USA > History > 2010 > African-Americans (I)

Freed From Prison,

Long Island Man Takes to Pulpit

December 24, 2010
The New York Times
By SARAH MASLIN NIR

CORAM, N.Y. — A Long Island man whose prison sentence in the fatal shooting a 17-year-old in front of his home was commuted by Gov. David A. Paterson said Friday that he was haunted by what he had done.

“I remember that family,” the man, John H. White, said in an interview after delivering an emotional speech at his church in which he described the horrors of prison. “I remember what they’ve lost. I remember their son. I will remember them the rest of their days. And I will ask God to forgive me all the rest of my days.”

It was Mr. White’s first full day at home after Mr. Paterson commuted his prison sentence after he had served five months of a 20-month to 4-year term. Mr. White, 57, had been convicted of second-degree manslaughter and criminal possession of a weapon in the racially charged case: his is one of the few African-American families in the upscale Suffolk County hamlet of Miller Place, and the teenager he shot, Daniel Cicciaro, was white, one of a group of young men who were demanding to fight Mr. White’s son Aaron one night in August 2006.

On Friday night, Mr. White, a construction foreman who is also a deacon at Faith Baptist Church in Coram, a less affluent town, spoke forcefully but cryptically about the time he served at the Mount McGregor Correctional Facility in upstate Saratoga County.

“There is another side to men that not even men know,” Mr. White said, standing before a congregation of about 40 on Christmas Eve. In a speech lasting about eight minutes and in an interview afterward, he described prison as an “upside-down kingdom” where “what’s right is sometimes wrong, what’s wrong is right.”

Mr. White, 57, wore a dark suit and red tie and began his speech with singing. His words were met with volleys of hallelujahs as the congregation celebrated his return. Church members had sent several hundred letters in support of him, part of an effort spearheaded by the N.A.A.C.P., said the Rev. Beresford Adams, Faith Baptist’s longtime leader.

“He’s an exceptional person,” he said of Mr. White. “He’s very devoted.”

“We are not gloating; I want to make that clear,” he added. “We are happy for the White family; our hearts go out to the Cicciaro family.”

On Friday morning at his home, Mr. White said that all he wanted was “to take a hot bath, to shave, to go to church.”

“Hope is eternal,” he said before shutting the front door decorated with a red-ribboned wreath.

At his trial, Mr. White described his actions as protecting his family from what he perceived as a lynch mob, saying Mr. Cicciaro and his friends yelled racial slurs as they stood in his driveway.

“There is no racial divide as far as the church is concerned,” Mr. Adams said. “We live on Christian principles that demand that everybody is the same in the eyes of God.” Chief among those principles, he said, “is forgiveness.”

Mr. Cicciaro’s mother, Joanne, declined to comment on the case on Friday. Dano’s Auto Clinic in Port Jefferson Station, which is run by the victim’s father, was closed on Friday, but a decoration, the face of an African-American Santa Claus, was taped to the outside of the front door. It was unclear who had put it there.

At a news conference in Manhattan, Governor Paterson said he wished he had spoken with the dead teenager’s family before making his decision. He said he ended up speaking with the family on Friday for nearly an hour, but declined to provide details.

The governor said that although he would not have changed his decision, “there were some points that Ms. Cicciaro made that were rather compelling.” He added, “There were some issues that were raised by Ms. Cicciaro that I will think about over the holidays.”

Nicholas Confessore and Anahad O’Connor contributed reporting.

    Freed From Prison, Long Island Man Takes to Pulpit, NYT, 24.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/25/nyregion/25white.html

Sentence Commuted

in Racially Charged Killing

December 23, 2010
The New York Times
By COREY KILGANNON

Gov. David A. Paterson announced on Thursday that he had commuted the prison sentence of a black man who fatally shot an unarmed white teenager outside the man’s house in August 2006, weighing in on a case where the issue of race on Long Island became as much fodder for debate as the man’s innocence or guilt.

The trial of the man, John H. White, had racial overtones, as defense lawyers suggested that the tension associated with the Deep South in the civil rights era was alive in 2006, in a New York suburb with good schools, high property values and privileged children.

Mr. White, 57, was convicted of manslaughter for shooting Daniel Cicciaro, 17, point-blank in the face after Daniel and several friends had left a party and showed up late at night at Mr. White’s house in Miller Place, a predominantly white hamlet in Suffolk County.

The white teenagers had arrived to challenge Mr. White’s son Aaron, then 19, to a fight. The white teenagers used threats, profanities and racial epithets outside the house. Mr. White, who had been asleep, grabbed a loaded Beretta pistol he kept in his garage.

In a statement, Mr. Paterson, who leaves office next week, said, “My decision today may be an affront to some and a joy to others, but my objective is only to seek to ameliorate the profound suffering that occurred as a result of this tragic event.”

Mr. White, reached by phone at his home on Thursday night and asked for his reaction to the commutation, said, “I’m blessed and highly favored, brother.”

“I thank the Lord God most of all — he’s my savior,” he added. “Every day I thank my savior I am alive.”

Asked about the governor’s decision, he said, “I won’t get into all that; I’ll just say that Jesus is the reason we celebrate Christmas.”

Mr. White, who had served five months at an upstate New York prison for the killing, was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and of criminal possession of a weapon. He had remained free on bail during an appeal, but after the appeal was rejected, a judge gave him a sentence of 20 months to 4 years in prison, a spokeswoman for the State Division of Parole said. The maximum sentence, under legal guidelines, would have been between 4 and 11 years.

In July, Mr. White began serving his sentence at the Mount McGregor Correctional Facility, in Saratoga County. He would have been eligible for parole roughly two months after his first hearing date, next October.

Frederick K. Brewington, a defense lawyer who represented Mr. White during the trial, said a group of advocates for Mr. White made an application to Mr. Paterson for a pardon, “outlining the reasons, what the particulars were and the value to the community.” He added that supporters of Mr. White had organized a letter-writing campaign to urge the governor to consider Mr. White’s case.

A commutation lessens the severity of the punishment. A pardon excuses or forgives the offense itself.

At the trial, Mr. White testified that his son woke him from a deep sleep the night of the shooting, yelling that “some kids are coming here to kill me.” Mr. White said he considered the angry teenagers a “lynch mob.”

Mr. White said their racist language recalled the hatred he saw as a child visiting the segregated Deep South and stories of his grandfather’s being chased out of Alabama in the 1920s by the Ku Klux Klan. He testified that his grandfather taught him how to shoot and bequeathed him the pistol he used.

But Mr. White said the shooting happened accidentally after he began turning to retreat and Daniel lunged at the gun.

Thomas Spota, the Suffolk County district attorney, said in a statement, “I strongly believe the governor should have had the decency and the compassion to at least contact the victim’s family to allow them to be heard before commuting the defendant’s sentence.”

Reached at his auto body shop in Port Jefferson Station, the teenager’s father, Daniel Cicciaro, reacted with annoyance when a reporter identified himself.

“Yeah, what do you need? An oil change?” he said. “We got nothing to say about it.”

Mr. Brewington said that Mr. White was released from prison at 8 a.m. on Thursday, and that the White family was happy with the decision.

“They’re all very thankful, particularly at this time of year for the blessings bestowed upon them and the thoughtful approach by the governor’s office,” Mr. Brewington said.

Mr. Paterson has granted nine pardons, three commutations and one clemency, and plans to make more pardons in immigration cases before leaving office on Dec. 31, officials in his office said Thursday.

The governor began a special clemency process in the spring intended to help permanent legal residents who were at risk of deportation because of long-ago or minor convictions. This month, he pardoned six of those immigrants, including a financial administrator at the City University of New York.

In the case of Mr. White, his lawyer, Mr. Brewington, acknowledged that race had played a big role in the trial, but he cautioned against viewing the commutation as racially based, especially because Mr. Paterson is black.

“He reviewed this matter as he reviews any other matter,” he said. “People have to be careful not to fan the flames of racism. If the governor happened to be white and he commuted the sentence of a white person, would that be an issue?”

Angela Macropoulos contributed reporting.

    Sentence Commuted in Racially Charged Killing, NYT, 23.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/24/nyregion/24commute.html

In a Changing Harlem, Rift Between Old and New Business Owners

December 19, 2010
The New York Times
By TRYMAINE LEE

Leah Abraham opened her cafe on Lenox Avenue in 2001 with a track record in business and a determination to chalk up another success. It never occurred to her to court the local elected officials and business and church leaders — the Harlem establishment — and get their blessing before she opened her door.

“I never felt that I had to ask for permission or that I had to wait my turn,” said Ms. Abraham, owner of Settepani, a cafe and restaurant on Lenox Avenue near West 120th Street. “I have done whatever I wanted to do despite anyone’s blessing.”

She soon realized, though, that her approach “is very different than the way the old guard looks at doing business in Harlem.”

And so nearly 10 years later, she said, business is good, but local leaders like Representative Charles B. Rangel, whose office is nearby, have yet to hold a meeting or an event in her restaurant.

“If he has an event, he’ll have it at Sylvia’s,” she said. “That’s the power that they have.”

Before million-dollar condominiums, fancy boutiques and coffee shops began to sprout along Lenox Avenue and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, Harlem was a struggling neighborhood of mom-and-pop shops, soul food restaurants and other small businesses that operated largely with a small-town exclusivity that is rarely replicated in other parts of the city.

Business deals were brokered over meals at places like Sylvia’s or in the pews of black churches, where local elected officials and other community leaders offered their blessings. It was there that new owners established relationships that often brought in business, as well as grants and financing.

Senior business owners said the meetings were as much about making intentions known as they were about showing respect — “kissing the rings,” many said.

“There were people in the community that you had to sell your ideas to: the politicians, the business organizations and churches, the nonprofit organizations,” said Londel Davis Sr., a former police officer who opened his first business, a deli, in 1983 and Londel’s, a bar and restaurant on Frederick Douglass Boulevard near 140th Street, in 1994. “They would support you with their business, and in return you supported them however you could.”

But with Harlem’s gentrification has come an unintended side effect: tensions between the neighborhood’s established business and political class and new business owners, some of whom view the old ways as patrimonial sentiment that is obsolete.

The schism seems to be as much about the old guard’s slowly losing its grip on power as it is about a perceived lack of respect shown by newcomers — a tension that many have said also exists in local politics.

Some say the rift is another indication of how much Harlem is changing.

“Today, I think instead of Harlem being viewed as a community, as a village, it is viewed as just another” business venture, said Walter J. Edwards, who opened his first business, a dry cleaner, in 1960, and later Full Spectrum, a real estate development company. “But how will those that opened the door be protected and taken care of?”

The old guard is still very active and, for the most part, still holds access to the purse strings to government loans and grants. At the top of the power heap is the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce, which has had a presence in the neighborhood for 114 years.

The chamber, as well as other business associations, including the Harlem Business Alliance, where Mr. Edwards is the chairman, have long-established relationships with Harlem’s older political leaders.

Those groups have long been vehicles for “money coming in and power,” which were scarce in times when banks and other institutions did not widely lend to blacks, said Van DeWard Woods, president of Sylvia’s restaurant and the son of its matriarch, Sylvia Woods.

In contrast, many of the new business owners come in better financed and operate with a casual indifference for neighborhood rituals. They say they are more concerned with handling their business than coddling egos.

Nikoa Evans-Hendricks, an owner of N Boutique on Lenox Avenue, which opened in 2005, said that she, like many of the “young and progressive” business owners, respected those who came before them, but that the climate was right for fresh blood and ideas.

“The old guard doesn’t have as much influence on the new guard,” Ms. Evans-Hendricks said. “There isn’t that same sense of indebtedness.”

Longtime business owners argue that respect is due because it was their sacrifices that led to the gentrified Harlem the newcomers now enjoy.

“They have a lot of fear, fear of ‘we’ve put up these fights and you don’t know our fight,’ ” said Ms. Abraham, who is something of a bridge between the old and new generations, and who is both admired and resented as a pioneer of the new Harlem. “They have a sense of ownership, that this was their Harlem.”

Eugene Giscombe, who opened a real estate business in 1982, described the scene as very “clubby” in the 1970s and ’80s, but doors were opened for young people who “wanted to go places and get somewhere in life.”

He said the old relationships were a necessity. For instance, he said, new business owners often needed politicians or prominent businesspeople to vouch for loans and rental agreements and to secure permits and licenses.

“I guess because things were so tough on us years ago that we looked inward to ourselves for support and encouragement and the ability to get things done through each other,” Mr. Giscombe said. “Back then we needed all the help we could get, and we looked around and we knew our neighbors and we went to them for support.”

Mr. Davis, owner of Londel’s, said, “We survived on the strength of the relationships that we built over the years.”

Many of the newcomers said that their independence did not come without consequences: Harlem’s institutions continue to support the businesses that came up the traditional way.

Both new and old Harlemites list businesses that they say opened with fanfare, but without local involvement. Word was spread that they were not interested in longtime Harlem residents or their patronage, the stories go, and eventually the businesses were forced to shut their doors.

Councilwoman Inez E. Dickens, whose district includes Harlem and whose family has operated businesses there for over half a century, cites her own support for a restaurant on Fifth Avenue near 116th Street. She said she held a couple of meetings there and invited colleagues to do the same. But the owners failed to welcome them, she said, and business dried up. The restaurant has since closed.

“The reality is that if you don’t do it, they will let it be known that you didn’t come into the community the right way,” Ms. Evans-Hendricks, of N Boutique, said. “You will most certainly be shunned.”

Some of the new business owners say they have turned to Mr. Edwards’s Harlem Business Alliance for advice. Others said, though, that the large, historic business associations, particularly the chamber, were too bureaucratic and slow-moving for the rapidly changing landscape.

The older institutions also appear to be focused on the large-scale development going on in Harlem, like the addition of Target, Applebee’s and upscale hotels and cultural centers.

“Being a member of one of these organizations in and of itself doesn’t guarantee success,” said Karl Franz Williams, owner of 67 Orange Street, a bar, and Society Coffee, a coffee shop, both of which opened within the past three years. “In the past maybe it was that way, that you couldn’t be successful without being a member, but that obviously is not the case anymore.”

A group of mostly newer Harlem business owners including Ms. Abraham, Ms. Evans-Hendricks and Mr. Williams last year formed Harlem Park to Park, a business alliance in south Harlem. The organization, with a mix of more than 50 old and new businesses, formed to offer an alternative to the established networks.

Councilwoman Dickens said there were risks in abandoning the old conventions.

“The new people come in and try to do business the way they would in some other place,” she said, “without any understanding of the culture here, and so many of them fail because they don’t extend themselves in the community.”

“They come in with great ideas and beautiful places that they invested their money in to build,” she added, “beautiful commercial storefronts, bars, restaurants, but there’s not enough of the new people coming in yet today to keep them alive.”

“Unless they are able to survive for another 10 years,” she said, “they will have to introduce themselves to not just the new who are coming in, but to those of us that have been here all along.”

    In a Changing Harlem, Rift Between Old and New Business Owners, NYT, 19.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/nyregion/20harlem.html

Black and Republican and Back in Congress

November 5, 2010
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — For the first time in over a decade, the incoming class of Congress will include two black Republicans, both of whom rode the Tea Party wave to victory while playing down their race.

One of them, Allen West, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army, prevailed in a tough fight in a South Florida district. The other, Tim Scott, is the first black Republican to be elected to the House of Representatives from South Carolina in over a century. They will be the first black Republicans in Congress since J. C. Watts of Oklahoma retired in 2003.

“I did not want to run as a black candidate; I did not want to run as a military candidate,” Mr. West said in a telephone interview. “I wanted to run as an American candidate and win the respect of the people.”

While the number of African-Americans in Congress has steadily increased since the civil rights era, black Republicans have been nearly as rare as quetzal birds.

For Mr. Watts, a former college quarterback, the job came with a significant spotlight and significant challenges — as an African-American he was a minority among Republicans, and as a Republican he was a minority among blacks on Capitol Hill. While his time in office overlapped the tenure of another black Republican, Gary A. Franks, who represented a Connecticut district from 1991 until 1997, Mr. Watts is in the one who came to represent the perks and travails of his position.

“I was smart enough to not allow Republicans to compel me to play the role of the ‘black Republican,’ ” Mr. Watts said in a telephone interview. “But I never felt compelled to ignore real issues of the black community either.”

He did not join the Congressional Black Caucus because it was dominated by Democrats, he said, a decision that Mr. West said was a mistake that he would not repeat.

“I think you need to have competing voices in that body,” Mr. West said. “I think that is important.” (Mr. Scott has not decided if he will join the caucus.)

African-Americans found a place in Congress in the latter decades of the 19th century, particularly during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, when 16 black men served, all of them Republicans. The first was Hiram R. Revels, of Mississippi, who was in the Senate from 1870 to 1871. Joseph H. Rainey from South Carolina was the first black member of the House, serving from 1870 to 1879, according to Congressional Quarterly’s “Guide to U.S. Elections.”

