History > 2007 > USA > African-Americans (I)

In Mississippi,

Ruling Is Seen as Racial Split

July 18, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

JACKSON, Miss., July 13 — A federal court ruling in June that forces voters to register by party could return Mississippi to the days of racially polarized politics, as many white Democrats warn that thousands of white voters will now opt definitively for the Republican Party.

Republican-leaning voters in Mississippi have long been able to cross party lines in primaries, voting for centrist Democrats in state and local races while staying loyal to Republican candidates in national races. But political experts here say that by limiting these voters — almost all of whom are white — to Republican primaries, the ruling will push centrist Democratic candidates to the other party, simply in order to survive.

Most black voters in Mississippi are Democrats, and black political leaders have been pushing for years to prevent crossover voting in Democratic primaries. Black leaders say they want to end precisely what white Democrats here seek to preserve, a strong moderate-to-conservative voice in the Democratic Party, and in the process to pick up more state and local posts.

The ruling last month by Judge W. Allen Pepper Jr. of Federal District Court allowed the legal remedy sought by black leaders. Judge Pepper said the Democratic Party in Mississippi had a right to “disassociate itself” from voters who were not genuine Democrats. Most other Southern states also have open primaries.

As a result of the ruling, which was handed down June 8 and barring an appeal will go into effect next year, few whites are likely to remain in the Democratic Party, experts here say, a prospect that Republicans regard with glee, white Democrats with horror and black leaders with indifference. Not for the first time in the South, Republicans and blacks have achieved a de facto unspoken alliance of common interests that has been particularly evident in the drawing of Congressional districts, where blacks are packed into majority-black districts, leaving little space for moderate white Democrats to be elected.

If white voters go Republican in these districts, so too, will white candidates and office-holders, ending a persistent anomaly in a state that easily went twice for President Bush but where hundreds of local officeholders remain Democrats. As elsewhere in the South, grass-roots leaders tend to be moderate Democrats with roots in the New Deal.

The governor is a Republican, and Republicans narrowly control the Senate. But the House is heavily Democratic, and in races this year for local offices like sheriff, supervisor and circuit clerk, about 2,500 of 3,000 candidates were Democrats, said W. Martin Wiseman, director of the John C. Stennis Institute of Government at Mississippi State University.

The Democrats’ dominance at the local level may now be threatened by Judge Pepper’s ruling.

“If they are required to re-register, the Democratic Party will be a shell of its former self because I just don’t think you’ll see those conservative whites re-register as Democratic,” said Jere Nash, who is white and a veteran consultant and onetime chief of staff to former Gov. Ray Mabus, a Democrat.

R. Andrew Taggart, a white lawyer who succeeded Mr. Nash when Kirk Fordice, a Republican, was elected governor, agreed. The ruling was “very far-reaching,” Mr. Taggart said. “He has essentially ruled our entire primary structure must be changed.”

“If forced to make a decision,” Mr. Taggart added, “a plurality of Mississippi voters will identify themselves as Republican.”

Black Democrats who pushed the lawsuit that led to the ruling seemed to view the potential hemorrhaging of white voters with equanimity. One of their leaders is Ike Brown, a state Democratic executive committee member who was recently found by another federal judge to have systematically violated voting rights of whites, through intimidation and other means, as party boss in his home county, Noxubee, in the eastern part of the state.

Welcoming Judge Pepper’s ruling, Mr. Brown said in an interview: “We are tired of being abused by the white Democrats in Mississippi. We have just had enough. We want the Republicans out of our party.”

Democrats here have recently made other efforts to rid their party of Republican leanings, trying, for instance, to force the state’s conservative insurance commissioner, George Dale, off their primary ballot because he voted for Mr. Bush. A judge put Mr. Dale back on.

But none of these efforts have much chance at being as successful as the lawsuit. Ellis Turnage, the lawyer who filed it, said he was not worried about whites’ quitting the party. “If they want to leave, let them leave,” Mr. Turnage said. “When they integrated the schools, look what happened. That’s not for me to deal with.”

Yet if that happens, the racial polarization of politics here could be complete. Until now, an important bridge across the race divide in Mississippi has occurred, for instance, in the Legislature, where for three decades blacks and centrist white Democrats have formed coalitions to finance public education, or to push back against conservative Republican governors who sought cuts in social programs.

“The beauty of what I’ve witnessed over the last 28 years is we’ve worked together,” said Thomas U. Reynolds, who is white and the state representative from the quiet courthouse town of Charleston in the north Mississippi hills.

Mr. Brown, by contrast, said Mr. Reynolds’s district — and others like it — would be more properly represented by a black, another motive cited for pursuing closed primaries.

A stooped country lawyer with a populist bent, Mr. Reynolds has traversed much of Mississippi’s four-decade emergence from segregation in the state Legislature, preoccupied with what he sees as Democratic causes like better education and health care. To get past the ruling, Mr. Reynolds said he was counting on the voters he greets by first name in the courthouse square to support him, regardless of party or race.

“These folks, black and white, are my friends,” he said.

Such support, however, cannot be taken for granted in a state where 85 percent of whites voted for Mr. Bush in 2004.

Calling Judge Pepper’s ruling a “tragedy,” Mr. Reynolds said voters should be allowed to vote for the candidate of their choice, regardless of party. “Of all the things that could have happened, this doesn’t help us,” he said. “It would further racially polarize Mississippi, and that’s one thing we don’t want.”

Judge Pepper ordered the Legislature to put a new system in place by Aug. 31, 2008. He also said photo identification for voters should be instituted, a requirement that is meeting resistance from some who welcome his other findings. Among those opponents is Mr. Turnage, the plaintiffs’ lawyer.

Others — old-line white Democrats — are hoping against hope that the ruling will simply prove a fleeting nightmare if it is muddied by the Legislature or overturned on appeal — though none have been announced.

“If this thing comes to pass, it’s the end of the Democratic Party in the state of Mississippi,” said Hob Bryan, a longtime centrist state senator from the northeastern part of the state.

“I don’t want to exclude anyone from the Democratic Party,” Mr. Bryan said. “I want to include more people.”

In Mississippi, Ruling Is Seen as Racial Split, NYT, 18.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/us/18south.html

Spike Lee

to Focus on Black Soldiers

    Spike Lee to Focus on Black Soldiers, NYT, 3.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-People-Spike-Lee.html

Military Sees Drop in Black Recruits

June 24, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 7:15 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The number of blacks joining the military has plunged by more than one-third since the Afghanistan and Iraq wars began, as other job prospects soar and relatives of potential recruits increasingly discourage them from signing up.

According to data obtained by The Associated Press, the decline covers all four military services for active duty recruits, and the drop is even more dramatic when National Guard and Reserve recruiting is included.

The findings reflect the growing unpopularity of the wars, particularly among family members and other adults who exert influence over high school and college students considering the military as a place to serve their country, further their education or build a career.

Walking past the Army recruiting station in downtown Washington, D.C., this past week, Sean Glover said he has done all he can to talk black relatives out of joining the military.

''I don't think it's a good time. I don't support the government's efforts here and abroad,'' said Glover, 36.

The message comes as no surprise to the Pentagon where efforts are under way to increase the size of the Army and Marine Corps.

Marine Commandant Gen. James T. Conway agreed that the bloodshed in Iraq -- where more than 3,540 U.S. troops have died -- is the biggest deterrent for prospective recruits.

According to Pentagon data, there were nearly 51,500 new black recruits for active duty and reserves in 2001. That number fell to less than 32,000 in 2006, a 38 percent decline.

When only active duty troops are counted, the number of black recruits went from more than 31,000 in 2002 to about 23,600 in 2006, almost one-quarter fewer. The decline is particularly stark for the Army.

Military Sees Drop in Black Recruits, NYT, 24.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Military-Recruits-Blacks.html

Anger at Coach

Fuels Racial Divide

in Rural Colorado

June 21, 2007
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH

LA JARA, Colo. — The photograph, of four popular high school students standing side by side, each clutching a gun in one hand and giving a stiff-armed Nazi salute with the other, terrified many people in La Jara and the surrounding poor farming communities of the San Luis Valley. Its discovery further intensified a bitter racial divide between supporters of a longtime coach, who is black, and a largely white group of students and their parents.

What began as a dispute over playing time on the football field has, in recent months, led to the closing of the school, Centauri High, for a day, the postponement of the prom and a series of emotional community meetings. Tensions between opposing factions have grown so pronounced that some people fear they are tearing apart a remote region in southern Colorado near the New Mexico border that is more diverse than many in the state.

Both sides agree that the problems at Centauri emerged long before the photo of the seniors, Trey Jackson, Dylan Valerio, Cole Smith and Kyle Martin, surfaced on the Internet in May.

All four were part of a group that in the fall of 2005 clashed with the veteran coach, Larry Joe Hunt, one of only a handful of African-Americans who live in Alamosa, near La Jara, where white and Hispanic residents predominate.

The boys, all members of the varsity football squad, were upset by what they felt was a lack of playing time and by what they called offensive language in hip-hop songs that Mr. Hunt, known for his intensity, played before games, said Cas Garcia, a lawyer representing the family of Trey Jackson. The boys, their parents and some other team members took their complaints to local school district officials but felt they were ignored, Mr. Garcia said.

This year, the dispute turned ugly when, according to Mr. Hunt’s son, Colby, 17, the players and their friends, who are white and Hispanic, began to insult Colby and other students who support the coach. Once, Colby recalled, they discussed, just loudly enough for him to hear, forming a club called the Lynch Mob or the Klan.

Ra Vernon, the mother of a Centauri student, said the players called her 15-year-old son, who is white and a friend of Colby’s, a racial epithet, and asked him, “Where’s the black boy at?”

“I was completely taken aback that in 2007, kids would still say or feel these things,” Ms. Vernon said. “It all just kept getting worse.”

Fearful for her son’s safety, Ms. Vernon pulled him out of Centauri last month before the school year was over.

Mr. Hunt filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, saying he had told school officials about many incidents he considered racially motivated.

Last year, the boys, some of whom also played basketball for Mr. Hunt, formed a breakaway team, the Running Rebels, and showed up wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the Confederate flag at a basketball camp the Centauri team was attending.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think things like this could still happen in this part of Colorado,” said Jane Corn of the Colorado Education Association, which is representing Mr. Hunt.

A school board member, Garth Crowther, told the education association that during a football game, Trey Jackson’s father, Vaughn, a local family physician, was upset over his son’s playing time and remarked, “I’m going to paint my boy black.” Dr. Jackson also used an obscene racial epithet to describe the type of person who could play on the team, Mr. Crowther said.

“I was shocked. But that’s what I heard,” said Mr. Crowther, who added that his daughter faced severe harassment at school because of her friendship with Mr. Hunt’s daughter, Lydia, 14.

Mr. Garcia said that he had no knowledge of Dr. Jackson’s comments but that the harassment claims against the boys had not been proven.

The intent of the Confederate flag shirts was misunderstood, Mr. Garcia said.

“The boys were not looking at it as a racial symbol,” he said. “They were rebelling against what they perceived to be unfair coaching practices. They didn’t understand that it would be viewed as hurtful or mean-spirited.”

Shortly after Easter break, someone raised the Confederate flag over Centauri High School, and some students began painting the flag on their cars, a practice that school officials ordered stopped.

Word of the Internet photo swept through the valley in May, prompting the North Conejos School District to contact local and state law enforcement authorities, close Centauri High for a day and postpone the prom. A local newspaper, The Valley Courier, ran the picture and an accompanying letter from more than 100 area residents, urging people not to sit silently “as racial intimidation rages across the community.”

Mr. Garcia called the photo “a big mistake” that was not racially motivated and for which the boys have publicly apologized. “It was a stupid thing to do,” he said. “Everyone involved in this has been devastated. Everyone has suffered.”

“I’ve known the Jacksons for years,” Mr. Garcia added. “If they were racist, I wouldn’t be representing them.”

By the end of the school year, many of Centauri High’s 340 students and their parents had grown frustrated with the administration’s response. Students convened an assembly in protest, and parents chastised school officials at a series of meetings.

“Because these problems have been neglected for so long, they’ve been allowed to escalate to a place of hysteria,” said Kathleen Chavez, an English teacher, who says the school has long ignored harassment of minority students.

The assistant school superintendent, Robert Alejo, defended the district’s decision not to punish the boys, all of whom were permitted to graduate with their classmates. He said district officials, after conferring with lawyers and law enforcement officials, could not discipline anyone because nothing but the Nazi salute picture, which did not involve school property, could be proven. The school district is awaiting a final report by a private investigator who was also hired to look into the accusations of racial harassment.

“There were rumors, innuendo, but nothing tangible was ever handed to my office,” Mr. Alejo said.

The school board president, LeRoy Salazar, who is a brother of Senator Ken Salazar and Representative John Salazar, both Democrats, agreed with Mr. Alejo, but said school officials should have moved more swiftly.

“In retrospect, we should have had Internet picture policies in place, community forums, student forums, diversity training, to make it really clear that any sort of harassment or intimidation or hate will not be tolerated in our community,” said LeRoy Salazar, who is a Centauri graduate along with his brothers.

Mr. Hunt met recently with the families of some boys with whom he had clashed, and a few apologized, Ms. Corn said.

Mr. Hunt said he would not comment until his complaint with the federal employment commission had been resolved, but his wife, Christine Hettinger-Hunt, who is white, said she found it “unbelievable that people haven’t fully understood how hateful and hurtful all of these actions have been.”

    Anger at Coach Fuels Racial Divide in Rural Colorado, NYT, 21.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/21/us/21racism.html

A Fixture

in the Heart of Harlem

Faces Another Fight

June 16, 2007
The New York Times
By ROJA HEYDARPOUR

The sounds of jazz in the 1970s slowly gave way to the hip-hop that now blasts from cars rolling down 125th Street in Harlem. The street itself has been transformed, as chain stores have moved into the area they long shunned.

Through it all, Sikhulu Shange, 65, has been a constant, a looming presence behind the register of his music store, the Record Shack.

Mr. Shange (pronounced shawn-gay) watched the marquee for the Apollo Theater across the street turn digital. He remembers when three retail stores occupied what is now a nearby Duane Reade.

Inside, he replaced the vinyl albums that lined the walls, first with cassettes and then with CDs of gospel, jazz, blues, reggae and a variety of African music, some of which was particularly hard to find elsewhere. The store even survived a bitter dispute 12 years ago that ended in a deadly fire.

Harlem is far different today, but the Record Shack remains an unofficial neighborhood landmark.

“Today I see these little kids who used to be mischievous, now they are grandmothers,” he said. “I can safely say that I was one of Harlem’s custodians of culture.”

The long, narrow walls of the Record Shack have weathered many changes, but after 35 years it may not survive the latest challenge.

Mr. Shange’s landlord, the United House of Prayer for All People, served him eviction papers in February and gave him 30 days to vacate. The case went to Civil Court, where a judge ruled in May that Mr. Shange had until March 31, 2008, to leave his store empty and “broom clean.”

The church argued that Mr. Shange had been allowed to operate without a lease for several years, while Mr. Shange says he deserves a new lease, given his many years of operating the store.

A lawyer for the church, Edwin Roy Eisen, did not respond to several phone calls seeking more details.

This is not the first time a landlord has tried to force Mr. Shange out. In the winter of 1995, he was arguing with an earlier landlord, Fred Harari, and customers and neighbors protested in the street in an effort to save his shop. Mr. Harari owned a store next door to the Record Shack called Freddy’s Department Store and held the sublease on Mr. Shange’s space.

The protests took on racial overtones and ended in an arson attack on the department store by one of the pickets, killing eight people, including the picket. At the time, there was some suspicion that Mr. Shange had a hand in organizing the protests. Eventually, the United House of Prayer for All People took over direct control of his lease, and his store has survived.

Twelve years later, rising real estate prices, gentrification and the proliferation of online music make the Record Shack’s hold on survival more tenuous.

Mr. Shange said he had been paying $4,500 a month in rent and was willing to pay more. He and his lawyer, Armani Scott, say the church has shown no interest in discussing a new lease.

Mr. Shange wants to rally support once again to fight his eviction, though he has no appetite for another tumultuous confrontation. He has more gray hair, the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth are deeper, and he rubs his face often. But the Record Shack and Harlem are too much a part of his identity for him to go, he said.

“I was one of the few people to cling to Harlem,” he said. “Harlem really groomed me into manhood.”

Mr. Shange came to New York City from South Africa in 1962 as part of a troupe called the Zulu Dancers. Mr. Shange decided to stay rather than return to the apartheid in his homeland. He overcame the immigrant’s homesickness by finding solace, education and ultimately a chance to start his own business in Harlem.

He learned about the American black struggle from some of the famous people who were part of the scene on 125th Street. He heard the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X speak, he said, and he keeps a picture of Marcus Garvey in his shop. James Brown, Miles Davis and Michael Jackson would drop by his shop, he said.

At 6 foot 4, Mr. Shange has the commanding presence of an elder on 125th Street. Both young and old walk into his shop and offer their condolences about his business’ future.

Angel Rivera stopped in after a day of work as a general contractor. “I’ve been in Harlem a long time, and we ain’t ready to see you go,” he said. “We’re not letting him shut the doors.”

Mr. Shange’s usually soft demeanor morphs into rage whenever he talks about Harlem’s economic state. His voice rose several decibels as he spoke recently to Morris Powell, the president of the 125th Street Vendors Association, on the corner of 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard.

“You have to be a millionaire even to be able to live in Harlem,” he told Mr. Powell, who wore a pin that said “economic racism.” “Too many businesses being closed, too many chains moved up here in Harlem.”

Moments later, as he walked back to his store, he passed several businesses, including Payless, a Verizon cellphone store, Lane Bryant and the Children’s Place. As Mr. Shange waited to cross the street to his store, an excited buzz came from a diverse group waiting to go see a dance performance at the Apollo.

“Now Harlem’s safe for everybody but black people, huh?” he said. “That’s interesting.”

A Fixture in the Heart of Harlem Faces Another Fight, NYT, 16.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/nyregion/16shack.html

Families honor

Mississippi men

killed by Klan

Fri Jun 15, 2007
6:49PM EDT
Reuters

JACKSON, Mississippi (Reuters) - The families of two black teenagers who were abducted and murdered in a 1964 Mississippi race crime set up a memorial to them on Friday, one day after a former Ku Klux Klansman was convicted of kidnapping in the case.

Dozens watched as Thomas Moore placed a sign and photographs on a roadside in the town of Meadville, in southwest Mississippi, at the spot where his brother Charles Moore and Henry Dee were last seen hitchhiking.

According to trial evidence, the two 19-year-olds were abducted by James Seale and other white extremists, taken to a national forest, beaten, stuffed in the back of a car and driven to the Mississippi River where they were tied down with heavy weights and drowned.

"In Memory of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore. Abducted and killed by the Klan, 2 May 1964. Bodies found in Mississippi River, July 12 and 13 1964," the sign said, according to witnesses.

A jury in a federal trial convicted Seale, 71, on Thursday of two counts of kidnapping and one of conspiracy in the case, the first time someone has been brought to justice for the murders.

Seale will be sentenced on August 24 and could face a maximum of life imprisonment on each count.

"The United States government owes every citizen in this country the right to find out what happened to their loved ones," said Moore, who campaigned for years to bring the case to court.

"The process has begun and in time I'm sure we'll forgive Mr. Seale," he said.

The case is the latest of several brought by federal prosecutors in recent years in an attempt to clear up dozens of killings of black Americans by white extremists in Mississippi and other parts of the South during the civil rights era.

    Families honor Mississippi men killed by Klan, R, 15.6.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1529283520070615

Ex-Klansman found guilty in Mississippi killings

Thu Jun 14, 2007
11:40PM EDT
Reuters
By Matt Saldana

JACKSON, Mississippi (Reuters) - A former Ku Klux Klansman was found guilty of kidnapping on Thursday in the 1964 killings of two black men in Mississippi, a case that highlighted white supremacist violence during the civil rights era.

A federal jury deliberated just two hours before convicting James Seale, who was also charged with conspiracy in the killings of 19-year-old Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore who were kidnapped while hitchhiking.

According to the indictment and testimony, they were taken to a national forest and Seale trained a shotgun on the teenagers while his companions beat them.

They then stuffed Dee and Moore into the trunk of a car, drove them to an offshoot of the Mississippi River, attached heavy weights to them and threw them alive into the water from a boat, prosecutors said.

The jury made clear neither of the kidnapped men was "returned unharmed," a statement that may increase a sentence whose maximum amounts to a life term on each count.

As the verdict was delivered, Seale, 71, turned to his wife, Jean, and whispered, "Are you OK?" Relatives of Dee and Moore, who had waited decades for justice, hugged each other and cried.

"I'm rejoicing for justice in this country. I see them (Dee and Moore) as rejoicing in heaven right now. Mississippi spoke today," said Thomas Moore, Charles' elder brother who worked for years to bring the case to court.

"Today's conviction of James Ford Seale brings some long overdue justice to the families of Henry Dee and Charles Moore, who were brutally murdered more than 40 years ago," U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said in a statement.

The main prosecution witness, another former Klansman who was granted immunity, testified during the trial that Seale told him he had killed Dee and Moore.

The trial was the latest brought by federal prosecutors in an attempt to clear up crimes during the 1950s and 1960s by white supremacists who aimed to terrify the black community into not supporting a campaign for civil and voting rights for African-Americans in the racially segregated South.

In many cases, the Ku Klux Klan and other groups were able to operate with impunity because they were supported by local law enforcement and judicial authorities.

By the same token, black Americans had few legal protections, and crimes against them often attracted little publicity.

The bodies of Dee and Moore were only recovered during a high-profile search for three civil rights activists later that year whose deaths generated widespread revulsion at the racial violence in Mississippi.

In 2005, a Mississippi jury convicted Klansman Edgar Ray Killen of three counts of manslaughter in those murders, which formed the basis of the 1988 film "Mississippi Burning."

    Ex-Klansman found guilty in Mississippi killings, R, 14.6.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1430400820070615

Rep. Parren Mitchell Dies at 85

May 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:34 p.m. ET
The New York Times

BALTIMORE (AP) -- Former Congressman Parren J. Mitchell, an eloquent but soft-spoken founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus and champion of civil rights, died on Memorial Day. He was 85.

Mitchell had been in intensive care, Greater Baltimore Medical Center spokesman Michael Schwartzberg said Tuesday in confirming his death.

He had been living in a nursing home since suffering a series of strokes several years earlier and died of complications from pneumonia, The (Baltimore) Sun reported.

Mitchell was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Baltimore in 1970 and was Maryland's first black congressman. The Democrat served eight terms before stepping down in 1986 to be the running mate to former attorney general Stephen Sach in his unsuccessful bid for governor.

''Throughout his life, Congressman Mitchell dedicated himself to opening the doors to opportunity for all Americans,'' said Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, a Democrat who now holds the 7th District seat. ''He was a true servant leader, never concerning himself about fame or fortune but, rather, devoting himself entirely to uplifting the people he represented.''

Mitchell was a member of one of the country's prominent civil rights families, dubbed the ''black Kennedys'' for their extensive record of service.

His brother Clarence Mitchell Jr. helped shepherd the major civil rights legislation of the late 1950s and 1960s as the NAACP's principal lobbyist, and was known as the 101st Senator. Parren Mitchell's sister-in-law, Juanita Jackson Mitchell, was the long-time head and legal counsel of the Maryland NAACP.

Parren Mitchell was also a political mentor to former NAACP President and Congressman Kweisi Mfume, who said his death was like losing a second father.

''He helped shape and define an era,'' Mfume said. ''He wasn't just going up against a doctrine, a lot of times he was going up against the government, and that required a special courage. He had the heart of a lion.''

Gov. Martin O'Malley described Mitchell as ''a transformational leader,'' and a source of inspiration.

''In the midst of a time of upheaval and change, he saw clearly where our nation's ongoing struggle for justice must head next -- economic opportunity for all,'' O'Malley said.

Born in Baltimore in 1922, Parren Mitchell was a graduate of Morgan State College and earned a Master's degree from the University of Maryland, according to biographical information supplied by Cummings' office.

He also served as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army during World War II, and received the Purple Heart.

Before his election to congress, Mitchell worked in the administrations of Baltimore Mayors Theodore R. McKeldin and Thomas J. D'Alesandro III, and Gov. J. Millard Tawes.

As a congressman, he fought for legislation requiring local governments to set aside 10 percent of federal grants to hire minority contractors.

He also gained notoriety during the Wedtech scandal in the 1980s, initiating the congressional investigation that eventually ensnared his nephews, state Sens. Clarence Mitchell III and Michael Mitchell. The two were sentenced to federal prison for their part in the scandal, which involved bribes to obtain no-bid military contracts.

Parren Mitchell was never accused of wrongdoing in the case.

Even as his health was failing in his final years, Mitchell remained a fiery advocate for change.

''I saw him a couple of months ago and he grabbed me by the collar and said 'never stop giving them hell,'' Mfume said.

Associated Press Writer Todd Hallidy contributed to this report.

    Rep. Parren Mitchell Dies at 85, NYT, 29.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Obit-Mitchell.html?hp

Mom Burial Next to Civil - Rights Worker

May 29, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:35 a.m. ET
The New York Times

MERIDIAN, Miss. (AP) -- The mother of a civil-rights worker killed in the 1964 ''Mississippi Burning'' case will be buried next to her son on Saturday, more than 40 years after she left the state because of death threats.

Fannie Lee Chaney, 84, died May 22 in New Jersey. She had lived to see a reputed Klan leader convicted two years earlier in the killings of her son and two other young men.

Her funeral will be held at the First Union Baptist Church, Clark's Memorial Funeral Home confirmed Tuesday. It is the same sanctuary where she had mourned her son James Chaney.

James Chaney, a black man, was killed on June 21, 1964, in central Mississippi's Neshoba County, along with fellow civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, two white men from New York. The three had been looking into the torching of a black church and helping to register black voters during what was known as Freedom Summer.

Their killings, and early efforts to prosecute the suspects, were portrayed in the 1988 movie ''Mississippi Burning.''

Fannie Lee Chaney left the state in 1965, saying she had received death threats after her son was killed, including one from a man who said he would dynamite her house and another caller who told her she would ''be put in a hole like James was.''

Mississippi prosecutors revived their investigation of the slayings a few years ago, and Fannie Lee Chaney testified in June 2005 at the trial of reputed Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen.

Killen, 82, was convicted on three counts of manslaughter on the anniversary of the men's deaths. He is serving a 60-year prison sentence.

    Mom Burial Next to Civil - Rights Worker, NYT, 29.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Chaney-Burial.html

Bank of America sued for race discrimination

Fri May 18, 2007
2:01PM EDT
Reuters
By Jonathan Stempel

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Five black current and former employees of Bank of America Corp. have sued the second-largest U.S. bank, accusing it of racial discrimination by steering lucrative clients to their white counterparts.

The 29-page complaint, filed Thursday with the U.S. District Court in Boston, contends that the bank discriminates against African-Americans in pay, promotions, training and support services.

It said the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank regularly teams African-American workers together and assigns them to largely minority neighborhoods and low net-worth clients.

When the workers complained, according to the lawsuit, the bank said it believed that clients are more "comfortable" dealing with bankers and brokers of their own race.

"There is a perception at the bank that predominantly white, wealthy customers in high net-worth neighborhoods are only going to be comfortable with Caucasian financial advisers and bankers," said Darnley Stewart, a partner at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann LLP who represents the plaintiffs, in an interview. "It's a complete stereotype."

Bank of America said it will defend against the lawsuit, and has a strong record of hiring and training workers. "We have been recognized for our success in creating and supporting a diverse and inclusive work place," spokeswoman Shirley Norton said. "Our company does not tolerate discrimination."

The lawsuit covers April 2003 to the present, and seeks class-action status. It seeks a halt to the alleged improper practices, back pay, and compensatory and punitive damages.

Separately, Bank of America was sued Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Delaware by a former paralegal who said he wasn't paid overtime when he worked during meal periods or beyond his standard 40-hour week. That lawsuit also seeks class-action status.

Norton said the bank hasn't fully investigated the claims, but has policies to ensure worker compensation complies with applicable laws.

DISCRIMINATION LAWSUITS

According to the bias complaint, Bank of America's investment services unit employs 4,400 "premier bankers" and 3,000 brokers in 30 U.S. states and Washington, D.C. It is unclear how many African-Americans might be covered by the lawsuit.

Other brokerages have also faced bias lawsuits accusing them, among other issues, of steering wealthy clients to particular groups of workers.

Merrill Lynch & Co. faces an 18-month-old lawsuit in Chicago by African-American brokers and trainees. Morgan Stanley, meanwhile, last month agreed to pay $46 million to settle bias accusations by six former female brokers.

The Bank of America plaintiffs work or have worked for the bank in the Atlanta, St. Louis and south Florida areas, according to the complaint.

Stewart said that while the alleged discrimination differs from accusations other brokerages have faced of creating hostile work environments, she said "it's equally pernicious."

"The tone from the top needs to be that the bank will treat professionals equally, and that is not happening," she said. "Too many decisions are left to people at the local level."

    Bank of America sued for race discrimination, R, 18.5.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1848318020070518

Daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. Dies

May 16, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:08 p.m. ET
The New York Times

ATLANTA (AP) -- Yolanda King, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s eldest child who pursued her father's dream of racial harmony through drama and motivational speaking, collapsed and died. She was 51.

King died late Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif., said Steve Klein, a spokesman for the King Center. The family did not know the cause of death, but relatives think it might have been a heart problem, he said.

''She was an actress, author, producer, advocate for peace and nonviolence, who was known and loved for her motivational and inspirational contributions to society,'' the King family said in a statement.

Former Mayor Andrew Young, a lieutenant of her father's who has remained close to the family, said King was going to her brother Dexter's home when she collapsed in the doorway.

Her death came less than a year and a half after her mother, Coretta Scott King, died in January 2006 after battling ovarian cancer and the effects of a stroke. Her struggle prompted her daughter to work with the American Heart Association to raise awareness about strokes, especially among blacks.

