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

DNA Pioneer’s Genome

Blurs Race Lines

December 12, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Now, this is awkward.

James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and winner of the Nobel prize, raised a storm recently when a British newspaper quoted him saying that black Africans are not as intelligent as whites. But his own brilliant DNA seems to blur the lines.

A new analysis of Dr. Watson’s genome shows that he has 16 times the number of genes considered to be of African origin than the average white European does — about the same amount of African DNA that would show up if one great-grandparent were African, said Kari Stefansson, the chief executive of deCODE Genetics of Iceland, which did the analysis.

“This came up as a bit of a surprise,” Dr. Stefansson said in an interview, “especially as a sequel to his utterly inappropriate comments about Africans.”

After the news of Dr. Watson’s genetic ancestry was published in The Times of London on Sunday, much of the British media played the news for a lark, with headlines like “Revealed: Scientist Who Sparked Racism Row Has Black Genes” and “DNA Pioneer James Watson Is Blacker Than He Thought.”

But the news, straddling the uncertain boundary of genetic science and society, is more than a Southern gothic drama of racial identity played out on the world stage.

“The irony is bigger, and broader, than his having made derogatory comments and having an ancestral relationship with the folks he insulted,” said Kathy Hudson, the founder and director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center in Washington. As people see what happens to Dr. Watson and others as they undergo what she called the “molecular Full Monty,” the inevitable surprises might “help people make the decision about whether they want their information for themselves, and to ask, Who will I share this with?”

Dr. Stefansson’s company is one of several marketing genome scans that promise to reveal anyone’s genetic propensities for disease, origins and more, for a price. Dr. Watson had already placed his own genome information online, as has another genetics pioneer, J. Craig Venter. Dr. Stefansson said he simply ran the data through his company’s analytical system.

Dr. Stefansson said that because his company had not produced the original data, “I am reluctant, personally, to make much of the analysis.” He added, however, that “on my face, it would elicit smiles.”

The controversy began with an article in The Times of London in October that quoted Dr. Watson, who was on a book tour, as saying that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really.”

According to the article, he said that “there are many people of color who are very talented,” and he hoped people were equal, but that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true.”

A publicity agent for Dr. Watson, Fraser Seitel, said that his client had no comment on the most recent turn of events, but noted that Dr. Watson, who is 79, “regrets very much what was attributed to him” in the original article and has repeatedly apologized for the comments while also disavowing them.

“Dr. Watson has never believed that the color of someone’s skin, or where they come from, or any other human quality gives any indication whatsoever of a person’s intelligence or potential to succeed in life,” Mr. Seitel said. While not stating explicitly that his client was misquoted in the original article, Mr. Seitel said, “he doesn’t have a recollection of it.”

George M. Church, a professor of genetics at the Harvard Medical School and the director of the Center for Computational Genetics, said he questioned the accuracy of any of the current scanning and analytical services.

Professor Church predicted that as the science of genetics advanced, fuzzy categories like race would become less important because genetic characteristics would point to factors like disease at an individual level.

Meanwhile, he said: “There are still a lot of bigots in the world. Maybe showing these things are more nuanced than they’d like it to be makes them think about it.”

DNA Pioneer’s Genome Blurs Race Lines, NYT, 12.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/science/12watson.html

Justice Dept. Numbers Show Prison Trends

December 6, 2007
The New York Times
By SOLOMON MOORE

About one in every 31 adults in the United States was in prison, in jail or on supervised release at the end of last year, the Department of Justice reported yesterday.

An estimated 2.38 million people were incarcerated in state and federal facilities, an increase of 2.8 percent over 2005, while a record 5 million people were on parole or probation, an increase of 1.8 percent. Immigration detention facilities had the greatest growth rate last year. The number of people held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities grew 43 percent, to 14,482 from 10,104.

The data reflect deep racial disparities in the nation’s correctional institutions, with a record 905,600 African-American inmates in prisons and state and local jails. In several states, incarceration rates for blacks were more than 10 times the rate of whites. In Iowa, for example, blacks were imprisoned at 13.6 times the rate of whites, according to an analysis of the data by the Sentencing Project, a research and advocacy group.

But the report concludes that nationally the percentage of black men in state and federal prison populations in 2006 fell to 38 percent, from 43 percent in 2000. The rates also declined for black women, while rates for white women increased.

Over all, the number of women in state and federal prisons, 112,498, was at a record high. The female jail and prison population has grown at double the rate for men since 1980; in 2006 it increased 4.5 percent, its fastest clip in five years.

The report suggests that state prison capacity has expanded at roughly the same rate as the prison population, with prisons operating at 98 percent to 114 percent of capacity, a slight improvement over 2005.

Still, many prison systems are accommodating record numbers of inmates by using facilities that were never meant to provide bed space. Arizona has for years held inmates in tent encampments on prison grounds. Hundreds of California prisoners sleep in three-tier bunk beds in gymnasiums or day rooms. Prisons throughout the nation have made meeting rooms for educational and treatment programs into cell space.

Private prisons have also been a growing option for crowded corrections departments. And local jails contracted with various government agencies to hold 77,987 more state and federal inmates last year.

    Justice Dept. Numbers Show Prison Trends, NYT, 6.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/us/06prison.html

For Struggling Black College,

Hopes of a Revival

December 5, 2007
The New York Times
By LAURA BEIL

MARSHALL, Tex. — When the light at University Avenue is green, drivers can pass Wiley College without a glance. There was a time, however, when this small black liberal arts college here caught the attention of a nation: in the 1930s, Wiley’s polished team of debaters amassed a series of victories over white competitors that stunned the Jim Crow South.

The college would go on to groom civil rights leaders like James Farmer Jr. and Heman Sweatt, whose lawsuit against the University of Texas Law School in the 1940s helped pave the way for public school integration. Yet Wiley itself, like many black colleges, has struggled for survival ever since, and even reached the brink of collapse. This year, professors and staff members accepted unpaid furloughs. One employee could not share a recent report with trustees because his department could not afford copy paper.

Now Wiley is looking for a Hollywood ending.

On Dec. 25, “The Great Debaters" will appear in theaters with Denzel Washington as its director and star, and Oprah Winfrey as producer. The film depicts Wiley’s most glorious chapter: 1935, when the black poet and professor Melvin B. Tolson coached his debating team to a national championship.

No one knows whether the story will raise the college’s fortunes, but Wiley, which has not been able to support a debate team for decades, is suddenly feeling the glow of celebrity. Enrollment has soared past 900 for the first time in at least 40 years. The administration building was given a face-lift, compliments of the moviemakers, who also manicured the campus with new greenery. There are hopes to revive the debate program, and in a movie tie-in, Wal-Mart is to endow a Melvin B. Tolson Scholarship Fund with $100,000.

Today, callers to the institution are greeted with a cheery recorded reminder: “Home of the Great Debaters.” Jamecia Murray, a junior from Logansport, La., has joked to prospective students that “you could wake up in the morning and see Denzel Washington out your window.”

Movies can have an impact on schools that lingers for years. Garfield High School in Los Angeles, made famous by “Stand and Deliver” in 1988, was able to recoup quickly when its auditorium burned last May. By October, the school had received more than $100,000 in donations, largely from those who remembered the film. “Garfield itself has become synonymous with the movie,” Nadia Gonzales, a school district spokeswoman, said.

But celebrity can be unpredictable. While “Fame,” in 1980, brought the High School of Performing Arts in New York City a bumper crop of applicants, many students resented the portrayal of drug use and premarital sex.

In many respects, Wiley’s story is the larger narrative of historically black institutions whose graduates lived to see landmark achievements in the 1960s, including passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But after securing the opportunity for bright young students to attend any institution they wanted, many black colleges stalled.

Texas had 11 black colleges in 1954. Three are now gone, another is on probation for academic and other problems, and a fifth operated during most of the 1990s without accreditation.

Wiley’s woes reflect 130 years of racial and economic tumult. The Methodist Church founded Wiley in Marshall, in the northeast corner of the state, which has always aligned with the Deep South more than the Old West. Harrison County, home to Wiley, once held the largest slave population in the state, and antebellum culture cast a shadow on race relations well into the 20th century.

By the time Mr. Tolson arrived in 1923, Wiley had emerged as an elite institution for the black middle class. The son of a Missouri preacher, Mr. Tolson had a soul fed by the Harlem Renaissance. He was both feared and loved, inspiring, as one biographer wrote, “devotion bordering on adulation in many who knew him well.” He remained at Wiley 24 years, publishing his most heralded work of poetry a year before his death in 1966.

Wiley’s 1935 victory over the University of Southern California (the opponents in the film are from Harvard) inspired people long denied dignity in white society. But the film omits one reality: even though they beat the reigning champions, the Great Debaters were not allowed to call themselves victors because they did not belong to the debate society, which did not allow blacks until after World War II.

The most renowned member of the debate team was a teenage James Farmer Jr., who would go on to found the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942. He would later use his Wiley-honed skills in debates against Malcolm X, an unflinching orator. “I debated Malcolm X four times and beat him,” Mr. Farmer told an interviewer in 1997. “I’d think, ‘Come off it, Malcolm, you can’t win. You didn’t come up under Tolson.’”

In 1960, college students in Marshall were jailed for the first large sit-in in Texas. Within five years, the federal government would require integration.

But as black students and faculty members were courted by white institutions, the college’s identity became less clear. “I don’t think anybody could have calculated what integration would really do,” said Bob Hayes, a United Methodist bishop in Oklahoma whose father became president of Wiley in 1971.

Wiley’s football program, which had five national champion teams, disbanded in 1969. Two years later, the Methodist Church dispatched the Rev. Robert Hayes Sr. to Marshall to dissolve the college entirely. “The bishop said, ‘Go give it a decent funeral,’” recalled Mr. Hayes, who now lives in Houston.

But the elder Mr. Hayes, a Wiley graduate, could not bring himself to close his alma mater. A commanding preacher with a silky baritone, he convinced town bankers not to call in loans. Until he left in 1986, Mr. Hayes kept the doors open, even while enrollment dipped below 400. Robert Sherer, a history professor for 14 years beginning in 1975, recalls that he “got constantly in trouble with the dean by failing too many students. Every student they lost was a major financial hit.”

Heightening a sense of instability, a succession of five presidents passed through Wiley between 1986 and 2000. Lawns grew weedy. Buildings aged. In 2000, trustees recruited Haywood Strickland, president of Texas College in nearby Tyler, as president. He restored stability, but his tenure has not been completely smooth. In 2003, The Marshall News Messenger reported that despite an official biography that lists “doctoral training” at the University of Wisconsin, and publicly taking the title “doctor,” Mr. Strickland in fact has no earned Ph.D.

“I was unaffected by it,” Mr. Strickland said of the report, adding that he did not believe he had misrepresented himself.

The college has run deficits for much of his tenure — 2006 ended $1 million in the red — but administrators predict finishing the 2008 financial year in the black. There are plans to establish the campus’s first endowed chair, named after Mr. Tolson. The poet’s home, next to campus, now sports a sign in the yard advertising its place in history.

For his part, Mr. Washington had not previously heard of the debaters or even the college, but he said, “I’m aware of the strength of these historically black colleges, and what they’ve done for millions of African-American men and women over the years.” His son graduated from Morehouse College, which recently raised $118 million.

While historically black colleges constitute only 3 percent of American higher-education institutions, they graduate about 24 percent of all black college students. Some prefer a campus like Wiley, so personal that faculty members will track down a student who misses class. “To teach in schools like this demands some missionary-like spirit,” said Solomon Masenda, an English professor who joined the faculty almost 20 years ago. “You fall in love with it. I cannot explain it.”

Deborah Phillips credits the college with identifying her daughter Ashley’s strengths. Ashley Phillips arrived in Marshall unsure of what she might accomplish. Last month, Ms. Phillips was crowned Miss Wiley. By next year, she plans to be in medical school, with Wiley’s biology program as her foundation.

On a crisp November morning, her mother watched Homecoming paraders toss candy from convertibles on University Avenue. “Here,” Mrs. Phillips said, “you’re a student who dreams.”