There were no blacks in Congress from 1900 to 1929, but since then, their numbers have increased bit by bit, especially after the civil rights movement, this time with Democrats leading the way, a reflection of the changed dynamics of each party and the shifts of power in state legislatures. Of all the blacks ever to serve in Congress, 98 have been Democrats and 27 have been Republicans; there are 42 African-American members in the current lame-duck Congress.

The yield of black Republican winners on Tuesday was small considering that 32 African-Americans ran in Republican primaries this year. “If two is the highest number of black Republicans to win since Reconstruction, it’s hard to call that a breakthrough,” said Tavis Smiley, a prominent talk show host who has repeatedly criticized Republicans as not doing enough to court black voters.

Mr. Scott and Mr. West represent the more conservative wing of their party — each had some Tea Party backing, including the support of Sarah Palin — but followed different paths to Congress.

Mr. Scott, who was born in North Charleston, S.C., grew up poor with a single mother until a Chick-fil-A franchise owner took him on as a protégé, he said, and imbued him with conservative principles. “Coming from a single-parent household and almost flunking out of high school,” Mr. Scott said, “my hope is I will take that experience and help people bring out the best that they can be.”

Mr. Scott, 45, was elected to the Charleston County Council in 1995 and the South Carolina House of Representatives in 2008. In the Congressional primary, this year he defeated both Carroll Campbell III, the son of a former South Carolina governor, and, in a runoff, Paul Thurmond, the son of former Senator Strom Thurmond, to take the seat in the First Congressional District, which hugs the South Carolina coast.

Mr. West, 49, has never held public office. Born and raised in a military family in Atlanta, he rose to battalion commander in Iraq. His 22-year military career came to an end during the war when he was relieved of his command after using a gun to coerce information from an Iraqi police officer during an interrogation. After retiring from the military in 2004, he moved to Florida, taught high school for a year and then went to Afghanistan as an adviser to the Afghan army.

John Thrasher, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party, said Mr. West won the battle to represent the 22nd Congressional District, which includes the coast of South Florida, because “he’s a great American patriot that resonated with people.”

“His opponent was Pelosi-Obama liberal,” Mr. Thrasher added, “and Allen gave them a different understanding of how government could be.”

Mr. West said he was more surprised that he won as a Republican in a district carried by the Democratic presidential nominee three elections in a row than as an African-American in a district with a white majority. But, he added, “I am honored to be first black Republican congressman from the state of Florida since Reconstruction. There is a historic aspect of it.”

Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

    Black and Republican and Back in Congress, NYT, 5.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/us/politics/06house.html

Violence After Sentence in Oakland Killing

November 5, 2010
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY and MALIA WOLLAN

OAKLAND — Protesters vandalized storefronts and clashed with the police here on Friday night after a white former transit police officer was given what they considered to be a light sentence for the killing an unarmed black man. But protests initially seemed less violent than others that have surrounded the controversial case.

The authorities said one officer was hit by a car — perhaps by a police vehicle — and another officer’s gun was stolen and turned on him. That protester was arrested, Police Chief Anthony W. Batts said, and a police police spokesman said 152 people had been arrested. “You have a very aggressive crowd,” Chief Batts said.

The demonstrations started after Judge Robert Perry of Superior Court in Los Angeles sentenced the former officer, Johannes Mehserle, to two years in state prison. But the judge dismissed a component of the charges that would have led to more prison time.

With time already served, Mr. Mehserle could be released from prison as early as next year. He was convicted in July of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Oscar Grant III, who was shot while lying face down on New Year’s Day 2009. He had been removed from a Bay Area Rapid Transit train after a fight, and Mr. Mehserle said that he had mistaken his gun for a Taser. He was acquitted of the more serious charge of second-degree murder.

The jury found that Mr. Mehserle was eligible for additional prison time because he had used a gun in the crime. But Judge Perry rejected that finding.

The shooting and subsequent verdict drew an angry reaction from Mr. Grant’s family, who thought Mr. Mehserle should have been convicted of murder, and sparked riots in Oakland.

The crowd on Friday initially assembled for a peaceful rally in front of Oakland City Hall, which had closed early, as had many businesses. But after the rally wrapped up, several hundred of the protesters began to roam downtown Oakland, vandalizing vehicles and businesses.

In Oakland, tensions between the city’s sizable black population and its police force are longstanding, even though the city has a black mayor and police chief. The mayor, Ron Dellums, had pleaded for calm, and police officers were out in force, with days off canceled and police helicopters hovering overhead.

But frustrations seemed present nonetheless. At the rally, Michael Johnson, a 26-year-old graduate student and medical case manager, said the sentence was a part of historic inequality.

“I’m indignant today,” Mr. Johnson said.

Malia Wollan contributed reporting.

    Violence After Sentence in Oakland Killing, NYT, 5.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/us/06transit.html

The Seat Not Taken

October 6, 2010
The New York Times
By JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN

AT least twice a week I ride Amtrak’s high-speed Acela train from my home in New York City to my teaching job in Providence, R.I. The route passes through a region of the country populated by, statistics tell us, a significant segment of its most educated, affluent, sophisticated and enlightened citizens.

Over the last four years, excluding summers, I have conducted a casual sociological experiment in which I am both participant and observer. It’s a survey I began not because I had some specific point to prove by gathering data to support it, but because I couldn’t avoid becoming aware of an obvious, disquieting truth.

Almost invariably, after I have hustled aboard early and occupied one half of a vacant double seat in the usually crowded quiet car, the empty place next to me will remain empty for the entire trip.

I’m a man of color, one of the few on the train and often the only one in the quiet car, and I’ve concluded that color explains a lot about my experience. Unless the car is nearly full, color will determine, even if it doesn’t exactly clarify, why 9 times out of 10 people will shun a free seat if it means sitting beside me.

Giving them and myself the benefit of the doubt, I can rule out excessive body odor or bad breath; a hateful, intimidating scowl; hip-hop clothing; or a hideous deformity as possible objections to my person. Considering also the cost of an Acela ticket, the fact that I display no visible indications of religious preference and, finally, the numerous external signs of middle-class membership I share with the majority of the passengers, color appears to be a sufficient reason for the behavior I have recorded.

Of course, I’m not registering a complaint about the privilege, conferred upon me by color, to enjoy the luxury of an extra seat to myself. I relish the opportunity to spread out, savor the privacy and quiet and work or gaze at the scenic New England woods and coast. It’s a particularly appealing perk if I compare the train to air travel or any other mode of transportation, besides walking or bicycling, for negotiating the mercilessly congested Northeast Corridor. Still, in the year 2010, with an African-descended, brown president in the White House and a nation confidently asserting its passage into a postracial era, it strikes me as odd to ride beside a vacant seat, just about every time I embark on a three-hour journey each way, from home to work and back.

I admit I look forward to the moment when other passengers, searching for a good seat, or any seat at all on the busiest days, stop anxiously prowling the quiet-car aisle, the moment when they have all settled elsewhere, including the ones who willfully blinded themselves to the open seat beside me or were unconvinced of its availability when they passed by. I savor that precise moment when the train sighs and begins to glide away from Penn or Providence Station, and I’m able to say to myself, with relative assurance, that the vacant place beside me is free, free at last, or at least free until the next station. I can relax, prop open my briefcase or rest papers, snacks or my arm in the unoccupied seat.

But the very pleasing moment of anticipation casts a shadow, because I can’t accept the bounty of an extra seat without remembering why it’s empty, without wondering if its emptiness isn’t something quite sad. And quite dangerous, also, if left unexamined. Posters in the train, the station, the subway warn: if you see something, say something.


John Edgar Wideman is a professor of Africana studies and literary arts at Brown and the author, most recently, of “Briefs.”

    The Seat Not Taken, NYT, 6.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/07/opinion/07Wideman.html

Obama: Black Lawmakers Must Rally Voters Back Home

September 19, 2010
Filed at 1:47 a.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Barack Obama implored black voters on Saturday to rekindle the passion they felt for his groundbreaking campaign and turn out in force this fall to repel Republicans who are ready to ''turn back the clock.''

In a fiery speech to the Congressional Black Caucus, Obama warned that Republicans hoping to seize control of Congress want ''to do what's right politically, instead of what's right -- period.''

''I need everybody here to go back to your neighborhoods, to go back to your workplaces, to go to the churches, and go to the barbershops and go to the beauty shops. And tell them we've got more work to do,'' Obama said to cheers from a black-tie audience at the Washington Convention Center. ''Tell them we can't wait to organize. Tell them that the time for action is now.''

His speech acknowledged what pollsters have been warning Democrats for months -- that blacks are among the key Democratic groups who right now seem unlikely to turn out in large numbers in November.

''It's not surprising given the hardships that we're seeing across the land that a lot of people may not be feeling very energized, very engaged right now,'' Obama said. ''A lot of folks may be feeling like politics is something that they get involved with every four years when there's a presidential election, but they don't see why they should bother the rest of the time.''

But he said he's just begun rolling back a devastating recession that's come down ''with a vengeance'' on African-American neighborhoods that were already suffering.

''We have to finish the plan you elected me to put in place,'' Obama said.

Summoning the joy many blacks felt at the election of the first African-American president and recalling the words of the late actor and activist Ossie Davis, he declared, ''It's not the man, it's the plan.''

Obama was treated to several standing ovations in the darkened cavernous center. But the hall grew quiet as Obama warned, ''Remember, the other side has a plan too. It's a plan to turn back the clock on every bit of progress we've made.''

Obama never spoke the name of the Republican Party, but repeatedly invoked its policies -- and did name its House leader, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio, a favorite Obama target in recent days.

Members of ''the other side,'' Obama said, ''want to take us backward. We want to move America forward.''

With polls showing his party facing a wide ''enthusiasm gap'' with the GOP, Obama sought to rally an important constituency in his speech.

''What made the civil rights movement possible were foot soldiers like so many of you, sitting down at lunch counters and standing up for freedom. What made it possible for me to be here today are Americans throughout our history making our union more equal, making our union more just, making our union more perfect,'' Obama said. ''That's what we need again.''

The caucus is a group reeling from ethics charges against two leading members, Democratic Reps. Charles Rangel of New York and Maxine Waters of California. Republicans are preparing TV ads spotlighting the cases, even though House trials are now not expected until after the November election.

Obama mentioned neither case in his 27-minute speech.

For Obama, the caucus dinner at the Washington Convention Center capped a week of concerted outreach to minority supporters, a traditional wellspring of Democratic strength.

------

Online:

Congressional Black Caucus: http://www.cbcfinc.org/home.html

    Obama: Black Lawmakers Must Rally Voters Back Home, NYT, 19.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/09/19/us/politics/AP-US-Obama-Black-Caucus.html

Varnette Honeywood, Whose Art Appeared on ‘Cosby Show,’ Dies at 59

September 16, 2010
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Varnette P. Honeywood, an artist whose brilliantly colored collages, paintings and prints presented a warm, upbeat picture of black American life and whose paintings were prominently displayed in the living room of the Huxtable home on “The Cosby Show,” died on Sunday in Los Angeles. She was 59.

The cause was cancer, Joyce Faye Allen, a cousin, said.

Ms. Honeywood, whose bright colors and simplified forms were strongly influenced by narrative artists like Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence, developed a socially conscious style of genre painting that showed black Americans in familiar settings: interacting with family members, gathering at church, socializing on a front porch.

“You can depict segregation, starving and homelessness,” Mr. Cosby told The Washington Post in 1997. “But in Varnette’s work you can see teenagers doing homework, a family cooking a meal, girls doing their hair.”

She drew inspiration in her early work from the area around McComb, Miss., where her grandparents lived. Later, assembling semiabstract forms into complex patterns, she depicted daily life in the neighborhoods around her in Los Angeles.

“Like many black children in L.A., I was taken back to Mississippi in the summers,” she told the reference work Contemporary Black Biography. “I grew up in the Black Arts Movement; was exposed to black artists; and I see myself as part of that legacy.”

Her work found its way to “The Cosby Show,” where it reached an audience of millions, after Mr. Cosby’s wife, Camille, saw a line of note cards, posters and prints that Ms.Honeywood and her older sister, Stephanie, sold through their company, Black Lifestyles.

The Cosbys began collecting Ms. Honeywood’s work in the early 1980s. Several of her paintings were featured prominently on the set of “The Cosby Show,” and she created the mural that served as a backdrop for Mr. Cosby’s show “Kids Say the Darndest Things.”

In the 1990s she collaborated with Mr. Cosby on the 12 titles in the series “Little Bill Books for Beginning Readers,” creating the characters and providing the illustrations. The books provided the basis for “Little Bill,” the animated series broadcast on CBS from 1999 to 2004, for which she served as a consultant.

Varnette Patricia Honeywood was born on Dec. 27, 1950, in Los Angeles. Her parents were elementary school teachers who had migrated from Louisiana and Mississippi.

At 12 she began studying art at the Chouinard Art Institute. She continued studying art at Spelman College in Atlanta, from which she received a bachelor’s degree in 1972. After earning a master’s degree in education from the University of Southern California in 1974, she taught art and helped design multicultural arts and crafts programs for use in the public schools.

In the mid-1970s she and her sister founded Black Lifestyles, one of the first art and greeting-card companies devoted to black themes.

Her 1974 painting “Birthday” was one of several featured on “The Cosby Show.” Her work also appeared in the television series “Amen,” “227” and “A Different World.”

“Certain art in our culture depicts a down feeling about how African-American people are treated,” Mr. Cosby told The Washington Post in 1997. “They are poor and needy or need help in righting the wrongs. Varnette’s work lets us not forget the personal joys.”

    Varnette Honeywood, Whose Art Appeared on ‘Cosby Show,’ Dies at 59, NYT, 16.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/16/arts/design/16honeywood.html

Ronald Walters, Rights Leader and Scholar, Dies at 72

September 14, 2010
The New York Times
By DENNIS HEVESI

Ronald W. Walters, who organized one of the nation’s first lunch-counter sit-ins to protest segregation as a young man and went on to become a leading scholar of the politics of race, died Friday in Bethesda, Md. He was 72 and lived in Silver Spring, Md.

The cause was cancer, his wife, Patricia Turner Walters, said.

Dr. Walters was 20 and president of the local youth chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. when he and a cousin, Carol Parks, organized a sit-in at the Dockum Drug Store in downtown Wichita, Kan. That was in July 1958, two years before students in Greensboro, N.C., staged the sit-ins that are often credited with starting the movement in many Southern cities.

Every morning for three weeks, the protesters in Wichita returned to the drugstore, sitting silently until closing time, despite constant taunting. Finally the owner relented and agreed to serve black customers, saying he was losing too much money as a result of the sit-in. That protest received scant national attention, and it was only in 2006 that Dr. Walters received an N.A.A.C.P. award for his role in organizing it.

By then he had made a significant mark on the civil rights movement — as a teacher, an author, a television commentator and an adviser to activists and politicians.

“He was an indispensable part of the brain trust of the movement,” Vernon E. Jordan, the civil rights leader and lawyer, said on Monday. “He was there for all of us, at the other end of the phone, if we needed his thinking, his synthesis of racial issues, political issues, economic issues. And he was always at the ready to get on the train to help the cause.”

Dr. Walters, who for 13 years until his retirement last year was director of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland, was a deputy campaign manager and debate adviser for the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson’s presidential bid in 1984. In the early 1970s, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Congressional Black Caucus, and he subsequently served as a staff adviser to Representative Charles Diggs, Democrat of Michigan, the first chairman of the caucus.

Dr. Walters wrote 13 books and scores of articles on racial politics. In “White Nationalism, Black Interests: Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community” (2003), he analyzed the resurgence of conservatism among whites.

Sixteen years before, in “Black Presidential Politics in America: A Strategic Approach,” Dr. Walters had envisioned the possibility of an African-American president and laid out the steps that such a candidate would have to take to reach the White House.

Patricia Walters recalled the night President Obama was elected two years ago: “We were stunned, elated and immediately fell into each other’s arms and started crying. My husband looked me in the eyes and said, ‘This is the vision I was trying to present when I wrote the book, that this was a great possibility.’ ”

Ronald William Walters was born in Wichita on July 20, 1938, the oldest of seven children of Gilmar and Maxine Fray Walters. His father was a career Army officer and later a professional bassist; his mother was a civil rights investigator for the state.

Besides his wife, he is survived by three brothers, Duane, Terence and Kevin, and two sisters, Marcia Walters-Hardeman and Sharon Walters.

Dr. Walters graduated from Fisk University with a degree in history in 1963 and went on to earn a master’s in African studies in 1966 and a doctorate in international studies in 1971, both from American University. He taught at Syracuse University in the late 1960s, was a visiting professor at Princeton and a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard and, in 1969, became the first chairman of Afro-American studies at Brandeis University. From 1971 to 1996 he taught at Howard University, including 15 years as chairman of its political science department.

