Julian Bond Looks at Post-Brown White Houses
News media commemorations of the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision dutifully continue, despite the overshadowing news from Iraq.
One of the most compelling presentations on the significance of the 1954 decision, which struck down the doctrine of “separate but equal” schools, aired over the weekend on C-SPAN. NAACP Chair Julian Bond, speaking at a March 26 program at Duquesne University and the University of Pittsburgh, recounted the responses of the executive branch and subsequent Supreme Courts since the ruling, using benchmarks that the news media themselves might consider.
“When the ’64 Civil Rights Act was being debated and finally became law, most in the civil rights community concentrated on the public accommodations section of the Act — on lunch counters and restaurants, and on provisions affecting employment discrimination,” said Bond, who in the 1960s was first reporter, then managing editor of the black newspaper the Atlanta Inquirer.
“Overlooked, for many, were provisions of the Act dealing with education, and overlooked today is how important the Act could have been in making Brown’s promise a reality.”
Excerpts from his timeline:
- “For the first 10 years after Brown, the emphasis was more on ‘deliberate’ than on ‘speed.’ The focus was on dismantling the dual school systems in the South, the products of de jure segregation, and in Southern accents, all deliberate speed meant any conceivable delay. Actual integration was more a legal fiction than fact. President Dwight Eisenhower had lobbied Chief Justice [Earl] Warren to rule for the Southern states and segregated schools; he never endorsed the Brown decision, and the resistant white South, emboldened by his rectitude, reacted with evasion and delay.
- “. . . When Congress was debating the 1964 Civil Rights Act, in all of Alabama, only 29 black students attended formerly white schools, only nine in South Carolina, and none in Mississippi. The four years following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represent the only period in the 50-year-history of Brown when there was active support for desegregation from both the executive branch and the courts.
- “. . . Within months of Nixon’s election [in 1968], what was then known as the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) was under orders to end the threat of funding cutoffs as a prod to integration; enforcement was transferred from HEW to the Department of Justice, which under Attorney General John Mitchell, argued in the Supreme Court for less desegregation, not more, establishing a pattern adopted by the Ford, Reagan, and Bush administrations.
- “. . . What distinguished the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush was their attacks on virtually all components affecting segregation and discrimination in American education.
- “. . . The percentage of black students at majority white schools in the South went from zero in 1954 to a peak of 43.5 percent in 1988, proving there is nothing wrong with Brown’s premise. It is Brown’s promise that has been broken — betrayed by a failure of presidential leadership, defeated by a lack of congressional oversight and action, ruined by a retreat by the federal bureaucracy charged with enforcement, and crushed by a series of unfavorable court rulings, ranging from the adverse to the hostile.
- “When William Rehnquist joined the Supreme Court, courtesy of Richard Nixon, all major desegregation cases since Brown had been unanimous. Rehnquist, as a clerk to Justice [Robert H.] Jackson during the Brown case, had written a memo arguing that the Court should uphold Plessy v. Ferguson. Then he lied about it at his confirmation hearing. As a justice himself, Rehnquist cast the first dissenting vote in a post-Brown desegregation case in 1973, setting the stage for what would become a new anti-desegregation majority in the 1990s after he became chief justice.
- “So today we have a chief justice who has consistently opposed school desegregation and an attorney general who built his political career on attacking the efforts of the federal courts to desegregate St. Louis and Kansas City schools.”
Filmmaker Wins, Emmett Till Probe Reopened
“The Justice Department said today that it was reopening the investigation into the death of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy whose abduction and killing in Mississippi in 1955 for supposedly whistling at a white woman helped spark the the civil rights movement,” as Maria Newman reports today on the New York Times Web site.
Two men were acquitted by an all-white jury at the time, an action denounced by critics as racist and contradictory to the evidence but all too common at the time. Moreover, for years the Till family and journalists have said that more than two people were likely involved in the killing.
