The DISH
Unbossed and unbought news and information you can use
Vol. 9 No. 38…Dedicated to the
Dialogue on Race…September 22, 2006
Ballad of Birmingham
By Dudley Randall (1914-2000)
"Mother dear, may I go downtown
instead of out to play,
and march the streets of Birmingham
in a Freedom March today?"
"No, baby, no, you may not go,
for the dogs are fierce and wild,
and clubs and hoses, guns and jails
ain't good for a little child."
"But, mother, I won't be alone.
Other children will go with me,
and march the streets of Birmingham
to make our country free."
"No, baby, no, you may not go,
for I fear those guns will fire.
But you may go to church instead
and sing in the children's choir."
She has combed and brushed her nightdark hair,
and bathed rose petal sweet,
and drawn white gloves on her small brown hands,
and white shoes on her feet.
The mother smiled to know her child
was in the sacred place,
but that smile was the last smile
to come upon her face.
For when she heard the explosion,
her eyes grew wet and wild.
She raced through the streets of Birmingham
calling for her child.
She clawed through bits of glass and brick,
then lifted out a shoe.
"O, here's the shoe my baby wore,
but, baby, where are you?"
[On the Bombing of a Church in Birmingham, AL 1963]
Online Slave Trade Database
Black genealogists are certain to find Emory University's Trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade project exciting. Emory University received $324,000 from the National
Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and $25,000 from Harvard University's W.E.B.
DuBois Institute for African and African American Research to revise and expand
"The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade," a CD-ROM database of transatlantic
slave ship voyages made between 1595 and 1866. It has become an invaluable
source of information for researchers, but it is expensive. Emory's project
will expand the 1999 CD and make it available online free.
David Eltis, the Robert W. Woodruff professor of history at Emory and project
director, claims the updated database will allow researchers to trace the path
of people from Africa to the Americas. Because the slave trade was a business,
Eltis said, "We have very good records. In fact, the records are better
than the records of Europeans. People from Africa were property and people from
Europe were not." The project is scheduled to be completed in 2008, the
200th anniversary of the implementation of Article 1 Section 9 of the US
Constitution; it banned the importation of slaves into the United States after
1808.
Expect to hear more as we approach the project's completion date. For more about
the project, see http://news.emory.edu/Releases/SlaveVoyagesData1150901442.html.
To subscribe to News@Emory for automatic updates of the latest news on the
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, contact Elaine Justice at 404-727-0643 or elaine.justice@emory.edu.
Civil Rights Division
of USDOJ
The United States Department of Justice (USDOJ), established in 1870, is
"charged with enforcing federal laws, providing legal counsel in federal
cases and construing the laws under which other federal executive departments
act. Headed by the US Attorney General, the chief US law officer and cabinet
member, the USDOJ is composed of six divisions (Antitrust, Civil, Civil Rights,
Criminal, Environment and Natural Resources, and Tax).
In August 1957, Congress, after debating for sixty-three days, enacted the
first civil rights law since Reconstruction to provide protection for blacks in
exercising their right as US citizens to vote. The Civil Rights Act of 1957
empowered the federal government to remove some of the obstacles that state and
local officials placed in the path of black registration and voting. It
authorized the creation of a civil rights office at the Department of Justice.
On December 9, 1957, Attorney General Herbert Brownell issued the order
establishing the Civil Rights Division. Headed by an Assistant Attorney
General, the division enforces federal statutes that prohibit
"discrimination on the basis of race, sex, disability, religion and
national origin."
"The Civil Rights Division is charged with enforcing the Civil Rights Acts
of 1957, 1960, 1964, and 1968; the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Equal Credit
Opportunity Act; the Americans with Disabilities Act; the National Voter
Registration Act; the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act; the
Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act, and other laws and
regulations that prohibit discrimination in credit, education, employment,
housing, public accommodations, voting and some federally funded programs, such
as those covered by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the
Education Amendments of 1972, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of
1973, as amended. The division also assists federal agencies in identifying and
removing discriminatory provisions in their policies and programs.
When the Division began in 1957, it had a handful of lawyers. In 2002, the
Division had more than 350 lawyers (Sources: www.usdoj.gov,
www.library.okstate.edu, and www.infoplease.com)
George’s Basal
Appeal
Senator George Allen (R-VA) is seeking re-election. A former governor and conservative, Allen recently appealed to his base. Reminiscent of George W. Bush's campaign 2000 swing through Bob Jones University, where he cemented his hold on the South by claiming the Confederate flag represented his heritage, Allen's basal appeal has become known as the "Macaca moment." Invariably, basal appeals are divisive, reinforcing racial or ethnic prejudice.
