From Another Century, a Liberating 9/11 Story
At a time when every magazine from Vanity Fair to Bird Talk contains an anniversary article on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, American History magazine has published a fascinating story about an event that took place exactly 150 years earlier — on Sept. 11, 1851, reports magazine columnist Peter Carlson in the Washington Post.
Shortly before dawn that morning, a posse of slave catchers led by Edward Gorsuch, a wealthy Maryland farmer, surrounded William Parker‘s stone farmhouse in Christiana, a village in southeastern Pennsylvania. Hiding inside the house were two slaves who had run away from Gorsuch’s Baltimore County farm two years earlier.
Gorsuch and a federal marshal from Philadelphia approached Parker’s front door and announced that they’d come to take the slaves.
“If you take another step,” replied Parker, himself an escaped slave, “I’ll break your neck.”
After summarizing the tale, Carlson writes:
“It’s an amazing story and it is told well by William C. Kashatus, the historian who created the underground railroad exhibit currently on display at the Chester County Historical Society in West Chester, Pa., not far from Christiana.
“Kashatus’s account did exactly what a good historical piece is supposed to do: It piqued my curiosity and sent me to the library to learn more. In a book of slave narratives, ‘I Was Born a Slave,’ I found Parker’s memoir, first published in 1866 in the Atlantic Monthly.
“Perhaps we should commemorate Sept. 11 with a moment of silence for the victims of last year’s terrorist attacks, followed by a toast to the memory of William Parker, American freedom fighter.”
Seeing, Hearing Commentators of Color Today?
Speaking of 9/11, how much commentary by people of color are you hearing today?
Ex-Mayor Campbell Links Voting, Broadcast Ownership
Media consolidation can be stemmed if more black Americans go to the polls, said former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell, Broadcasting and Cable reports.
“If you do not participate in the political process, your opportunity to be broadcasters will continue to shrink,” Campbell told the Black Broadcasters Alliance, one of several African American media groups in Washington, D.C., this week in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Campbell lamented the low voter turnout among young African Americans. In Atlanta, where 17,000 attend historically black colleges, he said, only 500 African Americans of college age voted in a recent primary. The low turnout was partially to blame for the defeat of five-term Rep. Cynthia McKinney, he added.
Itï¿œs no coincidence, Campbell said, that Hispanics have both high voter-turnout rates and are more likely to be served by Hispanic-owned broadcast stations.
Hispanics became the “minority du jour,” he added, because they are “insular and solid.”
Group Makes Deals With Huge Firms for Ownership
Although the number of stations owned by African Americans has dropped 26 percent since the deregulatory 1996 Telecommunications Act spurred a conglomerate buying spree, scores of black owners benefited, cashing out of their businesses after years of hard work and investment.
Nothing more typifies the conflicted sentiments held by many black owners of broadcast properties, reports Broadcasting and Cable, than the brokering business launched by the Minority Media Telecommunications Council, a Washington advocacy group.
The council has fought for stronger EEO rules, lobbied Congress to reinstate tax breaks for firms that sell to minority buyers, challenged mergers and offered legal representation for Jesse Jackson‘s Rainbow/PUSH coalition on media issues. But, in the past four years, it has entered a new line: brokering station spin-offs by large broadcast conglomerates to win government approval for megamergers.
Executive Director David Honig laments the consolidation wave and the impact on minority station ownership. But until the law changes, he says, the best source of minority ownership is big conglomerates willing to give minority buyers a chance at buying their stations.
Entering the brokerage business has put the council in the odd position of sometimes siding with giants accused of crowding minorities out.
Media Coverage Better on Arab Americans, Muslims
Have newsrooms learned more about covering Arab Americans and Muslims since September 11? asks Lillian Dunlap of the Poynter Institute.
Sandra Ali, reporter and anchor at FOX2-TV in Detroit and the station’s only Arab American journalist, says coverage at FOX2 has improved because Arab Americans and Muslims helped them.
Ray Hanania, president of the National Arab American Journalists Association and editor of the Arab American View in Chicago, says coverage of Arab Americans has improved nationally and locally partly because of the work by mainstream media.
But Joslyn Massoud, an Arab American journalism student at the University of Texas, says she remembers seeing pictures on television of Arabs with “lots of wrong information attached to them.” At one point she said a television station showed a photo of a man described as one of the hijacker-terrorists.
“The guy is alive, I know him,” she said. “They pictured the wrong guy.” People at the television station had confused two men with similar names.
Jaws Tight Over Comments on Serena’s Outfit
The tight black outfit that Serena Williams wore to the U.S. Open is getting plenty of comments — and so is Robin Givhan‘s commentary in the Washington Post.
Saying that Serena has a “propensity to select fashions more appropriate for a working girl of a different sort,” Givhan wrote Aug. 30 that Williams “is helping to transform the nature of women’s tennis into a game of muscle and power. She is turning the tennis circuit into a more diverse place. But her tight black tennis romper was the stylistic equivalent of trash talk. It looked trashy. And it did her a disservice. . . . One only wishes that Williams would use her wealth and notoriety to paint herself in equally flattering terms.”
Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler said the piece generated the most mail during his August vacation.
