History > 2011 > USA > African-Americans (I)

Pain in the Public Sector

December 4, 2011
The New York Times

Buried in the relatively positive numbers contained in the November jobs report was some very bad news for those who work in the public sector. There were 20,000 government workers laid off last month, by far the largest drop for any sector of the economy, mostly from states, counties and cities.

That continues a troubling trend that’s been building for years, one that has had a particularly harsh effect on black workers. While the private sector has been adding jobs since the end of 2009, more than half a million government positions have been lost since the recession.

In most cases, states and cities had to lay off workers because of declining tax revenues, or reduced federal aid because of Washington’s inexplicable decision to focus more on the deficit in the near term than on jobs.

Those layoffs mean a lower quality of life when there are fewer teachers, pothole repair crews and nurses. On Thursday, a deteriorating budget situation prompted what officials in Marion, Ind., called a “radical reorganization” of city services, which will result in the layoffs of 15 police officers (out of 58) and 12 firefighters (out of 50).

The cutbacks hurt more than just services. As Timothy Williams of The Times reported last week, they hit black workers particularly hard. Millions of African-Americans — one in five who are employed — have entered the middle class through government employment, and they tend to make 25 percent more than other black workers. Now tens of thousands are leaving both their jobs and the middle class. Chicago, for example, is laying off 212 employees in the upcoming fiscal year, two-thirds of whom are black.

That’s one reason the black unemployment rate went up last month, to 15.5 percent from 15.1. The effect is severe, destabilizing black neighborhoods and making it harder for young people to replicate their parents’ climb up the economic ladder. “The reliance on these jobs has provided African-Americans a path upward,” said Robert Zieger, an emeritus professor of history at the University of Florida. “But it is also a vulnerability.”

Many Republicans, however, don’t regard government jobs as actual jobs, and are eager to see them disappear. Republican governors around the Midwest have aggressively tried to break the power of public unions while slashing their work forces, and Congressional Republicans have proposed paying for a payroll tax cut by reducing federal employment rolls by 10 percent through attrition. That’s 200,000 jobs, many of which would be filled by blacks and Hispanics and others who tend to vote Democratic, and thus are considered politically superfluous.

But every layoff, whether public or private, is a life, and a livelihood, and a family. And too many of them are getting battered by the economic storm.

    Pain in the Public Sector, NYT, 4.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/opinion/pain-in-the-public-sector.html

William L. Waller, Ex-Governor of Mississippi, Dies at 85

December 2, 2011
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

William L. Waller, who as a prosecutor in 1964 twice tried to convict the segregationist Byron De La Beckwith of murdering the civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and who in 1971 forged a coalition of poor whites and newly enfranchised blacks to become governor of Mississippi, died Wednesday in Jackson, Miss. He was 85.

The cause was heart failure, his family said.

Mr. Waller, a Democrat and self-described “redneck,” used his governorship from 1972 to 1976 to appoint blacks to administrative boards and commissions for the first time in post-Reconstruction Mississippi. He elevated three historically black colleges to university status, and he abolished the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, which had fought integration.

The changes were accepted without much protest, but his declaring a state holiday to honor Mr. Evers was criticized, particularly by rural whites.

Mr. Waller gained prominence as a prosecutor after Mr. Evers, the Mississippi field secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., was assassinated outside his Jackson home shortly after midnight on June 12, 1963. Mr. Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and an outspoken racist — he often said he wanted to go to the segregated part of heaven or hell — was charged. His fingerprint was on the murder weapon, a high-powered rifle.

Even so, in two trials, two all-white juries could not reach verdicts. Still, civil rights advocates, seeing at least a partial victory, praised Mr. Waller, the district attorney, for preventing an acquittal.

He said he would not try the case a third time unless new evidence emerged. It remained open until 1969, when his successor dropped the murder charge.

In 1989, new evidence did emerge. Witnesses said they had heard Mr. Beckwith brag about the Evers killing. Others came forward to destroy his alibi. Because there is no statute of limitations on murder in Mississippi, Mr. Beckwith was indicted again. He was convicted of murder in 1994 and died in prison in 2001 while serving a life sentence.

William Lowe Waller was born in Oxford, Miss., on Oct. 21, 1926, and grew up on poverty’s edge on a farm in the Northeast Mississippi hill country. He would later be sure to mention the experience in his political campaigns, especially at rural stops. “Bill Waller is a redneck who has felt a hoe handle in his hands,” went the refrain.

After high school he hitchhiked to Memphis State University, where he earned a degree in 1948. He graduated from the University of Mississippi School of Law in 1950, served in the Army in the Korean War and worked as a private lawyer in Jackson. He became district attorney in 1960.

Mr. Evers’s murder was his biggest case, and perhaps his biggest challenge. For the first trial, only 6 out of a pool of 200 potential jurors were not white. Three of these were called for questioning, and all were dismissed. Mr. Waller, having only whites to question in jury selection, tried to weed out the most obvious racists.

“Do you think it’s a crime to kill a nigger in Mississippi?” he asked one potential juror.

After a long silence, the judge demanded an answer.

More silence.

“He’s thinking it over,” Mr. Waller said.

In the trials, Mr. Waller was not sure how to address Myrlie Evers, Medgar Evers’s widow. In his 2007 book, “Straight Ahead: The Memoirs of a Mississippi Governor,” he wrote that he was determined not to call her only by her first name, the customarily demeaning way many Southern whites addressed blacks.

But he knew that showing deference to a black woman by calling her “Mrs. Evers” would harm his chances of winning a conviction. So he managed never to address her by name, an omission he later regretted, he said in his memoir. He wished he had called her Mrs. Evers.

He ran for governor in a six-candidate field in 1967 and finished fifth. He tried again in 1971 in the Democratic primary campaign, emphasizing not race relations but building better highways, fighting drug abuse, creating jobs and cutting government waste. A rival, Lt. Gov. Charles Sullivan, appealed directly for the black vote, which had grown as a result of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Mr. Waller won a runoff between the two, getting many black votes in a contest that in an overwhelmingly Democratic state effectively decided the governorship. Local politicians and pundits attributed his victory to his vigorous prosecution in the Evers case.

As it happened, he was opposed in the general election by Charles Evers, Medgar Evers’s brother and the mayor of Fayette, Miss., who ran as an independent. On a populist platform and backed by rural whites and black Democrats loyal to the party, Mr. Waller rolled to victory with 77 percent of the vote.

Though Mr. Waller had not run on race issues, one of his first acts as governor was to name a black as a top adviser, attracting national publicity. He recruited the first blacks for the state’s highway patrol and appointed the first blacks to a planning committee for the Mississippi State Fair. He was grouped with Dale Bumpers of Arkansas and Jimmy Carter of Georgia as a new sort of Southern governor.

But Mr. Waller did not mind antagonizing his black supporters sometimes. He opposed busing for racial integration, and in 1972 he released a Ku Klux Klansman convicted of murdering a civil rights leader. The governor explained that the skills of the Klansman, Charles Clifford Wilson, in making artificial limbs were needed by a charity in Mr. Wilson’s hometown.

Mr. Waller ran unsuccessfully for the United States Senate in 1978 and for governor in 1987.

He is survived by his wife of 61 years, the former Carroll Overton; his sons, Robert, Edward, Donald and William Jr., who is chief justice of the Mississippi Supreme Court; and 14 grandchildren.

    William L. Waller, Ex-Governor of Mississippi, Dies at 85, NYT, 2.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/03/us/politics/william-l-waller-ex-governor-of-mississippi-dies-at-85.html

As Public Sector Sheds Jobs, Blacks Are Hit Hardest

November 28, 2011
The New York Times
By TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

Don Buckley lost his job driving a Chicago Transit Authority bus almost two years ago and has been looking for work ever since, even as other municipal bus drivers around the country are being laid off.

At 34, Mr. Buckley, his two daughters and his fiancée have moved into the basement of his mother’s house. He has had to delay his marriage, and his entire savings, $27,000, is gone. “I was the kind of person who put away for a rainy day,” he said recently. “It’s flooding now.”

Mr. Buckley is one of tens of thousands of once solidly middle-class African-American government workers — bus drivers in Chicago, police officers and firefighters in Cleveland, nurses and doctors in Florida — who have been laid off since the recession ended in June 2009. Such job losses have blunted gains made in employment and wealth during the previous decade and undermined the stability of neighborhoods where there are now fewer black professionals who own homes or who get up every morning to go to work.

Though the recession and continuing economic downturn has been devastating to the American middle class as a whole, the two and a half years since the declared end of the recession have been singularly harmful to middle-class blacks in terms of layoffs and unemployment, according to economists and recent government data. About one in five black workers have public-sector jobs, and African-American workers are one-third more likely than white ones to be employed in the public sector.

“The reliance on these jobs has provided African-Americans a path upward,” said Robert H. Zieger, emeritus professor of history at the University of Florida, and the author of a book on race and labor. “But it is also a vulnerability.”

A study by the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California this spring concluded, “Any analysis of the impact to society of additional layoffs in the public sector as a strategy to address the fiscal crisis should take into account the disproportionate impact the reductions in government employment have on the black community.”

Jobless rates among blacks have consistently been about double those of whites. In October, the black unemployment rate was 15.1 percent, compared with 8 percent for whites. Last summer, the black unemployment rate hit 16.7 percent, its highest level since 1984.

Economists say there are probably a variety of reasons for the racial gap, including generally lower educational levels for African-Americans, continuing discrimination and the fact that many live in areas that have been slow to recover economically.

Though the precise number of African-Americans who have lost public-sector jobs nationally since 2009 is unclear, observers say the current situation in Chicago is typical. There, nearly two-thirds of 212 city employees facing layoffs are black, according to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Union.

The central role played by government employment in black communities is hard to overstate. African-Americans in the public sector earn 25 percent more than other black workers, and the jobs have long been regarded as respectable, stable work for college graduates, allowing many to buy homes, send children to private colleges and achieve other markers of middle-class life that were otherwise closed to them.

Blacks have relied on government jobs in large numbers since at least Reconstruction, when the United States Postal Service hired freed slaves. The relationship continued through a century during which racial discrimination barred blacks from many private-sector jobs, and carried over into the 1960s when government was vastly expanded to provide more services, like bus lines to new suburbs, additional public hospitals and schools, and more.

But during the past year, while the private sector has added 1.6 million jobs, state and local governments have shed at least 142,000 positions, according to the Labor Department. Those losses are in addition to 200,000 public-sector jobs lost in 2010 and more than 500,000 since the start of the recession.

The layoffs are only the latest piece of bad news for the nation’s struggling black middle class.

A study by the Brookings Institution in 2007 found that fewer than one-third of blacks born to middle-class parents went on to earn incomes greater than their parents, compared with more than two-thirds of whites from the same income bracket. The foreclosure crisis also wiped out a large part of a generation of black homeowners.

The layoffs are not expected to end any time soon. The United States Postal Service, where about 25 percent of employees are black, is considering eliminating 220,000 positions in order to stay solvent, and areas with large black populations — from urban Detroit to rural Jefferson County, Miss. — are struggling with budget problems that could also lead to mass layoffs.

The postal cuts alone — which would amount to more than one-third of the work force — would be a blow both economically and psychologically, employees say.

Pamela Sparks, 49, a 25-year Postal Service veteran in Baltimore, has a brother who is a letter carrier and a sister who is a sales associate at the Postal Service. Her father is a retired station manager.

“With our whole family working for the Post Office, it would be hard to help each other out because we’d all be out of work,” Ms. Sparks said. “It has afforded us a lot of things we needed to survive really, but this is one of the drawbacks.”

In Michigan, Valerie Kindle, 61, who was laid off in April as a state government employee, said the loss of her $50,000-a-year job with benefits had caused her to put off retirement. Instead, she is looking for work. Two relatives have also lost state government jobs recently.

“There hasn’t been one family member who hasn’t been touched by a layoff,” Ms. Kindle said. “We are losing the bulk of our middle class. I was much better off than my parents, and I’m feeling my children will not be as well off as I was. There’s not as much government work and not as many manufacturing jobs. It’s just going down so wrong for us. When I think about it I get frightened, so I try not to think about it.”

Mr. Buckley, the unemployed Chicago bus driver who now lives in his mother’s basement, said his mother, a Postal Service employee, had grown tired of him “eating up all her food.”

“She’s ready for me to get up out of here,” he said. In the meantime, Mr. Buckley says his life has drifted into the tedium of looking for decent-paying jobs that do not exist.

“I was living the American dream — my version of the American dream,” he said of his $23.76-an-hour job. “Then it crumbled. They get you used to having things and then they take them away, and you realize how lucky you were.”

    As Public Sector Sheds Jobs, Blacks Are Hit Hardest, NYT, 28.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/us/as-public-sector-sheds-jobs-black-americans-are-hit-hard.html

The Unbelievers

November 25, 2011
The New York Times
By EMILY BRENNAN

RONNELLE ADAMS came out to his mother twice, first about his homosexuality, then about his atheism.

“My mother is very devout,” said Mr. Adams, 30, a Washington resident who has published an atheist children’s book, “Aching and Praying,” but who in high school considered becoming a Baptist preacher. “She started telling me her issues with homosexuality, which were, of course, Biblical,” he said. “ ‘I just don’t care what the Bible says about that,’ I told her, and she asked why. ‘I don’t believe that stuff anymore.’ It got silent. She was distraught. She told me she was more bothered by that than the revelation I was gay.”

This was in 2000, and Mr. Adams did not meet another black atheist in Washington until 2009, when he found the Facebook group called Black Atheists, which immediately struck a chord. “I felt like, ‘100 black atheists? Wow!’ ” he said.

