The Obama Presidency: Racism Run Amok

It's a Great Time to Be Racist

By: Nsenga Burton

Posted: August 12, 2011 at 12:57 AM

Let's face it: There's only one explanation for some of the attacks on President Obama.

Racists have officially lost their minds. In recent weeks, the venom spewed at President Barack Obama would leave one to believe that we are in the midst of a racist renaissance. "A dick," "jackass," "tar baby, "your boy" -- you name it and the president has been called it. For some reason, some people are so enraged by how this country is purportedly being run that they cannot separate a real critique of the president's decisions from mean-spirited name-calling related to his race.


Yes, the country that likes to pretend that it is far removed from its racist past has engaged in the verbal equivalent of a throwback jersey. Some people have reached far back into that Reconstruction-era closet, pulled out that dingy jersey adorned with racial slurs, shaken it out and put it on proudly. Elected officials have reduced themselves to behaving like petulant children, storming in and out of meetings and running to the media to lob personal attacks at the president, then offering lame apologies shortly afterward.

Is this the postracial era that so many people theorized about following the election of the nation's first black president? Try post-Reconstruction, because the harmful slurs and images being tossed around the Internet and in public spaces hark back more to a racist past than to a racially ambiguous future.

It's not surprising that President Obama is being received in such a way.


Trouble From the Start
We got a peek at what was to come just seven months into President Obama's tenure. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) shouted, "You lie!" during the president's speech about health care reform. Clearly Wilson had a flashback to legalized segregation, when folks publicly bullied, threatened and heckled blacks to remind them of who was "in charge."


Wilson subsequently issued an apology, saying his actions were "regrettable" and he'd let his emotions take over. He was just the first of a series of elected officials acting like fools and then offering weak apologies as a remedy for said actions.


To be clear, "You lie!" is not a racist exclamation. Yet and still, it is insulting and in recent memory has not been used against any other president, even when he may have been lying about one thing or another. President George W. Bush and the weapons of mass destruction, for example, or President Bill Clinton and the Lewinsky scandal could have triggered such a response.

The full article

Black Women Historians on "The Help"

 An Open Statement to the Fans of The Help:

On behalf of the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH), this statement provides historical context to address widespread stereotyping presented in both the film and novel version of The Help. The book has sold over three million copies, and heavy promotion of the movie will ensure its success at the box office. Despite efforts to market the book and the film as a progressive story of triumph over racial injustice, The Help distorts, ignores, and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are specifically concerned about the representations of black life and the lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism.

During the 1960s, the era covered in The Help, legal segregation and economic inequalities limited black women's employment opportunities. Up to 90 per cent of working black women in the South labored as domestic servants in white homes. The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy—a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites, the caricature of Mammy allowed mainstream America to ignore the systemic racism that bound black women to back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them. The popularity of this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.

Both versions of The Help also misrepresent African American speech and culture. Set in the South, the appropriate regional accent gives way to a child-like, over-exaggerated “black” dialect. In the film, for example, the primary character, Aibileen, reassures a young white child that, “You is smat, you is kind, you is important.” In the book, black women refer to the Lord as the “Law,” an irreverent depiction of black vernacular. For centuries, black women and men have drawn strength from their community institutions. The black family, in particular provided support and the validation of personhood necessary to stand against adversity. We do not recognize the black community described in The Help where most of the black male characters are depicted as drunkards, abusive, or absent. Such distorted images are misleading and do not represent the historical realities of black masculinity and manhood.

Furthermore, African American domestic workers often suffered sexual harassment as well as physical and verbal abuse in the homes of white employers. For example, a recently discovered letter written by Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks indicates that she, like many black domestic workers, lived under the threat and sometimes reality of sexual assault. The film, on the other hand, makes light of black women’s fears and vulnerabilities turning them into moments of comic relief.

Similarly, the film is woefully silent on the rich and vibrant history of black Civil Rights activists in Mississippi. Granted, the assassination of Medgar Evers, the first Mississippi based field secretary of the NAACP, gets some attention. However, Evers’ assassination sends Jackson’s black community frantically scurrying into the streets in utter chaos and disorganized confusion—a far cry from the courage demonstrated by the black men and women who continued his fight. Portraying the most dangerous racists in 1960s Mississippi as a group of attractive, well dressed, society women, while ignoring the reign of terror perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, limits racial injustice to individual acts of meanness.

We respect the stellar performances of the African American actresses in this film. Indeed, this statement is in no way a criticism of their talent. It is, however, an attempt to provide context for this popular rendition of black life in the Jim Crow South. In the end, The Help is not a story about the millions of hardworking and dignified black women who labored in white homes to support their families and communities. Rather, it is the coming-of-age story of a white protagonist, who uses myths about the lives of black women to make sense of her own. The Association of Black Women Historians finds it unacceptable for either this book or this film to strip black women’s lives of historical accuracy for the sake of entertainment.

Ida E. Jones is National Director of ABWH and Assistant Curator at Howard University. Daina Ramey Berry, Tiffany M. Gill, and Kali Nicole Gross are Lifetime Members of ABWH and Associate Professors at the University of Texas at Austin. Janice Sumler-Edmond is a Lifetime Member of ABWH and is a Professor at Huston-Tillotson University.

Word Count: 766

Suggested Reading:

Fiction:

Like one of the Family: Conversations from A Domestic’s Life, Alice Childress

The Book of the Night Women by Marlon James

Blanche on the Lam by Barbara Neeley

The Street by Ann Petry

A Million Nightingales by Susan Straight

Non-Fiction:

Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household by Thavolia Glymph

To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors by Tera Hunter

Labor of Love Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present by Jacqueline Jones Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration by Elizabeth Clark-Lewis

Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody

Any questions, comments, or interview requests can be sent to:

ABWHTheHelp@gmail.com

Progressives not recognizing racism in their criticism of Obama

Below is a great piece.  I made this very argument to a couple of our colleagues just yesterday.  I just heard a Rep Himes-NY remind his progressive friends of all that Obama has accomplished in 3 yrs!!!  Racism is at the base of this opposition to Obama is on the right and the left.  The Republicans and other white nationalists that have poisoned our politics.   On the other hand, these lefties blame Obama for OUR weakness.  We have lost EVERY battle: Van Jones, Acorn, Sherrod, etc.   And we would not have lost Sherrod were it not for the weakness of the NAACP.    If Barney Frank says the use of the 14^th Amendment would have been an impeachable offense, Obama’s decision to make a deal was not a sign of weakness.

It is reminiscent as the author says of the Smiley/West politics of the personal. "Obama’s not black enough" (read: weak, not radical enough).    He's not Martin and He's not Malcolm.     Even though his accomplishments have been historic, he "compromises too much."  Where is the sense of politics, of governance?   He is operating in context in a racially hostile environment, an environment in which mainstream reporters on mainstream or what Ismael Reed calls the "Jim Crow media."  RGN 

Progressives don't see Obama clearly because of our racial blind spots.

The predominately white progressive intelligentsia don't see Obama clearly because of our racial blind spot. We don't see the role of race in how he seems to understand himself and how other perceive him.


