History > 2006 > USA > Race relations

R.J. Matson

NY, The New York Observer and Roll Call        Cagle        18.1.2006
http://cagle.msnbc.com/politicalcartoons/PCcartoons/matson.asp

Martin Luther King.

Hip-Hop Is Spoken Here,

but With a Queens Accent

May 21, 2006
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE

There is not much racism in Howard Beach, say young people in Howard Beach. Just look at our clothes. Listen to our music. Listen to how we talk.

"In this neighborhood, it doesn't matter what color you are," said Lorenzo Rea, as he sat outside Gino's Pizzeria on Cross Bay Boulevard. "Everyone's listening to hip-hop, wearing G-Unit."

It has been two decades since a gang of whites here chased a black man to his death, and about a year since Nicholas Minucci was accused of fracturing the skull of a black man with a baseball bat. Howard Beach is still a mostly white, mostly Italian neighborhood, with a lingering — and, people there insist, unfair — reputation for prejudice.

But it is now also a neighborhood where the mostly white, mostly Italian kids favor the same style and music as their peers over in East New York and New Lots.

There may still be a few people around here "who have a problem," Mr. Rea allows.

"But if they don't like black people," he said, "they're still dressing in the clothes, listening to the music."

Whether such emulation is heartfelt or superficial is always up for debate, and it is in the hate-crime trial of Mr. Minucci, who admitted to investigators that he called out a too-familiar word beginning with the letter "n" to the man said to be his victim, preceded by the greeting "What up?"

His lawyers maintain that Mr. Minucci, 19, was defending himself against a robbery attempt, and during jury selection last week, they suggested that the word was not meant as an insult.

Most teenagers in Howard Beach, of course, weren't even born when the Rev. Al Sharpton led a march through their neighborhood to protest the 1986 episode, to jeering and taunting from the locals. During their adolescence, the city's name ceased to be synonymous with violent crime and racial tension. Where their parents feared the ghetto, they romanticize it, idolizing the swaggering culture and music born there.

"I got friends from all over," said Matt Martocci, a carrot-topped, buzz-cut 18-year-old, horsing around with some of them near a Howard Beach park on Thursday.

"We all listen to hip-hop. Look at how we're dressed," he said, pointing his thumbs at his immaculate navy Sean John track suit and gold chain.

Some of his friends live in New Howard, the neatly kept, almost entirely white district west of Cross Bay Boulevard where last year's attack took place. Some live in Old Howard, on the other side of the brackish creek spilling into Jamaica Bay. Many hail from Ozone Park or Lindenwood, more racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods on the other side of the Belt Parkway.

But they have hip-hop in common. They listen to Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Cam'Ron, and Fabolous. They wear G-Unit, Sean John and other hip-hop labels like Rocawear, the same brand-new baseball caps, stickers still affixed to the brims, cocked sidewise. Some stick hair-picks in their headbands, though few of them, truth be told, have hair kinky enough to need one. Like any number of white suburbanite kids, they favor black slang, embellished with the Queens accents of their parents.

"Sometimes, when I'm talking to my friends, it'll come out," said Mr. Martocci. "It's just slang. It's the way we talk. You know, I'm like, 'What up, my brutha.' "

His friends all nodded.

There are no high schools in the neighborhood, so when kids get older, they drift off to public high schools in Forest Hills or Ozone Park, or Catholic schools like Christ the King, all of them more racially and ethnically diverse than Howard Beach. Mr. Martocci attends Forest Hills High School, where, he said, his friends include black and Hispanic kids.

"The younger kids, they're not racist at all," Mr. Martocci said. "Everyone's gotten over it."

A few blocks away, in New Howard, a half-dozen or so young men were playing around near an elementary school, talking and wrestling. "We don't live in a bubble," one of them called out. Anthony Borzacchiello, 19, who goes to John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, and hopes to be a defense attorney, agreed. "I went to Christ the King," he said. "It's white and black. Everyone gets along."

Still, there are limits. Mr. Rea, who grew up in Ozone Park and works for a trash hauler, lives in Howard Beach with a Puerto Rican roommate. He listens to a lot of 50 Cent. Some kids call the rapper Fitty. "But I call him Fifty," Mr. Rea says, with a meaningful look. "I try not to go overboard. I don't like my jeans too baggy."

    Hip-Hop Is Spoken Here, but With a Queens Accent, NYT, 21.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/nyregion/21howard.html

Tolerance for a Racial Slur Is a Test for Potential Jurors

May 18, 2006
The New York Times
By COREY KILGANNON

Potential jurors for the trial of a 19-year-old charged in a bias attack in Howard Beach last summer have been asked some unusual questions during jury selection: Do they listen to rap music? Are they familiar with hip-hop culture? Yesterday, the prosecution and defense asked them how they feel about a certain longstanding epithet denigrating black people.

The epithet — or "the N-word," as the lawyer representing the defendant, Nicholas Minucci, repeatedly described it in court — may well be the crux of this racially charged and high-profile case.

Prosecutors in the trial, in State Supreme Court in Queens, will try to establish that Mr. Minucci, who is white, uttered the word as he chased down and beat a 22-year-old black man, Glenn Moore, with a baseball bat on June 29, fracturing Mr. Moore's skull. Mr. Minucci is charged with assault as a hate crime and 18 other counts and faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted on all of them.

Mr. Minucci told police investigators in a videotaped interrogation after the incident that he said, "What up?" — followed by the epithet — in addressing Mr. Moore as he approached him, and that Mr. Moore responded by saying, "What up?"

Mr. Minucci has maintained that his subsequent actions were self-defense against a robbery attempt.

If Mr. Minucci is convicted in the attack, but the jury decides it was not motivated by racial hatred, then he will face a lower sentence.

Prosecutors hope to prove the attack was motivated by such a bias. The defense, meanwhile, is expected to suggest that a young man growing up in a mixed neighborhood in New York City uses "the N word" as a matter of course and that the word no longer carries the racially charged overtones it has historically.

Mr. Minucci's friends and family have said that the word is uttered today more in collegiality than hatred, and that its proliferation in rap music and everyday conversation among young people of various races and ethnicities has changed its meaning and impact.

At one point yesterday, Mr. Minucci's lawyer, Albert Gaudelli, surveyed 11 potential jurors, four of whom were black. He turned to a black man from Queens Village and asked him what he thought about "the N word," explaining that "the N word is going to be an issue in this case, and its use."

The man responded, "It depends on who's saying it and how it's being used."

Mr. Gaudelli said, "At one time, it had only one meaning, as a pejorative term, but today it means many things, or can mean many things." He motioned toward the prosecutors and said of the case, "They have to prove that it is bias."

He told the jury pool, "The word in and of itself dose not establish bias. Does everyone agree with that?" This elicited a murmur of faint agreement.

However, for all the assertions that the word has become harmless, neither Mr. Gaudelli nor anyone else in the courtroom actually uttered it.

Outside the courtroom, Mr. Minucci's mother, Maria Minucci, discussed the word in explaining his actions. She calls the case politically motivated and charges that prosecutors have seized upon the word to justify a grandstanding prosecution of her son to get publicity for the Queens district attorney.

She said her son grew up in the ethnically diverse neighborhood of Lindenwood, where his friends were — and still are — the black and Hispanic children from nearby housing projects.

The pejorative has become a form of address, Ms. Minucci said.

"Every kid in the neighborhood uses it," she said. "It doesn't mean the same thing anymore. They all say it all day long, no matter what race. They all grow up saying it now."

She added, "All of Nick's friends — black, white, Spanish, Chinese — they all use the word. You should hear when they talk on the phone to him in jail. "

Ms. Minucci suggested that such a shift has been "the best thing possible for that word" because through its use "it's lost a lot of its power and hatred."

Clearly, not all prospective jurors felt that way. At one point, Mr. Gaudelli objected to the possible selection of one black woman who "felt that the use of the N-word is automatically biased and prejudiced," he said.

Under questioning by Justice Richard L. Buchter, she said, "I guess I'm from the old school. I still find it offensive when I hear it."

She eventually acknowledged that under certain circumstances she might see it otherwise.

Not surprisingly, prosecutors seemed to be looking for jurors who still hear poison in the word. One prosecutor, Michelle Goldstein, asked potential jurors it they were familiar with hip-hop terminology.

"Do you listen to rap music?" she asked a woman who appeared to be under 30. The woman nodded.

"Sure you do," Ms. Goldstein said. "It's all over the place. Clearly, there are offensive words. Just because rap artists use a word does not mean it is not offensive to people."

She turned to a white man in the jury pool who said the word must be evaluated in context.

"You have to look at who is communicating the word," he said. "Words have different meanings and annoy different people."

She asked a white male schoolteacher, "Wouldn't you agree that certain words are more commonplace today than 20 years ago when they were pejoratives?"

"Not in my classroom," the man snapped back, prompting laughter.

Suggesting that the word has not lost its sting, Ms. Goldstein compared it to "sweetheart," saying it means one thing when used by one's fiancé but something very different if uttered by a stranger to a woman on the street.

The defense and the prosecution both asked the jury pool if they would be biased against Howard Beach, which two decades ago was the location of another high-profile racial attack.

In the end, the jury of 12 was picked: four blacks, four whites, three Hispanics and one Asian. Two of the five alternates are black.

    Tolerance for a Racial Slur Is a Test for Potential Jurors, NYT, 18.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/nyregion/18howard.html

Schools Plan in Nebraska Is Challenged

May 17, 2006
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

In a constitutional challenge to a state law that would divide the Omaha public schools into three racially identifiable districts, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sued the governor of Nebraska and other state officials yesterday in federal court in Omaha, arguing that the law "intentionally furthers racial segregation."

Gov. Dave Heineman, a Republican, called the suit "a distraction" to recent talks intended to bring an accommodation among warring school superintendents. His spokesman said Nebraska's attorney general, Jon Bruning, also a Republican, would represent Mr. Heineman and the education officials named as defendants.

That task, however, may put Mr. Bruning in an awkward position. Before lawmakers passed the legislation and Mr. Heineman signed it on April 13, Mr. Bruning wrote that he expected legal challenges because its provisions dividing the Omaha district could violate the federal Constitution's equal protection clause.

"We believe the state may face serious risk due to the potential constitutional problems raised" by the law, Mr. Bruning wrote in a letter distributed to lawmakers. Mary Nelson, a spokeswoman, said yesterday that the attorney general had not yet read the lawsuit and would not comment.

The law, intended to resolve a boundary dispute between the Omaha schools and largely white suburban districts, created a learning community of area school districts that would operate with a common tax levy and required them to draw up an integration plan for metropolitan Omaha.

An amendment that passed late in the legislative session required that the Omaha public schools be split by 2008 into three districts following the attendance areas of existing high schools. The lawsuit argues that because Omaha is racially segregated by neighborhood, dividing the district that way would create one largely black, one largely white and one mostly Hispanic district.

The suit says the law violates the constitutional principle that in public education "the doctrine of separate but equal has no place."

The prime force behind the provision of the law under challenge was Senator Ernie Chambers, Nebraska's only black legislator, who argued that Omaha schools were already segregated and that the plan would allow blacks to control a district in which their children were a majority.

Theodore M. Shaw, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund Inc., who filed the suit on behalf of the Omaha branch of the N.A.A.C.P., said he respected Mr. Chambers's effort to give minority communities increased control over school administration.

"But we disagree with actions that will exacerbate segregation in the public schools," Mr. Shaw said. "I mean this is 2006, in a society that is diverse and multicultural."

    Schools Plan in Nebraska Is Challenged, NYT, 17.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/17/us/17naacp.html

Clyde Kennard with his sister, Sara Tarpley,
at O'Hare Airport in Chicago after his 1963 release from a Mississippi prison. He died that year.

Corbis/Bettmann        NYT        May 4, 2006

Pardon Unlikely for Civil Rights AdvocatE
NYT        4.5.2006        http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/04/us/04pardon.html
 

Pardon Unlikely for Civil Rights Advocate

May 4, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi acknowledges that Clyde Kennard suffered a grievous wrong at the hands of state officials more than 45 years ago. But he says he will not grant a posthumous pardon to Mr. Kennard, a black man who was falsely imprisoned after trying to desegregate a Mississippi college.

Mr. Kennard moved home to Hattiesburg, Miss., after seven years in the Army in Germany and Korea and three years as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. He wanted to finish his education at the local college.

But because that college, Mississippi Southern, was reserved for whites, state officials not only rejected Mr. Kennard's repeated applications but also plotted to kill him.

They kept him out of college by convicting him of helping to steal $25 of chicken feed based on what the sole witness now says was perjury. The 1960 conviction drew a seven-year prison term, and Mr. Kennard died of cancer in 1963.

Last month, Mr. Kennard's supporters asked Governor Barbour, a Republican, for a pardon. The state parole board must first make a recommendation, but Mr. Barbour has already said he will not consider granting one.

"The governor hasn't pardoned anyone, be it alive or deceased," said Mr. Barbour's spokesman, Pete Smith. "The governor isn't going to issue a pardon here."

Mr. Smith added that a pardon would be an empty gesture.

"The governor believes that Clyde Kennard was wronged, and if he were alive today his rights would be restored," Mr. Smith said. "There's nothing the governor can do for Clyde Kennard right now."

Mr. Kennard's case, which was the subject of a recent three-month investigation by The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., has also been pursued by students at Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill., and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University's law school, in Chicago. Several of the students involved said they were baffled by Mr. Barbour's response.

"Please," said Mona Ghadiri, 17, a senior at Stevenson High, addressing Governor Barbour, "if you are going to say no, at least give us a decent reason."

The only evidence against Mr. Kennard was the testimony of a black man named Johnny Lee Roberts, then 19, who said that Mr. Kennard, 33, had asked him to steal the chicken feed. Mr. Roberts, who did the stealing, received a suspended sentence. Mr. Kennard, convicted as an accessory, got a year for every $3.57 of feed.

Mr. Roberts has recanted, first to Jerry Mitchell of The Clarion-Ledger and then in a sworn statement before a judge.

"Kennard did not ask me to steal," Mr. Roberts said in the sworn statement. "Kennard did not ask me to do anything illegal. Kennard is not guilty of burglary or any other crime."

"I have always felt bad about what happened to Clyde," Mr. Roberts continued. "He was a good man."

Joyce A. Ladner, a sociologist, remembered being mentored by Mr. Kennard when she was a teenager. "He was a quiet, very dignified guy, a real gentleman," Ms. Ladner said of Mr. Kennard.

Aubrey K. Lucas, the director of admissions at the college when Mr. Kennard applied, recalled in an interview that it was the governor, J. P. Coleman, who decided against admitting Mr. Kennard.

That was a mistake, said Mr. Lucas, who went on to be president of what became the University of Southern Mississippi. "Kennard would have been the perfect person to integrate this university," Mr. Lucas said. "He didn't bring attorneys with him. He didn't bring the N.A.A.C.P. leadership."

There was little question of Mr. Kennard's qualifications.

"Everybody who knew him refers to him as brilliant — not as a smart man but as a brilliant man," said Barry Bradford, the teacher at Stevenson High who directed its project on Mr. Kennard, available at www.clydekennard.org.

State authorities had a different reaction. The files of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the state's segregationist spy agency, show that killing or framing Mr. Kennard was openly discussed as preferable to allowing him to enroll at the college.

March 30 was Clyde Kennard Day in Mississippi, and Governor Barbour issued a proclamation. He urged citizens to remember Mr. Kennard's "determination, the injustices he suffered, and his significant role in the history of the civil rights movement in Mississippi."

There has apparently never been a posthumous pardon in Mississippi, but there have been such pardons in 10 other states and in the federal system. Yesterday, Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana posthumously pardoned 78 people convicted of sedition early in the last century.

Mr. Lucas said pardoning Mr. Kennard might cost Mr. Barbour a few votes.

"There are some people around here still," Mr. Lucas said, "who think we should be separate as races and who refuse to see the errors of our past. But I can't imagine it would be a factor in his re-election."

    Pardon Unlikely for Civil Rights Advocate, NYT, 4.5.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/04/us/04pardon.html

New York dispatch

Guess who's coming to dinner?