In the two years since, Black Atheists has grown to 879 members from that initial 100, YouTube confessionals have attracted thousands, blogs like “Godless and Black” have gained followings, and hundreds more have joined Facebook groups like Black Atheist Alliance (524 members) to share their struggles with “coming out” about their atheism.

Feeling isolated from religious friends and families and excluded from what it means to be African-American, people turn to these sites to seek out advice and understanding, with some of them even finding a date. And having benefited from the momentum online, organizations like African Americans for Humanism and Center for Inquiry-Harlem have well-attended meet-up groups, and others like Black Atheists of America and Black Nonbelievers have been founded.

African-Americans are remarkably religious even for a country known for its faithfulness, as the United States is. According to the Pew Forum 2008 United States Religious Landscape Survey, 88 percent of African-Americans believe in God with absolute certainty, compared with 71 percent of the total population, with more than half attending religious services at least once a week.

While some black clergy members lament the loss of parishioners to mega-churches like Rick Warren’s and prosperity-gospel purveyors like Joel Osteen, it is often taken for granted that African-Americans go to religious services. Islam and other religions are represented in the black community, but with the assumption that African-Americans are religious comes the expectation that they are Christian.

“That’s the kicker, when they ask which church you go to,” said Linda Chavers, 29, a Harvard graduate student. The question comes up among young black professionals like her classmates as casually as chitchat about classes and dating. “At first,” she said, “they think it’s because I haven’t found one, and they’ll say, ‘Oh I know a few great churches,’ and I don’t know a nice way to say I’m not interested,” she said.

Even among those African-Americans who report no affiliation, more than two-thirds say religion plays a somewhat important role in their lives, according to Pew. And some nonbelieving African-Americans have been known to attend church out of tradition.

“I have some colleagues and friends who identify as culturally Christian in a way similar to ethnic Jews,” said Josef Sorett, a religion professor at Columbia University. “They may go to church because that’s the church their family attends, but they don’t necessarily subscribe to the beliefs of Christianity.”

Given the cultural pull toward religion, less than one-half of a percent of African-Americans identify themselves as atheists, compared with 1.6 percent of the total population, according to Pew. Black atheists, then, find they are a minority within a minority.

In 2008, John Branch made his first YouTube video, “Black Atheism.” With the camera tight on his face, Mr. Branch, now 27, asks, “What is an atheist? An atheist is simply someone who lacks a belief in God.” Half kidding, he goes on, “We’re not drinking blood. We’re not worshiping Satan.” The video has received more than 40,000 hits.

“I think it attracted so much attention because, in the black community, not believing in God is seen as a thing for white people,” said Mr. Branch, a marketing strategist in Raleigh, N.C. “I hate that term, ‘acting white,’ but it’s used.”

According to Pew, the vast majority of atheists and agnostics are white, including the authors Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.

Seeking a public intellectual of their own, some black atheists have claimed the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, interpreting his arguments against teaching intelligent design in the classroom to be an endorsement of atheism. But Dr. deGrasse Tyson is loath to be associated with any part of the movement. When contacted last week by e-mail, he noted a Twitter exchange he had in August, in which he told a follower, “Am I an Atheist, you ask? Labels are mentally lazy ways by which people assert they know you without knowing you.”

Jamila Bey, a 35-year-old journalist, said, “To be black and atheist, in a lot of circles, is to not be black.” She said the story the nation tells of African-Americans’ struggle for civil rights is a Christian one, so African-Americans who reject religion are seen as turning their backs on their history. This feels unfair to Ms. Bey, whose mother is Roman Catholic and whose father is Muslim, because people of different faiths, and some with none, were in the movement. The black church dominated, she said, because it was the one independent black institution allowed under Jim Crow laws, providing free spaces to African-Americans who otherwise faced arrest for congregating in public.

Recognizing the role of churches in the movement, Ms. Bey still takes issue when their work is retold as God’s. “These people were using the church, pulling from its resources, to attack a problem and literally change history. But the story that gets told is, ‘Jesus delivered us,’ ” Ms. Bey said. “Frankly, it was humans who did all the work.”

Garrett Daniels wrote on the Facebook group page of Black Atheists, “I CAME out that I’m an atheist to my family.” He added, “I’m not disowned and they apparently don’t love me any less.” A member responded: “Good for you. Seeking out religion just to fit in will drive you crazy.”

The Facebook discussion boards for these groups often become therapy sessions, and as administrator of the Black Atheist Alliance, Mark Hatcher finds himself a counselor. “My advice is usually let them know you understand their religion and what they believe, but you have to take a stand,” he said.

This strategy has worked for Mr. Hatcher, 30, a graduate student who started a secular student group at the historically black Howard University. For two of his Facebook friends, though, it has not worked, and they moved to Washington, not to sever ties with their families as much as to keep their sanity.

Now that Facebook groups have connected black atheists, meet-ups have started in cities like Atlanta, Houston and New York.

On a gray Saturday in October, 40 members of African Americans for Humanism, including Mr. Hatcher, Ms. Bey and Mr. Adams, met at a restaurant in Washington to celebrate the first anniversary of holding meet-ups. Speakers discussed plans to broaden services like tutoring and starting a speaking tour at historically black colleges.

“Someone’s sitting on the fence, saying, ‘I go to church, and all my friends and my family are there, how am I supposed to leave?’ ” Mr. Hatcher said on stage. “That’s where we, as African-American humanists, say, ‘Hey look, we have a community over here.’ ”

After the speeches, Mr. Hatcher looked at the attendees mingling, laughing, hugging one another. “I feel like I’m sitting at a family reunion,” he said.

Seated beside Mr. Hatcher was his girlfriend, Ellice Whittington, a 26-year-old chemical engineer he met through a black atheist Facebook group. He lived in Washington and she in Denver, so their relationship progressed slowly, she said, over long e-mails. But Mr. Hatcher said he fell immediately. “We bonded over music. She loved Prince.”

As for being nonreligious in the black community, Ms. Whittington said, “It definitely makes your field of candidates a whole lot smaller.”

She added, “It scared some men to hear me say I don’t believe in God the way you do. I’ve heard people say, ‘How can you love somebody if you don’t believe in God?’ ”

ON his blog “Words of Wrath,” Wrath James White is an outspoken critic of Christianity and of African-Americans’ “zealous embracement of the God of our kidnapper, murders, slave masters and oppressors.”

Though his atheism is a well-worn subject of debate with his wife and his mother (a minister), Mr. White, a 41-year-old Austin-based writer, avoids discussing it with the rest of his family. Though he won’t attend Christmas services this year, and hasn’t in years, he said, his family assumes he’s just “not that interested in religion.” To say explicitly he is an atheist, he said, “would break my grandmother’s heart.”

The pressure he feels to quiet his atheism is at the heart of a provocative statement he makes on his blog: “In most African-American communities, it is more acceptable to be a criminal who goes to church on Sunday, while selling drugs to kids all week, than to be an atheist who ... contributes to society and supports his family.”

Over the phone, Mr. White said he does feel respected for his education and success, but because he cannot talk freely about his atheism, it ultimately excludes him. When he lived in Los Angeles, he watched gang members in their colors enter the church where they were welcomed to shout “Amen” (they had sinned but had been redeemed) along with everyone else.

“They were free to tell their story,” Mr. White said, while his story about leaving religion he keeps to himself — and the Internet.

    The Unbelievers, NYT, 25.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/fashion/african-american-atheists.html

Stars Flock to Atlanta, Reshaping a Center of Black Culture

November 25, 2011
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON

ATLANTA — Cynthia Bailey, arguably the most glamorous of the “Real Housewives of Atlanta,” shivered in a sleeveless red shift, microphone in hand.

It was oddly cold, but the intrepid model carried on. She had a job to do: interviewing the talent that swaggered down the red carpet for the Soul Train Awards.

All along the police barriers that closed down Peachtree Street, fans screamed and elbowed one another for a better view. Those lucky enough to have tickets slipped into the Fox Theater, all glittery and prepared to party.

This was celebrity black Atlanta at its best.

A few years ago, the city probably would not have been able to pull off such a show. But fueled by a generous entertainment tax credit, the migration of affluent African-Americans from the North and the surprising fact that even celebrities appreciate the lower cost of living here, this capital of the Deep South is emerging as an epicenter of the black glitterati.

“It’s so ripe with African-American flavor and talent,” said Stephen Hill, an executive vice president for Black Entertainment Television, which will show the awards Sunday night.

“Atlanta is home to our core audience,” he said. “I’m trying not to make it a racial thing, but Atlanta is our New York, our L.A.”

To be sure, Atlanta has long had a high concentration of well-connected, affluent blacks. But the Atlanta area is now home to such a critical mass of successful actors, rappers and entertainment executives that few would argue its position as the center of black culture. Tyler Perry and his movie and television empire are based here. Sean Combs has a house in a suburb north of the city. The musicians Cee Lo Green, Ludacris and members of OutKast call it home. So does the music producer and rapper Jermaine Dupri.

Gladys Knight, an Atlanta native who was honored at the awards, which were taped Nov. 17, runs a chicken and waffle restaurant here. And it is not unusual to spot Usher at one of the city’s better restaurants.

“It seems like everything is happening here now,” said Dave Hollister, an R&B singer who spends a lot of time in Atlanta. “It feels like New York used to feel with a little more nicety.”

Atlanta’s A-list evolution was driven in part by the state’s 2008 Entertainment Industry Investment Act, which gives qualified productions a 20 percent tax break, said Warrington Hudlin, president of the Black Filmmaker Foundation, which is based in New York.

Producers who embed a Georgia promotional logo in the titles or credits can take another 10 percent off the tax bill. In the last fiscal year, $683.5 million worth of production — music videos, television shows and movies — was staged here.

“Atlanta is really becoming the black Hollywood,” Mr. Hudlin said. Because many black filmmakers are working on tighter budgets than white filmmakers, they need to save money and Georgia helps them do that, he said.

And producers of films and shows like the Soul Train Awards can find a variety of people to fill sets and seats. “This is one of our strengths, the diversity of people in Atlanta,” said Lee Thomas, director of the state’s Film, Music and Digital Entertainment Office. “It’s something we have over, say, Canada.”

The growth has also been fed by a decade of migration of blacks from the North. Nearly a quarter of a million blacks moved to the greater Atlanta area from outside the South between 2005 and 2010, making it the metro area with the largest number of black residents after New York.

More than a third of the new migrant households made more than $50,000 a year. One of the newcomers is Jasmine Guy, the actress whose most famous role was Whitley Gilbert on the sitcom “A Different World.” She was raised in Atlanta but spent 30 years in New York and Los Angeles.

She moved back three years ago, largely because she finds Atlanta offers an easier, gentler life for her family.

“At first I thought, how am I going to work?” she said. “But I have not stopped working since.”

In addition to acting, she directs and teaches younger actors. Like others in Atlanta’s black elite, she likes the fact that she finds herself among the majority at art museums and sophisticated restaurants.

And an added bonus? Paparazzi activity is at a minimum, but stars still get to feel like stars.

“They get the love and attention here like they wouldn’t get in New York,” said Kelley Carter, a pop culture journalist who has worked her share of rope lines and writes for publications like Ebony and Jet. She recently moved to Atlanta from Los Angeles herself.

It also doesn’t hurt that real estate here costs much less than in New York or Los Angeles.

“You can stretch a dollar more here,” said Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who played Theo in “The Cosby Show” and has been in Atlanta shooting a new sitcom, “Reed Between the Lines,” for BET.

“Atlanta affords you a different kind of vibe,” he said. “A little more warmth.”

But like several people interviewed, he’s not ready to say that Atlanta can best New York or Los Angeles.

Lance Gross is a star in the Tyler Perry constellation who spends part of his time in Atlanta. “A lot of people come through here,” he said, “but I can’t give it to Atlanta yet.”

Ms. Bailey, the “Housewives” star, still takes monthly trips to New York for what she calls a culture fix.

But she is investing in Atlanta, and recently opened the Bailey Agency — School of Fashion to help connect Atlanta’s most promising models with power players in the fashion world.

“Atlanta in two or three years is going to be perfect,” she said.

Maybe. The comedian Cedric the Entertainer, who hosted the Soul Train Awards, said Atlanta had always been a black mecca and continues to be one. He used to travel to the city when he was growing up in St. Louis. The city just keeps improving, he said. The talent pool gets bigger every day, which makes it easy to stage shows here.

“You can make some quick calls and say, ‘I had a fall-out. Let’s see if Ludacris can stop by,’ ” he said. “You have the real down-home love and you have a lot of transplants who give it a real sexy, young progressive energy.”

But, he said, Georgia will always be Georgia.

“It’s serious business down here but at the same time they’re still country,” he said. “I mean, sweet tea don’t go with everything.”

 

Robbie Brown contributed reporting.

    Stars Flock to Atlanta, Reshaping a Center of Black Culture, NYT, 25.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/us/atlanta-emerges-as-a-center-of-black-entertainment.html

Where King Once Marched, Now a Dedication

October 16, 2011
The New York Times
By HELENE COOPER and SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — Promising that “change can come if you don’t give up,” President Obama, the man who is perhaps the biggest beneficiary of the civil rights movement, on Sunday called on Americans to use the memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to help push for progress in today’s economically tough times.

Speaking at the dedication of the monument to Dr. King on the National Mall, Mr. Obama, at times adopting the cadence of Dr. King, said Americans must celebrate all that the civil rights movement accomplished even as they understand that the work is not done. Standing under the new monument, the first on the mall to honor an African-American, Mr. Obama struck tones that veered from the church pulpit to the floors of the nearby Capitol.

