Originally published Oct. 11, 2007
Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program has created 2,800 murals. “Ridge on the Rise,” by Josh Sarantitis and Eric Okdehm, shows such famous Philadelphians as entertainer Pearl Bailey, right, and jazz legend John Coltrane.
Columnists Get the Message, from Murals to Music
It was at a public forum on the Washington Post’s 2006 series “Being a Black Man” that the series editor, Kevin Merida, spoke a truth that encapsulated what others were saying during this columnists’ tour of Philadelphia:
“What we don’t do so well journalistically,” he said, “is connect the dots.”
Stories about crime “don’t show what police do in a community,” Merida, a Post associate editor, told a Temple University audience Monday night. Those about schools “don’t deal with what happens when kids leave the classroom.
“They need to be connected and written about as part of a piece, and bring more light than just heat on these discussions.”
At a four-day annual conference of the Trotter Group of African American columnists, speakers told the 30 journalists that the news media need to provide more context for the stories they produce on African Americans, and in their particular ways, the speakers demonstrated how they connect the dots in their own work.
The expert Philadelphians, brought to the group by columnists Elmer Smith of the Philadelphia Daily News and Linn Washington Jr. of the Philadelphia Tribune, ranged from Kenny Gamble, co-founder of the legendary Gamble and Huff hit-making “Sound of Philadelphia” in the 1970s, who is rebuilding houses in his Philadelphia hometown, to Jane Golden Heriza, who directs a Mural Arts Program in which communities, students and even inmates brighten blighted neighborhoods with stories-high murals and mosaics.
The conversations took place in a city where one in four lives in poverty, according to census figures, and where homicides totaled 306 for the year as of Friday, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Last year the number reached 406, giving the city the nation’s fourth highest murder rate. City officials are preparing to enlist up to 10,000 men to help fight crime by patrolling Philadelphia street corners in an effort called 10,000 Men Philly.
At the forum where Merida spoke, one of the organizers of that effort, Bilal Qayyum of Men United for a Better Philadelphia, was asked whether more effective combating of the drug trade would alleviate the murder rate, given that so many killings involve illegal drugs. Qayyum said that, in fact, the correct dots to connect are between homicides and arguments. More killings in Philadelphia are the result of common disputes than over drug-turf wars.
More dots to connect: With the proliferation of guns and lack of training in managing anger, ordinary arguments become deadly. And why has anger not been controlled or properly channelled?
“One of the biggest problems is so many of these boys need fathers to keep them in line and teach them,” Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson, renowned for his studies of urban street life, said at one session. “It’s hard to appreciate just how absent the fathers are.” Lack of anger management leads to “acting out” in school, placement in special education classes, and a path to prison.
To listen to Anderson, the media have poorly covered both the anti-snitching code in some black communities, in which criminals are not reported to police, and the role that structural forces play in the plight of low-income urban blacks.
On the latter, he said, “There is a profound alienation between poor black people and the corporatization of the [black] middle class. There is a structural problem. The jobs are fewer and they are competed for by more and more people. The underground economy emerges to pick up the slack.”
As for snitching, “There is a belief that there are two different forms of justice,” he said, articulating a rationale reminiscent of why many African Americans cheered the not-guilty verdict in the O.J. Simpson murder trial in 1995.
“They say ‘911’ is a joke.” If the police do come, “they might abuse the people who called them, and a lot of people think the cops are in cahoots with the drug dealers. Snitching doesn’t help your ‘street cred.’ It’s really self-protective.”
The quest for “street cred” is not limited to the hip-hop generation. Anderson told the story of a father whose daughter had been beaten by a boyfriend. The father felt he had to confront the man himself, not call the police, in order to send the proper message. “Mr. Johnson’s street credibility was on the line. He and others like him don’t trust the wider community to intervene in their issues,” the sociologist said.
Outsiders — he didn’t specify journalists, but he could have — have “a strong tendency to blame the victim and leave analysis of the structure alone.”
The concepts of self-awareness, self-knowledge and self-esteem might be ridiculed by some conservative pundits as elements of “political correctness,” but they aren’t by Philadelphians such as music mogul Gamble, mural art program director Heriza, historian Charles L. Blockson or lawyer Michael Coard, all of whom also addressed the columnists.
