The Scott Sisters As Political Fanfare

Please read my piece on The Root (www.theroot.com) at: http://www.theroot.com/views/scott-sisters-freed

Political Snow Blowing

New Yorkers, let’s not become part of the nation of whiners or of “wussies”, as Pennsylvania’s governor calls we 21^st century all or nothng at all, give it to me instantly Americans. Yes, Mayor Bloomberg over promised and under delivered. But who among New Yorkers, real New Yorkers, expected that with the wave of a wand this snow would disappear?

A Huffington Post whiner, FHTB, wrote: “Why do Mayors or Governors forget that snow removal is an absolute minimal requirement of cities during blizzards. ..excuses are never acceptable in such circumstances, no matter whether it is a holiday weekend or whether there are high winds, not enough equipment, or too many cars on the streets.” FHTB, you left out downsizing of the sanitation department over the last few years to meet budgetary demands. Whine. Whine. Whine.

But real New Yorkers understand reality. Heck, we can even get over the shellacking our Giants got in that historic loss a few weeks ago.

I am not heartless and, thus, feel for those who lost loved ones during the storm and its aftermath. But I also think of all those who, as evidenced in so many of our historic cemeteries, died in childbirth in the 1800s and all those who died during the flu epidemic in 1919 and all those who died of AIDS or AIDS-related complexes in the 1980s. Many of us believe that, as the Scripture says, “joy comes in the morning” after an extended night of sorrow. To everything there is a season. This is winter and often in the winter there is death.

This was a serious blizzard. Side streets are still not cleared. But many more of us should get off our butts and grab shovels rather than kvetching via the Internet or jumping in front of the cameras of television stations. This is what New Yorkers do: “We roll up our sleeves and fix it,” Mayor Bloomberg said Thursday. The “it” is deployment of equipment; use of personnel; communications with the public. This is no time for unions to say, “I told you so” regarding layoffs. The city – heck, the whole nation from bottom to top – has to learn to do more with less money from government.

Some elected officials have won (Jane Byrne, Chicago, 1980) or lost (Adrian Fenty, Washington, 2010) after badly-handled snow storms. Our own Mayor John Lindsay lost the GOP primary in 1969 because of snow removal and snow fatality issues; but he was ultimately re-elected. Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t have to worry about the politics of it all unless he plans to run for an unprecedented fourth term. Assuming he is not, he’s free to thoroughly investigate what went right and what went wrong during the blizzard of 2010 and to fix whatever was broken. As I see it, though, this was Mother Nature doing her thing -- and we are foolish to think we can control that.

August 28, 2010

“This is our day, and we ain’t giving it away,” Rev. Al Sharpton declared Saturday at a rally and march that his National Action Network sponsored in Washington. Also prominent were leaders of the NAACP, the National Urban League, labor unions, the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the National Council of Negro Women, Martin Luther King III and many of the usual allies on these occasions.

I heard no oratory that came even close to that heard at the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963 – 47 years ago, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., dissatisfied with the reception to his prepared speech, riffed the “I Have a Dream” portion for which he and the day are known.

Not far from Sharpton’s rally at the nation’s oldest public high school, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, or where the marchers ended up, at the site of the proposed King Memorial, the conservative, Tea Party, TV and radio huckster, Glen Beck, was making a fool of himself and, as I saw it, of the thousands who came to join him at the Lincoln Memorial to “restore” America. What they heard – if they listened – was a lot of hot air about God and love. As if his and Sarah Palin’s Christian followers (yes, she was a keynote speaker and, yes, they specifically made this a Christian event rather than an interfaith one) have a monopoly on that. Theirs was essentially an evangelical revival meeting without the communion sacrament and the passing of the collection baskets. “America today begins to turn back to God,” Beck declared. “God is not done with you yet, and He’s not done with man’s freedom yet.” In many ways his rambling, unfocused “sermon” at what also was clearly a politically-motivated power play, reminded me of Louis Farrakhan’s during the Million Man March – but Farrakhan did pass the collection baskets.

Before an overwhelmingly white gathering, blacks were featured as singers and prayer deliverers and – shamelessly – a niece of Dr. King gave her own “I have a Dream” speech, mixing her uncle’s cadences and various scriptural references. Alveda King, whom some apparently thought was King’s daughter, said: “I have a dream that one day soon God’s agape love will transcend skin color and economic status and cause us to turn from moral turpitude. I have a dream that America will repent of the sin of racism and return to honor. I have a dream that white privilege will become human privilege and that people of every ethnic blend will receive everyone as brothers and sisters in the love of God. I have a dream that America will pray and God will forgive us our sins and revive us our land. On that day we will all be able to lift every voice and sing of the love and honor that God desires for all his children.”

At his rally, Sharpton said of Beck’s gathering: “They may have the Mall, but we’ve got the message. They may have the platform, but we have the dream.” Actually Alveda King’s dream seems to differ mainly with that of Sharpton and others of the traditional civil rights coalition on abortion rights, gay marriage and prayer in schools. She’s against the first two; for the last.

While the Beckians were talking of taking back America, Tamika Mallory, the executive director of the National Action Network, was urging her audience to “take back our communities one by one.”

“We must not wait for others to do for us what we can absolutely do for ourselves,” she said. Tea Party supporters would not disagree with that.

In his last book, Dr. King asked: “Where do we go from here: chaos or community?” August 28, 2010, seems to answer: both. One group was “Restoring Honor”; the other’s aim was to “Reclaim the Dream.” Both groups were motivated to get off their butts and do something. But obviously, with leaders whose motives and messages can be questioned by people from all political spectrums, there is a great desire to build “community” – whether around God or a Tea Party movement or what’s left of the old civil rights coalition – but getting there without recognition of that fact is chaotic and probably doomed to failure.

Where Is The Silent Majority?

A growing minority of ignorant people are convinced that President Obama is a Muslim with a self-serving motive in supporting the right of Muslims to build a cultural center in downtown Manhattan not any closer to the “hallowed” World Trade Center site than strip clubs and at least two existing mosques. A lot of these pea-brains – many of them no doubt Tea Party supplicants – insist that he is not an American and should not be president. Of course, they mean that he is black and should not be president. Some unionized construction workers, who long have had a history of thwarting the attempts of blacks to join their ranks, are soliciting pledges from fellow workers to turn down any offers to work on the Islamic cultural center site.

Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been a strong defender of freedom of religion in this paroxysm of ethnic and religious bigotry and political demagoguery. In a speech on Governor's Island, within the hearing of the Statue of Liberty, he said earlier this month: "It is my hope that the mosque will help to bring our city even closer together, and help repudiate the false and repugnant idea that the attacks of 9/11 were in any way consistent with Islam. Muslims are as much a part of our city and our country as the people of any faith - and they are as welcome to worship in lower Manhattan as any other group."

This has become a national issue among the ill-informed, especially after President Obama stood up for the rights of all, including Muslims, to practice their religion and construct their institutions wherever they want so long as they follow local zoning laws.