Dr. Walters wrote a weekly syndicated column that appeared in many newspapers. Last month, in his last column, he recalled the “progressive spirit of the original nonviolent march” on Washington in August 1963, “which held out the hope of racial reconciliation and that America would finally cash a check of justice that would allow all of us to invest in the great project of democracy.”

    Ronald Walters, Rights Leader and Scholar, Dies at 72, NYT, 14.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/15/us/15walters.html

Revisiting Black History on Martha’s Vineyard

August 29, 2010
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

OAK BLUFFS, Mass. — As a getaway for two Democratic presidents, including the current one, Martha’s Vineyard is often disparaged as an undemocratic haven for wealthy white elites.

Kathlyn Joy Gilliam and Lorraine Parson thought differently from what they had read in black history books, and longed to visit.

“It’s always been said this is where the elite African-Americans came,” said Ms. Parson, 74. Mrs. Gilliam, her 79-year-old sister, added, “I didn’t realize how many African-Americans were here, though.”

By chance, the two women finally visited last week, while President Obama was here for his second August vacation since taking office. They did not see him, but they saw much of the island on a daylong tour of its African-American Heritage Trail: 22 sites that someday will probably add a stop for the secluded farm the first black president rented.

The island has often been called self-segregated, with most African-Americans here in Oak Bluffs. Its harbor drew freed slaves, laborers and sailors in the 18th century, and white locals sold them land. In the late 19th and 20th centuries, middle-class blacks bought or rented summer homes; many descendants returned annually. Most affluent whites live in Edgartown to the southeast or on farms and estates to the west, where Mr. Obama stays.

But many African-Americans here, year-rounders and summer visitors alike, insist it is not segregated. “This is one of the most integrated communities, racially and economically, that there is,” said Vernon Jordan, the lawyer and former civil rights leader, who has rented a summer place for years.

His wife, Ann, came here as a child from segregated Tuskegee, Ala., with her father, a surgeon. Her cousin is Valerie Jarrett, Mr. Obama’s longtime friend and adviser, who has vacationed here since she was a child.

“We’d hitchhike all over the island,” Ms. Jarrett said. “I never experienced a hint of discrimination on the island in more than 40 years.”

Influenced by Ms. Jarrett and other friends, Mr. Obama visited several times before he became president. In August 2004, amid his campaign for the Senate, Mr. Obama was here for a forum on the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruling against segregated schools. Also participating were two summer residents and Harvard professors, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Charles J. Ogletree Jr.

In 2007, Mr. Obama came for a fund-raiser when he was running for president. He called the island “one of those magical places where people of all different walks of life come together, where they take each other at face value.”

According to the book “African-Americans on Martha’s Vineyard,” a 1947 article in Ebony magazine said the “most exclusive Negro summer colony in the country is at quaint historical Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard.” It added, “Negro and white swim together on the public beaches, rub shoulders at public affairs.”

Forty-two years later, in 1989, Ebony again declared the island “a vacation mecca.”

The heritage trail includes stops at the houses of former Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the first black senator after Reconstruction and the first from the North; former Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr.; and Dorothy West, a Harlem Renaissance writer who for two summers in the 1990s was visited by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, another Vineyard resident and a Doubleday editor who guided Ms. West to finish her novel “The Wedding.”

Also on the tour is the oceanfront mansion of Joseph Overton, the onetime Harlem labor leader, which was known as the Summer White House of the civil rights movement. It faces the Inkwell beach, named long ago by black youths or black writers — no one seems certain. The house’s visitors included the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who vacationed on the island with his family a number of times, as well as Joe Louis, Harry Belafonte and Jesse Jackson.

The exclusive Chilmark area has Rebecca’s Field, land that the enslaved Rebecca Amos inherited and farmed until 1801. Edgartown has a plaque honoring the daughter who was taken from her to be enslaved elsewhere, Nancy Michael, called “Black Nance.” It calls her “a most singular character” — in the words of an 1857 obituary — for the spells she conjured for departing ship captains.

And on Chappaquiddick is the dilapidated house of her grandson, William Martin, who became one of the few black whaling ship captains in New England.

The tour guide, Alex Palmer, said the heritage trail group had been trying to raise money to restore the 1830 house or see it sold to someone who would do the restoration, but had been unsuccessful. Yet when he drove to the site, a new owner, Michael Partenio, was there with his two young sons.

Mr. Partenio, a photographer and producer from Danbury, Conn., who is white, said he would rebuild the house much the way Captain Martin knew it — and admit tour groups. He had already bought a guestbook; the visiting African-American women were the first to sign.

Mae Margaret Donaldson, 65, of Dallas, a cousin of Mrs. Gilliam and Ms. Parson, was so moved that she told everyone to hold hands in a circle. She prayed for a blessing on the house and its owners. Then she hugged Mr. Partenio.

“We’re going to take good care of it,” he told her.

    Revisiting Black History on Martha’s Vineyard, NYT, 29.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/us/30vineyard.html

In New Orleans, Black Churches Face a Long, Slow Return

August 27, 2010
The New York Times
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN

NEW ORLEANS — Five minutes past 9:30 a.m. on a Sunday this month, which is to say five minutes past the time the worship service was supposed to start, Shantell Henley pushed open the front door of her pastor’s house in the Lower Ninth Ward. She entered the living room to find a gospel song playing on the stereo, two ceiling fans stirring the sticky air and 25 folding chairs for the congregants waiting empty.

“Am I late?” she asked the pastor, the Rev. Charles W. Duplessis.

“No,” he replied, smiling. “We’re Baptists.”

His joke, though, could not dispel the truth. The problem at Mount Nebo Bible Baptist Church had nothing to do with any Baptist indifference to punctuality and everything to do with Hurricane Katrina, even as its fifth anniversary on Aug. 29 approached.

Having lost his house and his church to the broken levees in the Lower Ninth, Mr. Duplessis had managed by grit and will and fathomless faith to reopen in early 2009, using his rebuilt home to replace the sanctuary he couldn’t afford to replace, the sanctuary that had stood in some grim coincidence on Flood Street.

He installed an electric piano and a computer with a projector. He collected several dozen copies of the Baptist Hymnal. He put out weekly editions of the church bulletin; he put up a lawn sign declaring, “Our Church Is Back!”

What was not back was the bulk of his congregation. Of the 120 members before Hurricane Katrina, only 40 had returned. The rest were still strewn across the map — Alabama, California, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas. And Mr. Duplessis could not in-gather the exiles, as the Bible commands, because most of the Lower Ninth remained a ruin of buckled roads, cracked foundations and swamp grass six feet high.

“It’s church — it’s serving the Lord,” Mr. Duplessis, 59, said in an interview in his house. “If I linger on what I don’t have, I can’t see what I do have.” He paused. “But I know this isn’t where God wants us to be.”

In his plight and his persistence, Mr. Duplessis represents the experience of churches, ministers and congregations throughout the Lower Ninth. While the fifth anniversary of Katrina offers much reason to celebrate New Orleans’s revival, this neighborhood that once thrived with a black working-class of homeowners and churchgoers continues to stand as a desolated disgrace.

As every level of government has failed to restore more than a fraction of former residents to habitable homes, the black churches have tried desperately to return through a combination of sacrifice, insurance and charity. And anyone with an even cursory understanding of African-American life knows that without vibrant churches, the Lower Ninth can never truly rise again.

Where about 75 churches operated before Katrina, barely a dozen have been able to reopen, according to the Rev. Willie Calhoun, a local minister who has closely tracked the process. Even among those churches that have rebuilt, what were once congregations of 150 to 200 now number in the dozens. The monthly intake of tithes and offerings, previously $20,000 or more, has fallen to the low thousands.

“You got those that are still struggling to come back,” said Mr. Calhoun, the assistant pastor of East Jerusalem Baptist Church, “and you got those that came back but the congregations are so small they’re struggling to keep their doors open. And without the churches, you got no community.”

East Jerusalem, for example, has only $55,000 of the $150,000 it needs to replace the church building that was destroyed when the floodwaters propelled a house into it. In an especially perverse touch, which several other congregations have faced, New Orleans officials are requiring the church to buy land for off-street parking, as if the pressing problem of the Lower Ninth is traffic gridlock.

“I remember that film — ‘build it and they will come,’ ” said the Rev. Hall Lanis Kelly Jr., 62, the pastor of East Jerusalem. “I believe in that. The Bible tells us, you plant the seed, God will do the watering. But we sure thought that in two, three years, we’d be back.”

The Rev. Michael Zacharie did get back, rebuilding Beulah Land Baptist Church for nearly $400,000 with a combination of savings, insurance money and a grant from Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian relief organization. On the Sunday in early 2009 when he rededicated the trim red-brick sanctuary, Mr. Zacharie preached to only 50 of the 400 pre-Katrina members. Etched in the church cornerstone were the names of four who had died in the flood.

“We were determined to come back so we could be the light shining in the darkness,” Mr. Zacharie, 54, said in a phone interview. “We want to be there for anyone that needs comfort, counseling, compassion.”

Such balm in Gilead has long been the mission of the Lower Ninth’s black churches. When Mr. Duplessis first inspected the wreckage of Mount Nebo’s building — pews tossed aside like toothpicks, chunks gone from the roof, the rear wall knocked loose — he also learned that several boats had been tied to the steeple. With 20 feet of water around, the second floor of Mount Nebo was, in more ways than one, a sanctuary.

And so he has persevered in his living room. On this particular Sunday, the faithful finally did arrive, a dozen by 10:15 a.m., nearly 25 by 10:35. Mr. Duplessis preached from the Book of Joshua, all about determination. He conducted a baby blessing. And he joined his people in singing lyrics that were almost unbearably freighted with double meaning:

“Storm clouds may rise

Strong winds may blow

But I’ll tell the world wherever I go

That I have found the Savior and he’s sweet, I know.”

    In New Orleans, Black Churches Face a Long, Slow Return, NYT, 27.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/28/us/28religion.html

With Apology, Fired Official Is Offered a New Job

July 21, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, SHAILA DEWAN and BRIAN STELTER

This article was reported by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Shaila Dewan and Brian Stelter and was written by Ms. Stolberg.

WASHINGTON — Shirley Sherrod, the black Agriculture Department official whose firing and subsequent offer of rehiring by the Obama administration this week has sparked a national conversation about politics and race, said Thursday she believes she deserves a telephone call from President Obama — and the White House said Mr. Obama has not ruled it out.

Ms. Sherrod, who until Monday was the rural development director for the Agriculture Department in Georgia, said she was inclined not to return to the agency. Secretary Tom Vilsack on Wednesday said he was asking her to return to use her expertise to help move the department past its checkered history in race relations, but she told the “Today” show on NBC that she did not want the burden of solving the department’s racial problems to rest entirely on her.

She said she would like to have a conversation with Mr. Obama, but does not believe he owes her an apology.

“I’d like to talk to him a little bit about the experiences of people like me, people at the grass-roots level, people who live out there in rural America, people who live in the South,” she said on the show. “I know he does not have that kind of experience. Let me help him a little bit with how we think, how we live, and the things that are happening.”

Ms. Sherrod appeared on a round of morning talk shows, one day after the White House and Mr. Vilsack offered their profuse apologies to her for the way she had been humiliated and forced to resign after a conservative blogger put out a misleading video clip that seemed to show her admitting antipathy toward a white farmer.

By the end of the day, Ms. Sherrod had gained instant fame and emerged as the heroine of a compelling story about race and redemption.

Pretty much everyone else had egg on his face — from the conservative bloggers and pundits who first pushed the inaccurate story to Mr. Vilsack, who looked stricken as he told reporters he had offered Ms. Sherrod a new job. “This is a good woman, she’s been put through hell and I could have and should have done a better job,” Mr. Vilsack said, as he conceded that he had ordered Ms. Sherrod’s firing in haste, without knowing that the video clip, from a speech she gave to the N.A.A.C.P., had been taken out of context. He said that he had acted on his own, and that there was “no pressure from the White House.”

Mr. Vilsack’s late-afternoon appearance on Wednesday capped a humiliating and fast-paced few days not only for the White House, but also for the N.A.A.C.P. and the national news media, especially the Fox News Channel and its hosts Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, all of whom played a role in promoting the story about Ms. Sherrod.

The controversy illustrates the influence of right-wing Web sites like the one run by Andrew Breitbart, the blogger who initially posted the misleading and highly edited video, which he later said had been sent to him already edited. (Similarly, Mr. Breitbart used edited videos to go after Acorn, the community organizing group.) Politically charged stories often take root online before being shared with a much wider audience on Fox. The television coverage, in turn, puts pressure on other news media outlets to follow up.

The full video of Ms. Sherrod’s March speech to an N.A.A.C.P. gathering in Douglas, Ga., shows that it was a consciousness-raising story. Ms. Sherrod’s father was murdered in 1965 by white men who were never indicted; she spoke about how in response, she vowed to stay in the South and work for change. She married the Rev. Charles Sherrod, a civil rights leader and cofounder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Later, as director of a nonprofit group in Georgia formed to help black farmers, long before she went to work for the Agriculture Department, Ms. Sherrod received a request to help a white farm couple, Roger and Eloise Spooner, and she confessed in the speech that the request had given her pause. She did help them, however, and as the fracas over her firing became public this week, the Spooners came to her defense, saying Ms. Sherrod had gone out of her way to accompany them to see a lawyer and, in effect, had helped them save their farm.

“If we hadn’t have found her, we would have lost everything, I’m afraid,” Mrs. Spooner, 82, said in a telephone interview.

Fox News began its pursuit of Ms. Sherrod in prime time on Monday night on three successive opinion shows that reached at least three million people. Leading off, Mr. O’Reilly asked on his top-rated program, “Is there racism in the Department of Agriculture?” He discussed the tape, plugged Mr. Breitbart’s Web site and demanded that Ms. Sherrod resign immediately.

By the time Mr. O’Reilly’s remarks, which were taped in the afternoon, were broadcast, Ms. Sherrod had indeed resigned, a development that Fox’s next host, Mr. Hannity, treated as breaking news at the beginning of his show. He played a short part of what he called the “shocking” video from Mr. Breitbart, and later discussed the development with a panel of guests, mentioning the N.A.A.C.P.’s recent accusations of racism within the conservative Tea Party movement.

“It is interesting they just lectured the Tea Party movement last week,” Mr. Hannity said, telegraphing a talking point that would come up repeatedly on other shows.

Fox’s 10 p.m. show also covered the resignation as breaking news. Ms. Sherrod later said Fox had not tried to contact her before running the video clip repeatedly on Monday. (A Fox spokeswoman said the O’Reilly program had contacted the Agriculture Department for comment. On Wednesday, Mr. O’Reilly said he owed Ms. Sherrod an apology “for not doing my homework.”)

By Tuesday, Ms. Sherrod’s forced resignation was the talk of cable television news, and it was becoming clear that the Breitbart video clip had been taken out of context. After seeing the full video, the N.A.A.C.P., which had initially applauded Ms. Sherrod’s resignation, had reversed itself, saying it had been “snookered” into believing she had been acting with racial bias.

Still, Mr. Vilsack stood his ground on Tuesday, insisting that the Agriculture Department had a “zero tolerance” policy for discrimination. The department has for years been embroiled in lawsuits over accusations of discrimination against black farmers, and Mr. Vilsack said he had been working hard to “turn the page on the sordid civil rights record as U.S.D.A.”

By Tuesday night, however, the White House had intervened, a senior official said, and sent word to the Agriculture Department that Mr. Vilsack needed to reconsider.

The official said Mr. Obama had not spoken personally to Mr. Vilsack, but questions swirled around the White House on Wednesday over just how involved the president and his aides were.

Mr. Obama has shied from making race relations a major theme of his presidency, yet somehow racially charged controversies keep cropping up — as was the case last year, when the president said the Cambridge, Mass., police had “acted stupidly” in arresting a black Harvard University professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr. The upshot of that was the White House “beer summit,” in which Mr. Gates and the white arresting officer shared some cold beverages with Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In an interview Wednesday afternoon, shortly after Mr. Vilsack extended his public apology, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said Mr. Obama should hold another summit with Ms. Sherrod and the Spooners.

“In the end, it’s such a redemptive storybook ending,” said Mr. Jackson, who has known Charles Sherrod for decades. “I wish that Shirley Sherrod and the Spooner family could be invited to the White House and give them the credit that they’re due, because it is a great American story. A rural white family in Georgia and a black woman, overcoming years of segregation. It would be great if the president were to seize this moment.”

    With Apology, Fired Official Is Offered a New Job, NYT, 21.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/us/politics/22sherrod.html

Officer Guilty in Killing That Inflamed Oakland

July 8, 2010
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

A white Bay Area transit officer was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter on Thursday by a Los Angeles jury in the shooting death of an unarmed black man on Jan. 1, 2009, ending a closely watched trial that percolated with racial tension and cries for peace in the city of Oakland, Calif., where the killing occurred.