“I know there are better days ahead,” Mr. Obama said, his voice rising. “I know this because of the man towering above me.”

At times, Mr. Obama appeared to be drawing a comparison between himself and Dr. King. Often when he spoke of Dr. King’s struggles, it was impossible not to think that he was speaking of himself.

“For every victory, there were setbacks,” Mr. Obama said. “Even after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Dr. King was vilified by many.”

He continued, “He was even attacked by his own people, by those who felt he was going too fast and by those who felt he was going too slow.”

Mr. Obama’s speech culminated a morning — beautifully sunny and bright on the Washington Mall — during which a lion’s gallery of civil rights and black leaders stood on the podium to hail that a preacher of no rank had joined Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt to be memorialized into perpetuity in the National Mall area. Thousands of people crowded the mall for the festivities, which were rescheduled after Hurricane Irene canceled the initial plans.

The memorial — a four-acre tract along the Tidal Basin that is dotted with elm and cherry trees and anchored by an imposing granite statue of Dr. King — is the result of more than two decades of work. It was originally scheduled to be dedicated in August to coincide with the 48th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which was delivered at the Lincoln Memorial.

The expansive three-hour ceremony included speeches by civil rights leaders like Representative John Lewis and the Rev. Jesse Jackson and songs by performers like Aretha Franklin.

People came from all over for the event. Yvonne Binis took an early morning train with her 4-year-old grandson from Linden, N.J. Ms. Binis’s mother had been part of the March on Washington, and she said she came in honor of that.

“I’m here to see what she came down for,” Ms. Binis said, carrying a large folding chair in a backpack.

Some in the crowd remembered their childhoods in the Jim Crow South. Carolyn Bledsoe, 70, recalled the shame of being turned away from a restaurant in Goldsboro, N.C., in the 1950s, because she was black. “We got very scared,” she said, sitting in a blue dress jacket and a white baseball cap, with an insignia of the memorial on it. “We thought we might be followed.”

Mr. Obama is facing stiff challenges in his bid for re-election next year, particularly as the country is grappling with a 9.1 percent unemployment rate and a global economy that is reeling.

He urged patience. “Change depends on persistence,” Mr. Obama said. “When met with hardship, when confronting disappointment, Dr. King refused to accept what he called the ‘is-ness’ of today,” Mr. Obama said. “He kept pushing towards the ‘oughtness’ of tomorrow.”

Mr. Obama said that “when we think of all the work that we must do,” including rebuilding the economy and fixing ailing schools, “we can’t be discouraged by what is; we’ve got to be pushing for what ought to be.”

The monument is not only the first to a black man on the mall and its adjoining parks but also the first to honor someone who was not a president, according to the foundation in charge of putting it up, something that has been an inspiration to many.

“I drive past the mall every day, and to see that Martin Luther King is now there with Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson and Roosevelt — that is powerful,” said Lonnie Bunch, a founding director of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

Dr. King’s stone figure faces the Jefferson Memorial across the water. Lincoln is at his back, and Roosevelt to his right.

The design gave form to a line from Dr. King’s “Dream” speech — “With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” In the statue, he is emerging from a large piece of stone. Two towering granite mounds set behind him are the mountains of despair.

Mr. Bunch said that the dedication offered an opportunity to assess race relations in America.

“We are not in a post-racial America, but in an America that allows us to talk about race candidly in different ways,” he said. “Having a statue of Martin Luther King, without even saying it, lets people know that this is a different mall, this is a different America.”

For those who knew Dr. King, the dedication also offered an opportunity to remember the emotion and the intensity of the civil rights movement.

“The March on Washington was the point where the whole country seemed to come together,” said Sterling Tucker, a civil rights leader who worked with Dr. King. “It felt like, here we are, marching together as a nation in the right direction.”

Mr. Tucker, who is president of the National Theater in Washington, said he experienced the same feeling when Mr. Obama was elected in 2008. That this country elected an African-American, he said, was possible only because of the work that had been done by Dr. King’s generation, a point that Mr. Obama himself has often made.

“People think times are better because times have changed,” Mr. Tucker said. “No. They are better because people worked hard to make them better.”

Congress authorized the memorial in 1996, and Alpha Phi Alpha, an African-American fraternity, set up a foundation to establish it. A Chinese sculptor, Lei Yixin, was selected to create the 30-foot sculpture, and the Roma Design Group, a company in San Francisco, designed the layout, which includes a wall with Dr. King’s quotations and nearly 200 cherry trees. The cost was $120 million, and organizers said they were still trying to raise the last $3 million.

Mr. Tucker recalled the euphoria of the March on Washington a little wistfully. His said his generation of civil rights leaders was aging, and he sometimes had the sense that young blacks feel that the older generation dwells too much on that past.

Young black political leaders — Mr. Obama; Cory A. Booker, the mayor of Newark; and Adrian M. Fenty, the former mayor of Washington — “are cut from a different cloth,” Mr. Tucker said, moving beyond the racial politics of the past into new types of leadership.

But for all the gains, he said, there is still work to be done.

“Now there’s just more sophistication in trying to perpetuate the same old ways,” he said.

The memorial, Mr. Bunch said, will help.

“For so long we either tried to ignore race, tamp it down or try to say that it’s over, that we’ve solved all the problems,” he said. “His struggle helped us realize there’s still a great deal of ambiguity about race. His monument will ensure we don’t forget it.”

    Where King Once Marched, Now a Dedication, NYT, 16.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/us/memorial-of-martin-luther-king-jr-dedicated-in-washington.html

In Strangers’ Glances at Family, Tensions Linger

October 12, 2011
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

TOMS RIVER, N.J. — “How come she’s so white and you’re so dark?”

The question tore through Heather Greenwood as she was about to check out at a store here one afternoon this summer. Her brown hands were pushing the shopping cart that held her babbling toddler, Noelle, all platinum curls, fair skin and ice-blue eyes.

The woman behind Mrs. Greenwood, who was white, asked once she realized, by the way they were talking, that they were mother and child. “It’s just not possible,” she charged indignantly. “You’re so...dark!”

It was not the first time someone had demanded an explanation from Mrs. Greenwood about her biological daughter, but it was among the more aggressive. Shaken almost to tears, she wanted to flee, to shield her little one from this kind of talk. But after quickly paying the cashier, she managed a reply. “How come?” she said. “Because that’s the way God made us.”

The Greenwood family tree, emblematic of a growing number of American bloodlines, has roots on many continents. Its mix of races — by marriage, adoption and other close relationships — can be challenging to track, sometimes confusing even for the family itself.

For starters: Mrs. Greenwood, 37, is the daughter of a black father and a white mother. She was adopted into a white family as a child. Mrs. Greenwood married a white man with whom she has two daughters. Her son from a previous relationship is half Costa Rican. She also has a half brother who is white, and siblings in her adoptive family who are biracial, among a host of other close relatives — one from as far away as South Korea.

The population of mixed-race Americans like Mrs. Greenwood and her children is growing quickly, driven largely by immigration and intermarriage. One in seven new marriages is between spouses of different races or ethnicities, for example. And among American children, the multiracial population has increased almost 50 percent, to 4.2 million, since 2000.

But the experiences of mixed-race Americans can be vastly different. Many mixed-race youths say they feel wider acceptance than past generations, particularly on college campuses and in pop culture. Extensive interviews and days spent with the Greenwoods show that, when they are alone, the family strives to be colorblind. But what they face outside their home is another story. People seem to notice nothing but race. Strangers gawk. Make rude and racist comments. Tell offensive jokes. Ask impolite questions.

The Greenwoods’ experiences offer a telling glimpse into contemporary race relations, according to sociologists and members of other mixed-race families.

It is a life of small but relentless reminders that old tensions about race remain, said Mrs. Greenwood, a homemaker with training in social work.

“People confront you, and it’s not once in a while, it’s all the time,” she said. “Each time is like a little paper cut, and you might think, ‘Well, that’s not a big deal.’ But imagine a lifetime of that. It hurts.”

Jenifer L. Bratter, an associate sociology professor at Rice University who has studied multiracialism, said that as long as race continued to affect where people live, how much money they make and how they are treated, then multiracial families would be met with double-takes. “Unless we solve those issues of inequality in other areas, interracial families are going to be questioned about why they’d cross that line,” she said.

According to Census data, interracial couples have a slightly higher divorce rate than same-race couples — perhaps, sociologists say, because of the heightened stress in their lives as they buck enduring norms. And children in mixed families face the challenge of navigating questions about their identities.

“If we could just go about whatever we’re doing and not be asked anything about our family’s colors,” Mrs. Greenwood said, “that would be a dream.”

 

A Family’s Story

The colors that strangers find so intriguing when they see the Greenwood family are the result of two generations of intermixing.

Their story begins with Mrs. Greenwood’s adoptive parents, Dolores and Edward Dragan, of Slovak and Polish descent, veterans of Woodstock and the March on Washington, who always knew they wanted to adopt. They were drawn to children who were hardest to place in permanent homes. In the early 1970s, those children were mixed race.

Mrs. Dragan, a retired art teacher, remembers telling her adoption agency that she and her husband, then a principal, would take “any child, any color,” at a time when most people like themselves were looking for healthy white infants.

They adopted two mixed-race children within two years. The family seemed complete until Mr. Dragan came home from school one day and joked to his wife, “I’m in love with another woman.” It was the sprightly 6-year-old Heather, a student. She had been living with foster parents and was up for adoption.

“Holy cow, she just brought the energy into our home,” Mrs. Dragan recalled of their early days together in Flemington, N.J.

As the children grew, the Dragans tried to infuse their world with African-American culture. There were family trips to museums in Washington, as well as beauty salons in Philadelphia, where Mrs. Dragan learned black hairstyling skills.

However, the children were not particularly interested, and do not remember race being a big part of their identities when they were younger. “We were happy to be whoever we thought we were at that time,” Mrs. Greenwood said.

But as she moved into adulthood, she began to identify herself as a black woman of mixed heritage. She also felt more of a connection with whites and Latinos, and had a son, Silas Aguilar, now 18, with a Costa Rican boyfriend. She later married Aaron Greenwood, a computer network engineer who is a descendant of Quakers. A few years ago, they bought a split-level ranch house in Toms River and started a bigger family.

 

Stinging Insults

The shoulder shrugs about being mixed race within the family are in stark contrast to insults outside the home — too many for the Dragans and the Greenwoods to recount.

But some still sting more than others. On one occasion, a boy on the school bus called young Heather a nigger, and she had no idea what the word meant, so Mrs. Dragan, now 69, got the question over homework one night: “Mom, what’s a nigger?”

Once, on a beach chair at a resort in Florida years ago, a white woman sunning herself next to Mrs. Dragan bemoaned the fact that black children were running around the pool. “Isn’t it awful?” Mrs. Dragan recalled the woman confiding to her.

Within minutes, Mrs. Dragan, ever feisty despite her reserved appearance, had her brood by her side. “I’d like to introduce you to my children,” she told the woman. Awkward silence ensued.

“You know what? She deserved it,” Mrs. Dragan recalled during an interview at her home in Lambertville, N.J. “I figured, why miss an opportunity to embarrass someone if they needed it?”

Sometimes, the racism directed toward the Dragans seemed similar to what a single-race minority family might experience.

When the children were still young, a real estate agent in Flemington warned prospective buyers in her neighborhood about the Dragan household, saying that “there are black people living there, and I feel it’s my duty to let you know.” The people bought the house anyway, and later told the Dragans about the incident, once they had become friends.

“We weren’t blind to the reality of racism,” Mr. Dragan explained, “yet when you get into a situation where it’s your family, it really takes on a different dimension.”

Mrs. Dragan said her life came to revolve around shielding the children: “I was always on my A-game. My antennas were always up. I was aware all the time.”

Fast-forward 30 years, and Mrs. Dragan sees her daughter, Mrs. Greenwood, going through similar episodes with her own children — all because mother and child are not the same color.

“She gets the same stares I got when I was a young mother in the supermarket, with three African-American kids hanging off the cart,” said Mrs. Dragan, whose wisps of blond hair frame a fair-skinned face.

“You sort of put it out of your mind once your children are grown and you think, I just want to relax, that part’s over for now,” she continued. “But I’ve gotten a little more agitated lately.”

She does not like what she is hearing from her daughter these days. A typical story: On the boardwalk at the shore over the summer, Noelle scampered toward the carousel, her parents in tow. Even at 21 months, Noelle is a regular customer, so the ride operator, Risa Ierra, felt free to have a little fun.

“You know this little one isn’t really theirs, right?” Ms. Ierra joked to the other people in line. “Must have been switched at the hospital.”

Since Mr. and Mrs. Greenwood are friendly with her, they said later that they were not offended. But the exchange was typical of remarks Mrs. Greenwood hears often, even from people who seem well-meaning.

“‘Oh my God! Are they yours? Or are you their nanny?’” she said she was often asked. (By contrast, her mother, Mrs. Dragan, was often asked if she was hosting inner-city children as part of a charitable effort.)

“That’s the most common thing I get,” Mrs. Greenwood said of the nanny question. “But I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to justify me being their mother to strangers.”

 

Humor and Strength

The family has always used humor to cope, but sometimes that is not enough.

When the Dragan children were young, for instance, the family stopped at a restaurant near Disney World and people seemed to drop their forks when they walked in. “Yes, it’s true!” one of the Dragan children yelled. “These folks aren’t from around here!”

At least the family laughed, if no one else did.