The complete article  

Krugman: The President Surrenders!!!!!

Progressives are dismayed and disappointed that President Obama capitulated on the "the deal" that permitted the debt ceiling to be raised.  Raising the debt ceiling has ALWAYS been essential and routine.  But in their goal to make President Obama a "failure" and a "one term president,"  the right wing in the Congress extracted spending cuts without any enhanced revenues (taxes) to address the deficit and the debt.  Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman says the President surrendered to his opposition.  See Krugman below.  RGN

July 31, 2011

The President Surrenders  

By PAUL KRUGMAN

A deal to raise the federal debt ceiling is in the works. If it goes through, many commentators will declare that disaster was avoided. But they will be wrong.

For the deal itself, given the available information, is a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.

Start with the economics. We currently have a deeply depressed economy. We will almost certainly continue to have a depressed economy all through next year. And we will probably have a depressed economy through 2013 as well, if not beyond.

The worst thing you can do in these circumstances is slash government spending, since that will depress the economy even further. Pay no attention to those who invoke the confidence fairy, claiming that tough action on the budget will reassure businesses and consumers, leading them to spend more. It doesn’t work that way, a fact confirmed by many studies of the historical record.

Indeed, slashing spending while the economy is depressed won’t even help the budget situation much, and might well make it worse. On one side, interest rates on federal borrowing are currently very low, so spending cuts now will do little to reduce future interest costs. On the other side, making the economy weaker now will also hurt its long-run prospects, which will in turn reduce future revenue. So those demanding spending cuts now are like medieval doctors who treated the sick by bleeding them, and thereby made them even sicker.

The full article.

The Nation on Frances Fox Piven

The danger of the Glenn Beck attacks on Frances Fox Piven cannot be overstated.  With the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, we can see the dangerous climate that has been promoted by America's white nationalist politics.  Besides Bill O'Rielly and Rush Limbaugh, the Pied Piper for this movement is Glenn Beck.  Among his targets is Frances Fox Piven.  The Editors of The Nation provide an excellent analysis of Beck and the climate to which he contributes.  RGN

Glenn Beck Targets Frances Fox Piven

The Editors
The Nation 
January 20, 2011

On the afternoon of January 6, Frances Fox Piven, a distinguished professor, legendary activist, writer and longtime contributor to this magazine, received an e-mail from an unknown correspondent. There was no text, just a subject line that read: DIE YOU CUNT. It was not the first piece of hateful e-mail Piven had gotten, nor would it be the last. One writer told her to "go back to Canada you dumb bitch"; another ended with this wish: "may cancer find you soon."

Piven was unnerved but not surprised. These are not pretty e-mails, but they appear positively decorous compared with what has been written about her by commentators on Glenn Beck's website, The Blaze, where she's been the target of a relentless campaign to demonize her—and worse. There, under cover of anonymous handles, scores of people have called for Piven's murder, even volunteering to do the job with their own hands. "Somebody tell Frances I have 5000 roundas [sic] ready and I'll give My life to take Our freedom back," wrote superwrench4. "ONE SHOT...ONE KILL!" proclaimed Jst1425. "The only redistribution I am interested in is that of a precious metal.... LEAD," declared Patriot1952. Posts like these are interwoven with ripples of misogyny, outbursts of bizarre anti-Semitism and crude insults about Piven's looks (she's actually a noted beauty) and age (she's 78).

This fusillade was evidently set off by Piven's recent Nation editorial calling for a mass movement of the unemployed ["Mobilizing the Jobless [1]," January 10/17]. But Beck has had Piven in his cross-hairs for some time. In the past few years he's featured Piven, along with her late husband, Richard Cloward, in at least twenty-eight broadcasts, all of which paint them as masterminds of an overarching left-wing plot called "the Cloward-Piven strategy," which supposedly engineered the financial crisis of 2008, healthcare reform, Obama's election and massive voter fraud, among other world-historical events (see Richard Kim, "The Mad Tea Party [2]," April 12, 2010). Cloward and Piven, Beck once argued, are "fundamentally responsible for the unsustainability and possible collapse of our economic system." In his most recent diatribe against Piven (January 17) he repeatedly called her "the enemy of the Constitution." In Beck's telling, because Piven and her comrades on the left support civil disobedience in some circumstances, it is they—not the heavily armed militias of the radical right—who threaten Americans' safety.

It's tempting not to dignify such ludicrous distortions with a response. But in brief: Piven, throughout her career as an activist and academic, has embodied the best of American democracy. It has been her life's work to amplify the voices of the disenfranchised through voter registration drives, grassroots organization and, when necessary, street protest. The way economic injustice warps and erodes our democracy has been a central preoccupation. But passive lament has never been her game. Recognizing the leverage that oppressed groups have—and working with them to use it—is her special genius.

It's perhaps not surprising, then, that the pseudo-populist right finds her so threatening. The highly personalized and concerted campaign against Piven, already unsettling, takes on added gravity in the context of the recent shootings of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, federal judge John Roll and eighteen other people in Arizona. But while commentators debate whether the killer in that case—the mentally disturbed Jared Loughner—was inspired by the ravings of right-wing demagogues, the forgotten story of Byron Williams provides a straightforward example of the way hateful rhetoric fuels violence.

In July, Williams, a convicted bank robber, put on a suit of body armor and got in a car with a 9-mm handgun, a shotgun and a .308 caliber rifle equipped with armor-piercing bullets and set off for San Francisco. His destination was the Tides Foundation, which had been mentioned at that point in at least twenty-nine episodes of the Glenn Beck show, sometimes along with Piven. His goal, as he later told police, was to kill "people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU" in order to "start a revolution." Williams's mother said that he had been watching TV news and was upset at "the way Congress was railroading through all these left-wing-agenda items." Or, as Williams himself put it, "I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn't for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind." California Highway Patrol officers pulled Williams over for driving erratically and, after a firefight, subdued and arrested him before he could blow anyone else's mind away.

For a responsible journalist and a responsible media outlet, such an incident would have spurred a process of intense self-scrutiny. But this is Glenn Beck and Fox, and as is evident from the campaign against Piven, nothing of the sort occurred. In the hundreds of posts about Piven on The Blaze, there is not one admonition to tone down the violent rhetoric, not one clear instance in which an editor intervened to moderate the thread. In fact, commenters seem at liberty to egg one another on: one poster pointedly noted that Piven lives in New York City and teaches at CUNY; another then linked to a website that listed Piven's home address and phone number. "Why is this woman still alive?" asked capnjack. "Mainly because you haven't killed her, I imagine. See, someone that really cares and has the courage of their conviction must actually DO SOMETHING," responded Diamondback. And the calls for assassination are not limited to Piven. As Civilunrestnow put it in a post that perfectly captures the tenor of right-wing eliminationist fantasy, "I say bring it. 90 million legal gun owners with over 220 million legal firearms, MOST in the hands of people who claim to be center RIGHT. I think it's time to reduce the surplus population of leeches, lay abouts, left wing nut jobs, the main stream media, liberal politicians and MOST defense attorneys."