In the first of his weekly dispatches from New York,
Paul Harris reveals how casual racism among the white middle classes is still rife in parts of the United States

Thursday April 20, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

Lizzie was charming and fun in the way only old ladies from the Deep South can be. Her voice was not so much tinged by a lilting accent as positively laden with it. She was 80 years old and as full of life as someone a quarter of her age. She was funny and warm, kind and intelligent. She had studied political science at college and then travelled the world. She was deeply Republican but her opinions could surprise. On the hot button conservative issue of the day - abortion - she was keenly pro-choice, loudly declaring that she could not stand it when men told women what to do. 'And it is ALWAYS men who talk about abortion,' she said with a glint in her eye. 'Well, it's none of their damned business.' She was, in short, the perfect dinner guest.

Until she started talking about 'the niggers'. And 'how lazy' they were. It is hard to underestimate the shock value of the N word in American polite society. Or impolite society come to that. There is nothing so offensive. To hear Lizzie - especially someone as seemingly sweet and fun as Lizzie - use the word openly was a gobsmacking experience. It also raised some fairly unexpected questions when it comes to table manners. How do you react? Especially as she was a neighbour invited to a family dinner party. Cowardice won the day. Nervous glances were exchanged. The subject was changed.

But Lizzie did, inadvertently, reveal some truths about the American experience that are too often glossed over. White people - especially intelligent and educated white people - calmly describing their fellow American citizens as niggers is too often portrayed as a thing of the past. Or of ignorant red necks. That all ended in the 1960s, the official version goes. Martin Luther King and JFK put a stop to it. The truth is far different. Things have changed hugely since the 1960s but that period of time is not yet history.

For the really scary thing about Lizzie talking about 'niggers' was not that she had those opinions. It was that she clearly was unaware voicing them would be shocking. It was a useful reminder of how close some 'history' really is. There are people alive today who have been involved in lynching black Americans or those working for their civil rights.

Recently several prominent cases have been reopened, most notably in Mississippi. Just taking one look at the de facto segregation of many American cities into black and white neighbourhoods shows how far there is to go. As do incidents like that surrounding the resignation of Republican Senator Trent Lott in 2002. Lott had spoken of his admiration for pro-segregationist presidential candidate Strom Thurmond in the 1960s. At Thurmond's 100th birthday party Lott had declared: 'When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.'

Again what is shocking is not the bar room prejudice. Let's face it, few of us are entirely prejudice free. No, what is horrifying about that comment is the casualness with which it was doled out. Like Lizzie's, it is a sentiment born not of secret and furtive dislike, but of open and casual racism. So casual, in fact, that it is assumed to be the norm. It is a way of saying: Well, we all think that don't we?

Luckily the majority of Americans don't. I know black Britons far more at ease in America than back home in the UK. They see more opportunities here, and more acceptance. In the shape of Condoleezza Rice (and before her, Colin Powell) Americans have black politicians that could (if only they had wanted to) conceivably win the White House. By contrast a black PM in Downing Street still seems a long way off.

But it is always useful to be reminded of how far America has got to go in terms of race as well as how far America has come. To remember that current events take a very long time to fossilise into history and that until then we still have to live with them. So for that, Lizzie, I thank you.

    Guess who's coming to dinner?, G, 20.4.2006, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/columnists/story/0,,1757533

Alabama Legislature OKs pardon for Rosa Parks, others

Updated 4/18/2006 9:03 AM ET
USA Today

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The Alabama Legislature gave final approval to a bill that sets up a process to pardon civil rights icon Rosa Parks and hundreds of others arrested for violating segregation-era laws.

The sponsor of the bill, Democratic Rep. Thad McClammy, said the legislation could lead to pardons for Parks, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and hundreds of others convicted of violating laws aimed at keeping the races separate. McClammy said the arrests date back as far as the early 1900s.

The bill, named "The Rosa Parks Act" was amended in the Senate to allow museums such as The Rosa Parks Library and Museum in Montgomery to continue to display records of the arrests.

Parks was arrested 50 years ago for refusing to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus, an event that sparked the historic Montgomery bus boycott.

"This would grant pardons on request to anyone convicted under the Jim Crow laws," McClammy said, referring to the name often used to refer to the segregation-era laws.

The House voted 91-0 to approve Senate changes and pass the bill late Monday, about two hours before the 2006 regular session of the Legislature was scheduled to end.

The legislation now goes to Gov. Bob Riley, who has not said if he plans to sign it. Spokesman Jeff Emerson said Riley would review the bill and then decide.

Some black lawmakers have questioned whether Parks and other civil rights figures should be pardoned when the laws they violated have been ruled unconstitutional.

"Martin Luther King and the others were arrested with pride," said Rep. John Rogers.

    Alabama Legislature OKs pardon for Rosa Parks, others, UT, 18.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-18-parks-pardon_x.htm

Two athletes charged in race-tainted rape case

Tue Apr 18, 2006 12:35 PM ET
Reuters

RALEIGH, North Carolina (Reuters) - Two white lacrosse players from elite Duke University were arrested on Tuesday and charged with raping a black woman at a team party, in a case that has freshly exposed race and class tensions in America.

The two 20-year-old men, Reade Seligmann and Collin Finnerty, surrendered on charges of rape, sexual offense and kidnapping and were booked into the Durham County Jail in North Carolina. Bond was set at $400,000 for each and Seligmann was released on bond a few hours later, a jail official said. Through their lawyers, both have maintained their innocence.

The two arrested students are accused of raping a student from the predominantly black North Carolina Central University in Durham, who had been hired to dance at a March 13 party at an off-campus home shared by three of the players.

The 27-year-old mother of two told police the next day that she had been raped by three white men at the party. A news report quoted a neighbor as saying at least one man hurled a racial taunt from the house as the woman was leaving.

"It's a perfect storm," Duke law professor James Coleman said earlier this month of the case. "It involves race, privilege ... It involves arrogance, sex, athletes, the South," Coleman said on NBC television, after he was named to lead a university probe of the lacrosse team's culture.

Both arrested men played on the nationally ranked Duke lacrosse team. Lacrosse, a sport originated by American Indians, has long been associated with exclusive schools but its popularity has spread widely in recent years.

Defense attorneys demanded that prosecutor Mike Nifong drop the case after DNA tests of 46 players on the team failed to connect them with the accuser. Nifong refused and a state court judge sealed an indictment in the case on Monday.

The coach of Duke's men's lacrosse team resigned and the university canceled the team's season after weeks of protests that supported either the lacrosse players or the woman.

The case has sparked intense U.S. media coverage and highlighted tensions in Durham, where the annual cost of tuition and board at Duke exceeds the average annual income of city families.

"The entire world is watching Durham and North Carolina," said William Barber, the state head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "How we handle this will determine what kind of community we are," he told a news conference earlier this month.

Nifong, who is seeking reelection, has defended his handling of the case.

"The reason that I took this case is because this case says something about Durham that I'm not going to let be said," he said in a candidates debate, according to local WRAL television. "I'm not going to allow Durham's view in the minds of the world to be a bunch of lacrosse players at Duke raping a black girl from Durham."

Rape cases have long been a feature of U.S. racial debates. Accusations that black men raped or even leered at white women prompted lynchings and high-profile trials in the century that followed the 1861-1865 U.S. Civil War.

A 1987 allegation by black teenager Tawana Brawley in New York that she was assaulted by a group of six whites sparked a national debate over her truthfulness and helped propel civil rights activist Rev. Al Sharpton to national prominence. A grand jury threw out the case, citing lack of evidence and inconsistencies in her story.

    Two athletes charged in race-tainted rape case, R, 18.4.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyid=2006-04-18T163521Z_01_N18351588_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-LACROSSE.xml

Race a focal point in Duke scandal

Posted 4/16/2006 4:43 AM ET
USA Today

DURHAM, N.C. (AP) — Mayor Bill Bell is black. So are Police Chief Steven W. Chalmers, City Manager Patrick Baker and a majority of the city council. Durham's population is almost as black as it is white. So why is it that some blacks like Preston Bizzell, a 61-year-old Air Force veteran who said he's never experienced racism in his 30 years in Durham, believe justice here is swifter and harsher for a black man than a white one?

Bizzell sat on his bicycle recently and stared at the house where a black stripper claims she was raped and beaten by three white Duke University lacrosse players. He's convinced if the alleged attackers had been students at historically black North Carolina Central University, and their accuser white, "that same day, somebody would have been arrested."

"They wouldn't have spent that money (on DNA tests) over at that black university over there just to make sure they didn't do that," said Bizzell, a resident of the Walltown neighborhood, where some blacks still refer to the Duke campus as "the plantation." "No, no. If them girls had said, 'Him and him,' you're going to jail."

Without question, the case has racial overtones. But after a month of intense media scrutiny, it's hard to tell whether the coverage has shone a spotlight on existing racial tensions in Durham, or is creating those tensions.

Bell bristles at the suggestion that the rape allegations have somehow turned up the heat on simmering racial tensions in Durham. He says Durham has no more racial trouble than any city its size.

To him, comments like Bizzell's are more about the state of the country as a whole, where blacks are represented in jails and prisons out of proportion to their percentage in the population, as they are among the poor and poorly educated.

"I think it tends to be more out of frustration, with wanting to say something," he said. "I think it's more based on history."

Attorney Kerry Sutton, who represents one of the players, said it is outsiders who are injecting race into the story.

"They've made it a much bigger element than it ever should have been," she said.

On March 13, two black women went to an off-campus house to perform for members of the lacrosse team, which has only one black member. The accuser, a 27-year-old student at N.C. Central, has reportedly said she was subjected to racial slurs, and told police she was dragged into a bathroom and raped.

At a forum last week on the Central campus, a vocal, mostly black crowd peppered District Attorney Mike Nifong with questions about why no one has been charged and why the FBI has not been called in to help investigate this as a hate crime.

Joe Cheshire, who represents one of the team captains, characterized much of what was said as, "We black people are mistreated by the criminal justice system, so what we need to do now is go out and mistreat white people."

Sutton finds it ironic that anyone would suggest Nifong was dragging his feet because the players are white, especially when he is taking so much heat for pursuing the case at all.

"I've never known Mike Nifong to make a decision based on the race of a victim or a defendant or an attorney or the judge or anybody," she said. "That is simply not a factor."

Bell, a former city council chairman and three-term mayor, said he's seen Durham reduced in news reports to "a city of poor blacks ... and you've got Duke off to its own — a white university, a wealthy university."

In truth, he said, Durham's unemployment rate is just 4.4%. It's home to Research Triangle Park and its many high-tech companies. Two black-owned banks and the nation's largest black-owned insurance company are also based in Durham.

"We do have poverty," Bell said of his city of 187,000 residents. "But what city this size doesn't?"

As for the so-called racial tension he's read so much about, Bell hasn't seen it in the racially mixed crowds that have peacefully protested the alleged rape. "I'd say given the demographics of this community, I think you'll find more people are united on issues than are divided," he said.

But in a recent interview with The Associated Press, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said history can't help but loom large over this case. It is particularly horrible because these white men hired black women to strip for them.

"That fantasy's as old as slave masters impregnating young slave girls," he said.

Cheshire found Jackson's comment odd, since the lacrosse players did not specifically ask for black strippers.

"There is no slave-master mentality here, and that's just another perfect example of ... self-absorbed race pandering," Cheshire said.

Conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has suggested that Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton haven't visited Durham because of its "possibility of being a Tawana Brawley situation." He was referring to the 15-year-old black girl who claimed in 1987 she was raped, smeared with feces and scrawled with racial slurs by six white law enforcement officials — a claim championed by Sharpton but later discredited.

Jackson and others have suggested that even if the rape allegations are proven false, the racial slurs are enough to make this case worthy of such a national dialogue. One witness has said someone at the party shouted, "Hey bitch! Thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt."

That it happened at a university as prestigious as Duke, and among "some of its choice young men," makes that dialogue all the more necessary, Jackson said.

"The character of this thing is chilling," he said. "Something happened that everybody's ashamed of, nobody's proud of ..."

Even if some racial epithets were used, people "do say stupid things," Sutton said. When announcing the negative DNA results, even Cheshire acknowledged that doesn't mean there are not moral and ethical issues raised by the case.

Jackson said he's been too busy with immigration issues and the upcoming New Orleans election to visit Durham, but plans to come at some point. Sharpton had planned to attend a rally outside the party house this Sunday but canceled after its organizer asked him to stay away for now.

"We don't want our good to be turned into a racial issue," said Bishop John Bennett of the Church of the Apostolic Revival International. "I just think his coming may stir some people up."

There has been speculation of violence should no one be charged. Bell calls that expectation another sign of bias, recalling that last summer, when three seven-foot crosses were burned around town, whites and blacks came together to denounce the acts.

Bell arrived in Durham in 1968, the week the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. He said the city was an oasis of calm and civility during that crisis.

"We did not have the looting, the burning, the rioting," he said. And today, no matter what happens in the Duke lacrosse case, "I have no fear of that."

    Race a focal point in Duke scandal, UT, 16.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-16-duke-race_x.htm

Nebraska goes back to dividing schools on racial lines

Saturday April 15, 2006
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Guardian

Fifty years after America abolished segregated schools, the state of Nebraska was yesterday accused of seeking to carve up its largest school district along broadly racial lines: white, African-American and Hispanic.

Under a new measure signed into law by the governor, Dave Heineman, on Thursday night, Omaha's highly regarded public school system would be divided into three racially distinct entities.

North-eastern Omaha would have a mainly African-American school district, south-eastern Omaha would be largely Hispanic, and the relatively wealthy sections in the west of the city would be packaged into a largely white school district. The changes take effect from July 2008.

The division, which was proposed by the only African-American member of the state legislature last week, was adopted at breakneck speed.

Its provisions represent one of the most sweeping challenges to the desegregation of American state schools mandated by the supreme court in 1954. Nebraska's attorney general, Joe Bruning, warned that it could be in violation of the constitution, and would be challenged in the courts.

The measure has been opposed by a powerful coalition of business leaders - including Warren Buffett, the billionaire Omaha-based financier who is the world's second richest man after Bill Gates - as well as civil rights organisations.

"Basically, it is state-sanctioned segregation," said state senator Patrick Bourne who voted against the bill. "This sets race relations back a long way, and we are going to be spending a lot of money on lawyers' fees that we should be spending on our kids."

However, Ernie Chambers, who proposed the division, argued that local schools have been effectively segregated for years and that the stated aim of integration - to give black and white children an equal education in government schools - had been discredited.

"There has always been segregation. There is now, and always will be so rather than go through all this worthless talk that has gone on now for generations about integration, let's talk about getting better schools," he told the Guardian.

He said the system in Omaha discriminated against children in poor, largely African-American neighbourhoods, by denying those schools adequate resources. He said the new law would improve the quality of public schools.

But others are sceptical, noting that state schools are financed by property taxes, which would put schools in poor neighbourhoods at a disadvantage.

"They have opened a Pandora's Box. I don't think they are going to be able to solve this without having a lot of blood on the floor," said Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, a political science professor at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. "It's segregation just trimmed around the edges."

    Nebraska goes back to dividing schools on racial lines, G, 15.4.2006, http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1754360,00.html

A Former Trooper's Take on His Race Profiling Case

April 5, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

HAMILTON, N.J., April 1 — Twice every workday, John I. Hogan drives past Milepost 63 on the New Jersey Turnpike and feels his pulse begin to quicken.

These days, he makes the trip as a civilian, just another commuter, as he heads between his home in Bordentown and his job as a salesman in Jamesburg. Eight years ago, though, Mr. Hogan was a decorated New Jersey state trooper who patrolled the turnpike and called himself "King of the Big Road," when a brief encounter near Exit 7A changed his life, the lives of others and police policy.

It was late one spring night in 1998 when Mr. Hogan and a trooper named James Kenna maneuvered their police cruiser alongside a minivan carrying four young men, three of them black and one Hispanic, and ordered the driver to pull over. It was supposed to be an ordinary traffic stop, but then the van rolled backward and the troopers fired 11 shots, wounding three of the four men inside.

Because the young men were unarmed and the State Police had long been accused of stopping and searching drivers solely because of their skin color, the shooting set off a political uproar about the use of racial profiling in the war on drugs.

Mr. Hogan and Mr. Kenna were seen as national symbols of police discrimination and were indicted for attempted murder and aggravated assault. Those charges were eventually dropped, but the troopers were forced to resign after pleading guilty to lying to investigators about the shooting and repeatedly falsifying documents to conceal the fact that they stopped minority drivers because of their race. They each paid a $280 fine.