Yolanda King, who lived in California, was an actress, ran a production company and appeared in numerous films, including ''Ghosts of Mississippi.'' She played Rosa Parks in the 1978 miniseries ''King.''

''Yolanda was lovely. She wore the mantle of princess, and she wore it with dignity and charm,'' said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, one of her father's close aides in the civil rights movement. He added she was ''thoroughly committed to the movement and found her own means of expressing that commitment through drama.''

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who also worked with her father, said: ''She lived with a lot of the trauma of our struggle. The movement was in her DNA.'' The Rev. Al Sharpton called her a ''torch bearer for her parents and a committed activist in her own right.''

White House press secretary Tony Snow said President Bush and the first lady were sad to learn of King's death, adding, ''Our thoughts are with the King family today.''

Yolanda King founded and led Higher Ground Productions, billed as a ''gateway for inner peace, unity and global transformation.'' On her company's Web site, she described her mission as encouraging personal growth and positive social change.

The flag at The King Center, where she was a board member, flew at half-staff on Wednesday.

Yolanda Denise King -- nicknamed Yoki by the family -- was born Nov. 17, 1955, in Montgomery, Ala., where her father was then preaching. Her brother Martin III was born in 1957; brother Dexter in 1961; and sister Bernice in 1963.

She was just two weeks old when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus there, leading to the Montgomery bus boycott spearheaded by her father.

When she was 10 weeks old, the King family home was bombed in Jan. 30, 1956, as her father attended a boycott rally. Neither she nor her mother was injured when the device exploded on the front porch.

In 1963, when she was 7, her father mentioned her and her siblings at the March on Washington, saying: ''I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.''

She was 12 when her father was assassinated in Memphis, Tenn., in 1968.

King was a 1976 graduate of Smith College in Northampton, Mass., where she majored in theater and Afro-American studies. She also earned a master's degree in theater from New York University.

Yolanda King was the most visible of the four children during this year's Martin Luther King Day in January, the first since her mother's death.

When asked by The Associated Press at that event how she was dealing with the loss of her mother, she responded: ''I connected with her spirit so strongly. I am in direct contact with her spirit, and that has given me so much peace and so much strength.''

At her father's Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, she performed a series of solo skits that told stories including a girl's first ride on a desegregated bus and a college student's recollection of the 1963 campaign to desegregate Birmingham, Ala.

She also urged the audience to be a force for peace and love, and to use the King holiday each year to ask tough questions about their own beliefs about prejudice.

''We must keep reaching across the table and, in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, feed each other,'' she said.

Funeral arrangements would be announced later, the family said in a brief statement.

--------

On the Net:

Higher Ground Productions: http://www.yolanda-king.com

    Daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. Dies, NYT, 16.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Obit-King.html?hp

Memory of Gov. Wallace Shooting Fades

May 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:57 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LAUREL, Md. (AP) -- Many of Laurel's older residents can point to the precise spot in the shopping center where Arthur Bremer's gunshots paralyzed Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace and cut short his campaign for the White House in 1972.

They recall just what they were doing that May 15 afternoon when they heard that the loner from Milwaukee had shot Wallace five times as he shook hands in the parking lot of what was then the city's main retail plaza.

But 35 years later, as Laurel struggles to retain its small-town identity, the collective memory of its most famous event is fading.

''People say it happened over near the bank, but other people say it was over there'' by the drug store, said Scott Branch, standing behind the counter of the Hobby Works store he manages in the Laurel Shopping Center.

Branch said he frequently uses the shooting as a landmark in giving directions to the store. But with the younger set, ''I tell them it's where the Books-A-Million is and they say, 'Oh, I know where that is.'''

Wallace, who had carried five Southern states as a fist-shaking third party candidate in 1968, was mounting a surprisingly successful run in the Democratic primaries in 1972 before Laurel. Billing himself as the candidate of ''the average American,'' he was viewed as a serious wild card in the party and in Republican President Richard Nixon's bid for re-election.

A former segregationist, Wallace was best known for standing defiantly at the all-white University of Alabama in a symbolic face-off with the Justice Department as the National Guard stood by and two black students enrolled in 1963. By 1972, he had tempered his racist rhetoric and adopted a more subtle approach, denouncing federal courts over the ''involuntary busing'' of schoolchildren to meet desegregation orders and pledging a return to a ''law and order'' society.

Wallace had consistently fared well in polls and a few weeks before Laurel had led the crowded Democratic field in the presidential primary in Florida, where he carried every county. Even as he lay in the hospital after the assassination attempt, he led in Maryland and Michigan.

But the shooting effectively ended his national career, diminishing the fiery charisma that had made him a dominant political force in Alabama and leaving him in a wheelchair until his death in 1998.

There has never been much discussion of erecting a public marker on the site, city spokesman Jim Collins said. Even though Wallace ultimately apologized and asked forgiveness for his segregationist stands, a memorial would probably meet opposition because of his past, Collins said.

Views might be different had Wallace died at the site, he said. Memorials are more common at sites where historical figures died, such as John F. Kennedy in Dallas or the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. There is no marker, for example, at the Washington hotel where President Reagan was wounded in a 1981 shooting.

Michael Brey, who owns the Hobby Works store, said a simple marker might be appropriate. But he said it could be tricky.

''How do you do it without making it seem like it's a monument to a man who stood out in front of a school blocking black children from attending?'' he said.

Today, Laurel hardly resembles the small mill town it once was. Growth from the nation's capital about 20 miles to the south has surrounded the city with suburbs, and a busy commercial district with fast-food restaurants and car dealerships now dwarfs the strip center where Wallace was shot.

No one seems to know what happened to the wooden stage that the shopping center would roll out for community events and that Wallace stood upon to deliver his stump speech before wading into the crowd.

The bank that sits alone in the middle of the parking lot -- and is closest to the shooting site -- once displayed a large photograph of the scene in the lobby. But the national chain that bought the bank took it down years ago.

''I heard about it when I first opened my account,'' said 20-year Laurel resident Dianne W. Shields as she left the bank recently. ''They had (the photo) posted right there in front. You couldn't miss it ... everybody would talk about it.''

Wallace's family has never considered requesting a marker at the site, said Wallace's son, George Wallace Jr., a former Alabama Public Service commissioner who lost a bid to become lieutenant governor last year. If the local community wanted one, the family wouldn't object, he said. But it isn't planning to get involved.

''Time passes, memories fade. It's part of life,'' he said. ''It is a very historic site though. It sure is.''

(This version CORRECTS spelling of Brey.)

    Memory of Gov. Wallace Shooting Fades, NYT, 15.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Wallace-Shooting-Anniversary.html

Indictment in ’65 Killing That Inspired Rights March

May 10, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

NEW ORLEANS, May 9 — A grand jury in Alabama handed up an indictment on Wednesday in an obscure killing that helped inspire the historic Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. The case is the latest in a series of belated prosecutions of crimes from the civil rights era.

In February 1965, a black farmer, Jimmie Lee Jackson, 26, was shot by Alabama state troopers who were suppressing a voting rights demonstration in Marion in the Black Belt. Historians have said the killing indirectly helped lead to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The identity of the killer has long been known, James B. Fowler, a retired trooper, and on Wednesday Mr. Fowler’s lawyer, George Beck of Montgomery, said he could “only assume” that Mr. Fowler was the subject of the indictment.

The district attorney would not release the name or the charge until the defendant had been notified.

Mr. Beck said, “I think we can all assume that Mr. Fowler was indicted.”

Mr. Fowler, 73, has admitted the killing in interviews but insisted that the shooting was in self-defense as Mr. Jackson tried to grab the trooper’s gun.

Books on the civil rights movement have painted a different picture of that night. Multiple accounts say that Mr. Jackson was in a group of demonstrators pushed back by club-swinging troopers into Mack’s Cafe and that he watched his grandfather, Cager Lee, 82, being beaten and his mother, Viola Jackson, attacked.

When Mr. Jackson lunged to protect her, the historians say, a trooper shot him twice in the stomach.

He died eight days later. To protest, activists decided to march from Selma to the state’s Capitol in Montgomery. The confrontation on March 7, 1965, or Bloody Sunday, led to the Voting Rights Act.

“It’s a very important case, because his death led to the voting rights march,” District Attorney Michael W. Jackson said Wednesday in an interview. “This event helped trigger the Voting Rights Act, which helped enfranchise a lot of people. I’m a direct benefit of it.”

Mr. Jackson noted that he was the lone African-American district attorney in Alabama and the first from Selma. He is not related to the victim.

Mr. Jackson, 43, said that he had read about the Jimmie Lee Jackson case as a child and that when he was elected in 2005, became determined to reopen it.

Mr. Beck was an Alabama assistant attorney general in the 1970s who helped prosecute another revived case, that of the 1963 16th Street Church bombing in Birmingham in which four girls were killed.

“This case is vastly different,” Mr. Beck said. “In the bombing case, someone intentionally planned and carried out a very heinous act. In the Fowler case, Mr. Fowler was sent over to quell a civil disturbance by George Wallace and Al Lingo.”

Mr. Wallace was the governor, and Mr. Lingo led the troopers.

In January, federal authorities in Mississippi arrested James Ford Seale, 71, in the kidnapping and murder of two black teenagers in 1964, Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee. Jury selection is scheduled for this month.

Mr. Fowler, the retired trooper, told The Anniston Star of Alabama two years ago: “Jimmie Lee Jackson was not murdered. He was trying to kill me, and I have no doubt in my mind that under the emotional situation at the time that if he would have gotten complete control of my pistol that he would have killed me or shot me.”

Mr. Jackson said that though finding witnesses and evidence had been a struggle, “we’re very confident about the case we put together.”

Asked whether Mr. Fowler was the defendant, Mr. Jackson said: “You know who got indicted. I just can’t say it. You can figure that out.”

    Indictment in ’65 Killing That Inspired Rights March, NYT, 10.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/us/10alabama.html?hp

50 Years Later, Little Rock Can’t Escape Race

May 8, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Fifty years after the epic desegregation struggle at Central High School, the school district here is still riven by racial conflict, casting a pall on this year’s ambitious commemorative efforts.

In the latest clash, white parents pack school board meetings to support the embattled superintendent, Roy Brooks, who is black. The blacks among the school board members look on grimly, determined to use their new majority to oust him. Whites insist that test scores and enrollment have improved under the brusque, hard-charging Mr. Brooks; blacks on the board are furious that he has cut the number of office and other non-teaching jobs and closed some schools.

The fight is all the more disturbing to some here because it erupted just as a federal judge declared Little Rock’s schools finally desegregated, 50 years after a jeering white mob massed outside Central High to turn back integration.

In 1957, the fight was over whether nine black students could attend an entirely white high school. Now it is over whether the city’s black leaders can exert firm control over the direction and perquisites of an urban school district in the way that white leaders did for decades. When Mr. Brooks, who declined a request for an interview, cut 100 jobs, he saved money but earned the fierce ill will of many other blacks, who see the district as an important source of employment and middle-class stability.

Many whites, on the other hand, see the district, where issues of race have long been a constant backdrop, as a bloated bureaucracy, ripe for Mr. Brooks’s pruning. Where some blacks say Mr. Brooks disregards them and cozies up to the white business establishment, many whites say he is merely trying to stop white flight.

The bitter racial split has left some residents questioning the dimensions of advancement in the intervening years. There are no mobs in the street this time, but the undercurrents are nasty.

“We’re quite concerned about what kind of progress we have or haven’t made,” said Andre Guerrero, a white member of the Central High School 50th Anniversary Commission.

“This is a power struggle about whose voice is going to prevail,” Mr. Guerrero said as the school board prepared to meet last week.

Mr. Brooks’s tenure and the fight over him has thrown the district into turmoil.

“I’ve never seen anything like this — the divisiveness, the hate,” said the leader of the teacher’s union, Katherine Wright Knight. Another outspoken critic, Katherine Mitchell, the board president, said, “I’m saying, we have really regressed.”

The judge’s ruling in February, disputed by activists and black board members but welcomed by Mr. Brooks, freed the city’s schools from federal oversight. It marked the end of a government engagement that began in September 1957 when Army soldiers escorted the nine black students up the stone steps of Central High.

But it did not end longstanding resentments, and after a black majority was elected to the board for the first time last fall, the gloves are off.

Other urban public school districts in the South have suffered through similar racial battles over leadership, aggravated by symptoms that prevail here, too: white flight, inner-city poverty and what is referred to as the “achievement gap,” the wide divergence in test results between white and black students. The gap fuels resentment and makes an anathema of any perceived administrative leaning toward white students.

The fight here has been especially bruising because of its symbolic overtones and practical implications. Though whites have deserted the schools in many other Southern cities, they have not done so to the same degree in Little Rock, where they make up about a quarter of the 23,000 students. Birmingham, Ala.; Jackson, Miss.; New Orleans and Memphis, by contrast, had white percentages in the single digits or barely above, according to 2000 Department of Education data.

Most important, the 1957 racial ugliness at Central High is tightly bound up with the local identity. It was Little Rock’s shaming turn on the world stage, televised live, and the city has sought to overcome it for 50 years. Signs on the Interstate point visitors to the school and its visitors center; a festival, forums, ceremonies, theatrical events and more are planned in advance of an anniversary now clouded by the strife. Any hint that the troubles may echo that of 50 years ago, however distantly, is painful to some civic leaders.

“Here we are, coming up to the 50th, and we thought we were coasting,” said Nancy Rousseau, the principal of Central High, her voice trailing off.

Now integrated in its student body, if largely white in its advanced classes, the school is still an imposing brick-and-stone, Art Deco and collegiate gothic ziggurat towering over the old neighborhood surrounding it. It also remains a magnet for some of the best teachers and students in the state.

So polarized are the two sides that after Mr. Brooks summoned a statistician to demonstrate improvements in the schools at a recent board meeting, his opponents summoned another statistician to demonstrate precisely the opposite. Black and white board members took turns rolling their eyes and looking skeptical.

Jay P. Greene, head of the department of education reform at the University of Arkansas, said in an interview that Little Rock’s scores had been improving, like scores around the state, though pushing them up in a troubled urban district “itself is an achievement.”

The chamber of commerce backs Mr. Brooks, and the conservative editorial page of The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette crusades for him. Neither endorsement helps his image with black critics, who see his actions as inherently favoring whites.

He is “a person who doesn’t identify with black people at all,” said John Walker, a Little Rock civil rights lawyer who represents black students in the court case, which he has appealed. “The only thing he stands for is putting black people down.”

Though many whites hail the cuts in administration — a legislative study found it “terribly bloated,” a lawmaker said — Ms. Mitchell, the board president, said of them angrily: “African-American employees have lost $918,000,” and she enumerated positions lost or downgraded. Many whites laud the closing of the three schools with low attendance.

Dr. Greene, of the University of Arkansas, said he feared that the dispute was really about patronage, not educational quality. “I think it would be hard to make strong criticisms of the superintendent on educational grounds,” he said.

Yet Mr. Brooks has evidently neglected the political role vital to a superintendent’s success, some say.

“Roy Brooks has done a credible job reaching out to the grass tops, and a lousy job reaching out to the grass roots,” said James L. Rutherford, dean of the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, part of the University of Arkansas.

Mr. Brooks came from Orlando, Fla., three years ago, an administrator and former principal with a reputation for toughness and improving intractable schools, and he was opposed from the beginning by Ms. Mitchell and the teachers’ union, whose leader immediately predicted he would fail. His fortunes went downhill when blacks achieved their historic majority on the board.

Mr. Brooks sat impassively through the recent board meeting, never making eye contact with his critics. They voted to send him a letter outlining why they wanted to be rid of him; on April 30 he sued the board president in federal court, saying she was intimidating potential witnesses who might testify for him at a likely administrative hearing over whether he should be dismissed.

Black parents remained largely silent at the board meeting. But several other black parents interviewed as they picked up their children at Dunbar Middle School were not following the board majority’s line.

“He’s a real hands-on superintendent,” said Ray Webster, whose two small boys were jumping up and down in the back seat. Mr. Webster had met Mr. Brooks through the parent-teacher association.

“He actually cares about the kids. He actually shows concern for the kids,” he said, but that is a view vehemently rejected by his critics.

    50 Years Later, Little Rock Can’t Escape Race, NYT, 8.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/us/08deseg.html?hp

Study of N.B.A. Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls

May 2, 2007
The New York Times
By ALAN SCHWARZ

An academic study of the National Basketball Association, whose playoffs continue tonight, suggests that a racial bias found in other parts of American society has existed on the basketball court as well.

A coming paper by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student says that, during the 13 seasons from 1991 through 2004, white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players.

Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics, found a corresponding bias in which black officials called fouls more frequently against white players, though that tendency was not as strong. They went on to claim that the different rates at which fouls are called “is large enough that the probability of a team winning is noticeably affected by the racial composition of the refereeing crew assigned to the game.”

N.B.A. Commissioner David Stern said in a telephone interview that the league saw a draft copy of the paper last year, and was moved to do its own study this March using its own database of foul calls, which specifies which official called which foul.

“We think our cut at the data is more powerful, more robust, and demonstrates that there is no bias,” Mr. Stern said.

Three independent experts asked by The Times to examine the Wolfers-Price paper and materials released by the N.B.A. said they considered the Wolfers-Price argument far more sound. The N.B.A. denied a request for its underlying data, even with names of officials and players removed, because it feared that the league’s confidentiality agreement with referees could be violated if the identities were determined through box scores.

The paper by Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price has yet to undergo formal peer review before publication in an economic journal, but several prominent academic economists said it would contribute to the growing literature regarding subconscious racism in the workplace and elsewhere, such as in searches by the police.

The three experts who examined the Wolfers-Price paper and the N.B.A.’s materials were Ian Ayres of Yale Law School, the author of “Pervasive Prejudice?” and an expert in testing for how subtle racial bias, also known as implicit association, appears in interactions ranging from the setting of bail amounts to the tipping of taxi drivers; David Berri of California State University-Bakersfield, the author of “The Wages of Wins,” which analyzes sports issues using statistics; and Larry Katz of Harvard University, the senior editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

“I would be more surprised if it didn’t exist,” Mr. Ayres said of an implicit association bias in the N.B.A. “There’s a growing consensus that a large proportion of racialized decisions is not driven by any conscious race discrimination, but that it is often just driven by unconscious, or subconscious, attitudes. When you force people to make snap decisions, they often can’t keep themselves from subconsciously treating blacks different than whites, men different from women.”

Mr. Berri added: “It’s not about basketball — it’s about what happens in the world. This is just the nature of decision-making, and when you have an evaluation team that’s so different from those being evaluated. Given that your league is mostly African-American, maybe you should have more African-American referees — for the same reason that you don’t want mostly white police forces in primarily black neighborhoods.”

To investigate whether such bias has existed in sports, Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price examined data from publicly available box scores. They accounted for factors like the players’ positions, playing time and All-Star status; each group’s time on the court (black players played 83 percent of minutes, while 68 percent of officials were white); calls at home games and on the road; and other relevant data.

But they said they continued to find the same phenomenon: that players who were similar in all ways except skin color drew foul calls at a rate difference of up to 4 ½ percent depending on the racial composition of an N.B.A. game’s three-person referee crew.

Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks and a vocal critic of his league’s officiating, said in a telephone interview after reading the paper: “We’re all human. We all have our own prejudice. That’s the point of doing statistical analysis. It bears it out in this application, as in a thousand others.”

Asked if he had ever suspected any racial bias among officials before reading the study, Mr. Cuban said, “No comment.”

Two veteran players who are African-American, Mike James of the Minnesota Timberwolves and Alan Henderson of the Philadelphia 76ers, each said that they did not think black or white officials had treated them differently.

“If that’s going on, then it’s something that needs to be dealt with,” James said. “But I’ve never seen it.”

Two African-American coaches, Doc Rivers of the Boston Celtics and Maurice Cheeks of the Philadelphia 76ers, declined to comment on the paper’s claims. Rod Thorn, the president of the New Jersey Nets and formerly the N.B.A.’s executive vice president for basketball operations, said: “I don’t believe it. I think officials get the vast majority of calls right. They don’t get them all right. The vast majority of our players are black.”

Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price spend 41 pages accounting for such population disparities and more than a dozen other complicating factors.

For the 1991-92 through 2003-4 seasons, the authors analyzed every player’s box-score performance — minutes played, rebounds, shots made and missed, fouls and the like — in the context of the racial composition of the three-person crew refereeing that game. (The N.B.A. did not release its record of calls by specific officials to either Mr. Wolfers, Mr. Price or The Times, claiming it is kept for referee training purposes only.)

Mr. Wolfers said that he and Mr. Price classified each N.B.A. player and referee as either black or not black by assessing photographs and speaking with an anonymous former referee, and then using that information to predict how an official would view the player. About a dozen players could reasonably be placed in either category, but Mr. Wolfers said the classification of those players did not materially change the study’s findings.

During the 13-season period studied, black players played 83 percent of the minutes on the floor. With 68 percent of officials being white, three-person crews were either entirely white (30 percent of the time), had two white officials (47 percent), had two black officials (20 percent) or were entirely black (3 percent).

Mr. Stern said that the race of referees had never been considered when assembling crews for games.

With their database of almost 600,000 foul calls, Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price used a common statistical technique called multivariable regression analysis, which can identify correlations between different variables. The economists accounted for a wide range of factors: that centers, who tend to draw more fouls, were disproportionately white; that veteran players and All-Stars tended to draw foul calls at different rates than rookies and non-stars; whether the players were at home or on the road, as officials can be influenced by crowd noise; particular coaches on the sidelines; the players’ assertiveness on the court, as defined by their established rates of assists, steals, turnovers and other statistics; and more subtle factors like how some substitute players enter games specifically to commit fouls.

Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price examined whether otherwise similar black and white players had fouls-per-minute rates that varied with the racial makeup of the refereeing crew.

“Across all of these specifications,” they write, “we find that black players receive around 0.12-0.20 more fouls per 48 minutes played (an increase of 2 ½-4 ½ percent) when the number of white referees officiating a game increases from zero to three.”

Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price also report a statistically significant correlation with decreases in points, rebounds and assists, and a rise in turnovers, when players performed before primarily opposite-race officials.

“Player-performance appears to deteriorate at every margin when officiated by a larger fraction of opposite-race referees,” they write. The paper later notes no change in free-throw percentage. “We emphasize this result because this is the one on-court behavior that we expect to be unaffected by referee behavior.”

Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price claim that these changes are enough to affect game outcomes. Their results suggested that for each additional black starter a team had, relative to its opponent, a team’s chance of winning would decline from a theoretical 50 percent to 49 percent and so on, a concept mirrored by the game evidence: the team with the greater share of playing time by black players during those 13 years won 48.6 percent of games — a difference of about two victories in an 82-game season.

“Basically, it suggests that if you spray-painted one of your starters white, you’d win a few more games,” Mr. Wolfers said.

The N.B.A.’s reciprocal study was conducted by the Segal Company, the actuarial consulting firm which designed the in-house data-collection system the league uses to identify patterns for referee-training purposes, to test for evidence of bias. The league’s study was less formal and detailed than an academic paper, included foul calls for only two and a half seasons (from November 2004 through January 2007), and did not consider differences among players by position, veteran status and the like. But it did have the clear advantage of specifying which of the three referees blew his whistle on each foul.

The N.B.A. study reported no significant differences in how often white and black referees collectively called fouls on white and black players. Mr. Stern said he was therefore convinced “that there’s no demonstration of any bias here — based upon more robust and more data that was available to us because we keep that data.”

Added Joel Litvin, the league’s president for basketball operations, “I think the analysis that we did can stand on its own, so I don’t think our view of some of the things in Wolfers’s paper and some questions we have actually matter as much as the analysis we did.”

Mr. Litvin explained the N.B.A.’s refusal to release its underlying data for independent examination by saying: “Even our teams don’t know the data we collect as to a particular referee’s call tendencies on certain types of calls. There are good reasons for this. It’s proprietary. It’s personnel data at the end of the day.”

The percentage of black officials in the N.B.A. has increased in the past several years, to 38 percent of 60 officials this season from 34 percent of 58 officials two years ago. Mr. Stern and Mr. Litvin said that the rise was coincidental because the league does not consider race in the hiring process.

Mr. Wolfers and Mr. Price are scheduled to present their paper at the annual meetings of the Society of Labor Economists on Friday and the American Law and Economics Association on Sunday. They will then submit it to the National Bureau of Economic Research and for formal peer review before consideration by an economic journal.

Both men cautioned that the racial discrimination they claim to have found should be interpreted in the context of bias found in other parts of American society.

“There’s bias on the basketball court,” Mr. Wolfers said, “but less than when you’re trying to hail a cab at midnight.”

Pat Borzi contributed reporting from Minneapolis and John Eligon from East Rutherford, N.J.

    Study of N.B.A. Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls, NYT, 2.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/sports/basketball/02refs.html?hp

Radio Host Is Suspended Over Racial Remarks

April 10, 2007
The New York Times
By BILL CARTER

The radio talk show host Don Imus was suspended for two weeks yesterday after the outcry over his racially disparaging remarks about the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.

The suspension will begin Monday.

NBC News, which does a simulcast broadcast of Mr. Imus’s radio program on its cable news channel MSNBC, was the first to act, suspending Mr. Imus and calling his comments “racist and abhorrent.”

A short time later, CBS Radio, which is his chief employer, followed, saying it, too, would take Mr. Imus, 66, off the air for two weeks.

NBC also served notice yesterday that it would not tolerate insensitive remarks in the future. Mr. Imus had promised to change the tenor of the show, NBC said in a statement, and had agreed that the suspension was appropriate.

“Our future relationship with Imus is contingent on his ability to live up to his word,” NBC said. CBS made no statement other than that it was suspending Mr. Imus, who has been the host of “Imus in the Morning” for more than 30 years.

MSNBC will replace Mr. Imus’s program with news coverage. CBS was undecided about how it would fill the time.

The actions came at the end of a day of intensifying pressure on Mr. Imus from black leaders, who expressed outrage at his description last Wednesday of the Rutgers team as “nappy-headed ho’s.”

Mr. Imus tried to stave off calls for his resignation by appearing yesterday on a syndicated radio program that has the Rev. Al Sharpton as its host and making a more complete apology for what he said were “repugnant, repulsive, and horrible” comments.

He said he was also trying to reach out to the team, its coach and players’ parents to issue an apology.

Mr. Imus said he wanted to try to “see if they’ll forgive me and if there is something that can be established here that I can do to begin to build something positive out of this — and then who knows?”

But his job still appeared to be in jeopardy, with Mr. Sharpton and other black leaders calling for Mr. Imus to be fired, threatening to initiate a boycott of sponsors and demanding that the Federal Communications Commission take action against him and radio stations that carry his program.

It is unclear whether members of the Rutgers team will agree to meet with Mr. Imus. The Rutgers athletic director, Robert E. Mulcahy III, said in a statement yesterday, “I have relayed the message of Don Imus and his offer to apologize in person to the students and asked them to let me know how they wished to respond if at all.”

It is also still unclear how much support Mr. Imus can expect from the roster of politicians, authors and media figures who make up his daily guest list. Some of his regular guests, like the author Tom Oliphant and the editor at large of Newsweek, Evan Thomas, have already appeared with him and offered support. But Mr. Sharpton said yesterday that he would be asking “all the candidates running for president if they plan to appear on the show.”

Some of those candidates, like Senator John McCain and Senator Joseph R. Biden, are regular guests. Mr. McCain said in an interview in Phoenix yesterday that he was a “believer in redemption” and hoped that Mr. Imus could satisfy his critics with his apology.

Mr. Imus also found support in the publishing industry where he is highly valued by authors and publishers. The publisher of Simon & Schuster, David Rosenthal, said it would be a shame if Mr. Imus lost his job.

“I think he has been a fantastic forum for authors and for people with interesting ideas,” Mr. Rosenthal said..

The “Imus in the Morning” program is popular in New York, where it reaches about a half million listeners on the radio station WFAN. Mr. Imus is an employee of CBS, but WFAN is the only CBS station to carry the program. It is, however, syndicated on Westwood One, a company that is managed by CBS. Executives from Westwood One declined to comment.

The program has become particularly important for MSNBC, serving as that network’s regular morning program. “Imus in the Morning” has been building its audience steadily on MSNBC, threatening to overtake CNN in that time slot.

At NBC, the decision to suspend Mr. Imus was made by the management of NBC News, in consultation with the company’s corporate management, headed by Jeff Zucker.

The suspension will not begin until Monday because Mr. Imus had scheduled a telethon to benefit research into a cure for sudden infant death syndrome and neither outlet wanted to hurt that cause.

In his appearance with Mr. Sharpton, Mr. Imus offered no real defense for his statement, other than to say it was an attempt at humor that had failed miserably. “I understand there’s no excuse for it,” he told Mr. Sharpton. “I’m not pretending that there is. I wish I hadn’t said it.”

His critics say Mr. Imus has shown a pattern of racially charged remarks over the years. Some of these he tried to defend on Mr. Sharpton’s program, saying they had been misinterpreted or were satirical.

Mr. Sharpton asked if the newspaper columnist Clarence Page had once gotten Mr. Imus to pledge not to do any more racial humor. Mr. Imus said he had.

“Do you repent once a decade?” Mr. Sharpton asked.

Mr. Imus argued that he was not at heart a racist: “I think what makes a difference in this context, and you can still call for me to be fired, that’s fine, but I think what makes a difference, a crucial difference is: What was my intent?”

Though he said he did not want people to think he was trying to excuse himself, Mr. Imus did point to charitable work he has done with children with cancer — many of them black — on his ranch in New Mexico, as well as his effort to raise money to find a cure for sickle-cell anemia.

Mr. Sharpton said intent could not be considered when actions were “over the line.” He also said that no matter how good or decent Mr. Imus might be at heart, his actions in this case had “set a precedent” that would invite other commentators to make similar comments.

He promised he would push the issue with sponsors and the F.C.C. It was not known last night how advertisers, which have included Bigelow Tea, Chrysler and the New York Stock Exchange, would respond.