Blockson, who is especially known for his work identifying Underground Railroad locations, has battled tirelessly for recognition of African American historical sites in Philadelphia. He took the columnists on a tour of some of them, such as Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church, the oldest black church in the United States, where Richard Allen, the founder of the A.M.E. Church, is buried, and where Harriet Tubman spoke.
Coard described the historic work of a group of activists and himself to include recognition of George Washington’s slaves as the National Park Service commemorates the pre-White House executive mansion in Philadelphia. Telling a remarkable story, Coard outlined how the activists pressed archaeologists examining the site until the team uncovered evidence of slave life there. They found an underground passage from the kitchen to the main house, and a basement where Washington’s acclaimed chef, Hercules, presided— until he escaped to freedom.
Now, outside the Liberty Bell, video and audio exhibits will tell the story of the nine slaves Washington brought to Philadelphia, and visitors will see images of Frederick Douglass and Nelson Mandela. “We want little black boys and girls to be as proud of their ancestors’ contributions to the country as little white boys and girls. Slavery made American freedom possible. We ought to be not only beaming, but bragging,” Coard said.
Gamble has not been content to rest on his legacy as co-founder of Philadelphia International Records and collaborator on a long line of hits by the O’Jays, Teddy Pendergrass, the Spinners and other classic acts of the 1970s.
As a songwriter, producer and record company executive, Gamble believed in delivering “a message in our music,” as one of his songs was titled, and that between serving up dance tunes, he should “hit ’em again with songs that would be elevating their humanity. It became part of my lifestyle,” he told the group. Those songs, Gamble said, “were anthems for people who were conscious enough to understand the conditions we were in.”
Thus, starting in 1977 with the $1,000 purchase of the South Philadelphia house where he grew up, Gamble began buying vacant properties and restoring them and their surroundings, 135 houses in all. He joined with others to create subsidized housing through public-private partnerships, and in the process came to include a mosque (he is a Sunni Muslim) and a charter school. He moved his family from their suburban mansion back into the ‘hood.
“Violence in our communities shows we really do hate each other,” Gamble said, standing in a studio where the power of Patti LaBelle’s voice one broke a microphone. “We chose to create an environment where the center of the community would be a house of worship and the education you give to your children. Educate your young and you are able to grab hold of the world,” he said. The charter school has a waiting list of 1,000.
To tour North and West Philadelphia, as the columnists did in a Mural Arts Program trolley with Heriza, the program’s director, as a guide, is to see blocks and blocks of homes boarded up or in disrepair, coexisting with tenements and row houses populated by the black poor.
Yet the blight is interrupted by brightly colored murals and mosaics whose back story is a testament to understanding the power of the arts to change attitudes.
The murals are now in every Philadelphia neighborhood, Heriza said, including those on the tour, where “the only visual stimulation was alcohol and tobacco billboards.” The mural arts program, which began in 1984, offers free art education programs to thousands of young people and is the most extensive in the nation. Its employees work with neighborhood residents to find out what kind of art they want, and the results range from portraits of the late saxophonist Grover Washington Jr., a Philly native, to landscapes, a tribute to Philadelphia’s old Negro League baseball team, the Stars, and portraits of animals at the Philadelphia Zoo. Some feature quotations such as this one from black nationalist Marcus Garvey: “It is by education that we become prepared for our duties and responsibilities in life.”
“People start thinking that things can change and that people care,” Heriza said as the trolley rolled through Germantown. “This was a city where graffiti was everywhere.” The program also operates in five area prisons and in public health agencies. “The 4,000 kids in our program aren’t getting art anyplace else, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change. So many of the kids I work with are seeing success.” By contrast, she asked, “How much is it going to cost to incarcerate them?”
Urban problems aren’t very visible on the national agenda, speakers told the columnists, nor, they said, is there enough critical thinking published about them.
Raising the case of the Jena Six in Louisiana, in which black high school students face harsher charges than white students with whom they fought, Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree asked, “Do you think the Duke lacrosse kids would tolerate a judge like this presiding over their lives?”