Of the constant confrontations, Mrs. Dragan said: “I don’t always feel successful. I feel like I could have thrown my hands up a number of times, with the kids and other people.”

Often, she found the energy to fight. “Other times,” she said, “I locked myself in the house.”

The Dragans concede that at times they felt a strain on their relationship. “There is a lot of stress when people are looking at you and scrutinizing and judging,” Mr. Dragan said. “You might not hear it but you feel it. We felt it. That is stressful for a marriage. You do have to help and reinforce each other. Humor has really gotten us through a lot of heartache.”

Mrs. Greenwood uses the same strategy. She likes T-shirts with messages. She has one that she wears on St. Patrick’s Day: “This is what Irish looks like,” it says, a reference to her biological mother’s lineage. She is thinking about having one made that says, “Yes, I’m the mom.”

Mrs. Greenwood is not ready to have a conversation about race with Sophia, now 7. But Sophia is starting to notice the stares, the jokes, the questions. Mrs. Greenwood feels as though the world is forcing race into her home, which has been a respite from race ever since she was a little girl herself.

“I actually don’t know what to tell Sophia and Noelle when they start asking me, ‘Am I black?’ ” she said.

“If they look in the mirror or to society, they’re not going to be black,” she said, worried about what sort of internal conflicts this might cause.

“I’m afraid she’s going to start questioning who she is, and she shouldn’t have to,” Mrs. Greenwood added.

Mr. Greenwood has already tried something. “I’ve told Sophia that she is a perfect mix of her mommy and daddy,” he said, “but we’re going to have to talk more.”

Silas, Mrs. Greenwood’s half-Latino son from a previous relationship, started to ask race questions around age 7.

“I went up to my mom and said, ‘What am I?’ ” Silas recalled. “And, ‘What are you? Are we the same thing?’ I was just shooting questions. It was like a brain mash. I looked at my family and thought, ‘What is going on here?’ I was just lost. But after a really long explanation, I eventually understood.”

He paused, adding later, “I think my little sisters will be fine.”

Race is not something Silas says he spends a lot of time worrying about. He learned long ago about the family tree, and that he is part black, that his grandmother is Slovakian, his cousin is Asian, and so on — and hardly any of that matters to him.

“Barriers are breaking down,” he said.

For the moment, the matter seems simple enough for Sophia, too. She responds confidently when asked what race she is. “Tan!” says the second-grade student. “Can’t you tell by just looking?”

    In Strangers’ Glances at Family, Tensions Linger, NYT, 12.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/us/for-mixed-family-old-racial-tensions-remain-part-of-life.html

Marching in King’s Shadow

October 6, 2011
The New York Times
By DIANE McWHORTER

Cambridge, Mass.

IF you recognized the name of only one of the two greats who succumbed to cancer on Wednesday, that’s perhaps because the work of the Rev. Fred L. Shuttlesworth, who died at 89 in a hospital in Birmingham, Ala., was about as low-tech as it gets.

Using an operating system of unadorned bodily witness, backed by a headlong courage that often tested the grace of his God, Mr. Shuttlesworth was the key architect of the civil rights revolution’s turning-point victory in Birmingham, the mass marches of 1963. Their internationally infamous climax, the showdown between the movement’s child demonstrators and the city of Birmingham’s fire hoses and police dogs, gave President John F. Kennedy the moral authority he needed to introduce legislation to abolish legal segregation, passed after his death as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

True, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the reluctant leader whom Mr. Shuttlesworth virtually goaded into joining him in Birmingham, got the credit — and the Nobel Peace Prize — for their accomplishment. But that’s partly because Mr. Shuttlesworth was the un-King, the product not of polished Atlanta but of rough, heavy-industrial Birmingham. As the public face of the movement, King was its ambassador to the white world, while Mr. Shuttlesworth was the man in the trenches.

But without Mr. Shuttlesworth’s strategic acumen and troops, justice would have been dramatically delayed. And his failure to get his due may be yet another example of the country’s reluctance to face up to the “class warfare” that not only animates the current Occupy Wall Street demonstrations (yet another variation on the Birmingham template), but has long roiled the black community as well.

Among his movement colleagues, Mr. Shuttlesworth was known, with exasperation and admiration, as the Wild Man from Birmingham. He had been a lonely pioneer of nonviolent direct action in the 1950s, dispatching his followers to illegal seats in the front of Birmingham’s buses the day after the Ku Klux Klan bombed his bed out from under him on Christmas night in 1956. (“And this,” Mr. Shuttlesworth would later say, “is where I was blown into history.”)

He became increasingly frustrated trying to prod King, with whom he and two other black ministers founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, to fulfill their organization’s pledge to “redeem the soul of America.” If King was Hamlet, not quite able to make up his mind and break away from the ceremonial demands of his role, Mr. Shuttlesworth sometimes resembled the Road Runner. “I literally tried to get myself killed,” he said. He was involved in more bodily attacks, arrests, jail sentences and Supreme Court test cases than any other member of the S.C.L.C.

Mr. Shuttlesworth, born to young, unmarried parents and raised in hardship, had a long history of challenging not just white privilege but the prejudices of what he called the “tea sippers” of his own race, who had shunned his largely working-class movement until its success appeared inevitable, thanks to his efforts.

It was that experience that drove his often-tense relationship with King during the Birmingham protests. At one point the S.C.L.C.’s “Atlanta crowd” had tried to call off the demonstrations while Mr. Shuttlesworth was in the hospital recovering from injuries inflicted by one of the fire hoses of his equally determined nemesis, the arch-segregationist police commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor. Mr. Shuttlesworth, who readily acknowledged being a “cussing preacher,” used some hurtful profanity in letting King know what he thought of this capitulation — and overruled him, declaring the demonstrations back on.

When King traveled to Oslo the next year to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, won mainly because of the success in Birmingham, Mr. Shuttlesworth was not included in the sizable entourage that accompanied him. There is a sense that he was paying the price for being the first S.C.L.C. leader to buck King’s authority — with the added insult of being right.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, the man forever being eased out of the limelight had his own passing superseded within hours by the head-of-state mourning that greeted the death of Steven P. Jobs. Mr. Jobs is being remembered as the “the man who invented our world,” in the words of one headline, celebrated for creating objects to which their owners relate as though they were human. Mr. Shuttlesworth’s legacy, though, reminds us of the not-so-distant era when the task of our heroes was to persuade society to regard as human a class of people who had long been treated as things.

A few years ago, after Mr. Shuttlesworth had survived a house fire, I teased him about his continuing record of close calls, saying that even though the segregationists hadn’t done him in, somebody was going to get him one way or the other. “Yeah, and when they do,” he replied, “God’s going to say, ‘They got a man.’ ”

 

Diane McWhorter is the author of “Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama,

the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution.”

    Marching in King’s Shadow, NYT, 6.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/opinion/fred-shuttlesworth-marching-in-kings-shadow.html

Students’ Knowledge of Civil Rights History

Has Deteriorated, Study Finds

September 28, 2011
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

When Julian Bond, the former Georgia lawmaker and civil rights activist, turned to teaching two decades ago, he often quizzed his college students to gauge their awareness of the civil rights movement. He did not want to underestimate their grasp of the topic or talk down to them, he said.

“My fears were misplaced,” Mr. Bond said. No student had heard of George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, he said. One student guessed that Mr. Wallace might have been a CBS newsman.

That ignorance by American students of the basic history of the civil rights movement has not changed — in fact, it has worsened, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, on whose board Mr. Bond sits. The report says that states’ academic standards for public schools are one major cause of the problem.

“Across the country, state educational standards virtually ignore our civil rights history,” concludes the report, which is to be released on Wednesday.

The report assigns letter grades to each state based on how extensively its academic standards address the civil rights movement. Thirty-five states got an F because their standards require little or no mention of the movement, it says.

Eight of the 12 states earning A, B or C grades for their treatment of civil rights history are Southern states where there were major protests, boycotts or violence during the movement’s peak years in the 1950s and ’60s.

“Generally speaking, the farther away from the South — and the smaller the African-American population — the less attention paid to the civil rights movement,” the report says.

Alabama, Florida and New York were given A grades. Those states require relatively detailed teaching about the decade and a half of historic events, roughly bookended by the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling and the April 1968 assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the enactment of the federal Civil Rights Act a week later.

Many states have turned Dr. King’s life into a fable, said Mr. Bond, who now teaches at American University and the University of Virginia. He said his students knew that “there used to be segregation until Martin Luther King came along, that he marched and protested, that he was killed, and that then everything was all right.”

Alabama, Florida and New York require teaching not only about Dr. King but also about others like James Meredith, who in 1962 became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi; Medgar Evers, the rights organizer murdered the following year in Jackson, Miss.; and Malcolm X, the Muslim minister who challenged the movement’s predominantly integrationist goals.

Some experts in history education criticized the report’s methodology. Fritz Fischer, a professor at the University of Northern Colorado who is chairman of the National Council for History Education, said it was unfair to give Colorado and some other states an F because of vague state history standards, when they are required by state constitutions or laws to leave curriculum up to local districts.

“The grading system they came up with does a disservice in putting the focus on requirements that certain states are unable to meet and will never be able to meet,” Dr. Fischer said.

Even though Colorado’s standards barely mention the civil rights movement, some Colorado schools teach the civil rights movement thoroughly, he said. “I’ve been in classrooms and watched them teach about the sit-ins and about the controversies between Martin Luther King and Malcolm,” he said.

The report is by no means the first to sound an alarm about nationwide weaknesses in the teaching of American history.

Over the past decade, students have performed worse on federal history tests administered by the Department of Education than on tests in any other subject. On the history test last year, only 12 percent of high school seniors showed proficiency.

The law center’s report noted that on that federal test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, seniors were asked to read a brief excerpt from the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, including the phrase, “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Only 2 percent of the seniors were able to state that the ruling had been prompted by a school segregation case.

“I appreciate that they are shining a light on this,” said Kathleen Porter-Magee, a senior director at the Fordham Institute, a conservative Washington research group that produced its own report card on states’ American history standards this year. “We found that U.S. history standards were generally mediocre to awful, and this report finds the same thing.”

Even in schools that try to teach history rigorously, the civil rights movement may get short shrift because in the traditional chronological presentation of United States history, teachers often run out of time to cover post-World War II America, said Maureen Costello, a director at the poverty law center who oversaw and edited the report, titled “Teaching the Movement: the State of Civil Rights Education in the United States 2011.”

One reason the center decided to produce the report now is that 2011 is the 50th anniversary of crucial 1961 events, including the freedom rides.

    Students’ Knowledge of Civil Rights History Has Deteriorated, Study Finds, NYT, 28.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/education/28civil.html

Frank C. Arricale, Youth Board Leader

Who Calmed Race Tensions, Dies at 81

September 4, 2011
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

The summer of 1966 was long and hot, and racial tension crackled on the streets of Brooklyn. Frank C. Arricale, as the director of New York City’s Youth Board, reached out to people from different ethnic groups to keep unrest from erupting into violence.

He asked two men with street credibility for help: the brothers Albert and Larry Gallo, leaders of a Mafia family. The idea was that they could advise white youths, particularly Italian-Americans, to stay cool, just as black nationalists had been enlisted to reach out to black youths. The Gallos agreed; their motive, apparently, was to gain some positive publicity and perhaps a friendlier environment in which to run their nefarious businesses.

It seemed to work: the crime bosses ordered youngsters to stay out of the East New York neighborhood and cooperate with the police. Albert Gallo underlined the message by slapping a youth to the floor in a local luncheonette for using a racial epithet.

William H. Booth, chairman of the city human rights commission, commended the Gallos for doing “a fine service for the city.”

Others, though, including the police, were less admiring. They noted that the two Gallos had recently served 30 days in jail for refusing to answer a grand jury’s questions about rackets, and that their brother Joseph, known as Crazy Joey, was serving a prison term for extortion. Critics excoriated Mr. Arricale for giving the Gallos introductory letters written on city stationery.

The Brooklyn district attorney said Mr. Arricale (pronounced ar-uh-KAHL-ee) was guilty of “a deplorable abdication of responsibility” and convened a grand jury to examine his arrangement, but no indictment resulted.

Nor did riots occur. Weeks later, Mayor John V. Lindsay defended Mr. Arricale. “You can’t always deal with people who are leaders in the Boy Scout movement,” he said. “Sometimes you must call upon individuals with fairly rough backgrounds.”

Mr. Arricale died of congestive heart failure on Aug. 26 in Brookhaven, on Long Island, his daughter Frances Arricale said. He was 81 and lived in Bayside, Queens. Besides his daughter Frances, he is survived by his wife of 43 years, the former Maria Rogge; another daughter, Irene Arricale; a son, Marc; and two grandchildren.

Mr. Arricale had a succession of jobs in the city government and the school system, often pressing liberal causes. Henry Stern, a former parks commissioner, who like Mr. Arricale was a young Liberal Party soldier in the 1960s, called him “an irrepressible, irreverent reformer.”

“There are no Frank Arricales in city government today,” Mr. Stern said in an interview on Thursday.

As personnel director for the city schools in the late 1970s, Mr. Arricale oversaw putting hundreds of laid-off teachers back to work as the city emerged from a severe fiscal crisis. But he resented being compelled to assign them to schools on the basis of race to comply with federal guidelines intended to rectify what the government called a pattern of discriminatory hiring in the city schools.

He and others, though they agreed with the policy’s racial goals, considered it a quota system, one that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan likened to Hitler’s Nuremberg race laws and called a “prescription for division and hostility” in the schools.

