History > 2006 > USA > Race relations (III)

Questions of Race and Intent

Haunt a Long Island Shooting

September 30, 2006
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

MILLER PLACE, N.Y., Sept. 26 — When John H. White, 53, was sent to jail for the first time in his life last month, young black inmates at the Suffolk County Correctional Facility sought him out to give him his “props” — slang for respect.

They recognized him immediately from TV clips as that somber, professorial-looking black man who had confronted a group of white teenagers chasing his 19-year-old son and fatally shot one of them, Daniel Cicciaro, 17.

The inmates wanted to give Mr. White props for defending his son against what they saw as a white mob.

Mr. White said he cut them off, appalled. “Whoa! Whoa! Back off,” he told them. “You’ve got the wrong idea. It was an accident. I didn’t want to kill nobody, you understand? Keep your props.”

Everyone involved has said essentially the same thing, that race played no role in the cascade of events that led to the shooting here on Aug. 9. The four young men who were with Mr. Cicciaro said so. Mr. Cicciaro’s father, also named Daniel, said that to ascribe racist motives to his son was to slander a young man who had many black friends and whose mother is Puerto Rican.

Mr. White, whose $100,000 cash bail was posted on Sept. 14 in large part by Italian-American co-workers at the paving company where he has been employed for the last 21 years, said in response to a question that he did not see the young men pursuing his son as a white mob but as “a group of grown men” threatening his family.

But perhaps, as the issue of race plays out in many suburbs, race was nowhere and yet everywhere in the events of that night.

In recent interviews with Mr. White and the Cicciaro family, a picture of two families sharing similar values emerged. Both were long-married couples with two sons. Both had moved in the last two years to new homes in new suburban developments where, they said, they had hoped to enjoy a hard-earned prosperity.

Mr. White, an avid gardener who supported his family as a union laborer, commuting two hours each way between Suffolk County and New York City, had found a cul-de-sac in which to tend his dahlias and day lilies. Mr. Cicciaro, who owns an auto repair shop, had settled his family in a new house with room enough for an oversized garage for his collection of restored cars.

Yet, although their sons were acquainted, the families’ worlds were to a great extent delimited by an unwritten code of life on Long Island.

John and Sonia White, both originally from the South Bronx, are among a tiny number of blacks living in their development, and among only 47 black families in the community of Miller Place, population 11,000. That is a roughly proportional reflection of the larger reality of racial separation on the island, where about 12 percent of the population is black, while less than 1 percent live in communities that are integrated, according to census data.

On the night of Aug. 9, the surface calm of that predictable world was broken by a storm of unpredictable factors — alcohol, testosterone, and what seemed like a resurrection of the ghosts of Jim Crow. These ghosts included a rumor of rape connecting a black man to a white girl; two carloads of white men in pursuit; racial epithets; and an old handgun carried to Long Island from Alabama.

The shooting occurred around midnight of a Wednesday evening during which Mr. White’s son, Aaron, attended a party at an acquaintance’s home in a nearby town. At the party, where the police said there was a lot of drinking, a group of young men, all white, accused Aaron White of having threatened to rape a girl, also white. The threat was said to have been made by e-mail nine months before.

Though he denied making any threat, Aaron White was asked to leave, and did so. A short time later, according to the police, a group of men led by Mr. Cicciaro decided to pursue him. By cellphone, Mr. Cicciaro told him that he and his friends were coming after him, according to the police.

In the interview, Mr. White said he was awakened by his son “from a dead sleep.” The son told him that Mr. Cicciaro and his friends were pursuing him, and why. He said he thought “they were going to kill him,” Mr. White said, adding that Aaron was “more frightened than I had ever heard my son in his life.”

Mr. White said he grabbed a weapon he kept for protection, a handgun he had inherited from a grandfather, Napoleon White, who brought it with him when he left Oneonta, Ala., in the 1940’s for New York. In an unsolicited aside during the interview, Mr. White said his grandfather had left not long after the Klan killed two brothers, both shopkeepers. (The police described the unregistered gun as “an antique.”)

According to both Mr. White and his son, Mr. Cicciaro and his friends used racial slurs when they arrived at his house. The young men later denied it.

Mr. White said he told the men to leave, and that after “a lot of posturing” they seemed to be ready to go, when suddenly Mr. Cicciaro rushed him and grabbed the muzzle of his gun.

Mr. Cicciaro’s friends gave the police a different account. They said Mr. White pointed the gun in the face of each of them, shouting, “I’ll shoot you.” They said Mr. Cicciaro never grabbed the gun but waved it away when it was pointed in his face.