Gov. David Paterson is trying to come up with some sort of Solomonic solution, but so far neither the proponents nor the opponents of the center are paying much attention.

Don’t be among the ignorati. Do your own research on this issue and contact your representatives in the City Council, in Albany and in Congress. And contact your own religious leaders to convince them to weigh in. This article from Salon.com might be a good starting point.

To Rangel Opponents: Who's Got Game?

A rather footloose Charles Rangel glowed in the best wishes of some 800 people, most of whom presumably paid the advertised ticket price of $250 to $2500 for his birthday at the famed Plaza Hotel. “He has fought for New York through thick and thin,” Sen. Charles Schumer told the throng of Rangel supporters. “We are so grateful and thankful for that.” And Andrew Cuomo, the state Attorney General who is the Democrats’ nominee for governor said: "His voice has always been a powerful voice for the forgotten people and the forgotten places of this nation. That's why we're here tonight to say Happy Birthday Congressman Charles Rangel."

The day before Rangel had offered an unexpected – and rambling – account of his side of the 13 ethics charges pending against him in the U. S. House of Representatives. He took to the floor of the House chamber for more than a half hour, against the wishes of his legal and political advisers, demanding an expedited trial so he can get on with his re-election bid. The New York primary is Sept. 14.

“This damn sure ain’t no funeral, is it?” Rangel commented as he looked out over the Plaza gathering. It was not. But if they have game, now is the time for his opponents to step it up. They should know this is going to take more than talk to depose Rangel when one of his buddies, the ever genteel (publicly at least ) former Mayor David Dinkins, gives the finger to a heckler as he enters the celebration.

Speaking candidly about race

Shirley Sherrod, God bless her, got into trouble because a lot of antsy people – from President Obama on down in his administration – don’t understand context. They don’t understand nuance. Well, there is a heck of a lot they do not understand, but let me stick with these two.

I believe I know Ms. Sherrod; but I do recall her husband, Charles, from my days as a law student doing anti-death penalty work in rural Georgia and then returning to the area as a national correspondent for The New York Times some years later. He was a founder of SNCC.

As a Columbia University law student assigned as a summer intern to work with the Atlanta-based Team Defense, I was part of a group of mostly Ivy League and mostly white Northerners sent to Dawson, Ga., to try to save the lives of five young black men that even a blind person could see were being railroaded with charges of murdering a white man in a rural general store. We filed all sorts of motions in preparation for hearings and then, if need be, trials. Because Jimmy Carter was president and was making a big deal about human rights, and because Dawson in Terrell County was one of the areas he represented as a state legislator and, arguably, as governor of Georgia, this story went, as would be said today, viral. Literally. Reporters from big news organizations across the U. S. and media from Europe came to look into this human rights abuse in 1977 United States.

Focusing our attentions beyond the hearings that would have to be had, we began researching the names on the list of potential jurors we had been able to obtain. One student and I met a man who had been recommended to us as someone who knew just about everybody in the area. He was a true Southerner; my student colleague was a true Northern fish out of water who just presumed that we had a typical redneck on our hands. But I engaged. I began to talk Southern – about the crops and such. My colleague thought I was nuts. But then came the good stuff.

Our “redneck” went over the list with us and gave us the 411. Then he told a story about learning how to treat black folks. As a boy growing up on a farm, many of his playmates were black kids on the farm. One day, feeling his oats, he called one of them “nigga.” His mama heard that and ordered him onto the porch where she blessed him out, telling him to never be disrespectful like that again. They were “nigras” not “niggas”.

Many people might not see the difference, but the fact that he did and could tell us who on that jury list was most likely to let racist views control the verdict, was what I respected. We would have had a damn good jury had not President Carter’s people pulled strings behind the scenes to assure that the case of the Dawson Five was settled in their favor before we had to go to trial.

Charles Rangel and House Ethics

Read for yourself what the 20-term Congressman has been charged with by a subcommittee of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct after a case was recommended by Speaker Nancy Pelosi's Office of Congressional Ethics. It is hard to deny that some of this stuff he is accused of is the rather fishy side of politics -- as in, why did he do such a sloppy with paperwork or a good-old-boys-will-take-care-of-good-old-boys thing? As head of the House Ways and Means Committee, which, among other things, oversees taxes, why was he so bad at filing his own?

But, even holding one's nose, it is easy to say that under the rules of the game, a whole lot of legislators have done the same, or similar, things. The rules began to change when Speaker Pelosi came into office vowing to clean out the "swamp." It's primary occupants appear to be black members of the House. At last count seven of the 42 members were under some sort of investigation. As radio talk show host Santita Jackson asked earlier today: What is going on?

I am personally leaning towards the position that Rangel (D-New York) should step aside with dignity -- the President's position and that of some of Rangel's whippersnapper opponents in the September 14 Democratic primary in New York. But maybe he and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-California), who is also among those apparently under investigation, are on to something in declaring that they will fight it out no matter what it means ultimately for Democrats' continued control of the House. Maybe this does come down to the principle of the thing.

I've been writing about Rangel for The Root. This is the last piece I posted. There will be more. Let your voices be heard on this.

I've been on hiatus

But I'll have new postings starting later today.

Treat Elena Kagan Like You Would a White Man

She has impeccable collegiate credentials. She clerked for a U. S. Supreme Court justice -- Thurgood Marshall. She is the current Solicitor General, the top lawyer representing the government's side before the U. S. Supreme Court. But the Republicans in the Senate have suddenly discovered that she is a woman and that she clerked for Justice Marshall and she was dean at Harvard and she has been nominated by President Obama. And so they don't think she is qualified. She is no left wing nut. No uber feminist. She is exactly what some of these senators wish they were. But, in their eyes, all she has accomplished is a baaaad thing for the future of the universe.

Phyl Garland

For those of you who knew Phyllis (Phyl) Garland – friend to many of us, mentor to many of us, comforter to many of us – a letter begging for money to endow a scholarship in her name at the Columbia University School of Journalism should be an embarrassing reminder of how we have not done what needed to have been done years ago.

We need a minimum of $100,000. But, as you know from the jazz record hoarder and gourmand that she was, Phyl was no minimalist. While the $25 check written at an NABJ gathering here and there is very much appreciated, that level of giving won’t get us to even a minimum anytime soon. The current recipients of the Black Alumni Network Phyllis T. Garland Scholarship are honoring her memory but actually being subsidized to the tune of $5,000 each by the J School, not from the endowed fund that we owe Phyl. Since 1998, we have raised only $78,228. What does that say about us, about our commitment to the future of people of color in journalism, about our love for Phyl?

Earning a master’s at the J School these days costs $60,000 (tuition, room, board). Journalists often brag about not being mathematicians, but even a math-challenged person can see that we have work to do.

In a news industry that we know is in turmoil in 2010 as it tries to figure out its future, Asian Americans and Latinos are doing far better than Blacks. News outlets in whichever medium need people like Phyl who could cover any type of story. In her days at Ebony that spanned from the dangerous days of the civil rights movement to the discovery of Wynton Marsalis.

