History > 2006 > USA > African-Americans

An early-19th-century edition of "The Negro’s Complaint"

is among the collection’s thousands of rare books.

Marissa Roth for The New York Times        NYT        December 13, 2006

 Black History Trove, a Life’s Work, Seeks Museum

NYT        14.12.2006

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/
arts/14clay.html

Obituary

James Brown

Godfather of Soul

became a spokesman for black America

Tuesday December 26, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

Stocky but lithe, like a street-brawling puma, James Brown, who has died aged 73 of congestive heart failure, was a dominant force in the emancipation of African-American music and culture from the 1960s onwards.

He was still performing up to his death. The day before he was hospitalised for pneumonia, he was at his annual Christmas toy giveaway in Atlanta, Georgia, and looking forward to giving a New Year's Eve concert.

Not that Brown was ever comfortable with such a politically correct notion as African-American. He was first and foremost of, and for, the US. Secondly, he remained defiantly a southerner. And, although he was unashamedly black, he had a lot more Cherokee Indian and, by his own admission, Mongol blood in him than any special connection or empathy with Africa - despite being hailed as some kind of homecoming hero when touring that continent. Latterly he saw himself as Universal James.

From the degradation and apparent hopelessness of an apparently stillborn delivery in a rural shack in the segregated southern US - he was resuscitated only when it was noticed that his body had stayed warm - he fiercely drove himself to become an internationally renowned, massively influential icon of his own invention, the Godfather of Soul.

Like other sobriquets - the Hardest Working Man in Showbusiness was an earlier claim, Minister of New Super Heavy Funk a later pitch - GOS was OTT, but it was the one that stuck and most befitted the nature of the man and his Taurean charge at life.

His career thundered or faltered more in accordance with the strengths and pitfalls of his relentless ego and determination to be somebody than any believable script. The fallout of his monumental drive "to the bridge" is a persistently resonating pulse that informs the dance of opportunity for all of us, of any creed or colour.

Brown's professional recording career lasted more than 40 years, but it was the decade from 1965 to 1974 that circumscribed his most extraordinary achievements. During that turbulent era of civil rights upheaval and war in Vietnam, he exploded from the launch-pad of "chitlin circuit" stardom (named after the characteristic dish of boiled pigs' intestines), playing the chain of "safe" black venues in the south and east, to become a national spokesman for black America.

By then independently controlling his own affairs, he hob-nobbed with politicos and cultural luminaries, was feted by the White House and was credited with helping greatly to calm the streets immediately following the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4 1968. He bought three of the then five black-owned US radio stations, launched his own soul food restaurants and food stamps programme, entertained in Africa and for US troops in Vietnam. He commanded attention. He was on an unprecedented, socially provocative roll while all the while maintaining a punishing schedule with his frenetic stage show.

By the mid-1970s, his political and business naivety had backfired. Nonetheless, it was during those 10 years that he and, just as importantly, the changing ensembles of talented musicians he employed, inspired and bullied, created music that was challenging, exhilarating, fuelled with passion and a rhythmic intensity unlike anything before. Of the moment and of the man, it is a substantial legacy of work that remains wholly idiosyncratic and yet is repeatedly echoed around the globe.

A later defining moment in Brown's career came in January 1986, when he was inducted as one of the 10 charter members into the US music industry's Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame. The other worthies were either dead or well beyond their "best before" date. Brown was concurrently riding his biggest international hit for more than a decade (Living In America, appropriately soundtracked in the bullish movie Rocky IV) at the very time his back catalogue was being plundered by an entire new international generation.

Few bravehearts have attempted to replicate organically a James Brown recording as he and his musicians spontaneously created them. But with the advent of computerised sampling technology, all and sundry were suddenly able to swipe his card into a soundtrack for their own aspirations. The beats and rhythms, screams and hollers; the energy and badassness; the catharsis and charisma; the unorthodoxy; all there for the taking. What Brown had emoted as personal expression came back around as a worldwide display of scattershot sound bites.

Whether later disciples from Tokyo to Tooting Bec fully understood where James Brown was coming from in the first place is another matter entirely. He wasn't always entirely lucid on that score himself.

Brown was born in the pine woods outside Barnwell, South Carolina, to parents who soon separated, leaving him in the care of an "aunt" who ran a brothel across the Savannah river in nearby Augusta, Georgia. A raggedy-assed waif with limited education but street nous, his early focus on sport and music was interupted by four years in jail for petty theft.

Paroled in 1952 in Toccoa, Georgia, he was taken in by the Byrd family, initially "wrecking the church" as a fervent gospeller with Sarah Byrd (an innate gift he later parodied in the 1980 movie, The Blues Brothers), then joining brother Bobby Byrd's group, the Gospel Starlighters. With their secular heads on, known as the Avons, they bounced from the early inspiration of Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five to perform the jump-jive of Joe Turner, Roy Brown and Wynonie Harris, the closeknit harmonies of groups like the Ink Spots and Orioles, and the newly emergent rhythm and blues sounds of Billy Ward's Dominoes, Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters, The Clovers and suchlike. Byrd's Avons became the Famous Flames with Brown at the forefront and relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, in pursuit of local tearaway Little Richard.

In late 1955, Richard had a hit with Tutti Frutti and decamped to Los Angeles for an incandescent, if brief, eruption of some of the greatest rock and roll records ever made. Brown temporarily emulated Richard on stage, but eschewed rock and roll when it came time for the Famous Flames to record in February 1956. Instead they cut a tortured, gospel-derived personalisation of an Orioles version of the Big Joe Williams' blues, Baby Please Don't Go. They called it Please, Please, Please. Syd Nathan, the myopic owner of Cincinnati-based King Records, to whom they were signed by the producer Ralph Bass, called it "the worst piece of shit I ever heard", but released it anyway. It has sold millions over the years and remained Brown's cape-flourishing, knee-dropping homage to his past throughout his career.

Despite their initial territorial success, Brown and a changing vocal group struggled in southern obscurity until a second hit in late 1958 (Try Me, a more romantic supplication) convinced Ben Bart, the owner of Universal Attractions booking agency, to become Brown's personal manager, business mentor and surrogate "pops". Recruiting his first small band of regular musicians, and with his teeth, hair and wardrobe made over, by 1962 Brown was breaking box office records in major black venues throughout the US with a whirlwind revue of his own creation that synthesised all of his roots into a shockingly unique new persona. Live at the Apollo,the resulting LP recorded at the top New York venue, smashed him into the face of white recognition.

What followed did not go according to anybody's plan. Brown formed his own independent company, Fair Deal Productions, and rebuilt his band into a sizeable orchestra with the intention of crossing the tracks at Tuxedo Junction. The prevailing social climate in the US, Brown's responses to the situation, and the fact that his new recruits were mostly restless young jazzers, sparked them all off into uncharted territory. It was Out of Sight, Papa Got a Brand New Bag. A Man's World bathed in Cold Sweat. He Said it Loud, was Black and Proud and danced the Popcorn. In a New Day it was Funky Now. He was Super Bad, a Sex Machine with Soul Power. He had his Thang and Papa Didn't Take No Mess, he demanded Payback. This litany of just a few of his more familiar titles does little justice to the underlying tour de force, involving three effectively different bands over 10 years, that changed the direction of black American music.

By 1975, James Brown was showing the first signs of insecurity since the 1950s. In the charts he was being outflanked by many of the younger acts he had inspired, he was on shaky ground with his record company, Polydor (a dispassionate international corporation, unlike the seat-of-the-pants operation with which he had grown strong), some of his leading musicians left him, and the Internal Revenue Service was on his case.

It was then that he apparently began smoking something rather more confusing than the occasional menthol and began rehashing his old hits; following trends instead of creating them. Nevertheless, he soldiered on, still toured the world regularly to great acclaim, came up with a hit from time to time, and seemed to be settling into his establishment-honoured role as a living legend, until 1987. That year saw him back in a southern jail again - this time for throwing a drug-fuelled tantrum brandishing a shotgun and nearly getting himself shot to death in a Keystone Cops chase around state borders.

Released in 1991, a lesser man might have deemed it prudent to retire gracefully with his multifarious awards on the sideboard. Brown dusted himself off, ordered a new spangle suit, assembled another band and charged forth once again. It was never the same as his heyday, but it was never less than an audience with a formidably dominant personality. Letting off another rifle and another car chase in 1998 led to a drug rehabilitation programme, and in 2004 he was arrested on charges of domestic violence against his fourth wife, Tomi Rae Hynie, a former backup singer. She survives him, as do their son and at least three other children.

Honours came in the form of a Grammy lifetime achievement award (1992), a Kennedy Centre Honour (2003) and entry into the UK Music Hall of Fame when he was in London for an energetic appearance in the BBC Electric Proms at the Roundhouse last November. With the spirit of one of his 1973 million-sellers, James Brown kept on Doing It To Death.

James Brown, G, 26.12.2006, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/dec/26/
guardianobituaries.usa 

MLK's widow

built legacy of her own

Updated 12/26/2006 9:57 PM ET
USA Today
By Larry Copeland

ATLANTA — Coretta Scott King earned worldwide admiration for her almost-regal bearing and her good works after the assassination of her husband, civil rights crusader Martin Luther King Jr.

After he was killed in Memphis in 1968, Coretta Scott King spent much of the next 38 years securing his public legacy. She campaigned to make her husband's birthday a national holiday and saw those efforts pay off in 1983 when President Reagan signed a bill doing so.

She founded the King Center almost single-handedly, starting it in the basement of her home and steering its growth into a national shrine visited by more than a half-million people annually.

King also was a respected civil rights and human rights figure on her own. She met during the 1970s with then-President Jimmy Carter and the presidents of the Urban League and the NAACP to discuss civil rights. She worked in the USA and abroad to help end apartheid in South Africa and tried to carry on her husband's philosophy of non-violence through the King Center.

It was her graceful presence and steely determination that were remembered by many of the thousands who came here from all over the nation during a week of commemoration after her death Jan. 30 at 78 of complications from a stroke and ovarian cancer.

King's funeral drew an overflow crowd of mourners and dignitaries including President Bush and former presidents Clinton, Carter and Bush. President Bush called her "a beloved, graceful, courageous woman who called America to its founding ideals and carried on a noble dream."

She was the most tangible connection to Martin Luther King Jr., who is exalted by many Americans for his unswerving commitment to racial justice and fairness. She was a classically trained opera singer who married King in 1953 and endured years of threats and hardship during the civil rights movement.

After her husband was killed in Memphis on April 4, 1968, as he was about to lead a march by striking city garbage workers, she flew there and vowed to carry on his work.

After Coretta Scott King's death, thousands stood for hours in cold and rain outside the Georgia State Capitol where she lay in state, just to get a final glance. Thousands more lined the route traveled by the horse-drawn carriage that bore her body. Others waited into the wee hours outside her husband's former church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, where another viewing was held.

Many of the mourners brought their young children. They said they wanted the children to know about King's role in helping to banish legalized racial segregation. Among those in the long lines was Deja Stewart, 9. "To me, she means a lot," Deja said. "Because of this lady and what she did after he died … it makes me want to work hard and go to college and get a good education. I admire her a lot."

In November, King's body was moved from a temporary grave into a crypt that contains her husband's body. They lie side by side, surrounded by the stillness of a reflecting pool at the King Center.

    MLK's widow built legacy of her own, UT, 26.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-26-passages-scott-king_x.htm

Nanny Hunt Can Be

a ‘Slap in the Face’ for Blacks

December 26, 2006
The New York Times
By JODI KANTOR

Last month, Jennifer Freeman sat in a Chicago coffee bar, counting her blessings and considering her problem. She had a husband with an M.B.A. degree, two children and a job offer that would let her dig out the education degree she had stashed away during years of playdates and potty training.

But she could not accept the job. After weeks of searching, Ms. Freeman, who is African-American, still could not find a nanny for her son, 5, and daughter, 3. Agency after agency told her they had no one to send to her South Side home.

As more blacks move up the economic ladder, one fixture — some would say necessity — of the upper-middle-class income bracket often eludes them. Like hailing a cab in Midtown Manhattan, searching for a nanny can be an exasperating, humiliating exercise for many blacks, the kind of ordeal that makes them wonder aloud what year it is.

“We’ve attained whatever level society says is successful, we’re included at work, but when we need the support for our children and we can afford it, why do we get treated this way?” asked Tanisha Jackson, an African-American mother of three in a Washington suburb, who searched on and off for five years before hiring a nanny. “It’s a slap in the face.”

Numerous black parents successfully employ nannies, and many sitters say they pay no regard to race. But interviews with dozens of nannies and agencies that employ them in Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Houston turned up many nannies — often of African-American or Caribbean descent themselves — who avoid working for families of those backgrounds. Their reasons included accusations of low pay and extra work, fears that employers would look down at them, and suspicion that any neighborhood inhabited by blacks had to be unsafe.

The result is that many black parents do not have the same child care options as their colleagues and neighbors. They must settle for illegal immigrants or non-English speakers instead of more experienced or credentialed nannies, rely on day care or scale back their professional aspirations to spend more time at home.

“Very rarely will an African-American woman work for an African-American boss,” said Pat Cascio, the owner of Morningside Nannies in Houston and the president of the International Nanny Association.

Many of the African-American nannies who make up 40 percent of her work force fear that people of their own color will be “uppity and demanding,” said Ms. Cascio, who is white. After interviews, she said, those nannies “will call us and say, ‘Why didn’t you tell me’ ” the family is black?

In several cities, nanny agencies decline to serve certain geographic areas — not because of redlining, these agencies say, but because the nannies, who decide which jobs to take, do not want to work there. “I can’t service everyone,” said Maria Christopoulos-Katris, owner of Nanny Boutique, an agency that turned down Ms. Freeman’s request, even though it claims to cater to the city of Chicago. “I don’t discriminate.”

Ms. Freeman finally found a friend, another black mother, to watch her children.

Similarly, Ms. Jackson was told by some of the best-known nanny agencies in Washington that they did not serve Prince George’s County, Md., a largely black area bordering the District of Columbia.

“We have problems getting people to certain areas because of logistics,” said Barbara Kline, the owner of White House Nannies, which Ms. Jackson contacted. “I’m always worried people will interpret it the wrong way.” She added, “Nannies like to go where other nannies go or where their previous jobs were.” Ms. Jackson noted that White House Nannies served other suburbs, and that a bus stopped just minutes from her house.

Agencies represent only a small slice of nannies; most work through informal arrangements, further out of reach of civil rights and labor laws. (Because so many nannies are illegal, no one can say with certainty how many work in this country, let alone work for black families.)

In visits, telephone calls and e-mail exchanges across the country, nannies of all colors spoke of parents in sweeping ethnic generalizations: the Jews this, the Indians that. Viola Waszkiewicz, a white sitter in Chicago, has cared for black children, but explained that many fellow Eastern European nannies would not.

“We come here, and we watch TV and the news, and all we see is black people who got hurt, got murdered,” she said. Most of the nannies she knows “think all black people are bad,” she said. “They’re afraid to go to black neighborhoods.”