Mr. White said that when he tried to pull away from Mr. Cicciaro’s grasp, the gun went off accidentally. Mr. Cicciaro’s friends told the police that Mr. White simply pulled the trigger at point-blank range.

It was in the frantic 911 call by one of Mr. Cicciaro’s friends, made from a car carrying the mortally wounded teenager to a nearby hospital, that a police tape captured the type of racial invective the Whites said they had heard throughout the confrontation. The cellphone had been left on, and Mr. Cicciaro’s friends were heard using racial profanities as they spoke among themselves, investigators said.

A Suffolk County grand jury indicted Mr. White on gun charges and a single count of second-degree manslaughter, which is a charge of reckless homicide. The police initially charged him with second-degree murder, the intentional killing of Mr. Cicciaro.

In a separate interview, Daniel Cicciaro Sr., a man of medium height with scarred hands from many years of work in auto repairs, seemed almost in pain as he maintained an air of self-control. With his wife, Joanne, sitting beside him on the porch of their home in Port Jefferson, he said: “I want you to know I have no animosity personally or racially toward the White family. I cannot presume to know what was going through his mind at the time he killed my son. But God have mercy on Mr. White.”

Mr. Cicciaro returned again and again to his son’s lack of racial prejudice and the unlikelihood that race played any role in his pursuit of Aaron White. “If going to this guy’s house to beat up his son was seen as some sort of racial attack, my son was so not-racist that the thought would never even have occurred to him,” he said.

He disputed Mr. White’s claim that the shooting was accidental: “If it was an accident, like he says, why didn’t he call the police immediately? He called his lawyer instead. And why does he come out with a loaded gun in the first place?”

During his interview, Mr. White, a tall, thin bespectacled man with thinning hair, spoke with a similarly painstaking deliberateness. He said he had the gun to “protect my family” and told his wife to call the police, but she told investigators she did not hear him.

After the shooting, Mr. White said, he and his wife did not call 911 because they were “in shock.” Since the killing, “I have not slept at all,” he said. “I never think about anything else.” He said he felt “devastated and remorseful” for killing the teenager. “But I thought these guys, this mob, was coming to hurt my child.”

Asked if he saw them as a white mob, Mr. White pondered for a moment. “I saw them as a group of grown men in my driveway. I was scared to death.”

In describing his background, Mr. White placed himself as the second of eight children, and he referred repeatedly and with deep affection to his grandfather, tearing up when describing the family lore about the Klan killings of his great-uncles.

When pressed, Mr. White said he viewed his grandfather’s world and his as different universes. He rejected any notion that he might have perceived what happened in his driveway through the prism of his grandfather’s losses.

“I did not mean to shoot that young man,” he said. “I grieve for his family. I moved out here with my children just like everyone else, to protect them,” he said. “I have never had problems with white people — if I did, why would I have come out here in the first place?”

Mr. Cicciaro said he was “baffled” by a charge of less than murder against a man who “walked 80 feet down his driveway and told these kids he was going to shoot them, and then pulled the trigger.” He said he was “extremely disappointed” in the criminal justice system.

Mr. White said he understood that disappointment, but added that when he picked up his gun, he only meant to “scare those kids off,” he said.

During the interview, he referred several times to his new home as “my dream house.” He recounted how his wife, Sonia, decorated the house with loving attention. “Stickley, Audi in the dining room; Henredon, Baker living room; Kashan rugs, the works,” he said.

They will be leaving that house as soon as they can, Mr. White said.

“I wouldn’t feel comfortable keeping my family here. I know how I would feel if someone hurt my kid,” he said. “There wouldn’t be a rock left to crawl under.”

    Questions of Race and Intent Haunt a Long Island Shooting, NYT, 30.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/nyregion/30white.html

100 Years Later, a Painful Episode Is Observed at Last

September 24, 2006
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA, Sept. 23 — Two years ago, Saudia Muwwakkil, the director of communications for the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, invited community leaders to discuss how to mark the 100th anniversary of a 1906 race riot in which mobs of whites descended on the city’s black residents.

The racial strife shut down Atlanta for four days and ended with the bodies of black men hanging from trees and streetlights. But of those Ms. Muwwakkil called, almost none had heard of it.

The riot, so contrary to Atlanta’s conception of itself as the progressive, racially harmonious capital of the New South, had been erased from the city’s consciousness, left out of timelines and textbooks.

Ms. Muwwakkil said she was not surprised by the response. “I’m an Atlanta native,” she said, “and I had never learned anything about the riot. It wasn’t taught.”