Now, after years of living with that case as a stigma "that just won't go away," Mr. Hogan, 37, is trying to put the experience in a different perspective by publishing a book, "Turnpike Trooper." Mr. Hogan writes that he and Mr. Kenna were victims — of fate, which placed them at the scene of the shooting, then of a long line of elected officials, civil rights leaders and law enforcement officials angling for political gain.

Mr. Hogan's book contradicts so many statements he made to investigators in 1998 and in court when he pleaded guilty in 2002 that he had difficulty finding a publisher, and he finally decided to pay to have it published. Since the book's publication several months ago, he has also struggled to find an audience for it.

"I'm at peace with what happened," he said last Wednesday in an interview outside his office. "Sometimes, though, I think people just want this whole thing to go away."

In "Turnpike Trooper" Mr. Hogan writes that he was raised in a small, predominantly white town, loved sports, saluted the flag and considered troopers the equivalent of "Greek gods." He excelled once on the force, winning a prestigious assignment to the turnpike, and was nominated for trooper of the year.

In the book, Mr. Hogan says no one encouraged him to pick out minority drivers, flatly contradicting his own court testimony in 2002. Although New Jersey has since stiffened its guidelines against racial profiling and many experts say it is both unconstitutional and ineffective, he defends the practice, arguing that while drug use cuts across racial lines, his experience led him to believe that drug trafficking was dominated by blacks and Latinos.

Mr. Hogan also writes that he found it useful to his work as a trooper to listen to rap performers like Nas, N.W.A. and Notorious B.I.G.

"Staying cool, composed and speaking to individuals in a language they understood, and even began to trust, helped me be successful," he writes.

That was of little assistance on the night of April 23, 1998, when he and Mr. Kenna stopped the minivan.

Mr. Hogan writes that he fired only after the driver had backed up, struck his leg and knocked him over, and that he feared the young men were drug dealers trying to kill him and Mr. Kenna. (The driver said the minivan slipped into reverse.)

When he pleaded guilty in 2002 he acknowledged that he had lied to investigators about the circumstances that led to stopping the minivan and about crucial details of the shooting. He also testified that 75 police officers had urged him to lie and that some even took him back to the scene so he could prepare a more plausible story.

Mr. Hogan, who maintains the same close-cropped hair and chiseled build that he had as a trooper, explains the contradictions between the book and his earlier statements by saying he no longer has any motivation to lie.

"This is, every word of it, the truth," he said. "I just want the truth to come out."

"Turnpike Trooper" may be a bid for redemption, but it offers little in the way of remorse.

It makes acerbic references to the state's payment of $12.9 million to the four young men to settle the case, and it makes little mention of the injuries three of the men suffered. In the interview, he suggested that he felt as much sympathy for himself and Mr. Kenna as he did for them.

"There were a lot of people whose lives were affected that night," he said. "It's unfortunate that it happened, but there's no way to change the past."

Peter Neufeld, the lawyer who represented two of the shooting victims in their civil suit, said it was outrageous for Mr. Hogan to portray himself as a victim.

"These young men still have bullets in them," Mr. Neufeld said. "And it happened because Hogan and Kenna stopped them for no reason other than the color of their skin. Then they lied about it."

The omissions and discrepancies in Mr. Hogan's book seemed of little concern to the people who appeared on Thursday at a book signing in Hamilton Township, about five miles from where the shooting occurred. Sitting with his fiancée as he autographed a few dozen copies, Mr. Hogan said he appreciated the friendly welcome, especially after the indifference he had encountered while trying to promote the book.

Taking a microphone, Mr. Hogan asked if there were any questions from the 60 people in the audience, all of whom were white and several of whom wore New Jersey State Police T-shirts or hats. A man in a Nascar shirt asked whether he had made any television appearances. (A few local cable programs, but no luck with the networks or affiliates.)

Then a retired trooper, Walt Catlidge, asked his former colleague whether he planned a sequel.

"No," Mr. Hogan said, shaking his head. "I think this was enough for me."

    A Former Trooper's Take on His Race Profiling Case, NYT, 8.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/nyregion/05trooper.html

Mother builds legacy for son slain in Ohio

Updated 4/7/2006 1:17 AM

By Dan Horn, The Cincinnati Enquirer
USA Today

People think they know Angela Leisure's son.

They hear the name Timothy Thomas, and right away they've taken measure of his short life: He is a martyr who was shot by a police officer. Or, he is a criminal who caused his own death by running from police.

GALLERY: Ohio mother honors slain teen

Thomas, a 19-year-old black man, was shot and killed April 7, 2001, by a white police officer. The shooting sparked a period of unrest in Cincinnati that led to race riots.

Leisure has struggled the five years since her son's death to build a life without him and to preserve memories that involve something other than riots and race relations.

"People think they know him, but they don't," Leisure says. "I see him only as my child."

Since her son's death, Leisure, 39, has spoken at public gatherings about racial tolerance and pursued a lawsuit against Cincinnati that ended with a settlement of more than $1 million. Now she is trying to focus on repairing her family.

"Living in Cincinnati, there wasn't any place I could go where people didn't know me, or think they knew me," Leisure says. "It made my heart hurt. I couldn't repair the damage."

She left the city with her daughter, Tangelisa, 15, to a location she doesn't disclose.

Some people tell her the time away will help her heal, but she says they don't understand how much she has lost.

Opinions about Timothy Thomas formed quickly after his death.

Some saw him as the victim of racial profiling. Others saw him as a bad kid who ran from police.

Thomas did run from police — and had run at least twice before — but the 14 misdemeanor charges against the teen were all related to traffic violations.

The off-duty officers who started the chase April 7 weren't looking for Thomas but recognized him and knew about the traffic violations. Officer Steven Roach joined the chase, followed the unarmed Thomas into a dark alley and fired a single, fatal shot.

Roach did not return calls seeking comment. But he has said he feared for his life when he fired.

Cincinnati police officials have said race did not play a role in the case. Roach was later acquitted of negligent homicide charges, but he lost his job after an internal investigation found he gave conflicting explanations for the shooting.

He initially said he fired because he thought Thomas had a gun. He later said he was startled and fired accidentally.

"It was a complex situation," says Walter Reinhaus, president of the Over-the-Rhine Community Council. "But immediately following it, there were a lot of judgments made."

Leisure tried to tell people her son was neither the hero nor the villain.

In the months before his death, Thomas had earned a GED and landed a construction job. He was getting his life in order, Leisure says, because of the birth of his son, Tywon, in early 2001.

When young people told her they were destroying property "for Timothy" during the riots, she scolded them.

"He would not be like this," she told them. "He would not be doing this."

Leisure was determined to define her son's life on her terms by collecting photos, copying family videos and talking about fond memories.

The endeavor took on greater importance two years ago, when Tywon started asking questions about his dad. Her grandson, now 5, was 3 months old when his father died.

"Where's my daddy?" he asked shortly after his third birthday. "How come my daddy's not here?"

Leisure struggled to keep her composure in front of her grandson, saying only that "God needed him."

Leisure made a copy of her wedding video last year so Tywon could see his dad on a happy day. Tywon loved it and quickly learned to run the VCR himself.

Since leaving the city, Leisure worries about her relatives in Cincinnati, especially her 21-year-old son, Terry.

"I tell him, 'Be careful, be careful, be careful,' " says Leisure, who fears her family's notoriety will somehow cause trouble for Terry.

Her hope is that Cincinnati's collaborative agreement — a court-supervised plan to improve police-community relations — will lead to lasting change for the city. This, Leisure says, should be her son's legacy.

    Mother builds legacy for son slain in Ohio, UT, 7.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-06-ohio-mom_x.htm

A.C.L.U. Says Ethnic Bias Steered Georgia Drug Sting

April 6, 2006
The New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE

The American Civil Liberties Union is accusing federal prosecutors of ethnic bias in a sting last summer in which South Asian owners of convenience stores in Georgia were charged with selling household ingredients that could be used to make methamphetamine, a highly addictive drug.

In a legal filing, the A.C.L.U. said yesterday that prosecutors ignored extensive evidence that white-owned stores were selling the same items to methamphetamine makers and focused instead on South Asians to take advantage of language barriers.

The sting sent informants to convenience stores in six counties in rural northwest Georgia beginning in 2003 to buy ingredients that can be used to make the drug — ordinary household items like Sudafed, matches, aluminum foil and charcoal.

Prosecutors said the clerks should have known that the ingredients would be used to make methamphetamine because the informants who bought them said they needed the items to "finish up a cook," slang for making the drug.

But several South Asians said they believed that the informants were talking about barbecue.

Forty-four of the 49 people charged were Indian, and 23 out of 24 stores in the sting were owned or operated by Indians.

Documents filed by the A.C.L.U. yesterday include a sworn statement from an informant in the sting, saying that federal investigators sent informants only to Indian-owned stores, "because the Indians' English wasn't good." The informant said investigators ignored the informant's questions about why so many South-Asian-owned stores were visited in the sting.

Other filings said prosecutors had several tips that more than a dozen white-owned stores were selling the same ingredients, but failed to follow up on them. According to a sworn statement from a witness, law enforcement officials tipped off a white store owner about the investigation and recommended ways to avoid scrutiny.

David E. Nahmias, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, denied any bias. "We prosecute people based on the evidence and the law," Mr. Nahmias said in a statement, "not their race or ethnicity."

To date, he said, 23 defendants have pleaded guilty, and eight cases have been dismissed. Some of those cases were dismissed because prosecutors charged the wrong people because of confusion over names; more than 30 of the defendants share the common Indian surname Patel.

Of 629 convenience stores in the six-county area in the sting, 80 percent are owned or operated by whites, according to the A.C.L.U.'s court filing, but fewer than 1 percent of the stores in the sting are white-owned or operated. The filing said the clerk at the only white-operated store was known widely as a methamphetamine addict whose husband was in prison for making the drug. None of the Indians charged are accused of using or making methamphetamine.

Mr. Nahmias noted that several defendants had already filed motions claiming selective prosecution and that the court had rejected them.

But the A.C.L.U. said that the United States District Court in Rome, Ga., rejected the motions because the group had not provided any evidence. Since then, lawyers have spent $60,000 to track down evidence, hiring private investigators and searching 10,000 documents, according to the A.C.L.U. filing.

    A.C.L.U. Says Ethnic Bias Steered Georgia Drug Sting, NYT, 6.4.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/06/us/06sting.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Martin Luther King shooting tapes released online

April 05, 2006
Times Online
By Sam Knight

Thirty-eight years after he was assassinated on a motel balcony, photographs, recordings and police files that describe the death of Martin Luther King Jr. have been placed on the internet.

On yesterday's anniversary of Dr King's death, the Shelby County Register’s office in Memphis, Tennessee, made available hours of tapes, including hurried police calls from the scene of the crime, hundreds of photographs and thousands of pages of files and transcripts of the trial of James Earl Ray, the man found guilty of the shooting.

Dr King was shot in the jaw while he spoke to supporters from his balcony outside Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel in downtown Memphis in the early evening of April 4, 1968. He was in the city, and under police surveillance, trying to lead a peaceful protest of sanitation workers. He died an hour later.

The assassination was witnessed by dozens of people, including a clutch of police officers and firefighters who were watching Dr King from the locker room of Fire Station No 2, across the road from the motel.

Recordings of their first radio calls to the Memphis emergency despatcher were released yesterday. Through the scramble of voices come the words: "a shooting has occurred.... I'm at the Lorraine in the car... it has been verified that Reverend King has been shot... it has been confirmed that Reverend King has been shot."

The subsequent hour of calls, edited to 18 minutes on the website, show the rapid pace of events that later became the US Government's case against Ray, who first admitted shooting Dr King before recanting and insisting for the rest of his life, with the support of the King family, that he was framed for the crime.

Within moments, police officers can be heard saying that the fatal shot was fired from a run-down flophouse across the road from the motel: "The Reverend King has been shot from a brick building, it's a brick building directly east from the Lorraine Motel."

Then the description of a suspect and a make of car that became crucial evidence in the case against Earl Ray: "Got a description? A young white male, well dressed, a young white male, well dressed, running south from 424 South Main."

Officers are then told to look out for a "late model white Mustang". Minutes later a "bundle" containing a rifle was found outside a record shop.

Ray, an armed robber on the run after escaping from prison in Missouri in April 1967, was arrested in London two months after the shooting. He was held at Heathrow travelling under the name "Ramon George Sneyd" and his fingerprints were found to match those on the rifle found outside the Memphis record shop.

Ray confessed to the assassination, saying he stood in the bathtub of the communal bathroom in the flophouse to take the shot, and was sentenced to serve 99 years in prison. He died in jail in 1998 after four investigations, including a review by the Department of Justice, failed to find evidence to support a theory that Dr King was shot on the orders of a Memphis bar-owner.

Tom Leatherwood, the Register of Shelby County, said that the files surrounding the death of Dr King, including photographs of the flophouse, of Earl Ray and the "bundle", had been kept for years in the county archives before being moved to the register last year.

"I have younger children ranging from 5 to 13," he said. "And they are just not aware of the cost of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King gave his life for civil rights and so many people in America today just take that for granted."

"These files and the despatch tape, especially, are a real slice of history. When I heard it for the first time it was very chilling to me. It can make it very real for a new generation."

    Martin Luther King shooting tapes released online, Ts, 5.4.2006,http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2120209,00.html

Voting Rights Act pointed in a new direction

Updated 4/3/2006 10:19 PM
USA TODAY
By Bill Nichols

MACON, Miss. — Lean, lanky and a fast-talking blur of perpetual motion, Noxubee County Democratic Chairman Ike Brown has roamed the political landscape of eastern Mississippi for 25 years with one clear aim: electing Democrats who are really Democrats.
Brown has no time for moderate white Democrats who might get elected but who would then support Republican policies. "To hell with 'em," Brown says of people he calls "Dixiecrats." "They're not doing me one bit of good."

Brown's lawyer, Wilbur Colom, says he is simply "a tough politician." But the U.S. Justice Department says Brown's take-no-prisoners brand of politics has crossed the line into discrimination against white voters and candidates.

The Justice Department has launched a landmark lawsuit against Brown — the first time the federal government has used the 1965 Voting Rights Act to allege racial discrimination against whites.

Brown calls the suit, which is expected to come to trial this summer, a "nickel-and-dime lawsuit," an effort by the Bush administration to end his successes in building black voter turnout and electing black officials.

Justice Department spokesman Eric Holland accused Brown of "blatant and outrageous violations of the Voting Rights Act." Holland said Brown had committed actions "with the racially discriminatory purpose of defeating candidates that white voters support ... and with the intent of discriminating against black voters and black community leaders who support and work in coalition with whites."

'Extremely remarkable'

Some legal analysts say the suit marks a striking change of focus by the Bush administration on voting rights cases, which until now have centered on discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

"What's going on here in using the Voting Rights Act in this manner by the Justice Department is unprecedented and extremely remarkable," says Steven Mulroy, an assistant professor at the University of Memphis Law School who was a lawyer in the Justice Department's voting rights section from 1991 to 2000. "It's hard to imagine a more dramatic symbol of the change of orientation under the current administration."

The lawsuit has prompted soul-searching within the civil rights community nationally over whether the Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Johnson in 1965, should be used to protect whites.

"We oppose discrimination against any race," says Derrick Johnson, president of the Mississippi NAACP. He expresses deep concern about the Noxubee lawsuit because of the historic pattern of voting rights abuses — including voter intimidation and registration challenges — against blacks in Mississippi. He says those abuses continue and still have not been sufficiently investigated.

"Macon is almost 80% black and the current mayor is white ... and the black community supported him. That does not reek of racial discrimination — that reeks of a community choosing candidates they think will best serve their interests," Johnson says.

Holland rejects that assessment and says the Justice Department has filed enforcement actions under the Voting Rights Act to "protect the rights of black voters in at least 58 of the state's 82 counties, often with multiple actions within the same county."

Brown, who the Justice Department points out served 21 months in prison in the mid-1990s on charges of income tax fraud, says his efforts to elect blacks are no different than the hardball political tactics white politicos have used in Mississippi for generations.

Noxubee County, which is roughly 70% black, has gone from one black elected official to 44 since Brown came here in 1980.

Members of the Noxubee County Board of Supervisors, also named in the initial Justice Department complaint, have signed a consent decree agreeing to take steps to avoid future discrimination against whites. Board President William Oliver says he's seen no evidence of past transgressions.

