War in Libya

I don't get it, Mr. President. How many wars can we wage? "It is U. S. policy that Qaddafi has to go," you said yesterday. There are a whole lot of tyrrants out there, Mr. President. How do you pick and choose among them? I'd much prefer that you waged war on poverty and illiteracy here at home. Any way: here's an editorial in today's NYT.

Why is this day so different from other federal holidays?

Twenty-five years after the establishment of the MLK Jr. Holiday, so many people remain hostile to it, seeing it as a boon to “a special interest,” namely the millions of people of color, people of faith, people who believe in America. The last state to actually recognize the day was New Hampshire – in 1999. That was 16 years after President Reagan, the godfather of modern Republicanism, signed a bill creating the holiday.

In the latest display of this hostility and, frankly, ignorance Maine’s governor, who obviously does not see the Tea Party movement as one of special interests even when many of his fellow Republicans do, said that the NAACP could “kiss my butt” when questioned about his intent to skip events marking the holiday. Only after a raft of criticism did Gov. Paul LePage attend a breakfast hosted by a Rotary Club chapter and a senior citizens group. I'm guessing that the NAACP did not accept his booty call.

Before giving a keynote address at the event he chose to grace, a black preacher, the Rev. Effie McClain, said: “Don’t beat the man continually for something that’s been said.” Maybe not “continually,” but he should not be let off the hook so easily, saying something offensive but meaningful for his core constituents and then having his press office issue statements that are less vitriolic and more civil.

Maine is not the most chocolate state in the Union, but the King holiday was never meant to be a federal version of such traditional black celebrations as Emancipation Day or Juneteenth. It was intended to focus attention on the principles King stood for – and that presumably the nation strives for. Even those Tea Baggers who probably drink coffee in the comfort of their homes and trucks. Reagan said: ”So each year on Martin Luther King Day, let us not only recall Dr. King, but rededicate ourselves to the Commandments he believed in and sought to live every day: Thou shall love thy God with all thy heart, and thou shall love thy neighbor as thyself. And I just have to believe that all of us—if all of us, young and old, Republicans and Democrats, do all we can to live up to those Commandments, then we will see the day when Dr. King's dream comes true…”

To make the day palatable to some holdouts, including Arizona (which has flip-flopped over the years), it has become a day for renewing commitment to community service. In 1993, the federal government established the Corporation for National and Community Service to, among other things, coordinate King Day volunteerism opportunities across the country. The day is now the MLK Day of Service. Even the Obamas have taken a prominent role in promoting that aspect of the holiday. This year they volunteered to help fix up a public school building.

Now, I have no problem with that. King was not big on parties and accolades to mark his birthdate, which is actually January 15 but is observed as a federal holiday the third Monday in January. But this is my question, especially to the LePages of this country: Why aren’t Americans expected to volunteer to do good on Presidents Day or Memorial Day or Labor Day or Columbus Day? Why is this day so different from other federal holidays?

Just say "NO"?

The GOP is returning to power in the U.S. House of Representatives and rather than talking about reaching out to Democrats, they are continuing – and even upping – their campaign to effectively end Barack Obama’s once-promising presidency.

Check out this article:

http://readersupportednews.org/off-site-opinion-section/72-72/4492-republicans-aim-info-war-at-obama

Since 2008, the GOP has pursued a just-say-no campaign to Obama. Now that they are in leadership in the House, they still haven’t given us anything to say “yes” to when it comes to fixing all that’s broke in our economy, health system, criminal justice system, public school system and on and on. And there is all this kinda sorta racism among the vocal GOPers and the Tea Party folk that the President and the Democratic Party have not shown the courage to address.

Now is the time to reach out to your senators and representatives. Tell them what’s on your mind. And in addition to regular e-mail, make use of Facebook and Twitter and talk radio and any other medium to which you have access. http://www.congress.org/congressorg/directory/congdir.tt

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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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.