But in the months leading up to the 100th anniversary this weekend, there has been a concerted effort to correct the city’s amnesia, with walking tours, public art, memorial services, numerous articles and three new books. Genealogists have found a few descendants of those involved and located the marked tombstone of one victim. Next year, the riot will become part of the state’s social studies curriculum.

The rioting began on Saturday, Sept. 22, 1906, with a surge of white hysteria fomented by segregationist politicians and, more immediately, wildly exaggerated newspaper articles of attacks on white women by black men. By the time the violence ended, at least two dozen blacks had been killed and scores more injured, some taken from their homes or pulled off streetcars.

Later accounts attributed the deaths of two whites to the rioting, one of them a pregnant woman who died of a heart attack when she saw two black men torn apart by bullets.

The violence made international headlines. But in Atlanta, newspapers played down the events, reassuring readers that the “Negroes” had been “disarmed and dispersed.”

In recent years, the country has grappled with the racial episodes of its past in myriad ways, including front-page apologies by newspapers, truth commissions and criminal trials. If Atlanta is late in coming to the table, it is at least partly because of the way the city sees itself: as a place that has always offered an economic salve for racial tensions.

But the auditorium was full on Friday when Carole Merritt, a historian, stood and said, “The story of the riot has been too shameful to tell.”

Ms. Merritt was participating in a symposium at Georgia State University, just blocks from the Five Points intersection downtown where the mob had first gathered. She has written a book about the Herndon family, whose patriarch, Alonzo Herndon, became Atlanta’s first black millionaire. His Peachtree Street barber shop, elegantly appointed in mahogany and marble, was one of the rioters’ first targets.

The city’s self-image was under construction well before the riot. The black educator Booker T. Washington had offered his “Atlanta compromise,” promising that blacks and whites could work together without social integration. The white newspaperman Henry W. Grady persuaded Northerners to invest in a tolerant, industrial New South.

But in 1906, the city teemed with uneasy change, full of new residents who fit into unfamiliar categories: successful black business owners, college-educated blacks, the first generation of young black men not born into slavery. During the riot, three black corpses were tossed at the base of a statue of Mr. Grady.

Though the episode is commonly called the Atlanta Race Riot, some say the name is itself a whitewash, because the word riot implies unrest by a minority group.

“It’s not a riot,” said June Dobbs Butts, 78. “No, it was a massacre.” Ms. Butts’s father, John Wesley Dobbs, a civil rights leader, referred to the episode as “the Horror.”

That first night, whites shot, beat or stabbed to death any black man they could catch. One victim was a lame bootblack, another a Western Union messenger. On Sunday, with most blacks huddled inside their homes, groups of whites went into black neighborhoods in search of more victims. Some blacks defended themselves with guns, driving away their attackers. On Monday, a white party entered Brownsville, a middle-class black neighborhood, and a shootout ensued, resulting in the death of a white county police officer named James Heard.

If the violence contradicted the city’s self-image, the response was pure Atlanta. By Tuesday, white city officials had met with a hand-picked group of black leaders in an effort to restore order, beginning a tradition of interracial dialogue that became known as “the Atlanta way.”

The process of forgetting began almost immediately. “Atlanta is herself again, business is restored, and the riot is forgotten,” one newspaper headline declared two days later.

But the riot shaped the city in powerful ways. Scores of middle-class blacks left the city, and segregation grew more entrenched.

“Interracial cooperation was not equal,” said Clarissa Myrick-Harris, a historian and member of the Coalition to Remember the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, which planned this weekend’s events. “It was another way of maintaining and asserting power over blacks.”

“The white elite chose who they were going to meet with in the black community,” Dr. Myrick-Harris said, and a class divide emerged. Whites blamed the lower classes, both black and white, for the violence, and some black leaders characterized blacks who fought back as threats.

The riot also weighed heavily against assimilationists like Booker T. Washington in favor of more radical black thinkers like W. E. B. DuBois, who thought federal intervention was needed to protect blacks.

“It disproved Washington’s belief that if blacks worked hard, saved money and became respectable, then whites would recognize their interest in protecting them,” said David Fort Godshalk, the author of a recent book about the riot.

The riot helped spur the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and was cited as a life-changing experience for people as diverse as Walter White, who became the head of that organization, and Margaret Mitchell, the author of “Gone With the Wind.”

And its remembrance has brought a measure of pride to people like Pat Walker Bearden, who knew that her grandfather, Alexander Walker, had been in prison but only recently learned that it was because he had fired as Officer Heard approached his house. Mr. Walker had two small children and a pregnant wife. He was convicted in the officer’s death.