The officer, Johannes Mehserle, 28, had been accused of a more serious charge, second-degree murder, in the death of Oscar Grant III, 22, a butcher’s apprentice who was shot while lying face down on a platform after being removed from a Bay Area Rapid Transit train during a fight.

City officials were worried about a reprise of the 2009 riots that erupted in downtown Oakland, with crowds burning cars and smashing storefronts after Mr. Grant’s shooting, which was captured on cellphone video and widely disseminated on the Internet.

Initial reaction on Thursday was not promising: several hundred people gathered near Oakland City Hall early in the evening, and were seen to be taunting police officers in riot gear and throwing bottles. At least one person was either hit by a vehicle or injured by the surging crowd. But a heavy police presence seemed to be keeping the peace, and hundreds of others were listening peacefully to speakers who had gathered downtown.

Mr. Mehserle, who contended that the shooting was an accident caused when he mistook his sidearm for his Taser, faces up to four years in prison, and additional prison time because a gun was involved in his crime. Sentencing is scheduled for Aug. 6.

Mr. Grant’s family seemed disappointed with the verdict, which came after just a day and a half of deliberation by the case’s final jury. “We thought the jury was dismissive,” said John Burris, a lawyer for the Grant family. “It’s a small victory, but it is not a fair representation of what happened, an officer standing over him with his hands tied and shooting him.”

The verdict, announced to a packed courtroom at Los Angeles Superior Court, was preceded by anxious moments in downtown Oakland, where some merchants were boarding up storefronts in recent days in expectation of civil unrest.

Yolanda Mesa, 31, who said she was Mr. Grant’s sister-in-law, arrived downtown after the verdict and criticized the absence of blacks on the jury in Los Angeles. “We are not happy with this at all,” she said. “This is not justice.”

But for some, the very fact of a conviction of a police officer — a member of the Bay Area Rapid Transit police, not the Oakland force — was some solace. Black residents in Oakland, who make up a large portion of the population, have long had an uneasy relationship with the city’s police, whose past episodes of brutality and malfeasance have led to a long period of oversight by independent monitors and a federal judge.

“We’ve been suffering police brutality for generations,” said Lesley Phillips, a longtime Oakland resident. “We want it to end.”

City officials and the police in Oakland had been preparing for the verdict for several weeks as arguments were under way in Los Angeles, where the trial had been moved because of worries about impaneling an impartial jury in Alameda County. Reaction in front of the Los Angeles courtroom was calm, but officials in Oakland closed City Hall and sent city workers home soon after word that a verdict had been reached.

Mayor Ron Dellums and Police Chief Anthony W. Batts had been urging calm as the jury began deliberating. The police had also been put on alert, practicing antiriot maneuvers and coordinating with representatives of several local agencies in case of civil unrest. City officials had argued that much of the violence from earlier riots had been caused by “outside agitators.”

That message was echoed by a group called Oakland for Justice, which organized an evening rally to create “a safe space” where youths wouldn’t be “exposed to the risk of arrest because of the actions of others.”

But Arnold Lucas Jr., 19, said he was depressed by the verdict and thought it was unfair. “It’s the same thing as Rodney King,” he said. “Its 2010. The same thing is going on. There’s never going to be peace on earth.”

City Councilwoman Jean Quan said: “I don’t think anyone is really happy with the verdict. At least we’re pleased he didn’t get total acquittal.”


Rebecca Cathcart contributed reporting from Los Angeles Carol Pogash and Tad Whitaker from Oakland.

    Officer Guilty in Killing That Inflamed Oakland, NYT, 8.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/us/09verdict.html

Black Landowners Fight to Reclaim Georgia Home

June 30, 2010
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN

HARRIS NECK NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, Ga. — When the managers from the federal Fish and Wildlife Service talk about this 2,800-acre preserve of moss-draped cypress, palmetto and marsh, they speak of endangered wood stork rookeries and disappearing marsh habitat, dike maintenance and interpretive kiosks.

But when the members of the Harris Neck Land Trust talk about it, they speak of injustice, racism and a place they used to call home.

In 1942, Harris Neck, a thriving community of black landowners who hunted, farmed and gathered oysters, was taken by the federal government to build an airstrip. Now, the elders — who remember barefoot childhoods spent climbing trees and waking to watch the Canada geese depart in formation — want to know why they cannot have it back.

The Harris Neck Land Trust, formed by the former residents, their descendants and a handful of white families who owned land but did not live on Harris Neck, is asking Congress to return the land. The Fish and Wildlife Service maintains that the land is a crucial part of the national refuge system.

On its face, the quest of the former residents pits the goal of environmental conservation against that of righting a historical injustice. But it is also a conflict about two ways of life — one that tries to protect natural resources from human encroachment, the other demonstrating that humans can live in harmony with nature.

To the former residents, the suggestion that they cannot coexist with the wildlife on Harris Neck is absurd. “Wildlife was a part of us all of our lives,” said Kenneth R. Dunham Sr., 80, who was a child when the federal government gave Harris Neck families two weeks to leave before their houses were bulldozed and burned. “In my back door, I could hear the wild geese coming. We left food in the field so they would have something to eat.”

Harris Neck was deeded by a plantation owner to a former slave in 1865. Black families who settled there built houses and boats and started crab and oyster factories. But the community, many descendants suspect, was too independent for the comfort of McIntosh County’s whites.

During World War II, when federal officials were looking for a site for an Air Force base, the county’s white political leaders led them past thousands of uninhabited acres to Harris Neck. The government condemned the land and ordered the families to clear out with the promise, some residents recall, that they could come back after the war. Blacks received an average of $26.90 per acre for the land, while whites received $37.31, according to a 1985 federal report. In 1962, the wildlife refuge was established.

Trust members do not imagine that they can recreate their old way of life, but their plan for the land is meant to be similarly low impact. It includes solar energy, cutting-edge sewer treatment and organic farming. Most of the acreage would remain wild and open to the public.

But a little more than a tenth of the land would be developed — each of about 70 families would get four acres, with design requirements and a strict covenant that the land, now worth $100,000 or more an acre, could not be sold. There would be an eco-lodge and a convention center, which the county now lacks.

Transferring federally protected land is, of course, no easy matter. Representative Jack Kingston, a Republican who represents the area, has been generally supportive of the trust’s efforts but has tried to caution its members on the political difficulties. “Environmental advocates can be formidable adversaries,” he wrote in a May 25 letter to the trust.

Environmental groups, for the most part, have yet to voice opposition. Deborah Sheppard, executive director of the Altamaha Riverkeeper in nearby Darien, was hesitant to address the issue, saying that her organization had not taken a position. “This is not the traditional question that’s posed to environmental groups, and to the extent that people aren’t being responsive, it’s probably that they don’t know how to weigh in,” she said.

As a local resident, though, Ms. Sheppard said she was familiar with the history of Harris Neck and sympathetic to the former residents, displaced from land whose status as a wildlife refuge has helped drive the construction of million-dollar retreats nearby.

“People continue to suggest that people from Atlanta with money can live here in an ecologically sound way — why can’t people with experience hunting and fishing and living off the land live in an ecologically sound way?” she said. “Those people are rightly suggesting that they have a historic capacity to interact well with their natural resources. And the rest of us haven’t.”

Complicating matters is that the former residents are themselves, in a way, endangered. They are Gullah/Geechee, descendants of West African slaves who became some of the nation’s earliest black landowners. Their distinctive culture, preserved for years by isolation on the coastal barrier islands, has been threatened by development to such a degree that in 2006, Congress designated a Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor stretching from North Carolina to Jacksonville, Fla.

But without access to the land that sustained the Gullah way of life, there are few options for preserving it. Some official ideas were detailed in a letter from Cynthia Dohner, the regional director of Fish and Wildlife, who proposed, in lieu of returning the land, an “annual homecoming day” at Harris Neck and the chance to collaborate on an “interpretive kiosk.”

Evelyn Greer, 82, recalls the forced move out of Harris Neck in vivid detail: residents lugging furniture by hand or mule cart, leaving jars of preserved food and livestock behind. On the morning their house was to be demolished at 6 a.m., she and her mother woke early to retrieve a treasured phonograph and its two records. On the path, her mother froze.

“I heard the fullness in her voice,” Ms. Greer recalled. “She said, ‘We in plenty of time, but we’re too late.’ ” The house was in flames.

The family moved into a barn owned by the white man her mother worked for.

Now, Ms. Greer and other trust members meet monthly to pray, sing and mull their next move. There will be a meeting with a congressman who is friends with President Obama, and another with a Georgia Department of Natural Resources employee. Two longshoremen were in the room at a recent meeting — maybe the A.F.L.-C.I.O. could do something. “The Return of Our Land,” read an agenda. Then, pointedly, “Community Meeting No. 49.”

Mr. Dunham rose to deliver encouragement. “We’re going to move on, and we’re going to come on in spite all,” he said to amens and mm-hmms. “Won’t that be a happy time, when we all get to heaven? I’m talking about Harris Neck, now.”

    Black Landowners Fight to Reclaim Georgia Home, NYT, 30.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/us/01harris.html

For Negro Leagues Players, a Final Recognition

June 30, 2010
The New York Times
By ALAN SCHWARZ

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Only something so heavy could lighten their burden. Three men gripped a 150-pound headstone around the edges, lugged it 40 feet across the grass and lowered it into the dirt.

“Got it?” the anesthesiologist asked, tilting the slab in gently.

“Yeah. Yeah, over here,” the insurance man said.

They rose from their knees, brushed off their hands and stood back from the grave.

“Big Bill Gatewood,” the historian said with a sigh.

For almost 50 years, William M. Gatewood lay in obscurity in an unmarked grave here at Memorial Park Cemetery. But that ended Tuesday, when three baseball fans continued their quest to locate every former Negro leagues player without a headstone and do their share to right the wrong.

Gatewood was a star pitcher and manager in the early Negro leagues who is credited with giving James Bell his nickname, Cool Papa, and teaching Satchel Paige his hesitation pitch. Gatewood died in Columbia in 1962 with no one to arrange for a grave marker.

On Tuesday, he became the 19th player for whom the Negro Leagues Grave Marker Project has provided a headstone. The project volunteers track down unmarked graves, raise money for headstones and install them, often with their own hands.

“These were great ballplayers who don’t deserve to be forgotten, but they have been,” said Dr. Jeremy Krock, a 52-year-old anesthesiologist from Peoria, Ill., who began the effort seven years ago. “A lot of these guys, by the time Jackie Robinson made it, they were way past their prime. It was too late for them. And not having a marker on their grave for people to remember them only made it worse.”

Krock was joined at the gravesite Tuesday by Larry Lester, a Negro leagues historian from Kansas City, Mo., and Dwayne Isgrig, a customer service representative for a St. Louis insurance company. They convened under the beaming sun in central Missouri, drawn to Bill Gatewood’s grave by baseball, Negro leagues history and purposeful regret.

Since 2004, the remains of Highpockets Trent (Burr Oak Cemetery outside Chicago), Steel Arm Taylor (Springdale Cemetery, Peoria), Gable Patterson (Greenwood Cemetery, Pittsburgh) and other baseball pioneers have been tracked down and memorialized by the group.

It raises money for the $700 headstones primarily through members of the Society for American Baseball Research, although after hearing about the effort, some in baseball have quietly written checks, including the Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, the former commissioner Fay Vincent and the former player, manager and coach Don Zimmer.

At the annual symposium of SABR’s Negro Leagues Research Committee on July 15 in Birmingham, Ala., Sap Ivory — a first baseman for the local Black Barons from 1958 to 1960 — will get a headstone above his nearby grave.

The group’s primary targets now include two members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., Pete Hill and Sol White, among about 20 more on its growing list. Hill’s remains have yet to be found, and White is buried in an unmarked group grave at Frederick Douglass Memorial Park on Staten Island.

“We don’t want these men to continue to be unrecognized and invisible,” Lester said beside Gatewood’s new marker. “That’s just not acceptable.”

Ron Hill, Pete Hill’s great-nephew, who has been in touch with Krock’s group to help find his Hall of Fame relative, said in a telephone interview: “You wonder who these people are. But they were very sincere.”

Krock is a St. Louis Cardinals fan who had no particular interest in baseball history before he began the effort essentially by accident. Some older relatives had grown up in Ardmore, Mo., and still talked reverently about a 1930s Negro leagues outfielder from the town, Jimmie Crutchfield. Krock consulted an obituary, wanted to learn where Crutchfield was buried and eventually determined that he lay in an unmarked grave near Chicago.

A conversation with SABR’s Negro Leagues committee led to a mention in the group’s newsletter, and $25 checks from strangers started arriving at Krock’s home.

Krock came across two more players at Burr Oak, got headstones for them, too, and soon was after others. For Negro leagues players who died destitute enough to end up in unmarked graves, only fraying cemetery records can lead Krock to remains, as groundskeepers walk off distances with tape measures to pinpoint where the players might lie.

In the early Negro leagues, Gatewood — a huge man for his era at 6 feet 7 inches and 240 pounds — was the right-handed equivalent of C. C. Sabathia. Gatewood won 117 games for more than a dozen teams from 1906 to 1928 and pitched the first documented no-hitter in the newly organized Negro National League, in 1921. He threw another in 1926, when he was 45. As a manager, he mentored Cool Papa Bell, converting him from pitcher to star outfielder, and coached that quirky right-hander named Satchel.

Many decades later, Krock tracked down Gatewood’s remains at Memorial Park Cemetery just off Interstate 70 — although that was an even harder task than usual, because the original burial records burned in a church fire decades ago and Big Bill’s file read “Gatenwood.” Isgrig was a Gatewood fan because of their mutual ties to Missouri and arranged for the headstone for his forgotten hero.

On Tuesday, Krock spent his day off from the Children’s Hospital of Illinois by driving three hours to St. Louis, transferring the stone from a monument company pickup to his own Honda Pilot in a Denny’s parking lot, and driving another two hours to Columbia to meet Lester and Isgrig at the cemetery.

On mostly open grass made wavy by sunken graves, the three hoisted Gatewood’s stone by hand and placed it in a newly dug rectangle at what had previously been known to groundskeepers as Calvary 5, Row 3, Space 9. Krock wore a white polo shirt and khakis as he delivered prepared remarks; Isgrig and his two young children stood in Kansas City Monarchs shirts.

The gleaming stone read:

NEGRO LEAGUES BASEBALL

PITCHER AND MANAGER

“BIG BILL”

WILLIAM M. GATEWOOD

1881 1962

Instead of a hyphen between the years, they put a drawing of a baseball inside a glove, symbolizing Gatewood’s passion for the game that they, too, had inherited. None of Gatewood’s family, including four surviving grandchildren to whom Krock wrote letters, attended the ceremony.

“It won’t be a tourist attraction,” Isgrig said, “but it’s something.”

Several cemetery employees stood nearby to pay their respects and listen to stories about a man they had no idea was on their grounds.

The Westwood Memorial sales director, Bill Boos, had known nothing of the big pitcher or Negro leagues baseball. “Hearing everything today,” he said, “it almost feels like Big Bill Gatewood is coming back to life.” He offered Krock help connecting the group with other cemeteries.

As others walked toward the concrete path after the ceremony, Krock stopped, bent down and used his hands to adjust the stone a tick. Just to make sure it’s steady, just to make sure it stays.

    For Negro Leagues Players, a Final Recognition, NYT, 30.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/01/sports/baseball/01tombstone.html

Candidate Shrugs Off History’s Lure

June 25, 2010
The New York Times
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — Tim Scott seemed unburdened by history.

He is poised to become the first black Republican elected to Congress from the Deep South in more than a century, having trounced former Senator Strom Thurmond’s son in Tuesday’s Republican primary for South Carolina’s First Congressional District.

And yet when a voter, Carol Kinsman, a retired nurse who is white, greeted him here the other day, saying, “We’re going to make history,” Mr. Scott gently suggested that the color of his skin was not important.

“Our people are more concerned about the issues than anything else,” he told her. Then he quickly turned the subject to economic development and the need to expand the local Interstate.

Mr. Scott, 44, spent 13 years in county government and is in his second year in the South Carolina Legislature. But the national spotlight seemed to find him only Tuesday night. If elected in November — which is likely, given that his Democratic opponent, Ben Frasier, who is also black, is a perennial who has yet to bloom — he will become the only black Republican on Capitol Hill and the first since Representative J. C. Watts of Oklahoma retired in 2003.

“The historic part of this is nice to have — maybe,” he said of winning the Republican nomination, but he said it was also “a distraction.”

It is not hard to see what he means. This heavily Republican district stretches along the seacoast from here to Charleston, taking in many former plantations and including what was the main port of entry for tens of thousands of African slaves. The district is three-fourths white, and voted overwhelmingly for John McCain over Barack Obama in 2008.

But Mr. Scott, a staunch conservative, is a true reflection of its politics.