As the Times noted, “In the mid-1990’s, long after the trail had grown cold, a documentary filmmaker, Keith Beauchamp, started his film about the case, ‘The Untold Story of Emmett Till.’ He interviewed several potential witnesses, including one who had been jailed in another city at the time of the trial to prevent investigators from calling him to the stand.”
Beauchamp, a native of Baker, La., attended historically black Southern University and now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. He “has asserted that there were actually 10 people -? several of them still alive -? present at the murder. Till relatives, members of Congress, the N.A.A.C.P. and civil rights leaders pressed the federal government to reopen and investigate the Till case as it had several other civil rights-era murders,” Newman wrote.
Last month, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., cited Beauchamp’s film as they unveiled a congressional resolution that would compel Attorney General John Ashcroft and the U.S. Justice Department to re-open the investigation of Till’s murder. Another documentary, “The Murder of Emmett Till,” directed by New York filmmaker Stanley Nelson, aired on PBS’s “American Experience” in January 2003 and won an Emmy Award.
Why It’s Unlikely the Emmett Till Murder Mystery Will Ever Be Solved
Harper, Longtime AP Writer, Copes With ADD at 53
It wasn’t until last summer that Peter Alan Harper, reporter at the Associated Press from 1984 to 2000, realized he had attention deficit disorder. “One aspect of it is that if you are interested in something, you go full bore,” Harper, 53, told Journal-isms today. “If you’re working for a wire service, you’re in your milieu. I would say I thrived. I couldn’t see doing magazines. Now I know why.”
Harper’s case led a Sunday New York Times piece by Amy Harmon on brain differences, which some say “like body differences, should be embraced.” Proponents argue for what they call “neurodiversity.”
“I have been accepted at eight colleges and matriculated at five. I graduated from none,” Harper recalled for Journal-isms. “Books overwhelm me. Year-long courses frighten me. I now understand that I need tutors. I need assistance. I have index cards and pens all over the house. As I remember something, I have to remember to write it down.”
ADD is not the most serious of Harper’s problems. “They carried me out of the job on Feb. 4, 2000,” he said. “Other things had contributed for a decade. In 2000, I made eight trips to the emergency room and had five hospital stays.” He had sleep apnea, diabetes and osteoarthritis. Because of his heart problems, he is in a cardiac rehabilitation program.
As part of his recovery, Harper was in psychotherapy. A comment from his psychotherapist prompted him to look up “ADD” on the Internet, he said. The first sentence was “tips on how to pay your bills.” “I started banging my head against the wall. That was late 2003. I hadn’t looked at my mail since May 2003. It was like, ‘they’re talking about me.’ It was so overwhelming, I went into my bedroom, turned out the lights, and I was just crying.”
Harper is a 1980 graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Summer Program for Minority Journalists and attended Maynard’s cross-media program at the University of Southern California in 2001. In 1990, he said, he co-founded the high school journalism workshop of the New York Association of Black Journalists, and later was co-director of its faculty. He joined the AP in 1984 in Kansas City, went to the New York bureau in 1985 and became AP’s first African American national business writer in 1992. In 1994-1995, he had a Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in business and economics reporting at Columbia.
Harper says he can trace his ADD back at least to high school. “Most of us, at our age, don’t know about it because it wasn’t something” we were trained to look for, he said. “People are wired so differently that it goes against the grain of how we’re taught,” he said. “Many of those who fall by the wayside do so because their brains aren’t used to learning in that fashion,” he add.
To journalists and others, he offers this advice: “You have to take care of yourself. Look at all the possibilities. If we don’t take care of ourselves in all our known and unknown aspects, we won’t be long-distance runners. We will fall by the wayside.” Harper can be reached at pah@onebox.com
Limbaugh: Guards in Iraq Just Blowing Off Steam
While a number of conservatives have expressed outrage at the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. guards in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison, the most prominent conservative commentator, Rush Limbaugh was not so worried about it.