Ms. Bearden said that while she was working on her family genealogy, she began to learn more about Mr. Walker from her father: “Dad would always start out saying, ‘Papa didn’t take no mess.’ ”

    100 Years Later, a Painful Episode Is Observed at Last, NYT, 24.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/24/us/24riot.html

Unearthing a Town Pool, and Not for Whites Only

September 18, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

STONEWALL, Miss., Sept. 11 — In the fearful cosmos of the segregationist South, the integrated swimming pool occupied a special place: race-mixing carried to an intimate level.

So it was that when integration came to this old mill town in the 1970’s, its magnificent pool, 100 feet long and 30 feet wide, the summer delight of generations of white children, had to close, people here thought. It was filled in with truckloads of red southern Mississippi dirt, covered over and forgotten for more than 30 years.

But last summer, an edge of something was sticking out when a local real estate developer, his own past entwined with the state’s racial traumas, was poking around in the ground, trying to spark a renaissance among the old buildings here. Spadework revealed fancy blue tile, underwater light fixtures and smooth white walls.

The businessman, a former political candidate named Gilbert Carmichael, decided to spend $25,000 of his company’s money to excavate the pool and rededicate it to all, blacks and whites, in this struggling town of 1,100 just south of the highway hub of Meridian. The pool, which should be open next summer, may charge a minimal fee for upkeep but will be open to the public.

With the mounds of freshly dug dirt now lining the sides of the partly unearthed pool, memories of a town’s lost summers have also emerged, along with painful recollections: a bygone era’s racism and children — white children — bewildered by the closing.

“It just hurt their feelings awful, because they couldn’t understand why they didn’t have a place to swim anymore,” said Ardell Covington, 87, a former mayor. Pools all over the South closed in that period; many, if not most, stayed that way.

Mr. Covington’s children learned to swim at the Stonewall pool, which was owned, operated and closed, like almost everything else in town, by the textile mill, itself shut down by Burlington Industries in 2002 after more than a century of operation.

This town was named after the Confederate general Stonewall Jackson. In late 1868, its northern Mississippi founders opened what would go on to be one of the region’s longest-lived cotton mills. For years, it was a great success — during World War II it was a prime supplier of khaki to the United States Army — but its closing devastated Stonewall.

On the main street today, empty storefronts sit in the shadow of the giant mill, and all around are the boxy houses of former millworkers. The population is just under a quarter black.

Black children had never been allowed to use the pool. They might have aspired to — and one 65-year-old black woman here, who never learned to swim, remembers just that — but they were forced to go elsewhere during the hot summers.

“These black boys around here, they wanted to — they wanted to use that pool,” said the woman, Lindy Goodwin, who once worked at the mill. Instead, “the boys, they used to go to the branches,” Ms. Goodwin said, meaning to the local creeks. “Anywhere where there was water.”

The pool’s excavation offers a window into the sharp intrusiveness of segregation’s mandates, written and otherwise.

In the memories of whites here, the Stonewall swimming pool is recalled as both the joyful center of town life — “That was the main thing we did, every summer, we swam,” remembered Carol Long Ford, an alderwoman — and the place that closed when that old life was curtailed.

A newspaper photograph from 1969, headlined “Fun at the Pool,” shows it filled with splashing children, all white. “Our summer life centered around the swimming pool,” Ms. Ford said.

Yet there was no protest when the pool was filled with dirt several years later. “Nobody stood up,” said Oree Davis, secretary of the local historical society, her voice edging into bitterness. “They just took what came their way.”

“It was the worst thing that could have happened,” Ms. Davis added.

Even today, though, other whites acknowledge, in veiled language, what they describe as the sad necessity of what took place.

The pool “was out there until things happened the way they did,” said Mr. Covington, the former mayor. “Then, the integration came along, and being Southerners like we are, people just didn’t want to mingle that close. That was a no-no.”

Others said they believed that the potential for “trouble” — though they said there was never any in the town — justified the closing.

“There were a lot of things that were closed,” said George Mason Green, a local tree farmer who swam in the pool as a boy. “They just didn’t want to have a lot of ruckus. They assumed, and I think probably correctly, it was closed to keep down any problems associated with integration.”

“In all fairness,” Mr. Green added, “if they hadn’t closed it, there would have been a fight.”

Mr. Carmichael says he passes no judgment on the townspeople who went along with the pool’s closing. A veteran of this state’s fraught racial politics, Mr. Carmichael, 79, ran close but unsuccessful races for the Senate and the governorship in the 1970’s as a moderate Republican with liberal views on race, a path not in line with a state party that was turning sharply to the right.

He later served as the federal railroad administrator under the first President Bush.