Of course, crazed right-wingers enjoy the protection of the First Amendment, too. But the overwhelming and transparent calls for murder on Beck's website, among other right-wing hot spots, can't be casually dismissed as "just talk." At one time it was all just talk for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Dr. George Tiller's assassin, Scott Roeder, too. We were lucky that police happened to pull over Byron Williams before he reached the Tides Foundation's door. In a sense Glenn Beck was lucky too. How long will this luck hold out?

Need to Fight Back in Defense of a Colleague: Frances Fox Piven

Glenn Beck is certifiable.  Yet, his outrage continues.  Over the course of his machinations, he has concocted that one of our most honored colleagues is the reason for American ruin.  Beck has singled out Frances Fox Piven to construct his grand conspiracy to destroy America.  Fox News with its dedication to white nationalism has placed Beck as its evangelist.  It is time to fight back.  Media matters is a good place to start.  RGN

Dear Friend:

Over the past year, Glenn Beck has launched numerous false attacks against renowned Sociologist and progressive civil rights chamption Frances Fox Piven.

As a result of Beck's accusations that Piven promotes violence and is an "enemy of the constitution," numerous violent threats to Piven have been posted on Beck's website.

It is absolutely irresponsible -- and dangerous -- to let Beck continue his rhetoric and false attacks against Piven.

Tell Fox News President Roger Ailes it is his responsibility to stop

Beck's attacks now:

http://act.credoaction.com/campaign/stop_piven_attacks/?r_by=-3608226-CKtjMYx&rc=mailto2

Tea Party White Nationalism and "Social Engineering"

It is needless to say that the Tea Party movement is a white nationalist movement.  Conservatives or the right wing are in their heydey with the victories of the Tea Party movement.  Their economic policies of tax cuts for the rich are winning the day due to the widespread Tea Party victories in the 2010 elections.  As opposed to its racist reputation, there is an attempt to make the case that the Tea Party movement is an economic formation.  While to SOME degree that may be accurate, the driving force of the Tea Party is white nationalism.  They were formed to oppose America's first African American president.  Arizona's white nationalist laws, including those that would permit a Jared Loughner to purchase his gun and clips, are a prime example of Tea Party governance.  The story below by Stephanie McCrummen of the Washington Post on a North Carolina Republican school board is about the district's integration policy of longstanding being overturned by its Tea Party members.   RGN

Republican school board in N.C. backed by tea party abolishes integration policy


By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Staff Writer

Wednesday, January 12, 2011; 12:38 PM

RALEIGH, N.C. - The sprawling Wake County School District has long been a rarity. Some of its best, most diverse schools are in the poorest sections of this capital city. And its suburban schools, rather than being exclusive enclaves, include children whose parents cannot afford a house in the neighborhood.

But over the past year, a new majority-Republican school board backed by national tea party conservatives has set the district on a strikingly different course. Pledging to "say no to the social engineers!" it has abolished the policy behind one of the nation's most celebrated integration efforts.

And as the board moves toward a system in which students attend neighborhood schools, some members are embracing the provocative idea that concentrating poor children, who are usually minorities, in a few schools could have merits - logic that critics are blasting as a 21st-century case for segregation.

The situation unfolding here in some ways represents a first foray of tea party conservatives into the business of shaping a public school system, and it has made Wake County the center of a fierce debate over the principle first enshrined in the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education: that diversity and quality education go hand in hand.

The new school board has won applause from parents who blame the old policy - which sought to avoid high-poverty, racially isolated schools - for an array of problems in the district and who say that promoting diversity is no longer a proper or necessary goal for public schools.

"This is Raleigh in 2010, not Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s - my life is integrated," said John Tedesco, a new board member. "We need new paradigms."

But critics accuse the new board of pursuing an ideological agenda aimed at nothing less than sounding the official death knell of government-sponsored integration in one of the last places to promote it. Without a diversity policy in place, they say, the county will inevitably slip into the pattern that defines most districts across the country, where schools in well-off neighborhoods are decent and those in poor, usually minority neighborhoods struggle.

The NAACP has filed a civil rights complaint arguing that 700 initial student transfers the new board approved have already increased racial segregation, violating laws that prohibit the use of federal funding for discriminatory purposes. In recent weeks, federal education officials visited the county, the first step toward a possible investigation.

"So far, all the chatter we heard from tea partyers has not manifested in actually putting in place retrograde policies. But this is one place where they have literally attempted to turn back the clock," said Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the NAACP.

School Board Chairman Ron Margiotta referred questions on the matter to the district's attorney, who declined to comment. Tedesco, who has emerged as the most vocal among the new majority on the nine-member board, said he and his colleagues are only seeking a simpler system in which children attend the schools closest to them. If the result is a handful of high-poverty schools, he said, perhaps that will better serve the most challenged students.

"If we had a school that was, like, 80 percent high-poverty, the public would see the challenges, the need to make it successful," he said. "Right now, we have diluted the problem, so we can ignore it."

So far, the board shows few signs of shifting course. Last month, it announced that Anthony J. Tata, former chief operating officer of the D.C. schools, will replace a superintendent who resigned to protest the new board's intentions. Tata, a retired general, names conservative commentator Glenn Beck and the Tea Party Patriots among his "likes" on his Facebook page.

Tata did not return calls seeking comment, but he said in a recent news conference in Raleigh that he supports the direction the new board is taking, and cited the District as an example of a place where neighborhood schools are "working."

Beyond 'your little world'

The story unfolding here is striking because of the school district's unusual history. It sprawls 800 square miles and includes public housing in Raleigh, wealthy enclaves near town, and the booming suburbs beyond, home to newcomers that include many new school board members. The county is about 72 percent white, 20 percent black and 9 percent Latino. About 10 percent live in poverty.

Usually, such large territory is divided into smaller districts with students assigned to the nearest schools. And because neighborhoods are still mostly defined by race and socioeconomic status, poor and minority kids wind up in high-poverty schools that struggle with problems such as retaining the best teachers.

Officials in Raleigh tried to head off that scenario. As white flight hit in the 1970s, civic leaders merged the city and county into a single district. And in 2000, they shifted from racial to economic integration, adopting a goal that no school should have more than 40 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, the proxy for poverty.

The district tried to strike this balance through student assignments and choice, establishing magnet programs in poor areas to draw middle-class kids. Although most students here ride buses to school, officials said fewer than 10 percent are bused to a school to maintain diversity, and most bus rides are less than five miles.

"We knew that over time, high-poverty schools tend to lose high-quality teachers, leadership, key students - you see an erosion," said Bill McNeal, a former superintendent who instituted the goal as part of a broad academic plan. "But we never expected economic diversity to solve all our problems."

Over the years, both Republican and Democratic school boards supported the system. A study of 2007 graduation rates by EdWeek magazine ranked Wake County 17th among the nation's 50 largest districts, with a rate of 64 percent, just below Virginia's Prince William County. While most students posted gains in state reading and math tests last year - more than three-quarters passed - the stubborn achievement gap that separates minority students from their white peers has persisted, though it has narrowed by some measures. And many parents see benefits beyond test scores.