The F.C.C. may not have a direct means to address the issue. It was under a mandate from Congress to act against what was deemed indecency, but there is not a similar mandate against other types of speech by a broadcaster.

Several media executives said a bigger problem for Mr. Imus may be advertisers’ response to calls for a boycott. Most such boycotts usually prove to be ineffective but Mr. Sharpton and other black leaders promised to make this one work. Mr. Sharpton also said he wanted to make sure Mr. Imus did not come out of this experience unscathed.

“I’m scathed,” Mr. Imus said. “Are you crazy? How am I unscathed by this? Don’t you think I’m humiliated?”

Mr. Sharpton replied, “You’re not as humiliated as young black women are.”

Motoko Rich and Rebecca Cathcart contributed reporting.

    Radio Host Is Suspended Over Racial Remarks, NYT, 10.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/business/media/10imus.html?hp

To Close Gaps, Schools Focus on Black Boys

April 9, 2007
The New York Times
By WINNIE HU

OSSINING, N.Y. — In an effort to ensure racial diversity, the school system here in northern Westchester County is set up in an unusual way, its six school buildings divided not by neighborhood but by grade level. So all of the second and third graders in the Ossining Union Free School District attend the Brookside School.

But some minority students, the black boys at Brookside, are set apart, in a way, by a special mentoring program that pairs them with black teachers for one-on-one guidance outside class, extra homework help, and cultural activities during the school day. “All the black boys used to end up in the office, so we had to do something,” said Lorraine Richardson, a second-grade teacher and mentor. “We wanted to teach them to help each other” instead of fight each other.

While many school districts have long worked to close the achievement gap between minority and white students, Ossining’s programs aimed to get black male students to college are a new frontier.

Ossining school officials said they were not singling out black boys, but after a district analysis of high school students’ grade-point averages revealed that black boys were performing far worse than any other group, they decided to act. In contrast, these officials said, the performance of black girls compared favorably with other students and did not warrant the same concern.

The district calls it a “moral imperative,” and administrators and teachers say their top priority is improving the academic performance of black male students, who account for less than 10 percent of the district’s 4,200 students but disproportionately and consistently rank at the bottom in grades and test scores. The programs are voluntary, school officials said, and some students choose not to take part.

The special efforts for Ossining’s black male students began in 2005 with a college-preparatory program for high schoolers and, starting last month, now stretch all the way to kindergarten, with 5-year-olds going on field trips to the American Museum of Natural History and Knicks and Mets games to practice counting.

Ossining’s unusual programs for black boys have drawn the attention of educators across the country as school districts in diversifying suburbs are coming under new pressure to address what many see as a seemingly intractable racial divide with no obvious solution.

The federal No Child Left Behind law’s requirement that test scores be analyzed for each racial group has over the past decade spotlighted the achievement gap even in predominantly white suburban districts.

Some of the nation’s leading minority scholars have praised Ossining’s approach, but other educators, parents and civil rights groups contend that such separate programs do more harm than good. Last year, the New York Civil Rights Coalition filed a complaint with the United States Department of Education over such a program at the City University of New York, and the group plans to file a complaint with the state against Ossining’s program.

“I think this is a form of racial profiling in the public school system,” said the coalition’s executive director, Michael Meyers. “What they’re doing here, under the guise of helping more boys, is they’re singling them out and making them feel inferior or different simply because of their race and gender.”

At a time of wider debate over the socioeconomic barriers facing black boys, the focus on boosting educational support has gained traction with policymakers. In Maryland, a state education task force asserted in December that “school, itself, is an at-risk environment for African-American male youth” and issued a 58-page report “to justify fixing it — whatever the cost.”

In New York and other large cities, such concerns have spurred the creation of all-male schools aimed at drawing black students. Now, with debate over the achievement gap spreading beyond city borders, efforts like Ossining’s — though few as comprehensive — are sprouting up in suburbs nationwide.

In Teaneck, N.J., school officials formed an after-school club for black boys in 2005, with local black businessmen serving as role models. In the Cleveland suburbs, the South Euclid-Lyndhurst district has spent more than $20,000 a year on clubs that reward black male students for good grades with sleepovers and guest speakers.

And in the neighboring community of Shaker Heights, one of the nation’s best-known honors programs for black male students, the Minority Achievement Committee Scholars, has since 2004 received calls from more than 40 school districts that want to copy its efforts.

Here in Ossining, where Sing Sing state prison looms as a reminder that more black men are behind bars than enrolled in college, Latoya Morris, who is black, said that most of her black male classmates dropped out of school before she graduated in 1999. Now the mother of a 5-year-old boy in kindergarten, Ms. Morris, a nurse, said the extra support for black boys makes sense because the statistics are stacked against them.

“I don’t want my son to be in jail when he becomes a teenager,” she said. “I want him to have the same chances as a white child.”

The school officials here noted that it is too soon to measure the impact of their programs with test scores, but that the percentage of black students enrolled in college-level courses in 11th and 12th grades has more than doubled to 55 percent this year from 26 percent in 2004.

In the lower grades, teachers have also reported that disciplinary referrals for black boys have dropped — as much as 80 percent at Brookside — and that the boys are missing fewer homework assignments and paying more attention in class. (Efforts are under way now to begin similar programs for Hispanic boys, who have also not performed well.)

Since Lenox Robinson, a 12-year-old sixth grader, joined the district’s mentoring program in October, he has begun saving pennies and quarters in a glass jar under his bed — he has $10 so far — to pay for college. Lenox failed science last marking period mainly because, he said, he stopped trying after his friends made fun of him, adding, “I realize I shouldn’t have done that.”

Programs aimed specifically at black students, and the boys in particular, are a departure from past efforts that sought to erase the achievement gap by raising the performance of every student, but are gaining acceptance in some circles.

This summer, the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell and the investment bank Goldman Sachs are scheduled to convene their third conference of educators and professionals in the past year to brainstorm on “winning strategies for young black men.”

While most schools are reluctant to focus on any particular group of students, opposition has lessened.

Some black scholars said that achievement-gap programs must be tailored to the needs of black male students if the programs are to succeed. Freeman A. Hrabowski III, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, said that many black boys grow up with few male role models and in high-crime neighborhoods, where being smart in school is not considered cool. “You can’t just ignore the needs of a group and say all children are the same,” he said.

But Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust, a Washington-based group that advocates for disadvantaged children, worried that such efforts may unintentionally lump together high-achieving black students with low-achieving ones and, in effect, “declare a whole set of kids at risk.”

“You do have to worry whether you’re creating a stereotype that is as damaging as the one you’re trying to replace,” she said.

The Ossining district is one of the most racially and economically mixed in the affluent Westchester suburbs: about 16 percent of the students are black and 38 percent Hispanic, and nearly one-third qualify for free and reduced lunches.

A New York Times analysis of state education data showed that, among about 150 districts that tested students in the 2004-5 school year, the most recent available, Ossining’s achievement gap between black and white students was in the top fifth. For fourth graders, the gap widened on the English tests from four years earlier, while for eighth graders, the gap narrowed during the same period but was still twice as big as in all the other districts.

Since 2005, Ossining’s programs for black boys have cost more than $50,000, most of it from donations, grants and a student telethon. School officials said they had not received any complaints about the district’s use of resources for this purpose.

None of more than two dozen parents who were interviewed directly criticized the focus on black boys, or said that the boys were receiving preferential treatment. But several said the programs should be made available to struggling students regardless of race.

Under the programs, the extra attention begins in elementary school; every black boy in fourth and fifth grades, for example, is assigned a team of teachers to track his academic progress.

The boys also meet black role models, while their parents attend workshops on planning for college. Motivation is emphasized throughout. As part of a recent dress for success contest, high school boys wore suits to school for a month. The two winners received hand-tailored suits.

Last month, Brookside started a music class in which, with teacher approval, black boys are allowed to miss one period a week to learn to play conga drums and sing West African welcome songs. After one recent drum fest, 9-year-old Arthur Stokeley, a third grader, sat down with his mentor, Ms. Richardson, to review his class work.

“So how was school today?” Ms. Richardson said.

“It was great,” Arthur said.

Griff Palmer contributed reporting.

    To Close Gaps, Schools Focus on Black Boys, NYT, 9.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/09/nyregion/09school.html?hp

Black airmen honored for fighting Nazis, racism

Wed Mar 28, 2007 3:59PM EDT
Reuters
By Matthew Bigg

TUSKEGEE, Alabama (Reuters) - The first black U.S. Air Force unit will finally receive national recognition this week for fighting a double war -- one against the Nazis abroad, the other against racial segregation at home.

President George W. Bush will honor the surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen with a Congressional Gold Medal, the highest civilian award given by Congress, at a ceremony on Thursday at the U.S. Capitol.

The airmen helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement and influenced President Harry Truman's decision to desegregate the army in 1948.

But just as their success is being recognized, one aspect of the story is in dispute.

The "Red Tails" of the 99th Fighter Squadron -- so called because some of the planes they piloted had distinctive red tails -- flew some 1,578 missions from their base in North Africa, destroyed over 260 enemy aircraft, sank one enemy destroyer and demolished numerous enemy installations, according to military records.

For decades, they were also credited with never having lost a bomber under their escort. Yet Daniel Haulman of the Air Force Historical Research Agency said some of the many bombers escorted were in fact shot down.

Haulman, responding to a request from three airmen, analyzed five days of mission reports of the 332d Fighter Group and compared them with reports from the bomber groups they escorted and records of planes downed.

Over the five days, 25 bombers were shot down, though most were lost on missions where the number of bombers exceeded the number of fighters, he said.

"I don't think it (their reputation) will be diminished at all because of the achievements that they accomplished -- they don't really need that statement: 'Never lost a bomber'," he said, adding: "No other group could have done a better job."

'BOY, CARRY MY BAGS'

The 99th Fighter Squadron was set up after the army reluctantly agreed to train a group of black pilots at a remote air school in Tuskegee, Alabama, keeping them separate from the rest of the army in line with its policy of segregation.

In all, about 1,000 pilots were trained, and also ground crew. Fewer than a third of the pilots are still alive to receive the medal.

"We had the feeling that the program was designed to fail," said one of the pilots, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Charles Dryden, who graduated from the school in 1942.

"Our mantra was that we dared not fail because if we did, the doors of future aviation would be closed to black people forever," he said in an interview at his home in Atlanta.

Dryden, 86, who stayed in the Air Force after World War Two, recalled the "horrible discrimination" he faced and said he decided to stay away from whites in Alabama as far as possible to avoid breaking the racial mores of the south.

He was particularly incensed to see that German prisoners of war were given access to whites-only facilities at a base in South Carolina that were off-limits to him.

But his memories focus on how his own character was forged in the crucible of combat and racial injustice.

"I had a deep feeling of fear," he said of his first combat encounter. "It wasn't about the enemy, it was about myself ... But the first time I saw the enemy I ran (flew) toward him and I knew that I was a tiger and not a pussy cat."

On graduating from the flying school, he rode the train back to New York wearing his uniform.

"As I was proudly preening my way through the terminal a little white lady said: 'Here Boy. Carry my bags.'" The remark angered him but taught him a lesson. "It humbled me. It taught me: It's not the uniform that counts, it's what's inside."

RED TAILS

In recent years the airmen's story has been retold as a universal tale of triumph over adversity. Dryden published one of several airmen's memoirs, HBO released a film on the story in 1995 and director George Lucas is said to be developing a movie about the Red Tails.

But it would be wrong to isolate the airmen's achievement from the record of black military service that dates back to the U.S. Revolutionary War, said John Butler, professor at the University of Texas and author of a book on army integration.

What the airmen did should be seen as part of the record of black achievement under segregation in the South that included the establishment of numerous black colleges.

Tuskegee University, set up to educate blacks by Booker T. Washington, lobbied the Air Force to train the airmen at its own pioneering school for black civilian pilots at Moton Field, land now being restored as a national park and historic site.

"The Tuskegee airmen grew straight out of this culture of achievement and built on it," he said in an interview. "The segregation was part of the trigger that enabled them to succeed."

    Black airmen honored for fighting Nazis, racism, R, 28.3.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2723731820070328

For Some Black Pastors, Accepting Gay Members Means Losing Others

March 27, 2007
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

ATLANTA — When the Rev. Dennis Meredith of Tabernacle Baptist Church here began preaching acceptance of gay men and lesbians a few years ago, he attracted some gay people who were on the brink of suicide and some who had left the Baptist faith of their childhoods but wanted badly to return.

At the same time, Tabernacle Baptist, an African-American congregation, lost many of its most loyal, generous parishioners, who could not accept a message that contradicted what they saw as the Bible’s condemnation of same-sex relations. Over the last three years, Tabernacle’s Sunday attendance shrank to 800, from 1,100.

The debate about homosexuality that has roiled predominantly white mainline churches for years has gradually seeped into African-American congregations, threatening their unity, finances and, in some cases, their existence.

In St. Paul, the Rev. Oliver White, senior minister of Grace Community Church, lost nearly all his 70 congregants after he voted in 2005 to support the blessing of same-sex unions in his denomination, the United Church of Christ.

In the Atlanta area, a hub of African-American life, only a few black churches have preached acceptance of gay men and lesbians, Mr. Meredith said. At one of those congregations, Victory Church in Stone Mountain, attendance on Sundays has fallen to 3,000 people, from about 6,000 four or five years ago, said the Rev. Kenneth L. Samuel, the senior pastor.

Some black ministers, like their white counterparts, said they had been moved to reconsider biblical passages about same-sex relations by personal events, like finding out that a friend or relative is gay. Some members of the clergy contend that because of the antipathy to gay men and lesbians, black churches have done little to address the high rate of H.I.V. infection among African-Americans.

“The church has to come to a point when it has to embrace all the people Jesus embraced, and that means the people in the margins,” Dr. Samuel said. “It really bothered my congregation when I said that as people of color who have been ostracized, marginalized, how can we turn around now and oppress other people?”

It is hard to know how many ministers who lead the country’s tens of thousands of African-American congregations are preaching acceptance of gay men and lesbians. Some leading African-American religious thinkers and leaders — like Cornel West, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes and the Rev. Michael Eric Dyson — have called for inclusion of gay men and lesbians. But other leaders are convinced that the Bible condemns homosexuality and that tolerance of gay men and lesbians is a yet another dangerous force buffeting the already fragile black family.

“It is one of several factors that are taking away the interest in traditional marriage in the African-American community,” said Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr., the president of the High Impact Leadership Coalition, a black conservative Christian group. “I see the growing gay movement in the black community and our culture as almost evangelistic in nature, with what’s on television, with their legal agenda, all those things that have made homosexuality more acceptable.”

In the 13 years Mr. Meredith has led Tabernacle Baptist, he has presided over cycles of fraying and mending, this last time because of his preaching “love and acceptance,” he said. When he arrived in 1994, the congregation at Tabernacle had dwindled from several thousand members to about 110.

A compelling orator with the voice and showmanship of a stadium-rock star, Mr. Meredith quickly began to draw more new members. He preached against homosexuality. Then, five years ago, his middle son, Micah, told him that he is gay. Mr. Meredith and his wife began to read liberal theologians like Mr. Gomes and to look at Scripture again. What matters most in the Bible, Mr. Meredith said, was Jesus’ injunction to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself, and that includes gay men and lesbians.

As he preached greater acceptance of gay people, Mr. Meredith saw the face of his congregation change.

About three years ago, many older members, those who had hung on through the church’s waning, and who drove in from the suburbs because they had attended Tabernacle as young people, gradually began to leave. They took with them their generous, loyal tithing. The 90-year-old church had money to cover salaries and utilities but had a hard time paying for properties it had bought nearby. In September, Mr. Meredith held a commitment ceremony in the church for two lesbian couples. More people left after that.

As attendance dropped, the church cut back to one service on Sunday, from two. On a recent Sunday, the pews were filled with some older people like the deacons and deaconesses, though the head deacon had left recently after telling Mr. Meredith that he had turned Tabernacle into “a sissy church.”

Under banners that read “Kindness,” “Peace” and “Love,” there were young families with babies. And there were transgender people like Stacy Jackson and Nikki Brown. There were also lesbian couples like Angela Hutchins and Stephanie Champion, sitting together in the front rows.

Mr. Meredith preached about Moses, about the vision God gave him to do the right thing. He told congregants about holding on to that vision, regardless of who they were.

“Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t do it because of your lifestyle, because of your sexuality, because you don’t have an education, because you’ve done time,” he said. “Because God knew you before you were born, when you were still in your mother’s womb. If God loves everybody, who am I not to love everybody?”

“Amen,” people called out. “Preach it; preach it.”

Afterward, when the sanctuary was mostly empty, Ruth Jinks, a deaconess who has been at Tabernacle since 1969, sat in a pew, cane by her side, waiting for the church van to take her home. Gay men and lesbians do not make her uncomfortable, Ms. Jinks said. They have always been in black churches, under something of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. But she seems to have tired of Mr. Meredith’s mention of them. She hears from acquaintances that she goes to the “gay church.”

“I don’t think you need to be speaking about it from the pulpit all the time,” said Ms. Jinks, who is in her early 80s. “I joined this church; I support this church. I didn’t join a minister. I’m planning on staying here and will not let people run me away.”

One of the junior pastors is the Rev. Chris Brown, who grew up in a black Pentecostal church in Montgomery, Ala.

“My pastor in Alabama said gays had three rights: to redeem themselves, to repent or to die of AIDS,” said Mr. Brown, 32.

He added, “The African-American church thinks AIDS is a gay disease, and that everyone who got it deserved to.”

DeMarcus Hill, 32, said he admired Mr. Meredith’s “ability to embrace those people who everyone had rejected.” Mr. Hill once attended and worked at Tabernacle Baptist, and he is still friends with the Meredith family. But after reading the Bible closely, Mr. Hill, who is studying to be ordained as a Baptist minister, said he could not stay at Tabernacle because sex outside heterosexual marriage was not countenanced.

Mr. Hill said he agreed with Mr. Meredith that God loves everyone, including gay men and lesbians. “But God corrects you because he loves you,” he said, explaining that for gay Christians, such a correction would probably mean lifelong celibacy or eventually being with someone of the opposite sex.

    For Some Black Pastors, Accepting Gay Members Means Losing Others, NYT, 27.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/us/27churches.html

'Song of the South' release mulled despite possible controversy

AP
USA Today

ORLANDO (AP) — Walt Disney Co.'s 1946 film Song of the South was historic. It was Disney's first big live-action picture and produced one of the company's most famous songs — the Oscar-winning "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah." It also carries the story line of the Splash Mountain rides at its theme parks.

But the movie remains hidden in the Disney archives — never released on video in the United States and criticized as racist for its depiction of Southern plantation blacks. The film's 60th anniversary passed last year without a whisper of official rerelease, which is unusual for Disney, but President and CEO Bob Iger recently said the company was reconsidering.

The film's reissue would surely spark debate, but it could also sell big. Nearly 115,000 people have signed an online petition urging Disney to make the movie available, and out-of-print international copies routinely sell online for $50-$90, some even more than $100.

Iger was answering a shareholder's inquiry about the movie for the second year in a row at Disney's annual meeting in New Orleans. This month the Disney chief made a rerelease sound more possible.

"The question of Song of the South comes up periodically, in fact it was raised at last year's annual meeting ..." Iger said. "And since that time, we've decided to take a look at it again because we've had numerous requests about bringing it out. Our concern was that a film that was made so many decades ago being brought out today perhaps could be either misinterpreted or that it would be somewhat challenging in terms of providing the appropriate context."

Song of the South was re-shown in theaters in 1956, 1972 and 1986. Both animated and live-action, it tells the story of a young white boy, Johnny, who goes to live on his grandparents' Georgia plantation when his parents split up. Johnny is charmed by Uncle Remus — a popular black servant — and his fables of Brer Rabbit, Brer Bear and Brer Fox, which are actual black folk tales.

Remus' stories include the famous "tar baby," a phrase Republican presidential hopefuls John McCain and Mitt Romney were recently criticized for using to describe difficult situations. In Song of the South, it was a trick Brer Fox and Brer Bear used to catch the rabbit — dressing a lump of hot tar as a person to ensnare their prey. To some, it is now a derogatory term for blacks, regardless of context.

The movie doesn't reveal whether it takes place before or after the Civil War, and never refers to blacks on the plantation as slaves. It makes clear they work for the family, living down dirt roads in wood shacks while the white characters stay in a mansion. Remus and other black characters' dialogue is full of "ain't nevers," "ain't nobodys," "you tells," and "dem days's."

"In today's environment, Song of the South probably doesn't have a lot of meaning, especially to the younger audiences," said James Pappas, associate professor of African-American Studies at the University of New York at Buffalo. "Older audiences probably would have more of a connection with the stereotypes, which were considered harmless at the time."

Pappas said it's not clear that the movie is intentionally racist, but it inappropriately projects Remus as a happy, laughing storyteller even though he's a plantation worker.

Gone with the Wind, produced seven years earlier, endured the same criticism and even shares a common actress (Hattie McDaniel, who won an Oscar for "Gone" for playing the house slave "Mammy").

However, Pappas said he thinks the movie should be re-released because of its historical significance. He said it should be prefaced, and closed, with present-day statements.

"I think it's important that these images are shown today so that especially young people can understand this historical context for some of the blatant stereotyping that's done today," Pappas said.

From a financial standpoint, Iger acknowledged last year that Disney stood to gain from rereleasing Song. The company's movies are popular with collectors, and Disney has kept sales strong by tightly controlling when they're available.

Christian Willis, a 26-year-old IT administrator in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., started a Song fan site in 1999 to showcase memorabilia. He soon expanded it into a clearinghouse for information on the movie that now averages more than 800 hits a day and manages the online petition.

Willis said he doesn't think the movie is racist, just from a different time.

"Stereotypes did exist on the screen," he said. "But if you look at other films of that time period, I think Song of the South was really quite tame in that regard. I think Disney did make an effort to show African Americans in a more positive light."

Though Willis is hopeful, there's still no telling when — or if — the movie could come out (beyond its copyright lapsing decades from now).

For this story, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Disney's distribution arm, issued a statement: "Song of the South is one of a handful of titles that has not seen a home distribution window. To this point, we have not discounted nor committed to any distribution window concerning this title."

    'Song of the South' release mulled despite possible controversy, UT, 25.3.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2007-03-25-songofthesouth_N.htm

In New Jersey, Old Slave Quarters vs. New Homes

March 25, 2007
The New York Times
By J. COURTNEY SULLIVAN

SOUTH BRUNSWICK, N.J. — By the New Jersey Turnpike, where the state’s rural past runs into mammoth warehouses, a tug of war is taking place over the fate of a farmhouse built in 1713 with its cramped slave quarters over the kitchen still intact and a where a Revolutionary-era spinning wheel and a bill of sale for a young black girl were unearthed in the basement.

For the past two years, residents here have been trying to save one of the state’s last historic farmhouses and its trove of artifacts while opening a window even more on New Jersey’s Southern sympathies before and even during the Civil War.

“There’s nothing in any museum that recognizes slavery in New Jersey. That’s why this farm is so important,” said Elaine Livingston, a horse farmer here and a member of the Eastern Villages Association, a group fighting for the farm’s survival.

A retired shop teacher here and another member of Eastern Villages, Bill Klimowicz, drives a couple of miles down Davidson Mill Road to the Van Dyke farm once a month and plants a fresh American flag by each of the two cemeteries at the property’s edge. He can still remember the day in 1960 when he first went there after an elderly neighbor told him a Revolutionary War soldier and his family were buried there.

“I told all my friends,” he recalled. “We would ride our bikes over after school sometimes and just stare at the soldier’s tombstone. We were mesmerized.”

But it was while he and the association members were trying to hold back development — first a warehouse complex and now a swath of new houses — that they learned the gravestone might represent only a small part of the land’s historical significance.

The 229-acre property, bordered on the east by the turnpike, was deeded to the Van Dykes, a Dutch family, in the 1690s. Behind the farmhouse sits an original carriage house, a 19th-century barn and a slave burial site.

The current owner is a man named William Pulda, who bought the property in 1950s from the Van Dyke family. A caretaker family has lived on the farm for nearly 35 years, and local farmers lease the fields, where they grow soybeans and corn.

Two years ago, Mr. Pulda agreed to sell the land to a developer, Joseph Morris. Their contract gave all legal rights to the property to Mr. Morris, who immediately announced a plan to demolish the existing buildings and put up the warehouse complex.

But in February 2005, Mr. Morris unsuccessfully appealed to the town planning board to allow him to rezone the property, and now he says he intends to build a 76-unit housing development instead.

The Van Dyke farm is a rare remnant of a time when New Jersey was a major agricultural center, largely because of the thousands of slaves who cleared forests, started farms and worked the land.

In 1800, there were 12,000 to 14,000 slaves in the state, which might account for why New Jersey and New York were the only Northern states that did not move to end slavery during the Revolutionary War.

A local historian, James Shackleford, says that when he was researching slavery in South Brunswick he found documents in the archives at Rutgers University about a young slave named Amy and other slaves who lived on the Van Dyke farm.

He said the documents also showed Amy gave birth about every two years, with the slave owner apparently aiming to add slaves to his household. The importation of African slaves was banned in the 1780s.

The slave quarters in the farmhouse — where Mr. Shackleford estimates 10 to 12 people lived — consisted of two bare, wooden rooms, each about the size of a walk-in closet, with the original tiny windows and doors still intact, as well as a trap door leading to the kitchen.

“When I first saw them, I was dumbfounded,” Mr. Shackleford said of the quarters. “I looked at those walls, those doors, the starkness, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is the real thing.’ ”

For now, the association is clinging to the hope that someone will buy the farm and preserve it. Last year, Preservation New Jersey, a private, membership-supported group, put the farm on its list of the state’s 10 most endangered historical sites. Several state and local agencies have looked into the prospect of saving the property, but so far none of them have made an offer.

Last May, Mr. Morris, the developer, met with township officials and representatives from the state’s Green Acres Program, which provides financing for open space, farmland, and historic preservation. At their urging, Mr. Morris filed an application for preservation, which stated that for the right price — he was asking about $25 million — he might sell the land to the state.

“The state agreed to appraise the land and then give us a figure,” said Frank Petrino, an attorney for Mr. Morris. “If the figure made sense, Mr. Morris was willing to continue the process.”

But the state never completed the appraisal, according to Ralph Albinir, director of the Middlesex County Parks and Recreation Department, because state and local officials could not decide who should conduct it.

By the time the county was ready to move forward about six months later, Mr. Albinir said, Mr. Morris withdrew his application.

“He is a good businessman — he’s always willing to listen to an attractive offer,” Mr. Petrino said of his client, Mr. Morris. “But it’s my impression that there’s not a lot of money at the state level for land acquisition.”

But a spokesman from the Green Acres Program says the Garden State Preservation Trust has $86.8 million in its Green Acres Fund and an additional $84.6 million designated for farmland preservation.

“Everyone just seems to be standing back and waiting for someone else to make the first move,” Mr. Klimowicz said.

“I don’t understand it — plenty of places in the area have been bought for preservation, and certainly none of them had this many qualifications,” he said.

In the early 1980s, developers started buying up property on the east side of the turnpike between exits 9 and 8A, slowly at first, and recently with more zeal.

Farms have begun to disappear as the warehouses have crept closer and closer to the turnpike, which itself was expanded to 10 lanes from six along the stretch there in 1990.

“There used to be so many beautiful farms on the other side of Davidson Mill Road,” said Jean Dvorak, a high school English teacher who has been fighting to save historical and natural resources in the area for 20 years. “Sometimes when I drive along it now I just cringe. The Van Dyke farm is the proverbial line in the sand, and the state and local government must make sure that no one crosses it. Otherwise, a valuable piece of our history will be lost forever.”

    In New Jersey, Old Slave Quarters vs. New Homes, NYT, 25.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/nyregion/25slave.html

Texas district built by freed slaves fades away

Fri Mar 23, 2007 11:15AM EDT
Reuters
By Jeff Franks

HOUSTON (Reuters) - One of the last surviving communities built by freed slaves after the U.S. Civil War is on the verge of disappearing, despite long efforts to save it.

The old buildings of Freedmen's Town in Houston are being bulldozed to make way for new homes in a transformation that preservationists say is wiping out an important piece of history.

The U.S. South was once scattered with such communities, but most have faded away or been swallowed up by suburban growth.

The loss of Freedmen's Town is particularly significant because historians believe it was the largest of the freed slave settlements that was still intact architecturally and to some degree culturally.

Its long rows of narrow wooden houses, interspersed every block or two by churches, stood as a monument to the will of its founders to thrive despite bitter racism that forced them into isolation.

Freedmen's Town was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985, with more than 530 buildings in a 40-block area in the shadow of downtown Houston.

Today, only about 30 of those buildings remain and their fate is uncertain.

A few groups are scrambling to save what is left because they say it is important that society not forget the dark era in U.S. history that produced the freed slave settlements.

NEVER AGAIN

"People need to know that even though slavery ended, there was still a long time of disenfranchisement. Just like the Holocaust museums, this can remind us of what should never happen again," said Catherine Roberts, founder of the Rutherford B.H. Yates Museum, one of the remaining homes preserved in the neighborhood.

At the Civil War's end in 1865, southern blacks were freed from slavery, but not racism.

Driven away from white society by violence and persecution, they banded together to form their own towns and neighborhoods, some in remote rural locations, others at the edge of cities.

They had little money and no help from the government, but built flourishing communities apart from the white world that excluded them with segregationist "Jim Crow" laws.

"They had their own communities, they had their own schools and their own churches. At the time of segregation, it was really a parallel world," said historian Thad Sitton, author along with James H. Conrad of a University of Texas Press book called "Freedom Colonies: Independent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow."

Freedmen's Town was built on swampland along the banks of Buffalo Bayou and soon became a vibrant place with tradesmen, teachers, businessmen, and shopkeepers.