Pamela Potischman, a social worker in Brooklyn who specializes in parent-nanny relationships, said, “You rely on what’s familiar, so you’re going to rely on these vast generalizations to be self-protective.” She added, “The nannies talk, and they say, ‘This is what’s O.K. and what to watch out for.’ ”

This summer, Tomasina and Eric Boone of Brooklyn sought a nanny for their baby girl because their jobs — she is the advertising beauty director for Essence magazine, he is a lawyer at Milbank Tweed — require evening hours. After a Manhattan agency did not return Ms. Boone’s call, they searched on their own, and sat through one stomach-curdling interview after another.

One sitter, a Caribbean woman living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, asked about the “colored” people in the Boones’ neighborhood, Clinton Hill. A Russian sitter said enthusiastically that although she had never cared for a black child, she could in this case, because little Emerie Boone, now 7 months old, was light-skinned. All sitters expressed surprise that a black couple could afford a four-story brownstone.

“There were points where I got so frustrated that I picked up my child and I said, ‘Tomasina will show you out,’ ” said Mr. Boone, who is African-American and serves on the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The Boones now use day care. It is inconvenient — the center closes at 6, often forcing Mr. Boone to race to Brooklyn and then back to his Midtown office. But “there is no way we’re doing the whole nanny thing again,” said Ms. Boone, who is African-American and Puerto Rican.

Mr. Boone said, “To have someone refer to other black people as ‘colored,’ what does that teach your child about race?”

Like Ms. Freeman in Chicago and Ms. Jackson in Maryland, the Boones worry that nanny troubles could limit their professional advancement. In earlier generations, Ms. Jackson said, “We were the nannies.” Now, blacks “want to have it all,” working and raising children. “But to have it all you need help,” she said.

And that means qualified help. “How can you do a background check when someone doesn’t have a driver’s license?” Ms. Jackson said. “I’m not going to take this nanny just because she’s the only one I can get.”

In an exception to the usual stroller parade of black sitters with white children, some white nannies do care for black children — and experience slights because of it. Margaret Kop, a Polish sitter in Chicago, said that on a recent playground visit, “one of the other nannies asked me, ‘Where did you find that monkey?’ ” On the way home, Ms. Kop cried, stung by the insult to the child she loved.

Some black sitters, both Caribbean and African-American, said they flat out refused to work for families of those backgrounds, accusing them of demanding more and paying less.

“It seems like our own color looks down on us and takes advantage of us,” said Pansy Scott, a Jamaican immigrant in Brooklyn, basing her conclusions on working for a single black family years ago. Ai-Jen Poo, lead organizer for Domestic Workers United, a labor group, said, “Domestic employees are at the whim of their employers,” good or bad. “If they happen to run into an employer who for whatever reason is not respecting their rights,” she said, they may draw wildly broad conclusions.

The problem may be as much about class as race, said Kimberly McClain DaCosta, a Harvard sociologist who is researching how blacks care for family members. For nannies, working for an employer of the same background or skin color “highlights their lower economic status,” she said, but “the fact that their employers are black just makes that more intense.”

Many black families say they seek only a sitter who is reliable and loving. But some do have race-based preferences themselves. African-American professionals, who constantly battle the stereotype that blacks do not speak proper English, sometimes hesitate to hire Caribbean nannies who speak with lilting accents or island patois, said Cameron L. Macdonald, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

These parents want their children “socialized into what it’s like to be black in a racist society, but they also want their children to be socialized into being middle class. That’s hard for one person to do,” said Ms. Macdonald, who is white.

Ms. DaCosta is an African-American parent herself. She and her husband, who is Caribbean, have successfully employed several nannies for their three children. Still, the hiring process has been tricky. They preferred a black sitter, who would instantly understand matters like how to do their daughter’s hair. At one point, Ms. DaCosta scouted playgrounds, so she could spy on nannies’ skin color as well as behavior; another time, she placed a race-neutral ad, and hid by the window as the prospective nannies drove up, sighing with relief when a black one appeared.

Ms. DaCosta and her husband now use au pairs, checking the photos on their applications and announcing their own race at the start of the phone interview. “We don’t want any surprises,” she said.

    Nanny Hunt Can Be a ‘Slap in the Face’ for Blacks, NYT, 26.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/us/26nannies.html

Black History Trove,

a Life’s Work,

Seeks Museum

December 14, 2006
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 13 — Behind the dusty stools and the old towels, under the broken telephones and the picture frames, amid the spider webs, sits one of the country’s most important collections of artifacts devoted to the history of African-Americans.

Painstakingly collected over a lifetime by Mayme Agnew Clayton — a retired university librarian who died in October at 83 and whose interest in African-American history consumed her for most of her adult life — the massive collection of books, films, documents and other precious pieces of America’s past has remained essentially hidden for decades, most of it piled from floor to ceiling in a ramshackle garage behind Ms. Clayton’s home in the West Adams district of Los Angeles.

Only now is her son Avery Clayton close to forming a museum and research institute that would bring her collection out of the garage and into public view. Just days before Ms. Clayton died, he rented a former courthouse in nearby Culver City for $1 a year to become the treasures’ home, leaving him to scrape together $565,000 to move the thousands of items and put them on display for the first year.

“There is no doubt that this is one of the most important collections in the United States for African-American materials,” said Sara S. Hodson, curator of literary manuscripts for the Huntington Library in San Marino, one of the country’s largest collections of rare books and manuscripts. “It is a tremendous resource for all Americans, but especially African-Americans, whose history has largely been neglected.”

There are first editions by Langston Hughes and nearly every other writer from the Harlem Renaissance, many of them signed; a rare biography of the architect Paul R. Williams; and the oeuvre of the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.

There is an edition of “The Negro’s Complaint,” a poem complete with hand-painted illustrations; books by and about every notable American of African descent from George Washington Carver to Bill Cosby; and thousands more items concerning those whose names were lost or never known.

The roughly 30,000 rare and out-of-print books written by and about blacks in Ms. Clayton’s collection have never been fully archived.

There is also what Mr. Clayton calls the world’s largest collection of 16-mm films made by blacks; 75,000 photographs; 9,500 sound recordings; and tens of thousands of documents, manuscripts and correspondence: a treasure trove that Ms. Clayton assembled piece by piece, on her modest salary, scouring used bookstores, garage sales, antique shops and pretty much any place where she could find books and memorabilia related to the African-American experience.

The premier collection devoted to black literature and artifacts is the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. Other major collections include the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History at the Chicago Public Library, and those of Howard University, Temple University and the University of Arkansas.

Ms. Clayton’s collection is distinguished by its breadth and depth of materials, scholars say, including the films, the handwritten slave documents and the staggering assortment of ephemera, and is unmatched on the West Coast. “A collection like this is, in my mind, priceless,” said Philip J. Merrill, an expert on African-American memorabilia.

Mr. Clayton recalled his mother’s longing — and inability — to find a home for her collection, where it could be used by everyone from esteemed scholars to black teenagers who have yet to hear of W. E. B. Du Bois. “Culture is the measure of a civilization,” said Mr. Clayton, who left his job as an art teacher to shepherd his mother’s collection. “Without evidence of a culture, there is no proof that a people exists.”

For now, the future Mayme E. Clayton Library and Cultural Center has a jail cell (which may one day store sensitive items), three courtrooms (one with leather seats will be a theater) and a large portrait that Mr. Clayton painted of his mother.

But if all goes well, in 2008 it will become a research center, perhaps even a repository for other large collections of African-American history that, like his mother’s, are “sitting in boxes in the basements of homes and church libraries, waiting for a flood,” Mr. Clayton said.

The dispersion of important African-American cultural materials has long vexed researchers. “The older materials have always been collected out of a labor of love by someone who had the foresight to realize that researchers would find it valuable,” said Patricia A. Turner, a professor of African-American studies at the University of California, Davis. Putting such works together “will be very important for the scholarly community.”

Ms. Clayton’s interest in literature and black history was sparked during her childhood in Van Buren, Ark. Her father, a black merchant, wanted his children “exposed to black people of accomplishment,” Mr. Clayton said. Her father once took the family to visit Mary McLeod Bethune in Little Rock.

“I always had a desire to want to know more about my people,” Ms. Clayton said in a 2005 interview with the HistoryMakers, a video oral-history archive. “I would hear about another person, so I would go and try to find some books about that one. And it just snowballed.”

Ms. Clayton came to New York in her 20s, met Andrew Lee Clayton, whom she married in 1946, and soon moved to California to a tiny bungalow in historic West Adams where she started a family.

Her collecting grew from her work as a librarian, first at the University of Southern California and later at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she began to build an African-American collection.

In 1969 she helped establish the university’s African-American Studies Center Library, and began to buy out-of-print works by authors from the Harlem Renaissance.

Around that time, Ms. Clayton invested in a bookstore. When the principal owner squandered their profits on the horses, Mr. Clayton said, his mother agreed to take her partner’s collection of black-oriented books rather than take him to court.

Her business acumen became well known in the field. “I distinctly remember trading four items I had, which included a signed poem by Langston Hughes, for one book,” said Randall K. Burkett, the curator of African-American collections at Emory University. “Let’s just say she did very well.”

Ms. Clayton, an avid golfer, traveled for her sport, trolling for rare finds wherever she went. The centerpiece of the collection that grew this way is a signed copy of Phillis Wheatley’s “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,” from 1773. First published by an American of African descent, the book was acquired for $600 from a New York dealer in 1973. In 2002 it was appraised at $30,000.

The books and others items Ms. Clayton amassed cost her hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, her son said, money she got through scrimping, selling off books occasionally and living modestly.

Mr. Clayton, one of Ms. Clayton’s three sons, dreams of housing his mother’s collection in a 40,000-square-foot hilltop cultural center with an atrium garden, performance space and archived research center. “She always wanted something grand,” he said. He estimates it would cost $7 million to operate the center for three years. So far he has raised $15,000 and he said he was working with his congresswoman for a $150,000 appropriation.

For now he just wants the collection out of her garage — the films and some other items are in storage — and into the former courthouse, where the world can see it.

“One of the things that culture does is that it works like a family,” Mr. Clayton said. “If you know you come from a good family, it enables you to go out into the world, no matter what happens to you, and do O.K. It is the same thing with culture: If you know you come from a great people, it gives you that same feeling.”

    Black History Trove, a Life’s Work, Seeks Museum, NYT, 14.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/arts/14clay.html

Political Drama

Re-enacts Moments

in a Death Chamber

December 14, 2006
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

BERKELEY, Calif., Dec. 13 — As drama, what happened on stage at the Black Repertory Theater of Berkeley early Wednesday morning was not classic theatrical fare. The actors were mostly motionless, the play had only one line, and everyone in the audience knew how the story was going to end.

But creating a compelling narrative may not have been the authors’ point. The play was a re-enactment of the execution of the convicted killer Stanley Tookie Williams, staged on the first anniversary of his death by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison.

The performance was written and produced by Barbara Becnel and Shirley Neal, two friends of Mr. Williams and death penalty opponents, who were unapologetic about their play’s being agitprop.

“This is political theater in the extreme,” Ms. Becnel told a crowd of about 150 people who gathered to watch the performance. “But it’s political theater in the extreme because we need it.”

The execution of Mr. Williams, 51, a founder of the Crips gang who was convicted of murdering four people in 1979, has continued to be a rallying point for death penalty opponents as well as a source of contention about the methods of lethal injection.

In September, a representative of the state attorney general’s office acknowledged that prison guards and nurses had botched Mr. Williams’s lethal injection, failing to hook up a backup intravenous line to his arm. Ms. Becnel said Mr. Williams was in agony during his execution, which took 35 minutes to complete.

“I was there, I saw what they did,” Ms. Becnel said. “And I can tell you it was a 35-minute torture-murder.”

State officials deny that Mr. Williams suffered unnecessarily. “The execution went exactly as the protocol is designed to carry it out,” said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer. “The lack of the extra IV line was definitely a mistake, but it didn’t affect the execution.”

Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, an advocate for victims’ rights and law enforcement, said he believed Mr. Williams was a bad role model for a play.

“I think it hurts the anti-death-penalty movement to hold up as dastardly a criminal as Tookie,” Mr. Rushford said, citing Mr. Williams’s work with the Crips, a violent gang based in Los Angeles.

Mr. Rushford added that Wednesday morning’s performance was simply “preaching to the choir” of Mr. Williams’s supporters, many of whom rallied in front of San Quentin the night of his execution.

“I don’t expect an accurate portrayal of what happened,” he said. “But when you’ve made such a big deal of it, you can’t just let it drop after a year.”

Mr. Williams’s experiences in the death chamber were part of a Federal District Court hearing in September — stemming from a lawsuit by Michael Morales, a condemned rapist and killer — that may affect death penalty methodology in California. The judge overseeing the hearings, Jeremy Fogel, effectively halted executions in California until he could hear arguments on whether methods of lethal injection caused undue pain. Judge Fogel is expected to issue a ruling soon.

For supporters of Mr. Williams, his execution, which drew international press attention and a cadre of celebrity protesters, was unjust, in part because of his post-incarceration work speaking about the dangers of gangs through a series of children’s books, lectures and memoirs, many of which were written with Ms. Becnel. Mr. Williams also claimed to be innocent.

On Wednesday, the theatrical re-enactment began at 12:01 a.m., the time Mr. Williams entered the death chamber. It was performed by six actors, including Darby Tillis, 64, an exonerated death row inmate from Chicago who played Mr. Williams and said he had little trouble connecting with the role.

“When you’re on death row, you always have an imaginary scene that you live out many times: how you would feel if you went down for an execution,” Mr. Tillis said.

With a simple set — folding chairs, a gurney and a platform — the play’s action was minimal: three witnesses stood, a guard strapped Mr. Tillis to a gurney, a nurse fumbled with an IV. Only once did anyone speak, when Mr. Tillis asked the actor playing the frustrated nurse whether she knew what she was doing. The entire performance took about 12 minutes — about a third of the actual execution time.

And while the audience was silent throughout, some said the experience had left them shaken. Kirya Traber, 22, who wore a Save Tookie T-shirt, said she had been outside San Quentin the year before, but felt a lot closer to the drama on Wednesday.

“Here tonight,” Ms. Traber said, “was a lot more solemn.”

    Political Drama Re-enacts Moments in a Death Chamber, NYT, 14.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/us/14tookie.html

Editorial

An Assault

on Local School Control

December 4, 2006
The New York Times

More than 50 years after the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Board of Education, the nation still has not abolished de facto segregation in public schools. But thanks to good will and enormous effort, some communities have made progress. Today the Supreme Court hears arguments in a pair of cases that could undo much of that work.

Conservative activists are seeking to halt the completely voluntary, and laudable, efforts by Seattle and Louisville, Ky., to promote racially integrated education. Both cities have school assignment plans known as managed or open choice. Children are assigned to schools based on a variety of factors, one of which is the applicant’s race.

The plan that Jefferson County adopted for Louisville has a goal of having black enrollment in every school be no less than 15 percent and no more than 50 percent. Seattle assigns students to its 10 high schools based on a number of factors, including an “integration tiebreaker.” This tiebreaker, which is applied to students of all races, requires that an applicant’s race be taken into account when a school departs by more than 15 percent from the district’s overall racial breakdown.

Parents in both districts sued, alleging that the consideration of race is unconstitutional. In each case, the court of appeals upheld the assignment plans. In the Seattle case, Judge Alex Kozinski, a Reagan appointee who is highly respected by legal conservatives, wrote that because the district’s plan does not advantage or disadvantage any particular racial group — its pro-integration formula applies equally to all — it “carries none of the baggage the Supreme Court has found objectionable” in other cases involving race-based actions.

