Afro-Netizen

Black veterans of World War II received few of the honors their white brothers got

Some wounds still fresh

By Nurith C. Aizenman
The Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- A few months after the Allied victory in World War II, 24-year-old Capt. Harold Montgomery returned to the General Accounting Office here to reclaim his job with the U.S. Post Office Department.

Since leaving 4 1/2 years earlier, Montgomery had led a heavy weapons company of the Army's all-black 92nd "Buffalo Soldiers" Infantry Division up the western coast of Italy through barrage upon barrage of German fire. He had watched wounded men die as shrapnel sliced through the plasma bags set up to give them transfusions. He had grinned and waved as cheering residents of liberated cities pressed flowers and bottles of wine into his hands.

But when he walked into the GAO's grand, high-ceilinged lobby, it was as though time had stood still. A large plaque honoring postal employees who had served in the war did not list Montgomery or any other African American veterans, he recalled. And a personnel manager informed him he would not receive a pay raise given to returning white soldiers.

"To hell with that," retorted Montgomery, who resolved to find other work.

With the dedication of the National World War II Memorial this weekend, the memory of their homecoming still gives Montgomery and many other black veterans a bitter twinge. At events honoring the roughly 1 million African Americans who served in the war, they recall a fight waged on two fronts: against fascism overseas, and against racist laws and attitudes at home.

African American newspapers of the time called it the "Double V Campaign." And although the victory over the Axis powers was complete, the results of the second struggle were decidedly mixed.

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Sudan's Genocide: The Darfur Catastrophe

By Susan E. Rice and Gayle E. Smith
The Washington Post

Ten years ago CNN ran footage of bloated corpses floating down Rwanda's rivers, while Washington debated whether to call it "genocide." As U.S. officials who later were responsible for U.S. policy toward Africa, we helped plan several subsequent military interventions in Africa. But, like many others, we remain haunted by the Rwandan genocide. So it is with some humility and a full appreciation of the complexity of decisions to deploy U.S. forces that we hazard to recommend how to deal with a new Rwanda now unfolding in the Darfur region of western Sudan.

There, the government of Sudan and its proxy, the Janjaweed Arab militia, are attempting to crush a rebellion by Muslim Africans with the same vicious tactics they have used for years against Christian and animist opponents in southern Sudan. While negotiating a peace agreement with southern rebel forces, the government and its militia have killed, raped, kidnapped, bombed, enslaved, displaced, starved and burned countless innocent civilians in Darfur. U.N. officials have called this ethnic cleansing the "world's greatest humanitarian catastrophe."

Some 10,000 civilians have been killed. At least 130,000 refugees have fled to neighboring Chad. Over a million more have been internally displaced and are trapped by the militia in disease-ridden camps without adequate food or water. They face the imminent threat of starvation. The U.S. Agency for International Development estimates another 300,000 or more could die.

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The Right's Final Answer to Brown

The BlackCommentator
BlackCommentator.com

A direct line runs from the segregation academies of the post-Brown South and todays corporate-invented school vouchers movement.

Both talk the same language: a freedom of choice double-speak that would preserve and expand racial and economic privilege. In place of Brown, todays voucher advocates would subsidize the choices that somehow become available in an American social marketplace that has historically devalued Blacks. They would achieve this unregulated educational supermarket by liquidating the principle and promise of universal, quality public education.

Just as segregationists shut down the public schools of Prince Edward County, Virginia, in 1959 in favor of private white and Black academies, todays voucher advocates openly agitate for defunding urban public schools. The very same rightwing forces that sought to neuter Brown at every stage in its 50-year history now push privatization as a remedy for the misery they have wrought in Americas cities. They aim to profit literally from their own crimes.

The haste with which southern whites established private schools after 1954 made it impossible to cloak the exodus in euphemisms this was white flight from physical proximity to Blacks, pure and simple, and the name segregation academies, stuck. Whites in the North would react in much the same way when their turn came, opting out of the cities entirely to invest their taxes in quality schools for their own children in the suburbs. Those who remained in places like Boston chose private education over integration. You saw an immediate drain of white participation from public education, going into parochial and private schools, said Rev. Graylan Hagler, president of Ministers for Racial, Social, and Economic Justice. And ever since, they have attempted to redirect public dollars out of public education and into private schools.