    For Struggling Black College, Hopes of a Revival, NYT, 5.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/05/education/05wiley.html?hp

Op-Ed Contributor

Obama’s Color Line
 

November 30, 2007
The New York Times
By JUAN WILLIAMS

BARACK OBAMA is running an astonishing campaign. Not only is he doing far better in the polls than any black presidential candidate in American history, but he has also raised more money than any of the candidates in either party except Hillary Clinton.

Most amazing, Mr. Obama has built his political base among white voters. He relies on unprecedented support among whites for a black candidate. Among black voters nationwide, he actually trails Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points, according to one recent poll.

At first glance, the black-white response to Mr. Obama appears to represent breathtaking progress toward the day when candidates and voters are able to get beyond race. But to say the least, it is very odd that black voters are split over Mr. Obama’s strong and realistic effort to reach where no black candidate has gone before. Their reaction looks less like post-racial political idealism than the latest in self-defeating black politics.

Mr. Obama’s success is creating anxiety, uncertainty and more than a little jealousy among older black politicians. Black political and community activists still rooted in the politics of the 1960s civil rights movement are suspicious about why so many white people find this black man so acceptable.

Much of this suspicion springs from Mr. Obama’s background. He was too young to march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His mother is white and his father was a black Kenyan. Mr. Obama grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, then went on to the Ivy League, attending Columbia for college and Harvard for law school. He did not work his way up the political ladder through black politics, and in fact he lost a race for a Chicago Congressional seat to Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther.

In an interview with National Public Radio earlier this year, Mr. Obama acknowledged being out of step with the way most black politicians approach white America. “In the history of African-American politics in this country there has always been some tension between speaking in universal terms and speaking in very race-specific terms about the plight of the African-American community,” he said. “By virtue of my background, you know, I am more likely to speak in universal terms.”

The alienation, anger and pessimism that mark speeches from major black American leaders are missing from Mr. Obama’s speeches. He talks about America as a “magical place” of diversity and immigration. He appeals to the King-like dream of getting past the racial divide to a place where the sons of slaves and the sons of slave owners can pick the best president without regard to skin color.

Mr. Obama’s biography and rhetoric have led to mean-spirited questions about whether he is “black enough,” whether he is “acting like he’s white,” as a South Carolina newspaper reported Jesse Jackson said of him. But the more serious question being asked about Mr. Obama by skeptical black voters is this: Whose values and priorities will he represent if he wins the White House?

As he claims to proudly represent a historically oppressed minority, Mr. Obama has to answer the question. Too many black politicians have hidden behind their skin color to avoid it.

Fifty percent of black Americans say Mr. Obama shares their values, according to a recent poll by the Pew Research Center. But that still leaves another half who dismiss him as having only “some” or “not much/not at all” in common with the values of black Americans.

There is a widening split over values inside black America. Sixty-one percent of black Americans, according to the Pew poll, believe that the values of middle-class and poor blacks are becoming “more different.” Inside black America, people with at least some college education are the most likely to see Mr. Obama as “sharing the black community’s values and interests a lot.” But only 41 percent of blacks with a high school education or less see Mr. Obama as part of the black community.

Overall, only 29 percent of people of all colors say Mr. Obama reflects black values. He is viewed as the epitome of what Senator Joe Biden artlessly called the “clean” and “articulate” part of black America — the rising number of black people who tell pollsters they find themselves in sync with most white Americans on values and priorities.

And in a nation where a third of the population is now made up of people of color, Mr. Obama is in the vanguard of a new brand of multi-racial politics. He is asking voters to move with him beyond race and beyond the civil rights movement to a politics of shared values. If black and white voters alike react to Mr. Obama’s values, then he will really have taken the nation into post-racial politics.

Whether he and America will get there is still an open question.
 

Juan Williams, a political analyst for National Public Radio and Fox News Channel, is the author of “Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America.”

    Obama’s Color Line, NYT, 30.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/opinion/30williams.html

Defense in Teenager’s Death Invokes Memories of Lynch Mobs

November 28, 2007
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

RIVERHEAD, N.Y., Nov. 27 — The trial of a black man accused of killing a white youth who threatened his son will be as much about race and the echoes of Jim Crow lynch mobs as about the five minutes on a hot August night in 2006 when a white teenager was shot in the face, defense lawyers for the man suggested on Tuesday.

“In the South, black men were hung because they were accused of rape, and ironically, the incident that propelled the events of that night had the same sort of background,” said Paul Gianelli, the lawyer for the defendant, John H. White, 54, a construction foreman. Mr. White, who moved with his family into the predominantly white Long Island hamlet of Miller Place only two years before the killing, faces charges of manslaughter and gun possession in Suffolk County Criminal Court here.

“They were a mob, a lynch mob,” Mr. Gianelli said of the five youths who tracked Mr. White’s son, Aaron, 20, to his home that night.

The lawyer said the victim, Daniel Cicciaro, 17, and the other youths spewed racial epithets at Mr. White and his son that night. Police have said that the youths wanted to beat Aaron White because they believed he had posted a message on an Internet chat room threatening to rape a 15-year-girl they all knew.

Mr. White intended to use the gun only to disperse the group, Mr. Gianelli said, and it went off accidentally when Mr. Cicciaro grabbed for it.

In his opening statement, the assistant district attorney, James Chalifoux, conceded that racial epithets were shouted during the confrontation. He told the jury that Mr. Cicciaro and his friends had been drinking heavily before the shooting, but that the prosecution’s case would focus not on the decisions made by the victim but on those made by Mr. White.

“Some of you may not agree with what Daniel Cicciaro did that night,” he said. “But this trial is about John White’s actions. He did not act the way you would expect of a grown, 53-year-old man.”

Mr. Chalifoux continued: “John White did not lock his doors. He did not call 911. He did not go outside and try to defuse a volatile situation.” Then, he added: “Instead, he armed his 19-year-old son with a loaded shotgun. He armed himself with an illegal .32-caliber handgun. And he confronted these unarmed boys.”

After the shooting, Mr. White lifted his hands and, the prosecutor said, told the first police officer at the scene: “Some kids were trying to assault my son. I did what I had to do. You might as well put the cuffs on me.”

Police initially charged Mr. White with murder. A grand jury reduced that charge to manslaughter in the second degree, the equivalent of reckless homicide. In July, however, Mr. White rejected a plea bargain that would have guaranteed him a maximum sentence of two to six years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea.

If convicted on the manslaughter charge, he faces 5 to 15 years in prison.

In September 2006, Mr. White said in an interview that he had seen the youths not as a “white mob” but as “a group of grown men in my driveway. I was scared to death.”

During the interview, he described himself, unprompted, as the grandson of an Alabama man whose two brothers were lynched in the 1940s. He also said the .32-caliber revolver he used in the killing was bequeathed to him by his grandfather for protection.

The tall, bespectacled Mr. White sat impassively at the defense table Tuesday, occasionally taking notes.

Behind him, less than 20 feet away, sat Daniel Cicciaro’s father, Daniel, and his mother, Joanne Cicciaro. She clutched her midsection and gently rocked through most of a day of highly charged, gruesomely detailed re-enactments and descriptions of her son’s death: The single gunshot wound in the left cheek, the three inches between shooter and victim, the large pool of blood in the driveway and the victim’s cellphone lying nearby.

Both sides agreed that the dispute that led to the confrontation began at a birthday party. Aaron White was a guest along with all of the youths involved. At some point, a young girl known to all of them complained that his presence made her uncomfortable. Mr. Cicciaro and several others asked him to leave, and he did.

When the girl later told the youths she was uncomfortable because of a threat she believed was posted in an online chat room, Mr. Cicciaro decided to pursue the matter. He phoned Aaron White, cursing him, and then found out where he lived and left with his friends to find him.

They arrived in two cars, blocking off the driveway of the Whites’ home.

The first witness on Tuesday, the Whites’ next door neighbor, Anthony Morano, said the first sign of trouble he noticed was the sound of the cars “racing up and down the street,” apparently looking for the Whites’ address.

“Very noisy cars, they sounded like mini-motorcycles,” he said.

Then he heard “very boisterous arguing,” he said, and “a loud pop.”

When he looked out his upstairs window, he said, “I seen something fall to the floor, to the street.”

Earlier, Mr. Morano described Mr. White as a quiet, “Hello, how are you?” kind of neighbor who was meticulous about caring for his lawn and his flower beds.

    Defense in Teenager’s Death Invokes Memories of Lynch Mobs, NYT, 28.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/nyregion/28shoot.html

A Universe of Black Film

November 23, 2007
The New York Times
By FELICIA R. LEE

The African Diaspora Film Festival has grown each year since its genesis in a kitchen-table conversation between a couple of film fanatics frustrated by the shallow pool of black films in New York. Starting today the 15th edition of the festival will offer something for just about anyone interested in the global black experience: 102 films from 43 countries in a 17-day feast of documentaries, comedies, musicals, dramas and romances.

Reinaldo Barroso-Spech and Diarah N’Daw-Spech, the married couple behind the mom-and-pop venture, had also been casting about for “something important” they could do together, Ms. N’Daw-Spech recalled recently. After coming to New York from Paris in the 1980s and “not being able to see the same breadth and depth of films we saw in Paris, we figured there was a niche, a need,” she said. The couple, who are Columbia University graduates, chatted with a reporter in a lounge at Teachers College in between last-minute festival preparations.

“The festival has been our kid,” added Ms. N’Daw-Spech, whose day job is as a financial director at a Teachers College center. “The kid is an adolescent now. When we started out, we had no experience, no connections. We knew nobody. We got some film festival catalogs and started calling people.”

That first festival in 1993 featured 24 films at the Cinema Village in Greenwich Village and attracted about 1,500 people over one week. This year the couple (who also distribute some of the festival films on DVD and video) expect some 7,000 people from tonight through Dec. 9 at six locations throughout the city. The films come from countries including the United States, Jamaica, Haiti, Portugal, Angola, Germany and Britain.

Forty-five films will receive some sort of premiere at the festival: 23 are being shown for the first time in New York and 22 for the first time in this country. Along with the screenings are panel discussions on themes like “African leaders” and “slavery in cinema,” question-and-answer sessions with the filmmakers and even some parties.

The New York premieres include John Sayles’s new film, “Honeydripper,” the tale of a rural Alabama lounge owner’s efforts to save his business, starring Danny Glover, Charles S. Dutton, Stacy Keach and Mary Steenburgen. “El Cimarrón” by the Puerto Rican director Iván Dariel Ortiz tells a story of love and slavery in Puerto Rico in the 19th century. “Youssou N’Dour: Return to Goree,” directed by Pierre Yves-Borgeaud, is a documentary about a jazz concert on the island of Goree in Senegal featuring Mr. N’Dour, the renowned Senegalese singer, to commemorate all the Africans stolen from there and brought to the New World as slaves.

The opening night features the United States premiere of “A Winter Tale,” directed by Frances-Anne Solomon (a Trinidadian working in Canada), a drama about a group of six black men in Toronto who form a support group in the aftermath of the accidental shooting of a 10-year-old boy.

Like many of the filmmakers Dr. Barroso-Spech and Ms. N’Daw-Spech come from places where different cultures flowed together.

Dr. Barroso-Spech was born in Cuba of Haitian and Jamaican descent and received his doctorate from Columbia, where he teaches a course on using film in language education. His mother began taking him to films when he was a child in Havana, he recalled. “With the Castro revolution many Africans came to Cuba and with the Africans, film,” he said. “Those films were very important in my formative years. It created in me an understanding of the value of art and culture as a way to uplift me — and not just me, but a whole population.”

Ms. N’Daw-Spech is of French and Malian heritage. Together, the two now comb film festivals around the world for black images that speak about both common human experiences and the particulars of race.

They would not disclose the festival’s budget, but they get support from sources that include the New York State Council on the Arts and Teachers College. Ms. N’Daw-Spech, who earned her M.B.A. from Columbia, does the administrative work; her husband does the programming. They have one assistant and hire temporary help for the festival. For the last several years highlights from the festival have been shown at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. They also take some of the films to Chicago, Jersey City, Washington and Curaçao for smaller versions of the festival.