"If you could find three white people in this county who say black people discriminated against them," Oliver says, "I would like to know."

Angered by 2000 race

Brown acknowledges a fiercely partisan streak he says was sharpened by his fury after watching then-vice president Al Gore lose the 2000 election through a controversial recount in Florida.

"I got angry, upset and everything else," says Brown, who receives no salary in his political post and runs a recycling business. "Everything in my life became colored by R's and D's" — party identifiers.

He says he has no problem supporting whites for office — he campaigned for current Macon Mayor Bob Boykin, who is white. He chuckles when noting that Noxubee has only one white official elected countywide: prosecutor Ricky Walker. "If I could find a black lawyer who lives in the county, we'd get him, too," Brown says with a sly grin.

Colom describes Brown as a character, a political street fighter whose local knowledge is so encyclopedic that he can tell a candidate how many family members — including distant cousins and kin by marriage — his opponent can claim in a particular district.

The Justice Department lawsuit takes a dimmer view of Brown's actions. Some of the suit's allegations:

•Brown recruited black candidates to run in Noxubee knowing that they did not meet state residency requirements.

•Brown has excluded whites from participating in county Democratic affairs, using such tactics as moving the sites of meetings.

•Brown has attempted to prohibit whites from voting in Democratic primary elections by challenging their registrations and absentee ballots.

•Brown and county election officials working with him have discriminated against white voters by rejecting absentee ballots cast by whites on grounds that they are defective while counting black voters' absentee ballots that contained similar defects.

Brown does not rebut specifics of the suit but gives a blanket dismissal: "Bogus."

He also waves off a lawsuit against the Noxubee County Sheriff's Department filed late last year by former deputy Kendrick Slaughter, who is black. Slaughter says charges of disorderly conduct and reckless driving were filed against him by the department in retaliation for his cooperation with the Justice Department on the lawsuit.

Slaughter "is just trying to save his hide," says Brown, who says he knows nothing about the case. Slaughter declined to comment through his lawyer, Jim Waide. A U.S. District Court judge in Jackson has ordered that Slaughter's prosecution be halted. His request for damages is still pending.

Noxubee County Sheriff Albert Walker denies Slaughter's charges.

Precedent potential

Mulroy, the law professor, says the Brown case would result in a significant legal precedent, given that it marks a novel use of the Voting Rights Act.

In tiny Noxubee County — population 12,202, according to a 2005 Census Bureau estimate — it is viewed more as a referendum on Brown, a man everyone seems to know and have a strong opinion about, pro or con.

Take Colom, Brown's lawyer in nearby Columbus. Colom is one of Mississippi's best-known black Republicans. He was a delegate at the 2004 GOP national convention and ran unsuccessfully for state treasurer in 1987. Colom readily acknowledges his concerns about Brown's hard-edged partisanship.

"Ike knows that I think he's probably a net negative influence on the politics of this area," says Colom, who has taken Brown's case without pay. "I don't like his politics. I don't like his view of the world."

But Colom says he believes Mississippi needs less, not more, racial polarization in its political parties. He acknowledges that view mirrors the stance of the Justice Department suit, but he says the suit is not only baseless but also risks widening the state's racial split by making a political martyr of Brown.

"What they complain about Ike Brown doing, I see whites do in every county in Mississippi in every election and the Justice Department does nothing about it," Colom says.

Brown says the situation is simple: If voters in Noxubee's black majority support a candidate and work to get him elected, they expect him to vote and govern as a Democrat. Period.

"Let me tell you what the black folks in this part of the state say," Brown says. "They say: 'We do the voting. And when somebody we support wins, we don't want to be forgotten. When we win, we expect to really win.' "

 
A HISTORY OF VOTING RIGHTS

•Baker v. Carr (1962). Ruled that judges can review disputes over legislative redistricting, abandoning a view that such cases were political questions beyond court authority.

•Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections (1966). Struck down the use of the poll tax.

•South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966). Ruled that Congress has the authority to prevent racial bias in voting and that the Voting Rights Act is a legitimate response to the insidious and pervasive evil that denied blacks the right to vote.

•Perkins v. Matthews (1971). Blocked Canton, Miss., from carrying out an annexation that added new white residents to offset growth in black voting strength.

•Georgia v. United States (1973). Prohibited states that once deprived blacks of the right to vote from making changes in voting procedures without first submitting the changes to the U.S. attorney.

Sources: American Civil Liberties Union; USA TODAY research

    Voting Rights Act pointed in a new direction, UT, 3.4.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-04-03-voting-lawsuit_x.htm

Some ask: Why seek a pardon for Rosa Parks?

Posted 3/20/2006 5:50 PM Updated 3/20/2006 8:00 PM
USA Today

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — During the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott last year, civil rights leaders called for a pardon of Rosa Parks over her arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white man.

The Feb. 22, 1956 file photo shows Rosa Parks after she was arrested during the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala.
AP

But now, some — including the pastor of the church Parks attended in Montgomery — are coming out against the idea.

With a bill moving through the Alabama Legislature to pardon Parks and perhaps hundreds of others for violating segregation-era laws, they say a pardon implies she did something wrong.

"Why would brave people like this need to get a pardon from anyone? Someone needs to tell them that we treated you wrong," the Rev. Joseph Rembert, pastor of St. Paul A.M.E. Church, said Monday. "I want my grandson to know what she did."

However, Mary Smith Ware, 69, urged passage of the pardon legislation. The black woman was arrested and fined $10 for refusing to give up her seat on a crowded city bus about two months before Parks' arrest.

"I should be pardoned because I feel I didn't have to get up and give my seat to anyone," Ware said.

State Rep. Thad McClammy, a black Montgomery Democrat and sponsor of the bill, said the pardons will spell out that they are being issued because the Jim Crow laws were wrong. "I'm in no way trying to compromise history," McClammy said.

The idea of pardoning Parks, who died in October at age 92, and others was raised during the December celebrations in Montgomery honoring the 50th anniversary of her arrest and the start of the Montgomery bus boycott. (Vote: Should violators of Jim Crow laws be pardoned?)

Montgomery Mayor Bobby Bright said he would be uncomfortable pardoning Parks and others.

"They came up and resisted unethical, illegal and inhumane laws. I feel horribly inadequate to pardon someone who did nothing wrong," said Bright, who is white. "We should be asking them to pardon us for the way we treated her and others in that period."

The national president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Charles Steele, said he would like to see the Legislature pardon Parks and others.

Steele, a former member of the Alabama Senate, said he fears that if the arrests remain on the books, someone in the future will look at the records and not understand the moral context of the arrest.

Lillie Mae Bradford, 75, said she was arrested in 1951 after walking to the front of a bus to ask a driver to ask for a different transfer. He said the driver used a racial slur in ordering her to the back. She said that arrest has caused her difficulties over the years.

"It caused me a lot of problems when I tried to get state, federal and city jobs because I had a police record," Bradford said.

The pardons, which would have to be applied for by those arrested or by a family member, would be available to people who were arrested for violating various segregation-era laws, like the prohibition against entering whites-only restaurants and other public places.

    Some ask: Why seek a pardon for Rosa Parks?, UT, 20.3.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-20-parks-pardon_x.htm

Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn

March 20, 2006
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

BALTIMORE — Black men in the United States face a far more dire situation than is portrayed by common employment and education statistics, a flurry of new scholarly studies warn, and it has worsened in recent years even as an economic boom and a welfare overhaul have brought gains to black women and other groups.

Focusing more closely than ever on the life patterns of young black men, the new studies, by experts at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and other institutions, show that the huge pool of poorly educated black men are becoming ever more disconnected from the mainstream society, and to a far greater degree than comparable white or Hispanic men.

Especially in the country's inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban crime rates have declined.

Although the problems afflicting poor black men have been known for decades, the new data paint a more extensive and sobering picture of the challenges they face.

"There's something very different happening with young black men, and it's something we can no longer ignore," said Ronald B. Mincy, professor of social work at Columbia University and editor of "Black Males Left Behind" (Urban Institute Press, 2006).

"Over the last two decades, the economy did great," Mr. Mincy said, "and low-skilled women, helped by public policy, latched onto it. But young black men were falling farther back."

Many of the new studies go beyond the traditional approaches to looking at the plight of black men, especially when it comes to determining the scope of joblessness. For example, official unemployment rates can be misleading because they do not include those not seeking work or incarcerated.

"If you look at the numbers, the 1990's was a bad decade for young black men, even though it had the best labor market in 30 years," said Harry J. Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and co-author, with Peter Edelman and Paul Offner, of "Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men" (Urban Institute Press, 2006).

In response to the worsening situation for young black men, a growing number of programs are placing as much importance on teaching life skills — like parenting, conflict resolution and character building — as they are on teaching job skills.

These were among the recent findings:

¶The share of young black men without jobs has climbed relentlessly, with only a slight pause during the economic peak of the late 1990's. In 2000, 65 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20's were jobless — that is, unable to find work, not seeking it or incarcerated. By 2004, the share had grown to 72 percent, compared with 34 percent of white and 19 percent of Hispanic dropouts. Even when high school graduates were included, half of black men in their 20's were jobless in 2004, up from 46 percent in 2000.

¶Incarceration rates climbed in the 1990's and reached historic highs in the past few years. In 1995, 16 percent of black men in their 20's who did not attend college were in jail or prison; by 2004, 21 percent were incarcerated. By their mid-30's, 6 in 10 black men who had dropped out of school had spent time in prison.

¶In the inner cities, more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

None of the litany of problems that young black men face was news to a group of men from the airless neighborhoods of Baltimore who recently described their experiences.

One of them, Curtis E. Brannon, told a story so commonplace it hardly bears notice here. He quit school in 10th grade to sell drugs, fathered four children with three mothers, and spent several stretches in jail for drug possession, parole violations and other crimes.

"I was with the street life, but now I feel like I've got to get myself together," Mr. Brannon said recently in the row-house flat he shares with his girlfriend and four children. "You get tired of incarceration."

Mr. Brannon, 28, said he planned to look for work, perhaps as a mover, and he noted optimistically that he had not been locked up in six months.

A group of men, including Mr. Brannon, gathered at the Center for Fathers, Families and Workforce Development, one of several private agencies trying to help men build character along with workplace skills.

The clients readily admit to their own bad choices but say they also fight a pervasive sense of hopelessness.

"It hurts to get that boot in the face all the time," said Steve Diggs, 34. "I've had a lot of charges but only a few convictions," he said of his criminal record.

Mr. Diggs is now trying to strike out on his own, developing a party space for rentals, but he needs help with business skills.

"I don't understand," said William Baker, 47. "If a man wants to change, why won't society give him a chance to prove he's a changed person?" Mr. Baker has a lot of record to overcome, he admits, not least his recent 15-year stay in the state penitentiary for armed robbery.

Mr. Baker led a visitor down the Pennsylvania Avenue strip he wants to escape — past idlers, addicts and hustlers, storefront churches and fortresslike liquor stores — and described a life that seemed inevitable.

He sold marijuana for his parents, he said, left school in the sixth grade and later dealt heroin and cocaine. He was for decades addicted to heroin, he said, easily keeping the habit during three terms in prison. But during his last long stay, he also studied hard to get a G.E.D. and an associate's degree.

Now out for 18 months, Mr. Baker is living in a home for recovering drug addicts. He is working a $10-an-hour warehouse job while he ponders how to make a living from his real passion, drawing and graphic arts.

"I don't want to be a criminal at 50," Mr. Baker said.

According to census data, there are about five million black men ages 20 to 39 in the United States.

Terrible schools, absent parents, racism, the decline in blue collar jobs and a subculture that glorifies swagger over work have all been cited as causes of the deepening ruin of black youths. Scholars — and the young men themselves — agree that all of these issues must be addressed.

Joseph T. Jones, director of the fatherhood and work skills center here, puts the breakdown of families at the core.

"Many of these men grew up fatherless, and they never had good role models," said Mr. Jones, who overcame addiction and prison time. "No one around them knows how to navigate the mainstream society."

All the negative trends are associated with poor schooling, studies have shown, and progress has been slight in recent years. Federal data tend to understate dropout rates among the poor, in part because imprisoned youths are not counted.

Closer studies reveal that in inner cities across the country, more than half of all black men still do not finish high school, said Gary Orfield, an education expert at Harvard and editor of "Dropouts in America" (Harvard Education Press, 2004).

"We're pumping out boys with no honest alternative," Mr. Orfield said in an interview, "and of course their neighborhoods offer many other alternatives."

Dropout rates for Hispanic youths are as bad or worse but are not associated with nearly as much unemployment or crime, the data show.

With the shift from factory jobs, unskilled workers of all races have lost ground, but none more so than blacks. By 2004, 50 percent of black men in their 20's who lacked a college education were jobless, as were 72 percent of high school dropouts, according to data compiled by Bruce Western, a sociologist at Princeton and author of the forthcoming book "Punishment and Inequality in America" (Russell Sage Press). These are more than double the rates for white and Hispanic men.

Mr. Holzer of Georgetown and his co-authors cite two factors that have curbed black employment in particular.

First, the high rate of incarceration and attendant flood of former offenders into neighborhoods have become major impediments. Men with criminal records tend to be shunned by employers, and young blacks with clean records suffer by association, studies have found.

Arrests of black men climbed steeply during the crack epidemic of the 1980's, but since then the political shift toward harsher punishments, more than any trends in crime, has accounted for the continued growth in the prison population, Mr. Western said.

By their mid-30's, 30 percent of black men with no more than a high school education have served time in prison, and 60 percent of dropouts have, Mr. Western said.

Among black dropouts in their late 20's, more are in prison on a given day — 34 percent — than are working — 30 percent — according to an analysis of 2000 census data by Steven Raphael of the University of California, Berkeley.

The second special factor is related to an otherwise successful policy: the stricter enforcement of child support. Improved collection of money from absent fathers has been a pillar of welfare overhaul. But the system can leave young men feeling overwhelmed with debt and deter them from seeking legal work, since a large share of any earnings could be seized.

About half of all black men in their late 20's and early 30's who did not go to college are noncustodial fathers, according to Mr. Holzer. From the fathers' viewpoint, support obligations "amount to a tax on earnings," he said.

Some fathers give up, while others find casual work. "The work is sporadic, not the kind that leads to advancement or provides unemployment insurance," Mr. Holzer said. "It's nothing like having a real job."

The recent studies identified a range of government programs and experiments, especially education and training efforts like the Job Corps, that had shown success and could be scaled up.

Scholars call for intensive new efforts to give children a better start, including support for parents and extra schooling for children.

They call for teaching skills to prisoners and helping them re-enter society more productively, and for less automatic incarceration of minor offenders.

In a society where higher education is vital to economic success, Mr. Mincy of Columbia said, programs to help more men enter and succeed in college may hold promise. But he lamented the dearth of policies and resources to aid single men.

"We spent $50 billion in efforts that produced the turnaround for poor women," Mr. Mincy said. "We are not even beginning to think about the men's problem on similar orders of magnitude."

    Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn, NYT, 20.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/national/20blackmen.html?hp&ex=1142917200&en=6ca3ed1b3c6b74ca&ei=5094&partner=homepage

K. Leroy Irvis, First Black Chosen as Speaker of Pennsylvania House, Dies

March 18, 2006
The New York Times

HARRISBURG, Pa., March 17 (AP) — K. Leroy Irvis, a civil rights pioneer and a speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, died on Thursday at a Pittsburgh hospice.

State House records indicated that Mr. Irvis was 86, although his biographer said birth and school records showed that he was 89.

His death was reported by Clancy Myer, the state parliamentarian.

Robert Hill, producer of the 2004 television documentary "K. Leroy Irvis: The Lion of Pennsylvania," said Mr. Irvis was the first black to become speaker of a state house of representatives since shortly after the Civil War.

Mr. Irvis served as a Democratic member of the House from 1959 to 1988 and was elected speaker four times.

Mr. Irvis was born in Saugerties, N.Y., and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

He led groundbreaking demonstrations against discriminatory hiring and sales practices by downtown Pittsburgh department stores in 1947, and gained national attention when he sued a white-males-only Moose lodge in Harrisburg for refusing to serve him a meal. The Supreme Court ruled against him in the Moose case in 1972.