Allen was videotaped calling S. R. Sidarth, a
dark-skinned Virginian of Indian descent, a Macaca. A University of Virginia
student, Sidarth is a Jim Webb volunteer campaign worker; Webb is Allen's
Democratic opponent. "Macaca" is a racial slur often used by
French-speaking people to mean "monkey." Allen's mother is
French-Italian-Spanish. His campaign recently acknowledged that she is also
Jewish and from Tunisia (where French is spoken).
Tim Russert on Meet the Press (9-17-06)
questioned Allen about his "Macaca" remark. Like many of us, Russert
wanted to know where the word came from. Allen hedged, restating his apology
and assuring listeners there was no intent to use a racial or ethnic slur. He
ended with, "Oh, it’s just made up." Russert asked what his
made up word meant. Allen said, "Tim, if I thought that that was slurring
anybody based on their ethnicity or their race or their religion, I would never
do it. It's not who I am. It's not how I was raised."
Russert recalled Allen's civil rights record of
appealing to those who promote racist ideas, like the Council of Conservative
Citizens, Allen's socially conservative ideological base. As a member of the
Virginia House of Delegates, Allen opposed a state holiday honoring Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. He proposed instead a Confederate holiday. An Associated Press
report cited by Russert claimed, "Allen kept a Confederate flag in his
living room, a noose in his law office and a picture of Confederate troops in
his governor's office." Allen did not dispute the report.
In response to his civil rights record, Allen
admitted there is much for him to learn. A work in progress, he sees the
Confederate flag as a symbol of heritage - Southern pride - and a reminder of
his rebellious anti-establishment youth.
Allen is not the first politician to use divisive language and symbols to appeal to his base. When Bush did it in 2000, he carried the South. For the men and women seeking the nation's highest office, winning the South is crucial for victory. Given that strong incentive, expect more basal appeals and politics of division.
Why Republicans Rip the Voting Rights Act
By Earl Ofari
Hutchinson
In 1980 Ronald Reagan told biographer Laurence Barrett that the 1965 Voting
Rights Act was "humiliating to the South." The carefully handpicked,
emotionally charged words from then GOP Republican presidential candidate aimed
to tap into the fury of white Southerners over civil rights, and garner their
votes. Two years later, then Assistant Attorney General John Roberts (now
Supreme Court justice) sent a tidal wave of memos imploring Reagan to reject a
25-year extension of the act. Reagan approved the extension anyway.
Reagan did not want to buck Democrats and civil rights leaders who still had
clout in Congress and favorable public sentiment. The last thing Reagan wanted
was to be tagged a bigot and enemy of voting rights. Candidate Reagan's
soothing words to the South, and Robert's stern opposition, were huge signals
that many Republicans were at best ambivalent, and at worst, openly hostile to
the act.
That hasn't changed. The real aim of Republicans is to appease conservative
white voters in the South, just as candidate Reagan did.
Republicans took their cue from the old Southern Dixiecrats. For decades, they
screamed that the act was unlawful federal intrusion and violated states
rights. But racist Democrats weren't the biggest obstacle to the act's initial
passage. House Republicans were. Gerald Ford, who was then Republican minority
leader, proposed four provisions that would have weakened the bill. One
preposterous Republican gambit would have eliminated a provision requiring the
federal courts to approve all voting rights laws passed by Southern states.
With President Lyndon Johnson pounding away, and the stench of tear gas still
in the nation's nostrils from the 1965 attack by Alabama state police on civil
rights marchers at Selma, Republican House leaders relented and scrapped the
watered-down provisions. But that didn't end the fight to protect voting
rights. Republican Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Reagan and Bush
Sr. carefully crafted and fine-tuned the Republicans' Southern strategy. The
goal was to win elections by doing and saying as little as possible about civil
rights, while openly and subtly pandering to Southern white fears of black
political domination.
The loss of one or more states to the Democrats in the 2006 midterm election
and 2008 presidential election would spell political disaster for the GOP. The
key, as every Republican president since Nixon has known, is to maintain
near-solid backing from white Southern males.
They have been the staunchest Republican loyalists. Bush grabbed more than 60
percent of the white male vote nationally in 2004. In the South, he got more
than 70 percent of their vote. Without the South's unyielding backing in 2000,
Democratic Presidential contender Al Gore would have easily won the White
House, and the Florida vote debacle would have been a meaningless sideshow.
In 2004, Bush swept Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in every one
of the states of the Old Confederacy and three out of four of the border
states. That insured another Bush White House.
Bush, top Republicans and even the GOP obstructionists who temporarily derailed
the act's extension don't want to roll back the clock to the Jim Crow days when
the South concocted a vast array of literacy tests, poll taxes, informal voting
codes and whites-only primaries to boot blacks en masse out of the voting
booths. But more than a few Republicans do want to send the message that
they'll fight any threat to Republican rule in the South, even if that means
messing around with the Voting Rights Act.
About Me: Earl Ofari Hutchinson is the author of
"The Crisis in Black and Black" (Middle Passage Press). The
Hutchinson Report Blog is now online at Earl Ofari Hutchinson.com. Read the
complete article at www.alternet.org/story/38202/.