The Louisville and Seattle plans are precisely the kind of benign race-based policies that the court has long held to be constitutional. Promoting diversity in education is a compelling state interest under the equal protection clause, and these districts are using carefully considered, narrowly tailored plans to make their schools more diverse.

It is startling to see the Justice Department, which was such a strong advocate for integration in the civil rights era, urging the court to strike down the plans. Its position is at odds with so much the Bush administration claims to believe. The federal government is asking federal courts to use the Constitution to overturn educational decisions made by localities. Conservative activists should be crying “judicial activism,” but they do not seem to mind this activism with an anti-integration agenda.

If these plans are struck down, many other cities’ plans will most likely also have to be dismantled. In Brown, a unanimous court declared education critical for a child to “succeed in life” and held that equal protection does not permit it to be provided on a segregated basis. It would be tragic if the court changed directions now and began using equal protection to re-segregate the schools.

    An Assault on Local School Control, NYT, 4.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/opinion/04mon1.html

Sharpton and Jesse Jackson

Lead Angry Group to Site of Deadly Police Shooting

November 30, 2006
The New York Times
By SEWELL CHAN and DARYL KHAN

The Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton led relatives and community members on an angry and emotional visit yesterday morning to the Queens street where Sean Bell, an unarmed 23-year-old black man, was shot to death in a hail of police bullets early Saturday morning.

As the two civil rights leaders led their group, police officers continued searching the site for evidence yesterday, and investigators were seeking additional witnesses.

The police were trying to locate a man who may have been in Mr. Bell’s car on Saturday morning and another who witnesses say was at the heart of arguments outside Club Kalua, a cabaret, with groups that included Mr. Bell. That man was last seen dressed in black and standing in front of a sport utility vehicle with silver wheels in the moments before the shooting. It is unclear what role, if any, he played, the police said.

The police described the man who may have been in Mr. Bell’s car as being last seen wearing a beige jacket and running away from the shooting onto 95th Avenue, the police said.

As investigators working on the case seek the two men, the police are asking everyone arrested in the city whether they have any information about the case.

The case has attracted national attention, a fact underscored by the arrival of Mr. Jackson and by a call from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to Bruce S. Gordon, president and chief executive of the N.A.A.C.P., which wants the Justice Department to review whether the shooting violated federal civil rights laws. Mr. Jackson echoed that sentiment yesterday.

Mr. Gordon said the mayor, who has made fighting poverty a priority of his second term, had expressed interest in improving education and job opportunities for young black men. “I at least find his approach to be refreshing,” Mr. Gordon said, “but in no way am I comforted, because this incident just points out the disparities and abuses in the system that have to be changed.”

On Monday the mayor called the shooting “excessive,” a characterization that Gov. George E. Pataki agreed with.

“Obviously, 50 bullets fired into or at an unarmed individual in New York is excessive force,” Mr. Pataki said yesterday in a news conference broadcast by satellite from Kuwait, “but the appropriate response to that is something that I think the investigation of the mayor and the police commissioner will reveal.”

Mr. Sharpton hinted yesterday that he might call for a shopping boycott to protest the shooting.

Shortly before 9 a.m., Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Jackson led elected officials and clergy members to the spot in Jamaica, Queens, where five officers fired 50 shots at Mr. Bell’s car during a confrontation in which he drove into one of the officers and an unmarked police van. Two friends of Mr. Bell, Trent Benefield, 23, and Joseph Guzman, 31, were also in the car and were seriously wounded.

On Liverpool Street, at an impromptu sidewalk memorial of white carnations, red roses, candles and photographs taped to a brick wall, Mr. Bell’s aunt, the Rev. Diane Shepherd-Oliver, a minister at the New Life Temple of Praise in Syracuse, called for God’s help. “Pray for the policemen and the other individuals who are injured,” she said.

Mr. Bell’s parents, William and Valerie, and his fiancée, Nicole Paultre, whom he was to wed the day he was killed, were among those in the group.

“We appeal to people: Don’t do anything disruptive or in any way contrary to the memory of Sean Bell,” Mr. Sharpton said. “We do not want the world to see him as anything other than what he was. He was not violent. He was not a thug. He was not in the street. Don’t use your anger to distort who he was.”

Mr. Jackson said of the shooting: “This is a symbol, not an aberration. Our criminal justice system has broken down for black Americans and the young black males.”

Mr. Guzman’s sister, Yolanda, who has been at his bedside at Mary Immaculate Hospital, said of her brother, whom she helped raise: “He’s critical. He cannot talk. He has 19 holes in him.”

Mr. Guzman’s companion, Ebony Browning, squeezed the hand of their son, Juan, 6, and lighted a candle and taped up a photo of Mr. Guzman. “Pray for my child and pray for my husband, too,” she said.

Al Baker and Michael Cooper contributed reporting.

Sharpton and Jesse Jackson Lead Angry Group to Site of Deadly Police Shooting, NYT, 30.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/nyregion/30shoot.html

Lawyers Debate

Why Blacks Lag at Major Firms

November 29, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

Thanks to vigorous recruiting and pressure from corporate clients, black lawyers are well represented now among new associates at the nation’s most prestigious law firms. But they remain far less likely to stay at the firms or to make partner than their white counterparts.

A recent study says grades help explain the gap. To ensure diversity among new associates, the study found, elite law firms hire minority lawyers with, on average, much lower grades than white ones. That may, the study says, set them up to fail.

The study, which was prepared by Richard H. Sander, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and was published in The North Carolina Law Review in July, has given rise to fierce and growing criticism in law review articles and in the legal press. In an opinion article in The National Law Journal this month, for instance, R. Bruce McClean, the chairman of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, a major law firm, took issue with the study’s “sweeping conclusions” but not its “detailed data analysis.”

James E. Coleman Jr., the first black lawyer to make partner at Wilmer Cutler & Pickering, a prestigious Washington law firm now known as WilmerHale, said Professor Sander was overemphasizing grades at the expense of other qualities like writing skills, temperament and the ability to analyze complex problems.

“I don’t think you can do what he is trying to do, which is to use purely objective data to explain what is happening in law firms,” said Professor Coleman, who now teaches law at Duke and is a co-author of a response to Professor Sander called “Is It Really All About the Grades?”

Achieving racial diversity at all levels is an urgent issue, law firms say, but they acknowledge that gains among new associates disappear by the time new partners are elected. “We’ve seen stagnation and even decline when it comes to race,” said Meredith Moore, the director of the New York City Bar Association’s diversity office.

The new study proposes an explanation. It found that the pool of black lawyers with excellent law-school grades is so small that firms must relax their standards if they are to have new associates who resemble the pool of new lawyers.

Professor Sander found that very few blacks graduated from top-30 law schools with high grades.

Yet grades, according to many hiring partners and law students, are a significant criterion in hiring decisions, rivaled only by the prestige of the law school in question. For instance, Professor Sander found, “white law school graduates with G.P.A.’s of 3.5 or higher are nearly 20 times as likely to be working for a large law firm as are white graduates with G.P.A.’s of 3.0 or lower.”

The story for black students appears to be different. Black students, who make up 1 to 2 percent of students with high grades (meaning a grade point average in the top half of the class) make up 8 percent of corporate law firm hires, Professor Sander found. “Blacks are far more likely to be working at large firms than are other new lawyers with similar credentials,” he said.

But black lawyers, the study found, are about one-fourth as likely to make partner as white lawyers from the same entering class of associates.

Professor Coleman attributed that largely to law firms’ failure to provide minority associates with mentoring, encouragement and good assignments. “It’s such a high-pressure place that places so much emphasis on getting it right that a young associate easily loses confidence,” he said. “But to succeed you have to take risks.”

No one disputes that firms are failing to retain and promote most of the minority lawyers they hired, at salaries that can start at $135,000.

“Black and Hispanic attrition at corporate firms is devastatingly high,” Professor Sander wrote, “with blacks from their first year onwards leaving firms at two to three times the rate of whites. By the time partnership decisions roll around, black and Hispanic pools at corporate firms are tiny.”

Less prestigious firms are much less likely to hire minority lawyers with substantially lower grades than white lawyers, Professor Sander said in an interview.

“Black associates report experiences at small firms — in mentoring, job responsibility and contact with partners — that are generally indistinguishable from the experiences reported by white associates,” Professor Sander said. Those experiences suggest that minority lawyers at small firms have a good shot at partnership, but Professor Sander said he did not have direct evidence on that point.

Critics generally concede the raw numbers. But they offer different reasons for the gap between hiring and promotion. Some point to old-fashioned racism. Others say that firms act institutionally in hiring but leave work assignments to individual partners. Those partners often provide poor training, rote assignments and little mentoring to minority lawyers.

That should be unsurprising given the credentials gap, said Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, which opposes hiring preferences based on race.

“If everyone in the law firms knows you’re hiring according to a double standard, you actually may end up compromising the confidence that partners and others have in the ability of people hired on the basis of preference,” Mr. Clegg added. “It actually reinforces stereotypes.”

The experience of white female associates provides a series of contrasts. Women at large firms have slightly better grades than men, yet they are also underrepresented in classes of new partners. But women do not report the absence of mentoring and choice assignments that minority associates do.

“Strikingly, women’s self-reported work experiences — in terms of mentoring, level of responsibility and access to partners — are positive and indistinguishable from the self-reports of white men,” Professor Sander said. “Consistent with this picture, white women’s attrition rates as entering and midlevel associates are nearly as low as those of white men.”

Associates typically work for about eight years before being considered for partnership. “As women of all races approach the seventh year of their tenure, and contemplate the compatibility of big-firm partnership with their family and quality-of-life goals,” Professor Sander said, “many women pull out of the running for partners and seek out less demanding jobs.”

Though many supporters of affirmative action question Professor Sander’s conclusions, most academic experts say his empirical work is sound.

“He makes a good case,” said Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt, an authority on the economic analysis of legal problems at the Indiana University School of Law. “What the data tells him is that there’s a mismatch going on and it’s hurting black students.”

In their response to the Sander study, Professor Coleman and Mitu Gulati, another law professor at Duke, wrote that the Sander paper would aggravate the problem it described.

“The harm of the Sander article,” the two professors wrote, “is that it will contribute to the stereotyping that already undermines the success of black associates in elite corporate law firms.”

Stephen F. Hanlon, a partner with Holland & Knight, a national law firm, said the Sander study overlooked a positive reason for high attrition rates among minority lawyers. Female and minority lawyers, he said, are often hired away from law firms by corporate law departments, and that will have an impact over time.

“We have trained a very bright generation of women and minority lawyers who have gone to our corporate clients and who now decide whether to hire us,” Mr. Hanlon said.

Supporters of affirmative action acknowledge that trend, and add that high rates of minority attrition should be unsurprising given the grinding, mercenary culture of most law firms.

“Minorities, when they look at management structures and see that so few make it, they probably give up,” said Veta T. Richardson, the executive director of the Minority Corporate Counsel Association.

Even Professor Sander’s critics say he has started an important discussion.

“We have done our share of stone throwing,” Professor Coleman and Professor Gulati wrote in their response, “but that should not take away from the fact that Professor Sander has identified a real problem that needs serious study, and that his study has added considerably to the limited body of available, public research, even though his conclusions are, at best, premature.”

    Lawyers Debate Why Blacks Lag at Major Firms, NYT, 29.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/us/29diverse.html

Bebe Moore Campbell,

Novelist of Black Lives,

Dies at 56

November 28, 2006
The New York Times
By MARGALIT FOX

Bebe Moore Campbell, a best-selling novelist known for her empathetic treatment of the difficult, intertwined and occasionally surprising relationship between the races, died yesterday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 56.

The cause was complications of brain cancer, said Linda Wharton-Boyd, a longtime friend.

Along with writers like Terry McMillan, Ms. Campbell was part of the first wave of black novelists who made the lives of upwardly mobile black people a routine subject for popular fiction. Straddling the divide between literary and mass-market novels, Ms. Campbell’s work explored not only the turbulent dance between blacks and whites but also the equally fraught relationship between men and women.

Throughout her work, Ms. Campbell sought to counter prevailing stereotypes of black people as socially and economically marginal. Though critics occasionally faulted her characters as two-dimensional, her novels were known for their crossover appeal, read by blacks and whites alike.

Often called on by the news media to discuss race relations, Ms. Campbell was for years a familiar presence on television and radio. With the publication of her most recent novel, “72 Hour Hold” (Knopf, 2005), she also became a visible spokeswoman on mental-health issues. The novel, about bipolar disorder, was inspired by the experience of a family member, Ms. Campbell said.

Originally a schoolteacher and later a journalist, Ms. Campbell made her mark as a writer of fiction with her first novel, “Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine” (Putnam), published in 1992. Rooted in the story of Emmett Till, the book tells of a black Chicago youth killed by a white man in Mississippi in 1955. After the murderer is acquitted at trial, the narrative follows his increasing dissolution.

“I wanted to give racism a face,” Ms. Campbell said in an interview with The New York Times Book Review in 1992. “African-Americans know about racism, but I don’t think we really know the causes. I decided it’s first of all a family problem.”

Reviewing the novel in The Book Review, Clyde Edgerton wrote: “By showing lives lived, and not explaining ideas, Ms. Campbell does what good storytellers do — she puts in by leaving out.”

Ms. Campbell’s other novels, all published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, are “Brothers and Sisters” (1994), written in the wake of the Los Angeles riots of 1992; “Singing in the Comeback Choir” (1998), about a black television producer feeling cut off from her roots; and “What You Owe Me” (2001), about the friendship between two women, one African-American, the other a Jewish Holocaust survivor, in the 1940’s.

Elizabeth Bebe Moore was born in Philadelphia on Feb. 18, 1950, to parents who divorced when she was very young. Bebe spent each school year in Philadelphia with her mother, grandmother and aunt — strong, upright women she collectively called “the Bosoms” — who set her on a course of study, discipline and staunch middle-class respectability.

She spent summers in North Carolina with her father, who had been paralyzed in an automobile accident. There, she was enveloped in a heady world of beer, laughter and cigar smoke. She documented her contrasting lives in her memoir, “Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad” (Putnam, 1989).

After earning a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from the University of Pittsburgh in 1971, Ms. Campbell taught school in Atlanta for several years before embarking on a career as a freelance journalist. Her first book was a work of nonfiction, “Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two-Career Marriage” (Random House, 1986).

She also wrote two picture books for children, “Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry” (Putnam, 2003; illustrated by E. B. Lewis); and “Stompin’ at the Savoy” (Philomel, 2006; illustrated by Richard Yarde).

Ms. Campbell’s first marriage, to Tiko Campbell, ended in divorce. She is survived by her husband, Ellis Gordon Jr., whom she married in 1984; her mother, Doris Moore of Los Angeles; a daughter from her first marriage, Maia Campbell of Los Angeles; a stepson, Ellis Gordon III of Mitchellville, Md.; and two grandchildren.

Despite the subject matter of her books, Ms. Campbell expressed hope about the future of American race relations. In an interview with The New York Times in 1995, she described her motivation for writing “Brothers and Sisters,” the story of the friendship between a black banker and her white colleague.