“The complaining readers took offense at what they said was Givhan’s suggestion that Williams’s clothing ‘was that of a prostitute and was designed by a pimp,’ as one put it,” Getler wrote. “Another said her piece amounted to ‘outright insult and cruelty,’ and another saw it as making veiled references to Williams’s ‘character, morals and intelligence.’ Some saw it as racially tinged. “Givhan is a powerful writer, and this was obviously rough stuff. But my view is that it did not cross the line. Williams is the world’s top-ranked female player. She is special, as Givhan said, and is helping to transform the nature of women’s tennis. You can disagree, but that’s not out of bounds for fashion commentary,” Getler said.
Serena’s outfit was a hit elsewhere. “Black folks in general spoke loud and clear on BlackAmericaWeb.com: they loved it!” said Roland S. Martin, the Web site’s editor.
“Our membership numbers were only second to the people we signed up when Aaliyah died. The photo gallery is the most requested gallery we’ve ever had.”
Malcolm Gladwell Accused of Leaving Out Racial Angle
Is the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell a brilliant thinker and storyteller — or a pollyanna who blithely overhypes his subjects? To his fans, Gladwell is the perfect mix of entertainer and educator, always turning them on to some cool new scientific development, says Cynthia Cotts in the Village Voice.
But to a handful of critics, Gladwell, author of the best-selling “The Tipping Point,” is a promoter of curious causes with a deceptively one-sided narrative style that is so hypnotizing that readers don’t notice the details he is leaving out.
In the Aug. 5 issue of The New Yorker, Gladwell reported that the science of face-reading, along with other kinds of behavioral analysis, had become a popular tool for law enforcement post-9/11.
Upon reading the piece, science historian Julian Bleecker fired off a letter to The New Yorker, in which he argued that face-reading could become the latest blip in the “pernicious and racist” history of attempts to classify people according to physical data. He likened it to three failed experiments in the past: phrenology, the identification and gassing of Jews in Nazi Germany, and racial profiling in the U.S.
A heavily edited version of the letter appeared Sept. 2.
Gladwell wrote about his own background in the 1998 book “Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural,” edited by Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn. He grew up in rural Ontario, Canada, with his Englishman father and Jamaican mother, who had met in England at school.
A Day in the Life of Mark Whitaker
Mark Whitaker, Newsweek’s first African American editor, describes for Slate magazine how his Monday went. It’s usually a day off, but this week’s was altered because of Sept. 11 commitments.
“For the sake of the magazine I will do quality talk shows like ‘Hardball’ and ‘Charlie Rose,’ he writes. “And my wife, Alexis, and I sometimes get invited to dinner parties around Manhattan, where we invariably meet smart and interesting people and learn things that make their way into stories in the magazine.
“Yesterday I had to get dressed up and go out not to be guest but a hostï¿œof a luncheon that Newsweek threw at the Four Seasons restaurant to remember Sept. 11.” But he seems to long for the days when “for years, I would take advantage of this [day] to drop off and pick up my kids at school, do errands, and sneak off to public golf courses around New York City, where I played with everyone from playwrights to cops.”
Oprah Winfrey to Receive Humanitarian Award
Oprah Winfrey is to be the first recipient of the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award, to be given at the 54th Annual Primetime Emmy Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles Sept. 22, Broadcasting and Cable reports. Tom Hanks will present the award.
No thanks to former Black Panther Party chair Elaine Brown.
In her new book, “The Condemnation of Little B.,” Brown writes that “Winfrey does not use her powerful voice to speak out on behalf of black women, or men. . . even as the political agenda pounded poor black women and their children into deeper poverty and degradation. . . . This has been, apparently, a conscious decision: ‘The other kids were all into black power and I wasn’t a dashiki kind of woman . . . Excellence was the best deterrent to racism and that became my philosophy.” Brown writes. “She acts as a conduit for viewer contributions through an ‘Angel Network,’ and with Gary Zukav, a former Green Beret turned New Age writer, she takes ‘personal voyages’ that never take her back to the black community.”
Besides producing and hosting The Oprah Winfrey Show, the highest-rated talk show in TV history and winner of 35 Emmy Awards, Winfrey established the Oprah Winfrey Foundation in 1987. Winfreyï¿œs foundation supports the “inspiration, empowerment and education of women, children and families around the world.”
“Small But Proud” Group Honors NAB’s Dwight Ellis
“Please Post — We’re very small, but just as proud,” read the subject line on a posting to the Society for Professional Journalists’ e-mail list. Andrew W. Thornhill, director of the New School For Community Education – Seattle Vocational Institute, was announcing that Dwight M. Ellis, vice president, resource development at the National Association of Broadcasters, would be the first recipient of his school’s Inspiration Award.
Ellis “is responsible for a wide range of activities directed toward maintaining a multiculturally diverse workforce and business environment.
“This award is presented on this day, September 11, as a reminder that each and every life is a gift, that our American culture is important and that we will prevail.
“To acknowledge the spirit and deeds of an individual who consistently works to pave the way for talented leaders from our diverse communities.
“This award is not for leadership alone, but also for the willingness to remain constant while facing seemingly insurmountable odds.
“And, this award is a reminder to the many hard working individuals and teams in the communications industry that leaders with integrity and stamina will be noticed, will be an inspiration and will be acknowledged.”