He believes that President Obama is driving the country toward bankruptcy and socialism. And he has some regard for Mr. Thurmond, at one time a leading segregationist and warrior against civil rights. When Mr. Scott was first elected to the Charleston County Council in 1995, Mr. Thurmond sent him a handwritten note welcoming him to the party. A year later, Mr. Scott became the statewide co-chairman of Mr. Thurmond’s Senate campaign, his last before he retired in 2003 and died the same year at 100.

How could a black man support someone with such a racist past?

“The Strom Thurmond I knew had nothing to do with that,” Mr. Scott said. “I don’t spend much time on history,” he added, noting that Mr. Thurmond had “evolved” by the time Mr. Scott was born, and had become better known, locally anyway, for his extraordinary level of constituent service. Mr. Scott said he hoped to emulate Mr. Thurmond’s attention to constituents, though not his longevity in Washington.

His goals are to shrink government, repeal the new federal health care law and eliminate earmarks, even those that would help his state. In the state legislature, he has co-sponsored an Arizona-style immigration bill, earning him the endorsement of the Minutemen.

In the primary runoff, Paul Thurmond, his opponent, branded him a career politician and an ineffective one at that.

“My opponent has run for four offices in three years,” Mr. Thurmond said during a debate. “He’s the epitome of politics as usual.” He added: “You wonder why he hasn’t gotten anything done in the House. He’s introduced five bills and hasn’t passed a single one. Within six months of moving into the House, he was running for a different race — that is not commitment.”

Mr. Scott was embraced by some leaders of the Republican establishment, including Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, and some Republicans with Tea Party backing, including former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska (on Facebook), leading some to refer to a “black tea” movement, which is eager to shed any racial overtones.

He also received big donations from the Club for Growth, bringing his total amount raised to an impressive $600,000. Mr. Scott said that if elected, he would limit himself to four terms in Congress, in part because he is a man with a plan — a rather detailed one — that grew out of his troubled youth.

Mr. Scott’s parents were divorced when he was 7. His mother, a nurse at a hospital in Charleston, raised him and his older brother, who is now in the Army in Germany, by herself, often working 16-hour days to keep them off welfare.

Now a business executive, Mr. Scott said he never used drugs and worked since he was 13, wiping windshields at a gas station and serving popcorn at a movie theater. But he acted up in class to seek attention, he said, and by ninth grade, he was failing several courses, including civics, English and Spanish.

He was rescued by a man named John Moniz, who ran the Chick-fil-A next to the movie theater. Mr. Moniz became his mentor, imbuing him with his conservative, Christian philosophy and, as a graduate of the Citadel, teaching him the importance of structure and discipline. He also introduced him to the self-help views of the motivational Christian author Zig Ziglar.

“To know my story is to understand that there were people who had no reason to step up to the plate and help me, but who did,” Mr. Scott said. “I want to serve the community because the community helped me.”

Mr. Moniz died of a heart attack at 38, when Mr. Scott was 17. That prompted Mr. Scott to write down a “mission statement” for his life: to have a positive effect on the lives of one billion people before he dies.

From there he developed what he calls a “life matrix,” a script for living, which is a blueprint for his future, blocked out in five-year segments. Getting elected to Congress, he said, is “helpful” to his life plan, but his goals are laid out in terms of how much he can help other people.

“I have financial goals, the number of lives I want to impact, the number of speeches to give to nonprofits and to faith community organizations, the number of dollars to invest back into the community, the number of speeches to kids like me in high school who are dropping out,” he said.

He has already helped develop a “healthy heart” program at the hospital where his mother still works. (He has lost 30 pounds in the last two years.)

“If you really believe in something and that the government shouldn’t do it, you better be busy,” he said.

Government, he said, allows too many people to be unaccountable, while individuals can achieve great things.

“That’s why I need to invest my time, my talent and my treasure in getting things done,” like helping people develop self-discipline and financial security, he said. “That’s my ambition.”

    Candidate Shrugs Off History’s Lure, NYT, 25.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/26/us/politics/26scott.html

Black Women See Fewer Black Men at the Altar

June 3, 2010
The New York Times
By SAM ROBERTS

It is a familiar lament of single African-American women: where are the “good” black men to marry?

A new study shows that more and more black men are marrying women of other races. In fact, more than 1 in 5 black men who wed (22 percent) married a nonblack woman in 2008. This compares with about 9 percent of black women, and represents a significant increase for black men — from 15.7 percent in 2000 and 7.9 percent in 1980.

Sociologists said the rate of black men marrying women of other races further reduces the already-shrunken pool of potential partners for black women seeking a black husband.

“When you add in the prison population,” said Prof. Steven Ruggles, director of the Minnesota Population Center, “it pretty well explains the extraordinarily low marriage rates of black women.”

Among all married African-Americans in 2008, 13 percent of men and 6 percent of women had a nonblack spouse. This compares with nearly half of American-born Asians choosing non-Asian spouses.

“The continuing imbalance in the rates for black men and black women could be making it even harder for black women to find a husband,” said Prof. Andrew J. Cherlin, director of the population center at Johns Hopkins University.

The study, to be released Friday by the Pew Research Center, found that intermarriage among Asian, black, Hispanic and white people now accounts for a record 1 in 6 new marriages in the United States. Tellingly, blacks and whites remain the least-common variety of interracial pairing. Still, black-white unions make up 1 in 60 new marriages today, compared with fewer than 1 in 1,000 back when Barack Obama’s parents wed a half-century ago.

While the increased rate of intermarriage reflects demographic changes in the American population — a more diverse pool of available spouses — as well as changing social mores, they may presage a redefinition of America’s evolving concepts of race and ethnicity.

“The lines dividing these groups are getting blurrier and blurrier,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, an author of the Pew analysis.

For instance, of the 2.7 million American children with a black parent, about 10 percent also have one nonblack parent today. Because many mixed-race African- Americans still choose to identify as being black — as Mr. Obama did when he filled out the 2010 census — the number of multiracial African-Americans could actually be higher.

How children of the expanding share of mixed marriages identify themselves — and how they are identified by the rest of society — could blur a benchmark that the nation will approach within a few decades when American Indian, Asian, black and Hispanic Americans and people of mixed race become a majority of the population.

More precise estimates of the number of people who identify themselves as mixed race will be available from the 2010 census. Other census estimates found a 32 percent increase in the mixed-race population (to 5.2 million, from 3.9 million) from 2000 to 2008.

Still, the “blending” of America could be overstated, especially given the relatively low rate of black-white intermarriage compared with other groups, and continuing racial perceptions and divisions, according to some sociologists.

“Children of white-Asian and white-Hispanic parents will have no problems calling themselves white, if that’s their choice,” said Andrew Hacker, a political scientist at Queens College of the City University of New York and the author of a book about race.

“But offspring of black and another ethnic parent won’t have that option,” Professor Hacker said. “They’ll be black because that’s the way they’re seen. Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, have all known that. Will that change? Don’t hold your breath.”

The Pew analysis found that among newly married couples, 14.6 percent were mixed in 2008, compared with 11.2 percent in 2000 and 8.3 percent in 1990. (Among all people currently married, 8 percent of marriages were mixed in 2008, compared with 6.8 percent in 2000 and 4.5 percent in 1990.)

Of all 3.8 million adults who married in 2008, 31 percent of Asians, 26 percent of Hispanic people, 16 percent of blacks and 9 percent of whites married a person whose race or ethnicity was different from their own. Those were all record highs.

    Black Women See Fewer Black Men at the Altar, NYT, 3.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/us/04interracial.html

Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Economic Gains

May 30, 2010
The New York Times
By MICHAEL POWELL

MEMPHIS — For two decades, Tyrone Banks was one of many African-Americans who saw his economic prospects brightening in this Mississippi River city.

A single father, he worked for FedEx and also as a custodian, built a handsome brick home, had a retirement account and put his eldest daughter through college.

Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure.

“I’m going to tell you the deal, plain-spoken: I’m a black man from the projects and I clean toilets and mop up for a living,” said Mr. Banks, a trim man who looks at least a decade younger than his 50 years. “I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. But my whole life is backfiring.”

Not so long ago, Memphis, a city where a majority of the residents are black, was a symbol of a South where racial history no longer tightly constrained the choices of a rising black working and middle class. Now this city epitomizes something more grim: How rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress.

The median income of black homeowners in Memphis rose steadily until five or six years ago. Now it has receded to a level below that of 1990 — and roughly half that of white Memphis homeowners, according to an analysis conducted by Queens College Sociology Department for The New York Times.

Black middle-class neighborhoods are hollowed out, with prices plummeting and homes standing vacant in places like Orange Mound, White Haven and Cordova. As job losses mount — black unemployment here, mirroring national trends, has risen to 16.9 percent from 9 percent two years ago; it stands at 5.3 percent for whites — many blacks speak of draining savings and retirement accounts in an effort to hold onto their homes. The overall local foreclosure rate is roughly twice the national average.

The repercussions will be long-lasting, in Memphis and nationwide. The most acute economic divide in America remains the steadily widening gap between the wealth of black and white families, according to a recent study by the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University. For every dollar of wealth owned by a white family, a black or Latino family owns just 16 cents, according to a recent Federal Reserve study.

The Economic Policy Institute’s forthcoming “The State of Working America” analyzed the recession-driven drop in wealth. As of December 2009, median white wealth dipped 34 percent, to $94,600; median black wealth dropped 77 percent, to $2,100. So the chasm widens, and Memphis is left to deal with the consequences.

“This cancer is metastasizing into an economic crisis for the city,” said Mayor A. C. Wharton Jr. in his riverfront office. “It’s done more to set us back than anything since the beginning of the civil rights movement.”

The mayor and former bank loan officers point a finger of blame at large national banks — in particular, Wells Fargo. During the last decade, they say, these banks singled out blacks in Memphis to sell them risky high-cost mortgages and consumer loans.

The City of Memphis and Shelby County sued Wells Fargo late last year, asserting that the bank’s foreclosure rate in predominantly black neighborhoods was nearly seven times that of the foreclosure rate in predominantly white neighborhoods. Other banks, including Citibank and Countrywide, foreclosed in more equal measure.

In a recent regulatory filing, Wells Fargo hinted that its legal troubles could multiply. “Certain government entities are conducting investigations into the mortgage lending practices of various Wells Fargo affiliated entities, including whether borrowers were steered to more costly mortgage products,” the bank stated.

Wells Fargo officials are not backing down in the face of the legal attacks. They say the bank made more prime loans and has foreclosed on fewer homes than most banks, and that the worst offenders — those banks that handed out bushels of no-money-down, negative-amortization loans — have gone out of business.

“The mistake Memphis officials made is that they picked the lender who was doing the most lending as opposed to the lender who was doing the worst lending,” said Brad Blackwell, executive vice president for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage.

Not every recessionary ill can be heaped upon banks. Some black homeowners contracted the buy-a-big-home fever that infected many Americans and took out ill-advised loans. And unemployment has pitched even homeowners who hold conventional mortgages into foreclosure.

Federal and state officials say that high-cost mortgages leave hard-pressed homeowners especially vulnerable and that statistical patterns are inescapable.

“The more segregated a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeowners will face foreclosure because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities,” Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, told a Congressional committee.

The reversal of economic fortune in Memphis is particularly grievous for a black professional class that has taken root here, a group that includes Mr. Wharton, a lawyer who became mayor in 2009. Demographers forecast that Memphis will soon become the nation’s first majority black metropolitan region.

That prospect, noted William Mitchell, a black real estate agent, once augured for a fine future.

“Our home values were up, income up,” he said. He pauses, his frustration palpable. “What we see today, it’s a new world. And not a good one.”

Porch View

“You don’t want to walk up there! That’s the wild, wild west,” a neighbor shouts. “Nothing on that block but foreclosed homes and squatters.”

To roam Soulsville, a neighborhood south of downtown Memphis, is to find a place where bungalows and brick homes stand vacant amid azaleas and dogwoods, where roofs are swaybacked and thieves punch holes through walls to strip the copper piping. The weekly newspaper is swollen with foreclosure notices.

Here and there, homes are burned by arsonists.

Yet just a few years back, Howard Smith felt like a rich man. A 56-year-old African-American engineer with a gray-flecked beard, butter-brown corduroys and red sneakers, he sits with two neighbors on a porch on Richmond Avenue and talks of his miniature real estate empire: He owned a home on this block, another in nearby White Haven and another farther out. His job paid well; a pleasant retirement beckoned.

Then he was laid off. He has sent out 60 applications, obtained a dozen interviews and received no calls back. A bank foreclosed on his biggest house. He will be lucky to get $30,000 for his house here, which was assessed at $80,000 two years ago.

“It all disappeared overnight,” he says.

“Mmm-mm, yes sir, overnight,” says his neighbor, Gwen Ward. In her 50s, she, too, was laid off, from her supervisory job of 15 years, and she moved in with her elderly mother. “It seemed we were headed up and then” — she snaps her fingers — “it all went away.”

Mr. Smith nods. “The banks and Wall Street have taken the middle class and shredded us,” he says.

For the greater part of the last century, racial discrimination crippled black efforts to buy homes and accumulate wealth. During the post-World War II boom years, banks and real estate agents steered blacks to segregated neighborhoods, where home appreciation lagged far behind that of white neighborhoods.

Blacks only recently began to close the home ownership gap with whites, and thus accumulate wealth — progress that now is being erased. In practical terms, this means black families have less money to pay for college tuition, invest in businesses or sustain them through hard times.

“We’re wiping out whatever wealth blacks have accumulated — it assures racial economic inequality for the next generation,” said Thomas M. Shapiro, director of the Institute on Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.

The African-American renaissance in Memphis was halting. Residential housing patterns remain deeply segregated. While big employers — FedEx and AutoZone — have headquarters here, wage growth is not robust. African-American employment is often serial rather than continuous, and many people lack retirement and health plans.

But the recession presents a crisis of a different magnitude.

Mayor Wharton walks across his office to a picture window and stares at a shimmering Mississippi River. He describes a recent drive through ailing neighborhoods. It is akin, he says, to being a doctor “looking for pulse rates in his patients and finding them near death.”

He adds: “I remember riding my bike as a kid through thriving neighborhoods. Now it’s like someone bombed my city.”

Banking on Nothing

Camille Thomas, a 40-year-old African-American, loved working for Wells Fargo. “I felt like I could help people,” she recalled over coffee.

As the subprime market heated up, she said, the bank pressure to move more loans — for autos, for furniture, for houses — edged into mania. “It was all about selling your units and getting your bonus,” she said.

Ms. Thomas and three other Wells Fargo employees have given affidavits for the city’s lawsuit against the bank, and their statements about bank practices reinforce one another.

“Your manager would say, ‘Let me see your cold-call list. I want you to concentrate on these ZIP codes,’ and you knew those were African-American neighborhoods,” she recalled. “We were told, ‘Oh, they aren’t so savvy.’ ”

She described tricks of the trade, several of dubious legality. She said supervisors had told employees to white out incomes on loan applications and substitute higher numbers. Agents went “fishing” for customers, mailing live checks to leads. When a homeowner deposited the check, it became a high-interest loan, with a rate of 20 to 29 percent. Then bank agents tried to talk the customer into refinancing, using the house as collateral.

Several state and city regulators have placed Wells Fargo Bank in their cross hairs, and their lawsuits include similar accusations. In Illinois, the state attorney general has accused the bank of marketing high-cost loans to blacks and Latinos while selling lower-cost loans to white borrowers. John P. Relman, the Washington, D.C., lawyer handling the Memphis case, has sued Wells Fargo on behalf of the City of Baltimore, asserting that the bank systematically exploited black borrowers.

A federal judge in Baltimore dismissed that lawsuit, saying it had made overly broad claims about the damage done by Wells Fargo. City lawyers have refiled papers.

“I don’t think it’s going too far to say that banks are at the core of the disaster here,” said Phyllis G. Betts, director of the Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action at the University of Memphis, which has closely examined bank lending records.

Former employees say Wells Fargo loan officers marketed the most expensive loans to black applicants, even when they should have qualified for prime loans. This practice is known as reverse redlining.

Webb A. Brewer, a Memphis lawyer, recalls poring through piles of loan papers and coming across name after name of blacks with subprime mortgages. “This is money out of their pockets lining the purses of the banks,” he said.

For a $150,000 mortgage, a difference of three percentage points — the typical spread between a conventional and subprime loan — tacks on $90,000 in interest payments over its 30-year life.

Wells Fargo officials say they rejected the worst subprime products, and they portray their former employees as disgruntled rogues who subverted bank policies.

“They acknowledged that they knowingly worked to defeat our fair lending policies and controls,” said Mr. Blackwell, the bank executive.

Bank officials attribute the surge in black foreclosures in Memphis to the recession. They say that the average credit score in black Census tracts is 108 points lower than in white tracts.

“People who have less are more vulnerable during downturns,” said Andrew L. Sandler of Buckley Sandler, a law firm representing Wells Fargo.

Mr. Relman, the lawyer representing Memphis, is unconvinced. “If a bad economy and poor credit explains it, you’d expect to see other banks with the same ratio of foreclosures in the black community,” he said. “But you don’t. Wells is the outlier.”