“It was my attempt to bridge a racial gap,” Ms. Campbell said. “That’s the story that never gets told: how many of us really like each other, respect each other.”

    Bebe Moore Campbell, Novelist of Black Lives, Dies at 56, NYT, 28.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/books/28campbell.html

In Cincinnati,

Life Breathes Anew

in Riot-Scarred Area

November 25, 2006
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER MAAG

CINCINNATI — A few years ago, Jim Moll, a real estate agent, turned to his friend Bill Baum, a developer, and asked whether anyone would ever sell condominiums on Vine Street, the epicenter of race riots here in 2001.

“Not in our lifetimes,” Mr. Moll recalls Mr. Baum replying.

One recent afternoon, Mr. Baum, 57, stood on the battered pine floorboards of a 130-year-old building on Vine Street as a workman mixed cement in a wheelbarrow. Mr. Baum’s company, Urban Sites, is transforming this vacant brick shell into six condominiums, which he plans to sell by next summer.

“To hear the jackhammers and the booms and the nail guns,” Mr. Baum said, “it’s music to me.”

Vine Street runs through the heart of Over-the-Rhine, a neighborhood of narrow streets and ornate brick buildings built by German immigrants from 1865 to the 1880s. After decades of decay in the area, gentrification is spreading north from downtown and south down the steep hillside of Mount Auburn. New condominiums, art galleries, theaters and cafes are bringing people and investment.

But poverty remains, as do drugs, violent crime and the stigma of the three days of riots in 2001. The riots effectively killed an earlier Over-the-Rhine renaissance, in the late 1990s.

The magic of Over-the-Rhine is in its compact brick buildings. Mostly two- to four-story walkups, few are significant individually. But together they create a historic district with a scale and grace reminiscent of Greenwich Village in New York. In May the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed the entire 362-acre neighborhood as one of the country’s 11 Most Endangered Historic Places.

As Over-the-Rhine’s white families left for the suburbs after World War II, its buildings attracted black families displaced when Interstate 75 tore through the nearby West End neighborhood, said Vice Mayor Jim Tarbell, who moved to Over-the-Rhine in 1971. It gradually became a slum in what the Census Bureau has found is the sixth most segregated city in the nation.

By 1990 the neighborhood’s median family income was $4,999, census figures show. It was the most dangerous part of the city, according to Police Department records, with almost 22,000 calls for emergency service, 8 murders and 306 robberies in 2001.

During the first renaissance, a generation of young hipsters discovered Over-the-Rhine, drawn by sturdy, funky and affordable buildings just a five-minute walk from downtown. The first nightclubs moved to the area in the 1980s, followed by art galleries and specialty shops. St. Theresa Textile Trove opened in 1994 and attracted art quilters from across the country, said Becky Hancock, its owner. A few doors down stood the Suzanna Terrill Gallery.

At the height of the boom, Mr. Baum said, young downtown office and restaurant workers placed down payments on future apartments that still had garbage piled on the floor and pigeons nesting in the walls.

“There was this palpable feeling that things were really taking off,” said Ran Mullins, who moved to the neighborhood in 1999 and now owns Metaphor Studios, an advertising agency in Over-the-Rhine.

But early in the morning of April 7, 2001, Stephen Roach, a white police officer, shot and killed Timothy Thomas, an unarmed African-American, after a foot chase. A protest march two days later devolved into riots. Many Over-the-Rhine businesses were looted.

After the riots, redevelopment projects fizzled. Most of the nightclubs closed. Demand for apartments dwindled, Mr. Baum said. Art galleries, including Suzanna Terrill’s, closed, and St. Teresa Textile Trove moved to another neighborhood because customers refused to drive into Over-the-Rhine.

“The riots set this neighborhood back a decade,” Mr. Mullins said.

Paradoxically, the riots’ reverberations may actually speed Over-the-Rhine’s recovery. Afterward, thousands of renters receiving federal rent subsidies left the neighborhood.

“A huge number of people just vamoosed,” said Marge Hammelrath, director of the Over-the-Rhine Foundation.

Their exodus left 500 of the neighborhood’s 1,200 buildings vacant, according to the Trust for Historic Preservation. Property values dropped, making it easier for developers to buy into the neighborhood.

But unlike the last boom, where small developers rehabilitated buildings one at a time, Over-the-Rhine’s current wave of gentrification is driven by Cincinnati’s corporate and philanthropic elite, whose strategy is to buy entire blocks. The largest player is the Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation, known locally as 3CDC, which was created in 2003 with $80 million raised by the city’s corporate leaders.

In the last 18 months, 3CDC invested $27 million in Over-the-Rhine, buying 100 buildings and 100 vacant lots, said the organization’s president, Stephen Leeper. It completed 28 new condominiums on Vine last year and is building 68 more.

Next came the Art Academy of Cincinnati, which spent $13 million to move from its hilltop campus into two adjacent warehouses in Over-the-Rhine last summer. Now the academy’s sign, which is four stories tall and reads “ART” in red neon letters, casts its light into new condominiums. The academy also became an anchor for smaller arts groups, like Know Theater of Cincinnati.

The neighborhood’s rapid growth makes some people worry that low-income families will be pushed out.

“Obviously the architecture is beautiful,” said Bonnie Neumeier, a community activist. “But we feel that the faces of our people are more important than the facades of the buildings.”

This time, the biggest threat to revitalization may come less from crime or racial tension than from Over-the-Rhine’s buildings themselves. Many sat vacant for so long that they are on the verge of collapse, Mr. Tarbell said, and some that were used as crack dens were bulldozed.

“This is a race,” said Bill Donabedian, a director at 3CDC. “If we don’t move quickly, we will lose these buildings forever.”

In Cincinnati, Life Breathes Anew in Riot-Scarred Area, NYT, 25.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/25/us/25cincy.html

Perspectives on the Atlantic Yards Development

Through the Prism of Race

NYT

12.11.2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/nyregion/12yards.html

Perspectives

on the Atlantic Yards Development

Through the Prism of Race

November 12, 2006
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

It was the first of three public hearings on the $4.2 billion Atlantic Yards development, and Umar Jordan, a 51-year-old resident of Bushwick, Brooklyn, strode to the front of the auditorium and offered a vigorous defense of the proposal. “I’m here to speak for the underprivileged, the people that don’t get the opportunity to work, the brothers that just came over out of prison,” he said.

Those who opposed the plan, he said, were not true Brooklynites. Their concerns about traffic and noise were trivial. And stopping the project would force “young black men” into a life of crime. “I suggest you go back up to Pleasantville,” he concluded.

It was not the first time race has bubbled up to the roiling, overheated surface of the Atlantic Yards debate, where charges of dishonesty and bad faith fly with abandon. Indeed, take any major debate about urban development in Brooklyn in recent years, and sooner or later, the issue of race has moved front and center — usually linked to the question of who wins and who loses.

Some of the racial rhetoric in this fight has inverted the classic development squabble in which affluent, usually white New Yorkers tolerate ambitious development, while working-class people, often minorities in struggling neighborhoods, fear they will not enjoy its fruits.

Like Mr. Jordan, many of the most fervent supporters of Atlantic Yards present the project as a beacon of hope for black residents living near the proposed 8.7-million-square-foot project.

Critics of the project — black and white — see merely the same old development debate, punctuated by what they describe as a cynical race ploy. They say the project’s developer, Forest City Ratner, has deliberately stirred up an imagined racial divide over the project, enlisting its black allies to falsely cast affluent white residents as the chief source of opposition and as insensitive to the needs of black Brooklynites.

“I think race was used from Day 1 to window-dress the project,” said the Rev. Clinton Miller, pastor of Brown Memorial Baptist Church in Fort Greene.

Bruce C. Ratner, Forest City’s chief executive, is white, as are most of his executives. Several local community organizations with black leaders receive funds from the developer as part of a “community benefits agreement” they negotiated last year.

But a closer look at the coalitions lined up for and against the project, and the arguments they have mustered, suggests that Atlantic Yards has drawn no true color line in Brooklyn, but only a blur of intersecting agendas, opinions and constituencies, both black and white.

The project, designed by Frank Gehry, would radically alter the neighborhoods near Downtown Brooklyn where it would be built, with residential and office towers and a basketball arena for the Nets. Proponents say the project would provide more jobs and low-cost housing where they are urgently needed.

When pressed, however, nearly all of those involved in the debate played down the suggestion that opinion on Atlantic Yards cleaves to any purely racial contour.

They point out that the project’s leading political booster, Borough President Marty Markowitz, is white, and its leading opponent, Councilwoman Letitia James, is black.

In neighborhoods around the project site, they say, the pressures of class and gentrification have been as potent as race — though both sides say they believe those pressures favor their view of the project.

“Some of my friends are in the opposition, and they’re blacker than I am,” said the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a supporter and well-known Brooklyn pastor. “It ain’t a straight race question.”

Joe DePlasco, a spokesman for the developer, denied in a statement that Forest City had tried to use race to build public support for the project, or to isolate opponents.

“People say a lot of things, but at the end of the day you can only do what you think is right,” he said in a statement.

“From the start,” the statement continued, “we have reached out to diverse groups from all over Brooklyn — from Crown Heights to Marine Park from Sunset Park to Park Slope — to ensure that this project reflects the realities of life in this borough and addresses the unprecedented need for affordable housing, local jobs, small business development, health care, educational and training programs.”

He added, “Atlantic Yards is, among other things, all about inclusion, and we have worked hard to make it that way.”

Forest City, which is also the development partner in building a new Midtown headquarters for The New York Times, would not comment directly on past statements by its supporters.

In recent conversations, however, many of those involved in the Atlantic Yards debate spoke at length about the role that race has played — and not played — in shaping opinion on the project.

Though Brooklyn as a whole has been losing white residents for decades, the number living near the project site — in neighborhoods like Fort Greene, Boerum Hill and Prospect Heights — has grown steadily in recent years, according to census data.

Those new arrivals are more likely to be affluent and highly educated, especially compared with residents of the nearby public housing projects, where most residents are black and many are unemployed.

As white transplants have boosted the area’s median incomes, they have also forced up housing prices. In Fort Greene, for example, which borders the project site to the north, average apartment prices rose faster from 2004 to 2005 than in any other Brooklyn neighborhood.

“If you live nearby, you have a nice home and you have a job, you’re probably not that excited by the benefits, and you’re swamped by the drawbacks,” said Brad Lander, director of the Pratt Center for Community Development, citing the project’s potential to worsen traffic and overshadow the brownstone communities nearby.

“If you live a little farther away, and you don’t have a job and a nice house, then you probably get a lot more of the benefits,” Mr. Lander added. “None of that is about race per se. But when you layer on that the people who live nearby are more likely to be whiter and wealthier, and the people who live farther out are more likely to be people of color without good jobs or housing, the race elements have become stronger.”

That is one reason, say opponents and supporters alike, for the high-level interest in the project among the area’s black working-class and poor residents. Thousands of people, most of them black, packed a July information session about the project’s subsidized housing.

“The devil could bring in a project and say it’s jobs and affordable housing, and some of us will go for it, because we’re on a survival level,” said City Councilman Charles Barron.

But Mr. Barron also calls the project “instant gentrification,” a view shared by many opponents.

Atlantic Yards would include a substantial portion of subsidized housing for families at different income levels; but only about one-seventh of the project’s roughly 6,500 housing units would be classified as affordable for tenants making less than half of the median income for the New York City area.

Mr. Barron and other critics say a different project could provide as much or more moderately priced housing, with less negative impact on the area.

Most recent public polls about the project show supporters outnumbering opponents. But those polls have generally been too small to reliably measure sentiment among specific ethnic or racial groups in Brooklyn or the city as a whole.

In interviews, activists on both sides said they believed support and opposition cut across racial and class lines.

But some in the debate previously expressed less benign views.

Last year, James E. Caldwell, the president of Brooklyn United for Innovative Local Development, a job-training group known as Build, said it would be a “conspiracy against blacks” if Forest City did not win its bid for rights to build over the railyards on the site. Bertha Lewis, the New York executive director of Acorn, a national advocacy group for low-income people, attributed concern over the project to “white liberals.”

Interviewed recently, both Mr. Caldwell and Ms. Lewis backed away from those remarks. “Everybody said crazy things on both sides,” Ms. Lewis said. “I’ve apologized to folks, and folks have apologized to me.”

Both Build and Acorn — as well as a group Mr. Daughtry heads — receive funds from Forest City under the community benefits agreement. And both have been instrumental in turning out black participants who boost the project at community meetings, rallies and hearings. That, opponents say, has helped fuel perceptions that black support for the project is high.

In May, in an e-mail message to a Daily News reporter, the spokesman for Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, Daniel Goldstein, wrote of ties between those groups and what he termed their “wealthy white masters,” referring to Forest City. The reporter later wrote about the message, which sparked an outcry from the project’s black supporters.

Mr. Goldstein apologized for what he termed “unfortunate remarks.” But he and some black allies say his underlying criticism of Forest City and its supporters was legitimate.

“Interestingly enough, the African-American leaders who have supported us, or who we have worked with, every single one I spoke to said, ‘Sorry about what happened, you didn’t really say anything wrong, but you weren’t the person to say it,’ ” Mr. Goldstein said.

Opponents of the project say they had to fight against a perception that black Brooklynites tend to favor the project. Ms. James said that because black opponents of the project were likely to be less well-off, “they just don’t have the luxury of going to these meetings and reading 2,000-page documents.”

Others, however, suggest that the main anti-Yards organizations — their manpower, energy and funds provided largely by white members — have not reached out effectively to the older, more established network of black community activists.

“The problem that whites who are organizing are having, groups like Develop Don’t Destroy, is that they really are a one-issue organization,” said Bob Law, a radio program host and business owner who is a member of Develop Don’t Destroy’s advisory board.

Mr. Law does not spare Forest City. He said that the developer tried to “inject race” into the debate, urging its surrogates to cast whites as solely concerned with traffic and building height, and blacks as interested in basketball, housing and jobs.

But the leading opponents of the project, Mr. Law said, “are only concerned with the project, so they play into Ratner’s hands.”

    Perspectives on the Atlantic Yards Development Through the Prism of Race, NYT, 12.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/nyregion/12yards.html

Black candidates

head for middle at polls

Sun Nov 12, 2006 8:56 AM ET
Reuters
By Matthew Bigg

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Black candidates in the U.S. midterm elections moved toward the political center, seeking votes across the spectrum and playing down race, academics and analysts said on Friday.

The strategy reflects a further shift from African- American leaders rooted in the civil rights era to a generation of politicians for whom race can be used best as a vehicle for appealing to universal themes such as overcoming poverty.

In one of the most high-profile races involving black candidates, Democrat Deval Patrick was elected governor of Massachusetts, becoming the state's first black governor, after running on a centrist platform.

"You are every black man, woman, and child in Massachusetts and America and every other striver of every other race and kind who is reminded tonight that the American dream is for you too," a victorious Patrick told supporters.

In Tennessee, Democrat Harold Ford lost narrowly in his run for the Senate in a state where there are more registered Republicans than Democrats.

Bidding to become the first black senator from the South since the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction in the 19th century, Ford adopted positions designed to appeal to conservative voters.

He said he loved hunting, opposed gay marriage and wanted a fence along the U.S.-Mexican border to keep illegal immigrants out.