Here’s his take, as quoted by Dick Meyer, editorial director of CBSNews.com:
“I’m sorry, folks. I’m sorry. Somebody has to provide a little levity here. This is not as serious as everybody is making it out to be. My gosh, we’re all wringing our hands here. We act like, ‘Okay let’s just die,’ you know? ‘Let’s just give up. What can we do to make these people feel better? Let’s just pull out of there, and let’s just go. Let’s just become a neutral country. Let’s just do that.’ I mean, it’s ridiculous. It’s outrageous what’s happening here, and it’s not — and it’s not because I’m out of touch; it’s because I am in touch, folks, that I can understand. This is a pure, media-generated story. I’m not saying it didn’t happen; I’m [not] saying the pictures aren’t there, but this is being given more life than the Waco invasion got. This is being given more life than almost — it’s almost become an Oklahoma City-type thing. One more Bush sound bite, and the president continued explaining how real democracy works here.”
Continues Meyer: “Here’s Rush’s sociological evaluation of what really happened at Abu Ghraib, as quoted in a piece in The New Republic on Limbaughism:
“‘This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it, and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?
“‘I don’t understand what we’re so worried about. These are the people that are trying to kill us. What do we care what is the most humiliating thing in the world for them? There’s also this business of them all wearing hoods and how that?s also very humiliating. You can see more guys wearing hoods at a [Sen.] Robert Byrd birthday party 40 years ago than we’ve seen in these prisoner photos.'”
Fox Counters With “What We’ve Accomplished”
“As many of you may know by now, we thought the ABC News program, ‘Nightline’, made a mistake last week, listing all the brave men and women who died in Iraq but without providing the context of what they died for. So we said that we would put together our own tribute, our own list of what these brave men and women have built in Iraq,” moderator Chris Wallace intoned on “Fox News Sunday.”
What followed was a story about how the troops had put in electricity, improved health care, allowed a free press to flourish, made infastructure improvements, and the like. “What better time to try to make sense of the sacrifice of the 767 men and women who have died in Iraq?” Wallace asked.
In the panel discussion that followed, it was left to Juan Williams to note:
“Now, the things that we just saw Chris Wallace list, it seems to me, are things that you would say need to be done in many parts of the world. If we send social workers, if we send engineers, here’s the good that America can do, you know, here’s the Peace Corps.
“But you know what? This was a war. This is a war. And in a war, you want to win. And we have not won. We thought for a while, as the president said, you know, mission accomplished. It was not mission accomplished. We continue to lose people at a tremendously high rate there. We have not engendered much support, in terms of the Iraqi people, it seems to me. And we have absolutely damaged our international alliances.
“All of this suggests that there are major problems. And yet you list these things as if this is the reason we went into Iraq. We didn’t go into Iraq for those reasons. Certainly we went in there to try to do away with weapons of mass destruction, the threat that Saddam Hussein might have posed, in terms of terrorist networks, to us back home, given what happened on 9/11. But that’s not what you listed.”
As for the “767 men and women who have died in Iraq,” Wallace’s figure apparently includes only Americans.
As the New York Times said in a piece by Tom Zeller on Sunday:
“No official toll exists, but even the lowest estimates put the number of Iraqi civilian deaths in the month after ‘major combat’ began at more than 3,000. Last June, The Associated Press guessed that 3,240 Iraqi civilians died in March and April of last year. Iraq Body Count, an independent group tracking reports of civilian casualties, puts the number at more than 7,000.”
Hundreds Line Up for Chance to Be TV Reporter
In what the Detroit News calls a May sweeps stunt, Detroit’s WDIV-TV staged a competition called ?The Reporter,? in which one aspiring television news reporter gets a shot to join the news team at Channel 4 for three months this summer.
“Candidates, who began lining up as early as 8:30 a.m., were brought into WDIV?s studios where they were asked a series of questions ? who are the Big Three, for example ? and then to read a news story on camera,” Adam Graham reported.
“A few hundred hopefuls” came to the studios Wednesday, Graham wrote.
