlawn Cemetery, next to her husband and mother. But Swanson Funeral Home officials confirmed Tuesday that Parks would be entombed in a mausoleum at the cemetery and the bodies of her husband and mother also would be moved there.

    Thousands to Pay Final Respects to Rosa Parks in Detroit, NYT, 2.11.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Rosa-Parks.html

Funeral today in Detroit for civil rights icon

USA Today
Posted 11/1/2005 9:18 AM Updated 11/1/2005 11:41 PM

DETROIT — Annie Greene remembers hearing about Rosa Parks when Greene was a high school student in Georgia, back when black people were still being lynched in the South and Jim Crow laws made public humiliation a part of her daily life.

Zamarria Jones, age 7, walks past the casket of Rosa Parks on Tuesday.
Pool photo by Susan Tusa, Getty Images

Hearing that a black woman in Alabama had finally stood up for her rights was inspiring.

"It felt good, yes it did," Greene, now a receptionist at Greater Grace Temple, said between phone calls Tuesday. Greene has had a phone attached to her ear much of the time since last Wednesday, when a local funeral home called to say it would like to use the church to host Parks' funeral today.

On Tuesday, while thousands of people filed past Parks' casket at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History here, Greene was helping juggle final preparations for the funeral today. Civil rights leaders, entertainers and other dignitaries, from former President Clinton and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., to singer Aretha Franklin, are scheduled to attend.

Parks died Oct. 24 at 92. The soft-spoken woman was revered in Detroit, a city that is 85% black and is struggling to recover from decades of job losses and racial tensions.

"The beauty of her inspiration is that she was peaceful," says Roman Gribbs, who was mayor of Detroit from 1970 to 1974. "She was a lady of grace."

Parks moved to Detroit in 1957, two years after she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Ala. Her action instigated a 381-day boycott of the city's bus system and helped launch the modern civil rights movement, led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. She and her husband lost their jobs and were threatened, prompting them to move near family in Detroit.

Family members chose the Greater Grace Temple because of its size. The church can seat 4,000 people in the main auditorium and 1,200 more in overflow rooms.

Parks will be buried at Woodlawn Cemetery next to her mother, Leona McCauley, and her husband, Raymond Parks, who both died in the 1970s.

James Sigar and Salena Wilkinson drove from central Kentucky to Detroit on Tuesday to visit the place where Parks will be buried.

"This is something I said for the last 25 years I would do," says Sigar, who got up at 1 a.m. to start the six-hour drive north. "I respect her even more so than Dr. King. Dr. King was a byproduct of what she did — someone had to come first."

The revered but sometimes reluctant symbol of the dawning civil rights movement was 92 when she died Oct. 24 at her apartment in Detroit. Parks lay in honor in Montgomery, Ala., and in Washington before her body was returned Monday night to the city where she had lived since 1957.

Parks' mahogany casket was flown from Washington to Detroit, where it was carried into the rotunda of the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History for round-the-clock viewing through early Wednesday.

By 8 p.m. Monday, hundreds of people had lined up outside the museum in a raw drizzle to wait for their moment to file past the casket. By the time the museum doors opened, thousands were standing quietly in a line stretching more than a quarter of a mile.

On Tuesday morning, the line again spilled out the museum's front doors and into the streets. Vendors sold souvenir T-shirts, and those waiting in line sipped coffee.

Tony Dotson, 43, a maintenance worker from Detroit, stood near the front of the line Monday night.

"I want to pay honor to mother Parks," he said. "I appreciate what a blessing she was, and I'm thankful she was right here in Detroit and we didn't have to travel far to see her."

Deborah Lee Horne, 56, of Detroit said she came out of "love, love, love. And in memory of the movement and what she stood for."

Horne said she was encouraged by the sight of so many children and teenagers waiting with her. "I think what she did needs to be highlighted for young people," she said. "If not, they have no idea."

Viewing was to continue until 5 a.m. Wednesday, with Parks' funeral to be held at 11 a.m. Wednesday at Greater Grace Temple Church. Former President Clinton and singer Aretha Franklin were scheduled to attend.

Parks was to be buried next to her husband and mother in Detroit's Woodlawn Cemetery.

In a three-hour memorial service Monday at historic Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in Washington, Parks was honored by political, religious and civil rights leaders and others who spoke of the example she set with a simple act of defiance: refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery city bus on Dec. 1, 1955.

"I would not be standing here today, nor standing where I stand every day, had she not chosen to sit down," talk show host Oprah Winfrey said. "I know that."

Bishop Adam Jefferson Richardson of the African Methodist Episcopal Church called Parks a "woman of quiet strength" who was "noble without pretense, regal in her simplicity, courageous without being bombastic."

Her memorial brought together leaders of both parties, from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.

Earlier, tens of thousands of people filed silently past Parks' casket in the Capitol Rotunda in hushed reverence from Sunday night through midmorning Monday. Parks became the first woman to lie in honor in the Rotunda, sharing the tribute given to Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and other national leaders.

Capitol Police estimated the crowd at more than 30,000 but some participants said it was far bigger.

Among those paying respects was Judge Samuel Alito and his family, the day President Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court.

Bush, who presented a wreath Sunday night at a Capitol Hill ceremony, ordered the U.S. flag flown at half-staff over all public buildings Wednesday, the day of Parks' funeral in Detroit.

Parks was a 42-year-old tailor's assistant at a Montgomery department store when she was arrested and fined $10 plus $4 in court costs. That triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system led by a 26-year-old minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in December 1956 that segregated seats on city buses were unconstitutional, giving momentum to the battle against laws that separated the races in public accommodations and businesses throughout the South.

Parks' act exposed her and her husband Raymond to harassment and death threats, and they lost their jobs in Montgomery. They moved to Detroit with Rosa Parks' mother, Leona McCauley, in 1957.

Rosa Parks held a series of low-paying jobs before U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. hired her in 1965 to work in his Detroit office. She remained there until 1987.

Raymond Parks died in 1977. After retiring in 1988, Parks devoted herself to the Raymond and Rosa Parks Institute for Self-Development, a non-profit organization to educate young blacks about the history and principles of the civil rights movement.

    Funeral today in Detroit for civil rights icon, UT, 1.11.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-11-01-parks-memorial_x.htm

Parks' body returned to her adopted city

Posted 10/31/2005 10:08 PM Updated 10/31/2005 10:26 PM
USA Today

DETROIT (AP) — Rosa Parks was returned Monday to the city where the civil rights pioneer spent the last half of her life and continued waging a quiet struggle for equality.

Parks was 92 when she died Oct. 24 at her Detroit apartment. After being viewed at a church in Montgomery, Ala., and in Washington, where it had lain in honor in the Capitol Rotunda, her body was flown to Detroit and displayed at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History.

Hundreds of people stood outside on a cold, drizzly night to wait for their moment to file past the mahogany casket bearing Parks' body. They included Tony Dotson, 43, a maintenance worker from Detroit.

"I want to pay honor to mother Parks," he said. "I appreciate what a blessing she was, and I'm thankful she was right here in Detroit and we didn't have to travel far to see her."

Deborah Lee Horne, 56, of Detroit, said she came out of "love, love, love. And in memory of the movement and what she stood for."

Horne said she was encouraged by the sight of so many young people in waiting in line with her.

"I think what she did needs to be highlighted for young people," she said. "If not, they have no idea."

As the rain began to fall more steadily, umbrellas sprouted as some members of the crowd began singing "We Shall Overcome."

Viewing was to continue around the clock until 5 a.m. Wednesday, with Parks' funeral to be held at 11 a.m. Wednesday at Greater Grace Temple Church. Former President Clinton and singer Aretha Franklin were scheduled to attend.

Parks, a tailor's assistant at a Montgomery, Ala., department store, was 42 when she was arrested Dec. 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus. That triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system led by a 26-year-old minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The U.S. Supreme Court's December 1956 ruling that segregated seats on city buses were unconstitutional gave momentum to the modern civil rights movement. Parks' simple act of defiance became the stuff of legend over the years but exposed her to harassment and even death threats in Montgomery.

After Parks and her husband Raymond lost their jobs, they moved to Detroit with Rosa Parks' mother in August 1957. Rosa Parks held a series of low-paying jobs before U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. hired her in 1965 to work in his Detroit office. She remained there until 1987.

Conyers, speaking earlier Monday during a memorial service at historic Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in Washington, recalled a 1990 visit to Detroit by Nelson Mandela. The former South African president led the crowd in a chant of Parks' name, "which made us realize that this is an international phenomenon that we celebrate," Conyers said. "Rosa Parks is worldwide."

"I understand I am a symbol," she wrote in her autobiography. "But I have never gotten used to being a public person."

Conyers acknowledged as much the night Parks died, saying: "She never sought the limelight. She wasn't a political figure at all. Everybody wanted to explain Rosa Parks and wanted to teach Rosa Parks, but Rosa Parks wasn't very interested in that.

"She wanted to them to understand the government and to understand their rights and the Constitution that people are still trying to perfect today."

Raymond Parks died in 1977. After retiring in 1988, Parks threw herself into the Raymond and Rosa Parks Institute for Self-Development, a non-profit organization to educate young blacks about the history and principles of the civil rights movement.

    Parks' body returned to her adopted city, UT, 31.10.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-10-31-parks-detroit_x.htm

Thousands honor Rosa Parks in tributes

Posted 10/31/2005 8:45 AM Updated 10/31/2005 10:31 PM
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks was remembered Monday as a courageous woman whose defiance in the face of segregation helped inspire the architects of the civil rights movement and set an example for generations to follow.

"I would not be standing here today ... had she not chosen to sit down," Oprah Winfrey said in her tribute to Parks.
Manuel Balce Ceneta, AP

An overflow crowd of mourners joined official Washington to pay tribute to the woman whose refusal to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala., city bus helped galvanize the modern civil rights movement.

Talk show host Oprah Winfrey, who was born in Mississippi during segregation, said Parks' stand "changed the trajectory of my life and the lives of so many other people in the world."

"I would not be standing here today, nor standing where I stand every day, had she not chosen to sit down," Winfrey said. "I know that."

Bishop Adam Jefferson Richardson of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church said, "we are here not because Rosa Parks died but because she lived graciously, effectively and purposely, touching the lives of millions."

Richardson called Parks a "woman of quiet strength" who was "noble without pretense, regal in her simplicity, courageous without being bombastic."

Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C., said Parks' refusal to give up her seat "was the functional equivalent of a non-violent shot heard round the world."

"She saw the inherent evil in segregation and she had the courage to fight it in its common place, a seat on a bus," said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.

Parks' life was celebrated at the church, where several hundred people were listening to tributes by Winfrey, NAACP chairman Julian Bond, and Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., for whom Parks worked in his Detroit congressional office for more than two decades. (Related: Sights and sounds from the Rotunda | More photos)

Conyers recalled that when former South African President Nelson Mandela visited Detroit in 1990, he led the crowd in a chant of Rosa Parks' name, "which made us realize that this is an international phenomenon that we celebrate. Rosa Parks is worldwide."

In attendance was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy and Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean.

A painting of the elderly Parks rested above her mahogany coffin at the center of the altar, which was lined with flower arrangements. A large wooden crucifix loomed over the choir, which led the crowd in singing "Lift Every Voice and Sing" and "Battle Hymn of the Republic."

Earlier, more than 30,000 people filed silently by her casket in the Capitol Rotunda in hushed reverence, beginning Sunday night and continuing until well pas sunrise Monday.

Frist accompanied new Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito and his family to the Rotunda, where they paused in silent remembrance. Several senators joined the procession.

Elderly women carrying purses, young couples holding hands and small children in the arms of their parents reverently proceeded around the raised wooden casket. A Capitol Police spokeswoman, Sgt. Jessica Gissubel, said more than 30,000 passed through the Rotunda since Sunday evening, when the viewing began.

"I rejoice that my country recognizes that this woman changed the course of American history, that this woman became a cure for the cancer of segregation," said the Rev. Vernon Shannon, 68, pastor of John Wesley African-Methodist-Episcopal Zion in Washington, one of many who rose before dawn to see the casket.

Many were overcome by emotion. Monica Grady, 47, of Greenbelt, Md., was moved to tears, she said, that Parks was "so brave at the time without really knowing the consequences" of her actions.

Bathed in a spotlight, Parks' casket stood in the center of a Rotunda that includes a bronze bust of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system that helped initiate the modern civil rights movement.

In preparation for a memorial service, her casket was taken down the steps of the East Capitol by a military honor guard of pallbearers, followed by her family. A vintage Metropolitan bus dressed in black bunting followed the hearse, along with other city buses.

Parks, a former seamstress, became the first woman to lie in honor in the Rotunda, sharing the tribute bestowed upon Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and other national leaders.

Parks, who died last Monday at 92, was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, an incident that inspired King and helped touch off the civil rights movement.

President Bush, who presented a wreath Sunday night at a Capitol Hill ceremony, ordered the U.S. flag to be flown at half-staff over all public buildings Wednesday, the day of Parks' funeral and burial in Detroit.

    Thousands honor Rosa Parks in tributes, UT, 31.10.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-10-31-rosa-parks_x.htm

Americans Honor Parks at Capitol Rotunda

October 31, 2005
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times
Filed at 11:24 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In hushed reverence, Americans paid tribute Monday to Rosa Parks, with more than 30,000 filing silently by her casket in the Capitol Rotunda and a military honor guard saluting the woman whose defiant act on a city bus inspired the modern civil rights movement.

''I rejoice that my country recognizes that this woman changed the course of American history, that this woman became a cure for the cancer of segregation,'' said the Rev. Vernon Shannon, 68, pastor of John Wesley African-Methodist-Episcopal Zion in Washington, one of many who rose before dawn to see the casket.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., accompanied new Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito and his family to the Rotunda, where they paused in silent remembrance. Several senators joined the procession.

Elderly women carrying purses, young couples holding hands and small children in the arms of their parents reverently proceeded around the raised wooden casket. A Capitol Police spokeswoman, Sgt. Jessica Gissubel, said more than 30,000 passed through the Rotunda since Sunday evening, when the viewing began.

Many were overcome by emotion. Monica Grady, 47, of Greenbelt, Md., was moved to tears, she said, that Parks was ''so brave at the time without really knowing the consequences'' of her actions.

Bathed in a spotlight, Parks' casket stood in the center of a Rotunda that includes a bronze bust of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who led the 381-day boycott of the Montgomery bus system that helped initiate the modern civil rights movement.

In preparation for a memorial service, her casket was taken down the steps of the East Capitol by a military honor guard of pallbearers, followed by her family. A vintage Metropolitan bus dressed in black bunting followed the hearse, along with other city buses.

Parks, a former seamstress, became the first woman to lie in honor in the Rotunda, sharing the tribute bestowed upon Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and other national leaders. President Bush and congressional leaders gathered for a brief ceremony Sunday night, listening as members of Baltimore's Morgan State University choir sang ''The Battle Hymn of the Republic.''

Parks, who died last Monday at 92, was arrested in 1955 for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man, an incident that inspired King and helped touch off the civil rights movement.

Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., in whose Detroit congressional office Parks worked for years, said the ceremony and public viewing showed ''the legacy of Rosa Parks is more than just a success for the civil rights movement or for African-Americans. It means it's a national honor.''

People began gathering outside the Capitol before noon Sunday and the line of well-wishers and mourners slowly pushed along into the early morning hours Monday.

Parks also was being remembered Monday at a memorial service at the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in Washington and was then to lie in repose at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. The program at the Washington memorial service included tributes by Oprah Winfrey, NAACP chairman Julian Bond, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., and Conyers.

At the Capitol ceremony Sunday, Senate chaplain Barry Black said Parks' courage ''ignited a movement that aroused our national conscience'' and served as an example of the ''power of fateful, small acts.''

Bush, who presented a wreath but did not speak at the ceremony, issued a proclamation ordering the U.S. flag to be flown at half-staff over all public buildings Wednesday, the day of Parks' funeral and burial in Detroit.

''She was a citizen in the best sense of the word,'' said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa. ''She caused things to happen in our society that made us a better, more caring, more just society.''

Among those paying respect was Ann Durr Lyon, 78, of Harrisburg, Pa., whose parents, Virginia and Clifford Durr, helped bail out Parks following her arrest. Lyon carried with her a typewritten tribute to the civil rights pioneer, noting her mother ''is in heaven waiting for her friend. Mrs. Parks will light up God's heaven -- FREE AT LAST!''

Associated Press writers Samira Jafari in Montgomery and Juan-Carlos Rodriguez in Washington contributed to this report.

    Americans Honor Parks at Capitol Rotunda, NYT, 31.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Rosa-Parks.html?hp&ex=1130821200&en=341ddbc451c9d772&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Grieving Parks, Rights Leaders Ponder Future

October 31, 2005
The New York Times
By FELICIA R. LEE

The body of Rosa Parks lay in the Capitol Rotunda this morning, on view for thousands of Americans who wanted to honor the woman known as the mother of the civil rights movement. Her death last week has created a moment, many African-Americans engaged in political struggle say, to take stock of what that movement accomplished and whether it is still alive.

With the deaths this year of other major figures from a movement that once galvanized a mass following over issues like the right to vote, segregated lunch counters and a seat in the front of the bus, some say that not enough has been done to share that history with the young or to shape future leaders to carry on the cause. That movement has been replaced, in large part, by more dispersed struggles over issues like housing and employment, health care and incarceration.

"In the absence of dogs and hoses there is no immediate, obvious enemy before us, so it's harder to mobilize a sense of outrage," said Senator Barack Obama, an Illinois Democrat who is the only black member of the United States Senate. "Rosa Parks did not just sit down on her own initiative. She was part of a movement."

The reflection on the earlier civil rights movement and the next phase, if there is to be one, is occurring at an extraordinary time.

Hurricane Katrina exposed fault lines of race and class in America. The case of Emmett Till, the black teenager who was killed in the Mississippi Delta in 1955 supposedly for whistling at a white woman, has been reopened. Edgar Ray Killen, a former Klansman, was convicted in the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Miss.

Just last weekend, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice focused international attention on the civil rights struggle when she took Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, on a visit to the Birmingham, Ala., church where four black girls died in a bombing 42 years ago. Ms. Rice used the visit to link the civil rights struggle there to an international quest for democracy.

And last month, the Senate approved a measure that would create a Justice Department office to investigate and prosecute unsolved killings from the civil rights era.

"I do think there is a movement building," said Malika Sanders, 32, president of the 21st Century Youth Leadership Movement with headquarters near Selma, Ala., which trains young people to be human rights workers.

"If you look from California to Wyoming and from Maine to the furthermost tip of Alabama, you find people working on human rights issues," Ms. Sanders said. "It's a major challenge to this generation to put forth a vision that makes connections between those issues."

The echoes of the past come as many of the figures and chroniclers of the early fight are dying, leaving behind a black population with a median age of 30 - many born after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 and after legal barriers to voting, public accommodations and education were toppled.

"We are at a crossroads," said Representative John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat who is a former associate of Dr. King's. "We can either go forward or stand still."

"It seems every other day we are losing somebody and we have not done enough to inform, to educate another cadre of leaders," said Mr. Lewis, who once led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. "I am thinking not only of the death of Rosa Parks but of Constance Baker Motley, Vivian Malone Jones, C. DeLores Tucker."

Ms. Motley was a politician and lawyer who defended civil rights workers, and became the first black female judge on the federal bench. Ms. Jones was the first black graduate of the University of Alabama, and Ms. Tucker marched with Dr. King and founded the National Political Congress of Black Women.

Since the beginning of the year, other prominent leaders in the civil rights movement have died, including John H. Johnson, the founder and publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines; Ossie Davis, the actor and activist who eulogized Malcolm X; and Arthur A. Fletcher, known as the father of affirmative action.

It was the recent death of Mrs. Parks, though, that reawakened the desire to reflect, say some leaders from her era and young leaders of grass-roots organizations across the country.

While many struggles continue, they do not approach the drama of the march on Washington in 1963 when Dr. King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech or of Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, when Mrs. Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white man, setting off the bus boycott that brought Dr. King to national prominence.

"A lot of people are gone," said Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "You lose that witness, that personal testimony."

Mr. Bond was once one of the Young Turks of the movement. "Civil rights today has to fight the false belief that all those problems were solved in the Martin Luther King era," he said.

In some ways, the success of the earlier civil rights leaders is daunting, said Van Jones, the 37-year-old executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, Calif., an organization named in honor of the first executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They helped repair American democracy, integrated the mainstream and created a template for other movements, he said.

But a failing of that generation, Mr. Jones and some other young leaders said, was that it had no plan to nurture and hand off responsibility to younger leaders.

"The older generation did not realize fast enough it that it wasn't going to fix all the problems," Mr. Jones said.

Still, he says he remains hopeful. People are rallying behind campaigns like that of the colorofchange.org Web site, a kind of African-American equivalent to MoveOn.org, Mr. Jones said, and he sees a hunger for more unity. "We've got a lot of issues but not a lot of coherence," he said.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said the civil rights movement was alive and well but just looked different.

"The movement today is more Northern, more urban and more centered around police brutality and racial profiling," Mr. Sharpton said, adding that it was also less likely to be covered by a national news media that romanticized the Southern confrontations of the past.

Farai Chideya, a journalist and founder of PopandPolitics.com, an online opinion journal, said: "At this point, there's work to do on defining a movement as opposed to following a movement. If this generation wants to mount a challenge to the earlier generation's leadership they have to raise their own money and start their own organizations."

The earlier generation's success in helping remove a legal color line, those interviewed said, means only that racism can be subtler. Blacks continue to lag behind whites on every socioeconomic index. The new movement, they said, will focus not only on explicitly "black" issues but also on wider societal problems like joblessness and failing schools that affect blacks disproportionately.

"I eschew this idea that only sees civil rights as being about protest and litigation," said Marc H. Morial, the president of the National Urban League and a former mayor of New Orleans. "Those were tactics used in the 60's because we didn't have the right to vote and weren't sitting in the boardroom."

Others, too, say there is a much broader focus now.

"Our struggle has gone from civil rights to human rights," said Martin Luther King III, president of the King Center in Atlanta, created to preserve his father's legacy.

The Rev. Markel Hutchins, a 28-year-old minister in Atlanta, said: "The paradigm in America has shifted from black and white to the haves and have-nots." His group, the National Youth Connection, works to end poverty and to fight police brutality, among other things.

Many saw a catalyst to bring people together in the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, in which a slow local and federal response to the disaster left mostly poor and black residents stranded in New Orleans.

"What happened with Katrina took the cover off," Mr. Lewis said. "It said we've traveled a long distance but many of us have been left behind."

These days, said many of the political leaders and activists interviewed, problems like a lack of quality health care and joblessness are more complex than desegregation and can be solved only through a series of potentially expensive long-term initiatives and not just legislation.

"Today you can eat at a lunch counter but you can't get an education that allows you to go the next level," said T. J. Crawford, the 29-year-old chairman of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention and its Chicago local. "We build upon the intellectual capital, but there's not enough community building or institution building on a mass level, so you're forced to repeat the struggles of your parents and grandparents."

    Grieving Parks, Rights Leaders Ponder Future, NYT, 31.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/national/31civil.html?hp&ex=1130821200&en=2c46bd70b2784da5&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Thousands Gather at the Capitol to Remember a Hero

October 31, 2005
The New York Times
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 - Like thousands of others, the Waters family of Lawrenceville, N.J., three generations, arrived at the Capitol many hours early on Sunday, determined to witness what so many called an extraordinary moment in American history.

Shortly before 8 p.m., the coffin bearing Rosa Parks, the accidental matriarch of the civil rights movement who died last Monday at 92, arrived at the Capitol and was carried by a military guard to lie in the Rotunda.

A seamstress by trade, Mrs. Parks became the first woman ever accorded such a tribute and just the 31st person over all since 1852, a list that includes Abraham Lincoln and nine other presidents.

At a ceremony attended by dozens of dignitaries, President Bush and his wife, Laura, laid one of three wreaths at the coffin. Leaders of the House and the Senate laid the others.

Mr. Bush did not speak, but greeted a few people and shook hands before leaving.

Soon after his departure, the room was opened to the public, and a procession of admiring, curious and deeply thankful people slowly walked past. The Capitol police planned to keep doors open until midnight, possibly later if people remained in line, then reopen them at 7 a.m. Monday for three hours. The coffin will then be driven to the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in Washington for a 1 p.m. service.