"It's not enough for a black candidate to say, 'Let's make history,'" said Artur Davis, a black Democratic congressman from Alabama who said he was considering running for governor or the Senate.

"Voters are not going to cast a ballot, which is the most important thing they have, around making something abstract like making history," he told Reuters, adding the idea that race determined politics was becoming "stale."

The sentiment echoes views held by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, a rising star in the Democratic Party who says he is contemplating a run for president. Obama, who is black, campaigned on behalf of centrist Democrats in the elections.

BLACK REPUBLICANS

Commentators said it was difficult to draw many conclusions about black candidates and voters in an election in which Iraq and President George W. Bush's leadership dominated.

But the election showed blacks voted for Democrats even when a black Republican was in the race.

Republican Michael Steele lost his bid for an open Senate seat in Maryland and Republicans Ken Blackwell and Lynn Swann were beaten decisively in their bids to become governors of Ohio and Pennsylvania respectively.

"The White House and the Republican National Committee have long held as a goal increasing the percentage of black votes they get because ... if they can get above 20 percent they feel they can have a permanent Republican majority," said author and journalist Juan Williams.

"They hoped to break that loyalty .... (but) for the most part, black voters did not respond," he said.

Animosity toward Bush, memories of Republican opposition to laws passed in the 1960s to guarantee blacks the right to vote and affirmative-action policies to redress racial imbalances in the workplace and education helped explain the reluctance, commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson said.

"As African-Americans look at this (Republican) Party, it comes across as hostile, anti-civil rights and anti-black interest," he said.

Ford's loss to Republican Bob Corker sparked debate over whether race played a role, not least because an ad for Corker appeared to play on white racial fears of blacks.

"The question is, 'does appeal to race still make a difference in this part of the country?' Were there people who were unwilling to vote for an African-American and did the Republican campaign, at least in ambiguous ways, appeal to that?'" asked political science professor Bruce Oppenheimer.

Political scientist Marcus Pohlmann said people unwilling to vote for Ford would probably have voted Republican anyway.

    Black candidates head for middle at polls, R, 12.11.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-11-12T135614Z_01_N10255878_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-ELECTIONS-BLACKS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2

Election tests how much race matters

Updated 11/1/2006 1:21 AM ET
USA Today
By Susan Page

NEWTON, Mass. — When Democratic gubernatorial nominee Deval Patrick addressed members of the local Chamber of Commerce, he talked about stimulating the state's economy, streamlining regulations and improving public education.
And race? The subject didn't come up.

Patrick, who is African-American, and members of the audience, almost all of them white, insist color isn't a factor in this campaign. "I don't even see him as black," says Mike Hurley, 54, owner of the local Minuteman Press franchise. He jokes, "It looks like to me that he has a deep tan."

Colorblind electorate or not, Patrick is likely to make history next week. The political neophyte, who led Republican Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey by 25 percentage points in a Boston Globe poll taken Oct. 22-25, is poised to become the first black governor of Massachusetts and only the second black ever elected governor in any state.

He is one of a new generation of African-American politicians who are changing old assumptions about what offices black candidates can win.

Unlike senior black members of Congress, they are too young to have joined the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. They often haven't gone to historically black colleges or launched careers at black churches. Instead, many graduated from Ivy League colleges and pursued careers at big law firms. They often advocate pragmatism over ideology and aspire — like white politicians — to the most powerful elected offices in the country.

"African-Americans are now able to come through the political pipelines and break through old barriers," says Donna Brazile, a top Democratic strategist. "Whether they make it to the finish line is another thing, but the door has been left ajar."

In congressional elections next Tuesday, Memphis Rep. Harold Ford Jr. would be the first black senator popularly elected from the South if he prevails in a tossup contest for the Tennessee Senate seat. Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele is in a competitive contest for the Senate. Keith Ellison, who is black and Muslim, is favored to win a 70% white congressional district in Minneapolis. Angie Paccione, whose mother is black, is in a close contest to represent an 80% white district in Colorado.

A record six African-Americans hold major-party nominations this year for senator and governor — three Republicans, three Democrats — and another 10 are running for such statewide offices as lieutenant governor and secretary of State that often provide steppingstones to higher office.

To win, these candidates have to appeal to white voters, of course — and in a nation where race continues to resonate.

Ads against Patrick and Ford in recent weeks used "subtle and not-so-subtle" racial appeals, says political scientist Kerry Haynie of Duke. Skeptics, among them political scientist Ronald Walters of the University of Maryland, note that 1989 also was proclaimed a breakthrough year, when Douglas Wilder of Virginia became the first black ever elected governor — only to have 17 years pass without a second.

Still, David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies says he's seen a "co-evolution" by black candidates in shaping broad appeals and by white voters in being open to hearing them.

African-American candidates who lose next week will have been undone not by their race but by the same challenges that defeat white contenders, Bositis says.

Republican Ken Blackwell is running for governor in a year the Ohio GOP has been tainted by scandal, for instance, and Lynn Swann faces a formidable opponent in Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell.

"A lot of young kids are getting beyond race in a lot of ways — I say 'getting,' not 'got,' but 'getting,' " says Bill Perry, a middle-age high school teacher attending a rally for Patrick at the DCU Center Arena in Worcester, Mass. "It's just like my generation got beyond 'Are you Irish?' or 'Are you French?' That was our grandparents."

Thousands of people jam the arena, waiting for the chance to see Patrick and former president Bill Clinton. They wave small American flags and — at the urging of the emcee — use their cellphones to create a sort of instant phone bank, calling friends and urging them to vote.

"You ready to win?" Patrick asks to cheers when he comes on stage with his wife, Diane. Even at a rally, Patrick has a low-key, conversational style. He's given to on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand expositions on policy reminiscent of Clinton, his onetime boss and political patron.

"It's a pretty heady thing for a kid from the South Side of Chicago to have a president stump for you," Patrick tells the audience. While he's become accustomed to meeting with power brokers in the penthouses of skyscrapers, he says, "What's also wonderful is when the cleaning crew stops you in the lobby and says, 'I'm for you.' "

Patrick, 50, has lived in both worlds. He and his sister were raised by a single mother in one of Chicago's toughest neighborhoods, living on welfare for a time. A teacher recommended him for a program called A Better Chance, which awarded him a scholarship to attend Milton Academy, a tony prep school south of Boston.

It was, he recalls, "like coming to a different planet." He thrived at the private boarding school, graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law School, then worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. That's when he met Clinton, then governor of Arkansas. Later, as president, Clinton appointed Patrick assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Campaigning at the Chamber of Commerce breakfast, Patrick doesn't mention those jobs or his credentials on civil rights. Instead, he notes that he worked in senior posts at Texaco — chairing a task force appointed after the company lost a major race-discrimination lawsuit — and at Coca-Cola. That gives him the background to effectively manage state government, he tells the audience, many of them small-business owners.

"I bring a range of leadership experience in government, in business, in non-profits, in community groups that's broader than any other candidate in the race," Patrick says in an interview with USA TODAY. His skin color hasn't been an issue "because I'm not offering to be the first black governor of Massachusetts," he says. He's appealing to "all kinds of people from all corners of the commonwealth."

His opponent, Kerry Healey, 46, agrees that race hasn't been a significant factor — perhaps, she says, because her election also would represent a political breakthrough. She would be the first woman elected governor in Massachusetts. "That almost takes that all off the table," she says in an interview.

But Healey injected race with two TV ads in recent weeks, according to David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center. One ad took Patrick to task for writing two letters and contributing $5,000 to a campaign to win parole for a rapist, Benjamin LaGuer, a black man who proclaimed his innocence. Even after new DNA testing proved LaGuer's guilt, the ad shows Patrick calling him "thoughtful."

The second ad shows a white woman being stalked as she walks in a parking garage at night. Depicting Patrick as soft on crime, the announcer declares: "He should be ashamed — not governor."

Healey says the ads raise legitimate questions about Patrick's judgment in supporting LaGuer and the veracity of his initial explanations about what he had done.

Patrick sees a racial message. "There were a lot of reasons why people equated those ads with the Willie Horton ad," he says, a reference to a spot aired against Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential race that showed a glowering black man who committed violent crimes while on parole.

Suffolk University surveys showed Healey's attacks on crime initially narrowed Patrick's lead from 21 percentage points in early October to 13 points in the middle of the month. By the end of the month, however, they had backfired, Paleologos says. Patrick's lead rebounded to 27 points.

Patrick, who has never run for office before, seems poised for a resounding victory in a state where 6.8% of the population is black, half the U.S. average. He crushed two better-known white candidates in September's Democratic primary. Now the Suffolk survey shows him leading among every demographic group except Republicans.

Doug Wilder says Patrick shouldn't put too much stock in the findings. In his Virginia campaign, surveys of voters as they left polling places showed him ahead by a comfortable 10 percentage points.

When the votes were counted, he won by just half a point.

Wilder, now the mayor of Richmond, related that cautionary tale to Patrick strategists at a political fundraiser in Washington last month. He says "there's no empirical data" to prove that white voters today are any less likely to lie to pollsters about their willingness to vote for black candidates.

"There remains a non-trivial faction of white voters who will not vote for a candidate simply because (the candidate is) black," says Vincent Hutchings, a University of Michigan political scientist who is co-authoring a book called Wedge Politics. "We are kidding ourselves if we argue these people have disappeared from the landscape."

This year's contests will test whether African-Americans who advocate broad political agendas to mostly white electorates can win, he says. Haynie says their prospects are boosted by such high-profile black officials as Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, the current and former secretary of State, who have "helped pave the way."

To the White House?

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama roiled calculations about the 2008 presidential contest when he suggested last month he might jump in. And Patrick declines to rule out higher ambitions. "I'm not making any plans for national office," he says. But he also notes, "Life is what happens while you're making plans."

    Election tests how much race matters, UT, 1.11.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-31-election-race-matters_x.htm

Louisiana sheriff's suggestion

upsets blacks

Posted 10/28/2006 12:37 AM ET
AP
USA Today

GRETNA, La. (AP) — An outspoken sheriff in suburban New Orleans has again upset black leaders, this time by suggesting deputies would stop, search and run background checks on young black males congregating in high-crime areas.

Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee said Friday he was abandoning the plan, but made no apologies for it during a joint news conference with Dannatus King, president of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"I would prefer to prevent murder rather than solve a murder. But apparently not everyone feels that way," Lee said.

"There are no other people in this community more worried about solving crime and preventing murder than the black community. But not by stopping black people and harassing them for doing nothing," King responded.

The number of murders has increased in Jefferson Parish this year — 45 between Jan. 1 and Oct. 26, compared with 27 for the same period in 2005. Twenty-nine of the victims and 30 of the suspects have been black.

Lee has said the increase coincides with population shifts following Hurricane Katrina, saying drug trafficking has moved from devastated New Orleans to areas that suffered less damage.

Lt. Kenneth Jones, the sheriff's liaison with the black community, said he had urged the sheriff to make the random stops as a means of helping get guns off street.

"I support him and strongly recommend that we do what we have to do to take the weapons off the streets," said Jones, who is black.

In his 26th year as sheriff, Lee is a blunt-talking, country music loving Chinese-American whose resume includes work in the 1960s for Hale Boggs, the late Louisiana congressman who was an early supporter of racial integration.

Yet Lee's tenure has been marked by his rocky relationship with black leaders in and around his predominantly white parish, which dates to 1986, when white, upper-class neighborhoods were hit by a series of robberies in which two young black men robbed people in their driveways.

"If we see two young blacks driving a rinky-dink car in a predominantly white neighborhood, they'll be stopped," Lee said at the time.

Despite the latest disagreement, Lee said he would continue working with the NAACP to seek ways to reduce violent crime, including funding youth programs with tax dollars.

    Louisiana sheriff's suggestion upsets blacks, UT, 28.10.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-28-sheriff-suggestion_x.htm

Democrats

Fear Disillusionment

in Black Voters

October 27, 2006
The New York Times
By IAN URBINA

Last weekend, Jim Webb, the Virginia Democrat who hopes to oust Senator George Allen, crammed in visits to 12 black churches, and for several weeks he has been pumping money into advertisements on black radio stations and in black newspapers.

In Missouri, Claire McCaskill, the Democrat trying to unseat Senator Jim Talent, has been running advertisements about sickle cell anemia, a genetic illness that mostly afflicts black people, and the importance of stem cell research in helping to find a cure.

For Democrats like these in tight races, black voter turnout will be crucial on Election Day. But despite a generally buoyant Democratic Party nationally, there are worries among Democratic strategists in some states that blacks may not turn up at the polls in big enough numbers because of disillusionment over past shenanigans.

“This notion that elections are stolen and that elections are rigged is so common in the public sphere that we’re having to go out of our way to counter them this year,” said Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist.

This will be the first midterm election in which the Democratic Party is mobilizing teams of lawyers and poll watchers, to check for irregularities including suppression of the black vote, in at least a dozen of the closest districts, Ms. Brazile said.

Democrats’ worries are backed up by a Pew Research Center report that found that blacks were twice as likely now than they were in 2004 to say they had little or no confidence in the voting system, rising to 29 percent from 15 percent.

And more than three times as many blacks as whites — 29 percent versus 8 percent — say they do not believe that their vote will be accurately tallied.

Voting experts say the disillusionment is the cumulative effect of election problems in 2000 and 2004, and a reaction to new identification and voter registration laws.

Long lines and shortages of poll workers in lower-income neighborhoods in the 2004 election and widespread reports of fliers with misinformation appearing in minority areas have also had a corrosive effect on confidence, experts say.

The harder question is whether this jaded outlook will diminish turnout.

Recent polls have found record levels of outrage from Democrats about the current political leadership, which may offset the effect of black disillusion.

But Saleemah Affoul of Milwaukee, for one, is not so sure. Like many other black people in her neighborhood, Ms. Affoul said she was convinced that no matter how she voted, it would not be counted fairly.

“I do think the system is rigged,” she said. “I vote anyway because my forefathers worked too hard to win me that right. But not everyone feels that responsibility around here.”

Walking along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive in the gritty and mostly black section of Brewers Hill on the North Side of Milwaukee, Ms. Affoul said that cynicism in her neighborhood was on the rise.

She traced her own skepticism to one afternoon two months before the last presidential election when she overheard several young black men saying they were not going to vote because they feared being arrested at the polling station for their unpaid parking tickets. The neighborhood had been flooded with fliers from the Milwaukee Black Voters League, a fictitious group, saying that even minor infractions like parking tickets disqualified people from voting.

Ms. Affoul, 66, said she argued with the men but failed to convince them that they had been misinformed.

“I realized that maybe the poll tax isn’t gone after all, and that if people were willing to try that trick, they might be willing to do a lot more that I don’t even know about,” she said.

Black voters are expected to play crucial roles in races for governor and the Senate in Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Virginia.

In Maryland, where blacks make up about 30 percent of the electorate, the Democratic candidate for governor, Martin O’Malley, who is white, is trailing the Republican incumbent, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., by several points. Mr. O’Malley needs a large turnout among blacks in Baltimore to win, and he has mobilized more than 2,000 get-out-the-vote workers in black neighborhoods. He also helped his chances of attracting the black vote by selecting Anthony G. Brown, a black lawyer, as his running mate.