Disgruntled says: As
my momma always said - it's the mind-set. She was a maid in a big fancy house.
After a few drinks, bigots relax around their "people." That's when
the slurs slip out, as in the case of George Allen. Similarly, around those
over whom they exert power, they act out their prejudices. A case in point is
the Louisiana white school bus driver that ordered the black children to the
back of the bus. Rosa Parks, who recently died, is celebrated in this country
as a civil rights icon for having the courage to keep her seat on a public bus;
her defiance in the face of Jim Crow segregation and its domestic terrorism
sparked the Montgomery bus boycott. In 2006, Rosa would rollover in her grave
to learn some folks still believe blacks should be relegated to the back of the
bus.
Disgruntled wants to know: Lorenzo
Mathews died on his birthday. Born on September 11, he died in a hail of
bullets at twenty-one. For hours, his body lay on a parking lot while DeKalb
County policemen investigated their use of deadly force. There was a rally to
protest the police killing and this senseless death. Unarmed and black, Lorenzo
died under strange circumstances police has yet to explain. Who was Lorenzo;
why can't I Google his name?
Disgruntled feels: Switch! Here's a
little experiment. Check out the news reporting on Iran. Whenever you hear
Iran, insert Iraq or Afghanistan. It is deja vu! No one should be surprised
that the US has a date certain for war against Iran. You heard right -- Iran!
Listen closely to the talking heads; they said the same things about Iraq. When
they add "imminent threat" to the propaganda matrix, hold onto your
hats! It is time to switch those
irresponsible boys and their dangerous toys with responsible adults capable of
sitting at the diplomatic table to discuss issues of war and peace.
Civil Rights,
Conservatives and Cold Cases
George W. Bush signaled his support for the Southern approach to civil rights
in 2000 when he embraced the Confederate flag as his heritage. Here in the
South, and in the North, if they dared admit it, blacks are still very much
second class citizens. Sure the public "picnics" have ended and group
lynchings are no longer public celebrations, but blacks still die under bizarre
circumstances, often in police custody and in violation of their civil rights.
The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department has dozens of cold cases.
In far too many instances, law enforcement officials are directly involved, or
they sit on evidence against the person (s) responsible. Oftentimes, the
mastermind is someone respected in the community that gave the orders to
harass, injure and kill, like Bush and the use of torture at Abu Ghraib and in
secret CIA prisons.
All across the South, these crimes go unpunished, like the anthrax attacks
after 9-11. In "Can't just forget' civil rights era killings," Bob
Kemper (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 09/13/06) cites dozens of cold cases,
which include the Georgia lynching of George and Mae Dorsey and Roger and
Dorothy Malcolm at Moore's Ford Bridge on July 25, 1946. Then, there is the
brutal slaying of 14 year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi. Till was beaten,
shot and thrown into the Tallahatchie River for whistling at a white woman. In
Alabama, there is the cold case of Jimmy Lee Jackson, who was fatally shot by
police during a voter registration demonstration in Marion, Alabama on Feb. 18,
1965. Lee was shot while trying to protect his mother and grandfather from
club-wielding state troopers. His death helped spark the famed
Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march.
Mailbox: E-Mails, Faxes and
Telephone Calls
Email www.msnbc.msn.com Candidate Jim Webb on
Meet the Press (9-17-06) ... "Now, with respect to affirmative action, my
view on affirmative action has been that--and, and remains that it's a 13th
Amendment program. If you go back to the Johnson administration's executive
order on affirmative action, it was based on the 13th Amendment and the Civil
Rights Act of 1866, designed to remove the badges of slavery. African-Americans
are the only ethnic group in this country that have suffered from deliberate
discrimination and, and exclusion by the government over generations. When this
program expanded to the present day diversity programs, where essentially every
ethnic group other than Caucasians are included, then that becomes
state-sponsored racism. And we should either move this program back to its
original intent, which I support, or we should open up diversity programs to
the point where poor white cultures--and they are cultures, as in southwest
Virginia--have some opportunity.
Email jimp@gmail.com Civil rights hiring
shifted in Bush era...Conservative leanings stressed…By Charlie
Savage...Globe ...WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is quietly remaking the
Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, filling the permanent ranks with
lawyers who have strong conservative credentials but little experience in civil
rights, according to job application materials obtained by the Globe. The
documents show that only 42 percent of the lawyers hired since 2003, after the
administration changed the rules to give political appointees more influence in
the hiring process, have civil rights experience. In the two years before the
change, 77 percent of those who were hired had civil rights backgrounds.
Email wgmanor@bellsouth.net If
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales advised Bush on torture, is he liable for war
crimes prosecution under the Geneva Conventions or War Crimes Act? Just wonder,
since Bush is not a lawyer.
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