"I want these kids to be culturally diverse," said Clarence McClain, who is African American and the guardian of a niece and nephew who are doing well in county schools. "If they're with kids who are all the same way, to break out of that is impossible. You've got to step outside your little world."

'Constant shuffling'

But as the county has boomed in recent years - adding as many as 6,000 students a year - poverty levels at some schools have exceeded 70 percent. And many suburban parents have complained that their children are being reassigned from one school to the next. Officials blame this on the unprecedented growth, but parents blame the diversity goal.

"Basically, all the problems have roots in the diversity policy," said Kathleen Brennan, who formed a parent group to challenge the system. "There was just this constant shuffling every year." She added: "These people are patting themselves on the back and only 54 percent of [poor] kids are graduating. And I'm being painted a racist. But isn't it racist to have low expectations?"

As she and others have delved deeper, they've found that qualified minority students are underenrolled in advanced math classes, for instance, a problem that school officials said they've known about for years, but that strikes many parents as revelatory. Some have even come to see the diversity policy as a kind of profiling that assumes poor kids are more likely to struggle.

"I don't want us to go back to racially isolated schools," said Shila Nordone, who is biracial and has two children in county schools. "But right now, it's as if the best we can do is dilute these kids out so they don't cause problems. It sickens me."

In their quest to end the diversity policy, the frustrated parents have found some influential partners, among them retail magnate and Republican operative Art Pope.

Following his guidance, the GOP fielded the victorious bloc of school board candidates who railed against "forced busing." The nation's largest tea party organizers, Americans for Prosperity - on whose national board Pope sits - cast the old school board members as arrogant "leftists." Two libertarian think tanks, which Pope funds almost exclusively, have deployed experts on TV and radio.

"We are losing sight of the educational mission of schools to make them into some socially acceptable melting pot," said Terry Stoops, a researcher at the libertarian John Locke Foundation. "Those who support these policies are imposing their vision on everyone else."

'Disastrous' results

Things have not gone smoothly as the new school board has attempted to define its vision for raising student achievement. A preliminary map of new school assignments did not please some of the new majority's own constituents. And critics expressed alarm that the plan would create a handful of high-poverty, racially isolated schools, a scenario that the new majority has begun embracing.

Pope, who is a former state legislator, said he would back extra funding for such schools.

"If we end up with a concentration of students underperforming academically, it may be easier to reach out to them," he said. "Hypothetically, we should consider that as well."

The NAACP and others have criticized that as separate-but-equal logic.

"It's not as if this is a new idea, 'Let's experiment and see what happens when poor kids are put together in one school,' " said Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a think tank that advocates for economic integration. "We know. The results are almost always disastrous."

Many local leaders see another irony in the possible balkanization of the county's schools at a time when society is becoming more interconnected than ever.

"People want schools that mirror their neighborhood, but the bigger picture is my kid in the suburbs is connected to kids in Raleigh," said the Rev. Earl Johnson, pastor of Martin Street Baptist Church in downtown Raleigh. "We're trying to connect to the world but we're separating locally? There is something wrong."

Karenga on the Tea Party, the Constitution, and Black America.

In this Tea Party era there is a lot of talk about the Constitution by right wing Tea Partiers who lack understanding of the document.   There is a "faith" endorsement.   Like they love the Bible they love the Constitution, even when they have no idea what it says.  Representative Michelle Bachman recently stated that the Founding Fathers, including John QUINCY Adams, wrung slavery right out of the Constitution.  Dr. Maulana Karenga puts this white nationalist offensive in perspective.  RGN

Quoting the Constitution in Public: Whistlin’ Dixie in the Dark

Dr. Maulana Karenga

It is a sign of the rough and jagged edges of the times in which we
live, this surreal juncture of history where we encounter and are
cultivated to accept, with minimum and often misguided response, various
forms of fear-and-hate mongering, lies, illusions and political
lap-dancing – all deceptive by nature, diversionary by design, and
ultimately unfulfilling. Passed off as a time and arrival of a new
politics, it is a time and context in which hype and hypocrisy are
packaged and peddled as patriotism; the reform and reality of universal
health care is portrayed as something akin to sin; and corporate funding
and manipulation of anti-government sentiment is camouflaged as
constitutional concern and love of country.

For all this flag-draped drama and related talk of constitutional tests
and of turning the country back over to the American people, hides the
continued strengthening of corporate power, evident in the increased
funding of candidates, including Tea Party members; proposed
deregulation; rampant privatization; an ever-growing military budget and
prison-industrial complex; tax preference for the rich and continuing
foreign aid to friendly dictators and brutal allies in open and
unannounced wars and occupations around the world.

It is a time and context in which gun-totin’ and gun talk of “targeting
and taking out” opponents serve as both appetizers and main meal on the
menu of rightwing radio, and their political discourse and campaigns,
and where such vicious rhetoric and social craziness mix and merge with
personal anger and insanity to provoke and produce tragic results as
recently witnessed in Tucson. For in spite of denials, such a context
gives company and confirmation to the mentally disturbed and violent who
put in practice the right wing’s irresponsible and provocative call for
“Second Amendment remedies”.

Last week, the new colonists came to Washington town, Constitution in
hand, corporate interests in mind and chaos in their announced
intentions. Indeed, they came wildly dedicated and determined to
disrupt, reverse, repeal and otherwise neutralize the laws, legislative
initiatives and any and all efforts of President Obama to successfully
govern – a concentrated hostility which, in spite of ritual denial,
suggests racial implications. Thus, it is seriously suspected that they
quote the Constitution in public and whistle Dixie in the dark. Like the
original colonists, whom they seek to model and mirror in their confused
and fantasized conceptions of history, they are in acute and constant
denial concerning the contradictions in their beliefs, behavior and
exalted claims. And likewise, they are woefully unwilling to concede the
destructive and divisive nature of their self-righteous and exclusionist
ideas and activities, which foster and fuel racist and nativist hatred
and violence.

They began their public show, lining up like elementary school children
to read the Constitution on the House floor in deference to their doting
Tea Party foster parents. It was for the true believers a religious
ritual, the reading of a sacred text with related claims of the
brilliance and anointment of the Framers. But to hold to the myths, they
had to call for an amended version of the Constitution. For the original
version of the Constitution, like the men who wrote it, was too flawed
to justify the flowery claims made for it. It, like its writers, needed
to be remade into a more acceptable image, free of the racism, sexism
and classism that stained it. Indeed, the original version sanctioned
African enslavement, denied the wholeness of African humanity, setting
it as 3/5 of a person and rejecting our right of freedom even thru
escape. It also denied women the right to vote, favored property owners
and set aside the Senate for the more noble White men among them. It is
these inconvenient and uncomfortable facts in the Constitution’s
original construction that the new colonists sought to erase and not
reveal by reading a revised and sanitized version of it with its
corrective reconsiderations called amendments.