As a car dealer in Meridian in the early 1960’s, Mr. Carmichael replaced several times the vandalized windshield of Michael H. Schwerner, one of the three civil rights workers later murdered in the infamous killings outside Philadelphia, Miss., about 50 miles north of here.

White-haired, avuncular and courtly, Mr. Carmichael has bought up old buildings and land, dreaming of attracting commercial tenants, of recreating Stonewall’s bustle and of turning back the clock — in a limited sense.

“When integration came along, they didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” Mr. Carmichael said of the mill. “They solved the problem of integration by filling up the pool.” (A spokeswoman for Burlington Industries said nobody now with the company would have any recollection of the circumstances surrounding the closing.)

So unacceptable through almost all of the South was the idea of blacks and whites swimming together that even the Gulf of Mexico was off-limits to blacks in some areas. In April 1960, whites in Biloxi rioted after a group of blacks waded into the gulf from an all-white beach as part of an early civil rights protest, and several blacks were beaten and shot.

“Black folk and white people swimming together was just absolutely part of this ‘black men getting close to white women’ idea,” said Leslie B. McLemore, a political scientist at Jackson State University, in the state capital.

The swimming pool, in particular, “aroused all these racist fears,” said John Dittmer, a historian who wrote what many people consider the definitive chronicle of the Mississippi civil rights movement. In Jackson, the pools were closed in 1962; the huge pool at Audubon Park in New Orleans closed the same year, not reopening until 1969. In the Mississippi capital the pools stayed closed until the mid-1970’s.

The road to regeneration was much longer in the small towns with few resources of their own. After the mill’s closing four years ago, in which 800 people were laid off, Stonewall seems scarcely able to fathom Mr. Carmichael’s grand plans.

“I hope they do something to help,” said Lucy Shelton, who manages the grocery store. “It’s better than people just griping.”

A customer, Earlene Couch, said: “It’s going down. We need something to pick it back up.”

A hundred yards away, Mr. Carmichael’s business partner, Tom Sebring, kicked away some dirt and looked over at the partially exposed pool. “Look at all the years it’s been buried,” Mr. Sebring said, “and of no use at all.”

    Unearthing a Town Pool, and Not for Whites Only, NYT,18.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/18/us/18pool.html?hp&ex=1158638400&en=22ff0c1db804ee4f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

In Shadow of 70’s Racism, Recent Violence Stirs Rage

September 17, 2006
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH

FARMINGTON, N.M. — The memory of 1974 still hangs heavily over this troubled New Mexico town, like a bad spirit drifting down from the sandpaper mesas and scrub-speckled hillsides.

That was the year the bodies of three Navajo men were found in nearby Chokecherry Canyon, burned and bludgeoned. The three white high school students charged in their killings were sent not to prison but to reform school.

The violence and mild sentences incited marches by Navajos through Farmington’s streets and exposed tensions between them and the town’s largely white residents. The United States Commission on Civil Rights eventually investigated and found widespread mistreatment and prejudice against Navajos.

Now, more than three decades later, Navajo leaders here are again calling for federal intervention.

On June 4, the police said, three white men beat a Navajo man, William Blackie, 46, and shouted racial slurs at him after asking him to buy beer for them. The men were charged with kidnapping, robbery and assault, and are being prosecuted under the state hate crimes law, which allows for longer sentences.

Six days later, a white Farmington police officer killed a Navajo man, Clint John, 21, after a struggle in a Wal-Mart parking lot. The police said Mr. John had assaulted his girlfriend and attacked the officer — grabbing his baton and moving aggressively toward him — before the officer shot Mr. John four times. Mr. John had a history of violence, the police said.

Mr. John’s family says he did not have the baton when he was shot and is filing a wrongful death lawsuit against city officials, the Police Department and the officer.

The San Juan County Sheriff’s Office, which investigated Mr. John’s death, concluded that the shooting was justified. But after an outcry from Navajo Nation officials, the United States Justice Department is reviewing the matter to determine if a federal inquiry is necessary.

Both events have rocked this commercial hub of about 42,000 residents on the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation. After Mr. John’s shooting, the Navajo Council allocated $300,000 to study racial violence in the 11 towns that border Navajo land and to finance the John family’s lawsuit.

On Sept. 2, amid growing unease, Navajo leaders organized a march they said drew 1,000 participants. The march snaked along Highway 64, which leads to the Navajo community of Shiprock.

“We marched to memorialize the people that have died because of racial violence here,” said Duane Yazzie, president of the Shiprock chapter of the Navajo Nation. “This was an outlet for people who are frustrated and angry.”