It will then be flown to Detroit, Mrs. Parks's hometown, where she is to lie in repose at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History until Wednesday, when she will be buried.

While waiting to enter the Capitol, Swanee Waters, 68, talked about how important it was to have made the journey with her daughter, Beth Golden, 41, and especially her granddaughter Swanee Golden, who is 8 and learned about Mrs. Parks after reading a book just weeks ago.

"I just thought this was a way to make her aware of what happened in the movement," said Ms. Waters, who was a high school senior in 1955, when Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat for a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., a single act of defiance that is generally recognized as the start of the American civil rights movement.

Ms. Waters and her daughter thought it was imperative that Swanee share in the tribute.

"This is an opportunity she will never have again," Ms. Waters said, "and I thought it would be great for all three of us to come by."

Ms. Golden said: "My daughter doesn't have the memories that I and my mother have. So now when people talk about Rosa Parks and civil rights, my daughter can say she was in Washington, D.C., when she lay in honor. She'll have that moment."

It was a sentiment echoed by many who waited patiently throughout the day under a sparkling sky. The earliest arrived at 10 a.m., and many passed the hours in line reading newspapers, chatting with strangers or quietly singing songs like "We Shall Overcome," the anthem of the civil rights movement.

"This is a moment in time," said Judy Rashid of Greensboro, N.C., the dean of students at North Carolina A&T. "I'm standing in this line in her memory and for my unborn grandchildren, hoping they can be strong and courageous like Rosa was."

For refusing to move to the back of the bus and make way for whites, as the laws of segregation required, Mrs. Parks was arrested, convicted and fined $10, plus $4 in court costs.

But the episode set off a boycott of the Montgomery bus company that lasted 381 days and led to a Supreme Court decision that forced the bus company to desegregate, casting a mighty blow against Jim Crow laws that provided separate facilities for blacks and whites.

Over the next five decades, Mrs. Parks became an enduring symbol of the struggle for equality.

She moved with her husband to Hampton, Va., in 1957 and later that year to Detroit, where she resumed work as a seamstress before Representative John Conyers hired her in 1965 as a secretary and receptionist. She worked for him until she retired in 1988.

The lines of people at the Capitol were filled with proud and grateful African-Americans and with many whites, who said the societal changes she spurred benefited all Americans.

"Here was a woman who through a very unassuming personal action triggered a whole movement," said Brian Higgins of Takoma Park, Md. "I want to pay homage to that. As a white person, I find it particularly extraordinary that her act was such a universal message. It did as much for me as any minority in our society."

The coffin came to Washington after a memorial service earlier in the day at St. Paul A.M.E. Church in Montgomery, where Mrs. Parks was once a member. Hundreds attended, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the first black woman to hold that office, who was born in Birmingham one year before Mrs. Parks boarded the fateful bus.

"I can honestly say," Ms. Rice said in Montgomery, "that without Mrs. Parks, I probably would not be standing here today as secretary of state."

Lakiesha R. Carr contributed reporting for this article.

    Thousands Gather at the Capitol to Remember a Hero, NYT, 31.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/politics/31parks.html

U.S. President George W. Bush (R) and first lady Laura Bush
pay their respects to civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks
as her body lies in honor in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, October 30, 2005.
REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Parks tribute draws thousands in US Capitol        R        30.10.2005
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=
2005-10-31T032238Z_01_WRI980202_RTRUKOC_0_US-PARKS.xml 

Thousands mourn Rosa Parks

Sat Oct 29, 2005 6:57 PM ET
Reuters
By Peggy Gargis

MONTGOMERY, Alabama (Reuters) - Thousands of mourners streamed past the open coffin of civil rights icon Rosa Parks on Saturday in the city where her refusal 50 years ago to give up her bus seat to a white man helped lead to desegregation in America.

The casket of Parks, who died in Detroit on Monday at the age of 92, was draped in lace and her body was dressed in the uniform of a church deaconess as she lay at the altar of the St. Paul AME Church in Montgomery. Her coffin was taken to the church in a horse-drawn carriage.

"I admired Rosa Parks since I was a small child and this is my last chance to thank her," said teenager Dyshay Scott, who traveled to Montgomery with her grandparents from their home in South Carolina.

Parks was a 42-year-old seamstress for a Montgomery department store when she caught a bus in downtown Montgomery on December 1, 1955.

Her refusal to give up her seat to a white man who boarded the bus three stops after her led to her arrest. But it also sparked a boycott of the Montgomery bus system by black residents led by a then-unknown Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The boycott lasted 381 days, and legal challenges led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that forced Montgomery to desegregate its bus system and helped put an end to "Jim Crow" laws separating blacks and whites at public facilities throughout the South.

Mourners lined up around the block outside the church in Montgomery on Saturday. Some wept as they passed the casket.

Parks' body was to be on display until midnight. A service will be held on Sunday morning and her coffin will then be flown to Washington where she will become the first woman to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, a tribute usually reserved for presidents, soldiers and politicians.

Her funeral is scheduled to take place in Detroit on Wednesday.

COLORBLIND

Becky Hyatt, a white woman from Blountsville in north Alabama, said that when she was about 10 years old in a small town in Georgia, she was spanked for playing with a little black girl.

"I just felt I had to be here, as a child of the '50s and '60s. It's maybe my way of making amends," she said.

Joyce Huffman, of Montgomery, and several other mourners said Parks' legacy was to turn them blind to skin color.

"I'm colorblind. You don't get any blessing from hating people. If more people were colorblind there would be more peace," she said.

Actress Cicely Tyson, who played Rosa Parks' mother in the movie "The Rosa Parks Story," and who came to Montgomery from California, said Rosa Parks had been in her life as long as she could remember.

"We shouldn't be colorblind but should accept each other as human beings. To be colorblind is to be discarding," she said.

    Thousands mourn Rosa Parks, R, 29.10.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-10-29T235705Z_01_WRI980202_RTRUKOC_0_US-PARKS.xml

Rosa Parks to lie in honor at Capitol

Posted 10/28/2005 1:43 PM
USA Today > AP

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rosa Parks, the seamstress whose act of defiance on a public bus a half-century ago helped spark the civil rights movement, will join presidents and war heroes who have been honored in death with a public viewing in the Capitol Rotunda.

Parks, who died Monday in Detroit at age 92, also will be the first woman to lie in honor in the Rotunda, the vast circular room under the Capitol dome.

The House on Friday passed by voice vote a resolution allowing Parks to be honored in the Capitol on Sunday and Monday "so that the citizens of the United States may pay their last respects to this great American." The Senate approved the resolution Thursday night.

It will be only the fifth time in the past two decades that a person has either lain in honor or in state in the Rotunda. The last to lie in state was President Reagan after his death in June last year.

Parks' refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955 led to a 381-day boycott of the city's bus system and helped ignite the modern civil rights movement.

"The movement that Rosa Parks helped launch changed not only our country, but the entire world, as her actions gave hope to every individual fighting for civil and human rights," said Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada. "We now can honor her in a way deserving of her contributions and legacy."

In most cases, only presidents, members of Congress and military commanders have been allowed to lie in the Rotunda.

Parks would be the first woman and second black American to receive the accolade. Jacob J. Chestnut, one of two Capitol police officers fatally shot in 1998, was the first black American to lie in honor, said Senate historian Richard Baker.

Parks also would be the second non-governmental official to be commemorated that way. The remains of Pierre L'Enfant — the French-born architect who was responsible for the design of Washington, D.C. — stopped at the Capitol in 1909, long after his death in 1825.

"Rosa Parks is not just a national hero, she is the embodiment of our social and human conscience and the spark that lit the flame of liberty and equality for African Americans and minority groups in this country and around the globe," said Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn.

Officials with the Rosa & Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development in Detroit said at one point that Parks would lie in repose at the Lincoln Memorial. The National Park Service, however, said those plans were never formalized.

Lila Cabbil, the institute's president emeritus, said Thursday the information was released prematurely and the foundation and the Parks family were working with Reps. John Conyers and Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, D-Mich., and the White House to make arrangements to have a viewing in Washington.

The Capitol event was one of several planned to honor the civil rights pioneer. Parks will lie in repose Saturday at the St. Paul AME Church in Montgomery, Ala., and a memorial service will be held at the church Sunday morning.

Following her viewing in the Capitol, a memorial service was planned for Monday at Metropolitan AME Church in Washington.

From Monday night until Wednesday morning, Parks will lie in repose at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit. Her funeral will be Wednesday at Greater Grace Temple Church in Detroit.

Officials in Detroit and Montgomery, Ala., meanwhile, said the first seats of their buses would be reserved as a tribute to Parks' legacy until her funeral next week. Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick put a black ribbon Thursday on the first passenger seat of one of about 200 buses where seats will be reserved.

"We cannot do enough to pay tribute to someone who has so positively impacted the lives of millions across the world," Kilpatrick said.

    Rosa Parks to lie in honor at Capitol, USA Today > AP, 28.10.2005, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-10-28-parks-repose_x.htm

Rob Rogers        The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette        Pennsylvania        Cagle        28.10.2005
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/rogers.asp

Rosa Parks: An American hero

All she did was to refuse to give up her seat on a bus for a white passenger. But Rosa Parks' stand was the spark that lit the fire of a nation's civil rights movement. Rupert Cornwell reports on the death of a woman who transformed American society

Published: 26 October 2005
The Independent

A demure and modest woman, but possessed of a will of steel Almost exactly half a century ago, a weary black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus. She was arrested and put in jail - and the rest, quite literally, is history.

Strictly speaking, Rosa Parks' gesture of defiance on the evening of 1 December 1955 does not mark the beginning of the civil rights struggle that consumed America for the subsequent decade. That distinction belongs to the 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling, ordering the desegregation of schools.

In fact, she was not even the first black woman to be arrested for refusing to surrender her seat on a bus. In March and October that same year, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith respectively were arrested and punished for doing the same.

But Ms Parks' arrest was different. She was a demure and modest woman, but possessed of a will of steel. She was also married to an activist in the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), the oldest and most venerable US civil rights movement, where she gained a reputation as a militant for her efforts to boost black voter registration.

Her arrest gripped the country's imagination and galvanised the emerging civil rights movement. There followed a 380-day boycott of Montgomery buses by the city's blacks, organised in part by a young pastor newly arrived at the city's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, named Martin Luther King. The eventual triumph came nine years later, when President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But the small protest of Rosa Parks was the spark that lit the fire.

On Monday, aged 92, she died, venerated as little less than a 20th century saint. "A true American hero," Senator Edward Kennedy called her. "She sat down in order that we all might stand up - and the walls of segregation came down," said Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader.

Death was probably a merciful release. She was frail and suffering from dementia, and had hardly appeared in public for a decade. But her impact has been enduring; indeed it may be measured by the career trajectory of another black daughter of Alabama, who has risen to heights of which Rosa Parks could not have imagined 50 years ago.

Three days before she died, Condoleezza Rice, the first black woman to become Secretary of State, returned to her home state and the city of Birmingham, 100 miles north of Montgomery, where she was born. Elegant and immaculate, she was feted at every stop like a rock star - or rather like an aspiring Presidential candidate that, despite repeated denials, some people are convinced she is.

Ms Rice's message was diplomatic, as she repeatedly compared the struggle for democracy in Iraq with the long struggle of blacks to throw off Jim Crow. But it was also a conscious statement of what black Americans could accomplish, when given the chance. But that chance would never have been possible without the peaceful revolution inspired in part by Rosa Parks.

The 42-year-old seamstress paid dearly for her effrontery. She and her husband lost their jobs. Hate callers threatened to kill her, and white supremacists firebombed the homes of her supporters. In 1957, she moved to Detroit - belatedly joining America's great internal migration of the first half of the 20th century, when millions of blacks left the segregated, jobless south and moved to the new industrial cities of the north where work was plentiful and minds less closed.

From there, she watched the landmark events of the campaign for civil rights unfold. That 1957, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School. Three years later, four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged a non-violent sit-in at a Woolworths cafeteria counter after white waitresses refused to serve them.

In 1961, came the first "Freedom Riders," as students made bus trips to test recent laws banning the segregated travel that had led to Ms Parks' arrest.

Sometimes they were met by howling white mobs. Slowly however, the cause advanced. That October, James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, protected by 5,000 federal troops sent in by President Kennedy.

But the turning point was 1963, and the focal point Ms Rice's home town of Birmingham. That April, Dr King was arrested for promoting non-violent protest, and wrote his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," in which he argued that individuals had the moral duty to disobey unjust laws.

As unrest grew, Birmingham's Commissioner for Public Safety, the racist Eugene "Bull" Connor, turned dogs and firehoses against the demonstrators. The images drew outrage in the US and around the world, only strengthening the civil rights' cause.

On 28 August 1963, more than 200,000 people - far more than expected - joined the "March on Washington" that culminated in the "I Have a Dream" speech delivered by Dr King from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

All the while there was violence. Birmingham, probably the most segregated city of all, became known as "Bombingham".

Across the south, Ku Klux Klansmen terrorised neighbourhoods, while whites who rallied to the black cause were denounced as "nigger-lovers", beaten up, and sometimes murdered. But no single incident was viler, and none had more impact, than that on 15 September 1963 in Birmingham, at the 16th Street Baptist Church.

At 10.22am, a bomb placed by Ku Klux Klan members exploded. It was a Sunday, and the blast was timed to co-incide with the main morning service. Instead, the bomb killed four little girls, aged between 9 and 11, who were attending Sunday school in the crypt below the sanctuary.

Congress, the federal government, the entire world, even the American south, were stunned by the atrocity. President Kennedy was assassinated that November, but on 23 January 1964 the 24th amendment of the US Constitution took effect, banning the poll tax used in 11 southern states to obstruct black voting rights. On 2 July 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, the most sweeping of such legislation since Reconstruction, outlawing racial discrimination of every kind.

Last weekend, in a moving ceremony in the park opposite the 16th Street church, Birmingham paid formal homage to the four little girls, installing Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley in the city's Gallery of Distinguished Citizens. One of the speakers was Condoleezza Rice - who was personally touched by those murders of 42 years ago.

"Denise McNair was my friend," she told the 200 dignitaries gathered on a bleak, chilly morning. "We were children together, we played together. When I think of the four, I think of them like that, just little girls growing up, going to Sunday school at a time when America was experiencing terrorism of the worst sort. What would they be doing today had they lived. They were near my own age - in that sense, I'm just one of many."

Today, beyond argument, the state once run by the arch-segregationist George Wallace has been transformed, physically and spiritually. The narrow one storey "shotgun" houses and tawdry apartment blocks around the church in Birmingham, where black families used to live have gone. The area is now part of an expanding and thriving downtown.

Old "rust belt" Birmingham, named after the English city because of its iron and steel industry, is now home to high-tech industries and a glistening new university medical complex that is Alabama's biggest single employer. A black mayor sits in Birmingham's City Hall, a black now heads the city police department that used to set dogs on protesters, and a black leads the fire department that once turned high pressure hoses on people seeking their most elementary rights.

The mood has changed too. "Thank you Birmingham, for having a heart so loving and kind," Cynthia Wesley's adopted sister Shirley said at the ceremony - words that could never have been spoken by a black woman living there in Rosa Parks' day. And then there was Ms Rice herself, proof of the American dream, but speaking in a city that half a century ago was symbol of another America, the one where there was no limit to the indignities inflicted on citizens whose skin was a different colour.

In one way, Condoleezza Rice is a special case, the product of a driven middle class family that prized hard work, learning and self-advancement, part of a civilised and cultured black enclave that somehow existed outside the Jim Crow universe. But her ascent would have been impossible 50 years ago.

Even so, the picture is far from perfect. In some measure, the US has overcome what she terms its "birth defect" of race. But de facto segregation persists. Almost every city has its black neighbourhoods. In Washington, the north-west quadrant of the city is overwhelmingly white while the north-east and south-east are overwhelmingly black - two worlds that co-exist but have not merged.

Or take the elementary school in Birmingham attended by Ms Rice when she knew Denise McNair. Then, it was the Graymont Coloured School, today it's the Brunetta C Hill Elementary School, a state school supposedly integrated yet with only two non-black pupils among the 248 students.

"Birmingham has come a long way, and Birmingham has worked very hard to overcome its past," Ms Rice said last weekend, in words which could be applied to the entire country. "But the work is never done. Race is part of the US heritage, and will remain so. I hope one day we'll be completely colour blind, but we're not there yet." And indeed, almost every social indicator shows that while blacks now live longer, better, and richer lives than they did in the 1950s, they lag well behind whites. By some measures the gap is widening, not narrowing.

Nor did the Civil Rights Act expunge race from US history. Frustrated by slow progress and unkept promises, a new breed of black militants emerged.

In 1967, the Detroit to which Ms Parks moved was torn part by race riots. A year later Dr King was assassinated in Memphis, sparking riots in many American cities. In 1992, black Los Angeles exploded after four white police officers were acquitted of beating up the black motorist Rodney King. In 1995 however it gained revenge of a kind when a black-dominated jury acquitted OJ Simpson of murdering his white wife, in the most racially-charged trial of the decade.

One wonders now what Rosa Parks made of it all. Shy and quiet-spoken, she was uncomfortable with the beatification thrust upon her, and with her place in the civil rights pantheon alongside the likes of Dr King and Nelson Mandela. But she was surely no less determined than they to see the unfinished struggle through.

A demure and modest woman, but possessed of a will of steel

Almost exactly half a century ago, a weary black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a city bus. She was arrested and put in jail - and the rest, quite literally, is history.

Strictly speaking, Rosa Parks' gesture of defiance on the evening of 1 December 1955 does not mark the beginning of the civil rights struggle that consumed America for the subsequent decade. That distinction belongs to the 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling, ordering the desegregation of schools.

In fact, she was not even the first black woman to be arrested for refusing to surrender her seat on a bus. In March and October that same year, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith respectively were arrested and punished for doing the same.

But Ms Parks' arrest was different. She was a demure and modest woman, but possessed of a will of steel. She was also married to an activist in the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), the oldest and most venerable US civil rights movement, where she gained a reputation as a militant for her efforts to boost black voter registration.

Her arrest gripped the country's imagination and galvanised the emerging civil rights movement. There followed a 380-day boycott of Montgomery buses by the city's blacks, organised in part by a young pastor newly arrived at the city's Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, named Martin Luther King. The eventual triumph came nine years later, when President Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But the small protest of Rosa Parks was the spark that lit the fire.

On Monday, aged 92, she died, venerated as little less than a 20th century saint. "A true American hero," Senator Edward Kennedy called her. "She sat down in order that we all might stand up - and the walls of segregation came down," said Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader.

Death was probably a merciful release. She was frail and suffering from dementia, and had hardly appeared in public for a decade. But her impact has been enduring; indeed it may be measured by the career trajectory of another black daughter of Alabama, who has risen to heights of which Rosa Parks could not have imagined 50 years ago.

Three days before she died, Condoleezza Rice, the first black woman to become Secretary of State, returned to her home state and the city of Birmingham, 100 miles north of Montgomery, where she was born. Elegant and immaculate, she was feted at every stop like a rock star - or rather like an aspiring Presidential candidate that, despite repeated denials, some people are convinced she is.

Ms Rice's message was diplomatic, as she repeatedly compared the struggle for democracy in Iraq with the long struggle of blacks to throw off Jim Crow. But it was also a conscious statement of what black Americans could accomplish, when given the chance. But that chance would never have been possible without the peaceful revolution inspired in part by Rosa Parks.

The 42-year-old seamstress paid dearly for her effrontery. She and her husband lost their jobs. Hate callers threatened to kill her, and white supremacists firebombed the homes of her supporters. In 1957, she moved to Detroit - belatedly joining America's great internal migration of the first half of the 20th century, when millions of blacks left the segregated, jobless south and moved to the new industrial cities of the north where work was plentiful and minds less closed.

From there, she watched the landmark events of the campaign for civil rights unfold. That 1957, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock's Central High School. Three years later, four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, staged a non-violent sit-in at a Woolworths cafeteria counter after white waitresses refused to serve them.

In 1961, came the first "Freedom Riders," as students made bus trips to test recent laws banning the segregated travel that had led to Ms Parks' arrest.

Sometimes they were met by howling white mobs. Slowly however, the cause advanced. That October, James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, protected by 5,000 federal troops sent in by President Kennedy.

But the turning point was 1963, and the focal point Ms Rice's home town of Birmingham. That April, Dr King was arrested for promoting non-violent protest, and wrote his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," in which he argued that individuals had the moral duty to disobey unjust laws.

As unrest grew, Birmingham's Commissioner for Public Safety, the racist Eugene "Bull" Connor, turned dogs and firehoses against the demonstrators. The images drew outrage in the US and around the world, only strengthening the civil rights' cause.

On 28 August 1963, more than 200,000 people - far more than expected - joined the "March on Washington" that culminated in the "I Have a Dream" speech delivered by Dr King from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
All the while there was violence. Birmingham, probably the most segregated city of all, became known as "Bombingham".

Across the south, Ku Klux Klansmen terrorised neighbourhoods, while whites who rallied to the black cause were denounced as "nigger-lovers", beaten up, and sometimes murdered. But no single incident was viler, and none had more impact, than that on 15 September 1963 in Birmingham, at the 16th Street Baptist Church.

At 10.22am, a bomb placed by Ku Klux Klan members exploded. It was a Sunday, and the blast was timed to co-incide with the main morning service. Instead, the bomb killed four little girls, aged between 9 and 11, who were attending Sunday school in the crypt below the sanctuary.

Congress, the federal government, the entire world, even the American south, were stunned by the atrocity. President Kennedy was assassinated that November, but on 23 January 1964 the 24th amendment of the US Constitution took effect, banning the poll tax used in 11 southern states to obstruct black voting rights. On 2 July 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, the most sweeping of such legislation since Reconstruction, outlawing racial discrimination of every kind.

Last weekend, in a moving ceremony in the park opposite the 16th Street church, Birmingham paid formal homage to the four little girls, installing Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley in the city's Gallery of Distinguished Citizens. One of the speakers was Condoleezza Rice - who was personally touched by those murders of 42 years ago.

"Denise McNair was my friend," she told the 200 dignitaries gathered on a bleak, chilly morning. "We were children together, we played together. When I think of the four, I think of them like that, just little girls growing up, going to Sunday school at a time when America was experiencing terrorism of the worst sort. What would they be doing today had they lived. They were near my own age - in that sense, I'm just one of many."

Today, beyond argument, the state once run by the arch-segregationist George Wallace has been transformed, physically and spiritually. The narrow one storey "shotgun" houses and tawdry apartment blocks around the church in Birmingham, where black families used to live have gone. The area is now part of an expanding and thriving downtown.

Old "rust belt" Birmingham, named after the English city because of its iron and steel industry, is now home to high-tech industries and a glistening new university medical complex that is Alabama's biggest single employer. A black mayor sits in Birmingham's City Hall, a black now heads the city police department that used to set dogs on protesters, and a black leads the fire department that once turned high pressure hoses on people seeking their most elementary rights.

The mood has changed too. "Thank you Birmingham, for having a heart so loving and kind," Cynthia Wesley's adopted sister Shirley said at the ceremony - words that could never have been spoken by a black woman living there in Rosa Parks' day. And then there was Ms Rice herself, proof of the American dream, but speaking in a city that half a century ago was symbol of another America, the one where there was no limit to the indignities inflicted on citizens whose skin was a different colour.

In one way, Condoleezza Rice is a special case, the product of a driven middle class family that prized hard work, learning and self-advancement, part of a civilised and cultured black enclave that somehow existed outside the Jim Crow universe. But her ascent would have been impossible 50 years ago.

Even so, the picture is far from perfect. In some measure, the US has overcome what she terms its "birth defect" of race. But de facto segregation persists. Almost every city has its black neighbourhoods. In Washington, the north-west quadrant of the city is overwhelmingly white while the north-east and south-east are overwhelmingly black - two worlds that co-exist but have not merged.

Or take the elementary school in Birmingham attended by Ms Rice when she knew Denise McNair. Then, it was the Graymont Coloured School, today it's the Brunetta C Hill Elementary School, a state school supposedly integrated yet with only two non-black pupils among the 248 students.