Warrington Hudlin, president of the Black Filmmaker Foundation, estimated that there are more than 20 black film festivals in the United States, exposing audiences of all backgrounds to films they would otherwise miss. The African Diaspora Film Festival, he said, is one of the most important and is distinctive in including so many films from outside this country.

“Cinema of color is still marginalized,” Mr. Hudlin said. “These films are our refuge. They have a critical importance in our community as reliable venues for access to the artistic evolution in black cinema.”

As the number of small art houses continues to shrink, it has become even harder to find independent, smaller black films, Ms. N’Daw-Spech said.

“We want to keep doing everything we’re doing, but at a larger scale,” she said. “The best part is that we know that audiences share what we feel.”

    A Universe of Black Film, NYT, 23.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/23/movies/23dias.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth

November 18, 2007
The New York Times
By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr.

Cambridge, Mass.

LAST week, the Pew Research Center published the astonishing finding that 37 percent of African-Americans polled felt that “blacks today can no longer be thought of as a single race” because of a widening class divide. From Frederick Douglass to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., perhaps the most fundamental assumption in the history of the black community has been that Americans of African descent, the descendants of the slaves, either because of shared culture or shared oppression, constitute “a mighty race,” as Marcus Garvey often put it.

“By a ratio of 2 to 1,” the report says, “blacks say that the values of poor and middle-class blacks have grown more dissimilar over the past decade. In contrast, most blacks say that the values of blacks and whites have grown more alike.”

The message here is that it is time to examine the differences between black families on either side of the divide for clues about how to address an increasingly entrenched inequality. We can’t afford to wait any longer to address the causes of persistent poverty among most black families.

This class divide was predicted long ago, and nobody wanted to listen. At a conference marking the 40th anniversary of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s infamous report on the problems of the black family, I asked the conservative scholar James Q. Wilson and the liberal scholar William Julius Wilson if ours was the generation presiding over an irreversible, self-perpetuating class divide within the African-American community.

“I have to believe that this is not the case,” the liberal Wilson responded with willed optimism. “Why go on with this work otherwise?” The conservative Wilson nodded. Yet, no one could imagine how to close the gap.

In 1965, when Moynihan published his report, suggesting that the out-of-wedlock birthrate and the number of families headed by single mothers, both about 24 percent, pointed to dissolution of the social fabric of the black community, black scholars and liberals dismissed it. They attacked its author as a right-wing bigot. Now we’d give just about anything to have those statistics back. Today, 69 percent of black babies are born out of wedlock, while 45 percent of black households with children are headed by women.

How did this happen? As many theories flourish as pundits — from slavery and segregation to the decline of factory jobs, crack cocaine, draconian drug laws and outsourcing. But nobody knows for sure.

I have been studying the family trees of 20 successful African-Americans, people in fields ranging from entertainment and sports (Oprah Winfrey, the track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee) to space travel and medicine (the astronaut Mae Jemison and Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon). And I’ve seen an astonishing pattern: 15 of the 20 descend from at least one line of former slaves who managed to obtain property by 1920 — a time when only 25 percent of all African-American families owned property.

Ten years after slavery ended, Constantine Winfrey, Oprah’s great-grandfather, bartered eight bales of cleaned cotton (4,000 pounds) that he picked on his own time for 80 acres of prime bottomland in Mississippi. (He also learned to read and write while picking all that cotton.)

Sometimes the government helped: Whoopi Goldberg’s great-great-grandparents received their land through the Southern Homestead Act. “So my family got its 40 acres and a mule,” she exclaimed when I showed her the deed, referring to the rumor that freed slaves would receive land that had been owned by their masters.

Well, perhaps not the mule, but 104 acres in Florida. If there is a meaningful correlation between the success of accomplished African-Americans today and their ancestors’ property ownership, we can only imagine how different black-white relations would be had “40 acres and a mule” really been official government policy in the Reconstruction South.

The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.

Perhaps Margaret Thatcher, of all people, suggested a program that might help. In the 1980s, she turned 1.5 million residents of public housing projects in Britain into homeowners. It was certainly the most liberal thing Mrs. Thatcher did, and perhaps progressives should borrow a leaf from her playbook.

The telltale fact is that the biggest gap in black prosperity isn’t in income, but in wealth. According to a study by the economist Edward N. Wolff, the median net worth of non-Hispanic black households in 2004 was only $11,800 — less than 10 percent that of non-Hispanic white households, $118,300. Perhaps a bold and innovative approach to the problem of black poverty — one floated during the Civil War but never fully put into practice — would be to look at ways to turn tenants into homeowners. Sadly, in the wake of the subprime mortgage debacle, an enormous number of houses are being repossessed. But for the black poor, real progress may come only once they have an ownership stake in American society.

People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not.

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can’t black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework? Imagine Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson distributing free copies of Virginia Hamilton’s collection of folktales “The People Could Fly” or Dr. Seuss, and demanding that black parents sign pledges to read to their children. What would it take to make inner-city schools havens of learning?

John Kenneth Galbraith once told me that the first step in reversing the economic inequalities that blacks face is greater voter participation, and I think he was right. Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.

If the correlation between land ownership and success of African-Americans argues that the chasm between classes in the black community is partly the result of social forces set in motion by the dismal failure of 40 acres and a mule, then we must act decisively. If we do not, ours will be remembered as the generation that presided over a permanent class divide, a slow but inevitable process that began with the failure to give property to the people who had once been defined as property.
 

Henry Louis Gates Jr., a professor at Harvard, is the author of the forthcoming “In Search of Our Roots.”

    Forty Acres and a Gap in Wealth, NYT, 18.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/opinion/18gates.html

Income Gap Among Black, White Families Up

November 13, 2007
Filed at 11:54 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Decades after the civil rights movement, the income gap between black and white families has grown, says a new study that tracked the incomes of some 2,300 families for more than 30 years.

Incomes have increased among both black and white families in the past three decades -- mainly because more women are in the work force. But the increase was greater among whites, according to the study being released Tuesday.

One reason for the growing disparity: Incomes among black men have actually declined in the past three decades, when adjusted for inflation. They were offset only by gains among black women.

Incomes among white men, meanwhile, were relatively stagnant, while those of white women increased more than fivefold.

''Overall, incomes are going up. But not all children are benefiting equally from the American dream,'' said Julia Isaacs, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

Isaacs wrote a series of three reports that looked at the incomes of parents in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and of their grown children 30 years later.

Parents have long hoped that their children would grow up to be more successful than they were. Hopes were especially high for black children who came of age following the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The reports found that about two-thirds of the children surveyed grew up to have higher family incomes than their parents had 30 years earlier.

Grown black children were just as likely as whites to have higher incomes than their parents. However, incomes among whites increased more than those of their black counterparts.

The result: In 2004, a typical black family had an income that was only 58 percent of a typical white family's. In 1974, median black incomes were 63 percent those of whites.

''Too many Americans, whites and even some blacks, think that the playing field has indeed leveled,'' said Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League.

It has not, he added.

''We are like fingers on the hand,'' Morial said of black and white Americans. ''We are on the same hand, but we are separate fingers.''

Morial blamed the disparities on inadequate schools in black neighborhoods, workplace discrimination and too many black families with only one parent.

''The public policy commitment to this has been sketchy over the last 30 years,'' Morial said. ''There has not been a real focus on this.''

Perhaps most disturbing, middle-income black families do not appear to be passing on higher incomes to their children in the same way that white families have, Isaacs said.

She found that only one in three black children from middle-income families grew up to have higher incomes than their parents.

''That means a majority ended up slipping down,'' Isaacs said.

Among whites, about two-thirds of the children from middle-income families grew up to have higher incomes than their parents, she said.

On a positive note, black children from poor families were much more likely to grow up to have higher incomes than their parents, Isaacs said.

Isaacs compiled the reports for the Economic Mobility Project, a collaboration of senior economists and researchers from four Washington think tanks that span the ideological spectrum. The project is funded and managed by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Isaacs used survey data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which is conducted at the University of Michigan.

------

On The Net:

The Economic Mobility Project: http://www.economicmobility.org/

Brookings Institution: http://www.brookings.edu/
 
National Urban League: http://www.nul.org/

(This version SUBS top 2 grafs to CORRECT the number of families surveyed; ADDS last graf to include source of survey data )

    Income Gap Among Black, White Families Up, NYT, 13.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Income-Gap.html

After 2 Departures, Black Executives Ask: Is There Room at the Top?

November 1, 2007
The New York Times
By RON STODGHILL

The executives are a study in contrasts. One is a brash risk-taker who bootstrapped his way from an Alabama cotton farm to one of Wall Street’s largest brokerage firms. The other made his mark as a consensus builder who leveraged ties to one of America’s most powerful families to eventually lead the world’s largest media company.

E. Stanley O’Neal, 56, at Merrill Lynch and Richard D. Parsons, 59, at Time Warner, have nevertheless inhabited the public imagination as two executives who helped rewrite history by breaking down cultural barriers and rising to lead Fortune 500 companies.

But Mr. O’Neal retired under pressure this week after an unauthorized merger approach to a rival bank and an $8.4 billion write-down that resulted in an overall loss of $2.3 billion for the quarter. And Mr. Parsons has announced that he planned to retire by March at the latest. He has been under pressure to turn the reins over to Time Warner’s president, Jeffrey L. Bewkes, whom analysts say is likely to accelerate a shake-up by spinning off business units like AOL and Time Warner Cable.

Along with ruminations on their legacies, their situations have led to a debate over whether their accomplishments have helped break down barriers facing a younger generation of black executives angling for the corner office. Industry observers and civil rights leaders say Mr. O’Neal’s ouster has shed much-needed light on the dearth of African-Americans in so-called C-level positions in corporations, while underscoring the extent to which executive suites and boardrooms remain white male bastions.

The subject of race has proven to be delicate for African-American executives, many of whom prefer to view themselves as — at least publicly — an “an executive who happens to be black.” They have earned the right through hard work, they say, to be judged on their merits.

“We have demonstrated that we can not only run companies and in many cases, run them quite well,” says Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, a nonprofit civil rights organization. “There is an abundance of African-American talent out there. My hope is that they will get their chance to rise up and pick up the mantle.”

The chief executive of StarCom, Renatta McCann, said, “The victories of leaders like Stanley O’Neal and Richard Parsons are both symbolic and transformational.”

That said, she added. “we have yet to reach a tipping point where the pipeline organically regenerates. We have to achieve momentum and velocity, and it has to achieve scale to make it sustainable.”

To be sure, African-American chief executives preside over several large companies, including American Express (Kenneth I. Chenault), Aetna (Ronald A. Williams), Darden Restaurants (Clarence Otis Jr.), Sears (Aylwin B. Lewis) and Symantec (John W. Thompson). Several African-Americans also run or hold senior roles in major subsidiaries of Fortune 500 companies like General Electric (Lloyd G. Trotter), McDonald’s (Don Thompson), the Boeing Company (James A. Bell) and Xerox (Ursula Burns).

While some critics this week raised questions of race in Mr. O’Neal’s ouster, analysts and those with knowledge of Merrill’s actions, say that was not the case.

Mr. O’Neal was judged, they said, by the same standards of others in his position — the company’s performance and his relationship to the board.

Mr. O’Neal could not be reached for comment.

A spokesman for Merrill, Jason H. Wright, said: “During the years Stan was here, as an organization we very much embraced a meritocracy and inclusiveness that has translated into a more diverse work force that we’re proud of. The board has been very engaged in those initiatives and has no intention of changing, regardless of who is C.E.O.”

Alfred Edmond Jr., editor in chief of Black Enterprise magazine, said, “One of the biggest lessons is that being C.E.O. doesn’t make you bulletproof.”

“First we had to learn what it takes to get into that top spot,” Mr. Edmond said, “and now we’re learning what it’s like to live in it.”

As evidence, he pointed to Franklin D. Raines, who led Fannie Mae, the mortgage buyer, for six years before stepping down in December 2004 amid an accounting scandal, and Ann M. Fudge, who resigned in 2005 for personal reasons as chief executive of Young and Rubicam Advertising after the agency failed to keep several key accounts.