At turn of the century, it hit full stride, said archaeologist Fred McGhee, who has studied the area for the local school district.

"That's when it was one of the most shining, glaring, beautiful black neighborhoods in the country. There were black businesses, shops, churches, civic organizations -- which was a remarkable thing given that at the time the city essentially ignored it," he said.

HARSH BLOW

The Depression dealt a harsh blow to Freedmen's Town, and from then on it declined economically, becoming steadily poorer and less stable.

Politicians, with support from developers who coveted the prime location, began promoting the idea of urban renewal for the neighborhood in the 1970s.

Black leaders resisted for years, insisting that Freedmen's Town be preserved, but by the 1990s political and economic pressure to redevelop had won out.

What began as a trickle of change in the old quarter has become a flood the past few years.

Developers such as Bob Perry, better known nationally as the chief funder of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacks against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign, have torn wide swaths through the old housing stock and replaced it with condos and townhouses.

As the number of new homes has increased, Freedmen's Town, once all black, has become more affluent and racially mixed.

The pattern, said Sitton, is a familiar one for the old black communities.

"Those that were located around cities have generally been absorbed," he said. "They're so-called 'gentrified' and lose their identity, and taxes go up and people move away," he said.

"There's remorse and recognition we're losing something important, but the economics of it is that nobody can afford to be nostalgic."

Even though Freedmen's Town was on the National Register of Historic Places, weak local preservation statutes allowed the wholesale demolition of the old homes.

But in the end, said Lenwood Johnson, who grew up in Freedmen's Town and led a long fight to protect it, one thing did in his old neighborhood -- money.

The desire to make a buck by putting up new homes trumped the interest in preserving history.

"The people with money wanted it and got it. This system is so controlled by corporate dollars," Johnson said.

"Now a people's history and culture is being destroyed. If you destroy their culture, you eventually destroy the people."

    Texas district built by freed slaves fades away, R, 23.3.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1646529120070323

Blacks suffer most in U.S. foreclosure surge

Tue Mar 20, 2007 10:41AM EDT
Reuters
By Jason Szep

BOSTON (Reuters) - Barbara Anderson and her husband know racism. Among the first blacks to move into an Ohio neighborhood 25 years ago, she watched in horror as white neighbors burned her garage nearly to the ground.

Fast-forward to 2007 and Anderson talks of a different sort of discrimination: brokers of subprime mortgages who prey on borrowers with weak credit histories like the Andersons, who raised eight children in Cleveland's Slavic Village district.

"These subprime lenders target you to take you through disaster," said Anderson, 59, who filed for bankruptcy after a legal tussle with a subprime lender, a "nightmare" that she said ended four years ago when her home was nearly foreclosed.

"I was fortunate. I went to another bank that decided to give me a chance with a new loan. The day that happened my headache stopped, my blood pressure lowered, my sick stomach went away, and it was because now I could see some daylight."

Across the United States, blacks and Hispanics are more likely to get a high-cost, subprime mortgage when buying a home than whites, a major factor in a wave of foreclosures in poor, often black neighborhoods nationwide as a housing slowdown puts millions of "subprime" borrowers at risk of default.

Even more troubling, real-estate industry analysts say, is an alarming proportion of blacks and Hispanics who received subprime loans by predatory lenders even when their credit picture was good enough to deserve a cheaper loan.

In six major U.S. cities, black borrowers were 3.8 times more likely than whites to receive a higher-cost home loan, and Hispanic borrowers were 3.6 times more likely, according to a study released this month by a group of fair housing agencies.

"Blacks and Latinos have lower incomes and less wealth, less steady employment and lower credit ratings, so a completely neutral and fair credit-rating system would still give a higher percentage of subprime loans to minorities," said Jim Campen, a University of Massachusetts economist who contributed to the study.

"But the problem is exacerbated by a financial system which isn't fair," he said.

In greater Boston, 71 percent of blacks earning above $153,000 in 2005 took out mortgages with high interest rates, compared to just 9.4 percent of whites, while about 70 percent of black and Hispanic borrowers with incomes between $92,000 and $152,000 received high-interest rate home loans, compared to 17 percent for whites, according to his research.

"It's a huge disparity," he said. High-cost mortgages usually have interest rates at least 3 percentage points above conventional mortgages.

PREDATORY LENDERS

Predatory lenders moved aggressively into the subprime mortgage market as a housing price boom between 2000 and 2005 cut the risk of lending to people with damaged credit ratings.

Many focused on minority neighborhoods in slick sales pitches that offered the American dream: home ownership with no money down and little worry about poor credit.

"The predatory lenders reach out to those who don't really know, people with a lack of education," said Cassandra Hedges, a black 37-year-old mother of two fighting to stave off foreclosure of the Ohio home she bought three years ago.

"One of the first things my broker asked me was 'How do you know you are ready to buy a house. Have you done any research?' We said 'No'. At that point I think he realized 'Okay I got some people that don't know what the heck they are doing'."

She and her husband Andre now face a 10.75 percent interest rate on an adjustable-rate mortgage and monthly payments of $1,600 -- more than double the $650 she told her broker she could afford. Foreclosure looms after she missed a payment.

"If you're white they overlook the fact that your credit score is a little too low or you have one extra late payment," said Barbara Rice, a community organizer at the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group.

Rice, who is white, and a colleague who is black took part in an experiment in Massachusetts last year to test the racial bias of mortgage brokers. They both posed as prospective home buyers in a separate meetings with several brokers.

Rice presented a worse credit rating and lower income than her black colleague to brokers but received better treatment.

"I was given more information," she said.

Many traditional banks do not run branches in poor minority neighborhoods, creating a vacuum often filled by predatory lenders and unscrupulous brokers, said Stephen Ross, a University of Connecticut economist who studies lending.

When the property market was strong, those brokers could tell borrowers that rising prices meant they could easily remortgage their properties to keep up with payments. But since the market peaked in 2005, millions are struggling to repay those loans. This year, some 1.5 million homeowners will face foreclosure, research firm RealtyTrac estimates.

The U.S. Mortgage Bankers Association said disparities by race alone in home loans do not prove unlawful discrimination but may indicate a need for closer scrutiny.

    Blacks suffer most in U.S. foreclosure surge, R, 20.3.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1931892620070320

Between Black and Immigrant Muslims, an Uneasy Alliance

March 11, 2007
The New York Times
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

Under the glistening dome of a mosque on Long Island, hundreds of men sat cross-legged on the floor. Many were doctors and engineers born in Pakistan and India. Dressed in khakis, polo shirts and the odd silk tunic, they fidgeted and whispered.

One thing stood between them and dinner: A visitor from Harlem was coming to ask for money.

A towering black man with a gray-flecked beard finally swept into the room, his bodyguard trailing him. Wearing a long, embroidered robe and matching hat, he took the microphone and began talking about a different group of Muslims, the thousands of African-Americans who have found Islam in prison.

“We are all brothers and sisters,” said the visitor, known as Imam Talib.

The men stared. To some of them, it seemed, he was from another planet. As the imam returned their gaze, he had a similar sensation. “They live in another world,” he later said.

Only 28 miles separate Imam Talib’s mosque in Harlem from the Islamic Center of Long Island. The congregations they each serve — African-Americans at the city mosque and immigrants of South Asian and Arab descent in the suburbs — represent the largest Muslim populations in the United States. Yet a vast gulf divides them, one marked by race and class, culture and history.

For many African-American converts, Islam is an experience both spiritual and political, an expression of empowerment in a country they feel is dominated by a white elite. For many immigrant Muslims, Islam is an inherited identity, and America a place of assimilation and prosperity.

For decades, these two Muslim worlds remained largely separate. But last fall, Imam Talib hoped to cross that distance in a venture that has become increasingly common since Sept. 11. Black Muslims have begun advising immigrants on how to mount a civil rights campaign. Foreign-born Muslims are giving African-Americans roles of leadership in some of their largest organizations. The two groups have joined forces politically, forming coalitions and backing the same candidates.

It is a tentative and uneasy union, seen more typically among leaders at the pulpit than along the prayer line. But it is critical, a growing number of Muslims believe, to surviving a hostile new era.

“Muslims will not be successful in America until there is a marriage between the indigenous and immigrant communities,” said Siraj Wahhaj, an African-American imam in New York with a rare national following among immigrant Muslims. “There has to be a marriage.”

The divide between black and immigrant Muslims reflects a unique struggle facing Islam in America. Perhaps nowhere else in the world are Muslims from so many racial, cultural and theological backgrounds trying their hands at coexistence. Only in Mecca, during the obligatory hajj, or pilgrimage, does such diversity in the faith come to life, between black and white, rich and poor, Sunni and Shiite.

“This is a new experiment in the history of Islam,” said Ali S. Asani, a professor of Islamic studies at Harvard University.

That evening in October, Imam Al-Hajj Talib ‘Abdur-Rashid drove to Westbury, on Long Island, with a task he would have found unthinkable years ago.

He would ask for donations from the immigrant community he refers to, somewhat bitterly, as the “Muslim elite.”

But he needed funds, and the doors of immigrant mosques seemed to be opening. Imam Talib and other African-American leaders had formed a national “indigenous Muslim” organization, and he knew that during the holy month of Ramadan, the Islamic Center of Long Island could raise thousands of dollars in an evening.

It is a place where BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes fill the parking lot, and Coach purses are perched along prayer lines.

In Harlem, many of Imam Talib’s congregants get to the mosque by bus or subway, and warm themselves with space heaters in a drafty, brick building.

Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Imam Talib had only a distant connection to the Islamic Center of Long Island. In passing, he had met Faroque Khan, an Indian-born doctor who helped found the mosque, but the two had little in common.

Imam Talib, 56, is a thundering prison chaplain whose mosque traces its roots to Malcolm X. He is a first-generation Muslim.

Dr. Khan, 64, is a mild-mannered pulmonologist who collects Chinese antiques and learned to ski on the slopes of Vermont. He is a first-generation American.

But in the turmoil that followed Sept. 11, the imam and the doctor found themselves unexpectedly allied.

“The more separate we stay, the more targeted we become,” Dr. Khan said.

Each man recognizes what the other has to offer. African-Americans possess a cultural and historical fluency that immigrants lack, said Dr. Khan; they hold an unassailable place in America from which to defend their faith.

For Imam Talib, immigrants provide a crucial link to the Muslim world and its tradition of scholarship, as well as the wisdom that comes with an “unshattered Islamic heritage.”

Both groups have their practical virtues, too. African-Americans know better how to mobilize in America, both men say, and immigrants tend to have deeper pockets.

Still, it is one thing to talk about unity, Imam Talib said, and another to give it life. Before his visit to Long Island last fall, he had never asked Dr. Khan and his mosque to match their rhetoric with money.

“You have to have a litmus test,” he said.

One Faith, Many Histories

Imam Talib and Dr. Khan did not warm to each other when they met in May 2000, at a gathering in Chicago of Muslim leaders.

The imam found the silver-haired doctor faintly smug and paternalistic. It was an attitude he had often whiffed from well-to-do immigrant Muslims. Dr. Khan found Imam Talib straightforward to the point of bluntness.

The uneasy introduction was, for both men, emblematic of the strained relationship between their communities.

Imam Talib and other black Muslims trace their American roots to the arrival of Muslims from West Africa as slaves in the South. That historical link gave rise to Islam-inspired movements in the 20th century, the most significant of which was the Nation of Islam.

The man who founded the Nation in 1930, W. D. Fard, spread the message that American blacks belonged to a lost Muslim tribe and were superior to the “white, blue-eyed devils” in their midst. Under Mr. Fard’s successor, Elijah Muhammad, the Nation flourished in the 1960s amid the civil rights struggle and the emergence of a black-separatist movement.

Overseas, Islamic scholars found the group’s teachings on race antithetical to the faith. The schism narrowed after 1975, when Mr. Muhammad’s son Warith Deen Mohammed took over the Nation, bringing it in line with orthodox Sunni Islam. Louis Farrakhan parted ways with Mr. Mohammed — taking the Nation’s name and traditional teachings with him — but the majority of African-American adherents came to embrace the same Sunni practice that dominates the Muslim world.

Still, divisions between African-American and immigrant Muslims remained pronounced long after the first large waves of South Asians and Arabs arrived in the United States in the 1960s.

Today, of the estimated six million Muslims who live in the United States, about 25 percent are African-American, 34 percent are South Asian and 26 percent are Arab, said John Zogby, a pollster who has studied the American Muslim population.

“Given the extreme from which we came, I would say that the immigrant Muslims have been brotherly toward us,” Warith Deen Mohammed, who has the largest following of African-American Muslims, said in an interview. “But I think they’re more skeptical than they admit they are. I think they feel more comfortable with their own than they feel with us.”

For many African-Americans, conversion to Islam has meant parting with mainstream culture, while Muslim immigrants have tended toward assimilation. Black converts often take Arabic names, only to find foreign-born Muslims introducing themselves as “Moe” instead of “Mohammed.”

The tensions are also economic. Like Dr. Khan, many Muslim immigrants came to the United States with advanced degrees and quickly prospered, settling in the suburbs. For decades, African-Americans watched with frustration as immigrants sent donations to causes overseas, largely ignoring the problems of poor Muslims in the United States.

Imam Talib found it impossible to generate interest at immigrant mosques in the 1999 police shooting of Amadou Diallo, who was Muslim. “What we’ve found is when domestic issues jump up, like police brutality, all the sudden we’re by ourselves,” he said.

Some foreign-born Muslims say they are put off by the racial politics of many black converts. They struggle to understand why African-American Muslims have been reluctant to meet with law enforcement officials in the wake of Sept. 11. For their part, black Muslim leaders complain that immigrants have failed to learn their history, which includes a pattern of F.B.I. surveillance dating back to the roots of the Nation of Islam.

The ironies are, at times, stinging.

“From the immigrant community, I hear that African-Americans have to learn how to work in the system,” said Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, adding that this was not his personal opinion.

At the heart of the conflict is a question of leadership. Much to the ire of African-Americans, many immigrants see themselves as the rightful leaders of the faith in America by virtue of their Islamic schooling and fluency in Arabic, the original language of the Koran.

“What does knowing Arabic have to do with the quality of your prayer, your fast, your relationship with God?” asked Ihsan Bagby, an associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. “But African-Americans have to ask themselves why have they not learned more in these years.”

Every year in Chicago, the two largest Muslim conventions in the country — one sponsored by an immigrant organization and the other by Mr. Mohammed’s — take place on the same weekend, in separate parts of the city.

The long-simmering tension boiled over into a public rift with the 2000 presidential elections. That year, a powerful coalition of immigrant Muslims endorsed George W. Bush (because of a promise to stop the profiling of Arabs).

The nation’s most prominent African-American Muslims complained that they were never consulted. The following summer, when Imam Talib vented his frustration at a meeting with immigrant leaders in Washington, a South Asian man turned to him, he recalled, and said, “I don’t understand why all of you African-American Muslims are always so angry about everything.”

Imam Talib searched for an answer he thought the man could understand.

“African-Americans are like the Palestinians of this land,” he finally said. “We’re not just some angry black people. We’re legitimately outraged and angry.”

The room fell silent.

Soon after, black leaders announced the creation of the Muslim Alliance in North America, their first national “indigenous” organization.

But the fallout over the elections was soon eclipsed by Sept. 11, when Muslim immigrants found themselves under intense public scrutiny. They began complaining about “profiling” and “flying while brown,” appropriating language that had been largely the domain of African-Americans.

It was around this time that Dr. Khan became, as he put it, enlightened. A few weeks before the terrorist attacks, he read the book “Black Rage,” by William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs. The book, published in 1968, explores the psychological woes of African-Americans, and how the impact of racism is carried through generations.

“It helped me understand that even before you’re born, things that happened a hundred years ago can affect you,” Dr. Khan said. “That was a big change in my thinking.”

He sent an e-mail message to fellow Muslims, including Imam Talib, sharing what he had learned.

The Harlem imam was pleased, if not yet convinced.

“I just encouraged the brother to keep going,” Imam Talib said.

An Oasis in Harlem

One windswept night in Harlem, cars rolled past the corner of West 113th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. A police siren blared as men huddled by a neon-lit Laundromat.

Across the street stood a brown brick building, lifeless from the outside. But upstairs, in a cozy carpeted room, rows of men and women chanted.

“Ya Hakim. Ya Allah.” O wise one. O God.

Imam Talib led the chant, swathed in a black satin robe. It was Ramadan’s holiest evening, the Night of Power. As the voices died down, he spotted his bodyguard swaying.

“Take it easy there, Captain,” Imam Talib said. “As long as you don’t jump and shout it’s all right.”

Laughter trickled through the mosque, where a translucent curtain separated men in skullcaps from women in African-print gowns.

“We’re just trying to be ourselves, you know?” Imam Talib said. “Within the tradition.”

“That’s right,” said one woman.

The imam continued: “And we can’t let other people, from other cultures, come and try to make us clones of them. We came here as Muslims.”

He was feeling drained. He had just returned from the Manhattan Detention Complex, where he works as a chaplain. Some of the mosque’s men were back in jail.

“We need power,” he said quietly. “Without that, we’ll destroy ourselves.”

Since its birth in 1964, the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood has been a fortress of stubborn faith, persevering through the crack wars, welfare, AIDS, gangs, unemployment, diabetes, broken families and gentrification.

The mosque was founded in a Brooklyn apartment by Shaykh-‘Allama Al-Hajj K. Ahmad Tawfiq, a follower of Malcolm X. The Sunni congregation boomed in the 1970s, starting a newspaper and opening a school and a health food store.

With city loans, it bought its current building. Fourteen families moved in, creating a bold Muslim oasis in a landscape of storefront churches and liquor stores. The mosque claimed its corner by drenching the sidewalk in dark green paint, the color associated with Islam.

The paint has since faded. The school is closed. Many of the mosque’s members can no longer afford to live in a neighborhood where brownstones sell for millions of dollars.

But an aura of dignity prevails. The women normally pray one floor below the men, in a scrubbed, tidy room scented with incense. Their bathroom is a shrine of gold curtains and lavender soaps. A basket of nylon roses hides a hole in the wall.

Most of the mosque’s 160 members belong to the working class, and up to a third of the men are former convicts.

Some congregants are entrepreneurs, professors, writers and musicians. Mos Def and Q-Tip have visited with Imam Talib, who carries the nickname “hip-hop imam.”

Mosque celebrations are a blend of Islam and Harlem. In October, at the end of Ramadan, families feasted on curried chicken and collard greens, grilled fish and candied yams.

Just before the afternoon prayer, a lean man in a black turtleneck rose to give the call. He was Yusef Salaam, whose conviction in the Central Park jogger case was later overturned.

Many of the mosque’s members embraced Islam in search of black empowerment, not black separatism. They describe racial equality as a central tenet of their faith. Yet for some, the promise of Islam has been at odds with the reality of Muslims.

One member, Aqilah Mu’Min, lives in the Parkchester section of the Bronx, a heavily Bangladeshi neighborhood. Whenever she passes women in head scarves, she offers the requisite Muslim greeting. Rarely is it returned. “We have a theory that says Islam is perfect, human beings are not,” said Ms. Mu’Min, a city fraud investigator.

It was the simplicity of Islam that drew Imam Talib.

Raised a Christian, he spent the first part of his youth in segregated North Carolina. As a teenager, he read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” twice. He began educating himself about the faith at age 19, when as an aspiring actor he was cast in a play about a man who had left the Nation of Islam.

But his conversion was more spiritual than political, he said.

“I’d like to think that even if I was a white man, I’d still be a Muslim because that’s the orientation of my soul,” the imam said.

He has learned some Arabic, and traveled once to the Middle East, for hajj. Yet he feels more comfortable with the Senegalese and Guinean Muslims who have settled in Harlem than with many Arabs and South Asians.

He is trying to reach out, but is often disappointed.

In November, he accepted a last-minute invitation to meet with hundreds of immigrants at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, an opulent mosque on East 96th Street.

The group, the Coalition for Muslim School Holidays, was trying to persuade the city to recognize two Muslim holidays on the school calendar. The effort, Imam Talib learned, had been nearly a year in the making, and no African-American leaders had been consulted.

He was stunned. After all, he had led a similar campaign in the 1980s, resulting in the suspension of alternate-side parking for the same holidays.

“They are unaware of the foundations upon which they are standing,” he said.

Backlash in the Suburbs

Brush Hollow Road winds through a quiet stretch of Long Island, past churches and diners and leafy cul-de-sacs. In this tranquil tableau, the Islamic Center of Long Island announces itself proudly, a Moorish structure of white concrete topped by a graceful dome.

Sleek sedans and S.U.V.’s circle the property as girls with Barbie backpacks hop out and scurry to the Islamic classes they call “Sunday school.”

It is a testament to America’s influence on the mosque that its liveliest time of the week is not Friday, Islam’s holy day, but Sunday.

Boys in hooded sweatshirts smack basketballs along the pavement by a sign that reads “No pray, no play.” Young mothers in Burberry coats exchange kisses and chatter.

For members of the mosque — many of whom work in Manhattan and cannot make the Friday prayer — Sunday is the day to reflect and connect.

The treasurer, Rizwan Qureshi, frantically greeted drivers one Sunday morning with a flier advertising a fund-raiser.

“We’re trying to get Barack Obama,” Mr. Qureshi, a banker born in Karachi, told a woman in a gold-hued BMW.

“We need some real money,” he called out to another driver.

The mosque began with a group of doctors, engineers and other professionals from Pakistan and India who settled in Nassau County in the early 1970s.

“Our kids would come home from school and say, ‘Where is my Christmas tree, my Hanukkah lights?’ ” recalled Dr. Khan, who lives in nearby Jericho. “We didn’t want them to grow up unsure of who they are.”

Since opening in 1993, the mosque has thrived, with assets now valued at more than $3 million. Hundreds of people pray there weekly, and thousands come on Muslim holidays.

The mosque has an unusually modern, democratic air. Men and women worship with no partition between them. A different scholar delivers the Friday sermon every week, in English.

Perhaps most striking, a majority of female worshipers do not cover their heads outside the mosque.

“I think it’s important to find the fine line between the religion and the age in which we live,” said Nasreen Wasti, 43, a contract analyst for Lufthansa. “I’m sure I will have to answer to God for not covering myself. But I’m also satisfied by many of the good deeds I am doing.”

She and other members use words like “progressive” to describe their congregation. But after Sept. 11, a different image took hold.

In October 2001, a Newsday article quoted a member of the mosque as asking “who really benefits from such a horrible tragedy that is blamed on Muslims and Arabs?” A co-president of the mosque was also quoted saying that Israel “would benefit from this tragedy.”

Conspiracy theories about Sept. 11 have long circulated among Muslims, and Dr. Khan had heard discussion among congregants. Such talk, he said, was the product of two forces: a deep mistrust of America’s motives in the Middle East and a refusal, among many Muslims, to engage in self-criticism.

“You blame the other guy for your own shortcomings,” said Dr. Khan.

He visited synagogues and churches after the article ran, reassuring audiences that the comments did not reflect the official position of the mosque, which condemned the attacks.

But to Congressman Peter T. King, whose district is near the mosque, that condemnation fell short. He began publicly criticizing Dr. Khan, asserting that he had failed to fully denounce the statements made by the men.

“He’s definitely a radical,” Mr. King said of Dr. Khan in an interview. “You cannot, in the context of Sept. 11, allow those statements to be made and not be a radical.”

When asked about Mr. King’s comments, Dr. Khan replied proudly, “I thought we had freedom of speech.”

It hardly seems possible that Mr. King and Dr. Khan were once friends.

Mr. King used to dine at Dr. Khan’s home. He attended the wedding of Dr. Khan’s son, Arif, in 1995. At the mosque’s opening, it was Mr. King who cut the ribbon.

After Sept. 11, the mosque experienced the sort of social backlash felt by Muslims around the country. Anonymous callers left threatening messages, and rocks were hurled at children from passing cars.

The attention waned over time. But Mr. King cast a new light on the mosque in 2004 with the release of his novel “Vale of Tears.”

In the novel, terrorists affiliated with a Long Island mosque demolish several buildings, killing hundreds of people. One of the central characters is a Pakistani heart surgeon whose friendship with a congressman has grown tense.

“By inference, it’s me,” Dr. Khan said of the Pakistani character. (Mr. King said it was a “composite character” based on several Muslims he knows.)

For Dr. Khan, his difficulties after Sept. 11 come as proof that Muslims cannot stay fragmented. “It’s a challenge for the whole Muslim community — not just for me,” he said. “United we stand, divided we fall.”

The Litmus Test

Imam Talib and his bodyguard set off to Westbury before dusk on Oct. 14. They passed a fork on the Long Island Expressway, and the imam peered out the window. None of the signs were familiar.

He checked his watch and saw that he was late, adding to his unease. He had visited the mosque a few times before, but never felt entirely at home.

“I’m conscious of being a guest,” he said. “They treat me kindly and nicely. But I know where I am.”

At the Islamic Center of Long Island, Dr. Khan was also getting nervous. Hundreds of congregants had gathered after fasting all day for Ramadan. The scent of curry drifted mercilessly through the mosque.

Dr. Khan sprang to his feet and took the microphone. He improvised.

“All of us need to learn from and understand the contributions of the Muslim indigenous community,” he said. “Starting with Malcolm X.”

It had been six years since Imam Talib and Dr. Khan first encountered each other in Chicago. Back then, Imam Talib rarely visited immigrant mosques, and Dr. Khan had only a peripheral connection to African-American Muslims.

In the 1980s, the doctor had become aware of the high number of Muslim inmates while working as the chief of medicine for a hospital in Nassau County that oversaw health care at the county prison. His mosque began donating prayer rugs, Korans and skullcaps to prisoners around the country. But his interaction with black Muslim leaders was limited until Sept. 11.

After Dr. Khan read the book “Black Rage,” he and Imam Talib began serving together on the board of a new political task force. Finally, in 2005, Dr. Khan invited the imam to his mosque to give the Friday sermon.

That February, Imam Talib rose before the Long Island congregation. Blending verses in the Koran with passages from recent American history, he urged the audience to learn from the civil rights movement.

Dr. Khan listened raptly. Afterward, over sandwiches, he asked Imam Talib for advice. He wanted to thaw the relationship between his mosque and African-American mosques on Long Island. The conversation continued for hours.

“The real searching for an answer, searching for a solution, was coming from Dr. Khan,” said Imam Talib. “I could just feel it.”

Dr. Khan began inviting more African-American leaders to speak at his mosque, and welcomed Imam Talib there last October to give a fund-raising pitch for his organization, the Muslim Alliance in North America. The group had recently announced a “domestic agenda,” with programs to help ex-convicts find housing and jobs and to standardize premarital counseling for Muslims in America.

After the imam arrived that evening and spoke, he sat on the floor next to a blazer-clad Dr. Khan. As they feasted on kebabs, the doctor made a pitch of his own: The teenagers of his mosque could spend a day at Imam Talib’s mosque, as the start of a youth exchange program. The imam nodded slowly.

Minutes later, the mosque’s president, Habeeb Ahmed, hurried over. The congregants had so far pledged $10,000.

“Alhamdulillah,” the imam said. Praise be to God.

It was the most Imam Talib had raised for his group in one evening.

As the dinner drew to a close, the imam looked for his bodyguard. They had a long drive home and he did not want to lose his way again.

Dr. Khan asked Imam Talib how he had gotten lost.

“Inner city versus the suburbs,” the imam replied a bit testily.

Then he smiled.

“The only thing it proves,” he said, “is that I need to come by here more often.”

    Between Black and Immigrant Muslims, an Uneasy Alliance, NYT, 11.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/nyregion/11muslim.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Black Ga. Lawmakers Urge Slavery Apology

March 8, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:01 p.m. ET
The New York Times

ATLANTA (AP) -- Black legislative leaders said Thursday they will propose that Georgia apologize for the state's role in slavery and segregation-era laws.

''It is time for Georgia, as one of the major stake-holders in slavery, as one of the major players in lynchings, to say it's sorry,'' said state Rep. Tyrone Brooks, a Democrat. ''Sorry for the fact that it was involved in slave trade, sorry for the fact that it was involved in Jim Crow laws.''

The measure comes on the heels of a Virginia resolution, passed unanimously in February, expressing regret over slavery.

''If the capital of the Confederate states can lead the way in issuing an apology, then surely all of the other states that maintained slavery can consider doing the same,'' Brooks said.

Lawmakers in Missouri are considering a similar proposal, and Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen introduced a resolution in Congress asking the federal government to apologize for slavery and Jim Crow-era discrimination.

Brooks said the Georgia measure will be unveiled in the next few days. Along with asking for apologies from the executive branch and legislative branches, it could ask an apology from Georgia's judges.

The proposal is unlikely to find a warm reception in Georgia's Republican-controlled Legislature.

House Speaker Glenn Richardson said it would be ''impossible for legislation offering an apology for slavery to move this session'' because it's too late in the 40-day session. But he also questioned the need for any type of official apology.

''I'm not sure what we ought to be apologizing for,'' the Republican said. ''Nobody here was in office.''

Senate Majority Leader Tommie Williams, also a Republican, had a similar reaction.

''People shouldn't be held responsible for the sins of their fathers,'' Williams said. ''I personally believe apologies need to come from feelings that I've done wrong. I just don't feel like I did something wrong.''

------

On the Net:

Georgia Legislature: http://www.legis.state.ga.us

NAACP: https://www.naacp.org

    Black Ga. Lawmakers Urge Slavery Apology, NYT, 8.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Slavery-Apology.html

End of Till case draws mixed response

Non daté > sans doute 4.3.2007
By Allen G. Breed, Associated Press
USA Today

Even as the U.S. Department of Justice was announcing a fresh look at unsolved civil rights-era killings around the South, a Mississippi Delta prosecutor was closing the books on perhaps the most notorious of those cold cases — the brutal 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till.

To some, the Leflore County grand jury's decision not to return an indictment in the case following an exhaustive three-year federal investigation was a sign that not much has changed in Mississippi in the last 52 years.