"Birmingham has come a long way, and Birmingham has worked very hard to overcome its past," Ms Rice said last weekend, in words which could be applied to the entire country. "But the work is never done. Race is part of the US heritage, and will remain so. I hope one day we'll be completely colour blind, but we're not there yet." And indeed, almost every social indicator shows that while blacks now live longer, better, and richer lives than they did in the 1950s, they lag well behind whites. By some measures the gap is widening, not narrowing.

Nor did the Civil Rights Act expunge race from US history. Frustrated by slow progress and unkept promises, a new breed of black militants emerged.

In 1967, the Detroit to which Ms Parks moved was torn part by race riots. A year later Dr King was assassinated in Memphis, sparking riots in many American cities. In 1992, black Los Angeles exploded after four white police officers were acquitted of beating up the black motorist Rodney King. In 1995 however it gained revenge of a kind when a black-dominated jury acquitted OJ Simpson of murdering his white wife, in the most racially-charged trial of the decade.

One wonders now what Rosa Parks made of it all. Shy and quiet-spoken, she was uncomfortable with the beatification thrust upon her, and with her place in the civil rights pantheon alongside the likes of Dr King and Nelson Mandela. But she was surely no less determined than they to see the unfinished struggle through.

    Rosa Parks: An American hero, NYT, 26.10.2005, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article322291.ece

Paul Combs        The Tampa Tribune        Cagle        25.10.2005
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/combs.asp

Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks dies

Tue Oct 25, 2005 2:46 AM ET
The Guardian
By Tom Brown

DETROIT (Reuters) - Rosa Parks, the black seamstress whose refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white man sparked a revolution in American race relations, died on Monday. The U.S. civil rights pioneer was 92.

Shirley Kaigler, Parks' lawyer, said she died while taking a nap early on Monday evening surrounded by a small group of friends and family members.

"She just fell asleep and didn't wake up," Kaigler said.

The cause of death was not immediately known. Medical records released earlier this year, as part of a long-running legal dispute over the use of Parks' name in a song by the hip-hop group OutKast, revealed the she was suffering from progressive dementia. She rarely appeared in public in recent years.

Kaigler said Parks was at home in an apartment complex overlooking the Detroit River and the border with Ontario, Canada, when she died.

"She lived in the neighborhood that I grew up in," Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said of Parks, who lived in the predominantly black city for decades and had a major thoroughfare named after her.

"Everybody knew where her house was. Everybody would walk past and point her out," said Kilpatrick. "She was an amazing individual."

Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, said in a statement: "The nation lost a courageous woman and a true American hero. A half century ago, Rosa Parks stood up not only for herself, but for generations upon generations of Americans."

CIVIL RIGHTS ICON

"We are saddened by the passing of Rosa Parks. We rejoice in her legacy, which will never die. In many ways, history is marked as before, and after, Rosa Parks," said civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.

"She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down."

Parks was a 42-year-old seamstress for a Montgomery department store when she caught a bus in downtown Montgomery on December 1, 1955.

Three stops after she got on, a white man boarded and had to stand. To make room for him to sit alone, as the rules required, driver James Blake told Parks and three other black riders, "You all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats."

The other riders complied but Parks did not.

"No. I'm tired of being treated like a second-class citizen," she told Blake. Blake called police, who asked Parks why she didn't move: "I didn't think I should have to. I paid my fare like everybody else."

Parks was not the first black Montgomery bus rider to be arrested for failing to give up a seat, but she was the first to challenge the law. For years before her arrest, Parks and her husband had been active with local civil rights groups, which were looking for a test case to fight the city's segregation laws.

Four days later, she was convicted of breaking the law and fined $10, along with $4 in court costs. That same day, black residents began a boycott of the bus system, led by a then-unknown Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The boycott lasted 381 days, and the legal challenges led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision that forced Montgomery to desegregate its bus system and put an end to "Jim Crow" laws separating blacks and whites at public facilities throughout the South.

Parks and her husband, Raymond, moved to Detroit in 1957, after she lost her job and received numerous death threats in Alabama. From 1965 to 1988, she worked as an aide to U.S. Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat and founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus.

"For a long time people were a little bit afraid of Rosa Parks because she had created this whole new modern civil rights movement," Conyers told Detroit radio late on Monday. "They didn't know what to expect, and they certainly didn't expect someone that quiet. She sought no limelight; you'd never hear her talking about her own civil rights activities and all the things that she had been in," he said.

"She has saint-like qualities," Conyers added.

Parks' husband died in 1977. The couple had no children and Parks' closest living relatives are her brother's 13 sons and daughters.

Parks received the highest U.S. civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 1996 and Congressional Gold Medal of Honor in 1999. Recommending the medal for Parks that year, the U.S. Senate described her as "a living icon for freedom in America."

    Civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks dies, R, 25.10.2005, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-10-25T064328Z_01_HO508630_RTRUKOC_0_US-PARKS.xml

 

A visitor to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., looks inside the bus on which Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat.

Paul Warner/Associated Press

 Rosa Parks, 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement, Dies
NYT        25.10.2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/national/25parks.html?hp

 

Rosa Parks, civil rights pioneer, dies

The International Herald Tribune > The Associated Press
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2005

DETROIT Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern U.S. civil rights movement, has died at age 92.

Mrs. Parks died Monday evening at her home during the evening of natural causes, with close friends by her side, said Gregory Reed, an attorney who represented her for the past 15 years.

Mrs. Parks was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title ''mother of the civil rights movement.''

At that time, segregation laws in place since the post-Civil War Reconstruction required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations throughout the South, while legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.

The Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was riding on a city bus Dec. 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.

Mrs. Parks refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge, but Mrs. Parks was jailed. She also was fined $14.

U.S. Rep. John Conyers, in whose office Parks worked for more than 20 years, remembered the civil rights leader Monday night as someone whose impact on the world was immeasurable, but who never saw herself that way.

''Everybody wanted to explain Rosa Parks and wanted to teach Rosa Parks, but Rosa Parks wasn't very interested in that,'' the Michigan Democrat said. ''She wanted them to understand the government and to understand their rights and the Constitution that people are still trying to perfect today.''

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said he felt a personal tie to the civil rights icon: ''She stood up by sitting down. I'm only standing here because of her.'' Former President Bill Clinton praised Rosa Parks as ''a woman of great courage, grace and dignity'' who ''was an inspiration to me and to all who work for the day when we will be one America.''

Speaking in 1992, Mrs. Parks said history too often maintains ''that my feet were hurting and I didn't know why I refused to stand up when they told me. But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long.''

Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by a then little-known Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his civil rights work.

''At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this,'' Mrs. Parks said 30 years later. ''It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in.''

The Montgomery bus boycott, which came one year after the Supreme Court's landmark declaration that separate schools for blacks and whites were ''inherently unequal,'' marked the start of the modern civil rights movement in the United States.

The movement culminated in the 1964 federal Civil Rights Act, which banned racial discrimination in public accommodations.

After taking her public stand for civil rights, Mrs. Parks had trouble finding work in Alabama. Amid threats and harassment, she and her husband Raymond moved to Detroit in 1957. She worked as an aide in Rep. Conyers' Detroit office from 1965 until retiring in 1988. Raymond Parks died in 1977.

Mrs. Parks became a revered figure in Detroit, where a street and middle school were named for her and a papier-mache likeness of her was featured in the city's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Mrs. Parks said upon retiring from her job with Conyers that she wanted to devote more time to the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. The institute, incorporated in 1987, is devoted to developing leadership among Detroit's young people and initiating them into the struggle for civil rights.

''Rosa Parks: My Story'' was published in February 1992. In 1994 she brought out ''Quiet Strength: The Faith, the Hope and the Heart of a Woman Who Changed a Nation,'' and in 1996 a collection of letters called ''Dear Mrs. Parks: A Dialogue With Today's Youth.''

She was among the civil rights leaders who addressed the Million Man March in Washington in October 1995.

In 1996, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded to civilians making outstanding contributions to American life. In 1999, she was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Mrs. Parks received dozens of other awards, ranging from induction into the Alabama Academy of Honor to an NAACP Image Award for her 1999 appearance on CBS television drama series ''Touched by an Angel.''

The Rosa Parks Library and Museum opened in November 2000 in Montgomery. The museum features a 1955-era bus and a video that recreates the conversation that preceded Parks' arrest.

''Are you going to stand up?'' the bus driver asked. ''No,'' Parks answered. ''Well, by God, I'm going to have you arrested,'' the driver said. ''You may do that,'' Parks responded.

Mrs. Parks' later years were not without difficult moments.

In 1994, Mrs. Parks' home was invaded by a 28-year-old man who beat her and took $53. She was treated at a hospital and released. The man, Joseph Skipper, pleaded guilty, blaming the crime on his drug problem.

The Parks Institute struggled financially since its inception. The charity's principal activity — the annual Pathways to Freedom bus tour taking students to the sites of key events in the civil rights movement — routinely cost more money than the institute could raise.

Mrs. Parks lost a 1999 lawsuit that sought to prevent the hip-hop duo OutKast from using her name as the title of a Grammy-nominated song. In 2000, she threatened legal action against an Oklahoma man who planned to auction Internet domain name rights to www.rosaparks.com.

After losing the OutKast lawsuit, Reed, her attorney, said Mrs. Parks ''has once again suffered the pains of exploitation.'' A later suit against OutKast's record company was settled out of court.

She was born Rosa Louise McCauley on Feb. 4, 1913, in Tuskegee, Alabama. Family illness interrupted her high school education, but after she married Raymond Parks in 1932, he encouraged her and she earned a diploma in 1934. He also inspired her to become involved in the NAACP.

Looking back in 1988, Mrs. Parks said she worried that black young people took legal equality for granted.

Older blacks, she said ''have tried to shield young people from what we have suffered. And in so doing, we seem to have a more complacent attitude.

''We must double and redouble our efforts to try to say to our youth, to try to give them an inspiration, an incentive and the will to study our heritage and to know what it means to be black in America today.''

At a celebration in her honor that same year, she said: ''I am leaving this legacy to all of you ... to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be. Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die — the dream of freedom and peace.''

    Rosa Parks, civil rights pioneer, dies, IHT > AP, 25.10.2005, http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/25/america/web.1025parks.php




 

A Montgomery Sheriff's Department booking photo of Rosa Parks

Photograph:

Montgomery County (Ala.), via Associated Press

Rosa Parks, 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement, Dies

NYT        25.10.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/national/25parks.html

Deputy Sheriff D.H. Lackey fingerprints Mrs. Parks on Feb. 22, 1956.

Photograph: Gene Herrick/Associated Press

Rosa Parks, 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement, Dies

NYT        25.10.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/national/25parks.html

E.D. Nixon, former president of the Alabama N.A.A.C.P,

escorts Mrs. Parks to her court trial on March 19, 1956.

Photograph: Gene Herrick/Associated Press

Rosa Parks, 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement, Dies

NYT        25.10.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/national/25parks.html

Mrs. Parks speaking at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Jan. 15, 1969.

Photograph:

Joe Holloway, Jr./Associated Press

Rosa Parks, 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement, Dies

NYT        25.10.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/national/25parks.html

Rosa Parks, 92,

Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement, Dies

October 25, 2005
The New York Times
By E. R. SHIPP

Rosa Parks, a black seamstress whose refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., almost 50 years ago grew into a mythic event that helped touch off the civil rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's, died yesterday at her home in Detroit. She was 92 years old.

Her death was confirmed by Dennis W. Archer, the former mayor of Detroit.

For her act of defiance, Mrs. Parks was arrested, convicted of violating the segregation laws and fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. In response, blacks in Montgomery boycotted the buses for nearly 13 months while mounting a successful Supreme Court challenge to the Jim Crow law that enforced their second-class status on the public bus system.

The events that began on that bus in the winter of 1955 captivated the nation and transformed a 26-year-old preacher named Martin Luther King Jr. into a major civil rights leader. It was Dr. King, the new pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, who was drafted to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, the organization formed to direct the nascent civil rights struggle.

"Mrs. Parks's arrest was the precipitating factor rather than the cause of the protest," Dr. King wrote in his 1958 book, "Stride Toward Freedom. "The cause lay deep in the record of similar injustices."

Her act of civil disobedience, what seems a simple gesture of defiance so many years later, was in fact a dangerous, even reckless move in 1950's Alabama. In refusing to move, she risked legal sanction and perhaps even physical harm, but she also set into motion something far beyond the control of the city authorities. Mrs. Parks clarified for people far beyond Montgomery the cruelty and humiliation inherent in the laws and customs of segregation.

That moment on the Cleveland Avenue bus also turned a very private woman into a reluctant symbol and torchbearer in the quest for racial equality and of a movement that became increasingly organized and sophisticated in making demands and getting results.

"She sat down in order that we might stand up," the Rev. Jesse Jackson said yesterday in an interview from South Africa. "Paradoxically, her imprisonment opened the doors for our long journey to freedom."

Even in the last years of her life, the frail Mrs. Parks made appearances at events and commemorations, saying little but lending the considerable strength of her presence. In recent years, she suffered from dementia, according to medical records released during a lawsuit over the use of her name by the hip-hop group OutKast.Over the years myth tended to obscure the truth about Mrs. Parks. One legend had it that she was a cleaning woman with bad feet who was too tired to drag herself to the rear of the bus. Another had it that she was a "plant" by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The truth, as she later explained, was that she was tired of being humiliated, of having to adapt to the byzantine rules, some codified as law and others passed on as tradition, that reinforced the position of blacks as something less than full human beings.

"She was fed up," said Elaine Steele, a longtime friend and executive director of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute for Self Development. "She was in her 40's. She was not a child. There comes a point where you say, 'No, I'm a full citizen, too. This is not the way I should be treated.' "

In "Stride Toward Freedom," Dr. King wrote, "Actually no one can understand the action of Mrs. Parks unless he realizes that eventually the cup of endurance runs over, and the human personality cries out, 'I can take it no longer.' "

Mrs. Parks was very active in the Montgomery N.A.A.C.P. chapter, and she and her husband, Raymond, a barber, had taken part in voter registration drives.

At the urging of an employer, Virginia Durr, Mrs. Parks had attended an interracial leadership conference at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tenn., in the summer of 1955. There, she later said, she "gained strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks but for all oppressed people."

But as she rushed home from her job as a seamstress at a department store on Dec. 1, 1955, the last thing on her mind was becoming "the mother of the civil rights movement," as many would later describe her. She had to send out notices of the N.A.A.C.P.'s coming election of officers. And she had to prepare for the workshop that she was running for teenagers that weekend.

"So it was not a time for me to be planning to get arrested," she said in an interview in 1988.

On Montgomery buses, the first four rows were reserved for whites. The rear was for blacks, who made up more than 75 percent of the bus system's riders. Blacks could sit in the middle rows until those seats were needed by whites. Then the blacks had to move to seats in the rear, stand or, if there was no room, leave the bus. Even getting on the bus presented hurdles: If whites were already sitting in the front, blacks could board to pay the fare but then they had to disembark and re-enter through the rear door.

For years blacks had complained, and Mrs. Parks was no exception. "My resisting being mistreated on the bus did not begin with that particular arrest," she said. "I did a lot of walking in Montgomery."

After a confrontation in 1943, a driver named James Blake ejected Mrs. Parks from his bus. As fate would have it, he was driving the Cleveland Avenue bus on Dec. 1, 1955. He demanded that four blacks give up their seats in the middle section so a lone white man could sit. Three of them complied.

Recalling the incident for "Eyes on the Prize," a 1987 public television series on the civil rights movement, Mrs. Parks said: "When he saw me still sitting, he asked if I was going to stand up and I said, 'No, I'm not.' And he said, 'Well, if you don't stand up, I'm going to have to call the police and have you arrested.' I said, 'You may do that.' "

Her arrest was the answer to prayers for the Women's Political Council, which was set up in 1946 in response to the mistreatment of black bus riders, and for E. D. Nixon, a leading advocate of equality for blacks in Montgomery.

Blacks had been arrested, and even killed, for disobeying bus drivers. They had begun to build a case around a 15-year-old girl's arrest for refusing to give up her seat, and Mrs. Parks had been among those raising money for the girl's defense. But when they learned that the girl was pregnant, they decided that she was an unsuitable symbol for their cause.

Mrs. Parks, on the other hand, was regarded as "one of the finest citizens of Montgomery - not one of the finest Negro citizens - but one of the finest citizens of Montgomery," Dr. King said.

While Mr. Nixon met with lawyers and preachers to plan an assault on the Jim Crow laws, the women's council distributed 35,000 copies of a handbill that urged blacks to boycott the buses on Monday, Dec. 5, the day of Mrs. Parks's trial.

"Don't ride the buses to work, to town, to school, or anywhere on Monday," the leaflet said.

On Sunday, Dec. 4, the announcement was made from many black pulpits, and a front-page article in The Montgomery Advertiser, a black newspaper, further spread the word.

Some blacks rode in carpools that Monday. Others rode in black-owned taxis that charged only the bus fare, 10 cents. But most black commuters - 40,000 people - walked, some more than 20 miles.

At a church rally that night, blacks unanimously agreed to continue the boycott until these demands were met: that they be treated with courtesy, that black drivers be hired, and that seating in the middle of the bus go on a first-come basis.

The boycott lasted 381 days, and in that period many blacks were harassed and arrested on flimsy excuses. Churches and houses, including those of Dr. King and Mr. Nixon, were dynamited.

Finally, on Nov. 13, 1956, in Browder v. Gayle, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation on buses. The court order arrived in Montgomery on Dec. 20; the boycott ended the next day. But the violence escalated: snipers fired into buses as well as Dr. King's home, and bombs were tossed into churches and into the homes of ministers.

Early the next year, the Parkses left Montgomery for Hampton, Va., largely because Mrs. Parks had been unable to find work, but also because of disagreements with Dr. King and other leaders of the city's struggling civil rights movement.

Later that year, at the urging of her younger brother, Sylvester, Mrs. Parks, her husband and her mother, Leona McCauley, moved to Detroit. Mrs. Parks worked as a seamstress until 1965, when Representative John Conyers Jr. hired her as an aide for his Congressional office in Detroit. She retired in 1988.

"There are very few people who can say their actions and conduct changed the face of the nation," Mr. Conyers said yesterday in a statement, "and Rosa Parks is one of those individuals."

Mrs. Parks's husband, Raymond, died in 1977. There are no immediate survivors.

In the last decade, Mrs. Parks was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. But even as she remained an icon of textbooks , her final years were troubled. She was hospitalized after a 28-year-old man beat her in her home and stole $53. She had problems paying her rent, relying on a local church for support until last December, when her landlord stopped charging her rent.

Rosa Louise McCauley was born in Tuskegee, Ala., on Feb. 4, 1913, the elder of Leona and James McCauley's two children. Although the McCauleys were farmers, Mr. McCauley also worked as a carpenter and Mrs. McCauley as a teacher.

Rosa McCauley attended rural schools until she was 11 years old, then Miss White's School for Girls in Montgomery. She attended high school at the Alabama State Teachers College, but dropped out to care for her ailing grandmother. It was not until she was 21 that she earned a high school diploma.

Shy and soft-spoken, Mrs. Parks often appeared uncomfortable with the near-beatification bestowed upon her by blacks, who revered her as a symbol of their quest for dignity and equality. She would say that she hoped only to inspire others, especially young people, "to be dedicated enough to make useful lives for themselves and to help others."

She also expressed fear that since the birthday of Dr. King became a national holiday, his image was being watered down and he was being depicted as merely a "dreamer."

"As I remember him, he was more than a dreamer," Mrs. Parks said. "He was an activist who believed in acting as well as speaking out against oppression."

She would laugh in recalling some of her experiences with children whose curiosity often outstripped their grasp of history: "They want to know if I was alive during slavery times. They equate me along with Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and ask if I knew them."

    Rosa Parks, 92, Founding Symbol of Civil Rights Movement, Dies, NYT, 25.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/national/25parks.html?hp

    Correction: Oct. 26, 2005, Wednesday:

    Because of an editing error, a front-page obituary of Rosa Parks in late editions yesterday referred incorrectly to The Montgomery Advertiser, which printed a front-page article on Dec. 4, 1955, that publicized a boycott of Montgomery's buses the next day. It is a general-interest newspaper, not a black one.

    Correction source : http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/25/national/25parks.html?ex=1131080400&en=605629f10a2bc7f4&ei=5070

 

Mike Thompson

Detroit, Michigan        The Detroit Free Press        Cagle        25.10.2005

http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/thompson.asp

At Memorial Ceremony in Alabama,
Rice Pays Homage to Young Victims of Church Bombing

October 23, 2005
The New York Times
By STEVE WEISMAN

BIRMINGHAM, Ala., Oct. 22 - Forty-two years after the church bombing that killed four little girls and inflamed the civil rights movement, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice helped honor them Saturday by recalling one of the victims as a friend with whom she played with dolls and sang in musicals.

On the second day of a trip to highlight the civil rights era as an example for countries struggling to achieve democracy, Ms. Rice and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain visited the 16th Street Baptist Church, where the bombings occurred, and watched as plaques honoring the girls were unveiled.

"As God would have it, they were at Sunday school when America experienced homegrown terrorists of the worst sort," Ms. Rice said in an emotional ceremony at a park across the street from the church, which was bombed in 1963. In her speech, she sought to connect her childhood in the segregated South to her work as the first African-American woman to be the nation's top diplomat.

"It was meant to shatter our spirit," she said of the bombing. "It was meant to say that we shouldn't rise up. Just a few weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King said, 'I have a dream,' it was meant to tell us that, no, we didn't have a dream, and that dream was going to be denied."

For listeners, particularly Mr. Straw and visiting Britons, the ceremony was a reminder of how much had changed since the city of Ms. Rice's birth was known as "Bombingham," when it was inconceivable that someone from her tight-knit, middle-class, churchgoing community could rise to such prominence.

Since becoming first national security adviser and then secretary of state, Ms. Rice has not made a public display of her personal story as the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and church organist who grew up in the civil rights era.

But in recent months that reticence has lifted as Ms. Rice has pressed the Bush administration's campaign for democracy in the Middle East as a pillar of its foreign policy, and it has become useful to make an analogy between what Ms. Rice calls the American "birth defect," its record of racism, and the problems faced by other countries. Her seeming reluctance to dwell on her history was cast aside for this trip, as much of Alabama welcomed her home as a kind of daughter of history.

Ms. Rice took Mr. Straw on a tour of the church, where a crack can still be seen in the foundation, and of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, where the first sight upon entry is a pair of water fountains labeled "white" and "colored." A bombed-out bus and the door from the cell where King wrote "Letter From Birmingham Jail" are also on display.

Family members of the four girls, who were 11 to 14 years old, spoke at the ceremony, sometimes calmly and sometimes with tears and amazement.

"It's like - what can you say?" said Junie Peavy, the sister of one girl, Addie Mae Collins, through tears. "As I stand here, I'm thinking this is a great occasion. I have good feelings and I have sad feelings."

The other victims were Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair, whose father said he still had a picture of her with the Rev. John Rice, Ms. Rice's father, at a kindergarten graduation. Then he gave Ms. Rice another picture, of his daughter playing with dolls.

"Denise was my friend," Ms. Rice said. "We played together, we sang together in little musicals. We were children together, and we played with dolls. And that picture of Denise with the dolls will always be near and dear to my heart."

    At Memorial Ceremony in Alabama, Rice Pays Homage to Young Victims of Church Bombing, NYT, 23.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/national/23rice.html

The paradox that divides black America

Ghetto poverty has troubled white consciences.
But a gulf just as deep and persistent separates middle-class and poor blacks,
reports Paul Harris in Atlanta

Sunday October 9, 2005
The Observer

It was once a street so rich and central to black America that Atlanta's Auburn Avenue was known simply as 'Sweet Auburn'.

It was the site of America's first black-owned daily paper and first black radio station. It was here Martin Luther King was born. It was here King preached freedom from the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church.

In the 1960s, as the civil rights struggle raged, Sweet Auburn was wealthy and middle-class. Its businesses prospered, its nightclubs boomed. Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin played at the Top Hat Club and partied at the Palamat Motor Lodge opposite. As American blacks freed themselves from oppression, Sweet Auburn stood ready to reap the benefits.

