History > 2006 > USA > Race relations (II)

Police Describe Seattle Shooting

as a Hate Crime

July 30, 2006
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

SEATTLE, July 29 — A day after a gunman killed one woman and wounded five others in the offices of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, the police identified a Muslim man on Saturday as the suspect and said he used the Internet to select the federation as a random target for his anger toward Jews.

As Jewish groups across the Puget Sound region moved to increase security on Saturday, the police identified the suspect as Naveed Afzal Haq, 30, whose family lives in Pasco, in southeast Washington, about 180 miles from Seattle.

At a court hearing on Saturday, a judge ordered Mr. Haq held on $50 million bail at the King County Jail pending formal charges of murder and attempted murder, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Haq entered the courtroom in handcuffs, chains and leg shackles, and a white jail shirt that labeled him an “ultra security inmate.”

The police are treating the shooting as a hate crime based on what they say Mr. Haq told a 911 dispatcher shortly before surrendering.

“He said he wanted the United States to leave Iraq, that his people were being mistreated and that the United States was harming his people,” Chief R. Gil Kerlikowske of the Seattle Police said Saturday at a news conference. “And he pointedly blamed the Jewish people for all of these problems. He stated he didn’t care if he lived.”

The chief said the gunman apparently selected the federation as a target by randomly searching the Internet for Jewish organizations in the area. The police confiscated at least three computers, he said.

Chief Kerlikowske described an intense and violent scene inside the federation, with some of the 18 people present jumping out of second-story windows and one young pregnant woman crawling to call 911 after being shot in the arm as she covered her abdomen. When the gunman later encountered her on the phone with emergency dispatchers, she refused to hang up.

“She was able to get him to take the telephone,” the chief said, calling her “a hero.”

A neighbor of Mr. Haq’s family in Pasco said Mr. Haq had spoken of Jews as recently as 10 days ago, sometimes using stereotypes about Jewish influence in the United States.

“He was saying he wasn’t trying to be racial about it but how they had control over a lot of the newscasts and things, ownership and stuff,” said the neighbor, Caleb Hales, 21.

Colleagues of the victims said the gunman had identified himself as “a Muslim-American” who was “angry at Israel.”

The A.P., citing a statement of probable cause, reported that Mr. Haq had told a 911 dispatcher, “These are Jews and I’m tired of getting pushed around and our people getting pushed around by the situation in the Middle East."

The Seattle Times reported Saturday that Mr. Haq was also facing a charge of lewd conduct in Benton County, in southeast Washington, accused of exposing himself in public.

The police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have said they believe Mr. Haq was acting alone.

The chief said the Mr. Haq “was so enraged at first” but later calmed down and followed the emergency dispatchers’ instructions to leave the building with his hands up. He surrendered to the police at the federation offices near downtown 12 minutes after the shootings were first reported to 911.

The police have not released the names of the victims, all women. Three of the survivors were in serious condition on Saturday and two were in satisfactory condition, according to the media relations office at the Harborview Medical Center. They range in age from their early 20’s to 40’s and had gunshot wounds in the knee, groin, abdomen and arm. Federation officials said the woman who was killed was Pam Waechter, 58, its director of annual giving.

Federation officials identified the wounded women as Dayna Klein, 37; Cheryl Stumbo, 43; Layla Bush, 23; and Carol Goldman, 35; and Christina Rexroad, whose age was not known.

Asked to describe her group’s general relations with area Muslim groups, Amy Wasser-Simpson, the federation’s vice president, said, “We have had no negative interactions with the Muslim community whatsoever.”

Robert S. Jacobs, regional director for the Pacific Northwest Region of the Anti-Defamation League, who knew several of the victims, said that the three with serious injuries are not Jewish, including Cheryl Stumbo, the federation’s marketing director.

“These were really good, hard-working people who cared about the community and cared about their jobs,” he said.

The gunman apparently hid behind a plant at the federation’s offices and waited for someone to enter the building, and then forced his way inside at gunpoint when a teenager opened a locked door, Chief Kerlikowske said. The gunman had two semiautomatic pistols.

A half-hour before the shooting, Mr. Haq was ticketed for a minor traffic infraction on Third Avenue, the same street where the federation has its offices, the chief said.

Mr. Hales, the neighbor of Mr. Haq’s family, said he spoke with Mr. Haq on July 20,. Mr. Hales, whose family is Mormon, said Mr. Haq had talked about finding a job, perhaps in engineering. The conversation wandered, Mr. Hales said, with Mr. Haq expressing curiosity about Mr. Hales’s religion. “He told me he would stay up late up at night reading about people’s religions and cultural backgrounds,” Mr. Hales said.

His mother, Maureen Hales, said she believed that the Haqs were originally from Pakistan and that Mr. Haq’s father, Mian Haq, was an engineer who worked at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

    Police Describe Seattle Shooting as a Hate Crime, NYT, 30.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/30/us/30seattle.html

In Speech to N.A.A.C.P., Bush Offers Reconciliation

July 21, 2006
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, July 20 — In his first speech to the N.A.A.C.P. since taking office in 2001, President Bush acknowledged on Thursday that “many African-Americans distrust my party,” and defended his record on domestic issues, including education, prescription drug coverage and Hurricane Katrina.