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Remembering Vernon Jarrett

By George E. Curry
NNPA Editor-in-Chief
BlackPressUSA.com

WASHINGTON (NNPA) - Initially, I began this article with the ordinary things people write about when someone dies. But I hadn’t gotten to the end of the first paragraph before I realized that I couldn’t write anything ordinary about Vernon Jarrett, the pioneering journalist who was extraordinary in so many ways.

Vernon died Sunday night at the University of Chicago Hospitals at the age of 84 after a long bout with cancer of the esophagus.

This story is not about how Vernon died – it’s about how he lived.

Vernon has always been a larger-than-life icon in journalism. He entered the field in 1946, the year before I was born, but we have always shared a special bond. We are both Southerners; he grew up in Paris, Tenn. and I spent all of my childhood in Tuscaloosa, Ala. Both of us were history majors and editor of The Aurora, the school newspaper, at Knoxville College. We both maintained a passion for our alma mater and had been serving together on its Board of Trustees. Beyond that, Vernon Jarrett has set a high standard that I can only aspire to reach.

Most important, he was talented. Not only was he talented, he was in the never-ending quest to become the perfect writer.

Whenever you saw the Vernon Jarrett by-line on a story, it was solid assurance that everything that followed was well-researched and well-written. You could take it to the bank. Vernon was a founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists, served as its second president from 1977-1979, and prided himself on having never missed a convention in more than 25 years.

At each annual convention, you were as likely to find Vernon in the hotel lobby advising some newcomer in the business about his or her career as attending a workshop or speech.

Vernon Jarrett was a “race man” in the tradition of W.E.B. DuBois, William Monroe Trotter and Paul Robeson, towering historical figures that he could – and did – lecture about without prompting. He praised and challenged African-Americans and went to his death befuddled that any Black person working in journalism today could part his or her lips to ask whether he was a Black journalist or a journalist who happened to be Black.

Vernon and Les Payne, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of Newsday, would direct young journalists to read the birth announcements in newspapers and see if they could ever find a single instance of a mother giving birth a to a 7-pound, 8 ounce “journalist.”

Vernon’s position was that we’re born Black, we live as Blacks, we die Black, and we should feel some obligation to help people who are Black. It is only fitting that Vernon ended his professional career at the same place he started it six decades earlier – working for the Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper.

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What It Iz: Does America's Father Know Best?

By jimi izrael
Africana.com

Dr. Bill Cosby has caught a lot of ink over comments he made during a May 17 dinner at Constitution Hall in Washington commemorating the Brown vs. Board of Education decision desegregating the nation's public educational system. Coz used the podium to lambaste black youth and the underclass. Nobody is as entitled to read the people of America like America's Favorite Father. But I gotta tell you, Cosby was out of pocket. I wasn't there, but according to the Washington Post's transcript, he sounded like one of those drunken dinner guests who, apropos of nothing, gets up and starts telling tales out of school, as everyone sits around bemused and mortified. Bill Cosby talked down his nose at people who love and revere him, having obviously forgotten the trials and tribulations attached to poverty.

Tenderness and compassion can go a long way.

In his comments, Coz went on about the poor English many poor blacks use: "They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English," he said, according to the Washington Post. "I can't even talk the way these people talk: 'Why you aint,' 'Where you is' . . . And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. . . . Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. . . . You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!"

Somehow, Dr. Cosby, you managed.

Clearly, the man has forgotten his comedy records from the '70s and the three movies he did with Sidney Poitier — not to mention Mother, Juggs and Speed — all of which included often blue-ish dialogue liberally seasoned in the vernacular and jive-talk of the day. Cosby went on in his speech talking about all the fatherless children and irresponsible black men, but let's not forget that he, like so many of the poor people he's calling to task, has had some baby-mama drama of his own. I've had mine too, Jesse's had his — in this day and age, that isn't uncommon. But I take umbrage at cats like Coz, who get it in their minds to lay down black agendas from a position of moral authority, as if they do no wrong. The best role models are flawed role models — people just like you and me who rise above their own human frailty — and Cosby would do good to remember that. Like so many of his generation, he wags his finger at the young'uns, ostensibly in the name of love, while failing to see the broken legacy he and his have left behind.