After the city negotiated an end to race-based assignments in 1978, Mr. Arricale said, “I felt I had to go along with the racial placements in order not to lose millions of dollars to youngsters, but at the same time I was revolted and offended by the procedure.”

In the 1980s and early ’90s, Mr. Arricale was superintendent of school districts in Brooklyn and the Bronx. But he was fired by the Bronx board in 1992, accused of being indifferent to the needs of black students. He and others vigorously denied the charge.

Frank Clement Arricale, the son of a tailor, was born on April 16, 1930, in Manhattan and reared in the Bronx. After attending St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers for five years, he abandoned his plan to become a Roman Catholic priest and decided to teach, doing graduate work at Fordham University and Teachers College at Columbia University.

He taught in high schools and colleges, including St. John’s University, and held executive positions with the National Conference of Christians and Jews, the Catholic Interracial Council of New York and the Police Athletic League.

Joining Mayor Robert F. Wagner’s administration in 1961, he worked in the controller’s office, became a spokesman for a city relocation agency that helped people who had been forced from their homes, and directed a mayoral agency that helped dropouts.

After working on Mr. Lindsay’s campaign in 1965, he was appointed executive director of the Youth Board, focusing on job creation. In 1966, four months after the Gallo affair, Mayor Lindsay put him in charge of the relocation agency. He resigned in 1969 to run for a City Council seat in the Bronx, but lost. He then became executive director of Brotherhood in Action, a group promoting racial and ethnic harmony.

    Frank C. Arricale, Youth Board Leader Who Calmed Race Tensions, Dies at 81, NYT, 4.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/05/nyregion/frank-c-arricale-youth-board-leader-
    who-calmed-race-tensions-dies-at-81.html

Dr. King’s Legacy, From Different Angles

September 2, 2011
The New York Times

To the Editor:

To Cornel West’s fine essay about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (“Dr. King Weeps From His Grave,” Op-Ed, Aug. 26), I would add that we have constructed a third grader’s simplification as our national narrative about Dr. King: love one another, nonviolence, had a dream.

When my high school students listen to Dr. King’s “Beyond Vietnam” speech, they are shocked and amazed to hear him say: “We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin ... the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

This angry revolutionary is not the Martin Luther King whom they are familiar with. It is not hard to understand why our national leaders and myth makers exclude this part of Dr. King’s dream. But the way to truly honor him is to strive for his vision of America.

MARC KAGAN
New York, Aug. 26, 2011

To the Editor:

Cornel West enumerates many real problems in our nation. Unfortunately, his hyped-up tone mirrors the polarizing moralism of the Tea Party rather than the nonviolent universalism of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

President Obama’s courageous struggle to forge and pursue a balanced, long-range agenda in the face of destructive Republican ideologues has a closer kinship with Dr. King’s inclusive, ultimately powerful, vision of change.

MALCOLM OWEN SLAVIN
Cambridge, Mass., Aug. 26, 2011

To the Editor:

I’ve always respected Cornel West, who taught me at Princeton. So I’m disappointed over the tone of his Op-Ed essay attacking President Obama for a policy that he believes has fallen “tragically short” of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy.

Why wasn’t Dr. West raising as much of a fuss during the previous administration, whose policies proved far worse for the poor and working class?

Implicit in Dr. West’s criticism is that Mr. Obama’s “failed” policies stem from his not being black enough. Blacker-than-thou attitudes are remnants of an era better left forgotten.

DAVID H. ROANE
Norwood, Mass., Aug. 29, 2011

To the Editor:

Cornel West does not capture the spirit of the freedom movement that I knew as a young man working as a field secretary in the organization led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Professor West perpetuates the “great leader” syndrome that afflicts our celebrity-crazed culture with his quotation from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel: “The whole future of America depends on the impact and influence of Dr. King.”

What I learned from Dr. King and countless others was that the movement’s main power came not from eloquent leaders but from everyday citizens engaged in changing communities. This produced a politics of coalition building that is absent from Professor West’s hyperventilated call for “revolution” by a righteous left against a demonic right.

HARRY C. BOYTE
Johannesburg, Aug. 26, 2011

The writer is director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College in Minneapolis.

To the Editor:

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has already been honored by a national holiday and, in many major cities, a street named after him. But as Prof. Cornel West’s tribute makes clear, these memorials have failed to inspire many to adopt his vision for America and commit to pursuing it. Will his memorial in Washington do more?

Perhaps, if it functions as true public art. In the meantime, Professor West’s call to revolution memorializes Dr. King’s life and work better than 1,000 statues.

TIM IGLESIAS
San Francisco, Aug. 26, 2011

The writer is a professor of housing and property law at the University of San Francisco School of Law.

To the Editor:

I disagree with Edward Rothstein’s contention that the new Martin Luther King Jr. memorial appears “authoritarian” (“A Mirror of Greatness, Blurred,” Memorial Review, Aug. 26). However, I do think it depicts Dr. King as a stern, unbending and impregnable bulwark of humanist ideals in the face of vociferous and dangerous forces of reaction, in his time and in ours.

I’m glad to see him portrayed this way, and think he’ll help us muster the strength for the battles that lie ahead.

ERIC ORNER
West Hollywood, Calif., Aug. 26, 2011

    Dr. King’s Legacy, From Different Angles, NYT, 2.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/opinion/dr-kings-legacy-from-different-angles.html

Stetson Kennedy,

Who Infiltrated and Exposed the Klan, Dies at 94

August 30, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Stetson Kennedy, a folklorist and social crusader who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and wrote a lurid exposé of its activities, “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan,” died on Saturday in St. Augustine, Fla. He was 94.

The cause was complications of bleeding of the brain, said his wife, Sandra Parks.

Mr. Kennedy developed his sense of racial injustice early. A native of Jacksonville, Fla., he saw the hardships of black Floridians when he knocked on doors collecting payments for his father’s furniture store. His social concerns developed further when he began collecting folklore data for the Federal Writers’ Project in Key West, Tampa and camps for turpentine workers in north Florida, where conditions were close to slavery.

After being rejected by the Army because of a bad back, he threw himself into unmasking the Ku Klux Klan as well as the Columbians, a Georgia neo-Nazi group. He was inspired in part by a tale told by an interview subject whose friend had been the victim of a racial murder in Key West.

As an agent for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Mr. Kennedy, by his own account, infiltrated the Klavern in Stone Mountain and worked as a Klavalier, or Klan strong-arm man. He leaked his findings to, among others, the Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson, the Anti-Defamation League and the producers of the radio show “Superman,” who used information about the Klan’s rituals and code words in a multi-episode story titled “Clan of the Fiery Cross.”

In a celebrated exploit, he stole financial information from a wastebasket outside the office of the Klan’s Imperial Wizard, Sam Roper, in Atlanta.

The information led the Internal Revenue Service to challenge the group’s status as a charitable organization and demand nearly $700,000 in back taxes. He helped draft the brief that Georgia used to revoke the Klan’s national corporate charter in 1947.

After writing a series of articles on the Klan for the left-wing newspaper The Daily Compass — some with datelines like “Inside the Invisible Empire” and “Somewhere in Klan Territory” — he published “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan” in 1954. It was republished in 1990 as “The Klan Unmasked.”

In 2006, Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt, the authors of “Freakonomics,” reported in The New York Times that Mr. Kennedy had greatly exaggerated and dramatized his Klan-busting. The authors had interviewed Mr. Kennedy for their book and used his information about Klan symbolism, language and gestures to illustrate an economic point, but in telling Mr. Kennedy’s story they elicited new interest in his claims, especially from a Florida writer, Ben Green.

Mr. Green, while researching the life of Harry T. Moore, a black civil rights advocate murdered in 1952, and collaborating for a time with Mr. Kennedy on the project, read Mr. Kennedy’s archives in Atlanta and at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

Mr. Green concluded that Mr. Kennedy had relied heavily on the experiences of a man identified by the pseudonym John Brown, a union worker and former Klan official who had changed his ways and offered to infiltrate the Klan. Mr. Kennedy later confirmed that he had relied in part on an informant and that he had woven some of his testimony into his first-person account to make it more compelling. But he was unapologetic.

“I wanted to show what was happening at the time,” he told The Florida Times-Union of Jacksonville in 2006. “Who gives a damn how it’s written? It is the one and only document of the working Klan.”

William Stetson Kennedy was born on Oct. 5, 1916, in Jacksonville, where he developed an interest in local turns of phrase and sayings that he called “folksays,” jotting them down in notebooks.

While attending the University of Florida, where he took a writing course with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, he struck out on his own to do field work in Key West. There he married the first of his seven wives, a Cuban who gave him entree into the local émigré community for his folklore work. While gathering material for the Federal Writers’ Project, he traveled across Florida with the writer Zora Neale Hurston.

His Florida research found its way into “Palmetto Country” (1942), a folkloric survey of territory from southern Alabama and Georgia down to Key West, and the series American Folkways, edited by Erskine Caldwell. In 1994 he returned to folklore in “South Florida Folklife,” written with Peggy Bulger and Tina Bucuvalas, and “Grits and Grunts: Folkloric Key West” (2008).

Most of his writing was devoted to campaigns for social justice. A series on racial segregation written with Elizabeth Gardner for The Daily Compass in 1949 formed the basis of “Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A.” His other books included “Passage to Violence” (1954), a fictionalized version of his Klan experiences; “Southern Exposure” (1946), and “After Appomattox: How the South Won the War” (1995).

In addition to his wife, Sandra, Mr. Kennedy is survived by a son, Loren; a grandson, and several stepchildren.

Mr. Kennedy pursued the Klan and racist politicians through a variety of means. In 1950 he ran a write-in campaign for senator. Woody Guthrie, who lived on Mr. Kennedy’s lakeside property near Jacksonville, writing 88 songs there, composed a campaign song for him, titled “Stetson Kennedy,” declaring:

Stetson Kennedy, he’s that man;

Walks and talks across our land;

Talkin’ out against the Ku Klux Klan.

For every fiery cross and note;

I’ll get Kennedy a hundred votes.

Ridicule, too, formed part of Mr. Kennedy’s arsenal. In 1947 he tried, unsuccessfully, to incorporate his own shadow Klan so that he could sue the real Klan whenever it used the same name. He appointed himself Imperial Wizard and installed, as senior officers, an African-American, a Roman Catholic, a Jew, a Japanese-American and a Cherokee.

    Stetson Kennedy, Who Infiltrated and Exposed the Klan, Dies at 94, NYT, 30.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/us/30kennedy.html

Dr. King Weeps From His Grave

August 25, 2011
The New York Times
By CORNEL WEST

Princeton, N.J.

THE Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial was to be dedicated on the National Mall on Sunday — exactly 56 years after the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi and 48 years after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (Because of Hurricane Irene, the ceremony has been postponed.)

These events constitute major milestones in the turbulent history of race and democracy in America, and the undeniable success of the civil rights movement — culminating in the election of Barack Obama in 2008 — warrants our attention and elation. Yet the prophetic words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel still haunt us: “The whole future of America depends on the impact and influence of Dr. King.”

Rabbi Heschel spoke those words during the last years of King’s life, when 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of blacks disapproved of King’s opposition to the Vietnam War and his efforts to eradicate poverty in America. King’s dream of a more democratic America had become, in his words, “a nightmare,” owing to the persistence of “racism, poverty, militarism and materialism.” He called America a “sick society.” On the Sunday after his assassination, in 1968, he was to have preached a sermon titled “Why America May Go to Hell.”

King did not think that America ought to go to hell, but rather that it might go to hell owing to its economic injustice, cultural decay and political paralysis. He was not an American Gibbon, chronicling the decline and fall of the American empire, but a courageous and visionary Christian blues man, fighting with style and love in the face of the four catastrophes he identified.

Militarism is an imperial catastrophe that has produced a military-industrial complex and national security state and warped the country’s priorities and stature (as with the immoral drones, dropping bombs on innocent civilians). Materialism is a spiritual catastrophe, promoted by a corporate media multiplex and a culture industry that have hardened the hearts of hard-core consumers and coarsened the consciences of would-be citizens. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. Arbitrary uses of the law — in the name of the “war” on drugs — have produced, in the legal scholar Michelle Alexander’s apt phrase, a new Jim Crow of mass incarceration. And poverty is an economic catastrophe, inseparable from the power of greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats indifferent to the misery of poor children, elderly citizens and working people.

The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. Instead of articulating a radical democratic vision and fighting for homeowners, workers and poor people in the form of mortgage relief, jobs and investment in education, infrastructure and housing, the administration gave us bailouts for banks, record profits for Wall Street and giant budget cuts on the backs of the vulnerable.

As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people in the name of a morally bankrupt policy of deregulating markets, lowering taxes and cutting spending for those already socially neglected and economically abandoned. Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.

The absence of a King-worthy narrative to reinvigorate poor and working people has enabled right-wing populists to seize the moment with credible claims about government corruption and ridiculous claims about tax cuts’ stimulating growth. This right-wing threat is a catastrophic response to King’s four catastrophes; its agenda would lead to hellish conditions for most Americans.

King weeps from his grave. He never confused substance with symbolism. He never conflated a flesh and blood sacrifice with a stone and mortar edifice. We rightly celebrate his substance and sacrifice because he loved us all so deeply. Let us not remain satisfied with symbolism because we too often fear the challenge he embraced. Our greatest writer, Herman Melville, who spent his life in love with America even as he was our most fierce critic of the myth of American exceptionalism, noted, “Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial.”

King’s response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

In concrete terms, this means support for progressive politicians like Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont and Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Los Angeles County supervisor; extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.