“I consider it a tragedy that the party of Abraham Lincoln let go of its historic ties with the African-American community,” said Mr. Bush, whose relations with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People have been so strained that, until Thursday, he was the first president since Herbert Hoover to refuse to address the group. “For too long my party wrote off the African-American vote, and many African-Americans wrote off the Republican Party.”

Saying that “history has prevented us from working together when we agree on great goals,” Mr. Bush said the goal should now be to transcend political divisions.

“I want to change the relationship,” he said.

The 33-minute speech was an exercise in bridge-building, intended partly to strengthen ties between Republicans and black voters and partly to reassure moderate white voters with a message of reconciliation. Though Mr. Bush received a standing ovation when he called on the Senate to renew the 1965 Voting Rights Act — it passed unanimously hours later — a somber silence fell over the room as the president discussed his policies on education, jobs and housing, which polls suggest are unpopular with blacks.

The president was booed when he raised the topic of charter schools and was also interrupted by a heckler who shouted about the Middle East. Mr. Bush ignored the outburst, forging ahead with his speech, though the ruckus when the man was ejected briefly drowned out him out.

Mr. Bush repeatedly referred to the group as the N-A-A-C-P, attracting some notice from those who use the more traditional pronunciation of N-double-A-C-P.

Yet Mr. Bush did get some laughs. He opened the speech with a well-received ice-breaker, referring to Bruce S. Gordon, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., whose overtures to Mr. Bush ended the president’s no-show status. In December, after Mr. Gordon met several times with Mr. Bush in the Oval Office, the N.A.A.C.P. extended its customary speaking invitation to Mr. Bush, and he accepted.

“Bruce is a polite guy,” Mr. Bush told the crowd after Mr. Gordon introduced him. “I thought what he was going to say is, ‘It’s about time you showed up.’ ”

Mr. Gordon later gave the speech a grade of B. Others were not so generous.

Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, said Mr. Bush had “scored when he said he looked forward to the Senate approving the Voting Rights Act.” But Mr. Lewis said it would be difficult for blacks to overcome their anger over the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, whose devastation disproportionately affected them.

“People cannot forget Katrina,” Mr. Lewis said. “It’s going to take some time.”

Another civil rights leader, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, said he spoke to Mr. Bush backstage after the speech and urged him to begin "a meaningful dialogue’’ with a broader range of black organizations.

“He said, ‘Well, talk with Karl Rove,’ ’’ Mr. Jackson said, referring to Mr. Bush’s chief political adviser.

Mr. Bush received 11 percent of the black vote in 2004, and his speech came against the backdrop of concerted efforts by Republicans, notably Ken Mehlman, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, to court black voters. But Tony Snow, the White House spokesman, dismissed the suggestion that Mr. Bush was engaging in partisan politics.

“The president has been walking the walk,” Mr. Snow said, adding, “This was not an attempt to curry votes for the Republican Party.”

Nonetheless, the courtship could be especially important this November, when Republicans are fielding black candidates for governor in Ohio and Pennsylvania and for the Senate in Maryland.

Despite Mr. Mehlman’s earlier efforts, which included a 2004 apology for what he described then as the racially polarized politics of some in his party, tensions between the White House and the N.A.A.C.P. persisted until Mr. Gordon, a former telecommunications executive, succeeded Kweisi Mfume as president in June 2005.

At that time, the organization, which must remain nonpartisan to keep its tax-exempt status, was facing an Internal Revenue Service inquiry after its chairman, Julian Bond, issued a harsh critique of the Bush administration. So far, no action has been taken, a spokesman for the group said.

Mr. Bond, who stood on the dais with Mr. Bush Thursday, once likened the president’s supporters to “the Taliban wing of American politics.” At the height of the tensions, the president said his relationship with the N.A.A.C.P. was “basically nonexistent.”

Time and again throughout his speech on Thursday, Mr. Bush returned to the theme of moving beyond disagreements toward reconciliation. “We’ll work together, and as we do so, you must understand I understand that racism still lingers in America,” the president said.

But while many in the audience gave him credit for simply showing up, some were skeptical. “He waited until the 11th hour of his presidency to come to us with all of his great plans of working together,” said Kathy Sykes, secretary of the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Jackson, Miss., adding, “We recognize rhetoric when we see it.”

Promoting what he views as his accomplishments, Mr. Bush said his administration had committed more than $110 billion to help hurricane victims on the Gulf Coast and increased financing for historically black universities by 30 percent. He also said the federal government paid more than 95 percent of the cost of prescription drugs for the nation’s poorest Medicare patients.

“Look, I understand that we had a political disagreement on the bill,” Mr. Bush said, referring to legislation that provided the drug benefit, adding, “The day is over of arguing about the bill.”

Mr. Bush also laced his speech with repeated personal references to prominent blacks. As he reminded his audience of the brief visit he paid recently to the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, he praised “the gentle wisdom” of his tour guide, Dr. Benjamin Hooks, the former N.A.A.C.P. executive director, who was seated in the audience.

“It’s good to see you again, sir,” Mr. Bush said.

When he spoke about home ownership, Mr. Bush invoked Robert L. Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television, and the Rev. Anthony T. Evans, a prominent African-American pastor in Dallas, calling both men his friends. When he spoke about the Voting Rights Act, he gave a nod to the secretary of state, saying, “Condi Rice understands what this has meant.”

One topic the president did not touch was the war in Iraq, an omission that Mr. Lewis said left him surprised and disappointed, given that many blacks serve in the military. The White House press secretary, Mr. Snow, said later that Mr. Bush “had a pretty full plate just walking through domestic policy.”