Mr. Irvis was a teacher and prosecutor before winning a seat in the House, where he gained a reputation as a persuasive orator. He was elected speaker in May 1977. An office building in the Capitol complex that houses legislative offices and the Commonwealth Court bears his name. He was a trustee emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh, where a library reading room is also named for him.

He was a renowned builder of model airplanes and created masks and statues featuring African motifs.

Survivors include his wife, Cathryn, and two children.

    K. Leroy Irvis, First Black Chosen as Speaker of Pennsylvania House, Dies, NYT, 18.3.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/18/politics/18irvis.html

FBI passes Emmett Till case to district attorney

Posted 3/16/2006 7:14 PM Updated 3/17/2006 12:00 AM
USA TODAY
By Laura Parker

The FBI report on the reopened investigation into the 1955 murder of Emmett Till was handed over Thursday to a Mississippi prosecutor who could file state criminal charges or finally lay the case to rest.

Mississippi District Attorney Joyce Chiles said her staff would have to scrutinize the report to determine whether state charges should be filed. She said that the FBI report was delivered in multiple boxes and that she has not yet examined their contents.

"It's going to take time for our reviewers to look at it," Chiles said.

The Justice Department reopened the case in 2004 after a documentary filmmaker convinced federal prosecutors that the original investigation was incomplete and that some people still living may have been involved.

No federal charges will be filed because the five-year statute of limitations on federal civil rights violations expired long ago, said John Raucci of the FBI's office in Jackson, Miss. Raucci issued a statement saying the 22-month investigation, which included the exhumation of Till's body, was "exhaustive."

Till, 14, was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was dragged from bed, beaten, shot and dumped into the Tallahatchie River. He had purportedly whistled at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant at a store. Her husband, Roy, and his half brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted by an all-white jury but later admitted to the murder in an interview published in Look magazine.

Photos of Till's open-casket funeral in Chicago, where he lived with his mother, prompted outrage around the world.

Chiles said she will not discuss the contents of the FBI report and has not decided whether to make the report public if she concludes that no criminal charges are warranted.

"That question is too far down the road," she said. "I don't have any idea what we'll do in the future." Among the charges that could still apply in the 51-year-old case, she said, are murder or manslaughter.

Many of the principles and witnesses, including Roy Bryant and Milam, are dead, but Carolyn Bryant still lives in Mississippi.

    FBI passes Emmett Till case to district attorney, UT, 16.3.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-16-emmett-till_x.htm

Alabama bill would pardon violators of segregation laws

Posted 3/16/2006 5:19 PM
USA Today

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — Alabama lawmakers are considering pardoning hundreds, possibly thousands, of people who were arrested decades ago for violating Alabama's segregation laws.

The idea of a mass pardon gained traction after the death last year of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who had refused to give up her bus seat to a white man half a century earlier.

Even though the law allowing segregated seating on city buses was eventually overturned, Parks conviction is still on the record, said Rep. Thad McClammy.

"This is something that's long overdue. It's something aimed at giving the state a forward look," he said.

His proposed "Rosa Parks Act" would pardon everyone ever arrested under the state's segregation laws, which date back to the state's 1901 constitution. A House committee approved the bill Thursday, sending it to the full House for debate.

The old segregation laws required that blacks attend separate schools, use separate water fountains and theater entrances, and made it illegal for whites and blacks to marry, among other things.

There was no opposition to the proposed legislation in the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, where the plan was praised by Republicans and Democrats.

"I think it's wonderful. There were 89 people arrested during the bus boycott and I think every one of them should be pardoned because of the contribution they made to the state and the nation," said Rep. Alvin Holmes, a Democrat and veteran of the civil rights movement.

The Legislature is in the final 10 days of the 2006 session, but the committee chairman, Rep. Marcel Black, said he believes there's enough time to pass the bill.

"I can't imagine anyone opposing this," said Republican Rep. Steve McMillan.

    Alabama bill would pardon violators of segregation laws, UT, 16.3.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-03-16-rosa-parks-pardons_x.htm

Alabama church bombed in '63 named national landmark

Posted 2/20/2006 9:16 PM Updated 2/20/2006 9:20 PM
USA Today

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — The church where four black girls died in a racist bombing in 1963 was honored as a national landmark Monday, with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales recalling their memory amid a new string of attacks against churches in Alabama.

Speaking at the pulpit of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Gonzales compared the deadly bombing of the old brick building to a string of arson fires that have hit rural Baptist churches since Feb. 3. (Related story: Authorities: New fire not linked to arsons)

The fires, Gonzales said, are a reminder "there is still work to be done" in ensuring equal justice and fighting discrimination.

Gonzales called the building "a catalyst for the cause of justice" as he referred to the children killed when a Ku Klux Klan bomb went off at the Sixteenth Street church on Sept. 15, 1963.

"We protect this place for them," Gonzales said during a ceremony where Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton signed a proclamation adding the church to a list of about 2,500 places that carry the title of National Historic Landmark.

The audience included relatives of the four girls who were killed — Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14, and Denise McNair, 11.

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was an important meeting place for activists during the civil rights era, and the bombing became a worldwide symbol illustrating the depth of racial hatred in the South at the time. Three Klansman were convicted in the blast, the last in 2002.

Gonzales also was briefed during his trip on a string of fires that has scores of federal and state agents in Alabama checking out hundreds of leads. Investigators have said there does not appear to be a racial motive to the church fires. Some of the churches have had white congregations and others black memberships.

Ten rural, Baptist churches were damaged or destroyed by arsonists in central and west Alabama between Feb. 3 and Feb. 11, and investigators believe at least nine of the blazes were set by two suspects identified as men in their 20s or 30s.

Gonzales called the fire investigation a "very intensive, collaborative effort."

"We're working as hard as we can to try to get to the bottom of this," Gonzales said in a news conference. "Am I satisfied with the progress? I'll be satisfied when we find out who is responsible for these crimes and they're brought to justice."

The regional director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Jim Cavanaugh, said investigators believe a fire at a small church in northeast Alabama on Sunday was started by someone from the area and does not appear to be related to the other fires. And a fire at a Methodist campus ministry at the University of Alabama likely was accidental, he said.

The church fire task force also is still investigating a fire that destroyed a warehouse that housed a Christian-themed apparel business on Friday night, but Cavanaugh said agents are not sure what started the blaze.

Sixteenth Street Baptist is undergoing an extensive renovation to shore up its foundation, but Norton said the historic designation does not make the building eligible for new funding.

    Alabama church bombed in '63 named national landmark, UT, 20.2.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-02-20-birmingham-church_x.htm

Crowds greet coffin of Coretta Scott King

Posted 2/4/2006 3:29 AM Updated 2/4/2006 4:57 PM
USA Today

ATLANTA (AP) — Cheered by hundreds of people, the body of Coretta Scott King was carried through the streets by horse-drawn carriage Saturday to Georgia's state Capitol, where she became the first woman and first black person to lie in honor.

King's four children, Gov. Sonny Perdue and his wife Mary, and Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin escorted the casket inside to the Rotunda as a bagpipe played Amazing Grace.

"Coretta Scott King was a gracious and courageous woman, an inspiration to millions and one of the most influential civil rights leaders of our time," Perdue said. "She was absolutely an anchor and support for her husband."

It was a striking contrast to the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, when then-Gov. Lester Maddox, an outspoken segregationist, was outraged at the idea of state flags, then dominated by the Confederate Cross, flying at half-staff in tribute to a black man. He ignored King's death, refusing to authorize a public tribute.

Coretta Scott King died Monday at an alternative medical clinic in Mexico at the age of 78. Immediately after, the state flag she helped to change — no longer bearing the Confederate battle emblem — was ordered lowered by Perdue.

For most of Monday, King's casket will lie in Ebenezer Baptist Church, where her husband preached in the years before his death. Her funeral will be held at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, where the Kings' youngest child, Bernice, is a minister.

Few details have been released about the funeral, including who will deliver the eulogy. However, the American Jewish Committee said the King family invited the executive director of its Atlanta chapter to deliver remarks.

The King legacy is a major draw to Atlanta. The King Center, which is the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s tomb, attracts thousands, along with his nearby birth home and Ebenezer Baptist Church.

When Martin Luther King Jr. died, segregation was openly accepted in the South, even though it was on its last legs, said Akinyele Umoja, an African-American studies professor at Georgia State University.

"Lester Maddox had a strong base. Now, you don't have that constituency," Umoja said.

State Rep. Tyrone Brooks, who was a young activist in King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said Maddox was the epitome of Jim Crow, racist segregation.

"It became a national insult to Dr. King and the King legacy and the whole civil rights movement that was sweeping across the South, bringing about significant change," he said.

    Crowds greet coffin of Coretta Scott King, UT, 4.2.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-02-04-king-tributes_x.htm

King funeral, tributes reflect gains of civil rights movement

Posted 2/4/2006 3:29 AM Updated 2/4/2006 12:07 PM
USA Today

ATLANTA (AP) — King's four children, Gov. Sonny Perdue and his wife Mary, and Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin stood on the Capitol's steps, ready to escort the casket inside.

It was a striking contrast to the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, when then-Gov. Lester Maddox, an outspoken segregationist, was outraged at the idea of state flags, then dominated by the Confederate Cross, flying at half-staff in tribute to a black man. He ignored King's death, refusing to authorize a public tribute.

Coretta Scott King died Monday at an alternative medical clinic in Mexico at the age of 78. Immediately after, the state flag she helped to change — no longer bearing the Confederate battle emblem — was ordered lowered by Perdue.

She is the first woman and first black person to lie in honor in Georgia's state Capitol.

About 70 people stood at one downtown street corner in cold, windy weather waiting for the carriage to pass.

"I want to pay respects to the family and the difference they made to people across the globe," said Wayne Thomas, 48, of Lithonia, Ga.

Saturday's tribute was just one of several her husband, the famed civil rights leader, never received in a climate of segregation.

"This is not just a salute to Mrs. King. It's a tribute to her and her husband, and to all they stood for and did," said U.S. Rep. John Lewis.

Gov. Sonny Perdue planned to escort the casket into the Capitol alongside King's four children. That would be a striking contrast to the 1968 death of Martin Luther King Jr., when then-Gov. Lester Maddox was outraged to see state flags, then dominated by the Confederate Cross, flying at half-staff in tribute to a black man and refused to authorize a public tribute.

King died Monday at an alternative medicine clinic in Mexico. Immediately after, the state flag she helped to change — no longer bearing the Confederate battle emblem — was lowered by Perdue.

For most of Monday, King's casket will lie in Ebenezer Baptist Church, where her husband preached in the years before his death. Her funeral will be held at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, where the Kings' youngest child, Bernice, is a minister.

Few details have been released about the funeral, including who will deliver the eulogy. However, the American Jewish Committee said the King family invited the executive director of its Atlanta chapter to deliver remarks.

The King legacy is a major draw to Atlanta. The King Center, which is the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s tomb, attracts thousands, along with his nearby birth home and Ebenezer Baptist Church.

When Martin Luther King Jr. died, segregation was openly accepted in the South, even though it was on its last legs, said Akinyele Umoja, an African-American studies professor at Georgia State University.

"Lester Maddox had a strong base. Now, you don't have that constituency," Umoja said.

State Rep. Tyrone Brooks, who was a young activist in King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said Maddox was the epitome of Jim Crow, racist segregation.

"It became a national insult to Dr. King and the King legacy and the whole civil rights movement that was sweeping across the South, bringing about significant change," he said.

    King funeral, tributes reflect gains of civil rights movement, UT, 4.2.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-02-04-king-tributes_x.htm

Death of King leaves a likely unfillable void

Posted 2/2/2006 11:44 PM Updated 2/2/2006 11:51 PM
USA TODAY
By Larry Copeland and Melanie Eversley

ATLANTA — With the death this week of Coretta Scott King, the civil rights movement loses its best-known name and most familiar face.

King's passing also marks the end of an era. Her role as a moral and symbolic leader was unique, and black activists say it is unlikely that anyone will pick up the torch she carried for almost four decades after the 1968 assassination of her husband, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

"She was singular in the role that she played, and she can't be replaced," says Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, one of the oldest and largest civil rights groups.

Today, Morial and others say, there is no compelling black leader with the national stature of Coretta Scott King or her late husband. Instead, African-Americans have attained leadership roles in many areas of society.

There are more than 9,000 black elected officials, including 43 members of Congress.

"Back in the 1960s, the 10 or 12 (black) members were all national figures," Morial says. "Now, people will look more to people that are much closer to them and more local. The African-American leadership is much broader and more diverse than it's ever been."

Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., an early leader of the civil rights movement who was close to the Kings, agrees.

"We have more of a group leadership, not just two or three people, or the 'Big Six' like we did in the '60s," he says, referring to leaders of the nation's six major civil rights groups who planned the 1963 March on Washington. "We have ... all these very successful entertainers and business people ... that have emerged, so I don't think we have a lack of leadership."

Black people today are at the top in many fields, from Oprah Winfrey in entertainment, to Time Warner CEO Richard Parsons in business, to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., in what is sometimes called "the world's most exclusive club."

Ironically, the success of the movement that Martin Luther King led starting with the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955-56 defeated the forces that made that kind of leadership possible, says Manning Marable, professor of history and public affairs at Columbia University.

"Segregation was always a curse, but it was a perverse blessing in that black Ph.D.s and black street sweepers alike were forced to ride at the back of the bus," Marable says. "That created a unity among African-Americans because we all knew and understood what we were fighting against. That unity no longer exists because we have now won nominal civil rights."

Since Martin Luther King's death in 1968, "African-Americans have earned positions higher within white society than any person black or white could have dreamed possible in he segregated 1950s," Henry Louis Gates Jr., chairman of Harvard University's African and African-American Studies Department, wrote in his 2004 book America Behind the Color Line. "The black middle class has tripled, as measured by the percentage of families earning $50,000 or more. (Yet) the percentage of black children who live at or below the poverty line is almost 35%, just about what it was on the day that Dr. King was killed."

Today, Marable says, one-third of all black households have a negative net wealth, and the average black household has only about 8% the wealth of the average white household.

It is these "newer, tougher issues of economics, money and jobs" that today's black leaders must confront, Morial says.

Another issue galvanizing many blacks as they honor Coretta Scott King is a national push to extend and strengthen the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which outlawed practices that discouraged or prevented minorities from voting. Several provisions of the law are scheduled to expire next year.

Even before Coretta Scott King died, Georgia's black elected officials had been touting a "Save the Voting Rights Act" conference Saturday at her husband's old church here as a critical step toward protecting civil rights gains. Now, organizers are pushing the meeting as the ideal way for King's admirers to honor her.

"I don't think we need to look for anybody to replace Mrs. King," says the Rev. Joseph Lowery, an Atlanta activist who was one of her husband's contemporaries in the civil rights movement. "We need to just put her on the pedestal where she belongs, put her bust in the Capitol and extend the Voting Rights Act in her name."

Contributing: Eversley reported from McLean, Va.

    Death of King leaves a likely unfillable void, UT, 3.2.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-02-02-king-void_x.htm

King Funeral Has Surprise in Site Choice

February 3, 2006
The New York Times
By BRENDA GOODMAN

ATLANTA, Feb. 2 — Coretta Scott King's funeral will be held not at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where her husband once preached, but at a much larger suburban megachurch where her youngest daughter is an elder, funeral planners said Thursday.

Thousands of people, including world leaders and celebrities, are expected to attend the service at noon on Tuesday at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, the funeral director, Willie A. Watkins said.

The news surprised many people who had assumed that the funeral would be held at Ebenezer Baptist, the historic chapel in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his father and grandfather preached, and where Mrs. King was a board member until she died on Monday at age 78.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Rev. Raphael G. Warnock, senior pastor of Ebenezer, had said he "fully expected" Mrs. King's funeral to be at his church. On Thursday, Mr. Warnock said that he supported the family and that a viewing, a memorial service and a musical tribute would be held for Mrs. King at Ebenezer on Monday.

The Associated Press, citing a family statement, also reported that a public viewing would take place at the State Capitol on Saturday.

Ebenezer is next to the King Center on Auburn Avenue in downtown Atlanta, a neighborhood that is the nexus of the civil rights movement. "It's not my call, whatever that's worth," the Rev. Joseph Lowery said of the site for the funeral. "I would not have placed it at New Birth."

But Mr. Lowery, who helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. King, said space had been a major consideration.

"To have a public funeral where people can't get in wouldn't be fair," he said.