He was likely speaking of LaSalle Parish District Judge J.P. Mauffray, who presided over the June trial of Mychal Bell, who is now 17. Mauffray vacated Bell’s conviction on a conspiracy charge, saying he should not have been tried as an adult, yet he let a more serious battery conviction stand. In September, Louisiana’s 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Mauffrey was wrong and that the case belonged in juvenile court.
Ogletree also wondered who had noticed the parental ignorance displayed when Jena parents did not see the connection between the nooses on a tree and lynching. By contrast, “Let them place a swastika or a burning cross on that tree” and see the reaction, Ogletree said.
The bottom line: “Race has been pushed to the bottom of the agenda and no one seems to be outraged.”
In separate sessions, Anderson and Theodore M. Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., agreed. They called upon the journalists to press the presidential candidates to elevate the issue of race — and most of all, to connect those dots.
“We need critical analysis,” Anderson told the group. “No holds barred. Lay it out.” He said he was an admirer of the columns of Derrick Z. Jackson of the Boston Globe, one of the Trotter Group members.
How effective the journalists will be will depend in large part on who is given voice and authority, citizen bloggers notwithstanding.
Discussing “Being a Black Man,” Joe Davidson, an assistant city editor at the Post who worked on the project, noted that one key element in its success was that the Post “allowed black people in the newsroom to maintain control of the series.”
By contrast, Davidson recalled having worked at the Wall Street Journal, where African American staffers complained to management about a series on Africa they felt was unbalanced.
“They didn’t even bother to respond,” Davidson said of Journal editors.
- Betty Bayé, Louisville Courier-Journal: Philadelphia murals photo gallery
- Cary Clack, San Antonio Express-News: Philadelphia seeks 10,000 peacekeepers
- Cary Clack, San Antonio Express-News: Record producers’ message is in music
- Elisa Cramer, Palm Beach (Fla.) Post: ‘Gotta fight back as a people.’
- Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times: Disputes turn deadly when police arrive
- Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times: Making sure Liberty Bell keeps it real
- Elmer Smith, Philadelphia Daily News: Surrender? No, the papers misunderstand . . . or worse
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NABJ’s Stance on Imus Draws Cheers, Jeers
The National Organization for Women has joined the National Association of Black Journalists in opposing a return of radio host Don Imus to the airwaves, but NABJ’s Tuesday statement has also drawn criticism, including from Mike James, author of the subscription-only “NewsBlues” column about television news.
On Tuesday, NABJ urged Citadel Broadcasting chief executive Farid Suleman to halt negotiations with Imus. News reports say he could be back on the air by Dec. 1. Imus was bounced in April from CBS Radio and a simulcast on MSNBC after he called the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s.”
Under the headline, “No reward for Imus,” the National Association for Women posted a statement saying, “Let’s show Citadel what women (and the men who care) think about putting Imus back on the air, just as we are about to enter women’s college basketball season.
“Last time we called you to action, you sent more than 30,000 messages to CBS and NBC. . . . Send this message to your friends — let’s turn those 30,000 messages into 300,000! Even after Citadel signs Imus, your messages can still have an impact. Send a letter today, before Imus hits the public airwaves.”
Carol Jenkins, president of the Women’s Media Center, issued a statement saying an Imus return “sets an unfortunate example for those who care about the treatment of women in this society, and raises again the discriminatory nature of the medium itself.”
However, James of NewsBlues asked, “Shouldn’t ‘journalists’ aspire to neutrality . . . regardless of skin color? Not so with the NABJ, which, by its very definition, promotes exclusivity and encourages separatism. It is built on entitlement and discrimination . . . not journalism.”
Media critic Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times responded Thursday on his blog, “James seems to think that black folks in media who complain about racism mostly use the charge to seek special treatment, and he devotes considerable space on NewsBlues to stories which seem to illustrate that fact. As somebody who thinks much of TV news is not particularly friendly to people of color — black women can’t even wear their hair in a natural state on most TV newscasts — I wind up disagreeing with him often.
“Still, while I sympathize with the NABJ’s position,” Deggans continued, “my own feelings about this are a little more nuanced. I think it’s more important that Imus publicly apologize for what he really did wrong — basing a 35-year-career, in part, on insulting people of color — coming clean on past transgressions while pledging to never go there again.”