Whatever the responsibility, individual or corporate, the detritus is plain to see. Within a two-block radius of that porch in Soulsville, Wells Fargo holds mortgages on nearly a dozen foreclosures. That trail of pain extends right out to the suburbs.

Begging to Stay

To turn into Tyrone Banks’s subdivision in Hickory Ridge is to find his dream in seeming bloom. Stone lions guard his door, the bushes are trimmed and a freshly waxed sport utility vehicle sits in his driveway.

For years, Mr. Banks was assiduous about paying down his debt: he stayed two months ahead on his mortgage, and he helped pay off his mother’s mortgage.

Two years ago, his doorbell rang, and two men from Wells Fargo offered to consolidate his consumer loans into a low-cost mortgage.

“I thought, ‘This is great! ’ ” Mr. Banks says. “When you have four kids, college expenses, you look for any savings.”

What those men did not tell Mr. Banks, he says (and Ms. Thomas, who studied his case, confirms), is that his new mortgage had an adjustable rate. When it reset last year, his payment jumped to $1,700 from $1,200.

Months later, he ruptured his Achilles tendon playing basketball, hindering his work as a janitor. And he lost his job at FedEx. Now foreclosure looms.

He is by nature an optimistic man; his smile is rueful.

“Man, I should I have stayed ‘old school’ with my finances,” he said. “I sat down my youngest son on the couch and I told him, ‘These are rough times.’ ”

Many neighbors are in similar straits. Foreclosure notices flutter like flags on the doors of two nearby homes, and the lawns there are overgrown and mud fills the gutters.

Wells Fargo says it has modified three mortgages for every foreclosure nationwide — although bank officials declined to provide the data for Memphis. A study by the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project and six nonprofit groups found that the nation’s four largest banks, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase, had cut their prime mortgage refinancing 33 percent in predominantly minority communities, even as prime refinancing in white neighborhoods rose 32 percent from 2006 to 2008.

For Mr. Banks, it is as if he found the door wide open on his way into debt but closed as he tries to get out.

“Some days it feels like everyone I know in Memphis is in trouble,” Mr. Banks says. “We’re all just begging to stay in our homes, basically.”

    Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Economic Gains, NYT, 30.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/31/business/economy/31memphis.html

The Moynihan Future

May 28, 2010
The New York Times
By JAMES T. PATTERSON

Providence, R.I.

FORTY-FIVE years ago this month, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan began quietly circulating a report he had recently completed about the “tangle of pathology” — out-of-wedlock births, fatherless households — damaging low-income black families. The title said it all: “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”

It proved enormously controversial and established its author’s reputation as an iconoclast, yet today the Moynihan Report is largely forgotten. Sadly, its predictions about the decline of the black family have proven largely correct. Fortunately, many of its prescriptions remain equally relevant.

The report greatly impressed Mr. Moynihan’s colleagues in the Johnson administration. Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz, forwarding it to the White House, described an accompanying memo from Moynihan as “nine pages of dynamite about the Negro situation.”

President Johnson then asked Moynihan to help draft his famous 1965 commencement address at Howard University. Celebrating the 1964 Civil Rights Act and a voting-rights bill about to pass, the president nonetheless warned that freedom alone was not enough; changes in the economic and social situation of America’s blacks, the focus of Moynihan’s report, were likewise pressing. “We seek not just freedom but opportunity,” he declared. “We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and as a result.”

Many black leaders lauded the address. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told Johnson, “Never before has a president articulated the depths and dimensions of the problem of racial injustice more eloquently and profoundly.”

In late July, however, escalation in Vietnam began swallowing up money that might have supported the sort of social initiatives Moynihan and Johnson called for. In August, the Watts riots frightened many whites away from backing civil rights causes. Johnson’s powerful liberal coalition started to crack, and along with it his chances of passing wide-reaching social legislation.

Moreover, when the report was leaked that summer, its unflattering portrait of black families angered militant civil rights leaders. Some charged that Moynihan had “blamed the victim.” James Farmer, head of the Congress of Racial Equality, denounced the report as a “massive cop-out for the white conscience.”

Johnson was afraid to antagonize the civil rights leaders, and the report was soon consigned to oblivion. The moment, Moynihan later lamented, had been lost. Today many Americans continue to regard impoverished black people as undeserving malingerers, while others, still worried about offending black activists, insist that white racism is the sole explanation of racial inequality.

Meanwhile Moynihan’s pessimistic prophecies have come true. In 1965, a quarter of nonwhite births in the United States were out of wedlock, eight times the proportion among whites. Today the proportion of nonmarital births among non-Hispanic blacks exceeds 72 percent, compared with a proportion among non-Hispanic whites of around 28 percent.

Only 38 percent of black children now live with married parents, compared with three-quarters of non-Hispanic white children. Many boys in fatherless families drop out of school, fail to find living-wage work and turn to idleness or crime. Many girls become poverty-stricken single mothers themselves.

There are no magic bullets for the rise of out-of-wedlock births, a trend rooted in the decline in marriage rates and one that has affected other western nations as well. But as Moynihan recommended, we can expand employment programs to help young black people find work.

Our major effort, though, must be to help the very young. Black community leaders should collaborate with philanthropists and public officials in multi-faceted programs aimed at advancing the cognitive and social development, and ensuring the safety, of pre-school and school-age children in troubled neighborhoods.

Such efforts might be modeled on those of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which Barack Obama promised in 2008 to help replicate in 20 cities. The project features a “baby college” offering a nine-week parenting program, all-day kindergarten classes, K-12 charter schools, after-school tutoring, summer school, family counseling and a health clinic. In 2008 it reached some 8,000 children in a 100-block area, at a cost of $58 million.

None of this is cheap, or a guaranteed success. But if we do not act, the “tangle of pathology” that Moynihan described in 1965, having grown far worse, will be impossible to unravel, and America will become more deeply divided than ever along class and racial lines.


James T. Patterson is a professor emeritus of history at Brown and the author of “Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle Over Black Family Life From L.B.J. to Obama.”

    The Moynihan Future, NYT, 28.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/opinion/29Patterson.html

Bias Seen in ‘Police-on-Police’ Shootings

May 26, 2010
The New York Times
By AL BAKER

A governor’s task force studying mistaken-identity confrontations between police officers found that racial bias, unconscious or otherwise, played a clear role in scores of firearms encounters over the years, most significantly in cases involving off-duty officers who are killed by their colleagues.

The task force, formed last June by Gov. David A. Paterson to examine confrontations between officers and the role that race might have played, conducted what it said it believed was the first “nationwide, systematic review of mistaken-identity, police-on-police shootings” by an independent panel outside of law enforcement.

“There may well be an issue of race in these shootings, but that is not the same as racism,” said Zachary W. Carter, a former United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, who served as the task force’s vice chairman. “Research reveals that race may play a role in an officer’s instantaneous assessment of whether a particular person presents a danger or not.”

The report by the task force found that 26 police officers were killed in the United States over the past 30 years by colleagues who mistook them for criminals. It also found that it was increasingly “officers of color” who died in this manner, including 10 of the 14 killed since 1995.

More specifically, in cases involving a victim who was an off-duty officer, the task force reported that 9 of the 10 officers killed in friendly fire encounters in the United States since 1982 were black or Latino, including Omar J. Edwards, a New York City officer who was fatally shot in Harlem last May by an on-duty colleague, and Officer Christopher Ridley, an off-duty Mount Vernon officer shot and killed by at least three uniformed Westchester County officers in White Plains in January 2008.

The last killing of a white off-duty officer by an on-duty colleague in a mistaken-identity case in the United States happened in 1982.

“In short, there are many issues besides race present in these shootings, and the role that race plays is not simple or straightforward,” according to the report, which was delivered to Mr. Paterson this week.

But in searching for trends, the report said the conclusion of the task force was clear: “Inherent or unconscious racial bias plays a role in ‘shoot/don’t-shoot,’ decisions made by officers of all races and ethnicities.”

The task force, headed by Christopher E. Stone, the Guggenheim professor of criminal justice at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, made nine recommendations — directed at local, state and federal levels of government, including the United States Justice Department, he said.

It commended the New York Police Department for initiating a program, in the wake of the Edwards shooting, to test officers for unconscious racial bias, something Mr. Stone said he hoped would be replicated across the country.

Laurie O. Robinson, assistant attorney general for the Office of Justice Programs in the Justice Department, said the recommendations were something it would “review and consider very seriously.” She said she had shared them with colleagues.

The recommendations are aimed at “blunting” any unconscious racial bias, Mr. Carter said. They call for establishing protocols for off-duty conduct, increasing testing for racial bias among officers and improving how police departments manage such encounters when they occur within their ranks. One focused on prosecutors, calling for them to disclose publicly as much detail as possible about such encounters, and early on, to avoid having facts disappear in a fog of grand jury secrecy.

The 67-page report outlined the facts of the Edwards and Ridley shootings, as well as some of the 24 other fatal encounters since 1981. The task force spoke with current and former officers. It drew on three public hearings held around the state — in Albany in November and in Harlem and in White Plains in December. It identified several trends in reviewing the cases and in analyzing existing research on the topic.

Most of the 26 victims were male. Of the 10 off-duty victims, 8 worked in plainclothes, and 6 worked undercover.

Of the 26 fatal shootings, 5, including Officer Ridley’s case, involved an off-duty officer who came across a crime in progress and moved to help other officers or a civilian, the report found. In five other cases, including the Edwards shooting, an off-duty officer was a crime victim and then tried to make an arrest or to take police action, the report found. The only other New York City case the group studied involved Officer Eric Hernandez, who was off duty when he was shot by a colleague who responded to a 911 call and saw him in the aftermath of a brawl at a White Castle restaurant in 2006.

In all but 2 of the 26 fatal shootings of officers that were examined, the victim was holding a gun and had it “displayed” when he or she was shot, the report found. Indeed, it noted, “many of the victim officers with guns displayed reportedly failed to comply with the commands of challenging officers who ordered them to freeze or to drop their weapons.”

The report added, “This failure to comply is often simply the rapid turning of the head and body to determine the source of the verbal command.” The report referred to this reaction as “reflexive spin.”

The authors acknowledged that training for such instances was difficult because of the “rush of adrenaline” involved.

Deaths from friendly fire encounters — representing a small fraction of such confrontations — can tear at police officers and departments. In their wake, minority officers often second-guess their career choices, or are peppered with questions by relatives or friends, particularly those who have had difficult experiences with law enforcement, the study found.

A department’s recruitment efforts, in turn, can be hampered.

“Departments that had never imagined that such a tragedy would occur within their ranks find themselves unprepared to handle the inevitable emotion and trauma, sometimes leading to a loss of credibility and respect, not only with the public, but also among sworn members of their own law enforcement agencies,” the report’s executive summary said.

Yet, if patterns hold, such fatalities will afflict departments this year, next year and “so on into the future,” the summary said.

    Bias Seen in ‘Police-on-Police’ Shootings, NYT, 26.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/nyregion/27shoot.html

Lena Horne, Singer and Actress, Dies at 92

May 9, 2010
The New York Times
By ALJEAN HARMETZ

Lena Horne, who was the first black performer to be signed to a long-term contract by a major Hollywood studio and who went on to achieve international fame as a singer, died on Sunday night at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York. She was 92 and lived in Manhattan.

Her death was announced by her son-in-law, Kevin Buckley.

Ms. Horne might have become a major movie star, but she was born 50 years too early, and languished at MGM in the 1940s because of the color of her skin, although she was so light-skinned that, when she was a child, other black children had taunted her, accusing her of having a “white daddy.”

Ms. Horne was stuffed into one “all-star” musical after another — “Thousands Cheer” (1943), “Broadway Rhythm” (1944), “Two Girls and a Sailor” (1944), “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946), “Words and Music” (1948) — to sing a song or two that could easily be snipped from the movie when it played in the South, where the idea of an African-American performer in anything but a subservient role in a movie with an otherwise all-white cast was unthinkable.

“The only time I ever said a word to another actor who was white was Kathryn Grayson in a little segment of ‘Show Boat’ ” included in “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946), a movie about the life of Jerome Kern, Ms. Horne said in an interview in 1990. In that sequence she played Julie, a mulatto forced to flee the showboat because she has married a white man.

But when MGM made “Show Boat” into a movie for the second time, in 1951, the role of Julie was given to a white actress, Ava Gardner, who did not do her own singing. (Ms. Horne was no longer under contract to MGM at the time, and according to James Gavin’s Horne biography, “Stormy Weather,” published last year, she was never seriously considered for the part.) And in 1947, when Ms. Horne herself married a white man — the prominent arranger, conductor and pianist Lennie Hayton, who was for many years both her musical director and MGM’s — the marriage took place in France and was kept secret for three years.

Ms. Horne’s first MGM movie was “Panama Hattie” (1942), in which she sang Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things.” Writing about that film years later, Pauline Kael called it “a sad disappointment, though Lena Horne is ravishing and when she sings you can forget the rest of the picture.”

Even before she came to Hollywood, Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic for The New York Times, noticed Ms. Horne in “Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds of 1939,” a Broadway revue that ran for nine performances. “A radiantly beautiful sepia girl,” he wrote, “who will be a winner when she has proper direction.”

She had proper direction in two all-black movie musicals, both made in 1943. Lent to 20th Century Fox for “Stormy Weather,” one of those show business musicals with almost no plot but lots of singing and dancing, Ms. Horne did both triumphantly, ending with the sultry, aching sadness of the title number, which would become one of her signature songs. In MGM’s “Cabin in the Sky,” the first film directed by Vincente Minnelli, she was the brazen, sexy handmaiden of the Devil. (One number she shot for that film, “Ain’t It the Truth,” which she sang while taking a bubble bath, was deleted before the film was released — not for racial reasons, as her stand-alone performances in other MGM musicals sometimes were, but because it was considered too risqué.)

In 1945 the critic and screenwriter Frank Nugent wrote in Liberty magazine that Ms. Horne was “the nation’s top Negro entertainer.” In addition to her MGM salary of $1,000 a week, she was earning $1,500 for every radio appearance and $6,500 a week when she played nightclubs. She was also popular with servicemen, white and black, during World War II, appearing more than a dozen times on the Army radio program “Command Performance.”

“The whole thing that made me a star was the war,” Ms. Horne said in the 1990 interview. “Of course the black guys couldn’t put Betty Grable’s picture in their footlockers. But they could put mine.”

Touring Army camps for the U.S.O., Ms. Horne was outspoken in her criticism of the way black soldiers were treated. “So the U.S.O. got mad,” she recalled. “And they said, ‘You’re not going to be allowed to go anyplace anymore under our auspices.’ So from then on I was labeled a bad little Red girl.”

Ms. Horne later claimed that for this and other reasons, including her friendship with leftists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, she was blacklisted and “unable to do films or television for the next seven years” after her tenure with MGM ended in 1950.

This was not quite true: as Mr. Gavin has documented, she appeared frequently on “Your Show of Shows” and other television shows in the 1950s, and in fact “found more acceptance” on television “than almost any other black performer.” And Mr. Gavin and others have suggested that there were other factors in addition to politics or race involved in her lack of film work

Although absent from the screen, she found success in nightclubs and on records. “Lena Horne at the Waldorf-Astoria,” recorded during a well-received eight-week run in 1957, reached the Top 10 and became the best-selling album by a female singer in RCA Victor’s history.

In the early 1960s Ms. Horne, always outspoken on the subject of civil rights, became increasingly active, participating in numerous marches and protests.

In 1969, she returned briefly to films, playing the love interest of a white actor, Richard Widmark, in “Death of a Gunfighter.”

She was to act in only one other movie: In 1978 she played Glinda the Good Witch in “The Wiz,” the film version of the all-black Broadway musical based on “The Wizard of Oz.” But she never stopped singing.

She continued to record prolifically well into the 1990s, for RCA and other labels, notably United Artists and Blue Note. And she conquered Broadway in 1981 with a one-woman show, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music,” which ran for 14 months and won both rave reviews and a Tony Award.

Ms. Horne’s voice was not particularly powerful, but it was extremely expressive. She reached her listeners emotionally by acting as well as singing the romantic standards like “The Man I Love” and “Moon River” that dominated her repertory. The person she always credited as her main influence was not another singer but a pianist and composer, Duke Ellington’s longtime associate Billy Strayhorn.

“I wasn’t born a singer,” she told Strayhorn’s biographer, David Hajdu. “I had to learn a lot. Billy rehearsed me. He stretched me vocally.” Strayhorn occasionally worked as her accompanist and, she said, “taught me the basics of music, because I didn’t know anything.”

Strayhorn was also, she said, “the only man I ever loved,” but Strayhorn was openly gay, and their close friendship never became a romance. “He was just everything that I wanted in a man,” she told Mr. Hajdu, “except he wasn’t interested in me sexually.”

Lena Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917. All four of her grandparents were industrious members of Brooklyn’s black middle class. Her paternal grandparents, Edwin and Cora Horne, were early members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and in October 1919, at the age of 2, Lena was the cover girl for the organization’s monthly bulletin.