It never happened. Sweet Auburn is not very sweet today. The Palamat is overgrown with weeds. Auburn's sidewalks line abandoned lots and shuttered buildings. Homeless men (all black) cluster on street corners. Freed from segregation, Auburn became an impoverished ghetto.

Perhaps nothing else so encapsulates the endless paradoxes of being black in America. Never have blacks had so much legal freedom, yet there are record numbers in jail. Traditional black neighbourhoods have collapsed into drug-ridden crime strongholds, even as the black middle class is the biggest in history.

It is now 40 years since the Voting Rights Act that secured the black vote. It is 10 years since hundreds of thousands of blacks came to Washington in the Million Man March to demand a way out of poverty. It is a single month since Hurricane Katrina exposed the racial faultlines that fracture the big cities.

Almost four decades after King was killed, there are still two Americas. One is largely white and wealthy, one largely black and poor. They live cheek by jowl in the same country yet in separate worlds. The shocking thing about the TV pictures from New Orleans was not black poverty, it was the reaction of whites. 'Most whites were shocked about the amount of poverty in New Orleans, but black media have talked about poverty for the past 20 years,' said David Canton, professor of history at Connecticut College.

Bare statistics tell the story. Black life expectancy is six years shorter than that of whites. Black unemployment is twice as high. Blacks are twice as likely as whites to die from disease, accident or murder at every stage of their lives. About 24 per cent of black families live below the poverty line, compared with 8 per cent of the white population.

Yet nothing about race in America is that simple. In the Savoy Bar of Atlanta's Georgian Terrace Hotel, young blacks sip Martinis and flirt, dressed up to the nines. Outside, crowds spill out of the Fox Theatre dressed for an evening out. They are all black.

'It is great to be black in Atlanta,' said Monique Williams, a pretty 26-year-old legal clerk at the bar. 'This is our city.'

Certainly Atlanta, unofficial capital of the New South, can sum up the best of black America. It has a majority black population, a black mayor and an economy that is home to some of the biggest businesses in the world, including Coca-Cola and CNN. It has wealthy black suburbs, black universities and offers every opportunity for aspiring young blacks. It is a long way from the city of Gone With the Wind, where the only blacks were maids and slaves.

Mayor Shirley Franklin seems to sum up this hopeful city, often hailed as a beacon for black Americans. As Atlanta's first black woman mayor, she has won a national profile after a term aimed at rejuvenating a rundown downtown. She is hard-working, putting in 12-hour days and seven-day weeks, and has ended a series of corruption scandals that plagued previous administrations. She is likely to win re-election next month, backed by black voters and white business.

But Atlanta's politics are defined by race. A new law, backed by Franklin, made begging illegal in the downtown area last month. The move triggered a race row, with some politicians saying the law targeted young black men. When it finally passed, emotions ran so high that police arrested seven people, including a clergyman and a former city councillor.

At every level of US politics race is never far away. King, were he alive, would have rejoiced at the fact that successive Secretaries of State, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, have been black. He would also have been impressed that one of the hottest Democratic tips for the White House, and a possible running mate of Hillary Clinton in 2008, is Barack Obama, who is black.

But those stories have twists. Powell and Rice sprang from solid middle-class backgrounds. They have risen by playing down race. They have also emerged in the Republican Party, not the traditional home of black support. Moreover, Obama's blackness does not come from America. It is a legacy of a Kenyan father. He was born in Hawaii and his mother is a white woman from Kansas. In the world of race in America in 2005 nothing is ever as simple as black or white.

Yet the racial line often seems starkly clear. Nowhere more so than in New Haven, Connecticut: home both to Yale University and one of America's poorest black communities. The border is well known and obvious. It is where Elm Street, lined with Oxbridge-style student cloisters, suddenly changes to Dixwell Avenue, main thoroughfare of the black ghetto.

On one side is the world of the elite, where Ivy League students bustle from lecture halls to cafes. On the other side is north-west New Haven, where Dixwell's shops struggle to make ends meet, houses are in decay and drugs and crime are rife. One world is mostly white, the other almost all black.

As he sits on New Haven's famous green, surrounded by the trappings of Yale's wealth, there is no doubt on which side of the divide Nelson Brown falls. Black, poor and homeless, he pushes a shopping cart full of metal cans he picks up to recycle. The cart is draped with a faded and dirty US flag. 'It's all I can do to survive,' he said of his latest haul of soft drink cast-offs.

New Haven is the reality of America's urban black poor. 'People like the Katrina victims are living in every American city. We just ignore it,' said Robert Brown, a political scientist at Atlanta's Emory University. It is this world Katrina exposed to a white America that barely knew it existed outside of gangsta rap videos on MTV. This is the world abandoned by America in the post-civil rights era. It is a black underclass that failed to leave the inner city as whites fled to the suburbs, gutting cities of cash and jobs.

But there are other issues at work too. The divide of black and white masks another chasm just as deep: the gulf between poor and rich blacks. In fact, this divide is even more unbalanced than the racial one. The wealth of black America is far more concentrated in its top few per cent than white America.

Poor urban blacks have been abandoned by wealthy black Americans who move into the suburbs and mainstream America as fast as they can. The underclass they leave behind is a grim place and getting worse. In 1940 the illegitimacy rate among blacks was 19 per cent; today it is 70 per cent. Only 30 to 40 per cent of black men graduate from high school. That fact has prompted a bout of soul searching by middle-class blacks. Some have condemned what they see as self-perpetuating joblessness, poor education and a culture that worships crime. Others have appealed for more help, an increase in the affirmative action which has done apparently little to end black poverty.

The argument was crystallised in a spat between the black comedian Bill Cosby and the black author Mike Dyson. Cosby began it with a public excoriation of bad (and single) parenting, slang English, unplanned pregnancies, dropping out of education, and high crime. He even slammed black names 'like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap'. Cosby then went on tour holding town hall-style 'call-outs' in black communities.

It was an argument Dyson had little time for. He dubbed Cosby's roadtrip the 'Blame the Poor Tour' and wrote a book called Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? Dyson said poor blacks could not be blamed for a society geared up to see them fail and which had stacked the odds against them before they were born. Many leading blacks have joined the fight against Cosby. 'He unerringly and wrongly blames the poor. He seems to think that if they would only change their minds, all their problems would go away,' said Ronald Walters, director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland.

There is one thing both sides agree on: the black experience of America has been unique. Other immigrant groups have followed a familiar pattern of four stages. They arrived poor, suffered prejudice, assimilated, then prospered. So it went for the Irish, Italians, Asians and many others. In fact, Asians are now more successful than white Americans. They are more educated and get better jobs.

But much of black America is stuck at stage two, as it has been for generations. Unless one believes in racist theories, the answer must lie within black America's own historical experience. They were the only ethnic group brought to America involuntarily. For 250 years they were kept as slaves. Until the late 1960s blacks in the South were denied the vote, forced to eat in separate restaurants and segregated from society. Lynchings were still happening in the 1960s as the Beatles played in Liverpool and Bobby Moore lifted the World Cup in London. The exhibits of the Martin Luther King museum on Auburn Avenue are most shocking for showing how recently an apartheid system was the norm in swaths of America. That history lies heavy on black America's back. It is not a burden to be unshouldered in a generation or two.

Certainly that racist past is still alive for Robert Howard, a black civil rights worker in rural Georgia. He remembers vividly the days when white people in and around his home in Walton County could beat - or even kill - black people with little fear from the law. It was a time of segregation and deference, of living in fear when the word 'nigger' came from the lips of white people and not rap artists.

A tall, thin, graceful man, Howard exudes a calm when talking about race relations now versus then. 'Things are better. Of course they are. But you'd be amazed by how much is still to change,' he said.

Howard has worked tirelessly for a memorial to a Walton County lynching from 1946 when four local blacks were butchered by their white neighbours. It has earned him both praise and insult. 'There's some black people here right now who are still scared,' he declared.

But things have changed. Walton, like so many southern counties, used to be cotton country. No longer. The cotton fields have surrendered to strip malls or to forestry. It used to be strictly segregated. No more. That everyday racism is long gone too. Blacks have political power here, as they do now even in the deepest parts of the Deep South. Where segregation still exists, it is largely voluntary and economic, and not a matter of law.

But therein lies the problem. Even as the old racism lies dead, its legacy endures in the American economy. As the black middle class grows and black politicians rise to the pinnacle of power, wealthy America - both black and white - has still not come to grips with the problems of its millions of poor black citizens. 'We are grappling with that. Protest will not win these issues. All the old racist laws have been stricken from the books. Now it's economics,' said Brown.

It is a problem that cannot be ignored for ever.

Martin Luther King's most famous words summed up the optimism of the 1960s' civil rights struggle with: 'I have a dream.'

Now the poet Langston Hughes best describes black America at the start of the 21st century. 'What happens to a dream deferred?' he wrote. 'Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore - And then run?'

Two worlds

In 2005 black unemployment in the US was 10.8 per cent, compared to 4.7 per cent for whites.

More than 70 per cent of whites own their homes. Fewer than 50 per cent of blacks do.

Blacks are twice as likely as whites to die from disease, accident or murder.

Black life expectancy is six years less than white life expectancy.

Blacks are three times as likely as whites to be jailed and their sentences are often six months longer.

Net worth of a black household is 10 times less than a white one.

    The paradox that divides black America, O, 10.10.2005, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1588158,00.html

Phylicia Rashad and Anthony Chisholm in "Gem of the Ocean"        2004

Sara Krulwich        The New York Times        3.10.2005

August Wilson, Theater's Poet of Black America, Is Dead at 60        NYT        3.10.2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/theater/newsandfeatures/03wilson.html
 

August Wilson, Theater's Poet of Black America, Is Dead at 60

October 3, 2005
The New York Times
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

August Wilson, who chronicled the African-American experience in the 20th century in a series of plays that will stand as a landmark in the history of black culture, of American literature and of Broadway theater, died yesterday at a hospital in Seattle. He was 60 and lived in Seattle.

The cause was liver cancer, said his assistant, Dena Levitin. Mr. Wilson's cancer was diagnosed in the summer, and his illness was made public last month.

"Radio Golf," the last of the 10 plays that constitute Mr. Wilson's majestic theatrical cycle, opened at the Yale Repertory Theater last spring and has subsequently been produced in Los Angeles. It was the concluding chapter in a spellbinding story that began more than two decades ago, when Mr. Wilson's play "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" had its debut at the same theater, in 1984, and announced the arrival of a major talent, fully matured.

Reviewing the play's Broadway premiere for The New York Times, Frank Rich wrote that in "Ma Rainey," Mr. Wilson "sends the entire history of black America crashing down upon our heads."

"This play is a searing inside account of what white racism does to its victims," Mr. Rich continued, "and it floats on the same authentic artistry as the blues music it celebrates."

In the years since "Ma Rainey" appeared, Mr. Wilson collected innumerable accolades for his work, including seven New York Drama Critics' Circle awards, a Tony Award, for 1987's "Fences," and two Pulitzer Prizes, for "Fences" and "The Piano Lesson," from 1990.

"He was a giant figure in American theater," the playwright Tony Kushner said yesterday. "Heroic is not a word one uses often without embarrassment to describe a writer or playwright, but the diligence and ferocity of effort behind the creation of his body of work is really an epic story.

"The playwright's voice in American culture is perceived as having been usurped by television and film, but he reasserted the power of drama to describe large social forces, to explore the meaning of an entire people's experience in American history. For all the magic in his plays, he was writing in the grand tradition of Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller, the politically engaged, direct, social realist drama. He was reclaiming ground for the theater that most people thought had been abandoned."

To honor his achievements, Broadway's Virginia Theater is to be renamed the August Wilson Theater. The new marquee is to be unveiled Oct. 17.

With the exceptions of "Radio Golf" and "Jitney," a play first produced in St. Paul in 1981 and reworked and presented Off Broadway in 2000, all of the plays in the cycle were ultimately seen on Broadway, the sometimes treacherous but all-important commercial marketplace for American theater. Although some were not financial successes there, "Fences," which starred James Earl Jones, set a record for a nonmusical Broadway production when it grossed $11 million in a single year, and ran for 525 performances. Together, Mr. Wilson's plays logged nearly 1,800 performances on Broadway in a little more than two decades, and they have been seen in more than 2,000 separate productions, amateur and professional.

Each of the plays in the cycle was set in a different decade of the 20th century, and all but "Ma Rainey" took place in the impoverished but vibrant African-American Hill District of Pittsburgh, where Mr. Wilson was born. In 1978, before he had become a successful writer, Mr. Wilson moved to St. Paul, and in 1994 he settled in Seattle, where he died. But his spiritual home remained the rough streets of the Hill District, where as a young man he sat in thrall to the voices of African-American working men and women. Years later, he would discern in their stories, their jokes and their squabbles the raw material for an art that would celebrate the sustaining richness of the black American experience, bruising as it often was.

In his work, Mr. Wilson depicted the struggles of black Americans with uncommon lyrical richness, theatrical density and emotional heft, in plays that gave vivid voices to people on the frayed margins of life: cabdrivers and maids, garbagemen and side men and petty criminals. In bringing to the popular American stage the gritty specifics of the lives of his poor, trouble-plagued and sometimes powerfully embittered black characters, Mr. Wilson also described universal truths about the struggle for dignity, love, security and happiness in the face of often overwhelming obstacles.

In dialogue that married the complexity of jazz to the emotional power of the blues, he also argued eloquently for the importance of black Americans' honoring the pain and passion in their history, not burying it to smooth the road to assimilation. For Mr. Wilson, it was imperative for black Americans to draw upon the moral and spiritual nobility of their ancestors' struggles to inspire their own ongoing fight against the legacies of white racism.

In an article about his cycle for The Times in 2000, Mr. Wilson wrote, "I wanted to place this culture onstage in all its richness and fullness and to demonstrate its ability to sustain us in all areas of human life and endeavor and through profound moments of our history in which the larger society has thought less of us than we have thought of ourselves."

Mr. Wilson did not establish the chronological framework of his cycle until after the work had begun, and he skipped around in time. Although "Radio Golf," the last play to be written, was set in the 1990's, "Gem of the Ocean," which immediately preceded it in production (it came to Broadway in the fall of 2004), was set in the first decade of the 20th century.

His first success, "Ma Rainey," which took place in a Chicago recording studio in 1927, depicted the turbulent relationship between a rich but angry blues singer and a brilliant trumpet player who also wants to succeed in the white-dominated world of commercial music. From there Mr. Wilson turned to the 1950's, with "Fences," his most popular play, about a garbageman and former baseball player in the Negro leagues who clashes with his son over the boy's intention to pursue a career in sports. His next play, "Joe Turner's Come and Gone," considered by many to be the finest of his works, was a quasi-mystical drama set in a boardinghouse in 1911. It told of a man newly freed from illegal servitude searching to find the woman who abandoned him.

The other plays in Mr. Wilson's theatrical opus are "The Piano Lesson," set in 1936, in which a brother and sister argue over the fate of the piano that symbolizes the family's anguished past history; "Two Trains Running," concerning an ex-con re-ordering his life in 1969; "Seven Guitars," about a blues musician on the brink of a career breakthrough in 1948; "Jitney," a collage of the everyday doings at a gypsy cab company in 1977; and "King Hedley II," in which another troubled ex-con searches for redemption as the Hill District crumbles under the onslaught of Reaganomics in 1985.

As the cycle developed, Mr. Wilson knit the plays together through overlapping themes and characters. Many of the primary conflicts concern the dueling prerogatives of characters poised between the traumatizing past and the uncertain future. The central character in "Radio Golf" is the grandson of a character in "Gem of the Ocean." The guiding spirit of the cycle came to be Aunt Esther, a woman said to have lived for more than three centuries, who was referred to in several plays and who appeared at last in "Gem." She embodied the continuity of spiritual and moral values that Mr. Wilson felt was crucial to the black experience, uniting the descendants of slaves to their African ancestors.

A Fruitful Partnership

Mr. Wilson's career was closely linked with that of Lloyd Richards, who became the first black director to work on Broadway when he staged the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, Lorraine Hansberry's "Raisin in the Sun," in 1959. Ms. Hansberry's warmhearted but clear-eyed play about the struggles of a black family to move up the economic ladder in Chicago shares with Mr. Wilson's work a focus on the daily lives of black Americans, relegating the oppressions of white culture to the background.

Mr. Richards, the dean of the Yale School of Drama and the artistic director of Yale Repertory Theater from 1979 to 1991, was also the head of the Eugene O'Neill Playwrights Conference in Connecticut when Mr. Wilson submitted "Ma Rainey" to the program. ("Jitney," begun in 1979, had been submitted and rejected twice.) When it was accepted, Mr. Richards helped refine the work of the then-unknown writer and first produced and directed it at Yale Rep, where its success instantly established Mr. Wilson as an American playwright of singular talent, perhaps the greatest American stage poet since Tennessee Williams.

Mr. Richards would help shape and direct the next five plays in Mr. Wilson's cycle, ending with "Seven Guitars," which arrived on Broadway in 1996. Each play was refined through a series of productions at Yale and other regional theaters before moving to New York. (Most grew significantly shorter along the way: Mr. Wilson's work was most often criticized for excessive length and sometimes belaboring its ideas. In a celebratory review Mr. Rich wrote when "Joe Turner" opened on Broadway, he nevertheless noted, "As usual with Mr. Wilson, the play overstates its thematic exposition in an overlong first act.")

This formula replicated in a noncommercial arena the tryout circuit that had once been commonplace for plays aiming for Broadway, a method of development that ran aground as the costs of theater skyrocketed. The process, which also involved Mr. Wilson's longtime producer, Benjamin Mordecai, the managing director of Yale Rep during much of Mr. Richards's tenure, was important in defining a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship between the country's not-for-profit regional theaters and its Broadway-centered commercial establishment. (Mr. Mordecai, who was involved with all of Mr. Wilson's plays in one capacity or another, died earlier this year.) More significantly, the collaboration between Mr. Richards and Mr. Wilson was the most artistically fruitful in American theatrical history since Elia Kazan's association with Arthur Miller and Williams.

An Atypical Education

Mr. Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel on April 27, 1945, in Pittsburgh. He was named for his father, a white German immigrant who worked as a baker, drank too much and had a fiery temperament his son would inherit. He was mostly an absence in Mr. Wilson's childhood, and it was his African-American mother, Daisy Wilson, who instilled in her six children a strong sense of pride and a limited tolerance for injustice. (She once turned down a washing machine she had won in a contest when the company sponsoring the event tried to fob off a secondhand item on her.) Mr. Wilson legally adopted her last name when he set out to become a writer.

Eventually Mrs. Wilson divorced Mr. Wilson's father and remarried, and the family moved to a largely white suburb. As the only black student in his class at a Roman Catholic high school, Mr. Wilson gained an awareness of the grinding ugliness of racism that would inform his work. "There was a note on my desk every single day," he told The New Yorker in 2001. "It said, 'Go home, nigger.' " Mr. Wilson attended two more schools but gave up on formal education when a teacher accused him of plagiarizing a paper on Napoleon. At 15, he chose to continue - but essentially to begin - his education on his own, spending his days at the local library absorbing books by the dozen.

Mr. Wilson acquired an equally valuable education outside the library walls, hanging out and listening to the Hill District denizens pass the time on stoops, in coffee shops and at Pat's Place, a local cigar store. Eventually the voices he absorbed while hanging loose with retirees and sharpies in his 20's would re-emerge in his plays, sometimes with little artistic tampering.

Mr. Wilson acquired his first typewriter with $20 he had earned writing a term paper for one of his sisters at college. But he preferred to write in public places like bars and restaurants and had a particular affinity for composing on cocktail napkins. Only when he settled into his career as a playwright did he become comfortable writing at home, in longhand on yellow notepads.

By the time he was 20, Mr. Wilson had decided he was a poet. He submitted poems to Harper's and other magazines while supporting himself with odd jobs, and began dressing in a style that raised eyebrows among his peers. While most of the young men of the time were dressing down, Mr. Wilson was always meticulously turned out in jackets, ties and white shirts selected from thrift shops. Later he would be known for his trademark porter's cap.

Inspired by the Black Power movement then gaining momentum, Mr. Wilson and a group of fellow poets founded a theater workshop and an art gallery, and in 1968 Mr. Wilson and his friend Rob Penny founded the Black Horizons on the Hill Theater. Mr. Wilson was the director and sometimes an actor, too, although he had no experience, and learned about directing by checking a how-to manual out of the library. The company was without a performance space and staged shows in the auditoriums of local elementary schools. Tickets were sold, for 50 cents a pop, by chatting up people on the streets right before a performance.

But Mr. Wilson's aspirations as an author were still being channeled into poetry; after an abortive effort to write a play for his theater, he set aside playwriting for almost a decade. He came home to drama almost by happenstance. Mr. Wilson moved to St. Paul in 1978 and started working at the Science Museum of Minnesota. His task: adapting Native American folk tales into children's plays.

Homesick for the Hill District and growing more comfortable with the playwriting process, he started channeling the Hill voices haunting his memories as a way of keeping the connection alive. "Jitney," begun in 1979, was the result. It was produced in Pittsburgh in 1982, the same year that "Ma Rainey" was accepted at the O'Neill Center. (Mr. Wilson's first professional production was of a prior play adapted from a series of his poems, "Black Bart and the Sacred Hills," staged by St. Paul's Penumbra Theater.)

In a 1999 interview in The Paris Review, Mr. Wilson cited his major influences as being the "four B's": the blues was the "primary" influence, followed by Jorge Luis Borges, the playwright Amiri Baraka and the painter Romare Bearden. He analyzed the elements each contributed to his art: "From Borges, those wonderful gaucho stories from which I learned that you can be specific as to a time and place and culture and still have the work resonate with the universal themes of love, honor, duty, betrayal, etc. From Amiri Baraka, I learned that all art is political, although I don't write political plays. From Romare Bearden I learned that the fullness and richness of everyday life can be rendered without compromise or sentimentality." He added two more B's, both African-American writers, to the list: the playwright Ed Bullins and James Baldwin.

Although his plays achieved their success in the white-dominated theater world, Mr. Wilson remained devoted to the alternative culture of black Americans and mourned its gradual decline as the black middle class grew and adopted the values of its white counterpart. He once lamented that at convocation ceremonies at black universities, the music would be Bach, not gospel.

When a Hollywood studio optioned "Fences," Mr. Wilson caused a ruckus by insisting on a black director. In a 1990 article published in Spin magazine and later excerpted in The Times, he said, "I am not carrying a banner for black directors. I think they should carry their own. I am not trying to get work for black directors. I am trying to get the film of my play made in the best possible way. I declined a white director not on the basis of race but on the basis of culture. White directors are not qualified for the job. The job requires someone who shares the specifics of the culture of black Americans." (The film was not made.)

He was a firm believer in the importance of maintaining a robust black theater movement, a viewpoint that also inspired a public controversy when Mr. Wilson clashed with the prominent theater critic and arts administrator Robert Brustein in a series of exchanges in the pages of American Theater magazine and The New Republic, and later in a formal debate between the two staged at Manhattan's Town Hall in 1997, moderated by Anna Deavere Smith.

The contretemps began when Mr. Wilson delivered a keynote address to a national theater conference in which he lamented that among the more than 60 members of the League of Regional Theaters, only one was dedicated to the work of African-Americans. He also denounced as absurd the idea of colorblind casting, asserting that an all-black "Death of a Salesman" was irrelevant because the play was "conceived for white actors as an investigation of the specifics of white culture." Mr. Brustein referred to Mr. Wilson's call for an independent black theater movement as "self-segregation."

At the sold-out debate at Town Hall the friendly antagonists essentially restated their positions publicly. "Never is it suggested that playwrights like David Mamet or Terrence McNally are limiting themselves to whiteness," Mr. Wilson said. "The idea that we are trying to escape from the ghetto of black culture is insulting."

A Legacy of Stars

Mr. Wilson was dedicated to writing for the theater, and resisted many offers from Hollywood. (His only concession: adapting "The Piano Lesson" for television.) He didn't even see any movies for a stretch of 10 years.

But the list of well-known television and film actors who first came to prominence in one of Mr. Wilson's plays is lengthy. Charles S. Dutton scored his first success as the trumpeter Levee in the original production of "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom," a role he reprised nearly 20 years later when the play was revived on Broadway in 2003, with Whoopi Goldberg in the title role. S. Epatha Merkerson, now known as Lt. Anita Van Buren on "Law & Order," appeared opposite Mr. Dutton in "The Piano Lesson" on Broadway.