Such immature and uncritical conceptions of the document and attempts to
talk about it as a holy writ, unchanged and unchangeable, and to force
others to accept it is both self-deceptive and dangerous. It calls for a
paper patriotism devoid of real people with real problems and real
struggles to solve them. In other words, such an approach to the
Constitution denies its original flaws and the flaws of its Framers;
denies the changes made to correct these flaws; denies the history and
the life-and-death struggles required for the changes; and denies the
ongoing need to constantly reinterpret and change the document in light
of deeper and more ethical understandings of how we ought to live
together and relate.

The late and renowned Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, in his
1987 Bicentennial Speech, urged us to move beyond such mindless and
uncritical celebration of Constitution and country. He noted that such a
celebration cultivates a tendency “to oversimplify and overlook the many
other events that have been instrumental to our achievements as a
nation.” Moreover, it “invites a complacent belief that the vision of
those who debated and compromised in Philadelphia yielded the ‘more
perfect union’ it is said we enjoy now.” For Justice Marshall, the
Constitution was not “forever fixed” at Philadelphia. And he noted, he
did not “find the wisdom, foresight and sense of justice exhibited by
the Framers particularly profound.”

Indeed, he states “To the contrary, the government they devised was
defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war and
momentous societal transformation to attain the system of constitutional
government and its respect for individual freedoms and human rights we
hold fundamental today.” Thus, in recognizing the progressive changes
made from enslavement and exclusion to our unfinished struggles for
freedom and inclusion, “the credit does not belong to the Framers. It
belongs to those who refused to acquiesce to outdated notions of
‘liberty’, ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ and who strived to better them.” He
concluded that a rightful reading and a “sensitive understanding of the
Constitution’s inherent defects” will let us “see that the true miracle
was not the birth of the Constitution, but its life, a life nurtured
through two turbulent centuries of our own making.”

Justice Marshall argued that this history requires more than
“festivities with flag-waving fervor.” Rather, it calls for
commemoration of “the suffering, struggle and sacrifice that has
triumphed over much of what was wrong with the original document.” And
it deserves our viewing the document and its history “with hopes not
realized and promises not fulfilled” and therefore, with a commitment to
ongoing and increased struggles to achieve the hopes and promise, and
open up new horizons of human life and history.

Dr. Maulana Karenga, Professor of Africana Studies, California State
University-Long Beach; Executive Director, African American Cultural
Center (Us); Creator of Kwanzaa; and author of Kwanzaa: A Celebration of
Family, Community and Culture and Introduction to Black Studies, 4th

Edition, www.MaulanaKarenga.org.

Cunnigen: On Haley Barbour on Race and Racism in Mississippi (Revised)

Haley Barbour, Governor of Mississippi, has made absurd assertions that in his experience racism was no longer an issue.  Professor Donald Cunnigen sets the record straight.  He challenges Barbour's recollection of the times. RGN

The White Citizens Councils and Haley Barbour

The White Citizens Councils and Haley Barbour


As Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson has stated accurately, the White Citizens Councils members were no more than Klansmen in business suits. Unlike Joe Scarborough who attended schools in Mississippi from 1969-1974 and was oblivious to the existence of the White Citizens Councils, I grew up in Mississippi during the heyday of the White Citizens Councils from the late 1950’s through my high school years in 1970’s Mississippi. It was a powerful group that had a strong impact on the lives of African-Americans and whites in Mississippi.

When I conducted research for my dissertation on white southern liberals in Mississippi, I discovered the impact of the White Citizens Council. One of my research subjects was a racially progressive Jewish businessman. His business was boycotted by the efforts of the White Citizens Council. The boycott was a result of his decision not to fire African American workers in his dry cleaning establishment who planned to enroll their children in the newly proposed integrated Jackson (Mississippi) Public Schools. The boycott was so effective that he lost his business. As a man of conviction and integrity, he felt it was not his role to dictate to his workers the appropriate racial position regarding the education of their children. In his mind, American citizens had a right to provide the best education available for their children.

In the case of African-Americans, the White Citizens Council sympathizers published the names of African-American students who opted to participate in the integration of public schools via the new “Freedom of Choice” program. It was a program designed to prevent the massive integration of schools by allowing only a limited number of students to enroll in the local white schools, i. e., those students and their parents signed a consent form. The forms provided the names of the students and parents to local authorities who often used the information in nefarious ways. Consequently, their families were harassed and many parents lost their jobs. Personally, this activity had a direct impact on my own attempt to enroll in the local white high school. After I covertly submitted a form to enroll in the white high school, my mother’s fears for my physical safety and my father’s fear of job loss as a public school teacher resulted in their insistence that I remain in the African-American high school. My father personally contacted the school district to inform the authorities that I would remain in my present all-African American school rather than join a small group of students who integrated our local white high school. The White Citizens Councils were not viewed by my parents as a mild-mannered group of whites who were adverse to destroying the lives and livelihoods of African-Americans.

Mississippi tax payers, African-American and white, witnessed the White Citizens Councils take a pseudo-state sponsored role in the governmental affairs of Mississippi. The White Citizens Councils had an office located in close proximity to the state Capitol. The organization produced slick television presentations to support their segregationist point of view. In addition, it created a network of segregationist academies to thwart school integration. There was no doubt in the minds of any African-American of the period that the White Citizens Councils were more than benign middle-class whites who provided “segregationist leadership” in the period. The White Citizens Councils represented a powerful force in the arsenal of the segregationists throughout the South.

The impact of the White Citizens Councils continues to have an impact on the state because many of the old segregation academies have become critical elements in the state’s educational system. As a result, many communities have poorly funded segregated public school systems due to the middle-class white exodus from the systems. The grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren of the old White Citizens Council stalwarts are now the students in those academies. While the old racist rhetoric and ideology which was the basis for the formation of the schools may not be obviously present, the underpinnings of a racist history may still linger in other ways. On the national scene, “racial events” in southern states do not capture the attention of the media; for example, many African-Americans in Mississippi were well aware that former Senator Trent Lott spoke at a White Citizens Council event long before the infamous Strom Thurmond incident.

While the South has made tremendous strides in race relations, it is unfortunate that some individuals have chosen for political expediency to “whitewash” reality by creating a false racial narrative that does not vaguely resemble the life experiences of many African-Americans, especially in Mississippi. Progress can be made in American race relations when all parties acknowledge and appreciate the complex racial history that has made our nation great.

Donald Cunnigen, Ph.D.

Ishmael Reed on the President and the "Professional Left"

The President is being hammered by Progressives for his compromise with the Republicans.  Some have even suggested that he should be challenged in a primary.  What world are these people living in?   Their naivete will guarantee Karl Rove's permanent Republican majority to become a permanent reality.  Things are bad enough as they are.  With Obama we have a chance to overturn the "Reagan Revolution" to build on the 2008 victory, as opposed to the governance of  the "Atlas Shrug" and Tea Party crowds.  The Tea Party success in the last election should have served as a "call to arms," figuratively speaking, to prepare for 2012.  Instead, the President is being vilified not just from the Tea Party but from his own base.