By then the marriage of her parents, Edna and Teddy Horne, was in trouble. “She was spoiled and badly educated and he was fickle,” Ms. Horne’s daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley, wrote in her family history, “The Hornes.” By 1920 Teddy had left his job with the New York Department of Labor and fled to Seattle, and Edna had fled to a life on the stage in Harlem. Ms. Horne was raised by her paternal grandparents until her mother took her back four years later.

When she was 16, her mother abruptly pulled her out of school to audition for the dance chorus at the Cotton Club, the famous Harlem nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks, Duke Ellington was the star of the show and the proprietors were gangsters. A year after joining the Cotton Club chorus she made her Broadway debut, performing a voodoo dance in the short-lived show “Dance With Your Gods” in 1934.

At 19, Ms. Horne married the first man she had ever dated, 28-year-old Louis Jones, and became a conventional middle-class Pittsburgh wife. Her daughter Gail was born in 1937 and a son, Teddy, in 1940. The marriage ended soon afterward. Ms. Horne kept Gail, but Mr. Jones refused to give up Teddy, although he did allow the boy long visits with his mother.

In 1938, Ms. Horne starred in a quickie black musical film, “The Duke Is Tops,” for which she was never paid. Her return to movies was on a grander scale.

She had been singing at the Manhattan nightclub Café Society when the impresario Felix Young chose her to star at the Trocadero, a nightclub he was planning to open in Hollywood in the fall of 1941. In 1990, Ms. Horne reminisced: “My only friends were the group of New Yorkers who sort of stuck with their own group — like Vincente, Gene Kelly, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, and Richard Whorf — the sort of hip New Yorkers who allowed Paul Robeson and me in their houses.”

Since blacks were not allowed to live in Hollywood, “Felix Young, a white man, signed for the house as if he was going to rent it,” Ms. Horne said. “When the neighbors found out, Humphrey Bogart, who lived right across the street from me, raised hell with them for passing around a petition to get rid of me.” Bogart, she said, “sent word over to the house that if anybody bothered me, please let him know.”

Roger Edens, the composer and musical arranger who had been Judy Garland’s chief protector at MGM, had heard the elegant Ms. Horne sing at Café Society and also went to hear her at the Little Troc (the war had scaled Mr. Young’s ambitions down to a small club with a gambling den on the second floor). He insisted that Arthur Freed, the producer of MGM’s lavish musicals, listen to Ms. Horne sing. Then Freed insisted that Louis B. Mayer, who ran the studio, hear her, too. He did, and soon she had signed a seven-year contract with MGM.

The N.A.A.C.P. celebrated that contract as a weapon in its war to get better movie roles for black performers. Her father weighed in, too. In a 1997 PBS interview, she recalled: “My father said, ‘I can get a maid for my daughter. I don’t want her in the movies playing maids.’ ”

Ms. Horne is survived by her daughter, Gail Lumet Buckley. Her husband died in 1971; her son died of kidney failure the same year.

Looking back at the age of 80, Ms. Horne said: “My identity is very clear to me now. I am a black woman. I’m free. I no longer have to be a ‘credit.’ I don’t have to be a symbol to anybody; I don’t have to be a first to anybody. I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become. I’m me, and I’m like nobody else.”


Peter Keepnews contributed reporting.

    Lena Horne, Singer and Actress, Dies at 92, NYT, 9.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/arts/music/10horne.html

Homer Journal

An Officer Shoots, a 73-Year-Old Dies, and Schisms Return
 

February 15, 2010
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

HOMER, La. — For the past year, many residents of this tiny town in the northern Louisiana hill country have waited in anger.

They have waited ever since last Feb. 20, when Bernard Monroe, a 73-year-old black man left mute from throat cancer, was shot to death in his front yard by a white police officer who claimed, contrary to other witnesses, that Mr. Monroe had a pistol. They waited as the state police finished its investigation, as the case was passed on to the state attorney general and as a grand jury deliberated on a list of charges, including murder, manslaughter and negligent homicide.

And on Feb. 4, after two days of testimony, the jury delivered its decision: no indictment.

The outcome jarred a town of 3,400 that, like so many small Southern towns, has been struggling to move past a heritage of racial mistrust. Even among disillusioned black residents, it seemed like a throwback to uglier times.

“Nobody felt like he was going to get jail time,” said Faye Williams, 55, discussing the decision with others at Laketha’s Salon downtown and referring to the officer. “But we thought there’d be at least a trial or something. It just ain’t right.”

Last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a wrongful death lawsuit on behalf of Mr. Monroe’s family against the town and two former police officers, arguing that they had failed “to exercise reasonable care” and “created a volatile situation” in the series of events that led up to the shooting.

Jim Colvin, the town attorney, said he had just received the lawsuit and did not know enough about it to respond to its accusations.

The shooting happened on a Friday afternoon. Mr. Monroe had been sitting in a folding chair on the edge of his yard, amid more than a dozen friends and relatives. Two Homer police officers, Tim Cox and Joseph Henry, pulled up in separate cars and began making small talk, several witnesses said.

Shaun Monroe, Mr. Monroe’s son, who had been sitting in his truck in the street, pulled into the driveway. The younger Mr. Monroe, 38, has a criminal record, including charges in 1994 of firearms possession and assaulting a police officer, his last felony charges.

But there was no warrant for his arrest that Friday. Kurt Wall, the assistant attorney general who presented the evidence in the case to the grand jury, said the officers had been told that if they ever saw Shaun Monroe with a black bag, which they say they did, it probably contained drugs.

No other witnesses saw such a bag that day. But when Officer Henry called his name, Shaun Monroe darted behind the house, went back around the front and ran inside. Officer Cox followed and chased him through the house, a chase that, the lawsuit argues, was “without just cause” or legal justification.

Shaun Monroe burst out of the front door and was at the front gate when Officer Henry, who was in the yard, hit him with a Taser. Seconds later, Officer Cox reached the front screen door from the inside, witnesses said, as the elder Mr. Monroe was walking up the steps to the porch.

Officer Cox told investigators that the elder Mr. Monroe had picked up a pistol he kept on the porch and was aiming it at Officer Henry. All of the civilian witnesses say Mr. Monroe was carrying only a sports drink bottle.

But this is not in dispute: Mr. Cox shot Mr. Monroe seven times in the chest, side and back. Several witnesses said they saw a police officer later place the pistol next to Mr. Monroe’s body, but the police officers said that was because it had been moved when they were checking his wounds.

Much of the town, which is nearly two-thirds black, went into an uproar. In April, the Rev. Al Sharpton led a rally in Homer. In July, the two officers, who had been on leave, resigned and left town.

The state police produced a report in August, and, after reviewing it for several months, the district attorney passed it on to the state attorney general. A local prosecution presented a conflict, he said, as the two officers were witnesses in other parish cases.

The grand jury consisted of eight whites and four blacks, all from Homer and the surrounding area. Mr. Wall said that more than 20 witnesses testified, civilians as well as law enforcement officers.

“We just put everybody on and let them say whatever they had to say or observe and let the jury make their determination,” he said. “We felt it was a very thorough and accurate presentation.”

Many in the town, including some whites, are skeptical. They point out, for instance, that the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy was never called to testify about the nature of Mr. Monroe’s wounds.

“No one knows more about the way Mr. Monroe died than I do,” said Frank Peretti, the Little Rock-based pathologist, who was surprised to learn about the grand jury’s decision in the news. (Mr. Wall said his presence had not been necessary, as the parish coroner testified and had the autopsy report.)

Others see the case as closed.

“I just wish the black community could get beyond this,” said Toney Johnson, 61, one of two whites on the five-person town council. “The law has done its job, in my opinion.”

Mr. Johnson, who pointed out that Homer elected a black mayor several years ago with significant white support, said the council had become polarized along racial lines since the shooting. He says that Officer Cox was only doing what many residents in the poor, mostly black parts of town had requested — getting tough on the drug problem.

“It’s very tragic that this happened, but it happens,” he said.

The elected chief of police, Russell Mills, who is white, said he was advised by the town lawyer not to comment. He drew criticism shortly after the shooting for a statement he made to The Chicago Tribune that seemed to advocate racial profiling.

In a letter clarifying that statement in The Guardian-Journal of Claiborne Parish, Mr. Mills wrote that residents of high-crime neighborhoods had urged him to do something about numerous shootings, so he had developed a policy of “preventative policing,” in which officers stop groups of young people walking in these neighborhoods, ask for identification “and possibly pat them down.”

That approach, also used by some big-city police departments, is all too familiar to black residents here, many of whom call it harassment.

Though Homer has come far from the intense racial friction of the 1960s, a sense of mistrust has lingered, both white and black residents say. And though even some whites in town are privately troubled by the grand jury’s decision, many black residents have come away with bitter resignation.

“If it was a black man killing a white man, he’d be in jail, no question,” said Shavontae Ball, 20, whose sisters saw the shooting. “It’s like my grandmother said: ‘Ain’t nothing ever change in Homer.’ ”

    An Officer Shoots, a 73-Year-Old Dies, and Schisms Return, NYT, 15.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/15/us/15homer.html

For Obama, Nuance on Race Invites Questions

February 9, 2010
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON — The civil rights movement will come alive in song at the White House on Wednesday night, when President Obama plans to celebrate Black History Month with a star-studded concert.

And it came alive in quiet conversation on Martin Luther King’s Birthday, when Mr. Obama installed a rare signed copy of the Emancipation Proclamation in the Oval Office and invited a small group of African-American elders and young people in for a private viewing.

The two events — a televised extravaganza with celebrities like Morgan Freeman and Queen Latifah, and an intimate discussion with people like Dorothy Height, the 97-year-old chairwoman of the National Council of Negro Women — reflect the nuances in Mr. Obama’s handling of the often incendiary issue of race in America. He is using his platform to advance racial consciousness, even as he has steered clear of putting race front and center in his administration.

It is a balancing act that has frustrated some black leaders and scholars, who are starting to challenge Mr. Obama’s language and policies.

On Capitol Hill, members of the Congressional Black Caucus have expressed irritation that Mr. Obama has not created programs tailored specifically to African-Americans, who are suffering disproportionately in the recession. In December, some of them threatened to oppose new financial rules for banks until the White House promised to address the needs of minorities.

“I don’t think we expected anything to change overnight because we had an African-American in the White House, but the fact still remains that we’ve got a constituency that is suffering,” said Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland. “I think he could do more, and he will do more.”

Some black scholars say Mr. Obama has failed to lead on the race issue. The Kirwan Institute, which studies race and ethnicity, is convening a conference on Thursday to offer policy prescriptions. After analyzing the State of the Union address, the institute’s scholars warned that “continued failure to engage race would be devastating.”

Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown University sociologist and longtime supporter of Mr. Obama, is exasperated. “All these teachable moments,” he said, “but the professor refuses to come to the class.”

In an interview in late December with American Urban Radio Networks, a group of black-owned stations, Mr. Obama conceded that there was “grumbling” among African-Americans, especially about his jobs policies. But he rejected the idea that he should pay special attention to them — an argument that Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a black author and political analyst, called “disingenuous at best, and an insult at worst.”

Mr. Obama framed it this way: “I can’t pass laws that say I’m just helping black folks. I’m the president of the United States. What I can do is make sure that I am passing laws that help all people, particularly those who are most vulnerable and most in need. That in turn is going to help lift up the African-American community.”

Until now, black leaders have tended to tread lightly in criticizing Mr. Obama, and some find it painful. Black Americans remain overwhelmingly supportive of Mr. Obama; a recent ABC News poll found that 96 percent approve of his job performance.

But Elinor Tatum, the editor and publisher of the black-owned Amsterdam News, says that if blacks were asked “Is he doing a good job for African-Americans?” his numbers would be lower.

“Every time someone brings up an issue that affects blacks, he says that’s an issue that affects all of America,” Ms. Tatum said. “But at the same time, if he were of a different race or ethnicity, he would be playing to the black community. So there’s a double standard there. Should we be the victims in that?”

The conventional wisdom about Mr. Obama is that he tries to duck the issue of race, but close advisers say he is acutely aware of his role as the first African-American president and is trying to heighten racial sensitivity in constructive ways.

Many black leaders view this as wise. The Rev. Al Sharpton, who is working with Mr. Obama to close the achievement gap in education, says the president is smart not to ballyhoo “a black agenda.”

Instead, Mr. Obama has been trying to shine a spotlight on the history that laid the foundation for his presidency, with events like Wednesday’s concert and the celebration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, which offer a peek into his style.

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, said the King event was intended as “an intergenerational conversation” in which guests could share their experiences in a “safe and private moment.” Before the Oval Office tour, they gathered in the Roosevelt Room and Mr. Obama invited each to speak.

Dr. Height began with the story of her first encounter with the young Martin Luther King Jr., then 15 and trying, she said, to “analyze his own thoughts as he was trying to determine whether he wanted to enter the ministry, education or law.”

A local pastor, John Pinkard, recounted his dinner with Dr. King. Participants said the session seemed as much for the president’s benefit as their own.

“My impression was that it was deliberately something for him and for Michelle, and that it was kind of like medicine, it was healing for them,” said the historian Taylor Branch, who also attended. “It seemed to answer something personal for them.”

Race, of course, can be an incendiary issue in American politics: as a candidate, the biracial Mr. Obama was criticized as either too black or not black enough. He addressed the topic memorably in a speech in Philadelphia after the controversy involving his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

Ms. Jarrett said, “He has communicated quite clearly his thoughts on the subject.”

As president, Mr. Obama learned the pitfalls of talking bluntly about race. His comment that police officers in Cambridge, Mass., “acted stupidly” when they arrested a black Harvard professor, Henry Louis Gates Jr., caused an uproar, and the ensuing “beer summit” at the White House proved a distraction.

Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor who represented Mr. Gates and is close to Mr. Obama, said the president had never hesitated to talk about race but is more scripted now. “I think there is a carefulness — not a reluctance — but a carefulness about what should be said going forward,” he said.

Professor Ogletree said he “finds puzzling the idea that a president who happens to be black has to focus on black issues.”

Dr. Height agreed. Having counseled every president since Franklin D. Roosevelt on matters of race, she made a plea in a recent interview for Mr. Obama to be left alone.

“We have never sat down and said to the 43 other presidents: ‘How does it feel to be a Caucasian? How do you feel as a white president? Tell me what that means to you,’ ” Dr. Height said. “I am not one to think that he should do more for his people than for other people. I want him to be free to be himself.”

    For Obama, Nuance on Race Invites Questions, NYT, 9.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/us/politics/09race.html

In Sugar Hill, a Street Nurtured Black Talent When the World Wouldn’t

January 23, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID GONZALEZ

New York is a city of blocks, each with its own history, customs and characters. Yet from these small stages spring large talents. Anyone who doubts that need look no further than a stretch of Edgecombe Avenue perched on a bluff near 155th Street.

It was part of Sugar Hill, the neighborhood of choice for elegant black musicians, dapper actors, successful professionals — and those who aspired to be like them.

A red-brick tower at 409 Edgecombe was home to Thurgood Marshall, W. E. B. DuBois and Aaron Douglas, who has been called “the father of black American art.”

A few blocks farther north, the building at 555 Edgecombe burst with musical talent: Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Coleman Hawkins, Lena Horne and others. Right before and after World War II, when discrimination and segregation were commonplace, young people in Sugar Hill saw success stride by on the streets where they played tag and stickball.

The son of a taxi mechanic, Roy Eaton was a childhood piano prodigy who became a trailblazer in advertising. His friends on the block included the artist and writer Faith Ringgold; Cecelia Hodges, a Princeton professor and actress; and Sonny Rollins, the “saxophone Colossus,” who is still touring.

Many of them came from Depression-era families who were short on cash but long on dreams, managing to scrimp for music lessons or art supplies. And they lived in a community where neighbors and churches offered encouragement amid rampant racial discrimination.

“It was like our place to dream the impossible dream,” Mr. Eaton said. “It gave me a sense of, you might call it entitlement or unlimited possibilities — that nothing could stop me from doing what I felt I could do.”

A few doors down from where Mr. Eaton grew up, Cecelia Hodges reveled in the joys of reading. She had gotten the bug from her parents, West Indian immigrants who moved to Edgecombe Avenue from farther south in Harlem so she could attend better schools. Before she started first grade, her father found out the books she would use and read them with her.

She eventually skipped three grades.

Yet it was at home and in the neighborhood that her education was rounded out. Like her friend Roy, she attended St. James Presbyterian Church, participating in pageants and singing in choirs. It was the kind of church where pride was reaffirmed — the choirs, for example, were named after black composers — and dignity defended.

“These were things that were not emphasized in school,” she said. “Anything to do with what black people experienced, I got that from church and community groups.”

Her parents took her to the theater and showered her with books, like an 18-volume Dickens set they got from a newspaper promotion. “I was always told I was as fine as anyone else,” she said. “You have to work hard. But you’re able. I never suffered from low self-esteem.”