New Birth, a modern 10,000-seat church with its own school, computer laboratory and gym 15 miles east of Atlanta, is a dramatic contrast to Ebenezer's scarlet carpets and scratched wooden pews, and its sanctuary that still smells like furniture polish and aftershave.

It was not immediately clear why New Birth was chosen over Ebenezer, although Mrs. King's daughter Bernice King preaches there occasionally, said Erik Burton, a spokesman for the church.

Bishop Eddie Long, senior pastor at New Birth, sent a private plane to California on Tuesday to take members of the King family back to Atlanta and extended an invitation to them to hold the funeral in his sanctuary.

"I see why people think it should be held at Ebenezer," said Lynn Cothren, Mrs. King's executive assistant for 23 years. "But one thing Mrs. King was about was change. She was not so drenched in history that she could not change."

    King Funeral Has Surprise in Site Choice, NYT, 3.2.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/national/03king.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Coretta Scott King with her husband, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., after leaving court in Montgomery, Ala., in March 22, 1956.
Rev. King was found guilty of conspiracy to boycott city buses in a campaign to desegregate the bus system,
but a judge suspended his $500 fine pending appeal.

Gene Herrick/Associated Press        NYT        30.1.2006

Coretta Scott King, 78, Widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dies        NYT        31.1.2006
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Dr. King and Mrs. King led off the final lap to the state capitol at Montgomery, Ala. in March 25, 1965.
Thousands of civil rights marchers joined in the walk, which began in Selma, Ala., on March 21, demanding voter registration rights for blacks.

Associated Press        NYT        31.1.2006

Coretta Scott King, 78, Widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dies        NYT        31.1.2006
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Mrs. King and her daughter, Bernice,
at the funeral for Dr. King on April 9, 1968, in Atlanta, Ga.

Moneta J. Sleet, Jr./Associated Press        NYT        31.1.2006

Coretta Scott King, 78, Widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dies        NYT        31.1.2006
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Mrs. King spoke at an anti-war demonstration
in Sheep Meadow in Central Park on April 27, 1968.
She did not hesitate to pick up her husband's civil rights efforts after his death

Michael Evans/The New York Times        30.1.2006

Coretta Scott King, 78, Widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dies        NYT        31.1.2006
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Mrs. King led a picket line to protest apartheid in South Africa, in Nov. 29, 1984, at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C.

Charles Tasnadi/Associated Press        NYT        30.1.2006

Coretta Scott King, 78, Widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dies        NYT        31.1.2006
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Mrs. King marched with President Bill Clinton across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama on March 5, 2000
for the 35th anniversary of the march called 'Bloody Sunday,' which led to the Voters Rights Act of 1965.
Mr. Clinton was the first president to commemorate the event.

Larry Downing/Reuters        NYT        31.1.2006

Coretta Scott King, 78, Widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dies        NYT        31.1.2006
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If picking up Dr. King's mantle, in the end, was something of an impossible task, both of them described a relationship that was truly a partnership.
"I think on many points she educated me," Dr. King once said.

John Bazemore/Associated Press        NYT        31.1.2006

Coretta Scott King, 78, Widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dies        NYT        31.1.2006
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Coretta Scott King, 78,

Widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,

Dies

January 31, 2006
The New York Times
By PETER APPLEBOME

Coretta Scott King, first known as the wife of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., then as his widow, then as an avid proselytizer for his vision of racial peace and non-violent social change, has died, her sister in law, Christine King Farris, said this morning.

She was 78 and had been in failing health since suffering a stroke and heart attack last August. Mrs. King appeared at a Martin Luther King Day dinner on Jan. 14, but did not speak.

Andrew Young, the former United Nations ambassador and longtime family friend, said at a news conference this morning that Mrs. King died in her sleep. "She was a woman born to struggle," Mr. Young said, "and she has struggled and she has overcome."

In a statement, the King family said that "Mrs. Coretta Scott King, first lady of human and civil rights, died overnight." Mrs. King rose from rural poverty in Heiberger, Ala., to become an international symbol of the civil rights revolution of the 1960s and a tireless advocate for a long litany of social and political issues, ranging from women's rights to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, that followed in its wake.

She was studying music at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in 1952 when she met a young graduate student in philosophy, who on their first date told her: "The four things that I look for in a wife are character, personality, intelligence and beauty. And you have them all." A year later she and Dr. King, then a young minister from a prominent Atlanta family, were married, beginning a remarkable partnership that ended with Dr. King's assassination in Memphis on April 4, 1968.

Mrs. King did not hesitate to pick up his mantle, marching before her husband was even buried at the head of the garbage workers he had gone to Memphis to champion. She then went on to lead the effort for a national holiday in his honor and to found the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta, dedicated both to scholarship and to activism, where Dr. King is buried.

Aside from the trauma of her husband's death, which left her alone with four young children, Mrs. King faced other trials and controversies over the years. She was at times viewed as chilly and aloof by others in the movement. The King Center was criticized first as competing for funds and siphoning energy from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which Dr. King had headed. In recent years, it has been widely viewed as adrift, characterized by intra-family squabbling and a focus more on Dr. King's legacy than continuing his work. And even many allies were baffled and hurt by her campaign to exonerate James Earl Ray, who in 1969 had pleaded guilty to her husband's murder, and her contention that Ray did not commit the crime.

But more often, Mrs. King has been seen as an inspirational figure around the world, a dogged advocate for her husband's causes and a woman of enormous spiritual depth who came to personify the ideals Dr. King fought for.

"I think the way I will remember her is as a totally faithful, totally devoted wife and mother who nevertheless found time to offer her leadership skills and be involved with other children in need all over the world," Mr. Young said today.

"She'll be remembered as a strong woman whose grace and dignity held up the image of her husband as a man of peace, of racial justice, of fairness," said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, who helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. King and then served as its president for 20 years. "I don't know that she was a civil rights leader in the truest sense, but she became a civil rights figure and a civil rights icon because of what she came to represent."

Coretta Scott was born April 27, 1927, the middle of three children born to Obadiah and Bernice Scott. She grew up in the two-room house her father built on land that had been owned by the family for three generations.

From the start there was nothing predictable about her life. The family was poor, and she grew up picking cotton in the hot fields of the segregated South or doing housework. But Mr. Scott hauled timber, owned a country store and worked as a barber. His wife drove a school bus, and the whole family helped raise hogs, cows, chickens and vegetables. So by the standards of blacks in Alabama at the time the family had both resources and ambitions out of the reach of most others.

Some of Coretta Scott's earliest insights into the injustice of segregation came as she walked to her one-room school house each day, watching buses full of white children kick up dust as they passed. She got her first sense of the world beyond rural Alabama when she attended the Lincoln School, a private missionary institution in nearby Marion, where she studied piano and voice, had her first encounters with college-educated teachers and where she resolved to flee to a world far beyond the narrow confines of rural, segregated Alabama.

She graduated first in her high school class of 17 in 1945 and then began attending Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where two years earlier her older sister, Edythe, had become the first black to enroll. She studied education and music and after graduation went on to the New England Conservatory of Music, hoping to become a classical singer and working as a mail order clerk and cleaning houses to augment the fellowship that barely paid her tuition.

Her first encounter with the man who would become her husband did not begin auspiciously. Dr. King, very much in the market for a wife, called her after getting her name from a friend and announced: "You know every Napoleon has his Waterloo," he said. "I'm like Napoleon. I'm at my Waterloo, and I'm on my knees."

"That's absurd," Ms. Scott, two years his elder, replied. "You don't even know me."

Still, she agreed to meet for lunch the next day, only to be put off initially that he wasn't taller. But she was impressed by his erudition and confidence and he saw in this refined, intelligent woman what he was looking for as the wife of a preacher from one of Atlanta's most prominent ministerial families. When he proposed, she deliberated for six months before finally saying "yes" and they were married in the garden of her parents' house on June 18, 1953. The 350 guests, elegant big-city folks from Atlanta and rural neighbors from Alabama, made it the biggest wedding, white or black, the area had ever seen.

And even before the wedding she made it clear she intended to remain her own woman. She stunned Dr. King's father, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr., who presided over the wedding, by demanding that she wanted the promise to obey her husband removed from the wedding vows. Reluctantly, he went along. After it was over, the bridegroom fell asleep in the car back to Atlanta while the new Mrs. King did the driving.

Mrs. King thought she was signing on for the ministry, not ground zero in the seismic cultural struggle that would shake the South when he became minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery in 1954. But just over a year later the Montgomery bus boycott brought Dr. King to national attention and then like riders on a runaway freight train, the minister and his young wife found themselves in the middle of a movement that would transform the South and ripple through the nation. In 1960, the family moved back to Atlanta, where he shared the pulpit of the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church with his father.

With four young children to raise — Yolanda born in 1955, Martin 3d in 1957, Dexter in 1961 and Bernice in 1963 — and a movement culture dominated by men, Mrs. King, for the most part, remained away from the front lines. But the recognition of danger was always there, including a brush with death when Dr. King was stabbed while autographing books in Harlem in 1958.

What role she would play was a source of some tension between them. While wanting to be there for their children, she also wanted to be active in the movement. He was, she has said, very traditional in his view of women and balked at the notion she should be more conspicuous.

"Martin was a very strong person, and in many ways had very traditional ideas about women," she told The New York Times Magazine in 1982. She continued: "He'd say, "I have no choice, I have to do this, but you haven't been called,' " "And I said, "Can't you understand? You know I have an urge to serve just like you have.' " Still, he always described her as a partner in his mission, not just a supportive spouse. "I wish I could say, to satisfy my masculine ego, that I led her down this path," he said in a 1967 interview. "But I must say we went down together, because she was as actively involved and concerned when we met as she is now."

Instead, she mostly carved out her own niche, most prominently through more than 30 "Freedom Concerts" where she lectured, read poetry and sang to raise awareness of and money for the civil rights movement.

The division disappeared with Dr. King's assassination. Suddenly, she was not just a symbol of the nation's grief but a woman very much devoted to carrying on her husband's work. Exactly how to do that was something that evolved over time. Marching in Memphis was a dramatic statement, but Ralph Abernathy, one of Dr. King's lieutenants, was chosen to take over his movement. In stepping in for her husband after his death, Mrs. King at first used his own words as much as possible, as if her goal were simply to maintain his presence, even in death.

But soon she developed her own language and own causes. So when she stood in for her husband at the Poor People's Campaign at the Lincoln Memorial on June 19, 1968, she spoke not just of his vision, but of hers, one about gender as well as race in which she called upon American women "to unite and form a solid block of women power to fight the three great evils of racism, poverty and war." She joined the board of directors of the National Organization for Women as well as that of his Southern Christian Leadership Conference and became widely identified with a broad array of international human rights issues rather than being focused primarily on race.

That broad view, she would argue, was completely in keeping with Dr. King's vision as well. And to carry on that legacy, she focused on two ambitious and daunting tasks. The first was to have a national holiday in his honor, the second was to build a nationally recognized center in Atlanta to honor his memory, continue his work and provide a research center for scholars studying his work and the civil rights era. The first goal was achieved despite much opposition in 1983 when Congress approved a measure designating the third Monday in January as an official Federal holiday in honor of Dr. King, who was born in Atlanta Jan. 15, 1929.

President Ronald Reagan, who had long opposed the King Holiday as too expensive and inappropriate, signed the bill, but pointedly refrained from criticizing fellow Republicans such as Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who continued to denigrate Dr. King, saying he had consorted with Communists. The holiday was first observed on Jan. 20, 1986.

The second goal, much more expensive, time consuming and elusive remains to this day a work in progress — and a troubled one at that. When Mrs. King first announced plans for a memorial in 1969, she envisioned a Lincolnesque tomb, an exhibition hall, the restoration of her husband's childhood home, two separate buildings for institutes on non-violent social change and Afro-American studies, a library building an archives building and a museum of African-American life and culture. And she envisioned a center that would be a haven both for scholars and a training ground for advocates of non-violent social change.

Even friends say it may have been too ambitious a goal. Building the center was an enormous achievement in itself. But many of Dr. King's allies, particularly the leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, grumbled that the center was draining scarce resources from the movement. And over the years the center struggled to find its mission. Critics worried it had become too much a family enterprise with her two sons, Dexter and Martin 3d vying to be its leader. Those problems became particularly acute after she suffered a stroke and heart attack in August 2005 and the two brothers struggled for control over the center while she was recuperating. As a result, many feel it has not become the scholarly resource it could have become, while never becoming a center for civil rights activism.

And many supporters were saddened and baffled by the family's campaign on behalf of James Earl Ray, who confessed to the murder, then recanted and died in 1998 while still seeking a new trial. After his death, Mrs. King issued a statement calling his death a tragedy for his family and for the nation and saying that a trial would have "produced new revelations about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. as well as establish the facts concerning Mr. Ray's innocence."

Still, to the end Mrs. King remained a beloved figure, often compared to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis as a woman who overcame tragedy, held her family together and became an inspirational presence around the world. Admirers said she bore her own special burden — being expected somehow to carry on her husband's work and teachings — with a sense of spirit and purpose that made her more than just a symbol.

If picking up Dr. King's mantle, in the end, was something of an impossible task, both of them described a relationship that was truly a partnership. "I think on many points she educated me," Dr. King once said. And she never veered from the conviction, expressed throughout her life, that his dream was hers as well. "I didn't learn my commitment from Martin," she once told an interviewer. "We just converged at a certain time."

    Coretta Scott King, 78, Widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dies, NYT, 31.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/national/31cnd-coretta.html?hp&ex=1138770000&en=435a2f7d3bf7b954&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Coretta Scott King dies at 78

Posted 1/31/2006 7:52 AM Updated 1/31/2006 12:40 PM
USA TODAY
By Larry Copeland

ATLANTA — Coretta Scott King, whose determined activism after her husband's assassination in 1968 helped cement the civil rights movement's commitment to non-violence, has died, her family said Tuesday. She was 78.

Mrs. King had been partially paralyzed after suffering a stroke and heart attack in August 2005. Her last public appearance was Jan. 14, when she received a standing ovation from 1,500 at a dinner celebrating her husband's birthday.

She was the widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a role that shaped the rest of her life's accomplishments. She was the First Lady of the civil rights movement, a living symbol of everything it had won. (Multimedia: Photo gallery | Video)

But she was never an idle icon. Mrs. King worked tirelessly to ensure that the nation honor her husband's contribution. She campaigned for years to make his birthday a national holiday. President Reagan signed a bill in 1983 establishing it as a federal holiday, and the nation has observed it since 1986.She founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-violent Social Change here, starting it in the basement of her house. Today, the King Center is a national shrine, visited by more than 650,000 people a year.

For a time after her husband's death, Mrs. King was one of the nation's most respected black voices. In the 1970s, she met with President Carter and the presidents of the Urban League and the NAACP to discuss civil rights. A decade later, she worked in the USA and abroad to end apartheid in South Africa.

The Alabama-born Mrs. King met the young Baptist minister while both were in college in Boston. After he was slain on a motel balcony in Memphis on April 4, 1968, Mrs. King persevered, and she remained true to her husband's ideals, said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a civil rights activist who was with Rev. King in Memphis.

"She was his wife and companion from marriage to death," Jackson said. "They left Boston together (in 1954) and went back to a rural town in the South. Their home was bombed. She survived the bombing. She survived the threats. That gave her a moral authority. A lesser person would have been traumatized and would have surrendered (after the assassination). She simply got stronger, and she never gave it up."

NAACP chairman Julian Bond said it's easy to grasp Mrs. King's impact.

"What is less well understood about her after her husband's death is the way she kept focused on the ideas of non-violence," Bond said. "She never abandoned that. She focused on the use of non-violence as a way to settle human conflicts."

At the White House, Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, told Fox television: "President Bush and first lady Laura Bush were always heartened by their meetings with Mrs. King. What an inspiration to millions of people. President and Mrs. Bush are deeply saddened by today's news."

Mrs. King, a classically-trained opera singer who gave up a promising musical career when she married Rev. King, was the matriarch of a family that was as close to black royalty as America has known. Their children, Yolanda Denise King, 50, Martin Luther King III, 48, Dexter Scott King, 45, and the Rev. Bernice Albertine King, 42, are among her survivors.

"She dealt with the tragedy of the past with dignity and strength and at the same time she met the challenges of the future with courage and vision," said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, one of Rev. King's successors as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. "She's earned universal admiration."