But others, including the prosecutor herself, felt it showed the opposite — a maturing of racial justice in this part of the South.

"It would have been very easy for that grand jury to have returned a true bill based solely on emotion and the rage they felt. And I commend them for not doing that," says Joyce Chiles, the black district attorney who directed the case in which the grand jury declined to charge 73-year-old Carolyn Bryant Donham — the object of Till's infamous wolf whistle.

If the grand jurors had acted on the basis of hate, not evidence, Chiles says, that would have been more like the Jim Crow justice of 1955.

"I didn't feel good toward her; I still don't feel good toward her," says Chiles, who grew up on a plantation not far from the spot where Till's bloated, ravaged body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. But as the prosecutor who laid out the file for the grand jury, she had to acknowledge that the evidence to indict was just not there.

"We are justice seekers and not head hunters," Chiles says. "And If I were to follow the law and the evidence as it was presented, I would have had to have returned a no bill."

Since 1989, officials in Mississippi and six other states had won convictions in nearly two dozen civil-rights era cases that most had considered stone cold. The decision in the Till case was revealed Tuesday, the same day U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez announced the reopening of about a dozen cold cases; he did not reveal which cases they are.

To many, Till was the "sacrificial lamb" of the civil rights movement. And so when federal officials reopened the case in 2004, his family and others had high hopes that someone would at last be made to pay for killing the boy whose defiled, river-ravaged face helped galvanize mass opposition to Southern segregation.

In August 1955, Till left Chicago to spend the summer with his great uncle Mose "Preacher" Wright in the cotton crossroads town of Money.

Late that month, "Bobo" and some other kids went to the Bryant Grocery & Meat Market, across the Money Road from the "colored" school, to buy candy and pink-iced "stage plank" cookies. Simeon Wright and his cousin had just stepped outside when Emmett let out that whistle.

Wright was sharing a bed with Emmett two nights later when a car pulled up outside the family's house. Half-brothers Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam appeared with flashlights and pistols, and announced they'd come to see "the boy who had done all the talking."

The men ordered Emmett to dress, then led him outside. Mose Wright would later testify that he heard a light voice from inside the vehicle, like that of a woman, say they had the right one.

Three days after Emmett's disappearance, his body was found in the Tallahatchie, a gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His left eye was missing, as were most of his teeth; his nose was crushed, and there was a hole in his right temple.

As many as 100,000 people filed past Till's open casket during a four-day public viewing in Chicago. A graphic photo of his mangled face in Jet magazine helped stoke the nation's outrage and fuel the civil rights movement.

In 1955, an all-white Tallahatchie County jury took just 67 minutes to acquit Bryant and Milam of killing the 14-year-old for having the audacity to whistle at a white woman. It wouldn't have taken that long, one juror quipped, if they "hadn't stopped to drink pop ..."

The details of Till's gruesome lynching and the farcical trial were still ringing in Rosa Parks' ears on Dec. 1, 1955, when she decided to defy Southern custom by refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus to a white passenger.

Even after Bryant and Milam confessed to the killing in a 1956 interview with Look magazine, the federal government failed to move. The two died without ever seeing the inside of a prison cell, and many thought that was the end.

But the case was reopened in 2004, due in large part to the efforts of New York filmmaker Keith Beauchamp.

Beauchamp had seen the Jet magazine photo when he was 10, and the image had haunted him. He used the money his parents had set aside for his education and began looking into the case.

The filmmaker compiled a list of at least 14 people — black and white — he felt had some role in the kidnapping, beating and slaying. He went to the authorities with the names of five people who were still alive, including the former Mrs. Bryant.

During the original trial, the defense cynically suggested that the body buried in Chicago was not even that of Till — that the NAACP had dumped a cadaver from a black hospital in the river and hidden Till away. To put those rumors to rest, federal officials exhumed the body in 2005 and confirmed it was Till's.

The FBI amassed an 8,000-page file during its investigation but determined that the statutes of limitations had run out on all possible federal crimes. The agency turned the file over to Chiles, with a recommendation that she take a close look at Donham.

Roy Bryant denied at the time that his wife came along on the abduction, and no one has come forward who claims to have actually seen her at the Wright home.

Last month, Chiles presented the case to grand jurors in Leflore County, where a grand jury back in 1956 failed to indict Bryant and Milam for kidnapping, despite their confessions. The new, racially-mixed grand jury was to consider a charge of manslaughter.

Simeon Wright was devastated by the panel's decision, but not really surprised.

"They came up with this 50 years ago," Wright, 64, says from his home in Chicago, the city to which his family fled after his father testified against Bryant and Milam. "Some of the people haven't changed from 50 years ago. Same attitude. The evidence speaks for itself."

Beauchamp was outraged.

"I strongly believe that we should have gotten an indictment in that case," he says. "I know a lot of the things that we came across, and I'm questioning now how the case went in the grand jury, what was presented."

But journalist and author Juan Williams is not persuaded. "You have a mostly black (grand) jury, a black prosecutor. I mean, I don't know what he wants," Williams says. "It's not as if this has been a whitewash by any means."

Williams, author of "Eyes on the Prize" and other works on the civil rights movement, agrees with Chiles that bringing a weak case against Donham would have been just another injustice.

"I think the two guilty parties are dead," says Williams, a senior correspondent with National Public Radio. "You can't go back and revise history to your liking because you now live in a more enlightened era. Clearly, if we had time travel available to us, we could go back and rectify the misdeeds of the past. But to try to do it in this way strikes me as vindictive, and I think that's apparently the judgment of the grand jury."

David Beito, a University of Alabama history professor who has done extensive research on the Till case, says Beauchamp raised "a lot of false expectations" for a broad prosecution in this case — perhaps to the detriment of other cold cases.

"I think that there are many unsolved cases that could have been opened and led to successful prosecutions," says Beito, who is working with his wife Joyce on a biography of civil rights leader and Till family protector T.R.M. Howard. "I wish I could say that the Till case was one of them. Unfortunately, all the uncritical coverage of Keith has tended to detract from those cases which are cold, and getting colder every day."

Williams sympathizes with Simeon Wright, "because he is on the right side of history now." But to start punishing people "who are distant to the actual crime is not about justice, it's about satisfying some blood thirst. And that's what got us in this problem in the first place."

"I am very sorry that he feels that way," Chiles, the prosecutor, says of Wright. "I personally feel that a lot has changed.

"Men's hearts and attitudes have changed over time. This was a very intelligent grand jury, and a good grand jury. They looked at all the evidence that was presented and considered it, and I do respect their decision."

Beauchamp says the government should release the entire investigative file, so the public and historians can see for themselves whether justice was done in this case. He says he'll push for a congressional review if he has to.

But if those files do become public, it won't be from Chiles' office. And unless some startling new evidence comes to light, Chiles says the Emmett Till case is essentially closed.

Allen G. Breed is based in Raleigh, N.C.

    End of Till case draws mixed response, UT, 4.3.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-04-till-case_N.htm

Obama, Clintons Converge at Civil Rights Event

March 4, 2007
By REUTERS
Filed at 2:04 a.m. ET
The New York Times

SELMA, Alabama (Reuters) - Democratic rivals Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, along with former President Bill Clinton, take their high-voltage fight for the White House to a hallowed symbol of the U.S. civil rights movement on Sunday.

The trio of political stars descends on the small town of Selma, Alabama, for a series of events commemorating the 42nd anniversary of the 1965 civil rights march, a historic milestone in the drive to end racial segregation in America's South.

The early campaign collision between Clinton and Obama, the top two contenders for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, is another sign of the budding intensity of their rivalry.

Obama, who hopes to become the first black president in U.S. history, had been scheduled to give the keynote address at the ceremonies for weeks. Clinton, refusing to cede any black support to Obama, decided to attend as well.

The two candidates will give nearly simultaneous speeches in Selma churches less than a block apart. They will then walk with others across the Edmund Pettis Bridge, where state troopers violently attacked black marchers in a confrontation that drew national attention and helped lead to passage of voting rights legislation.

Bill Clinton will receive a civil rights award during the ceremonies in what will be his first campaign appearance with his wife since she entered the White House race in January.

Obama will begin the day early at a unity prayer breakfast in Selma and make a morning stop to visit with supporters before delivering his address.

CARNIVAL ATMOSPHERE

The confluence of candidates, a former president, a host of other top political and civil rights figures and a swelling horde of media promises a carnival atmosphere at the annual ceremonies.

The showdown comes as recent polls show Obama slicing Clinton's national lead and gaining ground among black voters as they become more familiar with the freshman Illinois senator. Clinton, a New York senator whose husband is hugely popular with black voters, had enjoyed big leads over Obama.

The event highlights the potential importance of black voters, typically the most loyal Democratic constituency, in early 2008 primaries. In Alabama, which has not set a date for its primary but could hold it in early February 2008, blacks could constitute more than 40 percent of the total vote.

Obama said in an interview with National Public Radio that his rise in the polls among black voters mirrored a similar increase during his 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate in Illinois.

``The notion that I'm not dominating the black vote in the polls makes perfect sense because I have only been on the national scene a certain number of years, and people don't yet know my track record,'' Obama said.

The Obama and Clinton campaigns recently sparred over critical comments about the Clintons by Hollywood mogul David Geffen, who hosted a fund raiser for Obama.

The two candidates sit atop most polls of the Democratic 2008 race, with former Sen. John Edwards, the 2004 vice presidential nominee, running third and forming a strong top tier. Five other Democrats also are running for the White House.

    Obama, Clintons Converge at Civil Rights Event, NYT, 4.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/washington/politics-usa-politics-democrats.html

Recalling Civil Rights, Democrats Seek Black Votes

March 4, 2007
The New York Times
By JEFF ZELENY

SELMA, Ala., March 3 — Representative John Lewis, whose political career grew out of the civil rights movement, had longed for the day he could vote for someone that he believed could become the nation’s first black president. So when Senator Barack Obama entered the race, he was on the cusp of declaring his support.

Until Bill Clinton called.

Now, Mr. Lewis said, he is agonizing over whether to choose Mr. Obama, whom he once described as “the future of the Democratic Party,” or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“One day I lean one way, the next day I lean another way,” said Mr. Lewis, Democrat of Georgia. “Sometimes, you have to have what I call an executive session with yourself, a come-to-Jesus meeting, and somehow, some way we will all have to make a decision.”

In the opening stretch of the 2008 Democratic presidential contest, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama and John Edwards, the former North Carolina senator, are embroiled in what party officials believe is one of the most competitive scrambles for black supporters since the Voting Rights Act was passed four decades ago. The chief rivals will be here on Sunday when the Clintons and Mr. Obama commemorate the 42nd anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when hundreds of activists — Mr. Lewis among them — crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge during a civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.

Representative Artur Davis, Democrat of Alabama, invited Mr. Obama to deliver the keynote address at the historic Brown Chapel on Sunday. After Mr. Obama agreed, Mr. Davis said, Mrs. Clinton accepted an invitation to speak at a church just down the street. And two days ago, Mr. Clinton said he would join his wife in Selma, the first time since she formally entered the race that he has been called on to use his clout so directly to give her a hand.

“Her timing speaks for itself,” said Mr. Davis, who supports Mr. Obama.

It will be the first time Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama share the same campaign turf, and curiosity was building Saturday evening as hundreds gathered in the historic district for the weekend festival. Aides to Mrs. Clinton dismissed suggestions that they were following Mr. Obama, but members of Congress traveling to Selma said they were encouraged by her allies to attend her speech, not his.

Mr. Obama also adjusted his schedule, a spokesman said, postponing a fund-raiser in Boston on Sunday evening after learning that the Clintons would be attending the daylong series of events here.

Mr. Edwards declined an invitation. He plans to be in California on Sunday to deliver a speech — about Selma and civil rights — at the University of California, Berkeley.

Black voters are a crucial component of the Democratic electorate. In 2004, despite intensive efforts by President Bush to break the Democratic dominance, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts won about 89 percent of the black vote.

In contested primaries, particularly in South Carolina, black support could be vital to the Democratic nominee. About 50 percent of the primary voters in South Carolina are black, and the state is fourth in line on the nominating calendar. Alabama, where about 60 percent of the primary voters are black, is making plans to move its contest to Feb. 2. And at least 16 states are considering voting on Feb. 5, including Florida, California, Illinois, New York and Texas, all states where black voters could hold considerable sway.

But the weekend appearances also offer a window into a broader struggle among the candidates to define themselves to the country and to associate themselves with the legacy of the civil rights movement in a way that could help them appeal not only to blacks but also to white Democratic voters who are proud of their party’s role in that struggle.

Mr. Obama, who was born in 1961, four years before the Selma march, grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, far from the civil rights battles that played out in the American South. While he plunged into racial issues as a young adult, he has traveled to the region only in recent years, beginning to build relationships with older leaders of the movement.

Mrs. Clinton, who was born in 1947, had her political sensibilities forged during the tumult of the late 1960s. She has benefited from her husband’s immense popularity among black voters, built gradually during their years in Arkansas and then the White House. Mr. Clinton will be in Selma to be inducted into the Voting Rights Hall of Fame.

Mr. Edwards, who was born in 1953 and raised in North Carolina, often discusses growing up in the segregated South and the obligation that brings him to address issues of race and class. He has courted black support in both of his presidential campaigns.

For Mrs. Clinton, the Selma appearance could be a test of her ability to connect with black audiences, and of Mr. Clinton’s ability to transfer his political aura to his wife.

It also gives Mr. Obama a chance to show he can compete with the Clintons, both in connecting the language and themes of the civil rights movement to the politics of today and in keeping the spotlight on himself in the middle of a head-to-head political spectacle.

“President Clinton remains popular and Senator Clinton will benefit a lot from that, but there are a lot of African-Americans who see the possibility of this,” said Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, who supports Mr. Obama. “People say, ‘He’s like my son or my grandson, and before I die, I’d like to have a chance to vote for someone who can win.’ ”

Clinton advisers said they were not concerned about polls showing some early signs of a tightened race for black support. They have been honing both a public message and a private political strategy to deal with what they acknowledge is the unmatchable personal appeal of Mr. Obama as a black candidate courting black voters.

“African-Americans historically align with people based on issues, not personality,” said Minyon Moore, a senior Clinton adviser who, among other things, has focused on building support in the black community. “People will look at her record, look at her biography, look at her experience, and support her as a real champion of their issues.”

Asked how Mrs. Clinton would compete for black votes with Mr. Obama Ms. Moore said: “It’s probably a proud moment for us all. But there’s so much history to be made this time around — having the first woman president, having the first African-American nominee, having the first Latino nominee.” The latter was a reference to Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, another Democratic candidate.

Ertharin Cousin, a senior adviser to the Obama campaign, said Mr. Obama needed to introduce himself to all voters, including blacks. “We have a responsibility to tell his story, to paint his narrative,” Ms. Cousin said. “He may not be of the civil rights era, but he is definitely an extension of the work that was done of that era.”

While Mr. Obama must appear credible to civil rights leaders, he is also looking beyond the establishment of black political leaders. He is seeking to give voters a deeper look at him, advisers said, hoping to drive home the notion that a black candidate can win the presidency.

For Mrs. Clinton, the strategy for reaching black voters at this early stage of the campaign involves strong outreach to black elected officials, business leaders and others, followed by phone calls to reinforce her candidacy from her husband and supporters like Robert L. Johnson, who founded Black Entertainment Television.

Mrs. Clinton is seeking to deepen her own relationships with black voters, Mr. Johnson said. “When she’s running for president, it’s far more important that someone say, ‘Gee, it’s Hillary Clinton on the phone,’ and not, ‘President Clinton’s calling to ask if we can support his wife,’ ” Mr. Johnson said. “Hillary knows the black community’s attachment to her husband doesn’t transfer to her.”

It may, however, buy her time to win over voters on her own.

Mr. Lewis, one of the few icons of the civil rights era still active in politics, has been enamored with Mr. Obama since he arrived in Washington. Long before Mr. Lewis knew Mr. Obama would run for president, he invited him to headline a 40th anniversary gala of the Voting Rights Act, saying, “I think the hopes and dreams and aspirations of so many of us are riding on this one man.”

Nevertheless, his strong sentiment toward Mr. Clinton has been enough for him to remain neutral in the presidential race.

“I talked with President Clinton. I know him a little better than I know Mrs. Clinton,” Mr. Lewis said. “Some of us are caught in between, but isn’t it healthy that we have the luxury to choose between two wonderful, gifted politicians?”

Patrick Healy and John M. Broder contributed reporting.

    Recalling Civil Rights, Democrats Seek Black Votes, NYT, 4.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/us/politics/04campaign.html?hp

Sun exclusive

A new twist to an intriguing family history

Census records, genealogical research show forebears of Obama's mother had slaves

March 2, 2007
From the Baltimore Sun
By David Nitkin and Harry Merritt
Sun Reporters

WASHINGTON -- Many people know that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas.

But an intriguing sliver of his family history has received almost no attention until now: It appears that forebears of his white mother owned slaves, according to genealogical research and census records.

The records - which had never been addressed publicly by the Illinois senator or his relatives - were first noted in an ancestry report compiled by William Addams Reitwiesner, who works at the Library of Congress and practices genealogy in his spare time. The report, on Reitwiesner's Web site, carries a disclaimer that it is a "first draft" - one likely to be examined more closely if Obama is nominated.

According to the research, one of Obama's great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 census in Nelson County, Ky. The same records show that one of Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves.

The Sun retraced much of Reitwiesner's work, using census information available on the Web site ancestry.com and documents retrieved by the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, among other sources. The records show that Overall, then 30, owned a 15-year-old black female and a 25-year-old black male, while Mary Duvall, his mother-in-law, owned a 60-year-old black man and a 58-year-old black woman. (Slaves are listed in the 1850 census by owner, age, "sex," and "colour," not by name.)

An Obama spokesman did not dispute the information and said that the senator's ancestors "are representative of America."

"While a relative owned slaves, another fought for the Union in the Civil War," campaign spokesman Bill Burton said last night. "And it is a true measure of progress that the descendant of a slave owner would come to marry a student from Kenya and produce a son who would grow up to be a candidate for president of the United States."

The research traces the Duvalls to Mareen Duvall, a major land owner in Anne Arundel County in the 1600s. The inventory of his estate in 1694 names 18 slaves, according to a family history published in 1952.

The records could add a new dimension to questions by some who have asked whether Obama - who was raised in East Asia and Hawaii and educated at Columbia and Harvard - is attuned to the struggles of American blacks descended from West African slaves.

"The twist is very interesting," said Ronald Walters, a political scientist who is director of the African-American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park. "It deepens his connection with the experience of slavery, even if it deepens it on a different side of the equation."

Gary Boyd Roberts, a senior research scholar at the New England Historic Genealogical Society who published a book on the family lineage of presidents, said he did not think the slave-holding history was "particularly unusual."

"If you have a white Southern mother, or a mother from the middle states who has ancestry in the South, it doesn't strike me that that should be very surprising," he said. While the majority of such families did not own slaves, many with some wealth did, Roberts said.

Reitwiesner's research identifies two other presidential candidates, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former Democratic Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, as descendants of slave owners. Three of McCain's great-great-grandfathers in Mississippi owned slaves, including one who owned 52 in 1860. Two ancestors of Edwards owned one slave each in Georgia in 1860.

It was unclear last night whether Obama was aware of any slave-holding ancestors, but he makes no mention of them in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.

The book contains many approving references to his mother's side of the family. At one point, he writes that his mother "could give voice to the virtues of her midwestern past and offer them up in distilled form."

The memoir, however, comes close to confirming the Overall-Duvall lineage - stopping a generation short. Census and other records complete the gaps.

In a reference to his American ancestry, Obama writes "while one of my great-great-grandfathers, Christopher Columbus Clark, had been a decorated Union soldier, his wife's mother was rumored to have been a second cousin of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy."

Clark was actually Obama's great-great-great-grandfather, according to Reitwiesner's research and census data available at ancestry.com. A 1930 census document lists Clark, 84, living in the same El Dorado City, Kan., household as a 12-year-old great-grandson, Stanley A. Dunham. Dunham was Obama's grandfather.

Clark's wife, Susan, was the daughter of George Washington Overall, the latest known family slave owner.

Reitwiesner, the researcher, declined to be interviewed for this article. "I'll let my Web page [wargs.com] speak for itself," he said in an e-mail. The Obama report contains a disclaimer that appears on all of Reitwiesner's work: "The following material ... should not be considered either exhaustive or authoritative, but rather as a first draft."

Genealogical experts who reviewed the Obama family tree at the request of The Sun would not vouch for its findings.

Most of the historical entries lack citations of authenticating source material, such as birth and death certificates or marriage licenses, said Barbara Vines Little, past president of the National Genealogical Society in Virginia, adding that "he has nothing here that I can see that would allow you to make any logical link."

"You just can't casually throw some documents together and make a sophisticated analysis," said Tony Burroughs, author of Black Roots: A Beginners Guide to Tracing the African American Family Tree and a consultant on a project by the New York Daily News that found that relatives of former Sen. Strom Thurmond appear to have owned the ancestors of civil rights activist the Rev. Al Sharpton.

But Roberts, the New England scholar, collaborated with Reitwiesner on a 1984 book about the American roots of Princess Diana, and calls him "exceptionally bright" and "quite a good researcher."

The online Obama family tree, Roberts said, is the work of "an informal team of genealogists" who specialize in Internet-based research and post their findings to test their validity.

"When you are gathering up things from the Internet, you can get fantastical - by that I mean wild and unbelievable - connections," Roberts said. "Many of them will fall; only a few of them will hold up. But some absolutely extraordinary things do hold up."

Assisting in the Obama research was Christopher Challender Child, a genealogist at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, who said that Reitwiesner culled fragments from a variety of sources. "There's a limit to what you can verify without a lot of money," Child said. "But from what I see, the line looks pretty good."

For some, the records may underscore Obama's unique racial heritage as a presidential candidate.

Author and essayist Debra J. Dickerson wrote in a January salon.com article that she had previously refrained from opining about the senator because "I didn't have the heart (or the stomach) to point out the obvious: Obama isn't black."

" 'Black,' in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves," Dickerson said.

Walters, who was deputy campaign manager for Jesse Jackson in 1984 and the author of Black Presidential Politics in America, agreed that questions raised by Dickerson and others "is an important debate."

"What people are really asking is, 'Can I trust this guy? Do I have confidence in this guy? Does he understand my situation, and therefore [is he] able to take my issues into the political system?'" Walters said.

    A new twist to an intriguing family history, BalSun, 2.3.2007,  http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/politics/bal-te.obama02mar02,0,3453027.story?coll=bal-home-headlines

In Bid to Ban Racial Slur, Blacks Are on Both Sides

February 25, 2007
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

Days after Michael Richards’s racist tirade at a Los Angeles comedy club, Leroy G. Comrie Jr., a New York City councilman, seethed as he listened to some black teenagers on a Queens street spewing out the same word Mr. Richards had been using.

“They were saying ‘nigga’ or ‘niggas’ every other word,” said Mr. Comrie, who is black. “I could tell they didn’t get it. They don’t realize how their self-image is debilitated when they use this awful word in public.”

So Mr. Comrie sponsored a resolution for a moratorium on the use of the n-word in New York City, prompting a spate of similar proposals in half a dozen local governments across four states in recent weeks. The New York City Council is scheduled to discuss Mr. Comrie’s proposal tomorrow and vote on it on Wednesday; the City Council in Paterson, N.J., and the Westchester County Legislature both unanimously approved such bans recently.

(Mr. Richards, who played Kramer on “Seinfeld,” has been invited to the New York City hearings; a Richards spokesman said that he would respectfully decline to attend.)

The measures, which describe the forbidden word as an “ignorant and derogatory” insult toward blacks, try to sidestep First Amendment questions by calling for “symbolic” bans only, meaning they do not have the force of law. Because they are largely aimed at blacks who use the word among themselves, the proposals have revived a debate over whether minority groups can co-opt epithets and make them empowering.

“There is a swelling population of black youth that use this word as if it is a term of endearment,” said Andrea C. McElroy, a black councilwoman who sponsored a ban on the racial epithet in Irvington, N.J., that was passed this month. “And I think it is basically incumbent upon us to remind them of the story of what that word meant to so many of our ancestors. This is something we probably should have done years ago.”

In the last year, there have also been other approaches taken to try to stem the casual use of the word.

Web sites like abolishthenword.com, founded by Brooklyn natives Jill and Kovon Flowers, and theunitedvoices.org are devoted to eliminating it, and some high schools in New York and New Jersey have created programs to teach the origins of the word and make students pledge not to say it.

Most of these efforts explain that the word was coined by slave traders 400 years ago to degrade blacks. The programs also tell of its deep associations with violence, segregation laws and injustice.

But not every effort has been embraced. In Brazoria, Tex., an ordinance that proposed fining anyone who uttered the word $500 was withdrawn after hundreds of residents — black and white — poured into a town hall meeting last month to oppose it.

John Ridley, a black author and filmmaker who has written extensively about the word, said efforts to abolish it are insulting because, he said, they suggest black Americans would allow themselves to be cowed “by six letters and two syllables.” Unlike the politicians trying to squelch the word, Mr. Ridley added, those who embrace it are showing backbone by declaring “we’re controlling it, we’re owning it.”

“I honestly think that with everything that’s going on in America, that the idea of trying to ban a word to solve a problem is just ridiculous,” he said. “And for people of color — with us possibly on the cusp of having a black man become president — for us to be worried about this word is ridiculous.”

The rapper Mos Def said in a 1999 interview that blacks were taking “a word that has been historically used by whites to degrade and oppress us, a word that has so many negative connotations, and turning it into something beautiful, something we can call our own.”

He was referring to the slang pronunciation, with an “a” instead of an “er,” that is common in rap lyrics.

Another measure of the word’s pervasiveness can be seen in a new Web site, niggaspace.com, that has prompted condemnations from many black leaders, including members of the New York City Council.

The site, modeled after the social networking site myspace.com, has, according to its founder, more than 200,000 registered members. Judging by the photos attached to their profiles, most appear to be black teenagers.

The site’s founder, who would identify himself only as Tyrone, said he drew a distinction between the two differently spelled versions of the n-word: “nigga,” he said in an e-mail message, embodies brotherhood and fraternity, not ignorance and hate.

“This comes down to a battle of people who wish to perpetuate an archaic and negative meaning of the word, and people who wish to continue an evolution of a word to give it a more positive connotation,” he said. “Myself, and the Web site, represent the latter.”

The word, in all its variations, stems from “niger,” which is Latin for black. One of the earliest recorded instances of its use in North America was in 1619, when a Jamestown colonist, John Rolfe, noted in his diary the arrival of a Dutch man-of-war with 20 African captives, or “negars,” according to Jabari Asim, author of a new book, “The N Word: Who Can Say It, Who Shouldn’t, and Why” (Houghton Mifflin).

There is some debate among scholars as to whether Mr. Rolfe intended the word as a pejorative or not; Mr. Asim said he believes it was an insult because otherwise Mr. Rolfe would probably have chosen the more neutral “Negro,” which had been in use as far back as 1555.

By the early 1800s, the word had become common in racist literature and among slave owners as a slur against black people meaning subhuman and inferior, Mr. Asim said, and a handful of black writers heatedly objected to its use. Two centuries later, in 1988, the rap group N.W.A. used the word four dozen times on a best-selling album, “Straight Outta Compton,” essentially igniting a debate over whether the racist connotation is removed when the word is culturally claimed by blacks themselves.

But Mr. Asim said the changed spelling by N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude) and others just mimicked uses throughout history. “We wrap ourselves in these comforting falsehoods when we say we’ve taken the power from the word and spelled it another way,” he said. “It’s a lie that allows one to lie.”

In his book, Mr. Asim pointed out that many segregationists excused their use of the term by saying it was just a Southern pronunciation of the more palatable “Negro. ” He argued that a different spelling does not sanitize the term from its ugly history. He said in an interview that only education, not legislation, would break today’s teenagers of the habit.

The sponsors of the bans on the epithet say that education is precisely their mission. Clinton I. Young Jr., who is black and who introduced the measure that passed in Westchester, said the legislation he drafted was meant to raise awareness about the painful history of the word.

He and other legislators said their goal was to create more programs like the one in Mr. Young’s district at Ossining High School. That program, called Project Earthquake, exposes black students to the origins of the word through lectures and documentaries, challenges them not to use it, and encourages them to dress professionally for class.

One student, Quantell Bazemore, 17, said that he and other classmates who once traded the word freely vowed to stop using it after joining the program last year.

“It’s not something that you can stop overnight, but it’s something you can work toward,” he said. “I have a friend or two who might see me and say ‘What’s up, my n-word?’ And then they stop and correct themselves and they say ‘Oh, I mean, ‘What’s up, my brother?’ ”

    In Bid to Ban Racial Slur, Blacks Are on Both Sides, NYT, 25.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/nyregion/25nword.html

Race, Politics and a Bridge in South Carolina

February 25, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER

RIMINI, S.C. — The woman’s voice echoed down the empty road, the sound bouncing back to the desolate spot by her trailer.

“Too isolated. Too peaceful,” she complained, but the echo had already made Mary Bawa’s point.

A powerful congressman, James E. Clyburn, the House majority whip, has staked his pride and a lifetime’s tempered pugnacity on ending that echo and this hamlet’s isolation with a new bridge. He faces the derision of hunters, environmentalists and much of South Carolina’s political establishment, who all see it as a pork-barrel waste of $150 million.

Undergirding Mr. Clyburn’s 10-year fight for what opponents mock as a “bridge from nowhere to nowhere” is the issue of race, the starting point in his four-decade ascent. The potential beneficiaries are mostly poor, rural blacks; the opponents are largely whites.

Mr. Clyburn wants to connect this forlorn central South Carolina community of about 500, across an artificial lake and swamp, to the equally destitute settlement of Lone Star, population 214, using nine miles of bridge and roadway. The poverty rate is 30 percent and above in both places, barely perceptible interruptions of broken-down houses on remote rural roadways. Lone Star’s most substantial structure is an old, abandoned brick store by the railroad tracks, empty for years; Rimini boasts a couple of old frame dwellings and trailers, and a store with an antique, faded bread sign on it.