    In Speech to N.A.A.C.P., Bush Offers Reconciliation, NYT, 21.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/21/washington/21bush.html

Project to ID Blacks in Revolutionary War

July 20, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:05 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BOSTON (AP) -- Thousands of black men fought for American independence during the Revolutionary War, yet their contributions rarely appear in modern history books.

Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the Sons of the American Revolution are hoping to change that with an ambitious project to identify those soldiers and their descendants.

''My first goal with this project is to enhance the awareness of the American public of the role of African-Americans in the struggle for freedom in this country,'' said Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard.

''Plus, my concern is that there are many people walking around, like me, who had no idea that I had an ancestor who fought in the Revolution,'' he said.

Gates was inspired to begin the project after he learned he had a relative who fought in the Revolution during filming of the PBS documentary series ''African American Lives,'' which used DNA testing and genealogical research to investigate the ancestry of notable black Americans.

The project, funded by Harvard and the Sons of the American Revolution, will identify blacks believed to have fought in the war and encourage their descendants to come forward.

Joseph W. Dooley, the chairman of the Sons of the American Revolution's membership committee, said he wants to identify as many people as possible who contributed to the war. He envisions future projects tracking the contributions of women and Native Americans.

The descendants will be eligible to apply for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution or the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Of nearly 27,000 members of Sons of the American Revolution, fewer than 30 are black, said Jim Randall, executive director and chief executive of the Louisville, Ky.-based organization. Of 165,000 Daughters of the American Revolution members, only about 30 are black, Dooley said.

An estimated 5,000 blacks fought for independence during the Revolutionary War.

''It's not recognized by most Americans that perhaps as much as 10 percent of George Washington's troops were black,'' Dooley said. ''It's reasonable to say that the contribution of blacks in the American Revolution was indispensable.''

Genealogist Jane Ailes, who also traced Gates' ancestry, plans to look over 80,000 pension applications for Revolutionary War soldiers and compare the names against federal census records, which often contained information on race.

Ailes said she has already identified more than 20 people who may have served in the Revolutionary War, including an escaped slave.

Gates was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution earlier this month, and several other members of his family may join as well. He said it was something he had dreamed of since reading Du Bois's ''Dusk of Dawn.''

Du Bois, a Massachusetts-born black activist of the early 20th century, was admitted to the organization's state chapter but rejected by the national organization because he could not provide sufficient documentation.

''I envied him for having the knowledge that he could make that claim, but I never thought I'd be standing up there,'' Gates said. ''It was a great honor and very exciting to pay homage to my ancestor. He risked his life to fight for the freedom of this country.''

------

On the Web:

Sons of the American Revolution: www.sar.org

Daughters of the American Revolution: www.dar.org

Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute: http://DuBois.fas.harvard.edu

    Project to ID Blacks in Revolutionary War, NYT, 20.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Revolutionary-War-Blacks.html

Advocates quietly push for slavery repayment

Posted 7/9/2006 3:54 PM ET
The Associated Press
USA Today

Advocates who say black Americans should be compensated for slavery and its Jim Crow aftermath are quietly chalking up victories and gaining momentum.

Fueled by the work of scholars and lawyers, their campaign has morphed in recent years from a fringe-group rallying cry into sophisticated, mainstream movement. Most recently, a pair of churches apologized for their part in the slave trade, and one is studying ways to repay black church members.

The overall issue is hardly settled, even among black Americans: Some say that focusing on slavery shouldn't be a top priority or that it doesn't make sense to compensate people generations after a historical wrong.

Yet reparations efforts have led a number of cities and states to approve measures that force businesses to publicize their historical ties to slavery. Several reparations court cases are in progress, and international human rights officials are increasingly spotlighting the issue.

"This matter is growing in significance rather than declining," said Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor and a leading reparations activist. "It has more vigor and vitality in the 21st century than it's had in the history of the reparations movement."

The most recent victories for reparations advocates came in June, when the Moravian Church and the Episcopal Church both apologized for owning slaves and promised to battle current racism. The Episcopalians also launched a national, yearslong probe into church slavery links and into whether the church should compensate black members. A white church member, Katrina Browne, also screened a documentary focusing on white culpability at the denomination's national assembly.

The Episcopalians debated slavery and reparations for years before reaching an agreement, said Jayne Oasin, social justice officer for the denomination, who will oversee its work on the issue.

Historically, slavery was an uncomfortable topic for the church. Some Episcopal bishops owned slaves — and the Bible was used to justify the practice, Oasin said.

"Why not (take these steps) 100 years ago?" she said. "Let's talk about the complicity of the Episcopal Church as one of the institutions of this country who, of course, benefited from slavery."

Also in June, a North Carolina commission urged the state government to repay the descendants of victims of a violent 1898 campaign by white supremacists to strip blacks of power in Wilmington, N.C. As many as 60 blacks died, and thousands were driven from the city.

The commission also recommended state-funded programs to support local black businesses and homeownership.

The report came weeks after the Organization of American States requested information from the U.S. government about a 1921 race riot in Tulsa, in which 1,200 homes were burned and as many as 300 blacks killed. An OAS official said the group might pursue the issue as a violation of international human rights.

The modern reparations movement revived an idea that's been around since emancipation, when black leaders argued that newly freed slaves deserved compensation.