The first five Garland Scholars are just the beginning of what we should be supporting.

Dani McClain [2005-06]: After graduation McClain was a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. She is now a writer with the Color of Change in Oakland, Calif.

Sabrina Ford [2006-07] of California is a reporter with the New York Post.

Lylah Holmes [2007-08] produced a documentary on the 2008 presidential campaign and she talked about her work on “Charlie Rose” [PBS] with leading political reporters.

Jessica Hopper [2008-09] produced the award-winning documentary “Behind Closed Doors” with classmate Pracheta Sharma on exploitation of women domestic workers and labor trafficking in New York City.

Micki Steele [2009-10] left an advertising agency in order to go to graduate school. She is now reporting at the Detroit News.

Let's do Phyl proud, not with contributions -- which we can do in our communities and our networks in so many ways -- but in recompense. Send money, $$$$, to Columbia University GSJ for the Phyllis T. Garland Fund, 2950 Broadway, 704-C Journalism, New York, NY 10027. If you have questions after all this, contact Sharon Meiri Fox at 212-854-5263.

Happy Flag Day!

Wear your colors proudly -- whatever they are!

Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

That's what Bill T. Jones said, channeling Fela, as he accepted a Tony award Sunday night.

Fences as a play and Denzel and Viola as actors done us proud.

So did Memphis.

Blacks and Broadway

The Tony Awards will be presented tonight, honoring the best of the Broadway theater season. A number of blackfolks have been nominated. Please read what I recently wrote for The Root:

June 6

I was born on June 6 in the colored side of the hospital in Conyers, Ga., the first of the six children of Minnie Ola and Johnnie Shipp. I call my mother on June 6 to sing “Happy Birthday” since, after all she did all the work that day.

That was 11 years after D-Day, a time well documented with a major exception: What about the black men who were part of that invasion of France and ultimately the liberation of Europe from Hitler’s Nazis? A column I wrote for the New York Daily News amid the 50^th anniversary hoopla in 1994 dealt with that, caught the attention of Rep. Charles Rangel and ultimately led to President Clinton belatedly recognizing black vets during at a White House ceremony. Later, with all the rave about the movie “Private Ryan,” starring Tom Hanks. I wrote in a column about the need to treat WWII veterans better, starting with health care: This is part of that column: “In 1944, blacks were usually treated as uniformed laborers, barred from combat units. One of them was my Daddy, a farm boy and shoe repairman from Conyers, Ga., whose company arrived in France on June 12, 1944, the day before "Private Ryan" ends.

We need to be angry and vigilant about an even younger generation of veterans, those of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can you imagine what it must be like to be in your 20s without adequate mental and physicial health care or even job opportunities?

Super Bowl 48: Bring It On!

Even if you are not a football fan, join with me in this moment. The Super Bowl in 2014 -- God willing and the creek don't rise -- will be in the new Meadowlands stadium, with shared hosting by New York and New Jersey. Granting this locale the game represents a return to some kind of reality: A game in late January or early February does not have to be played in Florida or some other sunny clime. If it snows during Super Bowl 48 in our outdoor stadium, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow! These big guys can play real football in all climates. They don't need coddling in guaranteed sunny weather. As NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg said, "This isn't beach volley ball. It's football, for god's sake!"

I'm sure other bidders on the game were looking at dollar signs. But we are, too. This region should make billions on the game. And players and thousands of fans and tourists alike will benefit from all that we have to offer -- the vices and the virtues, the wild side and the tamer side, our multiculturalism and, of course, the culinary variety that will take their breath away (but hopefully not too much of their waist sizes!).

The Reputed End of Law and Order: The Original

I am a big fan of crime dramas, none more than Law and Order and its various spin-offs. I have identified with it because of its “ripped from the headlines” plots and its use of New York City – my New York City – as parts of stories. For me, it was like a parlor game sometimes to identify exactly where a scene had been filmed. Sometimes scenes were filmed in my Harlem neighborhood.

Think of some of the issues tackled: domestic violence, wilding, forced female circumcision, adoption of black children from abroad to turn them into indentured servants, youth violence, a late night murder in a fast-food restaurant, gay-bashing, racial demagoguery. Even though each episode was preceded by a caveat that the story we were about to see was complete fiction, we aficionados knew differently.

The current cast in this 20^th season includes S. Epatha Merkerson and Anthony Anderson. But over the years in recurring roles or cameos or bit parts, black actors on the show have included Richard Brooks, Jesse L. Martin, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Michael Rooker, Viola Davis, Stephen McKinley Henderson, James Earl Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Beals, Ludacris, Edwina Findley, Ernie Hudson… And the list goes on. So do a number of careers. I get a kick out of reading the biographies of actors in theater; if they’ve been in New York for any length of time, it’s almost impossible that they did not do at least one episode of Law and Order. Indeed, two current Tony nominees, Viola Davis and Stephen McKinley Henderson, in Fences, are Law and Order alums.

I never watched Lost, so I didn’t care about its finale. Nor did I watch Friends – mainly because none of the main characters as a I discerned from People magazine would have been my friends. So I didn’t watch that finale. And I certainly did not watch Seinfeld, a self-proclaimed show about nothing when I was too busy to take time off for nothingness. So I didn’t get caught up in the hype of that finale.

But I do care about the end of Law and Order. Tonight’s episode will be only one hour. So I have a feeling that sometime in the future there will be a proper send-off. If Chuck gets a two-hour season ending episode, then certainly Law and Order deserves more than a one-hour finale to a 20-year run.

Haiti

So much is supposedly being done in and for Haiti. But how much is really having an impact on the survivors of the January earthquake and its aftershocks?

City Limits in New York has this new piece: http://www.citylimits.org/news/articles/4000/after-the-quake-rebuilding-haiti-from-brooklyn

AOL has this about Sean Penn’s work: http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/sean-penns-hardest-role-yet-haiti-camp-manager/19479788 - Sean Penn

CNN’s Soledad O'Brien has been vigilant even as much of the world press has turned to other matters, great and small.

Shakira has been there and plans to build a school.

The Haitian Times is going full speed ahead with plans for its Haiti Festival next month.

But I still think the government of President Preval is asleep, to put it in words that won’t offend my mother. He cannot wait for his term to be over in February. Of course, there might be another coup.

Gerald Boyd

I've just begun reading his memoir -- actually a combination of a memoir and a tribute by people who helped flesh out his story because he died in 2006 before finishing the book.

Boyd rose to the top ranks of the New York Times: managing editor, the No. 2 man, with a good chance of becoming No. 1, the executive editor. But along came that jerk Jayson Blair. Gerald -- and the executive editor -- lost their jobs. As they should have for a number of reasons. But they were ultimately the scapegoats. A whole lot of corporate folks at the Times should have fallen on their swords, including the publisher.