When in response to a question in which a reporter from the Wall Street Journal who raised the issue about his base accusing him having no spine, the President was clear that being "purist" is not amenable to governing.  As he said, holding such a position would mean "nothing would get done."  It is distasteful that the Bush tax cuts for America's richest were extended.  That was a bad decision on the President's part.   What would have been a worse decision on his part would have been to allow the Republicans in the Senate to block all legislation.  To turn an extension of unemployment benefits to the next Congress would be irresponsible.  To have allowed everyone's taxes to go up on January 1 would be calamitous.  Not only would every American be angry at the tax hike, they would blame it on the President.  He has to govern.  He is confronted by Republicans who are using every tactic in their power to defeat the President.   Moreover, a tax hike that is not agreed to, is likely to destabilize an already bad economy.  Simply for these intransigent Republicans, the worse things are the better for their politics. 


A major part of the problem is that the progressive mentality is a movement mentality -- an ideological orientation -- that is not always conducive to governing.  The President is in a different position.  He has to govern.  As the nation's leading politician, he must be a pragmatist. He is not a dictator.   Nor are Democrats committed to "a line." 


As evidenced by the health care reform debate, many Democrats are very conservative.  The Republicans on the other hand, are either ideologues or irrelevant.   Republicans who are not hardliners have been either marginalized in the Congress or defeated by Tea Party challengers.  This is the context in which the President make his judgments and run the government.


Ishmael Reed challenges the understanding of Progressives when it comes to having a Black man negotiating the political terrain.  RGN

What Progressives Don’t Understand About Obama

By ISHMAEL REED

Oakland, Calif.

NOT all of my white teachers viewed me as a discipline problem. To the annoyance of my fellow students, one teacher selected me regularly to lead assembly programs. A high school teacher insisted that I learn about the theater. She was an America-firster who supplied me with right-wing pamphlets and magazines that I’d read at breakfast and she didn’t seem bothered by my returning them with some of the pages stuck together with syrup.

But most of them did see me as an annoyance, and gave me the grades to prove it.

I’ve been thinking recently of all those D’s for deportment on my report cards. I thought of them, for instance, when I read a response to an essay I had written about Mark Twain that appeared in “A New Literary History of America.” One of the country’s leading critics, who writes for a prominent progressive blog, called the essay “rowdy,” which I interpreted to mean “lack of deportment.” Perhaps this was because I cited “Huckleberry Finn” to show that some white women managed household slaves, a departure from the revisionist theory that sees Scarlett O’Hara as some kind of feminist martyr.

I thought of them when I pointed out to a leading progressive that the Tea Party included neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers — and he called me a “bully.” He believes that the Tea Party is a grass-roots uprising against Wall Street, a curious reading since the movement gained its impetus from a rant against the president delivered by a television personality on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

The full article

Controversial responses: President Obama on "60 Minutes"

Robert Newby

Responses to the President's remarks at the press conference and "60 Minutes" have created quite a stir.  Many feel he was too conciliatory when it came to the election results.  There was a feeling that he took the blame for things that were not of his making.  In fact, his achievements have been favorably compared to FDR and Lyndon Johnson.  Even so, the Tea Party movement has demonized him and his policies because he is black.  The NAACP, with its Report on Tea Party Nationalism, exposed the racism that has been central to the President's opposition.  Yet, the historic victories by Republicans and Tea Party candidates nationwide were portrayed as something the President has done wrong.   For many, there is a resentment that the President is "taking responsibility" for forces that want make him "the other" and want to "take their country back."  One can only assume is that the President is assuming that old Harry Truman saying that "the buck stops here."   By taking responsibility for election results that were based largely by a veiled white nationalism, he appears to many to caving in to the opposition.  On the other hand, we should be reminded that the President has said that he is the President of even those folks who did not vote for him.  Here is the "60 Minutes" interview: RGN

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/11/04/60minutes/main7021844.shtml?tag=nl.e875

View from Canada: Trashing the President

William Thomas

The blog has been silent since the passing of Ron Walters.  Now that the election in which the President acknowledged he was "shellacked," it is time to bring clarity to what happened.  Obviously, the right wing demonized the President and made the election as a referendum on him and his policies.  Talk about a "vast right wing conspiracy?"  Clearly the Tea Parties are a racist formation with their lies that Obama is a socialist, a Muslim, Hitler, Lenin, you name it, anything that Americans abhor.   Here is a perspective from the OCTOBER 2010 SENIOR LIVING MAGAZINE.  A Canadian puts is all in perspective.  RGN

America - He's your President for Goodness Sake!

By William Thomas

Posted: Friday, October 1st, 2010

There was a time not so long ago when Americans, regardless of their political stripes, rallied round their president. Once elected, the man who won the White House was no longer viewed as a Republican or Democrat, but the President of the United States. The oath of office was taken, the wagons were circled around the country’s borders and it was America versus the rest of the world with the president of all the people at the helm.

Suddenly President Barack Obama, with the potential to become an exceptional president has become the glaring exception to that unwritten, patriotic rule.

Four days before President Obama’s inauguration, before he officially took charge of the American government, Rush Limbaugh boasted publicly that he hoped the president would fail. Of course, when the president fails the country flounders. Wishing harm upon your country in order to further your own narrow political views is selfish, sinister and a tad treasonous as well.

Subsequently, during his State of the Union address, which is pretty much a pep rally for America, an unknown congressional representative from South Carolina, later identified as Joe Wilson, stopped the show when he called the President of the United States a liar. The president showed great restraint in ignoring this unprecedented insult and carried on with his speech. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was so stunned by the slur, she forgot to jump to her feet while clapping wildly, 30 or 40 times after that.

Last spring, President Obama took his wife Michelle to see a play in New York City and republicans attacked him over the cost of security for the excursion. The president can’t take his wife out to dinner and a show without being scrutinized by the political opposition? As history has proven, a president in a theatre without adequate security is a tragically bad idea.

Remember: “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”

At some point, the treatment of President Obama went from offensive to ugly and then to downright dangerous.

The health-care debate, which looked more like extreme fighting in a mud pit than a national dialogue, revealed a very vulgar side of America.

President Obama’s face appeared on protest signs white-faced and blood-mouthed in a satanic clown image. In other tasteless portrayals, people who disagreed with his position distorted his face to look like Hitler complete with mustache and swastika.

Odd, that burning the flag makes Americans crazy, but depicting the president as a clown and a maniacal fascist is accepted as part of the new rude America.

Maligning the image of the leader of the free world is one thing, putting the president’s life in peril is quite another. More than once, men with guns were videotaped at the health-care rallies where the president spoke. Again, history shows that letting men with guns get within range of a president has not served America well in the past.

And still the “birthers” are out there claiming Barack Obama was not born in the United States, although public documentation proves otherwise. Hawaii is definitely part of the United States, but the Panama Canal Zone where his electoral opponent Senator John McCain was born? Nobody’s sure.

Last month, a 44-year-old woman in Buffalo was quite taken by President Obama when she met him in a chicken wing restaurant called Duff’s. Did she say something about a pleasure and an honour to meet the man or utter encouraging words for the difficult job he is doing? No. Quote: “You’re a hottie with a smokin’ little body.”