“Corporate performance will be the sword that you live and die by,” Mr. Edmond says.

“I know who I am when I go to bed, and who I am when I wake up,” Mr. Thompson of McDonald’s said. “I’ve never run away from a conversation when somebody asks what it’s like to be an African-American executive.”

But he added that he expects to be judged by his performance.

Beyond such visible exceptions as Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Parsons, some corporate diversity specialists say that in recent years, African-Americans have gradually lost ground to other minorities.

“When Carleton Fiorina left H. P., people said it was a rough time for women in the executive suite, but women in corporate America seem to be doing a lot better these days than African-Americans,” said Frank Dobbin, a professor of sociology at Harvard who studies corporate diversity. “Forty years after the Civil Rights Acts were passed, we’re much further behind than we should be.”

Martin Davidson, a professor at the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia, put it another way: “An individual can rise to the top for many reasons, and their rise does not mean that a real shift in the system has occurred. It could be many years before we see another African-American C.E.O. of a major corporation.”

At Sears, Mr. Lewis said, “we are building a culture where every associate has an opportunity to excel, if they’re willing to put in the work. We judge people by what they accomplish, not by who they are, what they believe or where they came from.”

According to Management Leadership for Tomorrow, a nonprofit corporate diversity consulting firm, the pipeline of African-Americans accounted for less than 5 percent of top entry-level positions, and less than 3 percent of senior management jobs last year.

While 15 percent of college graduates are African-American and Hispanic, John Rice, president of M.L.T., said, they only represent 8 percent of M.B.A. students at the top 25 business schools, only 3 percent of senior management positions and 1.6 percent of Fortune 1000 chief executives.

The irony, Mr. Rice said, is that companies have become more aggressive in their diversity efforts. Among the catalysts have been payments in racial bias lawsuits. In 1997, Texaco settled a class-action suit for $176 million. In 2000, Coca-Cola paid $192.5 million to about 2,000 employees.

“Still, the number of blacks in those stepping-stone positions is very small,” Mr. Rice said. “The reason there is no critical mass is that most companies focus only on short-term outcomes.”

In fact, says Professor Dobbin of Harvard, some diversity programs have actually proved counterproductive. According to Professor Dobbin’s 2006 review of diversity programs data filed by companies to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, initiatives aimed at reducing bias at the top resulted in a 6 percent decline in the proportion of black women in management.

In an effort to raise the ranks of black senior-level executives, the Executive Leadership Council, a nonprofit organization in Alexandria, Va., held a seminar in April called “Strengthening the Pipeline.” The group’s membership has grown to more than 400 from less than 100 in 1989.

The director of the organization, Carl Brooks, said some African-Americans have chosen a different route.

“The way my generation was educated was that we saw only one route to success, and that was to get hired by a company and go to work in a suit and tie and carry a briefcase,” Mr. Brooks said. “But the days of corporate America having a monopoly on talent is over. African-Americans are looking at the work place in ways that are far more expansive than we did.”

According to the most recent Census Bureau estimates, the number of black-owned businesses increased 45 percent to 1.2 million from 1997 to 2002, and combined revenue rose 25 percent to nearly $89 billion.

Over the last quarter century, the 37 percent growth in self-employment among blacks has outpaced that of whites (10 percent) and Hispanics (15 percent).

But last week, Denise Kaigler, head of global corporate communications for Reebok International was scouting for an African-American executive to speak at the annual leadership day.

After more than an hour talking with three executives of the Boston Club, the region’s largest organization of senior executives and professional women, only a handful of potential candidates emerged. “It’s really sad,” Ms. Kaigler said. “We shouldn’t have to think so hard.”

    After 2 Departures, Black Executives Ask: Is There Room at the Top?, NYT, 1.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/01/business/01generation.html

James Watson Retires After Racial Remarks

October 25, 2007
The New York Times
By CORNELIA DEAN

James D. Watson, the eminent biologist who ignited an uproar last week with remarks about the intelligence of people of African descent, retired today as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island and from its board.

In a statement, he noted that, at 79, he is “overdue” to surrender leadership positions at the lab, which he joined as director in 1968 and served as president until 2003. But he said the circumstances of his resignation “are not those which I could ever have anticipated or desired.”

Dr. Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, and later headed the American government’s part in the international Human Genome Project, was quoted in The Times of London last week as suggesting that, overall, people of African descent are not as intelligent as people of European descent. In the ensuing uproar, he issued a statement apologizing “unreservedly” for the comments, adding “there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

But Dr. Watson, who has a reputation for making sometimes incendiary off-the-cuff remarks, did not say he had been misquoted.

Within days, the Cold Spring board had relieved him of the administrative responsibilities of the chancellor’s job. In that position, a spokesman for the laboratory said, he was most involved with educational efforts and fund-raising.

In the years after he left Harvard to direct the laboratory, Dr. Watson transformed it from a small facility into a world-class institution prominent in research on cancer, plant biology, neuroscience and computational biology, the board said in announcing his retirement. Bruce Stillman, who succeeded him as president, said today that he had created an “unparalleled” research environment at the laboratory.

In his statement, Dr. Watson said the work of the Human Genome Project, an international effort which deciphered the chemical contents of human genes, had opened the door to work on many diseases, particularly illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, ailments he said have afflicted members of his family.

He also referred to his Scots and Irish forebears, saying their lives were guided by faith in reason and social justice, “especially the need for those on top to help care for the less fortunate.”

    James Watson Retires After Racial Remarks, NYT, 25.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/science/25cnd-watson.html?hp

N.Y. Lawmakers Moves on Anti - Noose Bill

October 22, 2007
Filed at 11:32 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- Following a rash of cases involving nooses, the state Legislature Monday moved toward making it a felony to display the symbol of lynchings in the Old South in a threatening manner.

''We won't tolerate this,'' said Sen. Dean G. Skelos, a Long Island Republican who sponsored the measure that passed Monday in the Senate. ''There is no place for racism and intimidation in America.''

The bill also covers etching, drawing or painting the symbol. He said that, as in the case of Nazi symbols and burning crosses, an intent to threaten or harass would be part of an anti-noose law.

The Democrat-led Assembly may convene Tuesday and could consider the measure then.

Skelos said the recent ''rash of incidents clearly demonstrates the need for tough new penalties.''

Monday's Senate vote came as New York City police said a black high school teacher in Brooklyn had been targeted with a letter containing racial slurs and a string tied into a noose.

The teacher told police she received the letter and the noose through the mail. Police say they have no suspects.

Nooses were also found earlier this month on a black professor's door at Teachers College at Columbia University, outside a post office near ground zero in lower Manhattan and in locations on Long Island. There have been no arrests.

There have been a number of other nooses found in high-profile incidents around the country, including in a black Coast Guard cadet's bag and on a Maryland college campus.

It was also in the so-called Jena Six case in Louisiana, where six black teenagers are accused of beating a white student. The incident happened after nooses were hung from a tree on a high school campus there.

    N.Y. Lawmakers Moves on Anti - Noose Bill, NYT, 22.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Anti-Noose-Law.html

Justice Says Law Degree 'Worth 15 Cents'

October 21, 2007
Filed at 12:13 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) -- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has a 15-cent price tag stuck to his Yale law degree, blaming the school's affirmative action policies in the 1970s for his difficulty finding a job after he graduated.

Some of his black classmates say Thomas needs to get over his grudge because Yale opened the door to extraordinary opportunities.

Thomas' new autobiography, ''My Grandfather's Son,'' shows how the second black justice on the Supreme Court came to oppose affirmative action after his law school experience. He was one of about 10 blacks in a class of 160 who had arrived at Yale after the unrest of the 1960s, which culminated in a Black Panther Party trial in New Haven that nearly caused a large-scale riot.

The conservative justice says he initially considered his admission to Yale a dream, but soon felt he was there because of his race. He says he loaded up on tough courses to prove he was not inferior to his white classmates but considers the effort futile. He says he was repeatedly turned down in job interviews at law firms after his 1974 graduation.

''I learned the hard way that a law degree from Yale meant one thing for white graduates and another for blacks, no matter how much any one denied it,'' Thomas writes. ''I'd graduated from one of America's top law schools, but racial preference had robbed my achievement of its true value.''

Thomas says he stores his Yale Law degree in his basement with a 15-cent sticker from a cigar package on the frame.

His view isn't shared by black classmate William Coleman III.

''I can only say my degree from Yale Law School has been a great boon,'' said Coleman, now an attorney in Philadelphia. ''Had he not gone to a school like Yale, he would not be sitting on the Supreme Court.''

Coleman's Yale roommate, Bill Clinton, appointed him general counsel to the U.S. Army, one of several top jobs Coleman has held over the years.

Thomas said he began interviewing with law firms at the beginning of his third year of law school.

''Many asked pointed questions unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated,'' he wrote. ''Now I knew what a law degree from Yale was worth when it bore the taint of racial preference.''

He said it was months before he got an offer, from then-Missouri Attorney General John Danforth.

Steven Duke, a white Yale law professor who taught when Thomas attended Yale, said Thomas is right to say that the significance of someone's degree could be called into question if the person was admitted to an institution on a preferential basis. However, he said that could be overcome by strong performance, noting that two Yale graduates -- Danforth and President Bush -- put Thomas into top jobs.

''I find it difficult to believe he actually regrets the choice he made,'' Duke said. ''It seems to me he did pretty well.''

Some classmates say Thomas -- who was raised poor in Georgia and stood out on campus in his overalls and heavy black boots -- faced a tougher transition than black students who came from middle-class or privileged backgrounds.

Frank Washington, a black classmate and friend of Thomas who also came from a lower-income background, said he had 42 interviews before he landed a job at a Washington law firm.

''It seemed like I had to go through many more interviews than a lot of my other non-minority classmates,'' said Washington, now an entrepreneur who owns radio and television stations.

Other black classmates say their backgrounds didn't matter.

Edgar Taplin Jr., raised by a single parent in New Orleans, said he landed a job after graduation at the oldest law firm in New York, and does not recall black graduates struggling more to get jobs than their white classmates.

''My degree was worth a lot more than 15 cents,'' said Taplin, who retired in 2003 as a global manager with Exxon Mobil.

Thomas has declined to have his portrait hung at Yale Law School along with other graduates who became U.S. Supreme Court justices. An earlier book, ''Supreme Discomfort,'' by Washington Post reporters Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher, portrays Thomas as still upset some Yale professors opposed his confirmation during hearings marked by Anita Hill's allegations that Thomas sexually harassed her.

Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh turned down requests for interviews about the justice's book, but said in a statement that he and his predecessors have invited Thomas to have his portrait done and the offer still stands.

Koh said they met for several hours about a year ago. ''He made it clear that he had greatly enjoyed his time at Yale Law School, and that he had great affection for his fellow students and for several professors who are still here,'' he said.

Thomas would not comment, said court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg.

William Coleman says it's time for Thomas to move on.

''You did OK, guy,'' he said.

    Justice Says Law Degree 'Worth 15 Cents', NYT, 21.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Yale-Justice-Thomas.html

Baltimore Journal

The Smoking Scourge Among Urban Blacks

October 20, 2007
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

BALTIMORE, Oct. 15 — Outside subways stops and bars in parts of this blighted city, slouching hustlers mutter “loosies, loosies” to passers-by, offering quick transactions, 50 cents a stick or three for a dollar.

Their illegal, if rarely prosecuted vocation: selling loose Newport cigarettes to those who do not have $4.50 to buy a pack.

In small corner markets, customers sometimes use code words like “bubble gum” or “napkins” to receive individual cigarettes wrapped in a napkin. Or they buy a flavored Black and Mild, the latest smoking craze here, from an opened five-pack.

Out-of-package sales are common in the poor areas of many cities, an adaptation to meager, erratic incomes and rising cigarette taxes. But researchers say they are just one facet of a high smoking rate among low-income urban blacks.

Even as antismoking campaigns have sharply reduced tobacco use in society at large, smoking has remained far more common among the poor of all races.