Similar marches 32 years ago protested the severe, sometimes violent treatment of Navajos, like the practice of beating drunken Navajos passed out on Farmington’s streets.

In 1975, the Civil Rights Commission released “The Farmington Report: A Conflict of Cultures,” which described widespread prejudice against American Indians in Farmington and said they had suffered in almost every area from injustice and maltreatment.

These days, Farmington is no longer the Selma, Ala., of the Southwest, as some derisively called it then. The town has more Indians — about 17 percent of its residents, compared with less than 10 percent in the mid-1970’s. The Civil Rights Commission, revisiting Farmington in 2004, found marked progress.

Mayor Bill Standley cited improvements including the creation of a citizen police advisory committee, an intertribal service organization and a Navajo behavioral health center. Mayor Standley categorized this year’s violence as isolated.

“When these things happen, we still have to be concerned, and we have to listen,” he said. “We have thousands of interactions between people in Farmington where nothing happens. But when things do go wrong, the culprit is usually alcohol. For the most part, it’s not racism that drives Farmington’s problems today, it’s alcohol.”

Indeed, a study this year by the Police Department showed that most crimes against Indians in Farmington were committed by Indians.

Police Chief Mike Burridge said the 12 Indians among the 124 officers on his force had supported the department after Mr. John’s shooting.

“They told me they wished it was a Native American officer that was involved,” said Mr. Burridge, adding that his officers underwent cultural sensitivity training that specifically addressed Navajo issues.

But Larry Emerson, chairman of the New Mexico Indian Education Advisory Council, said white residents had not absorbed the history of Indian subjugation and its psychological and social effects.

“The bias, the unfairness, this has been going on all along,” said Mr. Emerson, who is Navajo. “Our people have suffered intergenerational trauma. They’re so numb to it, they can’t feel own their feelings anymore.”

Racial violence — like the bludgeoning death in 2000 of a 36-year-old Navajo woman by two white men — still occurs, if less frequently. Mr. Emerson and Mr. Yazzie said many crimes against Navajos went unreported.

“We’ve become so accustomed to our treatment by the Anglo community, we just accept it as normal,” said Mr. Yazzie, who was shot by a white hitchhiker in 1978 and lost an arm in the attack.

Mr. Yazzie said he believed outsiders, new to Farmington and its complicated racial dynamic, were to blame for the upswing in violence. He said he considered Mr. John’s shooting unjustified and wanted the federal government to intervene, as it did in the 1970’s. Other tribal leaders agree.

“We’ve come a long way since 1974, but sometimes it takes the feds to move things in the right direction, said Joe Shirley Jr., the president of the Navajo Nation. “Otherwise, it doesn’t get done.”

A stroll down Main Street, lined with antique shops and Navajo art galleries, reveals familiar divisions.

“The majority of Navajos are good people,” said Joann Carney, a white saleswoman at a clothing shop. “But a few give them a bad name.”

“Navajos get a lot of looks walking down the streets here,” said Patrick John, an American Indian from Shiprock. “There’s a lot of tension here. This is a border town.”

For George Arthur, a Navajo Nation delegate who lives near Farmington, the problems are escalating. A few years ago, Mr. Arthur said, his son was beaten by white youths who tried unsuccessfully to set him on fire. Mr. Arthur said no one was charged in the crime.

“The Navajo are a proud people,” he said. “We’ve learned to survive, and we can tolerate certain aspects of life. But not when it comes to our dignity.”

    In Shadow of 70’s Racism, Recent Violence Stirs Rage, NYT, 17.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/us/17navajo.html

The House

Councilwoman Wins Primary for House Seat

September 13, 2006
The New York Times
By MICHAEL COOPER

A black city councilwoman won the racially charged primary for a Congressional seat in central Brooklyn yesterday, beating back a challenge from a white councilman to win a seat created nearly four decades ago to increase minority representation in Congress.

The councilwoman, Yvette D. Clarke, 41, narrowly beat three opponents to capture the seat, which has been held by blacks since the 1968 victory of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress.

This year’s campaign attracted national attention because of the strong run by the white councilman, David Yassky, whose candidacy raised questions about race and representation.

With all precincts reporting, Ms. Clarke led with 31.2 percent of the vote to Mr. Yassky’s 26.2 percent, according to unofficial returns tallied by The Associated Press. State Senator Carl Andrews, who had the backing of many Brooklyn Democratic officials and Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, had 22.9 percent. Chris Owens, the son of the incumbent, Representative Major R. Owens, who is retiring, received 19.6 percent.

Early this morning, Mr. Yassky conceded the race. “I congratulate Yvette Clarke on her victory,” he said in a statement.