Lady, that was the President of the United States you were addressing, not one of the Jonas Brothers! He’s your president for goodness sakes, not the guy driving the Zamboni at “Monster Trucks On Ice.” Maybe next it’ll be, “Take Your President To A Topless Bar Day.”

In President Barack Obama, Americans have a charismatic leader with a good and honest heart. Unlike his predecessor, he’s a very intelligent leader. And unlike that president’s predecessor, he’s a highly moral man.

In President Obama, Americans have the real deal, the whole package and a leader that citizens of almost every country around the world look to with great envy. Given the opportunity, Canadians would trade our leader, hell, most of our leaders for Obama in a heartbeat.

What America has in Obama is a head of state with vitality and insight and youth. Think about it, Barack Obama is a young Nelson Mandela. Mandela was the face of change and charity for all of Africa but he was too old to make it happen. The great things Obama might do for America and the world could go on for decades after he’s out of office.

America, you know not what you have.

The man is being challenged unfairly, characterized with vulgarity and treated with the kind of deep disrespect to which no previous president was subjected. It’s like the day after electing the first black man to be president, thereby electrifying the world with hope and joy, Americans sobered up and decided the bad old days were better.

President Obama may fail but it will not be a Richard Nixon default fraught with larceny and lies. President Obama, given a fair chance, will surely succeed but his triumph will never come with a Bill Clinton caveat – “if only he’d got control of that zipper.”

Please. Give the man a fair, fighting chance. This incivility toward the leader who won over Americans and gave hope to billions of people around the world that their lives could be enhanced by his example, just naturally has to stop.

Believe me, when Americans drive by the White House and see a sign on the lawn that reads: “No shirt. No shoes. No service,” they’ll realize this new national rudeness has gone way, way too far.

OCTOBER 2010 SENIOR LIVING MAGAZINE

VANCOUVER & LOWER MAINLAND

Our Loss of Ron Walters -- 1938-2010: A Major Contributor to the Blog No More



Wichita East Drum Section, Fall 1952

   The following are my remarks at the funeral service for Dr. Ronald W. Walters.  My perspective was that of a lifelong friend.  The memorial service at Howard University's Cramton Auditorium was a wonderful celebration of Ron's life work. The more personal side of Ron's life was the central theme of his funeral service.  Ron's overall contributions were enormous -- nationally and internationally.  Walters was rocognized to be "The Tallest Tree."   Having been appropriately recognized and honored for his professional life, my reflections were an extension of the family, more personal, specifically our friendship growing up.  My remarks were made at the funeral.  Since my time was limited to three minutes, my remarks were edited to fit the those constraints.  Here are the comments in full.  With Walters being a regular contributor to the blog, this tribute is a recognition of his insight on black politics.  RGN





Reflections on a Lifelong Friendship: Remembering Ronald W. Walters, Ph.D.

by

Robert G. Newby. Ph. D.

Ron Walters was my friend, my best man, my brother. We exchanged the Best Man role in each other's weddings.  Being an only child, when I say he was my brother, he was my brother. Pat asked me to make a few remarks about our growing up. My bond with Ron began at the end of my junior year at Wichita High School East in the spring of 1952. For the next year, my senior year, I was to be the head drummer in the marching band. At the behest of the band director, Kenneth Thompson, I recruited Ron to join our drum section at East as opposed to our cross-town rival, North. He chose to join me in that drum section and we have been more or less joined at the hip ever since.

Another aspect of that bonding was our respective identities were often blurred, since we were the only two blacks in this band of about 80 musicians and we both played the drums. About the second football game of the season I was injured in a freak accident and missed a game, which meant to all those white students in stands, he became “Newby.” To many of them he remained Newby for the next two years after I had graduated. I must say that our band director, who was very much ahead of his time, for not only was I the head drummer, he broke precedent to appoint me the first student, black or white, to be director of the pep band. When Ron became a senior two years later he had those same responsibilities. An interesting side point about Ron and I sharing the East High band together: When the picture of the drum section was taken -- note now I was the senior and I was the head drummer -- we were arranged for the photo shot. Of the nine members of the drum section along with our drums and symbols, there were two black faces in the photo. Ron is placed front row center. I am on the second row at the end. I assume the photographer thought Ron to be more photogenic. For those of you who have seen Ron’s captivating smile, you know the photographer was right.  As it turned out over the course of those early years, I may have run interference for Ron, but make no mistake, he was always the star.

During Ron’s hospitalization, I had the stark reminder of one of the jobs we had while in college. There was a group of about five of us African American students at Wichita State University who worked in the inhalation therapy department at Wesley hospital. Ron, Syd Dobson, and I, administered inhalation therapy treatments. Syd went on to become a technician with a heart transplant group in San Diego.

The three of us formed our social clique that had to the audacity to name ourselves “Le Clique.” To display this bond, at Syd’s urging, we often wore matching blazers with a patch with overlays of a compass, a double eighth note, and a gavel. The patch was indicative of our professional ambitions. Syd at that time envisioned himself as being an engineer, the compass represented Syd’s desire to be an engineer. Ron’s aspiration at the moment to be a lawyer was represented by the gavel. The musical notes of course represented by my interest in music.  In retrospect, the whole idea seems to be rather juvenile but it sure seemed cool at the time.  With both Ron and Syd having passed in October 2009, this is truly a sad day. This formation preceded Ron’s being the founding Polemarch of the University of Wichita, now Wichita State University, Kappa Alpha Psi chapter in 1958. Needless to say, Ron had a lifetime bond with those brothers he crossed over with: Galyn Vesey, who was Ron’s closest friend from Kindergarten on, Robert Blackwell, Lenward Holness, Howard Stewart, Charles Tisdale, Earl West, Willie Williams, and Billy Alexander.

There is one story about Ron and I that really puts our University Wichita times in perspective. In the summer of 1957, we were desperate for summer jobs. For some reason Wesley Hospital was out of the equation. We had heard that "running on the road" was a great summer job for young black male college students. We were striking out when it came to decent jobs in Wichita. Recall that we were the restricted to “Negro Jobs” at the time. The word was that out of Minneapolis between the railroads, the Great Northern, Burlington Northern, and the Northern Pacific, employed young black college males to work the Pullman and dining cars. We had been told that the railroads would start hiring on about the 18th to the 20th of June. Travelling between Minneapolis and Seattle, Portland, or San Francisco sounded like a fantastic opportunity. So, to beat the onrush of competitors, Ron and I took off for Minneapolis on the 9th or 10th of June. When we got there we were informed by railroad after railroad we were about 10 days too soon.

While in Minneapolis we discovered something we had not seen before, a black enterprise whose clientele was white. I think their name was Huggy Boys or something like that. We met their son who was a Kappa and had just finished his freshman year at Howard. We thought him kind of “out there” and representative of Frazier’s writings about the black bourgeosie of the time. Seemingly, his daily dress was suit, tie, hat and cane. Nonetheless, for the time that we were there, the family was kind to us, to the point of taking our calls from prospective employers.