Still, officials here said they were surprised when a recent study suggested that more than half of poor, black young adults smoke cigarettes — almost always menthol, almost always Newports.

In the latest twist, the study also found that nearly one in four of them also smoke candy-flavored cigarillos, often inhaling despite the danger posed by higher tar and nicotine levels.

Alarmed by the findings, the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, on Monday convened health experts, community leaders and high school students to discuss the spreading use of Black and Milds, plastic-tipped cigarillos that come in flavors like wine, cream and apple and are often seen in hip-hop videos and the HBO series “The Wire,” which is set in Baltimore.

Jamila Wilson, 17, said at the meeting that she had started smoking Black and Milds at 15 and now smoked several a day, inhaling.

“If you smoke the wine flavor, it gives you a buzz, ” Jamila said, adding that if she goes too long without, “I get light-headed.”

Amid violence and drug problems, smoking may seem a comparatively harmless vice. “But if you take a step back,” Dr. Sharfstein said, “it’s the smoking that will end up killing a lot of these kids, maybe not next week but well ahead of their time.”

In a stepped-up antismoking campaign, Baltimore officials are offering free nicotine patches or gum and are considering stronger measures to control sales of loosies, which are easily available to youngsters.

“The whole issue here is that the social norms haven’t changed the way they have in most of society,” said Frances Stillman of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, co-author of the study of smoking habits among Baltimore’s poor, which was published in August in the American Journal of Public Health. “Everybody smokes, and everybody thinks it’s O.K.”

In this latest study, researchers interviewed 160 blacks ages 18 to 24 who were enrolled in job training. In the group, 60 percent smoked cigarettes and 24 percent had recently smoked cigarillos.

A survey of 1,021 low-income blacks in Detroit, published in 2005 in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, found that 59 percent of men and 41 percent of women smoked, a finding that “shocked everybody,” said the chief author, Jorge Delva of the University of Michigan School of Social Work.

It has long been known that smoking rates are higher among the poor and least educated of all races, but Mr. Delva and other experts said the rates recently found among inner city blacks were surprisingly high, possibly indicating that they were undercounted in broad standard surveys.

For a mix of cultural reasons as well as targeted marketing, menthol cigarettes are particularly favored by blacks: 75 percent of blacks nationwide smoke them, compared with less than 30 percent of whites.

In the 1960s, Kools dominated the market. But Newports, with a lower menthol level that many say feels smoother, and backed by marketing including the green “Newport Pleasure!” posters in nearly every deli and gas station here, have taken a strong lead in many cities.

“All my friends smoke, and they all smoke Newports,” said Collin Mazick, 24, a resident of northeast Baltimore who is studying to become a geriatric nursing assistant.

In recent years, the promotion budgets of major cigarette companies have been disproportionately devoted to menthols, said Gregory N. Connolly, director of tobacco control research at the Harvard School of Public Health. “It appears the industry is targeting the most vulnerable groups through advertising and manipulation of menthol levels,” Mr. Connolly said.

In an e-mailed response to questions, the Lorillard Tobacco Company, maker of Newports, said its marketing was directed at “all adult smokers,” although 51 percent of Newport buyers are blacks.

In Montebello, a tough section of northeast Baltimore, Newports are shared, sometimes for cash by people trying to recoup the cost of a pack.

“Everybody here smokes who can afford it,” said Eddie Johnson, 54, who broke a heroin addiction during a recent jail stay and is now training to be a drug counselor. Mr. Johnson said he smoked 10 to 20 cigarettes a day.

Scientists have not found that menthol cigarettes per se are more dangerous, but they say that menthol may make it easier to start smoking and harder to quit, and that it intensifies the effect of nicotine.

A resident of the Montebello alleys, Antonio Stokes, 39, who was vague about how he made money, agreed. Of the Newport he bummed off a friend the other evening, he said: “It’s worse than crack. They should have a detox center for these things, too.”

    The Smoking Scourge Among Urban Blacks, NYT, 20.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/20/health/20tobacco.html

Nobel Winner Issues Apology for Comments About Blacks

October 19, 2007
The New York Times
By CORNELIA DEAN

James D. Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel prize for deciphering the double-helix of DNA, apologized “unreservedly” yesterday for comments reported this week suggesting that black people, over all, are not as intelligent as whites.

In an interview published Sunday in The Times of London, Dr. Watson is quoted as saying that while “there are many people of color who are very talented,” he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa.”

“All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.

In a statement given to The Associated Press yesterday, Dr. Watson said, “I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said. There is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

But his publicist, Kate Farquhar-Thomson, would not say whether Dr. Watson believed he had been misquoted. “You have the statement,” she said. “That’s it, I am afraid.”

Late yesterday, the board of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research institution in New York, issued a statement saying it was suspending the administrative responsibilities of Dr. Watson as chancellor “pending further deliberation.”

On Wednesday, Bruce Stillman, president of the laboratory, had issued a statement saying the laboratory’s trustees, administration and faculty “vehemently disagree” with the sentiments of Dr. Watson, who has served as director and president of the laboratory, whose school of biological sciences is named for him.

Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor study plant and animal genetics, cancer and other diseases. Dr. Stillman said they did not “engage in any research that could even form the basis of the statements attributed to Dr. Watson.”

Dr. Watson is in England to promote his new book, “Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science” (Knopf). In a statement, Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf, said only that it was “understandable that his comments have caused upset throughout the world.”

There is wide agreement among researchers on intelligence that genetic inheritance influences mental acuity, but there is also wide agreement that life experiences, even in the womb, exert a powerful influence on brain structure. Further, there is wide disagreement about what intelligence consists of and how — or even if — it can be measured in the abstract.

For example, in “The Mismeasure of Man,” Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist, dismissed “the I.Q. industry” as little more than an effort by men of European descent to maintain their prominence in the world.

Nevertheless, Dr. Watson, 79, is hardly the first eminent researcher to assert that inherited characteristics like skin color are correlated to intelligence and that people of African descent fall short. For example, William B. Shockley, a Nobel laureate for his work with transistors, in later life developed ideas of eugenics based on the supposed intellectual inferiority of blacks.

His ideas were greeted with scorn, and Dr. Watson is encountering a similar reaction. According to the BBC, the Science Museum of London canceled a speech Dr. Watson was to have given there today, saying that much as it supports robust discussion of controversial ideas, Dr. Watson’s assertions on race and intelligence are “beyond the point of acceptable debate.”

Henry Kelly, president of the Federation of American Scientists, a private group that works to bring science to policy making, said it was “tragic that one of the icons of modern science has cast such dishonor on the profession.”

    Nobel Winner Issues Apology for Comments About Blacks, NYT, 19.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/science/19watson.html?ref=science

Scientist Returns Home After Race Furor

October 19, 2007
Filed at 10:23 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

LONDON (AP) -- A prominent American scientist who set off an international furor with remarks about intelligence levels among blacks canceled a book tour of Britain and returned home Friday, after his employer suspended his administrative duties.

James Watson, 79, is chancellor of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Late Thursday, the lab's board said it had suspended Watson's administrative responsibilities pending further deliberation.

Watson, who shared a Nobel Prize in 1962 for DNA research, apologized on Thursday.

''I am mortified about what has happened,'' Watson said. ''More importantly, I cannot understand how I could have said what I am quoted as having said.''

Watson returned to the United States ''because of circumstances back home at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,'' said Kate Farquhar-Thomson, a head of publicity at Oxford University Press. ''He felt that's where he needed to be.''

Farquhar-Thomson had been accompanying Watson on a tour of Britain to promote his new book, ''Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science.'' Her company published the British edition.

The trouble began after the Sunday Times Magazine of London quoted Watson as saying that he's ''inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa'' because ''all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -- whereas all the testing says not really.''

While he hopes everyone is equal, ''people who have to deal with black employees find this is not true,'' Watson is quoted as saying. Yet he also said people should not be discriminated against on the basis of color, because ''there are many people of color who are very talented.''

The comments, cited Wednesday in a front-page article in another British newspaper, provoked condemnation on both sides of the Atlantic. The Cold Spring Harbor lab issued a statement saying its board and administration ''vehemently disagree with these statements and are bewildered and saddened if he indeed made such comments.''

    Scientist Returns Home After Race Furor, NYT, 19.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Britain-Controversial-Scientist.html

Hate-Crime Investigation at Columbia

October 10, 2007
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

A hangman’s noose was found hanging on the door of a black professor’s office at Columbia University Teacher’s College on Tuesday morning, prompting the police to start a hate-crime investigation.

Detectives with the New York Police Department’s hate-crime task force were investigating whether the noose, which was discovered on the fourth floor of the college at about 9:45 a.m., was put there by a rival professor or by a student who was angry over a dispute. Colleagues of the professor identified her as Madonna Constantine, 44, a prominent author, educator and psychologist.

Ms. Constantine is a professor of psychology and education at Columbia and has published several books on race relations, including “Addressing Racism” in 2006 and “Strategies for Building Multicultural Competence in Mental Health and Educational Settings” in 2007. Derald Wing Sue, one of her co-authors and a fellow professor at Columbia, said Ms. Constantine was devastated by the incident.

“She’s all right at this point with the support of colleagues, friends, students and family,” said Mr. Wing Sue, an adjunct professor at the school of social work. “But you can imagine the terrible impact that this has had on her.”

Ms. Constantine could not be reached at her office on Columbia’s campus this morning.

The discovery of the noose — a widely reviled symbol of black lynchings in the South and elsewhere — sparked outrage across the campus. Last night, about 150 students held a protest outside the Teachers College building at 525 West 120th Street, and organizers of the rally called for another protest and student walkout at 2 p.m. today. The news also ignited a chain of e-mail messages between students that described the incident as “Jena at Columbia,” referring to an incident in Jena, La., last year that prompted violence after three white high school students hung nooses under a tree where six black students had been sitting the day before.

In an e-mail message to students and faculty at the school, the president of Teachers College, Susan Furhman, said the incident was a “hateful act, which violates every Teachers College and societal norm.”

The president of Columbia, Lee C. Bollinger, also released a statement condemning what happened.

“This is an assault on African Americans and therefore it is an assault on every one of us,” he said. “I know I speak on behalf of every member of our communities in condemning this horrible action.”

The discovery of the noose comes in the wake of several incidents that have incited racial and political tensions at Columbia in recent months, including a visit by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in September and the discovery of racist and threatening graffiti in a bathroom at the School of International and Public Affairs. Last fall, the campus drew media attention after a group of students stormed a stage to protest a speech by the head of a group that opposes illegal immigration.

Mr. Wing Sue, Ms. Constantine’s colleague, said students and faculty were at a loss to figure out who pinned the noose to the door.

“You speculate about all the possible reasons that could have instigated such a cruel and hateful act,” he said. “Is it a disgruntled student, is it a conflict with a colleague or staff, is it her work on racism that has pushed buttons on this matter?”

“This is something the police are investigating,” he added, “but to me it represents a major opportunity for Columbia to begin the process of dealing directly and honestly with race and racism. It’s a hot button issue that is representative of the larger community and society.”

    Hate-Crime Investigation at Columbia, NYT, 10.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/10/nyregion/10cnd-columbia.html?hp

Jena 6 Teen Released on $45, 000 Bail

September 28, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:36 a.m. ET
The New York Times

JENA, La. (AP) -- A black teenager whose prosecution in the beating of a white classmate prompted a massive civil rights protest here walked out of a courthouse Thursday after a judge ordered him freed.

Mychal Bell's release on $45,000 bail came hours after a prosecutor confirmed he would no longer seek an adult trial for the 17-year-old. Bell, one of the teenagers known as the Jena Six, still faces trial as a juvenile in the December beating in this small central Louisiana town.

''We still have mountains to climb, but at least this is closer to an even playing field,'' said the Rev. Al Sharpton, who helped organize last week's protest.

''He goes home because a lot of people left their home and stood up for him,'' Sharpton said as Bell stood smiling next to him.

''There's only one person who could have brought me through this and that's the good Lord,'' Bell told reporters later in front of his father's house.