Cornel West, a philosopher, is a professor at Princeton.

    Dr. King Weeps From His Grave, NYT, 25.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/opinion/martin-luther-king-jr-would-want-a-revolution-not-a-memorial.html

A Dream Fulfilled, Martin Luther King Memorial Opens

August 22, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

WASHINGTON — Now we know: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it leads to a picturesque glade beside the Tidal Basin, with the Washington Monument providing sentry.

After more than two decades of planning, fund-raising and construction, the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial — a four-acre tract south of the Mall featuring a granite statue of Dr. King — has officially opened to the public.

The memorial will be formally dedicated on Sunday in a ceremony that is expected to draw perhaps a few hundred thousand people from around the country. But some of its earliest judges came on Monday, as hundreds of city residents and visitors stood in line for their turn to take a look.

“I wanted to be part of this history,” said William Wilson, a retired federal employee. “This is the architecture of progress.”

The dedication, which is to include remarks by President Obama, coincides with the 48th anniversary of the March on Washington and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial.

The monument is the first on the Mall and its adjoining memorial parks to honor an African-American, said Harry E. Johnson Sr., the president of the foundation in charge of erecting it. That made it an emotional occasion for many who came to see it.

“This is important as a black American,” said Jerome McNeil, who was there on Monday taking photographs for his grandchildren. “It’s not just a statue, it’s a symbol of what we can do if we put our minds to it.”

In 1996, Congress authorized the memorial’s establishment, and Alpha Phi Alpha, an African-American fraternity, set up a foundation to accomplish that. A Chinese sculptor, Lei Yixin, was selected to create the 30-foot sculpture, and an architect, Ed Jackson Jr., designed the layout, which includes a bookstore, a wall with Dr. King’s quotations and nearly 200 cherry trees. The cost was $120 million, and organizers said they are still trying to raise the last $5 million.

The design gave form to a line from Dr. King’s “Dream” speech — “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope,” said Mr. Jackson. In the memorial, he noted, Dr. King is seen emerging from the stone of hope. The two towering mounds set slightly behind him, forming a sort of passageway to the statue, are mountains of despair.

Some visitors said they did not like the fact that Dr. King was facing the Jefferson Memorial, not the Lincoln Memorial, but Mr. McNeil said he did not mind.

“The only thing I don’t like is that I have to wait until 11 a.m. to get in,” he said.

During a press briefing on Monday, Mr. Johnson chose to emphasize Dr. King’s focus on poverty and justice, steering away from questions about race. It was more a gesture of hope, he said, than a tactic of avoiding an inevitably difficult conversation.

“We hope that in the next 100 years, that won’t be important,” he said, referring to race relations. He sought to emphasize universal themes. “What’s important is that you have food in your belly.”

For Mr. Wilson, race is still very much present, but he did not expect the monument to do much to change that.

“I don’t think this will resolve a lot of things,” he said. But, glancing up toward the statue of Dr. King, he added: “He definitely earned it.”

    A Dream Fulfilled, Martin Luther King Memorial Opens, NYT, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/us/23mlk.html

Killing of Black Man

Prompts Reflection on Race in Mississippi

August 22, 2011
The New York Times
By KIM SEVERSON

JACKSON, Miss. — No one disputes that James Craig Anderson, a middle-aged black family man with a quick wit and a demanding sense of style, was robbed, beaten and then run over by a group of white teenagers in a motel parking lot early one morning in June.

But as the case builds — charges against the young man accused of driving the Ford pickup that hit Mr. Anderson were raised to capital murder on Friday, and the F.B.I. is now involved — significant questions remain.

Was the killing of Mr. Anderson premeditated racial violence? An act indicative of a deep cultural divide?

Or was the behavior of Daryl Dedmon, the slight, blond teenager who could be facing the death penalty, simply an anomaly born of anger, alcohol and teenage stupidity, as some close to the case suggest?

Beyond those questions, many here are asking whether Mr. Anderson’s death will prompt a deeper discussion of race relations in a state that has struggled mightily to move beyond its past.

“Racism has always been part of the lifestyle in Mississippi in one form or another,” said Dr. Timothy Summers, 68, a Jackson psychiatrist whose father started the first black-owned savings and loan in Mississippi in the 1950s.

“There still is that component of our culture that very much likes to hold on to how things have been in the past,” he said. “That group, however, doesn’t represent the broader cross-section of people who are good and honest but perhaps too naïve, perhaps too quiet, too complacent in looking at racism.”

Although they lived just 15 miles apart and spent Sundays in church, Mr. Anderson, 48, and Mr. Dedmon, 19, could not have led more different lives.

Mr. Dedmon liked his high school agriculture classes, but not as much as he loved hanging out with friends at a drive-in restaurant in the largely white suburban county where he lived, his friends say. He was the joker among a group for whom country music, Bible verses, Bud Light and pickup trucks serve as the cultural markers.

Mr. Anderson was a good country cook, a gifted gardener and always genial, his family said. He liked his job on the assembly line at the Nissan plant north of Jackson, where he had worked for about seven years.

“If you met him, the first thing you were going to see was that grand piano smile,” said his eldest sister, Barbara Anderson Young.

He made a point of taking care of old people and children and was helping his partner of 17 years, James Bradfield, raise the 4-year-old relative for whom Mr. Bradfield has legal guardianship. He sang tenor in the choir at the First Hyde Park Missionary Baptist Church and was so good “he’d have you falling out,” Mr. Bradfield, 44, said.

And if a friend or relative was not dressed well enough for an event, he would tease him or her into a nicer outfit.

No one is sure why Mr. Anderson was in the parking lot at the Metro Inn at 5 a.m. on June 26. He might have been at a party, Mr. Bradfield said. He was by his truck when two carloads of partying teenagers pulled off the interstate, according to prosecutors, who cited video from a motel security camera and statements from witnesses. Family members say he might have lost his keys, which have not been returned to them.

The video shows some of the teenagers running back and forth between their cars and Mr. Anderson. He was beaten repeatedly and robbed, the district attorney said. Items like a cellphone, a ring and his wallet were taken, according to interviews with family members.

Then, one car drove off. But an F-250 pick-up — driven by Mr. Dedmon, the prosecutor said — pulled out of the parking lot and ran over Mr. Anderson as he staggered along the lot’s edge. The murder charge against Mr. Dedmon was raised to capital murder after District Attorney Robert Shuler Smith of Hinds County said he had evidence that Mr. Dedmon had robbed Mr. Anderson.

Why the teenagers drove across the Pearl River to that tough section of Jackson is at the heart of the case, which will be presented to a grand jury in a few weeks as a racially motivated crime, Mr. Smith said.

John Rice, 18, is the only other person charged, his accusation one of simple assault. A lawyer suggested at a hearing that the teenagers were out for a beer run. Mr. Smith and national civil rights groups believe they were seeking out a black person to harm. Witnesses told the police that one teenager yelled “white power” and that Mr. Dedmon, using a racial slur, later bragged about hitting Mr. Anderson.

Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, is working with the family and their lawyer, Winston J. Thompson III. Mr. Dees said his group was investigating whether some of the teenagers involved may have loose ties to a gang with white-supremacist leanings. Mr. Smith is taking a more cautious approach.

“I don’t think there are aggressive gangs out there beating up black people,” Mr. Smith said. “I do think because of the political and economic structure and the re-engineering of society, it appears that certain parts of the country and Mississippi feel their culture is under attack.”

The Rev. Brian Richardson of Castlewood Baptist Church in Brandon, Miss., who went to Mr. Anderson’s funeral and has become close to the family, believes Mr. Dedmon is a product of his upbringing and a culture that does not do enough to stop bullying.

In an interview at his church in a nicely kept section of the county where Mr. Dedmon was raised, Mr. Richardson, who is white, said Mr. Dedmon had called his son, Jordan, 18, derogatory words for homosexual and mocked his friendship with black students when they were in high school together.

Mr. Richardson said he had raised the issue with school officials, and once had to deal with the police when Mr. Dedmon and some other boys drove to the family home.

The Richardsons point out that while racism is not unique to the Deep South, a deep streak of “us and them” exists.

“There is a subgroup that takes the Southern country-boy thing to another level,” Jordan Richardson said.

Mr. Dedmon’s lawyer did not respond to requests for an interview, but friends and family of some of the young people involved say the death was an accident.

At the Sonic Drive-In in Rankin County, where redneck is a term of endearment among the young whites who hang out nightly, the young people do not see Mr. Anderson’s death as a hate crime. And they say they are not racists.

“They don’t know how bad this hurts us,” said Shanna Brenemen, who attends Brandon High School and was close to Mr. Dedmon.

Although a conversation with them might be laced with racial slurs, they point to black friends, including some running Tater Tots and limeades to the cars parked at the drive-in. The way people are portraying them is simply wrong, they said.

“We’re just country, and whoever comes here, we welcome everybody,” said Mr. Dedmon’s younger sister, Tiffany, who will be a junior at Brandon High School. “This whole thing is getting blown out of proportion.”

In a letter he sent her from his jail cell, Mr. Dedmon said he had committed himself to Jesus. He warned his sister away from trouble. “I want you to get in the Bible for real,” he wrote. “I don’t want you to end up like this. I thought drinking was fun but look where it got me. And seriously choose your friends wisely, Tiff. My so-called friends got me in here.”

For Mr. Bradfield and Mr. Anderson’s siblings, the case is nothing but a hate crime. Jackson, for its part, has been slow to publicly address the case. Mayor Harvey Johnson, who is black, issued his first public statement on the matter last week. A public vigil was held on Aug. 14. A few hundred people marched from a nearby church to the motel parking lot and placed a wreath on the grassy spot near the curb where Mr. Anderson was hit.

Perhaps interest in the case was muted, people close to the family and in the community said, because Mr. Anderson’s family had been slow to come forward.

Although the family has created the James Craig Anderson Foundation for Racial Tolerance, they wanted to protect themselves from the media scrum and political opportunism that would surely come from a fist-pounding demand for justice, said Mr. Thompson, the lawyer. Mr. Anderson’s family and others wonder why only two of the seven teenagers were charged. And perhaps the toughest question of all: Could racism really be that blatant in a city that has worked for decades to overcome it?

“The Help,” a film that explores the relationships between black maids and their white employers in the 1960s, sold out several shows during its debut weekend here.

People walking out of a theater an hour after the vigil last week said that although Jackson has changed in some ways, racism remains.

“It’s still here,” said B. J. Quick, 50, a black man who saw the movie with his girlfriend, who is white. “It’s just under the surface more.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 22, 2011

An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to the Anderson family's lawyer.
He is Winston J. Thompson III, not Winston J. Thompson II.

    Killing of Black Man Prompts Reflection on Race in Mississippi, NYT, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/us/23jackson.html

David C. Baldus, 75, Dies; Studied Race and the Law

June 14, 2011
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

David C. Baldus, whose pioneering research on race and the death penalty came within a vote of persuading the Supreme Court to make fundamental changes in the capital justice system, died on Monday at his home in Iowa City. He was 75.

The cause was complications of colon cancer, his wife, Joyce C. Carman, said.

Professor Baldus’s work was at the center of a 1987 Supreme Court decision, McCleskey v. Kemp, which ruled that even solid statistical evidence of racial disparities in the administration of the death penalty did not offend the Constitution. The 5-to-4 ruling closed off what had seemed to opponents of the death penalty a promising line of attack.

The Supreme Court had reinstated the death penalty in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia after a four-year moratorium. Georgia and other states had in the meantime enacted provisions meant to address discrimination in capital punishment.

“It seemed to us that Gregg had indulged the assumption that race had been flushed out of the system,” said John C. Boger, who argued the McCleskey case for the defendant and who is now dean of the University of North Carolina School of Law.

Professor Baldus, a longtime faculty member at the University of Iowa College of Law, and two colleagues, Charles Pulaski and George Woodworth, set out to test that assumption. Their study examined more than 2,000 murders in Georgia, controlling for some 230 variables.

The study’s findings have often been misunderstood. They did not show that blacks were significantly more likely to be sentenced to death than whites. What the study found was that people accused of killing white victims were four times as likely to be sentenced to death as those accused of killing black victims. In other words, a death sentence often hinged not on the race of the defendant but on the race of the victim.

Professor Baldus’s work was meticulous, said Anthony G. Amsterdam, a law professor at New York University and an authority on the death penalty. “Dave had a unique genius for digging into masses of messy factual information and discovering crucial human forces at work behind the purportedly impersonal administration of criminal law,” Professor Amsterdam said.

The study was presented to the Supreme Court by lawyers for Warren McCleskey, a black man sentenced to die for killing a white police officer. “David was really the whole foundation of the case,” Dean Boger said.

But Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., writing for the majority, said individual criminal cases cannot be decided on the basis of social science research, however sound.

“In light of the safeguards designed to minimize racial bias in the process, the fundamental value of jury trial in our criminal justice system, and the benefits that discretion provides to criminal defendants,” Justice Powell wrote, “we hold that the Baldus study does not demonstrate a constitutionally significant risk of racial bias affecting the Georgia capital sentencing process.”

In 1991, after he retired, Justice Powell was asked whether there was any vote he would have liked to change.

“Yes,” he told his biographer, John C. Jeffries Jr. “McCleskey v. Kemp.”

Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired last year and who was one of the dissenters, wrote about the case in December in The New York Review of Books.

“That the murder of black victims is treated as less culpable than the murder of white victims provides a haunting reminder of once-prevalent Southern lynchings,” Justice Stevens wrote.