About six years ago, the issue started gaining momentum again. Randall Robinson's "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks," was a best seller; reparations became a central issue at the World Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa; and California legislators passed the nation's first law forcing insurance companies that do business with the state to disclose their slavery ties. Illinois passed a similar insurance law in 2003, and the next year Iowa legislators began requesting — but not forcing — the same disclosures.

Several cities — including Chicago, Detroit and Oakland — have laws requiring that all businesses make such disclosures.

Reparations opponents insist that no living American should have to pay for a practice that ended more than 140 years ago. Plus, programs such as affirmative action and welfare already have compensated for past injustices, said John H. McWhorter, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

"The reparations movement is based on a fallacy that cripples the thinking on race — the fallacy that what ails black America is a cash problem," said McWhorter, who is black. "Giving people money will not solve the problems that we have."

Even so, support is reaching beyond African-Americans and the South.

Katrina Browne, the white Episcopalian filmmaker, is finishing a documentary about her ancestors, the DeWolfs of Bristol, R.I., the biggest slave-trading family in U.S. history. She screened it for Episcopal Church officials at the June convention.

"Traces of the Trade: A Story From the Deep North," details how the economies of the Northeast and the nation as a whole depended on slaves.

"A lot of white people think they know everything there is to know about slavery — we all agree it was wrong and that's enough," Browne said. "But this was the foundation of our country, not some Southern anomaly. We all inherit responsibility."

She says neither whites nor blacks will heal from slavery until formal hearings expose the full history of slavery and its effects — an effort similar to South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission after apartheid collapsed.

    Advocates quietly push for slavery repayment, UT, 9.7.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-07-09-slavery-reparations_x.htm

Texas Lawsuit Includes a Mix of Race and Water

July 9, 2006
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

DeBERRY, Tex. — Frank and Earnestene Roberson no longer need to drive the 23 miles to a Wal-Mart near Shreveport for a safe drink of water.

Instead, it is delivered to them in five-gallon jugs, courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency.

But they and neighbors in this historically black enclave in the East Texas oilfields seem no closer to being able to drink, cook or bathe safely from their own wells since the E.P.A. found the groundwater contaminated with pollutants that included arsenic, benzene, lead and mercury.

Calling themselves victims of "environmental racism," community members in June filed suit in federal court, accusing the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the state's oil and gas industry, of failing to enforce safety regulations and of "intentionally giving citizens false information based on their race and economic status."

The commission said it had yet to receive formal notice of the lawsuit and had no comment on it.

But almost two decades after Mrs. Roberson first began complaining, setting off years of inconclusive state inquiries, the agency says it is now moving against a large oilfield services company that deposited wastes at a nearby disposal site that has since been closed.

The inspector general of the E.P.A. is also concluding a separate investigation into the handling of the problem.

With 30,000 oilfield waste disposal sites throughout Texas, there is no clear evidence that the community here was singled out for dumping, although residents said it followed a pattern, documented by the E.P.A., of pollution hazards that disproportionately affect minorities.

They said that pleas for help, including letters to President Bush, were bounced from one agency to another, and that their treatment stood in sharp contrast to a $1.7 million cleanup last summer by the railroad commission in Manvel, a largely white suburb of Houston.

"They worked very fast and were very diligent," said Mayor Delores M. Martin of Manvel.

Resentment is dying hard among the Robersons and their relatives on County Road 329. They are the descendants of a black settler, George Adams, who paid $279 and a mule for 40 acres here in 1911.

"This is America? It looks worse than the third world," said the Rev. David Hudson, the Robersons' nephew. Mr. Hudson, a retired California radio and television station manager, pointed out where wells had been plugged and where an elderly relative died last year in a home cut off from running water.

"I look at this as poisoning the only source of groundwater," he said, "as tantamount to lynching."

The tangled history of the disposal site, which began around 1980 as a deep injection well for saltwater wastes from drilling operations, makes apportioning blame difficult. Since then, according to records of the railroad commission, the disposal site has been under the control of six different operators. It was last operated by Basic Energy Services of Midland, which describes itself on its Web site as the nation's third largest contractor servicing oil and gas wells and used open holding tanks to store waste for pumping to a second injection well nearby.

The railroad commission said that Basic Energy had operated the tanks for more than two years without a permit, resulting in a demand by Panola County in 2003 that the disposal line under the county road be shut down. The commission has been asking the company to track any migration of pollution.

"Basic has been slow to respond to our requests," said John Tintera, the commission's assistant director for site remediation.

Ken Huseman, the president and chief executive of Basic Energy, would not respond to specific questions but said in a statement that the company's goal was to have no adverse impact on the environment, and that it would be responsive to the railroad commission.

But Mr. Hudson, who runs a local family ministry and teaches at the Church of the Living God, said the commission had close ties to the industry and had denied that DeBerry had a problem.

Mr. Hudson said he had directed his appeals, in vain, to the sole black member of the commission, Michael L. Williams, a former assistant secretary of education for civil rights at the federal Department of Education. A spokeswoman said Mr. Williams could not comment on the DeBerry case because it was "still in enforcement."

Mr. Hudson recently settled a state civil lawsuit against Basic Energy under terms that remain confidential. "We didn't get enough to get shoelaces," he said.

The lawsuit was settled, he said, after his lawyer found that the railroad commission had fined one of the site's operators, Falco S & D Inc. of Shreveport, La., $27,747 in 2000 for having illegally dumped about 3,000 barrels of chemical waste there. That made it difficult to determine Basic Energy's liability, Mr. Hudson said.