In Tennessee, Representative Harold E. Ford Jr. is depending on a strong showing from blacks in Memphis, which he represents, to edge past Bob Corker and become the first black senator from a Southern state since Reconstruction.

In Virginia, Democrats hope that recent accusations of racism against Senator Allen will motivate blacks to vote for his Democratic opponent, Mr. Webb.

Ronald Walters, director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, said the reason for the rise in black voters’ cynicism could be summed up in a single word: confirmation.

Mr. Walters said that episodes of voter suppression that were dismissed in 2000 as unfounded recurred in 2004 and were better documented because rights groups dispatched thousands of lawyers and poll watchers. In addition, the first national data-tracking tool, the Election Incident Reporting System, offered a national hot line that fed a database of what ended up to be 40,000 problems.

“All of a sudden after 2004, these weren’t just baseless or isolated incidents,” Mr. Walters said.

The type of misleading letter sent this month to 14,000 Hispanic immigrants in Orange County, Calif., threatening them with arrest if they tried to vote, was hardly a first. In 2004, similar fliers appeared in predominantly black neighborhoods in the Pittsburgh area, on official-looking letterheads. The fliers said that because of unusually high voter registration, Republicans were to vote on Election Day, and Democrats were to vote the next day.

Fliers sent in Lake County, Ohio, told people that if they had registered through the N.A.A.C.P., they could not vote.

Asked whether such tactics from 2004 could influence black turnout next month, the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York, whose National Action Network is also mobilizing voter protection teams, said that despite insufficient action from Democrats in responding to the problems, he believed that black turnout would be high.

“Just because more of us believe that folks are trying to rob us of certain rights doesn’t mean we are more likely to give up and leave the front door unlocked,” Mr. Sharpton said.

The rollout of new voting machines may also be contributing to black voters’ fears.

“African-Americans are more susceptible to conspiracy theories about the new technology because they have been subject to actual conspiracies more often than the rest of the population,” said David A. Bositis, senior political analyst for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington, a research organization dedicated to African-American issues.

Marsha Lindsey, a black paramedic and former poll worker in Dayton, Ohio, said that after 2004 she stopped arguing with her black friends when they said there was no point in voting.

Spencer Overton, a law professor at George Washington University and author of “Stealing Democracy: the New Politics of Voter Suppression,” said the threat of voter suppression presented difficult strategic decisions.

“Voter suppression is a real threat,” Mr. Overton said, “but Democrats can’t invest so much into voter protection that they don’t have adequate resources to turn out their voters to the polls in the first place.”

The Rev. DeForest B. Soaries, who is black and was appointed by President George W. Bush as the first chairman of the United States Election Assistance Commission, an agency meant to help carry out the Help America Vote Act, said Democrats overestimated the problem of voter suppression in much the same way Republicans overestimated the problem of voter fraud.

Skepticism is especially pronounced in poor black neighborhoods, Mr. Soaries said, because these communities are often disproportionately affected by problems with machines and the number and training of poll workers. When problems do occur in these areas, he added, they occur against a historical backdrop of voter suppression.

Whatever its consequence, the topic is very much on Democrats’ minds. At a recent Democratic fund-raiser in Atlanta, at the home of Representative John Lewis, who is black, conversation centered on perceptions that widespread voter disenfranchisement would haunt the 2006 elections.

Former President Bill Clinton addressed the issue there, criticizing some Republican campaign tactics. After mentioning rough-edged political ads and other strategies, he said, “And when that doesn’t work, they try to keep you from voting.”

Headed into a statewide candidates’ forum on prison overhaul, for pastors from Baltimore, the Rev. Heber Brown III, who is black, said that the success of black voter mobilization efforts in 2004 set the stage for some disillusion.

“Last time, you had hip-hop leaders like Russell Simmons, Eminem and Sean Combs with the Vote or Die campaign and lots of young blacks voted but what did they get?” said Mr. Brown, 26, pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Baltimore County. “Now when you talk to young black voters you can’t just say, ‘Get out the vote,’ you have to first do a lot of explaining, cut through a lot of confusion about the 2004 vote and first talk about how change takes time.”

Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.

    Democrats Fear Disillusionment in Black Voters, NYT, 27.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/27/us/politics/27race.html?hp&ex=1162008000&en=d93c2f55a9276a25&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Where have

all the black soldiers gone?

African-Americans written out of Pacific war

in Clint Eastwood's new film, veterans say

Saturday October 21, 2006
Guardian
Dan Glaister in Los Angeles

On February 19 1945 Thomas McPhatter found himself on a landing craft heading toward the beach on Iwo Jima.

"There were bodies bobbing up all around, all these dead men," said the former US marine, now 83 and living in San Diego. "Then we were crawling on our bellies and moving up the beach. I jumped in a foxhole and there was a young white marine holding his family pictures. He had been hit by shrapnel, he was bleeding from the ears, nose and mouth. It frightened me. The only thing I could do was lie there and repeat the Lord's prayer, over and over and over."

Sadly, Sgt McPhatter's experience is not mirrored in Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood's big-budget, Oscar-tipped film of the battle for the Japanese island that opened on Friday in the US. While the film's battle scenes show scores of young soldiers in combat, none of them are African-American. Yet almost 900 African-American troops took part in the battle of Iwo Jima, including Sgt McPhatter.

The film tells the story of the raising of the stars and stripes over Mount Suribachi at the tip of the island. The moment was captured in a photograph that became a symbol of the US war effort. Eastwood's film follows the marines in the picture, including the Native American Ira Hayes, as they were removed from combat operations to promote the sale of government war bonds.

Mr McPhatter, who went on to serve in Vietnam and rose to the rank of lieutenant commander in the US navy, even had a part in the raising of the flag. "The man who put the first flag up on Iwo Jima got a piece of pipe from me to put the flag up on," he says. That, too, is absent from the film.

"Of all the movies that have been made of Iwo Jima, you never see a black face," said Mr McPhatter. "This is the last straw. I feel like I've been denied, I've been insulted, I've been mistreated. But what can you do? We still have a strong underlying force in my country of rabid racism."

Melton McLaurin, author of the forthcoming The Marines of Montford Point and an accompanying documentary to be released in February, says that there were hundreds of black soldiers on Iwo Jima from the first day of the 35-day battle. Although most of the black marine units were assigned ammunition and supply roles, the chaos of the landing soon undermined the battle plan.

"When they first hit the beach the resistance was so fierce that they weren't shifting ammunition, they were firing their rifles," said Dr McLaurin.

The failure to transfer the active role played by African-Americans at Iwo Jima to the big screen does not surprise him. "One of the marines I interviewed said that the people who were filming newsreel footage on Iwo Jima deliberately turned their cameras away when black folks came by. Blacks are not surprised at all when they see movies set where black troops were engaged and never show on the screen. I would like to say that it was from ignorance but anybody can do research and come up with books about African-Americans in world war two. I think it has to do with box office and what producers of movies think Americans really want to see."

He added: "I want to see these guys get their due. They're just so anxious to have their story told and to have it known."

Roland Durden, another black marine, landed on the beach on the third day. "When we hit the shore we were loaded with ammunition and the Japanese hit us with mortar." Private Durden was soon assigned to burial detail, "burying the dead day in, day out. It seemed like endless days. They treated us like workmen rather than marines."

Mr Durden, too, is wearied but unsurprised at the omissions in Eastwood's film. "We're always left out of the films, from John Wayne on," he said. Mr Durden ascribes to both the conspiracy as well as the cock-up theory of history. "They didn't want blacks to be heroes. This was pre-1945, pre-civil rights."

A spokesperson for Warner Bros said: "The film is correct based on the book." The omission was first remarked upon in a review by Fox News columnist Roger Friedman, who noted that the history of black involvement at Iwo Jima was recorded in several books, including Christopher Moore's recent Fighting for America: Black Soldiers - the Unsung Heroes of World War II. "They weren't in the background at all," said Moore. "The people carrying the ammunition were 90% black, so that's an opportunity to show black soldiers. These are our films and very often they become our history, historical documents."

Yvonne Latty, a New York University professor and author of We Were There: Voices of African-American Veterans (2004), wrote to Eastwood and the film's producers pleading with them to include the experience of black soldiers. HarperCollins, the book's publishers, sent the director a copy, but never heard back.

"It would take only a couple of extras and everyone would be happy," she said. "No one's asking for them to be the stars of the movies, but at least show that they were there. This is the way a new generation will think about Iwo Jima. Once again it will be that African-American people did not serve, that we were absent. It's a lie."

The first chapter to James Bradley's book Flags of Our Fathers, which forms the basis of the movie, opens with a quotation from president Harry Truman. "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know." It would provide a fitting endnote to Eastwood's film.

First person

Sgt Thomas McPhatter, 8th US Marine Corps ammunition company, was at Iwo Jima in 1945. These are his memories

We set up an ammunition dump and the Japanese spotted it because they were firing mortars. There was black powder and smoke everywhere. It's unbelievable what you can smell. Men losing their legs ...

"On the second night we were hit again by mortar fire. All of a sudden the dump was burning. I said the whole dump's going to go soon, and we couldn't put the fire out. We made our way to the beach ... when I got to the beach my eyes were burning and the dispensary put something on my face. Two days later they start ammunition drops from planes. They started dropping the ammo in multi-coloured parachutes like an ice-cream canopy. So you've got to chase ammunition with the enemy firing on you. Oh, Lord. My platoon leader put us in for a commendation but that never got anywhere. It was beyond the call of duty.

"Our last involvement was when we turned back a banzai attack ... the last battle on Iwo Jima. There were army people there who had come after us to repair the airfield who were living in tents ... they came out of their holes with their swords drawn, high-hollering 'Banzai!' The Japanese cut the guy ropes and they were running them through the canvas with their swords. When they came through our area, we were still sleeping in the dirt. We cut them down. It was the black soldiers that did it. It's never been recognised.

    Where have all the black soldiers gone?, G, 21.10.2006, http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Guardian/0,,1928009,00.html

Little Rock School

Board Majority Black

October 12, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:15 p.m. ET
The New York Times

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) -- For the first time since federal troops escorted nine black students into Central High School 49 years ago, the Little Rock school board has a black majority.

Dianne Curry won a runoff election Tuesday, meaning four of the Little Rock School District's seven board members are black. The 26,000-student district has been predominantly black for years, but until now, it had never had a black-majority school board.

''Right now, they see a board that looks like them and it's easier for us to connect with them,'' said school board member Charles Armstrong, elected last month. ''You've got a board that can reach out to the community.''

Until 1957, Little Rock had operated separate schools for blacks and whites. Despite a U.S. Supreme Court order, Gov. Orval Faubus sought to prevent nine black students from entering Central. President Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne to enforce the court's order.

Federal courts have continued to monitor the desegregation effort since 1965.

''Maybe this is a sign of change coming,'' said Armstrong, who is black. Previous boards had difficulties relating to the community because it didn't match the racial makeup of the city's schools, Armstrong said.

The biggest question is whether the district will change the way it deals with continuing desegregation questions. It has sought to free itself from federal monitoring, but a judge ruled two years ago that the district was not adequately appraising how well its academic programs helped black students. He maintained partial control over the district.

School Board President Robert Daugherty, who is black, said a majority-black board may help open dialogue with a group of community members that has intervened in the federal case to promote the causes of black students.

''In the near future, you'll see the district working more closer with the other stakeholders here in the city,'' Daugherty said. ''I think people are looking for a change. They're tired of things as usual, business as usual. They want people who are more in tune with the community, and I think that's what you see now.''

    Little Rock School Board Majority Black, NYT, 12.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Little-Rock-Schools.html

Lieberman Civil Rights Role

Acknowledged

October 12, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:10 p.m. ET
The New York Times

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- A black leader who had accused Sen. Joe Lieberman of lying about his civil rights record said Thursday he accepted Lieberman's word that he marched with 1960s-era activists against segregation.

''It is true that he marched with Dr. King, but I believe Dr. King would be disappointed in his record as a senator over the past 18 years,'' said Henry E. Parker, a former state treasurer, in a statement released by the campaign of Lieberman's rival Ned Lamont.

''I accept the fact that Senator Lieberman provided documentation that he participated in the civil rights movement in the 60s,'' added Parker.

Lieberman, locked in an increasingly nasty re-election race, on Wednesday disputed charges by Parker that he had lied about his 1960s activism fighting segregation in the South.

Earlier, the Connecticut Federation of Black Democratic Clubs, which includes 20 clubs across the state, endorsed Lamont and questioned whether Lieberman had marched for civil rights. Lamont attended the event.

Lieberman's campaign responded by producing a 1963 college newspaper clip that cites Lieberman's reporting from Jackson, Miss., about the arrests of civil rights workers. Lieberman was chairman of the Yale Daily News.

Lieberman said he led a group of Yale students to Mississippi. He also recalled being part of the Washington, D.C., crowd at the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famed ''I Have a Dream'' speech in August 1963.

''Was I there?'' Lieberman said on Wednesday. ''You bet I was there.''

Lamont's campaign has tried to distance itself from the charges. Campaign manager Tom Swan said Lamont was not questioning Lieberman's civil rights background. However, Lamont's campaign paid for a flier the group distributed at the event.

Lamont captured the Democratic nomination from Lieberman in the August primary. The three-term Democratic senator is running as an independent.

    Lieberman Civil Rights Role Acknowledged, NYT, 12.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Connecticut-Senate.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

U.S. Says

Blacks in Mississippi

Suppress White Vote

October 11, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

MACON, Miss., Oct. 5 — The Justice Department has chosen this no-stoplight, courthouse town buried in the eastern Mississippi prairie for an unusual civil rights test: the first federal lawsuit under the Voting Rights Act accusing blacks of suppressing the rights of whites.

The action represents a sharp shift, and it has raised eyebrows outside the state. The government is charging blacks with voting fraud in a state whose violent rejection of blacks’ right to vote, over generations, helped give birth to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Yet within Mississippi the case has provoked knowing nods rather than cries of outrage, even among liberal Democrats.

The Justice Department’s main focus is Ike Brown, a local power broker whose imaginative electoral tactics have for 20 years caused whisperings from here to the state capital in Jackson, 100 miles to the southwest. Mr. Brown, tall, thin, a twice-convicted felon, the chairman of the Noxubee County Democratic Executive Committee and its undisputed political boss, is accused by the federal government of orchestrating — with the help of others — “relentless voting-related racial discrimination” against whites, whom blacks outnumber by more than 3 to 1 in the county.

His goal, according to the government: keeping black politicians — ones supported by Mr. Brown, that is — in office.

To do that, the department says, he and his allies devised a watertight system for controlling the all-determining Democratic primary, much as segregationists did decades ago.

Mr. Brown is accused in the lawsuit and in supporting documents of paying and organizing notaries, some of whom illegally marked absentee ballots or influenced how the ballots were voted; of publishing a list of voters, all white, accompanied by a warning that they would be challenged at the polls; of importing black voters into the county; and of altering racial percentages in districts by manipulating the registration rolls.

To run against the county prosecutor — one of two white officeholders in Noxubee — Mr. Brown brought in a black lawyer from outside the county, according to the supporting documents, who never even bothered to turn on the gas or electricity at his rented apartment. That candidate was disqualified.Whites, who make up just under 30 percent of the population here, are circumspect when discussing Mr. Brown, though he remains a hero to many blacks. When he drove off to federal prison to serve a sentence for tax fraud in 1995, he received a grand farewell from his political supporters and friends, including local elected officials; whites, on the other hand, for years have seen him as a kind of occult force in determining the affairs of the county.