District Attorney Reed Walters' decision to abandon adult charges means that Bell, who had faced a maximum of 15 years in prison on his aggravated second-degree battery conviction last month, instead could be held only until he turns 21 if he is found guilty in juvenile court.

The conviction in adult court was thrown out this month by the state 3rd Circuit Court of Appeal, which said Bell should not have been tried as an adult on that particular charge.

Walters had said he would appeal that decision. On Thursday, he said he still believes there was legal merit to trying Bell as an adult but decided it was in the best interest of the victim, Justin Barker, and his family to let the juvenile court handle the case.

''They are on board with what I decided,'' Walters said at a news conference.

Bell faces juvenile court charges of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit that crime.

He is among six black Jena High School students arrested in December after a beating that left Barker unconscious and bloody, though the victim was able to attend a school function later that day. Four of the defendants were 17 at the time, which made them adults under Louisiana law.

Those four and Bell, who was 16, all were initially charged with attempted murder. Walters has said he sought to have Bell tried as an adult because he already had a criminal record, and because he believed Bell instigated the attack.

The charges have been dropped to aggravated second-degree battery in four of the cases. One defendant has yet to be arraigned. The sixth defendant's case is sealed in juvenile court.

Bell's lawyer, Carol Powell Lexing, said his next hearing is set for Tuesday.

Critics accuse Walters, who is white, of prosecuting blacks more harshly than whites. They note that he filed no charges against three white teens suspended from the high school over allegations they hung nooses in a tree on campus not long before fights between blacks and whites, including the attack on Barker.

An estimated 20,000 to 25,000 protesters marched in Jena last week in a scene that evoked the early years of the civil rights movement.

Walters said the demonstration had no influence on his decision not to press the adult charges, and ended his news conference by saying that only God kept the protest peaceful.

''The only way -- let me stress that -- the only way that I believe that me or this community has been able to endure the trauma that has been thrust upon us is through the prayers of the Christian people who have sent them up in this community,'' Walters said.

''I firmly believe and am confident of the fact that had it not been for the direct intervention of the Lord Jesus Christ last Thursday, a disaster would have happened. You can quote me on that.''

The Rev. Donald Sibley, a black Jena pastor, called it a ''shame'' that Walters credited divine intervention for the protesters acting responsibly.

''What I'm saying is, the Lord Jesus Christ put his influence on those people, and they responded accordingly,'' Walters responded.

After the news conference, Sibley told CNN that Walters had insulted the protesters by making a false separation between ''his Christ and our Christ.''

''For him to use it in the sense that because his Christ, his Jesus, because he prayed, because of his police, that everything was peaceful and was decent and in order -- that's not the truth,'' Sibley said.

Walters has said repeatedly that Barker's suffering has been lost in the furor over the case, and that what happened to the teen was much more severe than a schoolyard fight.

Walters also has defended his decision not to seek charges in the hanging of the nooses, which he said was ''abhorrent and stupid'' but not a crime.

    Jena 6 Teen Released on $45, 000 Bail, NYT, 28.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Jena-Six.html

Blanco: No Challenge of 'Jena 6' Ruling

September 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 8:45 a.m. ET
The New York Times

BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) -- The prosecutor in the ''Jena 6'' cases has decided not to challenge a ruling that sent 17-year-old Mychal Bell's case to juvenile court.

LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters had earlier said he would appeal the state appeals court's decision to set aside Bell's second-degree battery conviction on the grounds that Bell should not have been tried as an adult.

Gov. Kathleen Blanco announced Wednesday that she had spoken with Walters and asked him to reconsider pushing to keep the case in the adult system. She said Walters contacted her Wednesday to say he had decided not to appeal the ruling.

''I want to thank him for this decision he has made,'' Blanco said.

Bell, who remains behind bars, was one of six Jena High School teens arrested after a December attack on a white student, Justin Barker. Five of the six teens initially were charged with attempted second-degree murder, though charges for four of them, including Bell, were later reduced. One teen has yet to be arraigned, another was handled as a juvenile and records are sealed.

Blanco made the announcement at a news conference with activists Martin Luther King III and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Sharpton said he hopes a bond will be set low enough to allow for Bell's release, and he thanked Blanco for getting involved.

''I want to congratulate her for showing leadership,'' Sharpton said. ''And I want to congratulate the district attorney for good judgment.''

Blanco said Walters gave her permission to announce his decision and said he planned to discuss his decision publicly Thursday.

The case brought more than 20,000 protesters to the central Louisiana town of Jena last week in a marched that harkened back to the demonstrations of the 1960s.

Critics accuse local officials of prosecuting blacks more harshly than whites. They note that no charges were filed against three white teens suspended from the high school for allegedly hanging nooses in a tree on campus -- an incident that was followed by fights between blacks and whites, including the attack on Barker.

Walters condemned the noose incident, calling it ''abhorrent and stupid'' in a New York Times op-ed piece this week, but he said the act broke no Louisiana law.

In the article, Walters defended the aggravated second-degree battery counts most of those charged in the attack on Barker now face. He said Barker was ''blindsided,'' knocked unconscious and kicked by at least six people, and would have faced ''severe injury or death'' had another student not intervened.

    Blanco: No Challenge of 'Jena 6' Ruling, NYT, 27.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Jena-Six.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Justice in Jena

September 26, 2007
By REED WALTERS
Jena, La.
The New York Times

THE case of the so-called Jena Six has fired the imaginations of thousands, notably young African-Americans who, according to many of their comments, believe they will be in the vanguard of a new civil rights movement. Whether America needs a new civil rights movement I leave to social activists, politicians and the people who must give life to such a cause.

I am a small-town lawyer and prosecutor. For 16 years, it has been my job as the district attorney to review each criminal case brought to me by the police department or the sheriff, match the facts to any applicable laws and seek justice for those who have been harmed. The work is often rewarding, but not always.

I do not question the sincerity or motivation of the 10,000 or more protesters who descended on Jena last week, after riding hundreds of miles on buses. But long before reaching our town of 3,000 people, they had decided that a miscarriage of justice was taking place here. Their anger at me was summed up by a woman who said, “If you can figure out how to make a schoolyard fight into an attempted murder charge, I’m sure you can figure out how to make stringing nooses into a hate crime.”

That could be a compelling statement to someone trying to motivate listeners on a radio show, but as I am a lawyer obligated to enforce the laws of my state, it does not work for me.

I cannot overemphasize how abhorrent and stupid I find the placing of the nooses on the schoolyard tree in late August 2006. If those who committed that act considered it a prank, their sense of humor is seriously distorted. It was mean-spirited and deserves the condemnation of all decent people.

But it broke no law. I searched the Louisiana criminal code for a crime that I could prosecute. There is none.

Similarly, the United States attorney for the Western District of Louisiana, who is African-American, found no federal law against what was done.

A district attorney cannot take people to trial for acts not covered in the statutes. Imagine the trampling of individual rights that would occur if prosecutors were allowed to pursue every person whose behavior they disapproved of.

The “hate crime” the protesters wish me to prosecute does not exist as a stand-alone offense in Louisiana law. It’s not that our Legislature has turned a blind eye to crimes motivated by race or other personal characteristics, but it has addressed the problem in a way that does not cover what happened in Jena. The hate crime statute is used to enhance the sentences of defendants found guilty of specific crimes, like murder or rape, who chose their victims based on race, religion, sexual orientation or other factors.

Last week, a reporter asked me whether, if I had it to do over, I would do anything differently. I didn’t think of it at the time, but the answer is yes. I would have done a better job of explaining that the offenses of Dec. 4, 2006, did not stem from a “schoolyard fight” as it has been commonly described in the news media and by critics.

Conjure the image of schoolboys fighting: they exchange words, clench fists, throw punches, wrestle in the dirt until classmates or teachers pull them apart. Of course that would not be aggravated second-degree battery, which is what the attackers are now charged with. (Five of the defendants were originally charged with attempted second-degree murder.) But that’s not what happened at Jena High School.

The victim in this crime, who has been all but forgotten amid the focus on the defendants, was a young man named Justin Barker, who was not involved in the nooses incident three months earlier. According to all the credible evidence I am aware of, after lunch, he walked to his next class. As he passed through the gymnasium door to the outside, he was blindsided and knocked unconscious by a vicious blow to the head thrown by Mychal Bell. While lying on the ground unaware of what was happening to him, he was brutally kicked by at least six people.

Imagine you were walking down a city street, and someone leapt from behind a tree and hit you so hard that you fell to the sidewalk unconscious. Would you later describe that as a fight?

Only the intervention of an uninvolved student protected Mr. Barker from severe injury or death. There was serious bodily harm inflicted with a dangerous weapon — the definition of aggravated second-degree battery. Mr. Bell’s conviction on that charge as an adult has been overturned, but I considered adult status appropriate because of his role as the instigator of the attack, the seriousness of the charge and his prior criminal record.

I can understand the emotions generated by the juxtaposition of the noose incident with the attack on Mr. Barker and the outcomes for the perpetrators of each. In the final analysis, though, I am bound to enforce the laws of Louisiana as they exist today, not as they might in someone’s vision of a perfect world.

That is what I have done. And that is what I must continue to do.

 

Reed Walters is the district attorney of LaSalle Parish.

    Justice in Jena, NYT, 26.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/opinion/26walters.html

Little Rock Nine Mark 50th Anniversary

September 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:30 p.m. ET
The New York Times

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) -- The Little Rock Nine, once barred from Central High School because they are black, arrived on its soggy campus Tuesday in limousines as the community marked 50 years since President Dwight D. Eisenhower directed soldiers to escort the students inside.

''They didn't ask to be a part of history, but they certainly are now,'' said U.S. Rep. Mike Ross of Arkansas.

Seating was set out for 5,000 people on the front lawn of the inner-city campus, where the high school is now 52 percent black. Classes were canceled Monday and Tuesday to accommodate ceremonies marking the school's integration.

Gov. Mike Beebe said society had made progress since the Central crisis, but he said economic and educational inequalities still exist.

''There will always be a necessity to show that we are inclusive as a society,'' Beebe said. ''The lesson is that we need to make sure that people learn from this event and be as inclusive as possible.''

Dale Charles, head of the state NAACP chapter, said the commemoration overstates the progress in race relations. Broad swaths of Little Rock are still predominantly black or predominantly white.

''After today, the lights will go out and people will look at something else. Today is a commercial piece,'' Charles said.

In September 1957, then-Gov. Orval Faubus used the Arkansas National Guard to keep nine black children out of Central High, telling a statewide TV audience that court-ordered integration would spark mob violence. He didn't acknowledge that he helped manufacture the crisis to boost his segregationist credentials.

Outside the school Tuesday, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said the civil rights struggle continues 50 years later in a social system that has ''first-class jails and second-class schools.''

''We were winning against all odds. Now we're begging youth to attend school,'' Jackson said.

Gene Prescott, who photographed the school's integration for the Arkansas Gazette in 1957, noted the difference in the crowd over 50 years. The all-white mob 50 years ago jeered the nine; Tuesday's crowd of blacks and whites welcomed them.

''They are mingling and they are shaking hands. That certainly is a change,'' Prescott said.

Former President Clinton joined the ceremony. Ten years ago, Clinton and then-Gov. Mike Huckabee walked to the front of the school and held the doors open for the Little Rock Nine: Melba Patillo Beals, Elizabeth Eckford, Ernest Green, Gloria Ray Karlmark, Carlotta Walls LaNier, Terrence Roberts, Jefferson Thomas, Minnijean Brown Trickey and Thelma Mothershed Wair.

Huckabee, now a Republican presidential candidate, said President Bush likely would have attended Tuesday's ceremonies if not for his visit to the United Nations.

''Like all of us, he can only be in one place at one time,'' Huckabee said. ''I'm sure if he hadn't have shown up at the United Nations, there would have been people critical of him.''

The U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated classrooms unconstitutional, ruling that many districts were operating education systems that were separate but not equal. By the fall of 1957, the Charleston and Fayetteville school districts had integrated peacefully, but agitators targeted Little Rock for trouble.

For three weeks, Little Rock became the focus of a showdown between Faubus and Eisenhower. Faubus pulled the Guard away, but a crowd gathered outside the school Sept. 23 to prevent it from complying with U.S. District Judge Ronald Davies' desegregation order.