The benefits of the bridge are disputed. But listening to Mr. Clyburn and the handful of residents here, they almost appear a side issue.

His push for the span across Lake Marion, in its motivation and drive, harks back to the earliest days of a career begun when South Carolina was still wrestling with segregation. Since then Mr. Clyburn has reached a pinnacle of his party’s leadership, achieving a number of firsts for a black man along the way: first black governor’s adviser, in 1970; first black congressman from his state since the late 19th century, in 1992. He has pragmatically worked within the white-dominated system, while watching his state partly transform itself as a New South success story.

Yet Mr. Clyburn’s campaign for the bridge linking two mostly black specks on the map in the heart of his district, eschewing pragmatism, is imbued with the sharp spirit of defiance from the civil rights era, when he was jailed as a college student protesting segregation.

It is a fight pitched in terms from another era. Defending his position, Mr. Clyburn’s words seem fueled as much by a political lifetime’s butting against white-held levers of power as by the bridge’s potential benefits, and his stated desire to alleviate a swath of black rural poverty.

The issue on the surface is 2.8 miles of bridge over Lake Marion and the pristine Upper Santee Swamp alongside a long-established railroad trestle. A few trains rumble through, though mostly it is a place where only waterfowl make loud noises.

Underneath that surface issue, however, is the congressman’s will to buck his white opponents. “Their opposition is not about the environment,” Mr. Clyburn said angrily. “Their opposition is very much more base than that,” he said, emphasizing the word.

Arrayed against him are the Republican governor, much of the state’s Congressional delegation, the reservations of various state and federal agencies, some of the region’s leading environmental groups and a vociferous chorus of white huntsmen, some of whose racist commentary has been carefully collected from the Internet by the congressman’s staff. Even the state’s Transportation Department has said the bridge is not a priority. The opposition appears to make him even more determined to proceed.

“I am the hardest person in the world to intimidate,” Mr. Clyburn, 66, said in an interview.

“They’re wrong about this bridge,” he added, “they know damn well they’re wrong.”

The hamlets themselves are barely 50 miles south of the state capital, Columbia, but seem a world away.

“Last five years, economy gone down,” said Troy Nelson, unemployed and looking for a job, like his cousin Richard. Both were standing outside the low, cinder-block Drayton Family Store in Rimini. “Right now, you’d accept any type of work,” he said. The area “needs a whole lot of help,” he said.

“The system disregard this area,” Richard Nelson said.

Mr. Clyburn, numbers at the ready, says the bridge will make jobs, schools and hospitals far more accessible to these places of chronic high unemployment and low schooling rates; environmental advocates counter that the bridge will hardly lessen commuting times, and will not alter the fact that residents will still find their respective regional hubs of Orangeburg (for Lone Star) and Sumter (for Rimini) more convenient for services.

What is more, it will “destroy over 15 acres of wetland” said the Southern Environmental Law Center in a lawsuit filed last year, hurt the wildlife in the unspoiled Sparkleberry Swamp and generally disrupt a calm place.

“It’s the biggest waste of money,” said Robin Inabinet, a white fisherman, stepping off his boat on the Lone Star side of Lake Marion. “There’s nothing here, and there never was nothing here.”

On the other side of the lake, though, the sense of grievance, and of resentment against whites, is strong.

“Rimini just happens to be a little community of black people, most of them poor,” said Johnny Taylor, who runs the Drayton store. “They just don’t want to see nothing good happen to it.”

For now, the project’s opponents have the upper hand, with the Health and Environmental Control Department denying it a permit in January. Mr. Clyburn vows to fight on.

“It’s about destroying a pristine area,” Mr. Inabinet said. “This is one of the last undisturbed areas on the east coast.”

J. Blanding Holman IV, a lawyer with the environmental law center, said that roads tended to fragment habitats for wildlife.

But these arguments hardly intersect Mr. Clyburn’s train of thought, pitched at a wholly different historical perspective. Where the lawsuit sees “spectacular remoteness and beauty,” Mr. Clyburn sees the land underneath Lake Marion, flooded by the creation of a hydroelectric project in 1941, and some of it undoubtedly owned by blacks. The lawsuit speaks of enjoyable kayaking trips on the water; Mr. Clyburn resurrects 40-year-old discussions about building a bridge over it, to help the impoverished areas.

His critics resolutely reject any racial basis for the disagreement; Mr. Clyburn, the lifelong pragmatist who worked his way up, sees race as fundamental.

“You see all this, and you know why it was never done — because the people over there had no political power, none,” he said.

“These people were disenfranchised,” said Mr. Clyburn, a fundamentalist minister’s son who said he may have been “divinely put where I am to fight this battle.”

Scornfully, he suggests that his critics are merely hiding the basic truth about race.

“The bridge was not built in 1968 because of discrimination,” he said. “That’s what it was, and we all know that. And all these people who are running their mouths, they know that. They know the deal. They get upset simply because I know the deal.”

    Race, Politics and a Bridge in South Carolina, NYT, 25.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/us/25bridge.html

Va. lawmakers pass slavery apology

Posted 2/24/2007 6:44 PM ET
AP
USA Today

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Meeting on the grounds of the former Confederate Capitol, the Virginia General Assembly voted unanimously Saturday to express "profound regret" for the state's role in slavery.

Sponsors of the resolution say they know of no other state that has apologized for slavery, although Missouri lawmakers are considering such a measure. The resolution does not carry the weight of law but sends an important symbolic message, supporters said.

"This session will be remembered for a lot of things, but 20 years hence I suspect one of those things will be the fact that we came together and passed this resolution," said Delegate A. Donald McEachin, a Democrat who sponsored it in the House of Delegates.

The resolution passed the House 96-0 and cleared the 40-member Senate on a unanimous voice vote. It does not require Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's approval.

The measure also expressed regret for "the exploitation of Native Americans."

The resolution was introduced as Virginia begins its celebration of the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, where the first Africans arrived in 1619. Richmond, home to a popular boulevard lined with statues of Confederate heroes, later became another point of arrival for Africans and a slave-trade hub.

The resolution says government-sanctioned slavery "ranks as the most horrendous of all depredations of human rights and violations of our founding ideals in our nation's history, and the abolition of slavery was followed by systematic discrimination, enforced segregation, and other insidious institutions and practices toward Americans of African descent that were rooted in racism, racial bias, and racial misunderstanding."

In Virginia, black voter turnout was suppressed with a poll tax and literacy tests before those practices were struck down by federal courts, and state leaders responded to federally ordered school desegregation with a "Massive Resistance" movement in the 1950s and early '60s. Some communities created exclusive whites-only schools.

The apology is the latest in a series of strides Virginia has made in overcoming its segregationist past. Virginia was the first state to elect a black governor — L. Douglas Wilder in 1989 — and the Legislature took a step toward atoning for Massive Resistance in 2004 by creating a scholarship fund for blacks whose schools were shut down between 1954 and 1964.

Among those voting for the measure was Delegate Frank D. Hargrove, an 80-year-old Republican who infuriated black leaders last month by saying "black citizens should get over" slavery.

After enduring a barrage of criticism, Hargrove successfully co-sponsored a resolution calling on Virginia to celebrate "Juneteenth," a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.

    Va. lawmakers pass slavery apology, UT, 24.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-24-virginia-slavery_x.htm

FBI may reopen cold cases on 1950s and '60s slayings in the South

Posted 2/23/2007 8:18 PM ET
AP
USA Today

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The FBI is considering reopening dozens of cold cases involving slayings suspected of being racially motivated in the South during the 1950s and '60s.

An announcement could come as early as Tuesday, according to a law enforcement official who spoke with the Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the plans have not yet been finalized.

In addition to the FBI's own investigations, the Southern Poverty Law Center submitted its own list last week of 74 potential unsolved slayings that involved white-on-black violence.

Thirty-two of the deaths happened in Mississippi. The others were in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Kentucky and New York.

Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project for the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, said each case was researched in the late 1980s when the group was putting together a civil rights memorial. But it is unclear if each could be considered a civil rights case, he said.

"The truth is we don't know," said Potok, whose group investigates hate crimes. "In each case there was some evidence to suggest that these were racial murders, but it absolutely was not proven. Had we been able to nail them down, their names would've been literally chiseled into the civil rights memorial that sits outside our building here."

U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton in Jackson reviewed the list of Mississippi killings for the Associated Press on Friday and said based on the limited amount of information available that none would qualify for federal prosecution under civil rights statutes. But he said many could still be prosecuted on a local or state level as murders.

The deaths outlined by the center happened in a variety of ways, from police-involved shootings to trysts with white women broken up by gunfire.

In most cases, the statute of limitations under federal civil rights laws will have run out, Lampton said. In others, charges could not be brought because the accused already have faced charges and been cleared by a jury.

Last month, FBI Director Robert Mueller said the bureau was aggressively seeking to solve cold civil rights cases, vowing to "pursue justice to the end, and we will, no matter how long it takes, until every living suspect is called to answer for their crimes."

Most recently federal prosecutors brought kidnapping and conspiracy charges against James Ford Seale, 71, who allegedly participated in the 1964 kidnappings and murders of Charles Eddie Moore and Henry Hezekiah Dee in southwest Mississippi.

Seale was arrested Jan. 24 after the U.S. Justice Department reopened its investigation and learned that he was still alive. He has pleaded not guilty and is due for trial in April. The case qualified for federal prosecution because the captors allegedly took Moore and Dee across the state line into Louisiana while they were still alive.

In 1994, Mississippi won the conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the 1963 sniper killing of NAACP leader Medgar Evers.

In Alabama, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in 2002 of killing four black girls in the bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963. In 2001, Thomas Blanton was convicted.

Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman, was convicted last June of manslaughter in the killings of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964.

Lara Jakes Jordan in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

    FBI may reopen cold cases on 1950s and '60s slayings in the South, UT, 23.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-23-cold-cases_x.htm

The World of Black Theater Becomes Ever Bigger

February 21, 2007
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

BALTIMORE, Feb. 18 — Urban theater — or what has been called over the years inspirational theater, black Broadway, gospel theater and the chitlin circuit — has been thriving for decades, selling out some of the biggest theaters across the country and grossing millions of dollars a year.

In the last two years, however, the tenor of the business has changed, especially since Tyler Perry, the circuit’s reigning impresario, took in $110 million at the Hollywood box office with “Diary of a Mad Black Woman” and “Madea’s Family Reunion,” movies that were based on his plays; they cost less than $7 million each to make.

The bigger players are developing television series, and veterans who have been part of the circuit for years suddenly have movie deals. The word in the industry is that urban theater is about to go mainstream.

“A year and a half from now, if you’re not coming with a play, film script and sitcom spinoff, you’re not going to be able to go anywhere in this business,” said Gary Guidry, one of the founders of I’m Ready Productions, based in Houston, another of the circuit’s big producers.

But the sight of crowds of theatergoers slowly streaming into the Lyric Opera House here on Saturday and Sunday, continuing to walk through the door throughout the first act and eventually filling just about every one of the 2,564 seats for a performance of “Men, Money and Gold Diggers,” prompts the question: If this is not already mainstream, what is?

As white theatergoers were lining up for “Wicked” at the France-Merrick Performing Arts Center across town, the audience filling up the Lyric, a slightly larger theater, was almost exclusively black, mostly middle-aged women. Many said they had heard about the play through the traditional lines of the circuit’s promotion: radio ads, fliers in local business and church parking lots and an astonishingly effective word-of-mouth network that precedes the show from city to city.

Some aspects of urban theater are set in stone. Top tickets average about $30 less than those of touring Broadway shows. And it has become standard practice to sell DVDs of the plays after the tour; Mr. Perry has reportedly sold more than 11 million.

The plays, which typically take place in contemporary settings, are often sprinkled with R&B solos and duets, and tend to be a mix between melodrama and farce, with clownish archetypes, like churchy grannies and two-bit entrepreneurs. And they all have uplifting plots, usually about a woman torn between a glamorous philanderer, whose speech is laden with double-entendres, and a humbler, more dependable man, whom she eventually chooses. (The more muscular actors also have a tendency to take off their shirts.)

More than a marketer’s demographic description, urban theater is a genre like the sitcom or courtroom thriller, and experiments tend to fare poorly. David E. Talbert, a 15-year veteran of the circuit, said he once wrote a pure comedy without an inspirational message and was bluntly advised by audience members not to try it again.

Mr. Talbert, 40, is the other powerhouse on the circuit, along with I’m Ready Productions and Mr. Perry. By Mr. Talbert’s own estimate, he has grossed $75 million over the last decade and a half with 12 plays, and counting. He likens himself to Neil Simon as a playwright who tries to cater to his audience’s wants and tastes rather than hew to some establishment idea of high art.

Mr. Guidry, 33, and his producing partner, Je’Caryous Johnson, 29, the author of “Gold Diggers,” are not so content with the status quo. They have departed from the form somewhat by adapting popular romance novels to the stage; like many younger people in the business, when they first began attending the plays, they felt the quality was, well, not great. Granted, they added, theatrical distinction has never really been the main point. That point, in the view of many, has been simply to have theater by, for and about contemporary black people.

Antonio Banks, who was snapping and selling souvenir photographs in the lobby of the Lyric, summed up a prevailing attitude among theatergoers: “Not much is offered to them,” he said. “If they can find an outlet, even if it’s not really good, it helps them escape from reality for a while.”

That attitude has been changing. One reason, said Laterras R. Whitfield, a 28-year-old from Dallas who broke into the field four years ago with “P.M.S. — It’s a Man Thang,” is that the market is becoming saturated.

“It appears to be so easy,” he said, “that a lot of people say, ‘Hey, I can do this,’ and they just write a play and find somebody silly enough to promote it, and then people go see it and say, ‘What is this mess?’ ”

The target audiences, in general, do not have much disposable income, and having been burned too often with bad plays, they are more discriminating. The excitement of going to see theater made explicitly for them, Mr. Johnson said, is no longer enough. Without the equivalent of a Broadway imprimatur to guarantee a certain level of production quality, though, reassuring theatergoers is not easy.

“If I tell you ‘Les Miz’ or ‘Cats’ or ‘Hairspray,’ you immediately know what I’m talking about,” said Brian Alden, whose North American Entertainment Company promotes Mr. Johnson’s plays. “In urban theater, we’re marketing an unknown product, so generally we’re marketing a name.”

But outside of Mr. Perry — who has also acted in many of his plays, most notably in drag as the vigilante grandmother, Madea — there are no writers or producers everyone knows by name, except for some of the older gospel impresarios, who no longer have the buzz they once did.

So active producers are now heavily casting recognizable film and television actors and singers.

At a recent, crowded performance of Mr. Talbert’s new play, “Love in the Nick of Tyme,” at Newark Symphony Hall, none of the dozen or so audience members interviewed knew Mr. Talbert. They did, however, know the name of the male lead, Morris Chestnut, the heartthrob film and television actor. Mr. Chestnut and other familiar faces in the circuit are not in the top ranks of fame; former sitcom stars tend to be particularly well represented. But they are celebrities of a caliber that would have been unheard of in a gospel play 10 years ago.

Increasing star power and the box office success of Mr. Perry, who is now developing three television series and a few more movies, are signs of the circuit’s move into big business.

But there are still few signs of acceptance by the cultural establishment. Reviews of Mr. Perry’s first two movies, which were based on his plays, were overwhelmingly negative.

For now, critical disregard can be a selling point. On Feb. 13, the day before the opening of “Daddy’s Little Girls,” Mr. Perry’s latest film, he sent an e-mail message to the members of his database, complaining of the skepticism from Hollywood insiders and journalists.

“It is as though we are all so unsophisticated that we won’t support a great movie about a good father,” the message read. “We know the truth, so let’s show them at the box office.” (The first weekend grosses were estimated at a robust $17.8 million.)

Mr. Perry declined to comment for this article.

The circuit’s position in the universe of black theater — particularly as distinct from the work of black playwrights presented in literary theater — is a topic that has long been discussed. While some scholars and theater professionals have criticized gospel plays for trafficking in stereotypes, others see it as another kind of drama, even finding, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. put it in a 1997 article in The New Yorker, “something heartening about the spectacle of black drama that pays its own way.”

Kenny Leon, who is directing the Broadway-bound production of August Wilson’s last play, “Radio Golf,” works in the same building as Mr. Perry in Atlanta. “I look at theater that is produced at some of the regional theaters and theater that is produced on that circuit as two different things,” he said. “We shouldn’t try to make them be the same things.”

No figure attracts more conflicting opinions than Mr. Wilson, who died in 2005. Mr. Talbert, being almost hypnotically unflappable, is not shy about his view: if the audiences who go to Mr. Wilson’s plays are predominantly nonblack, he asked, then how significant could he be to black people?

But Mr. Guidry and Mr. Johnson, the young Turks, think the genre can continue to develop while still staying true to its traditions. In 2002, when they produced an adaptation of Michael Baisden’s “Men Cry in the Dark,” they did not advertise its basis as a best-selling romance novel, fearing it would alienate the church-based audiences. Now a play’s origin as a novel is a selling point.

And as for Mr. Wilson, Mr. Guidry said that “Fences,” Mr. Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, could do perfectly well with some judicious trimming, a little more comedy and, of course, a savvy marketing campaign.

“Man, if it were called ‘Big Man, Stronger Woman,’ ” Mr. Guidry said, “this thing could tour.”

    The World of Black Theater Becomes Ever Bigger, NYT, 21.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/21/theater/21urba.html

Big piece of civil rights history is falling apart

Updated 2/12/2007 12:37 AM ET
By Jerry Mitchell
The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger
USA Today

MONEY, Miss. — Years of neglect and the battering winds of Hurricane Katrina have all but destroyed the country store where the crime that galvanized the civil rights movement began.

The events at Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in August 1955 led to the murder of a black teenager named Emmett Till. "Like the Liberty Bell, it's the symbol of the movement," Democratic state Sen. David Jordan says. "That ought not to be lost."

Leflore County Tax Assessor Leroy Ware says the store isn't worth a penny on the county's books — but that didn't stop the crumbling store's owners from initially asking local officials last year for $40 million. They later reduced their asking price to $4 million.

Local officials balked and countered with a $50,000 offer. Talks broke off, and the store has continued to rot, despite being included on the Mississippi Heritage Trust's list of the state's "10 Most Endangered Historic Places."

Harold Ray Tribble, whose family owns the property, says he plans to start working in March with local, state and national officials to return the property to its original condition. "We want to restore it," Tribble says. "It's a part of history, and it's about to fall down."

Till, 14, a Chicago teen visiting his cousins in Mississippi, walked into the general store on Aug. 24, 1955. Some people said he asked for candy. Some said he asked the proprietor, 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, for a date.

She testified that Till grabbed her and called her "baby," but Till's cousins said he never touched her or said anything inappropriate. As Till exited the store, he whistled at her, the cousins say.

Several nights later, Bryant's then-husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, kidnapped Till and beat him repeatedly before shooting him. They tossed him into the Tallahatchie River.

After their arrests, the pair admitted abducting Till but denied killing him.

At trial in September 1955, defense lawyers claimed civil rights leaders had planted the body in the river. Jurors acquitted Bryant and Milam, who later admitted their guilt in Look magazine.

Tribble says his family wants to preserve history and has artifacts from the old store. "We've got all the signs, the cash registers, the shelves," he says.

If the store were returned to its original condition, it could be a tourist attraction. Last year, dozens of student groups from across the nation came to the area to visit civil rights sites, including the store, Jordan says.

In neighboring Tallahatchie County, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission is creating a civil rights trail for visitors that would include markers to recognize such places as the courthouse where Till's killers were tried and the spot in the Tallahatchie River where his body was found.

A recent Justice Department probe into Till's slaying also renewed interest in the case. Last year, the FBI recommended local prosecutors take a closer look at Carolyn Bryant. Roy Bryant died in 1994 and J.W. Milam in 1980.

A Leflore County grand jury will take up the case in March.

    Big piece of civil rights history is falling apart, UT, 12.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-12-civil-rights-store_x.htm

Obama Formally Enters Presidential Race

February 11, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY

SPRINGFIELD, Ill., Feb. 10 — Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, standing before the Old State Capitol where Abraham Lincoln began his political career, announced his candidacy for the White House on Saturday by presenting himself as an agent of generational change who could transform a government hobbled by cynicism, petty corruption and “a smallness of our politics.”

“The time for that politics is over,” Mr. Obama said. “It is through. It’s time to turn the page.”

Wearing an overcoat but gloveless on a frigid morning, Mr. Obama invoked a speech Lincoln gave here in 1858 condemning slavery — “a house divided against itself cannot stand” — as he started his campaign to become the nation’s first black president.

Speaking smoothly and comfortably, Mr. Obama offered a generational call to arms, portraying his campaign less as a candidacy and more as a movement. “Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what’s needed to be done,” he said. “Today we are called once more, and it is time for our generation to answer that call.”

It was the latest step in a journey rich with historic possibilities and symbolism. Thousands of people packed the town square to witness it, shivering in the single-digit frostiness until Mr. Obama appeared, trailed by his wife, Michelle, and two young daughters. (“I wasn’t too cold,” Mr. Obama said later, grinning as he acknowledged a heating device had been positioned at his feet, out of the audience’s view.)

Still, for all the excitement on display, Mr. Obama’s speech also marked the start of a tough new phase in what until now has been a charmed introduction to national politics. Democrats and Mr. Obama’s aides said they were girding for questions about his experience in national politics, his command of policy, a past that has gone largely unexamined by rivals and the news media, and a public persona defined more by his biography and charisma than by how he would seek to use the powers of the presidency.

“He’s done impressively so far, but at some point he’s really going to have to move to the next stage,” said Walter Mondale, the former Democratic vice president who made the phrase “where’s the beef” famous in his 1984 challenge to the credentials of a rival, Gary Hart, the former senator from Colorado.

The formal entry to the race framed a challenge that would seem daunting to even the most talented politician: whether Mr. Obama, with all his strengths and limitations, can win in a field dominated by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who brings years of experience in presidential politics, a command of policy and political history, and an extraordinarily battle-tested network of fund-raisers and advisers.

Mr. Obama has told friends that he views Mrs. Clinton as his biggest obstacle, though his aides said they remained very wary as well of former Senator John Edwards, another rival for the Democratic nomination.

Mr. Obama hit the question of experience in the opening bars of his speech on Saturday, suggesting that he would seek to use his limited time in government as an asset by casting himself as an agent of change who was free from the pull of special interests and politics as usual.

“I recognize there is a certain presumptuousness in this — a certain audacity — to this announcement,” he said. “I know that I haven’t spent a lot of time learning the ways of Washington. But I’ve been there long enough to know that the ways of Washington must change.”

For Mr. Obama’s campaign, struggling to put this unlikely organization together in just three months, the first focus is Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Obama’s aides said they had spent weeks discussing how to derail what David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s campaign manager, described as “the dominant political organization in the Democratic Party.”

Mr. Obama’s decision to spend the first two days of his presidential campaign in Iowa, where he headed after his announcement, reflected one of the first important strategic decisions in that regard. His organization sees Iowa as a place where he could surprise Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Edwards with an early victory. The eastern part of the state, a critical region for Democrats to win and where Mr. Obama spent the rest of Saturday, shares a media market with neighboring Illinois. Mr. Obama has been a fixture in local news since winning his Senate primary nearly three years ago.

In trying to undercut Mrs. Clinton’s claims of experience, Mr. Obama’s campaign has decided to borrow techniques that Bill Clinton used to defeat the first President Bush in 1992. Mr. Obama, reprising the role of Mr. Clinton, on Saturday presented himself as a candidate of generational change running to oust entrenched symbols of Washington, an allusion to Mrs. Clinton, as he tried to turn her experience into a burden. Mr. Obama is 45; Mrs. Clinton is 59.

But more than anything, Mr. Obama’s aides said, they believe the biggest advantage he has over Mrs. Clinton is his difference in position on the Iraq war. Mrs. Clinton supported the war authorization four years ago. Mr. Obama has opposed the war from the start, and has introduced a bill to begin withdrawing United States troops no later than May 1, with the goal of removing all combat brigades by March 31, 2008, taking a far more explicit stance than Mrs. Clinton on ending the conflict.

“America, it’s time to start bringing our troops home,” he said Saturday. “It’s time to admit that no amount of American lives can resolve the political disagreement that lies at the heart of someone else’s civil war.”

Yet even on a day that pointed to Mr. Obama’s strengths — a big, excited crowd, a speech that in its composition and delivery demonstrated yet again why he is viewed as a singular talent in the Democratic Party — it seems evident that Mr. Obama’s easier days as a candidate have passed. Unlike Mrs. Clinton, or to a lesser extent Mr. Edwards, Mr. Obama has not gone through a full-scale audit that will now come from Republicans, Democrats, journalists and advocacy groups, eager to define him before he defines himself.

Some Democrats, including Mr. Obama’s opponents, seem increasingly game to challenge him, particularly when it comes to the substance of an Obama candidacy. Mr. Edwards offered a hint of what Mr. Obama faced in an interview the other day, as he discussed national health care, when he was asked his reaction to Mr. Obama’s views on providing national coverage.

“I haven’t seen a plan from him,” Mr. Edwards said. “Have you all?”

Mr. Obama has glided to his position in his party with a demeanor and series of eloquent speeches that have won him comparisons to the Kennedy brothers and put him in a position where his status as a black man with a chance to win the White House is only part of the excitement generated by his candidacy.

But with perhaps one major exception, his plan to disengage forces in Iraq, he has avoided offering the kind of specific ideas that his own advisers acknowledge could open him up to attack by opponents or alienate supporters initially drawn by his more thematic appeals.

Mr. Obama went so far as to tell Democrats in Washington last week that voters were looking for a message of hope, and disparaged the notion that a presidential campaign should be built on a foundation of position papers or details.

“There are those who don’t believe in talking about hope: they say, well, we want specifics, we want details, we want white papers, we want plans,” he said then. “We’ve had a lot of plans, Democrats. What we’ve had is a shortage of hope.”

But some Democrats were scornful. “That’s nonsense,” Mr. Hart said. “It posits that it’s either-or. Who’s saying you can’t talk about hope? I’m not talking about white papers: I’m talking about one big speech about ‘How I view the world.’ ”

In an interview before he left for Illinois, Mr. Obama said he realized his powerful appeal as a campaigner would take him only so far. Other campaigns that have relied extensively on the life story of the candidate have typically foundered.

“If a campaign is premised on personality, then no, I don’t think you can stay fresh for a year,” he said. “But if the campaign is built from the ground up and there is a sense of ownership among people who want to see significant change, then absolutely. It can build and grow.”

And in his speech here on Saturday, Mr. Obama, trying to offer himself as the grass-roots outsider in contrast to a member of a political family that has dominated Washington life for 15 years, presented his campaign as an effort “not just to hold an office, but to gather with you to transform a nation.”

“That is why this campaign can’t only be about me,” Mr. Obama said. “It must be about us. It must be about what we can do together.”

    Obama Formally Enters Presidential Race, NYT, 11.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/us/politics/11obama.html?hp&ex=1171256400&en=b7468ead369bac72&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Obama opens 2008 race in historic setting

Sat Feb 10, 2007 5:16AM EST
Reuters
By John Whitesides, Political Correspondent

SPRINGFIELD, Illinois (Reuters) - Democratic Sen. Barack Obama opens his 2008 White House run on Saturday in a setting rife with symbolism and historic links to Abraham Lincoln's fight to end slavery.

Obama, 45, a rising party star who would be the first black U.S. president if elected, launches his campaign outside the old state Capitol where Lincoln famously decried slavery in an 1858 speech and declared "a house divided against itself cannot stand."

In a video presentation on his Web site, Obama said the kickoff to his campaign would begin "a journey to take our country back and fundamentally change the nature of our politics."

His candidacy has intrigued Democrats looking for a fresh face and sparked waves of publicity and grass-roots buzz about the first black presidential candidate seen as having a chance to capture the White House.

Obama has vaulted quickly into the top tier of a crowded field of Democratic presidential contenders along with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and 2004 vice presidential nominee John Edwards.

Five other Democrats are contending for the nomination, including New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, former Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack and Sens. Chris Dodd of Connecticut and Joseph Biden of Delaware.

An exploratory trip to New Hampshire in December drew sold-out crowds, hordes of media and positive reviews for Obama.

But the freshman senator from Illinois has faced questions and doubts about his relative lack of experience, his policy views on a wide range of issues and on whether the United States is ready to elect a black to the White House.

Obama has shrugged off questions about his experience and resisted efforts to define his candidacy by race, saying a fresh perspective is needed to break through Washington gridlock on issues like energy, health care and the Iraq war.

Asked in a CBS "60 Minutes" interview to be aired on Sunday if being black would hold him back as a candidate, Obama said, "No ... if I don't win this race it will be because of other factors -- that I have not shown to the American people, a vision for where the country needs to go," Excerpts were released on Friday.

SPEEDY ASCENT

Obama was an early opponent of the war and has called for a phased withdrawal of troops starting in May. He opposes President George W. Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq.

Obama's political rise has been astonishingly fast. He gave the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention before he was even elected to the U.S. Senate, and he has authored two bestselling books and appeared on numerous magazine covers.

The son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya, he was the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review and served eight years in the Illinois Legislature in Springfield before going to Washington.

Obama will follow up his announcement with a three-day campaign swing to the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire and his hometown of Chicago.

    Obama opens 2008 race in historic setting, R, 10.2.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN0923153320070210

Push to Resolve

Fading Killings of Rights Era

February 3, 2007
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA, Feb. 2 — For every infamous killing that tore at the South in the 1950s and ’60s, there were many more that were barely noted, much less investigated.

Virtually all such cases gained momentum only when the victims of the past found voices in the present, like those that helped arrest a 71-year-old man last month in connection with the Klan killings of two black teenagers in Mississippi in 1964. Rather than police officials, it has often been journalists and filmmakers who have combed through documents and tracked down witnesses, fueling some 15 years of successful prosecutions.