David Christopher Baldus was born in Wheeling, W.Va., on June 23, 1935. He was educated at Dartmouth College, the University of Pittsburgh and Yale Law School. He joined the University of Iowa College of Law faculty in 1969.

Professor Baldus wrote two books, “Statistical Proof of Discrimination” and “Equal Justice and the Death Penalty.”

Professor Baldus’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a sister, Sue Gittins of Port Charlotte, Fla.; two daughters from his first marriage, Katherine Baldus and Helen Baldus, both of Brooklyn; and four stepchildren, Jeffrey Carman of Paducah, Ky., Craig Carman of Iowa City, and Kate Robinson and Glen Carman, both of Chicago.

In a 1995 speech on what he called “the death penalty dialogue between law and social science,” Professor Baldus considered what had led the Supreme Court to allow executions to proceed in the face of his study.

“Perhaps most important, in my estimation,” he said, “is that race-of-victim discrimination does not raise the same sort of moral concerns as race-of-defendant discrimination — even though, from a constitutional standpoint, discrimination on the basis of any racial aspect of the case is illegitimate.”

    David C. Baldus, 75, Dies; Studied Race and the Law, NYT, 14.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/us/15baldus.html

Rescuing the Real Uncle Tom

June 13, 2011
The New York Times
By DAVID S. REYNOLDS

THE novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, born 200 years ago today, was an unlikely fomenter of wars. Diminutive and dreamy-eyed, she was a harried housewife with six children, who suffered from various obscure illnesses worsened by her persistent hypochondria.

And yet, driven by a passionate hatred of slavery, she found time to write “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which became the most influential novel in American history and a catalyst for radical change both at home and abroad.

Today, of course, the book has a decidedly different reputation, thanks to the popular image of its titular character, Uncle Tom — whose name has become a byword for a spineless sellout, a black man who betrays his race.

And we tend to think of the novel itself as an old-fashioned, rather lachrymose affair that features the deaths of an obsequious enslaved black man and his blond, angelic child-friend, Little Eva.

But this view is egregiously inaccurate: the original Uncle Tom was physically strong and morally courageous, an inspiration for blacks and other oppressed people worldwide. In other words, Uncle Tom was anything but an “Uncle Tom.”

Indeed, that’s why in the mid-19th century Southerners savagely attacked “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as a dangerously subversive book, while Northern reformers — especially blacks — often praised it. The ex-slave Frederick Douglass affirmed that no one had done more for the progress of African-Americans than Stowe.

The book was enormously popular in the North during the 1850s and helped solidify support behind the antislavery movement. As the black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois later wrote, “Thus to a frail overburdened Yankee woman with a steadfast moral purpose we Americans, both black and white, owe our gratitude for the freedom and the union that exist today in these United States.”

The book stoked fires overseas, too. In Russia it influenced the 1861 emancipation of the serfs and later inspired Vladimir Lenin, who recalled it as his favorite book in childhood. It was the first American novel to be translated and published in China, and it fueled antislavery causes in Cuba and Brazil.

At the heart of the book’s progressive appeal was the character of Uncle Tom himself: a muscular, dignified man in his 40s who is notable precisely because he does not betray his race; one reason he passes up a chance to escape from his plantation is that he doesn’t want to put his fellow slaves in danger. And he is finally killed because he refuses to tell his master where two runaway slaves are hiding.

As for Little Eva, she bravely accepts her coming death and says she would gladly give her life if that would lead to the emancipation of America’s enslaved blacks. Together Tom and Eva form an interracial bond that offers lessons about tolerance and decency.

Unfortunately, these themes were lost in many of the stage versions of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” that inevitably sprung from its immense popularity. Indeed, Stowe’s novel yielded the most popular and one of the longest-running plays in American history.

The first dramatization of the novel appeared in 1852, the year it was published, and countless others followed. By the 1890s, there were hundreds of acting troupes — so-called Tommers — that fanned out across North America, putting on “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in every town, hamlet and city. Some troupes even toured internationally, performing as far away as Australia and India.

The play, seen by more people than read the book, remained popular up to the 1950s and still appears occasionally, including a staging last fall at the Metropolitan Playhouse in New York.

But as the story moved from the book to the stage, Stowe’s revolutionary themes were drowned in sentimentality and spectacle. Eva’s death was frequently a syrupy scene in which the actress was hauled heavenward by rope or piano wire against a backdrop of angels and billowing clouds.

Uncle Tom, meanwhile, was often presented as a stooped, obedient old fool, the model image of a submissive black man preferred by post-Reconstruction, pre-civil rights America.

It was this Uncle Tom, weakened both physically and spiritually, who became a synonym for a racial sellout by the mid-20th century. Black musicians, sports figures, even establishment civil rights leaders were all tarred with the “Uncle Tom” label, often by younger, more radical activists, as a way of demeaning them in the eyes of the African-American community.

But it doesn’t have to be that way; Uncle Tom should once again be a positive symbol for African-American progress.

After all, many people who over the years were derided as Uncle Toms — Jackie Robinson, Louis Armstrong and Willie Mays, to name a few — are now seen as brave racial pioneers.

Indeed, during the civil rights era it was those who most closely resembled Uncle Tom — Stowe’s Tom, not the sheepish one of popular myth — who proved most effective in promoting progress.

Rosa Parks didn’t mind the Uncle Tom label, since she believed that great change could result from nonviolent moral protest. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., though often called an Uncle Tom, also stuck to principled nonviolence.

Their form of protest was just as active as Tom’s, and just as strong. Both Stowe and Tom deserve our reconsideration — and our respect.

 

David S. Reynolds, a professor of American studies and English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author of “Mightier Than the Sword: ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and the Battle for America.”

    Rescuing the Real Uncle Tom, NYT, 13.6.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/opinion/14Reynolds.html

Don Barden, a Leading Black Businessman, Dies at 67

May 19, 2011
The New York Times
By NICK BUNKLEY

DETROIT — Don H. Barden, who rose from poverty to build one of the nation’s largest black-owned businesses through casinos and cable television, died on Thursday in Detroit. He was 67.

The cause was lung cancer, his lawyer, Henry Baskin, said.

Mr. Barden’s business empire started with a record store in Lorain, Ohio, that he opened at 21 with $500 in savings. Last year, the magazine Black Enterprise ranked Barden Companies as the 10th-highest-grossing black-owned company, with $405 million in revenue. Mr. Barden was the founder of Barden Cablevision, which built the cable television system serving Detroit and several suburbs. Comcast bought the system for more than $100 million in 1994, and Mr. Barden used the proceeds to open the Majestic Star, a riverboat casino in Gary, Ind.

In 2001, Mr. Barden became the first black owner of a Las Vegas casino with his purchase of Fitzgeralds.

But he remained bitter about being denied the opportunity to open a casino in Detroit. Several years after the city began to allow casinos, he tried to get one of the licenses, proposing a $1 billion theme park and resort in partnership with Michael Jackson.

In recent years, he faced setbacks in his businesses and in his personal life. His gambling company, Majestic Star Casino, which operates casinos in Indiana, Colorado, Mississippi and Nevada, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2009. Earlier this year he and his third wife, Bella Marshall, separated after 23 years of marriage. She said he was no longer competent to handle his investments, an assertion he denied.

Mr. Barden was widely known for his charitable work. He organized a series of regional economic peace conferences to address Detroit’s crime problem, national reputation and need for economic development.

“He faced a lot of long odds,” said the Wayne County executive, Robert A. Ficano, who often consulted Mr. Barden for advice. “He knew how to run a business and have a heart for the community. He remembered where his roots were and never gave up wanting to improve this area.”

Donald Hamilton Barden was born on Dec. 20, 1943, in Inkster, Mich., a mostly black suburb of Detroit. The ninth of 13 children, he grew up sharing a bed with three brothers and left for college in the hope of becoming a business owner rather than an autoworker like his parents and an older brother.

“I figured I’d give myself 10 years trying to be an entrepreneur,” he said in a 2007 profile in The New York Times. “If I didn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, I could always go at 30 to 32 and get a job in the factory.” He dropped out of Central State University in Ohio because he lacked the money to continue and in 1965 opened Donnie’s Records, which he promoted through appearances by the Jackson Five and James Brown. During his 20 years in Lorain, west of Cleveland, Mr. Barden became the first black member of its City Council, founded a newspaper, The Lorain County Times, worked as a news anchor and hosted a weekly television talk show.

Mr. Barden began developing real estate in Ohio before turning his focus to cable television in the 1980s, when he returned to Detroit and won the contract to install a system throughout the city.

Besides his wife, Mr. Barden is survived by a son, Don Jr., and a daughter, Alana M. Barden.

    Don Barden, a Leading Black Businessman, Dies at 67, NYT, 19.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/business/20barden.html

White Supremacist Leader Is Shot and Killed at Home;

Young Son Is Held

May 2, 2011
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — A leader of a Southern California white supremacist group was shot and killed on Sunday at his home here, investigators said.

The victim, Jeff Hall, 32, was a regional director for the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi group based in Detroit.

Mr. Hall, a plumber and the father of five children, was shot at his suburban home on Sunday morning, said Lt. Jaybee Brennan of the Riverside Police Department. Lieutenant Brennan said the police responded to reports of gunshots at Mr. Hall’s home just after 4 a.m. The police later detained Mr. Hall’s son, believed to be 10 years old. The department said no other suspects were being sought.

A neighbor said she saw several guns being removed from the home.

An official with the National Socialist Movement in Southern California said that he had seen Mr. Hall on Saturday night and had planned to have breakfast with him on Sunday.

“All I can tell you right now is Jeff’s dead,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the nature of the investigation and his group’s activities.

Mr. Hall was an impassioned speaker seen as a rising force in the National Socialist Movement. On Saturday afternoon, he held a monthly meeting of the Southern California chapter at his home, a gathering of about a dozen members that The New York Times had sent a reporter to cover.

At the meeting, he discussed both mundane housekeeping items — the need for members to sell raffle tickets for a fund-raiser, for example — as well as a May “patrol” at the Mexican border in Arizona, a militia-style activity meant to combat illegal immigration.

“This is a very active area right now,” Mr. Hall told his members, adding that he felt that the federal authorities were dropping the ball on border patrols. “You guys get your Glocks cocked and get ready to rock,” he said. “We’re going to the border. That’s how we do it.”

Mr. Hall discussed a recent rally in New Jersey and praised his members’ participation, which earned several of them promotions in the group.

“You guys get out there in the street, you get out on the border,” he said. “And you did a good job.”

 

Ian Lovett contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

    White Supremacist Leader Is Shot and Killed at Home; Young Son Is Held, NYT, 2.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/us/02white.html

Census Data Presents Rise

in Multiracial Population of Youths

March 24, 2011
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

WASHINGTON — Among American children, the multiracial population has increased almost 50 percent, to 4.2 million, since 2000, making it the fastest growing youth group in the country. The number of people of all ages who identified themselves as both white and black soared by 134 percent since 2000 to 1.8 million people, according to census data released Thursday.

Census 2010 is the first comprehensive accounting of how the multiracial population has changed over 10 years, since statistics were first collected about it in 2000. It has allowed demographers, for the first time, to make comparisons using the mixed-race group — a segment of society whose precise contours and nuances were largely unknown for generations. The data shows that the multiracial population is overwhelmingly young, and that, among the races, American Indians and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are the most likely to report being of more than one race. Blacks and whites are the least likely.

In what experts view as a significant change from 2000, the most common racial combination is black and white. Ten years ago, it was white and “some other race” — a designation overwhelmingly used by people of Hispanic origin, which is considered by the government to be an ethnicity not a race.

“I think this marks a truly profound shift in the way Americans, particularly African-Americans, think about race and about their heritage,” said C. Matthew Snipp, a professor in the sociology department at Stanford University.

Across the country, 9 million people — or 2.9 percent of the population — chose more than one race on the last census, a change of about 32 percent since 2000. But in the South and parts of the Midwest, the growth has been far greater than the national average. In North Carolina, for instance, the multiracial population grew by 99 percent. In Iowa, Indiana and Mississippi, the group grew by about 70 percent.

“The numbers, for mixed race families like my own, mean that the world must stop and recognize the changing face of today’s family, the changing face of today’s individual,” said Suzy Richardson, founder of Mixed and Happy, a news and opinion Web site focused on issues of concern to multiracial families.

There are 57 racial combinations on the census. But of the population that chose more than one race, most chose one of the four most common combinations: 20.4 percent marked black and white; 19.3 percent chose white and “some other race.” The third most common pairing was Asian and white, followed by American Indian and white. These four combinations account for three-fourths of the total mixed race population.

For Michelle Hosenbackez, who is white and Hispanic and is married to a black Cuban man, the data suggests a future for her 16-month-old daughter that may be much different from her own childhood. Mrs. Hosenbackez, 27, of Raeford, N.C., said, “With the mixed race population growing the way it is, she will be able to say, ‘Hey, that person is like me.’ I want her to be able to build confidence in that identity.”

    Census Data Presents Rise in Multiracial Population of Youths, R, 24.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/us/25race.html

Many U.S. Blacks Moving to South, Reversing Trend

March 24, 2011
The New York Times
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and ROBERT GEBELOFF

WASHINGTON — The percentage of the nation’s black population living in the South has hit its highest point in half a century, according to census data released Thursday, as younger and more educated black residents move out of declining cities in the Northeast and Midwest in search of better opportunities.

The share of black population growth that has occurred in the South over the past decade — the highest since 1910, before the Great Migration of blacks to the North — has upended some long-held assumptions.