"Second only to my family, the Times defined me; I was addicted to the paper and all it represented, cloaking myself in its power and prestige," Boyd wrote. But after Jayson Blair, a black guy, a youngster really, was revealed as a fraud, a plagiarist and a drug addict who kissed ass to make himself fit in with the old boys' club that made success possible at the Times, Boyd, a black guy, was blamed. This is what he wrote about the bosses he had cozied up to all those years: "With its fundamental principles in jeopardy in the wake of the Blair Affair, the Times did what its leaders thought was best for the franchise. Their message to me, however, was that I had intentionally jeopardized the franchise, something I would have found akin to drowning my own child."

Only after he was ousted did he recognize -- or at least acknowledge -- something I knew when I left the paper in 1993, "a potent dose of racial animosity, which was there all along, of course, but far more sinister than I allowed myself to believe." He'd come a long way from being what his former wife and his colleague at the Times describes as "the black militant on the University of Missouri's Columbia campus" in the 1970s.

Ask book stores for the book. It's My Times in Black and White and it is not published by one of the major houses. So ask for it.

Farewell, Lena. Farewell, Evelyn.

You know Lena Horne’s name more than you know Evelyn Cunningham’s, but they are both sophisticated ladies you’d like to have had a good ol’ Southern breakfast with as they regaled with sometimes ribald stories about hard times and rebounding from hard knocks. Oh, did they leave a lot of folks “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” (Lena’s song)!

Lena Horne, 92, Brooklyn’s own, died on Mother’s Day. Evelyn, 94, a native of Elizabeth City, N. C., who made Harlem her home, beat Lena through the Pearly Gates less than two weeks earlier, on April 28. Obviously there to scope the place out and then to interview Lena on deadline before graciously showing her around.

A teenaged Lena performed in Harlem’s Cotton Club, described by Aljean Harmetz of the New York Times as “the famous Harlem nightclub where the customers were white, the barely dressed dancers were light-skinned blacks, Duke Ellington was the star of the show and the proprietors were gangsters.” Hollywood in the 1940s, where she could work but not live without the intervention of influential people like Humphrey Bogart, wanted her to be some exotic woman with no obvious black identity. She did what she had to do, including kick butt, before bolting. And in the 1960s civil rights struggles she, like Harry Belafonte, was up front and center. She was triumphant in a 1981 one-woman show on Broadway, “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music”. She won a Tony Award and a couple of Grammy Awards for that – and the admiration of a younger generation or two.

Halle Berry is the latter day Lena Horne with the benefits of what Lena Horne achieved in a life that made her high yellow features, as they were called back in the day, a blessing as well as a burden. Back in 2002, when she became the first black woman to be awarded the Best Actress Oscar, a very emotional Halle said: “This moment is so much bigger than me. This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. It’s for the women that stand beside me: Jada Pinkett, Angela Bassett, Vivica Fox. And it’s for every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”

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

So true, too, of Evelyn Cunningham, a star journalist at the Pitttsburgh Courier when it was one of the premier crusading black newspapers that black train workers helped smuggle into the South. She downed whiskey with John Wayne because he was already drinking when she arrived for an interview. She had stories of covering presidents from Harry Truman on. She worked as a special assistant to Nelson Rockefeller when he was New York’s governor and later the Vice President under President Ford.

Wall Street, Time Warner, the civil rights movement, countless college students and my Harlem dining table are the beneficiaries of Evelyn Cunningham. She taught Dick Parsons, now head of Time Warner, how to dress when he thought being “fly” was the thing while interviewing for an internship with Governor Rockefeller in 1970. He wore a suit that was creamy yellow with purple highlights. She concluded, as he recalled at a memorial service for her at Harlem’s St. Philip’s Church: “That boy is rough, but he’s going somewhere.” After the job interview, she pulled him aside and said: “Boy, who told you you looked good in that suit?” She took him shopping and got him something respectable in the government and business worlds in which he has soared.

When he was fourteen and already a loudmouthed civil rights activist, Al Sharpton, then the Brooklyn youth director for Dr. King’s Operation Breadbasket, led a delegation of youth to protest outside the governor’s office. After a time someone came out and told Sharpton that Mrs. Cunningham, someone he had never heard of, wanted to speak with him inside. When she asked what his group sought, he was still pretty much in the hollering mode. She interrupted to say: “I think that eventually you will get to a point.” And as he continued doing his best mau-mauing, she said: “Young man, you’re not going to scare me. I know Fidel Castro, and I knew Malcolm X.” She taught him how to focus his issues so those who wanted to help had a list to add to their agendas and make the most of their face time with people with power and influence. Even into her later years she met annually with Bruce Llewellyn, a major businessman who died in April, and presented him with a list of causes she wanted him to support.

In her 80s she insisted on walking the mile or so from her apartment building on Riverside Drive to mine for potluck dinner and, more importantly, to talk to young people I’d gathered there. If I had not run the CNN profile of her, they would never have known what she had accomplished in such a life well lived. But even without that visual backdrop, they were mesmerized and inspired. “Her zest for life was contagious,” Mayor David Dinkins, a former neighbor on Riverside, said of her at the memorial service at St. Philip’s.

She was never an invisible woman, and she made sure that a longtime neighbor, Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, will not soon be forgotten. It is because of Evelyn and her cohorts that a beautiful memorial by Elizabeth Catlett is there across the street from their apartment building on Riverside Drive. Check it out, reflect, refresh, renew your vows to be well and to do good.

The President and this oil spill

Please see my latest posting on The Root, which I hope you will follow as one of your main sources of news and information.

http://www.theroot.com/views/slow-down-mr-president

Please support theater!

Denzel Washington, Viola Davis and Mykelti Williamson are in a limited-run revival of August Wilson’s drama, Fences.

David Alan Grier is one of the leads in David Mamet’s intense comedy/drama, Race.

And there is Fela!, a musical based on the life of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the late Nigerian performer and political activist.

Closer to home for many of you is Through The Night, written and performed by Daniel Beaty. It opens at the The Riverside Theatre, 91 Claremont Avenue at 120^th Street in Manhattan on May 7. The special guest for opening night’s post-performance community dialogue is Bill Cosby. This is the official description: “Six African American males, ages 10 to 60, discover their power through one extraordinary event.” Beaty promises to “give voice to this community of men, those who love them, and what it means to be black and male in America.” In addition to Mr. Cosby, those scheduled to participate include Ruby Dee, Sonia Sanchez, Malik Yoba and Donnie McClurkin. General admission tickets are $20. For reservations, call 212-870-6784 or do it online at www.theriversidetheatre.org.

Except for concepts like Tyler Perry’s Madea, or Oprah’s involvement with a Broadway musical version of The Color Purple, we blacks get a deservedly bad rap for not supporting works that have something to say about our experience in the U.S.

Dorothy Height

Fox News chose not to cover the homegoing services for Dr. Height, even though -- or maybe because -- President Obama was one of the eulogists.