He also went on to talk about the culture of conspicuous consumption so many of us — poor and middle-class — fall into:

"Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal," he declared. "These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids — $500 sneakers for what? And won't spend $200 for 'Hooked on Phonics'..."

Poor people want things just like rich people do, and we could argue that the middle class fuels the cult of conspicuous consumption as some realization of the American Dream. Cosby also used his speech to talk about young people wearing their clothes backwards(?) and the crazy names they sometimes have. But he wasn't done.

"There are no 'political prisoners' ...These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake and then we run out and we are outraged, [saying] 'The cops shouldn't have shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?"

Okay

I'm all for keeping it gulley. But, while I don't believe in "political prisoners" post-1960s either, Cosby is a fool for suggesting that getting shot in the head for stealing pound cake had it coming. That comment is outrageously irresponsible — it's like saying Timothy Thomas deserved to be shot for having too many traffic warrants. Cosby is clearly disconnected, walking around his brownstone in $500 sweaters ranting incredulously about young folk and poor blacks to no one in particular.

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Click here to listen to audio excerpts of Cosby's May 17th invictive.

Sudan, Rebels Sign Pact Ending Civil War, Rebels Say

May 26 (Bloomberg) -- The Sudanese government signed a series of agreements with the country's main rebel group aimed at ending more than two decades of civil war that has killed more than 1.5 million people, a rebel spokesman said.

Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Taha and the leader of the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Army, John Garang, signed the agreements in Naivasha, Kenya, after talks they began in September 2003, SPLA spokesman Steven Wondu said.

The agreements cover all remaining areas of dispute in their talks: federal government authority and national wealth, as well as local power-sharing in the disputed areas of Abyei, southern Blue Nile, the Nuba mountains, and the capital Khartoum.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan called the agreements a ``major step forward'' and urged ``the two parties to sustain their commitment and persevere on the remaining issues, especially the cease-fire arrangements,'' according to a statement released by his spokesman in New York.

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After 2000 Chaos, Voters in Florida Are Wary

By Abby Goodnough
The New York Times

SAWDUST, Fla., May 20 — The party had barely begun when Shirley Green Knight arrived with her optical-scan voting machine, lugging it out of a pickup truck and stationing it between the D.J. and the food tent. The sight was no longer strange to the people of Gadsden County, where Ms. Knight, the elections supervisor since 2001, attends most communal gatherings with the machine and a gently pleading message: Your vote will count this time, so please, please come out.

Gadsden County, a quiet stretch of tomato fields and piney woodlands hard against the Georgia border, had the highest rate of disqualified ballots in Florida in 2000: 12 percent of those cast in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Almost 2,000 county residents voted in vain that year, and cynicism still courses through the heavily Democratic county of 45,000, as regular as summer rain.

"All my life I have never seen the TV stations declare a winner, then change their minds," said Greg Johnson, a fourth grade teacher in Quincy who still wonders if his ballot landed in the scrap heap. "The Supreme Court decided that election, not us. I like politics, but people in power can get away with stuff and I'm just not sure this time."

As Election Day 2004 draws near in a battleground state whose 27 electoral votes could prove crucial to the victor once again, a movement is rising in poor black communities to register and to educate, reassure and entreat. A top goal is to change the mindset of people like Mr. Johnson, who still harbor deep suspicions about everything from the accuracy of voting equipment to how polling places are chosen and what role Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, will play in Florida's outcome.

"It's no longer as simple as saying, `You're of age, you're a citizen, you're duly eligible to vote,' " said Andrew D. Gillum, an organizer with the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way in Tallahassee, where he is a city commissioner. "Instead we're having to convince a lot of people who are thinking, `Why bother, it won't matter anyway.' "

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The New Minstrel Show: Black Vaudeville With Statistics

By Thad Mumford
The New York Times

There has never been a better time to be a black athlete. Moneywise, it is now a sum-of-zeros game. (If only my parents had seen the long-term value of studying Rod Carew's books on hitting instead of math and chemistry.) African-Americans have turned white football and basketball players into tokens. And while our representation in baseball continues its decline, the percentage of blacks who dominate the game continues to surge. The reign of Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters could lead to a time when country club athletic equipment will be on back order in Harlem's sporting goods stores.