Other notable actors who appeared in one or more of Mr. Wilson's plays include Angela Bassett, Roscoe Lee Browne, Phylicia Rashad, Courtney B. Vance, Laurence Fishburne, Lisa Gay Hamilton, Keith David, Viola Davis, Delroy Lindo, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Leslie Uggams and Brian Stokes Mitchell.

Mr. Wilson's first two marriages, to Brenda Burton and Judy Oliver, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Constanza Romero, a Colombian-born costume designer he met when she worked on "The Piano Lesson"; and two daughters, Sakina Ansari (from his first marriage) and Azula Carmen Wilson (from his third). He is also survived by his siblings Freda Ellis, Linda Jean Kittel, Richard Kittel, Donna Conley and Edwin Kittel.

Mr. Wilson did not write plays with specific political agendas, but he did believe art could subtly effect social change. And while his essential aim was to evoke and ennoble the collective African-American experience, he also believed his work could help rewrite some of those rules.

"I think my plays offer (white Americans) a different way to look at black Americans," he told The Paris Review. "For instance, in 'Fences' they see a garbageman, a person they don't really look at, although they see a garbageman every day. By looking at Troy's life, white people find out that the content of this black garbageman's life is affected by the same things - love, honor, beauty, betrayal, duty. Recognizing that these things are as much part of his life as theirs can affect how they think about and deal with black people in their lives."

In describing his own work, Mr. Wilson could be analytical or offhand. A soft-spoken man whose affability masked a sometimes short temper, he was a connoisseur of the art of storytelling offstage and on. Here's the story behind all his characters' stories, in his own words: "I once wrote a short story called 'The Best Blues Singer in the World' and it went like this: 'The streets that Balboa walked were his own private ocean, and Balboa was drowning.' End of story. That says it all. Nothing else to say. I've been rewriting that same story over and over again. All my plays are rewriting that same story. I'm not sure what it means, other than life is hard."

    August Wilson, Theater's Poet of Black America, Is Dead at 60, NYT, 3.10.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/theater/newsandfeatures/03wilson.html?hp

Man Convicted in '64 Case and Out on Bail Is Rejailed

September 10, 2005
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

A judge sent Edgar Ray Killen, the former Klansman convicted of the 1964 killing of three civil rights workers in Mississippi, back to prison yesterday, saying Mr. Killen had deceived the court about his health when he asked to be released on bond.

The hearing was called after Mr. Killen, who was granted bail after testifying that he was confined to a wheelchair, was seen up and walking by sheriff's deputies.

"That's incredible to me," the judge, Marcus Gordon, said. "I feel fraud has been committed on this court."

"Without the testimony of the defendant's poor physical condition," Judge Marcus's written order said, "the court finds that the defendant has failed to show by clear and convincing evidence that he is not a danger to the community"

W. Mitch Moran, one of Mr. Killen's defense lawyers, said prosecutors had not shown that his client had committed fraud, but added that he was not surprised by the ruling. "Politics and political pressure got to the judge," he said.

Many civic leaders in Philadelphia, Miss., had been dismayed when the judge granted bail to Mr. Killen, 80, pending his appeal, raising the possibility that he would die a free man after serving barely six weeks of his sentence.

They viewed Mr. Killen's conviction in June in the decades-old case as a chance to overcome the town's reputation as the place where one of the most infamous deeds of the civil rights era took place.

But at the bond hearing in August, Judge Gordon said that Mr. Killen, who was convicted of three counts of manslaughter, had not been shown to be a flight risk or a threat and was entitled to be released on bond, which he set at $600,000.

Mr. Killen, his brother, and his friends and neighbors put up enough property to make bail that afternoon.

Mr. Killen's ailments played a major, if silent, role in the trial. He used a wheelchair as a result of a logging accident in March and had a private nurse waiting outside the courtroom . On the first day of testimony, he was hospitalized. When the verdict was read he used an oxygen tank.

At his bond hearing, he used his left hand to raise his right hand to swear the oath, saying he could not move it on its own. He testified that he was confined to the wheelchair except while sleeping, and complained of a lack of medical attention in jail.

But on Friday, four sheriff's deputies testified that they had seen Mr. Killen driving around Neshoba County, and a fifth said he had seen him getting gas. A woman whose family owns the gas station also testified that he had come there to buy gas.

"He was walking between the truck and gas pump" unaided, said Connie Hampton, a deputy.

Mr. Killen was convicted in the disappearance of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who had been visiting Philadelphia to inspect a black church burned by the Klan.

The three were stopped by a sheriff's deputy for speeding and held in the county jail until a mob of Klansmen could gather. After their release they were waylaid, beaten and shot, then buried in a pond dam with a bulldozer.

The federal government tried 18 men for conspiracy to deprive the victims of civil rights. Seven were convicted, but in Mr. Killen's case the all-white jury deadlocked, with 11 favoring conviction, while one juror said she could not convict Mr. Killen because he was a preacher.

At the hearing in June, prosecutors said that Mr. Killen had organized the mob, ordering them to buy gloves and planning where the bodies would be hidden, although he was not present when the killings took place. The defense said that Mr. Killen had been a member of the Ku Klux Klan but had not taken part in the killings.

The jury declined to convict him on murder charges, but were offered the option of manslaughter at the request of the prosecutors. Mr. Killen's lawyers are now appealing in part on the grounds that they did not prepare a manslaughter defense.

"It's interesting," said Susan Glisson, the director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi. "Forty-one years ago the police department was involved in a conspiracy to murder these three young men. The fact that members of that same police department are now involved in putting Mr. Killen back in jail is indicative of how far this community has come."

Relatives of the victims expressed relief that Mr. Killen would be incarcerated once more. "I think the wheels of justice are turning. Slowly, but they are turning," said Ben Chaney, the brother of James Earl.

Rita Bender, the widow of Mr. Schwerner, said it was important to show that racial violence would not go unpunished. "In some ways the issue was not whether Edgar Ray Killen could walk or not," she said. "The point is that Edgar Ray Killen was and is a danger to the community."

Jerry Mitchell contributed reporting from Philadelphia for this article, and Terry Aguayo from Miami.

    Man Convicted in '64 Case and Out on Bail Is Rejailed, NYT, 10.9.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/national/10killen.html?hp&ex=1126411200&en=d44489ba2876788d&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Slavery in America

Black and white—and red all over

Aug 25th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Britain's best-known historian examines a turning point in the history of slavery—and the fight for American independence

NATIONS need luck in their historians, as with everything else, and in Simon Schama, Britain—not to mention America, where he lives and works—has hit the jackpot. It must have been tempting to follow his panoramic “A History of Britain”, the three volumes of which dominated the bestseller lists in 2000 and beyond, and made him into Britain's national storyteller, with more from the lucrative mainstream. The book trade would surely have opened up acres of space for Mr Schama on Victoria, on Churchill, on Lincoln.

But he has done no such thing. On the contrary, Mr Schama has deployed his celebrity in the service of an episode which did not even rate a footnote in his earlier work—the noble but half-baked attempt to plant a colony of freed American slaves in Sierra Leone at the end of the American war of independence in 1776. Anyone who felt that his “A History of Britain” skipped a little lightly over the empire's adventures overseas (leaving some ugly national skeletons unrattled in the process) now knows why. Like a stealthy chef, Mr Schama was pocketing truffles for his own later use.

He was also returning to the form of vibrant and cosmopolitan narrative which entitled him to write “A History of Britain” in the first place. His first book, “The Embarrassment of Riches” (1987), was a meticulous and witty account of Holland's artistic golden age in the 17th century; “Citizens”, his next work, was a storming narration of the French revolution, a bloodbath which generations of abstract ideologues had managed to drain of blood. Now, once again, his articulate intelligence plays elegantly over a saga full of grim twists. There are heroes and cowards, fools, chancers and baffled victims. The doomed migration from Nova Scotia to Africa (just as resonant as the Australian odyssey described by Robert Hughes in “The Fatal Shore”) is gripping and vivid. It stinks of putrid flesh and maggots, tar and rope, chains and broken promises.

The story of the freed American slaves is not quite unknown, but neither is it well known. British history has rarely dwelt on the loss of its colonies across the Atlantic (preferring to celebrate victories), and until recently has been happy to draw a veil over the horrors of slavery (“ghastly business—less said about it the better”). But this terrific story straddles some very large contemporary concerns: the roots of transatlantic racism, and the ugly wrench that inspired the special relationship.

At the height of the conflict, Britain guaranteed freedom to any slave who fought for the king against George Washington's slave-owning rebels. And in 1772, in London, Lord Mansfield, nudged by the advocacy of Granville Sharp, an abolitionist, judged that Africans could not be transported against their will. It sounded good. Thousands of slaves, lacking a better offer, joined the king's cause.

It goes without saying that Britain's pledge was issued with only token expectation that it would need to be honoured—victory would surely render it irrelevant. But military incompetence and American resolve turned it into a disquieting political reality. After much smudging, a liberal haven—an 18th-century African Zion—was marked out in Sierra Leone. African-Americans began to go “home”.

It was a disastrous enterprise from the start; what began as a rescue mission was later seen as a “racist deportation”. As revolutionary echoes from France made London's potentates tremble, cargoes of ex-slaves were dumped on a malarial strip of impossible land. Some were seized as slaves again; others, in an even more horrid reverse, became slavers themselves. It was the only business they knew.

With dash and cunning, Mr Schama follows his leading characters into the shadow that falls across his story. “Histories never conclude,” he writes. “They just pause.” If it is true that history is not the past—merely what we have now instead of the past—then we must tip our caps to Mr Schama for reminding us of the grotesque events whose scars still sting today, more than a century afterwards.

Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution.
By Simon Schama.
BBC Books; 407 pages; £20. To be published in America in May 2006 by HarperCollins.

    Black and white—and red all over, E, 25.8.2005, http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4316123

Ex-Klan Figure in 1964 Killings Is Freed on Bail

August 13, 2005
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

Edgar Ray Killen, the former Klansman whose conviction in June in the 1964 killing of three civil rights workers in Mississippi seemed to close one of the state's darkest chapters, was released yesterday when a judge granted bail pending an appeal.

The release raises the possibility that Mr. Killen, 80 and in poor health, will die a free man after serving barely six weeks of his sentence.

He was convicted on three counts of manslaughter on June 21, 41 years to the day after a mob of Klansmen killed the three campaigners - James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner - in an incident that galvanized national support for the civil rights movement. Prosecutors said Mr. Killen organized the mob.

Judge Marcus Gordon of Circuit Court, who gave Mr. Killen the maximum possible sentence, said in court that he had little choice but to set bond while Mr. Killen appealed his conviction. Judge Gordon said the state had not proved that Mr. Killen, who uses a wheelchair, was a flight risk or threat.

"It's not a matter of what I feel, it's a matter of the law," Judge Gordon said.

Rita Bender, wife of Mr. Schwerner, said the judge had not considered the danger to the community in the broader sense.

"To me this indicates a lack of understanding the seriousness of, and conveying the seriousness of, crimes of racial violence," Ms. Bender said by telephone from Seattle, where she lives.

Mr. Killen's release, she said, increases "the risk of violence by people who get the message once again that there is no control over them."

Jewel Rush McDonald, a member of the black church where the three victims had made contacts for a voter registration drive, also denounced the decision after attending the court proceedings.

"We have worked so hard in trying to clear this dark cloud from over Neshoba County, and as far as I'm concerned the judge just set us back 41 years," Ms. McDonald said.

Her church, Mount Zion United Methodist, has been a major force in a multiracial coalition that issued a "call for justice" in the case last year, before Mr. Killen's indictment.

To make the bond, which Judge Gordon set at $600,000, five friends of Mr. Killen put up property, County Clerk Patti Duncan Lee said. Mr. Killen and his brother Bobby also put up a parcel of land valued at $38,000, Ms. Lee added.

Seven witnesses, including a man who put up property, vouched for Mr. Killen.

Mr. Killen took the stand, complaining of a lack of medical care since he entered the Central Mississippi prison in Pearl, though he acknowledged that he had been seen by doctors.

"They checked me through the line like a cattle auction," he said. "I'm very unhappy with the treatment I've received."

Mr. Killen is recovering from a logging accident in March and required an oxygen tank at his trial.

Mr. Killen said he had to bribe a convict to obtain a pillow.

"I can barely sleep," he said. "I still don't understand how I could lie in severe pain for 24 hours and no one even brings me an aspirin. I'm not a drug addict."

A spokesman for the State Corrections Department said Mr. Killen had received proper medical care and he was not aware of any complaints.

Prosecutors worked for years to build the case against Mr. Killen, as other cases from the civil rights era were successfully reopened, resulting in convictions that at had one time seemed impossible.

When Mr. Chaney, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Schwerner disappeared, the nation was riveted by the search for them. Their bodies were found in an earthen dam, and the federal government tried 18 men in 1967 on charges that they conspired to deprive the three victims of their civil rights. Seven men were convicted. None served more than six years in prison.

In Mr. Killen's federal case, the all-white jury hung, 11 to 1, in favor of conviction. In the state trial this year, the jurors did not convict him of the most serious charge of murder, but rather manslaughter. The prosecution and the defense agreed that Mr. Killen was not present at the actual killings. Prosecutors maintained that he had planned the deaths and disposal of the bodies.

If Mr. Killen had been convicted of murder, he would not be eligible for release on bond.

Legal experts and others questioned the bail decision. James E. Prince III, publisher of The Neshoba Democrat, a weekly newspaper, said:

"He may not be capable of enacting revenge, but he has stature within a certain community. And they are capable of enacting revenge. It's difficult to bring closure on the reign of terror with him out of prison It's difficult, because that fear is still there with him out."

Mr. Prince criticized District Attorney Mark Duncan, for "a fairly weak presentation," saying Mr. Duncan had failed to emphasize Mr. Killen's connection to hate groups that might be capable of terror or violence. Mr. Prince noted that Mr. Killen was convicted of telephone harassment, a felony, in the 70's.

Experts have said Mississippi law is not crystal clear on when a judge has to grant bail. The law says a person convicted of any felony other than child abuse, sexual battery of a minor or a crime in which a death sentence or life imprisonment is imposed is entitled to be released on bail pending appeal if the convict shows that he is not a flight risk or a danger.

The statute also says the convict is entitled to release "within the discretion of a judicial officer," and "only when the peculiar circumstances of the case render it proper."

Jerry Mitchell contributed reporting from Philadelphia, Miss., for this article.

    Ex-Klan Figure in 1964 Killings Is Freed on Bail, NYT, August 13, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/13/national/13killen.html

Race in America

The black hole

Some of the things that helped blacks 40 years ago are now obstructions

Aug 4th 2005

From The Economist print edition

FORTY years ago this week, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act—and began to complete a process that should have been resolved at Gettysburg a century earlier. After the civil war black Americans were free to vote, but southern whites invented a myriad of restrictions to stop them doing so, forcing them to pass impossible literacy tests (“How high is high?”) and threatening complainers with the sack or much worse.

The Voting Rights Act outlawed such intimidation, allowing millions of black southerners to vote (most ever since have plumped for Johnson's Democrats). Together with the previous year's Civil Rights Act, it led a revolution to change the two-tone nature of American society, in which whites and blacks lived separate and unequal lives. This entailed not just ending legal white supremacy (allowing blacks, for instance, to sit at lunch counters, occupy the front seats on buses, and vote), but also devising programmes of positive discrimination to push blacks forward. Affirmative-action programmes were set up to help black students to get places at universities and black-owned businesses to win government contracts.

This revolution was a magnificent act of empowerment (see article). Blacks have surged forward. Nobody finds it odd to meet a black chief executive, general or judge. All that is missing is a black on a presidential ticket; fittingly, the person with the best chance of gaining that honour in 2008, Condoleezza Rice, was a close friend of one of the girls killed in an infamous church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.

The canard of Jim Crow

But is the civil-rights revolution still working? For most black politicians, nearly all of whom (unlike Ms Rice) are connected with the left wing of the Democratic Party, this is still a heretically “racist” question, asked by people who want to turn back the clock to Jim Crow. That is a disgraceful canard. No respectable critic—least of all this newspaper—wants to reintroduce programmes that discriminate against blacks. What is at issue is the programmes that discriminate in their favour—and there are both principled and practical reasons for Americans of all colours to doubt that these still help.

The principled reasons start from the perspective that the colour of people's skin is a bad basis for social engineering. Even 40 years ago, it was not easy to explain to a poor white student why his university place should go to a richer black one. Nowadays, there are many more rich blacks; and race in America is patently no longer a two-tone issue.

Last week, when the Department of Justice invoked the Voting Rights Act in Boston, it was to protect the rights of Hispanics and Asians. Blacks are no longer America's biggest minority; Latinos have skipped past them. And do these old terms make sense anyway? In places like California, where races are gloriously jumbled up, everybody is a minority of some sort, so trying to divide them into racial groups has become an increasingly Orwellian job. Does a Guatemalan grandmother score more than an Asian uncle? Is a recent arrival from Ethiopia as black as the grandson of a sharecropper?

Many black leaders would insist that, thanks to the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, they are still owed special treatment. But it is here that the practical set of doubts appears. Put bluntly, although most American blacks are doing better, too many are doing badly. One black American man in three ends up in jail. The proportion of black children born outside wedlock has risen from a quarter in the 1960s (then considered an outrage) to two-thirds. Indeed, blacks score disproportionately badly in virtually everything to do with crime, education and family structure.

It is hard to blame all this on white racism. For instance, although blacks are still paid less on average than whites, some studies have found that blacks are paid as much as or even more than whites with the same educational qualifications. There is also growing evidence that the very policies that helped blacks 40 years ago now contribute to their problems.

Government activism has helped expand the black middle class, but it has also created dependence on government and dissuaded blacks from pursuing the same business road to success as Latinos and, especially, Asians. Affirmative action has improved the lives of some blacks; but it has also over-promoted others (helping push up the drop-out rate at universities); it has encouraged blacks to hold themselves to lower standards than other groups; and it has allowed whites—often unfairly—to cast aspersions on the achievements of blacks who have earned success purely on merit and talent.

Too tied to the Democrats

Even the Voting Rights Act has been abused, becoming an excuse for politicians to gerrymander absurdly shaped “black” congressional districts, which elect black Democrats. There is, of course, nothing wrong with voting for Democrats—The Economist even endorsed one for president last year. But reliance on one party lets down blacks dramatically. For instance, blacks, stuck in grotty schools with unsackable teachers, support school vouchers. But Democrats, who rely massively on the teachers' unions, have systematically opposed such reform. Meanwhile, Republicans, who win only one in ten black votes, have little incentive to divert money from richer whiter school districts.

So celebrate this week's anniversary as a great American achievement. But hope that, at the next milestone in 2015, America's black leaders are still not looking back to the 1960s—and that a few more blacks will have joined President Rice in the Republican Party.

    The black hole : Some of the things that helped blacks 40 years ago are now obstructions, E, 4.8.2005, http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4247114

    Autre article (payant) : The state of black America, Aug 4th 2005, From The Economist print edition > HOW many bubbles are there in a bar of soap? In the old South, if you were black and could not answer this question, or pass some other equally absurd literacy test, you could not vote. That was one way southern whites got round the American constitution's 15th amendment, ratified in 1870, which promised that no citizen should be denied a vote on account of race or colour.… , http://www.economist.com/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4246090

Former Klansman Guilty of Manslaughter in 1964 Deaths

June 22, 2005
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

PHILADELPHIA, Miss., June 21 - In what is likely to be the final chapter in a story that has troubled a generation, a jury pronounced Edgar Ray Killen guilty of manslaughter on Tuesday in the deaths of three young and idealistic civil rights workers who disappeared on a summer night here exactly 41 years ago.

Mr. Killen, 80, sat in a wheelchair, the thin, greenish tubes of an oxygen tank under his nose, his _expression impassive as the verdict was read aloud. Throughout the courtroom, people wept - the Killen family on the right, the victims' relatives on the left, as well as townspeople deeply invested in seeing the case brought to trial in hopes that Neshoba County could overcome its past.

Roscoe Jones, a tall, elderly black man with tear-rimmed eyes who had worked alongside the three men who died, pushed his way through the crowd to the side of Rita Bender, a diminutive white woman who had been married to one of them. "Excuse me," Mr. Jones said, politely urgent. "Excuse me." When he reached Ms. Bender, they embraced.

The disappearance of the three men, Andrew Goodman, 20, Michael Schwerner, 24, and James Earl Chaney, 21, on June 21, 1964, drew the national news media and hundreds of searchers to Neshoba County, while Mississippi officials said publicly that the disappearance was a hoax intended to draw attention. When the three bodies - two white, one black - were found under 15 feet of earth on a nearby farm, the nation's horror helped galvanize the civil rights movement. The case, dramatized in the movie "Mississippi Burning," is one of the biggest in what some have called the South's "atonement trials" revisiting civil-rights-era atrocities.

Jurors said the evidence fell short of what they needed to convict Mr. Killen, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, of murder.

"I should say I heard a number of very emotional statements from some of the white jurors," said Warren Paprocki, 54, a white juror. "They had tears in their eyes, saying that if they could just have better evidence in the case that they would have convicted him of murder in a minute. Our consensus was the state did not produce a strong enough case."

The defense plans to appeal. "At least he wasn't found guilty of a willful and wanton act," said James McIntyre, one of Mr. Killen's lawyers. "Manslaughter is a negligent act."

Although the federal government tried 18 men, including Mr. Killen, on a conspiracy charge in 1967, Mr. Killen - a preacher and sawmill operator - was the first to be charged by the state. The 1967 jury deadlocked over Mr. Killen, and he has maintained his innocence. He faces up to 20 years in prison on each count when he is sentenced on Thursday.

As he was wheeled out of the courthouse, Mr. Killen swatted away television cameras and microphones.

With witnesses dead and memories fading, he could be the only one of the mob of Klansmen responsible for the killings to be tried. Prosecutors say that a grand jury heard all the available evidence against the eight original defendants still living but returned only one indictment, against Mr. Killen. While some in Neshoba County said it was too late and too painful to revisit the episode, others thought that in doing so, the county might find redemption.

"Finally, finally, finally," said Jim Prince, the editor of the local weekly newspaper, The Neshoba Democrat. "This certainly sends a message, I think, to the criminals and to the thugs that justice reigns in Neshoba County, unlike 41 years ago."

Ben Chaney, James Earl Chaney's younger brother, said he spoke briefly to his 82-year-old mother after the verdict. "She's happy," he said. "She finally believes that the life of her son has some value to the people in this community."

But for some of those who had hoped to see Mr. Killen convicted of murder, the manslaughter verdict was less than a total victory. "The fact that some members of this jury could have sat through that testimony, indeed could have lived here all these years and could not bring themselves to acknowledge that these were murders, that they were committed with malice, indicates that there are still people unfortunately among you who choose to look aside, who choose to not see the truth," Ms. Bender, who was married to Mr. Schwerner, said after the trial.

To Nettie Cox, the first black to run for mayor in Philadelphia, the verdict was an affront. "Manslaughter," Ms. Cox said, putting her hands to her temples. "I just can't absorb manslaughter."

But two jurors interviewed said there was not enough evidence that Mr. Killen, who was accused of orchestrating the killings and recruiting the mob that abducted the men and beat Mr. Chaney, shooting all three, had intended for the men to die.

Both the defense and the prosecution failed to impress the jury of nine whites and three blacks. Jurors said neither presented enough witnesses and that the case relied too heavily on transcripts from the federal trial.

On Monday evening, after deliberating more than two hours, the jury reported to Judge Marcus Gordon that they were evenly divided, and he dismissed them for the night. But after deliberating for nearly three hours on Tuesday morning, they reached a unanimous verdict.

Jurors disputed an inference that manslaughter may have been a compromise verdict. One, Troy Savell, a white history teacher and coach, said he was initially in favor of acquittal, but his opinion changed as the jury deliberated. "I think the reasonable doubt was not there that he didn't have anything to do with it," Mr. Savell said.

Mr. Paprocki said race did not play a role in the deliberations. One of the three blacks on the jury was vocally in favor of a murder conviction at first, Mr. Paprocki said, but he was not sure where the other two stood.