But this is what he said, and we should not forget Dr. Height, the godmother of the Civil Rights Movement and a pioneer in so many areas during her 98 years on this earth. She helped integrate the YWCA in Harlem in the 1930s. That's when two of my great aunts were involved in the YWCA, so I'd like to think they were involved with her efforts. She was the lone woman at the table when the big men of the Civil Rights Movement were organizing the March on Washington in 1963 and when major legislation -- public accomodations, voting rights, etcetera -- became the laws of the land.

"Look at her body of work," the President said. "Desegregating the YWCA. Laying the groundwork for integration on Wednesdays in Mississippi. Lending pigs to poor farmers as a sustainable source of income. Strategizing with civil rights leaders, holding her own, the only woman in the room, Queen Esther to this Moses Generation -- even as she led the National Council of Negro Women with vision and energy, vision and class.

"But we remember her not solely for all she did during the civil rights movement. We remember her for all she did over a lifetime, behind the scenes, to broaden the movement’s reach. To shine a light on stable families and tight-knit communities. To make us see the drive for civil rights and women’s rights not as a separate struggle, but as part of a larger movement to secure the rights of all humanity, regardless of gender, regardless of race, regardless of ethnicity.

"It’s an unambiguous record of righteous work, worthy of remembrance, worthy of recognition. And yet, one of the ironies is, is that year after year, decade in, decade out, Dr. Height went about her work quietly, without fanfare, without self-promotion. She never cared about who got the credit. She didn’t need to see her picture in the papers. She understood that the movement gathered strength from the bottom up, those unheralded men and women who don't always make it into the history books but who steadily insisted on their dignity, on their manhood and womanhood. She wasn’t interested in credit. What she cared about was the cause. The cause of justice. The cause of equality. The cause of opportunity. Freedom’s cause.

Civil Rights: The Changing of the Generations

At the recently concluded National Action Network convention in New York City, hosted by Rev. Al Sharpton, two things were evident in the context of present civil rights leadership. First: Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson are increasingly moving into the elders status. Second: The heads of both the NAACP (Ben Jealous) and the National Urban League (Marc Morial) are younger, more vibrant. But those two don’t yet have meaningful measurable track records.

What really hit home is that many of the civil rights legends from the MLK days, and even before, are at the end of days. Benjamin Hooks, longtime leader of the NAACP, a preacher, a lawyer and the first black to serve on the Federal Communication Commission – died last week at the age of 85. When I saw him a couple of years ago in Memphis at the commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of MLK’s death, he was very frail. Dorothy Height, the chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, is very ill. She is 98 years old. And, according to Sharpton, Rev. Joseph Lowery sounds very weak though in a conversation he tried to assure Sharpton that he was OK. Lowery was an MLK contemporary and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with him. Lowery eventually became president of the SCLC. And last year he delivered the benediction at President Obama’s inauguration, beseeching the Lord “to help us work for that day when black won’t be asked to get back; when brown can stick around; when yellow will be mellow; when the red man can get ahead, man; when white will embrace what is right…”

Maybe because they don’t see such rather expensive gatherings as priorities or maybe because they have other outlets for mobilizing around social justice issues, there were not lots of young people present at the convention. Interestingly enough, it was 50 years ago that young people founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which gave us, among others, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Julian Bond, who recently stepped down as chair of the NAACP.

ADDENDUM: Dorothy Height died Tuesday morning, April 20, at the age of 98.

Presidents and the Supremes

They don’t always get what they want, but I’m hoping that President Obama sticks to his values as he nominates a new justice to the United States Supreme Court. That appointee would replace Justice John Paul Stevens, who has announced that he is retiring in June.

Here are a few examples of surprises to presidents and to senators who voted for these people who are guaranteed jobs for life:

· Justice Stevens, once thought of as a moderate Republican, eventually became the leader of the liberal wing of the Court during his 35 years on the bench.

· Justice Hugo Black, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, evolved into a key defender of the New Deal, the social revolution led by President Franklin Roosevelt, who appointed him, and a proponent of civil liberties and civil rights. Writing about Justice Black, Paul L. Murphy said in The Reader’s Companion to American History: “When Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1937, critics objected because of his KKK past; but on the Court he proved to be an active constitutional populist….In the final analysis, Black was a people’s justice. His opinions were clear and moving, and his commitments were to a constitutional order that would extend ‘liberty and justice for all.’”

· Black’s tenure eventually overlapped with that of a President Eisenhower appointee, Chief Justice Earl Warren, named to the Court in 1953. The Warren Court gave us the end of legal segregation and many reforms in voting rights and in the criminal justice systems in the 1960s. That prompted Eisenhower to declare that the appointment of Warren, a fellow Republican and former friend, was “the biggest damned-fool mistake I ever made.” But Warren later explained his shift from conservative law-and-order man to liberal this way: “On the Court I saw [things] in a different light.”

· When President Richard Nixon named Warren Burger as Chief Justice in 1969, he wanted to put the brakes on some of the activism of the Earl Warren years. But Burger did not exactly turn back the hands of time. One scholar wrote in 1981 that “the Court is today more of a center for the resolution of social issuses than it has ever been before.”

· When President Kennedy named Byron White to the Court in 1962, and described him as “the ideal New Frontier judge,” he probably didn’t think that White would become the conservative that he ultimately was.

· Conservatives were persuaded by President George H.W. Bush’s team that David Souter was one of them when he was named to the Court. But he became more liberal during his 18 years on the Court. It was his retirement in 2009 that paved the way for President Obama to appoint a Hispanic woman, Sonia Sotomayor, to the Court.

Of course there are some justices who live up to their billing – judges like Clarence Thomas, who has been exactly what President George H. W. Bush wanted: a black man who was young enough to be around for decades and to transform the Court into a more conservative body. Justice Thurgood Marshall, the man whose seat he took but whose shoes he hasn’t tried to fill, said upon his retirement: "My dad told me way back that you can't use race. For example, there's no difference between a white snake and a black snake. They'll both bite."

I’m sure President Obama will keep that in mind as he prepares to make his second nomination while trying to persuade 67 senators to vote his way. In the Senate there are many Republicans who have said they will vote "no" no matter who he nominates. There are nervous-Nelly Democrats afraid that a "controversial" nominee will affect their re-election bids. And, of course, there are various Democratic party loyalists, insiders and fundraisers demanding that the President appoint a black person, a woman, a very openly "progressive" person.

Who said that being President was all Easter egg-rolling festivities on the lawn?

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

I write this before the final round of the Masters. Who knows what Tiger will do, though he is -- after all the sexual scandal and corporate ostracism -- in the running.

Back in 1997 I wrote a column about how blackfolks, especially those into the sport of golf, were so proud of Tiger Woods at Augusta National. People who didn't care about or know anything about golf were excited. That included me.

But swept up in the historic nature of what was happening in a game and at a place that had deliberately excluded blacks who were not servants, I paid attention. And I reached out to some veteran golfers among blackfolks I knew. One was Nezelle Bradshaw, a woman who had been in the game on black circuits since 1949 or 1950 and who could tell me stories of some of the storied black players like Teddy Rhodes and Charlie Sifford.