In her acceptance speech, Ms. Clarke said she planned to carry on in the tradition of Ms. Chisholm. “She rewrote history,’’ she said. “She was independent. She was brilliant.’’

“I will never be intimidated from standing up for what I think is right for a diverse cross section of my constituency,’’ said Ms. Clarke, the daughter of the first Caribbean-born woman to serve on the City Council.

Winning the Democratic primary is usually tantamount to winning the seat in this overwhelmingly Democratic district. It was one of dozens created after the Voting Rights Act to increase minority representation in Congress, so Mr. Yassky shook many in the political world with his decision to enter the race.

Some black leaders labeled Mr. Yassky an opportunist for moving into the district to run for the seat, and complained that he was trying to take advantage of a divided black vote. He was called a “colonizer” by the incumbent, Mr. Owens, who hoped to see his son win the race. And several black leaders tried to clear the field to help a consensus black candidate win.

But the rare prospect of an open seat in Congress attracted three black candidates who stayed in the race. Ms. Clarke narrowly rose above the pack with the support of several powerful unions adept at turning out voters.

In another closely watched Congressional primary in Brooklyn, Representative Edolphus Towns, the 72-year-old incumbent, narrowly beat back two challengers, Councilman Charles Barron and Assemblyman Roger Green. Mr. Barron came within eight percentage points of beating Mr. Towns, even though Mr. Towns had raised $1.1 million while Mr. Barron raised just over $109,000.

The race won by Ms. Clarke was bitterly fought. Fliers falsely claiming that she was quitting the race circulated in the district yesterday. Other fliers highlighted Mr. Andrews’s close ties to Clarence Norman Jr., the former Brooklyn Democratic leader, who was convicted last year of corruption charges.

All four candidates tried to outdo one another with their opposition to the war in Iraq. But they split when it came to the hottest local issue: the proposal to build housing, office towers and an arena for the Nets near Downtown Brooklyn. Mr. Owens was outspoken in his opposition to the plan; Ms. Clarke supported it.

Racial and ethnic politics seemed to play as big a role as issues. In interviews, though, many voters said that race was not a factor for them.

“The race card will always be played,’’ said Lisa Branic, 43, a black woman who voted in Crown Heights. “You always want whoever is going to do what’s right. That’s the most important thing. Not the color of one’s skin.’’

But some black voters said they were angered by Mr. Yassky’s candidacy. Rudolph Joseph, 76, a retired assistant director of Downstate Medical School, said: “Yassky has no right over here. This district was created for Shirley Chisholm, a black.’’

“We can’t go into the Jewish community to run for anything,’’ Mr. Joseph said, pointing toward Eastern Parkway. “It’s not right.’’

The district has grown whiter in recent years, partly because of the changing demographics of central Brooklyn and partly because of new district boundaries that were drawn in the 1990’s. The new boundaries expanded the district into more of Park Slope, Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights.

Before the redistricting, blacks made up almost three-quarters of the district’s voters. Now the district is 58.5 percent black and 21.4 percent white, according to the 2004 Almanac of American Politics. The district has voters with West Indian roots, African-Americans, Hasidic Jews, and a growing population of immigrants from Pakistan and Haiti.

At times, Mr. Yassky’s campaign stumbled in its efforts to reach out to black voters. An endorsement by relatives of James E. Davis, a popular black councilman who was shot dead in City Hall in 2003, backfired when they promptly un-endorsed him.

Ms. Clarke found herself on the defensive after her claims to have graduated from Oberlin College were reported to be false.

And Mr. Andrews, who won the support of many prominent politicians, including Mr. Spitzer, whom he once worked for, found himself constantly asked about his close ties to Mr. Norman.

Mr. Owens had enthusiastic backers, but apart from his father, he had little organizational support.

Kate Hammer, Karen James and Matthew Sweeney contributed reporting.

    Councilwoman Wins Primary for House Seat, NYT, 13.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/13/nyregion/13cong.html

City Ad Firms Agree to Hire More Black Managers

September 8, 2006
The New York Times
By DIANE CARDWELL and STUART ELLIOTT

Finding that just 2 percent of the upper echelon of the advertising industry is black, New York City officials said yesterday that they had reached agreements with several of the nation’s biggest ad firms forcing them to bring more black managers into this crucial sector of the city’s economy.

The city’s Human Rights Commission found that hiring of black workers had barely improved since an inquiry found similar problems 40 years ago. Of 8,000 employees working for 16 agencies the commission examined, Patricia L. Gatling, chairwoman of the commission, said about 22 percent make more than $100,000 a year, and only 2.5 percent of those are black.