Today, her husband is one of the nation's most revered figures. His picture hangs in the office suites of powerful business executives and the walls of seedy taprooms. Elementary schoolchildren of all races write essays every year for Martin Luther King Day. She could visit almost any major city in the USA and find a street bearing his name.

Mrs. King was a reminder of what the nation had been — and a symbol of how far it has come. Her husband died dismantling a government-sanctioned system of racial segregation that denied constitutional rights to some Americans because of their skin color.

In the national psyche, Mrs. King belonged to all of that.

A role that grew

Before her husband's death, Mrs. King had a limited role in the civil rights movement. Her husband led marches and demonstrations in cities around the South, starting with the Montgomery Bus Boycott that began in 1955. She sang at fundraisers early on and later attended some marches. Mostly, she stayed home — often reluctantly — to raise their four children.

But Mrs. King became active in the peace movement during the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, said Taylor Branch, author of a three-book history of the civil rights movement, including this year's At Canaan's Edge and 1988's Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters. (Related: A timeline of Coretta Scott King's life)

"There was a time when Dr. King let her go make speeches he couldn't make" because of a potential backlash against the civil rights movement, Branch said. "She was speaking for outright withdrawal from Vietnam at a time when the well-known anti-war voices were calling for a negotiated settlement."

Rev. King was assassinated in Memphis just before he was to lead a march by striking city garbage workers. James Earl Ray, who confessed to the crime and then recanted, was convicted of the murder. He died in prison of liver failure in 1998 at age 70.Decades after the assassination, many Americans recalled where they were and what they were doing when they learned of his death. They remembered the silence as families gathered around the television for news bulletins. Suddenly, the hopes and dreams Rev. King had inspired seemed dashed; outraged blacks rioted in more than 100 U.S. cities.

The nation saw Mrs. King mourning in indelible black-and-white images from her husband's funeral at Ebenezer Baptist Church here. She was proud, beautiful and tragic.

The road to Montgomery

When Coretta Scott met her future husband in Boston in 1952, the South was a place that would seem alien to Americans in 2006.

Blacks and whites did not dine in the same restaurants, sit near each other on buses or trains, or jointly elect their government officials."Whites Only" and "Colored Only" signs marked separate entrances for restaurants and restrooms and hung above water fountains that stood side by side. The segregation laws of the South dictated that black riders on a crowded bus give their seats to white riders who wanted them.

Boston seemed a far more progressive place to Miss Scott and Martin King. She was studying voice on a scholarship at the New England Conservatory of Music; he was working on a Ph. D. at Boston University.They met through the efforts of a mutual friend. Rev. King had complained to the friend that he wanted to meet "a few girls from down home," according to David L. Lewis' 1970 book King: A Biography. The friend gave him Miss Scott's phone number.

In that first phone conversation, the young King — an established ladies man — laid it on pretty thick. "I am like Napoleon at Waterloo before your charms," he said.

But Miss Scott was no lightweight. "Why, that's absurd," she responded. "You haven't seen me yet."

But he persisted — and won the heart of the young woman he called "Corrie." His father, Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., a powerful Atlanta minister nicknamed "Daddy King," initially objected. He wanted his son to marry an Atlanta girl. But they eventually won him over, and they were wed on June 18, 1953, at the Scott family home near Marion, Ala.

The following year, Rev. King Jr. accepted the job as pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. It was there that his life intersected with Rosa Parks in a struggle that would make both of them American icons.

On Dec. 1, 1955, Mrs. Parks, a seamstress at a Montgomery department store, refused to give her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. The incident sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, during which blacks stayed off city buses for more than a year. In 1956, the Supreme Court upheld a U.S. District Court finding that Alabama's state and local laws requiring segregation on buses were unconstitutional.The bus boycott propelled Rev. King to international prominence. He emerged as the clear leader of the civil rights movement.

Overcoming fear

Mrs. King's life as his wife would not be tranquil, but she was prepared.

"As we were thrust into the cause, it was my cause, too," she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in January 2005. "I married the man and the cause. I realized I, too, could be killed."

There were harrowing moments:

On Jan. 30, 1956, during the bus boycott, Mrs. King and her two-month-old daughter Yolanda, nicknamed Yoki, were home with a woman from the church when their house was bombed. The dynamite, thrown on the front porch, blew out windows and filled the front room with smoke and glass, but no one was hurt.

In September 1958, Mrs. King flew to New York after her husband was stabbed by a mentally ill woman while signing copies of his new book about the bus boycott, Stride Toward Freedom. Doctors removed the sharp blade of a letter opener from near his aorta. If he had so much as sneezed, Rev. King said later, the blade would have punctured his aorta, killing him instantly.

In 1960, Rev. King was arrested at a sit-in Atlanta. When Mrs. King, six months pregnant at the time, learned that her husband was being sent to a state prison, she was disconsolate. Sen. John F. Kennedy, then running for president, called Mrs. King to reassure her.Her husband wrote a letter from his cell asking her to be resolute. "I know this whole experience is very difficult for you to adjust to, but as I said to you yesterday, this is the cross that we must bear for the freedom of our people," King wrote, according to Bearing the Cross, a 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights history by David Garrow. King signed it: "Eternally yours, Martin."

Despite the nature of that closing, allegations of Rev. King's marital infidelities have swirled for years and are detailed in histories of the civil rights movement. Then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who despised Rev. King and believed he was a Communist sympathizer and adulterer, routinely bugged his hotel rooms. In January 1965, the FBI sent Mrs. King a tape containing her husband making bawdy jokes and the sounds of people having sex, according to Bearing the Cross.

In recent decades, Mrs. King was criticized by Garrow for what he saw as her heavy-handed handling of Rev. King's public image, papers and speeches. The King family sold his voice and image to companies such as Cingular Wireless and Alcatel, which used them in advertisements, while denying or limiting access to some researchers and scholars.

"It would be easy to say the decade of embarrassment is primarily the children's fault," Garrow said. "I don't think that would be honest or fair. I think Mrs. King herself increasingly found that running a historical archive was not going to be a profit-making venture. The sense that his legacy ought to be used for maximum income — I think that's something that increasingly stems from her."

Garrow traces Mrs. King's actions to the financial hardships she endured as Rev. King's wife."Much of her behavior of the past 15 years — all the crass or embarrassing commercial uses of his name or image — has its roots in the sense of privation she experienced when he was alive," Garrow said. "Not only did they not have any money, but Doc did not believe in spending money on the family and the household. He would spend money on food, good hotels, good suits, but that was about it."

Despite worries over money and other issues, Mrs. King stood by her husband, well beyond his death.Mrs. King never remarried, and she lived until 2005 in the modest home in Atlanta's Vine City neighborhood that she and Rev. King had bought in 1965.

"That, to my mind, is one of the most important things," Garrow said. "Because that really underscores the extent and intensity of her commitment and attachment to him and his memory."That house was her bond to him, was the link."

Contributing: The Associated Press; Bill Welch

    Coretta Scott King dies at 78, UT, 31.1.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-31-corettascottking_x.htm

Civil rights icon Coretta Scott King dies at 78

Tue Jan 31, 2006 9:47 PM ET
Reuters
By Karen Jacobs

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Coretta Scott King, who surged to the front of the fight for racial equality in America after her husband Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, has died at age 78, friends and family said on Tuesday.

Mrs. King, who had been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, died late on Monday in Mexico, where she had been seeking possible treatment, a family spokeswoman told Reuters.

"Mrs. King was in Mexico for observation and consideration of treatment for ovarian cancer," the spokeswoman said. "She was considered terminal by physicians in the United States. She and the family wanted to explore other options."

Funeral arrangements were not expected to be known until after Mrs. King's children returned to Atlanta with her body, expected early on Wednesday, the family spokeswoman said.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that King died at Hospital Santa Monica, a health center in Rosarito Beach, Mexico, where many Americans seek alternative and sometimes controversial treatments. The hospital declined comment.

"Her daughter was with her at the time she passed," said Bishop Eddie Long of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, Georgia, pastor for King's youngest child, Bernice.

King, often called the first lady of the civil rights movement, suffered a debilitating stroke and heart attack in August. She was last seen in public on January 14 at a dinner marking the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, where she received a standing ovation from a crowd of 1,500 people.

By fall, Mrs. King had been told she had ovarian cancer, the Atlanta newspaper reported on its Web site.

Her steely determination, grace and class won her admirers inside and outside the civil rights movement. On Tuesday, accolades poured in from leaders in politics and business.

HAILED BY BUSH, CLINTON, CARTER

President George W. Bush began his State of the Union address by praising King, drawing a standing ovation.

"Today our nation lost a beloved, graceful, courageous woman who called America to its founding ideals and carried on a noble dream," Bush said. "Tonight we are comforted by the hope of a glad reunion with the husband who was taken from her so long ago, and we are grateful for the good life of Coretta Scott King."

Former President Jimmy Carter called her "a mainstay of the movement for nonviolent political change," and former President Bill Clinton said Mrs. King was "a giant in the fight for equal rights for all Americans."

Joseph Lowery, one of Martin Luther King Jr.'s closest aides who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the slain civil rights leader, told a news conference in Atlanta that her memory will live on in the hearts of people who love liberty.

Coretta Scott King played a back-up role in the civil rights movement until her husband was gunned down on a Memphis motel balcony on April 4, 1968.

Mrs. King, who was in Atlanta at the time, learned of the murder in a telephone call from the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a call she later wrote, "I seemed subconsciously to have been waiting for all of our lives."

As she recalled in her autobiography "My Life With Martin Luther King Jr.," Mrs. King felt she had to step fully into the civil rights movement after her husband's assassination.

She created a memorial and a forum in the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. The center has archives containing more than 2,000 King speeches and is built around the King crypt and its eternal flame.

Coretta Scott was born April 27, 1927, near Marion, Alabama. Spending most of her early years on a farm, she saw little prejudice until she was sent into town to attend Lincoln High School, a black school in the segregated South.

"It was awful," she said of living in Marion. "Every Saturday we would hear about some black man getting beat up and nothing was done about it."

SCOTT HOME BURNED DOWN

Her father built a small trucking business but his success began to irritate poor whites, she said, and after harassment someone burned down the Scott home on Thanksgiving night 1942.

"I guess I was being prepared for my role when I was growing up because when we were young children my father's life was in danger," Mrs. King once told Reuters. "We were afraid he was going to be killed.

"A white man threatened him and he never ran. He was fearless," she said.

After graduating in 1951 from majority white Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, Coretta Scott studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

Martin Luther King, who was studying for his doctorate in theology at Boston University, had told a mutual friend he was looking for a wife. The friend gave him her phone number but when he came calling she was not impressed.

"I saw this green car coming up the street and this short man," she said in an interview. "He leaned over to open the door, and when I got in the car I saw this very young looking man. I thought, 'Oh my God, I expected to see a man but this is a boy.'"

When he began to speak, however, she changed her mind.

She never doubted King would battle the status quo. "Even at the time we were courting," she said, "Martin was deeply concerned -- and indignant -- with the plight of the Negro in the United States."

They were married at her parents' home on June 18, 1953, and had four children: Yolanda Denise, born in 1955; Martin Luther III, born in 1957; Bernice Albertine, born in 1963; and Dexter Scott, who turned 45 the day his mother died.

    Civil rights icon Coretta Scott King dies at 78, R, 31.1.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-02-01T024723Z_01_N31367618_RTRUKOC_0_US-KING.xml&archived=False

Five facts about Coretta Scott King

Tue Jan 31, 2006 10:23 AM ET
Reuters

(Reuters) - Coretta Scott King, widow of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, was a leader of the fight for racial equality in America in her own right.

* Coretta Scott was born April 27, 1927, near Marion, Alabama. Spending much of her early years on a farm she saw little prejudice until she reached high school.

* Her father had a small trucking business but his success began to irritate poor whites in the area, she said, and, the Scott home burned in an arson fire on Thanksgiving night in 1942.

* She received a B.A. in music and education from the mainly white Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and then went on to study at Boston's New England Conservatory of Music, where she earned a degree in voice and violin.

* She married Martin Luther King on June 18, 1953, and the couple moved to Atlanta, where King was co-pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church with his father. In 1956, the couple moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where he took over the pulpit at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. It was there he became active in the civil rights movement. He was killed on April 4, 1968.

* She created a memorial and a forum in the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. She also led the fight to have a national holiday named for him.

    Five facts about Coretta Scott King, R, 31.1.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/NewsArticle.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-01-31T152330Z_01_N31385360_RTRUKOT_0_TEXT0.xml&related=true

Smithsonian Picks Notable Spot for Its Museum of Black History

January 31, 2006
The New York Times
By LYNETTE CLEMETSON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 — After nearly a century of political infighting and delay, the Smithsonian Institution on Monday selected a prominent space on the Mall near the Washington Monument as the site of its National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

Supporters of the project, including many black cultural, political and academic leaders, who labored for years to have the museum approved, greeted the selection by the Board of Regents, the institution's governing body, with elation.

High-profile advocates of the museum, the institution's first dedicated to a comprehensive study of the black American experience, had told Smithsonian officials that any site off the Mall would be viewed as a slight to African-Americans.

In September 2004 the National Museum of the American Indian opened to much fanfare and high visibility in its site on the eastern edge of the Mall near the Capitol.

Some groups responded to the announcement on Monday with disappointment, arguing that the project would clutter the Mall, the grassy expanse stretching from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capitol.

Smithsonian officials said the vote on the site was not unanimous but would not give details. Officials said they hoped to open the new museum within the next decade.

"My first task for tomorrow is to stop smiling," said Lonnie G. Bunch, director of the museum.

The selection of the five-acre site allows Mr. Bunch to move forward with choosing an architect, as well as to begin raising money and acquiring collections. Cost estimates for the museum, the 19th in the Smithsonian complex, range from $300 million to $500 million. Fifty percent of the cost will be paid by the federal government, the other half by private sources.

The building will probably be at least 350,000 square feet, roughly the same size as the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian officials said.

Mr. Bunch, former director of curatorial affairs for the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, left a position as president of the Chicago Historical Society in July to lead the new project. He said it was "quite fitting that the experience of African-Americans take its place among the museums and monuments that make the National Mall a world-renowned location."

Fund-raising has already started and will be greatly aided by the site selection, Mr. Bunch said.

Lawrence M. Small, secretary of the Smithsonian, said the institution was committed to building "a remarkable museum that will inspire generations of future visitors from around the world with truly American stories of perseverance, courage, talent and triumph."

Richard D. Parsons, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner Inc. and a co-chairman of the museum's advisory council, said he planned to use America Online, which Time Warner owns, to create a virtual connection between the museum and potential donors, by offering links to the kinds of material and artifacts that the museum will contain.

"We are going to try to hit this at several levels," Mr. Parsons said in a telephone interview after the announcement. "We will reach out to the entire corporate community and the philanthropic community, but also just folks at very large levels and at the $5 and $10 level. And you can use online communities to reach these people in new and unique ways."

Supporters said the highly visible spot, adjacent to the Washington Monument across the street from the National Museum of American History, acknowledged the centrality of the African-American experience in the country's development.

Efforts to build a national museum of black history began in the early 1900's but were repeatedly thwarted by political and social opposition well into the 1990's. In 1994 Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, passionately blocked Senate passage of a bill authorizing the museum, saying Congress should not have to "pony up" for such efforts.

"Thank God," said Robert L. Wilkins, a Washington lawyer who headed the site selection committee on a presidential commission formed in 2002 to make recommendations for the museum to Congress. "Even though the building has not yet been constructed, I feel like we have finally fulfilled this long quest in an honorable and appropriate way."

Many opponents of the site had lobbied heavily for a site south of the Mall, arguing that the new museum would help bring about a much-needed physical and psychological expansion of the Mall beyond its current boundaries.

"It is a lost opportunity," said Judy Scott Feldman, chairwoman of the National Coalition to Save Our Mall, a group founded in 2000 to oppose the site of the World War II Memorial between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. "We believe that there was a possibility here to make this museum not the last museum on the 20th-century Mall, but the first museum on the 21st-century Mall. It could have motivated the nation to move the Mall into the future."

Detractors said they had long suspected they were waging a difficult battle.