On that Masters Sunday in 1997 as the final round was underway, she said of Tiger: "He is just head and shoulders above all the other people. He has confidence. He has skills. And he has ice water flowing through his veins." After he won, she told me: "This man has done something incredible."

Some polls say that men are more forgiving of Tiger than women. Not the case with the women I know, including some like Mrs. Bradshaw, who turns 92 next month. "He's a good athlete, an excellent golfer -- and what he did is what most men have done in their lifetime....It's no big deal because most men do it. It's not right, but we have to be realistic in this world."

My 82-year-old mama, considered Mother Shipp at the Macedonia Baptist Church in Conyers, Ga., said: "I think he's doing what he's supposed to do: winning the game. I hope he gets his life straightened out with his family."

OK. So I talked to my younger sister, Norma, who has a doctorate in theology and has played golf. "I'm still happy about his accomplishments, but I'm disappointed in his personal behavior. He needs to get his personal life together because he has a lot of people looking up to him." So I put this question to her: If he were her man, would she take him back? "HELL NO! No money in the world would make me want to stay with someone who betrayed me that way with that many indiscretions."

A male cab driver I spoke with earlier today said the worst thing for Tiger would be for him to actually win the Masters because that would contribute to his sense of invincibility not just in golf but in life.

The television ratings are up. The Professional Golf Association -- and the golfers on the tour -- are making money because Tiger is back, burning bright as the British poet William Blake wrote in the 1800s.

The Census and Me, Part 2

I received a call from a U.S. Census Bureau representative a few minutes ago after one of my neighbors told her that I'd neither received a form nor had someone knock on my door the way it was done in 1790.

SO: I answered the questions, even the one that asked if I am "African-American, Black or Negro."

I've been counted.

The Resurrection of Haiti

Consider this image of Haiti – specifically of a section of its capital, Port-au-Prince – published in The New York Times on March 27:

“The lights of the casino above this wrecked city beckoned as gamblers in freshly pressed clothes streamed to the roulette table and slot machines. In a restaurant nearby, diners quaffed Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin Champagne and ate New Zealand lamb chops at prices rivaling those in Manhattan.

“A few yards away, hundreds of families displaced by the earthquake languished under tents and tarps, bathing themselves from buckets and relieving themselves in the street as barefoot children frolicked on pavement strewn with garbage.

“This is the Pétionville district of Port-au-Prince, a hillside bastion of Haiti’s well-heeled where a mangled sense of normalcy has taken hold after the earthquake in January. Business is bustling at the lavish boutiques, restaurants and nightclubs that have reopened in the breezy hills above the capital, while thousands of homeless and hungry people camp in the streets around them, sometimes literally on their doorstep.”

Hmmm. Haiti’s leaders see the January 12 earthquake as “a rendezvous with history that Haiti cannot miss.” In a lengthy proposal presented March 31 to representatives of 130 potential donor nations, they outlined a 10-year rebuilding plan, while acknowledging that, long before that 35-second earthquake, Haiti was in trouble. “We understand the importance of reviewing our political, economic and social governance. We pledge to act in this regard,” the Action Plan for National Recovery and Development of Haiti, presented by President Rene Preval, said. “The earthquake must not obscure the desired goal: building a democratic Haiti that is inclusive and respectful of human rights.”

Unlike what seems to be the case as described in that New York Times piece -- or in what I observed in my first visit to Haiti some months ago.

It has been clear since January 12 that the world wants to help Haiti; but Haiti must assure that it is capable of accepting that help and moving forward as a sovereign democratic nation, not a beggar nation with its hands out and its corrupt officials leading the charge. The action plan says that Haiti “is committed to keeping up its efforts in the fight against corruption and to establish mechanisms capable of [ensuring] the greatest amount of transparency in the management of public funds.”

Preval and the team of government officials and international civilian experts have estimated the damage done to Haiti as a result of the earthquake at $8 billion.

From the action plan: “ Very soon after the earthquake, it was obvious that such a toll could not be the outcome of just the force of the tremor. It is due to an excessively dense population, a lack of adequate building standards, the disastrous state of the environment, disorganized land use and an unbalanced division of economic activity. The capital city (Port-au-Prince) accounts for more than 65 percent of the country’s economic activity and 85 percent of Haiti’s tax revenue.” Part of the long-term plan is to redistribute population to other parts of the island nation. That requires success in achieving one set of its goals: “…We must create jobs, re-house disaster victims, open schools and higher education institutions in preparation for the new school year, provide access to health care, prepare for the hurricane season, bridge the gap in state tax revenues, restart the administration and boost the economic channels.”

It took a 35-second earthquake to force the Haitian government to move in the direction it should have been for years of politicians more interested in deposing each other, an elitist class that has done little for the poor who inhabit areas like Cite Soleil and all that “where’s mine?” attitude that has inhibited legitimate trade.

Now a 55-page plan of action and impressive words from Preval, whose term ends in February 2011, are what we have. That and prayer.

LESTER HOLT HAS THE WEEKEND OFF

I sometimes think of this NBC news man as the hardest working brother in broadcast. He anchors on weekends both in the morning and in the evening. He fills in for Brian Williams on weeknights. He covers disasters. He covers Olympics. He does features such as on his mother's Jamaican roots. He plays lots of instruments and loves jazz and sometimes jams with guests on The Today Show. He loves flying. He loves gadgets. He seems to be rather lousy as a cook during those segments on Today, but he also seems to have a gourmand's appreciation of food.

My 82-year-old mother is in love with him. He actually sent her an autographed photo, which, of course, she shared with her church and beauty parlor circles.

Have a good break, Lester!

The Census and Me

I received this from the National Urban League:

"Dear Friend,
 


"When the founding fathers met in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention, their work remained unfinished for almost 200 years until the passage of modern civil rights legislation. Even on the nation's census, the framers of the constitution only counted people of African descent as 3/5ths of a person. On April 1, 2010, you will have the power once again to finish their work. Let's make sure that our community really counts this time.


"On April 1st, the nation counts itself. You should have received a Census Form at your home or apartment that asks you several very simple questions."


Check out what the Census Bureau has well-known people, including Dorothy Height, saying about the importance of this effort: http://2010.census.gov/2010census/

BUT, GUESS WHATt? I have yet to receive a census form. I guess I’m on the way to not being counted – unless, of course, I raise hell!

theGrio

Check out my first piece for theGrio, a project in the NBC Universal world that aims to bring news and information to blackfolks:

www.thegrio.com/money/bad-economy-motivates-black-philanthropists-to-give-back.php

Martin Luther King Jr.

I think the Kennedys have it right. Rather than dwelling on the anniversaries of assassinations, they mark the birthdates of JFK and RFK with family rituals.