Garcia-Irigoyen Promoted at Orange County Register
“Leticia Garcia-Irigoyen has been promoted from staff writer to managing editor of The Orange County Register’s Spanish-language newspaper Excelsior. Garcia-Irigoyen has also worked at the Los Angeles Noticias del Mundo and La Opinion,” reports the National Association of Hispanic Publications.
David Person, Huntsville Times Win Lawsuit
The Alabama Supreme Court sided with the Huntsville Times and editorial writer David Person in a lawsuit filed by a police officer claiming he was defamed in a 2000 commentary piece by Person, the Alabama Press Association reports.
“Officer Edward W. Smith originally filed the suit in 2001, naming Times editorial writer David Person and a Huntsville woman who had complained about the investigator,” the association said.
“Person wrote an editorial about the complaint made against Smith in which he quoted a Huntsville woman as she described the alleged abusive language used by Smith.
“A Madison County Circuit Court dismissed the case on the grounds that a police officer is a public figure and must prove there was intent to harm them in libel cases.
“Smith appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court claiming he was off-duty at the time he spoke to the Huntsville woman and should not be considered a public figure.
“The Supreme Court ruled 5-0 that courts have consistently held that police officers are public figures.”
Phyl Garland Retiring From Columbia J-School
Columbia University School of Journalism was planning a farewell dinner tonight for Phyl Garland, who is leaving the school after is leaving the faculty after three decades. Garland is the only tenured African American faculty member at the school.
Before joining the faculty, Garland worked at Johnson Publications, specializing in cultural news reporting. She has written a book on black music and was a regular contributor to music magazines. including Stereo Review,” as her one-time adjunct, former New York Times reporter C. Gerald Fraser, noted. “A primary advocate for all J-school students, Garland manifested special concern for black students,” Fraser said.
AAJA J Camp Grad Named Presidential Scholar
Jessica Marati of the Academy of Our Lady of Guam, a graduate of the Asian American Journalists Association’s J Camp high school journalism program, has been selected as one of the Presidential Scholars award recipients for 2004, the Pacific Daily News reports.
“It’s kind of freaking me out, I just keep on thinking about why all these good things are happening to me,” the paper quoted Marati as saying. “But I’m really honored to be representing Guam with this award.”
“The Presidential Scholars award, established in 1964, is given to a male and a female student from each state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and a student from U.S. families living abroad, as well as 15 chosen at-large and 20 Presidential Scholars in the Arts, according to the Presidential Scholars Web site. Jessica Marati was named in the Americans abroad category,” the paper said.
Mark Trahant Urges Bill Richardson as VP Choice
One way to upset a 45-45 split among the electorate “is to move a large voting block to your side. This is what happened for some four decades in the South when the region’s white voters shifted to the Republican side,” wrote editorial page editor Mark Trahant in his column in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
“The new South is Latino, U.S.A.”
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry “has a transformative opportunity; he could name Bill Richardson to the ticket.
“Richardson is New Mexico’s governor. And despite his Anglo- sounding name, he is Hispanic, speaks fluent Spanish and is a great campaigner.”
Naomi Campbell Wins Appeal on Invasion of Privacy
“Model Naomi Campbell’s privacy was invaded by an article and photo published in the Mirror newspaper that revealed she was a drug addict, the U.K.’s highest court ruled,” reports Eamonn Sullivan for Bloomberg News.
“Lawyers for Campbell had challenged a 2002 decision by the Court of Appeal that the model had been “deceiving the public when she said that she did not take drugs.” Her lawyers claimed that the newspaper’s photograph of Campbell leaving Narcotics Anonymous was a breach of confidence and invasion of privacy.
“The ruling by the House of Lords in London restricts what the press can publish about the private lives of individuals. The Mirror, owned by Trinity Mirror Plc, had argued in earlier hearings that Britain had no absolute law of privacy.
“The article and photograph ‘constituted such an intrusion in the appellants’ private affairs that the factors relied upon by respondents do not suffice to justify publication,’ Lord Carswell wrote. `I’m unable to accept that such publication was necessary to maintain the newspaper’s credibility.”’