Still, many whites said privately they welcomed the Justice Department’s lawsuit, which is scheduled for trial early next year.

“In my opinion, it puts the focus on fair play,” said Roderick Walker, the county prosecutor Mr. Brown tried to oust, in 2003. “They were doing something wrong.”

Up and down South Jefferson Street, though, in the old brick commercial district, the white merchants refused to be quoted, for fear of alienating black customers. “There’s a lot of voting irregularities, but that’s all I’m going to say,” one woman said, ending the conversation abruptly.

The Justice Department’s voting rights expert is less reserved. “Virtually every election provides a multitude of examples of these illegal activities organized by Ike Brown and other defendants, and those who act in concert with them,” the expert, Theodore S. Arrington, chairman of the political science department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, wrote in a report filed with the court.

Mr. Brown is coolly dismissive of the case against him. He has no office at the white-columned Noxubee County Courthouse, but that is where he casually greets visitors, in a chair near the entrance. A loquacious man, he both minimizes his own role and portrays himself as a central target. Far from being the vital orchestrator portrayed by the government, “when I was in Maxwell prison in ’95 and ’96, the show went right on,” he said.

There are so few whites in the county, Mr. Brown suggests, that the tactics he is accused of are unnecessary to keep blacks in office.

“They can’t win anyway unless we choose to vote for them,” he said with a smile. “If I was doing something wrong — that’s like closing the barn door when the horse is already gone.”

He sees the lawsuit against him as merely the embittered reaction of whites who feel disenfranchised, and he scoffs at a consent decree signed last year in which county officials agreed not to harass or intimidate white candidates or voters, manipulate absentee ballots, or let poll workers coach voters, among other things. “I wouldn’t sign my name,” Mr. Brown said.

But the Justice Department is pressing ahead with its suit, and wants to force Mr. Brown to agree to the same cease-and-desist conditions as his fellow county officials.

The state’s Democratic establishment has hardly rallied around Mr. Brown; privately some Democrats here express disdain for his tactics. Instead, he is being defended by a maverick Republican lawyer who sees the suit as an example of undue interference in the affairs of a political party.

“To do what they want to do, they would virtually have to take over the Democratic Party,” said the lawyer, Wilbur Colom, adding that Mr. Brown’s notoriety had made him the focus of the investigation. “I believe they were under so much pressure because of Ike’s very sophisticated election operation. He is a Karl Rove genius on the Noxubee County level.”

In Jackson, though, a leading light in Mr. Brown’s own party, Mississippi Secretary of State Eric Clark, a longtime moderate in state politics, refused to endorse him.

“Anybody who tries to prevent people from voting is breaking the law,” Mr. Clark said. “I certainly suspect some of that has been going on.”

Back in Macon, in the shadow of the courthouse green’s standard-issue Confederate monument, Mr. Brown spoke of history: “They had their way all the time. They no longer have their way. That’s what it’s all about.” The case is “all about politics,” he said, “all about them trying to keep me from picking the lock.”

But Mr. Walker, the county prosecutor, insisted the past had nothing to do with the case against Mr. Brown. “I wouldn’t sit here and pretend black people haven’t been mistreated,” he said. “I hate what happened in the past. But I can’t do anything about it.”

    U.S. Says Blacks in Mississippi Suppress White Vote, NYT, 11.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/11/us/politics/11voting.html

Buck O’Neil,

Negro Leagues Pioneer,

Is Dead at 94

October 7, 2006
The New York Times
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN

Buck O’Neil, a star first baseman and manager in the Negro leagues and a pioneering scout and coach in the major leagues who devoted the final decade of his life to chronicling the lost world of black baseball, died last night in Kansas City, Mo. He was 94.

Bob Kendrick, marketing director for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, reported the death last night, according to The Associated Press. O’Neil entered the hospital in August but was released after a few days. He was readmitted Sept. 17, The Associated Press said.

O’Neil was a smooth fielder and a two-time league-leading hitter with the Kansas City Monarchs, one of the Negro leagues’ most acclaimed teams, and he also managed them. He spent more than three decades working in the Chicago Cubs’ system, becoming one of organized baseball’s first black scouts and then the first black coach in the majors. In all, his baseball career spanned seven decades.

O’Neil had been chairman of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Mo., since its founding in 1997 and made scores of appearances to raise funds for it. He bore witness to the exploits of figures like Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston and Ray Dandridge. All of those players were inducted into the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown belatedly, their prime seasons in the Negro leagues coming in the years before Jackie Robinson broke the modern major league color barrier.

O’Neil was among 39 candidates for entry into the Hall of Fame at a special vote in February 2006 to consider figures from black baseball who were not among the 18 previously inducted. Seventeen people were elected in that vote by a 12-person committee, but O’Neil and Minnie Minoso, the only two living figures given consideration, were not chosen.

The former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, who was chairman of the committee but did not vote, expressed surprise that O’Neil was not chosen. The Negro Leagues Baseball Museum reported receiving expressions of dismay from the Hall of Famers Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks and Lou Brock over the exclusion.

When the 17 figures were inducted into the Hall on July 30, 2006, O’Neil opened the ceremony with a recollection of the Negro leagues.

Brock, who was signed for the Cubs’ organization by O’Neil in the 1960’s, attended O’Neil’s 94th birthday party, where he told The Kansas City Star: “Buck is a man God chose for this time. He has seen it all. He saw a transformation of people, of society, of a country. Somebody’s got to be around to tell that story. I think he has been preserved for that purpose.”

For all his accomplishments, O’Neil was little known to most baseball fans until he was interviewed for Ken Burns’s nine-part 1994 television documentary “Baseball.” Still active into his 80’s — he was a special-assignment scout for the Kansas City Royals then — O’Neil told viewers of the golden age of the Negro leagues, the 1930’s and 1940’s.

“Thanks to Ken Burns, I became an overnight star in my 80’s,” O’Neil said in his memoir, “I Was Right on Time” (Fireside), published when he was 85. “But as far as I’m concerned, I felt like I was already on top of the world when I got to play with and against some of the best ballplayers who ever lived.”

He professed no regret for his lost chance to play in the majors. “Waste no tears for me,” he said in his autobiography. “I didn’t come along too early. I was right on time. You see, I don’t have a bitter story. I truly believe I have been blessed.”

White-haired but still a trim 6 feet 2 inches and 190 pounds, O’Neil radiated joy in the Burns documentary, recalling how Sunday churchgoers in Kansas City scheduled services an hour early so that they could attend the Monarchs’ games, and how the Negro leagues’ annual East-West game at Chicago’s Comiskey Park became a memorable event for black Americans.

John Jordan O’Neil Jr. was born on Nov. 13, 1911, in Carrabelle, Fla. When he was a youngster, his family moved to Sarasota, and by age 12 he was playing semipro baseball. When he was barred from Sarasota High School because of his race, he enrolled at Edward Waters College in Jacksonville and earned his high school diploma there, then completed two years of college.

O’Neil left school to play pro baseball, gaining his nickname when he was confused with an executive from another club named Buck O’Neal. He endured the indignity of playing in a grass skirt with war paint for a barnstorming team called the Zulu Cannibal Giants, but in 1938 he made his debut with the Monarchs of the Negro American League.

O’Neil led the league in batting twice, hitting .345 in 1940 and .350 in 1946, when he returned from Navy service, and he played in three East-West All-Star Games. He managed the Monarchs from 1948 to 1955, when they remained one of the Negro leagues’ top teams, and played for them through the 1954 season.

O’Neil was hired by the Cubs as a part-time scout in 1953 and steered Ernie Banks, then the Monarchs’ shortstop, to the Cubs. Hired as a full-time Cubs scout in 1955, he discovered not only Brock but also Lee Smith and Joe Carter. In May 1962, O’Neil became the first black man officially designated as a major league coach, but the Cubs used him purely in an instructional role.

In 1995, the Baltimore Orioles renamed a training facility in Sarasota the Buck O’Neil Baseball Complex, and Sarasota High School presented O’Neil with a degree at a ceremony seeking to atone for his being barred so long ago.

In July 2006, O’Neil came to the plate twice at the All-Star Game of the independent Northern League and walked each time, part of a promotional campaign to have baseball officials place him in the Hall of Fame. O’Neil’s wife, Ora, a teacher, whom he married in 1946, died in the late 1990’s. They had no children.

For O’Neil, baseball represented a lifelong joy. “Nowadays, whenever us Negro leaguers put on the old uniforms for autograph-signings and such, you can just see the years peel away,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I’ve seen men lose 50 years in just a few hours. Baseball is better than sex. It is better than music, although I do believe jazz comes in a close second. It does fill you up.”

    Buck O’Neil, Negro Leagues Pioneer, Is Dead at 94, NYT, 7.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/07/sports/baseball/07oneil.html

Bridging a Racial Rift

That Isn’t Black and White

October 3, 2006
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WILLACOOCHEE, Ga. — The ministers close their eyes and raise their voices to the heavens and, for a moment, they are colorless. Two men who grew up desperately poor, who picked tobacco in the fields and hauled boxes at Wal-Mart and whose life journeys ultimately led them to the Lord and to each other.

“It’s like praying with a brother,” said the Rev. Harvey Williams Jr., 54, who is black.

“He looks out for me and I look out for him,” said the Rev. Atanacio Gaona, 45, who is a Mexican immigrant. “In the eyes of the Lord, there are no colors.”

In this immigrant boomtown in Atkinson County, about 45 miles north of the Florida border, the ministers have forged a rare friendship that transcends the deep divide between blacks and Hispanics here.

For centuries, the South has been defined by the color line and the struggle for accommodation between blacks and whites. But the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Hispanic immigrants over the past decade is quietly changing the dynamics of race relations in many Southern towns.

The two pastors find that the fault lines that separate their communities sometimes test their friendship and challenge their efforts to bring blacks and Hispanics closer together.

Blacks here, who had settled into a familiar, if sometimes uneasy, relationship with whites, are now outnumbered by Hispanics. The two groups, who often live and work side by side, compete fiercely for working-class jobs and government resources. By several measures, blacks are already losing ground.

The jobless rate for black men in Georgia is nearly triple that of Hispanic men, labor statistics show. More blacks than Hispanics fail to meet minimum standards in Atkinson County public schools. And many blacks express anguish at being supplanted by immigrants who know little of their history and sometimes treat them with disdain as they fill factory jobs, buy property, open small businesses and scale the economic ladder.

“If you have 10 factory openings, I would say Hispanics would get the majority of the jobs now,” said Joyce Taylor, the Atkinson County clerk, who is black. “And if you look at the little grocery stores, there are more Hispanic businesses than black businesses.”

“It’s kind of scary,” said Ms. Taylor, 44, whose daughter was laid off from a factory here. “My children, looking forward, it may be harder for them.”

Some Hispanics say African-Americans treat them with hostility and disparage them with slurs, even though blacks know the sting of racism all too well. They say many blacks are jealous of their progress and resent the fact that whites, who dominate the business sector, look increasingly to Hispanics to fill work forces. Blacks say employers favor immigrants because they work for less money.

An Area of Intense Feelings

The killing of six Mexican farm workers in a robbery last year in Tifton, about 30 miles away — and the arrest of four black men in the case — has heightened the friction. Nothing so violent has occurred here, but some Hispanics say black criminals focus on immigrants in this town, too.

Speaking of blacks, Benito González, 51, a Mexican who has worked alongside them at a poultry plant, said: “They don’t like to work, and they’re always in jail. If there’s hard work to be done, the blacks, they leave and they don’t come back. That’s why the bosses prefer Mexicans and why there are so many Mexicans working in the factories here.”

Such images stoke the debate over how to overcome tensions, which flared nationally this year when some African-Americans expressed anger and unease as immigrant groups hailed efforts to legalize illegal immigrants as a new civil rights movement. Although the push in Congress to create a guest-worker program has stalled, concerns about competition between black and immigrant low-wage workers remain.

Those feelings resonate with particular intensity in the South, home to the nation’s largest share of African-Americans and its fastest-growing population of immigrants, according to an analysis of census data by William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

The two Pentecostal ministers who pray together are men of faith who say they believe that blacks and Hispanics should be allies in the struggle to overcome discrimination and economic adversity, even though they acknowledge that interethnic unity is often hard to come by.

Mr. Williams, a thoughtful man who studied psychology in community college, ruminates in a weekly newspaper column on topics like spirituality, ethnic relations and his recovery from cocaine addiction 20 years ago.

Mr. Gaona, whose boyish looks belie his intensity, left school after second grade to help his father work the fields in Mexico. He entered the United States illegally and started picking tobacco here when he was 24. Over the past decade, he has received his citizenship and built his church from the ground up.

The two men met working on a Wal-Mart warehouse floor in neighboring Coffee County around 1993 when Mr. Gaona was starting to deepen his faith and Mr. Williams, already a pastor, was looking for a ride to work.

Neither expected much from the acquaintanceship.

Mr. Gaona, who said his perceptions of black Americans were shaped in Mexico by news reports of crime and violence in poor urban areas, recalled, “I was thinking: ‘He’s black. Who knows what he wants from me?’ I was just trying to keep my distance.”

Mr. Williams said he never envisioned a friendship because he had never known blacks and Hispanics to be friends.

“I think I probably saw him as being a Hispanic,’ he said, “and I was only going to get so close.”

Over the next five years, in their hourlong weekday commuting trip in Mr. Gaona’s 1988 Oldsmobile and later in Mr. Williams’s 1982 Ford station wagon, they discovered common ground. Both are divorced fathers. Mr. Williams has two sons and two daughters. Mr. Gaona has five boys.

Both grew up poor, working in the fields. And both were trying to advance at Wal-Mart and searching for pathways to God. It was Mr. Williams who helped persuade Mr. Gaona to quit Wal-Mart to open the first Spanish-language church in this town.

Today, the men are remarried, full-time ministers who chat by telephone and disregard the diners at local restaurants who still gawk at the sight of a black man and a Hispanic man eating together.

But they also remain painfully aware of the fear and prejudice that remain in their communities.

Mr. Williams, who leads a working- and middle-class congregation of teachers, Civil Service workers and factory workers at the Union Holiness House of Deliverance, shakes his head as he describes the jokes about Mexicans with poor hygiene that circulate among some black people he knows.

“It was not so long ago that we were the object of jokes,” Mr. Williams said. “I’m constantly having to remind people.”

Mr. Gaona, whose flock at the Iglesia Alfa y Omega is dominated by factory and farm workers, says his members often describe American blacks as moyos, a derogatory Spanish term that sometimes refers to a black insect. He used the term, too, he admits, before he found God and his friend Mr. Williams.

“Every now and then, I remind them that we need to respect people, no matter how they look or their color,” Mr. Gaona said. "But mostly, we don’t know them, and they don’t know us. There’s no real communication going on.”

Gaps and Similarities

The tension simmers just below the surface in the quiet communities of bungalows and trailers where the two churches are situated. Five years ago, these neighborhoods were overwhelmingly black. Today, Hispanics and blacks account for 21 percent and 19 percent of the county population of about 8,000, respectively.