Meantime, Kansas City Star sports columnist Jason Whitlock, who at the height of the Imus controversy wrote a piece headlined, “Imus isn’t the real bad guy: Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture,” told Michael David Smith of AOL Sports that he wants to be considered for the Pulitzer Prize.
Whitlock wrote then of the Rutgers women’s basketball team’s news conference on the Imus slur: “An hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.”
The columnist also said he should be considered for his pieces on the Jena Six case.
- Faye Anderson, Women’s Media Center: From Imus to Industry — What Price Dignity?
- Editor & Publisher letters: Readers Respond to NABJ Opposing Don Imus
- Andrew Hampp, AdAge: Will an Imus Return Get Backers?
- Keith Herbert, Newsday: Mixed signals on Imus’ return to radio
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More Groups Join Effort to Continue Bailey’s Work
“An array of Bay Area journalists, as well as highly respected media organizations and local university journalism departments, have formed an investigative team to continue the work of journalist Chauncey Wendell Bailey Jr., and answer questions regarding his death,” a coalition of journalism organizations announced on Wednesday. Bailey, the editor of the Post newspapers, which include the weekly Oakland Post, was murdered in Oakland on Aug. 2 while reporting on a story regarding the suspicious activities of the Your Black Muslim Bakery in that city.
The group’s announcement had its genesis in a posting on the Journal-isms message board from Kenneth J. Cooper, freelance writer and former national editor of the Boston Globe.
Cooper wrote on Aug. 7, “I think the best way to honor Chancey’s commitment to journalism would be for NABJ to organize a team of reporters to swoop into Oakland and finish his investigation of this Muslim group. That’s what white dailies did in the 1970s when the Mafia killed Don Bolles in Arizona. That would be a fitting tribute, and a strong message to black criminal enterprises around the country to not even dare try doing the same thing to another journalist.”
Mary Fricker, a retired reporter who is a member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, had urged her group to take action as well.
Two days after Cooper’s message, Bryan Monroe, then-president of the National Association of Black Journalists, announced at the NABJ convention in Las Vegas that NABJ, IRE, the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and the Center for Investigative Reporting would meet to discuss ways to continue Bailey’s work.
With Wednesday’s announcement, the coalition has broadened to include Bay Area media outlets, university journalism programs and other groups. Dori J. Maynard, president of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education may be contacted for more information at (510) 684-3071.
Separately, the San Francisco Chronicle, which is not part of the project, began a series on Bailey’s assassination on Sunday.
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Thomas Says Reading Papers Would Waste His Time
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, continuing his media tour to promote his new memoir, said on C-SPAN that he doesn’t read newspapers because it would be a waste of time, and that he had never heard of Washington Post op-ed columnists Ruth Marcus and Eugene Robinson, who wrote critical pieces about him.
On the other hand, Thomas called talk-show host Rush Limbaugh “a wonderful friend” and said he liked the pieces about him on CBS-TV’s “60 Minutes” and ABC-TV’s “Nightline,” criticized in some quarters as “puff pieces.”
“Certainly, the ’60 Minutes’ piece was fair and just really, I thought, quite good. And I think the piece at ABC, they’ve been very, very fair,” he said in the interview with Brian Lamb that aired on Sunday.
Lamb asked Thomas, “How much do you read the newspapers?
“THOMAS: Oh, I don’t. I don’t. I don’t think it’s a good use of my time.
“LAMB: So, you don’t read the Post in the morning?
“THOMAS: No. I used to read the New York Post, but that was about it.
“LAMB: Why do you feel that way? Why is it a waste?
“THOMAS: Well, I think it’s — I think that what they — I wanted to be a journalist. But I think a part of being a good journalist is being honest. I think it’s not shaping the news, but reporting the news.
“And I think we have long since gone past the point when people are just being honest with us. And so, I don’t waste my time with it.
“LAMB: Well, then, you probably didn’t see this. Or maybe your wife, Ginni, who seems to watch this stuff and tell you?
“THOMAS: Oh, no, she doesn’t tell me, because I’m not interested.”
Lamb read Thomas this passage beginning a column by Robinson: “I believe in affirmative action. But I have to acknowledge, there are arguments against it. One of the more cogent is the presence of Justice Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court.”