Eisenhower that night authorized the use of federal troops to enforce Davies' order, and members of the 101st Airborne escorted the Little Rock Nine to classes on Sept. 25, 1957.

    Little Rock Nine Mark 50th Anniversary, NYT, 25.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Integration-Anniversary.html

Emancipation Proclamation Draws Crowds

September 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:48 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) -- As she looked at the Emancipation Proclamation, Catherine Jewell-Gill recalled her days of picking cotton in Arkansas as a child and later becoming a teacher and principal.

Jewell-Gill was among more than 2,100 people who filed through the Clinton Library on Saturday to see the three-page document that declared the end to slavery. Jewell-Gill, 72, said having the document in Little Rock during the 50th anniversary of the desegregation of Central High School pulls history together.

''I think it coincides beautifully,'' she said.

More than 10,000 people are expected to file past the proclamation during its four-day stay in the city, a rare trip outside the National Archive.

On Saturday, people came from as far away as California for a chance to look at the document's cursive script and President Abraham Lincoln's signature. The calligraphy drew Abby Loyd's attention.

''I think it's amazing,'' said Loyd, 30, of Little Rock.

The proclamation, issued in the midst of the Civil War, comes as Little Rock celebrates the 50th anniversary of nine black students braving angry white crowds to attend classes at Central High. President Dwight D. Eisenhower dispatched federalized troops to protect the students and uphold the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregated schools are unconstitutional.

That history drew Martina Westmoreland and her husband and son from Pasadena, Calif., to Little Rock for the weekend.

''It's exciting to be a part of this anniversary,'' said Westmoreland, 62. ''I'm also very much impressed with Little Rock itself. ... I always think of civil rights as being a problematic period, but I like the way that Little Rock is saying it's celebrating 50 years of integration.''

------

On the Net:

National Archives: http://tinyurl.com/qfma7

Clinton Presidential Center: http://www.clintonlibrary.gov

    Emancipation Proclamation Draws Crowds, NYT, 23.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Emancipation-Proclamation.html

FBI Probes Anti - Jena 6 Web Page

September 23, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:19 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- The FBI is reviewing a white supremacist Web site that purports to list the addresses of five of the six black teenagers accused of beating a white student in Jena and ''essentially called for their lynching,'' an agency spokeswoman said Saturday.

Sheila Thorne, an agent in the FBI's New Orleans office, said authorities were reviewing whether the site breaks any federal laws. She said the FBI had ''gathered intelligence on the matter,'' but declined to further explain how the agency got involved.

CNN first reported Friday about the Web site, which features a swastika, frequent use of racial slurs, a mailing address in Roanoke, Va., and phone numbers purportedly for some of the teens' families ''in case anyone wants to deliver justice.'' That page is dated Thursday.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said in a statement Saturday that some of the families have received ''almost around the clock calls of threats and harassment,'' and called on Gov. Kathleen Blanco to intervene.

A Blanco spokeswoman said the governor had asked law enforcement -- primarily state police -- to investigate.

''These people need more than an investigation. They need protection,'' the Rev. Jesse Jackson said. He said his organization would be in touch with President Bush's nominee for attorney general, Michael Mukasey.

''This is a test for the disposition of the Department of Justice to serve as an intervenor and a deterrent'' to hate crimes and discrimination, Jackson said. He said federal marshals should protect the families.

Carolas Purvis, whose number was among three listed on the Web site, said she did not feel in danger. Purvis is the aunt of Bryant Purvis, who has yet to be arraigned. She said she has received a number of calls, some from people who say nothing, others to let her know that her number had been put on the site. One, Friday night, used the N-word to her young son, she said.

A dispatcher for the LaSalle Parish Sheriff's Department said no one in the office Saturday could say whether any threats had been reported.

Of the two other numbers listed as ''active'' on the Web site, one was not answered Saturday; the other yielded a constant busy signal.

On Thursday, thousands of demonstrators marched in a civil rights demonstration in support of the so-called Jena 6. The six black teens were arrested after a December attack on a white student -- the culmination of fights between blacks and whites.

Of the six teens arrested, five initially were charged with attempted second-degree murder; charges for four have been reduced as they were arraigned. Charges against the sixth teen, booked as a juvenile, are sealed.

Mychal Bell is the only one to have been tried so far. A state appeals court recently threw out his conviction for aggravated second-degree battery, saying he couldn't be tried as an adult. He remained in jail pending an appeal.

William A. ''Bill'' White, listed as the Web site's editor and commander of the American National Socialist Workers Party, did not immediately answer an e-mail to his address. Calls to one of the two William Whites listed in Roanoke were not answered; the other said he was not involved with the site.

Blanco said Saturday that harassing families involved in the case ''cannot and will not be tolerated.''

''Public attacks on private citizens done out of ignorance and hatred is appalling, and anyone who stoops to such unspeakable persecution will be investigated and subject to the full penalty of law,'' she said in a statement.

------

Associated Press writer Janet McConnaughey contributed to this report.

    FBI Probes Anti - Jena 6 Web Page, NYT, 23.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Jena-Six.html

La. Protests Hark Back to '50s, '60s

September 21, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:31 p.m. ET
The New York Times

JENA, La. (AP) -- It had many of the signs of the early civil rights protests -- militant slogans, upraised clenched fists and multitudes of police -- but none of the hate and fear-drenched campaigns in Selma, Little Rock and Montgomery.

Thousands of protesters descended on this tiny central Louisiana town Thursday, rallying against what they see as a double standard of justice for blacks and whites.

But unlike the protests that became landmarks for civil rights when fire hoses and police dogs greeted demonstrators, the rally to support six black teenagers charged in a school fight had a festive yet laid-back air.

''It was a great day,'' said Denise Broussard of Lafayette. ''I really felt a sense of purpose and commitment, but it was also a lot of fun. I met great people and made some good friends.''

The march for the so-called Jena Six, a group of black teens initially charged with attempted murder in the beating of a white classmate, was one of the biggest civil rights demonstrations in years.

Hours later, police in nearby Alexandria said they arrested a white man after officers noticed two nooses dangling from the rear of his pickup truck. The driver, identified as Jeremiah Munsen of Colfax, was charged with inciting a riot.

In Jena on Friday, the state district court scheduled a session to decide whether a judge who has been hearing the case of Mychal Bell, one of the six youths, should be made to step aside from a bond hearing.

Bell, now 17, is the only one of the six black defendants to be tried. He was convicted of aggravated second-degree battery, but his conviction was tossed out last week by a state appeals court that said Bell could not be tried as an adult on that charge.

Bell had been arrested on juvenile charges including battery and criminal damage to property, and was on probation at the time the white student, Justin Barker, was beaten. He remained in jail pending an appeal by prosecutors. An appellate court on Thursday ordered a hearing to be held within three days on his request for release. The other defendants are free on bond.

The case dates to August 2006, when a black Jena High School student asked the principal whether blacks could sit under a shade tree that was a frequent gathering place for whites. He was told yes. But nooses appeared in the tree the next day. Three white students were suspended but not criminally prosecuted. LaSalle Parish District Attorney Reed Walters said this week he could find no state law covering the act.

The incident was followed by fights between blacks and whites, and in December a white student, was knocked unconscious on school grounds. According to court testimony, his face was swollen and bloodied, but he was able to attend a school function that night.

Six black teens were arrested. Five were originally charged with attempted second-degree murder -- charges that have since been reduced for four of them. The sixth was booked as a juvenile on sealed charges.

On Thursday, old-guard lions like the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton joined scores of college students bused in from across the nation who said they wanted to make a stand for racial equality just as their parents did in the 1950s and '60s.

But while those early protesters dodged police batons and were insulted by the white population, demonstrators on Thursday petted police horses, chatted with officers and posed by the Jena Police Department sign.

''It was a big event for us,'' said Donna Clark, who traveled from Atlanta with her husband and four young daughters. ''We got matching T-shirts and drove all night. It's exciting and I think the girls can say later they were part of history.''

People began gathering before dawn; state police put attendance between 15,000 and 20,000, though organizers said the crowd was much larger.

Law enforcement officials said the biggest problem was the heat.

''It's been a very peaceful and happy crowd,'' said Sgt. Julie Lewis of the Louisiana State Police. ''Really these are very, very nice people. They are welcome in Louisiana any time.''

The only strident note came at the end of the rally when a group of Black Panthers took the microphone and led the crowd in chants.

''We're nonviolent when people are nonviolent with us,'' one speaker said. ''We're not nonviolent with people that are violent with us.''

Jena residents, resentful of the massive protest in their little town and the racist label stamped upon them, were scarce during the demonstrations. Businesses closed, and so did the library, schools, city offices and the courthouse.

''I don't mind them demonstrating,'' said resident Ricky Coleman, 46, who is white. ''I believe in people standing up for what they think is right. But this isn't a racist town. It's a small place and we all get along.''

In Washington, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee said he would hold hearings on the case, though he did not set a date or say if the prosecutor would be called to testify.

Walters, the district attorney, has usually declined to discuss the case publicly. But on the eve of the demonstrations, he denied the charges against the teens were race-related and lamented that Barker, the victim of the beating, has been reduced to ''a footnote'' while protesters generate sympathy for his alleged attackers.

President Bush said he understood the emotions and the FBI was monitoring the situation.

''The events in Louisiana have saddened me,'' the president told reporters at the White House. ''All of us in America want there to be, you know, fairness when it comes to justice.''

------

Associated Press writers Errin Haines in Atlanta and Michael Kunzelman in Jena contributed to this report.

    La. Protests Hark Back to '50s, '60s, NYT, 21.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Jena-Six-Protest.html

Louisiana Protest Echoes the Civil Rights Era

September 21, 2007
The New York Times
By RICHARD G. JONES

JENA, La., Sept. 20 — In a slow-moving march that filled streets, spilled onto sidewalks and stretched for miles, more than 10,000 demonstrators rallied Thursday in this small town to protest the treatment of six black teenagers arrested in the beating of a white schoolmate last year.

Chanting slogans from the civil rights era and waving signs, protesters from around the nation converged in central Louisiana, where the charges have made this otherwise anonymous town of 3,000 people a high-profile arena in the debate on racial bias in the judicial system.

“That’s not prosecution, that’s persecution,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the founder of the RainbowPUSH Coalition and an organizer of the demonstration, told a crowd in front of the LaSalle Parish Courthouse. “We will not stop marching until justice runs down like waters.”

The Jena High School students, known as the Jena Six, are part of a court case that began in December, when they were accused of beating a white classmate unconscious and kicking him and a prosecutor charged them with attempted murder.

The beating was preceded by racially charged incidents at the high school, including nooses hanging from an oak tree that some students felt was just for white students. The tree has been cut down.

One student, Mychal Bell, 17, was convicted in June of aggravated battery and conspiracy. Those charges were voided by appeals courts, most recently last Friday. Mr. Bell has not been released from jail.

Even as demonstrators marched in Jena, which is 85 percent white, an appellate court ordered an emergency hearing to determine why Mr. Bell had not been released.

Mr. Bell is the sole student who has had a trial. Amid pressure from critics, prosecutors have gradually scaled back many charges against the other five.

Although the starting incident occurred about a year ago, the case has been slow to join the national conversation. After Mr. Bell’s conviction, though, the details spread quickly on the Internet, text messaging and black talk radio.

The case has drawn the attention of President Bush, who said to reporters in Washington on Thursday, “Events in Louisiana have saddened me.”

“I understand the emotions,” Mr. Bush said. “The Justice Department and the F.B.I. are monitoring the situation down there, and all of us in America want there to be fairness when it comes to justice.”

Students, particularly those at historically black colleges, have also had a pivotal role in spreading the details. They poured into town after all-night bus rides. Many said they were happy to pick up the torch of the civil rights struggle.

“This is the first time something like this has happened for our generation,” said Eric Depradine, 24, a senior at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “You always heard about it from history books and relatives. This is a chance to experience it for ourselves.”