Lyrical Spanish chatter competes with the sweet Georgia drawl as blacks and Hispanics share streets, assembly lines, classrooms — and hardships — that could prove to be the basis of community and political alliances. The two groups appear more likely to be poor than whites. About 36 percent of Hispanics and 31 percent of blacks live in poverty in Atkinson County, census data shows; 17 percent of whites are poor.

The two ethnic groups report experiencing some discrimination from non-Hispanic whites, who account for 60 percent of the population, and they view the blue-collar jobs in the factories that manufacture industrial fabrics and mobile homes as steppingstones to prosperity.

School administrators and sociologists suggest that the gap between blacks and Hispanics in employment and education may stem in part from immigrant parents who push their children harder to succeed in schools and the immigrant zeal to find work, regardless of how much it pays.

Many black adults, who typically have more formal education than new immigrants, seethe at the disparities. In a town where neighborliness is entrenched, blacks and Hispanics often treat one another warily.

It is hard to envision such tension in the ministers’ friendship, particularly as they laugh amid the wooden pews in Mr. Williams’s church. But in many ways, they, too, keep their distance.

Despite more than 10 years’ friendship, the two have never dined in each other’s home. Their wives and children have never met, nor have their congregations.

Mr. Gaona does not know the black families who live near him. And he has never addressed Mr. Williams’s congregation, even though his friend has invited him several times. The minister says he feels uncomfortable preaching in English.

Mr. Williams, who has spoken at his friend’s church twice, says there is more to it. (Mr. Gaona’s English, after all, is quite good.)

“There’s still a barrier there,” Mr. Williams said.

He said the worshippers in Mr. Gaona’s church seemed reluctant to mingle with him after his guest sermons there several years ago.

“They are like standing on the side, you know, with their heads down as if waiting for me to leave,” he recounted. “They’re uncomfortable. And that’s one reason for not visiting him any more than I do.

“It’s one of my goals in life, to break down these nationality walls. But people are pretty divided. I just don’t know if that’s going to change.”

Mr. Williams concedes that he, too, strives to do better. He does not know the name of the Hispanic family that lives near him. For a time, he refused to wave to Hispanic drivers on the road because they often hurt his feelings by ignoring him and the Southern tradition of greeting strangers. He has since decided to wave — no matter what.

His wife, who did not grow up around immigrants, still feels a bit uncomfortable socializing with Hispanics, despite his long friendship with the Hispanic pastor.

A Shoulder to Lean On

Mr. Gaona said he was recently taken aback when his 5-year-old came home from school and described his black classmates as moyos, the aspersion.

“ ‘Why you need to call them like that?’ ” Mr. Gaona said he asked his son. “I’m trying to share with him that’s not right. But that’s what he hears.”

Still, on most days the two men put aside such awkwardness and focus on supporting each other.

When Mr. Gaona’s computer became infected with a virus, he called Mr. Williams, who stopped by to help repair it. When state officials refused to renew his brother’s driving license because his immigration papers were not in order, Mr. Gaona called Mr. Williams in frustration.

Mr. Williams relies on Mr. Gaona to interview Hispanic immigrants who ask to rent his church’s social hall for parties. And it was his respect for the Hispanic pastor that helped persuade him to use his newspaper column to chastise Americans who disparaged the newcomers.

“I believe that rather than be angry or envy those who have came to America and found success, we ought to be learning from them,” Mr. Williams wrote.

As the ministers meandered through their changing neighborhoods one afternoon, they considered taking their friendship to another level by preaching a joint service for their congregations. Though they knew it might never happen, they envisioned Spanish speakers and English speakers, newcomers and long timers’ holding hands and praying beneath the oak trees.

On that sultry summer afternoon, it felt good to dream about the possibility. Somehow, it felt like it just might be the start of something.

“We’ll get together one day soon and do one out in the open,” Mr. Gaona said.

Mr. Williams replied: “That sounds good. That sounds good. We’ll do that.”

    Bridging a Racial Rift That Isn’t Black and White, NYT, 3.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/us/03georgia.html

Black Incomes

Surpass Whites in Queens

October 1, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM ROBERTS

Across the country, the income gap between blacks and whites remains wide, and nowhere more so than in Manhattan. But just a river away, a very different story is unfolding.

In Queens, the median income among black households, nearing $52,000 a year, has surpassed that of whites in 2005, an analysis of new census data shows. No other county in the country with a population over 65,000 can make that claim. The gains among blacks in Queens, the city’s quintessential middle-class borough, were driven largely by the growth of two-parent families and the successes of immigrants from the West Indies. Many live in tidy homes in verdant enclaves like Cambria Heights, Rosedale and Laurelton, just west of the Cross Island Parkway and the border with Nassau County.

David Veron, a 45-year-old lawyer, is one of them. He estimates that the house in St. Albans that he bought with his wife, Nitchel, three years ago for about $320,000 has nearly doubled in value since they renovated it. Two-family homes priced at $600,000 and more seem to be sprouting on every vacant lot, he says.

“Southeast Queens, especially, had a heavy influx of West Indian folks in the late 80’s and early 90’s,” said Mr. Veron, who, like his 31-year-old wife, was born on the island of Jamaica. “Those individuals came here to pursue an opportunity, and part of that opportunity was an education,” he said. “A large percentage are college graduates. We’re now maturing and reaching the peak of our earning capacity.”

Richard P. Nathan, co-director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, called Queens “the flip side of the underclass.”

“It really is the best illustration that the stereotype of blacks living in dangerous, concentrated, poor, slum, urban neighborhoods is misleading and doesn’t predominate,” he said.

Andrew A. Beveridge, a Queens College demographer who analyzed results of the Census Bureau’s 2005 American Community Survey, released in August, for The New York Times, said of the trend: “It started in the early 1990’s, and now it’s consolidated. They’re married-couple families living the American dream in southeast Queens.”

In 1994, an analysis for The Times found that in some categories, the median income of black households in Queens was slightly higher than that of whites — a milestone in itself. By 2000, whites had pulled slightly ahead. But blacks have since rebounded.

The only other places where black household income is higher than among whites are much smaller than Queens, like Mount Vernon in Westchester, Pembroke Pines, Fla.; Brockton, Mass.; and Rialto, Calif. Most of the others also have relatively few blacks or are poor.

But Queens is unique not only because it is home to about two million people, but also because both blacks and whites there make more than the national median income, about $46,000.

Even as blacks have surged ahead of whites in Queens, over all they have fallen behind in Manhattan. With the middle class there shrinking, those remaining are largely either the wealthy, who are predominantly white, or the poor, who are mostly black and Hispanic, the new census data shows.

Median income among blacks in Manhattan was $28,116, compared with $86,494 among whites, the widest gap of any large county in the country.

In contrast, the middle-class black neighborhoods of Queens evoke the “zones of emergence” that nurtured economically rising European immigrants a century ago, experts say. “It’s how the Irish, the Italians, the Jews got out of the slums,” Professor Nathan said.

Despite the economic progress among blacks in Queens, income gaps still endure within the borough’s black community, where immigrants, mostly from the Caribbean, are generally doing better than American-born blacks.

“Racism and the lack of opportunity created a big gap and kind of put us at a deeper disadvantage,” said Steven Dennison, an American-born black resident of Springfield Gardens.

Mr. Dennison, a 49-year-old electrical contractor, has four children. One is getting her doctoral degree; another will graduate from college this school year. “It starts with the school system,” Mr. Dennison said.

Mr. Vernon, the lawyer from Jamaica, said: “It’s just that the people who left the Caribbean to come here are self-starters. It only stands to reason they would be more aggressive in pursuing their goals. And that creates a separation.”

Housing patterns do, too. While blacks make more than whites — even those in the borough’s wealthiest neighborhoods, including Douglaston — they account for fewer than 1 in 20 residents in some of those communities. And among blacks themselves, there are disparities, depending on where they live.

According to the latest analysis, black households in Queens reported a median income of $51,836 compared with $50,960 for non-Hispanic whites (and $52,998 for Asians and $43,927 among Hispanic people).

Among married couples in Queens, the gap was even greater: $78,070 among blacks, higher than any other racial or ethnic group, and $74,503 among whites.

Hector Ricketts, 50, lives with his wife, Opal, a legal secretary, and their three children in Rosedale. A Jamaican immigrant, he has a master’s degree in health care administration, but after he was laid off more than a decade ago he realized that he wanted to be an entrepreneur. He established a commuter van service.

“When immigrants come here, they’re not accustomed to social programs,” he said, “and when they see opportunities they had no access to — tuition or academic or practical training — they are God-sent, and they use those programs to build themselves and move forward.”

Immigrants helped propel the gains among blacks. The median income of foreign-born black households was $61,151, compared with $45,864 for American-born blacks. The disparity was even more pronounced among black married couples.

The median for married black immigrants was $84,338, nearly as much as for native-born white couples. For married American-born blacks, it was $70,324.

One reason for the shifting income pattern is that some wealthier whites have moved away.

“As non-Hispanic whites have gotten richer, they have left Queens for the Long Island suburbs, leaving behind just middle-class whites,” said Professor Edward N. Wolff, an economist at New York University. “Since home ownership is easier for whites than blacks in the suburbs — mortgages are easier to get for whites — the middle-class whites left in Queens have been relatively poor. Middle-class black families have had a harder time buying homes in the Long Island suburbs, so that blacks that remain in Queens are relatively affluent.”

The white median also appeared to have been depressed slightly by the disproportionate number of elderly whites on fixed incomes.

But even among the elderly, blacks fared better. Black households headed by a person older than 65 reported a median income of $35,977, compared with $28,232 for white households.

Lloyd Hicks, 77, who moved to Cambria Heights from Harlem in 1959, used to run a freight-forwarding business near Kennedy Airport. His wife, Elvira, 71, was a teacher. Both were born in New York City, but have roots in Trinidad. He has a bachelor’s degree in business. She has a master’s in education.

“Education was always something the families from the islands thought the children should have,” Mr. Hicks said.

In addition to the larger share of whites who are elderly, said Andrew Hacker, a Queens College political scientist, “black Queens families usually need two earners to get to parity with working whites.”

Kenneth C. Holder, 46, a former prosecutor who was elected to a Civil Court judgeship last year, was born in London of Jamaican and Guyanese parents and grew up in Laurelton. His wife, Sharon, who is Guyanese, is a secretary at a Manhattan law firm. They own a home in Rosedale, where they live with their three sons.

“Queens has a lot of good places to live; I could move, but why?” Mr. Holder said. “There are quite a number of two-parent households and a lot of ancillary services available for youth, put up by organized block associations and churches, like any middle-class area.”

In smaller categories, the numbers become less precise. Still, for households headed by a man, median income was $61,151 for blacks and $54,537 for whites. Among households headed by a woman, the black and white medians were the same: $50,960.

Of the more than 800,000 households in Queens, according to the Census Bureau’s 2005 American Community Survey, about 39 percent are white, 23 percent are Hispanic, 18 percent are Asian, and 17 percent are black — suggesting multiple hues rather than monotone black and white.

“It is wrong to say that America is ‘fast becoming two nations’ the way the Kerner Commission did,” said Professor Nathan, who was the research director for the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in 1968 and disagreed with its conclusion. “It might be, though, that it was more true then than it is now.”

    Black Incomes Surpass Whites in Queens, NYT, 1.10.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/nyregion/01census.html

Life keeps getting worse

for black men in U.S.

Published: Monday, March 20, 2006
The New York Times
By Erik Eckholm

BALTIMORE — The plight of black men in the United States is far more dire than is portrayed by common employment and education statistics, a flurry of new scholarly studies warn, and it has worsened in recent years even as an economic boom and a welfare overhaul brought gains to black women and many other groups.

Focusing on the life patterns of young men, the new studies by specialists at Columbia, Princeton and Harvard universities and other institutions show that the huge pool of poorly educated black males is becoming more disconnected from the mainstream society, and to a far greater degree than white or Hispanic men.

Especially in American inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legitimate work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime declines.

Although the deep problems afflicting poor black men have been known for decades, the new data paint the most alarming picture yet of ravaged lives and a deepening national calamity that scholars say has received too little attention.

"There's something very different happening with young black men, and it's something we can no longer ignore," said Ronald Mincy, professor of social work at Columbia and editor of a new book, "Black Males Left Behind."

"Over the last two decades, the economy did great," Mincy said, "and low- skilled women, helped by public policy, latched onto it. But young black men were falling farther back."

Many of the new studies go beyond the traditional approaches to looking at the plight of black men, especially in determining the scope of unemployment. For example, official unemployment rates can be misleading because they fail to include those not seeking work or incarcerated.

"If you look at the numbers, the 1990s was a bad decade for young black men, even though it had the best labor market in 30 years," said Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and co-author, with Peter Edelman and Paul Offner, of "Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men."

In response to the worsening situation for young black men, a growing number of programs are placing as much importance on teaching life skills - like parenting, conflict resolution and character building - as teaching job skills.

These were among the recent findings:

The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990s. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20s were jobless - unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated.

By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white dropouts and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts.

Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20s were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.

Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990s and reached historic highs in the last few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20s who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30s, 6 in 10 black men whodropped out of school have spent time in prison.

In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

None of the litany of problems that young black men face was news to a group of men from the airless neighborhoods of Baltimore, who recently described their experiences.

Curtis Brannon, 28, quit school in 10th grade to sell drugs, fathered four children with three women and spent several stretches in jail for drug possession, parole violations and other crimes.

"I was with the street life, but now I feel like I've got to get myself together," he said the other day in the row-house flat he shares with his girlfriend and four children. "You get tired of incarceration."

Brannon said he planned to look for work, perhaps as a mover, and he noted optimistically that he had not been locked up for six months.

A group of men, including Brannon, gathered at the Center for Fathers, Families and Workforce Development, one of a number of private agencies that are trying to help men build character along with workplace skills.

William Baker, 47, has a lot to overcome, he admits, not least his recently ended 15-year stay in the state penitentiary for armed robbery.

He sold marijuana for his parents, he said, left school in the sixth grade and later dealt heroin and cocaine.

Since leaving prison 18 months ago,he has lived in a home for recovering drug addicts and has started a $10-an- hour warehouse job while he ponders how to make a living from his real passion, drawing and graphic arts.

"I don't want to be a criminal at 50," Baker said.

Terrible schools, absent parents, racism, the decline in blue-collar jobs and a subculture that glorifies swagger over work have all been cited as causes of the deepening ruin of black youths. Scholars - and the young men themselves - agree that all these intertwined issues must be addressed.

Joseph Jones, director of the Baltimore fatherhood and work skills center, puts the breakdown of families at the core.

"Many of these men grew up fatherless, and they never had good role models," said Jones, who himself overcame addiction and prison time. "No one around them knows how to navigate the mainstream society."

All the negative trends are associated with poor schooling, studies have shown, and progress has been slight in recent years. U.S. data tend to understate dropout rates among the poor, in part because imprisoned youths are not counted.

Closer studies reveal that in inner cities across the country, more than half of all young black men still do not finish high school, said Gary Orfield, an education expert at Harvard and editor of "Dropouts in America."

"We're pumping out boys with no honest alternative," Orfield said in an interview, "and of course their neighborhoods offer many other alternatives."

    Life keeps getting worse for black men in U.S., NYT, 20.3.2006,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/world/americas/20iht-blacks.html