The E.P.A. has acknowledged a potential danger in the groundwater. "We found that the groundwater in the Panola County community is indeed contaminated with several substances," wrote Johnny D. Ross, project manager in the Inspector General's office in a January memo. Those substances, Mr. Ross wrote, "pose a threat to human health and the environment."

In 2003, the railroad commission found in residents' wells benzene, barium, arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury "at concentrations exceeding primary drinking water standards," said Peter Pope, a specialist with the commission.

But the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, in tests taken last August, found no excessive contamination there, said Andrea Morrow, a spokeswoman. She said she could not explain the discrepancy.

The problems go back at least to 1987 when, railroad commission records show, Mrs. Roberson began complaining of spillovers from the injection well. Her well water was discoloring her bathtub, she reported, "and it causes bad stomach problems when consumed."

The railroad commission took samples in October 1996, finding "no contamination in the Robersons' household supply water that can be attributed to oilfield sources."

By April 2003, however, commission tests found barium and chloride above maximum contaminant levels in Mr. Hudson's well, along with traces of two oilfield chemicals. The source was unclear. He plugged his well and moved to another house connected to the Bethany-Panola Public Water System.

Last year, Mr. Hudson said he obtained a $375,000 federal loan to connect the community to the same municipal supply, but the water company, concerned that the residents would be unable to repay the money, rejected the application.

The E.P.A. arranged last August for the delivery of bottled water to the Robersons and others with tainted wells. Some residents, however, have been less fortunate. Maggie Golden, a 73-year-old cousin of Mr. Hudson's mother, had been getting water piped in by Basic Energy to replace her hand-pumped spring-fed system which had been contaminated, said her sister, Mary Lee Kellum, a Houston teacher.

"Then all of a sudden they cut it off," Ms. Kellum said.

Mr. Hudson said he appealed to Basic Energy, which restored the water for about a month but then shut it off after the disposal site was closed down. They drank bottled water, but to bathe, Ms. Kellum said, "we'd go to the church and borrow water in big barrels and heat it up: the pioneer days were back again."

Her sister died in the house on June 17, 2005, Ms. Kellum said. "She just went to sleep during the night," she said. "It was stressful stuff. She said, 'I'm tired of struggling.' "

    Texas Lawsuit Includes a Mix of Race and Water, NYT, 9.7.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/us/09deberry.html

The Deal That Let Atlanta Retain Dr. King's Papers

June 27, 2006
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA, June 26 — It was in a short conversation over dinner, devoid of bargaining, that Mayor Shirley Franklin took the first step toward ensuring that a significant chunk of this city's patrimony would be returned here for good.

"She said, 'How much?' I told her the price, and she said, 'O.K.,' " recalled Phillip Jones, a King family representative who met with the mayor that day, June 18, to discuss the impending auction of the bulk of the papers belonging to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Late last Friday, a week before the auction was to be held at Sotheby's in New York, where the papers are on exhibit, officials announced a deal. With no collateral, Ms. Franklin had secured a privately financed loan of $32 million allowing a nonprofit organization created by the city to stop the auction and buy the collection from the King family. The papers are to go to Morehouse College here, Dr. King's alma mater.

Dexter King, the younger of Dr. King's two sons, said he thought his father and mother, Coretta Scott King, who died this year, would have been happy with the arrangement.

"I actually felt that if Atlanta really could step up and do this, it would be so wonderful, and I'm personally grateful to the mayor as well as to Ambassador Young," Mr. King said of Andrew Young, who had been encouraging Ms. Franklin's efforts. "It really was a community effort, and that's what I appreciated most about it."

As with many of the King family's decisions, the prospect of the auction had brought grumbling among Dr. King's former associates, persistent critics of the family and city boosters who said Atlanta, his hometown, was the collection's rightful home.

Some had said the millions that the collection would fetch at auction was nothing but ransom that would go to the four King children, who have frequently provoked scorn for their handling of their father's legacy and the nonprofit center here that bears his name. Others had fretted that the collection — 10,000 items, most of which bear Dr. King's handwriting — would be sold to a private owner and lost to scholars, or to Atlanta, forever.

But none of Atlanta's institutions was prepared to muster the asking price for the papers, and it was rumored that New York City, among other parties, was prepared to compete for them. It was left to Ms. Franklin to take action. To ensure an advantage, she agreed to pay $2 million more than the $30 million for which the papers were appraised in the late 1990's.

"I didn't want to risk losing the papers over a million dollars," the mayor said in a telephone interview Monday. "To Atlanta they are priceless."

Mr. Jones, the King family representative, defended the price, saying, "Those in the know said to us over and over again: this auction, these papers are going to go way above the appraised value."

Still, some people whom Ms. Franklin approached for help thought the family should simply donate the papers. Dr. King's two sons had already been criticized for taking six-figure salaries from the King Center while it fell into disrepair and for aggressively defending their right to control their father's intellectual property. And in insisting on retaining the copyright, some scholars had complained, the family had made it hard for the papers to find an institutional home.

But archivists say such an arrangement is not unusual.

"It's a double standard," Dexter King said from his home in Malibu, Calif. If the family makes a point of retaining copyright, he said, "then all of a sudden we see in the media, 'The King family is greedy'; no, we're just following the historical standard."