Having said that, I will share with you here some of the remarks I made at the 2004 birthdate observation of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The place was The Central Synagogue in midtown Manhattan, New York City. The hosts were Jews and blackfolks.

“When he was 18 years old, in 1947, he became his father’s assistant at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. He was ordained Feb. 25, 1948, a few weeks after he turned 19 and a few months before he graduated from Morehouse College.

“Fifty years ago, when King was 25, the civil rights revolution began in earnest when the U.S. Supreme Court decided that separate was not equal in the nation’s public school system and declared segregation unconstitutional. We as a nation are still grappling with the import of that decision. Even when I went to the ‘white’ high school, months after King’s death, my hometown was just getting around to implementing the Supreme Court’s decision of so long before to integrate ‘with all deliberate speed.’

“1954 was not only momentous because of the Brown decision, but that is also the year when MLK became pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama – 25 years old! 14 months later he was chosen to head the Montgomery Improvement Association, which was leading the bus boycott that began after Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to relinquish her seat to a white man on a city bus. For the remainder of his life he was blessed and burdened by a role that, by Aug. 28, 1963, had made him as A. Phillip Randolph said in introducing him to an audience of hundreds of thousands in Washington, ‘the moral leader of our nation'….

“I come today not to presume what a living 75-year-old MLK would be doing other than going to church and enjoying birthday cake with his family. But I come to encourage all of us – myself included – to do as King did in his short life, which saw landmark litigation, marches, sit-ins, pray-ins, wade-ins, freedom rides, anti-war demonstrations.

“To me, it’s irrelevant whether King was a saint or not. He was a doer. When called upon to work to change what was wrong with the world, beginning in Montgomery, he took on the job, despite the sacrifices that entailed….

“Around Easter we Christians often sing, ‘Were you there when they crucified my Lord?’ Of course, we were not. That was thousands of years ago. But we can update that question to ask not just where we were during various stages in the struggles for justice and peace, but where we are and where we will be.”

Rain, Rain, Don't Go Away

I know a lot of us have had lots of snow and rain in recent weeks -- months, even! But I'm annoyed by TV weather people who turn rain into a villain. Sure, there may be inconveniences, but Mother Nature is just that: a nurturing presence. Don't lose your minds. We need rain for those veggies you eat in restaurants or purchase at supermarkets. I need rain for my garden, and, truth be told, by cats, Frankie and Sammie Dee, prefer rainwater to what I give them from the tap and even from relatively expensive bottles of Poland Springs!

Rain is a good thing.

The Incredibly Shrinking Mr. Preval

Rene Preval is the president of Haiti, but he seems to let leaders of other countries do all the talking when it comes to how to rebuild his nation following the January 12 earthquake and all the aftershocks (smaller earthquakes) thereafter. In photos of former President Clinton and former President Bush doing walk-abouts in Port-au-Prince last week, there was an unidentified black dude just a step behind: the president of Haiti.

At a memorial service a month after the big earthquake he said that his wife had urged him to speak to his people right away. And this is what his response was: "What can I say to the people who are dead, who are injured, the people who have lost loved ones? Haitians, the pain is too heavy for words to express."

That's why you are the president, Mr. Preval. Find the words to express what your country needs. Haiti has been screwed up for more than a century, in large measure because of United States policies and those of other foreign governments. Now is the time to put into play long-term development plans that you were talking about more than a year ago and meshing them with those that have emerged since the earthquake through the United Nations and the European Union, among others.

This week your voice should be a megaphone at the conference on Haiti that the United Nations is hosting in New York. Don't be a wimp.

RIGHT ON, MR. PRESIDENT!

While extremist knuckleheads are threatening the lives of the President and members of Congress because of their differences of opinion on health care reform, our Commander in Chief steathily went to Afghanistan today to boost morale of troops and, hopefully, kick Afghanistan’s president in the butt. To get this war -- and the one in Iraq -- over with, so-called leaders like Afghanistan's need to step up.

President Obama shows that he can multitask, while his opponents are stuck in the mud.

March Madness! So This Is An Excuse For Rape?

So many of us Baby Boomers, especially those who grew up in the South and were on the frontline of integrating one thing or another, have issues to this day. But I must say that Tom Payne is way beyond the way beyond.

He was the first black player on the University of Kentucky basketball team, and one can hardly imagine the hell he went through. But he has put others through a greater hell by raping them. I came across this article in which Payne essentially gives himself a pity party: he was an integration warrior without the armor to handle the task. So he became a rapist? “He has been imprisoned for all but three years since 1972, in three different states for three different convictions,” the Fanhouse article says. He is currently finishing out a sentence in Kentucky, but hoping he can be released early since he is nearly 60 and his mother is in her 80s and can use his help and, of course, he has a message to offer to young people who might go astray.

From the article: “Starting in Georgia at the end of his rookie season with the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, then in Kentucky after cases were made against him while he was still in Georgia prisons, then in California in the 1980s after being paroled, then back in Kentucky in 2000 when he was paroled in California, for violating his parole in the previous state, Payne has been in prison for all but three of the last 38 years.”

Pity the fool.

He wants the University of Kentucky to recognize him as the pioneer that he was. But I cannot see a school honoring a man as a serial rapist frittered his life away.

Read the article and make your own call on this:

http://ncaabasketball.fanhouse.com

Civil Society?

Sometimes I think we give too much credit to and are over-adoring towards The Founding Fathers. After all, while talking about liberty and justice for all, a bunch of them were slave owners and others benefited from slave trafficking. They talked about how “all men are created equal” while conveniently ignoring men who were not white property owners and ignoring women altogether.

And yet…

As they cobbled together the Constitution that has pretty much stood the test of time -- with amendments, of course --they did not go after each other with the kind of venomous rhetoric we are seeing today in the contest over health care reform. Language that is racist and xenophobic and sexist and homophobic. Language that threatens the lives of the President and of members of Congress, some of whom have closed their offices while shielding themselves behind security guards.

I suppose the last time we were this "civil" was during the Civil Rights Movement and, before that, the Civil War. In both eras, many lives were lost.

Is this the U.S. or Taliban country?

O Brother Where Art Thou?

As the vote on President Obama's health care reform nears, I've been struck by the lack of very public support and cajoling from Harlem's Rep. Charlie Rangel, the former chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee who is now enmeshed in all sorts of investigations into his ways and means of doing personal business with government resources.

We should be seeing Rangel, a senior member of Congress, all over the media landscape, to persuade and reassure we the people. He should be there with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as she misses no opportunity to use media for the message. I'm sure he's doing some wheeling and dealing behind the scenes, but a more public face is sorely missed at this critical time.