After a week of being told that no hiring would begin before about the 18th of the month we came to the conclusion that even though lodging was not costing us anything, my car was our lodging, we could not last for another week. Moreover, we discovered that with its 10,000 lakes, the mosquitos in the Twin Cities in early June are fierce. On a Saturday, and no job prospects at hand, we decided that if we left Minneapolis by about noon we would get back to the Esquire Club before it closed so that we could party. We danced every kind of dance to be danced that night, fast dances, slow dances, the cha, cha, cha, you name it we danced it. Because we had to be flexible when it came to job applications, we had all of right attire, but we had slept in the car for a week. Nonetheless, we must not have “offended” anyone. Thankfully, no dances were refused.

The thing I will miss most in Ron’s absence is that he and I could always laugh at the same things. In the summer of 1963, in preparation for his marriage, Ron had found a job as a orderly at Crittenden Hospital in Detroit. I was living in Pontiac. Ron spent the summer with me. Our friends were a group of African American school teachers in the Detroit and Pontiac schools. This was still a time when teaching or social work, for all intents and purposes, were the only professions for young college grads. In this group were individuals who thought that their intellectual prowess was superior to everyone, particularly these two dudes from the flatlands of Kansas. After all, their degrees were from University of Michigan. At an afternoon backyard picnic, Ron and I paired up for a game that was popular at the time, "Password." Our experiences together allowed us to defeat all comers for hours, often with one-word clues. That afternoon was a highlight that we often reflected on and brought us much delight as a confirmation of our bond.

As many of you know, Ron was an avid fan of both tennis and football. As stated, Ron was in the marching band not on the football team. He was around the game of football. Before he was a fan of that Washington NFL football team, with its politically incorrect name, he was a fan of the East Aces and after that the Wichita Shockers and I assume Fisk’s team, as well. He liked the game. When it comes to the NFL, his team was always victorious over my team in even in the playoffs and when that team had a Hall of Famer, another native Wichitan, Barry Sanders. It is not necessary that I name the team for which I have season tickets for 34 years.

Ron’s love of tennis comes not just as an observer. Our game was at the courts of McKinley park, Wichita’s largest segregated park. That park has since been renamed McAdam’s park in the namesake of Wichita’s first black park administrator. Ron and I had a pretty good game. We both dug deep to spend $35 for the top of the line Slazenger rackets. We modeled our game after the Panchos, Segura and Gonzalez. We were not in the class of Charles McAfee, however. Charlie was the first African American to get a tennis scholarship to the University of Nebraska. Notice the scholarship was not to the University of Kansas. McAfee who was one of our role models, went on to become an award winning architect. The tennis culture at the park was socialization process of its own. Apart from McAfee, we often competed with these Korean war vets who called themselves the “Hungarian Freedom Fighters.” Hours on the courts particularly in addition to the trash talking, when no women were on the courts, the conversation was just like the barbershop when it came to race and politics.

Ron’s leaving Wichita for Fisk was clearly a case of racism having done us, the nation, a big favor. As indicated by the sit-in, Ron was ahead of his time. When it came to the social side of our relationship we were equals but when it came to politics, he was the leader. He introduced me to DuBois and E. Franklin Frazier. As a high school student, Ron participated in Boys State, an activity that no black students that I know of had participated. I don’t know if Ron was a member of the national Honor Society or not, which would have been very difficult for a black student at that time. I do know that his high school grades were exemplar. Even so, when he was a sophomore at Wichita, he received a “C” on a paper for a government class. He got the “C” with the explanation from the professor that the paper was really an “A” paper but he knew no “colored boy” could write a paper of that quality.” The very next semester with my encouragement he went to Fisk, where he thrived to become the student and scholar he became. Going to black America’s academic roots and legacy helped shape him in a way he never would have developed at Wichita State.

I have always been proud to say that I was able to be a part of his really big transition in academia. From a frustrating struggle following King's assassination, as the regional director for the Michigan Civil Rights Commission in Battle Creek, I came to DC to spend time with Ron and Pat and check out the “Poor People’s” campaign. The night I was to leave for DC, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. While on my visit, my brother in law at the time was a graduate student at Brandeis, was desperately hoping I could find Ron. The students at the university had just successfully negotiated for an African American studies program. Ron’s Ph.D. with an emphasis on Africa made him an ideal candidate to provide leadership for such a program. Ron became the pioneer. The real victory for the students is that with his commitment to academic excellence, the program at Brandeis gave shape to an academic mission not simply a center from which to wage protest.

As brilliant as Ron was, in about 1972, I discovered he had a blind spot, when it came to race. When I was in graduate school at Stanford, he came to the campus for a visit. Having grown up in a very white Kansas and attended school in a segregated Tennessee and attended graduate school at American University, the diversity of the Bay Area, with its large Asian and Latino populations presented a challenge to his paradigm. His question to me was “Who are all of these people?” In Wichita there were some Mexican Americans but their numbers were few. Even though there were some Chinese restaurants in town, we had no Chinese classmates. Surely, he was cognizant that people of color, other than blacks lived in America, but not in these numbers. He went on to provide international consultations on the role of white nationalism in Latin South America.

In preparation for that excellent story on Ron that appeared in the Washington Post on September 12th, and even though he chose not to include it in his story, Matt Scheur asked me a profound question about Ron: What shaped Ron’s ideas, particularly notions that he would defy well entrenched social norms? Ron’s family was not middle class or members of Wichita’s black elite but they were entrepreneurs. His grandfather was a plumber, I believe. His grandfather had brothers who were also in the trades as carpenters, brick masons, radio/TV repair, you name it. They were independent not relying on whites for their livelihood. His father was Gilmor Walters, known in Wichita for being a “race man.” He had been in the service and served as the Warrant Officer for the Army’s Black musicians. Gilmore’s organizational affiliation was primarily the “colored” Musician’s local. From that platform he would express his protest by writing letters to the editor. Once his son had a Ph.D. in "black liberation" he became unrelenting in his attack on the system. This was the family context of his socialization, independence, and a commitment to the black community.

It is important that we recognize that the Dockum Drug Store sit-in did not just fall from the sky. Ron’s family always supported his leadership in the community. Also, as Aldon Morris points out in his award winning book, “The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement,” in regional meetings of the NAACP, chapters in Kansas, Oklahoma, and other states in the Midwest shared ideas about how to attack segregation. In his capacity as President of Wichita’s NAACP Youth Chapter that Ron attended these meetings. Though not an NAACP meeting per se, it was such a meeting at the University of Illinois-Urbana that Ron met his companion for life, Pat. When he came back to Wichita, he proclaimed to all that he had met his love. A student at Philander-Smith, she was intellectually strong with a commitment to civil rights. In fact, as he described it, the two of them had stayed up all night talking civil rights. Our response was sure, talking civil rights?

From that night on, their life’s work was fused. As was said so many times yesterday [at the Howard memorial service], whatever Ron’s accomplishments, he did not do them alone. Pat was his constant support and critic. That night in Urbana led to a marriage just short of 50 years, and a commitment to the black community and black politics that has been unparalleled, and taken us to a different place. Ron will be missed but we can rest assured that in Pat his legacy will be preserved.