The advisory council — which includes numerous influential black leaders, including E. Stanley O'Neal, chairman and chief executive of Merrill Lynch & Company; Robert L. Johnson, founder of Black Entertainment Television; and Oprah Winfrey — recommended the monument site to the Board of Regents in early December. They based their recommendation on a review of a 198-page engineering evaluation, commissioned by the Smithsonian, of four potential sites. Two were on the Mall; two were not.

"We were very clear and unanimous in our recommendation," said Michael L. Lomax, president and chief executive of the United Negro College Fund and a member of the advisory council. "The site articulates not just the kind of recognition the museum will receive, but ultimately what kind of recognition African-Americans will receive for their contributions to the country."

In an interview, Mr. Johnson said he had told Mr. Small that he would resign from the advisory council if the board chose a site off the Mall.

"The symbolism of denying African-Americans the same treatment as museums like the Museum of the American Indian, the Holocaust Museum and all of the great museums on the Mall would have been too much," he said. "To have relegated this museum to another site, when people are looking to it to answer everything from the need for an apology for slavery to reparations, would have been the ultimate dismissal."

The 17-member board includes several politicians, as well as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. Vice President Dick Cheney was the only member not in attendance for the announcement, made in a lecture hall near the Castle, the Smithsonian's main administrative building.

President Bush, who signed the bill authorizing the museum in December 2003, also endorsed a site on the Mall last February at a Black History Month event at the White House. "We have a chance to build a fantastic museum, right here in the heart of Washington, D.C., on the Mall," the president told those in attendance, including Mr. Small.

Mr. Bunch said in an interview that he awoke at 4 a.m. on Monday, the day of the announcement, in a fit of excitement and anxiety over the vote.

"I have always thought that the honor of creating this museum would make any place that it is located sacred ground," he said. "My focus has just been let me know what the decision is, and off to work I will go."

He is quickly hiring staff members to fill his temporary offices, near the site south of the Mall that the board rejected.

Lakiesha Carr contributed reporting for this article.

    Smithsonian Picks Notable Spot for Its Museum of Black History, NYT, 31.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/arts/design/31museum.html?hp&ex=1138683600&en=f66da1719e8d9aa2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Protesters at King March Oppose Air Force Flyover

January 17, 2006
The New York Times
By TIM EATON

SAN ANTONIO, Jan. 16 - Protesters wore yellow and black armbands and chanted during speeches Monday in disapproval of the inclusion of Air Force jets at the end of this military city's 20th annual march honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Activists had threatened to boycott the march, but 100,000 people turned out as expected.

The protesters said Dr. King, who opposed the war in Vietnam and dedicated his life to nonviolence, would not have supported the display of military muscle. Supporters of the flyover by T-1 training jets from 99th Training Squadron from nearby Randolph Air Force Base pointed to the squadron's direct lineage to the Tuskegee Airmen, the country's first group of black military pilots.

An activist, Tommy Calvert Jr., attended the event and led a group of a few dozen people who wore armbands. "Dr. King's dream was buried by the M.L.K. Commission," Mr. Calvert said after the flyover. "Dr. King was against militarization. We have to honor his values."

Other protesters released white doves, carried signs reading "Peace Not Planes" and repeated a chant of "Shame" as the T-1's passed overhead.

City Councilwoman Sheila McNeil, who was the honorary M.L.K. March chairwoman for the city's M.L.K. Commission, was part of the effort that invited the 99th Training Squadron to fly over the city, which she called "Military City, U.S.A."

"We understand that Dr. King was against the Vietnam War, but he wasn't against the military," Ms. McNeil said.

Dr. King regularly worked with the military during events promoting racial equality, she said. It was National Guardsmen who escorted black students into once segregated schools in the South in the 1950's and 1960's, Ms. McNeil added.

Another supporter of the flyover, Mayor Phil Hardberger, said he heard Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech in person and understood the civil rights leader's values.

"I think it's a great honor to Dr. King," Mr. Hardberger said of the flyover. "Even the armed services, essentially, bow down before him and his ideas."

Henry Cisneros, the former San Antonio mayor and former housing secretary in the Clinton administration, said he did not oppose the flyover, adding, "We want to have as inclusive a day as possible." Mr. Cisneros also said it was important to consider that such a large portion of the military was black, and that Dr. King would not support excluding them.

Much of the protest was enmeshed with criticism of the war in Iraq. There is a growing portion of the population that is opposed to the war, Mr. Cisneros said, "even in Texas, even in Bush country."

Melvin Pipkins, 52, a marcher not connected to the protest, was part of the quiet opposition to the flyover. He said he understood the squadron's history but still objected to the jets at the event.

"That's a whole different episode of history," Mr. Pipkins said. "Don't try to put it all into one basket."

Far removed from the controversy was Capt. LeRon Hudgins, a 31-year-old African-American pilot, who flew one of the two T-1's over Pittman-Sullivan Park here.

"I just thought we'd go out and put on the best show that we could, we would go home, and it'd be over," Captain Hudgins said in the week before Monday's event.

Captain Hudgins volunteered to be a part of the flyover because his involvement represented Dr. King's dedication to equality. Before the Tuskegee Airmen, blacks were locked out of roles as military pilots, Captain Hudgins said. Reflecting on his own position, Captain Hudgins, a graduate of the Air Force Academy, noted that he had risen to a coveted position in the military.

"I don't see how there can be a bigger tribute to the idea of equality," Captain Hudgins said. "For me, being in the 99th, and being a black pilot myself, I think it is tremendous tribute to some of the things that he fought for."

    Protesters at King March Oppose Air Force Flyover, NYT, 17.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/national/17king.html

Bush Salutes Memories of 2 Civil Rights Leaders

January 17, 2006
The New York Times
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - President Bush saluted the memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, saying Dr. King, like Rosa Parks, who died last year, "roused the dozing conscience of a complacent nation."

In remarks here to commemorate Dr. King's birthday, Mr. Bush invoked the religious faith held by Dr. King and Mrs. Parks, another symbol of the civil rights movement, in describing freedom not as "a grant of government, but a gift from the author of all life." And he said that more needed to be done to achieve their goal of racial equality.

"The reason to honor Martin Luther King is to remember his strength of character and his leadership, but also to remember the remaining work," Mr. Bush said at a symposium sponsored by Georgetown University at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. "The reason to honor Mrs. Parks is not only to pay homage to her strength of character, but to remember the ideals of active citizenship."

For Mr. Bush, who started his day with a trip to the National Archives to see the Emancipation Proclamation, the events had clear political undertones. He has long harbored hopes of breaking the grip of the Democratic Party on the loyalty of black voters. But whatever progress he may have made in his first term suffered a setback in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when he was widely criticized as failing to respond urgently to a natural disaster that fell with particular ferocity on poor blacks.

As Mr. Bush made a point of telling his audience here, Laura Bush spent Monday in Africa, attending the inauguration in Liberia of Africa's first elected female president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Ken Mehlman, who spent much of his time last year courting minority voters, spoke Monday to an audience at a predominantly black church in Beltsville, Md.

In his remarks, Mr. Bush called on Congress to renew the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some provisions of which would otherwise expire in 2007.

But his administration has come under fire from some critics for taking what they consider a lax attitude toward voting rights.

The Justice Department acknowledged last month that top officials had overruled a finding by the department's civil rights staff in 2003 that a Texas redistricting plan that helped gain Republicans seats in the House would violate voting rights laws. And Mr. Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court seat being vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr., came under questioning at his confirmation hearings last week over his description of himself in 1985 as a critic of the "one person one vote" precedents set by the Supreme Court.

Democrats also used the commemoration of Dr. King's birthday to send a political message, trying to link continued progress in civil rights to an issue they consider the Republican Party's greatest vulnerability right now, the far-reaching corruption investigation into the relationships between lobbyists and lawmakers.

"Working together, we can defeat this culture of corruption that neglects the moral issues that Dr. King fought for," said Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic minority leader.

    Bush Salutes Memories of 2 Civil Rights Leaders, NYT, 17.1.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/politics/17bush.html

Americans honor Martin Luther King

Posted 1/16/2006 8:34 AM Updated 1/16/2006 12:50 PM
USA Today

GREENVILLE, S.C. (AP) — Millions of people across the country are remembering slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King on Monday's national holiday in his honor. (Related video: MLK's legacy celebrated)

Christine Pollard of Oklahoma City, sings Lift Every Voice and Sing, during a celebration of the life of Dr. King.
AP

In Washington, President Bush visited the National Archives and paid tribute both to King and to Abraham Lincoln. In Chicago, Rev. Jesse Jackson praised King as a prophet whose dream has not been fully achieved. (Related story: Bush marks MLK day with gospel performance)

Bush viewed the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln signed to free the slaves, and the president said Lincoln "recognized that all men are created equal."

The president said King "lived on that admonition to call our country to a higher calling." Bush added that King "called Americans to account when we didn't live up to our ideals."

Jackson spoke at the 16th Annual Rainbow PUSH Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Breakfast in Chicago on Monday morning.

He said blacks are free but not equal in life expectancy, access to education and infant mortality. Jackson urged the breakfast's 2,000 attendees to continue to fight for change.

U.S. Sen. Barack Obama, Ill. Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley also spoke at the breakfast, which also honored people whose work over the past year has been in the King tradition.

Most Americans believe there has been significant progress in achieving King's dream of racial equality, though blacks are more skeptical, an AP-Ipsos poll found. (Related story: Poll: Most see racial progress, but blacks skeptical)

Racial integration has swept across much of American life and blacks have gained economic ground since the height of the civil rights movement. Two decades ago, the government established a federal holiday in honor of the slain civil rights leader.

On some measures such as annual income, blacks have closed the gap considerably with whites over the past few decades, census figures show. The progress for blacks may have stalled, however, and some even fear a possible backlash.

"We've made great progress over the last 50 years," said Julian Bond, national chairman of the NAACP. "Progress has always been stop-and-start, and sometimes backup. We're in a holding pattern right now."

Three-quarters of those surveyed say there has been significant progress on achieving King's dream. But only 66% of blacks felt that way.

"At times I have felt that we've made progress," said Aubrey Jones, a black deputy warden at a state prison near Macon, Ga. "At other times, I feel we're at a standstill, especially when you come across instances of individuals being prejudiced."

The obstacles extend beyond instances of discrimination and prejudice.

"For a big portion of the African-Americans, there's not better education," said David Bositis, an analyst of black issues for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. "There have been some gains made, but it's uneven. A lot of whites basically say: 'The civil rights movement has been done. I don't want to hear about it anymore.'"

Only 23% of respondents say they will do anything to commemorate the national holiday that took effect in 1986 after a lengthy campaign in Congress to honor King. A solid majority of blacks, 60%, say they will get involved in holiday activities.

Some say the civil rights movement sparked a backlash that could reverse gains.

Among those concerns are efforts to require a voter ID card in Georgia; the expected confirmation of conservative Judge Samuel Alito to be on the Supreme Court; immigration's effect on the job market for blacks; and an expected fight next year over reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.

"Politically, the group that has gained the most after the civil rights movement was white Southern conservatives," Bositis said. "They have transformed the Republican Party, which has become the dominant political party."

All 50 states gradually recognized a King holiday. But only one-third of businesses offer a paid holiday, according to the Bureau of National Affairs.

Participation in the holiday was enhanced by legislation passed in 1994 establishing the day as one of service.

In many places, people will help with projects aimed to improve the community and help the needy. Supporters of the holiday try to discourage businesses from using it as a marketing gimmick.

"Martin Luther King would turn over in his grave if he thought he was recognized by a day of shopping and rest," said former Sen. Harris Wofford, D-Pa., who worked with Rep. John Lewis of Georgia to establish the holiday as a day of service.

"The idea that it's a day on and not a day off is catching on. But the King holiday is well short of what it needs to be," Wofford said.

Three-fourths of those polled say King should be honored with a federal holiday. Blacks almost unanimously favored that, according to the poll of 1,242 adults that included an oversample of blacks.

The poll, taken Monday through Thursday, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Accusations that King committed adultery and plagiarized material in academic writings emerged in the years after the holiday was established. Those claims remind people that King had human failings despite his larger-than-life image as a hero of the civil rights movement, said William Boone, a political scientist at Clark Atlanta University. (Related story: Heed Dr. King's words, Atlanta mayor urges)

"It does not diminish the mission he was on," Boone said. "People now have a tendency to sanitize him, to make him more palatable to a broader spectrum of the American population."

For Latoya Williams, a black mother of four from Norfolk, Va., the holiday is a chance to remind her children what King accomplished to give them more opportunities in life. Her children respond with a weary, "We know, Ma."

Replays of King's soaring "I have a dream" speech from 1963 inspire Williams every time.

"When I hear that speech they play on TV every year," she said, "I still feel that dream."

    Americans honor Martin Luther King, UT, 16.1.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-16-king-holiday_x.htm

AP Poll: Most see significant progress in realizing King's dream

Posted 1/14/2006 12:34 PM Updated 1/14/2006 12:48 PM
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — Most Americans believe there has been significant progress in achieving Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of racial equality, though blacks are more skeptical, an AP-Ipsos poll found.

Racial integration has swept across much of American life and blacks have gained economic ground since the height of the civil rights movement. Two decades ago, the government established a federal holiday in honor of the slain civil rights leader.

On some measures such as annual income, blacks have closed the gap considerably with whites over the past few decades, census figures show. The progress for blacks may have stalled, however, and some even fear a possible backlash.

"We've made great progress over the last 50 years," said Julian Bond, national chairman of the NAACP. "Progress has always been stop-and-start, and sometimes backup. We're in a holding pattern right now."

Three-quarters of those surveyed say there has been significant progress on achieving King's dream. But only 66% of blacks felt that way.

"At times I have felt that we've made progress," said Aubrey Jones, a black deputy warden at a state prison near Macon, Ga. "At other times, I feel we're at a standstill, especially when you come across instances of individuals being prejudiced."

The obstacles extend beyond instances of discrimination and prejudice.

"For a big portion of the African-Americans, there's not better education," said David Bositis, an analyst of black issues for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. "There have been some gains made, but it's uneven. A lot of whites basically say: 'The civil rights movement has been done. I don't want to hear about it anymore.'"

Only 23% of respondents say they will do anything to commemorate the national holiday that took effect in 1986 after a lengthy campaign in Congress to honor King. A solid majority of blacks, 60%, say they will get involved in holiday activities.

Some say the civil rights movement sparked a backlash that could reverse gains.

Among those concerns are efforts to require a voter ID card in Georgia; the expected confirmation of conservative Judge Samuel Alito to be on the Supreme Court; immigration's effect on the job market for blacks; and an expected fight next year over reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act.

"Politically, the group that has gained the most after the civil rights movement was white Southern conservatives," Bositis said. "They have transformed the Republican Party, which has become the dominant political party."

All 50 states gradually recognized a King holiday. But only one-third of businesses offer a paid holiday, according to the Bureau of National Affairs.

Participation in the holiday was enhanced by legislation passed in 1994 establishing the day as one of service.

In many places, people will help with projects aimed to improve the community and help the needy. Supporters of the holiday try to discourage businesses from using it as a marketing gimmick.

"Martin Luther King would turn over in his grave if he thought he was recognized by a day of shopping and rest," said former Sen. Harris Wofford, D-Pa., who worked with Rep. John Lewis of Georgia to establish the holiday as a day of service.

"The idea that it's a day on and not a day off is catching on. But the King holiday is well short of what it needs to be," Wofford said.

Three-fourths of those polled say King should be honored with a federal holiday. Blacks almost unanimously favored that, according to the poll of 1,242 adults that included an oversample of blacks.

The poll, taken Monday through Thursday, has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Accusations that King committed adultery and plagiarized material in academic writings emerged in the years after the holiday was established. Those claims remind people that King had human failings despite his larger-than-life image as a hero of the civil rights movement, said William Boone, a political scientist at Clark Atlanta University.

"It does not diminish the mission he was on," Boone said. "People now have a tendency to sanitize him, to make him more palatable to a broader spectrum of the American population."

For Latoya Williams, a black mother of four from Norfolk, Va., the holiday is a chance to remind her children what King accomplished to give them more opportunities in life. Her children respond with a weary, "We know, Ma."

Replays of King's soaring "I have a dream" speech from 1963 inspire Williams every time.

"When I hear that speech they play on TV every year," she said, "I still feel that dream."

    AP Poll: Most see significant progress in realizing King's dream, UT, 14.1.2006,http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-01-14-martin-luther-king-jr_x.htm

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