Ms. Franklin said she had three points in response to people who thought the family should have given the papers away. "Dr. King copyrighted his own work," she said, "so he expected that it would have value and expected it would be part of the legacy. Mrs. King very much supported the sale of the papers to the appropriate institution. And the third thing that I say is that Dr. King left the rest of us a tremendous legacy, but he was not a wealthy man," and the bulk of his family's inheritance lies in his intellectual property.

In coming up with the necessary money, Ms. Franklin began to call in favors from a long list of Atlanta's major corporations and prominent citizens, including Delta Air Lines, Coca-Cola and Tyler Perry, author and star of "Diary of a Mad Black Woman." Ultimately, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, the developer Herman Russell, Turner Broadcasting and Cox Enterprises, the owner of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, also agreed to help.

Meanwhile, Mr. Jones told Sotheby's that he thought the family had a buyer.

The deal still requires some work, though: Ms. Franklin has secured only $8.8 million in pledges; the rest of the money is in loan guarantees. Last Wednesday, David Redden, a vice president of Sotheby's, spoke to the mayor for the first time and asked whether, before the auction was canceled, she would be able to come up with the money. In reply, she cited one of her major accomplishments: raising $3 billion to bail out the city's water system, which had been ailing for years.

During a week of intense negotiations, Ms. Franklin decided that the papers would go to historically black Morehouse College, which was attended not only by Dr. King but also by his father, grandfather and two sons. Morehouse, where Dr. King's funeral was held after his assassination in 1968, does not have its own archives, however, and so the collection will initially be housed at a library serving that college and several others.

The deal was hailed as a victory for Ms. Franklin. It was, The Journal-Constitution reported, a "classic Atlanta story — like winning the 1996 Olympics — of taking a near impossible challenge and galvanizing city support to make it happen."

    The Deal That Let Atlanta Retain Dr. King's Papers, NYT, 27.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/us/27king.html

Morehouse College to inherit King papers

Updated 6/24/2006 12:39 AM ET
AP
USA Today

ATLANTA (AP) — A collection of Martin Luther King Jr.'s handwritten documents and books won't be sold at auction and instead will be given to his alma mater, officials said Friday.

A coalition of businesses, individuals and philanthropic leaders led by Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin bought the collection from the King family for an undisclosed amount, said Morehouse College President Walter Massey.

The personal papers and books of the civil rights leader were expected to sell for $15 million to $30 million at Sotheby's auction house in New York on June 30. Massey said the Atlanta group offered more than that.

Massey said his historically black college near downtown Atlanta would acquire the collection, which historians had called one of the greatest American archives of the 20th century in private hands.

"It really didn't belong anywhere else," said Andrew Young, a lieutenant of King's during the civil rights movement, who became overcome with emotion when discussing the deal Friday night.

The papers span 1946 to 1968, the year King was assassinated. They include 7,000 handwritten items, including his early Alabama sermons and a draft of his "I Have a Dream" speech, which he delivered Aug. 28, 1963, at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Atlanta is King's birthplace and where his wife, Coretta Scott King, raised their four children after his death. It also is where she founded the King Center for Non-violent Social Change and where King and his wife are entombed.

"I can't imagine a better home than the home of Dr. King for this collection," said Sotheby's Vice Chairman David Redden, who confirmed that the auction would no longer take place.

"It was there for years, it's going to be there forever. I think that's a marvelous conclusion to this extraordinary process," he said. "It guarantees that it will be looked after properly and made available to the public."

Redden would not disclose the purchase price. The city was the sentimental favorite in the bidding and was rumored to have stiff competition from others across the country, including the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, Duke University, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.

Coretta Scott King's death in January was a catalyst for the sale because her will calls for the liquidation of her estate.

For years, Sotheby's auction house has tried to sell the collection, but previous negotiations with various institutions fell through.

"People have seen this as an opportunity to step up and lay claim to Martin Luther King's non-violent heritage as a part of Atlanta's tradition," said Young, a former mayor of the city.

Franklin, the current mayor, did not immediately respond to calls seeking comment.

The 139-year-old Morehouse College stands as the largest private, liberal arts college in the country for men with 2,800 students, and one of only four all-male colleges in the U.S. The school's other famous alumni include actor Samuel L. Jackson, former U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher and film director Spike Lee.

    Morehouse College to inherit King papers, UT, 24.6.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-06-24-king-papers_x.htm

Schools' Efforts on Race Await Justices' Ruling

June 24, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — School officials in Berkeley, Calif., take race as well as parent income into account as they assign students to public schools, with a result that many black children who live downtown are bused to classes in the mostly white neighborhoods on the hills that overlook San Francisco Bay.

In Lynn, Mass., the authorities guarantee that children can attend their neighborhood school, but consider race in weighing students' transfer requests, sometimes blocking those that would increase racial imbalance.

And here in Louisville, the school board uses race as a factor in a student assignment plan to keep enrollments at most schools roughly in line with the district's overall racial composition, making this one of the most thoroughly integrated urban school systems in the nation.

As different as they are, all these approaches and many more like them could now be in jeopardy, lawyers say, because of the Supreme Court's decision this month to review cases involving race and school assignment programs here and in Seattle.

"We'll be watching this very closely, because whichever way the Supreme Court rules, it will certainly have an impact on our district," said Arthur R. Culver, superintendent of schools in Champaign, Ill., where African-American students make up 36 percent of students. Under a court-supervised plan, the district keeps the proportion of black students in all schools within 15 percentage points of that average by controlling school assignments.