Willis Lyon, the only one of the three black jurors who could be reached by phone on Tuesday, said: "The only thing I'll say to that regard is that we were as fair with Mr. Killen as we could have been. I think we gave him as fair a verdict on his behalf as was allowable."

Reached by phone, Shirley Vaughan, the forewoman, said she was emotionally drained by the trial and reluctant to speak. "With the little amount of evidence that we had, we did the very best that we could," she said.

Mark Duncan, the county district attorney, said he did not blame the jury for finding Mr. Killen guilty of a lesser charge than murder, pointing out that three of the four key witnesses were dead. "I think it was asking a lot of a jury to convict a man based on testimony of people who they couldn't see. All they had were their words on paper."

Mr. Duncan's partner in the prosecution, Attorney General Jim Hood, said two witnesses that had come forward since the case was reopened in 1999 had died, one by suicide and the other under questionable circumstances.

There were other obstacles for the prosecutors. Although seven of the original defendants, besides Mr. Killen, are still alive, they refused to testify before the grand jury in exchange for immunity, Mr. Hood said.

Confessions and other statements about the crime were not admissible if the witness was not available for cross-examination, they said.

Asked about the possible legacy of the trial, Mr. Hood said: "I'm just a prosecutor, I don't pretend to be a sociologist. I will allow the historians to analyze what impact this trial may have on this community and the state of Mississippi and its reputation throughout the world."

Jurors, on the other hand, said they were keenly aware of the significance and symbolism of the trial. "I felt dispirited last night because of the six-six split," Mr. Paprocki said. "I was very concerned that in the event of a hung jury that it would just reinforce the prejudicial stereotypes that have been attached to Philadelphia and Neshoba County. I was very much saddened by the fact."

But on Tuesday, he said, "Folks that had been fairly well saying no, they just couldn't convict him, said, 'Well, manslaughter.' I don't know what happened. It was fairly dramatic. It made quite an impression on me."

Ariel Hart contributed reporting from Atlanta for this article.

    Former Klansman Guilty of Manslaughter in 1964 Deaths, NYT, June 22, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/22/national/22civil.html

Widow Recalls Ghosts of '64 at Rights Trial

June 17, 2005
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

PHILADELPHIA, Miss., June 16 - As soon as word got out about where they were staying, it was time to leave.

A man who rented a house for them was threatened.

A minister's wife gave them an apartment, but there was no running water and they had to go to a black-owned hotel every morning to wash, sneaking through the back door because they were white and did not want to draw attention.

When they had a phone, it rang constantly. People on the other end would tell Rita Schwerner that her husband was a dead man. Their license-plate number was circulated to law enforcement officers.

That was the welcome given a young couple who arrived in Mississippi from New York in 1964 to join the civil rights movement, the former Ms. Schwerner, now Rita Bender, told a jury on Thursday. She was the first witness in the state murder trial of a onetime member of the Ku Klux Klan accused of orchestrating the killing of her husband, Michael Schwerner, and two other civil rights workers, James Earl Chaney and Andrew Goodman, more than 40 years ago.

Articulate and serene, with close-cropped white hair and a soft, sad smile, Ms. Bender told the jury of her marriage to Mr. Schwerner - she was 20, he 22 - and their move, soon after, to the South. She also told of his disappearance near Philadelphia, while she was at a training program in Ohio, and how when she returned to Mississippi after hearing the news, the only place she could stay was the black-owned hotel, with a guard organized by black ministers keeping watch outside.

It was a close-up view of a time when terror was commonplace and the mere act of helping people could endanger them. The jury paid close attention, but the defendant, Edgar Ray Killen, 80, was absent from the courtroom. Mr. Killen had retreated, complaining of shortness of breath and a "smothering sensation," his lawyer said, and was later taken from the Neshoba County Courthouse on a stretcher.

After a recess, the presiding circuit judge, Marcus Gordon, announced that Mr. Killen was in the hospital undergoing tests and that the trial would resume on Friday morning if doctors approved.

Mr. Killen, a sawmill operator and preacher in a wheelchair because of a tree-felling accident in January, had been in court for the first part of the morning while the judge dealt with procedural matters. But as the jury entered for the first day of testimony, his lawyer James McIntyre approached the bench and asked for permission for Mr. Killen to retire.

Because of Mr. Killen's poor health, a bed and a nurse had been provided for him in the courthouse.

With Mr. Killen's permission, the trial proceeded without him, and Ms. Bender was the first witness. The jury was not told the reason for Mr. Killen's absence because the judge did not want them to be swayed by sympathy, the judge said.

With James Hood, the state attorney general, questioning her, Ms. Bender, now a lawyer living in Seattle, described the community center for children that she and her husband helped open in Meridian, Miss., about 30 miles from Philadelphia.

Mr. Schwerner and Mr. Chaney, who was from Meridian, built shelves to house the donated books that were not available in the public library for blacks. There was a Ping-Pong table. But the workers were also trying to help blacks register to vote, making contacts and looking for places to hold training classes. Mr. Schwerner and Mr. Chaney had visited the Mount Zion United Methodist Church, a black church in Neshoba County near Philadelphia.

In June, while they were at a training session in Ohio where they met Mr. Goodman, they learned that church leaders had been beaten by Klansmen, the church burned to the ground, Ms. Bender said.

At this point, Judge Gordon gently admonished Ms. Bender, saying she was speaking too quietly. "I'm sorry," she replied, still composed. "It's a little bit emotional. I'm sorry."

In the courtroom, Ms. Bender's husband and relatives of Mr. Chaney watched, as did Bettie Dahmer, the daughter of Vernon Dahmer, another Mississippi civil rights leader, whose killer was tried and imprisoned in 1998. Two men occupied a row set aside for Mr. Killen's family.

Ms. Bender spoke up, saying that her first husband, who was known as Mickey, and Mr. Chaney, whom she called J.E., had decided to return to Mississippi to see the church.

"They had to go back and see those people," she said. "You don't abandon people who have put themselves at risk." The two men, joined by Mr. Goodman, climbed into the blue station wagon the Schwerners used and returned to Mississippi.

They reached Meridian safely, and the next day, Sunday, June 21, they drove to Philadelphia to see the church. Late that night, Ms. Schwerner received a phone call saying they had not returned.

They had been missing for two days when Ms. Schwerner learned that the station wagon had been found, burned, in the Bogue Chitto swamp in Neshoba County. By then she was at the Cincinnati airport, on her way back to Mississippi. Coincidentally a fellow civil rights proponent, Fannie Lou Hamer, was there, and the two heard the news together. Ms. Hamer, the granddaughter of slaves, drew Ms. Schwerner into her arms and the two of them cried. "Our tears were mingling with each other," Ms. Bender said.

Out of fear for Ms. Schwerner's safety, the rights workers had sent her home with an escort, who accompanied her to Neshoba County. "I wanted to see the burned-out car," she said. "I was absolutely insistent."

It was in a garage, scorched bare on the inside and perched on blocks because the tires had melted away, she said.

During cross-examination, Mr. McIntyre had essentially one question for Ms. Bender: Did she have any personal knowledge of Mr. Killen's involvement in the killings?

Ms. Bender said she did not.

In the broiling sun on the courthouse lawn afterward, Ms. Bender took advantage of the attention from reporters to press an idea she has repeated in the years since 1964.

"You're treating this trial as the most important trial of the civil rights movement because two of these three men were white," she said. "That means we all have a discussion about racism in this country that has to continue. And if this trial is a way for you to all acknowledge that, for us to all acknowledge that and to have that discussion openly, then this trial has meaning."

Early in the day, the judge said he would admit testimony from the transcript of the 1967 federal trial in the case, in which 18 men, including Mr. Killen, were accused of conspiring to deny the three victims their civil rights. Seven were convicted, but the jury deadlocked on Mr. Killen because of one holdout juror.

Crucial witnesses from that trial are now dead, but prosecutors intend to introduce their testimony from the transcript. The defense had sought to bar the old testimony.

After Ms. Bender, a second witness was called but had barely begun to testify when the judge sent the jury from the room again. Mr. Killen had been given oxygen, and paramedics were taking him to Neshoba County General Hospital.

Later in the afternoon, Dr. Patrick Eakes, the head of intensive care there, told reporters that Mr. Killen, who has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder, would probably be able to return to court in the morning. He had high blood pressure, and it had spiked, the doctor said, perhaps because of his injuries. When pressed, he conceded that the spike could have been caused by the stress of the trial.

"I imagine everyone's blood pressure in that room is probably a little high right now," Dr. Eakes said.

    Widow Recalls Ghosts of '64 at Rights Trial, NYT, June 17, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/national/17civil.html

Le Sénat américain

présente ses excuses aux victimes de lynchages

14.6.2005
Le Monde, avec AFP

Le Sénat américain s'est officiellement "excusé", lundi 13 juin, d'avoir renoncé à interdire explicitement les lynchages, des crimes racistes qui ont fait quelque 4 750 morts, dont les trois quarts des victimes étaient des Noirs, entre 1881 et 1964.

"Le Sénat a trahi ces Américains, si nous voulons vraiment avancer, il faut reconnaître cet échec et en tirer un enseignement", a souligné, lundi, la sénatrice de Louisiane Mary Landrieu, une démocrate qui estime que le nombre des victimes de ces actes pourrait se rapprocher des 10 000 morts si on prenait en compte les anonymes d'avant 1881.


Plusieurs descendants de victimes avaient fait le voyage à Washington pour l'occasion, ainsi que le seul survivant connu d'un lynchage, James Cameron, 91 ans, fondateur du "Musée de l'Holocauste noir" à Milwaukee (Wisconsin, Nord) et auteur de "Un temps de terreur : l'histoire d'un survivant".

En 1930, ce cireur de chaussures de 16 ans était en cellule avec deux autres Noirs, accusés comme lui du meurtre d'un homme blanc et du viol présumé d'une femme blanche, lorsqu'il avait entendu une foule abattre le mur de la prison. "Nègre, nègre, nègre", entendait-il hurler tandis qu'il se faisait rouer de coups, a-t-il raconté à USA Today.

En prière, il avait senti un nœud coulant se poser sur sa gorge quand, miraculeusement, ses agresseurs avaient changé d'avis, peut-être convaincus par une voix anonyme les appelant à "laisser ce gamin : il n'a rien à voir avec un meurtre ou un viol".

"LA PART D'OMBRE DE NOTRE HISTOIRE"

Paradoxalement, le vote du Sénat coïncide avec l'ouverture dans le Mississippi (Sud) du procès d'une très célèbre affaire de lynchage, ayant inspiré le film Mississippi burning. Edgar Ray Killen, ancien membre du Ku Klux Klan, âgé de 80 ans, risque la peine de mort pour avoir organisé le meurtre, en 1964, de trois jeunes militants des droits civiques, un Noir et deux juifs new-yorkais. Depuis lors, il n'avait guère été inquiété - de fait, moins de 1 % des responsables de lynchages ont été condamnés, selon une association ayant milité pour les excuses sénatoriales.

Des lynchages ont pourtant eu lieu sur la quasi-totalité du territoire américain, à l'exception de quatre Etats de Nouvelle-Angleterre (Nord-Est), avec une prévalence particulièrement marquée dans les Etats du Sud, en particulier Mississippi, Georgie, Texas et Louisiane.

"C'est un sombre et terrible chapitre de notre histoire", a reconnu le porte-parole de la Maison Blanche, Scott McClellan, qui a souligné que, dans la matinée, le président George W. Bush avait expliqué à cinq chefs d'Etat étrangers reçus à la Maison Blanche : "Nous travaillons à progresser au-delà de la part d'ombre de notre propre histoire."

"METTRE FIN À CETTE PRATIQUE"

Mary Landrieu a confié qu'elle avait travaillé à des excuses sénatoriales après avoir lu un recueil de photos de lynchages, Without sanctuary, album d'une bouleversante exposition itinérante révélant que les persécutions étaient des occasions de fête pour certains Blancs.

A trois reprises, entre 1920 et 1940, la Chambre des représentants avait adopté un texte anti-lynchage. Chaque fois, ces initiatives étaient restées lettre morte en raison de l'opposition du Sénat.

La proposition de loi rappelle également que "près de 200 propositions de loi contre le lynchage ont été présentées au Congrès durant la première moitié du XXe siècle, et qu'entre 1890 et 1952 sept présidents des Etats-Unis avaient demandé au Congrès de 'mettre fin à cette pratique'".

"Les excuses sont une bonne idée, mais elles ne feront revenir personne", a déclaré le survivant James Cameron. "J'espère que la prochaine fois on mettra moins longtemps à reconnaître nos fautes."

"Il restera toujours de profondes cicatrices, mais j'ai l'espoir que nous commencerons à guérir les blessures provoquées par le lynchage", a répondu le chef de file de la majorité républicaine, Bill Frist.

    Le Sénat américain présente ses excuses aux victimes de lynchages, Le Monde,14.6.2005, http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3222,36-661783@51-627394,0.html

U.S. Senate apologizes for shame of lynchings

Mon Jun 13, 2005 10:08 PM ET
Reuters
By Thomas Ferraro

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Senate on Monday formally apologized for having rejected decades of pleas to make lynching a federal crime as scores victims' descendants watched from the chamber's gallery.

On a voice vote and without opposition, the Senate passed a resolution expressing its regrets to the relatives as well as to the nearly 5,000 Americans -- mostly black males -- who were documented as having been lynched from 1880 to 1960.

These deaths occurred without trials, mostly in the South, often with the knowledge of local officials who allowed mob lynchings to become picture-taking, public spectacles.

During this period, nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress, three of which passed the House of Representatives.

But despite the support of the legislation by seven U.S. presidents, the measures died in the Senate with much of the opposition coming from southern lawmakers who raised procedural roadblocks.

Such legislation would have made lynching a federal crime and allowed the U.S. government to prosecute those responsible, including local law enforcement officers.

SIGNATURES MISSING

Dan Duster, a descendant of Ida B. Wells, a former slave who became an anti-lynching crusader, praised senators who publicly backed the resolution of apology and scorned those who did not.

No lawmaker opposed the measure, but 20 of the 100 senators had not signed a statement of support of it shortly before a vote was taken on a nearly empty Senate floor.

"I think it's politics. They're afraid of losing votes from people of prejudice," Duster said of those who did not sign the statement of support.

The resolution was first proposed last year by Sens. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, and George Allen, a Virginia Republican, after they read the book, "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America," a pictorial history by James Allen.

"The more I learned about this terrorism in America, the more committed I became to doing something positive and passing this resolution," Landrieu said.

"The Senate failed these Americans," said Allen. "If we truly want to move forward, we must admit that failure and learn from it."

The resolution expresses apologies not only to the victims of lynchings, but also to their descendants, nearly 200 of whom came to the Capitol to witness passage of the measure.

Also there was James Cameron, 91, believed to be the only known lynching survivor. Cameron was arrested in August 1930 in Marion, Indiana, and taken to jail along with two of his friends for the murder a white man and suspected rape of a white woman.

A mob broke into the jail and pulled the three out. Cameron's two friends were hanged, and a noose was placed around the neck of Cameron, then a 16-year-old shoeshine boy.

But as the noose was tightened, a voice reportedly shouted out that Cameron was guilty of no crime. He was returned to his cell and later convicted of being an accessory to the white man's death. He was pardoned in 1993, by then-Gov. Evan Bayh, now a Democratic U.S. senator from Indiana.

"The apology is a good idea, but it still won't bring anyone back," said Cameron. "I hope that the next time it won't take so long to admit to our mistakes."

While most lynching victims were deemed criminal suspects, others had merely gotten into a spat with a white man, perhaps for looking at a white woman. Lynchings refer not only to hangings, but mob executions by beatings, bullets and fire.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the first black woman to hold the post, praised the Senate for its apology, saying, "better late than never."

"I remember as a kid the stories about lynchings -- everybody's family had at least one story," Rice, who grew up in the South, told MSNBC' "Hardball with Chris Matthews."

"My grandfather, who ran away from home at 13 because he'd gotten into an altercation with a white man over something that happened with his sister, and he was pretty sure that if he hung around, that's what was going to happen," Rice said.

(Additional reporting by Arshad Mohammed)

    U.S. Senate apologizes for shame of lynchings, R, Mon Jun 13, 2005 10:08 PM ET, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-06-14T020844Z_01_N13113554_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-CONGRESS-LYNCHING-DC.XML

Whereas the crime of lynching succeeded slavery

as the ultimate expression of racism in the United States

following Reconstruction; (Introduced in Senate)

SRES 39 IS

109th CONGRESS

1st Session

S. RES. 39
Apologizing to the victims of lynching and the descendants of those victims for the failure of the Senate to enact anti-lynching legislation.


IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

February 7, 2005

Ms. LANDRIEU (for herself, Mr. ALLEN, Mr. LEVIN, Mr. FRIST, Mr. REID, Mr. ALLARD, Mr. AKAKA, Mr. BROWNBACK, Mr. BAYH, Ms. COLLINS, Mr. BIDEN, Mr. ENSIGN, Mrs. BOXER, Mr. HAGEL, Mr. CORZINE, Mr. LUGAR, Mr. DAYTON, Mr. MCCAIN, Mr. DODD, Ms. SNOWE, Mr. DURBIN, Mr. SPECTER, Mr. FEINGOLD, Mr. STEVENS, Mrs. FEINSTEIN, Mr. TALENT, Mr. HARKIN, Mr. JEFFORDS, Mr. JOHNSON, Mr. KENNEDY, Mr. KOHL, Mr. LAUTENBERG, Mr. LEAHY, Mr. LIEBERMAN, Mr. NELSON of Florida, Mr. PRYOR, and Mr. SCHUMER) submitted the following resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

RESOLUTION

Apologizing to the victims of lynching and the descendants of those victims for the failure of the Senate to enact anti-lynching legislation.

Whereas the crime of lynching succeeded slavery as the ultimate expression of racism in the United States following Reconstruction;

Whereas lynching was a widely acknowledged practice in the United States until the middle of the 20th century;

Whereas lynching was a crime that occurred throughout the United States, with documented incidents in all but 4 States;

Whereas at least 4,742 people, predominantly African-Americans, were reported lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968;

Whereas 99 percent of all perpetrators of lynching escaped from punishment by State or local officials;

Whereas lynching prompted African-Americans to form the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and prompted members of B'nai B'rith to found the Anti-Defamation League;

Whereas nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress during the first half of the 20th century;

Whereas, between 1890 and 1952, 7 Presidents petitioned Congress to end lynching;

Whereas, between 1920 and 1940, the House of Representatives passed 3 strong anti-lynching measures;

Whereas protection against lynching was the minimum and most basic of Federal responsibilities, and the Senate considered but failed to enact anti-lynching legislation despite repeated requests by civil rights groups, Presidents, and the House of Representatives to do so;

Whereas the recent publication of `Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America' helped bring greater awareness and proper recognition of the victims of lynching;

Whereas only by coming to terms with history can the United States effectively champion human rights abroad; and

Whereas an apology offered in the spirit of true repentance moves the United States toward reconciliation and may become central to a new understanding, on which improved racial relations can be forged: Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the Senate--

(1) apologizes to the victims of lynching for the failure of the Senate to enact anti-lynching legislation;

(2) expresses the deepest sympathies and most solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of victims of lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity, and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States; and

(3) remembers the history of lynching, to ensure that these tragedies will be neither forgotten nor repeated.

    Whereas the crime of lynching succeeded slavery as the ultimate expression of racism in the United States following Reconstruction; (Introduced in Senate), SRES 39 IS,February 7, 2005,  http://www.congress.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:S.RES.39:

KKK suspect goes on trial for Mississippi murders

Mon Jun 13, 2005 5:38 PM ET
Reuters

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. (Reuters) - A suspected Ku Klux Klansman accused of the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers sat solemnly in a wheelchair in a Mississippi court on Monday as jury selection began in a trial that promises to stir the ghosts of the state's segregationist past.

Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old ordained Baptist minister, is the first person ever to be tried by the state for the notorious slayings of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney, dramatized in the movie "Mississippi Burning."

In anticipation of demonstrations by white supremacists and black civil rights activists, police barricaded streets and escorted Killen and other figures into the two-story courthouse in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the trial is being held.

J.J. Harper, the Imperial Wizard of the American White Nights of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, was among those who appeared outside the court. It was not clear whether Harper or other Klan members were supporting Killen.

Defense lawyers, however, were quick to distance their client from the white supremacist movement. "The Klan is a hate group," said defense attorney James McIntyre, who added that Harper's presence was unwanted.

The start of the trial came five months after Killen was arrested near Philadelphia and charged with the murders of the trio, who were shot on a remote road outside this rural eastern Mississippi town 41 years ago.

'FREEDOM SUMMER'

Killen was arrested and indicted on three counts of murder shortly after the state reopened a long-dormant investigation into the killings, which helped galvanize support for the civil rights movement and were later dramatized in the 1988 film.

Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney, all in their 20s, were helping blacks register to vote during the "Freedom Summer" campaign.

Killen, who was injured in a March logging accident, has pleaded not guilty to the murders and is free on bond. His lawyers had attempted to postpone the start of the trial, arguing that their client was too ill to assist them.

Prosecutors say Killen was the mastermind of a Klan plot to abduct and kill the civil rights workers on June 21, 1964, shortly after they were released from the local jail where they had been held on charges of speeding and arson.

Killen was among more than a dozen men, including several known Klansmen, who were tried for federal civil rights violations in 1967. Seven were convicted and sentenced to prison terms of between three and 10 years.

Killen's trial ended in a hung jury. The all-white jury reached an 11-1 vote, with the one holdout saying she could never convict a preacher.

Despite evidence collected by the FBI, state prosecutors did not charge the suspects with murder. No jury in Mississippi had at that time ever convicted whites for killing blacks or civil rights workers.

Killen's trial is expected to last about three weeks.

    KKK suspect goes on trial for Mississippi murders, R, Mon Jun 13, 2005 5:38 PM ET, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2005-06-13T213844Z_01_N1384829_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-RIGHTS-MISSISSIPPI-KILLEN-DC.XML

Revisiting '64 Civil Rights Deaths,

This Time in a Murder Trial

June 12, 2005
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

PHILADELPHIA, Miss., June 9 - It is just a fork in a country road, with nothing to mark it but a retired newspaper editor named Stanley Dearman, standing there with a slight tremor in his stout frame, saying, "This is where it happened. Right in the center here. The cars all pulled around in a circle and they were in the center."

He was talking about James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael H. Schwerner, three young civil rights workers who were killed here by a mob of Klansmen on June 21, 1964. Their disappearance - they were found 44 days later buried in an earthen dam - riveted the nation and proved to be a pivotal event in civil rights history. On Monday, the first man to be charged with their murders, Edgar Ray Killen, 80, will stand trial, for a second time, in the killings.

In 1967, the federal government tried 18 men, including Mr. Killen, on charges that they had conspired to violate the victims' civil rights. Seven were convicted, and none served more than six years; in Mr. Killen's case, an all-white jury deadlocked. Five of the original defendants, none of whom took the stand in the first trial, have been subpoenaed to testify in the new trial.

[Prosecutors continued to subpoena new witnesses, the court clerk reported on Friday, including Mr. Killen's brother, Oscar Kenneth Killen.]

Mr. Killen, an avowed segregationist, maintains his innocence.

The victims' burned station wagon.        Associated Press

Revisiting '64 Civil Rights Deaths, This Time in a Murder Trial

NYT

June 12, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/national/12civil.html?

 

The trial will be one of the biggest of what some have called the South's "atonement trials" revisiting the most notorious atrocities of the civil rights era. One after another, new prosecutors have returned to these old crimes, spurred by news media investigations, relatives of the victims, the success of other prosecutors and even their own youthful memories.

In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted in the assassination of Medgar Evers, a leader in the Mississippi National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Mr. Beckwith died in prison in 2001. Three years ago, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in Alabama for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four black girls. He died of cancer in prison last year.

In Chicago this month, prosecutors exhumed the body of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old who was kidnapped and killed in Mississippi in 1955. Two men were acquitted of his killing by an all-white jury but later admitted they were responsible. The men have died, but prosecutors believe others were involved and are seeking DNA evidence.

The literal, and figurative, exhumations of the past are the result of increasing black political power and younger, more enlightened whites, said Susan M. Glisson, the director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi. "It represents a maturing South," she said.