A sophomore schoolmate, Charley Caldwell Jr., 22, said he was moved to attend the rally by the details of the case.

“When I first heard about it,” Mr. Caldwell said, “I thought it was obscene. So I felt I had to come. When we got here, there’s nothing but white people, and they aren’t used to seeing this many people of color.”

The case also resonates for people not in college.

April Jones, 17, who traveled from Atlanta, with her parents, Diana and Derrick, said she saw the problem as one of basic fairness. Ms. Jones could not understand why the students who hung the nooses were not punished severely.

The students were briefly suspended. District Attorney J. Reed Walters said Wednesday that the action did not appear to violate any state laws.

“I just feel like every time the white people did something,” Ms. Jones said, “they dropped it, and every time the black people did something, they blew it out of proportion.”

Mr. Walters sharply criticized the nooses on Wednesday, saying: “I cannot overemphasize what a villainous act that was. The people that did it should be ashamed of what they unleashed on this town.”

A marcher, Latese Brown, 40, of Alexandria, said, “If you can figure out how to make a school yard fight into an attempted murder charge, I’m sure you can figure out how to make stringing nooses into a hate crime.”

    Louisiana Protest Echoes the Civil Rights Era, NYT, 21.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/us/21jena.html

Alabama Plan Brings Out Cry of Resegregation

September 17, 2007
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — After white parents in this racially mixed city complained about school overcrowding, school authorities set out to draw up a sweeping rezoning plan. The results: all but a handful of the hundreds of students required to move this fall were black — and many were sent to virtually all-black, low-performing schools.

Black parents have been battling the rezoning for weeks, calling it resegregation. And in a new twist for an integration fight, they are wielding an unusual weapon: the federal No Child Left Behind law, which gives students in schools deemed failing the right to move to better ones.

“We’re talking about moving children from good schools into low-performing ones, and that’s illegal,” said Kendra Williams, a hospital receptionist, whose two children were rezoned. “And it’s all about race. It’s as clear as daylight.”

Tuscaloosa, where George Wallace once stood defiantly in the schoolhouse door to keep blacks out of the University of Alabama, also has had a volatile history in its public schools. Three decades of federal desegregation marked by busing and white flight ended in 2000. Though the city is 54 percent white, its school system is 75 percent black.

The schools superintendent and board president, both white, said in an interview that the rezoning, which redrew boundaries of school attendance zones, was a color-blind effort to reorganize the 10,000-student district around community schools and relieve overcrowding. By optimizing use of the city’s 19 school buildings, the district saved taxpayers millions, officials said. They also acknowledged another goal: to draw more whites back into Tuscaloosa’s schools by making them attractive to parents of 1,500 children attending private academies founded after court-ordered desegregation began.

“I’m sorry not everybody is on board with this,” said Joyce Levey, the superintendent. “But the issue in drawing up our plan was not race. It was how to use our buildings in the best possible way.” Dr. Levey said that all students forced by the rezoning to move from a high- to a lower-performing school were told of their right under the No Child law to request a transfer.

When the racially polarized, eight-member Board of Education approved the rezoning plan in May, however, its two black members voted against it. “All the issues we dealt with in the ’60s, we’re having to deal with again in 2007,” said Earnestine Tucker, one of the black members. “We’re back to separate but equal — but separate isn’t equal.”

For decades school districts across the nation used rezoning to restrict black students to some schools while channeling white students to others. Such plans became rare after civil rights lawsuits in the 1960s and ’70s successfully challenged their constitutionality, said William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights.

Tuscaloosa’s rezoning dispute, civil rights lawyers say, is one of the first in which the No Child Left Behind law has become central, sending the district into uncharted territory over whether a reassignment plan can trump the law’s prohibition on moving students into low-performing schools. A spokesman, Chad Colby, said the federal Education Department would not comment.

Tuscaloosa is not the only community where black parents are using the law to seek more integrated, academically successful schools for their children.

In Greensboro, N.C., students in failing black schools have transferred in considerable numbers to higher-performing, majority-white schools, school officials there said. A 2004 study by the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights documented cases in Florida, Indiana, Tennessee and Virginia where parents were moving their children into less-segregated schools.

Nationally, less than 2 percent of eligible students have taken advantage of the law’s transfer provisions. Tuscaloosa, with 83,000 residents, is an hour’s drive west of Birmingham. During court-ordered desegregation its schools roughly reflected the school system’s racial makeup, and there were no all-black schools.

But in recent years the board has carved the district into three zones, each with a new high school. One cluster of schools lies in the east of the city; its high school is 73 percent black.

Another cluster on Tuscaloosa’s gritty west side now amounts to an all-black minidistrict; its five schools have 2,330 students, and only 19 are white. Its high school is 99 percent black.

In contrast, a cluster of schools that draw white students from an affluent enclave of mansions and lake homes in the north, as well as some blacks bused into the area, now includes two majority-white elementary schools. Its high school, Northridge, is 56 percent black.

At a meeting in February 2005, scores of parents from the two majority white elementary schools complained of overcrowding and discipline problems in the middle school their children were sent to outside of the northern enclave.

Ms. Tucker said she, another board member and a teacher were the only blacks present. The white parents clamored for a new middle school closer to their homes. They also urged Dr. Levey to consider sending some students being bused into northern cluster schools back to their own neighborhood, Ms. Tucker said. Dr. Levey did not dispute the broad outlines of Ms. Tucker’s account.

“That was the origin of this whole rezoning,” Ms. Tucker said.

Months later, the school board commissioned a demographic study to draft the rezoning plan. J. Russell Gibson III, the board’s lawyer, said the plan drawn up used school buildings more efficiently, freeing classroom space equivalent to an entire elementary school and saving potential construction costs of $10 million to $14 million. “That’s a significant savings,” Mr. Gibson said, “and we relieved overcrowding and placed most students in a school near their home. That’s been lost in all the rhetoric.”

Others see the matter differently. Gerald Rosiek, an education professor at the University of Alabama, studied the Tuscaloosa school district’s recent evolution. “This is a case study in resegregation,” said Dr. Rosiek, now at the University of Oregon.

In his research, he said, he found disappointment among some white parents that Northridge, the high school created in the northern enclave, was a majority-black school, and he said he believed the rezoning was in part an attempt to reduce its black enrollment.

The district projected last spring that the plan would move some 880 students citywide, and Dr. Levey said that remained the best estimate available. The plan redrew school boundaries in ways that, among other changes, required students from black neighborhoods and from a low-income housing project who had been attending the more-integrated schools in the northern zone to leave them for nearly all-black schools in the west end.

Tuscaloosa’s school board approved the rezoning at a May 3 meeting, at which several white parents spoke out for the plan. One parent, Kim Ingram, said, “I’m not one who looks to resegregate the schools,” but described what she called a crisis in overcrowding, and said the rezoning would alleviate it. In an interview this month, Ms. Ingram said the middle school attended by her twin seventh-grade girls has been “bursting at the seams,” with student movement difficult in hallways, the cafeteria and locker rooms.

Voting against the rezoning were the board’s two black members and a white ally.

Dan Meissner, the board president, said in an interview this month that any rezoning would make people unhappy. “This has involved minimal disruption for a school system that has 10,000 students,” he said.

But black students and parents say the plan has proven disruptive for them.

Telissa Graham, 17, was a sophomore last year at Northridge High. She learned of the plan last May by reading a notice on her school’s bulletin board listing her name along with about 70 other students required to move. “They said Northridge was too crowded,” Telissa said. “But I think they just wanted to separate some of the blacks and Hispanics from the whites.”

Parents looking for recourse turned to the No Child Left Behind law. Its testing requirements have enabled parents to distinguish good schools from bad. And other provisions give students stuck in troubled schools the right to transfer. In a protest at an elementary school after school opened last month, about 60 black relatives and supporters of rezoned children repeatedly cited the law. Much of the raucous meeting was broadcast live by a black-run radio station.

Some black parents wrote to the Alabama superintendent of education, Joseph Morton, arguing that the rezoning violated the federal law. Mr. Morton disagreed, noting that Tuscaloosa was offering students who were moved to low-performing schools the right to transfer into better schools. That, he said, had kept it within the law.

Dr. Levey said about 180 students requested a transfer.

Telissa was one of them. She expects to return this week to Northridge, but says moving from one high school to another and back again has disrupted her fall.

One of Telissa’s brothers has also been rezoned to a virtually all-black, low-performing school. Her mother, Etta Nolan, has been trying to get him a transfer, too.

“I’m fed up,” Ms. Nolan said. “They’re just shuffling us and shuffling us.”

    Alabama Plan Brings Out Cry of Resegregation, NYT, 17.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/17/education/17schools.html

Leaders urge patience in W. Va. torture case

15 September 2007
USA Today

CORA, W.Va. (AP) — Civil rights leaders told a packed church on Saturday to have patience for the legal process and to pray for the recovery of a black woman who was allegedly tortured and sexually assaulted by a group of whites.

Listeners filled every pew and stood in the back of a small church as speakers from the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and local groups led prayers and answered questions.

Authorities say the woman was held captive for more than a week at a ramshackle trailer, where she was tortured, sexually assaulted and forced to eat animal droppings. Her ordeal ended Sept. 8 after police received an anonymous tip. Six suspects, all white, were arrested.

Most of the discussion Saturday at St. Phillip Baptist Church centered around the allegation that at least one suspect used a racial slur and the question of whether the suspects would face hate-crime charges.

U.S. Attorney Charles T. Miller has said there would be no federal charges for violations of equal rights laws. Logan County Prosecutor Brian Abraham can still pursue state hate-crime charges.

State National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Director Kenneth Hale asked the local black community not to arbitrarily demand prosecutors file hate-crime charges until the investigation is complete.

The Rev. Gill Ford, a regional director for the NAACP, said leaders discussed the racial aspect of the case Friday with Abraham.

"Everybody has a different way they define racism," Ford told the audience. "The law looks at it in a different way than all of us look at it. So we need to start talking to each other so we are speaking the same language."

Abraham has said he wants to first pursue charges that carry stiffer penalties than the hate crime law. One of the six, Bobby Brewster, had a previous relationship with the victim and was charged in July with domestic violence, Abraham has said.

The suspects remain in custody in lieu of $100,000 cash bail each. Hearings are set to begin Monday.

The woman's mother said Thursday that her daughter was expected to remain hospitalized for a few more days.

    Leaders urge patience in W. Va. torture case, UT, 15.9.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-09-15-torture-wva_N.htm

Conviction

in Racially Tinged Louisiana Case

Is Overturned

September 15, 2007
The New York Times
By RICHARD G. JONES

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 14 — A Louisiana appeals court on Friday overturned the conviction of an African-American high school student who was accused of the beating of a white classmate in case that has become a flashpoint for accusations of racial bias in the state’s judicial system.

The student, Mychal Bell, 17, was one of six black teenagers accused in the beating of a schoolmate in the northern Louisiana town of Jena last December. Mr. Bell was the first accused student to face trial, and his conviction on charges of conspiracy and aggravated battery drew accusations that prosecutors were biased.

His lawyers argued that Mr. Bell was not old enough to be tried as an adult and that the maximum penalty that he faced — 22 years in prison — was excessive. Facing increasing pressure from national civil rights groups, prosecutors in recent weeks have reduced the charges against some of the other defendants, who are yet to face trial.

On Sept. 4, Mr. Bell’s conviction on conspiracy charges was overturned by another judge.

A lawyer for Mr. Bell, Louis Scott, said in a telephone interview Friday night that his client felt a sense of relief at the decision but is still concerned by the prospect of another trial in Juvenile Court.

“I explained it to Mychal in football terms,” Mr. Scott said. “We started the game down by a touchdown and a field goal. On Sept. 4, we got the field goal. Today, we got the touchdown. Now, we get to start the game all over again.”

The teenagers, who have come to be known as the Jena Six, were originally charged with attempted murder in the beating of a classmate, Justin Barker, who was injured in a brawl that was sparked by racial taunts, including the dangling of hangman’s nooses from a tree.

    Conviction in Racially Tinged Louisiana Case Is Overturned, NYT, 15.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/us/15jena2.html