Faced with the findings, nearly a dozen agencies, including those owned by the Interpublic Group of Companies and the WPP Group, have promised to set numerical goals for increasing black representation on their creative and managerial staffs and to report on their progress each year.

Under the agreements, the agencies have agreed to submit to three years of monitoring by the city, under which the companies will report hiring, promotion and retention figures to the commission each year. If they do not meet their goals, they will hire an outside consultant to help them do so, among other measures.

At the same time the companies have agreed to set up diversity boards and to link progress on the issue to their managers’ compensation.

The commission has the authority to fine companies up to $250,000 or to sue them, but officials said that they believed the threat of pressure from agency clients like Pepsi and Citigroup was a more effective stick in bringing corporate leaders to the negotiating table.

“In a city where African-Americans make up one-quarter of the population, with billions of dollars in purchase power, the lack of representation in the advertising industry is completely unacceptable,” Ms. Gatling said at a meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington yesterday. “There are plenty of secretaries and clerks, but very few African-Americans have risen much higher.”

A former advertising executive first brought the problem to the attention of the commission, which decided to focus on black workers as officials discovered that they were more severely underrepresented than other groups, Ms. Gatling said.

The city’s ad industry has long had a huge economic and symbolic role in New York, accounting for 46,000 jobs in the city. The industry is a crucial part of the media nexus — from TV networks to glossy magazines to Web design firms — that help make New York City the nation’s business capital. And the industry’s failure to hire and promote minorities has put it at odds with its clients as they try to reach an increasingly polyglot consumer marketplace.

By signing the agreements, which also require that agencies establish recruiting and internship programs through universities with large minority student populations, the agency executives can avoid the embarrassing prospect of testifying at public hearings scheduled for Sept. 25, at the start of the industry’s annual gathering, Advertising Week. So far, of the 16 agencies subpoenaed to testify by the commission, only the agencies of the Omnicom Group have declined to work on an agreement, officials said.

The commission’s analysis, which looked at salary levels as well as job titles, indicated that although the major ad firms have black workers, they are largely absent from the most senior or creative levels. Of 476 employees at DDB’s New York office, commission officials said, 51 are black. But of 159 employees making $100,000 or more, only 2 are black. Neither is among the 29 employees earning $200,000 to $300,000 or the 22 employees earning more than $300,000.

A similar pattern exists across the industry, commission officials said. At BBDO, of 1,077 New York office employees, 104 are black. In the group making $100,000 or more, 6 employees are black; among the 140 who earn $100,000 to $200,000, there are only 5. Not one of the 89 employees who earn $200,000 to $300,000 is black, and among the 59 earning above $300,000, there is but one black employee.

At Merkley & Partners, 10 of 207 employees are black. None earn more than $100,000.

Through the years, the advertising industry has tried to make efforts to increase the diversity of its work force, in many instances spurred by agency clients: marketers want the staff members of the agencies to reflect the increasing diversity of the American consumer, so they can better aim their pitches at a multicultural shopper.

One senior executive at a top agency said there had been previous investigations by the commission or its predecessors in 1968 and 1978, which led to reports being issued but nothing more. He spoke only when granted anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the agreement before it was formally announced.

“This represents a concrete step in the right direction,” the senior executive said, because until now “no agreement has ever been signed by any agency on this issue.” Whatever efforts have been made before have been voluntary and informal, the senior executive said.

“The industry generally has recruiting issues,” the senior executive said, adding: “Let’s be honest. Minorities are targeted broadly by everyone: Wall Street, Fortune 100 companies. Your top minority students have lots of opportunities outside advertising.”

Interpublic, which owns agencies like Draft and Gotham, said the decision by four of its agencies to sign agreements with the city commission demonstrated how the firms “will continue to make achieving an increasingly diverse work force and transparency on this issue major corporate priorities,” said Philippe Krakowsky, an executive vice president at Interpublic.

One company not party to the deal is Omnicom, which owns agencies like BBDO, DDB and Merkley. But Omnicom says it is pursuing its own strategy for diversifying its work force, making an arrangement with the City Council that does not involve setting specific hiring goals.

The company has promised to spend, for instance, at least $2.35 million to finance a diversity development program that will include an institute at Medgar Evers College from which the company will hire graduates. And it has pledged to recruit at historically black colleges around the country. The City Council has agreed to put up matching funds of $1 million for the institute.

    City Ad Firms Agree to Hire More Black Managers, NYT, 8.9.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/08/business/media/08ads.html?hp&ex=1157774400&en=5780e36e0c24cad7&ei=5094&partner=homepage