Over the past 15 years, courts have ended desegregation orders in scores of school districts. But many districts around the country seek to maintain diversity with voluntary programs like magnet schools and magnet programs, clustering plans that group schools in black neighborhoods with those in white, and weighted admissions lotteries that assign classroom seats by race.

All of this is now a gray area of the law until there is guidance from the Supreme Court on how far school systems may go in the quest for racial diversity.

Courts in the 1990's mostly struck down the use of race in assignment decisions, but three federal rulings since 2003 have permitted its use. As the legal ambiguity has grown, hundreds of districts have dropped voluntary efforts to maintain racial balance. Others have vigorously pursued them, even as a debate has emerged over whether racially mixed schools provide the nation with important educational benefits.

"Most school districts believe that there are educational benefits in having students attend school with other students of different backgrounds," said Maree Sneed, a lawyer who filed a brief in the Louisville case on behalf of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of the nation's largest urban districts. "It prepares them to be better citizens."

But Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Washington group critical of affirmative action, said such assertions were based on "touchy-feely social science."

"It'd be dangerous for the court to allow discrimination whenever a school board produces some social scientist who claims that racially balancing schools to the nth degree is essential for teaching students to be good citizens," Mr. Clegg said.

The debate comes as immigration, housing patterns and ethnic change have made achieving racial balance in the schools an increasing challenge.

A study published this year by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University reported that partly because of the rapid growth of Latino and Asian populations, the traditional black-white model of American race relations was breaking down. Yet white students remained the most racially isolated group, even though they were attending schools with more minority students than ever before, the report said.

Although whites in 2003-04 made up 58 percent of the nation's public school population, the average white student attended a school where 78 percent of pupils were also white, the study said.

The proportion of black students attending schools where 10 percent of students or fewer were white increased to 38 percent in 2003-04 from 34 percent in 1991-92.

Gary Orfield, the project's director, said a decision barring the use of race in student assignments would most likely intensify those trends.

"School boards would be captives to the racial segregation that occurs in housing markets," Mr. Orfield said. "Boards would be forbidden to do what courts once ordered them to do, and what they now want to do voluntarily."

How many of the nation's 15,000 districts currently consider race in assigning students to schools is unclear because no one keeps track, experts said. A brief filed in the Louisville case by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative public-interest law firm, asserts that "nearly 1,000 districts" have some type of race-based assignment plan.

But that figure traces from a 1990 Department of Education survey of schools, and David J. Armor, a George Mason University professor who participated in that survey, said that in the 1990's, many districts abandoned race-based plans. Still, he estimated that "many hundreds of school districts" continued to use race in assigning students to schools.

Many of the nation's largest urban districts have so few white students that large-scale plans to seek racial balance are hardly feasible. New York, where 14 percent of students are white, does not consider race in school assignments, said Michael Best, the Department of Education's general counsel. The only exception is Mark Twain Intermediate School in Brooklyn, where a 1974 federal court order requires that the school's racial demographics be kept in line with surrounding middle schools.

At least a half-dozen cities have developed voluntary student transfer programs that involve enrolling minority students from an urban district in a suburban district.

The Jefferson County district in Louisville is one of the most thoroughly integrated urban school systems in the nation. That is partly because its boundaries include suburbs as well as Louisville's urban core. Sixty percent of students are white, and 35 percent are black.

Its student assignment plan, which evolved from a court-ordered desegregation effort, keeps black enrollment in most schools in the range of 15 percent to 50 percent by encouraging, and in some cases obliging, white students to attend schools in black neighborhoods, and vice versa.

Fran Ellers and her husband are writers who are white. They live in the Highlands neighborhood east of downtown. But they enrolled their children, Jack and Zoe, at Coleridge-Taylor Montessori Elementary in the largely black West End.

"We wanted a diverse environment," Ms. Ellers said. "When I toured Coleridge-Taylor, I was struck by the mix of black and white children, quietly working together as equals in a classroom."

Nechelle D. Crawford, by contrast, who is African-American and lives in the West End, said her sons Keion and Jeron could attend Coleridge-Taylor, but instead she opted to send them to Wilder Elementary in a largely white suburb 25 minutes away by bus. "The boys love Wilder," Mrs. Crawford said, adding that there are a number of international students. "They have different opportunities, see different faces."

In a survey carried out in 2000 by the University of Kentucky, 67 percent of parents said they believed that a school's enrollment should reflect the overall racial diversity of the school district.

A white lawyer, Teddy B. Gordon, ran for a seat on the Jefferson County School Board in 2004, promising to work to end the district's desegregation plan. He finished last, behind three other candidates.

Mr. Gordon represents the plaintiff in the Louisville case, Crystal D. Meredith, who is white. She sued after the district denied her request to transfer her son Joshua from Young Elementary, in the West End, to Bloom Elementary, nearer her home. The district said the transfer would disrupt Young's racial balance.

Judge John G. Heyburn II of Federal District Court ruled against Ms. Meredith in 2004, saying that the district had shown a "compelling interest" in maintaining integrated schools. A federal appeals court upheld that ruling, but the Supreme Court has now agreed to review the case.

In an interview, Mr. Gordon predicted that if Louisville's student assignment plan was overturned, the schools would rapidly resegregate. But that should be of no concern, he said.