Thomas replied, “You could go and find somebody at a local tavern who has had too much to drink saying that.
“That’s useless. That’s supposed to be insulting and cute.
“When you get to the point of ridicule and making little sort of low-brow comments like that, then you’ve run out of real arguments.”
He similarly dismissed a Post story by Kevin Merida, a Thomas biographer, that described him as bitter.
Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. Merida told Journal-isms that Thomas returned the copy of his and Michael A. Fletcher’s book on Thomas, “Supreme Discomfort,” and their accompanying note.
Ex-Aide Says Thomas “Perjured Himself” onto Court
Angela Wright, a former employee of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who went on to become a journalist and accused Thomas of sexual harassment, told Michel Martin of National Public Radio’s “Tell Me More” that Thomas “perjured himself onto the Supreme Court.”
Wright was fired by Thomas when she worked for him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In an interview that aired Tuesday, Wright told Martin that when Thomas testified at his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings about her firing: “He perjured himself onto the Supreme Court. He said that I had been fired because he heard that I had called somebody on his staff the F word. . . . It was an absolute lie. Nothing that even remotely resembled that ever took place between me and Clarence Thomas. . . .
“Ultimately what happened was there was a commissioner who wanted my position for her person, and the entire situation was orchestrated so that I was relieved of that position.”
Of Thomas’ memoir, Wright said, “I always knew him to be a mean-spirited, nasty, fairly unstable person. It was enlightening to read his account of his childhood, because that did put it in perspective. Actually, my heart went out to the young child Clarence once I understood he was a child whose father was absent, whose mother sent them away, who was raised by an unemotional grandfather. I finally understood where all his anger and mean-spiritedness came from. I knew it was there. And also, his self-loathing and his hatred for anything black or civil rights oriented or affirmative action.”
Wright became an assistant city editor at the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer but has left journalism, Martin told Journal-isms. She has since married and preferred that her married name not be disclosed because of the hate mail she has received, the host said.
- Wayne Dawkins, Spot-on.com: Supreme Distrust
- Deborah Douglas, Chicago Sun-Times: Thomas verdict: Reviled justice deserves respect
- Financial Gazette, Harare, Zimbabwe: The Other Dark Side of America!
- Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report: Clarence Thomas, the ‘Anti-Black’
- Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe: The justice run amok
- Mark Sherman, Associated Press: Thomas Book a Best-Seller Online
- Dawn Turner Trice, Chicago Tribune: Thomas’ past isn’t reflected in his record
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Simmons Named Opinion Editor at Washington Times
Deborah Simmons was appointed editor of the editorial page of the Washington Times, succeeding Tony Blankley, the former press secretary to onetime House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Simmons, not to be confused with Debra Adams Simmons, managing editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, had been deputy editor of the page. Blankley left last month to join the Edelman Group, a policy and public-relations firm.
“‘Deb has been at The Times almost since the creation,'” in 1982, “said Wesley Pruden, editor in chief of The Times, who made the appointment. ‘She has been there, done that, a newspaperwoman with the wide-ranging experience in local, national and international affairs, the curiosity, insight, fire and enthusiasm that make our editorial pages some of the liveliest anywhere. I’m delighted to make this appointment. Our readers will be, too.'”
Although the newspaper is dwarfed in circulation by the Washington Post, posting a Monday-Saturday circulation of 73,875 and 41,140 on Sundays, the paper, created with financial backing from the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, is the favorite of conservative Republican administrations.
Simmons wrote the paper’s editorial last month criticizing the Republican front-runners who skipped the GOP presidential debate at historically black Morgan State University.
And in April, she wrote her own column supporting the National Association of Black Journalists in its criticism of Don Imus after the radio host called the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy headed ho’s.”
“The coming weeks and the next several months should be horrendously busy for NABJ, Bill Cosby, Russell Simmons and other culture warriors if they stand their ground,” she wrote.
“News organizations don’t always see eye-to-eye with each other. Yet that’s one of the awesome aspects of journalism — disparate points of view. It’s one of the reasons my father, an artist and a libertarian, designed the logo for NABJ.” Her dad, Arnold P. Simmons, a heraldic artist and portraitist, died in 1991.