Both Michigan and Illinois, whose cities have rich black cultural traditions, showed an overall loss of blacks for the first time, said William Frey, the chief demographer at the Brookings Institution.

And Atlanta, for the first time, has replaced Chicago as the metro area with the largest number of African-Americans after New York. About 17 percent of blacks who moved to the South in the past decade left New York State, far more than from any other state, the census data show.

At the same time, blacks have begun leaving cities for more affluent suburbs in large numbers, much like generations of whites before them.

“The notion of the North and its cities as the promised land has been a powerful part of African-American life, culture and history, and now it all seems to be passing by,” said Clement Price, a professor of history at Rutgers-Newark. “The black urban experience has essentially lost its appeal with blacks in America.”

During the turbulent 1960s, black population growth ground to a halt in the South, and Southern states claimed less than 10 percent of the national increase then. The South has increasingly claimed a greater share of black population growth since — about half the country’s total in the 1970s, two-thirds in the 1990s and three-quarters in the decade that just ended.

The percentage of black Americans living in the South is still far lower than before the Great Migration in the earlier part of the last century, when 90 percent did. Today it is 57 percent, the highest since 1960.

“This is the decade of black flight,” said Mr. Frey. “It’s a new age for African-Americans. It’s long overdue, but it seems to be happening.”

The five counties with the largest black populations in 2000 — Cook in Illinois, Los Angeles, Wayne in Michigan, Kings in New York and Philadelphia — all lost black population in the last decade. Among the 25 counties with the biggest increase in black population, three-quarters are in the South.

The Rev. Ronald Peters, who moved last year from Pittsburgh to Atlanta, said it was refreshing to be part of a hopeful black middle class that was not weighed down by the stigmas and stereotypes of the past, as he felt it was in the urban Northeast.

“Too often, people turn on TV and all they see are black men in chains,” said Mr. Peters, president of the Interdenominational Theological Center, a seminary in Atlanta. “Atlanta is a clear example of a different type of ethos. The black community is not people who have lost their way.”

Increasingly blacks are moving to places with small black populations. Just 2 percent of the black population growth in the last decade occurred in counties that have traditionally been black population centers, while 20 percent has occurred in counties where only a tiny fraction of the population had been black.

Segregation declined during the decade. Among the nation’s 100 largest metro areas, 92 showed segregation declines with most of the largest occurring in growing areas in the South and West, Mr. Frey said.

The South was the fastest growing region over all, up 14 percent from 2000. Its white population increased as well, though whites grew substantially in the West as well, something that was not the case for blacks. Growth of Asian and Hispanic populations — which grew the fastest over all — was widely distributed throughout the nation.

“The center of population has moved south in the most extreme way we’ve ever seen in history,” said Robert Groves, director of the Census Bureau.

Northern blacks were a big part of Southern gains. There are now more than one million black residents of the South who were born in the Northeast, a tenfold increase since 1970.

Blacks who moved to the South were disproportionately young — 40 percent were adults ages 21 to 40, compared with 29 percent of the nonmigrant black population. One in four newcomers had a four-year college degree, compared to one in six of the black adults who had already lived in the South.

Cicely Bland, 36, a publishing company owner who left her home in Jersey City in 2006 for Stockbridge, an Atlanta suburb, said life was better because it was more affordable. Her choice was as much about cultural affinity as it was job opportunities.

“The business and political opportunities are here,” she said. “You have a lot of African-Americans with a lot of influence, and they’re in my immediate networks.”

Over all, the black population grew by 11 percent in large metropolitan counties, but by 15 percent in adjacent smaller counties in the metropolitan area, suggesting a strong movement of blacks to the suburbs. The top 10 fastest-growing areas were suburbs, census officials said.

Not everyone was well off. Katherine Curtis, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who specializes in demography and inequality, said blacks who returned to the states where they were born tended to have a higher poverty rate than those who went to other Southern states. One reason could be that they moved back for family, not economic opportunity, she said.

The black population grew by 11 percent over the decade, faster than the 1 percent growth in the white population, but far behind the 43 percent growth in the Hispanic population, whose increase made up more than half of all population growth in the decade.

But there were declines among blacks under 18, down 2 percent for the decade. The population of white children was down 10 percent, with 46 states experiencing declines in the white youth population, Mr. Frey said. Children from minority groups are now about 46 percent of the total population under 18, compared with 53 percent for whites.

In Atlanta, Mr. Peters, who grew up in New Orleans, viewed the changes as a source of pride for Americans, saying the South had changed a lot in his lifetime.

“One of the things that I grew up with was looking forward to the day that there would be a New South,” he said. “This is it. The New South represents a more inclusive community, what we can become as a country.”

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Washington, and Robert Gebeloff from New York. Robbie Brown contributed reporting from Atlanta.

    Many U.S. Blacks Moving to South, Reversing Trend, NYT, 24.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/25/us/25south.html

APNewsBreak: Ariz. Bombing Suspects' Trial Delayed

March 2, 2011
Filed at 2:54 p.m. EST
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS


SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (AP) — An Arizona judge has delayed the trial of twin brothers accused of being white supremacists who are charged with a 2004 bombing that injured a black city official in Scottsdale.

Dennis and Daniel Mahon had been scheduled to go on trial March 9.

But U.S. District Judge David Campbell has postponed the case for nine months so it will begin on Jan. 10.

In his order, Campbell says he was extending the trial date at the brothers' request and based on a "substantial" amount of information disclosed by the government in the case.

The brothers are charged in a bombing on Feb. 26, 2004, when a package detonated in the hands of Don Logan, Scottsdale's diversity director at the time, injuring his hand and arm and hurting a secretary.

    APNewsBreak: Ariz. Bombing Suspects' Trial Delayed, R, 2.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2011/03/02/us/AP-US-Scottsdale-Bombing.html

Charles E. Silberman, Who Wrote About Racism in the U.S., Dies at 86

February 13, 2011
The New York Times
By MARGALIT FOX

Charles E. Silberman, a journalist whose books addressed vast, turbulent social subjects including race, education, crime and the state of American Jewry, died on Feb. 5 in Sarasota, Fla. He was 86 and had lived in Sarasota in recent years.

The cause was a heart attack, his family said.

A former writer and editor at Fortune magazine, Mr. Silberman was known in particular for three books that took on some of the most highly charged issues of the day: “Crisis in Black and White” (1964), “Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education” (1970) and “Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice” (1978).

In “Crisis in Black and White,” he explored the nation’s long history of racial oppression and its dire effects on the economic, social and educational prospects of 20th-century blacks. The book spent nine weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Reviewing it, Time magazine wrote that Mr. Silberman “marches in no-nonsense fashion to a number of hard truths that are not meant to comfort or console.”

In “Crisis in the Classroom,” the product of a study underwritten by the Carnegie Foundation, Mr. Silberman turned his attention to the state of American public education, which he indicted as bleak, oppressive and generally in disarray.

“Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice” examined American crime and punishment through the lens of racism.

Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Roger Wilkins said, “In a field as beset by emotion, mythology and fear as crime is, honest reporting, earnest analysis and honorable speculation can surely serve the republic well, and that is what this book does — and more.”

Charles Eliot Silberman was born on Jan. 31, 1925, in Des Moines and grew up in New York City. After Navy service aboard a minesweeper in the Pacific in World War II, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Columbia University in 1946 and did graduate work in economics there.

Mr. Silberman taught economics at Columbia and the City College of New York. He joined Fortune in 1953 and was on staff there until the early 1970s.

Mr. Silberman’s wife, the former Arlene Propper, whom he married in 1948, died last year. He is survived by four sons, David, Rick, Jeff and Steve, and six grandchildren.

His other books include “The Myths of Automation” (1966), written with other Fortune editors, and “A Certain People: American Jews and Their Lives Today,” which he described in interviews as his most personal book.

Published in 1985, “A Certain People” drew wide attention for its hopeful assertion — contrary to the hand-wringing by many prominent Jewish writers over intermarriage and assimilation — that American Jewry was undergoing a renaissance.

Jews could now enjoy success without fear of anti-Semitic reprisals, Mr. Silberman argued, and there was renewed interest among young Jews in keeping the faith.

To critics who took the book to task for naïve optimism, Mr. Silberman’s response was simple. As he told Newsweek in 1985, “It takes guts to bring good news to the Jewish community.”

    Charles E. Silberman, Who Wrote About Racism in the U.S., Dies at 86, NYT, 13.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/14/us/14silberman.html

Bomb Is Found in Backpack Before March Honoring King

January 18, 2011
The New York Times
By WILLIAM YARDLEY

SEATTLE — A suspicious backpack found Monday along the route of a march honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in Spokane, Wash., contained a live bomb that was “likely capable of inflicting multiple casualties,” federal investigators said Tuesday.

The package, found before the morning march, prompted law enforcement to ask march officials to change their route and several businesses to evacuate as investigators sent in bomb-smelling dogs, a robot and specially trained officers.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said the bomb was neutralized at the scene. It was found on a bench at North Washington Street and West Main Avenue.

“We’re certainly approaching it as a potential domestic terrorism event at this point,” said Frank Harrill, the F.B.I.’s supervisory senior resident agent in Spokane.

“Whether the motive was racial or an individual was being targeted, it’s too soon to say,” he said.

The device, partially concealed by clothing in a Swiss Army-brand backpack, was reported to police about 9:25 a.m. by a contract worker whose duties included helping to maintain a nearby parking lot, Mr. Harrill said. The worker apparently handled the bag and took photographs of it and sent the photographs to the police, Mr. Harrill said.

The F.B.I. is offering a $20,000 reward for information about the identity of anyone seen with the backpack. The agency is also seeking photographs or video taken in the area that morning.

The Rev. Percy Watkins, known as Happy, who read Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at a gathering before the march that included city officials, American Indian leaders and others, said most people in the march did not know about the bomb threat, or that the march had been rerouted, until after the march.

    Bomb Is Found in Backpack Before March Honoring King, NYT, 18.1.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/us/19bomb.html

Send Huck Finn to College

January 15, 2011
The New York Times
By LORRIE MOORE

Madison, Wis.

EVER since NewSouth Books announced it would publish a version of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with the “n-word” removed, reaction has split between traditionalists outraged at censorship and those who feel this might be a way to get teenagers, especially African-American boys, comfortable reading a literary classic. From a mother’s perspective, I think both sides are mistaken.

No parent who is raising a black teenager and trying to get him to read serious fiction for his high school English class would ever argue that “Huckleberry Finn” is not a greatly problematic work. But the remedy is not to replace “nigger” with alternative terms like “slave” (the latter word is already in the novel and has a different meaning from “nigger,” so that substitution just mucks up the prose — its meaning, its voice, its verisimilitude). The remedy is to refuse to teach this novel in high school and to wait until college — or even graduate school — where it can be put in proper context.

“Huckleberry Finn” is not an appropriate introduction to serious literature, and anyone who cannot see that has never tried putting an audio version of it on during a long car trip while an African-American teenager sits beside her and slowly, slowly slips on his noise-canceling earphones in order to listen to hip-hop.

The derogatory word is part of the problem, but not the entirety of it — hip-hop music uses the same word. Of course, the speakers are different in each case, and the worlds they are speaking of and from are very distant from one another. The listener can tell the difference in a second. The listener knows which voice is speaking to him and which is not getting remotely close.

No novel with the word “kike” or “bitch” spelled out 200 times could or should be separated — for purposes of irony or pedagogy — from the attitudes that produced those words. It’s also impossible that such a novel would be taught in a high school classroom. And if it were taught, student alienation might very well contribute to another breed of achievement gap.

“Huckleberry Finn” is suited to a college course in which Twain’s obsession with the 19th-century theater of American hucksterism — the wastrel West, the rapscallion South, the economic strays and escapees of a harsh new country — can be discussed in the context of Jim’s particular story (and Huck’s).

An African-American 10th grader, in someone’s near-sighted attempt to get him newly appreciative of novels, does not benefit by being taken back right then to a time when a young white boy slowly realizes, sort of, the humanity of a black man, realizes that that black man is more than chattel even if that black man is also full of illogic and stereotypical superstitions.

Huck Finn refers to himself as an idiot and still finds Jim more foolish than himself. Although Twain has compassion for the affectionate Jim, he has an interest in burlesque; although he is sensitive to Jim’s heartbreaking losses, he is always looking for comedy and repeatedly holds Jim up as a figure of howling fun, ridicule that is specific to his condition as a black man.

The young black American male of today, whose dignity in our public schools is not always preserved or made a priority, does not need at the start of his literary life to be immersed in an even more racist era by reading a celebrated text that exuberantly expresses everything crazy and wicked about that time — not if one’s goal is to get that teenager to like books. Huck’s voice is a complicated amalgam of idioms and perspectives and is not for the inexperienced contemporary reader.

There are other books more appropriate for an introduction to serious reading. (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” with its social-class caricatures and racially naïve narrator, is not one of them.) Sherman Alexie’s “Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” which vibrantly speaks to every teenager’s predicament when achievement in life is at odds with the demoralized condition of his peer group, is a welcoming book for boys. There must certainly be others and their titles should be shared. Teachers I meet everywhere are always asking, How can we get boys to read? And the answer is, simply, book by book.

One reader’s sensitivity always sets off someone else’s defensiveness. But what would be helpful are school administrators who will break with tradition and bring more flexibility, imagination and social purpose to our high school curriculums. College, where the students have more experience with racial attitudes and literature, can do as it pleases.

Lorrie Moore is the author, most recently, of the novel “A Gate at the Stairs.”

    Send Huck Finn to College, NYT, 15.12011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/opinion/16moore.html