In Philadelphia, the case against Mr. Killen will be tried by the Neshoba County district attorney, Mark Duncan, and the state attorney general, Jim Hood, who are serving their first terms in office.

Revisiting '64 Civil Rights Deaths, This Time in a Murder Trial, NYT, June 12, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/national/12civil.html

According to testimony at the 1967 trial, Mr. Killen was not present at the killings but masterminded them. The three civil rights workers went to Neshoba County to inspect the Mount Zion United Methodist Church, a black church that had been burned by the Klan the preceding week. They were stopped for speeding by Cecil R. Price, a deputy sheriff, and taken to the Philadelphia jail.

Deputy Price, according to testimony, was himself a Klan member and held the three for hours until a mob could gather. Mr. Killen, witnesses said, a preacher and local Klan leader, summoned Klansmen and chose the killing and burial sites. Eleven members of the jury wanted to convict him, but there was one holdout - a woman who said she could "never convict a preacher."

For years, the case was closed. Mr. Dearman, who is a former editor and publisher of The Neshoba Democrat, said the prevailing opinion among whites was that it was best to let time erode the painful memories of that era. But the stories refused to be forgotten. Standing at the site of the killings, Mr. Dearman said, "I have brought literally hundreds of people over 40 years here."

In 1988, the killings were dramatized in the film "Mississippi Burning." The killings were not just a stain on Neshoba County's image - they were Neshoba County's image.

The first suggestions that the case could be revisited came at a 25th anniversary observance of the killings in 1989 at Mount Zion, where Secretary of State Dick Molpus offered the first apology by a Mississippi official to the families of the victims.

Even at that late date, his remark is widely seen as having wounded his political career. In 1995, during Mr. Molpus's unsuccessful run for governor, his opponent, Gov. Kirk Fordice, won cheers at the Neshoba County Fair when he said, "I don't think we need to keep running this state by 'Mississippi Burning,' apologizing for what happened 30 years ago."

Over time, however, the idea of reopening the case picked up steam, with the help of a report in The Clarion-Ledger, a Jackson newspaper, that one of those convicted in 1967, Sam Bowers, had boasted to a state archivist that the "main instigator" of the Philadelphia killings had gone free. Later Mr. Bowers, since convicted in the killing of Vernon Dahmer, a prominent civil rights worker, confirmed to the state authorities that he had been referring to Mr. Killen.

In 1999, Mr. Hood's predecessor, Mike Moore, reopened the case. But the evidence, which included 40,000 pages from the F.B.I., was daunting, and the investigation wore on. In 2001, Mr. Price, the former deputy sheriff, who was reportedly cooperating with the authorities, died in a fall from a cherry picker.

Revisiting '64 Civil Rights Deaths, This Time in a Murder Trial, NYT, June 12, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/national/12civil.html

Meanwhile, another group formed in Neshoba County to observe the 40th anniversary of the killings. The Philadelphia Coalition included the mayor, the publisher of The Neshoba Democrat, elders from the Mount Zion church and other leaders. This time, they did more than plan an event. They called for the state to take action. At the time, only a plaque at the Mount Zion church memorialized the three victims. The coalition published a tour guide detailing all the sites related to the killings and the civil rights movement in the county.

To some residents, these actions were long overdue. Deborah Posey, who was once related by marriage to a defendant in the 1967 trial, joined the coalition. "It was what I'd been wanting and what I'd been praying here for years," Ms. Posey said. "That they would say, 'This took place here; we're not going to hide it any more. We're going to deal with it.' "

But others resisted, questioning the necessity of bringing up the case. Hugh Thomasson, a local businessman, suggested in a letter to The Neshoba Democrat, that the victims had been "outside troublemakers." He added: "The media has profited for four decades by smearing Neshoba County and Mississippi. I ask, 'When is enough enough?' "

In January, the state attorney general, Mr. Hood, convened a grand jury and presented evidence against eight of the original defendants still living, a spokesman said. According to news reports, at least two of them testified. The jury returned an indictment against Mr. Killen. Shortly afterward, Mr. Killen, a sawmill operator, was hit by a falling tree and hospitalized. The trial, set for March, was postponed until June 13.

Jim Prince, a co-chairman of the Philadelphia Coalition and the current editor and publisher of The Neshoba Democrat, estimates that about 70 percent of the county's residents now support re-examining the case.

Still, as the town prepares for droves of reporters, closed-off streets and even, potentially, white supremacist demonstrators, there is an air of stoicism.

"They should have done it 40 years ago," said Teresa Pace, an owner of Stribling Printing, on the courthouse square. "If they'd done the right thing then, they wouldn't have to be fussing with it now."

While many whites view the trial as a chance to show that Philadelphia has changed, many blacks, like Elsie Kirksey, a police dispatcher, see it slightly differently. "The trial is a starting point," said Ms. Kirksey, who is in the coalition. "We can't get a miracle out of the trial. One trial can't change Neshoba County. Although, it can help."

    Revisiting '64 Civil Rights Deaths, This Time in a Murder Trial, NYT, June 12, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/12/national/12civil.html?

Black lynching victim's body reburied in Illinois

Sat Jun 4, 2005 4:40 PM ET
Reuters

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Relatives on Saturday reburied Emmett Till, the black teenager lynched in Mississippi 50 years ago, following an autopsy that might yield clues to an unsolved murder that helped spark the U.S. civil rights movement.

The burial took place at the Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois, about 25 miles from Chicago, a spokesman for the cemetery said.

The FBI exhumed Till's body on Wednesday in a bid to shed light on a crime that symbolized the raw history of race relations in America.

Autopsy results were sent from the Cook County Medical Examiner in Illinois to prosecutors in Greenville, Mississippi, where charges could be brought.

Simeon Wright, a cousin of Till's who was there when the youth was dragged from his bed, said the FBI has not discussed the autopsy results with him.

But officials have said "I'll be very pleased," he added.

The Justice Department announced a year ago it was reopening the case. The federal statute of limitations has expired, but information gleaned from the probe could lead to state charges.

In reviewing the case, the FBI determined that no autopsy had been performed.

Till was 14 and living in Chicago in the summer of 1955 when he visited relatives in Mississippi, then the heart of the segregated American South. He allegedly whistled at and talked to a white woman in a store, for which he was kidnapped and killed.

OPEN CASKET

His battered body turned up in the Tallahatchie River near Money, Mississippi, weighed down by a cotton gin fan tied with barbed wire to his neck. He appeared to have been tortured and shot.

Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley, ordered his disfigured face displayed in an open coffin in Chicago. It was viewed by tens of thousands of people and photographs brought the horrors of lynchings to millions.

Two white men, one of them married to the woman with whom Till was said to have whistled at, were charged with his killing and acquitted by an all-white Mississippi jury.

The men later described in a magazine interview how they had beaten Till. But the two could not be tried again because they had been acquitted. Both are now dead.

Lawmakers, family members and civil rights groups such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had urged the Justice Department to reopen the case.

A new documentary film, "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till," has turned up witnesses to the crime that indicate others were involved in his abduction and torture.

The director, Keith Beauchamp, said he thinks as many as 14 people, including five blacks, played a role.

"There is forensic evidence that we believe would bring others to justice," said Beauchamp, speaking after a screening of his film in New York. (Additional reporting by Cal Mankowski)

    Black lynching victim's body reburied in Illinois, R, Sat Jun 4, 2005 4:40 PM ET, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-06-04T204036Z_01_N04298583_RTRIDST_0_USREPORT-CRIME-LYNCHING-DC.XML

After 50 Years, Emmett Till's Body Is Exhumed

June 2, 2005
New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY and GRETCHEN RUETHLING

CHICAGO, June 1 - Fifty years after Emmett Till's swollen, battered body was pulled from the muck of the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi, it was removed from the ground once more on Wednesday, carried away from a quiet cemetery in south suburban Chicago for an autopsy at last.

Three relatives of Emmett, the 14-year-old black Chicagoan whose killing helped galvanize the civil rights movement, gathered before dawn at the Burr Oak Cemetery in the town of Alsip, listened to a preacher say a prayer and stood by as a backhoe dug into the earth. Before noon, a concrete vault that contained the metal coffin bearing the remains was driven off on a flatbed truck, surrounded by squad cars, to the office of the Cook County medical examiner.

Federal authorities ordered the exhumation as part of their new investigation into Emmett's kidnapping and death, one of more than 20 cases of killings in the Jim Crow South that have been reopened in recent years. The new inquiries have been prompted by a new generation of prosecutors and investigators, by the work of historians and filmmakers, by witnesses who have unexpectedly come forward and, simply, by the interest that has grown with each new investigation.

The Till inquiry is aimed at determining who might have been involved in Emmett's killing other than the two men who were acquitted of it by an all-white jury but who later told Look magazine that they were responsible. Both are now dead.

The authorities said Wednesday that the autopsy would confirm, once and for all, the identity of the body in Emmett's grave and, they hope, determine the cause of his death and identify any remaining evidence that might link him to his killers. Although he was beaten beyond recognition - and is believed to have been shot - there is little question that the body is his. Still, an autopsy was never done, for reasons that have since grown obscure.

"Someone asked me if I was sad today," said Simeon Wright, a first cousin of Emmett's mother who waited at the grave site on Wednesday. "I was sad in 1955. My heart was broken then."

"But now I'm not sad," Mr. Wright said, adding, "We are almost at the end of it."

Mr. Wright, now 62, was sharing a room with Emmett on Aug. 28, 1955, the night when, accused of whistling at a white woman, he was taken from a relative's Mississippi home, where they were staying.

"The last time I saw him, some men were forcing him to get out of bed and get his clothes on, and that was it," Mr. Wright said. "I never dreamed we would finally get to this day."

With the passing of time, the Till case had become mostly just a memory to many, one chapter of a fading struggle. Then, last year, after two filmmakers made separate documentaries on the case, the Justice Department announced that it was opening a new investigation. Prosecutors said information uncovered in the making of the documentaries had disclosed that people in addition to the two acquitted defendants, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, might also have been involved.

On Wednesday, in a telephone interview from New York, Keith Beauchamp, one of the filmmakers, said of the exhumation: "This was a day that we hoped for. This is something that I prayed for for a long period of time."

At the cemetery in Alsip, the mood was tense and somber on Wednesday morning. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation shrouded the burial site in a white tent so that outsiders could not watch. Reporters were held at the cemetery gates. No one spoke during the digging, said Arthur Everett of the bureau's Chicago office.

Mr. Everett said he was uncertain how long the medical examiner's investigation would take.

At the trial of Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam, half a century ago, their lawyers suggested that the body recovered from the river might not even have been Emmett's and that he might be alive somewhere. On Wednesday, Frank Bochte, an F.B.I. spokesman, said: "The first and foremost thing we're trying to do is to put to rest any theories that the body inside there is not Emmett Till. We would like to settle that issue once and for all."

Beyond that, the authorities said they were uncertain precisely how much they would be able to learn about the killers and the cause of death from remains so old.

Once the examination is complete, the remains will be returned to Emmett's family, to bury again.

In recent weeks, the question of exhumation had become a matter of debate within the family. At least one member of the extended family, Bertha Thomas, speaking in early May, publicly expressed concern about any need for it.

On Wednesday, though, Emmett's relatives said they were united.

"The family talked about it," said Crosby Smith Jr., one of the three relatives who stood by for more than three hours at the cemetery. "The family's in agreement."

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had been alongside Ms. Thomas as she expressed her doubts, said Wednesday that he supported the family's agreement on the question but that he wondered why the authorities had taken so long to investigate properly.

"In pursuing this 50 years later, it just leaves you with questions," Mr. Jackson said. "Justice delayed is justice denied."

    After 50 Years, Emmett Till's Body Is Exhumed, NYT, 2.6.2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/02/national/02till.html?

Body of black lynching victim exhumed in Illinois

Wed Jun 1, 2005 1:02 PM ET
Reuters

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The FBI on Wednesday exhumed the body of a black teenager killed in a Mississippi lynching 50 years ago, hoping to shed light on an unsolved crime that symbolized the raw history of race relations in America.

A burial vault with a casket containing the body of Emmett Till was unearthed with the help of a backhoe beneath a white tent over his grave site. Family members held a brief prayer service there beforehand inside a quiet suburban cemetery near Chicago.

In the summer of 1955 Till was 14 and living in Chicago when he visited relatives in Mississippi, then the very heart of the segregated Old South. He allegedly whistled at and talked to a white woman in a store, for which he was kidnapped and killed.

His battered body turned up in the Tallahatchie River near Money, Mississippi, weighed down by a cotton gin fan tied with barbed wire to his neck. He appeared to have been tortured and shot.

Two white men, one of them married to the woman with whom Till allegedly flirted, were charged with his killing but acquitted by an all-white Mississippi jury.

The men later described in a magazine interview how they had beaten Till but the two could not be tried again because they had been acquitted.

Both are now dead but a recent documentary, "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till," by New York filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, turned up witnesses to the crime who indicated several people were involved.

The FBI is looking for evidence to see if its possible to still bring charges at the state level. It was not clear, however, what the exhumation would accomplish beyond proving that the body is that of Till, and some experts have said it was likely to yield little else. No autopsy was ever performed.

In announcing its investigation a year ago the U.S. Justice Department said it had received new information and wanted to determine if any prosecutions were still possible in Mississippi.

At the time one official called the Till case a "grotesque miscarriage of justice" that still "stands at the crossroads of the American civil rights movement."

Till's burial vault was placed on a flatbed truck, covered with a blue tarp, and hauled away to the Cook County morgue for an examination.

After his death Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley, ordered her son's disfigured face displayed in an open coffin in Chicago. She died in 2003 and was buried next to her son.

His body was viewed by tens of thousands of people and photographs carried the horrors of lynchings in the American South to millions.

His death and a subsequent bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, triggered by Rosa Parks' refusal to give up her seat, together helped spur the civil rights movement.

The Chicago Historical Society, which is opening an exhibit on lynchings in America, said experts have been unable to determine how many hate crime-related deaths occurred in the country's history but they are believed to number "in the thousands."

    Body of black lynching victim exhumed in Illinois, R, Wed Jun 1, 2005 1:02 PM ET, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2005-06-01T170232Z_01_N0140129_RTRIDST_0_USREPORT-CRIME-LYNCHING-DC.XML

Burning crosses signal return of Ku Klux Klan

28 May 2005
The Independent
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington

Police in Durham, North Carolina, have launched an investigation after three crosses were set alight in one night - triggering fears that the Ku Klux Klan may have targeted the city. Yellow leaflets, purportedly produced by the KKK, were found at the site of one of the burning crosses.

While burning crosses have long been associated with the Klan, people in Durham said this was the first time for a generation that such an incident had been reported in the city. Students of the Klan also say that it is vastly reduced in its membership and influence from 40 years ago. It may be that the crosses were simply set ablaze by pranksters.

"At this day and time, I thought we'd be beyond that," said the city's mayor, Bill Bell. "People do things for different reasons, and I don't have the slightest idea why anyone would do this."

The first burning was reported at around 9.20pm outside one of the city's churches, the second 40 minutes later next to a construction site and the third half-an-hour later at an intersection in the city centre. Each cross was around 7ft tall and 4ft across. They had all been wrapped in sacking and doused with kerosene. "We're working with the FBI in investigating this, but right now we don't have any leads," said Kammi Michael, a spokesperson for the Durham Police Department. Durham's population of around 200,000 is evenly split between white and black and the city has long enjoyed a reputation for having little racial friction. Mr Bell, who entered politics in 1972, said that even after the assassination of Martin Luther King which sparked riots elsewhere across the country, the city was able to remain relatively calm.

But observers say that even today the KKK retains a strong presence in parts of the US South, where there are said to be between 30 and 50 cross burnings reported every year. Many of them are known to be carried out by the Klan.

Joe Roy, chief investigator for the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Centre, an Alabama-based campaign group, said that North Carolina had 37 active "hate groups", including neo-Confederate and neo-Nazi organisations. Of all of these, the Klan is most active.

"You've got a lot of Klan presence in North Carolina - always have," said Mr Roy. "Something may have touched them off." In recent weeks there have been other reports of KKK leaflets being distributed across the South. In Philadelphia, Mississippi, where in two weeks the trial is due to start of an 80-year-old former Klan member accused of organising the 1964 killing of three civil rights workers, leaflets apparently printed by the KKK were discovered two weeks ago.

In Durham, part of North Carolina's prosperous "technology triangle", local people have been holding vigils since the burning crosses were discovered on Wednesday evening.

"I think that the community is bringing itself together. I've heard nothing negative, just shock from everyone," said Mayor Bell.

Theresa El-Amin, director of the Southern Anti-Racism Network, which organised a community meeting, told the Raleigh News and Observer newspaper: "People in Durham are not going to let this go down. This is a mean and evil thing."

    Burning crosses signal return of Ku Klux Klan, I, 28.5.2005, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=642006

Old South racism lives on

in Big Easy's Bourbon Street

20 May 2005
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
The Independent

On Bourbon Street in New Orleans, the drinks flow freely and the good times come easy. Depending, that is, on the colour of your skin. The famous thoroughfare that runs through the heart of the city's historic French Quarter has long drawn tourists in search of strong cocktails, relaxed by-laws that permit drinking in the street and the chance to flash one's chest for the prize of a string of gaudy beads.

But the street's reputation as a bastion of bawdy fun has been damaged by a report that suggests there is still more than a whiff of Old South attitudes in the city known as the Big Easy. An undercover study found black drinkers at Bourbon Street bars were likely to be over-charged for drinks and hassled more by doormen than white customers.

"Man, it's as if New Orleans was stuck in the 1950s and 1960s, in terms of race relations," Mayor Ray Nagin told reporters. "We come together for Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest; we like to party together. But on economic issues, school issues, things like that, we're still far apart."

The study was commissioned by Mr Nagin's office amid claims of racial discrimination after the death of a black college student, Levon Jones, who was involved in a scuffle with white bouncers at a Bourbon Street establishment, the Razzoo Bar and Patio, on New Year's Eve.

Although the broad findings of the report have been published this year, the city had declined to "name and shame" the bars and clubs found to have been discriminating. These were made public this week only after a copy was passed to the local newspaper.

The newspaper, The Times-Picayune, said the undercover study, using black and white testers, found that at 15 bars on Bourbon Street black customers were either charged more for drinks or were hassled by doormen.

At the Tropical Isle, for instance, a black tester was charged $8 (£4.36) for a Long Island Iced Tea for which his white colleague, buying his separately, was charged $6.75. At The Blues Club the price ranged from $9 to $7.25, depending on whether the tester was black or white.

At other clubs, black customers were treated less hospitably than white customers and were often told to tuck in their shirts or take off their baseball caps. The study found the greatest disparity was at the 735 Club where the black testers were charged a $10 fee at the door with the promise that the cover charge would include unlimited free drinks. Inside, they were told there was no such deal and all drinks would have to be paid for.

The reaction of management at the bars named in the report has ranged from outrage to denial. "You've got to be kidding," said Tracy Lemarie, head bartender at Fritzel's Bar, which was accused of charging a black tester $1 more than his white colleague. "I just don't believe that. I don't care who you are, what colour you are or what language you speak, and I'm on my girls all the time about that. If it happens again, I hope people tell us about it and those employees will be gone." Larry Bagneris, the executive director of the city's human relations commission, said yesterday that 300 French Quarter employees recently attended the first of three sensitivity training seminars.

He told The Independent: "It's not good for our reputation but what has been good is the response. People are committed to coming together and finding out what is wrong. We got a black eye but every black eye can heal."

Mr Jones died after he and friends tried to enter the Razzoo Bar. Details are disputed but a lawsuit said Mr Jones intervened to help a friend who was refused entry. Mr Jones was pinned to the ground by doormen and died. A post-mortem examination showed that he was suffocated by a choke hold. Three men have been charged.

    Old South racism lives on in Big Easy's Bourbon Street, I, 20 May 2005, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=639787

Malcolm X at prayer

in New York City, circa 1963

NYT

19.5.2005

Photograph: Robert L. Haggins/Schomburg Center

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/19/arts/design/19malccut.html?hp

The Personal Evolution of a Civil Rights Giant        NYT        19.5.2005

Malcolm X at a rally in Harlem, circa 1963.

Photograph: Robert L. Haggins/Schomburg Center

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/19/arts/design/19malccut.html?hp

The Personal Evolution of a Civil Rights Giant        NYT        19.5.2005

The Personal Evolution of a Civil Rights Giant

May 19, 2005
New York Times
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

In the 1940's, Malcolm Little a k a Detroit Red (and, later, a k a Malcolm X, a k a El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) wanted to impress co-conspirators in petty crime with his ruthlessness and daring. He loaded his pistol with a single bullet, twirled the cylinder, put the muzzle to his head and fired. The gesture demonstrated that he was unafraid of death and therefore not afraid of much else. And when he recounts the story in his 1965 autobiography ("as told to" Alex Haley), the reader is also impressed - though evidence of his brilliance, fury and self-destructiveness is, by then, hardly necessary.

A new exhibition about Malcolm X opens at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture today (which would have been his 80th birthday). And though it doesn't mention this theatrical gesture in its survey of one of the most significant black leaders in American history, Malcolm's public displays of passion and position sometimes seem as courageous, dangerous, and even, yes, foolish, as his game of Russian roulette.

The exhibition, "Malcolm X: A Search for Truth," seeks to map out the major themes of his life in a "developmental journey" reflecting his "driving intellectual quest for truth." It offers evidence that has been unavailable: personal papers, journals, letters, lecture outlines - rescued from being sold at auction in San Francisco and on eBay in 2002.

Those papers, which the Shabazz family had lost control of when monthly fees for a commercial storage facility were left unpaid, were returned to them, and then lent for 75 years to the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center in Harlem. The documents are lightly sampled in this first public showing, but they will eventually offer greater insight into Malcolm X's developmental journey: from child of a Black Nationalist father murdered in his prime, to a star elementary school pupil in a largely white school; to a hustler and criminal; to a convert, while in prison, to Elijah Muhammad's eccentric brand of Islam; to a radical minister who built Muhammad's Nation of Islam into a major national movement, declaring the white race to be the devil incarnate; and finally, to a political leader who, cut off by Muhammad, turned to traditional Islam and was rethinking his views, just as he was assassinated in New York's Audubon Ballroom in 1965 at the age of 39.

His brief life stands as a challenge no matter one's perspective, an overweening presence in the roiling currents of American racial debates. After all, Islam is a force in the American black community partly because of Malcolm X (who, after his 1964 hajj to Mecca, changed his name to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz). Advocates of reparations for slavery echo his arguments. Less radically, so do believers in the encouragement of black-run businesses and schools. And by seeking to internationalize race, particularly in the mid-1960's, Malcolm X helped set the stage for the doctrines of Third Worldism, which asserts that Western enslavement of dark-skinned peoples is played out on a world scale.

Even those who dissent from such views can recognize in Malcolm X's fearsome intelligence and self-discipline a kind of a developmental quest, ultimately left incomplete. The exhibition, which also includes material from the Schomburg and other collections, tells that story chronologically, using textual summaries and photographs to create a context for the personal papers.

Those papers include letters from Malcolm to his brother, Philbert Little, describing his first embrace of the Nation of Islam, as well as a disturbing sequence of letters about his final embrace, suggesting how Muhammad tried to rein him in. And above the display cases, the walls are lined with photographs chronicling the life: an elementary-school photograph of Malcolm, glimpses of the bodies of Nation of Islam followers killed by Los Angeles police in 1962, views of halls packed with devoted listeners, and finally, glimpses of the fallen chairs and stark disorder of the Audubon Ballroom after Malcolm X was murdered. An epilogue to the exhibition displays court drawings of the trial of the accused assassins, along with objects found on his body, including a North Vietnamese stamp showing an American helicopter getting shot down.

But, despite the new personal documents, there is something familiar about the exhibition, which does not offer new interpretations and misses an opportunity to delve more deeply into the difficulties in Malcolm's quest. In his autobiography, Malcolm X spoke of the importance of speaking the "raw, naked truth" about the nature of race relations. He also recognized one of the tragic consequences of enslavement: the erasure of the past. The name "X" was provided to initiates as a stand in for a lost original name. Names could also be readily changed because they were little more than expressions of newly formed identities.