Only now, with time running out because potential witnesses and suspects are dying off, have law enforcement officials begun to take a systematic approach to unsolved civil rights crimes. The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently canvassed its field offices for the first time, compiling a list of 51 victims in 39 cases, most of which were never investigated by the bureau.

The list was prompted not by the string of convictions, but by a letter about the lynching of two black couples at the Moore’s Ford Bridge, east of Atlanta, in 1946, said Chip Burrus, the assistant director of the F.B.I.’s criminal investigative division.

“When I read the letter, I said, ‘I’ve never heard of Moore’s Ford. What is this about?’ ” Mr. Burrus said. “There’ve got to be more of these things.”

That a single letter prodded the F.B.I. to action illustrates how slender are the time-brittled fibers that knit together the outcome in these fading crimes.

In the case that produced the recent arrest, timing was crucial. If the bodies of the victims, Henry H. Dee and Charles E. Moore, had been found just three weeks earlier in the summer of 1964, their deaths might have been largely forgotten.

The two friends, a sawmill worker and a college student, were 19 when they disappeared in May 1964, last seen hitchhiking on the highway near Meadville, Miss. They were beaten and drowned by Klansmen who mistakenly believed the two were involved in plotting an armed uprising. Two months later, on July 12, a fisherman spotted the torso of Mr. Moore in a Mississippi River backwater called the Old River. Mr. Dee was found the next day.

At the time, an extensive search was under way for three civil rights workers, two of whom were white New Yorkers, who had disappeared on the opposite end of the state in what became known as the “Mississippi Burning” case. The initial classification of Mr. Moore’s body as that of a Caucasian male, and thus potentially one of the missing rights workers, caused a spurt of media coverage.

That fleeting interest had two results, said David Ridgen, a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation producer who has made a documentary about the case. It prompted the F.B.I. to investigate, and it ensured that there was enough in the historical record to arouse the curiosity, decades later, of scholars and reporters.

Countless other race killings, however, were minimally recorded. In the late 1980s, when the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., was creating its memorial to 40 civil rights martyrs, most of whose cases remain unprosecuted, researchers found more than 80 victims who could not be included because not enough was known about the circumstances of their deaths.

“It was so frustrating and sad,” said Sarah Bullard, the project’s chief researcher. “If the information wasn’t there I couldn’t include them, no matter what I suspected or felt.”

Mr. Burrus of the F.B.I. said he was not familiar with the monument or the center’s research, but that the bureau had also consulted civil rights groups in compiling its list.

Because local newspapers often ignored such killings, Ms. Bullard pored over microfilm of national newspapers and records compiled by the Tuskegee Institute, internal memorandums of the N.A.A.C.P. and other civil rights groups, and cartons of news clippings collected by a research group called the Southern Regional Council and stored in the basement of a Korean grocery in Atlanta.

Ms. Bullard recalled references to an unidentified teenager who was found in the Big Black River in Mississippi wearing a Congress of Racial Equality T-shirt. After scouring all her sources, she learned only his name, Herbert Oarsby.

“There were activists who were trying to pay attention,” Ms. Bullard said, “but at the same time there were African-American communities who knew that racist crimes amongst them were not going to be investigated or reported and made the choice not to seek justice because it would bring on further violence against them.”

That may have been the case with Mr. Moore’s mother, Mazie, who made her elder son Thomas promise not to avenge or seek justice for his brother’s death. In 1964, when reporters found her at the country shack where she had lived all her life, she repeatedly praised the white residents of Franklin County, a Klan stronghold, and said there was nothing to be done.

Alvin Sykes, a civil rights advocate who has urged the federal government to pass the Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Bill, which would provide $11.5 million per year to investigate these cases, said part of that money would be used to encourage people scared into silence at the time to come forward. “We have absolutely no idea how many of them are out there,” Mr. Sykes said.

Mazie Moore died in 1977, and in 1998 Thomas Moore finally decided to seek justice, contacting the local district attorney, Ronnie Harper, who was unaware of the case. Mr. Harper requested information from the F.B.I., and was told that no file on the case existed.

But in 2000 two journalists, Jerry Mitchell of The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson and Harry Phillips of ABC News, obtained copies of the F.B.I. investigation file that was said to be missing, which had led to the arrest of Charles M. Edwards and James F. Seale in November 1964, though the charges were dropped when the district attorney said there was not enough evidence to make a case.

Mr. Phillips used the file to track down the F.B.I.’s principal informant, Ernest Gilbert, then 74, persuading him to do an on-camera interview about the case, and Mr. Mitchell reported that because the crime began in the Homochitto National Forest, where the two victims were tied to trees and beaten with switches, federal prosecutors might have jurisdiction in the case.

But even those breakthroughs did not force prosecutors to act. Mr. Harper says he was told by the F.B.I. that Mr. Gilbert would not testify. The F.B.I. closed the case in 2003 because the jurisdiction issue could not be resolved, said Deborah Madden, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. office in Jackson. Mr. Gilbert died in 2004.

Thomas Moore, living in Colorado Springs, grew tired of telling reporters his brother’s story with no result. But in 2005, Mr. Ridgen, the documentary producer, convinced him that the two should go back to Mississippi together.

On that trip, they discovered that Mr. Seale was not dead, as several newspapers had reported, but was still living in Franklin County. Then came a coincidence: Thomas Moore had served in the same Army unit as Dunn Lampton, who became the United States attorney in Jackson in 2001. Mr. Moore and Mr. Ridgen persuaded Mr. Lampton to reopen the case, resulting in the recent arrest of Mr. Seale, who has pleaded not guilty.

“Thomas Moore had a lot of information about what happened, and I made use of that,” Mr. Lampton said. “You don’t come into an office and go back and start digging through all the old files to find something to do. It’s only when someone brings that to your attention.”

    Push to Resolve Fading Killings of Rights Era, NYT, 3.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/us/03civil.html?hp&ex=1170565200&en=6b31fcf752a5094b&ei=5094&partner=homepage

4 hate-crime beating teens get probation

Posted 2/2/2007 11:38 PM ET
AP
USA Today

LONG BEACH, Calif. (AP) — Four of nine black teenagers convicted in the racially charged beating of three white women on Halloween were sentenced to probation Friday.

Punishment could have ranged up to confinement in a California Youth Authority lockup until age 25. The teens were ordered to serve 250 hours of community service, 60 days house arrest, and take anger management and racial tolerance programs.

"It was an awful crime. Terrible, emotional and physical injuries," Juvenile Court Judge Gibson Lee said.

Last week, Lee convicted nine teens — eight female and one male — of felony assault, with a hate-crime enhancement against all but one.

Among those sentenced Friday were an 18-year-old youth, his twin sister, their 16-year-old sister — who didn't receive the hate-crime enhancement — and another 16-year-old girl.

The other five defendants face sentencing next week. Names of the defendants were withheld because they are juveniles or were juveniles at the time and were tried as juveniles.

The 18-year-old male teenager had pleaded with the judge, saying he was innocent and tried to help the victims, including taking a skateboard away from an assailant who was using it as a weapon.

"What will my life be like? I'm 18 and convicted of a hate crime," he said.

The victims were in an affluent area of Long Beach that draws crowds with fancy Halloween displays when a crowd of black youths yelled racial insults and one shouted "I hate whites," according to prosecutors.

One victim testified the trio was pelted with small pumpkins and lemons. A witness testified two of the women were beaten with skateboards.

Prosecutors said the beating only ended when a black motorist stopped, pulled the assailants away and shielded the women with his body.

"I'm not sure if all the emotional scars will ever completely vanish," 21-year-old Loren Hyman, one of the victims, said earlier in a victim impact statement. "I feel like the beating I endured on Halloween night is still not over."

Two 15-year-old boys face trial later on charges of felony assault with the hate-crime enhancement.

Long Beach, 22 miles south of downtown Los Angeles, is a major U.S. cargo port with a racially diverse population of 475,000 and neighborhoods ranging from high-end shoreline condos to low-income urban areas.

    4 hate-crime beating teens get probation, UT, 2.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-02-halloween-beatings_x.htm

Minimum wage hike would help blacks: study

Fri Jan 26, 2007 2:21 PM ET
Reuters
By Ed Stoddard

DALLAS (Reuters) - Proposed increases in the U.S. minimum wage would likely result in pay raises for around 2 million black workers, according to a study released this week by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

The Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives earlier this month approved legislation to increase the minimum wage over two years to $7.25 per hour from $5.15 per hour -- which would be its first hike in a decade.

But Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked the bill, demanding it also include small business tax relief. The Senate was set to debate the bill again on Friday with passage of a wage hike-tax break measure expected next week. The Senate and House would then have to negotiate a final version.

"Our analysis shows that this increase in the minimum wage would have a significant positive impact on African American families and communities," said Ralph Everett, president and CEO of the Joint Center, a Washington-based think tank.

"African Americans are more likely to live in states that either have no minimum wage or have minimums equal to the federal rate, and so they would certainly benefit from a new law raising the floor," he said.

The report estimates the following numbers based on the proposed staggered increases up to 2009:

2007 - 189,000 black workers benefit when minimum wage rises to $5.85 an hour.

2008 - An additional 419,000 benefit when it goes to $6.55 an hour.

2009 - 753,000 more benefit when it climbs to $7.25 an hour.

"Wages for many low-income workers are just above the current federal minimum wage but below $7.25 and that is why the numbers get larger as you go along," Dr. Margaret Simms, an economist at the Joint Center, told Reuters by phone.

The center's study also estimates that a further 651,000 black workers could see wage increases over this same time period because of raises in state minimum wages or a combination of state and federal hikes -- bringing the total number to around 2 million.

It said that the largest number of black workers who would get a wage boost from the federal legislation were found in southern states, where black poverty remains widespread four decades after the civil rights movement.

"However, despite the positive effects for these workers, there are likely to be 2 million other workers, about 9 percent of them African American, who will not benefit from the increase due to existing federal exemptions from minimum wage laws," the center said.

These could include workers in very small businesses, agricultural laborers and some workers in training.

    Minimum wage hike would help blacks: study, R, 26.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2007-01-26T192052Z_01_N26358518_RTRUKOC_0_US-MINIMUMWAGE-BLACKS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2

Man pleads not guilty in 1964 Mississippi race case

Thu Jan 25, 2007 6:06 PM ET
Reuters
By Kyle Carter

JACKSON, Mississippi (Reuters) - A former Ku Klux Klan member pleaded not guilty on Thursday to charges in the 1964 murders of two black teenagers in Mississippi, in a case that highlights violence used by white supremacists during the civil-rights era.

Marshals escorted James Seale, 71, to and from federal court in Jackson for an initial hearing on kidnapping and conspiracy charges.

A three-count indictment says Seale trained a shotgun on the teenagers while his companions beat them. Then they attached heavy weights to the pair and threw them alive into the Mississippi River.

"These tragic murders are straight from among the darkest page of our country's history," FBI Director Robert Mueller told a news conference in Washington at which the charges were detailed.

Seale, who faces a maximum life term on each count if convicted, was manacled and wore an orange prison uniform. A bond hearing in the case is expected on Monday.

Until Thursday no one had been charged with the murders of the two 19-year-olds, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, although they were long thought to have been abducted and killed by members of the Klan.

"On or about May 2, 1964, defendant Seale aimed a sawed-off shotgun at Dee and Moore" while fellow members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan "beat them with switches and tree branches," according to the indictment.

It said Seale and the others attached a Jeep engine block to Dee, took him onto the Mississippi in a boat and threw him in. They attached iron weights and railroad rails to Moore and also threw him into the river, the indictment said.

The murders attracted little publicity at the time and were typical of dozens in the Deep South, many involving Klan members protected by authorities who approved of their efforts to tyrannize blacks and halt the civil-rights movement.

The movement, led by Martin Luther King, used nonviolent tactics and civil disobedience in a campaign to outlaw racial segregation in the South and permit blacks to vote there.

"These allegations are a painful reminder of a terrible time in our country ... when some people viewed their fellow Americans as inferior and as a threat based only on the color of their skin," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told the news conference.

CLIMATE OF FEAR

Dee and Moore were killed on the pretext that whites feared activists from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee were running guns into the area, according to the Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Mississippi.

Their bodies were recovered during a high-profile search for three other civil rights activists later that year.

In 2005 a jury in Mississippi convicted Klansmen Edgar Ray Killen of manslaughter over those murders, which had helped crystallize revulsion at opposition to civil rights in part because two of the victims were white volunteers from New York working to register blacks during a "Freedom Summer" campaign.

Veterans of the civil-rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s say the climate of fear in the south caused by the violence was nowhere greater than in Mississippi.

Thelma Collins, Dee's elderly sister, said she cried when she learned Seale had been arrested.

"I had shed so many tears over the years whenever I get to thinking about it. I thank the Lord I got to see it (an arrest) at 70 years old," she told reporters in Washington.

Thomas Moore, the 63-year-old brother of Charles Moore, said he made a promise at his brother's grave to fight for his case until he dies. "I cried when I got the word" of the arrest, he told reporters.

"Mississippi cold cases can be solved. There can be justice even 40 years later," said Moore, who worked with journalists to get the U.S. attorney in Mississippi to reopen the case in 2005.

(Additional reporting by James Vicini in Washington)

    Man pleads not guilty in 1964 Mississippi race case, R, 25.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2007-01-25T230555Z_01_N25441355_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-RIGHTS-MISSISSIPPI.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2

Mississippi Man Arrested in Killing of 2 Blacks in ’64

January 25, 2007
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA, Jan. 24 — A 71-year-old man was arrested Wednesday in Mississippi on federal kidnapping charges stemming from the 1964 killing of two black teenagers who were tied to trees, whipped and drowned.

The suspect, James F. Seale, a former crop-duster, was indicted in Jackson and taken into custody in the southwestern Mississippi town of Roxie, not far from where the two young men were seized.

The charges against Mr. Seale, some seven years after the Federal Bureau of Investigation reopened the case, are the latest in a string of prosecutions of racially motivated slayings from the 1950s and ’60s. While virtually all the prosecutions so far have proved successful, investigators have long warned that every passing year makes it more difficult to build a case.

Many of those killings became nationally infamous, like the murder of three civil rights workers — James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — portrayed decades later in the movie “Mississippi Burning.” But like dozens of lynchings in that era, the deaths of the two victims in this case, Henry H. Dee and Charles E. Moore, both 19, were far more obscure.

The discovery of their bodies, in the Old River near Natchez, Miss., attracted attention mainly because it was initially thought that they might be those of two of the three missing rights workers, who, as the nation looked on, were being sought by federal agents, dozens of volunteers and 400 Navy sailors.

Still, the F.B.I. took on the Dee-Moore case, and in November 1964 Mr. Seale, the son of a chapter leader of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and another man, Charles M. Edwards, were arrested. Local authorities never prosecuted them, however, even though Mr. Edwards, according to the case file, had told federal agents that he, Mr. Seale and others had beaten Mr. Dee and Mr. Moore, who, Mr. Edwards said, were alive when he left them.

Mr. Dee was a sawmill worker; Mr. Moore had recently been expelled from college after participating in a student demonstration. According to a variety of accounts pieced together from F.B.I. files, the Klan mistakenly believed that they were Black Muslims involved in plotting an armed uprising.

That season had been dubbed Freedom Summer by civil rights volunteers hoping to get blacks onto the voter rolls, but in and around Natchez it was a time of terror spread by the Klan. When Klan members saw Mr. Dee and Mr. Moore hitchhiking in early May, they returned with reinforcements and ordered them into a car.

The two were taken deep into the Homochitto National Forest, where they were secured to trees and beaten. They were then driven across the nearby state line to Louisiana, where they were tied to an engine block and thrown into the river with tape covering their mouths.

Mr. Edwards is still living, although The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson reported Wednesday that he was not expected to be arrested and was a potential witness in the case against Mr. Seale. James Newman, the sheriff of Franklin County, which includes Roxie, said Mr. Seale was in poor health and used a cane to walk.

Mr. Edwards is described in the documents from the time as an admitted Klansman. In an interview in 2000 with Jerry Mitchell of The Clarion-Ledger, who has written extensively about the case, Mr. Seale denied being a Klansman or knowing any members, although his family’s involvement in the Klan is well documented.

The F.B.I. reopened the case in 2000 after investigative files that had been thought lost were recovered, and after Mr. Mitchell reported that the killings had most likely occurred on federal land, giving federal prosecutors jurisdiction in what was seen as a case potentially involving murder charges. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined Wednesday to explain the decision to charge Mr. Seale with kidnapping, and a spokeswoman for the United States attorney in Jackson did not return phone calls.

In 2002, Mr. Seale’s son began telling newspaper reporters that his father was dead. But Thomas Moore, the elder brother of Charles Moore, returned to the area with a documentary filmmaker on a trip in 2004, and a local resident directed him to the mobile home where Mr. Seale lived. Mr. Seale ran inside and shut the door.

    Mississippi Man Arrested in Killing of 2 Blacks in ’64, NYT, 25.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/25/us/25mississippi.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Former Mississippi lawman charged in 1964 slayings of 2 black teens

Updated 1/24/2007 6:56 PM ET
By Jerry Mitchell, The (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion-Ledger
USA Today

JACKSON, Miss. — Six years ago, reputed Klansman James Seale scoffed at the notion he'd ever be arrested for kidnapping and killing two African-American teenagers in 1964.

He may not be scoffing now, arrested today on federal kidnapping charges in connection with the Ku Klux Klan's May 2, 1964, abduction and slayings of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore.

Asked in 2000 if he had anything to do with crime, Seale replied, "I ain't in jail, am I?"

The arrest of the 71-year-old former cropduster marks the 28th arrest from the civil rights era in the United States over the past two decades.

Since 1998, Moore's brother, Thomas, has been pushing for justice in the case.

Upon learning of the arrest, he choked up. "I'm very emotional," he said. "I don't know what to say."

He said he's grateful and thankful the day finally came. "I'm just glad I had something to do with it," he said. "I just hope Charles and Henry Dee know there is justice on the way."

Dee's sister, Mary Byrd, also welcomed the news. "I feel good now," she said. "Yes, indeed."

Since 1989, Mississippi and six other states have re-examined 29 killings, leading to 22 convictions, most recently in 2005 when a Neshoba County jury convicted Edgar Ray Killen of manslaughter for orchestrating the Klan's killings of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

"We are extremely pleased to see that the federal government is truly committed to taking care of its unfinished business from the civil rights era," said Alvin Sykes, a Kansas City activist whose work helped lead to the reinvestigation of the 1955 killing of Emmet Till.

The Till case may be presented to a grand jury later this year.

Sykes is now pushing legislation that would create a cold cases unit within the Justice Department to track down unpunished killers from the civil rights era. "When Congress passes the Till bill, you can best believe there will be a lot more perpetrators from that era who will be facing the bar of justice for the lynchings they thought they got away with many years ago," Sykes said.

The slayings of Dee and Moore are among dozens of killings that plagued this nation during the civil rights movement. The names of 40 martyrs from the movement can be found on the National Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, and nearly half of those killings took place in Mississippi.

Seale was arrested once before in connection with the slayings. That came Nov. 6, 1964, when authorities arrested him and Charles Marcus Edwards on murder charges.

At the time, authorities confronted Seale and told him they knew he and others took Dee and Moore "to some remote place and beat them to death," FBI records say. "You then transported and disposed of their bodies by dropping them in the Mississippi River. You didn't even give them a decent burial. We know you did it. You know you did. The Lord above knows you did it."

"Yes," Seale was quoted as replying, "but I'm not going to admit it. You are going to have to prove it."

When authorities arrested Edwards, he "admitted that he and James Seale picked up Dee and another Negro in vicinity of Meadville and took them to an undisclosed wooded area where they were 'whipped,'" a Nov. 6, 1964, FBI document says. "States victims were alive when he departed the wooded area."

According to FBI documents, Dee and Moore were hitchhiking from Meadville when Klansmen coaxed them into their vehicle by pretending to be law enforcement agents. Deep in the woods, Klansmen repeatedly beat the teens, believing they knew something about a rumor regarding gun-running in Franklin County.

Finally, one of the pair claimed the guns were being hidden in a church, hoping to stop the violence.

It didn't.

Klansmen loaded Dee and Moore into the trunk of a car and hauled them across the Mississippi River. There, Klansmen tied them up and weighted them down with a Jeep motor block before dumping them into the Old River two miles south of King, La.

On July 12, 1964, a fisherman found Moore's body and reported it to authorities.

Two months after the arrests, then-District Attorney Lenox Foreman asked to have the murder charges thrown out, saying further investigation was needed.

FBI agents pressed forward, but many were fearful, including potential witnesses. "This informant advised he would not testify under any circumstances because he is concerned for his life and the lives of his family," a Jan. 12, 1965, FBI document reads.

At the time of the killings, Seale and Edwards worked for International Paper Co.

The FBI said the Klan in those days infiltrated unions at that company and others in Natchez. On Feb. 14, 1964, Alfred Whitley, a black employee at Armstrong Tire Co., was abducted and whipped. Two weeks later, Clinton Walker, a black employee at International Paper, was killed on his way home. His car was riddled with bullets.

In 1965, George Metcalfe, an NAACP leader and Armstrong employee was nearly killed when a bomb exploded his car. Two years later, his friend and fellow employee, Wharlest Jackson, died when his truck exploded.

"The Klan ruled then," Thomas Moore recalled. "There were a lot of things that happened back then."

As years passed, the killings of his brother and his friend were forgotten — like so many others from the civil rights era.

In 1998, memories of his brother's killing were rekindled when he read about the dragging death of James Byrd in Texas and decided to write a letter.

Shortly after a judge sentenced Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers to life in prison in 1998 for ordering the 1966 killing of NAACP leader Vernon Dahmer, Thomas Moore wrote District Attorney Ronnie Harper, asking him to look into the case. Harper agreed, but acknowledged he lacked the resources to investigate the matter.

In late 1999, the FBI reopened the 1966 killing of sharecropper Ben Chester White after learning the killing took place on federal property, deep in the Homochitto National Forest. Klansmen killed White in an unsuccessful attempt to lure Martin Luther King Jr. to the Natchez area.

On Jan. 13, 2000, The Clarion-Ledger reported White's killing wasn't the only violence that took place in that forest — so had the beatings of Dee and Moore.

After FBI agents reported they had destroyed their files in the case, The Clarion-Ledger found they weren't destroyed and got copies.

The Clarion-Ledger also tracked down and interviewed Seale, who blamed the newspaper for talk of reprosecution. "You don't have anything better to do but to stir this stuff up," he said.

The FBI reopened the case, only to stall when they believed the FBI's key informant in the case, Ernest Gilbert, was dead.

The Social Security Death Index showed a man of the same name had died in Mississippi in 1999, but the real Gilbert was still alive and living in Clinton, La.

In spring 2000, ABC News producer Harry Phillips tracked him down and got the former Klansman to share his story of a friend's confession to the crime. The FBI then interviewed Gilbert.

Gilbert told The Clarion-Ledger how Seale's brother, Jack, came to him and confessed his involvement in Dee and Moore's killings. "I couldn't live with it," Gilbert said. "I wish I never had been in the Klan. It messed my life up."

But by the end of 2000, authorities let the case grow cold. They still had questions regarding federal jurisdiction and were busy preparing to prosecute Ernest Avants for White's killing.

Federal authorities didn't get interested again in the Dee-Moore killings until July 13, 2005 — a few weeks after jurors convicted Killen in the killings of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner.

That's when Thomas Moore met with U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton of Jackson, convincing him to have his office take a second look at the case.

Lampton has taken a personal interest in the case, sometimes accompanying FBI agents in their interviews.

No charges are expected against Edwards, who has been interviewed by the FBI and may be a witness against Seale.

Mississippi native Myrlie Evers-Williams, chairman emeritus of the national NAACP, still shudders when she recalls the dark days when the Klan reigned in Mississippi.

"It was fear at its worst. You could easily link it to what took place in Nazi Germany," recalled Evers-Williams, whose husband was assassinated by a Klansman in 1963. "It was being afraid to sit in your living room on a sofa because there was a window."

    Former Mississippi lawman charged in 1964 slayings of 2 black teens, UT, 24.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-24-miss-deputy-arrest_x.htm

Dairy could doom historic California town, group says

Updated 1/21/2007 11:38 PM ET
USA Today
By John Ritter

ALLENSWORTH, Calif. — A few restored buildings among sprawling flat acres of farmland are all that's left of an ambitious experiment a century ago — one doomed to fail but still an enduring symbol of African-American self-sufficiency.

Allen Allensworth, a former slave who rose to Army colonel, brought a colony of blacks here to a sparsely settled corner of the Central Valley in 1908. His vision was a discrimination-free town where blacks, through hard work and education, could compete in white America.

Unforeseen events killed the dream, but in the 1970s, the state preserved the town as a historical park. Today, Allensworth, an icon of black history, is threatened by a herd of cows, its patrons say.

Tulare County, the USA's top milk producer, has tentatively approved plans for a large dairy outside the 240-acre park. The Friends of Allensworth, a group with members across the state, fears odor and flies from 9,000 cows and their manure will drive visitors away. The group wants the dairy located somewhere else.

"Allensworth is one of a kind. It can't be replaced," says Victor Carter, president of the Friends of Allensworth. "It should be there for our youth, to see what we can accomplish given a chance." The park had 7,843 visitors in fiscal year 2006, according to the state parks department.

Ed Pope's family settled in Allensworth in the 1930s. He returned in retirement "to become a preservation activist on the scene." The park is on the National Register of Historic Places. If the dairy comes, Pope says, he could stand on railroad tracks next to the park "and throw a rock and hit a cow."

"If people stop coming, the state can't justify spending money to keep the park open. And if the park dies, Allensworth dies," says Pope, 77.

'Leave Allensworth alone'

The California Legislature's Black Caucus opposes the dairy. Its chairman, Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, hasn't ruled out legislation to stop it, says his spokeswoman, Jasmyne Cannick.

As a state senator in the 1960s, Dymally sponsored the bill creating the state park. In December, he urged Tulare supervisors "to leave Allensworth alone" and find another site for the dairy.

The park's buildings — including a church, hotel, two general stores, post office, barber shop, drugstore, bakery and Allensworth's home — have been restored to original form. The Friends hold several annual events here. Volunteers from around the state interpret the history for visitors.

In its heyday, many black Californians disapproved of Allensworth. Hostility has softened over the years, Carter says. "Black leaders at the time didn't believe in separation," he says. "They felt like we were doing what the white population wanted. Feelings ran deep."

Col. Allensworth has come to be seen as a visionary. He tried to establish a college — a Tuskegee of the West — so young blacks in the early 1900s would have access to higher education without returning to the South.

"It was very hard to get a high school diploma, much less college, in the West at that time," Carter says. The Legislature killed a proposal for a college at Allensworth.

After the colonel was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1914, the town declined. Its land turned out to be less fertile than the founders had thought. The source of its economic prosperity, a stop on the Santa Fe Railroad line, was lost to a nearby town. World War I drew young men to jobs in the cities. Once-plentiful water dwindled.

"The plan was to make the town productive for the ages," Carter says. "That didn't come to fruition."

Dairy more than a mile away

County officials say the dairy, on two separate sites, will be more than a mile from the park's edge and won't be a nuisance to visitors. Modern dairy techniques control smells and pollution from open pits, or lagoons, that hold waste from dairy operations, county Supervisor Connie Conway says. Dairies must obtain water- and air-quality permits.

"It's a very high-technology, scientific business now," Conway says. "The industry is highly monitored and, in my county, very socially and environmentally responsible."

Conway says the dairy will be downwind from the park, though Carter and his group dispute that.

In 1998, Tulare County settled a lawsuit from the state attorney general, agreeing to study environmental impacts of dairy development. Two years later, the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, a California group that provides legal help on environmental issues, sued the county, claiming its study was inadequate.

The county settled again in 2001, ending a three-year moratorium on new dairies, but the study still isn't final. In 2005, more than 600,000 Tulare cows produced $1.5 billion in milk and dairy products.

The spread of industrial megadairies and their environmental hazards from contaminated runoff and air pollution caused by decaying waste have led to lawsuits and tougher regulations. Plans for new dairies near residential areas invariably draw opposition, even here where agriculture is king.

"We have some of the nation's worst air pollution, and with the influx of dairies it's only going to get worse," says Caroline Farrell, a lawyer for the center on race.

Landowner Sam Etchegaray plans to convert about 12% of his 2,692 acres of crops and pasture to more profitable dairy operations that his sons will operate, says his lawyer, David Albers.

State parks officials are exploring whether they can stop the dairy by buying development rights from Etchegaray and keep a crop buffer around the park.

"We're talking," Albers says. "The parks department seems very motivated to buy the rights. But we could have very different ideas about what the value is."

    Dairy could doom historic California town, group says, UT, 21.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-01-21-allensworth_x.htm

In Virginia, More to 'Get Over' Than Slavery

Saturday, January 20, 2007; A23
The Washington Post
By Colbert I. King

On last Monday's Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, Frank D. Hargrove, a Republican lawmaker in Virginia's House of Delegates, said that instead of seeking a formal apology from the commonwealth for slavery, "black citizens should get over it." Hargrove also reportedly wondered how far such apologies should go. "Are we going to force the Jews to apologize for killing Christ?"

Frank Hargrove is one reason that young African Americans should never take their hard-won rights for granted. His outlook is also a wake-up call to some of my Jewish friends who think they have it made.

He has nothing I want, including an apology. But I'm not getting over slavery.

There's nothing quite like going to a county office building down in Culpeper County, Va., and finding evidence of your family's enslavement. I did that several years ago.

Pages of land records confirmed the story I had heard since I was a young boy: that my late mother's maiden name, Colbert (my first name), was taken from a white Culpeper County family that had the last name Colbert and that owned my great-grandfather and his siblings before the Civil War.