Al Sharpton Gets a Strange Stamp of Approval

What a difference access to money and tailored suits and the likes of Donald Trump and exclusive men’s clubs and expensive cigars and, oh yeah, the White House, makes. Al Sharpton has re-invented himself so many times since I met him in the 1980s when he was rotund, had hair permed on a regular basis as a homage to James Brown, wore shiny neon jogging suits and a huge Martin Luther King medallion around his neck. He has now done it again. But what’s really scary is that he has let Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal re-invent him and present him as what once was called “a safe Negro” who is acceptable in polite company and can be counted upon to bring blackfolks, specifically Democrats, to the voting booths in November. Check out a front page article in today’s (3/17) Wall Street Journal: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/03/16/obamas-new-partner-al-sharpton/

President Obama is mistaken in thinking that Sharpton, like Booker T. Washington so many decades ago, can speak for blackfolks and influence how they vote and how they live. Washington, an accomodationist, was an adviser to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft during the segregation era. Sharpton, an unrepentant opportunist, is an adviser to President Obama in what is supposedly the “post-Civil Rights” era.

Many blackfolks remember -- not fondly -- the Sharpton of the garrish jogging suits and the incendiary language; the man who actually paid people to show up at his rallies to bamboozle gullible media into thinking he had a larger and more loyal following than he did. Those people are not likely to follow his lead in today’s political climate.

I may have a cup of tea with Sharpton or appear on his syndicated radio program, but for President Obama there is more at stake. He does not want to be known, as the WSJ declared today, as Sharpton’s “partner.”

Sharpton and Tavis Smiley, the broadcast host who is as good as Sharpton in the self-promotion arena, have tangled over Sharpton’s Obama connection. Smiley says, in the WSJ article, that it is hard “to speak truth to power about the suffering of black people on the one hand, and then be running in and out of the Oval Office and trying to run the president’s agenda or express White House talking points.” Professor Cornel West of Princeton is quoted as saying that Sharpton risks becoming “a symbolic insider.”

And this is part of the reason: The Wall Street Journal is a linchpin in Murdoch’s conservative communications empire that includes The New York Post and the Fox News Channel. Sharpton is a frequent guest on Fox shows hosted by Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

The French have a saying: The more things change, the more they remain the same. As Billie Holliday sang: Them that’s got shall get. Them’s that’s not shall lose. Sharpton’s got; a whole lot of blackfolks will lose because of his latest re-invention of himself as someone who no longer believes in the power of well-directed protest politics -- independent of those to whom he should be speaking truth.

Clarence and Ginni Thomas: The Yin and the Yang

I have defended Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when I felt he deserved defense. But he is a nerdy weirdo. Prof. Linda Greenhouse so eloquently made the point in a piece published March 11 at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com: “February 22 was the fourth anniversary of the last time Justice Thomas asked a question during an argument. His silent presence on the bench has evolved into a weirdly compelling example of performance art.”

His wife, on the other hand, has been very vocal as a member of that “tea party movement” that has risen as a so-called grassroots opposition to President Obama. In a Los Angeles Times piece by Kathleen Hennessey on March 14, Ginni Thomas told a gathering in Washington: “I am an ordinary citizen from Omaha, Neb., who just may have the chance to preserve liberty along with you and other people like you.” She wants to save the United States from Obama’s “hard-left agenda” and went on to say: “I have felt called to the front lines with you, with my fellow citizens, to preserve what made America great.”

Imagine the couple’s dinner talk. As a lifetime appointee to the court, Justice Thomas is supposed to be totally apolitical. His wife is anything but. Just as Justice Antonin Scalia seems to be his guardian angel and mentor on the court, his wife is probably just as influential at home.

His votes in coming cases bear greater scrutiny.

I’ll end this blog entry with a New York Daily News column I wrote in 1995 and that was part of the “body of work” that earned me a 1996 Pulitzer Prize for commentary (www.pulitzer.org)

CLARENCE THOMAS' INPUT IN RACE DEBATE

BY E.R. SHIPP

Wednesday, July 12th 1995, 1:14AM

THREE OF MY fellow Georgians stand at the forefront of our painful national debate on racism and remedies: House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the self-proclaimed leader of the Republican revolution; Rep. Cynthia McKinney, whose racially gerrymandered congressional district the Supreme Court deemed unlawful, and Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court justice who, if you listen to some folks, was single-handedly responsible for that decision and an earlier one limiting the federal courts' role in the area of school desegregation.

Thomas has been pilloried, "called everything but a child of God," as we say in Georgia. But rather than being "an Uncle Tom," as so many are so quick to say, at times he sounds to me like W.E.B. Du Bois, the scholar, founding member of the NAACP and Pan-Africanist whose bona fides has not been called into question as far as I know.

You probably think I'm nuts, but consider what Du Bois had to say 60 years ago when educators like himself and lawyers such as Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall were debating what to do about segregated schools. Work to raise their quality, while conceding the reality of American apartheid? Or sue to end state-mandated segregation, arguing that integration was the only assurance black children could get a decent education?

In the July 1935 Journal of Negro Education, leading scholars, including E. Franklin Frazier, Ralph Bunche, Horace Mann Bond, Alain Locke and Du Bois, weighed in on the subject. Du Bois chastised blacks for their "utter lack of faith" in their own schools. "[A]s long as American Negroes believe that their race is constitutionally and permanently inferior to white people, they necessarily disbelieve in every possible Negro institution." The quality of the education should be paramount, he said, not whether black kids sat next to white kids in integrated classrooms. "The Negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools," Du Bois declared. "What he needs is Education."

Thomas seemed to echo Du Bois a few weeks ago in finding that a federal judge had gone too far in requiring an elaborate desegregation plan to achieve racial balance in the public schools of Kansas City, Mo., where, in some instances, schools were 90% black. Looking at black students' poor academic performance, the federal judge concluded that there was a link between the high proportion of blacks and the low quality of the schools.

"It never ceases to amaze me that the courts are so willing to assume that anything that is predominantly black must be inferior," Thomas wrote in a passionate critique of the Kansas City plan. Of the Missouri court's insistence on racial balance, he said: "This position appears to rest upon the idea that any school that is black is inferior, and that blacks cannot succeed without the benefit of the company of whites."

Thomas, like Du Bois, would say to local school officials and parents: Fix the schools to make sure that they are indeed educating kids. Demand that every school gets its fair share of education dollars. Let kids go to school in their own neighborhoods if they choose. And forget about what proportion of students are of what race. Thomas agrees with Du Bois that it's wrong to use children as "battering rams" in the elusive goal of creating an integrated society.

Admittedly, Thomas is a strange bird, but he seems to have more faith in the ability of blacks to stand on their own two feet than do some of those who berate him. His is an Old Testament-style tough love. He is yes, I do believe this a proud black man. But a confused one.

"We're a mixed-up generation, those of us who were sent to integrate society," Thomas once said.

I'm part of that generation that was the first to integrate this, that or the other. We've got the bruises psychic, if not physical to show it. So who better than us the expeditionary troops, the cannon fodder to force Americans to confront racism and shape remedies that make sense for the 1990s? Black thought on racism did not begin with the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case. The remedies we seek should not end with it.

---------------------------

The questions I raised at the end of that column remain. But Justice Thomas is probably the most messed-up, mixed-up member of his generation.