Sundays were special, and not just because of church.

“Much of my education came on Sunday afternoons in my living room,” she said. “Dad had visitors, and the talk always turned to race, or what they called ‘the plight of the Negro in American society.’ I listened, and I learned about the plight of black folks, and how one had to be to get ahead in this society.”

She went on to get her doctorate in the oral interpretation of literature, combining her love of reading and theater. After years of teaching in public schools, she was tapped in the 1970s for a professorship at Princeton, where she stayed until the late 1980s.

These days, she devotes her talents to one-person shows, some highlighting figures like the pioneers for racial equality Sojourner Truth or Fannie Lou Hamer.

Inside Ms. Hodges’s Princeton home, shelves sag with books from her long teaching career. The walls are festooned with African masks, paintings, and photographs of Malcolm X and President Obama. And in the living room, two chairs, their arms smooth from the decades, occupy a place of honor. They’re the ones her father and his friends used to sit in during those Sunday debates.

For her, their talk of unity back on Edgecombe Avenue played out in small ways: as a professor, she invited homesick black students to her home for dinner or a chance to mingle with writers like Ishmael Reed.

“It was the unrecognized part of the job,” she said, recalling the thanks those alumni expressed at a reunion a few months ago. “And years later, you realize the effect it had on others.”

Art and Expectations

Next door to Ms. Hodges’s home on Edgecombe, Faith Ringgold, nee Jones, spent her after-school hours drawing and painting, having graduated from her first easel, scavenged by her father on his rounds as a sanitation truck driver.

Her mother, who would become a clothing designer, taught her how to work with fabrics. Decades later, Ms. Ringgold’s painted quilts would be on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

She remembers arriving on Edgecombe in 1942 to a feeling of community. Her family’s pleasures were modest, with summer nights lazing about tar beach, up on the roof. Doors were kept open, and conversation flowed.

“People knew each other and looked out for each other,” she said.

Among her early friends on the block was Sonny Rollins, whom she remembers fondly as a shy, cute boy always toting his saxophone. He sometimes played in her apartment (though she joked that Mr. Rollins’s mother made him practice in the closet, lest he disturb the neighbors).

“I still remember the day he graduated from high school,” she said. “Sonny was talking about his last day at school and how he was going to pursue his music career full time. Like Roy, he knew right away.”

She had been a sickly child, with asthma keeping her from school. Yet even in her earliest years, she showed a talent for art.

“I had all these creative people living around me,” she said, referring to Duke Ellington and the tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers, to name a few. “We all lived together, so it wasn’t a surprise to see these people rolling up in their limos. And that said to us, you can do this, too.”

She stayed in the neighborhood after college, married and began teaching art in public schools. While she had been raised in an era of high expectations, she was dismayed by what she saw as the unthinking prejudice of other teachers.

“They would say: ‘Oh, poor so and so, they can’t do the work. Their mother’s on drugs, or the family’s on welfare,’ ” she said. “That’s a weird sympathy that just drags you down, down, down. Expectations are the key. We were raised to know you could do it. And that’s that.”

The neighborhood captured her visually, too: the thick girders of the George Washington Bridge that she once spied from her roof have figured prominently in more than a few of her story quilts. Even now, living just on the other end of the bridge, she continues to mine her roots for inspiration.

“Sugar Hill gave me such a wealth of images,” she said. “Just the people, the environment, what we did on holidays, tar beach. It just keeps giving. And I keep getting pulled back.”

Literally. She is involved with a project to build a children’s museum on the first floor of a building going up on 155th Street, around the corner from her childhood home. She hopes it will be the kind of place that imparts a touch of creative magic. Like home.

“Children come into the world with an overpowering creativity,” she said. “Then you get older and you say, you can’t do that. Or other people say you can’t do that. Well, I’m afraid you can.”

‘An Unlimited Horizon’

For Roy Eaton, the childhood wonder of his Edgecombe Avenue days has been like a light guiding him through dark moments and celebrations alike.

His piano career almost didn’t happen. He was slipping a piece of paper under the bathroom door, imitating the men evicting his neighbors in 1933, when it suddenly opened and mangled a finger.

Three years later, when he received the first of many awards, the 6-year-old pianist stood on stage at Carnegie Hall and carefully hid the shortened digit.

“I thought if somebody noticed my finger, they’d change their minds and take away the prize,” he recalled. “That was the first challenge I had to face in my life.”

He did not shy away from it or those that would follow, thanks in large part to his mother, Bernice, who worked as a domestic servant after she arrived from Jamaica.

“My mother constantly reminded me that I was black in America,” he said. “In order to get credit for 100 percent, you have to do 200 percent.”

He began taking piano lessons at age 6, just nine months before winning his first competition and receiving that award at Carnegie Hall.

“When I sat down at the piano, it was as if I was speaking,” he said. “I knew I wanted to be a concert pianist, and never wavered. Nobody had to tell me.”

Years later, his mother said she would have killed herself with work to ensure his success. Although his father did not want her to work, she slipped out for housekeeping jobs, salting away a few dollars. When judges at a piano competition suggested that Roy, then 13, needed a better piano to strengthen his fingers, she managed to buy a reconditioned Steinway Grand.

Like other local children, he showcased his skills at St. James Presbyterian Church, where the children performed to an appreciative audience at Sunday teas. The church also exposed Roy to accomplished musicians and mentors like the organist Melville Charlton.

“During services, he could improvise a fugue based on the last hymn he had played,” Mr. Eaton said. “He could do this in the style of Bach, he was so highly skilled. His praise of what I was doing meant so much to me.”

His growth as a pianist continued through college, though his concert career petered out after he served in the military during the Korean War.

He ended up as a copywriter and composer at an advertising agency, a rarity for a black man in the 1950s. He wrote jingles, including the one for Beefaroni, a pop-culture standard burned into a generation’s collective subconscious. (“We’re having Beefaroni. It’s made with macaroni. ...”)

None of his accomplishments were unusual for him, he said, even if others thought they were.

“I went through my life as if racial prejudice did not exist,” he said.

Now the father of 7-year old twins, he is reminded daily of his own early energy. The piano he learned on rests in the softly lighted sanctuary of the Episcopal church next door to his home on Roosevelt Island. In his apartment, the walls feature portraits of him in performance, as well as a quilt by his friend Faith, with women dancing around the George Washington Bridge.

“I am still that little boy that sees an unlimited horizon,” he said.

He practices every morning at his own piano, where pictures and sheet music are scattered. Within a few notes of a Chopin nocturne, he is once again that child for whom the world beyond Sugar Hill awaited. His fingers are nimble, even the mangled one, as he sways to the music.

The final notes hang in the air, like a slow, final breath. A child’s half-smile creases his face. His eyes are rimmed with tears.

    In Sugar Hill, a Street Nurtured Black Talent When the World Wouldn’t, NYT, 23.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/nyregion/23sugarhill.html

Poll: Black Optimism Rises; Hispanics Wary on Race

January 12, 2010
Filed at 3:01 p.m. ET
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON (AP) -- One year after the election of President Barack Obama, black optimism about America has surged, while Hispanics have become more skeptical about race relations, according to a Pew Research Center poll released Tuesday.

Thirty-nine percent of blacks say African-Americans are better off now than five years ago, according to the poll. In 2007, just 20 percent of blacks felt that way.

Fifty-three percent of African-Americans say the future will be better for blacks, and 10 percent say it will be worse. Three years ago, 44 percent of blacks said the future would be better, and 21 percent said it would be worse.

Obama's election is the obvious explanation for this optimism, especially considering the recent recession, said Andrew Kohut, president of the Pew Research Center.

''The poll shows a whole list of ways in which black attitudes are more positive than they were prior to President Obama's election,'' Kohut said. ''When you have a big event like that, and all of the indicators are pointing in one direction, I think the conclusion is inescapable.''

Even though the median black household income has declined relative to whites since 2000, 56 percent of blacks and 65 percent of whites say the difference in standard of living between the two races has narrowed, the poll found.

''Blacks are saying the income gap has narrowed, when in fact that is not the case,'' Kohut said. ''It has something to do with the perception and the sense of things as more positive.''

A majority of both blacks and whites say the core values of each group have grown more alike in the past decade.

Still, 81 percent of blacks say more changes are needed to ensure equality, compared with 36 percent of whites and 47 percent of Hispanics. The groups also continue to have divergent opinions on how much discrimination exists.

The poll found that Hispanics, not blacks, now are seen as the ethnic group facing the most discrimination. Twenty-three percent of all respondents say Hispanics are discriminated against ''a lot,'' compared with 18 percent for blacks, 10 percent for whites and 8 percent for Asians.

Hispanics also are less optimistic than other groups about interracial relations. When whites and blacks were asked how well their group gets along with Hispanics, more than 70 percent say ''very'' or ''pretty'' well. In contrast, only about 50 percent of Hispanics feel the same way.

There have been a number of recent attacks on Latinos that advocates say are hate crimes fueled by anti-immigration rhetoric.

''My sense is that racism in this country seems to be pretty entrenched,'' said Carmen Febo-San Miguel, executive director of the Latino cultural center Taller Puertorriqueno in Philadelphia. She cited the beating death of a Mexican immigrant in Shenandoah, Pa., that federal authorities have called a hate crime.

''We've all witnessed some of the efforts to combat racism, but at the same time, we still see ... this incredible violence, for the sole reason of being from a different race, being perpetrated against Latinos,'' she said. ''You really wonder how deep these roots are buried and how difficult it is going to be to eradicate it.''

Hispanics are much more likely to believe there is significant discrimination if they were born in the United States. Forty-eight percent of foreign-born Hispanics say there is ''a lot'' or ''some'' discrimination against their group; 79 percent of Hispanics born in America felt that way.

The poll also delved into how Americans perceive Obama. A stratospheric 95 percent of blacks still view Obama favorably, while 56 percent of whites view him favorably, down from 76 percent just before the inauguration.

This could be connected to blacks' and whites' different views about the economy, and the idea that blacks were hit hard by the recession but had much less to lose.

The percentage of whites who rate the economy as excellent or good has fallen from 42 percent to 7 percent since late 2006, the poll found. Among blacks, that percentage only fell from 16 percent to 14 percent.

Black political leaders criticized Obama last month for not doing enough specifically to help unemployed blacks. In the poll, 80 percent of blacks say he is paying the right amount of attention to blacks. Thirteen percent of blacks say he is paying too little attention, and 1 percent say too much.

Twenty-two percent of whites and 42 percent of Hispanics say Obama is not paying enough attention to their respective groups.

The poll of 2,884 people, including 812 blacks and 376 Hispanics, was conducted by landline and cellular telephone from Oct. 28 to Nov. 30, 2009. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points for the entire group, 3.5 percentage points for whites, 4.5 percentage points for blacks and 7.5 percentage points for Hispanics.

    Poll: Black Optimism Rises; Hispanics Wary on Race, NYT, 12.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2010/01/12/us/politics/AP-US-Poll-Race.html

No Longer Majority Black, Harlem Is in Transition

January 6, 2010
The New York Times
By SAM ROBERTS

For nearly a century, Harlem has been synonymous with black urban America. Given its magnetic and growing appeal to younger black professionals and its historic residential enclaves and cultural institutions, the neighborhood’s reputation as the capital of black America seems unlikely to change soon.

But the neighborhood is in the midst of a profound and accelerating shift. In greater Harlem, which runs river to river, and from East 96th Street and West 106th Street to West 155th Street, blacks are no longer a majority of the population — a shift that actually occurred a decade ago, but was largely overlooked.

By 2008, their share had declined to 4 in 10 residents. Since 2000, central Harlem’s population has grown more than in any other decade since the 1940s, to 126,000 from 109,000, but its black population — about 77,000 in central Harlem and about twice that in greater Harlem — is smaller than at any time since the 1920s.

In 2008, 22 percent of the white households in Harlem had moved to their present homes within the previous year. By comparison, only 7 percent of the black households had.

“It was a combination of location and affordability,” said Laura Murray, a 31-year-old graduate student in medical anthropology at Columbia, who moved to Sugar Hill near City College about a year ago. “I feel a community here that I don’t feel in other parts of the city.”

Change has been even more pronounced in the narrow north-south corridor defined as central Harlem, which planners roughly define as north of 110th Street between Fifth and St. Nicholas Avenues.

There, blacks account for 6 in 10 residents, but native-born African-Americans born in the United States make up barely half of all residents. Since 2000, the proportion of whites living there has more than doubled, to more than one in 10 residents — the highest since the 1940s. The Hispanic population, which was concentrated in East Harlem, is now at an all-time high in central Harlem, up 27 percent since 2000.

Harlem, said Michael Henry Adams, a historian of the neighborhood and a local resident, “is poised again at a point of pivotal transition.”

Harlem is hardly the only ethnic neighborhoods to have metamorphosed because of inroads by housing pioneers seeking bargains and more space — Little Italy, for instance, has been largely gobbled up by immigrants expanding the boundaries of Chinatown and by creeping gentrification from SoHo. But Harlem has evolved uniquely.

Because so much of the community was devastated by demolition for urban renewal, arson and abandonment beginning in the 1960s, many newcomers have not so much dislodged existing residents as succeeded them. In the 1970s alone, the black population of central Harlem declined by more than 30 percent.

“This place was vacated,” said Howard Dodson, director of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “Gentrification is about displacement.”

Meanwhile, the influx of non-Hispanic whites has escalated. The 1990 census counted only 672 whites in central Harlem. By 2000, there were 2,200. The latest count, in 2008, recorded nearly 13,800.

“There’s a lot of new housing to allow people to come into the area without displacing people there,” said Joshua S. Bauchner, who moved to a Harlem town house in 2007 and is the only white member of Community Board 10 in central Harlem. “In Manhattan, there are only so many directions you can go. North to Harlem is one of the last options.”

In 1910, blacks constituted about 10 percent of central Harlem’s population. By 1930, the beginnings of the great migration from the South and the influx from downtown Manhattan neighborhoods where blacks were feeling less welcome transformed them into a 70 percent majority. Their share of the population (98 percent) and total numbers (233,000) peaked in 1950.

In 2008, according to the census, the 77,000 blacks in central Harlem amounted to 62 percent of the population.

In greater Harlem, the black population peaked at 341,000 in 1950. The black share hit a high of 64 percent in 1970. In 2008, the comparable figures were 153,000 and 41 percent, respectively.

About 15 percent of Harlem’s black population is foreign-born, mostly from the Caribbean, with a growing proportion from Africa.

Some experts say the decline in the black population may be overstated because poorer people are typically undercounted by the census, and Harlem has a disproportionate number of poor people. Others warn that proposed development and higher property values may force poor people out and say that when the city was the neighborhood’s leading landlord it should have increased ownership opportunities for Harlem residents .

“Gentrification — the buying up and rehabilitation of land and buildings, whether by families or developers, occupied or abandoned —means a rising rent tide for all, leading inevitably to displacement next door, down the block, or two streets away,” said Neil Smith, director of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Mr. Dodson of the Schomburg Center moved from Riverside Drive to Newark not long ago. He said, “I tell people that I can’t afford to live in Harlem or in New York in the manner I deserve to.”

Other analysts point to the outflow of some blacks and the influx of others as positive evidence that barriers to integration have fallen in other neighborhoods and that Harlem has become a more attractive place to live.

“It’s a mistake to see this only as a story of racial change,” said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president. “What’s interesting is that many African-Americans are living in Harlem by choice, not necessity.”

Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, said, “Harlem has become as it was in the early 1930s — a predominantly black neighborhood, but with other groups living there as well.”

Ronald Copney, a former limousine driver, and his two sisters share a brownstone on West 147th Street that his grandmother bought in 1929. He rents two floors to tenants, one of whom is white.

“This was always a very nice neighborhood,” he said. “In a way, it’s better now as far as property values are concerned.”

Geneva Bain, the district manager of Community Board 10, blamed the economy and the lack of jobs, rather than gentrification, for the dwindling number of blacks.

She acknowledged, though, that white newcomers have sometimes been greeted ambivalently. “Integration is very subjective,” Ms. Bain said. “One person’s fellowship is another person’s antagonism. I am one who thinks that central Harlem has become a better place because of integration.”

Mr. Dodson, the Schomburg Center director, said one source of historic resentment remained true: that while blacks made up a majority of the population, they still accounted for a tiny minority of the property owners.

“There are people who would like to maintain Harlem as a ‘black enclave,’ but the only way to do that is to own it,” Mr. Dodson said. “That having been said, you can’t have it both ways: You can’t on the one hand say you oppose being discriminated against by others who prevent you from living where you want to and say out of the other side of your mouth that nobody but black people can live in Harlem.”

“The question of whether it’s a good thing or not,” he added. “I honestly can’t make that judgment yet.”

    No Longer Majority Black, Harlem Is in Transition, NYT, 6.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/nyregion/06harlem.html