The documented portrayal of my bloodline isn't easily forgotten. Those relatives of mine were considered legal property, which explains why they were listed by name, with individually assigned monetary value, among the inventory of farm implements, barnyard animals and other Colbert-owned assets.

"Get over it." Not likely.

Hargrove was correct when he told the House of Delegates on Tuesday that "not a soul in this legislature" had anything to do with slavery. It was before their time. But Virginia's shameful history on race is not limited to slavery.

Hargrove, who will be 80 next week, cannot escape the fact that he and many white Virginians alive today were present when the spirit of Jim Crow reigned supreme in the Old Dominion.

Hargrove was 17 when the Virginia legislature passed a law requiring separate white and black waiting rooms at airports. Surely he must have heard about that.

When Hargrove was 29, Sen. Harry Byrd declared massive resistance to the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision desegregating public schools. Did he miss that?

What did 31-year-old Hargrove think in 1958 when the General Assembly passed a series of laws to prevent school desegregation, including a measure forbidding state funds to be spent on integrated schools? That was a memorable year. And the next year, Prince Edward County went to an extreme to protect lily-white education. It closed the school system rather than integrate.

Recall (courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society) this repugnant chapter of Virginia's racial history that occurred in Hargrove's time:


? On Feb. 20, 1960, students from the historically black Virginia Union University entered Woolworth's department store on Broad Street in Richmond, sat at the lunch counter and patiently waited to be served. Instead, the management closed the store.


? On June 9, 1960, an integrated group of youths sat at a Peoples Drug store lunch counter in Arlington. Waitresses served the whites, then walked away. A few minutes later, the lunch counter was closed.


? In 1963, protesters gathered in front of the College Shoppe Restaurant on Main Street in Farmville. Management refused to serve blacks. Sheriff's deputies, in keeping with Virginia's Jim Crow laws, forcibly removed them.

Today, black Virginians no longer must ride in the backs of buses. They aren't confined to theater balconies or other designated areas. Their visits to restrooms, parks, beaches and swimming pools are not blocked by "White Only" signs.

Most changes didn't result from state action. Virginia's Jim Crow system was brought down by a combination of lawsuits, a courageous civil rights movement, people such as Elaine R. Jones and Oliver W. Hill of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and federal civil rights laws.

And contrary to what Frank Hargrove and others may wish to believe, the state's legacy of segregation and discrimination in education and employment has harmed many black Virginians, depriving them of the tangible benefits enjoyed by their white counterparts.

Professor Richard F. America put it this way in his book "Paying the Social Debt: What White America Owes Black America": "Discrimination is good for someone, but most people have chosen to think of it merely as unkind or socially unfair. . . . Restitution theory strips away the pretense. It lets us see how discrimination has indirectly enriched millions of people relative to those who have been excluded."

Now chill. This piece isn't about reparations. It is, however, a reminder -- as if one is needed -- that the Emancipation Proclamation did not remove the shackles from the descendants of slaves; that injustice and inequality were an integral part of Virginia during the adult life of Frank Hargrove.

Which gets me to the source of his consternation: the legislative proposal for Virginia to issue an apology for slavery. I'm not sure it's worth the trouble. But if the effort must be made, why should the apology be limited to involuntary servitude? Why not include the sins of segregation and discrimination? Unlike slavery, those are sins that loads of Virginians, alive and well today, had something to do with.

    In Virginia, More to 'Get Over' Than Slavery, WP, 20.1.2007, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/19/AR2007011901542.html

Overall cancer deaths decline again, but statistics not as rosy for blacks

Updated 1/17/2007 10:52 PM ET
USA Today
By Anita Manning and Steve Sternberg

The number of Americans dying of cancer declined for second year in a row, this time by a much greater number, the American Cancer Society reports, a signal that decades of advances in prevention and treatment are paying off, experts say.

Although black women have a 9% lower cancer rate than their white peers, black women have an 18% higher death rate for all forms of cancer. Black men have a 15% higher rate of cancer and a 38% higher death rate than white men, a trend that extends from 1999 to 2003.

These statistics stand in stark contrast to the cancer society's overall tally, out Wednesday, showing 3,014 fewer cancer deaths in 2004 than in 2003. Cancer rates have been declining since 1991, the society says, but the first reported drop in actual numbers of deaths was a decline of 369 deaths from 2002 to 2003. The 2004 numbers represent only the second drop in more than 70 years of record-keeping.

"The prognosis is grim for African-Americans," says Carla Boutin-Foster, co-director of New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell's Center for Multicultural and Minority Health. She blamed the disparity on multiple factors, including a lack of street-level cancer education programs, spotty insurance coverage and widespread poor nutrition, obesity and inactivity.

Making major gains among blacks represents a challenge because many lack access to the preventive services and treatment available to other Americans, says Bruce Chabner, clinical director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center.

"It's a combination of poverty and where they live," he says. "Many live in rural areas or urban centers served by large municipal hospitals that may not offer access to early diagnosis and specialty treatments." He said biology also plays a role. Breast and prostate cancers in blacks can be "more advanced at diagnosis and more difficult to treat."

Taken as a whole, the report yielded good news. "One of the reasons this is so remarkable is that we're living to be older, and cancer, like most chronic diseases, is more common as we age," says Richard Wender, American Cancer Society president. "So if we can actually reduce the true number of deaths, even while we're getting older … that's real progress."

The report, Cancer Statistics 2007, says that in 2004 there were 553,888 cancer deaths compared with 556,902 in 2003.

Other highlights of the report:

•Deaths from colorectal cancer showed the greatest decline. The rates dropped 5.7%, says Elizabeth Ward, director of surveillance research for the cancer society. No one factor is responsible, but "the efforts (TV news anchor) Katie Couric and others have made to educate people about the importance of colorectal cancer screening, as well as efforts to make it available, for example, for coverage under Medicare, have played an important role."

•Lung cancer deaths dropped by 333 for men but increased by 347 for women, because women historically begin smoking later than men, the report says. Men's lung cancer deaths peaked 15 years ago. "Women are peaking now," Ward says.

•Breast cancer deaths in women declined by 666 cases. The disease is expected to account for 26% of new cancer cases in women.

•Prostate cancer deaths decreased by 552 cases; prostate cancer accounts for 29% of new cases.

    Overall cancer deaths decline again, but statistics not as rosy for blacks, UT, 17.1.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-01-17-cancer_x.htm

Racial Hate Feeds a Gang War’s Senseless Killing

January 17, 2007
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 16 — The Latino gang members were looking for a black person, any black person, to shoot, the police said, and they found one. Cheryl Green, perched near her scooter chatting with friends, was shot dead in a spray of bullets that left several other young people injured.

She was 14, an eighth grader who loved junk food and watching Court TV with her mother and had recently written a poem beginning: “I am black and beautiful. I wonder how I will be living in the future.”

“I never thought something like this could happen here in L.A.,” said her mother, Charlene Lovett, fighting tears.

Cheryl’s killing last month, which the police said followed a confrontation between the gang members and a black man, stands out in a wave of bias-related attacks and incidents in a city that promotes its diversity as much as frets over it.

Ethnic and racial tension comes to Los Angeles as regularly as the Santa Ana winds. Race-related fights afflict school campuses and jails, and two major riots, in 1965 and 1992, are hardly forgotten. But civil rights advocates say that the violence grew at an alarming rate last year, continuing a trend of more Latino versus black confrontations and prompting street demonstrations and long discussions on talk-radio programs and in community meetings.

Much of the violence springs from rivalries between black and Latino gangs, especially in neighborhoods where the black population has been declining and the Latino population surging. A 14 percent increase in gang crime last year, at a time when overall violent crime was down, has been attributed in good measure to the interracial conflict.

This month, the authorities reported that crimes in the city motivated by racial, religious or sexual orientation discrimination had increased 34 percent in 2005 over the previous year. Statistics for 2006 have not yet been compiled.

Rabbi Allen Freehling, executive director of the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, a group created after the 1965 riots, said the recent growth in hate crimes reflected a failure by government and community leaders to prepare residents for socioeconomic changes in many neighborhoods, “and therefore people have a tendency to lash out, out of desperation.”

In November, three Latino gang members received sentences of life in federal prison for crimes that included the murder of two black men — one waiting for a bus, another searching for a parking spot — and assaults on others in a conspiracy to intimidate black residents of a northeast Los Angeles neighborhood.

In another case, a twist on past racial dramas, 10 black youths, some of whom prosecutors say had connections to a gang, are on trial for what prosecutors contend was a racially motivated attack in neighboring Long Beach on three young white women who were visiting a haunted house on Halloween. Long Beach also experienced an increase in hate crimes in 2005.

But even with the alarm caused by the recent increase in bias crimes, Constance L. Rice, a veteran civil rights lawyer, said that, considering Los Angeles’s diversity, race relations remained relatively calm and were even marked by many examples of groups getting along.

Still, in several corners of the city, particularly where poverty is high and demographics are shifting, tensions have been flaring.

“You don’t find entire segments of the city against one another,” Ms. Rice said, “but in the hot spots and areas of friction you find it is because the demographics are in transition and there is an assertion of power by one group or the other and you get friction.”

In Harbor Gateway, the neighborhood where Cheryl Green was killed, tension had grown so severe that blacks and Latinos formed a dividing line on a street that both sides understood never to cross and a small market was unofficially declared off-limits to blacks. Ms. Lovett had warned her children not to go near the line, 206th Street, but Cheryl had ridden her scooter near it to talk to friends when she was shot.

Neighbors said the dominant 204th Street gang, which is Latino, had harassed blacks and Latinos alike and effectively kept the groups divided, though language and cultural differences also have contributed to segregation.

“We wave hello, but I cannot really talk to blacks because my English is limited and I don’t want to mess with the gang,” said Armando Lopez, speaking in Spanish, who lives near where Cheryl was shot.

A man who described himself as a former member of the 204th Street gang said black gang members had shot or assaulted Latinos, too, and explained the violence as a deadly tit-for-tat.

“They shot a Mexican guy right around the corner from here and nobody protested or said anything,” said the man, who asked that his name not be used for fear of retaliation. He referred to neighborhood speculation that Cheryl’s killing was in retaliation for the killing of Arturo Mercado, a Latino shot to death in the neighborhood a week before Cheryl in what the police call an unexplained shooting.

The violence in that neighborhood and others has prompted a flurry of announcements by Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa and police officials promising a renewed crackdown on gangs, particularly those responsible for hate-related crimes. Mr. Villaraigosa plans to meet Friday with Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, about expanding its assistance in investigating gang and hate-related violence; the agency has been working with the police on such investigations in the San Fernando Valley, where gang violence has increased the most.

Chief William J. Bratton has said the Police Department would soon issue a most-wanted list of the city’s 10 to 20 worst gangs, with those most active in hate crimes likely to land on it.

“It’s to say, ‘We’re coming after you,’ ” Mr. Bratton said.

A city-financed report by Ms. Rice released Friday said Los Angeles needed a “Marshall plan” to address gang violence in light of a growth in gang membership and a lack of a comprehensive strategy to curb the problem.

Despite the spike in hate crimes in 2005, the total number of bias-related incidents in Los Angeles, 333 in a city of 3.8 million people, was down from peaks in violent crime in the mid-1990s and just after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Cheryl Green’s killing particularly alarmed community and civil rights advocates because of her age and the indication that the neighborhood’s long history of racial violence was continuing. Two Latino gang members have been charged with murder in the case. With the district attorney having filed a formal allegation that the men were motivated by hate, they could be eligible for the death penalty or life in prison without parole if convicted.

Mr. Villaraigosa, the city’s first Latino mayor in over a century, was elected in 2005 in part on a promise of keeping peace among racial and ethnic groups. He attended a rally in the Harbor Gateway neighborhood Saturday, one of a few demonstrations calling for unity. He hugged Ms. Lovett and Beatriz Villa, the sister-in-law of Mr. Mercado, the Latino killed earlier.

“Our cultural and ethnic diversity are cornerstones of a strong L.A.,” the mayor said Friday, “and violent crime motivated by the victim’s skin color will not be tolerated.”

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, an African-American syndicated columnist who plays host to the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, a weekly gathering in the Leimert Park neighborhood of South Los Angeles, said blacks complained that illegal Latin American immigrants were stealing jobs. Latinos, particularly newcomers unaccustomed to living among large numbers of African-Americans, in turn accuse blacks of criminal activity and harassing them.

“I think L.A. is a microcosm of what could happen in big cities in the future,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “When we have the kind of tension you see in L.A. in the schools, the workplace and now hate-crime violence, my great concern is this is a horrific view of what could happen in other cities.”

Ms. Lovett, Cheryl’s mother, said the family moved to Harbor Gateway six years ago to get away from a high-crime neighborhood in another part of Los Angeles. A relative of a black neighbor was shot by the gang a few years ago, she said, and recently she had begun looking for a safer area.

“I feel it is unfortunate my daughter had to be the sacrificial lamb,” she said. “But I just hope there is a change in this neighborhood.”

    Racial Hate Feeds a Gang War’s Senseless Killing, NYT, 17.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/17/us/17race.html?hp&ex=1169096400&en=20e6b200bebccf4f&ei=5094&partner=homepage

King Day in Atlanta, ‘the One Without Mrs. King’

January 16, 2007
The New York Times
By BRENDA GOODMAN

ATLANTA, Jan. 15 — Politicians, religious leaders and relatives of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gathered Monday in the chapel that was his spiritual home to celebrate his birthday, but for the first time, they did so without the presence of his widow, Coretta Scott King, who died last year at 78.

Dr. King’s older sister, Christine King Farris, conducted the service in the place of her sister-in-law and thanked all for being present “on this special occasion, the one without Mrs. King.”

Tributes to her were nearly as plentiful as those to Dr. King; and choral music, a special love for Mrs. King, who was a trained singer, played a large role in this year’s service.

“The 39th annual commemorative service is the first time we have gathered on my uncle’s birthday without the presence of our rock, our spiritual guide, our dear founder, Coretta Scott King,” said Isaac Newton Farris Jr., a nephew of Dr. King.

Many of the thousands who lined the streets around Ebenezer Baptist Church to watch a parade and peace march that followed the service said they were inspired to attend this year’s celebration as much because of Mrs. King’s legacy as her husband’s.

“I wanted to find out if it had the same spirit as it had in years past,” said Geneva Vanderhorst, 52, of Marietta, Ga. “And it does. This whole city has picked up her mantle.”

Hundreds of visitors squeezed into the wood pews in the church on Auburn Avenue, where Dr. King, his father and grandfather preached, with hundreds more listening from a newer sanctuary built across the street. Thousands also watched the proceedings on a live, locally televised broadcast.

Against the backdrop of an escalating war in Iraq and increasing economic disparity in the United States, many who spoke during the ceremony used Dr. King’s pulpit to call for a return to the principles of social justice and nonviolence that defined the civil rights leader’s life.

“Millions can’t find jobs, have no health insurance and struggle to make ends meet, working minimum-wage jobs,” said Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta. “What’s going on?” she asked, invoking the title of the Marvin Gaye song.

The Rev. T. DeWitt Smith, president of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, said, “When we fight a war for oil and not for democracy, we are in trouble,” adding, “There is no excuse for war.”

Outside the church, Robert Snead, 6, stood on Auburn Avenue with his brother, Tyriq, 2, and waved a white and blue sign with a dove that read “Troops Come Home.”

The boys’ mother, Felecia Snead, of Atlanta, said she brought them to the King Day celebration this year because her brother, an officer in the Navy, was about to be sent to Iraq for a second tour of duty.

“I wanted them to know about nonviolence,” Mrs. Snead said. “I wanted them to know there’s an alternative.”

    King Day in Atlanta, ‘the One Without Mrs. King’, NYT, 16.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/16/us/16king.html

King’s Daughter Honors Parents

January 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:02 p.m. ET
The New York Times

ATLANTA (AP) -- From the pulpit of the church where Martin Luther King Jr. once was pastor, Atlanta's mayor reminded the congregation Monday that his work for peace and justice remains unfinished.

Mayor Shirley Franklin admonished congregants at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church not to pay tribute to King's dream on his birthday, observed as a national holiday Monday, and then contradict it the next.

''Millions can't find jobs, have no health insurance and struggle to make ends meet, working minimum wage jobs. What's going on?'' she said, repeating a refrain from soul singer Marvin Gaye.

''Thousands of black and Latino students drop out of high school believing education will not matter and statistics say it doesn't because they can't find jobs ... What's going on?''

Earlier in the service, Georgia's newly elected congressman, Rep. Hank Johnson, paid tribute to King's children and their late mother, Coretta Scott King, who died nearly a year ago.

''On this day we honor their sacrifice and commitment, and we must carry on their work,'' said Johnson, a Democrat. ''Today as we salute Dr. King, we also lift up the life and work of Mrs. King who left us last year.''

President Bush, in an unannounced stop at a high school near the White House, said people should honor King on the holiday by finding ways to give back to their communities. Classes were not in session but volunteers were sprucing up the school.

''I encourage people all around the country to seize any opportunity they can to help somebody in need,'' Bush said. ''And by helping somebody in need you're honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King.''

In a ceremony Sunday at Ebenezer Baptist Church, King's eldest daughter evoked the civil rights movement while reminding those remembering her parents that America has not yet reached the promised land of peace and racial equality.

''We must keep reaching across the table and, in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, feed each other,'' Yolanda King said Sunday during a presentation that was part motivational speech, part drama.

Yolanda King, 51, told The Associated Press the holiday provides an opportunity for everyone to live her father's dream, and that she has her mother's example to follow.

''I connected with her spirit so strongly,'' she said when asked how she is coping with her mother's loss. ''I am in direct contact with her spirit, and that has given me so much peace and so much strength.''

Several hundred people gathered Monday morning in West Columbia, S.C., for a breakfast prayer service honoring King.

The Rev. Brenda Kneece, 45, executive minister of the South Carolina Christian Action Council, said King set the standard for sacrifice and vision.

''The vision became even more powerful because he understood the risks he was taking,'' Kneece said. ''It's very important for our children to know that his sacrifice didn't win the war. We still have to keep at it.''

A management refusal to grant the King holiday as a paid day off led to a job action Monday at a huge Smithfield Foods Inc. hog slaughtering plant at Tar Heel, N.C.

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union estimated that 400 of the 2,500 people scheduled to work at the Smithfield plant walked out or didn't show up for work Monday. The union and the workers asked Smithfield last week to grant Monday as a paid holiday, but the company said the request came too late for a change of work plans.

This year's holiday comes on the day King would have turned 78. King was assassinated while standing on the balcony of a hotel in Memphis, Tenn., on April 4, 1968. His confessed killer, James Earl Ray, was arrested two months later in London.

Coretta Scott King died last year on Jan. 31 at age 78. An activist in her own right, she also fought to shape and preserve her husband's legacy after his death, and shortly after his death she founded what would become the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change.

------

On the Net:

King Center: http://www.thekingcenter.org/

    King’s Daughter Honors Parents, NYT, 15.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-King-Holiday.html?hp&ex=1168923600&en=6987a6c0557cb72b&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Links to Slavery and N.F.L. Star

on a Hill in Texas

January 7, 2007
The New York Times
By LEE JENKINS

TOMLINSON HILL, Tex. — One hundred and fifty years ago, a white farmer named James K. Tomlinson rode through central Texas in a covered wagon and settled 15 acres of pasture land.

Today, the legacy of that land is carried on by a 27-year-old pro football player in San Diego whose ancestors were Tomlinson’s slaves.

LaDainian Tomlinson, the San Diego Chargers’ running back and the most valuable player in the National Football League, may not be related to James Tomlinson, but they are linked by the hill that bears their name.

Tomlinson Hill belongs to both of them. After Emancipation, LaDainian Tomlinson’s ancestors kept the name and stayed on the hill. They wanted to make the place their own.

“I know the hill isn’t really named for us,” LaDainian Tomlinson said. “But I take pride in it, and I take pride in my name. When I think of that hill, I think of my family. When people look at it, I want them to think about me and my family.”

Tomlinson Hill is not listed on maps. Locals refer to it as a settlement, not a town. It does not have a post office, a gas station or a store. It is not really even a hill; the altitude rises slightly from nearby Marlin and Lott. Cows graze on either side of dirt roads. Dogs run unleashed in the streets. Their barking pierces the country quiet.

The hill used to be crowded with Tomlinsons. The houses of LaDainian’s relatives and those of James Tomlinson’s descendants were divided by a pasture and a fence.

The divide still exists, a pasture separating white families from black families, large homes from small ones. The population, about 100, is racially mixed and composed largely of senior citizens. There may be only one person left whose last name is Tomlinson. He is 71, has gray stubble and usually needs a walking stick to get around.

Standing in his front yard, next to a rusty pickup truck and a car that needs new spark plugs, Oliver Tomlinson sorted through his mail. “I’m looking for my Super Bowl tickets,” he said. “I know they’re coming.”

Oliver explains to anyone passing by that his son plays football for the San Diego Chargers and that they are going to the Super Bowl. When it is suggested that they first need to win two playoff games, he waves his hand dismissively. [The Chargers have a bye, and their first game will be scheduled for Jan. 13 or 14.]

Oliver lives in a one-story white house on a corner. He watches his son’s games on a television set with a rabbit-ears antenna. He surrounds himself with space heaters. Rain clatters off his tin roof. He has no phone. Among the few decorations on the walls is an unframed photograph of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“LaDainian has asked me to move to San Diego,” Oliver said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice into a peanut can. “But I can’t leave this hill. It’s been too good to me. This hill has given me everything I need. The Lord blessed me with that boy and this hill.”

LaDainian was raised by his mother in Waco and estranged from his father, who left the family for long periods. But LaDainian’s visits to Tomlinson Hill provided a connection to his relatives. His father lived on the same block as his uncles, aunts and cousins.

Neighbors used to watch the young LaDainian dash from one house to another, often accompanied by his favorite pet, a black-and-white Poland China hog. “He was fast,” said Jewel Hodges, a Tomlinson Hill resident. “He was always fast.”

When the family made bonfires under the mesquite trees at night, LaDainian would put a toy on the edge of the fire, then try to grab the toy before it was engulfed. It was as if he were taking handoffs.

His paternal grandfather, Vincent Tomlinson, watched over LaDainian. Vincent worked the fields for John and Albert Tomlinson, descendants of James Tomlinson. Vincent lived in a house built by John and Albert, in a row known as the subdivision.

John and Albert hired Vincent’s wife, Julie, to be their cook. Every June 19, Vincent and Julie took the day off to give a party in honor of Emancipation Day. John and Albert lent them space for the party. Julie baked her famous pecan pie for everyone.

“It evolved into a unique relationship between the two families,” said Robert Stem, a state district judge who has lived on Tomlinson Hill for 30 years. “I remember Vincent and John always riding around together in an old Chevrolet pickup, running fox hounds. They called each other cousin.”

John and Albert did not have any sons, and their family name seemed destined to die with them. To honor John and Albert more than 20 years ago, Mr. Stem named his youngest son John Tomlinson Stem.

“I didn’t know then about LaDainian and what he would accomplish,” Mr. Stem said. “He has brought a whole new meaning to the Tomlinson name. By the way he acts and the way he plays, he has brought a lot of smiles to a lot of people on Tomlinson Hill.”

LaDainian set a record with 31 touchdowns this season and did not do a choreographed dance after any one of them. While San Diego appreciates his hip-fakes and stiff-arms, Tomlinson Hill appreciates how he unfailingly gives credit to his mother, Loreane Chappell, and his offensive line.

LaDainian still lists Waco as his hometown and returns every off-season, but it has been years since he made the 45-mile drive from Waco to Tomlinson Hill. He is in contact with his father, but they are not close. If and when he visits the hill, he will find a few changes.

Most of the pigs and horses are gone. The only business, a barbecue joint, has burned down.

Several of the houses on his father’s block are abandoned and decayed, the walls collapsing under the weight of time.

Not long ago, a new family moved in and thought about changing the name of Tomlinson Hill. The newcomers approached Oliver with a proposal.

“Do you know that my son is LaDainian Tomlinson?” Oliver said. “Do you know LaDainian Tomlinson, the football player?”

The new residents were embarrassed. “They apologized,” Oliver said. “They just told me to forget about it.”

Another local family, the Neumanns, would probably not have allowed such a change. Jenny and Ronnie Neumann live on the other side of the pasture from Oliver, but they talk about LaDainian as if he were their next-door neighbor.

They have a football autographed by LaDainian. They sent their youngest son, Hunter, to LaDainian’s football camp in Waco.

They talk glowingly about the day that Hunter played catch with LaDainian.

If the Chargers are playing at the same time as the Dallas Cowboys, most of the televisions in Texas are tuned to the Cowboys game. The Neumanns watch the Chargers.

“Terrell Owens plays for the Cowboys and he’s a clown,” Ronnie Neumann said. “LaDainian plays the game right. He makes us proud.”

Ronnie looked out his front yard at the only sign for Tomlinson Hill, the only visible proof that this place has a name.

The wooden welcome sign is held up by two tall posts, and the letters are attached to barbed wire. A few of the letters are falling off.

“We’ve got to get that fixed,” Ronnie said.

The sign hangs over a field that used to be a reunion ground for Confederate soldiers. Now, families and church groups rent the field for $65 a night in the summer. Usually, though, it just serves as a large front yard for Hunter.

Hunter is 13 and plays football. He looks too lean to be a running back, but he wears navy blue gym shorts emblazoned with LaDainian’s initials, L. T.

Every time Hunter opens his front door, he sees the sign for Tomlinson Hill, a name loaded with cultural significance.

But Hunter does not think about settlers and slaves. He does not reflect on American history — only football history.

“When I see it,” Hunter said, “I just think of L. T.”

    Links to Slavery and N.F.L. Star on a Hill in Texas, NYT, 7.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/sports/football/07tomlinson.html

Massachusetts Swears in

a Black Democrat as Governor

January 5, 2007
The New York Times
By PAM BELLUCK

BOSTON, Jan. 4 — In a ceremony rich with gestures of openness and symbols of conquering adversity, Deval L. Patrick, the first black governor of Massachusetts, took his oath of office on Thursday. He promised far-reaching changes in attitude and policy and asked people to “see our stake in each others’ dreams and struggles as well as our own, and act on that.”

In the state’s first outdoor inauguration, part of four days of events intended to include people across the state, Mr. Patrick, the first Democratic governor here in 16 years, said, “For a very long time now we have been told that government is bad, that it exists only to serve the powerful and well-connected, that its job is not important enough to be done by anyone competent, let alone committed, and that all of us are on our own.”

“Today we join together in common cause,” he said, “to lay that fallacy to rest.”

Mr. Patrick takes over from Mitt Romney, a Republican, who is planning to run for the presidency, and already Mr. Patrick has revealed many positions that oppose Mr. Romney’s. The former governor did not attend the inauguration.

Mr. Patrick has said that he will restore $383.6 million in budget cuts made by Mr. Romney to social services and other programs, that he will reverse the former governor’s agreement authorizing the state police to arrest illegal immigrants, and that a Romney-endorsed effort to remove some Massachusetts Turnpike tolls is unrealistic.

Mr. Patrick also said he might revoke some of the 200 11th-hour appointments Mr. Romney made to boards and commissions.

And, while Mr. Romney strongly backed a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, Mr. Patrick spoke out strongly against it this week, even as the legislature gave it first-round approval.

While the legislature is heavily Democratic in this heavily Roman Catholic state, many Democrats are more conservative than Mr. Patrick on issues like same-sex marriage. He also faces a budget deficit of about $1 billion. And it will not be easy to put into effect the state’s new health insurance reform.

“I’ve never seen a governor who has such high expectations on him as Deval Patrick,” said Jeffrey Berry, a political scientist at Tufts University. “Democrats regard him as something of a demigod. They expect him to be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and pay for social services.”

Paul Watanabe, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, said: “I think he’s going to find that governing is a lot more challenging than being a candidate. And that the demands placed upon him by large numbers of individuals — a record number of people that voted for him — are going to be difficult to meet.”

Mr. Patrick also faces criticism over his inauguration celebrations. While much was inclusive — the open-air ceremony, a town-meeting-like “youth inaugural” for students, and upcoming ceremonies in five other cities — there was also a gala whose cost was paid for largely by corporate donors, who were allowed to give up to $50,000 each.

At the inauguration itself, however, on one of the balmiest January days in memory, the tone was full of possibility, pride and humility. In a state where the legacy of busing and segregation still stings, Mr. Patrick, reared in poverty on the South Side of Chicago, took the oath on a Bible given to John Quincy Adams by Africans from the Amistad slave ship whom Adams had helped free.

Four previous Massachusetts governors were present, as was L. Douglas Wilder, the former governor of Virginia and the only other black since Reconstruction to have been a governor.

The populist timbre, and the high expectations of Mr. Patrick, were sounded early, with a benediction by Rabbi Jonah Pesner describing the multicultural electorate and the problems of poverty, violence and discrimination.

“Behind every face hides so many secrets — painful secrets of suffering,” Rabbi Pesner said, urging the governor and the people to create “a commonwealth rebuilt, repaired and redeemed.”

Among the crowd was Derward Jacobs, 60, who is disabled and who drove his scooter to the State House because “I felt like I should be here.”

George Greenidge Jr., 35, leader of an alliance of black colleges, said, “Today is a beacon of hope.”

Mr. Greenidge added that Mr. Patrick had “re-engaged a constituency that really never was involved in state politics, especially people from lower economic backgrounds.”

Beth Gilbert, 52, of Norfolk, Mass., acknowledged the steep demands that confront Mr. Patrick, saying, “When you elect a Republican governor, part of their bargain is they don’t really believe that government can solve the people’s problems. That’s probably what’s led to higher expectations here.”

Mr. Patrick signaled he was aware of the difficulties.

“I am an optimist, but not a foolish one,” he said. “I see clearly the challenges before us.”

He added: “Change is not always comfortable or convenient or welcome. But it is what we hoped for, what we have worked for, what you voted for, and what you shall have.”

Massachusetts Swears in a Black Democrat as Governor, NYT, 5.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/05/us/05boston.html