In fact, invention became crucial. For Malcolm X, it was a matter of control: mastering one's past, determining one's character and, finally, controlling one's future. Documents describe how members of the Nation of Islam were expelled for any backsliding, including adultery. In one letter, Malcolm almost provides a motto for his kind of charismatic discipline:

"For one to control one's thoughts and feelings means one can actually control one's atmosphere and all who walks into its sphere of influence."

But this also means that the truth can seem less crucial than the kind of identity being constructed, the kind of past being invented. After reading the autobiography, we learn from Alex Haley's epilogue that Malcolm actually confessed that his story of Russian roulette was not what it seemed: he had palmed the bullet. Everybody had been hustled, the readers included. The adoption of Nation of Islam ideology, with its invented history and its evil scientist named Yacub breeding the white race, is another kind of hustle.

Curiously, the exhibition itself doesn't make enough of such distinctions. In a wall display, labeled "Messengers of Hope and Liberation," major figures like W. E. B. Du Bois have no more stature than such figures as Wallace D. Fard. Fard was the greater influence on Malcolm X, since he created the Nation of Islam mythology, but he may not have had any African heritage at all and, as Karl Evanzz argues in his recent book, "The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad," he had even encouraged the practice of human sacrifice.

As if reluctant to be too judgmental, there is also not enough explanation of the quarrel with Elijah Muhammad, though the photographer Gordon Parks quoted Malcolm X saying, just before his death: "I did many things as a Muslim that I'm sorry for now. I was a zombie then - like all Muslims - I was hypnotized, pointed in a certain direction and told to march. Well, I guess a man's entitled to make a fool of himself if he's ready to pay the cost. It cost me 12 years."

That kind of statement is too blunt for this exhibition, which makes suggestions but seems reluctant to draw too many distinctions. But even the differing interpretations of Malcolm's final transformation might have been outlined with more clarity. It is intriguing to read, in one 1964 letter from Malcolm's office to Martin Luther King Jr., an expression of apology for "unkind things" said in the past. And the trial of the accused assassins from the Nation of Islam merits more explanation, particularly because a conspiracy theory of F.B.I. involvement has long simmered, even as Muhammad was known to have encouraged threats against Malcolm X and had already sent one disciple to kill him. The quest for truth, surely, goes on, but part of it means facing squarely the extent of certain kinds of hustle.

"Malcolm X: A Search for Truth" is at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, 515 Lenox Avenue, at 135th Street, Harlem, (212) 491-2200, through Dec. 31.

    The Personal Evolution of a Civil Rights Giant, New York Times, May 19, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/19/arts/design/19malccut.html

F.B.I. Will Exhume

the Body of Emmett Till for an Autopsy

May 5, 2005
The New York Times
By GRETCHEN RUETHLING

CHICAGO, May 4 - The F.B.I. said on Wednesday that it would exhume the body of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old black Chicagoan whose killing 50 years ago in the segregated South helped fuel the civil rights movement, to determine the cause of his death.

The plans come one year after federal prosecutors and the authorities in Mississippi reopened the investigation, prompted in part by two documentary films about the crime.

During the investigation, officials discovered that an autopsy had never been performed and the cause of death had never been determined, said Deborah Madden, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. in Jackson, Miss. Officials plan to exhume the body, which is buried in Alsip, Ill., a Chicago suburb, this month. The plans were first reported on Wednesday by The Chicago Sun Times.

"I truly believe there's forensic evidence that could possibly link others who were involved," said Keith Beauchamp, 33, of New York, one of the two filmmakers whose documentaries revived interest in the case. "I'm hoping it will bring justice for the family and bring them closure."

Emmett, who was raised in Chicago, was kidnapped, beaten, shot to death and dropped in the Tallahatchie River in 1955, reportedly after he whistled at a white woman in Money, Miss., while visiting relatives.

Two white men who were acquitted in the case by an all-white jury and later confessed to the crime in a magazine interview. Both are now dead, but Mr. Beauchamp said that as many as 10 other people, 5 of whom are still alive, might have taken part in the killing and could still be prosecuted.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, one of the members of Congress who joined Mr. Beauchamp in urging federal officials to reopen the investigation, said every stone should be turned over to bring those responsible for the murder to justice.

"In this rare instance, justice delayed will not be justice denied," Mr. Schumer said. "We cannot afford to wait, because the witnesses and potential defendants are getting much older."

About 22 cases of killings in the civil rights era have been reopened in the South since 1989, said Andrew Blejwas, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group based in Alabama that monitors hate crimes. These investigations have led to 25 arrests and 16 convictions, Mr. Blejwas said.

    F.B.I. Will Exhume the Body of Emmett Till for an Autopsy, NYT, May 5, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/05/national/05exhume.html

Illinois White Supremacist Given 40-Year Sentence

Wed Apr 6, 2005 05:06 PM ET
Reuters

CHICAGO (Reuters) - White supremacist Matthew Hale was sentenced on Wednesday to 40 years in prison for plotting to assassinate a federal judge whose husband and elderly mother were later slain by a another man angry at the judge.

Hale, 33, a neo-Nazi who preached racist rhetoric as leader of his Illinois-based group, "World Church of the Creator," was convicted a year ago of soliciting the murder of U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow.

Hale's solicitation to have Lefkow murdered was characterized as terrorism by prosecutors, who urged U.S. District Judge James Moody to levy the harshest possible sentence.

Hale, a law school graduate acting as his owned attorney, said no crime had been committed and insisted he be sentenced to eight years or less.

Lefkow had presided over a trademark case that stripped Hale's group of its name and resulted in fines that led Hale to ask his security chief, an FBI informant who secretly taped their conversations, to kill her.

When Lefkow's husband and mother were murdered Feb. 28, Hale's followers were immediately considered suspects.

But nine days later, unemployed electrician and cancer patient Bart Ross committed suicide during a traffic stop. Evidence indicated he committed the murders while planning to kill Lefkow and others he blamed for not taking his claims of medical malpractice seriously.

During the murder investigation, the imprisoned Hale released a message through his mother saying neither he nor his followers had anything to do with the crime.

In 1999, a member of the group incensed that Hale had been denied a law license went on a shooting spree throughout the U.S. Midwest targeting minorities in which he killed two people. Hale also denied having any advance knowledge of that rampage.

    Illinois White Supremacist Given 40-Year Sentence, R, Wed Apr 6, 2005 05:06 PM ET, http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=KG0H0NBKUHXY2CRBAEKSFFA?type=domesticNews&storyID=8106736

Californian jails end racial segregation

25 February 2005
The Independent
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

Forty years after the great civil rights battles in the American South, one of the last bastions of formal racial segregation in the United States is set to topple, following a Supreme Court ruling decrying the California prison system's practice of separating black, Latino and white inmates.

The nation's highest court said the principle at stake was the same that led to a landmark ruling in 1954 ordering school desegregation - the idea that there is no way to separate people and say meaningfully that they still enjoy equal rights under the law. "We rejected the notion that separate can ever be equal ... 50 years ago in Brown vs Board of Education," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said in the majority ruling, "and we refuse to resurrect it today."

The Supreme Court stopped short of declaring prison segregation to be unconstitutional, referring the case back to the federal appeals court. But the 25-year-old Californian policy of sorting inmates by race on admission to the prison system is almost certainly doomed - only the timing remains in doubt.

The case carries considerable significance since California has by far the largest state prison system in the US, with some 160,000 inmates, and has also grappled for the past 40 years with an explosion in violent, racially based prison gangs.

State prison officials argue that because the existence of gangs such as the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican Mafia and the Black Guerrilla Family, many of whose members they say would rape, assault or kill a member of a different race given half a chance, keeping them apart is the only way to prevent anarchy.

Proponents of desegregation, however, say race-based separation exacerbates the problem and deepens the inter-racial animus. "Indeed, evidence demonstrates that integrating inmates reduces all forms of prison violence," Senator Gloria Romero, who has been leading the anti-segregation charge, wrote recently.

Bert Deixler, the lawyer who took the case to the Supreme Court on behalf of a black inmate appalled by the blanket discrimination he found on entering prison, argued that the California policy was discriminatory and wrong-headed, since it relied on racial stereotyping to make certain assumptions about inmates.

"You can look at gang membership as a basis for special treatment," he said, "but you can't look at people coming off the bus and say, 'Blacks go through that door and whites go through the other door'. This policy assumes if you are of a certain race, you have a penchant for interracial violence."

Nobody is underestimating the bewildering problem of California's prison gang culture, which is a reflection of and a breeding ground for street gangs in Los Angeles, Oakland and elsewhere. The Mexican Mafia, also known as La Eme, dates back to the 1950s, and is now a thriving presence on the streets as well as behind bars, involved in drug trafficking, money-laundering, prostitution and many other rackets.

Its main rival is another Mexican gang called Nuestra Familia, based in northern California. Although vendettas between the two are common, there is little or no evidence that either Latino gang holds grievances against other racial groups.

Of particular concern to prison officials was the creation of the Aryan Brotherhood in Folsom State Prison in the late 1960s, because anti-black violence was part of the gang's ideology from the start - including a reputed stipulation that killing a black man was the passport to entry into the gang.

Since then, California's increasingly overcrowded maximum security facilities have been racked by spasms of violence, including a fight that broke out 18 months ago in a private facility where black, Latino and white inmates hacked at each other with knives and meat cleavers stolen from the kitchen.

Last year, riots broke out in several prisons, including one jail where a Latino guard was stabbed to death by gang-affiliated inmates.

    I, 25.2.2005, http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=614533

Chef de Klan

Le 28 mars va se rouvrir le procès concernant trois meurtres perpétrés par le Ku Klux Klan en juin 1964 à Philadelphie (Mississippi). Un ancien prêtre baptiste va devoir répondre de ces crimes restés dans l'histoire américaine comme le symbole de la violence raciste opposée au mouvement des droits civiques.

Libération, 4 février 2005
Philadelphie (Mississippi), envoyé spécial
Par Fabrice ROUSSELOT

Recroquevillée sur sa chaise roulante, Mable Steele, 87 ans, a du mal à se souvenir de cette soirée du 20 juin 1964. C'est Jacqueline, sa fille, 8 ans à l'époque, qui raconte. «Je jouais devant la Mount Zion Church avec mon frère. On a entendu les camions du Ku Klux Klan de loin. Vite, on est allés prévenir nos parents dans l'église et tout le monde s'est précipité dans les voitures. Mais ils étaient déjà là. Moi, j'avais la tête baissée. Je n'ai vu que les cagoules. Je sais qu'ils ont demandé à mon père si "on avait vu les trois garçons". Après, ils ont tout brûlé.»

Les «trois garçons», le Klan ne mettra pas longtemps à les retrouver. James Chaney, un Noir de la région, Andrew Goodman et Michael Schwerner, deux jeunes Blancs new-yorkais, étaient tous venus dans la petite ville de Philadelphie, à l'est du Mississippi, dans le cadre d'une campagne visant à encourager la minorité noire à s'inscrire sur les listes électorales. Le lendemain, après être allés constater les dégâts à la Mount Zion Church, ils seront arrêtés par la police locale ­ officiellement pour «excès de vitesse». Sitôt relâchés, ils tombent dans une embuscade tendue par le Klan. Goodman et Schwerner sont tués par balles. Chaney, parce que noir, est battu à mort.

Depuis, ces meurtres, restés dans les mémoires comme les «Freedom Summer murders», ont hanté Philadelphie et ses 7000 habitants. Ils sont restés dans l'histoire américaine comme le symbole le plus marquant de la violence raciste qui s'est opposée au mouvement des droits civiques. En 1967, dix-huit suspects sont passés devant les tribunaux, toutefois sous la seule inculpation «d'atteintes aux droits civiques». Sept d'entre eux ont été condamnés à des peines ne dépassant pas dix ans de prison. Un prêtre baptiste du nom d'Edgar Ray Killen, considéré comme le leader du Klan dans la région, échappera à toute condamnation. Une jurée expliquera plus tard qu'elle n'avait pas pu se résoudre à envoyer un «homme de foi» derrière les barreaux.

Quarante ans plus tard, l'affaire vient de nouveau se rappeler à la mémoire de Philadelphie. Le 8 janvier dernier, après convocation d'un grand jury, l'Attorney General du Mississippi, Jim Hood, et le District Attorney de Neshoba County (le comté de Philadelphie, ndlr), Mark Duncan, ont prononcé à la surprise générale trois chefs d'inculpation pour meurtre contre Edgar Ray Killen, aujourd'hui âgé de 80 ans. Soulignant tous les deux «qu'il était temps que justice soit faite».

L'enquête, explique le procureur Mark Duncan, a été «activement» rouverte en 1999, après qu'un journal local a publié une interview de Sam Bowers, le leader des White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, l'une des organisations les plus puissantes du KKK à l'époque. Bowers, qui purge une peine de prison à vie pour un assassinat en 1966 dans une autre ville du Mississippi, déclarait alors que «cela ne le gênait pas d'être en prison car un autre leader du Klan avait échappé à la justice». Dès lors, le procureur Duncan allait réétudier quelque 44 000 pages de déclarations et de dépositions faites dans le cadre du procès de 1967. Sans compter les rapports du FBI qui avait investi Philadelphie en 1964 durant plus de quarante jours, avant de retrouver les corps de Chaney, Goodman et Schwerner enfouis dans la terre du Mississippi. «Je ne peux pas vous dire si nous possédons de nouveaux éléments à charge contre Killen, je peux vous dire cependant que nous avons fait notre maximum pour clore cette affaire, sans considérer les réactions des uns et des autres», conclut Mark Duncan.

«Comme un gros nuage»

Car les réactions n'ont pas manqué à Philadelphie. Lors de la comparution d'Edgar Ray Killen devant la cour, une alerte à la bombe a forcé à une évacuation des lieux. Le frère de l'accusé s'en est pris à la presse, en attaquant un cameraman. «Les meurtres ont toujours pesé sur la ville comme un gros nuage», raconte James Young, l'un des membres noirs du conseil de gouvernement de Neshoba County. «Si personne n'a été accusé de meurtre en 1967, c'est parce que les autorités du Mississippi ne le voulaient pas. Aujourd'hui, le procès nous oblige à nous demander où en sont vraiment les relations raciales dans le sud des Etats-Unis. Bien sûr, les choses ont évolué. Les KKK n'existent pratiquement plus par ici, les lois ont changé, mais jusqu'à quel point ? Il y a toujours de la discrimination, notamment économique, et les Noirs font toujours face à l'exclusion. Comme par hasard, les avis sur le procès sont radicalement différents dans les deux communautés.»

Le long de la départementale 492, au sud de Philadelphie, la county line Baptist Church domine les champs, posée sur une colline. Non loin de là se trouve Union, la ville d'Edgar Ray Killen. L'église a été un jour celle de l'ancien pasteur. Le nouveau, Robin Risher, hésite avant de parler, puis tente de s'expliquer. «Tout le monde nous traite de racistes, mais c'est faux.» Le procès ? «Je ne vois pas ce que cela va apporter. Il vaudrait mieux laisser tout cela dans le passé.» Le lendemain, au service du dimanche, devant une assemblée de paroissiens totalement blanche, le pasteur Risher se laisse aller un peu plus. «Une nouvelle fois, nous sommes face à une situation qui va créer des tensions raciales. A quoi bon ? Il y a quinze ans, Hollywood est venu nous faire la leçon (1). Aujourd'hui, ce sont des politiciens trop zélés qui pointent leur nez. Personne ne peut juger personne. Le seul juge, c'est Jésus notre Seigneur...»

A la sortie de la messe, personne ne veut commenter «l'affaire». Seul Wilbur Kiser, 79 ans, accepte. Natif du Kansas, il a passé les cinquante-deux dernières années de sa vie dans le comté de Neshoba. «Moi, assure-t-il, je n'ai jamais voulu entrer au KKK. Parce que j'ai toujours considéré que les Noirs devaient avoir les mêmes droits que les Blancs. Mais par ici, certains ont toujours des idées un peu particulières. Monsieur Killen a beaucoup de soutien.»

Quand il se présente, Edgar Ray Killen décrète d'emblée qu'il n'a «pas beaucoup de respect pour les médias». Sorti de prison le 12 janvier, après qu'un «ami» a hypothéqué sa maison pour couvrir sa caution de 250000 dollars, il attend son procès fixé au 28 mars et affirme qu'il «ne dira rien aux journalistes américains qui l'ont déjà condamné». A un quotidien français, il est prêt à donner sa version des faits et reçoit chez son avocat, Mitchell Moran. Chemise à carreaux et large chapeau de cow-boy posé à ses côtés, celui qui apparaît désormais comme un frêle grand-père nie tout en bloc. «Je n'ai jamais rencontré ces trois garçons et n'ai jamais appartenu au Ku Klux Klan, affirme-t-il. J'aurais des remords si j'avais fait quelque chose. Mais je suis en paix avec moi-même et avec Dieu.» Pourtant, quand on commence à évoquer les problèmes raciaux, l'avocat intervient pour demander que «l'on ne parle pas de Blancs ou de Noirs dans cette interview».

Tout à l'est de Philadelphie, au bout d'une route à peine bitumée, la Mount Zion Church est toujours là. Elle a été reconstruite après l'incendie. Mable et Jacqueline Steele vivent un peu plus loin, dans une modeste maison jaune. Tout le monde ici a la peau noire, et les bâtisses délabrées qui se succèdent dans les bois dégarnis en disent long sur les conditions économiques qui prévalent. «Peu importe l'âge des criminels, ce que nous voulons, c'est que la justice suive son cours, même après quarante ans», note Jacqueline.

«Mascarade de justice» selon les défenseurs

En réalité, depuis une dizaine d'années, le Mississippi et aussi l'Alabama ont décidé de rouvrir plusieurs affaires de meurtres ayant impliqué le Ku Klux Klan durant les années 1960, avec l'intention de tirer un trait sur le passé raciste du Sud américain. Quoique, souvent, les procès ne permettent pas de faire toute la lumière sur des faits vieux de plusieurs décennies. A Philadelphie, plusieurs dépositions de témoins en 1967 avaient accusé le shérif local, Lawrence Rainey, et son adjoint, Cecil Price, d'avoir prévenu le Klan de l'incarcération des trois militants. L'adjoint avait passé cinq ans en prison mais Rainey y avait échappé. Aujourd'hui, les deux hommes sont morts. Certains s'interrogent aussi sur le rôle de la police d'Etat du Mississippi ou de la Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, une commission fondée en 1956 pour «se protéger» du gouvernement fédéral et qui aurait conservé des dossiers secrets sur les activités du Klan dans la région. Les principaux acteurs cependant ne sont plus là. Selon Mitchell Moran, le défenseur d'Edgar Ray Killen, «c'est une mascarade de justice à laquelle on se prépare». En dehors de l'ancien pasteur, seuls sept des dix-huit inculpés de 1967 sont encore en vie. L'avocat affirme que l'accusation a bâti son dossier sur les témoignages de six d'entre eux, qui auraient participé au meurtre et assureraient que Killen a organisé l'assassinat sur l'ordre de Sam Bowers, le leader des White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Celuici aurait voulu la mort de Michael Schwerner, considéré comme un «dangereux activiste». «Si ce sont les meurtriers qui accusent mon client et s'ils ont obtenu la clémence des procureurs en l'échange de leurs témoignages, cela ne fait pas grand sens», conclut Mitchell Moran.

100 000 dollars de récompense

Devant des piles de dossiers, le District Attorney Mark Duncan assure que «de nombreuses pièces du puzzle se mettront en place avec l'ouverture du procès». Il n'exclut pas non plus que la comparution de Killen entraîne d'autres inculpations, alors qu'une récompense de 100 000 dollars a été promise pour toute nouvelle information. «Ce procès est nécessaire, parce qu'il va nous permettre d'aller de l'avant», soulignent en choeur James E. Prince et Leroy Clemons. Les deux hommes, respectivement rédacteur en chef blanc du Neshoba County Democrat, et président noir de la branche locale de la NAACP, l'organisation de défense des droits des Africains Américains, sont le symbole de l'image que veut désormais donner Philadelphie. Avec d'autres personnalités, ils ont fondé en 2004 la Philadelphia Coalition, une association multiraciale qui a pour but d'en finir une fois pour toutes avec les «Freedom Summer murders». «Tout n'est pas parfait, mais les relations entre les deux communautés sont bien meilleures. Les gens sont plus éduqués, moins ignorants et ont moins peur les uns des autres. Si on veut que les générations futures vivent en complète harmonie, alors il faut clore ce chapitre.»

C'est Martin Luther King Day à Philadelphie. Comme dans tout le pays, la ville célèbre la mémoire du leader noir assassiné. Au nord de la voie ferrée, ils sont une petite cinquantaine à avoir bravé le froid pour aller marcher dans rues. Il n'y a pas un seul des représentants blancs de la ville, uniquement des Noirs.

    Source : Libération, 4.2.2005, http://www.liberation.com/page.php?Article=273053

Allen Dulles leads the search:

Missing civil rights workers

Thursday June 25, 1964
The Guardian
From Hella Pick

New York, June 24

Four hundred members of the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee today started a 24-hour vigil outside the Federal Court House here in support of their plea for Federal protection for civil rights workers in Mississippi.

The move follows the disappearance of three of the committee's workers, two whites and one Negro, on Sunday from Philadelphia, Mississippi. Anxiety for them deepened after their burned-out car was found yesterday in a swamp a few miles outside Philadelphia. Today State police were joined by Federal agents in the search.

The Federal Government is deeply concerned not only for the three men but for the safety of the rest of the 900 students who plan to spend the summer on voter registration and other civil rights programmes in the recalcitrant segregationist State of Mississippi.

'Curious choice'

President Johnson has sent Mr Allen Dulles, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency, to lead the investigation. Some of the civil rights organisations see this as a curious choice, asserting that Mr Dulles has rarely shown himself as their friend.

The Attorney-General, Mr Robert Kennedy, has delayed the start of his visit to Europe, and is cutting Ireland out of the itinerary to return to the civil rights front.

President Johnson has been busy appealing privately and publicly today for restraint and co-operation to maintain a "society free from anarchy, violence, and disdain for the law." He has talked with Mississippi's Governor Johnson to reinforce his request for co-operation form the State police.

But the President is having a hard time making up his mind on the extent of Federal protection he can offer to Southern civil rights workers. He is fully aware that the political and practical implications of Federal intervention are formidable.

Physically, it would mean deploying vast armies of Federal police in the highways and byways of Mississippi to ensure unmolested movement for civil rights workers. Politically, such a move would be subject to the charge that the Federal Government was trying to take over responsibility for law-enforcements from the State Government.

This would add to the gravamen and appeals of Senator Goldwater and Alabama's Governor Wallace that the Federal Government was turning itself into a police State and encroaching fundamentally on the State's rights guaranteed under the Constitution.

But such arguments carry little weight with the civil rights organisations or with the relations of the three missing men. The parents of the two missing white students pleaded personally yesterday with President Johnson to intervene.

James Farmer, the head of CORE, one of the organisations working on the Mississippi summer project, has asked what kind of Administration could send White and Coloured Peace Corps workers all over the world and yet could not ensure the safety of young people engaged on similar community projects in their own country.

The three men are: Michael Schwerner, aged 24, of New York, who has been engaged for the past six months on a community project in Mississippi; Andrew Goodman, aged 20, a student form New York, and a Southern Negro, James E. Chaney, aged 21, a plasterer.

Nothing new

Some Mississippi officials have promptly asserted that the disappearance was staged by the civil rights organisations as a means of attracting attention to their project. This is discounted by the Administration and denied by the civil rights organisations.

A brief talk with leaders of the Students' committee confirms their anxiety for the missing men. The leaders have been pleading for Federal protection for weeks, knowing that the students would be harassed. They point out that there is nothing new in beatings, disappearances, and burnings in Mississippi.

That is why the local Negroes were so cowed; indeed the students' project was conceived not merely to teach Southern Negroes of their rights but also to give them some self-confidence.

    Allen Dulles leads the search : Missing civil rights workers, G, Thursday June 25, 1964, http://www.guardian.co.uk/fromthearchive/story/0,12269,1510640,00.html
 

Related

Mississippi Burning / Freedom Summer

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4729735,00.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4716602,00.html

Library of Congress > The Progress of a People

A Special Presentation

of the Daniel A. P. Murray Pamphlet Collection

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/aap/aapexhp.html

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aap/aaphome.html