"We're a diverse society, a multiethnic society, a colorblind society," he said. "Race is history."

Chester Darling, the lawyer who represented parents in a 1999 suit challenging a school assignment plan in Lynn, Mass., holds similar views. "If children are in segregated schools, de facto or not, as long as they are getting the education they need that's fine," he said.

Lynn, nine miles north of Boston, is one of 20 Massachusetts school districts that receives financial incentives for promoting racial balance under state law. Lynn's plan seeks to keep the proportion of nonwhite students in elementary schools within 15 percent of the overall proportion of minorities in the district's student population. Last year, 32 percent of students were white, and 68 percent were nonwhite.

Under the Berkeley plan, parents choose three schools, and the district weighs classroom space and parents' education and income, as well as race in assigning the child.

"New parents would prefer to have their kids in a neighborhood school, that's pretty overwhelming," said Michele Lawrence, Berkeley's superintendent. "But if I surveyed parents who have gone through the process and met teachers, they would have a high percentage of satisfaction."

David M. Herszenhorn contributed reporting from New York for this article.

    Schools' Efforts on Race Await Justices' Ruling, NYT, 24.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/24/us/24race.html?hp&ex=1151208000&en=125474bfd9ac18c5&ei=5094&partner=homepage

King Archives Will Be Sold at Auction

June 9, 2006
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA, June 8 — After years of trying to sell the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s archives to a library or university, the King family will instead put them up for auction on June 30, Sotheby's announced Thursday.

The sale, expected to bring $15 million to $30 million, will take place exactly five months after the death of Coretta Scott King, Dr. King's widow, who was keenly interested in finding an institutional home for the papers.

The buyer will determine the future accessibility of the papers. Many were housed for years in the archives of the nonprofit King Center in Atlanta, but the papers considered the most interesting by scholars, including a trove of handwritten sermons, were found in Mrs. King's basement and have not been widely studied.

"I'm really on tenterhooks about it," said Taylor Branch, the author of a three-volume biography of Dr. King. "Because it'll wind up in a library or it'll wind up dispersed."

David N. Redden, a vice chairman of Sotheby's, said the papers would be sold as a single lot to help ensure that they find a public home. "It really is a challenge to the institutions of America to muster up and buy it," he said.

Mrs. King had tried in vain to sell the papers, first to the Library of Congress for $20 million, then to a variety of other institutions, Mr. Redden said. The Library of Congress sale fell through when questions were raised by lawmakers about the price. The papers were appraised at $30 million by Sotheby's in the late 1990's.

They include 7,000 items in Dr. King's own hand, including a draft of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, an annotated copy of "Letter From Birmingham Jail" and a program from the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on which Dr. King scribbled notes for a speech about John F. Kennedy's assassination.

A blue spiral notebook contains a statement read to an Atlanta judge about why Dr. King chose to stay in jail after his arrest during a sit-in, and a note to the women arrested with him praising them for their faith in nonviolent methods, according to a news release from Sotheby's.

Also among the papers are letters and telegrams from presidents and civil rights leaders, an exam "blue book" from Morehouse College containing what is described as Dr. King's earliest surviving theological writing, and a collection of books with his handwritten scribbles and critiques.

The handwritten sermons and a collection of index cards reveal a less familiar side of Dr. King, that of clergyman and pastor to a flock, said Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.

"What we can see from those kinds of materials is the way in which his religious identity shaped his identity as a civil rights leader," Dr. Carson said.

There is also a collection of ephemera, including flight coupons, receipts, and even, Mr. Redden said, the deposit slip for the check from the Nobel Foundation.

Mr. Redden said he had been through much of the collection with Mrs. King before her death, and that she had only to glance at a document to recall the circumstances of its creation.

Archivists and historians agreed that the collection was highly coveted. But some said the price was far out of reach.

"I would be stunned if they could command that sort of price, and I would be even more stunned if they command that from a library," said Brian Schottlaender, president of the Association of Research Libraries. But, he added: "How do you value the Martin Luther King papers? Good Lord, he was such a significant figure."

Kathleen E. Bethel, the African-American studies librarian at Northwestern University, agreed that Dr. King was a giant, even compared with other civil rights movement leaders. But she said that only the oldest and wealthiest institutions might hope to buy the papers, and that there was no obvious "angel" who might step forward to donate the money. "No one comes to mind," she said.

Mr. Redden countered that the papers were worth far more than $15 million, the low end of the expected range. For comparison, he said, some 450 pages of manuscripts by James Joyce were sold two years ago to an Irish library for more than $11 million.

The papers are owned by the King estate, not the King Center, a struggling nonprofit organization founded by Mrs. King that has received federal money over the years to catalog the papers and to make them available to scholars. The King Center houses the papers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which Dr. King helped found.

Another group of about 83,000 documents — a third of Dr. King's personal letters and manuscripts — were donated to Boston University by Dr. King in 1964. Mrs. King tried unsuccessfully to get them back.

None of the four King children responded to requests for comment on the sale. Since the death of their mother, they have also explored the idea of selling the King Center to the National Park Service, which administers the historic district that includes the center, Ebenezer Baptist Church, and the birth home of Dr. King.

    King Archives Will Be Sold at Auction, NYT, 9.6.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/us/09king.html?hp&ex=1149912000&en=c7c04f11c747eb7d&ei=5094&partner=homepage