Advertisers now line up to have black sports figures push their products, especially to the audience they covet, with near-liturgical zeal, 18- to-25-year-old white suburban males, many of whom are mesmerized by the idiomatic hip-hop jargon, the cock-of-the-walk swagger, the smooth-as-the-law-allows attire of their black heroes.

But there is a downside to all this. The unsayable but unassailable truth is that the clowning, dancing, preening smack-talker is becoming the Rorschach image of the African-American male athlete. It casts a huge shadow over all other images. This persona has the power to sell what no one should buy: the notion that black folks are still cuttin' up for the white man.

Any ethnic group that ever found itself on the periphery of equality and acceptance has had to create coping mechanisms. Some who were victimized by bigotry secretly mimicked the prejudicial perceptions of their oppressor with exaggerated, self-deprecating depictions of their behavior, their very private burlesque that gave them brief respites from their marginalization.

For African-Americans, burlesque as healing balm became the essential comedic ingredient of black vaudeville. Comics would strut and cakewalk through now classic routines that savagely lampooned minstrel shows, popular staples of mainstream vaudeville in which white performers in blackface and coily-haired wigs further dehumanized their own creation, the darkie prototype.

Black vaudeville would become a casualty of expanding educational opportunities that created an evolving black middle class with deep concerns that minstrel-like characterizations were degrading and would only perpetuate the accepted attitude that the Negro was the slap-happy court jester for whites.

But a variety of factors, in particular the canonizing of youth culture, the de-emphasizing of wisdom and the glorification of the boorishness inherent in America's look-at-me culture, has played a major role in putting black vaudeville back on the boards. The featured attraction? A number of black athletes.

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Bias Probes Drag On Too Long, EEOC Says

Time Frame Exceeded by Average of 3 Months

By Darryl Fears
Washington Post Staff Writer
The Washington Post

Federal agencies allowed worker complaints about discrimination and harassment to languish well beyond the time allotted to process them, frustrating employees and costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, according to an annual report on the federal workplace released yesterday by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

On average, the 356-page report for 2003 concluded, federal agencies take three months longer than the 180 days they are given to investigate claims of sexual harassment, racial bias, age discrimination and complaints of retaliation against whistle-blowers.

"The average processing time, we think, is unacceptable," said Cari M. Dominguez, the commission's chair. "Justice delayed is justice denied. We are not moving these cases as quickly as we should."

Although the 13,248 worker complaints in 2003 were down 8 percent from the previous year, only 5,307 investigations were completed within the 180 days allowed. Agencies took an average of 267 days to finish the job.

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The Real Deal on Emmett Till

By Herb Boyd
Managing Editor
The Black World Today

New York -- It will take a book to correct all the misinformation, lies, and distortions about what happened to fourteen-year-old Emmett Till beginning on that fateful August day in Money, Mississippi almost a half century ago.

One day Simeon Wright promises to write that book, but until then he has begun to straighten the record in a few interviews, particularly as a participant in Keith Beauchamp’s documentary "The Untold Story of Emmett Till" that has been so instrumental in getting the Justice Department to reopen the case.

"Yes, Emmett did whistle at Carolyn Bryant," said Wright, tackling one of the longstanding debates about what triggered the tragic incident. "Another cousin, who wasn’t at the store when it happened is responsible for perpetuating accounts that he didn’t. He wasn’t there. I was."

The most widespread explanation of the "wolf whistle" came from Till’s mother Mamie Mobley Bradley, who said that she had told her son to whistle whenever his stuttering stuck him a word. "But Emmett wasn’t stuttering when he whistled," Wright said.

Wright, Till’s cousin, said it was six of them who accompanied Till to Bryant’s grocery store that day on August 24, 1955. "It was me, Wheeler Parker, my brother, Maurice, Thelton Parker, Roosevelt Crawford, and Ruthie Crawford," he said during a recent interview at New Orleans restaurant in Brooklyn. "To this day, I don’t know what possessed Emmett to do that.

"And there’s another thing that should be cleared up about that incident," Wright continued. "We didn’t put him up to it. Many of the books and stories said that we dared him to do it. But that’s not the truth. He did it on his own, and we had no idea why."

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